Altruism or the Other as the Essence of Existence A Philosophical Passage to Being Altruistic (Value Inquiry Book Series / Studies in Existentialism, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology, 363) 9004448381, 9789004448384

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Altruism or the Other as the Essence of Existence

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-in-Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 363

Studies in Existentialism, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology Edited by Mark Letteri (University of Windsor)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​vibs and brill.com/​se

Altruism or the Other as the Essence of Existence A Philosophical Passage to Being Altruistic By

Iraklis Ioannidis

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: 'Abandonment' by Efklia Syrta. Image used with permission by the artist. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ioannidis, Iraklis, author. Title: Altruism or the other as the essence of existence : a philosophical passage to being altruistic / by Iraklis Ioannidis. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Value inquiry book series, 0929-8436 ; volume 363 | Includes index. | Summary: “The author offers fresh, yet radical, philosophical insights into the much contested topic of altruism. Whereas the debate on altruism, since time immemorial, consists in trying to determine whether we are biologically altruistic or not, Ioannidis explores altruism otherwise. Following Nietzsche, he traces altruism to the phenomenon of promising or giving one’s word. His analysis provokes us to think that our ossibility to exist cannot be realized without this event”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2021001674 (print) | lccn 2021001675 (ebook) | isbn 9789004448384 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004448391 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Altruism. | Other (Philosophy) Classification: lcc BJ1474 .I45 2021 (print) | lcc BJ1474 (ebook) | ddc 155.2/32–dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001674 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001675

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4838-​4 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4839-​1 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Iraklis Ioannidis. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To the mother I call my mother

∵

Contents Preface: For the Words That Follow Unquestioned ix 1 Prologue 1 1 Introduction 2 2 Introducing Altruism 12 1 Altruism or Living for Others 12 2 Another Positivist Attempt 20 3 The Duty of (Effective) Altruism 23 4 Moving towards the Other beyond Arguments and Habits 43 3 Pathway One: We Must Live for Others 46 1 Minding the Gap of Prescription 46 2 From Teleology to Deontology and Back 56 3 From Arguing for Altruism towards Beli(e)ving in Altruism 64 4 Skepsis on Intentionality 70 5 Biosis of Promise 90 4 Pathway Two: The Other 100 1 Tracing the Other 100 2 Husserl’s Other in Me 101 3 Heidegger and the (In)Authentic Being-​with Others 122 4 Sartre’s Dynamic Self-​Other in Entropy 139 5 Hodological Options, Horizonizing 168 5 Pathway Three: Presence and Existence 169 1 Meet-​in(g) the ‘Meta’ of the Physical 172 2 Metaphysical Mimodrama 192 6 Pathway Four: To Follow a Scot River or to River a Scot Follow or the Logos of Heraclitus 198 1 Undertaking to Disengage Heraclitus’ Logos from Thinking with(in) Being 209 2 The Debate 214 3 Simple Logos? 237 4 Reading dk 1 without Being 251 5 Logos through the Other 260

viii Contents 6 C-​secting the Feminine Body 273 7 Logos as Existence: Death and the Promise 276 7 Pathway Five: Toward Understanding and Meaning as Altruism Requesting the Eyes/​Is of the Other 281 1 Meaning Like a Reli(e)ving Movement from Dark to Light: Kant and the Blind Intuition 284 2 Knowledge as Delight: Heidegger and the Phenomenon 295 3 Peirce’s In-​decision and Phaneron 300 8 Pathway Six: Meaning as a Passage from the Other An Unbracketing 337 1 To-​words and toward Meaning out of Nothing 338 2 The Gift(ing Logos) of the Other 345 3 The Givenness of the Orphan and the Orphanity of the Gift 352 4 Passage, Promise, Gifting Logos & a Door 370 5 Kafka’s (A)Mazing D(o)or-​Gift 375 9 Epilogical Touches An Authentically Poor or Aporetic Conclusion 386 Acknowledgements 389 Index 390

Preface: For the Words That Follow Unquestioned This is a philosophical journey on altruism. With the word ‘altruism’ we usually mean an act or action, a behavior or patterns of behavior, or, generally, a way of living consisting in achieving the well-​being of others. Our philosophical destination is, thus, the ‘well-​being’ of ‘others.’ Let us start with the traditional definition of altruism. As the Oxford Dictionary suggests, altruism is “disinterested or selfless concern for the well-​ being of others, esp. as a principle of action.”1 To achieve the well-​being of others in altruism in such a disinterested or selfless way is to act for the sake of others unconditionally and without reserve. Doing something good for the other without wanting anything in return. Not wanting anything in return means not expecting anything in exchange for the good act. Properly speaking, it is a non-​reciprocal acting at the expense of the one who engages in the altruistic act. This expenditure for the sake of others may sometimes lead to one’s death. In such cases, we say that such an act has as its denouement an unconditioned and unconditional giving in the form of sacrificing one’s life for the well-​being of others. We tend to consider such acts as the epitome of altruism. The limit of altruism, the ultimate horizon of altruism, becomes the sacrifice of life. With respect to ‘well-​being,’ the limit is an unconditioned and unconditional givenness represented as a sacrifice for the others. The ‘others,’ the recipient of the well-​being to whom the altruistic act aims and ends, could be a single person, a group of people or the totality of the world as in the case of Christ. Formally, we could use the term ‘Other’ to include all cases of receivers. The capital ‘O’ will allow us to investigate the altruistic act irrespective of the recipient. Altruism will not depend on who the actor or the recipient is. And since we have announced through our title that altruism is the essence of human existence, then we are warranted, if not justified, for this abstraction, this capitalization, and this general investment signified in the collective and encapsulated in this assigned circle: ‘O.’ Altruism is very popular today. One could even say that altruism is in scholarly fashion. There are scientists who provide ‘proof’ that the essence of the human species is altruistic. We have instincts that are altruistic, they say. We are made to live altruistically otherwise we cannot survive. For that reason, they provide us with ways of enhancing these altruistic instincts that secure our well-​being and our perpetuation as a species. In a similar vein, there are 1 See relevant entry in oed.com.

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Preface: For the Words That Follow Unquestioned

philosophers who talk about how we can be altruistic effectively. There are also sociologists and ethnographers who depict human nature with the same colors. With respect to these works, our research is timely. It is also timely with respect to our times. Currently, we witness a concern with respect to the Other; a concern to otherness in general and our relationships with others. Public opinion is concerned with the future of Europe. Inter-​ national relations have become an issue –​financial crises, Brexit, the future of the European Union to name a few. On a global level, on-​going wars around the world produce refugees and the dealing with these other people has become an issue. The threat of a new nuclear war is still there as the media inform us. And the current situation with what has been referred to as the ‘covid-​19 pandemic’ has, despite its semantic problems, lead to the implementation of measures in the name of protecting the vulnerable Other. In this respect, our research is timely, that is, it is aligned with these common concerns. Yet, at the same time, our research is untimely. Untimely in the sense that Friedrich Nietzsche conceptualized the untimely. This research is untimely since we are using a technology which is rather outdated; one could even say ancient. This technology is thinking (as) questioning. For wont of a more fitting word, a more adequate term at this time, we shall use the name ‘meditation.’ And we could then claim that this “meditation too is untimely, because [we are] here attempting to look afresh at something.”2 We are attempting to look afresh at a timely concern: altruism. Our coming to feel that we need to look afresh at altruism will be questioned in our next chapter, our prologue. Through our technology of thinking (as) questioning we shall attempt to show why such a new way of looking at altruism is required  –​lest we fall into an abyss of paradoxes. In our proper introduction, which comes after the prologue, we shall propose another way of looking at altruism with a promise to question it all along in case it becomes hostile to altruism, to the well-​being of the Other. This untimely way, this looking afresh at altruism requires another way of writing about it; a writing faithful to our end, the ‘well-​being of the Other;’ in other words, an altruistic writing. But the untimeliness of the new, an absolutely new way of writing, new in-​itself, an absolutely new writing risks becoming a foreign language. We cannot afford to estrange ourselves to the point of creating such communicational boundaries. Yet, these boundaries as limits make altruism possible. The movement for the well-​being of the Other

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: cup, 1997), 60; hereafter, Untimely.

Preface: For the Words That Follow Unquestioned

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comes as crossing but not crossing out these foreign boundaries, these boundaries of Otherness. This might initially suggest an aporia, an impossibility, or a paradox. Timely, in our philosophical times, it is. Untimely, however, it does not have to come to be so. The impasse, or a-​poria, the a-​porous3 or poor, as the one with no means to get by or to-​get-​there, is of our times. Untimely, the aporia comes to be the possibility of an opening, a question, a passage. Hence, our technology comes to be a movement of creating a passage between the common and the foreign through questioning. And that is why it will end without ending, without concluding. Our epilogue will be another question. In this respect, once again, our research is untimely as there will be no conclusion to be profitably incorporated in the current respects of altruism to be labored and produce profitable outcomes. 3 Aporous means, literally, without the means to pass. The aporous is thus the one who cannot pass or, metaphorically, the one who is also without the means to get by, thus poor. We shall try to overcome this aporia later.

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­c hapter 1

Prologue Where do I begin?

shirley bassey

…

The problem of writing opens by questioning the arche jacques derrida

…

Any questing surmise necessarily seeks its own confirmation michael polanyi

…

The best way will be to go back to the beginning and inquire what it is that we can be content to wish for independently of any ulterior result charles sanders peirce

…

Philosophy must return to the beginning martin heidegger

…

The question is not simply the objective totality of the words printed on this page; it is indifferent to the symbols which express it. In a word, it is a human attitude filled with meaning jean-​paul sartre1

∵ 1 Shirley Bassey, “Where do I Begin?” in Love Story (L.A., CA: Columbia Records, 1971). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 267; hereafter, Grammatology; Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: ucp, 1975); Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Vol. I-​X (Cambridge, MA: hup, 1931); hereafter cp; Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy ( from Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: iup, 1989); hereafter Contributions; Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Washington, DC: wsp, 1993); hereafter, bn.

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_002

2 Chapter 1 1 Introduction? Traditionally, introductions are not meant to face a question mark when they appear in the beginning of a writing. Introductions are not questioned when they are supposed to fulfil their function, that is, to be the title of that which they introduce. Yet, here, we resist the tradition, we have already resisted the tradition, by questioning it. We have questioned it with a question mark. We have made the introduction face (with) a question mark. The question mark next to the introduction is not man-​made but handmade. This mark, a mark next to the introduction, which is the word ‘introduction,’ that is, (the) other marks; (that) marking next to the other marks is not a typographical error; not a mis(sed)take. It is not because that mark has been forgotten either. Not what in French we call oubli or what the ancient Greeks called λήθη. It is in fact the reverse. It is ἀ-​λήθεια: it is true. It is true as it asks, as it questions without forgetting. It is our handmaid to truth. It poses a question. It is the beginning of all research. One mark transforms, so to speak, the previous marks into a question. But what is the question here? This work, as entitled in its very beginning, in its title, on the front page, in the beginning of the whole, in the ἀρχή (arche), attempts to find altruism, in particular, the being of altruism. It wants to make a point, an argument about what altruism is. The title says “Altruism as the essence of existence.” And this argument is being questioned before it begins. It is introduced by being questioned. Altruism is introduced by self-​questioning. Ultimately, altruism is a question about doing for the Other, l’autrui; for the Other, who is another ‘I,’ and, yet, just here, in this writing, another mark. All this work, then, is about this and that marks, a quest to mark altruism: What is altruism? We just introduced the work and its aim through a farrago of paradoxes, absurdities and oxymora. The question (mark), which intends to the whole work, which traverses the whole work, since this work is an attempt to answer the question, to face it, seems somewhat unbecoming (while being) only next to the title (of the) ‘introduction’ of the work. But traditionally, it is in the very space between the introduction and the chapters that the question is posed. Alternatively, and aligned with tradition, we could have started with the following: “In this work we shall provide an answer to the question, “What is altruism?” The work as a whole is an answer to this question. The introduction is part of the work, part of the answer, part of the whole. If this work as an answer is the whole, then the introduction is a fragment of the whole, a fragment of this answer. Yet, in reality, for us, this question stood outside of the quest to answer it, outside of its introduction which takes place here. Our question

Prologue

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stood outside of this work of which it is an answer. So what does the introduction (actually) introduce? Again, traditionally, the introduction is meant to (also) introduce, at least provisionally, the answer to the question posed (before the quest to answer it). The introduction introduces the work (of which it is a part) as the result(s) of the quest (to answer the question), (and is presented) traditionally as an argument. Yet, if the work is to stand as an answer to the question, then the work must have already been concluded, finished –​at least provisionally. We must have already marked the boundaries of the work somehow, its horizon. The answer to the question as the end (telos) of the quest must have already been formed, at least somehow –​provisionally, horizonally –​in order for the work to be introduced as a provisional answer to the question. We must have already somehow answered, closed, ended, our question. If this work were to be an open ended question it would have to be a quest. For whom, then, is this an introduction? Can something be really introduced without having first, somehow, somewhat, finished? Or, differently, can the introduction be without referring to that whole which is to be introduced, its object, its pro-​visional horizon? Can the introduction be wholly blind? What kind of introduction could pose an open ended question? We are not faced with paradoxes but with the Other. This is an introduction for the Other; the Other for whom this is an introduction both to our question and to our work as an answer to it. The introduction is the beginning of (our) presenting (of) our quest. In the τέλος (telos) of the question for us and the ἀρχή (arche) of the quest for the Other, “the end makes one with the beginning” as Jean-​Paul Sartre2  –​an other Philosopher Rendering On Us Such Tale (or T(r)ail) –​told us. Or, in the words of the poet, “in the end is my beginning.”3 But both this beginning and this end is another beginning since the quest here, in this space and time, is not our original quest. On the one hand, it is an attempt of a re-​presentation of the quest, a re-​quest. On the other hand, it is an introduction for the Other, now as it unfolds, (a) present for the Other, a presentation of our written logos of and about our quest. The two hands of the one body, the body (of) writing, which is one at the same time and place, bound to the hands of the reader, make all this to be a body of writing of/​about our quest, an attempt of a re-​presentation of our quest, a re-​presentation of our own course of answering the question, a re-​course to the beginning, to our

2 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. James Wood and Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2000), 19. 3 Thomas Stearns Eliot, Four Quartets (NY: h.m.h.pc., 1943), v, 200.

4 Chapter 1 question, to the ἀρχή: How shall we write about altruism in a way that comes to be for the Other? Paradoxically, without this re-​course to the point of introducing the quest for the Other, without this request coming from the Other, there would be no quest as such. The quest comes into being as a unity, a unified whole, a this, a this writing, a this book, only through the logos of its re-​quest/​request, only through the movement to communicate the quest to the Other. The Other’s request. To come back and recount it. “Nothing happens when you live … But everything changes when you tell about life … You seem to start at the beginning … And in reality you have started at the end.”4 Before the end of the research, there is no introduction of the research. After the end, there cannot be an introduction except through the recognition of the end which is at the same time an other introduction before this (written) introduction. Nothing would have been an answer to the question if this quest had not ended. And the course of the quest would have been without being an answer to be introduced (as an answer) to an Other, if it had not been somehow requested by an Other. This in between, that space and time that opens up in what looks like an introduction, “that which passes (comes to pass) always and (yet) never properly takes place”5 in the meeting of two perspectives, the convergence of two courses; two courses which converge, which come to-​get-​there, to reach an end, e-​gos together with their Is, eyes that m/​ee\t to a point, a point (being) marked by a (wh)y, a why to live it and not leave it; to read it and not rid it, who rite and write together till the end, together in the end, till the writing ends, until it dies, until death … all this comes to altruism. Untimely now, where do we begin? The quest has been finished and it has started as a re-​quest. Yet in the beginning, following tradition, we were wont to say in the introduction, that is, in the ‘real’ introduction of the quest, the introduction before this introduction, the one we wrote before entering the quest, before having finished the quest, the research, the experiment, the project; we were wont to say that we wanted to argue that “the other is the essence of my existence.” It was an actual, a real introduction (Figure 1). Such was our first introduction. An attempt to argue about altruism being the essence of human reality. In the beginning, we were motivated to follow Auguste Comte and argue that we should live for Others as this is our natural disposition. Our progress as human beings can only be achieved through helping each other, that is, by being altruistic to each other. But we wanted to go

4 Sartre, Nausea, 20. 5 Derrida, Grammatology, 267.

Prologue5

­f igure 1  Attempt 1

6 Chapter 1 further than that and claim that the Other is the essence of our existence; that we cannot be without the Other. That it is through, with, and by the Other that we are what we are. In this schema, we were motivated to demonstrate philosophically the reasons for which we should then engage in altruistic behavior. In the beginning we had a claim to defend. The claim “It is ethics that reveals the being qua being. It is ethics that makes manifest the essence of our human existence. It is altruism which un-​conceals what human reality is.” We wanted to prove this claim. A claim which is uneasy and not easy to defend. In our quest for altruism, this uneasiness turned into an anxiety. The anxiety for not having realized how much we are living (with)in these categories: these definitions, these lines, these borders which mark (what) ethics (is) by prescribing (who) the Other (is). Our quest was to find altruism, define what it is and from that, our quest was transformed into a mission to argue, to convince, to rationally persuade about its importance, and just like Comte, to show why and how we should live for the Other. But in the quest of going after the Other, the Other requests us to think:  How can we talk of/​about altruism with(in) the category of “argument?” If an argument is an attempt to prove something to an Other, to convince, to persuade through the power of logic, to rationally persuade the Other, then how can this work for altruism? It seemed as if we were trying to convince the Other that we should live for them. For whom is this an argument? If this is an argument, is it to convince ourselves, as oneself as another, about how to be with the Other, including our self as an Other? Or, is it to address the Other about how they should be with/​to each other excluding ourselves from this whole, just like the introduction above, just like the θεωρός (theorist) as the director of an ancient drama overseeing the actors on stage from somewhere above, in Archimedes’ favourite mark?6 More questions come after us. “Ordinarily when we argue with others, we try to persuade them of some point.”7 But there is something violent with this “with” here; with this attempt to persuade, to convince. It seems that marks, or signs, such as “argue,” “advance an argument,” “defend a claim,” as well as their relatives “dodge the objection,” and “bite the bullet;” are all metaphors, that is, 6 We could ask with Derrida:  In the presence of whom do we write? What is the object or objective of this writing with respect to altruism when altruism is a move which must move toward something else, other than itself, other than the self as a start? Analogize it differently: If altruism is a benefit, a good deed, a good word, a good rhyme for the Other, who and where is this Other? In re(-​)verse: If this were a crime against humanity, who commits (to) this crime? Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: sup, 1995); hereafter, Name. 7 Ernest Lepore, Meaning and Argument: An Introduction to Logic through Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 5.

Prologue

7

means of transport to some place, or in Aristotle’s terms, to some τόπος νοητός (semantic/​noematic place), which is a place in whose proximity a battle is taking place. A place of violence: The forms of persuasion are many. We can persuade others by hitting them, by screaming at them, by drugging them, and so on. These kinds of persuasion are, unfortunately, prevalent. However, in this book we will use the term ‘argument’ exclusively to pick out sets of statements of the following sort …8 But, dividing, putting a vertical line between the elements of the category of persuasion, in other words, by siding with this “sort,” such “sets of statements of the following sort;” by siding with them and using them as tools for our re-​ quest, we will still be siding with the whole category of persuasion, and, possibly, s(l)iding to violence. There is probability in sliding into this “so on” whose proximity is violence. Taking out the physical violence of (the things that make up the category of) persuasion, or, taking out the physically violent things (that make up the category) of persuasion, we are still left with the essential element (that makes up the category) of persuasion as such, we are still left with a non-​ physical violence. With arguments, the violence comes from the force of signs. The force of our signs and their organization, their syntax, their logic. Signs in syntagmata are like military regiments. But for us, these signs, regimented as they are, like infantry marching against the Other to conquer them (symbolically), to convince them, is still to con-​vince, to vincere, to win over the Other. To borrow an expression from Husserl, conviction rests on exerting a pull. To be convinced means to be pulled toward, be it strongly or weakly. It is a speaking against another.9 Signs intro-​duced, organized and ordered to advance an argument, by a duce, a leader, the writer, the arguer, the ‘I.’ For the Other to be convinced by an ‘I’ would mean to be pulled over, drugged, and dragged by the ‘I’ that persuades. The violence of persuasion is not eliminated in the difference between the symbolic and the physical. The violence is still there, idle, and deferred –​in semblance. But how can such violence expressed through “argue” and “argument” relate to/​with altruism? Is altruism not alien, foreign, different, to any form of competition and antagonism, to any form of argument of one against the other? Is not altruism one for the Other rather than (one being pitched) against an other? Hence, in what sense and with what reason 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment:  Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1973), 305–​306; hereafter, Experience.

8 Chapter 1 can we argue? If a “logical” argument comes from in-​ducing, de-​ducing, ad-​ ducing or re-​ducing signs and concepts in order to convince the Other, does the Other get to respond to or for all this? And, equally importantly, is it possible to talk about altruism without arguing? Can we win the Other without winning over them, at their expense? These thoughts motivated us to resist these metaphors whilst re-​questing altruism. In so doing, we were motivated to attempt a second introduction as opening of this re-​quest (Figure 2). There was a second introduction. An attempt to bring back another argument. An argument as undertaking, as an attempt to explore and make manifest how altruism reveals the essence of existence. But because this exploration had already been done in some sense, ‘exploration’ could not properly depict what this work is in reality. Is it a presentation? What is presented here is some signs in different combinations and spatial organizations. But even through such a presentation of signs, we could say that an attempt is being made nonetheless. An attempt to express the experience of altruism through signs. The attempt, then, is to present altruism. To present it with signs. Signs are the tools which appear ready to hand for this attempt. But altruism was not presented to us with signs originally. So this is not a presentation of altruism as a taking in its original presentation, that is, of living it, experiencing it. Rather, it is an under-​taking of its re-​presentation. This undertaking, this attempt at hand then, the ἐπι-​χεί-​ρημα (argument), is an attempt, an effort, an essay to express how all this was made manifest to us, that is, how altruism revealed us the essence of human reality. But if this re-​presentation is about altruism in some way, should the way itself, the writing, not be altruistic itself? If we are to present in writing, to re-​present what was presented to us in a way other than writing how altruism is the essence of existence, would, then, this presentation as representation be altruistic? How could this come to be? How could we write altruistically? This second introduction led us astray and straight to the one of the most well-​ known philosophical questions. Can a representation of something match its original presentation, its original experience? In this case, could a symbolic representation, in this case representation through written language, re-​present altruism in its full being, as what it is when it is experienced, when it is lived? Can language mirror life? Even if it could, life would have to hold still; the painter cannot represent a moving mannequin on the canvas. Both mannequin and mannequin-​represented are (re)presented still, almost lifeless; an alive mannequin (being) dead-​like and a dead mannequin (appearing to be) alive; one imitating lifelessness and the other imitating life. Representation and reality m/​ee\t in death. Just like the introduction which comes alive only when

Prologue9

­f igure 2  Attempt 2

10 Chapter 1 the end has come, so representation comes alive only when the presentation has ended. And between presentation and representation, between the lived body and the body on the canvas, there is the hand of the painter. Between life and death, there is the writing hand of the Other. Between Ida Bauer and Dora, a suicide letter, a writing in Sigmund Freud’s hands. A present for Freud to represent.10 Between John Keats and Adonais, a poem from Shelley Percy’s hand;11 between the abjected thief and Jean Genet, a journal, a present undertaking, an argument, an act of the hand, an ἐπιχείρημα, a writing: If I attempt to recompose with words what my attitude was at the time, the reader will be no more taken in than I. We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. … the interpretation that I give … is what I am–​now.12 Now, then, without an introduction, without a proper argument to introduce, we, like Genet, undertake, we attempt something at hand now, an other sense of argument, an ἐπιχείρημα, to express how it was made to us manifest that

10

11 12

Besides the suicide notes of Ida Bauer that mark the beginning of Freud’s psychoanalyzing ‘Dora,’ there is an interesting story behind this name and its being given. The name was literally a gift to the Freud family. In The Psychopathology of Everyday life, Freud tells the story of how he was inspired to represent Ida Bauer as Dora. ‘Dora,’ which in ancient Greek means ‘gifts,’ is given to Freud by a nursemaid who had to give up her real name: “When the next day I was looking for a name for someone who could not keep her own ‘Dora’ was the only one to occur to me.” Ida had come to Freud with aphonia; voiceless, speechless. The tragic irony consists in the fact that Ida, giving herself, was true for whatever reason she may have had. The logos of her being there was expressed in bodily presence yet aphonically. Her logos was never listened to, nor heard. As if her logos coincided with the absence of speech –​we shall come back to (this) logos later. The name of the nursemaid comes to give voice to someone who appeared with no name. Nursemaid and Ida come to delineate a horizon of sacrifice and givenness. In a way, Psychoanalysis starts with muted lips (Dora and Ida), or the feminine (Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 1–​24, trans. James Stranchey (NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), 1313). Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose (London:  Penguin, 2017); hereafter, Selected. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Paris: Olympia Press, 1954), 31.

Prologue

11

altruism reveals the essence of human reality, how the Other is the essence of our existence.13 13

In a letter sent to the Sorbonne, Descartes describes his Meditations initially as an ‘undertaking.’ Before any argument to convince, there is an other argument, an ἐπιχείρημα, an essay in all senses; an attempt (René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy:  with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge, cup: 1996), 3; hereafter Meditations 1; René Descartes, Meditations, Objections, and Replies, trans. Roger Ariew and Donald Cress (Oxford: oup, 2006), 1; hereafter, Meditations 2). In our undertaking, our attempt ends in the Other. In this quest, we orient ourselves towards the Other. We could also say that we constitute our selves towards the direction of the Other. We are somehow directed by the Other who constitutes our direction. Foucault has found an analogous undertaking in the ancient practice of ascesis. Whereas, today, when we use the term ‘ascetic’ we deploy a meaning with particular religious connotations, a meaning which would imply some kind of renunciation of self, Foucault found that ascesis for the ancients meant something different. It was an undertaking, a particular ἐπιχείρημα which “does not take away: it equips, it provides.” What would an undertaking which provides, which gives to the Other be if such an undertaking would come to be altruism? –​Foucault has explored ‘asceticism’ in various works after reading Nietzsche. However, he deals with ascesis more immediately elsewhere (see Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–​1982, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 420). For the relation between ascesis and the Nietzschean concept of meditation see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and the Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-​Fashioning:  Foucault and Nietzsche,” in Parrhesia, 2, (2007): 44–​65.

­c hapter 2

Introducing Altruism 1

Altruism or Living for Others

Philosophically, altruism is traditionally associated with Comte’s famous phrase, Vivre Pour Autrui. Comte claims that altruism is a ‘historical’ undeniable fact. Human beings have existed and have progressed over the millennia by ordering their capacities, abilities and actions collectively, that is, by helping each other, by living with and for each other. Collectivities are formed to overcome the material difficulties of life in order to survive. For Comte, there is an in-​order-​to-​survive prior to all these human states of affairs, an order for survival. In order to survive, human beings have worked together, each one in their own capacities and abilities as no one is equal and they could not be.1 What one lacks and cannot get, one receives from the other. This removing of obstacles by each one for the other2 leads to progress and its condition is order; the order for survival and self-​preservation. Order and Progress, then, are the conditions for human evolution historically proven. For Comte, once philosophy becomes completely positive, that is scientific, by disentangling itself from negative philosophy –​theology and metaphysics –​ which does not allow for true knowledge, it, this new positive philosophy, as “a doctrine which shall be more organic”3 will be able to “disclose the general laws of human evolution.”4 Everything is about laws, natural and social, which have to be interpreted through time and through the concepts of order and progress. Just as there is biological evolution which culminates in human beings, “the whole course of animal advancement,”5 so there is also social evolution (from single family units to civilized interconnected societies). This evolution, is manifested in human beings as “Man is impelled to ameliorate as much as possible in its whole economy, according to the whole of the means within his power.”6 Morality, then, is nothing but practicality. Moral rules are practical

1 Auguste Comte, Positive Philosophy:  Vol. I-​II, trans. Harriet Martineau (London:  John Chapman, 1896), Vol. ii, 17; herafter, Philosophy. 2 Ibid., 47. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 Ibid., 506. 5 Ibid., 149. 6 Ibid., 553.

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_003

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rules which alongside the physical laws of the universe secure the evolution of the world as a whole. Comte attempts to link the concepts of order and progress to the concept of love. The new “positivist motto, Love, Order, Progress lead us to the conception of Humanity”7 and elevates love, the sympathetic instincts, as the condition of life. “To live in others is, in the truest sense of the word, life.”8 Human nature is united through affection and this unity which secures human evolution is conditioned in moral progress which is the object of human life. No progress can be achieved in humanity without love. “Love, then, is our principle; Order our basis; and Progress our end.”9 To live for others is the ultimate duty. Otherwise, relying on self-​love, which is a possibility, there would be no progress at all. A being of self-​love, “man or animal”10 has a life condemned to “miserable alternation of ignoble torpor and uncontrolled excitement”11 which is, for Comte, against our nature; our nature to evolve. We need to resist our egoistical tendencies and allow for our biological system of sympathetic instincts to be expressed as it is: a system that allows for our evolutionary progress, biological and social: Thus the expression, Live for Others, is the simplest summary of the whole moral code of Positivism. And Biology should indicate the germ of this principle, presenting it in a form uncomplicated by disturbing influences.12 Comte theorizes our altruistic tendencies as “the altruistic system of discipline, which holds a continual rein upon the personal instincts.”13 This system, which is first identified as patterns of sympathetic behavior that characterize social life, will be later characterized by Comte as the function of instincts which enable or condition such behavior. These instincts, in turn, will be located in the brain. Our altruistic behavior is a manifestation, or better, a representation of such brain functioning.

7

Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity I-​II, trans. Martineau (London: John Chapman, 1875), Vol. i., 5; hereafter Polity. 8 Ibid., 278. 9 Ibid., 257. 10 Ibid., 566. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Comte, Polity Vol. ii, 59.

14 Chapter 2 For Comte, it is not only that we have to live for others in the present. Progress unfolds over time. Its being is related to our past, present, and future. While in the present we live better while helping each other, by cooperating,14 we could not have done it without the special contribution of those generations that have passed. Our present is the future of a past generation, and it is conditioned by the collective labor of our fellow human beings in the past; the “living are always governed by the dead.”15 In the present, then, arises our duty, our obligation to live for the others to come, as the others worked for their future which is our present. It is unquestionable for Comte that “the true purpose of our objective existence in life: which is, to transmit, improved to those who shall come after, that increasing heritage, we received from those who went before,”16 is the source of our duty to live for others to come. And by living for others to come we will be able to gain our “indirect immortality”17 just like the others before us. According to Comte, the issue with altruism, or any kind of moral behavior, is essentially the reason for which one should/​would engage in it. The Spartans were altruistic for honor, and so was Socrates in a way, in remaining faithful to his philosophy until his end. So are Christians who act altruistically to find their way to heaven. But for Comte, these cannot be registered as phenomena of pure altruism because such behaviors are all driven by some form of “self-​love.”18 There is an aspired personal, egoistical benefit that motivates the behavior with respect to the Other rather than the action being motivated without an underlying personal benefit as its ultimate end. The Other is used as a means to an end, what Immanuel Kant called heteronomy, and not as an end itself.19 Altruism would be true altruism, that is, we would be in harmony with our nature for Comte, only if it was done by all for all. One for all and all for one as in Alexandre Dumas’ novel.20 Each one for the Other not equally, but in the way each one can be of practical service to the Other. What one misses some other has, and in sharing it we all become better, we evolve. We perfect ourselves with, by, and through the Other.

14 Ibid., 223. 15 Ibid., 294. 16 Ibid., 63. 17 Ibid., 306. 18 Comte, Philosophy. 19 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J.  Gregor (Cambridge: cup, 1998); hereafter, Groundwork. 20 Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers (Irvine, CA: Saddleback, 2001).

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In conclusion, altruism is a biological system of instincts, a system located in the brain, that conditions all our sympathetic feelings and all our cooperative behaviors with the others. This system is the ultimate guarantee for securing the purpose of human life which is its continual evolution and progress. What becomes imperative then, as Comte will elaborate further in the Catéchisme Positiviste,21 is to remove the obstacles that hinder this natural capacity to function properly. Just as humans remove obstacles in nature in order to survive, so the same needs to be done with those obstacles that thwart the proper functioning of the naturally altruistic brain. This function is not an automatic or spontaneous process, a natural flow of our being, even if it is described as an instinct or a set of instincts. Rather, it needs to be enabled. The enabling of this process is guaranteed by a negative action. This negative action is the limiting of the selfish instincts which can block the altruistic ones. Sometimes in some sort of “control”22 or “discipline,”23 but mainly by a natural process of proper upbringing and enculturation; through “habitual exercise”24 and “training.”25 We need to “learn to live for others” through habit26 or, with “une habitude … assez etablie.”27 Conversely, addressing the deviating cases of people who do not allow the natural tendencies to play out, all those who diverge from contributing to the realization of the objective of (the evolution of) life must be controlled and then ordered to do so. Such re-​ordering will enable the progress of humanity for all. But the re-​ordering of those who resist needs be done by practices of discipline and corrective measures which are “not coercive,”28 but, rather, educative in order to be able to help them as well; to bring them to the normal course of life, the proper order, which will enable their natural progress, that is, to become better and evolve. Thus, all members of contemporary humanity reach their full potential through altruism. All for one and one for all.

21

Auguste Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste ou Sommaire Exposition de la Religion Universelle (Paris: Edition Apostolique, 1891), 125; hereafter Catéchisme. 22 Comte, Polity Vol. ii, 10. 23 Ibid., 69. 24 Ibid., 168. 25 Ibid., 176. 26 Ibid., 222. 27 Comte, Catéchisme, 125. This conflict between habit and nature raises questions concerning the naturality of the natural. We shall shortly explore such questions. 28 Comte, Philosophy Vol. ii, 151.

16 Chapter 2 Recently, the same arguments with Comte have been proposed by philosophers and scientists.29 We shall briefly mention the striking similarity of Comte’s altruism with Donald Pfaff’s argument that we are beings equipped with an altruistic brain, that is, that “we are naturally good.”30 Pfaff’s argument is essentially the same as Comte’s, what in the music industry they call a remix of a previous song. Truth be told, if one puts one text next to the other, even the metaphors employed are strikingly similar.31 From Positive Science to Neuroscience, we can now believe that “our brains our wired to produce altruistic behavior.”32 And, as Comte believed, if Positive Science rather than Theology and Metaphysics can enable humanity’s evolution, does it not seem, then, as a natural (epistemic) evolution that “if suddenly a neuroscientist demonstrates that almost certainly the human race is predisposed toward benevolence, then isn’t there an immediate connection between science and real life?”?33 We are endogenously altruistic and we should all be altruistic in order to evolve. Comte talked about how to enable the sympathetic instincts and Pfaff restates this imperative as “improving performance of the moral brain.”34 It is all about removing obstacles in Comte35 and in Pfaff.36 Habit again plays an important 29

Not all scientists would agree that we are essentially altruistic. By espousing a version of evolutionary theory, they argue against altruistic instincts or brains, or they are content to confine altruism to members of kin. 30 Donald W.  Pfaff, The Altruistic Brain:  How We Are Naturally Good (Oxford:  oup, 2015); hereafter Brain. 31 We are not claiming that Pfaff’s book is identical nor the same with Comte’s. The analogy we are trying to articulate, “Pfaff’s book feels as if it is a remix of Comte” constitutes a deterritorialization –​a philosophical practice we borrow from Deleuze and Guattari. The concept of deterritorialization-​reterritorialization appears first in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane (Minneapolis, MN:  ump, 1983). The use of this technique as a philosophical method aims at displacing existing discourses in order to create new meanings (see also the elaboration of this technique in Rosie Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); hereafter, Posthuman). By defamiliarizing the concept of ‘remix’ from the music industry and applying it on the industry of philosophy and science, we can conceptualize the discourse at hand analogically and enhance it conceptually. This strategy allows us to go even further with the borrowed grammar of the music industry and explore deeper conceptual connections and meanings. Pfaff’s book, like a music single, is a sampling; a remixed version of Comte without mentioning the features that it samples. It is presented as new when in fact it is not. 32 Pfaff, Brain, 12. 33 The meaning of a double question, a question nested within a question, will be examined later as we go along. 34 Pfaff, Brain, 156. 35 Comte, Philosophy Vol. i, 47. 36 Pfaff, Brain, 156.

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role. “Once we go get into the habit, the brain’s adaptation will make that habit a more consistent part of our nature.”37 And for the divergents, those who cannot demonstrate this empathy as acting altruistically, we move from Comte’s catechism, from talk therapy and schooling, to pharmacotherapy. “It is likely, therefore, that some combination of talk therapy and pharmacotherapy will best strengthen Altruistic Brain operations.”38 Before proceeding, we ought to pause and pose some questions. If it is the case that we ought to be altruistic, why does it matter where this argument comes from? Pfaff says that neuroscience “uses hard science  –​that is, hard neuroscience –​to propose a detailed theory of moral conduct founded exclusively on what we know about the brain function.”39 Besides the metaphor of “hard” which seems to deliver a pregnant condition for knowledge, there seems to be something soft, a soft transition from the factual to the proposed. Pfaff uses a theory about how the brain functions, how we are, in order to propose a(n other) detailed theory of moral conduct; how we should be. However, this is not a theory about what the conduct actually is, but about a conduct that should be from what we are. When we pause and pose the movement from how we are, to how we ought to be, the ground seems soft rather than hard. The “how we ought to be” is not itself manifested through hard neuroscientific evidence. That course of “hard” observation, rigorous and consistent testing through the neuro-​scientific organon, has come to an end in the posi(ti)ng of what we are. There is a stop of the scientific theory before the proposing of the new theory. There is a break between the two posi(ti)ngs, the theory of ‘being’ and theory of ‘ought to be.’ Even if we agree that hard science gives us the facts about how we are, that is, the posi(ti)ng, then the proposing of what we should be is not itself scientific –​as the other is. This proposing is not equal to posi(ti) ng; there is no meaning in the “propositing.” The ideality of the pro-​, the imagery of the pro-​and the possibility of being that it announces do (not) lie in the realm of facts. What is happening then? From what we are, from ontology we move to axiology, how we ought to be based on how we should have been determined on the basis of what we are. There is also a paradox involved in this proposal. It pertains to what is going to be in the future. What neuroscience tells us now, about or in our current 37 Ibid., 223. 38 Ibid., 264. This movement towards an ideal end is evidently a platonic follow. Even the crescendo from talk therapy to pharmacotherapy is again a re-​enactment of Plato’s civic vision as laid out in The Republic  –​ Plato, Politeia, trans. N.  M. Skouteropoulos (Athens: Polis, 2002) [Πλάτων, Πολιτεία, μτφ. Ν. Μ. Σκουτερόπουλος (Αθήναι: Πόλις, 2002)]. 39 Pfaff, Brain, 7.

18 Chapter 2 being, will be destroyed in the future if we do as neuroscience tells what we ought to do now. If we were to compare the hard facts of how we are now and how we would be in the future –​after having done what we are not now but ought to have been based on what we are –​these would not be commensurate. If we do what we ought to do now which we are not, then we are going to change, differ and, thus, end up being something different from what we are now. This difference may not be qualitative but quantitative in the sense of enhancing what we are (not) now. This logic echoes the practice of plastic surgery which enhances what is already there; there seems to be some sort of enhancement that is not accounted for in what appears to be hard. It is in this ‘getting hard’ evidence that we find knowledge. We could say that there are different sorts of copulation here. The copulation between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ which is supposed to deliver active being, praxis, is created surgically and leaves a gap.40 Early enough, Hume had spotted such gaps and declared surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; … For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.41 Minding the gap that Hume observed uncovers other interesting points. First, we have the proposing, the proposition ‘we ought to live for others’  –​ regardless of whether it is Socrates/​Plato, Christ/​Bible, Comte-​Pfaff/​anatomy/​ neuroscience who propose it. The proposing is for us to reach a destination of being, the altruistic mode of being supposedly being better than any other 40

41

There is another possible reading for this happening. Supposing that there is a lack between what we are and how we need to be, then there is an anticipation for connecting this gap, this ridge, in time. Bridging the being which is with the being which is supposed to be as if leading to its own perfected being, allows for an anticipation of the perfect, ideal being to be. This anticipation spreads being in time and preads, as in robs and plunders, the difference which takes place in the meantime for the arrival of the being that ought to be –​for a more intricate analysis of how this exclusion of difference takes place in other philosophers, most notably in Hegel, see Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. and Richard Rand (Nebraska: unp, 1986), 110–​114. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 245; hereafter, Treatise.

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modality of being which is always a possibility. The objective is the ‘same.’ All the above express, be it in different ways, the same proposition ‘we ought to live for others.’ Nietzsche, writing in roughly the same period as Comte, says that Comte, “did in fact, with his moral formula Vivre Pour Autrui, outchristian Christianity.”42 Essentially, Comte found an alternative way to argue for what Christianity was arguing for. And, in logical parity, we can say that Pfaff, in his turn, seems to have found an analogous way to argue for the same proposition. Second, whether or not the proposition ‘we ought to’ will be awarded the stamp of ‘true’ or ‘false’ depends not on what the proposition proposes, but on the way it has been proposed. For the moment, the proposition ‘we ought to live for others’ does not reflect the world, we do not live for others –​not entirely one could admit. Looking at the different ways this proposition has been proposed over time, it seems that the latest versions differ only in the packaging, in the way they are offered, in the way they are formed, in the way they marketed in the stock market of ideas. Looking at the proposition in its historical perpetuation we can see that it is not the position that is changing but the pro-​, what comes before reaching the final (pro)position. Truth comes from the title of the proposition, and particularly, the one who is entitled to propose. Or, it is not the meaning of the proposition that bears its force, or what it prescribes us to do, but the way, the method, the medium through which it is produced. The message itself is lost and its medium becomes the message. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the truth lies in the production of the message not in the message itself.43 And, as Paul Feyerabend notes, since we are in an era where the role of the priest as holder of the truth has been passed down to the scientist, as the keeper of the organon to true knowledge, the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ is bridged neither by a scientific formula nor with a logically-​deductive one. It is bridged psychologically.44 It is in 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak:  Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans R.  J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: cup, 2005), 82; hereafter Daybreak. 43 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (NY:  Gingko Press, 1967). A  similar point is made by Husserl twice. In Experience and Judgment and in the Crisis Husserl notes that our knowledge has been founded on a tragic error of confusing ‘truth’ or ‘Being’ with “what is actually a method” (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology:  An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL:  nup, 1970), 51; hereafter, Crisis); and, in Husserl, Experience, 45. 44 This phenomenon is evident in all Comte’s work. The Christian priest is literally replaced by another priest, the scientist. The Catéchisme of Comte, is a real catechism, a religious catechism. Positive philosophy is a religion in the same way that Christianity is. Positive philosophy is called by Comte “the new universal religion.” In Feyerabend’s work, we get a glimpse of how the advances in knowledge through this new religion are ultimately based

20 Chapter 2 the name of science that one is asked to be convinced about the truthfulness of the proposition and be motivated to act accordingly –​just as it was in the name of God, or in the name of the King, that someone were to be convinced to act in a particular way. In the name of regulating ideas in the Kantian sense.45 The motivating force to realise the proposition ‘we ought to live for others’ is derived from an appeal to some authority, to some principle, to some arche, to some title as epistemic authority.46 Finally, from a historical viewpoint, what we see is not the operation of an altruistic brain but the destruction of it. The altruism proposed by all our thinkers, which essentially should be the determinate behavioral schema proposed by the ‘we ought to live for others,’ is coming forth through an antagonism of who can make the argument for altruism more convincing, “harder.” If, as Comte and Pfaff argue, it is through altruistic behaviour that we progress, certainly, the intellectual behaviour through which the argument of altruism has progressed historically is not of an altruistic kind. Could we try harder or maybe economize our efforts differently to reach altruism? 2

Another Positivist Attempt

Let us go to another scientist who proposed altruism economically. Marcel Mauss47 advances an argument about a new way of organizing our societies based on the principles of reciprocity and generosity. Mauss derives these organising principles from extensive ethnological and anthropological research in/​of societies to which we refer as ‘primitives.’ Mauss’ argument is founded on the presupposition that our societies have evolved from a similar stage and by drawing commonalities between contemporary practices with those of the so-​called primitive societies he concludes The system that we propose to call the system of ‘total services,’ from clan to clan–​the system in which individuals and groups exchange everything on “propaganda” and “psychological tricks” (Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (NY: Left Books, 1975); hereafter, Against). 45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1929), A320/​B377; hereafter First Critique. 46 It is an appeal to the “doctors” of life, les médecins, as Michel De Montaigne used to called these figures of authority. Michel De Montaigne, Les Essais: Tomes I-​III (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); hereafter, Essais. 47 Marcel Mauss, The Gift:  The Form and Reason for Exchange, trans. W.  D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1954); hereafter, The Gift.

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with one another –​constitutes the most ancient system of economy and law that we can find or of which we can conceive. It forms the base from which the morality of the exchange-​through-​gift has flowed. Now, that is exactly the kind of law, in due proportion, towards which we would like to see our own societies moving …48 Therefore, let us adopt as the principle of our life what has always been a principle of action and will always be so: to emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily. We run no risk of disappointment.49 Mauss’ formula of giving freely and obligatorily is, perhaps, what we are looking for were we to claim that altruism is the essence of existence. If everyone were to adopt such a principle, we would be able to make manifest altruism altruistically. However, we need to consider some things first by looking closely at what Mauss proposes us to do. The societies that Mauss observes are not like us, they are different, yet, analogous. The analogy is the beginning; we have had the same or an analogous starting point as a base. Our difference lies in the fact that we have flowed, moved, departed from the base. But this flow in which we are found is evaluated negatively with respect to the base. The base, as the principle [ἀρχή] of our life, has taken a turn and Mauss proposes to re-​turn the turn, to return to the base. To flow back to the basic principle, the kind of law, in due proportion, towards which we would like to see our own societies moving. But this moving constitutes a backward movement not an evolution if the latter harbors inside it any sense of progress. The base, the principle of life, which all these societies manifest in their different ways, is set as a desired, proposed, possible new direction to our current flow. Those societies have not flowed; they still manifest the base. We will not be disappointed if we run back to that primitive base. We will be equally or more appointed from what we are now. A progress is revealed through a regression. If we are to return to the base, then that suggests that our path has taken a wrong turn. Life has flown in a wrong direction. It is as if our current flow of life has been an accident to our essential being which these primitive societies show us. From what we are appointed by life we have been disappointed by flowing. We have moved away from the essence of life and are experiencing an accident. The essence of life is manifested, as these societies still illuminate it, in reciprocal empathy. With Mauss, the evolution from the primitive base

48 Mauss, The Gift, 90. 49 Ibid., 91.

22 Chapter 2 has negative connotations. The connotations of an accident to our essential being. What Mauss proposes is a progress through regression. While seemingly different positive accounts, they are all, however, based on a logic of supplementarity. This logic has been explained by Jacques Derrida. He has revealed this theme in Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, in Claude Levi-​Strauss, and in Ferdinand de Saussure. Life as it is lived, as it unfolds, as it flows is considered as an accidental movement. And “this unhappy accident is also a “natural progress.””50 Life in its manifestations, either as language (Rousseau/​Strauss/​Saussure) or as morality (Comte/​Mauss/​Pfaff) “is born out of the process of its own degeneration.”51 And the argument of the philosopher, the scientist, the ethnologist, the ethnographer, the linguist comes as a supplement to cure an accident. It is offered as a resistance of what comes about naturally and as a force that will inscribe another moving towards what is revealed as a base, as an origin of the accidental flow. Here, the supplement is announced as required to arrive at the telos which accidentally is the beginning, the base. It manifests, however, the same characteristics of the supplement which fills the gaps of any theory of origin. Dis-​regarding this structure, we arrive, inescapably, at the same questions haunting the first step to this re-​turn to the base, the re-​turn to life as it should (have) be(en). Yet, as Mauss proposes, “let us adopt as the principle of our life,” that with which we are now living without, as we are flowing.52 Will the re-​turn to what we were at the beginning protect us from flowing back to what we are now? Can we guarantee the possibility of not flowing into another accident? Is it possible to not flow? As Martin Heidegger wonders, “are not beginnings rather in each case there precisely so that after them everything moves away from them?”53 Second, what would motivate us all to flow back? Why would one be motivated to run back to a system of generosity and reciprocal empathy analogous to that which these basic, ‘primitive’ societies have/​are/​manifest, even if that running back is done in due proportion? And what is quantified here as

50 Derrida, Grammatology, 242. 51 Ibid. 52 Mauss asks for permission or requests to adopt this principle. Who or what is that which does not let us adopt? We shall meditate on this ‘letting’ and this ‘adoption’ later, after flowing from this base morality. However, we shall now mention that this letting is not an asking of or for a favor if the latter means to give grace. This asking, this question, comes as a request which opens the possibility of decision. 53 Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy:  Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Indiana: iup, 2012), 30; hereafter, Beginning.

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proportion which is due? It is due to whom? Who owes to whom and why? Can we move away from such exchanges? 3

The Duty of (Effective) Altruism54

Similar questions have been raised and have been attempted to be answered by a company of philosophers who have come up with the idea and practice of Effective Altruism (ea). ea is both a philosophy and a movement. As Peter Singer, one of the founding fathers of ea, tells us, it “is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most we can.”55 Similarly, along with William McAskill, another founding father of ea, they write that ea “is a growing community based around the idea of aiming to do the most good one can.”56 The most good is construed as being charitable to those who need help to save their lives. Charity is construed mainly in monetary terms, in money. Thus, donating money to charities supposedly saves lives around the world and, thus, ends up being how one can do “the most good.” Donating to charities that can provide a proven record that they save or that they have the potential of saving the most lives possible is how one does “the most good” effectively. ea has received a lot of attention and has generated a lot of discussion within philosophical journals, newspapers, and on-​line in various forums and blogs.57 The main criticism of ea is that by donating to charities ea leaves fundamental moral issues such as global poverty and injustice unaddressed. ea arguably does not promote radical institutional change which could lead to an ultimate eradication of the problems that may endanger people’s lives in the first place. Such criticism, however, is on the performative or the empirical aspect of the movement and not on its philosophical foundation. That is, criticism of ea focuses on evaluating the practical realisation of its mandates 54

55 56 57

This fragment of our meditation has already been published in Conatus-Journal of Philosophy: Iraklis Ioannidis, “Shackling the Poor or Effective Altruism. A Critique of the Philosophical Foundation of Effective Altruism,” Conatus: Journal of Philosophy, 5, no. 1 (2021). Special mention is due to the editor Despina Vertzagia who kindly allowed us to reprint this paper and enhance our quest. Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (New Haven and London: Yale University, 2015), vii; hereafter The Most. Peter Singer and William MacAskill, “Introduction,” in The Effective Altruism Handbook, ed. Ryan Carey (Oxford: Centre For Effective Altruism, Oxford University Press, 2015), viii. All the references to this volume will be made as: in Carey, The Handbook. For an extensive recent literature review see Brian Berkey, “The Institutional Critique of Effective Altruism,” Utilitas, 30, no. 2, (2018): 1–​29.

24 Chapter 2 with little, if any, evaluation on its philosophical foundation. Essentially, it is a consequentialist critique insofar as it focuses on what its results are. For our quest we need to start with the philosophy of ea. ea is a rather recent movement if we go by the name of it. Before exploring ea from the writings of the community, let us reflect for a bit on the title. By its title, ea introduces us to an altruism that is different from what altruism is. The adjective “effective” allows us the possibility to conceive of other ways of being altruistic which are not ‘effective.’ Yet, ea purports to be precisely that. There is a difference in being altruistic and being altruistic effectively. If altruism is simply about doing good, then ea is about “doing good better” or “the most good that you can do” as the supplementary titles of the books of McAskill and Singer announce respectively. Such “adjectivation” adjects, in other words adds or appends58 to altruism certain conditions. Let us explore these conditions. That ea is both a philosophy and a movement “raises the sticky question of how books that seek to popularize ea … should be evaluated.”59 Our quest requires to problematize this sticky question. We can continue reflecting on the philosophy of ea, or on the movement itself, or on the way the philosophy becomes praxis. Regardless of what one opts to do, what the above comment from Jennifer Rubenstein suggests is of crucial importance because it asks us to apply the principle question of ea on ea itself. That is, we can ask: How good or how effective is ea? But, most importantly for our purposes here, we can ask: How altruistic is ea?60 In the The Effective Altruism Handbook, Singer and MacAskill tell us about the idea of ea and where it comes from. We read that the idea “arose naturally out of recent developments in economics, psychology and moral philosophy.”61 We focus on the philosophy: The development of moral arguments, by Peter Singer and others, in favor of there being a duty to use a proportion of one’s resources to fight global poverty, and in favor of an “expanded moral circle” that gives moral weight to distant strangers, future people and nonhuman animals.62

58 59

For the various meanings of “adject” see www.oed.co.uk relevant entry. Jennifer C. Rubenstein, “The Lessons of Effective Altruism,” Ethics & International Affairs, 30, no. 4, (2016): 516; emphasis added. Hereafter, The Lessons. 60 See also Amia Srinivasan Srinivasan, “Stop the Robot Apocalypse,” The London Review of Books, 37, 18, (2015): 3–​6; hereafter, Stop. 61 Singer and MacAskill in Carey, The Handbook, xii. 62 Ibid., xiii.

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Because it is difficult to trace in their writings who the ‘others’ are, those others who have developed similar moral arguments, we shall first focus on Singer’s philosophical argument on there being a duty to use a proportion of one’s resources in order to be altruistic.63 This choice is important and needs a bit of clarification. By starting with Singer’s widely discussed paper, we are not claiming, as some might hastily read, that the plausibility of ea depends exhaustively on the plausibility of Singer’s moral arguments advanced in his 1972 paper; after all, one might be convinced of ea’s worth without ever having read (t)his paper. Their decision may rest on the development of (the) moral arguments by Peter Singer and others. But the development requires a seed, an origin. This origin may not be visible in what has developed –​the acorn’s kernel is not visible from the outside. In his writings, Singer identifies the origin of ea in his argument advanced in his 1972 paper.64 Based on the textual evidence, there is no other philosophical argument to be found as an origin. Our quest begins by philosophically exploring such founding or fathering, that is, begetting argument of or for ea.65 63

64

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Earlier, we saw in Mauss that we due in due proportions. However, in Mauss, the giving in due proportions is not represented in terms of a system regulated by capitalist principles but it is a giving of reciprocity following a form of an economy which has little to do with capitalism. Exchange is the condition of this primal form of economy which Mauss identifies as the first form of collective economy but it does not lead to accumulation of capital or differences in property. It would be interesting to interrogate why this research has not attracted the attention of the community of ea but this is not our path here, yet. In both his books, Singer starts with the argument of the 1972 paper. In his contribution in The Handbook the same appeal is made. In his recent attempt to defend his moral position from various critics he cites his own 1972 paper with the following: “Given the present conditions in many parts of the world  …  it does follow from my argument that we ought, morally, to be working full time to relieve great suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters.” Peter Singer, “The Most Good You Can Do: A Response to the Commentaries,” Journal of Global Ethics, 12, 2, (2016): 163. Unless we completely disregard the textual evidence, the foundational philosophical arguments which condition the development of ea are found in the 1972 paper. In a recent anthology on ea, MacAskill defines ea but he does not offer a moral argument as a motivating reason to follow ea (cf. Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer, Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). He simply rephrases the main ideas of a consequentialist thinking –​we say consequentialist and not utilitarian as Gray and Frazer do (cf. John Gray, “How & How Not to Be Good,” The New York Review of Books, 5, 21 (2015): retrieved from https://​www.nybooks.com/​articles/​ 2015/​05/​21/​how-​and-​how-​not-​to-​be-​good/​; Giles Fraser, “It’s Called Effective Altruism  –​ But is it Really the Best Way to Do Good?” The Guardian, 23, 9 (2017):  retrieved from https://​www.theguardian.com/​money/​belief/​2017/​nov/​23/​its-​called-​effective-​altruism-​ but-​is-​it-​really-​the-​bestway-​to-​do-​good); in utilitarianism the most you can do is cashed out in terms of happiness whereas a consequentialist can, theoretically, assume any kind of standard of rightness to maximize their impact. As in his monograph, MacAskill rests

26 Chapter 2 Singer’s 1972 article starts with the following: “As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter and medical care.”66 Whether used literally or figuratively, the death of the Other seems to have motivated Singer to explore whether or not we have a duty to help and save those who are dying. But where does this duty come from? Singer says that if it is in our power to act in such a way as to prevent something bad from happening; and if this prevention would not entail our sacrificing something of comparable importance, then we have to act in that way. This principle follows from an “assumption,” that is, “that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.”67 At this instance, Singer does not say that death is bad but qualifies badness as a particular kind of death. This qualification opens up the possibility of asking the reason for such a particular death. If this death comes from a ‘lack,’ then at some point we need to confront this lack and ask how it has come about. But before we proceed in this path let us follow Singer in his writing. As Singer avows, if one does not believe that such suffering and death are bad, then his reasoning will not appeal to them and they “need read no further.”68 For those (of us) who share the assumption that Singer articulates would mean that the principle of altruism stated above follows logically. To make this evident, Singer provides us with an imaginative scenario or what is usually called a thought experiment. We shall quote the scenario as it has been written by Singer to avoid missing any important details: … if I  am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I  ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my on most people’s intuition on making a difference and doing good assuming a pro tanto reason. But we must ask: whence and whither such intuition or reason? One might interpret it as an intuition pointing to a universal truth (cf W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1930), or as a hard-​wired neural mechanism  –​as we saw earlier with Comte and Pfaff  –​or one may interpret it as a deep-​seated habit (cf Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo trans. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Random House, 1967); hereafter, Genealogy; we shall come back to this point shortly); a habit like the one MacAskill asks us to pick up in being effectively altruistic at the end of his monograph: “1. Establish a Habit of Regular Giving.” See William MacAskill, Doing Good Better:  Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference, (London: Guardian Faber, 2015), 165; hereafter, Doing Good. 66 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1, no.  3 (1972): 229; hereafter, Famine. 67 Ibid., 231. 68 Ibid., 229. This exclusion is interesting and raises questions to what effective altruists profess as a need for a global ethic but we cannot take up this thread here.

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clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.69 Like most thought experiments, Singer’s experiment aims to accelerate our understanding70 by focusing closely only on what is relevant in making the argument. For this acceleration, however, there is a cost: historical sacrifice.71 For instance, we are not given any further information concerning how we ended up passing a shallow pond. Yet, we ought to, that is, we have a duty, to wade in and pull the drowning child out. If we assume that death is bad and that no death, or something of comparable moral importance, will come to us by preventing it, then we have to do it. The comparison is whether to save a drowning child or get muddy. The death of the drowning child would be, presumably, much worse than the impairment of some clothing. In other words, the issue is about value. The value of life weighs or is worth more than the value of clothing. The animate is more valuable than the inanimate. Most people would, perhaps, agree that saving the child would be the right thing to do –​regardless of whether such a statement could be motivated by some sort of social desirability or cultural mandate. If we feel authentically that we ought to save this child, Singer tells us, then there is no reason why we should not feel the same way for those suffering in East Bengal or any other distant Other who would be suffering and dying through a need for food, shelter, and medical care. “The fact that a person is physically near us, so that we have personal contact with him [sic], may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away.”72 If you would really save the child and you feel that this is the moral thing to do, then you really need to save those who need to be saved based on your experiencing their suffering and dying. Although the child may be experienced from a close distance, the moral feeling of obligation should not alter if the experience of 69 Ibid. 70 For an extensive description of thought experiments and their development see, James Robert Brown and Yiftach Fehige, “Thought Experiments,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019):  retrieved from https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​win2019/​entries/​ thought-​experiment/​. 71 We are using the term ‘historical’ with the widest possible scope. In this case, ‘history’ can refer to past events which can be traced to condition or cause a present situation and its possible future developments. For instance, we are presented with a drowning child. A historical question for this situation would amount to: What occurred for the child to end up in this situation? 72 Singer, Famine, 232.

28 Chapter 2 someone in need of being saved comes from a medium of communication. The physical distance between your body and their body should not play any role in mitigating this feeling since the experience of their suffering which results from your perceiving it remains the same. The only difference is the medium of perception. With the child you use your eyes, with the refugees you use your eyes and another medium such as pictures, television, internet and the like. The perception of someone being in need of assistance is, essentially, the same. Thus, there is no reason why the moral duty should not be felt for the distant Other along with the concomitant actions which would entail saving them. Furthering his argumentation, Singer tells us that just because there could be others who could provide assistance for those in need, be they drowning babies or refugees, it does not make it any less of an obligation for us to help. Our moral obligation should be felt the same and, thus, propel us to action regardless of any other who could also help. Regardless of what others are doing and the distances involved our duty is to save the ones in need.73 Since the distance as physical proximity and the number of other possible helpers should not mitigate our dutiful obligation to help the drowning baby or the refugees in East Bengal, Singer extends the dutiful obligation to help others no matter where they may be. “Given the present conditions in many parts of the world, however, it does follow from my argument that we ought, morally, to be working full time to relieve great suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters.”74 In this way, if pulling the baby out of the pond would have fulfilled the moral obligation in the case of the drowning baby, then for the others who are far away, the moral duty can be fulfilled by giving money to those who can provide the assistance that would save them and thus relieve their suffering. In Singer’s words, “the application of the moral conclusion we have reached” is the “giving away a great deal of money [which] is the best means to this end.”75 And this giving away is not squandering, but, like in the case of East Bengal, giving to those “[e]‌xperts, observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed famine-​ prone areas [who] can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block.”76 In simple terms, this would mean giving a great deal of money to charities –​which are made up of people –​who 73

For an analysis of what this argument entails in praxis –​ie. the restriction of collective action –​see Rubinstein, The Lessons. 74 Singer, Famine, 238. 75 Ibid., 238. 76 Ibid., 232.

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can be as effective as we would have been were we to save a drowning child by pulling it out of a pond. Whereas some people may consider that this giving money to charities might not be “the best means to this end” Singer considers two arguments. Someone might consider that this is the responsibility of one’s government and thus they should not engage in giving what the government should (have) be(en) giving. Such a thought would enable them to waive their responsibility. Yet, as Singer argues, we cannot establish whether refusing to donate to charities would either motivate the government to take up or eschew this responsibility. “So the onus of showing how their refusal will bring about government action is on those who refuse to give.”77 Yet, it should be of no concern to us whether any other would (also) engage in the same undertaking. Focusing on our duty alone, we should help regardless. The second argument for not giving money to private charities as the best means to the end of relieving suffering revolves around the idea of population control. Arguably, letting people die out of famine maintains sufficient resources for everyone else; whereas if the former were saved, that would mean spending those resources or part of them and, possibly, their or our “fac[ing] starvation in a few year’s time.”78 However, as Singer underscores, that argument simple points to the fact that there needs to be some population control because the limited earth resources cannot indefinitely sustain an ever-​ growing human population; it does not negate the moral obligation of helping those suffering and dying from famine.79 Following these two arguments, which aim to convince us that giving to private charities is the best means to the end of being altruistic as defined earlier, Singer proceeds to clarify that this moral conclusion can be realized in two ways. We can give in two ways. There are two versions of the principle “giving as much as we can” which is analogized with all that we could do. The stronger version is that we “ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility –​ that is, the level at which by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift.”80 The second one, the

77 Ibid., 239. 78 Ibid., 240. 79 Singer is not very clear here as to whether the starvation refers to the possible descendants of those suffering now or a possible starvation for all. Some philosophers who disagree, like Garett Hardin, believe that we should not help the poor at all otherwise we would all starve sooner rather than if we did not help them at all  –​cf. Garett Hardin, “Lifeboat ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today (1974): 800–​812. 80 Singer, Famine, 241.

30 Chapter 2 moderate one, is the one which is closer to the principle of saving unless this saving means sacrificing something of comparable moral significance. So, it is our moral duty to do all we can to help others and “taking our conclusion seriously means acting upon it.”81 And this action is an act of charity whereby we give away as much money as we can in order to help those who are suffering or dying. This is the foundation on which ea rests: Giving money. But, as we saw earlier, there have been some developments to these moral arguments. One such development refers to clarifying what the good is and, all the more so, how we can know what we give is as effective as it could possibly be. In other words, how can we know that all that we can give can have the best possible outcome which should be nothing else than the “most good”?82 The “most good” is articulated as the improvement of the world such that there would be less suffering and more happiness in it and where people live longer. Effective Altruists (eas) work in materializing these values which are terminologically packed into the phrase “saving lives.” The latter, “of course, only ever means extending someone’s life” in a way that they are happy and not suffering. Whereas we do not have a clear indication of what is the ideal number of years one should live, we can thus risk the following hypothesis from the writings of EAs: Premature death would translate into any age of below 70 years old.83 Our moral obligation to do the most we can to save lives, as defined by eas, has also been developed with respect to how the action of giving should be carried out. To fulfil our moral duty according to the developed ea would entail to (a) choose a career which would allow us to make as much money as possible so that we can give as much money as possible to charities –​what they call “earning to give,”84 (b) choosing causes and donating to charities which pursue this cause and which can provide a proven track record that they do save lives or have a verified probability of being able to do so, and (c) giving body ‘parts’ that we can regenerate85 and possibly “non-​ regenerative organ[s]‌” such as kidneys insofar as they are not causing any serious damage endangering our own well-​being. All this amounts to being altruistic effectively. We have conceptually followed ea and we have also gone all the way back to its founding principle as explained by Singer. Let us go back to ea’s childhood –​ after all, if we are to adopt ea it is the abandoned child that we first need to 81 Ibid., 242. 82 Singer, The Most, 7;9. 83 MacAskill, Doing Good, 27–​29. 84 Singer The Most, 39. 85 Ibid., 70.

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rescue from its being drowned. By accepting the assumption that Singer set forth earlier, we shall reflect on the analogy that he has attempted. Is saving a drowning child instead of getting muddy analogous to saving the refugees of East Bengal or any other distant Other? Also, is the act of saving the drowning child analogous to giving money to charities? We start by reflecting on the thought experiment. If we were to be as logically strict as Singer asks us to be, then we would struggle to see how this drowning child comes easily under the category of suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. Since we do not have historical or contextual information, this child might have ended up in this situation for a million different reasons other than the category which we assumed to be bad. Nevertheless, let us wade in this murky logical pond and try to follow Singer. Let us give him a free pass for the moment, or as it is usually said, let us be charitable to Singer and allow him to make manifest this duty. Let us assume that we feel that we ought to wade in and pull the drowning child out. Singer tells us that when presented with this scenario most people or his students would shout out that they would save the child. They feel that this is the moral thing to do. However, just because most people would agree that saving the child is moral, that does not make it necessarily so. This appeal to the majority or to, what amounts to the same, an appeal to representationalism, will haunt us until later. For the moment, the point we need to raise is that what constitutes morality is traced to a feeling of being compelled to act in a particular way when compared to alternatives. The thought experiment, as every thought experiment, excludes all variables apart from the ones that need to be compared. Let us attempt to investigate these variables. According to the thought experiment the variables that are analogized in the two cases are: 1. Perception 2. Evaluating badness 3. Feeling moral obligation 4. Providing aid in order to save … if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it [perception], I ought [feeling moral obligation] to wade in and pull the child out [providing aid in order to save]. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing [evaluating badness]. In order for a strict parity between the two cases to obtain we have to secure parity for each individual variable between the case of the drowning child and the case of the distant Other. Singer has already given us some reasons for

32 Chapter 2 which perception is analogous in both cases. So far, we have secured the parity of perception as an act. However, we have not analogized the content of perception.86 If the parity of the content of perception does not obtain, then the overall parity will fail.87 If the extension from child to refugees does not prove to be analogical, then the further analogy from East Bengal as the distant Other to any Other could not pass either. There are two issues that make the parity of the content of perception difficult to obtain. First, the child is one and the refugees are many. Logically, we can say with Heraclitus88 that the one and the many are in the end one –​so that we can assume logical parity in classes, i.e. class of child and class of refugees. We have to assume a logic of classes to make the analogy happen. The logical parity can be achieved by thinking of thinking of a class of drowning children to be saved and then thinking of a class of refugees to be saved –​the parity is between a thinking of classes. This, however, goes beyond perception. Initially we were asked to think of a perception of a child and then a perception of refugees. Yet, the analogy is not between what is thought to be perceived –​or having been perceived –​but of a reworked thought; a thought with classes. If the variable of perception is to be kept, as Singer aims to do, then we would have to imagine as many children as refugees –​that is the meaning of strict analogy in all levels. Imagine you come across hundreds of children drowning in ponds –​or as many children as refugees you see on television or whatever else medium; do you still feel the same moral obligation to save all of them? As many as you can? Save them all by yourself? Most of us could possibly answer affirmatively to the first two questions. Yet, if the scenario had us imagining as many children as there were immigrants in East Bengal, then that might change the dynamics of whether saving all of them would interfere with the sacrifice of something of comparable importance. Having more children to save may raise a feeling of compulsion to save them but it may equally raise the amount of sacrifice –​even if this sacrifice was only of time.89 The passage between the 86

For the importance of the difference between perception and content of perception see Husserl, Experience. 87 Needless to emphasize that we are talking about parity, analogy, not identity. We are looking for contents of perception which are on a par not identical –​identical perceptions are impossible since the difference of time will always make them slightly different. 88 Heraclitus, Apanta, trans. Tasos Falkos-​Arvanitakis (Athens:  Zetros, 2010); [Ηράκλειτος, Άπαντα, μτφ., Τάσος Φάλκος-​Αρβανιτάκης (Αθήνα: Ζήτρος, 2010)]. 89 And, thinking on a utilitarian register, this time could possibly be used to produce more happiness than the happiness to be produced by saving children from ponds. And this question about which of the two acts would have produced more happiness is a question that can only be decided upon by researching the historical context of each situation.

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one and the many does not secure the non-​violation of the principle of sacrificing something of comparable importance. And this is the cost of changing from perception into a thinking with classes to obtain an analogy. Let us continue exploring the variable of perception. Singer attempts to neutralize the variable of distance in perception in order to obtain the parity. Perhaps, Singer assumes that distance is implied only in the case of perceiving the refugees. However, there is also distance in the perception of the drowning child. The perception of the child is not just a perception of a child; it is a perception of a drowning child. Our perception has already been classified as ‘child’ and ‘drowning.’ How do we know that the child is drowning? It is given by the scenario of course. But to perceive that a child is drowning and to know that a child is drowning are two different things. Singer says “see” but this ‘seeing’ which should lead to our moral intuition of feeling compelled to help would have to be a knowing that this is the case. Here Singer enjoys and enjoins the senses of ‘seeing’ in order to neutralize the distance which is always implied in perception. Seeing a child drowning in an authentic act of perception does not immediately entail knowing that the child is indeed drowning. The child could be playing or faking and the like. I can see something which would turn out to be something else. The condition of seeing with epistemic import requires a particular distance and engagement –​not to mention the historical context of each event. And this particular distance and engagement cannot be secured immediately in the case of an additional medium of perception (for example television or internet) which informs us about what is the case.90 Someone suffering and dying from lack of food, shelter and medical care may have visual signs that provide immediate information about their situation whereas the case of a drowning child does not. Thus, strictly logically, analogous perception fails. The parity of perception cannot be achieved based on what Singer has given us. But let us provide some more charity to his attempt and allow the possibility that the perceptions are analogical. We have already given some charity in order to achieve the analogy between the category of drowning and the category of dying from a lack of food, shelter and medical care. To make this happen we assumed the broader category of dying. The second variable that we identified was ‘evaluating badness.’ However, there is an issue of agency which might pose problems in securing the logical parity for this variable. For instance, the ‘child’ is a class of persons and these

90

The present controversy over the development of the Covid-​19 virus as an epidemic or pandemic is an adequate example of this point.

34 Chapter 2 persons can vary with respect to their agency and their power of acting. We could suppose91 that the child requires help and we know better what kind of help to provide in order to save them. But the presupposition here is that the child cannot save itself hence our act(ion) is deemed necessary. However, the class of refugees may quantify over persons who know what they need to do to save their lives. If they could reason like we do, could we not ask them what kind of help they need? Would we not be stealing their autonomy as reasonable people if we assumed that we know better how to save them? If we assume a logical parity between ‘children drowning’ and ‘refugees dying of hunger,’ then we would be sacrificing the autonomy of refugees as follows: First, the categories ‘drowning’ and ‘dying from hunger’ are bad with respect to the imminent death that they imply. Second, the categories ‘children’ and ‘refugees’ end up being analogous with respect to not being able to avert the condition of badness. Yet, the category ‘refugees’ includes or may include both ‘children’ and ‘adults whereas the category ‘children’ should exclude ‘adults.’ With Singer’s analogy, however, we could end up doing the following: with respect to autonomy of action and reflecting and acting responsibly, we would be treating the children as refugees and the refugees as children. Apart from the moral issue involved in this type of thinking, we shall focus on its logical problems. The logical flaw is generated here from an implicit use of a metaphor. ‘Pulling the child out of the pond’ is used to arrive at the idea of ‘pulling the Other out of their suffering and death.’ But in our case the issue is of creating an analogy, a logical parity, not a metaphor. To assume that the class of ‘drowning child’ is analogous with the class of ‘refugees dying from’ with respect to evaluating the badness of their condition is only possible if, and only if, we provide some more charity to Singer. Yet, even with more (logical) charity what we save here will haunt us if we look at the type of aid we could provide. To understand this further we need to introduce an auxiliary concept, the ‘body.’ The provision of the aid in the case of the child was “wading in” and “pulling out” which refer to one’s own body. Bodies come into contact. The aid comes from one’s body and more importantly from the power of one’s body. We agreed with Singer that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”92 Now, 91

We use the term ‘suppose’ as we do not have any more historical information about the child which would relate to its capabilities. This problem will haunt us again later. 92 Singer, Famine, 231; emphasis added. Contrary to Kissel who argues that there is “no deep theoretical incompatibility between ea and anti-​capitalism,” we have to note that insofar as effective altruists represent power in monetary terms, then this representationalism would always stumble or stick on the issues of adequacy and, thus, the possibility

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through the referential opacity of ‘power’ Singer moves into suggesting that providing aid as donating money is analogously powerful to “wading in” and “pulling out” someone who is drowning.93 But such a logical move does not follow. Even if we presuppose that in the end of both events people’s lives are saved, one bodily action is not as powerful as the other precisely because in the case of donating money more bodies will be involved in this saving supplementing one’s power of wading in and pulling out.94 Let us think this in re(-​)verse: To punch someone is not necessarily analogous with having someone hired to punch them. The analogy would obtain, if it would, concerning the impact on the receiver i.e. being hurt. The ends may be analogous but the events are not. Thus, the logical extension of the two scenarios cannot obtain unless we give more charity to bridge this logical gap. So far, we have provided a lot of (logical) charity to Singer to make his argument work. Yet, there are other issues which flow from such a logical path. Earlier we raised a question concerning the history of the event of the drowning child. For the class of persons in East Bengal we get a glimpse of the history through the very adjective ‘refugees.’ The reason for which we inquired into the history or the context for the drowning child is because we wanted to explore whether this could possibly affect our evaluation of the situation and, thus, our moral intuition and, finally, our motivation to act. In the paper where the drowning child first appears, Singer avowed that the moral obligation to help comes as an entailment of one’s evaluation of dying of a lack of food, shelter, and medical care as bad. This evaluation comes from an assumption and this assumption harbors a belief that things can be bad or good in themselves, objectively. In his later writings, Singer does not claim that this is an assumption but a truth and that “the eternal truths of reason can generate feelings in all human beings.”95 Following Henry Sidgwick, Singer argues of reserves and surpluses on which capitalism rests –​we shall revisit this point shortly (Joshua Kissel, “Effective Altruism and Anti-​Capitalism: An Attempt at Reconciliation,” Essays in Philosophy, 18, no. 1 (2017): 19). 93 In the same line of thought, MacAskill conceives power in terms of the amount of money one has in their possession (see Chapter 1, Doing). 94 In one of the ways that effective altruists apply their principles is through the Charity ‘Give Directly’ which transfers the donated money directly to those whom they consider in need. Even in this case, the body-​to-​body action of wading in and pulling out is still not analogous with handing in money physically or virtually through an electronic transfer. The medium which intervenes between the bodies, in this case money, through which everything is represented, is what shatters a strict analogy. It is also this medium which allows them to advance an argument which gives the impression that by a single click on the computer you can save lives. 95 Singer The Most, 81.

36 Chapter 2 that there are “self-​evident fundamental moral principles, or axioms, which we grasp through our reasoning capacity.”96 One such axiom is that everyone’s good, or let us say well-​being, is of equal importance and thus we are bound to regard each other’s well-​being as our own. It is thus reason that plays a generating force for acting for the well-​being of the Other. Supposedly, reason can motivate us to help the other. Yet, the scenario that Singer proposed initially was not meant to show how reason works or should work in the case of the drowning child, but how there is a moral intuition generated at the instance of ‘seeing’ someone dying. The problem that Singer tries to solve is that of being motivated to help regardless if it is judged to be the moral thing to do. Before we proceed to the issue of motivation we shall pause and reflect on this philosophical idea of objectivity in what is good or bad. This view is often called “objectivity in ethics” or “moral realism-​universalism.” The opposing view to realism would be relativism, meaning that there are no truths about right or wrong. A moral intuition of right or wrong is equated with a judgement since we are in the realm of evaluating something. In this case, there are moral judgements which can be deemed true or false. Reason is that which can help us reach those fundamental moral truths. However, this creates a circularity. If reason is that which can lead us to moral truth then what is moral truth? Obviously that which is coming from reason, that is, reasonable. Unless we fall into a vicious regress we would have to say platonically that truth here is also the good. And what is good? That which reason allows us to grasp. As we shall shortly explore, unless we presuppose some ultimate end or a regulating idea, truth and reason do not make much sense in explicating each other.97 Singer, who espouses Darwin’s evolutionary theory of being, tries to show that helping others is a fundamentally true judgment and also consonant with the theory of evolution which poses as an end one’s own survival and the perpetuation of the species.98 This is also the way that other philosophers who espouse moral universalism attempt to conceptually fund their thoughts. The argument is essentially transcendental. For instance, as Rachels tells us: “There is a general point here, namely, that there are some moral rules that all societies must embrace,

96 Ibid. 97 See Kant’s First Critique. For reason to work an ens realissimum is required –​be it God or any other Ultimate End as a regulating idea. 98 see Katarzyna de Lazari-​Radek and Peter Singer, “The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason,” Ethics, 1, no.  10 (2012):  9–​31. It is based on this regulating idea of ‘survival’ and ‘perpetuation of the species’ that Comte and, now, contemporary neurobiologists are trying to make a case about humans’ being essentially altruistic.

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because those rules are necessary for society to exist.”99 Unless there is universality of how cultures act in some fundamental respects, cultures would not have existed in time. However, what this transcendental thinking does not reveal is why we, be it singularly or collectively, should exist or survive. For whatever reason, I can inquire into the reason of existence and I cannot find any compelling argument for why I, as a person who reasons, should exist –​whether I evolved or was created. And this ‘why I should exist’ refers not only to my origins but also to my purpose in life. Why is this relevant to our discussion? It is relevant because Singer admits that surviving without meaning, that is, purpose in life, does not make much sense and is “a self-​defeating enterprise.”100 Perhaps, evolution is an effect of having a meaningful life and not the cause of it. It is not that we all have reason that we perpetuate our species, but we perpetuate our species as a result of creating a reason, a purpose in life which motivates us to go on. According to Singer in his later effective altruist writings, in the natural development of his arguments, securing the well-​being of the Other does not seem to be propelled exclusively by a mandate of reason, nor by an immediate intuitive compulsion, but by a personal pursuit of happiness which would come about by creating a meaningful life. And this meaning means having a purpose since we “live in a time when many people experience their lives as empty and lacking in fulfilment.”101 In this case, however, helping the Other does not come from the well-​being of the Other as an end in itself, but instead it is a personal reason –​or a desire –​to have a meaningful life. Ethics “offer a solution. An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger, goals thereby giving meaning to our lives.”102 From reason we now move to “the need” of finding “meaning and fulfillment in life” and thus many people turn to effective altruism as a way of giving their lives a purpose it would not otherwise have.”103 Reason alone cannot give itself in a way as to motivate the enterprise, the business for producing the well-​being of the Other; it cannot find, fund, and found a (foundational) ground to help the Other unless reason first takes a detour whereby it gives (into) self-​satisfaction –​from a universal reason we have passed into a universalized personal/​particular reason. What we have

99

James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: Random House, 2012): 24; original emphasis. There is a difference between wanting to live and having to live. We do not have to live; there is no necessity in living. One can always commit suicide. The latter, even if undesirable, is within our power. 100 Singer in Carey The Handbook, 9. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 10. 103 Singer, The Most, 91; 47.

38 Chapter 2 here, then, is not a need but a desire for a meaningful life which is fulfilled by helping the Other. And for this desire to be fulfilled the Other must be in need of help. Does this mean that the Other must be constantly in need of help for us to keep living and believing in a meaningful life (as eas)?104 To explore this hypothesis we would need to go back to the semantic ambivalence of the variable (4): providing aid. In the case of the drowning child, the provision of aid is wading in and pulling out. It happens once with one’s body. Once again, there is no ‘again’ or a gain when saving the child.105 It happens once for the child itself and not for us –​hapax. The child is saved from imminent death and then it returns to its normal life or it is on its own.106 In the case of the Other who dies from poverty, lack of shelter or medical care, could we say something analogous? It is right at this moment that the history of each scenario becomes significant concerning the provision, and future provision, of aid. If we were to do all that is in our power to wade in and pull out the Other from imminent death coming from poverty, lack of shelter and lack of medical care what would that mean? For the latter two, the lack already sign posts us their fulfillment. We can provide shelter and medical care. eas realize this –​ there is no doubt about that. But what about poverty? What is the lack that is fundamentally implied in poverty? Earlier we followed Singer in thinking that poverty relates to the lack of food. We ought to help those who die from famine. But famine and poverty in the developments of ea are translated in terms of money. Poverty is represented in monetary terms presupposing a capitalist economy. MacAskill writes:

104 From the philosophy of psychoanalysis, this would be an instance of projection and masochism with respect to having a meaning on the condition of the exploitation of the Other; and the giving of charity both as projection and as a reaction formation to justify the guilt of the exploitation. 105 A whole new path has just opened up right here: is it possible to do or give something with no return? We are not yet ready to explore such giving. We promise to return to this issue. 106 This point may raise concerns as to the extent to which a child can make it on its own. That concern would require a clear conceptualization of what we mean by ‘child’ (see Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Random House, 1965). Obviously, a newborn baby or a baby without certain developed capacities cannot. Yet, once certain capacities are developed a child as a young human being could do surprising things for their survival (see John Eekelaar, “The Emergence of Children’s Rights,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 6, no. 2 (1986): 161–​182; or the confessions of Jean Gennet in his various works). But even if one adheres to a strong paternalism, an individual of a certain age can be knowingly independent in terms of avoiding being drown in ponds. I thank an anonymous reviewer for allowing me to think this further.

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For almost all of human history –​from the evolution of Homo sapiens two hundred thousand years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250  years ago –​the average income across all countries was the equivalent of two dollars per day or less. Even now, more than half of the world still lives on four dollars per day or less. Yet, through some outstanding stroke of luck, we have found ourselves as the inheritors of the most astonishing period of economic growth the world has ever seen, while a significant proportion of people stay as poor as they have ever been.107 We let the reader decide how much ‘luck’ has to do with the ‘lack’ of food as a result of the building of our colonial empires; how much ‘luck’ and ‘lack’ is involved in slavery, genocide and ethno-​cleansing which have made us, the western world, the inheritors of the abundance that MacAskill describes. Instead, we would like to underscore how eas do not reflect on their presupposition that poverty gets construed in capitalist monetary terms. As MacAskill says, when it comes “to helping others, being unreflective means being ineffective.”108 It is not the case that poverty, for almost all of human history, was a matter of income and money. Plato for, instance, describes poverty (πενία) as aporia (ἀπορία) (ἡ οὖν Πενία ἐπιβουλεύουσα διὰ τὴν αὑτῆς ἀπορίαν παιδίον ποιήσασθαι ἐκ τοῦ Πόρου).109 And aporia, as a quick semantic and etymological analysis would suggest, relates to the inability to move –​ultimately related to what the body cannot do.110 Because we take the current capitalistic system of exchanging goods for granted, we now think that the poor is the one who does not earn beyond a numerical monetary threshold in a capitalist setting. The poor, then, are not the ones who are not able to sustain themselves foodwise, through the power of their bodies, but the ones who cannot participate in the current system of exchanging goods effectively so as to sustain themselves. Taking such representations for granted will not allow eas to wade in and pull out the poor from poverty but will always be limited to trying “to end the 1 07 MacAskill, Doing, 20. 108 Ibid., 7. 1 09 Plato, Symposium, retrieved from: http://​www.perseus.tufts.edu/​hopper/​text?doc= Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0173%3Atext%3DSym.%3Apage%3D203. 110 Even when ‘aporia’ is used by Aristotle to describe a noetic impasse, the explication used is always with reference to the body –​cf Thomas Aquinas who translates and comments on Aristotle’s aporia: “For just as one whose feet are tied cannot move forward on an earthly road, in a similar way one who is puzzled, and whose mind is bound, as it were, cannot move forward on the road of speculative knowledge.” Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, retrieved from: https://​isidore.co/​aquinas/​Metaphysics3.htm.

40 Chapter 2 extreme poverty.”111 Would that mean that there should always be poverty? Why should there always be poverty? Whereas MacAskill seems to neglect the philosophical and historical developments of representing poverty, Singer takes for granted that altruism should be defined within the capitalist setting: “Like it or not, for the foreseeable future we seem to be stuck with some variety of capitalism, and along with it come markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities.”112 Since ea sticks to capitalism, ea is always going to be ineffective. It fails to reflect on the phenomenon of poverty and the development of its representations. If we really were to be altruistic (effectively), then we should realize Singer’s analogy differently by reflecting on how to wade in and pull out the other from poverty and not just from the way poverty is represented within a capitalist setting.113 But, perhaps, that requires another economy, an economy which would not be charitable to sustaining the condition of poverty as, arguably, takes place in capitalism. Such an economy would not make an allowance, would not allow the poor to exist as capitalism does. It would aim at not allowing the existence of the poor or the aporous. But such a possibility requires a thinking where poverty is not represented in monetary terms, a representation which has created the opacities we have explored. And yet, eas are not likely to promote such a passage precisely because it cannot be quantified in the epistemic terms they accept in order to be convinced about its importance.114 We are, thus, stuck with a representation of poverty in monetary capitalist terms and this representation allows only a thinking of the eradication of a type of poverty and not the eradication of poverty itself. This means that by being charitable to this (representation of) poverty we sustain it. Just as in this path so far we have been giving representational charity to eas in terms of logically bridging their argument without being able to offer us a path to altruism, so too, giving monetary charity within

1 11 MacAskill, Doing, 105; my emphasis. 112 Singer, The Most, 50. 113 ea cannot be saved just by making some fine tunings in their methods or their causes as Gabriel tries to show; see Iason Gabriel, “Effective Altruism and Its Critics,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 34, no. 4 (2017): 457–​473. Analogically, just rearranging furniture would not do if our aim is an authentic restructuring. Since the philosophical-​theoretical axiomatic principles are problematic, any realization of them, be it adequate or, per impossibile, perfect, would entail these philosophical-​theoretical problems, in one way or another. 114 One could even risk here the hypothesis that the epistemic criteria set forth by ea are complicit with the political system in which they emerged. As Srinivasan aptly put it: “capitalism, as always, produces the means of its own correction, and effective altruism is just the latest instance.” Srinivasan, Stop, 6.

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a system which sustains the existence of those who have and those who have not, ie capitalism, not only is not effective altruism; it is not even authentically altruistic. If poverty did not take place would we need to give to charity? What would the meaning of giving to charity be if there were no poverty? With poverty represented with(in) capitalism charity becomes its crutch. Charity is not like wading in and pulling out someone from a drowning pond, but maybe like throwing a life jacket, a life preserver. Preserving the life of the poor in the conditions that they are found also preserves the conditions which endangered them in the first place; it is not saving them from these conditions. Following ea which relies so much on giving monetary charity within a capitalist setting we do, in one sense, sacrifice something of comparable importance: the possibility of trying to authentically free the poor from poverty.115 And, if we take Singer to the letter that ea offers a purpose in life, as we explored earlier, then that would mean that our meaningful lives in ea would require the sacrifice of the poor’s possibility to authentically overcome poverty. With ea we see how moralizing about those in need in monetary representational terms ends up at their expense. For us to be charitable we need those who are in need of such charity utterly neglecting how they came to be poor –​the refugees of Bengal were the effect of post-​colonial war not just some outstanding stroke of luck. It seems that such altruism is not motivated by the Other per se, but by a desire to have a purposeful life. In one sense, we are permitting the Other to sacrifice themselves for us. Some altruism does occur but not only from us but for us as well. Back to the beginning. Singer admitted that if one does not believe that such suffering and death are bad then his reasoning will not appeal to them and they “need read no further.”116 This prescription seems a bit troubling. It allows for an exclusion of those who would not share Singer’s presuppositions. Singer makes no effort to try to understand why some might disagree with his assumption. An authentic altruism would start right here, that is, in the attempt to understand the Other rather than by imposing our own beliefs, our values, and, with capitalism, our ways of life on them. The problem with ea is not only that is ineffective but that it is funded by a philosophy which has little to do, which in Latin means give, when it comes to helping the Other authentically; doing or giving without reserves and/​or surpluses.

115 For a similar critique see Matthew Snow, “Against Charity,” Jacobin (2015); retrieved from: https://​www.jacobinmag.com/​2015/​08/​peter-​singer-​charity-​effective-​altruism/​. 116 Singer, Famine, 231.

42 Chapter 2 But let us attempt one more time. Let us be convinced for a moment; let us adopt the idea that we should be altruistic.117 Without adopting, nothing will happen. We ought to be altruistic. Yet, when “we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, [these logical/​reasonable] conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and ’tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain’d with difficulty.”118 The logical or reasonable or rational, or scientific conclusion reached is not usually realized in praxis, in everyday life. The adoption of the principles turns out to be brief and ephemeral; it does not endure in time. Adoption would require breaking these old habits which push these principles to a place where they cannot take place. Adopting a theory in theory cannot live in praxis, it will be forgotten. Life makes theoretical reasoning forgettable.119 It is at this very moment of the impotence of reason that the power of habit comes in. Being habituated in a particular way has always been the key concept and the force to realize the moral proposal/​proposition. The ‘in-​between’ between these two realities is tacitly proposed to be bridged with habit. It is not surprising that moral philosophers and scientists resort in one way or another to the mistress of habit as the way for their argument about the good to be realized.120 The moral proposition is realized in the “vis inertiae of habit, … something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid.”121 And what better way, as Nietzsche showed, then, but to make the habit “harder,” making it a custom, a tradition, a culture, an-​other reality, something appearing naturally and in-​itself? This is what history teaches. (Moral) thinking is but a habit. Is habit then all there is?

117 A new path has opened ahead of us:  adoption. We are not ready to explore this phenomenon. 118 Hume, Treatise, 238. 119 “My habitual opinions keep coming back,” wrote Descartes, even when reason tries to doubt everything since it is the most reasonable thing to do when it comes to certainty (Descartes, Meditations 1, 15). It takes time, three days of trying, of ascesis, of exercise “to have accustomed myself to leading my mind away from the senses” (Ibid., 37; emphasis added). To think rationally is to accustom oneself to something. But the power required for breaking and entering habits, this power that connects, is a logos nowhere to be found(ed). 120 We have seen earlier how habit was playing a crucial role for Comte and Pfaff. Even eas appeal to the magic of habit to be able to sustain what the(ir) reason cannot (see MacAskill’s last Chapter). Kant himself, as we shall see, could not avoid resorting to habit for being able to reach reason. 121 Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy, 24.

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You for instance want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is desirable to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man’s inclinations need reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man?122 4

Moving towards the Other beyond Arguments and Habits

Taking into consideration all these factors, do we still want to argue about altruism? Is this project just about or just by providing reasons for being altruistic and see if we could all in the end meet, as “habituated in altruism”? Will we not like “miserable fools”123 be chasing another Moby Dick124 or a Snark?125 Altruism here is not to be provided as a prescription followed by reasons as possible motivations for future habituation. We saw that Mauss put it paradoxically in the phrase “freely and obligatorily.” How can this happen? We desire to create a passage to altruism altruistically. Our undertaking in printing does not aim at imprinting reasons in the sense that our representation is (im)printed on this paper. Our desire is not to create another noble lie or cause to be (im)printed like a tattoo or to be revered as a totem in our existence. To arrive at altruism altruistically is to arrive at the Other in the Other’s being, into Otherness, into difference. This movement requires a resistance; a resistance of being driven to the Other based on some sort of egological motivation. In empirical cases, the ego is somehow resisted in its aspirations when it di(v)es to help the Other. This resistance, in our philosophical undertaking, right here, can be a sort of bracketing of a particular epistemological way of approaching the Other. It is the epistemological way of the Other that we need to find first, if we are to find the Other. In other words, it is the very words of the Other that we need to follow; in pursuit of the word of the Other, in Other words. And by this bracketing we have options. In this bracketing, we follow Edmund Husserl126 though not 122 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes (London: Alma Classics, 2010), 75; hereafter, Notes. 123 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-​Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: cup, 2005), 175; hereafter, Anti-​Christ. 124 Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1851). 125 Lewis Caroll, Hunting of the Snark:  Agony in Eight Fits (London:  MacMillan and Co. Limited, 1876). 126 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy (Second Book), trans. F.  Kersten (The Hague:  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983); hereafter, Ideas ii.

44 Chapter 2 till the end –​nor as an end, a particular end, but as coming towards the Other. Our bracketing is not exactly that of “putting out of play” or “inhibition”127 proposed by classical phenomenology. Instead of holding in check epistemologies in order to arrive at the foundational episteme, or, a theoretical representation of the possibility of such a foundational ‘I know’ or ‘Eye knows,’ the bracketing we shall perform does not have a direction of outside to inside “()” in order to find the (transcendental) I/​ego/​episteme which would make altruism possible. Rather, we shall reverse the bracketing and make it from the inside to the outside “)(” as an unbracketing. It would be as if we come in-​between a fullness and a poverty, as if we come like the metaxy of the platonic eros, ἔρως. The ‘I’ we said is resisted yet we might as well say desisted. Remaining at its full force, the ‘I’ exhausts itself towards a full intention towards the Other, whoever the other may be; unbracketing and de-​bracketing. Here, in our (w)riting altruism, such desistence, such reversal of the phenomenological method gives us options. Instead of epistemological closure or reduction to one way of philosophizing, we have an openness as affirmation of all ways the Other could be expressed. Along then with the scientist, the theologian, the materialist, the idealist, the phenomenologist, the feminist, the poet, the singer, the sculptor, the theologian, … the Other here is not in “adiaphoris;”128 we are not indifferent to what the Other has to say –​as we experienced with Singer. The Other is welcomed in their difference. This philosophical openness is something like the epistemological anarchy of Paul Feyerabend where “anything goes.”129 The bracketing turns into, comes to be an unbracketing or an apoche, an abstaining from a particular way of doing our inquiry towards altruism. This anarchy, if anarchy is the term, allows us to avoid committing a performative paradox in our philosophizing. The limits of our openness are the limits of the words that we shall employ in this writing. But we can overcome this quantitative limitation by allowing time to understand the Other. We can promise to act like Rousseau: “While reading each Author, I made it a law for myself to adopt and follow all his ideas without mixing in [introjecting] my own or those of anyone else, and without ever disputing with him.”130 Adopting and following. We opt to flow with the Other, the 127 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), 20; hereafter, Meditations. 128 Nietzsche, Untimely, 170. 129 Feyerabend, Against, 159. 130 Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly (New England: unep, 1995), 199; emphasis added. See also how Derrida announces an analogous way of f(ol)lowing with the Other immediately after thinking of Rousseau (Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol.

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logic of the Other, the logos of the Other, by bracketing not the Other but the ‘I.’ Bracketing the ‘I’ allows for an unbracketing of the Other to speak in their own words. It is a move toward the Other, an altruistic move. Following the thought of the Other is like carefully carrying out an experiment: their experiment, their thought. Where does their thought, their noetic-​cognitive paths lead us? Could they lead us to altruism altruistically? To undertake the noetic paths of the Other, is that not altruism? Is not altruism first and foremost a trying, an undertaking to coming to no end with respect to the Other; to no end towards the Other? Trying to understand the Other comes to be what we call altruism. Making sense with the foreignness of the Other makes altruism possible. We risk this hypothesis. Thus, our journey displaces the traditional concept of altruism. Altruism will be traced back to the nothingness of the logos of existence, a nothingness which the Other makes a plenitude. The Other (being) as the reason why I live. The Other as the reason to why (we) live. Borrowing an expression from Gabriel Marcel, we hypothesise the Other as (my) ontological counterpart to death in this project, in project, in any project, in life. We articulate the Other as giving their logos for our existence, for the Eleusis of our logos. My existence cannot come to be without the Other and reciprocally the Other cannot come to be without me. I-​and-​the-​Other as noema, as dia-​logos (dialogue) in existence. Without the Other, I am a thing and with the Other I am no-​thing-​ and-​every-​thing, free. The Other as the essence of existence. But before going along with the Other, before we quest for the Other, we have a question left to pose. If we must unbracket in order to find the Other, it is with the “must” with which we shall begin. We shall unravel our masts for this quest. We must explore what imposes itself in the beginning as prescription. This is the first thing we encounter in the move from the “I” to the Other. We say ‘we shall’ or ‘we must’ unbracket. But if we must unbracket which could be read dialectically as ‘(“we must bracket the bracketing”),’ then we shall first pause at the must and pose it as a question. Unravel our masts for the quest to begin. Mustn’t thy not? I-​II, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: sup, 2008), Vol. ii, 209; herafter Psyche i or Psyche ii.

­c hapter 3

Pathway One: We Must Live for Others

1

Minding the Gap of Prescription

Our proposition we “must unbracket” is logically on a par with “we must live for others.” They both prescribe a specific way of being. In a prescriptive mode, prescription, is expressed linguistically by utterances such as “must,” “should,” “need to,” “ought,” and the like, or just by any imperative. It is also imperative that the imperative form be construed in its wider sense since in everyday interactions an imperative form depends on its contextual birthplace. Indirect ways of suggestion may very well fall under prescriptions: “I would do that if I were you” or “It might be advisable to” or “have you thought of doing that?” accompanied by prosodic and gestural cues which unite with the words to imply an imperative meaning. We can construe the boundaries of the imperative form as any form of communication which suggests a particular course of action either literally or metaphorically where the relevant meaning is generated by all possible elements of communication: any act that has an imperative meaning-​intention. Conversely, as Husserl has explained, expressions with a grammatically imperative form need not necessarily fall under what we refer to as imperative meaning. “John must harness the horses”1 may as well communicate a wish of mine instead of an imperative act from me to the Other; “there is no mere objective obligation … but my own will, and this not in my words, but rather in my tone and in the circumstances.”2 Since we are performing a logical investigation of prescription, we can follow Husserl and proceed into identifying the intentional essence of the genus of prescriptive propositions using the criterion of act-​quality based on the presentative intention that makes such compound acts what they are. That is, direct our reflection to prescription as a phenomenon appearing through prescriptive propositions and, by marking the boundaries of meaning between 1 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol. I-​II, trans. J.  N. Findlay (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), Vol. ii, 330; hereafter, Investigations. Following Husserl, we are moving from language as a means of communication and expression, to expression and communication of prescription through language. 2 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 330.

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_004

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prescriptive and non-​prescriptive propositions, arrive at the essence of these propositions, that is, at the being of the phenomenon of prescription; the eidos or the region of prescription. Following Husserl, by marking the variation between this and that, prescription and non-​prescription, we hope to arrive at the source of prescription. Let us start again with Comte’s proposition “we must live for Others.” This proposition seems to be a synthesis of the following. Firstly, what has conditioned the genesis of such a proposition is an evaluation of our current mode of life which as different from the one proposed is negated with respect to its value. The way we live our lives insofar as it is not for Others means that it is not the proper, the correct, the right, way of leading our lives. This clandestine evaluative mechanism which negates the present with respect to a possibility is a sine qua non of every prescriptive proposition. This mechanism hides yet another mechanism which operates at its background. “We must do X” is a proposition which negates the value of the current mode of doing but it can realize this negation only insofar as there is a presupposed objective, a telos, an end. That is to say, that the negation of the current state of affairs or being is conditioned upon a projected, wished, or pursued being or state of affairs which is not currently actualized –​or not fully actualized –​while the current actualization is somehow not contributing to what the preferred actualization is deemed or, better, wished, desired to be. Let us use an example to clarify. Suppose that I am waiting at the bus station with a friend and it is 15.25. I have an appointment at 15.30 and the distance between the bus station and the place of the appointment is usually ten minutes by bus. My friend says: “You must take a taxi.” What this prescriptive proposition reveals is an evaluation of my current state which must be altered if I want to reach my objective, that is, to arrive on time in the place of my appointment. The axiological power of any prescriptive proposition is derived unquestionably from such an implicit objectively (we can even admit the term intersubjectively here with no philosophical residue) presupposed telos. It goes without saying that if I do not care if I am late for my appointment or if I am short of cash which I value more than being late for my appointment, then, the prescriptive proposition of my friend loses its power in terms of motivating me in the prescribed action. And if that happens it follows, a fortiori, that I implicitly approve my current ontological status as right contrary to the possible one, that which is expressed in my friend’s proposition. One might object that I might well desire to be on time and also be aware that my current situation needs modification if my objective is to be met, yet, practically, as I  am short in cash a gap emerges between thought and action. Suffice it to mention for the moment the following. If I value being on time would it

48 Chapter 3 not be reasonable to suggest that I would try to exhaust all the ways in which such an objective could be achieved –​even if that means sprinting to be on time? If I truly want to be on time would I not be motivated to an action which I perceive will fulfill my objective? So far, a prescriptive proposition of this sort seems to be constituted by dynamic evaluative synthesis. Dynamic because the telos which conditions the evaluation of the present is itself conditioned by the present which negates it. Let us unfold our story. In this situation, another possibility would be to ask my friend for money. Does it now make sense to talk about how my friend should act based on the above? Based on our earlier elucidation, since we both share the same objective i.e my arriving on time, if no other objective could cannibalize it, that is, at that very moment, my arriving on time is valued equally and authentically by both of us, does it not logically follow that my friend should help me by giving me the money? If she opts not to then we cannot assume that she indeed valued the same objective with the same force as I do. If we wish to assume it, authentic valuing will lose its meaning. It might be objected that not all propositions of the prescriptive kind are conditioned upon such a negation of the present. For instance, if my friend and I, a couple of days before, were found to be discussing about my future plans and the appointment rises in the discussion, and she then mentions “you must take a taxi to get there on time,” it seems prima facie that there is no negation of the kind discussed above. However, reducing the phenomenon of the utterance, we see that in these cases the same evaluative synthesis is still at work. What motivates my friend to utter such a proposition? If I habitually take a taxi and my friend knows this, then such a proposition cannot occur meaningfully. But if I do not, then we see the evaluation operating in the background. These cases reveal an evaluation of my regularities which, if continued in the future, then they are evaluated as not being conducive to the attainment of my goal. If I act as I habitually do, which is not taking a taxi, then I cannot secure this goal based on my friend’s evaluation. Suffice it to say, what is evaluated is my habitual past deemed to continue in the future. Therefore, what is negated is a present(ed) regularity. As we reflect further on prescriptive propositions, two more interesting points emerge. While we have presented an example of another person uttering the proposition, due to the reflective reality of our being, the whole interaction could occur with oneself and oneself as another, me-​to-​myself, which, while giving another dynamic, still demonstrates how the evaluative synthesis is at work. Instead of a synthesis, we are accustomed to call it reflection in philosophy but its structure is basically the same. A crucial difference is revealed which uncovers another phenomenon. In the ek-​static mode of reflection

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where I  commerce with myself about the situation, the alignment of the telos of myself with myself gives rise to motivation for action. With the case of myself in reflection the manifestation of the conceptual alignment will be manifested in my action, whereas with my friend this very same manifestation will be revealed in the action of either persons depending on the possibilities of the interaction (me ordering a taxi or my friend giving me the money). The second interesting feature that emerges relates to what we can refer to as punctuation. The example offered was an abstracted moment during a series of events in one’s life. The conceptual alignment which is at the core of the prescriptive proposition, if it occurs, it must somehow be conditioned. These conditions are to be found somewhere, but where? For the moment, precisely because we abstracted life and created an episode situated in its punctuated form at a bus station, the prescriptive proposition revealed how it operates with respect to a potential future. What about the past and the present? Once the prescriptive proposition is situated in experience we are faced with something magnificently absurd. The proposition “You must take a taxi” works not only in comparing the present with a possible future, but, also, it presupposes a specific conceptualization of the unfolding of events which logically cohere with reference to the attainment of the implicit objective. What this means is that the power of the proposition relies on certain presuppositions based on past experience either lived by the interactants or mediated in the form of reasoning or knowledge, and at the same time beliefs and expectations about the future; that is, taking a taxi supposedly will get me to my destination –​to which I might never have been before –​only if I also believe that a taxi will be faster than a bus in this specific empirical ensemble, where I also assume implicitly that my appointment will not be cancelled, that I will not die in the process and so on and so forth. But how can I believe that? We can say here with Hume that the paradox of induction is revealed. There is some kind of belief of a future which is presently unjustified since I  cannot control the monstrosity of the infinite possibilities that might take place. This projection to a future based on past and present which is crystallized in the beliefs of the interactants reveals this absurdness; a tendency to commit to an objective which we cannot ultimately control. One cannot object here about whether there is inductive reasoning going on or not.3 Insofar as the course of action is (stopped in the sense of) paused by uttering a proposition, which suggests a negation of the unfolding of the

3 Following Husserl we could say that “[a]‌ll praxis with its projects involves inductions” (Husserl, Crisis, 51).

50 Chapter 3 course of action at the beginning of the utterance, and insofar as the telos of the course remains implicit, that is, pre-​sup-​posed in both courses of action (waiting for the bus –​prescribing its negation through another act –​the taxi), then there is spontaneous thought. And insofar as the thought does not rely on a whole, based on which the best course of action can be deduced, the thought is inductive. These (conceptual/​reflective) syntheses may happen at the speed of light, which we mistake as not happening at all, yet they do happen. If one objects with the use of the concept of reasoning or reflection here, one could, with Hume, refer to this phenomenon as a “secret operation.”4 But the problems of prescription do not lie only in the punctuation of the future. In our bus-​taxi example, reflecting on the proposition “you must take a taxi” we have situated our analysis as if the starting point of the genesis of the proposition is the appreciation of that very moment. As if the experience of the prescription commences there. We have ignored the historicity of the interaction and most importantly the historicity of the interactants. A proposition does not stand in an experiential vacuum. As an expression it communicates something. What it communicates must be sought after apprehending the complexity of what conditions it precisely because this conditioning will affect the way the telos is to be attained. For instance, while I might well value being on time for my appointment I might also have excluded the possibility of asking my friend for money if I know that she is not well-​off. The possibilities of realizing my aim will be conditioned on other values and facts that relate directly to the very moment that the prescriptive proposition is uttered even if those values and facts do not immediately reveal themselves in the context of the prescriptive uttering; and so, prescriptive propositions are characterized by a historicity of various levels (personal, cultural, and so on) toward a presupposed telos. Earlier, we mentioned that the presupposed telos is similar to both the action that is unfolding and the prescription that stops this unfolding to propose another, an alternative one based on the presupposed telos –​at that moment we thought that “arriving on time” was the presupposed. When the layer of historicity is taken into consideration, the presupposed becomes just a supposed telos of the present under-​geared, under-​ labored by another, a real presupposed, the ultimate telos, the eschaton, the ultimate end; one can even characterize it as the unconscious end –​posing any presupposed to face the question ‘why,’ as in ‘why ‘being on time for the appointment’’ will open a regress of “in order to” which will ultimately reveal

4 Hume, Treatise, 60.

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the ultimately presupposed, the end in the end as a beginning, as a principle as an ἀρχή: ‘why live?’5 Prescription is revealed as the other side of ontology and epistemology.6 What this means is that prescriptive propositions rely on a sort 5 And ‘this in order to’ to which we adaptively strive carries a certainty which is passed over to all judgments. “All certainties are organized in the unity of a single certainty; correlatively, everything which exists for me is organized in a single world, to which are then related at any given time the particular paths of adaptive striving, of activity in the broadest sense, which also includes cognitive praxis” (Husserl, Experience, 291). But, ultimately, this adaptive striving faces the threshold of death as barrier. Regardless of religious convictions, there is no further constitution beyond death. Death, says Husserl, englobes the thinking being in its night (Husserl, Crisis, 49–​51). 6 Our (western) modern thought has so far been ultimately teleological –​even in its attempt to be free of teleology; to be free from teleology is still a telos, an in order to. It might not be the telos of an object as a particular objective but it is still a horizon, a vision, or an orientation. For scientific theories to work we must set an ideal fixing point; a punctuation. For instance, for evolutionary theory to work there must be a presupposed telos at hand, i.e., the reproduction of the species. But if we ask “Why do the species have to be perpetuated?” then we have no reason. Justification comes to an end at some point and this end is not a particular end but an actual real end. All the theorization of our modern times is implicitly conditioned on a presupposed possible unexpressed telos, a punctuated effect. All simple factual propositions like “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius” can be formed in terms of prescription: “In order for the water to boil, 100 degrees must be reached.” No theorization can be formed if a telos is not implicitly accepted. As Sartre has shown, whenever something is to be interpreted through the concepts of cause-​effect or means-​end which are indistinguishable, a deon-​ teleological morality has been introduced unquestionably and unquestioned-​ly (Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Material and Revolution,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays by Jean-​Paul Sartre, trans. Annette Michelson (NY:  Collier Books, 1962), 198–​256). Moreover, precisely because scientific thinking is attempting to provide one big long, yet in micro form, an excell(ent) form of the world, it becomes instrumental par excellence (soi meme).The in order to phenomenalizes itself in all sorts of deductive-​inductive-​abductive reasoning. But it is always driven (ducted) by transcendentalism: either by a transcendental beginning (signifier/​i ) or by a transcendental end (telos, purpose, signified). Such an end is, for instance, evident in both Aristotle’s and Kant’s ethics theorizations. If the noumenal were not proven, a groundwork for morality could not be established. For Aristotle, if the issue of consciousness after death were not solved, all theorization about ethics will have to be punctuated in the experiential boundaries of life-​death. Thus, Marcel seems to be justified in surmizing that at this very deon-​teleological way of thought which characterizes our modernistic scientificofunctional thinking and being rests on our inability to accept and exercise metaphysical philosophical investigations whose “purpose … lies outside of the order of the practical [the telos, the function, the end, the result]” and which investigation “cannot be translated into the language of action” (Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being Vol. I-​II: The Gifford Lectures 1949–​1950, trans. G. S. Fraser (London: The Harvill Press Ltd), Vol. 1, 7; hereafter, Mystery. Heidegger calls this inability an illness of thinking, an “asthenia” (Heidegger, Contributions, 127). It would take us a long way out of our journey to examine the extent to which other so-​called non-​ teleological, yet eschatological, philosophies are free from a telos –​Derrida’s messianic or Deleuze’s nomadicity, even as advanced by Braidotti whereby we are supposedly unshackled from an in order to. The only atelic path is the possible path. The atelis which also means

52 Chapter 3 of agreement about an objective to be attained based on how things were, are, and how things should unfold based on something ultimately presupposed. If this agreement cannot initially hold at the conceptual level between the persons engaged in the prescriptive event –​if we can call it so –​then, it is doubtful if the proposition can bound any person and motivate relevant action. The greatest affinity of morality –​as prescription –​with ontology and epistemology will, however, be denuded if, holding on to what we have analyzed so far, we approach the different levels of generality in which prescriptive propositions operate. The example we offered above is an example about a practical everyday (prescriptive) proposition. It is a very concrete proposition which suggests a course of immediate action. However, Comte’s proposition ‘vivre pour autrui’ operates on a different level of generality. This is a prescription which operates as a framework based on which other practical prescriptive propositions can be derived or, better, deduced. This proposition works as a principle, an ἀρχή, a whole. Comte’s proposition does not give a specific direction about how one needs to act but only a general orientation about how we need to act. In a sense, such propositions work as a theoretical foundation based on which the more concrete propositions will be derived; the axiomatic. The theoretical foundations which precede such axiomatic propositions are usually the general orientations based on which societies are organized and lie dormant in cultural norms and lawmaking processes. For these general orientations, however, the same dynamic evaluative synthesis that was described earlier must be at work if they are to bound a motivation to relevant action, which, in this level, is the formulation of axiomatic propositions, which, in turn, will be formulated as practical guidelines to be materialized in actual behavior. These theoretical foundations must be accepted somehow. But what does it actually mean to accept? Let us explore with an example. If we are to accept the Christian framework of organizing and leading our lives, then for this framework to bind and motivate action other relevant presuppositions must be tacitly accepted; one must believe. For example, to believe in the existence of the Christian God, and most importantly to believe that the way our lives need to be lived is such that will inadequate has no end to be identified within it. The inadequate existence is the finite existence since, on its own, it does not exist its end –​this is something we need to investigate further. So, a thinking, a philosophy of non-​teleology and non-​eschatology would be metaphysics not with God who is perfect –​teleios, infinite, perfect –​but with an Other who is equally unending, finite, inadequate. Kant proposes to have the Other as end who does not properly end. This, however, requires qualification.

