The Role of the Hermit.

The hermit is a conventional scapegoat. The categorization imposed upon a person allows the conventionally faithful their comfort in reality.

“…the act of insaturation has to provide the opportunity to encounter beings capable of worrying you. Beings whose ontological status is still open but are nevertheless capable of making you do something, of unsettling you…Beings that have that have their own resources.” (Bruno Latour. The Inquiry into Modes of Existence. c.2013. Harvard. Pg 161)

In the pervious post I indicated that I am not advocating or implying a withdraw that could indicate a hermit or an ascetic in the conventional sense. In fact, I go so far as to imply that there is no longer a possibility of such a place, such a status.

While I will at some point show how Latour operates along a particular vector, within a particular orientation upon objects, for now we can begin to see that the operator stays there, where she is ontologically, part in reality yet part not real, insaturated in the conventional assertion of ubiquity, omnipresence and omnipotence. We can begin to understand how I might frame reality as conventional and at that established in faith. For what is unsettling of insaturation is indeed the element of offense that allows for conventional faith to operate, for the conventional route to have credence; Latour says as much but indeed sees his orientation as the only viable route. (More on that later). 

What is still shoved into that outside and marginal (read: unimportant) position, called the hermit and the ascetic, is indeed that which remains to be heard.  But only by those who have ears….

“…Beings who-…keep on standing there, uneasy, at the crossing.”(Ibid. pg 162)