There Can Be Faces, But Not Hearts
On how when we don’t know someone, we lack any standard by which to confidently identify “breaks” between the person’s “foreground” and “background.” Thinking is stuck.
(Photo by Yolanda Suen)
Imagine you were reading through some papers I wrote, and you stumbled upon the following phrase:
“Humans are wholes.”
If you know me, you know I just finished a “Philosophy of Lack” series on how humans are “ontologically lacking.” “Wholes” are death drives, following the series, so if you read the above sentence in a paper of mine, you’d actually know it was the product of an error: I meant to say, “Humans aren’t wholes,” but left off the “n’t.” It was a mistake. However, if you didn’t know me, why would you ever think I made a mistake? The sentence, “Humans are wholes,” is readable and clear—you’d practically have to take me on face value. There’d be no reason to doubt what I wrote, and in fact to doubt it might seem crazy and open an entire horizon of possible paranoia and insanity. For all my sentences could possibly be wrong—how could you possibly begin to read what I wrote?
If you ran across the sentence, “Humans are wholes,” in my writing, you’d have reason to think it was “earlier pieces” and that my thinking had changed on the topic. Presently, I try to avoid the language of “wholeness,” “being,” and the like, not because there’s absolutely no truth to any of this, but because my emphasis now focuses on “lack” and “becoming.” If you knew me, you’d know this about me, but if you didn’t you’d have no reason to think that my earlier writings on “being” didn’t reflect my current thinking. If you read my current writings, you’d have reason to think I somehow “fit” the topics of “being” and “becoming” together, and then might proceed to understand my thought as somehow depicting this effort. Such a synthesis though might not be present: instead, I’ve simply changed my mind. But, again, without the relationship, there would be no way to know one way or the other.
There is a “break” between me and the sentence: I have either changed my mind or made a mistake. There is a “break” in time or thought: what “I am” is not represented by the sentences, “Humans are wholes.” But how could you possibly know that without knowing me? There is nothing in that sentence that says to you, “I no longer represent Daniel’s thinking,” and in fact the sentences “says” to you, “Daniel thinks humans are wholes.” Nowhere does the sentence provide reason to think that it’s not an accurate representation of my mind, that it is “incomplete,” or the like. In fact, for you to conclude the sentence is somehow “wrong” without knowing me would be irrational. You would be right, and yet you would not be following the evidence.
The alignment of truth and rationality requires shared conditionality, which means in practices a shared relationship. Where shared conditionality is lacking, regardless of if right or wrong, all alignments of truth and rationality will be arbitrary. Personally, I don’t like for my life and thinking to be arbitrarily formed, even if ultimately there is some degree of imperfection and “guessing” I must accept. And indeed, I must accept “nonrationality” (a topic discussed throughout O.G. Rose).
I repeat: nonarbitrary knowing and recognizing “breaks” is only possibly in the context of relationship and familiarity. Where there is no relationship, there is no possibility of identifying “what’s on the surface” as conflicting with something else. Irony, sarcasm, insincerity, misspeaking—these too require a relationship to identify, especially if communicative “cues” are missing. Without relationships or “meeting the conditionality” of knowing a person, there is no way to know if there is a break between “the surface” and “the depths,” “the signifier” and “the meaning” (beyond luck). Perfection is proof of indifference. A relationship that doesn’t surprise hasn’t begun.
Where there is no relationship or shared conditionality, we are lost at sea without an oar. We’re guessing, and “practically forced” to take everything at “face-value.” How couldn’t we? Rationality, logic, and the like necessarily have us “accept” how things are presented to us: we’d have no “reason to think” that what was “presented to us” wasn’t a reflection of “how things were.” But this means something critical: where relationships are lacking, we “practically” must treat the people around us as how they are “presented” and “appear.” Yes, we can know there is a difference between how we experience a person and what they say from who they actually are and what they mean, but we cannot understand the nature of this “break” or fill in its details without a relationship. Where there are no relationships, we “practically must” treat people like surfaces, even if we “know better,” for the abstract knowledge alone cannot “fill in the gaps” on what constitutes this “break.” We’re stuck. We’re in the dark.
“The true isn’t the rational” is a phrase meant to suggest that rationality is organized by what it believes is true. If I think it’s going to rain today, it’s rational to bring an umbrella, even if ultimately it stays sunny out. Rationality is always determined relative to “what I think is true,” which is strange, because then how do I determine truth? If rationality comes after truth, what is used to ascribe to truth? This gets us into the whole trilogy, The True Isn’t the Rational, but it is enough here simply to discuss how rationality is bound to what we believe is true. Since the degree we can (imperfectly) know “the truth” of a person is relative to how much and well we relate to them, this means the nature of our rationality regarding people must be relative to how much we know them. This doesn’t necessarily mean we “know” a person who we see everyday (and arguably we never fully know a person), but I do mean to say that “relationships” are epistemologically significant. And this applies not just to people, but to everything: all thinking is conditioned.
“Conditionality” is a middle-ground between “fundamentalism” and “relativism,” “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” and I’ll elsewhere discuss it under the umbrella of “Aesthetic Epistemology,” which is another topic for another time and inspired by James K.A. Smith. Mainly, the point is that our ability to think is always “bound” to what we experience and the quality of that experience, and that literally all thinking beyond that is “uninformed guessing.” It could still happen to be right, yes, but the probability is not high.
Rationality is bound by relationships, whether to people, objects, things, etc., for thinking beyond relationships is imagining. I stress, “imagination” can be right, for it is possible for me to “imagine” something that is indeed the case, so do not mistake me as suggesting that “rational” and “right” are similes. Not at all, and throughout O.G. Rose there are defenses and elaborations on “imagination.” My point here is only to draw distinctions between “acts of rationality” and “acts of imagination” so that we can better understand why in fact rationality is necessarily conditioned and why “conditionality” is a critical epistemological schema. Hierarchy is not valid here.
Imagination can think beyond the truths which a rationality is organized according to, making it possible for that rationality to organize itself according to new truths, which may or may not be right. Imagination “fills in the gaps” where rationality and our ideas of truth must be lacking, perhaps because we are finite beings who cannot meet every possible condition and enjoy every possible relation. If we were infinite, perhaps imagination would be unimaginable (expect maybe to consider “contradiction,” though perhaps it can be argued we never actually envision contradiction, only think it, as discussed on Hegel). God may not dream, only create.
To further play on the language we’ve established and to close this work, rationality is bound to “the face” of what is presented: it cannot consider or organize itself relative to “the heart,” and yet the heart is just as real if not realer than the face. Thanks to imagination, we are never technically “stuck” with “the surface” or “foreground” of life, but all “escapes” will prove arbitrary without relationships and shared conditionality. To reach the heart meaningfully, we must relate, but relations require facing The Real (as described by Lacan). This is hard, but suffering the difficulty is when we can cease questioning what matters.
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