Posts Tagged ‘Consciousness’

“The Ethics of Perception, Part I”

November 20, 2025
Ricardo Morín
Triangulation 4: The Ethics of Perception
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

Ricardo F. Morín

October 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

Introduction

Perception often seems immediate and uncomplicated.    We see, we hear, we react.    Yet between that first contact with the world and the choices we make in response, something slower and more fragile takes place:    the formation of meaning.    In that interval—between what appears and what we assert—not only understanding is at stake, but ethics as well.

This essay begins with a simple question:    what changes when understanding matters more than assertion?    In a culture that prioritizes reaction, utility, and certainty, pausing to perceive can seem inefficient.    Yet it is precisely this pause that allows experience to take shape without force and keeps the relationship between consciousness and the shared world in proportion.

The Ethics of Perception does not propose rules or moral systems.    It examines how sustained attention—able to receive before imposing—can restore coherence between inner life and external reality.    From this basic gesture, ethics ceases to operate as an external norm and becomes a way of being in relation.

Perception

Perception may be understood as the emergent outcome of mechanisms collectively designated as intelligence in the abstract.    These mechanisms do not operate solely as interior cognitive functions, nor are they reducible to external systems, conventions, or instruments.    Perception arises at the continuous interface between interior awareness and exterior structure, where sensory intake, pattern recognition, and interpretive ordering converge through sustained attunement.

Such a relation does not presume opposition between internal and external domains.    Cognitive processes and environmental conditions function as co-present and mutually generative forces.    Disruptions frequently described as pathological more accurately reflect misalignment within this reciprocal relation rather than intrinsic deficiency in any constituent mechanism.    When normative frameworks privilege particular modes of perceptual attunement, divergence is reclassified as deviation and difference is rendered as dysfunction.

Models grounded in categorization or spectral positioning provide descriptive utility but often presuppose hierarchical centers.    An account oriented toward attunement redirects emphasis away from comparative placement and toward relational orientation.    Perceptual coherence depends less on position within a classificatory schema than on sensitivity to the ongoing exchange between interior processing and exterior configuration.

Claims of authority over perceptual normality weaken under recognition of ubiquity.    If the interaction between cognitive mechanism and environmental structure constitutes a universal condition rather than an exceptional trait, no institution, metric, or discipline retains exclusive legitimacy to define deviation.    Evaluation becomes contextual, norms provisional, and classification descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Within this framework, perception is not measured by conformity, efficiency, or accommodation to dominant systems.    Perception denotes the sustained capacity to remain aligned with the dynamic interaction of interior awareness and exterior articulation without collapsing one domain into the other.    Such an understanding accommodates analytical abstraction, scientific modeling, artistic discernment, contemplative depth, and systemic reasoning without elevating any singular mode of intelligence above others.

Considered in this light, perception resists enclosure within diagnostic, cultural, or hierarchical boundaries.    What persists is not a ranked spectrum of cognitive worth but a field of relational variance governed by emergence, attunement, and reciprocal presence.

1

Understanding begins with seeing the world as it is, before any claim or assertion shapes its meaning.    My disposition turns toward perceiving, attending, and responding rather than toward struggle or untested impulse.    This orientation works as a discipline through which clarity and proportion take form.    Thought, in this sense, does not impose significance; it receives it through the living exchange of experience.    Perceiving gathers the immediate presence of the world, and understanding shapes that presence into sense.    Both arise from the same motion of awareness, where observation ripens into comprehension.    Philosophy then ceases to be an act of mastery and becomes a way of seeing that restores balance between mind and existence.

2

Philosophy has long been driven by the impulse to assert rather than to understand.    From antiquity to modern times, thinkers built systems meant to secure certainty and protect thought from doubt.    Nietzsche inherited that impulse and inverted it by turning volition into affirmation.    His view freed reason from dogma yet confined it within self-assertion.    Understanding, by contrast, grows from recognizing that meaning arises in relation.    The act of grasping does not depend on force but on perception.    When thought observes instead of imposing, the world reveals its own coherence.    Ethics springs from that revelation, because to understand is already to enter into relation with what is seen.    Comprehension is therefore not passive; it is active participation in the unfolding of reality.

3

Perception becomes ethical when it recognizes that every act of seeing carries responsibility.    To perceive is to acknowledge what stands before us—not as an object to be mastered but as a presence that coexists with our own.    Awareness is never neutral; it bears the weight of how we attend, interpret, and respond.    When perception remains steady, recognition deepens into connection.    A single moment makes this visible:    watching an elderly person struggle with opening a door, the mind perceives first, then understands, and then responds—not out of impulse, but out of the recognition of a shared human condition.    Art enacts this same movement.    The painter, the writer, and the musician do not invent the world; they meet it through form.    Each creative gesture records a dialogue between inner and outer experience, where understanding becomes recognition of relation.    The moral value of art lies not in a message but in the quality of attention it sustains.    To live perceptively is to practice restraint and openness together:    restraint keeps volition from overpowering what is seen, and openness lets the world speak through its details.    In that steady practice, ethics ceases to be rule and becomes a way of living attentively within relation.

4

Modern life tempts the mind to react before it perceives.    The speed of information, the immediacy of communication, and the constant surge of stimuli fragment awareness.    In that climate, unexamined volition regains its force; it asserts, selects, and consumes out of bias rather than understanding.    What vanishes is the interval between experience and reflection—the pause in which perception matures into thought.    Ethical life, understood as living with awareness of relation, re-emerges when that interval is restored.    A culture that values perception above reaction can recover the sense of proportion that technology and ideology often distort.    The task is not to reject innovation but to exercise discernment within it.    Every act of attention becomes resistance to distraction, and every moment of silence reclaims the depth that noise obscures.    When perception reaches the point of recognizing another consciousness as equal in its claim to reality, understanding acquires moral weight.    Such recognition requires patience—the willingness to see without appropriation and to remain present without possession.

