Philosophy
Positive Philosophy
—2—
MOTION AND FUNCTION
We are searching, but we are not moving. We wait to be moved, but find that that may not be a good idea. We are examining the mechanisms with which we are surrounded. We extend and retract like lungs. We exhale and inhale. Our world seems to grow smaller but we hold no more than we ever have. We stop waiting and look around. The wilds are populated by uncertain creations. We attempt to discover the character of each, but the inquiry quickly grows too large, and leaves us with a feeling of insufficiency. We are standing but we do not know where we are. We are searching for the place but all around us is strangeness. Inside of this strangeness we construct spheres within which we can feel ourselves familiar. We are one and we are many – the voice in our heads does not belong to us, we cannot say of it 'it is mine' although it certainly appears to be. The words while unclear are useable. We are not beginning, we are already here. That is the nature that underlies this inquiry. In the beginning, or what is held to be the beginning, we were also already here. Any time we select we will find the same result. This is ground enough to pause. A pause is not a wait, however. We rest, we stop to see if we can find the place we are after. But there are no places. We pause again – the question has been wrongly put. That becomes clear. There is nothing to ask for. What we would like to do is to stop asking.
But what is an investigation if not an asking? The material does not cooperate. We retreat. We are climbing a ladder that has no dimension or direction. There is an element that must climb. But we are also not climbing. The movement we are discussing is apparent only within the limit – outside it is as if nothing happens. This particular movement, however, is not concerned with how or why – the place happens when movement leaves these elements, and all elements, behind. We are moving within a limit, and the limit is the matter of concern. We have left certain questions behind out of necessity. To question is a bringing up that reinforces. So we leave the act of questioning. While we cannot speak of building new limits we can speak of building. It is in the moment when we leave behind all discussion of purpose that we can begin to talk fruitfully about how we should proceed. The desire to know the answer to this question is a further obstacle. All desires as such act in the same way. It is only when we desire not to desire that we are able to properly approach the matter.
We are in a realm of machines but we would like to proceed without mechanical assistance. While such language calls out for correction we must recall that to return does not guarantee certainty or knowledge. The point we are looking for and at does not as a point exist. We use it temporarily as a shelter of sorts. But we are moving, and we carry the point as far as we can. Eventually it grows too small to hold, and vanishes. At the limit certainty and knowledge cease to exist. This cessation leaves behind a shell but is not to be taken seriously. There is no question of transcending the limit, since this involves us in a simple logical contradiction – that is, to say we 'transcend' by definition eliminates the acting 'we', but only an agent as constituted can transcend. We do not transcend – rather what we do is gently push at the limit. But the limit is constructed, it is a machine and as such, unchangeable. That is the argument it puts forth. There is no need to get stuck at this point. The nature of mechanism is the positing of (self) permanence. The act of positing is however not the same as permanence. There is no need to take posited permanence as permanent. Everything flows. The limit flows, the mechanism flows. It is merely a question of observable speed. The melting of a pane of glass held to be solid but which is actually a dense liquid points us in the right direction. We are confronted not so much by delusion as by illusion.
In the interest of utility we posit permanence, but utility is not necessarily the optimization of function. We are interested in how the mechanism functions. In the act of establishing permanence it posits itself as real, and as real it becomes that which by reality is defined. Reality as such has no concern for itself. It simply holds itself as that which is. This holding activity, however, is also present, and serves as a key. We are looking at actions, motion. Behind the fixed is the fluid. Inside of every particle is movement. Earth flows to water, water flows to air, air flows to fire. These states themselves are simply illusions — a convention established to fix control, to speak of what is. We are not speaking of what is, however. We are working at pushing: – we want to see where such a pushing can lead. We are not trying to be more scientific that science. We are simply pushing. In pushing we note points of resistance. It is in these points that our focus begins to operate. Focus can be thought of as the point of a welding flame, where oxygen acetylene and fire combine to release energy.
Work without focus drifts and does nothing. Focus directs and localizes. Everything flows. Every thing, that is, held as thing, in actuality flows, and as flowing in fact is not a thing. What we hold and construct flows, only the movement operates at a slower speed than our perception. Such speed is not absolute. The only steady factor is that in order to hold, the speed must always stand outside of our holding. There is always enough time to freeze what flows – what flows is frozen in time. Nothing exists outside of time, and time does not exist outside of us. Thus no matter how apparently far away from ourselves we move, no matter, that is, how objective we become, we are always within the limit of this border.
