4.
The argus-eyed lichens, expand and eo ipso complicate the concept of a synthetic-dispersive form of attention. Each eye covers one segment of the environment it sees in front of it. Consequently, all the eyes together create a collage of segments that complement each other, connect and assemble the general picture of things. The eyes are grouped in an irregular circular set. Each segment visualized by the eyes fits into the representation of the reality opposite them. Perhaps reality does not turn into a representation, but it is identified with it haptically, due to the immediate connection of the concrete with the mind that touches it. The eyes are simultaneously and simultaneously focused on the total representation; from a perspective that is divided into as many parts as there are eyes that cover the segments. The parts depend on the number of eyes that divide the representation in accordance with their quantity. But paradoxically, each segment turns into an individual perspective, regardless of the fact that the eyes cover the representation from the same angle. The segment constitutes a state of affairs that is complementary to the state of affairs in the whole representation. From the perspective of the representation, the segments are parts of a single perspective. But as solipsistic segments, the parts turn into independent perspectives, because they do not build on another state of affairs, but constitute their own, detached from external contexts. Even if we tear the segments technically from the performance and get to know them better per se in order to discover whether they are subtly connected to the representation, they acquire their own contexts that turn them from parts and segments into independent perspectives. We assume that this argument is sufficient to conclude that the eyes are focused on the representation from multiple unidirectional perspectives. By unidirectional perspectives we mean all segments that become contextually independent of the representation while at the same time retaining the formal angle from which they observe the representation.
The visual focus of the argus on the representation from multiple unidirectional perspectives contains another property that is opposite to it. The argus, seen as a complete plant, keeps the entire representation in focus thanks to the eyes, despite the fact that the eyes divide the representation into segments and contextually isolate them; conveniently, permanently or once and for all. But if we see the relationship between the representation (i.e. the specific environment) and the argus from the perspective of the eyes that observe it one by one and by themselves, and consequently pay attention to the representation, we will see that attention tends to be dispersed in the name of the impressions that it wants to encompass, get to know, contextualize and systematize. So, from the point of view of what happens to the representation while the eyes observe it, attention manifests itself in the form of multiple unidirectional perspectives. From the point of view, however, of how the eyes perceive the representation, attention has the opposite function. It disperses to retrieve the impressions. Before it succeeds in doing so, it takes over the impressions from the segments it wanders through in the overall picturesque organization or in the potential contextual whole.
These opposing views related to the structure of single attention, i.e. their ambitendential movements, are not intended to disorient attention and do not destroy insight into the representation. They move ambitendentiously to encompass and get to know the representation. But as they flow back into consciousness, they enable consciousness to sublimate the complex representation. They also help it to see the representation through the prism of consistent details. Dispersion helps us to spread out in all directions until we have encompassed the entire representation, no matter how complex it is. Dispersion makes attention flexible. It allows us to wander with our eyes over the representation without considering possible cause-and-effect relationships. But most one-way perspectives control dispersion. They do not introduce us to the inner world of the representation. If necessary, they force us to look at the details and develop in us the tendency to recognize consistent formations and syntheses. They present several segments simultaneously and encourage dispersion. But the segments are always relatively related. Therefore, most unidirectional perspectives highlight connections and relationships and curb our arbitrary walks around the representation. They help the mind to organize the segments according to the meanings and contexts (the synthesis of meanings) that we have recognized in the impressions. Thus, as we perceive the representation, we have the opportunity to observe its contents in general, aggregate, and individual terms.
We have reached the point where we must further deepen the idea of synthetic-dispersive attention. Dispersion and most of the same-directional perspectives have deepened this idea. But the idea will be deepened still further if we show how the three modes of impressions that attention reveals to consciousness cooperate.
