THE METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE IN FERNANDO GONZÁLEZ’ WORK

By Carlos Enrique Restrepo

Translated by Juan Felipe Cano

Conference declared for the Matacandelas Theater on March 21st, 2007, about the concept of metaphysics on the basis of El libro de los viajes o de las presencias [The book of trips or of presences] by Fernando Gonzalez.

First of all, in a very brief tour from Aristotle up to Fernando González, we will characterize the notion of metaphysics as a certain way of seeing in order to uncover the sense of presence. Secondly, following Heidegger, we will try to clarify the notion of metaphysics as an occupation that concerns man’s nature; there would be maybe a certain pathos, a suffering or pathology that is the one that moves man to metaphysics. And the third matter we will scarcely achieve to outline is the one of the trip.

In some way, metaphysics names philosophy itself. It can be partly said that the whole philosophy is metaphysics, at least Aristotle named it as primary philosophy. The word metaphysics was posterior to Aristotle; neither he nor the Greeks spoke about a metaphysics. This term was coined up by a classifier of his works to name a series of writings posterior to those which compose physics and philosophy of nature. At first, the term metaphysics was only used to name Aristotle’s writings posterior to those which approach these questions, but then it became word in common use to designate what Aristotle called primary philosophy, that is to say, a merely theoretical, merely speculative meditation which never relies on sensitive experience or on an empirical observation of the world, a type of meditation that in general terms philosophy recognized as the question of Being or the question about Being.

In this respect, I would like to talk about the notion of theory in Greek philosophy. Theory is translated as contemplation, it refers to the fact of seeing, to a certain way of seeing, to a seeing that does not correspond in any case to sensitive observation, but that is rather orientated to the suprasensible, which exceeds the area of the sensitive and corresponds to thought activity; a seeing that is a function, not of look, but of thought, of the logos. It seems to me that this question of seeing is strongly related to “presence” in Fernando González’ work. What is this Greeks’ seeing , what is this Greeks’ theorizing? We said that it escapes to the sensitive, it is rather a intelligible seeing, a seeing that points at the conceptual captation of something, and in its major generality this something is the question of Being. Greeks distinguished two things, something they called “entity,” which we can simply understand in terms of the things of the world or of the objects of the world, a bit in the sense of existence. They distinguished what is called “entities” with regard to “Being” in general, which is not visible like things or like entities. This one is the object of theory or of the asking of metaphysics understood as that way of seeing which is a matter of thought. Of every thing we say it “is”: “the tree is”, “the house is”, but Being does not reduce to this simple singular existence of things because Being, what the metaphysical seeing pretends to make visible, escapes to the singularity of objects, it is universal, it is something common to objects, it is a certain property or quality of objects, namely, the fact of being. “Being” is something general and empty; in this sense Being is metaphysical since it exceeds our simple captation of the world, the way in which we ordinarily apprehend the world.

The Greeks related this Being to presence. The experience they had of the world was that of seeing in it something else than things, and this something else —Being itself or Being in general— was what moved the théorein, the theorizing or the particular seeing that constituted metaphysics and, in a strict sense, philosophy. This one is the way in which Greek man comes out to the meeting of this presence that shines in things and that is beyond the same things.

In Fernando González’ work, in the former descriptions that he offers of Lucas de Ochoa, we find this form of contemplation that aims beyond the sensitive: “I saw him on a Monday, bewildered, standing on the sidewalk of Fabricio’s shop. The whole night and the whole morning it had drizzled. He was looking at the puddles, but without seeing them, seeing his world in them.”1 The presence that happens there, what this contemplator has before his eyes, is something different than what is merely present; the presence is a presence of something else, and it is what constitutes this peculiar way of seeing: “He was looking, but without seeing, at the buses and at the people who was passing by.” “Eureka! I am knowing or getting conscious now! Now I glimpse, since Presence is never seen.”2

When Aristotle spoke about this primary philosophy and about this contemplation that he attributes to thought, he also says that, unlike other sciences, metaphysics is theoretical insofar as it differs from practical knowledges; it is theoretical insofar as it is speculative, inasmuch as it rather uses concepts. Aristotle says that this particular behavior of man towards metaphysics, different from practical knowledges, took place when there were already solved all the immediate needs of life, when man did not have to labour at the occupations that imply work, the insurance of his subsistence, etc. To such an extent, in its form of “science,” metaphysics or philosophy could just arise when there was a social ordination which allowed that an aristocracy or a priestly caste existed and was kept owing to the action of the slaves’ work. The development of mathematics by Egyptians, for example, supposed the same way of social organization. In ancient Greece, philosophy was also peculiar of a certain aristocracy because it supposed that man did not have to do with the things of the world, with the world of need, but this particular way of seeing was demanding the time of theory, the time of contemplation, a kind of idleness, if you want. In Fernando González’ life and work there is this idleness, he is a kind of contemplator or flâneur in Baudelaire’s way, —in any case a wild metaphysician. Unlike the great idle ones of West as Baudelaire, his own is a metaphysics to the measure of Envigado in whose limits it seems like the world ends; his form of expression and his style reveals what was within reach of a philosophizing in a city like that, in the conditions of his time. A free wandering exists in it, the necessary vagrancy of the one who has time for those things for which nobody has time, and who can dedicate himself to see in them something else. That Aristotle was speaking about idleness as a necessary precondition of the theoretical life, as requirement for philosophizing, it seems to me that one can suspect it in the way of going over that this beholder has, this contemplator to whom Being lets its presence happen.