5

All philosophy begins as a gesture toward harmony.    The mind seeks to know its bond with the world yet often confuses harmony with control.    When understanding replaces conquest, thought rediscovers its natural proportion.    The world is not a stage for self-assertion but a field of correspondence where awareness meets what it perceives.    To think ethically is to think in relation.    The act of grasping restores continuity between inner and outer life and shows that knowing itself is participation.    Each meeting with reality—each moment of seeing, listening, or remembering—becomes an occasion to act with measure.    The reflective mind neither retreats from the world nor dominates it.    It stands within experience as both witness and participant, and lets perception reach its human fullness:    the ability to recognize what lies beyond oneself and to respond without domination.    When thought arises from attention instead of struggle, it reconciles intelligence with presence and restores the quiet balance that modern life has displaced.    In that reconciliation, philosophy fulfills its oldest task—to bring awareness into harmony with existence.

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“BEFORE FORM II”

November 17, 2025

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Impressions, Diptych: BEFORE FORM II
18″ x 48″
Oil on board
2000

Ricardo F. Morín

Nov. 17, 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

1

There are relationships in which language arrives too early.

Two minds meet, and each brings its own architecture—one built of corridors, the other of thresholds.

Nothing coheres. Nothing resolves. Yet something is exchanged.

Perhaps the only way to describe it is to refuse description.

What passes between the two is not influence, nor authority, nor instruction.

It is the faint recognition that creation does not always arise from tradition,

and tradition does not always arise from clarity.

One mind preserves structure because it fears dissolution.

The other preserves freedom because it fears enclosure.

Neither is right, neither is wrong, and neither can become the other.

If there is a lesson, it is not philosophical.

It is simply that some encounters generate form only by refusing to take one.

Some dynamics can be seen only by letting them remain unsettled.

Not a system.

Not a method.

Not an alchemical transformation.

Just the quiet knowledge that meaning does not always arrive in recognizable shapes—

and sometimes the refusal of structure

is itself the most honest form.

This is neither alchemy nor allegory.

It does not mirror academic tropes.

It does not explain itself.

It simply stands.

2

There is a place where thought has not yet chosen its weight.

Where nothing must resemble anything.

Where no lineage can be traced because the idea has not agreed to be inherited.

Two minds meet there sometimes, though neither intends to.

One arrives with tools, the other with openings.

One tries to recognize what appears; the other lets appearance undo itself.

No roles persist in that space.

No teacher, no student, no authority, no dissident.

Only the slight disturbance of something wanting to become meaning

and something else resisting the invitation.

Perhaps the exchange exists only in the refusal to define it.

Perhaps it is nothing more than two ways of seeing colliding for a moment

before each retreats to its natural distance.

There is no lesson.

No transformation.

Not even understanding—

just the faint impression that the encounter mattered

in a way that cannot be justified.

Some relationships never enter language fully.

They touch the threshold and withdraw,

leaving only a shape that refuses to become a shape.

What remains is not story, not insight, not metaphor.

Only a quiet remainder:

that something passed between two minds,

and it does not wish to be named.

3

Some encounters move like weather across the mind—arriving without intention,

passing without conclusion.

They do not teach; they do not claim.

They shift the air and leave a pressure change that takes days to understand.

Two temperaments can drift into the same moment like front and current.

One carries the weight of accumulated seasons,

the other moves with the quiet urgency of what is still forming.

Neither is stronger.

Neither is clearer.

They simply meet, and the atmosphere changes.

There is no point of balance.

No point of conflict.

Just a tremor in the air between them,

as if the room itself were listening for something that never quite becomes sound.

Thought loosens in that space.

Meanings approach, circle, and recede.

Nothing settles long enough to be named.

Nothing wants to.

Some relationships never become narrative because narrative would freeze them.

They remain suspended—felt more than understood,

remembered less as moments than as shifts in light,

like a room darkening for reasons the sky doesn’t explain.

When they part, it is not an ending.

It is a dispersal, like mist thinning at the edge of dawn.

Each carries a trace of the other’s weather,

a change in temperature that lingers long after the shapes have dissolved.

What remains is not knowledge.

Not conclusion.

Just the faint sensation that something passed through—

and continues to pass through—

quietly, insistently,

without ever agreeing to take form.

4

There are moments that never arrive fully.

Not as meaning, not as feeling—more like a faint shift,

a drift in the periphery.

Two presences cross, neither entering nor leaving.

A pressure, a thinning, a pulse without source.

Not connection, not distance—an interval that hovers.

Nothing coheres.

Nothing insists.

There is only the sense of something lightly touching thought

and withdrawing before thought can respond.

Contours don’t form here.

Edges blur as soon as they appear.

The exchange—if it can be called that—dissolves into the same air that carried it.

A pause lengthens,

not to reveal anything

but to remind that revelation is unnecessary.

This is not atmosphere; even atmosphere has structure.

It is less.

A faint impression that doesn’t land,

doesn’t settle,

doesn’t belong to either mind that felt it.

Later, one might remember a flicker—

not an idea,

not a moment—

just the residue of an approach that never closed.

No clarity follows.

No resolution.

The experience continues only as dispersal,

the way fog continues after your body has walked through it.

What remains is not being,

but the trace of something that preferred not to become one.