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lead to the telos that the Christian framework posits. But this acceptance, this belief, is not just a conceptual acceptance. To believe is not just to think but, as Normal Malcolm says, to have thought embedded in action.7 With respect to the Christian framework that would be to act in Christian ways. In Resurrection Lev Tolstoi is exploring through his characters how this could be possible, but in the process he reveals an absurdity. Nekhlyudov, the main character, is going through the process of realizing the absurdity of professing to have a state organized and guided by the principles of a Christian God where people suffer and die out of ignorance; where the penal system is anything but Christian and where prisons, and the whole reformatory system is causing more suffering. In a series of observations, he becomes convinced that “all the vices which developed among the prisoners. … were not causal, nor due to degeneration, nor to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type (as dull scientists, backing up government, explained it) …,”8 but by the very penal system itself which is exactly the reverse of the Christian way of life. A Christian society can never be commensurate with a penal system. Tolstoi reveals the hypocrisy of confessing a belief when the latter is not manifested in praxis; to think that one believes and to profess that one believes when in fact they are in a state of self-​deception, or what Sartre called bad faith, mauvaise foi, is hypocricy. To believe is when the having phenomenalizes itself as being in action, in praxis, in behavioral terms. The proof of holding a belief is to attest to it. And to attest to a belief is to testify it in oneself, to be-​have it. “Here having seems really to pass into being.”9 So to believe in the Christian framework would be to behave like Christ. But the problem is not only that no one apart from Christ can be Christ –​in all possible senses of ‘be’–​as Nietzsche book-​marked.10 The problem is that one is not actually convinced into trying to be like Christ. They profess a belief they do not actually believe since they do not be-​have it. The belief is, in Mill’s words, a “dead dogma, not a living truth.”11 7 8

Norman Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: cup, 1977); hereafter, Thought. Lev Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Louise Maude (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House Moscow, 1950), 533. 9 Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity: The William James Lectures (Cambridge, MA: hup, 1963), 100; emphasis in original. 10 Nietzsche, Anti-​Christ. 11 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: The Floating Press, 2009), 59. There are many philosophers who believe that, concerning any one person, “what views he holds is not a matter of how he behaves” (Daniel M. Taylor, Explanation and Meaning (Cambridge: cup,1972), 62). To ‘hold’ this belief maybe due to an illicit shift in perspectives and clear ambiguity. Daniel Taylor tells us: “Consider the following argument: people often think they want something x when it is clear from their behavior that they really want y” (Ibid., 60; emphasis added). It is not at all clear what exactly the ‘it is clear’ is supposed to be clear about.

54 Chapter 3 It is this being convinced that we need to look for. Let us have a thought experiment. Let us think about how we can convince a person about the prescription ‘Thou shall not kill.’ The person whom we want to convince has killed before all sorts of animals and is an atheist, hardcore Darwinian and determinist. The person believes in the survival of the fittest and, by removing the paradox, they believe that they are or they need to be the fittest to survive –​or that in order to survive they need to become the fittest. They are determined to do whatever they need to survive and if killing another human animal is an option for their survival so be it. To complicate it further, they are also sympathetic to various philosophical ideas which propose that in life all we do is in vain since the only sure thing is death. They also view society as degraded because it restricts our animalistic instincts. And here is the challenge for us: what kind of reason or logic can we employ in order to convince them otherwise? Employing the democratic principle in the sense of objectivity, that is, to argue that most people think it is wrong to kill, so they must be wrong not to align with a sensus communis or the ancient κοινόν λόγον (common logic) is not an argument which will carry weight. It lacks the intermediate premise for why the majority would have access to truth and reality better than the individual, or, to put it in the poet’s words “Si 50 millions de personnes disent une bêtise, c’est quand même une bêtise.”12 We cannot either appeal to any religious

12

Clearly, not for the person who says that x.  Therefore, either for an observer, another person, or God, or the same person down the temporal line. Quid? Also, it is also not clear what exactly we hold when we hold a belief. Clearly, when I hold a belief is not like holding a watermelon. It seems that what is clear is Nietzschean hypocricy, Sartrean bad faith or what Michael Polanyi calls living in two worlds (Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning). This bad faith can be traced all the way back to antiquity. Seneca, approaching the Cynics of his day who discounted money yet were asking it, put the matter clearer: “You declare that you detest money. This is your position, this is the role you have taken on –​So play that role!” (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2011), 43; hereafter, Benefits). The example of the Christian that we mentioned is on a par with the reductive scientist who ‘holds the belief’ that everything is material and tries to reduce it to mechanical processes of cause and effect; hence, ‘holding’ another belief that intangible things, our values, do not exist i.e. love, justice, freedom to name a few. In this case the scientist “allows himself to be duped when he so honors them” –​that he is permitting himself willingly to suffer from illusions of their grandeur” (Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 68). Let us remix this thought a bit. The point is that no-​one follows Christ by enacting his acts. People follow Christ in the way we follow in social media. The following is exhausted virtually not embodiedly. As mentioned in the previous note with Seneca we do not play by the rules set by Christ. We do not adopt the Christian role. Anatole France as quoted in Ralph G.  Nichols and Thomas R.  Lewis, Listening and Speaking:  A Guide to Effective Oral Communication (London:  W.C. Brown, 1954), 74. Or, with Ludwig Wittgenstein we can say that, “from seeming to me –​or to everyone –​to be

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or theological argument since it goes beyond their scope of beliefs. If any argument is to be offered as convincing in this case, then it needs to work within the boundaries of their presuppositions of atheistic-​determistic persuasion. It needs to be based on fundamental principles of evolutionary theory and scientific methodology. But even if they professed they were convinced not to kill as they are made to be altruistic, how could one be sure that they were indeed convinced other than by the person manifesting that in their behavior? And this being convinced must be secured by some continuity for it can always be the case, that if the person is like Dostoevsky who wants to live his life as “he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated” and who believes that “one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea)”), then all logical “systems and theories [will] continually [be] shattered to atoms.”13 Is there, then, any prescriptive foundation that could be believed in such a way as to be ‘freely’ chosen to be-​lived?14 so, it does not follow that it is so” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 1; hereafter, Certainty). 13 Dostoevsky, Notes, 33. 14 This point of unfettered motivation can be seen in reverse as well. It challenges all new critical discourses about how we should be. We propose or promote different figures that we should realize but never really tell ourselves a story of why one should realize it. From ambitious rejections (cf. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject (Fordham: fup, 2015)) to the most sophisticated proposals of so-​called posthuman subjectivity “which has to embrace” “the criticisms of narrow minded self-​interests, intolerance and xenophobic rejection of otherness,” as Braidotti tells us, the motivation of or for an atelic why or how one can be motivated to enacting or re-​enchanting the world with such figures and such proposals is ultimately wanting (Braidotti, Posthuman, 52). We wholeheartedly agree with Braidotti in that respect but my capitalist father does not. (How) do I convince him? (How) do I motivate him to such a direction? How should I  direct (t)his drama? Alternatively, we could articulate this point through Schwartz’s analyses of transformation (Michael Schwartz, “Introspection and Transformation in Philosophy Today,” The Gift of Logos, eds. David Jones, Jason M.  Wirth, and Michael Schwartz, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 187). To translate something into the idiom of the Other will not necessarily transform their consciousness towards realizing, enacting, embodying a proposed comportment. My translation to the idiom of the Other does not necessarily entail the Other’s transformation. The metaphoricity which conditions translation is not enough. The motivation, the desire, the taking an interest in changing is what cannot be theorized. What is the motivation, as a beginning which is not coerced, in order to create a space of enactment? If what is being translated is a fact, then one, to borrow from Gloria Anzaldua, must own this (f) act (Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/​La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Luke Books, 1987), 107; hereafter, Borderlands). Motivation here takes the form of inspiration. Anzaldua places her bet on this inspiration and promotes a spiritual activism in

56 Chapter 3 2

From Teleology to Deontology and Back

We are aiming to ground altruism in belief that reverberates through living by everyone and in all circumstances, and that could ground all subsequent practical prescriptive propositions. Such an attempt is common in the history of philosophy. We can see such attempts in all great thinkers who engaged in ethics and morality. We shall introduce two prominent traditions and evaluate them laconically. John Stuart Mill15 took as an indubitable fact that happiness is the ultimate foundation based on which we can construct all our morality. Taking happiness as the ultimate foundation, since everybody is seeking to be happy and avoid negative experiences, seems to meet the criterion of experience in terms of this ‘something’ that could be universally believed and actively be lived by all people. It seems that everyone is motivated to act by the desire to be happy. Despite the fact that such an idea circumvents the desire to live, as it is always possible that one can decide not to live, happiness as the universal criterion for promoting normative patterns of behavior raises questions. Is happiness construed in the same way by all people? How can we secure that the way I construe and pursue happiness is in essence the same with others? Most importantly, can we secure that one’s happiness will not become another one’s misery? This difficulty must be precisely understood. It is not just a theoretical issue to play with logically and from which a definition could be agreed and all will/​ would be happy. The issue of a definition of happiness has been adequately tackled by Aristotle.16 However, in its practical application it discloses a monstrous problematic. The way our society has been organized cannot secure a uniform pursuit of happiness for all since, as Michel De Montaigne observed,17 the doctor will never be happy with the health of his fellow citizens, since his livelihood and being are conditioned on the non well-​being of the others. Earlier we saw that ea who are primarily f(o)unding their philosophy on this idea of happy life disregard completely the historical conditions which lead to these kinds of states of affairs. For instance, Jankélévitch mentions that, strictly attempt to activate change from within. But this change from within implies some kind of adopting what the Other has offered. 15 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Batoche Books, 2001). 16 See Aristole, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. Dimitrios D.  Lipourlis (Athens:  Zetros, 2006)  [Αριστοτέλης, Ηθικά Νικομάχεια, μτφ. Δημήτριος Δ. Λυπουρλής, (Αθήναι:  Ζήτρος, 2006). Insofar as εὐδαιμονία does not give itself exhaustively to happiness then there could be a possibility to see if altruism can take place in its path, but this quest would need to be deferred for another time. 17 De Montaigne, Essais.

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speaking, being a doctor points to altruism since the doctor’s praxis for fulfillment of happiness in helping the Other creates more happiness by the services provided. But for this to happen, being a doctor must not be mediated by an order of being paid for being a doctor in order to live.18 Since the ultimate end is an ‘in order to survive’ by being paid by being a doctor, being a doctor will eventually entail the dialectics that Montaigne observed. It is this exclusive mediation of being that creates these dialectics. Mill fails to resolve them in his treatise. Unable to derive universality of happiness, he reduces his claim of “the happiness for all” to “the happiness for the majority.” The happiness of all gives its place to the happiness for the majority, thus mirroring the politics of representational democracy. The politics of being remain intact. In addition, once again, for these ethical politics to be realized, people are to be motivated by the power of habit and not by an unfettered motivation –​“As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal … a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action.”19 Kant, however, aware of the contingency of anything empirical had looked elsewhere. That is, morality, if it is to lead to action that bounds, the move from conception to action, cannot be justified and cannot be realized unless there is a foundation common to all, irrespective of the accidental way one could be, how a society could be organized, or what goals one sets in their lives. So, the purpose of the Groundwork is to lay the foundations on which everything else can be derived. Kant is looking for a structural form that is lawlike and can hold for any circumstance universally and necessarily, for everyone, at any time, in any place; no exceptions, no reductions. Yet, Kant, while trying to avoid the contingency of the empirical, falls victim to it. In trying to set out the foundation of moral philosophy Kant begins by stating For that there must be such a philosophy is clear of itself from the common idea of duty and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity.20

18 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le paradoxe de la morale (Paris: Seuil, 1981); hereafter, Paradoxe. 19 Mill, Utilitarianism, 19–​20. 20 Kant, Groundwork, 2; emphasis added. Insofar as the first edition of the First Critique was written before the Groundwork, what would happen if we took the common idea as an idea as understood under the principles of the First Critique? We cannot explore this path further here.

58 Chapter 3 What is striking is that Kant, even before laying the Groundwork, a ground of an obligation, he appeals to a common idea, that of obligation. Methodologically consistent, in that Kant is starting from experience in order to arrive at that which does not arise out of experience, he seems merely to assume a common idea without derivation. The problem is that Kant starts from the empirical, but he never gives justification for the apodeictic certainty of the common idea. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt to Kant, as Paul Ricoeur does, in that “as in Aristotle, moral philosophy in Kant does not begin from nothing; the task is not to invent morality but to extract the sense of the fact of morality,”21 should we not be offered a justification of such fact derived from a common idea instead of being a common opinion, as ἒνδοξα (endoxa)? Stated differently, if there is truth in that there is the ‘what ought to be,’ why would that ‘ought’ start with taking for granted an analytic association with the idea of duty as obligation?22 Kant’s quest for providing a groundwork of morality is infected at outset with empirical vagueness which is obvious in his exposition of real-​life examples of what constitutes duty which reveals ‘moral worth.’ The latter must, for Kant, be experienced as an obligation in order to be absolutely good no matter what. To be absolutely good can only be achieved by a will to be absolutely good –​an absolutely good will. Moral worth is revealed through such a good will which obliges to act accordingly. In a way, morality is this accord between willing the absolutely good and realizing it in action. In between the will and the act is the feeling of obligation, our duty. To follow one example from Kant, a person cannot be moral without feeling that they are obliged to act in some way. So, a shopkeeper who treats everyone equally is moral insofar as they are aware of the obligation of treating everyone equally. If they do not, then they are not moral. The contentment the shopkeeper might feel as the result of acting in accordance with the demands of an absolutely good will, could not and should not be used as (further) motivator for action as such motivation would undermine the absolute goodness of the will to be good, but will be a will to feel good passing through the will to be good. Such a diversion

21 22

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 205; hereafter Oneself. This question summarizes an unsolved problematic in philosophy:  the difference between χρῆ and δεῖ. Following Kant, we may “leave it undecided whether what is called duty is not as such an empty concept,” yet the difference of man-​dated action, future action which is not presently undertaken, and thus ought to be done, comes from different places, origins, states of affairs when expressed in either of these two ancient tripartites (Kant, Groundwork, 31).

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of the will to (its) objective good(ness), will not be autonomously good, but driven by an intermediate end to feel good, what Kant calls heteronomy. That is, the deed would not be motivated by an absolutely good will and the obligation felt to realize it, but it would be the result of an end to feel good from the deed which contingently happens to be good –​or of an end subjectively represented as good. The end then, possibly motivated by “covert” impulse of self-​love,23 becomes the subjective contentment and not the absolutely good will itself which reveals moral worth. As Ricoeur underscores, the moral worth must be found in a will to action which is good without qualification, universally and necessarily, good in-​itself, intelligibly as good in and of itself without other qualifications. This stipulation of morality in an unqualified will is what anchors “the deontological moment in the teleological aim.”24 Kant’s morality does not escape teleology. But there is more. Let us follow Kant in the obligation that must be felt in the will to be good or the good will to realize itself which would amount to the same. We shall explore the nature of this obligation and ask how many times such an obligation should be felt? Suppose that with Kant, I am wondering whether I should lie to get something. I reason that lying is not good absolutely. This reasoning about whether what I am willing is good absolutely, unconditionally, that is, universally and necessary, is the categorical imperative. This reasoning allows me to arrive to the logical conclusion that lying is not absolutely good, hence I should never lie. I now feel obliged not to lie because I formulated the categorical imperative and reasoned the contradictions that such an act would imply and entail. It is my duty now to realize this universality in the particular instance that I am found –​that I should not lie to get what I want in order to be good objectively, not only for me but for all possible others. Let us lay out the process. I have broken off from the world of sense and its causality and I experience “independence from the determining causes of the world of sense.”25 I freely and with no obligation pause my course of action and think what I should do. I reason freely that the act of lying is fraught with contradictions. I then set up a contract with myself based on the logical demands of reason (my being autonomous) and I formulate the maxim “I shall not lie ever.” In the current situation in which I  find myself motivated to question whether I should lie or not, I now feel the obligation of reason when I need 23 Kant, Groundwork, 19. In other words, “in the case of what is to be morally good it is not enough to conform with the moral law but it must also be done for the sake of the law” (ibid., 3; original empahses). 24 Ricoeur, Oneself, 205. 25 Kant, Groundwork, 58.

60 Chapter 3 to realize the maxim ‘I should not lie now, in the present.’ The obligation is not felt when I freely decided not to lie henceforth. Rather, the obligation is going to be felt when I need to realize the maxim in the causal order of sense. The steps are: (a) I break off the causal order of sense, (b) I freely exercise my understanding and formulate the categorical imperative, and (c) I freely materialize it in the world of sense. For we now see that when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognize autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as put under obligation we regard ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding.26 Our duty, ourselves as put under obligation, happens after being free. Morality can only happen between freedom and obligation. Besides the platonic echoes of Phaedrus in being metaxy, in-​between two worlds27 –​ which by the way destroys the principle of non-​contradiction on which the categorical imperative is founded, that is, how we reason  –​I  only experience my freedom positively while formulating maxims aligned with reason. In the world of understanding of which I  am a member, of which I  partake, of this metaxy that I am,28 I am free, unbounded by the causality of sense. Here, there is no feeling of obligation just pure understanding. Pure understanding allows us to deduce freedom as its principle “in order to fill its own needs.” But this freedom is destructive and negative –​especially since it can lead us anywhere but the world of understanding. If we apply the schema of movement, however, then we see how Kantian deontology is found(ed) on a double negation. Contrary to what Kant says, the freedom which each 26 27

28

Ibid., 58; emphasis added. All translations from Ancient Greek texts are ours unless otherwise noted. For our translations we have used as reference both a Modern Greek Edition of the texts and an English one. The English edition used is: Plato, Plato’s Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN:  Hackett, 1997); hereafter, Complete. The Greek editions are always handy as they include the ancient text as well; see: Plato, Faidros, trans. Panagiotis Doїkos, (Athens: Zetros, 2006). [Πλάτων, Φαίδρος, μτφ. Παναγιώτης Δοϊκος, (Αθήναι: Ζήτρος, 2001)]. Human beings are classed as homo noumenon in Kant. In Kant, the classical distinction ‘appearance-​reality’ applies to human beings as well. Human beings are characterized by their empirical side (homo phaenomenon) and their essential side, their intellectual side (homo noumenon) (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: cup, 1991), 65; 111; 144; 215; 219).

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time conditions the (re)entering to the world of understanding is negative, that is, by resisting the causal order of sense. And the freedom to realize the autonomy of the will in the world of sense is again negative in so far as it goes contrary to the causality of the world of sense. There does not seem to be any positive motivation to initiate the circuit of the categorical imperative however –​we shall come back to that.29 Our first question was how many times such an obligation should be felt; our analysis now needs to add another question: How many times should I  perform the ritual of the categorical imperative with respect to the act of lying? If I formulate the categorical imperative now and I freely believe that reason demands of me to ‘not to lie ever,’ and I  oblige myself to live by this maxim, how many times should this be experienced for me to be moral? If I  understood that ‘Lying is not good universally and necessary,’ then why do I have to reason about it again? Suppose I am like Hume, forgetful. Down the path of my life, and following the axiomatic principles set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason I  repeat the practice for such morally good conduct.30 So, I experience the same process one, two, three, … n times. How many times would be enough? And, most importantly, how many times would such an obligation should be felt when I am not lying? At one point, I will be so habituated into not lying that the feeling of obligation will surely wear off. Will I not be moral then? Do I always have to perform this ritual and always feel obliged? Since I have arrived at the universality of ‘I shall never lie’ why should I keep coming back to reason about it?31 Kant replies thus: for, if someone asked us … how it happens that a human being believes that only through this does he feel his personal worth, in comparison with which that of an agreeable or disagreeable condition is to be held as nothing, we could give him no satisfactory answer.32

29

One might venture to interpret Kant as thinking that the moral law itself conditions this freedom but this interpretation would not be just (cf Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 65; hereafter Given). 30 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S.  Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 193–​4; hereafter, Second Critique. 31 Let us quest(ion) further. Why should I always feel apprehended in order to tell the truth? Now let us radicalize this thought: What about the blunt person, the stone-​cold person who vomits the truth with no hesitation at all? Is s/​he moral? 32 Kant, Groundwork, 55.

62 Chapter 3 It seems that we cannot touch this. Only Kant, as a philosopher, touches this –​ a “touch without touching.”33 We have to respect a distance for this unknown reason which shall motivate us where there is no satisfactory answer to come from reason. This is one of the reasons for which Kant’s morality is deontological –​otherwise, it is just another version of teleology, for good. Étienne Balibar34 attempts to touch on this how; how can one believe such an idea of duty? Through Balibar’s archaeology of the subject, we can appreciate the possibility of the Kantian belief of duty being formed politico-​ historically, that is, one comes to believe it through the political and historical conditions one is found living. Specifically, the Kantian belief of duty is a belief being formed out of the political circumstances of an era of transition from a citizen who is purely obedient to a rule external to them and derived by a king or a by framework of prescription of which they have nothing to say (e.g. religion), into a citizen, being subject to their (own formed) laws. “We see the final appearance of the “subject” in the old sense, that of obedience, but metamorphosed into a subject of the law, the strict correlative of the citizen who makes the law.”35 If this is the case, two challenges emerge. On the one hand, how can freedom be free from historicity, and on the other hand, how can reason be disentangled from tradition, custom and habit? But there is also another problem in Kant’s analysis which he himself realizes at the end of the Groundwork. The structural form of the categorical imperative that he proposes can be enacted only if one feels, or with Michel Henry’s reading,36 one is auto-​afffected such that through abiding to the demands that reason posits to the will, can the will have access to its real (noumenal) nature. Kant calls it taking an interest37 in the pure formal aspect of reason by which 33 Jacques Derrida, On Touching Jean-​ Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), 66; hereafter Touching. This touching without touching is not just a wordplay. It can be traced as the ultimate task of the philosopher as described by Plato: “Τί δ᾽ ἄλλο, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ἢ τὸ ἑξῆς; ἐπειδὴ φιλόσοφοι μὲν οἱ τοῦ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχοντος δυνάμενοι ἐφάπτεσθαι, οἱ δὲ μὴ ἀλλ᾽ ἐν πολλοῖς καὶ παντοίως ἴσχουσιν πλανώμενοι οὐ φιλόσοφοι” (Plato, Republic, 484b). ‘ἐφάπτεσθαι’ has been translated as touching or grasping yet a more apt translation would be a touching without touching achieved when we osculate. And since osculate suggests a point of contact just like lips do, that would fit much better with the platonic dialogue with respect to the kissing references which precede this definition. At the same time, for things to be κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχοντος a touching or a grasping would endanger their being themselves. 34 Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-​Luc Nancy, (NY: Routledge, 1991), 33–​57. 35 Ibid, 48. 36 Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1973); hereafter, Essence. 37 Kant, Groundwork, 54.

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we get a sense of the intelligible nature of our being. Through this interest we momentarily transcend to the real world, the world of understanding to which we as intellects belong, the in-​itself of ourselves (homo noumenon). Taking an interest comes as the possibility of being who we are in ourselves, autonomous rational beings realizing ourselves, making ourselves morally worthy. But what could possibly motivate such a taking an interest? Kant admits: Here an incentive must be quite lacking; for this idea of an intelligible world would itself have to be the incentive or that in which reason originally takes an interest; but to make this comprehensible is precisely the problem we cannot solve.38 Kant chooses to follow Hume here:  He suspends judgment. Another touching without touch coming from a distance. Another instance of deontology. Otherwise, we would have to say that there is no reason to be moral –​only that there is morality accustomed to be(come) reason. Besides this formidable conclusion, deontology and teleology form a coin, each is the other of the same. Firstly, even in the Kantian (formal) analysis, what we identified earlier as a presupposed telos is at work. This interest to an intelligible noumenal world is the telos in one way or another –​or in Ricoeur’s reading, the telos as the good life through an autonomous free will. The end for Kant is a movement from a natural being (homo phaenomenon) to “man as a moral being (homo noumenon).”39 There is no way for a prescriptive proposition or a framework of prescription to work if a telos is not presupposed. Ethics and morality and their practical correlates, are all conditioned upon a certain end, a telos. The telos, in a formal way, is the a priori, holding universally and necessarily, and, as such, it becomes a principle, a beginning, the ἀρχή of all morality. Secondly, if we re-​punctuate the horizon of the deontological experience, then the underlying teleological aspect of deontology can make the latter slide at any moment to custom and habit –​with all the formidable consequences for what constitutes reason as ‘logic.’ What is also interesting while following Kant is the consequences of this following over time. If duty which reveals the moral worth of the unconditioned and unconditionally good will is per-​se-​vered, that is followed over time to the (Kantian) letter, then a psychological fatigue is inevitable. Duty becomes torturing oneself to feel obligation. Following this duty means to habituate 38 Ibid., 65. 39 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: cup: 2006), 226.

64 Chapter 3 oneself to feel obliged with a counterbalance of contentment which does not neutralize or console feeling obligation but, rather, has to be negated as well so that it does not contaminate pure reason as the absolutely good can only be manifested in feeling obligation! No rest for the wicked! Finally, we always bump into this issue of motivation or interest in Kantian terms. Even if reason demands, I still have to be motivated towards it, or to move-​act with respect to it, to live it, as ego, as I beli(e)ve in what it commands. But, for us and our altruistic quest it is impossible to find a motivation with respect to or to the respect of the otherness of the Other that altruism suggests –​ either in teleology or deontology. 3

From Arguing for Altruism towards Beli(e)ving in Altruism

What we have seen so far is that none of the existing epistemological and moral frameworks allow us to arrive at altruism in a motivated way, a way free from habit or from some sort of presupposed telos which supplants the very notion of unfettered motivation. We asked ourselves: How can we achieve that ‘freely and obligatorily’ that we saw in Mauss? And then we took it further: “Is there, then, any prescriptive foundation that could be believed in such a way as to be ‘freely’ chosen to be-​lived?” Maybe what we need to do is re-​visit the phenomenon of believing or of how a belief is formed and then proceed to how one can believe in altruism which in turn will be manifested by be-​living altruism. We thus opt to start with Hume since, as Husserl writes, Hume tried to “explain genetically how in general we come to believe.”40 This is precisely what we are looking for –​the coming to believe. Let us follow Hume in his path. Hume started from everyday occurrences with which everyone can associate and tried to describe the experience of believing as some sort of affectivity or feeling. Starting from the most common everyday occurrence of how it is that people believe in different things he writes: ’Tis confest, that in all cases, wherein we dissent from any person, we conceive both sides of the question; but as we can believe only one, it evidently follows, that the belief must make some difference betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent. We may mingle, and unite, and separate, and confound, and vary our ideas in a hundred different ways; but ’till there appears some principle, which fixes 40 Husserl, Experience, 392.

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one of these different situations, we have in reality no opinion: And this principle, as it plainly makes no addition to our precedent ideas, can only change the manner of our conceiving them.41 Some principle, some ἀρχή, is what motivates us towards believing something and not something else while we conceive both sides of the question. In returning to Kant’s discourse, we can conceive both what reason demands us to do and its opposite or its alternatives. Yet, the decision will be conditioned by something which for Kant is precisely the problem we cannot solve, yet, for Hume appears. In every issue, the essential difference between and among them is not in conceiving the object at hand differently, that is, referring to the same thing yet meaning something else or presenting the ‘same’ in a different way; rather, it is in differently conceiving the ‘same’ object after having understood the other ways of conceiving it. And, the most important is that we are somehow aware of some difference betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent. Hume tried to describe this difference which ‘motivates us towards’ as some sort of being determined towards, some sort of being affected which necessitates our believing. From having a belief Hume changes the philosophical discourse into a manner of being, a manner of our conceiving. The latter, in Hume, is the manner in which the mind forms the ideas that it receives from the world as the world is impressing the senses. ’Tis a particular manner of forming an idea: And as the same idea can only be vary’d by a variation of its degrees of force and vivacity; it follows upon the whole, that belief is a lively idea produc’d by a relation to a present impression.42 For Hume, the association of ideas is a combination of hows. The first is the how which comes about from what impresses itself upon the mind, from what makes up the world and gives rise to its/​their phenomenological counterparts, that is our ideas, that particular manner of forming an idea. “Our ideas are copy’d from our impressions, and represent them in all their parts.”43 Another 41 Hume, Treatise, 56; emphasis added. 42 Ibid., 56. 43 This is what Hume refers to as the copy principle. In the Abstract, Hume underscores the importance of the copy principle: “we can never think of anything which we have not seen without us, or felt in our own minds” (David Hume, “An Abstract of a Book Lately Published,” in https://​davidhume.org/​texts/​a/​). It is not only Hume’s “fundamental principle” but something universal and with “unforgiving force” (Harold W. Noonan, Routledge

66 Chapter 3 how comes from how these ideas are related in conjunction with the principles of the mind with which we can actively mingle, and unite, and separate, and confound, and vary our ideas in a hundred different ways. While such a complex of hundred different ways, is an active reflection of our ideas, to believe is the ultimate way the mind is affected by its principles in the way that it reflects what it receives from the ‘exterior’ world in not so active a manner.44 Nothing in the world ‘causes’ me to believe something in a serial mechanical way.45 I have ideas of things in the world which are associated in such a way as to believe in something or that something is the case. This association is happening in the mind and the best manifestation of the interiority, what Hume calls “internal,”46 the immanence of the association, is the creation of an ‘idea’ related to a present impression or sensation which constitutes “belief.” A person who sees a river ahead of them and stops their journey believing that they would sink should they pass through it cannot justify their belief out of what they perceive or what they could reason of it: Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Knowledge, (London:  Routledge, 1999), 7; hereafter, Hume). Hume gave a “kind of phenomenological turn” with respect to ideas. There is also a stronger (idealistic) reading whereby it is impossible “of conceiving a specific difference between external objects and perceptions” which seems to imply an influence from the Port-​Royal philosophers whereby a simple idea is a mirroring of what impresses itself from the outside (Simon Blackburn, “Hume and Thick Connexions,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, (1990): 239; cf also Kenneth W. Winkler, “The New Hume,” in The New Hume Debate, eds. Rupert Read and Kenneth A. Richman, (2000): 78–​79; hereafter, New). In this case, the identity of the thing in the world will be mirrored in the impression and correlatively to the identity of the idea that the impression gives rise to. Some other commentators, for instance Garciela De Pierris, argue that Hume is “neutral about the ontological aspect of inspected items” which fits with his overall skeptical standpoint. Whatever the turnout of such a debate, we read the copy principle as occurring adverbially, within a how; the impression is ultimately the how of what is from the world and is impressing itself “in all their [its] parts” in the mind to form an impression which in turn gives rise to a simple idea. The idea may very well mirror or reflect the impression but the impression may or may not mirror or reflect an/​one object as a cause of the impression (Garciela De Pierris, “Causation as a Philosophical Relation in Hume,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64, (2002): 56). The idea, as the relation to a present impression cannot not have a duration in what constitutes ‘present.’ 44 Marina Frasca-​Spada and P.  J. E.  Kail, Transcendental Empiricism? Deleuze’s Reading of Hume (Oxford: Oxford Publishing Online, 2005). 45 That is what the thought experiment of the Enquiry is meant to prove. The alien person who first lands on earth and applies reason to understand it needs time to acquire these constantly conjoined occurrences, these habits, which will enable them to understand what is going on. Reason is helpless with just one ‘causal’ happening (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: oup, 2007); hereafter, Enquiry). 46 Hume, Treatise, 58.

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The idea of sinking is so closely connected with that of water, and the idea of suffocating with that of sinking, that the mind makes the transition without the assistance of the memory.47 The belief is not a new idea of what constitutes ‘river’ but a way of trans-​ forming a present impression into an idea, a way of perceiving the world. Belief “is nothing but a strong and lively idea deriv’d from a present impression related to it.”48 The “it” relates to the impression which is not yet an object, a river, a this. The this comes with a lively idea which relates to the impression, or better, to the impressing. It is necessary for the object to rise up as such in relation with something that it is not present. It is a necessary connection to some past idea which in turn is related to some past impression. Necessity is for Hume a customary association. In the famous example of the billiard ball, nothing in the idea of one ball presently moving towards the other carries with it any phenomenological feature betraying the necessity that, upon hitting the other ball, the latter will move. We are necessitated to believe that this will happen because of all those similar cases we have experienced in the past which we found to have been (causally) related. But the necessity with which I believe it now does not impress itself from what is (not) happening in the world now but from my mind. And even if I reflect on all similar past occurrences, then my “representations of the causally related [past] pairs themselves simply turn out to have no such further content.”49 To believe something before it happens must, therefore, be some sort of feeling, an affectivity, a being affected by. And such affectivity is what leads us to believe that … ; rather, such affectivity is to believe. That particular way in which we are compelled to (be) live (in) something, to perceive something as. As Gilles Deleuze points out, the issue with Hume is not how the present resembles with a single past in order to find the affectivity which constitutes our believing, but what conditions the multiplicity of hows in the past all the way back to the beginning.50 But the beginning needs the unfolding of time for the iteration of resemblances to take place. Nothing happens in the beginning;

47

There is much to say here about the idea of water and river. The waters of the rivers and their associations will be touched upon in the follow(ing) chapters. 48 Hume, Treatise, 61; emphases added. 49 Don Garett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (NY:  oup, 1997), 106; cf. Winkler, New, 55–​59. 50 In his phenomenological analysis of the causes of belief, Hume writes: “From a second observation I conclude, that the belief, which attends the present impression, … is produc’d by a number of past impressions and conjunctions” (Hume, Treatise, 60).

68 Chapter 3 it is not the A  precedent to B, nor the A‘‘‘ …n which has been experienced as precedent to B’’’ …n, but the in-​between associations and the in-​between resemblance of resemblances. A customary association “can never be acquir’d merely by one instance.”51 The first are related only through, and, or, by what will come next as similar, as resembling, as analogous. But the experience of resemblance must have been retained in some manner to form that customary association which will determine the present as a particular manner of conceiving, as a belief. At the same time, this holding onto the past is (another) how; this time how the mind makes the transition without the assistance of the memory. “The subject can go beyond the given because first of all it is, inside the mind, the effect of principles transcending and affecting the mind.”52 A multiplicity of relations of association give rise to believing. I do not chose to believe something, instead I am to believe it based on how I have lived in a past which is constituted as such. Hume opts to call this custom but underneath this term hide all those past impressions and associations which condition how a present impression will be presented as an idea, that is, how it will be lived, how it will be believed. Experience is then to be accounted for, to be explained transcendentally as the how I have become accustomed to associating things in the past with regards to an impressing now. And this pressing association, is not the product of reason but something customary which gives rise to believing. This pressing association which negates all other possible options allows for affectivity as re-​flection as feeling. To believe is to feel. And this feeling is not coming from the senses but it arises out of re-​flection; it is reflection. When I  am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.53 Hume saw his account as “a violent paradox,” “extravagant and ridiculous,”54 and “extraordinary,”55 and, yet, the only one which could explain how we come to be motivated to believe. Believing that something is, was or will be, 51 Ibid. 52 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin N.  Boundas (NY:  cup, 1989), 24. 53 Hume, Treatise, 59. 54 Ibid., 91. 55 Ibid., 53.

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perceiving in its broadest sense with certainty that something is when such certainty does not come from the present. Yet, in another sense, to believe is never about the present but about a resembling past and a resembling past future which constitute the present. There is an interesting oxymoron that arises in Hume’s account. It seems that for Hume ‘reflection’ has two manifestations. The first as secret operation of the mind and the second as an operation which gives preference to possible associations of re-​flection. In the first manifestation, although the customary association is done secretly, in the mind, the feeling is coming through a re-​ flection on the associations, a comparison of possible associations immediately. The custom operates before we have time for reflexion. The objects seem so inseparable, that we interpose not a moment’s delay in passing from the one to the other. But as this transition proceeds from experience, and not from any primary connexion betwixt the ideas, we must necessarily acknowledge, that experience may produce a belief and a judgment of causes and effects by a secret operation, and without being once thought of.56 In the second manifestation, when I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. But when I give preference it seems that various ontological domains open up at once. The first is the coming back to the associations, to reflect them. What conditions this coming back to reflect? It cannot be merely customary. At the same time, it cannot be a coincidence that the whole discussion of belief has opened by supposing an Other: “Suppose a person present with me, who advances propositions, to which I do not assent”57 or cases wherein we dissent from another person. This coming back, in (re)turn to re-​spect, raises ontic-​ontological questions. Who/​what comes back to reflect, and, most importantly, is there a possibility of not giving preference? It may be, as Hume says, only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me, but do I always fall prey to this blow which the presence of an Other with me has initiated? I may be able to reflect on my own associations of ideas, but can I just reflect without taking the position of an Other? Let us look at it differently. Hume says that belief comes after experience. But what is experience? How does experience come to be? Repetition of

56 57

Ibid., 58; emphases added. Ibid., 55; emphases added.

70 Chapter 3 impressions and a convoluted mechanism of (their) association conditions experience secretly. In Hume we see that experience is more the ‘experiencing as’ rather than the ‘experience of or about something.’ Is there a difference between this ‘as’ and the ‘of’ or the ‘about’? Most philosophers would claim that all these expressions point to the fact that experience is always intentional. There is never just experience but experience is always referring to something. Experience cannot come to be without being intentional and this is what we indirectly learn from Hume’s analyses. As Husserl admits in many of his works, it is Hume’s proto-​phenomenological analysis, an other philosopher’s work, which triggered him to re-​flect and re-​conceptualize ‘intentionality.’58 We shall digress and examine whether the concept of intentionality enables us to arrive at altruism as we have intended or if we need to come back to this Humean affectivity in some other way. 4

Skepsis on Intentionality

Traditionally, intentionality is about knowledge, episteme. If we go back in time, we see that intentionality, the aboutness that marks the mental, is all about σκέψις (skepsis). If Liddell and Scott are right and σκέπ-​τομαι is to examine and to look carefully, to spect,59 then this kind of inspection requires one’s bodily stasis, one’s stillness or standing, rather than moving. Knowledge begins with the end of bodily movement. As Plato describes in Cratylus, the end of the

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Indicatively:  “… David Hume’s Treatise contains the first systematic sketch of a pure, though not eidetic, phenomenology, and, in particular, Volume i of it is the first sketch of a comprehensive phenomenology of cognition. … this treatise is instead an actual “transcendental” phenomenology, though a sensualistically perverted one” (Husserl, Ideas II, 423). “Hume’s brilliant Treatise already has the form of a rigorous and systematic structural exploration of the sphere of pure lived experience. Thus in a certain sense it is the first attempt at a ‘phenomenology’ ” (Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–​1931), trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 117. 59 See the relevant reference in (Lidell and Scott, http://​stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/​lsj/​ #eid=97451&context=lsj&action=from-​search). In Cratylus, Socrates invites Hermogenes to skepsis, to think together (391a), as in to observe and to look carefully, that is, inspect what Cratylus was talking about which confused Hermogenes (384e). As Derrida writes, with skepsis, “[o]‌ne is on the lookout, one reflects upon what one sees” and most importantly this means to keep that ‘what’ in suspense; in the modality of skepsis one “reflects what one sees by delaying the moment of conclusion” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of Blind:  Self-​Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-​Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: ucp, 1993), 1; hereafter, Memoirs).

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physical movement gives way to the movement of the mind, the skepsis, the mental inspection as directed(ness) to the things, targeting them like a bow’s arrow. Intentionality as mental inspection is precisely this targeting; it is the directed(ness of the) arrow to something. For knowledge to occur, this skepsis must reach its end in the thing aimed; the arrow must find its target. As Plato underscores, if the arrow misses the target or falls down or it breaks, then there is no knowledge. ‘episte ¯me ¯’ (‘knowledge’) … it stops (histe ¯si) the movement of our soul towards (epi) things, rather than that it accompanies them in their movement.60 We need to make a very important stasis, a stop, before proceeding to knowledge. Knowledge is all about ends. Yet knowledge comes at the end of the movement not in stasis itself, just in standing. The movement of our soul stops for knowledge to be attained. Once reached, it then passes this movement onto the body, like the hand that releases the arrow. Just as skepsis as the movement of the soul, begins when the movement of the body ends, in standing, so knowledge has occurred only when the body begins to move again. As Félix Ravaisson put it, “in reflection and the will, the end proposed by intelligence is an object opposed to itself, as the more or less distant goal of movement.”61 If skepsis or standing continues with no end, then it becomes skepticism, there is no moving or moving on; there is no end in the movement of thought. And if skepsis does not have a single end, an object, its moving is in random. This moving is skeptical, like doubting end-​lessly –​or, as Heidegger reads in Parmenides, a “bewildered” noesis, dull and “directionless to and fro.”62 In either case, skepsis without end, endless skepsis is like living in an endless dream as Socrates recounts: What I think you heard so many times from those who ask for [is] this, that is, what kind of proof do we have at our disposal to provide when 60 Plato, Cratylus or Per the Correctness of Names, trans. I.  Zaharopoulos, (Athens, Daidalos, 2012), 437a)[Πλάτων, Κρατύλος ή Περί Ορθότητας Ονομάτων, μτφ. Ι. Ζαχαρόπουλος, (Αθήναι: Δαίδαλος, 2012), 437a]; hereafter, Cratylus. Socrates juxtaposes these movements in Theaetetus (Plato, Theaetetus, trans. I.  N. Theodorakopoulos, (Athens:  Academy of Athens Publishing, 1980), 153–​155; 93–​95) hereafter, Theaetetus [Πλάτων, Θεαίτητητος, μτφ. Ι. Ν. Θεοδωρακόπουλος, (Αθήναι: Ακαδημία Αθηνών, 1980), 153–​155; 93–​95]. 61 Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008), 55. 62 Heidegger, Beginning, 96.

72 Chapter 3 one wants to ask us if this very moment we are sleeping and all our thoughts are dreams, or we are indeed awake and we do indeed speak to each other.63 Or, what kind of proof would one need for knowing about the essence of things which would make the dream of the reality of the essence of things become real, that is, to take it out of the dream? Consider, Cratylus, a question that I for my part often dream about: Are we or aren’t we to say that there is a beautiful itself, and a good itself, and the same for each one of the things that are?64 Knowledge, episteme, is about whether one can move out from such a dream. To arrive to knowledge is to have an itinerary, a passage out of dreaming, to adaw, to be a-​wake (délit). This waking up is what René Descartes was aiming at as the passage to absolute knowledge: I will regard the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things as nothing but the bedeviling hoaxes of my dreams … But this undertaking is arduous, and a certain laziness brings me back to my customary way of living. I am not unlike a prisoner who enjoyed an imaginary freedom during his sleep, but, when he later begins to suspect that he is dreaming, fears being awakened and nonchalantly conspires with these pleasant illusions. In just the same way, I fall back of my own accord into my old opinions, and dread being awakened.65 While Descartes needed God’s aid to get out of the dream, to move out from skepticism, he arrived at a thinking thing. He concluded that he was a thinking thing. He had, in Brentano’s later elaboration, an immediate insight of/​ about thinking. The movement here takes place and time not in what can be perceived through the modalities of perception mediated by biological/​material organ(s) but in thought itself immediately, the immediate perception of thought. The movement here takes a different direction. Perception perceives itself as a mental phenomenon or a mental state with a mental object.

63 Plato, Theaetetus, 158c. 64 Plato, Complete, 439d; 155. 65 Descartes, Meditations 2, 12.

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Consequently, no one can really doubt that a mental state which he perceives in himself exists, and that it exists just as he perceives it. Anyone who could push his doubt this far would reach a state of absolute doubt, a skepticism which would certainly destroy itself, because it would have destroyed any firm basis upon which it could endeavor to attack knowledge.66 What Brentano suggests is that there is no stasis, no firm basis, no absolute standing, even in skepsis. There is always movement even in thought, in perception. We just have to trace the direction of the movement, of the thought, of the perception. Every mental phenomenon is characterised by … the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, … reference to a content, direction toward an object … or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, … In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved … This intentional in-​existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. … We can, therefore, define mental phenomena … those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.67 Skepsis, or the mental, is never standing, it is moving toward an object. Skepsis is like the movement of the arrow of a bow as Socrates recounts in Cratylus.68 The movement towards a target, to ward something. There is never skepticism insofar as we can reveal the object toward which skepsis moves, what it intends, its intentionality. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself. But this object is not necessarily a physical object. And that is why the mental is marked by in-​existence. The direction toward of skepsis, is reference to an object, which exists as its content but need not exist in the world as a physical object. This movement, this intentionality is in existence for the person, yet we know that it could be an inexistence with respect to the object. If the object of the mental act corresponds adequately to a physical thing; if the mental can be identified with a physical phenomenon; if the mental object is an adequate representation of a physical thing, the perception can 66 67 68

Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and Linda L.McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995),7; hereafter, Psychology. Ibid., 68; emphases added. The metaphor of bow and arrow for describing intentionality has been used in phenomenology as well; see Husserl, Experience, 36; 218.

74 Chapter 3 be interpreted as an exhaustive description of what is physically presented to the person. But that need not be the case. With mental reference, in Brentano’s words, “if someone thinks of something, the one who is thinking must certainly exist, but the object of his thinking need not exist at all.”69 Hence, intentional in-​existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. On the one hand, intentionality neutralizes skepticism by revealing the existence of the one who intends, by describing a movement from the subject to its subjective object, but on the other hand, this movement is always internal; it is a relation of oneself to oneself without the possibility of moving (back) to the external physical world. We cannot know whether the subjective object (the mental phenomenon) refers to an objective object (the physical phenomenon). Husserl, however, revisiting intentionality, could not really acquiesce to such a Cartesian and Kantian inspired internal and external distinction, and wanted to “draw more precise distinctions between the world of the individual, the world of the empirical, social community, and perhaps the world of an ideally community of knowers, the world of (ideally perfected) science, the world in itself.”70 Husserl finds the distinction between mental and physical phenomena suspicious.71 Phenomena or “the appearing of things”72 do not enter into consciousness, but we live through them. We are always conscious of some thing. Consciousness moves towards some thing other than itself, that is, it transcends itself. This movement, this transcendence is intentionality. There 69 Brentano, Psychology, 212. 70 Ibid., 89. In Experience and Judgment, Husserl uses the expression ‘external perception’ (19). Whereas external perception gives primacy to space, Husserl will reposit the distinction in temporal terms. Perception is now distinguished not spatially as internal and external but temporally. The external perception refers to the presence of something, the itself there, the immediacy of the given or as Husserl likes to call it the self-​giveness of the things which happens now, presently. In contrast to this perception is the presentification of the thing in memory or imagination. Such presentification comes after the giveness of the thing. This after does not make it spatially internal but a different way of appearing (19–​20). That is why it “makes no essential difference,” as Husserl demonstrates, “to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is ficticious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I  think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-​sided polygon as of a regular thousand-​faced solid” (Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 99). 71 As Husserl avows in his notes on the lectures for the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time, everything is existence-​in rather than in-​existence that Brentano posited (Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1813–​1897), trans. John B. Brough, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); hereafter, Internal. 72 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 83.

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is never skepticism as there is always movement. Consciousness is always moving, it is a unified stream of consciousness. As Sartre says of Husserl’s fundamental concept of intentionality, there is nothing in consciousness but “a movement of fleeing itself, a sliding beyond itself.”73 Instead of putting things into consciousness, as with Brentano, devouring and dissolving them, consciousness found(s) things while streaming. With Sartre, You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter in your consciousness, for it is not of the same nature as consciousness.74 Consciousness is this interplay between finding and founding.75 We found things as wooden, hard, interesting, lovable, and repulsive. There is never a pure representation of things-​in-​themselves. In the stream of consciousness, things are found based on how they have been previously found(ed) and, in turn, they are founded anew as they are presently found. It is not a matter of what object appears but what appears as an object. The intentional object then is not what appears in consciousness but some-​thing in “its modes or ways of givenness”76 as a constituted unity. This constituted unity, the intentional object, Husserl calls ‘noema’ or ‘sense’ constituted out of various noetic acts (perceiving, thinking, judging, wishing, loving etc.). Consciousness as sense giving, is noesis. If we go back to Brentano, even if there is a direction towards an object when in presentation something is presented, the primary direction to what is presented can itself become a new object of another presentation in the sense that ‘in presentation something is presented’ is now a new intentional object, a new presentation. If what comes out of the noetic is the noematic, the noetic can in turn be intended in the stream of consciousness and can turn into a noematic. This is what Husserl called a change of attitude which is “a thematic transition from one direction of apprehension to another to which correspond correlatively different objectivities.”77 And by this thematic transition it can posit itself as an object.

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Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Intentionality:  A Fundamental Idea in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology (1970): 5. Cf. Husserl, Experience, 53–​4. 74 Ibid., 4. 75 Husserl, Experience, 24. 76 Antony J.  Steinbock, “Saturated Intentionality,” The Body, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 180; hereafter, Saturated. 77 Husserl, Ideas ii, 221.

76 Chapter 3 Consciousness is, ergo, a positional consciousness. It posits its object, as Sartre says, “in order to reach an object and it exhausts itself in the same positing.”78 For example, I see in front of me the Parthenon. The intentional object of the experience is not just the physical thing but also the way the physical thing is lived through, I see it. The noetic here may be the perceiving. But to be as much faithful to the originally Husserlian thought as possible, this perceiving of the physical thing stands in relation with how it has been lived through in the past and constituted as the ‘Parthenon’ and in relation with all these previous intentional experiences which lead to the moment of the expression of the proposition. To see the Parthenon is an experience, an intentional act founded on many other intentions retained in consciousness. “Most if not all, acts are complex experiences very often involving intentions which are themselves multiple.”79 As Steinbock put it, intentionality is saturated. In turn, ‘I wish to see the Parthenon’ is an intentional act equally saturated by the noetic act of wishing and of the physical thing which is wished to be seen. In turn, the physical thing is itself another constituted unity which has been sedimented over the course of the stream of prior intentional experiences (mental acts or consciousnesses) as Husserl usually characterizes the aboutness of the physical things. Equally as well, the wishing is another constitution which ‘adds’ something new to the unity. ‘Wishing’ here is another way that something can be given to consciousness, a “newly”80 objectivating process, an additional constitution to prior intended strata of constitution with respect to the thing. This broadening of the concept of intentionality allows Husserl to conceive intentionality as existence rather than tracing it with Brentano to in-​existence in its myriad senses. If something can be intended, then it exists. The object exists as it is constituted through intention(s). The constitution of this unity is the phenomenon, the noema, how the world appears. As Stephen Strasser underscores, Husserl’s objection to Brentano relies on not accepting a distinction between cogito and cogitatum, noesis and noema, “experience and that to which experience refers” as they are “inseperably linked.” Both of them can be intended in the same manner, that is, they can be given to consciousness as “pure phenomena; they are immanent manifestations which phenomenological psychology must describe.”81 78 Sartre, bn, li. 79 Ibid., 96. 80 Husserl, Ideas ii, 18. 81 Stephen Strasser, “Phenomenologies and Psychologies,” Readings in Existential Phenomenology, eds. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’ Connor, (Englewood Cliffs, nj: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1967), 335; hereafter, Phenomenologies.

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There are many implications of this broadening of the concept of intentionality for how to come to an unfettered believing in altruism. Firstly, Husserl disentangled truth from the scholastic conception of truth as a relation of correspondence between a proposition and an object existing independently of a consciousness which proposes, that is, which intends the world. Re-​visiting Descartes, Husserl underscored that “I may doubt whether an outer object exists, and so whether a percept relating to such objects is correct, but I cannot doubt the now experienced sensuous content whenever that is I reflect on the latter, and simply intuit it as being what it is.”82 The same line of thought permeates the first part of the Cartesian Meditations where Husserl accepts that we can, with Descartes, doubt being as a datum of experience and puts in its place the phenomenon of being “as mine … [which] has for me sense and validity as “true.””83 The object of experience, as a phenomenon, whatever that may be, exists by the fact that it is for me as being what it is. The fact that it is, is the fact. And this facticity is not one of countless theoretical possibilities within a certain factually delimited sphere. It is the single, sole truth which excludes all other possibilities and which, being established by insight, is kept pure from fact in its content and mode of proof.84 This mineness is kept pure from fact in its content and mode of proof depending as it does solely on its feeling of being mine. The object insofar as I adequately perceive it by excluding all other possibilities, is lived for me, as it is for me and in its mineness I come to be-​live it, I believe it. Believing is always true as believing is intentionally related to the actual process of the constitution of the object, and since the object cannot be separated from the way it has been constituted, there is no way to believe something which is false. The constitution is always subjective, always mine hence the sole truth. ‘False’ is another constitution, be it mine in another moment of the stream of consciousness or a moment of another stream of consciousness intending –​i.e. when I express what the fact is for me. Husserl’s intentionality leads us to ‘mineness.’ The constitution of an object through consciousness, leads us to ‘mineness.’ The latter is not to be construed as an object of a subject or an ego. It is an impersonal feeling. In the stream of consciousness, in living through something, when we “become absorbed, e.g., 82 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 345. 83 Husserl, Meditations, 19. 84 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 53.

78 Chapter 3 in the perceptual ‘taking in’ in the act of some event happening before us,”85 like in the case of seeing the Parthenon above, there is no ego to be found in the act-​experience. When act-​experience is naturalized or put into relief from the stream of consciousness, that is, the act-​experience is interrupted and attention is turned towards it, it is then that the ego is found as another constitution, another transcendent object. The ego is intended, is posited, is constituted just like any other object, it is a transcendent object. The question now is whether the repetitive ego-​constitutions that are found in the various reflected acts reveal or point to a transcendental ‘I,’ a core sense, a transcendental schema, which phenomenalizes itself as ‘mineness’ and unifies the stream of consciousness as mine, and of which the empirical ego is just another intention, another sketch, another adumbration. There is a bit of oscillation in Husserl as to whether this mineness is to be referred to as ‘adequate perception’ or ‘something lived’ (erlebnis) or some sort of ‘presence’ or ‘pure consciousness’ or in what is referred to as ‘pure (transcendental) ego.’ Many philosophers have noticed that there is a certain tension in Husserl’s writing with respect to this pure ego. This tension is revealed as an oscillation in the possibility of objectivating, directing attention, intending to a pure ego even in the sense of a filmy demarcated horizon. In the Logical Investigations Husserl writes in a note exploring intentionality: the empirical ego is as much a case of transcendence as the physical thing. If the elimination of such transcendence and the reduction to pure phenomenological data, leaves us with no residual pure ego, there can be no real (adequate) self-​evidence attaching to the ‘I am’. But if there is really such an adequate self-​evidence –​who could indeed deny it? –​how could we avoid assuming a pure ego?86 Then again, Husserl criticizes Hume and Berkeley who reduce “phenomenal bodies to bundles of ideas” because they fail to notice how in the case of the physical thing “the bundle itself, the intended complexes of elements, are never present in real fashion in any human consciousness and never will be.”87 This is because there will never be a perception “adequately intuited in any consciousness.”88 And since “adequate intuition is the same as internal perception” one cannot not analogize the bundle of the constituted physical thing 85 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 53. 86 Ibid., 352. 87 Ibid., 89. 88 Ibid., 90.

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with the transcendental pure ego and wonder whether such an adequate perception could ever be accomplished, whether either could be intended. It all comes down to whether the reduction can yield an adequate perception of “the living intention which cannot be adequately imparted in words.”89 But now this adequate perception, as all adequate perception, is unrelated with the actual existence of a thing but with its ideal presentification since the most immediate perception is noematic, unreal –​I can think of Bismarck as I think of my alien friend Toby. Intentionality cannot play the role of ‘adequate’ in the adequate perception. So, the real (adequate) self-​evidence attaching to the ‘I am’ is not intentional yet still within the realm of (the intentional) consciousness –​ it is a “hidden subjectivity.”90 To be sure, consciousness as a stream made up of intentionalities, must be somehow unified if it is to be a stream. There is a transcendental field of unification at play. Whether this field is a transcendental ‘I’ or an ‘eye’ which actively directs its ray of attention from here to there –​a favorite analogy for Husserl –​or whether it (the field) is empty, impacts our investigation. What we are looking for is how we can come to believe in altruism. For the person who does not believe in altruism this translates as coming to be motivated to believe in altruism and for the person who already believes in altruism, that they are freely motivated to believe even if that believing is put into relief, by, for example, judging. In either case, believing in altruism must be actively motivated by the person be-​having the belief. Intentionality can help us think of how we come to be motivated to believe, but can it help us believe and be-​ live altruism? Simply, can intentionality intend itself? “How is the intentionality that makes all things visible be revealed –​to itself?”91 What does it mean for constitutive intentionality or consciousness to be self-​conscious –​which for our purposes here would be to be self-​consciously altruistic? One of the reasons that Sartre denied the existence of a transcendental ‘I’ was that consciousness as a stream would be destroyed. If the transcendental field was an ‘I’ it would violently separate consciousness from itself, it would divide it, slicing through each consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness. The existence of consciousness, indeed, is an absolute, because consciousness is conscious of itself; in 89 Ibid., 88. 90 Husserl, Experience, 43. 91 Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, trans. Karl Hefty, (Chicago: nup, 2015), 47; hereafter, Incarnation.

80 Chapter 3 other words, the type of existence that consciousness has is that it is consciousness of itself. And it becomes conscious of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object.92 As mentioned earlier, consciousness becomes conscious of itself in the process of the constitution of the object, through noesis. The fact that something is (constituted), is the fact. Admitting the condition of intentional consciousness to an anterior transcendental unity marked by an opaque pole, an ‘I,’ even if that ‘I’ is intentional, would cut off the absoluteness of intentionality. It would always be an ‘I’ which passes into consciousness and into consciousness of something. A unity before a unity would make the noema of constitution redundant. Intentionality would be sliced by an opaque blade.93 For consciousness to be intentional it has to be absolute consciousness, an impersonal non-​unified transcendental field. Following the Husserl of the Investigations and not of the Ideas, Sartre elaborated on the two ways of consciousness, the reflected and the unreflected. The unreflected is a non-​ positional consciousness in the sense that consciousness does not become an object but it reveals itself through the constitution of an object which is other than itself.94 If this unreflected consciousness is intended, it becomes the intentional object of another consciousness and it is then posited as an object by a reflective consciousness; it is constituted as consciousness reflected-​on. This is not just reflective consciousness but consciousness itself reflected-​on. But as Sartre underscored in his later writings, this is always the very same consciousness through and through. There is not another consciousness external to itself to be added to transform the unreflected to a reflected-​on through reflection of itself. There is only a movement from a pre-​reflective consciousness to a reflective, if intentional consciousness is to have any meaning at all. For instance, in the consciousness of a pleasurable object, “pleasure can not be distinguished –​even logically –​from consciousness of pleasure.”95 There is a pre-​reflective consciousness which conditions the reflection of consciousness.

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Jean-​Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego:  A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), 4; hereafter, Transcendence. 93 Or, “a knife blade” that “cuts a piece of fruit in two” (Sartre, bn, 28). 94 Later, Sartre will reformulate this thesis where consciousness as the for-​itself is its own past which is never its object but revealed through the negation of the thing in the world which it constitutes. “The past is “posited opposite” the for-​itself and assumed as that which the for-​itself has to be without being able either to affirm or deny or thematise or absorb it” (Ibid., 140). 95 Sartre, bn, liv.

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And because this “fleeting”96 consciousness is not positional yet conditions positionality itself, it is put in brackets: “Consciousness (of) pleasure is constitutive of the pleasure as the very mode of its own existence, as the material of which it is made, and not as a form which is imposed by a blow upon hedonistic material.”97 This bracketing suggests that consciousness reflects itself as in a mirror in every intentional moment. Pleasure is always consciousness (of) pleasure. Similarly, if this reflection is intended, that is, if it becomes reflective to be the reflected-​on, to be consciousness of consciousness, intentional consciousness would be transcending to itself, yet revealing itself through this positionality. It would be consciousness (of) consciousness. But since this is a constitution of the transcending consciousness, there will always be something ‘missing.’ This consciousness is a “slope on which I cannot stay.”98 To say that consciousness is consciousness of something means that for consciousness there is no being outside of that precise obligation to be a revealing intuition of something-​i.e., of a transcendent being. Not only does pure subjectivity, if initially given, fail to transcend itself to posit the objective; a “pure” subjectivity disappears. What can properly be called subjectivity is consciousness (of) consciousness. But this consciousness (of being) consciousness must be qualified in some way, and it can be qualified only as revealing intuition or it is nothing.99 Consciousness is always in-​itself and transcends itself. As a phenomenon of being it is in-​itself and for-​itself and “no-​thing” in between100 –​“nothing has just slipped in between that state and the present state.”101 It is just like the line of the horizon. That no thing which comes to be by the sky touching the sea or the sea touching the sky. This horizon is “all the mystery in the world;” yet it is beyond this horizon where everything happens.102 96 Ibid., liii. 97 Ibid., liv. 98 Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Yale: yup, 1953), 118; hereafter, Sartre. 99 Sartre, bn, lxi. “This means that the being of consciousness does not coincide with itself in a full equivalence” (74). This Sartrean skepsis permeates the Being and Nothingness when he says that “if we attempt to grasp it [reflection] as reflecting, it vanishes and we fall back on the reflection” (76). Sartre may call this facticity but “it is impossible to grasp this facticity in its brute nudity” (83). 100 Ibid., 77; emphasis added. 101 Ibid., 28; emphasis added. 102 Eugene O’ Neill, Beyond the Horizon and Marco Millions (London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1960), 25.

82 Chapter 3 On the one hand, the ego as a transcendent object always refers to the past as consciousness intends itself. In uncovering the different layers of its constitution it can never find an ‘I’ as a beginning, as an arche. It is found when it finds itself in re-​flection, in constitution. On the other hand, as it projects itself into what it could possibly be with adumbrated intentions based on a schema of how it has been so far, or as an analogized schema based on other egos, other transcendent objects, these infinite intended adumbrations fail to reveal a totality, they face a wall, the wall of death, or nothingness. The transcendental field of consciousness is anxiety. The movement (of constitution) ends (itself) in death, nothingness. If consciousness as constituting intentionality is not skeptical, as we said in the beginning, it is because it has an end, or better, the ultimate end. Consciousness of consciousness is absolute knowledge: death. Consciousness is a conscious movement toward death. To know means to be aware of death. There are two questions here revealed and left suspended, and these questions have motivated the critique of the classical phenomenological programme of intentionality. The first question, posed by Jean Nabert to Sartre,103 is how we account for the being of the transition between the pre-​reflective and the reflective. And we could add what accounts for the eternal recurrence of such transition, a transition which is rarely if ever likely to be the same in a stream of consciousness. The second question, closely related to the first is that the transition can never be intentional. To be clear, consciousness as consciousness of something, intentional consciousness, “must produce itself as a revealed-​revelation of a being which is not it and which gives itself as already existing when consciousness reveals it”104 and in consciousness’s attempt to recover itself this being which is not it, it becomes a being-​for-​itself. But re-​ covering is an affectivity which evades intentionality. The ‘re’of the recovering or the ‘re’ of the reflecting cannot be constituted as such-​and-​such; the ‘re’ is an affectivity, something non-​intentional. Sartre’s reworking of the classical Hegelian concepts of ‘in-​itself’ and ‘for-​ itself’ with Husserl’s exploded/​saturated intentionality brings about a brilliant concept. Consciousness is always something that it is not, and it is not what it is. Self-​consciousness must be expressed in brackets, or in Derrida’s terms sous rature; as conscience (de) soi, since it can never intend itself, that is, reflect itself fully. If, as we saw with Brentano, in presentation something is presented, 103 Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self,” Readings in Existential Phenomenology, eds. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’ Connor, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 113–​142. 104 Sartre, bn, lxii.

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in the case of consciousness that something is never what it is, consciousness can never be presented in its fullness. It is presenc-​ing rather than presenting itself, never constituting itself to itself –​even though it does try to do that, yet in any attempt it has always already failed. When Sartre says that “the For-​itself is the thetic consciousness of the world in the form of presence and non-​thetic self-​consciousness [conscience (de) soi],”105 there is always already something that cannot be presence, as constitution, or full intention. At the same time, however, paradoxically one could say, it is through these breaks and fragments of constitution that consciousness is presented as such, as what it is, a consciousness-​of. In the attempts to reflect on itself it reveals itself in being aware of itself while being conscious of something which is not the constitution of itself. Consciousness sees itself not with full eyes but with a wink. Even in introspection, Sartre says, “I try to determine exactly what I am, to make up my mind to be my true self without delay –​even though it means consequently to set about searching for ways to change myself.”106 But there is always this delay since reflection apprehends the reflecting “as Not-​yet,”107 as a deferral, which is never thought, never intended in all senses of the term. Each term, each reflection, as the object of reflecting “while positing itself for the other, became the other.”108 There is something always missing, deferred, unthought in the enduring game of reflection-​reflecting/​reflective-​reflected on, it is always something for-​itself. As Michel Foucault put it, consciousness seems as the inexhaustible unthought which “whatever it touches it immediately causes to move:  it cannot discover the unthought, or at least move towards it, without immediately bringing the unthought nearer to itself.”109 Spiraling back to our discussion on habit, a habit is a habit when it is not reflected, when it lives in itself, when it is what it is not. Reflecting on a habit, a break has already taken place. The habit has been cracked. Ultimately, a pre-​ reflective consciousness cannot be reflected upon without such a break, such a crack which will allow the pre-​reflective to become intentional consciousness. But that break, that fissure, that dehiscence is never intended, it is felt –​affectivity. To come back to Hume and rework his observation, it is the difference betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent we

1 05 Ibid., 127. 106 Ibid., 63, emphases added. 107 Ibid., 126. 108 Ibid, 152. 109 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:  An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Routledge, (London: Routledge, 1989), 357.

84 Chapter 3 are conscious of, and this difference cannot be accounted through intentionality. How, then, does this crack, this opening come to be? Let us provide an extraordinary example. The phenomenological reduction either in Cartesian or Husserlian way is the foundational road to knowledge. And this is precisely because the reflection is what allows the broaching, the puncture of the universality of custom and habit. We can accept that everything is connected by some sort of customary association, but the very fact that we can stop and reflect on these associations, putting intentional experience into relief, when we stand and try to under-​stand how the associations are associated, all of which means to question, then we broach the custom and we break the habit. We can accept that “we get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking;”110 that we are constituted out of a bundle of perceptions, caught in a matrix of habits, (physical) associations and (bio-​chemical) causalities. Yet, the possibility of leaping out of this ocean of determinism, even for seconds, as if taking a breath, like dolphins, and then necessarily back in, allows the opening of a place, an in-​between, which feels like this difference betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent. If everything is determined, the possibility of arriving at the consciousness of this determinism is, if not to destroy it, at least to breach its essence. The determinism of consciousness is cracked by this movement of reversal whereby we can talk about the ‘consciousness of determinism.’ And even if the latter is part of the determinism itself, such re-​flection is a break. To extend the naturalistic analogy, there is the difference betwixt that (conception) to which we ascend, and that from which we descend. The affectivity, that Humean lively feeling felt during a movement comes out of folding, from in-​flecting an uninterrupted movement, a stream of consciousness. This affectivity is feeling. It is affectivity which I experience as mine. It is this mineness again that we come back to. But that feeling of mineness cannot be thematized or localized, it is lived through what is intended, like an extra something, a partes extra partes, of the intentionality which it makes possible. It is not a property of the experience nor the experience of. It is what underlies one (experience) into the other, that which allows to find and found every intentional experience. That which even in dreams, daydreams or night dreams, or thought experiments, is always felt through something intended which is other than itself:

110 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’ Brien (NY: Penguin, 1975), 15.

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So, when I dream, it might be the case that the room that I think I see and the persons to whom I  believe I  am speaking do not exist. But, if in the course of this dream, I experience a fright, this is what it is. It is absolutely, untouched and unaltered in its being by the fact that it is a dream and that there is no room or person or world. Its being remains untouched and unaltered by the alteration of seeing, by the disturbance of the ek-​static site of visibility in which everything that is given for me to see becomes visible.111 What Henry means here with this is what it is, this facticity, is not the affectivity, the feeling that we are trying to describe. This relates to the intentional experience, to the facticity of the experience, the in-​itself. Even if we take facticity with Husserl as erlebnis, something lived, or with Heidegger as the ““that-​ it-​is” of facticity [which] never becomes something that we can come across by beholding it,”112 we will not be able to capture affectivity, as a mineness as ‘it’, or ‘this’, as something intended. As Henry elaborates, the phenomenological reduction, or any kind of reflection in the colloquial sense, is a thematization of being, an attempt to objectify experience, an attempt which even if unsuccessful, is still “responsible for the disappearance or vanishing of feeling.”113 Feeling cannot be reflected in or as feeling. Yet, even during reflection there is feeling which is not captured by it. Feeling is only lived as feeling. As Derrida put it, “living is thus what precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise to.”114 Along similar lines, and somewhere along the lines of his investigations, Wittgenstein tries to capture this feeling as something that cannot be reflected, as “imponderable.”115 It is those “subtleties” between the tone of voice and the gestures. The subtleties are disclosed somewhere, somehow in-​between how a child is formed to live, the forms of its life, how it is in(-​)formed, and the time the child starts to doubt. Somewhere in-​between the certainty and the doubt 1 11 Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson, (London: Continuum, 2012), 14. 112 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 174; hereafter, bt. 113 Henry, Essence, 544. 114 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays in Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison and Newton Garber (Evanston, IL: nup, 1973), 13; hereafter, Speech. 115 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 1953), 228; hereafter Investigations. This characterization, the ‘imponderable,’ appears in dim light in Sartre as well; especially when he writes that it is the “imponderable difference separating being from non-​being in the mode of being of human reality” (bn, 66).

86 Chapter 3 is the imponderable feeling. In-​between the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus who is positively informed and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations who is doubtful, there is the essential break of philosophical habit; “the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.”116 Yet, such habit broke down. “The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.”117 In-​between two ways of philosophizing, the “old way of thinking” and the new “remarks,” there are breaks, “sketches of landscapes” from “journey ings,” “criss-​cross” in every direction and “grave mistakes”118 as another manifestation of the Humean phenomenon of difference: difference betwixt that conception to which we assent, and that from which we dissent. Outside of this movement comes Wittgenstein’s new philosophy, Wittgenstein. Borrowing from Derrida, again, we could say that What exceeds this closure is nothing: neither the presence of being, nor meaning, neither history nor philosophy; but another thing which has no name, which announces itself within the thought of this closure and guides our/​[his] writing [t]‌here. A writing within which philosophy is inscribed as a place within a text which it does not command.119 What is it that which announces itself within the thought of his/​Wittgenstein’s/​t-​ his closure and guides his writing there, from marking a whole, to re-​marking it, to breaking it into pieces and reflecting on it? Can it be intentionally present? What is happening in-​between the “beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, [and now that] I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes”?120 What is the difference? What affectivity is writing itself in these years in-​between the philosophical (re)marks other than life itself, biosis? From the philosophy of intentionality, be it in the phenomenological tradition or the scientific tradition, we move to a philosophy of life which can encompass both. Borrowing from Derrida, we might name this biosis an “ultratrascendental concept of life” which will “enable us to conceive life (in the ordinary or biological sense),”121 and, in our case, altruistic life through which 1 16 Wittgenstein, Investigations, vii. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Derrida, Grammatology, 286; emphasis added. 120 Wittgenstein, Investigations, viii. 121 Derrida, Speech, 15.

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we propose to be altruistic and resuscitate life as biosis. If altruism is to be lived, in an unfettered way, to be lived as believed, the motivation to live for Others must condition life in all its breaks and movements. Either for the one who does not live for Others to break the old ways, or for the altruist to continue it in a way that does not end up in a habit unconscious of itself or, still worse, an altruism which has resulted from an in-​formed habituated life. To come back where we started, altruism or to live for others has to be lived as believed, it has to be biosis. Henry’s radical opposition to this term, or Derrida’s appreciation of it as life in the biological sense will allow us here to make another altruistic attempt in the philosophical plane. Henry is opposed to equating the condition of affectivity to biosis for, as he explores in Incarnation, the condition of affectivity as auto-​affectivity is best manifested as “transcendental phenomenological life, the pathos-​filled self-​revelation from which the flesh draws its pathos, its reality qua pure phenomenological reality, as pathos-​filled reality.”122 It is the transcendental condition of life itself, life experiencing itself by affecting itself, “the being given to itself of existence in its reality, its original revelation”123 which not only (1) falsifies any kind of intentionality, but, also (2) disposes of a concept of a body “from the ordinary experience that underlies Greek thought as well as our own,”124 and “… is no longer the one known to the Greeks, the bios of their biology.”125 Henry is referring to a body as a material ensemble which is governed by laws and whose laws are those that a logos  –​as episteme  –​of the life of this body can describe, hence biology. However, life is revealed in a flesh that feels and it is not just a body that senses based on the logos of its functionality. While we agree with Henry, there is one very important epistemological point that needs to be made for the second objection. Indeed, Henry is right about the concept of the scientific biological construal of the body having been related to this type of concept of bios. But to what extend is this ‘Greek thought’? What is inscribed in this metonymy? Would it extend to the logos of the so-​called pre-​Socratics? What does this classification ‘Greek’ refer to? What does it intend? And what is the responsibility in perpetuating that particular ‘Greek thought’ and not questioning it? This metonymy usually be-​lies Western Metaphysics as founded by Socrates-​Plato-​Aristotle that particular western philosophers, scholastics among others, loved to reprise and remix for 1 22 Henry, Incarnation, 132. 123 Henry, Essence, 645. 124 Henry, Incarnation, 131. 125 Ibid., 132.

88 Chapter 3 the epistemic pursuit of their good life/​zoe (eu zein). There is much to be said about the workings of metonymic use and the use of the metonymy ‘Greek’ versus ‘Hellenic’ in describing Greek thought.126 There is an other Greek thought, another logos, a Hellenic logos, where bios is not related to a particular kind of knowledge or a knowledge of the particular but a philosophy of life. Ricoeur, for instance, while going through Aristotle’s appropriation of the term does not fall into the same trap. Another Bios, or Vios or Vie before its philosophical transvaluations comes to be Life as we mean it here. Ricoeur is very careful and says “this notion of life merits reflection.” “It is not taken in a strictly biological sense but in the ethicocultural sense … the word “life” [bios] designates the person as a whole, in opposition to fragmented practices.”127 And this life also includes the concept of elan (βί-​ώσις) which in turn relates much better to the phenomenological principle as Henry describes it, the principle of human reality as “undergoing experiencing itself” when life is not truncated into particular episodes or seen in fragmented practices. We can agree with Henry insofar as bios has been supplanted by ζωή (zoe) constituted in an embodied consciousness which relates directly to a supposed animalistic nature of human reality as if a product of some kind of evolution –​the rational animal or the social animal, or the animal which erects itself or has an erection and becomes rational and social –​and it is not to be found outside of a particularly intended use of the metonymy “Greek thought.” But this bios cannot come through a thinking that is already founded on the classical distinctions which pass as genetic or primitive. Thus, we have to be guarded towards both Giorgio Agamben’s and Rosi Braidotti’s use of these terms. For Agamben, the appreciation between zoe and bios is the main topic of the profound Homo Sacer. Agamben appreciates a difference between zoe as bare life, animalistic life voicing itself, and bios as living being with logos as politicized language, a qualified life or political existence. But this conceptual 126 With very few exceptions, western literature on Nietzsche neglects the difference between the Greek and the Hellenic. These are not some biological properties as in some sort of biological structure that makes one ethnic group be what it is. There is no room here for genetic formations or any other conclusive forms of essentialism. The difference, as we shall see, comes in bios itself. The difference is a difference in life force, in will to power –​Both in the Untimely Meditations and in The Genealogy of Morals, and later in all his works, Nietzsche phenomenalizes a difference in the will to life as epistemic logos, a platonic logismos –​reactive, negative activity –​and logos as logicis –​activity and creativity. One could say that the most violent and enduring appropriation in history has been ‘bios’ and ‘logos’ –​we shall quest(ion) this path later (cf Plato, Republic, 439–​440; λογισμός/​λογιστικόν/​παρά τον λογισμόν versus λέγω/​λόγος/​λογικόν). 127 Ricoeur, Oneself, 177; emphasis added.

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difference comes from a decision to start the genealogical analysis from Plato and Aristotle. The “inclusion of zoe in the polis” is thus not “in-​itself, absolutely ancient.”128 There is no justification for starting/​ending the genealogy in Plato and Aristotle who play the representatives of what is inscribed in the metonymy ‘Greek thought’ as a supposed authoritative beginning. This decision implies that there is a natural pre-​giveness of this distinction as authoritative hence tacitly accepting its ontological status as inscribed by these figures of ‘Greek thought.’ This distinction which Agamben takes on from Michel Foucault is a distinction which, as Judith Butler observes, is a “distinction itself precluded in the task of genealogical investigation.”129 For Aristotle the natural state precedes the political chronologically. Following Agamben who questions this we could say that if “the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the City, which appears at the moment the City is considered tanquam dissoluta, “as if it were dissolved” (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like a state of exception),” then one must question the kind of distinction implied by accepting the ontological necessity of the rational animal and ascribe this particular distinction to a tanquam dissoluta itself –​l’animal donc que je suis.130 Braidotti’s use of zoe is different. Taking for granted that bios is anthropocentric relating to normative logic as reason or discursive practices, she proposes the use of the term zoe to signify the life force which subtends all life –​ living beings –​not the bestialization of life as in Agamben. “Zoe as the dynamic self-​organizing structure of life itself,”131 is non-​human and transversal force. We shall come back to this displacement in our fifth pathway. However, there is one point that needs to be made here. This zoe, as a transerval force, which entails “the recognition of trans species solidarity,” has an intriguing peculiarity: a basis on “our being environmentally based, that is to say, embodied,

128 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-​Roazen (Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1998), 9; hereafter, Sacer. 129 Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” The Journal of Philosophy, 86, no. 11, (1989): 607. 130 If we take only one sense of ‘suis,’ that of following, then we could arrive back to Plato where this distinction between bare life and bios comes apparent in the Republic. There, life as zoe is reserved for the working class whereas bios is for the rich or those who can sustain themselves without working at all, “ἐν ἀσχολίᾳ τε πάντων;” “Ὁ δὲ δὴ πλούσιος, ὥς φαμεν, οὐδὲν ἔχει τοιοῦτον ἔργον προκείμενον, οὗ ἀναγκαζομένῳ ἀπέχεσθαι ἀβίωτον” (Plato, Republic, 406b; 407a). The bestialization or animalization, dare we say the zoo(n)-​ation of the Other. 131 Braidotti, Posthuman, 60.

90 Chapter 3 embedded, and in symbiosis with other species.”132 From a hermeneutical point of view which operates on the borders, with a cultura mestiza to borrow from Anzaldua,133 we also have the following observation: In Braidotti’s translated text of Nomadic Subjects in modern Greek the translators have a difficulty of ‘biosis’ or a ‘biosis’ of a difficulty. They are forced to translate and back-​translate their biosis into a zoe which is not theirs. This whole to-​and-​fro movement whereby a term goes to its other and back to its other of the same, forced the translators to pause and make a note to the (Greek) reader that they should understand zoe differently.134 Having had their bios snatched out in/​by another idiom, they register zoe in contradistinction to the bios of the citizen just like in Agamben! Bios gets registered in the polis since the translators do not have any other way out.135 Equally, if ultra-​transcendental life as différance or trace or supplement “is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay as the active work of difference”136 then, again, historicity not in fragmented practices must be accounted for if this work is to be revealed as a movement which is the same movement which is not identical.137 And biosis is all about this (w)hole moving. And, indeed, it is the holes of the whole, the breaks, the differences, and the spacings that we need to trace in being altruistic; that which is missed in transcending, in intending, in projecting altruistically. What is missing in the process of projecting, is, as Nietzsche described, the biosis of pro-​missing. 5

Biosis of Promise

Our analysis leads us to another phenomenon which has been widely philosophized and is akin to the phenomenon of prescription: the phenomenon of

132 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects:  Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (NY: cup, 1994), 67; emphasis added; hereafter, Nomadic. 133 Anzaldua, Borderlands, 1987. 134 One should compare page 192 in Braidotti’s original text with page 203 in the translated text alongside the extended note that follows at the end of the chapter in the Greek version (230). The Greek text with no bios is: Ρόζι Μπραιντοτί, Νομαδικά Υποκείμενα: Ενσωματότητα κι Έμφυλη Διαφορά στη Σύγχρονη Φεμινιστική Θεωρία, μτφ. Αγγελική Σηφάκη και Ουρανία Τσακάλου, (Αθήνα: Πολιτεία, 2014). 135 Similarly, when the translators translate ‘sustainability’ their only grammar is through bios. And this creates the paradoxical situation of having ‘βιωσιμότητα’ (sustainability) without ‘βιος’ (life)! The hyperreality of bios! 136 Derrida, Speech, 87. 137 Ibid, 129.

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promise. In promising, as Marcel underscores, we are committing to an objective based on past and present circumstances without having an ability to assure the unfolding of events that will secure the same ontological standing which presently gives genesis to the promise. When I make a promise now it is a promise about the future; if I were to be doing it now it would be an act that I would be acting not promising it. In this future, whether close or distant, I cannot logically, reasonably or otherwise secure that how I am now that I make my promise (how I feel, my capabilities and so on) I will also be in the future when the promise is to be fulfilled; when action will need to realize the words –​if we take the words as a form of action that means that with the promise I delay, postpone, defer an action I were to be doing it now; or with more exactitude and in avoiding the dialectics of negativity, my action comes to be different. The promise contains the dynamic synthesis that we mentioned earlier in prescription, yet here, it takes the form of committing. But this dynamic synthesis in the case of promise is the reverse of that of prescription. In prescription I pause, suspending the current action, and in virtue of my pre-​sup-​ posed telos, I affirm a new course of action, the proposed. Taking this back to our previous example of getting somewhere on time, I suspend the action of waiting for a bus, and affirm a new course of action, getting a taxi to reach my telos, that is, my presupposed end as the arriving on time. Describing it slowly, in prescription I negate the present course of action (pause) in virtue of the telos (pro-​posed) which affirms and conditions this negation for not fulfilling it, i.e. the telos (pre-​sup-​posed). Conversely, in the promise, I affirm the negation of any possible futures which does not secure the future as represented by the promise, by the present as represented. I commit to a present promised; I present one possibility among the myriad other of possibilities that could make up the future. I present one possibility, excluding all the rest that could happen and by omitting them, I commit to one. I present a willed future and I commit to realizing it. In so doing, in committing, I affirm not only the possibility out of a whole, but also the possibility of making one possibility a whole, viz., a future. So when I promise, I pause-(and)-pose the present and pro-​pose it as future –​I create. To promise, then, is to future, and this is conditioned by a look to “a ‘beyond’ which is inaccessible to verification.”138 This dark beyond is the distinctive mark both of the promise and the prescription. The act of promising and the act of prescription suggest a leap to the future. To overflow the future with the present. To leap the present and

138 Nietzsche, Anti-​Christ, 48.

92 Chapter 3 spell or lip the future. And as all leaps and lips can be sealed with failure and falsity, so do these acts. Yet, still, we perform them. We need to digress a bit and focus more on the promising phenomenon of promise; promising both for what we called ‘punctuation’ and for altruism, perhaps. Our analysis of promising suggests looking at the promise in its occurrence and focusing on its conditions just before-​and-​after the promise has been made, just before-​and-​after the words have been lipped, and not spreading the horizon of promising up to the point of its possible (non)realization. In the promise “I will come to see you tomorrow” we proposed to look at the context of the time and space of the uttering/​utterance, when it is lipped. If one extends the horizon of the promise and leaps to the point that the utterance refers (i.e. tomorrow), that is, if one punctuates promising to the point in (ontic) time, which is literally proposed by the statement as promise, then one will miss the leap of the act of promising and the act will be characterized differently. To analyze what constitutes a promise such punctuation will have to take into account whether the promise was fulfilled or not –​whereas in our case the outcome of the promise is not related to the undertaking of realizing the act of promising. The setting up of the horizon, this punctuation, has profound philosophical implications. For instance, J.  L. Austin, in fear of sliding to moralism as the “one who says ‘promising is not merely a matter of words! It is an inward and spiritual act!’,”139 analyzes all the elements involved in promising (utterances, statements, propositions, intentions, chain of events) and evaluates what kind of relation among these parts need to obtain so that a promise could be said to be a ‘real’ promise.140 What makes a promise, a ‘real’ promise? This question leads to a distinction between act and event; the act of promising and the event of promising. The act of promising involves the utterance at its contextual birthplace as intended by the speaker who acts, who intends with their words to mark their intention to act; in this they future. The event of promising includes the outcome of the act of promising. This distinction enables Austin to identify any act of speech as a promise insofar as it meets certain criteria. One of the criteria in the case of a promise will be for the outcome of the promise to be realized. With such a distinction, we have in Austin’s words, a distinction between a fulfilled promise and one that “was void, or given in bad faith.”141 Thus, in the locutionary form –​the simple predicative statement or constative –​“I will come to see you tomorrow” we can discern the illocutionary form 1 39 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 10; hereafter, How. 140 Ibid., 28. 141 Austin, How, 11.

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as force (the implied intended action) of a promise which can be re-​formed as a (new constative) statement “I promise that I will come to see you tomorrow;” in which case what will make the promise a ‘real’ or felicitous promise is whether the (new) constative obtains, that is, it (be)comes true –​based on a correspondence theory of truth; words mirroring the world. And in order to avoid the contingency of the constative obtaining without the intention of the person who promises it, since it is always the speaker who performs, “the speaker does in speaking”142 –​otherwise the illocutionary force would become a moot point –​the speaker must be engaged in the becoming true of the proposition. That is, they have to make it happen. It is not surprising to see John Searle underscore that “the essential feature of a promise is that it is the undertaking of an obligation to perform a certain act.”143 It seems then that Austin’s promise to avoid moralizing and psychologizing the analysis of discourse was void, or given in bad faith as the promising speech act collapses into deontological morality. Austin offers no justification for why a real promise is one that is, or better, that has to be fulfilled. There is an implied justification in Austin’s and Searle’s analyses which is methodological or epistemological. By including the fulfillment of the promise within the definition of promising –​that is to say, to make the outcome of the promise ‘internal,’ constitutive of the act of promising –​ the event of promising, which can at the same time be unique with respect to all other types of speech acts, can be depicted no matter who and how one promises. While such an approach may seem to avoid the danger of introducing psychologism into epistemology, it comes at a cost, and Ricoeur’s analysis becomes relevant here. On the one hand, talking about promises as identifiable events marks off the person who does the promising by silently introducing a third-​person perspective. The definition of promising as an event presupposes a third-​person perspective which opens up Pandora’s box, which must, ironically, include all possible and impossible paradoxes. First, it neutralizes the participants involved in the event of the speech act of promising. Since, with speech acts, the sayer is also the doer, the definition of promising as an event neutralizes the sovereignty of the sayer/​doer. Concomitantly, if a promise is just an event no matter who promises, then we cannot assign responsibility for such an act. If a promise falls through, then we need some-​one, some-​thing to attribute the failure of doing one’s duty –​since Austin and Searle make it a matter of duty. Talking 1 42 Ricoeur, Oneself, 43. 143 John Searle, “What is a Speech Act?” in Philosophy in America, ed. M.  Black, (Ithaca, NY: cup), 13; hereafter, Speech.

94 Chapter 3 about promising as an event akin to ‘raining,’ ‘falling off the stairs,’ or ‘the combustion of a motor engine,’ does not allow room to talk about responsibility. On the other hand, Ricoeur makes a more sophisticated remark. The utterance ‘I promise you’ is one coming from a first-​person perspective. This can also be the case when one utters reflectively the proposition ‘He promises you.’ Both these utterances could be registered as descriptive or representive. Yet, between them, there is a vast difference in reflexive reference, so vast that it almost goes unnoticed.144 Simply, there is a difference in doing which relates to the first point raised as to who is doing and what is done in each case. When I say ‘He promises you’ I may not make any ontological commitment about the ‘he’ or the ‘you’ or the ‘I’ that describes the world. In both cases, I narrate an event of promising and I am identifying the characters of these events without, however, making any commitments on these narrated identifications. But when I say ‘I promise you,’ I am not just narrating an event or signifying the world. I make an attestation of my commitment to act, not generally but especially for you, the other to whom I especially refer through a reflexive reference to our rich history together; a reflexive reference which is complicit in the promising as will to act. Through the Other, I am able to spread my self temporally into the past and the future. When I  promise, I  narrate by organizing, re-​citing the future. I am about to become both “lecteur et scripteur,” speaker and writer, an authentic author of the future.145 Taking promising as a particular class of events not only omits talk about responsibility but lies on a more profound reduction, or we could say on an epistemological irresponsibility of avoiding “an entire problematic, namely that of personal identity, which can be articulated only in the temporal dimension of human existence.”146 And it is precisely through the question of this temporal dimension that we have been analyzing the act of promising. Let us rephrase our question. Our question is about the boundaries of promising, its horizon, either from first-​, second-​, or third-​person perspectives:  when does the horizon of the promise begin and end? Who decides those boundaries? One could say that Austin’s and Searle’s extended horizon is the only way to differentiate the class of ‘promise’ out of the entirety of speech acts in such a way that ‘promise’ becomes identifiable and re-​identifiable in every situation no matter who 144 “The expression “I promise” (or, more precisely, “I promise you”) has the specific sense of promising which the expression “he promises” does not have, for the latter retains the sense of a constative (or, if one prefers, of a description)” (Ricoeur, Oneself, 42). 145 Sophie-​Jean Arrien, “De la narration à la morale:  le passage par la promesse,” Cités (2008): 99; hereafter, Passage 146 Ibid., 114; original emphasis..

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promises and how. But still, can this epistemological demand not be fulfilled by a horizon of promise marked only by the context of the uttering, or the issuing of the words? Let us look again at Austin’s approach to speech acts. Austin emphasizes that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action –​it is not normally thought of as just saying something.” Given this stipulation, why is the issuing of the utterance not evaluated in the very act of “issuing?” With respect to promising, why is there a metaphysical leap taken to the point in time of its (non)fulfillment for the promise to be (re)defined as promise only if the statement of the proposition turns out to be true –​and particularly by presupposing a very particular definition of truth? Punctuating the promise at such end point takes away the ontological importance of the intention of the promise at the moment of its manifestation, in the issuing of the utterance that it conditions, and, forcibly, ends up moralizing the act of promise as something “I must certainly intend: but I must also think what I promise feasible;”147 or as with Searle, as a duty I must fulfil and suffer its undertaking.148 To make matters worse, even if one allows this horizon to spread, Austin and Searle do not allow a possible change of intention in fulfilling the promise after its occurrence. The intention, as some kind of inner phenomenon, can only phenomenalize itself in the action. A promise is not a promise without at least the intention to realize. Concomitantly, we lose the opportunity for an explanation when the speaker has a change of heart and no longer intends to fulfil the promise.149 Austin’s and Searle’s leap from the lips of the promise to the future seals the difference between promising and the intention of fulfill the promise. While issuing the utterance, in the uttering, these may be the ‘same,’ yet time allows for their difference to be revealed. Such a difference takes place within this extended horizon of promising and is covered up by Searle and Austin; in their covering up they recognize the difference but supplement it with a feeling of obligation and duty. But paradoxically, such a feeling could never have motivated the act of promising itself.150 1 47 Austin, How, 47. 148 Searle, Speech. 149 Cf Seneca who deals with this extensively. (Seneca, Benefits, 109). That is precisely why and how promising does not involve an obligation but a will which wills to change the present which it defers in its being. 150 This thought can also be demonstrated without the epistemic terms true/​false but with the axiological/​moral terms right/​wrong. Oswald Hanfling is explaining that promise is not a rule-​following activity and if one is sensing an obligation to fulfil one’s promise the latter is not derived by a phantasmagorical rule: “It has been thought, for example, that it is in virtue of a rule that one ought to keep one’s promises. But is this correct?

96 Chapter 3 If we allow ourselves a bit of a wordplay with Austin’s title, we are not offered an analysis of what doing things with words could be in each case of promising. Rather, as the title suggests, we are told how to do things with words, how to arrive at ‘promising’ which is implicitly presupposed as fulfilled. Austin provides a manual for how to arrive at a ‘promise’ in all possible senses. We see here what we said earlier about the medium and the message. Austin and others impose a particular schema through which utterances can be universally determined as promises. Yet, this schema does not derive its justification from promising itself as if there is a distinct horizon of promising revealing itself in-​itself; it is punctuated epistemologically by a method of possible identification. The method makes the promising; the medium makes the message. Finetuning the horizon of promise such that it includes its outcome, punctuating it at a particular space and time, is not coming from a ontological necessity of the phenomenon of promising but from a metaphysical presupposition of accepting an epistemological necessity of identification. But this epistemological necessity, is, as a necessity, a must, that is, a prescription: we have to promise like this –​otherwise we do not promise. Finally, if methodologically the schema of having a real promise, dependent on whether what the promise promises is realized, allows for a consistent way to classify ex post facto whether something is a promise, then, at the same time, it allows for one to have a manual of promising, a “how to do with words” when promising. This way, such a schema not only ends up as a duty, but also a duty in bad faith. Opening up the lips of the promise with duty, opens up the question of the direction to which this duty refers. Duty for/​towards whom? In the promise of the I will always love you Nietzsche wrote: One can promise actions but not feelings; for the latter are involuntary. He who promises someone he will always love him or always hate him or always be faithful to him, promises something that does not reside in his power … To promise always to love someone therefore means: for as long as I love you I shall render to you the actions of love; if I cease to love

Suppose I have promised you to do x. Why, in that case, would it be right for me to do x and wrong not to do it? The answer is obvious: because I promised. It is not, however, because of a rule that I am obliged to do x, and it is not because of a rule that the reason ‘Because I promised’ is effective. That reason is perfect as it stands and the introduction of a rule would contribute nothing” (Oswald Hanfling, Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 52; hereafter, Wittgenstein). However, Hanfling goes to the extreme of equating agreement to do something with promising which is obviously not a path we are following here.

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you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, though from other motives:  so that in the heads of our fellow men the appearance will remain that love is still the same and unchanged. –​One therefore promises the continuation of the appearance of love when one swears to someone ever-​enduring love without self-​deception.151 Adding a temporal spread exterior to the lips of promising in order to make the act of promising an event for lips so that it can be evaluated on the basis of a correspondence of adaequatio intellectus et rei, requires as a counter-​balance, adding an interior temporal leap, which works as an effacement of the feeling of promising supplanted by a sense of duty to make the words happen, to real-​ ize them. Marking, stabbing, let us say, the horizon of promise from the outside comes as a backstabbing of the intention on the inside. A sealed promise from the outside lips, pro-​missed suffering from the inside. Yet, since this is also possible, let us retort to the ancient distinction of promising as giving one’s word (logos) and promising as the undertaking of realizing that word.152 When we give our word, our promise may not be related only to the content of the promise, nor might it be viewed psychologistically as to what kind of feelings precede, before or will emerge after the promising. When I promise, I “dispose of the future as if it were the present” as Hannah Arendt put it.153 This acting, this “dis-​posing” is an act of where I pause-​and-​pose, just as we saw in prescription. The act of promising is expressed in a dialectical way at the boundaries of affirming and committing, where I act a pause of the present and pose a present as a future. As Ricoeur underscores, the ‘I’ here is not just a place holder but a limiting point where the world is anchored. The disposal can only take place through such anchoring, “the privileged point of perspective on to the world which its speaking subject is.”154 The boundaries of affirming and committing, where I  act a pause of the present and pose a present as a future means that I can impose myself on the course of things, I de-​limit them, I stamp them.155 As Marcel suggests, there is 151 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: cup, 1996), 42; hereafter, Human. 152 As Ricoeur says, promising is one thing, feeling duty or being obliged to keep one’s word is another. Instead of taking duty as part of our nature as Ricoeur does following Kant, we could say that duty is brought to the world, it is opened up, through the promise. Again with Sartre, we bring duty to the world (Ricoeur, Oneself). 153 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: ucp, 1958); hereafter, Condition. 154 Ricoeur, Oneself, 51. 155 Guy Samana, “Paul Ricoeur:  Une antériorité qui se servit de l’identité à la promesse,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, (2005): 63; hereafter, Paul.

98 Chapter 3 “a supremely important distinction to be made between the committal in itself and an affirmation not implied by it which is concerned with the future.”156 I am affirming the possibility of one possibility not to be missed in the monstrosity of the infinite possibilities to come, that is, by omitting all possibilities but the one willed and (re)presented in the promise. This affirmation reveals a power with two sides on the one side, a ἡγεμονικόν which asserts its identity across time and plays the role of the guaranteeing power; on the other side, a conglomerate of elements of myself which the ἡγεμονικόν with which I identify myself, makes it its business to control.157 A promise reveals a leading power (ἡγεμονικόν)158 which comes to be seen out of its willed becoming. But this becoming is not haphazard, it is not just a becoming out of the many that could be. It is a directed becoming to the being that it wants to be, the one that it wills. Not a power that wills a future, but the will to future, a will to power. This will to future is an active force, one that wants to “impose forms.”159 The words do not reflect it, they belie it. This will is not revealed in the words that are formed by the lips, but by that which empowers the lips to vibrate the world, to make it mean. “When a promise is made, it is not the words that are said which constitute the promise but what remains unspoken behind the words that are said.”160 A power revealed in the silence, forces itself in-​between the words, in-​between the pause-(and)-pose. Fewer words reveal more silence, and more silence is more power as “the words even weaken the promise, in as much as they discharge and use up strength which is a part of the strength which makes the promise.”161 But this ‘power’ that is revealed through the promise is a power revealed through the Other to which the promise is directed. In the promise we have the first opening to the Other by a movement which is posed without being presupposed: I promise to you. The promise punctuates the Other as the telos of 156 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Glasgow: Robert MacLebose and Company Limited, 1949); 41; hereafter, bh. 157 Ibid, 42. 158 In Ricoeur’s analysis, which is heavily inspired by Marcel, the promise reveals the constancy of self which is not just the passive immutability of character. It is the highest expression of identity of ipse in contrast to that of idem (Ricoeur, Oneself, 124; 267). 159 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Columbia, NY:  cup, 1983), 42; hereafter, Nietzsche. 160 Nietzsche, Daybreak, 165. 161 Ibid.

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its movement. The promise is the ultimate paradox: I am commanding myself for you. This is not a duty “but an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will.”162 And this desire is motivated by the Other.163 As Ricoeur explains it, the Other allows me not only to spread myself in time but also to maintain myself over time.164 And this maintenance is authentic without support from habits and dispositions according to which I or another could use to characterize myself. As Samana elaborates Ricoeur’s reflection on promising, this maintaining is not only about the self but about another affirmation of the self-​other relation which, through the act of promising, re-​affirms its memory over time. Keeping one’s word is the act through which the self and other are revealed either as sovereighty or as ipseity.165 Viewed within a historical horizon, this movement becomes foundational. Arendt traces the condition of history and development of western civilization to the phenomenon of promising (and forgiveness) as subtending the contractual form of law-​full western societies. In this case, promising can be seen from a pragmatic point of view as a tool used to control the precariousness of human affairs arising out of the unpredictability of individual human action. The act of promising is the way to remedy “the basic unreliability of men who never can guarantee today who they will be tomorrow” and equally of neutralizing “the impossibility of foretelling the consequences of an act within a community of equals where everybody has the same capacity to act.”166 If history starts with the formula I promise you, to whom do we promise? Who is the Other to whom we offer a future? 1 62 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 57. 163 I am giving myself to you by enacting what you would like but you do not command me. I command myself for you and me. Does this require a beginning? Could motivation play the inceptual role of a beginning in the event of promising? 164 Ricoeur, Oneself, 341. 165 Arrien, Passage, 99. “Promettre, c’est affirmer une survivance des souvenirs attachés à une personne au delà des conditions objectives ayant rendu passible l’acte de langage” (Samana, Paul, 64). 166 Nietzsche, Daybreak, 244.

­c hapter 4

Pathway Two: The Other

It is the passage from aesthesis, from simple sensuous awareness, to acting, evaluating and so forth which is the rule husserl1

∵ 1

Tracing the Other2

Our initial exploration of what is altruism led us to trace a path of how altruism could be possible. Our exploration felt promising. We cannot argue for altruism. Altruism comes through be-​li(e)ving (in) altruism. The latter can be conceived as coming to believe in altruism, bios of altruism manifested in the act of promise. Biosis of altruism, (be)living in altruism could be manifested descriptively in the formula I promise you. In promising to the Other we could, perhaps, find and found the altruistic move. We now need to explore the “Other.” We shall start again with Edmund Husserl and classical phenomenology precisely because Husserl tried to answer the question of the Other in both ways that the Other can appear:  in our everyday world, which Husserl calls

1 Husserl, Experience, 64. 2 The passage that follows from/​of/​through Husserl was reworked after its end and was originally submitted for the Robert Papazian International Competition in Philosophy in 2018 whose theme was Empathy. This passage which was reworked after the first yet appears published before it can be found in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Iraklis Ioannidis, “No Empathy for Empathy:  An Existential Reading of Husserl’s Forgotten Question,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27, no. 2 (2019): 201–​223. I would like to thank Professor Maria Baghramian for her contribution in the publication of this paper. Reflecting on it now, the main undertaking of deconstructing empathy will be found in this passage as well. However, an additional question would have to be explored with respect to ‘competition’ and ‘empathy.’ But that quest would have to be suspended for the moment. Yet, the happening of after-​before which meddles the possibility of identifying with certainty which comes first, will be, would have already been, explored in our next pathway.

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_005

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lifeworld, and in the surrounding world which is the world of the theoretical attitude, the attitude of skepsis, that is, the attitude of (yielding) knowledge. Immediately, however, we are in a predicament. The split between lifeworld and surrounding world opens up the question of the beginning, the ἀρχή, or punctuation. Is the ἀρχή in the everyday world, the vita activa, the world where the Other is to be examined first, or, is it in the theoretical world, the vita contemplativa? And what about the world between the two? Is that world accessible? And what about the passage between the two? Does the coming from this and that require a passage? Is the Other to be found there as well? Maybe these questions could be answered if we followed Husserl closely and performed what he calls the phenomenological reduction.3 To do that we should follow his passages closely rather than rely, as we have done so far, on what many of his commentators –​how they –​have interpreted them/​him. “And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically.”4 2

Husserl’s Other in Me

Phenomenological reduction is doubting everything. We refuse to “accept anything as existent unless it is secured against every conceivable possibility of becoming doubtful.”5 We will accept something as existing only if it is furnished with absolute apodictic certainty which is “a mental seeing of something itself.”6 Apodicticity relies on how things themselves affect us in the how of their appearing to us. Yet, the givenness of things themselves, or their objective self-​ evidence, as Husserl sometimes calls it,7 should not be conflated with the empiricist theory of “feeling of evidence” as he underscores in Ideas I.8 However, according to Husserl in Ideas

3 Although the phenomenological reduction as such appears in the later writings of Husserl, Barnett Brouch, in his Introduction of the On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time traces it all the way to his first writings as a way of knowing in which the psychological is disengaged from the phenomenological –​where the possibility of the knowledge of the possibility of episteme lies. 4 Husserl, Meditations, 7. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Ibid, 12; Husserl, Experience, 348. 7 Husserl, Experience. 8 Husserl, Ideas i, 40; Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 66; hereafter Idea. In another instance, this certainty comes to be found in the “domain of the prepredicative, on practical evidence and the evidence of feeling” (Husserl, Experience, 65).

102 Chapter 4 ii,9 each mental seeing, as cogito, is a sort of affection, a coming into contact with. This apodicticity, this mental seeing, is the principle of principles for the possibility of knowledge. It feels like intuitive touching; a pre-​cognitive grasping.10 Such touching is an affection which runs two ways at the same time. It is like putting one’s hand on a physical thing where the hand is touching-​ touched. This affection, this a-​logical touching is integral to mental seeing because Husserl asks us to doubt even logic since “like every other already given science, logic is deprived of acceptance by the universal overthrow”11 –​ deprived by the thorough-​going doubt. If by logic Husserl means what was put forth by Socrates/​Plato, Aristotle, and their followers, then its doubt is perfectly intelligible. However, if logic comes to be understood as λόγος/​logos, or the way the latter comes to appearing, then we are in a further predicament. In our culture, λόγος is language, speech, reason, logician’s logic, grammar, mentality, discourse, expression and so on. To deprive acceptance of all this, that is, this (without) logos, is for us, perfectly unintelligible  –​to borrow a phrase from George Berkeley. And if, per impossibile, this could happen, the whole world would become unintelligible. It would be a silent spectacle as Emmanuel Lévinas said.12 But since we have promised to follow Husserl into this abyss, let us unravel our masts in this quest and set out. “In short, not just corporeal nature but the whole concrete surrounding life-​world is for me, from now on, only a phenomenon of being, instead of something that is.”13 With the phenomenological reduction then, everything is reduced with respect to its being. That does not mean that nothingness emerges. Quite the contrary, everything that was given before, in its particularity or generality, is now given as a phenomenon of being which claims being. The self doubts; the self reduces everything, including itself, to a phenomenon. This allows everything to be received anew. But, according to Husserl, during this reduction, while the being of things is doubted, their givenness is phenomenally the same. Even if I doubt that this cup exists and it is just an illusion, it is still the same phenomenal thing that I used to call a cup. With the doubting, 9 Husserl, Ideas ii, 370. A “a pure act of seeing” as givenness “insofar as I reflect on them” (Husserl, Idea, 24). 10 Husserl, Experience, 29. 11 Husserl, Meditations, 13. 12 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: dup, 1961), 136; hereafter, Totality. Merleau-​Ponty understands this silent spectacle as perceptual fullness:  “This is the silent language whereby perception communicates with us” (Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (NY: Routledge, 1962), 56; hereafter, Phenomenology). 13 Husserl, Meditations, 19.

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I call into question its being by accepting its phenomenal givenness and bracketing, the process of phenomenological ἐποχή, all its “existential positions.”14 By doubting all existential positions, all previous ontological predications are forcibly suspended, they are concomitantly bracketed. In this realm “nothing speaks.”15 Things silently appear themselves, they are given in their ontic possibility, in their being themselves. This process reveals an interesting phenomenon in the case of the one who performs the reduction. The self, the ego as Husserl likes to call it, is a part of a world which the ego itself reduces and is itself being reduced as part of the world, thus, the ego is the one that initiates this process of reduction and is itself also reduced. Yet, as is the case with everything being reduced, the givenness of the ego to itself will be phenomenally the ‘same.’ But since I, as the ego that reduces, bracket my existential position, that which will receive the reduced self, the phenomenal ego, cannot be the ego that initiates the reduction and which will now appear in its pure phenomenality. By the phenomenological reduction the ego is given to that, to _​(something)_​, which has its ontology suspended, which cannot be itself in its previous empirical being as the former is now bracketed as part of the world. That means that the self “transcends”16 itself to be given to itself in its pure givenness. That which17 conditions this transcendence, the coming back to the ego which conditions the bracketing, can only be a transcendental ego. If this “transcendence,” which consists in being non-​really included, is part of the intrinsic sense of the world, then, by way of contrast, the Ego himself, who bears within him the world as an accepted sense and who, in turn, is necessarily presupposed by this sense, is legitimately called transcendental, in the phenomenological sense.18 Let us look more deeply into this process. Through the phenomenological reduction, which is a form of a reflection as we crudely adumbrated earlier, I transcend myself to be given to myself anew as a phenomenon –​part of an

14 Ibid., 20. 15 Husserl, Experience, 306. 16 We should make a note here that the use of the term transcendence is still in a sense constitution by a detour of an overcoming, a surpassing of the ego. Conscious ego surpasses the ego to be given as consciousness. 17 The ‘that which’ has already started to haunt us. That ‘that which’ which bounds like a spell or like a witch casting its spells must be investigated further with respect to logos. 18 Husserl, Meditations, 26.

104 Chapter 4 equally phenomenalized world. This process reveals an ego which is part of the world and its transcendental onlooker19 who receives the reduced ego as a phenomenon, as part of a phenomenalized world. This is an “alter ego,” an ego “not as “I myself,” but as mirrored in my own ego.”20 This Other, this alter-​ego, this onlooker, receives the ego as part of the world which is also given phenomenologically. This alter-​ego is the condition based on which everything can be reduced. But this reduction does not mean being at an Archimedean point outside of the ego. It is the very ego that transcends itself to be given transcendentally to itself and not transcendently. Let us explore this with an example. This cup that I perceive becomes a something, something that affects me in a particular way through the ways that I can be (so) affected by it. But in terms of my ego and the cup, after the reduction, I do not perceive an additional thing, that is, myself as from afar and a thing that I called a cup before the ἐποχή. The splitting of the ego that Husserl refers to is taking place in immanence and not in exteriority as if I were a new metaphysical ego looking back at my empirical ego from a physical distance. It is an immanent transcendence, and this is justified by the fact that Husserl insists on the sameness of the “phenomenally experiential result” before and after the ἐποχή. However, this alter-​ego as onlooker, cannot be found as a phenomenon in the reduced world precisely because it is the condition of the phenomenological reduction. It is revealed as 19

In the Second Meditation of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl refers to this onlooker as “disinterested” (35), or “non-​participant” (37), or the primordial self in order to make explicit the purity of the givenness of the experience in the transcendental level. Whilst acknowledging reception of Derrida’s reading of the phenomenological reduction revealing the Other in Me, that is, that I am always already intersubjective, we cannot at this point follow this path. Stricto sensu, Husserl is first motivated toward the possibility of revealing the Other as an embodied consciousness with epistemic certainty. Derrida’s reading does not show how what is affecting me is the Other as Other, as an embodied other like me and not just an other version of me. Derrida’s reading relies on the fact that the phenomenological reduction allows for the passage to the idea of another through variation in which case the ‘I’ and the Other are expressions of variance or of difference of one single eidos, that of being (human). But this possibility which further allows to say that there is another like me does not take us to the other as what Husserl would call a ‘conretum’ –​in which case here would be in propria persona. What Derrida seems, perhaps, to forget or bracket, along with many Husserlian commentators, is that the phenomenological reduction is not the first step towards the discovery of the conditions of epistemic possibility. Before, or, better yet, alongside the reduction is what Husserl calls retrogression –​one aspect of retrogression is to go back to the things themselves which entails immediate experience. This immediacy of the propria persona means there, with the world, with the Other and not just in pure reflection where the ‘I’ is(olates). Self-​ isolation negates the phenomenology of life, life itself. 20 Husserl, Meditations, 94.