“He looked at the puddles, but without seeing them.” There are two different attitudes: to look and to see. He looked but without seeing, he looked at Being in the manner of pure presence. In one of Castaneda’s books, A separate reality, it is spoken  —though making perhaps an inverted use of the terms— about this difference between looking and seeing. Don Juan, the Indian master who teaches Castaneda, tells him that he looks at things but he does not have the gift of seeing, and Don Juan claims to Castaneda that this separate reality which he wants to announce him needs him to be able to leave the simple looking in order to see. In a sense, the metaphysician is the man who looks at a “hinterworld”, as Nietzsche calls it, a world behind the world; he is a man from Otraparte, to speak in Fernando González’ language; he belongs to the kind of those who inhabit or get across the finite as in a kind of nostalgia of eternity. It might probably be a metaphysician, it might probably be metaphysics: yearning for hinterworld.

Philosophy demands this behavior, this pathos, this attitude in which human being behaves no longer before things in the habitual way, this attitude by which he ceases to live in the ordinary way and in which objects he is concerned with are no longer those which constitute the general interest of people, but they place in a particular sphere, in an own world, like the delirious one, if it is wanted. Philosophy has always had this component of delirium and of form of hallucinatory existence; the one who deals with it has before himself other objects, his matter is other one different from that of the common man, something else is had in hands: it does not mind if it is called Being, the One, Nothingness, absolute Spirit, which remain always unknown for the common man. For this reason they are few the men who have to do with it, because it is not a matter of an ordinary interest.

But though in ancient Greece metaphysics could be completely identified with philosophy itself, as time passed it became only a discipline among others. Inasmuch as other objects arose for thought, metaphysics was limited to a particular kind of problems. Today philosophy is extremely diverse; nevertheless, what constituted the dominant object of the former metaphysics, the question about Being that escapes to the simple entities or what we have indicated with the term “presence,” continues having this character of the most general, speculative, theoretical asking, which does completely without experience, without ordinary sensibility, and which leads to concept as philosophical reality.

In the 20th century there appeared a type of philosophy inspired by Heidegger, which not without a sort of mannerism was known in France with the name of existentialism. Fernando González’ way of being a metaphysician is nearer to existentialism than to Aristotle’s classic understanding, of which in any case he preserves some of its essential features, as we could see. As time passed, metaphysics properly —what philosophers accept as such— turned into a too dogmatic thing, into a canonical and academic way of philosophizing, a scholastical and profesoral thing. So that, though it is probably not the case to identify completely González with existentialism, he coincides with this later in embodying a metaphysics that is nearer to experience, that has to do more immediately with life instead of getting lost in an “excess of theory.” González himself establishes this difference of his thought with regard to academic philosophy. His way of being a metaphysician is not carried out like the great theoretical ones of the classic systems, but in the wild way of Envigado, the city he dwells. Unlike the metaphysician in the Greek style and that one of the philosophical tradition who ends up doing a world of concepts, for Gonzalez it is not a question of a conceptual metaphysics directed to the formulation of a system. In contrast to Presence and Intimacy, “the concept is only the corpse of life.”3 By his own, Nietzsche says that there are more concepts than realities in the world, and such an unreality is the fatal destiny of  philosophy when it just obeys —as in Hegel’s— to the imperative of concept. With regard to this difference, González says: “Oh, my wizard life interrupted! Because I am properly neither novelist, nor essayist, nor philosopher (how disgusting is the conceptual philosophy!), nor erudite, but Wizard.”4 Wizard, but not philosopher. It is probably in relation with what we said about a peculiar manner of seeing. He does not become over in concepts, does not get lost in the infinite task of spinnig the spiderweb of reason.

