Oikology

The ecosystem calls for an ecology, the 'logos' invited in our 'oïkos', the reason invited in our house. To avoid any confusion with its counterfeits which proliferate today and for better comprehension it should undoubtedly be spelled according to its etymology. Oïkos - logos. Ecology. Not a little insipid idea recovered in easy ideologies here and there, but the highest task and undoubtedly the biggest challenge of our time. You think first of the simple possibilities of material survival. The possibilities of survival of authentic humanity are still more threatened.

The 'Logos' invited in our 'oïkos',  that is reason, intelligence and sense needed in our house of humanity. The whole house of humanity. The house of whole humanity. It comes and forces us to reflect on our enclosures and our openings. It comes when we become aware that our wells are blocked and our sources polluted. It comes when the energy fluxes become insufficient and when the tanks get emptying. It comes when garbage overcomes us. It comes when we feel to live above the possibilities of provisioning and recycling our earth. It comes and forces us to reflect on our limits and our fences. It comes to recall us that the inside is not possible without the outside. It comes to dissipate our illusions.

It is when the air gets stinking that we think opening our windows. It is when the breath is becoming short that we remember that there is an outside. It is when we suffocate on a garbage dump that we get the idea for an ecology. Which value has water when it overflows? It can take an infinite price when you are lost in the desert. We are not finished crossing our spiritual desert. To quench our essential thirsts we are likely to find nothing more than blocked wells and polluted sources. However these 'sources of water spouting out for eternal life' must exist!

Never as much as today, we risked spiritual asphyxiation. However did there ever exist a civilization as rich in cultural productions as ours? Admittedly. But what is needed for this proliferation of 'constituted' sense is an open space for its disproportion. It misses the constituent sense. The sense which gives sense. The sense which protests against absurdity. The sense which resists the nonsense. The sense which opens the horizons. The sense which puts in prospect. The sense which gathers what is dispersed and disperses what is bound. The sense which bursts the vicious circles. The sense able to read between the lines. The sense which does not lose humour.

The oikology cannot pass beside the question of the ultimate including of all including spaces. And thus the ultimate hot spring and the ultimate cold well.

Can man give to himself his hot source? It is remarkable that all human cultures, except for the 'modern' one, functioned or continue to function with a powerful hot source of absolute meanings : God, Being, Cosmos, Nature, Order, Values…, a sufficient large cold well and accumulators of sense quite charged. All these cultures function in homeostasis with the ecosystem of sense. And until their decline, the no-entropy of sense victoriously defies the entropic fate of the degradation of the meaning. Here it is not about such or such particular sense but about the total sense, to some extent the sense of the sense, the radical donation of the sense, the fertile field of the sense in general.

Today the human possibility feels trapped in its horizons. At the same time, it tries hopelessly to cross the limits. When totality is enclosed in absolute immanence there is no more space left elsewhere. 'Trans' itself is trapped in immanence. A pure function, a pure operation, simply the verb 'to transcend'. Without anything inside nor beyond, without 'transcendence'.

For the spirit which thus lost its natural opening beyond of itself, to the transcendence, there can remain only one possibility of exit. And this one can be only 'negative'. Something like an act of rupture and destruction. But it is impossible to leave the cave differently. Such a daring and violent risk is necessary. Once the breach opened, the light floods. While inside, the reasons married the positive curve of space and could only give reason to themselves. Once released, they distinguish the fatal loops. This enclosure is given as 'impossible to circumvent' only to the spirit which already despairs of being able to circumvent itself. That is being able to go out of itself, to be surprised in relativity, and more deeply in relation. Then reasons become able to distinguish between reasons. The 'absolute' ones are put in perspective. The powerful ones are knocked down and the humble ones exalted.

Today we are likely to lose the Sense. There was never a civilization so rich in cultural productions as our modern one. A proliferation of 'constituted' sense. But it misses the 'constituent' one. Never was the risk of spiritual asphyxia so threatening as today.

Absolutely urgent becomes the need today for an ecology of sense. We were believing we could make function our spiritual system in strict enclosure and buckled in schizoid autoproductive autonomy. We wanted to be masters and owners of the total system itself. Much more, masters and owners also of his hot source and of its cold well. Masters and owners thus of all his potential difference, that is of all its creative spiritual energy. It is impossible that immanence buckled into strict immanence can produce something else than tautological redundancy. Man needs more than man to become really human. He needs the Other one. He needs the great vertical Difference. He needs God.

The sense in the sense... There is always a broader sense - a more including sense - which carries our actual sense. One can also express that while distinguishing between the 'constituted' sense, that one which is currently and effectively mine or ours, and the 'constituting' sense, namely the dynamics which makes possible, which generates and which carries the constituted sense. The sense is not from nothing. Every sense is always given starting from a larger and more fundamental sense. The simple possibility of saying: “it is absurd” presupposes such an including possibility of sense.

The various levels of sense fit into each other. A 'why' is not necessarily an ultimate 'why'. It remains still and still the 'why' of 'why'. Each constituted sense lives thus by grace of a constituent sense. Trying to carry out the thought until its extreme end does not go without finally giving up in front of an ultimate including Sense. Which is this including? Nature? Chance? Necessity? Reason? God? Fundamentally each philosophy orbits around one of these absolute includings.

goto