Prologue:
‘Who am I’ is the most difficult question yet posed to any human being. Not ‘what am I’, which bears several immediate responses from biology to sociology; not ‘how am I’, which can be answered by evolution and psychology alike; not ‘where am I’, which is a geographical and astronomical query, and not even ‘why am I’, which cannot be responded to unless and until the identity of the being in question is established. This ‘who’ is a moving target, changing over the life-course or yet from weekday to weekend. It is intensely personal, confrontational, intimate, subjective and liable to libelous label. It is something that simply being human does not directly address. Humanity is a ‘what’, an objective facticality of history and evolution both. It is also a cosmic fact, though an insignificant one, so we are assured – and is this not the beginning of the avoidance of the other question? – and it is, in the end, an ‘essence’ that does not alter itself in any serious manner over the generations. The basic constitution of the human species bears little resemblance to its much vaunted ‘humanity’, relatively present or absent, leaning towards the humane inhumane, aping its apical ancestry too closely or shunning it altogether. No, this ‘who’ must needs remain uncategorized in that way. And yet the question remains.
It is the kind of question that tests also the remains of
human faith, for to ask a question one must make the leap of faith that there
can in fact be at least a response, if not an outright answer. An explication,
an interpretation, if not an explanation or a certainty. In short, that there
is a way to understand the question,
of whatever character, and that in turn this understanding will contribute to
the Selbstverstandnis of selfhood.
The specific question of the ‘who-ness’ of beings involves us in a lengthy
journey through some of the shadows of modern thought. The stations of this
unholy book follow below, but though its finite goals are charred with the
flames of desire and the smoke of despair its absolute value is a new
humaneness from which humanity can only benefit. I ask the reader to tread this
fearsome sanctuary with me, to walk on the proverbial coals that linger like
the spilled blood of a murder, spreading still.
To do so, an examination of many of the key thoughts that
animate, or reanimate, the thread of discourse known loosely as ‘anti-humanism’
must be accomplished. But such an analysis must differ from the liberal
humanist stance that calls out anything that appears to deny the sovereign soul
inherited from godhead, lately truncated. No, decapitation leaves the head
intact. That it is parted from the body of works is not the final thing. It is
not fatal to thought, for thought, in its freedom and its interiority, needs
not the ability to speak its name. John the Baptist’s head spoke onward gifted
with divine force. The solitary head of the old god still nods sagely at us in
its afterlife. No, the mind of this our own artefact must be exhumed and
vivisected while it is still within mortal memory, while it speaks in its own
unhurried silence the language of the inexistent. It whispers without lips this
message: that you as a human being are
yet more than Being could ever be.
This is the call of lived time. Being retreats, yes, but
not merely in the presence of beings. More so than even the presence of others,
it is the Das Man of the social world at its least social and most sociable
that forces upon Being a self-recantation. But the response has ever been, ‘civilization
is a thin veneer, it is Eros which is the more serious mode of beinghood, that
and the thanatic.’ This is too simple, for the erotic life, as we shall see
below, is not only not the fullest life – only love is real, as the artist tells us – it is also not a rehearsal
for death. It is already death in
life, for it wishes the timeless, the non-conscious. This is why it can easily
be an addict. It commits life to live on in the penumbra of fuller being. We
will examine this problem in some detail. Along with this, ‘anti-history’
accompanies the so-called ‘anti-humanism’ as its own shadow selfhood. What then,
is it? There are various candidates: the unwritten, the prehistoric, the
structural – deep or mythic or naked or what-have-you – the phenomenological. One
thing is more certain; it is time bereft of time, which in turn will be
examined to further the sense that a rejection of an historical consciousness
that is effective in lived time poses the greatest ethical risk to a human
future. That said, after the dark reaches of a cloying and clasping
unadulterated Eros, we shall encounter a compendium of ethical implications to
understanding that ‘anti-humanism’ in fact is our singularly best hope for that
self-same future. Indeed, it may be the case that humanism anew, the topic of
the conclusion to this book, must rest solely upon the series of drastic
insights brought into the lighted space of beings
now, and not Being, that resolves the
challenge of all modern thought presents to its authors.
Being as it has Been
It must have been a primordial sensibility that gave up
the first clue to consciousness. Now forever beyond the obscure, so much so
that the prehistoric cannot include it in its wider ambit, that first moment wherein our ancestors
recognized themselves for what they just as suddenly were, that moment alone
stood to be repeated for a finite infinity of other moments. Not similar in
depth, to be sure, but alike in astonishment. The death of another who was to
that moment like oneself. That first internecine violence, wherein the
surviving proto-hominid stared starkly down at the unmoving eyes of his
would-be rival, all the way to Nuremberg and Hiroshima and beyond, repeats the
penumbra of that moment. It is the naked sword of vision, with the blade
bloodied by lived being, as if the numinosum of nakedness unveiled another
layer of flesh. What lies beneath what is already naked? Why is there an unconscious
when consciousness would seem more than enough? Why is there structure when
there is already grammar? Why is there an unsaid lurking behind all that is
spoken? Why the genotype, why the quanta? It is not so much the interior of
truth that gives it its sometimes sullen and sudden depths, but rather its
interiority.
Recently Being is not what it was. Its history had not
been questioned. If beings were historical, which had never been seriously
disputed, why not Being ‘itself’? At one hand lay the newly quantum reality, a
sub-structure so deep that the very term depth began to lose its meaning. It
was uncertain, not quite measurable, seemingly random. It was not a structure
so much as a void, full, not of things, but rather of itself. This must have been
mindful of the person who is nothing but arrogance. And was it not arrogant to
imagine that, for the first time, what underlay cosmos was its very opposite?
The back side of a god was the truer face of Truth. Yet at the other hand lay
infinity. Ordered, obeying the same laws no matter the billions of light years,
showing itself only in a minority – today we understand that a full two thirds
of the universe is made up of the furtive ‘dark energy’, for instance – and
stretching back to the most recent beginning of all things, of all realities.
If only we could see it! To glimpse creation is, at one level, to prove the
existence of God itself.
Though it may be ironic that beings seek to prove Being,
to excuse themselves, perhaps, to give them a reason that they are mere beings
and nothing more, or yet to give themselves a goal to which to aspire – all of
these and maybe more together circulate as modernity’s lifeblood – we as quanta
do live in a highly structured, fastidiously ordered social world that mimics
the wider cosmos. This worldly microcosmos is not of course the World which
worlds itself, as in Heidegger, but what it is defies the sense that at the
deepest level yet known, randomness and chaos could generate anything
meaningful at all. Yet it was up to ourselves not so much to discover this
‘relationship’, but in fact to give it meaning whatever might be the truth of
things. This is so because “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among
other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its
very Being, that Being is an issue
for it.” (Heidegger 1962:32 [1927], italics the text’s). Hence ‘Being
ontological’, as he puts it, comes before ontology, which is, at the core, a
study of itself as Being. Myself as a
being must be counted amongst this study, which is at the essence of
self-understanding. But the ‘as’ is here not a mere simile or even an analogy.
It is as-ness because beings are historical, as is the study thereof and
therein. Now, that said, does this imply that Being too is historical in its
ultimate character? Modern thought answers a resounding ‘yes’ to this question.
And this is where the trouble begins. Or rather, it is
the end of the beginning of the troubling ‘issue’ that human being, Dasein, has
for and in itself. It is both as this issue and it is also simply this issue;
it is this issue and it remains so. In
the lead-up text to Being and Time, Heidegger
asserts that “It is the history of the incapacity to pose the question of being
in a radically new way and to work out its first fundaments anew…” (1992:6
[1925]) that is ‘grounded’ in the very being of Dasein. Because I have an issue
with my being, I cannot radically formulate it to myself. Instead, I take an
interest in the time of beings,
whether that time is the one in which I live my actual life, or perhaps it is a
historical period deemed somehow ‘relevant’ to me personally or to the apparent
Zeitgeist in which I am ensconced,
etc. Thus the conception of time cannot only be an historical one and thence it
is directly related to the conception of Being that cannot be parsed from
beings, or can no longer be so parsed. And why is this, Heidegger asks us. Clearly, at this point and long after
in Heidegger’s work, phenomenology is the only manner in which or by which to
investigate such issues. It is radical where one needs radicality. It is of the
essence where one needs the essential. It is focused on the ‘beforehand-ness’
of beings that does not necessarily result in the pat response ‘Being’ as such.