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the condition of the everyday ego which performs the reduction. Only if there is such an unworldly transcendental ego can the ego perform such a cogitatum, a transcendence of the world and its parts, of which one is the empirical everyday self. And since such an ego is immanent it amounts to acquiring “myself as the pure ego with the pure stream of my cogitationes.”21 Because of the ἐποχή, where I have abstracted everything, even the everyday intersubjective predications which I used before the reduction to convey my experience in the world, what I find is an ego “the only Object “in” which I “rule and govern” immediately … . As perceptively active, I experience (or can experience) all of Nature, including my own animate organism, which therefore in the process is reflexively related to itself.”22 Sinply, I am given myself to myself objectively in its purest form. I am an-​Other to myself. I come into contact with (my) transcendental subjectivity –​I am self-​given to myself. In this exercise, Husserl is absolutely right to point out that were I to abstract everything from what is given to me in the stream of consciousness and, all the more so, if I abstain from all the use of language which is the manifestation of an intersubjective yet empirical enterprise in the world of experience prior to the ἐποχή, then I am left with ““my animate organism” and “my psyche,” or myself as a psychophysical unity.”23 Indeed, I am given to myself as an-​Other, but not as another subject because that would mean another version of the empirically intentional subject. If we undertake the reduction meticulously, and this is the point where Husserl parts with the Cartesian reduction which he considers incomplete, then the transcendental ego is pure subjectivity which conditions the experience in the world. And the world is given to subjectivity in its pure form. But as a condition, transcendental subjectivity not only receives a phenomenological plenum but also projects this plenum into being a world; it gives it being, it constitutes it by “means of acts of perception, imagination, and categorical observation.”24 It is itself intentional in its pure form and, hence, Husserl arrives at the conclusion that the task of transcendental phenomenology is the “systematic disclosure of constituting intentionality.”25 So far the reduction has revealed to us a transcendental subjectivity, which Husserl seems to be identifying with constituting intentionality, and an ego given to the latter as a psychophysical unity.26 For the moment, we will follow 21 Husserl, Meditations, 21; original emphasis. 22 Ibid, 97. 23 Ibid. 24 Strasser, Phenomenologies, 338. 25 Husserl, Meditations, 86. 26 Reading Husserl, Donn Welton claims that Husserl moves us from a mind-​body dualism to a body-​body dualism, the conscious body as the psychophysical body. The lived body is

106 Chapter 4 Husserl’s syllogisms to understand how Husserl finds the Other that we are looking for. The ego which is received by the primordial self is a phenomenon and, as part of the world, it is a phenomenon among all other phenomena. To be precise, however, after the reduction there should only be phenomenalizing rather than phenomena. Phenomena come after the phenomenalizing is being itself thematized. For Husserl, however, we have the phenomenon of the ‘cup,’ and, most importantly, other entities which before the reduction and the ἐποχή I called other persons. That is to say, it is as if the revelation of my primordial self as transcendental “makes constitutionally possible a new infinite domain of what is “other:” an Objective Nature and a whole Objective world, to which all other Egos and I myself belong.”27 Following this line of thought, as I am given to myself, all others whom I used to experience as egos before the ἐποχή are now also given to me as phenomena, since all egos are part(s) of the world. Once again, these are all given to me in the same objective way as I have been given to myself. Thus, if all other persons are like me before the reduction, then, simpliciter, these other egos must also be given to me and to themselves in the same manner as I am given to myself after the reduction.28 The apodictic revelation of the Other then, if there is one, must be revealed as an other subjectivity –​which has been revealed in my reduction. What we are looking for, then, is what Husserl calls transcendental intersubjectivity, that is, how transcendental egos or pure subjectivities relate. We are looking for an affection

the conscious body without consciousness being localized in a particular area of the body, for example the brain (see Donn Welton, “Soft, Smooth Hands: Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Lived Body,” in The Body, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 38–​56). While this is true, phenomenologically speaking, there is never an authentic dualism as Husserl talks about two poles and a connecting dash. The phenomenological reduction as “first reduction” () reveals the psychophysical unity and ‘something’ transcendental; or, as a “regressive inquiry which goes from the life-​world to the subjective operations from which it itself arises” (Husserl, Ideas i, 138–​141; Husserl, Experience, 50). But, then, precisely because “we already find logical operations of sense” at this level, Husserl advances a transcendental reduction to penetrate descriptively deeper into what constitutes the ‘transcendental.’ Here a “genuine μετάβασις” [transition] (139) is required (Husserl, Ideas i, 138–​141; 139). Yet, the phenomenological/​eidetic or epistemological reduction is itself a “μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος” (Husserl, Idea, 30). Different reductions correspond to the difference between epoche and ἐποχή, and, also, the ἀποχή which is required in the transitions. Rather than a dualism, we read in Husserl consciousness as trialism where the connecting dash, the passing into, “a surplus” (Ibid., 39) is as essential as the poles. 27 Husserl, Meditations, 107. 28 “The phenomenological-​eidetic reduction places me on the footing of a possible monad in general” (in Anthony J. Steinbock, “Edmund Husserl’s Static and Genetic Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review, 31 (1998): 146; hereafter, Static.

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of blending, where our “perspectives blend,”29 to use Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s expression. It is this “blending” or this “communication,” while being “immediately in touch with the world”30 in which we will find the Other. We have to remember that Husserl’s starting point is not to answer the question of the existential basis of the Other; his aim is to discover the methodological principles which will always allow us to arrive at an Objective view of the world, the ultimate foundation for a philosophy as science, for absolute true knowledge. The quest to find the other as Other becomes shortlisted in his philosophical agenda due to the criticisms of phenomenology resulting in solipsism; solipsism will never allow an objective world to be revealed when objective means being given to me as to all other fellow human beings. The quest to find the Other becomes a need to find where we converge; an objective world in an other sense of objective –​the world as an object to all.31 The “phenomenological (that is to say, the epistemological)” question; or the “[e]‌pistemological question about the possibility of experience is the question about the essence of experience.”32 We need to elaborate on this convergence –​sometimes also called a transcendental principle of justification.33 The constitution of an object has as its ultimate condition (a point of) unity. This unity is what remains identical throughout all the possible ways of its appearing to an ego. This objective sense as “that which remains identical throughout the variations of sense”34 is the new Husserlian conceptualization of the Kantian schema, “a rule-​ governing schema.”35 Something repeats itself in its various appearings and Husserl admits that the Other, who can also receive the schema of the world or the world as schema is important for saving me from a possible solipsistic 29 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, xii. 30 Ibid, xiii. 31 It is at this point that Husserl would make a distinction between apodictic and adequate evidence. The former would relate strictly to the subjective whereas the latter to certainty through the account of an Other as the principle of verification for the apodictic. This is necessary since the world is not only a reference point but also the collection of all its points. The Other is required for creating an adequate account for the totality of the world as part of it. 32 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 9. 33 Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Exploring the First Person Perspective (London: mit Press, 2005); hereafter, Subjectivity; Dan Zahavi, “Intersubjectivity,” in Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, eds. Sebastian Luft and Soren Overgaard, (London: Routledge, 2011), 180–​189; hereafter Intersubjectivity; Dan Zahavi, Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: oup, 2014); hereafter, Exploring. 34 Steinbock, Saturated, 189. 35 Ibid.

108 Chapter 4 pathology. If I constitute the world myself and “everything is in harmony,”36 then it could be the case that “I become for them an interesting pathological Object, and they call my actuality, so beautifully manifest to me, the hallucination of someone who up to this point has been mentally ill.”37 My verification principle is the Other. This convergence, this blending, or the recognition of what is common to all, a “mutual understanding”38 is a fundamental condition for knowledge and sanity. This convergence, sometimes also referred to as co-​ constitution, is fundamental precisely because it neutralizes the possibility of illusory or abnormal uncovering of the world at the same time of uncovering the world itself.39 ““The true thing” is then the object that maintains its identity within the manifolds of appearances belonging to a multiplicity of subjects;” it is an intuited object for all “related to a community of normal subjects.”40 Therefore, if a transcendental subjectivity refers to the way the appearing world appears, that is, the phenomenalizing is constituted into phenomena, then, a transcendental intersubjectivity is the condition for the objectivity of the object, “the appearing of the true thing.”41 But apart from the true thing, what the Other also secures, at the same time, is my normality as the negation of my being an interesting pathological Object. Husserl attempts to prove the Other as an Other with the following transcendental schematic analysis. The Other in their being, if they are to be like me, which in this case is another consciousness, must experience the same phenomenon of Other-​ness of self –​if they were to perform the reduction. But this, as mentioned, cannot be accessible to me from here as an objectivating ego or to the ego that is given to me in that process. And this is only logical since, “if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and

36 Husserl, Ideas ii, 84; or in unanimity and homogeneity as it is mentioned elsewhere (Husserl, Experience). 37 Ibid., 85. 38 Ibid., 87. 39 We see here another instance of how sanity and knowledge, as the two ends of one line, one structure, are held in check by the Other. Knowledge as what is common to all bonds with sanity and a harmony with the Other (Husserl, Experience, 362–​3). The knower is never the sovereign in the constitution of the true thing; there is never sovereignty in the constitution of the true thing. The knower is never a king in the world. ““[B]‌elieving oneself to be a king” is the true secret of madness” (Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–​1974, trans. G. Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27). But this madness is not for the king but for the Other. 40 Husserl, Ideas ii, 87. 41 Ibid., 87.

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I myself would be the same.”42 So, the only way remaining to uncover other empirical persons as transcendental subjectivities in the reduced world, is by, what Husserl calls, analogizing apperception through appresentation. ‘Appresentation’ is a thought of Husserl’s which we first find in the Logical Investigations. To use his example, suppose we experience a box. We perceive the box from a particular perceptual angle but never as a whole. To perceive all of it we need to turn it over or change our angle, but we will then be ‘losing’ the perceptual content we had before. What we ‘lose’ we appresent. What we call a box is an apperception,43 an object as “a web of partial intentions fused together in the unity of a single total intention.”44 This fusion is conditioned on passively retaining the ‘lost’ content while the new is presented and what is not present is appresented through what is expected. Appresenting reveals how consciousness, as an intentional act, transcends itself becoming something that it is not. And by this transcendence, the intentional act is constituting consciousness. For instance, when I see the front side of a box and I  am appresenting the rest so as to talk of an experience of a ‘box,’ the latter becomes something that I  reach as a consciousness beyond that which I am actually experiencing. But to appresent something I must have had a prior experience of it (or something similar) and apperceived or apprehended it as such.45 If I experience a box now, I apperceive it as box based on a ““primal instituting,” in which an object with a similar sense became constituted [as a box] for the first time.”46 Put simply, I analogize my current apperception with that apperception which was primally instituted as ‘box.’

42 Ibid., 109. 43 “Apperception: a consciousness that is conscious of something individual that is not self-​ given in it” (Husserl in Steinbock, Static, 151). 44 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 211. 45 Most of the times in Husserl, ‘apperception’ and ‘apprehension’ are identifying the same function. As Husserl himself states in the Investigations:  “The term ‘apperception’ is unsuitable despite its historical provenance, on account of its misleading terminological opposition to ‘perception;’ ‘apprehension’ would be more usable” (243). Here we shall consider the two terms co-​extensional even if this reduction harbors risks as Husserl explains. Since apprehension constitutes the limiting point of the ego and marks the boundaries of active and passive constitution it cannot be equated with apperception which implies an active comportment. “The existent as the unity of identity is, to be sure, already passively pregiven, preconstituted; but it is only in apprehension that it is retained as this identical unity, although this need not as such involve anything in the way of predicative activity” (Husserl, Experience, 60). Apprehension is the limiting point between the passive and the active. However, our terminological reduction with apperception will not create any issues in our path. 46 Husserl, Investigations Vol. ii, 111.

110 Chapter 4 Before we proceed we have to pause since this idea of primal instituting or “what has been fixed”47 through previous foundings or previous constitutions which allow for the analogical apperception to take place, creates a thorny passage between institution and constitution. What I constitute for the first time as ‘something’ can be a primal instituting for the next phenomenalizing which will, by its phenomenological similarity, be constituted as the same something or something different.48 What this theorizing opens up though, is the conditions of the first constitution –​genesis49 –​which counts as a primal institution. There is a great philosophical discussion as whether this “primal instituting” should be conceived in the way Husserl talked about it in the Ideas, that is, as a core sense or a schema which comes to be constituted through repetition, or as a genetic impression closer to a Humean conceptualization of a datum impressed on consciousness and retained somehow (in memory);50 or as a cogitatio whose re-​presentation in the analogizing process becomes a riddle or non-​conceptualizable.51 To analogize with an older similar phenomenalizing/​ schema –​or internal horizon –​the new datum must somehow be presented but it is not  –​yet it must somehow exist, to be analogized. Representation here reveals its full equivocality. The intentional act of consciousness as transcendence becomes either a re-​presentation with a sense of simulation or a synthesis. The synthesis seems to make the notion of analogizing redundant and the simulation demands another representation as synthesis with what is (synthesized?) as (new) analogon. Even if the primal instituting refers to a horizon of habitualities created out of repetitive past likenesses, the prescriptive aspect of this horizon must be one; a synthesis of the past many or the many pasts which creates a guideline for the like to be apprehended. In this case, the analogizing apperception would operate only in the appresentations and this operation would be blind without expectation.52 47 Husserl, Experience, 36. 48 Ibid., 38. 49 To be fair, Husserl avows that when he uses the term ‘genesis’ he never means the very beginning of. The concern is not of the first genesis (Ibid., 23). 50 Cf Husserl, Experience, 88. 51 Cf the analyses of Henry and Derrida respectively (Henry, Incarnation; Jacques Derrida, Speech; Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Mariam Hobson (Chicago: ucp, 2003); hereafter, Problem. A similar point, yet from the perspective of language, is made by Eley in his Afterword of the English translation of Experience and Judgment. Since Husserl never really abandons the discursive apparatus of ‘essence’ and ‘eidos’ in his descriptions, these issues are unavoidable. 52 That is why some phenomenologists, following Merleau-​Ponty and giving primacy on the embodied aspect of consciousness, will depart from this metaphysically atomistic notion of the primal instituting and theorize about the intentional act of consciousness

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Despite this issue, we find that this process of analogical apperception through appresentation cannot be (of) the same regional eidos as that used when we apperceive the transcendental subjectivity of the Other within the reduction. As a rule, the analogizing apprehension must be conditioned on a primal instituting if we are to claim an experience as an experience of. Without our analogizing apprehension there is no possibility to claim an experience of which is built up through the relevant appresentations. The reason for this is that the primal instituting becomes a blueprint, if we can use such an expression, the rule-​governing schema,53 by which a verification of what the consciousness transcends in the process of appresentation can be achieved through a corresponding fulfilling (empirical) presentation of what is transcended. Put simply, the primal instituting conditions the criterion of verification of the analogical apperception. For instance, if I am faced with the front part of a car, I have a perceptual horizon of the front part which I apperceive as the front part of a car –​the perception opens up a horizon of indeterminate possibilities. But to arrive at the conclusion that I am indeed having an experience of the front part of a car I need to experience the whole car out of which my experience of the front can be validated as such. By changing perspectives and perceiving the rest of the object, that is, kinaesthetically, I  can receive the corresponding fulfilling presentations of what I  appresented and thus validate my experience when these appresentations are adequate (or not –​it might turn out to be a replica of the front of a car).54 However, the possibility of such appresentation after the phenomenological reduction with respect to the Other as Other like me, that is a consciousness, is, as Husserl emphatically mentions, “excluded a priori.”55 Some of Husserl’s followers56 have suggested that the experience of the Other qua Other qua me is immediate in the life-​world whereas it is only in the theoretical attitude, in the surrounding world, that the issue of the existence of the Other is brought up. The familiarity with the Other in the everyday as pure transcendence in the sense of an ongoing dialogical interaction between the body and the world in which both reveal themselves without prior institution/​constitution. (An example which makes the analogical relation redundant could be the person who engages in parkour). 53 Or a type (Husserl, Experience, 123). 54 Each thing perceived according to Husserl has both internal and external horizons. It is the internal horizon which, though empty and awaiting fulfilment as the opening of indeterminate possibilities, has an inductive, prescriptive feel based on previous findings which have contributed to its formation and enrichment. 55 Husserl, Meditations, 109. 56 See for example the hermeneutics of Zahavi.

112 Chapter 4 experience cannot be questioned but the determination of the Other is an issue. However tempting this way to read Husserl may be, such path of exegesis would be blocked when reading that the certainty of the Other like me requires a transition from the familiar which is always open to falsification. What is required is the transition to a reflection, which thus, mediately or immediately, confers a final certainty to a being-​with of man qua person (of the ego-​like), or of animal subjectivity, and in this derivative [fundierten] way determines an existent which is not simply a corporeal existent but a subjective corporeal existent.57 Even if the certainty of the presence of the Other has been “passively pregiven”58 we still need to put out of play these familiarities. Let us go back and resume now our reduction. After the reduction, I am given to myself as a psychophysical unity which Husserl calls an animate organism. The Other is given to me firstly as a body. I cannot as of yet claim that this body there (of the Other) which I can appresent analogically with the body of my animate organism is equally another animate organism. To do that it would mean that I could have the possibility of a corresponding fulfilling presentation of the Other as a psyche in order to complete the appresentation which is impossible. What Husserl must have in mind is not the problem of epistemic access to the Other’s mental experience as framed by Descartes, for example. Rather, the issue must be the very possibility of that body there having epistemic access to itself, that is, to be conscious and, also, the possibility of my knowing that the how of my accessing myself is structurally/​essentially the same yet not identical with the way that the body there can have access to itself. In simplified terms, whether there is another mind like mine, discovering its mind in the way I discover mine. Simpliciter, if the Other can perform a phenomenological reduction. Husserl attempts to resolve this difficulty and to explain the analogizing apperception at a transcendental level through the phenomenon of pairing. Pairing is defined as the phenomenological unity of similarity of distinct data that are given with the same prominence in consciousness. It is a form of association but this association is marked by a passivity in the sense that things are given in themselves and, though distinct, they are nevertheless given

57 Husserl, Experience, 55. 58 Ibid.

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uncontrollably and synchronously in the unity of consciousness. The distinct data constitute a pair, a phenomenological unity, by being given ‘into’ consciousness together, in essence simultaneously, and with the same prominence even though there are distinct; or, as Husserl maintains, in coincidence. Their mutual givenness in the unity of consciousness associates them and constitutes them as a pair. That also means that, as a pair, an apperception of the one can be possible through the other by “a mutual transfer of sense.”59 Pairing is the first step towards apprehending the Other as a transcendental subjectivity, like when I apprehend my self as I am given to myself after the reduction. And this starts with the body. It is the body as horizon which allows for the inception of an act of turning-​toward it with the prospect of its realization as an other body like mine. We shall quote Husserl’s explication extensively to make manifest a second sense of pairing that is presupposed in his exposition. Husserl writes: Now in case there presents itself, as outstanding in my primordial sphere, a body “similar” to mine –​that is to say, a body with determinations such that it must enter into a phenomenal pairing with mine –​it seems clear and without more ado that, with the transfer of sense, this body must forthwith appropriate from mine the sense: animate organism.60 In the margin of this passage we can see that Husserl is oscillating between two types of association which are at work indeterminately. Let’s follow the reduction carefully. After the reduction and the ἐποχή of all predications, I am given to myself as an animate organism, a psychophysical unity. This is the first pairing that I must be experiencing. My body and my psyche are given to me as a unity. Their prominence is equal and their distinctness as data (not as objects) are given simultaneously in the objectified ego, my ego as phenomenon. My transcendental subjectivity is then revealed to me by and through reduction simultaneously with the psycho-​physical unity, an original pairing. The reference point for this pairing is my transcendental subjectivity, whilst “its data” is the unity of the psyche and the body. So, the first otherness is located in a new way within me in immanence: I am a psychophysical unity; better, I experience myself as a psychophysical unity, or, even, better I apprehend myself as a psychophysical unity.

59 Husserl, Meditations, 113. 60 Ibid.

114 Chapter 4 The pairing that the previous quotation suggests is a different one. This pairing may have the same reference point, my transcendental subjectivity (or so it seems because Husserl is never clear on this), but its data is different. The body of mine and the body of the Other need to be first paired so that I can experience the Other as Other, as another psychophysical unity which could enable a transfer of sense to their transcendental subjectivity. The likeness now will refer to my body and the body of the Other. It seems that, by the body of another organism which I apprehend like mine, there must be a pairing, the same psychophysical unity of a body and a psyche, hence the other is an other like me. But “is the apperception actually so transparent?”61 This is indeed the second pairing that I must apperceive but since I apperceive it, I cannot arrive at it inferentially as we just did. I must be given it somehow. But how? It is at this point that Husserl’s intersubjectivity gets its transcendental flavor. With the reduction, my body is given to me objectively but this objectivity cannot mean perspectival wholeness. As already mentioned, the transcendence that the reduction offers implies a stepping out of the world so it can be looked at from a distance, but this distance is not of a physical nature where one actually stands outside the physical like a metaphysical entity, able, from such a distance, to take an objective view.62 That implies that though

61 Husserl, Meditations, 113. 62 To provide a familiar example: That the earth revolves around the sun is not something that we know as we know, for example, that we have hands, nor something that has been proven objectively in the strictest empirical sense –​to use phenomenological grammar it cannot be apprehended in simple receptivity. The senses of knowledge vary and we illegitimately or instrumentally mix up how we know something even if it just refers to knowledge in propositional terms (Paul Feyerabend, “Realism and Instrumentalism: Comments on the Logic of Factual Support,” in Philosophical Papers (1975): 176–​202). The objectivity of knowledge in the case of sun-​earth is an empirical indefiniteness precisely because “we can secure no standpoint from which a close whole of Being would be surveyable” (Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existence: Five Lectures, trans. William Earle (Bremen: The Noonday Press, 1957), 52; hereafter, Reason). We are always within the whole that we examine –​ see also Husserl’s example concerning the judgment “The earth is larger than the moon” (Husserl, Experience, 239–​240). For the sun-​earth whole, to prove their exact relationship would need an observer to be able to stand at a point of absolute rest or outside the universe. Only such an experience of the phenomenon could constitute unquestionable objective empirical data for which we would require ideal circumstances. Husserl’s distance is not of this sort. To achieve the distance of the phenomenological reduction, as Merleau-​Ponty explains in an effort to refute it, is to put something given from the world, that is a phenomenon, “entirely under our gaze” and “think it without the support of any ground, in short withdraw to the bottom of nothingness” (Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL:  nup, 1968), 112; hereafter, Visible). Only from such “nothingness” can what is given reclaim a being which is

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objectively given, it is given from the reference point of the ‘I’  –​or better yet, the mental eye since Husserl talks about mental seeing. Phenomenally, though, this means one possible appearing, and this appearing is always present though not always prominent to the transcendental ego. Now, the presence of another’s body is first given as another body that enters my intentional horizon much like my own body. It is just a body not an Other’s body. To be precise it is not even a body, as in a field of pregivenness,63 it is a phenomenon first and foremost much like my body as a phenomenon. The modality of givenness of the objectified body here must be the same with those in a phenomenological reduction. Both phenomenal entities are phenomenally given in the same modality to my primordial objectivating, constituting ego, and thus their difference becomes a difference of spatial presentation, and only that.64 The only difference that reveals itself in the appearing is spatial, here versus there. This difference in spatial presentation suggests that as the modality of my body is given to me in its spatial exteriority from here, the givenness of the other bodily presence presents an analogue of the spatial modes that my body would have if it were there. The phenomenal likeness of these two thematized phenomenalizations, given simultaneously in one act of consciousness, is what suggests a pairing but a pairing of a different kind and one very much close to an analogising apperception. To use the scissors example that Husserl mentions, when I apprehend scissors as scissors the primal instituting which guides the analogizing is not present in my perceptual act. However, in the case of the other body and my body, both phenomena are simultaneously present and are analogized with and through each other due to their perceived likeness. Husserl is very clear about this from the start of §51 in the Meditations:  “the primally institutive original is always livingly present, and the primal instituting itself is therefore essential, that is, re-​claim its eidetic structure. But this nothingness, as we said earlier, is not authentic nothingness but nothing in particular, that is, pure phenomenalizing. 63 Husserl, Experience, 72. 64 It is very tempting at this point for sexual categories to deter us and wonder how this is possible. But if we perform the reduction following Husserl’s instruction and keep those categories in parantheses, the appearing of the Other’s body (which is not yet a body but phenomenalizing) is phenomenally the same formally or schematically, a surface which is not sexed to use Judith Butler’s expression (Butler, Foucault). Sex as a category requires constitution. Phenomenology cannot be charged with sexism if we follow Husserl as faithfully as possible –​see also the description in Experience and Judgment (155–​56). If we performed the reduction to the letter, the first reduction, then the Other, as we shall shortly see, would be the remains of all the possible concepts we could possibly ascribe to them. For an exploration of what this ‘remains’ gives one would have to follow Derrida closely in Glas –​but this we let for another quest; see Derrida, Glas,.

116 Chapter 4 always going on in a livingly effective manner.”65 It may well be that my body as a phenomenon from here becomes the primal constituting based on which the other phenomenon becomes a body as my body would look from there. But since both are present, the analogizing apperception of that phenomenon over there as body like mine is of a different kind. It has the form of inter-​x, where ‘x’ is a placeholder. I can constitute my body-​phenomenon as a body only through appresenting it with another body which has become a body after being analogized as another (possible) appearing of my body-​phenomenon. This pairing conditions how I am given my body in its fullest since, as mentioned earlier “in primordial viewing, I can never represent my body to myself as a whole.”66 In other words, in primordial givenness I cannot arrive at the noema of my body without there being another body. This pairing becomes the possibility of completing the rest of the possible appearings of my body here through the similarity of the body over there –​since I cannot do so on my own or through my own kinaestheses. If we allow ourselves the terminology of the Investigations, there can be no schema of my body without an Other’s body. The other body comes also to fill up the rest of the possible appearings that are missing from the way I am given my body. I appresent my body as an object in the transcendental field through the other body that is found in my intentional horizon. In the case of my body, the Other’s body allows both for the schematization of ‘body’ and the limit of what will constitute its adequate intention. We could say that the reduction that has phenomenalized ‘my’ ‘psycho-​physical unity’ and the appearing of the Other’s body, manifests a pairing which, in turn, allows for the constitution of ‘my body.’ Only such an interpretation can make sense of why Husserl ends up asking “What makes this organism another’s, rather than a second organism of my own?”67 Husserl’s question asks why we are left with the question of belongingness. In the phenomenological reduction, the modality of objectified givenness is the same for all parts of the phenomenally reduced world. That is, the phenomenal sameness of a body here with the body there are each two parts that together constitute a primal instituting of ‘body.’ Treating that appearance here as another appearing of the there which together constitute a whole, could leave us with the impression of a split of my body here and there. It is precisely when the other side of my body is not given as mine that the Other as 65 Husserl, Meditations, 112; all emphases in original. 66 Michael Theunissen, The Other:  Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans Christopher Macann (Cambridge, MA:  mit Press, 1986), 66; hereafter Other. 67 Husserl, Meditations, 113.

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an animate organism will reveal themselves, thus leading to the original pairing that I transcendentally experience the Other as an Other like me. Yet, once again this revealing will be carried out appresentatively.68 As a psychophysical unity, I experience the giveness of myself in the way I behave. I govern my body. It is me who moves there, turns here, and operates my body. The other body there, through which I  appresent my own, is not, however, governed by me. But the way I apprehend myself governing my body in a reflective act is manifold. Moving my arm, for instance, is a three-​fold givenness in the plane of consciousness: (my) arm is moving, the movement of (my) arm, my moving my arm. The Other who moves their arm in a like manner suggests their being an animate organism like me. My behavior and the way my behavior is given phenomenally to me, becomes the analogue based on which I can arrive at the Other as a pairing; as a psychophysical unity which has been given in the mode of pairing for me in the reduction. As already mentioned, I cannot appresent their psyche. I can only appresent the unity as a pair. I apprehend the Other’s body as body because it is through that body that 68

There is a hermeneutic discrepancy in this reading when compared with others in the literature. For instance, Theunissen reads Husserl as having proved the other body as an organic non-​thing and then goes on to look at how Husserl will answer the belongingness question of that body. Yet Husserl excludes the experience of the Other inferentially, and though Theunissen does indeed appreciate the non-​inferential aspect of Husserl’s analysis, he continues to prioritize the apprehension of the Other as an animate organism before it is available to me as not being my body. In this way he cannot show how the Other is given as an Other through the governing of their body which reveals both that they are not me and that they are like me who governs my own body. Now this reading becomes of crucial importance because it relates to what we saw earlier: the issue of mine-​ness. This problematic surfaces again in attempts to link Husserl’s account to neuroscience. Evan Thompson, for instance, attempts to show that when neuroscience tries to account for the recognition of the Other through the so-​called mirror-​neurons it echoes Husserl’s account of pairing. Crudely, a set of neurons have been discovered that display the “same” pattern of activity of goal directed bodily movements whether the movements are of the object of study (monkey) or an object of the object of study. Yet, if they are the ‘same,’ and the stipulation of non-​inferential recognition of the Other is kept, Husserl’s question “What makes this organism another’s, rather than a second organism of my own?” remains unanswered (Husserl, Meditations, 113). Either there is a mineness that will characterise this activity as mine and the other’s as an other, or, a difference between the activities must exist for the non-​inferential pairing to occur as (felt) immediate pairing. This objection is not new. Sartre has shown the problems of any theory which attempts to link consciousness to “cerebral impressions” (Sartre, bn, 108). Namely, such materialism fails to account for the material differences in spatio-​temporal consciousness and drowns in a reductive representationalism. For a more elaborate analysis on the problems of the discourse of mirror-​neurons see our passage in No Empathy for Empathy as mentioned in the beginning of this pathway.

118 Chapter 4 I claim my living body. But that organism having a body like mine does not necessarily mean that it is an animate organism like me. The analogising apprehension will have to occur by revelation of the Other’s psyche. This apprehension will be carried out appresentatively in the following manner. It will be done through the Other’s behavior which reveals the governing of the Other’s body which in turn will reveal their being an Other like me. When the other body is revealed as not being governed by me it reveals its being an animate organism, simpliciter. That organism is appresented as an Other inasmuch as their behavior, the governance of that body, finds its analogue in mine in the way I have experienced my body being governed by me. In this way, the appresentation of the Other proceeds by a continuous fulfilment of analogizing apprehensions of the Other’s behavior with mine. There is a “fulfilling verifying continuation” of the Other’s behavior which appertains to mine as it has been given in my own experience of my ego. This is why Husserl calls it a harmonious behavior “as having a physical side that indicates something psychic appresentatively.”69 If knowing something means grasping or retaining in grasp or apprehend, the Other’s psyche could never be grasped or apprehended. The Other remains in “presumptive certainty.”70 Husserl’s attempt to find and found the Other in oneself through the phenomenological reduction has limited success and problems arise from it. We shall explore Sartre’s and Heidegger’s objections before trying to follow their view of the Other. Heidegger first objects to what we can refer to as the chronological order of the encountering-​the-​Other. The Other is not “encountered by a primary act of looking at oneself in such a way that the opposite pole of distinction first gets ascertained.”71 For Heidegger, as we shall shortly see, the self, or Dasein, is structurally connected in being with the others in the world, and this connection is manifested through the everyday concerns of the self. Clearly, Heidegger’s point of departure is our everyday life, what we can call the plainly empirical –​ the vita activa. But Husserl’s avenue, according to Heidegger, thwarts this possibility. A transcendental phenomenology starts with the ontological manifestation of the self’s being related back to itself through transcendence and equates the otherness of the self with itself as a phenomenon of otherness in general. It becomes an issue of commutative praxis between the transcendental and the empirical levels. It becomes “a Projection of one’s own Being-​toward-​oneself

69 Husserl, Meditations, 114; emphasis added. 70 Husserl, Experience, 306. 71 Heidegger, bt, 155.

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‘into something else.’ The Other would be a duplicate of the Self.”72 Now this projection, even if one takes it in the psychological sense that it might suggest (but clearly not the psychoanalytical), is not necessarily problematic. For instance, if by projection we include the appresentation of my body through the body of the Other in exteriority, no issues seem to spring up. Briefly, I might experience embarrassment when someone points out to me that there is a big stain on the back of my outfit. This being, that I would be, cannot but be conditioned on a primal instituting of my having been the observer of such an occurrence in another. I cannot be embarrassed about something that is not happening to me. But this happening to me –​on my outfit –​is not happening in me, it is happening there, in the exteriority of my body the access to which can be gained only through the Other. Yet Heidegger insists by suggesting that all these cases which reveal an empathy among Daseins cannot hold base only on a presupposition that “Dasein’s Being towards an Other is its Being towards itself.”73 If Dasein’s being toward an Other is its being toward itself how is the relationship of itself to be made manifest to the Other as Other? Heidegger’s single line challenge is indeed insurmountable. Husserl does not resolve the problem of the Other but transposes it. Transcendent egos reveal the primordial egos through and in a community of objectified embodied egos, but in this transcendence the transcendental subjectivities remain incommunicable. If the absolute certainty of the phenomenological reduction, as absolute bare givenness, is secured in the transcendental level, then the gap between the transcendental subjectivities that Husserl opens up renders his “transcendental intersubjectivity” a formal concept only. The givenness of the Other as a transcendental subjectivity can never be achieved not only because of its unworldliness, as Theunissen says, but also because the givenness of Other is always mediated by its phenomenological counterpart. The inter-​in Husserl is between constituted subjects or, at best, between a constituting subjectivity and a constituted subjectivity but not between constituting subjectivities. The real problem is not because there is an observable distance between self and Other.74 We accepted that distance in the phenomenological reduction. The problem is that of the asymmetry of constituting intentionalities (i.e empathy)75 and a misguided presupposition

72 Ibid., 162. 73 Ibid., 155. 74 Nick Crossley, Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming (London: Sage, 1996). 75 Nathalie Depraz, “Autrui: Autrui et l’atruisme,” in Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, ed. Monique Canto-​Sperber (Paris: puf, 2004), 123–​127.

120 Chapter 4 of the “reflective self-​understanding of an isolated first-​person subject.”76 Let us temporarily mark this phenomenon as intersubjection rather than intersubjectivity and promise to come back to it later.77 It seems, so far, that “the true problem is that of the connection of transcendental subjects who are beyond experience.”78 The second objection that we need to state is inspired by Sartre’s thought, yet surprisingly Sartre never makes the connection. We can refer to this objection by borrowing a phrase from Theunissen:  “the certification of the character of the Other as transcendent transcendence.”79 In essence, we are dealing with the problematics of appresentation. In the introduction of Being and Nothingness Sartre demonstrates how the philosophical move from the dualism of the ancient substance-​ manifestation metaphysical accounts, to the equation of substance with manifestation –​things are themselves as they appear –​results in another sort of dualism, that of a finite being with infinite appearings. The fact that we can never grasp, say, a cup in its totality but through infinitely many adumbrations is not the only reason we reach this new dualism. To be sure, an innumerable concatenation of adumbrations are “this cup.” But at the same time, it is not only a change of the object. The innumerable is also multiplied by a “subject constantly changing”80 and is infinitely referred to other ‘thises.’ Can we apply this criticism to the analogizing apperception of the Other through appresentation? The continuous analogizing apprehensions which will work as the fulfilment for the appresented Other raise the issue of sufficiency or, as per the above, the inability to certify that the Other is an Other. How much fulfillment is sufficient (appresentational adequacy) in order to be able to arrive at the point that the Other is existing much like me, a transcendental self, who could engage in a reduction? If, as in modern philosophy, we dispense with the substance-​appearance dualism and treat things as themselves appearing temporally, which allows for inexhaustible horizons of appearance, don’t we end up with an infinity of possible appearances that could describe a finite object? Sartre’s point about a finite-​infinite new dualism can be framed with respect to the problematic of the Other in simple terms:  How much fulfillment do I  need in order to

76

Karl-​Otto Apel, From a Transcendental Semiotic Point of View, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Manchester: mup, 1998,) 131; hereafter, Transcendental. 77 Cf Pathway Four; Pathway Five and our passage in No Empathy. 78 Sartre, bn, 234; 324. 79 Theunissen, Other, 146. 80 Sartre, bn, xlvii.

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arrive at the certainty that the appresentation of the Other is sufficient for me to constitute the analogical apprehension complete/​adequate? But how can it be complete when the primal instituting, which bears its stamp on my infinite behavioral possibilities, is not fixed and concrete? Is the death of the Self or the Other a sufficient point? “Yes, she was like me”? But if death is the ultimate point of sufficiency does this not mean that empathy brings a closure, an early death to the Other as an adequate analogized apprehension which limits what the Other could be? How could what the other could be ever be revealed adequately?81

81

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl tells us that “adequate perception represents an ideal” (238). Yet, elsewhere “experience proper” is referred to as “intuitive and ultimately adequate experience” (Husserl, Internal, 9). This is how Derrida critiques the appresentation in the phenomenological sense. Derrida takes appresentation as the limit of phenomenology. If phenomenology is seeking to know the possibility of knowledge, then, with respect to the Other, that knowledge is always going to be limited. The limits of knowledge are the Others. Does this mean that the Other remains an ideal and can never be touched or as Derrida says, the Other should always remain messianic? This is an issue of punctuation as discussed earlier. Some philosophers attempt to solve this issue by discarding the atomistic idea of primal instituting based on which these problems arise. They re-​use the notion of Kantian spontaneity to talk of an immediacy of experience that does not need to be mediated by a genetic moment which will be (im)posed as the criterion of identification in the future. Henceforth “the immediate is no longer the impression, the object which is one with the subject, but the meaning, the structure, the spontaneous arrangement of parts” (Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 67). Thus, the question of how much appresentation is required as adequate fulfilment is a question neutralized. Yet cut one head and a thousand more appear. In his later work, Merleau-​Ponty talks about all perceptions, be they illusions or not, all being part of the world; its various perspectives which are all real and each one is giving way to the other in the course of approximating the real being of the world “whose accomplishment is only deferred” (Merleau-​Ponty, Invisible, 41). This approach does not differ much from the solipsistic theoretical attitude as with Husserl; instead of thinking with the mind here the whole body is the organon of theorisis. Now, Merleau-​Ponty claims that this immediacy, this body to body spontaneity, reveals the Other as Other and, hence, the existential question of the Other does not get off the ground. Yet this Other is constantly revealed in every interaction as the same deferral is in play. The Other is deferred. In this case, the Other is constantly under development, or, possibly, under scrutiny; life in suspicion, in bodily scepticism, are you there? Is it you? Will I find you tomorrow? This constant deferral, this continuous à venir, the messianicity of the Other, this waiting for Goddot, is a modern play. A dialectical play between the conditioned and the unconditioned; a Kantian game, a game of conditions. Starting from the ‘I’ in the world does not allow for a space for the Other to be touched without violating their total otherness.

122 Chapter 4 3

Heidegger and the (In)Authentic Being-​with Others

Heidegger begins with the world, the vita activa while exploring further the Husserlian relationship of finding-​found. The self, the Dasein, finds itself as it is found(ed) in the world. I am thrust in the world some-​where, there, full of entities that surround me. I am found as I find myself in an en-​vironment and that is why I  am always already there, dans un environ, περί-​που, an approximate, an average. And this plays out in two ways. To say “I am in Glasgow” presupposes a convoluted complexity of a referential totality, a scheme of reference, since Glasgow is, for example, north of Athens but it is equally south of it from a different referential pole. But, I am there, also means that while found in this averageness, it is me82 who finds myself in this environment among the other entities which are not me.83 It is also through these entities as they present themselves, appropriately or not for my concerns, that I am found as a being there with and among them.84 Furthermore, that I am found means that I am delivered to my own being based on what I do, and what I do reveals how I am related to this environment and hence my concern with it. I am found in the world, there, somewhere. I  am related to this there in a manner that Husserl calls “undergoing and doing,”85 and Heidegger, from Aristotle, calls the “in-​order-​to” or my overall comportment.86 The referential totality based on which I am always found there is grounded on my practical concerns, my always end-​oriented praxis already formed based on my concerns, my being “always already over and above beings, beyond beings.”87 My being among other entities has been revealed as a relation of my practical concern with reference to all surrounding entities; all entities which I also find there, in the world. I am revealed to myself as I am en-​viron-​ed, surrounded by entities the sum of which I appreciate as my world. My Being is 82 83

This is what Heidegger usually refers to as Dasein-​with and Husserl as a transcending Ego. While we will explore the issue of the ‘there’ later, it is worth mentioning here that the ‘there’ which translates ‘Da’ should not be conceptualized as a topographical coordinate. As Heidegger explains, the “Da is the clearing and openness of what is, as which a human stands out.” ‘Clearing’ is important as it precedes knowing and representing. It relates to standing open “in which something present comes to meet something else present” (Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/​67, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Alabama: uap, 1979), 126; hereafter, Heraclitus). The standing open, pure standing, stasis as we saw earlier, precedes the under-​standing where epi-​stasis or episteme takes place. 84 I surround everything and everything surrounds me. Heidegger uses Heraclitus’ writing of the one and the many to explain this idea further. 85 Husserl, Meditations, 165. 86 Heidegger, bt, 65. 87 Ibid., 68.

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manifested or, better still, disclosed in what Heidegger defines as my dealings with entities in the world which appear as ready-​to-​hand, or my concern,88 or are disclosed as present-​at-​hand, for a possible concernful being in the world. But this referential totality of entities in which I am found, that is, the world including myself, has already been interpreted, has already been founded for me before I find myself found there in it. It has been interpreted by other entities which are also disclosed to me, I find them; Others like me, who are already “at work, that is, primarily in their Being-​in-​the-​world.”89 To say that I am in the office on the fifth floor of the Sir Alexander Stone building already reveals what this referential totality suggests; a totality which I did not construct in order to define my being (t)here. This average complexity, this en-​viron has already been interpreted by other entities which are/​were like me, who have already been found there for their own concern. I am not only found there in the world, I am also found with Other entities in it and they are found in their world with me. In finding myself in the world I am always already found(ed) by being-​in-​the-​world. We have thus three structures that define the Being of Dasein. The Being-​in-​ the-​world,90 the Being found in the world (Dasein-​with),91 and the Being-​with with Other entities who are disclosed as having similar concerns. My praxis reveals a concern for my Being. My Being is an issue and this issue is manifested in my dealings with worldly entities which are disclosed in the process. In this process I am found with Other entities that manifest similar concerns through their dealings with the entities around us. My being is always disclosed as being-​with them, but this Being-​with structure does not signify an ontologically interpreted being as mere presence, as an arithmetic aggregate with Others. Being with Others can still find me ontologically in the being of feeling alone or, conversely, in the absence of Others, I can still be disclosed in the being of feeling their presence. These two occurrences are possible only because, essentially, the Being of Dasein in the world is always already, that is, Being-​with-​Others-​in-​the-​world –​ an essential relation. The Other is revealed as Other to me through common concern and it is through common concern that the Other is revealed to me as something that I also am. However, the everyday commerce with the Other has different 88 Ibid., 157. 89 Ibid. 90 A two-​fold structure: as a facticity among other entities which constitute the world, and as a transcendence, the in-​order-​to which constitutes Dasein’s dealings based on its circumspective concern, an overall comportment. 91 Every dealing with the world and other beings reflects my self-​comportment (Ibid., 65).

124 Chapter 4 manifestations; either as solicitude or indifference or empathy (as a being with Others understandingly). All of these, however, must be conditioned upon a fundamental ontological relation of Being-​with which is disclosed out of Dasein’s concernful Being in the world. “Being-​with is an existential constituent of Being-​in-​the-​world.”92 And, concomitantly, “this means that because Dasein’s Being is Being-​with, its understanding of Being already implies the understanding of Others.”93 As an ontological structure, this Being-​with, which is disclosed in one’s concern, conditions the various manifestations it may have. For Heidegger, a phenomenalizing of such a modality is what he calls the They –​the French concept meant by the word ‘on:’ on fait, on dit, on va faire. Before analyzing the They and the being of this phenomenon, it must be understood that, for Heidegger, the ontological structure of Being-​with conditions the They. That is to say, the being of the phenomenon of the They (along with any other of its possible manifestations) could not be if there were no primordial interconnectedness of Daseins; primordial interconnectedness is essential. Dasein is found in the world with Other Daseins. Dasein’s Being is Being-​with, “a primordially existential kind of Being.”94 We can, with ample textual evidence, read it, as Sartre does, as an a priori structure. As Heidegger writes in analyzing Anaximander’s fragment, we are always already in connection with Others through being in connection with Being which makes every being be.95 Heidegger, and Jaspers following him, will try to delimit Being as that (which is) so encompassing that “it finds its limits only in nothingness”96 –​“assuming we may at all say something like that of nothingness.”97 As mentioned earlier, I am thrust into the world. To be thrust into the world means that I do not have a conception of my beginning. But that I have a conception of reveals that I can be delivered to myself; I am with myself, a Dasein-​ with. When I start to reflect on my being, when my being becomes an issue for myself, it is in a theoretical sense through reflection, a mode of Being which derives from my practical concerns; I  am always found in a relational complexity depending on my at-​hand concerns. Before anything springs up in a reflective manner, as present-​at-​hand, I  am immersed in my circumspective dealings with the entities which offer themselves ready-​to-​hand for me. But 92 Heidegger, bt, 163. 93 Ibid., 161. 94 Ibid. 95 Heidegger, Beginning, 48. 96 Ibid., 54. 97 Ibid., 52.

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these entities, even as ready-​to-​hand, along with the referential totality of other entities, are revealed as present-​for-​hand98 or potential ready-​to-​hand in the process of being immersed in the actualizing ready-​to-​hand, and they have/​are already (been) interpreted by Others who have already been found in similar encounters in the world. All these Other Daseins, which are revealed through the way the world, in which I find myself there, has been interpreted for me, are the They. The They offer for me a world in which I find myself being concerned with myself in a way they have already interpreted.99 We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The “they” which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.100 We can safely infer that Heidegger is referring to the cultural framework within which we are found ourselves from birth to the point we are delivered to ourselves. In the terminology of Karl Jaspers who is very closely related to Heideggerian existentialism, the They is called the “encompassing authority.”101 It is a form of how things are, “a compelling certainty,”102 a form of truth, “a reality of the community that embraces all men, as the form of the truth claiming to support all truth” and I know this truth “to the extent that I have grown up in it. I can live by it, but never deduce it or classify it.”103 And it is an 98

Heidegger never uses this term, present-​for-​hand. We borrow the expression from Levin’s analyses on Heidegger (Michael David Levin, “The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment: Heidegger’s Thinking of Being,” in The Body, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 1999), 122–​150; hereafter, Embodiment); our use intends this idea of a heuristic implement in order to summarize what Apel calls “intermediate gradations” between present and ready (Apel, Transcendental, 132). That is, the passing of ready-​ to-​hand to present-​at-​hand modes of being, allows for gradations which reveal what Heidegger calls Dasein being-​ahead-​of-​itself in the horizon of its praxes. 99 Apel writes that our pre-​ understanding of Being-​ in-​ the-​ world-​ with-​ Others, what Heidegger usually expresses through the formula “always already,” is itself a “pre-​ understanding [which] is always already linguistically articulated in the sense of the ‘public interpretation of the lifeworld” (Apel, Transcendental, 107–​108). The ‘linguistically’ has to be taken in the broadest sense possible as a language-​game, form of life, mode of existence (existentiell) rather than particular languages. 100 Heidegger, bt, 164; original emphases. 101 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F.  Grabay (Philadelphia, PA:  upp, 1971), 50; hereafter, Philosophy. 102 Ibid., 47. 103 Ibid., 50.

126 Chapter 4 authority that prescribes me towards without my realizing it as “I never catch sight of it as authority.”104 It is my very way of living as I have been brought up, my form of life as Wittgenstein would say, my language-​game.105 To understand the importance of the They and its authoritative being we can use Malcolm’s example.106 As I return home each day I leave my keys on my desk. This is the place from where I  recover them if I  want to leave my house. Out of a They which holds that physical entities cannot pop in and out of existence in this world, my keys cannot vanish into thin air. My understanding of a situation upon which I discover that my keys are not in the place I normally place them would most likely be to initiate a search of possible other places I might have left them or they might have dropped. Conversely, in a culture, and we can say out of a They, where a belief that physical things do pop in and out of existence is maintained, such an interpretation of the world would present a different set of possible actions. For instance, I may concern myself with something else until the keys are revealed to me somewhere instead of me going after them. Absorbed in a They where material things do not vanish, the horizon of appropriate possibilities of action would exclude anticipation of self-​revelation of my keys since this is a possibility that, as Heidegger would say, has been levelled down107 by the interpretation of the world by the They. This example shows how the world to which Dasein is delivered is already interpreted (for the Dasein) by the They.108

1 04 Ibid. 105 Wittgenstein, Investigations. 106 Malcolm, Thought. Malcolm never refers to Heidegger or the concept of the They. Malcolm talks about the role of ideology as a synthesis of theoretical knowledge as disclosed in everyday cultural practices or individual praxes  –​expansion of Wittgenstein’s concept of language-​games as life forms. But as it will become evident, the reference to the same phenomenon is patently obvious. These similarities of Heidegger and Wittgenstein have already been explored in the literature (cf. Apel, Transcendental). 107 Heidegger, bt, 169. 108 In terms of social Ontology, Alfred Schutz has made surgical contributions by analyzing that this social interpretation of the world, this Heideggerian They, is not as contingent and impersonal as it may sound when we analogize it with ‘culture’ or ‘cultural practices.’ There is a process of approval of what kind of interpretation will be disseminated socially, institutionally, such that it will eventually end up being considered as “knowledge” and be lived as cultural practice. After all, it was Copernicus and not Hypatia who is credited with “discovering” that the earth revolves around the sun. Sappho is still a poet and not a philosopher like Parmenides while De Beauvoir is a literary critic and not a philosopher proper. This phenomenon may well be beyond our scope to engage here yet we appreciate it in all senses of the word (see Alfred Schutz, “The ‘Well-​Informed’ Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” Social Research, 13, 4, (1946): 463–​478).

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The They subjects Dasein because it imposes how the world is; and this interpretation procures a distinctive set of possibilities of being for Dasein. The They is not a physical subject yet it is “the Realest subject” of everydayness which dictates in one way or another the how of the in-​order-​to of Dasein. Sometimes Heidegger equates the They with what we sometimes refer to as common sense which is expressed in the everyday discourse of Dasein with Others. Yet this common sense in which Dasein is absorbed and according to which it comports itself for its concerns is for Heidegger an inauthentic way of being. Dasein is not authentic to itself when it loses itself in the ways they think and act. Dasein lost in the They is, in a sense, idle. In its everyday commerce with the world as “the they-​self”109 Dasein is guided by-​and-​to the possibilities which open up for its concern based on how they have always already interpreted the world. Heidegger offers two compelling examples of how the They cover up the authentic Being of Dasein:  Death and Time. We shall be concerned with Death since it derives from the demands of the Fundamental Ontological Interpretation itself, that is, the meaning of Being which comes before anything else and conditions it. If Being is to be understood as a concept transcendentalis, the analysis of Being must start from the being (entity) for which Being becomes an issue. “In ontological Interpretation an entity is to be laid bare with regard to its own state of Being.”110 But this cannot prima facie happen in the case of human Dasein for which Being is an issue. The being of this entity cannot be analyzed holistically unless it is taken as that being “which is between birth and death.”111 But can we understand the being of death? Per impossibile, the experience of death would not secure an understanding of Dasein’s entity as a whole. To experience the being of death already presupposes a being which understands the experience of. Understanding of death which would allow an ontological analysis of Dasein proper cannot include an experience of death since the latter presupposes some sort of being. To experience death would mean to be dead but that is absurd since dead is not to be. (To be) ‘dead’ is for someone who is not dead.112 A dead Dasein simply is-​not 1 09 Heidegger, bt, 167. 110 Ibid., 275. 111 Heidegger, bt, 76. 112 Drew Leder provides a nice example to make this oxymoronic point evident. I can imagine, Leder says, myself being inside that coffin where I see another lying there. Yet, “this is not a sight I can see with my own eyes” (Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: ucp, 1990), 144; hereafter, Absent). I  do not know what it is like to be in that state and it is impossible to know. It is “a necessary terminus at which the ‘I’ cannot arrive” (Ibid., 145). Yet, Heidegger takes this point further. If this terminus is necessary for me a posteriori it is revealed as necessary for Dasein a priori; if it is revealed to me as (with) another Dasein,

128 Chapter 4 for itself (an issue of, in, and for itself). But for an (living) Other Dasein, the former is dead. However, an ontological interpretation of Dasein requires an understanding of this experience since the formula “I am” can only be completed when no predicate awaits to attach to it. As Courtine maintains “I am in the full and absolute sense when I am-​dead. It is only in dying that I can say certainly and absolutely I am.”113 But I cannot get to (say that) ‘I am’ (dead). So, if an ontological analysis of death demands a hermeneutic of Dasein as a whole, then we can find an experience of, but not arising out of the being dead or the Being of Death,114 that is, we need a being-​towards which words yet wards death. How is this possible? Not by an experience of death but, in Heidegger’s terms, by an existentiell Being towards death the existential manifestation of which is felt as the lack of any potentiality of Being for Dasein. The move is analogical par excellence. By seeing the death of Others we understand what death is. The absence of any potentialities of Being for an Other Dasein. As a Dasein’s end, how can I know this necessity for me in advance? How can I testify to that necessary possibility not being only my possible possibility? It is unconcealed, as we shall see, through feeling, as angst  –​or dread as Heidegger put it in his lectures on Metaphysics (Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Existence and Being, trans. R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949); hereafter, Metaphysics). This testimony, this irreplaceability of my becoming is as if death has already taken place somehow; like an unexperienced experience (Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: sup, 2000); hereafter, Instant. 113 Jean-​François Courtine, “Voice of Conscience and Call of Being,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-​Luc Nancy (NY: Routledge, 1991), 82; hereafter, Voice. 114 This is nothing other than the great transcendental lesson of Parmenides (Parmenides, Prosocratikoi, trans. Georgios Christodoulou (Athens:  Stigme, 2002)  [Παρμενίδης, Προσωκρατικοί, μτφ. Γεώργιος Χριστοδουλου (Αθήναι:  Στιγμή, 2002)]. Talk of becoming already presupposes something that can become. The possibility of becoming rests on the possibility of being  –​even Husserl admits to this inescapability in his lectures (cf Husserl, Internal). Following Parmenides, Heidegger refuses to compartmentalise being in its various or potential manifestations of becoming. In other words, Heidegger attempts to avoid the dialectic being-​becoming based on a transcendental something. We cannot converge more with Courtine when he says: “If in order to determine its being and the mode of being peculiar to it, Dasein cannot utter I am, except on condition that implicitly translates such a formula into an I can die, it is precisely because Dasein is not. This is why it would be vain, for example, to seek to oppose a fundamental ontological thesis in the sense of the Fundamental-​Ontologie to the Parmenidian “esti gar einai” (ἐστί γαρ εἶναι, part vi, p. 21) (Courtine, Voice, 82; emphases in original). Just as Parmenides, Heidegger refuses, and rightly so, to fall into the trap of the They who provide “no recognition, no discussion, of the seasons of a lifetime” (Levin, Embodiment, 130).

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it is its ownmost eschatic (uttermost) potentiality. Since the being of Dasein is constantly manifested in the horizon of possibilities that the world in which it is found opens, Dasein were, is, will or could be something. The existentiell conception of the Not-​Possible as witnessed in the death of Other Daseins can lead to an existential manifestation of Being towards death since death is the totally and authentically Not-​Possible. Therefore, for a proper ontological analysis we need to understand the being towards death which means, philosophically, to bring about the ὓστερον-​πρότερον.115 The Dasein that performs the ὓστερον-​πρότερον, experiences itself not in a noetic attitude of a theoretical vision but in a perfect attunement of its Being. It is a “primordial mode of attunement that effectively reveal’s Dasein’s entire structural make-​up.”116 It is the existential manifestation of Dasein as it reveals the totality of its Being, it closes Dasein’s circle of Being from within. That mood is not a thought but a primordial feeling that reveals the totality of Dasein. It is the ultimate certainty. The certainty of my death which does not rely on the inductive mode of “the unerringly confirmed fact that one dies.”117 The empirical manifestation of death is not enough to induce a certainty of the kind of “my death” as the ultimate full-​stop of possibilities, the exhaustion, the no more. “A proposition of the type “one dies,”” says Courtine, is not enough to present me with the certainty that I  will die even if I  logically make the deduction/​induction/​abduction. Nothing can intro-​duce me, in-​duce or ad-​ duce to me the feeling of death. The certainty does not have any traces of logical/​scientific causality. In the attempt to constitute my ultimate potentiality of Being I face a wall which my consciousness cannot surpass. I feel angst. Death is revealed to me as anxiety. It is my being towards death revealed in/​as anxiety. Anxiety is feeling certain of my being of death, a certainty which no Cartesian hyperbolic doubt and no phenomenological reduction can dispel or spell out. Anxiety, as an attempt to constitute, to attune with the ultimate potentiality of Being which closes Dasein, which reveals its non Being is primordial.118 This 1 15 The latter before –​hýsteron próteron. 116 James Magrini, “ ‘Anxiety’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Harbinger in Authenticity,” Philosophy Scholarship, 15 (2006): 78; hereafter, Anxiety. 117 Magrini, Anxiety, 80. 118 We have to note that anxiety is also revealed in an attempt to constitute the beginning of my being, as Derrida marginally notes in his doctoral thesis on Husserl (Derrida, Genesis). As an anecdotal example, around the age of four, I remember waking up from a weird dream –​those dreams which are responsible for driving us to the abyss as Nietzsche once said –​with the following thoughts lingering in my mind: Where was I before I was born? Who would be in my place here if it had not been me? And if someone else was here in my place where would I be? Would I be dead? Where will I be when I die? These questions do not have answers; these are the only questions that do not have answers. They do not

130 Chapter 4 attunement is not a sense of fear as they think because fear is always fear of something. Fear is intentional and it can be overcome, it can be rationalized. Anxiety does not have any sense and it cannot be overcome. It is a feeling of dread, and its aboutness is nothing, nullity, no possible constitution because it traverses the whole being which cannot be constituted, it cannot be sensed but felt in/​as angst. At the same time, anxiety is the ultimate crisis of meaning, the ultimate breakdown of intentionality. In anxiety no thing has meaning. Dasein is revealed to itself as no-​thingness, void, it sees no-​thing, it is not at home. Just like “seaing along” as the poet Philip Bailey119 wrote. It does not see itself as something; in its attempt to seize its being toward death it is seized; it seas. Seeing-​death-​is-​seaing with no object to attempt to hang on to, completely out of reach, eyes/​Is unwalled: … Concha would cry when she found out I  was dead, she would have no taste for life for months afterward. But I  was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. When she looked at me

have answers because the feeling on in-​existence, the border of my existence is covered with feeling with no room left for any thing else. I cannot constitute my ego. The first time this happened, I felt I was turning into ice and then slowly melting as cold sweat was running all over my body; I wrapped myself with the covers and went back to sleep –​ unlike Marcel who was determined to find out –​as Anne Marcel prefaces Thou Shall Not Die: “We must recall that this philosopher [Marcel] is primarily the same little boy who asked the adults in his life: “Where are those who have died?” The grown-​ups replied that they do not know. “Well then,” said the child, “when I grow up, I shall seek to find out” (in Gabriel Marcel, Thou Shall Not Die, trans. Katharine Rose Hanley (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), vii; hereafter, Thou). In this sense, we cannot really accept, as Jean-​Luc Marion does, that the feeling of “mineness” of Dasein is conditioned only in the being towards death (Jean-​Luc Marion, “L’Interloque,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-​Luc Nancy (NY: Routledge, 1991) 238; hereafter, L’Interloque). Just because in being towards death it achieves clarity, a ‘position,’ as Heidegger says, or, as it comes to a distinctive mode of disclosedness, it does not mean that it is revealed only in that modality of Being. Rather, it is just that this modality is clear, distinctive as it is not adulterated in the everyday concern of x –​which suggests a particular intentionality. But then again, as Sartre shows, the anguish cannot necessarily come from anticipating a physical death, but from the inability to resolve, to surpass it (Sartre, bn, 32) and, we could add, to reflect one’s self out of this surpassing, after this. There is no consciousness (of) death. Unquestionably, however, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, this feeling, non ana-​lyzable and non trans-​latable, changes forever what is left of existence (Blanchot and Derrida, Instant). 119 Philip James Bailey, Festus (NY: James Miller, 1872), 484.

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something passed from her to me. … if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn’t reach me. I was alone.120 The Being toward death reveals the totality of Dasein’s Being in/​as anxiety. However, they distort the Being toward death into a being of death. Death has been interpreted as something “bad.” They talk about death in a “fugitive manner,”121 as an occurrence in the world which is happening somewhere, to someone but “not right now;” it does not affect me as it has nothing to do with me now. The now for me is the everydayness of the world in my actual and possible concerns. The now is life, and death, its “opposite,” should not concern me. The profoundest anti-​phasis, the ultimate concern, my ownmost potentiality of Βeing which is death is distorted in the sense that it will happen somewhere, somehow, indeterminately, whereas in reality it could happen anytime, anywhere, anyway. Being towards death is not something that could happen, it is happening. Living is being toward death and they conceal it. The being towards death which essentially starts by the being of birth is concealed so that dying “which is essentially mine in such a way that no-​one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the ““they” encounters.”122 We encounter death; we count it; idly as in ‘there were five dead in that accident,’123 but not recount it; we are encountering it by discounting death by giving prominence to numbers –​“s/​he was 80 years old.” They avoid it through numbers. “In the end, the dead will be represented, thus held at bay.”124 In The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy recounts: Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions likely to result from Ivan Ilych’s death, the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, “it is he who is dead and not I.” Each one thought or felt, “Well, he’s dead but I’m alive!”125 120

Jean-​Paul Sartre, The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander (NY: New Directions, 1948), 12; original emphases. Hereafter, Wall. 121 Heidegger, bt, 297. 122 Ibid. 123 The recent situation with the so-​ called Covid-​ 19  ‘pandemic’ allows to exemplify Heidegger’s analytic in many ways, the counting of death being one. 124 Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and Others, (Stanford, CA: sup, 1993), 4; hereafter, Birth. 125 Lev Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Hazleton, PA: ecs, Penn State, 1998), 4.

132 Chapter 4 By such a fugitive way of dealing with death, they orient Dasein towards how death should be understood. It should not interfere with the everyday circumspective concern of Dasein. By such an understanding, the state of mind which accompanies the ultimate possibility of Dasein, anxiety as in the face of death, is transformed into a fear of something that Dasein has to overcome by forgetting about it. Peter Singer writes: If I think that [death] is likely to happen at any moment, my present existence will be fraught with anxiety, and will presumably [?]‌be less enjoyable than if I do not think it is likely to happen for some time. If I learn that people like myself are very rarely killed, I will worry less.”126 Facing the ultimate possibility of Dasein and experiencing its anxiety is presumably not enjoyable and this presumes that the ultimate potentiality for human existence is to be joyful or, at least, more enjoyable; not being able to overcome the fear of death “gets passed off as a weakness with which no self-​ assured Dasein may have any acquaintance.”127 A healthy, living Dasein is self-​ assured, and will worry less, presumably. In this way, Dasein is alienated from its authentic Being which is manifested when one’s ownmost potentiality for Being, being towards death, is concealed or suppressed in one’s own daily circumspective concern. In the workings of the They “One never dies, and a certain form of im-​mortality might even represent one of the ultimate constituent features of the “They.””128 They force Dasein towards a “mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence.”129 This mode leaves Dasein realizing and potentializing itself without accounting for its a priori ownmost potentiality for Being which is Death. This way Dasein loses itself in all sorts of possibilities which open up when its concern is horizonally determined, interpreted, re-​stricted by the They. This mode of being is for Heidegger inauthentic as the They constantly bars Dasein from opening up the way to its authentic potentialities for Being. Authentic potentialities accrue when the ownmost potentiality for Being, death, is appreciated by Dasein in the moment of potentializing. The concreteness of the self, the authentic self, a solid ‘I’ cannot be revealed when Dasein is not choosing itself and is alienated from its ultimate and ownmost potentiality for Being which

1 26 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: cup, 1980), 91; emphases added. 127 Heidegger, bt, 298. 128 Courtine, Voice, 80. 129 Heidegger, bt, 299; emphases in original.

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for each Dasein is felt as/​in mineness and it is non-​relational; which cannot be avoided and which cannot be outstripped. When Dasein anticipates death it becomes non-​relational, it comes back to its individual mineness; its concrete pure self. Anticipation of death individualizes the alienated Dasein previously lost in the They self, being a part of the Τhey.130 Death lays claim to Dasein as individual says Heidegger. While they have expelled the occurrence of death to an atemporal topos, death can occur to Dasein at any time and place, what Heidegger calls the indefiniteness of certainty. This indefiniteness of certainty can bring back Dasein from the lullabies of the They by creating a rupture from the potentialities they propose for Dasein. At the same time by being called back from the They, anticipation of death in its indefiniteness of certainty calls forth Dasein to its individualized self which is nothing else but the true anxiety of the ultimate potentiality of Being. “The indefiniteness of death is primordially disclosed in anxiety.”131 But this anxiety is not produced because Dasein thinks of death. Rather, as Dasein is always ahead of itself in its potentializing, it manifests itself authentically in resolving by anticipating its ownmost non-​relational and not to be outstripped potentiality for Being, death. By such anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein can be itself, its authentic self. The authenticity is revealed as anxiety through a struggle of possibilities. Being resolute means choosing the one at present which could be as ultimate and unique, as individual and mine as my fundamental Being, death. The present is intensified in this moment of resolution, as Jaspers puts it: it is elevated.132 it becomes the most important. Based on our analysis, it has already become evident how the Other appears as a detrimental surface for the self in Heidegger. In the everydayness, the Other, in the form of the They, impedes the self from Being itself, authentic Being. While reading Heidegger’s thoughts one wants to ask:  Where is the determinate Other in Dasein’s circumspective concern? Is she exhausted in the They? Does this hold in the reverse direction as well? That is, when the Other encounters me, am I a manifestation of the They for them which they –​ in both senses –​don’t realize? Does this also mean that since we are both lost in the they-​self in our everyday encounters that we both perpetuate each other’s alienation? And If I do find my authentic self in anticipatory resoluteness 130 Again, as an example we can bring forth how They constitute(d) the covid-​19 as a pandemic. Death is constituted as a result of this virus which is to be overcome through a lockdown, a medical treatment and so on. While the covid-​19 could have been an opportunity for an authentic anticipation of death, it has ended up being objectified through fear. 131 Heidegger, bt, 356. 132 Jaspers, Philosophy, 81.

134 Chapter 4 how does the existentiell possibility which I choose in the ultimate existentiale moment of anxiety contribute in the (re)shaping of the they-​self after I choose? Can the Other, by the same token, not contribute in my coming to anticipatory resoluteness as motivation? Oxymoronically, the Other as an existentiell-​existential human being is literally absent from Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. We encounter the Other as (a) They (be)coming a suppressive force for my being an authentic Dasein. In Heidegger, authentic Dasein comes through a rupture from the They which the Other represents authentically in our everydayness by being herself inauthentic.133 Heidegger could object by saying that in anticipatory resoluteness Dasein is breaking away from the They whom the Other represents, and dialectically, by this leaping ahead, Dasein also frees the Other inasmuch as Dasein itself in its absorption in the They-​self is contributing to the Other’s alienation. So, by breaking off the They-​self, Dasein is freeing both self and Other from the They. Yet, there are questions. First, Heidegger does not offer any account of how such a dynamic freeing can be manifested in the Other at the moment of anticipatory resoluteness for both Dasein and Other. How is such freeness experienced in terms of the Other, from the Other’s perspective? Second, if, as we mentioned earlier, Being-​with is a primordial structure, “an existential ontological determinant,”134 which conditions all possibilities of Being, can we not, then, assume that the self can break away from the They-​self and leave the Other still alienated as they maintain other They-​relations with Others? There is another aporia with Heidegger’s analysis. Earlier we understood and appreciated the importance that Heidegger places in the Being-​with of Dasein as an ontological structure. With the anticipatory resoluteness, the Being-​with cannot be reconciled with an existentiale structure of Dasein as the authentic manifestation of Being in a solus ipse Dasein; a Dasein in existential replete autarky,135 itself alone. Let us elucidate this aporia. An existentiell possibility of being indifferent towards others can only be conditioned as we said in a primordial Being-​with. So far, so good. But, can an individualized self, a 133 This is not Sartre’s critique about the “concrete Other” in a dew dress, i.e. the particular Other. It is the other side of Sartre’s critique. Sartre accuses Heidegger of losing the concrete other person of the everydayness –​recall Husserl’s retrogression. My friend Maria is/​as a part of They when I see her in the morning on the bus to go to work. Sartre talks about the determinate Other that Heidegger misses. Our objection lies on the dynamic interaction of determinate Others. What happens when self and other who constitute the They-​self break off or not at different temporal moments in their everyday encounters? What do they do to themselves then, what happens theyn? 134 Theunissen, Other, 176. 135 The term is borrowed from Marion’s reading of Heidegger in L’Interloque.

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Dasein in replete autarky, self-​contained, (a) self-​expressed (as an) existentiale Being of anxiety, a self found outside of an existentiell Other, an Other who is represented by and in turn represents the They, take us back to the ontological structure of Being-​with? This aporia comes de facto and de jure. It seems to us that Heidegger follows Nietzsche in talking about the distantiality of Self and Other (the pathos of distance) that can only be grounded in a primordial interconnectedness, a Being-​with structure. Yet, what seems to be missing is a complete account of how the authentic self is grounded in this structure in the reverse manner, βουστροφηδόν [boustrophedon] so to speak, in order to close the ontological circle. The Fundamental Ontological Interpretation cannot close the ‘circle’ in just accounting for the being towards death (or birth for that manner). From a factual perspective, how does Dasein pass, or in Nietzschean terms overcome this moment of its autarky in Being itself in the choosing of itself? In other words, how does Dasein dis the severance of the autarky in order to find itself in deseverance authentically back into being in the world, to disclose its (other) ontological structure? Heidegger leaves an unbridgeable gap between the Being-​with and the solitary moment of vision, as he defines it, which is the moment when Dasein feels abandoned136 and anxious in anticipatory resoluteness; the moment when its conscience, ontologically construed, calls it back to suspend its praxes in circumspective concern which is determined by the They and which conscience, if it is heard, now calls it (Dasein) forth to resolute/​resolve in anticipation in the mode of Being towards death. Sartre is right here indeed: “Human-​reality at the very heart of its ekstases remains alone.”137 But, this being alone cannot be just an existentiell alone if the Being of Dasein is at this moment authentic. This alone means that there is an utter “dissolution of all direct connection between Others and me,”138 pure existentiale, pure angst, pure severance. “Standing by and against other Existenzen.” It is “a contracted point.”139 As Marion underscores, “we must conclude that it [Dasein] does not relate towards anything else”140 –​meaningless. How can we reconcile, how can we go from this dissolution which is construed as an existentiale Being of Dasein to its Being-​with as an ontological structure,141 to two distinct structures, existentiale and ontological with no in-​between? 1 36 We shall return to this curious abandonment in our final pathway. 137 Sartre, bn, 250. 138 Theunissen, Other, 191. 139 Jaspers, Reason, 61–​62. 140 Marion, L’Interloque, 239. 141 In Jaspers, the objection we are raising against Heidegger could not hold because Jaspers’ approach to the They as Spirit is one of the manifestations of the Existenz as an

136 Chapter 4 This discontinuity, this discrepancy can be revealed in an other way. Following Heidegger, Being-​with is still evidenced when Dasein will choose in its anticipatory resoluteness. As Heidegger appreciates it well, in its calling forth it will fall again into the possibilities of Being which have always already been opened up horizonally by the They. But if the authentic self is only found in the moment of choosing, the call of conscience which makes Dasein reticent from the praxes determined from and by the They, and brings it forth face-​to-​face with itself to resolute; if the authentic self is found in that moment, then the temporal structure of Dasein as an ecstatic temporality, a temporality that temporalizes itself seems to be challenged. If authentic self is the moment being found in anticipatory resoluteness, in the grasping of the content-​less call of conscience, then that moment must be a-​temporal and non-​ecstatic, pure formal self-​presence or pure Being. There can be no ecstasis in that moment, that instant which instances death. It must be a consciousness as nothing, something-​never, τί-​ποτέ. And if we clothe this thought with more technical terms, the moment of anticipatory resoluteness must necessarily be non-​intentional. That means that the moment of vision is devoid of all noema, it is nothing. As we said earlier, seeing as seaing. But how, then. can the atemporal re-​temporalize itself? How does it get ashore? What is the movement required from the nothing to something, from non-​intentionality to intentionality, from atemporal self-​presence to self-​temporalization?142 Let’s keep this question in reserve for a moment and move towards the de jure side of the aporia. If the authentic Being is revealed in an anticipation toward death, then surely, if it is the call of conscience which awakens Dasein out of the They, that means that the ultimate potentiality for Being is apprehended negatively Encompassing. For Jaspers, authentic existence is Transcendence and the They is that through which such mode of Being can be achieved. Heidegger distinguishes his thought sharply from Jaspers in the lectures on the fragment of Anaximander. However, the problem is that if human existence is “the Being of beings we our selves are,” then what is lost in the authentic resolution, what is di-​solved needs that which needs to move it to the state of re-​solving. And that seems to be missing from Heidegger’s analytic (Jaspers, Reason, 65). 142 Marion has elaborated on this question with respect to what comes after the subject if subjectivity or the transcendental ‘I’ is destroyed in the Heideggerian analytic of Dasein. “To what extent does Dasein still “destroy” the metaphysical project of a transcendental I unconditioned because self constituted? Dasein doubtless overcomes all subjecti(vi)ty by challenging the permanency of the hypokeimenon or of the subject of the res cogitans. However, the Self’s autarky remains connected with the strange motto of a “ … standig vorhandene Grund der Sorge,” i.e ., constantly present at hand basis of care” (Marion, L’Interloque,, 240).

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while in the They. Sylviane Agacinski asks us to pause here and re-​punctuate the philosophical question. Who/​What is taking a call to break off from the They? If the being whose Being is an issue asks the question of (its) Being, this “ “who” (who orients the question in this case) is not the who to whom or to which a question can be put in the sense of being addressed.”143 And Agacinski is right to re-​punctuate: “the experience of the question precedes the determination of the who.”144 But what kind of experience would that “experience of the question” be? There is some being here that is not accounted for in the They-​self/​self-​existentiale ontological structure. The breaking away from the They, the attempt at severance is only possible as the introduction of a dash which can only ever be a They-​Self. If this breaking off comes from a feeling of the certainty “dying,” a sum moribundus145 or, in more Heideggerian terms, a felt temporalization, “a time-​to-​come opened up by the “coming to die” and as though reflected by it,”146 then the ultimate potentiality becomes the criterion based on which Dasein will resolve (out of) the They. Adding an other layer of metaphoricity here, the being towards death can only be the medium for the message, the authentic self. Otherwise, if we collapse them scientifically (medium+message), we can ask, as Albert Camus does, why not choosing the ultimate potentiality anyway? Why not dash away absolutely? Put it in Heideggerian terms, if authentic self is all about a turn(ing) to itself, a kehre, and realize itself away from the They, what could be the reason of re-​turn(ing)? Some choose to scroll forward as David Levy did and keep “searching for meaning”147 when all meaning is gone, but some do not. What is the difference? Jaspers makes an interesting remark: But the more resolutely we are ourselves, the more decisively we learn that we are not ourselves alone, but that we are given to ourselves. Even our own authentic reality as Existenz is not “ultimate” reality.148 This is another way of phrasing what Heidegger has acknowledged. That is, that we will choose from the panier of the They, as it is “constantly present at

143 Sylviane Agacinski, “Another Experiencing of the Question or Experiencing,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-​Luc Nancy (NY: Routledge, 1991), 20; hereafter, Another. 144 Ibid. 145 Levin, Embodiment, 81. 146 Ibid. 147 David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward (NY: Arcade Publishing, 2001), xvii. 148 Jaspers, Philosophy, 68; emphases added.

138 Chapter 4 hand in the basis of care.”149 If meaning, noema, comes from care, ἐν-​νοια, and in the turning to ourselves the ‘ἐν,’ the ‘of’ is dropped, why should I care? Here the distinction de facto/​jure collapse. The how/​why separation is nullified. Can we risk the hypothesis that “we are given to ourselves” could entail that the Other is never only They but that the Other can dis-​sever the contracted point of anticipatory resoluteness and bring us back as in re-​temporalise us? Is not the Other who can re-​introduce Dasein to the being in the world? Can this not be another instance where the Other comes to be our counter-​part to death? There are two possibilities if we look at the way other philosophers have dealt with this aporia. Marion suggests that the analytic of Dasein “designates not so much that which succeeds the subject, but rather the last heir of the subject itself, to the extent that Dasein offers a path whereby it may tear itself away from subjectivity, without being successful.”150 Similarly, Marcel talks about this choosing itself, this contracted point as an ingatheredness where “I ought to say both that I am my life and that I am not my life.”151 Closer to Marcel’s contracted point is Anzaldua’s analogy of embrujada. We are held embrujadas, haunted, contracted, arrested when “the advent of death become[s]‌intolerable.”152 Despite their differences, these accounts take the possibility of an absolute detachment, a pure existential nothingness as a theoretical abstraction. The second possibility is more pragmatic, as suggested by Levin. This Being unto death is taken as a recollection that can only take place on the condition of our being embodied beings. In connecting Heidegger’s investigations on metaphysics –​where human reality is depicted as an organon of truth where truth is unconcealment of being(s)  –​with the analytic of Being and Time, Levin reads the recollection as the coming back to that primordial state where “we are exposed to the solicitations of the presencing of being and opened up to the dimensionality of being. As beings endowed with “ontological bodies,” we mortals can build and dwell in the clearing opened up by the presencing of being, letting ourselves undergo the opening-​up and carrying-​forward of our experience that this presencing can solicit.”153 This reading, however, disregards the existentiale of anxiety. The problem is not that there is not an opening-​up or carrying-​forward, this famous Hegelian surpassing. The problem is how to do those things after the contraction to the ‘I.’ In a colloquial

1 49 Heidegger, bt, 240. 150 Marion, L’Interloque, 240. 151 Marcel, Mystery Vol. i, 137. 152 Anzaldua, Borderlands, 69. 153 Levin, Embodiment, 133.

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sense, what is the motivation towards after all are found(ed) (in) vain? Could Sartre promise an exit from a severed I/​eye? 4

Sartre’s Dynamic Self-​Other in Entropy

If humanity consisted only of platonic philosophers who happened to read Being and Nothingness, then they, the philosophers as kings would have decreed that the writer had condemned human reality to a perennial conflict, antagonism, and endless war. Yet, Sartre would resist the subjection to such a totalitarian outlook by looking back at them. Looking at them and beyond the immediacy of their eyes, seeing on the other side of their royal (and) philosophical occultation would reveal them in their naked being, in their pure subjectivities. Making them ashamed of the nothingness that they really are, de-​throning them and making them fall “into the world in the midst of things.”154 If only for a moment, perhaps, Sartre would have helped them arise free. Sartre is our hodological option to altruism, perhaps. Let us look closely at the Sartrean text and the path he opened for us. “The Existence of Others” in Being and Nothingness starts with a problem, a dissatisfaction, a question. Having previously explored ontologically the being of human reality as self-​consciousness Sartre wonders:  Do other consciousnesses exist? How could we know? For Sartre, neither idealism nor materialism can reveal the Other as self-​consciousness. Ab initio, we have the Berkeleyan thorn of classical idealism:  “The Other’s soul does not give itself “in person to mine.””155 Human reality is not just a material body; a material substance experienced in the world like a stone. A material body is pointing to the soul but cannot deliver it. Then again, there can be no image or representation of the Other qua self-​consciousness. We have no eidos of the Other qua self-​ consciousness. “It remains always possible that the Other is only a body. If animals are machines, why shouldn’t the man whom I see pass in the street be one?”156 Classical idealism here fails. But so does modern idealism construed as what it is like to know the phenomenal consciousness of the Other. I can never know what it is like to experience something from the point of view of another consciousness otherwise I would be them –​we saw that with Husserl as well. Finally, for Sartre, historical materialism fails. Sartre appreciates the Socratic question: How would one define a being, which, being human in all 1 54 Sartre, bn, 289. 155 Ibid., 223. 156 Ibid., 224.

140 Chapter 4 sorts of ways, is different in the sense of having been given birth by beasts? If the Other experience themselves like I experience (of) myself, then historical materialism falls into an idealism; some sort of material idealistic essentialism which could never allow us to know if there is an Other consciousness which can be self-​consciousness. On the other hand, going through Kant, Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger, Sartre feels that their accounts cannot reveal an Other self-​consciousness as they are ensnared in some sort of idealism. The attempts of finding the Other ‘within’ oneself as in a system of representations or deriving them logically from concepts, be they constitutive or regulative, fall one by one like houses of cards touched by a mild breeze. Sartre cannot find any satisfactory account for not affirming the ontological separation as he calls it157 of Self and Other when taken as self-​consciousnesses. Undeniably, human reality “at the very heart of its ekstases remains alone.”158 The Other as a self-​consciousness to be proved logically or from a conceptual structure, syllogistically, or through a substantial world in-​itself will always be a hypothesis that cannot be validated or invalidated. The Other may be “conceived as real, and yet I can not conceive of his real relation to me.”159 How can we know, then, if there is an Other as self-​consciousness? Let us first look briefly at knowledge. For Sartre, “there is only intuitive knowledge.”160 There is no difference between consciousness and knowledge.161 If consciousness is “a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself,”162 then, this primitive negation whereby consciousness is split into an in-​itself and a for-​itself creates the possibility of knowledge. This negation, transcendence, upsurge, dehiscence, detachment, and distance, allows the thrusting forth of consciousness as witness which makes things be on a foundation of its nothingness. Consciousness is knowledge as negation which makes things be. When I say “I am not a chair,” 157 Sartre, bn, 243. This ontological separation means that the Other is tout autre, is always ultimately unrepresentable. Not just another man or woman but any other consciousness (of) self is ultimately unrepresentable. 158 Ibid., 250. 159 Ibid., 229. 160 Ibid., 172. 161 As it will become obvious, we cannot share the motivation of some commentators who share Yiwei Zheng’s reflection on the Sartrean text whereby “what Sartre meant by ‘knowledge’ is cognitive, linguistic, positional consciousness (which does not include pure reflection).” See Yiwei Zheng, “On Pure Reflection in Sartre’s Being and Nothringess,” Sartre Studies International, 7, 1 (2001): 38. 162 Sartre, bn, 172.

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or “I have eaten a doughnut,” consciousness is revealed as the possibility of standing, of being present in-​between two things, this and that  –​me/​chair; me/​eating body. From the chair being here and the doughnut being inside me, there is only a standing consciousness as di-​stance between them which is ultimately nothing. Consciousness is that distance, this very negation which makes them be, “this and that” yet adding nothing to the distance or the differing temporal stages; and without altering them one bit as they are themselves. And this negation is knowledge as the presence of the for-​itself to the things that it negates: that “this is not that.” “It is the very being of the for-​itself in so far as this is presence to_​_​_​; that is, in so far as the for-​itself has to be its being by making itself not to be a certain being to which it is present.”163 Ergo, bodily senses are not immediately related to the ontological structure of knowledge, “nor can we derive knowing in its fundamental structure from the body in any way or manner whatsoever.”164 Concomitantly, if the Other qua consciousness like me were to be proven, then I, as consciousness must be able to experience such a distancing which does not come from me but from another consciousness which can negate, which can know, which can think: another cogito. If the Other exists like I do, then my cogito in its being will be able to disclose the Other not as a structure of itself like an emaciated Kantian category,165 or in terms of being constituted by me. The Other cannot be a concept, either regulative or constitutive. Rather, the only option, if there is an Other qua self-​ consciousness, would be for their cogito to be revealed in my cogito as their cogito; “by disclosing to me the concrete, indubitable presence of a particular ‘concrete’ Other just as it has already revealed to me my own incomparable, contingent but necessary, and concrete existence.”166 Based on these thoughts, the Other as self-​consciousness cannot be revealed here among the signs of this text. Any kind of reflection cannot reveal the Other as self-​consciousness. So, Sartre asks us to think through a modality of consciousness which points to “a radically different type of ontological structure”167 in which the presence of the Other can be traced as self-​consciousness: feeling (a)shame(d). Phenomenologically, during its occurrence, being ashamed is a non-​thetic, non-​positional self-​consciousness. When I am ashamed, what am I ashamed of? To be ashamed cannot be related intentionally to the entities outside me. I am ashamed of myself. So, my consciousness is directed towards 1 63 Ibid., 173. 164 Ibid., 218. 165 Borrowing this expression from Michael Polanyi (Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning). 166 Sartre, bn, 251. 167 Ibid., 221.

142 Chapter 4 me, my-​self. But at the same time it is not me since it is I who am ashamed. Is it the Other? It cannot be the Other of whom I am ashamed because the Other cannot enter into my consciousness of shame in a reflective attitude. Also, “shame is not originally a phenomenon of reflection,”168 while feeling ashamed does (necessarily) change when the whole experience is being reflected. Let us try again. Being ashamed is a self-​consciousness. Let us suppose with Sartre that the intentionality of this experience is interiority, pure immanence. In describing this immanence, however, what comes in-​between the before and the after of this biosis, that is, my being ashamed of this being that I am ashamed of, is the Other. My being of which I become ashamed is conditioned upon the Other. We could say that “The Other makes me feel ashamed as the Other is the condition of my feeling shame.” But we would be going too quickly now. Let us reduce the speed of the reflection. We have already forgotten that, now, we are reflecting on having been ashamed. The Other, whom we just posited as the condition of our being ashamed is not an Other subjectivity, another self-​consciousness like me, but part of our reflected-​on self-​consciousness of shame, or of having been ashamed. If anything, we have assigned the Other a subjectivity, as a subject of a proposition. If shame points to another subjectivity when reflected-​on, then the Other as subjectivity can be revealed when I am originally feeling ashamed, when shame is taking place in the encounter with the being that makes me feel ashamed, in a situation of shame. So, on the one hand, I can only encounter the Other in a situation where the Other makes me feel ashamed (or pride or apprehension). This is how the Other is presented to me, in a situation; it is an encounter, an absolute event. “Thus shame is shame of oneself before the Other.”169 Before, not after –​ the Other comes after me in all senses. On the other hand, shame as an existentiell moment in human reality reveals not only a new mode of being of myself for myself but also the Other as “the indispensable mediator between myself and me.”170 The Other as an Other consciousness, another for-​itself. If we now look reflectively and reconstitute the shameful experience,then the Other as self-​consciousness will not be revealed as they are. We are still in the cogito, in reflective consciousness. But, “a little expanded,”171 it reveals to us “as a fact the existence of the Other and my existence for the Other” in the same way it has revealed my existence. The troubling experience of shame motivates Sartre to suggest that only if there is an Other consciousness like me can I make sense, 1 68 Ibid. 169 Sartre, bn, 222; original emphasis. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., 282.

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understand, the experience of shame. There is no noema of shame if there is not an Other consciousness like me. The Other comes after me. This expansion of the cogito has a transcendental flavour mixed with a reductio ad absurdum. We can put this together as a trascendental reductio ad absurdum. His description seems like a transcendental argument, yet it is not exactly that. For instance, it is not in the sense that we all know that Others like me exist and try desperately to find the methodology which will reveal them with certainty against the skeptic. “We can see here the sophistry of realism.”172 At the same time, it is not the transcendentalism we saw in Heidegger or the one of Merleau-​Ponty –​which we here mention en passant. For Merleau-​Ponty “my experience must in some way present me with other people, since otherwise I should have no occasion to speak of solitude, and could not begin to pronounce other people inaccessible.”173 That Heideggerian thought may be true, yet, Sartre, avoiding the recourse to the medium of meaningful propositions attempts to find the actual experience which meaningfully reveals (to intuition) the Other to me and me to the Other. This is another of Sartre’s innovations which even his critics, like Marjorie Grene,174 had well appreciated. Sartre tries to find ways where logical descriptions and rational exegeses do not contradict the phenomenology of life –​our biosis. In his review of Camus’ ‘absurd,’175 Sartre writes that one has to read both the Myth of Sisyphus in its philosophical explanation of the concept and look at the play The Stranger which makes you feel the absurd: the two sides of consciousness, as he usually puts it, which any philosophical account of being must harmonize. At the same time, the approach introduces a reductio since in the formula “Only if there is an Other as self-​consciousness can I make sense of my feeling (a) shame(d) –​the noema of shame;” the options for the category of the Other are not closed by Sartre. Any possibility of this Other must be like me otherwise shame could not be consciously experienced as such. We can put in the variable ‘Other’ anything, from a robot, to philosophical zombies, aliens, animals to … “whatever or whoever he may be.”176 If they are not a consciousness like me shame would not occur. In a way Sartre anticipates Hilary Putnam’s multiple realisability of consciousness.177 In our perceptual experience, the Other appears as an object –​like the metallic indicator that shows me the seconds of 1 72 Ibid., 224. 173 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 419. 174 Marjorie Grene, Dreadful Freedom, (Chicago: ucp, 1948); hereafter Dreadful. 175 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Situations i (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 92–​112. 176 Sartre, bn, 263. 177 Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Camridge, MA: mit Press, 1988).

144 Chapter 4 the hour. The person that moves to step on that bus that I see coming does not reveal her being a consciousness to me. Even if I have been in that experiential context before, and her whole behavioural schema could be used to appresent her as a consciousness, it is not enough. She might well be a perfected robot. In this sense, Sartre says that, perceptually, pacing the behaviourist, the experience of the Other as a body moving leaves the being of the Other only probable as self-​consciousness. It is “infinitely probable that the passerby whom I see is a man and not a perfected robot.”178 How can I know that they are a self(-​) consciousness179 in my being as self(-​)consciousness? If the Other and the self are necessarily separate and no relation of whole-​ parts defines them; and if the only possibility of one existing for the Other is an immediate certainty as guaranteed by a reflective-​transcendent cogito in its modality of givenness to itself; and if this modality also reveals that the self can never objectify itself even in self(-​)consciousness but only be given as pure presencing to (it)self; then, the only possibility for the existential certainty of the Other, is the Other to be given to me (my cogito) as their cogito, their subjectivity. But since this subjectivity cannot be construed as Cartesian epistemic access, what the Other is in-​itself, it must be given in a mode of an immediate ontic-​existentiell way in fundamental connection with me,180 as a consciousness with the certainty which my cogito can reveal and guarantee for-​itself, as self(-​) consciousness. In Theunissen’s word’s “the task has much rather to be, or Sartre thinks, that of leaving the encounter with the Other its factical character and still exhibiting its indubitability.”181 Only if there is another like me, can I make sense of my experience of presenting to myself my self as another (that I am what I am not and I am not what I am, that is self(-​)consciousness) which is shame. Let us retrace Sartre’s steps. My world opens up as an instrumental complex. I, as a consciousness, I am always for something. A plethora of possibilities which I can realize. The Other 1 78 Sartre, bn, 253. 179 Henceforth, whenever we are referring to Sartre’s conceptualization of conscience (de) soi we will be using the signs self(-​)consciousness by putting the dash in parenthesis. We believe this is closer to Sartre’s intention. The term ‘self’ might suppose for many readers a closure, a concrete, distinct, self-​contained entity either materially or conceptually, a conceptual unity of ‘self;’ and this, in our reading, is precisely what Sartre wanted to avoid. The consciousness (of) self is not self-​consciousness; there cannot be closure in the self being consciousness of itself hence the dash must be, as Derrida would say, sous rature, to remind us that there is always something non intentional which does not present itself in-​itself-​for-​itself. 180 Ibid. 181 Theunissen, Other, 205.

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first appears as an object amongst objects for my project, my objective. Now, if I take the body over there which moves as hiding a possible subjectivity, I would immediately and non-​reflexively pass into a theoretical mode and treat them as subjects. The Other would just be a point of reference as they appear in my conscious horizon, “a privileged object.”182 Yet, when I attempt to thematize my world with the other as a subject(ivity), as a referential pole, it does not mean that the Other magically becomes an Other qua subjectivity qua me. The Other becomes subject as they are subject to my categories183 or to my web of (objective) metrical relations –​to borrow from Marcel’s184 reading of Sartre. If, however, I constitute the probable Other there as a subject like me, then, when I do that, when I thematize the world like that, the world does not open up as the way it did before, but, rather, it escapes me. “Nevertheless, this new relation”185 which is given at once reveals a being which cannot essentially be revealed to me. “[T]‌here is a regrouping in which I take part but which escapes me, a regrouping of all the objects which people my universe.”186 The Other as object, when treated as subject(ivity) (by me) in my consciousness, escapes me. They escape me because the world cannot reveal to me its being and its potentiality from that subjective view and it simultaneously reveals a being and a potentiality which is denied to me; and, at the same time denies (disintegrates),187 the one that my subjectivity reveals for-​itself. What Sartre emphasizes is that our concern about the existence of the Other as self(-​)consciousness is not just another version of the Cartesian observation that we cannot have epistemic access to their phenomenal experience. The phenomenal experience, the “what it is like,” always refers to a past modality –​of being conscious in the mode of the in-​itself. The taste of the coffee as sweet is past/​passed at the very moment I refer to it as sweet. Here, Sartre’s point extends to a future modality. When I suppose the Other body being like me, a consciousness, from a resemblance I see in that thingly body over there, I cannot have direct access to it the way I have to my own. If I did, as we saw with Husserl, I would be them. However, the disintegration which experience points to is an “appearance of a man in my universe.”188 The issue of finding

1 82 Theunissen, Other, 254. 183 Ibid. 184 Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (NY: Citadel, 1970), 70; hereafter, Existentialism. 185 Sartre, bn, 255. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid.

146 Chapter 4 another consciousness then is how the world opens up for them as a for-​itself. Merleau-​Ponty fully appreciates this delicate point when he writes: My consciousness, being co-​extensive with what can exist for me, and corresponding to the whole system of experience, cannot encounter in that system, another consciousness capable of bringing immediately to light in the world the background, unknown to me, of its own phenomena. … even if I succeeded in thinking of it [the other body there] as constituting the world, it would be I who would be constituting the consciousness as such, and once more I should be the sole constituting agent.189 Even if I treat that Other body as subjectivity just because it looks and acts like me, I can never have access to its motivations. The Other, alone, and from a sceptical distance, cannot be revealed as a (subjectivity) for-​itself to me. What is revealed is a phenomenon whereby, if treated as a subject(ivity) in the horizon of my other objects, that body just ceases to be what they were for me before, that is, when the Other was just treated as an object within an overarching instrumental complex. That is, the world is not correlatively unified as it does in my consciousness since (my) objects are now subjected by another consciousness hypothesized by me, revealing potentialities and thematizations that negate mine. But that does not reveal the Other as a subjectivity for-​itself –​the way my cogito has revealed mine. Both situations fall under the concept of ‘asujettissement’ (subjection, subjugation). What reveals the Other to me is their metaphysically looking at me: In a word, my apprehension of the Other in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent possibility of being-​seen-​by-​him; that is, to the permanent possibility that a subject who sees me may be substituted for the object seen by me.190 The look is the process by which self and Other are revealed to each other, offered to each other, in their being as self(-​)consciousnesses. But this look is not just a look as looking at the grass. It is a metaphysical look, a look of meaning to. Many eyes can be directed at me, but not all of those eyes constitute

1 89 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 407. 190 Sartre, bn, 257.

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a looking at me which can be felt as such, like Thomas Mann describes this delicately in Tonio Kröger: The spectator by the glass door of the dining room was now beginning to attract attention after all, and from handsome flushed faces uncordial and inquiring looks were cast in his direction; but he stood his ground. Ingeborg and Hans glanced at him too, almost simultaneously, with that air of utter indifference so very like contempt. But suddenly he became conscious that a gaze from some other quarter had sought him out and was resting on him … He turned his head, and his eyes at once met those whose scrutiny he had sensed. Not far from him a girl was standing, … She had lowered her head and was gazing up at Tonio Kröger with dark, melting eyes. He turned away …191 It is a look which questions our world. Such quest from the Other’s I/​Eye makes us a-​shame-​d. It is the nothingness of an-​other negation, of an other (w)hole in the world that I feel piercing my whole world and revealing my (w) hole of it. This quest(ion)ing does not derive from the ‘ocular balls.’ It passes through them as the question aims at an Other. The look is blind with respect to the eyes; the visibility of the Other is not related to vision in Sartre’s look. In the example of Sartre’s looking through a keyhole and experiencing someone looking at him, he experiences shame. My being ashamed is “a shameful apprehension of something and this something is me.”192 It is the Other’s look which originally makes me feel ashamed. The origin, the arche of shame is an Other consciousness. Shame is the trace of an Other consciousness in reflection encountered by me in a situation. In my project of getting satisfaction as a peeping Tom, I am leaning towards the keyhole to be able to see someone on the other side of the door.193 I freely create the situation by subjecting the other in order to express my desire. In that setting the entities around me are objectified by me as my project –​even that body behind the keyhole is another object as part of/​for my objective, the possibility of my (consciousness (of)) satisfaction. In leaning towards the keyhole, I am transcending towards being satisfied. I am not being just a body that leans through the keyhole –​I am what I am not and I am not what I am. When 191 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (Mishawaka, IN: Bantam, 1988), 129. 192 Sartre, bn, 221. 193 It is always on the other side of a door where consciousness happens –​we shall come back to the door in the end as a beginning.

148 Chapter 4 the Other looks at me and I apprehend it, this (Sartrean) facticity is sundered. The immediacy of my being conscious of getting satisfaction, this unreflected consciousness, which is me as the organization of the world toward that objective, where all things are without distance from myself in this relational circuit, this whole; all this is sundered, disconnected, put into relief, mise hors circuit. With the look of the Other my project is destroyed; a catastrophe takes place. All the objects receive a distance; the whole ‘satisfaction’ is shattered; pierced by a look which reveals its parts of which I am one. The whole becomes a hole out of which irrupt parts, the keyhole, the handle, the door, a body next to the door. At the same time, a self which would have appeared only in reflective consciousness appears now and “comes to haunt the unreflective consciousness.”194 A self is constituted through a motivation which is not mine. Something else mobilizes the elements of the world while immobilizing me. I am not a consciousness (of) satisfaction any more but a consciousness (of) seeing my self as … here as a voyeur: “I am a voyeur.” I receive a being which is the being seen as I am. The Other, another constituting subjectivity, reveals to me my being as being observed because it can subject everything into beings other than itself, that is, make them be. But this revelation is at the same time a revelation of the Other as an Other freedom revealed to me through my being ashamed. The Other’s freedom is revealed to me insofar as my consciousness (of) shame is indetermination and unpredictability for (my) being. I cannot escape it. In being ashamed, shame is something that I am but it is out of my control; I cannot shake it off. I am nearly utterly passive. By being looked at, by being seen as an object amidst other objects, the Other is revealed to me at the same time, simultaneously, by the fact that I can be in the process of being objectified by an entity which can objectify, another freedom, subjectivity, transcendence. At the same time, the Other reveals their freedom to me, as my being ashamed is a revelation of a free organization of the world which in principal escapes me. Shame opens a wound and makes my world bleed, it is an “internal haemorrhage.”195 If only for an instant, I am an object for the Other and a subjectivity for me, an in-​itself-​for-​itself; a being “in the midst of the world which is at once this world and beyond this world.”196 Shame reveals both the Other as a freedom and my subjectivity to me –​in the way my cogito would have reflected it had it reflectively reflected-​on itself. 1 94 Sartre, bn, 260. 195 Ibid., 261. We could call it a blessing; a wound felt from the inside if we were to borrow from Anzaldua (Anzaldua, Borderlands, 64). 196 Sartre, bn, 261.

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I am being looked at, I feel ashamed, my possibilities are altered. This alteration is not just a different reorientation toward instrumental complexes, not yet. That would only be another form of transcendence that I could have initiated myself. This alter-​ation of possibilities is an alienation of my transcendence. Sartre calls it my transcendence-​transcended. The world opens up and closes to reopen through the Other in their being present as a freedom, as a transcendence. In being ashamed, a new horizon of possibilities opens up. That dark corner which was previously present-​at-​hand now stands as a ready-​to-​hand possibility where I could hide and avoid getting caught, though only to close again as a possibility insofar as in the Other’s freedom it is also a probability of being illuminated to reveal my being hiding. The possibility of the dark corner becomes a dead possibility for me. My transcendence is transcended by the Other’s freedom. When I transcend to that hidden corner as a place to hide, the Other as a freedom could transcend it by illuminating it, and thereby negating my transcendence. This corner is not a hiding place when I –​speaking from the Other’s perspective here –​illuminate it. Sartre concludes: “The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”197 This is how the Other is revealed to me as another consciousness. The Other reveals my being and their being directly in my consciousness. This see-​saw structure is not, however, interpreted teleologically by Sartre in the Hegelian sense as Jacques Lacan does. The Other is not there to be ultimately destroyed –​or to destroy me. That is an open issue, an empirical issue in the naïve sense; time will tell. This see-​saw can only happen if myself and the Other are simultaneously present. It is at the same ‘time-​and-​space’ that the dark corner arises as a possibility for me and a probability for the Other only to remain as a dead possibility for me. It is a temporalising-​with and a temporalising-​through the Other and their probabilities. It is a “trans-​mundane” presence198 of the Other. The look presences the Other as freedom, a free subjectivity, a for-​itself. It is not the spatiality of the organs that look at me. It is the look which is revealing my transcendence which in turn is revealing the disruption of my immersion in a situation in the same way that my reflective consciousness would have disrupted my being immersed in my situation. But because I can never be an object of myself as this chair is an object for me, the Other is “the being for whom I am an object; that is, the being through whom I gain my objectness.”199 Therefore, the Other with their look presents itself in my consciousness and is manifested affectively (pride/​shame). So while we cannot prove the Other 1 97 Sartre, bn, 264. 198 Ibid., 270. 199 Ibid., 271.

150 Chapter 4 either as a representation or a Kantian category, or, pace Husserl, as a structural element found in a phenomenological epoche, we can be conscious of them as they deliver ourselves to ourselves in a way that we are unable to. The Other is present in my consciousness as I am conscious of this presence which is manifested in an affective correlate: This demonstrates sufficiently that it is not in the world that the Other is first to be sought but at the side of consciousness as a consciousness in which and by which consciousness makes itself be what it is. Just as my consciousness apprehended by the cogito bears indubitable witness of itself and of its own existence, so certain particular consciousnesses –​for example, “shame-​consciousness” –​bear indubitable witness to the cogito both of themselves and of the existence of the Other.200 Now we can go back to the compelling thesis. Only if there is another like me, only if an Other comes after me, can I make sense of my experience of presenting to myself my self as another (I am what I am not and I am not what I am) which is phenomenalized in the modalities of shame/​pride. Sartre’s ‘if’ is not the modern logical conditional construed within a binary presupposition: where something is constituted as xyz, it cannot (onto)(nomo)logically be A and not-​A at the same time and in the same place; thus states the thesis of non-​contradiction and exclusion of the middle term. Sartre assumes one of the ancient conditionals: the ἅμᾰ. What Derrida shows us in his analysis of the ἅμᾰ201 in Aristotle’s discourse on time or through the Platonic φάρμακον,202 is precisely this non-​binary logical option, the inclusion of the middle, the middle voice. A logic which included rather than excluded the middle voice in its representations. The pharmakon is both cure and poison at the same time, in the same space. The ‘logic’ of life cannot tolerate a phenomenology which applies principles of exclusion.203 This ἅμᾰ is what makes Sartre’s thesis so compelling. 2 00 Sartre, bn, 271; emphases added. 201 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The Harvester Press Limited, 1982); hereafter Margins. 202 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981); hereafter, Dissemination. 203 Husserl, for instance, while bracketing and abstaining from everything in the phenomenological and transcendental reductions, he sometimes leaves the principle of non-​ contradiction and exclusion of the middle term intact. In the Ideas I we read: “The only propositions of logic to which phenomenology might have occasion to refer to would therefore be mere logical axioms, like the law of contradiction, axioms the universal and absolute validity of which it would be able to make evident, however, on the basis of examples included among its own date” (136). We say sometimes since in The Idea of

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When the if is construed as ἅμᾰ then there cannot be an experience of shame or pride without the Other as another consciousness like me –​any other exegesis becomes absurd. These are happening both at the same time, at the same place. I feel ashamed ἅμᾰ there is an Other and/​or there is an Other ἅμᾰ I feel ashamed. I/​The Other comes to be each Other’s counterpart: The Other side of my consciousness. And now we can better understand Sartre’s use of the metaphor of the perfected robot in order to emphasize that the factuality of the Other through their body in dis/​tance cannot reveal their subjectivity just because it seems to be analogous to mine, empathetically. The perfected robot is an in-​itself, an en-​soi, by the very fact that it is already finite in its programming. There is no pour-​soi in something programmed and perfected, be it even the most open system possible in quantum mechanics. Consciousness, subjectivity, is free through and through to constitute. Consciousness is not a system or “a formula.”204 Consciousness is pure motivation insofar as it is, its being is in question by being other than it is. The Other, if they exist as I exist, must be a true openness, a total freedom to be whatever they can be motivated to be, that is, they can choose out of the infinite rather than to adapt to the infinite possibilities of a (pre)determined finitude. Seeing Robert Olson’s relevant analysis one could even conclude that ‘consciousness and motivation’ is a tautology for Sartre. Yet, we have to re-​underscore that consciousness for both Husserl and Sartre is not a causa sui; it is a motivation:205 Phenomenology all principles and axions of what we refer to as ‘logic’ in modernity are “questionable” and “dubious” even if they are moderately espoused (18). In Experience and Judgment the mental seeing which is the method required to uncover the eidos presupposes a thinking without it: “… what is seen as unity in the conflict is not an individual but a concrete hybrid unity of individuals mutually nullifying and coexistentially exclusive: a unique consciousness with a unique content, whose correlate signifies concrete unity founded in conflict, in incompatibility. This remarkable hybrid unity is at the bottom of essential seeing” (345). Following Husserl’s oscillations will lead us astray with respect to altruism. Suffice it to say that Husserl keeps the principle for objective truths, that is, truths with respect to objects of actuality. This is required since reality requires time and its conditions. Everything, following Kant, is in time rather than time being in everything. The condition of experience found in immediate intuition has time as its form. (cf Husserl, Experience, 355). 204 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: yip, 2007), 21; hereafter, Humanism. 205 If anything, Sartre fully respected Husserl’s consciousness as motivation unlike many Husserlian and neo-​Husserlian thinkers who miss the 70+ pages in Ideas ii where motivation is explained by Husserl in a non-​causal way and with a particular paragraph (§60) to ‘resistance’ and the ‘I can.’ Sartre made just one addition: the embodied Other; who can motivate me as myself for myself. By analogizing motivation with consciousness, Sartre

152 Chapter 4 For the same reasons it is impossible to assign to a consciousness a motivation other than itself. Otherwise it would be necessary to conceive that consciousness to the degree to which it is an effect, is not conscious (of) itself. It would be necessary in some manner that it should be without being conscious (of) being. We should fall into that too common illusion which makes consciousness semi-​conscious or a passivity. But consciousness is consciousness through and through. It can be limited only by itself.206 That is why the relation with another consciousness is metaphysical and not causal. It is not because of the other that I feel ashamed. The look of the Other as a conscious look is not like looking at the grass, at the wall. When the look is directed at me it reveals to me and through me the Other by delivering me (a being ‘outside’ of me) to myself –​the look is the pure middle voice. It confers a felt outside to my transcendence.207 Sartre, to be fair, does not even consider the Other as a condition of shame. The Other can only be revealed as a motivation. Many commentators, for example Dan Zahavi, interpret the latter as intervention and the Other as mediator being me and myself of whom I feel ashamed of. Shame, Zahavi says, “presupposes the intervention of the other, not merely because the other is the one before whom I feel ashamed, but also and more significantly because that of which I am ashamed is only constituted in and through my encounter with the other.”208 But it is very difficult to be motivated by such accounts. But let us try. Let us look at what Zahavi refers to with the proposition ‘that of which I am ashamed is only constituted.’ What is ‘that’ which is constituted? Nothing, or better, still, no thing. Nothing is constituted by me from the Other’s look. Being conscious of being looked at, the look of the Other, “is first an intermediary which refers from me to myself.”209 Being ashamed is both a being that I am as being ashamed and, simultaneously, a being that I am not as the one who is being ashamed of (my self). The other does not intervene but motivates. He is not a mediator, if by that we permit the creeping in of a rusty causal link not only overcomes the binary conscious/​unconscious, but also, anticipates the figuration of the schizoanalytic desire. With Deleuze and Guattari, desire comes as aferential. It does not point to a transcendental signifier, a particular ‘I’ but a field of rhizomatic ‘conditions.’ This determinate indeterminable transcendental field, even when referred to linguistically as desire which motivates, displaces the possibility of economizing this field. 206 Sartre, bn, 27. 207 Ibid., 263. 208 Zahavi, Subjectivity, 213. 209 Ibid., 259.

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to supplement a metaphysical source of motivation. The self is affecting the self through and through by being motivated by the Other; it is not a causal reaction as Gavin Rae210 describes it. It is a feeling, an affectivity inspired by the Other reacting on my own. The minute I am conscious of being a voyeur I fail to be one. I can resume being a voyeur but that’s my choice. The original being for-​itself has been shattered; to continue to believe in it would be pure bad faith: “the objective fact of the being-​in-​itself of the consciousness of the Other is posited in order to disappear in negativity and freedom.”211 The Other, if they are like me, can cause things to happen and they can be motivated. But to be motivated by the Other means essentially that the Other is not an inert other –​just a material object; a stone cannot motivate me –​but a subjectivity like me can. Causation runs to the physical plane while motivation in its ontological sense –​if motivation has any meaning at all –​runs in the metaphysical. The Other as another self(-​)consciousness is a motivation whose other side is resistance –​no perfected robot can resist its programming or be in bad faith. So the Other can only be revealed to me ἅμᾰ they reveal me at the same time and in the same place. Magically (borrowing from The Transcendence of the Ego)212 or metaphysically (from the attestation in Materialism and Revolution),213 they motivate me, they reveal me by resisting me. The Other’s look is a “shock which seizes,”214 a catastrophe which is immediately a strophe, a turning about or a turning towards myself, that is, entropy, shame.215 210 Gavin Rae, “Sartre and the Other:  Conflict, Conversion, the Other, & the We,” Sartre Studies International, 15, 2, (2009): 54–​77; hereafter, Conflict. 211 Sartre, bn, 62. 212 Sartre, Transcendence. 213 Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” trans. Annette Michelson in Literary and Philosophical Essays (NY: Collier Books), 198–​256. 214 Sartre, bn, 264. 215 Entropy genuinely means shame:  http://​stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/​lsj/​#eid=37403&​context=​ lsj&action=hw-​list-​click. Luce Irigaray seems to be following closely a Sartrean path in Sharing the World (Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (London: Continuum, 2008); hereafter, Sharing). She writes: “… a subject who limits my freedom but restores my impetus by reopening my own world is not sufficiently envisioned. The Western philosopher considers that the relation to the world is determined by a single centre of source, a single opening to the world. Now the freedom of the other represents another opening, another project or centre with respect to the world” (Ibid., 76). This re-​opening is sometimes called by Irigaray an ‘anastrophe’ which literally means a turning around. The limiting of my freedom, which we called with Sartre ‘catastrophe,’ a des/​dis-​traction, is followed by an anastrophe, an entropy, a dis-​straction, by an other transcendence. The Other’s look “can call me back there” (Ibid., 94). And this calling diss-​es my course. It shocks and seizes my course as transcendence in the world. “This calling back to ourselves is also a calling back to the present” (ibid).

