- Teresa of Ávila

In physics, a wave is a disturbance that travels through space and time, usually accompanied by the transfer of energy.

Waves travel and the wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass transport. They consist, instead, of oscillations or vibrations around almost fixed locations. For example, a cork on rippling water will bob up and down, staying in about the same place while the wave itself moves onwards.

One type of wave is a mechanical wave, which propagates through a medium in which the substance of this medium is deformed. The deformation reverses itself owing to restoring forces resulting from its deformation. For example, sound waves propagate via air molecules bumping into their neighbors. This transfers some energy to these neighbors, which will cause a cascade of collisions between neighbouring molecules. When air molecules collide with their neighbors, they also bounce away from them (restoring force). This keeps the molecules from continuing to travel in the direction of the wave.

Another type of wave can travel through a vacuum, e.g. electromagnetic radiation (including visible light, ultraviolet radiation, infrared radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, and radio waves). This type of wave consists of periodic oscillations in electrical and magnetic fields.

A main distinction can be made between transverse and longitudinal waves. Transverse waves occur when a disturbance sends waves perpendicular (at right angles) to the original wave. Longitudinal waves occur when a disturbance sends waves in the same direction as the original wave.

Waves are described by a wave equation which sets out how the disturbance proceeds over time. The mathematical form of this equation varies depending on the type of wave.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave

- G.W.F. Hegel, Enz. § 247Z.

Here we see that the relation between thinking and subjectivity is inverted. The question explored in the following article revolves around the problem of thinking and subjectivity. We will take our departure from a quote by the philosopher Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon who speaks authoritatively about real possibilities for transformation. The lecture from which it is taken, the so called Colmar lecture, presentes unresolved riddles in contemporary philosophy in relation to this problem of thinking, subjectivity and the question of the real I of the human being. We will try to see how the dissolution of everyday personality is a part of the transformation, but only mention in passing now that the real problem comes after this is accomplished; what becomes of the individual that has passed through its own dissolution and nothingness? The Colmar lecture treats these questions as they emerge in 20th century philosophy, and one example of how this emerges in the debate in contemporary philosophy we read in a recent book about Deleuze:

As is obvious, we are here dealing with a radical transformation of thinking, and one which strikes directly into the heart of the human being. If Deleuze’s thinking really is to overcome the opposition between thought and being, it must be the actual event of thinking which is that which strikes through the being of the thinker as a thinking on the part of being itself, and not a conceptual representation of this process, -which would of course be an enormous self-contradiction. Thinking can not be attributted to someone thinking about something (being), but becomes the very ground of being as it unfolds itself.

Such a transformation of thinking, it’s historical background, and some of the problems involved in it was the focus of the Colmar lecture. Taking his departure from the philosophical work of Rudolf Steiner, Ben-Aharon tried to show how post modern and present day philosophy was and is striving with some of the same problems which can be found hidden in the work of this neglected figure. The central concept leading the lecture was the “spiritualization of thinking” and this term designates the same process as hinted at above; the reconsiliation and merging of thinking with the infinity of the absolute.

[Steiner] says for example: now that the role of philosophy was fulfilled (meaning at the end on the 19th century), “we must have the courage to let the lightening of the will strike directly into thinking through the wholly singular being of the individual person.” This will element can fire thinking and release it from its bodily fetters, freeing its wings to soar and ascend into the open cosmic etheric universe. Then it will no longer be the same “I” who thinks, but it will be the stream of cosmic thought that flows through my transformed being. “IT thinks in me” will become a truthful experience and real supersensible event. But precisely this remarkable spiritual achievement, namely, the “IT thinks” poses serious problems of epistemology, identity, and of course ethics, which cannot be resolved by means of present day philosophy and science.

