Inspired by “The Net (52),” Honoring The Absolute Choice
What Is Fitting in a Situational Universe Where Things are Waves More than Objects
Javier Rivera noted during “The Net (52)” that Martin Buber sees “waiting” as a critical act, and I couldn’t help but wonder if theology was traditionally “the psychoanalysis of waiting” more than desire. “Waiting” is a state that anticipates something wanted or is at the very least “open” to something, but “desire” in the Lacanian tradition is “seeking an object,” which can cause numerous pathologies and problems. The conversation suggested a distinction between “being-at” and “being-along” (the second of which Thomas Jockin associated with “abiding”), and it would seem that when we desire something we are in a mode of “being-at,” which causes problems, but when we are waiting, we are in a mode of “being-along,” which can better avoid pathologies of desire.
To “wait” seems like “clearing” in Heidegger, which allows “Being to come forward,” while “desire” seems to be when we seek “being as if Being,” causing self-effacement. It also came up in “The Net (52)” that to desire something seems inherently reductionist, because if “I want x” I must “practically act” as if I know everything there is to know about x (for at the very least I must assume that x cannot possible turn out to be something I won’t desire). And yet I can never access “a whole thing,” and though I likely know this when asked directly, in the act of desiring the object, I “practically” act as if I do not know this and/or that I know x won’t disappoint me. X is something which I can “be at,” and in this I “reduce x out of” being something which could disappoint me. In this way, “being at,” which is “a mode of desire” versus “a mode of waiting” seems reductionist, while “being along” is for me to wait for things to “disclose themselves” (like Being must for Heidegger), and in this way I do not reduce things but let them “unfold themselves.” “Being-at” (desire) practically reduces, while “being along” (waiting) allows things to be (themselves).
I
The things we want most in life seem to be things we cannot approach directly, only indirectly, putting us in a strange stage where we need to be “intentional about being unintentional,” focused upon putting ourselves in situations where we can be surprised by that which we need to “live-along.” “Being-at” and “being-along” can be thought of as “desiring-at” versus “desiring-along,” “looking-at” versus “looking-along” — there are numerous angles, all of which I mean to imply. We must intentionally seek states in which the unintended can occur, and the unintended must be something we don’t live-at but live-along (all of which comes together to form a situation versus a thing, to allude to Leibniz). We must intend that which negates our intentions so that we can move into a space of openness for that which we will follow — a strange paradox, and yet this describes what humans seem most “fitted” for and in. We must work hard as a writer (intentional discipline) so that we can sit at our desk and “wait” where something unexpected might happen (unintentional inspiration) that we then follow skillfully (living-along).
Writing is mysterious, and mystery can help remind us to live-along versus live-at, and there is also a mystery in the ocean, of not knowing when the “waves” will come and when they won’t. The ocean itself has an aura of vastness and mystery about it, and all of that can help remind us that it is the “Vastness” from which all phenomena emerge, come, and return to (the waves pull back from the shore).
Indeed, a metaphor of surfing might help our investigation. The surfer does not surf “at” a wave, but more so surfs “along” a wave. Yes, the surfer must go “toward” the wave insomuch as she goes to the ocean, but once she is in the situation where waves are possible, she sits on her board and waits for the right wave. When she lets a wave pass her, we don’t take this as evidence that “she lied when she said she wanted to surf”; instead, we understand that she discerned the wave that passed as “not the right one.” The surfer thus floats upon her board patiently, discerning the right time and the right wave. When it comes, she will let the wave carry her and she will ride it: she will not try to “own” the wave or collect is like an object. The wave is and isn’t an object: the wave is something that must come and go. It has a time. It is a movement of time. And when she discerns the right wave — which comes with the risk of missing a better wave after it — she turns around and paddles not to capture the wave but to “catch it” in the sense that she rides it. Once the wave is gone, and it will always be gone, and she will never capture it again. The time is done. And all of that — the skill, the waiting, the decision, the evanescence — comes together to make surfing so magnificent. And if objects are more like “waves” then “things,” then everything in life can reflect a magnificence of surfing.
