Benjamin Lobato

“the reader must him– or herself attend to experiencing simply this moment, now. What Hegel notes in his description of this experience is that the now is itself not experienced as an isolated instant, but is experienced as a passage: it is experienced as coming into being and passing away in a temporal flow. 10 But the notion of “passage” is more complex than the notion of “is” – it is becoming, a motion defined as “from … to,” and not just an unqualified immediacy of being. What we see here is that, if we try to describe experience simply in the terms of unqualified immediacy – if we use a simple term such as “is” or “now” or “here” – we under – represent the character of that experience, and the experience of the “now” itself reveals this. Our approach to receptiveness – our attempt to describe the experience without introducing an intervening interpretation – allows our object to reveal itself to us in such a way that it demonstrates the insufficiency of our own initial approach to it, demonstrating that it is becoming and not simply being as our initial apprehension implies. The project of phenomenology seems initially to demand a “hands off” approach, but, in enacting that project, we find out from the object that this attitude is inadequate to it. The “hands off” approach is in fact a tacit presumption that the object must be simple “being,” and does not allow the object to appear on its own terms as becoming: apprehending the object as becoming goes hand in hand with a transformation of perspective, a transformation in what one is prepared to recognize.”
― Stephen Houlgate, A Companion to Hegel