The benefit of this attentional approach that deepens is more than twofold. This dynamic structure of attention allows us to navigate in space and, as we hinted at above, to correct past mistakes. At the same time, the example we will give will show us the greatest depths of the attentional approach. Let’s say we forgot a bag on a chair. The chair is located among a large number of identical chairs arranged at a common dining table. The positions of the chairs are relatively non-identical because each chair is surrounded by a circumstance. Specifically, behind it grows a circumstance that distinguishes its location from the locations of the other chairs. The circumstance behind it makes the location different. It distinguishes the chair from the other chairs by lending it its own identity. In order to remember which chair he left his bag on, the subject must imagine the surroundings of the chair, which are responsible for the chair acquiring an identity and standing out from the sea of identical segments. If the subject has perceived and memorized only the situation of leaving the bag on the chair, he will never remember exactly where he left the bag, unless he goes to look for it by immediately examining the surroundings. This means that he has trapped himself and his consciousness in fixation. But he has the freedom to act in due time and in advance in the right direction. Fixation is the central and most limited perspective. It encompasses only the bag that needs to be found on a particular chair with an identity merged with the monotonous circumstance of the dining table. Our own description of what encompasses the attention embodied in fixation is so complex that we wonder whether fixation is really as limited as it seems to us at first encounter with it.
The table, the chair with or without a bag, constitute a circumstance that falls within the framework of fixation. We perceive them at the same time as separate individual things (individually), as individuals that make up the general picture (generally), and as individuals that are gathered around each other in the field of the circumstance (collectively). In this sense, the fixed circumstance and its objects form a structure that lacks an object frame, in contrast to the bricks that make up the structure in the conditionally boundless object. Let us assume that on the table there are utensils and dishes that are repeated in an alternating order. They partially fall within the circumstance of fixation if, for example, our unidirectional perspectives encompass the faces of the chairs and what is in front of them and do not shoot the entire dining complex, from the front to the back. Because of this, the dining circumstance is formed by more than two types of relatively identically arranged objects. Whichever of the unidirectional perspectives that complement each other and create the framed living space we choose we will always pay attention to it in a synthetically dispersive way. In focus we will include all the objects and their positions. Fixation will try to catch the particulars that are important to it or that attract it. In this case, we cannot use the centralized-divided form of attention because we are not dealing with two types of objects that complement each other in a perfectly correct and horizontal order. The brick network branches out in all directions. But its high and stereotyped organization allows us to move in any direction consciously through perception to encounter a kind of relationship between two types of objects. The relationship simplifies the brick network, even when it extends to infinity.
We have discovered that fixation has its own circumstance composed of multiple objects that can be seen through the prism of the three modes of perception. If fixation has its own circumstance, then its own space is provided by the same-directional perspective. Furthermore, focus is equalized in fixation, since consciousness can give priority to some objects in the fixed circumstance over others. Common to all fixations whose circumstances and spaces-with-objects create perspectives seen from the same angle are the arrangement of chairs, table, and utensils. Dishes can be considered part of the internal circumstance of fixation that helps us conditionally remember where we left our bag and recognize the place once we find it or reach it. We need to catch which segment of the alternately repeated dishes reflects the location of the chair with the bag, and head towards it. But the alternating repetition of the same dishes is relatively diverse, diverse enough to confuse our inspectional accounts. From objects of focus, dishes as objects within the fixed circumstance, can turn into objects of fixation, if consciousness is directed towards them; and if it neglects the other objects that constitute the fixed circumstance. But the relative diversity of dishes and their alternating repetition help us to take a small step and to advance in the formation of an accurate orientational representation. Moreover, in the fixed circumstance the alternating repetition disappears. What remains is the configuration of dishes-objects inherent in the chosen unidirectional perspective.
We notice the fixed circumstance. With fixation we hunt down certain objects and locations in order to free them from the optical influence of the focus that reduces their expressions. The objects contained in the circumstance of fixation are not reduced as much as the objects in the circumstance of focus that encompasses the surroundings of the fixed circumstance. Fixation restrains the focus. It allows it to “blur” the life constellations of the circumstance by an iota, so that they equilibrate on the border between clarity and blur. All objects, locations and their common life spaces share this ambivalent characteristic. The surroundings of the fixed circumstance are radically blurred, but this does not mean that we cannot recognize what type of life constellation and what kind of object relations and configurations are involved. We see such and such objects, we recognize how they are located in space. Yet their constellation of life is an extremely blurred field that does not advance our keen premonitions. This phenomenon is doubled in imagination. Whenever we want to see clearly what we obviously imagine, we fail. But in the mental world, the consequences of moving away from the imagined object are the opposite of the consequences of moving away from the focus and the environment that it forms around the fixation. As we move away from the imagined object, its appearance crystallizes immanently, its concreteness acquires clearly depicted expressions. But at the same time, it seems to us that the object is woven from air. Once the environment of the focus, or part of it, has been transformed from a fixed circumstance into a focus that encompasses the environment of the fixation, its content is transformed into a relatively definite and extremely blurred whole. Whichever object in the fixed circumstantial area we grab with the fixation, the portion of the focus area that surrounds the object will turn into the fixed circumstantial area. Thus, each segment that was extremely blurred and relatively defined in the whole of the focus now becomes ambivalent, that is, half is blurred and half is clearly visible. This constitution of fixation and the way in which it illuminates the objects in its surroundings allows us to experience the objects in it as individual, generalized, and collective.
