Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.5 Vantage Points, Passages, and Crossroads
With the temporal development of one’s own world, the tendencies and motivations that have been enacted according to the concrete situations in one’s life also emerge, become stabilized, or vanish. In this respect, we are always living according to a direction, attuned in some way or other, each according to his or her own distinctive vantage point and position within the world. This position, which differs from per- son to person, in each case corresponds to a sphere of possibilities of signification, which is always mobilized as it factually takes shape and which constantly affects the domain of its own intelligibility.9 This direction corresponds to a turning toward a certain meaningful context, and hence to an inclination of one’s sense of refer- ence, which in its enactment determines the ever-restless and different margins of the world of one’s life. It is evident that each person grasps meaningfulness in a
8 Heidegger writes: “In factical life experiences run through each other in multiple ways, at one moment coming out of this life-world, at the next moment out of that one, entwining and reshaping themselves, growing over themselves—among the availabilities back and forth, over and away to other running motivations” (GA 58, p. 55).
9 Boss (1977) grasps this point by grafting it upon the spatial harmonics which has always been dear to phenomenology: “Once human existence is seen as bearing the spatio-temporal worldwide realm of openness as, itself, a perceptive and actively responsive openness, the problem of location takes on a wholly different aspect. It is then self-evident that the possibilities for relatedness belong fundamentally and immediately to the whole realm of perceptive openness. They are, in fact, what constitute human being-in-the-world. This openness is the primordial spatiality or prespatiality in which the possibility of a phenomenon’s being located at any point in space is grounded” (p. 132).
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different manner from others and in a distinct way in each phase of his or her life.
The phases of one’s life are different periods characterized by the stabilization of a range of different horizons that intertwine to form a more or less stable unity of sense, a perspective: the separate motivations and tendencies constituting the famil- iarity which each person has with his or her life constantly coalesce and recombine with respect to present occurrences.
Perspective is a phenomenal field that draws us in and guides us. As we find ourselves concretely absorbed by the world, perspective lends immediate intelligibility and accessibility to occurrences. Each one of us can mindfully experience this network of tendencies and horizons of expectations, although for the most part it remains undetected in everyday life. In our ordinary expe- rience, a given way of grasping the world will correspond to the more or less variable accentuation of a series of aspects of the sphere of the proper which, in the present situation, will intertwine with our encounter with things and other people, so as to shape in each case the way in which we feel emotionally situated.
The framework of perspective is an emotional one, in the sense that it is our emotional condition that concretely expresses, not just the way in which we actually feel in our relation with other people and in the world but also the space of memory and the horizon of our expectations (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009). Being emotionally situated therefore corresponds to a way of finding oneself in a given situation and with a way of facing the future; hence, it is always connected to a personal story which guides it and which in turn is guided by it (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009;
Caputo 2015).
What becomes clearer within this framework is the prospect theory developed by Kahneman (2011), since we can now better understand the foundation of what he describes as one’s “reference point,” i.e., the state relative to which gains and losses are evaluated; “For an example, take the following scenarios: Today Jack and Jill each have a wealth of 5 million. Yesterday, Jack had 1 million and Jill had 9 million.
Are they equally happy? (Do they have the same utility?) … The happiness that Jack and Jill experience is determined by the recent change in their wealth, relative to the different states of wealth that define their reference points (1 million for Jack, 9 mil- lion for Jill). This reference dependence—Kahneman observes—is ubiquitous in sensation and perception” (p. 274).
To different degrees, we all take charge of our past in the light of a complex of expectations, guided by a project suited to our tendencies, through which we determine our conduct and bearing in everyday life. In this grasping (or failing to grasp) the weight of our story by assigning ourselves a future as a task, we experience that through which we determine ourselves; and this determination occurs in our daily behavior and way of operating, guided by big or small pas- sions. Day after day, the task in question—or its absence—takes place through the actual implementation of the tendencies of our historical being, supported by emotional dispositions which make us open up and become attuned to the
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
world by situating us within it with and for others.10 It is thanks to this taking charge of one’s own history as a task, as labor and work, that we encounter the world and other people through given configurations and modes of relation. So as we mature, as embodied time, by following our life trajectories, supported, exposed, and directed by our emotional tones, we anchor ourselves by relating to things and other people.
Over the course of our life, these tendencies to situate ourselves in given ways may become stabilized, giving rise to different phases of our personal existence.
These will be characterized by enduring (yet not permanent) configurations of emo- tional engagements which will determine the directions of our taking care of things:
a given style and perspective of involvement—and hence given projects, relations, commitments, social contacts, objectives, and careers. This is what Patočka (1976) has in mind when he grasps one’s being-in-the-world in terms of the overall move- ments pertaining to one’s life journey and which are defined by their orientation:
“an overall movement distinct from the partial and individual acts within which the total movement withdraws and concentrates at a given moment” (p. 106).