154 Chapter 4 From the perspective of the cogito there is no initiative and no effort; the look is a moment of désœuvrement, “a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted,”216 or, in Sartre’s words “both ekstatic cohesion and the character of the in-​itself.,”217 but only for a moment because consciousness always questions itself, flees itself. This re-​turning to and revealing myself is motivated by an Other other than myself in reflection “as if”218 it were myself. It is through encountering the Other as a free subjectivity that the category of “as if” comes about when later on in our personal reflections we will try to constitute, to provide an ac(curate)-​count of the en-​count-​ering the Other as a response to the question of the existence of the Other. Apart from shame, Sartre will use the body as another example that points to the phenomenonalizing of an Other subjectivity. In this case, the body which I am is to be objectified by the Other. I am my body or as Sartre says I exist my body. I cannot render my body an object for myself. Everything else is an object for me where my body stands as a reference point where all other entities reveal their objectivity for me. As Adrian van Kaam219 put it, my body is a bridge to the world. We could extend this metaphor by analogizing the body as a diving board; the board from which I try to dive and get acquainted with the world. In this sense I cannot identify with my body, as I am and I am not my body at the same time and place. I can only div(id)e (in) the world with the body that I am; I cannot objectify my body without destroying it and with it the world that is revealed through or in virtue of this body. The body is the medium but the medium is not the message –​I transmit myself to the world through this body. However, the Other can utilize and know my body as an object in a way that I cannot. As shame reveals me, myself in pure immanence, shyness reveals my body as experienced as object for the Other-​as-​subject. In both cases it appears that “the Other accomplishes for us a function of which we are incapable and which nevertheless is incumbent on us: to see ourselves as we are.”220 However, whereas in the first case it is me, in my transcendence-​ transcended and in pure interiority that I grasp myself as the Other alienates my possibilities as subjectivity –​or, in Sartrean terms, as a for-​itself, the Other We shall encounter again this shock when we face Pierce’s shocking question in our last passage towards the Other. 216 Agamben, Sacer, 62. 217 Sartre, bn, 266. 218 Ibid., 227. 219 Adrian van Kaam, “Sex and Existence,” in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, eds. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’ Connor, (Englewood Clifs, NJ:  Prentice-​Hall, 1967); hereafter, Sex. 220 Sartre, bn, 353–​354.

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arrests my transcendence and I am presented to myself as a for-​itself-​in-​itself –​ in the case of the Body, the “how we are” is relayed to us not in pure immanence, as this is not possible, but through language –​broadly construed as means of representation. (My) body is alienated through an accessory reflection which is nothing but an observation coming from ourselves where the body is just a quasi-​object:  “we constitute it as a quasi-​object by means of an accessory reflection.”221 This quasi-​object is the psychic body, the alienated lived body. To make that quasi-​object an object we need the Other, or better, the language that the Other can freely use and which we can understand. With the Other as a consciousness it is possible to reveal myself as a body’s object-​ness, in a way I could otherwise never have access to. I need another freedom which can attempt to objectify it just as in the case of the for-​itself where I need the Other to reveal me as a for-​itself-​in-​itself. Ergo, I need the Other. Without the Other I cannot exist, “the Other’s disappearance as look throws me back into my unjustifiable subjectivity and reduces my being to this perpetual pursued-​pursuit toward an inapprehensible In-​ itself-​for-​itself.”222 And this is why we desire the Other’s body. Looking for the Other’s subjectivity is realized by an attempt to objectify the Other (looking at) and can only be motivated if the Other suggests their being a subjectivity. As the Other is found in the world with us and suggests their subjectivity by their looking at us, this being will first and foremost be revealed in a situation as Body. That is why the body is not desired only in its pure materiality. The body which is desired, “the organic totality which is immediately present to desire is desirable only in so far as it reveals not only life but also an appropriate consciousness.”223 Consciousness, revealed by a look passing through ocular balls, is the motivation toward the Other who is the only possibility of revealing what I am. So the Other’s For-​itself must come to play on the surface of his body, and be extended all through his body; and by touching this body I should finally touch the Other’s free subjectivity.224

2 21 Ibid., 355. 222 Ibid., 381. 223 Irigaray phrases this phenomenon thus: “The objectivity of the other [the other’s body] cannot be reduced to any object; it corresponds to a reality irreducible to any subjectivity, but is, however, a perceptible expression of it, a sort of phenomenal projection of the existence of the other” (Irigaray, Sharing, 87). 224 Sartre, bn, 381.

156 Chapter 4 Through my attempt to capture the Other’s body in desire I reveal myself and the Other as incarnated consciousness but always from my perspective. I experience my consciousness incarnated by my body as flesh through the erotic desire in the caress. The body of the Other which appears, which phenomenalizes itself as erotic desire, questions. An embodied consciousness is attracted to another embodied consciousness as a question, a manifold question.225 For Sartre, this question is a quest(ion) of revealing free subjectivity –​a quest to touch the Other as subjectivity. I experience my flesh through the Other as my body is an object for them in pure passivity, and at the same time I do the same for them when I caress them. To be precise, the transcendence of self and Other is limited to each other. I  can never, as Sartre says, fully objectify myself. If it were possible I  would become an in-​itself which can never happen. But in intimate encounters with the Other, the Other becomes the limit of my transcendence and I to theirs in caressing. It is this limiting of the transcendence which reveals my self and the Other as incarnated consciousnesses in caressing. The Other’s body is not found in an instrumental complex to be used for; it is not a possibility of something that the self sees for-​itself. It is there in its presence against which the Other’s Body is revealed as flesh. Desire is just the manifestation “of that reciprocity”226 to reveal my Being through the Other while I reveal theirs. But since I am never aware of the true nature of my desire, the caress degenerates into taking over a body as an object of satisfaction. “I take and discover myself in the process of taking, but what I take in my hands is something else than what I wanted to take.”227 When I surpass the limit of the transcendence which reveals to my consciousness both my and the Other’s freedom, we degenerate into the phenomena of objectification of the Other expressed bodily in masochism, sadism and so on. If I surpass the limits through which the Other consciousness reveals itself by itself in the surface of the body, then no matter how much I turn it around or penetrate it, it would only be revealed to me as what it is in-​itself, pure materiality. Although Sartre introduces us to a brand new dynamic phenomenology of the Other he raises expectations which are not in the end met, perhaps. There is one objection against the look which Sartre anticipates and directs to himself. Yet, as Sartre has well appreciated, there will be no definite answer to this one particular question, because it is the question itself, the philosophical question. It is the question of the being of presence. 2 25 van Kaam, Sex, 230. 226 Sartre, bn, 398. 227 Ibid.

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It could always be the case that I feel that I am being looked at and yet nothing is revealed as such in the horizon to motivate such an affectivity from my side; I could (have) be(en) mistaken. But Sartre says no. Even in those cases, the Other, as we said earlier, cannot be conceived simply as a physical-​material substance. The fact that I can perceive the Other in that noise behind me, a noise which challenges my enterprise as (being) immersed in my instrumental complexes in (unreflective228) consciousness, reveals phenomenologically that “the Other is present everywhere, below me, above me, in the neighbouring rooms; I feel profoundly my being-​for-​others.”229 Later on, Sartre tells us that “the Other’s omnipresence is the fundamental fact, the objectivity of my being-​there is a constant dimension of my facticity.”230 This is consistent in terms of shame and of shyness were I am presented in a reflective consciousness with a being as the Other sees it; for example, I  can still feel ashamed reminiscing of something which happened a year ago. Clearly, a material presence of an embodied consciousness, hic et nunc is not required. But that can only happen in a reflective mode in which case, retrieving Sartre’s old term, is a (past-​present) consciousness reflected-​on. Shall we not suppose a difference in the situation with an embodied Other? How can we reconcile the Other’s omnipresence with the difference between the Other as embodied in a situation and the Other as a mis(ed)taken sound –​particularly in consciousness (of) shame reflected-​on? Also, if a noise coincided with the silent entrance of a thief who could become present in my horizon, which of the Other’s look would have primacy? Would there be a difference? Are they overdetermined? How could the two ‘looks’ be reconciled in the reflected-​on consciousness where we trace the Other? Sartre always asks us to account for the being of differences in being. And if the look of the Other is a constant dimension of my facticity to which facticity do we refer? Is it the fact that I am always an Other for myself or that the Other is revealed to me through being an Other for myself? Let us reflect. To say, on the one hand, that the Other pushes me to a particular horizon of possibilities based on a re-​interpretation of the world because of their looking at me is close to saying that I do not choose my possibilities authentically just

228 Gavin Rae analyzes the Look through the concept of “pre-​reflective” consciousness which is ultimately the for-​itself. We want so much to agree with this interpretation yet there is a question. Why did Sartre, who introduced the pre-​reflective in the introduction, started using the unreflected in the Look? Is there any meaning other than possible error behind this? We are satisfied with posing the question and reserve a hypothesis for a later work (Rae, Conflict). 229 Sartre, bn, 277. 230 Ibid., 354.

158 Chapter 4 like in the case of the Heideggerian They. If the Other directs me towards_​_​ how does this direction matter? When the Other interrupts my project it “is to be defined as an escape-​from-​itself towards_​_​_​.”231 In Heidegger, we have an undifferentiated self in the They who in order to be itself needs to break off from the They; and in Sartre we have a concrete cogito which could be dissolved into an alienated cogito insofar as it is being affected by the presence of an undifferentiated Other-​look as They. On the other hand, what will condition that affectivity? If I am to claim the noise behind me as a possible look toward me, then the look is not a look but something () in my horizon which arrests my attention, brackets my transcendence, my for-​itself, my project. If this is a structure of Being as Sartre claims, one of the three ekstases of the being of human reality, then it cannot be conditioned on the particularity of the ontic-​existentiell occurrence but rather expressed by it. Either as a peeping Tom or as just looking through a window at the Parthenon or daydreaming, something () must result in the my-​being-​ seen which comes to present (to) myself as my being seen. Lacan reads this in a similar way and turns the look into a gaze that “sees itself”232 or thinks it does in the insatiable desire of the ‘subject’ to master itself by unifying itself. It is “a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other”233 to perpetuate the narcissistic desire to be (the) one, to the master(y) of an illusory I/​eye. But with this gaze this () is imagined within me as being the Other. I give “body to the gaze.”234 Rightfully, perhaps, Lacan asks But does this mean that originally it is in the relation of subject to subject, in the function of the existence of others as looking at me, that we apprehend what the gaze really is? Is it not clear that the gaze intervenes here only in as much as it is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels himself surprised, but the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire?235 2 31 Sartre, bn, 100. 232 Jacques Lacan, “Towards a Genetic Theory of the Ego,” in The Body, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 226; hereafter, Genetic. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 Lacan, Genetic, 227. The desire that Lacan speaks of is the desire of the unity of identity, of an Ideal-​I, which we always strive to achieve as we are trying to escape the abyss of desire opened up as lack after the dehiscence of the primitive state of the ultimate satisfaction in the womb, the so called primitive narcissism. We cannot enter into the details of Lacanian mis(sed)-​readings of the Sartrean text. Suffice it to say that it seems to us that we look at Sartre’s look as ontologically neutral. Sartre does not rely on any regulative idea such as evolution or utility as Lacan does in order to describe human reality as

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This seeing itself is not the choosing itself in the case of Heidegger. It is an attempt to apprehend ourselves from without or as a thing. But it is my encountering from without not my encountering an Other embodied being; the latter is encountered as if it were me. In this, Lacan appears exact. Sartre tell us elsewhere that this is the typical structure of the for-​itself, of consciousness. This turning back upon the self is a wrenching away from self in order to return to it. It is this turning back which effects the appearance of reflective nothingness. For the necessary structure of the for-​itself requires that its being can be recovered only by a being which itself exists in the form of for-​itself. Thus the being which effects the recovery must be constituted in the mode of the for-​itself, and the being which is to be recovered must exist as for-​itself. And these two beings must be the same being.236 Can we accept that the being of this event (in the Sartrean sense) claims the same being as in the case of the embodied presence of an Other who interrupts my project –​if the Other is another for-​itself? Is there a difference? Even if we cannot fully follow Lacan’s insatiable desire as lack which ultimately destroys the Other outside the symbolic-​reasoned world, we can admit that Lacan’s gaze at the look reveals interesting things: the phenomenon of surprise and desire. We shall keep these in reserve and continue with the look. With their look, the Other not only arrests my transcendence but ‘destroys it.’ I stop being immersed in looking at the Parthenon or daydreaming. I wake up and reveal this immersion, this for-​itself to myself  –​the for-​itself passes into the in-​itself:  I was looking at the Parthenon  –​the being looking at the Parthenon was made-​to-​be/​is-​was, est été.237 The Other has darkened the Parthenon revealing to me my looking at the Parthenon. There is a scotoma, in the Greek sense, a darkening, a killing of the initial transcendence: the initial transcendence is killed, is transcended. But what is this killing? Is it a death as an inability to transcend? –​ Yes, if it refers to the initial project that has been transcended; it has been killed, it is in-​itself. No Proust can bring it back as it was (being) for-​itself.

such (Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sherdian (London: Routledge, 1989), 5; hereafter, Ecrits). The being of negation is not a Hegelian lack which “has no other outcome –​Hegel teaches us this –​than the destruction of the other” (Ibid., 220). The Other is missing just like ‘I.’ (See Jacques Lacan and Jeffrey Mehlman, “The Other is Missing,” in Television (1987): 131–​133). 236 Sartre, bn, 154. 237 Ibid., 22.

160 Chapter 4 –​

No, because it is not me who is killed, scotom-​ised but only my being as a particular transcendence, as a motivation towards. The Other does not annihilate me by looking at me, they destroy me. But this destruction, is just distraction, catastrophe. “Man’s relation with being is that he can modify it.”238 We can never annihilate; we only modify; destroy/​ create is that relation of modification. The Other destroys the towards, our intentionality: the motivation towards remains; “the destruction of all objectivity for me.”239 The motivation itself is still there, if only for a moment suspended, deferred;240 it is looking to hold on to something else. It is just free, if only for a moment, anxious towards; “in suspense … in the mode of the ‘not yet’ or of ‘the already-​no-​longer.’241 The for-​itself-​in-​itself revealed in anxiety of no thing in particular, with no intentionality, warded but not worded. Destruction is nothing other but the modification of possibilities; to turn to a new direction (κατά-​στροφή), a cata-​strophe, a new trope, a new intentionality, a new course, a new path to reveal the world. Destruction is at the same time creation –​from stroy to story. Insofar as I live, I am a for-​itself, a possibility. Therefore, the Other as a destroyer, a distractor motivates me towards_​_​. But how can the Other be revealed as Other qua me when the transcendence-​ transcended as “rejected possibles in turn have no other being than their “sustained-​being;” it is I  who sustain them in being, inversely, their present non-​being is an “ought-​not-​to-​be-​sustained”?242 In other words: If anxiety is revealed in the same way in the look as, for example, in walking over a ridge and deciding how to proceed, there is not ultimate possibility rather than the one I make to be. Is there a difference between these two phenomena of making to be? What is the felt difference between my own motivation and the motivation I receive from the Other such that will allow both to reveal the other subjectivity as embodied consciousness and overcome the philosophical reef of solipsism? If there is no difference between the Other as an embodied consciousness and the Stoic Other as They, are they, Merleau-​Ponty –​interpretation of Sartre as pure idealism –​Heidegger –​the Other as They –​ and Lacan –​subject of sustaining itself in desire –​not right to criticize Sartre? We need to go back and clarify the two negations of self(-​)consciousness: the external and the internal. According to Sartre, the external relation is rather easy. When I say that ‘this cup is not this inkwell’ there is a being as a witness 2 38 Ibid., 24. 239 Ibid., 267. 240 “For a moment, the totality of the world is kept in suspense” (Irigaray, Sharing, 89). 241 Sartre, bn, 285. 242 Ibid., 31.

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(myself) that stands in-​between these beings and can categorize them without altering them in any way in their being. “Both of these objects are what they are and that is all.”243 However, when I say “I am not this inkwell” or “I am not handsome” the negation is internal: The negation becomes then a bond of essential being since at least one of the beings on which it depends is such that it points toward the other, that it carries the other in its heart as an absence.244 This negation belongs to the for-​itself and not to the in-​itself as the former has nothingness as its own foundation –​it can only detach itself from itself to stand witness for-​itself. In other words, consciousness is always for-​itself, the negative relation of consciousness to itself as the split between the for-​itself (what consciousness is not in its ecstatic mode and it is not what it is) –​in-​ itself; as such, it is the being of the For-​itself, [which] causes there to be an Other. This does not mean that it gives being to the Other but simply that it gives to the Other its being-​other or the essential condition of the “there is.”245 That is the case for the cogito as a schism in its possibility of self(-​)consciousness. However, with regard to the Other [the other as another subject], on the contrary, the internal negative relation is a relation of reciprocity.”246 The aporia: Does this mean that we have two negations at play in the embodied encounter with an Other? If the being of negation is founded on the nothingness that characterizes human reality as a nihilating withdrawal from being, (in-​itself(-​)for-​itself), to which being would this new negation of reciprocity relate; mine, or the Other, or to both? The event with the Other introduces this other negation which is distinct from the always happening interior negation which makes consciousness possible. What is their difference and what makes it such that my transcendence-​transcended, the resistance felt by another

2 43 Ibid., 175. 244 Ibid. 245 Ibid., 283. 246 Ibid., 284.

162 Chapter 4 consciousness reveals another subjectivity, and not a perfected robot or a phantasized Other? Is there a difference between the negations? If the negation is essentially the same then the reciprocity differs from the interiority by the fact that the negation in reciprocity is performed by me through the Other, it is motivated from the outside (by another subjectivity in the process of being revealed to me). The Other inspires a refusal or negation as consciousness overflows the bodily presence to reach me. In this sense … the Other exists for consciousness only as a refused self. But precisely because the Other is a self, he can himself be refused for and through me only insofar as it is his self which refuses me.247 But now this is a bit strange because a refused self could equally be mine when I sustain all my possibilities and reveal my freedom in anguish. The choice is a negation there as well, a for-​itself. The self can only be the for-​itself, only (the) for-​itself (is) never in-​itself. If the Other is presented to my consciousness as a refused self, what would be the difference between that mode and the for-​ itself which refuses or negates its past-​ing counterpart –​which is essentially a difference which is nothing in-​itself yet it conditions all knowing? “Knowing belongs to the for-​itself alone, for the reason that only the for-​itself can appear to itself as not being what it knows.”248 Is there something different intuited in these two negations? If not, we end up in an extreme solipsism in the way Merleau-​Ponty re-​reads Sartre in his later works. “How in the first place could I ever recognize other (my) selves? … Unless I learn within myself to recognize the junction of the for itself and the in itself, none of those mechanisms called other bodies will ever come to life. … ”249 The negation of reciprocity is still operating within a unity of consciousness as is my interior negation; and since we cannot avoid the structural interiority as immanence, the Other who, as refused self is presented in my consciousness, is not another Self, another negated in-​itself, another subjectivity which unites its own negations, but it is another me: “The solipsist being is already in himself the absolute other which he becomes for himself with the apparition of the other.”250 A fortiori, in such pure immanence, the possibility of being conscious of the being of the distinction between Pierre

2 47 Sartre, bn, 175. 248 Ibid. 249 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 434. 250 Merleau-​Ponty, Visible, 62.

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and Robot Pierre is forever lost. The reef of solipsism is there in all its efficacy. Is there an alter-​na(rra)tive? The second option is to appreciate the reciprocity as a transcendentally revealed Being-​with structure which can secure how the simultaneity, as felt transcendence-​transcended in pure immanence, can present an eidetic difference between a real conscious Pierre and his clone-​produced robot  –​there must be a ‘felt’ presence since a robot Pierre could also potentially arrest my transcendence. Even with an expanded cogito we are in pure immanence and, particularly so, because Sartre’s phenomenological analysis has bracketed any kind of language in the encounter with the Other as look –​the Other is left to be manifested affectively in me, in a consciousness that I am, in shame or pride or ... . And since “these feelings themselves are nothing more than our way of affectively experiencing our being-​for-​others,”251 the only way to arrive at an eidetic difference of the interior negations, which would allow the Other to be received as Other qua Other like me and not a robot, would be through a metaphysical being-​with structure which allows an accidental for-​itself to be revealed. But if we took that road, absolute freedom without foundation will be compromised for we would be always already connected with a metaphysical bond to the Other. Even if the for-​itself “must be they in order to deny that it is they,”252 there is still a difference. Either there is a difference of denial between and among the for-​itselfs that constitute the world through the realization of their different projects (historical difference) or a difference of the thickness-​ es of the in-​itselfs which are negated. In response to this worry, Merleau-​Ponty adopts a materialist outlook and denies the primacy of the cogito which does not allow for the possibility of a presence of the other in the self. It seems that for Merleau-​Ponty, “the contact of my thought with itself seals me within myself, and prevents me from ever feeling that anything eludes my grasp. … there is no opening, no ‘aspiration’ towards an Other for this self of mine, which constructs the totality of being and its own presence in the world.”253 Away from the cogito as an internal negation, the intentional character of consciousness as active transcendence is a material contact, “the simultaneous contact with my own being and the world’s being”254 since we all have come from the same worldly flesh. But, if consciousness in general receives such a construal, why could it not be expanded to the consciousness of the Other 2 51 Sartre, bn, 288. 252 Ibid. 253 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 434. 254 Ibid., 439.

164 Chapter 4 grounded in simultaneity of being, to a reciprocal presence as per Sartre? Are we not in danger of confronting a parallelism of individual immediate presences for which we cannot account? Merleau-​Ponty’s material Kantianism, the material categories of perception, are still left unbridgeable. As Sartre initially thought, … abandoning it [the useless and disastrous hypothesis of a transcendental concrete subject] does not help one bit to solve the question of the existence of Others. Even if outside the empirical Ego there is nothing other than the consciousness of that Ego –​that is, a transcendental field without a subject –​the fact remains that my affirmation of the Other demands and requires the existence beyond the world of a similar transcendental field.255 Finally, if we are always already in contact with each Other, how could we account for the transcendence as negation, as the coming back to question that contact, or that the Other could not exist for that matter? If everything were material this paper would not exist. No thing could write it –​in all senses. We could look for the solution in the cogito and its cogitationes and remember that all these descriptions have “been worked out on the level of the cogito.”256 During the encounter with the Other during which I reveal myself to myself through them I do not gain any particular knowledge of myself. What is revealed is neither “knowledge nor category,”257 only feeling subjectiv(ity). What is revealed during the encounter is no thing. I feel “uneasiness,” entropy as I endure the Other’s presence. But this entropy, this coming back to myself, this reprise, is felt as surprise as Lacan said. But surprise requires another embodied being looking at me otherwise it would become a fright. It is here that we can distinguish between the negations. An authentic entropy is not self-​motivated but motivated by an Other revealed in my feeling (of) surprise. I can never surprise myself and no object can surprise me either. Inert objects, of the causal order, can scary me, spook me, give me a fright, can cause me fear but never surprise me. The Other is about to take me as an object (m’entreprend) and thus surprises me (me surprend) and at the same time I am ashamed (entropy) of my self (je me déprend de mon emprise). In this way I stand under the existence of the Other, I come to understanding them (comprendre), “an implicit and non-​thematised comprehension.”258 The object through which the Other 2 55 Sartre, bn, 235. 256 Ibid., 268. 257 Ibid., 275. 258 Ibid., 289.

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presences can be moral shame, pride or fear during the constitution of the reflective attitude, but in the event unfolding in its ontological time, it is the Other revealed in the entropy, the instant of surprise. Lévinas’ account shares the entropic movement: “The Other who provokes this ethical movement in consciousness, and who disorders the good conscience of the coinciding of the same with itself involves a surplus for which intentionality is inadequate.”259 This surplus of intentionality is the surprise, awe; a_​we. The proof that the Other exists as a mind is not only a proof of consciousness but a proof of consciousness as freedom revealing the self’s for-​itself in-​itself. But that is always from the perspective of one ‘I.’ Since the for-​itself can never be in-​itself and will flee to something other than it is, the wrenching away will constitute a resistance to the objectification of the Other. By resisting this in-​ itself the Other self becomes conscious of my freedom as resistance to being objectified by the Other’s freedom. Since only another freedom as subjectivity can objectify, I need the Other to resist them in their attempt to my being objectified by them. And since I can never be fully objectified as consciousness, the proof for the Other of my subjectivity would be mutatis mutandis et ceteris paribus that they experience a resistance in my attempt to flee their attempt to objectify me. I resist the Other in the(ir) process of (1) attempting to objectify (me) and (2) being objectified (by me). This is the process by which the Other as a subject is revealed to me as subjectivity in the certainty of the cogito. It is me who will resist the objectification of the Other by being presented as a subject to them. But because I will resist, I will be presenting myself as an-​Other-​ to-​them-​as-​subjects. Only in this way can we claim that the Other is “appearing to me within the unity of its own temporalization.”260 Thus, simply, all Is (eyes) converge, meet in an attempt to constitute the world. But, as Sartre says, the goal for the revelation of both freedoms as reciprocity is not to look for the Other. The encounter must be gratuitous. Freedoms are revealed in resisting their reciprocal objectivating processes.261 Consciousness can never become an object; if it attempts it, it lives in bad faith. I need the Other to destroy their 259 Lévinas, Totality, 353. The event of the ‘we’ cannot take place without surprise. “The event is something which happens without the horizon –​there is a horizon –​but the event crosses or exceeds it” (Jacques Derrida, “Betrayal Out of Fidelidy (A Response),” in Filiation and Its Discontents, eds. Robert Harvey, E. Ann Kaplan, and François Noudelmann (Stonybrook, NY: sup, 2009), 65. I would really like to thank Robert Harvey for sending me this book. 260 Sartre 1993, 241. 261 As Irigaray notices, if we grand that we are transcendences in the sense of freedoms, then we cannot talk about knowing the existence of Other by sharing their freedom; “freedom is not shareable as such” (Irigaray, Sharing, 100).

166 Chapter 4 transcendence ontologically as they attempt to do the same to me. “I possess the being who has the key to my object state and since I can cause him to make proof of my freedom in a thousand different ways.”262 For Sartre, self and Other are necessary and always in conflict.263 They say so, perhaps. As Iris Murdoch observes, the “lesson of L’Ȇtre et le Néant” would seem to be that personal relations are usually warfare, and at best represent a precarious equilibrium, buttressed as often as not by bad faith.”264 The Other conditions the way we are to become conscious of our freedom only by trying to destroy it. Freedom cannot be defined, but only felt in a negative way, when it is threatened. And freedom is revealed by being threatened not in its interiority but in its exterior expression as a bodily manifestation. Marcel265 concludes by attributing a vociferous nihilism to Sartre. It is true that in the Being and Nothingness Sartre does not show if this conflict is an ontological necessity –​he does mention though that the whole work is describing the eidetics of bad faith. Some commentators have tried to find solutions in his later works as to whether the conflict is a necessity and how Sartre attempts to overcome it –​and even if the whole work of Being and Nothingness does not reveal an ontological necessity.266 But, following Hans-​Georg Gadamer’s267 advice, let us subject the text to a different question; in Sartrean words, let us resist it ontologically: How can Sartre talk about a radical freedom, a dreadful freedom to use Grene’s268 phrase, and still make a claim about an ontological structure which suggests something so platonically eternal, the universal and the necessary, the a priori? If we posit the idea of consciousness as absolute free motivation emerging as regulative from the Sartrean text, what kind of antinomy is this to be free and at the same time be in conflict forever? Our hermeneutic has revealed that Sartre’s dynamic phenomenology which is indeed, as Marcel says, “masterly”269 reveals human reality as a desire to reveal myself through the Other. Most of the times this encounter can indeed 2 62 Sartre, bn, 380. 263 Ibid., 364. 264 Murdoch, Sartre, 87. 265 Marcel, Philosophy. 266 Rae for instance following Zheng is trying to work out what constitutes authentic social relations in Sartre through the concept of “conversion.” This conversion comes as a radical decision but we are not ready to talk about it, yet. First, we need to explore what the metaphysical feel is, if it is something. 267 Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (NY: Continuum, 2004); hereafter, Truth. 268 Grene, Dreadful. 269 Marcel, Existentialism, 71.

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degenerate into the various other manifestations –​which in the case of the body Sartre analyzes beyond a bastardized evolutionary Freudian lens. It starts with a desire and crescents into love. Desire is the ontological foundation of transcendence. If transcendence is freedom then it is revealed only through the other. As Lévinas further explored, Sartrean desire is not a need. Andrew Kelley, commenting on Lévivas writes that “on Lévivas’ account if there were only one human being in existence and no others, then this single human being would not and could not experience of the wholly other. In, short, for Lévivas, the spark for there to be experience of the wholly other, comes from, as a result, of the other person.”270 This spark is the analogy that could fit in Sartre’s account of the desire for the Other. It is not that the Other is Hell with ontological necessity. Rather, the Other could become Hell for me as I could for them. Murdoch is just: Me and Other are in a precarious equilibrium, buttressed as often as not by bad faith. But that is not an ontological necessity. We are free to create a safe equilibrium. There is a balance required for my desire to be free and to be revealed to myself as the freedom that I am. In my desire to be free I request the Other. The Other is the catalyst for revealing my freedom by questioning it. Desire is not lack as in Hegel. Desire is not linked to need where lack dovetails as in Lacan. Desire is transcendence, a for-​itself, a project to be accomplished. Desire can be the desire for recognition of my being a freedom. This recognition comes negatively through an attempt to be negated by another freedom. But is this a necessary event, an ontological necessity? This is what Irigaray asked. Yes, only if we look for our own-​selves, for our narcissistic survival where the Other becomes a threat and an antagonist. But that is only one regulative idea(l) of living. I can be with the Other in a thousand different ways. We can attempt each other, we can be with each other in creative and inspiring rhythms rather than a competitive, antagonistic, inter-​subjecting271 one where one (m)eats the Other to satisfy their survival.272 We can meet the Other in the surprise of creating. We can look for each other to create. This being with the Other,

270 Andrew Kelly, “Jankélévitch and Lévinas on the Wholly Other,” Lévinas Studies, 8, 1 (2013): 35; hereafter, Wholly. 271 For an analogous exploration of intersubjection see Iraklis Ioannidis, “Broaching the Difference Between Intersubjectivity and Intersubjection Inspired by the Feminist Critique,” Sophia Philosophical Review, 10, 2, (2017): 38-​68. I would like to thank Professor Alexander Gungov for allowing us to reprint part of this previous path here. 272 Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-​Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–​119; hereafter, Eating.

168 Chapter 4 authentic understanding, comes to be just like making music together  –​as Alfred Schutz273 understood Sartre. There is still one worry however with the desire to be revealed as free. According to Sartre It is what I have to be as having-​been-​it. Therefore, I can not free myself from it. At least, someone will say, I escape it for the present, I shall escape it in the future. But no. He who has once been for-​others is contaminated in his being for the rest of his days even if the Other should be entirely suppressed; he will never cease to apprehend his dimension of being-​for-​ others as a permanent possibility of his being.274 How does this contamination involve my being as existing desire? If I desire the Other to reveal me as subjectivity, I do not seek to destroy the Other but I am haunted by a desire to be revealed by the Other. If I am haunted by the Other who has revealed me, what does this haunting mean? We are not ready yet to follow this path. 5

Hodological Options, Horizonizing

Earlier, we came to believe that altruism is a phenomenon revealed through promising. The formula I promise to you led us to an investigation of the Other to whom we promise. The Other is revealed by coming after us to unveil our fragile bios. This is another promise, a silent promise coming from the presence of their existence, an existence without words. But it is our word that we give to the Other when we promise. We need to attempt another quest now. We need to question the giving of one’s word, the “donner la parole,” or “δίδωμι λόγον” (give logos). Can existence be present without logos? Do we need existence and presence to give a word? Is there promising without logos to be given? If the promise is to give to the Other, what is this giving if not a gift, a gift as one’s logos? 273 Alfred Schutz, “The Homecomer,” American Journal of Sociology, 50, 5 (1945):  369–​376; Alfred Schutz, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationships,” Social Research, 18, 1 (1951): 76–​97. 274 Sartre, bn, 534.

­c hapter 5

Pathway Three: Presence and Existence

For your eyes only, only for you … sheena easton

…

When Nita was very young, I took her to her first July 4th picnic and she got scared … she got frightened and before I knew it, she was gone, lost. A million people around me. I felt this panic start to rise up and before hit I suddenly could hear her. Not her voice. It was the sound that she used to make when she slept against my chest. It was a … feeling. … or a vibration and. … I … followed it straight to her. No one believed me … I knew that it happened the wachowskis

…

That logic has already, from the earliest times, proceeded upon this sure path is evidenced by the fact that since Aristotle it has not required to retrace a single step … immanuel kant

…

But what is the use of appealing to contradictions, if logic itself is in question and becomes problematic? … Thus the field is now characterised edmund husserl

…

We can be deluded about whether here or there something is present at hand, but presence at hand as such is beyond delusion martin heidegger

…

“Can I do it like you do it?” That’s what they be asking us Logic The one, the wise, both wants and does not want to be called Zeus heraclitus

Every separation is a link simone weil

… …

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_006

170 Chapter 5 And who is to decide? rosi braidotti

…

Οὐκοῦν καὶ ἡμῖν νευστέον καὶ πειρατέον σῴζεσθαι ἐκ τοῦ λόγου, ἤτοι δελφῖνά τινα ἐλπίζοντας ἡμᾶς ὑπολαβεῖν ἂν ἤ τινα ἄλλην ἄπορον σωτηρίαν plato/​s ocrates1

∵ We have followed a path to where it becomes very difficult to resist Sartre’s point that by the time we reflect on something, that lived something is no more.2 Reflection breaches and divides what was originally the lived phenomenon in the process of reliving it differently, revealing it in reflection, as another biosis. It is this thought, this movement, this skepsis, perhaps, which led Sartre to claim that the Other, just like the self, is never fully (re)presented in reflective consciousness, but, rather, that the Other (is) presences (as) feeling (of) motivation-​and-​resistance; feeling traced in reflection and (re)presented as shame. Following Sartre, we said that ‘feeling’ is not to be related with sensibility, rather, it is metaphysical and unable be reduced to any particular description or materiality. It can neither become an object of thought nor a thing; either indexed referentially as a predicated object of thought (ideal abstract object) or designated indexically as a determinate physical thing. In classical terms, it cannot be consumed or consummated into an eidos, a type or a form –​neither a universal nor a particular, and definitely not a function or a process. Earlier, we attempted to describe ‘feeling’ as entropy. Now, we will reflect further on the curb of entropy as an inflected movement and elaborate on its description with the aid of the concept ‘metaphysical.’ We will do this by taking the word of other philosophers according to whom there is no (such) thing as metaphysical.

1 Sheena Easton, “For Your Eyes Only,” in For Your Eyes Only (Soundtrack), (Hollywod, CA:  Warner Bros., 1981); The Wachowskis, Sens8 (USA:  Netflix, 2016); Kant, First Critique; Husserl, Idea; Heidegger, Beginning; Logic, “Under Pressure,” in Under Pressure (NY: Def Jam, 2014); Heraclitus, Apanta,; Braidotti, Posthuman; Plato, Republic, 453e. 2 It is only by the means of a footnote, here in the margin, outside the linearity of the text, that we can supplement this proposition with the qualifier that this very proposition ‘it becomes very difficult to resist,’ will allow us to bring to affinity, to analogize and create a path through metaphysical, feel, and logos.

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Already, it seems that we have contradicted ourselves. What we will be reflecting on in this chapter, oxymoronically as this (future continuous tense) sounds  –​although paradoxically there can be (no) sound if one is reading these lines-​signs without the aid of their lips  –​is the attempt to bring into materiality, insofar as these signs are material, ‘feeling’ which, following Sartre we characterized ‘metaphysical’  –​transcending, going beyond the material. Through the Other, not an other world, we say we can attempt to accomplish the metaphysical. We are not projecting another world, another real, intelligible one versus the one in which we are living as the sensible, phenomenal one. But even such logos, which divides the world into two, decides it metaphysically. The metaphysical comes to be logos as decision. The decision as logos given by the Other comes to be feeling metaphysical or metaphysical feel. The Other’s writing, their logos, is our aid to the metaphysical. The aid is in-​between and beyond the material, the blank between ‘aid’ (and) ‘is;’ the ἀϊδής, (aidis), unseen and silent, beyond the eidos –​ Other philosophers presented here materially through their writing, their signs. Just like it was necessary for the student of Neoplatonic (Christian) Schools to “know the many names and views of previous philosophers”3 to understand the catechesis of Plato and Aristotle, analogously, it is through other philosophical writings that we will feel the metaphysical  –​with the logos of the Other, ana-​logously. Through the writings of other philosophers, then, we will attempt to cross the physical and feel beyond, meta-​physically. To cross the boundaries of the physical and go beyond it feels like a movement with no ledge, no standing on a firm ground to guide the reflection on our standing. No ledge to support our thought –​only existing (the) presence of the writings of other philosophers. These writings will be our guides to the metaphysical. Writings presenting the other-​wise, or, other-​whys, other reasons for believing that there is nothing beyond the material. In these words, being in presence amounts to the same, as being in existence. In following these different writings, we shall trace feeling metaphysical or metaphysical feel back to the fragments, the character, that is, the ‘logos of Heraclitus’ –​in all its senses. But first, let us start with a question. Let us ask:  How do other philosophers understand and talk about the metaphysical?

3 Jorgen Mejer, “Ancient Philosophy and the Doxographical Tradition,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Marie Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2006), 23; hereafter, Doxographical.

172 Chapter 5 1

Meet-​in(g) the ‘Meta’ of the Physical

The metaphysical has always been related to/​with Metaphysics. We shall start with a contemporary introduction to Metaphysics, presently, Michael Loux’s 3rd Edition of Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.4 Let us follow Loux to introduce us to metaphysics. Loux’s Metaphysics is (an) enjoined and enjoyed (text) in four editions. Each edition is more or less the same with the preceding and the succeeding one. Changes are overall summarized in each preface. In the first edition we read: Metaphysics is a discipline with a long history; and over the course of that history, the discipline has been conceived in different ways. These different conceptions associate different methodologies and even different subject matters with the discipline; and anyone seeking to write an introductory text on metaphysics must choose from among these different conceptions. … I have chosen to follow a very old tradition (one that can be traced back to Aristotle) that interprets metaphysics as the attempt to provide an account of being qua being. On this conception, metaphysics is the most general of all the disciplines; its aim is to identify the nature and structure of all that there is.5 The second edition adds another chapter in introducing metaphysics … but the most important change is the addition of a new chapter on the debate between Realists and anti-​Realists … relationship between thought/​language and the world. The view, which can be traced back to the origins of philosophy in the Greek period, is that there is a mind independent world correspondence which makes our beliefs/​statements true.6 The third edition “adds a chapter on causation and a chapter on the nature of time.” The fourth edition adds two chapters: one on the relation between a

4 Michael Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (First Edition) (NY: Blackwell, 1998). There is much to say about this decision but let us not get ahead of ourselves. Since we are passing through the three editions of Loux’s Metaphysics, we shall reference them as ‘First’ for the first edition in 1998, ‘Second’ for the 2001 second edition, and ‘Third’ for the 2002 third edition. 5 Loux, First, x. 6 Loux, Second, xii.

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common sense whole and its parts … and one on the problem of metaphysical indeterminacy,” as well as another writer. “Both were written by Thomas Crisp.”7 In the introduction proper we read Philosophers have disagreed about the nature of metaphysics. … Sometimes, they characterise it as the attempt to identify the first causes, in particular, God or the Unmoved Mover; sometimes, as the very general science of being qua being.8 It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. If one looks to works in metaphysics, one finds quite different characterizations of the discipline. … the difficulty of identifying a unique subject matter and methodology for metaphysics is not simply traceable to the long history of the discipline. Even in its origins, there is ambiguity about just what metaphysics is supposed to be.9 Yet, most philosophers grosso modo Follow the Aristotelian characterization of metaphysics as a discipline concerned with being qua being. That characterization gives rise to the attempt to identify the most general kinds or categories under which things fall and to delineate the relations that hold among those categories.10 We shall follow closely these highlighted, emphasized signs. As Loux says, most philosophers agree that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is about τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν, being qua being. Indeed, in his Preface to Metaphysics, Jacques Maritain states that the “subject matter of metaphysics is being as such.”11 Étienne Gilson agrees and, quoting W.  D. Ross’ widely accepted translation, takes Metaphysics “as ‘a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.’ ”12 Heidegger, while initially going with the flow of the “being as such” or the “being of beings”13 as 7 Loux, Third, xiii. 8 Ibid., 1. 9 Ibid., 2. 10 Loux, First, 1. 11 Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (Virginia, VA: Books for Library Press, 1939), 17. 12 Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: pims, 1952), 1. 13 Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–​3, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Indiana, IN: iup, 1995); hereafter, Aristotle’s.

174 Chapter 5 relating to the subject matter of metaphysics, he later changed his mind and characterised τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν differently14 –​feeling of nothingness. The difficulties that Loux identifies with respect to Metaphysics are not about transferring τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν into being qua being or l’étant en tant qu’étant. But it is in this very transference or translation that we would like to make manifest the metaphysical. The anonymous feeling of translating the one material schema into another, the feeling of passing from one language(-​game) into another. Feeling lucky, we do not have to express or articulate the metaphysical with being since it writes its own history as translation, which is always already transformation and as, we shall characterize, logos. Logos as feeling metaphysical or metaphysical feeling, which writes itself as a decision and which, in turn –​ entropy –​comes to be reflected as the difference of feel between the meaning, the noema of the linguistic expressions and the feel of whether or not these linguistic expressions amount to the same (‘thing’) after having been translated.15 Loux’s difficulties, however, are difficulties of identifying ‘τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν’ adequately with “what metaphysics is.” The “difficulty of identifying a unique subject matter and methodology.” But this is not the only characterization of metaphysics. As Loux admits “I have chosen to follow a very old tradition” or “One must choose.” Metaphysics as an identification is based on following and choosing. Loux decided on one from other traditions and possible interpretations. But there is a double choice: One made by Aristotle as “characterization” since “even in its origins, there is ambiguity about just what metaphysics is supposed to be” and one made by us (along with Loux) as “following Aristotle.” 14 Heidegger, Metaphysics. 15 We are not dealing with “what should be understood as the unitary meaning of these words of the three languages” which would lead us to wonder whether there is “a unitary normative dimension to be presupposed in our understanding of meaning and understanding.” Our focus here is on the passing of one medium to another, the passage which allows for such meaning/​understanding (Karl-​Otto Apel, Selected Essays:  Towards a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Edouardo Mendietta (NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 74; hereafter, Selected. Not what makes “it possible to play off the one language game against each other” but what it is like to play off. This interplay between passing and passage from one language into another is what Wittgenstein called the imponderable feeling (Ibid., 146). As Oswald Hanfling observed, this is not ‘what it is like’ as some personal sensation or quale but that which motivates us to say for instance that today what I am feeling could be best analogized with the word blue (Hanfling, Wittgenstein). This feeling is also felt as the inability to fix a criterion of identifying it by repetitive representation(s). In Descartes, this feeling is written not as a soul as an immaterial object, but feeling that “peculiar effort on the part of the mind,” this new effort which “shows the difference between imagination and intellection” (Descartes, Meditations 2, 41).

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This duplicity of choosing, the possibility of deciding which rests on both affirmation and negation and goes beyond it, comes to be feeling metaphysical or metaphysical feel. Loux’s logos. We shall begin with two of Loux’s terms ‘characterization’ and ‘following.’ Logos is all about characterizing follows and following characterizations. Two terms: to follow and to characterize. These terms seem ambiguous precisely because we cannot immediately and/​or conclusively decipher their role. Are we to take these terms literally or metaphorically, or both at the same time? To characterize is, literally, to engrave, to imprint, to inscribe, or, simply to write on or in something; as in a surface, material.16 But we could also say: to characterize literally, is to engrave, to imprint, to inscribe, or, simply to write on or in something; as in a surface, material. Metaphorically, we can say that to characterize means to give an account, to make a judgment or an evaluation. The difference between the above characterizes metaphysical follows. But let us ask, how did Aristotle characterize “metaphysics” as the being qua being if that is what we are all following? Similarly: In what sense have we all followed what Aristotle characterized –​at least those of us who follow him? And why? Let us begin with the first question and the issue of characterization. Following Loux,17 The term ‘metaphysics’ as the name of the discipline is taken from the title of one of Aristotle’s treatises. Aristotle himself never called the treatise by that name; the name was conferred by later thinkers. Aristotle called the discipline at work in the treatise first philosophy or theology, and the knowledge that is the aim of the discipline wisdom.18 And now the mimodrama begins  –​we shall come back to follow this characterization. Nevertheless, we are on a quest with no beginning or end: From Loux we understand that Aristotle never characterized (literally) what he characterized (meaningfully) as ‘metaphysics’ but as ‘first philosophy.’ The text 16

http://​www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​30656?redirectedFrom=characterise#eid. Derrida has tried to see whether there can be anything beyond the metaphoricity of the metaphor. But metaphor comes after the ‘after’ as μετά-​. How can one translate the φορά of the meta-​ phor and its metaphoricity? Here we start with the ‘after.’ 17 Another instance of the metaphysical we are trying to characterize is the difference between reading and writing these two words. ‘Following’ comes before Loux in writing while it goes after him. In reading, no one is followed if Loux does not become the object of the following thus coming after the verb. Yet, this difference makes no difference in meaning. 18 Loux, First, 2.

176 Chapter 5 Metaphysics was never characterized as/​ᾗ/​qua/​en tant que Metaphysics but as first philosophy. Two questions arise from this: How did Metaphysics come to be? How is first philosophy characterized within the text such as to be a philosophy which is first? According to Marie Louise Gill: The title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) literally means “the things after the physical things.” This was not Aristotle’s own title1. In Metaphysics A.1 he calls the project wisdom (sophia) and says it is knowledge of the first causes and principles (982a1–​3). Though not his own title, “metaphysics” is in one respect a suitable description of Aristotle’s project.19 Whether ‘suitable’ means ‘adequate,’ which would open up a discussion of criteriology as principles of adequacy, will not affect us for the moment. We decide to focus on the fact that the title that Aristotle never himself characterized to characterize his work based on our characterizations was not even metaphysics but ta meta ta phusika –​which is here characterized as meaning literally after the physical. Before dealing with the word “after” let us follow the footnote that Gill has inserted. Perhaps the title is due to Andronicus of Rhodes (first century bce) or an earlier Hellenistic editor. On the tradition about the transmission of Aristotle’s texts, see Pellegrin, the aristotelian way, in this volume.20 Let us then defer for a moment the reading of Gill’s text and follow Pellegrin so as to understand how metaphysics, which is and is not metaphysics –​unless one accepts that metaphysics amounts to the same as ta meta ta phusika –​ has been characterized (by the followers of Aristotle) but has not been characterized (by Aristotle) and yet has been the bedrock, the ledge, of all philosophy in the west as first philosophy. Pellegrin recites a(n) (a)mazing anecdotal account of the writings of Aristotle passing through the hands of at least four people (Theophrastus, Neleus, Appelicon, Tyrranion) before

19

Marie Louise Gill, “First Philosophy in Aristotle,” in in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Marie Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 347; hereafter, Aristotle. 20 Gill, Aristotle, 347; emphasis added.

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Andronicus corrected and edited the texts of Aristotle and, most important, set them in the order in which they have been transmitted to us. All later editions are thus merely reincarnations of that of Andronicus of Rhodes (see Mejer, ancient philosophy and the doxographical tradition, in this volume).21 But did he write them on a surface, characterize them literally? Jorgen Mejer22 doubts this as the ancient tradition was primarily dialectic and rhetorical, such that the logographer need not necessarily have coincided with the speaker. In Paul Moraux’s extraordinarily meticulous research23 we read that the logographers were scribes who were paid to write down, characterize literally, the dialogues that took place during these long walks of the Peripatetic School. The scribes in-​scribed (the) “testaments.”24 It may seem, then, that, according to Pellegrin: we do not have a text that is, strictly speaking, from Aristotle’s own hand (or, more precisely, dictated by him, since the ancients did not write but rather dictated the works published under their names).25 It is reasonable then to suppose, once again, that not only “metaphysics” or “ta meta ta phusika” are words unknown to Aristotle but ‘all’ Aristotelian texts are “a loosely-​stiched motley.”26 Or, particularly for Metaphysics, we could say that metaphysics is a myth, a discourse which, according to Plato, is without origin, without source, without arche; just like the Pegasus, springing out of no single source but from a movement of insemination that is transformed into dissemination. Metaphysics, then, which according to one chosen tradition is a discourse about the first principles and causes of all things, contradicts itself since as a being qua being it does not have any one such first cause or principle itself –​no identity, no unity, no categoricity.

21

Pierre Pellegrin, “The Aristotelian Way,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Marie Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 239–​240; Aristotelian. 22 Mejer, Doxographical. 23 Paul Moraux, Les Listes Anciennes des Ouvrages d’ Aristote (Louvain: Louvain, 1951); hereafter, Listes. 24 Moraux, Listes, 244. 25 Pellegrin, Aristotelian, 244. 26 Christopher Shields, “First Philosophy First: Aristotle and the Practice of Metaphysics,” in The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. James Warren and Friesbee Sheffiedl, (NY: Routledge, 2014), 232; hereafter, Practice.

178 Chapter 5 After following these “traces,”27 let us go back to Gill’s proposition that “The title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) literally means “the things after the physical things.” This was not Aristotle’s own title1. In Metaphysics A.1 he calls the project wisdom (sophia). What we now must ask is who is ‘he’? We read in some philosophers that Metaphysics deals with unity, identity, and categoricity. Insofar as we follow Pellegrin, what does it mean to talk about Aristotle as a unity, a person characterizing, either by proxy or himself, any of his texts if “Andronicus corrected and edited the texts of Aristotle and, most important, set them in the order in which they have been transmitted to us”? What exactly is unified, identified and categorized here as ‘Aristotle’ or the pronoun ‘he’? Without forgetting these questions, let us keep them in reserve and go back and follow another discernible thread for the title Metaphysics.28 Metaphysics refers to those texts of Aristotle for which Andronicus found no apt name and baptized them as those texts which go or come after (which follow (from)?) those of the Physics. After a detour we are faced with follow-​up issues. The meaning of ‘after’ can be, as Anton-​Hermann Chroust mentions, a [a]‌purely arbitrary designation, which owes or allegedly owes its origin to a library cataloguing reference and, hence, to a mere accident born out of embarrassment and practical necessity [and] is the supposed historical origin of the term or title ‘metaphysics.’ … this fanciful story, which borders on the incredible, has been accepted by nearly every scholar without challenge.29 But then again, it could be that it was not born out of embarrassment but a decision, a logos: We may suppose that Andronicus thought that this is the natural place of the Metaphysics, because he thought that the study of all things and of things simply in so far as they are beings, i.e. metaphysics as characterised by Aristotle, comes naturally after the study of changing and material 27 Moraux, Listes, 245. 28 Heidegger is just in saying that all we can say about Aristotle is that he was born, thought, and died –​as recounted in Hannah Arendt, “Politics and Philosophy of History: Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, CT: yup, 1978). Anything beyond that becomes speculation. Yet, the thread that we are pulling out from this analysis is the difference of feel, when saying “according to x” where x is a person I talked to last night and “according to Aristotle.” 29 Anton-​Hermann Chroust, “The Origin of Metaphysics,” in The Review of Metaphysics, 14, 4, (1961): 602); hereafter, Origin.

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things, the things with which we are directly familiar from sense perception and experience, i.e. physics as characterised by Aristotle.30 In Politis’ characterization, the ‘meta/​after’ “comes naturally after the study of changing and material things” and suggests a chronology of serial order or sequence –​a logic of mathematical sequence. But this observation is not based on perception or experience strictly speaking, but on supposing and inferring based on other principles. It might as well be supposed, as other thinkers do, that the title had a more utilitarian purpose for the catechesis of this philosophy in the neo-​platonic schools –​after all, Loux characterized metaphysics as a discipline. “Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a difficult work. It is also one of the most dense pieces of philosophical writing.”31 And, since, philosophy in these neo-​platonic schools “had become mainly the study of texts by Aristotle and Plato,”32 then the title might as well represent the utilitarian reason for creating and editing Metaphysics for discipline –​a syllabus for a didactic sequence. Depending on what principle-​criterion one decides to follow, depending on the arche one makes, different options will come about. Which one to choose? After all, following ‘Aristotle,’ it is the first principle-​cause of Metaphysics qua Metaphysics that we are looking after here –​just like ‘he’ instructed (διὸ καὶ ἡμῖν τοῦ ὄντος ᾗ ὂν τὰς πρώτας αἰτίας ληπτέον).33 Finally, Moraux’s work suggests yet another hypothesis. In his (a)mazingly “minutieuse”34 intertextual analysis he feels compelled to claim that Ariston of Ceos had the original, the authentic and complete list of Aristotle’s works including his testaments. The interesting part of this is that ‘testaments,’ as we read in a footnote cited in ancient Greek, is a decided translation of a word which deviates from its customary-​traditional translation (διαθήκαι) and is used to refer to Aristotle’s writings (inscriptions  –​Ἀριστοτέλους λόγους) and not simply to refer to a testament that a scribe could have (re)inscribed based 30

Vassilis Politis, The Routledge Companion to Aristotle and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–​2; hereafter, Companion. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 Mejer, Doxographical, 22. 33 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a.21. The original ancient text is derived from Αριστοτέλης, Μεταφυσικά, μτφ. Αναστασία-​Μαρία Καραστάθη (Αθήνα:  Κάκτος, 1992)[Aristotle, Metaphysica, trans. Anastasia-​Maria Karastathi (Athens: Kaktos, 1992). We follow the standardized mode of citation. Translations of the ancient text into English are ours unless otherwise noted. For our translations we have consulted the modern Greek Editions and various English editions in order to decide which one feels like a smooth passage from the Ancient to the English voice. 34 Moraux, Listes, 245.

180 Chapter 5 on Aristotle’s diction. Ariston was writing only after one hundred years after the supposed (hypothesized, mortgaged, recorded) date of death of Aristotle, so Moraux’s claim that Andronicus possessed the authentic list has merit. Supposing that what Ariston had at his disposal was coming from Aristotle himself, αὐτ-​όν καθ’ αὑτ-​όν, Aristotle qua Aristotle, Aristote en tant qu’ Aristote, and at the same time that nothing had happened over the hundred years after his death, then it is reasonable to believe that, as Moraux says, Metaphysics can be traced directly to their creation, their beginning, the voice of Aristotle. But that temporal difference will always haunt with respect to being sure whether Ariston’s hand re-​presents the whole list of Aristotle’s works rather than a re-​collection of it based on a representation, or recollection, a testament of another follower. Now, let us draw some further implications from these last characterizations (λεγόμενα /​legomena). Following Moraux, not only can the title and all the texts be plausibly attributed to Aristotle himself, αὐτ-​όν καθ’ αὑτ-​όν, but the meaning of the title Metaphysics can be deciphered as well. Let Moraux be right, Metaphysics cannot be just a haphazard name, there is logos behind it and we can be fully justified in going back and forth to all the texts of Aristotle and trying to understand what he meant. Let Moraux be not right, or that we cannot decide whether Aristotle characterized his works; on what grounds are we to be intertextual? Let Moraux be right, per our decision, or as ‘Aristotle’ says in Metaphysics: ἒστω –​letting it be. We, then, just need to find the logos of the title of Metaphysics and (de)cide the others which have come about accidentally. Following the higher abstraction principle of metaphysics, we can say that all these suppositions, which have taken place, which place is for us now the present discussion, can be considered what ‘Aristotle’ has ‘characterized’ as συμβεβηκότα; 35 beings (ὂντα) happening at the same time and place with being (οὐσία) flowing from being, like the flow of Pegasus, but not being being (οὐσία). We have the accidents but we do not have the essence –​from Loux: “the unique subject matter and methodology” of metaphysics. According to ‘Aristotle’ there is another distinction that can be made to help us uncover the identity of the title of Metaphysics. With respect to us, all these suppositions about the title are happening at the same time, but with respect to the title ‘Metaphysics,’ insofar as it is a title itself αὐτό καθ’ αὑτό, with reference to itself, someone must have written it, inscribed it. And for inscription,

35 ‘συμβεβηκότα’ ever since the Scholastic translation has, unfortunately remained, ‘accidents.’

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a hand is required as first principle, “the most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken”36 (βεβαιοτάτη δ’ ἀρχὴ πασῶν περὶ ἣν διαψευσθῆναι ἀδύνατον).37 The ‘Hand’ could be the first principle of characterizing unless a title can come into being in another way which would belie it. Following this principle then, how could one decide whether the hand that wrote the title was the hand of Aristotle αὐτό καθ’ αὑτό and not that of a scribe or a faithful acolyte, a follower? One could say here that a witness could decide, a witness who was being present at the time of the inscription and could testify it –​having always already decided that the witness being present was not blind or experiencing an illusion.38 This decision opens up as it closes down a universe of further possibilities; without however allowing for closure of this universe, nor allowing for an indeterminate horizon. How can we bring all these possibilities to an end; who ended up characterizing the title Metaphysics? Being itself a title, Metaphysics can be said in many ways but there must be one way for all, the universally objective way (οὕτω δὲ καὶ τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς μὲν ἀλλ’ ἅπαν πρὸς μίαν ἀρχήν).39 For ‘Aristotle,’ the ultimate principle to guide us should be the principle of non-​contradiction. Before following this path of the ultimate principle, let us reflect for a moment. We are always in the process of characterizing ‘feel’ as metaphysical by following metaphysics which we traced through Loux back to its source, the arche: ‘Aristotle.’ And we have also been following the text in the sense of miming it with respect to finding the being qua being with respect to its title. Just like Metaphysics qua Metaphysics as a title, so being is said in many different ways: “οὕτω δὲ καὶ τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς μὲν ἀλλ’ ἅπαν πρὸς μίαν ἀρχήν.”40 With respect to being, there seems to be another principle in the beginning:  this untranslatable ‘οὕτω,’ which concerns the way ‘Aristotle’ decided how ‘being’ is being said or described (‘ὂν λέγεται’) always based on an ultimate principle. And this way could be one too many. Any which way based on how ‘Aristotle’ “collect[ed] and consider[ed] the credible views, or endoxa concerning his subject matter, because he th[ought] it advisable to survey the progress which 36

Ross takes ‘διαψευσθῆναι’ as ‘mistaken,’ but it could also be ‘to belie.’ (William David Ross, Aristotle: Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912); hereafter, Collected). 37 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1005b.5. 38 As Derrida writes, “witnessing substitutes narrative for perception. The witness cannot see, show, and speak at the same time, and the interest of the attestation, like that of the testament, stems from this dissociation. No authentication can show in the present what the most reliable witness sees, or rather, has seen and now keeps in memory” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs, 104). 39 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1003b.5. 40 Ibid.

182 Chapter 5 has been made prior to his investigations.”41 One way (οὕτω) to express the metaphysical feel would be to decide to characterize it as the (principle of the) decision of what constitutes the whole, the universe of all the “credible views.” That is, what makes what is being said (λεγόμενα /​legomena) come to be all the possible credible perspectives, or endoxa concerning his subject matter –​ and that there are no more to look for or follow. Hence, the beginning is the end: the cessation/​ciding of looking for more sources of λεγόμενα or endoxa. Another decision (always already) silently decided or a decided decision. In this way of viewing the metaphysical feel, what is written in the text is not only an issue of how many credible views exist, but, also, what has always already been decided as what counts as credible views. And this has implications for what counts as existence. In ‘Aristotle’s’ example about whether Socrates and Socrates-​seated are two different substances/​essences, feeling characterizes existence as coming to dis, dis-​tinguish, dis-​scern one from the other; the de-​cision of what (is) phenomenalized ahead of us: “ἢ τῶν πρὸς τὴν οὐσίαν λεγομένων, ἢ τούτων τινὸς ἀποφάσεις ἢ οὐσίας.”42 Before coming to wonder whether Socrates and Socrates-​seated are two or one, there is a decision about the contours of the difference of each being. ‘Being’ is a way of thinking which is a way of doing and which rests on the modality that it can be conceived as such, that we can count ‘it’ as distinct. We can risk the term punctuation here, yet again. Decision is in the old use of the term tinct: to dye, to imbue, to subject; putting a mark, a stop, a stigme, a stigma on the phenomenonalizing or the appearing, and as such, indexing it as this, ‘τόδε,’ and placing it within this spacing τοιόνδε. Thus, one might think as Shields does: What matters in the current context is that debate about this matter is a metaphysical debate, and not just any metaphysical debate, but one concerned with unity, being, priority, and categoricity,43 with the proviso that the metaphysical is not explained through the concept of existence prior to the apophasis, the decision, the punctuation of the phenomenalizing. The decision comes from logos which is not what is said, the λεγομένων, as discourse or reason. Logos comes to be the apophasis and apophansis 41 Shields, Practice, 334. Or, the endoxa as “of “reputable opinions” (endoxa), that is, opinions granted by everyone, or by most people, or by the wise, or by the majority of them” (Pellegrin, Doxographical, 234). 42 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1003b. 43 Shields, Practice, 339.

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at the same time-​space always-​already. This logos is what we are trying to link step by step with the concept of decision and feel, and now it does not feel we can call it a concept any more. It feels more like the in-​between, that other which allows for the debate to take place as the in-​between (Hume), the τόδε and τοιόνδε –​as we said in the prologue: the in-​between, the passing from this to that: ἔκ τε δὴ τούτων [λεγομένων] θεωροῦσι φανερὸν ὅτι οὐδὲν τῶν καθόλου ὑπαρχόντων οὐσία ἐστί, καὶ ὅτι οὐδὲν σημαίνει τῶν κοινῇ κατηγορουμένων τόδε τι, ἀλλὰ τοιόνδε.44 If, then, we view the matter from these standpoints, it is plain that no universal attribute is a substance, and this is plain also from the fact that no common predicate indicates a ‘this’, but rather a ‘such.’45 I think these arguments show pretty conclusively that none of the things that pertain universally is a substance. And we have also given its due weight to the fact that none of the things predicated in common picks out a this-​thing-​here, but rather such-​and-​such a kind.46 All western philosophy is encased in these lines: theory (θεωροῦσι), phenomenon as an object and/​or evident (θεωροῦσι φανερὸν), totality (καθόλου), unity (οὐσία, τόδε τι), existence-​existents (ὑπαρχόντων), being/​substance/​essence (οὐσία), signification (σημαίνει), predication-​categorization (κατηγορουμένων), indexing (ἔκ τε δὴ τούτων/​ /​τόδε τι /​τοιόνδε), criterion of being (οὐσία τῶν κοινῇ κατηγορουμένων). The metaphysical comes through logos as decision. A decision on what there is, literally, an act beyond the physical:  apophasis and apophansis. Let us juxtapose the above with the following passages from the Of Interpretation: ἔστι  δὲ  εἷς  λόγος  ἀποφαντικὸς  ἢ  ὁ  ἓν  δηλῶν  ἢ  ὁ  συνδέσμῳ  εἷς,  πολλοὶ δὲ οἱ πολλὰ καὶ μὴ ἓν ἢ οἱ ἀσύνδετοι. τὸ μὲν οὖν ὄνομα καὶ τὸ ῥῆμα φάσις  ἔστω μόνον.47 44 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1039a.1; emphases added. We here encounter an interesting concept, the phaneron (φανερὸν). In what follows, and after we have explored presence and existence, we shall explore the phaneron. 45 Ross, Collected, 1039a.1; 2370. 46 Hugh Lawson-​Tancred, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (London: Penguin, 1998), 1039a.1; 180; hereafter, Metaphysics. 47 17a. As original reference for the ancient text we use Αριστοτέλης, Κατηγορίαι και Περί Ερμηνείας, μτφ. Παύλος Καλλιγάς (Αθηνα:  Πολιτεία, 2011)  [Aristotle, Categoriai and Peri Ermenias, trans. Pavlos Kalligas (Athens: Politeia, 2011)]; hereafter, Peri.

184 Chapter 5 Now, those propositions are single which indicate one single fact or are one, as we said, by conjunction. And those propositions are many which indicate not one but many or else have their parts unconjoined.48 A single statement-​making sentence is either one that reveals a single thing or one that is single in virtue of a connective. There are more than one if more things than one are revealed or if connectives are lacking.49 And also, the signifying passage that follows: Ἔστι δ’ ἡ μὲν ἁπλῆ ἀπόφανσις φωνὴ σημαντικὴ περὶ τοῦ εἰ ὑπάρχει τι ἢ μὴὑπάρχει, ὡς οἱ χρόνοι διῄρηνται·κατάφασις δέ ἐστιν ἀπόφαν­σις τινὸς κατὰ τινός, ἀπόφασις δέ ἐστιν ἀπόφανσις τινὸς ἀπὸ τινός. ἐ­πεὶ δὲ ἔστι καὶ τὸ ὑπάρχον ἀποφαίνεσθαι ὡς μὴ ὑπάρχον καὶ τὸ μὴ ὑπάρ­χον ὡς ὑπάρχον καὶ τὸ ὑπάρχον ὡς ὑπάρχον καὶ τὸ μὴ ὑπάρχον ὡς μὴ ὑπάρχον.50 The simple statement is a significant spoken sound about whether something does or does not hold (in one of the divisions of time). An affirmation is a statement affirming something of something, a negation is a statement denying something of something. Now it is possible to state of what does hold that it does not hold, of what does not hold that it does hold, of what does hold that it does hold and of what does not hold that it does not hold.51 And a simple proposition, more fully, is a statement possessing a meaning, affirming or denying the presence of some other thing in a subject in time past or present or future. We mean by affirmation a statement affirming one thing of another; we mean by negation a statement denying one thing of another. As men can affirm and deny both the presence of that which is present and the presence of that which is absent.52 What we have is a logos that makes a statement, a declaration. This logos is apophantic. This logos as apophantic lets something be seen.53 The logos ranges from simple words to propositions (words connected together by a voice). But 48

Harold Cook, “Aristotle: On Interpretation,” in Aristotle: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, eds. T. E. Page, E. Capps, W. H. D. Rouse, and E. H. Warmington (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1938), 17a; 123; hereafter, Interpretation. 49 J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle: Categories and De Interpretaione (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 17a; 46; hereafter, Aristotle. 50 Aristotle, Peri, 17a23. 51 Ackrill, Aristotle, 17a23; 46. 52 Cook, Interpretation, 17a23; 123. 53 Cf Husserl, Experience, 7; 225–​6.

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there is also a simple declarative (ἁπλῆ ἀπόφανσις) which is the signifying voice claiming something or nothing. Moreover, we have apophasis as the negation or affirmation of the declarative based on some criterion. The question now is how does logos let something be seen? Aristotle lavishly enjoins and enjoys the one noun ἀπόφασις which does not let to be seen where it comes from. The one noun ἀπόφασις comes identically from two different sources: two verbs can claim it: ἀποφαίνω, which means declaring, categorizing, judging, predicating (including); and ἀπόφημι which means denying, negating (excluding).54 So, before the voice and before the apophantic logos as predication, as phoně, there is another logos which opens the field for both declaring, categorizing, judging, predicating and denying all of which are the same but not identical.55 To declare whether something exists or not in the simple apophansis there will always already have been a decision, it would only have come after deciding what counts as existence which will make the necessary connections so it can be that which the voice will declare. The voice, however, does not simply let the logos be seen. The voice as phoně is not necessarily what comes out of one’s mouth in particular. In Cratylus, Plato uses the voice to refer to ancient language or dialect, or both.56 It can also refer to tradition where it is more akin to women’s idiom.57 In Orpheus’ Argonautica, the phoně is also used to describe not what one does, as in speaks, but what one hears. In this case the phoně is never one’s own as it is one of the sounds, one of the ways through which the other appears and, thus, it could dissimulate the logos which is supposed to represent.58 One can still de-​cide between the Derridian translation or the Scholastic translation as a statement. 54

See how Derrida tackles this without following through the implications: “… the modality of apophasis, despite its negative or interrogative value, often recalls that of the sentence, the verdict, or decision, of the statement” (Derrida, Name, 35). When Husserl attempts to find the origins of the predicative judgment in Experience and Judgment he writes: Only the elucidation of the origin of this structure, traditionally defined as judgment, can provide the answer to this question and to all further questions associated with it: to what extent is the predicative judgment the privileged and central theme of logic, so that, in its core, logic is necessarily apophantic logic, a theory of judgment? Furthermore, what is the mode of connection of these two members which are always to be distinguished in judgment? To what extent is the judgment synthesis and diaeresis (analysis) in one?” (Husselr, Experience, 14). Unfortunately, we never get an analysis concerning the oneness of the judgment, the apophansis as both synthesis and division (diairesis). Yet, we do read that, in the end, every judging as an active positing taking rests on decision (Ibid., 272–​3). 55 Just like Pegasus whose source is an intercourse, not intended either before or after, but springing forth (πηγάζει), silently. 56 Plato, Cratylus, 398b-​e. 57 Ibid. 58 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 845–​849.

186 Chapter 5 Since we are allowing our judgments to take place with ‘being’ then we would have to say that logos is not the phoně. The phoně declares but the logos is not only apophantic but apophatic as well. Logos comes to be seen as phoně but it is not it. Logos comes along silently as decided decision: The decision of the dictum is the dictum of the decision –​the apophasis of the apophansis is the apophansis of the apophasis. In traditional characterizations of the characterizations of ‘Aristotle,’ a particular trade takes place between apophasis and theology and apophansis and ontology. Yet, if we go back to the passage of ‘Aristotle,’ then we can see that all these terms that surround logos take us to existence. All terms lead back to existence, to ὑπ-​άρχει which we could characterize literally as ‘under principle.’ This is a path we need to proceed even if we have not reached our end to decide whether Metaphysics either as title or as determinate text belongs to Aristotle qua Aristotle, αὐτ-​όν καθ’ αὑτ-​όν. Now, Aristotle or the text of ‘Aristotle’ tells us that there can be a principle on which we can decide about (the) being qua being on all levels of theoretical discourse. The ultimate principle is the principle of non-​contradiction: something cannot be and not be at the same time and place. Let us quote extensively two famous (peripatetic) passages τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό (καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα προσδιορισαίμεθ’ ἄν, ἔστω προσδιωρισμένα πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείας)· αὕτη δὴ πασῶν ἐστὶ βεβαιοτάτη τῶν  ἀρχῶν· ἔχει γὰρ τὸν εἰρημένον διορισμόν. ἀδύνατον γὰρ ὁντινοῦν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνειν εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι, καθάπερ τινὲς οἴονται λέγειν Ἡράκλειτον. οὐκ ἔστι γὰρ ἀναγκαῖον, ἅ τις λέγει, ταῦτα καὶ ὑπολαμβάνειν59 It is impossible for the same thing at the same time both to be-​in and not to be-​in the same thing in the same respect. (This will bear some logical sharpening, but let that pass for now.) Here, indeed, we have our securest of all principles, which entirely fits the standards that we have set for it. No one can believe that the same thing both is and is-​not. On one interpretation, this is the point that Heraclitus was making. (What of course is not impossible is that one can say one thing and believe another.).60 It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections, any further qualifications which

59 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1005b.5. 60 Lawson-​Tancred, Metaphysics, 1005b5; 91.

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might be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe.61 If we go by the book, per scriptum, we have to translate ὑπάρχειν not with being but with existence.62 So, we can have something like this: this or that cannot, at the same time and place, both exist and not exist with respect to itself and according to itself. Even if we claimed some accuracy for this translation, there is yet another issue which creates difficulty. What if this logos occurred during a peripatos and Aristotle was pointing at something or holding something, referring to the perceptual domain? As we shall see later, the whole text starts with the importance of perception. The referential αὐτὸ (this/​that) would have different possibilities for interpretation than the case in which ‘he’ would be using this indexical to refer to his own thought, as if holding a belief.63 But is

61 Ross, Collected, 1005b.5; 2271. 62 Reading Edward Halper’s paper on Aristotle’s principle of non-​contradiction there is immediately a question. This recalcitrant ὑπάρχει is at times translated as “falling under the scope” and a little bit further down as “belongs:” “It seems to me that Aristotle is using the discussion of non-​contradiction in T4-​8 to explain how metaphysics can include all beings … More interesting than the claim that non-​contradiction holds is the claim that all beings fall under its scope ἅπασι γὰρ ὑπάρχει τοῖς οὖσιν 1005a22–​23) …, there is the question of what he means by the claim that the principle “belongs to all beings.” The term “belongs” (ὑπάρχει) regularly expresses the relation of attributes to substance” (Edward Halper, “Aristotle on the Extension of Non-​Contradiction,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 1, 4, (1984), 369). Obviously, with different translations there will be different interpretations but what is important is the decision as feel conveyed here metaphorically with “It seems to me.” Another interesting translation is that of Michael V. Wedin. Οur disobedient word ὑπάρχει takes another peripatos in metaphors: “It is impossible for the same thing to hold and simultaneously not to hold of the same thing and in the same respect (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό). This passage denies that there can be something that has and does not have a given property or attribute” (Michael V. Wedin, “A Curious Turn in Metaphysics Gamma: Protagoras and Strong Denial of the Principle of Non-​Contradiction,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 85, 2, (2006): 108; hereafter, Curious). From falling under the scope, the word by word translation always already platonically broken into its parts, to belonging, to holding, to having, discloses a vast difference. And surprisingly, with de-​cision as feel there is no justification for these interpretations to follow, they just f(ol)low. 63 Wedin for instance decides the latter option with no justification from the text however. “If one presses the relativist side of this option, then it is not clear that someone else could believe the same propositions that I  believe” (Wedin, Curious, 125). If one follows this route, as Husserl did, a new science emerges: phenomenology.

188 Chapter 5 this not another way of saying whether something can exist at once in-​itself and for itself or not? And this principle becomes the first science: Ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ’ αὑτό. αὕτη δ’ ἐστὶν οὐδεμιᾷ τῶν ἐν μέρει λεγομένων ἡ αὐτή· οὐδεμία γὰρ τῶν ἄλλων ἐπισκοπεῖ  καθόλου περὶ τοῦ ὄντος ᾗ ὄν, ἀλλὰ μέρος αὐτοῦ τι ἀποτεμόμεναι περὶ τούτου θεωροῦσι τὸ συμβεβηκός, οἷον αἱ μαθηματικαὶ τῶν ἐπιστημῶν. ἐπεὶ δὲ τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ἀκροτάτας αἰτίας ζητοῦμεν, δῆλον ὡς φύσεώς τινος αὐτὰς ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι καθ’ αὑτήν. εἰ οὖν καὶ οἱ τὰ στοιχεῖα τῶν ὄντων ζητοῦντες ταύτας τὰς ἀρχὰς ἐζήτουν, ἀνάγκη καὶ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ ὄντος εἶναι μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς ἀλλ’ ᾗ ὄν· διὸ καὶ ἡμῖν τοῦ ὄντος ᾗ ὂν τὰς πρώτας αἰτίας ληπτέον.64 There is a kind of science whose remit is being qua being and the things pertaining to that which is per se. This science is not the same as any of the departmental disciplines. For none of these latter engages in this general speculation about that which is qua that which is. Rather, they delimit some section of what is and study its accidental features (a prime example is mathematics).We, however, are investigating principles and fundamental causes, and these must evidently pertain per se to a kind of nature. Now the traditional search for the elements of the things that there are is in fact the search for these very principles. So the elements, too, of that which is must pertain to it not accidentally but qua thing that is. And by the same token this inquiry also comprises the investigation of the primary causes of that which is qua that which is.65 There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-​called special sciences; for none of these others treats universally of being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attribute of this part; this is what the mathematical sciences for instance do. Now since we are seeking the first principles and the highest causes, clearly there must be some thing to which these belong in virtue of its own nature. If then those who sought the elements of existing things were seeking these same principles, it is necessary that the elements must be elements of being not by accident but just because it is being. Therefore it is of being as being that we also must grasp the first causes.66

64 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1003α21. 65 Lawson-​Tancred, Metaphysics, 1003a21; 86. 66 Ross, Collected, 1003a21; 2264.

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There is so much going on in these peripatetic passages that we need first to delineate, adumbrate, fence off, that is, in ‘Aristotle’s’ idiom, phrase this logos with questions. What is the first justification of ‘Aristotle’ for this principle? The justification which in some editions comes in bracketing “(καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα προσδιορισαίμεθ’ ἄν, ἔστω προσδιωρισμένα πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείας)” is precisely bracketing the difficulties of logos. Ross translates this statement as “we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections any further qualifications which might be added.” Whatever the merits of this translation, our worry is on “letting pass” the imperative form of ‘to be’(‘ἔστω’) and the sense of logos. To translate δυσχερείας as objections is loose; a rather abstracted way of referring to difficulties, nuisances, disgusts. Now, λογικὰς δυσχερείας may refer either to difficulties of reason or logical difficulties, in which case it would mean paradoxes or contradictions; or difficulties of coming into a discussion with someone, hence, dialectical difficulties as in conversational difficulties. The latter is the sense that Plato uses in Politics67 while being annoyed by the sophists because he could not understand them –​as did Aristotle with Heraclitus. We do not have to be logical to make dialectical sense. Logic or dialectics, how can we decide? What shall we let pass? Back to the pnc. If this principle is not ‘to be supposed’ or not ‘supposed to be,’ but be the ultimate ground under which all beings are to be ruled or ruled out (αὕτη δὴ πασῶν ἐστὶ βεβαιοτάτη τῶν ἀρχῶν), then, to avoid any logical contradiction which could stand against it (its self-​proof), the principle must be self-​evident, per se, itself with respect to itself, self-​respecting, in-​itself, that is, αὐτό καθ’ αὑτό, being qua being or τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό. Is this circular? Is Metaphysics just an attempt to prove the apodicticity of pnc? Metaphysics is the first science investigating the being qua being and its principle must be the object of itself –​at once for-​itself and in-​itself –​apodictic, analytic, a priori?68 Another option is to think that what is meant by θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ’ αὑτό is a question about what it is for something to be, following the ‘in virtue of itself’ option. But as Politis has shown, if one takes this interpretation then Loux’s previous point that the aim of metaphysics, which he traces back to Aristotle, “is to identify the nature and structure of all that there is” does not follow. The issue is not to create lists of beings and ask why these beings are what they are and not others, but why the things that 67 68

Πλάτων, Πολιτικός, μτφ. Φιλολογική Ομάδα Κάκτου (Αθήνα: Κάκτος, 1993) [Plato, Politicos, trans. Philologike Omada Kaktou (Athens: Kaktos, 1993)]. We should cross-​reference this circularity with Heidegger’s “study of first principles” whereby any “formal objection” referring to setting out first principles “are always sterile when one is considering concrete ways of investigating” (Heidegger, bt, 27).

190 Chapter 5 exist for us are what they are in the first place. Following this line of thought one must suppose, as did Heidegger and Politis does, that Aristotle must have thought that we have a pre-​understanding of beings and based on this pre-​ understanding their being becomes a concern for us as a theoretical issue. This makes sense but it is dangerous for two reasons. One, because we have already decided that from the definition θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ’ αὑτό we have not taken into consideration the part “and everything that exists in-​itself or based on-​itself” and so we are disregarding the role of existing. Two, the pre-​understanding that Aristotle has in mind is based on vision, “the sense of sight” (Ross) /​“sight is the sense that especially produces cognition in us and reveals” (Lawson-​Tancred): “τὸ ὁρᾶν αἱρούμεθα ἀντὶ πάντων ὡς εἰπεῖν τῶν ἄλλων. αἴτιον δ’ ὅτι μάλιστα ποιεῖ γνωρίζειν ἡμᾶς αὕτη τῶν αἰσθήσεων καὶ πολλὰς δηλοῖ διαφοράς.”69 The contours of being, what is distinct, as different from something else, comes only from vision, that is the ultimate principle. Combining the two, the world is interpreted by/​for (my) eyes only, only with and by vision. In the peripatos of vision there comes a visible, apparent contradiction blind to the eye. Vision as aesthesis of knowledge is supposed by ‘Aristotle’ to characterize the strongest appetite of all people. “By nature, all men long to know. An indication is their delight in the senses. For these, quite apart from their utility, are intrinsically delightful, and that through the eyes more than the others.”70 If this delight, desire, love, affection (ἀγάπησις) is for vision, and as it has been characterized in Plato’s Definitions71 that “Ἀγάπησις (agape¯sis) [is] contentment, welcoming everything” then, as Nietzsche says, we are on the verge of madness  –​or better, yet, we are versing madness, letting it be. The original text is “Ἀγάπησις  ἀπόδεξις  παντελής.”72 The affection of vision becomes the vision of the affection, and that is the principle of knowledge; self-​contentment through the vision. And then, from the absolute delight of vision to the absolute delight of logic as pnc. If vision is the grounding sense, the ultimate principle, then we need to stop and stare, verse as one re(s)public(a),73 in unity, and choose: which of the two has priority, vision or logic? The logic of vision and/​or the vision of logic?

69 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 980a. 70 Lawson-​Tancred, Metaphysics, 980a. 71 Most scholars highly doubt that this text has been characterized by Plato himself –​but that does not affect us here. 72 This Platonic text has been retrieved from http://​www.physics.ntua.gr/​~mourmouras/​ greats/​platon/​orismoi_​platonos.html. 73 One Republic, “Stop and Stare,” in Dreaming Out Loud (Palmdale, CA:  Mosley Interscope), 2007.

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But since we are being altruistic, and just as we followed Husserl in the abyss, let us follow Aristotle into the madness of pnc and apply ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ could be) to our question of Metaphysics. We can characterize the following: either Aristotle characterized Metaphysics or he did not. Can we decide the truth value of this proposition without appealing to what is meant by characterized? Only a decision can set in motion the pnc, a decision that lies before it, otherwise following Heraclitus, we could characterize the following: Aristotle characterized and did not characterize Metaphysics without lying and without re-​lying on any ultra-​transcendental principle. And further, if we decide that Metaphysics is Aristotle’s creation, in all possible ways that this utterance could correspond to fact –​in all possible ways of looking after the scattered matter of ‘Aristotle’ –​then, what can be said that there is –​in the language of metaphysics –​in the present, is one affinity: his logos and his death. It is logos that becomes the counterpart to death; it is the logos of the other who kept Aristotle’s anamnesis by imitating what he recorded Aristotle as having said. Perfect and instructing imitation of praxis, that is, drama. And the editor of this metaphysics a mime: philosophy as knowledge is (in the language of being and metaphysics) a mimodrama. We are deciding another punctuation of ‘logos’ beyond what we think as logic, either in its ancient or its modern vestiges. Logicians have followed Aristotle and have created a system of calculation of thought (logistic-​syllogistic) presupposing an end based on Plato’s dialectics of good and bad and Aristotle’s ultimate pnc. But the history of logic is not the history of either of them as Robert Zaborowski showed in his question of the logic of feeling.74 Aristotle’s logic is based on logismos (calculus). Logos does not need a telos other than itself as beginning and end. Logismos, what in the west we call “logic” presupposes an end as truth, the good, God, evolution and so on –​some kind of eschatology or teleology. Presently, the logos we have been attempting to link to metaphysical feel or the decision is predicated on nothing in the language of Plato-​Aristotelian metaphysics –​that is, it is nothing. No thing obeying no principles but creating them. In the language of metaphysics it is imperative and magic: the magic of the imperative and the imperative of magic; the “void toward which and from which we speak.”75 Logos allows us to create lying

74 75

Robert Zaborowski, “La Logique des Sentiments: Esquisse d’une Question,” Organon, 36, (2007): 23–​35. Michel Foucault, “Language To Infinity,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol II: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (NY: The New Press, 1998), 89; hereafter, Foucault, Infinity.

192 Chapter 5 beyond the positive/​negative or any binary dialectic: logos comes to being as apophasis of the apophansis and the apophansis of the apophasis. Logos characterizes metaphysically beyond binaries. Is it by coincidence that Kant sets out the groundwork of the moral good will with his good character? Understanding, wit, judgment and the like, whatever such talents of mind may be called, or courage, resolution, and perseverance in one’s plans, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable for many purposes but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will which is to make use of these gifts of nature, and whose distinctive constitution is therefore called character, is not good.76 What we will emphasize is the “distinctive constitution,” the character of the mind; a mind which is characterized by “Understanding, wit, judgment and the like,” all analogues, all of which are gifts. The will’s distinctive constitution is called character, it makes use, it characterizes. The will is not itself good. Kant characterizes what the will should do in order to be considered good. He analogizes. He likes, he phrases the good as “universal ends.”77 What the will needs to do in order to be good. We saw it before and now again, deontology is teleology, calculus, and logismos –​not logic, but an art of logos, a technology. A particular kind of technology, a technology of the kind. The will as character is neither good nor bad in itself. It lays its paths, “it brings into conformity,”78 it characterizes. In-​itself it, the will as logos, is absurd phrasing, an absurd passing, an intermediate zone (lède) with Stéphane Mallarmé. Logos comes to being as The Demon of Analogy characterizing itself.79 Logos folds like Zeus –​the passing movement from Zeus to Dias. Logos (creates) passages. That is why Heraclitus said the one, the wise, both wants and does not want to be called Zeus. Logos comes from beyond physical; it comes to being: Eleusis; logos comes after being. 2

Metaphysical Mimodrama

We are now in the right time and place to come back and look after a term we characterized but did not follow:  mimodrama. The action (of) miming. The 76 Kant, Groundwork, 7. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Stéphane Mallarmé, Divigations (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpextier, 1897).

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movement of looking after to taking after. Logos as follows from Mallarmé and Heraclitus or what amounts to us the same, comes in (the) in-​between (the) two, that is, “la voix [voie] même (la première, qui indubitablement avait été l’unique).”80 The mimodrama, on which Mallarmé writes, had happened, as the “Preface by a certain Fernand Beissier”81 recounts, after passing “un chemin tout sombre ce soir-​là descendent le long de la Seine: puis, poussant une petite porte. …” But not for Mallarmé. He read it in a booklet, entitled Pierrot Assassin de sa Femme. A  booklet that Paul Margueritte had written on his own performance as a mime which Fernand Beissier prefaced. This mimodrama is about a crime:  killing a woman with no trace. Following Derrida, that on which Mallarmé writes has a(n) (a)mazingly flowing structure with changes like river currents change: The temporal and textual structure of the “thing” (what shall we call it?) presents itself, for the time being, thus: a mimodrama “takes place,” as a gestural writing preceded by no booklet; a preface is planned and then written after the “event” to precede a booklet written after the fact, reflecting the mimodrama rather than programming it. This Preface is replaced four years later by a Note written by the “author” himself, a sort of floating outwork.82 This structure is taking after the follow with which we have been characterizing metaphysics on this white surface, this “paper,” οὕτω. If we re-​cite Loux again, For reasons I try to make clear in the introduction, I have chosen to follow a very old tradition (one that can be traced back to Aristotle) that interprets metaphysics as the attempt to provide an account of being qua being.83 In this phrasing, it is not only Aristotle’s metaphysics or what scattered or extended matter matters, but something that has been interpreted by many traditions including one that can be traced back to Aristotle. Yet, the attempt to provide an account of being qua being has traditionally been the (philosophical) character of Aristotle. Is there another metaphysics, one that bears not its 80 Ibid., 14. 81 Derrida, Dissemination, 198. 82 Ibid., 199. 83 Loux, First, x.

194 Chapter 5 title? For the time being, we have Loux, a writer, who writes something, chosen to follow, a follow of an interpretation of metaphysics, which appears not to be that of Aristotle, but can be traced back to him, but then again, is a follow, an interpretation of what ‘Aristotle’ has characterized as being qua being. And since “Aristotle’s characterization” “gives rise to the attempt to identify the most general kinds or categories,” Metaphysics amounts to the action (of) miming Aristotle, a mimodrama of ‘Aristotle,’ this time in re(-​)verse. Just as Mallarmé writes on the operation of the Paul Marguerite as the mime, anyone’s writing on the operation of Aristotle as the philosopher of the first philosophy, looks after taking after what can and cannot be referred to, characterized as Aristotle’s Metaphysics –​strictly speaking, no thing and/​or nothing. We have seen how it is impossible to know whether the proposition “Aristotle characterized Metaphysics” is a re-​presentation, a complete and exact translation of praxis to speech, a transfer from one system to another without (ontological) loss –​especially if each proposition refers to a single unit, or a horizon of meaning. The truth of the proposition as an accurate representation, that is, a precise and exact re-​presentation of something happening in the world, a platonic word-​to-​world relation of correspondence, cannot be decided unless one decides to punctuate the differential structure of each term all of which/​witch forms the proposition. If the latter is taken as a unit, an object, as something distinct, a particular, then the proposition does not re-​represent, and one can go as far as saying that the proposition does not represent at all but simulates. Its operation, like that of Aristotle or Marguerite is simulation: “It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”84 And these models are modes, tropes, movements of “perpetual allusion” “une allusion perpétuelle sans briser la glace.”85 There is no stopping, no silvering in the other surface of the glass to allow for a reflexion, a mirror-​image, a re-​verse of what might have happened, a pure re-​ presentation as transferring the presence of the past into the presence of the present. If there is no decision, there is no silvering but slivering. If there is no decision, no siding, then there is endless sliding from one to the other, a maze, an amazing representation of no thing in particular. The decision is always related to the ‘which’ and the ‘witch:’ the Magic that spells it. The connection, as we saw in Aristotle’s signifying voice which precedes it; the magic of the connection: the which/​witch which commands: it is the imperative of magic

84 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Paris: Semiotext[e]‌, 1981), 2. 85 Mallarmé, Divigations, 187.

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and the magic of the imperative.86 It is logos as decision: creating spells, spelling out, making wor(l)ds. Let us begin again with the analogy. In the beginning there was walking, meandering, a promenade, a peripatos. The booklet that Mallarmé reads starts at the end of an accompanied and followed path, a peripatos. A path that, in his analysis of the text, Derrida decided to leave out. “C’est ici, me dit la vieille bonne qui m’accompagnait, dѐs que nous eûmes traversé la cour dont la porte à claire-​voie s’ouvrait large et neuve sur la berge;”87 through a path of the river Seine. Just like Aristotle’s peripatos with Plato following paths along Ilissos river to reach the Lyceum or the academy, Mallarmé’s reading of Pierrot and our reading of Metaphysics are traced to following, meandering, promenades –​ peripatoi. According to Carlo Natali: The name peripatos means “promenade” or “place where one can stroll,” after dinner for example (Eudemian Ethics I.2, 1214b23–​24; see Bonitz 1870, s.v. peripatos). … It is not clear exactly what this peripatos was; it might have been a colonnade, or else a leafy walkway. The term later came to indicate the lessons of the “philosophical school,” and it is used in this sense in the passage by Dicaearchus just quoted, in which the philosopher plays on the ambiguity of the term peripatos and contrasts the more usual meaning with the more technical one. … the school of Plato was indicated with the term peripatos. … In his will, Lyco uses peripatos to describe the buildings of the school, or the school itself (Diogenes Laertius 5.70).88 A manner of walking or a place where one can stroll or a pathway to be followed. But what is there nomologically, a priori if one will, for there to be walking? What is that which could unify the promenade, the stroll, the pathway, the school, and the buildings? Peripatos is always already peri-​patos, about walking. And walking needs always already a ground, a bottom, a patio, a patos, a ledge. Before (under)standing, hands or feet, there is touching a ground, ledging –​can we stretch ‘ledge’ so that ledging could come after in the sense of looking after and taking after legein (λέγειν), logos? With no ledge there is no 86 87 88

Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Commandment?” (2011):  https://​backdoorbroadcasting. net/​2011/​03/​giorgio-​agamben-​what-​is-​a-​commandment/​; hereafter, Commandment. Paul Margueritte, Pierrot Assasine de sa Femme (Paris: Paul Schmidt, 1882). The part we follow comes from the Preface to this book by Fernard Beissier which is unpaginated. The online version: http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​bpt6k715330/​f1.image.langFR. Carlo Natali, Aristotle: His Life and School (Princeton, NJ: pup, 2013), 118.

196 Chapter 5 walking –​and with knowledge there is no walking; knowledge, episteme is on the stasis as we explored earlier. Both the booklet of Pierrot and the letting (be) of the book of Metaphysics is about an ultimate ground, an ultimate principle, a ground for moving. The book of Pierrot is about a beginning, a principle, composé et rédigé par lui-​même,89 en tant qu’ étant, (like) the principle of the book Metaphysics. Both, attempt to characterize the ultimate principle of having something in and of itself, in-​itself-​for-​itself, just like the mime In the beginning of this mime was neither the deed nor the word. It is prescribed … to the Mime that he not let anything be prescribed to him but his own writing, that he not reproduce by imitation any action (pragma: affair, thing, act) or any speech (logos: word, voice, discourse). The Mime ought only to write himself on the white page he is; he must himself inscribe himself through gestures and plays of facial expressions. At once page and quill, Pierrot is both passive and active, matter and form, the author, the means, and the raw material of his mimodrama. The histrion produces himself here. …90 The mime is ultimate beginning, looking and taking after himself by himself. To backtranslate this in ancient Greek ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ’ αὑτό. And he is producing, creating the ultimate principle in showing how a crime can be committed without contradiction, a crime, which is another being, another ὂν, to take place and time per se, τὰ τούτῳ  ὑπάρχοντα καθ’ αὑτό. Just like Pierrot, Aristotle, like our mime, is creating, producing a principle that would make the first philosophy possible, the pnc. Trying to turn the river into a rivet so that it grounds itself. And just as the proof of the crime has been left in suspension,91 so the proof of pnc has been left in suspension. Both went for peripatos92 and … abducted by the demon (of) analogy. All knowledge of 89 Mallarmé, Divigations, 186. 90 Derrida, Disseminations, 209. 91 The audience never experiences a crime in the act of Margueritte nor has there ever been such a witnessed crime. 92 ‘Going peripatos’ is an ancient Greek expression meaning going somewhere and getting lost. Just like the proof of how “the laws of logic are rules of judging which are necessarily valid,” as Brentano wrote and yet, supplements with “I do not wish to claim, however, that there is now general agreement on this point. After all, if we had to wait for universal agreement, we could not even be sure of the law of contradiction” (Franz Brentano, The Origins of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. Roderick M. Chrisholm, (NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 5; 35). This is exactly how Plato/​Socrates engages with the pnc. The

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metaphysics analogous to, according to, conformable to, following, guided by, prescribed by the imitating of the logos of Aristotle-​Plato to the no ledge of being comes to an inertia. Inertia as a habit, a habitual following without logos, without logicis as Nietzsche characterized this metaphysics of the good logismos/​calculus –​or the calculus of the good. A metaphysics which is not logical, not coming from logicis, but a kind (of) metaphysics or the metaphysics of the kind; of the good calculation or the calculation of the good. Yet, just as the story of Pierrot has a pre-​text from which it flows or follows, or mazes, “back corridors and genealogies,”93 so the story of the metaphysical character of the pnc has a pre-​text, the logos of Heraclitus; a logos about a river which is and is not the logos of a river. latter comes as an axiomatic hypothesis not as something given a priori –​“ὑποθέμενοι ὡς τούτου οὕτως ἔχοντος εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν προΐωμεν” (Plato, Republic, 437a; emphasis added). 93 Derrida, Dissemination, 204.

­c hapter 6

Pathway Four: To Follow a Scot River or to River a Scot Follow or the Logos of Heraclitus Every judgment which has passed through [the test of] a foundation has the character of normative justification, of orthos logos edmund husserl

…

Τά μέν δή λόγων πέρι έχέτω τέλος-​ τό δέ λέξεως, ώς έγώ οϊμαι, μετά τούτο σκεπτέον, καί ήμϊν ά τε λεκτέον καί ώς λεκτέον παντελώς έσκέψεται plato/​s ocrates1

∵ In our previous paths2 we found that giving one’s word comes close to altruism. This giving one’s word was traced back to a metaphysical feel. In trying to understand the metaphysical, we ended up in a roundabout way to the issue of logos. In our passing, we found that what has been referred to as ‘metaphysical’ has been an acting-​(of)-​miming a particular way of thinking, a thinking which subsumes everything under the principle ‘Being.’ Thinking in this way requires the principle of non-​contradiction (pnc) whereby something cannot be and be at the same time. We traced this way of thinking back to the writings which we characterized through the proper name ‘Aristotle.’ The pre-​text for this writing led us to Heraclitus’ logos. In this part of our undertaking we shall try to follow Heraclitus rather than perpetuating this 1 Husserl, Experience,312; Plato, Republic, 392c. 2 The first steps for this path were taken in the “Biennial Conference of the International Association for Pre-​Socratic Studies” conference, held at Delphi in June 2018. I would like to thank Babette Babich, Nestor Cordero, Sylvana Chrisakopoulou, and Christos Sideras for the valuable questions and feedback. I would also like to thank Arnaud Villani for our discussions in Heraclitean philosophy.

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_007

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metaphysical mimodrama without questioning. We shall investigate whether the logos of Heraclitus can give us a promise, an authentic logos, which does not give in to thinking with(in) the metaphysics of Being where altruism could take place. We shall start following Heraclitus through a recent book called Apanta (absolutely everything),3 which is a book without a single author. This materially distinct object is written –​in the colloquial metaphorical sense –​that is, printed in modern Greek, and comprises a prologue from Greek authors, a translation of W.K.C Guthrie’s4 work in modern Greek by an author other than those two of the prologue, and, finally –​reading from top to bottom –​an epimetron –​addendum –​by an author other than the previous ones –​all men, though we shall go after this later. At the end of the first page is the signature-​ logo(type) of the Editions, its logo: the expression of that in virtue of which we have a unified thing with all these texts that (re)present everything available for Heraclitus. In one sense, this logotype as a type of logos bounds everything. Everything that there is available for Heraclitus. However, in this book where everything about Heraclitus is bound, Heraclitus himself is bounded by absence. There is a bout concerning Heraclitus’ logos. We have fragments of Heraclitus but in this ‘of’ we have the same issue of agency and property that we faced earlier with Aristotle. What is referred to as the fragments of Heraclitus are writings about Heraclitus coming from other writers. Many other writers have tried to compile these writings and bind them into what we refer to as the fragments of Heraclitus. If anything, written logos comes as the possibility of bounding existence. Yet in these other writings a book is mentioned: “Both Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Sextus Empiricus say that Diels fragment 1 (dk22 Bl) of Herakleitos [sic] comes from the beginning of “his writing” (synggrammatos)[συγγράματος]; and this word is often translated as “his book,” on the assumption that a piece of writing must be a book.”5 Did Heraclitus write a book? Philosophically, we cannot accept that there was a book written by Heraclitus. The issue is that we do not have a witness to testify that Heraclitus wrote  –​be it an inscription or something else. We have testimonia about a ‘book’ in circulation –​just as we have testimonies that he said something like this or that. But, this bartered or exchanged work has left traces which do 3 Heraclitus, Apanta -​since this edition follows the Dielz-​Kraz archivization of the fragments we shall use ‘dk’ for future reference. 4 The possible follow to the Scottish origin of Guthrie was not initially intended in the title –​ ironically enough. Yet, most of this journal was never intended as such, as such. It writes itself, we sometimes edit here and there. 5 Victorino Tejera, “Listening to Herakleitos,” The Monist, 74, 4 (1991): 491; hereafter, Listening.

200 Chapter 6 not lead to Heraclitus’ logos –​both philologically6 and philosophically.7 If we accept that a book must have been written, even in the form of a σύγγραμμα, that is literally, a bound writing, we could never know whether the writing was “made up of a series of relatively independent reflections and maxims … or of a more unified text, indeed of a continuous argument.”8 At the same time, relying on secondary sources “on ne pourrait guère rien conclure concernant un enchaînement des formules valable pour Héraclite.9 Simpliciter, every intelligible reconstruction of Heraclitus’ ‘book’ as writing or recorded saying which has been somehow bound, could never be a re-​construction, a re-​presentation of the actual written logos of Heraclitus –​if there were any. Nevertheless, the issue of the ‘book’ is complicit with how we deal with the issue of the logos of Heraclitus.10 But, even if we had a book as a supplement or ‘perfect’ substitute for Heraclitus’ logos, or even Heraclitus himself speaking to us, or even reciting his own ‘logos,’ analogous philosophical arguments could be raised with respect to accessing an original meaning intention captured by what we consider today as a ‘book.’11 Concerning the above, Heidegger once wrote: In my opinion, the distress of the whole Heraclitus interpretation is to be seen in the fact that what we call fragments are not fragments but citations from a text in which they do not belong. It is a matter of citations out of different passages.12 Yet, we still have in our hands a book with everything about Heraclitus. A bout about Heraclitus will haunt us in many ways, yet we can still bout our way through by starting with this book which is bound to have everything about Heraclitus; this bound object which abounds in something about Heraclitus.

6

Cf. Geoffrey S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (London: cup, 1954), 7; hereafter, Cosmic. 7 Cf. Κώστας Αξελός, Ο Ηράκλειτος και η Φιλοσοφία (Αθήνα: Εξάντας, 1986), 21–​24. [Kostas Axelos, Heraclitus and Philosophy (Athens: Exadas, 1986), 21–​24]; hereafter, Axelos, Heraclitus. 8 André Laks and W. Most Glenn, Early Greek Philosophy Volume III: Early Ionian Thinkers Part 2 (London: hup, 2016), 114; hereafter, Early. 9 Clément Ramnoux, “Études Presocratiques,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger (1961):  77; Clément Ramnoux, “Études présocratiques (suite),” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, (1962): 76–​89; hereafter, for both works, Études. 10 Concerning the original categorization of the fragments, see the critiques of   Axelos, Heraclitus, 20–​ 22; early Charles H.  Kahn, “A New Look at Heraclitus,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1, 3 (1964): 189; hereafter, New. Tejera, Listening, 491–​2. 11 This problem is analogous to the one we faced in our previous path with Aristotle. 12 Heiddeger and Fink, Heraclitus, 150.

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In a book otherwise written in modern Greek, the sections have been annotated with Latin characters: A, B, C. It is the ‘C’ section that interests us –​in all the possible ways that this last sentence could be read. But first let us follow its title: Mimeses. It is a section of a collection of writers who attempted to follow the logos of Heraclitus. A similar section exists in Guthrie as an Appendix and its title is “The river-​statement.”13 Guthrie writes:  “The evidence that Heraclitus said (in whatever exact Greek words), ‘You cannot step twice into the same river,’ is perhaps stronger than that for the genuineness of any other fragment.”14 After citing seven different sources that imitate, that is, re-​cite and recite, respectively, this proposition, Guthrie mentions those who claim that Heraclitus might have talked about his river differently and wonders “What is the evidence that he put it differently?”15 And here another mimodrama of metaphysics begins. Do the exact words matter? What is the matter with the river dictum? The first-​century A.D. writer of a book on Homeric allegories (also called Heraclitus but otherwise unknown), after seriously misquoting fr. 62, proceeds: “And again he says: ‘We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not” (Heracl. Homer. Qu. Horn. 24, fr. 49 a dk: ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.16 And most importantly Since our authorities agree that this allegory stood for an essential of Heraclitus’ thought, he himself may well have stated it more than once in slightly different terms. It is certainly tempting to suppose that what Vlastos has called the ‘yes-​and-​no’ form is his own (cf. ‘is not willing and is willing’ in fr. 32, ‘wholes and not wholes’ in 49 fr. 10).17 But how can we tell what has happened with this logos? Don’t we need a principle, an ultimate one? A principle that is for-​itself-​in-​itself, writing itself, author-​itative, αὐτό καθ’ αὑτό?

13

W. K.  C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy:  Volume 1:  The Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans (NY: cup, 1962), 488; hereafter, History. 14 Guthrie, History, 488. 15 Ibid., 489. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

202 Chapter 6 The words ‘we are and are not’ are irrelevant to this discussion, save as they do or do not tend to discredit the preceding sentence. I agree with Vlastos that, taking the verb in the full existential sense, they express a thoroughly Heraclitean sentiment. They have been thought to make an abrupt transition, and it is not improbable that Heraclitus’s unscholarly namesake should have thrown together two utterances which did not come together in the philosopher himself. But he had his reason for doing so, for they both illustrate the same Heraclitean doctrine, that so-​called natural entities or substances have no permanent being but undergo a constant flux of change and renewal.18 Through an other Heraclitus, who imitates Heraclitus proper, we see that one of Heraclitus’ fragments comes about while binding, connecting, bringing together already uttered words. Logos comes to be bound after words. When Plato, in the Republic, criticizes Homer for imitating improperly the logos of the heroes he narrates, the issue is that Homer narrates as if the logos is his own. However, the narration, mimetic as it is, is still a logos: “Ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν γέ τινα λέγῃ ῥῆσιν ὥς τις ἄλλος ὤν, ἆρ᾽ οὐ τότε ὁμοιοῦν αὐτὸν φήσομεν ὅτι μάλιστα τὴν αὑτοῦ λέξιν ἑκάστῳ ὃν ἂν προείπῃ ὡς ἐροῦντα;”19 The mimetic narration is still a logos, the logos of the narrator who brings together, throws together in the same way the words bound by the logos they imitate. Mimetic or not, narration comes after logos as bound words or words bounded. What Guthrie suggests in the excerpt above is that the later Heraclitus had thrown together two utterances which did not come together in the philosopher himself. What ‘authentic’ Heraclitus had brought together, his logos, is not the same as what came together with the later Heraclitus. The latter’s logos does not imitate perfectly the logos of the ‘original’ since the words ‘we are and are not’ are irrelevant to this discussion. If the words “we are and are not” are irrelevant to this discussion that means that being has been inserted into a logos where it does not belong. And this logos whereby being is an issue, as if defying it, comes about through a river. The issue is being and its relevance to logos. Shall we first ask what is the irrelevant or shall we ask how can one λέγει the irrelevant? Do these questions amount to the same? Is there a difference? Can we tell a difference? Perhaps, feel a difference? Let us start with the latter.

18 Ibid., 491. 19 Plato, Republic, 393c.

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A peculiar feeling comes about in Quine in trying to figure out the relevance of a word and an object. For his quest(ion) Quine travels to Ephesus to follow the river Cayster. Shall we risk the hypothesis that Heraclitus of Ephesus was equally inspired by this river? Heraclitus may have flowed with this river, yet Quine seems ravelled by it. He takes a particular way in terms of interpreting the river statement of Heraclitus of Ephesus possibly inspired by Cayster. He decided to interpret, decided to not or decided not to question the relevance of being in this rivered logos. He followed another version of Heraclitus’ fragment. From the first edition of From a Logical Point of View20 all the way to its revised editions, and then to Word and Object,21 Quine philosophizes with this translation: “You cannot bathe in the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you.” He takes it as a logico-​lingustic paradox resting on the indeterminacy of meaning of the term ‘river’ which can be solved by taking river as a materially scattered object; spread in space and time like a process rather than a thing. Taking river as a process through time, the river can be split into stages; the horizon of the follow and the water as multiplicity of molecules –​as in Guthrie: so-​called natural entities or substances. In this way, the river, as water, as a multiplicity, as a class of molecules, can be found a bit further down the horizon of the f(ol)low of the river as a different stage of the whole of its horizon –​keeping the variable of substantial matter (natural entities) rigorously intact. In this case, and insofar as one can run faster than the flow of the river as water, that is, insofar as one can get hold of the flow of the water alone; or use “in these days of fast transportation” a metaphorical means, a means of transport faster than the river flow as a particular substance as a class of molecules, then indeed, they can “bathe in the same water twice while bathing in two different rivers.”22 This means that there has always already taken place a decision to exclude the dirt of the dirt and the dirt of the water; the waters are clean and pure, ideal, unsullied, virgin. But, could this not come from the other translation of the fragment of Heraclitus, among other things? As Alec Misra points out, Quine’s version of the fragment forbids the possibility of interpreting Heraclitus as affirming the possibility of bathing in the same river twice.23 20

Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View:  9 Logico-​Philosophical Essays (NY: Harper & Row, 1953), 65; hereafter, Essays. The direct reference to Heraclitus, using the same translation, is also evidenced in Willard Van Orman Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” The Journal of Philosophy, xlvii, 22 (1950): 621–​633. 21 Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object, (Cambridge, MA:  mit Press, 1960), 105  ; hereafter, Word. 22 Quine, Essays, 66. 23 Alec Misra, Principia Logica (Lulu: Lulu.com, 2005); hereafter, Principia.

204 Chapter 6 But having appreciated that, Heraclitus’ point would amount to verifying Quine’s very own thoughts about the indeterminacy of translation which is the same as Nietzsche’s, as Heidegger’s, and as Derrida’s but not identical.24 Rather than charging Quine with “misquotation”25 or with being a material nominalist in bad faith –​since he cannot avoid theorizing without making use of abstract (ideal/​immaterial) objects26 –​we merely draw attention to Quine’s ‘feel,’ those spaces in the text which phenomenalize his judgments of what plausibility is –​what is/​seems for him plausible –​which comes to characterize the (w)hole of his project; carves it, literally characterizes it, binds it, at its joints, no less than twenty times: The sifting of evidence would seem from recent remarks to be a strangely passive affair, apart from the effort to intercept helpful stimuli: we just try to be as sensitively responsive as possible to the ensuing interplay of chain stimulations. What conscious policy does one follow, then, when not simply passive toward this interanimation of sentences? Consciously the quest seems to be for the simplest story. Yet this supposed quality of simplicity is more easily sensed than described. Perhaps our vaunted sense of simplicity, or of likeliest explanation, is in many cases just a feeling of conviction attaching to the blind resultant of the interplay of chain stimulations in their various strengths.27 The interanimation of sentences is sensed, not described or represented. It is a blind feeling or feeling blind which cannot be designated in any of the ways Quine has explored. It can only be traced, like the dirt of the river, the stream of experience where

24

In a similar fashion Appel writes: “Thus, for example, modern semanticists like Quine or Davidson may hardly be aware of the fact that not only the thesis of the “indeterminateness of translation” but even the question of “radical translation” or “radical interpretation” had a certain equivalent in the hermeneutic tradition (e.g. Schleiermacher’s supposition that even with regard to ordinary conversation, nonunderstanding rather than understanding should be considered as a matter of course)” (Apel, Selected, 52). 25 Misra, Principia. 26 This charge comes from David Armstrong and Hilary Putman. David M.  Armstrong, “Against Ostrich Nominalism:  A Reply To Michael Devitt,” in Properties, eds. D.  H. Mellor and Alex Oliver (Oxford:  oup, 1997), 101–​111; Hilary Putnam, “Mathematics and the Existence of Abstract Entities,” Philosophical Studies:  An International Journal of Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 7, 6 (1956): 81–​88. 27 Quine, Word, 17.

