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p.1 Let us speak plainly: Doesn't living elude thought? 'Sometimes I think, sometimes I live,' Valery noted as an adage
[JLJ - A human being is so instinctively 'matched' to his/her environment that one virtually 'knows' what to do, how to 'go on,' with living, the managing of our current predicament as it unfolds into the next, the expert regulation and direction of our available energy and of our cycles of expending and recovering that energy, the creation and selection of practical schemes to proceed, the seeking out and building meaningful relationships, but with little ability to deconstruct the actual process of doing so. What we see at core, are merely 'tricks' that 'work, to some degree,' which we have collected like shells from the beach, or stamps or coin collections, into a silent sleeping (yet poised) portfolio, selecting among the many such acceptable ways to proceed, one to execute. Such is life.]
p.3 living is what we find ourselves in and from which there can be no retreat, in which we are always already engaged and from which we could never imagine emerging... Could we ever dream of anything other than living? It is a word without any possible infra or beyond. Living, therefore, expresses at once what is most immediate and that which is never satisfied
[JLJ - The question is not that we are engaged in living, the question is, how do we "go on," given that we are in such-and-such a predicament? This is the central problem of cognition, since (in a complex world filled with competing agents) we can't just simply make up goals and then go directly to them. We have to approach our goals indirectly, strategically, perhaps with knowledge of leverage and an understanding of the interacting forces at play, what typically happens, and with an adaptive capacity or available potential to 'correct' situations - changing our attitude or posture or pivoting in our action path - when we find things not as we thought them (often via our hastily constructed heuristic short-cuts) to be.]
p.14 'When fools listen, they are like the deaf...' ...Absent to which they are present, said Heraclitus - they do not encounter. They are there, physically present in the flesh, but, as they say, their minds are elsewhere... not 'awakened'.
p.15 present, they are absent. They think they are present, but they are not. This is because they have not attained presence, have not satisfied its requirements. Heraclitus makes it clear that this required capacity lies in the aptitude to 'encounter' or, more rigorously still, that it consists in what is 'as it is' within the encounter.
p.21 It is the resolution not to postpone to... which alone opens a real present... in this as it is of the encounter, we no longer substitute for it that 'standard convention' which we form day after day
[JLJ - Why attend? IMHO attention begins with an agent in a predicament, and a chosen strategy or scheme, and the need called for to make the most of the situation we are in. Various things compete for our attention within our predicament. We wisely decide what things are of immediate interest to us - are deserving of our attention, and we then tend to them. We push other things - not worthy of our immediate attention - off until later. Why? Wise attention is an effective strategy to prevent the things we could have and should have attended to, from blowing up and requiring much more effort later. A clock is ticking and things are changing, including the world and ourselves. We attend so that we don't later say, "I should have seen that sign, I should have identified that task as needing to be started or completed, and attended then. Now I have to attend to a much larger problem." Nearly everything can be postponed - at a cost. We tend to those things that might have a larger cost to us later if postponed. Then we get tired of attending, and decide that the cost of postponing is worth the gains from relaxing.]
p.24-25 I count upon the fact that I can redo in order not to do; that I can reread in order not to read. The appearance of the second time allows me to step across the first time, and no time ever happens
[JLJ - We do not have to accomplish all of our tasks at once, in the 'present' present, we can if we choose to do so, select a scheme which defers until tomorrow - the future 'present' - what we are critically unsure of today, or are critically short of energy to accomplish today.]
p.26 To define the present by 'attention' is, in fact, amply anchored in the history of philosophy. Let us see if this conception is sufficient.
p.30 I open onto the present... and make it emerge as soon as I put up an obstruction to the temptation to postpone.
[JLJ - Strategic postponement is a tactic of cognition. But we do so in order to strategically attend to those things which we determine deserve our present attention, else the predicament we are in grows worse or potentially worse. As a child and teenager, we are constantly reminded to "pay attention" to those things that need or deserve our attention. By the time we are adults we know what we should or ought attend to, and do so almost by instinct. Much of my day is spent in attending to specific things, and in deciding how to resolve the competition for attention of the other things.]
p.31 If, therefore, attention is insufficient to constitute the present, both because it remains dependent on that to which it is attentive and because its extent is not clear but frayed, not to postpone depends, in contrast, as a decision, only on itself, and, from the beginning, inscribes a stumbling block.
p.31 Not to postpone raises an obstruction... on this side of which a present can accumulate... Let us say that as soon as I cease to defer I am anchored in a present.
