We seem to have come to see the world as black and white. But there are greys and we are fast losing sight of them. Perhaps we have to come to terms with the limitations of this oversimplification of the world that we see as black and white. Maybe we have to consider how language opens us to our world. The language actually mediates our experience of the world. Often we think that we experience the world extra linguistically and express our experience through language. The word that stands between us and our experience of the world opens our access to the world. There does not seem to be extra-linguistic access to the world. This is why I think the Philosophy of yes or affirmation of Fredric Nietzsche as well as Jacques Derrida can open new vistas to experience and understand the world and express our understanding and experience.
Opening ourselves to the complexity of the mediation of language opens us to critical crossroads of semantic filiation as well as aporetic crossroads of double-bind or ambiguity. This suggests that our illusion of false mastery over the world is dissolved and we are greeted with the return of the mystery of the world. We are challenged to a humble yes saying to the rich unfolding of mystery that surrounds and embodies us. This means we have to give up black boxing reality into fixed either /or categories and hyphenate our either/or thinking . It is a challenge to keep both the poles of either/ or thinking under erasure or animated suspension. Such thinking takes us into what may be called chaosmotic mode wherein we may be enabled to leap into inventive thinking that otherwise is not possible through the enforcement of the principle of contradiction of binary logic. This means Derrida’s yes to both poles of our thinking intensifies possibilities of leaps in our thought.
A tensive indeterminacy of both the poles of either/or thinking is a result of a double yes that hyphenate both the poles of our habitual thought. The double yes put our thought into a mode of transgression and exceeds all our categories of thought. There is a critical force to this saying of double yes. It is a yes yes that says come to the other, the unthought. This points out hyphenation or yes yes opens the door to the coming of the other, the different and the novel.
We may also find another bind to the yes yes of Derrida. Even when we say no or we disagree we first say yes to the pre-given and then disagree. This means our yes is always presupposed even when we are under the sway of either/ or thinking. Even when we say no to the pre-given after saying yes to it, our saying no is a form of yes to our mind and our convictions. This indicates that our utterance of no is a yes to our mind. This is the second yes while the first yes is yes to the pre-given. Therefore, if we think deeply there is no yes and no. There is only yes and yes. All our thinking happens through innumerable yeses. Each of us thinks only through yes while we interpret our thinking with either/ or logic of Aristotle. This means we think yes and we become yes. We can only yes everything. Even when we say no, we are yessing to our deepest convictions and value.
We are yessing all the time. We are our yes. But subjecting ourselves to the binary logic that structures our either/ or thinking, we begin to see life as yes and no. Even when we operate under binary logic, we say yes to its rules that constrain our thinking. This is why we open new possibilities of thinking by putting our either/ or thinking under erasure. Our life is an absolute yes to everything good and bad. Hyphenation of our either-or thinking opens us to the coming of the other beyond our imaginative anticipation. It even opens us to our own self-destruction. We say yes to our own self-destruction. We can also say a yes of sabotage wherein our yes is merely one of pretension. At the same time, there is also a yes of negation. We live a yes of negation when we say no but fail to live our no. Maybe it is important that we begin to deeply securitize how yes works in our lives. It might open us to several ways that we live our yes even while we say no . we are living our yes to life and to ourselves. Maybe this insight might convert our yes to life, to ourselves into a yes to God, Humans and the Cosmos.
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