Posthumanism and Phenomenology: The Focus on the Modern Condition of Boredom, Solitude, Loneliness and Isolation (Analecta Husserliana, 125) 3031104137, 9783031104138

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Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research

Volume CXXV Posthumanism and Phenomenology The Focus on the Modern Condition of Boredom, Solitude, Loneliness and Isolation Edited by

Calley A. Hornbuckle Jadwiga S. Smith William S. Smith

Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Volume CXXV Series Editors William S. Smith, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Jadwiga S. Smith, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Daniela Verducci, University of Macerata, Italy Editorial Board Francesco Alfieri, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy Angela Ales Bello, Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, Italy Gary Backhaus, Harford Community College, Bel Air, Maryland, USA Carla Canullo, University of Macerata, Italy George Heffernan, Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA Calley A. Hornbuckle, Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA Maija Kūle, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain Thomas Ryba, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Rajesh Sampath, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA Marie Antonios Sassine, Dominican University College, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Miloš Ševčík, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Francesco Totaro, University of Macerata, Italy

Series Editors: William S.  Smith, Executive President, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Jadwiga S.  Smith, Co-President, American Division, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Daniela Verducci, Co-President, European Division, World Phenomenology Institute, Macerata, Italy Founded in 1968 by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland) Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research is meant to pick up again and continue Husserl's Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (Halle 1913 – 1930), hence its name “Yearbook” although as a book series it appears in several volumes a year. It collects the vast research work gathered at the seminars and international conferences being held by the World Phenomenology Institute and its four incorporated International Phenomenology Societies with world-wide scholars. Analecta Husserliana promotes the aim of an extensive philosophical and interdisciplinary work to elaborate Husserl's initial idea of mathesis universalis, in a renovative unfolding of phenomenology. Around the axis of phenomenology of life and of the Human Creative Condition a variety of ingenious insights and ideas of phenomenologically inspired philosophies, sciences and humanities meet in an original interdisciplinary dialogue. Breaking conceptual barriers, they advance originally the great project of an universal science in a harvest of innovative ideas. Analecta Husserliana includes an Encyclopedia of Learning (vol.80) and enjoys a world-wide authority. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.

Calley A. Hornbuckle Jadwiga S. Smith William S. Smith Editors

Posthumanism and Phenomenology The Focus on the Modern Condition of Boredom, Solitude, Loneliness and Isolation

Editors Calley A. Hornbuckle Associate Professor of English Dalton State College Dalton, GA, USA

Jadwiga S. Smith Co-President (American Division) World Phenomenology Institute Bridgewater, MA, USA

William S. Smith Executive President World Phenomenology Institute Bridgewater, MA, USA

ISSN 0167-7276     ISSN 2542-8330 (electronic) Analecta Husserliana ISBN 978-3-031-10413-8    ISBN 978-3-031-10414-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity  The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas ����������    3 Jadwiga S. Smith Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common Telos of the All����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   11 Randolph Dible  From Boredom to a Posthumanist Fulfillment����������������������������������������������   29 Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith Experiencing Boredom: A Phenomenological Analysis��������������������������������   39 Tõnu Viik Part II The Body/Technology/Ecology  Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question of Humanism����������������������������   55 Fiachra Long  The Growing Solitude of the Body ����������������������������������������������������������������   69 Marie Antonios Sassine  Somatic Dissection and the Journey of Animal-Being����������������������������������   79 Roberto Marchesini “Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women Writers and the Posthuman������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 Calley A. Hornbuckle

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Contents

Part III Body, Culture and Society The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s Idea of Psychical Distance from the Perspective of Levinas’s Concept of the Aesthetic������������������������  105 Miloš Ševčík Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 Abigail Hess Humor and Amusement Based on Incongruities: A Dialectical Approach������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 Anna Małecka Part IV A Shrinking World The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/Isolation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God����������������������������������������������  137 Tony E. Afejuku Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “Diminishing Boundaries of a Shrinking World” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River” from Wild (2012)����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 Rosemary Gray Part V Narrative and Solitude Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation of Death and Solitude��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 John N. Balsavich Part VI Aesthetics and Ontology An Apology for Abstraction in an Age of High Definition and Photo Realism in the Work of Kandinsky and the White Shaman Rock Art Panel and Related Rock Art Sites����������  181 Bruce Ross  Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness������������������������������������������������������  191 On Victor G. Rivas López

Contributors

Tony E. Afejuku  University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria John N. Balsavich  Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA Randolph Dible  The New School for Social Research, New York City, NY, USA Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith  Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA Rosemary  Gray  Department of English University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa Abigail Hess  Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA Calley A. Hornbuckle  Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA Fiachra Long  University College Cork, Cork, Ireland Anna  Małecka  AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Kraków, Poland Roberto  Marchesini  Director of Centre Study for Post-human Philosophy, Bologna, Italy Victor G. Rivas López  Meritorious Puebla University, Puebla, Mexico Bruce Ross  Independent Scholar, Hampden, ME, USA Marie Antonios Sassine  Dominican University College, Ottawa, ON, Canada Miloš Ševčík  Charles University, Prague, Czechia Jadwiga  S.  Smith  World Massachusetts, USA

Phenomenology

Institute,

Bridgewater,

Tõnu Viik  Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

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Part I

Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity

The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas Jadwiga S. Smith

Abstract  Historical temporality of the concept of boredom is counter to Heidegger’s treatment of boredom as essential to his philosophical investigation of temporality/ time but without the grounding of boredom in historical or cultural milieu or, for that matter, in psychology or neuroscience. A mood (Stimmung) of boredom does not have a direct intentional object of its own, but it can accompany emotional and/ or cognitive experiences by giving them a certain coloring or tonality. Heidegger’s final statements are about contemporary man avoiding or suppressing profound boredom out of concealment and lack of courage to face the question of oppression “in this fundamental attunement.” Levinas, on the other hand, sees insomnia as “primordial opening” to the understanding of “impossibility of hiding in oneself” (Levinas E (1993) God, death, and time. Edited by Jacques Roland. Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 209). Thus, Heidegger’s investigation of boredom parallels Levinas’s investigation of insomnia as revealing particular states of awareness and consciousness. But, unlike the Being held captive in a particular mood of boredom in Heidegger’s metaphysics and the pessimistic evaluation of profiting from the experience of profound boredom, Levinas’s insomnia reveals “the Other within the Same who does not alienate the Same but who awakens him” (Levinas E (1993) God, death, and time. Edited by Jacques Roland. Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 209). Keywords  Heidegger · Levinas · Boredom · Insomnia · Awakening · Consciousness · Mood · Attunement · The Other · The Being Two publications on the subject of boredom, one solely devoted to it, were published in the United States in 1995: Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Gruudbegrieffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit submitted by Heidegger in 1975 and published by J. S. Smith (*) World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_1

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Klostermann in 1983), and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Spacks has not a single reference to Heidegger’s treatment of boredom and its utmost importance to his explication of the fundamentals of metaphysics. Of course, she was simply unaware of his work at the time of the preparation of her book on boredom. The reason I mention Spacks’s book is to underscore the fact that, though Heidegger mentions the importance of the subject of boredom to “contemporary man,” he is not interested in investigating any historical context of cultural implications of boredom. For Heidegger, “profound boredom” (tiefe Langeweile) is his philosophical investigation of Dasein, in which boredom emerges as the crucial attunement/emotional tonality to which Dasein is already predisposed. For Spacks, however, boredom is a historically late concept: an eighteenth-century belief in personal theological obligation giving way to nineteenth-­ century fatalism and twentieth-century location of responsibility outside the self. It explores the ways of subjectivity and the operation of social theory. The story begins in eighteenth-­ century England because the concept of boredom begins there. And the narrative comes to a stop if not an end in the present moment, when comic strips and advertisements as well as novels and sociological or psychological treatises…attribute to boredom enormous and essentially unalterable power. (Spacks 1995, ix)

She attributes the emergence of the idea of boredom as related to the development of the eighteenth-century interpretation of leisure: “It was born in the same era of the ideas of ‘leisure’ and the pursuit of happiness, and its social and literary functions have charted the development of civilization’s discontents” (Spacks 1995, x). Spacks speaks directly of the invention of boredom as a “fabrication” in eighteenth-­ century England: It has haunted Western society ever since its eighteenth-century invention. Its twentieth-­ century magnification absorbs ever more material for the imaginative writer, in a paradoxical relation that has intensified since the English fabricated the notion. (Spacks 1995, 272)

Spacks traces the evolving attitudes toward boredom through the lens of literature and pays particular attention to the gender and class distinctions as crucial to the ever-changing ethical and aesthetic views of boredom. Thus, the stress on the historical temporality of the concept of boredom is counter to Heidegger’s treatment of boredom as essential to his philosophical investigation of temporality/time but without the grounding of boredom in history/culture or, for that matter, in psychology of neuroscience. I am introducing Heidegger’s “profound boredom” and Emmanuel Levinas’s “insomnia” in the context of Patricia Meyer Spacks’s book on boredom in order to stress the fact that as boredom has emerged as an ever-growing subject of interpretation—from philosophy to popular culture—so has insomnia become a preoccupation not only of psychiatrists but also of TV psychologists, popular movies and then also of… philosophy. At the same time, closer to the end of his investigation of the attunement of boredom, Heidegger asks a penetrating question: “Has man in the end become boring himself?” (Heidegger 1995, 161). But he does not want to over-emphasize his answer as focused on modern history, despite his use of the term “world history”:

The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas

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we did not pose this question to those who run around in public and give themselves credit for their achievements, those servants of culture who ape their own inventions; we did not ask where these people stand in the course of world history, or how far they have come hitherto and what is to be the outcome in this respect. We did not ask where man stands, but how things stand concerning man, concerning Da-sein in men. (Heidegger 1995, 161)

On the other hand, Levinas’s progress toward the reinterpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein as continuous presence and engagement of Being rather than the precariousness of disclosure and concealment is a way of dealing with the present, the embodied present, which leads Levinas to embracing both “transascendence” (engendered as common, everyday events) as well as transcendence (Infinity), a creating a uniquely human expression—and thus the infinite interrelated to the sensible. Levinas, unlike Heidegger, recognizes the rationality of the self, sensibility, and transcendence. Hence, insomnia is not just a physiological/psychological event but an awakening of consciousness because the activities and moods of the self originate and end with the consciousness of self. The awakening of consciousness is, then, connected to the bodily requirement of sleep, and, in reverse, sleeping is an act of escaping consciousness. The states of being awakened, asleep, fatigued, indolent, or being in a state of insomnia allow the clearest illumination of the gap between self and I. In contrast, Heidegger’s focus on anxiety—though later expanded with attunements/moods of boredom, joy, awe—seems to be suspended from immediate bodily connections by his emphasis on Dasein’s framed relationship to time. Both philosophers stress the role of awakening, though Levinas refers to it much more directly as connected to sleep. Heidegger speaks of being awakened to the attunement of boredom, but one can also add another kind of awakening, though not as directly renewed, that is consciousness being awakened from boredom into the state of reconnectedness with beings of the world, no longer in limbo, no longer being left empty as was the case in the midst of boredom. Levinas’s insomnia, however, stresses not just openness to the world but vigilance for-the-other; it is a primary ethical meta-category (as discussed in Of God Who Comes to Mind). Insomnia is the uselessness of a responsibility that introduces God; Levinas calls “relationships-­ to-­God, the original insomnia of thinking” (Levinas 1986, 120). Both Heidegger in his treatment of the attunement of boredom and Levinas in his treatment of insomnia speak of the condition of being overtaken by these moods and their revelatory impact on Being. Heidegger speaks of the “extremity of the moment of vision” as prompted by the third kind of boredom he calls “profound boredom,” and Levinas in his “In Praise of Insomnia,” published in 1976, comments on: a journey on which we pass through the notion of a witnessing that was not referred to an experience, a bearing witness in which the infinite in relation with the finite, disquiets or awakens the finite, which is equivalent to the psyche qua inspiration and which was understood concretely in the sense of an ethical intrigue. (Levinas 1993, 206)

Thus, these awakenings for both thinkers are revelatory as to the apprehension of consciousness, and they both consider time as a fundamental point of reference in their respective treatment of boredom and insomnia. Levinas interprets:

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J. S. Smith this breaking open of the experience of witnessing, this expiation of the forms by the Other, as the diachrony of time. This is a time that would lend itself [se donnerait] to our understanding to a reference to-God itself [l’a-Dieu meme]—before being interpreted as pure deficiency or as a synonym of the perishable or the non-eternal. That is, what gives itself to be understood as that which is diametrically opposed to the traditional idea of God. It is as if, within temporality, there were produced a relationship with a “term” or end (but is it properly speaking a term?) that is third to being and to nothingness—an excluded middle or third, and in this way, alone, a God who would not be thought in an onto-theo-logical manner. (Levinas 1993, 207)

Thus, time for Levinas is not an enemy, so to speak, or does not have to be interpreted as a “deficiency,” as a “synonym of the perishable or not eternal.” But, for Heidegger, boredom reveals the temporality of design as oppressed by “a peculiar indication of its shortness”; the “while” in German translation of boredom as Langeweile or “long while”: That the while becomes long means that the horizon of whiling—which at and for the most part shows itself to us, if at all, as that of a present, and even then more as what is now and today—expands itself into the entire expanse of the temporality of Dasein. This lengthening of the while manifests the while of Dasein in its indeterminacy that is never absolutely determinable. This indeterminacy takes Dasein captive, yet in such a way that in the whole expansive and expanded expanse it can grasp nothing except the mere fact that it remains entranced by and toward this expanse. The lengthening of the while is the expansion of the temporal horizon whose expansion does not bring Dasein, liberation, or unburden it, but precisely the converse in oppressing it with its expanse. In this expanse of time it oppresses Dasein and thus includes in itself a peculiar indication of its shortness. (Heidegger 1995, 152–53)

This oppressive nature of temporality of Dasein is responsible for emerging of the attunement/mood of profound boredom. Heidegger summarizes his definition of profound boredom as “the entrancement of temporal horizon”: entrancement which lets the moment of vision belonging to temporality vanish. In thus letting it vanish, boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly authentic possibility of its existence, an existence only possible in the midst of beings as a whole, and within the horizon of entrancement, their telling refusal of themselves as a whole. (Heidegger 1995, 153)

Heidegger’s vocabulary in relation to temporality and boredom (“perishable,” “oppressed,” “refusal”) reveals an ultimate sense of inadequacy of exploring the attunement of boredom to its core. He admits just that: Yet even this definition, which has arisen from a more penetrating interpretation, does not tell us much if it is taken as an assertion in which something is supposed to be established, instead of as a more incisive directive for interpretation, i.e., one more laden with questions, namely for an interpretation which unexpectedly has left itself behind and brought the design it has interpreted to the verge of the attunement to be interpreted, yet has never directly transposed it into this attunement itself. (Heidegger 1995, 153–54)

This definition is based mostly on the third form of boredom and thus cannot claim to be universal; it is nonetheless this third form which is more essential because it is “more profound, and thus more essential.”

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The first and second form of boredom do not strike one as necessarily paralleling Levinas’s thoughts, but they are necessary to the presentation of the third form of boredom, the understanding of profound boredom. This profound boredom has some crucial points of connection with the ideas of awakeness in Levinas. This first form is illustrated by Heidegger as “passing the time as a driving away of boredom that drives time on” at a railway station: We are sitting, for example, in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway. It is four hours since the next train arrives. The district is uninspiring. We do have a book in our rucksack, though—shall we read? No. Or think through a problem, some question? We are unable to. We read the timetables or study the table, giving the various distances from this station to other places we are not otherwise acquainted with at all. We look at the clock— only a quarter of an hour has gone by. Then we go out onto the local road. We walk up and down, just to have something to do. But it is no use. Then we count the trees along the road, look at our watch again—exactly five minutes since we last looked at it. Fed up with walking back and forth, we sit down on a stone, draw all kinds of figures in the sand, and in so doing, catch ourselves looking at our watch yet again—half an hour—and so on. (Heidegger 1995, 93)

The futility of various diversions we try to occupy ourselves with leaves us in “limbo by time as it drags” (Heidegger 1995, 99), or to say it more precisely: “The dragging of time as it were refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything. It forces it to leave us empty” (Heidegger 1995, 105). Things then, when bound to time, can leave us empty: “Things can leave us empty only along with that being held in limbo that proceeds from time” (Heidegger 1995, 105). The second form of boredom acknowledges not the objective length of time, as associated with the waiting at the station, but with the depth of boredom, with more profound boredom. Heidegger distinguishes between being bored by something and being bored with something. Passing time during a boring evening—being bored with the evening—is “simultaneously, what we are bored with here is passing the time. In this boring situation, boredom and passing the time become intertwined” (Heidegger 1995, 113). So, nothing particularly is boring (unlike the station and all the fruitless activities to counteract our boredom) during our boring evening. Instead, “we have something indeterminate that bores us” (Heidegger 1995, 114), the “I know not what,” which does not create any unease resulting in a search for some form of occupation, but rather accepts the “indeterminate unknown” (Heidegger 1995, 116). The time seems to stand still, and we seem to slip away from ourselves, quite satisfied (Heidegger 1995, 118). But are we really, asks Heidegger, and his answer is twofold: first, as a result of abandoning ourselves to what we interpret as an absence of boredom (obstructive casualness captures, ensnaring this passing of time); and second, leaving ourselves behind, our proper self—an emptiness can form a sense of dissatisfaction with all that “chattering.” The time does not drag then, but “whiles [weilt] and endures,” and manifests itself as “more originary being held in limbo” (Heidegger 1995, 122). Time stands still but, Heidegger warns, that we do not make time vanish. Instead, the present stretches as a result of that casual abandoning of self, with the sensation of the past and future being cut off. This is “being held in limbo to time in its standing, and is thus the sought-after

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structural moment of being bored with” (Heidegger 1995, 126). Heidegger underscores the importance of the second form of boredom because in it: “we are held more towards ourselves, somehow enticed back into the specific gravity of Dasein even though, indeed precisely because in doing so we leave our proper self standing and unfamiliar” (Heidegger 1995, 128). Finally, in the third form of boredom, the individual relationship to boredom is lost. It’s no longer “I” or “we” acknowledging being bored, but, instead, we say, “It is boring for one” (Heidegger 1995, 134). One does not imply any connection to “name, standing, vocation, role, age and fate” (Heidegger 1995, 135); neither does it imply any generalizing or concrete distinction. Thus, we are not bored by any particular beings (first form), and we are not bored ourselves (second form). What the third form reveals is emptiness, being left empty, “relieved of our everyday personality,” making “everything of equally great and equally little worth” (Heidegger 1995, 137), ultimately resulting in all encompassing “indifference enveloping beings as a whole” (Heidegger 1995, 138). At this point of his discussion of boredom, Heidegger questions the “impoverishment” which exposes the self to nakedness, indifference: “Beings as a whole refuse themselves tellingly, not to me as me, but to the Dasein in me wherever I know that ‘it is boring for one’” (Heidegger 1995, 143). Thus, the temporality of Dasein is revealed through the temporal character of profound boredom which is a form of temporal entrancement. This temporal entrancement is broken in time “ruptured only through time itself” (Heidegger 1995, 151). This moment of vision, or “disclosedness for action,” is a moment of reconnection from Dasein with the temporality of past, present and future. It is a form of awakening in a Levinasian sense, an act of facing the world. For Heidegger, boredom has a revelatory value at the moment of its rupture, its disclosedness for action, but the magnitude of his investigation of boredom creates an oppressive sense of helplessness. Heidegger is aware of the danger of interpreting the third form as a form of despair. He objects to such a view as it would imply a leap into another attunement. Ultimately, Heidegger stresses that boredom “in the ordinary sense is disturbing, unpleasant and unbearable” and should be eliminated (Heidegger 1995, 158). However, one is to appreciate boredom and all other attunements because “[m]oods are something that awaken pleasure or displeasure in us, something to which we have to react accordingly” (Heidegger 1995, 159). Heidegger’s endowment, his appreciation of moods, feelings as expressed in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is quite striking because one is familiar with his earlier works and their emphasis on anxiety and temporality in the shadow of death. He sees boredom in the ordinary sense as a way of suppressing profound boredom and thus getting involved, or we could say awakened in the context of Levinas’s work, though in a superficial way, in the busy activity of Dasein.

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Levinas, on the other hand, is immersed in the ethical relevance of his philosophical investigation of wakefulness. In his stress on the obligation of the self toward the Other, he perceives insomnia as a state of wakefulness, a heightened sense of awareness of the Other, resisting the mundane and impersonal. In Of God Who Comes to Mind (1986), Levinas interprets insomnia as extreme vigilance for-­ the-­other. Thus, the moment of breaking out of boredom is “disclosedness” of the self, awakened to beings, reengaged with the world in a self-centered way. For Levinas, however, insomnia awakens consciousness, it is a form of responsibility that opens L-dieu (in later Levinas). Unlike the Being held captive in a particular mood of boredom in Heidegger’s metaphysics and the pessimistic evaluation of profiting from the experience of profound boredom, Levinas sees insomnia as revelatory: “the Other within the Same who does not alienate the Same but who awakens him” (Levinas 1993, 209). Heidegger’s final comments about contemporary man avoiding or suppressing profound boredom out of concealment and lack of courage to face the question “what oppresses us in this fundamental attunement” (Heidegger 1995, 167). Levinas on the other hand sees insomnia as prior to intentionality: “primordial opening that is an impossibility of hiding; one that is an assignation, an impossibility of hiding in oneself” (Levinas 1993, 209). Insomnia is not just not being asleep. It is a category escaping categorization “on the basis of a determinant activity” in order to determine, to qualify the Other: “Insomnia is the tearing of [that] resting within the identical” (Levinas 1993, 209). Levinas finds in the act of awakening the “spirituality of the soul… ceaselessly woken up in its state, its state of soul” (Levinas 1993, 210). The formlessness of insomnia reminds one of the state of boredom because of its lack of intentionality and also because, according to Levinas, consciousness breaks out of insomnia, not unlike reaching a moment of vision out of profound boredom. Levinas affirms the primacy of insomnia, stating consciousness is born out of insomnia and ultimately leading to the forgetting of the Other, to grasping the ever anew presence in the process of subjectivity from within. Levinas closes his essay/ lecture on insomnia and its role in the emergence of consciousness with a statement that cognition is not the only mode of meaning. He states: “It is necessary to put experience in question as the source of all meaning” (Levinas 1993, 211). He questions “the resolution of all meaning to exhibition. Thus, the investigation of insomnia leads Levinas to a statement that emotion or anguish or the representation in phenomenological interpretation are not to be of central importance. He acknowledges the complexity of the treatment of representation in Heidegger, but he states: “In Heidegger, the question is much more complex, but we nevertheless still find in him that idea of monstration and manifestation, which remains the corollary of meaning. “But we must at least recall the situation of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, in which the cogito bursts under the impact of something it cannot contain” (Levinas 1993, 212).

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References Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. W. McNeil and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1986. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1993. God, Death, and Time. Edited by Jacques Roland. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1995. Boredom: The History of a State of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common Telos of the All Randolph Dible

Thought builds on time… on many scales. (Peter Manchester, Unpublished Introduction to The Syntax of Time)

Abstract  This chapter explores foundational issues in the philosophy of time and space by comparing the phenomenological contributions of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Peter Byrne  Manchester. Each of these two philosophers have revived an ancient paradigm for thinking about problems of continuity in the philosophy of space and time. Peter Byrne Manchester’s 2005 book, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander—the second in the Brill series Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition—traces Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness back through Plotinus to Aristotle’s philosophy of time, and thereby reconnects its problematic to the most archaic origins of philosophy in the Presocratics. Through the philosophical reconstruction of an ancient worldview on the basis of an insight about the ordering principle of time as a logical syntax, Peter Manchester uncovers a neglected ancient doctrine called spherics (sphairikē, or sphairikon logon), which has deep implications not only for time but for all the dimensions of experience. He names his guiding figure the Sphere of the All, a formulation belonging to his ancient sources. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life also recognizes a previously unnoticed syntax. For her, it is the intrinsic functioning of life, which she elaborates in her phenomenology of life as ontopoietic process. Her extensive account of life’s inner-workings yields a phenomenological cosmology of multiple spheres of being grounded in a “great vision of the All” (Tymieniecka 2000, 643), much like Manchester’s spherics. The convergence to similar frameworks arrived at independently by these two philosophers is R. Dible (*) The New School for Social Research, New York City, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_2

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a philosophical synchronicity due to the teleology at play in their phenomenological thought, common to multiple philosophical cosmologies, but what is more remarkable is the convergence of their specific functional systems and metrological terms. This convergence arises from the pursuit of an ancient and perennial cosmology rooted in a deep synthesis of order and measure. The ancient intuition that the language of God is the language of mathematics plays a special role in classical phenomenology, and the recovery of the doctrine of the spheres represents a new contribution to the synthetic and geometrical side of this intuition. By arriving at a synthesis of the most fundamental ontological units in these two systems, a new paradigm of speculative cosmology and transcendental logic emerges from the paradigm of the sphere. Keywords  Ancient philosophy · Cosmology · Mathesis universalis · Metrology · Paradigm · Phenomenology · Pythagoras · Spheres · Syntax · Synthesis Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, founder of the World Phenomenology Institute and Analecta Husserliana, and Peter Byrne Manchester, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and founding member of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, have each in their own way sought to open up the horizons of the Husserlian phenomenology of time to the dimensions of eternity through making explicit its place in the broader context of its most ancient precedents in the philosophical speculation on time. Each thinker articulates a holistic vision of the way the total cosmos makes its mark in every ordered and measured part. Manchester frames time in an infinite sphere called the Sphere of the All, “an all-encompassing self-referential equality of an intentional kind—a disclosure space” (Manchester 2005, 53). Tymieniecka’s key concept of phenomenological disclosure is the traditional notion of the unity of apperception, but she extends this Kantian and Husserlian concept to include in its compass the fundamentally creative functions of life’s essential individualization (Tymieniecka 2000, 265–80). Tymieniecka’s modal thematization of life in its elementary operations presents in relief the place of life’s inner-workings within the big picture of the fullness, or ‘the All’ (ta panta), of possible fulfillments, and develops outward into a phenomenology of possible worlds (Tymieniecka 1974, 3–41). It could be said that what Tymieniecka’s modal realism of the phenomenology of life contributes is a visualization of individualization. Manchester’s phenomenology of time and Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life will be shown to have sufficient structural and methodological convergences to frame a phenomenological place for an ancient paradigm called the doctrine of the spheres (sphairikē, or sphairikon logon). The philosophical theory of manifolds (Mannnigfaltigkeitslehre) is at the core of both Kant and Husserl’s methodology, and this is the song that undergoes modulation to a new key in the phenomenological work of both Manchester and Tymieniecka. Tymieniecka’s cosmic architectonic presents a vision of the human position in the All “as the underlying unity of the life of the cosmos and human life” (Tymieniecka 2011, 5). The word “life” has a technical sense in Tymieniecka’s vocabulary. For

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her, life is the unique phenomenon where the disclosure of being to itself occurs through an implicit ordering principle. But this also happens to be an intuitive insight that is implied in the common idea that life is a self-promoting and self-­ steering part of a total cosmic harmony. Tymieniecka’s technical term for life is “ontopoiesis,” and it includes the definition of the biological systems term “autopoiesis” within its scope, but the usual sense works as well.1 Life is also the subject of Manchester’s phenomenology of time, specifically the experience of time and the imagination of eternity by eternal life. Manchester’s primary aim is to expose the reductive understanding of time as a point on a line by showing how time is, as the Pythagoreans intuited, the sphere itself. Manchester’s central motif of the placement of the aperture of phenomenological disclosure in the Sphere of the All can supply Tymieniecka’s overall corpus—from the “multi-sphere model” of her earlier work (Leibniz’ Cosmological Synthesis; Tymieniecka 1964; see also Tymieniecka 1965, and Tymieniecka 1966) to the later “geo-cosmic transcendental positioning” of Analecta Husserliana volumes 100–115—with a geometrical definition, and with that the beginning of a synthetic mathesis universalis. Manchester’s allusions to “a lost continent in the history of philosophy” (Manchester 2005, 56) that he calls “the ancient ‘spherics’” (54), and “the original phenomenology of the sphere” (53), indicate a lost work, and his choice of the Stoic formulation “Sphere of the All” gives important first clues to how the general spherics functions. The phenomenology of the sphere discerned in the meeting of the phenomenology of time and the phenomenology of life reveals through methodological and formal coincidences a well-defined clearing for future phenomenological development. The convergence of Manchester’s and Tymieniecka’s philosophies implied by the work of weaving together their structural and methodological coincidences hints at the possibility of developing a more explicitly convergent phenomenology of life and time, perhaps already discernible on the horizon. Over many years of development, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s cosmic architectonic came to define a phenomenology whose method did not limit itself to the constitution of the given world, but included the human and cosmic creative dimension of the genesis of the world and its structures. The self-evidence of the given phenomenal world of the individual is a coherence superseded by an intercoherence of universal self-evidence at the level of the world order,2 and finally at the ultimate level of transcendental logic. Her thesis takes the orderliness and universality of mathematical science as a model for both thought itself and Kant and Husserl’s

 Tymieniecka engages the autopoietic theory in Analecta Husserliana volumes 60, and 100, and other contributors to Analecta Husserliana have also compared ontopoiesis with autopoiesis, for instance Daniela Verducci and Elisa Tona. See also my own study on the topic of the calculus occluded by Maturana and Varela’s theory, “Ontopoiesis, Autopoiesis, and a Calculus Intended for Self-Reference,” forthcoming in Analecta Husserliana. 2  World order: the constant, intrinsic pattern of organization, whose presence is arrived at conjecturally through “structurally rooted indications concerning the relations… to the world order” (Tymieniecka 1966, 21). 1

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architectonic structures. This universality of self-evidence is a theme whose roots lie sedimented in the origins of mathematics and within what Burt C. Hopkins calls “the ancient precedents to pure phenomenology” (Hopkins 2010, 21–83; see also Hopkins 2011). The Cartesian notion of self-evidence is developed further by Husserl at the core of his own unfinished task, and in the foundation for his task of universal science, in the mathesis universalis of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. Tymieniecka’s phenomenological realism of possible worlds is a conjectural extension of the given or indexical universe (“this” universe; the actual universe). This realism is based on anticipatory evidence of the other spheres in a “multi-sphere model” that provides a monadological, Leibnizian constitutive scheme that explains “how the universe is producible or at least possible” (Tymieniecka 1964, 6). A prototype of Tymieniecka’s Leibnizian phenomenological architectonic and Manchester’s phenomenological Spherics is in part precipitated in the work of one of Tymieniecka’s sources, Dietrich Mahnke, a first-generation student of Husserl from the Göttingen period (Tymieniecka 1964, 96–7). Mahnke was a student of both Husserl and Hilbert, and wrote a new monadology of his own before eventually writing the most comprehensive study of the idea of the infinite sphere in his study of the history of mathematical mysticism, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt (1937). Present-day  phenomenologist James G.  Hart also employs a Leibnizian scaffolding in his intersection of modal realism and phenomenological eidetic analysis (Laycock and Hart 1986, 104; Hart 2009, 25–32). The extension of phenomenology into the All, therefore, is not unprecedented.  This is the absolute idea of Husserl’s infinite task. The Pythagorean harmony of the spheres is an obvious inspiration of Leibniz’ own possible worlds theory. Leibniz’ architectonic scaffold is the scala naturae, the great chain of being, and has its roots in philosophical cosmology. These cosmic roots have inspired generations of thinkers, and could be seen to condense in the perennial statement deriving from the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers: Deus est sphaera infinita cuius centrum ubique, circumferential nusquam. God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. Genealogies of the great philosophers, poets and mystics who have found inspiration in this definition of the Sphere can be found in Georges Poulet’s The Metamorphoses of the Circle (Poulet 1966), and in Dietrich Mahnke’s Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der Mathematischen Mystik (Mahnke 1937). The key to the Sphere of the All is another figure, the “Semeion” (sign or indication) of the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, which expresses the relation between time and eternity. This mark, first reported by the early Neoplatonist Iamblichus, is expressed as the vertex of an angle, and the precise wording that Manchester suggests is “a straight line which is broken is the sign, on account of the fact that the breaking becomes origin of one line, limit of the other” (Manchester 2005, 44). Manchester’s reading of this vertex is that it is not an angle, and not a point, but a breaking. Thus, as indication, it is composed not of one broken ray but of two rays, “each in its own dimension” (45). As mere indication, this is a figureless figure, like the infinite sphere, and as a kind of privation, it is equally beyond being. The breaking occurs in the act of drawing the figure, and can just as well be a “moving

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touching” wherein order is communicated from one dimension of time (“persistence in intelligible purposiveness”) to another (“distribution into phases of sensible motion” [69]). The two-ray touch-and-communication interpretation of this figure expresses the fundamental discontinuity (breaking) in the fundamental continuity (sphere) in the essential fact that in order to draw it, “one must decelerate and come to a stop… in order to begin in the new direction” (63). This two-dimensionality or double-continuity is Manchester’s distinctive contribution to the understanding of the relationship of these elements expressing the original topos of time and eternity as a dimensional construct. This two-dimensionality is the key to opening up our way of thinking about time to the paradigm of the sphere. Manchester’s goal is not exclusively to re-figure our thoughts about time and life, but to re-open the dimension of eternity through the Neoplatonic “engine” of participation (Manchester 2002, 81). These figures—the sphere and the original angle marking the center—are the initials of a synthetic way of thinking that was historically lost to the power of analysis, under whose logistical spell we have fallen deeper and deeper. The ancient way of thinking starts to disappear when it is first formalized by the very same thinkers we must return to in order to find the way through the sedimentations of traditia to the general spherics. In this respect, the historical goal of a new search for the spherics would be to sort out the place of these geometrical insights in the beginnings of the project of the mathesis universalis. The mathesis universalis in the present context is perhaps best summed up in Descartes’ aim of finding a “pure science of order and measure… part of which today is called logic,” and which is similar to Plato’s relation of dianoia to noesis (Kant 1974, lxi). Tymieniecka often invokes this Husserlian foundational ideal of phenomenology, and Manchester grounds his phenomenology in a comparatively synthetic paradigm called the spherics. Since both expressions of mathesis begin with Archytas, a brief genealogy should begin there. The ancient arithmetica universalis of Archytas was the first universal mathematics, worked out in about 400 BCE. It was a proportion theory of Pythagorean harmonics expressed in an arithmology of rational numbers, according to Mahnke’s student Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann (Hofmann 1957, 15–25). The demonstration of the existence of irrational linear ratios brought this dream of a rational universe to an end, and for many this discovery of irrationals represents a break with the Pythagorean idealism of a harmonious cosmos. The mathesis universalis of the modern period of philosophical system building revives the dream, and Husserl’s early ontological philosophy is modeled on the project of a mathesis universalis in Leibniz’ sense. Husserl’s mathesis universalis is most fully expounded in Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1969), where it provides a model for a development of the formal ontology at work in the general method of phenomenology. But in his earlier Philosophy of Arithmetic, the arithmetica universalis is inspired by Newton, who in turn provides a work significantly different from anything still connected to Pythagorean intuitions, making the later model of the Leibnizian mathesis a more solid connection to the pre-Diophantine mathematics (Husserl 2003, 310). The key difference between the Pythagorean mathematical intuitions and what

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comes later is the development of speculative logic and formal ontology with Parmenides (Manchester 2005, 113–24), and the eventual formalization of analysis. This difference marks the paradigmatic change with regard to eternity that in The Syntax of Time Manchester hopes to “operationalize” (86) and reactivate. “Riding the rails” of the mathesis universalis, as she puts it (Tymieniecka 2009, 176), Tymieniecka initiates a new phenomenological reduction of life based on the later Husserlian phenomenology of the life-world, and expands the phenomenological method to include the constitution of all possible life-worlds. In her phenomenology, life is discovered in the baffling simplicity of its initial functional relations to the manifold of possible dimensional frameworks for worlds. Life itself becomes the common thread of a science of subjectivity. Tymieniecka’s microcosmic and metrological concept of life’s primogenital functioning fills the interval between, on the one hand, living processes in the phenomenal manifold, and on the other hand, the Archimedean point of the reduction to a continuum of life. The hypostatic reduction of life to the synthetic a priori necessity of experience affirms the presence of life in all the possible forms that any kind of functioning might take. Form follows function, and this ‘functioning’ is the ordering principle of operations behind the articulation of a unified mathesis universalis. The infinite variety of host vehicles of life all ride the rails of the same system. According to the perspective afforded by a unified mathesis in which the final term of analysis is the first term of synthesis (Kant 1974, lx–lxvii), the phenomenological realism of possible worlds represented by Tymieniecka’s philosophy stands upon a twofold mathesis: (1) the eidetic analysis of the structure and order of the lifeworld represents the ground of the world’s constant form at the arithmetical level, where the world order and its phenomenal form is interdependent. This is Husserl’s intuition of essences at the level of the lifeworld. Call this the real living framework of life. (2) The analysis then proceeds through conjectural inference to constructive synthesis at the algebraic (the primary algebra or ars combinatoria) level of free variation upon the re-entry of the given eidetic structure into its own space. This is Husserl’s free variation in imagination. Call this the imaginary framework of possible life. These two dimensions, the real living framework and the imaginary framework of life, can be seen as the emblem of the extensive place of life, standing in the disclosure space of its own self-reference. In their synthesis, the two dimensions of this twofold express the universal forms of space and time, eternity and temporality, stasis and flux. The meting out of life in spatiotemporal experience can be graphically indexed, I suggest, by a two-ray graph of the dimensional crossing of indication embodied by the Semeion. Illustrated by a carpenter’s gnomon or Kabbalistic Yod (the seed of creation), this figure is a simple archetype of a ubiquitous crossing of indication, but its appearances in three areas of the proximal research vicinity are worth mentioning. While I am focusing on the Semeion of Archytas the Pythagorean described in Peter Manchester’s The Syntax of Time, there are other systems that inspire the

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perspective of a unity of mathematics in a unified mathesis universalis,3 and also a geometry of life.4 In these systems, everything hinges on the idea of the hinge—the path of crossing, common to openness and closure—and just what the idea of the hinge discloses is the opening of an aperture of disclosure space as the arc of a circle. In the primitive sense of disclosure, what the circularity of self-reference expresses is the continuity of radical discontinuity in the act of crossing; a monad of change and order. The noetic triad at work in the noetic circle is the dynamo of causality effecting the original synthesis of space and time in the original creative act of construction.5 The mathesis universalis finds in Tymieniecka’s architectonic  The technical details of the mathesis synthesis are inspired by two systems: George SpencerBrown’s Laws of Form and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “original geometry.” The right-angle bracket of the ‘marked state’ operator (the ‘mark’ or the ‘cross’) in George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (Spencer-Brown 2008) guides a unified mathesis, but this consideration is beyond the scope of this presentation. The iconic logic of Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications is a void-based system that begins by drawing a distinction (“the first distinction”) in an otherwise unmarked state. The initial consequences of this fundamental operation of crossing the void yield the two laws of form, the calculus of indications. These indications of the first distinction are signs that synthesize the construction of a universe, called the marked state, or simply the form. The laws at this level are called the primary arithmetic. The next level is distinguished by the introduction of variables, and this is called the primary algebra. Within the primary algebra a new calculus grows inside the calculus, and this is the re-entry of the form into itself, which we experience as the fifth crossing or fifth eternal order. The five eternal orders correspond to the four dimensions of experience, plus the void. Husserl’s early work on manifolds and syntaxes sought just such a universal laws of form in the context of the widest sense of a mathesis universalis. Husserl’s theory of formal manifolds and Tymieniecka’s work on the universal world-order is vindicated by this achievement of a void-based eidetics. 4  The other system is Fichte’s “original geometry.” In his geometry, the archaic construction “UnendlichEk” is rendered by David W. Wood as “infinite polygon” (Wood 2012), but it could also be translated ‘unending angle,’ comparable to Mahnke’s allmittelpunkt. Fichte’s “living and active self-consciousness” replaces a perceived “rigid and lifeless formalism” (4) of analytic geometry, and we shall follow the same spirit here. The working-out of a rigorous deductive system of geometrical elements gives the prototypical form of a general spherics in a way that is, I imagine, more in line with Proclus’ noetic theory of the geometricals than Euclid’s lost Sphaerica (judging by the formalism of the Elements) because it expresses the geometry of life. Seeing a point from another point cannot get to the heart of being a point, on account of the extension of experience. As Spencer-Brown puts it, being seeing being seeing being seeing being cannot see itself without going half-blind, the blind side being the future. The ontological procession of dimensionality characterizes living processes, that is, all experience. Inter-objective relations give no insight as to the synthesis of life, and neither does pure analysis. Scaled to our world, a living geometry calls on us to find a way to explore other dimensions and other worlds—the other spheres of being. 5  Manchester’s work on the noetic triad (Manchester 1992) as prefiguring the doctrine of the trinity and expressing the schema of participation of the one and the many should be researched along with his insights about the noetic circle in The Syntax of Time (Manchester 2005, 149), yielding a real “engine of participation” (134; Manchester 2002, 81), the engine of the vehicle of the soul, the ochema pneuma. For my own part, triangles and circles are never alone, always dynamic, and the schema ochema is the circular activity of the original angle, which is not a closed form without the circle, but always indicates three values anyway; the marked state, the unmarked state, and the distinction. The construction of stereometric form in the Timaeus (53d–55c) can be seen as a sphere-packing operation if the constituent triangles are understood to be the angles signifying the centers, radii, and intercoherence of spheres. 3

