Saturday, 24 November 2018



In whatever world is being experienced there is no experiencing object but only and exactly one present-being-experiencing - and this is the simplest and most direct evidence that the 'I' is not-two. As against this there is the qualitative difference between experience of things, the class of I-it relations and the experience of others, the class of I-thou relations, so called. This difference contains the entire case for a plurality of distinct selves. But on closer examination it says no more than that the class of relations to things is not the paradigm for all relations to the not-self. In intimate relations with another there is something like an oscillations in self-reference between being as a subject and being as an object. The conceptual-experiential space in which you arise as virtual bearer of the experiencing is rotated on itself when the experience is of the I-thou variety. Out of respect for the peculiar energies you 'encounter' in other selves you push the evidence that there is only one present-experiencing into the background, or perhaps better stated, you 'deconstruct' it in so far as it is concretely constituted out of objectivities. If you are seized by something like a moral imperative it remains an error to take this as evidence for the existence of distinct selves, or transcendences. It is not 'otherwise than being' but is exactly what the phenomenon of being is like. And so with all the putative evidences of hermeneutic phenomenology.

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