Indeed, one might better use the term ‘beforehandedness’ to designate such
territory as may be located in the depths of primordial existence.
The first station along this way, whether we approach
from our own condition or imagine that we are first descrying it from the far
side to our own, the side of myth and magic, occurs with the earliest idealism
to which we are historically privy. That is to say, the earliest that does not
appear as mere myth itself: “Ever since Plato turned his back on the Athenian
democracy and set out his scheme for an ideal city, political philosophers had
been writing about politics in a way that systematically ignored the most
salient political features of human beings – that they are plural, that each of
them is capable of new perspectives and new actions, and that they will not fit
a tidy, predictable model unless these political capacities are crushed.”
(Canovan, in Arendt 1998:xii [1958]). This is the direct result of the ‘issue’
of Being amidst beings. Being is itself a perspective that, while apparently
unchanging, allows for and indeed may be said to provide a rationale for, the
mutability of beings as both culture and individual. One could extend the idea
of organismic evolution into culture, the ‘superorganic’, as Kroeber called it
in 1917, but it is not simply a matter of cultural ‘adaptation’ running by
itself. How does humanity adapt? Through a conscious effort on the part of each
of us. This consciousness is ‘effective’ in this sense long before it became
historical per se. Still later, “Man
became aware of consciousness itself; the fact of thought became itself an
object of thought.” (Jaspers 1960:598 [1948]). Yet we may suggest that the
‘issue’ of Being as beings, that being a being prefaces all such thought
‘about’ being in the way that one is
ontological before there is ontology and also is historical before there is
history – in the sense that one is aware of the passage of the temporal and not
necessarily that one has measured time in intervals or even seasons – means for
us that we also have become our own objects. Certainly we ‘use’ others and are
used by them in the way we might pick up an instrument. This may lead to a kind of aesthetics or make
itself aware of the ethical, or it may simply be an instrumentality. However it
may turn out for individuals in different periods of their singular lives, the
consciousness that I am part of something greater than myself – and this awareness must have been primordial
and presumably extends beyond and before the genus Homo – may have given rise to the incomparably more recent
distinction between being and Beings. For in social contract societies we do
not find the language for the one, only the all. Yet what we do discover is an acknowledgement of the
smaller and the larger and it is to this that we must cleave our historical
analysis of Being in the light of beings.
If this is a perennial puzzle, it is partly due to a
simple narcissism that refuses to undertake itself in that self-same light:
“All in all, man has become a riddle for himself. The elements of this riddle
are scattered in history, and in the present only those sovereign moments in a
diffuse state, contribute to a possible solution. The contribution comes from
within ourselves, but its objective existence is firmly established.” (Bataille
1991:232 [1976]). As in Durkheim, this induction could be reframed as an
inductivity, something ‘electric’ and thus something of the body as well as of
energy. Material and spirit, the answer to the riddle of ourselves is at once a
little cliché and Whitmanesque, but as well reaches outward, perhaps in an
equally stereotypical manner, into the atomic age. How could a series of
related species known only for its flint-knapping skills for over two million
years or more have ‘harnessed’, as the word is so used, the power of the atom?
The obvious links – tool-making, action at a distance in terms of injuring or
killing another whilst keeping oneself safe from harm (and how does nuclear war
do that, one wonders), the projection of consciousness into what is
non-conscious, the affirmation of cosmic evolution in that the same basic
material is used to construct both our bombs and our brains – work round the
riddle of the selfhood of humanity. ‘Harness’ is a term from the previous
epoch, when not only weapons of such magnitude could not be imagined – or was Revelations that very imagination writ
into the mythic bracket of divinity? – but the realm of the smallest, the
quanta, was something that once again, only angels could achieve. How many muons
fit on the head of a pin?
However scholastic the genesis of the riddle, any
response must take us out of the realm of the scholar and into that of thought
and thought unthought. Perhaps the beginnings of our historical response
occurred even before Plato: “According to Aristotle, Homer does not depict himself, as do many less talented
authors, but ‘…introduces a man, a woman, or any other character, and no one is
deprived of character, for everyone has one.’ (cited in Kristeva 1996:120
[1993]). Just below, it is ‘style that is the intermediary’ in the creation of
character or a character, and we are told, famously, that the ‘poet makes
himself into another god’ (ibid:122). Yes, because he is creating a new set of
myths to supplant the old – Homeric literature makes the transition between the
purely mythic murk of primordiality and introduces human action in the world,
or informal history (we await the arrival of Herodotus and Thucydides to
formalize this dynamic) – but more than this, the poet speaks for the rest of
us who remain would-be gods. She is more than Sophia, who imparts wisdom to
those in ignorance. Here, we are all possessed of the wisdom of the riddle. We
are all as is the Sphinx.
Yet ancient history is something we moderns have invented
for ourselves. By definition, classical authors were writing about recent
history, as we might write about modernity. For them, what is ancient for us
was nothing more than contemporary. Indeed, Homer represented both the
beginning and the end of another kind of time. Afterwards, the recent, before,
the ancient. It was left to us to understand that history is more seamless than
all of that, and this due to a new conception of experience: “One of the
conceptual achievements of the philosophy of the Enlightenment was enhancing
history into a general concept which became the condition of possible
experience and possible expectation.” (Koselleck 1985:200 [1969]). We become
historical beings as part of the riddle of pre-ontology, rather than beings
before whom history is set, as in the fates of the Greeks. Now fate rests in
the heart of myth, so ancient literature, especially drama but also narrative
that is based upon presumed events such as the Trojan War, at once brings myth
into the world as well as making myth more worldly. Though our recent
conception of agency is, in that very world, likely as limited as was the
Greek’s theoretical sense of existential action, we are much more concerned
that we in fact possess this agency and imagine that we can alter our destinies
inscribed in the arc of thrownness. This additional achievement of modern
thought rests in the human heart and as such, cannot stand with any ultimate
certainty vis-à-vis history as we can know it, let alone myth as we have
forsaken it. Even so, “…the theory in question conveys the humanist conviction
that man’s action on his environment and on himself can and must become
completely one with his knowledge of the environment and man…” (Canguilhem 1989:104
[1966]). Such a unity is only possible because of ‘existential a prioris’, as
Heidegger has investigated them. If for the enlightenment experience is itself
as form of knowledge – it may be unsystematic, illogical, even irrational, but
nevertheless it is known as is any
memory or feeling – then the next sensibility that is brought to bear upon
human experience is its obverse; that we cannot experience what we cannot know,
even if this knowledge is post hoc. Just so, an hermeneutic experience is said
to be one about which one had no prior knowledge, hence its ‘confrontation with
the tradition’ in the objective sense of discourse and the history of thought,
and its radicality to the subject who nonetheless experiences it. Perhaps ‘it’
may be loosened somewhat here to remind us that we, at first at least, do not
know what ‘it’ actually is that we are experiencing. This comes later, even if
this later is but momentary. Yet an hermeneutic experience, if it can exist as
stated, is still not the same thing as an irruptive one. This later breaks into
mundane experience and is radically alien to interpretation, forcing us to
engage in none other than the non-rational analogical processes that animate
myth and perhaps even fate.
It is so that such irruptions may in time be assimilated,
just as modern science claims that its territory can ever expand to take into
account objects or experiences that for now perhaps remain beyond its current
explanatory frameworks. But this is only the case because of the wider ambit of
the existential a prioris, something that phenomenology has provided for us.
These “…are the universals or forms that stand to the experience of each human being in the same manner that
the Kantian categories of the Understanding stand to the objects that we know.”
