Polt (2013:29-31) – a dação do ser requer participação

How is being given? Being (givenness) may be the result of repeated experiences of given beings. But this answer—the simplest and most plausible—raises the problem of how anything can be given in advance of a sense of givenness. Alternatively, one can hold that being is given through non-sensory perception (Husserl’s “categorial intuition”).¹ But perhaps what we grasp when we begin to “perceive” being is superficial. Being may be given, then, only through articulate discussion of some kind.²

If so, then being cannot be given without some activity on our part. In fact, there can be no giving without receiving, which is itself an activity. To put it most paradoxically, we could argue with Derrida that the gift is impossible. A gift must be free, gratuitous; it must also be received by its recipient. But the very act of receiving the gift is a basic form of acknowledgment, or gratitude; it thus constitutes some reciprocity, some payment for the gift. A gift paid for, however, is not a gift at all. The gift thus cancels itself out, because the gratitude it requires annuls the gratuity that defines it as a gift.³ We can dissolve this paradox if we remove the assumption that a gift must be completely gratuitous, and think of it instead as involving a surplus or imbalance. (30) Still, the paradox teaches us that there is no such thing as a completely passive “getting” of the given.⁴

If the givenness of being requires human activity, we may suspect that being stems exclusively from our activity. This approach obviates the problem of how we can be given anything through nonsensory means. Being may not be given at all until we give it to ourselves. But if being is a human creation, it is not a creation of any ordinary sort. If being were not given to us, we would not even exist as human beings. Our creation of being, then, would be an act of self-creation; it would also be an activity that we would have to perform. This is a strange sort of “activity,” but there are several possible models for it. There are cultural practices, such as language and tool use; if our understanding of being is like these (as Wittgensteinians might say), then it is culturally relative, but it is not subject to arbitrary individual choice. There are contingent psychological laws, such as preferring sweet to bitter; like these, the understanding of being might be universally human, or nearly so, but carry no necessity (as a Humean could argue). There is also the activity of mathematical thought, which carries necessity with it; perhaps (as a Kantian might hold) there is a similar necessity in our understanding of being.

Being, then, may be revealed by perception or discourse, or generated by our own activities, whether these activities are contingent or necessary. But whichever of these explanations we may choose, it was an emergency that first alerted us to givenness by bringing it into question. What if emergency were not only a stimulus for philosophical reflection, but also crucial to the very giving of being. Then moments of emergency would not only reveal a prior sense of givenness that we could now unfor-get, but would revitalize and transform this sense. Maybe we would never have a sense of givenness—and never be ourselves—if it were not for emergencies. Maybe without the opportunity to make being our own that is provided by ruptures in our familiar world, we could not return to that world and truly inhabit it. Maybe without emergency, we could never truly belong.

If so, then our starting point—immersion in a familiar whole—may be nothing but the effect of forgotten emergencies. Emergency generates being, opening a world—but then we lapse or relapse into this world. Once again, we take the given for granted. The un-settling emergency that made genuine settlement possible tends to be forgotten as we settle into our home and settle for the quotidian. Fighting against this lapse would mean allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to emergency—an emergency that is not simply (31) handed to us but which we must also seize; an event in which all being, including our own, would become urgent; an event in which we would fully be there; an event that would found belonging.