Fixation contains focus. But once fixation has taken over the focus and torn away part of its “territory,” focus as we knew it disappears, vanishing as a source of radical blurring. Focus compensates for the loss by specifically blurring the territory that fixation has abandoned. This optical reciprocity of focus and fixation is necessary if we are to find our way in life space and correct our wrong actions. The surroundings also become relative to fixation because it focuses on its own surroundings and the objects that are important to it. But in this way, the surroundings and their content lose their orientational value. They become equal to the other segments of life space and lose their separate identity. Therefore, we must get to know and remember the surroundings, at least that which is characteristic of the chair with the bag, in order to know exactly where to look. We cannot do this except by shifting the fixation, and transforming the blurred surroundings into a secondary circumstance; into a circumstance of the fixation and the chair with the bag. Focus illuminates the surroundings of the representation, that is, of the available concreteness, in order to provide consciousness with a relative insight into the state of things that do not bind us to ourselves. If consciousness can relatively perceive what kind of life space it is dealing with, it will be able to concentrate on the segments it needs. F1ixation is disorderly associative. It attempts to reconcile the clear with the obscure, even as it creates an ambivalent balance between them. They become defective tools and media of the skills of symbolic perception because fixation blocks recognition until it centralizes consciousness in the object we wish to know. Focus is dissociative in nature. It spreads everywhere along the parameter of the fixed circumstance and creates circular fields into which different segments of the life space that we perceive and observe as a representation enter. The further away the life space and its content are from the fixed circumstance, the more blurred the view. In a similar way, we grade the manifestations of objects and realities in the imagination, reducing and inducing them in a controlled manner, in order to extract the best from their symbolic presence.
5.
The relationship between fixation and focus, between the fixed circumstance and its surroundings, is the last and deepest phase of synthetic-dispersive attention. We can define the functional nature of focus and fixation differently. Focus assumes auxiliary orientations, gathers them into a consistent blurred field. Fixation exploits the given orientations and uses their trajectories to learn the appropriate role of objects in the life space. The latter, fixation, supports the system of the generalized, the individual and the collective by gathering objects into the surroundings of the narrower focus and making them relatively clear.
Unfortunately, Sarah completely neglects these structures and elements of attention. She is too busy trying to mechanically capture the possibilities of getting out of the situation. Running intensifies the mechanical observation and makes it less functional than it is in natura. Instead of truly observing, Sarah passes by the essential impressions. After a while, the monotonous action reduces the panic. Sarah stops. The whole sinks in foul agony. She cannot properly get angry due to fatigue and powerlessness. She nurtures angry moods, and with their help she tries to break down the walls that surround her. The walls do not respond. In this way, they emphasize their morbid role. They threaten to suffocate her, not the narrow space, but their cruel muteness. The muteness threatens as such. If we consider Sarah’s behavior from this point in the adventure, we will notice that she has tried to act to free herself from the situation in two extremely inarticulate ways. First, she hastily tried to find a way out by thinking that if she ran along the path she would find it. Now, she is hitting the walls even though she is “subconsciously aware” that she has no strength. Even if she had strength, the obscure circumstances have already killed her. Her movements are poorly thought out, and yet they try to satisfy the essence of action. The poor thoughtfulness reveals to us a new dimension of action. It is not just pure activity, an eternally restless elan vital that predetermines the setting of systematic goals. It is not an energy that takes place in itself, but also for itself, so that it reflects, or establishes, professional activities and narrow specializations. Action is also not just a solipsistic intentional operation. It is not satisfied with merely existing as a purposeful and active mental vital. It does not “boast” that it surpasses every goal and every procedure. We say, action is not either/or, and we have the right to say so confidently, because poorly conceived movement shows us how ambivalent action actually is in natura. Action is a constructive force that exists as something that sets goals and solves