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a common cord, a filium Ariadne, in the phenomena of life, and with it the beginning of a synthetic mathesis. The synthetic a priori can be understood in this way as form that is function, that is, life. Although not an explicit theme in Tymieniecka’s own writings, the initials of a mathesis synthesis are already operational in her theory of manifolds and analytic of life’s intrinsic timing and spacing. Nor is the mathesis synthesis an explicit theme in Manchester’s phenomenology of time, but the figure of the noetic circle and the ultimate frame of the Sphere of the All bear in themselves an intentional relation to the explicit theme of an originary angle and the two-dimensionality of time. The universality of mathematical insight may be analytic or synthetic in its expression, but its validity comes from the truth articulated at the level of indication. The sign or mark of indication is the form of whatever presents itself, as an indication of its full sphere of being. The initials of the synthetic mathesis universalis are the relations of the center to the sphere of self-reference. If there is an architectural atom of form or a monad of time, it is indicated by the actual here and now. And its truth coincides with its being in the name of the ancient Logos. This is the Logos of Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, and its ancient economy of eidetic power is evoked also in Peter Manchester’s phenomenology of time in the emblem of the sphere, which we shall see is the “whole pie” which we can know through its slices, or spanned intervals. The fullness of this Logos is indicated by the invocation of the ancient name of the All (ta panta), which retains the power of reference to both the totality of the orders of being (the cosmos) and at the same time the postulation of an indefinite void beyond (apeiron). The suggested initiation of a mathesis synthesis and its concomitant phenomenology of the spheres are not the product of a comprehensive reconstruction of the lost ancient spherics on the part of Manchester or Tymieniecka, nor of the original force of the Logos. But by harnessing the power of an a priori mathesis synthesis, the suggested phenomenology of the spheres appears in the coalescence of Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life and Manchester’s phenomenology of time. The Syntax of Time takes the spanned interval of the “now” from Aristotle’s writings on physical time as the fundamental unit of phenomenological disclosure space whose continuity is guaranteed by the constancy of its scaling and framing, like the frame-rate of a cinematic production, or the rotation of a reel. The ancient category of the soul and the modern phenomenological category of inner time-consciousness provides the consistency of its spanning. The Nu-Upsilon-Nu of the Greek “Now!” (νυν; nun in Greek) is for Peter Manchester the very “Now!” that the Goddess pronounces to Parmenides in his poem, and it is a form of unity that is not a number (arithmos) but a measure (metron). In the context of motion, this spanned interval is the discontinuity and diremption of the opening of the dimension of time itself. Manchester notes that the character Nu is a continuative consonant, laying out a flux of potential nows (Nu, Nu, …), with the actual now marked out by pronouncing two and pronouncing the interval (Y; Upsilon) in between them (Manchester 2005, 94). Manchester connects the Aristotelian device to its dialectical prototype which he finds in the gnomonic sign of Archytas. Manchester interprets the figure of Archytas

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to express a measure of the spherical unity of continuity and discontinuity, a being in tune with its becoming (Manchester 2005, 48–9). The Syntax of Time begins with a first chapter on the topic of two-dimensional time in Husserl’s time-consciousness diagram of retentional-protentional space and in the Neoplatonic reception of the Semeion of Archytas. By continuing through chapters on the relevance of this theme in Plotinus, Aristotle, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, two-dimensional time is connected to the figure of the Sphere of the All. The metrical relations of the Sphere and the sign of the center are filled out along the way. The final chapter brings it all together by reading the famous cosmological fragment of Anaximander through the lens of Plotinus and Heraclitus, with a new translation: “for they take amends and give reparation to one another for their offense, according to the syntax of time” (Manchester 2005, 150). Syntax here means the coordination of the origin (center) and limit (circumference) in the figure of a circle or sphere, whereas in our culture we are more familiar with syntax as linear contextual relations. Syntax is here the analytical form of the circle because it coordinates the common character of the universal language with the universal and eternal life that it draws on. This expression of life is meted out like a sentence of universal programming. In “Chronos and Kairos” (Tymieniecka 2000, 491–501), Tymieniecka also analyzes Aristotle’s account of physical time as an interval, with the soul “as the concrete principle of life itself,” the synthesizing element indispensable to the space-time matrix (494). For Tymieniecka, the “inner workings” of life are the fulcrum or axis of measure and differentiation expressed succinctly in her words, “Life times itself!” (Tymieniecka 2011, xiii). Her “universal reference system” (xiv) includes functions she names scanning and spacing, a grid “abstracted,” she says, “from all the singular steps of life’s timing—the system of time and space coordinates, a stable grid for all the change that may be drafted on it” (xiv). These “inner workings” carry in their performance what she calls “a ‘limit,’ a ‘circumference’” (304). A circumference is a curved horizon, and curvature is precisely what Manchester’s metrology contributes to Tymieniecka’s. This limit, for Tymieniecka, is the unity of life, but it also repeats the Pythagorean limit concept of the monas. The One, the monas, is also the limit, the peras. Its proper contextual framework was theorized in the physical cosmology of Anaximander: the Apeiron, the Unlimited. This state is a simplicity beyond unity, and it shares the equability of formlessness with the other concept of paramount significance to the Pythagoreans, the indefinite dyad or aoristos dyas. Its equality and evenness make it the other of two elements of number that are common to all numbers in the Pythagorean concept of arithmetical genesis. In the Pythagorean paradigm, these two are not numbers but the non-numerical elements of all numbers, and they are the first elements of the ancient arithmetica universalis. It is the same with Spencer-Brown’s primary arithmetic. All evenness or harmony calculus or condenses to the ultimate unmarked state, which would be pure and radical nothingness: the absolute infinite, the infinite sphere, or simply the Apeiron. Tymieniecka continues in the aforementioned chapter, “Chronos and Kairos,” with the proviso “yet is it not time but life, which comes first to be seen at the ontopoietic groundwork of existence?” (491). In Tymieniecka’s phenomenology, life

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may come before time, but the parameters of a disclosure space according to time within eternity are a necessary step in the philosophy of cosmo-transcendental positioning that is the guiding concern of her later work. By interpreting both the phenomenology of time in Manchester and the phenomenology of life in Tymieniecka for their shared concern to express their architectonic systems in metrological terms, a phenomenology of phenomenology appears: the phenomenology of the sphere(s). Peter Manchester’s work conforms to a once-extant paradigm he calls “the ancient Spherics,” a “lost continent in the history of philosophy” (Manchester 2005, 56), which he argues only incidentally resurfaces in his work because its recovery is underway in Neoplatonic studies. This comment certainly refers to the astronomical Spherics found in the work of Theodosius and Aristarchus, but may refer to the rootedness of Platonism in the Eleatic and Pythagorean traditions, where the cosmological insights of ancient astronomical civilization are synthesized in theurgy and theory. It might also refer more specifically to the cosmological doctrines of Plato’s younger contempory Eudoxus, whose theory of homocentric spheres exerted influence on Platonism generally and was also influential on Plato’s own later writings (Plato 2000, xlviii). It is also very likely that the recovery of the ancient Spherics could refer to the reconstruction of the unwritten doctrines (agrapha dogmata) of Plato taught inside the Academy to initiates, the so-called esoteric oral teachings. Of this latter possibility, Konrad Gaiser’s doctrine of the “Mathematisierend-analytischen Elementen-metaphysik” or “Dimensionenfolge,” provides a reconstruction of Plato’s inner-Academic systematic doctrine based on Plato’s own numerous references, the positive accounts of his successors, but foremost through a negative or polemical reading of Aristotle’s critiques of Plato’s oral teachings. This possibility is especially interesting for the purposes of a synthetic understanding of mathesis universalis. In this system, tied to the Tübingen interpretation of Plato’s unwritten doctrines, the stereometric form of body and soul develop from first principles through the geometrical dimensional series represented by the geometric elements of point, line, plane, and solid.6 Gaiser’s doctrine of the mathematical dimensional series is especially useful for generalizing the dimensional aspect of Manchester’s phenomenology of time and Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, and for the metrology of the phenomenological disclosure space. We might even speculate that this series or schema presents the corresponding syntax of space, but for a full comparison with Manchester’s system a further step in Platonic interpretation is necessary, and another Neoplatonism scholar, Philip Merlan, provides it. The efficient-causal continuity of the dynamic progression of dimensional synthesis in Gaiser’s dimensional series of kinetic-geometrical elements corresponds to Merlan’s multi-sphere model of the Platonic Academic systematic, according to which a series of concentric spheres  See Gaiser  (1963). For an overview of this doctrine with original sources, see Hans Joachim Krämer’s (1990) Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents (trans. John R. Catan), and the 2012 volume, The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s InnerAcademic Teachings (ed. Dmitri Nikulin; Nikulin 2012). 6

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correspond to different levels of being. As Dominic O’Meara describes it, “each sphere deriving from the higher and ultimately from two principles, the constitution of an uppermost sphere” (O’Meara 1998, 21–3). But Merlan’s doctrine of the spheres of being also provides a doctrine of the unity of being that is a unity of the multiple spheres, akin to Lovejoy’s famous “great chain of being,” derived from a Leibnizian “principle of plenitude” (Merlan 1960, 152; Lovejoy 1964, 52–5). In his book From Platonism to Neoplatonism, Merlan begins his account by characterizing Neoplatonism with the deduction of the spheres by means of logical implication from the first principles of an indefinite many and an indefinite one, the latter being an “ontic indeterminateness, i.e. fullest ‘being’” (Merlan 1960, 1). The Platonic systematics of Gaiser and Merlan could provide a modern precedent for Manchester’s reference to an ancient doctrine called the Spherics, and if their interpretations are correct, they could provide the ancient context we are seeking. But the lost content remains subject to reconstruction outside the strict jurisdiction of the archeology of sedimented historical fact. This task lies in the wider domain of Husserl’s reactivation of original intuitions. An introductory chapter that was omitted from later drafts of The Syntax of Time begins with a modern backward-turning perspective on this same ancient Platonic theme of time as the image of eternity, a theme which Plato attributes to Pythagoras. In an unpublished version of the introduction of The Syntax of Time, Manchester writes: Eternity and time relate as paradigm and image. Once you have seen the paradigm of something you can then recognize its image, which might otherwise present the common form in so degraded or misdirecting a way that you would not necessarily even note the phenomenon that displays it… When something is characterized with regard to a paradigm, thought is directed in a way more fundamental than by definition. Ahead of definition is identification of the thing to be defined. (Manchester, n.d., 5–6)

He continues in this section to frame the ensuing project in the context of the philosophy of science and the branching off of the traditional worldview with the development in Ancient Greece of speculative logic. His explicit goal is to reanimate the imagination and experience of eternity, lost to logical abstraction and transformed into its negative image of mere timelessness since Boethius. The historical structure of this project of The Syntax of Time is anchored to the paradigm-­ shifts represented in the figures of Boethius and Spinoza, as identified in his encyclopedia entry on eternity: A certain purely logical interest in the eternity/time contrast, detectable already in Boethius (responding more to Porphyry than Plotinus) and Thomas Aquinas, was amplified by the new mathematical spirit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, resulting in the reduction of eternal presence to a kind of schematic simplicity illustrated particularly clearly in the system of Spinoza. The effect was to dissociate the speculative notion from its experiential basis, producing in the end the degraded conception of eternity as lifeless stasis or logical tenselessness that has been the target of complaint in historicist, existentialist, and process theologies of the past century. (Manchester 1987, 170)

The contribution to the history of ideas represented by tracing and tying down the paradigm shifts that transformed the experience of time and imagination of eternity

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aids in identifying the ancient spherics, but Manchester’s phenomenology of the disclosure space is created for the purpose of reactivating the original intuition of the sphere and operationalization of the premise that time is the life of the soul. Husserl was also concerned with reactivating the original intuitions of mathematical insights in his project of the origin of geometry. Both Tymieniecka and Manchester shared Husserl’s concern to return to things themselves, and the sphere of being in which the things themselves come to presence is the very thing itself that embodies this return. For the disclosure of dimensions of truth beyond the given phenomenal universe, such as the truth of mathematical intuition, this return means going beyond the iconic data of appearance (the image) to discover the true reality of a non-­ imagistic original, or paradigm. In the case of the self-referential nature of the Sphere of the Paradigm, the return is to the self itself which stands as a referential background of equality and stasis against which the object or the other thing (the hetero-referent object signified)—stated in full: the world itself—stands in relief, disclosed. This background state of disclosure space is the manifold of spatiotemporal continuity whose phenomenological study Husserl initiated with the theory of formal manifolds in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Thus, above all these other resonances, I propose that Peter Manchester intended his work on syntax in the context of transcendental phenomenology to make its ultimate contribution to the kind of work that Husserl was engaged in with the theory of possible syntactical unity, and the formal theory of the manifold, as presented in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Here the term “syntax” carries all its meaning from the formal analytics of universal judgment forms (formal apophantics, from Chryspippus’ ancient On The Syntax of the Sayables to modern linguistics and philosophy of language) to the domain of transcendental logic and phenomenology. “Syntax” refers to the manner of synthesis, in the root sense of syn-taxis; the cosmic order of operations. Taxis means order, and thesis means position, so in a root sense, syntax and synthesis present the same wide vision, and in the move from the phenomenologies of life and time to the phenomenology of the spheres and the mathesis synthesis, each of these two terms compliments the other. Manner of synthesis refers to ‘something about’ the being or event, such as its becoming or ceasing to be. But that is only the surface situation of ‘something about’ a being or event; its syntax. Beyond syntax is the synthesis of all the ways or manners of being (the multiplicity of spheres), and that is the Sphere of the All. The Sphere of the All is the outermost limit of being in the most encompassing sense: it is the total and solid omnipresence and fullness of being. Just inside the outermost sphere is a penultimate sphere where just coming to be and ceasing to be give way to duration and durability, like the memory of a simple arithmetical operation in the electronic circuit of a calculator. This level is what appears to us as time in the sense of a dimension of being. Without the addition of appearance or expression, time in itself is in fact the very manner of being that we referred to before the crystallization of time into duration, which in fact is the birth of space from time. This is the place in the Sphere of the All where the intelligible categories of being—space, time, and causality for Kant, whose tradition of the manifold of intuition we are here following with Husserl—constitute the continuity of a sphere, or a world.

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It is important to recognize these connections because in Husserl’s own development, we can see that phenomenology was built from the ground up, upon the pure formal analytics of a mathesis universalis in the classical sense that reaches through Leibniz and Descartes back to the ancient rationalist dream of the Greeks, the arithmetica universalis. It is upon the basis of the order that already constitutes the flux of life that a first order of unity and then a second order of variability emerges. This simplex of order is not apparent at once, but appears for the second intentionality (intentio secunda) of the dianoetic act of thetic coherence, the sphere of images that is the gnomonically projected layer of reality we know as the imagination. “The timelike is,” writes Manchester, “motion taken twice, in comparison to itself (spanned) and hence already in comparison to all other motions” (Manchester 2005, 97). This ‘not once’ of order is the ‘not once’ of time. The emergence of ordered thought or coherence (and any hypostatized first thought, first order, or first time) repeats the order of eternal dynamics, according to the syntax of time. The idea of syntax implies time, but also space, and finally space-time coordination or continuity. Building on the notion of the syntax of time, a synthetic and metric mathesis universalis develops in the vision of the sphere. Leibniz sought a common or universal characteristic in the structural core of the phenomenal universe. In their introduction to Kant’s Logic, Hartman and Schwarz give an extensive overview of the modern conception of the mathesis universalis as established by Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. They describe the end of analysis sought by Leibniz as the primitive or primary concept “from whose combination all the rest are made” (Kant 1974, lxxvi). He never reached this final term of analysis, but if he had he would have discovered the first term of the progressive synthetic method. What is suggested by Archytas’ Semeion is a fundamental operation of crossing that characterizes disclosure. I would like to suggest that this fundamental operation of crossing is, in the context of the mathesis universalis, Descartes’ ideal of a “simple nature,” which Hartman and Schwarz describe as “the identification [and distinction] of analysis and synthesis, the result of analysis and the beginning of synthesis” (lx). Husserl’s pure analytics sought just this in a theory of forms as a systematic theory of syntactical structures or “form-laws of possible coexistence or, equivalently stated, laws of possible syntactical unity” (Husserl 1969, 335). This project of a “higher theory of forms” or of eidetic universalities or eidetic laws—all formulations of the pure analytics of the hypothesized mathesis universalis (336)— is precisely what is achieved in the pure mathematics of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, where the unity of mathematics is expressed according to a rigorous deductive system of the consequences of the act of crossing called the first distinction. The ontology of Laws of Form is a meontology, an ontology of the consequences of there being nothing. This most economical unity of mathematics deserves to be interpreted as the mathesis universalis because it seems to satisfy all the requirements offered by the ancient and modern philosophers. A unified mathesis is necessary to confirm the metrological connections of the phenomenologies of Manchester and Tymieniecka in a way that establishes the synthetic method of the spheres. Based on the analytic logistic of Laws of Form, my proposal for a reconstructed general spherics is the unified and two-fold mathesis of the phenomenology of the

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spheres discussed earlier, called the mathesis synthesis. It may be more or less identified with the convergence of the phenomenologies of time and life, because unlike the familiar phenomenology that is limited to the phenomenal universe given to the senses (the phenomenology of sense), it is not distinct from transcendental logic. This is because a phenomenology of the spheres concerns itself with the form of the path (the hodos, of this new method, or meta-hodos) common to both the order of derivation of transcendental logic and the order of operations of constructive synthesis. As a reconstruction of ancient doctrine, it might be the reconstituted coherence of the noetic doctrine of the geometricals. In Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus, he employs the graphic representation of the center of a circle and its periphery to express the relation of time and eternity, but this image suggests that the circle is constituted by the revolution that draws the line. Instead, the sphericity of the total and complete sphere itself produces world order analogous to the way black holes reduce world order. The parameters of the disclosure space are gnomonically projected onto the perimeter through a centripetal force of intentionality radiating through the center, much like how the reference beams of laser holography create stereometric resonances in interference patterns. For every parametric point of reference that develops in such techniques, there is a whole sphere of circumstantial interference that contains and constitutes it through coherent superposition. As the self-referential frame of reference for the disclosure space, the sphere and its center frame the implicit angle of re-entry into its own phase space by the arc of its unmarked sphere. In the mathesis synthesis, every mark is the arc of a sphere of being which draws the forms we discern in experience by what might be called circumferential inference. The logical construction of metrological form produces the given phenomenal universe as an image of its sphere of being, an image of the All. In an unpublished introduction to The Syntax of Time, Peter Manchester writes, “I must now turn about and admit that our title itself, ‘the syntax of time,’ is meant to suggest a convergence of linguistics and physics” (19). He accomplishes this by “[making] Plotinus available as a channel for recovering the phenomenological dimension of the Greek physics of time as it is forever made important in Aristotle… The goal of this study is to reanimate the old identification” (18–9), against the reductive identification of modern analytic geometry. He does this to bring physics through transcendental phenomenology, back from what is merely evident to us. His goal is to return physics to its original Aristotelian aim towards what is evident by nature. In Manchester’s view, Heraclitus’ Logos anticipates a “logic of natural necessity” in Aristotle, which in turn is a gloss on Anaximander’s protean proposition that things find cosmic justice, resolve their differences, and arrange themselves according to “the syntax of time (he tou chronou taxis)” (26). The Greek taxis is rendered as syntax because in Anaximander it is not a serial ordering in succession by which things arrange themselves to resolve their differences. It is a patterning or structuring of affairs, more like the syntax of speech and listening than the conventions of writing. The syntax of expression and spontaneous interpretation follows the logic of natural necessity, the Logos. Thus the syntax of time is not the logic of words and deeds (the opinions of mortals), but the Logos of nature and

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cosmos. By manipulating language to modulate the power of the Logos through language, Heraclitus invents speculative logic: “Most precisely, he anticipates what comes to flower in Parmenides and Plotinus: the practice of speculative logic as physics. The same procedure in our time is called transcendental phenomenology” (n. d., 27). In Volume 100 of the Analecta Husserliana, the primordial feature of life, the logos of life, is recognized as sentience in the sense of the operative sentential computation of a universal calculus ratiocinator (Leibniz’s counterpart to the characteristica universalis). In this context we get a direct sentential sense of the logos, in the context of the mathesis universalis, which here is called the “common modality of all differentiation” (Tymieniecka 2010, 14). In the prologue to Volume 100 she refers to phenomenological life as “the sentence of the logos of life—a thread running through the divine script” (Tymieniecka 2009, xxix). Here the complete sentence of life, “logoic sentience” (xxix), like a continuous contour drawing, indicates that the innumerable rays of differentiation all come from the same elemental operation and proceed with the order of a sentence complete with a universal alphabet and a universal syntax. Here, as well as in Volume 105, the ontopoietic process of life is described as “laying down the flesh and cornerstones of the ultimate and primary mathesis universalis,” fleshing out the architectonic implied by the idea of a language of universal manifestation, as conceived by Kant, Leibniz and Descartes, but also the long-standing geometrical tradition initiated by Archytas, Diophantus, Euclid, and others, at the root of the theory of manifolds and the universal world-­ order. As the following quote makes clear, she recognizes in this universal language both an alphabet and a syntax: In its universal alphabet are signs ciphered by the infinitely versatile transformability of the constructive processes of individualizing beingness. In its syntax are the laws of the modality of life together with its arsenal of constructive devices—all of which remind one of a spider’s spinning its web, for even so, life spins its sense along the track of its life-timing and -spacing. Suspended upon its existential becoming—like a spider upon its web—the self-individualizing in the ontopoiesis of beingness differentiates through a sequence. (Tymieniecka 2010, 14; Tymieniecka 2009, xxvii–xxviii)

As we just saw, the syntax of time is not like the syntax of written language precisely in that it is not like a serial ordering in succession, but a logic of natural necessity. Manchester’s thesis is that time is more than the sequence whose representation is the domain of the variable ‘t’ in Cartesian analytic geometry, but instead is a sphere in its vertical descent from the eternal presence of the Logos. Having reached the Archimedean point of life’s universality, Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of the Logos connects the given to the immediate source of its articulation in the life that constitutes it, the Logos of Life. What is most immediate is the inherent cosmic position that is taken for granted in the classical undertaking of the transcendental constitution of experience, in the very folding action of the manifold. This activity of passive synthesis with its totality of external horizons flows around all things, and all things are sedimentations of this universal flux and original spring of life. We experience the sediment at the bottom of the river in the inimitable way we do, in virtue of this flux, and the flux itself remains hidden by its multiplications and

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additions of constitutive construction within the transparency and silence of its continuity. Tymieniecka recognizes intelligible calculation in the natural ordering of the flux, and recognizes the all-encompassing continuity of expression. The classical conception of the mathesis universalis still holds, even if we pursue the direction of the mathesis synthesis, and there is no better metaphor for the resonant computations and communications within the continuum of life-worlds than a universal mathematical language. For Tymieniecka, the articulations of this universal language are the articulations of life’s inner workings and constructive progress. She writes that “life spaces and times itself” (Tymieniecka 2010, 107) along what she also calls the “spacing/scanning axis” (107). These functional terms express the hidden articulations of life which inhere in all experience, structuring individualization. To make sense of the birth of my own subjective experience from the span between the cosmological singularity and the totality of the relevant sphere of being within the Sphere of the All, the birth is visualized as being a sum and product of the operations of differentiation. Life times itself, and in so doing is a product issuing from itself in its indefinite yet structured analysis of pure self-reference—life squared, cubed, etc.—and I would add that life adds to itself, spatializing the fullness of the thetic Sum in the indefinite synthesis of its creation, the poiesis of its radical novum. These mathematical operations are concatenated in vital self-reference, whose remainder accounts for life: the logos of life speaks and observes through the aperture of the soul, which is called in the phenomenology of time the disclosure space. In Manchester’s phenomenology, the spanning of the disclosure space is the fundamental unit, but the spans are scaled in the harmonic sense, and framed by the form of the sphere, whose telos is the Sphere of the All. In the logic of natural necessity, life as the unfurling of experience and as the totality of the lifetime is a spanned, “Cosmetic Array” (Manchester 2005, 49), scaled according to the syntax of time in the perimeter of the sphere where the array is synthesized as the unity of a cosmos. In the synthetic method of a phenomenology of the spheres, finally, this unity is placed, positioned, in the framework of the spheres whose ultimate frame, the outermost frame, is the Sphere of the All. Tymieniecka writes that this elemental ray of the logos of life proceeds in its constructive advance according to “a dianoiac thread” (Tymieniecka 2009, 31), the very same dianoia which Peter Manchester names syntax. Tymieniecka finally does employ the construction “the cosmic sphere of the all,” in the summary on the back of Analecta Husserliana Volume 114, Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. The Life-World, Nature, Earth: Book Two, but the allusion to the Stoic formula is incidental (Tymieniecka 2013). With such convergences and coalescences, the continued project of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenological cosmology can be advanced  and enriched by adding to this great vision of individualization, the vision of Peter Manchester’s synthetic, syntactical paradigm of the infinite sphere. Rounding off the cosmic architectonic, and grounding its method in the figura paradigmatica of The Syntax of Time, we are tempted to note that like eternity itself, nothing coheres like the spheres.

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References Gaiser, Konrad. 1963. Platons Ungeschriebene Lehre. Studien zur Systematischen und Geschichtlichen Begründung der Wissens. Stuttgart: Klett. Hart, James G. 2009. Who One Is: Book 1, Meontology of the “I”: A Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Springer. Hofmann, Joseph Ehrenfried. 1957. The History of Mathematics. Trans. Gaynor, Frank, and Henrietta O. Midonick. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc. Hopkins, Burt C. 2010. The Philosophy of Husserl. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ———. 2011. The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ——— 2003. Philosophy of Arithmetic. Trans. Allas Willard. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Logic. Trans. Robert Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz. New York: Bobbs-­ Merrill Co. Krämer, Hans Joachim. 1990. Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics. A Work on the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents. Albany: State University of New York Press. Laycock, Stephen W., and James G.  Hart, eds. 1986. Essays in Phenomenological Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1964. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mahnke, Dietrich. 1937. Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der Mathematischen Mystik. Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Manchester, Peter. 1987. Eternity. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 5. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1992. The Noetic Triad in Plotinus, Marius Victorinus, and Augustine. In Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed. Rickhard T. Wallis. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2002. Teleology Revisited: A Neoplatonic Perspective in Environmental Biology. In Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, Part One, ed. R.  Baine Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2005. The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. ———. n.d. Unpublished Introduction to The Syntax of Time. Stony Brook: The Estate of Peter Byrne Manchester. Merlan, Philip. 1960. From Platonism to Neoplatonism. Hague: M. Nijhoff. Nikulin, Dmitri, ed. 2012. The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings. Albany: State University of New York Press. O’Meara, Dominic. 1998. The Structure of Being and the Search for the Good. London: Routledge. Plato. 2000. Timaeus. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett. Poulet, Georges. 1966. The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Spencer-Brown, George. 2008. Laws of Form. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Leipzig: Bohmeier Verlag. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1964. Leibniz’ Cosmological Synthesis. Netherlands: Van Grocum, Ltd. ———. 1965. Conjectural Inference and Phenomenological Analysis. In Contributions to Logic and Methodology in Honor of J.  M. Bochenski, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. ———. 1966. Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? Prolegomena to the Phenomenology of Cosmic Creation. Asse: Van Grocum, Ltd.

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———. 1974. Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The ‘A Priori,’ Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. Vol. 3. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. ——— 2000. Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, Book Four. Vol. 70. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2009. The Fullness of the Logos in the Key of Life, Book One. The Case of God in the New Enlightenment. Vol. 100. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2010. Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, Book Three: Heralding the New Enlightenment. Vol. 105. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2011. Phenomenology/Ontopoiesis Retrieving the Geo-Cosmic Horizons of Antiquity: Logos and Life, Part One. Vol. 110. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013. Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. The Life-World, Nature, Earth: Book Two. Vol. 114. Dordrecht: Springer. Wood, David W. 2012. “Mathesis of the Mind”: A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry. Amsterdam: Rondopi.

From Boredom to a Posthumanist Fulfillment Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith

Abstract  When speaking of the posthistorical, one is also speaking of posthumanism, so that the question becomes “On what basis can one speak in these terms? And what are their main characteristics?” I begin with statements that include these questions, and answer by exploring the theme of negativity put forth by Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Negativity generates negative phenomena and contexts that lead to negative feelings and states of mind. It also includes such phenomena as boredom, solitude, loneliness, and isolation, which I consider in this order to show the similarities and differences among these phenomena and pose the question whether they can influence one another. I conclude by examining whether these phenomena are symptoms of a posthumanist nihilism or if they can bring forth changes in our human, insurmountable finitude. If so, a different ethics arises that sets aside the humanism of the past and puts in its place a posthuman way of being-in-common based on co-existence. Keywords  Posthumanism · The body · Boredom · Solitude · Fulfillment Fortunately, we humans possess a language that sheds some light on the topic of negativity, a concept that is most fruitful in understanding the related concepts that make the core of this study. Negativity, as conceived of by Giorgio Agamben, is “ironic self-negation” (Agamben 1993b, XVI), but these few words, though they remind us of the self-referentiality that has become the protagonist of so many contemporary philosophical studies, are not sufficient to understand the whole range of negativity. For a start, according to Agamben, the contemporary philosopher looks for unity; that is, for meaningful and relevant connections beyond language’s fragmented words. Let’s first point out that, contrary to the system adopted by the ancient Romans, the words of the alphabet are now written separately one from the other—a fact that says a lot about the phenomena under consideration. Agamben’s consistent approach M. T. Goldsmith (*) Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_3

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ends up by becoming “an inquiry into the void,” since philosophy has no object on which to lay its foundations (Agamben 1993b, XIX); what is lacking is a being capable of sustaining a positive (not positivistic) approach to what is called philosophia perennis. After having distinguished ethics from morality, the first being a collective and external domain and the second being a mere personal and inner conviction, Agamben speaks of a planetary humanity formed by “a singularity without identity,” an entity unworthy of an ethical denomination and consequently prey to the emptiness that ensues (Agamben 1993a, XI–XVI). Out of negativity one can only identify negative phenomena such as boredom, solitude, loneliness, and isolation—all of which share a common origin, a worn-out subjectivity that cannot provide us with a permanent, stable ethics. It is, then, worth enquiring whether there are similarities and differences among these phenomena and, if there are, what is their nature and what is their relation to each other. These phenomena (known since antiquity as conditions and part of a humanity outside of the accepted ethos) have, with modernity acquired a relevance all their own, since negativity has become the theme of posthumanism’s pervasive nihilism. However, we are not confronting a mere historical issue, which could easily provide us with the hope that a solution is just a matter of time: nihilism is pervasive, capable of affecting the most hidden aspects of human experiences. The most significant of these phenomena is boredom, the first step leading to nihilism and consequently the most pervasive condition leading to other negative phenomena; paradoxically, boredom is the “richest” source of negativity. Boredom has been a topic considered by a number of philosophers since at least the nineteenth century, but before taking into account the theories of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, I look at some of its different modes I believe as being relevant to understand this “concept.” The first consideration concerns the fact that boredom is above all a lack of self-­ determination: the will is passive and the bored person’s rejection of alterity ends up by being subjected to that of the other, not seeing in the other anything worth taking seriously. Because of this negative attitude, the individual leads a boring life characterized by constant repetitions, a routine that can go so far as to wear out the person in question. The daily life is the case in point; but there is another type of boredom which is not so detrimental to the individual, and this is the boredom that occurs following a demanding and strenuous work that has occupied the whole person; then rest becomes welcome, but this rest is a form of boredom since it does not occupy in any way the individual, and is lived as being slightly painful; it can be beneficial after all, considering that this type of boredom generally does not last long, sooner or later the individual in question will resume his/her activity or a different kind of activity as compared to the previous one. There is a uniformity in the general approaches to the theme of boredom in the sense that they are all negative, more or less strongly described. Boredom is therefore a state of being that requires negativity as an explanation beyond the differences among philosophical theories. Schopenhauer and his almost-contemporary poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi, often mention this condition: boredom is a sort of destiny and state of

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mind that sooner or later besets all of us by isolating a person without necessarily revealing itself in the presence of other people; one remedy, for instance, is considering the constant invasion, the omnipresence of the screen which does not, as some may think, provide a remedy; its function is, in fact, to distract momentarily from the emptiness that lies at the bottom of human life, but instead leads inevitably to boredom. In the end, boredom corresponds to a refusal of the world, which is considered unworthy of attention, and is also the result of an unstable state of mind. However, boredom becomes philosophically significant, just like nihilism, since it indicates the unwillingness and passivity of an empty being, the ultimate state of the meaningless. Having begun his philosophical career with a dissertation of irony, Kierkegaard immerses himself in a-systematic theory which includes all possible descriptions of what a human being can encounter. Concerning boredom, he begins by saying “I … proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring” (1987, 285); Kierkegaard talks about boredom as if we were dealing with a contagious disease affecting all humanity, even the people who engage themselves in activities of any type. What they produce is destined to provoke boredom, Kierkegaard considers boredom to be a mode in which everyone is exposed, some cases, I add, can be worse than others. Such a universal principle does not allow any solution except an activity which provides very little satisfaction. Here, we have a reversal of positions: for Kierkegaard activity is not a positive remedy, whereas for Schopenhauer activity leads to a partial advancement from the negative aspects of boredom. As a universal phenomenon, the concept of boredom has an important philosophical tradition; for Kierkegaard, who saw in the figure of Don Juan the personification of boredom, it is the corrupting root of all evil, which does not necessarily cure suffering since it is at the very core of humanity and in particular it is at the core of the aesthetic life as opposed to the ethical and the religious stages of life. In Kierkegaard’s words: “Boredom is the demonic pantheism” that “consumes everything” (1987, 290 and 37) instead of accepting human truths. In the end, we are indeed facing a powerful negativity, since boredom generates repulsion (285). In fact, these words are followed by a series of ironic statements explaining why humans were created and why Adam and Eve were led to sin, and why the Babylonian tower was built. They were all ways to defeat boredom, thus showing the incapacity of accepting the unknown; however, these were mere palliatives and as such they demonstrate that they were doomed to fail. Arthur Schopenhauer’s different approach describes the role of boredom in his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation. According to him, “Boredom is anything but an evil to be thought of lightly” (1969, 313); in fact the will is a universal principle, the tyrannical force of human life, making humans willing beings, in contrast to animals, the bored individuals fall prey to boredom when their desires and activities come to an end, then boredom predominates with all its negative aspects. It follows that boredom is for Schopenhauer’s strong language “life-­ destroying,” (1969, 64), and even stronger: when the will is not active and is unoccupied we fall into the “torture and misery of boredom” (1969, 203–4). Given Schopenhauer’s premises and overall philosophy of the predominance of the will as

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the principal characteristic of life, it would be difficult to argue with him without agreeing with his metaphysics. Another point to consider is that boredom has, philosophically speaking, no defenders, they all consider boredom in negative terms, although there are differences within this uniformity. Giacomo Leopardi is a case in point, since his view is ethical and socially oriented in the widest possible sense, therefore secular rather than religious. As a particular type of suffering, boredom denies pleasure taking hold of the whole human being and resulting in a nihilism that destroys the very fabric of the social world. It is, and remains, a negative phenomenon compared by Leopardi to hatred (1983, 549). He writes that boredom “does not involve pain; it involves the totality. It can become an all-pervasive indifference. And indifference is not suitable to man,” since the human world demands human involvement (551). Instead, the bored person is condemned to a self-imposed loneliness, to a void deprived of any form of vitality; given this lack, boredom and loneliness—understood as the avoidance of stimuli—go hand in hand, although their concepts differ when considered philosophically, since loneliness, if prolonged, can well be the result of an objective situation and not a choice. The discussion of boredom has attracted those philosophers who, more than others, have raised the issue of subjectivity: What can be more subjective than the boredom resulting from an indifference vis-à-vis the world? Boredom is “mine!”, one can think, but as a useless possession it plunges the individual into nothingness; that is, into an unwanted, meaningless mental void incapable of any significant development. In so doing, it joins forces with a solitude that promises the absence of suffering from the presence of an unwanted human diversity; everything for the bored individual is evident: after a disappointing otherness there is nothing to discover and nothing to admire, with the consequence that living is to passively accept an uncreated void that rests on insubstantiality. Given these dismal considerations, boredom, solitude, and loneliness are indications of a tragic worldview; more specifically, they are all different but related answers to the human, overhuman, or posthuman conditions. The posthuman has thus found a “place” [locus] where to situate the inner side of what used to be called the human condition; at the moment when everything (or almost everything) is disclosed, when the satisfaction of desires, or lack of them, dominate, then boredom enters the scene to put a person in a state that is between melancholy and cheerfulness (Leopardi 1983, 609). Time has changed Kierkegaard’s and Leopardi’s views, so that a new posthumanism requires different answers to the phenomenon of boredom. Nowadays what is needed is a time-specific perspective inclusive of the wisdom provided by contemporary philosophers. The question is whether the fragmentary world of images that follow one after another is perhaps a way to eradicate boredom, but aren’t the images themselves boring? Paradoxically, the images of the screens surrounding the Planet seem to be more interesting than the tangible world, whose reality is taken for granted or put aside as being irrelevant; both the material world and the ubiquitous virtual world are boring, almost irrelevant, so that the result is that truth itself becomes ambiguous. The screen suspends the solitude of the present moment but, with its endless repetitions, it bores people again and again, so that the screen

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isolates and does not change in any fundamental way the present, impassive human world. The posthuman condition offers phantasmatic experiences, whose ultimate meaning leads to indifference. However, not everything has changed: according also to the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, boredom is a negative form of solitude, which, if brought to the extreme, becomes isolation and unhappiness. Jankélévitch speaks of boredom as a kind of disease—not terribly serious, but quite common; a disease that is not justified by life itself or by nature. As a matter of fact, life is in and of itself movement demanding activity, whereas boredom is a “futile sadness,” a kind of monologue that “isolates its victims and makes them inert” (Jankélévitch 1963, 62–63). When solitude and boredom are found together, they are difficult to untangle; solitude makes humans live in a different dimension and can be voluntary or involuntary, whereas isolation is generally involuntary. As to the feeling of loneliness, it puts the whole person in a state of dismay, since it can be caused by a lack of interest on the part of other people; yet, there is also a positive solitude called “beata solitudo,” and this is an additional point that differentiates Jankélévitch from the previous considered thinkers. Jankélévitch reminds us that after having been surrounded by a crowd, people can actively and eagerly seek solitude, withdraw into themselves far from possible negative experiences. This is a psychological state of mind, when solitude is welcome and is lived as a state of repose. As a result, solitude becomes a choice, and sometimes even a choice for life when it coincides with the avoidance of company, due to the belief that it is the right answer to the noise of the world. However, it is worth mentioning that solitude is also an ontological condition that is not a matter of choice; it is the solitude all human beings have within themselves, due to the uniqueness that at times makes us melancholic or resigned to the point that extreme solitude may coincide with a solipsistic state of mind leading to hubristic consequences. That is probably why society as a whole has been critical of such a response to human life that should be lived accepting its variety and enjoyment, whereas extreme solitude is typical of a posthumanity that suffers from an undesired loneliness, loneliness that per se is a passive, self-induced feeling, a step away from isolation. Jankélévitch does not contradict previous evaluations of loneliness, but he adds concrete considerations to the positive aspects of loneliness the characteristics of which make life open to different possibilities. Instead, the undesirable aspects of solitude which can erupt suddenly and are therefore unwanted and unexpected, are far removed from the enjoyment of which Levinas speaks in Totality and Infinity. In a conversation with Philippe Nemo, published in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas tackles the topic of solitude in order to deny its existentialist significance and to introduce instead an ontological difficulty. Levinas says: “I cannot share my existence” (1985, 57). Such an apparently simple statement indicates that “Solitude … appears … as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology” (1985, 57–58). On this point Philippe Nemo mentions the monad that he himself is: “I am monad inasmuch as I am … without doors or windows” (1985, 59). However, solitude “is only one of the marks of being,” as Levinas says (1985, 59); it is thanks to enjoyments that we elude it, but if there is sociality, and there is, it does not have the same structure of knowledge.