[JLJ - Not quite, in my opinion. As soon as our current predicament prompts us to consider ways to proceed, and we out of necessity adopt a practical scheme for going on, as soon as we validate such a scheme as appropriate, necessary, and very likely to work, and are tempted by seeing the partial or imagined results of such a scheme, only then can we begin. We are in the present when our predicament 'stirs' within us options for going on, and we decide on then begin to execute such a scheme - of some kind. This scheme for going on tells us what to attend to, as well as what to ignore, what obstacles to avoid, what to value and what to postpone.]
p.33-34 If I count on the differed, it means that I am not limited to my aim, that I give 'time some time', that I know how to wait for a materialization which no longer belongs to me. I divest myself of impatience in order to gather... To agree with the differed means that I consider the present moment to be an investment.
p.35 from where does thought come (to me)? From what night has it been hatched?
p.36-37 More subtle than the art of doing (immediately, by exerting oneself) is that of the allowing to happen (counting on a ripening) - when the subject places his initiative between parentheses in order to allow the progress that is underway to operate in concert and over a longer period... when the faculties provoked are put on ice in order for the implied factors and conditions to be more broadly mobilized and to come together to unblock a difficulty encountered... Duration unravels on its own.
p.38 a civilization (like the individual) is strong only at the level of the differed it can bear, that is, in what a generation knows how to plant (as a resource to come) without claiming to be able itself to harvest it - I will not see the shade of the oaks with which I have reforested the hill.
p.39 Am I in the process of evading it or of allowing it to come... Or, rather, is it that I do not postpone, but nor do I force, that I do not avoid, but that in letting it rest I do so in such a way that a deposit silently accumulates, from which the present becomes 'perennial'... can have unexpected results?
p.40 it is necessary to know how to allow the effect to occur, as a consequence, or a 'return', of a preliminary investment, confident that one is in the propensity under way and acquiescing wisely in this differed - rather than worrying the world with one's desire and impatience.
p.40-41 'The wise man starts at the back' in such a way that he would be able to be 'carried ahead' ...choosing to situate himself within the hollow, he calls upon the effect to realize himself fully... This differed is itself the bearer of effect. Rather than want the result from the outset through his action, it is better to discretely set in train a process which leads there of itself - and such is the art of 'not acting' (wu wei)... it is better... to prepare the field for the event sua sponte of the effect which, proceeding from its own maturation and carried along by conditions, will be so much better implanted and, consequently, more solid. For it finds itself progressively implicated by the situation, in proportion to its development, and is no longer a forcing.
p.41-42 We cannot directly aim at the complete, the 'straight' or the 'full'; but, by situating ourselves in the inverse state, the hoped-for effect is allowed to be adopted ('naturalized') by the continuing course of things and to extend by itself to its dawning.
p.45 when the marks... by which the 'festivity' is defined are realized, and occur in a positive way, it may no longer entirely be festivity, revealing sufficiently well that it escapes such marks in the way it springs up; that what within it is effective - at once drive and energy - is removed from that positivity; consequently, it finds itself lost in its definition.
p.47 the capacity at work... is to be considered in a divergent way... it does not allow itself to be reduced to the characteristics or properties which serve to define it and by which we see it show itself.
p.48 The non-coincidence is therefore between what I would call, in order to oppose them, the effective and the determinative, between the capacity at work such that, as it springs up, it overflows and defeats any possible determination; and the determination that codifies and as such serves the definition which is henceforth completely definable and thus specifiable.
p.49 the determination (any determination) grasps what is settled and not the springing up
p.51-52 we know very well the value of the sketch in painting... there might be, according to Baudelaire, paintings which are 'done' but not 'finished'... For what the sketch reveals against the ontological tradition (which claims that the more something is determined, the more it 'is') is that the work is all the more effective when it knows how to remain upstream, and maintain itself in process - that it takes its departure before the end so as to remain at work, that it does not conclude itself in order not to be settled.
p.53-54 The very fact of the completeness of their evidence means that we no longer have a perspective on them
p.55 it is in the opposed moment, the one of withdrawal, that the settling is exposed, so that, emerging from its evidence, it appears. At the moment of withdrawal, there begins a desaturation of the determination which disencumbers and takes away its opaqueness.