them at the same time. In systematic practice, it is difficult to determine which is first, the goal or the solution, because the solution is a goal and the goal manifests itself in the form of a solution. This standard allows poorly conceived movement. Movement is bad precisely because we hesitate between the solution we are looking for and the problem we cannot solve because we are still looking for the solution. Thus, action falls into the abyss of possibility, which is at the same time a decisive moment. Any radical transcendence of action, in the style of Minkowski2, ends in a dead end. We cannot bring this force to life if it does not arise in advance as a consequence of the simultaneous search for a solution and the resolution of problems through the search for a solution. Sarah is constantly inarticulate, although she changes her ways of acting, because she is being ground by the dialectical vortex of the solution as a goal that is set and the goal that should arise in the form of a solution. Sarah moves badly because she has not conceived the action and acts pointlessly because she has not articulated the movement. In order to conceive the action and move articulately, she needs to set a goal. And she acts pointlessly because she has not articulated the movement with the help of the solution that will contain the goal. Her main mistake is that she allows panic to block her rational abilities. Sarah is powerless because she elevates action above its dialectical nature through pathological conditions. Not only does she not know how to unite the goal and the solution in the concept and action, but she does not take them into account at all. She thinks that if she does something, if she calls upon this force, if she abuses its raw manifestation and exploits its otherness, she will find a way out. If nothing else, Sarah has revealed to us how meaningless the idea of an immanent action that we initiate in order to manifest ourselves as beings that have and show meaning is.
Even if she were to learn the dialectical concept of action, Sarah would not be able to implement it. This concept is not easily accessible. Like attention, it must pass through transformative filters. In fact, the stages of attention are part of the filters that consciousness must pass through in order to gain a true idea of action and its nature.
Sarah interrupts her futile activity and pauses to think for a moment. She “practices” a “protoplasmic” form of attention: she gathers attention into pure consciousness in order to simultaneously follow up on three modes of the hopeless situation. She actualizes the hopeless situation, retains the most vivid impressions, and expects to draw some lesson from them. Heidegger calls this contemporary manifestation of the hopeless situation “concern for the time we live in”3 and it is inherent in every human spirit to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how capable it is of delving into its own destiny. Attention gathers in consciousness to experience the complex destiny in a three-dimensional temporal way – as actualization from the aspect of the present, as retention from the aspect of the past, and as expectation from the aspect of the future. That and the concern for the time we live in are two faces of the same immersing. This attentional form hints at the essence of immersion and represents its initial structure.
In order to immerse we or the subject must unite attention with consciousness in order to imagine the acute outcomes in their synthetic field and in our life. This time, attention does not walk consciousness along the contents, along the trajectories, along the territory of vivid concreteness and along the vivid mental representation in order to reveal its identity secrets. Attention does not guide consciousness from a certain distance, but they turn into a psychomental functional, and together and simultaneously dive into the given representation. This sudden immersion of consciousness and attention into the representation gives the soul a powerful epiphanic impulse. It knows that there is something greater than what is given to it at the moment, but it can never discover it. The very thought of immersing increases awareness of the mysterious factualities that lurk around and subtly offer their meanings and exits. Therefore, Sarah, with the help of the primitive temporal structure of immersing, acquires a “sixth sense” and provides herself with access to what is most unobvious and present in her surroundings. In the place where she is, she thinks about her situation and rests temporarily, despairing because she has not solved the riddle of the infinite path. In the meantime, a voice comes to her and tells her that she is not investigating where she should, because if she had investigated properly, she would have found the way out by now. This criticism can also be understood as an attempt to confront Sarah with the fact that she has neglected the parodic arguses that symbolically show how she should search for things in the space of the challenge.
