Phenomenology under the sign of the hare

02 Jan, 2024

Matter, luck, and ecology

I. First pass
Sometimes we will seek to articulate the meaning of being, 'meaning' only designating the "upon-which" something can be conceived in the possibility of being what it is.¹ In order to avoid invoking a free-floating subject which is already 'considering' objects against a 'backgrounded' world—a kind of articulation in which the question of the meaning of being has already been made both impossible to ask and indefinitely deferred, a kind with which humans have been more and more rapidly discovering their own disembodiment, disengagement from community and environmental life, and biological meaninglessness, understood now in the everyday sense as well as in the more basic sense sketched out above, for the past four hundred years—we will endeavor towards a phenomenological approach to this seeking when it arises.

All this is only to say we will restrict ourselves to the question "what is it like?" so that the articulation of the meaning of being in general collapses to that of the meaning of our being, that is, the "upon-which" we can conceive of the question "who am I?" In this sense we will 'stick to' the 'first-person' lens of awareness, on the surface of which we can discover entities like the 'self' or the 'world.' This makes for a useful way to simply notice these entities without relying on them as building blocks, that is, we can make plain their contingency on 'what it is like to be' whatever we are. This collapsing is not, however, an outright sacrifice of the question of the meaning of being in general: it is simply the most familiar of a few intermediate vantage points from which to survey it.

Somewhere amid this collapse, or amid our struggle to regain footing on the ground of 'objectivity,' we will re-encounter the next most familiar vantage point, the articulation of the meaning of our being together, the kind of being that "you and I" share, what has been hitherto passed over unsatisfactorily as an "autonomous, irreducible relationship"² and in an everyday context takes the shape of an already agreed-upon consensus and interfaith in a persistence against which we can even think to ask "are you still there when I shut my eyes?" We may say that our answer to this question emerges out of a latent intuition towards the meaning of matter. Sometimes we may even concede that it is some kind of faith that gets us to its reassuring "yes," but under no circumstances would we pronounce that this answer has involved a 'leap of faith.' That is because we intimately and already know the 'truth of the matter' but not how we arrived there. We already understand in the most complete and final way what it is that we are experiencing and moreover what it is that we are sharing, but so far we have no particular orientation towards the relationship between these two, or their relationships with the fact of our 'being matter' or our 'being alive,' as rough and ready as all of these particular phrases may, as of now, be.

The extent to which our intuition 'in this matter' is a result of already sharing it is also precisely the extent to which we can also already discover its valences in something that must eventually come to resemble reciprocity. Phenomenologically, the only 'in' we have onto sharing is an unshakable feeling that our cares and concerns are not wasted, not simply that others 'encounter in the world the same entities we do'—since this could come down to, at best, a practicality, an agreement on referring to the same 'events' with the same words—but rather that our each care is met by a 'cared-for.' This feeling, for instance, would be uprooted at its very premise by the idea that we are first and foremost an entity among others to which relationships are then tacked on, relationships which could just as well be stripped away while leaving us otherwise unchanged. This theoretical 'stripping away' would also be the exact sense in which these relationships become arbitrary, carrying with it the sense that we 'could have just as well' have not struck friendships with who we have, or lived where we have, or made the mistakes we've made—in this way the possibility for our every touch and lingering to have meaning would be snuffed out: who we are becomes divorced from the articulation of what it is like to be us, since the answer to this 'who' would be at best an image, a circumstantial but otherwise free-floating idea, an agreement between parties on what qualities and relationships are referred to by the word "I." Therefore we will be mindful of the fact that our 'first-person' lens is not well-defined on its own, and accordingly any kind of ecological—meaning for now only 'total'—phenomenology will have no degrees of freedom to play with. There is nothing arbitrary about one's perspective, nothing which is theoretically free to be other than what it is. It is incumbent on us to recognize how this takes shape as our 'being matter:' we are matter by default and to the extent to which we can be cared for. Without already having been cared for we would not be who we are and neither would be an articulation of this fact.

