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Saturday, 16 September 2017



Those components of experience that depend upon a capacity for a certain kind of purposive action are just those from which you can consider yourself as detached. Whether such a capacity has independent existence, so you can imagine, say, augmenting it via certain training, or via a drug, is not important, it is rather about how you think of that kind of experience and of your relation to it. The question belongs to the grammar of experience. The ability to think of some part of experience as depending on a capacity is surely itself a capacity, but what is not capacity is the possibility of having a given capacity. This is to say that the mental operation of detachment is not purely a matter of imagination but of an approach to the existential. Detachment only emerges with the weight of the question, 'who is detaching?' The distinction emerges in the case of love where to say that the other is an end in themselves means that it is not a matter of a certain way of treating them but of the absolute event of an encounter, of whether the other remains present (as or in the question) after you have detached from the circumstances, from the capacities you have brought to bear. In the question 'who?' the particularity of the situation stands over against the thought, the implicit description of the situation - it belongs to the happening of the situation and not its meaning, its assimilation to a world. If this is taken to be an antithesis then its significance is lost, the two are a difference which does not constitue a duality.

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