Sarah looks around, as if she had already adopted the attentional essence of the argus. Her mechanical thinking about the hopeless situation through superficial immersion in herself prompted her to remember that she should pay attention to the things around her and how she should pay attention. Consequently, the protoplasmic form of attention prompted Sarah to practice the synthetic-dispersive form. She abandoned the approach of endlessly wandering around the labyrinth to find a visible way out, just as consciousness abandoned the idea that it had to constantly reflect on everything in the representation without stopping. After performing this procedure, Sarah recognized the place where the voice came from and saw the object that addressed her. This alone means that Sarah began to pay more attention to the segments and their individualities. Therefore, she saw the worm without a problem. The primal immersion and synthetic-dispersive way of observing the surrounding atmosphere helped Sarah delve deeper. Their cause-and-effect relationship established a deeper connection between consciousness, attention and the environment in the operational field of reflection. The worm is the second archetypal figure that outlines the trajectories of development of enhanced immersion. The worm symbolizes the eternal, chaotic, pure and transcendent movement in the black abyss of primeval time. Also, its elongated figure represents passivity as such; that which lasts motionless regardless of whether it is a material or temporal entity. Length represents duration that is not tied to any being and does not depend on its volume. Duration discriminates аny volume and any movement on the surface of the volume that allows the temporal manifestations of objects and their implicit time metrics. The black depths of primeval time are like pure duration. They hide movements and time in a dense, all-encompassing and motionless substance. The worm moves constantly, twists and is repulsively restless. These movements symbolize the chaotic flow of primeval time in the pure duration and all scary phenomena that can outbreak from the depts of dark infinity.
Immersion creates the synthetic effect of primeval time and the black abyss that encompasses everything. As we delve into the identity or expression of the object and events, it seems to us that if we do not catch the impression in a short time, we will fall into the snake pit of infinite time. It will bite us slowly and mercilessly swallow the torn pieces. There we will suffer completely separated from being-in-the-world. Or if we are not afraid that time has come to catch us, if we are not afraid of the predatory time that we ourselves panicky invent and manically make available to ourselves, we feel ourselves gradually falling into the endless process of insight and consideration. Finally, our manic-panic feelings reappear and completely overwhelm and absorb us until we ourselves are transformed into pure astral duration. They mock us because we believed we could banish them from our cognitive life. Thus, pure movement and pure passivity, which are at the same time endless movements and infinite durations, establish the dynamics of immersion. They bring us into the cosmic expanses of the uncreated world.
If we seize the moment and manage to discover and capture the essential impressions, we emerge consciously to the surface. We emerge from the state of immersion as if it had never happened, even though the object we hold in memory is entirely covered with reflections that testify to its magnificent function. This is a consequence of the fact that immersion traps us in the essence of the object. It holds us there, or cyclically returns us if we have somehow gotten out and failed to stay there, until we obtain with our own strength what we desire. Hence, immersion is a dynamic correlate of memory. But memory uses dynamics, that is, it uses immersion as a bait, to rediscover and resymbolize the objects that immersion has already served and given to us. Sometimes the desired is an entity that hints to our intuition that we desire it, even though we are seeing it for the first time. Immersion places us in the essence of the object (or event) in order to elevate observation to consideration. Sarah observed while she considered the space of the challenge mechanically. But now, having deepened, begun to pay attention and “feel the texture” of the space, she began to consider. In this case, observation does not play the role of waiting for a pre-constituted process to yield some outcome. Here, observation is a bad twin of consideration; it is insufficient consideration. Observation does not serve in-depth attention; it undermines it in the name of the dynamic self-manifestations of the one who does not pay attention as he should due to his own dynamics.
In fact, immersion is a credible, detached action. It can take place, and always begins to take place, independently of whether it forces us to focus on a specific object or event, or manifests itself as a pervasive attentional function of consciousness that wants to call up or create within itself the representation it needs. Fichte made a catastrophic miscalculation when he identified action with the “I.” The I is related to passivity as such and to pure duration. It is not an inert entity in the sense of the possibility of potentially moving, but a static entity – it never moves. There is no action that is based solely on passivity and duration per se, or solely on perpetual motion. Movement, duration, and passivity are inherently interdependent. Duration connects movement and passivity and creates conditions under which movement manifests itself as an immobile element of passivity, and passivity manifests itself as a mobile element of movement. Proof that this is so, from the sphere of pure action, is the inherent dialectical unity of the goal and the solution. The goal is the general potential of the envisaged structure. The solution is a complex structure that meets the individual criteria set forth in the general potential. The goal presupposes the maneuvers of the solution. This means that it suffers the dynamic moment of resolution just as much as the dynamics of resolution depends on the passive assumptions in the goal. The pair solution/goal coincides by the nature of functioning with the triple pair movement/duration/passivity. Action and immersion are correlated because the pairs correspond functionally.