(Needleman 1963:27, italics the text’s). If the mind is not quite such an
object – insofar as it is a reification on the one hand, and insofar as we have
but partial knowledge of it itself, since indeed it is our own mind that must know itself – then existence takes from
the object world its deliberate and self-conscious objection to it. It is
through Dasein’s objection to the world into which it has been thrown
unannounced and involuntarily that it itself knows itself as its own Being. It
is not the Being of beings that partakes of the older metaphysics, but it
cleaves to itself the Being of the Understanding. It is this Verstehen that at once is nothing other
than Selbstverstandnis and
being-in-the-world. It is formed in the world of forms but it is not a form. It
is formal without necessarily becoming a formula. And more than this, it is always
forming and never set. As much as social institutions attempt to instill,
sometimes brutally, a set form, human beings overcome it. If they do not, and
of course there are examples of this as well, they can no longer truly be
referred to as being human: “…the word human
never denotes, as simpleminded people imagine, a stabilized position, but
rather an apparently precarious equilibrium that distinguishes the human
quality. The word man is always connected with an impossible combination of movements that destroy one another.”
(Bataille, op. cit:342, italics the text’s). The marriage of light and dark
occurs only through the human presence.
Yet we have persisted in mimicking the natural order in
our human relations. Perhaps this is what all children of the cosmos must do,
at least at first. It would be one of the many vital questions that would have
to asked of any extraterrestrial species, for instance; did their
self-understanding pass through this same childhood? Such questions are, for
the time being, moot, but it is important that they remain so. Not for any
objective purposes, of course, but solely so that we have enough time to ask
them, most seriously, of ourselves. Indeed, this may be a prerequisite to
contact, as many science fiction tales have implied.
However that side of things may be or may yet be, it is
more important to recognize the plural ‘nature’ of humanity to juxtapose it
with the two forms within which this living plaster is supposed to set. We are
not made of clay for nothing, to speak metaphorically, and a jar is meant to
hold something or other. It is a vessel, not only of the spirit, but of
knowledge and experience and finally, of existence. It can be shattered as can
the clay jar, but even in its shards it is recognizable as something which was what we are. No archaeology, either of the ground we tread upon or of the
phenomenological ground of beings, would be possible without this immediate
resonance, as well as of course our sudden sense of loss at beholding what had
been lost before us. This much is crucial, “…for the question as to who ‘we
human beings‘ actually are has never received less of an answer than it has in
our age, and today we stand again at the threshold of new queries with respect
to this we.” (Binswanger 1963:226,
italics the text’s). The ‘we-ness’ of humanity has also never been challenged
more seriously. It was one thing to deny it and yet not have the power to
destroy it, as almost the entirety of the historical epoch bears chief witness.
This often witless adumbration of the sameness ‘in spite of’ – why act upon it when one can merely state
it and appear noble? – carries us headlong into our own time wherein we now
deny it at our peril, collective and complete.
Such a ‘we’ as we are can be partly understood by noting that
Dasein is ‘alongside’ other things instead of in fact being them: “Being-in-the-world has always expressed itself, and as being alongside entitiesencountered
within-the-world, it constantly expresses itself
in addressing to the very object of its concern and discussing it.” (Heidegger
1962:458 [1927]), italics the text’s). Even if this is ‘grounded’ in the sense
of time, in temporality, as Heidegger
puts it, the first thing one actually addresses is the being-otherness of the
entity in question. We do not in fact immediately nor instantly know, even if
we are ‘constantly’ expressing ourselves, if this otherness is an other to
self, an object, a force of nature or culture or both, etc. So a ‘concernful
reckoning up’ of these possibilities into relative plausibilities (op. cit.) –
in no manner within-this-world do we attempt to assign numeric ‘odds’ to such
encounters during this process – takes place. What can be said of this process
is that it at once ‘expresses itself’, as Heidegger notes more than once in
these passages, but that it also ‘reckons’, pronounces a kind of always
penultimate judgment on these
encounters, rather than upon them.
The ‘upon’ is more final, perhaps even fatal, in such a context, and it closes
Dasein off from the world within-which it must encounter itself and express
itself. Such otherness as there may be – and it is constant in itself and it also expresses itself – begins amorphously. For instance, Arendt speaks of Marx’s
‘labor creating man and labor’, in other words, itself (op. cit:86), or that
products, commodities or no, become independent of and alien to human life
(ibid:89). So here we have two omnipresent examples of the encounter with
otherness in modern society; the forces by which labor transforms humans and
the force by which that same labor transforms the world. The results are, at
best, mixed. How do we express the ‘itself ‘of Dasein under such conditions? How
does the world now world itself under the grind of capital? What kind of
character does the individual Dasein take on in order to avoid the distraction
of objectified expression, which may still be self-expression if selfhood is
itself a commodity, which it often appears to be or to have become? But it is
self-expression without self-understanding: “Hypertrophied and giant consumers
of their time and other people’s time, these characters are endowed with a
symbolic value after they reach a temporality superior to that of the phenomena
– and indistinguishable from the dynamic of Being.” (Kristeva, op. cit:323). Only
after they have reached this ‘superior’ temporality – contrast this with the
drive to attain merely a superior tempo
in all things – then there is a sudden upshift of the dialectical variety.
Something is conserved or bracketed without being bracketed out. But is it not
this very leap that makes for a disconnect? We go from what is not even Dasein
all the way to Being, as if we were subject to an objective enlightenment of a
more Eastern sensibility. What is overleapt is ‘man’ itself.
We know from Nietzsche’s famous caution that Man cannot
be so overleapt, and one must rather become a bridge to the superior form. What
life looks like from this side of the existential chasm is defined by not only
distractions that are calculated to decoy, but also by the simple detail of
living on. The casual expression that references the devil, who is to be found
in such details, speaks to our sense that we can know an other’s scheme.
Calculated distractions are just that, and betray themselves when we return to
what passes for mundanity, as when we attend an evening entertainment event and
then go back to work the next day. But the details of the quotidian seem to be
part of the very fabric of what it means to live day to day. We are attentive
to them because we think them necessary or at least, unavoidable. Even so, and
however their numbers, we are enthralled to them, and sometimes by them as
well: “In the view that defines us as modern, there are an infinite number of
details. Photographs are details. Therefore, photographs seem like life. To be
modern is to live, entranced, by the savage autonomy of detail.” (Sontag, op.
cit:126). ‘Stills’, as they are sometimes still called, capture a reality that
in fact was real for so momentary an instant that it tends toward the irreal,
as if it called into being a Being, placed essence into existence, made the
phenomenal noumenal. Such an image contradicts itself. It isn’t real, but it
exposes a level of reality that cannot be noted in the flux of either tempo or
temporality. Is it the ‘superior temporality’ we seek or is it only its
‘character’? No, it is neither, we contemporary skeptics state. It is only an
image of what occurred and more than that, what partially occurred,. What
actually occurred can only be captured in a film – ‘rolling stock’ – and never
a still. This skeptical sensibility is also of our own time, very much guiding
the tempo of our temporality or very much trying to do so. Nietzsche’s friend,
the historian Jacob Burkhardt, “…places it at the origin of modernity, in that
‘ontological’ scepticism inherent in the incessant change of all human
institutions.” (Moretti 1987:140). Why should change ‘itself’ not be responded
to by an essential skepticism? Are we reacting then to this or that change or
to the wider sense that change is what we are? At the same time, why should we
react this way if it were not for a sense that we are both singular – how dare
I change or be forced to change when I am one
thing? – or at the very least, if not singular, are yet sovereign – I can
command change, but only the changes I myself want and seek. Skepticism, that
hallmark of modernity – though it emerges in Classical Greece and then
flourishes in the Hellenistic period when the Alexandrian empire brought home
to that small group of city-states the wider relativism and relevance of the
known world – must ultimately be turned against the selfhood of the self. In
fact I am not one thing, we drily note, in fact I cannot control much of what
occurs. Much of what occurs, occurs to
me, and not because of me.