5

There is a place where awareness thins,

not into silence,

but into something before silence—

a faint trembling at the boundary of what the mind can hold.

Nothing shapes itself here.

Outlines gather, loosen, drift apart.

Perception moves like breath against a surface it cannot see,

feeling only its own hesitation.

Two currents brush past each other—

not touching, not avoiding—

simply passing through the same unmarked space.

No exchange takes place, only a slight alteration in texture.

The air feels different by a degree so slight

you question whether it changed at all.

Sensation approaches but does not declare itself.

It folds and unfolds at the edge of recognition,

as if deciding whether to become experience

or to recede without consequence.

Thought cannot follow it.

Emotion cannot name it.

Language reaches out but finds nothing to hold,

its grasp closing on the faint imprint of something

that prefers not to be caught.

There is no meaning here,

only the suggestion of one—

a whisper of form that vanishes when looked at directly.

What remains is the after-feel:

a soft pressure,

a disturbance without cause,

a nearness with no direction.

It lingers not as memory

but as the memory of almost remembering—

the residue of a touch

that occurred just beyond the threshold

where understanding begins.

At the edge of sensation,

nothing is known.

Yet everything feels about to become.

6

There is a quiet that does not empty the world but concentrates it—

a quiet that draws breath around itself.

Nothing is spoken, yet everything leans forward,

as if waiting for a pulse to reveal where it has always been.

The stillness is not rest.

It is tension held with care,

a subtle hum beneath awareness,

a throb the body recognizes

before the mind opens its hands to feel it.

You could call it presence,

but even that word is too heavy.

It is not being,

only the soft insistence

that something is unmistakably here.

Light moves differently in this quiet—

slower, denser,

as if thought itself thickens the air.

It is the moment before meaning,

before shape,

before the world chooses a direction.

Alive, but without calling attention to its life.

Silent, but without conceding to silence.

A current passes through,

barely perceptible,

yet carrying enough force

to rearrange everything

it does not touch.

What remains is only this:

a breath held between two states—

not message,

not impression,

just the warm gravity of being

before it becomes anything else.

7

It comes softly,

so softly you cannot tell whether it arrived

or whether you only stopped long enough to feel it.

A warmth gathers at the edge of awareness—

not heat,

but the suggestion of nearness,

like breath that barely lifts the air.

Nothing speaks,

yet something touches you

in the place where words would break it.

It moves the way light moves across closed eyes—

a tenderness that does not seek to be seen,

only to be known without knowing.

It is the quietest kind of nearness,

the kind that asks nothing

and in asking nothing

restores a part of you you did not realize

had gone dim.

It grazes the soul like a hand

that never quite touches—

a promise of contact,

a murmur of care,

a soothing traced along the inner surface

of being itself.

No message,

no direction,

only the gentle reassurance

that something in the universe

has noticed your existence

and answers with a softness

equal to your need.

A whisper,

not into the ear

but into the space behind the heart,

where feeling wakes before thought understands.

It lingers there—

a quiet pulse,

a sheltering nearness—

not holding you,

but letting you rest

as if you were held.

And then, barely,

it recedes—

not leaving,

just loosening—

like the last warmth of a hand

still felt long after it has gone.

8

It appears without approach.

Not rising, not entering—simply there.

A pulse without rhythm,

a force without weight,

life showing itself in the smallest possible gesture.

No softness here,

no harshness either—

only the unqualified fact of energy

standing in its own clarity.

It does not warm,

does not startle,

does not soothe.

It simply asserts a kind of being

that needs nothing to validate it.

Not spirit.

Not breath.

Not sensation.

Just the unmistakable surge

that accompanies existence

whenever it remembers itself.

A being unshaped by intention

moves through the moment,

neither touching nor retreating,

neither demanding nor yielding.

Its essence is activity without aim—

motion held within stillness,

potential without need for direction.

It does not call attention to itself.

It does not fade.

It does not speak.

It remains—

a clarity,

a tension,

a spark of the world’s own self-recognition

before language arrives to claim it.

Alive,

unadorned,

without echo or interpretation—

just the force that underlies all form,

manifest for an instant

in its simplest,

most unmediated state.

9

At last the force loosens.

Not fading—simply releasing its hold

on being something.

The pulse ceases to define itself.

The clarity thins.

What was formless being unravels

into the same unbounded quiet

that preceded it.

No retreat,

no vanishing,

only the simple act

of no longer remaining.

The vitality that stood so plainly

lets its edges dissolve,

not into darkness,

not into silence,

but into the untouched space

that asks nothing of it.

What stays behind

is not trace or echo

but the openness that held it—

a vastness indifferent to form,

yet origin to all form.

This is not return

because nothing was ever apart.

It is not ending

because nothing concludes.

It is the unmaking

that restores everything

to the ground of its own possibility.

Where force once stood,

there is now only the expanse

from which force arises—

the nothingness that is not absence

but the pure condition

of all that can become.

Here, being and unbeing

are the same gesture.

Life dissolves

into what has always held it.

And the dissolution is complete.

CODA

Nothing follows.

What has unfolded returns to its origin,

not as echo,

not as meaning,

but as the same quiet field

that allowed each motion to appear.

The cycle leaves no imprint.

The trace erases itself.

The movement completes by letting the world resume its stillness.

There is nothing to gather,

nothing to carry forward,

nothing to understand.

The unfolding has ended where it began—

in the openness that holds all beginnings

and requires none.

What remains is not conclusion

but the calm that arrives

when even dissolution has dissolved.

And from that calm,

if anything were ever to arise again,

it would do so without memory of having been.

