conceptual inquiry regarding meaning » concrete conditions » materiality
This node pertains to the material conditions of our lives. As biological beings, our genes and bodies fundamentally condition our experience, as does the physical environment in which we live. Questions under this node will invite us to explore the relationship between our embodiment and our experience.
The way our bodies affect our lives is most immediately apparent given our state of health, physical abilities, age, living conditions, etc. This node's basic most focus will therefore be on matters of diet & nutrition, access to clean water and nutritious foods, physical exercise, access to adequate healthcare, and so on. Already it's clear that L-phase nodes will overlap to a great extent. Access to clean water, nutrious foods, and adequate healthcare is already a social concern.
And the way our bodies affect our lives extends beyond basic health needs to the way we are perceived (given our bodily presentation) according to the norms of the social worlds we inhabit. If we live in a world where people who look like us are commonly conceived of as criminals, for example, how does this condition our experience? If we live in a world where people who look like us are commonly excluded from opportunities otherwise extended to others, how does this condition our experience? Moreover, given societal pressures, how are people that look like us expected to act? What possibilities are we expected to pursue? What roles are we expected to play? And how can these expectations be affected? Etc.
Reflections upon how certain aspects of technology condition our lives might also be included under this node. Global climate change, for example, is one way our technologies are changing Earth, our planet and home. The fact that we and our world are concretely interconnected is becoming all too clear in all the wrong ways. The ability of many of us to shelter behind screens in climate controlled rooms with indoor plumbing mustn't tempt us to overlook our fundamental dependence upon a stable global climate.
The D-node constitutes the limit of the holistic mode of attending involved in subjective intelligibility (Z of M). This mode of attending stretches out toward qualitative experience by broadening our attention. The limit to this is the point at which our attention is at its broadest. It's broadest in ways much deeper than we can consciously control. I can't control whether I'll be able to walk through that wall. My attention at that level is utterly open—that is, I have no choice but to receive the rude awakening of being unable to walk through the wall. What comes of the broadest mode of attention are experiences we simply bump up against. We have no choice but to be open to certain experiences—namely, those physiologically conditioned. This basic openness is what allows us to bump up against things in the first place. We bump because we're inseparably part of that materio-causal continuum we call physicality. To bump up against something means to encounter something impenetrable. The impenetrable limit of our qualitative attending is what we call materiality.
Additionally, our material/physiological needs mark the hard limit of our capabilities (Z in A). Physiological needs must be met before we can do anything at all. These needs are also that out of which we're motivated to ask what can I do? (Z) in the first place, where the question is, more precisely, what can I do to survive?
