Gaze, Time, and Power: The Structure of Disclosure

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I propose expanding Heidegger’s phenomenological method and, instead of being and time, considering the triad of gaze-time-power.

These are not three separate concepts, but rather an attempt to describe more precisely how, in Heidegger’s language, the disclosure of being takes place. Gaze-time-power is something like an analogue of the Christian Trinity: God is strictly one, but reveals himself in three hypostases.

We can begin with basic phenomenological experience. We perceive the world through the sense organs. Let us conditionally call this gaze. Not only because vision has traditionally been considered the main way of perceiving the world, but also because gaze leaves its trace in language: by gaze we mean not only a visual image, but also a concept.

Gaze always exists in time — in the horizon of openness. Imagine darkness or white noise. In practice, both are indistinguishable for us. For the perception of a visual image, dynamics are necessary. It is precisely dynamics, that is, the analysis of the horizon of the possible, that makes a visual image meaningful for us. If we see a still life — a vase with fruit — we understand how the picture could change dynamically. The fruit can rot or be eaten, the vase can fall and break, be replaced by another one, and so on.

A visual image cannot be neutral; it is always connected with a certain concept. Gaze is always non-neutral and assembles the picture hierarchically — distinguishing the main from the secondary. Already in this sense, the hierarchical character of gaze is connected with power. If there is no context of use, no possible dynamics, no presumed history, then the object is invisible to us. For example, if we are not radio engineers, then radio components instead of apples will make the picture partly invisible: we can distinguish an apple from a pear, but part of the picture will become mere noise for us.

Power in this triad consists in the fact that our observation is not passive and determines not only the horizon of the possible, but also the horizon of actions. Our existence can be defined quite simply: we observe the world — gaze — in order to determine the future — time — and make a certain decision in order to change that future — power.

This is not unique to human beings. We can imagine some primitive organism feeling out the surrounding world from its inner darkness in order to decide where to crawl in search of food or where to flee from danger. However, such an organism would hardly distinguish its sense organs, strategy, objects, and possibilities. In its understanding, this would be a single mode of existence through which being is disclosed to it.

The triad gaze-time-power is, for me, a more understandable starting point than Heidegger’s disclosure/concealment of being, from which he builds his understanding of time. In my view, the triad is more operational, and a processual understanding of the world follows more naturally from it. Moreover, the triad already includes Heidegger’s openness and concealment.

This can be explained without excessive mysticism, by referring to Sun Tzu’s philosophy of war. War is the way of deception; deception is the way of war. This phrase states the essence of war almost directly: falsehood, that is, concealment, and war are practically one and the same.

War in the abstract sense is something very close to power. After all, power also implies a certain instability, a tension: power is always also the potential possibility of losing power itself. A more concrete everyday example can also be given: every form of management, including any business or production, is built on asymmetry. Business-power always, in one way or another, surveils and conceals part of its goals and possibilities; that is, it itself remains hidden. At the same time, the subordinate is maximally open.

Power consists not only in the gaze itself, but also in limiting the gaze of the subordinate. This removes the excessive mysticism of time as darkness. In my view, the scheme I have described says the same thing as Heidegger, but cuts off the murky interpretations.

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A significant indirect argument in favor of the idea that gaze, time, and power belong to the basic structures of human involvement in the world is that these are precisely the structures that are often affected in mental disturbances.

In Lem’s Solaris, a psychologist, in order to check whether he has gone mad, performs mathematical calculations and compares the results with the ship’s computer. It is unclear whether Lem himself considered this scene psychologically realistic, or whether he used it as an image of a rational, scientistic model of consciousness. But from the point of view of psychology, such a criterion seems doubtful.

The ability to calculate, by itself, does not yet guarantee the preservation of human involvement in the world. There are known cases in which people with features of the autistic spectrum, or with savant syndrome, are capable of performing complex calculations quickly and accurately, while at the same time having pronounced disturbances in other spheres of perception, communication, or life-orientation.

More revealing here are not disturbances of calculation, but disturbances of gaze, time, power, and meaningful involvement.

Gaze: a person may feel that someone is constantly and secretly observing them. The world ceases to be a neutral field of things and becomes a scene of another’s gaze.

Power: a person may feel that someone from outside is controlling them, inserting thoughts into them, giving them commands, or directing their actions. Their own agency is disturbed and is experienced as having been seized by an external force.

Time: the ability to freely enter into and withdraw from the flow of life is disturbed. In depersonalization or derealization, a person may experience themselves as detached from their own body, actions, and the surrounding world.

