potency

POTENCY

The English title of my thesis is „Potency. An Essay on Multi-layered Universe“.

The West is traditionally dominated by dualistic conceptions of man and his being: body on the one hand and spirit on the other. The practical outcome of this dualism is twofold: it can lead to the neglection of body and basic ignorance of it, in the name of „higher“ spiritual values; or it can lead to the cultivation of the only body (sport and sex industry are based on it) and to the contempt and fear of the spiritual dimension.

I believe an alternative to this dualistic model could be elaborated, using the Chinese concept and practice of qi. According to my hypothesis the qi is a layer of reality between mind and body, neither altogether spiritual nor altogether corporeal. I believe the integration of this concept could have significant effects on all levels of human life, including, among others, sociological and educational spheres.

In order to integrate the concept of qi a general theoretical framework is needed. I have elaborated its basic principles, making use of some concepts from the French contemporary philosophy, namely from Bergson, Ruyer and Deleuze, and in the following I will describe it in some detail.

For the basic axiomatic for the conceptualization of different layers of reality (e.g. body, qi and mind), I use the concepts of interpenetration/juxtaposition. In the corporeal reality or „layer“ the different elements juxtapose each other – this is first of all the case of visual perception, which is further developed and purified in a geometrical space of pure juxtaposition. What we generally see, pertains already according to the definition to this layer of corporeal perception. But if we cannot directly see something, it doesn’t mean that this reality would be nonexistant or of less importance.

According to my hypothesis the qi-layer of reality is more interpenetrating than the corporeal layer, so that it is impossible to surgically cut out a mo or an acupuncture point. But the qi still has a characteristic extension, so that different points for influencing the qi can be charted on maps or sculptures of human body in the traditional Chinese medicine.

The mind or psychological layer is still more interpenetrating than the qi. You cannot cut off a piece from your imagined or remembered mental image. Its elements interpenetrate each other, so that one element contains all the others. But the interpenetration is not absolute, as a mental image still has a certain extension or juxtaposition: still right and left, up and down can be differentiated in it.

The maximum degree of interpenetration I call the Self. In the Self there is no trace of actual juxtaposition that can still be found in the psychological level. But this doesn’t mean that the Self is homogeneus. On the contrary, the Self is the motor of heterogenety. I conceptualize this system of the Self with the concepts of insight and action, and these two define the original Potency of being. Insight and action are two constitutive and inseperable sides of being. They are aspects of the same thing, so the duality of insight and action is altogether different from the dualism of body and mind.

We can discover this fundamental duality by following two fact-lines: the fact-line of consciousness and the fact-line of microphysics. In the first line we discover an insight or consciousness implicated in every activity and in the end of the second line we discover a „pure action“, a hypothetical original state where the distinction of mass and energy has not yet arisen.

All the evolutioncould be thought as the working of this original duality of insight and action (or, more abstractly, of being-to-itself and differing-form-itself). The evolution could be then thought of as the hierarchization of action (hierarchically structured bodies) and as the differentiation of insight into consciousness and unconsciousness. In this case „at the bottom“ of every creature is the pure action common to all, and „at the top“ every creature’s ultimate sphere of unconsciousness envelops the original insight.

In this manner I would be able to present a philosophically grounded view of evolution and a more realistic conception of human being with concrete philosophical tools to overcome the inlaid dualism of Western philosophy. As a corollar field of interest I would like to trace to some extent the development of Western dualism. My initial hypothesis is that this development owes heavily to the absence in the West of some concept equivalent to the qi and is linked to the gradual disappearance or reinterpretation of analogous notions (the Greek pneuma, for example).