———————————————————————————————
If we make a preliminary response to the question ‘who am
I?’ by simply saying ‘I am change’, then is it the case that this
being-in-the-world is, by definition, change ‘embodied’ or am I the very body
of change in an otherwise unchanging world? By this, of course, we do not mean
the world of nature or the worlds nature has created by and for itself, but
rather the world in which we find ourselves thrown. There would be no change in
that world without us mutable beings
making and remaking it, one might argue: “…if existence is definitive for
Dasein’s Being and if its essence is constituted in part by
potentiality-for-Being, then, as long as Dasein exists, it must in each case,
as such a potentiality, not yet be
something.” (Heidegger 1962:276 [1927], italics the text’s). This appears so
simple that we want to simply nod our heads at it in fulsome agreement. But the
implication of not yet being anything
at any one moment only strikes us more deeply when we maintain the notion that
we are this or that, even that we are
change ‘itself’ or at least, embody it. Later on, Heidegger notes that
anticipation must therefore take in the ‘whole of Dasein in advance’, the
possibility of existing in this entire potentiality, even though we cannot
exhaust possibility in the existential sense (op. cit:309). But why cannot we
be something and still ‘not yet be’ something else? Why does the not-yetness of
our Dasein, its forward-looking, anxiety and concernfulness as Sorgeheit exclude the being of something
or other for the time being? Its seems, on the face of it, an overstatement to
decline the being of A because we are not, or not yet, or never, the being of
B. This appears reasonable, but we are also not yet grasping the fuller meaning
of potentiality. Even in being A we are aware that A could be different, could
be more than it in fact is for us. B is not of immediate interest unless we
ourselves have given up any aspiration to be the more of what we already
imagine we are. And it is this, more than the world, that disallows one to
complete one’s being in the wider existential sense whilst existing, as
Heidegger is often wont to point out, as well as in the more local sense of not
‘reaching one’s potential’ to use a casual phrase. We say more than we know in
this case. It is an admonition often directed at children but also at those who
have ‘given up’ before they had, in our eyes at least, fully tried to become
this other, better, version of simply A.
We have, in a word, taken over the divinely inspired
goal-oriented and above all, finished state of being to which worldly and
mortal life can aspire. We know we are unfinished beings, but instead of being finished by another force and in another
space, we are simply completed by
death. In modernity, completion is judged the only possible result of
potentiality. One never finishes
anything, let alone oneself: “A previously divine teleology thus encounters the
ambiguity of human design, as can be shown in the ambivalence of the concept of
progress, which must continually prove itself to be both finite and infinite if
it is to escape the relapse into the naturalistic and spatial sense it earlier
embodied.” (Koselleck 1985:104 [1969]). As in the more formal difference
between a discrete and finite distribution such as the binomial curve under
which one can make predictions based on series probability, and the infinite
and continuous curve of actual data in the natural world, a completely human sense of history understands the
finite as itself, yes, but also conceives the infinite as a God. It is this
latter which needs to be brought into the human ambit. There is a role
reversal, if you will, for the more recent historic period agrarian gods cleaved
themselves to a human interest. They initiated history whilst we actuated it,
and continue to do so. Now, humans must have an interest in Godhead, to fill
both a power vacuum but also a symbolic space, as if the ‘horror vacui’ of the
Greeks had shown up our finiteness for what it actually was.
If a relapse was to be avoided one had to throw oneself
into the mix, as it were. Dasein’s thrownness, its projection, always had a
certain sense of regret about it. Yet philosophy became even more necessary to
our sense of selfhood, as well as science. The first now represented the
thought that emanated from the only form of consciousness now indeed understood
as understandable. The second the fruits of that conscious, and often
self-conscious, labor. Certainly, “…it was at least as decisive that man began
to consider himself part and parcel of the two superhuman, all-encompassing
processes of nature and history, both of which seemed to doomed to an infinite
progress without ever reaching any inherent telos
or approaching any preordained idea.” (Arendt, op. cit:307). Yet we have found,
rather to our collective chagrin, that inserting ourselves into these processes
– in the Victorian period, as their summa
cum laude, in our own time, as their reticent and often incompetent
stewards – that this not only vouchsafed nothing with regard to either a final
destiny or an ultimate end but in fact guaranteed that Telos would forever be
banished from both the historical and the cosmic mindset. Rather, we have
witnessed a sense that time has been, as Koselleck puts it, ‘temporalized’.
This Verzeitlichung, leads into a
kind of flux, which exceeds the boundaries of the previous era’s sense of what
constituted a ‘period’, as in that suggested by art history or archaeology, for
instance, “…at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration
which characterizes modernity.” (Koselleck, op. cit:5). Even the use of the
term ‘era’ should provide a caution. Indeed, we can periodize the
pre-temporalized history in a manner which no longer cleaves to our own. Just
as that era’s Gods possessed, and were possessed by, a human interest – this
defines them in the same way that their predecessors were defined by their lack
of interest or even their outright enmity towards humanity – the sign
transcendent of time gave that era its very form. Without such a position,
without a supra-Godelian viewpoint, history and time become the same thing.
Yet reason remains. Used or no, the defining character of
our own humanity must somehow assume, or at the very least, presume to assume,
the position vacated by the sign of the transcendent. So “Only now have we
established ourselves as ‘universal’ beings, as creatures who are terrestrial
not by nature or essence but only by the condition of being alive, and who
therefore by virtue of reasoning can overcome this condition not in mere
speculation but in actual fact.” (Arendt, op. cit:263). Here we do not take
Arendt as suggesting we overcome our lot as living beings per se – though of course much more recently this has been in fact
the drive to construct artificial vehicles to house our intelligence, including
our reason; what then would be the
reason that is divorced from life, one might ask? – but rather those conditions
peculiar to our own time. It is, subtly and almost silently, a revolutionary
statement. Relative reference points, specific purposes, finite goal-oriented
actions, and most indubitably characterizing our own era, the equally
centerless value systems which conflict with one another all over the globe, all
of this is the life-condition with which Dasein is faced. Though back-dropped
by an older evolutionary process, the resonance of which might be seen in both
dreams – falling or being chased motifs, for instance – or the semi-conscious
awareness that gives us tingles when in the presence of either the profoundly
sublime or the profoundly dangerous – the elevation experienced with great
works of art or the unreasoning shudder in the face of what could still be
called evil – our present-day life-condition is apparently more or less
controlled only by ourselves. It is now old hat to recite the losses incurred
from geocentrism to heliocentrism though in 1958 it was very much of the
moment, given Arendt’s own early reference to Sputnik etc. This ‘drama’ of
modernity is more than mere spectacle on the objective side, more than mere
theater on that subjective. It is nothing less than the elevation of originally
organismic evolution, in spite of it being also sometimes nothing more than the
degradation of the same: “…we must envisage the transition from animal to man
as a drama, which we can take as having lasted and as having had ups and downs,
but whose unity we must grant.” (Bataille, op. cit:73). Yes, we can never know
what actually occurred, there, on the ground, some seven or so millions of
years ago. It has been said before now that palaeoarchaeology and cosmology are
two arcs of the same circles, closing in upon one another and closing round the
compass at which the center stands humanity. But no matter how detailed the
fossil record and no matter how fine our optics, so far creation, that cosmic
and anthropic both, has eluded us.