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Clearly then, for Levinas solitude is one with isolation, since they are not separate ontologically. In an early work Time and the Other, Levinas clearly distinguishes ontology from anthropology and psychology; only the ontological approach is truly philosophical and therefore rational; after this premise Levinas can go as far as introducing the theme of solitude and loneliness in order to connect it to the solipsism that he defines as the “very structure of reason” (Levinas 1987, 65); consistently, worth quoting are Levinas’ words: “Knowledge does not surmount solitude. By themselves, reason and light consummate the solitude of a being as a being, and accomplish its destiny to be the sole and unique point of reference for everything” (1987, 65). Isolation is suffering and solitude—extreme passivity, and therefore tragic. Nevertheless, there is useful suffering and there is useless suffering, and only the latter prevents us from enjoying life (Levinas 1991, 100–07). In the section of Totality and Infinity entitled “Affectivity and the Ipseity of the I,” Levinas writes: “We are catching sight of a possibility of rendering the unicity of the I intelligible. The unicity of the I conveys separation. Separation can be solitude and enjoyment— happiness or unhappiness” (1969, 117–18). Qua ipseity (ipseitas), the I stands for the singularity and the uniqueness of the individual; as conceived by Levinas, it is not so much a concept but rather an indication of interiority, whose solitude makes it separated from the totality. There is also another instance that confirms the solitude of the body and that manifests the originality of Levinas’ thinking, I refer to a specific part of the body that emerges in his work: the Face, or Visage, of the other, which is to be understood as even provoking the Other (with a capital O), and as absolute transcendence that is barely mediated by language (Levinas 1969, 194–5). In Levinas’ words: “The face resists possession, resists my powers” and “puts the I in question” (1969, 197 and 195). The face-to-face marks the beginning of an ethical world, even though the human face (human by definition) and its expressions are—if thought of from the ontological viewpoint—an enigma, since the face, and I quote, is “the infinity of the other” (1969, 213). As such, I add, it can never be boring and remains mysterious. In his work Time and the Other Levinas says, “to be is to be isolated by existing” (1987, 42) and also: “I see the other. I am not the other. I am all alone” (42). Yet, as mentioned, despair can be alleviated by sociality, which, however, cannot be a solution that nullifies the ontological reality of solitude; it can only mitigate the feeling of loneliness for a limited period of time. In fact, there is a distinction that should be made while discussing the early Levinas: his work De l’existence à l’existant helps us to understand the difference that obtains if we distinguish between “solitude” and “loneliness”; as mentioned above, solitude is an ontological state that cannot be eradicated, but there is also loneliness, “being alone,” which is a more subjective state, a feeling. The “proximity” or distance between the two states cannot be ignored so much so that Levinas writes that it is impossible “de se défaire de soi même” (2013, 127); there cannot be proximity between ontological solitude and a temporary feeling, since they are situated on different planes. A further distinction must be made between the I (Je) and the me (moi) (2013, 129); the moi tries to attenuate loneliness, its world is the world of desire and materiality, but there is nothing definitive in this world, which does not coincide with the world of light and

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solitude (2013, 122). Moreover, it is the boredom of the moi (2013, 128) that is part of the realm of social exteriority and materiality; the I and the me differ radically and pursue different aims. The moi is connected to the materiality of the individual person, who cannot escape his/her ontological situation. Given the precarious harmony of a posthuman world (but is it still right to call it a world?) and given the generalized loneliness that follows from, or is preceded by, boredom, these two phenomena become almost indistinguishable from isolation; both can be a matter of choice; that is, of an active refusal to be part of an indifferent environment. If this is the case, then solitude and isolation are beyond good and evil, and so is boredom. The more the posthuman condition changes human lives, both biological and mental, the more contemporary philosophy tackles the virtuality of our environment. Well aware of this situation was Jean Baudrillard, whose radical positions went beyond Levinas’ humanism to speak of a world that has been killed by the virtual reality of the screen, the presence of which gives us an illusory world of simulacra, whereby reality and communication are reduced to networks of terminals (Baudrillard 1995, 16). Today’s posthumanism—and I quote Baudrillard—is “affiliated more and more with the preservation of the individual and of humankind as a genetically defined entity” in such a way that the limits of the human and the inhuman tend to fade away (2000, 21). No Übermensch in sight. Given these insightful considerations, solitude, self and other have become similar to nonexistence; no wonder that solitude, loneliness, and isolation have changed dramatically, just as human experiences and lives have and are approached in different dimensions, with the consequence that humans have found different ways of considering what is relevant to living; old theories have lost their previous significance, yet their essence has remained the same. What has changed is the way contemporary human beings relate to the phenomena that cause them, so well detected by Baudrillard. On these themes, the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy identifies the point within which different possibilities emerge; the most important one concerns the immanence that intrinsically connects the singular and the plural dimensions of a life lived. Nancy’s conception of humanism relegates it to the past, thus differentiating himself from Levinas’ humanism; in Nancy’s words humanism is only “the postulation of the meaning of man … humanism deliberately (willfully) goes no further than man’s will. The inhumanity of his world is not terribly surprising” (1997a, 25). What consequences can be drawn for our topic from these words is carefully discussed by Nancy, who mentions boredom in order to contrast it to the threat posed by the old opposition “happiness/unhappiness,” a distinction going back to at least the nineteenth century; in addition Nancy equates boredom to a totally anachronistic nihilism, adding that here and now there is no time for nihilism (1997b, 145). Responding to Levinas on the issue of the totality, Nancy does not hesitate when he writes: “Sense is singularity in the collective or worldly sense of what makes of the totality of the existent the singular absolute of being” (1997b, 68); in other words, the present world involves each individual in a more pressing world. What is clear from this statement is that multiplicity and the singular, although distinguishable, are always immanently interrelated, and we should not

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forget that “Finitude is not a privation” (1997b, 29), a statement that excludes any sentimentality on our part. Given these arguments, Nancy is ready to ironically dismiss the idea of solitude as a Romantic anachronism; solitude is “a thought of subjective supposition that touches its own abyssal character, incapable as it is of even perceiving that it still states its topos precisely in common” (1997b, 72). An immanent combination of singularity and multiplicity allows Nancy to emphasize what it means to be “with,” claiming that there is a commonality of being that keeps humanity from being isolated; this situation is almost a “given,” a matter of overcoming alterity in such a way that there is a “being-in-common,” notwithstanding the nihilism that seeps into the “human project”; the fact itself that there is a human project leads to the conclusion that a “new” form of humanism changes what was called the “human condition.” This project is humanism itself, and, in fact, Nancy writes: “The man of humanism can never be there where he is, but only in his project and as project” (1997a, 34). Specifically, the project is nothing other than the Faustian project that makes us hesitate between a “yes” and a “no,” and yet it is determined in the end to pursue that which is initially “given.” However, and most important, for Nancy, nihilistic tendencies of such determination indicate a liberation from the philosophical question of the subject that has occupied the minds of so many philosophers since at least Descartes; in changing the old Cartesian dictum “ergo sum” to “ego cum,” Nancy elucidates and dissolves the old topos of subjectivity, and with it a subjectivity centered on a singularity that cannot be attained in full. Given these considerations, it is clear that his position differs from that of Levinas, who thought that humanism is the recognition of an essence and therefore a necessary “attribute” without which there would be no significant human life; moreover, and not surprisingly, Levinas, contrary to Nancy, puts forth the human at the center—not of the universe, I specify, but of ethics. The questions concerning humanism lead us to ask what these two philosophers have in common, whether we are facing a human or overhuman finitude, an unsurpassable essential humanity or a posthumanity plunged into a common finitude; for Nancy, no thinking being would be so unlimited to be considered eternal in absolute terms; to think otherwise would be not only hubristic but also self-defeating. Even a resuscitated Übermensch—with all his supposed charisma—would be unable to master, once and for all, the posthumanist, constant changes about to happen at every moment and then build an interminable static utopianism instead of approaching a possible plural fulfillment. Such fulfillment is and remains only a possibility, there is no certainty that a totality of being can be achieved; finitude is the last “stage” both of the individual person, and of the totality in which a person dwells but from which he/she is separated by an act that produces the uniqueness of the I. For Levinas, this act does not exclude transcendence, whereas Nancy’s position remains faithful to immanence, whereby even his theory of the being-in-common that he puts forth is declared to be finite as is the search for sense which has turned out to be unattainable. The question whether these two antithetical positions are consistent with humanism should be further clarified by considering that Nancy’s position calls for a new posthumanism. On this point, Nancy does not hesitate; in his L’oubli de la filosophie

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(1986, 72) he writes: “Humanism is by now that which makes man flee,” whereas Levinas’ position embraces a more traditional but profound humanism.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1993a. The Coming Community—Theory Out of Bounds. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993b. Stanzas—Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L.  Martinez. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. Le crime parfait. Paris: Éditions Galilée. ———. 2000. The Vital Illusion. Ed. Julia Witwer. New York: Columbia University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1963. L’aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux. Paris: Éditions Montaigne. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1987. Either/Or—Part I. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leopardi, Giacomo. 1983. Zibaldone di pensieri. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity—An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1991. Entre nous—Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2013. De l’existence à l’existant. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1986. L’oubli de la philosophie. Paris: Éditions Galilée. ———. 1997a. The Gravity of Thought. Trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. ———. 1997b. The Sense of the World. Trans. Jeffrey S.  Librett. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications.

Experiencing Boredom: A Phenomenological Analysis Tõnu Viik

Abstract  The paper presents a phenomenological investigation into experiencing boredom in everyday life. The analysis is grounded in several concrete experiences that the reader is invited to participate in and imaginatively stage for him or herself. Based on these thought experiments, and theoretically proceeding from the work of Husserl, Heidegger and others, the paper argues that boredom has to be seen as a particular way of experiencing time, namely, experiencing it as being non-eventful. The characteristic feature of experiencing a situation as eventful depends on the possibility of filling the time of the situation with meaning by colonizing and domesticating it with narratives, purpose, usefulness, etc., whereas in boredom we are facing the not yet domesticated, not yet cultivated, not yet narrativized time that is perceived as empty, uncanny, and unhomely. The time of boredom is experienced as “not mine,” and, in its most alienating form, as inhuman. Keywords  Boredom · Phenomenology · Event · Meaning · Husserl · Heidegger It has probably happened to all of us that we have been bored by particular things, people, events, or situations. If we have to stand in a long queue, or have to wait for a delayed departure, it is likely that we consider these episodes boring. Our children tend to complain about being bored whenever they have nothing exciting to do, or when they have to do something they don’t like doing. Some people claim their whole lives to be boring. According to an empirical study by Alycia Chin and others (2017), 63% of the US population experienced boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. The study also concludes that boredom is more prevalent among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. Some authors, philosophical and literary, have insisted that the world is essentially a boring place, or that human life as such is a boring endeavor, or that experiencing boredom reveals something fundamentally significant about our life. Yet some other authors claim T. Viik (*) Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_4

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that boredom is not a universal psychic feature, but a cultural and historical phenomenon of Western civilization that emerged about 200 years ago (see Svendsen 2005, 11–15). Phenomenologists sometimes distinguish between two main types of boredom. One is a feeling that is related to a particular thing, person, or event. Standing in a long queue, having to listen to an annoying person, dealing with something that is not interesting, having to wait for departure, etc. are good examples of this type. Another type is a boring mood that is not related to particular things, events or circumstances, but is a way in which the subject perceives his or her life as a whole and relates to the world in general. Heidegger famously argues for the second type of boredom in Being and Time, claiming that a mood (Stimmung) reveals how one is “there” in the world. Thus, the mood is one of the possible ways that define one’s whole existence and her entire mode of being present in the world (Heidegger 1993, §29, 134). Husserl has also argued that mood is a general feature of a subject’s attitude towards the world that is not derived from the experience of any particular object or situation. However, as he points out, a mood still “illuminates” the objects that are given in the experience of this subject by giving them a particular “tonality” or “colouring“. If we are in a good mood,” claims Husserl in one of his manuscripts, “then any this or that catching our eye looks friendly, loving, and rosy” (M95).1 If we apply this to boredom, then it has to be considered a feature that characterizes the human subject rather than some objective particularities of the world that have the feature of being boring. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger (1995) distinguishes between as many as three kinds of boredom, but only the first one – being bored “by something” – corresponds to what we commonly consider an instance of boredom in our daily lives (Heidegger 1995, §18c–§38, see also Ratcliffe 2009, 357–358). Heidegger’s third type of boredom resembles his description of boredom in Being and Time. It is an all-encompassing attitude of the subject without a particular intentional object or situation that she is bored about. The second one has an intentional object (a dinner party), but one of the peculiar characteristics of this type of boredom is that the situation is only felt boring in retrospect, while it feels quite pleasant and satisfying during the event (Heidegger 1995, §24, 109). Heidegger considers the two latter types of boredom more “original” or more “profound” (Heidegger 1995, §24a, 107, §37, 160), but such forms of affectivity are not commonly experienced in everyday life. I am not sure whether the second type of boredom in Heidegger would not be better categorized as a retrospective regret about time that was not spent well (when one is reminded of other possible options). And I am also not sure whether the profoundest form of boredom in Heidegger is actually not a remnant of a romanticized idea of aristocratic idleness, belonging to a whole range of literary and philosophical clichés from the times of the dawn of Western aristocracy, or whether it is indeed a timeless and universal form of affectivity that  Mood is discussed by Husserl in M-manuscript from the years 1900–1914. He also discusses the structure of mood in the manuscript A VI 34, written in 1932, titled “Zur Lehre von der Intentionalität in universaler oder totaler Betrachtungsweise” (A VI 34,1931). 1

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can be achieved by philosophical elites. However this may be, the scope of my investigation here will be limited to experiences of boredom that are commonplace in the natural attitude. I will not be dealing with types of boredom that are conceptualized in philosophical or literary theories, and perhaps less commonly experienced in everyday life. I will start my analysis with concrete experiences that I will ask the reader to participate in, thus grounding my analysis in the phenomenological evidence of what can be “felt,” or at least imagined to be felt when a particular type of experiencing boredom is imaginatively staged for oneself. I see this as part of a phenomenological investigation of everyday life that concentrates on sense-making processes that we routinely carry out in the natural attitude. Attempting a phenomenological analysis also means that I am not interested in an objective explanation of boredom – as it might be attempted in psychology –, but I will describe boredom “from inside,” i.e. in the way it is experienced from the first person singular point of view. In other words, I am interested in the contents and essential features of a subjective experience of boredom rather than its neurological, biological, or psychological explanations. This phenomenological approach is experimental in the sense suggested by Don Ihde (1986), who has argued for a strategy of conducting “experience-­ experiments” for carrying out phenomenological analysis (Ihde 1986, 14). Let us start with the following thought-experiment: imagine yourself having to listen to a reading of a book in a foreign language that you do not know. You attend to the voice, but you understand nothing of its semantic content. Imagine that the reading is carried out in a socially controlled situation like a lecture room where everybody is expected to sit still, deal with nothing else during the presentation, and to be attentive to the speaker. The reading goes on and on. Imagine also that you have no smart phone or computer to entertain you. It is likely that after a short while you will feel bored. You become aware of your body, you start shifting your position in the chair, you become conscious of the conflict between what you would like to do and what is expected of your behavior. You let our eyes wonder around in the auditorium, and start observing the room and other people. Soon it becomes literally impossible to keep your attention focused on the voice of the speaker. You look at the watch once and again, and will most likely be disappointed, because less time has passed than you had hoped for. The prospect of doing what is expected of you, and even keeping the appropriate body posture, feels like a task that requires increasing effort and endurance. If you know that the reading will indeed continue for a long time, you start feeling a very specific type of discomfort that is both bodily and mental. You are fatigued, your body feels like a burden to be carried through every passing minute of which you are increasingly aware. There is a sense of helplessness in acknowledging you being in an inescapable situation that is facilitated by the auditorium, the speaker, and time. It feels that they have captured, silenced, and imprisoned you; all you can do is to yield to their power and wait for the time to pass. Why do we feel discomfort in situations like this? Is it because nothing catches our interest or excites us, or because the chairs are uncomfortable? Is it because our

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brain has released progesterone or melatonin into our bloodstream, or because we don’t understand the language, or because of the social coercion? Is it because of the conflict between what we want and what is expected of us, or is it because of the afternoon hours? Before attempting to answer these questions, let us change the scene a bit. Imagine that we are still sitting in the same auditorium, but instead of a presentation in a foreign language we are now attending to a presentation in English. But this time it is a telephone book that is read out. Now we understand each word and sentence, and yet we will very soon, in fact in a matter of minutes, become bored again. The reason why we feel discomfort seems to be similar: we are expected to focus our attention on something that is simply not relevant to us and therefore fails to attract our interest. It seems that if the content of the presentation were engaging, or at least somewhat interesting, it would be much easier to mobilize ourselves to fight the fatigue and the discomfort of the chair. Now let us make the situation more tolerable: imagine that we are attending, in the same auditorium, to a lecture on phenomenology, or a poetry reading. In this case some people become bored as quickly as all of us would in the previous two examples, but others might not be bored for an hour or two. What constitutes this difference in experiencing one and the same situation by these two groups of people? It obviously has to do with the degree to which they are interested in the content of the presentation. In the first scenario described above, when we have to listen to a lecture in a foreign language, we cannot be interested because we miss the content of the talk altogether. All there is left to attend to is the speaking appearance of the lecturer. In the case of the telephone book reading, we are capable of attending to the semantically given content of the talk, but this content feels most likely pointless in the form of an oral presentation. But in the third scenario, if we happen to be interested in phenomenology, it is likely that we will experience certain readiness, willingness, or even desire to attend to the content of the talk. In this case we will find ourselves making an effort to understand what is said, how what is said at the moment coheres with the previous claims of the speaker, and how all of this relates to what we already know about the subject. Sometimes our thoughts wander away and we miss a part of the talk, but this wandering has very different temporal qualities in comparison to our mind’s wandering when we are bored. In the latter case time slows down, but here it speeds up. We wish to have more time to contemplate the contents of the talk. It still happens that we miss some parts of the talk when taking a mental detour. But it feels as if it is our excitement about some of the ideas that actively pushes our attention away from the lecture, being so interesting that, once again, we cannot focus. However, this time our inability to focus is not because the talk is uninteresting. Rather, it feels so significant that it almost forces our mind to think about the relevant implications. Even our bodily reactions show that it matters to us. Affective engagement with the content of the talk can include feelings of intellectual excitement, satisfaction, and approval, but also negative feelings of dissatisfaction or disapproval. In either case, when emotions are engaged, we are experiencing something opposite to boredom. In such situations we experience

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willingness and motivation to make an effort to attune ourselves to the content. More precisely, it feels like the content actively attracts our interest, and we are just responding to its quality of being interesting. However, if we didn’t know what phenomenology was, and if we did not have any motivations to find out, we would probably be bored just as quickly as when listening to the presentation of a telephone book. Being engaged with a reading of poetry seems to have a slightly different set of requirements for making it interesting. We can feel engaged and enjoy the reading even if we are not invested in the particular topic or contents of the poem. Our attention can rather be drawn to the artistic use of language and the aesthetic qualities of linguistic content. However, in order to enjoy it we must be able to appreciate poetry as a literary genre and must have learned to value it in the past. Thus, the feeling of boredom in the four cases described above seems to be dependent on whether the situation offers something that relates to our past intellectual activities. If nothing in what is presented connects to our existing mental and cultural investments, it feels not interesting, and we’ll get bored. Thus, what is boring seems to form a vast domain that is left over from the tautology of being interesting at the moment because we have found it being interesting in the past. There must have been, of course, moments in the past when these particular mental and cultural investments were created, and it is not necessary that they must have been interesting and exciting at that time. Nevertheless, the existence of these mental investments has created the possibility of our present excitement about the subject. Certainly some other situations can be imagined where we feel captured and interested without being previously engaged with the subject, but let us turn back to our four examples and concentrate on the particular moment of the onset of boredom – the very moment when we cannot pay attention anymore; the moment when what is presented simply slips away from the conscious focus, when our mind wanders towards other things. It seems that this process takes place almost against our will or is at least not initiated by it. What can we say about this moment from the phenomenological point of view? What happens when we lose attention? How do things fade away from the focal point of our consciousness? This fading away seems similar to falling asleep, which, as we know, is notoriously difficult to control. We can try to force ourselves to sleep by willfully imitating the sleeping mode – lying down, relaxing our muscles, breathing slowly, freeing our mind from (worrisome) thoughts, etc.  – but when we finally fall asleep, this feels not like an act that is carried out by our mind. All insomniacs know that we can purposely only help to facilitate sleep, as if only to mediate and prepare the circumstances for it to take place. The very falling asleep itself occurs as if independently of us; it seems to be the result of an event that our mind and body passively yield to, rather than actively carry out. We seem not to have any agency in making this event actually take place. It might be argued on this basis that falling asleep is not an act of consciousness at all, even though it radically alters the mode of our consciousness. Perhaps it is something that our body does to the mind, not vice versa? The same applies to waking up from sleep. It seems to be an action of our body, rather than our mind. Perhaps

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experiencing boredom is a similar event in the sense that it is initiated by our body rather than our consciousness? For we can mindfully attempt to resist boredom, but our mind cannot really stop its initiation by the body. If so, then phenomenology as a study of consciousness might be inadequate for understanding the process of being seized by boredom, and we would have to study our physiological and neurological processes instead. This line of arguing, however, assumes a sharp division between conscious and bodily states and acts. While we can certainly make a meaningful distinction between acts of conscious deliberation and unconscious bodily processes, a sharp contrast between mind and body is less convincing when consciousness is viewed more widely than being a self-reflective, rational and voluntary kernel of the human mind. According to Husserl most of the work of consciousness in the natural attitude is in fact characterized by “passivity”, i.e., by the feature of us not being an active and conscious designer of the sense-making activities that our consciousness is carrying out. On the contrary, the workings of our consciousness and sense-­ making in everyday life are to a large extent habituated, automated, intersubjectively and culturally conditioned (see Viik 2016). The habituation and automation of the processes of consciousness is constituted both on the level of individual past experiences and social normativity: a conditioning that Husserl respectively calls “primary” and “secondary passivity.” We also know that our consciousness is embodied in the sense that conscious activities necessarily involve the body, and in the sense that various bodily activities tend to involve consciousness. Thus, while admitting that certain bodily processes may play a role in experiencing boredom (for when we are bored, we are always bodily situated and bodily participating in something), I propose not to draw a sharp line between our bodily and conscious activities in experiencing boredom. Rather, boredom needs to be seen as a type of embodied, physically and socially situated mode of consciousness. We can also make use of Husserl’s theory of affectivity that characterizes the natural attitude. As he proposes in Ideas I, we perceive things not just as having a cognitive identity (that enables us to recognize the object and distinguish it from the rest), but also as having “value-characteristics” (Wertcharactere) and “practical characteristics” (praktische Charactere) that belong to these objects. As a result, most of the things and events that we encounter are experienced not just as being a particular “this” or “that,” i.e., as having a cognitive identity, but also as being beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable, useful or futile, and, of course, practically or aesthetically interesting or not interesting (Husserl 2009 58). Boredom, as we saw above, appears when we experience something as being not interesting. Does it mean that we have to first evaluate something as not interesting in order to feel bored by it? If so, the question of boredom becomes dependent on the affective component of our conscious activities - it kicks in when we ascribe the value of “not interesting” to a thing or a person that we perceive. Applied to our thought-experiment it would mean that a lecture on phenomenology, or a poetry reading is first judged or valued as not interesting, as a result of which it will be experienced as boring. This “judgement” or “evaluation” is most likely carried out passively. We feel as if we just react upon the attractiveness or unattractiveness that

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characterizes the event itself, but in fact this reaction depends on our meaning-­ bestowal activities. If so, the question becomes how to analyze phenomenologically the non-­ interesting: something that is de-valued, or given a negative value as not being worthy our attention. The sphere of non-interesting is notoriously difficult to approach, because it is by definition something that stays at the margins of consciousness. It is much easier to turn the question around and try to understand what we perceive as interesting, for what is experienced as interesting seems to be the very opposite of what is experienced as boring. Sean Desmond Healy writes that the word “boring” became widespread at the same time and increased in frequency at the same rate as the word “interesting” which we hear a lot in our times (Healy 1984, 24). What strikes our consciousness as interesting? We know from the psychological studies of attention that our mind automatically attends to objects with certain features. For example, within the visual field we are automatically attuned to objects that are more intense in colour or contrast. We are also automatically attuned to objects that move, as opposed to objects that stand still. Or, within the auditive field we automatically attune to sounds that are unexpected. Imagine hearing a loud sound that resembles the trumpeting scream of an elephant. Our minds are built so that it is impossible not to pay attention to it. Moreover, we automatically attend to things, postures, and images that signal a possible threat or reward. This feature of our mind is extensively exploited in advertising when marketed goods are associated with visual images of attractive human bodies, for example. We also involuntarily attend to images that are violent or bizarre, as well as visually or cognitively paradoxical. Thus, there is a range of objects that capture our attention involuntarily. Such objects are outstanding in contrast and colour; they exhibit movement, unexpectedness or surprise, or they hint towards a possible threat or pleasure, or are violent or bizarre. From here, we can draw a list of opposite features that must consequently form the features of the non-interesting. These would include being monotonous and repetitive, having no perceptual emphasis, not moving, not indicating any threat or pleasure, being ordinary, understandable, and corresponding to our expectations. Besides, as we are social and cultural beings, the sphere of non-interesting includes social, cultural and linguistic objects, works, situations, and messages that have no relevance to our personal, social, and occupational investments, either mental or material. But are the features of the non-interesting really the features of the boring? Let us carry out another thought-experiment. Try to recall the formatting style of the title of this paper. You probably saw it if you are reading this sentence here, and you might be able to remember what the title said without turning the pages or scrolling the screen back to it, but you probably did not pay attention to its formatting style, perhaps because you were focused on its conceptual content. Thus, your mind probably “judged” the formatting style of the title as not being extraordinary, and consequently as not worthy of dedicated attention. Does this mean that that it bored you during the reading of the paper? Most likely it did not. Even though you must have

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“registered” it while reading the title, it probably just “fell out” of your mind as soon as your eyes moved on towards the first paragraph. Thus, while it is true that what is interesting draws our attention, we are not allowed to conclude that being boring equals failing to catch our attention. What we are not attending to, and what we do not notice consciously, is not yet boring. We know from psychology and cognitive science that attention has to be selective regarding the variety of perceived stimuli in order to be able to concentrate on the area where attention is most needed at the moment. Our mind cannot focus on everything and process all the information available, because we are quite limited in terms of how much data can be processed at each moment. Therefore, psychologists often define attention as the process of selective allocation of the limited processing resources of the mind, as already proposed in 1890 by William James in his Principles of Psychology. Attention, he argues, “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (James 2012, 1:403). Thus, we have to acknowledge that even though we tend to make a connection between what is not interesting and what is boring, this connection cannot be maintained from the psychological and phenomenological point of view. Regardless of whether the criteria of interest have been formed by evolution, social circumstances, cultural habituation, or personal past experiences, training and education, it is not the case that everything not meeting these criteria is experienced as boring. For when we are actually bored by something, we attribute to it a negative value, while we obviously do not carry out value-judgements regarding things that we do not pay attention to. Only the things that we are capable of noticing can be attributed some value or practical worth. All the rest swims in the ocean of silent and pre-­meaningful existence that is unreached even by forgetfulness and oblivion. Let us imagine a small rock, or even better, a temporary cloud formation on a distant planet that has not been, and never will be, discovered. It never was and never will be experienced “as something” that could be attributed a positive or negative, practical or aesthetic value. For such a thing to be classified “as something” that is not significant, and hence not interesting, would mean considering it irrelevant for somebody, but for that it must first be turned into an object of consideration and be perceived or cognized as such. But the vast majority of things in the universe are never given this chance. From the phenomenological point of view, this cloud formation has a pre-meaningful existence that is not even nothing – it is literally not a thing at all. It is just an exemplar of pre-meaningful no-thing-ness that has no characteristics attached to its silent and nameless, unidentifiable being in the meaningless desert of pure existence. Such a thing is certainly not boring, for what is experienced as boring must minimally be experienced “as something,” and it needs to be continually present in the sensory field of our experience for some time. All our four examples included such identifiable and continuously enduring objects that were constitutive of the experience of boredom: a presentation in a foreign language, the reading of a telephone

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book, a lecture on phenomenology, and a recitation of poetry. Their continuous presence was obviously among the necessary conditions for experiencing boredom. As they were all auditive objects and formed examples of the same type, let me invoke a yet different case of boredom, experienced and described by Lars Svendsen: … The things that surround us do not seem to offer us anything. Exactly what should they offer? When we wait at an airport, we get information about arrivals and departures, we can buy sandwiches, a cup of coffee, slip into the smokers’ lounge, read newspapers … So why is waiting at airports so deadly boring, when airports actually provide so many possibilities for whiling away the time? The answer is that an airport often denies us the possibility we want most of all – to get on a plane at the scheduled time so we can leave the airport itself. The airport is only there to be left. (Svendsen 2005, 119)

This echoes Heidegger’s example of waiting at the train station as his first type of boredom (1995, §23, 93–105). As Heidegger explains, we are not bored by the things themselves that we encounter at the train station (timetables, the station building, a road running along in front of the station with rows of trees on either side), but by the fact that “we are left empty” by these things (Heidegger 1995, 104). The things do not function for us. They are of no use or interest, for they are given in a way that does not correspond to what we want to do, namely, to take a train and to leave the station. Similarly, in Svendsen’s case the airport is boring not because its interior and shops necessarily fail to attract our interest, but because they keep occupying our mind while not being of interest to us at the time given. The same is true about the telephone book reading or a lecture on phenomenology when experienced as boring. The situation of dealing with these objects is boring precisely because the non-interesting continues to define the situation of our embodied and situated existence that is stretched out over a certain time interval. It almost hurts that we cannot free ourselves from the presence of the non-interesting. What should belong, we feel, to the silent and nameless desert of pure being keeps constituting the content of our experience and in doing so keeps accruing a more and more negative meaning and significance. Thus, we can say that boredom is a bodily situated state of discomfort or dissatisfaction arising from a forced connection between restrictive physical circumstances and the contents that are given in our experience within these circumstances. It is a temporal and situational conflict between practical necessities (in the case of traveling) or social coercion (in the case of the lecture) and the freedom of our mind, its desire to move forward. Let us look more closely into this feeling of discomfort. We just said above that the discomfort stems not so much from the uninteresting character of the objects themselves as from a conflict between the persistence of these objects and the subjective desire to be freed from their presence. What I would like us to pay attention to is that this conflict is given to us in the form of a specific time experience. A boring lecture is not just a prolonged presence of the semantically boring content that we are forced to experience. It is also an uncomfortable stretch of time that we will have to endure. When experiencing boredom, we become conscious of time. This is why, as time passes and the feeling of boredom evolves and deepens, we tend to check our watch more and more often, wishing that more time had passed already. It is common that

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we overestimate how much time has passed when we are bored. Boredom makes the subjective time stretch out and endure longer than it normally would. In retrospect, however, situations experienced as boring seem short. When we are ill, for example, we wish the hours and days to pass faster, but when we look back, these hours and days barely feature in our memory. We remember us being sick, but a week spent ill at home afterwards feels a short period of time because it was probably not eventful and did not contain much to remember. The exact opposite happens when we spend a week on a good holiday. Time flies quickly as we experience it during the holiday, but in retrospect we have a lot to remember, and afterwards the time of this week seems longer than usual. A famous literary example illustrates this effect of subjective time stretching. Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, visits his cousin at a sanatorium in Berghof, and decides to stay there for a short while. In his first week, there is a lot to take in. He has to learn the routines of the sanatorium life and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants. Afterwards, the routines are repeated daily and weekly, whereas not that many new people arrive at the sanatorium. As the same events happen to the same people each day, Castorp soon loses track of time. Life in the sanatorium is so repetitious and monotonous that longer time periods seem not to flow at all, and each day seems to last forever. Time stops running and comes to a standstill. As a result, Castorp barely notices that he ends up spending seven years of his life in the Berghof sanatorium. Time becomes wrapped up in retrospect, while being stretched out during each day he spends there. Mann accentuates the impression of this time paradox by making the description of the first sanatorium week long and detailed, while the book runs through the rest of the years with relatively less numerous pages. Thus, the time of the first week is literally stretched out in reader’s experience, while the rest of the book literally shortens the time of reading. When we are bored, it is also the case that time stretches out during the event, and this prolonged duration tends to collapse into nothingness in retrospect. The time of a boring lecture, when it is experienced as uneventful and monotonous, will almost come to a standstill during the lecture. This time is, however, short in retrospect, because it did not contain anything meaningful or significant that would later form the contents of our memory of the event. When a period of time is filled with meaningful things taking place, it is experienced as an event. During an event, a lot can happen, and the time flows in accordance with what is happening, harmonizing the contents of the event with its plot, rhythm, speed, and duration. The episodes composing the event are subject to the same logic. Each of them runs ideally in such a speed that the meaning and the temporal characteristics of its contents harmonize. As a result, the time of the event is experienced as having the character of a “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). When the event is experienced as flowing, the meaning of its constituent episodes and their contents, their practical and value-characteristics, come to the fore in the experience and “fill” it up. The corresponding stretch of time is experienced as eventful, because it is filled with things happening. The same contents form the memory of the event afterwards.

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When experiencing boredom this is obviously not the case. The temporal character of the event is experienced as the opposite of that of the flow. It is the time of the event itself that comes to the fore in the experience, rather than the contents of its constituent episodes. But this time feels uncanny and alienated. It feels alienated because it cannot be made meaningful for the subject experiencing it. It is not just because we are “held in limbo” and being “paralyzed” by time, since all our other projects (that normally make our lives meaningful) are put on hold and experienced as “refused” by the situation (Heidegger 1995, 100, 140). It feels alienated also because we are experiencing time itself instead of its contents (that could fit or not fit our projects). It is certainly true that what is going on during a boring event cannot be harmonized with the protentive and retentive projections that we have about our life, but there is something beyond these restrictive circumstances that makes a boring situation uncanny. The uncanniness characterizes the time itself as it reveals itself in the experience of boredom. I agree with Heidegger in his view that what is at issue here is “the question of what time itself is” (1995, §23, p. 105), but I depart from his analysis in two ways. I maintain that the uncanniness of time becomes experienced already in the first type of boredom, while it does not open up any “authentic possibilities” of our Dasein regarding understanding itself, its finitude, or the world (1995, §34, p. 153). Whether such “authentic possibilities” may open up in experiencing boredom by philosophers is not under question here. Thus, the time experienced in everyday cases of boredom in the natural attitude reveals itself as uncanny and unhomely. I agree that when experiencing boredom there is nothing meaningful to do during the time given. We are “held in limbo,” as Heidegger puts it, all things appearing as empty and ephemeral. But the essential characteristic of the situation lies precisely in its impossibility to be turned into something meaningful, not even into a philosophical project of understanding our existence. It is because boredom opens up the very meaninglessness of time – either a period of a particular duration, or, perhaps for philosophers, of time as such. But even if it is just a relatively short stretch of time, it is still time in a peculiarly uncanny form that does not allow itself to be filled with any meaning whatsoever. It is time in its pure form as if it were an alien force that would not allow itself to be tamed. Normally, our time and particular temporal durations are filled up with meanings; we colonize and domesticate time by narratives, by purposeful activities, by taking care of our lives, of others and ourselves, our practical needs, etc. But here we have time itself in its pure form that does not allow for these purposeful activities and acts of meaning-bestowal. It is a strange dimension of the world that has no more meaning in itself than the spatial dimensions do. We have no better answer to the question why there is time than to the question of why are things in a three-­ dimensional space. We all participate in a life-long collective effort to turn our spatial surroundings into an organized habitat, and we attempt to fill up the time of our days with what is purposeful and meaningful, or what is exciting and pleasant. We are used to filling and organizing time both on the practical level by our deeds and undertakings, and

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on the mental level by attributing various meanings to its different stretches and durations. But in experiencing boredom, time is experienced as devoid of all meaning and purpose, and hence it is unpleasant and not exciting. It is given to us in an alienated form, revealing its unhuman and uncanny nature, for in boredom we are facing the time that is impossible to domesticate, cultivate or even narrate. The time that we are given in experiencing boredom exhibits nothing more than the pure “emptiness” of time itself, with nothing attached to it. As we know, there are other experiences of time that make it “flow,” and yet other that make time “pass,” or be “spent well” or “not well.” But only in boredom the uncanny face of time itself is revealed. Boredom brings time to the fore of the experience through its coercive conflict with the freedom of our consciousness. Thus, in boredom we are stuck with time that cannot be forgotten or moved to the margins of our consciousness or domesticated by meaning-making and significance – something that we as cultural beings, as homo symbolicum, are used to doing with time. We are forced to have a glance at the time as it is without any cultural form, meaning or significance. This is an uneasy situation, because we are much more comfortable with narratives than with time itself. And that is why it is so tempting to watch television or surf on the internet when we are bored or just tired  – not because it necessarily offers us something interesting, but because it fills up the time that we might otherwise experience as uncanny. If we did not watch television or surf on the internet, we would need to try to make time meaningful with our own efforts, but now these devices do it for us. They organize the time we are given with a minimal effort from our part. This is obviously handy in moments of boredom, but also in other circumstances when time is difficult for us to endure. Acknowledgments  This research was supported by the European Union through the Estonian Research Council project, Landscape approach to rurbanity” (PRG 398).

References Chin, Alycia, Amanda Markey, Saurabh Bhargava, Karim S. Kassam, and George Loewenstein. 2017. Bored in the USA: Experience Sampling and Boredom in Everyday Life. Emotion 17 (2): 359–368. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New  York: Harper & Row. Healy, Sean Desmond. 1984. Boredom, Self, and Culture. Rutherford and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. ———. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2009. In Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Ihde, Don. 1986. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. New York: State University of New York Press.

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James, William. 2012. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Courier Corporation. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2009. The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie, 349–372. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. Trans. J. Irons. London: Reaktion Books. Viik, Tõnu. 2016. Understanding Meaning-Formation Processes in Everyday Life: An Approach to Cultural Phenomenology. Humana Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (31): 151–167.

Part II

The Body/Technology/Ecology

Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question of Humanism Fiachra Long

Abstract The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seemed to agree with Heidegger’s critique of humanism when he delivered a Conference address at Elmau in 1999. He rejected, however, the way Heidegger used the metaphor of a shepherd to explain the proper essence of the human and developed a counter-position and a contrary understanding of shepherding that he considered truer to contemporary times. During his speech, Sloterdijk used some examples from Plato’s Statesman to support a distinction between good breeding and civility and thus implied that humanistic education had to incorporate efforts to promote biomedical improvements in the human condition, effectively broadening the work of education centred traditionally on the “reading of good books.” Did Sloterdijk then commit himself to some kind of eugenic programme? He immediately denied this. Did his view amount to a logical progression from Heidegger’s position or was it a radical departure? To clarify this question, this paper first sketches out Heidegger’s argument as put forward in the Letter on Humanism, then notes Sloterdijk’s response to Heidegger’s analysis before finally attempting to identify some key differences between these writers on the issue. Keywords  Heidegger · Sloterdijk · Humanism · Shepherding · Taming · Fallenness · Boredom The extraordinary success of Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 book, Critique of Cynical Reason, tapped into what Andreas Huyssen described as “the pervasive malaise and discontent in contemporary culture” and sold over 40,000 copies in a few months (Sloterdijk 1987, ix). Described by some reviewers as “simplistic, faddish, pretentious, anti-theoretical,” and “regressively irrational,” this text was nevertheless welcomed by the philosophical community as a general critique of the Frankfurt School. On foot of this success, Sloterdijk presented a paper on humanism in Basel in July F. Long (*) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_5

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1997 before being invited to present before a group of German educators at Elmau Castle, the Bavarian castle of G7 summits, in 1999. His talk, since known as the Elmauer Rede, was published first in Die Zeit in 1999 but not without raising a storm of controversy for what commentators took to be his advocacy of eugenics, a claim he swiftly denied. Thomas Asshauer (1999), for instance, summed up Sloterdijk’s project as “The Zarathustra Project” in response to a number of articles that appeared in the Frankfurter Rundshau and the Süddeutsche Rundshau, notwithstanding Sloterdijk’s own retort calling these interpretations “lies and hallucinations” (Sloterdijk 1999). This controversy kept dogging Sloterdijk throughout his career but also ensured his national profile. Areňas (2003) has given an excellent chronology of this debate. The paper in focus here with the provocative title Regeln für den Menschenpark appeared as a chapter in Nicht Gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger (2001). The English language translator of this chapter, Mary Varny Rorty, described Sloterdijk’s version of humanism as Hobbesian. Did this view also apply to Heidegger’s account? Heidegger’s reluctance to invoke the concept of humanism in response to Jean Beaufret’s invitation in 1946 may well have amounted to tacit support for the Hobbesian view of nature. Had World War II with all its atrocities not finally exposed the barbarism at the heart of our supposed civilization, and therefore did we not suffer from a deep-rooted, if unacknowledged, tension in ourselves between civilization and barbarism? On the other hand, Sloterdijk’s imposition of a Hobbesian template on Heidegger’s analysis may not have been justified. It could be argued that Heidegger remained a kind of optimist. Besides any admission  that Hobbes was correct, the audience responded poorly to Sloterdijk’s use of the concept of “good breeding” in the context of education, especially when he prioritized good “breeding” over good “reading” as the key to achieving victory for civilization over bestiality. Listening to this speech, educators had to conclude that humanistic education required biomedical enhancement as an educational strategy where possible, in addition to the “reading of good books.” But did this not make the educational process complicit in promoting an eugenicist agenda? The implications of this question for the philosophy of education is not my topic here, even though I attempted to look at it elsewhere (Long 2017). Instead, I want to look more closely at Sloterdijk’s rejection of Heidegger’s rejection of humanism. One difficulty in doing this is that Sloterdijk’s polemical tone colours his texts. He does not like being bounded by purely logical rules. Another difficulty is Heidegger’s known antipathy towards modern technology, an antipathy that Sloterdijk does not share. A third difficulty is their apparent agreement to abandon humanism in the sense that the cumulative wisdom of tradition might be sufficient to launch human beings on the path of truth. Are our authors fundamental allies on the question of humanism? To achieve some insight into this question this paper first sketches out Heidegger’s argument as proposed in the Letter on Humanism, then notes Sloterdijk’s response and modifications to it, before finally attempting some conclusion about the future of humanism arising from this interchange of views.

