450. Resonance and reality



As an antidote to the alienation that accompanies the acceleration in society (of technology. society itself, life), defined as voluntarily going along with things one does not really want, Hartmut Rosa proposed ‘resonance’.[i] Resonance arises in a relation, between people and people, or between people and things, perhaps also between things, where there is mutual influence. Not an echo, not a copy, reproduction of the same, no fusion, but absorption in the one what comes from the other, and assimilation, perhaps transformation. Having effect and being affected.

This notion corresponds with my discussion, at several places in this blog, of the contrast between Nietzsche and Levinas in relations between people. One needs to be open to others, let them exert influence, rather than only exerting power over them. One needs opposition from the other, and from things, to achieve the highest form of freedom: freedom to change one’s  value orientations,  freedom from prejudice. This is no guarantee of objective truth. It can be determined by shared ideology or bias, such as a shared language, but it is better than a one-sided view.

There is a deeper value in this than I discussed before. As argued by Kierkegaard, and others, life, having a self, is being involved in a process, not having a thing, but a process of developing  oneself. This derives from the Hegelian thought that one cannot look in all directions at the same time. Seeing anything requires looking in one direction to the exclusion of others. One cannot say or do everything. What works, what is true, fails sooner or later. In their failure one learns about things, so failure is inevitable and to be appreciated, in the interaction between people and things, in work and society.  Hegel applied this to the collective, in a march of history, with the dream of ultimate amalgamation into one. But as stressed by Kierkegaard, it applies also, and in particular, to the individual, in his/her development, and is ongoing.

This, I propose, is the deeper meaning of resonance. In philosophy, it cuts even deeper, touching upon the old opposition between realism and idealism. Going back to the old ‘problem of Kant’: we see and conceptualise the world according to our ideas, or ‘categories’ or ‘forms of thought’, so that we (probably) do not see the world ‘as it is in itself’. What, then, is the basis for realism, and of the ‘truth’? As I claimed before, in this blog, truth as ‘warranted assertibilty’ is giving arguments, but that is always partial, needing arguments from a different perspective for supplementation. 

There is an evolutionary argument: We must in some sense adequately conceive of the world,

or at least part of it. Otherwise humanity would not have survived. We have the capacity to

 allow the world to shout ‘no’ if we are mistaken. This does not mean that we always see the

world completely and correctly, but we know it partly, in some sense, and we don’t know in

how far. The only chance we have of approaching it is to compare it with what other people see

and think, and to go ahead and practice that, allowing others and things to ‘shout “no”’.

What part of the world do we see ‘correctly’, then? The part that is most relevant for survival

and reproduction. Those are, first of all, things moving in time or space.  Abstractions are

based on metaphors from that more certain knowledge. These are the ‘metaphors we live by’

(Lakoff and Johnson), in what earlier in this blog I called the ‘object bias’. Misconceptions of

abstractions, such as, for example, those of democracy, happiness, justice, meaning will

jeopardise the future survival of humanity.

So, here also, the human being should develop and learn from the world.    

 

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[i] Hartmut Rosa, Resonance, 2016, Cambridge: Polity Press.

450. Resonance and reality