Dear Tim,
yes, I find Ranulph's account to be useful and attractive.
As Popeye says: "I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam."
Which is another way of saying "being is the doing of being" except that what Popeye also says is:
"Where's the entrance to the exit?"
That is, at different moments of consciousness, it is BEING that knows itself coming and going (atemporal or multi-temporal in a world), whereas DOING is always a doing with the world and hence it is, like language, directional, sequential and consequential.
In an article I am currently working on I talk about doing The Continental (Fred and Ginger) which has the great lines:
It's something daring, The Continental,
A way of dancing that's really 'entre nous'.
It's very subtle, The Continental,
Because it does what you want it to do.
<http://www.reelclassics.com/Teams/Fred&Ginger/lyrics/continental-lyrics.htm>
Later versions change "entre nous" to "new" which is dumb but hey, never underestimate your audience.
The "between us" of "entre nous" is exactly what I am wanting to point to. DOING is always a "between us" - there is always an other in the doing - the world, an object, another person (real or imagined): Fred and Ginger are doing the being of the doing of The Continental.
BEING is the awareness that the "it" (the DOING, The Continental - the "entre nous") does "what you want it to do". That is, in the DOING there exist atemporal or multi-temporal moments of awareness of a "you" that is able to predict (have thoughts before speech) and able to pre-tend (bend towards before bending) such that plasticity is available to consciousness, as an awareness, prior to the delivery of a move in the dance. If existence precedes essence (Sartre) then here BEING precedes DOING.
The fact that the "you" in the song and the dance is the plural/singular is an extension of Winnicott's notion of the subject-object. That is, Fred can find Ginger as his subject-object and Ginger can find Fred as her subject-object and the outcome of this state of BEING, as a couple, is the dangerously sensual dance, The Continental.
One can DO couple without BEING a couple (just two people dancing together) but one cannot BE a couple (Fred and Ginger magic) without DOING couple. In the DOING of a BEING couple, BEING precedes DOING and hence, one might suggest, BEING is the primary condition of design.
Time for lunch.
cheers
keith
>>> Tim Smithers <[log in to unmask]> 04/05/13 10:17 AM >>>
As Ranulph says, being is the doing of being.
-- Tim
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