Participatory exposure: what is visible is so because the invisible is stronger than the visible

The intelligible is something that is always there, whether one comprehends it or not. As Heraclitus says:

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος
αἰεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι
καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες
τὸ πρῶτον

“This Logos is always so,
yet human beings remain uncomprehending,
both before they hear it
and even after they have heard it for the first time.”

This Logos comes into the world through similarity - similia similibus attrahuntur.
This implies that there must be some predisposition, some prior affinity, if one is to be drawn towards what the intelligible discloses.

As Aristotle writes:

ἀλλὰ πεφυκόσι μὲν ἡμῖν δέξασθαι αὐτάς
(Ethica Nicomachea, 1103a)

“We are by nature predisposed to receive them.”

In the beginning, we are characterised by what William Desmond calls porosity. We are always already in contact with What has sense for us. Yet the majority - οἱ πολλοί - do not understand it, or are incapable of sensing it.

Heraclitus again expresses this with remarkable clarity:

τοῦ Ἡρακλειτείου μεμνῆσθαι …
καὶ ὅτι ᾧ μάλιστα διηνεκῶς ὁμιλοῦσι
(λόγῳ τῷ τὰ ὅλα διοικοῦντι),
τούτῳ διαφέρονται,
καὶ οἷς καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἐγκυροῦσι, ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ξένα φαίνεται

“One must remember the saying of Heraclitus:
although people associate most constantly
with that with which they are always in contact —
the Logos that governs all things —
they remain estranged from it;
and the things they encounter every day
appear foreign to them.”

Why are we open to the Logos? Because we are, in the most radical sense, a sheer ‘that-it-is’. We are positi: we are part of, and belong to, what we dwell within. We inhabit the same field of being as that which addresses us. For this reason, we remain open to whatever comes to us.

And we are open because we possess, at the most basic level of our being, the capacity to be stunned — this porosity of exposure.

The porosity that arises from this "being stunned" allows the invisible to become visible through proximity or adjacency. For Heraclitus says once more:

ἁρμονίη γὰρ ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων

“The invisible harmony is stronger than the visible one.”