Skip to main content

Javier Otaola, Heidegger and the Metaphysical boxes

It was a mild and pleasant autumn day in Bilbao and the unusual structure of the Guggenheim museum drew a strange silhouette against a background of emerald hills and mountains. Javier Otaola and I found ourselves on the second floor of the museum, in front of a sculpture by Jorge Oteiza entitled “Caja Metafísica por Conjunción de Dos Triedros- Homenaje a Leonardo”. The sculpture consists of a steel box with openings on both sides. A seemingly incomplete structure. While I was wondering what the hell this could mean, if anything, my host and friend Javier Otaola began to speak:


Metaphysical Box for the Conjunction of Two Triangles - Tribute to Leonardo. Jorge Oteiza

OTAOLA: As humans we are “Entities” conditioned by our physicality, by the limitations of time and space, we are ourselves and our circumstances as Ortega y Gasset said. But we are also “Beings”, potentiality, incompleteness. Look at this box, Darren…

ME: It has a definite basic structure but it is open…

OTAOLA: Correct. We are also open as human beings. Open to the possibility that our consciousness grants us. Human beings are incomplete and imperfect. This is both a curse and a blessing.

ME: Perhaps a curse… but a blessing?

OTAOLA: Consider this: a tiger is perfect in its “tigricity.” A tiger has no other possibility than to be a tiger in all its fullness. In that sense it is perfect. But it also lacks our capacity to develop, to create, to become something else.

ME: Is this a reference to Heidegger’s philosophy of Being?

OTAOLA: Yes! To understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our life into the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.” Heidegger uses what seems to be a strange and complicated language like “Dasein” or “being in the world” to talk about the self in order to eliminate all prejudices and assumptions. Our normal language is too problematic, subjective, full of prejudices and does not allow us to discuss the true essence of things. We are Beings in time and therefore Beings towards death. Precisely, knowing this gives us the need to be authentic, to build ourselves, to determine our options, thus opening ourselves to new possibilities.

ME: New possibilities that the tiger, despite its perfection, does not have…

OTAOLA: Correct!

ME: And returning to sculpture… what do you know about Oteiza? Do you think he would also be making the same reading of his work as you?

OTAOLA: Oteiza was one of the most important Basque sculptors of recent times. Oteiza was interested in emptiness and the emptiness that a sculpture creates in space. Emptiness organizes space and also creates space. Perhaps we could equate this to the possibilities offered to us by our being towards death and our being here: the opportunity to become.
ME: So, this is truly a message of hope. Even a philosophy of hope! We are bound by a set of circumstances but, like this metaphysical box, we are open to all kinds of possibilities!

OTAOLA: Yes! And each of us is unique since each of us is like this box but our openings and circumstances and our being in the world are totally different. We are conditioned as Entities but as Beings we are free. That is why I consider myself a joyful pessimist.

ME: A joyful pessimist?

OTAOLA: Not only do our defects and imperfections constitute our possibilities and openness, thus allowing for creativity and self-construction, but we must also understand pessimism as an attitude that can uniquely and necessarily lead to optimism. Pessimism is open to optimism, while optimism is subject to pessimism. That's why I prefer to be a cheerful pessimist. In this way we don't have to expect the worst, but we have to be prepared to face it, and when good things happen unexpectedly, we cheerfully lean towards optimism.

ME: This is definitely a very good policy. And it follows that our humanity, however flawed, is actually an empty space that we can create. In this way we can face our limitations despite them.

OTAOLA: Indeed. And not so bad! The possibilities are endless in both directions. Life must be lived: worse than dying is giving up on life. We must treasure and enjoy the good moments of conversation and work, of love and friendship. We are here to live life carefully, yes, but also with passion.
Writer, Freemason and solicitor Javier Otaola and the author of this blog, Bilbao, October 2024.

Suddenly, the Guggenheim had vanished and had become the backdrop for the most interesting of conversations. It was time for a glass of wine and a pintxo.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on Liber MMM

"Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot." Robert Anton Wilson Six months ago, seeking a new metaphysical model, I approached the IOT ( the Illuminates of Thanateros).  The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) is an international magical order formed in the early 1980s, officially around 1987, by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, key figures in the development of chaos magic. Emerging from the ideas in Carroll’s Liber Null and Sherwin’s writings in the late 1970s, the order took its name from “Thanatos” (death) and “Eros” (sex), representing the polar forces of magical energy and human experience. The IOT was created to promote chaos magic as a practical, results-oriented system stripped of dogma, emphasizing techniques such as sigil work, altered states, and belief as a tool to be adopted and discarded. Its objectives include fostering magical training and initiation within a struct...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Gods are Welcome

    He was a wise man who invented God. Plato It's not unusual for many people who are looking for a particular spiritual path to do so first by knocking on the door of mainstream, organised religion. After all, mainstream religions have achieved the impossible at least on one level: they have made the belief in the supernatural acceptable to an extent. Yes, they have sought this through unscrupulous means at times and by finding strength in numbers. The problem, of course, is that exclusive belief in one religious paradigm is at best hugely limiting. At worst, it's unadulterated fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, regardless of the particular flavour and packaging it comes in, is normally always a dangerous thing. Somehow, be it through the work of the crusaders or of  Buddhists killing Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or ISIS and their campaign  of terror in recent times, people always end up dying.  So, the most discerning spiritual se...
Post a Comment
Read more

Aeonics and the death of God

Mainstream religions are limiting by design. Limits are probably necessary for us humans but there is an implicit problem with religions: they resist change, by design, since they purport to stand for inmutable truths. I spent a long time trying to balance my former Christian faith and the impossible challenges of living in a global, enlightened and post Christian world. I had created my own metaphysical prison.  But of course, I came to realise that it the issue goes far beyond all that. We don't live in a post- Christian world. We live in a post- Theist world. This is to say, what we thought of as God, what we described as God in such intricate detail in all our different religions across time was merely a construct, a way of creating a metaphysical superstructure that would help us hold civilization together. But a construct isn't necessarily the truth. It is important to note that rejection of the different guises that we, as humans, have chosen to present our g...
Post a Comment
Read more