Reflections. Spring 2015, Volume 12, No. 1

SpringBlossomsThe qualities of our presence to each other create an enveloping field that filters all our encounters through the web of our assumptions – conscious and unconscious. This web of assumptions is intimately alive within the very cells of our bodies that register our encounters and establish our capacity for feeling. They are the intrinsic link between our ‘minds’ and our ‘bodies’ – the integrity of our actual symbol/semiotic speaking being. The tightness or looseness, flexibility or rigidity, openness or constrictiveness of this living assumptive web within which we abide, allows or disallows our understanding and development – physical, psychological, social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

The experiences of our presence to each other highlight another reality intrinsic to the integrity of our physical being: the fact that, also on a cellular level, we exist only in relation; in relation to all, our own and other species – to the whole of all that exists, seen and unseen.

Feelings, the medium of attentiveness and presence, as well as the register of our encounters, are also the ontological witness to our existence as relation.

The vicissitudes of presence highlight another aspect of our reality: the intrinsic nature of relation as caprice and possibility. The fields of our experience in relationships float on a sea of yet to be discovered possibilities for articulating relation; possibilities that both enable the creation of our assumptions and destroys their reification.

The realities of presence constitute, establish and challenge the depths of every cell in our bodies, every structure that sustains us, every word and thought that links and differentiates us.

Feelings are our ears for listening to the eternally unfolding atonal music of existence; signals of our existence that occur in the allowances between us.

Every sensation is a word or phrase in the ongoing conversation of our existing together

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There is also another vision of freedom

at the very heart  of philosophy,

with the pre-Socratics,

and developed in the Socratic dialogue.

This fundamental variety of freedom

is not subordinate to a cause.

This fundamental variety of freedom is in Being

and moreover,

the Being of Language Which is Being Delivered

a Being which delivers, gives, or presents itself

to itself and to the other,

and liberates itself in the process.

This liberation of the Language-Being

occurs in the encounter

between the Self and the Other.

This approach inscribes freedom

into the very essence of philosophy,

as eternal questioning,

before allowing it to become fixed

in the succession of causes and effects and the ability to master them.

What I am interested in discussing, in the context

of the modern world,

is this conception of freedom.

This kind of freedom is very different from the

calculating logic

that leads to unbridled consumerism;

it is a conception that is evident in the Speech-Being,

in the Presenting

of the Self to the Other.

After Julia Kristeva

Thinking about liberty in dark times

In Hatred and Forgiveness.

http://www.holbergprisen.no/images/materiell/2004_kristeva_english.pdf

©  2015 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW

All rights reserved

South Garden Press, New York

For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com