Metaphysics and the Gap
“Why do I exist? ” This is the most fundamental question that I am capable of asking about myself, and as such, it is the most fundamental question that can be asked about everything that concerns the “I,” in particular what the “I” is. This is why, from the subject’s point of view, the question “Why do I exist ” is the metaphysical question. The foundation of the subject depends on the answer to this question. If I can say why I am, then I can also say what my origin and destination are, and perhaps I can even determine the trajectory that leads me from my origin to my destination, so that not only is it “I,” but it knows what it is.
But perhaps the foundation is to be found not only in the answer, but even in the question, or at least in the way it is posed. Indeed, the question is already based on a number of presuppositions. The first of these presuppositions is “why.” On reflection, the “why” presupposes the I. It presupposes it because it postulates that the I’s presence in the world is not self-evident. But this non-obviousness is not itself obvious. There is a major component of the universe for which presence in the world does not, a priori, need justification. This is the case for everything we usually refer to as nature, i.e., basically everything in the universe that has not been designed by the human “I.” Let us take the example of a forest. A forest maintained by the human “I” is invested with a function; this function can be aesthetic, in the form of a park, for example; it can also serve an economic purpose, such as hunting or the timber industry; or it can be maintained to preserve it, out of concern for the “environment,” for example. In all cases, the forest is invested by human beings with a function, even the simple and fundamental function of preservation. The forest obeys a reason assigned to it by man.
But what about the forest that has never met man, and which man has never been able or willing to manage? The human “I” will reply that it knows, having studied it, that such a forest fulfils a “balancing” mission, thanks to which, in the end, what we call (biological) life can arise. But this is not the answer to why the forest exists. It is an effect, perfectly objective and scientifically founded, of the forest’s presence in the world. But the forest, as a forest, did not come into the world because in this way, and thanks to it, life would become possible. It came into being because a whole series of physico-chemical processes took place over millions of years to bring the forest into being. It is the same with everything in nature. The question of why nature exists is no longer asked today, because we know the answer to this question, which is given to us by science. Nature has happened, because it had to happen.
The situation of the I is quite different. If the question of “why do I exist” is asked, and continues to be asked, it is because no definitive answer has yet been found. Of course, from a biological point of view, “I” is here because two human progenitors, male and female, mated and begot it. But everyone is well aware of the inadequacy of this answer. Unlike nature, biology does not provide a sufficient answer to the question of why the “I” exists. And this is why the question of why the I continues to be asked. The I is aware that between the biological answer and the real answer to the question, the definitive answer, there is a gap that has never been bridged.
The perception of this gap is the foundation, everywhere and always, of metaphysical questioning. Of course, the approach to this gap can be fundamentally different. Some people, often in the East of the world, may consider that the purpose of the I is to close the gap and become nothing more than a component of nature. But this does not change the perception of the gap. The gap is and remains, even if we do not know what it is. And it is from this being of the gap that the question of the why of the I is written. In other words, to ask why the I is, is to ask about the being of the gap. In French, the question of “why” can be understood in two ways, both of which are close in writing but radically different in meaning: pourquoi, in the sense of “what is the cause that explains?” Pour quoi, in the sense of “what is the end in view?” So, “why am I here?” or “what is the purpose assigned to me?” The being of the gap is such that one or the other, or perhaps both questions, remain unanswered. If the two questions remain unanswered, it is perhaps because their questioning is closely linked and even, at heart, identical: what grounds my presence in the world is the finality, the destination assigned to me; but also, if a destination is assigned to me, it is because there is a foundation to my presence in the world. Perhaps the origin is in the destination, and the destination in the origin.
The thing about the gap is that there is no definitive answer to these questions, and if there is not, it is essentially because the two questions merge. The fact that there are no answers to these questions does not mean they should no longer be asked; on the contrary. It is the nature of all fundamental questions that they remain unanswered. On the other hand, if the question of origin and destination were separate, it would be no less difficult to find an answer. Because origin and destination are in some way intertwined, it is difficult to proceed as we usually do, first identifying the cause, then coming to the destination.