p.56 the moment of withdrawal is instructive. The flight seems to exist but does not appear... the settling is obvious but, no longer being prominent, is not discerned... But because the withdrawal de-prescribes... only the withdrawal creates appearance, in other words by (itself) withdrawing, it reveals the ground from which this springing up emerges.
p.57 'What' appears, because it reappears from difference... Otherwise, we only begin to perceive 'what' living is when life is already withdrawing into ourselves, through old age or sickness, and not when it rises in power or spreads out in maturity.
p.70 it is only from a withdrawal that presence exists as it is
p.79 it is disappearance that is the condition of appearance, since presence cannot illuminate of itself but obstructs; this is what makes the withdrawal necessary.
p.88 Could we set out from higher up as a beginning? ...Like all activity, thought also gets bogged down, as does life.
p.92 Holding itself withdrawn from any of the effects of settling, it thereby avoids immobilizing itself into a certain form, one that is completed and rests in its identity, fixing it in its particularity. In this way, the 'great image' prevails in it, as is said in what follows... 'The great image has no form...'
Neither, consequently, should we be surprised that Chinese thought could perceive the 'way', dao, other than under the form of the Withdrawal. But it is a 'withdrawal' which is precisely paired with its 'deployment' - the way needs to withdraw in order to allow it still to occur... Only the withdrawal allows deployment; or the disappearance is the condition of appearance.
p.93 The way, the dao, withdraws or hides (yin), to the point that it is no longer nameable, but this is what allows it to constantly spread and dispense.
p.95 all effectivity withdraws from its effectivization, to the extent that it is settled, in order to remain effective in it.
p.99 it is the endless quality of our hunger, the insatiability of our desires, the fact that our satisfactions always entail fresh deficiencies - that is a characteristic of life; in short, the cask should always be leaky, so that there is a continual need to pour into it without it ever being possible to fill it up
p.100 the fact that we always have a fresh hunger... our desires are never satisfied... is what keeps it progressing and active and maintains its vitality; it is what keeps it in tension... between desire and satiety. It is precisely in this between that we live. Rather than dreaming of some ideal, terminal-optimal, state to which we would finally gain access so as to remain there forever, life is justified only as a lack whose satisfaction will legitimately open out onto a new lack. It is justified only as a 'leaky cask'.
[JLJ - Jullien perhaps at his best, churning out answers to life's questions. Jullien must be pondered, not simply read like a dime novel.]
p.101 The question is: Where should the plenitude of life be situated? ...the plenitude of life will be situated in the in progress of life, implying a renewal which is itself possible only if all filling up is at the same time an emptying out, all gratification an escape? ...in the tension of an activity which refuses to accept that desire should be limited in order not to have to stop?
[JLJ - See how problems can emerge when we do not look at life in terms of deciding how to 'go on.' We can decide on what life is, but this answer by itself will not help us to decide how to 'go on' within it. The mind sometimes sees only murky shadows when it does not ponder what should instead be pondered and what it was designed to ponder - how to 'go on' from the current predicament. It is kind of irrelevant what life 'is' - we nonetheless have to 'go on' within it. A rabbit might ponder what life means, what human houses are, and what the life-world means. Hard as it might try, it will not arrive at an answer, and it meanwhile has to try to decide how to 'go on' from within its predicament. Perhaps we are in a similar situation.]
p.114 who says that it would necessarily be this state ('of rest') that we have to enjoy...? Why not the changing (unstable) being deployed in the between (of activity) and in relation to which the rest in sight is only an ideal support serving, again by contrast, motivation and whose character would be revealed after the (temporary) fictive event as fundamentally of little concern?
p.118 What could a counter-discourse, should we wish to find one, take support from... Or what other logical possibility would remain to loosen the blockage that has been instigated...?
p.119 the tao, the 'way', expresses the between which does not immobilize itself from any side as it ceaselessly allows a way through. This is not the way leading to something (to a telos or coveted end), but the way of 'viability' by which the continuum of life is renewed. But this is also why the tao can only be described as 'hazy', 'vague' or indeterminate - it is not of 'Being'.