Therefore we see that in attempting at actualizing this reversal, we must find the real experential relation thinking has to our given self, and not only the conceptual representation of it. It can not simply think these conditions conceptually by means of represented ideas, but must enter these conditions and think them in such a way that it is possible to deactualize and reactualize them. The first task therefore is to find ways of deactualizing thinking’s involvement in anything given in order to actualize the difference between thinking on the level of “i think” and this other pre-personal thinking which we have seen must be there before what we know as thinking comes into being. Thinking must be able to deactualize its involvement in anything given (memories, given determinations, affections or any kind of sensibility) in order then to enter these and consciously re-actualize them.

But how do we begin this process? As seen above, we have already discovered the difference within thinking, i.e. it’s conscious results which are on the level of “i think”, which is image and representation of the world without any real substantial beingness, but we can by means of the inherent logical nesessity of this thinking when it analyzes itself see that it itself must be a product of something we still can call thinking, but which we are unable to determine. By this is meant that we see the pure possibility of distinguishing, of creating concepts, of determination, as a creative power inherent in thinking, but we are unable to determine it, to grasp it. We are unable to create a sufficient conceptual representation of thinking. We only see this “thinking” as a “black spot” within daily rational consciousness. This means that we must give up the implicit assumption of knowing what thinking in itself is.

This thinking which we have now recognized as a blind spot within normal thinking is transcendental to this normal thinking of the “i think”. But by this is not meant that we have deduced a transcendental realm which must forever lie outside experience. It is rather a produced or actualized immanent-transcendental relation, which becomes actualized preceisly by means of how our thinking experience comes to be, how it is held fast in consciousness and related to subject and objects. It means that the experience of thinking awakens by being related to the subject which understands itself from within thinking in the first place. This “primordial” pre-personal thinking is that which determines the meaning of “subject agains object”.

This understanding or determination is of course supported by the continuos sensations and memories which make out our everyday experience of being human, but these sensations and memories only become ourselves, our obvious given “i”, by means of what we mean by saying that thinking creates the determination “subject-object”, otherwise it would be sensations and memories not belonging “to anyone”, not having the “i think, i am” consciousness. But since, as is already said, we can not cancel this composite and deactualize and depersonalize it at will, it shows that it affects and determines thinking. From this we can assume that this composite, sensations/body, memory, affections themselves have an intimate relation to the nature of this what we have called a pre-personal thinking. We can therefore assume that, as is the case in Deleuze’s and Steiner’s philosophy, it is more correct to regard the difference between thinking and sensibility as a difference in degree, rather than one in kind.

From a plane of immanence we produce the trancendental of thinking, and therefore have two different meanings of thinking: thinking as image and representation, which is what we know in experience, and thinking as a creative force on the level of being itself.

But if this is so, it means that “thinking” means actualizing this difference. To think is to create this split, to actualize the difference between reality and semblance and to place “oneself” (this term is already ambigious) outside reality. And therefore the question occurs; can we think the actualization of this difference itself? Is it possible to think this act which actualizes the transcendental? Can we make thinking immanent to itself again? (In this question we must now remember what we have already seen; “we” (or “i”) means here not what we percieve to be ourselves, which in any case is no real idenity, but a composite of elements given the determination of subject by means of thinking which, as we have seen, does not belong to this composite idenitity and the determination subject, (”i think”, “i am”), but is the logical condition for it, and therefore must be a pre-individual force.)

Then we must find the place and time where this split is created, the act which actualizes this difference, and see if this act itself can be thought in such a way that it begins to enter the experience of thinking. Can the thinking of the “i think” touch the Outside of this thinking and approach the event horizon, a zone where the known laws may begin to mutate and dissapear into this black hole of thinking?

This means to look for the remnant of reality within our normal thinking. The act in which thinking is divided and spilt, the moment when it leaves it’s own source in order to flash up as “my thought”, is where we hopefully could find the remnant of true reality.

This remnant of the real, of reality before it is subjectivized and personalized into our individual representations is brought forth in the above quote from the Colmar lecture: it is the will element inherent in our usual thinking. If we can strengthen this and then “have the courage to let the lightening of the will strike directly into thinking through the wholly singular being of the individual person” then we will be able to actualize the reality of thinking. Then thinking will be different from the thinking of “i think” because the reality of thinking, it’s creative and formative force, becomes stronger than the composite of forces which creates the “i” of the “i think”.