We require tools to investigate the functioning of the limit before us. Because we cannot touch the limit we likewise cannot touch our tools. What fills the space of tools is not a thing, however – we merely use the space where we would normally insert our tools, which is to say the empty form that is left when the real tools are removed. We fill this space with flow, for if we do not fill it, it will fill itself, and create more things, although no matter how much flow we pour into it, it still remains empty. This is not our goal. What we are looking for is a properly functioning set of tools. But still the emptiness of the space confronting us is irksome. Our words wash up against it, but then fall back into the sea. In looking into this space we see emptiness, and within this emptiness we see ourselves. We have completed a circle, but this is not to say that we have completed the circle. There are a multitude of circles, each of which reaches completion when we apply this process. That is another way of describing a process in which we live: the movement is circular. 'This is that' is a circle. But a circle is not flat. It twists, undulates, like a coil. But a coil that does not follow any line. What we are looking at, that is, is not defined.
After a stop there is a pause. Then comes a rest, then motion. Motion comes out of the stop. We arrest ourselves in order to move ourselves. We are looking at what makes us stop. In this looking we detect a certain freedom. There is nothing else. We direct our eyes, the rays shine out. The fundamental observation is that there is no metaphor. We are always calling. Sometimes we go heard, sometimes the call goes unanswered. This does not affect the nature which calls. We are calling. That is enough. We reinforce ourselves by means of what we need. What is needed is a variable function. There are no fixed definitions. What we are looking at moves, we move. What concerns us is this movement. We examine it, we watch the motion. It is movement. There are obvious difficulties in trying to fix this moment. Such a fixing is the action of the event we call time. Time is an application of energy. Energy is what is required to maintain the functioning of the mechanisms of the constructions we are trying to observe. To speak of time is to speak towards the correct nature of the question – how, that is, do we then apply our energy if in not that way? There is enough room here to think. We look out at what surrounds us. We are directed by a constant series of false paths. Each makes itself as alluring as the next. Each, that is, goes to its own utmost ability to lead us away. There is never an indication that we are looking at a false path.
The areas which we approach do not occupy space. Space exists only within the construction we call limit. Space is the field in which the assembly of this construction can occur, and thus can be considered fundamental, but only in so far as we are dealing with interior questions. Obviously the notion of interior is flawed, since there is no exterior per se, and interior can only correctly function when matched with a corresponding exterior. We are dealing with the space within the limit, but also that which enables this limit. We are looking, that is, at the field of possibility. But we are only using this field as a temporary measure. What is really of interest is that which is enabled by it. But that which is enabled does not exist separately – this a delicate point, and one we will leave to the side for a moment.
The reaching of such a point is a sign. To have found a point at all is an indication that the question has been reduced to its most constituent part. But this reduction does not mean we have arrived anywhere – no, rather it demonstrates that the where we have gotten to is the cornerstone of the method with which we are applying ourselves to the problem. But there is no problem, and the method itself is what must become suspect. We are not looking for points, although our thinking leads us to find them. But we are poorly educated. Knowledge is not a good tool. It leads, then controls, then leaves only a reflection of itself with which to see and finally feel. Feeling is motion, e-motion. Feeling is fluid, feeling changes, feeling flows. Feeling cannot be fixed. Feeling dives into deep waters. We must approach such matters more carefully, and in such an approach we will negotiate a retreat. This retreat will frequently become necessary due to the nature of the medium we are using here. But the presence of retreat is not an indication of error – rather it is a part of the procedure. Retreat happens when we push too far. Retreat is a function of pushing the limit. We push, then stop. But we do not stop precisely where we have extended ourselves, for there is a certain elasticity present, and this pushes us back slightly. Thus the retreat is simply a part of the motion. And motion is what we are looking for.
But in speaking of motion we fall back to another problem: what is moving?. Something must be moving, and further, something must move. The question has returned to the prime mover, the creator of the created. Such returns always take us back to familiar ground. We move through territories that have already been occupied. The application of words almost guarantees this re-transgression. But this almost is not complete. Movement as flow does not escape but does suggest certain other possible arenas. What is required is to stop searching. Motion itself must be the mover. We have been repulsed by the limit, and must re-negotiate our circumstances. While it is easy to listen to words it is harder to hear the unsaid. It is precisely such a listening that will be required in what follows.