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Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as published begins by refusing to limit action to production. Instead, he loads us straight away with the charge that we are simply still not “thinking.” The relevance of “thinking” for humanism is set out at the start. To think in Heidegger’s sense is to accomplish man’s relation to Being, to stand, as it were, in the House of Being and to dwell there. This is the essence of the human. It is what separates us from all other animal life: “it concerns the relation of Being to man.”1 But what does this mean? If it is “thinking” that allows this relation to happen, then it does not reflect thinking in the sense Plato or Aristotle bequeathed to us, thinking as techne, thinking as production, thinking as theoria, thinking as a form of science in competition with other sciences. Instead, for Heidegger, “thinking” is a practical task, a pneumatic (spiritual) not a productive act. Heidegger wonders why we need the word “humanism” at all. He remains sceptical about any project that might want to return us to metaphysical thinking, even though his exact manner of describing the metaphysical is sometimes difficult to pin down. Sometimes he objects to metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense of substance where substance attributes reality to some underlying substrate, process or pattern. Sometimes the metaphysics he challenges refers to the modern Cartesian pattern, namely  the object side of the subject-object relation. For this reason, Heidegger objects to the “modern metaphysics of subjectivity” because it prevents Language per se from exercising its function. Instead, Language constrained by this rubric is twisted to serve “our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings” (Heidegger 2011, 151). Thinking, in contrast, presents us as nameless beings who should be dedicated to listening to Being in whose environment individuals have little to say, for it is not up to them to originate any talk. For Heidegger, humanitas first raised its profile in the Roman Republic, and Sloterdijk will amplify this observation with decorative descriptions and witty observations about the contrasts between butchery on the battlefield or in the amphitheatre and the sensitive stoical advice offered to one another by the litterati. Heidegger does not elaborate on this kind of detail. For him slaughter and bestiality are repugnant and should not be celebrated even in a negative way. And yet humanism, because it has been unable to break free of the metaphysical presuppositions of classical and more recent philosophy, has understandably tried to frame its thinking around constructions of civilization, all noble in their own way but lacking an essential  truth ingredient. For Heidegger, the exception has been the poets, especially Hölderlin (1770–1843) whose work has attempted to describe that realm beyond traditional humanism’s reach (Heidegger 2011, 153). By contrast the humanisms of Marx and Christianity are to be rejected while Sartre’s existentialism is also to be rejected. These attempts do not expose the essence of man to his true destiny but effectively impede the realization of this destiny due to the obstacle posed by their forms of metaphysics, the metaphysics of production in the case of Marx, the  I use Frank A. Capuzzi’s translation in conjunction with J. Glenn Gray in Krell (ed.) 2011, p. 147.

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metaphysics of salvation in the case of Christianity, the metaphysics of subjectivity in the case of Descartes and Sartre. So one clear reason why the word “humanism” has lost its meaning today is the widespread prevalence of metaphysics in whichever form it is presumed to take. Heidegger now wonders if the term “humanism” should be retained at all, even if everyone agrees that civilization rather than barbarism describes human beings. Heidegger not only wants to sidestep traditional humanism, but to do so exposes him to the unwarranted charge of supporting inhumanism. He also wants to avoid locating the human in logos (science or logic) and this leads to the charge of irrationalism. Neither the charge of inhumanism nor irrationalism is justifiable in his case, or so he argues, but alongside these he also wants to sidestep linking the human essentially to “values,” another metaphysical term. Indeed he supports Nietzsche’s proposal to revaluate all values in the light of the death of God but is he then an atheist? He argues not. To consider god a “value,” even the “highest value” is problematic and “a degradation of God’s essence” because it returns the god concept once more to the realm of metaphysics. On the contrary to think against value is precisely what is needed to enable the truth of the clearing of Being to become operative and for God to be understood in its true light. Heidegger is non-committal about the existence of God but he is very insistent on the existence of ek-sistence, the thrown reality of a being who can think in the openness of Being. “Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought,” he writes (Heidegger 2011, 172). Heidegger is particularly sensitive to the description of the human as a rational animal, a metaphysical description that is not exactly false but, like most metaphysical descriptions, is not entirely  accurate  either. By centering on the principle of animalitas (zōon) as the base principle, we are presuming that our animality is what sets us off as real whereas Heidegger contends that it is man’s ek-sistence that is man’s basic reality principle. Ek-sistence means standing in the Clearing (Lichtung) of Being and is the most distinguishing mark of the human being. Only humans are capable of this “essence” which means that the potentiality of Dasein adumbrated in Being and Time which can be activated in the project of Dasein’s life as a being among other beings is not the touchstone for what is truly human. We are not simply potentialities for being in some fuller sense, animals who are not yet what they are meant to be but rather a kind of being different from animal life. Heidegger claims that our being is closer to the gods and that “the essence of divinity is closer to us” (Heidegger 2011, 156), closer to us than the environment-constricted forms of life enjoyed by animals. Given that the human essence does not have a specific description, its proper operation is not kept in view by actualising some range of potentialities in oneself but by holding open the space of Being, a space which allows truth to appear. Only “thinking” can keep this space open. The essence of the human is to be the shepherd of Being. Heidegger, however, uses this metaphor simply to  indicate the shift in emphasis in his current reflections from Being and Time where he was concerned to offer an analytic of Dasein. Now in Letter on Humanism “what is essential is not man but Being” (Heidegger 2011, 161). What shimmers in the background in Being

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and Time as signalled in Dasein’s ontological understanding of being has now come into focus as a manifestation of the human essence. Heidegger now spends several pages justifying his earlier text in the context of his current presentation of Being after the turn. He explains how his previous project in Being and Time had opened up the question of Being as he is now presenting it, but that now his concern no longer centres on the issue of Dasein but on the Clearing of Being. Being has always been “the transcendens pure and simple.” It is now generally only poets who understand this. He mentions a recent lecture on Hölderlin’s “Homecoming” in 1943 but he could easily have referenced his entire lecture courses given during the winter semester 1934/1935 on Hölderlin’s Germanien and Der Rhein (See Krell 2011, xxxvi, Dreyfus and Wrathall 2007, 11). The poets reveal the extent of man’s homelessness on the planet. Even if Dasein is mainly preoccupied with beings and caught up in the cares of life, it is only the ek-static character of the human that enables his own truthfulness to appear as the shepherd of Being, the one who engages in the adventure of holding open the Clearing of Being: Eksistence, in fundamental contrast to every existential and “existence,” is ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being. It is the guardianship, that is, the care for Being. (Heidegger 2011, 167)

This oft repeated claim changes the traditional meaning of humanism which incorporated the assimilation of competencies, skills and values into a moral life following contours set down by Plato and Aristotle. (Heidegger 2011, 171) To understand existence through the lens of logos is once again to set up a picture of man as the measure of all things. He complains that humanism draws down everything to its own human measure and pulls Dasein back from the “question concerning the truth of Being.” Heidegger claims that a precedent for these insights can already be found in the pre-Socratics. The Heraclitus fragment ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn suggests a definition of humanism as dwelling in nearness to the gods. This fragment shows how ēthos becomes the dwelling place in which Being can appear but over which the human has neither executive control nor any constructivist power. The human can “think” Being but not “construct” Being. It is possible  to draw some theological conclusions from this insight but readers need to be wary. Just as Heidegger is at pains to say that his account cannot be claimed to be atheistic simply because the issue of God is thought to be derived from the shepherding role of the human in the Clearing of Being, so we need to be wary of suggesting that this structure enables theism as presented in traditional Judeo-Christianity. The most authentic dwelling place of man lies “beyond” the metaphysical, in a sphere beyond all values from which point all values are revaluated, a sphere of essential (positive) nihilism where Being can appear. The question for Heidegger is why the essence of the human is to preserve, indeed to shepherd, such a value-free event as Being itself. Heidegger might have the concluding word: Yet Being—what is Being? It is It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it. ‘Being’—that is not God and not a cosmic ground. Being is farthest than all beings and is yet nearer to man than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art,

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There is no mention of Plato’s Statesman in Heidegger’s Letter. Nor is there any inkling that the battle between barbarism and civilisation presupposes a Hobbesian turn. Nor is there a clear link with Judeo-Christianity. Indeed the advent of Being in the Clearing can announce malign as well as benign forces. On the other hand, there is no support for the biological enhancement of humans, chemical or mechanical. When Heidegger suggests the idea of “taming” it is in the guise of Verfallenheit (Fallenness) and the tendency of Dasein to become preoccupied with its own affairs, with its daily encounters with other beings. However, the Fallenness of the They is a positive feature of Dasein’s being as presented in Being and Time. “The ‘They’ is an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution” (#27, BT 167; GA 2 129). He repeats this positive evaluation of Falling in #38 (BT 220; GA 2 175) although he also notes the possibility of a certain tranquilization (Beruhigung) that “aggravates” (steigert) this Falling and can lead to alienation, if one’s potentiality-for-being is ignored. Heidegger uses expressions like temptation (Versuchung), as well as tranquilization and a “downward plunge” (Absturz), and this language is mingled with other religious phrases like “drunk with sin” (in der Sunde ersoffen) to add some negative connotations to Fallenness. Fundamentally, however, this feature is positive. Sartre, however, advocates a rupture from all entanglements with being en-soi. This is not Heidegger’s view. Even in the Letter on Humanism, Verfallenheit although linked to ensnarement and a turning aside from “an ecstatic relation of the essence of man to the truth of Being” (Heidegger 2011, 160) bears none of the ultra negative meaning attributed to Sartre’s en-soi or “taming” in Sloterdijk’s later account. Given a Sloterdijk twist, “taming” does not announce the need for courage in order to face up to the “homelessness” of humans in view of their ek-static vocation to “think” but becomes part of the many options people use to refuse the technologies available to improve themselves while making strenuous efforts to stick with conventional breeding behaviours in the interest of the established elite. Even the most basic husbandry could not support such a strategy. This suggestion on its own angered the audience at Elmau.

Sloterdijk’s Argument Sloterdijk holds that humans are fundamentally beasts and require taming in order to be civilised. Humanism is invoked as a response to this dark side of human beings. In “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” literacy, as we have seen, is identified as the element identified by ancient Greek and Roman educators precisely for this purpose, to convert the beast to civilized ways (Sloterdijk 2009, 12). An exchange of letters between literate leaders became a privileged means of establishing friendship (and power management) among the

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ancients. What civilised people wanted in those days above all, in the opinion of Sloterdijk, was to send one another “inspiring messages” of the kind that engendered a type of “club fantasy” (Sloterdijk 2009, 13) or even “sorcery” by which humans could bewitch themselves into believing that the civilised veneer described their underlying reality. General humanism (Sloterdijk provocatively uses the term “national humanism” echoing the ill-reputed phrase “national socialism”) operated as a bewitching process, effective in the age of literacy, but watered down now in the age of mass media, radio and television. After 1945, Sloterdijk suggests, attempts were made at the revival of different kinds of humanism based on value or production. Humanism took a Christian or Marxist form or even sought to establish once more the heady Enlightenment notion of development, but to no avail. The shock of war and the ineffectiveness of “values” in the light of that war pointed rather to an underlying “biological indeterminacy” and “moral ambivalence” in the human being (Sloterdijk 2009, 16). We need to remind ourselves of Sloterdijk’s twin claim here: first, that humanism is a form of (dishonest) “taming” that tips the balance in favour of civility and away from bestialization (Sloterdijk 2009, 16) to which he wants to oppose a kind of transhumanism; second, that he uses Heidegger’s letter in support of the Hobbesian view of man and his own critique of “metaphysical” forms of humanism. Sloterdijk may be correct in assuming that in 1946 Heidegger did not know if he had friends and felt quite isolated and devastated not only by the war but by being forbidden to teach. He had also by this time lost belief in the centrality of Dasein as a privileged location, adequate to the exploration of Being. His attempts at both the justification of his arguments in Being and Time and their clarification in the light of objections raised against them could not deflect Sloterdijk from the latter’s main claim, notably that “the pattern of the literary society became the norm of political society.” Surely, he surmises, the correspondence instigated by Jean Beaufret in his letter to Heidegger could also serve as an example of this traditional form of supportive contact between intellectual leaders in society? Pity if this particular exchange of letters had lost its force in keeping with all literary enterprises. Sloterdijk paraphrases Heidegger’s objection to the term humanism: Why should humanism and its general philosophical self-presentation be seen as the solution for humanity, when the catastrophe of the present clearly shows that it is man himself, along with his systems of metaphysical self-improvement and self-clarification, that is the problem? (Sloterdijk 2009, 17)

While both of our writers disagree with the Biblical notion that “man is born in the image and likeness of God,” Sloterdijk basically disagrees with Heidegger on the issue of human  self-improvement. Self-improvement is possible, Sloterdijk will argue, but there is now no possibility of achieving a general consensus based on the exchange of written words because present societies are “postepistolary” and for that reason “posthumanistic.” In such an environment, friendships cannot be based on a common consensus on what it means to be human. To Sloterdijk, Heidegger’s reflections had opened up a way of thinking of the human which bypassed the traditional accounts of Christianity, Marxism and even Sartrian existentialism. Sloterdijk

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is right to suggest that Heidegger’s work deliberately directed itself against Aristotle’s conception of man as a “rational animal.” He also qualifies Heidegger’s position as “hermetic” (Sloterdijk 2009, 18) without further elaboration, and notes how Heidegger seems to situate the human in a special category of being, neither animal, nor divine, but closer to the divine than to the animal. For this reason, humans now have the special position of shepherd or guardian of Being, but Heidegger’s shepherd of Being imposes “radical constraints” on human behaviour because it dampens biological change, keeping it quiescent and focused mainly on a receptive listening to the voice of Being (Sloterdijk 2009, 18). Contrasted with the current appetite for strong men, Heidegger preaches the ascetic ideal of restraint, the “disarmament of subjectivity,” the mitigation of the political and technological ambitions of biological man in favour of a more quiescent attitude appropriate to the shepherd of Being. Sloterdijk’s mocking tone about this “shepherding” function, however, indicates a profound objection to Heidegger’s “hermetism.” Indeed this now leads to the crucial question. Because Sloterdijk links education to a taming ambition, an ambition which according to him in times past found itself exercised in the exchange of letters between friends and therefore subject to the many constraints and conventions of literacy expression, how can the situation of the human in the “house of Being,” in the Clearing (Lichtung) of Being, become anything other than another taming strategy in this negative sense? The simple answer is that it cannot. Faced with this answer Sloterdijk develops his own solution with occasional reference to the categories of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sloterdijk agrees with Heidegger’s rejection of Aristotle’s rational animal hypothesis and prefers the designation “shattered animality.” He accepts the Heideggerian trope of environment and world in order to indicate that humans have fallen out of an “environment” and into a “world” and he agrees that we find ourselves in-the-world, oriented towards Being or experiencing the Clearing (Lichtung) of Being, as Heidegger describes it. These Heideggerian terms are combined in Sloterdijk’s analysis to deliver a controversial connection between domesticity and theory-building, as if domestic environments were a denial of the practice of human beings to stand in the broad light of day. Does a problem not seem to be announced when literacy or the taming of thinking due to the proper use of words should be linked to the “hermetic” profile of the human who stands in the Clearing of Being but refuses to act for change? (Sloterdijk 2009, 22). Sloterdijk connects Heidegger immediately to Nietzsche’s view about a possible collaboration between ethics and genetics in breeding politics, but in so doing he takes a step away from Heidegger to propose a tongue-in-cheek image of society as a “human zoo,” a zoo in which humans deliberately place themselves: In city parks, national parks, provincial or state parks, eco-parks—everywhere people must create for themselves rules according to which their comportment is to be governed. (Sloterdijk 2009, 25)

Sloterdijk’s use of Plato’s Statesman or Politicus in this context is puzzling. Certainly Plato’s text explains the technique of division-making as a theoretical act that establishes expertise and begs the question about the proper expertise required for

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political leadership. Even though human qualities are required for leadership, these are relatively understated. The assumption is that cognitive expertise will lay the foundation for good political leadership. The Stranger who is the principle interlocutor with the young Socrates in this dialogue elaborates on the various domains of expertise that might exist in the community. By means of the philosophical method of “division,” the hope is to distil these forms of expertise until we are left with what is foundational to all expertise per se and thus the human cognitive qualities foundational to a just society. A contrast is made, separating a previous era when the gods supposedly gifted human leaders with these leadership qualities in contrast with our current time when humans need to make do with what they can learn themselves. Now that the gods have fled, to use a poetic phrase, no City-State at the time of Plato currently boasts such a leader, but rather States are run by “imitators,” sophists who mimic the governance all states ideally require. Written laws permit the management of a state even if no currently living person has total belief in these laws. Plato however knows nothing of the “death of god.” If “courage” becomes a telling quality in state leadership against mediocrity, it is because it manifests  the “divine, when it comes to be in souls, that opinion about what is fine, just and good” (Statesman 309c).2 The human cannot rely on itself alone “because it is in the nature of courage that when it is reproduced over many generations without being mixed with a moderate nature, it comes to a peak of power at first, but in the end it bursts out completely in fits of madness” (Statesman 310d). The Stranger’s solution for the art of statesmanship is to weave together the woof and weft of courage and moderation in a single society marked by friendship and agreement (Statesman 311c). But this is the humanist manifesto that has been proven to fail. Plato’s advice will no longer work. It is not the stability offered by the gods acting in the background that impresses Sloterdijk, for he does not mention these elements, nor indeed the exchange of letters by the well-educated. Instead, it is the image of herding and taming that captures his attention. Normal husbandry requires the promotion of proper breeding and the avoidance of chimeras and beasts. “Taming” is not tranquilization but rather the active function of biological selection. Hence in Sloterdijk’s case, biomedical enhancement dandles like a real prospect in front of our eyes without moral comment but with the slightest hint of approval. His support for a Nietzschean-inspired idea of self-breeding as a proposed ideal is the remedy endorsed for his underlying Hobbesian view of man. Otherwise we are left with a life that is “nasty, brutish and short” without reprieve.  These are not palatable thoughts for a group of German educators.

 I use Rowe’s translation in (Cooper 1997).

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Conclusion Here I want to make two concluding remarks. In summary then. For Heidegger, the ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn (Heidegger 2011, 174) normally translated to read “A man’s character is his daimōn” is explained as the space (ēthos) in which the god (daimōn) can appear. This is a region of the Clearing of Being—Heidegger’s central theme according to Krell (Krell 2008). The human is to be situated outside animal nature, precisely because humans stand closer to the gods than to animals. Moreover, Aristotle’s description of man as the zōon logon echon [the animal who has reason] is inadequate as a description of the human (Heidegger 2011, 154). Humanism has faltered because humans have never been rational enough. Not only is Heidegger explicit about his rejection of a metaphysics of nature to describe mankind but he is not in any way hysterical when he contends that our way of being is closer to the divine than to animals. The first point of difference between Heidegger and Sloterdijk therefore is the relevance of the gods in both accounts. For Heidegger the gods are central; for Sloterdijk they are the product of “hysterical” thinking. Although Sloterdijk accused Heidegger of crypto-Catholicism on several occasions in his article, Heidegger’s connection with religion is perhaps better described by Hans Jonas who suspected a link in Heidegger’s thought with gnostic sources. Jonas noted three elements in this. First and in general, the gnostic mind believes that there is some secret link between man and god (the gods or God), even if this god does not appear as the revealed God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Sloterdijk picks up on the secrecy of this link by issuing a disparaging remark about Heidegger’s unspoken ambition to serve as chief shepherd of Being. Second in contrast with this secret vocation (applicable to all humans within this neohumanism), man finds himself ambiguously bound to nature and to bodily being with all its laws and patterns obliging humans to conform to these same patterns and laws. This distracts the human being from his true destiny as a “spirit” (pneuma) called to achieve a higher spiritual state of being. In both our authors, there is a sense in which the body is not that important, in Heidegger’s case because our life is more properly “pneumatic,” in Sloterdijk’s case because our biological conditions can be and should be improved. Linked to this issue is the third element, namely, that no trustworthy pattern of life can follow from observing the laws of nature or from the logos of humans because these laws work constantly to bind and thwart our spiritual instinct. Therefore nature is no guide to leading a human life as such and so the animal rationalis category is unworthy of the human. As children of light, Heidegger can no longer feel at home in the world and so a sense of homelessness anticipates the eventual release of death into a happier state of being. In the meantime, true believers live by means of a gnostic antinomianism (lawlessness) that gives only notional assent to nature’s laws but refuses to be bound by the current state of human knowledge/science because they flatter to deceive and do not present the human in its proper light (Jonas 2015, 331). Jonas sums up these thoughts:

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In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger argues against the classical definition of Man as “the rational animal,” that this definition places man within animality, specified only by a differentia which falls within the genus “animal” as a particular quality. This, Heidegger contends, is placing man too low…What is important for us is the rejection of any definable “nature” of man which would subject his sovereign existence to a predetermined essence and thus make him part of an objective order of essences in the totality of nature. In this conception of a trans-essential, freely “self-projecting” existence I see something comparable to the gnostic concept of the trans-psychical negativity of the pneuma. (Jonas 1992, 333–34)

For Heidegger, in the view of Jonas, modern man has been thrown into an “indifferent” world which does not care whether humans achieve their proper destiny, a type of absolute vacuum or, as Jonas describes it, “a bottomless pit” (Jonas 2015, 338) whereas for Sloterdijk, the life of man is essentially Hobbesian. Heidegger’s solution is the Mandaean move into a Clearing where the pleroma of Being can at last demonstrate its relevance for man’s being quite apart from the ensnarement of Dasein’s being in everyday affairs. Sloterdijk’s solution is biological enhancement guided by nature but not bound to its evolutionary limitations. This leads us to the issue of taming and domestication and may explain why Sloterdijk writes disparagingly about Heidegger’s shepherd while also supporting the idea of good breeding. Heidegger’s almost reverent tone for the shepherd’s work contrasts with the mocking tone of Sloterdijk who rejects the passive behaviour of Heidegger’s shepherd (Sloterdijk 2009, 18). Indeed he mocks Heidegger’s (unspoken) claim to be a prophet of Being, ministering to a “church of scattered singletons” (Sloterdijk 2009, 19) because for Sloterdijk humanism must take its shape apart from such a liturgy of passive control. Sloterdijk considers that Heidegger’s proposed exit from environment to world will develop “psychotic animals” and so they scramble back to patterns of taming to reassure themselves and keep themselves sane. They become self-taming animals. Domestication is what humans desire above all, domestication that expresses itself in theme parks, zoos, bubbles, globes, comfort zones, artificial environments that make up for what we have lost as “shattered” animals. We generate for ourselves protected spaces and forms of language and theory that immunize us from a reality over which we despair of having any control, a reality which induces in us general passivity with respect to the biological conditions of our being. These words, categories, theories hem in the human spirit and make it smaller. Schooling also follows  the same project  of taming (Sloterdijk 2009, 23), for schooling has lost any ambition to promote the human as such. Reviewing the controversy raised by his Human Park speech (die Elmauer Rede) some time later, Hans Jürgen Heinrichs asked Sloterdijk whether his speech actually supported “people breeding” and whether indeed humans should have the right to improve their natural condition. Sloterdijk explained in response that there are two models of shepherding. On the one hand there is a pastoral and idyllic image of the shepherd as a passive observer, a guardian of the flock as presented. On the other hand there is a breeder of animals, an improver of resources, a promoter of new and improved realities:

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His response to Heinricks, however, exposed the kernel of the difference between our two writers. While both agree that there needs to be an antinomial struggle against nature and all its limiting effects (a biological struggle), only Sloterdijk interprets this struggle as a need to make some positive interventions in the biological conditions of the human being. While Heidegger speaks of moderation and mindfulness (Besinnung), a kind of thinking that cannot bypass our own proper human energies, moderns, to use Sloterdijk’s words, “are Pelagians or semi-­ monotheistic humanists, most often they are vague atheists equipped with a vague trousseau of quasi-transcendent human rights” (Sloterdijk 2007, 106). Sloterdijk, including himself among that number no doubt, promotes the same neo-gnostic indifference towards the conditions of nature as Heidegger does. Perhaps I am unfair to imply that Sloterdijk must take up a position for when human tinkering goes wrong, if nature as we know it becomes untenable, if oceans rise up to swamp populations, if the sun’s radiation bleaches crops and bodies, if climatic conditions finally make it impossible to live in the world. In those circumstances, self-­ improvement, which is part of the cause of climate change, will be pretty pointless. The reason I side more with Heidegger in this debate comes from his reflections on the way boredom arises in the ordinary everyday lives of human beings. There seems to be a fundamental ontological challenge which pushes us out of our everyday cares while at the same time revealing the extent to which we are bound to them (Heidegger 1995). This point is perhaps not too obvious. We need to accept the limitations of our “nature” in the natural world. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger describes his experience of sitting in a quiet rural railway station, waiting on the next train with four hours to wait. The wait is intolerable and the delay begins to weigh heavily on him. He looks at train timetables and tries to imagine himself going to this destination or another. He walks around. He looks at the clock and notes that the time has gone slowly. He goes out and counts the trees planted outside in a line. He takes out a book to read but puts it away after a short time, unable to concentrate. He tries to scribble some notes but sets this aside too. He needs to know why he is so distracted and ultimately bored. He surmises that the experience of waiting has knocked him out of connection with things and that he now for a time at least had been also knocked out his normal temporal rhythm. He notes how things have withdrawn from him in this state and have thrown him back on himself. Try as he might—to open a book, to take out a notepad and pens, even to walk up and down, these actions seem fruitless to shift a more dominant mood of boredom. Thinking about this experience, Heidegger focuses on his connection with things in normal circumstances. These things themselves have lost the power to hold him connected and withdraw (hingehalten). Then as they release him, he is thrown back on himself, being left empty in the process (leergelassen). The question may be how this experience relates to time because when one is bored time weighs heavily. One

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is left restless, so perhaps it is some relation to time itself that is behind the experience of boredom. Perhaps some action or actions will provide the antidote to this mood. But actions, like things, don’t help. They are chosen in the hope that they will while away the time and dispel the feeling of boredom being experienced but whiling away the time manifests boredom (Gelangweiltwerden). Boredom has revealed a crack in our everyday preoccupations with those things that bind us to them because now we have been let go and have been released into an experience of time that is truly boring. Heidegger describes an even deeper experience of boredom following a house party which he enjoyed, a form of boredom which seemed to occur in hindsight as he found himself alongside the party, a kind of being bored alongside (sichweilen bei), an unspecified boredom feeling (GA 29/30, 173). It is a boredom that occurs while one is alongside the flow of life where things do not withdraw, where one is not left empty, where time does not weigh heavily on one’s shoulders but where nonetheless a sense of dissatisfaction with oneself arises afterwards. One becomes bored with oneself. A sense of ontological failure begins to mount within us, as if we too like animals have been ensnared by the attractions of the everyday and have reneged on our true potential as humans. Animals which are “poor in world” or weltarm do not experience this pull because they are entirely given over to the environments that sustain them. Not so human beings. We note how Fallenness (Verfallenheit) has ensnared us in the preferred familiar environment of a tamed existence. Boredom or a deep dissatisfaction with ourselves motivates us as humans to change our lives, as Rilke once famously said, for it is on this condition alone that our human life stands or falls. On this point at least both Sloterdijk and Heidegger agree. The difference, however, is that while Heidegger is willing to accept reality as he finds it, for it will soon be left behind, Sloterdijk will not rest until humans have reinvented themselves as much as they can. It might be possible to label Sloterdijk’s approach hyper-humanist provided one acknowledges the dismissal of human nature underlying it. The Letter on Humanism revisits these reflections on boredom from the perspective of the turn because now what is authentic to the human spirit is the ability to “think,” a process that is awakened in us when we fail to recognise or enact our function as shepherds of something, call it nature or Being.

References Arenas, L. 2003. El fin del hombre como fin? Cronica de la polemica Sloterdijk-Habermas. Pasajes 12: 70–81. Asshauer, Thomas. 1999. The Zarathustra Project. Die Zeit, September 2. Cooper, John M., ed. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Mark A.  Wrathall, eds. 2007. A Companion to Heidegger. Vol. 35, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Conceptxs of Metaphysics. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Edited by John Sallis. In Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2011. Letter on Humanism. In Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London/New York: Routledge. Jonas, Hans. 1992. The Gnostic Religion. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Beacon Press. Krell, David Farrell, ed. 2008. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London/Toronto/Sydney/New Delhi/Auckland: HarperCollins. ———, ed. 2011. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London/New York: Routledge. Long, F. 2017. Transhuman Education? Sloterdijk’s Reading of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. Journal of Philosophy of Education 51 (1): 177–192. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eltred. Vol. 40, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1999. Frankfurter Rundshau. 31 July. ———. 2007. Neither Sun nor Death. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2009. Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 12–28.

The Growing Solitude of the Body Marie Antonios Sassine

Abstract  The paper suggests that while the body is the impassable frontier between us and the Other, it is at the same time a privileged means for recognizing our own and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility. The body, however, is growing more solitary in the post human times that we are entering. Interactions with others rely less and less on corporeal presence. Abstract mediated contact is becoming the norm and is frequently favoured as a more convenient and liberating form of sociability. But are there fundamental differences between these modalities of presence—the virtual one and the full physical presence—that deserve attention? This paper argues, drawing on phenomenological analyses by Husserl and Patočka and on insights from Nietzsche, that a growing ‘solitude of the body’ is reverberating into a gradual absence of the Other and that this phenomenon is translating into narrower and more subjectively defined notions of community and common world. The suggestion here is that Patočka’s call for a phenomenology of corporeity is ever more pressing and relevant. Keywords  Jan Patočka · Husserl · Nietzsche · Solitude—body · Spatiality— modalities of presence—phenomenology of corporeity Does the body have its own language, one that relies on an alphabet of the senses, situating us, orienting our attention, opening up horizons of sense and meaning that are not available to disembodied communication? Does the human body, in the fullness of its experience of space and time here and now, allow the Other to emerge in ways that nourish the imagination required for empathy, for compassion, for transcending the limits of individuality? The claim here is that the body speaks a mysterious and meaningful language that is not captured by discourse. Its subtle expressions and gestures are part of the fabric of proximity and presence. This sphere of communication is inevitably excluded more and more in the forms of the technologically driven sociability that populate our world. As these forms become dominant, we are, I think, at risk of losing parts of ourselves and closing off M. A. Sassine (*) Dominican University College, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_6

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important possibilities in our relations to others. The reason for that, I suggest, is that we overlook the body, that assumed part of who we are, as a fine and distinctive instrument of knowledge: the body is constantly and instantaneously recording, sending, and reacting to subtle messages about our situation and our world. The limits, therefore, that technologically mediated interactions impose on the body’s experience of the world may never be noticed, but our relation to ourselves and to others may be irrevocably weakened. The knowledge the body provides is part of a unified set of physical and mental impressions that are not available through mediated mechanisms. The body’s very force is in what it recounts about a present moment, now, in its vitality and compelling immediacy as opening up potential horizons of ‘my’ world. This world of open-­ ended presence is marked by possibilities of surprise, and mystery. The body itself is the perceptual window onto this open-endedness. It is the point of orientation relative to what is manifest, to what appears or lies concealed. The body deciphers what is revealed, but its grasp and expression go beyond what discourse divulges. This body, whether it be broken, compromised, or thriving, is the site of my experience of the world, of otherness. It is now falling silent, growing more solitary.

Spatial Presence The body is that enigmatic boundary between us and the Other. But it is also an irreplaceable portal to recognizing our own and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility, whether it is detected in a fleeting anxiety of the eyes or in the touch of a comforting hand. Our experience of suffering in the body is immediate and visceral. It can be a sure basis for empathy, as it can connect us to the experience of all other human beings and to the suffering of animals. Pain, sorrow, hunger, thirst, and fear, as well as comfort, ease, or joy are all felt in the body. The clarity and decisiveness of sensible experience can be a path to joining us empathetically to all sentient beings. Bodies are capable of recounting what is being experienced in ways that supplement, replace or shed light on discourse. Oftentimes, even when no words are exchanged, there can still be eloquent communication in what the body reveals. At the end of The Winter’s Tale, for example, when the story of the wondrous events that have come to pass produces a stunned silence, the Bard tells us “They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gestures” (Shakespeare, 1978, The Winter’s Tale, Act 5, 2, 12–15). But no such speech can be heard, or such gestures observed in the absence of the body. Even the most sophisticated virtual communication is not attuned to the body’s fleeting and varied language. And that is not simply a technological challenge; it is the nature of disembodied sociability. Its achievement is precisely to escape the potentially messy immediacy of an unplanned and concrete emergence of an embodied Other. It creates a communicative space that allows us to choose how and when others will engage with us—through which medium or platform, framed in what specific way, and at a time that suits us.

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To speak about the body, though, is not to hearken to old dichotomies of body and soul. It is simply to recall that human beings live a specific and subjective experience of corporeity. Corporeity is the profound sense of situatedness in the precarious and ephemeral here and now. It marks the movement of life. And the body’s experience in grief and joy, in illness and pain, in hampered movement or in the freedom of the dance provides differing and shifting perspectives of how I and my world, I and the Other, shape and affect one another. Corporeity is thus the site and the opening to a variety of horizons, which in their overlapping unity provide a brighter, more profound picture than any abstracted and mediated virtual experience, no matter how sophisticated. As Nietzsche puts it in The Will to Power section dealing with Principles of a New Evaluation: “Essential: to start from the body and employ it as guide. It is the much richer phenomenon, which allows of clearer observation. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the spirit” (1968, 289, 532). It is precisely the richness of bodily phenomenon with its promise of unique perception that is jeopardized when it is replaced by abstract communication. The modes of presence that are becoming common currency as a basis for sociability do not bring into play the many observational capacities of the body. They are forms of presence that rely on an instrumentalized mediation of the senses: the components of the senses that can be removed from the immediacy of time and space. What remains is the body as an object, reduced from the more mysterious phenomenon of subjective experience to one that can be virtually transmitted. Jan Patočka (1998, 5) describes the objectified body as being “The body we experience through the senses, which is distinct from us, not the body which differs from all others in my lived experience by being mine, by being the null point of my orientation, by my being able to draw away from (and approach again) all bodies-in-space except my own body.” This body that is not mine, from which certain operations of the senses can be abstracted and captured as mathematically available functions, is the one that dominates our communication with one another today. It is a body to which the Other is revealed equally as another object, removed from the limits of time and space. There is, of course, great freedom in this liberation from limits, from the brokenness that can constrain our access to the world and to the Other. The experience of the Other, though, becomes limited to what these mathematical functions allow and to what they exclude. As a shared space and time becomes less and less necessary to the dominant forms of communication and sociability, the risk is that the richness that bodily presence endows to our being together will gradually fade from our experience.

Movement Toward the Other The body as object is not, however, a contemporary scientific invention. It has its roots in Western philosophical history. This ‘third person’ body, as Patočka (1998, 9) calls it, is the one we encounter in philosophy right from its Greek origins.

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Indeed, beginning with Plato, the very senses of this body are placed in a hierarchy according to their freedom from immediacy, to their affinity with abstract concepts. Sight and hearing are deemed to be of the highest order as their reach extends beyond what is near. Most importantly, sight and hearing can clearly distinguish and seize quantity; they are closer to the mathematical, to the harmonies of music, to the Logos of discourse, to the clarity of geometry and number. The mathematical intervals in a scale can be heard but also repeated ad infinitum; geometric proofs can be seen over and over. Unlike taste, smell or touch, sight and hearing are not tied to the momentary and passing. For precisely that reason, they point to a realm of clarity and permanence, to what is timeless and universal, in short, to number. The very capacity that sight and hearing have to capture what is distant and quantitative makes them better candidates for technological operations than the other senses. Touch, taste, and smell are closer to the flow of time and to space, which with every movement provides new and varied perspectives. Our technologically enabled disembodied communication today is part of our philosophical heritage and is based on the potential mathematization of hearing and seeing. Husserl argued in The Crisis that the growing ‘technisation’ in the sciences was based on a mathematization of nature itself and operated on the basis of distance from real things. It had lost its sources in genuine presence and attention to experience in the life-world. Our modes of communication simulate presence and proximity, but they lose the spatiality of what is near and far, what calls for movement or withdrawal. Nietzsche sees movement in the body as revelatory of inner life. He compares the body to a regent who does not need to know every activity in order to rule. The body is the ruler of a country rich with differing activities but bound together in a unity: “The most important thing, however, is: that we understand the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, thinking— and that, wherever we see or divine movement in a body, we learn to conclude that there is a subjective, invisible life appertaining to it. Movement is symbolism for the eye; it indicates that something has been felt, willed, thought” (Nietzsche, 1968, 271, 492). The body speaks through movement. Movement is orientation in spatiality, and spatiality is central to us, to the bodies that are ours, to our relation to the world and to others. To be conscious of our own human embodiment, to be present to it in the Other, is perhaps a way also to becoming more humane. For we cannot simply escape the limits of the body and all it might suffer, we cannot shed it or render it abstract. Empathy is nourished by the simple recognition of subjective experience as embodied. “Our body,” Patočka says, “is a life which is spatial in itself and of itself, producing its location in space and making itself spatial. Personal being is not a being like a thing but rather a self-relation which, to actualize this relation, must go round and through another being” (1998, 31). For us as spatial beings, proximity, as presence in the temporal and spatial modes, is an experience that allows otherness to reveal itself in fresh and unexpected ways, opening up to a past and future, to a far and near. Proximity brings in play the mystery of the Other as presence, multi-layered, opaque, and transparent. This recognition of the Other calls upon receptivity and movement from us. It implies a shared space and time, a common world of

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embodiment. How does the abstraction and absence of proximity alter our relationship to the Other? Patočka (1998, 36) reminds us, “Nietzsche says that the Thou is older than the I. The I aiming outward in the sense of a centrifugal energy, preoccupied with things while overlooking itself—that is only an I with some reserve, since the fullness of the I, the personal I is always the correlate of Thou.” The personal I that is overlooked is the I of the body that is mine, the one I inhabit. The Thou is older and more apparent in this experience because the body is assumed. But the Thou is a way to the I, to our own corporeal life, to bringing it to light, to vitalizing it, to imbuing it with sense. The embodied I, however, has generally been overlooked in favour of the body as object, the body that philosophy has examined. This is the body that science has studied and abstracted into the various technological extensions of the senses that now structure a large part of our experience and personal relations. For the body as object, there is no Thou, there is no spatiality. It is a free impersonal body. Science has allowed the unanchored ‘soul’ abstracted from this body to find easy company in books, in music, in its unimpeded wandering when and wherever it wants. This is no mean achievement and certainly it can add depth and breadth to an individual life. But it is perhaps too easy to forget that the body that is mine remains confined to what it can touch, smell, taste, hear or see, as part of a unitary experience of what is near and what is far. That body can measure its solitude. It has to move to arrive at another whose embodied experience remains similar but entirely different though real and felt. This movement is meaningful; it is permeated with soul. Indeed, as Husserl (2002, 252) says, “The Body is, as Body, filled with soul through and through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing etc. Likewise so is every human performance, every human production.” Performances and productions, the arts in general, have much to teach us about the captivating mystery of the body, its intelligence, its precise language. This is not a language that can be captured and formalized. It can only be learned through practice and refinement of observation. It requires movement towards the other and receptivity to the other. The Otherness that we seize in gestures and expressions cannot be abstracted because it belongs to a specific moment and space. It is woven into an experience of the Other as body filled with soul. Stravinsky, writing in the early forties, bemoans the passivity and the indifference that the wide availability of music was encouraging in listeners, who no longer had to exert themselves, to move from their own space to hear good music: “The time is no more when Johann Sebastian Bach gladly traveled a long way on foot to hear Buxtehude. Today radio brings music into the home at all hours of the day and night. It relieves the listener of all effort except that of turning a dial. Now the musical sense cannot be acquired or developed without exercise. In music, as in everything else, inactivity leads to the paralysis, to the atrophying of faculties” (1994, 135). We do not often think of the senses as requiring cultivation, nurture, and practice, in short—an education. But the poets understand the dullness that can overcome a body and fundamentally alter its experience of the world and others. In the words of C.H. Sisson (1996, 8):

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My errors have been written in my senses The body is a record of the mind My touch is crusted with my past defences Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind. Perhaps it is time to consider the consequences of living in a world that rarely calls on the full exercise of the senses working together in a body that it fully present. The individual body in question may well be one in which one or more of the senses are not functional, or only partially. That is irrelevant to presence. That body will nonetheless experience the world through the body that in ‘mine’, and that means a unified and specific form of corporeal presence, one that determines the quality of my movement toward the Other. Even if the movement toward the Other is only in the flicker of an eyelid, it would still signify an active presence, a movement that is seeking a reciprocally attentive response in a shared place and time. Many will be familiar with the French journalist Jean-Dominique’s Bauby’s memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, translated into English as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. After a massive stroke, which left him with ‘locked-in-syndrome’, his only remaining movement and means of communication was his left eyelid. The book is the product of what he was able to communicate to a ‘transcriber’ about his experience of being imprisoned in his body and the poignant reflections and memories it inspired. One of the truly remarkable elements of that extraordinary story is what it recounts about presence and attention, on the part of Bauby, communicating elegantly and beautifully through the movement of one eyelid, and on the part of his interlocutor, the ‘translator’, who produced the singular manuscript. To speak about the risks of the senses becoming blunted and etiolated is, therefore, not to exalt a form of sensuality, but to emphasize the subtle dimension that the senses make available through presence and attention. To live in a body in which only one eyelid is subject to conscious control is to live a specific corporeal existence, but it remains an experience of the world that can be communicated to an empathetic person who is attentive to the language of the body. As Husserl (2002, 247) puts it: “I hear the other speaking, see his facial expressions, attribute to him such and such a conscious lived experiences and acts, and let myself be determined by them in this or that way. The facial expressions are seen facial expressions, and they are immediately bearers of sense indicating the other’s consciousness, e.g., his will, which in empathy, is characterized as the actual will of this person and as a will which addresses me in communication.” The performing arts, in particular, bring into relief the subtle corporeal dimensions of this empathetic communication. Practice in the sustained use and discipline of the senses seems to enlarge capacities of perception, of empathetic understanding. We have always known intuitively that an educated ear, a musician’s ear, hears more, that a visual artist’s eye sees more, that a wine connoisseur’s palate tastes more. There is knowledge associated with the senses, specific to the instrument developed Each sense reveals something different about the world, and in a very different way from pure intellectual grasp. The senses as instruments of knowledge are what is risk in a post-human age. “And what magnificent instruments of

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observation we possess in our senses!”, cries Nietzsche (2003, 3, 46). Their knowledge reveals the Other beyond language through empathetic understanding of corporeity. The body is not a coarse and blunt mechanism superseded or simply animate by the soul or mind. For Stravinsky again, the distinguishing mark of the “thoroughbred artist” is that every subtle movement is part of the performance, part of the refined and insightful interpretation. The attentive listener, as well, is not a passive spectator but can also see the music in the bearing and movements of a performer: “An experienced eye follows and judges, sometimes unconsciously, the performer’s least gesture.” These gestures are full of sense and meaning. “The dancer is an orator who speaks a mute language. The instrumentalist is an orator who speaks an unarticulated language” (Stravinsky, 1994, 128). The movements of the body, the expressions, the gestures are one with the soul and reveal the psychic life in the way that language does, perhaps slightly more so as they are often unconscious. The body is the site of contact and sense, of sensibility. It is inexhaustible in its referral to further horizons. If the body falls mute, is something of the Other also lost? Is a language forgotten, fallen into disuse? “Concerning the experience of others,” Husserl tells us, “every person, in virtue of his Body, stands within a spatial nexus, among things and to each body for itself there pertains the person’s entire psychic life, grasped in empathy in a determinate way, so that therefore if the Body moves and occupies ever new places, the soul too, as it were, co-moves” (2002, 176).

