Can
spirit be defined?
The more you try to define it, the
more it
eludes you. What is left is only the poverty
of an absolute nudity. To 'define' means to 'go around' something, to
'delimit' it, to 'seize' it, to 'possess' it, to 'include' it into
your understanding. The spirit does not permit this.
Spirit
refuses to be 'defined'. You can only define the 'what' (what it is)
of a substantial
essence. But the WHAT (what it is) of the spirit is always
evanescent. There never remains but a THAT.
I cannot seize the spirit. It is the spirit which, already, seizes me.
It is the one which 'defines' me, which 'includes' me and my
intellectual possibilities. Those ones cannot include it in turn.
Does this mean that the spirit is only ghostly illusion? Of course
not. Because the spirit can be apprehended. You make
permanently the relevant experiment of its presence and of its
reality. It calls for an intelligibility of the openess.
Spirit
is gaping. It can thus be apprehended only in
gaping.
Beyond its évanescent 'what' you experiment the 'that' of the
act of its sudden appearance. You can however get some 'idea' of it.
but only a 'negative' one.
It
has neither matter nor space-time dimensions. Does this mean it is
without 'substance'? A kind of epiphenomenon? An illusion? A sham? A
simple conceptual ideality? The materialist monism can only refuse
any 'reality' of its own for the spirit. If, indeed, the total
reality is of only one order, namely the material order, which place
could remain for the spirit? Its order, indeed, is not that of
matter. Its reality has to be sought in an 'other' radical different
order.
Which
is thus this 'specific reality' of the spirit? Is it simply
'virtual', as in the Buddhist 'idealism' where the spirit is
fundamentally reduced to the not-substance of a kind of state of
consciousness? Against the monist approaches of what is 'real', it
is necessary to return to dialectics
and to approach the total
real in
tension between contrary polarities in direct opposition. Spirit is
thus the 'different'
one
which provokes the 'same'
one
OUT. Not a substantial 'what' but a dynamic act.
The
spirit is where it is not. Not in a fullness
but in a gap.
A void which crosses the fullness. An empty plenitude. A full vacuum.
It is not nowhere in particular. It acts everywhere at the same time.
The spirit is in distance.
The spirit intervenes.
It is INTER. It is between. The
spirit reads
between the lines.
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