LETTER TO ZADIE SMITH

Dear Zadie: I have read your book Feel Free and I accept the challenge you propose at the end of the prologue: "It is impossible to fight for a freedom that we have forgotten how to identify." Language, the world, and the Self, in your opinion, are the three trembling legs that support the uncertain act of writing. I add that maybe they sustain the uncertain act of living. It is clear that none of these three legs properly belong to us, and we have no dominion over any of them. By the time we came into existence, language and the world were already there. We didn't choose them. I'm not thinking of "the world" in its sublime and unfathomable version, but of the small environment in which we grew up. We don't choose our language, or our parents, or our country, or our social status. That's the everyday world. On the other hand, the Self or ego, seems to be nothing more than the framework created by our conscious experience within such conditions, with the result of create an identity (being someone). The Self can be understood as the adjunct narrative of our lives, and, as such, it is in some ways scripted. However, everything that can be written, can be rewritten. I can't change the language or "that" world, but I can change the narrative I unfold about them and about myself. I felt a sense of serenity about your description of the French Market. This market seems to be out of time. You say, "When you're standing in the market you don't go to work, you don't go to school, and you don't wait for a bus. You don't go to the subway or buy basic necessities... You're suspended in an outdoor urban area that's evolved, specifically, to prevent people from doing." Effectively and strictly, there is nothing to be done there. All the trinkets on offer have a curious quality: that of significant-insignificance, which is an apparent oxymoron. Apparently, because sooner rather than later we become aware of the unity that underlies every contradiction. You write wrapped in nuances and these are immune to contradiction, because they slide into the dialectical modulation of what there is. Indeed, in this market you may or may not buy any of the cheeses, artificial flowers or whatever. Nothing there seems to be a real need for you. It means you're not attached to any of those objects, foods, or crafts. Then you are free. The Buddha says: attachment is the "great prison" of human beings. And that prison is the ego or Self, whose substance is, in the end, the web of our history of attachments and fears. Nonetheless, the attachments that Siddhartha Gautamá proposes are heard as a constriction and a paralysis of our possibilities as human beings. But will it be so? Should we detach?

A minimum reflection is therefore in order. What is detachment? Does detachment mean abandoning what we love (as the Buddha did with his father, wife, and son)? That would be a hasty conclusion. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that detachment is trying not to appropriate, not to possess, and not to use what we love. If we fail to do so, the result is the annihilation of the beloved. The value of things and people do not depend on us but on themselves. "My" daughter is not defined by the idea that she is "mine," but because she is herself. We can relate to people, things, and nature, but they all have their own structure, measure, and dignity. No matter how much someone says that the land on his farm belongs to him and puts his foot on the ground in a gesture of dominance, the planet, sooner or later, reminds him that this land is billions of years old, and that all property in this realm, as in others, is nothing more than a mirage of the ego. From there I can understand your words about the French Market: in it, we don't need to appropriate something. But that lack of ownership rarely happens in our culture. The tendency and temptation are to believe that freedom consists in choosing and acquiring something and owning it. But what usually happens is that instead of a profit, we have a loss. With ten pounds we can buy a hundred different things, but once we've bought one, the rest disappears, and the word "mine" pops up over that one. Nevertheless, doesn't this appropriation kill the freedom of what has been acquired, as happens with the plant torn from nature and inserted into the banished earth of a flowerpot? That's why it's so hard to be free. The impulse to possess excludes the possibility of being in the midst of the world only as part of it, and not as owners of something. Every possession decision in our lives reduces our freedom. We can share life with other human beings, with nature, and literally with the universe, but every time we try to possess something we are not in a loving relationship, but in a commodity activity. I sense the diaphanous freedom you felt in the middle of the French Market. There all the things around you were like a landscape that can be observed with a mixture of serenity, deference and gratitude. We are pleased with the mixture of magnificence and insignificance that defines the world and culture and that undoubtedly reflects us. The inactivity, this "not-doing" that you mention, as you know, has been one of the topics spread by Byung Chul Han, especially in his book Vita Contemplativa. This author, of Korean origin and German training, offers a curious mixture of oriental perfectionist brevity and the search for ontological stability, that point of reference on which all activity should be mounted. That is why Martin Heidegger dominates his thought and Byung Chul Han expresses it in short texts and sentences. What he seems to dismiss is the infinite rhetoric of Western European philosophy. On the other hand, and penetrating into his theses, the contemplative life is confused in him with the "meditative thought" that Heidegger opposes to the "calculating thinking" proper to technique (for an extension see the article "Technique" in this same journal). Byung Chul Han is waging them against the frenetic activity that characterizes our age. Using the Manichaeism that characterizes us in the West, he thinks that activity is opposed to non-activity. As we have pointed out, reflection is complicated when he states that inactivity is equivalent to contemplation and that he also makes it synonymous with meditation. However, I think they are different things. Heidegger does not use the expression "meditation" in a Buddhist sense. Heideggerian "meditative" thinking is the most perfect form of thought, whereas Buddhist meditation is the attempt to eliminate all thought. Contemplation, on the other hand, is a very different phenomenon. It does indeed originate from the Latin word contemplatio, which is a compound term meaning "shared temple." The temple is a topos, a limited place or piece of land on which the cult building is constructed. Effectively, ‘tem’ is to cut. It is then a clear, reserved and trimmed topos to look attentively at the magnificent spectacle offered by what is there. That's a temple. But is contemplation a non-doing, a mere passivity? If we understand all doing as "production" or "manufacture", evidently contemplation is not that. It is worth asking, then, dear Zadie, whether activity is only material production and manufacture. However, perceiving, feeling, thinking, or remembering are acts, meaning that they possess the actuality of the now. The act acknowledges the presence, but does not imply movement, fabrication, or concrete result of "things." From there it is understood that "theory" comes from the Greek ‘theorein’, which means "to look attentively". And, what is looked at is what there is as perceptual, aesthetic, emotional, abstract or ethical presence. Theory requires contemplation, i.e., temple and reverence. What you and Byung Chul Han tell us is that frantic doing is nothing more than an escape. About what? Of the anguish of our finitude? Or the anguish of the abysmal and immeasurable, which will never be ours? Be that as it may, hyperactivity, the heretical doing associated with a needy belief in development and growth, is an illusion of control impossible to reach.