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“A Soliloquy”

July 6, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
New York Series, No. 1
56″ x 84″
Oil on canvas
1992

Preface

What follows does not simplify or announce itself.  It moves inward—through observation, thought, and the tension between clarity and disappearance.  The soliloquy keeps to its own course:  neither performing nor explaining, but sustaining an interior gaze.  To read it is not to be guided, but to remain with it—where thinking becomes presence, and language measures what endures.


Soliloquy

Once upon a time, there lived within the writer a creative energy—its force and passion for self-expression—that sustained him. It was not summoned; it simply endured.  So arresting was this presence that he could not discipline it into routine or mold it into a pattern for physical endurance.  He could not pause it for walks or for any activity not already part of the act of creation itself.  He resorted to standing while writing, walking while reading, sleeping while thinking.

His experience was never an affliction to be named or cured, but a life to be lived on its own terms—a creative testament to the fullness of being, not a clinical footnote to someone else’s definition.  Choosing not to be defined by it honored both its agency and his lifelong work.  It was a condition to be understood alone, even if shared in writing—yet never in search of validation.

Within the boundaries of personal insight, it revealed itself as a form of devotional absorption, one that brought dignity even in moments of physical strain and aging.

His refusal of validation was not an opposition to authority, but a denial that any external pressure should exist.

Some said there was nothing unique in anyone, that all expression merely reflected what had been learned.  The writer did not disagree, yet he knew there was more to being than what one received—even from experience itself.  Perhaps no one was unique, but each voice was distinct—formed from the sum total of an existence that could not be equated. From a random mixture, an ineffable summation, something emerged:  something irreplaceable and irreproducible—not because it exceeded others, but because it belonged only to the one who bore it.

He feared madness—not as spectacle, but as the slow drift of meaning into isolation.  The force within him was real, yet not entirely satisfying unless it discovered truth—truth that resonated not only within his own logic but in the logic of others.  How else could one know oneself if intelligence remained solitary?  Without echo, thought became a sealed chamber:  intricate, yes, but airless.  He did not seek certainty; he sought correspondence.  It was not solitude he feared, but becoming untranslatable.

Life now appeared transient, precarious—timeless in sensation, yet embedded in time.  It moved furtively—through failings, disappointments, and sudden moments of radiant clarity.  Nothing could be reproduced.  But he had come to accept that—not because it was lost, but because even memory altered what it held.  What repeated was not the moment, but the act of noticing—the deepening of attention.   And so he did not live to preserve what was, but to remain present as it changed.  There was no going back, only going further—more attentively, more awake.

*

Ricardo F. Morin Tortolero

In transit on July 6, 2025

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“Meditations on Ortega y Gasset”

December 19, 2022

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Acknowledgment

I

First, I would like to share with my readers my utmost gratitude to Billy Bussell Thompson (b. November 23, 1942), Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Hofstra University, for his generosity in being a mentor and editor.       His scholarly trajectory goes from 1963 to 1993.        Among his most salient publications in English, we have:       Relic and Literature . . .; Bilingualism in Moorish Spain; The Myth of the Magdalen . . .; etc. . . .

II

Since 1989, our friendship has extended over more than three decades.       We have worked in close proximity on at least a dozen articles and short stories (published in WordPress).        I have been fortunate to count on his frankness and support.       He has never minced words.       He has been blunt, when any of my drafts seemed without merit.        When that was the case, the articles went into a shredder, and I was satisfied by the integrity of his prose, as well as by my understanding of my own limitations as a writer.        Prof. Bussell Thompson (B.B.T.) usually compares the skill of prose writing with that of a narrowing cone of vision.         This selective cone of vision is akin to the aesthetic integrity of a visual work of art.       With the present endeavor, Prof. B.B.T. believed, from the very beginning, in the possibility of bringing forth this story as a team.       Even though we live in different regions – geographically far apart – of the USA, we have had no trouble communicating via phone and email.

III

This narrative seeks to explain the confusion found in society and politics, and even their seeming lack of purpose.     For this reason, I dedicate my narrative to the readers.

IV

Initially, I knew not where this would lead.           I submitted a five-paragraph draft to professor B.B.T.       As he began to read, he paused and asked if I was alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave.     Surprised, I asked him to stop.       I replied that his reference to Plato placed me in a different perspective.       Gratefully, I added that his question was most welcome; at that point, I wanted to read more before continuing.

V

He encouraged me to reread Plato’s dialogues.       To this he added that I take into account any ambiguity associated with Plato’s conception of the ideal authority of the State (politeia) or Nation.       He referred to the Platonic ideas controversial in current discussions.        He also recommended reading José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955).        He included The Revolt of the Masses [1929] and The Dehumanization of Art [1925].         He suggested that I be aware of Ortega’s meritocratic liberal perspective (though we believed that Ortega had not been known for openly endorsing any political ideology) and to heed the relevance Ortega gives to the man who is aware of his limitations – opposed to the man who is unaware:     both the bourgeoisie and the mass man (who exemplify, for him la razón sinrazón [the reason for unreason]) – as explained in The Revolt of the Masses.       And finally, I focus on the distinction between “content” and “form,” to explain the break by the avant-garde from the bourgeoisie.

VI

Professor B.B.T. and I also had an exchange of ideas over the parallels between the Platonic and Orteguian thought.      He advised me then to read anew Meditations on Quixote [1914] both in Spanish and in English.      There, B.B.T. thought that I could find a significant or productive landscape of ideas on which to reflect and, thus, be able to develop my own interpretations about the nature of knowledge, its limits, and how to find the meaning of the ideal of truth.

