Working with effort at the gymnasium I become divided into two parties, the one that is determined to continue and the one that begs for a stop. Each of these is a possible point of identification but in the moment I cannot entirely identify with either. For the most part I am the former. This is the one that then becomes implicit, it commands from a bridge in the mind while the other keeps trying to break in from the side of the body. It is as if they are vying for the alleigance of the one who actually executes the actions that constitute the lived moments. And the identification takes places for this one in an ongoing way. It is as if the "I" can only know itself through this process called identification, the reflexive accedence to one of the parties, and this knowing is not merely cognitive but practical since it determines its active choices. The reflexive choice cannot settle conclusively for either side since it requires a unity of meaning and feeling and these are divided between the two. Again, the oddity of this process may be just a reflection of the neurological incompatibility of the two dispositional systems.

All psychological objectivities are cultural artifacts, nonetheless, and crooked as they may be they permit us to dismantle the machine. Isn't this rather naïve? What you call dismantling is another artifact from the same tool chest and the degree to which these yield to one other is already delimited. We may imagine other tool chests and other forms of penetration, the fact remains that all awareness of the machinations of inner reality goads us to this task.

Narratives arise in the space where other narratives break off. This breaking off is the appropriate mode of ending for any story, since it leaves the possibility open for resumption. Always stories within stories, divagations, deferrals, multiple threads, so that forgetting or leaving aside is as much a part of this moment as resuming, as starting afresh, as gathering up into new sense. There is a resonant silence when a story breaks mid-sentence…. and then, another story begins. We are not sure if it is the continuation of the previous one or a new story altogether.

The most blatant form of discursive thought is silent inner speech, and this mostly has a more or less optional character. Even so, when we exercise the apparent choice to stem the flow of this speech, to halt the process of its forum, we merely still certain facial muscles and are able to sense that we have already acceded to the little bright sentential capsules that shoot from we know not where into the space of our attention. Regardless of this, at each moment we find ourselves in an ever changing life situation and the colouring and the solicitations that it bears with it as it comes over to us are also discursive although less obviously and less optionally so, and furthermore, by that very discursivity belong all the more fatally to us. This incessant process where feeling and quantity of life are transformed into narrative is where we naturally, unthinkingly, find ourselves.

Discursive thought, then, is not distinguishable from the flow of lived time, which it indeed seems to fix in an unequivocal sense. Its grammar, in both implicit and explicit insistence provides the topology of linearisation for that temporality in which we will always strive in vain to recover ourselves.

It is possible, by a certain inner effort to change the mode of attack of presence, and of the fading of the contents of perception and of sensation. In this way what is perceived outside the body and what is sensed inside it serve in the same way as events against which we construe differing forms of lived time. Examining this more closely we may be inclined to subsume the content of perception into the general sphere of the contents of bodily sensation, and we may do this without loss of transcendence since there is no possible limit to the forms of lived time. At any rate the salient contrast is with (discursive) thought, about which none of the above is true.

The body-self and the mental “me” are two modes of self that I can distinguish and alternate between in exploratory attention. A very deliberate effort of attention is required because these different modes play the same role in the ongoing organisation of experience and cannot appear in that role at the same time. Still, the mental “me” can appear to have been the observer of the body-self, but not vice versa. They answer to being the standing realities or immanent personae of that functioning self which gives itself over to oblivion in each inner event.

These are observations about the imagination, but to say so requires something like the Romantic imagination. What fulfills this function in a post-romantic era?

There are other starting points and other inquiries, yet even of the most pragmatic there is a sense that they take place within the frame of the same inchoate demand. We do not imagine animals as sharing this same imperative, yet when we try to imagine intentional robots they are subject to it, and a fortiori when we imagine ourselves to be such knowledge-hungry robots. We are impatient to uncover our own impostures, as if to do so would quiet the rage.

Whatever may be possible as a logical or metaphysical deduction, the interest here is in an experiential deduction. To one lying awake in the dark – beset with a paradoxical demand: abandon everything which will fall away and find that which abides. This is a venerable starting point. To it we must add: to one lying awake in the dark there comes the realization that we are always lying awake in the dark. Furthermore, the second half of the demand is not so unequivocal. Who, within us or beyond us, could ask for that which abides? To describe it in this way is to beg the question. In the dark we are called, but we know not to what or by what or even where to locate the addressee of this call.

Difference, as implied in the indelible solitude of the self, is nonetheless immanently transcendental, that is, it is wholly immanent but stands in relation to all other immanences as if it were transcendental, as if it did faithfully represent being. This is one experiential axis of difference, the other, which unfolds as the panoply of the world is easily, it seems, traced back to the self’s ability to differ from and within itself, its ability to dream. Where these intersect we can no longer speak of difference (nor of self) but must adopt a new word, such as “the open”. [c.f. the eighth Duino Elegy of Rilke.]

Difference is achieved strategically in relation to some end; this makes it actual. The world is developed like a film by solutions of appetite. The appetite for the real is like a developer that is too strong and erases the image. Whatever is posited strategically is always subject to revision; it does not support premises that go beyond its occasion.

If difference were to be accepted as holding for the real then we would be in a wholly discrete cosmos, ultimately one of multiple solipsisms. This may be the case, but the imperative to keep this question open runs deeper than the links of a possible reasoning that would prove it to be so. Similar problems beset a deduction on behalf of any experiential counterpart of difference, such as “oneness”.

Experience of difference exhausts the metaphysical content of difference. In other words: the concept of difference is based in experience but is a generic concept and so cannot be pinned to a specific type of experience. In this way it may seem to be prior to experience. This logical vastness or depth does not, however, warrant the transcendental deduction that difference is ultimately real. How does one thread one’s way from the experientially posterior to the metaphysically prior? The hoary old reflex which has reiterated this demand is of more interest than its solution.

Is there anything in experience that can provide a basis for knowledge of what is ultimately real, or even of what is necessarily real for me? Is some sort of transcendental deduction possible? In Kant’s time the natural analogies for such a defense of experience were space and time and mathematics, since these were at the heart of the most successful contemporary sciences. In our time an equivalent notion would be information, or more fundamentally, difference.

That birth and death alternate, that winter and summer succeed each other, that all things glide along and move is a generally accepted proposition. But to me this is not so.
- Seng Chao, "On Time".


What happens? And who wants to know?