Φυλλο

Φυλλο

Τρίτη 15 Δεκεμβρίου 2015

Trying to get the gist of the modes of existence

This is an effort to articulate the gist of the Modes of Existence, their ways of interconnecting, for me. A kind of personal draft. It is not a faithful presentation of  Latour's intent and thought. It is my way of making something meaningful for me out of it, making use of my understanding of life. I accept gratefully what I find of value in his work but it does not bound me. It is to the reality that I try to be faithful to the degree that I can (even though I am just a common person and not a philosopher , getting the allowance from my culture which recognizes the right of searching for the Good even for commoners) and not to the author.

I start by the feeling that in this way of approaching things the self is like a wheel turned by the winds. The self registers meetings (crossings?)  that bring him/her forth in the foreground and also is witness of meetings (crossings?) that happen.
In the way that I make sense of the modes of existence the self is always in the potential presence of other potential discussants. There is a potential community of humans in which experience can be shared most probably by understanding "between the lines" (in the way I take Alva Noe to be suggesting for art in "Strange tools"). To my understanding this sharing is a way of distributing the tension Voegelin speaks about when putting the human in an intermediate place. Put otherwise, for me this community is the equivalent of the synods in Christianity.

When one is in the flow of a mode, one feels in "flow", that is in a situation when it is difficult to asign priority to the puppeteer or to the pupet. Other modes are perceived in the background, with the side of one's eye, and it feels that they could be grasped ("If I turn my attention to this mode I could just zero on it").  They too are part of what is going on. But graspability (in a reified form) is a little like a Hermann Grid Illusion (http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_herGrid/). It is the feeling of the easy presence of other modes and how they are viewed when flowing in this mode, that creates the special feel of this one mode which, being in flow, one cannot zero on without loosing its special feel. When one stops to zero one is in [PRE] which is like standing in apprehension. If one zeros on other modes and manages to get flowing then a similar situation reapears. It is the similarity of the experience that  justifies us in recognizing "one more mode" (recognizing the quality of "modeness of experience"), and not the list of specifications at the end of the book (the list is important and helpful and is a progress in understanding but is not the constitutive experience of the mode- I find myself speaking as if the "mode of existence" is a symbol in Voegelin's sense).

If the flow on different modes is like music [PRE] is the silence that is unknowingly pregnant.

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