Approaching the Indeterminable
If the being of the gap is doomed to the non-definitive, the unfinished, we would say it is indeterminable. There is a “something” in the question “Why do I exist” that prevents us from being satisfied with a biological answer, but also prevents us from answering the question once and for all, because the origin and destination of the why protect each other, shadowing each other we might say. We are accustomed to the indeterminate. All the work of human reason, in the West, and particularly through the action of what we call “science,” aims to lift the indeterminate, to reduce its space more and more, so that, in the end—an end that is, it seems, getting closer and closer—there will be nothing left in this world but the determinate.
But what about the indeterminable? How can we think of what refuses to be determined, what resolutely opposes all determination? Here, we can choose to move in either of two directions: either we consider that in the indeterminable there is a principle that opposes all determination; or we consider that in every process of determination, whatever it may be, there is a limit, a lack, a frontier, which forbids determination beyond it and, consequently, establishes the territory of the indeterminable. The first line of inquiry quickly ends up locking us into a circular dilemma that can be summed up as follows: what, in the indeterminable, is indeterminable? Such a question is impossible to answer. Which leaves us with the second option, which poses the problem differently. What is it in the process of determination, in determinacy, that meets its limit, thus freeing up space for the indeterminable?
Determinacy is the seizure of a thing, a being, to express its reason for being in the world. It is not limited to the official space of “reason.” Determinacy also knows how to account for the reason for being in the world of madness, of insanity, either by referring to a medical determination of insanity, or by referring to a theological or philosophical determination of it. The Scriptures affirm that “the fool says ‘God does not exist,’” while philosophy frequently asserts that folly is cured by the wisdom that philosophy provides. There is therefore no rational limit to the exercise of the principle of reason that underlies determinacy. On the other hand, there may be a question mark over the notion of “seizure.” Does all being allow itself to be grasped in the same way that determinacy intends to grasp all beings, i.e., without leaving them any alternative other than to be grasped in order to be interrogated and have to give an account of their raison d’être?
What does it mean to be seized? It is being apprehended. What does it take to be apprehended? It requires a form. A form can, of course, be material. Such is the shape of this mountain; such is the shape of this face. But when it comes to abstractions, form is the conceptual envelope of abstraction. Form is not just the word for it. It is a certain signifier/signified articulation that conforms to reason. Form thus makes it possible to grasp the being by delimiting it, by assigning it contours that it is not free to modify, and which separate it, forever, from other beings. Being is thus identified, and must henceforth conform to its identification. In the West, this process of grasping being has been imposed for so long that it has become radically impossible to think of the world in any other way, and not only impossible but unthinkable: the thought of grasping has become natural to us; it has become our nature; whereas in other parts of the world, totally different ways of thinking about being have long prevailed, through for example mythical thought and the representation of being as both itself and anything other than itself.
The West has, a priori, won its battle against being, so that each of them submits, con-forms, to its grasp, i.e., to the constraints of its form. Yet there is one being, of a rather special kind, that refuses to conform. It is time. There are, of course, a multitude of mediocre representations of time in our world, which aim to apprehend time, to give it, at last, the proper form. Thus, we try to convince ourselves that time is just a moment, allowing ourselves to be swallowed up at every moment by a totalizing representation of the instant in which we immerse ourselves entirely. In this way, we try to believe that the instant is everything and that time is nothing, until the next instant comes along and grabs us; then we forget the previous instant and believe, once again, that the present moment is everything. In the same way, and at a slightly higher level, we submit to the cult of progress, which serves no other purpose than to reassure us by giving us the illusion that we have definitively mastered time, which can now only hold good surprises in store for us.
But every time, time dismantles our mediocre attempts. It does so by shaking us, often “when we least expect it,” as the Gospel says. This shaking results from the irruption of tragedy into our lives. Events, whether individual or collective, occur which, because of their intensity, impose the evidence of time. The mourning of a loved one, with the suffering it brings, forbids us to consider that all is for the best in the best of worlds, and that everything will get better and better. It sends us back to the future, as an unpredictable and dangerous opening that nothing can ever control. It also imposes the past as never again, a bitter and painful closure. It manifests the fragility and even futility of the present, and, in turn, the enigmatic shadow of eternity. Death, the death of the individual subject, is the climax of this irruption of the tragic; faced with death, the subject can no longer play with time or waste time. Suddenly, he or she is confronted with the evidence of the already gone, the uncertainty of the not yet, the derisory finitude of the present and the question of eternity.
