Whoever Saves a Life Saves the Whole World

Some notes toward a world vision (or just some notes in light of Charles Winckelmans de Clety)

I suppose that, if he lives long enough and makes it to around mid life, everyone is allowed a position or two. (Yes, “everyone” is singular, referring to each and every singular (human ) person; consider its second element.) If that’s true, well, I’m no exception, and I’m male and I just recently turned 36. The upshot, I guess, is that I’m entitled to a position or two—as a treat. So, as a treat—to myself only, maybe—I am going to sketch a few of my positions—or, rather, positions to which I’m more or less strongly inclined. (To the over-eager reader, please note: the following is a sketch, and much of it, I know, is both controversial and in need of much more elaboration and much more argument than I provide. I am not trying to write a treatise nor provide a demonstration. Either come along and have fun with me or, for the sake of us both, please see yourself to somewhere where you can have and share authentic peace and joy.)¹

I’ve been fairly well convinced for a long time, now, that the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion that the knower and perceiver in act is, respectively, the known and perceived in act. For a non-identity of perceiver and perceived, knower and known, as far as I’ve been able to tell, as any theory of knowing or perceiving as a kind of contact entails, interpolates between knower and perceiver and what is known or perceived an unbridgeable divide, a gap across which no act of knowing or perceiving can cross. Conceiving the knower-known or perceiver-perceived relation not as an identity but a relation between distinct act and distinct thing, or distinct act and distinct act, one of which stands over against the other, leads, as far as I’ve been able to tell, to some form or other of representationalism, a “theater of the mind” conception of knowledge or perception. We represent, somehow or other, on one plane or other, or in one mode or other, things; but then we either trust our representations or we ask why we should take them as expressing things as they in fact are—why having these representations constitutes true knowledge or true perception. One either takes on faith that it is so or one is left having to reason about the relation of representations to the things they supposedly represent—an impossible task, since, on this view, one could only know those relations, and the things related, through further representations. Either, then, it’s seemed to me, follow Aristotle and Aquinas in affirming the identity in act of knower and known, perceiver and perceived, or leave yourself, ultimately, having to reject the possibility of knowledge and true perception, reject the notion we can have real knowledge of real things and real perception of real things; I have not, for myself, seen a way toward a position that doesn’t fall to one side or other of that dichotomy (in other words, it’s not struck me as a false dichotomy.)

Either knowing something is knowing it as it is, or it isn’t. If I do not know it as it is, then I do not really know it but something else—if I know anything at all. While there is a moment of cognition that involves a turn to universals—the term of all cognition, the point toward which cognition strives and cannot rest until it achieves it, is knowledge of real being—call it, if you wish, following Duns Scotus, intuitive cognition, cognition or knowledge of things as they are precisely as existing, which things exist concretely and not abstractly. This may be a term we can only move toward and never achieve, but both love and a true commitment to knowing rely on this possibility as a real possibility: the true lover is not satisfied with anything less than loving his beloved as his beloved is, which not only then takes as its term the existence and the fullness of the existence of the beloved as it is but also seeks to know this—for not only is the beloved, as affirmed in love, worthy of being known as he is, but love can more fully accomplish itself as love the better the beloved is known truly; and all those who are truly committed to the work of knowing, like all true lovers, is not satisfied with anything less than knowing what the knower wants to know, and that as it is. All seeking after true knowledge—of oneself, of others, of things in the world—for whatever purpose is a seeking after knowing real being. And real being is not abstract but concrete. Thus, knowing has as its term knowing concrete things as concrete, real beings not abstractly but as they in fact, in truth, are.

As knowledge (for me and all who, like me, are embodied) must follow upon perception, such that one cannot know by an act of knowing what is not given in and through an act of perception, if there is no real identity between perceiver and perceived in act, then no knowledge is possible. And if the existence of real, concrete beings is not given in an act of perception, in which act there is an identity of perceiver and perceived in act, then the existence of the thing to be known cannot be known in an act of knowing.

