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Tuesday, 2 August 2016



Doing never flags. We are always doing something but the intensity of our doing occupies a wide range with at one end the association with a positive will which strives to bring something about that is not yet the case, and at the other a negative will, the refraining from doing anything to hinder what is already underway. In this sense, and apart perhaps from certain exceptional automatisms, doing can be equated with willing, and together with thinking and feeling it forms one of the dimensions of being. It is a temptation to seek the absolute of will in a putative free-will because the notion of latter is of something independent and free-standing, outside of the endless flow in which all doing in caught up. Free-will is indispensable as a framing device for understanding and committing to certain kinds of actions, decisive in a life-historical sense, but it is incoherent as an ontological category, as a type of thing. The position of the absolute of will thus remains open and we must look to the adventures of our doing. To be born 'into this breathing world' is to be born into doing, as breathing is the very gauge of action, conscious and unconscious, heavy or suspended and so on. In addition the relations to the other have their own formations in doing through the distinctions of activity and passivity, of doing and being done to, of dominance and submission, as well as of doing with and its integration and interplay with feeling and knowing in intimate experience.  

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