On the root of vessels in primordial man
How are we to understand beyond the ‘revealed’ relationship between light and vessels, in light of the relationship of their roots in primordial man? Towards this end, can our first task be to reduce the question of the revealed to the question of the psychic?
That is, do the horizons of both questions open up onto the word ‘phenomena.’ Those things which are at stake in awareness. Or, more precisely, the character of those things that allow them to be at stake in awareness. And what can that character be but visibility, apparentness. And do these themes, already clothed in optical metaphor, clue us in to the manifest superiority of light on the level of the revealed? Here superiority means nothing more than light’s resonance with the most natural metaphor of phenomena. Light as phenomenal disclosure. Light’s resonance with the fact of subjectivity. Or p’nimi. That being said, light as the disclosure of divinity signals first and foremost that light has, in an essential way, a possibility beyond the visibility of phenomena. Light also discloses what is hidden by illuminating the invisible. Or makif. Here, would it be fruitful to understand this particular possibility of light as its ethical capacity, its illumination of the hidden point of the thou shalt not kill, precisely that which demarcates light as beyond phenomena, its holiness? For Levinas, this holiness which moves beyond the apparency of Being, but starts within it, is the transascendence rendered in the face of the Other.
In this light, don’t vessels appear comparatively shallow? How, in the context of the psychic, can the reception of phenomena be made holy? For the mystic, isn’t it the case that this reception is articulated by the ‘merely’ in the phrase ‘merely phenomena?’ The fact that, within awareness, the categories of everydayness, plainness, normativity, causality, etc., seem to always already receive, with the quality of having already regularized, the starting and ending points of disclosure? Isn’t this akin to the bare fact of awareness occurring, in each case, ‘within a mind?’ To me. The perspectival fact of subjectivity. And vessels as this limit. On the level of the revealed, is it true that vessels begin as limit but end in limit’s essential implication, which is difference, multiplicity? However, in relation to the capacity of awareness for holiness, this difference isn’t yet an ethics. In fact it only sketches out, once again, the intersubjectivity in which we find ourselves articulating all the ordinary questions of epistemology and physics. But isn’t this just the field referred to by the word ‘matter?’ The character of those things which are at stake in awareness through intersubjectivity. Meaning, you and I agree on and recognize matter as something shared, something that falls or floats or moves to the left or spins.
Along the route towards understanding the relationship between light and vessels in primordial man, can we take our lead from the aforementioned meaning of the word ‘matter’ in contradistinction to that of the word ‘phenomena?’ If the latter is referred to most naturally by the optical, to what extent can the former be referred to by the proprioceptive? Where is my body in space? Where is yours? Where do we stand relative to one another? The metaphor of the proprioceptive, however, doesn’t stop at the level of physical space: as the reception of the disclosed, don’t vessels essentially pronounce the place where that reception occurs? And isn’t the capacity of that place to be shared as matter essentially named by the category of the real?
We need to keep in mind that we’ve been working all along in the metaphor of the psychic. As a self-consistency check, our point of contact with primordial man should only invoke the root of the kind of revealment which occurs as awareness. For example, we should be careful to only invoke the root of light in primordial man as it pertains to the potentiality of disclosure. Mystically, we know that the root of light has as its origin the ‘forehead’ of primordial man. The forehead, as the locus of anointment, inaugurates the origin of the sacred as distinguished from the profane. If, in awareness, light discloses the visible as well as the invisible, can we understand light’s root as the beginning of this differentiation between the one and the other? Light’s root as the incipient moment of what is and isn’t hidden in the point of ethics. The precise moment when disclosure occurs from within or without.
What kind of potentiality in primordial man corresponds to the meaning of vessels revealed as matter? Mystically, we know that the root of vessels occurs from the ‘eyes, nose, and mouth’ of primordial man and that for this reason the root of vessels is said to be ‘more essential’ to god’s self, where mechanistically the self in question is god’s absence of lack. In this respect, the root of vessels is said to have a similar quality of perfection, in which all essences can be said to be consubstantial and without contradiction. Not simply as possibilities included in that self, but rather as actual manifestations of its perfection, in the sense in which it cannot be said that such and such an essence is lacking. Can we understand this in connection with a potentiality of the psychic? The Rebbe Rashab gives a parable of the stages of concentric development of the soul: most essential is the pure, undifferentiated ‘I’ of which all the capacities of the soul can be said to describe. Out from this innermost place is born all the powers of selfhood, the various motions beginning in the ‘I can.’ We learn from Levinas that it is in fact these powers which constitute the site of the Same, where ‘I can’ appropriate, assimilate, or calculate anything, even the trajectories of the most distant stars. For Levinas, the Same is the primary condition for Being which is always punctured by the presence of the Other. Here, however, the root of vessels as essential to primordial man signal a deeper possibility: matter, connoting the sharedness of Being as made evident in intersubjectivity, is not ruptured by the Other but, because of the total perfection of its root, essentially contains it.
Although phenomenal disclosure is ruptured by the exigency of ethics in the obligation towards the Other, a possibility which is conceived in the root of light, the relative perfection of the root of vessels contains no such breach. In fact, for the Rebbe Rashab, the operant condition for the superiority of vessels is that god intends to have a dwelling place in finitude: vessels as matter are, precisely in the absence of lack at their root, near to this intention as its telos. That god intents for vessels to be dwelt in, you and I, together.