Toward Understanding the Radicalness of Surrender

Abstract

The article seeks to isolate three meanings of the radicalness of which, undifferentiatedly, is the state and the relation of cognitive love, entailing involvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt. Building above all on the second of these characteristics, the suspension of received notions (which is being compared with the phenomenological suspension), the three meanings of the radicalness of result as, first, the surrenderer's being in the world; second, as an element in a theory of society; and third, as a criterion of maximum or optimal research. Before dealing with the radicalness of I must first try to say what I mean by itself. I mean by it, undifferentiatedly, a state and a relation, which can be a relation to anybody, including oneself, and to anything, but the state and the relation are not, to repeat, differentiated. This much to categorize as the sort or type of thing it is-a strange thing, state and relation undifferentiated. But what state and relation? Seminally it is the state and relation of cognitive love-seminally, because whatever other meanings it may have flow from it. Among them are involvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt.1 To means to take as fully, to meet as immediately as possible whatever the occasion may be. It means not to select, not to believe that one can know quickly what one's experience means, hence what is to be understood and acted on: thus it means not to suppose that one can do justice to the experience with one's received notions, with one's received feeling and thinking, even with the received structure of that feeling and thinking: it means to meet, whatever it be, as much as possible in its originariness, its selfness. The term surrender itself, with its ironical military connotation, polemicizes against the official Western and potentially worldwide consciousness of the relation to the world, both nature and man's world and even man himself, which is not but mastery, control, efficiency, handling, manipulating. Similarly, a synonym of surrender, total which indicates the undifferentiatedness of the experience, polemicizes against totalitarianism, which is so closely and fatally related to that consciousness which surrender fights. As to the meanings of that I mentioned-total involvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt, I can talk only about the second, the suspension of received notions, because it is the meaning which may give the most direct access to the radicalness of surrender. It is immediately apparent that it is related to the phenomenological bracketing, but it is more radical. For