We cannot apprehend time to identify it. On the contrary, it is time which, in due course, comes to apprehend us. But why does time, the only or almost the only being of all, resist us in this way? Because we cannot give it form. Time exceeds all the formalizations in which we pretend to enclose it. Over a century ago, Henri Bergson showed us how difficult it is to think about duration, that continuous flow that we betray as soon as we try to conceptualize it. For us, flow is the fact of flowing, the timeless essence of “flowing;” but there is a world between this timeless essence and the phenomenon of the continuous flow of time, as we intuitively experience it.
Duration is not the only impossible formalization of time. For time is not only flow, passage and transience. It is also the opposite of flow, passage and transience. Time is the most stable, the most immobile thing in the universe. Since the discoveries of contemporary physics, we have known about the relativity of time. But this relativity does not call into question the massive immobility of time. It may well be that, transported into certain realms of space, consciousness experiences an acceleration, a slowing down, or even, in certain borderline cases, a stopping of time. In all cases, it would be a matter of consciousness experiencing time as accelerating, slowing down or even stopping. But underneath, deep down, time moves forward, because even if we were to perceive an interruption in time, time would continue on its way. The universe without time is unthinkable. Thus, time is the fundamental characteristic of the universe, the one that never changes and never will. The universe is first and foremost time.
Because it is both movement par excellence (to take a necessarily approximate spatial analogy) and stability par excellence, while these two categories are naturally mutually exclusive, for the ordering of our reason, time is impossible to determine: it is indeterminable. Thus, to return to our inquiry, we must ask whether, in the fundamental indeterminacy of the question “Why do I exist.” this indeterminacy is not related to time, since determination encounters its limit, which, as we have seen, is time. But what is this relationship?
Against the Times
We are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the dominant Western way of thinking, usually referred to as “humanism,” which has become hegemonic in the West over the past three centuries. This dominant way of thinking is one of measurement. It is the measure of the gap I mentioned earlier, which determines metaphysical questioning, and it considers that this gap is destined to shrink until it disappears, by virtue of the progress I mentioned earlier. What is progress? It is the process by which reason determines what is. Progressively, the human subject universalizes his determination of what is. This is done in two ways: on the one hand, by extending the process of determination to all beings, including those that were thought to be best protected from seizure or apprehension: for example, everything that was previously sacred or transcendent, and which cannot escape man’s determining power; on the other hand, by intensifying the work of determination, in particular through science, so as to go ever further in the mastery and subjugation of being.
Progressivism, the dominant characteristic of humanism, is opposed to metaphysical questioning. It considers such questioning to be a component of “mystery”—a category it abhors. Consequently, metaphysics can only be a spiritual space in continuous retraction, which, on a theoretical level, is already dead, since we have now known the answer to the question “Why do I exist? The “I” is there to determine the world, and if this task does not yet appear with sufficient clarity, it is because the work of determination is still unfinished. It must be extended and deepened, particularly in the direction of the subject itself, which constitutes the last being to be fully determined, once it has determined all the other beings. Moreover, because the being “man” is not yet fully determined, it is not yet perfectly clear why he is in the world, and this is why there is still metaphysics. Soon, however, the gap will be completely closed, so that the world will be transparent: the transparency of reason’s determination of everything, and the transparency of the mission assigned to man, which, once practically completed, will finally be fully recognized on the theoretical level as the end of the subject.
This end of the subject will bring to a close the metaphysical age of the world, to use Auguste Comte’s phrase. It will be succeeded by the age of exploitation of the world. Determination is not an end in itself. It must enable, through the knowledge it offers, the most rational use of the world and of man within the world, so as to exploit the general potential of the universe, and that of each being within the universe. We often believe that the exploitation of the world, little by little, is historically receding behind us and giving way to a “humanization” of the world. This is a complete illusion. The exploitation of the world and of man is, if humanism perpetuates its domination, entirely ahead of us, and we can begin to appreciate the perspective of this “ahead of us” through the rise, in our societies, of all the processes of management; I am not just talking about financial management here, but above all about “human resources” management, consumer desire management, “natural resources” management and “data” management, all of which characterize a generalized movement to economize the world by understanding everything, and the human psyche in particular, in terms of management, i.e., economic efficiency. There is no such thing as a neutral, “disinterested” exploitation of the world. In the end, all exploitation boils down to the management of beings, i.e., to economic calculation, since this consists precisely in making the most of available resources.