VII

In writing my last short story, entitled In Darkness, Professor B.B.T. had already urged me to note the meaning for circunstancia1 (“circumstance”) as defined by Ortega in Meditations on Quixote.       It was clear to us that both Ortega’s phenomenological approach to “circumstance” and Plato’s thesis on the transformation of the individual (through knowledge) shared commonalities, which nurtured my own narrative.

VIII

But, the narrative journey proved to be just as challenging as Professor B.B.T. had pointed out.     His criticism, even then, never ceased being constructive and energetic.    His compassion was present as long as I was mindful of the necessity for clarity and precision.    Often, he would cite Ernest Hemingway’s authenticity and precision. 

IX

Time and time again, I experienced enormous pain in trying to comprehend what I wished to express.    Freeing my prose from superficiality was like taking a deep breath to exhale the vagueness of my anxieties.    Sometimes I was unable to get away from the obvious.    Other times, either I hid behind the complex, or I would cling to abstract and cryptic thinking:    the reductive jargon of the social sciences.    Professor B.B.T. repeatedly suggested succinctness:      I needed to respect the simplicity of language and find a way to its accessibility.    Bringing Plato and Ortega to the reader was my responsibility.    I was not to imitate them nor to think like them, but to represent them authentically.    My first obligation was to the reader.    For this I had to avoid euphemisms, randomness, and diversion.    The affirmation of effective communication is an objective worth the effort.      I would only understand myself, if I were to understand the reader.

X

B.B.T.’s exhortations and criticisms, I welcomed enthusiastically.    His challenge became mine.  He has been exorcising my limitations for two decades:    Every time we have worked together, I have discovered something new in myself.    I have become more attuned to both English and Spanish.    I have had to be my own translator.     In these instances, I have grown more respectful of the two languages.    I have had to capture their essence by comparing them:     the one informs the other.

*

Prologue

In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus [circa 369 B.C.E.], Socrates proposes that the extraordinary extraction of ideas is like bringing forth a new life and purging what is unnecessary.    Likewise, the aim here is to produce and discuss what enlightenment is, and the obstacles to its achievement.    Socrates has helped me in my definition of knowledge:     Is morality universal, or is objective morality even possible?    For these ideas I am indebted both to Plato and to Ortega y Gasset.

Ricardo F Morin, December 19, 2022

Editor Billy Bussell Thompson

 

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Plato, Roman marble bust copied from Greek original, 4th century B.C.E., Capitoline Museums, Rome.

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Socrates, Roman marble bust copied from Greek original, 2nd half of the 4th century B.C.E., Capitoline Museums, Rome.

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José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), detail of photograph of his impersonation of Honoré de Balzac, circa 1900.

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One way to objectivity is to recognize one’s own subjectivity.    Metaphors for understanding reality are rare.    One sees the world primarily through one’s own experience.    It is difficult (though not impossible) to understand what one has not experienced.    Truth never rests:  It is not singular, but always plural.

Anonymous

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1

Index

  • 1. Awareness of the Transformation of One’s Self:

The highest principle of inquiry is consciousness of one’s self.    In inquiry lie the beginnings of change.

 

2

Index

  • 2. The Absence of Trust:

In our age of disbelief, the stories we tell each other about the past and the present seem to be in a state of collapse.    There is a lack of continuity in the social order, increasingly suffocated by misinformation and distrust.  We challenge each other over what is real and what is not.

3

Index

  • 3. The Unassailable Truth:

For most of us an ultimate truth remains unattainable and the stories we share from the past and the present no longer seem useful.    Along with the disappearance of our past stories, both the person who seeks truth and the act of giving a person his due are in crisis.     Our society finds itself defined by a decline in trust both in government and its institutions.    Despairingly, the challenge is that the creation of new stories has become an act of preservation.     Likewise, autocracy is on the ascendance.    A lack of faith has sown aimlessness.    What can change this course of despair?    What will bring enlightenment to us?

 

4

Index

  • 4. Consciousness:

Knowledge is constantly changing and the result of this destabilization carries us into greater disorder.     For this reason clarity is more necessary than ever to understand ourselves.     Even if clarity is not always possible, to know oneself is imperative.    Thus arises the tension between continuity and change.    Here lies the quest for survival.

 

5

Index

  • 5. Not Knowing:

Not knowing is the essential condition of existence, despite one’s apparent desire for knowledge or for authority.     To know is to inquire.     Reality, though fleeting, inspires reflection.     Change begins with the recognition that one is not in isolation.     Not even the one (who seeks self-sacrifice for his spiritual advancement) by absolute cloister could get rid of his entanglement with the world.    It is by relating to other people and his environment that this person comes to know who he is.     Not even he (who despises the symbols of fear) is capable of freeing himself from his anguish.   The fear of not knowing hangs over all of us.     It is possible that striving without measure (in the aspiration for rationality) only leads us to end up being irrational:     Here lies the origin of complexity given the absence of innocence.

 

6

Index

  • 6. The Energy of Life:

In his theory of cultural attributes (Meditaciones del Quijote, Meditación preliminar; Índice 8, La pantera o del sensualismo, pág. 21), José Ortega y Gasset gives us his concept of razón vital2, which means reason is expressed through life itself.    Ortega parses the European mind into two archetypes:     the Germanic and the Mediterranean.     The former is meditative and the latter sensuous.   Of the sensuous he says:     The predominance of the senses usually implies a deficiency in inner powers.    What is meditating as compared with seeing?     As soon as the retina is hit by the arrow from without, our inner personal energy hastens and stops the intrusion.     The impression is registered, subjected to civilized order; it is thought, and in this way it is integrated in the building up of our personality, and cooperates within it – Evelyn Rugg and Diego Martín’s translation – Notes and Introduction by Julián Marías – pp. 85-86.     The Orteguian admonition here is to find the balance between extremes:   between the excesses and deficiencies of these two archetypes.