If to know something and perceive something is to be identical in act as, respectively, knower and as perceiver with the thing known as known and the thing perceived as perceived, and if the existence of a thing is given, in different modes, through the identity of perceiver and perceived and knower and known, then, to perceive and to know something is, variously, to be involved in that thing’s existence. And it is to be involved in the known and perceived thing’s existence transitively, for it is an identity relation constituted in act, and both are active in that act, for that act is the act of both. Knowing and perceiving are each modes of identity and givenness, others (such as love) being possible, but they are real modes of identity and givenness, and this in real being.

All things are what they are in no small part because of their context(s). To know something is to know it as it is related to other things, for by being it is so related. But as past things are related to present things by virtue of forming and bringing into being every context in which everything presently existing exists, and everything presently existing exists within contexts nested in still other contexts, which themselves are comprised by the total context that is the sum total of all presently existing things, to know something as it is is to know it as, variously, related to everything that presently exists and that has ever existed, although in different ways (the present exists whereas the past as past does not). As the existence of a thing known is given in the knowing of it, and as the existence of a thing is, in no small part, constituted, formed and shaped, in its relations to all other things, the entirety of all that exists and all that has existed is given implicitly in every true act of knowing.

To know myself is to know myself as multiply contexted—if I may allow myself a neologism, as, of course, a treat—which includes myself as existing within the context of all that exists, as it exists. To know myself and to perceive myself is to have myself given to myself as I am, which is related to everything that exists; to be so given to myself is to have all that exists given to me, at least implicitly, variously in an act of perception and an act of knowing. And as everything that exists is here now, variously, on account of things past, which were themselves what they were for being related to everything that was then present, in perceiving and knowing myself—even if obliquely or indirectly in perceiving and knowing my body—all that once was is also given implicitly whenever I am perceiving or knowing myself. (How the past and what is past—neither of which, as past, anymore exists, is a question I would like to take up in a future post—is given in the present, at least implicitly.

In knowing and perceiving, all that is, as it is, is given, and this either explicitly or implicitly. (This is just as true of aspects or dimensions of things considered singly.)

My acts of knowing and perceiving, insofar as they are my acts, are or exist by my existence, my most fundamental act, the act whence all other acts flow as an unfolding, a working out, of that one act. As with all my other acts, my acts of knowing and perceiving are ways in which and through which my most fundamental act unfolds and develops—or fails to do so or thwarts that unfolding. As it is I who know and who perceive, my acts of knowing and perceiving are my acts and not another’s. Thus, the known and perceived in act are by the existence that is the existence of the knower and perceiver who knows and perceives them. That is, without denying that things exist in themselves, the for-the-knower or for-the-perceiver (or, from the vantage point of the in-itself, the for-another insofar as it is for that other within the other’s act of perceiving and knowing) of anything known or perceived is by the existence of the one knowing or perceiving; that is, the existence of a thing known or perceived by me, insofar as it is given as for-me, exists by my act of existence. And as all things are given explicitly or implicitly in every act of knowing or perceiving, the-world-for-me, which is given at least implicitly in every one of my acts of perceiving or knowing, as well as the past and all past things intended by every part of the-world-for-me, exists by my act of existence.

To be me, then, to be a person, is to have a world that is by my existence. In existence, the-world-for-me and I are one.

It goes without saying—for it is fairly plainly phenomenologically given—that my body and my world are not coextensive. My existence, my most fundamental act—my life-act, as Winckelmans de Clety puts it—is centered on my body, conditioned by by body even as it actuates my body, but my existence “extends” far beyond my body to the entire universe-for-me. My person and the world-for-me may be by one and the same act-to-be, but this does not follow that my body and the world are wholly identical; my body is the center of my world, the “place” whence my thinking and reflecting proceeds, but my existence—and thus my person—is not limited to it but encompasses it as one part of the world that it actuates. This may explain near death experiences, where “centers of consciousness” can “roam about,” aware of what is going on here and there but without being so through the body. (There is one famous case of a woman who underwent neurosurgery to correct a brain aneurism. Given the way the procedure proceeded, there was a period where her brain activity was next to nil. And yet, during that time, she was “disembodied” and aware of what was going on in the operating room.) Persons are more their existence then their bodies, which are that through which their existence centers itself and through which their existence unfolds their world as from a central point, as well as that through which the world is colored and felt and perceived. To be a person is to actuate and to have a world, for a oneself and a world to exist as polar moments; such a world may include a center, which for the embodied person is the body, but it is not reducible to its center, for its center is not its existence.