How could it not have? The very concept hails from the
previous metaphysics. To imagine we can arrest what is essentially a ‘divine’
moment through technological means alone marks us as just as essentially
arrogant, if not worse. But there is another level of technocratic means and
ends which affects us much more personally. The individual, politically and
morally part of a group, yet ethically and existentially solo, at once human and
a human being, the latter enveloped
in the task of Dasein-as-it-is, is marked by our sense that creation and
construction can be made into the same thing: “A paradox within a paradox is
generated: the problem of uniqueness replaces the unique person, and the former
is itself typified. The formula: ‘Treat each person as a unique individual’
contains its own refutation.” (Natanson 1974:258). This ‘obversion’, so to
speak, forces each of us in daily life to self-typify. The common-place
question ‘what do you do?’, which is meant to be read as concerning what one
does for a living, tends to take the place of ‘who are you?’, which is our
original question. Certainly the former is more easily answered. To be fair, it
has taken on various guises, like ‘what’s your line’, or ‘where do you work’
etc, which are more honest and direct. Even so, its obverse is assumed to have
something to do with our authenticity in that one’s identity, so wrapped up
within one’s ‘day job’ to the point of predefining social role, is or can be
holistically understood through it alone. And this is merely the most prevalent
form of typification in mundane life. Yet we are aware, sometimes painfully,
that not only are there numerous social roles occupied by a single individual –
perhaps the rationale that our particular personal ‘recipe’ of them is what actually makes us an authentic
individual – and that social roles overlap they also often conflict with one
another. This is so basic, both to social discourse and the discourse of
sociality alike, that in order for it to function as it does it must simply be
overlooked. Akin to the disconnect between a culture’s ideals and its
realities, the microcosmic version thereof that lies within ourselves cannot be
too closely scrutinized. Koselleck notes this issue is reflected in the problem
of there being a crisis that is unsaid but that critiquing this issue does not
resolve the crisis. Quite the opposite: “…the critical process of enlightenment
conjured up the crisis in the same measure in which the political significance
of that crisis remained hidden from it.” (1988:9 [1959]). Just so, the casual
expression ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ encapsulates the challenge
facing any person or culture which attempts to excavate its basic assumptions
regarding the interface between reality and ideal, self and world. Sovereignty
is an ideal for a national entity and plays forcefully into one’s conception,
as a citizen, of national identity, so-called. But in an interconnected world
there are severe limits placed even upon governments and their ability to act
for and by themselves. Writ small, these same limits occur in the daily life of
individuals. Indeed, there is almost nothing that one can accomplish entirely
by oneself. ‘Projects of action’ are an attempt by the individual to maintain
her individuality in the face of the world, not of forms, but of others. They
begin from a rarified height of phantasm, as Schutz has stated, and yet have an
openness about them simply because they are future-directed. Since Schutz’s
‘because’ motives are a closed book – the action is in the past and thus can
seem to be free of the same limits that are about to enthrall ‘in order to’
motives – even so, they still provide the model for courses of action to be
taken (cf. Natanson, op. cit:42). It is a bit of a sleight of hand, and we feel
slighted, even slightly awry, when we are forced to recognize both limit and
‘work around’, as the managerial phrase has it. There is a rustic dialectic to
all personal ruminations of this sort; I am made aware of the locale of my ability, its relative paucity
of power and its truncated reach. In this, the most important aspect of
‘enlightenment’ has to do with language itself and how it no longer cleaves to
the model of behavioral schema: “Language is just as much infrastructure as
superstructure. The schema of the infrastructure and the superstructure must be
rejected resolutely, for here we encounter a strict circular phenomenon in
which the two terms, in turn, implicate each other and transcend each other.”
(Ricoeur 1965:202 [1955]). This circle is hermeneutic in character. The action
of the other must be recognized – this is done mostly tacitly and based upon
social conventions learned, for most of us, early on – but their motives must
be interpreted. ‘Confessions’, whether on the stand, in the box, or in the
bedroom, can be faked.
This location, recently touted as only ‘social’ in its
nature, is in fact also personal and historical, as well as perhaps structural.
More than each of these in turn and all of these combined, it has a
phenomenological location, or better, position, that doesn’t merely reflect a
worldview but refracts it, Weltanschauung
lensed through Wesenschau. It tempers
the temporality of its time, and just as the Zeitgeist hovers above the agent, pushing us to separate ‘infra’
and ‘super’ if we heed its power alone, so we as actors have the ability to
confront the day, as well as the tradition, through the use of language which
can also conceal intent: “Action is subject-bound, it builds up in a temporal
development, and its full significance is always on the far side of the actor’s
intention. The act is a unitary phenomenon which is object-oriented and whose
meaning is graspable.” (Natanson, op. cit:38). Meaning is not ‘attached’ to an
act in the same way as history is not ‘added’ to being. This circle, unity, or
is-ness of human action-in-the-world may remind one of an instinct of sorts, in
the way that animal being is in its world. But there is a crucial difference: aside
from the fact that it already and always has meaning and is thus meaningful in a manner that the behavior of animals does
not – this is why it is behavior and not act
to which we refer in this other realm – human beings live by virtue of their
acts and how they are interpreted by others. In a word, our world is both
intersubjectively meaningful and is something that stands over against us.
Animals are part of the natural being of a world which worlds itself away from all meaning. Unlike the autographed hand
of the divine in medieval understandings of nature, our contemporary view is
that humans remake the world, for better or worse, solely in their own image.
This new world, brave or no, is only fully realized in
the eighteenth century. It becomes part of ‘public life’, as it were, just as
meaning in general now seeks its autochthonous advent: “The movement which
blithely called itself ‘the Enlightenment’ continued its triumphal march at the
same pace at which its private interior expanded into the public domain, while
the public, without surrendering its private nature, became the forum of
society that permeated the entire State.” (Koselleck 1988:53 [1959]). This
advance was mirrored in intellectual life. Ideally, the source of the state, its
own people, were to remain within a freedom that disclosed itself through the
division between private and public. This
distinction appears to have gained yet further merit today, when privacy issues
are both fashionable but also in some cases serious, as in the medical sphere. Publicly,
we are but a citizen within the modern nation state, a resident of one of its
geopolitical subsections, and so on. We are immigrants, emigrants, migrants, or
even transients. The phrase ‘no fixed address’ has become the ultimate
indictment against our would-be citizenship but also against our oft elusive
freedom. It is true that some homeless persons choose to remain so in front of
other possibilities, but these people are rare. The idea of home itself still
carries an undeniable weight, and is the objectively identifiable converse to
Dasein’s existential identity.
Just as personhood became enveloped in the notion of
citizenship during this period – it has been pointed out that for the final
dozen years or so of Nietzsche’s life he was stateless, which is somehow
fitting, or that Marx was ejected from no less than three states before
rusticating in London; could there are also be infra-persons and super-persons?
– ideas ‘themselves’ must also have an origin point, a home. Speaking of the
enlightenment intellect, Heidegger suggests that “…what alone mattered, what
was decisive for them, was concrete work, and that meant the propensity toward ‘facts’. Accordingly, the
first task to be carried out in history was to disclose and to secure the
sources.” (1992:14 [1925], italics the text’s). If the person has a birthplace
and thence perhaps also a birthright, just so, ideas too have sources, origin
points, places of birth and growth, ontogenesis and phylogenesis alike. Sources
‘positioned’ ideas in history and towards history. Philology, historical
analysis and historiography were all of the moment. In this very same period,
beginning with Chladenius’s ‘optical’ logic c. 1740, the historian could now
assert a position of his own, take up an argument from a specific point of view
or historical location. This was the modern beginning to our understanding of
social location and epistemic privilege, among other recently fashionable
sensibilities (cf. Koselleck 1985:140 [1969]).
A century or more later, however, it had to be admitted
that the source-based optical gaze, the reportage of historical witnesses, the
tracing of genealogies in the traditional sense, was not going to be enough to
fully understand existence not only as it had become by this time but also in
its essence. Therefore, Dilthey took up the task by focusing upon the ‘object’
of history as a structure of ‘life’ (cf. Heidegger, op. cit:17). Dilthey’s
version of psychology, also a new and burgeoning discourse, made singular the
sense that history was akin to reality and that consciousness ‘itself’ was
constructed through their mutual imbrication. The ‘sources’ of this sensibility
are obvious enough; Marx and Engels stunning statement of 1846 that ‘consciousness
is itself a social product’, an historical condition, Darwin’s 1859 exposition
of nature as cleaving to a non-conscious non-teleological set of forces, and so
on. Diltheyan psychology did not examine its case through the lens of either
deviance or pathology, but rather took it to be not only the normative but
necessary condition of human existence. The discursive step toward Dasein must
assuredly follow. In between, as it were, it fell to Husserl to construct the
analytic that moved the former into the latter. This was “…a special method for
prising apart the merely taken-for-granted from the intuitively graspable, and
for describing delicately and in detail the region of intuitive transparency
that this distinction opens up.” (Wood 1989:39). What is this ‘intuitive
region’? Heidegger states with emphasis how phenomenology simply is ‘scientific ontology’, and that there
is ‘no ontology alongside a phenomenology’ (1992:72). Wood continues by
reminding us that for Husserl, no ‘general cognitive framework of science’ could
ever be the subject of an empirical study. One does not scientifically study
the autochthonous region by which thought is possible. Science is secondary to
phenomenology; all science (op. cit:40). Just as is our ‘natural attitude’
hallmarked by its lack of concern – in that concernful being does not manifest
itself automatically within such a sphere and indeed cannot normally do so – phenomenology
in its pre-objectivity is no less than a ‘title’ for being. (Heidegger, op.
cit:74). Any previous take on what ‘comes before’ does not make a viable enough
distinction between immanence and transcendence (ibid).