 

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Index

  • 7. Human Agency and Its History:

A second source for my understanding of the mind and the senses is found in Plato’s Republic (politeia) – Socrates’s dialogue of the allegory of the cave at the beginning of Book Seven.     There have been many interpretations.     Mine differs.     My purpose is to rid suffering from the mind of the freed slave.     Once freed from shackles, the mind of the freed slave (who ascends to the mouth of the cave) discovers its own vision of the world.     Despite the sun’s glare, the uneducated mind is transformed by the newly found ideal of truth.     But the awareness by the prisoner (who has remained behind) is inseparable from the condition of the freed man:      The slave (remaining in shadows of suffering) is not entirely separable from the memory of the freed man.     Because of suffering, the freed man’s mind is aware of its inability to know.      At the same time, the freed mind learns how its own transformation may be dependent on the new course of its history.     This mind’s actions allow participation in change, and change is possible through self examination.      The mind examines itself through meditating.     Meditation is not an obligation, but a necessity.     Meditation is the result of the mind’s freedom and it is the means to understanding its own choices in its approach to truth:     But this effort is only an approximation to the infinity of truth.     The freed mind (facing the visible world) is lacking here.    Thus, the freed mind recognizes that neither its actions nor the course of its history is predictable.     They (i.e. the mind’s actions and the course of its history) come from multiple possibilities about belief.  

The freed mind realizes that time is an illusion:     Time is fleeting, false, and deceitful.     The mind, habitually trapped in its past, remains mired in pain.     Anger (which comes from the past in search for justice) has for its sole purpose the manifestation of resentment.     But anger only manages to put its existence on hold, awaiting compensation.     Just as time is an illusion for the mind, the quest for emotional reparation is also an illusion.     For the mind, there is no vindication by being trapped in the labyrinth of illusion.     Only the rationality of active love can compensate for anger.     If the mind of the lover of truth can project itself lovingly in the direction that it resents, then a liberating sense of bravery arises towards itself.     Anger and sentimentality are one and the same.      As the force of love sheds sentimentality, one’s desires dissipate and with them anger as well.     Thereby, violence ceases to exist.     Socrates’s allegory of the mind (freed from suffering) carries all these implications and comparisons towards a goal of Ideal Truth.

 

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Index

  • 8. Alertness:

In an effort to understand Ortega’s concept of circumstancia (“circumstance”), his Meditación preliminar, Indice 6, Cultura mediterránea, explains to us that when he goes through the landscape of ideas he has to meditate with alertness on the influence of his experiences.     Needless to say, this includes all his past and present relations, the geographies he has occupied, and everything he has done in life.     Ortega forewarns us of the risks in this act of meditation:   We are accompanied by a keen suspicion that, at the slightest hesitation on our part, the whole world could collapse, and we with it.    When we meditate, our mind has to be kept at full tension; it is a painful and integral effort – Index 6, Mediterranean Culture, translated by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (Introduction and notes by Julián Marías [a favorite student of Ortega y Gasset]), p. 34.     In Plato’s dialogues, the same “effort” is found:     Through the act of meditation, Socrates’s freed man draws transformation and redemption from the narrow crevices among ideas.     Meditation helps the lover of truth get closer to his existential condition; it offers him the possibility of reacting differently, and sustains him with the very energy that life provides.

 

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Index

  • 9. Faith:

For the one who fears meditation, having faith in one’s own actions and changes are not sufficient for inquiry.     History is not alive for him:     It is at a point of no return; it is dead.    This person is in a world of despair and surrounded by the proverbial dancing of shadows.     This person is bound in his own chains, is overwhelmed by a lack of confidence, and is, without trust, unable to make a leap of faith.     Neither the notion of individuality nor the concept of free will seems satisfactory any longer.      This person relinquishes personal power and is unaware of the forces influencing his mind and his senses.     His refusal to face reality becomes a conscious decision for the suppression of truth.     This refusal is antithetical to life itself.    For him, life becomes enslavement and stands in opposition to the freed man, who fearlessly ponders the reality of the visible world, and passionately delves into the exploration of the unknown.   The mind of the freed man represents Ortega’s concept of razón vital, desirous to be absorbed by it.

 

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  • 10. Deliverance:

Distractions can be multiple.     In Ortega’s playful analysis, he implies that if meditation is extraneous to the fears of the mind, it can succumb to obsession, and even fall despairingly into manias.      Ortega values the relevance of every influence.     He understands that a human being and his landscape are not separate.     The unity of the two means his salvation by circunstancia (“circumstance”):   Thus his appreciation of circunstancia:    Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo – Al Lector, Índice, pág. 41 (which I translate as “I am myself [in a world of perceptions] and also the material world that surrounds me; if I don’t save them, I don’t save myself”).     Incidentally, here Ortega preempts his conclusion with what he has read in the Bible:   Benefac loco illi quo notus es3  (loosely translated into English as “do good in the place where you are known”).     With these remarks, Ortega reinforces the idea that he is unable to disassociate himself from his surroundings.    If he is to flourish and to find salvation, it will be necessary for him to understand and protect what he shares with his environment. 