What we see therefore is that the impotence of thinking, it’s experienced inability to penetrate it’s own creation (this we have “abstractly” realized by analyzing thinking and implicit in experienced this inability) is the first experience of it’s pre-personal force. It is this experience which teaches us that thinking has an innate will element but that it is incarnated in such a way that its incarnation determines its nature more then it’s own innate being as “thinking”. Lifting the act of thinking into consciousness actualizes this will and strengthens it.

This we can now explore in thinking by beginning to think, and in the beginning experience the beginning. Thus we explore the act of actualizing the difference in thinking. We bring the beginning of thinking into consciousness and thereby we bring ourselves into proximity to the event in which the pre-personal infinite thinking flashes up as my thinking and becomes reflected. Then we fuse our individual personalized will (the will in the thinking of the “i think”) with the will-element of the pre-personal thinking which is there before the birth of “me” and “world”. And it is “this will element [which] can fire thinking and release it from its bodily fetters, freeing its wings to soar and ascend into the open cosmic etheric universe.” (from the YBA passage above)

We direct “our” will towards the act out of which what is gracefully given is given in the act of understanding, while the pre-personal cosmic thinking, that which constitues the subject and object - the thinking of the Outside - grows inside this act of beginning to think. More and more the true beginning of thinking is actualized, and takes over the place of the “i” which used to be there before the thinking. And one day, this “i” does not think any more, but is in truth thought by thinking in “me”, and thus, maybe, we inhabit a new world of cosmic immanent life.

“Das Dasein: das mittehaft-offene und so verbergende Zwischen, zwischen der Ankunft und Flucht der Götter und dem in ihm gewurzelten Menschen.”

- Heidegger, Vom Ereignis

The story of the lonely, suffering, god, goes as follows: God, as single being, is isolated, and has no one to relate to. This circumstance causes suffering; the supreme being wants an other, isolation is not the state which realizes what God is.  So He creates the cosmos and other beings in it in order to replace the loneliness with the joy of company.

In the story of the joyful god, God is so magnificent that He continually self-transcends and creates. To create belongs to the nature of God; there is no decision to create that were once made. God cannot not create. He overflows in His excellence. One can compare this to the idea of love as an infinite source, a fountain that never empties. On this account, one would say that if you give love, the amount of love you have does not decrease in any way; if anything it increases.

So again: Why is there something and not nothing? I have a tendency to prefer the idea of the suffering god as an explanation, but I easily to recognize this as as an arbitrary, personal, preference. Is it possible to think these ideas in relation to each other? Find some way of fulfilling both conceptions at once? I fall asleep a short moment and suddenly the following idea is born into my mind, still unclear, but still explicable:

Any subject, any self-consciousness, has already transcended being a simple being that is located here or there, or transcended being limited in any way. This is the overflowing, the continuous expansion; the subject, God, always proceeds out of itself. But the transcending proceeds out into nothing, it looses itself, does not return to itself. This is the suffering. Only another being of the same kind as oneself can realize the transcending quality of the subject. This is why company is joyful (and also why misery loves company …). The subject transcends itself in an attempted act of love or joy, which simply belongs to its nature; as far as it proceeds to nothing it is continuous loss of love, continuous suffering. As far as there are two conscious beings present, the self-return becomes a fact, love is not lost, but received. And the self-return of the one is the self-return of the other. For any one as opposed to another is not the realization of self-consciousness, of self-knowledge, self-feeling, self-experience. Only the other as oneself carries this promise. Self-consciousness is never a single being. Self-consciousness seeks an other; self-consciousness is this other-seeking. But it is also a self-seeking. The other-seeking is a self-seeking. And only an other being that is also self-seeking can realize the self-seeking of the original subject.