But what, exactly, is this distinction that must be made?
By the time we are able to read the fuller statement contained in Being and Time, two years later, we find
that thinkers such as Schutz and much later, Natanson, have, perhaps
ironically, practiced the ‘disappearance of praxis’: “So if one posits
‘practical’ concern as the primary and predominant kind of Being which factical
Dasein possesses, the ontological possibility of ‘theory’ will be due to the absence of praxis – that is, to a privation.” (1962:409 [1927], italics
the text’s). Of course, this does not imply that ‘tarrying’, ‘looking around’,
‘inspecting’ and so on constitute the beginning of a theoretical attitude. Not
in the least. They are part of the detailed carrying on of a practice, almost
like a diagnostic. They are neither pre-theoretical nor post-theoretical as
they never attain the circle in which reflective thought is ensconced. Yes, one
could certainly admit to the presence of interpretation during this carrying on
which is also something that Heidegger relates as ‘being at a standstill’ in
its relation to praxis. But lingering is not thinking. Simply put, it is a kind
of manipulation, not in the ethical sense per
se or immediately – though one may now wonder if tarrying in general is
tantamount also to malingering and not merely lingering; is it not the case
that when we do not know how to practice this or that we must either admit it
through repetitive failure or try to cover over through deceit our
incompetency? – but rather as within the context of the ready-to-hand (cf.
ibid:410ff). Language is itself not exempt from this manipulation. Insofar as
we communicate our intents through and by language, even if these be deceitful
in that we communicate something other than our ‘authentic’ desires, the
primordiality of concernful being ‘comes and goes’ as it were. It does not find
a home within language as such. Wood notes that there are three ‘levels of
concern’ regarding the metaphysical ‘adequacy’ of language in general: “…that
of metaphysis, that of the permeation of ordinary language with metaphysical
concepts, and the problem of the original lie of language as such.” (op.
cit:296). Nietzsche’s famous early essay is a testament to this line of
questioning. This is not only a question of style, as many commentators have
noted Nietzsche is equally famous for. Certainly, style allows the artistry of
creative thought to be communicated, without regard for authorial intent, on
the one hand, and one’s own peccadilloes on the other. But serious art contains
serious messages, and we cannot be distracted by style to the extent that a
text becomes ‘only’ art, even if Nietzsche’s early work could be considered
such by the usual standards. Even the variety of translations of the title of
the 1871-2 essay that seems to disallow not only concernful being as an
authenticity in the world but also language as ever an authentic expression or
manifestation of Being transfiguring world should put us on guard. Each reader
is looking to render this intriguing work – surely, along with the Communist Manifesto, the most important
short piece of the nineteenth century – in her own way: sometimes it is ‘truth
and lie’, others ‘truth and falsity’, in a sometimes ‘extramoral’, or ‘non-moral’,
or even ‘ultra-moral’ sense and so on. Yet is it really such a scandal that
words have different meanings pending context, that they can tell the truth or
no depending intent, that they can dissemble and dissimulate and duplicitously
duplicate? Hardly. It is not that Nietzsche simply overstates his case, but his
youthful mind appears quite taken by what would become in Saussure, for
instance, a model of precisely how communication does take place and how we are able to identify both truth and lie
in the vast majority of contexts and cases. In a word, we know our own language as it is and we are not daunted by this
knowledge, but are rather given an essential aspect of our human freedom.
One must project a form of empathy to elevate one’s
mundanity into the space of concernful beingness. Yes, language may well hinder
such a venture, but so might reflection, if we are to take the radical idea of
the neighbor seriously. No act, observed or perhaps more profoundly, witnessed,
takes place beyond language just as it does not transcend the temporal. It is
something that is done, after all. How
it is acted makes all the difference and in this it is no different than how
language is used. Praxis may vanish in order for the theoretical attitude to be
attained, but thought as Being-there does not. Yet it is a specific aspect of
thought which is of foremost concern: “The imagination has a metaphysical
function which cannot be reduced to simple projection of vital, unconscious, or
repressed desires. The imagination has a prospective and explorative function in
regard to the inherent possibilities of man. It is, par excellence, the instituting and constituting of what is humanly
possible.” (Ricoeur, op. cit:126-7). Herein, ‘myth’ does itself also refer to a
phenomenology, that of consciousness and of humanity. It is, ironically
perhaps, the pre-logocentric function of myth that animates the prose of not
only storytelling in general but also life-narrative. Imagination is the
harbinger of human mythos. And just as this mythic imagination ‘persists’ – a
term of which Simmel, just after the following, is very critical – the human
vehicle for myth, the soul, continues within human consciousness as a makeshift
but also as an aspiration. This must be so, “…otherwise it would be
inconceivable that tomorrow this soul calls exactly the opposite particular into
the same psychic life.” (Simmel 2011:96 [1918]). Just as both the saint and the
murderer sleep – perhaps their dreams do regularly differ? – I as a singular
Dasein perform well or badly, harbor bitterness or happiness, regret or
contentment, look to a future unlimited or dwell in reminiscence. What remains
is not merely the remanant of all of the other unsaid or undone words and deeds
that make up each life, but rather a thought-through existence which, from our
phenomenological standpoint, is the same thing as essence.
This ‘psychic unity’, however suppressed or conflicted,
is challenged not along lines stemming from social role but rather along its
stifling stenochoria, its narrow boundedness that has the effect of making it
either less than it is or less than it could be. The most dangerous myth may
indeed be the last one, the one of final, fatal ends, the one of the
apocalypse. No noble god would frame a human end and call it its own, and one
would hope that no higher being would welcome a human engineered mass suicide. There
is merit to the stratigraphy of myth, even if we should not apply it to
ourselves. ‘Higher’ really does
confer responsibility upon the being deemed to be such. Whether or not we
humans can aspire to such reaches is perhaps another matter. But in one sense,
we have already attained this space, and that through the sense that the
‘psychic life’, the life of the human psyche, lives within us but is also
greater than us. And we are aware of this larger sensibility even in the
quotidian: “We do not see flesh and infer a human being inside it; we confront
a psyche in seeing a man. The Other lives and is recognized at the focus of his
glance, in the space he warms, and in the void his language fills. In this
bodily presence the sociality of man achieves its primordial expression.”
(Natanson, op. cit:109). Indeed, it is as well a primordial expression of our
own humanity in recognizing the Other in this way. Not Otherness, of course,
for it is the uncanny obverse to the
neighbor figure, which is likely why some older authors have interpreted it as
possibly evil if not in origin, at least in intent. But the Other, or others,
or one another, this
intersubjectivity is only possible because she recognizes me in the same
manner. The ‘looking glass self’ has this other level to it: it is a mirrored
selfhood, back-dropped by the tain of personhood and framed by culture. In this
image, the unframed personhood cannot be said to be a person at all.
This said, such a mutual recognizance embraces not the other
per se, but the human relation writ
into a microcosm of solidarity. Often passing, especially in large-scale
anonymous societies shot through with the aptly labeled ‘loosely coupled
networks’ and such things, and oft taken for granted in a way more extreme than
is implied by the ‘natural attitude’, the ‘world-taken-for-granted’, is
nevertheless a constant and consistent reminder of our own humanity. We only
remain human with regard to the others, and these whether living or dead, and
thus they may be said to be fully present in their immanence in the same way as
a phenomenological a priori is claimed to be. More so, they too are objects in
the phenomenological sense. If our subjectivity, however radical, however
‘glancing’, and however singular, makes an object out of what is at first a comprehending
‘ray’ purely subjective, then it suggests that otherness, though an
abstraction, is a fundamental object of resistance at the macrocosmic level.
Even so, this does not directly address the question: “The problematic of
knowledge may be expressed thus: how can something be an object for a subject?