I clearly do not create myself. I have grown from a point before which I was not, and I will, despite my desires to the contrary, die. When I die, the-world-for-me will die. I do not, then, give myself my existence; my existence is given. Whence it is given is a question for me.

I am given to myself and, as I have a world, a world that, as world-for-me, exists by my existence, and can by my acts determine how my world is determined, how it shows up to me—even, by an extreme act, make my world, the-world-for-me, die, I can distinguish between the for-me of what I perceive and know and myself; I am an in-itself for which that which I perceive and know is for-another.

What is for-me is also an aspect or mode of an in-itself—another person. What I know or perceive in knowing and perceiving is my being, which is personal. But I also know my being as bound up in the being, the existence, of others: the-world-for-me is what it is because of the being of everything else; as in knowing and perceiving I am identical in act with what I know and what I perceive, I am at liberty to think, perhaps even must think, that the identity relation is transitive, that I and my world, which are identical in existence, are for-another and co-constitutive, with all others, of that world and its existence, and thus the existence of another. If so, the African notion of Ubuntu is deeply true: I am because we are, we are because I am.

The for-another of all things is a real unfolding of the existence as it is in itself of the in-itself of all things that are such, that are for-another. In acting toward oneself and one’s world, either well or badly, one is never simply acting toward himself but also toward another—for good or ill. To love oneself is to love all, to love another is to love oneself; to hate oneself is to hate all, to hate another is to hate oneself; to respect another is to respect oneself, to hurt another is to hurt oneself.

The for-another and the in-itself cannot be collapsed. For the in itself is not given as such by anything that is also for-itself, or that for which it is for-another, for all are co-given, and equally so. One can, however, freely choose to cultivate and unfold one’s world such that the in-itself of all that is, in the world-for-oneself, which is perceived and known and encountered in the for-oneself of those things given in an act of perceiving or knowing, is respected and unfolds and develops in harmony with oneself as this in-itself. And one can, by the same token, act toward another as given, or intended, in the for-oneself of that other given in an act of perceiving or knowing as simply existing for oneself, as simply a for-oneself, as simply an aspect of one’s world, and so as something over which one has and can exercise lordship, dominion, in the way one has lordship or dominion over oneself as an in-itself in and through one’s freedom. And as one can so act, so others can act—as experiences of personal evil and violations of personal integrity of all sorts attest.

In action, specifically in the action of love, the in-itself is intended most clearly; hate and indifference obscure the in-itself that the for-oneself of the in-itself in question is a particular unfolding—a particular unfolding on account of it being one unfolding of that in-itself, where other unfoldings of the in-itself in question occur in each world in which it is a for-another and thus a constitutive part or aspect of that world.

As each person for-me is, for him- or herself, an in-itself by whose existence the world-for-him/her exists, then each for-me that intends an in-itself intends a whole world, a whole world that includes everything that is, including me, in itself as a moment of itself. The human family is, if the above is true, thus an inextricably linked system of worlds. Furthermore, it follows that, indeed, to save a life is in a very real sense as if one had saved the whole world—for in fact, in a very real sense, he has done so.

1. The sketches of positions that follow draw heavily from the work of Charles Winckelmans de Clety’s The World of Persons. My path toward the present state of my thinking has ben shaped and guided by many, including a fortuitous encounter with the African notion of Ubuntu sometime ago, but The World of Persons has brought things together in a way nothing else has.