The piece I've been working on during the days is coming into a clearer focus, though why I'm working on it still remains a bit of a mystery to me.
It's said that the artists, the writers lived longest in the concentration camps of the second ww. The people who were trying to use their time on earth, such as it was, to make something, or accomplish something.
Some truth in that. There's not really anything that can safely be called bare existence, if by existence one means simply being, with nothing, as they say, going on. Existence, which becomes a critical piece of philosophical vocabulary for a very specific reason in the last century, is a conglomeration of all of the small, unnoticed glances, breaths, heartbeats, fire alarms, etc. that are the objects of our attention while we live.
So just attempting to continue, to keep having life, as we have the sense of having life, reaches for a fog, in a way. There's nothing solid to take hold of, or event to reach for. And yet, intuitively, this is the life-force, especially in a prosperous and fearful age, in which, as Canneti said, death has become the coin fo the realm. Or perhaps that should be coign ("vantage point").
Our lives, phenomenologically speaking, are simply series of specific actions and intentions. The power, or I suppose eventually the capacity, to do that is what we should perhaps paraphrase "existence" to stand for. And yet, none of these moments really reach the higher life that we normally would associate with the fight of living. There is some distention between our strong desire to live, and the quotidian things we might do if allowed a few extra minutes above the sod. Is, then, the desire to live exclusively addressing the totality? Is that the only nominatum for which the force of this desire is justifiable?
There are exceptions, I think. Someone who wanted to live long enough to do a certain thing, for example. Someone who is doing something important for others. And, perhaps, someone who is attempting to accomplish something with the time that they have, such as it is. Why might this be so?
When we are attempting to make something -- ποεισισ -- the thing that we are attempting to make gives our work a method (μετ' οδοσ) we know, in a practical sense, how to accomplish the thing that we are trying to do. And this plan is based in knowing the connections between things, how they all hang together. The making of the art and the thinking of the concept for the art both require sufficient understanding to create the thing and sufficient judgment to both set our heart on the right thing, and accomplish that thing in a way consistent with our desires. And these are not separate -- they both require us to have a certain map of the way things are, and our desires teach us the associations, and the associations lead us to desire.
So in setting out to create something, the soul, the comprehensive principle, is engaged in both defining the world around it and coping with that world, making something within it. And the point is that these two things are basically the same thing. We understand according to our desire, and desire according to our understanding, The reason that we make maps of the world around us is that we wish to go to certain places, and our maps are created by depicting the places and roads that we desire.
So, when the understanding is a factor of desire, when the world is illuminated by our seeking, it is not just that something called existence is more full. We move from existence to action, and thereby have our being in a way not given to simple observation.