Action and immersion are never the same, although they are equal and inherently related. Immersion symbolizes the spirit of action, it is the most original action. The help it gives us in observing and considering the picturesque and objective environment anticipates the goal and the solution. The recognized essential impressions should encourage us to place them in the structure of the solution and to include them in the goal as its assumptions. Action collects its goal/solution pair and operates with it independently of immersion, although it uses immersion to enable the intellectual and material processes that belong to it naturally. Minkowski says that action can only manifest itself in a desolate environment, in an environment in which there are no objects and events4.
Such an atmosphere is created by immersion, which begins to act only in itself and only for itself. The initial immersion creates the desolate environment where impressions have yet to be reflected. It forces them to appear together with pure activity. In this initial phase of every action, action is a pure moment of immersion. Once impressions have appeared in the empty environment, observation, consideration, acquaintance and recognition of the identity of the represented thing gradually give way to goals, solutions and their products. In this way, action becomes independent of immersion. The emptiness inherent in the initial activity of immersion is not displaced from the field of pure action in order to separate it from immersion. It is an atmosphere in which the possibility and necessity of immersion and action being separated without being separated is pre-established. Immersion stimulates the processes of action. But after that it turns into a subsequent technical moment of consciousness that creates meaningful contents, means and products. Because of the latter, immersion cannot be separated from action, even when virtuoso habit gains the upper hand over our practices. The virtuoso habit indicates how much immersion has turned into a reflex of action introjected into our being.
6.
With the previous paragraph, we conclude the archetypal understanding of attention. Immersion is an act of intensified attention. We immerse ourselves in the object of interest as soon as we begin to observe the impression seriously and truly devote our cognitive abilities to it. The more we immerse ourselves in the object of interest, the more specific truths about itself it will reveal to us. Intuition will spontaneously squeeze them out of its pure being. And we can consider immersion from the perspective of attention. While we are attentive, we behave in accordance with two possible psychomental states. Either we are attentive constantly and without interruption, or we are attentive by stopping at one attentional phase. We stop immersion, as if in that phase of intensified immersion, attention will reveal to us some perspective of objectivity that cannot be intuitively discovered in the other phases. Moreover, attention is as constant as we are able to maintain ourselves in a state of immersion. As we immerse ourselves, and even when immersion is a cyclical energy that keeps consciousness in one phase of observing and considering the object of interest, we allow attention to function, regardless of whether its persistence lasts for a short or long time.
Immersion and action were inherently united in the atmosphere of pure movement. But the same gap created the possibility that they could be separated a priori and inseparably cooperate. In this way, action became more and more important, and immersion became less and less relevant, although equally influential. In the end, it seemed that we were only acting, while the truth was that we had aligned immersion with action in order to be both efficient and committed. We could act without immersion. But then the products of our action would be due to the reflex of routine accuracy that we had adopted while acquiring the fundamental habits necessary to perfect the work experience. Our minds would wander elsewhere and something else would become the object of our immersion, but the reflex of routine accuracy would smooth things out by itself. Or we will become too absorbed in work and will separate ourselves solipsistically from the surrounding being-in-the-world, including the mental. Therefore, we need to establish a balance between the awareness of work, the awareness of the surrounding being-in-the-world and the awareness of our being in the given conditions through immersion5. For our existence to be appropriate on the level of the work task, we need to align our behavior with systematic practice, and not act alongside it in an inappropriate way. So it is not entirely true that action cannot be detached from immersion and left only in the empty environment and its atmosphere. Practical action will become independent. But immersion will always be based on pure movement or pure proactivity that is potentially active. Immersion always strives to illuminate impressions. Impressions always serve us to make sense of them and apply them in some activity. Therefore, immersion is potentially active sui generis. Immersion that remains only in the empty environment and creates the atmosphere with potential activity, is absolutely connected with attention. Then, they inherently and synchronously shoot impressions and their structures. They focus on them without thinking about how they will use them as tools for action. With this, we also exhaust the empirical representation of attention that is not based on the experimental interpretation of archetypal symbols. The archetype associated with the first challenge in the maze was the subject of experimental interpretation until we were convinced that each symbolic segment has a deep and causal application in the symbolic description of attention. The experimental basis as an element of interpretation disappeared after the archetypal idea completely coincided with the symbolic object of interest.