Phenomenology of Corporeity Patočka, pursuing Husserl’s enquiries on the body, thinks that a phenomenology of corporeity is what is required to adequately reflect the body as subject. Perhaps more than ever in these disembodied times, the difference between real presence and abstract contact is worth considering. We all know it is easier to send a few words through the ether than to sit quietly and helplessly with a suffering human being, to simply live out situations where words fail. In “I can be somewhere only through a body, otherwise it is not I but only thought of an I,” says Patočka (1998, 12). The thought of an I seems to be getting steadily more confused with the fullness of bodily presence. Prescient Nietzsche, comparing Modernity to digestion and nourishment, describes the growing and relentless onslaught on the senses such that “impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely relate to stimuli from outside.” For Nietzsche, the consequence is: “Artificial change in one’s nature into a “mirror”; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested” (1968, 47, 71). To be interested only as surface means to remain unchanged, unmoved in any profound way. It also means that the senses do not get much practice or exercise in the subtle reading of another’s physical presence. The sustained and receptive attention required for the empathetic consciousness to flourish is rarely called upon. In any

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case, the choice for physical presence, for traditional sociability, may no longer be available as the spaces and occasions that require concrete bodily presence grow scarcer. In these post-modern times and post-human times, we can be everywhere and, therefore, frequently nowhere. We can be with everyone, therefore so often with no one. As experiences involving the senses diminish, and as the effort required to exercise and refine their functions becomes unnecessary, there is an impoverishment of the intelligence of the senses. This impoverishment means the body is more isolated. And as the Other is rarely encountered through the proximity of shared experience, even when such meetings happen, the solitary body may be less able to perceive and to understand the language of the body or to speak it. Patočka’s call for a phenomenology of corporeity seems a promising avenue for exploring the consequences of the vanishing elements of mystery and surprise in inter-subjective relations. While Patočka recognized that Husserl opened up the way the way to a phenomenology of corporeity, he did not think he went far enough because “Husserl did not reach the radical question—what is a human? The way from the transcendental subject to humans leads through corporeity” (1998, 70). Ultimately, a phenomenology of corporeity would need to address that specific question. What is a human, what is a human body? It would need to discern and to explore the experience and the meaning of embodiment. Integral to this phenomenology would be the emergence of the Other and of empathy relative to modes of presence and to the openness or closure of horizons. A phenomenology of corporeity would need to pursue what Nietzsche thought philosophers were beginning to do when he proclaims: The evidence of the body—Granted that the “soul” is an attractive and mysterious idea which philosophers have rightly abandoned only with reluctance—perhaps that which they have since learned to put in its place is even more attractive, even more mysterious. The human body, in which the most distant and most recent past of all organic development again becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond which a tremendous inaudible stream seems to flow: the body is a more astonishing idea than the old “soul.” (1968, 347–348, 659)

Husserl and phenomenology have certainly opened up the path to enquiring about the mystery of the body. Scientific progress, though, despite its very focus on the physical, has managed to abstract and reduce the experience of the body. The enigmatic and captivating human body as a way to ourselves and to the Other is being cast aside and replaced with the body as object, as third party removed from the limits of space and time. Heidegger approaches the subject of body from a different perspective. He looks at how a body becomes that—just a body, indistinguishable throughout the universe. He says that for the ancients there were specific kinds of bodies that had distinct motions—upward, downward, straight line or circular— according to their nature, earthly or celestial, and to their place and time. He uses Newton’s First Law of Motion (Every body continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion in straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed upon it) to explain mathematization and the way it differs from the ancient use of mathematics. Heidegger (1967, 89) says: “How about this law? It speaks of a body,

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corpus quod viribus impressis non cogitur, a body which is left to itself. Where do we find it? There is no such body…. This law speaks of a thing that does not exist. It demands a fundamental representation of things which contradict the ordinary.” Today the same question can be asked of the human body, the one that gives itself over to mediated capture through the algorithms of virtual presence. As relations become more ethereal, fleeting and epidermal, as the mysterious embodied human gives way to the transparency of the post human, it may be worth enquiring at what cost. If the body is shot through and through with soul, as Husserl suggests, then a phenomenology of corporeity, now in these post-human times, may help us determine what we are gaining in disembodied being-with-others and what part of our soul we may also be losing. If to be human includes the fullness and mystery of bodily experience, do we not lose parts of ourselves and part of the experience of the Other in the growing solitude of the body?

References Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. Le scaphandre et le papillon. Paris: France Loisirs. ———. 1998. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Trans. Jeremy Leggatt. New  York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. What is a Thing? Trans. W.B. Barton, Jr. and V. Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, Gateway Edition. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House Vintage. ———. 2003. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. Patočka, Jan. 1998. Body, Community, Language, World. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Edited by James Dodd. Chicago and Lassale: Open Court. Shakespeare, William. [1623]1978. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by Peter Alexander. Great Britain: Collins London and Glasgow. Sisson, C.H. 1996. Selected Poems of C.H. Sisson. New York: New Directions Publishing Company. Stravinsky, Igor. 1994. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Somatic Dissection and the Journey of Animal-Being Roberto Marchesini

Through others the earth becomes warm, loving, benign. Others are therefore the original demonstration and not a mere external need; they are our anchoring to existence, the relationship with what in the world is already prepared for us. Jan Patočka

Abstract  The post-human proposal undoubtedly represents a deep break within traditional philosophical thought. However, it would be wrong to consider it a kind of anti-humanism, as it is rather a redefinition of the humanist canon based on some shifts related to: (1) the ontological definition of the human condition; (2) the interpretation of the character of animality; (3) the referential or co-factorial meaning of otherness; (4) the anthropopoietic meaning of techne. If one wanted to synthetically translate those shifts into a “paradigmatic node,” one could say that, from a post-­ humanist viewpoint, human predicates are based neither on the human being nor iuxta propria principia. That is, they are not grounded in an autarchic, autopoietic and, ultimately, reflexive concept of ontology. The human is considered to be the result of an introjective relationship with otherness, so that the predicate emerges from the point of connection as a dialogical product. In other words, human predicates are considered emergent, and not emanative. In a post-humanist vision, human emergence is not realized through a disjunctive view and or a purification of otherness, that is, by the virtue of human self-absorption – as in the Cartesian cogito – but, on the contrary, takes place in the welcoming openness to otherness. Therefore, the human is the outcome of a hybridization, an anthropo-decentralizing event, an epiphany that introduces new perspectives of being. Otherness here plays the role of activating some existential dimensions that are not previous to the dialogical-­ conjugative act. One could say that the human condition is realized at the margins and through some marginalizations.

R. Marchesini (*) Director of Centre Study for Post-human Philosophy, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_7

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Keywords  Animality · Ontology · Ontopoiesis · Post-human philosophy · Phenomenology of life

Introduction Life is about relationships developing over time, synchronized and incomprehensible causalities that constantly demand remote explanations of the text. Life shows its corpuscolarity in the here-and-now and yet also expresses an undulatory nature, a choral Dionysian flow deriding any explanatory attempt. Life is a succession of thresholds connecting seemingly distant worlds, in the ambivalence of processes that seem closed in on themselves and open systems, poetics that arise as fractalic references to an otherness that is constantly redefining itself. Life is a relationship (Tymieniecka 2009), an itinerary drawn by heteronomy, a creative process that uses dialogue to address the uniqueness of the real. By contrast, a relationship can never be an objective interface between two beings, aiming to bring out a content. It is rather a “construction of predications” – that is, propositions that, just like a painter with a palette of colours, collect world contents so as to realize themselves. These predications emerge thanks to the “how” of the encounter – that is, depending on the reciprocative milieu substantiating, or rather sharing, the act of giving. Perception therefore refers to a previous experience such as immedesimation, anthropomorphism, or the somatization of the instrument. It reconnects otherness to something concerning me and, at the same time, transforms this previous experience so as to reach a state concerning us (Marchesini 2014). I call this being-in-relation a “mirroring process” or ontopoiesis through hybridization. Ontology is the result of a relationship – that is, a process neither intrinsic to the subject nor already given. The human as experience in the world therefore arises from the capacity of suspending a kind of immersion in the real and opening new passages of intersection and connection to the world. The human does not manifest itself in a fractalic and anthropoplastic reproduction, claiming to be the measure and subsumption of the real, but rather in inaugurating new levels of reality by the hybridization with external entities. In this sense, it is possible to say that the human should never be considered a defined or definable entity, but rather a constantly negotiable position, destined to transcend itself in the very act of being-there. One can say that the human cannot help participating. However, this does not mean to neglect the human condition itself, turning it into an anodyne and empty liquidity, subject to any predicate whatsoever, as if otherness were the container and the human being were an amorphous content. Hybridization can take place because the human being has a peculiarity, a certain structure or nature, whatever it may be called. However, this is a virtual structure  – one that demands and agrees to be organized by the dialogical coordinates that it encounters  – rather than a deterministic essence/substance that is self-realized and selfexplanatory. The human condition cannot be obtained by opposition – which would

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lead one to invent some counter-terms so as to position it – but rather by references, that is, connective structures. Therefore, this means starting from the animality of the human being and recognizing those predicative redundancies (which are not insufficiencies, but quite the contrary) that allow for the heteronomic organizational plurality. It also means that any attempt of internal recognition is doomed to fail and only gather the dust, so to speak, of the human experience. One cannot perceive oneself without a decentralizing process – that is, an ecstatic evenience of suspension. This process, however, cannot be an autopoietic result, as it would increase gravitation. For this reason, any self-explanatory – but also self-­ descriptive  – attempt might be misleading. The subject can perceive himself because, thanks to otherness, he has already transcended himself in the predicative expression. Therefore, to relate to the world means to participate in a mirroring process – understood as donation of/to otherness – that involves the entire body in several moments, but always as predicative emergence. One can therefore say that the those engaging in dialogue – as entities enucleated by the dialogue – do not own the predicate, which is rather the outcome of the mirroring process. The predicates, therefore, cannot be obtained through internal recognition. Furthermore, this predicative emergence should not be confused with the traditional essentialist formulas, that is, mimesis and polemos, to stick to the most common canons. Mirroring does not refer to the objective predicates of beings but rather to the “how” of the dialogical process – that is, the modalities of mutual donation between beings in relationship with each other. For this reason, the appearance of otherness does not refer to a merely phenomenal being extraneous to my Dasein. In fact, it is rather an epiphany – that is, a place for the ontological transformation of the self. This encounter does not leave one unaffected in one’s essence  – which, besides, should make one reflect on the resulting inconsistency, the risk of circularity, the endless regress, and the petitio principii of any attempt to found Dasein juxta propria principia. The risk of solipsism, highlighted by Husserl’s reflection, lies within an ontopoietic conception based on a withdrawal that is phenomenologically irresolvable  – that is, that gives rise to tautological recursivenesses from which it is difficult to find a way out. The emergence of subjectivity within the relationship indicates, instead, that every presence is always reference and every self-perception is always the result of a decentralizing into the other. Consequently, the perception of others never refers to an object but is always a “transfiguration into the other” realized through a diachronic matrix. This matrix aims to reproduce by resonance an identificative sense that does not necessarily belong to individual experience, so as to then reach a condition that exceeds the boundaries of the individual. Therefore, individual experience becomes a temporary connection, not even a parenthesis, in this flow of subjective becoming within the singularity of its relational trajectory. Hence the need to better define the very concept of referential relationship, distinguishing it from its traditional meanings. Reference is a state of acceptance and introjection of otherness and, simultaneously, a self-giving to otherness. Thus, ontopoiesis is an emergent threshold rather than the realisation of a disjunctive process. The subject, therefore, does not bend or project himself through mirroring, but

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rather welcomes otherness through a kind of possession-welcoming of it and by being in ecstasy within it. By doing so, the subject can suspend the ego and participate in a condition that transcends it. It is a process that transcends into immanence. Mirroring is neither a liberation nor an emancipation from the body, but rather a liberation-emancipation of the body that can thus reorganize itself and increase its virtualities through mirroring. To shift from a reflexive ontology to a relational ontology means to take into account the referential meaning of relationship, as well as the epiphanic effect of otherness and, in particular: (a) the transformational journey of animal becoming, along the two axes of animal emancipation and theriomorphic hybridization as revelation of the over-human; (b) the somatic dissection operated by the technopoietic infiltration as acquisition of new virtualities (the body without organs) and of a predicative reorganization. This leads to a significant paradigmatic shift from a humanistic conception of Dasein to a post-humanistic conception based on a hybridative emergence.

Relational Ontology One’s presence in the world is a continuous process of mirroring the other, a being-­ with that implies a somatic communion, an ecstasy within otherness, a shared nature of bodies harmoniously aligned on the same level of relationship. Otherness gives itself through an affective process that is first of all an impression, a motion of co-­ sentience (rather than appearance or noematic content) and, simultaneously, an epiphany – that is, a revelation of existential dimensions virtually accessible for the self, a threshold to escape from one’s individual boundaries, a suspension of such boundaries and a participation in something that transcends the self. Thresholds are never anodyne holes along the bastions of identity, but rather interfaces, filters that allow for the mirroring process. It is therefore important to consider ecological thinking not as a description of the living, but rather as a paradigm that interprets the living and its poietic skills. Life is creativity, as somatization of relationships and transformation of dialogues into flesh. Therefore, a threshold is the place of perception as experience and visitation of otherness. Life is not made of separate entities, but rather of connecting thresholds. Life is a continuous seminar of relationships. It is a flow that, just like a flame in need of oxygen, goes upwards and produces ever-changing figures that – unable to repeat themselves – throb in their singularity and take space through the hybridization with the world. As a result, inspiration is never an inner search of the outline of a poetics. It is always an opening up to the world, a “being available” to the other. The narcissistic self would like to deny this exchange, hiding the threshold connecting it to otherness, building a limes around its world and thus defining a metabolic domain where only interchanges are allowed, but nothing more. Nevertheless, inspiration lies precisely in the ability to open up this flow, release that threshold and activate the bidirectional meaning of the Latin hospes. This is well exemplified in the

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concept of shelter that was one of the most important conceptual turning points of Edith Stein’s thought: her literal recommendation to “make space” for otherness. Life means expanding within the world, as an act of inclusion and of self-­ donation, rather than of submission. Inspiration, therefore, means recognizing oneself within alterities. This mirroring requires suspension, the exercise of epoché. It is not a coincidence that people often speak of inspiration in terms of possession, ecstasy, alienation. However, it is necessary to make a clarification. These processes do not disconnect subjectivity from the body – that is, they do not nullify corporeity but, on the contrary, release it. The body, freed from the chains of the reflexive self, can open up to otherness. Obviously, I am here relating to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1962), Michel Henry (Henry 1973) and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (2012). Desire, as need to participate – that is, as hospitality towards the other and openness of thresholds for the dialogical singularity – is the driving force of subjectivity. Creativity is not driven by a deficiency; it is not the obvious conclusion of a gravitational languor or a need that demands to be compensated in order to give rise to a kind of blissful autonomy. On the contrary, creativity continuously reproduces the non-equilibrium that is at the root of life. This non-equilibrium is desire as “being-for-the-relationship,” which is the very foundation of subjectivity. In my opinion, the core of the problem lies within the several meanings of the concept of relationship. Claiming to be the result of the relationships with otherness can lead to some dangerous misunderstandings, if the essentialist principle of individuation remains the same. The word “relationship” is too general and open to various (I’d say divergent) interpretations. According to the classic argumentative dialectic, relationship means comparison, uncertain background, evolution by contrast, rejection. This then gave rise to some broad and inadequate, albeit very common, translations in which the term relationship is used in situations that would actually require better terms such as reaction, response, interaction, interface, fruition, projection. Going beyond all of this, there are at least two conceptions of relational state that are very different from what I mean by relational ontology, which is not based on the inclusion of the other but, conversely, of the epiphany of otherness. Let’s look at the first one. For example, one may think of a predicative reduction of the being by which the latter exchanges its identity with the predicate of relationship, thus annihilating itself to being nothing more than a mere “term of relationship” with otherness: you are nothing but somebody’s brother, father, friend. In this case, the relationship is no longer a transaction, but only a positionality towards the dyadic plurals that can be contracted. There could be a lot to say about this interpretation, which relates to individualism itself more than one would expect. On closer inspection, the subject in relationship with the other is like a sun around which revolve the planets of otherness, which would therefore be identified according to the predicate of relationship. This interpretation of the relationship (which I would define taxonomic) is actually dismissive and deprives it of its productivity. The reason for this is very simple: we continue to think of the individual as an impenetrable and monadic universe that can relate to otherness, but is never contaminated by it. In other cases, the relationship is translated into infusion: transmission of contents that, as such, transcend the plasma membrane of the individual. This is the

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focus of the debate between those who consider this process a reduction of ownership or weakening of identity, and those who, on the contrary, interpret it as an increase of sovereignty over the contents taken. However, the relationship is once again denied a status of its own, its specific productivity. In my opinion, the relationship is more like a projection into the other, able to show new hybrid existential dimensions, or something reminiscent of a possession that transforms the individual’s predicates by reorganizing its inherent contents. Being in a relationship, doesn’t mean looking at otherness as a phenomenon, but rather being inclined towards its hybrid redefinition. In the relational encounter, the other-than-oneself is transformed into other-in-oneself and undergoes a metamorphosis that profoundly alters its contents. Within the relationship, otherness is always epiphanic: it becomes annunciation and revelation of an unexpected way out of one’s heritage, and offers the individual a break so that he can transcend himself. To consider the relationship as a simple transfer of contents means to degrade epiphany to mimesis: no longer an interpretation and representation of otherness, but a simple assimilation of/in it. This transition entails a series of metamorphoses that lead one to talk about a post-humanist approach. I would like to mention some of them: (1) the overcoming of essentialism, that is, the containing and gravitational concept of being within a model; (2) the rejection of the dichotomic-disjunctive model that defines a being through the construction of impenetrable domains; (3) overcoming the exclusive dialectic based on a universal concept of belonging; (4) the virtual view of being, which does not mean cancelling the internal predicates, but reinforcing the importance of the organization operated from the outside; (5) the relational interpretation of the predicative outcome, which should therefore not be assigned to the characters of beings in a relationship with each other, but should be considered emergent from them. This is the meaning of what I call “heteronomy of identification.” Individuation, therefore, is a process of decentralization and reorganization in line with the support of otherness. It is not a gravitation that transforms the identitary expression into an orbitation fixed around its nucleus. However, it is neither a nullification or erosion of the heritage itself: the past is not washed out, but rather enriched and allowed to leap onto a new reorganizational orbital. Furthermore, it is also a recursive event, as it is possible to talk of a fractal (that is, diachronically developed) structure of introjections of otherness. Because of this, singularity is nothing more than a historical path of encounters, where each one of these reorganizes the heritage and produces a new relational matrix for future encounters. This critical point leads one to misconceive what has been said so far as a weak declination of identity. I do not think that to admit the relational meaning of identification means to give an image of transparency of it. To look at one’s relationships means to give voice to all those presences in-self, that is, to what they represented in the how of the encounter. The epiphanic contents of the encounter do not correspond to the phenomenal predicates of otherness but rather to the relational ones – that is, what otherness was able to reveal. Contents are therefore not transmitted as such and otherness is transformed into a space of decentralization – that is, a space for the emergence of new existential dimensions for the self, interpreted on the basis of the contents of

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heritage one has. Each introjection of otherness changes the threshold of relationship with otherness and, therefore, the becoming does not deny heritage but rather reorganizes it.

Emancipation from Animality and Animal Epiphany The interpretation of animal otherness is paradigmatic for the understanding of those mechanisms of removal and reduction that do not allow one to deal with the more general issue of hybridization. Typically, the non-human is subjected to the following nullifications of its potential presence to the dialogue (Marchesini 2016): (1) reification, that is, the negation of its subjectivity, which may find several forms, the most common being lack of will, non-possession of logos, instinctive irrationality, inability to achieve high levels of intentionality; (2) transformation into a regressive figure, believing the animal to represent the past and the domain of animality to represent the heritage; this idea must be rejected in order to fully appeal to the human dimension. This denies the heterospecific an effective presence to the encounter; (3) alienation, that is, the prejudice that the existential level of other species is unknowable, with the consequent inability to effectively communicate and establish a relationship, believing the different umwelten to be separate monads; (4) projection, that is, the transformation of the heterospecific into a mirror that therefore does not mitigate but rather strengthens the subject’s narcissistic tendencies, with the consequent arbitrary construction of the other’s identity and positionality, which is in fact denied effective participation to any (even basic) form of the relational encounter. Animal otherness, subjected to these operations of denial and removal, is distanced both from the relationship and from revelation. The threshold with the animal source, designated to open up to recognition (the awareness of animal-being) and epiphany (one’s reflection in heterospecific otherness) therefore undergoes a final rejection, and what would normally allow one to participate in animality is thus removed. When animal otherness undergoes these forms of humiliation and rejection, part of the reflection always collapses. First of all, the human being tends to deny both the presence and the substance of its animal-being: (a) animality thus does not become a dimension allowing for a specific declination of the human, but rather the shore to leave behind so as to let the human emerge; (b) the animal drive is translated into heritage, projected into the past and considered a sort of ancestrality that rises from the depths and muddies the waters presence, rather than the reason for Dasein. At this point, a redefinition of the character of animality is necessary. One has to abandon the reclusion inside the res extensa  – the animal as automaton  – that becomes a monadic bubble in the Umwelt and poverty-in-world in Heidegger’s thought. If animality is deprived of any character of subjectivity and turned into a mere mechanical functionality of some automatisms, trained by phylogenesis and ontogenesis, then it is clear that any predication of the human will seek comfort

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within an emancipation from animality and not within the expression of its animality. This is why I speak of “emancipation of animality” from the captivity in which it was kept by Descartes. This is why, in the field of philosophical ethology, I call into question the meta-predicative structure of animal-being, that is, animal ontology. Animality is a creative, and therefore relational, presence in the world that takes place through the diachronic construction of states of singularity. Animal-being thus means constantly transcending the past and to rearrange heritage according to coordinates given by the here-and-now. In this regard, the animal is not immersed in the present but rather builds its own present arbitrarily. For this reason, I speak of animal Dasein: if the animal were an automaton, she would freeze at the first change! However, given the singularity of the real – it offers similar, but not identical, occurrences – the animal has to be present and able to interpret the “margin of originality” provided by its here-and-now. The individual is an actor playing a certain script. Therefore, animal-being means “conjugating reality according to specific coordinates” or, in other words, establishing a unique dialogue with the world. This dialogue, however, should not be compared to a mechanical function  – even if it is instructed by specific endowments, be it innate or learned. Endowment as such cannot bring out interpretation, which, on the contrary, is the core skill to manage the “margin of originality.” Endowment is a set of tools, not of automatisms. Animal subjectivity – which thus also defines human subjectivity – is a modal expression of body, as Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1962) had well understood, and as we can see in Fancisco Varela’s enactive conception (Varela 1999). It can be linked to the condition of “being a body” that shows a plurality of relational levels expressing themselves through internal organizational dynamics and specific perceptive inclinations actively addressed to external reality. So, it is possible to say that subjectivity is not an amodal condition but an intentional structure requiring external specification. It means recognizing Dasein within animality. On the other hand, if it is true that every specific animal taxonomy indicates a specific immersion in the world, then it is also true that the umwelten have a significant degree of homological and analogical overlapping. Therefore, one is never facing separate worlds, but rather universes constantly dialoguing with each other. This is what allows for the theriomorphic hybridization. The humanistic approach denies the dialogic loans established with other species to construct one’s own identity, passing its predicates off as mere emanations, autarkic outcomes, characters produced independently – that is, realized either by expressing the predicative significance or by compensating imaginary shortcomings. In this way, one recognizes that different cultures emerge through an intercultural exchange – that is, through mutual reflection. And yet, when it comes to going to the source and discussing anthropo-poiesis – that is, the emergence of the human dimension realized within a cultural matrix – an arbitrary Rubicon is drawn, which does not allow other species to contribute to the construction of the human. Hence the humanist claim to consider the human, as autopoietic dimension of predication, the autarchic outcome of the action of Homo sapiens and, at the same time, the claim that man can only be understood through internal recognition.

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Actually, the very deep dialogue between human and animal otherness, which has always existed, has left many traces of loans and reflections, especially in the cultural dimension. In other words, animal otherness is part of us not as expression of animality  – as this is implicit in the human condition of animal-being  – but because it is the matrix of the human reorganization defined anthropopoiesis. Animal epiphany derives from a dialogical event with a non-human otherness capable of decentralizing the human being into a new hybrid condition. This means that the anthropopoietic process should not be considered a gravitation on the human. Nor should it be considered an emphasis or epiphenomenon concerning predicates related to the human being as a species and phylogenetic heritage. Rather, it is a process of decentralization. Epiphany must be understood as a moment in which the human being, in relationship with otherness, goes beyond the phenomenon (the animal as other-than-­ oneself) in order to access an epiphanic – that is, annunciating – event (the animal as other-within-oneself), which is able to point at a new existential dimension. Before showing us “how to fly” – that is, the flying techniques – birds have shown us that “it is possible to fly” – that is, they introduced us to a new inflection of presence in the here-and-now. In this regard, epiphany has operated a decentralization from the existential dimensions present in heritage and therefore opened the way to the over human not as power but rather as revelation and abandonment.

Technopoiesis and Somatic Dissection Poetics arise suddenly – almost by a spontaneous gemmation – whenever the body frees itself from the sclerotic connections imposed on it by the predominance of the past over singularity, by a reluctance to make space for otherness, by a partial closure of mirroring thresholds, by a drastic decrease of desire. These restrictions may also derive from a dominant heritage and, sometimes, are driven by the subject’s limited ability to act. Indeed, also the anatomy of species  – establishing specific relationships among the histological levels – can limit a body’s poetic potentialities. Sometimes, it may happen that an event or support operate a kind of disjunction among the parties, a real dissection: Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Therefore, the process of actualization is reversed and a relevant virtuality that allows for new mirroring declinations is recovered. The body therefore takes on new predicates, accesses new experiences, opens new epiphanic thresholds, connects to new coordinates of desire. This is not an enhancement of the body, but rather a reorganization of the somatic fabric on a new matrix-­ level offered by otherness. If subjectivity is a somatic dimension – that is, modal and not amodal – it is necessary to understand what “being a body” means, where individuality is a creative process that uses a variety of pre-rational levels, as was well explained by AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka in her “Phenomenology of life” (Tymieniecka 2007). The body is a matrix of relations with the world and the predicate emerges precisely from

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these relationships. Therefore, it can never be deduced through an internal recognition. The body, enucleated from its multiple relationships, is not a body but a corpse. The liminality of the body, therefore, should not be understood as a disjunctive-­ protective border, but rather as “relational threshold” that brings out its being, its presence, in a process of “making space” through dialogue-connection with otherness. The connective coordinates define the possible relational accesses even before any specific performativity. It is necessary to go beyond a narrow interpretation based on the dichotomy between humanity as absolutely liquid or totipotent (the human as indefinite and protean condition) and humanity as defined by strict conditions that lead to predicative significance (the human as a given condition whose every predicate is its emanative outcome). If, on the contrary, one considers heritage as a “dimension of specific virtuality,” that is, contained within a range of possibilities that are not necessarily achievable motu proprio, then one can understand the meaning of the heteronomic organization actualized as dialogical emergence with otherness. To see heritage as a dimension of specific virtuality means to accept the openness to transcendence that grounds Dasein, without falling into the fallacy of self-explanation or total indefiniteness of the human. Indeed, this would deny the ultimate meaning of reference, because it is not possible to start a dialogue without a condition. The heritage identifies some ranges of “virtuality”: the human being cannot be changed into anything whatsoever, nor can he transhumanize into something beyond, not linked to what came before. Therefore, in a post-human perspective it is wrong to believe that: (1) the technological support has only a probiotic, exonerative, ergonomic, disjunctive, amniotic function, as in the humanist tradition; (2) the support could be independent from its hosting body, so as to determine a total overcoming of it, leading the human being to a condition that has nothing to do with humanity, as it is in transhumanism. The support unveils new shapes of humanity and introduces new predicative dimensions. Each technopoiesis is a reorganization of some somatic connections: a real dissection able to bring out new predicative structures that either recover inherent virtualities or produce new declinative innovations. Therefore, it is not an enhancing bacterium, but rather a virus that reprograms the infected cell. It does not comply with some morpho-functional coordinates of the body but, on the contrary, bends the body onto its performative guidelines. Furthermore, the revealing conception of techne should not be seen as emergence of the human peculiarity, but rather as a revelation of new existential anchorages to the world  – that is, new connections and conjugations to otherness. This revelation is therefore participatory, convivial – even tender, I would say – rather than a disjunctive, distinctive, purgative disclosure of otherness that brings out the human by contrast. In this regard, the technopoietic process makes the human being more and more conjugated, vulnerable and in need. These states translate into predication in the strict sense. The human being reveals himself by expressing his need of otherness rather than by rising above otherness so as to dominate it. Hence the clear gap between the humanistic vision that considers the human being as an a priori condition, metric and subsumptive of world, and a posthuman reading that considers the human being as a work in progress that is neither a

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measure of the world nor of herself  – that is, of the emergent predications. The humanistic conception referred to human centrality  – the Vitruvian image  – that necessarily lead to a universal to be translated anthropoplastically, transforming other beings into orbitals. A posthumanistic vision, instead, avoids any conception of human autopoietic and self-sufficient centrality. Hence the very different conceptions of heritage and of the relationship between organ and techne. The resulting explanatory structure, in fact, needs an internal source so as to substantiate that relationship. The humanistic reading of techne thus underlies the exonerative character of the tool called to relieve the body from its function and, in this way, protect it both from the arduousness of the performance and from the difficulties caused by a supposed impropriety or original deficit of the biological equipment of the human being. Nevertheless, this idea is countered by the fact that  – if techne compensated for some ab origine lack – one should be faced with a deceleration process of the technopoietic act instead of an evolution that is growing exponentially. On the contrary, the acceleration that characterizes technopoiesis can only be understood by admitting a progressive expansion of instances: techne is a flywheel of connections and, therefore, a stimulus of needs. The body is not deficient, but overabundant – that is, open to dialogical creativity, eager to conjugate to the world, like a tree expanding according to the organizational-­ directional coordinates of light. The ergonomic and compensatory idea, pursued by the myth of incompleteness, fails to account for the effect of disorientation and instability that every technopoiesis produces on human ontology. It is a condition of non-balance, fibrillation, yearning, as if each technopoietic act distanced us from a gravitational centre that would otherwise stabilize each individual orbit. Techne therefore encourages  – instead of curbing  – a process of exuberance, because it opens up new world-connecting channels. Technopoiesis is like falling in love that makes us more powerful, but also more vulnerable. Techne does not make us more impervious and self-sufficient, but rather more conjugated to the world and more in need of otherness. Techne is not a fractalic and projective emanation of human predicates, but rather the outcome of a dialogue with otherness. Therefore, techne will not produce a protective amnios, but open new exchanges of somatic exposure to world. Whenever a technique or technology penetrates a body  – as techne is always infiltrative even when it seems external – it reorganizes the latter’s virtual coordinates, just like a virus. The emerging predicates are therefore the result of a dissection of the body, a real disjunction of its parts, able to release them and thus enhance their declinative paths. The technological dissection does not only break up the limitations implied by the correlation between the parts, but also initiates a liquid somatic condition, an epoché of umwelt coordinates, thus opening up spaces for experimentation within a plurality of dimensions of animal-being. In this sense, the technopoietic suspension and the journey inside animal-being have a common root, even though one is led to consider these two areas as disjoint, distant or perhaps even antinomical. Eccentration is an expansion of experience, an augmentation of the immersive horizon, a new self-perspective. One is suddenly

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faced with many journeys-experiences in animal-being: the thrill of flight, the choreography of dance, the connection between new perceptual accesses, the expression of new harmonics and so on. It is a shamanic and a technological experience. Hence the feelings of instability, anxiety and excitement, power and vulnerability, social chaos and loneliness  – all together  – that characterize our contemporary world so pervaded with technopoietic somatizations that decentralize the human being from his phylogenetic core. Once again, the human is found in his vertigo, in his reaching for the sublime, in his endless pilgrimage, his need to overcome himself. But also in his immense need of the world and his never-ending search for love.

References Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Henry, Michel. 1973. The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Marchesini, Roberto. 2014. Epifania animale. L’oltre uomo come rivelazione. Milano: Mimesis. ———. 2016. Etologia filosofica. Alla ricerca della soggettività animale. Milano: Mimesis. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. 2007. Phenomenology of Life: From the Animal Soul to the Human Mind, Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2009. The Case of God in the New Enlightenment. In The Fullness of the Logos in the Key of Life. Book I. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2012. Christo-Logos: Metaphysical Rapsodies of Faith. In The Fullness of the Logos in the Key of Life. Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer. Varela, Francisco. 1999. Ethical Know-how: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

“Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women Writers and the Posthuman Calley A. Hornbuckle

Abstract  Numerous encounters of sense perception and materiality, which decenter the human and open up experience to radical alterity, permeate Romantic-era texts. Through various encounters with the nonhuman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on why it wasn’t always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence. Their poetry reveals a sensitivity to the limits of humanism by investigating uncanny entanglements with nonhuman beings. These encounters invoke a pre-reflective engagement with the world. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and posthumanist understandings of ecomaterialism, this essay explores the “strange kinship” between the human poet and nonhuman poetic subject. Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith critique dichotomous rationale, deconstruct species supremacy, and challenge human essentialism. By invoking the primacy of embodiment, these Romantic-era women writers offer shared corporeal investigations that move toward a posthuman ethos. Keywords  Romanticism · Posthumanism · Embodiment · Perception · Ecomaterialism · Merleau-Ponty · Barbauld · Robinson · Smith In “The Caterpillar” (1816), Anna Letitia Barbauld’s speaker experiences a fleshy encounter that exposes her to an uncanny entanglement with the nonhuman. Having slaughtered “whole families” without hesitation, the speaker finds that a “single wretch,” to whose race she has “sword perdition,” forces her to feel the caterpillar’s “individual existence” and, subsequently, a “fellowship of sense with all that breathes” (Barbauld 1994, 14, 20, 24, 26, 27). Her initial contact is sensory, pre-­ reflective; it’s an experience of the body that captures her attention and prevents her from killing the creature. In Merleau-Ponty’s (2003) phenomenology, this experience constitutes an “inter-animality” that unites species through the embodiment of C. A. Hornbuckle (*) Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_8

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perception (189). This “strange kinship,” as he deems it, is part of an ontological structure consisting within a lateral continuum (271). In other words, the human and nonhuman intertwine through a shared horizon of being. Moving beyond the idealism of Husserl and human exceptionalism of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on embodiment suggests, as Louise Westling (2014) has pointed out, a “biological continuity” with the natural world that challenges “anthropocentric arrogance” and “restores us to our place in the community of animals and the wider biological community” (4, 5). In her poem, Barbauld posits an openness to the radical alterity of nonhuman animals, and even though that awareness can never be fully grasped, it can be intuited through the inter-relationality of perception, behavior, and matter. Her investigation, I would argue, contemplates an ecological sensibility that moves toward a posthumanist understanding. As her speaker contemplates the intrinsic value of the caterpillar, she challenges the essentialism of human agency and privilege. And Barbauld is not alone in this endeavor. We see similar encounters of sense perception, which decenter the human, in the poetic works of Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Mary Robinson’s “The Linnet’s Petition” (1775), for example, features a bird speaker who successfully petitions for his freedom, but not before leaving his mistress to revisit a “strange extasy” embodied within a conflicted primacy of bodily contact (2000, 70). In “To the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection” (1804), Smith’s speaker laments the absent vitality of a fire-fly, who is now a mere specimen of scientific collection, estranged from its natural habitat, no longer capable of thriving in a dynamic environment. The speaker experiences a “kindred merit,” but one of estrangement that “weeps alone,” as she keenly charts how its “living luster” has become enslaved through ostentatious display (Smith 1993, 3, 70). By exploring the sensory, material animalistic encounters of the human poet and nonhuman poetic subject, Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on why it wasn’t always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence. These strange human and nonhuman encounters elicit a relationality worthy of respect. However, before turning to the poetry, I will first discuss posthumanism and then outline Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights to show how these British women writers orient us toward a posthuman ethos. In a way, Romantic-era women writers were always posthuman by virtue of their marginalized status. Posthumanist understanding allows us to see the fallacies of not only man as measure of all things but also the privileged positionality of European, white, male discourses of humanism, itself. Posthumanism deconstructs human essentialism and places the human within a spatiotemporal as well as biological spectrum of existence, one in which humans are only a part, a miniscule part in comparison to the multitude of mineral, plant, and animal species on the planet. Moreover, humans have allowed language and neural complexity to position them as superior to all other species, and that simply isn’t the case. In fact, we have so much to learn from the bioenergetics, biosemiotics, chemical signaling, and epigenesis of other species, and posthumanist investigations are helping us to think about how we can learn from nonhuman beings on their terms, instead of our own. As Cary Wolfe (2010) points out, posthumanism underscores a continuum of existence

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well before and beyond human experience. Posthumanism, he maintains, “comes both before and after humanism”: before in “that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world” and after in that it “names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore,” pointing, thus, “toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms” (xv, xvi). Furthermore, Rosi Braidoitti (2013) notes how humanist discourse excluded marginalized others; the standard for the unitary subject excluded women, nonwhite, nonheterosexual, underprivileged, indigenous, and nonhuman beings. Building her posthumanist groundwork from an anti-humanist perspective, Braidotti emphasizes a bioegalitarian point of view: the posthuman “deconstructs” “species supremacy, but it also inflicts a blow to any lingering notion of human nature, anthropos and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and non-­ humans, or zoe” (65).1 In other words, she advocates that posthumanism must interrogate the notion of “‘Man’ and his others” and disempower that dialectic (65). She also situates posthuman subjectivity in an “ethics of becoming” through symbiosis, embeddedness, relationality, and multiplicity, which is, however, “still grounded and accountable” (49). The term “accountable” is key here because a posthumanist ethos cannot devolve into computational strong emergence. Matter and mind constitute an interdependence of which we have yet to recognize or even know. We exist in a complex spectrum of being that depends on relationality, contextuality, sociality, and community.2 Drawing extensively from Spinoza’s ideas on monism and Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on vitalist materialism, Braidotti emphasizes a post-­ anthropocentric turn to usher in new epistemological and ontological paradigms. This turn also involves a “radical estrangement” from human-centered concepts of morality, transcendence, innateness, and universality rooted in humanist discourse (Braidotti 2013, 92). Historically, these have derailed us from realizing our geopolitical imperatives—to all species, including the planet, itself. Additionally, posthumanism doesn’t necessarily abandon the human; rather, it takes the human out of its historic isolation. Serenella Iovino (2016) claims that the posthuman is “the ontological narrative of the human in its infinite paths of entangled becoming with its others” (12). The human component is a small part in a much larger fabric of existence. It’s at this juncture of entanglement that I call upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about inter-animality before turning back to the Romantic-era women writers, their

 For Braidotti, zoe is the mindless vitality of life carrying on, everywhere. Braidotti writes, “for me there is a necessary link between critical posthumanism and the move beyond anthropocentrism. I refer to this move as expanding the notion of Life towards the non-human or zoe” (50). 2  While outlining the limitations of strong emergence and panpsychism, cognitive scientist Michael Silberstein encourages us to think of matter as contextual, not the sum of its computations or as intrinsically mental. Contextual emergence looks at how “things emerge from the web of relations in certain contexts” (36:45). Contextual emergence, in other terms, is cultural, environmental, and mental; it is a relational story of mind and matter. See also Braidotti 26, 52, 59. 1

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sensitivity to the limitations of humanism, and their embodied perception of nonhuman beings. In the second (1957–1958) and third (1959–1960) courses of his unfinished Nature notes, Merleau-Ponty investigates the notion of “inter-animality” in which he argues that humans and animals exist in shared world of Being (2003, 173, 189). They are given together, each opening up to the other by virtue of their “corporal schema” (2003, 208, 224, 225). “The world and the others,” he writes, “become our flesh,” and “[t]he flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world” (2003 211, 218, 1968 127, 136). Perception, as such, is an embodied phenomenon experienced within a lateral ontological structure (2003, 239, 268, 271, 273, 1968, 125). By emphasizing that a “lateral union of animality and humanity” exists within the logos of the sensible, Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that humans and animals perceive one another through bodily sensation in a biological spectrum uneclipsed by power differentials (271). As Kelly Oliver (2008) points out in “Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals,” “[a]nimal bodies and cultures emerge concurrently with human bodies and cultures precisely because there is continuity between the physical world, biological life, behavior, and consciousness”(114). Regardless of our conscious state, we’re always already responding to others, human and nonhuman, and the environment in which we’re situated, our Umwelt, which I’ll discuss later. Notably, Merleau-Ponty rejects Cartesian dualism as well as species hierarchy rooted in a logos, as such: “We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in short, in the Ineinander [in one another] with the animal” (2003, 214). He goes on to write that the “meditation of our ‘strange kinship’ with animals” “is to be understood as our projection-introjection, our Ineinander with Sensible Being and with other corporeities” (2003, 271, 1968, 133). We might instinctively feel, intuit, or reflect upon a sense of kinship with nonhuman others; this “shared embodiment,” as Oliver also mentions, “includes both reflective and unreflective consciousness” (114). On this note, I’d like to turn back to Barbauld’s “The Caterpillar” while keeping in mind this “strange kinship” and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. When Barbauld’s poetic speaker claims that the caterpillar makes her “feel” and “recognize” its “individual existence,” she embarks on an investigation of sense perception that speaks to what Merleau-Ponty, in The Visible and the Invisible, speculates as “kinship opening upon a tactile world” (Barbauld 1994, 25, 26; Merleau-­ Ponty 1968, 133). Even though, in this earlier work, Merleau-Ponty was less interested in animals, we can see how much of the phenomenology of perception, embodiment, and intertwining of flesh manifest in his Nature notes, and, thus, I would suggest that his underdeveloped and fragmented thoughts on “strange kinship” are ripe for ecoposthumanist analysis. Notably, Merleau-Ponty clearly intends not to equate flesh and matter; they’re disparate in his phenomenology. The intertwining of flesh is perceptual, not material (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 146). Barbauld operates on both levels in her poem “The Caterpillar.” The “light pressure of [the caterpillar’s] hairy feet” causes the speaker to stop and endeavor to preserve its life despite her having recently engaged in mass extermination of its species (8). The

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moment of becoming tactilely engaged opens up the speaker to its presence, effectively giving the caterpillar a kind of agency that alters intention. She “cannot harm” this “single sufferer”: “Present’st thyself before me, I relent” (1, 36, 28). The creature’s life is no longer expendable. Confessing that she has “crushed whole families” and poisoned them with “vials of destruction,” she realizes that she had done so without remorse, but now the caterpillar’s individuality impresses its existence on her (20, 22). That bodily awareness brings to bear an increased awareness of life and commonality “with all that breathes” (27). In this experience of “inter-­ animality,” sense and sentience intertwine in chiasmic relationship. Barbauld breaks down the subject-object dichotomy, putting her speaker and the caterpillar on a lateral horizon of shared kinship. The “world and the others,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “become our flesh” (2003, 211). From a posthumanist perspective, we’re invited to think of the myriad of interand intra-species molecular, biological, chemical, and electromagnetic signaling interacting within the fold of matter and perception, a complexity that precedes conscious understanding, but reminds us that a human body and a caterpillar’s body are both separate and non-separate entanglements. The closest Barbauld’s speaker can get to this awareness is consciousness of the caterpillar’s “light pressure” on her arm (8). In a Kantian sense, that moment is already paradoxically compromised in its recognition. Nonetheless, as she gazes upon its “velvet sides, “scann[ing] [its] form with curious eye,” the speaker’s embodied perception invites a sensibility that honors the nonhuman (6, 3). In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) argues that matter is ontologically constituted by entanglement. She calls this “agential realism,” by which she means that the “world is an open-process of mattering through which mattering itself acquires meaning and form through the realization of different agential possibilities” (141). From this perspective, bodies—human and nonhuman—“are not entities with inherent boundaries”; they are “phenomena that acquire” boundaries through “dynamic structuration” (Barad 2007, 172). Agency, in other words, doesn’t depend on the human. Moreover, recent neurobiology has shown that insects not only have complex neural activity and learn to respond to stimuli in unique ways, but they also exhibit signs of cognitive behavior regardless of brain size. In “Cognition with Few Neurons: Higher-Order Learning in Insects,” Martin Guirfa (2013) observes how fruit flies and bees seem to have “attentional processes” by which they regulate behavior (288). Flies exhibit associative behavior that is trainable (Guirfa 2013, 286). Bees exhibit concept learning that involves learned relations and choice (Guirfa 2013, 289). Both have dopaminergic neurons that “may modulate selective attention” (Guirfa 2013, 288). The neuroscientific implications of these studies, as Giurfa notes, ushers in a greater appreciation for the “cognitive sophistication of the miniature brains of insects,” especially since traditional biology has often “overlooked the enormous richness of invertebrate behavior” (291). Barbara Webb (2012) carefully notes that “cognition should not be an umbrella term for all neural processes”; nevertheless, the insect brain is a “promising place in which to further unravel the mechanisms of cognition” (2720, 2721). For Barbauld and other Romantic-era women writers, the insect brain wasn’t, of course, of the utmost concern, but respect for life and empathic feeling were.