To begin where we will end: this being cared for is also the first-person experience of luck. Here we must be careful to not simply 'point out' luck as a quality of certain events, like coincidences or miracles, or certain objects like amulets. Rather, we are simply going to notice 'what it is like' to be—what is the total phenomenal 'color' of awareness when we are—lucky. Luck is a feeling which both warrants and elicits a phrase like 'things just happen to me.' Whether these are 'good things' or 'bad things' comes down to whether we mean 'good luck' or 'bad luck,' but regardless, the feeling of luck has something to do with a carelessness in the first place. Carelessness is not, however, a kind of awareness in which there is no care, nor is it somehow the 'empty space' other than that towards which care is oriented. If we 'let care be' without objectifying it in advance, we can notice that awareness is never without care and there is no such 'peripheral vision' of care wherein something else 'could fit.' Likewise, blasé or silly moods don't mean that there is no care, but rather only reflect that my concern is elsewhere: not only just in the sense that my concern is an entity somewhere-else in space, but also more generally in that it is not my concern; it has no meaning for me. This meaninglessness here signifies a refusal to allow my circumstance to open up to me in its full importance, that is, the importance of sharing with me my world, and so it will remain as a 'set of objects' which 'I happen to be surrounded by or alongside.'

This is all to ask, what could be something like carelessness? Keeping care in mind, to return to the phrase 'things just happen to me' means noticing that the orientation of this 'just' is towards that which I was originally unconcerned. If I endeavor to open a door and it opens, I am not lucky. If I attempt to open the door but otherwise refuse to treat it with the importance of an opened door, and it still opens, then I am lucky. In some sense, its meaning has 'blind-sided' me. Combined with our understanding of care as a total phenomena, however, we must rule out carelessness as a 'blind spot.' If we're patient, we can notice instead that this 'blind-siding' is just the deepening motion of care, the growth from meaninglessness to meaningfulness. Carelessness is not even a 'present' deficiency in care, only the articulation of its shallowness growing deeper. Neither can we mistake this motion for any kind of agential 'penetration' into the 'true depths' of the 'inside' of some matter: we have intuited already that the meaning of matter has to do with the sharedness of being—this 'growing deeper,' then, is not a directed growth in one way or the other but rather an intensification of the understanding of this sharedness which can only mean a recognition of the awareness of the 'other end' of care. Luck has within it, precisely here in its connection to carelessness, the relationship between care and matter which is the inverse³ of the everyday understanding of care in which in each case only "I care" about some matter or other.

II. Second pass
There is nothing more clear, open, and already meaningful than the field of awareness. That being said, the stock and trade of the kind of awareness we as human beings have often seems to be symbols. How can we reconcile these two feelings while also admitting that symbols seem in each case to be 'representative,' 'textual,' or at worst 'burying their true meaning' in arbitrary pictures? In our heart of hearts, and in our dreams, we have one clue: the most profound kind of symbol lives not 'on top of' awareness, or even encountered within it, but rather this symbol seems to be overlaid with awareness. We are not speaking of a translucence in which two colors filter through to us at once, partially obscuring and mixing with each other, but we are instead sniffing out the kind of symbol which can be wholly 'there' in addition to whatever other entities we meet. In dreams this takes the form of 'meeting someone but knowing that they are someone else,' or having 'the image of a bright blue iris hang over everything.' We have already noticed that in care there is no 'periphery' around which 'to care about other things' as well; this kind of symbol must not then be a 'point of concern,' not something cared for, because it can also 'be there.' Instead, it is a kind of coloring to care, not a quality of it but a sign under which this particular care was born, a sign which doesn't 'predict the future' in any way but guides care's understanding of everything by the hand, determines how this care goes about caring.

The phenomenological method, too, cannot and should not claim to take place as the articulation of an 'ordinary, undistinguished, and universal' prototype of 'bare awareness.' Care is the extent to which awareness can be understood to maneuver towards purpose: it goes about this in some particular way which has no guarantee of either universality or unadornment. Caring always takes place amid an interwoven field of meaning that bestows upon it importance. Caring was in each case born under such a field and this field is interwoven so tightly that it can never 'be fully parsed' or pulled apart: it forms a totality which adorns this care always and can always be 'read' as its birth-sign. These totalities are exactly those 'profound kinds of symbols' we discover in dreams, in eternal stories, etched into the barks of trees, in swirls of bacteria under the microscope and in the rich wet textures of a cow's nose. The care to articulate something, which forms the horizon for the possibility of doing phenomenology, is also precisely this way. Once again, this is not a sacrifice of the premise of the question of the meaning of 'my being' or even of the meaning of being in general: it is the attempt to notice the kind of vantage point from which we are surveying these questions, how high up it is and in which directions lie which constellations. This, however, is not a passive or simply reflexive maneuver. In order to let ripen the full intersignificance of matter and luck through care, we can take advantage of the propensity for our kind of awareness to be held and guided by symbols by taking up in advance a particularly apt symbol for these kinds of questions as the lodestar for our phenomenological viewpoint.