All management determines power, which is also knowledge: the power/knowledge to manage. Western humanism ended with the taking of power by power, which is characteristic of our societies, where power is imposed everywhere in its impersonal form—control, regulation, stimulation, manipulation. Our societies are becoming increasingly reduced to tangled networks of signals, designed to manage human beings, to make them entirely predictable in order to generate profit and therefore power. Compared to the initial, highly disinterested ambitions of humanism, the reversal is striking. Man’s mission to determine the world is reversed, in effect, into hyper-determination of man for the benefit of power, i.e., depersonalized power, when power is no more than a mapping of networks. But—and this would merit a lengthy analysis—perhaps this reversal was itself foreseeable, because what is at issue in Western humanism, and beyond its emphatic and idealistic proclamations, is less the “liberation” or “emancipation” of the subject than the nihilism of the will to power in pursuit of complete domination of the world, the end of the end of the subject being to determine, in order to dominate.
The I as a Project: Between Anguish and Hope
The path we are pursuing is resolutely the opposite of this orientation, since in the indeterminacy of the answer to the question “Why do I exist.” we believe that there is, not the not-yet-determined, but the indeterminable: the indeterminability of time. But in what way is the subject concerned by the indeterminability of time? We are more inclined, spontaneously, to think of the “I” as an essence outside time, which has its own coherence and, as such, does not need time. But the real “I” is not this imaginary “I.” It is entirely projected into time, and this projection never ceases. At every instant of time, just as at the origin, it is projected into time and consequently subjected to the categories of temporality: the haunting of the origin, the irreversibility of the past, the unpredictability of the future, the fragility of the present, the sense of flux that renders everything derisory and, at the same time, the quest for an eternity that liberates meaning.
The I is not an essence; or if it is, it is a posteriori, when its journey through time has come to an end and it has passed into another dimension of time. Not being an essence, the I cannot be determined—any more than time can be. Perhaps we could say that all being, once embodied in time, is also projected. But there is a difference: the being other than the I has a form, even if that form is immaterial. A tree’s foliage changes with the seasons. Like all biological beings, it grows; it ages. However, there is one reality that perpetuates itself within the tree—being a tree. For the observer who contemplates it, it is not only this existent that ex-ists, that emerges from itself to become itself again, it is also this immobile form that, through its successive coverings, remains and that time does not seize. Similarly, the idea, the concept—freedom, for example—is not just something that is embodied, or not embodied, in history. It is also a form that escapes history, the contours of which we can discuss indefinitely, but which has a form.
The situation of the “I” is quite different. From the point of view of consciousness, the other beings are not only temporal realities, but also dwellings outside time, and it is precisely this quality of dwelling that makes it possible to discuss the nature, for each being, of its dwelling and the link that unites this dwelling to the other dwellings. But while the human body, like other beings, has its abode, the I is unrepresentable outside the experience of time, because it is entirely immersed in time. As such, it is in-form like time. It is only from time that time can be felt; it is only from time that the “I” can be felt. In a certain sense, it can be said that “time” and “I” are the poorest of beings, because they are without abode. Those without a dwelling are wandering.
In common reasoning, it’s better to have a home than to be wandering. There is no need here to decide which of these two states is preferable. All we can say is that the state of wandering prohibits being brought to, and ultimately reduced to, a dwelling. The wanderer thus retains the essential openness characteristic of freedom, and this openness enables him to have a project. Indeed, the “I” not only has a project, it is a project. The “I” immersed in time is nothing other than a project that, at every moment, updates itself as a project. Far from being a determinant, self-assured essence, it constantly projects itself in search of the abode it does not (yet) have. For, if time has its abode, which is inaccessible to mortals, the “I” is, for its part, in search of this abode, which it does not know, but which it hopes for.