To tie ourselves to the fixed, to live in time, is to not move. Or rather it is to attempt to not move. But to cut the cord is to float aimlessly. This is the continuation of the counter-argument. Perhaps movement itself does not offer the necessary precision. Something, after all, moves. And this something moves from one place to another. Thus movement offers a thing and two places, or three things. This collection of things is not quite what we are looking for. There are after all already more than enough things. We do not need to assemble such a body. But the body itself (that is to say, the collection of things), as all bodies must do, breathes. There is an inward and outward process of respiration. Things, as constituted, follow this process. Things and places themselves, as existing, follow this movement. And we follow them, which explains our inability to see the process. We as the so called conscious agent are already three steps behind in the process. So we grapple our way, not wanting forever to be last. But last also is a place – it is not last that we do not want to be – no, rather what we want to do is move with the movement – neither leading nor following.
So we must consider that we have lost our way. Or rather, it is not that the way is lost, but that our method has led us astray. In our concern with what is around us we have forgotten to move. And in our concern for movement we have inadvertently gotten stuck in what is around us. Movement is around us. So we have posited ourselves as some us that stands in the midst of movement. Whether resting or active it is the same. The positing agent stands while we fall. In this too there is familiar taste, for we always seem to come back to the same point. And in this last return we ask ourselves what is real. And how we see in a way that lets us ask this in the first place.
We have both attempted to sever the bonds to knowledge, and to reconnect the space left behind to a changing form we call movement. But this action may be illusory. Perhaps we are only seeking to renew our knowing of motion. But this is not all bad. Since we are doomed to live inside of circles we might at least try to keep clear about the circle's character – how, that is, is it made? But it is not only a question of 'how'. Or rather, it is not a question of 'how' at all. Our only choice is to make the circle, to let it breathe, to note when and if irregularities appear. What we want to see is the moment that the circle becomes apparent. We are opening the process to reveal the action of the mechanism. This opening is not a removed, objective operation. Neither is it subjective. The entire notion of subjective/objective is the result of an active process of production. Without this process neither can be said to exist. There is difficulty in moving beyond this observation.
This difficulty points towards something which is more than a gap in our thinking. What is suggested is a fundamental error: we do not know ourselves. In this sense our ignorance is complete. And the more we believe we know the greater are the obstacles confronting us. We do not in fact know, and this is precisely the problem. What we do is create what we then hold as what we know. We are at heart creative creatures. And what we create is ourselves.
We are returned to abstraction. What we hold as abstract is another way of saying what we consider removed from us – us as a group of individuals. Our thinking prefers to operate on entities. The world which we create is filled with such entities. We ourselves are entities. When we wish to gain control over a collection we posit general rules, rules however which are governed by functionality. Functionality is simply another way of describing the extent to which such rules allow the control we are looking for. The name we give each system is nowhere near as important as the effect – does it, that is, work?
But entities as such are always constructed. There is, for example, no tree separate from its root and soil and minerals and air and sun. To speak of a tree is truly to speak in abstraction. Likewise there is no person without a social body surrounding them. The words we are using to constitute ourselves and the world are presented to us as givens. They connect the group, they create the group, and the individuals it contains. The simple term word of course is insufficient. There is a complete semiotic that connects and creates. Without this process there is no human being per se. Although this point should be fairly obvious by now it still seems to slip by unnoticed at times.
The 'to be' structure is the cornerstone of the rational method. We cannot rationally deal with a process until we have determined it 'is'. Once we do this, we can go on to speak of what many 'are'. Then we can say what the rule for these many 'is', and so on. Clearly the power of the rational process cannot be questioned. It is for this reason that philosophy must take great care when using this tool, perhaps even to the extent of making a move away from rationality. That which is placed at a distance has diminished power over us. Reason must be returned to its proper place, as one tool among others. But such a thought is almost unthinkable. Instead, philosophy has more or less reduced itself to constructing its own objects of investigation, like a child playing make-believe. It removes itself one step further from the matter at hand, and thus, while insuring its practitioners a steady income, also insures the absence of content. Content in philosophy is provided by the construction of a more powerful method. But method is a deceptive term. We are not facing a teachable, repeatable phenomenon in the sense of an empirical science. Rather what is given is a tool that allows for a manipulation of the limit. Because our world is strongly shaped by this limit, it resists efforts of this type. Such resistance, however, makes no difference in the long run, since the movement has an inexorable quality, and logic, of its own. What we do as philosophizing agents is merely to put form to this movement. In a sense we transform ourselves into this movement. We neither follow nor lead, but remain content to breathe in and out.