On our first pass though these questions, have the ways in which we've gone about asking them been shepherded by some particular sign? Have we already begun to gather up into our 'prototypical awareness which is quiet enough to notice things' the thematic charges of some field in which, if we could feel connected enough to wander it and not feel lost, the sun could set and we could be illuminated all around with the intimate conversations of fireflies? Who we have been looking at straight in the eyes all along, or better, whose eyes we have been looking through in the first place, has been the hare. Not only has the hare been understood for millennia and across disparate cultures as a symbol of fire, of the moon, or of playfulness, but also primarily and most generally as a symbol of luck—it is in this role that the hare is overlaid with humanity's familiarity with matter.

"The hare is a symbol of enlightenment, not only of the spirit but of the dawn, the dawn of day and the dawn of the year which we call spring. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph—a picture of a hare—stood for the auxiliary verb 'to be,' [...] associated with creation and had the sense of being, existing, and persisting..."⁴

For us, to take up the viewpoint of the sign of the hare is not to ask the question of how or why the hare has coalesced as the sign for the totality of these particular meanings, nor to simply wonder what kinds of traits available in the sign of the hare can become 'talking points' for our phenomenology of luck. We will only invoke this sign at all in order to ensure that, as once having been born under some totality of meanings in particular, our care to articulate what luck 'is like' has already been marked and adorned by that totality of meaning which for millennia has already oriented humankind towards its most familiar, manifold, and meaningful answers on the subject. That is, the sign of the hare has coalesced like it has because of an apparently clear relationship with humans' understanding of what matter already is: playful, unpredictable, brilliant, lucky. This is enough to signify the hare's relevance in guiding us too in our questions about the meanings of matter.

To what extent, however, has our consideration of matter so far only pertained to possible answers to the question "what's the matter?" That is, have we restricted ourselves to articulating only what it's like to care for 'things' in our milieu, even if they may have the same character as something which we ordinarily refer to with the words "your awareness"? Have we all along been secretly imagining to ourselves that if we 'just cared enough' to 'envision a thoroughly radical or universal' system of entities, that we would suddenly find ourselves articulating what a multifarious care would be like? If awareness is to be likened to a clearing in which it becomes possible to care for matter, then have we implicitly been trying to cut away at the edge of this clearing in order to 'clear out more'? In our everyday life we have made for ourselves a clearing encircled by a horizon of tree-lines, rooftops, 'distant friends,' or other cultures. Even if in today's day and age we like to think that this horizon has widened and widened so that it now takes the form of a circle of 'fundamental particles' on one side and the 'entire universe' on the other, isn't there still a feeling that we've missed the point so as to remain silent in the face of 'your clearing in which you encounter me as matter' on the one hand and 'the forest which we already must've cleared' on the other, as well as the relationship between these two? Silent where there could be the striking of deep friendship. This all goes to point out that we must stay wary of relying on 'radial' cosmogonies—with a center and an edge—within which entities, by virtue of their contrast against a back-dropped 'firmament,' take over as the only 'subject matter' of care. The stakes are high because in this way we're blind to the fact that the forest having formed the possibility for this clearing in the first place itself deserves veneration, and not simply in the way of treating 'helpless entities' 'with respect' so that they 'will last' and can be shared with others after the fact. Here, we are intuiting the fact that this forest, as we will soon see, is something akin to a "you all."

We can now endeavor to 'take off the training wheels' of our conceptual 'vantage point' which we have made use of in analogy once or twice; it has so far relegated us to a kind of 'conic viewpoint' with ourselves at the apex. Towards this end, any talk about a 'lens of awareness' has already implied a focal point, and talk of "you and I" has already been trivialized into a 'bird's eye view' from which our 'two clearings' appear 'touching' like a Venn diagram. Instead, and in accordance with the sign of the hare, we will crouch down low into the form of the hare:

"They never used to have a hole like a rabbit. They just had a seat; and they'd scrap [scrape] this seat and sit with their hind-part into the seat and lay their head out do they could see anyone coming. And by scrapping out this little hole, when they sat in it, it used to bring them on a level with the land. [...] That was the seat, or form we used to call it. [...] They never run home to a hole anywhere."⁵