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actual memories are mostly traces not of past sensation but of past conceptualization. We cannot rest with a running conceptualization of the unsullied stream of experience; what we need is a sullying of the stream. Association of sentences is wanted not just with non-​verbal stimulation, but with other sentences, if we are to exploit finished conceptualizations and not just repeat them.28 Let us follow Quine and interanimate what he left behind:  Sullied streams like colored rivers with sedimentations and algae growing out of control, the overhaul of dirt which can make the river an unclear passage or a crimson tide which allows for meaning and experience, for life; sullied like the woman’s flow, the period, the punctum –​the a-​bout-​ness of a woman. Reading these passages, and, en passant, a passage is always already a follow, a flow, a bout, characterizes without saying/​telling the logos of Heraclitus: (what is saying and/​or hiding comes as) signaling, just like the Oracle of Delphi or like the bout of Sibyl which Heraclitus traces in a voiceless manner. The signaling is that, not only have we been miming metaphysics, but, we have been habituated in not thinking in any way but through metaphysics –​with Being. Indeed, as Guthrie mentions, the words of being are irrelevant in the discussion of the flow, the bout, the follow. Rather than following being we shall follow the words if we were to come to get there with Heraclitus as Cratylus did: Εύμέντοι ἴσθι, ὦ Σώκρατες, ὃτι ουδέ νυνί ἀσκέπτως ἒχω, αλλά μοι σκοπουμένῳ καί πράγματα έχοντι πολύ μάλλον έκείνως φαίνεται ἒχειν ώς Ἡράκλειτος λέγει.29 Looking for translations of these fragments we found ourselves at a bout; drunken or wrestling bout with Being: 1. But I assure you, Socrates, that I have already investigated them and have taken a lot of trouble over the matter, and things seem to me to be very much more as Heraclitus says they are.30 2. Yet be well assured, Socrates, that not even now am I unreflecting, but to me as I deliberate and exert myself it appears to be much more in the way that Heraclitus said.31 Cratylus speaks about Heraclitus without Being and yet we bout his logos and force it to drop down into words with/​of being. We have imposed ‘being’ on

28 Ibid., 9. 29 Plato, Cratylus, 440e. 30 Plato, Complete, 440e. 31 Geoffrey S.  Kirk, “The Problem of Cratylus,” The American Journal of Philology, 72 (1951): 235; hereafter, Problem.

206 Chapter 6 these sentences which they do not have. How can we get to Heraclitus’ logos without taking the roundabout of being? Let us attempt to follow Heidegger who quest(ion)ed all traditional interpretations of metaphysics. Metaphysics, following its history, Heidegger says, seems as an attempt to think being qua being or the Being of beings as the grounding ground onto-​theologically –​as we saw with Loux. But, “a specific laying of the foundation of metaphysics never arises out of nothing but out of the strength and weakness of a tradition which designates in advance its possible points of departure.”32 Thus, a deconstruction is required, a going back all the way to the first texts which would help us “recover those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being;”33 yet forgot them along the way.34 Heidegger advises us to take a turn by re-​reading the first texts while trying to bracket in a way the onto-​theological interpretation that was sealed with Plato-​Aristotelian metaphysics and Christianity. He tries to show us how to read differently without using today’s categories in order to make sense of these first texts about Being. A different reading (as) following the signs of these fragmented texts and their interrelations could allow us to understand what has been lost through the myriad interpretations, translations and transformations –​all the interanimations. In other words, to adopt a different οὕτω. In his new reading in ridding of onto-​theology, Heidegger gives us new insights. As Iain Thomson observes, with such an undertaking, Heidegger comes to think that metaphysics as an “ontotheological project is not historically necessary.”35 Being can be cleared from categories such as the one that Guthrie used to interpret Heraclitus’ fragment –​i.e so-​called natural entities or substances. Whereas tradition took logos as denotation, logic as calculation, reason, and the passing from one to the other, Heidegger elaborates on a different meaning, one that is found in many of his writings. Logos comes to be an expression of care through questioning being for a being whose being is an issue. It is through logos that this being is expressed, revealing itself to itself or to Others; logos is “the letting something be seen.”36 In other words,

32

Martin Heidegger Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, IN: uip, 1990), 5; hereafter, Kant. 33 Heidegger, bt, 310. 34 Walter Biemel, “Heidegger and Metaphysics,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 50–​60. 35 Iain Thomson, “Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8, 3 (2000): 318; hereafter, Ontotheology. 36 Heidegger, bt, 56.

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logos derives from a particular kind of being as an expression of its being. Thus, “because the function of λόγος lies in merely letting something be seen, in letting entities be perceived. … λόγος can signify the reason.”37 Heidegger takes logos as discourse or saying in the sense that it makes manifest to another person what is being talked about. Yet, this interpretation is still ledged on the unsteady “apopha(n)sis” of Aristotle that we saw earlier. Can we try differently and save the logos of Heraclitus from being? Could we undertake to bring the logos of Heraclitus to existence without being? Heidegger’s clearing of metaphysics is still a path,38 even if circumferential, contour-​ial, within the outer layers of the horizon of Being; Being which is everything and nothing and out of which everything flows. Thinking is still within Being. The “river-​bed of thoughts may shift,” says Wittgenstein, but we can “distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-​bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.”39 And what about the banks where everything is deposited? It “consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which is one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.”40 In Heidegger, everything keeps flowing from the bank of Being even if everything flows differently and the ontotheological categories are washed away. The bank of Being is still banking logos to being. Heidegger’s Being may be coming like Mallarmé’s river, a rève (dream) which is of undecided origin and from which everything flows. A  movement of a stream of images struggling to come to a focus, like a dream, like a poetic verse. Like in a wrestling bout where we struggle to bring into focus other aspects of Being’s ‘inceptive’ self-​showing, not out of some antiquarian ‘nostalgia’ (pace Derrida), but rather in an anamnetic attempt to recover ways of understanding Being otherwise than as the ontotheological ‘ground’ of beings.41 But (what) Heidegger never quest(ion)s, at least, in these works, (is,) understanding without Being. If anything, he (f)allows it. And, by all means, our composition or con-​verse-​ation could not have been characterized without such (f) allowing. Heidegger was the first to show how the subject-​object thought that 37 Ibid., 57. 38 In Contributions Heidegger questions the range of the questioning of being not being itself. 39 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 15. 40 Ibid. 41 Thomson, Ontotheology, 23.

208 Chapter 6 characterizes western thinking is just a modality of thought and not a necessity. It permeates all western expression including western technology which enframes the world in a particular way. Is understanding possible without Being and its followers, its flows and its excretions: being, essence, presence, beingness, unity identity, horizon, pnc? Is Heraclitus attempting such a thinking? Heidegger never quest(ion)s the principle and circumference of Being –​ its limits, its hori-​z-​on. His “other beginning of thinking”42 as enowning, is a thinking with(in) be-​ing. This zigzag philosophical movement, this follow, this end of principles of Being Derrida questions in Marges. In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper.43 Our undertaking then shall follow on from Heidegger’s work including Derrida’s questions. Derrida did not attempt such a quest either as he took it as impossible to read these texts by ridding them completely of the ontotheological grounds in which we understand them; that is, withdrawing them from the Bank of Being. Yet, insofar as the ontotheological comes after the logos of Heraclitus, such an undertaking, difficult as it would be, can come to be worth(y of) a try. Our quest then to Heraclitus reveals that we shall undertake a pace, a passage, a path, a peripatos to the dark outside of Being and that comes about as

42 Heidegger, Contributions, 175. 43 Jacques Derrida, Margins, 134. If we use Heidegger’s terms, what Derrida notes as ‘prescription’ might as well be termed ‘prestruction’ (see Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), 1-​38. When Heidegger asks in Being and Time which point should be the point of his departure he chooses being for which being is an issue for Dasein. And then again, “We must rather choose such a way of access and such a kind of interpretation that this entity can show itself in itself and from itself” (Heidegger, bt, 37). This is not coming from any givenness –​there is no phenomenological reduction in Heidegger. A logos of Being has been given permission. It is this logos that Heidegger will question later through a kuhre (turn), through a quest(ion) to the Pre-​Socratics. To be fair, Heidegger may have been hesitant, yet, he was still thinking the crossing when he was writing in Contributions “still they [the contributions] are not able to join the free jointure of the truth of be-​ing out of be-​ing itself” (Heidegger, Contributions, 3).

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the dark follow of Heraclitus’ river. A question of understanding without passing through Being –​Being which yet passes through beings, that is, the ontic-​ ontological teleology, the natural, the physis, the physical. To approximate Heraclitus, to talk about Heraclitus avoiding a bout itself to Being comes forth in the attempt to-​get-​there with Heraclitus’ logos. We shall undertake such a bout to Being so that his logos could come about. Our quest then amounts to bracketing, parenthesizing a way of thinking which has determined the logos of Heraclitus. To come to terms with Heraclitus with no auxiliaries and delegations; without loans and fund(ing)s from the Bank of Being. 1

Undertaking to Disengage Heraclitus’ Logos from Thinking with(in) Being

Karl Reinhardt once wrote: “[I]‌f you want to explain Heraclitus, tell us what his problem was.”44 Let us start this reduction with Reinhardt’s invitation. Let us take it as a philosophical challenge and approach Heraclitus through the problem of (his) ‘logos’ –​be it logos as the totality of his written fragments or the way he used the term ‘logos,’ one needs to grapple with ‘logos’ overall. We shall explore the problem of ‘Heraclitus’ logos’ through the following question –​focusing primarily on the Cratylus: Did Heraclitus say how things are45 or how it appears to be46 as we translate that Plato wrote that Cratylus says Heraclitus was saying?47 How could it be that Heraclitus(’ logos) said how things are? Another way of putting this question: to what extent do the fragments of Heraclitus reveal a reflection undertaken with ‘being’? From Plato onwards, we have been tyrannized48 or contaminated49 by thinking everything with(in) ‘being’ and, thus, “nous sommes obsédés de 44 45 46 47

48

49

In Karl R. Popper, “Kirk on Heraclitus, and on Fire as the Cause of Balance,” Mind, 72, 287 (1963), 386; hereafter, Kirk. Translation 1; see page 205. Translation 2; see page 205. Choosing the Cratylus as a primary source aligns with Gadamer’s suggestion to approach Heraclitus mainly through Plato and Aristotle (see the chapter “Solid Ground:  Plato and Aristotle;” Hans-​Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rob Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2001), 33–​41; hereafter, Philosophy. As Peirce says, this way of thinking, this “being accustomed to being,” this “habit” is how we live and philosophize, so much so, that it has “dominated the world for so many ages and still in great measure tyrannizes over the thoughts of butchers and bakers.” (cp. i.390; 173; our tyrannical emphasis). “une contamination millénaire” (Jean Bollack, Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 32; hereafter, Héraclite).

210 Chapter 6 montrer un ceci, et de (nous) convaincre que ce ceci, ici, est ce qu’ on ne peut ni voir, ni toucher, ni ici, ni ailleur.”50 Does Heraclitus get obsessed with ‘being?’ Does he allow it as the principle which regulates his thought? Or, in Plato’s words, does Heraclitus “ἠξίωται ταύτης τῆς προσρήσεως τοῦ εἶναι?”51 As we shall see, such a hypothesis goes against the traditional interpretations of Heraclitus. However, starting with the Cratylus we can entertain this hypothesis if we take into serious consideration the movement or transference, in other words, the metaphoricity, whereby the authentic logos of Heraclitus, what he gave us as logos (Did say),52 passes into the writing of Plato (Plato wrote) after having been (supposedly) enacted by Cratylus (Cratylus says) and, then, translated by us, so that we have something to talk about. It is in this ‘aboutness’ that a bout is created, a bout in Heraclitus’ logos. In such passages and back-​turnings, Heraclitus loses sovereignty of (his) logos and comes to be subjected to interpretations through the paradigm of being (was saying/​it appears to be).53 The logos of Heraclitus becomes an object of interpretation

50 51

52

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Jean-​Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000), 7. “Using being as axiom (ἠξίωται) for enunciation (προσρήσεως) /​ putting enunciation under the principle (ἠξίωται) of being” (Plato, Cratylus, 423e; our translation). Derrida has also paid attention to the use of προσρήσεως in other Platonic texts. Yet, he has omitted this one which would have disturbed the flow of his trace of being. Πρόσρησις does not entail being πάντα κατ᾽ ἔριν καὶ χρεών –​see Derrida, Psyche Vol-​II, 170-​175. In Kantian terminology, Heraclitus does not allow ‘being’ as a regulating idea. To use Guthrie’s expression, ‘being’ as regulating idea of thought can be characterized as “the mass of later testimony which would make him [Heraclitus] conform to the expected” (Guthrie, History, 456). In this path, a “hint on a less usual interpretation may be given extra prominence against” this “mass of later testimony” (ibid.). We could even say ‘what Heraclitus testified’ if it be true that Diogenis Laertius records Heraclitus’ having left his writing as a testament in the temple of Artemis (Διογένης Λαέρτιος, Βίοι Φιλοσόφων, μτφ. Φιλολογική Ομάδα Κάκτου (Αθήνα:  Κάκτος, 1994), ix, 6 [Diogenes Laertios, Philosophers’ Lives, trans Kaktos Philological Team (Athens: Kaktos, 1994), 6]. We stumble once again into the issue of biosis since Laertius work in Greek is entitled ‘Βίοι’ and not ‘Lives.’ We use ‘paradigm’ in the Platonic senses which, again, boils down to how we think (cf John M. Rist, “The Order of the Later Dialogues of Plato,” Phoenix, 14, 4 (1960): 207–​221; hereafter, Order). Nietzsche called ‘thinking with being’ the trope of metonymy –​ confusing cause and effect. But metonymy implies another trope, that of metaphor. The issue of ‘metaphoricity’ in Heraclitus has been mainly investigated with respect to the semantic trajectory of the term ‘logos’ (discourse → contents of discourse → truth → order of things; cf, Edwin L. Minar Jr, “The Logos of Heraclitus,” Classical Philology, 34, 4 (1939): 323–​341; hereafter, Logos; W. J. Verdenius, “Notes on the Presocratics,” Mnemosyne, 13, 4 (1947): 276; hereafter, Notes; Guthrie History, 38; 403–​490). Yet, our point, inspired by later Heidegger,

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in virtue of an “interchange, exchange”54 through ‘being,’ and thus comes to be what we are saying that and what his logos is. If anything, as Guthrie says, “to translate is sometimes to have taken sides already in a disputed question of interpretation.”55 Yet, we can hypothesize even more radically: We conceptually translate Heraclitus most of the times through ‘being’ which constitutes a conceptual style from Plato-​Aristotle onwards.56 The sides are banks of being as we hardly witness any quest without its aid; we stay at the banks without following Heraclitus’ river. Can we “to try to understand what this Logos was”57 in a way where we understand through another logos which does not subject itself to being? If we trust our eyes like Heraclitus testified he did,58 we can see how we have been accustomed to assigning the paradigm of being or to translating his fragments through/​with this logic even when the text shows us otherwise. As one can plainly see from the ancient sentence above, Plato records or makes Cratylus express himself without ‘being’ in order to testify his following Heraclitus. However, our orthodox translations or interpretations involve ‘being’ to the point of imposing on the text a conceptual or

is that this metaphoricity, while silently underpinning our thinking, comes from giving primacy to the conceptual currency of ‘Being’ (cf Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1972; hereafter, Basic). This attitude of economizing our thinking through the Bank of ‘Being’ is not a necessity but a historical contingency –​“our justification for this habit of thought is that the form remains the same” (Guthrie History, 467; emphasis added). Our undertaking aspires to approximating Heraclitus without mortgaging his fragments in the Bank of Being to yield interesting meanings. Neither do we perform an investment in the dialectics of being-​becoming. We shall undertake an Eleusis, a coming to, not the never-​ending ever-​living cycle of be/​ing-​ be/​coming subtended by a formal Logos. 54 Friedrich Nietzsche in Carole Blair, “Nietzsche’s Lecture Notes on Rhetoric: A Translation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 16, 2 (1983), 94–​129; hereafter, Nietzsche, Rhetoric. 55 Guthrie, History, 404. 56 We are consciously excluding Parmenides from this proposition. Whereas many exegetes take Parmenides as founding ontology and laying the ground for ‘logic’  –​where logic means here the ontotheological/​mathematico-​scientific modern way of thinking –​ philosophically, such an appreciation has been challenged (cf. Heidegger, Basic). It is, however, worth mentioning that, again philosophically, translating without ‘being’ would put Reinhardt’s hypothesis of Parmenides philosophizing earlier than Heraclitus back to the table –​only insofar as one accepts that one was aware of the other which is always ultimately unjustified as Popper and Gadamer have explained (Popper Kirk; Hans-​Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. Robert Coltman (New  York:  Continuum, 2003; hereafter, Knowledge). 57 Guthrie, History, 419. 58 Heraclitus, dk 55 ; 101a.

212 Chapter 6 philosophical outlook that the text does not, at least terminologically, convey. In many of Heraclitus’ fragments no verb is used –​not to mention the verb ‘to be.’ To use O’ Brien’s expression, Heraclitus undertakes expressions “sans liaison verbale,”59 yet we sentence them to or with ‘being.’ Most our translations take place in virtue of imposing verbs and ‘being’ where no such inscription has taken place. This tendency, which goes beyond a lectio facilior, appears prevalent. We have already followed Reeve’s and Kirk’s translations of the Cratylus but let us add a few additional examples. When Heidegger and Fink find it difficult to approximate Heraclitus in the way he thinks how we live the death of the Other they “make the transition from life and death to being alive and being dead” whereas the text does not make a terminological investment on ‘being.’60 In Marcovich’s first two parts of Some Heraclitean Problems, none of the fragments he translates from Greek have any version or conceptual derivative of the verb ‘be,’ yet all his translations are undertaken with the help of this term –​and its affiliates (is, are, being, substance, essence).61 Ramnoux also uses ‘being’ in her reconstructions of the logical structure of the fragments.62 Verdenius for instance insists that ‘φύσις’ in Heraclitus should be translated as “essential nature.”63 Finally, in a much inspiring analysis of Graham where he argues that Heraclitus does not personify nature, he ends up translating fragment 123 as “nature is ever hidden.”64 But, to what extend is this anachronistic? ‘Essential nature’ appears in studies on rhetoric by Flavius Sergius, Cicero, and Papirius Fabianus as a neologism to convey Aristotelian concepts.65

59

“Nous lisons dans le grec: ὃδος ἂνω κάτω μία καί ὡϋτή. Littéralement: “chemin vers le haut, vers le bas, un et le même.” Il en est de même au fr. 61; substantifs et adjectifs se succèdent ici sans liaison verbale: θάλασσα ὓδωρ καθαρώτατον καί μιαρώτατον, ἱχθύσι μέν πότιμον καί σωτήριον, ἀνθρώποις δέ άποτον καί όλέθριον” (D. O’ Brien, “Héraclite et l’unité des opposés,” Revue de la Métaphysique et de Morale (1990), 148; hereafter, Héraclite). A similar point is made by Cherniss (Harold Cherniss, “The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12, 3 (1951): 333; hereafter, Characteristics). 60 Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 93; 155. 61 Fragments B79, B82, B48, B54 do not have ‘being’ and Marcovich sentences them to be revealing “the paradoxical essence of things” (Miroslav Marcovich, “Some Heraclitean Problems,” The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter, 12 (1981):  3; hereafter, Problems. 62 Clément Ramnoux, Études. 63 Verdenius, Notes, 273. 64 Daniel W. Graham, “Does Nature Love to Hide? Heraclitus B123 DK,” Classical Philology, 98 (2003), 175–​179; hereafter, Nature. 65 Nietzsche, Rhetoric, 121.

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Similar impositions which are coming from the paradigm of being are carried out when we talk about Heraclitus’ epistemology66 and objects of knowledge which are terms and conceptualizations derived from the idiom or dialect of episteme as set by Plato and Aristotle. The “difference between the knowing subject and the knowing object”67 has not taken place or would not have been accepted by Heraclitus. Much “that might now be regarded as philosophical –​ethical and political theory, logic and epistemology  –​is either wholly lacking in this early period or present only at an embryonic stage.”68 Fritz’s inspiring analysis of νοῦς casts serious doubt on any attempt to ascribe unconditionally such epistemological terms on Pre-Socratic thought –​including Homer and Hesiod in this metonymy of ‘Pre-Socratic.’69 Truth as the transcendental aim of knowledge does not even have a possibility in Heraclitus according to Aristotle.70 The schema subject-​ object-​episteme-​truth which finds its rudimentary expression in ‘S is p’ or Subject-​ Predicate is a way of thinking flowing from the paradigm of Being. As Ramnoux explains in another work, Heraclitus’ thought does not kneel before being.71 To the extent that we desire to follow the logos of Heraclitus, our treatment of this ‘logos’ cannot rely on investing on ‘being’ aspiring to yield interest of knowledge. We shall characterize a bout where there is no ledge on Heraclitus but logos as a legein ledging on Heraclitean fragments. To reflect, our undertaking flows along Axelos’ and (early) Kahn’s appreciation to approach the fragments holistically.72 With respect to similar undertakings, 66

Patricia Kenig Curd, “Knowledge and Unity in Heraclitus,” The Monist, 74, 4 (1991), 531–​ 549; hereafter, Knowledge; Edward Hussey, “The Beginnings of Science and Philosophy in Archaic Greece,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Marie Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (London: Blackwell, 2012), 3–​18; hereafter, Science; Joel Wilcox, “On the Distinction Between Thought and Perception in Heraclitus’, Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, 26, 1 (1993), 1–​18; hereafter, Distinction. 67 W. J. Verdenius, “Science Greque et Science Moderne,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger (1962), 276; hereafter, Science. 68 Guthrie, History, xi. 69 Kurt von Fritz, “ΝΟΥΣ, ΝΟΕΙΝ, and Their Derivatives in Pre-​ Socratic Philosophy (Excluding Anaxagoras): Part I. From the Beginnings to Parmenides,” Classical Philology (1945), 223–​242; herafter, Nous. 70 “οὔτε δὴ καθ’ Ἡράκλειτον ἐνδέχεται λέγοντας ἀληθεύειν” (Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1063b.61; emphasis added). 71 “L’homme Héraclitéen ne connaît pas des genoux dont on ne glisse plus” (Clémence Ramnoux, Vocabulaire et Structures de Pensée archaïque chez Heraclite (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959), 2701; hereafter, Vocabulaire). 72 Kahn changed his hermeneutic style over the years. Initially, Kahn followed Axelos in calling the debate over the logos of Heraclitus “fruitless” (Kahn, New, 192; footnote 9); whereas, later, he sided with the paradigm of being and thus recoiled to treating Heraclitus’ logos as “the eternal structure of the world as it manifests itself in discourse”

214 Chapter 6 we feel that we come in proximity with recent work on Heraclitus from David Rankin,73 Joanne B.  Waugh,74 and Irene Loulakaki-​Moore.75 Through these passages we shall attempt to go further with the flow of Heraclitus. But to begin we must go to the end. At the end of the debate of Heraclitus’ logos. 2

The Debate

Mark Johnstone’s76 recent article is a perfect treat for engaging with the debate of Heraclitus’ logos. In this treatise, Johnstone attempts a meaning for the term ‘logos’ by trying to identify the intention of Heraclitus. Following closely the relevant philological and philosophical debates, he attempts to overcome the two conflicting accounts that have been produced over time as interpretations of what the ‘logos’ of Heraclitus is, or how Heraclitus uses the term ‘logos’ in order to convey his philosophy. According to Johnstone, there have been two main conceptual avenues proposed as ways of understanding what Heraclitus means with the terms ‘logos.’ On the one hand, there is a simple way whereby logos is to be taken as the noun of the verb ‘λέγω’ which means an account, a story, or a discourse. Simply enough, this ‘logos’ is what one says simpliciter. Yet, behind this simplicity lies the presupposition that discourse is simply what comes out of one’s mouth. This is a metaphysically unexciting way of understanding the logos of Heraclitus as Barnes has it.77 The other way, metaphysically loaded, takes logos as some kind of cosmic principle, a formula, some kind of structure or law which subtends everything. And, since for Heraclitus things change, this principle is what orders change. The cosmos is imbued by and is manifested by and

73 74 75 76 77

(Charles H.  Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus:  An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: cup, 1979), 94; hereafter, Art). David Rankin, “Heraclitus Fragment B1 DK Revisited,” Hermes, 123, 3 (1995), 369–​373; hereafter, Heraclitus. Joanne B. Waugh, “Heraclitus: The Postmodern Presocratic?” The Monist, 74, 4 (1991), 605–​ 623; hereafter, Postmodern. Irene Loulakaki-​Moore, “The Dark Philosopher and the postmodern turn: Heraclitus in the poetry of Seferis, Elytis and Fostieris,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (2014), 91–​ 113; hereafter, Dark. Mark A.  Johnstone, “On ‘Logos’ in Heraclitus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 47 (2014), 1–​29; hereafter, Logos. “The noun logos picks up, in an ordinary and metaphysically unexciting way, the verb legei; it is wasted labour to seek Heraclitus’ secret in the sense of logos” (Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1979), 44; original emphasis. Hereafter, Presocratic).

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through such an order. In this interpretation, theology is just a breath away to snatch this logos and to account ‘it’ as some kind of divine principle which orders and governs everything. Interpreting the logos of Heraclitus in this way, one could extend its meaning to the logos of God as a Divine Word. Before advancing with Johnstone’s account, we need to make a long digression and make an important philosophical remark with respect to the Divine Word. This will help to elucidate further the logic of metaphoricity which flows from the paradigm of being and will help us in our bracketing. In a relevant paper, Miller, who supports the metaphysical loaded interpretation of Heraclitus’ ‘logos’ as cosmic principle ie. Divine Reason, provides an oxymoronic view that “[d]‌espite superficial similarities, this Logos of Heraclitus stands in no direct connection with that of the fourth Gospel.”78 His main argument is that this interpretation belongs to an old-​school religious thinking and that the differences are quite “irreconcilable”79 between Heraclitus and John.80 Apart from the fact that Miller does not show us anything motivating towards following this view, philosophically speaking, this view is untenable because the very issue here is about the transcendent and/​or the transcendental as

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Ed. L.  Miller, “The Logos of Heraclitus:  Updating the Report,” The Harvard Theological Review, 74, 2 (1981), 176; hereafter, Logos. See also Verdenius, who follows Burnet, by maintaining that the Johannine logos has “nothing to do with Heracleitos or with anything at all in Greek philosophy” (Verdenius, Notes, 275). This aphoristic ‘nothing to do’ or ‘anything at all’ is a bit tricky however. To the extent that Johanine logos is about God as a Trinity of which Jesus ‘is’ a constitutive/​constituted part or a manifestation of a mysterious or paradoxical unity, the interpretation of which has caused so many denominations, then, there is definitely some metaphoricity in this one God with many parts. Also, in terms of the style of discourse “it is impossible not to be struck by the similarity between his [Heraclitus’] use of paradox and parable and that of Jesus” (Guthrie, History, 438). 79 Miller, Logos, 175. 80 For a completely opposite view see Guthrie History; and Stavros J. Baloyiannis, “The philosophy of Heracletus today,” Enkephalos, 50 (2013): 1–​21. See also Finkelberg’s position whereby “Christian apologists were fascinated by the aspects of Heraclitus’ theory of cosmic fire that, in their view, anticipated Christian ideas of the Last Judgment and hellfire (B64 and B66, as well as B14, B23, and probably B28b), and their account of the cosmic cycle served only as an explanatory background” (Aryeh Finkelberg, “On the History of the Greek Κόσμος,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98 (1998): 218; hereafter, Κόσμος). See also Justin Matyr who writes in his Apology: “We have been taught that Christ is the first-​born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them” (Justin Martyr, “First Apology, Second Apology,” in Ante-​Nicene Fathers, Volume 1, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, NY: Public Domain), 178).

216 Chapter 6 divine.81 That is, whether everything there is, is as we experience it, or there are two worlds, the natural/​sensible and the supranatural/​suprasensible or intellectual/​divine world. Vlastos wrote that “… Anaximander, or even Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and others … did call nature ‘god …’. ”82 That is, they transferred the order of the divine to an impersonal order ‘Nature.’ In this logic of transference, metaphor, God passes into Physis, Physis passes into Being, and the latter into God; and nowadays into Evolution.83 It is in this metaphor conceived as the end of a long “intellectual revolution”84 that all Pre-​Socratics are interpreted. One of the aims of this path is to re-​move Heraclitus from this metonymy of Pre-​Socratics. Let us recite a stoic claim even though it is orthodoxy to think that the Heraclitean logos was largely distorted by the Stoics. Seneca, made an amazing observation.85 He said: “It is nature,” someone objects, “that provides these things for me.” Do you not grasp that when you say this, you are merely giving god a different name? What else is nature but god and the divine reason which permeates the whole world and all its parts?86 This objection requires a lot of attention, especially because of the analogies it advances. When we say, we give. In the ‘this’ there is the ‘name.’ Saying, comes as giving and the ‘name’ as a gift. A (no) thing is given when we say, with our logos. The giving of the logos is that which we cannot grasp. A path opens up to 81

See also Frankel who appreciated that the discussion is about the immanent and transcendent and who took a bold position whereby he situated Heraclitus in the transcendent/​ transcendental camp (Hermann Frankel, “A Thought Pattern in Heraclitus,” The American Journal of Philology, 59, 3 (1938): 309–​337; hereafter, Pattern. Cf Minar’s response in Logos and Ramnoux, Études, 100. 82 Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume i:  The Presocratics, (Princeton, NJ: pup, 1995), 22; hereafter, Studies. 83 See Heidegger’s Contributions for a detailed and piecemeal analysis of how this transference takes place (cf Guthrie, History, 27). We could include Ramnoux’s analysis into this logic of transference since, according to her reading, the first philosophical thoughts were formed around the divine and then passed into the ontological. However, Ramnoux uses the word “semantic mutation” to describe this passage and it would take us far off our path to problematize the difference (Ramnoux, Vocabulaire, 272; cf Jean Wahl, “Une étude sur la pensée archaique,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1960): 92–​106). 84 Cf Guthrie, History, 29; Kirk, Heraclitus, 227. 85 A very risky hypothesis would be that Seneca might have been inspired by Xenophanes here insofar as we trust Aristotle who attributes such thinking to Xenophanes (Aristotle, Metaphysica 986b.24). 86 Seneca, Benefits, 81.

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examine the complicity of logos and the gift but we are not ready to undertake this path. First, we need to focus on the consequences of this giving which analogizes nature with god. What Seneca is suggesting is that whether you call ‘it’ “unseen order of Nature,”87 or “[the real] constitution of things,”88 or Logos, or Nature, or Physis, or Order, or Reason, or God, or Being, or Truth, it amounts to the same. On top of that, with such transference we do not escape dividing the world into two transcendentally. We create an ‘else’ and deposit the divine whereas the divine is part of the parts as it permeates everything. For our concern with the logos of Heraclitus the issue boils down to whether one accepts that Heraclitus philosophizes through a transcendentally postulated end as structure, law, truth, or God; be it transcendent or immanent, Platonic-​Kantian, Aristotelian-​Hegelian or Spinozist.89 The logic of metaphoricity, which aspires to arriving at knowledge as a transcendental end –​in the sense of how things are structured –​as the ultimate truth, forces the logos of Heraclitus (to be) expelled to the transcendental realm –​be it immanent or transcendent. The fact that we have at our disposal fragments which could be interpreted as pointing to something hidden becomes the justification for re-​ metonyzing this metaphoricity –​the transfer to the revelation of the hidden order of things –​and, by projecting it to Heraclitus, we thus end up thinking that he was thinking to signify some kind of everlasting Being or the Divine Word.90 Can we think or quest(ion) otherwise? Does Heraclitus’ logos divide the world, and if so, how? Or, if we think he does not, how do we account for these fragments that might be interpreted in this way? 87 Kirk, Heraclitus, 111. 88 Guthrie, History, 438. 89 See Guthrie’s reply to Vlastos about an arche which is “in purity and perfection or at the circumference of the cosmos” (Guthrie, History, 470). Logos is interpreted oxymoronically as if Heraclitus meant a “divine principle as immanent as well as external” (ibid., 471; emphasis added). Guthrie’s approach without the qualification ‘divine’ would amount to Fink’s quasi-​Spinozist approach of ‘being’ as the transcendental immanent/​transcendent principle (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus). 90 In her exploration of Hippolytus’ Refutatio, Ramnoux explains how the very raison d’ être of this treatise was to refute those ‘Christians’ who are considered heretics precisely as a result of repeating Heraclitean philosophy or reading Heraclitus in a Christian way. (Ramnoux, Études, 93–​95). Even if “[i]‌l serait donc faux de croire qu’Hippolyte, ou le pseudo-​Hippolyte, ait lu des idées chrétiennes dans Héraclite,” the fact that Hippolytus combats those who did shows that there was room for Heraclitus to be appropriated by the Christian outlook (ibid., 100) –​Hippolytus does indeed recognize the possibility of such readings in order to refute them. And this room might as well be those fragments which could be read pointing (to something) beyond.

218 Chapter 6 Guthrie writes, for instance, that “unique and enigmatic Heraclitus of Ephesus was also advancing towards the fateful division between the reason and the senses” and that “he saw the whole natural world in a continuous cycle of flux and change.”91 Such philosophical paroxysm and mania to reconcile ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ where being means stability and becoming means flux is the trademark of the vast exegetical writings on Heraclitus.92 Being and becoming as opposites unite and create harmony with Logos as the transcendental condition. The phenomenal appears harmonious while the in-​itself hides opposition, war, strife, fire and/​or Logos. Despite the anachronistic philosophical vocabulary of episteme, Curd suggests that knowledge and wisdom can be found within the same world rather than separating them platonically.93 Yet, her account mimics Aristotle’s reply to Plato in that the universals/​kinds can be found in this world rather than the ideal world. Another way to explore Curd’s insight is through Heraclitus’ concept of time. But to do that one has to have time to play with Heraclitus’ time and none of the epistemological accounts on Heraclitus have time for his time; none deal with time precisely because for knowledge to occur time must not exist or must be frozen otherwise time threatens to change the permanence that knowledge requires; that somethings is.94 Propositional knowledge kills time. 91 Guthrie, History, 5. 92 We cannot exclude the early Heidegger (until the Contributions) with his unfolding of Being and Axelos’ formula of the ἐν γίγνεσθαι τοῦ εἶναι from this thundering. This tendency to “distill the eternal from the immutable,” as Baudelaire early enough perceived, “has its foundations in Platonic and Aristotelian concepts and representations and is in marked contrast with the Heraclitean philosophy” (Loulakaki-​Moore, Dark, 93). 93 Curd, Knowledge, 535. 94 Kirk in The Problem of Cratylus has explored this question with respect to whether knowledge is possible when everything changes. Obviously, if the subject and the object of knowledge constantly change there can be no knowledge  –​which is the so-​called extremity propounded by Cratylus in that we cannot even enter into the same river once (cf Sartre’s critique on Husserl concerning this very topic on Being and Nothingness). However, our question here is not about knowledge but about consistency. If everything for Heraclitus comes about through opposites or opposing forces, then why not include in this universal class one’s logos, and equally Heraclitus’ logos –​since logos is treated as distinct from the enunciating subject? Ramnoux explores this possibility only with respect to the diacritical possibilities of words –​“avec plusieurs sens qui se battent pour le même mot, avec des mots aussi qui se groupent selon leurs lois autonomes … … imposent la découverte merveilleuse du sens auquel on n’avait pas encore pensé” (Ramnoux, Vocabulaire, 83) –​yet she never takes this route for interpreting logos. Gigon was the first to try it in the sense of starting to approximate logos through polemos. But he linked polemos to an eternal truth as divine law (cf Guthrie, History, 447). As Bollack says Gigon divinized war making it the end of logos –​an essential unity (cf Cherniss, Characteristics,

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In Poster’s insightful analysis according to which Heraclitus critiques epic language, the fragments that hint to the unapparent could easily be taken to mean possible allegorical or figurative uses of language.95 If one listens to epic language and reflects on it, then they will find inconsistencies. Yet, if one takes the time, as Heraclitus did, and plays with language, that is, when one uses and abuses this language allegorically and figuratively, then the thinker creates connections which may have been registered as unapparent before –​but they are not now after having been created.96 In Poster’s analysis we have a suggestion that the logos of the thinker connects. Considering the fragment 123 which is translated as “nature loves to hide itself” we can apply Poster’s insight and say simply that a play of hide and seek relates us to (our) nature. The passive “κρύπτεσθαι” can be interpreted through a medium mood since, if time is introduced, nature is first visible and then hides. And with(in) time rather than being we resolve the fixation of a transcendental hidden harmony as in the case of the bow and lyre that Guthrie, among others, insists on.97 Bow and lyre are man-​made constructions. The one who put together the elements in order to create the bow or lyre experienced the opposing forces in the most apparent way bodily. In trying to create these objects these forces have been experienced before they became unapparent after construction; the unapparent is for the one who inspects the ready-​made product, not the one who uses it or, most critically, the one who made it.98 A play of hide and seek which is ultimately a play of time makes the play of apparent-​unapparent. Verdenius is just when he says that we present Heraclitus as the father of “Neo-​Kantianism” when we take his logos as some kind of divine reason or order of things.99 In his first Critique Kant deals precisely with whether logic as the structures of proper reason evolve, change or whether they have a proper being over time.100 We project Kantianism, essentially another form of 414). He tried to find the truth of Heraclitus’ logos in war. By removing truth as a transcendental end we can appreciate how logos in Heraclitus comes to be through war. 95 Carol Poster, “The Task of the Bow:  Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 39, 1 (2006): 1–​21; hereafter, Task. 96 Ibid., 14. 97 Guthrie, History, 450–​453. 98 See Duchamp’s art on the ready-​made put in relief; see Loulakaki-​Moore’s analysis on Fostieris’ poem Παλινωδία and the way he plays with Heraclitus’ play of nature (Loulakaki-​ Moore, Dark). Otherwise, as Meno tells Socrates, –​and which Wittgenstein will explore in his Investigations –​one cannot express the truly unapparent. The unapparent like a bout can only be talked about. 99 Verdenius, Notes, 275–​6. 100 Kant, First Critique.

220 Chapter 6 neo-​Platonism, on Heraclitus.101 This is a result of interpreting logos as reason or some kind of transcendental structure.102 And this structure must have ‘being’ which does not change. Otherwise, how can reason, as structure, be what it is overtime? Yet, everything changes for Heraclitus, yet lo-​gos-​be-​hold! All change except for Logos! Thus “everlasting is only the logos, which in its spiritual aspect is the rational principle governing the movements of the universe, including the law of cyclic change.”103 By a para-​noic move, the logos is pushed outside of everything that changes as the condition of change –​it arises out of experience! The logos of Heraclitus thus becomes the “law of becoming.”104 But can we ascribe such philosophical inconsistency or dialecticity (being-​becoming) to Heraclitus? To be con-​ sistent, that is, συν-​ετοί,105 we would have to admit para-​ doxically106 with Nietzsche that “Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie:107 It is worth noting that crafty Nietzsche says that Heraclitus will remain eternally right not that he is so. This remaining comes after Heraclitus’ logos. After this long digression let us go back to Johnstone’s account given in the way he treats the logos of Heraclitus. As Johnstone’s careful analysis shows, both interpretations that have been offered to pin down Heraclitus’ logos have their shortcomings in the sense that neither can be applied exclusively and exhaustively to all his uses of the term ‘logos;’ that is, for all the instantiations 101 See Guthrie: “the faith that the visible world conceals a rational and intelligible order” (Guthrie, History, 29). Yet, while Kant starts with a footnote by taking the division of the ancients as axiomatic, he ends up saying that we cannot prove that but we rest on faith! 102 Cf Colvin who recognizes that “the persistence of identity through change” is “Aristotle’s doctrine of change” (Matthew Colvin, “Heraclitean Flux and Unity of Opposites in Plato’s “Theaetetus” and “Cratylus,”” The Classical Quarterly, 57, 2 (2007), 759; hereafter, Flux). 103 Guthrie, History, 5. 104 Ibid., 435. 105 We should come back to the issue of συν-​ and ξυν-​ later. 106 ‘Paradoxically’ in an ancient sense means opining next to, or better yet, at a distance from the majority opinion (παρά-​; cf παρουσία as being next to). ‘Paradoxically’ meaning an opinion which creates a ‘logical’ contradiction and not a contra-​dictum against an other person’s dictum starts with Aristotle. 107 Nietzsche, Anti-​Christ, 197–​198.

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of the term in the fragments that we have in our possession and we attribute authorship to Heraclitus. Hence, Johnstone proposes an interpretation according to which Heraclitus uses a common term employed during his period in order to articulate his philosophical thinking.108 Between the view that forces the term to be meaning a simple account, speech, word, argument (oratio); and the one that pushes the term to a metaphysical realm as order, principle, Reason, Law (ratio), Johnstone proposes a treaty.109 He treats, as in extracts or estreats,110 the strongest points from these two accounts and creates this passage, this follow: The world’s constant, common presentation of itself to us as an ordered and intelligible whole. In other words, Heraclitus denotes by the term ‘logos’ neither his own discourse nor a cosmic law, but rather the world’s orderly and intelligible (i.e. comprehensible, understandable) presentation of its nature to us throughout our lives. On this view, to understand ‘this logos’ is to understand the world as it presents itself to us –​that is, as it becomes available to us in our experience –​much as one might understand (or fail to grasp) the meaning of a written or spoken account.111 Johnstone’s proposal amounts to saying that Heraclitus displaces the common meaning of the term ‘logos.’112 The strongest point of this interpretation 1 08 Cf Guthrie, History, 419. 109 A possible objection could be raised in that logos can also have meanings such as “proportion,” “measure,” or “ratio,” which cannot be classified in either ratio or oratio (cf Minar, Logos). However, if logos as simple speech is meant to be neutral and devoid of any value –​if that is ever possible as we shall shortly see –​and ratio as somehow ordered or organized thought, then it is highly unlikely that one would be able to philosophically disengage any form of ratio (measure, proportion) from ratio (reason). (cf last section of Minar’s Logos; Popper, Kirk, 392; Miroslav Marcovich, “On Heraclitus, Phronesis, 11, 1 (1966): 29; hereafter, Heraclitus). We shall radicalize (early) Kahn’s view that even if logos is to be taken as counting, recounting, narrating and the like, “it may also carry with it some connotations of rational collecting” (Kahn, New, 192). 110 An old term denoting extraction of an original document especially legal or forensic (see oed.com relevant entry). 111 Johnstone, Logos, 21. 112 “… his employment of the term here is intended to be striking and surprising. … Heraclitus played on the most contemporary use of the term ‘logos’ in order to express his own distinctive philosophical ideas” (Johnstone, Logos, 21). Verdenius is also trying to show how Heraclitus displaced the ‘common’ meaning of terms in such a way as to support “his doctrine.” He focuses on θυμός: “it does not seem improbable that Heraclitus connected the heat of anger with his general principle, fire” (W. J. Verdenius, “A Psychological Statement of Heraclitus,” Mnemosyne, 11 (1943): 119; hereafter, Psychological). As it will become evident later, what we are trying to explore in this path is that instead of a particular meaning,

222 Chapter 6 derives from the analogy that Johnstone tries to create between the logos as ratio and logos as oratio. However, we can make two observations after trying this analogy. First, such an analogy between ratio and oratio is not new. Bollack traces this very same account to Schuster in 19th Century: “the logos was understood as the “language of nature,” as “nature’s revelation of an intelligible discourse.”113 Heidegger’s early conceptualization of the unfolding of Being revealed in discourse in Being and Time rests on a similar “analogy.” He pursues this even in his Early Greek Thinking: “Heraclitus thought logos as his guiding word so as to think in this word the Being of beings.”114 Gadamer, who does not ultimately relinquish ‘being,’ would, perhaps, agree with Johnstone in the sense that Heraclitus “wants to ‘lay out’ or ‘unfold’ this one/​being; and this is the logos to which it is proper to listen.”115 Vlastos’ account is also strikingly similar. Vlastos talks about the consubstantiality of the logos of the cosmos and the logos of the person as if they shared a property of an analogous becoming. They are both presented in a meaningful and intelligible order.116 Similarly, Minar takes the logos as an account “analogous to nomos” and thus takes ‘logos’ as a technical term for Heraclitus’ signifying the “meaning of things.”117 In close proximity is Granger’s account who follows (the later) Kahn whereby the logos is that which orders everything, the structure of the world, which is heard much like one’s encounter with a discourse.118 Curd’s account whereby “Heraclitus likens the possession of real knowledge to the comprehension of language, and the structure of the world to the structure of language”119 is again in critical proximity. Finally, Ramnoux’s account according to which Heraclitus “avait sous les yeux le texte du monde”120 is akin to reading the world like a written logos. logos in Heraclitus can be analogized as the possibility of dividing-​and-​connecting; as a power that displaces. 113 Jean Bollack, The Art of Reading: From Homer to Paul Celan, trans. Catherine Porter and Susan Tarrow, with Bruce King (Washington, DC:  Center for Hellenic Studies:  Harvard University Press, 2016); hereafter, Art. See Bollack’s note 12 in the chapter Logos:  “In opposition to the translation of logos with “reason” in the Hegelian tradition, cf. Schuster (1872: 19): “the revelation that nature offers us in a language that we can understand”; he opts for “discourse” (20). 114 Heidegger, bt; Beginning, 78. 115 Gadamer, Knowledge, 56. 116 Vlastos, Studies, 127–​150. 117 Minar, Logos, 341. 118 Herbert Granger, “Death’s Other Kingdom: Heraclitus on the Life of the Foolish and the Wise,” Classical Philology, 95, 3 (2000): 261; 266; hereafter, Death. 119 Curd, Knowledge, 531. 120 Ramnoux, Vocabulaire, 76.

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The problem with all these “middle” or “balanced” accounts is that they conflate metaphoricity with analogia and metaphor with analogy.121 This brings us to the second point concerning Johnstone’s analogy. Rather than an analogy, Johnstone’s attempt can be revealed as a dissimulated metaphor. To see how, we first need to describe the difference between analogy and metaphor. Many, if not all exegetes, talk about Heraclitus’ analogies, metaphors, and similes. Hölscher for instance reads Heraclitus’ fragments either as similes, metaphors or analogies but he never problematizes the difference between these logical schemata. Let us problematize. Suppose A and B. If A and B are implicated in an analogy then there is no privileging of either A or B. The fact that A  and B are compared is an effect of their being brought together logically. The A and B are analoga through a logos that collates them and brings them together. Analogy as comparison means bringing together.122 Fragment 60 which reads “way up down one and same” analogizes; it does not metaphorize nor creates a simile. This fragment may be taken as making “obvious the unity of an essence constituted by opposites”123 only if we think and speak with essences and substances and generally the logic of being.124 If not, the fragment itself just phenomenalizes a bare connection. But the question now is what or who, or better with later Heidegger, whence and whither this connection? If A and B are implicated in a metaphor or a simile then one is interpreted through the other. One is the means towards the other as an end. Cicero considered it a trope of conceptual deficiency since “you take what you have not got from somewhere else” and thus they come to be a “sort of borrowing.”125 121 See Verdenius for an extensive list of Neo-​Kantian exegetes for whom Heraclitus “discovered an analogy between our way of reasoning and the world-​process” (Verdenius, Notes, 277). 122 Even in Aristotle, analogy precedes metaphor: μεταφορά δέ ἐστιν ὀνόματος ᾀλλοτρίον ἐπιφορά ἢ άπό τοῦ γένους έπί εἶδος ἢ άπό τοῦ εἴδους έπί τό γένος ἢ άπό τοῦ εἴδους έπί εἶδος ἢ κατά τό ανάλογον. (Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b). 123 Uvo Hölscher, “Paradox, Simile, and Gnomic Utterance in Heraclitus.” in The Pre-​ Socratics:  A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alexander P.D. Mourelatos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 236; hereafter, Paradox. 124 As Ramnoux reads it without invoking the aufhebung, i.e. subl(im)ation towards a transcendental end: “La route, toujours la même, qui monte et qui descend, ne désignerait pas le mouvement de la sublimation, ni de la dégradation: ni celle du feu, ni celle de l’âme” (Ramnoux, Études, 81). 125 “These metaphors, therefore, are a species of borrowing, as you take from something else that which you have not of your own. Those have a greater degree of boldness which do not show poverty, but bring some accession of splendour to our language” (Cicero, On Oratory and Orators, trans. J. S. Watson (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1875), 237).

224 Chapter 6 Metaphor already implies the working of analogy as its condition in bringing the two together but not the reverse. In the logic of Being which rests on some ulterior truth as an end “the value of the visible is that it is a symbol and a simile that points to the invisible.”126 Hölscher says that Heraclitus’ logos “must be one of paradox, simile, and riddle, precisely insofar as it seeks to proclaim the essence of what is.”127 But does it? By removing thinking with essences and the logic of metaphoricity, the logos of Heraclitus comes (to be) purely analogical. In this way, we can follow Frankel in what he calls the thought pattern of Heraclitus, the three-​term proportionality (a:b::b:c) without the metaphoricity or the hierarchy to something beyond. Frankel’s denkeform can be read purely analogically yielding different implications.128 As Bernadete showed, Heraclitus confronts us with symmetrical reversibilities.129 In simple words, an analogy does not point to a telos as the metaphor does. The connection itself is its telos. Reflecting then amounts to understanding how this connection came to be; in ancient terms the Eleusis of logos. Now let us see how Johnstone’s “analogy” amounts to a dissimulated metaphor. As we saw earlier, Johnstone writes: to understand this logos’ is to understand the world as it presents itself to us –​that is, as it becomes available to us in our experience –​much as one might understand (or fail to grasp) the meaning of a written or spoken account. If this is an authentic analogy, then we should take this noetic road in reverse like the road of Heraclitus. If we press this interpretation further and reverse it, then, would we not end up having the understanding of a written or spoken account being presented to us as an ordered and intelligible whole just like the world? Are we not falling into the metaphysically loaded camp of the interpretation? Is this not a play of Hegelian dialectics?

1 26 Hölscher, Paradox, 232. 127 Ibid., 233; emphasis added. 128 See Mourelatos’ inspiring paper on Fragment 114 where he works the symmetric reversibilities, or as he calls them “logical symmetries” that are generated by Heraclitus’ logos without the metaphoricity to something beyond (Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, “Heraclitus FR 114,” The American Journal of Philology, 86, 3 (1965): 265; hereafter, 114). 129 Seth Bernadete, “On Heraclitus,” The Review of Metaphysics, 53, 3 (2000): 613–​633; hereafter, Heraclitus.

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Let us look at the debate on the logos of Heraclitus anew to clarify this point. If our criterion of definition is ‘the metaphysical’ we can say that we have had two conceptually antithetical interpretations. Thus, we are warranted to characterize the history of the interpretative dialogue on Heraclitus’ logos as a play of Hegelian dialectics. On the one hand, we have Thesis A: logos is not metaphysically laden, it is just a word, or account. On the other hand, we have Thesis B:  logos is metaphysically loaded, a metaphysical principle of order which orders change. Johnstone’s account which combines the two in order to find the common ground could be characterized as a synthesis.130 Could such a dialectical synthesis be compatible with Heraclitus’ logos even if we acquiesced that Heraclitus had a particular intention in using this term as Johnstone argues? Most philological and philosophical analyses aspire to capture the particular meaning intention of Heraclitus. To be precise, what we have are texts, written logoi. In a way, what we are trying to capture is the intention hidden in the written logos of Heraclitus. According to Gadamer, a hermeneutic analysis which aspires to capture meaning intentions as if they are particular intelligible objects originates in Romanticism and particularly Kant’s theory of genius as a transcendental signifier.131 However, Emlyn-​Jones’ analysis shows us that this tendency to separate the logos of a person from its intention can be traced all the way back to Aristotle but cannot be manifested in the Pre-​Socratics.132 Does this mean that we should ascribe an efficient cause for this way of 130 For Hegel, reason has as its fundamental function to think the highest form of unity. Thought has three moments as it ever moves. The abstract, the dialectical and the speculative. Johnstone’s treaty between the dialectically opposed accounts can also be considered speculative in the Hegelian sense. For a similar Hegelian interpretation of the unity of opposites see Mantas Adomenas, “Heraclitus on Religion,” Phronesis, 44, 2 (1999): 87–​113. 131 It is open to question whether a hermeneutics which aspires to capture meaning intentions would be any different if we just recited the fragments as Tejera suggests. We were tempted to agree that “listening to the fragments without preconception, if we can do it, will at least free them from the distortions produced by the alien frameworks into which they have been forced” (Tejera, Listening, 494). To a certain extent that can be possible, as will become manifest later. Yet, when we were about to ask a friend to recite them for us we fell into a predicament –​what would be the mother tongue of the person to recite the fragments? If anything, the recitation does show how we read and speak through our own mother tongue. It shows another instance of what feminists call an interpretation of the Other (ancient Greek here) as the other (us enacting the ancient) of the Same (us) (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Alan Sheridan (New  York:  cup, 1977.); hereafter, Sex). 132 C.J Emlyn-​Jones, “Heraclitus and the Identity of Opposites,” Phronesis, 21, 2 (1976): 89–​114; hereafter, Heraclitus.

226 Chapter 6 thinking to Aristotle? Would that not mean that our thinking is still tyrannized by Aristotelian causes?133 Havelock suggests that the separation, the abstraction of one’s logos from their embodied being is the condition of philosophical thinking. The latter commences by the separation of what was described from the speech of the speaker and thus “rendered the logos in which it was written an artefact, an object separate from the describer’s own consciousness.”134 Such separation is not manifested in the Pre-​Socratics. But if we dig a bit deeper in the broader context of that ‘period’ we could also see, as Claude Moss, does that all these developments whereby the logos of the person is separated from their being takes place at a time of political and economic transitioning. And the economic reasons here must somehow be accounted as conditions of coming to philosophizing:

133 A note on Aristotelianism comes here as an incumbent so that the mimodrama of metaphysics can be bracketed. See first Kirk: “If philosophy is the search for causes, then it must soon concern itself with what lies beyond” (G. S. Kirk, “Sense and Common-​Sense in the Development of Greek Philosophy,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 81 (1961): 105; hereafter, Sense). Why would philosophy be a search for causes? As Popper maintained, “there is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested: the problem of understanding the world in which we live, including ourselves, who are part of that world, and our knowledge of it” (Karl R.  Popper, “Back to the Pre-​Socratics:  The Presidential Address,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 59 (1958–​9): 1; hereafter, Pre-​Socratics). But that knowledge cannot be limited to “the realm of causes” (Guthrie, History, 36). For those who “agree with Aristotle” leisure is the “pre-​condition” of, or causes philosophy to be (Ibid., 31), whereas for those who do not, it is through the tragedy of human existence that we come to philosophize (cf Foucault, Infinity). Following Kirk, Guthrie introduces the ‘history’ of Pre-​Socratic philosophy around and through such concepts of first causes and causa sui (Guthrie, History, 1–​25). Such scheme of reference for the interpretation of the Pre-​Socratics is Plato’s and mainly Aristotle’s metaphysics. But that does not mean that they caused this to happen. They offered a conceptual path, a conceptual scheme and we follow it and think it is a natural progression. Compare for instance how Guthrie explores the origins of Science. By comparing the accounts of Herodotus and Aristotle he aligns himself with Aristotle:  “In holding that disinterested intellectual activity is a product of leisure Aristotle is clearly right”! (ibid., 34–​5). Concerning the issue of causes compare Cherniss where he begins by cautioning us not to read the fragments through an Aristotelian philosophy, including causes, yet, as the text unfolds he lapses into evaluating the Pre-​Socratic theories through the concept of sufficient reason and cause (Cherniss, Characteristics, 323; 324). Finally, Verdenius’ most inspiring account about Pre-​Socratic philosophy as science not being defined by the limits of prediction and control as is our modern science, is, still, shackled in explaining away this outlook under the easy way out of cause and effect (Verdenius, Science, 324–​5) –​for a similar critique see Tejera, Listening. 134 in Waugh, Postmodern, 611.

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Thus, just as the abstract concept of value arises from the separation of commodity exchange from use, the abstract concept of Being is an abstraction resulting from the separation of exchange, within the symbolic order of language, from use. Being is the abstract concept of the money form. As Heraclitus puts it: “There is exchange of fire for all things and all things for fire, as there is of wares for gold and gold for wares.”135 Perhaps, Heraclitus thinks through this very transition. Fragment 90 that Goodchild cites, burns, as in destroys, as in stroys, as in tells another story, as in phrases the issue of metaphoricity and exchange. There is no identity or equal value between gold and what we produce yet we exchange them as if there were; in the same way we conceptually exchange everything with ‘being’ and think that being exists or has value.136 Fire, however, can trans-​verse and impact everything just like the sun. In the Cratylus, Plato discusses this issue a propos justice. The key word there is διαϊόν137 which means transverse, pass through, go through, move to and fro. By taking into consideration how the whole text is an exploration of Heraclitean themes we could safely risk the hypothesis of τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦ διαϊόντος as a possible logos for Heraclitus’ first fragment. Ultimately, it is with logos that everything can be brought together, logos trans-​verses. Thus, we can use Frankel’s schema as an existential graph and reveal how an analogy comes to be: gold:products:: (Heraclitus’) logos:: fire:every-​being The question then of a meaning intention can be phrased thus:  Could the logos of Heraclitus which brings these together be ultimately revealed as meaning intention exchanged through his oral or written products? If we are

135 Philip Goodchild, “Money, Gift and Sacrifice: Thirteen Short Episodes in the Pricing of Thought,” Angelaki, 4, 3 (1999): 28). 136 Both Guthrie and Kirk underscore the echoes of the ‘one and the many’ in this fragment, and while Guthrie does take a step to bring closer a thread to “mercantile transactions” he does not extend his critique to reasoning with Being (Guthrie, History, 461). Obviously, “we need not expect Heraclitus’ thought to be by our standards completely logical or self-​ consistent” only insofar as we do not separate ourselves from the habit of thinking within modes of exchange and the banking metaphor of being (Ibid.) Heidegger and Fink’s analysis of this fragment is again riveted on the one-​many reference of Being (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 106–​107). Bollack and Wizmann’s thesis that Heraclitus is the first thinker ever to try to awake us from our compulsive (dis)order of thinking in the banks of being stands firmly (Bollack and Wismann, Héraclite). 137 Plato, Cratyluys, 412 –​ 413.

228 Chapter 6 to approximate the meaning intention of Heraclitus, in the sense of getting to know it then how do we proceed? If we are to find the unknown we cannot presuppose that we know it, or ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον.138 If what we hope to find is the meaning intention of Heraclitus that hope must be without particular end. Otherwise we are going to be trapped in circular reasoning.139 With an alternative reading of Fragment 18 we can say with Heraclitus that if we do not hope the unhopeable we can’t find that which has not been found yet, which, if it exists, we do not have access to it. To hope for that which cannot be hoped comes as a double negation which allows hope to shine in its brilliancy as not having an object. Only death can stop hope [and setting forth] entirely. In order to live, one has to negate death as the end of life in both its senses –​as the limit of time and the limit of space. We can hope for the h-​elp/​ἓλπις of Fragment 27 approached without being: When humans (will) have died, (it) stays140 all of which they cannot hope nor set forth. Heraclitus as dead stays through his logos –​he remains as we saw earlier with Nietzsche. If sleeping touches on death whereby death confronts us as mystery, then our ways should touch on Heraclitus confronting his logos as mystery. Analogically, a double negation comes to be necessary for coming into contact with his logos. We have to be hypnotized into his ways. Our way of being needs to be negated in order to approach this ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον. So, a way to Heraclitus’ inaccessible being may come not as if we are to be transferred or transported, i.e. metaphorized, to a particular place but through analogizing what Heraclitus gave us embodiedly –​just like sleep comes analogously to death. In this way, our thinking should approximate, to the point of touching, ἃπτεσθαι, the process of thinking of Heraclitus.141 And this hope just gave us a passage. Hope and setting forth both refer to the future. However, in their 1 38 Heraclitus, dk 18. 139 Cf Finkelberg, Κόσμος, 105. 140 ‘ἂνθρώπους’ can come as the subject of the participle ‘ἀποθανόντας.’ The verb ‘μένει’ is left abandoned to oscillate between two subjects: either what actually stays in the end from those who have died, i.e their corpse, which by the way needs to be thrown away like manure (dk 96); or the whole sentence “all that which they do not hope for nor set forth.” Either way to stay means to reside or to dwell, that is, to have a fixity contra what it means to be a living person, a flowing person who hopes and sets forth. The fragment has an amazing logical consistency in expressing the stasis of death versus the always-​flowing life. Yet, these are not opposites since it is death residing, remaining in life that makes life come to be what it is. As Nietzsche observed, a double forgetfulness is required in order to live –​to forget that we are dying and that we will die. 141 Hope allows one to extend themselves. For an additional emphasis on the style of double negation which rids the object see Loulakaki-​Moore on her analysis on how Fostieris creates his poems enacting Heraclitus (Loulakaki-​Moore, Dark, 110–​112). See also Fink’s and

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similarity they are dissimilar, as they can also be taken as opposites: embodiedly hope can be seen as passive and setting forth as active. We can now pass to the so-​called Heraclitus’ ‘doctrine’ of opposites. How can we start with the opposites in Heraclitus? Based on our discussion would it make sense to say that we need to find an analogous logos with respect to the opposites? Suppose it does. As a reminder, we are still following Gadamer, so our starting point is the writings of Plato as he was in closest temporal proximity, i.e. chronologically analogous, to Heraclitus.142 Before, then, engaging with the doxagraphers we can focus on Plato’s treatment of Heraclitus.143 Let us consider how Plato dealt with the opposites in the Cratylus. Let it be as it has been claimed, that Plato had appreciated in depth the logos of Heraclitus. If, as Kirk maintains that “Aristotle was dependent solely upon the Platonic dialogues, and particularly the Cratylus for his information” on Heraclitus, then

Heidegger’s concept of “thoughtful transposition” (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 49–​50; particularly the analogy of ἓν-​παντα/​θνητοί-​ἀθάνατοι, 102–​103). 142 The issue of whether some Cratylus was Plato’s teacher is not affecting our textual approach (Cf D.J. Allan, “The Problem of Cratylus,” The American Journal of Philology, 75, 3 (1954), 271–​287; hereafter, Problem). For the difference between Plato and Aristotle on recording the opposites see O’Brien, Héraclite). If one accepts Allan’s point about a young Cratylus in Plato and older Cratylus in Aristotle then there is no contradiction in the different interpretations of the ‘doctrine’ of Heraclitus through Cratylus. It is rather difficult to be convinced that Plato “never took Heraclitus seriously in the dialogues” (Kirk Problem, 35–​36;); or, as Colvin has recently argued that “a rather caricatured version of ‘Heracliteanism came down to later writers” (Matthew Colvin, “Heraclitean Flux and Unity of Opposites in Plato’s “Theaetetus” and “Cratylus,,”” The Classical Quarterly, 57, 2 (2007): 767). Here we follow Aylward when he says that the issue is not whether Plato understood Heraclitus properly or not. Rather, our question should be to what extent he appropriated his logos (Stephen Aylward, “Stepping into Rivers: Ontology in Heraclitus,” McGill, 2 9, (2008): 2). But even in claiming that Plato appropriates Heraclitus, in one way or another, such appropriation comes to be or follows from having been inspired by him somehow –​as Frankel shows in the introduction of his analysis (Frankel, Pattern); see also Guthrie since this is one of the few points he diverges apologetically from Kirk’s reading (Guthrie, History, 437). To be inspired by someone is another way of saying that Heraclitus provided a way, a path through which Plato’s logos could unfold. Isn’t inspiration a noetic spark; to give fire, to fire up one’s thought, to in, which means give, fire, in-​s-​pire? We totally agree with Gadamer who reads Plato both as a philosopher and as a literary writer (cf also Allan, Problem; Benardete, Heraclitus, 615). In the Phaedo Plato’s ‘arguments’ are not solely in the anticipated Aristotelian form in which we formulate them today. “Thus in the Phaedo the strongest argument is not an argument at all but the fact that Socrates holds onto his convictions right up to the end and corroborates them through his living and dying. Here the course of the action itself plays the role of the argument” (Gadamer, Philosophy, 47). Something similar is happening in the Cratylus. 1 43 Cf Guthrie, History, 437.

230 Chapter 6 all the better to focus on this text.144 To what extent, then, did Plato analogize Heraclitus? The orthodox readings of the text take as its core theme the possibility of knowledge and the issue of social constructivism.145 But such interpretations are, as we have seen, ledged on Being: Being itself or being in-​itself, or being qua being are all essentially about Being per se; per c, ampersand Being. In Heraclitus, this per se, per c, may lead us to different paths. It is the C-​ section of our book which has bound all that there is about Heraclitus. In Heraclitus there is another C-​section which looks after a bow, an arch or a lyre and is related to life and death: “τῷ οὖν τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος͵ ἔργον δὲ θάνατος.” In the language of being this fragment is usually translated as “the bow is a name for life but its work is death;”146 an allegory which follows the whole Heraclitean philosophy about harmony being born out of antitheses. After all, Heraclitus says many times that in opposite forces comes ἁρμονίη: what opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions (τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν καὶ πάντα κατ’ ἔριν γίνεσθαι) and that “all things come about by difference/​strife just like in the bow and the lyre” (οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑαυτῷ ὁμολογέει παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης). This path which connects bow, lyre, name, function, instrument, life, and death, is a path that is followed by Plato in the Cratylus. The Cratylus of Plato, like the bow of Heraclitus, displays in its very structure a παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη (backward-​turning construction, dk B51). The

1 44 Kirk, Problem, 253. 145 The traditional interpretations of this text take as its essence the relation between language and thought, or language and the world, or dialectics, or whether, as the title suggests, the names that we use are correct or not with respect to the nature of things; and, how we can know. Naming only a few: “There are three major divisions, which I have called respectively, “Names as ideal instruments,” “Names as imitations and manifestations of reality,” and “Names as practical semantic tools” (Ronald B. Levinson, “Language and the ‘Cratylus’ Four Questions,” The Review of Metaphysics, 11, 1 (1957): 29; hereafter, Language); “It had long been known –​and well before Plato’s Cratylus –​that signs can be either given by nature or established by man” (Foucault, Order, 68); “At the end of the Cratylus then, as in the Meno, we find that some kind of prior direct acquaintance with the nature of things is a necessary condition for inquiry and discovery” (Georgios Anagnostopoulos, “The Significance of Plato’s ‘Cratylus’,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 10, 2 (1973), 344); hereafter, Significance; “Two theories discussed in Plato’s Cratylus try in different ways to describe the relationship between word and thing” (Gadamer, Truth, 406). 146 Haxton translates it as “The living, when the dead wood of the bow springs back to life, must die” (Brooks Haxton, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (New York: Viking, 2001), 55; hereafter, Fragments).

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bow bears witness to its double nature in its very name: βίος [bios], the bow, the bringer of death, is also βίος, life itself (dk b 48). The man who shoots the bow in his one action brings both death and life:  death to his victim, an animal sought for food or an enemy himself intent upon inflicting death, and life to himself, in the form of life-​sustaining food or the defeat of a mortal enemy. In the same way, in the Cratylus, the position at first upheld by Socrates, that names signify by nature (φύσει), both is and is not true (for though some words signify by nature, others signify only by convention, νόμῳ).147 Following Nancy Demand, the text demands the pnc. David Sedley, has recently explained how we can read this platonic text as Plato’s thinking aloud. Plato “is thinking aloud in a very particular way: he is sorting out the relation between two major components in his own intellectual make-​up. That is, at any rate, how I shall be attempting to read the dialogue.”148 In this way, the text is the representation of Plato’s inner voice; a discourse between Plato as self and as other of the same. As tradition has it, the two major components of his intellectual make-​up are the Socratic and the Pre-Socratic. The pre-​Socratic is mainly the philosophy of Heraclitus, which, as the article of Demand demands, we can read as the pnc. It follows that this text is literally –​characterizes –​ Plato’s coming to terms with the pnc and/​or Plato’s re-​versing-​a-​version of the philosophy of Heraclitus. The apostrophe of Plato from Heraclitus and the acceptance of the logos of Socrates, the logic of being which is the logismos of true with good and false with bad. Neither of these last propositions are off course since “no statement about the doctrine of the Cratylus can be truer than its contradiction, unless it is grounded in a recognition of this primary fact.”149 Similarly, in Derrida’s interpretation, Plato’s overall attempt has been a struggle to establish the justifiability of knowledge through binaries. Derrida’s focus is the pharmakon, a concept without (being) a concept (with a determinate horizon), and which Plato is attempting to submit, to subject, to put under the Socratic principles. To put ‘it’ under the principles of true/​correct/​good and false/​incorrect/​bad.150 Going further, we can risk the hypothesis that Plato’s overall aim, and in the Cratylus in particular, is to subject the logos of Heraclitus –​in all senses –​to another 147 Nancy Demand, “The Nomothetes of the ‘Cratylus’,” Phronesis, 20, 2 (1975): 106; hereafter, Nomothetes. 148 David Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge: cup, 2003), 3; hereafter, Cratylus. 149 Levinson, Language, 28. 150 Derrida, Dissemination.

232 Chapter 6 logos, the logic of binaries. The logos of Heraclitus as punctuation, decision, creativity, that is to say, logos which makes things come to be(ing) is (mis) taken as language/​discourse/​speech and thought so that it can be put under the principle of being and the essence of things.151 The logos of Heraclitus is dark and associated with fire. It makes Socrates wonder (aporia).152 And in this aporia or embarrassment, Socrates-​Plato always machinate, concoct,153 and conspire154 instead of bringing a deus ex machina as the tragic poets do.155 They machinate differently, either by deciding not to inspect head on (deferring)156 or by associating whatever makes them wonder with something barbaric that needs to be enslaved (differing)157 in order to be understood (différance). With respect to Derrida’s language-​game, Derrida’s logos, Plato presences différance par excellence. Further still, and following the text, we can say that the logos of Heraclitus is pressed with Being, being suppressed158 by the most familiar ‘thing,’ ‘category,’ ‘concept,’ ‘way of thinking,’ ‘way of understanding,’ and, thus, repressed rather than expressed as such. Logos becomes a being which is to be manipulated in order to achieve one’s ends.159 But the text (of Cratylus) has no end. There is no solution to this dialectical struggle. No being is reached, just like existence. No matter how much it is characterized by a piercing questioning to come to an end, by the appetite of eros,160 still, a common end does not come, each inter-​locutor flows away differently in the end. Despite the numerous attempts of Socrates to convince Cratylus, who claims to be following Heraclitus’ philosophy, Cratylus resists this all the way. In the end, he claims that he will hold the subject matter (=Kρατ/​ύλος) of Heraclitus’ philosophy firmly, just like his name is prescribing him to do, and he will not be convinced by Socrates. The reply of Cratylus resonates with Dostoevsky’s

151 This attempt to re-​categorize logos and attempt to master it through other concepts is evident as early as in Proclus’ discussion of Cratylus (Proclus, On Plato’s Cratylus, trans. Brian Duvick (Ithaca, NY: cup, 2007)). 152 Plato, Cratylus 409. 153 Ibid. 409d. 154 Ibid. 413a. 155 Ibid. 425e. 156 Ibid. 417; 422d. 157 Ibid. 410. 158 Ibid. 410b. 159 Ibid. 385 and 408. 160 Catherine Pickstock, “The Late Arrival of Language:  Word, Nature, and the Divine in Plato’s Cratylus,” Modern Theology, 27, 2 (2011): 238–​263.

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man from the underground who can say no to all reasoning for no reason –​as we saw in our first steps of this undertaking. The ‘I can’ precedes the ‘I think.’161 Each person expresses their logos. What is important to note here is that the end of the text suggests an incompossibility of these logoi. Both parties retain their full force in the end. We have opposing forces which do not become one. No-​one is con-​vinced in the end. Cratylus agrees to disagree and leaves.162 This is not to say that this is what Heraclitus would have done or that the philosophy of Heraclitus is enacted by Cratylus properly or adequately. After all, the director of this drama is Plato. However, it does suggest that synthesis in the sense of consensus or agreement whereby one is convinced by the other could not be compatible with Heraclitus’ logos according to Cratylus who claims to follow him –​as Plato witnessed. The forces which are antithetical and clash are not consummated into a synthesis but retain their full force without reserve. But if we were to account for the ending of the debate as it unfolds, in time, we would have to say that in the end the forces involved are united in their separation. They may be separated from each other but for the recorder Plato they are united in their separation both in expressing their opposing views during the dialogue and when they separate in which they unite in not agreeing. So, during the dialogue they are separated in their unity (logoi/​dialogue or →←) and then united in their separation (no dialogue/​moving bodies ←→). And the condition for making this phenomenon possible is clearly another logos –​dare we say, with Aristotle and Derrida an external to the debate logos; a logos eksoterikos? Would that be enough of a bout to pass dialectics? Let us quest(ion) differently: Who or what is outside this debate if not the silent witness Plato or for us, his book, his written logos that testifies it? Before being an

161 Even if one accepts Kirk’s rendition of the debate, Cratylus’ answer is unequivocally clear (Kirk, Problem). He can say no to all (knowledge) for no reason but just because he can. Whether, as Kirk suggests, he reached a state of confusion during the dialogue which would probably have made him to change his mind at a later stage, as young people usually do, is, at least, irrelevant (Ibid., 237). In the context of the text, Cratylus says no –​refus absolu to Socrates’ reason. Sedley gives to the text a more auto-​biographical spin in the sense of Plato’s coming to terms with the need to decide whom –​from his teachers –​ to follow (Sedley, Cratylus). This interpretation makes it even clearer how Plato’s text as logos comes to be uniting opposing forces. 162 The inconclusiveness in the Cratylus is also found in the Theaetetus and the Parmenides. As Rist underscores, the exercise of this text can be read as not producing any particular philosophical direction “unless we accept the Neoplatonic and Hegelian interpretation.” (Rist, Order, 26).

234 Chapter 6 archivist, the logos of Plato comes to be a ligament for both the then and the now for them, and the then and the now with us now.163 Let us see how. Initially we have Hermogenes and Cratylus but no logos about their past dialogue. With embodied Plato as absent presence or present absence, i.e. with his logos, we can have the following denkenform: Hermogenes: Cratylus: Socrates:: Plato’s logos:: Ancient Greek reader Hermogenes: Cratylus: Socrates:: Plato’s logos:: Reader now Ancient Greek reader:: Plato’s logos:: Reader now Logos comes to be a ligament between the past past and past present; and between the past (which includes the past past and past present) and now. But this ligament does not give itself in the dialogue. Plato haunts the dialogue; in virtŭ of (his) logos, here as writing in the colloquial sense, we come to know what took place, perhaps.164 Logos cannot be defined but can be told in a way other than it itself is. Logos is not an intelligible, ideal or material object to be defined as such and such. In one sense, logos is related here with the presence as it brings present to us, it gives us what happened. It presences a historical event. It gives us the taking place. We could say we early Heidegger that logos presences, makes (a) present. But whence or whither this possibility of presencing something possible? If we now take the last form of the analogy we can bring it closer to Heraclitus’ creating a liaison of the past and his present. And this past is a feminine past. Sybil’s voice:: Heraclitus’ logos:: Greeks then/​We now Heraclitus logos recovers a past. It is a wise past in so far as Sybil, the feminine figure or the figure of the feminine, are adjoined through his logos. The recovery of this wise past, a true past, opens up to the present and the future. The opening comes through the logos of Heraclitus which creates a jointure,

163 Axelos is just in describing logos as a bond or a liaison (Axelos, Heraclitus). Before archiving, before the opening of the possibility of metaphor, there is always already a logos bringing (φέρειν) (things) together or to get there where the metaphor (μετα-​φέρειν) intends. Once again we are bound in a bout with a logos (of the) after (μετά). 164 The ‘perhaps’ is here necessary since, as Derrida demonstrated, the “bare device of being-​ two-​to speak” which characterizes every narrative “is the possibility of non-​truth in which every possible truth is held or is made” (Derrida, Given, 153).

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a ligament; (through his) logos. What Heraclitus brings as (a) present, what he gives a chance to be heard is Sybil’s logos –​the ancient feminine voice. And this voice is important insofar as in its manner it speaks the truth. In this manner here means not with words but with signs. With signs which do not signify through exchange as language or as phonetic logos does. And this past is a feminine past which he does not capture epistemically, he does not know it but he hearkens it, he feels it.165 We postulated that after the end of the dialogue logoi are separated in their unity or united in their separation –​as Plato said in the Sophist: in drawing apart, drawing together.166 How is this possible without dialectical or transcendental thinking? As they both live in the same polis governed by the laws of the city they are united in their separation. The expression of unity of the many citizens comes to be the law that they follow or make. Many laws, one polis. Many poleis, one culture,  –​not one country.167 We see the pattern. The one and the many are neither interchanged nor posited hierarchically. Neither are concentric circles.168 The circle metaphor limits the possibilities of the spiralling sweepings of the one and the many logos. Σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένων ὁ κάλλιστος κόσμος.169 The one and the many make up spirals and vortices; like forces 165 Another path awaits us: the feminine. We shall come back to the issue of the feminine logos after flowing with Heraclitus’ logos. 166 Plato Cratylus, 242d. 167 We can extend this thinking to the cosmos but, as Fink carefully observes, our analogical thinking comes limited “because we still do not know what it means to go over into another dimension. If we wish to speak of an analogy in this connection, then we must think it in a specific way. In this analogy, only one side is given to us, namely the phenomenal one. As we hold selectively to specific phenomenal structures, we translate them into large scale in an adventurous attempt” (Heiddeger and Fink, Heraclitus, 50). Fink parallels Popper’s interpretation of the Pre-​Socratics (cf. Popper, Pre-​Socratics). 168 The patterns of hierarchy or concentric circles can be traced to Plato’s attempt to engage with the one and many in the Republic. Many Greek cities do not constitute one bigger one nor one culture which permeates them all. Two cities at war do not constitute one city (423a). Moreover, each person should not engage in anything else apart from what fits their nature; one person cannot be engaged in many occupations: “ὅπως ἂν ἓν τὸ αὑτοῦ ἐπιτηδεύων ἕκαστος μὴ πολλοὶ ἀλλ᾽ εἷς γίγνηται, καὶ οὕτω δὴ σύμπασα ἡ πόλις μία φύηται ἀλλὰ μὴ πολλαί” (Plato, Republic, 423d). The concentric circles pattern is reflected in how each person constitutes a small reflection of the character of the whole nation –​again a platonic myth, this time a myth of meta(l)s. If we characterize a nation as greedy then this greediness would be found, reflected, in some way in its many citizens –​“πολλὴ ἀνάγκη ὁμολογεῖν ὅτι γε τὰ αὐτὰ ἐν ἑκάστῳ ἔνεστιν ἡμῶν εἴδη τε καὶ ἤθη ἅπερ ἐν τῇ πόλει;” (ibid., 436a). And a bit further down, the soul of each person has three parts not many. The one may have many parts harmoniously yet hierarchically fitting together like a pyramid, but the one and the many are not in the end one in Plato. 169 Heraclitus, dk 124.

236 Chapter 6 they whirl in and whiz out creating the fairest totality, like in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.170 But let’s explore more. The forces are not only two. In the beginning we have two participants (Hermogenes/​Cratylus) the debate of whom we do not witness. Then we have three participants (Socrates/​Hermogenes/​Cratylus) –​we shall also account for the witness Plato, the silent recorder who likes to hide yet signify to us with his written logos what is happening.171 Let us look again at the text. In the beginning of the dialogue Hermogenes and Cratylus are engaged in an endless debate. It is Socrates who comes to the fore when their dialogue is about to stagnate. A discourse running idle with respect to an end is diss-​ed to become another, a new discourse running another course. In this new course, in turn, Cratylus is kept in silence, in the margin until he is called out to participate in the discussion with Hermogenes and Socrates; called at the very moment when their discussion is becoming moribund. When Socrates’ thought is exhausted, when his logos is about to falter,172 it is the silent logos of the Other, the alter that re-​fuels. The transcendentally empirical principle which allows a re-​newel, a new center of the structure for the discussion to take place and time, is the Other, the logos of the Other; the Other as an embodied existence. A pressing situation comes to be ex-​pressed through the logos of the Other, their very existence. With no ledge from the Other, without passing through the Other, there is no surpassing to knowledge. It is in virtŭ of the logos of the Other who re-​vamps, re-​phenomenalizes, or, better, creates a new spectacle,173 re-​presents itself and allows for a new round for or of an accounting of how things are. Otherwise, like “most of our wise men nowadays get so dizzy going around and around in their search for the nature of the things that are, that the things themselves appear to them to be turning around and moving every which way.”174 Each new course is not a circle but a spiral. Logos breaks the circle of being. Logos both breaks and unites. Plato’s dialogue allows us to analogize logos with each person who is opposing another; there is dialogue as πόλεμος δια τοῦ λόγου. Logos will cease to be what it is by failing to come in dialogue with the other of its same. The logos 170 The vortices that make up Van Gogh’s painting style are like the movements of his sunflowers. If we look at a living sunflower, the vortex is not hierarchical as in a Fibonacci sequence but like Fermat’s spiral –​for Fermat’s spiral variations see Robert J. Krawczyk, Fermat’s Spiral Mandalas, (iit, 2005; retrieved from:  https://​mypages.iit.edu/​~krawczyk/​rjkbrdg05.pdf). The one and the many can be analogized non-​hierarchically, non-​ Hegelian as a Fermat’s spiral. 171 That is how the ἂναξ can neither say nor hide but can signify (Heraclitus, dk 93). 172 Plato, Cratylus, 427. 173 “ἀναθεασαίμην;” ibid., 411. 174 Ibid., 411.

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of each person opens and closes at the same time possibilities for new ways of engaging with the same topic. The unity is not an end but created as the dialogue endures. Unity comes to be endurance not an end state.175 Those who are kept in silence in turns are analogous to Plato as witnesses recording the opposing forces. The difference between them and Plato is that Plato writes in the colloquial sense. He documents, he archives, he records. For now, we can say that logos can thus come to be described as a way of cording and recording by creating a ligament of/​for opposing forces. Does this mean that the logoi as opposing forces are identifiable particulars, distinct beings?176 If our analogizing each person’s logos as a force comes closer to Heraclitus’ logos, shall we say that each person is a distinct logos or just simply what each person says, their account simpliciter? Also, if as all exegetes find that “in Heraclitus the coming-​to-​be of all things (i.e., the world-​process, which is essentially the reciprocal interaction of opposites) takes place κατ’ ἒριν και χρεών,”177 shall we not quantify under the category ‘things’ logos as what one says, their logos as account?178 What would it mean for the logos to come to be through such an opposition of forces? 3

Simple Logos? It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple. … Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.

175 Or unity “thought of as substance” (Hölscher, Paradox, 232). There is no κυκεών as a drink with a particular texture, smell and taste if you stop stirring and the elements start to be both together yet apart. 176 Popper says that for Heraclitus there are no solid bodies. “Things are not really things, they are processes, they are in flux” (Popper, Pre-​Socratics, 12). But the issue here is not about tangibility but about identity and distinctness both of which imply or involve some sort of being, stability, structure. For a process to be what it is, it must be a particular whose particularity can come either from repetition or by something other which determines it. Thus, a process can never be a good analogy for philosophizing flux (Cf G. S. Kirk, “Popper on Science and the Presocratics” Mind, 69, 275 (1960): 334; hereafter, Popper). 177 Minar, Logos, 336; overloaded emphasis added. 178 This very question can also be found unanswered in the Theaetetus. Axelos, Bollack and Wizmann have appreciated that “le langage fait partie du monde” (Bollack and Wismann, Héraclite, 21). However, even if they try to show how Heraclitus’ logos follows or projects the opposing forces that constitute ‘wor(l)d’ both as word and as world, their adherence to the paradigm of being does not allow them to extend this idea to the fact that the logos comes to be through opposing forces. The critique of Bollack and Wismann on Axelos is still couched on being (ibid., 36–​7).

238 Chapter 6 … It is the simple thing that’s hard to do.179 The usual method in semantic analyses of ancient Greek words is to catalog180 the various uses of the word in the texts that they appear and then evaluate the ways which could have been used by a particular author at a particular time.181 The presupposition here is that each word/​term is like a container182 which has an authentic, core meaning/​concept inside. The core meaning of a term is usually taken from the first text that we can trace the term in question. A term, then, as a container expanding and shrinking overtime, can thus take up more or less meanings attached to it. With more meanings attached to it we can say that a term has more than one senses. So, the meaning intention by an author is essentially the choice of sense which is inferred by a determination or measurement of the scope of the application of the term. This will be done after having catalogued all the possible uses of the word from the texts that it appears in order to ascertain the systematic use of the term.183 Thus, by comparing the extent to which an author converges or diverges in their application from what is taken/​we take as a core meaning, we can arrive at the meaning intention of the author in question –​simply how the author uses a term. In this section, we provide two additional reasons for which ‘logos’ as an account can never be simple, no matter the period or the author we look at. That is to say, if there is a core, authentic meaning for the term ‘logos’ that cannot be ‘simple account.’ The first reason is phenomenological and the second is philological. The formula ‘simple account’ constitutes a contradicto in adjecto. Most analyses that trace the semantic career of the term ‘logos’ start from Homer and Hesiod. Until now, various such analyses have yielded that logos was initially used only to pick out speaking and “over the course of the fifth century the range of uses of ‘logos’ broadened considerably.”184 According to Minar, the word “λόγος is simply the verbal noun from λέγω, which means primarily “gather, collect,” as appears clearly from the cognates collected by 179 Bertol Brecht, In Praise of Communism, (2018): https://​www.culturematters.org.uk/​index. php/​arts/​poetry/​item/​2729-​in-​praise-​of-​communism. 180 We italicize ‘log’ for a reason that should come about shortly. From the prologue, we have been trying to indicate to as many possibilities of meaning of ‘logos’ as possible. 181 We are referring to cases of extant terms not neologisms. For neologisms see Richard Robinson, “Ambiguity,” Mind, 50, 198 (1941): 140–​155; Apel, Transcendental. 182 The use of the metaphor ‘container’ helps to overcome the philosophical debate about whether meaning and reference are distinct or not. 183 Cf Kirk Heraclitus, 38–​39. 184 Johnstone, Logos, 14.

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Walde-​Pokorny.”185 These cognates come from verb similarities which we try to track etymologically through the root ‘λεγ-​.’ As Hoffman explains: The noun logos, according to Liddel, Scott and Jones, is derived from the verb legein. Therefore an inquiry into the root meaning of logos must begin with an inquiry into the root meaning of legein. The root meaning of legein comes from the Indo-​European stem leg-​, which means “To collect; with derivative meaning ‘to speak.’ ” … In Homeric Greek legein retains this root sense of “to gather” and “to lay.” …The meaning of legein appears to have evolved from the older meanings of “to lay” and “to gather” toward the newer meanings of “to speak” and “to reason” … 186 Let us question a couple of things before questing for the golden meaning of logos. Heraclitus would have approved such questioning since οὐ δεῖ ὡς παῖδας τοκεώνων, τοῦτ’ ἔστι κατὰ ψιλόν· καθότι παρειλήφαμεν.187 Let us question this tradition. Why start from ‘leg-​‘/​‘λεγ-​‘? Why not start from ‘log-​’/​’λογ-​’? We decide to log the semantic career of logos through λέγ-​ειν/​λέγ-​ω. But this decision is not a necessity. As Cartwright writes in the context of analysing the issue of the standards of identity that Heraclitus’ river statement poses, there is no reason to think that words are necessarily constituted from morphemes or phonemes. We decide how we want a word to be constituted,188 or better yet “we are told how we are to”189 take something as ‘word.’ If one starts up questioning this, as Plato and Derrida did,190 there is no reason why we could not start with the first distinct element that could refer to something. May we start with ‘l’ or better yet, the inscribed ‘Λ’ which by the way is ξυνόν to all logos-​related ὁνόματα? If we give primacy to the verb, with the presupposition that it can lead us to some primitive being, have we not allowed for an intrusion of Aristotelian methodology, yet again?191 1 85 Minar, Logos, 323. 186 David Hoffmann, “Logos as Composition,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 33, 3 (2003): 28–​29; hereafter, Logos. 187 Heraclitus, dk 74. 188 Helen Morris Cartwright, “Heraclitus and the Bath Water,” The Philosophical Review, 74, 4 (1965): 479. 189 Ibid., 483. 190 Plato in the Cratylus and Derrida in Grammatology. 191 Arguably, that every verb refers to some ‘being’ comes from Port-​Royal Grammar. Foucault has traced it back to the founding principles of episteme –​Plato and Aristotle (Foucault, Order). To a certain extent, Plato might be excused here. It may be that with Plato, ὃνομα is distinguished from ῥῆμα in the Cratylus while subjected to truth in the Sophist, yet,

240 Chapter 6 Let us focus now on the issue of the imperative which Hoffman, among many others, expresses with the following: “… an inquiry into the root meaning of logos must begin …” (see above) How can we justify such imperative which we could easily back-​turn, back-​ translate into ancient greek as τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦ δέοντος? Is this a natural necessity? Where does this deontology derives its force? And most importantly in Heraclitean terms is this happening κατ’ ἒριν και χρεών? Let us leave that aside for a while and look at the rest of the follow: … “The meaning of legein appears to have evolved from the older meanings of “to lay” and “to gather” toward the newer meanings of “to speak” and “to reason …” (see above). With this in mind, let us explore the phenomenology of gathering. Is there, in any possible world one could possibly imagine, a way to gather without aspiring to that which is to be gathered?192 Even if the reference of ‘leg-​’ goes strictly platonically, from word-​to-​world correspondence, from the word “to gather” to the world in the act of gathering, in which possible world can we gather without intending to that which is to be gathered? Can there be gathering without that which is to be gathered as a telos or intentionality? Prima facie, then, log(os) without an end which implies some sort of reasoning in setting it forth193 is a priori phenomenologically impossible. The only possible way to gather without being aware of what is gathered and how/​why/​when/​where the gathering happens would be to gather, in all possible senses, robotically or

his etymological intoxication, as Gadamer calls it, deters him from deciding which is the prime significant linguistic element with ostensive or truth function. (cf. Allan, Problem, 286; Gadamer, Truth). That the verb is the royal entry to ‘what there is,’ is an Aristotelian after-​path, a μέθοδος. 192 See the 19th century lexicons of Greek that Heidegger cites in Rand (Nicholas Rand, “The Political Truth of Heidegger’s “Logos”:  Hiding in Translation,” PMLA, 105, 3 (436–​447). None of the philologists can disengage the supposed primordial meaning of logos as “to gather” from some kind of ratio or teleology. (cf. 439–​441). See also Guthrie whose exegesis is thoroughly Aristotelian: “A complete logos is a description which at the same time explains … As Aristotle said, the only complete definition [of logos] is one which includes a statement of the cause” (Guthrie, History, 38). And by this anachronism, the logos of Heraclitus will be painted in causal terms. 1 93 Borrowing this phrase from Kahn; from both his major works on Heraclitus.

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like a sleep walker.194 It follows that logos without some kind of reasoning in the sense of intending is impossible even if we accept that logos authentically meant collecting (wood). Thus, we can say that it is not that people do not hear the cosmic logos and appear stupid. It is because they do not express their own logos. Simply, they don’t think. How is this possible? Either they do not have logos or they accept a logos which is not their own. Both cases would constitute acts of mimeses; a drama or as we already have explored, a mimodrama. They are drifting away without questioning what they are believing and doing. Their logos is simple in the sense of accepting to follow uncritically a logos which is not their own. To make this even clearer we need to pass into the philological point about logos. In the lists offered for the uses of the term ‘logos’ there is always one term relating to λέγω, and λέγ-​ for that matter, which is missing. The term which challenges strongly the hypothesis of an original meaning of logos as simple account or gathering and the like is ἀλεγίζω. It appears in Homer, in Hesiod, and in Orpheus.195 The word ἀλεγίζω relates to the phenomenon of promising or giving one’s word.196 A peculiar word which means to refrain from, to hold back one’s own, to fallow oneself in order to allow the logos of the Other to be expressed. In Homer: ἀλλὰ  σοί,  ὦ  μέγ’  ἀναιδές,  ἅμ’  ἐσπόμεθ’,  ὄφρα  σὺ  χαίρηις, τιμὴν  ἀρνύμενοι Μενελάωι σοί τε, κυνῶπα, πρὸς Τρώων· τῶν οὔ τι μετατρέπε’ οὐδ’ ἀλεγίζεις.197

194 Cf Rankin’s analysis on the hero: “What is clear is that Heraclitus does not regard the hero as an unconscious fighting machine, but as a person who is capable of conscious decision in the light of a developed understanding of reality” (H. D. Rankin, “Heraclitus on Conscious and Unconscious States,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 50, 2 (1995): 81; hereafter, Heraclitus). Logos comes in complicity with responsibility and decision as we shall see. 195 We find compelling the case made by Sophias (Σοφιάς) that Argonautica could be traced to the first Orpheus poet. Without necessarily agreeing with his re-​construction, his case about the chronology of the text seems consistent (Ορφέας, Αργοναυτικά, trans. Σοφιάς (Αθήνα: ΝΟΩΝ, 2010) [Orpheus, Argonautica, trans. Sophias (Athens:  No-​on, 2010)]; hereafter, Orpheus, Argonautica). 196 To be fair, Guthrie is the only one who spots the peculiarity of “λόγον διδόναι” but influenced by Aristotelianism he did not make the connection in his most elaborate analysis of this phrase (Guthrie, History, 38). 197 Όμηρος, Ιλιαδα, μτφ. Ιάκωβος Πολυλάς (Αθήνα:  ΟΕΔΒ, 1978), 1.160; [Homer, Iliad, trans. Iakovos Polylas (Athens: oedb, 1978), 1.160].

242 Chapter 6 Achilles tries to make Agamemnon feel shame for not valuing the promise Achilles made to go to war with him. Achilles made a promise to fight with him and now Agamemnon dis-​honors him by not allowing this promise to be undertaken. He ἀλεγίζει. In Hesiod: μῆτερ,  ἐγώ  κεν  τοῦτό  γ’  ὑποσχόμενος  τελέσαιμι ἔργον, ἐπεὶ  πατρός γε δυσωνύμου οὐκ ἀλεγίζω.198 Chronus is promising to his mother not to allow the deeds of his father to take place. The promise is to go against his father’s logos –​another silent promise. Chronus’ ἀλεγίζειν against his father comes as a silent promise to do as per his mother will. In Orpheus: μίμνωμεν προφρόνως ξυνῶν ἐπαρηγόνες ἄθλων, ζωοί νοστήσαιμεν ἑά πρός δώμαθ’ ἕκαστος· ὅς δέ κεσυνθεσίας δηλήσεται, οὐκ ἀλεγίζων… .199 The semantic ambivalence of the excerpt is again about another promise not go against the oaths they have sworn allegiance to. All the formulations above are negative. One can interpret the term as not measuring or counting the consequences of one’s actions. But one can simply say that ἀλεγίζω means “I don’t care.”200 An expression of care is the issue here as Achilles states it beautifully. Agamemnon does not take heed of the fact that Achilles came to war for him and not just because he had a personal reason to destroy the Trojans. All three texts convey the meaning of not holding back but going against the logos of an Other. Logos has never been a simple account or speech in aorist. It has always been related to promising and giving to an Other. Logos always, from then until now in modern Greek, has retained the core meaning of expressing oneself towards the Other, that is, to be committed. But this commitment is not just words but also deeds. That is why in fragment one Heraclitus’ logos unfolds in words and deeds. 198 Ησίοδος, Θεογονία, μτφ. Σταύρος Βλάχος και Άγγελος Βλάχος (Αθήνα:  Παπαδήμας, 2007), 170. [Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Stavros Vlahos and Aggelos Vlahos (Athens:  Papademas, 2007), 170]; hereafter, Hesiod, Theogony. 199 Orpheus, Argonautica, 350–​354. 200 Heidegger haunts us here since we come back to ‘care.’ Yet, the care comes through the Other first and not through one’s being which is an issue.

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This brings us back to the issue of (dis)embodiment since, as the texts above suggest, going against one’s logos means to engage with one’s body. Logos as simple account is a disembodied one. Just like an Aristotelian voice that we saw in the previous path. Let us remind ourselves the writing: ἔστι  δὲ  εἷς  λόγος  ἀποφαντικὸς  ἢ  ὁ  ἓν  δηλῶν  ἢ  ὁ  συνδέσμῳ  εἷς,  πολλοὶ δὲ οἱ πολλὰ καὶμὴ ἓν ἢ οἱ ἀσύνδετοι. τὸ μὲν οὖν ὄνομα καὶ τὸ ῥῆμα φάσις ἔστω  μόνον.201 What we can now note in passing anew this passage is the Euclidean imperative φάσις  ἔστω:  a simple account could allow this to happen if/​insofar/​as long as/​ the verb is part of a phenomenon. But you do not have to admit to this axiomatic thesis –​the responsibility for accepting this axiom phrased by Aristotle lies with you as it is ultimately unjustified.202 And so is the idea of a simple logos which comes through another Aristotelian passage: Ἔστι δ’ ἡ μὲν ἁπλῆ ἀπόφανσις φωνὴ σημαντικὴ περὶ τοῦ εἰ ὑπάρχειτι ἢ μὴ ὑπάρχει … .203 Logos cannot be simple unless one forgets that the decision of the dictum is the dictum of the decision –​the apophasis of the apophansis as the apophansis of the apophasis.204 Expression is both inclusion and exclusion at the same time in the same space. Remembering Nietzsche:  one can always decide to stay silent. Silence is as much powerful a logos as the voice which dissimulates it. In listening, the logos is silent but that does not mean absent –​unless one takes logos with Aristotle as oral expression, i.e. phonetic. “Not knowing

2 01 Aristotle, Of Interpretation, 17a. 202 Cf Agamben, Commandment, https://​waltendegewalt.wordpress.com/​2011/​04/​01/​ giorgio-​agamben-​what-​is-​a-​commandment-​. 203 Aristotle, Of Interpretation, 17a.23. 204 In Heidegger’s words, “logos is in itself both concealment and unconcealment” (Heidegger, bt, 17). Or, as Bollack says, Heraclitus is trying to make manifest this inherent contradiction of logos: “The content of knowledge that speech organizes carries it away and distances it from the distancing on which the Archimedean point of listening is constituted, when it produces this art outside the topic, separate from all the topics touched on in discourse. Speaking does not provide access to this point. All aphorisms have as a presupposition this basic mechanism of a distance beyond speech, which determines the choice of words on the basis of absence and negation” (Bollack, Art, 12). In both ways, logos comes to be through opposing forces. In this sense, Hippolytus who interpreted the logos in Heraclitus as the “principle of division” just focused on one side of logos so that he could retain the other for his orthodox Christian doctrine.

244 Chapter 6 how to listen, neither can they speak” says Heraclitus.205 In silence we ingather ourselves by suspending speech, we muster and master our logos.206 We do not expend it leaving space for the expression of another. To give one’s logos is always already a decision; better yet, let us drop the Aristotelian object –​or better subjectum –​and say that logos comes to be decisive. Logos characterizes, or better yet, each person as logos can come to be characteristic. There is not one single logos. Each person comes to be through the logos of the Other who exhausts, fallows ones’ own and allows a place for the former. Let us complicate matters with another neglected issue that we mentioned earlier. For Aristotle the voice is one’s own property. To what extent is this possible for pre-​Aristotelian voices? We saw that in the Cratylus, Plato uses the voice to refer to ancient language or dialect,207 or both; as tradition, the voice is more akin to women’s idiom.208 However, in Orpheus’ Argonautica, the phoně is also used to describe not what one does, as in speaks, but what one hears. In this case, the phoně is never one’s own as it is one of the unified sounds, one of the ways through which the other appears and, thus, it could dissimulate the logos which is supposed to represent.209 Simply put: I don’t own a voice, I don’t have a voice but the voice is just one of the sounds another hears in the process of my expression; again in Nietzschean words, how I discharge my will. But how I appear to the Other is always amidst what surrounds them/​us in the κόσμος.210 Let us thicken the plot with what Plato calls in the Cratylus ‘ἐνεοί.’ These “stupid” beings have logos as they can point to the distinctness of beings. “If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people (ἐνεοί) do at present?”211 The “dumb” may lack reason 2 05 ἀκοῦσαι οὐκ ἐπιστάμενοι οὐδ’ εἰπεῖν (Heraclitus dk 19). 206 See the amazing analysis of Monseu on silence and ingatheredness (Nicolas Monseu, Points de Silence: Perspectives Philosophiques (Louvain: pul, 2016); hereafter; Points). 207 Plato, Cratylus, 398b-​e. 208 Ibid., 418. 209 Orpheus, Argonautica, 845–​849. 210 In this way, imagining the expressive or exhibitive form of Heraclitus by reciting them as Tejera suggests must be done always with the caution that we cannot be in the κόσμος of its original expression. Here is another reason for which logos as simple account never happens. Even as phoně, “simply hearing words, in a physical sense” (Poster 14) is never simple, it happens amidst in a situation, in a katastasis. The issue is not only to hearken what is not said in the saying as Bollack and Wismann write, but, the fact that we never experience the logos as it is but as a mediated expression in situ (cf Bollack and Wismann, Héraclite, 22; 25; 29). 211 Αριστοτέλης, Προβλήματα, μτφ. Βασσίλιος Μανδηλαράς (Αθήνα: Κάκτος, 1995), 422 [Aristotle, Provlemata, trans. Vassilios Mandelaras (Athens: Kaktos, 1995), 422]; hereafter, Aristotle, Problems.

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and speech but not logos insofar as they attempt to signal to us what could go under the principle of their hands or their body, their under-​taking, their es/​ say, their (non Aristotelian) logical argument. Cratylus who ends up pointing the finger instead of speaking, as it has been recorded by Aristotle, does in a way make manifest logos without verbal language.212 Pointing the finger, which we could also express it as indexing is a way to express things to one another with a particular part of our body. Let us make matters even more complicated. In Aristotle, the ἐνεοί are said to have λαλιά through which they φθέγγονται:213 Διὰ τί οἱ κωφοὶ πάντες διὰ τῶν ῥινῶν φθέγγονται;ἢ διὰ τὸ ἐγγὺς τοῦ  εἶναι ἐνεοὺς εἶναι; οἱ δὲ ἐνεοὶ λαλοῦσι διὰ τῶν ῥινῶν· ταύτῃ γὰρ  αὐτῶν ἐκπίπτει τὸ πνεῦμα διὰ τὸ τῷ στόματι μεμυκέναι. μεμύκασι δέ, ὅτι οὐθὲν εἰς φωνὴν χρῶνται τῇ γλώττῃ.214 We could say that it comes as a result of our physical make up how we distinguish things, the make up of our bodies. We distinguish things contingently on how we are. Yet, there is also the reverse outlook for Heraclitus: if all beings came to be smoke we would distinguish them through our noses.215 Let us pause for a moment and reflect on this Aristotelian point which he attributes to Heraclitus: εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν.216 Should the many beings came to be one undifferentiated smoke, one being, we would still differentiate them with our nose, a part of our body. Would they cease to be

212 Cf Kirk, Problem, 251. As mentioned earlier, Allan has made an overwhelming suggestion to think that Cratylus in the platonic dialogue and Cratylus in Aristotle’s Metaphysics are one and the same person. Cratylus, then, just as his name suggests, holds fast overtime Heraclitus’ teaching by resisting the Aristotelian transvaluation of logos as φωνή σημαντική. We cannot follow Allan, however, who takes the act of indexing as a result of his own thought and criticism to Heraclitus. Cratylus could be exploring where Heraclitus’ thought was leading just like Quine did (Allan, Problem). Is it a coincidence that Quine explores the issues of indexing through ostension, intension and extension at the banks of Cayster in a similar intellectual manner like Cratylus? After all, as an old Chinese proverb runs “once pointed out is better than a hundred times said” (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 17). 213 For Heraclitus, Sybil φθέγγεται (Heraclitus, dk 92). Obviously, if he follows Sybil in her meaningful expression, then clearly, logos as only discourse or only reason does not fit the picture. 214 Aristotle, Problems, 899a 5. 215 εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν (Heraclitus, dk 7). 216 Johnstone, Logos, 7.

246 Chapter 6 smoke? With respect to their being no, but with respect to our logos yes. What does logos do if not de-​ciding the fabric of being? Like thunder, logos οἰακίζει. With these considerations, fragment 50 can reveal a different meaning. A propos, Johnstone says that “the view that Heraclitus wished only to insist that his audience listen to his argument without prejudgment threatens to reduce his weighty contrast between ‘listening to me’ and ‘listening to the logos’ to banality.”217 Indeed it would be if we presuppose that ‘his argument’ is a logos in the Aristotelian way. What Heraclitus is urging us to do is not to hear his voice or listen to his argument as if the logos was distinct from him which comes out and metaphorizes itself into just a voice that signifies a particular intention. Rather, he urges us to hearken and follow how he phrases, how he enframes the world, how he de-​cides it. If one followed his argument as under-​ taking to show how logos divides and unites at the same time they would have to agree.218 How else would Heraclitus be able to follow the raging logos of Sybil who comes about φθεγγομένη?219 Logos conceptualized without the body can be traced all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Logos as denoting a phoně without a body is a path forged by Aristotle which we follow without question.220 Yet, Johnstone writes that we have evidence which “suggests that around the beginning of the fifth century bc, when Heraclitus was philosophically active, the word ‘logos’ usually denoted a written or oral account or story presented to an audience to persuade or entertain them.”221 Another way to articulate the above is to reiterate with Hoffman that “the meaning of logos was relatively unitary through the fifth century and can be better understood …”222 Let us explore the passive voice “usually denoted” and the impersonal “can be better” or “the meaning … was.”223 This passivity, which, even grammatically, 2 17 Ibid. 218 Another issue for the traditional interpretations of logos for this fragment would be to reconcile ‘λόγου’ with ‘ὁμολογεῖν.’ How can one have the ‘same’ logos, literally ὁμολογεῖν? The latter means confession. The only way that ὁμολογεῖν could come to be would have to exclude its representational possibility and rest on a communion of feeling. And this feeling cannot be put in epistemic terms. (Cf Derrida, Given, 168). 219 Heraclitus, dk 92. 220 Even Derrida had taken for granted what the tradition has appropriated as ‘logos.’ Despite his profound and inspiring analyses on Aristotle’s logos, he never comes to touch Heraclitus. Heraclitus’ logos has never been given a chance –​it has always been translated, appropriated and reappropriated. 221 Johnstone, Logos, 3. 222 Hoffmann, Logos, 20. 223 Cf Guthrie “… the ways in which the word was currently used in and around the time of Heraclitus” (Guthrie, History, 420).

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implies impersonality and irresponsibility comes to be problematic for many reasons.224 It speaks in aorist and camouflages objectivity which is attempted by the interanimation of the documenta. On the one hand, we imply that all the writings that we have at our disposal resemble or represent adequately (as if a platonic ὁμοί-​ωσις) all the possible uses of the term in that particular period –​ and that there is such a particular period as if in-​itself; that there is a structure of this period which makes it be what it is.225 Even if one acquiesces on the periodization of time, let it be (ἒστω) that such a period exists, it does not follow that its essence will be reflected in the texts that we have at our disposal. If that were the case, this would mean that through these very limited texts we could have a perfectly intelligible access, a full re-​presentation of all the ways all the speaking subjects who could have used the term did use the term as we think for that period.226 Or, that what we have at our disposal is adequate in order to warrant deductions of what were the case –​from what is now according to the texts that we have which are categorized in the way that we interpret them.227 Even if all the texts that we could possibly have or could have existed could allow us to say “All texts say/​suggest/​argue/​prove that x is y” in no-​way follows that “x is y.” But apart from this, the most dangerous anachronism comes from what follows from this thinking: If a term does not prostitute itself in any inscription we have at our disposal, then we safely infer that it did not exist at that time! 224 See also Nietzsche’s notes on Rhetoric where he classifies the personification of abstracts ideas as metonymic tropes (Nietzsche, Rhetoric). See also a very insightful analogy made surprisingly by Guthrie whereby in “our own age the impersonal factors (regression, complex, trauma, and the like) are sometimes put to the same use. ie [responsibility … transferred from the agent to an external compulsion] (Guthrie, History, 27). 225 For the issue of historicism and periodization see Heidegger and Derrida (Heidegger, Contributions; Derrida Margins; Grammatology). It is not the periodization which interests us here but the epistemological implications we draw as an effect of a periodization which is of our own making –​a web which we weave like spiders do (Heraclitus dk 67a). 226 We vainly think that we have access to the commonest ancient interpretation as Kirk maintained. Is this commonest, this superlative of the common, also ξυνόν? Hardly. This vanity goes so far as to suggest that we know more of the Pre-​Socratics than they knew themselves (cf Miller, Logos, 164). We have to remember, as Popper does, that all our disembodied accounts are “necessarily somewhat idealized” (Popper, Kirk, 392). Our accounts of their accounts are (not) a play of mirrors (cf. Waugh, Postomoder, 609; Ramnoux, Vocabulaire, 81). 227 The discovery of the Derveni papyrus constitutes evidence contra the strongest intellectual cases made to show that dk 3 is not Heraclitean (see Theokritos Kouremenos,, George M. Parassoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou, The Derveni Papyrus (Firenze: Leo. S. Olschki Editore, 2006), col. ix, 5; 68). But still, no text can supplement living uses of language.

248 Chapter 6 The attested occurrence of a word in a text in no way determines its existential status. If that were so, then all slang and local dialects of remote villages would be a myth –​in the modern sense of myth. Living logos cannot be accounted by documents which are also monuments, signs of death. Unless we presuppose with the term “common usage” a proper or “the normal usage”228 of language set authoritatively by one or many who have the power to institute it. Thus with Heraclitus, as also with Thrasymachus in Plato’s republic, “νόμος καὶ βουλῇ πείθεσθαι ἑνός.”229 Isn’t one of the issues in the Cratylus whether we shall be convinced by the νομοθέτης? As far as the “usually” is concerned from Hoffman’s quotation above: What is the implicature in the use of ‘usually’?230 What we have are texts written or signed by male names –​let us keep in reserve the issue of Neo-​Platonism and the Church Fathers. In what uni-​verse are we to justify that the uses of the term in the texts that we have re-​present the living uses of the term from ξύμπαντας according to what we ideally quantify as 4th-​5th century bc? The texts supplement the living (uses of) logos based on the ἒνδοξα that we have. Is that not pure Aristotelianism, yet again? An embodied logos is equated with a disembodied male intellect manifested in writing. A text may popularize a term or a concept but that does not mean that the text determines its existential status or exhausts its possibilities of meaning. We mentioned earlier that we have not access to all the living uses of the term logos. We do not have epistemic, and, most importantly, existential access to how ξύμπαντας would have used the term. This leads us to the issue of the 2 28 Graham, Nature, 176. 229 Heraclitus, dk 33. See also Nietzsche on common usus (Nietzsche, Rhetoric, 107–​108). 230 What we want to illuminate here is again the workings of metonymy. Here the metonymy refers to a representational epistemology reflecting a representational democracy. We start by examining the texts which we ascribe to a class –​say the Pre-​Socratic philosophers –​and by a magical a-​logical leap we move all the characteristics we have found in the majority of the texts and re-​ascribe them and impose them to a whole of which we do not have access. We have used the term implicature from Grice because there is no other way to understand how one can be convinced from such thinking which reconstructs the whole speculatively out of very limited particulars. It is one thing to say that according to the texts that we have we think that Heraclitus believed that x and a quite different thing to say that according to the texts the Pre-​Socratics or the Greeks –​whatever these terms quantify –​believed that x. The workings of metonymy can even lead us to believe that we can contradict accounts which derive from a writer’s observation. (cf. See Allan’s account: “It is one thing to be critical of Aristotle’s accounts systems of philosophy, and quite another to dispute of events in his own lifetime, when this is confirmed evidence of Plato, and they are the only available authorities” (Allan Problem, 281). This is why Gadamer thinks that the debate about whether Heraclitus preceded Parmenides or not is a pointless game of historicism.