The I’s project is to be saved. The “I” is not a reality that has already found itself, that knows it has an immense dwelling, and whose job is to clear out more and more of the space around that dwelling. The “I” is simply rich in its hope of salvation, which nothing supports or guarantees. But what does it mean to be saved? From a philosophical (not theological) point of view, salvation is that which forever frees us from danger. What danger is that? The danger of losing oneself. The “I” immersed in time is looking for a home. It would like to complete its wandering in time, but by giving meaning to its wandering. That is why it is plagued by the fear of wandering aimlessly and losing the purpose of its project forever. This fear is the fundamental anguish of the “I.” When it is sincere, i.e., when it does not invent a representation of itself outside time, the “I” is plagued by the anguish of losing itself in time, the anguish of being nothing but a useless and derisory project, the anguish of holding on to nothing and being held by nothing.
Loss is not anguish. Loss is the resignation of holding on to nothing and being held by nothing, so that the subject no longer expects or hopes for anything from his presence in the world through time. The answer to the question “Why do I exist” for nothing. Nothing is its temporal destination. But what is nothing from the point of view of time? It is habituation, the repetition that nothing surprises. Accustomed to perceiving the origin as a mistake and denigrating it; accustomed to perceiving the past as a burden; accustomed to perceiving the future as useless; accustomed to perceiving the passage of time; finally, accustomed to rejecting eternity and fearing it because it resembles eternal addiction.
Addiction breeds boredom. The “I” that has decided that it is in the world for nothing, for the nothing, sinks into boredom, so that it maintains an ever-deeper detestation of the whole of being and of that which makes it possible for there to be being, the coming into the world. The “I” would like the world never to have come and for nothing ever to have come into the world, thus fueling its nihilism. Nihilism is the will for nothing to win the day and overcome the universe, so that the universe is nothing but the reign of nothing. Conscious of being nothing, the “I” continually conspires to make its nothingness the general state of the universe; and this conspiracy constitutes the ultimate act of will of which it is still capable. But this will is itself occupied by nothingness—it can only sneer, degrade, destroy through dullness and corruption. It is incapable of any positive action, although it tries to convince itself that its negativism is a sign of energy. How does the reign of nothing manifest itself? By the conviction that everything is equal and, in fact, worthless, and by working to ensure that this is the case, crushing without hesitation anything that claims to stand out, particularly in terms of origin and past. Nihilism can be characterized by great drama or, on the contrary, by an infinite multitude of insidious pettiness. In all cases, the same demand for indistinction in the indifference of insignificance is expressed.
For the “I,” the test of anguish constitutes a major risk of losing oneself. But this ordeal is inescapable. The “I” does not have the freedom to free itself from it, because it is inherent to its condition as a project in time. The “I” must confront anguish, which encircles it in many ways—through the panic of time’s flight, as much as through the feeling of being in excess, of bringing nothing to the world, or of bringing nothing out from it. Anguish is the mark of the “I.” To experience the “I” is first and foremost to feel the anguish that results from passing through time and the possibility of losing oneself in time.
But alongside the anguish resulting from the danger of being lost, the “I” also experiences the hope of salvation. It does not know the essence of this salvation, but it hopes for it. What is this hope? The hope of eternal deliverance from the danger of loss. This presupposes that salvation, however unknown it may be, lies beyond the present projecting condition in time. For only an exit from this condition of temporal project can eternally free man from the danger of this world. This is why all “rationalized,” “determinable” forms of salvation, such as salvation through the consumption of goods or, at a higher level, salvation through the human end of human history, through classless society, are only substitutes, ersatz salvation. Salvation, in fact, is always beyond.
Space to be Created
The anguish of loss and the hope of salvation define a space. This space is that of the “I” when the “I” is true to itself, and no one other than the “I” can occupy it. This is why a first answer to the question “Who am I?” is: I am here to inhabit this space. “Inhabiting” is obviously not a neutral term, and we shall now meditate on this notion. To “inhabit” does not mean to be satisfied with being there, to be a there, oscillating between fear of loss and hope of salvation, indefinitely bounced about from one to the other. To “inhabit” means to “arrange space” so that it is truly one’s own; in other words, to give space a meaning starting from oneself.
