Propositions on Emergency

Abstract

Predefinablessense: Things can be held or beheld, defined or dealt with, because they inhabit a sense-dimension. To see things is to see past them. The here and now are meaningful only in a distance and a span. The apparently immediate needs a medium in which to appear.excess: Things surpass their sense. They are more than the mediating dimension in which they are met. Their excess can elude definition, resist visibility, and solicit reinterpretation.Definitionsbeing: the sense of excess and the excess over sense. The concept of being indicates nonconceptuality: to grasp a thing as something that is (an entity) is to acknowledge that it surpasses the grasping. To recognize something as an entity is to experience it, within a sense-dimension, as exceeding that dimension.Being as such pertains to any entity that can be met in any way. Particular ways of being pertain to particular kinds of entities, with their characteristic senses and ways of exceeding sense.Scholium: As excess, being is often called existence. As sense, being is often called essence. The distinction is useful, but the experiences of existence and essence are normally interdependent.From a logical point of view, being appears as the separate functions of existential quantification and predication. But the capacity to make existential assertions (more broadly, to recognize excess) is tightly linked to the capacity to assign predicates (more broadly, to make sense of entities).emergency: a clash between sense and excess. An event in which excess challenges sense and resists being interpreted, so that sense has trouble getting a purchase on entities.The Emergency would be the primordial clash between sense and excess, the contest that generates the contenders as such, first establishing sense with excess as its counterpart.Unsettling emergencies are non-primordial emergencies, events in which some settled sense is unsettled by some excess.To emerge as emergent is to originate in a clash between sense and excess and call for an interpretation-to issue from an emergency and become an issue, hovering, unresolved and dissonant, demanding to be addressed.Scholium: What is most often called an emergency, the irruption of a threat that demands an immediate response, does not necessarily challenge sense, since the interpretation of the irruption may follow well-worn paths. But such an irruption always has the potential for trauma and surprise, so it can become an emergency as defined here.Emergencies as defined here are not necessarily threatening; they can bring pleasure and delight. Sense can be unsettled by an experience of wonder or rapture.Unsettling emergencies range from a passing confusion to a conceptual revolution to the shattering of a world. The degree to which an emergency can be understood within established sense-dimensions is a matter for judgment. Mature judgment develops through experiences of emergencies of various scopes.An emergent issue may hover in the background, even though it seems to have been resolved. The emergent is pacified when it takes the form of an answered question. It is dormant when it is not even recognized as a question.The Emergency can be defined in terms of sense and excess, as their origin; but it itself would be neither sense nor excess. To define it is not to understand it, nor to reduce it to the terms of the definition.Postulates 1. There are entities whose own being emerges for them. Call them we.1.1. Our excess over sense emerges for us. That we are here, that we exist and may not exist-regardless of how we may interpret our existence-has become an issue for us. We are faced with death as the ultimate excess, the extreme withdrawal from the sphere of sense. This issue can fade into the background as we take our existence for granted.1.2. The sense of our excess emerges for us. We are faced with the question of who we are, the demand to interpret ourselves as entities. …