In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced elements which implied this deep transformation of philosophy that ended up in existentialism. Something essential is at stake from the moment he proposed to leave the traditional definition of human being —by Aristotle— as “rational animal.” Unlike Aristotle, for Heidegger human being is “a being thrown into existence.” Similar to the episode of Genesis, this “thrown being” mentions a form of exiled existence, an existence that is circumscribed to a world that is revealed at the same time as inhospitable and unknown. In this sense, Heidegger introduces the fundamental understanding of humang being as “being-in-the-world,” as “being-there” or Dasein. With that, other questions appear there for Heidegger which derived in the mentioned existential attitude of philosophy, and principally, the need to think therefore about a disposition of mind, a particular affection as the necessary condition for philosophizing. This one is the second element I would like to develop here. For Heidegger, the human understanding of Being is determined by a state of mind that corresponds to this structure of Dasein, of the thrown being or “being-in-the-world.” This particular state of mind for philosophizing is angst.

Sartre wrote Nausea, in which there is an experience of Being, or rather of presence, out of this state of mind that he calls not “angst” but “nausea.” For Sartre, nausea is a state that happens to man without knowing from where nor why. I remember that in some passages the character Antoine Roquetín narrates the coming of this nausea almost from his foreboding; he accounts how nausea begins harassing him until dragging him to a becoming that hands him in to the full estrangement of things. It relates to the way seeing: things begin leaving to be familiar, begin to look like “differently;”utensils, instead of protecting human existence, become incomprehensible, a strangeness intervenes between the subject and his experience of objects, a distance that finally let us see this man’s condition of thrown into the world, provoked by the simple existence of what we use to call “things.” Nausea can be described in terms of the experience of the world as inhospitable; it bespeaks this character of exhibition, of thrown and finitude inherent to the world and to the fact that humang being is comprehended in the world. Nausea, as angst, reveals Being as Nothingness, a  frightening nothingness, horrifying, but serene at the same time, scarcely a rumor. In it, things interpellates us, let something indeterminate happen, an alienation, a loss of the dimension of the nearby and familiar that bewilder us in the unknown. Nausea is then this pathos, which Heidegger in his own terms —and also González— names “angst.”

Metaphysics takes in its favor the commotion, the fine rapture of angst. So, angst is revealed as the state of mind that moves on philosophizing. Nevertheless, it is necessary to observe that in an essay called What is metaphysics? Heidegger distinguishes angst from fear or dread because, according to his point of view, fear happens in relation to something specific, whereas angst puts us before the pure Being which is exactly experienced as Nothingness. Heidegger writes: “Angst does not allude to this fearful anxiety that so frequently goes with fear, a fear that appears with extreme facility. Angst is something fundamentally different from fear, which is always for the sake of a determinate thing. Angst, on the contrary, does not allow such similar state of confusion to appear, it is rather crossed by a very particular calmness. Angst, which is original, uses to be repressed in man. Angst is here. It is just asleep. Its breath vibrates permanently, crossing man completely. The original angst can wake up at any time in man. For such a thing it is not necessary that any extraordinary event wakes it up. The deep scope of its kingdom is situated in proportion with the smallness of what can manage to cause it.”

I believe this existential attitude derived from angst has its repercussions in Fernando González, who moreover knew Heidegger’s philosophy. In The book of trips or of presences permanent allusions exist to the opening of presence from angst. In fact, many times González names presence exactly “Néant,” Nothingness. For Heidegger, angst reveals that man is a “being-to-death.” For Fernando González, it is an opening of Nothingness. In any case, neither death nor Nothingness must be thought here negatively. Death, though it is always “in every case mine,” and though it precipitates to Nothingness, contains a commonness with everything that lives; it communicates or relates any singular existence insofar as all the finite beings go to it and on it any existence gets up. Additionally, Nothingness is for Gonzalez the Intimacy born out of Presence, and which he beautifully describes as experience of trip, or what is the same thing, experience of nudity: “Living is to become nude directing one’s nothingness. A trip, an indefinitely undressing. Looking for nothingness, becoming nothing, confessing and throwing the corpse of the own nothingness to men, and you are feeling terror, and the quake and the beatitude of the infinite intimacy, which is no longer nothing, but NO-THING, pure nudity.” “Intimacy. This is the promise! From it we come and in the trip to it there are many things, tragedies and beatitudes. The world is necessary to suffer it, to ponder and to understand it. It is not possible to see or to live the otherness but directing this life (there the trip is!).”5

About all this it would be necessary to conclude in Fernando González’ own words an understanding of metaphysics in which it dominates his experiencial sense and which he always denominates as living experience. Philosopher is this “living experiencer” of presence insofar as he assumes the secret, the persistent intimacy of things: “All this means that metaphysics is posible, not as conceptual knowledge, but as LIFE.”6 I think that, in this point of the definition out of the elements we have outlined, namely, the attitude of seeing, the pathos or state of mind and the sense of trip, we can have an idea of Fernando González’ thought, of his condition of metaphysical thinker.