In an idealistic context, the question is: what is that in the subject which
renders possible the appearing of an object for him?” (Ricoeur, op. cit:156). It
is sometimes glossed over that we too are objects, and that, first and foremost
for others. This then is another, related, question: Why is consciousness so
predominant that it brackets the objectitude of Dasein instantaneously? How is
it that our object status in the wider world of forms of being – alongside the
world of modes of being; action,
intent, care, looking-ahead, and so on – can only be recognized through the
back doors, as it were, of objection and objectivity? The former resides in our
resistance to not only social norms but also to the presence of others. The
latter rests in the aspiration that we can apprehend the truth of things
through our being-there. If “…knowledge as such cannot even be grasped if we do
not from the outset see the specific context of being in which knowing as such
as possible.” (Heidegger 1992:165 [1925]), then this ‘inversion of its being’
that Heidegger immediately discusses cannot access more than an epistemological
know-how regarding Being or Other or World. Next, the term ‘contextures’
appears, implying that Dasein’s worldly location is to be also thought of as
textured in specific ways native to this or that context. This is ‘in-being’,
kindred with the interiority of phenomenology, though such a term expresses the
objective status of what for us must remain intimately subjective, though not
essential. Since Dasein is a priori not
an entity, the ontological ‘decipherment’ to which it is subject is clearly not
the same kind of ontology as is to be found in metaphysics as we have known it
(cf. ibid.). Here, an ancient rubric is given a new ‘contexture’, the
‘diminishing of the difference between logos and experience’ (cf. Koselleck
1985:172 [1969]). Both the inner life of reason and the worldly life of social
forms and formations were guided by the same singular law. This idea resonates
in both modern science and in science fiction alike, wherein consciousness and
cosmos are somehow to be related, either through an anthropic principle or
through evolution itself. But phenomenology excavates this structure more
radically. It could only do so, perhaps ironically, by virtue of the just as
radical break modern science undertook to make with the previous metaphysics:
“It is this cultural event of the birth of experimental science which brought
about the destruction of the philosophico-theological synthesis of the true, or
at least made its dissolution visible, for [ ] this synthesis never existed but
as an intention or a pretension.” (Ricoeur, op. cit:167). By the mid-17th
century, the distinction between veracity and veridicity was also given a new
sensibility. The first became something that had an eminent plausibility about
it, an eye-witness kind of accounting, or self-accounting, but still very
unlike say, a traveller’s tale or, with fitting irony, a ‘likely story’. The
second was subject to a much more stringent definition, one that partook from
that point on only in the context of the experiment. Indeed, to this day,
experimental control attempts to remove context, let alone contexture, from the
to-be-recorded. The idea of witness also drops away, rather precipitously, when
we move from veracity to veridicity. Not only does it retain something of its
visionary or religious baggage, the witness is yet called forth in the sphere of
justice and the courts as if this person was also a kind of judge, or at least,
his presence is to aid the construction of a final judgement. It is almost as
if the witness is a premonition of the just, though after the fact. The witness
is, in this sense, the ethico-subjective converse to the neighbor.
For the scientific researcher, however, recording is
objectively different from bearing witness. One, it is most often the case
today that non-human ‘observers’ are doing the recording. The scientific sensate
is as technical as are the questions it asks of the world. When asking the same
order of questions of itself, science must at first pause. Diagnostics
performed by or on machinery or technology, or the laboratory rubrics and
processes, distillations of theoretical models aside, have limited scope and
agenda. Are the machines functioning correctly? In the end, how would we know
if they were or were not, if the question confronted by the research is indeed
a new one? We project our sensibility into the machine and hope for the best.
We hope, in a word, for enough veracity to preclude doubts about veridicity:
“Only ‘in the light’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can
anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and
delimited in terms of this projection.” (Heidegger 1962:4141 [1927]). There are
no ‘bare facts’, he concludes, and even within the purely mathematical
‘disclosure’ of nature, the key idea is the a priori itself, discovered by the
‘prior projection of their state of being’ (ibid). This is crucial, for such a
sensibility immanentially tells us that science even as practiced is part of
phenomenology, rather than other way round or that they are somehow entirely
divorced from one another. Can Being ‘itself’ be subject to the same kind of
projection?
This seems a long way from both mechanism and
behaviorism, the two fundamental concepts animating the science of non-sentient
nature and that of animal nature respectively. The singularity of the contemporary
idea of will, however conscious or no, has granted us enormous subjective
freedoms, including the ability to think more and more critically about our own
condition, if we so choose. Even so, “The brilliance of the modern view is that
human behavior is thus subject to mechanistic explanation because rational
analysis can be made of the organization of means to achieve goals, and the
goals themselves are set by vectors of inertial forces.” (Neville, in Cook
1993:150). We should at once remind ourselves that rationality is not
rationalization nor is it to provide rationales for something, nor to merely
construct ratios. Canguilhem notes that the measure of quantity does not annul
quality but rather merely denies it (cf. 1991:110 [1966]) as well as that ‘scientific
knowledge invalidates qualities’. Here too is a new term: validity. Resting
uneasily between veracity and veridicity, and connoting a probabilistic version
of them both at once, validity is often said to have at least seven statistical
forms, including aspects which denote ‘face value’ and interpretive validity.
But it is conceptual validity that is the aim, and to attain this, quality
itself must be sacrificed. One cannot have a concept that carries any
predictive or predicative power based on a single case alone. Just so, the
singularity of the person in modernity guarantees her nothing in regard to any
of the knowledge of modernity. How I ‘fit into’ the world as we now know it or
have come to known it through science and its applications such as medicine and
engineering is perhaps more of a mystery than ever before. Previous worlds
worlded differently enough, and though with a great vanity hooked into that of
the concept of the mascot and then general human interest godhead, human beings
understood their relationship to those worlds more comprehensively than do we
today. This is so because we at first do not understand the questioner herself:
“World in its most proper sense is just that which is already on hand for any
questioning. The questions persists only on the basis of a constant
misunderstanding of the mode of being of the one who raises this question.”
(Heidegger 1992:215 [1925]). Our being is both ‘constitutive’ of the world but
at once is thrown into a world which has nothing to do with its constituting
force. The world is ‘already discovered’ in constituting being and is thus
thought of as an ‘entity’. The resistance one encounters in the world of forms
and all the more so, that of norms, should be enough to convince us of the veracity of this world. It is less
amorphous than we imagine, just as we ourselves are more so. Of late, of
course, the world in its most natural form, its predetermined and already
discoverable form, has felt the resistance of human presence, to its detriment.
Even so, we are destroying our own world, and not the world in its most base sense. It may be possible in the future
to do both, to leave this beautifully marbled blue ball in lifeless pieces
kindred to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where another planet
likely once existed before being torn apart by conflicting gravitational forces
during some primordial epoch. But surely this is not only not a noble mission
for Dasein it is also one that asserts quantity over quality. Heidegger notes
informally how important Simmel’s 1918 work was to his own formulations of the
next decade, including this sense of unity held within the thrownness of Dasein
‘into’ the world. Simmel’s own view “…sees the form of its unity immediately in
the fact that it expresses itself in changing contents or, more correctly, that
it consists in their being lived and done.” (op. cit:153). Each act holds the
entirety of life responsible for it and likewise, and these contents are
experienced as a continuity. Each act ‘works back upon the ground’ which cannot be given any further definition,
such as that of either essence or transcendence. Simmel speaks with emphasis
about the obligatory quality of each act, that our life becomes defined by our
continuous action but also, and more tellingly, that each act, in its singularity, tells of the whole (ibid). This is
first and foremost an ethics, but it is also an existentialism that verges upon
phenomenology in the Heideggerean sense. This is different than its
psychological offspring or cousins in terms of its understanding of rationality
and typification. It is not ‘affective’, to use Minkowski’s description. The
psychic unity of Dasein is, as we have seen, not part of something other than
itself within the arc of its project. Modern knowledge, which is almost
entirely epistemological in character, does not apprehend the psyche and can
only reduce it to measurable components. But in doing so, the deeper question
has to do with our motives, to render ourselves in this pixelated manner.