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As she concludes the poem, we see Barbauld parsing the human capacity for sympathetic identification, and, in effect, the limits of humanism. Her speaker reveals that “capricious Pity, /Which would not stir for thousands, melts for one” (39–40). The lone warrior, having escaped “from the field” of battle, managed to obtain amnesty, but the “horrid war” against pests will prevail (36, 30). The engagement with this creature is ephemeral. This caterpillar will survive and “[d]epart in peace” by virtue of its individual presence (2). However, the speaker questions her gesture, thus claiming, “‘Tis not Virtue, /Yet ‘tis the weakness of a virtuous mind” (41–42). As Barbauld undercuts the purity of her speaker’s actions, she also exposes the anthropocentric strongholds of her time. If one’s moral standards were absolute, then the salvation of this particular European tent caterpillar might extend to the entire species, the Malacosoma neutria, otherwise known as the Lackey moth.3 But, for Barbauld’s time, as well as our own, those standards are still anchored in human imperatives. In “The Caterpillar,” Barbauld is acutely aware of the paradoxical nature of her speaker’s spontaneous sympathy (41). In “Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and ‘The Caterpillar,’” Alice Den Otter (2004) makes a compelling case for how Barbauld “reverses” the image of benevolent “pest-controller” only to launch a more “subtle tirade against the vanity of British sympathies” in terms of hospitality, war, and dissent (222). Den Otter explores how the ambiguity embedded in the final claim of the poem positions Barbauld to showcase the caterpillar and war narratives as “mere rhetorical performances, designed to win assent from the audience so as to reinstate her political voice of righteous prophecy” (224). As Den Otter, and many others have noted, Barbauld often uses undercutting wit that calls into question or problematizes her poetic arguments (226).4 Such ambiguity embedded in the final claim of “The Caterpillar,” Den Otter notes, presents “a relative ethics that shifts as circumstances shift, presenting an assumed order that nevertheless is disjunctive, disrupting conventional analogies and comfortable sensibilities with a subversive style and an abrupt conclusion that provokes serious thought” (230). By questioning humanism on multiple levels, “The Caterpillar” reminds us not to take for granted even our seemingly “virtuous” acts and to be mindful of all their implications (42). We can never truly do justice to another species, but we can, at the very least, make sincere attempts to try. As Frans de Waal (2009) notes, if we want to understand empathy, we “need to start thinking from the bottom up” (15).5 Like Barbauld, Robinson depicts an intertwining of flesh and feather to explore the (un)limits of self and other. In “The Linnet’s Petition,” Robinson features a bird  Den Otter makes a strong case for how Barbauld was most likely referring to the tent caterpillar (214). 4  Isobel Grundy notes how the multiplicity of Barbauld’s literary voices “resist dichotomy, encompassing both poetry and prose, and within each mode embracing public oratory and domestic chat, intense seriousness and sly humour, the self-deprecating, the professionally confident, and the overtly ambitious” (23-24). Louise Economides shares how Barbauld “raise[s] serious questions” beneath her “playful veneer” (84). 5  The Age of Empathy (2010). 3

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speaker who petitions his mistress, Stella, to set him free. Having endured captivity in a “gaudy cage,” finding himself “without a cause confin’d,” the bird wins over his mistress’s pity (5, 41, 27).6 He appeals to her, as well, by pointing out how much pleasure he voluntarily imparted to her when he could freely choose to rest “[b]eneath [her] window” or “charm” her from the “myrtle bow’r” (37, 39, 38). Advocating for his freedom, the bird tells Stella, Ah! what avails this gaudy cage, Or what is life to me, If thus confin’d, if thus distress’d, And robb’d of liberty. (41–44) Upon hearing his plea, Stella is moved by “kindred pity” (66). Recalling when she first “caught the flutt’ring thing,” she remembers having “felt strange extasy” (69, 70). Much like Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about “strange kinship,” the “strange extasy” that Robinson explores in her poem immerses her poetic subjects in a momentary intertwining of flesh, of the same body and not the same, of the visible and the invisible. The subject-object divide momentarily breaks down, as Robinson reveals the experiential encounter of embodied perception as well as its interpretive measure. Ted Toadvine (2009) notes that this kind of inter-animality constitutes both connection and estrangement. In his conclusion to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, Toadvine points out that “[t]o be a part of nature as chiasmic intertwining is never to find oneself at home, therefore, but always to be rent by the play of an inside that opens onto an outside” (135). New materialist theories reveal the elision of boundaries among different bodies of matter. Hannah Bergthaller’s “Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from Systems-Theoretical Perspective” shows how entities are always already embedded in complex systems having agency beyond the “halo” of human telos (2014, 38). Providing a brief overview of autopoiesis, from biology and cognition to social ecology and material ecocriticism, Bergthaller points out how systems can self-organize, assimilate, and demonstrate both “emergent and distributed” agency apart from what we think of as individual volition or “external determination” (37). “The new materialists,” Bergthaller comments, “rightly remind us that humans are not really ‘individuals,’ that they are not ‘indivisible units’ but temporary confederacies of material agents of different kinds and sizes (many of which, one should add, constitute autopoietic systems in their own right)” (48). As we see in Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining of flesh, which operates through the fabric of perception, matter is enmeshed in complexity far beyond cognitive measure. In “The Linnet’s Petition,” the moment Stella feels the “strange extasy” upon catching the bird, the bird is giving itself in a form of resistance (70). The human and the animal are interconnecting well beyond cognitive perception.  “The Linnet’s Petition” is also a mimetic response to “The Mouse’s Petition.” Robinson began writing poetry in her early teens, but in her Memoirs, she recounts how much Barbauld’s poetry influenced her: “I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures” (qtd. in Feldman 590). 6

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Those “confederacies of material agents” are at work through the inter-animality of perception (Bergthaller 2014, 48; Merleau-Ponty 2003, 189). This encounter elicits a “strange kinship” that highlights an uncanny embodiment, which is fleeting, as Stella’s perception of her feeling evolves into the cognition of “never [knowing] so great a bliss, /As when she set him free” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 271; Robinson 2000, 71–72). Throughout the poem, Robinson creates a tension between animality and humanity that forces her human subject to recognize the linnet’s agency in its own right. The linnet outlines several reasons why he should not be ordained to such a “fate” (18). By revealing to her his loss of happiness, condemned to “despair” and “every joy bereft,” the linnet sets in motion a kind of reverse sympathetic identification (49, 52). Instead of directly encouraging her to imagine a similar fate, he beckons her to pity his “unhappy” circumstance: “So may you never feel the loss, /Of peace, or liberty” (57, 59–60). The linnet doesn’t wish upon her the same fate. Instead, he points out that her actions could have much larger ramifications. His story unfolds a history of species superiority that, at least for a brief moment, forces the human subject to open herself to a much broader horizon of experience. In “Toward an Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty,” Rosalyn Diprose (2009) investigates intercorporeality as ethical possibility in a posthuman world. Considering the symbolic nature of corporeality in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, she notes how the intertwining of life (of the human and nonhuman) serves as a perceptual event that can enable humans to be more receptive to moments of entanglement with the nonhuman: “While Merleau-Ponty does not elaborate, we could conjecture that, as an ethical principle, ‘wonder’ involves being receptive to the multiplicity of becomings encountered in our entanglements, and, to take up his work on the ‘event,’ being receptive to the transformations other entities or persons effect in us” (15).7 Here, Diprose is referring specifically to a comment Merleau-­ Ponty makes about wonder, but her point speaks to the ethical implications of receptivity, reciprocity, and responsibility. The plea that Robinson’s linnet makes beckons his mistress to encounter what Merleau-Ponty deems a “participation in and kinship with the visible” (1968, 138). The linnet causes Stella to experience “[e]ach tender feeling wrought” (64). Stella must physically experience her imposition reflected back to her—at least for an instance. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]hat the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh” (1968, 127). Robinson’s linnet, in other words, galvanizes an entanglement that exposes the hypocrisy species supremacy, thereby enabling the human to witness its “anthropocentric arrogance” (Westling 2014, 5). Similarly, in “To the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection,” Smith demonstrates how knowledge of nonhuman others is severely compromised when seen only through a human lens without regard to their ecological embeddedness. Her speaker, with “kindred merit,” laments the death of a Jamaican firefly, now existing

 Diprose’s comment here refers to a passage in “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work” (15, note 54). 7

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in isolation, as spectacle for the cabinets of the curiosi (70).8 Musing upon the firefly, now alienated from its natural habitat, she journeys through an imaginary tour of its native land, highlighting the scenes upon which this firefly’s bioluminescence no longer shines: “How art thou alter’d! since afar, /Thou seem’dst a bright earth wandering star; /When thy living lustre ran” (1–3). She goes on to explore a myriad of tree and plant species, through which, when alive, the firefly may have flown: “majestic trees,” such as “Guazume” (Theobroma guazuma, [or the] Great Cedar of Jamaica)* or “Swietan” (Mahogani)*; the savory quality of “Pimento’s” (Myrtus Pimento, [or] Jamaica All-spice)* “glossy green”; “rustling fields of maize and cane” (Saccharum officinarum)*; “Granate’s” (Punica granata, [or] Pomegranate)* “scarlet buds”; cocoa’s “avenue”; “the green Banana’s head” (Musa Paradisiacus, [or] Plantain or Banana)* or “Shaddock’s loaded bough [a.k.a. “forbidden fruit]”*; or the aromatic “wave” of “Coffee’s” (Coffea arabica)* “fragrant bough”; “Plumeria’s” (Tree Jasmin)* “luscious bloom”; or “Plinia’s” (Plinia pedunculata)* “mild perfume” (4, 5, 6, 12, 16, 38, 40, 13, 15, 16).9 By honing in on a Caribbean environment teeming with diversity, Smith’s speaker emphasizes the sheer emptiness resonant in this disembodied firefly, thereby underscoring the grave necessity of studying nonhuman animals or organisms in their own environments. Furthermore, “To the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection” invokes the absence of Umwelt, or what Jakob von Uexküll deems as the symbiotic relationship between an animal and its environment. Put differently, Smith has to recreate an Umwelt of which the firefly is conspicuously absent. An organism is best understood when taking into consideration the environment in which it operates and to which it responds. Uexküll claims, “We no longer regard animals as mere objects, but as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting” (qtd. in Buchanen 2008, 2). In Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-­ Ponty, and Deleuze, Brett Buchanen (2008) explores how Umwelten are enmeshed within a “symphony underscored by rhythms and melodies,” consisting of an “artful play of interconnections” that reaches “outward for greater accompaniment” (28).10 Contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Umwelt in The Structure of Behavior, Buchanen further notes that the openness of the Umwelt, and not the infinity of the world, is the hidden source and ontological horizon of the embodied animal subject” (115). Smith’s firefly, now divorced from its Jamaican habitat and decontextualized within a display of “vaunting OSTENTATION,” becomes an object of instrumental value—a remain for human use—but whose intrinsic ecological value is extinguished (65). In other terms, effective ethology presupposes structural ontologies interacting with environmental phenomena, and as Smith’s poem demonstrates, taking the  The eighteenth-century term for people who collected rare specimens on a fairly wide scale is “curiosi” (sg. curioso). 9  Smith carefully footnotes the Latin names. The asterisks denote Smith’s footnoted terms, which I have not included in quotation marks so as not to confuse citations from the verse. 10  In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[e]very organism,” said Uexküll “is a melody that sings unto itself” (159). 8

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firefly out of the milieu in which it operates and to which it responds negates scientific and aesthetic integrity: “Never Naturalist shall view, /Dart with coruscation bright” (36–37). The collector’s cabinet cannot recreate the biodiversity of which the firefly used to be a part. Smith shows how the natural historian is alienated from accurate study, equipped only with a “faded form” to which “no spark remains” (49, 50). Conversely, Smith’s speaker acknowledges a “kindred merit” with the firefly, one that invokes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “strange kinship” (Smith 1993, 70; Merleau-Ponty 2003, 271). She feels its estrangement and alienation. With Smith, we find this “merit” rooted in marginalization of gender, as well (70). As many scholars, such as Theresa M. Kelley, Donna Landry, and Mary Ellen Bellanca have noted, eighteenth-century women writers were excluded from canonical science, but they, nonetheless, took up natural history in their writing and art, providing alternative views about the natural world; they “demonstrated that poetry could also be natural history” (Landry 2000, 489).11 With remorse, Smith’s female speaker pays tribute to the firefly’s essence, and like her own “modest worth,” as poet, “[u]nmark’d, unhonor’d, and unknown,” she presents a kinship that dignifies nonhuman worth or merit (67, 68). Ironically, Smith’s poetry is the naturalist’s best access to the firefly’s existence. Only through poetic representation, which invokes an imaginary journey through the senses, can the naturalist observe the nonhuman individual that once was. By commemorating the Jamaican firefly in a poetic Umwelt, equipped with Linnaean binominal taxonomy and detailed notes, Smith offers a “corporeal schema” that is, perhaps, more posthumanist than humanist (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 208, 224, 225). Smith’s “kindred merit,” Robinson’s “strange extasy,” and Barbauld’s “fellowship of sense” all place the human on an ontological spectrum of embodiment that breaks down the dialectic between human and nonhuman (Smith 1993, 70; Robinson 2000, 70; Barbauld 1994, 27). In effect, these writers level hierarchies implicit in Enlightenment humanism, firmly entrenched in Cartesian dualism, Baconian science, and Newtonian physics, and invite us to reconsider their poetry through a posthumanist lens and ethics of understanding. By focusing on the intertwining of fleshy encounters, Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith acknowledge a kinship that is accountable to the world; it is relational and embedded (Braidotti 2013, 49). This kinship, existing within vast a fabric of being, is both strange and familiar, something to be experienced but never truly known. The Ineinander, rests, as Merleau-­ Ponty notes, in a “projection-introspection” (1968, 133). For British women Romantic-era writers, the poetic imagination was word made flesh. David Abram (2010) notes so eloquently,

 For example, Theresa M. Kelley notes how Smith incorporates and challenges Linnaean nomenclature by disabling its “rigid binomialism” with common names (239). Mary Ellen Bellanca notes how Dorothy Wordsworth, “[l]ike other women writers” “used anthropomorphism to imagine feeling for, and confer subjectivity on, other living things” (134). Furthering Lawrence Buell’s concept of “dual accountability,” Bellanca notes how nature journals constituted “an intricate triangle of observers’ perceptions, cultural beliefs, and reference to material reality” (41). 11

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To acknowledge this affinity between air and awareness, however, is to allow this curious possibility: that the awareness that stirs within each of us is continuous with the wider awareness that moves around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds. Every organism partakes of this awareness from its own unique angle and place within it, imbibing it through our nostrils or through the stomata in our leaves, altering its chemistry and quality within us before we breathe it back into the surrounding world. (223)

We, humans, have so much to learn about this continuity. And Barbauld’s, Robinson’s, and Smith’s poetry, like many poems of the Romantic era, invite us to perceive reciprocal relations of embodiment, Ineinander with the nonhuman, and imagine beyond the boundaries of the human (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 214).

References Abram, David. 2010. In the Depths of a Breathing Planet: Gaia and the Transformation of Experience. In Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, ed. Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, 221–242. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. 2007. Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bergthaller, Hannes. 2014. Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn form a Systems-­ Theoretical Perspective. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 37–50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buchanen, Brett. 2008. Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press. De Waal, Frans. 2009. An Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New  York: Three Rivers Press. Diprose, Rosalyn. 2009. Toward an Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-­ Ponty. Parrhesia 8: 7–19. Economides, Louise. 2016. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. New York: Palgrave. Feldman, Paula R., ed. 1997. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Grundy, Isobel. 2014. ‘Slip-shod Measure’ and ‘Language of Gods’: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range. In Anna Letitia Barbauld: New perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy, 23–36. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Guirfa, Martin. 2013. Cognition with Few Neurons: Higher-order Learning in Insects. Trends in Neuroscience 36 (5): 285–294. Iovino, Serenella. 2016. Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism: Introduction. Relations: Beyond Anthropomorphism 4 (1): 11–20. Kelley, Theresa M. 2003. Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and ‘Material’ Culture. In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman, 223–254. Albany: SUNY Press. Landry, Donna. 2000. Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807. Huntington Library Quarterly 63 (4): 467–489.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes form the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2008. Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals. Epoché 13 (1): 101–120. Otter, Alice G.  Den. 2004. Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and ‘The Caterpillar’. Studies in Romanticism 43 (2): 209–230. Robinson, Mary. 2000. Selected Poems. In Peterborough, ed. Judith Pascoe. Broadview: Canada. Silberstein, Michael. 2015. Matter, Mind and Meaning. Lecture. Filmed October 12, 2015 at Wesleyan University. http://videos.wesleyan.edu/detail/video/4568092549001. Accessed 30 Apr 2016. Smith, Charlotte. 1993. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press. Toadvine, Ted. 2009. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Webb, Barbara. 2012. Cognition in Insects. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 367: 2715–2722. Westling, Louise. 2014. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Part III

Body, Culture and Society

The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s Idea of Psychical Distance from the Perspective of Levinas’s Concept of the Aesthetic Miloš Ševčík

Abstract  In this paper, I analyse Edward Bullough’s standard concept of psychical distance as a general aesthetic principle from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the aesthetic. First of all, I point to the peculiarities of Bullough’s own description of psychical distance. He emphasizes that distanced content, that is, the content of aesthetic phenomena, comes upon us as a “revelation,” which is neither subjective nor objective, neither individual nor general, neither personal nor indifferent. Distanced content is thus outside the correlation, which forms experience as emerging from subjective intention to an object. Further, I point out that Levinas describes such a revelation of the “outside” as “exoticism” of the aesthetic event. This exoticism means extracting a thing from the realm of objects, which is the world, and suspending the relationship between the thing and the subject. I, however, also highlight Bullough’s statements that with a distanced attitude, we interpret affections as characteristics of phenomena that have a “postulating” character. Such a view is, surprisingly, compatible with Levinas’s idea of the essential aesthetic category of rhythm. My intention is thus to demonstrate that Bullough sensitively circumscribed the fundamental features of the aesthetic, which are recorded by Levinas. Keywords  Bullough · Levinas · Art · Aisthesis · Exoticism · Distance It is fair to say that Edward Bullough’s essay “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” (Bullough 1912) is a canonical work of twentieth-­ century aesthetics. Various ideas of this essay have been interpreted and employed in aesthetic theories many times. Some have criticized and rejected Bullough’s statements; some have shown the stimulating nature of Bullough’s concept despite its limitations and, sometimes, obscurity; others have tried to employ Bullough’s concept productively, and have been profoundly approving, though seeking to make M. Ševčík (*) Charles University, Prague, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_9

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Bullough’s solution to the problems of psychical distance more precise and persuasive or trying to apply it in directions that were omitted by Bullough himself. The most famous campaign against the concept of psychical distance was led by George Dickie (1964). Allan Casebier (1971) sought to employ the concept productively when he differentiated between emotional and attentional distance with respect to a work of art. Sheila Dawson (1961) had a highly positive and welcoming response to the concept. The variety of approaches to Bullough’s concept of psychical distance suggests, on the one hand, the noteworthiness of this theory, its persuasiveness, fair-­ sightedness, and profundity, and, on the other hand, its intricacy and ambiguity. In my paper I follow several remarkable passages of Bullough’s essay, which may serve as a new basis for the interpretation of Bullough’s theory. My interpretation goes beyond what Bullough explicitly says in some passages of his essay; however, this interpretation highlights what is suggested by other claims of Bullough and, mainly, by the manner he employs – and also his refusal, as I seek to demonstrate – to use the fundamental terms. My intention is to show that the specific manner Bullough employs and refuses the fundamental terms points to the fact that what is psychically distanced is beyond the subjective and the objective. I argue that what is psychically distanced is thus exotic, as Levinas says when describing the nature of aesthetic event. To present the fundamental features of his theory of psychical distance Bullough uses the example of a passenger on a ship surrounded by dense fog. The situation of the passenger is, on the one hand, a source of fear and worry, because it is potentially or even actually dangerous, but, on the other hand, this situation becomes the source of intense aesthetic enjoyment, if the psychical distance starts to take effect. The key part of Bullough’s description of the passenger’s situation is as follows: It is a difference of outlook, due – if such a metaphor is permissible – to the insertion of distance. This distance appears to lie between our own self and its affections, using the latter term in its broadest sense as anything which affects our being, bodily or spiritually, e.g., as sensation, perception, emotional state or idea. Usually, though not always, it amounts to the same thing to say that the Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are the sources or vehicles of such affections. Thus, in the fog, the transformation by Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self – by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends – in short, by looking at it “objectively,” as it has often been called, by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the “objective” features of the experience, and by interpreting even our “subjective” affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon (Bullough 1912, 89).

From a certain point of view, an interpretation could be offered which would highlight the fact that, because of the intervention of psychical distance, the person’s mental perspective is broadened since phenomena and their corresponding affections are disconnected from the practical self, from the needs or aims of the practical self. In such an interpretation, the aesthetic self thus remains; it is different from the practical self and emerges because of the distancing of the practical self from objects

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and affections. According to such an interpretation, the aesthetic self looks at things and feels affections objectively, that is, with no relation to the practical purposes of the usual self. But it is clear that whereas in the first part of the cited passage, the presence of the self, that is, the personality, is admitted, in the second part of the passage, the presence of the self is called into question by putting the subjective nature of affections into quotation marks. In this passage, it is also suggested that, with distance, affections should be attributed to phenomena rather than to personality. The objectivity of phenomena, however, is put into quotation as well, and this clearly indicates the inadequacy of this description. I conclude that because of distance, a situation emerges in which the employment of the terms “subjective” and “objective” is inadequate. I argue that, in this particular situation, Bullough is ascribing the central role to affection. On the one hand, the term “affection” is used to describe everything the subject experiences or conceives; but this term is also used to describe the movement of the expropriation of all experiences and mental creations of the subject. This expropriation is, after all, confirmed by Bullough in the passage which emphasizes that aesthetic experience has its centre of gravity not in the self, that is, the person or subject, but in itself, that is, in the experience or the object that mediates the experience. It is for this reason that “whether I like it” in matters concerning beauty is “like a somnambulist being called by name” (Bullough 1912, 108). Such a question, Bullough says, “throws the whole aesthetic mechanism out of gear” (Bullough 1912, 108–109). He then makes the following “paradoxical” statement: “the more intense the aesthetic experience, the less one ‘likes,’ consciously, the experience” (Bullough 1912, 109). So, according to this statement, the most intense aesthetic absorption is the less conscious; it is an experience similar to that of a somnambulist and not the experience of the actual or waking self. I would add, however, that it is highly questionable to discuss the somnambulist self as if it were endowed with powers similar to those of the waking, actual self, as if it were conscious of its experiences and feelings and able to conceive of notions or visions in the same way. Another way to put the question is: can beauty be considered an object of an experience, if that experience is gained by the conscious, waking, or actual self? I suppose that the answer must be no: it cannot. The suddenness or unexpectedness of the commencement of psychical distance and the nature of the emerging distanced sphere is reflected in Bullough’s term “revelation” (Bullough 1912, 90). On the one hand, this revelation consists in “impressions apart from our own self which is impressed” (Bullough 1912, 89), Bullough thus supposes that such impressions are not felt by the subject and can be described as subjective only if subjectivity is put into quotation marks. On the other hand, Bullough also suggests that revelation consists in aspects of objects, which “do not touch us immediately and practically” (Bullough 1912, 89). Thus, such aspects belong to objects “objectively” only if this objectivity is put into quotation marks, because such an objectivity of the revelation of aspects of objects is not compatible with the objectivity we approach as the practical or recognizing self or the subject.

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According to Bullough, such a revelation of the distanced sphere embraces various types of qualities of phenomena. In his famous example of the ship in dense fog, Bullough speaks about a “veil surrounding” the passenger “with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness” (Bullough 1912, 88). He also describes “the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger” (Bullough 1912, 88). He also suggests, however, that such a hypocritical denial is combined with the “strange solitude and remoteness from the world” (Bullough 1912, 88–89). Finally, he claims that this remoteness from the world may, in its “uncanny mingling of repose and terror,” acquire “a flavour of concentrated poignancy and delight” (Bullough 1912, 89). I would emphasize that, in this description of Bullough’s, the aspects of a situation which we would tend to classify as objective are mingled with the aspects that we would tend to term as subjective. But the qualities peculiar to such a situation cannot properly be ascribed either to objective relations or to subjective states. The situation affects the passenger as a revelation which does not relate to him or her as to the self of practical or theoretical activity or the self of affective experience. The situation, then, goes beyond the correlation of the subjective and the objective. In this description of Bullough’s, qualities of colors and shapes are mingled with affections of delight and terror; the qualities of the situation are thus both subjective and objective, that is, they are subjective and objective only in quotation marks; otherwise they are neither objective nor subjective. According to Bullough, the qualities of the situation establish relations that go beyond relations observable from the perspective of the subject both in the objective and the subjective domain. Going beyond both the objective and the subjective in the distanced sphere in this way is repeatedly emphasized in Bullough’s essay. For example: no work of Art can be genuinely “objective” in the sense in which this term might be applied to a work on history or to a scientific treatise; nor can it be “subjective” in the ordinary acceptance of that term, as a personal feeling, a direct statement of a wish or belief, or a cry of passion is subjective. “Objectivity” and “subjectivity” are a pair of opposites which in their mutual exclusiveness when applied to Art soon lead to confusion (Bullough 1912, 90).

The reality of art could thus be conceived as ambiguous, neither subjective nor objective. But Bullough’s claims in this essay indicate that he intends to conceive of the situation of distance not as ambiguous, but as simple. It seems that the ambiguity of this situation is suggested by the unsuitability of the traditional terms Bullough uses. He is clearly struggling to demonstrate that it is necessary to dismiss inherited, traditional terminological pairs and to regard the distance as something that merges traditional dichotomies because it surpasses them. He says: “Art has with equal vigour been declared alternately ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic,’ ‘sensual’ and ‘spiritual,’ ‘individualistic’ and ‘typical’. Between the defense of either terms of such antitheses most aesthetic theories have vacillated. It is one of the contentions of this essay that such opposites find their synthesis in the more fundamental conception of Distance” (Bullough 1912, 90).

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For example, Bullough states that “the appeal of Art is sensuous, even sensual, must be taken as an indisputable fact”; but such a ‘sensuousness of Art’ is freed from the “grossly personal and practical elements” by the action of Distance (Bullough 1912, 107). Bullough says that the “sensual side of Art” is “purified, spiritualized, ‘filtered’ by Distance” (Bullough 1912, 107). The “transmutation” by Distance (Bullough 1912, 107), which Bullough speaks of, means the development of the spiritual on the basis of the sensuous; the penetration of the appeal of the spiritual is derived from the unfiltered sensuous in its personal and practical appeal, but such a sensuous is filtered by distance. The distance thus creates a sphere that is outside the spiritual and the sensuous as traditionally conceived, the sphere where the spiritual and the sensuous are undistinguishable from each other or, rather, where something different from both the spiritual and the sensuous appeals. If Bullough’s statements are taken at face value, the sphere created by distance is out of reach both of spirit as an ability to generate immaterial realities as thoughts, notions, and images and of the ability to intend practically and personally bodily objects. I would emphasize that a similar analysis could be conducted on other pairs of contradictory terms, from which Bullough intends to delimitate the distanced sphere. Clearly, Bullough has serious difficulty presenting the simplicity of the nature of the distanced sphere. This difficulty becomes particularly evident, for example, when he approaches the problem of the relationship between the general and the concrete. He returns to this problem several times, as if he senses that the solution he has come up with were insufficient. In one passage of the essay, he opposes generality in art, and identifies it with undesirable abstractness; in other passage, he renders the generality of art as being in opposition to abstractness, and he states that such generality is fundamentally connected with art. Bullough thus ascribes to art the non-abstract, or in fact the non-general generality, together with individuality free from personal concreteness. I certainly do not wish to say that it is impossible to find in Bullough’s investigation something different from what I have just sought to emphasize, or even contradictory to what I have sought to highlight. The intricacy and incompleteness of Bullough’s statements present the interpreter with a task that can be discharged in many different ways. It is even probable that Bullough himself would view with suspicion the interpretation that I have tried to suggest. After all, he conceives of distance as psychical; he speaks of distance as the “essential characteristic of aesthetic consciousness,” as a “special mental attitude towards the experience,” and as an “outlook” upon experience (Bullough 1912, 118). From such expressions, one could easily derive the assumption that the subject-object relation or correlation is the fundament of any discussion on distance. Nevertheless, I would argue, the special intellectual sensitivity or clairvoyant intuition, which is perhaps typical of ingenious thinkers, led Bullough a bit farther. He is constantly dissatisfied with all the terms he uses, as if what he wanted to grasp by means of these terms (which he both uses and shows to be problematic) remained ungraspable. I wish now to show that Bullough’s original, clairvoyant concept of psychical distance is surprisingly similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s description of the aesthetic event and that such a similarity could be observed in several respects. I highlight

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that both thinkers emphasize the expulsion of subjectivity from the process and results of artistic creation, and they show that such a creation has a postulating nature. At the most general level it should be emphasized that if the distanced sphere emerges as a revelation detached both from object and subject, then this revelation is outside the common correlation by which the experience is formed and outside the intentionality of the subject towards the object. The revelation of such an outside is described by Levinas as the revelation of the “exoticism” of the aesthetic event. In his Existence and Existents (Levinas 2001), published in 1947, Levinas states that the “exoticism” of art or of the aesthetic event in general is identical with extracting things from the realm of objects and suspending the relationship between the thing and the subject. Levinas says: Things refer to an inwardness as parts of the given world, objects of knowledge or objects of use, caught up in the current of practice where their alterity is hardly noticeable. Art makes them stand out from the world and thus extracts them from this belongingness to a subject. […] What is called the disinterestedness of art does not only refer to the neutralization of the possibilities of action. Exoticism modifies the contemplation itself. The “objects” are outside, but this outside does not relate to an “interior”; they are not already naturally “possessed”. A painting, a statue, a book are objects of our world, but through them the things represented are extracted from our world (Levinas 2001, 46).

In his concept of the exotic, Levinas approaches the nature of the relation of the artistic “representation” to the world. Things are part of our world, but they are extracted from our world by means of artistic representation. The nature of artistic production thus lies in extraction, in the presentation of things without any relation to the objective pole of experience and any relation to the subject as well. Levinas describes this extraction as an absence of forms, because forms transmute exteriority into inwardness. Colors, sounds, or the world of the artwork do not refer to objects, do not cover objects that are graspable and conceivable by subject; on the contrary, they uncover things in their exotic exteriority. It is precisely in this absence of the transmutation of the exteriority into inwardness that the aesthetic event emerges. This absence of the appropriation of an object by a subject is described as aisthesis, sensation (Levinas 2001, 46–47). Sensation does not lead to the objective order, and for that reason also presents an obstacle to the establishment of the “subjective order” (Levinas 2001, 47). In this context, Levinas points out that the endeavor to preserve true exoticism in the artistic sphere is identical with the strict removal of the “servile function of expression” of the personality from the artwork. The artistic sphere is the result of the expulsion of the expression of the soul of the artist or the soul of the “landscape or things” (Levinas 2001, 49). I point out that similar references to the expulsion of the soul or of inwardness from the aesthetic sphere also appear in Bullough’s considerations on psychical distance. He emphasizes that artistic production is neither the direct nor the indirect expression of the artist’s personality (Bullough 1912, 113); it is not a reflection of the artist’s “experiences or convictions” (Bullough 1912, 114). It is a “fundamental” mistake, he says, “to identify straightway the artist and the man”. Bullough says that such identification does not correspond to the “interpolation of Distance” which lies

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between the conception of the artist and the conception of man (Bullough 1912, 114). Such a nonhuman nature of the artist and his or her production is illustrated by the example of the process of dramatic production. Bullough emphasizes that in this process that the fundamental difference and incongruity occurs between the “emotional idea” (that is usually suggested by the actual experience) and the dramatic “situation” that is made up of the “interplay of certain characters” (Bullough 1912, 115). During this process, the “man’s” emotional idea – that is, the reflection of a concrete and practical self  – “condenses itself” into a dramatic situation, or is “sucked up” by the characters (Bullough 1912, 116). But the artist is altogether “powerless to direct or even to influence” (Bullough 1912, 115) this process. In this respect the artist is a passive participant in the process of production. The life of this passive artist is incompatible with the life of the active man; when the man dies, the artist is born. The result of this change is the “distanced finished production,” the artist’s sphere “divorced” from “actuality” (Bullough 1912, 116). In this divorce, the “personal affections”– “whether idea or complex experience” – are “separated from concrete personality,” are filtered by the “extrusion of its personal aspects” and by the “throwing out of gear of its personal potency and significance” (Bullough 1912, 116). The artist’s sphere includes filtered and thus intensively appealing affections. The reason for this intensive appeal is that distanced affections are free from a restrictive connection with the personality of an artist and the actuality of the models of artistic production. Concerning the artist’s inability to control or even to influence the process of modeling it, however, the artist’s sphere is akin to the sphere of the spectator of art. The distanced sphere is endowed with a particular “quality” of appeal, which is inherent in the relation both of the artist and the spectator to art (Bullough 1912, 117). Bullough says that this relation of “mere beholder” or “producing artist” is “impersonal” and thus “personally intensive” (Bullough 1912, 117). The appeal of the distanced sphere is of a “postulating character” because it is beyond the “sphere of individual interests” both of the artist and the spectator (Bullough 1912, 117). This intensive, postulating appeal of art, which is neither subjective nor objective, does not concern the personality of the artist or the spectator. This postulating nature of the impersonal aesthetic sphere is also suggested by Bullough’s considerations of on the aesthetic appreciation of color. He argues that aesthetic appreciation differs from the appreciation of color, which relates to the personal enjoyment of the “organic” effects of color (Bullough 1912, 110). If this type of appreciation prevails, anyone, when asked why he or she likes a certain color, will reply that it is because the color strikes him or her as “warm or cold, stimulating or soothing, heavy or light” (Bullough 1912, 110). The aesthetic appreciation of color, by contrast, does not result from such organic effects and personal enjoyment. In aesthetic appreciation, the qualities of colors are attributed with a “kind of personality”; they are “energetic, lively, serious, pensive, melancholic, affectionate, subtle, reserved, stealthy, treacherous, brutal” (Bullough 1912, 110). For Bullough such “characters” of colors are neither “mere imaginings,” nor “accidental associations”; they “follow definite rules in their application” (Bullough 1912, 110). In aesthetic appreciation, organic effects are transformed into

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“attributes of colours” (Bullough 1912, 110). By means of “distancing,” personal affections are transformed into impersonal ones, into affections of colors. In the aesthetic sphere, affections and qualities are attributed with personality even though such affections and qualities, of course, have no real personality. Such an attributed impersonal personality even postulates the way it is characterized. I propose that a parallel emphasis on the postulating character of the aesthetic sphere is also present in Levinas’s considerations of rhythm. Rhythm is a general aesthetic category, because it captures a fundamental feature of the aesthetic sphere; it expresses the fundamental passivity of both the artist and the recipient of the artwork. In his 1948 essay “Reality and its Shadow”, Levinas maintains: “Rhythm represents a unique situation, in which we cannot speak of consent, assumption, or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is a part of its own representation” (Levinas 1989, 132–133) According to Levinas, this catching up and carrying away occurs not “despite” subject, because in rhythm there is no longer a subject; rather it occurs in the “passage” from subject to “anonymity” (Levinas 1989, 133). Rhythm is not unconscious, because its automatic character remains “present”; but it is not conscious either, because, in rhythm, consciousness is “paralyzed in its freedom,” “totally absorbed in the playing” (Levinas 1989, 133) According to Levinas, rhythm thus reveals that the aesthetic sphere is “outside the conscious and the unconscious,” because it is a sphere of the objective position of the subject or a sphere of the “exteriority of the inward” (Levinas 1989, 133). The fundamental passivity of participating in the subordination to rhythm is evident in the recipient, who dances to a song, listens to poetry, or admires a picture. But it is also present in the artist. The “possessed or inspired,” maker of a song, a poem, or a picture “listens to a muse”. Levinas argues that what is called the “artist’s choice” is the natural selection of facts and traits. The artistic creation is governed by its artist’s freely taken decision; it is “solicited” by rhythm emerging in reality (Levinas 1989, 133). Rhythm always resounds “impersonally” (Levinas 1989, 133). But the impersonal nature of rhythm is different from objectivity, which, by contrast, is graspable and conceivable, because the aesthetic sphere insists on the absence of the object, as if the “object had died, were degraded, were disincarnated’ (Levinas 1989, 136). The representation is broken up both in classical works, which are only seemingly attached to objects, and in modern works, which purposively destroy objects because they want to be “pure painting” or “pure poetry” (Levinas 1989, 134). Similarly to Levinas, Bullough emphasizes the postulating character of the distanced sphere as a fundamental feature of both the artist’s and the spectator’s contact with this sphere. The overwhelming appeal of the aesthetic sphere cannot be correctly described using the traditional terminological opposites, because it goes beyond both subjectivity and objectivity, and also beyond both the individual nature of experiences and the abstract nature of concepts. I have tried to demonstrate that Bullough insistently suggests that the nature of the distanced sphere lies somewhere between these opposites; yet he offers no new terms for a more suitable description of this “in between” area. These terms, however, are provided by later thinkers, of whom Levinas seems to be one of the most

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significant. My suggestion from this point view is that the distanced sphere, as described by Bullough, is exotic in the sense of in between the subjective and the objective, or rather outside of the subjective and the objective. The distanced sphere is the sphere of the revelation of aisthesis.