Obsessiveness: thought becomes stuck in a cycle. A person cannot voluntarily switch away, leave the repeating pattern, or stop the inner return of the same thing.

Meaning: things may cease to assemble themselves into an intelligible picture. A person sees the elements of the world, but no longer grasps their place, purpose, context, or living connection with possible action.

Therefore, madness reveals itself not only, and not even primarily, in an error of reasoning or in an incorrect calculation. More deeply, it manifests itself in the damage to those structures through which the world first becomes humanly accessible: gaze, time, power, and meaning.

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I’m with you on this. The present manifests as possibility, as something like the collision/divergence of possible futures. The subject as prejudice discloses risk and opportunity, foregrounding this and ignoring that.

It’s fascinating to consider intentional concealment on the part of the subject. Heidegger’s concealment is instead suffered by the subject. The subject is self-hidden in one case of usually unconsciously blind in the other.

I also find Sun Tzu’s deception is essence of war something like the center of his text. Control the nervous system of your enemy. That is efficiency. Steer armies with shaped breath or cunning marks on papers that are meant to be intercepted.

Preach openness. Practice concealment. Did you ever play Stratego ? Great game where bluff comes into play. Lure the enemy into an ambush or bomb.

To me “darkness” remains a great metaphor for the future. The subject’s blindness is the world for subject as dark. But deception is false light. Deception is mirage. The deceived subject runs not into darkness, for then he would be slow and cautious, but rather into a booby-trapped mirage.

On the other hand, we can imagine a deception that throws a false darkness over the otherwise obvious. If the point is to slow the subject down, then perhaps his enemy conceals what is simple in a noise that might as well be darkness.

In this context, a powerful gaze pierces the shroud of false complexity and is not hobbled by noise.

Hobbes tells us to look into the darkness of our own hearts.

Concerning the first, there is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs. But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce Teipsum, Read Thy Self: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himselfe, and considereth what he doth, when he does Think, Opine, Reason, Hope, Feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions. I say the similitude of Passions, which are the same in all men, Desire, Feare, Hope, &c; not the similitude or The Objects of the Passions, which are the things Desired, Feared, Hoped, &c: for these the constitution individuall, and particular education do so vary, and they are so easie to be kept from our knowledge, that the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designee sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to decypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himselfe a good or evill man.

But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him onely with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himselfe. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.
…
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verball discourse cannot do, farther than the Judgement shall approve of the Time, Place, and Persons.

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Pay attention to the metaphor of God here. God — obviously, the supreme Power — is often represented in different religions as an observer. He may be depicted as a great eye, or as seated on a throne in heaven, looking down upon the world.

And at the same time, God is hidden, dark, unknowable.

Time, in this sense, is what possesses absolute power over us. It is what, under the form of justice, eventually collects all debts.

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@FireOlogist I think you will definitely like it.

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May I ask you to express everything you have written in the form of an analytical formula with explanations, so that we can examine your intuition in detail?

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That would be very ambitious. Even Heidegger never finished Being and Time :slight_smile:

And here we are, in a sense, speaking about a project that would continue Heidegger, or at least move from a Heideggerian starting point.

For many months I have been trying to organize a set of insights into a coherent picture, but at the moment I still have only a constellation of intuitions united by a common theme. Perhaps others have thought in a similar direction as well.

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As I noted earlier in my conversation with @j_j , I’m impressed by the fact that people from all over the world are thinking about the same things. Yes, everyone uses different tools for description, but the dynamism of existence has apparently become so glaring for us that we can’t help but notice that the plugs of “eternal essences” have stopped working.

Most likely, it’s just the way things are these days…

Returning to the topic, I’ll say this. I’ve been wrestling with these questions for about two years now, and I’ve begun to make noticeable progress, firstly, thanks to constant debate with an opponent who fundamentally disagrees with me, and secondly, I’ve begun to try to express my opinions (as much as possible) using inequalities. And so it is here. I notice a fundamental similarity between your views and mine, but I would like to see an analytical expression. It’s just that lately it’s been a thrill and has forced me to move away from literature in order to express them precisely (I haven’t perfected it yet, though).

If it’s not too much trouble, give it a try!

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This slightly reminds me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where the place of contact obsessively manifested itself through several random people from all over the world :slight_smile:

If I could use clear logic here, I would. When I can’t, I tend to fall back into metaphors and a more poetic style.

If you are interested, I can later gather and publish the rest of my notes on this topic.

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Yes, I’m certainly interested in this. Moreover, I’ll share some of our joint findings:

𝐴𝑡𝑥 ≠𝐴𝑡𝑥+1

This inequality symbolizes fluidity. Let’s take A as a certain entity, but the problem is that in the next moment, A becomes something else. Then questions arise: is there even such a thing as A, outside the observer’s mind?