There is another archetypal representation of attention from ancient Greek mythology. It represents the way in which attention exhausts its function and ceases to exist conditionally. We will briefly present the plot of the myth: Hera sends the many-eyed Argus to punish Io, Zeus’s mistress, for allowing Zeus to cheat on Hera with her. Zeus turns Io into a white cow. Argus learns that the cow is Io disguised as an animal, so he captures her. In the meantime, Zeus sends Hermes to free Io from slavery. Argus is a tireless supervisor. While one eye is resting, the other eyes monitor the captive and the entire environment. With various artistic and intellectual skills, Hermes manages to interest and put all of Argus’ eyes to sleep. After that, he executes him. Prospectively, the only thing that is unusual in this mythological story is the bizarre content of the event and its even stranger course. But once we discover the symbolic secrets hidden in this coded picture of things, we will be convinced of how powerful the imagination of the ancient Greeks was. This is not a story of sexual abundance, its loss and its restoration, but rather depicts the “life” path of attention until its death.
The relationship of Zeus and Io has nothing to do with their sexual adventure. Rather, it is hermeneutically transfigured and begins to symbolize the relationship between absolute and vivid abundance. The sexual relationship does not suggest that vivid abundance originates from an absolute source of life, but that abundance as an obvious, superficially perceived and unrecognized concreteness leaves an absolute impression. The essence of abundance as an absolute impression is reflected in the being of Zeus. Argus, i.e. attention, comes to capture Io because in the abundance that Io symbolizes it recognizes an essence that it must take receptively into account in order to utilize its perceptive potentials, together with the immediate impressions that constitute its content. Hera is an ancient mother-of-all. As such, she blesses every occurrence, including the occurrence of what attention will help consciousness to extract as a significant impression and future meaning. In this sense, Hera is the opponent of Zeus and Io. The emergence of perceived impressions abolishes the absolute state of picturesque abundance; it seeks to decompose it, then structure it, and thereby reduce and deabsolutize it. Just as Argus serves Hera, so attention serves the impressions that arise as elements of consciousness. Argus sets out to capture Io. Zeus finds out and transforms Io into a white cow. But with this transformation, Zeus does Argus a unwanted favor. Argus recognizes in the being of the white cow the goal he needs to seize, i.e. Io. How does Argus recognize the zoomorphic Io? Argus symbolizes attention and his expressed need to constantly hunt for interesting, necessary, and essential impressions in the overall changing environment. Therefore, his entire body is covered with eyes in the first place. The eyes are thrown onto his body like smallpox. The white cow symbolizes picturesque abundance seen from a perspective that transcends the state of absolute impression but does not abolish it. The cow itself symbolizes abundance. In the case of attention, abundance is identified with the essence of representations in general. The apparent concreteness is full of impressions that form a consistent existential abundance, similar to the content of the mythical story we are describing. The white color, or albino-genesis, is something that does not contain pigmentation. The white cow represents the vivid abundance that, despite being full of colorful and sumptuous impressions, leaves the impression of an entity without pigment. This means that in the first moment after attention touches the representation, or the moving image of the event: 1) it reduces the absolute impression because it prompts consciousness to notice that the representation (event) is full of attractive and unusual impressions. At the same time: 2) the impressions are pale and almost dead because consciousness does not know them and has yet to get to know them. In fact, the white color helps Argus to recognize Io more than the cow. The abundance directs him to the content, but the color encourages him to keep his attention on it. The strange color encourages him to grab it without fear of making a mistake like Ajax who was ashamed because he stole a simple unreasonable animal. If, however, he fails to accomplish the task, his shame will be less because in his case, a woman really turns into an animal. Imagination does not do this for lack of reason, but it will still pay a price for its mistake. However, all attention is riveted to such representations in which no boundary can be set between the absolute impression of the representation and the immediate impressions as interesting elements embedded in it. Trained attention is inevitably inclined to perceive and with great accuracy notes such representations whose predominant characteristic is the abundance of impressions and attractive contents. The predominant characteristics, in this case the no-pigment zone, force it to notice the state of the representation in which the absolute and the impressions merge into each other. Thus reducing the absolute impressiveness without abolishing the absolute state.