This means that as I am self-conscious alone I have a false self-consciousness; it is an imitation of the full realization, somehow fixated in time and space. I am given this possibility; I have not created the conditions for it. My relation to creation, joy and suffering, as a limited being within the cosmos, must then be different than God’s. I believe however, that this relates to the way a human being must be different to the infinite being of God, in order to realize the self-seeking joy-suffering of God. It is the concrete otherness that God sought; the human being as the real creation and theology becomes the actual self-conscioussness of God. Joy is the source, but its expansion is at once suffering; only the return is the real joy.

In the neo-platonic conception the focus is on the idea of the emanation and return, and not so much a nostalgia regarding this original unity or one. I shall call such nostalgia for the return to an original state a romantic sentiment, but I will not limit such romanticism only to the feeling of nostalgia. Both moral judgments that praise an original state as well as all objective judgments that this state is factually a better state also belong to what I call romantic positions.

This romantic position can be divided into two sub-categories. One claims that the original state is somehow undifferentiated, and that the root of the corruption of the world in one way or another lies in this differentiation into to singular entities. This can be called this pre-differentiation romanticism. Some of the philosophies that have been developed in the 19th century can be said to belong to this pre-differentiation romanticism. Sartre’s idea of moral action as properly happening when it is unreflective, when one simply sees the other as oneself, i.e. that there is no such distinction and the action is spontaneously done without any rational deliberation, then it action is good and moral. Heidegger’s idea of a return to being is another example. We have somehow lost our connection to the real, and the only hope for philosophy is to find a way speak to this original being, which has been lost.

The other sub-category sees one of the separate entities of the world as essentially better than any other, as carrying a legacy from the original unity. The corruption is then located in the other entities. The basic idea is that of all the different traditions, cultures and peoples of the world, only one of them is essentially good and the others are simply a bad influence. This romanticism could be called totalitarian, since is seeks to understand one group, or one individual, as the privileged and the others as having no essential right’s of their own. The history of the 19th century gives many examples of this, although cases such as Stalinism may prove hard to fit into the picture of the idea of an original unity, but still there is the conception of the privilege of the one or the group (the party or the working class) over everyone else.

One of the simplest understandings of Hegel would put him in the latter category, i.e. the interpretation or myth of him as being some kind of ideologist of the Prussian state. Hegel’s philosophy does indeed contain ideas of unity as something higher, but his ideas on this are indeed quite complex and differentiated. The question about whether or not Hegel is a philosopher of unity or identity cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. In my opinion one needs to focus as much on Hegel’s attention to the differentiation of society that happens with modernity, and his analysis of the shadow side of this differentiation in order to even start approaching his idea of unity.

Differentiation could indeed be said to be the hallmark of modernity. The world of the middle ages, antiquity and as far back as recorded history goes, is very much a Great Chain of Being, as described by Arthur Lovejoy. In the old world everything was connected, existed within a hierarchy, with the smaller parts always mirroring the whole, which they were fully dependent upon. There is an ordered continuum that runs from the heavens, through the human world, the animal kingdom and so on. The idea of a separate individual does not exist. This world has more or less fallen apart in our age, but this does not in any way have to be understood as something bad. If fact, differentiation could be described as the dignity of our own age. The differentiation of the value spheres as described by Max Weber is a differentiation that is also liberation. That which in many ways was the unifying force of the Great Chain was religion, which meant that the free inquiry and empiricism that is the foundation of modern science could not exist. As far as the beautiful goes, the differentiation of modernity implies that everyone is free to seek their own ideals and create freely without any external norms. All of this is of course a matter of negative freedom, of abstract individualism, and one could point to the one-sidedness of this differentiation and the longing for community, which it creates, as in Zygumt Bauman’s analysis. It is easy to see that the longing for community may lead to seeking out comfort or a possible rescue in some romantic idea.

