Uncertainty carries with it the possibility of an obsessive desire for certainty.
Anker, Michael.
The world as such, world simply as world, is always already in absolute excess of itself in differentiation. This movement of difference is already there, already happening, for as Derrida would say, difference itself already exists within attempted unity.
Anker, Michael.
This differentiating movement within the world creates a constant play and transformation - a continuous spacing which opens the world to novelty and event. In short, the world in itself is enough.
Anker, Michael.
What does it mean to begin? Beginnings start with a gesture, a decision, a line which creates relation. The line is the beginning of thought. It marks the place where we are together because we are apart. Apart from one another we are a part of the shared world. The line gives us a beginning – a space of contingent place in the fabric of being and becoming.
Anker, Michael.
Being a beginning that continuously begins, the line exists outside the notion of absolute origin. There is no original origin since the line incessantly marks a new beginning for thought - the interstitial place where continuous decision marks an always already opening/closing line in the pure opening of thought itself. Origins exist within the movement of beginning, and the line gives beginning to origin and trace at the same time.
Anker, Michael.
The line/mark/trace is the beginning of thought. It gives us a beginning – a place without place within the fabric of being and becoming. Being a beginning that continuously begins, the line exists outside the notion of absolute origin. There is no origin since the line incessantly marks the beginning of thought - the place (non-place) where continuous decision marks an always already opening/closing line in the pure opening of thought itself. Origins exist within the movement of beginning, and the line gives beginning to origin and trace at the same time.
Anker, Michael.
The trace as simultaneous memory of what was, is, and what may become, holds open the space for the beginning of beginnings. We cannot begin without the mark or trace which always precedes us. This is the beauty of the line in itself. The line shows us both what we are and what we are not. It is the re/presentation of “being” and “non-being” at the same time. The line is the continuous something which emerges from the giving potentiality of the pure opening of nothing - the nothing from which without there simply would be no-thing. We thus have a world as some-thing which shows itself to us through the movement of beginnings beginning again and again.
Anker, Michael.
I was talking last night about love and for me it's not so much a ... it's kind of like the concept of the good .. it's not really a fixed idea for me. It's something I have to work in relation-to. So I am very interested in the idea of relation. So, in a phenomenological sense, for me, the relation to the good is of importance today. Which is why in my title, I say Sensing the good.
Anker, Michael. "Poetic Becomings: A Sensing of the Good." (Video). Camden Philosophical Society Conference. July 24, 2010.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, a French Philosopher, who pays attention to the double meaning in sense because sense can mean sense like the way we sense the world or feel the world but it can also mean what the world means to us. So it has meaning and sensibility at the same time.
Anker, Michael. "Poetic Becomings: A Sensing of the Good." (Video). Camden Philosophical Society Conference. July 24, 2010.
...not that I am trying to reach an absolute meaning, but I am trying to sort of weave them together, again for a sensibility. So, on the other hand, basically, I want to try to open our thinking, tonight, toward thinking as a relation to the good itself. With the time of absolutes very far behind us, I believe, we can find meaning in the world perhaps without a reference to a fixed or stable concept of the good.
Anker, Michael. "Poetic Becomings: A Sensing of the Good." (Video). Camden Philosophical Society Conference. July 24, 2010.
So how can we gain a sense of what it means in our time to ethically exist at or make decisions within a global framework of uncertainty and undecidability?
Anker, Michael. "Poetic Becomings: A Sensing of the Good." (Video). Camden Philosophical Society Conference. July 24, 2010.
I thought that perhaps a paradoxical suggestion about the relationship between ethics and uncertainty would simply scare away an audience.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
My thesis this evening is not in praise of uncertainty versus certainty. In fact, I hope to show how they work together in a symbiotic relationship as compared to and "either/or" and thus dualistic relation. As I see it, part of the problem of thinking on ethics in any manner outside certitude comes from dualistic thinking itself. In particular, such dualism's as mind/body, being/becoming, one/many, identity/ difference, and poros/aporos.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
The situation therefore is not whether one should favor the indeterminacy of aporos over the determinacy of poros, or vice versa, but to see these terms as coexisting and at play within one another.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
I would now like to take a step back and discuss a phrase which I believe illuminates the phenomenological, ontological, epistemological, and psychological sensibility necessary for an ethics not only in relation to uncertainty, but the symbiotic relation between the terms thus already discussed. In other words, we will now move toward how I believe ethics relates to what we have thus far discovered. It brings us now to a phrase from my book. I wrote this phrase in an attempt to thematically come to terms with a certain element of thought I found in philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche to Derrida and others.The phrase reads as follows: "As something is coming to be it is always already becoming something other." My book outlines in detail ten possible meanings which I believe surface from this phrase.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
In a state of becoming, otherness or difference is already in being. Pure unity or a totalization of being without difference and thus multiplicity implies an impossible separation from the continuous motion of becoming. In fact, the motion implied in becoming necessitates a continuous relation between being and difference, for the relation in itself is the movement of life. All motion (becoming) in itself is the relation between any attempted unity and difference.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
This existential stance is of importance for it combines the uncertainty, the anxiety, and the instability of transformative becoming into a possible precursor to thinking ethics. An ethical stance, as such, could only be inventive and furthermore always open to its own ongoing transformation. This existential sensibility (mood, Stimmung) affirms the idea that ethics can never be grounded in certainty for certitude in totalization closes the open transformative space for becoming or that which is yet to come.
Anker, Michael. "The Ethics of Uncertainty." (Lecture). in: College of New Rochelle. January 27, 2010.
The experience of aporia allows a true decision to emerge – a decision without measure and without predetermined criteria.
Anker, Michael. The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings. Atropos Press. 2009. Paperback, 120 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0974853429.
Soon enough, however, the caller's true desire changes from the original desire to talk with the friend into a much deeper desire to fill the gap of uncertainty, which pervades over the entire situations. Now, they simply want to know what has happened - they want to be freed from the uncertain modality of perhaps itself. The "perhaps" is now the phenomenological obsession, not the desire to talk with the friend. A conversation with the friend is now substituted for a much larger problem, i.e., filling the uncertain gap of non-knowledge.
Anker, Michael. The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings. Atropos Press. 2009. Paperback, 120 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0974853429.
With fidelity there is commitment and perhaps a type of surety, but never the kind which closes off the possibility for future events to come.
Anker, Michael. The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings. Atropos Press. 2009. Paperback, 120 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0974853429.
In fact, contemporary views on anxiety and obsession have a lot to learn from Nietzsche. for anxiety in itself is not the problem; it is the symptoms expressed in the intolerance and in ability to sustain uncertainty itself. The desire for certainty in relation to uncertainty creates the problematic symptoms the contemporary world now mistakenly calls anxiety ... To view anxiety as a symptom is to miss the fundamentally positive potentiality of an ontological restlessness that precedes notions of decision and responsibility. Without this a priori anxiety, there in fact would be no such thing as a decision, for to make a decision one must first be held temporarily in the space of indecision.
Anker, Michael. The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings. Atropos Press. 2009. Paperback, 120 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0974853429.
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