On each occasion, this range of life trajectories attains unity through the enactment of experience, through one’s expressive situation. As it becomes visible, this unity of sense points to a range of different horizons, which are not brought together according to any associative logic or ordered through a theoretical approach that grasps each object as a basic element that congeals multiple appearances according to a unity of expression; rather, the opposite is the case: a range of different phenomena here attain unity through an expressive situation. In this respect, unity of expression does not have only one reference, but rather points to a heterogeneity that is to be traced, dis- entangled, and interpreted in relation to a particular period in one’s life.
On the one hand, the stabilization of one’s own situatedness, and hence of certain forms of manifestation which distinguish each phase of one’s life, corresponds to the enduring delimitation of given fields of meaningfulness and thus too of stimuli and attractions; on the other hand, it corresponds to a persistent configuration of modes of reference through the actualization of forms of engagement that become structured in emotional terms. In this respect, we speak of “emotional style”
(Wiegehalt) to describe the way in which life becomes stabilized over time accord- ing to certain tendencies but also the way in which it stably reaches itself in particu- lar circumstances and in different periods, which clearly may vary from person to person and over the course of one’s existence (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009). Although life is fully present in every situation, the notion of situatedness, as it is used here, refers to a stable perspective as a condition that is engendered over the course of an individual’s existence by those key occurrences that constitute turning points and
10 Heidegger grasps this relation with the other as the threat of subjection (Botmassigkeit) to the dictatorship of the anonymous “yes” (GA 2, p. 126). Radically reversing its meaning in ethical terms, Levinas instead grasps the same phenomenon as the command (Gebot) issued to me by the face of the other, an order to be obeyed (see Greisch 1994a).
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hence mark some transformations and new life trajectories. These key occurrences trigger a re-attunement of the global sense of oneself, by reconfiguring the condi- tions of our openness to perceiving and dealing with what we encounter and, at the same time, of the way in which what we encounter attains manifestation. These crucial experiences, which can constitute a challenge for one’s life as a whole, are closely reminiscent of the limit experiences described by Jaspers (1919) and engen- der the various contexts that characterize the stages of maturation of a human being;
in this respect, they mark the passages and crossroads of existence.
Ever since Classical Antiquity, the changes just described have been ascribed to the body. Human life, in other words, has been divided into periods of maturation accord- ing to the development and transformation of the body—periods reflecting those dif- ferences which the various human groups have acknowledged in relation to the possibility of accessing specific shared domains. It is usually within the framework of these stages of evolution that the modes of participation in society have been deter- mined, the specific roles and duties of citizens—which is to say their participation in public life—being age-dependent. This subdivision into different stages, which estab- lishes a kind of socially acknowledged norm for emotional development—usually divided into three or four ages (childhood, youth, maturity, and old age)—runs through the iconography of the Renaissance (e.g., Giorgione, Titian) and informs an extensive literature that, in the modern age, extends from Kierkegaard (2013) to lifespan devel- opmental psychology. The underlying assumption is always the same: the stability of invariants relative to the stages of bodily development. This stability is also emotional, as emphasized by Erickson (1982), who associates each passage with a crisis.11
This primacy assigned to the development of the body as an entity within the world, whose transformations also mark the stages of maturation of the self, is the underlying approach embedded in the genetic code of evolutionary psychology. It conceives development in relation to the embodied being as an entity that belongs to the world, instead of grasping the taking shape of a body—my, your, or their body—in the light of individual experience.
From the perspective we are endorsing, although the various phases of life may coin- cide with stages of maturation that are clearly articulated in ways that differ from person to person, the turning points in one’s life history cannot be reduced to these transforma- tions. In the various phases of our existence, the temporary stability of being emotion- ally situated determines, in different ways, the mode of enactment of our sense of reference with respect to that which acquires meaningfulness as we encounter it. This temporary stability manifests itself as an orientation toward a world that gives life direc- tionality and anchorage. What also emerges as the world is brought into manifestation is a mode of existing in the light of which the body becomes such, in each case becoming established in relation to the bonds and sensibilities that characterize it at a given stage of its evolutionary journey, thereby determining its possibilities in terms of develop- ment. In other words, through enactment, at each stage of evolution over the course of one’s life, the sense of reference given within—and with—life itself delineates a world possessing a force of attraction that at the same time lends life a gravitational direction.
11 For a review, see Baltes et al. (2006).
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.6 The Prominent and the Unprominent: Life’s Relation