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philosophical difference between common and ξυνόν.231 Sextus Empiricus says that the common is the ξυνόν. If one accepts that there is no difference between the two, then the interpretation would lead to characterizing the term ξυνόν as being a technical term or a geographical variation. Is this a just interpretation? Let us start with von Fritz who takes ξυνόν as “the main object of the νοός –​ the ξυνόν.”232 He explains that Heraclitus attempts to express with ξυνόν the one divine common law –​“the all-​pervading divne law.”233 Such a syntax will make the human logos have the possibility to partake in the divine. This conceptual schema is par excellence platonic, the issue of μέθεξις –​see earlier footnote on Justin Martyr. Following Fritz and Fraenkel, Darcus proposes the schema man-​ logos-​Logos-​theos as if hierarchical whereby ξυνόν is a “force-​field” between human and divine.234 Again, this in-​between, this μεταξύ, is platonic. While Darcus provides an insightful problematization of ξυνός, her schema cannot account how “Logos” can be the connective since men maybe “speaking with noos”235 but the Divine does not speak for Heraclitus in the way it would for Homer and Hesiod –​or Christianity as in the word of God. Darcus’ account, like Kirk’s, attributes the theory of methexis to Heraclitus. Perhaps this could be how Plato took Heraclitus? Vlastos takes ξυνόν as identity in change in one thing or something common in different things that change making it sound like an Aristotelian essence with its accidents.236 Curd talks about ξύνεσις as

231 Bollack and Wismann have provided a meticulous critique on the issue of ξυνόν as translated by common by Sextus. However, here, we would like to reveal a platonic thread in such an interpretation instead of a Stoic one (Bollack and Wismann, Héraclite, 38). 232 von Fritz, Nous, 233. 233 Ibid. 234 Shirley Darcus, “ ‘Daimon’ as a Force Shaping ‘Ethos’ in Heraclitus,” Phoenix, 28, 4 (1974): 402–​404; hereafter, Daimon. 235 Ibid., 403. 236 Vlastos, Studies, 145. This way of interpreting ξυνόν through the idea of a permanent substratum has been used to explain the common logos. See Guthrie’s History: 443–​44; 461; 465. The συμβεβηκότα, or what has been latinized as accidents, means literally happening at the same time and place. And this concept is used to explain away the reciprocal occurrence of the (hidden) “permanent substratum” and the (apparent/​accidental) “mutable characteristics” (Ibid., 446; cf Colvin, Flux, 759; Serge Mouraviev, “Heraclitus B31b dk (53b Mcb): An Improved Reading?” Phronesis, 22, 1 (1977): 7–​8. For a similar critique with the one we are advancing here see Emlyn-​Jones, Heraclitus, 91–​92; Tejera, Listening, 492; Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 101–​103). We follow Pritzl in that “ξυν-​conveys the idea of union, connection, a putting together, is to bring or set together” (Kurt Pritzl, “On the Way to Wisdom in Heraclitus” Phoenix, 39, 4(1985): 309). Yet, this putting together is not pre-​existent but has to come to be and thus requires time.

250 Chapter 6 some kind of transcendental truth which though common to all in principle, that is, “publicly available,”237 only few grasp it.238 The ξυνόν does not refer to some common property or something proper to all. Take for instance Pericles’ ‘πρός τε ξύμπαντας καὶ καθ’ ἑκάστους,’239 and Thucydides’ καὶ ἡ ξύμπασα πόλις οὐκ αὐτοκράτωρ οὖσα ἑαυτῆς τοῦτ’ ἔπραξεν.240 The element ‘ξ’ signifies “all of all” without reserve; utterly, completely, exhaustively; not just something common to all as if there is a property common to all. In Pericles, ξύμπαντας as a unity is contrasted with taking each individually, καθ’ ἑκάστους –​one and many, or, better yet, one too many. To re-​present “all of all” there is, forcibly, a temporal movement which exhausts the all one by one, καθ’ ἑκάστους, and comes back to itself so that we can talk of “all of all.” The “all of all” is without reserve. But this is not a tautology as if the all of all is ‘A=A’ where the ‘of’ means ‘logical’ identity or an atemporal process of identification. For the all to exhaust itself and of itself –​even if it is a class of only one member –​in order to find itself again as it were, in a new beginning of the same, requires time and a to-​and-​fro movement. Time is required to make the uphill and downhill one and the same, all of all yet one.241 The one and the many, ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα, reveals time when being is lifted. When Heraclitus says τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν, we can interpret him as castigating folk for not taking the time to exercise their own logos which could only come to be manifested in dialogue –​ as we saw earlier with Plato. Without postulating a transcendental ulterior truth in which they partake, everyone can question things in dialogue yet they 2 37 Curd, Knowledge, 537. 238 Ibid., 534. This approach raises the question of how is it possible for the logos to be available to all if only few in the end grasp it. The answer would be ἐν δυνάμει, that is through another Aristotelian presupposition. 239 Θουκυδίδης, Ιστοριών Α-​Γ, μτφ. Αναστάσιος Γεωργοπαπαδάκος (Αθήνα: Κάκτος, 1992), B64; 122 [Thucydides, Historion A-​Γ, trans. Anastasios Yiorgopapadakos (Athens:  Kaktos, 1992), B64; 122]; hereafter, Thucydides, History. 240 Ibid., Γ62; 120. 241 Among other things, the element ‘Ξ’ can be registered as what linguists call a semelfactive element. It has the potential of expressing subtleties of time. Malinowski shows that in many “primitive” languages there is an “adverbial particle … which put before a modified verb, gives it, in somewhat vague manner, the meaning either of a past or of a definite happening” (B. Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” In The Meaning of Meaning, eds. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1923), 303). As Malinowski admits, only lost in the ways of doing things with another culture, that is, embodiedly and embeddedly, only by resisting his own language and its structures could he come to understand how some forms “express the subtleness of temporal sequence” (Ibid., 304). Even in modern Greek, the element ‘Ξ’ has retained its semelfactivity.

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choose ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν. Everyone has logos, everyone can question but folk chicken out. In time, they become stupid for not exercising their questioning power: βλὰξ ἄνθρωπος ἐπὶ παντὶ λόγῳ ἐπτοῆσθαι φιλεῖ.242 4

Reading dk 1 without Being

As we have seen, with very few exceptions, Heraclitus has been translated and interpreted through or with(in) ‘being’ or through Platonic and Aristotelian patterns of thought. Something analogous happens with his first fragment. According to Guthrie, Socrates teaching was: … if everyone understood the true nature of goodness, its appeal would be irresistible, and failure to comply with its standards could only be due to a lack of full understanding.243 If one exchanges the term ‘goodness’ with ‘logos’ in the excerpt above, they can have a conceptual summary of most exegeses on Heraclitus’ logos. It matters least if one sides with the metaphysical or the simple view of logos. Both of them presuppose that there is a particular meaning of logos either way. When essentia, that is being, precedes logos, the latter is objectified as something particular; an intelligible entity that we try to capture. As promised, οὐκ ἀλεγίζoμεν being. Approaching this fragment Verdenius starts one of his papers on the Pre-​ Socratics by saying that: The opening sentence of Heraclitus’ work runs as follows: τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον·244 This proposition comes to be incorrect if we accept that Heraclitus inscribed something. If there was an original ‘book’ crafted by Heraclitus it was certainly never inscribed by him in lower case. One might think that this is trivial and common knowledge. Yet, taking into consideration the much cited Aristotle’s testament on Heraclitus’ punctuation, then the issue of writing in lower case becomes paramount. If we rewrite the fragment in upper case what do we 2 42 Heraclitus, dk 87. 243 Guthrie, History, 9. 244 Verdenius, Notes, 271.

252 Chapter 6 have? Tarán is the first one to undertake the writing in upper case. He represents it thus:  “τουδελογουτουδεοντοσ.”245 His concern, however, as in most philological discussions, is not about punctuation. Rather, it is whether one or both of the formulae ‘δε’ is authentic or not. The discussion about punctuation is limited in deciding the scope of the ‘ἀεὶ.’ Let us re-​gard the fragment in upper case. What have we lost? Punctuation. Should we not include under the term ‘punctuation’ apostrophes apart from commas and full stops? What does the play of punctuation signal? Bollack says that with Heraclitus we must make a choice in punctuating the text. Indeed. Crafty Heraclitus λέγει in such a way as to show us how we decide the meaning of what he says yet paradoxically he says it without saying it. Like the Oracle who uttered ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis the responsibility of interpretation lies with the listener –​be it oral or written. In the τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος where does the apostrophe we follow, that is, our accepting τοῦδ’ ἐόντος come from? One can trace this rendition all the way back to Jacob Bernays who corrected Hippolytus’ text,246 which read, apparently, τοῦ δέοντος. The justification is the juxtaposition of Sextus’ and Aristotle’s texts which make reference to this ‘opening’ with ‘being.’ One might suggest that Aristotle’s text is prior to Hippolytus’ and thus we should take Aristotle’s rendition as being closer to Heraclitus. But that comes to be a petitio principi since Aristotle preferred to see being all over. But even between τοῦδ’ ἐόντος, τοῦ δέοντος, or Sextus’ τοῦδε ἐόντος we can ask:  Why not take the possibility that Heraclitus plays here with the normativity of being? That ‘being always’ sounds like normative δέοντος? The ‘δε’ which we apostrophize does not make a philosophical difference. Here, Tejera’s suggestion to read the text aloud comes to be vitally suggestive. Be it ‘τουδελογουτουεοντοσ’ or ‘τουδελογουτουδεοντοσ’ what we make manifest is our own apostrophe from retreating from thinking with(in) being. Being, if it is to be, it has to be no matter when and where. From Husserl and Bergson we have learnt that the instant of the eternity is the eternity of the instant, one and same. The play between the concepts of ‘being forever’ and ‘normativity’ becomes evident.247 Let us go back to the whole fragment.

245 Leonardo Tarán, “The First Fragment of Heraclitus,” Illinois Classical Studies, 11, ½ (1986): 3; hereafter, First. 246 See Miroslav Marcovich, Hippolytus:  Refutatio Omnium Haeresium (Berlin:  Walter De Gruyter, 1986). 247 See Tejera’s uniquely insightful translation without ‘being’ (Tejra, Listening, 406).

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τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων, ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει. τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται. Whether the inscription was τοῦδ’ ἐόντος or τοῦ δέοντος then Kirk is just to punctuate ἀεὶ with ἀξύνετοι precisely because ‘being’ or ‘ought’ already include the concept of always. Being is always normative even if it is (for) an instant. However, as many exegetes have noticed the term “ever being” (αἴεν ἐόντες) frequently featured in Homer and Hesiod to signify the everlasting divine life of the gods. Thus, the ἀεὶ could have been placed by Heraclitus in such a way as to bring about such inconsistency. Whoever frames the world either with being or being forever they would come to be inconsistent for two reasons. Both because everything changes or is in flux, and because, philosophically, being and being forever do not differ essentially but logically; logically meaning how one divides time. Let us not forget that the first one to divide the absoluteness of time, eternity itself, time in-​itself undivided, in-​itself, that is, Chronus, is Zeus. Sophia comes to be the understanding of how one comes to divide, or in Heideggerian terms, clearing; or better yet in Shakespearean words, learing. To be wise means to be King Lear.248 Λόγος as the possibility of expression comes to be the force that opens up a path by displacing what is –​without this displacement of being logos cannot come to be. When Heraclitus says κατὰ φύσιν in the ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει, the orthodox interpretation of ὅκως ἔχει has been “according to nature.” By presupposing an object, i.e. being, we have the translation of “according to its own nature.” And this nature means the essence of each thing –​and all this by turning ἔχει into being. Let us ask: If Heraclitus divides each thing (ἕκαστον), why not include in the ἕκαστον the speaker himself –​just like Pierrot that we found earlier?249 The word ἕκαστον can easily

248 ‘lear’ means division or taping; “binding for the edges of a fabric” (oed.com). It is this binding, or ligament that Heraclitus tries to set forth in/​with ‘his’ philosophical logos. 249 See earlier comment on Heraclitus’ inquiring himself (Heraclitus dk 101). It was worth noting Fink’s in-​depth analysis of the one and the many in relation to lightning and τα πάντα. “τα πάντα signifies a concept of “everything,” which allows nothing outside of itself. … The relatedness in question between lightning that guides τα πάντα and τα πάντα itself is a relatedness of one to many” (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 15). If being is τα πάντα then logos can burn this being to make sense.

254 Chapter 6 mean all and each severally –​as we saw with Pericles earlier. The relation of ἕκαστον with chopping wood (κάστον) lingers in the play of words. We can try the κατὰ φύσιν bi-​directionally: ‘I am a natural distinguisher, or I distinguish by nature (=I cannot not distinguish), I  decide, I  confer value, I  punctuate things.’250 I  narrate κατὰ φύσιν /​ κατὰ φύσιν dividing each thing and phrasing how (it) has.251 We can interpret the φράζων ὅκως ἔχει without imposing being –​without metaphorizing ἔχει into being or essence. How does it have? What is the subject for having? ‘ὅκως ἔχει’ comes after Heraclitus’ narrating, dividing and phrasing. Grammatically, it is the object or objective of narrating, dividing and phrasing. So, here, a conception of things(-​in-​)themselves does not have room to take place. If we re-​punctuate the fragment and include τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους in the previous phrase, then we have a striking analogy which exemplifies the πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον. By expressing themselves with being, they always come to be inconsistent both when they use it inadvertently252 and when they hear it from another. Using this logos of being forever/​infinitely they appear dumbfounded or infinitely-​inexperienced/​infinitely-​untried when they witness the words and deeds which he narrates by telling how has for other folk. By using this logos of being they rob both themselves and the others from the possibility of expressing how they have themselves in the world. They come to be self-​destructive. To say that ‘x is y’ as if this logos applies to all, they give up their logos for being, they ἀλεγίζουσιν. Thus, when folk use being to tell how things have for everyone they are faced with Heraclitus who,

250 Heraclitus is not struggling to make distinctions as Wilcox says (Wilcox, Distinction, 13). He tries to show us how all distinctions come to be through our logos. Ramnoux’s translation is interesting: “mais les hommes ressemblent à des gens sans expérience, bien qu’ils aient fait expérience des paroles et des œuvres, telles que moi je les expose, divisant selon la nature, et composant pour dire les choses comme elles sont” (Ramnoux, Études, 103). The “selon la nature” of Ramnoux would stand neutrally if she did not end up introducing being in “pour dire les choses comme elles sont” where being is interchanged with nature. All these translations which make Heraclitus trying to show us the essence of each thing are couched on being. We follow metaphysics: distinguishing each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is –​being qua being. As if things are distinct in themselves while having forgotten that the whole discussion in the Cratylus is all about how things come to be! 251 The same issue as we made manifest earlier with Cratylus; we turn ἔχει into being. But this turning, this trope comes from our own logos. We transform or transvaluate everything into being in virtue of our logos. (For the ‘archontic sense’ of having and the way we objectify existence through being see Heidegger, Pathmarks, 25-​37). 252 The ἀκοῦσαι might easily mean inadvertent, involuntary.

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as δοκιμώτατος breaks this (way of) being expressed, this (way of) setting oneself forth, this (not) having of oneself. He exposes the inconsistencies of such (a) δοκέοντα.253 The ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων consistute his very logos. His logos, like lightning, steers τα πάντα, or, in other words divides all he entires.254 Like Zeus who unites and divides merely by name: Ζεῦξ/​Διός. He strikes them like lightning. But because they cannot use their logos they cannot dialogue with him, they cannot do justice to him and, thus, he is distant, dark –​metonymy, metaphor, displacement. But thinking with being (τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος) folk think with an impersonal logos which is not their own (δοκέοντα). They think impersonally, robotically, like sleepwalkers by not questioning. They decide to live but they do not know why.255 They are borrowers of a meaning which is not their own. They are crawlers waiting to be guided by a logos which is not their own, by a nomos in which they do not partake.256 In time, they come to be ἀξύνετοι. The term resounds the double axe, ἀξί̄νη. We could imagine two types of folk based on the movement of the double-​edged axe –​or Nietzsche’s hammer. Heraclitus cuts with his own logos, he does not rely on being, he questions it, he breaks it (δοκιμώτατος). Folk who live by being, who believe it, who have themselves under its principles, are like the other side of the axe that never cuts anything but air. They are thin-​cutters, κατὰ ψιλόν.257 They are on the path of another’s 2 53 Heraclitus, dk 28. 254 Ibid. dk 64. ‘entire’ as a verb has an ancient usage meaning to make whole, to unite –​see oed.com relevant discourse. We arrive at Fink’s analogical thinking: “The movement of λόγος, which brings-​forth and establishes, steers and determines everything, corresponds to the lightning movement that brings-​forth” (Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 9). But contra-​Fink we do not exhaust this logos in language which has a phonetic being behind it (cf 54). 255 Heraclitus, dk 20. Fragments 71 to 75 are all about folk who do not think as in not questi(ion)ing with their own logos. To understand that they are authentically living would mean that they are authentically dying. Living and dying make up the ends of the same via, or better bios. We are not in a circle of life-​death precisely because we do not have a conception of beginning of our life and the end of it. We live the birth and death of others. And other others live the birth and death of us. Immortals need not mean only gods as if they are the only beings that are forever. Immortals do not have a life –​either as gods or those who died in battle. Their life carries out to the living and that is how the mortals live the death of the immortals. A life/​death without its own logos comes to be mortal. And the death/​life of its own logos comes to be its life. 256 See fragment 11. The ἑρπετὸν resounds πέτομαι which means flying but can also refer to hope. As we saw earlier to hope means to live. The ἑρπετὸν can also link to hopeless folk. The nomos for them is always a blow which they only receive –​they do not create. 257 Heraclitus dk 74.

256 Chapter 6 logos. Shall we also not remember those who do not lead their lives but let themselves be lead by paths created by others?258 They live a borrowed life ledged on a force which is not their own. Instead of passaging in life, they are passengers of some other’s life. Heraclitus’ logos however comes sharply like a thunder and burns such being as inauthentic logos. Those who do not create passages with the living seem to be leading an absolute private life because they do not express their logos. As we saw earlier, logos cannot come to be without dialogue. Folk live as if they were alone by interiorizing a logos which is not their own. They do not come into dialogue. To come in con-​sistency, all of all have to exercise their logos, the expression of which will come to be more strong than anything divine. Fragment 114 does not exhort the divine law which permeates a world which no human nor god created. The fragment can be read as a thought experiment concerning the possibility of the power of a logos created when all of all decided authentically in dialogue. With the way he λέγει, the way he enframes or phrases the world,259 Heraclitus neither lets entities be perceived nor reasons reason. He does not unconceal. He does not punctuate Being to find beings nor does he define beings to trace Being. ‘The logos of Heraclitus,’ in all senses (is) dark, as (it is) exposing this habituation, this ‘this,’ ‘th’ is,’ comes at once to spark our thought like Prometheus: he gives us fire, he in-​s-​pires: by lifting up our punctuation in being he reveals this principle through which we comport ourselves without questioning it. Heraclitus is not obsessed with Being or beings. He de-​parts from it. He does not f(ol)low with it. “The dark is, to be sure, without light, but cleared.”260 His logos comes about being a bout (to) being. If we used a naval metaphor, we could say that Heraclitus tries to come in touch with logos as a ship that wakes. One can be a passenger on this ship or

258 Ibid. dk 71. The play between ὁδός and ἂγω can be irritating (even) in ( modern) Greek ears. ἂγω is, perhaps, one of the strongest ways to convey agency, by leading. Agency here is given to the ‘path’ which the sleeping person, the forgetful person has been found without having any contribution in its creation. τοῦ ἐπιλανθανόμενου is, as proverbially said in modern Greek, the one who goes wherever the wind blows. S/​he does not lead but is lead by exhausting their agency, fallowing it, in allowing to be blown away. τοῦ ἐπιλανθανόμενου is not only the person who λανθάνει accidentally but the one who allows or who has already allowed themselves to forget ἐπι-​; Like in epi-​steme, epi-​signifies a towards, some kind of allowing in the sense of not resisting. The poet thus manifests the ultimate agency. That is why in Christianity the God as creator is the Poet. 259 We have to keep always in mind that logos cannot exhaust itself in language which is ultimately phonetic. 260 Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus, 162.

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steer it. The pilot need not only be one as we are habituated with our modern ships. Yet, either modern or ancient, for the ship to wake, displacement of the waters must occur. Logos likes to hide in such displacement. As Heraclitus tries to show us how we steer everything with our logos, he tries to make us (come to be) fully accountable of our ways. To take up the responsibility of our existence. His logos, thus, comes to be unbe-​coming, dis-​turbing. Dispelling the dream of the wa(l)king crowds who walk and talk of being. Heraclitus wakes otherwise. He awoke to his logos which can question everything. Heraclitus questions and makes one lose grip of the world. Heraclitus does not allow a justification coming from ‘being’ which expels responsibility to a transcendental beyond. He gives ‘Being’ a full stop. He comes to be awaken from the comatose situation of being. All punctuation on existence takes a lift. Heraclitus lifts punctuation and make us roll and lift. His logos cuts through all being. One could say with Nancy that Heraclitus breaks language to the point where language touches sense, where he comes in contact with what he could say. With no ledge from being Heraclitus touches sense, ἅπτεται. Every logos as embodied force steers, stirs, moves. Even the movement, whereby everything divided is,261 signals a rhythm, ῥυσμός; the λέγων ῥυθμίζει, which means bring into a measure or attune.262 Heraclitus, by challenging being as a rhythm which stalls the world, at-​temps differently. His logos taps, like a tuning fork as Nietzsche would have it, to at-​tune with everything (τα πάντα) by not f(ol)lowing with a logos of being. It is precisely the circle and the line that he brackets so that he can come in touch with the rhythm of the wor(l)d. Let us not forget that, as Hesiod tells us, after Chronus’ retort to being what he is, time itself, Zeus undertakes to realize the promise that Chronus never fulfilled. Zeus unites-​and-​divides the eternal flowing (Rhea) of time (Chronus). Zeus unites Rhea with her logos by dividing Chronos. The beginning of the world starts with such apportioning of time; time begins to flow in instants in virtue of Zeus’ logos.263 As a middle term, Zeus comes to be the figure of logos in virtue of which human nous can come to be. The horizon between Rhea and Uranus is just Chronus, time. Through his lightning spark or his sparking light history begins. Heraclitus as the dark philosopher gives light, by making the concealment (λήθη) utter the (un)concealment (ἀ-​λήθεια) in the language of 2 61 Reading required here with anastrophe. 262 When Archilochus says “Just know what sort of ‘rhythm’ possesses human beings” he says so in the context of not being able to protect himself from the rhythms imposed by others. 263 See Fink’s and Heidegger’s important analysis of apportioning of time in Heraclitus fragments (Heidegger, and Fink, Heraclitus, 58–​89).

258 Chapter 6 Being. How the (ir)relevant comes to be, and how being(s) come(s) to be ending up in the same beginning, one’s (un)questioned follow, their (non)decision. Logos as decision, a limitless line which divides and unites instantly, at the same time and place, comes like a-​bout; like a river, a canal, a cutting through, a C-​section which gives birth. Heraclitus’ logos is both bow and lyre. It is like the canal of SueZ-​SaiD, like ZeuS-​DiaS, like Mallarmé’s divided world of analogy. If we re-​read Mallarmé’s “The demon of analogy” and unbracket the punctuation of property, the ‘of,’ then we can come up with a passage without being and its properties: Lède/​ Monde /​Lan/​ Alogie.264 In this path, the metaphysical logos, in the language of metaphysics, is alogical, absurd as it has no ledge but creates it. As Axelos described, (the) logos (of Heraclitus) creates the phenomena, sisting the phenomenalising, punctuating and connecting them together as the phenomena of one universe, meaning-mizing, making them be(ing) and threading them into a whole, a uni-​verse. Logos trans-​verses; logos futures like a promise. Logos connects, con-​sists speech and phenomena, phenomena and speech to create thought to rest, to be.265 Logos is not the frame of mind which it reveals nor a point of view –​and certainly not the expression of a causal/​trascendental connection which transports itself from the outside to the inside and then back to the outside (physical cause→ bodily impression → translation-​transformation/​metaphor → speech). Logos frames, phrases the

264 Lède/​ Monde /​Lan/​ Alogie, literally means, cutting the world spontaneously without particular logic: Logos. This cutting is the first step before the representation of the cutting which in the language of being is the movement, the metaphor, the transport to, the analogy: In the Cratylus the analogy is what comes as the differentiating element from all the beasts which can see (Plato, Cratylus 399c). Analogy is also a metaphor as “connecting diverse matters” (Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 76). We cannot forget either that, even in the strongest form of causal behaviorism, it is the analogy that does the work of describing a sensation: when someone “describes his pain as a stabbing, a grinding or a burning pain, though he does not necessarily think that his pain is given to him by a stiletto, a drill or an ember, still he says what sort of pain it is by likening it to the sort of pain that would be given to anyone by such an instrument” (Hanfling, Wittgenstein, 193). The metaphor comes after the analogy: The Demon (of) Analogy. 265 Axelos, Heraclitus. When Heidegger talks about the structural function of logos, the issue of con-​sisting comes forth in the “apophantical signification” which means “letting something be seen in its togetherness [Beisammen] with something –​letting it be seen as something” (Heidegger, bt, 56). Once again, the apophasis of the apophansis is the apophansis of the apophasis. These primordial elements of logos come up again in his writings as enframing. Logos is this “queer connexion,” con-​sisting differential elements, sounds and phenomena into words and objects (Wittgenstein, Investigations, 199). It is only in the Introduction to Metaphysics that Heidegger moves away from the ‘letting be seen’ to talk about the gathering gatheredness of logos.

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mind. Heidegger used enframing for this phenomenon. So let us re-​phrase logos with the other Heidegger’s logos: Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-​upon which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-​reserve. As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing. He can never take up a relationship to it only subsequently.266 This gathering comes about as clearing and phrasing. The gathering orders. Logos cannot reveal (apophansis) before gathering together the given (apophasis). Heidegger’s enframing does flow along Heraclitus’ logos: What is said of logos [the first fragment that we cited of Heraclitus] here corresponds exactly to the authentic meaning of the word “gathering.” But just as this word denotes both 1) to gather and 2) gatheredness, logos here means the gathering gatheredness, that which originally gathers. Logos here does not mean sense, or word, or doctrine, and certainly not “the sense of a doctrine,” but instead, the originally gathering gatheredness that constantly holds sway in itself.267 But it is also only through this possibility of (in)gatheredness that logos can be traced. This lapse of time, this distance, “the inscription of the inscribable,”268 this différance implies that the logos of Being does not amount to the Being of Logos. Logos of Being (is) always already before & after logos. Logos always keeps word. Logos promises, and if one wills, logos commands Being and can question it, like a will to power. It is not our being that claims what (there) is, it is our logos. Logos confers being on and, as such, “that which confers value does not have value.”269 Call it free will, but you will have already called it. 266 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977), 24; hereafter, Question. 267 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics Θ 1–​3, trans. Gregory Fried (New Haven, MA: yup, 2000), 135; hereafter, Introduction. 268 Derrida, Memoirs, 45. 269 We are following Kelley’s translation of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s First Philosophy (see Kelly, Wholly). It is not par hazard that Jankélévitch described ‘this’ as the metalogical. Human reality is expressed through the empirical (being) and the metaempirical (the relations of being) and the ways it can bring these together. But the power to bring these together, to con-​sist them, is an ‘aspect’ which is always left out. Andrew Kelley writes: “[A]‌ccording to Jankélévitch, there is still one more “aspect” that has been left out and this is “act” or “action” (154, 155, 179, 184). The act or action is what posits or creates both the empirical

260 Chapter 6 Beyond being there is logic(al) as silence; beyond logos … absolute silence, inexistence. 5

Logos through the Other

Earlier we saw how Heraclitus followed the feminine logos of Sybil. We also saw how the spiraling of the opposites does not lead into a synthesis nor is conditioned by a transcendental unity. We mentioned earlier that ‘ἁρμονία’270 occurs for Heraclitus out of the opposites. But is ‘ἁρμονία’ harmony as we have the habit of characterizing it today? Before Plato and Aristotle, the term signified ‘joining’ or ‘fastening.’ The positive valuation has not yet been included into this ἁρμονία.’ A good joining, something which fastens well, comes only through opposites not through similars –​and this cannot be a puzzle. In what sense is a joining taking place when it comes to the bow and the lyre? We shall undertake another reading of Cratylus yet this time we shall follow the text from the beginning, head on. The text starts with the following: “Βούλει oὖv καί Σωκράτει τῷδε άνακοινωσώμεθα τον λόγον.” This is the first line of the ancient Greek text of Cratylus as it has been passed down to us. The very first arche of the text. The very beginning of a bound text. Hence, we do not need any reference. Based on such a closed text the first line is auto-​referential; it is the arch(e), the royal entrance to Socrates’ intercourse with Hermogenes and Cratylus after passing time with Euthyphro. However, in this auto-​referential sentence, logos is usually being translated (either in modern Greek or English) as discourse or debate, or the subject of debate or discussion, or conversation. And there is one sense in which it does make sense to have such a translation. After all, “Cratylus and Hermogenes have already been engaged in heated debate,”271 and in the presence of Socrates’ coming toward them from the royal stoa,272 they decide to stop. We could say that the course of their exchange was exhausted (fallowed) and stopped, and another and the metaempirical, and he names this the “metalogical.” As such, it neither exists, nor subsists, nor has the character of “relating” or “relationing,” which is the nature of intellection” (Kelley 2013, 32). Logos is pure act, logos con-​sists, ‘hapax.’ This ἅπαξ, does not relate to anything, it creates and posits says Kelley (34) –​whether or not one takes ‘it,’ which is another way of saying, whether one questions in this or that way, transcendentally, immanently or transcendently, logos tells. 270 Heraclitus, dk 8; 51. 271 Sedley, Cratylus, 3. 272 We should not forget that one of the senses of ‘stoa’ is (underground) passage, pathway, follow, and the like.

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questioning of the same logos came to be; exchange (f)allowed an other exchange. Hermogenes asks Cratylus if he wanted to communicate their logos to Socrates who did not experience it; ‘it’ was between them two, the two (Hermogenes and Cratylus); a course dis-​sed in its happening, its taking place and now ‘it’ is something which can be communicated. If one admits that Hermogenes and Cratylus were dialogue-​ing, then what would be communicated as logos to Socrates? If the communication refers to the reason of their debate, then this reason would have come after their coming together. The debate happens somewhere during their inter-​course. The debate happens after dialogue-​ing. This logos, then, is the announcement of the logos of a spoken dialogue having just taken place and time and reached an end. How was this announcement to take place? Obviously, a complete re-​presentation of the prior course of exchange was impossible –​or it would be a drama, an enactment.273 The announcement was to be made by representing the gist, the essence of the discussion, what the discourse was about, in one sense its (collective) intentionality, its noema, its meaning. In this way, the recourse to the discourse will be by removing the accidental, non-​necessary parts of the discussion and presenting its essence274 through another discourse. Interpreting logos this way is what Derrida would call Western Metaphysics, of(f) course. But even in this course of understanding we can still trace a different path by following exactly what the text demands and going to and fro275 as demanded by the text.276 There is another pretext for Cratylus. Hermogenes whines about not understanding what Cratylus means when he says that he is not named ‘Hermogenes’ correctly. The whole text becomes an attempt to give a final solution to the problem of the correctness of names by providing an answer to the frustration of Hermogenes: «Οὔκουν σοί γε», ἦ δ΄ ὃς, «ὃὀνομα Ἐρμογένης; οὐδε ἅν πάντες καλῶσιν ἄνθρωποι». Καί ἐμοῦ ερωτῶντος καί προθυμουμένου εἰδέναι ὃτι ποτέ λέγει, οὔτε άποσαφεῖ οὐδέν εἰρωνεύεται τε πρός με, προσποιούμενός τι αὐτός εν έαυτῷ διανοεῖσθαι ώς εἰδώς περί αὐτοῦ, ὃ εἰ βούλοιτο σαφῶς εἰπεῖν, ποιήσειεν ἄν καί ἐμέ όμολογείν καί λέγειν ἅπερ αὐτός λέγει. Εἰ οὖν πῃ ἔχεις συμβαλεῖν τήν Κρατύλου μαντείαν, ἡδέως αν ἀκούσαιμί. μᾶλλον δέ αὐτῷ σοι ὃπῃ δοκει [ἔχειν] περί ὀνομάτων ὀρθότητος ἔτι ἄν ἣδιον πυθοίμην, εἴ σοι βουλομένῳ {ἐστίν}.277 2 73 Interestingly, here we have an announcement rather than a narration (διήγησις). 274 Plato, Cratylus, 386e. 275 Ibid., 428e. 276 Ibid., 428. 277 Ibid., 383–4.

262 Chapter 6 Your name isn’t ‘Hermogenes,’ not even if everyone calls you by it.” Eagerly, I  ask him to tell me what he means. He responds sarcastically and makes nothing clear. He pretends to possess some private knowledge which would force me to agree with him and say the very things about names that he says himself, were he to express it in plain terms. So, if you can somehow interpret Cratylus’ oracular utterances, I’d gladly listen. Though I’d really rather find out what you yourself have to say about the correctness of names, if that’s all right with you.278 Even with such a translation, it becomes clear from the very beginning that the logos has never been simply about an exchange, but about understanding and about understanding the logos of Heraclitus. A logos which makes nothing clear, which is dark, and which does not punctuate what he means. Expressed in oracular utterances, it just signals. A logos whose force is in the end kept through (the name) Cratylus, since the Socratic influence was resisted:  “But I assure you, Socrates, that I have already investigated them and have taken a lot of trouble over the matter, and things seem to me to be very much more as Heraclitus says they are.”279 Cratylus is naturally named; he remains a follower of Heraclitus just as his name prescribes –​he holds on to the matter of Heraclitean philosophy till the end. And Hermogenes? Poor Hermogenes is not only poor in not understanding Cratylus, as he laments in the opening of the dialogue, but, also poor in making money. He is not Hermogenes as his name suggests  –​Hermogenes either as belonging to the genus (clan) of Hermes or as the son of riches, or as a good rhetor: Well, the name ‘Hermes’ seems to have something to do with speech: he is an interpreter (herme¯neus), a messenger, a thief and a deceiver in words, a wheeler-​dealer  –​and all these activities involve the power of speech. Now, as we mentioned before, ‘eirein’ means ‘to use words’, and the other part of the name says –​as Homer often does –​‘eme¯sato’ (‘he contrived’), which means ‘to devise’. And it was out of these two words that the rule-​setter established the name of the god who devised speech (legein) and words, since ‘eirein’ means the same as ‘legein’ (‘to speak’).280

2 78 Plato, Complete, 383–​4; 102. 279 Ibid., 440d; 156. 280 Ibid., 407e; 126.

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But as messenger of the Gods, the in-​between the mortals and the Gods, he attempts to understand. This attempt to understand by following the divine words without questioning them and translating them to the mortal idiom, has been adverbially another characteristic of Hermes. And so is our Hermogenes. His whole attempt is an attempt to understand, he has the eros, the question, to learn about what Socrates thinks and learn from him –​transmitting from the philosopher, the holder of truth, the in-​between the divine and the mortal, to the rest of the mortals.281 Despite the conventionalism that might be suggested by his name, he seems to be living it, as being prescribed and pre-​ scribed by it. And so does Socrates. Socrates is the solution, the path to truth and salvation just like his name suggests. When Socrates approaches our two heroes, he does not only come toward them but to ward them off the evil of non-​decision. ‘Socrates’ could be read as saving the state or holding what is right/​good/​true. The debate between Hermogenes and Cratylus is undecided –​there are antithetical forces at play –​until Socrates comes along. Socrates is coming to ward these forces off, to bring good by resolving the “heated debate.” Coming from the royal stoa, the ultimate judge, after being enlightened by Euthyphro, the rational man –​ the man with upright, direct phronesis –​Socrates is ready to save the day. Plato’s etymological intoxication, as Gadamer said, is not exhausted only in the words analyzed by Socrates in the text but can be found everywhere. In this intoxicated path, can we resist asking if the text can be seen as a reactive force à la Nietzsche and/​or a reaction formation à la Freud,282 both of which suggest Plato’s attempt to lime or better to sublime his own being (as) named? Whether or not the name of Plato was283 a nickname is of no relevance here. The fact that ‘Plato’ could be traced to mean, in one way or another, fat –​as in wide substance or being extended beyond an ideal average, therefore also phat(ic) –​then the question whether the name is correctly imitating, re-​presenting the essence of the man naturally comes to haunt the text as a spectre.284 In the same way that it could be possible to take Derrida as hiding

281 In Phaedro and Theaetetus the in-​between is always between the mortal and the divine (truth). 282 A reactive force as the text whose subject stretches as wide as the writer’s name (Plato/​ wide) or a reactive formation as a sublimation of the resentment of being given a name which is not the subject’s proper. (Aristocles/​Plato). 283 There is evidence that the original name given to Plato was ‘Aristocles’ and that ‘Plato’ was a nickname. A good case has been made for ‘Plato’ being Plato’s original name –​see James A. Notopoulos, “The Name of Plato,” Classical Philology, 34, 2 (1939): 135–​145. 284 Two points:

264 Chapter 6 naturally behind the hymen of his name,285 behind the curtains,286 might it not be that Plato is expressing his coming to be what the name to which he re-​ sponds pre-​scribes? Might his name be true: (a) as right because he answers to it,287 he is interpellated by this name, and/​or (b) because it reflects/​imitates his essence correctly/​adequately. That he has come to be keeping the promise of his name: to be wide in all senses. After all, the text is per c: Per the Correctness of Names. Even if … Plato wants to demonstrate that no truth (aletheia ton onton) can be attained in language –​in language’s claim to correctness (orthotes ton onomaton) –​and that without words (aneu ton onomaton) being must be known purely from itself (auta ex heauton).288 If Plato is to be known purely from himself, being (Plato) qua being (Plato) and everything relating to this being based on the principles of this being, by Plato himself, then the name ‘being wide’ must necessarily be inspected, it becomes an issue –​wide in the aesthetical body, wide in intellectual acumen or wide in some other sense(s) entirely. The text starts with the frustration of Hermogenes of not understanding and reacting to Cratylus. Maybe this frustration is Plato’s

First, when Nietzsche goes after Plato in The Twilight of the Idols he does so in all sorts of ways even those suggested by the meaning of his name:  Wide in expression:  “It seems to me that Plato mixes up all the forms of style which makes him a first-​rate decadent of style” and wide in physiognomy and morality “there is nothing we envy less than the moral cow and the fat happiness of good conscience” (Nietzsche, Anti-​ Christ, 225; 173). The name is linked to personality. Second, this link, this to-​and-​fro relationship between the name and the personality, this shadow cast between them, is something that carries over from the deep ends of time as Ernst Cassirer shows. Even today, the name as a legal, medical, forensic, and so on, archive, is what constitutes the personality, what characterizes the person. “Word [name] is of crucial importance in the development of human mentality” (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (Ontario: Harper and Brother, 1946), 62; hereafter, Language). The name is what holds the matter together, simply put: Cratylus. 285 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation trans. Avita Ronell and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985); hereafter, Ear. 286 In Memoirs of the Blind, one of Derrida’s first names comes to haunt him in his dreams: “If I have recently discovered this double dolor or mourning of Eli (to be distinguished, if only by a bit, from Elijah, or Eliah, which turns out to be one of my first names), I must have read and then forgotten …” (Derrida, Memoirs, 23). 287 Gadamer, Truth, 406. 288 Ibid., 407.

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frustration not being able to come to terms with his name –​in all senses, an existential struggle. Plato is struggling with the essence of (his) existence through (his) naming. He is trying to find ways to explore (his) essence not head on and without foreign barbaric idioms, but by under-​standing it, putting it under familiar principles (the principle of Being) and through a dialogue –​a dialogue with himself as proposed by Sedley. But this creates its own frustration. We will see shortly, after the detour of the proper names, that Plato is suggesting that truth comes after a name has been given and used to imitate the essence of a thing. The correctness of the proper names that Plato-​represented-​by-​Socrates/​Socrates-​ represented-​by-​Plato examine first are all of heroes-​past, dead people. Their names are examined after their death. Plato will never be able to know the correctness of his name as long as he lives. For Socrates he knows –​he held the true, the correct. This knowledge is always for Others. And this anxiety writes itself in the text. Even if we take after his definition that logos is made up of names, thus discourse, the logos of the proper names of the living is in-​between life and death, its truth cannot be judged until their death. Just like Aeschylus advises not to judge someone happy until you see both their death and their way of dying, one’s proper name cannot properly be judged as correct until their death.289 But even if we conjecture that proper names of dead heroes represent them adequately after their death, still, it could have been a contingent matter. Whoever baptized them (excepting the case of Gods) could have given them names either by the custom of assigning the name of the progeny, or by a wish290 to become what the name sug/​gests –​a gest to be saturated by the phenomena the name calls for or seeks after. The name could be a commandment, a magical incantation, a spell or a curse. To know one’s name, to spell (out) one’s name is to cast a spell. In either case, proper naming becomes a baptism, a rigid designation, following one in all possible worlds, like a curse, a spell. Baptism, in the ancient voice, means to disable by flooding, or by fluid elements. The baptized is always followed, always characterized by a name no

289 The name, as Derrida has shown in many of his works, opens up the field of predication based on one’s interactions with the Other. Death signals the cessation of such activities. As such, the only predication which can be added to the proper name for the dead person is that x is dead, which is true in all senses –​true of the person (being qua being) and true for us as the opposite of what the person was before, alive. One could even say that existential philosophy is metaphysics proper –​understanding (of) death. 290 Plato, Cratylus, 397b.

266 Chapter 6 matter which world. The paths of name and essence merge. They have one flow –​“Name and personality merge.”291 The magic of the proper name cuts/​decides being both ways and cannot unshackle Plato from Heraclitus logos. If the baptism had been unintentional and the name ends up representing adequately the person after their death, then the logos of Heraclitus as destiny, the logos which makes the essence of beings, would turn out to be true –​as name, onoma. If not, if the baptism happened under the principle of knowing the essence of things ahead of time, then it cannot be from a mortal who is bound by death –​as Cratylus suggests. It has to be someone who can have epistemic access before and after the life-​death course of the person. Once again, the logos of Heraclitus comes true: only logos as tradition overcomes death. Knowledge as episteme is following the logos of the one (human tradition or divine). Therefore, the existential question about the proper names of the living or the dead cannot be explored; it has to be deferred. In my view, we must leave such names aside. We are most likely to find correctly given names among those concerned with the things that by nature always are, since it is proper for their names to be given with the greatest care, and some may even be the work of a more than human power.292 And these things that by nature always are, are the traditional material or ideal objects or things, eide/​kinds. The very first sentence of the text did not allow us to follow the traditional interpretations of the text. Now, we can make a U-​turn (anastrophe), like a poetic lyre, and go back to follow the scholastic way head on. In this way, Plato begins with a classification: the name, being made by phonetic units, is part of the logos as language (discourse) which in turn is part of praxis of relating to things. The relations come to be based on the essence of the relata. Just as cutting iron with one’s hand will never happen because the essences of these things do not allow it, analogously, so it is/​(must be) the case with names:293 there must be a proper name that allows for the proper distinction of things according to their essences. Besides the spurious analogy that grounds the whole discussion (between two things and logos versus logos and thing), it is all about truth as correctness; and, correctness has to be a good representation, 2 91 Cassirer, Language, xx. 292 Plato, Complete, 397b; 115. 293 Plato, Cratylus, 387.

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and, a good representation being conditioned on that difference which (f) allows the thing as sensible distinct presentation (presence) has to be the name as intelligible distinct re-​presentation (presence in the mind resembling adequately the original presence, eidos). In this schema, logos is reduced as the medium that allows the movement between the two worlds. The analogy of ‘cutting’ is not accidental. Cutting is all about making boundaries, differentiating one thing from another –​categorizing is literally cut-​ego-​rising –​the speaker cuts Being and makes words/​things rise. The cutting is associated with identity and unity. If names are to be naturally or conventionally given to things, these ‘things’ must be numerically distinct either naturally or conventionally –​or be understood as distinct, eidos. Naming is all about boundaries, horizons; the name de-​fines Being into being. It is all about what makes the sensible ‘the’ be what it is –​“So just as a shuttle is a tool for dividing warp and woof, a name is a tool for giving instruction, that is to say, for dividing being.”294 It is all about cutting and manipulability, calculus. So how do names come about? The first candidate is the nomothetes; name-​ giver as lawgiver or legislator. Those who set up the language must have the expertise to do so with respect to knowing the things in the world based on their essence –​in-​themselves –​being with respect to their own essence –​“καθ’ αὐτά προς τήν αὐτών ούσίαν.”295 Naming then as representing is, of course, imitating adequately the essence of things.296 The most interesting discussion now springs about what comes first: Does the nomothetes need to have prior knowledge of the thing prior to naming, or does naming itself represents at the same time this knowledge of the name giver with respect to the thing they name? This is an issue of the economy of the after.

294 Plato, Complete, 388b; 107. This translation has omitted the word “fabric/​textile” (e-​pha-​ sma) (ὑφάσματος). The text goes: “ὅνομα ἄρα διδασκαλικόν τί ἐστιν ὂργανον καί διακpιτικόν τῆς οὐσίας ὣσπερ κερκίς ὑφάσματος.” On the one hand, this word, ‘textile,’ is, as Derrida has shown, complicitous with the eidos and the phenomenon and what makes the phenomenalizing the phenomenon. One of Derrida’s critiques of phenomenology as the science of the ultimate principle demonstrating and defining the structures of the constitution of the object or the thing is this complicity with platonic presence; visual, sensible presence versus intelligible ideal presence. On the other hand, it eliminates the analogy of being (like) a text-​ile. 295 Plato, Cratylus, 386e. “Ούκ άρα παντός ἀνδρός, ὣ Έρμόγενες, ὅνομα θέσθαι [ἐστίν] αλλά τίνος ὁνοματονργοῦ· οὓτος δ’ ἐστίν, ώς ἓοικεν, ό νομοθέτης, ὅς δή τῶν δημιουργῶν σπανιότατος εν άνθρώποις γίγνεται” (Ibis., 389α) –​which we can translate as “Hence, Hermogenes, from all men, not all can give a name but some name-​maker, creator of names. And from these creators the rarest defined by men is the legislator.” 296 Plato, Cratylus, 423c.

268 Chapter 6 In order for language to represent, it must take after, imitate adequately the essence of things. In all senses, language is set up after that which is to re-​ present. But this ‘after’ as resemblance can only take place after the time something has reached its end, that is, it has already come to its ‘being;’ as being an entity297 –​a distinct being; even if that distinctness is horizonal as an object in the mind. It is this spatio-​temporal discrepancy which allows the name to be subjected to the modalities of truth and false –​which means to verify the quality of the resemblance, or for the legislator to know which name is best, proper. The judgment for something being true or false with respect to a name requires a constant to-​and-​fro which must be stopped at some time and place for the judgement to take place and time; and this cessation requires stasis. The truth or falsity comes after the event of stopping, of stasis. We can borrow Alain Badiou’s apt expression that “truth is always-​post eventual”298 here in the case of Cratylus. Truth comes after a rupture or syncope of discoursing. When Cratylus, having being silently present in the margin, first engages in dialogue with Socrates, the previous discussion of Socrates with Hermogenes is interrupted. The truth of what was said in the discussion cannot be checked until the discussion is stopped. In order to check the truth of what had just been said, Socrates says, they should reverse and re-​verse by going back to those things that they had been discussing thus far. They should follow, he says, the advice of the poet, that is, to look back and forth at the same time299 –​“backwards and forwards simultaneously,” though this time the truth will be checked with the logos of the margin, the silent Other presence. Truth comes only with an Other. Unless the names are given by a divine being, and thus they would be necessarily correct since both being and its name are coming from the same creator, naming can always be held in check by the philosopher dialectician who necessarily comes after the naming process. ‘After’ is here translated as following, that is, re-​tracing the legislator’s steps in/​of the naming process. Let us exemplify the retracing of the legislator’s naming process. Let us take ‘Hercules entered the Parthenon.’ This would be true iff (one –​even one self-​ same –​saw) Hercules climbing up the acropolis and getting inside the temple Parthenon. But, when we, who come after the legislator, use the names he has set, (‘Hercules’, ‘entered’, ‘the’, ‘Parthenon’) to represent some being in the world, truth or falsity is not immediately dependent on our re-​presenting 2 97 Ibid., 438. 298 Alain Badiou, “On a Finally Objectless Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. Edouardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-​Luc Nancy, (NY: Routledge, 1991, 26). 299 Plato, Cratylus, 428e.

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the things, but, first and foremost, dependent on our correctly using these names. Truth as platonic correspondence to things comes, as Nietzsche spotted, through intermediaries. There is never one correspondence at play in correspondence theories of truth. There is correspondence about whether each word has been used correctly by the legislator in order to refer to the thing (x); but, for us, there is also correspondence about whether we properly follow the principles of usage (y). In this way, when we use words which are supposed to re-​present things, truth is following the path of the legislator who follows the path which reveals the nature of things –​if we hold on to the principle, the logos (“κατά γάρ τόν αύτόν λόγον”)300 that a nomothetes has given the names, and properly so. Whatever the case, there can be no (nomo)logical entailment from x to y or y to x because we could represent as the nomothetes would by chance or represent correctly by chance by not following the nomothetes. But now an aporia comes forth. As Cratylus maintains, flowing with this principle, this logos, keeping this variable fixed, ‘that the legislator with his names has re-​presented things adequately with respect to their essence,’ it follows that, to know things, is exhausted in following the associations of the names made by the legislator –​they will naturally reflect the things that there are (and what they are) essentially.301 In this case truth is the logos of the one, in this case the logos of the nomothetes, the one who first defined –​as Heraclitus maintained.302 It is the economy of the logos of the one, the archon, the lord. Naming comes after him. If, however, we doubt that the legislator did this properly, then we cannot trust the names they have assigned to things. We do not know the first principle (the logos) on which they based the revelation of the essence of things. And the latter, if not correct, will affect all the rest of the naming.303 They are not divine but human; they are like painters304 and lyre producers.305 The names express their own thoughts306 and ironically they have been nominated, named, ordained, prescribed by us as being the rarest in kind in their ability to name! (“It follows that it isn’t every man who can give names, Hermogenes, but only a namemaker, and he, it seems, is a rule-​setter –​the kind of craftsman 3 00 Ibid., 393d. 301 Ibid., 435. The logos which is held onto vehemently from Plato is that “copy and the original constitute the metaphysical model for everything with the noetic sphere” (Gadamer, Truth, 409). Visual versus intelligible resemblance, not analogical resemblance. 302 Heraclitus, dk 33. 303 Plato, Cratylus, 436d. 304 Ibid., 429. 305 Ibid., 390. 306 Ibid., 418a.

270 Chapter 6 most rarely found[ed]307 among human beings”). In either case, the product of the nomothetes need not necessarily be judged as good by themselves but by those for whom it is aimed. Just as a non-​representing person will judge the adequacy of the re-​presented in the representation,308 just as the lyre player will judge the good functionality of the lyre, so the dialectician, who questions and responds309 will judge the adequacy of the name-​giving process. But in any case, there is a sense in which the nomothetes is both bow and lyre. He functions analogically with these instruments. The demon of analogy comes back to haunt the discussion and put it in an endless recurrence of the same:  a vicious regress. A  dream without a wake, without waking up as we saw earlier. An incessant cycle manifested in the process of holding the nomothetes in check. If we are to check the validity of the name giving process we either need to re-​trace the steps of the nomothetes from the beginning or we need to characterize things anew310 from the beginning, based on how we perceive things, and then compare. And now another aporia for both cases: Where should we begin? From where does the imitator start the imitation which is a way of cutting the sensible, of dividing it, making it distinct?311 “But how are we to divide off the ones with which the imitator begins his imitation?”312 We start from sensibility, the aesthesis. But now, how can we perceive the essence of the distinctness of things without their names (or other names) since the thing cannot be learnt without being distinct, a distinctness which is supposed to be represented in the unity of the word or the unity of each of its parts and their inter-​relations/​inter-​animations  –​ whether through natural or conventional resemblance?313 Plato’s answer: with 307 Plato, Complete, 389a; 107. The original ancient text plays on the equivocation on the difference between finding and founding in the past tense. In most translations, this play is lost. Nevertheless, if one questions about the use of the passive ‘found’ they will most likely end up in our discussion of intentionality with Husserl –​the oscillation between found and founded, founded and found. 308 The mannequin of the painter will judge whether the imitation of them is good, the Other, the represented, not the painter in a narcissistic jouissance. 309 Plato, Cratylus, 390. 310 Ibid., 436. 311 One cannot avoid making the connection here with ¶2 in early Heidegger when he asks, “From which entities is the disclosure of Being to take its departure?” (Heidegger, bt, 26). At the same time the text reveals the later Wittgenstein aporia: “One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name. But what does one have to know?” (Wittgenstein, Investigations, 15). 312 Plato, Complete, 424a; 140. 313 Plato, Cratylus, 438. Once again, epistemology goes to-​and-​fro with, passes into, ontology. Either by checking whether the nomothetes correctly names things according to their essence or by knowing how to correctly re-​name things according to their essence brings

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the principle (logos) of the body. Indexing and pointing with our hands and body just like the speechless: “If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb314 people do at present? Once again, the dumb may lack reason and speech but not logos insofar as they attempt to signal to us what could go under the principle of their hands or their body, their under-​taking, their essay, their (non Aristotelian) logical argument. It must be clear by now what is happening in the Cratylus. Logos is being debased as language as a mere medium of re-​presenting thought which becomes independent of it and subjected to it. The ancient multiplicity of logos is resisted. An attempt is being made to make understanding/​thinking –​all the variations of the noetic –​distinct from language and speech; a Heideggerian acquaintance, participation, methexis with Being through beings and without the is.315 As with the tradition of western metaphysics, so for father Plato, this understanding starts only through the aesthesis, sensibility. Hence the new aporia: how will the sensible affection, this acquaintance be lifted up and translated into the domain of language? Even if there is “prior direct acquaintance”316 with things for Plato, there is still the issue of the affection coming to be transformed, expressed, re-​presented, translated linguistically. The logos of Heraclitus once again, the con-​sisting of sensibility to the declarative voice us back to the tacit knowledge that one has to have in order to ask or investigate naming-​ theorizing. Again with later Wittgenstein “We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name. And we can imagine the person who is asked replying: “Settle the name yourself” –​and now the one who asked would have to manage everything for himself” (Wittgenstein, Investigations, 15). 314 We have already mentioned earlier that the word in the ancient text is ένεοί which is either without voice or inexperienced, without reason, but not without logos as it seems since they can point to and index –​they are intentional and intentionally extensional. Merleau-​ Ponty comments it thus: “Plato still allowed the empiricist the power of pointing a finger at things, but the truth is that even this silent gesture is impossible if what is pointed out is not already torn from instantaneous existence and monadic existence, and treated as representative of its previous appearances in me, and of its simultaneous appearances in others, in other words, subsumed under some category and promoted to the status of a concept” (Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 139). This silent gesture motivated by some kind of conception, some kind of reasoning is speechless logos or as Merleau-​Ponty likes to refer to it as the speech of silence. 315 Heidegger’s attempt is to illuminate this pre-​noeticolinguistic acquaintance with Being. Presence is not a participation with some ideal forms but, still, an attunement with the world; this presence in the world requires some kind of methexis to be understood –​if it is not a concept, or a category, or any kind of affectivity. 316 Anagnostopoulos, Significance, 17.

272 Chapter 6 comes to haunt the process of naming. Naming, λέγειν, that is, giving a word, is logos like is a promise, a command, an imperative –​a power to in-​stitute. In our reading, Plato’s struggle with his new method of understanding, Being and dialectics, does not give any definite answer. Some philosophers argue for this or that intention of Plato by being inter-​textual, by interanimating the platonic texts to express a thought about what he must have been ultimately doing in the text (what his wide genius intended). If elements, phonemes, morphemes, words and discourse can never be found if they constitute pure re-​presentation or pure convention, then, the only alternative is to make any letter, any sound, any word, a sign: Thus, in all discussion of language ever since, the concept of the image (eikon) has been replaced by that of the sign (semeion or semainon). This is not just a terminological change; it expresses an epoch-​making decision about thought concerning language. That the true being of things is to be investigated “without names” [=the Aristotelian being of beings] means that there is no access to truth in the proper being of words as such.317 Once again, whether recognizing the contours of (material or ideal) beings, their unity as distinct existents, or taking a particular direction for a course of interpretation, there is logos always already before and after. And this has always been in virtue of an Other. Earlier we looked at the architectonics of the text with respect to the opposites and found that it is the Other locutor who is not yet an inter-​locutor who must come into the fore to help with the truth. It is all about the arche-​tectonics where representation passes into its other, the enactment. If we were to enact the dialogue, the silent aid of the Other comes to be the virtue with whom re-​tracing the steps of the naming process can come to be possible. Otherwise, like “most of our wise men nowadays get so dizzy going around and around in their search for the nature of the things that are, that the things themselves appear to them to be turning around and moving every which way.”318 An ecomony of the same, like a pirouette or Pierrot the mime, or like a dream: fallen into a kind of vortex and are whirled around in it, dragging us with them. Consider, Cratylus, a question that I for my part often dream

3 17 Gadamer, Truth, 145. 318 Plato, Complete, 411; 129.

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about: Are we or aren’t we to say that there is a beautiful itself, and a good itself, and the same for each one of the things that are?319 Without another to pull us out of this flux, the logos of the other to characterize a wake, to awake us, there is no knowledge. The arrow does not hit its mark. But this Other in Socrates and Plato are limited to an Other of the Same; in this case the sexual same. The dialogue of knowledge is taking placed with logoi of the same sex; a hom(m)osexual dialogue. It is now time to go back and engage with the harmony of the bow and the lyre in Heraclitus –​a question which we have kept in reserve. 6

C-​secting the Feminine Body

In the paradigm of Being all interpretations of the bow and the lyre take them as opposites by looking at their being and the way they are being used, their modus operandi per se. The relations of these instruments are exhausted in their being taken as solid sticks with strings attached. Granger makes a slight deviation and takes the bow as analogical to war and the lyre to “music and poetic recitation.”320 Instead of looking at the conditions of each organ, he looks at their opposing unity. Yet, this look is still motivated by Aristotelian functionalism. Snyder’s approach is an exception.321 She takes a visual instead of a functional approach. Her reflection on the bow and the lyre engages with their form. While she focuses on the “opposite ends of each object” her interpretation is still Platonic-​Kantian whereby the ends of each instrument could be conceptually extended to form a circle, a unity; consummation, and, thus, revealing how Heraclitus “is looking beyond the obvious to see a connection that, while not immediately apparent, is still basically visual in nature.”322 The bow and the lyre are indeed opposite instruments but they form another harmony. We have seen how Socrates analogizes the bow with the beginning of knowledge.323 In the Cratylus, however, the nomothetes is the one that can lead us to knowledge. He produces the names which are the key instruments of knowledge. Yet, what the nomothetes produces, like a lyre producer as we saw 3 19 Ibid., 439c; 154. 320 Granger, Death, 268. 321 Jane McIntosh Snyder, “The Harmonia of Bow and Lyre in Heraclitus,” Phronesis, 29, 1 (1984): 91–​95; hereafter, Harmonia. 322 Ibid., 93. 323 Plato, Cratylus, 420. Cf our skepsis on intentionality in introducing altruism.

274 Chapter 6 earlier, will not be judged by himself but by the lyre player. Knowledge requires an intersection between targeting and saying. The bow and the lyre intersect in producing knowledge. And this intersection comes from an analogy, a bout in the way they are constituted. Both instruments are joined in the bout of the c-​section that they form. This can be one way that bow and lyre are brought together in Heraclitus. For both instruments to function, a hollow is required. And this hollow is not a closed circle but a c-​section. The maker has to create a rupture, a crescent. The makers of the instruments cannot tell the quality of their functionality as we saw with Plato. The hand that makes them requires the hand that will play them in order to judge whether they are doing what they are meant for. A dialogue between maker and player is required in order for the instruments to reach their end. With respect to knowledge, the nomothetes, targeting being like an arrow from a bow ends being both player and maker. A dialogue between these two instruments does not take place in the text. Socrates never engages with the lyre producer. The analogies of bow and lyre which join together in Heraclitus are jumbled up in the Cratylus. The logos that brings them together is lost or stolen just like Hermes stole the cattle from Apollo before producing the lyre. In the Cratylus, Hermogenes does not produce nor play a lyre as his progenitor Hermes had. He just follows the already uttered words of Socrates: s ocrates:

Look at it this way. If you were asked who gives names more correctly, those who are wiser or those who are more foolish, what would you answer? h ermogenes: That it is clearly those who are wiser. s ocrates: And which class do you think is wiser on the whole, a city’s women or its men? h ermogenes: Its men. s ocrates: Now you know, don’t you, that Homer tells us that Hector’s son was called ‘Astyanax’ by the men of Troy? But if the men called him ‘Astyanax’, isn’t it clear that ‘Skamandrios’ must be what the women called him? h ermogenes: Probably so. s ocrates: And didn’t Homer also think that the Trojans were wiser than their women? h ermogenes: I suppose he did. s ocrates: So mustn’t he have thought that ‘Astyanax’ was a more correct name for the boy than ‘Skamandrios’? h ermogenes: Evidently.

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s ocrates: Well, let’s investigate why it is more correct. Doesn’t Homer himself suggest a very good explanation when he says …324 The masculine name ‘Astyanax’ is a better production of ‘Skamandrios.’ The son of Hector should be given the name of ‘the lord of the city’ and not the ‘name of a river’ –​Skamandros was the river by the city of Troy. There are two names and Hector called his son in both ways as we learn from Homer. However, one must be the correct name. Truth is only one in the Socratic drama. The fact that there are two names must have come from two different types of nomothetes. Just as the name ‘νομοθέτης’ suggests, the producer of names is a man not a woman. Hence, the bad name must have come from the feminine production; a production which announces life, the son of Hector. Yet, a river is not a good production. Nowhere in the text is there an attempt to understand the logos of Skamandrios in the same way that Heraclitus felt the logos of Sybil whose logos was a-​bout. Even, nowhere in the text is there an attempt to understand the logos of the feminine in the way that we could have traced the steps of the nomothetes. Without even playing with the name that the feminine logos has produced, he rejects it. A primordial rejection of the Other is contrary when the Other is required for knowledge, but not for Socrates/​Plato when the rejection is of the feminine logos. In this text, we can decipher “an even more archaic matricide,” one “deeper that the murder of the father, at the origin of our culture.”325 Plato’s logos, as a recorder, archives the c-​secting of the feminine logos which we have never allowed to come about. We have bouted it down to words from a logos of a masculine exchange:  Homer-​Socrates-​Hermogenes-​Plato. And this exchange relates to how a child should come about.326 Where Socrates appeals to Homer for the match(ing) correctness of names, Heraclitus would flush out Homer327 from this match. Another match, another joining, an other fastening is required for a correctness of names. The 3 24 Plato, Complete, 392–​393; 110–​111. 325 Luce Irigaray, To Speak Is Never Neutral, Gail Schwab (New York: cup, 2002), 257; hereafter, Speak. This matricide in the Cratylus is clear and direct, one could say intentional or with intentionality; per se. In the Republic, the killing takes place in a roundabout way. Either way, the feminine logos comes to be rejected. 326 To the extent that we can follow the feminists that episteme is masculine, and we have the courage to follow such a path without reserve, then this c-​section which refers to the name of a child as the production of the feminine, we can understand how the modern c-​section carries with it such an appropriation of the feminine body –​see Braidotti’s profound analysis in Nomadic Subjects. 327 Heraclitus, dk 42.

276 Chapter 6 feminine and the masculine have to be joined in another Harmony where the feminine is not suppressed. Skamandros was the river of Troy which could turn red as mythology has it. Once again, we have the flow, the river, and the SocraticoPlatonic logos-​decision to reject whatever is not able to be subjected to Being. With Heraclitus’ logos, however, the river is followed, a logos is given to be heard, an attempt to be understood is undertaken. 7

Logos as Existence: Death and the Promise

What has been referred to as logocentric Western metaphysics is a decisive moment of following the Plato-​Aristotelian translation/​characterization of logos and putting it under the principle of Being. That is the struggle written in Cratylus. A struggle of principles, an existential struggle. A constant to and fro between the ontic and the ontological. A metaphysical movement with episteme as grounded on a radical idealism/​materialism lived in semblance: the substantial, the ontic, in other words beings, haptic or abstract with an attempt to go to a beyond as a teleological ens realissimum, Being or God. Existence as logos or logos as existence has been put under the principle of Being (a reactive logos) ever since the Cratylus.328 No special deconstruction is required for the meaning of this proposition. The textual evidence is on 423e when Socrates talks about “ἐστίν οὐσία τις ἑκατέρω αὐτῶν καί τοῖς ἄλλοις πᾶσιν ὅσα ἠξίωται ταύτης τῆς προσρήσεως τοῦ εἶναι.” The usual translation for this sections is “a being or essence, just like every other thing that we say “is.” ”329 Yet, before ‘is,’ we say: and we say based on what we decide to (not) say: “ὅσα ἠξίωται ταύτης τῆς προσρήσεως τοῦ εἶναι” is a conditional. This conditional can have two interpretations. Either how many things can be put under the principle of being or if one decides to designate, accost, name (προσρήσεως) things based on the principle of Being. In both cases there 328 Evidently, we cannot follow Derrida without reserve in what he refers to as logocentrism. The decision to follow and to idolize Plato and Aristotle, as Nietzsche made clear, does not fallow nor exhaust logos. The trot-​bébé of western logic and metaphysics as calculation of binaries cannot be expanded to the Heraclitean way of thinking/​logos  –​nor to what we metonymize as Pre-Socratic. Derrida never questioned logos beyond metaphysics. Even François Laruelle who talks about the non-​philosophy of philosophy as the invisible path of a decision, the so-​called secret, still follows logos and logic on a Plato-​ Aristotelian path (François Laruelle, “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication,” Parrhesia, 9 (2010): 18–​22). Logos (d)i(e)s still as a being; yet this dying comes to its being itself; (d)i(e)s in a sui-​cide. 329 Plato, Complete, 423e; 140.

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is a decision: whether or not one decides to put all things under the principle of Being. If. … Being does not come naturally or, with (later) Heidegger, there is no natural necessity of analogizing everything with Being. There is decided historical necessity of not questioning and following without stopping this unquestioned course of life interpretation, this unstopped (noetic) praxis. Accepting to equate understating with/​through all the tropes of Being is still a decision, a putting something under a principle without resisting it –​still logos, will to power though an a-​versing-​re-​version of it, a silent promise. And what is re-​versed into being is an aversion of death. The existential logos of Heraclitus is re-​versed into being. In an attempt (a reactive logos) to surpass death. To unravel this thread, we need only to ask: Why did Plato decided to characterize the logos of Socrates in writing when Socrates did not think much of it as we know from Phaidro? Whence this decision, this logos? Back to the text again. Socrates spend the day since dawn with Euthyphro330 in the supreme court. After his being announced the charges that had pressed on him, we found him again in dialogues. These charges could end up with severe penalties; even death –​ironically as it happened. Yet Socrates, according to the documents we have, that is, Plato’s texts, his archives, Socrates ends up engaging in a rather lively –​with jouissance –​discussion with Hermogenes and Cratylus. Socrates might die but no big deal. Compared to the soulless monster Mersault in Camus’ The Stranger,331 Socrates manifests the absurd par excellence. No existential struggle, just pure apathy. Such stoicism and collectedness is dumbfounding, admirable, and, one could say, even heroic. No wonder why Nietzsche “envied him:” “there is nothing we envy less than the moral cow and the fat happiness of good conscience.”332 A good conscience which negates all life. Socrates keeps going and living as if no(thing) grave is happening; business as usual. Yet this business is oral. No matter how much truth there was in this signifying voice, this voice is still a sound. And yet, sound is a course to oblivion, it goes with the wind and perishes (θανόν). It is forgotten (λήθη); a “pure poetic flash that disappears without trace, leaving nothing behind it but a vibration suspended in the air for one brief moment.”333 It is not. Much like a course without reflection. To be then is to be remembered. Not to be forgotten (ἀ-​λήθεια/​truth), to renounce the course’s oblivion (ἀπο-​θνήσκω), that is, not to die:

3 30 Plato, Cratylus, 397a. 331 Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 332 Nietzsche Anti-​Christ, 173. 333 Foucault, Order, 311.

278 Chapter 6 Not only since the invention of writing has language pretended to pursue itself to infinity; but neither is it because of its fear of death that it decided one day to assume a body in the form of visible and permanent signs. Rather, somewhat before the invention of writing, a change had to occur to open the space in which writing could flow and establish itself, a change, symbolized for us in its most original figuration by Homer, that forms one of the most decisive ontological events of language: its mirrored reflection upon death.334 And who’s mirrored reflection upon death is written in the Platonic dialogues if not the Socratic logos? Marking in letters is death’s writing before these letters after Derrida. To mark “a finger and some sand suffice.”335 But with a summer breeze the mark is gone, gone back to what it was, no-​thing, no trace. “In order to be memorable, the inscription must either be violent or supported by an adequate substance,”336 characterized. But why need the trace, the mark to be memorable without desiring to be remembered? The violence does not initially come from the inscription. It is the violence of death that is attempted to be discharged in the representation. Writing is never material or ideal. The violence of the inscription remembers, represents without re-​presenting without re-​membering the violent inscription of pending, imminent death. It is its expression; death as the imminent of the immanent and the immanent of the imminent. Logos comes after the physical: metaphysical logos. Logos expresses itself in text with itself as pre-text where an Other (w)riting has died/dyed. We know this already from Pericles. If the Parthenon were to be rebuilt in the pretext of having utility to protect from a potential future threat against the Persians, the monument is a documentation, a text whose pre-​text does not signify the text itself but promises. Like Pericles, the document, the monument, the letter, the mark are not against death but beyond it: ἢν καὶ νῦν ὑπενδῶμέν ποτε (πάντα γὰρ πέφυκε καὶ ἐλασσοῦσθαι), μνήμη καταλελείψεται, ῾Ελλήνων τε ὅτι ῞Ελληνες πλείστων δὴ ἤρξαμεν, καὶ πολέμοις μεγίστοις ἀντέσχομεν πρός τε ξύμπαντας καὶ καθ’ ἑκάστους, πόλιν τε τοῖς πᾶσιν εὐπορωτάτην καὶ μεγίστην ᾠκήσαμεν. καίτοι ταῦτα ὁ μὲν ἀπράγμων

3 34 Foucault, Infinity, 90. 335 Irigaray, Speak, 122. 336 Ibid.

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μέμψαιτ’ ἄν, ὁ δὲ δρᾶν τι καὶ αὐτὸς βουλόμενος ζηλώσει· εἰ δέ τις μὴ κέκτηται, φθονήσει.337 Even if we do give a little ground at some point in our time (and it is a law of nature that all things are subject to decline), posterity will remember that we had the widest empire of Greeks over Greeks, that we held firm in the greatest wars against their combined or separate forces, and that the city we inhabited was the most complete in every facility and the greatest of all. All this the disengaged may deplore, but those with their own ambitions will want to emulate us, and those who have failed to gain power will envy us.338 It is the course of death that is dis-​sed with (Platonic) logos in writing: Socrates’ death. The platonic texts document, attempt to remember those interactions with Socrates by re-​membering them.339 “Those dead who have not been able to be saved and transported to the boundaries of the concrete past of a survivor are not past; they along with their pasts are annihilated.”340 This is another struggle written in the Platonic texts. To re-​member Socrates’ logos so that it can reverberate through eternity –​instead of going down in infamy or oblivion, and thus contradicting his name/​essence! Just like Shelley’s elegy on Keats To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: “With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!”341

3 37 Thucydides, History, Book ii; 64; 122. 338 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: oup, 2009), Book ii; 64; 105. 339 We have decided to give emphasis to a particular existential thread with respect to the platonic motivation of being in bad faith with respect to writing. In this reconstitution of Socrates’ fame, that is, his logos, one could also trace another logos of gratitude impelling to inscription. Derrida traces such a thread in the Biblical story of Tobit and Tobias. When Tobit following the logos of an angel re-​sights his father Tobias, what comes about is an “order to write: in order to give thanks, the memory of the event must be inscribed” (29). Maybe Plato is thanking Socrates for being his teacher, his intro-​con-​duct-​or to philosophy. 340 Sartre, bn, 112. 341 Shelley, Selected, Verse 1; 2.

280 Chapter 6 Writing is always true as it promises. To give one’s word, logos, comes to characterize a future, it writes it. Logos writes how things will come to be. It decides. And this decision, this promise, this writing is an inscription for the Other. To promise is to prescribe oneself toward inscribing the Other in the future –​just like Plato and Shelley did. But the inscription of the Other in the future is at the same time the keeping of the promise. It is the Other’s logos that is kept in the future. Writing as a technology is the way a promise is kept –​the undertaking of a promise. A monument of death (written logos) becomes the document of life (logos as writing). That is why every document/​monument lies342 openly or to the open so that it can tell the truth of existence; it objects to death. Just like a promise, it stands in nothing, it is nothing. Logos is no thing, lies on itself. Logos makes the ‘is’ come to be. That is why logos tells itself prior to every signification (apopha(n)sis) and thus, is no-​ledge. It can only be something, it can mean through the Other, in dialogue, in meaning. Every text characterizes or is a character: a logos of dialogues past (passed) but not passed away. Every document represents without re-​presenting a dialogue. There can be no representation if there has never been an Other to motivate it. Representation itself is a techno-​logy going beyond the passing away, the dying present. Representation dies/​dyes the present for a beyond. But this beyond can only take place in dialogue with an Other, in understanding and meaning. So long as another can tell (ledge): (t)here (w)here … When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to th/​ee.343 342 In both senses of ‘lies:’ either lying in not telling the truth, or lying as in laying on a surface (κείμενον, text). 343 William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: oup: 2002), Sonnet 18; 417; emphasis added.

­c hapter 7

Pathway Five: Toward Understanding and Meaning as Altruism Requesting the Eyes/​Is of the Other

Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind; that their being is to be perceived or known berkeley

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Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task heidegger

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How prayer gallops and light groans … I  see that clearly. It’s too simple rimbaud

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The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something –​ and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? –​Would this defect be comparable to colour-​blindness or to not having absolute pitch? wittgenstein

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I wish the light could shine now for it is closer, it is near… But it will not present my present And it makes my past and future painfully clear …And I must examine my breath and look inside Because I feel blind hercules and love affair

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Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, Wear shirts and boots ’cause it’s okay to be a boy, But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading,

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_008

282 Chapter 7 ’Cause you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like wouldn’t you … What it feels like for a girl madonna

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… dans les questions que vous me posez, c’est sans aucune provocation que j’ai presque envie de répondre que c’est vraiment celui qui pose la question qui seul a les moyens d’y répondre deleuze

…

We have considered a dead eye in the midst of the world in order to account for the visibility of this world sartre1

∵ In the beginning of our journey, we set out for altruism. Traditional philosophy was commanding us to argue about altruism, but we resisted it by questioning it. We resisted it not only because to argue for altruism contra-​the-​dictum of the other constitutes a logical paradox; but, also, because, such an act risked becoming altruism’s violent opposite. We had to change the perspective and understand how one comes to be altruistic which is also to live altruistically, to believing it in action: to be-​li(e)ve in altruism. This believing in altruism is like following the Other, questing them. Following as a silent promise to be there. Promising is to give one’s word. Giving one’s word is to mandate, to prescribe. It is to future; to fallow the present in order to allow a future for the Other. It is an imperative found(ed) on decision. Looking at the event of promising we were led back to logos as the ‘first’ principle: existence as decision. Finally, our path shows, so far, that logos cannot come to be but through dialogue. It is the notion of dialogue that we feel compelled to investigate here. If one were to analogize logos with subjectivity it is dialogue as intersubjectivity that we shall explore in this path; the presence of the Other in the sense of granting the promise or by requesting it. To what extent does the Other participate in altruism? What 1 George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1901); hereafter, Works. Heidegger, BT; Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems (2002):  www.poetryintranslation. com; Wittgenstein, Investigations; Hercules and Love Affair, Blind (New York: dfa Records, 2008); Madonna, What It Feels Like for a Girl (Los Angeles, CA: Maverick Record, 2000); Gilles Deleuze, Webdeleuze (www.webdeleuze.com/​textes/​73); Sartre, bn.

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would be the difference between following and stalking if the Other does not somehow wink, accept, or at least inspire the(ir) being followed? And, at the same time, for an altruism that goes all the way in sacrificing oneself for the Other –​irrespectively of whether the act is spontaneous, synchronic, or diachronic –​how does it avoid degeneration into an unrequited act from either perspective? The one who sacrifices themselves completely will never know the outcome of the sacrifice and the one who is saved will be forever in debt in an intentionality without finitude, a course with no closure; a curse instead of a course. Finally, to what extent does altruism involve a witness as a third term between the giver and the receiver of the act? The third perspective as recognition of the act is paramount. The act could be translated as heroic or as stupid. How can the meaning of such an act be fixed in a common sense, in universal communication, in a uni-​verse? Could it be that communication, understanding each other, meaning, intersubjectivity, and altruism constitute a tautology? From an empirical and phenomenological standpoint dialogue is to be para-​ mount to altruism. But so it is from a conceptual point of view. We italicized the words –​ promising, mandating, imperative, prescription, decision, logos –​ to provide emphasis on them so as to make them stand out of the crowded passage, to give them extra visibility. The emphasis is given not with their being just present, but with being irregularly distanced, or better, di-​stanced with respect to the other words. The emphasis does not refer to the present, but to a modification of it. Such a modification is an excess with respect to the present; and so it is with the conceptual referents of these words. The concepts that we have tracked down do not have an essence or a referent –​either as denotatum or designatum, united or scattered –​in the present world or in the wor(l)d of presence. The grammar of the present cannot conclude them. No thing can bring them to light if light is understood as the presence of the present. The grammar needed to illuminate these concepts requires tenses –​future and/​ or past, temp(t), to-​and-​fro –​and most importantly an Other. These concepts spect the Other. They are oriented toward and to ward the Other. Can we analogize dialogue with altruism? Ironically, what it is like to know these concepts requires an event of dialogue. But meaning which comes about in the event of a dialogue does not come to light. If meaning is produced in dialogue, this product is beyond sight –​in all senses of the word. In the history of philosophy, linking meaning to understanding and to knowledge has allowed our focusing on how one person understands, the conditions for understanding, where meaning and knowledge all blend into one concept: experience or consciousness. This movement to experience, however, has dispensed with the Other in the process of understanding understanding, knowing knowledge, meaning meaning. The eyes/​Is of the Other have

284 Chapter 7 been plucked out from the philosophy of understanding (of) understanding.2 The others become blind and wander/​wonder around like a curse while we attempt to account for understanding alone in the Kantian sense of the conditions of experience as understanding alone. We are desperately trying to find those subjective conditions –​philosophy is in despair of subjective conditions. Paradoxically, however, this background blind movement has always been one of our main metaphors for what it is like to know, to understand, to mean. Knowledge, understanding, and meaning, flow as a movement from blindness to I-​ness/​eye-​ness. 1

Meaning Like a Reli(e)ving Movement from Dark to Light:  Kant and the Blind Intuition

We shall start with Kant. To know what it is like to know, knowledge itself, Kant starts from experience. But just because knowledge starts from experience that does not mean that it arises out of experience. Knowledge is expressed through the concept of understanding and understanding through judgement; and judgement as a synthesis of intuitions and concepts, a spontaneous act. One of Kant’s famous judgements is that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”3 Let us begin. This judgment is metaphorical. As we saw earlier, every metaphor is always already an analogy. Intuitions that do not have concepts, intuitions that are not subsumed by concepts are analogized with blindness. It has been suggested that concepts in Kant are what we commonly refer to as general terms and intuitions are singular representations relating to ‘objects’ by an immediate condition. What does this immediate condition mean? Kantian scholars, like 2 Just like Sartre, Irigaray traces this plucking out the Eyes/​Is of the Other as the main trend of Western philosophy. “The Other as such has not been sufficiently considered as an essential dimension of our belonging to the world” (Irigaray, Sharing 75. Our belonging has been theorized as caring “about the relations of the subject to things, and about the relations between things and the world, but very seldom between two subjects, especially two different subjects –​the only place where speaking is really indispensable” (Ibid., 6). Ultimately, this care takes care of its own private time disregarding the temporality of the Other. Intersubjectivity, as we shall explore, would mean to give back the eyes/​Is to the Other which “shifts the concern regarding temporality” (Ibid., xviii). It is not only what unfolds for me in the sense of what I perceive and know. The concern is not only my caring about me and my ultimate knowledge of my being towards death, but about a time and a time of our time for making this time meaningful, a time that matters. A time that matters without particular matter is one which has rhythm: an intersubjective ‘(k)now.’ 3 Kant First Critique, B75.

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Lisa Shabel and Charles Parsons, accept that Kant’s intuition is related to the concept of ‘immediacy’ but, as Parsons underscores, Kant never unpacks his notion of ‘immediate condition’ adequately. His proposal, also A.C. Ewing’s, is “direct phenomenological presence to the mind, as in perception.”4 But as W. H. Walsh explains, this presence cannot be an appearance as a (unified) physical object. This requires a synthesis of a “stream of uncoordinated sense data,”5 thus an appearing. Walsh, as does Deleuze, suggests that the word ‘object’ is already too much for Kant. What is presented to, what affects the sensibility is “initially the phenomenon as sensible empirical diversity,” a manifold; not “an appearance” but an “appearing.”6 Intuition, then, is an appearing as direct, immediate, phenomenological presence. What we should not forget is that (1) if it is intuitions that we are looking for and (2) if intuitions are always blind without concepts, then what we are essentially doing is trying to understand what it is for an intuition to be what it is; what it is to be blind. But we are not. So it is like trying to understand blind-​ folded. We need the schema of blind-​folded otherwise what is our empirical imagination going to represent when bringing to mind blind intuitions –​as when it brings heavy cinnabar to represent red colour? Granted that what we intuit is an appearing, that which is received by the aesthesis, then what is the appearing before being intuited as intuition? What is the appearing before being the intuition? In the Transcendental Aesthetic, before anything, there is the object, the something; but is it “the” or “this”? If aesthesis is reception, as Kant says “nothing but receptivity,”7 then what there is in the vestibule of sensibility is for Kant an object. Our questions: Is the given a diversity as Deleuze and Walsh interpret ‘it’ before becoming the intuition? If so, what is the difference between that diversity and what Kant calls empirical diversity? Let us go back to the passage. The given before it is being given is an object for Kant. The object becomes an empirical diversity through the sensibility. “Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions.”8 It yields: This ‘it’ must be referring to the sensibility as (passive) receptivity being causally linked to the object

4 A. C.  Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London:  Methuen & Co Ltd, 1938), 29–​65; Charles Parsons, “The Transcendental Aeshetic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: cup,) 66. 5 W. H. Walsh, Walsh, “Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics I-​II,” Philosophy, 14, 55 and 56, (1939): 436. 6 Glles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1984), 8; hereafter, Kant. 7 Kant, First Critique, B130. 8 Ibid., B34/​A20.

286 Chapter 7 which acts upon it. Yet, ‘it’ is also active with respect to the understanding as it yields intuitions. The object seems to be in-​itself as a causally efficacious unity for Kant before the sensibility breaks the unity, turns it, or destroys9 it into an empirical diversity which is the object of the intuition as sensation. Here one could say that the empirical intuition is a horizonal appearing, or appearing multiplicity within the horizon, the lounge of sensibility. But originally, the object must be in-​itself and has an effect on the sensibility which is the sensation: The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance.10 We have to follow the objects and the relations here. What affects the sensibility, the first part of the medium of representation, is an immediate object. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. From this, comes another object, which is undetermined, empirically diversified. To put it differently. Step 1:  an object (A)  has an effect on sensibility (B) (effect of A on B is sensation C) Step 2: Sensation relates A to C which is the empirical intuition. The object of this empirical intuition is undetermined. But how and what comes into the vestibule? Just before the Transendental Ideas we read again “… an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio). This is either intuition or concept (intuitus vel conceptus). The former relates immediately to the object and is single, the latter refers to it mediately by means of a feature which several things have in common.”11 Relations are not about unity-​diversity but about (im)mediacy. It has already been decided whether there is diversity or unity. The immediate relation is the intuition, the single object, the particular. Can an object not be single? Can an object ever be understood without some form of unity even if that unity is just the boundaries of the perceptual horizon of an “undetermined” 9

We use the term ‘destroy’ with no reference to valuations –​just as we did earlier with Sartre. Beyond binaries, destroy takes another meaning as catastrophe, as turning into something else. 10 Kant, First Critique, B34/​A20; emphasis added. The singularity of the object which acts upon the sensibility is again explicitly mentioned in the Second Critique and a manifold of times in the Anthropology (Kant, Second Critique, 45; 64). Charles Sanders Peirce seems to read Kant in a similar way since he comes to registering Kantian philosophy as a strand of nominalism (Peirce, cp i). 11 Kant, First Critique, A320/​B377; second emphases added.

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sensible manifold, a this, a the, a that or just a (movement of am index which points towards)? The aesthesis follows the logic of Plato-​Aristotle, as Kant says in a more than telling footnote:  “the language and sense of the ancients, in their far-​famed division of knowledge into αἰσθητά και νοητά.” Question:  why are intuitions blind if for the ancients the αἰσθητά did provide knowledge and Kant agrees that “an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio)”? Is it not because sensibility destroys the object, as that platonically driven object in-​itself, its formal nature, its essence? Only if sensibility, the senses, the bodily senses, destroy the object (epistemically speaking) can we talk about representations which are intuitions –​mediated by a schema: Concerning the object per se, we are still blind: The manifold of representations can be given in an intuition which is purely sensible that is, nothing but receptivity; and the form of this intuition can lie a priori in our faculty of representation, without being anything more than the mode in which the subject is affected. But the combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses, and cannot, therefore, be already contained in the pure form of sensible intuition. For it is an act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation; and since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be entitled understanding, all combination be we conscious of it or not, be it a combination of the manifold of intuition, empirical or non-​empirical, or of various concepts is an act of the understanding.12 Let us read this passage again. The “manifold of representations” is a bundle of unsynthesized perceptions (sensible affections) of the object. The given is an intuition which is always purely sensible. That is another way of saying that the object in-​itself is not received in-​itself at once. The reception of “the purely sensible” as the intuited, the given manifold, has a reason for not being a unity but a manifold; the destruction of the unity is done by the senses. The form of this intuition, the form of sense is a priori; that means universal. Now, the universal can have two directions. Either universal, that is, the same across all possible intuitions for the same subject, and/​or universal across all other entities that can intuit. The clarification “without being anything more than the mode in which the subject is affected” leaves us blind with respect to which

12 Kant, First Critique, B130.

288 Chapter 7 direction we shall read the a priori.13 If it is in both directions, as the a priori should be, then how are we to understand the mode? We are provided with time as pure form of affection. But an a priori form, universal and necessary, cannot fall under the category of modality because modality is not an aesthetic representation. Time as a priori form can cover the vertical direction (within the ‘same’ subject), and the horizontal direction (across different subjects) but not both at the same time unless we presuppose a normative dimension of sensibility, how sensibility must be a priori in order for time as a priori form to cover both dimensions. We read: “But the combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses.” If the manifold is to be combined then it is not unified. But insofar as it is a manifold it is delimited or determinable. Either case implies some sort of unity. The unity of the manifold is not the essential unity of the object which makes the object what it is in-​itself. The sensible manifold is the ‘destroyed’ object in-​itself which is going to be re-​ unified, or, to be exact, re-​membered from the fracturing form of sensibility. It is not an original diversity from which the form of the sense makes a sensible object. Each form of sense in its empirical diversity mani-​folds. Time as form of intuition destroys, keeps together and unifies the object, the one world which the understanding will have to put back into place as an intelligible one. That is why … the combination can never come to us through the senses and cannot be already be contained in the pure form. The syntheses are always the business of the understanding. Let us add another intriguing passage: By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one [act of] knowledge. … Synthesis of a manifold (be it given empirically or a priori) is what first gives rise to knowledge.14 If aesthesis does not provide knowledge it is because it merely receives an appearance of an ‘object’ which is a thing in-​itself. After all, we cannot sense a whole house singly, let alone the unity of the cosmos, the world. There is no object that has been given in its entirety. It is received spatio-​temporally as an undetermined spatio-​temporal unity but not received as its unity but as a sensible unity, a sensation, a presence. It goes through the fracturing sensibility. It is 13

That is also Husserl’s objection to Kantian thinking of the two senses of the ‘a priori’ in the Logical Investigations. 14 Kant, First Critique, B103.

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in this sense that understanding will have the burden of putting together what the sensibility destroyed and retained (synthesis speciosa) (“Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present;”15). The object that will be re-​presented through the spontaneity of the understanding will always be a phenomenal object, an appearance, not as it is in-​itself –​but phenomenal and always bound to the manifoldness of the manifold. All the syntheses of the understanding are in a sense reactions to the passivity of the sensibility. A calling upon them which will take place in time. Time as the ultimate form of sensibility destroys the presentation of the object and creates a representation of it at the same time. There is a possibility of reading the ‘object’ that affects the sensibility as diversity, appearing, only if the object becomes a difference of emphasis in the appearing relative to the ongoing operation of the senses. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche relied heavily on the philosophical illusion to which Kant seemed to remain blind: there is no switch on/​off of sense and perception. Insofar as we live we sense. An effect of an object of sense can make sense only as a difference with respect to a constant appearing –​not as a pure cessation of sense by an introduction of the received sensation. There is no introduction but a difference in emphasis of affectivity. But Kant has not allowed us any pathways to such reading precisely because of his metaphysical presupposition of causal efficacy16 between the object in-​itself and its phenomenal presence. Sensibility for Kant does not have the duplicity that we see in the spiritualist tradition culminating with Bergson where aesthesis is the organe-​obstacle –​that which both hinders and enables perception. For the intuitionists, intuition does not have an interval, a middle term which allows the distinguishing of subject and object. As Ravaisson liked to reiterate, in pure intuition there is no interval, subject and object are one. The object is created in an interval.17 For Kant, in the beginning there is an object (pro)visionally. That is why the middle term for Kant is not aesthesis itself but the schema which mediates, which reverses the causal efficacy of the thing in-​itself into a reactive presentation warding/​ wording an intelligible re-​versal, that is, a representation. The appearance, the Kantian phenomenon, can be traced, or better has to be traced, as a causal efficacy on the senses from the thing-​in-​itself, some kind of Aristotelian essence otherwise:

15 Kant, First Critique, B151; original emphases. 16 Apel, Transcendental. 17 Ravaisson, Habit.

290 Chapter 7 If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, if a man changed sometimes into this and sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar.18 The nerve of this argument is about permanence of being, essence, which allows, which conditions the passing of the objective to the subjective through causation.19 While this is all good and well, we have forgotten already that since we started from experience, the conditions of experience which allow the passage from experience of the object (the particular) to the forms/​conditions of experience (universal) which make the former possible are (causally) fallowed from the experience of someone whose sensibility is grosso modo like Kant’s; a particular envisioned and not a blind Kant –​nor even a man changing sometimes into envisioned and into blind. At the moment that Kant gives the aesthetic a privilege universally, this universality has (been) fallowed (from) a particular class of what the aesthetic, sensibility is supposed to be. To accept Kant’s aesthetic theory reveals the ground of a democratic implicature, to use Grice’s term,20 of how normal sensibility is supposed to be –​“those who have been diagnosed normal.”21 Envisioned Kant would remain blind about what it is like to know that there is no red color for the blind person. That intuition is indeed blind, one cannot opt to optically see it and make it a manifold. The intuition of the blind person could only re-​present ‘red’ through dialogue with an envisioned person. Subjective form of time cannot play the transcendental intersubjective condition that could trace a shared meaning of ‘red’ so that it could justify universality in the structures of sensibility since it defies the possibility of coming to indexing/​intending ‘red.’ What would the intentionality of this dialogue be? What does the blind talk about? How, can the blind person talk about and “understand” ‘red’? G. W. Leibniz before Kant had written:

18 Kant, First Critique, A101; emphases added. 19 Husserl elaborates that “a sensuous schema belongs to the essence of a thing” (Husserl, Investigations, 40). 20 H. P.  Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intention,” The Philosophical Review, 78, 2 (1969): 147–​177. 21 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 227.

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Thus we cannot explain what red is to a blind man, nor can we make such things clear to others except by leading them into the presence of the thing and making them see, smell, or taste the same thing we do, or, at very least, by reminding them of some past perception that is similar.22 What exactly does a blind man see? What is the analogy, the ‘similar,’ which should play the role of the Kantian schema in the case of reminding the blind of some past perception of ‘red’? Leibniz tells us that they understand, they see distinct notions –​could we (f)allow here a Husserlian mental seeing? But these distinct notions are not coming from the(ir) senses; they are intelligible marks that everyone can see, or better, learn to see since “we are leading them into the presence of the thing and making them see.” Intelligibility, in its equivocality, is meaning as the achievement of some sort of communication and not some achievement of a functional process of subjective conditions and empirical content. Nothing will pass as ‘red’ to the blind unless we “make” them see, that is, understand. But there is nothing (in) commonly (being) understood between each other, no common sense. The sense of seeing is seaing. Seaing to find an end, an edging, a port, a word, an analogy toward meaning. In our attempt to communicate we are all blind:23 I remember that I know the meaning of those words, and I decide that explanation is not necessary at this time. I  usually call such thinking, which is found both in algebra and in arithmetic and, indeed, almost everywhere, blind or symbolic.24

22

G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 24; hereafter, Essays. 23 Derrida writes:  “One must always remember that the word, the vocable, is heard and understood, the sonorous phenomenon remaining invisible as such” (Derrida, Memoirs, 4). This invisibility is not the interior of a glove as Merleau-​Ponty thought that could pass into the visible under certain circumstances as in the case of losing one’s sight. This invisibility is blindness “addressed not only from blind to blind like a code for the nonseeing, but speaks to us, in truth, all the time of the blindness that constitutes it. Language is spoken to us from/​of blindness. It always speaks to us from/​of the blindness that constitutes it” (ibid). If perfect communication, absolute presence of meaning were possible, analogous to the perfect communication of oneself as another, as in telepathy, then, still, the perfect ideal point of the one shared meaning, the absolute unity of distinct ‘Is’, would, like a self-​ portrait, be a meaning involving blindness in its making –​the eyes or the Cyclopean eye would have no place in this trans-​action. 24 Leibniz, Essays, 25.

292 Chapter 7 Such blind thinking is a mathesis universalis which deals with “notions common to several senses, like the notions of number, magnitude, shape [which] are usually of such a kind.”25 Meaning is intelligibility even for the blind person. Yet, ironically, scientia is like passing from blindness to vision as intelligibility.26 It is through the blind, or better, thanks to or in virtue of the blind that episteme is understood as the event of overcoming blindness, by supplementing it. “By a singular vocation, the blind man becomes a witness he must attest to the truth or the divine light. He is an archivist of visibility.”27 This archiving, this audit trail, is required to reveal or de-​veil the passage from dark to light, a performative schema for the intro-​duce-​ing of a logical category of the understanding on the intuition which is blind. But the blind is never understood. The otherness of the Other is used to understand oneself.28 There is a “specular isolation”29 of the blind, an abandonment of the blind in solitude. The blind is used to reveal what it is like for the envisioned to know. “He seems the center around which stars glow/​While all earth’s ostentations surge below.”30 What it is like to know, as Plato writes in The Republic, is either fallowing darkness to allow for forms to be revealed, like having the eyes of an owl, like Glaucon who can pierce darkness; or, to move out, to turn away from darkness, as if getting out of a dark cave:

25 Ibid., 24. 26 En passant, this movement from darkness to the light, E/​enlightenment, which is also an introduction to knowledge, can be traced back to the overcoming of the dark philosophy of Heraclitus as we saw earlier with Aristotle. Derrida has shown how episteme –​ Plato-​ Aristotelian philosophy –​in art and science share this point of view with respect to knowing: “the master of truth is the one who sees and guides the other towards the spiritual light” (Derrida, Memoirs, 6). 27 Derrida, Memoirs, 20. 28 This is the second time we come across this phenomenon –​cf our path on ea. 29 Ibid. 30 Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems, trans. Jessie Lemont (New York: Tobias A. Wright, 1918), 34. This is also evident in the advances of the so-​called objective phenomenology. Thomas Nagel suggested that an objective phenomenology tries to “develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what is like to see” (Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review, 83, 4 (1974), 449). Richard K. Atkins who follows him writes that “whether we actually succeed is a matter of indifference, so long as we can identify structural similarities between the two experiences. As Nagel says, the vocabulary could be used to describe to a man born blind what it is like to see colour. Whether we succeed or not is a different matter” (Richard Atkins, “Toward an Objective Phenomenological Vocabulary:  How Seeing a Scarlet Red is Like Hearing a Trumpet’s Blare,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12 (2013), 838; hereafter, Objective). The blind remains blind but is now also muted.

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But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul and that the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.31 The intellectual eye receives without pressure, no resistance. The eye must be free of resistance and thus free of effort. Knowledge amounts to a feeling of relief. To know as in to find the light is to be relieved from darkness, from being blind. To be relieved is a care-​free business: inertia. If there is pressure or resistance the Glauconian eye becomes Glaucoma(tic). Too much light dazzles and blinds. The eye cannot foresee, predict, know what is ahead in full light. There is no truth in the absolute light. Such light hurts the eye/​I and one prefers to be(come) blind –​Oedipus plucked his eyes out. A hand is required to cast a bit of a shadow, an aegis to moderate, to adaw the absolute light. It is through the hand that folds, that contrasts light and dark, creating the shadow. Throwing a bit of silence onto the light. It is the hand that silences. Knowledge is felt in shadow, a to-​and-​fro between light and dark: the relief of the shadow. Would there be knowledge without the ledge of the blind to give us a hand? How would we know that we have knowledge if there were no blind shoulders on which to stand and see/​sea further? Still, what it is like to be blind is still not intuited –​neither in Leibniz nor in Kant. As Wittgenstein would say, we remain meaning-​blind with respect to what the blind person sees. It is the “analogy” with the blind that aims “to throw light here.”32 Yet, apart from the blind intuition of blindness, there is a decision of understanding through the object of the eyes as subjective conditions of objectively valid knowledge which is not through the counterpart of 31 Plato, Complete, 518c. 32 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 83. The analogy of ‘light’ with knowledge has been traced mythologically and theologically with respect to the Other as animal –​by Derrida, Cixous, Haraway, and Braidotti. Animals have helped us in creating “the social grammar of virtues and moral distinctions for the benefit of humans” (Braidotti, Posthuman, 69). But this is not for all but just the envisioned. For Plato, one either needs to have the eyes of an owl (Glaucon) that sees in the dark, fallowing the dark, piercing the dark with rays, beams of light, or be able to turn to, move towards the light. These natural ways can also be technologically supplemented by throwing light. The distinctness of an object as ‘light’ comes out from the possibility of its manipulability, a ready-​to-​hand. In our reading, the animal support takes place through an invisible reference from the presence of the mythological Hephaistian owl represented by Glauco’s name and Glauco himself (turning almost 270 degrees and able to see in the dark or being able to see (the light) after having turned to the wide (i.e. platonic) light which saves him from darkness; the saving light (i.e. socratic light).

294 Chapter 7 the blind’s eyes or through the understanding as that which is is synthesized in the so called objective appearance of the blind. The blind has been decided as the counterpart to knowledge. We never asked the blind or walked blind folded all the time. The transcendental “Is” are always (structured with) eyes. The logic of vision has been imposed on the Other, here as blind, as a vision of logic just like we saw in the previous chapter. There is a reach to the Other only to come back to oneself and exclude the Other as improper/​I’m-​proper. Understanding understood as an Odys-​sea of vision. A return to one’s being, to the same is-​land; the ground of being and the being of ground after seeing/​seaing. Understanding, making sense, achieving meaning has always been understood as seeing through an expropriation of blindness.33 But this seeing is an opening “to a future whose night is but the opacity produced by the density of the superimposed transparencies.”34 One could risk the hypothesis that such a superimposed transparency is an implicature, in this case a democratic implicature which makes the normal, the proper, the canonical distribution, the curve, the I/​eye/​aye. And this democratic implicature is representational, not presentational, that is, not a presentational democracy where the blind speaks in their embodied presence. Another superimposed transparency is economic. Seeing clearly is simple. Simple as in thrifty but also cheap in investment. Not much effort is required in exchange but just a standing and seeing how things come to be, pure see-​ how, show, spectacle, theory. A distance from the object of sight. Don’t touch! Leave the object itself as it is, pure and virgin, in-​itself! The eyes can thus lie on it simply, as it is, safely.35 But, at the same time, seeing is simple as requiring no effort, happening spontaneously. There is no waiting for the world. It is given immediately when the blinds are lifted –​when the lids of the eyes and the blinds are removed as obstacles. The eyelids are leads to knowledge until they are removed. Just as the Other Is/​eyes who sea/​see the world aimlessly, without direct(ed)ness, it is seeing that finds the world immediately, directly –​ see earlier citing/​sighting of Husserl. Mental seeing supplements seeing blind, seaing. “No longer to see the objects in my room because I have closed my eyes

33

34 35

There is a slight difference in what we are trying to articulate here, and what Derrida traced as the exorbitance of vision (Derrida, Touching, 201). We are not only emphasizing the decision to give primacy to vision. We question the possibility of knowledge if there had been a decision not to appropriate the Other. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor, (Chicago: ucp, 1986), 345; hereafter, Trace. The virginity of the given and the given woman as wife is a marriage which we shall not attempt here.

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is to see the curtain of my eyelids.”36 In the dark we may not see something determinate. “But that is still a seeing.”37 I can still sea the world yet with more effort. Seeing sees itself as requiring no effort, and no effort means no sweat, avoiding the body’s inundation, the rivers of the body overflowing and giving it superfluity of feeling, biosis. Seeing is not a heavy work but a light work. The light of knowledge comes simply, effortlessly, naturally, as a delight (délit), as a relief of the blinds –​both as eyes/​Is and as eyelids. It is the relief of opening one’s eyes and getting out of bed (délit), waking up, or, as we saw in the beginning, flowing out of a dream. But this dream does not require sleeping but slipping into something else: A skilled critic can enhance our appreciation of a work of art by pointing out features that lie open before us –​aspects of the work to which we had not paid due attention, or the right kind of attention. He ‘opens our eyes’, we say –​even though, of course, our eyes were open already. And here, as in philosophy, it is essential that we come to see for ourselves the significance of what has been pointed out.38 Sleeping does not require closing our eyes and snoring. Sleeping is inertia. The awake wakes as Heraclitus said, consciousness is change. Waking becomes seeing, seeing becomes seaing irrespective of eyes/​Is if there is no Other, no change, no difference, no analogical emphasis, no slipping into something else. And this change is felt, or rather, this change is imponderable: a light change. The passage to understanding feels emphatically delightful. Just like when one calls our name and italicizes our being from the crowd. 2

Knowledge as Delight: Heidegger and the Phenomenon

Heidegger was the first to illuminate an inconsistency in Kant’s equating phenomenon with appearance. Instead of the object of an empirical intuition, an entity, or a being-​in-​itself, Heidegger will use the term ‘phenomenon,’ distinctly from Kant’s use. The famous ¶7 of Being and Time is all about destroying the scholastic object and giving primacy to the phenomenon as thing itself. The destruction will be done as a resistance to Kant’s decision not to disambiguate between the different senses of appearance which lead Kant to equate 36 Sartre, bn, 319. 37 Heidegger, bt, 50. 38 Hanfling, Wittgenstein, 103.

296 Chapter 7 appearances with phenomena  –​at the same time Heidegger’s decision is a decision of following a Husserlian path: the conditions of meaning constitution are differentiated from the conditions of judgement, and the conditions of their validity. Nevertheless, following Heidegger, it seems that ‘phenomenon’ does not lose its objective boundaries completely; it still remains something indeterminately unified, still decided (quasi)transcendentally, horizonally. Let us start with The Concept of Phenomenon where Heidegger traces the phenomenon through the middle-​voiced ancient term ‘phaino’ and the root ‘pha.’ We shall consider the root of the phenomenon later; here we shall ask about its stems. How do the boundaries of the phenomenon-​a phenomenalize themselves? Where does one phenomenon end for another to start? Our question is how the spatio-​temporal boundaries of phenomena are self-​punctuated in the sense of their “self-​evidence,”39 their givenness if one will, or the appearing as such. We must phrase the question more. To clarify this question we need a passage, a clearing: “Phenomenon,” the showing-​itself-​in-​itself, signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered. “Appearance,” on the other hand, means a reference-​relationship which is in an entity itself, and which is such that what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfil its possible function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a ‘phenomenon’. Both appearance and semblance are founded upon the phenomenon, though in different ways. The bewildering multiplicity of ‘phenomena’ designated by the words “phenomenon,” “semblance,” “appearance,” “mere appearance,” cannot be disentangled unless the concept of the phenomenon is understood from the beginning as that which shows itself in itself.40 From both a philological and a phenomenological standpoint, it is a bit difficult to associate the middle-​voice with that which shows itself in itself precisely because the phenomenon is always a phenomenon for someone based on the access that they have. Otherwise, we run into a formal or performative paradox (how is the given given if there is no one to be given to? How can the given be given? It is given itself by being given). Heidegger uses ‘phenomenon’ for that “which shows itself in itself, the manifest”41 and ‘phenomena’ for what can be manifested, can be brought to light 39 Heidegger, bt, 50. 40 Ibid., 54. 41 Ibid., 51.

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or what was in ancient times referred to as beings (entities). Indeed, Heidegger says that “an entity can show itself from itself in many ways, depending in each case on the kind of access we have to it.”42 But while admitting the importance of the kind of access which legitimizes the middle-​voice phenomenon, Heidegger decides not to elaborate on what constitutes the kind and jumps straight into the access. We remain blind to the kinds of access. Heidegger tells us that an entity may show itself differently –​may seem otherwise –​than it is itself. This modality of (seeming) otherwise is (a) phenomenon as semblance. But semblance, is always already founded on something (the phenomenon as manifest) that can manifest itself by referring to something (the semblance) that is not itself in that it refers to something else which, in turn, does not show itself in itself. This type of phenomenon Heidegger calls “privative modification” of the phenomenon as manifest and leaves it aside.43 Insofar as it is formally related to the phenomenon44 as manifest, Heidegger decides to leave the how of this appearing aside.45 But on what grounds does this something else, this privative modification appear? What kind of access would we have of it? Is this an other intuition to which we are blind? Appearing always takes us back to aesthesis. Appearing is always related somehow to the aesthesis: Αἲσθησις the sheer sensory perception of something, is ‘true’ in the Greek sense, and indeed more primordially than the λόγος which we have been discussing. Just as seeing aims at colours, any αἲσθησις aims at its ἲδια [the same/​what is seen in private] (those entities which are genuinely

42 Ibid. 43 Ironnically enough, just as we did with Kant, we stumble again into the issue of modality, mode, trope. 44 This formal relation is of course the temporal unfolding of Being as the thing itself. 45 One might think of Macbeth’s illusory dagger. This illusory dagger (semblance) is founded on something that manifests itself  –​let us carefully use the word ‘cause’ here as a set of conditions –​by referring to something (ie psychological distress) which is not itself (distress) in that it refers to something else (“heat-​oppressed brain”) which in turn does not show itself in itself (but like the feeling of holding an actual dagger). In the A.R. Braunmuller edition of the Shakespearean play, there is an interesting quote about how this soliloquy was enacted and performed for Parisian audiences. Interestingly, this private phenomenon had to turn into a “semi-​private performance of the dagger-​scene as ‘une espèce de pantomime tragique’ (Hedgcock 65).” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Cambridge: cup, 1997), 63). As with Mallarmé’s Mimique, we can never really enjoy an absolutely privative phenomenon, there must always be a passage even for a “pantomime tragique.” Heidegger’s absolutely ἲδιον sense makes no(n) sense as we shall see.

298 Chapter 7 accessible only through it and for it); and to that extent this perception is always true.46 If any αἲσθησις aims at its ἲδια and is always true, and if “the entities of which one is talking must be taken out of their hiddenness; one must let them be seen as unhidden (ἀληθές [true]),”47 how can the ‘be seen as unhidden’ take place and time between beings with different aestheses which would allow us to talk about the privative and non-​privative (public)? This same question appears in Heidegger’s translation of the Anaximander fragment. While time orders what is going to be revealed and concealed, those aspects of being which will pass into appearing or appearance, the distinctness of beings, that is, their contours are analogized with a passing from night to day: Appearance means emerging entrance into contours; this entrance-​into is supposed to be out of order. Whence steps that which enters into contours? Out of a lack of contours. What holds itself in apparentness persists in contours over and against contourlessness. … Seen this way, what then is disappearance? Let us remain within the basic experience of the Greeks! When day gives way to night and darkness falls over things, then contours and delineated colours disappear, the limits of things become indistinct and fade away, things lose their substantiality and individuality everything is concealed in the gaping void (χάος) of darkness.48 Heidegger’s translation is compelling. This eye-​paradigm of knowledge has been the predominant interpretation to the point of becoming a burlesque spectacle, a fulfilling temporality for one pair of eyes/​Is. Richard Rorty writes: Dewey sees the metaphor of the Eye of the Mind as the result of the prior notion that knowledge must be of the unchangeable: The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light and is seen; … A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome. (The Quest for Certainty [New  York,  1960], p. 23).49

46 Heidegger, bt, 57. 47 Ibid., 56. 48 Heidegger, Beginning, 20. 49 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: pup, 1979), 23.

