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5.10 Trajectories and Turning Points
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As it flows by, experiencing the world which it is attuned to, and which enables it to find itself on every occasion, our life articulates itself as intelligibility or the lack thereof, as the acquisition or loss of familiarity with itself, with the environ- ment it lives in, and with others. Within such an encounter with a self that con- stantly renews itself, generating meaning, what also takes concrete shape and acquires relevance is experiences, which may be of greater intensity and therefore define one’s perspective while at the same time disclosing a new horizon of expec- tations. In this sense, in the situation at hand, I will grasp and single out a particu- lar field of meaningfulness with respect to the overall context of my factual experience, on the basis of which I will experience myself in relation to how I deal with my own world. We here catch a glimpse of that peculiar interweaving of an experienced past, more or less sedimented according to certain changing inclina- tions, and the horizon of expectations defined by it—a tension which is resolved again and again through the enactment of ipseity. What we have here is the end- less dialectic between sameness and ipseity, mediated and configured by a narra- tive that makes it possible to integrate the diversity, variability, discontinuity, and instability within a coherent story, engendering what has been described by Ricoeur as a person’s narrative identity. Ricoeur thus argues that the essential dif- ference between the narrative model and all other models of connection lies in the status of the event which, by entering into the flow of the narrative, in each case connects the person to his or her own story.
determinations which it acquires depend on the referential context within which it is generated (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009).17
I go to work, devote a lot of energy to my profession, occupy myself with botany, read nineteenth-century French literature, play golf, cook dinner, and, more generally, live with a person I love, have a family and life project, and worry about my teenage daughter, while my wife is thinking of changing job, my mother requires assistance, and so on. In other words, I am always directed toward something, or rather toward a
“not yet,” according to a weave of perspectives that change over time and lend my existence meaning but also a certain familiarity and, with it, an intimacy with certain other people, a solidity, a sense of being settled somewhere, a dwelling place. Levinas notes: “The subject contemplating a world presupposes the event of dwelling, the withdrawal from the elements (that is, from immediate enjoyment, already uneasy about the morrow), a recollection in the intimacy of the home” (1991, p. 153).
This is the subtle stability that colors everyday life and of which our attitudes and habitus are but one manifestation. This corresponds to prominent ways of realizing ipseity, which generate tendencies to lend meaning to the things we encounter—ten- dencies that are never permanent. Together with these tendencies and the modes of enacting them, problematic spheres take shape that may lead to new orientations and new forms of fulfillment. Each life transformation therefore coincides with a moving away from certain nexuses of intelligibility and accessibility, from particu- lar configurations of familiarity, and at the same time with the emerging of new availabilities that may be mobilized in view of new tendencies. The fact of drawing upon the experience of oneself during a transformative process implies a new self- intimacy, which structures itself through ongoing experience in view of possible new horizons of sense. On the other hand, if the way in which ipseity expresses itself in each case is through a situation, it is evident that the most significant trans- formations over the course of our life will be associated with the way in which we actually grasp the material content we encounter. Once again, life “addresses itself and answers itself in its own language” (GA 56/57 1999, p. 42).
Various circumstances can change the course of our life, altering our personal stability and lifestyle, thereby affecting the interpenetration of the various levels of existence (the world of the self, the surrounding world, the collective world). These impermanent saliences which life gives itself as it unfolds represent its modes of manifestation, which stabilize or change as forms or styles of familiarity.
One real-life example—a tragically common one in these years of economic crisis—will help illustrate this point: I lose my job. Consequently, my economic condition changes and, with it, my possibility of accessing certain social contexts and of spending time with certain people, my perception of my own admissibility
17 In this sense, an action, to the extent that it implies the intention of being recognized for what it is, may express a certain illocutionary force—during a conflict in a couple, for instance—that has very little to do with the energetics of vitality affects, as argued by some researchers working on the motor system (Di Cesare et al. 2013).
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and personal worth, the emotional dynamics between myself and my wife, the way in which I relate to my children as a father, my career projects and how much I intend to invest in them, my balance of efforts and rewards, the satisfaction I derive from what I do, the way I relate to my desires—and so on.
In other words, in the search for a new stability, motives and tendencies recom- bine, engendering new meaningful contexts and problematic areas, new specific areas of self-understanding, which constitute a renewed direction of sense. The life of men and saints alike is marked by such turning points and more or less sudden and momentous reorientations, which lend life a new direction.
Echoing a theme—that of extreme situations—dear to the young Jaspers, Poeggeler writes: “Clearly, we interpret the table we use in our everyday life on the basis of the ‘what’ that is known to us about it; but man is not the mere realization of a ‘what’, since this ‘what’ discloses itself in the great moments of life and, fur- thermore, must always be determined anew” (1995, p. 297).
Actual cohesion of the sense of self takes the form of a changeable situatedness, manifesting itself in ever different ways in contexts of occurrences—albeit within the framework of directions of sense pertaining to different periods of one’s life. But, at the same time, it is precisely through this circumstantial quality that the cohesion of the sense of self becomes accessible: through it, the domain of the proper reveals itself, acquiring greater intensity, while lending definition to the surrounding world and the social one, which therefore always manifests itself in a fluctuating way. As has been repeatedly stressed, this intensification corresponds to the current enactment of certain tendencies (or the emergence of new ones), and hence to a certain life trajec- tory, which in each case is motivated by its very flowing. So each person reveals himself to himself within particular occurrences, and in a particular context of events, and this unique disclosure at the same time represents the way in which life addresses itself, by taking charge of it—or not. Facts therefore unveil that the encounter with that which becomes present reveals to the individual the meanings to which he can open himself up in that particular moment of his life. At the same time, the very same events will motivate—or fail to motivate—the person to act in accordance with the meanings he perceives. It is evident, therefore, that motivation does not coincide with—and cannot be traced back to—an inner, objective, and all-encompassing sys- tem governing the individual and his world; rather, it only occurs in response to what the person grasps as being meaningful within his world.
