Fragment 196, word count: 283.

tags: caring, embodiment, time, creativity, spirit, existence.

Spirit exists in a multitude of distinct individual instances, but isn’t anything like a thing. Spirit exists in each case as a busy principle of world organization at some location in an unfinished world. It isn’t an almighty principle of world organization, but instead is a personalizing principle, a principle of caring which is anchored to locality by embodiment and confers value and dramatic context onto certain (otherwise) mere things that constitute a surroundings, making the world into staging for living a life. Caring is personalizing and as such an organizing vector directed into a (strictly) non-existent future.

Personalizing the world is always a creative intervention into the shape of brute actuality by a specifically embodied spirit. Creativity operates in the dimension of time, and is not any kind of essentialist thing conforming to neat categories. The phenomenon of spirit is the sense of the passing of time in the personalizing world, with fear and eagerness to live the future, dramas of ceaseless loss and unpredictable ever-emerging differences. Every act of discovery/ perception contributes to an interplay of anticipation and surprise redirecting the vector of caring into an entirely suppositional future.

Spirit is the existence which supposes, and supposes its own existence in a mutable future as a busy expressing, actively representing a personal world organization and always at the point of voicing something of its newness. In this way spirit is the existence which supposes its own existence as an unfinished particular, a future coming into being at the raw edge of the incompleteness of actuality. You can’t know yourself because you never finish inventing yourself. At no moment do you foresee everything you will create in projecting your life.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.