To “inhabit” does not mean, for example, to abolish the fear of loss, because loss is anguishing and anguish is painful. Nor does it mean moving from the hope of salvation to salvation itself, because what we hold is more certain than what we hope for. Similarly, “inhabiting” does not consist in dividing space between “down here,” which would be the exclusive domain of the anguish of loss, and “up there,” which would be the exclusive domain of the hope of salvation. The space of the “I” is not made up of “earth” on one side, and “heaven” on the other, so that the “I’s” project in time would be limited to tilting from earth to heaven. In this space, in fact, “heaven” is already on earth through the hope of salvation, and earth is also “in” heaven, for the hope of salvation cannot be conceived without the risk of loss. We hope for what we are not sure of, and it is because the “I” is anxiously aware of the fear of losing itself that it situates itself in hope rather than certainty.
To think of the dwelling of the “I” as a confrontation between “earth” and “sky” is to condemn oneself to perceive the dwelling of the “I” as a tear. Tearing causes suffering, and suffering, little by little, prompts us to imagine the space of the “I” as a choice between two dwellings—either the sky, and only the sky, or the earth, and only the earth. But anyone who enters into this choice and chooses heaven or earth is no longer inhabiting the space of the “I.” It has made fragmentation, separation, his space, and now perceives it only as the limit of what it is not, as a closure.
To “inhabit”, on the other hand, is to experience loss and salvation, the here below and the hereafter, “earth” and “heaven,” but to experience them as a permanent interpenetration. It is this interpenetration that is the abode of the “I.” It is the abode of the “I” because it is accessible only through the most authentic awareness of time, which is both the perpetual passage of everything and the presence of eternity. This is where we find the fundamental indeterminacy of the status of the “I” mentioned earlier, and which means that the origin is in the destination and the destination in the origin. For time, felt in all its metaphysical depth, is both origin and destination. Origin as passage; destination as eternity. Or—origin as eternity; destination as passage.
To “inhabit” is to arrange space; it is therefore to live within the dwelling. “Living” implies experiencing the anguish of loss in order not to lose oneself, and it also implies experiencing the hope of salvation in order to save oneself. The two movements are in fact identical—not to lose oneself is to save oneself; to save oneself is not to lose oneself. We can therefore limit our reflection to salvation. What is salvation? How do we save ourselves? Since it is somewhere beyond, we do not know what salvation is. On the other hand, we do know what the hope of salvation is. It is, first and foremost, the humility of realizing that what we hope for is lacking. It is humility that makes us realize that we are still in a time of struggle against the danger of loss. It is also the humility of realizing that our hope does not obey us, that it has a life of its own that we cannot constrain. Finally, hope is, of course, expectation—expectation of what is to be, of which we have no certainty. It is the expectation of great joy. But what joy is truly great if we do not keep it coldly and selfishly to ourselves, if we do not communicate it to those we love?
Perhaps then we realize that salvation is already in the hope of salvation. Of course, this is not a vague, uncertain, veiled hope. Hope must be lived in all its depth for salvation to be already in hope. If this is the case, we find in it the virtues that give the dwelling place of the “I” all its nobility—humility, i.e., awareness of the risk of loss; but this awareness does not despair. It is even necessary if the “I” is to wait for what is not, what will never be, certainty. And this humble yet unshakeable expectation is itself the condition for being joyful, and for taking with it not only the “I,” not only the loved ones, but the totality of created beings.
No Longer to be Oneself, In Order to Be
But what is the path that leads us to true hope? Because one cannot break into hope. It requires constant work, which is work and, at the same time, the opposite of work. It is work because it requires a rigorous and sustained effort, a discipline, and because it is not aimless. Its aim is to lead us to hope. But it is also the opposite of work, because work in principle aims to increase our personal capital, even if only in the form of self-gratification: We have accomplished this task; it may not have been very complicated, but we have accomplished it; we have enriched ourselves, at least by proving to ourselves that we were capable of accomplishing this task.
The work we are talking about here, on the other hand, is a work of unburdening the “I,” of essential impoverishment. It consists in no longer being oneself. As we have seen, the “I” experiences the fear and temptation of being nothing, of losing itself in nothing. But even when it resists this temptation and inhabits the space between the fear of loss and the hope of salvation, it can forget the limits that delimit this space and thus define it. The “I” can forget that it is a project in time and consider that it is a project without time; that time is an external phenomenon that does not call into question the status of the “I,” its internal coherence.