p.120 Tao, the 'way', already expressed the renewal of a passage - when one makes 'use' of it - which through its 'evident medium' (chong dao) never results in gratification
p.121 pouring without filling; drawing without exhausting. This formula is sufficient to make its respiration clear, in its continual exchange, as it renews itself from one to the other but does not go to the end of either one, for the one already calls upon the other, and, refraining from untenable states, also refrains from disjunction (either totally empty or totally full), the respiration is what effectively holds in the interval. It is always of the moment
[JLJ - One could also see this as an interacting process where each part recursively calls on the other, effectively creating a sustaining effect, which moves without being directed, yet does not truly or effectively rest. An artificially intelligent agent 'playing' a complex game of strategy is effectively moved to action by what its competition-trained sensing tells it is important now. It does not so much make moves in a game, as it is moved by what it is pre-programmed to detect as important now. The moves made in the game perhaps emerge from such actions.]
p.123 Life and death, striking us by their event, 'are', in truth, only to bring to light the occasion of life.
p.124 'Holding between' is the concept to be developed which needs, from being a technique, to become an ethic... holding-between means to keep active by arranging this intervening period... a holding maintenance of life
p.135 Plato produced nothing less than the magisterial tool of the dialectic... it was really to allow a 'participation' between essences, but still preserving their reciprocal 'externality'
p.137 the dialectic is that tool which allows the zone of turbulence to be overcome without allowing ourselves to be carried away
p.142 But how could we name this fundamental of the between or of the ambiguity that can result in the one as well as the other...?
p.145 If we are to cease to allow ourselves to be obsessed by one contrary to the detriment of the other... it must be acknowledged that the discrete on this side, which is the link to the other, has to be discerned so as to rise to the intense between which holds them in correlation.
p.147 While ambivalence expresses the simultaneous coexistence of oppositions (at once I love and detest an object), the funds of ambiguity is such that the one opposed is not yet distinguished from its other; the separation between them remains indecisive.
p.152 There is no possible beginning of an ontology [JLJ - the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being]... What is grasped, instead, in a global apprehension, is the continuous communication... from the springing up to the settling down, this process of life having no other horizon except itself in its inextinguishable ('unfathomable') capacity to renew itself.
p.161 We are unable to conceive of not living.
[JLJ - As before, and in my view, the purpose of cognition is to ponder then determine how to 'go on' within our current predicament. Take away the predicament and cognition loses purpose.]
p.162 Living is that eternal silence, implied right within us without our understanding it. How can we get a 'grasp' on it?
p.163 what philosophy in Greece did, in a masterly way, was to make us forget what living is, and this is why we once again need to return to it in order to measure its incidence.
p.177 On the subject of 'living', will we ever emerge from the private conversation?
p.187 this belief... is... the pathway or... the initial, continually required, opening, by which 'living' is deployed and becomes effective within us... 'Without belief, we could neither go through the door nor sit at the table or go to bed'
p.193 If it is true that every given concept... can only be pinned onto 'living', it is no less the case that a philosophy of 'living' will be able to develop only at the heart of a tension or a conceptual polarity.
p.193 Hegel... was, I believe, the first philosopher who tried to restore the thought of 'living' into the heart of philosophy.
p.198 Would not 'living' be defined, in fact, in going back to Hegel, as the unacceptability of... remaining (resting) within oneself? ...For life to be conceived as that whole 'developing itself' and 'dissolving its development' and 'conserving itself simply in this movement', as Hegel concludes, is what portrays 'living' in the enduring capacity of emergence that it finds within itself - in its continual revival, or its springing up, without there yet being Meaning to draw us forward or telos to project.
[JLJ - Perhaps instead living is the story of a passion, which drives one forward, in a directed aim away from the fate of the common destiny, and headlong into an unknown journey, which is guided by dreams and visions, not entirely coherent, but serving as goals, if in reality there are none.]
p.199 It is true that there is no concept that gives us the satisfaction of thinking about 'living'.