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The primacy of the objectifying gaze is not a necessity, and not even a historical necessity. Rather, a follow created by Plato and Aristotle perpetuated and re-​ fall-​owed in the West. Another translation of Anaximander’s fragment could easily get us closer to Heraclitus’ nose50 as the sense which marks the contours of beings as a difference of aesthesis. What Heidegger did notice, but decided to ignore, is the kind of access that allows fallowing of Being for beings. There is no logos to give philosophical primacy to the logos of vision over the logos of touch.51 Any and all aesthesis aims at its privative sense. It can also be related directly with what Heidegger calls “phenomenal” encounter which is “that which is given and explicable in the way the phenomenon is encountered.”52 Nietzsche describes the privative encounter as idiotic.53 The absolutely private is an idiot, or better, appears as idiot to the public –​just like having an absolutely private language.54 It is always about a private property, a pro-​perty, a pro-​fessional keeping a-​part from the Other. Any aesthesis for the envisioned is not the same as this aesthesis for the blind. There is nothing that it is like to see yellow for the blind as it is for the envisioned. If a blind person were to give us a story of what they see “what would a journal of the blind be like?”55 The given for the one is not the same as the given for the other and thus there is a difference in what counts as phenomena irrespective of the temporal unfolding of the 50 Heraclitus, dk37:  “If everything were turned to smoke, the nose would be the seat of judgment.” Le sommelier, an otherwise blind scientist, is an apt proof for that. While this requires an effort, the difference of skill between the drunkard and the sommelier, to use Ravaisson’s example, makes the aesthetic, as the difference in aesthesis the seat, or better yet, the throne of judgement. 51 In his later works Heidegger tries to reveal an essential link between the hand and the logos –​both in What Is Called Thinking and in Parmenides (Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. F.  D. Wieck and J.  G. Gray (New  York:  Harper and Row, 1968); hereafter, Thinking; Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN: iup, 1992). Resisting the logic of vision, “the essential correlation of the hand and the word as the essential distinguishing mark of man is revealed in the fact that the hand indicates and by indicating discloses what was concealed, and thereby marks off, and while marking off forms the indicating marks into formations” (1992, 84). This turn, as we saw in the previous chapter, takes us closer to another way of thinking but it is still within the contours of Being, in this case the being of the hand. Logos is freed from a signifying voice but it is cuffed in one particular part of the body, the hand. Even in his Contributions, the question is always a question of be-​ing –​thinking as quest(ion)ing with Being cannot escape nominalism, the particular, and the proper. 52 Heidegger, bt, 61. 53 Nietzsche, Anti-​Christ, 27. 54 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 88. 55 Derrida, Memoirs, 33.

300 Chapter 7 phenomenon  –​a temporal unfolding which could be founding these givennesses. It is always about what is given and taken, an exchange. Universally, with respect to the given, we are still blind, no light piercing through. We need to bring the blind closer and bridge the distance of sight, the distance to which the eye/​I extends. We need a blind touch. Could we, at least, come to ask the blind directly, donner la parole, and see whether darkness can be pierced by light? Maybe the eyes/​Is can be re-​versed and darkness be Peirced? 3

Peirce’s In-​decision and Phaneron56

In this meditation we have been writing  –​in the colloquial sense, pencil-​ writing and then computer-​typing. Writing is not a dialogue with the Other, even if the Other is taken to be present as another within oneself –​we saw this earlier with Plato. We cannot engage in dialogue with the Other through writing no less with the blind. We cannot ask the Other, in this case the blind, about their ‘blind’ intuitions directly. What we could do, here in writing, is to attempt to approximate the Other by questioning the universally given with respect to the eye/​I. To take up the thread of our previous analysis, if there is such a given which is given universally and necessary, then what is given in its givenness must be able to be given to all to whom it can be given –​the blind included. The a priori given is either the object, that which is objectively given irrespective of differences, meaning, or the gift as Charles Sanders Peirce wrote. We shall start with the objectively given. The objectively given shall be able to recur to everyone who wishes to repeat the observation of what is given. Their report of what is given must be the same as anyone else’s. This is Peirce’s critical starting point. “Indeed, he [anyone] must actually repeat my observations for himself, or else I shall more utterly fail to convey my meaning than if I were to discourse of effects of chromatic decoration to a man congenitally blind.”57 This decided (non)decision allows Peirce to look for and look after rather than look at the phenomenon as “the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.”58 If we ask to 56

This path has been worked slightly differently; cf Iraklis Ioannidis, “The Other Side of Peirce’s Phaneroscopy:  Analogising Phaneron Without ‘Being’,” Sophia Philosophical Review, 12, 2 (2019), 74-​101. A special note to Professor Alexander Gungov who allowed us to reprint it for our quest here. 57 Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 74–​5; hereafter, Writings.. 58 Ibid., 75.

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whose mind this presence is taking place, where and when, Peirce says “I reply that I leave these questions unanswered, never having entertained a doubt that those features of the phaneron that I have found in my mind are present at all times and to all minds.”59 This universality, this ‘phaneron’ makes no claim for the kind of being for whom (such) presence (it) is; be they blind or of different ethnicity, sex(uality), age et cetera. Peirce will describe what is present objectively through the φανερόν (phaneron). First, we have to dispense of the definite article. Phaneron is indefinite with respect to whom ‘it’ is present. Phaneron disregards our differences; physiological, psychological or historical.60 One might say that presence is so stretched to the point of being practically an absence since nothing could be found universally to be presenced among so diverse a number of beings. This is precisely the question that André De Tienne poses in his analysis of phaneron.61 Such an objection, however, reveals that we try to analogize phaneron with “phenomenon” of classical phenomenology, a privative phenomenon, an idiosyncratically lived phenomenon; or with “idea” or “representation” of post-​Kantian philosophies. But Peirce does not talk about a presence of, that which is present, or an object of intuition, but presence to any mind whatever. For Peirce, there is no talk of intentionality; no talk of of or about.62 These are ways of using the old notion of “idea” (eidos) and Peirce thinks that idea is way too narrow a concept to impart the features of phaneron. Phaneron is not bound physiologically, psychologically or historically. The features of phaneron “are perfectly familiar to everybody.”63 One could say they are phanera themselves. Phaneroscopy, the science of phaneron, “scrutinizes the direct appearances, and endeavours to combine minute accuracy with the broadest possible explanation.”64 The question now is how we are to achieve the objectivity (of the features) of phaneron which is familiar to everybody –​including the blind.

59 Peirce, Writings., 141. 60 The historical can be understood spatio-​temporally. For instance, a pencil and a cassette next to each other could be construed for some as an index of how to reel back the cassette tape when it had been “chewed” by a boombox. Now, since cassettes and boomboxes are longer in use, some people might not be able to understand what is present as an index. Phaneron must be phaneron-​obvious phenomenon to all, a priori. 61 André De Tienne, “Is Phaneroscopy as a Pre-​Semiotic Science Possible?,” Semiotiche, 2, 30 (2004), 1; hereafter, Phaneroscopy. 62 An interesting semantic trajectory coming from the modern usages of phaneron is that it is still objectless. One can say in Modern Greek ‘is/​einai phaneron’ meaning ‘is obvious’ not ‘it is obvious.’ 63 Peirce, Writings, 142. 64 Ibid., 75.

302 Chapter 7 Most thinkers who reflect on Peirce’s writings start through Peirce’s hierarchy of sciences. In this hierarchy, mathematics is placed as the foundation giving its principles to Phaneroscopy. While this way of approaching phaneron has its merits, there are disclaimers that Peirce presents that makes it difficult to follow the hierarchy unquestionably. First, This classification, which aims to base itself on the principal affinities of the objects classified, is concerned not with all possible sciences, nor with so many branches of knowledge, but with sciences in their present condition, as so many businesses of groups of living men. It borrows its idea from Comte’s classification; namely, the idea that one science depends upon another for fundamental principles, but does not furnish such principles to that other.65 This hierarchy could not be taken as foundational precisely because it reflects the present condition, that is, the time of Peirce’s writing. If it were to be taken as foundational and immutable, such a decision would clash with Peirce’s strong adherence to the principle of fallibility according to which no established and eternal truths exist. For Peirce everything evolves, there is synechism in the world and, thus, such a hierarchy cannot be taken as absolutely foundational –​it has pragmatic rather than ontological value. Second, the sciences at the time, and to a critical extent today, are not carried out irrespective of one’s self-​preservation. To occupy oneself with the investigation of truth “for some ulterior purpose, such as to make money, or to amend his life, or to benefit his fellows, he may be ever so much better than a scientific man.”66 Here Peirce’s worries parallel those of Plato and Nietzsche with respect to the professionalization of the sciences. To what extent can philosophy be a business for making a living without itself being compromised by that end? “Relatively,” says Peirce, “knowledge even of a purely scientific kind has a money value.”67 Finally, the third reason concerns the idea about whether a foundational science can provide its principles to other sciences without itself being dependent on the other sciences for its own. Now, this is an idea borrowed from Comte. Again, it is an idea and not a fact nor an established, no less an absolute truth –​maybe an axiomatic principle but not an absolute truth. But is the idea a proper fit for phaneron? 65 66 67

cp i.180; emphases added. cp i.45. cp i.120.

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The role of an idea is impertinent for an investigation of phaneron. Peirce writes: English philosophers have quite commonly used the word idea in a sense approaching to that which I give to phaneron. But in various ways they have restricted the meaning of it too much to cover my conception (if conception it can be called), besides giving a psychological connotation to their word which I am careful to exclude. The fact that they have the habit of saying that “there is no such idea” as this or that, in the very same breath in which they definitely describe the phaneron in question, renders their term fatally inapt for my purpose.68 To say “there is” or “there is not” is a habit. For Peirce ‘Being,’ feels an empty conception.69 Thinking or conceiving is an act. Thinking is carried out through signs and signs are tools we use in order to do something. The habit of saying is an extension of a habit of doing. This is not just a Humean reiteration that thinking relies on a customary association of ideas. This thesis is much stronger. It is akin to Nietzsche’s thesis that thought is nothing more or less than habits or addictions of doing or making things. Does this mean that mathematical reasoning is also such a habitual thinking? To explore this question we shall go back to the hierarchy and to mathematics. With few exceptions,70 philosophers think that mathematics is considered as the foundation of all sciences by Peirce. “Peirce’s classification of the sciences stipulates that mathematics is the most fundamental of all sciences for the reason that it is the only one that is completely groundless, unsupported by any other science, and independent of worldly experience.”71 Indeed, Peirce writes that mathematics is a rigorous science, consistent thus groundless. But this groundlessness is also irresponsibility. The groundlessness and independence is not some ultra transcendental form of the book of the universe. “Mathematics studies what is and what is not logically possible, without making itself responsible for its actual existence.72 It is a tool in the sense 68 69 70

71 72

cp i.285. cp i.548. Cf Peter Skagestad, “Peirce’s Semeiotic Model of the Mind,” The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misak (Cambridge: cup, 2006); 241–​256; hereafter, Model; and Sandra Rosenthal, “Peirce’s Pragmatic Account of Perception:  Issues and Implications,” The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misak (Cambridge: cupress, 2006), 193–​213; hereafter, Perception. De Tienne, Phaneroscopy, 1. cp i.184.

304 Chapter 7 that “mathematical reasoning is a logica utens which it develops for itself, and has no need of an appeal to a logica docens.”73 Mathematics is not a “closed book” as some “family of minds” take it to be.74 It is very rigorous and consistent because it is utterly ideal. The principles of mathematics are not to be deliberated. Once set, everything follows from them objectively irrespective of idiosyncrasies. Mathematical thinking is a train of thought. But so is man’s reasoning overall, “a train of thought.”75 Once the tracks are set, it goes by itself, like a train. But how are these tracks, these principles set? Are the principles phaneron? Who sets them? Are they objectively given? And who/​what drives this train of thought? To look for an answer to these questions let us go back to the beginning. Peirce himself writes that his whole work is but a mathematical treatise; it follows rigorously from some basic axioms. But when it comes to these axioms: My book will have no instruction to impart to anybody. Like a mathematical treatise, it will suggest certain ideas and certain reasons for holding them true; but then, if you accept them, it must be because you like my reasons, and the responsibility lies with you.76 The responsibility lies with us. We can either decide to follow them or not –​ like in the nomothetes we encountered in Cratylus. And this is also the case for any mathematical reasoning. Peirce seems to be following Berkeley and Erasmus in that, when it comes to formulating axiomatic principles, there is no transcendentality involved but just responsibility:77

73 74 75 76 77

cp i.417. cp i. 570. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings: 1867–​1893, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian J.  W. Kloesel (Bloomington, IN:  iup, 1992), 54; hereafter, just ep. cp i.11. … or is it folly? For Desiderius Erasmus only folly can approximate to this thinking when it comes to arithmetic mathematics. Mathematics just like sciences “crept into the world with other the [sic] pests of mankind, from the same head from whence all other mischiefs spring” (Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1913), 63). Berkeley’s admonition, however, is closer to Peirce. Mathematics though producing statements with rare clarity and consistency according to its own rules and principles, and though “their way of deduction from those principles clear and incontestable … there may be certain erroneous maxims of greater extent than the object of Mathematics, and for that reason not expressly mentioned, though tacitly supposed, throughout the whole progress of that science” (Berkeley, Works, 324; emphases added).

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But of late mathematicians have fully agreed that the axioms of geometry (as they are wrongly called) are not by any means evidently true. Euclid, be it observed, never pretended they were evident; he does not reckon them among his κοιναί ἔννoιαι [common concepts/​concerns], or things everybody knows, but among the αἰτήματα postulates, or things the author must beg you to admit, because he is unable to prove them78. There seems little room to think phaneron according to arithmetic mathematics or the hierarchy. But before listing another possible objection to Peirce’s mathematics, let us scope, observe carefully, what this passage suggests. Those things that the author must beg you to admit reveal an ontology which is distinct from that of the common things. As we saw earlier, there are two ‘ontologies,’ the apophantic and the apophatic (the imperative). Peirce acknowledges that which Aristotle did not question; there is decision on whether one wants to admit to something or not. Responsibility precedes action. Yet, the most important reason for which Peirce cannot accept traditional mathematics as a foundation for analyzing phaneron is his attitude to the pnc and the principle of excluded middle that is derived from it. In the formula 1+1=2 the relations ‘+’ and ‘=’ both partake and do not partake in the result of ‘2.’ There are three relations that are not accounted for but are responsible for this truth: unity, equity/​equation, addition/​prosthesis. Ideally, this formula can be taken as fact. It is a fact that if you accept the axiomatic principles then, necessarily, you will end up with this formula. But in everyday experience, such a fact cannot take place. Nothing can be given in the world to compel us to admit that this formula is a fact. We are responsible for making this happen. Setting the principles of science is an event. And for Peirce, as Sandra Rosenthal aptly put it, “the independently real as a continuum of events is precisely that to which neither the law of noncontradiction nor the law of excluded middle is perfectly applicable.”79 A  phaneroscopist “will be sure sooner or later to become entangled in a quarrel with the principle of excluded middle.”80 78 cp i.130. 79 Rosenthal, Perception, 205. It is thus very difficult to follow Houser’s and Bellucci’s conclusion that there is an isomorphism between experience and arithmetic mathematics (Nathan Houser, “La structure formelle de l’ expérience selon Peirce,” Études Phénoménologiques (1989):  77–​ 11; Francesco Bellucci, “Peirce on Phaneroscopical Analysis,” Journal Phänomelogie (2015): 56–​72. We could conclude that experience actualizes a mathematical structure with the proviso that we are responsible for this actualization. As Husserl admits in the Ideas I if we had not learnt to count in (particular) numbers, it is highly unlikely that the world would reveal itself arithmetically. 80 cp i.434.

306 Chapter 7 Mathematical reasoning in the modern sense excludes the middle. We, as phaneroscopists, shall quarrel with it, and with logical entailment, we shall quarrel with such mathematics. Perhaps, Peirce’s mathematics can be conceived as rigorous and consistent reasoning in another sense. Nearly all Peirce scholars talk about the primacy of Peirce’s logical reasoning and they point to his logical analysis as looking at the laws or structures according to which inferences are made.81 The kinds of reasoning that Peirce talks about are classical deduction, induction, and abduction. While being critical of the Greek Aristotelian logic in the sense of syllogistic inferences, Peirce did acknowledge the role of Analogy as a combination of induction and retroduction. But these kinds of reasoning rely on a “habit-​taking faculty.”82 They are “inferential habits.”83 “There are still other operations of the mind to which the name “reasoning” is especially appropriate, although it is not the prevailing habit of speech to call them so.”84 Maybe this other sense of mathematical reasoning which could be the foundation of phaneroscopy implies operations of the mind for which we do not have the prevailing habit of speech. In this sense, mathematical reasoning might be consistency and rigorousness as responsibility and justice. Let mathematics be in the ancient habit of semeiosis, that is, of mathesis, that is learning. If we disentangle mathematical reasoning from arithmetic, from numbers, which are our creation, then mathesis, that is learning, will be animated by our desire as “the true scientific Eros.”85 Eros is not love, but what precedes the materialized/​realized questioning. Peirce calls it the first principle of reason: desire to learn.86 The desire to learn starts with questioning. This is authentic mathesis/​ mathematical reasoning. Untainted by any authorities this eros/​ἔρως takes its authentic meaning of a continuous rhythm of questioning (ἔρώ-​τησις) which is not arhythmetic. Mathesis questions the rhythm of life. Numbers are a system with a determinate rhythm asynchronous to life:

81

82 83 84 85 86

As Joseph Ransdell carefully observes, what we refer to today as logic would be classified as logic in the narrow sense in Peirce. The broad sense would be reasoning including logos as analogized in this journal (Joseph Ransdell, “Is Peirce a Phenomenologist?” in http://​ www.iupui.edu/​~arisbe/​menu/​library/​aboutcsp/​ransdell/​PHENOM.HTM (1989); hereafter, Phenomenologist). cp i.351. cp ii.64. cp i.608. cp i.620. cp i.135.

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Numbers are merely a system of names devised by men for the purpose of counting. It is a matter of real fact to say that in a certain room there are two persons. It is a matter of fact to say that each person has two eyes. It is a matter of fact to say that there are four eyes in the room. But to say that if there are two persons and each person has two eyes there will be four eyes is not a statement of fact, but a statement about the system of numbers which is our own creation.87 This creation is a technology based on a logica utens. But this technology belies a “science of the eye.”88 Mathematical reasoning as reasoning with numbers is, as all thinking, notational; it is a system of names, signs, revealing a tool requiring eyes and hands in order to. Mathematical reasoning with numbers, like algebra and geometry, is indeed a powerful instrument –​one could even say magical. As Skagestad mentions, Peirce has shown how “the specific material quality of a sign enables the precise kind of reasoning it makes possible.”89 Any instrument, any tool requires a particular manipulation. But this particularity is not consistent with the generality of phaneron. If mathematics is first foundational, then it cannot be the kind of mathematics which is restricted to numbers with a particular aim. The aim must be universal. Reasoning is an “uncommon gift,”90 “something that can never have been completely embodied.”91 The mathematics of Peirce are a mathematics of responsibility and justice. This mathematical reasoning comes to be just as ethics (is). There is almost an exact parallelism between them. They bear the same logic; they are homo-​logous, analogous to each other, each being the counterpart to the Other; two sides of one shield. Neither symphonious nor equal, nor identical, but the same in sense, in common, synchronous. The “ideals of good logic are truly of the same general nature as ideals of fine conduct.”92 Almost exact parallelism –​one with, alongside the other, on the same path. Therefore, let mathematical reasoning be foundational not as applying numbers to life to calculate it, but by applying the responsibility and justice that they presuppose as rigour and consistency to make sense of it. Hence,

87 cp i.149. 88 cp i.34. 89 Skagestad, Model, 252. 90 cp i. 657. 91 cp i. 614. 92 cp i. 333.

308 Chapter 7 [i]‌f there are really any such necessary characteristics of mathematical hypotheses as I have just declared in advance that we shall find that there [are], this necessity must spring from some truth so broad as to hold not only for the universe we know but for every world that poet could create. And this truth like every truth must come to us by the way of experience.93 After all is said and done, “nothing is truer than true poetry.”94 The poet is a rhythmic mathematician rather than an arythmetic one. Peirce talks about mathematics without numbers: “The common definition, among such people as ordinary schoolmasters, still is that mathematics is the science of quantity. As this is inevitably understood in English, it seems to be a misunderstanding of a definition which may be very old.”95 Mathematical reasoning is rhythmic, it is just about universal life and experience. Peirce appears as the first bio-​ logist –​with the concept of bios explored in the first steps of this journey. So, let us go by way of experience. So far, we have seen that we could not rely or re-​lie on the traditional mathematical reasoning to approach the universality of the givenness; those elements which Pierce takes to make up phaneron and which are present to everyone with no exception. Objectivity is justice, as Nietzsche claims during the same period in an untimely manner: something common to all. This objectivity is not an object thought nominalistically. It is universal in the sense of being reported by all, by being uni-​versed. There is always some previous private habit, private thought, some ex-​ception which might derail us from the uni-​verse for which we are looking. The rigorousness that we need is the responsibility in being just to all. Therefore, we cannot any longer rely on the hierarchy of knowledge as the “present condition of the sciences.” With the utmost rigour, we cannot rely on any hierarchy because any such classification compromises justice, a just classification (ac)cording (to) all –​in all senses of according. Therefore, we need another passage to Phaneroscopy, an other Peircian passage to follow: The student’s great effort is not to be influenced by any tradition, any authority, any reasons for supposing that such and such ought to be the facts, or any fancies of any kind, and to confine himself to honest, single minded observation of the appearances. The reader, upon his side, must 93 94 95

cp i.417. cp i.315. cp iv. 231.

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repeat the author’s observations for himself, and decide from his own observations whether the author’s account of the appearances is correct or not.96 At this point, Peirce sounds as if he is proposing some kind of Cartesian or Husserlian reduction. Peirce says “every reader can control the accuracy of what I  am going to say about them.”97 Ransdell who identifies Peirce as a kind of phenomenologist argues that we cannot consider Peirce inviting us to a reduction because reduction implies doubting and for Peirce that is sham reasoning. Peirce did not dismiss doubt and skepticism. His problem with the reduction of Cartesian and Husserlian phenomenology is its negativity and violence against existence. Starting with experience, or rather, life, is pure positivity. Why doubt this? We do not have to seclude, isolate, and reduce ourselves in order to do justice to the phenomena. Rather than a reduction, Peirce invites us to directly engage with the appearances:  to be honest with what we are observing, scoping with care, carefully. What we scope, we report. As Randsell reports, with Peirce, such scientific inquiry does not refer to “any special type of property of the subject-​ matter of the science … or by reference to some special “scientific method” (in the sense in which that would usually be understood), but rather by reference to the communicational relationships of its practitioners, considered as members of a potentially infinite community of shared cognitive concern.”98 The mathematics of science in Peirce is looking for and reporting, logging bios, a bio-​logicis: justly and responsibly. And the reporting is engaging in communication with Others. Let us scope Peirce’s report then. Peirce starts with an analogy to chemistry and what counts as the most fundamental elements in this science. De Tienne advises to “bear in mind the importance of the chemical analogy, which explains why Peirce was for a while tempted to call his new science by the name of “phanerochemy.” It was with the eyes of the trained chemist and mathematician that he wanted to observe the phaneron.”99 We have seen how the eyes cannot be taken as the logic of vision or the spectacle theory of knowledge for Pierce –​this is the case for the pragmatists as we show earlier with Rorty and Dewey. We shall question it again later. For the moment, let us lift

96 cp i. 286. 97 cp i.286–​7. 98 Ransdell, Phenomenologist, 6. 99 De Tienne, Phaneroscopist, 13.

310 Chapter 7 the punctuation100 of De Tienne’s quotation and see how Peirce’s writing f(ol) lows: Why do I seem to see my reader draw back? Does he fear to be compromised by my bias, due to preconceived views? Oh, very well; yes, I  do bring some convictions to the inquiry. But let us begin by subjecting these to criticism, postponing actual observation until all preconceptions are disposed of, one way or the other.101 Peirce never denies that we all have presuppositions and that there is no objective presuppositionless way of knowing or doing science. The only thing that allows us to pursue the authentically scientific reasoning is by questioning those presuppositions and preconceptions  –​even those that we are accustomed to think or have been brought up to believe that are definitely true, like 1+1=2, or, to use his favorite example, that 2x2=4. So how can we account for the importance of this analogy? Does Peirce talk in random? I fear I may be producing the impression of talking at random. It is that I wish the reader to “catch on” to my conception, my point of view; and just as one cannot make a man see that a thing is red, or is beautiful, or is touching, by describing redness, beauty, or pathos, but can only point to something else that is red, beautiful, or pathetic, and say, “Look here too for something like that there,” so if the reader has not been in the habit of conceiving ideas as I conceive them, I can only cast a sort of dragnet into his experience and hope that it may fish up some instance in which he shall have had a similar conception.102 By casting “a sort of dragnet” in order to find a similar conception, an analogy, Peirce questions his habitual ways of thinking. One could even say that for Peirce “habitual” and “thinking” are tautologous. Thinking, that is using signs, consists in habits of use. It is these habits that the questioning disturbs. And

100 There is much to be said about how much Peirce understood the importance of punctuation. To punctuate is to decide where to put a sign, a mark. The principle of continuity and synechism which holds firmly, and which reveals true evolution, is never punctuated in itself. Desire creates classes he tells us; what we think of as natural kinds or classes depends on our punctuation. Even if one were to decide that there are natural classes then they must admit some evolving passage from one into another. 101 cp i. 289–​90. 102 cp i.217.

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this questioning within his writing is not reducing the Other in order to try to find them afterwards in a particular schema of what is supposed to be there according to what he takes it to be the common sense in which he, himself, partakes. The Other is always already there as a question, and the Other questions through Peirce. The Other is there in the form of questioning. The presence of the Other is not felt with the eyes of a chemist or a mathematician in the arithmetic way. The Other becomes a critical blind eye on the self, he is trying to “duplicate himself and observe himself with a critical eye.”103 To allow for phaneron, Peirce (f)allows critically. The constant presence of the blind re-​ presentation attests to that. Peirce attempts (to) the blind who pierces Charles Sanders’ thinking, the envisioned writer. He creates shocks for himself with self-​criticism, he is letting-​speak his Other: Unfortunately, to be cocksure that one is an infallible reasoner is to furnish conclusive evidence either that one does not reason at all, or that one reasons very badly, since that deluded state of mind prevents the constant self-​criticism which is, as we shall see, the very life of reasoning. Congratulations, then, from my heart go out to you, my dear Reader, whom I assume to have a sincere desire to learn, not merely the dicta of common sense, but what good reasoning, scientifically examined, shall prove to be. You are already an unusually good logician.104 The very life of reasoning is constant self-​criticism. To follow and question, to-​ and-​fro, questioning and looking for and looking after reasons for rather than looking at reasons that explain in the modern (common) sense. This is another mathematical reasoning through justice and responsibility in doing justice to the Other through self-​criticism. In the end, “nothing can be more precious to a sincere student than frank and sincere objection.” The scientific spirit is always questioning, “demands reasons” echoing Nietzsche, while “the rest demand faith.”105 Before we proceed, we cannot but allow another observation to be noted. Keeping the rhythm, the flow of questions coming to being, we are compelled to see “family resemblances”106 with some feminist reasoning which “continues to interrogate,”107 to keep questioning itself. Luce Irigaray writes according 1 03 cp i. 626. 104 cp ii.123. 105 Nietzsche, Human, 108. 106 cp i.29. 107 Irigaray Sex, 119.

312 Chapter 7 to her point of view, writing (as) woman, just like Peirce’s writing (as) man of vision. A passage is written and immediately after, another passage comes to pass a question on it as a whole inspired by the Other. The order is not of expropriating the Other. The Other is not grasped and asphyxiated. The Other is not categorized according to what seems evident to oneself. The Other is neither seen nor gazed, not captured by an eye/​I. The Other is not re-​garded. It is the Other who regards the self. The Other is not looked at, the Other is looked for through an extension of (the one of the) self; there is a quest for the Other through questioning oneself. This is an extension of oneself, a quest(ion). The question is an attempt to reach the Other and touch them before falling back to what one will say about the(ir) being that is. It is an effort of resisting oneself in being blind toward the Other. It is a move toward the tempo of the Other, an attempt to touch their course of experience, their tempo.108 An “effort –​for one cannot simply leap outside that discourse –​to situate myself at borders and to move continuously from the inside to the outside.”109 And since the properly Other is missing in writing, it is writing that invites the Other as an interlocutor who questions at the borders.110 As Margaret Whitford notices, in the writings of Irigaray, there is a dual purpose; “she wishes to occupy the position of analyst and analysand simultaneously.”111 Just like Peirce who states and questions in order to verify or question a statement further. The quest starts with what there is according to one’s logic and continues as a dia-​logic, a dialogue through questioning. It is not only finding the universal elements of phaneron. It is to be able to have them versed-​by-​all, uni-​vers-​all-​y. The Other as questioning takes the role of a verification principle in Peirce’s writing. To use Merleau-​ Ponty’s phrase, questioning as we try to reach the Other provides a “second openness”112 to the world. At the same time that it limits my own view of the world; it enlarges it with another possibility –​with extra eyes/​Is. Without quarrelling with the pnc we cannot see how to limit a subjective view is at the same time to enlarge it. If we keep the schema of what the world is, the schema of Being and knowledge, the Other fallows my limited schema to allow for an 108 When Husserl decides to set Phenomenology as the Critique of Knowledge, the possibility of the knowledge of the possibility of knowledge, it is the Other as deaf and blind who comes to help him –​the possibility of knowing how music is possible requires silence just like the seeing as knowing needs blindness (Husserl, Idea, 30; 46). 109 Irigaray, Sex, 122. 110 An anastrophe:  “to turn back on our path to question ourselves about where we are already situated” (Irigaray, Speak, 7). 111 Margaret Whitford, “Luce Irigaray and the Female:  Imaginary:  Speaking as a Woman,” Radical Philosophy, 3, 8 (1986): 8. 112 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 59.

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enhancement. With only myself, one I, I can only look at what is only for me. With questioning myself, I can extend this looking by looking for the Other, another I. And with the Other present I can look for more and look at more. It is a logos of letting-​tell rather than letting-​be: a dialogue. Now, let us follow Peirce and try to find the a priori elements of phaneron. Peirce sometimes calls them categories and as such Phaneroscopy could be called the “doctrine of categories.”113 For Peirce these consist of three indecomposable elements which he calls firstness, secondness and thirdness. Peirce uses various words to describe these three hypothesized categories. Firstness: feeling, presence, quality, possibility, chance, life. Secondness: (brute) fact, reaction, (brute) force, absolute last, haecceity, existence. Thirdness: thought, law, learning, habit, representation, idea. Peirce also talks about degenerate forms of these elements or categories. Why degenerate? One could say that if these are the universal categories then they should also be found within each individually. Yet that would violate the principle of indecomposability that Peirce uses to characterize them. The degeneracy then must take on a different principle. If we take the principle of synechism and continuity, then the categories, while being indecomposable, must have a way of being connected, that is, there must be a pathway from one category to the other. One will not generate the Other as in a type of hierarchical ordering but one will de-​generate itself as other. Each category departs from its race and its kind and touches the other. Let us keep this hypothesis in reserve and start engaging with Peirce’s report. To begin, we will report on an experiment that we repeated according to his instructions. We put our shoulder against the door. There is a two-​sided consciousness of resistance and effort. This is secondness, the being of actual, brute fact. However, secondness is not the above proposition “The brute fact … .” The proposition about a brute fact, an actual fact of experience as felt, is a representation of it, not a re-​presentation. The medium of representation, a thought about a brute fact, is thirdness. It is the course itself as (having been) felt which is the brute fact, it is what it is, “it just is.”114 The justness, the exactitude of fact is past/​passed as having been felt. This ‘is’ is plural; forces (having been) felt as compulsion. “Force is compulsion; and compulsion is hic et nunc.”115 Thus, secodness is all about tensed presence. Firstness consists of qualities and possibilities of feeling forces. The possibility of coming to presence is always passed through thirdness; the ways to represent the just passed/​ past. Secondness is a junction of forces and and, thus, an event: “The event 1 13 Ransdell, Phenomenologist, 1. 114 cp i.145. 115 cp i.212.

314 Chapter 7 is the existential junction of states (that is, of that which in existence corresponds to a statement about a given subject in representation) whose combination in one subject would violate the logical law of contradiction.”116 Let us scope out these categories further. Richard Atkins has argued that the three Cenopythagorean/​ Kainopythagorean categories (firstness, secondness, and thirdness) do not exhaust the scope of Phaneroscopy. In providing textual evidence from Peirce’s writings he concludes that Phaneroscopy aims also at uncovering a “second set of categories”117 distinct from the Cenopythagorean ones and qualitative in nature. This second set is supposed to explain what the first set has left unaccounted. Apart from the textual evidence, Atkins gives us the example of a perception to motivate this concomitant phaneroscopic programme: the example of perceiving a black phone. But before analyzing this example let us briefly mention that, as Atkins underscores, secondness is a dyadic relation, firstness is a monadic, and thirdness is a triadic relation. The monad is not identity. Identity implies negation, thus secondness. For something to have an identity there must be something else which it is not  –​either particular or universal in the classical sense. Peirce attempts to show that any further or polyadic relations can be built up through dyads or triads. We should not think of thirdness as composed of a dyad and a monad, nor a dyad as two monads. Thirdness makes the connection and involves the elements. It is involution. It is what weaves, what unifies by creating a plexus, what com-​plexes. Thirdness is “a conception of complexity.”118 This observation comes back to verify the fact that arithmetic mathematics is not the kind of reasoning apt for dealing with phaneron since the relations and forces which make the results possible are non-​accountable. It could neither be related exclusively with chemistry as in chemistry there are indecomposable elements whose valency extends the triad.119 Let us go back to Atkins’ example and the perception of a black phone: “When it comes to a feeling of some thing, say, my black phone. First, we 1 16 cp i.494; original emphases. 117 Richard Kenneth Atkins, “Broadening Peirce’s Phaneroscopy: Part One,” The Pluralist, 7, 2 (2012): 13; hereafter, Broadening. 118 cp i. 526. 119 The philosophical importance of the indecomposability of the triad will be inspected later as it is analogous to the possibility of the gift. Donald W.  Mertz has argued that not all logical polyadic relations can be reduced to the triad and, echoing Derrida along another path, they both cast serious doubt on the possibility of the possibility of the gift or the formula ‘A gives B to C’ (Donald W. Mertz, “Peirce: Logic, Categories, and Triads,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 15, 2 (1979): 158–​175.

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have a feeling of my black phone, namely the black itself. Second, we have the brute fact of the black phone. The black phone and I stand in a dyadic relationship of ego and non-​ego.”120 For Atkins qualities like ‘red’ are first. He also insists that “it was precisely among the different colors –​their vividness and the quantities of their qualities –​that Peirce had managed to glimpse the second set of categories.”121 Let us proceed with what Peirce has advised us, that is, that we “must analyze the phaneron by separating the decomposable from the indecomposable elements”122 and question them. Atkins starts the second part of his paper by underscoring the importance of “separating the decomposable from indecomposable elements of the phaneron.”123 The perception of the black phone. This perception of the black phone presupposes vision. Can it be an obvious phenomenon,124 phaneron for the blind? No. For the blind there is not a black phone, for the envisioned there is. To take color sensations as first featuring phaneron would belie a democratic implicature of vision. Atkins’ statement would be true, universal, phaneron, only insofar as one starts with the brute fact of the envisioned; only if the indefinite community of phaneroscopists as community of scientists had eyes like ours. This is not universalizable, nor does it conform to minute accuracy. Peirce gives a great many examples with color sensations. But he is very careful to say that the sensation is not feeling and thus not quality, not firstness. A sensation of blackness is not part of the indecomposable elements of phaneron but supersedes it. Sensation is a combination of feeling (firstness) and medium (organ of perception). “That quality is dependent upon sense is the great error of the conceptualists.”125 Sensations are idiosyncratic because they depend on the particularity of each sensation. Feeling as part of phaneron cannot be a particular sensation, a modality of sense which implies a (prior) classification of sense. “The blind man from birth has no such feelings as red, blue, or any other color; and without any body at all, it is probable we should have no feelings at all.”126 Even if one forgets about the imaginary blind fellow who is always there (and follows) to question (by fallowing) Peirce, the following passage seems defining:

1 20 Atkins, Broadening, 13. 121 Ibid., 14. 122 Ibid., 7. 123 Richard Kenneth Atkins, “Broadening Peirce’s Phaneroscopy: Part Two,” The Pluralist, 8, 1 (2013): 97; hereafter, Broadening Two. 124 cp i.127. 125 cp i.422. 126 cp vii.586.

316 Chapter 7 That mere quality, or suchness, is not in itself an occurrence, as seeing a red object is; it is a mere may-​be. Its only being consists in the fact that there might be such a peculiar, positive, suchness in a phaneron. When I say it is a quality, I do not mean that it “inheres” in [a]‌subject. That is a phaneron peculiar to metaphysical thought, not involved in the sensation itself, and therefore not in the quality of feeling, which is entirely contained, or superseded, in the actual sensation.127 Atkins’ statement that “qualities like red are Firsts”128 becomes true only if the standard of the analysis is the principle of the majority. We could call redness a phenomenon in the classical sense but not an indecomposable element of phaneron. Christopher Hookway, for instance, appreciates that color perception is not universalizable nor does it conform to minute accuracy. “Unless we think that all inquirers must possess visual apparatus like ours or that they will inevitably encounter creatures that possess such visual apparatus, … colour propositions cannot be true and that their objects are not real.”129 Phaneroscopically there cannot be the black phone, neither black nor phone nor black phone. Phaneroscopically, there is and there is not a black phone on the table. The presuppositions of sensing through vision or through particular parts of the body as organs of perception linked to distinct senses presuppose distinctions that cannot be universalizable not even prima facie. De Tienne 1 27 cp. i.304. 128 Atkins, Broadening, 7; original emphasis. 129 Christopher Hookway, “Truth, Reality, and Convergence,” The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misak (Cambridge: cup, 2006), 131. To be fair, in the second part of his essay, and in a very insightful essay on the role of prescinding and abstracting in phaneroscopic analysis, Atkins acknowledges that we start our inquiry “in the thick of language and laden with presuppositions” (Atkins, Broadening, 107). Our aporia is why Atkins does not question these presuppositions as Peirce constantly does by performing on his observation the required “prescissive abstraction” rather than being entangled in some sort of hypostatization. It is unsurprizing that he concludes that there is a paradox in Peirce about qualities being described (putatively) as both decomposable and indecomposable. Similarly, Hookway, while identifying that truth for Peirce is convergence he never questions how this convergence comes to be. Entangled in nominalism and representationalism he looks instead at true propositions forgetting that propositions are a modality of representation –​thirdness –​and thus neglects that truth as convergence might reside in some sort of communication of feeling. He does appreciate a quote where Peirce talks about it as force that we feel (2006, 141) but as he is working only with propositions he cannot appreciate the quality of truth as feeling. Truth “(if there be any truth) shall be part of the existential fact and not merely of thought” (cp i.489). If he did, as De Tienne does, he would have ended into a paradox of whether the phaneron and its truth needs expression as description or judgment.

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writes that “L’esse du phanéron est son percipi … et le perceptum ne se détache pas du percipiens.”130 Let us combine this Berkeleyan thesis that Peirce follows with the axiom of phaneron being present to any mind whatever. Since there are percipiens with no vision, does it not follow with strict logical entailment that the feeling as firstness, as indecomposable element of phaneron cannot be a color sensation? And if one wants to start with color phenomena would that not be mean that color must be decomposed based on those who do not feel it? In addition, thinking color sensations as first belies a nominalistic habit. Peirce says:  “If we say “The stove is black,” the stove is the substance, from which its blackness has not been differentiated, and the is, while it leaves the substance just as it was seen, explains its confusedness, by the application to it of blackness as a predicate.”131 The perception of the phone as that of the stove already includes the color quality, it is part of the experience. Once again, Peirce seems to be following Berkeley. A substance is the sum total of its qualities. Nominalists (following Aristotle) divide a substance into essential (primary) and accidental (secondary) qualities through some (techno) logical medium. For instance, John Locke132 talked about the microscope. But Berkeley said that what we see through the microscope could still be said to have phenomenal qualities. What would be the difference? The microscope or the telescope do not change the qualities of the percipium, they only enhance the quantity of the quality  –​we still use our eyes. Color is indeed a quality but not a phaneroscopic quality. Color quality refers to the experience of the envisioned. In one sense it is accidental and not essential.133 In another sense, the blind sense, it is neither, it simply is not. What it would be, where it would ‘inhere’ would be in the subjective discourse of a definite, particular group of envisioned scientists of the particular/​particle.134 Or, to create another parallel with Irigaray, a hom(m)osensual exchange. 130 André De Tienne, “Quand l’ apparence (se) fait signe,” Recherches Sémiotiques, 20, 1–​3 (2000): 99 ; hereafter, Signe. 131 cp. i.548. 132 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Hazleton: psup, 2013). 133 cp i.527. 134 This is another instance where Peirce approximates Nietzsche. Our physics he says, “is one way of interpretation, an interpretation driven by sensualism. Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too: this strikes an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and convincing –​ after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear, what is “explained”? Only what can be seen and felt-​every problem has to be pursued to that point (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1966), 22; hereafter, Beyond).

318 Chapter 7 “That quality is dependent upon sense is the great error of the conceptualists.” Let us explore this anew. Quality is not dependent upon sense. De Tienne, for instance, agrees that “le phanéron ne se limite pas à ce qui apparrait à nos sens.”135 But following this, he takes sensations such as pleasure or pain as indecomposable elements, thus feeling. With the thesis that feeling is not limited in sensations Peirce continues: “as for pleasure and pain, which Kant and others have represented to be of the essence of feeling … we certainly do not think that unadulterated feeling”136 …“no feeling could be common to all pleasures and none to all pains.”137 These are theses of hedonism which involve negation and negativity. Pain is explained as privation of pleasure. Feeling, however, is pure positivity. Feeling is not sensations. We can phrase this rather awkwardly, that is, in a novel and non-​habituated way, saying ‘feeling presences qualities;’ and if the domain of reference, the vestibule of presentation is sense, then they come to be sensations. Feelings do not become sensations but they come to be (as) being sensed. Qualities are presented to us through feeling and are not sensation “which is entirely contained, or superseded, in the actual sensation.”138 Qualities “are mere may-​bes, not necessarily realized.”139 Through sensations we can come to “know/​make sense” qualities. That is why Peirce makes the title of his description “Qualities of Feeling” –​“the quality of what we are immediately conscious of.”140 But being felt is not being sensed. Qualities can be realized in ways other than sense. Peirce’s example is telling: I can imagine a consciousness whose whole life, alike when wide awake and when drowsy or dreaming, should consist in nothing at all but a violet color or a stink of rotten cabbage.141 We can also add that we can feel pain in the sense of being heart broken. When one hears from their partner that their relationship is over, nothing is felt in the ear which senses the vibrations of the air. The feeling which overwhelms the body and becomes untranslatable and un-​locatable is not a sensation, it does not involve the functional body immediately. The abysmal pain of heartbreak

1 35 De Tienne, Signe, 98. 136 cp. i. 333. 137 Ibid. 138 Peirce, Writings, 81. 139 Ibid. 140 cp i.343. 141 Peirce, Writings, 81.

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is not a sensation but a quality of feeling.142 Whereas qualities can be realized/​ actualized as sensations, in the broadest possible explanation qualities are realized, they pass from their own mode of being in themselves as possibility –​ firstness –​into a secondness as qualities of feeling for us. Therefore, feelings are “the quality of immediate consciousness,”143 only if they are not interrupted, that is felt, passed into the possibility of being talked about. [f]‌or example, this or that red is a feeling; and it is perfectly conceivable that a being should have that colour for its entire consciousness, throughout a lapse of time, and therefore at every instant of that time. But such a being could never know anything about its own consciousness. It could not think anything that is expressible as a proposition.144 For instance, redness is a possibility for the blind person just as blindness is a possibility for the envisioned –​should their eyes function differently or they wear a blindfold. What is before something being sensed is a possibility of sense, a quality that can be sensed according to the sense for which it becomes a sensation. But to say that red is quality or possibility of sense comes after having being affected with similar ‘red’ or ‘color’ experiences otherwise we could never know anything about it. We could not think anything that is expressible as a proposition. Here we can see how Peirce follows Hegel in a strange costume as he said. A quality of feeling is what it is not. It has to be resisted somehow in order to be able to come into consciousness and thus be talked about. Things may perhaps come into relations with others but they may not. For instance, there is no sense to a congenitally blind person to talk about something being yellow. Color perception is idiosyncratic –​as is being color blind. Firstness is quality, or, better, firstness is all about qualities, pure multiplicity. But these qualities as a mode of being (firstness) are not sensations and attributes. Phenomena phenomenalize themselves with respect and in relation to a plethora of subjects according to their idio-​syncratic being –​the private grasping, the aiming at ἲδιον that we saw we Heidegger. We need always to retain the main thesis of Peirce’s phaneroscopy marking the difference with all other nominalistic philosophies: it “scrutinizes the direct appearances, and endeavors to combine minute accuracy with the broadest possible explanation.”145 142 Like Wittgenstein’s ‘imponderable feeling’ where everything is blurred in the sense of unusual (Wittgenstein, Investigations). 143 Peirce, Writings, 82. 144 cp i.310. 145 Peirce, Writings, 75.

320 Chapter 7 There is never a direct appearance of ‘x’ to a blind person, a deaf person, a person on a wheelchair, a woman, a man, a bourgeois, a farmer or a princess; what there is, is ‘manifold of sense.’ The way Peirce understands the “manifold of sense,”146 is “marvelous and infinite diversity.”147 The manifold for Peirce is what each (hu)man folds based on their idiosyncratic way so as to synthesize a manifold of sense. And this humanifold of sense would also be related to what they desire to do. Rosenthal has an apt phrase to capture this thought: what “enters the structure of human awareness is not an absolute given but a taken.”148 Firstness is plenum, possibility, quality, which when related to a being to which it can relate is then felt in their particular way of being so related. There is no phenomenon of, or phenomenon, or phenomena; these expressions presuppose some kind of thematization or objectification, a particular point of view coming from “the idea of being” –​ nominalism. This leading idea is a regulating idea, a modality of thought thus thirdness. “The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought.” It is not that there are qualities: just Qualities. To talk about qualities of feeling comes after creating some sort of rupture in feeling. We should explore this further and observe how it correlates with Peirce’s statement of the “Manifestation of Firstness:” The idea of First is predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, freedom. The free is that which has not another behind it, determining its actions; but so far as the idea of the negation of another enters, the idea of another enters; and such negative idea must be put in the background, or else we cannot say that the Firstness is predominant. Freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity; and thus the first becomes predominant in the ideas of measureless variety and multiplicity. It is the leading idea of Kant’s “manifold of sense.” But in Kant’s synthetic unity the idea of Thirdness is predominant. It is an attained unity; and would better have been called totality; for that is the one of his categories in which it finds a home. In the idea of being, Firstness is predominant, … in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought.149

1 46 Ibid., 79. 147 Ibid., 66. 148 Rosenthal, Perception, 197. 149 Peirce, Writings, 79; cp i.302.

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Let us read this description closely. Peirce talks about freedom and the “idea of” freedom. The idea or a concept of something includes its having been negated not its opposite-​negative as in modern logic. “To love and to be loved are regarded as the same concept, and not to love is also to be considered as the same concept.”150 We cannot talk about freedom unless there is that which resists it. To talk about freedom as firstness we include the negative, the idea in the background or else we cannot say that the Firstness is predominant. Therefore, absolute firstness is not only unthinkable, but it does not make any sense in any senses. Absolute firstness would be a purely monadic state unrelated to anything else, “a suchness sui generis.”151 If firstness is freedom and no otherness is to be found to negate it, then firstness is no thing in particular, thus everything. That is why freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity. It is pure measureless positivity. An object cannot be firstness as it is contained in a relation with a subject. No unity is in firstness even if it is a determinable concept-​less and schematized appearing as a Kantian intuition. Unity implies otherness as secondness. To give us an idea to which we might approximate absolute firstness Peirce attempts a metaphor: it would be like being in a “confused dream,”152 or a pure quality like a state of feeling in a slumberous condition.153 An absolute firstness then is sense-​less possibility: For as long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have any being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may perhaps come into relation with others.154 Therefore, in talking about freedom, the negation of life, of freshness, is always already implied. Such negation can be taken as reaction, resistance or relation, thus secondness. Not being in any relation is being free. But then Peirce qualifies that and says that it is not in being separated from qualities that Firstness is most predominant, but in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. Because Peirce talks of the manifestation of firstness, firstness can be construed as non-​mediated, that is immediate and uninterrupted. It could be a “manifold” of sense without beginning/​end: Life –​or as we called it earlier biosis. Not a Kantian intuition but a constant intuiting. Peirce again meets Nietzsche when 1 50 cp i.294. 151 cp i.303. 152 cp. i.175. 153 cp. i.303. 154 Peirce, Writings, 76; emphasis added.

322 Chapter 7 he talks about his chaos as multiplicity of forces as “formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations –​another kind of phenomenal world, a kind “unknowable” for us.155 This formless unformulable is not that there is no feeling. Rather, there is no particular feeling. We constantly feel while alive as Berkeley underscored. There is a continuous contact, an uninterrupted course, and that is the course of life: all that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in the present instant. His whole life is in the present. But when he asks what is the content of the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what remains of it is greatly metamorphosed.156 Interestingly, what creates a rupture in presence is the question. The question that enables the beginning of knowledge always comes too late. The question signals both a beginning and an end; the end of an uninterrupted course of presence. This uninterrupted course, this chaotic, formless unformulable feeling is not a phaneric flow or, as De Tienne calls it, “courant phanéronique”157 or “phanéron vécu.”158 That would be imposing a Kantian and Husserlian view on phaneron as some kind of subjectiveness. This peculiar and idiosyncratic flow is firstness composing phaneron not phaneron itself. The only possible way to talk of firstness as lived is to resort to the Husserlian and Heideggerian notion of mineness –​what we called biosis. This is the only way that firstness with respect to each individual person can be approximated with a thin recourse to secondness and thirdness. If the peculiar and idiosyncratic is taken in such a subjective Kantian way, as absolutely private, then that absolutely private could not be analogized with a private property which has a door to public view, but just private, a purely idiotic feeling about which nothing could be said. A being within a private property with no doors, a Leibnizian windowless monad as an ideal limit. It is a case with no frame. For Peirce, first is always in contact with the second and the third since everything is continuous. There is always a door to allow a passing from private to public. There is never absolute private because there is nothing to be said about it.

155 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 307; hereafter, Power. 156 cp i.306. 157 De Tienne, Signe, 121. 158 Ibid., 108.

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Second, not only can we not talk of feeling per se but, also, we cannot feel feeling in its entirety; just but qualities of feeling. This is important because Peirce avoids talking about a genesis of feeling. From our previous quotation: It is not in being separated from qualities that Firstness is most predominant, but in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought. Logically speaking, since the issue is not being separated from qualities, then feeling, as course of life can be a relation without the dominance of relata. We can use De Tienne’s expression of “le flux de la manifestation”159 as an ideal limit of nothing becoming manifested, singled out or taking (pre)dominance. If that is exact, feeling is a constant acting upon one another without either of the relata becoming (pre)dominant. It echoes the always already being-​with of Heidegger but it diverges from it since the non-​predominance would be a result of forces as harmony and fragmentation and not some ontological bond with something transcendental. To make this observation clearer let us follow Peirce’s door. This experiment is conducted in two ways. First, opening a door with a hand, and then with a shoulder. Why the change? This change is important phaneroscopically. Obviously, the hand, the shoulder, the foot, the tongue are all parts of a living body. We could push the door left ajar with any of these parts. The universal is the living body. There is no need to privilege the hand that grasps the knob –​or a particular masculine part of the body which becomes the head of the interpretation. Peirce immediately escapes a possible psychoanalytic charge where his hand is grasping and turning a knob in order to come to his end of opening the door. Knowledge as grasping is overcome and left behind: Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, you put your hand upon the knob to open and enter it. You experience an unseen, silent resistance. You put your shoulder against the door and, gathering your forces, put forth a tremendous effort.160 And also

1 59 De Tienne, Signe, 120. 160 cp i.320.

324 Chapter 7 You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double consciousness.161 Notice ‘in the end’ that hand, fingers are all questioned; no fingering the door, no grasping a knob for a particular end. There is another justice here which is not sexual. By not privileging any part of the body Peirce invites women in the indefinite community of phaneroscopists as scientists.162 Phaneroscopy goes beyond sexual differences, because it is living justice: just shoulder and door. (My/​Our/​Your/​His/​Her/​Any-​body’s) shoulder against the door to open it reveals a “two-​side consciousness”163 of effort and resistance. It does not matter how much the resistance is or how much effort is put. The brute fact is that any-​living-​body found in this experiential setting would have such an experience. Why? Because it is logical. A logic which is not a logic of the hand or a logic of the head –​or the I/​eye. It is a logic of embracing, of hugging, of inviting everyone in dialogue. Peirce has pierced his vision and possibly his sex. We could easily say about Peirce what Derrida says about Lévinas. A “masculine point” of view but “a point of view that goes blindly (with no view) into this place of non-​light.”164 And this non-​light we have called the no ledge of the blind and the feminine that Peirce does not have but requests it. He looks for it with questioning himself as the Other that he is not. The no ledge is knowledge away from any particular being. A different kind of knowledge. Peirce’s philosophy draws together pure science with pure justice both of which are implicated in the human business of coming into communication with the Other, of making sense; meaning/​intersubjectivity.

1 61 cp i.324. 162 There is no particular body implied in Peirce’s thinking. Peirce touches on Simone De Beauvoir’s critique: “there are conditions without which the very fact of existence itself would seem to be impossible. To be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards this world; but nothing requires that this body have this or that particular structure” (Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.  M. Parshley (London:  Jonathan Cape, 1956), 36; hereafter, Second). 163 Peirce, Writings, 76. 164 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emannuel Lévinas, trans. Pascale-​Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: SUPress, 1997), 39; hereafter, Adieu.

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But let’s go back to the door’s opening to a uni-​versal logic. Logically speaking, ‘Shoulder to door’ is analogous to ‘living body to material body,’ and the objective fact, as in just fact, as in what is happening exactly, is what is lived by any kind of living body that forces itself upon a non living body: a two-​sided consciousness of effort and resistance. Atkins is right to end up talking about forces for his second set of categories but these forces are the indecomposable elements of phaneron revealed for all living bodies in secondness. Hence, the firstness is all about forces with the possibility of becoming manifest through communication with other forces.165 What we have to question now is this two-​sidedness. Peirce says that effort and resistance are only two ways of describing the same experience. This experience has come in handy and has been used plenty of times to describe consciousness as two-​sided in classical phenomenology. But can it do justice to all experience without shouldering life? From Husserl all the way to Merleau-​ Ponty there is a hand ‘touching and being touched’ –​with the exception of the quest(ion)ing caress of Sartre.166 For Husserl, the hand touching and being touched, the two-​way directionality of consciousness is instantaneous. There is no interval between the hand touching and the hand being touched. Merleau-​ Ponty changes a bit, displaces as Derrida put it, this Husserlian example. The hand touches passes into a hand being touched depending on the direct(ed) ness of the constituting conscious body, its attention. For Peirce, the two-​sided consciousness seems to lack this passing into since we have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. These are supposed to be two ways of describing the same phenomenon. Let us explore further. Let’s start with the obvious phenomena. It is obvious that the reversibility from effort to resistance requires thought to be represented. While secondness, it requires reversing, and this reversal is a re-​versal which can only be attained by thought as a medium. That means, simply, that we are within the world of representation if we reflect on it. As such, it would be a thirdness in secondness precisely because the forces are being evaluated, reflected upon during 165 One of Peirce’s favorite examples is the inkstand: “There is a blind force about the inkstand by which it crowds its way into our universe in spite of all we can do” (cp viii.153). 166 In his profound analysis of touching and the caress, Derrida left out, or perhaps, left in(-​) tact Sartre’s approach whereby “to touch and to be touched, to feel that one is touching and to feel that one is touched –​these are two species of phenomena which is useless to try to reunite by the term “double sensations.” (Derrida, Touching; Sartre, bn, 304). For Sartre, even in the case of touching myself, I am “curing myself” –​I cannot caress myself, precisely because I cannot reveal myself to myself. The caress which unravels the body and attends to transcend it toward a consciousness which reveals it, can only come from another consciousness.

326 Chapter 7 the act.167 The reversal would be a thought on feeling not the feeling as being felt in the course of its uninterrupted course of action –​its firstness. And it cannot only be secondness since secondness is absolute final. Therefore, if it is in any way singled out it would involve thirdness. But to what extent is this thirdness involved? How far extends its juris-​diction? Does it also mean that the very possibility of feeling the reaction requires some kind of thirdness too? While I am seated calmly in the dark, the lights are suddenly turned on, and at that instant I am conscious, not of a process of change, but yet of something more than can be contained in an instant. I have a sense of a saltus, of there being two sides to that instant. A consciousness of polarity would be a tolerably good phrase to describe what occurs. For will, then, as one of the great types of consciousness, we ought to substitute the polar sense.168 Let us keep the ‘saltus’ in reserve as something more that can be contained in an instant; and that the two sides of an instant cannot be conceived without an invisible third dimension to allow for the connection of the two sides. That is what is meant by polarity. A second experiment: Today, while I was putting my mare into her stable, in the dusk of the evening, I noticed a black streak upon the floor, which I at first took for a shadow. But upon closer inspection (for my eyes are not as good as they once were) I saw that it was a large black snake. I experienced a certain shock strong enough to enable me to perceive what that shock consisted in, namely, in a sense that the snake was there in spite of me. Now, even if I had anticipated seeing the snake, and even if, anticipating it, I had wished to see it, still, when I did come to see it, I should have experienced something of that same sense of being compelled to see it. Such a sense of compulsion, of a struggle between something within and something without, accompanies every experience whatever.169 Peirce is consistent with his descriptions. The two-​sided consciousness, the polar sense, the two sides of the shield, the shock, the compulsion, action-​ reaction, effort-​resistance are all attempts to describe the consistency of secondness. While seated calmly in the dark, when the lights are suddenly turned 1 67 cp i.530. 168 cp i.381. 169 cp ii.22.

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on, there is feeling not only of the new state of affairs in sensing the light but, also, of the change which connects the just passed with what is ‘now.’ If A is the dark and C is the light states of Peirce respectively, there is a saltus, an abrupt transition or a breach of continuity. In the second example, there is initially a black streak which Peirce takes to be a shadow. Rosenthal’s phrasing is again apt. The initial taking does not come to be undifferentiated as a shadow. What is taken, the streak, was within the continuity  –​we could even say of the community here  –​of what is to be expected in a stable in the dusk of the evening. The streak comes to be a shadow. Does this involve a shock? Not according to the text. A shadow is not a force. For it to have been taken as a shadow will only come about after the close inspection and after the shock. What that shock consisted in was in a sense that the snake was there in spite of me. What is there in spite of Peirce is an other existence –​in this case that of a snake. Existence surprises, it shocks, it resists. The shock as secondness is Peirce’s coming into contact with another existence, another force.170 Now, in the first example Peirce is alone and there is no other existence in the proximity to justify this reading. Is there an inconsistency with the example of the saltus? No. We could appreciate existence in the light either as an extended force or think logically how it could be that the lights are suddenly turned on and then we can understand that another existence is manifested there under the principle of continuity –​from afar. Does this passive voice not imply some kind of passed/​past will passing or will to be passing ‘behind’ the lights –​even if we conceived an automatism behind the operation of lighting? Existence is manifested in secondness through shocking resistance upon our determination, our will, our existence. Something compels us by clashing with us, with our course of life. This interpretation aligns well with the experience of the blind who get shocked through their stick and uncover existence: “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: … The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of action.171

1 70 cp i. 328–​9. 171 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology, 166.

328 Chapter 7 It is through shocks and vibrations that the extended touch of the blind, analogous to sight, provides information about what there is. “Secondness, strictly speaking is just when and where it takes place and has no other being.”172 What is, there and then, for whatever living body is just force. Indeterminate, indefinite force that compels, that is, felt as shock, a blind force. The blind intuition is not an object but force. What is left to scope is the saltus, the break itself. If the instant has two sides, the polarity that allows it to be connected to the past and the future to create a junction, then there is a passage not as process of change but of change itself, of difference. Yet for there to be a change, there must be a possibility of change, a firstness. The saltus or the shocking stick is not exactly a middle term but comes to be an allowance of feeling differently. But this difference requires some ‘thing,’ some sort (of being) able to pass from the before and the after in the sense of connecting them together, in re-​membering them, in sorting them as continuous. The saltus is a shock, some kind of disturbance, an interruption –​but just that just. Here Peirce could be anticipating Husserl in the sense that this interruption is a crisis, krisis; a crack in the continuum, a dis-​of the course of one’s activity. The question is whether the very possibility of this interruption requires thirdness. Here lies all the controversy about whether phaneron includes some kind of representation or not; whether some sort of thirdness is involved in enabling, in allowing for the two-​sided consciousness. Since thirdness or thought is also habit one could say with the spiritualists whom Peirce knew well, that only in virtue of a previous habituated sense, some kind of previous inertia, could a crisis, a shock, a breaking of the habit occur. We can call this a phaneroscopic observation from Ravaisson:  “habit remains for a change which is not longer or is not yet.”173 Peirce may agree since consciousness would never be possible without the possibility of representation. What would just secondness be? It would be just pure existence, like constant explosions.174 Let us bring up another example from Peirce about the shock. The long whistle of the approaching locomotive, however disagreeable it may be, has set up in me a certain inertia, so that the sudden lowering of the note meets with a certain resistance. That must be the fact; because if there were no resistance there could be no shock when the change of note occurs. Now this shock is quite unmistakeable. It is more particularly to 1 72 cp i.532. 173 Ravaisson, Habit, 25. 174 cp i.532.

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changes and contrasts of perception that we apply the word “experience.” We experience vicissitudes, especially.175 Experience is difference. The changes and contrasts are the dis-​ings, going off (an inert) course. There is no experience without a shock, or a choc as Nietzsche called (t)his ‘secondness.’176 But this dis-​ing, this rupture, this choc does not seem to be a digital change from zero to one and vice versa. In this example the dis-​ing seems analogical. It is a difference in emphasis that is shocking, out of which the awareness of the approaching locomotive is appreciated. There is what the architects call entasis, a change of quantity within stretched, continuous, habituated quality. This entasis creates an emphasis which shocks, which resists by inflecting the continuity. Without resistance or reaction to the flow of the qualities we could never have a manifold, not even as mood. Moods presuppose some emphasis in the feeling, some folding, some differentiality, some “perversity,”177 to be felt as moods, thus some secondness.This secondness is not a break, or a lack, or some kind of negation. It is surplus, overflow, entasis. We can analogize this perversity with the so-​called ambiguous images. Some people initially perceive one version of the image –​they read it in one way. They perceive the image in a certain way, there is only one course of perception, a continuous seeing as Wittgenstein said. This continuous seeing as perception implies feeling. Now, there is effort put in-​to make that perception switch to perceive an alternative one which is another(’s) course of perception and which switching is at the same time to resist the (one’s) initial course, to dis-​it. And when both have been perceived, there is equally effort/​resistance

1 75 Peirce, Writings, 88. 176 Ciano Aydin and Rosella Fabbrichessi have explored many points of contact, touch-​ points, between Nietzsche and Peirce (see Ciano Aydin, “Beyond Essentialism and Relativism:  Nietzsche and Peirce on Reality,” Cognitio,7 1 (2006):  25–​47, and Rossella Fabbrichesi “The Body of the Community: Peirce, Royce, and Nietzsche,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2009): 1–​10). Let us briefly mention that they are also close in the way they conceive emphasis as a shock/​choc to inertia. Nietzsche called it a reactive force: “The really specific thing in pain is always the protracted shock, the lingering vibrations of a terrifying choc in the cerebral center of the nervous system: –​one does not really suffer from the cause of pain (any sort of injury, for example), but from the protracted disturbance of equilibrium that occurs as a result of the choc;” “One must understand that the same objections can be made to the passions as are made to sickness: nonetheless-​we cannot do without sickness, and even less without the passions. We need the abnormal, we give life a tremendous choc by these great sicknesses” (Nietzsche, Power, 371–​2; 408). 177 cp i.335.

330 Chapter 7 to maintain one over the other. But sticking to one or the other means to have different discourses. With this analogy we can prescind even further. This time through perspectives. From our perspective the effort to see one image differently is at the same time resistance to the previous one. With a bit of help from Wittgenstein we can say that the picture is the same and at the same time different, yet with respect to itself it is identical. “But what is different: my impression? my point of view? –​Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes.”178 But the picture has not altered. But have we? In what sense have we changed? We are still in contact with the ‘same’ physical object. When it comes to what changes we are blind to it. No thing changes. We are surprised by the new as if it were magically changed. We just feel the change as a surprise. The shock here is a surprise; a surprise we feel which cannot come from us but from an Other existence. An existence which could impart to us a different way of relating to things. But this existence is not the picture. It is another’s use of the picture, another’s discourse of the picture, another force which surprises when we come in contact with it. In my use of words, when an ear-​splitting, soul-​bursting locomotive whistle starts, there is a sensation, which ceases when the screech has been going on for any considerable fraction of a minute; and at the instant it stops there is a second sensation. Between them there is a state of feeling.179 Once again, feeling is an uninterrupted course which qualifies (itself) through sensations; sensations which are not caused by something in particular. Rather, they are the manifestations of the inter-​action between Peirce and the driver of the locomotive through various media. That is what the principle of continuity and synechism essentially means. The reaction to another’s determination is sensed by Peirce. The shock felt is a clash with an Other will to power, an Other determining force, a force that puts things/​signs into use for an end; an Other will that determines forces for what it wills. The Other as another force mediated by signs imposes itself, manifests itself in our situation. The Other’s will conflicts with ours as in a duel. Deleuze described it thus:

1 78 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 195. 179 cp i. 332.

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L’action, qu’est-​ce que c’est que l’action ? C’est le duel. L’action implique au moins le rapport entre deux forces : effort-​résistance, action-​réaction, que ces forces soient réparties entre deux personnes, entre une personne et une chose, toutes sortes de combinaisons sont possibles, mais on acceptera –​ très grossièrement –​pour le début de notre analyse, la formule : l’action c’est le duel. Et c’est ça la vraie secondéité.”180 Secondness is a struggle between something within and something without.181 And the struggle is a conflict of forces in their different usage of signs for their ends. The locomotive becomes an unpleasant experience in Peirce’s use of the words. That is, in the way that Peirce represents it –​in all senses. He means it as such. In this sense the driver is mean to him –​to his body, to his ears that split. For the driver the locomotive is used for another reason. He means it differently. The clash and the duel is between forces in their manipulation of signs, between what each one means to do with the signs-​objects they employ. While the clash may not be intentional, that is, directed particularly towards Peirce, it still affects Peirce. One’s actions have universal effects, not particular.182 We could not appreciate the situation as such unless we resist thinking through the distinction of material/​immaterial; once we do, we could see that everything is a sign in Peirce’s use of words. There are no objects as distinct things just signs. No objects but objectives. In this way the contro-​versy regarding whether there is thirdness in secondness revolves around different levels of phaneroscopic analysis, that is, different levels of logical observation. Let’s now turn to thirdness to explore further in what sense secondness comes only after some mediation, some form of thirdness. Overall, thirdness is “the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last.” Peirce does not leave room to talk about thirdness as a particular medium. We cannot say thirdness is this or that. There can only be “Examples of Thirdness” as the title suggests. This mode of being which consists, mind my word if you please, the mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a determinate general character, I call a Thirdness.183 1 80 Deleuze, Webdeleuze, textes 73. 181 cp ii.22. 182 It is a sort of “trespassing” as Arendt describes. “But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations” (Arendt, Condition, 240). 183 Peirce, Writings, 76; original emphasis.

332 Chapter 7 Let us attempt some readings of what thirdness ‘consists.’ Authentic thirdness consists in the judgment, the ‘I think.’ The judgement, the “I think,” is grounded in laws. To think means to apply laws (nomos, νόμος, νομίζω). Α judgment cannot be passed without laws as means that will ground this judgment. These laws are “the means”184 through which secondness will acquire a determinate character. In other words, how that which has been felt will be interpreted, represented. Thirdness is the in-​between of firstness and secondness –​a “conceptual mediation with the intuitively given phenomena with understanding or, respectively, reason.”185 The means are themselves grounded in desire, what one desires –​the pragmatic principle. In the example of the cook who makes an apple pie for a guest, the desire (of being) ‘pleasurable’ is traced through its being represented as cooking a tasty apple pie. The desire is represented through means: the cook-​book, the apples, the cooking appliances and so on. All these ‘things’ are in reality signs that are manipulated for the representation of the force, the desire to be presented pleasurable to the guest. In simple words, to make the guest feel nice –​desires coming into contact, secondness. This is what the cook is meaning to do with the apple pie –​the logos of the cook. No means can be applied without desire. The end indeed justifies the means as the end is a representation of the beginning, the desire, which hides, which is be-​hinding the representation. “Law without force to carry it out would be a court without a sheriff.”186 The cook thinks that in order to give pleasure to a guest an apple pie must be produced. In this sense, every time a cook desires to produce this quality to others, s/​he might go on and make an apple pie. This is one sense in which future facts of Secondness will take on a determinate general character. They grow from the present into the future. Thirdness as law “determines how facts that may be, but all of which never can have happened, shall be characterised.”187 The law does not only predict as a theory, but it commands as well, it governs.188 Unless the cook quests other ways, pleasure for the guest will consist in making an apple pie. What we have to ask is how these laws are set up. How are the means come to be chosen for a judgment? Here we have two options. Peirce acknowledges that tradition is imposed on us as we grow up. We are introduced into ways of doing things and these ways include the manipulation of signs. Thus, we are introduced into a particular way of thinking. This is the very meaning of custom. 1 84 Ibid., 80. 185 Ibid.. 154. 186 cp i.212. 187 Peirce, Writings, 78. 188 cp i.537.

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Thinking is customary doing. We learn how to do/​think things based on the culture to which we belong –​largely construed. The student who learns axiomatic principles resists them says Peirce. They question them. But this resistance is overdetermined by the teachers’ and the parents’ force. Phaneroscopically, we are forced into ways of doing/​thinking. That is meant by being introduced into something. Yet, the question comes after some kind of thought, some kind of habit has been established. Rosenthal writes that “interpretive activity begins at the primordial level of the formation of repeatable content which can activate habits of anticipation.”189 In one sense this true. But the primordial habits are those we learn from Others. We are already within a recipe of doing things, already within a system of meanings, a language-​game. The habits are appreciated as habits only after some rupture, some questioning. This questioning comes when we quest alone. In one sense, secondness cannot take place if there is no thirdness but that does not mean that thirdness causes secondness. Yet, there is another way of introduction. Thoughts “can be produced and grow,”190 in dialogue. For instance, an innovation is a new way of doing something. A new way of thinking about something. Innovations include rearrangement of sign relations. Sometimes this rearrangement might involve creating a new name. Apel uses Peirce’s words to explain this phenomenon in the contemporary scientific community with respect to scientific discoveries. To name something, someone (interpreter) needs to collect, that is, decide which phenomenal qualities (object/​resistance) will be hooked up with a sign (name). The sign as an index, whether new or old, must be meaningfully linked to other things/​signs, it must somehow be involved, interwoven, so that it can supplement the rupture –​created by the interpreter’s embodied presence –​the secondness in the customary community of signs. This process is what Apel calls the baptism protocol.191 But for the intellectual hook up to work it needs to come in dialogue, in communication with others. The new assortment in signs must be communicated. It must be agreed and followed by others. This dialogue does not necessarily need the presence of original resistances to take place; it does not have to rain at the time one is to proliferate the link of ‘rain’ to rain, insofar it can be supplemented with analoga, that is, with a virtual context analogous to the present context of communication which could contribute to its proliferation. That is why a claim to an objective knowledge is a claim about discursivity, a passing on, a tradition. So on the one hand, as Apel explains

1 89 Rosenthal, Perception, 200. 190 Peirce, Writings, 78. 191 Apel, Transcendental, 150.

334 Chapter 7 [T]‌he indexical definition of the extension of the name [to what it actually corresponds in real space and time] must not only contain phrases like “identical in structure” and “causing this visual experience, whatever that structure is,” but it must be supplemented by a picture or a description of the structure of the visual (or, for that matter, nonvisual but sensual) experience, say by a list of qualities (and relations of qualities) that appear to make up the structure of the causally effective entity that is pointed by “this.”192 And then, in order for the ‘name’ to supplement the ‘this’ and be proliferated, it will have to be supplemented in dialogue by analogous qualities and relations of qualities, so that others can come to know what the ‘name’ means –​what is supposed to do. In a Wittgensteinian vein one could say:  The “original baptism” has already to be performed along the lines of a public rule of identifying that can be followed in a sense by the first discoverer as well as by all potential reidentifiers.193 With respect to the original context of the first discoverer we may always remain “cognitive[ly] blind”194 as there will always be “pragmatic difference between intensions and extensions,”195 but we may still have, through analogies, a competence with respect to its meaning. If we decide to follow the protocol it will always be done through analogizing anew. Once again, one can decide not to follow, to resist the effort of the lawgiver, of the nomo/​onoma-​ thetis. In such classical epistemological terms, the Other becomes the principle of verification. With Apel’s account we could reveal altruism effortlessly in epistemic-​ epistemological terms as the path to truth. The world does not really reveal itself to me without you. The world is revealed in a me-​with-​you relation where we all converge, an intersubjective convergence. With Apel, such intersubjective agreement, convergence or consensus, is even more important when we reflect to see whether our epistemological quest, our path to truth, is epistemically on track, according to the standards that we may have tacitly or explicitly accepted. In simple terms, to know the world, I need you and you need me, the 1 92 Ibid., 149. 193 Ibid., 150. 194 Ibid., 147. 195 Ibid., 146.

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world as truth is revealed to a we. It is never a singular ‘I know that.’ It is ‘we know that.’ What it is like to know is a we-​experience, an intersubjective experience. Knowledge is itself an indefinite dialogue as negotiation, a collective deliberation. There is no objective truth without an Other. Truth is a collaborative undertaking; One needs to connect with the Other to-​get-​there, together. However, what if someone were blind to the possibility of truth interpreted as valid judgements set by a particular community? Apel defines truth according to Peirce as the agreement of an “indefinite community of interpretation … as the transcendental subject of valid cognition.”196 Truth comes to be an intersubjective relation manifested in a community “as the dialogue of all rational beings” with the possibility “in principle of coming to consensus about meaning and truth within the frame of the infinite dialogue of the indefinite community of interpretation.”197 A  dialogue not only about truth but about the truth of truth as well. Two questions come immediately to mind: How is this consensus felt? What is its secondness like? Furthermore, an indefinite community cannot be bound by a horizon. What would happen if we extended the community really indefinitely? What would we end up with? Phaneron as meaning as making sense of each other. Understanding each other as well as the understanding of the understanding of each other: meaning. There is absolutely no regress here no matter how high the order of understanding or meaning –​understanding of understanding of … goes back to meaning and understanding. The understanding of meaning is the meaning of understanding: and that is phaneron. If we follow Peirce, the indefinite community means every other; every other matters. Who is this other? Anyone who has the possibility (first, force) to question us (come into relation with, secondness) with their ways of doing things (thirdness). We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word “meaning,” or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind … In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded [in] to conformity to the form to which the man’s mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition

1 96 Apel, Essays, 127. 197 Ibid., 128.

336 Chapter 7 believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.198 Our thoughts are habits. We are always already moulded –​already introduced into a particular existential modality. Phaneron would be meaning as intersubjectivity, as noema, as the creating new moulds, new ways of doing indefinitely. If the force that we are is a questioning force, then we need an other equal force to come in contact with if meaning is to emerge, if it is to be created. And this meaning seems to have the structure of the gift for Peirce. Meaning, communication, intersubjectivity, phaneron are all ways to convey the gift. 198 cp i.343.

­c hapter 8

Pathway Six: Meaning as a Passage from the Other An Unbracketing

The German word sein signifies both “to be there” and “to belong to Him” kafka

…

Got a secret, Can you keep it? Swear this one you’ll save, Better lock it, in your pocket, Taking this one to the grave. If I show you then I know you, Won’t tell what I said, ‘Cause two can keep a secret If one of them is dead the pierces

…

Silence et parole adviennent ensemble dans une complicité essentielle et dans leur relation réciproque nicolas monseu

…

There is something calling me … Everything happens beyond the horizon eugene o’neill

…

But piece by piece, he collected me up, Off the ground, where you abandoned things. Piece by piece he filled the holes that you burned in me. Six years old and you know. He never walks away. He never asks for money. He takes care of me. He loves me. Piece by piece, he restores my faith. That a man can be kind and the father could, stay kelly clarkson

…

As he lay in bed one night thinking of this, and turning and tossing, he sighed heavily, and said to his wife, “What will become of us? We cannot even feed our children; there is nothing left for ourselves.” “I will tell you what, husband,” answered the wife; “we will take the children early in the morning into the forest, where it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our work and leave them alone; brothers grimm (hansel and gretel)

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_009

338 Chapter 8

…

“There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents-​-​oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?” samuel butler

…

Once born, they decide to live and go through death, but more likely they decide to rest, and leave behind them kids so they can as well go through death heraclitus

…

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you (οὐκ ἀφήσω ὑμᾶς ὀρφανούς· ἔρχομαι πρὸς ὑμᾶς)  john1

∵ 1

To-​words and toward Meaning out of Nothing

Meaning has been primarily associated with something other than the Other. Hanfling remarks that the “Cartesian view, that a human being is essentially a mind, has its counterpart in recent writings, where a similar status is given to the brain.”2 This observation is exact. The difference in contemporary philosophical writings is whether the brain (philosophy of mind) or the whole body ([neuro]phenomenology) as organon of meaning produces its meanings. Both modalities of thinking meaning presuppose the in-​itself. Furthermore, in the discourse of meaning intentions, the criterion of achieving meaning has been approached antagonistically. Ultimately, meaning will be realized in a circuit of exchange when a master voice intends a slave audience to act as the masterly

1 Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, trans. Geoffrey Brock, Michael Hofmann (London: Harvil Sercker, 2006); The Pierces, “Secret,” in Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge (New York: Lizard King, 2007); Monseu, Point; O’Neill, Beyond; Kelly Clarkson, “Piece by Piece,” in Piece by Piece (New York: rca, 2015); The Brothers Grimm, Grimms’ Fairytales, trans. Edgar Taylor and Maria Edwardes, (Chicago:  Gutemberg, 1971); Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, (New  York:  E. P. Dutton and Company, 1916); Heraclitus, Apanta; John 14:18. 2 Hanfling, Wittgenstein, 97.

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voice intends through the signs it employs; thus, the slave’s obedience which becomes the enactment of the master’s voice intention, becomes, in turn, the epistemic criterion of verification for the achievement of meaning.3 Some philosophers, like Polanyi,4 show us that understanding meaning through various means of transport and such dialectics become meaning-​less. The metaphors of mechanical containment, capital exchange, and antagonism are inadequate with respect to understanding how meaning comes about. Meaning is an event taking place as a movement whose structure is a from-​to. Meaning is the end, the focal target of a (subjective) synthesis taking place in one’s imagination; a synthesis of subsidiary clues that culminates in a focal target, the meaningful particular, meaning simpliciter. Taking inspiration from stereoscopic image viewing and Gestalt psychology, Polanyi traces this from-​to relation to all types of knowing –​functional, phenomenal and semantic. “The subsidiaries of from-​to knowing bear on a focal target, and whatever a thing bears on may be called its meaning. Thus, the focal target on which they bear is the meaning of the subsidiaries.”5 These subsidiaries are always tacit and idiosyncratic; they make up each person’s personal knowledge which Polanyi calls “indwelling.”6 There is a multiplicity of subjective conditions the synthesis of which can be tacit and unconscious, or it can be rendered a focal target itself; the indwelling can be dwelled upon and thus become a from-​at movement of meaning –​ where the subsidiaries, the personal knowledge, the noetic/​noematic act itself becomes the focal target. This from-​at movement would constitute an explanation, that is, meaning as an integration, an articulation of what we want to do based on what puzzles us. Just as in Husserl where knowledge and meaning come about in taking something in relief out of the lifeworld, similarly, the from-​at movement is a from-​to meaning targeting those subsidiaries which allow from-​to movements. The rules of the synthesis are of course learnt; they constitute a skill, an ability. But ultimately, reminiscent of Kant and Quine, Polanyi would say that we could never fully uncover or specify these rules and subsidiary clues completely. “They are not specifiable … We cannot look at 3 This Hegelian dialectic is evident in the debate between Grice, Strawson and Apel. See H.  P. Grice, “Meaning,” The Philosophical Review, 66, 3 (1957):  377–​388; Grice, Utterer; H.  P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Speech Acts, eds. Peter Cole and Jerry L.  Morgan (New  York:  Academic Press, 1975):  41–​58, Peter F.  Strawson, “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts,” The Philosophical Review, 73, 4 (1964): 439–​460; John Searle, Speech, 1–​15; and Apel Selected. 4 Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning. 5 Ibid, 35. 6 Ibid., 44.

340 Chapter 8 them since we are looking with them.”7 In Peircian terms, this whole account could be an explanation of what a person means (to do). But what about the Sartrean question whereby two people come together with respect to what they mean to do? How is meaning with an Other achieved in this encounter? We shall dwell on the from-​to movement in semantics, that is, in the meaning achieved in language. A word has a meaning, Polanyi tells us, insofar as the imagination traverses the letters of a word and synthesizes them into a particular, a unity. Dwelling on the individual clues paralyzes the meaning of the word; there is no word at all, just haphazard signs. So for instance, if one looks at the letters ‘p,a,s,s,a,g,e’ individually, nothing will come about as the meaning of the word ‘passage’ which requires a synthesis, a movement from these subsidiary clues to the meaningful word ‘passage.’ Mutatis mutandis, the meaning of a phrase or a sentence, a proposition, a paragraph, a text, a book and so on, is a movement whose structure is a ‘from’ of an undetermined determinable set of auxiliary clues into a determined particular end which is the meaning of the synthesis of those clues. In Polanyi’s words, “If we focus our attention on a spoken word and thus see it as a sequence of sounds, the word loses the meaning to which we had attended before.”8 This linear movement of from-​at which is also from a ‘from’ to a ‘to,’ even as a synthesis, takes letters and words as signs which “point not to themselves but to what is not present.”9 If meaning is related to a synthesis of the various elements in order to arrive at the meaning of ‘passage,’ then, there seems to be a predetermined destination, an end. No matter how one treads the path of the signs ‘p,a,s,s,a,g,e,’ the meaning becomes the end of the synthesis of the word ‘passage’ –​unified as word after a particular end. However, when we bring the Other into a meaningful dialogue such subjective accounts seem lacking in meaning. If we attempt to understand a person talking a foreign language, the problem of meaning which in this instance means to understand what they mean, starts not at the moment of not being able to go behind their words or to synthesize the sounds into meaningful words –​and much less uncover the intention with which they use a word. The first thing is to punctuate their words as words out of their being sounds, or better, out of an undifferentiated sounding sequence. In speaking, either in the case of a person who speaks a foreign language or in the case of one’s speaking our mother tongue incoherently or in the speed of light, or with an accent, then, for meaning to emerge the first requirement seems to be to find them 7 Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 61. 8 Ibid., 38. 9 Gadamer, Truth, 146.

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words.10 From the undifferentiated whole of sounds or noise to the this of the thematized part of the whole as a word. Thus, to understand what is said or being said with words, a word must already be finished somehow so we can go back after the elements of the word and synthesize them into a meaningful word. If we want to use the category of synthesis we shall say that meaning does not come about from a synthesis as a linear movement, but by a to-​and-​ fro –​or a schizo-​opening in to and fro simultaneously; (t)here, simultaneously. But the focal target of this synthesis is not a presupposed word but a sounding Other who words. This means that the first condition of meaning is to follow the Other in their vocal paths, under-​stand, what they word. After all, what we do is to follow their punctuation. Heidegger writes that “what we “first” hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-​cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling.”11 In this way, even when “the speech is indistinct or in a foreign language, what we proximally hear is unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone-​data.”12 But how do we hear them unintelligible words? This slang phrasing is philosophically revealing. We cannot hear unintelligible words before we hear them words. For there to be a word, it must be differentiated from other words. It must be guarded, warded from the other words. Spoken words, like breaths, need a stillness in-​between, a bit of apnea for them words to come to be; a little bit of change which is a little bit of nothing, a bit/​beat, a saltus. After all, one needs to catch one’s breath before one speaks words. Words do not come out of a panting voice. There must be a saltus from one word to the other, a leap.13 Some such interval or spacing is required. In speech, this spacing is perceived as breaks of silence. Logos characterizes that silent folding of the breath which becomes a voice (voix) and ultimately a vocal f(ol)low (voie) as a compilation of words and breaks. But just some silence that breaks a voice is not enough to allow for the distinctness of a word. The silence that precedes and follows the phoně must pass into the surrounding sounds which will allow the phoně to be heard as a word.

10

And this is prior-​to-​and-​after the a priori implication of “the “we” –​the “we as a sharing of the idiom” (Blanchot and Derrida, Instant, 35). 11 Heidegger, bt, 207. 12 Ibid., 207. 13 Earlier we mentioned the importance of the shadow for seeing in the light. We said a bit of silence so we can see. Once again, to understand the Other, to make sense, starts with silence.

342 Chapter 8 This spacing is a diastemic relation as Derrida called it.14 With no spacing we will not be able to differentiate a voice from any other sound; otherwise, words, voice, and sound would become psychedelically indistinguishable like Jimmy Hendrix’s wah-​wah guitar pedal. The coming to being of words involves creating differences in the sense of emphasis. This diastemic relation is analogous to what Lévinas calls “retentissement.” As Monseu explains, the unique sound of a word “réside dans la rupture qu’il provoque.”15 This rupture can be read as an emphasis and can indeed be analogised with a scandal, a c-​rime from the o-​rdinary flow of always sensing. And as is the case with all crimes, some perversity is required. The intonation and the so-​called prosodic elements that have been deemed parasitic to meaning are essentially related and, thus, are allowing for such perversity or emphasis to occur. It is in virtue of these ‘parasites,’ this perversity, that a spoken word comes to be. It is a logos that gives emphasis to a phoně (voix) by dividing and decorating it, inflecting it, making it vibrate, and wording it into a speech as a vocal path (voie) in the world. Similarly, in the written text, before any synthesis takes place, before any rule is followed, we have to fall in-​and-​out of the blanks; in-​between these spaces, these cracks of white, flowing in-​between the lines and following their curves, their schemata, while being moderated by the punctuation –​in the colloquial sense. This is what will give us the rhythm for the synthetic movement of the imagination. This diastemic relation allows for emphasis for words to come to be. No meaning can be trans-​mitted, trans-​ported, trans-​lated unless there are blanks and spaces, intervals, margins, in-​and-​out, of which there will be signs, words, texts, books ... . With Plato and Derrida we followed the possibility of meaning to the line –​the gramme. Meaning could be traced to the inflected gramme, the crease, the rhythm of the line as character. Even in calligraphy where there are no blanks between the letters of the word, there must be some silent uninflected line that repeats itself along with the repeated blanks between the words to allow for the emphasis required for a word to emerge. Meaning starts from scribbling a line that can change into something other. Without this change as emphasis, this spacing and this tempo, no rules could be applied. Rule following comes after –​if it ever comes at all.16 Even when

14 Derrida, Margins. 15 Monseu, Point, 90. 16 Hanfling following Wittgenstein makes an even stronger claim that language is not a rule-​based activity at all. Meaning is for him just knowing how most people normally use words (Hanfling, Wittgenstein, 54). This knowing is neither inferential nor theoretical but an embodied skill. To speak is like riding a bicycle or like making coffee. This skill is ultimately a habit or addiction of doing something. Speaking is not like taking a manual and

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the ‘containers’ of meaning are gestures, as Searle proposes,17 we would not be able to wonder where one’s gestures have meaning intentions behind them unless they are first understood as gestures –​the distinctness of the gesture as an analogously repeatable pattern emphasized from the before-​and-​after. For meaning to come about there has to be such rhythm, a diastemic organization of the body with the world where an emphasis is created. This diastemic relation in the language of being is that to which we have been referring generally as punctuation or de-​cision: the enactment of logos as a force which characterizes; breaks-​through, cuts through,18 punctuates the wor(l)d. In Peirce’s terms, a force which quests, undertakes, and sur-​prizes.19 In any case of meaning, it is a path that we are after, that we follow. A path created by the logos of the Other as it words, as it characterizes the world. The tools for this wording, this writing of words are contingent. The physiology of discourse is contingent. One can create aerial writing, a speech by using their lungs, thorax et cetera along with their lips and their tongue. Or, aerial writing could be characterized by the hands in the case of sign language. It is not the material organ that makes words but the logos that makes words by dividing, inflecting its own body. Signs, in whatever form, are characters, inscriptions that trample (on) Being in order to. There are no beings in themselves whose distinctness is a property or feature of themselves. Features come as we future. Similarly, words as signs have no meaning in themselves; and neither do symbols. Peirce is exact; everything can be taken as a sign which refers to some other sign and so on ad infinitum. The marketers have shown us how a word, as in a sign, can become a symbol and vice versa. For them, signs and symbols, everything, becomes a tool to motivate purchase. Words are as much symbols as are signs; they are logo-​types, paths to meaning, technologies in order to. Meaning as the end of following instructions. But such a skill could easily be an internalized rule, a technology which the body has appropriated in and for itself in a Foucauldian sense. 17 John Searle, Intentionality:  An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge:  cup, 1983); hereafter, Intentionality. 18 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” eds. Ed. Keith and Paula Cohen Signs, 1, 4 (1976): 875–​893; hereafter, Laugh. 19 This sur-​prise can also be read as over-​taking  –​as we saw earlier in Sartre. Monseu writes:  “… l’acte de parler est ainsi une action du corps et le travail de la signification se fraye un chemin à partir de cette vie organique” (Monseu, Point, 63). The bringing together of all the material conditions of a corporeal being in order to speak and signify is an act of characterizing a path de-​parting from this organic life by bringing together its potential. But this overtaking is a fraying that needs a rhythm to come to be a phrasing, otherwise it would turn into a sparagmos –​overtaken, torn apart by the (organic) forces that it over-​takes in its meaning-​mizing process.

344 Chapter 8 human expression is a logo-​type or an art of logos, a techno-​logy. Making sense is like making way, an art of creating paths to a destination. Even neuroscientists understand each other along neural pathways and circuits. Everything is put into use like any tool in order to. Initially, we learn to use these tools, to follow these paths. These paths are the ways we are introduced to life. By the time we understand that we are understanding, we have always already been walking in/​on certain paths, towards; we have been living through, in (a) modality of existence, in (a) form of life. We have been taught, tutored on how to do things; thinking is a way of doing. Initially we are offered pathways that ward/​word us, that is, prescribe to us how to live–​with a particular destination. We are given a logica utens –​in order to survive, to self-​ preserve, to go to heaven or to hell, to become dust to ... . They constitute rites to life as anthropologists call them. These paths which presuppose their horizon provide us with a gift. “What has to be accepted, the given, is –​so one could say –​ forms of life.”20 If forms of life could be analogized to paths then it is not the paths that constitute the gift, but the passage which is given along with them. A particular path gives its universal possibility as it draws our attention towards.21 The passage is this drawing then, this writing on Being, on our being if one wills, in order to exist. It is an attitude towards. Can existence be without an attitude, an orientation towards? Within a mode of existence, a particular path, a logica utens comes a logica docens as its universal possibility. This possibility of possibility which (f) allows it would have to have come as gift. Through a particular path the Other gives us the universal. A universe of possibilities and the possibilities of a uni-​verse, meaning. The possibility of bios as choosing or creating a life with a particular meaning is a gift from an Other. To exist begins with such promise of the Other. The beginning of existence is the Other’s giving their word –​(not) a word as lexis, as their logos; not their being but their existence as transcendence towards and to word/​ward us. This beginning, this arche, is the gift as a passage, an opening, an overture to a beyond being, au-​délà, a metaphysical opening. It is a logica do-​c-​ens. Just to agitate some etymological threads, the latin ‘do’ means to give. What is given is an ens, something. But this something is given through an opening which looks after a c-​section; a bow or a lyre. This opening is a door-​δῶρον, literally gift, created on us from the Other. It is coming from the Other’s logos who gives it to us by characterizing a body that we never were but promised to come to

20 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 226. 21 Wittgenstein, Certainty.

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be through this body. If the Other’s promise is altruism, then altruism is the essence of coming to existence. As Peirce put it exactly, meaning is a gift. And if making sense is the essence of existence then the Other comes to be the essence of existence. Philosophers cast doubt on the possibility of the gift. They have fallowed every possible way and they cannot allow the gift without some reference to a transcendental beyond (nature, infinite exchange, or God). If the gift is not possible could it be because it is itself possibility? Let us explore. 2

The Gift(ing Logos) of the Other

The gift has always been attempted through the logos of Being where it can be represented with the formulae ‘A gives B to C’ or ‘someone gives something to some other.’ Some philosophers have casted doubt as to whether the gift as gift is possible. The main worry about the gift is how it can escape a system of exchange or a system of the infinite: How would it be possible to have ‘A gives B to C’ without reference to anything else as its own universal particularity or particular universality? This constitutes an aporia. (Thinking/​Doing/​ Philosophising/​Living) with(in) Being, and all its parent-​theses makes the gift to be impossible. But, then, as Derrida wonders, how is ‘it’ possible to talk about what is at the same time the impossible?22 How do we come to (re)present, talk about the impossible –​the gift? And this ‘it’? Before we explore this (im)possibility, let us apply what we learnt from Peirce. ‘A gives B to C’ involves representation by abstraction as does ‘someone gives something to some other.’ Obviously, they are not identical. But are they adequately the same? Could we say that they have the same reference or correspondence in the language of being? Are they (transcendentally) analogous in their logical abstraction/​formalization? In the first formula we can classify a cash machine that gives money to me. In the second we cannot, prima facie. But if we used the principle of continuity and synechism as Peirce does, then indeed we could say that the machine as a sign represents someone or some people who put it together for that end. By all means, things change, as Donna

22

As Robert Bernasconi notes, the early Derrida thinks the gift to be impossible. But, in his later works, Derrida converges with Lévinas’ thought (Robert Bernasconi, “What Goes Around Comes Around:  Derrida and Lévinas on the Economy of the Gift and the Gift of Genealogy,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 256–​273.

346 Chapter 8 Haraway notices,23 and they might of course go off course when machines start re-​producing each other with no human aid at all. But even then, the beginning, the arche which would also signal the telos of the human, would have been coming from human reality –​and could be traced just like in the movie Blade Runner. But this infinite relation does not have the meaning of gift that we are looking for. The gift, if it is possible, has to be exhausted in just ‘A gives B to C.’ The principle of continuity does not seem to protect the gift from falling into an infinite referral to something other. Moreover, A can give an argument to C, in the sense of knowledge or in the sense of a kick or a blow –​as we saw in our introduction. ‘A’ and ‘C’ can be my supervisor, myself, or my imaginary friend Toby from Mars. Such promiscuous abstraction will fail to prescind justly the givenness of what we mean with the gift. If the gift is registered with positive evaluations, if it is given for the well-​ being of the Other, the logical prescission fails us. Promiscuous abstraction or prescission will universalize the gift to the point of rendering it neutral and beyond subjective evaluations  –​a disgusting kiss or a loving kick would be equally a gift. In all these examples, there is no absolute beginning, and hence, there is no absolute ‘A’ that initiates the gesture of the gift, and, as such, neither absolute ‘C’ as a terminal receiver of the given. Nor the magic of the justness/​suchness/​ thatness of what is given which must pass from one to the other with no history, no genealogy, no future and (positive) value. Can we quest(ion) the gift anew, afresh, untimely? Let us consider what other philosophers have given us for the gift. We need their philosophical paths to think further. For Derrida, for there to be a gift it must be given without having been given by someone or received by someone as a gift, otherwise there is always the risk of the gift falling into a circle of exchange. For the gift not to degenerate into something other, then it must be unconditioned or unconditional as given. If the gift is given with the expectation of being given back or given away in some form, then the gift is cancelled. With respect to the receiver, if the gift is recognized as gift, then the gratitude of the gift becomes its symbolic restitution and falls back to the circle of exchange. “Gratitude would in fact be the return of the movement to its origin.”24 For the gift to be a gift, it must not be in any away perceived as a gift by the person who receives it. There cannot be any reciprocity for the gift from the receiver. The gift must stay given with ingratitude. 23 Donna J.  Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:  The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 24 Lévinas, Trace, 349.

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But this “staying” given must be out of space and time otherwise it could take the form of debt. When someone sacrifices their life for an other, the ultimate gift one could say, the other is indebted for the spontaneous act of courage which defied everything for their sake. The full being of the one who sacrifices themselves with no remainder, with no reserve, becomes a gift. But this gift, insofar as it is remembered as a gift, makes one (in)grateful, (in)debted in (in)gratitude. Such spontaneity, unrequested and unrequited, negates the possibility of being resisted. It can turn into an imposition rather than a given. The sacrifice decides to include the Other by excluding their response. The Other becomes mute, fallowed, without being allowed to say anything in this movement. The given can be given only through the possibility of being resisted as gift. But such a possibility itself, the possibility of being resisted, would cancel the gift as absolutely given –​were the resistance to be realized. To resist the given is not for the given to be what it is, given. Resisting or negating the gift destroys it because it will never be given, it will never leap the net of the intentionality to be given; it will stay forever intended –​as psychoanalysts would say, it would be a frustrated intention. The gift, then, requires the possibility of being resisted but not actually or virtually become resisted. The paradox of the gift runs its course from the perspective of the donor as well. A gift is always guided by an intention to give by the giver. To intend to give something to someone as a gift is saturated with an intention to give. Even a suggestion is saturated with intentionality, it is a sugged gesture. This intention(ality) is what destroys the gift as pure given. The gift must not at all be driven by a back thought, an arrière-​pensée as Jankélévitch put it,25 that the gift is (to be/​being) given. In the purity of the gift, in its blankness, authenticity, and innocence, just one speck, one hue, one idea, one infinitesimal shade of intentionality is enough to grey the gift and make it other than it is, different from a gift: But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either; otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give.26

25 Jankélévitch, Paradoxe. 26 Derrida, Given, 14.

348 Chapter 8 This is a Hegelian thought coming from the dialectic of master-​slave/​donor-​ receiver. It is in this sense that Hegel did not like to give pity. Because pity makes the Other a slave of one’s superiority. Pity or mercy border with contempt which elevate one in reducing the Other. Even if the Other refuses our pity we rest with the gesture of intentionality of having offered –​and we saw that earlier as well with E.A.. And this, as Derrida underscores, can start way back when one is preparing to give. The gift cannot fall into an economy of preparation which means essentially that it cannot take place in time. In a similar vein, Jankélévitch writes that for the gift to happen “that which gives, gives what it is not” and “that which gives, does not have what it gives.”27 This seems the impossible because the gift or what is to become given must be thought/​intended and unthought/​unintended at the same time and space lest it falls into a circle of exchange and representation. This means that for there to be a gift, it must be radically forgotten. The gift, if it is to be a gift, must be deleted from memory. It cannot be repressed, suppressed, or depressed in the abyss of an unconscious. The unconscious, “that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive.”28 Any kind of (im)pressing can ultimately be relieved; it can be reversed and thus re-​versed, that is expressed, relived differently and, thus, destroy the originally given. The intentionality of retention of the given must be uprooted or exhausted in the gesture of giving. The gesture must be unsuspended; it must fly with no re-​serve. It cannot be served again. No pathway, no memento can be retained for the gift as gesture of givenness. It cannot be served with anything else either. A gift card that follows the gift supplements the given and destroys it; the gift is not enough as given if it is to be served with something else which divides its uniqueness. In this sense, it must not be linked to any other path either. There can be no association for the gift with anything else, no trace of it. The gesture of the given as such must have no res-​erve, that is, it must be res orbus. Something akin to no thing, bereft of kinship, like an orphan. If there is a linking or likening pathway to the given, it will only make it a matter of time for the gift to be neutralized as gift –​even in the Freudian sense of neutralization. The gift must be without analogy, without apopha(n)sis. Otherwise, the gift will fall into an economy, a system of rules, a language game of being which could illuminate it, characterize it, give it emphasis and thus meaning and recognition. If it is not exhausted, ousted from time and space, if it is in any way pressed, then there is always a time and place of its release and expression, its relief, its exhalation. The given

27 In Kelley, Wholly, 29. 28 Cixous, Laugh, 880.

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would expire, it would become a product of a labour with an expiration date. As long as it is retained, conserved in memory, it will always be a matter of time to be outdated. The gift cannot be dated if it is to be a gift. The gift cannot have an expiration date. It cannot be outdated but be out of date, unhinged from temporality, outside of any kind of phenomenality, pure or-​phan, blind light. This out of date presses the gift out of time and space yet be given in time. Derrida appeals to the gift as restance, a kind of forgetting which is not forgetfulness, but a trace: Et cet oubli se portant au-​delà de tout présent, il y va du don comme de la restance sans mémoire, sans permanence et sans consistance, sans substance ni subsistance; il y va de ce reste qui est, sans l’être, au-​delà de l’être, epekeina tes ousias.29 This oubli; this λήθη which is at the same time its opposite goes beyond being and thus becomes truth (ἀ-​λήθεια). Truth is the gift. A blind truth beyond being and remembrance. This beyond being, that which rests without being in the frame of time, what remains without memory, is remaining only in the receiver. Yet, the forgetting as the after-​math of the given must be equally, or better yet, equa(nomica)lly-​ isonomically appearing, remaining or, in this discourse traced, to both donor and receiver. But it cannot be the same at the same time because that would be shared –​which implies rememberance –​not given. For any given, there must be a divortium that allows for a directed movement, a pathway from one to an other. What is moved, or passed, just like the meaning of a from-​to, must be partibus ad totum. One speck of more or less would, again, destroy the given as given or as intended to be received and received as intended. But there must be something more in the gift if someone is to give something to someone –​if not an intention, there must be a movement towards which is not given. What could this surplus be? The trace does not help us talk about the gift since the given of the gift as trace must be equa(nomica)lly-​isonomically a trace in the possibility of the given. Where is this trace to be found, the donor or the receiver? Also, who traces it? What makes the trace a trace? Would we not have to talk about trace of intention and trace of reception in order to be just to the gift that is given? The trace must be present even as restance to both (t)here. We fall back to the

29

Jacques Derrida, Donner le Temps: La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 187; hereafter, Donner.

350 Chapter 8 intersection of past and future making the gift some kind of presence. There is difficulty dis-​engaging ourselves of and from being, precisely because the trace has to overcome one’s being and then reach an other (being? trace? traced being?). The event of the gift articulated as trace will leave us with a binary of possible-​impossible. It is possible to trace it here, impossible to trace it there, with the risk of culminating tracing the gift as absolute negation or absolute presence. As the presence of the present, the plenitude of the present, the gift would be a gift as an absolute present, the permanence of being always already there. A path with no beginning or end, a path deadened or a deadened path: Not a particular path leading here or there, but on the path, on the Weg or Bewegen (path, to move along a path, to cut a path), which, leading nowhere, marks the step that Heidegger does not distinguish from thought. The thought on whose path we are, the thought as path or as movement along a path is precisely what is related to that forgetting Heidegger does not name as a psychological or psychoanalytic category but as the condition of Being and of the truth of Being.30 Here, it is not only that the gift is the present but the gift becomes the present. But how does it become? Or, a more difficult question, how does it come to be? The gift must always already be there with no beginning or end, just absolute permenance. But in this aisle-​less/​I-​less/​eye-​less path, the given falls into another economy, an economy of being-​with, which is the economy of the bond.31 A permanent holding with Being. The stakes of the given would be cashed out, articulated or explained in Being. A board of shareholders in the Bank of Being –​a corporation or intercorporeality as in Merleau-​Ponty –​ shareholding in Being. And the coming to be of this intercorporeality or being-​ with will be thrown to some unintelligible ‘with’ –​into which we are found, thrown, or fallen; or out of an explosion as in Merleau-​Ponty.32 In Heidegger it 30 Derrida, Given, 18. 31 Husserl was maybe the first to point out how we need to bracket this “bond to being.” “Only if we become conscious of this bond, putting it consciously out of play, and also free this broadest surrounding horizon of variants from all connection to experience and all experiential validity, do we achieve perfect purity” (Husserl, Experience, 351). Although Husserl was after the uncovering of the purity of the eidos, still the latter conceived as “absolutely pure possibility” is how we could analogize the gift. 32 “I call the evolutionist perspective in question … I  replace it with a cosmology of the visible in the sense that, considering endotime and endospace, for me it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever” (Merleau-​Ponty, Visible, 265).

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is called out in throwness,33 the facticity of being delivered over. But it is precisely the delivery, the towards, the movement of the gift, the gesture that we are missing either in the language of Being or of Différance. As Derrida realized in his later writings, what we are looking for is a “promise of a path.”34 But does this promise not need de/​live/​rance?35 If the given is out of time and space should the deliverance not be beyond these transcendental parent-​theses of Being and Trace-​of-​Being? If it does, does this mean that the delivery must also be out of time and space? But can the delivery happen out of place and time? If the gift is out of date, then it is also beyond a particular movement. All movement is related to change, and change to time or duration. Jankélévitch explains that the gesture of the giver cannot be met by the gesture of the receiver in the gesture of the gift. A simple gesture towards implies its return and this return can happen at any time like in the time of one’s changing one’s mind to give what one had prepared. It is not only the given –​that which leaves one’s hands to be given –​ that must be out of date, but also the delivery as a whole must be beyond time and space. The hand that stretches to give and the hand that stretches to receive go back to their bodies. Can a person with no hands or arms not give or receive? How does an arm-​less and/​or leg-​less person feel, enjoy and enjoin a gift? If the gift is to be possible it must be beyond any-​body. The given must be without medium. It cannot be immediate, that is presence, precisely because we need the movement towards. But this movement must be a movement out of time. An impossible movement. Or, a surplus in movement which shall work as an unmediating medium. Back to the surplus. Before the surplus, in the divortium between the donor and the receiver to be created in the act of givenness, the event of the act of the given can not be witnessed either. The given must create a sight out of sight, a site which cannot be cited or recited/​resighted; beyond vision. The beyond, must be beyond all eyes/​Is that could see it and recognize it as something. The gift cannot be talked about or commented on. There can be no spectator, nor auditor, nor accountant of the given. No account(ing) could be inspired by an other Other who could witness the given as given and (de)base it through some kind of grammar, some kind of representation –​which is to say to read/​ rid it: read it other-​wise and rid its being what it is. An infant must be dropped at the steps of the institute with no witnessing of the body that places it on the stairs. There can be no message, no writing that could be traced. The trace 33 Heidegger, bt, 174; 219. 34 Derrida, Adieu, 24. 35 Literally, the door of life, or a support for life.

352 Chapter 8 works as a witness and a witness works as a trace. The delivery cannot be furtive which belies an intentionality of stealthy being waiting to be disclosed in the metrics of a posology of sense; in forensics. For the gift to be pure(ly) given, a silent passage must be created. A  passage to which we are all blind and deaf. The gift comes to be an enactment of a universal blindness-​and-​deafness which comes from beyond traditional justice. The given requests a silent, blind, invisible and unheard of labor. The enactment of the given comes to be a passage as a surplus to a path and/​which passes incognito. “The passing passes on with the passing.”36 The given comes as a silent and invisible passage in time like a pathway backwards –​as Monseu describes silence.37 But this back which wards is the clock which never appears and backs, as in cloaks, the pathway. The gift comes to be a passage from beyond time into time, a passage-​in(to)an-​a-​warded-​time, a warding/​wording. The gift is given through the wording of an Other, in the act of their characterizing. In other words, the gift comes to be through the act of giving one’s word/​ logos: through promise. 3

The Givenness of the Orphan and the Orphanity of the Gift

The gift is indeed impossible in the language of Being or in the logic of supplementarity  –​trace (of Being). Thinking with such parent-​theses, the gift becomes an aporia. Being dispenses the gift as much as it dispenses bios. The gift is lived and we cannot represent it. But we can enact the gift by telling how we come to be-​li(e)ve what we have been given. Here, in writing, we could just enact the gift by creating an analogy. And a promising analogy that we have already touched upon has come to be the orphan. Could the orphan tell the gift –​in re(-​)verse: could the gift let the orphan be? According to the Oxford Dictionary, the orphan is “A person, esp. a child, both of whose parents are dead (or, rarely, one of whose parents has died). In extended use: an abandoned or neglected child.”38 It is the extended use that we shall take, especially the abandonment of the child. To abandon a child means essentially that one does not want it. The child is a burden, a hurdle

36 François Noudelmann, “A Non-​Genealogical Community,” in Filiation and its Discontents, ed. Robert Harvey, E.  Ann Kaplan and François Noudelmann (Stonybrook, NY:  sup, 2009), 45. 37 Monseu, Point, 2016. 38 oed, http://​www.oed.com/​search?searchType=dictionary&q=orphan&_​searchBtn=Search.

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in one’s projects, in one’s course of life. It is something extra to one’s own embodied existence. To abandon is to dispense with something someone does not want. The intentionality of abandoning a child is not on a par with the intentionality of giving it. The abandoned child is dumped with the prospect of releasing the one who has been encumbered by it. Thus, with respect to meeting the requirement of not wanting to give, of not intending to give something to someone, the child that is dumped is not given. It is left to its own destiny: just as it is. The intention is to dump, to excrete what is not required –​ we do not desire what we dump. There is no intentionality to give something to someone. Let us extend this analogy with the dumping of an infant. The course of the infant which has been dumped no matter where, no matter how, no matter by whom, has a nomological course: The child will not last as it is. It does not have space or time but just is finite space and time –​just that. Suppose that the child is dumped outside the steps of an orphanage. Someone, somehow, dumps a baby at the steps of an orphanage with no traces. No knock on the door and furtive escape; no writing, no letters, no signs. No intentionality of giving  –​ there is no assignment for this body; no inscription or prescription along with it. There are no witnesses either –​pace us, as Berkeley would object. It could have been anyone dumping a baby. Time passes and when the door of the orphanage opens, someone beholds the spectacle of a dumped baby in spite of what their original intention was in opening that door. The intentionality of opening the door in order to … is interrupted by a body. This interruption creates a call. And it is clearly a call which disses-​courses. Two courses of two bodies meet in the prospect of death. A death as a destruction of courses, not death as the end of life. In this particular case it is also a call to/​of conscience. As a member of the institution I am called39 to action. Do I take it in or leave it there? Do I resolve by myself or by the frame-​work of the polis? Do I call for or appeal to a polic-​y, do I call the polic-​e or appeal to my supervisor about what I should do? Do I engage in tracing the actor of this drama, of this action? The dumped baby’s course is still unquestioned. It is the decision to receive it that would transform the dumped baby into an orphan. The discourse of the

39

The use of the passive voice is intentional. We shall see in a few lines that there is never passivity in this call. This is not some kind of ontological necessity which creates the call. It is grounded on some representation. In this case, the fact that I work as a member of an institution, i.e. the orphanage, and it is my duty, in the sense of my role there as an employee and I have to act accordingly. My role there re-​presents what I need to do. The concept ‘employee of an orphanage’ is a particular commandment for how the given will be shaped; a thirdness, as Peirce taught us, which de-​termines.

354 Chapter 8 orphanity of the orphan will start after it has been decided to be received, to be picked up. The discourse of the orphan starts after the end of the course of its having been abandoned. Just as it is, there, lying there in front of whoever opens the door, belies the horizon between beings –​between categories: being dumped and being orphaned. The body there constitutes a pure horizon. The intentionality of picking it up does not come from an intentionality to receive what was given but what was found there; abandoned/​dumped. With no intentionality to give an orphan and no intentionality to receive one’s child as an orphan, the body dumped makes the absolute gift. The orphan (ὀρφανόν), as the etymology suggests, is the first phenomenon because it is never concealed and never unconcealed  –​it goes beyond this dialectic. There is nothing else there apart from a living/​dying body, there, a body that runs its own course. It is the pure phenomenon as finite time (how long it will last) and space (its material extension); and it is beyond particular predications –​it just is, there. Uprooted itself, it contains the root of all phenomenality: Heidegger’s favorite ‘pha.’ Between the ‘ὀρ’ (becoming) and the ‘όν’ (being) there is the logos of the –​φα–​(pha), the wonder or the drama of the absolutely given. The abandoned baby comes to be an orphan once it has been taken as such by an Other who questions its abandoned course. The body that one receives is the absolutely given. The life of the orphan, its discourse, its bios, starts after one’s claiming reception of something which by reception becomes other than it is –​from dumped to orphan: after an inscription on it has been made, a decisive characterization of/​on what it is. Even in the juridical order, as Agamben shows, He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order.40 The body dumbed is thus the pure phenomenon, the purely given body, the threshold, a pure horizon, pure givenness. The gift is a body or the body is the gift –​the gift of the body and the body of the gift are identical in the instance of the just-​before-​and-​after one opens the door. The Other who receives becomes the counterpart to the baby’s course to its end, to its death. To receive an orphan is to delay and defer its own course to death, its not lasting as it is. 40 Agamben, Sacer, 28.