References Bullough, Edward. 1912. ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle. British Journal of Psychology 5 (2): 87–118. Casebier, Allan. 1971. The concept of Aesthetic Distance. Personalist 52: 70–91. Dawson, Sheila. 1961. ‘Distancing’ as an Aesthetic Principle. Australian Journal of Philosophy 39: 155–174. Dickie, George. 1964. The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude. America Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1): 56–65. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Reality and its Shadow. In The Levinas Reader. Edited by Séan Hand. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, 130–143. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2001. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love Abigail Hess

Abstract  In Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love, the freaks do not hide. Geeks are sideshow performers who are the result of human interest in the manipulation of bodies. Dunn’s exploration of the human perception of freakish bodies should be studied in the context of posthumanism, which requires to give the body a more crucial role as the vehicle for perception of the spaces through which it moves. Particularly, I am writing to join the posthuman conversation to Dunn’s work using ideas primarily originating from thinkers who were influential to modern posthuman studies, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault as well as Carey Wolfe, Katherine Hayes, and Donna Haraway who are actively engaged in the posthuman discussion and have taken the chance to distinguish posthuman thought from other forms of literary criticism. By delving into the alignment of social and physical spaces through which freakish bodies exist and disappear, where they are safe and where they are in danger, we can we further understand what it means to be human. Keywords  Dematerialization · Embodied experience · Reflexivity · Hayles · Foucault · Freakshow · Merleau-Ponty The presentation of freakish bodies in carnivals and sideshows used to be quite common but began to disappear as medicinal science found names and causes for many of the performers’ conditions. Audiences have experienced guilt and discomfort at viewing individuals who could now be considered handicapped or exploited by show managers. The movement of the freakish body from performative stages to disguised, hidden states within communal space takes a similar course to thinker Michel Foucault’s (1977) study of how punishment moved its focus away from the body to the mind—or soul—in the “non-corporal system” of the shadow box prison (16). In Katherine Dunn’s (1983) novel Geek Love, the freakish body is transferred back onto a public stage, portraying bodies that are bestial, surgically altered and A. Hess (*) Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_10

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preserved. Dunn pushes her characters and their bodies to their extremes until they are almost unrecognizable as human, testing for the fragile stitching where the freakish body is allowed to be observed and where it should be hidden. In doing so, she explores the spaces of inclusion and exclusion of the freakish body, which pushes the boundaries of social acceptance and pushes freakish bodies into the realm of isolation. Dunn’s novel resists the modern American cry for the polite protection of the disfigured that ultimately leads them to seclusion. Although her frank and unrelenting writing makes readers uncomfortable, by keeping the tortured body centered, in visceral detail, Dunn reveals hidden social systems through which the body is punished today. This punishment echoes the works of Michel Foucault, whose idea is important for the analysis of Geek Love. But before Foucault wrote about the panopticon of the prison, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) wrote Phenomenology of Perception and discusses many ideas of the body and its crucial role in human experience eventually used by posthumanism. He advocates for the body as a prerequisite for a conscious understanding of the self, soul, and true method for interacting with the world. He asks, “Can I not find in the body some threads that the internal organs send to the brain and that are instituted by nature in order to give the soul the opportunity to sense its body?” (78). For Merleau-Ponty, we must search for this method of perception that takes the body into consciousness, an introspection of the physical. Otherwise, we are doomed to an existence where “Consciousness of the body and of the soul are thereby repressed, and the body again becomes that highly polished machine that the ambiguous notion of behavior had almost made us forget” (78). Ultimately inspiring Michel Foucault, who eventually popularized embodiment, Merleau-Ponty’s writing is crucial as we understand how the bodily experience, especially the estranged experience within a freakish body like those of Dunn’s characters, tell us more about humanity as they move through the world. Foucault agrees with Merleau-Ponty that the body has a crucial role to play in determining the consciousness of life and self. Rather than focusing on the body as the perceiver, Foucault is interested in the ways the body has been used as a subject to be perceived. Part one of Michel Foucault’s (1977) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison is called “Torture” and is broken into two chapters, “The Body of the Condemned” and “The Spectacle of the Scaffold”. In his introduction Foucault recounts a particularly violent public execution of an individual who is burned, torn apart with metal forceps, drawn and quartered, and then burned again. He doesn’t leave out the excruciating details of how the executioner struggled to rip apart the strips of skin and muscle or how the horses were not strong enough to quarter the body and the executioners had to saw the limbs to start them off (3–4). Foucault (1977) places this vivid example in the forefront of his reader’s mind and then traces the history of the movement from public execution and torture to the impenetrable modern prison system where punishment is blocked from the public eye and operates separate from it. Public punishment was deemed to be grotesque, offensive, and a social recreation of the criminal’s crimes. And so, once moved to the shadow box of the prison, punishment became “a less immediately physical kind” (8) that shifted its focus from the body and “physical pain” (8) to an

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amorphous idea that uses the body as an “instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property” (4–9). For Foucault, there is also a tremendous, if not equal, horror in moving punishment away from the body to the mind—or soul—in this new “non-corporal system” (16). Dunn’s (1983) Geek Love is packed with freakish bodies either born fantastic, or created by the Binewski family themselves through genetic manipulation. Olympia Binewski, the narrator, is an albino-hunchback-dwarf born from one of her parents’ experiments with self-selection. Her mother consumes a regimen of chemicals and other drugs during gestation in the hopes of creating a sideshow freak, interesting enough for a single-act in the family carnival. Alas, Olympia is deemed ugly by her family’s standards, but is not freakish enough to have her own show like her flipper-­ limbed brother Arturo, the Aqua Boy, or her twin Siamese sisters Iphy and Elly. And so, she must prove her devotion to her family and their Fabulon by finding her own unique talent, using her alluring voice to draw in the crowd as an apprentice to her father, the outside barker whose role is to attract an audience from the midway into the freak show tent. While Mrs. and Mr. Binewski have no physical deformities of their own, their children cannot easily hide their unique bodies in public. Even though Olympia does disguise herself in public life as a grown woman with a hat, glasses, and “goat wig” (Dunn 1983, 12) she still gets stares from passersby on her daily route to work. In Merleau-Ponty’s introduction of Phenomenology of Perception, he acknowledges the limits of embodied perception and how he “can see one object insofar as objects form a system or a world, and insofar as each of them arranges the others around itself like spectators of its hidden aspects and as the guarantee of their permanence” (1945, 71). Because we live in a multi-dimensional world, we can only notice sides of objects, the outer shells and angles of passersby on the street. Understanding that there is more to perceive than what a single gaze allows helps to create the world in association with other passersby in the same plane. Although only part of Olympia can be perceived and although she covers most of her body while in public, her physical difference is still unmistakable. Bestial bodies are so misshapen from the normal human body that they are at once noticeable; they meet a threshold of change in shape that causes onlookers to gawk and disrupts passersby in action. Roger Lund explores the possible causes of the human disassociation from dwarfs, hunchbacks, and persons with physical deformities. He looks mostly at writings by authors and poets during the eighteenth century, which he calls a “callous” (2005, 92) age where mockery of the deformed was very common by persons of all classes and associations. Lund argues that deformed persons were considered inhuman during this time period because their bodies do not follow the argument of design, which dictates that nature “display[s] a visible and unmistakable beauty and order” (2005, 94). Because deformed bodies are often not symmetrical, they cause a disturbance in the observer’s view of nature and stand out annoyingly like a warp in a glass or a wrinkle in a shirt (2005, 94–95). The difference between a bestial body and a normal one, is that the shape is distorted enough to cause a repeated experience of disturbance.

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Thus, Olympia describes the stare of the passerby as the “ice moment” (Dunn 1983, 14) where the observer notices the freak, pauses, and is immediately ashamed at having done so. A similar experience happens when an observer passes a beggar. Eyes are diverted, and a sense of guilt is felt. However, the passerby feels guilt at the beggar for not donating money or offering any help, while the passerby of the freak feels guilt for noticing their existence in the first place, the fact that they are different from other unobtrusive bodies around them. This noticing is not a conscious mental act; instead, the experience is much like Taylor Carmen’s (2012) description in the forward of Phenomenology of Perception, it derives from “skillful bodily responsiveness and spontaneity in direct engagement with the world” (5). Somehow, the recognition of freakish bodies is highly attached to the normal plane of perception stationed by the structure of the body norm. Olympia is a dwarf, and because of this bodily deformity, her movement exists on a lower plane than that of most other passersby. In the same way that one might notice the swift movement of a mouse scurrying across the floor from the periphery, Olympia’s stature attracts attention with her isolated intersection across the bottom of the normative plane of sight. In Olympia’s description of this occurrence, thawing out of the ice moment involves sharing the experience with others and coming up with a reason for the interruption. They ask, where did these freaks come from? Olympia imagines they suppose her and her mother “are residents of an institutional halfway house, or that the circus is in town” (Dunn 1983, 14). Here, Olympia strikes upon two spaces in which the bestial body is expected to be found. The ice moment does not occur under settings where the bestial body is meant to be the primary focus. In what Merleau-Ponty (1945) calls the “object-horizon structure” (70) or perspective, Olympia’s body uses this structure as a means to recede into the background or unveil herself into the foreground. In the introduction to Phenomenology of Perception Donald Landes (2012) notes “the movements of the body or the apparent sizes of objects do not cause the structures of the visual field, but they motivate them” (39). Olympia’s difference in size and shape motivates her unveil. Because of her freakish body, she has less control of where and when she moves between the hidden and active lines of sight. In either case, because her figure is highly unique from those around her, she is ultimately isolated everywhere, whether she hides in the shadows or when she is drawn into the light. Lund (2005) notices that the eighteenth-century public culture was less guilty about laughing at physical deformity and traveling sideshows, which were much more popular than they are today. Dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins, the armless, and the limbless found wealth and security in displaying their unique bodies. Branded as anatomical wonders and dressed for high-class society, these freaks found employment where, otherwise, they would not be able to. As medicine advanced throughout the twentieth century, doctors found causes for the conditions of famous freaks like the pinheads or people with large growths or missing digits. Instead of marvels, freaks were more rightly deemed patients. And this understanding allowed for less bestial bodies to be born with advances in prenatal care. The sideshows all but disappeared as they offended the public’s collective sentimentality. Rachel Adams (2001) opens Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural

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Imagination by arguing that even “During the period of their decline, [sideshows] maintained a firm hold on the imaginations of many Americans who had visited them in better days. This imaginative afterlife gave rise to a certain paradox: as actual freak shows were evicted from culture, their representational currency multiplied, granting them symbolic importance” (2). Adams describes this afterlife as a world where the average person yearns to see the spectacular, the bally line, the freaks on stage. Cultural memory of the sideshows spikes curiosity, but shows themselves are gone and the proper space in which the masses are allowed to stare has been stripped away. In Dunn’s novel (1983), the freaks live during this time after the sideshows were no longer actively traveling across the country. The deformed are primarily civilians rather than performers and the average person does not see the bestial in public or daily life. The Binewski family lives normally within the confines of their trailer (the domestic home) or the sideshow (the stage). One day, when Mrs. Binewski tells her children that they will all go out to the store together, the eldest, Arty, asks her “Do you think it’s a good idea if we all go” (56)? He then makes a point to choose his wheelchair rather than the rubber pads for his belly that he uses to slither across the ground and clarifies, “It’s easier in public” (57). Arty knows he can’t use the mode of transportation that he prefers in his domestic life, because it will never have been seen before by the inhabitants of the outside word. His small comment foreshadows the extreme reaction from the social world. Dunn does not just re-invoke the ice moment, instead, one of the most commonplace public spaces—the store— becomes the most dangerous place for the freak children. As they get out of the family van, they are seen by another man in the parking lot who, horrified by the site of the creatures filing from the vehicle, grabs his gun and opens fire, trying to kill them all (58–59). There is blood and smoke, tears, a mother begs for her children’s safety, all narrated by Olympia when she was only six years old. The drastic change between spaces of safety and danger, of living and trespassing are immediately made apparent by the extremity of the situation. In this scene, Arturo, who chooses to publicize himself as being a combination of man and seal, morphs further into this hybridity as he senses the danger before it happens and is ultimately hunted like animals are. In What is Posthumanism, Wolfe (2010) acknowledges the posthuman interest in the human-animal relationship and argues that “we can no longer talk of the body or even, for that matter, of a body in the traditional sense” any longer (23). Dunn (1983) exaggerates this hybridity as the children are instantly mourned as both children and the hunted, freaks, and an endangered species. Though Dunn is not directly exploring the notion of posthumanism, this work could be important posthuman analysis as scenes like the parking lot shooting show how the freakish body’s movement through space changes characters from a human family to desperate animals. As the spaces become more dangerous, the characters morph from their confident personas as super-humans to sub-human prey. As an adult, Olympia travels the city alone, in semi-disguise, moving as quickly and quietly as possible. She spends time only at her work as a radio personality, where her body is invisible, and her home where she is solitary. While she grew up

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in the carnival, she could reveal herself freely, living within community of her family. There, her bodily presence was wanted and fit the pattern of randomness that a freak show provides. If Olympia and her brothers and sisters were to stand in a line up, the eyes focusing on them would move erratically across their drastically disparate heights, sizes, colors, and shapes. Within the randomness, Olympia could live in the background. Inside the city, she must actively work to change her appearance to go unseen. In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles (1999) writes of the conflicting experience of the “embodied” and “weightless” human experience, where individuals are familiar to their temporal and physical existence as well as a transcendent one “made possible in part by the near-instantaneous transfer of information from one point on the globe to any other” (394). She is wary of the trend to consider the weightless experience superior for its sense of freedom, unbound by time, space, and pain, and forewarns doe-eyed thinkers, arguing that there is an influential human “connection with direct sensory experience” (395) that would be lost in a completely unembodied existence. But as a radio voice, Olympia does this daily. She uses technology to assert her presence and spirit dissociated from her body. However, the physical world and city that she is a part of continues to exist outside of the radio studio. Each time she leaves the studio, her body rematerializes, only to wish she could hide herself again. Although Olympia is able to live, if only during working hours, as a bodiless voice, as information flowing though waves from the station’s tower, what she really needs, is to find a space when she can exist in safety, rather than a new medium through which to exist. One night, as she often would, Olympia secretly follows her daughter, Miranda, who is completely unaware of her heritage or her mother’s existence. This night, she goes to a strip club where Miranda works as a dancer. The club specializes in women with small deformities that are fetishized, like Miranda’s small pig’s tail at the base of her tailbone. There is a topless contest that night and in a savage moment, much like The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s contest for the Pope of Fools, Olympia is unwantedly pulled onto the stage and her bestial body is exposed (Dunn 1983, 18–21). In his second section of Torture, “The Spectacle of The Scaffold,” Foucault argues that the public execution needs to be “spectacular” and “seen by all almost as its triumph” (1977, 34) to be successful in its purpose, that being to scare off or warn the public of committing crimes. The stage creates a space where Olympia’s deformed body can become spectacular, as it is presented as a unique object worth viewing, rather than a disability that should not be identified: The college girl, dumbfounded, is still pumping away with her mouth open, her knees and arms still following an old order to dance, as her mind is pummeled by what I am, and what they have done to me, and wondering if I am in on it…How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born (Dunn 1983, 20).

Dunn (1983) allows Olympia this one triumphant moment where she can safely be proud of her body and re-materialize in the most indelicate of places, the stage of a

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strip club. The extremity of the indecency of the situation provides the spectacle that Foucault mentions. Not only is she on display, but she is naked and proud where many would think she never could be. Geek Love toys with the social delineations of space where the bestial body has power and where it does not. Within the audience she was nothing, unwanted, merely surviving in secrecy. On the stage, she is purposefully exposed and exuberant. Dunn’s freaks wish to gain control of this power; in their attempt to do so, they ultimately explore the same questions as Merleau-Ponty on the issue of gaze: “We must attempt to understand how vision can come about from somewhere without thereby being locked within its perspective” (1945, 69). Throughout the novel, the Binewskis have power when they are located in the carnival or the stage, but they are isolated once they move out of these spaces. Near the end of the novel, a reporter asks Olympia if she had the power to magically make her family “physically and mentally normal” (Dunn 1983, 282) would she do it? She responds in the negative: “That’s ridiculous! Each of us is unique. We are masterpieces. Why would I want us to change into assembly-line items? The only way you people can tell each other apart is by your clothes” (Dunn 1983, 282). Here, Dunn creates two planes of human isolation. What Olympia says is true. The normal body can also feel alone amongst a sea of other normal bodies. In the moments that the freakish body is on the stage, it isn’t just powerful, it is also coveted. While the freakish body is isolated amongst the masses as a unique shape, normal bodies can also feel isolated amongst the crowd. Each body fights to either come in or out of focus, to be seen or go undisturbed. Merleau-Ponty readdresses the question of how gaze truly works and how humans access the world within the space of their vision. In the essay “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes an existence where moving about and viewing objects does not ultimately prove to the subject that they are separate from the object. Instead, the act of seeing joins the subject to what is being seen. Here, the body, “because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition: the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (1964, 125). If I were to invite an audience into this world view as the barker of a sideshow, I might describe the world beyond the tent to be just as relevant as vertebrae and neurons. All the objects of the world working together to house life and allow for being as skin covers the body and binds it together. That’s sensational billing, a suggestion offered to the audience that Olympia is trained to provide. But a such visceral description of the world would most likely enrage an expecting audience once they would walk into the world beneath the sideshow tent and see that the world is still exactly as they know it, objects resting on other objects, and their own separate bodies moving amongst them, all cold strangers to each other. But if, the audience could understand the world as Merleau-Ponty’s connected body, perhaps Olympia, her brother, and sisters would be more easily perceived as human and to the same extent of the audience members themselves. While freaks can have any number of variations from the average human body, Merleau-Ponty describes a particular physical configuration in where the human

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body would no longer perceive like a human. This amounts to a forced reallocation of the eyes from the front of the face to the sides of the head “like certain animals…with no cross-blending of visual fields” (1964, 125). Merleau-Ponty argues that this type of configuration “would not reflect itself; it would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would be no humanity” (1964, 125). Humanity devoid, because the fish or horse-­headed human would not be able to see their limbs, would not allow for shared lines of sight where the eyes join focus, and would not see a fully connected world. However, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t grant that a girl who is born with eyes on either side of her head ceases to be a human girl. The correct configuration of body parts clicking to place like Barbie and Ken dolls does not define the human. Instead, Merleau-Ponty suggests that humanity exists in the space between “the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do” (1964, 125). In other words, humanity exists within an active perception of and connection to the world. This human interaction with the world does not merely take place between what Aristotle would conceive of as the space between the rational soul and the body, with a synapse from the mind to the limbs. Rather, humanity exists between the viewer and the viewed, and spontaneously between all pieces that make up the body, cells, tendon, bone, hair in association with space and other objects. For Merleau-­Ponty, humanity is movement toward the calling from the worldly body that makes up all things. The freaks in Dunn’s novel do not just include the born freaks of the Binewski family. Dunn also incorporates freaks that are created through a warped kind of medicine, people who chose to become amputees in order to feel less isolated amongst the masses of normal bodies. Arturo creates his first cult follower by catching ahold of her fear, the same sense of isolation of being a normal body amongst other normal bodies. She is an obese woman, and Arturo asks her if what she really wants is to be beautiful, to be loved, or to be “all right” (1983, 177–179). Arturo’s confidence in his freakish body is instantly attractive while he is in his tank, surrounded by an audience there to see only him. When he asks her again what it is she wants, she replies, “I want to be like you are!” (1983, 178). The Arturians find peace because they believe that by removing the body parts that made them fearful of judgment, and by giving up any hope of having a perfect body, all that will be left is peace. Without limbs they can’t do anything, but also don’t want to do anything or feel like they need to prove something. Their catch phrase becomes “Peace, Isolation, Purity” (1983, 227). The Arturians search for the disembodied experience that Katherine Hayles mentions has become more popular with the rise of technological advancements. She notes that in both liberal humanism and cybernetics “Embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased” (1999, 4). The Arturians are looking for an existence that will ultimately separate themselves from the psychological problems associated with the body, but ultimately, their real troubles are a sense of isolation inside their bodies. The Cartesian separation of body and mind and all other bodies is what

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mistakenly holds them captive. In his introduction to Phenomenology of Perception, Claude Lefort explains why Merleau-Ponty’s work argues against this sense of isolation where humans often find themselves: “the body and its surroundings cannot be defined in isolation, if every attempt to describe the constitution of one presupposes a reference to the constitution of the other, and if every relation of cause to effect or means to end can only be determined in function of a certain given meaning of ‘configuration,’ then the classical distinction between the subject and the object is no longer viable” (2012, 23). The Arturians did not need to try and lose their physical bodies to find peace and community; rather, if they lived more like Dunn’s freaks, in glory of their bodies, in a community constructed by appreciating bodies, and in understanding of the embracing nature of the universe, they would have been fine. Dunn (1983) continues to play with the irreversible and the eternal by introducing freaks as preserved bodies of the once living or barely born. In the business of the carnival, Mr. and Mrs. Binewski are frugal with their resources. Through the many attempts to create the perfect freak, the mother gives birth to six infants that were so deformed they did not survive. They are kept bottled and set on display like science experiments in “the Chute…six clear-glass twenty gallon jars…each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice tape” (1983, 52). It is the Binewski women’s task to tenderly clean the jars daily and to remember that the preserved children are still part of the family, to be loved and cared for as any of them (1983, 52–55). Although shocking, Dunn’s Chute is a tribute to what used to be a common travelling show across America throughout the 1800–1900s. In his book, Secrets of the Sideshows, Joe Nickell has a chapter dedicated to what he calls “curios” (2005, 320) or preserved bodies. Preserved fetuses and infants were referred to as “pickled punks” (2005, 322) by carnies, and in later years the specimens in these displays were often not real at all but made of rubber, in which case their name changed to “bouncers” (2005, 325). There was a hierarchy of value according to show managers, who would pay the most for the pickled punks that were born alive, the next highest for those that were real, and the least for the rubber bouncers, which would then also differ in levels of realism (2005, 322–326). The most horrifying aspect of Dunn’s Chute is not only that the fetuses are real or that two of them were born alive—one was named Apple and lived to the ripe age of two—but that the maternal mother is the one who keeps and displays them. While the death of a newborn is normally a private affair and display of the body would be sacrilege, the Binewskis believe that their unique bodies are the most important aspect of themselves, and by displaying their dead, they give them a chance to be fantastic, a wonder even in death. This act of preserving the dead became family tradition even before the jar children. After Olympia’s grandfather died, his last wish was to remain with the carnival forever, and her parents happily stuck his urn atop the generator truck as a shrine (Dunn 1983, 7). While the children of the chute are greatly valued, they only exist together as part of the blow off--a freebie to view after the main shows. The Binewskis do share the same tendency as the 1800s show manager to rank their acts according to their proximity to life. The living are more

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valuable. Olympia remembers how her mother would repeat over and over, “We had such hopes for her” (Dunn 1983, 54) to the jar child that would have been marketed as a Lizard girl, with a flat face and large tail. The patron’s experience of the Chute also forces the audience to think about the strangeness of birth and development of even normal bodies. Walking through the Chute’s dark tent itself evokes the image of birth—of coming out from the dark to the light, wide world. They pass by children in different forms of development, like a stages of conception poster where the fetus must grow, split, combine, and enclose correctly, with infinite mistakes possible. While many pickled punks in American sideshows did contain deformed fetuses, normal looking fetuses were also an attraction, as the normal developmental stages of the fetus do look alien or amphibian, as the fishy groupings of cells bulge and grow limbs. The Binewski family display is even stranger as all of their potential children, like the Lizard girl, also show the potential for freakishness. One with two heads, another with no bones, and one that is not even self-contained. This one the children secretly call “the Tray” and Olympia describes it as “a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached” (Dunn 1983, 54). Within the Chute, the freaks seem even less human because they are still, inanimate objects. It is more of a museum than a show, where the jars are to be studied, closely. The jar itself, though transparent, creates a contained space and more visible separation between the observer and subject. Here, the audience is meant to fear the simple possibility of creating one of these monsters themselves as they look at the two-headed baby, or the Tray, or they can view the normal development of the body, and see how it is just as freakish, for a time. Apple, the jar child who lived until she was two, seemed to have little physical deformity other than lazy eyes. She was almost completely unresponsive to stimuli however, and most likely had a severe cognitive disability. As an almost normal looking child, she had no place in the family sideshow. Olympia mentions her death nonchalantly, in a blameless, practiced way: “A pillow fell on her face” (Dunn 1983, 54). Although there is some mystery to Apple’s death, which is almost a family folklore, it is clear that Dunn’s characters are ready to murder their children if they are not born to the freakish standards of their parents. Apple was more valuable to Mr. and Mrs. Binewski as a pickled punk than as a daughter. While Mrs. Binewski may have condoned the murder, she is still, eerily, a caring mother to her jar children. Once made a freakish curiosity through preservation, Apple can safely reside at the carnival. By creating an extreme distortion between the mother’s role of protector and executioner, Dunn shows how the space of the carnival can be just as dangerous to average bodies as the outside world can be to the bestial. There is a point where Olympia, in her early teens, upset that her secret crush did not return her love, imagines herself dead and that her family would cremate her and set her urn next to her grandfather’s in tribute to her memory, but the thought is discarded after she imagines them preserving her “in the Chute in the biggest jar of all and I’d float naked in formaldehyde and the twins would bicker over who had to shine my jar” (Dunn 1983 172). Small, white, and underdeveloped, Olympia does look like the pickled punks without the glass around her. To be placed there would

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mean she was a failure, like the others, who had so much potential—we had such hopes for her—but ultimately could not survive. In Dunn’s novel (1983) the grotesque descriptions of bodies paired with the extreme behavior of the Binewski family’s flipped value system that prefers the freakish body over the norm, highlights and underscores the inhumane systems in place that subjugate freakish bodies to specific, confined spaces. To regulate the populace’s discomfort at running into a freak on the street, the hospital, television, freak show stage, and museum have become the only spaces where freakish bodies can materialize completely and live safely in the physical realm. Otherwise, they are forced to dematerialize, and in accordance with social etiquette, the observer ignores their existence. “Not staring” becomes a denial of existence and a reflexive motion toward the all but disappearance of the freakish body in popular society. Dunn has layered her novel with freaks who are the Binewski family’s conscious experiments. They are developed, born, and created using modern technology and medicine. While many critics have considered her extreme treatment of the body to be grotesque, in actuality, she touches on the many ways that the human body is increasingly transformed by our technologies and forces us to understand our bodies in conjunction with objects, animals, and the physical spaces through which we wander. Surgical bodies also maintain spaces that are isolated from normal society. Like the physical freak that may have a genetic disease, the patient of surgery undergoes a grace period where they are treated as breakable objects. The leg cast, neck cone, and sling are all visual indicators that a person is not their normal self and should be treated much like an invalid. Staring at a person’s shaved head and scar after brain surgery is disrespectful in the same vein as staring at a bestial body. The difference between the surgical body and the bestial is that the surgical body will heal, and they can return to normal society once again. However, in Dunn’s novel (1983), surgery is always irreversible. It leaves its mark on the body, takes away pieces of it, and adds new pieces that are essential for the body to continue to exist. After the shooting in the store parking lot, the shooter is sent to a mental hospital and eventually returns to his house, shoots his wife with a shotgun and turns the gun on himself (Dunn 1983, 215–17). But he doesn’t die. Instead, modern medicine somehow saves him. As a result, he becomes an awkward contraption. With most of his face gone, his is half tubes and bags of liquid powered by a squeezable air pump. In public, he wears a covering over his horrible face and is forever after called “the Bag Man” (Dunn 1983, 217). The Bag Man is a freak both because his physical body is mangled and altered forever after his many surgeries, and because he is a visible failure of death. The lingering feeling of death surrounds him as his IV-like bags dangle in place of his face. He is a walking hospice, only alive with the help of machines that are now part of his body. The Bag Man is the human cyborg, part man, part tube and machinery. In What is Posthuamnism? Wolfe (2010) notes that critics must transform their understanding of the human from the mind to include the ways in which the body and the artificial parts of the body “‘bring forth a world’” and speaks to “the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself” (25). Dunn’s character, the Bag Man, exhibits the next step in human evolution, surpassing the historical animal-human relationship toward what

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will ultimately be the human descendent, the immortal, the cyborg. His prosthetic body defies the old world of blood and flesh, and “brings forth” a new definition of life, forever after carried forth by machines.

References Adams, Rachel. 2001. Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American cultural imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunn, Katherine. 1983. Geek Love. New York: Warner Books. Foucault, Michel. [1977]1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New  York: Pantheon Books. Citations refer to the Vintage. 1995 edition. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How we Became Posthuman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lund, Roger. 2005. Laughing at Cripples: Ridicule, Deformity, and the Argument from Design. Eighteenth Century Studies 39 (1): 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2005.0051. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1945]2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. ———. [1964]1994. Eye and Mind. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Johnson, Galen A (ed.), 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Citations refer to the 1994 edition. Nickell, Joe. 2005. Secrets of the Sideshows. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Humor and Amusement Based on Incongruities: A Dialectical Approach Anna Małecka

Abstract  Since the ancient times, the problem of humor has constituted a challenge for the philosophers – from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Hobbes, to Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Freud and Bergson – to quote but a few examples. In the paper, the discussion of one of the most inspiring philosophical type of reflection upon humor is based on the so-called incongruity theory, as pertinently describing the sources and mechanism of humor. The discussed theory encourages to assume the dialectical standpoint, in the view of which humor appears to be rooted in two mutually contradictory interpretations of a given situation, leading eventually to their paradoxical synthesis. It is exactly this perversity and astonishment with the specific adequacy of joining the juxtaposed semantic layers (traditionally excluding each other) that the charm of humor relies upon. Through the feeling of amusement, this process leads to a temporary suspension of the one-track stereotypical approach to the phenomena which constitutes the main determinant of boredom, and offers an outlook via the prism of unexpected paradoxical relationships. Keywords  Humor · Laughter · Amusement · Philosophy of humor · Dialectics of humor · Incongruity theory · Humor from phenomenological point of view The question of humor, however unserious it may seem at the first sight, since the ancient Greek times has engaged most serious philosophical analyses. Assuming the universalist and essentialist approach, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Hobbes, to Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Freud and Bergson  – to quote but a few spectacular examples – attempted to explain the complex mechanism of humor, expecting that the insight into the nature of humor would facilitate a better understanding of human nature, in particular the human quasi-cognitive relation to the world, its creative potential, and, indirectly, the paradoxical character of reality itself. In many ways, humor seems akin to philosophy: parting from the A. Małecka (*) AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Kraków, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_11

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practical aspects of life, abandoning the commonsensical approach for the sake of fresh and astonishing solutions, searching for unobvious though often crucial meanings and perspectives. As John Morreall notices: “To have cultivated a philosophical spirit or rich sense of humor is to have a distanced, and, at least potentially, a more objective view of the world” (John 1987, 2). Accordingly, in the present article, a specific aspect of humor and laughter will be considered: “laughter at or about something, that interests the philosopher” – to quote Roger Scruton (Scruton 1987, 157). In the phenomenological spirit, paraphrasing the same author we can consider humor to be an intentional object of the amused state of mind, finding its expression in laughter (Scruton 1987, 157–158). Accordingly, humor can be perceived as the basic concept in relation to its accompanying phenomena such as amusement, the comic, wit, and laughter. In the history of humor research, three main groups of methodological trends can be distinguished: the so-called superiority theory, the incongruity theory and the energy release theory. The theory of superiority was introduced by Plato and Aristotle and fully developed by Hobbes who argued that laughter is an expression of enjoyment evoked by a sudden feeling of the subject’s own superiority over others or in relation to the subject’s previous position. This theory was (and rightly so) repeatedly criticized. As Hutcheson noted, we do not always laugh at other people’s failures, and, additionally, there are many situations in which such failure is by no means a cause of laughing; therefore the feeling of superiority is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of perceiving a given situation as ridiculous (Tave 1960, 55–58). Similarly, the relief theory, whose leading heralds were Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud, does not adequately capture the essence of humor. In accordance with the physiological concept, laughter is nothing else but a liberation of excess of accumulated neural energy, and plays mainly a therapeutic function. It would be difficult, however, to identify humor-related amusement with the release of energy. As Roger Scruton points out, both the energy release and the superiority theories are inadequate: “The mistake of ‘superiority’ and ‘release’ theories alike, is to find the meaning of humor in what it does for the subject, rather than in how it represents the object. Humor is not, normally, self-directed. Indeed, one of its values lies in the fact that it directs our attention unceasingly outwards” (Scruton 1987, 169). From the phenomenological point of view, amusement involved in humor may be considered a mode of reflection which presents its intentional object in a specific enjoyable light. Thus, the group of incongruity theories which focus on the so-­ understood intentional object within the “humorous experience” seem to be more pertinent. They find in humor a potential of opening fresh perspectives and amazing perverse insight into reality, thus coping with the feeling of boredom petrified by stereotypical approaches. The interpretations of humor in terms of incongruity have had a long tradition. Also, several modified versions of this group of theories prove popular in contemporary philosophically oriented studies in humor. Unlike other research orientations, such concepts attempt at discovering the distinctive features of humor mechanism, indicating its paradoxical and quasi-cognitive character that indirectly enables the discovery of the contradictory nature of reality itself. According to this

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theory: “What amuses us is some object of perception or thought that clashes with what we would have expected in a particular set of circumstances” (Morreall 1987, 6). The very concept of “incongruity” is also replaced by related terms such as inconsistence, contrast, conflict, incompatibility, and even contradiction. These theories refer to the incongruity between our expectations resulting from the baggage of experience and knowledge, and the reception or imagery of a particular thing or event; the incompatibility of elements put together, a simultaneous recognition of things traditionally belonging to different reference systems. Through the feeling of amusement, such process leads to a temporary suspension of one-track recognition of phenomena, offering a look through the prism of the dialectical relationship between the opposing elements.

The Historical Overview In the history of philosophy, several intriguing contributions to the vastly understood incongruity theory of humor can be found. It is Aristotle who first draws attention to the problem of inconsistency between the initial part of the humorous narrative and its outcome. Even though in the spirit of the superiority theory he states that essentially we laugh at human weaknesses, in the Rhetoric he remarks that laughter may indeed constitute a reaction to many different types of inconsistencies, and not solely the imperfections of others. He says in a manner that is well known as Kantian, that surprise lies at the root of laughter: “One way for a speaker to get laugh is to set up a certain expectation in his listeners and then to hit them with something they did not expect” (Morreall 1982, 16). Also, Cicero, in an akin way, says that laugh is evoked by a situation “when we are expecting to hear a particular phrase and something different is uttered” (Cicero 1875, II 63). It is Francis Hutcheson, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, who is commonly considered the father of the incongruity theory. Opposing Hobbesian superiority theory popular at that time, he proposes his own concept of the association of ideas, explaining the source of humor in terms of “bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as resemblance in the principal idea” (Hutcheson 1997, 233). For the first time we encounter here a dialectical recognition of the humor operation. The opposites joined together on a superior level, initiate a humorous situation. Contrary to Hobbes, Hutcheson considers the resulting laughter to be good-natured. Moreover, the underlying incongruity is regarded as a positive value, illustrating the diverse abundance of life. Hutcheson analyzes the humorous inconsistency on the example of burlesque, with its juxtaposition of such contrasting ideas as: grandeur, dignity, sanctity, perfection, and meanness, baseness, profanity on the other side. Mark Akenside, on the other hand, generalizes this principle to “some incongruous form, some stubborn dissonance of things combin’d” (Tave 1960: 71). The main role in the reception of

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the ridicule, however, is assigned to the emotion consequential to that perception, and – in opposition to Hutcheson – Akenside considers that emotion to be scorn. The Scottish successors of Hutcheson include Alexander Gerard, who says that “[the object of] that sense, which perceives, and is gratified by the odd, the ridiculous, the humorous, the witty; and whose gratification often produces, and always tends to mirth, laughter, and amusement (…) is in general incongruity, or a surprising and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety in things” (Alexander 1759, 66). And wit, humor, and ridicule turn to constitute skillful imitation of odd and incongruous originals (Tave 1960, 75). As an imitator, humor metaphysically implies the incongruity inherent in reality itself. Another Scottish thinker who continues the study in the role of incongruity in relation to humor is James Beattie. In his Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, the author synthetically describes the essence of incongruity in the following way: “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances considered as united in a complex object or acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them” (McGhee and Goldstein 1983, 40). Beattie exposes the principle of joining together the incompatible elements, and it is exactly this unusual dialectical unification of non-matching aspects that can astonish and thus evoke laughter. In his famous definition, Kant defines laughter as “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation to nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable by the Understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment” (Kant 2007, 133). The inconsistency between the expectation evoked by the beginning of the joke, and the lack of satisfying this expectation as a result of a sudden turn in the punch line is exposed here. As an example, Kant presents the following story: “The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed: ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look’” (Kant 2007, 133). Laughter is a reaction to the absurd, to a situation in which – as Kant says – the intellect remains disappointed. Instead of satisfying a desire for cognition, the subject gains a feeling of enjoyment allowing for regaining the balance of vital power. The author of the Critiques argues that humor is related to the originality of the spirit, a talent to acquire a certain disposition of mind in which judgments that are different from usual ones (or even contradictory to them) are formulated about things, though in compliance with some rational principles. Humor would mean, therefore, a special ability of mind to perceive phenomena in an original way, “inverted” in relation to everyday reception, differing from both the intellectual cognition and the aesthetic experience of beauty. Continuing this track of interpretation, Arthur Schopenhauer finds the cause of laughter in a sudden feeling of the “incongruity between a real single object and the concept under which, from one point of view, it has been rightly subsumed” (Schopenhauer 1969, 59). The more correct is this subsuming from one point of view and the larger and more spectacular inconsistency from another, the more ridiculous the effect of contrast is. In laughter, the inconsistency between the

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abstract concept and the object designated by it is recognized. Thus, laughter leads to realizing that abstractions are not able to satisfactorily meet the subtle variation of the concrete. Yet, as Scruton notes, “the real incongruity of which Schopenhauer speaks lies not between object and concept but between points of view” (Scruton 1987, 161)  – the view that will be later developed by another Arthur, namely Koestler. Schopenhauer also draws attention to another truly philosophical aspect of humor related to sublimity. Humor arises from the sublime mood which is in conflict with the outside world; the mood which tends to grasp the world with the same concepts that define subjective sensations. The incongruity between these concepts and their objects leads to the perception of the ridicule which hides the profound seriousness. Thus, real humor, unlike irony begins with a smile, and ends in a most serious reflection. Such is the dialectic of the ridicule and the serious – not uncommon in the philosophical reflections on humor. Similarly, William Hazlitt in the Lectures on the English Comic Writers states that laughter alongside crying is an indicator of human condition suspended between tragedy and comedy. It constitutes a reaction to the contrast between our expectations and the actual situation: “Ridicule is necessarily built on certain supposed fact, whether true or false, and on their inconsistency with certain acknowledged maxims, whether right or wrong” (Hazlitt 1841, 34). The existential-dialectical and ultimately theological approach to humor is outlined by Søren Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Humor, which he interprets in terms of comicality, results from contradictions which are inseparable from existence, and both the comic and the tragic are rooted in them. The comic differs from the tragic by the lack of profound suffering. The humorist recognizes the suffering in life but “turns deceptively aside and revokes the suffering in the form of the jest” (Kierkegaard 1941, 400). Hence, in the experience of humor one is aware of the possibility of evading the contradiction, and therefore it is not painful. Comicality so understood has its background in existence, and humor lies at the confinium (border territory) between the sphere of ethicality and religiousness; due to the strong sense of contradiction it constitutes the last stage of existential consciousness before faith. The Absolute manifests itself through the dialectic, and humor has its modest part in this revelation. George Santayana also speaks in the dialectical spirit, remarking that wit by “discovering common traits and universal principles assimilates things at the poles of being” (Santayana 1955, 153), and thus refers the feeling of amusement to an incongruous image. Even Henri Bergson in his famous essay on Laughter stresses the basic contrast that underlies the comic situation: namely between spirit and life on the one hand, and inert matter on the other; flexibility and rigidity enforced on the body and mind (Bergson 1918). The notion of incongruity is here limited to the incompatibility between mechanism and life. Laughter is supposed to serve a therapeutic function, leading to the correction of criticized social behaviors.

