Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.3 Ipseity and Individuation
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individual life begins with the articulation of sense through which it is factually realized. Psychotherapy sets out from life itself: for life itself is forced to choose the care of self as a means to achieve its fullness by its very unfolding and hence by its very motility, which constantly erodes the meanings it engenders. Only in such terms is it possible to understand why one of the crucial elements for the reconstruction- appropriation of a patient’s personal story lies in the therapist’s sen- sitivity to discover and indicate those events whose meaningfulness has shaped the actual course of the person’s story; this sensitivity represents the cornerstone of every therapeutic relationship.
what absorbs us and our being absorbed. Patočka calls this the sphere of appear- ance—of which the world and ipseity merely constitute two traits—the phenomenal field and outlines its composition as follows: “We consider this universal totality of what manifests itself, the great whole, as belonging to the structure of appearance as such, as well as to that to which what manifests itself appears, namely subjectivity (which has an empty pronominal structure, not to be identified with a single fixed subject) and the ‘how’ of appearance” (1995, p. 177).
Therefore, in each case, what appears coincides both with an appearance of lived experience and an appearance of the world. In every instant, feeling alive corre- sponds to this experience which on each occasion finds completion and renewal in the meaningful connections that we come across. We bear traces of these events, as a living text that is to be reinterpreted again and again in the light of the world.
So as the world becomes viable and visible, the experience I have of it becomes passively and actively “available,” so to speak, in the form of elements that can be mobilized anew in relation to the course of my actual life—as conditions determin- ing the production of subsequent experiences or as the entrenchment of an ability: a habit.
The world which life touches upon takes shape as the world of that life: a life which, without any first person, receives itself and historically appropriates itself in relation to the complexes of meaning which it comes across time after time through its own factical flow. The meaning of living is therefore generated in each case through the way in which life—my life—de facto understands, expects, imagines, desires, behaves, and remembers within the context of the fullness of the experience of how it perceives itself. This generation of meaning is always suspended upon an expectation, a “not yet,” the structural deficiency of life, its need of enjoyment (Levinas 1979), its desire—which in every instant corresponds to a new context of expectation that enables the world to appear and life to actualize and manifest itself.
Clearly, all this cannot be described as a judgment on the part of the body, under- stood as a “mode of cognitive grasping of the world,” which is how cognitivists have viewed it, surfing the recent trend of embodiment (Solomon 2004, p. 77). Less still can embodiment be conceived as the perception of oneself elicited by the immediate experience of the world and ensured by a body, understood as a material entity—a fragment of organized biological matter—which is how it is conceived by neuro- phenomenology, in keeping with cybernetics, thereby revealing the idealistic under- current of this discipline. Once again, the two perspectives overlap when it comes to this theme, since they share the same ontology and therefore the same view of embodiment, which they interpret by taking consciousness as their starting point, ultimately regarding embodiment as one of its modes. Whether we are speaking of embodied cognition, embodied simulation, the embodied theory of mind abilities, or the embodied affects, the body is conceived as a mode, a condition that enables the living consciousness to make sense of the world. This even applies to Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology, since—as Barbaras (2007) notes—it designates the body as an entity within the world whose property is to enable its perception, instead of thematizing the body as what emerges as such through its being-in-the-world. In other words, it does not grasp the body in the light of an ipseity which, in bringing
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the world into manifestation ever anew, reaches itself through that which it causes to appear, thereby establishing its substrate.
I walk down the stairs, cross the street, reach a bridge, and go and buy some wine: the concrete actualization of life corresponds to the direction it takes on every successive occasion, starting from the still undifferentiated motility that constitutes it and which in each case plunges, so to speak, into meanings, into lived experience.
This tension toward something, this restless possibility of being something, finds its determinations in terms of content in the concrete enactment of directions of sense, in the establishment of living, actual relations. The way in which I encounter myself, then, the familiarity or lack of familiarity with my own self, the fact of possessing or not possessing myself, is not given theoretically, but in each case corresponds to that meaning which is generated—in a fully concrete unity—in a concrete vital rela- tion, in the factical realization of life.
Seeking to confine life to stable forms, to a clear-cut conceptuality, as a psychol- ogy resorting to the method of natural science has done, means betraying the funda- mental essence of life: the transitoriness of one’s being on a journey, the motility of life (kinesis tou biou). This constitutive transitoriness of life is such that in each case what is at stake, on a day-to-day basis, is oneself. Hence the rigor of psychology is understood as the science of personal meaning, which can only differ from that of the natural sciences: it has to do with the capacity to grasp the original production of sense in actual life.
Even in the most banal everyday experiences, when we attempt to grasp our- selves starting from our life, which is what we are, we once again come across those structural aspects which Aristotle regarded as the basic features of sublunar entities:
the motility of life and its incompleteness—that incompleteness which character- izes every entity in motion.
Yet, at this stage, something new appears. The motility of life now manifests itself, not as the change from a condition of incompleteness to one of completeness (as selfsameness endures in its being), but rather as an inclination toward a “not yet,” a still indeterminate tension, a being turned toward something (Bezugsinn) that in each case concretely emerges (Vollzugsinn) in the actual encounter with an occur- rence (Gehaltsinn) and, crucially, manifests itself as self-intimacy. Movement, therefore, is not a passing from non-presence to presence, but rather a conducting and leading oneself toward what is experienced in its meaningfulness, a taking care of something which may be enacted in different ways. In other words, movement amounts to a mode of self-presence which, in renewing itself on every occasion with respect to that which thereby manifests itself, spells out the way in which this enactment becomes time and leaves a trace for each person, marking the path of individuation.
“Time—Heidegger states—is to be understood here not as the framework or dimension in which facts are ordered, or the (specifically formal) character of the connections among historical events, but rather as the mode of motility, meaning a character that not only makes motility possible by releasing it from within, but con- stitutes it as itself moving in an autonomously factical way” (GA 61 1985, p. 169).
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
As we have seen, time is one’s concrete mode of comportment in this or that situ- ation (i.e., the “how”). Thus the process of individuation takes shape and unfolds as a life trajectory, from cradle to grave, through the enactment of sense in relation to the events we encounter as our life journey unfolds. For each one of us, becoming a story in every instance amounts to the actual co-experiencing of our self-familiarity in grasping the meaningfulness of that which meets us. In this respect, becoming a story is the mode in which our relation to our own past is preserved according to the enactment of our being-there in the light of various fields of possibility. This rela- tion is renewed in actual occurrences and points to a being-there that concretely exists precisely by virtue of its relation to that which it regards as its own story:
being-there gains a story in which to live through its mode of updating its past—a past that is therefore a vital part of ipseity.