The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.
What is lacking is:
- vision which respects sanity, and
- sanity which recognizes vision.
*
Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.
Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.
But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.
*
We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.
We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.
*
Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.
We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.
*
Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”
Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”
Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”
Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”
Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”
Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”
Is experience essentially individual?
*
Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive. The world is seen as together.
Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.
Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.
Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.
Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.
*
On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.
*
Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.