Parallel to Ortega’s analysis is Plato’s Socratic allegory, which teaches us the effect that the visible world has on our mind.     From these two perspectives, the mind tends to be discouraged by what it does not understand.     Awareness of the visible world’s influence is for both thinkers an instinct for survival.     To be aware, therefore, means to be silent, away from the deafening sound of fear.      As long as there is fear, promoted by the progress of civilization, there will be no movement or separation from distractions.     Confronting fear means dispersing it, making it disappear.     Dispersal of fear is fundamental to the understanding of self.      Releasing oneself from fear is confronting one’s not-knowing.     Enslavement (at the depth of the cave) is equivalent to accepting the impositions of fear.     Both, for Ortega and Plato, the opposition to indifference is found through meditation; thereby one is able to be alert and know oneself.

 

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Index

  • 11. Perception and Storytelling:

​True confidence is living in uncertainty.     An overriding fact is that human beings organize themselves around the making of stories.      Every story we create is an act of piety that consoles the mind.      Yet new stories and old ones are provisional tools that fill the gap of our faith, filling in the void of our ignorance.      Whether the story be true or not, storytelling rescues us from ourselves.      Storytelling is our razón vital.    It seeks to expose us to the best possible meaning of ourselves:     Meaning in storytelling is found by investing oneself with the willpower to exceed adversity.    Meaning is found by creating something new within oneself.    Meaning is found in one’s vulnerability and in the constant pain to overcome it.      The process of finding meaning reveals that one cannot control Truth.     Happiness depends on how one accepts the absence of control, and how we can stop disliking our limitations.​

Storytelling persuades us to think that one’s actions will spread deeply into one’s consciousness.     One may not always be able to defeat the element of preconception, for bias is always with us.     As long as suffering, uncertainty, and the effort to overcome them exist, bias will persist.     Bias lurks behind our thoughts, quiet and insidious, yet it is there for a reason in spite of its harmful effects.    The irony is that if one banished preconceptions, there would be no further progress.    In any story, if the hero overcomes the villainy of bias, it is because he is able to change:     If one does not overcome bias, one does not grow and there is no transformation.     Success is not as important as the struggle to overcome bias.    Every time adversity comes to us, it is an opportunity for the recognition of those preconceptions that still reside in ourselves.     Success does not provide happiness.     Happiness is only possible through self discovery.     As such, one becomes symbolically the whole of humanity.     This is its highest expression:     The creation of something new as we face adversity, and the worse the adversity, the greater the opportunity.

 

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Index

  • 12. Reasoning (sentience vs sapience):

Awareness of fiction is the appreciation of the paradox between what is and what is not.     Knowledge expresses not only the awareness of one’s own intuitions and senses, but also the reasoning about those intuitions, senses, and impressions.    That is, every time we examine the perception of our memory, we are editing our understanding.    Thus, the way we organize and observe ourselves comes from our desires and senses at that moment, and this comes from our memories.    For instance, it is difficult for us to agree on a common origin or a common thread uniting us as a species, even if that may be true.     Whether we wish it or not, we define ourselves by the histories we create either in groups or in countries.     In doing so, we are actually imagining separate and fragmented believes that we belong to separate locales, cultures, and races.     Yet, there is an unavoidable thread that connects us as a species.     Such composition is found in our common and preponderant origin, though our perception may resist being part of it.     We endow ourselves with differences dictated by the conditioning of our perceptions.     In The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega refers to this condition as la razón de sinrazón (“reason without reason”), which explains our deeply rooted irrationality and fragmentation.        Knowledge implies greater content than what is gained through the form of our perceptions.     Our minds tend to abbreviate history, even believing that it does not exist. Yet the more expansive the “circumstance” or condition of apprehending truth, the greater the maturity our existence demands from us.

 

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Index

  • 13. Maturing Emotional Intelligence:

If a human being is the measure of all things, then also one comes to appreciate that knowledge is always inconclusive.     Thus, meditation strengthens our mind, our memory, our learning, our attention, and our self awareness.     Meditation on the past, the present, or the future depends on emotional intelligence.     Emotional intelligence is based on capturing the import of influences from all areas of a man’s life, from one’s behavior to one’s relationship with others and one’s environment.     Ultimate reality depends on the level of maturity of a person, and it is through meditation that one matures.     Hence, how a person chooses to act depends on meditation and his level of emotional intelligence.     For the fanatic (obsessed with fear) meditation seems impossible.     For the fanatic, doubt is not the issue.    The fanatic seeks to reiterate cycles.     The fanatic fails to understand that fear of change is irrational because it is inevitable that the world is constantly evolving.     The fanatic seeks to change what is beyond his control.     From the Orteguian point of view, this person, within a closed valuation system, does not find consolation because his mind fears what it does not understand.

 

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Index

  • 14. Our Connection to the Universe:

From Ortega’s perspective of Cervantes’s Don Quixote [1605-15], we learn that the courage granted by Love – not hate – impels us towards understanding …the useless remains of a shipwreck that life, in its perpetual surge, throws at our feet. – To The Reader, p. 31.    Love is a divine architect who, according to Plato came down to the world – ὥστε τὀ πᾶν αὐτῶ ξυνδέδέσθα – so that every thing in the universe might be linked together:      Separation means extinction.     Hatred, which separates, isolates, and pulls apart, dismembers the world, and destroys individuality – To the Reader, p. 33.

Hence, Ortega explains that the imperative for the individual is to reflect on one’s circunstancia (in medias res), … to arouse the desire of understanding the universal in its particulars. – To the Reader, p. 31:     To ignore the fact that each thing has a character of its own, and not that we wish to demand of it, is, in my opinion, the true capital sin, which I call a sin of the heart because it derives its nature from lack of love.     There is nothing so illicit as to dwarf the world by means of our manias and blindness, to minimize reality, to suppress mentally fragments of what exists.     This happens when one demands that what is deep should appear in the same way as what is superficial.     No, there are things that present only that part of themselves which is strictly necessary to enable us to realize that they lie concealed behind it. – p. 62.

