What we need.

Those words capture in retrospect my sense of the exchange of ideas experienced a few hours ago when the philosophy discussion group held a virtual meeting to consider (M)existentialism.  The launch pad for this discussion was Carlos Alberto Sanchez’ essay about Emilio Uranga’s philosophical work.  The texture of the discussion was similar to the rapids encountered on a mountain stream when white water rafting.  We were tossed about as we discussed the basic concept of the “existentialist” manner of thinking.  Existentialism turns our default state of mind on it’s head.  What if there is no essential core, no bedrock of identity as unchanging as the DNA received before I was born?  What if everything about me, has been formed by and in response to the conditions, social and material of my environment?  What if the contingencies of “life,” happens to be all there is; the “I” is the product of mere attachment to something else, another way of saying ‘accident’? 

Stop for a moment to let that sink in…  You and I are the outcome of a mashup of many factors, many confluences of persons extending back in time …  Can you feel the vertigo, the sense of insufficiency, a palpable absence of comfortable belonging?  I can. 

So here I am and here you are, the result of uncountable coincidences, responsible, — as if by fate or by the decree of the gods, we awaken on the stage where every word is a deed, standing alone we protagonists must act, a spotlight bathes us with illumination…

We discussed Uranga’s work by relating a number of personal stories as examples of some technical terms.  Nepantla is life lived pulled between two worlds, differing, conflicting ethical imperatives.  I move back and forth between a rigid rule-based evangelical upbringing, and the playful experimentation of a intellectual ethos.  I am shape-shifting; I have a “uncentering center” between two extremes, unsettled.  I do not have the luxury of purity, — living in overlapping modes, in contaminated space.

We touched on zozobra, a term describing the emotional texture resulting from a life lived between two worlds, how it feels to live between two extremes. 

This reminds me of some lines in Burnt Norton the first of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

There is only so much that can be said about our location.  There is a limit to the facility of words to define, and even to describe where we have been and the place we now inhabit.  Saying only goes so far, words can only point…

Eliot goes on:

The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung* without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

That’s it!  Is that not a apt description of our quest?  We search for inner freedom, for release from suffering, for a new world, the horrors of history resolved…

At least that is what I think the discussion of last night meant to me.  I wonder what it meant to others?

*Erhebung is a feminine noun meaning elevation.