Our idea is not only to just say all of this and expect to randomly benefit. Rather, we hope that seeking the form of the hare will inspire us anew to take up unequivocally two threads we've left unwoven: the fact that we have no satisfactory way to address the forest's 'totality of matter' which so far has been resisting any attempt, no matter 'how wide the net is cast,' to care for it except as another thing, and also the fact that this address 'is addressed to' 'not just' matter 'but also' other awarenesses whose address towards it includes us. In clear view of the levelness of the hares' field of forms, let us in advance cast suspicion on this 'not just... but also...' which would, if otherwise let roam free, conspire to build up for us just another 'actor-network'⁶ from things, no matter how egalitarian their criteria, with the 'property of awareness.' Our route will be to weave a kind of relationship between matter and awareness (metaxy) which is satisfactory by itself but also 'degenerates' into the familiar 'network' of 'thinking things' who encounter each other amid a forest of 'non-thinking things.' Our criteria for this relationship will come from the hare: levelness, openness, totality. To make sure that a 'network metaxy' emerges as a degenerate case is to demonstrate that the hare's metaxy will be no free-floating proposition but a simple respect which, as it becomes covered up and distracted, finds expression in our everyday modern treatment of 'others' and 'nature.'

If we've no 'things' and no 'minds,' what other threads are we left with to weave? At this point we must recall that we've all along had only one thread which has been 'our' awareness and that matter 'shows up' 'in it.' On the other hand, we're sure that this awareness does not appear to others, but appears to others as matter. 'To me' you appear as matter, whereas I appear to myself as awareness. Here let us resolve these two feelings under the guidance of the openness of the hare's form, the fact that we intuitively and already share matter in such a way that we have the capacity to 'care for each other:' matter is not hidden from you by virtue of it appearing for me, nor is there some matter that could only appear for me and not for you. In fact, the way we will endeavor to resolve these two is to level off the 'in it' entirely, to trust our sense from the beginning that there is no privileged 'in' to awareness which exclusively 'allows' matter to be 'revealed.' Without this 'in' of ordinary phenomenology or the vulgar 'alongside' of a network, we are only left with the 'is' of selfsameness, the simple identity of the 'to be' of the hare. 'Awareness' and 'matter' must 'turn out to be' the 'inside' and 'outside' perspectives on the same something we all share, where all that 'inside' refers to is the possibility of being that something. As in, I am assured that you are aware to the same extent that I am assured that there is a possibility of 'being you' and that possibility is actualized by you. Similarly, and as a necessary corollary, there must be an awareness of anything, even an amoeba or a mug of tea, just as much as there is a possibility of 'being that' amoeba or mug of tea. Phenomenologically speaking, this possibility is a meaning of being because 'being matter' allows us, 'as awareness,' to conceive of matter as matter, and because 'being aware' is only possible on the basis of first 'being matter.' In its restricted form, this last clause reminds us that 'my awareness will change after I drink a mug of tea, because of the caffeine.' As far as all of this description is a cosmogony, its 'being that' forms its only explicit structural item, that is, its capability for 'difference' to develop as perspective is also the meaning of its 'to be,' a meaning which is founded in sharing. Only when this meaning is forgotten about does this difference appear to be exclusionary, and only on the basis of this forgetting does our ordinary cosmogony regarding 'entities' arise.