[JLJ - Perhaps we think about our current predicament, including the things and people and events of our life world (and the circumstances and driving forces in our time and age), and practical ideas come to us about how to maneuver to either stay afloat, to meet our needs, or to advance somehow to our advantage. To these ideas, we then ask ourselves, 'How much should I care about that?' and dismiss some as not worth our time. Others of these ideas that are judged to 'deserve our thought' are pondered. We are bombarded by advertisements and suggestions from friends and associates. Out of all these efforts, we develop a way to 'go on' that we 'believe' will meet our needs now and in the future. We manage our cycles of regenerating rest and practical activity. We build and maintain social relationships. We call this living - or at least I do.]
p.213 Knowledge isolates a 'nature' and places it as an object, methodologically organizes its progression, elaborates its tools of abstraction, produces notions and constructs mediations, renders spaces indifferent and projects an equal and mapped out time; it develops an argued discourse which promotes the conditions of science as well as politics.
p.220 How to gain access to what or in what we find ourselves already still committed - from which all springing up and plenitude originates but which is precisely what we lose hold of because we are immersed in it? What cannot be captured - there is always the problem of the 'grasp'. What obliqueness, ruse or detour could be introduced to enable us to lift ourselves to the point of facing that from which we remain ineluctably without a distance which allows us to conquer it?
p.222 when one is entangled in something, it is necessary to know how to restore some separation
p.223 The first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics... 'Any method or investigation and similarly any action and choice apparently aims at some good...'
p.224-225 As Aristotle had said: Is not everything 'vain' if we are without an end...?
[JLJ - But what if we are not after a specific end, but an emergent effect?]
p.238 neither this here nor that now towards which I aim, nor this self that I am when confronted with them, remain - they each carry on dissociating themselves from themselves.
p.240 Can other strategies of access to the immediate not be conceived through the word?
p.241 Can we not conceive of a mediation of the word... not allowing itself to be dragged along by this discursivity but thwarting and interrupting it, thereby short-circuiting the mediation engaged in rather than deploying it? It will cause the immediate to surge forth not after (in fine) but at the very heart of mediation, or of its between
p.243 In order to cut short the discursive temptation, so as to create ingress into the immediate, but without delay or postponement, the most elementary thing is to be satisfied with the brief form. This maintains the word in its springing up, withheld from becoming settled or from 'spreading out'... an access - the word succeeds in expressing, by being married with its movement, the dawning of a moment.
p.244 How to 'aim' at a moment whose sufficiency as an instant is such that there is no need for us to think about some other time... such a moment... in it the here and now are gathered into an impression whose affirmed ephemeral quality has banished the ephemeral; the place which is hollowed out dispenses with all localization.
p.245-246 Could anything be added to it? What dialectic of the universal and the particular could still intervene?
p.247 What could be added to it?
p.248 Far from giving access to it, linking it, continuity and discursivity (causality) are obstacles to grasping the here and now.
p.253 only the immediate exists
p.253 the zen Master is aware that the 'tree' 'I' perceive at the moment is different from the 'same' tree 'I' perceived just a moment before... the zen Master appeals to re-activity
p.256 [Proust] 'One has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere' for so many years 'and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter - which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years, and it opens of its own accord' (1992b). This access, in which every search ends, is really, for the Narrator, an access to 'living'
p.264 For the problem of access (to the here and now) is that of our per-ceptive capacity, without it being necessary for all that to break through a curtain of perceptible illusions and to denounce appearances. It is strategic... The here and now not being directly graspable, it is necessary to approach them indirectly.
p.270 One never sees what is always seen.
[JLJ - Perhaps instead, one never dwells on what is always seen. We quickly ask ourselves, 'how much should I care about that?' - then as quickly conclude our diagnostic test and move on.]
p.272-273 Let us recall the stages of this new knowledge elevating 'living' into a strategy. [JLJ - text bullets added for readability]
- Let us begin by renouncing postponement, so as to make a moment emerge, while allowing it to come (to ripen) from the moment thanks to the deferred (1).
- Let us choose to rise up from what is settled to the springing up, or from the comfortable platitude of the determination of the effective which has left it - let us not allow living to coincide with any inherent property (2).
- Let us decide to put an end to the prestige of the End so as to give a place to the 'between' of the holding-between - living is fulfilled in this between which allows a grasp, and not by its extremities (3).
- Let us think of this 'living' without refraining from the concept, but in the crux of a conceptual contradiction which diverges it within itself by disclosing and tightening it (4).
- Finally let us not give in to the illusion of an initial immediacy, but, similarly, cut loose the mediation from the immediate, so as not to allow it to be indefinitely postponed (5).
These are so many conditions of 'awakening', but without conversion, since the one appears fully through the other
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