This seems to me to fit your intuitions very well.

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To be honest, from the outside this still looks a bit like your own internal language :slight_smile:

I can show, however, where I am trying to move with my own “trinity.” In my case there is a stronger departure from pure phenomenology, because gaze–time–power works not only phenomenologically, but also culturally and civilizationally.

The gaze can be separated from the individual human being and exist as a concept — and then it acquires its own supra-human power. For example, when we speak about the “influence of time,” we may mean several things at once: the fate of a people, some power or destiny leading it somewhere, but also culture, fashion, the current agenda — in other words, a certain gaze.

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I start from a processual view of the world. For me, a “thing” has no real meaning outside the context of interaction.

At the same time, the essence of time and interaction is that the result is never known with absolute precision. As soon as the result becomes completely certain, it already belongs to the past and is fixed as a thing — or, more precisely, as a trace of what has happened.

So for me, a thing does not change by itself, as an isolated object. It is always included in some process. Time is precisely what makes change possible. While the process is still unfolding, the result remains open. Once the process is over, we no longer have the living processual thing, but rather the trace left by what has taken place.

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Excellent, I share this view.

But now let’s go further and return to time within our approach. Traditionally, time is viewed as something objective. I’ve asked myself about time many times here on the forum. And I really don’t know what it is: an essence, a temporality, or perhaps a container in which the possible becomes such…

But what if time itself arises only in the act of participation? Look at modern physics and its claims of relativity (and so on about the influence of gravity).

From this, I conclude that perhaps time isn’t quite something that can be considered an ontological category.

Note that I’m not arguing with you, but rather testing my thoughts a little, and in a gentle manner.

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I agree that time is not something existing by itself.

That is precisely why, in my case, it is not time alone, but a certain new entity, an inseparable connection: gaze–time–power.

I do not believe in time as a river-like flow. For me, it is rather a statistical set of processes, which are not neutral, but attack, destroy, absorb, conceal, and create one another.

In one of my posts I gave examples. For instance, reading a book written a hundred years ago is a certain process which takes place almost in isolation from everything else in the world. We do not need to take into account the movement of all atoms in the galaxy over the last five thousand years in order to read a message somewhere on the wall of a forgotten cave.

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Yes, I roughly understood your perspective.

Thus, hypothetically, it’s not the essence that comes first, but the act (from which time then sparkles).

And here I always run into the following question from the substantialists: But then the act of what with what? If nothing existed, then what enters into the act?

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I agree, this is a rather delicate point.

It may turn out that in some kind of nothingness, processes arise out of nothing and then create objects. That sounds doubtful.

But perhaps one can try to make the following move: nothing arises by itself, but exists only in a context. Processes exist in the world and at the same time are this world.

One could say that this is just a certain trick. But let us take the modern understanding of physics. In the microworld, particles are quantized, and there are separate quanta of interaction. And at the same time, a particle cannot exist in isolation, but only in the context of a macro-system. After all, time and its scale are always relative to something.

If physicists agree to work with such a paradoxical scheme, why should we not also work with it? Perhaps this paradox will be clarified more precisely through time by someone else.

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Moreover, it turns out (according to modern physics) that the particles themselves don’t exist: they’re just fields interacting. There are no solid balls there.

But what’s curious is how these same physicists, while at the forefront of this field, still remain hostage to concepts like “time.” Moreover, having removed God, they replaced him with… the Big Bang.

I haven’t delved too deeply into the Big Bang yet, but I can already confidently say that the facts we can observe support the Big Bang only insofar as the interpreter’s perspective is predicated on it. And if we look through the lens of not a single, but multiple explosions, the same facts begin to confirm this theory…

Oh, this philosophy, and now physics!

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Physicists exist within the framework of the triad gaze–time–power called mathematics. In my view, mathematics is a special kind of philosophy — a concept that, in its own way, forms the world and sets the horizon of the possible. Modern physics is impossible without mathematics — it is the eyes and hands of physics. Therefore physics expresses itself through mathematical concepts, which are not neutral.

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So, I still have a ton of unresolved questions.

Sorry, we’ve gotten a bit off topic. Still, I insist: please present your approach analytically so we can offer some criticism.

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Sorry, I cannot express my ideas in a few formulas.

Rather, for now it is a set of intuitions that can be summarized as follows: wherever we find time, a concept/gaze, and power, we can try to analyze them through one another.

In a sense, this is an alternative to the post-structuralist approach — another branch stemming from Heidegger.