As soon as it forgets time, the “I” becomes a self. The self is a representation of the “I” operated from time, so that the “I” thinks of itself as an “I” outside time. As such, the “I” believes it can be satisfied with being itself. It is what it is; and what it is, belongs to it alone. The “I” has made itself form, and this form is called the “self.” By making itself a form, the “I” now resembles other beings. Like other beings, in particular, it can become an object of study and determination. But, unlike other beings, it is its own object of study. This study of the self, occupies the “I,” and it occupies the “I” all the more since, in the case of the “I,” form is no more than a projection. The self is a purely imaginary, fictional construction of the “I,” since this consists in representing the “I” outside time, whereas the “I” is only time. Because it is a fictional construction, the self is a form without limits, a formless form. This means that we can give it any form we like, but also that the given form is never the definitive one; we can build another, and another.
Thus, the search for the self is akin to sinking. This sinking is also a flight. From what? Escape from the anguish of loss and the hope of salvation. By doing so, the “I,” busy tracking down the self, abandons its space, the space of the “I.” By abandoning its space, it renounces the hope of salvation. In abandoning its space, it renounces metaphysics; but in renouncing metaphysics, it renounces the question “Why do I exist” and substitutes the psychological, not metaphysical question “Who am I?” Now, there is an abyss between psychology and metaphysics. Metaphysics opens onto the dwelling place of man, which psychology does not know.
The “I,” occupied by the self, consequently forgets its home. Neither the anguish of loss nor the hope of salvation has any hold on it: because it believes it has already found itself, and because it believes it is self-sufficient. It is only by taking the opposite route, i.e., through a continuous impoverishment that consists in systematically refusing all the proposals to be oneself that are made to it, only by consenting to be pure projection in time, that the “I” finds the walls of its dwelling, and thus perceives it once again as a dwelling. Where does this continual impoverishment come from? From a constant expenditure of the self that the world proposes and imposes on us at every moment as a status. From the world’s point of view, this expenditure is a waste, an unnecessary expense. From a philosophical point of view, it is a sacrifice. The figure of sacrifice is the destiny of the “I,” which has no choice if it wants to remain.
What is sacrifice? It is a radical, voluntary expenditure, motivated by no personal interest whatsoever. Sacrifice is a gift. The nature and object of the gift may differ radically, but there is no sacrifice if there is no voluntary, disinterested gift. From the point of view of the dominant Western anthropology, the figure of sacrifice is the very type of unthinking, and therefore behavior to be proscribed because it is radically opposed to what is wise, reasonable and desirable for man. The dominant anthropology is, in fact, entirely, and increasingly, on the side of accumulation. Accumulating goods, “experiences,” “pleasures” and “knowledge” through our “network” is the goal we are constantly urged to pursue. Why such perseverance in the incentive to accumulate? Because, in our representation of the world, to accumulate is to be, so that to accumulate more is to be more.
Accumulation is not simply a matter of material goods. Perhaps it is not even primarily about material goods. What counts, in fact, is not the materiality of possession; it is possession itself. The more we possess (and to have possessed is still to possess—memories, a positive self-image, and so on), the more we are aware of being, of weighing on the world. And, in fact, ontology is, for us, a question of weight. Some people weigh more than others on the world stage; they therefore exist more; they are more.
But why link the question of being to that of accumulation, of the relative weight of beings? This inclination is obviously not due to chance. It results from the privileged position we attribute to the process of determining what is. As I said earlier, determining more and more is the direction relentlessly pursued by Western “progressivism.” Determining being itself is obviously part of this program; it even constitutes its acme, since being is supposed, rightly or wrongly, to constitute the epicenter of thought. But the goal of determining being is not neutral. In the first place, it presupposes that being, like any other being, is determinable. But if being shares determinacy with all other beings, how does it differ from other beings? How can what is similar, be superior? There is only one possible orientation for distinguishing what is equivalent—this orientation is quantitative. Only the notion of quantity makes it possible to differentiate between what is essentially identical. Let us take the example of mathematical numbers—numbers are numbers, and as such, there is nothing substantially different between two numbers. They are both singular variations of a common principle: mathematical magnitude. But numbers can be distinguished by the amount of mathematical magnitude each carries with it. “1” and “1,000,000” are basically the same reality, but at the same time, they are two very distinct arithmetical realities.