Perhaps we are weary of psychology as it once was, and thus also wary of its
return. But archaeological analytics of the self are still used to ironically
reduce the existential continuity of life-acts to some prior trauma,
performance, theater, or relationship. Bleuler’s original understanding of
autism – it was he who also coined the term – is a prime example of this
problem that has recently received a second childhood, as it were. Autism is
synonymous with ‘interiorization’, the schizophrenic is merely a ‘wakeful
dreamer’, and so on. But “This psychology, though born of a reaction against
rationalism, has by no means rid itself of it. In replacing the rational with
the affective, it subordinates (as rationalism did), the psychic life to one of
its functions and thus remains faithful to the principle of cutting-out and
breaking-up, which is so dear to discursive thought.” (Minkowski 1970:280
[1933]). Minkowski asks us whether or not the interior life could play such an
essential role for the schizophrenic, especially given that most, if not all,
of his delusions are drawn from popular culture, that is, the social world at
large and not from some inner and private sanctum of the distorted imagination.
‘Empty talk’, is how Minkowski refers to what in earlier periods might have
simply been put down to the Victorian ‘ravings’ of the ‘lunatic’ mind. There is
a surfeit of theater in both daily life and
the life that shuns it. Insanity per se,
is at base a turning away from the norms; one is a ‘moron’, according to the
Greeks, and indeed, if the fates still exist for some of us, to turn away from
these as well makes one the fabled if astonishingly reckless ‘hyper-moron’.
This ‘folding-back’ upon oneself that is the core of the
first definition of autism, is nonetheless not the rule for schizophrenics in
general. This selfhood has been distended, broken apart, and not by discourse
but rather by the self! These public actions take place in the external world
of fellow-humans and it is as if the Dasein has distorted itself not to fit
some mysterious ‘inner’ life but to make the world into a dime novel in which
they alone are the principle. It is, in a sense, a contemporary rendering of
an anonymous world into the language of personal myth. Personal, yes, but
not private, because, like any genius – the one who goes beyond her time,
perhaps equally recklessly as does the schizophrenic who uses that same time to
make a self-styled heroine of herself – the person ‘with autism’ craves
disciples and attention. And yet, this is a challenge that all of us today must
face: how to place oneself in the world as it is, as we noted above: “Modern
man, however, must build his own personal world, after making himself lord and
master of his own life and death; and the external world, ruled by material,
economic, and technical powers, can no longer offer him a foothold.”
(Binswanger 1962:235). We realize that it is not so much general myth that the
schizophrenic or related person seeks to reinvent but rather mere theater, a
theater which is intensely social without being responsible in any way to the
world of sociality. It is, in a word, asocial theater, a presentation of self
shorn of obligation and mutual aid, a story all too likely in the midst of the
self-adoration of capital and the self-aggrandizement of individualism. The
‘lunatic’ today is thus merely an overheated version of ourselves.
If the world as lensed only through such humanity is but
a titanic ship of fools, there is yet a resistance associated with the
objectivity or, to use Arendt’s term, the ’durability’ of the world: “From this
viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human
life…” and through these human beings can achieve a kind of sameness. This is
not directly contrary to the Heraclitan chestnut about the ever-changing
stream, and it was not so even in his own time. But what it does signal to us
is that our subjectivity has nevertheless constructed something over against
itself, and this quite apart from the “…sublime indifference of an untouched
nature…” (op. cit:137). Even the problem of mortality can be solved, if not
entirely resolved, along these lines. The world worlds on, but the social world
also continues. History does not end, nor does it begin again. This is the
sacrifice the modern person must render if his world is to continue at all.
Once again, only in myth does time stop and the adunatic advent of an uncannily
new adventure appear. We face the resonance of this apical ancestor of our
conception of measured time but we must not mistake it for that precise primordiality.
Our incomplete understanding of both ourselves and of history – and this quite
objectively in both cases, between archaeology and the history of consciousness
as lived – forces us to make a decision based upon what we can know at the
time, which is a very different thing from saying that time stops for us in order that we make such a
decision, whatever it may be: “…man, in order to be able to interact
efficiently with other human beings, must, at intervals, make a total orientation out of a given stage of partial knowledge.”
(Erikson, 1960:78 [1956], italics the text’s). Given that almost all of our
decisions at the personal level have to do with this kind of intersubjective
action, our understanding of ourselves – recall this is not yet the same thing
as a phenomenological Selbstverstandnis
– is both partial, in that it is incomplete, but also partial in that it is biased. I am partial to myself. If the
spontaneity of the neighbor – another reckless figure who acts away from
himself without a ‘because motive’ – can overcome this self-interest
momentarily, it does so by way of an irruptive insertion of the mythic into
sociality, the epic into history. Such an event is rare enough and does not
constitute an adunatic force in any cosmogonical sense. Time does not stop and
restart itself anew due to the acts of one heroic individual who seeks nothing
other than to save the other. But in that
moment, time has no meaning for either party, nor does partiality or
incompleteness. The act is everything
and it consumes us precisely because it has nothing
whatsoever to do with the interior life of the individual, distorted,
navel-gazing, irresponsible, and unresponsive as that life is.
Thought has sought this freedom in both directions, as it
were. On the one hand, the thinker posits himself as the considered and
considerate neighbor of all. But on the other, he also turns away from the
world and not only in order to interpret it. The world becomes for him a mere
receptacle of his thought, which is the gift of both myth and epic combined. It
is true that to free ourselves from praxis we must nurture “…the intellectual
freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge. At the same
time, by abstaining from all definite content, whether as a formal logic and
theory of science or as the legend of being beyond all beings, philosophy
declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.” (Adorno 1991:6 [1964]).
The authentic neighbor exists through and by her act alone, and not by any
consideration that may come afterward. This act is to-be-shared as its mode of
being, but it is not shared in the usual sense of intersubjectivity. It is a
gift but without presentation or ritual. Its gift reaches back into a communal
hearth of shared consciousness that is the stuff of the mythic life. Is there
something within our long-evolving mind that could be said to remember such a reality, or is it merely
and ethics of aspiration and hope, one that ‘saves’ us for another day?
Either way, consciousness must at once shake off
technique for its own sake and yet confront both the tradition and immerse
itself in the world-as-it-is. The act of consciousness, thought ‘itself’, can
only become an ‘event’ in this way. Generally, once again perhaps since Plato,
thought has often failed to accomplish either of these joint tasks: “I’m not
saying that thought, constituted as such, is unacquainted with that which it
calls ‘inhuman’, or foul or shady, but it cannot really integrate it; it knows
it from above, through condescension, from the outside: all that is strictly a subordinate object
for it, which it considers arbitrarily, without recognizing its own
involvement, in the way medicine regards the diseases.” (Bataille 1991:22
[1976], italics the text’s). The ‘spirit’ of consciousness is often lost to its
letter. But thought is not law, and indeed, it is the very thing that keeps the
legal order from becoming the natural one. That alone is worth the price of
having to think as a selfhood and think the being-of self into being. In the
end, we are only demeaning ourselves if we heed only the letter of thought, its
technical virtuosity and its endless feats of linguistics and logic. Necessary
as is the day’s repast, nevertheless, the letter of thought is something that,
akin to the tradition that it gradually accumulates for itself, must be
overcome. In our own time, this tradition is not religious in character or
stature, but rather positively scientific and even technological. Science is
perhaps the most objective tool humanity has yet constructed, but it too has a
spirit that reminds us that it is the direct descendent of religious thought,
despite its overthrow of religion as an explanatory framework: “The function of
the concept of science has become inverted. The often invoked methodological
neatness, universal confirmation of the consensus of the competent scholars,
the verifiability of all assertions, even the logical rigor of the lines of
reasoning, is not spirit: the criterion of watertight validity always also
works against spirit.” (Adorno, op. cit:38). To remind ourselves that
technique, let only its objectifying marque, technology, is only a means to an
end becomes more difficult in a world so engrossed with the manipulative power
of the machine, its res extensa, its
aluminum angel. Upon these wings we can ride, bodily, into the void, but kindred
to the denial of rationality to be found in affectivity, the denial of
spirituality which is also a rational aspect of human consciousness –
self-understanding consciousness cannot but run up against the problem of that
self-same consciousness; how is it possible that a thinking being exists in an
unthinking universe? – can only in time deny our very existence.
This is the first section of my new book ‘The Penumbra of Personhood: anti-humanism reconsidered’ due out later this year.