Jul 4, 2025 09:25 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 5, 2025 09:13 PM by Magical Realist.)
"I shall not seek the explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of all things, like the origin of all things, must remain a secret of eternity. But I want to understand in such a way as to be brought to the inevitably inexplicable. I want to understand in such a way that everything inexplicable presents itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable and not as being something that I am under an obligation to believe."---Leo Tolstoy
We need to get used to the fact that conscious experience is itself unexplainable, unknowable, and necessarily so.
Heidegger characterizes Being as revealing itself thru self-concealment--as that which cannot be known in itself. It is the same with light. Light reveals and makes visible all that is around us, but only because it is itself invisible and transparent. If light were visible in itself it could not serve as the medium of all that is visible. Everything would be occluded in the blinding radiance of light itself.
Such says Heidegger is the relation of thought to Being. Thought, or conscious experience, reveals Being but only by itself being unthinkable and concealed. Thought or consciousness is the medium of Being, and is thus invisible and inaccessible precisely in that it reveals Being. A movie screen remains invisible and concealed from sight as long as we are watching the movie projected upon it. It is less surface than it is portal--an opening up into the being and space revealed as the movie. A liminal threshold or doorway facilitating our being inside the movie.
How is one to become conscious of that which remains concealed so as to precisely make manifest Being as beings? Only as that aspect of Being that forever recedes from us even as it manifests and makes present itself as Being. Consciousness then as Being's elusive and depth-imparting shadow one might say. Thoughtful attention as the "blanking out" or "clearing" making possible the emergence of Being's absolute presence AS beings: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”― Martin Heidegger
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."---Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We need to get used to the fact that conscious experience is itself unexplainable, unknowable, and necessarily so.
Heidegger characterizes Being as revealing itself thru self-concealment--as that which cannot be known in itself. It is the same with light. Light reveals and makes visible all that is around us, but only because it is itself invisible and transparent. If light were visible in itself it could not serve as the medium of all that is visible. Everything would be occluded in the blinding radiance of light itself.
Such says Heidegger is the relation of thought to Being. Thought, or conscious experience, reveals Being but only by itself being unthinkable and concealed. Thought or consciousness is the medium of Being, and is thus invisible and inaccessible precisely in that it reveals Being. A movie screen remains invisible and concealed from sight as long as we are watching the movie projected upon it. It is less surface than it is portal--an opening up into the being and space revealed as the movie. A liminal threshold or doorway facilitating our being inside the movie.
How is one to become conscious of that which remains concealed so as to precisely make manifest Being as beings? Only as that aspect of Being that forever recedes from us even as it manifests and makes present itself as Being. Consciousness then as Being's elusive and depth-imparting shadow one might say. Thoughtful attention as the "blanking out" or "clearing" making possible the emergence of Being's absolute presence AS beings: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”― Martin Heidegger
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."---Antoine de Saint-Exupery