Argus, holds Io in bondage. She cannot escape him because while one eye is resting, the other is watching her vigilantly and comprehensively noticing the changes in her surroundings. The eyes that close their eyes to rest symbolize: the fixation that gives up the circumstance that it encompasses with its sensory bundles and the focus that is reestablished after the fixation leaves. The eyes that are open and spend the energy credit symbolically substitute the fixation that is riveted to the circumstance that interests it and observes whether and how the objects in it move. They prevent the intrusion of malicious forces, just as the fixation does not allow the wide focus to flood the fixation and suffocate it with the expansive field that blurs the view. While Io trembles before the incorruptible guardian, Hermes arrives, the god who sublimates the sciences and blesses new knowledge. He begins to put to sleep the terrible eyes that lurk like a disgusting infection on the body of the monster Argus. Some fall asleep one by one, some faster, others slower, others surrender to sleep in groups, and still others hardly give way. Hermes uses all his skills to stun and disable the eyes. After all the eyes have fallen into the power of the nightmare that will immediately overtake them, Hermes will kill Argus and free Io from his sensory clutches. This is how every reason that manages to make sense of impressions and place them in a general context deals with attention. With every creative success, reason abolishes, i.e. dissolves, the fixation inherent in the impression it exploits. Reason extinguishes fixations by the very fact that it makes sense of impressions. In the end, both fixations and impressions are transformed into structured meanings. Reason directs fixations and manipulates impressions to create an immortal cultural product. In the name of this non-symbolic function of reason, Hermes puts the eyes to sleep and takes over the impressions. After Hermes puts the eyes to sleep, only the helpless body remains, which is easily accessible and can be easily injured. Do not realized representations reject and alienate attention after the subject learns about them all that the intensified and manic immersion will lead to? Every attention, even the most profound, experiences the fate of Argus. Whatever the fate of the picturesque abundance stage-wise or “artistically” framed in the representation, it is again absolutized. Reason re-composes it in a new way, places it in different contexts and partially attributes new contents to the abundance. It reproduces it as a picturesque whole. Or it transcends its content in order to abstract it and use it with the help of other natural languages. Whatever the outcome of the exploitation of the picturesque contents and whatever transformation the abundance itself undergoes, it is reabsolutized. It turns into a self-sufficient complex entity that waits for some other attention, another reason and another consciousness to deconstruct its immediate impressions. Therefore, attention disappears, but abundance continues to exist regardless of having experienced several life adventures. The pictorial content, full of semantic allusions and mysterious impressions, restitutes its nature as if nothing had happened to it. Therefore, as much as Zeus works against attention, he also works for it and helps it to be realized. It can be said that the situation in which attention steals the represented abundance necessarily precedes any absolutist restitution. Zeus and Hera, Hermes and Argus establish an eternal return based on their symbolic essences and played roles. The center that sets the drama in motion is Io and her zoomorphic position.
This ancient mythological symbolism depicts the death of attention. With the death of attention comes the death of action. No matter how much we have perfected the reflex of routine accuracy, it has limited use. It is replaced by a machinal awareness of the things of the world. Machinal consciousness is a parody of attention. It turns attention into a function that sequences endlessly mental representations and associations related to the objects of the current environment together with the environment as such. Our attention must not be reborn in such a way. It must be aligned with the plans of the being-that-rushes-before-itself and be of immediate use to the being-at as it attempts to organize the objects, ideas, and plans it needs. Attention must economize its persistence, channel it, distribute it, and use it to co-establish with reason the structured plans of action, which cannot be such unless it is purposeful. Attention must support and encourage the directionality of action toward the goal; to enter into action as a being that is part of its instrumental aspects. Without such attention, action will be dead in an hour, and no habit, routine, or reflex will save it from death. Action is a bridge that connects the self-expression of the subject and the being-in-the-world that surrounds the subject from within and without. Attention is the most important supporting pillar that allows action to take on this homeostatic function.
- Рибо А., Творческое воображеніе, С.-Петербургъ, 1901, с. 11-17. ↩︎
- Минковски Э., Проживаемое время. Феноменологические и психопатологические исследования, Городец, Москва, 2018, с. 106-110. ↩︎
- Хайдеггер М., Бытие и время, „Наука“, Санкт Петербург, 2006, с. 406. ↩︎
- Минковски Э., Проживаемое время. Феноменологические и психопатологические исследования 109. ↩︎
- Self-coordinated reflection plays such a role in the genetic forms of social systems. It is supposed to save the superobject from a situation of unequal agonistic and apologetic relationship with the opponent. More on this in Genesis of Social Systems. ↩︎
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