 

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Index

  • 15. A Heroic Perspective:

Knowledge comes before fanaticism.     Fanaticism is, for Ortega, the rejection of the perspectives of others.     Ortega points to reasoning as an act of charity, which uncovers differences, and suggests that understanding is akin to the circling of an eagle in flight.      To be oneself, for Ortega, is the same as it is for Cervantes.      The act of being a hero takes place through a sensitive exploration of the nature of reality.      In Ortega’s view, as well as for Cervantes’s, the will of the hero belongs only to the persona of Don Quixote:   Because to be a hero means to be one out of many, to be oneself if we refuse to have our actions determined by heredity or environment, it is because we seek to base the origin of our actions on ourselves and only on ourselves.      The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors, nor of his society, but his own.     This will to be oneself is heroism. – First Meditation, 15, The Hero, p. 149.    
… I do not think that there is a more profound originality than this practical, active originality of the hero.    His life is a perpetual resistance to the habitual and customary.    Each movement that he has to make has first had to overcome custom and invent a new kind of gesture.    Such a life is a perpetual suffering, a constant tearing oneself away from the part of oneself, which is given over to habit and is a prisoner of matter. – First Meditation, 15, The Hero – p. 149.

 

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Index

  • 16. The Fear of fate:

A Socratic life is heroic, but if unexamined, of no value.     In the pain of living, one has to embrace the fact that the examination of fear is part of life.     Alongside this examination, fate is never artificial.     Fate does not deceive, even in our misfortunes.      Fate is not illusive, though our perception of time may be.      Instead, fate challenges us to change.      In change, fate protects us from stagnation.     What appears to be random is, in fact, an opportunity for learning.     Consequently, fate exists not for attacking, but for stimulating our transformation.     Fate does not move against us, but challenges us to change by confronting obstacles.     Fate attacks fear, because one’s fear takes away one’s ability to make choices.    Narratives of fear turn out to be self-fulfilling prophesies.      Fear deceives and defines us.     It hampers survival.     Fear prevents our evolving, it paralices us:     We resist giving up habits because of fear.     Thus one languishes and fails to overcome disbelief.

 

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Index

  • 17. Boundlessness and Humility:

The shadow of shame represents one’s flaws.    The shadow is what one wishes not to be, though its shadow be part of oneself.     Only, when the shadow is accepted with humility, do its flaws dissolve in the act of loving oneself with compassion.     Ultimately, the fanatic will recognize his incompleteness and become aware of his own insignificance:     The incapacity for completeness looms over all of us.     Only through risk does one learn the extent of one’s bounds and how much further one may go.     We advance through humility and humility appreciates neither truth nor falsehood.     Humility is the acknowledgment of one’s inexorable estrangement from an infinite truth.    Only the humble voice recognizes the struggle for understanding and change.     Both depend on a flight from despair.     For Ortega and for Plato, the mark of the highest values is found in our vulnerability.     If we surrender absolutely, then we find redemption.

 

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Index

  • 18. Epilogue:

My perspective treats Plato and Ortega outside of any theistic justification.     I leave aside any application of Plato to theological thought.     Likewise,  I ignore any attempt to ascribe religious respects to Ortega’s theory of values.     For me their notions, when applied to theology, are not credible.     I understand Plato and Ortega in their search for the limits of human perception and rationality.     Efforts to apply their philosophies as religious foundations are outside of my purpose.

The depth of Plato and Ortega’s thought is not to be found in a method for objective morality.     Nor is it ethical relativism, nor even is it found in a claim of universality.      Ideologies on morality are derived from norms dictated by theologians, seemingly unwilling to relinquish authority.    The role of the lovers of truth is not to dictate virtue nor to define the godhead.    Their teachings are centered on rationalism.    Their humanism is based on a concept of justice that is antithetical to fixed norms.    The paradigm of true knowledge – according to Plato and Ortega – is derived from love based on the originality of heroism.     This love does not reside outside of the individual.     This love is not found in the promise of a transcendental world.     This love finds man’s salvation in the present.  This love calls for self examination.   And above all, this love is a liberation from the numbness of the mind.

*

Endnotes:

1 For Ortega circunstancia, is a representation of the sum total of influences in the consciousness of a man, thus expressing the reason for his existence.

2 Razón vital stands as Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy which views that reason is, in of itself, an expression of life.

3 I failed to find this Biblical citation.

 

Bibliography:

  • Ortega y Gasset, José, Meditaciones del Quijote:   Meditación Preliminar y Meditación Primera, (Madrid:  PUBLICACIONES DE LA RESIDENCIA DE ESTUDIANTES, SERIE II.—VOL. I, Universidad Central de Madrid, 1914)
  • Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha [1605–1615] (Cambridge:   Harvard Publishing Company, 1893.   Translated by John Ormsby. 4 vols. in 8 books.  Limited Edition No. 71/320. 1st edition.
  • Platón. Teeteto. Introducción, traducción y notas de Marcelo Boeri. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2006.
  • Ortega y Gasset, José, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Editorial Revista de Occidente, 1928).   Fue publicado inicialmente en 1927 como una serie de artículos en el diario El Sol, antes de ser recopilado en formato de libro en 1928 por Editorial Revista de Occidente en Madrid.
  • Sarmiento, Edward , “Blackfriars” (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., August 1950), v. 31, No. 365, 356-63.

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