To think of being as determinable is to condemn ourselves, sooner or later, to thinking of being in terms of quantity, as that which weighs most. In the absence of any substantial difference, quantity is the only means of distinguishing through classification, but also of orienting classification—what is heaviest, what represents the highest figure, etc., is superior. Hence the link between ontology and the question of weight, the consequence of which is to reduce the world to mere relative differences. Being is being because it is more than other beings, not because it is. But of what is it more? This question is the focus of all thought, especially moral thought, in our world. Some people—still in the minority, to be honest, but growing in number—claim that we are more when we have more material wealth. Others say that you are more when you have experienced more pleasures than the average man. Still others claim that to be more is to know more, to be more knowledgeable than other men. Whatever the variety of answers offered, it is always a question of quantity—to be is to be more.
The figure of sacrifice breaks with this ontology of quantity. It does not tell us that to be is to be less, for that would be to situate ourselves in the same ontology, simply by inverting the signs, by valuing the “less” where previously we valued the “more.” Sacrifice takes us into another dimension of thought, where being is no longer a question of weight, and even less of relative weight. Sacrifice, through the radical impoverishment it induces, introduces us to a universe where the question of quantity no longer has any meaning, because it no longer matters. He who has stripped himself of all self-representation, he who permanently strips himself of all self-representation, no longer has any concern for accumulation. He is elsewhere.
But what is this elsewhere where he is? And how can we think of being without going through determination? What is the “I” if it is not the self? We said earlier that the “I” occupied by the self, forgets its home. But how can an “I” without identity have a home? Perhaps because it has no home. And if it has no abode, then it is an abode. But how can that which is not even itself be a dwelling? Perhaps because we think of “abode” in the wrong way. We spontaneously think of abode as possession, as an external attribute that manifests our status. But the abode of the I is not a possession. It is the I when the I is no longer the self.
Welcoming Life
Home is welcome. The “I” is home when it is nothing but welcome, when it disappears behind welcome. Welcome to what? Welcome to the life that comes. At every moment in time, and eternally, life comes into the world through time. How does it come into the world? It comes as a gift, an unconditional gift that, at every moment, renews its gift. Being is gift, and that is why dwelling, truly inhabiting the world, is nothing other than welcoming the world as a given gift. But this “nothing else” is perhaps the most difficult thing to conceive and to want. Other beings receive life as a gift, and as they receive life, they participate in it; life lives through them. Man, on the other hand, opposes the gift with the closure of determination. Determination is closure because it opposes the gift, and gratitude for the gift, with the evidence of the positing of things that have no other function than to be appropriated by man, so that he reassures himself by reasserting his status as the great appropriator.
It is extremely difficult to free oneself from this status, because without it, man experiences the sensation of being nothing. And indeed, he is nothing. But this nothingness is the necessary condition for man to be—in other words, to be receptive to the gift and, by being receptive to the gift, to be dwelling, to be the dwelling that man must be, and that he alone can be among all beings. What is this abode? It is recognition. Man alone has the ability to be grateful for the gift of life, at every moment. In this way, man inhabits his home, for he lives in it. And by living in his dwelling, he can hope for salvation, which is not a change of dwelling, but a passage from gratitude lived out at every moment of earthly existence to gratitude lived out eternally for the gift of life. To live, in fact, is to give thanks for the gift of life. And if we ask ourselves the question we began with: “Why do I exist,” then we understand that the answer to this question is simple, terribly, implacably simple: I exist to live—that is, to recognize and be grateful for life.
This answer is such that every time we think we have grasped it, it retreats, leaving us with the question to ask again and again—because we do not order life to be there and nowhere else. To welcome it, we need a certain current of inner energy, what the moralists of the seventeenth century called the generosity of the soul, a mixture of tenderness and happy passion, which gives us the courage to strip ourselves bare in order to recognize life and be grateful to it. But this inner energy can never be taken for granted. It is therefore up to high civilizations to foster and encourage such generosity, which—needless to say—is the very opposite of our world’s temperament, and in particular its sad passion for accumulation.
Featured: Interior with the Artist’s Wife at the Window, by Carl Holsøe, ca. late 19th century.
