The Journey Defines the Destination; The Destination Defines the Journey

Or on the significance of attentive personal struggle before the ease offered by AI

One person climbs a mountain to witness a sunrise.¹² The journey is an arduous one, requiring that he leave his house while it is still dark and make his way up winding, steep, and sometimes treacherous mountain paths to sit at last atop that mountain on a rock and, looking east, watch as the soft fire of dawn washes over the clouds below, and as the new day’s sun rises to meet him. Another person cannot be bothered with a trek up this mountain; he is impatient, he is on vacation, and anyway he has many things pulling at his attention and does not have the time. And besides, he is wealthy. But he has heard that the sunset seen from this mountain is quite grand. So, he charters a helicopter to fly him to the top of the mountain just before daybreak. The journey is easy, comfortable, and quick. He gets out of the helicopter, sits on the folding chair he brought, and watches the sunrise with a cup of coffee in hand near some poor bastard who clearly walked the whole way. After sunrise, the wealthy man gets into his chartered helicopter and leaves. The man whose journey had been a struggle stays a while longer, contemplating what he is experiencing, contemplating where he has come from, and contemplating where he is going. As he has things to do, the man gets up, gives the vista he had put effort into seeing one last time, and begins his trek back down the mountain, looking forward to a good breakfast.

In a certain and very real sense, both men in the above example saw the same sunrise. They sat on the same mountaintop, felt the same breeze and land under their feet, and saw the same clouds and the same light run through those clouds as the sun slowly rose above them. In another sense, one much more real and closer to the concrete truth of things, each man saw a different sunrise, and the differences between what they saw could not be more striking. For there is no seeing that is no the seeing of a concrete seeing subject, nor is there an actual object of sight that is not the concrete object of a concrete act of seeing by a concrete seeing subject.

Objections will surely immediately arise. “But I can imagine a sunrise without anyone being present!” No, you are imagining a concrete sunrise from your vantage point as imagining subject, and it only has existence in and through your imagination, through which you form things out of the memory of your various experiences. “But we have images of sunrises, and we know from science that the sun and earth move independently of anyone experiencing them!” Such images are only images in relation to subjects who have seen them, who remember them, and who interpret or understand them as images based on prior, empirically-rooted experiences of learning to so interpret them; you only make such claims because you remember your own interpreted experiences thereof and you have experienced as communication from others about the same. And as for science and what we “know” from it about the world independent of our experiences of it—assuming, for a moment, that “independent of our experiences of it” has any real sense when we plumb it deep enough—there is no science as such but singular scientists who, in communication with other scientists, either as colleagues or at one time as students, have received, learned, and applied methods to the interpretation of their experiences and the givens of their experiences, and who, in communication with others, have developed complex ideas—theories and models—out of such work that they subsequently communicate to others, which communication is not actually intelligible unless it is hear or read and understood; there was never, at any time, something being investigated and theorized about that was not the actual object of an actually perceiving, reflecting, and thinking subject. One can of course talk about or read about sunrises others have experienced, and one can then imagine things out of hearing that talk or reading the relevant words, but there is no actual sunrise that is not or that has not been actually experienced that one can meaningfully talk about, for all such talk is only meaningful if one has had actual experiences of sunrises to develop the ideas and images the words direct him to think about or imagine, which thinking and imaging directs one back, through one’s ideas and images, to memories of concretely perceived sunrises. The sunrise that is independent of a perceiving subject is thus nothing more than a regulative idea or a limit concept, not something that one can reasonably posit as intending or tracking something real apart from all concrete sense experience.³

With objections having been headed off, we can return to our original line of thought.

Both men in the above example saw a different sunrise. But this is not simply because the concrete act of seeing is always of a concrete subject whose act it is. For that very act is by virtue of the existence of the one whose act it is; it exists by the same existence as the man in question exists and by which all the aspects of himself and all his memories exist. That existence, the act of existence by which each man is, is the existence of an integral whole—and an embodied, worlded whole at that. Each aspect or part of the man influences, conditions, every other, and so every activity of his, which exists by the existence of the whole that he is, influences, conditions, every other:⁴ the memory of a person and all that is actual in that memory; the history of that person, and all that is actual in, and made present through, that history; and the world as it is for that person, as experienced and perceived by him—all parts or aspects influence each other, condition each other, for they are through the unity of a singular existence (although a singular existence that at the same time is the particular existence it is by virtue of the larger community of personal existences of which his is an integral part). As one’s actions not only are that through which one unfolds his life and so embodied existence but are also by means of the existence of everything that constitutes him as him, it follows that one’s actions are as much a part of one’s memory and world and history (finally) as any other part; it thus follows that what one does conditions the whole of what and who one is, that it influences the entirety of his actual existence and what exists by his existence—for good or ill. That is, there is no such thing as an action that is meaningless, that that can be considered utterly inconsequential for the whole of which it is a part. Both men saw a different sunrise, then, not only because it was the sunrise it was because it was for each one individually, but also because each sunrise existed conditioned and determined within and by and through a different personal world, a world conditioned and determined by a different set of actions and ways of acting—an entirely different form of life.