“Waiting” for Buber means we seek without finding, and the surfer indeed seeks a wave but doesn’t find it; the wave presents itself. To desire is to seek to find, while to wait is to seek without finding. But does this reduce everything into experiences to be enjoyed? No, because the wave is gone and didn’t mind us in the slightest: it came and went. We did not “use” the wave at all, really, only “road it” (a point of clarification that suggests why so much “toward the end” of philosophical inquiry is so fine and nuanced). The wave is like Heidegger’s Being, something we cannot reduce, only be “open to” from a place of “waiting” and vulnerability.
II
Beauty, selfhood, happiness, truth — all strange topics that seem to unveil that that we need to live-along more than live-at, and perhaps these unveil what everything is like, no exceptions. Though we tend to associate “beauty” with an “exceptional experience,” what if really beauty is a revelation of how we should treat all phenomena, even what seems “normal?” I believe this is the case, as it is the case that realizing “objects are waves” is to realize how objects “always already” are like, though grasping “objects as waves” over “objects as things” seems an exception to the rule, when really “waves” are revelations of what’s normal.
If the world did not “present itself” to us as “objects which are things,” we’d likely lose our minds, and Hegel certainly understands that we require “reason and understanding,” that we couldn’t jump straight to “reason” without moving through “ordinary consciousness.” This being the case, experiences like goodness and beauty must be “mysteries” as we know them, things which we can mistake as exceptions, when really they are revelations of “the norm” which we are naturally stuck (at first) in “understanding” from encountering.
We require “understanding” so that things appear as objects and we maintain sanity, but “reason” “speculatively knows” things are more like “waves.” We must earn our “waiting”; we must learn our “letting (go).” We must resist temptations of Lacanian desires and objects so that we might wait like Buber insists. Living-at always encounters a saturation point where it fails, but there is no necessary point where living-along must have enough. Living-at cannot be infinite, but living-along can be like beauty.
If Dimitri is right that the tragedies of life are either “getting what we want” or “not getting what we want,” what might we obtain and garner in this life that we also don’t gain? Personally, I can only think of “the three infinities,” mainly beauty, truth, and goodness. No matter how much beauty we experience, there is always more we could experience, and so it goes with truth and goodness. Thus, it is possible for us to gain them without exhausting them, and so the infinities might avoid “the two tragedies of life.” These are principles that in my view are never lived-at, only lived-along, and the three furthermore help us keep living-along. If being-along is optimal for human flourishing, the question becomes how we might teach-along and raise-along versus teach-at or teach-along.
Humans can only ever be incomplete, but if we live-along beauty, goodness, and truth, we might find ourselves “(in)complete,” which is to say “complete in our incompleteness.” What we learn in Lacan regarding our inability to ever be fulfilled by “objects of desire” might be evidence that we are seeking the wrong things: we simply don’t work when we “live-at” like a car doesn’t if we fill it with water instead of oil. The dysfunction of a car in this circumstance is evidence that “we’re doing it wrong”; likewise, when humans are dysfunctional seeking “objects of desire,” this could be evidence to us that we are “doing it wrong.” We do not address our incompleteness with living-at, just like we don’t address an empty gas tank with water. Rather, we address our incompleteness with living-along, which requires us to live “toward” the three infinities. Our dysfunction isn’t evidence of doom, as isn’t a car that won’t start; rather, we encounter evidence of a need to adjust our method.
III
To live-at and desire a thing suggests “thingness,” which Owen Barfield teaches us is idolatry and will cause us great misery and pathology. He was right. It is tempting though to believe in “thingness” as most fundamental reality because that is what we naturally experience (according to “understanding”), and indeed thinking works by treating entities “as if” things (breaking them apart), or else comprehension and intelligibility would never be possible to start. Furthermore, living-along requires us to give up some control and to accept “situations” which might surprise us, and this is not natural. Considering this, “the temptation of thingness” is unavoidable: it comes with “understanding,” and no one can “reason” except through the negation/sublation of “understanding.”
