Perhaps the reason that Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida do not talk about the self in this sense is that for them it simply does not exist. — John
Perhaps, but there is something for the self to be transcendent of and that is really the point of Henry's polemic against any scientific understanding of the "individual". The point for Henry (and interestingly in a similar way for Berdyaev whom I've also been enjoying reading of late) is precisely that the individual is not the self. — John
Yes, I know this and I understand your perspective. I agreed with you in my first reply to you.It's more than that. When I say "infinite" or "meaning," I am only pointing to something which my language never is. All language does this. My thoughts and speech about my eye are not my eye. Talk about my computer is not my computer. Speech about the infinite is not the infinite.
Yes I agree, but I don't see it as this simple, see below.The infinite cannot be known in the personal. It cannot be an interpretation. Either requires that the infinite be subject to change, for it be a object depending on the actions, understanding or existence of the finite human.
Here we need to tease out the esoteric from the exoteric understanding and use of transcendence as it has been handed down to us from the traditions. The notion of attaining the infinite(being delivered into eternity) and following a study and practice and then reach Nirvana and leave behind the finite. This is the exoteric understanding that is disseminated widely through our culture and the religious traditions.Transcendent accounts consider the infinite something to be obtained, through study, through living, through following a tradition: belief in the spiritual (to use Wayfarer's term), then the infinite will be present, the world will be saved from the absence of the infinite. Ironically, the argument for the transcendent is that we become the infinite, that we cease living in the finite realm and enter the eternal.
Yes, this is strictly true of infinity, but do you realise that infinity is a human invention? We should be using the word eternity, or some other word which refers to an endlessness, but also allows for the unknown, which allows for realities and events which seem illogical, or impossible to us from our limited perspective.We might describe immanence as the understanding that the infinite is inaccessible to us. No matter what we do, we will not live the infinite. Whatever our lives, we will still be finite creatures of change, no matter how much we understand the world or the infinite which it expresses. While there is infinite expressed everywhere and anywhere, the most we will ever do is point to it, no matter how much we understand (or do not understand) it.
This comes to the heart of the matter. For me eternity is also unavoidable, but currently (due to our evolutionary incarnate predicament) unavailable, or veiled to us in our day to day existence. It is due to the veil that eternity is transcendent, but the mystic realises that the veil is the hard casing of a bud, to speak metaphorically and that our body has within it, in a latent form, the apparatus to release our true nature in some way into our incarnate selves.It is in the respect that immanence and transcendence are similar, both refer to eternity expressed in reality. The difference is that transcendence understands eternity to be an object obtained or accessed though specific action, while immanence understands it to be necessary and unavoidable. Even you, more a pluralist in these matters, would say that it's particular action, a particular life, a particular mystic tradition which brings the eternal, which accesses it.
Yes, I agree, the eternal is everywhere, is all, we are eternity devices, but we just don't see it.I say that no-one needs to do anything to express the eternal. Everyone necessarily does so, no matter who they are. The whole world does. God (the eternal) is necessary and not something that is obtained or acts. Even the despairing or suffering express it. There is no means to obtain it (God, tradition, etc.,etc.) because it not the sort thing that is obtained. It's outside the world of change, greed and desire. No-one ever accesses it, no matter how much they understand or feel it.
A case can be made that if there is something universal about human nature, then we don't have the radical freedom, ethical responsibility etc that you seem to want to preserve. If there is an essence and that essence is given by something outside the subject (by something transcendent, say), where is the freedom? — Πετροκότσυφας
Because he rejects that the subject is necessarily constructed by such forces. Sure, he says that this is what has happened in various times and what happens in our time and tries to show how specific subjectivities were produced, but he does not accept that this is necessarily how it ought to be. — Πετροκότσυφας
The one universal thing about selves is the fact that they are all truly free. — John
So freedom cannot ever be an "abstract truth" but rather something that must first be believed (on the basis of our intuitions and lived experience) before it can be fully lived. — John
But what in the world has belief got to do with freedom?
A case can be made that if there is something universal about human nature, then we don't have the radical freedom, ethical responsibility etc that you seem to want to preserve. If there is an essence and that essence is given by something outside the subject (by something transcendent, say), where is the freedom?
— Πετροκότσυφας
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