Is t
here an emerging intersection between the questions “Who are you?” and “What are you doing?”
One seems to concern “ being” and the other “action.” Our reflection on them is our "thinking."
We are drawn into a new landscape where these seemingly separate modes of thinking/being/acting arrange themselves into a perspectival phrasing that creates a new inquiry into what we are thinking, who we are being, and where we are doing. The phrasings can shift around the interrogatory pronouns, eg: who are we... thinking? what are we... acting? and, where are we... being?
Here's what occurs to me about this -- despite the fracturing into separate realities of thought and matter by Descartes in his "I think, therefore, I am" where the res cogitans (the thinking thing, ie thought) and the res extensa (the extended thing, ie matter), are irretrievably split and separated into a dualism that has troubled the way we view existence and the world and one another -- there is a new call for reintegration and non-dual apprehension of what it means to dwell in the world.
In other words, who we are, what we do, and where we think, is a secular and spiritual perichoresis.
The word perichoresis comes from two Greek words, peri, which means “around,” and chorein, which means “to give way” or “to make room.” It could be translated “rotation” or “a going around.” Perichoresis is not found in the Greek New Testament but is a theological term used in three different contexts. In the first, perichoresis refers to the two natures of Christ in perfect union within the same Person. In the second context, perichoresis refers to the omnipresence of God as He “intersects” with all creation (see Acts 17:28). In the third context, it refers to the mutual intersecting or “interpenetration” of the three Persons of the Godhead and may help clarify the concept of the Trinity. It is a term that expresses intimacy and reciprocity among the Persons of the Godhead. A synonym for perichoresis is circumincession. (--from, What is perichoresis? | GotQuestions.org
And this
from Music and Dancing:
The theologians in the early church tried to describe this wonderful reality that we call Trinity. If any of you have ever been to a Greek wedding, you may have seen their distinctive way of dancing . . . It’s called perichoresis. There are not two dancers, but at least three. They start to go in circles, weaving in and out in this very beautiful pattern of motion. They start to go faster and faster and faster, all the while staying in perfect rhythm and in sync with each other. Eventually, they are dancing so quickly (yet so effortlessly) that as you look at them, it just becomes a blur. Their individual identities are part of a larger dance. The early church fathers and mothers looked at that dance (perichoresis) and said, “That’s what the Trinity is like.” It’s a harmonious set of relationship in which there is mutual giving and receiving. This relationship is called love, and it’s what the Trinity is all about. The perichoresis is the dance of love.(–Jonathan Marlowe) (--from, The dance of love: perichoresis)
The most important difference between Christianity and all other religions (is) that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance… (The) pattern of this three-personal life is . . . the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.(-–C. S. Lewis ) (--from, The dance of love: perichoresis)
In what ways would our dwelling in this environment with one another be changed if there were to emerge a synchronous circumincessional appreciation of reality that exemplified the deepest longings and affections of personal and cosmic existence?
I am what I am includes I am what I do, I am what I think, I am what you are thinking, being, doing. It is not difficult to calculate how foreign and frightening this kind of realization might rise up within us. We've cultivated a long narrative, personal and cosmic, that I am not you, your thoughts are not my thoughts, your acts not my acts.
This opportunity to "turn about with" (ie. L.
conversatio = conversation) is one beckoning us to follow.
Because I am fond of philosophy, I call this turn a function of the life of philosophy. It is also the functional aesthetic of poetry. (My meandering this morning put me in front of the words of the song "
I'm Not Gonna Miss You." written with/for Glen Campbell as he began his descent into Alzheimer's and death. d.8aug17)
Richard Kearney approaches this univocality of integrality in his work of religious philosophy.
This from an interview:
AF: ...You are, I think, actualizing what Pierre Hadot intended – philosophy as a total experience. Hadot was retrieving ancient and Renaissance models of the Platonic academy, and Marsilio Ficino’s Florentine academy where people lived out what they believed. That is unique and timely, we do need such an academy for our world.
RK: I am very honored by what you say. But while I do try to apply philosophical thinking to the world of action, I would not, in all honesty, consider myself either a real philosopher or a scholar. Let me explain. I think there are philosophers, scholars, and thinkers. By “philosophers” I mean the original great minds: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein...people who devote their lives to really important questioning and usually have one single world-changing idea. Then there are the “scholars” – brilliant academic commentators who provide detailed analysis and exegesis on the work of the great philosophical minds. Think of Aquinas and the Scholastics or some of the best continental and analytic commentators of our own time. And finally there are what I would call “thinkers”: minds who try to apply philosophical ideas and scholarship to concrete practical matters of living and being-with-others in just com- munities – in other words the lived worlds of human existence, religion and society. I would count as “thinkers” people like Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche, Kristeva and most existentialists. When Heidegger says that Kierkegaard is not a philosopher but a “religious thinker,” this is what he has in mind. Kierkegaard was not a university academic but someone who took on society, the church, the market place, what he called “the present age.” He was a sort of modern Socrates. If I were to place myself anywhere, it would be as a humble clerk to this kind of lived thinking, or thinking for life, thinking as healing, thinking in action.
(—from, THINKING IN ACTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD KEARNEY, by ALINA N. FELD, The General Theological Seminary and Hofstra University, in Review of Contemporary Philosophy 16, 2017, pp. 150–171, ISSN 1841-5261, eISSN 2471-089)