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The Other who receives is the counterpart to this imminent and immanent death. The Other is the essence of keeping the body in(-​)existence –​including Brentano’s sense of in-​existence. The analogy of the orphan can be extended more. If we think phaneroscopically, with exactitude and justice, we could not resist admitting that all of us have been orphans –​in the instance of the just before-​and-​after we were taken up, adopted, by an Other. Every baby that is given birth is excreted, dumped and abandoned. As Annie Anzieu described it through psychoanalysis, the vagina is “a place of exit: things flow, are born, discharge or slide out of the body. Milk, period, baby” (in Naomi Segal).41 The body that delivers another part of its own is exuding being. In this logic of phaneroscopic analogies and family resemblances rather than genealogically sexed filiations, the cutting of the umbilical cord seals the dumping of the baby, its abandonment. The baby is banned to be on its own –​if only for an instant.42 Even if one is adamant and insists to adhere to representations of being, drawing a theory of being as a system of biophysical or biochemical laws or an idea(l) of an always already there ‘with’ Being, this death as not lastingness cannot not be admitted. Death as not lasting is the natural necessity of an excreted body –​‘just that.’ And just that means: no thing, nothing else, nothing other. The body, extension and time, that is simply, limited duration, is finitude. It cannot have a definite outcome apart from its own course as abandoned body. On its own, its zoe, its being qua being, its en tant qu’ étant, it is destined as not to last. Its becoming rests on the fulfilment of its being: not lasting as it starts its proper being, that is, ending in death. At the same time, in what kind of philosophical justice can we introduce a Spinozist or quasi-​Spinozist ontological discourse of auto-​poeitic force of a body as living matter which, in its own accord and severed from an umbilical

41 42

Naomi Segal, “To Love and to Be Loved: Sartre, Anzieu, and the Theories of the Caress,” Paragraph, 32, 2 (2009): 231. This is another way of understanding the abandonment of being that Heidegger talks about. Thinking within Being, abandonment is experienced in the feeling of distress in the be-​ing delivered over (to one-​self). In fact, there are two deliveries, two comings. The first coming is the possibility of being; the truth of be-​ing or Being is exhausted in the finitude of what is dumped. The possibility of its enowning comes through the logos of the Other as care. In the second coming, which involves the defamiliarization of being in order to come nearest to be-​ing –​the turn –​the possibility of affirming any being, the possibility of re-​turning is the choice one will make. The second coming is indeed about judgment, the ultimate judgment one could say: Keep be-​ing, keep trying to be and, if so, how; or not trying to be at all. The second coming is the ultimate question: to be or not to be as Camus writes aided by Sisyphus.

356 Chapter 8 cord, is living/​lasting and on the same accord dying/​not-​lasting? For instance, Braidotti, following Deleuze, tells us about human embodiment and auto-​ poeisis as the character of human reality. In her own words, such “philosophy of becomings rests on the idea that matter, including the specific slice of matter that is human embodiment, is intelligent and self-​organising.”43 At the same time, to follow the character, the logos, of a post-​anthropocentric approach “requires more efforts of our imagination to ground our representations in real-​life conditions and in an affirmative manner.”44 Exhausting all our representational efforts, where exactly is this self-​organizing and intelligent slice of matter expressing itself when manifested as a phenomenally material unity which is about to dis-​unite and self-​destruct –​or with Heidegger, about to dis-​sway? Quid/​quo/​qua evolution, quid/​quo/​qua becoming, quid/​quo/​qua auto-​poeisis? In all good faith, it is this abandoned question or the question of abandonment that cauterizes Being-​Becoming –​no matter how one (s)lices45 the meaning of becoming: where in the abandoned baby as material unity can we affirm a “desire for self-​expression and [becoming] ontologically free”?46 Following Nietzsche’s quest(ion): Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-​ preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength-​life itself is will to power; self-​ preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles-​one of which is the instinct of self-​preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency).47 Auto-​poeisis is not self-​preservation. However, it does not slice teleology or transcendentalism as it cannot account for itself. Auto-​poeisis actually refers simply to our poetic being. With respect to the ‘auto’ just like in referring to automobiles we remain blind to the driver who characterizes it, whose logos of being it is. The double (ac)counting of Auto-​poeisis is one of the ‘errors in physiologicis’48 poeting ‘counterfeit in psychologicis.’49

43 Braidotti, Posthuman, 35. 44 Ibid., 72. 45 ‘Lice’ is an older version of ‘like’ –​see oed relevant entry. 46 Braidotti, Posthuman, 56. 47 Nietzsche, Beyond, 21. 48 Nietzsche, Power, 249. 49 Nietzsche, Human, 181.

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At another point, Braidotti seems to suggest a request “to develop a dynamic and sustainable notion of vitalist, self-​organising materiality.”50 We acknowledge reception of this point but we have to underscore that we are still in danger of slipping into the transcendentalism of Being. The becoming is related to the being that it is. We can read Braidotti as suggesting not a becoming stemming from a particular being but coming to be and this coming to be cannot come to be if it is not allowed by the aid of the Other. The arch(e) of our bios comes through hetero-​poeisis. It is in this logos that we can cross paths with the characterizing of our being as “the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.”51 The flow, the coming to be of the desire is an Eleusis which comes in virtue/​virtǔ of the Other. The coming to be of the desire in its own voice –​per-​se-​phoně –​is in virtue of the Other’s calling, the Other’s logos which decides. This coming to be is a happening, a request which rests on one’s decision, one’s logos, one’s character.52 The potentiality of this being to be enduring or to exist, whatever one decides to put first, come as gift; given not a given. How this body will be characterized is conditioned upon one’s logos. There is no reason or natural necessity which determines one to pick up what (a) body has (been) excreted. If one is compelled by habit or custom to do so –​by any religious, cultural or legal mandates, any kind of commanding representations  –​that compulsion or appeal to duty is not supported by any necessity. In our example with the institution, the compulsion to act in a particular way is grounded on 50 Braidotti, Posthuman, 82. 51 Braidotti, Posthuman, 100. 52 Life, as bios, starts with breaking of the course of being by questioning it –​and we shall see what this ‘mysterious’ breaking means. It is another, as in an Other’s questioning this body. Life starts with the aid of the question of the Other. This body is resisted in realizing its essence. This resistance comes from the Other –​not a hand, but a picking up, a hug, an embracement  –​the silent touching of an Other’s welcoming. The Other braces a body, entangles (with) an Other body to use Susan Stuart’s terms (see Susan A.  J. Stuart, “The Articulation of Enkinaesthetic Entaglement,” in Inscribing the Body, eds. Andreas Ackermann, Matthias Jung, and Michaela Bauks, (Wiesbaden:  Springer vs, 2015), 19–​36; Susan A.  J. Stuart, “Enkinaesthesia and Reid’s Natural Kind of Magic,” in Thinking Thinking:  Practicing Radical Reflection, eds. Donata Schoeller and Vera Saller (München:  Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg, 2016), 92–​111; Susan A.  J. Stuart, “Feeling Our Way: Enkinaesthetic Enquiry and Immanent Intercorporeality,” in press). Yet, going beyond Stuart, we have to admit that the intentional transgression, the enkinaesthetic entanglement goes beyond the dialectic of active/​ passive, reflective/​ nonreflective. There is crossing of the boundaries of the pure phenomenon as essence. There cannot be an affective reciprocity always-​already there before this transgression, this crossing of boundaries of the foreign-​ness of the other body; even enkinaesthesia requires a passage. Crossing but not crossing out the boundaries of the Other.

358 Chapter 8 an appeal to being a member of an institution –​the institution is the parent-​ thesis for my action; the institution as polis, as a body of policies to which I could appeal for what to do. That particularity is representational and by no universal means universally presentational. The natural course of what one body has negated by excreting it has its own universal desire-​less destiny, its own in-​itself: death as limited duration. There is absolutely no necessity and no compulsion to pick up what is dumped or what is found lying there. One can dispel all illusions with the magic word ‘no’ and move on. In what Jankélévitch calls the almost-​nothing of the instant, one can say ‘no’ and slice, cide and put a s(l)ide to all the sophisms of supposed moral or natural necessities and nomologies with respect to being compelled to pick up a dumped body –​refus absolu.53 The Gordian knot of Being and the necessity of Being can be cut with logos, a will to power. Again, with Jankélévitch, we shall think of this absurdity neither tragically, nor lightly but seriously.54 In thinking with being we have been accustomed to beli(e)ving in some ideal/​material connection between the parents and the child as if the latter is ‘properly’ connected to the former. This ‘properly’ ends up becoming some kind of property through various representations of being which take the form of belonging or being connected. A  material conncection before birth becomes an ideal connection after. Such representations of being –​such transcendental parent(-​)theses as maternal/​paternal instincts, filiations represented by blood types and genetics, all of which have made us blind to the fact that there is absolutely no such connection of being with these living bodies as existences –​neutralize our responsibility. As Simone De Beauvoir explained, these transcendental material/​ideal connections and bonds are exposed ridiculously in the cases of adoption –​in the colloquial sense –​or abortion; in child abuse and child neglect55 –​or in the practices of other cultures or historical eras e.g. the Spartans who dumped their infants at will –​or cases of supposedly ‘abnormal’ babies which we put to death, supposedly not able to lead a ‘good’ life –​according to the definition of good life that we endorse in each epoch. But this evaluation, this evaluative synthesis of something being proper or improper, good or bad, rest utterly, as we saw in our first chapters, on our logos and not on what there is.56 They belie a “swearing allegiance to already uttered 53 Jankélévitch, Parodoxe. 54 Françoise Schwab, “Vladimir Jankélévitch: Les Paradoxes d’une Éthique Résistante,” Revue d’Éthique et de Théologie Morale (2009), 41; hereafter, Paradoxes. 55 De Beauvoir, Second. 56 As Anne van Leeuwen writes, for de Beauvoir, sense is constituted not ready-​made. There is no normativity in existential relations which could be justified by an appeal to an epistemic naturalism which is ultimately a form of representationalism. A  connection

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words,”57 from lexeis, laws of a They that have not come from our logos but from a faith never questioned. There is neither a material nor an ideal connection between beings or Being: we create it –​better yet, we have institutionalized it. These insitutions have ended up passing as natural and then coming to haunt us. To appeal to any such parent-​thetical representations is to relinquish one’s responsibility, one’s logos/​decision for coming to be a parent. It constitutes an excuse,58 another decision to be excused from a serious decision. The decision to come to be a parent is dropped in favor of some parent-​thesis, some representation, some bracketing: in an a-​logical or absurd there is.59 But this between living beings, existences, is an accomplishment not a “natural” bond (Anne van Leeuwen, “Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Possibility of Feminist Phenomenology,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26, 2 (2012): 474–​484). An example of epistemic naturalism which attempts to prove that there is a natural bond between the mother and the new born would be an argument like the one advanced by Michael J. Russell et al., who claim that mothers can identify their own infants by their odors (Michael J. Russell, Terrie Mendelson, and Harman V.  S. Peeke, “Mothers’ Identification of their Infant’s Odors,” Ethology and Sociobiology (1983): 29–​31). While the justification for the claim is backed up by statistical significance –​which only rules the particular results have not been generated by chance –​the representational evidentiary support is rather low (less than 65% in first few hours and less that 60% the following days). In addition, the whole experimental design does not secure the exclusion of other variables which could have produced these results. But even if we accepted this and we generalized from the 26 mothers of that particular set to all mothers of the history of humankind –​another instance of ex-​ appropriating the Other by the other of the Same by extrapolating the same into a simulated Other –​it does not show that there is a natural material/​ideal bond between the mother and the body that she excretes. It does not follow neither in the logic-​logismos of being nor in (the logicis of) life. From another angle, Cixous writes that the woman (as) body has been represented teleologically as the body that gives birth. “Begetting a child doesn’t mean that the woman or the man must fall ineluctably into patterns or must recharge the circuit of reproduction” (Cixous, Laugh, 890). Pregnancy is just a possibility of articulating human desire which ultimately rests on a decision. To posit an evolutionary idea(l) of a teleological perpetuation of the species belies other under-​lying motives. 57 Irigaray, Sharing, 22. 58 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Humanism, 29. Agamben traces the mythologeme of political philosophies which treat the newborn with the representation of being ‘sovereign subject’ on the grounds that it has just been born –​or just because it is born. He writes: “The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two terms” (Agamben, Sacer, 128). While we follow this writing to the letter we cannot assume that it is just “mere coincidence” (124). To think so is also an excuse. 59 The ‘there is’ is talked about idly by everyone and no-​one as we saw with Heidegger. It involves and implicates an anonymous transcendental subject. The life of this anonymous subject destroys one’s logos as within there is ‘I choose to live’ within “an already existing desire that is to be lived in one way or another according to the advice of parents, teachers or public opinion” (Irigaray, Sharing, 74). With(in) parent-​theses, ways which

360 Chapter 8 there is is a constitution of a world which appeals to particular representations, not the universality of human reality which, phaneroscopically, is free to say no and resist –​or say yes and renew its vows. As Irigaray explains, “the impetus of freedom originates in a specifically human real and reality and not in sexual or procreative instincts, which are not strictly human.”60 The parent is one who adopts us not because of some impersonal necessity of being but by a courageous decision to offer. What kind of necessity would impel someone to get involved in this adoption? And this decision must stem from a desire not from a need, a lack or an appeal to a policy. “The decline of desire is due to its reduction to need, to the subjection of its impetus to a “for what?” and not “for whom?” it was destined.”61 There is ultimately no need to become, and certainly no need to continue being a parent. To mask the desire with a representation of need and then appeal to it as a justification for action is to kill the desire. To reverse it to something other than it is: To cultivate the relations with the one who brought you into the world does not involve the same elements for those who are the same as her or different from her –​that is, for a female or male subject. And to have recourse to the abstraction of a paternal law for remedying a supposedly amorphous empathy in the first relations with the mother cannot solve the passage from nature to culture:  rather, it evades the problem from repressing it.62 Irigaray, just like De Beauvoir, underscores that it is not the material/​ideal representation that makes a parent. Recourse to such representations, even viewed as spontaneous, could lead to repression –​and with possible concomitants on which psychoanalysts thrive to work. No representation makes a parent; a representation which works as a reification of a bond that feeds the eye/​ I. Let us unbracket such theses and think justly. Let us reverse these parentheses, these transcendental parent-​theses, these brackets. Let us unbracket and keep unbracketing as we promised in the beginning of our undertaking. Let us request the Other by questioning all these parent-​theses that deprive an authentic welcoming of the Other. parenthesize my logos, which bracket it and which I (f)allow, I decide to not question in good faith and thus live bracketed with(in) bad faith. 60 Irigaray, Sharing, xix. 61 Ibid., 83. 62 Ibid., 3.

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What makes a parent is the blind-​and-​silent force of the decision to give what one does not have in or as being: to give one’s logos. This is what is usually explained as the passage from nature to culture. The creation of this passage is what we need to trace rather than a compulsive bond that seriously, justly, logically and phenomenologically/​-p ​ haneroscopically does not exist as such. Such imposed represented compulsion makes it a matter of time to lead to what Irigaray calls with Hegel “the death of the parents.” But besides this death, an appeal to a representation which works as an imperative from the outside manifests the beginning of the phenomenon of appropriation that we called intersubjection; an amorphous empathy, an empathy coming only from the empathiser where the Other is mute: I know what you are. I have empathy towards you as you are mine, you have come out of my body: “possession, subjection, appropriation.”63 In the same vain, the abandoned body does not necessarily compel me to pick it up be-​the-​cause that it reflects in its entire surface my own finitude as Lévinas has described. The orphan may reflect in its bodily surface my own imminent death, my own finitude. In this sense it is an epiphany both in its Latin and Greek meanings. Indeed, its appearance could arrest my course. It could arrest me temporarily and give me options about what to do with it. But, as we saw with Sartre and with Peirce, this could be done with the sound of the bushes, or the shadow of a stick or with a snake which comes in (to) spite my course of action. If I say no and move on, I owe no apology for my act unless one presupposes some transcendental reason, some transcendental authority based on which my act shall be evaluated –​a beyond that regulates a priori. A body whose surface is reflecting me, the sense of the face which becomes a surface re-​flecting, and re-​membering my finitude, my own course to death, may –​if one accepts that it is even possible –​arrest my transcendence. We can

63 Irigaray, Sharing, 4. As Irigaray writes, “we welcome or shelter the other because of some politica-​cultural paternalism or maternalism, some social idealism or ideology, some religious or moral commandment” (Ibid., 22). This is an appeal to a beyond, a representational beyond even if it declares that one regards the other as end in-​itself. Any way of life that appeals to representations or the beyond in the sense of the transcendent or the transcendental and does not give time and space for the unknown of the present is doomed to appropriating the Other “and does not let them really be free” (Ibid.). In a more revealing note, Irigaray underscores how such transcendental representations end up in being a ruse of a force to master the Other because of a fear of taking the responsibility to change towards the unknown. “The flesh, born from the encounter, then only leaves an emptiness after being reduced to an energy to be mastered, to be exhausted in order to put an end to the obstacle, the questions, the overflow and the absence, the jubilation and the anxiety” (Ibid., 37).

362 Chapter 8 say it will arrest it but it does not necessarily will it. The silent call of the baby is not the silent call of the widow or an Other who looks at me in the sense of holding me, re-​garding me, inspiring me, a-​musing me or resisting me –​all of which fall under an ecomony of surprise. In my own course, in my own monologue, in my own totality, the epiphany of the Face interrupts my interiority as Simonne Plourde explains the Lévinasian thought. It does just that; it just shocks me, but it does not have to compel me towards any particular representation or action. For Levinas it does: Le Moi est du coup tiré de sa quiétude et ressent la responsabilité qui lui incombe sans qu’il y ait auparavant consenti. … c’est un sens qui perce sous le sens immédiat de l’approche, « un sens autre faisant signe à un entendement qui écoute au-​delà de ce qui est entendu, à la conscience extrême, à la conscience réveillée ».64 Yet, the breaking of my totality, this interruption belies a course of action, a transcendence that was en cours. If we want to talk about totality here, then this totality is an immanent totality because I am already within a course. If we want to equate the totality of the ‘I’ and the totality of the newborn with its own course to not lasting, to dying, then we are committing a phenomenological fallacy.65 The baby cannot transcend in the same way –​if we can even talk of transcendence here –​that I was transcending before being interrupted. To use Lévinas’ term, the “work” is not the same. To equate the two courses as totalities, as transcendences in their own immanence would become an equation which is not phenomenological but formal –​even if we allow for a particular punctuation which reveals a parity of two totalities, two courses with uneven pasts. And this formality is grounded in representation and intentionality and a logic of unjust abstraction. For me, the body there is both an obstacle and an opening. For the body there, what am I? To begin with, can I be anything? Does the orphan feel a presentational resistance, the way I feel 64 65

Simone Plourde, “E. Lévinas et V. Jankélévitch: un ‘grain’ de folie et un ‘presque-​rien’ de sagesse pour notre temps,” Laval théologique et philosophique, 49, 3 (1993): 411. Lévinas equates the orphan with an Other being that transcends on the account that both can retort to the state of being of wallowing or sobbing, like a baby. This is fair. Kafka does it too –​it is the only way he says he could get in touch with his father: when he wept. But next? Where is the will to power of the baby when the baby’s sobbing passes away? How does the sobbing pass away? The being that transcends can be touched in so many ways to alleviate the drama of tears which tears its existence. The baby? When we radicalize the analogy we find formal consistencies yet phenomenological and living/​bios-​logical inconsistencies.

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it? Does it actually feel insofar as feeling is different from sensing? To analogize these two totalities, even if one accepts that they are on a par on a formal level, is an analogy which does not do justice to them or to what they could come to be together. We can say that with both of them, “there is something that is neither subject nor substantive.”66 However, one of them had-​has-​will have possibilities in their own anonymity. The body-​dumped-​and-​not-​yet-​orphan exists only as one accumulated matter –​a course to end. If this matter does not come to matter for someone, then it cannot become matter-​reality. Kelley writes: “For Lévinas, the I arises in a breakup of totality by the very presence of the Other.”67 To have a totality, as we also saw with Peirce, that means that there is Otherness. Something that negates this totality by affirming it as totality otherwise there cannot be a totality. But, if the Otherness is such that conditions such totality then how can it interrupt and constitute it at the same time? This is a paradoxical reciprocity that Derrida tries to resolve both in his earlier work and in Adieu. But there is an other logical and phenomenological asymmetry that Derrida missed. If we move from the formal/​ideal level of philosophy and phenomenologize in life, then, the Otherness that constitutes the totality cannot only be the Other which interrupts it. And the Other that interrupts this totality cannot only be the totality of Otherness that constitutes it –​we are always in an en-​viron. Let us look at this closely. In Time and the Other, Lévinas writes: Consciousness is a rupture of the anonymous vigilance of the there is … it is already hypostasis; it refers to a situation where an existent is put in touch with its existing. Obviously, I will not be able to explain why this takes place. There is no physics in metaphysics. I can simply show what the significance of hypostasis is.68 To claim that the hypostasis, the being in touch with one’s own existing, is the same in infant and widow, constitutes a decision to start phenomenology with formal logic, with a regulating idea of identity –​which already presupposes otherness as negation. Lévinas double counts. This asymmetry comes about because Lévinas starts his description either formally or using a regulating idea and passes into its dialectical Other  –​entrapped in formalities and parent-​ theses. In Totality and Infinity the account starts with the presupposition of 66

Emmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: dup, 1987), 46–​7; hereafter, Time. 67 Kelley, Wholly, 37. 68 Lévinas, Time, 50.

364 Chapter 8 an evolutionary theory informed by a melange of Hobbesian-​Rousseau-​ean conception of human reality –​the contentment of an atheistic consciousness closed in-​itself and happy with the elements. Totality, egoism, and the ipseity of the Ego are all synonymous in Lévinas’ work. Again the hypostasis as totality is regulated by an idea(l). A parent-​thesis which does not derive its justification phenomenologically but formally. There is a difference when we start with what is evident and arrive at the metaphysical, rather than starting with metaphysical presuppositions and regulating the evident accordingly. These presuppositions do violence to the phenomenology of life. To what extent does the orphan or the dumped baby manifest egoism? Suppose, also, that the orphan does interrupt one’s course and motivates one to depart from its totality as Lévinas suggests.69 What does the analogy of departure suggest? To depart, to create a distance from, a point is needed to be taken as point of departure: a port, a porta, a door. In the case of Lévinas there has to be a point of departure of the self, which departs from itself, to come back to itself and touch itself (totality), and another point where this circle, this exchange breaks off –​another port. Is there a difference between the two? For the first, Lévinas suspends judgement: “I will not be able to explain why this takes place.”70 Perhaps, we can think this suspended aporia as the formal and phenomenological aporia Merleau-​Ponty found in Sartre.71 For both Lévinas and later Derrida, the face to face with the Other is the opening of a door which announces hospitality; an instantaneous contact.72 It is the threshold of welcoming the Other, “the threshold toward the Other.”73 But what about the hospitality of my self with myself in suspended hypostasis –​the first unaccounted departure? Is that not to be reckoned as hospitality? Formally it should. And then? How (come) such suspension? Could we not with Henry analogize this hypostasis as an ongoing hospitality in the surface of my body as presence, a Parousia, offered by a transcendental Arche-​Hospitality, Arche-​Parousia offered by God? Possibly, hypostasis then becomes absolute presence as auto-​ affectivity, as pure pathos, narcissistic empathy.74 And if so, what would be the difference between these hospitalities? We are missing the sym-​pathy. 69 Lévinas, Time, 52. 70 Ibid. 71 Cf Pathway two. 72 One has to be very delicate here with this Derridian animadversion from différance which requires time to the instant of the instance with no time metaxy. 73 Derrida, Adieu, 54. 74 This thesis is clear in Incarnation. In an interview with Olivier Salazar-​Ferrer, Henry approaches what Lévinas calls hypostasis as life taken as a sort of continual presence, omnipresence of oneself to oneself –​“la Vie, comprise comme une sorte d’omniprésence

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Let us look at it differently. To depart does not require a specific place and time. To depart does not require us to specify any metrical relations. It is given to us as meaning by itself. It is a welcoming concept for and of all desire to move. Even if to depart suggests just one step, if the departure consists in making one step, a moving, a from-​to, a boundary is crossed,75 a necessary and contingent boundary which we can call ‘door.’ Departure consists in just crossing a door, taking a step, a leap, opening one’s lips, a horizon of parting, a div(id) ing from here to there. A saltus from here to there both of which come to be only after the move. The ‘there’ signals the arrival from a ‘here’ yet it can only be seen as here after it has become a (t)here. Departure or arrival, beginning or end can only be re-​presented with an analogy: from-​to (t)here. But this from-​ to cannot come from an orphan which does not have (t)here. To have such a place in the world one needs to be able to transcend, to be able to (de)sever the world. As such, a clearing is required. And who does this clear-​ing, the clear-​ ance, this clean-​ing of the body which f(ol)lows from an opening if not the decided and decisive welcoming embracing of the Other as a source of goods; clearly a m-​other? In the case of the orphan without any representation, as pure phenomenality, just presentation, there is no beyond. Lévinas enjoys and enjoins a double meaning in the Face as awaking conscience and consciousness. And equally a double meaning in the responsibility. The invitation of the surface of the body construed without intentionality would be to act (consciousness) but not to act in a particular way which would mean to compel (conscience), and from which an apology for not accepting the invitation would follow. The Face, this visible surface of the body which comes to my light, my visibility, hence literally an epiphany, re-​minds me, re-​verses my finitude and calls for me to act. It compels me by interpellating me but not in a particular way. I can resist it at any time –​in bad or good faith. Lévinas’ apology as the first word appeals to a particular transcendental, to a particular nominalism. If anything, if the Other reflects my action, it is a confession (homology) that comes first and not an apology. A perpetrator of an act needs first to confess. To confess means to give an analogous yet different interpretation of an act for which one is accused. If the accusation (A) is the call to the accused (B), it is, again, the acceptance

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à soi-​même, qui tout en changeant, ne se sépare de soi” (Michel Henry:  pour une phénoménologie de la vie  –​entretien avec Olivier Salazar-​Ferrer, ed. Olivier Salazar-​ Ferrer (Paris: Corlevour, 2010). Human reality as thinking-​historical starts in the ‘crossing’ as Heidegger described in Contributions. What we want to enact is how this crossing comes about from an Other who gives their logos, their promise for creating the possibility of crossing.

366 Chapter 8 of the call that comes first in this giving (C). The Other as the condition of this entropy, the coming back to reflect on what has been done and to claim responsibility for it, to avow for it, comes before or after accepting or recognizing that an act was not right. The act is what it is. The right or wrong comes from the possibility of differential interpretation. Confession requires someone who can side with a new interpretation not counter it. The interpretations counter each other out not the one with the Other. Confession means to come in communion with; to see with; to get there, together. The other is a counterpart in the event of confession, an homologue. Again, in the representational terms of Levinas, the Other is my counterpart to death (homo-​logue) not my transcendental judge reflecting a divine justice compelling me to act toward a particular good for the Other where the Other is sacrificed in favour of a communion with a beyond. With the orphan, I am not hostage in its space because it does not have space or time as I have (had) space and time constituted in my transcendence –​a transcendence which is unthinkable without a being passed/​past. The orphan just is (space-​and-​time). It does not transcend in the way that I had just transcended before being interrupted by it.76 And even if I decide momentarily to pick it up, that could also mean to move it out of my way and pursue my course leaving it intact –​with tact and care, responsibly –​as if I were never there –​ and thus returning to my course.77 There is no presuppositionless reason why 76

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Although we are closely following Irigaray, at times she seems to oscillate in her phenomenological description. The baby does not transcend. The “first link” that the mother has created and whom “has helped me to enter into existence” is not one “that I formed with my mother” (Irigaray, Sharing, 111–​112). It is my mother’s promise, her logos characterizing my being, giving me means to be able to transcend so I can make sense. Representing the relation between mother-​child or par-​ent-​ent as analogous to intersubjectivity, “ ‘two who(s)’ ” is to debase and degrade, to not do justice, to the metaphysical work of care that the mother does in order to come to be (a) parent; the agony and struggle to create a path from the ent, as exist-​ent, to exist-​ence (Ibid., 115). We agree with her thesis that “The two are in the world, but the world in which they dwell is not the same” (Ibid., 115). But the relation is not between “ ‘two who(s)’. ” We recognize the ‘who’ of the mother but there is no ‘who’ of the child until the mother opens up a door by characterizing, providing means to the child to enable it to pass into existence; “she who has been the company and the mediator of our first being in the world” (Ibid., 117). If “in that earlier relation to the world, the relation with the mother and her mediation were decisive” (Ibid., 118), it is because she transcends toward and to ward by giving her word to the Other who is not yet (t)here; Just she transcends at this time and in time. The Other as who may never come. Claiming responsibility should be considered neutrally –​beyond good and evil. If not, we will end up parsing responsibility by infusing it with acting well. Drink responsibly or kill responsibly; euthanasia may be considered responsible killing for someone’s well-​being; but whose?

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I should owe an apology for that.78 Again, as Jankélévitch says, a conversion or change from all to all, a radical mutation is required from just being next to a body (par ent) to constantly being with an Other (parent). But that radical conversion does not come from the Other tout court. It must be decided/​promised –​there must be logos behind, logos that extends, quests to the Other by questioning itself. Once we realise that, once we understand that the body that is dumped does not belong to us and that we (do not) have to adopt it, then the decision to adopt comes to be a courageous decision, what Jankélévitch has called a serious decision. The serious decision is the courage to engage.79 No representation can and at the same time should be allowed to demob one’s logos. No representation can, nor should take the role of a (transcendental) justification for an ontological bond that comes to be iff one creates it by acting. And to create this bond is to decide it; and this decision is a de-​cision, a cutting through. This serious decision is an absolute acting will; a heroic decision motivated by a personal desire to offer oneself to someone who cannot appreciate it and cannot recognize it in the present; and to whom I owe nothing –​before adopting them. It is also to understand that to adopt is at the same time the reverse: to opt-​to-​add a burden in one’s course. An opting which does not come from duty which appeals to a transcendental justification. It is a personal opening to welcoming an Other. An Other who has not yet come and may not ever arrive. An Other whom I do not know and I cannot (ever) know. The Other’s coming is possible and the promise is creating an opening for this possibility: the possibility of possibility. “Welcoming requires an availability for that which has not yet occurred, an ability and a wanting to open ourselves to the unknown, to that which is still unfamiliar, and in a sense, will always remain unfamiliar.”80 To adopt is a promise to allow the coming of an Other’s possibility or 78

For Lévinas, as Plourde explains the values value before freedom. Responsibility comes before freedom in such a way which makes Lévinas’ account transcendental. For Jankélévitch freedom comes first and, responsibility, as in Sartre, is the counterpart to an absolute freedom. 79 Schwab, Paradoxes. 80 Irigaray, Sharing, 18. There are great differences in the philosophies of Jankélévitch and Irigaray. For Jankélévitch, the heroic decision does not come to be after deliberation; it is spontaneous, in the absolute blind darkness that propels towards the well-​being of the Other. On the other hand, for Irigaray the preparation of the welcoming is heavily invested with ongoing deliberating which allows one to secure their ground for the welcoming of the Other; equally heroic yet with a will to power which endures. Be that as it may, the decision to adopt the Other, is the point where they touch, where the logos of each philosopher comes to touch the Other, where they dialogue –​through our writing. This decision for Irigaray comes from the event –​or advent –​of the newborn which, by

368 Chapter 8 the possibility of an Other. That does not mean that this request is dissymmetrical or paradoxically reciprocal in passivity as in Derrida and Lévinas. It is just deciding to eroticise their being, to treat them, to adopt them as strangers where they are questioned and thus promised a place to come to tell their story –​ philo-​xenia. To adopt implies giving one’s time and space which the Other receives as care. And this giving is to live less for oneself. Not less in being but another less. To less one’s transcendence to a personal transcendental beyond by changing its direction where the personal becomes inter-​personal. The less comes as differential change. To adopt announces the first economy. Caring for oneself turns around, a decided anastrophe, and comes to be care for me-​and-​the-​ other. To adopt is a matter of distribution of transcendence; from being disinterested to taking another interest. The anticipation of another transcendence matters. An enhanced transcendence happening at the same time/​space yet in another direction, the Other’s direction. It is abandoning one’s own beyond, a self-​imposed ban to one’s beyond, which does not involve the Other and a div(id)e for the quest for an Other. In Irigaray’s terms, it is changing the direction of transcendence from vertical to horizontal.81 This is how one’s bios comes to be. Let’s play forth(-​)with the horizontal. It is trying to find/​found space and time for the Other to come to be. Giving the Other a horizon of existence. Is that horizon not an extension of their time and space in all senses? Giving space and time in this other body is adopting ways to prevent its not-​lastingness. To adopt is “not to let death have the last word, or the first one;”82 to adopt is to rupturing the same (individual beings) and the Same (the couple), calls for action. With this advent there are “three births” not just one (Irigaray, Sharing, 31). “There are now at least three new existences, which, at this very moment, make us pass from one life to another, from world to another” (ibid). “Something has happened” (Ibid., 32). She goes on by quest(ion)ing a similar path: “How could I deny this, or want to nullify its having taken place? And, moreover, why? Unless I find it an obstacle in my way, an impossible crossroads upon my path, a disowning of myself” (ibid). And there is always this possibility in the depths of my thinking being –​a being repressed by parental representation and sublimation; a being which does not recognise that it is absolutely free to say no and go on for whatever reason. To appeal to ideal/​material bonds, the so-​called “natural conception” is a favouring of “a physical begetting in love because of its easiness” (Ibid., 35). It is an overevaluation of “genealogical relations to the detriment of love as such” (ibid). It is again in love that these two very great philosophies find and found their existence. As we shall see, the quest(ion) is erotic in the ancient sense, ἐρώτ-​ησις, a quest to look-​for-​-​and-​ after the Other which requires a fall with the Other in love, in eros, in quest(ion), and not a fall in love of the Other. 81 Irigaray, Sharing, 121. 82 Lévinas, Time, 3.

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confront the death of the Other with one’s own time and space, with an-​other transcendence. It is a quest against the death of the Other, a questioning of death by providing a horizon of existence, a request to come to live. To adopt a body is to (f)allow its time and space, in all senses its being, and give it an alternative, an existence. To give such alternative is to promise a horizon of existence by questioning its previous being.83 If the horizon is the effect of two bodies coming into contact, this horizon belongs to none of them but to a beyond which they create/​enact together. But the beginning of the contact, in the instance we are discussing, starts only from the movement of the Other. A movement of an extended transcendence, a quest towards another by questioning oneself. This questioning is the first promise. To adopt is to promise ‘Thou shall not die.’ What does this mean? To promise, we saw, is to future. Here the future is not only for oneself but for an Other, an impersonal other without eyes/​Is: You, whoever you are, shall not die. ‘Thou shall not die’ is never accomplished. It is an undertaking, a constant trial. It does not mean that you should last forever. It means that I  will you to exist by trying myself towards you. It is a promise to give a bit/​beat of time and space before death. It is death that I am up against when I adopt. It is to silence death for a bit/​ beat. To ward off the course of immediate not-​lastingness. This is how to promise is to give one’s word. To adopt is to ward the Other from death by giving a word of welcome now, at this very instant. It is to sea to the whether of the possibility of an Other. The gift then is not the orphan as we said earlier, but the promise, the logos which wards one’s course, which dis-​ses it and gives them discourse. The gift is the passage (fallowed being) created by one’s logos which will allow for the Other to express their own logos, to future. The gift is the promise to communicate with the Other by (f)allowing, questioning ontic-​ontological time and space (body) for the creation of place, an existential place, an Other’s place, a place where they can have their own time and space of expression (logos). It is a promise in all senses of the giving (of) one’s word. Before all existence and being, there is the promise of the Other: gifting logos.

83

We are close with Derrida here when he says that “the gift, if there is any, must go against nature or occur without nature” (Derrida, Given, 162).

370 Chapter 8 4

Passage, Promise, Gifting Logos & a Door

The philosophical-​scientific canon has always been oriented toward finding ways to characterize literally the metaphor of passing from nature to culture. It has always been a question of deciphering linearly the how of the evolution from nature to culture. Irigaray uses the concept of ‘cultivation’ to describe the movement, the metaphor, from ‘nature’ to ‘culture.’ From a sociological perspective, Georg Simmel84 also prefers to describe human reality as the process of cultivation which shall yield its fruits –​in the sense of a process by which our essence will be realized. Yet, again, apart from the issue of the genealogy of this metaphorical representation which, as De Beauvoir maintains, can be traced to male sexuality,85 it lacks phaneroscopic prescission. We can cultivate land and re-​cultivate it to yield crops. The land can ultimately remain fallow, barren, and be(come) abandoned. Or, we could never have had the possibility to cultivate. When this lack becomes evident and pressing, there is only one way to express this passage from nature to culture; an alternative logos comes to rescue this fallowed metaphor of cultivation: “It is based on an inner fact which can be expressed completely only allegorically and somewhat vaguely as the path of the soul to itself.”86 The allegory of the path: There can be no human reality without a path and a passage coming from the logos of an Other –​this alter logos, literally allegory –​as its universal possibility; a logos which figures or better prefigures our being. Suppose we take the orphan as a hypostasis as Lévinas said. Let the identity pass, let it be. In this absolute narcissistic identity, where the self is in the order of its same, in and of itself, a closed circle, there is a mimodrama happening. As we saw with Mallarmé’s narcissist mime, this hypostasis is played over the surface of one body closed on itself. To access this mimodrama, this 84

Georg Simmel, Simmel On Culture: Selected Writings, Theory, Culture & Society, eds. David Patrick Frisby and Mike Featherstone, (London:  Sage, 1987); hereafter, Culture. When Heidegger talks about the ‘being of a people’ in the sense of a collective or a culture he writes about a “higher order of be-​ing” which has to be achieved: “Mindfulness of what belongs to ‘being a people’ constitutes an essential passage-​way” (Heidegger Contributions, 30). But this passage-​way or crossing is never the given of the Other but it is sacrificed to an anonymous ‘be-​ing.’ 85 The cultivation of the land and the possibility of yielding its goods has always been associated with the ploughing of the feminine land to yield crops and reproduce. “He wishes to conquer, to take, to possess; to have woman is to conquer her; he penetrates into her as the ploughshare into the furrow; he makes her his even as he makes his the land he works; he labours, he plants, he sows: these images are old as writing; from antiquity to our own day a thousand examples could be cited” (De Beauvoir, Second, 170). 86 Simmel, Culture, 55.

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enclosed spectacle, a path and a passage are needed, both of which will allow to see, to have a theory of this absolute sameness: “un chemin tout sombre ce soir-​là descendent le long de la Seine: puis, poussant une petite porte.”87 The mimodrama of hypostasis, the in-​itself of the or-​phan spectacle, is (a) happening behind closed doors. To see it we first have to follow a path leading to a small door. Many paths could have le(a)d to that door but the passage, the door that we shall pass is universal for all possible paths that could have le(a)d to it. The door which would allow the passing of the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside is universal, une petite porte. This door, which in the ancient phoně sounds like δῶρον which means gift, constitutes an entrance –​ the beginning, arche –​of and for culture. In our idiom: a passage which fallows being and allows the departure from being to existence. And this door is given to us through the promise (logos) of the Other. In this way we can understand Lévinas’ and Derrida’s ‘trace’ differently. The trace as passage can be just the incision on our being created by another’s logos; the trace of the Other’s transcendence on our being. “In a trace has passed a past absolutely bygone.”88 The trace is like a wake. It is the Other who awakes us from a wallowing dream by (f)allowing, characterizing our being. The logos of the Other drafts, writes an opening, o-​pens our being from the circle of atemporality. A trace, says Lévinas, “is the insertion of space in time, the point at which the world inclines toward a past and a time.”89 Simply, a passage into time for a being, or better still, for a something which is out of time, alien to time, closed in itself and wallowing. The trace is an opening, a schism, a draft. This drafting is the first promise; an indelible mark not as a trace with particular ontic-​ontological import, but a mark through which –​in all senses of ‘through which’ –​we trace, find or found everything. Through which everything flows as Mallarmé wrote. It remains, there, pres/​ent-​and-​abs/​ent like a promise of a promise. It (f)allows every transcendence we undertake. But this mark, this scar, this “incision made in time that does not bleed,”90 comes from the Other. Perhaps, Sartre may have been suggesting this with the terms ‘omnipresence’ and ‘contamination’ of the Other. What the Other gives us is their logos through its mediation and representation; their promise of giving us what they think is good, our well-​being. But the gift is not the intentionality of the gesture but the effect of the gesture itself. And this effect is entropy which phenomenalizes or traces the how of the attempt of the Other’s fulfilling their 87 Margueritte, Pierrot. 88 Lévinas, Time, 357. 89 Ibid., 358. 90 Ibis., 354.

372 Chapter 8 promise. Is not the gift the unbracketing of Being through a m-​other logos, a promise as giving us her wor(l)d? There is the implication of a passage in the giving of one’s wor(l)d. This passage stays given on our being like an indelible and indicible mark, a character on our being. It is in this sense that the passage is the promise. The gift is a mark as the first writing, a writing avant la lettre. Because it is a promise as the possibility of every transcendence … writing is the first passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me –​the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live –​that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? –​a feminine one, a masculine one, some? –​several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which life soars.91 Although Cixous thinks that the ‘I’ is ontologically intersubjective, that there is within me an Other, we can retain our convergence with her in the phrase that the Other presences themselves. The Other not as part of my presence but as a present, a gift, a promise which I feel (as) passing, as I transcend. Since the entrance and the exit, the opening that we require in order to transcend is what allows my desire to know and from which life soars, the promise of the Other is felt as that very threshold of entrance/​exit. It is the horizon beyond which everything happens. One cannot ex-​ist without passing from the Other’s logos. The Other is not just standing next to this passage, this door. The Other is under-​standing it; the Other is that door –​not the Other’s being but their logos. The passage is given through the path. The path as means is nothing else than everything that we learn by example. We are taught these means by example. From how to eat and do our toilet to the language that we speak and the how to speak it. Lévinas talks about teaching as a manner of speaking or a manner of reasoning and this could be broadly construed in the sense of Peirce’s logica utens, a mother language game. To learn the mother language requires a game of repetition, habitual way of doing. The possibility of habit then is not an ontological necessity but an expression of the gift. The first habitus is given by the Other who tries to reach us. A trying to reach through repetition, again and again, through patterns of touch, sound, gaze and so on. It is the constant exposure of the Other, of the m-​other, who goes into a repetition, into

91 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betty Wing (Manchester: mup, 1986), 157–​8.

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a routine, a procedure, who inscribes themselves in circuits of action, again and again to reach us. The orphan is drawing in from the m-​other by withdrawing from itself, it is ex-​hausting them. The orphan drinks up, absorbs, hausts the source of goods, the means offered for its lasting –​to pass from duration to endurance. The orphan exhausts the m-​other. Is a mother ever not tired-​by-​ being-​tried? The m-​other gives until the orphan takes care for-​itself. Until it can procure for itself and thus exemplify itself. Until it can resist the offering of means and can make its own means, be its own example. Can we not say that to express oneself is to self-​exemplify? The passage then is not the means offered but the effect of these means which constitutes an opening where the orphan can exit it, ex-​it, and decide for-​itself what path to follow or create.92 When it can reflect and understand. “Concern, in fact, can be interpreted as a way of substituting oneself for the mother, which a process of reversal makes difficult to decipher.”93 The deciphering of the process of reversal is a question of ‘how.’ Ever since our introduction we have been attempting to characterize this how, that is, that introduction to ‘culture’ requests the invisible aid of the Other. We said that the opening of being, the passing from being to existence requires a gift which literally means a door. If, to use another analogy, we are “awaken to another world,”94 the world of the mother, it is ultimately not about the world of the m-​other, but about the how of the awakening. This awakening is, in all senses, a c-​section95 on the circle of being. This break comes as a tear, a crack, a fissure 92

As Kafka writes to his father, “your effect on me was the effect you could not help having” (Franza Kafka, Selected Works, (London: Secker & Warburg Limited, 1976), 20; hereafter, Selected. 93 Irigaray, Sharing, 119. This passage which is given through a path is what Patrick Modiano is writing without writing it himself in his novel entitled Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier. By this title formulated in the French subjunctive, Modiano fallows all the teleological prescription one could mean with such a syntax in compelling the Other with an ‘in order to,’ a ‘so that’ or a ‘do so, that,’ and passes into the promise which reveals that in the end of this prescription the one who commands inscribes themselves toward the Other by being commanded in the ‘just-​in-​case’ one is to be lost. The prescription passes into a promise of not being lost. And this promise comes through a m-​other’s writing. A m-​other who in Modiano’s elliptical writing is not the biological mother but the woman who gives him this subjunctive in written form. The representationally biological mother is substituted by a m-​other who ‘adopts him’ by caring. The m-​other cares by providing the possibility of a bios, thus a bios-​logical m-​other with her written address: her promise to him for him (so) as (not to be) lost (Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne me perdes pas dans le quartier (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 94 Irigaray, Sharing, 104. 95 As we saw earlier, the dark Heraclitus uses two metaphors for this opening. The opening as c-​section can be done with bow or lyre. Both constitute a logical opening of being. It is

374 Chapter 8 on being from which one’s logos/​existence could flow. To create an opening, a door for the Other to see/​sea on the Other side, some force is required for drafting this door. In this way, the drafting of the door surprises us. In the attempt to open a door on our being, the Other surprises us. The Other surprises us by attempting to question the monotony of being, its natural course to death by giving us a rhythm which comes through the how of this opening; in this way every surprise is tempora(ri)lly abrasive or excoriating. The surprise is always in-​between, the horizon of all times, a ligament between the arythmentic and the rhythmical: logos. To phrase another analogy, scientists talk about the phenomenon of palmar grasp. New-​borns’ palms are closed. And if you try to open the hands there is a reflex, in essence an immediate reaction, whereby the hands will clench.96 There are many ways to open these hands. You can finger them or hug them. Or you can caress them and make them shiver. The ways that the m-​other will traverse the surface of this body, the way she-​verses will leave marks, verses on this body, shivers, grooves, rhythms. The opening of the palm can be done with fingering, with penetrating the palm. But it can be done with encompassing the hand or the whole body, with embracing it –​in both its English and French meanings. We saw with Sartre the importance of the caress. It is not a give and take as Derrida describes. The one who caresses verses the body and writes an opening on the surface of the body. The caress creates a metaphysical opening to the Other as one traverses their body. A caress by one hand over a surface is not versing the same as an embracing caress by one’s whole means, one’s whole body. The caress questions, verses, rills. How much caress will be spent through the hand and how much through the whole body? It is in the expenditure of the caress taking place in the whole surface of one’s body where the other can have a surface to be revealed. It is the horizon of two bodily surfaces,

96

our choice, our decision, whether the opening toward and to word the other will be done with a bow –​killing physically or in semblance, or with a lyre –​by being a-​muse for each other, an inspiration. “To elicit the palmar grasp reflex, the examiner inserts his or her index finger into the palm of the infant from the ulnar side and applies light pressure to the palm, with the infant lying on a flat surface in the symmetrical supine position while awake. Tactile without pressure and nociceptive stimulation of the palm are both inadequate. The response of the reflex comprises flexion of all fingers around the examiner’s finger, which is composed of two phases: finger closure and clinging. The latter occurs as a reaction to the proprioceptive stimulation of the tendons of the finger muscles due to slight traction subsequent to the application of pressure to the palm” (Yasuyuki Futagi, Yasuhisa Toribe, and Yasuhiro Suzuki, “The Grasp Reflex and Moro Reflex in Infants: Hierarchy of Primitive Reflex Responses,” International Journal of Pediatrics, (2012): 5).

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the hug or the cuddle; (t)here, where an embrace or an en-​com-​passing can be felt. A passing towards each other in the hug or the cuddle, in the syn-​pathetic touching of contact. The opening of the other as request requires a tactics of touching with tact, a rhythm of tac-​tics, a rhythm of a bit/​beat; a beat of embracing. Similarly, De Beauvoir talks about the verse, the rhythm engendered in/​by rocking the baby-​body. Different rhythms contribute to the constitution of different openings which will affect the ways we transcend. They compose ways, horizons of the ways of transcendence. We have categorized rhythms as proper for boys and proper for girls. Rhythms that suit according to what someone is supposed to become. Throwing oneself to the world becomes sexed, throwing like a boy or a girl,97 when it is in fact engendered by being en-​gendered by the one who promises to help one transcend. In fact, the possibilities are infinite precisely because the opening is the possibility of possibility. Again, if the gift as opening or the opening as gift might be analogized with a process, then it is just (that) process, or in Kafka’s words Prozess: a trial; a procedure or proceeding towards the possibility of a verdict; to be able to come to the ultimate trial, the possibility of judgement, understanding. And, again, this process, this trial, this undertaking, is an attempt coming from an Other who is gaining towards. Once again, and this again-​ness as process comes to be through a forced, better still, an en-​forced writing on the ‘gain,’ dispels the naturality or naturalness of the process, it gainsays it as it goes against it; it is a process of opening a door for someone’s gain. It is all about gain as help or avail, and/​or bargain as opportunity. But whose? It is on this undecided decidability or the decided undecidability of the quest(ion) through which Kafka’s writing comes to be writing literally, or literally writing, as Walter Benjamin would say,98 of the opening as gift, as door. A door on/​with which Kafka was literally fixated in his writings. 5

Kafka’s (A)Mazing D(o)or-​Gift

Kafka was fixated on/​with this ‘door’ as a gift or as opening to the world which (f)allows existence. But this fixation was not just on any door but his door. If only we could say ‘his this door.’ We shall not attempt another reading of 97 Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl:  A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Human Studies, 3 (1980): 137–​156. 98 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); hereafter, Illuminations.

376 Chapter 8 Kafka’s work as a whole. We just want to enact this fixation in Kafka’s writing –​ not represent it, but enact it. We just want to fix our attention on the door as a figure of the whole of existence or the given or created (w)hole of this figure in Kafka’s writing. A (w)hole which Deleuze and Guattari take as a burrow, as it is written in one of his short stories, whereas for us it seems more like a burrow turned into a furrow and open to view in writing: “All that can be seen from outside is a big hole.”99 But let us start from the beginning, once again, let us try a beginning. “How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known.”100 Benjamin also took heed of the door. Reflecting on Kafka, he wrote to Gerhard Scholem that Kafka can be heard through a physicist’s words: “If one reads the following passage from Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, one can virtually hear Kafka speak. ‘I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated process …’.”101 The threshold of entering a room is an opening, a ‘door.’ Yet, besides the fact that all three realized the importance of Kafka’s door, a possible arche which allows a reading of Kafka beyond the traditional ways –​theologically, with classical psychoanalysis, or classical legal theory –​and, thus, rid the violence of exhausting the meaning of this writing within particular categories; still, they did not show enough respect to ‘his this door.’ “Yes, the mere thought of the door itself.”102 Deleuze and Guattari “enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon.”103 And as Benjamin claims, there is essentially no entrance to Kafka’s work. Any way we claim to enter his work fails, and this failure is the beauty of Kafka’s revelation: “the beauty and purity of a failure.”104 This rushing in into Kafka’s work seems indeed a process bound to failure, just like his father’s process which kept him in limbo without reaching him. Let us go back to the door and start with the front door. Let us officially announce ourselves at the front door by knocking. None of the officials announced themselves in his writings. All officials pop up harassing the writer

99

Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, (New  York:  Pantheon Books, 1971), 205; hereafter, Complete. 100 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka:  Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minesota, MN: ump, 1986), 3; hereafter, Kafka. 101 Benjamin, Illuminations, 141. 102 Kafka, Complete, 210. 103 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 3. 104 Benjamin, Illuminations, 145.

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and showing no tact, no touch, no respect. Let us try to reach Kafka’s front door otherwise. It is right (t)here that we shall fail. If we fix ourselves by fixating on the front door we shall fail, and for two reasons. First, there is no front door in Kafka, no official or proper door to knock. Second, when a front door appears, it is never properly functional; it appears as after having been torn open: “they had evidently left it open, as one does in houses where some great misfortune has happened.”105 The misfortune is that there is no path to the front door as passage to the house, the apartment, the Castle. As Sartre noticed, “the castle on top of the hill is visible from everywhere but no road leads to it.”106 To come to knock on a front door is impossible. To be fixed at a front door as an official entrance is not only hopeless but impossible. Kafka’s front door or entrance is defected: “The burrow has so many unavoidable defects imposed by natural causes that it can surely stand this one defect for which I am responsible, and which I recognize as a defect, even if only after the event.”107 The realization of this defected entrance, one can even call it a trauma or say that the door has been blessed, comes ‘If only after the event.’ An entrance is an entrance from a particular orientation, let us say the outside. From the other side it is an exit. Only, after, one has taken the Other side can the entrance be seen in its universality –​entrance/​exit. Only after such an event. And this event is an event of understanding –​seeing oneself as another. The door is this threshold, this border, this edge, The Bridge: “not traced in any map”108 and yet allowing for the Other to come. In this story, ‘in his this’ story, the bridge bends only after a passenger comes on it. All the stories of Kafka can be traced back to the beginning, this arche, this front door which does not exist, but which appears unofficially as an essential condition for all the events and connections of events in the stories. This opening as door is just an arc, a frame which allows every beginning, every possible being, every ar(ch)e. There is always a door before, around, or beyond which everything happens. Every story is fixed in a physical or virtual door which allows its unfolding.109 And with no front door as a transcendental beyond, 1 05 Kafka, Complete, 70. 106 Françoise Derins, Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, “A Lecture by Jean-​Paul Sartre,” October, 87 (1999): 25; hereafter, Lecture. 107 Kafka, Complete, 210. 108 Ibid., 259. 109 Even in stories such as the Jackals and the Arabs a door is always drawn virtually. “One jackal came from behind me, nudging right under my arm, pressing against me, as if he needed my warmth, and then stood before me and spoke to me almost eye to eye.” (Kafka, Complete, 256; emphasis added). If we were to draw or enact this description the whole movement of behind-​right_​under-​against-​before sign-​writes a door.

378 Chapter 8 everything is contained within a milieu of rooms, corridors and doors. As the architect Ayah Rahmani110 writes, there is no world as a beyond or exterior. Even in those stories where there is a link to another city or another country as in The Trial and in America, this link is a corridor to another room that requires another door  –​or a port(al), some kind of opening. This opening is simply transcendence or the possibility of existence. The opening to the world is a fixation which is first of all his fixation. The door about which he writes or a door which is fixed in all so many places in his writings goes beyond any figure of writing, metonymy or metaphor, since it is the very door that was written, fixed, or framed on his being. The door is the only figure, if one could call it so, that is never distorted or proliferated, never assembled into series or assemblages; it never escapes itself.111 The door is written both in the abundance, fluidity and universality of the en vrac and the robustness, solidity and particularity of the en bloc. It (f)allows all the writings of Kafka –​it is the very possibility of his writing. Kafka never writes about or of a door. He writes with the aid of the door. And when he attempts to write a-​bout-​to-​it there is nothing to say, there is no whole door, but just a hole and a doorkeeper. To write about the door is to be fixated and do nothing like the man from the country who stands before the ultimate paradigmatic door: Before the Law. This fixation at the door succeeds in failing as fixation just at the instance of the figure of the door or the door as figure. If this were not so, there would be no construction, no writing at all about this failure, this defect. And this failure which fails its success, fails again and again by not being what it is, that is, (im)possible. This failure is written and, thus, fails to be a failure in the distance around a point which can never be reached, in the instance of the just-​before or just-​after-​the door: in writing and erasing, in constructing and destroying, in doors opening and closing restlessly as Ayad Rahmani put it –​“leaving and returning,” versing and reversing, to and fro.112 That is exactly what is happening in The Burrow. Apart from the whirlpool of creating and destroying the interior of this habitat, the to-​and-​fro is more evidenced when the dweller attempts to dwell on a noise. No path can lead to 110 Ayad B. Rahmani, Kafka’s Architecture’s: Doors, Rooms, Stairs and Windows of an Intricate Literary Edifice (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &Company, Inc., 2015); hereafter, Architecture. 111 Benjamin, and following him, Deleuze and Guattari, have provided beautiful analysis of the figures in Kafka whose structure is differential. They appear in differential intensities traversing all his corpus, his body of writing. These figures, proliferate schizophrenically “to unblock a situation that had closed elsewhere in an impasse” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 53). Yet, there is only one figure for which none and all interpretations apply: the door. 112 Rahmani, Architectures.

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that noise, that minor failure of silence which becomes so loud and which bugs the inhabitant of the burrow. In the being of absolute silence or in the absolute being of silence there is an opening, a noise, but there can be no access, no entrance, no door to it. No matter how many corridors, paths, and alleys the inhabitant creates, this noise can never be found in its source. Insofar as one is arrested by this humming with its various rhythms, then there is no possibility of going back. And, tragically as it is, there is no reason for this rhythm; the rhythm is the reason. And, in The Trial, once arrested or accused by the law there is no turning back. There is no reason for this law, the law is the reason. This opening for which one is not responsible offers, prescribes, promises a life on a “razor’s edge:”113 one can go against it either towards a life of forgetfulness, by forgetting about it in habit or addiction, a life without reason, without justice; or towards death.114 To be fixed on writing about this opening, this rhythm, this door itself is like a trial with no end; “a sheer impossibility.”115 Benjamin insists that we should never forget that Kafka gave in his testament an order for his unpublished writings to be destroyed, yet, at the same time, we cannot forget his other testament that all of his writing is about his father. How can we reconcile these two testaments with that which testifies itself indelibly in his writings as the figure of door? Let us start from the letter to his father; not the beginning of the letter but the beginning testified by Kafka as his beginning within the letter, Kafka’s existence avant la lettre, an event inscribed on him and coming to be his first memory: Once in the night I kept on whimpering for water. … After several vigorous attempts had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out on the pavlatche and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door.116 The first memory is an exodus from being in the house and an abandonment to the pavlatche outside the shut door. A door which was opened and then closed.

1 13 Kafka, Complete, 277. 114 As Smock describes, this door can be accessible only in dying. “To enter one need only die, be left out, take the last step which is: no step. Stillness.” And just as it is “a place with no entrance except the exit, from which all depart before arriving,” it is also the reverse, a place with no exit except the entrance from which all arrive before departing –​as we saw earlier (A. Smock, “Doors: Simone Weil with Kafka,” MLN, 95 (1980): 859. 115 Kafka, Complete, 76. 116 Kafka, Selected, 559.

380 Chapter 8 This is a dramatic experience which opens the story of his memories, his-​story. But this dramatic experience starts with his being carried out. Right after this experience comes the writing of a wonder-​ful experience, that of being driven to public view. The wonderful experience is about his being presented in the bathing-​hut: “What made me feel best … I was able to stay behind in the hut alone and putt off the disgrace of showing myself in public until at length you came to see what I was doing and drove me out of the hut.”117 In-​between these two experiences there is difference to such an extent that we could say that it is a chaotic opening, a chasm. In-​between the carrying out and the driving out there is a chasmatic difference. Any particular psychoanalytic or religious reading will fail to account for these reversals which do not necessarily happen in the same text but transverse the whole writing corpus. We follow that all Kafka’s writings are about entering the symbolic world, the passing to culture. But this passing should not be construed in the sense of the exclusion and repression of otherness as one assimilates the Logos of the Father-​God-​Transcendental Authority. Rather, entering the symbolic world is revealed in the possibility of questioning this logos.118 Anne Fuchs writes that “Like no other modernist writer Kafka is concerned with the symbolic threats on which the symbolic order is erected. This is the explicit theme of his ‘Letter to his Father’ which explores his own relationship with his father as an example of the crippling effects of unbridled paternal dominance.”119 We just saw the reversal of this dominance within the same text. There are other reversals proliferating in Kafka’s body of writing. If the abandonment in the palvatche comes from Kafka’s desire which is absurdly represented and which his father negates by expelling its expression altogether, this absurdity is an unbridled welcoming from a feminine other. The woman in the first interrogation in The Trial does not inquire about K.’s

1 17 Kafka, Selected, 560. 118 This is what Simmel has called the “paradox of culture.” 119 Anne Fuchs, “A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Man who Disappeared,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, eds. Julian Preece (Cambridge: cup, 2002), 35; hereafter, Psychoanalytic. Earlier we saw the reversal of this sheer dominance. Another psychoanalytic reading, less patriarchical and more existential would start from this neutralization: the in-​between, the frame of the door. The door is nothing and everything –​sheer impossibility. As Sartre writes, Kafka’s writing is all about being found in this impossible situation: “If Kafka’s “original project” was his discovery of the self through a return to Jewish sources, the father not only provided a passageway but at the same time appeared as an obstacle in the path. As a result, the father attracts and repels Kafka to an equal degree” (in Jo Bogaerts, “Book Review:  Jean-​Paul Sartre. Situations III,” The Germanic Review, 90, 2 (2015), 148; hereafter, Review).

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absurd quest(ion). She does not need a reason. She tells K. to go through the door. And remarkably, a reversal in the same text which has been neglected in the name of the father is the following: K., feeling the air too thick for him, stepped out again and said to the young woman, who seemed to have taken him wrongly:  ‘I asked for a joiner, a man called Lanz.’ ‘I know,’ said the woman, ‘just go right in.’ K. might have not obeyed if she had not come up to him, grasped the handle of the door, and said: ‘I must shut this door after you, nobody else must come in.’120 Whereas the male doorkeeper stands absurdly and shuts the door only after death, the female doorkeeper shuts the door after passing into the absurd living. Just like Samsa’s sister in The Metamorphosis who attracts him with her rhythm in the living room, so many of the female characters in Kafka are the ones who adopt the rejected and abjected hero. Obviously, her trial to create a path for him fails in the end. Still, her trial comes to strike a gain, some time, before, against death which is the reverse of the shocks of the father who is bugged by this presence and pushes him immediately to the silence of his room. Kafka’s writing is rewarding by re-​wording the femine gestus121  –​ as Benjamin would say. Yet, if anything, it is not only that the entering to the symbolic order does not exhaust itself in the oppression and depression caused by the father, but, rather, by the very possibility of an archaic opening the details of which one cannot even trace: You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and

1 20 Kafka, Selected, 31. 121 There are multiple ‘rewardings’ of the femine helpers in Kafka. But, in this particular text, the sister is the giant who says ‘Enough.’ She will not sacrifice her own transcendence till the end. The feminine is never on trial in Kafka when trying means representing a process of exculpation or vindication. They are never accused. They are on trial by enactment: they have all tried for Kafka’s gain. They have been there to help him again and again.

382 Chapter 8 because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.122 Everything has happened in this o-​pening. In the surprise of the question, in the sudden appearance of the Other who quests him, who is asking (for) him, who is looking for his answer, there is no reason. The reason to be offered comes after the request. He cannot answer writes Kafka. He is (in) pieces: Partly because he was afraid and partly because he could not approximate. As we shall see, Kafka cannot approximate because the de-​tails of this frightful presence cannot be touched. There is no contact. He cannot tail, follow his father/​ m-​other. There is no sight, no intentionality as subject of this fear. The ‘father’ is a hollow referent. There is just magnitude which goes beyond observation, beyond scope, beyond sight. In the first quest by his father, Kafka was afraid because he was afraid. There is no other reason: the Other is the reason. Or, he was afraid because of the reason he gave him. His reason of being? Within this fear there is an element of surprise. His Father was an Other who surprised him by calling him into question and asking for reasons –​forgetting that he gives the reason by being it; the Other who parts being and asks him to depart from it and go with them in their path, to reason. But this surprise turned into a fright as there was no reason. The magnitude of the opening had shocked him so much that he could not approximate –​one cannot approximate with no reason. He just stood before (t)his Law. Even now while he passes it (in)to writing, he is afraid. There was never a passing from standing-​under him to an understanding. The “impression [he] made on the child,” these “worn grooves”123 that he engraved on his brain, ended up in “depression.”124 It was an opening which was not done with care but with speed, and violent shocks: “… completely tied to the business, scarcely able to be with me even once a day, and therefore made all the more profound an impression on me, never really leveling out into the flatness of habit.”125 One could even risk a hypothesis that has not yet been dared in the literary canon. The Trial, if not all of his writings, is not about Kafka himself but literally written about the bouting father. Deleuze and Guattari came very close to formulating this thesis when they write: “the judges, commissioners, bureaucrats and so on are not substitutes for the father; rather it is the father who is a 1 22 Kafka, Selected, 558. 123 Ibid., 567. 124 Ibid., 560. 125 Ibid., 559.

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condensation of all these forces that he submits to and then he tries to get his son to submit to.”126 In his endless trial, his father does not have a reason for his life other than the transcendental policies and traditions whose secret authority authorizes one to be reli(e)ved by relinquishing one’s responsibility. And in this vertigo of absurdity, in his father’s trial with no ultimate reason, the process of bringing up his son falls into this void. Deleuze and Gauttari are once again exact to underscore that “the question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.”127 It is Kafka himself who is the true accuser and judge since he has come to understand and reflect on the real absence of his father. The story of his abandonment on this area, this spacing, this pavlatche is on trial. But absurdly there is no defendant. His father, a true enactment of the Law, brought him to life to abandon him. In reality Kafka is an orphan picked up by enacting a transcendental logos and not by the enactment of giving one’s logos. Kafka cannot try his father for not keeping his promise because he never really gave one: he never tried. Kafka never doubts that this opening or gift comes from his parents. It is not taken for granted but it is given to him. But it seems that this gift which is given from his parents is not an offering for him and him alone but an exchange. It is as if his father wanted something in exchange. This father opened a door but wanted something in return for opening. And the tragedy of this drama is that the gain from this exchange was not even for his father. It was for neither for the one nor for the other but a sacrifice to a transcendental beyond (for no) reason. It is not Kafka who fails but his father. He would not leave the door but would stand there blocking it. “What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road.”128 It is as if he would not deserve this gift unless he followed the only path through which this passage was created. If Kafka did not follow “in-​such-​and-​such a way,”129 then he did not deserve a gift as promise or invitation. That is why his life, his bios, felt “an undeserved gift from you.”130 But this undeservedness is (not) coming from his father’s promise as someone who is fathering words which are not his. In the end, no one fails, says Kafka, because

1 26 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 12; emphasis added. 127 Ibid., 10. 128 Kafka, Selected, 559. 129 Ibid., 564. 130 Ibid.

384 Chapter 8 he never really followed his father  –​‘father’ is an empty referent, a hollow, a bout. The fixation of Kafka on the door is precisely there where there is no path, no door but just a frame. To create a door a frame, an opening must be formed. Where there is no door to kick, push, unlock, open or close, there is only framing. His door was framed, period; only framed. Framed as in created, that is, draught, and framed as in fraught with the terror of nothing to separate, as in naught. With respect to his father, Kafka was carried and pulled into the world but left abandoned. With no door to open and close, there is no passage, no possibility of a path, transcendence or meaning. Lying out in the passage, abandoned in the nothingness of the horizon, Kafka was adopted and then abandoned. The promise was broken.131 Yet all this, despite the trauma of the shocking opening, the chasm of not being able to approximate a father who is absent, was still a gift –​even if it was “an undeserved gift from you.”132 A gift which opened t/​his being into three parts: “the world was divided for me into three parts”133 The trauma of being a “slave,” the chasm of an Other’s wor(l)d “infinintely remote from mine,” and the wonder of asking how “everybody else lived happily and free from others and from having to obey.”134 An undeserved gift, yet gift nonetheless. What Kafka was grateful of was the gift; yet for the gesture of this gift he was resentful. Yet he could write for both only in virtue of both where no one is to blame and that both are to blame: A gives B a piece of advice that is frank, in keeping with his attitude to life, not very lovely but still, even today perfectly usual in the city, a piece of advice that might prevent damage to health. This piece of advice is for B morally not very invigorating –​but why should he not be able to work his way out of it, and repair the damage in the course of the years? Besides, he does not even have to take the advice; and there is no reason why the advice itself should cause B’s whole future world to come tumbling down.

131 This drama writes itself ironically in the debate about Kafka’s works. Kafka created an opening to the world with his writing, a writing whose belongingness is on trial with respect to rights of ownership “ironically in family court.” The passages of Kafka are blocked anew by opposing forces of profit as Butler explores (Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?,” London Review of Books, 33, 5 (2011)). But these forces claim to be family and what is best for Kafka’s writing! Kafka’s writings are orphans. 132 Kafka, Selected, 564. 133 Ibid., 562. 134 Ibid.

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And yet something of this kind does happen, but only for the very reason that A is you and B is myself.135 He is grateful for the giving of the advice as the giving allowed him to not take it. As we said earlier, for a gift to be a gift it must allow for the possibility of its negation. Among other things, what Kafka gave us was the gift. Not a definition or a representation of the gift but its enactment. He showed us, or better yet to use Sartre’s expression, he guided us136 literally by enacting what the gift as coming to existence involves. Coming to existence is an event, a movement towards a living (room) from a path (a corridor) which links the living with the anonymous being (locked private room). The opening of this anonymity, this gift, this door, involves a gestus from the Other. It is a play of forces and that is why it comes to be wonder(full)/​thauma(turgic)-​(θαῦμα), chasm(atic) (χάσμα), and trauma(tic) (τραῦμα). Even if the gain of this existence is expelled to a beyond, never to be found(ed), once a-​gain, the Other is the writer of this drama, the essence of existence. To exist is to be given an Other’s logos, a blessing, an indelible opening, a promise, the spell of a metamorphosis. 1 35 Kafka, Selected, 580. 136 Jean-​Paul Sartre, What is Literature, (Cambridge: cup, 1988), 53.

­c hapter 9

Epilogical Touches

An Authentically Poor or Aporetic Conclusion

In the beginning, by the very title of this journal, we made a promise. We promised to undertake writing about “Altruism as the essence of existence.” To the extent that this undertaking is drawing to an end in this concluding section, then the undertaking will have failed. Our failure will not consist in not having shown that altruism is the essence of existence or in not having represented that the essence of existence is altruism. With respect to the category of ‘Being,’ we have succeeded. We have exposed how our being cannot be realized without the Other. No matter the boundaries of being, that is, the hori-​z-​on; no matter how indeterminate one takes being to be, the very possibility of a horizon is the Other. We have presented how the Other conditions all possibilities when we use ‘Being’ as the means of understanding. We thus have succeeded in requesting the logos of the Other out of the anonymity when ‘Being’ governs. We have succeeded in writing about how there can be no world if the Other does not first give us their wor(l)d, their logos. If human reality defines itself as the possibility of understanding, as the possibility of making sense, then this very possibility is given by the Other. The possibility of understanding as a passage from being to existence is the door, the gift, and it is metaphysically created by an Other’s logos. Hannah Arendt said that there is no possibility of collective living, of a community, of culture tout court, without the phenomenon of promising. Through our journey, we came to believe that the human condition is itself impossible without the act of promising. We thus extended Arendt’s thesis and touched truth primitively. In Orpheus’ Argonautica, the very possibility of Jason’s existence depends on Orpheus’ promise. There is a double promise in that text. A promise to come along with the rest of the collective to undertake the acquisition of the Golden Fleece and a promise to tell about the journey itself. It is this double promising that Orpheus calls destiny. The Other is the condition of our humanity and our destiny. In Hesiod’s Theogony, there is again a double promise. The children of Uranus and Earth are kept in the darkness by Uranus. He does not allow them to come to light; they cannot exit the cave where they are kept. It is Chronos who first promises an undertaking to realize his mother’s word and save the

© Iraklis Ioannidis, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004448391_010

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children. But Chronos is being devoured by his narcissism and fails. In time, in being himself as himself, he ends up like his father. It is the promise of Zeus that undertakes to dispel the narcissism of Chronos, time itself; to fallow him and allow for the possibility of the human condition to take place. Human reality starts with a double promise. Our failure is analogous to Chronos’ failure. Insofar as this journey towards the Other ends, our promise fails; it is devoured by the end of trying; just like the stopping of Chronos’ trying. Our failure is not a failure of representation but of enactment.1 And so is our hypothesis. We risked the hypothesis that “Trying to understand the Other is altruism.” If altruism is a promised attempt to understand the Other, then this attempt is bound to failure. “To promise to try” always succeeds in failing and fails in succeeding. There are no felicitous or correspondence conditions for/​in ‘trying.’ For trying to succeed, trying must not end. The trying is successful as an ongoing quest. Insofar as this journal must come to an end, the trial is over; insofar as one ends the trying of understanding, understanding has failed. This quest towards the Other, apart from endurance, requires adoption. The attempt to understand the Other can come to be a felicitous attempt, insofar as it endures, when Other comes to be adopted as an orphan, that is, devoid of any representation. An attempt to understand the Other is felicitous to the extent that we deploy or enact a phenomenological reduction by defamiliarizing ourselves from all the representations that the Other is. This unbracketing can only take place with another promise; a trying questioning that promises no end. In “the driving onset of questioning, there is affirmation of what is not yet accomplished,” said Heidegger.2 Yet, this questioning is about what is; a quest in the boundaries of being, imprisoned in an endless circle. The question(ning) which would allow us to come closer to the Other, to approximate them, affirms not what they are or that they are but the possibility of coming to-​ge(t)-​there. And this affirmation comes in our re-​questing the Other, with another question, a request. The most violent question demands a response. The most virulent question is not a sentence. It will never sentence the Other to a particular place. An enduring question(ning) of the Other promises their possibility. 1 It is worth noting here, in the end, a philosophical confusion which lasts since time immemorial. ‘Representation’ cannot be transported to the ancient lexicon since it would suggest a contradiction in terms. Even in the modern Greek lexicon, this invention of being able to repeat or reproduce a presence or a presentation would always pass through enactment (αναπαράστασις). 2 Heidegger, Contributions, 8.

388 Chapter 9 Again, for the gain of the Other, for the Other’s gain as well-​being, as we promised in the very beginning, as the very beginning of the Other’s destiny, comes another question:  Why do we stop trying to come towards with the Other? Hesiod’s answer is simple. Because there is no Chronos-​Time for the Other. Insofar as time is given to himself, insofar as the undertaking of the promise is for one’s self, a narcissistic promise, then there can be no human reality. Irigaray told us that we have not learnt to live with the Other. We learn to live with a transcendental beyond where the Other is but an obstacle to be dominated or an accessory at best; eaten or calculated as Derrida showed us. We have learnt only to look for transcendental and subjective conditions. The shadow of the subjective smothers the Other. How come the logos of the Other ends up permanently displaced in this learning? How come the logos of the Other does not get honored in this learning but, instead, we go against it? How come we do not have such philotimo for the Other? This must be our next philosophical quest.

Acknowledgements How can one make use of this space which demands particular acknowledgements when this work is a universal acknowledgement of the Other who (f)allows this work? To the extent that I shall choose to bring to this area particular others, would this very marginal section not defy and undermine the whole project? Where does one start and in what criteria of filiation one will have to succumb to particularize others? Acknowledging this question, a question which at least, to a degree, disturbs this section, a section which targets for particular recognition, I shall attempt to mention a few proper names. Among these names shall be the par-​ents of this work. My supervisors who adopted the research question I posed to them; they who heard the call and they who were there all this time until the quest(ion) was properly written: Dr. Susan Stuart and Dr. Olivier Salazar-​Ferrer. And of course another name affiliated in its non-​ filiation. My non-​genealogical sibling, Dr. Heleni Rizou who was also there for the whole time during this undertaking. Finally, Mr Ryan J.A. Gemmell who has challenged me in many ways during this work and Mr Kenneth Bell along with the staff room of Morgan Academy whom I will always have in my heart. But before this part came to (its) end, more people (have) helped. The editor Mark Letteri and the team of Brill, Fenja Schulz and Kavipriya Venkataraman have, in one way or another, contributed to the coming to be of this work.

Index abandon 352–​353, 382–​383 abandoned 30–​31, 227–​229, 337, 352–​ 353, 355–​356, 361–​362, 370, 384 abandoning 164, 352–​353, 368 abandonment 135, 292, 352–​353, 355–​ 356, 379–​381, 382–​383 abandons 110 adopt 355, 384, 387 adopting 42–​43, 44–​45, 56–​57, 367–​369 adoption 22–​23, 42–​43, 358–​360, 387 adopts 163–​164, 358–​360, 373–​374 aesthesis  aestheses 298 aesthesis 100, 190, 270–​272, 285, 287, 288–​289, 297–​298, 299–​300 aesthetic 10–​11, 285–​286, 287–​288, 290, 299–​300 aesthetical 264–​265 aid 28–​29, 31, 34–​35, 38, 72–​73, 170, 171, 210–​ 211, 272–​273, 345–​346, 357, 373–​374, 378 aided 355 alogical 102–​103, 259, 360 alogia 259 analoga 223, 333–​334 analogia 223 analogical 31–​32, 33, 110, 111, 120–​121, 128–​ 129, 224, 235–​236 anastrophe 153–​154, 258–​259, 266–​267, 313, 368 aphonia 10 aphonically 10 apophansis 182–​184, 185, 186, 191–​192, 207, 243–​244, 259, 280, 348–​349 apophantic 184–​185, 186, 305 apophantical 259 apophasis. 182–​185, 186, 191–​192, 243–​244, 259 apophatic 185, 305 apnea 341 apoche 44–​45 apostrophe 231, 252 apostrophes 252 apostrophize 252 arc 377–​378 arch 230–​231, 260–​261, 357

arche 1, 2, 3, 19–​20, 82, 147, 177, 179, 181–​182, 217, 260, 344–​346, 364, 370–​371, 376, 377–​378 arhythmetic 306–​307, 308, 373–​374 arithmetic 123, 291, 305, 306–​307, 310–​311, 314 arithmetically 306–​307 ascesis 10–​11, 42–​43 ascetic 10–​11 asceticism 10–​11 asthenia 50–​52 atelic 50–​52 atelis 50–​52 attune 129–​131, 257 attunement 129–​131, 230–​231, 272 awake 71–​72, 227, 273, 295, 318, 374–​375 awaken 257–​258, 373–​374 awakened 72 awakening 373–​374 awakens 136–​137 awakes 371–​372 awaking 365–​366 awoke 257 bank 207, 208, 210–​211, 350–​351 banking 207, 227 banks 207, 210–​211, 227, 245–​246 before-​and-​after 92, 342–​343 bios 50–​52, 87, 89–​90, 100–​101, 168, 230–​231, 255–​256, 308, 309, 344–​345, 352, 354, 357, 368, 373–​374, 383–​384 biosis 86–​87, 89–​90, 100–​101, 142–​143, 170, 210–​211, 294–​295, 321–​322 bios-​logical 373–​374 blank 171 blankness 347 blanks 342–​343 blessed 377–​378 blessing 149, 385 bond 161, 163–​164, 234–​235, 323, 331, 350–​351, 358–​360, 361, 367–​368 bonds 39–​40, 108–​109, 358–​360, 368–​369 border 129–​131, 348, 376–​377 borders 6, 89–​90, 178, 311–​313

391

Index boundaries ix–​x, 46, 50–​52, 55, 94–​95, 97–​98, 110, 202, 266–​267, 279, 286–​287, 295–​296, 357, 386, 387 boundary 337 bounded 199, 202 bounding 199 bounds 57, 103–​105, 199 boustrophedon 135 bout 3–​4, 199, 200, 205–​206, 207, 208–​209, 210–​211, 213, 219–​220, 256, 273–​274 bouted 275 bouting 382–​383 bow 71, 73–​74, 219, 230–​231, 258–​259, 260, 269–​270, 273–​275, 344–​345, 373–​375 bracket 45, 103–​105, 206, 350–​351, 360 bracketed 102–​103, 163, 225–​227, 360 bracketing 43–​45, 80–​81, 102–​103, 150–​151, 189, 208–​209, 215–​216, 358–​360 brackets 80–​81, 82–​83, 158, 257, 360 breach 84, 326–​327 breaches 170 care 26, 27–​28, 31, 33, 35–​36, 38, 47–​48, 136–​138, 206–​207, 242, 266, 284, 337, 355, 366–​367, 368, 372–​373, 382 caress 156, 325–​326, 355, 374–​375 caresses 374–​375 caressing 156 caring 284, 368, 373–​374 catastrophe 147–​148, 153–​154, 160, 286 chasm 379–​380, 384–​385 chasmatic 379–​380 choc 329, 330 cogitans 136–​137 cogitatio 110 cogitations 103–​105, 164–​165 cogitatum 76, 105 cogito 76, 102–​103, 140–​141, 142–​143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 153–​154, 157–​158, 161, 163, 164–​166 commit 36–​38, 49, 91–​92 commitment 67–​68, 94, 242 commitments 94 commits 6 committal 97–​98 committed 196–​197, 242 committing 44–​45, 90–​92, 97, 362–​363

contaminate 63–​64 contaminated 168 contamination 168, 210–​211, 371–​372 contour  contourial 207 contourlessness 298 contours 182, 189–​190, 272, 298, 299 courage 192, 276, 347, 367–​368 courageous 358–​360, 367–​368 crack 83–​84, 328–​329, 373–​374 cracked 83–​84 crackling 341 cracks 342–​343 crime 6, 193, 196–​197, 341–​342 crimes 342–​343 criminal 52–​53 crisis  crises ix crisis 19–​20, 49–​52, 130–​131, 328 c-​section  c-​secting 273 c-​section 230–​231, 258–​259, 273–​274, 276, 344–​345 cuddle 374–​375 dash 105–​107, 136–​137, 144–​145 de-​bracketing 43–​44 defamiliarizing  defamiliarization 355 defamiliarizing 16–​17, 387 dehiscence 83–​84, 103, 158 delay 69, 83, 90, 354–​355 delaying 70–​71 demon 192, 197, 258–​259, 270–​271 depart 21, 110 departing 343, 379–​380 departs 256, 313, 364 departure 118–​119, 206, 207–​208, 364, 365, 370–​371 depress  depressed 371–​372, 381–​382 désœuvrement 153–​154 destroy 73, 136–​137, 149, 160, 165–​166, 168, 242, 286, 287, 348–​349 destroyed 17–​18, 73, 79–​80, 136–​137, 149, 288–​289, 379 destroyer 160 destroying 154–​155, 295–​296, 378

392 Index destroy (cont.) destroys 60–​61, 159, 160, 227, 287, 288, 347, 348–​349, 360 destruction 20, 160, 287–​288, 295–​296, 353 destructive 60–​61, 201 destruction 206 detach 161 détache 316–​317 detachment 138, 140 detail  detailed 17, 216 details 26–​27, 158, 381–​382 diastemic 341–​343 dictum 186, 201, 220, 243–​244 disowning 368–​369 dispel 129, 357–​358, 386–​387 dispelling 257 dispels 375 dispose 97 disposal 71–​72, 97, 179–​180, 217, 246–​248, 281 disposed 310 disposes 87 disposing 97 disposition 4–​6 dispositions 98–​99 disrupt  disrupted 149–​150 disruption 149–​150 disturb  disturbance 85, 328, 330 disturbed 210–​211 disturbing 13 disturbs xii, 310–​311, 372 divortium 349, 351–​352 docens 303–​304, 344–​345 draft 371–​372 drafting 371–​372, 373–​374 drafts 371–​372 drama 55n14, 191, 233–​234, 241, 261, 275, 353, 354, 362–​363, 383–​385 dramatic 379–​380 draught 384 dread 72, 127–​128, 129–​131 dreadful 143–​144, 166 dream 71–​73, 85, 129–​131, 207, 257, 270–​271, 272–​273, 294–​295, 371–​372

dreaming 72, 191–​192, 318 dreams 71–​72, 84–​85, 129–​131, 265 dump 352–​353 dumped 352–​354, 355, 358–​360, 364, 367–​368 dumping 353, 355 dumps 353 eidos  eide 266 eidetic 70–​71, 114–​115, 163 eidetics 166 eidos 47, 103–​105, 110, 111, 139–​140, 150–​151, 170, 266–​267, 301, 350–​351 eleusis 45, 192, 210–​211, 224, 357 enact 272–​273, 352, 365–​366, 375–​376, 377–​378, 387 enacted 62–​63, 210–​211, 233–​234, 297–​298 enacting 54–​55, 55n14, 99, 225–​227, 229–​ 230, 382–​383, 385 enactment 55n14, 261, 272–​273, 338–​339, 342–​343, 352, 382–​383, 385, 387 enkinaesthesia 357–​358 enkinaesthetic 357–​358 entasis 329 entendement 362 entrance 157, 298, 370–​371, 372, 376–​377 entrances 376 entropy  entropic 164–​165 entropy 139, 153–​154, 164–​165, 170, 174, 365–​366, 371–​372 epoch 89–​90, 359 epoche 105–​107, 149–​150 epoch-​making 272 erect  erected 380–​381 erection 88 erects 88 eros 43–​44, 232, 263, 306–​307, 368–​369 erotic 156, 368–​369 eroticize 367–​368 essay 8, 10–​11, 102–​103, 270–​271, 316–​317, 318, 343 essays 35–​36, 50–​52, 85–​86, 153–​154, 174, 203, 223–​224, 259, 291, 336, 363–​364, 375–​376 exhalation 348–​349

Index exit 138–​139, 355, 372–​374, 376–​377, 379–​380, 386–​387 fallow 241, 277, 282–​283, 370, 387 fallowed 260–​261, 290, 345, 347, 369, 370 fallowing 257, 292–​294, 299, 315 fallows 243–​244, 313, 371–​372, 373–​374 female 313, 360, 381–​382 feminine 10, 234–​236, 260, 273, 275, 276, 325, 370–​371, 372, 375–​376, 380–​382 feminist 44, 90–​91, 311–​313 feminists 225–​227, 276 figure  figuration 151–​152, 277–​278 figurative 219 figuratively 26, 219 figure 4, 8, 203, 234–​235, 257–​258, 375–​376, 378, 379 figures 20–​21, 55n14, 370–​371, 378–​379 filiation, (acknowledgements) 165–​166, 352, 355, 358–​360 finger 244–​245, 270–​271, 278, 374–​375 fingering 324, 374–​375 fingers 318, 324, 374–​375 fissure 83–​84, 373–​374 fix 174, 376–​377 fixated 375–​376, 378 fixating 376–​377 fixation 219, 375–​376, 378, 384 fixed 110, 120–​121, 269, 282–​283, 377–​379 fixes 64–​65 fixing 50–​52 fixity 227–​229 fluid 265–​266 fluidity 378 fold  folding 84, 329, 341 folds 192, 293, 319–​320 frame 258–​259, 281, 322, 335, 349, 377–​378, 380–​381, 384 framed 112, 120–​121, 378, 384 frames 253, 258–​259 framework 52–​53, 62, 125–​126, 353 frameworks 64, 225–​227 framing 384 fraught 59–​60, 384 fraye 343 fraying 343 furtive 351–​352, 353

393 gather 238–​239, 240–​241, 259 gathered 240–​241 gatheredness 259 gathering 240–​241, 259, 323 gathers 259 gaze 114–​115, 147, 158, 159, 299, 372–​373 gazed 311–​313 gazing 147 gest 265–​266 gests 265–​266 gestural 46, 193 gesture 272, 342–​343, 346, 347, 348–​349, 371–​372, 384–​385 gestures 85–​86, 196, 342–​343 gestus 385 grooves 374–​375, 382 haemorrhage 148 hapax 38, 259–​260 haptic 276 harmony  harmonia 274–​275 harmonious 117–​118, 218 harmoniously 235–​236 harmonize 143–​144 harmony 14, 107–​109, 218, 219, 230–​231, 260, 273–​274, 275–​276, 323 haunt 31, 34–​35, 103–​105, 147–​148, 179–​180, 200, 263–​264, 265, 270–​272, 358–​360 haunted 138, 168 haunting 22, 168 haunts 234 haust  hausts 372–​373 hearken 244–​245, 246 hearkens 234–​235 Hellenic 87–​88, 222, 225–​227 Hellenistic 176 hero 241, 381–​382 heroes 202, 263, 265–​266 heroic 277–​278, 283, 367–​368 heteropoeisis 357 hollow 274–​275, 382, 383–​384 homologue 366–​367 homologous 307–​308 homology 366–​367 hug 357–​358, 374–​375 hugging 325 humming 378–​379

394 Index hypocrisy 52–​53, 54–​55 hypostasis 203, 363–​364, 365–​366, 370–​371 hypostatization 316–​317 idiot 299–​300 idiotic 299–​300, 322 idol  idolize 277 idols 43–​44 imitate 201, 202, 265, 268 imitates 202, 263–​264 imitating 8–​10, 191, 196–​197, 202, 263–​264, 267 imitation 191, 196, 269–​271 imitations 230–​231 imitator 270–​271 impasse ix–​x, 39–​40, 376, 378 imprint 175 imprinting 43–​44 incantation 265–​266 inceptual 99 incision 371–​372 inflection  inflected 170, 342–​343 inflecting 329, 341–​342, 343 ingather 244 ingatheredness 138, 244–​245 inspiration 55n14, 229–​230, 339, 374–​375 inspire 282–​283 inspired 10, 74, 98–​99, 120–​121, 152–​153, 198, 203, 210–​211, 229–​230, 311–​313, 352 inspires 162 inspiring 167–​168, 211–​212, 213, 224, 225–​ 227, 246, 246n219, 361–​362 intact 56–​57, 150–​151, 203, 366–​367 interplay 75, 174, 204 interpose 69 interrupt 77–​78, 268, 318–​319, 353, 362–​363, 364, 366–​367 interruption 328, 353, 362–​363 interrupts 157–​158, 159, 361–​362, 363 intersubjection  intersubjecting 167–​168 intersubjection 119–​120, 361 intersubjective 103–​105, 284, 290, 334–​336, 372 intersubjectively 47–​48 intersubjectivity 105–​108, 114, 119–​120, 282–​283, 284, 325, 336

interval 289, 341, 358–​360 intervals 342–​343 interwoven 333–​334 inundation 281 involution 314–​315 irrupt 148 italic  italicize 238–​239 italicized 283 italicizes 295 join 208 joined 273–​274, 275–​276 joiner 381 joining 260, 275–​276 joints 204 jointure 208 junction 162–​163, 313–​314, 328 katastasis 244–​245 kehre 136–​137 key 42–​43, 165–​166, 202, 227 keyhole 147–​148 keys 126 kick 346, 384 leap 91–​92, 95, 97, 248, 313, 341, 347, 365 leaping 84, 134 leaps 91–​92 lear 253 learing 253 lède 192, 258–​259 ledge 171, 176, 195–​197, 213, 236, 257, 258–​259, 280, 293, 324 ledged 207, 229–​230, 255–​256 ledging 195–​196, 213 liaison 211–​212, 234 lift 257, 309–​310 lifted 250, 271–​272, 294–​295 lifting 256 lifts 257 ligament 233–​235, 236–​237, 253–​254 link 13, 117–​118, 152–​153, 169, 182–​183, 191–​192, 263–​264, 299–​300, 333–​334, 366–​367, 377–​378 linked 76, 167–​168, 219–​220, 263–​264, 285–​286, 316–​317, 333–​334, 348–​349 linking 283–​284, 348–​349 links 385

395

Index lip 91–​92 lipped 10, 62–​63, 91–​92, 95, 96–​97, 98, 171, 343, 365 list 179–​180, 223–​224, 334 listing 305 lists 189–​190, 241 lock 337 lockdown 133 locked 385 lyre 219, 230–​231, 258–​259, 260, 266–​267, 269–​270, 273, 274–​275, 344–​345 madness 108–​109, 190, 191 magic 42–​43, 191–​192, 194–​195, 266, 346, 357–​358 magical 248, 265–​266, 307–​308 magically 144–​145, 153–​154, 330 mannequin 8–​10, 269–​270 margin  marges 207–​208 margin 113, 170, 236, 268 marginal xii marginally 129 margins 150–​151, 208, 246–​247, 342–​343 mask 360 maze 194–​195 mazes 168, 176–​177, 196–​197 mazingly 179–​180, 193 meandering 195 metaxy 43–​44, 60–​61, 249–​250, 363–​364 methexis 271–​272 metonymy  metonymic 87–​88, 246–​247 metonymize 277 metonymy 87–​89, 210–​211, 213, 216, 248, 255, 277, 378 metonymizing 217 mime 191, 193, 194–​195, 196–​197, 272–​273, 370–​371 mimeses 201, 241 mimetic 202 mimics 218 miming 181–​182, 192–​194, 205 mimique 297–​298 mimodrama 175–​176, 191, 192–​194, 196, 198–​199, 201, 225–​227, 241, 370–​371 mirror 8–​10, 65–​67, 80–​81, 299 mirrored 65–​67, 103–​105, 277–​278 mirror-​image 194–​195

mirroring 57, 65–​67, 92–​93 mirror-​neurons 117–​118 mirrors 246–​247 mistress 42–​43 mix 114–​115 mixed 143 mixes 263–​264 mixing 44–​45 monument 278–​279, 280 monuments 247–​248 mood 219, 329–​330 moods 329 mortgage  mortgage 179–​180 mortgaging 210–​211 mould 335–​336 moulded 335–​336 moulds 336 mourn 279 mourning 265 mouth 185, 214–​215 music 16–​17, 167–​168, 273, 313 mute 347, 361 muted 10, 292–​293 myth 84–​85, 143, 177, 247–​248, 265 mythologeme 358–​360 mythological 293–​294 mythologically 293–​294 mythology 275–​276 naked 139 narcissism 158, 386–​387 narcissist 370–​371 narcissistic 158, 167–​168, 269–​270, 364, 370–​371, 388 neglect 39–​40 neglected 244, 352–​353, 380–​381 neglecting 41 neglects 50–​52, 316–​317 nihilate  nihilating 161–​162 nihilism 166 noise 157, 158, 340–​341, 378–​379 noises 341 nose 245–​246, 299 noses 245–​246 nuisance  nuisances 189 nursemaid 10

396 Index oblivion 277–​278, 279 obsession  obsédés 209–​210 obsessed 209–​210, 256 obstacle 361–​363, 368–​369, 380–​381, 388 obstacles 12, 15, 16–​17, 294–​295 occultation 139 offer 25, 36–​38, 40–​41, 99, 124–​125, 134, 358–​360, 366–​367 offered 19–​20, 22, 49, 52, 54–​55, 58, 96, 146–​147, 220–​221, 225–​227, 241, 344, 348, 364, 372–​373, 382 offering 373–​374, 383–​384 offers 40–​41, 93, 114–​115, 127–​128, 222, 378–​379 office 122–​123 official 377–​378 officially 376 officials 376–​377 omit  omits 94 omitted 210–​211, 268 omitting 91–​92 onlooker 34–​35, 103–​105 opaque  opacities 39–​40 opaque 79–​80 operate 50–​52, 110 operates 47, 49, 52, 69, 89–​90, 117–​118 operating 48, 162–​163 operation 20, 49–​50, 69, 110, 194–​195, 288–​289, 327, 335–​336 operations 16–​17, 105–​107, 306–​307 opinion  opining 220 opinion ix, 64–​65, 200, 220, 360 opinions 42–​43, 72, 182 opportunity 95, 133, 290, 375 oppose 128–​129 opposed 71, 87, 225–​227 opposes 230–​231 opposes 211–​212 opposing 36–​38, 218, 219, 233–​234, 236–​237, 243–​244, 273, 384–​385 opposite 65, 80–​81, 118–​119, 131, 215–​216, 230–​231, 266, 273, 282–​283, 349 opposite-​negative 321

opposites 218, 220, 223, 225–​230, 237, 260, 273 opposition 87, 88, 110, 218, 222, 237 opt 44–​45, 64, 290 opting 367–​368 option 54–​55, 139–​140, 141–​142, 150–​151, 163, 188, 189–​190 options 43–​44, 68, 143–​144, 168, 179, 332–​333, 361–​362 opts 24, 48, 68, 222 oracle 205, 252 oracular 262 oral 54–​55, 95, 227–​229, 244, 246, 252, 277–​278 oratio 220–​222 orators 224 oratory 224 orbus 348–​349 orient 10–​11, 132 orientation 50–​52, 344, 376–​377 orientations 52 oriented 283, 370 orients 136–​137 orphan 348–​349, 352–​355, 361–​364, 365–​367, 369, 370–​371, 372–​373, 382–​383, 387 or-​phan 349, 370–​371 orphanage 353, 354 orphanages 338 orphaned 353–​354 orphanity 352–354 orphans 338, 355, 384–​385 osculate 62–​63 oubli 2, 349 outdated ix, 348–​349 outlook 139, 163–​164, 211–​212, 217, 225–​227 overcome ix–​x, 12, 40–​41, 44–​45, 129–​131, 132, 133, 135, 160, 166, 214, 238–​239, 323, 349–​350 overcomes 136–​137, 151–​152, 266 overcoming 103–​105, 292–​293 overflow 91–​92, 329, 361–​362 overflowing 294–​295 overflows 162 overhaul 205 overtake  overtaken 343 over-​takes 343

Index overtaking 343 over-​taking 343 overture 344–​345 owl 292–​294 oxymoron  oxymora 2–​3 oxymoron 69 oxymoronic 127–​128 oxy-​moronic 215–​216 oxymoronically 133–​134, 171, 217 pace 149–​150, 207, 208–​209, 368 pacing 143–​144 pack  packaging 12 packed 30 pain 259, 318–​319, 330 painfully 281 pains 318 paint  painted 8–​10, 240–​241, 269–​270 painting 236 pair 100, 112–​113, 117–​118, 298 paired 114 pairing 112–​113, 114, 115–​118 pairs 67 parasite  parasites 341–​342 parasitic 341–​342 parent 358–​360, 361, 366–​367 parental 368–​369 parentheses 345, 352, 360, 363–​364 parenthesis 115–​116, 144–​145, 357–​358, 360, 363–​364 parenthesize 360 parenthesizing 208–​209 parents, Acknowledgements 332–​333, 352–​353, 358–​360, 361–​362, 366–​367, 383–​384 parkours 110 parse  parsing 366–​367 pavlatche 379, 383–​384 paroxysm 218 penetrate 105–​107, 156, 171 penetrates 370–​371 penetrating 374–​375 persuade 

397 persuades 7–​8 persuasion 7–​8, 54–​55 persuasive 318 perverse  perversity 329–​330, 341–​342 perverted 70–​71, 131, 281 phrase 12, 30, 43–​44, 101–​102, 120–​121, 166, 189, 241, 254–​255, 296, 311–​313, 318, 320, 326, 340, 372, 374–​375 phrased 227–​229, 243, 258–​259, 334 phrasing 137, 192, 193–​194 phrases 155, 192, 227, 246, 256, 258, 334, 341, 343 plexus 314 pluck  plucked 283–​284, 293 plucking 284 plunder  plunders 18–​19 pole  polar 326–​327 polarity 326, 328 pole 80, 118–​119, 122, 145–​146 poles 105–​107 polemos 219–​220 pond 26–​27, 28–​29, 31, 34, 40–​41 ponds 32–​33, 38–​39 poor xi, 23, 29, 39–41, 262, 386​ port 291, 364, 377–​378 porta 364 porte 193, 195, 370–​371 praxis  praxes 124–​125, 126, 135, 136 praxis 17–​18, 24, 28–​29, 42–​43, 49–​53, 56–​57, 118–​119, 122, 123, 191, 194–​195, 266–​267, 276–​277 pretext 10–​11, 197, 198–​199, 261–​262, 278 promenade 195–​196 promenades 195 prosodic 46, 341–​342 prosthesis 305–​306 prostitute 247–​248 protract  protracted 330 pull 7–​8, 26–​27, 31, 38, 39–​40 pulled 7–​8, 384 pulling 28–​29, 34–​36, 38, 40–​41, 178 push 157–​158, 220–​221, 381–​382

398 Index radical 23–​24, 26–​27, 87, 166, 204, 276, 357–​358, 367–​368 radicalize 61, 221–​222 radically 101, 210–​211, 337 react  reacting 152–​153, 264–​265 reaction 38–​39, 152–​153, 263, 313–​314, 321–​322, 325–​327, 329, 330, 374–​375 recall 129–​131, 135 recalling 10 recalls 185 recite  recitation 225–​227, 273 recite 198, 201, 225–​227 recited 225–​227, 351–​352 recites 176–​177 reciting 94–​95, 199–​200, 244–​245 recognize  recognition, acknowledgements 4, 89–​ 90, 108–​109, 117–​118, 128–​129, 167–​168, 231–​232, 282–​283, 348–​349 recognize 86, 95, 162–​163, 217, 352, 366–​369, 377–​378 recognized 346 recognizes 220 recognizing 272, 366–​367 recollect  recollection 138–​139, 179–​180 reconcile 135, 157, 218, 246, 379 reconciled 134–​135, 157 reconciliation 35–​36 record 23, 30 recorded 179–​180, 191, 244–​245 recorder 233–​234, 236, 275 recording 229–​230, 236–​237 records 211–​212, 236–​237 recount 4, 131 recounted 178 recounting 221–​222 recounts 71–​72, 73–​74, 131, 193 regress 36–​38, 270–​271, 335 regression 21–​22, 246–​247 regressive 105–​107 reification 361 reject 275–​276 rejected 160, 276, 381–​382 rejection 54–​55, 275 rejections 54–​55 rejects 275

release 348–​349 releases 71 releasing 352–​353 relieve  relief 28–​29, 77–​78, 79, 84–​85, 147–​148, 219, 293, 294–​295, 339–​340, 348–​349 relieve 25, 28–​30 relieved 293, 348–​349 relieving 29 relinquish 222, 359 relinquishing 383–​384 relive  relived 348–​349 reliving 170 remain 56–​57, 96–​97, 119–​120, 122, 149–​150, 220, 289, 290, 293–​294, 296–​297, 298, 334, 356, 367–​368, 370 remainder 347 remained 181–​182 remaining 14, 43–​44, 108–​109, 220, 227–​229, 291, 349 remains 27–​28, 49–​50, 85, 98, 107–​108, 115–​116, 117–​118, 122, 135, 136–​137, 139–​140, 164, 210–​211, 227–​229, 262, 281, 292–​293, 295–​296, 322, 328, 349, 371–​372 remix 16–​17, 54–​55, 87–​88 remixed 16–​17 request 3–​4, 8, 22–​23, 167–​168, 357–​358, 360, 367–​369, 374–​375, 382, 387 requested 4 requesting 8, 282–​283, 386, 387 requests 6, 22–​23, 324, 352, 373–​374 reserve viii, 136, 157–​158, 159, 178, 248, 250, 273, 276, 277, 313–​314, 326, 347, 348–​349 reserved 89–​90 reserves 14, 34–​35 reside 96–​97, 227–​229, 316–​317 reside 341–​342 residing 227–​229 residual 78 residue 47–​48 restance 349–​350 retentissement 341–​342 retrogression 103–​105, 135 rhyme 6–​7 rhythm 257, 258–​259, 284, 306–​307, 311–​313, 342–​343, 373–​375, 378–​379, 381

Index rhythmic 308 rhythmical 374–​375 rhythms 167–​168, 258–​259, 374–​375, 378–​379 ridge 18–​19, 160 rite 4 rites 344 rupture 133–​134, 268, 274–​275, 320, 322, 329, 333–​334, 341–​342, 363 rupturing 368–​369 saltus 326–​327, 328, 341, 365 sample  samples 16–​17 sampling 16–​17 sanity 108–​109 scar 371–​372 scatter  scattered 191, 193–​194, 203, 283 schism 161, 371–​372 schizoanalytic 151–​152 schizophrenia 16–​17 schizophrenically 378–​379 scotoma 159 scotomized  scribe 179–​181, 248 scribes 177 scripteur 94 scriptum 187–​188 sea 81, 293–​295, 369 seaing 129–​131, 136, 291, 294–​295 seas 129–​131 secret 49–​50, 69, 108–​109, 215–​216, 277, 337, 338, 383–​384 secretly 69–​70, 281–​282 semelfactive 250–​251 semelfactivity 250–​251 shade 347 shadow 263–​264, 293, 327, 342–​343, 361–​362, 388 shatter  shatter 55, 148, 152–​153 shatters 35–​36 shiver 374–​375 shivers 374–​375 shock 153–​154, 326–​327, 328–​329, 330–​331 shocked 327, 382 shocking 125, 153–​154, 327, 328, 329, 384–​385

399 shocks 153–​154, 310–​311, 327, 329, 361–​362, 381–​382 shoulder 313–​314, 323, 324, 325 shouldering 325 shoulders 293 sight 125–​126, 127–​128, 189–​190, 283, 291, 294–​295, 299–​300, 327, 328, 351–​352, 382 sighting 294–​295 silver  silvering 194–​195 sleep 72, 129–​131, 227–​229, 240–​241 sleeping 71–​72, 227–​229, 255–​256, 294–​295 sleepwalkers 255–​256 slept 169 slice 355–​356, 357–​358 sliced 80 slicing 79–​80 slide 63, 355 sliding 7–​8, 74–​75, 92–​93, 194–​195 slip  slipped 81 slipping 294–​295, 357–​358 sliver  slivering 194–​195 spark 166–​167, 229–​230, 256, 257–​258 sparking 257–​258 specter 263–​264 spell 91–​92, 103–​105, 129, 265–​266 spelling 194–​195 spells 103–​105, 194–​195 spiral 236 spiraling 83–​84, 235–​236, 260 spirals 235–​236 split 101, 116–​117, 140–​141, 161, 203, 331 splitting 103–​105 stab  stabbing 97, 259 stasis 70–​71, 73, 122–​123, 195–​196, 227–​229, 268 suicide 8–​10, 36–​38 sully  sullied 205 sullying 205 surpass 129, 131, 156, 277 surpasses 103–​105 surpassing 103–​105, 131, 138–​139, 236 surplus 105–​107, 164–​165, 329, 349, 351–​352 surpluses 35–​36, 41

400 Index symbiosis 89–​90 symphonious 307–​308 syncope 202 tape 302 taping 253–​254 teach 279 teacher 229–​230, 280 teachers 233–​234, 332–​333, 360 teaches 42–​43 teaching 245–​246, 251, 372–​373 tear 138, 373–​374 tears 362–​363, 372 tense 171, 269–​270 tensed 313–​314 tenses 283 tension 78 thauma 274–​275, 385 theme  thematic 75–​76 thematization 85, 320 thematizations 146 thematize 80–​81, 144–​145 thematized 84–​85, 105–​107, 115–​116, 341 theme 22, 100–​101, 185, 230–​231, 337 themes 227 thorax 343 thread 26–​27, 178, 227, 249–​250, 277, 280, 300 threading 258–​259 threads 344–​345 threat ix, 167–​168, 278–​279 threatened 166, 354 threatens 218, 246 threats 380–​381 threshold 39, 50–​52, 347, 354–​355, 364, 372, 376–​377 thrive  thrifty 294–​295 thrive 360 throw 293–​294 throwing 41, 293, 375 thrown 202, 227–​229, 351 thrownness 350–​351 throws 155, 202 thrust 122, 124–​125, 140–​141 thunder 245–​246, 255–​256 thundering 218

tinct 182 tool 99, 266–​267, 303–​304, 343–​344 tools 7–​8, 230–​231, 303–​304, 343, 344 touch 62, 63, 105–​107, 155, 156, 227–​229, 246, 256–​257, 294–​295, 299–​300, 311–​313, 326, 327, 328, 337, 362–​363, 364, 367–​368, 372–​373, 376–​377 touched 67–​68, 140, 201, 325–​326, 352, 362–​363, 382, 386 toucher 209–​210 touches 62, 83, 222, 227–​229, 313, 325, 386 touching 62–​63, 81, 101–​102, 155, 195–​196, 227–​229, 294–​295, 310, 325, 326, 357–​358, 374–​375 touching-​touched 101–​102 track  tracked 283 tracks 303–​304 trail 292 train 303–​304 trained 309–​310 training 15 trample 343–​344 trauma 246–​247, 377–​378, 384–​385 travel  travels 203 traverse 374–​375 traversé 195 traverses 2–​3, 130–​131, 340, 374–​375 traversing 378–​379 tread  treads 340 treat 120–​121, 145–​146, 198, 359, 367–​368 treated 144–​145, 146, 218, 272 treating 34, 58–​59, 116–​117, 214–​215 treatise 18–​19, 42–​43, 47–​48, 50–​52, 56–​57, 65–​68, 69–​71, 175, 214, 217, 304 treatises 175 treatment 133, 213, 229–​230 treats 58–​59, 188, 220–​221, 225–​227 trespass  trespassing 332 trial 369, 375, 377–​379, 380–​383, 384–​385, 387 trope 160, 210–​211, 223–​224, 254–​255 tropes 194–​195, 246–​247, 276–​277 tune  tuning 96, 257 tunings 40–​41

401

Index umbilical 355–​356 unbracketing 43–​44, 360, 371–​372, 387 unfettered 54–​55, 56–​57, 64, 77, 87 unfold 48, 50–​52, 222, 229–​230 unfolding 49, 50–​52, 67–​68, 165–​166, 218, 222, 297–​298, 299–​300, 377–​378 unfolds 3–​4, 14, 22, 225–​227, 233–​234, 242, 284 unformulable 321 unhinged 348–​349 untimely  untimeliness x untimely ix–​x, 4, 44–​45, 88–​89, 308–​309, 346 upsurge 140–​141 vanity 246–​247 vertigo 383–​384 vestibule 286, 318 vestiges 191–​192 vibrate 98, 341–​342 vibration 169, 277–​278 vibrations 318–​319, 328, 330 violate  violating 122 violence 6–​8, 278, 309, 363–​364, 376 violent 6–​7, 50–​52, 68–​69, 278, 282–​283, 382, 387 violently 79–​80 virgin 203, 294–​295 virginity 294–​295 virtŭ 234, 236 virus 33–​34, 133 vortex 236, 272–​273 vortices 235–​236 waive 29 wake 159, 256–​257, 270–​271, 273, 371–​372

wakes 256–​257, 295 waking 72 wall 82, 129, 131, 152 wallow  wallowing 362–​363, 371–​372 ward 73–​74, 263, 283, 344, 366–​367, 369 warded 160, 341 warding 289, 352 wards 352, 369 weave 246–​247 weaves 314 web 109, 145–​146, 246–​247, 332 welcome 361–​362, 369 welcomed 41 welcoming 190, 357–​358, 360, 363–​364, 365, 367–​368, 380–​381 whirl 235–​236 whirled 272–​273 whirlpool 378–​379 wink 83, 282–​283 woman 140–​141, 193, 205, 275, 294–​295, 311–​313, 319–​320, 359, 370–​371, 372–​374, 380–​381 women 185, 244, 274, 324 wonder 78–​79, 115–​116, 174, 182, 232, 277–​278, 342–​343, 354, 384–​385 wonderful 379–​381 wondering 59 wonders 22–​23, 139–​140, 201, 345 wound 148, 149 yield 78–​79, 210–​211, 213, 370 yielded 238–​239 yielding 101, 224, 370–​371 yields 285–​286 zone 192