Openness to Being
It is easy, and tempting, to create dichotomies. Either this or that, no in-between. Recently there has been a discussion in my circles about city-life versus homesteading, situated in the context of Hamilton versus Jefferson. My friend broke this dichotomy by explaining how rural populations are dependent on the industrial production in cities and how the cities are dependent upon the agricultural yield in rural areas. It is not country versus city, but country and city.
With this being said, sometimes dichotomies do exist. Often the very real dichotomies are more fluid than fixed, but the very ability to go back and forth between the two options necessitates there being two options to flow back and forth between. Let us make this more concrete. There are people who are, or it might be better to say there are moments when a person is, open to Being and those who are closed to Being. Maybe this made things opaquer…after all, what is “Being?” To even ask this question, we are told by Martin Heidegger, presupposes an understanding of Being because the verb “is” in “what is Being?” is a synonym of Being. For “Being” is “what is”, and thus to ask, “what is Being” is to ask, “what is what is?”
Lest we set out to rewrite Being and Time, and it would just be better for you to read it than any second-class rendition of mine, let us look at a passage from Jean-Paul Sarte’s Nasea:
“It was useless to repeat to myself: This is a root; it did not click in my mind. Its function did not explain anything: there was no connection between its function as foot, as hydraulic pump, and this hard compact surface, like the skin of a seal, this oily, harsh obstinacy. The function explained roots in general, but this particular root, with its color, its shape, its arrested movement, was beneath all explanation. Every one of its qualities leaked from it a little, overflowed, became partly solid, became almost a thing; every one of them was unnecessary in a root.”1
Sarte is not the hero of this story and will actually stand as a type of the man closed to Being, but he gives a very accurate description of Being. Being is not this or that, it is not reducible to explanation, but is something that oozes from what is. To say Being is something is to treat Being like a being, one type of thing among many other things, but we cannot get around this linguistic difficulty. Again, as Sarte puts it so well, Being is “beneath all explanation.” We can talk about why roots in general have such and such a function or are made of such and such a material, but there are moments where this particular root comes into the eye and something about it is more than what can be said.
We too have this oozing and loose quality, to quote Sarte again,
“There we were, the whole lot of us, awkward, embarrassed by our own existence, having no reason to be here rather than there; confused, vaguely restless, feeling superfluous to one another. Superfluidity was the only relationship I could establish between the trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Vellenda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the insipid cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it…I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death—my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden—would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.”2
To the oozing, the looseness, we add superfluidity to our description of Being, or maybe a particular experience of Being if we cannot speak of what Being is. Simply, Being appears. Without reason, without necessity, oozing and loose, Being confronts us.
Gabriel Marcel, a French Catholic existentialist, phenomenologist, and somewhat the rival of Sartre’s, comments this on the above passages from Nasea:
“What could be further than this from the traditional vision of the overabundance of being which has haunted all the great poets, particularly the pantheists from Lucretius to Maurice de Geurin? The overflowing richness of reality which was experienced by them as something positive, and as a kind of glory, is for Sartre, a looseness, an obscenity (the word is inevitable).”3
Being confronts us, yet it confronts Marcel differently than it does Sartre. For Marcel, Being is an overabundance, contrasted with the “oozing” and “looseness” of Sartre, and is an “overflowing richness”, not something that would induce thoughts of suicide. However we might explain it, Marcel was open to Being and affirmed its goodness while Sartre was closed off to Being and thought it absurd. Affirmation or rejection, openness or closedness, either or.
These two responses to Being have tremendous significance, as our relation to Being dictates our relation to beings. Marcel connects Sartre’s rejection of Being to his contempt for the social order built around saying “yes” to Being, which we know as the Christian affirmation that creation is a good thing, that Man is a very good thing, and that God is the Good. Saying “no” to Being, Sartre rejects everything that says “yes” to Being, and this is why Marcel says, “for Sartre the very existence of the family is profoundly suspect.”4 In a harsh criticism of Sartre, Marcel says “Sartre’s world is the world as seen from the terrace of a cafe.”5 Why? Because he is aloof from the world and can only look at it with criticism. Any engagement with the world, any affirmation of Being, is impossible for Sartre. Those like Sartre have to look at the family with suspicion, for the family is an affirmation of the goodness of Man. Why would you ever have children if you did not truly believe that human life is very good and if you did not truly believe that life is, even with its pains, a good thing?
Using the imagery of the terrace of a cafe draws out the contrast between someone who is observing those in the cafe and those who are in the cafe. Sartre is not with friends having coffee and scones, he is not enjoying a feast, he is looking down on them. Sartre, used here as a type for those closed to Being cannot enjoy a feast. Joseph Pieper, whom all my Christian readers should take a look at, says the following about feasts,
“What, then, is required to celebrate a feast? Obviously more than a day off from work. This requirement includes man’s willing acceptance of the ultimate truth, in spite of the world’s riddles, even when this truth is beheld through the veil of our own tears; it includes man’s awareness of being in harmony with these fundamental realities and surrounded by them. To express such acceptance, such harmony, such unity in nonordinary ways—this has been called since time immemorial: to celebrate a feast. And at this point we realize that there can be no feast without gods; indeed, that the cultic celebration is the primordial form of any feast.”6
Looking at the world and saying, “it is good”, which is what Pieper means by “man’s willing acceptance of the ultimate truth”, is what makes it possible for Odysseus to pour libations upon a rock, for the Thanksgiving turkey to be served, for Jerry Garcia to sing “Sugar Magnolia”, or for Christ to raise up bread and wine and say, “take eat, this is My body and My blood.” Without affirming the goodness of Being, “even when this truth is beheld through the veil of our own tears”7, it is not possible to feast. At best wine and food can be a distraction, a way to drown Sartre’s thoughts of suicide. Food and wine cannot be libations, a Thanksgiving meal, elements in a Grateful Dead concert, or the Body and Blood of Christ for the man who in the face of Being, like Sartre, contemplates suicide and only holds back because the act could not wipe away Being.
From the Pre-Socrates, to Aristotle, to Leibniz, to Heidegger, it has always been assumed that the first question of philosophy is “what is Being?” I want to challenge this and put forward “are you open to Being?” as the first question of philosophy. Before we even begin to work towards a description of Being, we already have been confronted by Being and have reacted to it in some way. Indeed, our answer to “what is Being” will be shaped by whether we are open, or closed, to Being. In our description, always shaped by our acceptance or rejection, will spring an affirmation of, or suspicion thereof, family and our ability, or inability, to enjoy a feast. We might go back and forth between accepting or rejecting Being, a fluid modality that is carried along by repentance and despondency. We might go from acceptance to rejection and remain there for the length of days. Yet, however fluid or static our relation to Being is, its poles are always that of openness and closedness.
Marcel, Gabriel. Translated by Manya Harari. The Philosophy of Existence. Cluny Media. Providence, Rhode Island. 2018. 57, 58.
Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existence. 2018. 59, 60.
Marcel, 59.
64
64
Pieper, Joseph. Translated by Lothar Krauth. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. Ignatius Press, San Fransisco. 1990. 26
Pieper. 26