Each man saw a different sunrise because it fell within and was formed by the influence of different actions and ways of living. Each man had crafted and was living out a different way of being, and all that went into that way of being went into making the sunset what it was for each man.

For the first, the sunset was the end of a careful, attentive struggle up a mountain, and it fell within a life that was both capable of such a struggle and that appreciated it. That first man’s sunrise was a part of a much larger whole that included memories of struggle, of mountain dirt felt beneath feet, rocks felt beneath hands, mountain air passed through mountain greenery breathed, and of mountain life seen and heard; it was the light that illuminated a place known by a person who was actually capable of knowing and loving it. Moreover, it was this sunrise because it was a sunrise for someone willing to give life and the living of life time: the walk toward the mountain took time, the struggle up the mountain took time, and giving attention to all that was of the mountain and to the sunrise and its light at the end took time; and after taking time at the top to attend to and enjoy the sunrise, it would take time to walk back down the mountain—which was also, as anticipated, something that contributed to making this sunrise this sunrise. And the sunrise itself, being a part of an integral whole, conditioned and determined also what came before it and what the man who saw it anticipated going forward: the person whose sunrise it was had thereby a memory, history, and world formed by a sunrise calmly attended to subsequent actions determined and conditioned by the act of having calmly and peacefully attended to a sunrise. A slow life, a calm life, a life present to itself and what constitutes it, and a life that dignifies its world with taking time to be with it in all its earthy richness—that is what the first person’s sunrise fell within, was formed and defined by, and that served to condition and define, if only in part, the rest of the personal world into which it fell.

For the second, the sunrise was quite different—in fact, in many ways, the opposite of what it was for the first. The sunrise was for him not the end point of an attentive journey up a mountain, not an object of contemplation and of rest in light of memories of calm struggle and attentiveness within a thoroughly earthy world, but something rushed to, seen, and then left just as quickly. That is, it was a spectacle, an element in the pursuit of particular sensations and remembered experiences, nothing more. It was part of a life on the move, not one at rest but in constant motion, one that has all the elements of an embodied personal world but that considered these either inconsequential or subordinated to sensation-seeking or the ability to say that one has done something. While for the first person the sunrise was a point of depth and deepening, for the second it was simultaneously a surface and something that made more surface-like and shallow the lived existence of the one for whom it was. Because of the conditioning effects of all on all, if a full human life is one marked by depth and calm and attentiveness over and through and within the depths, then the very act of seeking merely to see a famous sunrise drew the second person further away from being fully human.

As we are pressured to move faster and faster, to flit more and more quickly over and past the surfaces of things for the sake of an ever metastasizing desire for the profit that comes from produced things bought and consumed in ever greater quantities, something like the above reflection is worth having in mind—especially as AI technologies ever more rapidly improve in their ability to help us produce what is desired of us. Pressure to live life at an ever faster pace and to flit past things ever more quickly will only increase. But as it is our lives and personal worlds that are at stake, our worlds that are formed or deformed by what we do—by everything that we do. One can of course choose to bow to pressures to perform, to produce; but that shapes the kind of world that is one’s own, conditions and defines one’s very lived existence and all that is made to exist by that existence: to so bow, even in little things, is to decide for a life and a world and all that one is that is more and more surface than depth, that is emptier rather than full, that is more dead than alive—for a corpse is all surface, even if involuted surface, with no lived depth.

Before the ever more rapid development of AI, we have a choice: We can choose, like the person who struggles up the mountain attentively to contemplate and appreciate a sunrise, to live, and in living to develop worlds of attentive struggle and the stillness that comes after struggle, to choose and choose again to form worlds of ever greater depth. Or, we can, like the person who flew in simply to experience the sunrise, choose ease and rapid movement from one thing to another, which is to choose surfaces over depth and thus to create for ourselves lives and worlds of increasing surface and decreasing depth. That is, we can choose to live life to the fullness of life, or to live a life become more and more like death. The choice is ours; but we must choose.

1. Header image: Samuel Colman, The Narrows and Fort Lafayette, Ships Coming into Port (1868)

2. So much of the following reflection draws on work that I have already done on this Substack. As lacing the thing with hyperlink after hyperlink would interrupt the flow of reading the thing, the reader ignorant of my work so far but committed to honest engagement is encouraged to read previous posts before attempting a critique of the present essay.

3. This does not however, entail a kind of Kantian solipsism, for, as I have argued elsewhere in this Substack, following Charles Winckelmans de Clety’s work and the African philosophy of Ubuntu—and, I hope, the givens of experience as given—we exist and act because others also exist and act; to be is to be a subject-in-community, and to be a community is to be a community-in-and-through-subjects: I am because we are, but we also are because I am; and the being of the experienced world as we actually experience it and so known it is not distinct from the being of ourselves as worlded, communally-constituted persons.

4. The astute reader would have already noted that, on the view being presented in this essay, and on this Substack generally, there is a mutual indwelling or circumincession of every persons who does exist and has existed in every other; one cannot give anything even approaching a complete account of this or that human being’s existence without giving an account of where they stand, where they are situated, within the entirety of the community of human beings.