III. Third pass
Now that we've made a rough sketch of 'the hare's metaxy' as well as alluded to its capacity to be forgotten, we should be able to give some shape to its intrasignificance, that is, what it means 'from the inside.' We will go about this by simply passing again through the themes we've been concerned with all along, this time keeping an 'inside-out' account of their meaning. We will begin again with the question of persistence, of which the readiness of its answer we had chalked up to 'a latent intuition towards the meaning of matter.' What we've sketched out already tells us that this meaning is nothing more than the possibility of 'being it,' signifying that it is only our 'inside perspective' of matter that allows 'the rest of matter' to appear as what it is. Our trust in matter's persistence, then, comes down to the fact that not only is our awareness all we have, but also that we couldn't be without it; this trust is non-contingent and therefore 'has no need of reassuring.'⁷ That being said, isn't there still the lagging feeling that this trust is contingent on 'our agreement' that what we share is in fact shared as whatever it is and not as something different for you or me? Earlier, we had simply stated the connection between our 'intuition towards matter' and our 'always sharing it:' now we are in the position to grasp its meaning. First and foremost, we must again keep in mind that by sharing we don't mean to say 'I own some particular bit of matter for some time, and then you own it for some time,' nor are we referring to the fact that 'both of us are going about our lives in the same place,' but instead we simply mean to point out the transparency of caring and being cared-for. If matter is nothing but the 'outside perspective' of awareness as such then it goes without saying that one cannot waste care. That is, one cannot care for some matter or other so that it somehow ends up 'not being cared-for.' However unfamiliar this interpretation may seem, it forms a basis for the possibility of authentic sharing, the kind of sharing by virtue of which no one is 'taken away from' but rather always provided for. Authentic sharing is made possible by the concern made available in the shared matter at hand, which in turn is grounded in the transparency of care. If care could 'disappear' 'along its travels,' then this communality of care would not be a guarantee, and in fact matter would be 'split up' according to the lines of not just 'who cares for whom' but also 'who knows who cares for whom:' communality would become reduced to a public ledger keeping track of communality. In fact, this is precisely the movement towards ordinary inauthentic sharing, something which is only possible when one has already forgotten about the 'being that' of the cared-for. In this way, too, our trust in persistence only appears to be contingent on 'agreement' when the transparency of care is fogged over and reduced to a ledger. Only then can persistence, which was otherwise clear as nothing but faith in the necessity of our awareness, be doubted like the signatures on a ledger can be doubted.

Although this communality of authentic sharing is precisely what we meant when we had intuited that the address towards totality would find expression in a "you all," the meaning of the address itself still needs some more untangling. What makes so deceptively obvious the answer to the question "who" at the 'receiving end' of this address? Here we need to circle back to our 'clearings in forests' in which we had originally passed over the substantiality of this 'forest.' The reason why this analogy took hold of us in the first place, in apparent conflict with the openness of the hare's form, was that 'not everything' appears to us: we weren't concerned, however, simply with our own 'locality,' or that we 'don't know what's going on around the corner,' but rather with the focus of care. Naturally, we always concern ourselves with some matter or other and never 'everything.' Care's focus establishes itself as an everyday meaning of difference, signifying that, on the 'basic' phenomenological level, that is to say 'what it is like for me,' difference only makes itself known up to my own propensity as a caring being to distinguish. In this way it also sets itself as the everyday barrier to letting 'everything' be important: the focus of care is the last barrier to discovering ecological meaning and why it eludes us. To the extent that we have so far discussed the possibility of carelessness we have also already presupposed this focus, but do we now have a clue into what it means for care to be focused? Does our hare's metaxy already include something that looks like it might form a basis for focus? What we would be seeking here is a structural item in which difference could eventually appear in the everyday, as it does in focus. Luckily, the hare's metaxy only has one structural item in the first place so our list of candidates is as easy as it is obvious to us by now: 'being that' is the only possible meaning to the focus of care, since it is what establishes the possibility of difference in the first place—by establishing this difference through the development of perspective, difference makes itself known on the everyday level as 'caused by' the focus of care.

If this is really the case, then is the meaning of ecology forever to elude us as 'beings who care?' Why should something as important as care form a barrier to letting ecology be meaningful? In fact, we have only let our words get ahead of ourselves. We should instead be asking: how can care degenerate so that it forms this barrier? We have already noted that the 'difference' involved in the 'being that' is not by itself exclusionary and only appears to be so when we have forgotten that its meaning is only to be discovered in sharing. Since this 'perspectival difference' forms the meaning of focus, our clue will be to note what it is on the everyday level that we have forgotten about so that focus too lends itself towards an exclusionary difference, a difference of the 'and... or...' For the last time we will follow the 'sign of the hare which is hanging over everything.' The possibility of being cared-for is only available because of the transparency of care, which in turn makes clear that the ground of care is in authentic sharing; the possibility of being cared-for finds its most natural expression in carelessness, something which on the everyday level makes itself known as luck. Therefore, to forget the true meaning of care is to forget that we are ourselves lucky. The meaning of ecology, thus stated, is that the "who" who cares for me is whatever is shared among the 'members of the community' founded by the metaxy of the hare. If I have forgotten my luck, I have primarily forgotten the luckiness of being myself a member of this community, and I have forgotten most of all to be grateful for this fact.