Failure Is Freedom

Season 2 Final


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We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowable identities or definitions cannot completely reduce all of what is given by our experience, which is the "too-much givenness" of phenomenology, to objective or whole phenomena or concepts. The classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl attempted to eliminate the mediating concepts of perception via the "Eidetic Reduction," so that what appears might appear from its own initiative, or so that phenomena may appear in-themselves, as themselves, and from themselves, stripped of the obscuring mediation of concepts. But this return to some sort of primary naivete has proven elusive because the conceptual mediation of experience seems to be the ground of any possible experience, even though Kantian categories aren't really concepts but the internalization of the natural laws, which ground whatever appears. 

Raw or unmediated percepts have to be copulated with other percepts to be perceived, which means that at least the categories of relation and difference are necessary mediators of whatever appears as given. The primary relation, or category, of cause to effect is given by the relation of space-time to matter-energy according to the categories of the natural laws. But causes cannot be directly observed, as David Hume famously pointed out, and effects, especially those considered as what appears as the phenomena of the world, cannot be reduced in total to material causality as is demonstrated in the work of Jean-Luc Marion by his concept of "Saturated Phenomena." The too-much givenness of Saturated Phenomena leaves any possible reduction to physical causality or to conceptual reasons constitutively incomplete, and therefore, they produce the non-objects of "Counter-Experience," rather than the objects of the material reduction or to the phenomena of the Eidetic reduction. 

This incompleteness, which Marion describes as the mismatch between intuition and intention or between what is given as affective, or felt, phenomena and what can be reduced to causes, leaves room for the virtual space of the subjunctive Imaginary in which possibilities can be actuated and realized, but also in which these realizations actualize more open possibility, which Deleuze thought of as the difference given by a repetition without a concept and Meister Eckhart thought of as God's revealing by withdrawing deeper into His infinite depths. This is the infinitely open, constantly multiplying possibility that does not mean a hermeneutics of anything-goes, but rather of a dialectic with the creative processes of being's becoming other than itself in the relation of identity to difference or self to other or interior to exterior or the One to the many, and so on. Hermeneutics is then where we will turn to next in season three because it is how we participate in creation by making being eternally new.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

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Failure Is FreedomBy https://www.martinessig.com