Objects are not “things” for Barfield but “relations” and “situations”; objects are more like “waves.” And if we treat things like objects and live-at them, they will still be waves and knock us over. But if we treat things like waves, then we will know that need to live-along them, and so we will have a chance of surfing them. If we stand and let a wave smack into us, it will knock us over, but if we move-along a wave, we can diffuse the blow and enjoy a good ride. This is how we should approach our desires: what we want is not a “thing” but a “wave,” and a “wave” is best approached with a mode of “living-along” versus “living-at.”
Beauty, goodness, and truth are “waves” versus “things”: they seem to “sweep up into themselves” things and entities, and then they define those phenomena according to their qualities. When we experience “the strike of beauty,” suddenly paintings and mountains “feel beautiful,” as if they were “pulled up” into something out of nowhere. If we’ve been in an ocean, we might resonate with this experience: suddenly the current “pulls us up” into the wave and lifts us off the ground. A wave draws into itself and lifts, and then it hits and withdraws. This suggests what experiencing “the three infinities” can be like, and arguably all phenomena are like this, in the sense that atoms pull our vision up into phenomenological experiences of say a flower which “strike us” and then we move on. Perhaps things don’t “withdraw” like experiences of beauty do, for we instead leave or move on (though things “withdraw” through time, I suppose), but the point is that there are similarities, suggesting that everything participates in the three infinities (though perhaps in diffused ways).
IV
Hegel’s “contradiction,” which is an Indirect Ontology, is fundamentally a form of being-along, but the word “contradiction” also suggests mistake and error, which hints at something. If living-along is optimal for humans, this would suggest that it is an “Indirect Ontology” or “Indirect Metaphysics” which is best for us, but if this is the case then we will also need a “Doubtable Epistemology,” for no doubt we will make mistakes. We are “indirect beings” who are “tinkering” and “experimenting” more than “getting it right or wrong.” Nobody knows all the answers, and yet there are “answers.” What might the nature of the universe though be like for this to be the case? That’s a great question, and in my view it suggests reality must be a Bergsonian Timespace more than a spacetime. (It’s another topic, but to momentarily speak Hegelian, we need to be-along according to an “Absolute Situation,” which requires the negation/sublation of “understanding” error into “reasoning” mistake as precisely evidence of “Absolute Knowing,” which is when we might engage in “Absolute Waiting” for the “Absolute Idea” — the Absolute “unfolds” only if we wait on it.)
To take a broad view, we perhaps need a Doubtable Epistemology (following Michael Polanyi), an Indirect Ontology (Hegel), and Timespace Metaphysics (Henri Bergson), all of which come together to suggest our Situation (Leibniz). This would suggest we need to focus on creating “indirect situations” we can live-along, that we see reality as a Timespace (being-along) versus spacetime (being-at), so that we might be-along like surfers. Beauty, goodness, truth — the infinites are revelations that objects are “waves” more than “things,” and we can never have too much of these three, for these are the infinities. A life of living-along is a life of infinity, a life which is never exhausted.
In conclusion, “living-at” is a life of desire in which we seek objects, causing problems and pathologies. In contrast, “living-along” corresponds to “waiting,” a mode of being open to possibilities and allowing things to unfold without reducing them to desires. Living-along “clears” in a Heideggerian sense, while living-at tries to posses and thus ironically loses through exhaustion and boredom. “Thingness” is a temptation, but we might avoid that temptation with time. To live-along is to live toward infinities which are never exhausted, but that requires us to be willing to surf waves that might always take us where we don’t expect to venture — a great blessing, seeing as where we aim to go can prove empty and lacking. This in mind, if we are living-at, it might be best if we have second thoughts.
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