The experience of the encounter with oneself, which takes shape through the horizon of sense produced by coming face to face with a situation, is a historical phenomenon. To put it in different terms, history—being-there historically—is an experience which takes shape again and again in concrete situations, in view of a given horizon of expectation. The perception of being alive, which in each case manifests itself through its enactment in such or such a way, is experienced in a historical sense through this actualization: the phenomenon of history, therefore, emerges as an act that experiences itself through its specific realization.
The fact of being myself in this or that situation, then, coincides not with any precise “me,” with the “now moment,” (Stern 2004) but with self-possession and self- understanding: it is a form of self-possession which has nothing to do with self- perception and less still with self-observation or my own self-image. Rather, it takes
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
shape as participation in lived experience, in the past, according to a present mode of access and hence according to a mode of grasping.18
As regards this familiarity which each person establishes with himself, and which changes from one period of life to the next, the lived experiences which I gain access to again and again by being alive cannot exist before me as objects amassed in a repository called the past. In each individual experience across the different seasons of my life, I am fully myself in one particular circumstance: when an occurrence leads me to encoun- ter my own self. It is through this ever-situated restlessness of existence—kinesis tou biou—that life determines itself by choosing its possible directions and, without ever withdrawing from itself, prereflectively notices itself in each case: for in each case the experiences I have are my own. The world of ipseity is marked not by cinematographic inwardness, but by a unique and intimate self- involvement—the immanent historicity of life—which takes shape again and again in specific situations.
The sphere of historicity primarily coincides not with the reflective access to or inner perception of one’s experiences, but with the kind of familiarity which every human being has with himself: with his own past, which is experienced according to an intelligibility that is constantly renewed in accordance with a web of tenden- cies and motives subject to the changing circumstances. Clearly, the way in which life notices itself also depends on how lived experiences manifest themselves, how the weight of the past makes itself felt: the more the past determines a person’s pres- ent life—by circumscribing the situations he or she can experience—the more the weight of the person’s being-there proves momentous and the experience of grasp- ing oneself becomes an objective experience. Thus one’s own past is constantly perceived as a burden, as a duty.
This aspect is what Heraclitus may have in mind when, in the remarkable frag- ment 119 D.-K. (Eraclito 1978), he uses a striking expression—which in ancient Greek carries an absolute meaning (Arciero 2006)—to argue that “a man’s way of life determines his fate, while his fate determines his way of life.19”
The same theme, which Heidegger describes as a key element in early Christianity and as a value for all men, is developed by St Paul in his reply to the Thessalonians: life
18 Heidegger grasps this experience as an intuition: an original retro- and pre-conceptual formation.
19 Fragment 119, Ethos antropoi daimon, revolves around the terms ethos and daimon, character and destiny. Most commentators (Zeller and Mondolfo 1961; Kirk et al. 1983; Kahn 1979;
Marchovich 1978) adopt Snell’s reading, according to which the destiny of a man is determined by his character.
If we instead read the fragment as a noun phrase (Arciero 2006), i.e., as a “nominal predicate, with neither verb nor copula, regarded as the standard expression in Indo-European, whereas the verbal form would have been the third person of the present indicative of ‘to be’,” then it “does not express any factual data, but establishes a timeless and permanent relation which acts as an authori- tative argument” (Benveniste 1966). In other words, daimon cannot be considered as predicative of ethos, but rather carries an essential value, insofar as it expresses an integral part of the human being. What makes this such a remarkable fragment, then, is the speculative tension springing from the simultaneity of ethos and daimon, which coexist in parallel yet distinctly: the simultaneity of the one and the many. From this perspective, it is even more interesting to note that if in the same sentence we had the verb esti, the third-person singular of the present indicative of “to be,” the sentence would refer to present situations: it would find its content in the situation it refers to.
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is actually unfolding, and this facticity “must be historically assumed and directed toward an instant that is not determinable” (Pöggeler 1995, p. 297). A person who has faith will take charge of his life by acting at every moment in the enduring light of hope.
“Noticing oneself,” then, does not consist in any final determination of the con- tent of one’s own story; rather, it coincides with the “vital process of the loss or attainment of familiarity with concrete, lived life itself” (GA 58 1992, p. 165). In the very act of unfolding and taking shape through the range of references offered by the situation at hand, experience partakes of the underlying web of lived experi- ences, which is therefore part of the integral unity of experience. In this respect, the interpretation of the ongoing situation (die verstehende, die hermeneutische Intuition) carries with it a certain provenance while at the same time being directed toward a range of references in view of which we encounter each occurrence. Hence, the sense of familiarity with oneself, the sense of self, emerges and takes shape in conjunction—and in conformity—with a sense of enactment. In other words, one’s own story becomes accessible within the framework of a present context of intelli- gibility, and life transformations disclose the possibility of mobilizing the world of the self in relation to new tendencies.
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