Such a breathing cannot be defined. It is not simply one thing or another. There is no category breath. Perhaps as a working definition we could speak of an opening, although, as already noted, there is no question of opening the limit. Instead what occurs is rather an opening as such, one motion among others. An opening, that is, that lets in, in the same way that our lungs open to let in air. It is not that they are closed, but rather that they are expanded and, while not really doing anything, are thus filled. After being filled they contract, and empty. Respiration forms a continuous flowing motion:- opening as that which lets in, closing as that which expels. With opening we allow the world to enter and sustain us, with expelling we eliminate the used and useless. While it is difficult at times to determine such use value the process is in fact automatic — no determination is called for. It is not necessary to ask if the oxygen we ingest is useful or if the carbon dioxide we expel is useless. What nourishes us is consumed and transformed – there is no need to ponder weightily on such matters. We absorb the world in order to create the world. The process is not contained within self-hood. Positive philosophy is concerned only with carrying out this process. All other activities which might present themselves are only errors inadvertently injected by our use of rationality as a tool. Rationality, because of its power, is a challenge to control.
But this is precisely the challenge we face. The method threatens us with consumption. What should simply be a mechanism of ascertaining function becomes the dominant agent, and begins to create its own demands. Thus the entire philosophical project begins to collapse under the weight of its own tools. This collapse, however, is not a separate event in the process of philosophy. We are on a spiral, and we return to collapse as a precondition of creation. It is like a tree falling in the forest and providing food for the next generation. Philosophy arises out of its own collapse. There is no such thing as philosophy – there is only an ongoing endeavor. This particular endeavor, however, is a special category of work: – the problem to be solved does not exist. We are operating without questions or problems. The notion that there is some set or order of questions which is the appropriate domain of philosophy simply reveals a fundamental lack of awareness about what philosophy is engaged in. The project, because of its interest in the limits, always remains fluid. This does not mean that we do not try to establish limit, although it does say that we easily succumb to the insecurity caused by an unstable limit. And insecurity is precisely what is at hand: the need to fix and control is the need to make secure.
But perhaps we are hasty – we may not be looking at a need at all; what is at hand may simply be a desire. But what do we mean when we say desire? Surely we are observing a mechanism at work. Perhaps it would be better to think of it in this way – within the border of the sphere we maintain a certain lack is felt. In order to fill this lack we investigate the arena of possible objects until we light on the one that seems most able to satisfy our craving. But the process does not end so simply. Once the mechanism has been put into play, each successful operation strengthens its functioning. Finally we exist only to satisfy the mechanism. Out of the plethora of created needs floats rationality. Rationality offers its services because objects are its prime currency.
What is of primary interest, however, is this lack. We are looking, that is, at an empty space. And it is out of this empty space that our world as such flows. But such fluidity makes us uneasy, and we strive to fix it, to establish boundaries, the beyonds of which we simply call the savage wilds – places, that is, not of use, and not under our control. We return to this empty place. In order to be empty, there must have been something filling it. Such logic is not required, of course, but such logic should be allowed to run its course. In order to understand this lack we must come to understand the emptiness that seems to draw us in so powerfully. And simply to give us something to work with, something perhaps a little too un-philosophical, I would suggest that what is lost is the originary non-separation. In other words, it is our own very creation of ourselves as individuals and selves that creates the condition for the lack. The space that we seek to fill can never be filled in the way that we try to do. And the greater that our sense of self becomes, the greater become our needs. And this simply because we have in fact stepped away from ourselves as non-individual entities. Religion can be thought of as the attempt to return to the condition that exists prior to this dis-connection.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that we are not qualified to function as selves. Like children driving a car we will inevitably crash. Our reasoning as reasoning monads will always be fundamentally flawed in this way. The premise is wrong. I and mine are already misrepresentations of the process. We still do not grasp the fundamental point, which is that as entities we do not exist. We have come to completely mistake abstraction (the 'I', 'it' etc.) for the non-abstract (the actual ground of existence – lack of dis-connection as actual function). Philosophy is the work of removing ourselves from the sphere of abstraction.
We use what is central now only as one tool among others. We at once create our selves and strengthen our creation by careful use of tools. Language becomes a tool of cooperation, the world around us is born as a source for the construction of the tools of our survival. We grow and expand by careful and careless bounds. But we become locked into the mechanism we have unleashed as well. Our language creates for us a world that is at once free and a prison. Freedom is an ill-defined something that might best be thought of as the moment of recalibration of the limit producing mechanism. The sensation of freedom does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the motion of the limit. It is when the limit has been reached then pushed that we can most honestly use this word.