When the differentiation of modernism shows its one-sidedness, some form of pluralism seems to be the only viable route, or one can at least understand the reaction of post-modernism: There can be no return to any primordial unity; the only possible way is to create small enclaves of meaning, i.e. never a total or overarching meaning, grand narrative, which applies to all. This mindset implies that in essence there is no real essence, only relative pockets of life where apparent connectedness is allowed, and there is no all-embracing ideal world, which can serves as a foundation for judgments about what has real value or what real progress means.

There is an inherit dilemma in pluralism as grounded in a post-modern attitude and the view that all values are relative. Pluralism, when it is thought through, has an openness also towards a view that rejects pluralism as a consequence, for instance openness for the view of pre-differentiation romanticism as described above. Often a reaction to this takes the form of saying that pluralism actually is something better than the world of the Great Chain of Being, for instance since it implies a higher degree of tolerance of difference, it is more cosmopolitic and is capable of taking more perspectives into account. This however is then a form of modernism, since the claim amounts to a defense of the idea that there has been essential progress. Modern societies of a world that has become more and more global tend to go back and forth between the extremes of this dilemma, claiming on the one hand that freedom to pursue ones own goals should be a privilege of all, and on the other that this viewpoint is in fact the best one and that other viewpoints that challenge this basic pluralism must be defeated or at least checked.

This dilemma can be viewed as a kind of aporia, and it is here I understand Hegel to offer a possible new approach, which can understand this dilemma as having a positive meaning, or at least can give it a positive meaning, when its extremes are integrated in a higher unity. That is exactly the point of a Hegelian understanding this issue. There is a possibility of a unity that is not of the romantic sort, but rather as something yet-to-be, not something located in some primordial state. In my opinion, pluralism in a global world has three options. Either one understands pluralism as something that really brings a kind of loss with, a loss of truth, a loss of meaning and somewhere safe to put ones faith and trust, or one accepts the dilemmas and paradoxes of pluralism and differentiation, not as the be-all end-all, but as least as representing some of our most advanced and most human intuitions, and as the only alternative to a romantic longing that may very well be good-intentioned but still unable to satisfy a modern enlightened consciousness which is very well aware of the possible pitfalls of romanticism. Or one has the third option, of viewing both the possibility of going back to some primordial oneness as well as the possibility of remaining within the differentiated modern world that struggling with fragmentation and issues such as the colonization of the life-world as unsatisfactory, and that there is the possibility of a new integration of that which has been differentiated. Pluralism is then viewed as the ground of something new, by no means intrinsically corrupt, but a stepping-stone for something that is yet to come.

What could such a third option be? It seems hard to speak seriously today about a return of grand narratives, but it seems to me that this is the only viable route if one is not to accept the other alternative, as proposed by Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations, that we must understand what we are not in order to understand what we are ourselves – our concern with ourselves always having priority. What Hegel has to offer is a concrete approach to a global cultural recreation of connectedness on a level that humanity has never seen, i.e. as including the highly differentiated individual consciousness that has learned to see its seeing of its other as itself as partaking in a freedom that we only vaguely can see the greater implications of. These implications are, in my view, that of a yet-to-be-created cultural pantheon carried by intercultural dialogue and commonly formulated universal history.

Here is a very good resourse for littrature with an excellent introduction to this work

The Lista installation-project this summer (2009) will have improvisation and «events» as its theme. The gallery will function as the place where work and experimentation is done, and this will be open to the audience. During four days the duo  (prep. guitar, prep. piano, electronics) will explore different kinds of material through improvisation. This will be collected and condensed into a closing concert at the last day. This will be an attempt to collect the musical events which occur during the improvisations the preceeding days. The gallery is thereby showing not «works» as objects, but work as events. The lighthouse will show the sound spatially spread out across the stairs so that the audience moves spirally upwards in a field of sound, a «soundscape» created in the gallery and split up into different perspectives inside the lighthouse. More info will come.

Here is a teaser from the duo Silvola-Eftestøl who will be doing the installation together: Improvisation for a lost cage