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 ontemporary Theories of Humor Referring to the Concept C of Incongruity Contemporary literature on the subject provides numerous examples of the theory of humor in which the theme of incongruity (conflict, contradiction, incompatibility, paradox) dominates. For Gregory Bateson, humor draws our attention to the importance of a certain incompatible element which so far has been marginal, and suddenly comes to the foreground (Bateson 1969). Similarly, Paul McGhee says that the humorous experience is generally inconsistent with our previous knowledge or experience (McGhee and Goldstein 1983). William Fry, on the other hand, stresses the issue of contradiction between the real and the unreal, which occurs in the dimension of specific experience: the fun. And it is exactly the attitude of enjoyment and amusement, i.e., a pleasant experience, that John Morreall identifies as a trait distinguishing humor from other reactions to incongruity, such as anxiety) (Morreall 1982, 133). Similarly, Gӧran Nerhardt emphasizes the fact that the reception of incongruity must take place in a safe, non-threatening atmosphere if it is to result in laughter. The essence of amusement may be considered  – following Michael Clark – to rely on pleasure resulting from the perception of incongruity. The dialectics requires that the contradictory elements are united and reconciled at a higher level, so that the paradoxical relationship between the incongruous elements can be found. Essentially, laughter is evoked by the discovery of a certain striking and essential analogy or relation between the elements or semantic layers which seemingly are completely unfitting to each other. The so-called incongruity-resolution theory, proposed by Jerry Suls, may be regarded as an attempt at such dialectical reconciliation (Suls 1983, 41–44). Suls, referring to Beattie, finds in his theory an inspiration to think in terms of the unification of incongruities. In his two-step model of humor reception, the subject is first confronted with incongruity, and in the second stage is motivated to resolve it. Humor arises when the incongruity is resolved: that is to say when the punch line of the wit shows a special relationship with the initial information. It seems, however, that it is not so much the resolution of the incongruity that matters, but rather finding the dialectical relationship between the apparently incompatible phenomena (either in the present or past experience or in the acquired knowledge) – a relationship that occurs in a wider perspective, in which both options paradoxically coexist. And it is exactly this weird relationship that amuses, astonishes, and provides intellectual satisfaction. In this way, humor can transform our reception of reality, by redirecting the track of our thinking and feeling from the usual paths towards the so-far unknown horizons. An interesting theory is presented by the Italian psychologist Giovannantonio Forabosco, who, in a discussion with Suls, notes that also in the final stage of humor perception there remain some inconsistencies, which indeed constitute a prerequisite of humor: “The resolution of incongruity does not eliminate it  – to cite Władysław Chłopicki commenting on the above Forabosco’s opinion – but it only contributes to the emergence of an ‘incongruity that makes sense’, ‘a coherent

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incongruity” (Chłopicki 1995, 37). In Forabosco’s model, the recipient perceives the incongruity, then the congruity aspect, and simultaneously the initial and final incongruities. The reaction of the recipient would be a dialectical reception of both congruity and incongruity, as some kind of oscillation of thought. In the contemporary studies of the structure and dialectical essence of humor, Arthur Koestler’s theory of bisociation constitutes a brilliant concluding comment on the incongruity issue (Koestler 1967, 35–38). In the light of this concept, all creativity, any original thoughts and discoveries (in the spheres of science, art, and also humor) are rooted in the ability to perceive events or ideas simultaneously in two different, separate and incompatible systems of reference, ruled by conflicting rules. Thinking in terms of one system, one “logic” or one “domain of discourse” cannot deliver original solutions. Any creative act requires action on more than one plane, in more than one system. The escape from the routinized mode of thinking and behavior is indicated by a sudden flash of insight, which shows a known situation or event in a new light and triggers a new reply to it. The act of bisociation unites the separated matrices of experience; it allows for “simultaneous living in two different planes,” multidimensionally, creatively and interestingly. And it is precisely this violent clash of two matrices of perception or reasoning, ruled by different rules, that triggers laughter. A bisociation of a given phenomenon in two traditionally separate systems causes a sudden oscillation of thoughts from one associative context to another, and emotional tension evoked by it finds its outlet in laughter: “Thus laughter rings the bell of man’s departure from the rails of instinct; it signals his rebellion against the singlemindedness of his biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit, governed by a single set of ‘rules of the game’” (Koestler 1967, 63). As the most common form of humor Koestler lists bisociations of meanings (metaphorical and literal), the sublime and the trivial (e.g. the sublime form with a trivial contents), as well as “replacement” – in which the binding concept is transferred from the originally marginal position to a dominant one, presenting the whole in a completely new light. The true nature of humor and amusement lies, then, in the perverse association of elements in incompatible frames of reference, which reveals the deeper and unobvious congruity of apparently incongruous phenomena, creatively enriching the existence. All in all, the discussed dialectical concepts which offer the truly philosophical interpretational perspectives of humor mechanism prove that this exceptional experience is an important factor contributing to human wellbeing. It provides us with a temporary rest from the dictate of common sense with its dull schematic solutions, and can also inspire imagination and creative acts in various domains of life. So understood humor challenges us to unite elements of multifarious competitive and even mutually contradictory discourses in an original way, and thus enriches and refreshes our contact with reality as such.

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References Alexander, Gerard. 1759. In An Essay on Taste, ed. A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell. London. Bateson, Gregory. 1969. The Position of Humor in Human Communication. In Motivation in Humor, ed. Jacob Levine, 159–166. New York: Atherton Press. Bergson, Henri. 1918. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred Rothwell. New York: The Macmillan Company. Chłopicki, Władysław. 1995. O humorze poważnie. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Oddziału Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cicero on Oratory and Orators. 1875. Translated by J. S. Watson. New York: Harper & Brothers. Hazlitt, William. 1841. Lectures on the English Comic Writers. London: John Templeman. Hutcheson, Francis. 1997. Laughter and Self-Love. In The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, ed. Alexander Broadie. Edinburgh: Cannongate. Morreall, .John 1982. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———, ed. 1987. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Judgment. Translated by John H. Bernard. New York: Cosmo Classics. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1941.Concluding Kierkegaard’s Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koestler, Arthur. 1967. The Act of Creation. New York: The Macmillan Company. McGhee, Paul E., and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds. 1983. Handbook of Humor Research. New York: Springer. Santayana, George. 1955. The Sense of Beauty. Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover publications, Inc. Scruton, Roger. 1987. Laughter. In The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreal, 156–171. Albany: State University of New York Press. Suls, Jerry. 1983. Cognitive Process in Humor Appreciation. In Handbook of Humor Research, ed. Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, 39–57. New York: Springer. Tave, Stuart M. 1960. The Amiable Humorist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Part IV

A Shrinking World

The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/ Isolation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God Tony E. Afejuku

Abstract  This essay attempts to assess the highly prominent Nigerian novelist’s (Chinua Achebe’s) two very famous and rich novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, as philosophy and literature of significant, perfect thought from the standpoint of Achebe’s thematic thrust relating to the subject of solitude/loneliness/isolation in both novels. The essay advances and underlines the argument that Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are two modern (African) novels which are concerned with the focused on subject which results from man’s (typified in each text’s hero’s) alienation from himself, from his land and from his fellow men including posthumans. The essay’s conclusion is that in Achebe’s novels philosophy and literature offer contending means of gaining access to human nature. Keywords  Chinua Achebe · Solitude/loneliness/isolation · Alienation · Solitary · Spiritual · Things Fall Apart · Arrow of God · Jean-Paul Sartre · Albert Camus · Stranger · Heroes · Protagonists · Kings · Rebels · Okonkwo · Ezeulu · Umuofia · Umuaro · Existentialism · Humanism · Absurd · Passions · Philosophy · Literature · Modern novels Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the Nigerian novelist’s first and third novels, are two African novels that have attracted a great deal of attention for different reasons1 Many critics especially of the old brigade of African literary and critical establishment within and outside Africa accept the first as the most popular novel to come out of Africa mainly on account of its excellently couched anticolonial thrust and its universal appeal in this wise. As for Arrow of God, its main  The respective editions of the texts studied are as follows: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958, 1965). Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964, 1974). 1

T. E. Afejuku (*) University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_12

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appeal centres on its aesthetic or technical quality, which is superior to Things Fall Apart’s that, however, trounces it in terms of their universal popularity. In fact, Things Fall Apart is so universally popular to the extent that it has been ranked as the fifty-sixth of the best, that is, “the greatest” one hundred novels of all time.2 But both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God clearly share, unequivocally, the same popular subjects of culture, anti-colonialism and post-colonialism; however, what I propose to attempt in this essay is an assessment of the two famous and rich novels as philosophy and literature of significant, perfect thought from the stand-point of Achebe’s unique thematic thrust relating to the subject of solitude/loneliness/isolation. The essay attempts to advance and underline the argument that Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are two modern (African) novels that are concerned with the focused on subject which results from man’s (typified in each text’s hero’s) alienation from himself, from his land and from his fellow men including post-humans. The heroes of the two novels – Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart and Ezeulu of Arrow of God – are doomed men, doomed figures, who bring ruins upon themselves through their misunderstanding of themselves and their fellow men in their society that they equally misunderstand. In fact, they also seem to misunderstand their own actions, emotions and what their respective societies truly and really expect of them. The image of each man, of each hero, the image which Achebe immortalizes in each novel is that of one who is a stranger, an outsider to himself and to his people and society. Right from the very beginning of Things Fall Apart Achebe presents Okonkwo as a young man of valour which the hero’s wrestling skills and fearlessness underscore. Nothing in his presentation or description explicitly indicates that his heroic qualities, which he is proud of, will lead to his untoward end. The same observation is applicable to Ezeulu, the hero of Arrow of God. He is an intellectual, not in a book sense, but in the sense of his innate gift. Unfortunately, he is not intellectually circumspective enough to know and foresee that he is a stranger in the locus of his communal or societal or phenomenological existence. Both heroes, both protagonists, could not see that the posthuman gods they believe in, in accordance with the cherished belief system of their community would not save or help them in the long run from their people and community and even from themselves that they battle against as well. We can thus conveniently liken each novel to Albert Camus’s The Outsider although the French-Algerian novelist’s novel is about a man, a character, a figure with a totally different temperament from Achebe’s. Also, the central figure in Camus’s novel belongs to a society and culture totally different from Achebe’s protagonists. But Camus’s and Achebe’s concern themselves with men who preside among the ruins of their own existence. The point of this comparison is that I am reading Achebe’s novels as philosophy and literature that tend to affirm that “existentialism is a humanism,” as Jean-Paul Sartre puts its.3 Clearly, this is the theoretical plank, the theoretical spring-board, of this essay. The existentialist  Daniel S.  Burt, The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time (New York: Checkmark Books, 2004), pp. 248–251. 3  Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans., Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), p. 17. 2

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who cherishes freedom should not deny another of his freedom. Sartre puts this impressively humanistic idea insightfully as follows: And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on our own. Of course, freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is commitment, I am obliged to will the freedom of others at the same time as I will my own. I cannot set my own freedom as a goal without also setting the freedom of others as a goal.4

One moral or psychological insight we can glean or infer from these words of Sartre is that harmonious interpersonal relations in any society will be possible only when we accept and adopt the wisdom or doctrine or principle contained therein. Achebe’s protagonists under investigation, as we can interpret them, tend to counter Sartre’s profound observation with the way and manner that they conduct themselves in the novels. As African characters, they go against the grain and convention of their people who advocate respect and harmony for the life of the group and community they belong to. If we agree with Bruce King, a first generation critic of African creative writing and an expert of Nigerian literature, that “Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature” (qtd., in Burt),5 we will not be wrong to say that Achebe’s protagonists under focus in this essay can rightly be studied from the perspective of Sartre’s quoted words above, which is not essentially pro-African – for Achebe’s artistry can be seen in the way he creates protagonists who cherish their own freedom above the freedom of others. In other words, we are simply stating here that the philosophy in Achebe’s novels is not far from that of European novelistic conventions even though his ideas and themes express the characteristic communal features of his Igbo (Nigerian) people. Okonkwo has only one passion in life: to succeed against all odds, no matter what. He does not want to be like his father, Unoka, the flutist, the artist in his community, who was always in debt and who bequeathed nothing to his children at the time of his death. He also detests his father’s oratory, the type of oratory that the old man, as an artist and a dutiful one, employed as an effective weapon against his creditors. As far as Okonkwo is concerned his father was an efulefu, Igbo epithet for a waste-pipe, a useless man – who could not, because of his laziness, take a title from his community. Okonkwo deeply feels ashamed of his father, an agbala, that is, a dishonourable man who was not better than a woman. In short, Okonkwo fully resents everything his father stood for, and hates the thought of being called his father’s son; he detests to be identified with him. He tends to disavow his father’s humanism while proclaiming his own. Okonkwo, frontline farmer, man of action, accomplished wrestler and great warrior who always prefers and wishes to be seen as a strong man who must not be perceived to exhibit any emotion or passion bordering on feminine ones isolated himself from his biological father, whom he always  Sartre, p. 49.  Burt, p. 248.

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also saw as a weakling. He, out of the fear of being thought weak, deliberately radiates emotions of fear in his household. His wives and children must do his bidding – rightly or wrongly, without qualms. His thought of existential failure isolates, alienates him from humane passion as the following passage depicts: As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry. “My father, they have killed me?” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.6

The passage is clear enough and does not need any elaborate commentary along the line of our discourse. But it needs some qualification. Ikemefuna, “a doomed lad,” “an ill-fated lad”,7 we are told, is the little boy brought to Okonkwo’s Umuofia community by members of Mbaino community as appeasement for the killing of an Umuofia daughter by a member of Mbaino community. Okonkwo becomes his putative father who is bound to protect him against any kind of harm. But at the appointed time, Ikemefuna, the scape-goat, the “sacrificial lamb,” is to die,,8 for “Umuofia has decided to kill him. The Oracle of the Hills and the caves has pronounced it.”9 Should Okonkwo follow tradition, the custom of his people, against his true passion, and be part of the people to kill him? In the seventies and eighties many notable critics within and outside Africa debated the matter. All of them: David Carroll,10 Charles Nnolim,11 Oladele Taiwo,12 G.D. Killam,13 Solomon Iyasere,14 Robert M. Wren,15 and Damian U. Opata,16 in varying degrees, insightfully condemned Okonkwo’s action – although Opata, the last named critic of Nigerian letters, postulated that “Okonkwo’s killing of Ikemefuna is an unconscionable act, but we cannot logically go beyond that to establish that by killing Ikemefuna he committed an offense.”17 I disagree. I share the critical perspectives and objective sentiments of the other named critics Opata  Achebe, Things Fall Apart, p. 43.  Ibid, p. 6. 8  Damian U.  Opata, “Eternal Sacred Order Versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, Research in African Literatures, 18.1 (1987),p.71. 9  Achebe, Things Fall Apart, p. 40. 10  David Carrol, Chinua Achebe (New York: Twayne, 1970), p.44; (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 42–43. 11  Charles Nnolim, “Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic”, Modern Black Literature, ed. S. Okechukwu Mezu (New York: Black Academy, 1977), p. 58. 12  Oladele Taiwo, Culture and the Nigerian Novel (London: Macmilllan, 1976), p. 118. 13  G. D. Killam, The Writings of Chinua Achebe, rev.ed. (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 20. 14  Solomon Iyasere, “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart,” Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 102. 15  Robert M. Wren, Achebe’s World: The Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Novels of Chinua Achebe (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980), p. 44. 16  Opata, “Eternal Sacred Order,” pp. 71–79. 17  Ibid., p.79. 6 7

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disagreed with. But unlike them and Opata I see Okonkwo as an existential character who turns against his passion, against his essence as a human in a troubled world. Part of Okonkwo’s existential character is to know fear, the type of fear that will debar him from bringing ruins to his own self. But he alienates himself from his true passion and embraces a useless passion that turns him into a lonely stranger to himself, to his family and to his community. We must not gloss over the following sentences of the extract quoted above: “Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak”. Why should Okonkwo feel powerless over what people think of him, rightly or wrongly? His freedom of judgement as he demonstrates above is wrong and faulty, and is devoid of the humanism of existentialism. Clearly, all his actions in the novel move in this direction. And we must believe that the gods, the posthumans of Umuofia, including the Oracle of the Hills, are not in support of his useless passion (a passion that is far more useless than his father’s which he detests). Or why does he suffer the reverses in the novel? If Okonkwo had glued himself to his true nature, or if he had allowed his true nature to glue itself to him, he would not have committed the taboo he commits in the week of peace that debars him from beating his wife or any member of his household; he also would not have been involved in the accidental killing of a kinsman that forces him into exile from Umuofia. Of course, it was in his seven years of exile that things fell apart in his paternal community of Umuofia. In other words, in alienating himself from his true being and essence in the quest to satisfy a societal or communal perception, we see a man who wants to be free and who at the same time is enslaved without knowing it. His and his community’s tragedy derives from this reality that is not his existential reality. It is not surprising that his impetuous killing of the messenger of the imperial force in Umuofia leads him to commit suicide in the end, a very bad taboo that alienates him from the land, and earth of Umuofia, the community he craves his passions to satisfy as its hero and leading light. What an irony that Umuofia consigns his corpse to the bad bush in the end without giving Okonkwo a befitting burial his status demands! He becomes truly lonely in the end; he ends as a being that lived in nothingness. He is dazed, too dazed to see his people abandon him at a momentous time he thinks that they should unite and fight for the soul of Umuofia, their great community of vibrant and valiant men. He does not understand his new times which have isolated him, and from which he has equally been isolated without his being really aware of this reality. But Okonkwo is an ambiguity, an absurd ambiguity. Do we see him as a pessimistic hero or do we accept him as an optimist betrayed by his wrong passions and the people, and the community he serves diligently with the passions? Is Achebe not telling us that Okonkwo’s and his community’s passions are absurd? We do not need to respond to these questions one by one. What we can call the Okonkwo phenomenon is traceable to his attempt to determine freely his existence and himself in relation to his community, his environment without the wisdom to know or surpass his limitations. In the worldview of Achebe’s Igbo people, the remote or real cause of Okonkwo’s actions, inactions and ill-actions that lead him to an untoward end must, to borrow Chukwugozie Maduka’s words, “reside somewhat in the evil machinations of some enemy. Such an enemy may be other human persons, ancestors,

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spirits or even community gods. The power of such enemies to plant death for an adversary or an offender seems to be boundless.”18 In the context of Things Fall Apart in which Okonkwo, in varying degrees, offends, for instance, his father’s and Ikemefuna’s spirits (and even his community’s as well) Maduka’s quoted words speak volumes. And to quote Sartre: “Death by the irreducible pluralism of truths and of beings, the unintelligibility of reality, chance – these are the core components of the absurd”.19 Although these themes are not presented as such in Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s useless death that underlines his irrational passions, caused or not by his adversaries, and chance that brought the English imperialist force of destruction to Umuofia, illustrate, to borrow Sartre’s words, the “nothingness,” “forlornness,” “impotence,”20 and the emptiness of Okonkwo and his Umuofia community at a significant period of their experience and existence when they ought to have united against irrational schism that isolates them from one another with the ultimate consequence of their annihilation. Achebe lays everything lucidly even if not philosophically, that is, phenomenologically bare, for the reader to espy in his tone of literary charm and creative wonder, a tone in which he introduced his unusually original Nigerian, nay, African novel to the world in 1958. But why does Okonkwo commit suicide? Okonkwo’s suicide, as absurd as it is, can be seen from the following African perspective which John Mbiti, a renowned scholar of African philosophical and religious thought, explicitly explains: There are always physical causes and circumstances surrounding every death..... But African people believe that a particular person will only die from one of those physical causes because some human or other agent has brought curse, witchcraft, magic and so on. These are what one may call the mystical causes of death. People often wish to know both the physical and mystical causes of death: it is not enough for them to find out only the physical causes. They take much trouble to establish the mystical causes as well and this is done through diviners and medicine man.21

This perspective is not significantly different from the one Maduka, Achebe’s kinsman, offers in his earlier quoted words. But it is interesting to observe that Okonkwo’s suicide must have been witchcraft-induced or magic-induced or curse-­ induced – and we say, affirm or infer this from an African philosophical standpoint. But we must go with Sartre’s insightful observation relating to the subject of suicide: The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusion and without resignation, either. The absurd man asserts himself by revolting. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him.22  Chukwugozie Maduka, “Funeral Orations as Indicators of What a Good Life Ought to Be,” Human Affairs (2008), p. 200. 19  Sartre, Existentialism, p. 75. 20  Ibid. 21  John Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 141. 22  Sartre, Existentialism, p. 78. 18

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Without over-labouring the point, Okonkwo’s suicide must be seen, read and understood in this light. He rebels against his people and their world (which is also his world) by dying the way he dies. He also dies the way he dies because he does not want the new imperial power in his homeland to commit him to death with imperial glee, not permissible to his passionate ideal. He resents the rules of the game of the new, strange political lords in his land. He does not want to be their condemned prisoner. Instead, he chooses to be his own condemned prisoner who Achebe presents with impeccable lucidity. But it is out of the question to say or to suggest that Achebe admires Okonkwo’s chosen path of suicide as an answer to his existential escape from the problem he has created. Even members of his clan are not happy with his chosen end that they find strange and absurd as a titled man and hero of the clan. He does not get from them a decent burial because of his ironically bad and absurd end. Achebe’s second novel, Arrow of God, is also an absurd one in which we encounter a strange traditional, cultural priest, an intellectual one, oppose defiantly his people, his community and his god, his posthuman benefactor, who is his people’s, his community’s and his household’s guiding spirit. Ezeulu is a strange one, an unusual man, an unusual African personage of authority - spiritual and political – who takes the side of the enemy against his people. His word of honour gives the land in dispute between his Umuaro people and Okperi community to the latter. The imperial administrator in the person of the figure/character called Winterbottom is impressed with him – although he finds his conduct strange. He is fond of the African priest of candour whose odd integrity enchants him. The reader also is fond of the strange chief priest whose sacred role in his community compels him to stay straight at all times. But, ironically, his people, led by his rival priest Ezedimili, hate him for being truthful and for taking the side of Okperi against Umuaro in the land case. He certainly is a strange one in their midst. His conduct isolates him from them, from the majority of them. Soon he learns that no man, however powerful or influential, can take the side of the enemy against his people and lives thereafter in perpetual peace with himself, on the one hand, and with his people on the other. The entire conflict of the novel originates from this strange behaviour and ironically good conduct of the Chief Priest of Ulu who lives among his strange people. His action of odd, unorthodox, unfamiliar concern for the enemy underscores the absurdity of the irony of situations and events that accentuate the isolation that axes Ezeulu from his people and which also alienates Ulu, the god he serves as chief priest, from him. Very early in the novel Achebe gives the reader his authorial view pertaining to Ezeulu’s foreshadowed isolation/loneliness which becomes highly transparent as the novel progresses. Indeed, Achebe succinctly reveals Ezeulu’s absurd paradox as a person or protagonist through his clever authorial presentation and admonition of him as seen in the following passage: Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his powers over the years and the crops, and therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose the day. He was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that

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was said to be his. As long as the goat was alive it was his; he would find it food and take care of it. But the day it was slaughtered he would know who the real owner was. No! The Chief Priest was more than that, must be more than that. If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival – no planting and no reaping. But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare.23

This passage in which Ezeulu ponders his status and role as Chief Priest, in the words of G.D. Killam, “foreshadows the course that the whole of the action of the novel is devoted to working out.”24 Ezeulu, the absurd ethical and moral priest, prophetically contemplates what is to come, what is to befall him and the people of Umuaro. He, as early as this time in the novel, foresees the schism that would isolate, alienate him from his spiritual, posthuman benefactors and people. Of course, he does not wish this to happen, but his absurd, odd hubris disallows him from halting the inevitable. He clearly realizes that the powers he possesses are borrowed ones; his spiritual and political authority and powers derive from his people who gave them to him on loan, and who also make it possible for Ulu, their god and spiritual essence, to endow Ezeulu with awesome powers. In the end he refuses what he should not or ought not to refuse; he refuses what no Chief Priest before him had ever refused, he dares what he says he would not dare, and what no Chief Priest before him had dared; simply, he does what he himself knows cannot and could not be done without dire, tragic consequences for any transgressor which he proves himself to be. But Ezeulu must be understood as an existentialist who is not ready to shy away from his kind of absurd adventure that alienates him from his god and community. He foresees his solitude, isolation, loneliness but he refuses to shift ground, an attitude a non-existential critic such as G.D. Killam says “remains a mystery.”25 But Killam utters these words in reference to what Akuebue, Ezeulu’s best, “perhaps his only friend,” thinks of the rebellious Chief Priest.26 As Achebe tells the reader, Ezeulu’s conduct makes Akuebue “afraid and uneasy like one who encounters a madman laughing on a solitary path.”27 And the path Ezeulu has chosen is a solitary, lonesome one indeed. The fascinating solitary figure tells Akuebue thus: I have my own way and I shall follow it. I can see things where other men are blind. That is why I am known and at the same time I am unknowable. You are my friend and you know whether I am a thief or a murderer or an honest man. But you cannot know the thing which beats the drum to which Ezeulu dances.28

 Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 3.  G. D. Killam, “Notions of Religion, Alienation and Archetype in Arrow of God, Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith (London and Dalhousie UP, 1976), p. 153. 25  Ibid., p. 156. 26  Ibid. 27  Achebe, Arrow of God, p.131. 28  Ibid., p. 132. 23 24

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The protagonist of Arrow of God is a totally odd rebel who is fully self-­conscious of his absolutely solitary role and status as the “unknowable” priest of the deity whose admonition he jettisons: ‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human child. Who told you that this was your own fight?29

The “impertinent human child,” the impertinent, spiritual custodian of Umuaro and their god, who cherishes independence and freedom from both his community and deity, defies them. He believes that there is grace in the kind of freedom he seeks, the kind of freedom that exists in the realm of the absurd where he is the only one who hears the “beats of the drum”30 to which he dances alone. Clearly, the “beats of the drum “he dances to, as we see in the end, are the beats of the drum for a man whose fate the material world of his human community and the spiritual, posthuman world of the gods have perfectly sealed. His obstinate blindness to what humans and posthumans expect of him leads him to his untoward isolation in the realm of abhorrent madness, which, however, cannot but comfort him as a man, a modern man, a figure and hero who is free to be what he wants to be, and not what anyone else wants him to be. If one were to be asked to choose between Okonkwo and Ezeulu, if one were to be asked to make a choice between both protagonists from the standpoint of the focus and argument advanced in this essay, one would state that both men are obstinate figures who are at peace within their absurd world of obstinacy – even though they do not eventually share the same temperament. Okonkwo is an obstinate, impetuous modern man of action, while Ezeulu is an obstinate, cool and calculating modern man of intellectual bent. Both are arrestingly portrayed as ambiguously absurd humanists who rebel against the irrational standpoints of their fellow humans and super-humans in the forms of deities and spirits that influence conducts of humans. Because they bewilder the inhabitants of the world of humans and the super-humans by their intense feelings that bind them to their isolated thoughts and fundamentally absurd world, they cannot but be what they are in the novels under focus. We cannot but conclude that in Achebe’s presentation of both protagonists, philosophy and literature offer contending means of gaining access to human nature. All the sentences, incidents, conversations, dialogues in both novels lead to one destination: the nature of the absurd man in his absurd universe. The actions of Achebe’s protagonists in the two novels tend to produce ambiguous outcomes of despair and failed optimism as we find in the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure.31 Despair and failed optimism in the novels lead to death (as exactly is the case in Things Fall Apart and Ambiguous Adventure); in Arrow of God they lead to madness, which is a kind of living-dead situation. Each hero’s

 Ibid, p. 191.  Ibid., p. 132. 31  Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1994). 29 30

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aspirations and life end abruptly, which emphasizes the absurd universe of the absurd humans who inhabit it. But to answer pointedly the question of choice raised in the opening lines of the preceding paragraph, I must let Achebe speak for me: Whenever people have asked me which among my novels is my favourite I have always evaded a direct answer, being strongly of the mind that in sheer invidiousness that question is fully comparable to asking a man to list his children in the order in which he loves them. A patter familias worth his salt will, if he must, speak about the peculiar attractiveness of each child. For Arrow of God that peculiar quality may lie in the fact that it is the novel which I am most likely to be caught sitting down to read again.32

From the standpoint of this essay, Arrow of God is “the novel which I am likely to be caught sitting down to read again”. However, in the final analysis, my philosophical reading and interpretation of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God may be seen or understood as absurd. But I will still stick to my own understanding and meaning of the novels without hesitation. They are respectively truthful statements about man, a fascinatingly strong man, who aspires to be what he wants to be in his world, no matter the pangs and consequences of loneliness he compels himself or he is compelled to accept by forces that fail to accept or understand his cravings. To the best of my knowledge, no study of Achebe’s novels focused on has given them the perspective I have given here. In fact, in this essay, none of the leading cited critics of Achebe dwells on the heroes of the two novels from the perspective of their respective phenomenological worlds of solitude and loneliness. It would be too tedious to provide any further textual evidence by way of literary review, for instance, of the critics’ essays, to back up my claim relating to Achebe’s existential accomplishments. Furthermore, no new studies of the two novels, as contained in Ernest Emenyonu’s 2004 very well edited two volumes on the great novelist dwell on the subject that has gained my attention. The essays in general, and in varying degrees, are centred on different aspects of pre-colonial and colonial history, Igbo (Nigerian) traditional culture, society, politics and issues of postcolonialism/postcoloniality and the artistic inclinations of Achebe relating to his novels and short stories.33 Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are profound modern novels that explore significantly man as a rebel, a passionate, isolated, lonely rebel, without scruples, against society and also against himself. The protagonists of the two novels are indisputably kings and rebels of solitude. And their other names are isolation and loneliness. This is a befitting end to this essay.

 Achebe, Arrow of God, “Preface to Second Edition.”  Ernest N. Emenyonu, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 1, Omenka: The Master Artist (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004); and Ernest N. Emenyonu and Iniobong I. Uko, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 2, Isinka, the Artistic Purposes: Chinua Achebe and the Theory of African Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004). 32 33

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References Achebe Chinua. 1958, 1965. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. ———. 1964, 1974. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann. Burt, Daniel S. 2004. The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. New York: Checkmark Books. Carrol, David. 1970, 1980. Chinua Achebe. New York: Twayne. London: Macmillan. Emenyonu, Ernest N. 2004. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 1. Omenka: The Master Artist. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Emenyonu, Ernest N., and Inionbong I. Uko. 2004. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Vol. 2. Isinka, the Artistic Purposes: Chinua Achebe and the Theory of African Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Iyasere, Solomon. 1978. Narrative Technique in Things Fall Apart. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, 92–110. London: Heinemann. Killam, G.D. 1976. Notions of Religion, Alienation and Archetype in Arrow of God. In Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith, 152–165. London: Dalhousie University Press. Killam, G. D. 1977. The Writings of Chinua Achebe. Rev. Ed. London: Heinemann. Maduka, Chukwugozie. 2008. Funeral Orations as Indicators of What a Good Life Ought to Be. Human Affairs 18: 197–213. Mbiti, John. 1975. Introduction to African Religion. New York: Praeger. Nnolim, Charles, and E. 1977. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic. In Modern Black Literature, ed. S. Okechukwu Mezu, 56–60. New York: Black Academy. Opata, Damian U. 1987. Eternal Sacred Order Versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart. Research in African Literatures 18 (1): 71–79. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press. Taiwo, Oladele. 1976. Culture and the Nigerian Novel. London: Macmillan. Wren, Robert M. 1980. Achebe’s World: The Historical and Culture Contexts of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. Washington: Three Continents.

Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “Diminishing Boundaries of a Shrinking World” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River” from Wild (2012) Rosemary Gray

Abstract  Consideration of Okri’s “Heraclitus’ Golden River” occurs here within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes – beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything,” cited as the epigraph to Okri’s Wild (2012) intimates an African epistemology of cosmic holism, while his concept of the metaphysical capacity of poetry to transform the earth into mother [Gaia] sheltered by the sky and under the sun as an inscrutable god, expressed in A Way of Being Free, foregrounds the relation between the fluidity of artistic creativity and an eco-phenomenological exploration of “the diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world.” This interpretation of Okri’s poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” rests on his own conception of “wild” as energy meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental, chaos honed. The reading of this poem celebrates mystical unrest viewed from an ontopoietic appreciation of the sublime. The argument attempts to show that, for this Nigerian poet, “wild” is perceived in his third anthology from a heightened consciousness perspective as that which is transcendent – man’s link with the firmament. This cosmic aspect accords with what the American nature poet Robert Frost called wildness, that wild/ Arcadian place or the unconsidered land where life itself sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces and to which the poet must go, alone and in silence, to ignite his/her creativity. Keywords  African epistemology · Cosmic holism · Creative solitude · Culture and consciousness · Ben Okri · “Wildness”

R. Gray (*) Department of English University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_13

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Introduction This consideration of Ben Okri’s poem “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” from his third anthology of poetry, Wild, is predicated upon his conception of “wild” as energy meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental: as chaos honed (Okri 2012, Dust jacket). My interpretation seeks to celebrate the mystical unrest in the poem, viewed from an ontopoietic appreciation of the sublime. The argument attempts to show that, for this Nigerian born Londoner, “wild” is perceived from a heightened consciousness perspective as that which is transcendent – man’s link with the firmament – at once evoking a phenomenological and posthuman reading. This cosmic aspect accords with what the American nature poet Robert Frost called “wildness,” that wild/ Arcadian place or the unconsidered land where life itself sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces and to which the poet must go, alone and in silence, to ignite his/her creativity, underscoring the subtheme of isolation/solitude (Frost 2014, 2). My analysis is thus situated within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes  – beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything” (Okri 2012), cited as the epigraph to Wild, intimates an African epistemology of cosmic holism, while Okri’s concept of the metaphysical capacity of poetry to transform the earth into mother [Gaia] sheltered by the sky and under the sun as an inscrutable god, expressed in A Way of Being Free (Okri 1997a, b, 2), foregrounds the relation between the fluidity of artistic creativity and an eco-­ phenomenological exploration of “the diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world” (Okri 2012, 92); a world symbolized here in the desertification or circumstantial demise of the city of Ephesus. Ephesus, the home of Heraclitus,1 stands in the Maeander Valley, southeast of the mouth of the Maeander (Cayster) River in modern day Turkey. The river flows into the Mediterranean. Southwest of the city is Mt. Koressus (Bülbüldag), on the east is Mt. Pion (Panayirdag), and there is a plain of arable land northwards between the city and river. Ephesus’s harbour lay about four miles inland from the Mediterranean with a man-made canal cut to run eastward from the Maeander. Heraclitus’s Ephesus was rich enough to boast one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis, and it later contained the massive Library of Kelsus; as a centre of trade, it was unrivalled (See Greaves 2010). Then what happened? The river gradually silted up despite Herculean efforts to keep the canal open and, now, a visit to the ruins of Ephesus is hot and dusty. But for Heraclitus and his contemporaries the Maeander was the most significant physical feature of the city’s wealth, trade and fame. These geophysical aspects were perhaps the impetus behind Okri’s poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” with its central theme of the change/no change dialectic and its catalytic river motif.

 Heraclitus (c. 535 BC – 475 BC) lived during the so-called Archaic Period usually from c. 700 to 494 BC. He was not a philosopher but a sage and cosmologist. 1

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Okri stands in a long tradition of creative writers moved by the reading of the pre-Socratic cosmologist, Heraclitus, whose fragments of writing are sufficiently enigmatic for him to have been given the sobriquet, “the Obscure.” The archaic thinker made elliptical commentaries on the phenomenological world, especially about how things change. The statements were not from a rationalist, Aristotelian viewpoint. Heraclitus’s oracular statements belong to the tradition of “wisdom literature” which flourished from Babylonia to Ionia and into Sicily and Egypt in archaic times and tended to the pithy, the contradictory, the obscure (Lazaridis 2007, 219–220, 243). Okri’s own oeuvre displays a similar virtuosity in making profoundly oracular, elliptical statements. Moreover, his speculative Weltangschauung [worldview], intimating a phenomenological realm between subjective and objective reality, is in line with Heraclitus’s comprehension of the world. Yet, whereas readers of the contemporary Okri can make a clear distinction between what is considered rational, scientific and provable, and set that in opposition to what is imaginative, poetic and metaphorical, it is more difficult to do so when faced with the fragments of the Sages in pursuit of wisdom some 2600 years ago. Okri’s is a bold enterprise to gloss the archaic words of Heraclitus in his poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” in order to bring them within the understanding of a modern reader in his anthology entitled, “Wild” (2012, 92–94). This poem speaks to both the tradition of wisdom literature and contemporary ecological investigations, not to mention our global imperative. The contemporary audience Okri addresses, however, makes little distinction between urban and wild except as part of a private tourist programme. Unlike Okri, we tend to take for granted writing as signs disinvested of their numinous power to give access to potent wisdom and it is commonplace that our wise folk, like the actress, Udita Goswami, producer, William Arntz and philosopher, Werner Heisenberg can end up in pseudoscience films for the masses, such as “What the Bleep Do we Know?”

 pistemic Eco-Phenomenology and the River E of Creative Inspiration In an uncanny echo of the film’s title, “What the Bleep do we know?” Okri states in A Time for New Dreams that the “[t]he universe grows more mysterious around us even as we find out more about it” (2011, 28). He suggests that the reason behind this paradox is that “we are taught to see less in ourselves, to ask no questions about our true inner nature” (2011, 28). Elaborating on the need for self-discovery or what fellow Nigerian and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka terms man’s “gravity-bound apprehension of self” as “inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon” (1976, 1995), 3), Okri posits that, [k]nowing ourselves, we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit (2011, 29).

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This excerpt suggests that Okri apprehends big movements in philosophy through reading and the imagination – so, he goes from the wisdom literature that counsels self-control to the full blown philosophical idea of “Know thyself.” He thus extends Soyinka’s ethics. His epistemology, akin to that of Heraclitus, embraces both ethics and politics. “Knowing ourselves” or exercising our own logos, Okri submits, “we will know others” and so come to realize that the external logos of the cosmos entails an “ethical and political scheme in which one is persuaded by the best person, who can only be the one who exercises this capacity best” (Kahn 1979, 24). Put simply, this implies the dawning of enlightenment by the knowing self, that is, through self-apprehension. Indicative of epistemic eco-phenomenology, would be the poet’s green economy awareness, his deep concern for, and the need to grapple with, current as well as perennial issues, issues vitally significant to the survival of humankind, at the heart of which lies a tension between education (what we are taught) and knowledge of self. “Only through self-knowledge,” Okri insists, “can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which is only a higher ignorance” (2011, 29). What then is the inspirational role of art in countering our “higher ignorance,” in providing intuitions and/or new ways of thinking to address or redress culturally imposed indoctrination and man’s destruction of the planet – the frame of Part 1 of his poem entitled “Heraclitus’ Golden River” (2012, 92–93)? The answer, as implied in Part 2, resides in a symbiosis of the impetus and equipoise of one-world consciousness. An Okri aphorism: “To see a work of art or the truth in a work requires a solid foundation in ourselves” (2011, 24), coupled with the poem’s reiterated pivotal injunction to “Spread illumination through this darkening world” (2012, 94, ll. 82–83), encapsulates impetus. His claim in A Way of Being Free that “[t]he poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun the inscrutable god …” (1997a, b, 2), together with the poetic lines: “Poets pray to the goddess of surprise/ Love is seduced by change,/ Itself unchanging” (2012, 93, ll.28–30), reflects equipoise. Ultimately, the poem – as a whole – advocates discretion, which moves to self-­ knowledge as a metaphysics of life. Both abstractions are basic tenets of “wisdom literature.” The proposition is evidently a re-view and revival of a pre-modern, mythopoeic relationship with Nature as a living, sentient interlocutor, and of life rather than man as “the measure.”2 This resonates not only with the poem’s title but

 As Nicoletta Ghigi argues, pointing to the anguish and ‘dis-ease’ that characterize our generation and the need to re-humanize, to re-appropriate one’s own life and one’s own telos: “To constitute a metaphysics as a science that makes this telos its own object or to think of a philosophical reflection that is completely turned toward life and its meaning offers us the possibility of rethinking the human and to rethink her existence as a true return to authentic existence … as the being to which we are and in which we participate insofar as we are single personalities endowed with our own interiority and, above all, our own telos that gives form to life” (2014, 9). 2

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also with Theodor Adorno’s claim that art “suspends self-justificatory, teleological rationality” (2002, 138), an aspect integral to Okri’s poetic enterprise.

“Heraclitus’ Golden River” Part 1 of the poem under discussion reflects our “darkening world” of dispossession, “war” and “rage,” while Part 2 is a meditation on the dance of illumination through knowledge of self and our cosmic oneness. As noted, consideration of Okri’s poem occurs here within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes – beyond culture and below consciousness. Epistemic ecology and the posthuman, suggestive of a mystical journey of transformation and enlightenment, are melded into a mythic conjunction. Heraclitus’s oracular fragments inform the thrust of the poem. Its title, for example, invokes Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux and, by implication, a unity of opposites. Reminiscent of Okri’s deployment of the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” [I too lived in Arcadia] – the inscription on the tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s painting of Les Bergers d’Arcadie – in his 2007 novel, In Arcadia, with its multiple signification,3 Heraclitan fragments are couched in a comparably complex twinned and epigrammatic style. Consider, for example, two of the river fragments: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow (έτερα και έτερα)” (Dk22B12)4 and “Into the same river we step and do not step, we are and are not (ποταμοϊς τοις αΰτοϊς ... είμεν τε και ουκ είμεν)” (B49a).5 As Prier observes, It is the dyadic phrase έτερα και έτερα that dictates the oppositional nature of the [first] fragment itself because of the strict sense of disjunction yet identity the words imply. Yet, everywhere the underlying third term, or the Logos as unity, is symbolized by the river — the river that … [in the second fragment] unifies life and death, the ultimate opposition for man (1976, 70).

The relation between eco-phenomenology and the fluidity of artistic creativity foregrounds our embeddedness in the cosmos. A close observation of natural forces and a metaphysics of life, arising from an expectation that the imagination/ creativity

 See Gray, Rosemary. 2009. “Apologia pro Ben Okri’s In Arcadia: A Neglected Masterpiece.” English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 26, no. 1: 65–71. 4  Graham, Daniel, W. “Heraclitus.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 2 October 31, 2014. ; and Cleanthus from Arius Didymus from Eusebius. (4) Web. 1–14. October 31, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/. Accessed April 13, 2016. 5  Anon. “Heraclitus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 5. October 31 2015. Compare: “No man even steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” (Aquileana 2015: 3). Web. 31 October 2015: 1–23. https://aquileana.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ guarda5.png/. Accessed April 13, 2016. 3

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that will bring us into an understanding of the phenomenological wild with its immense complexity, is at play.6 The opening lines of “Heraclitus’ Golden River”  – “Change is good, but no change/ Is better” (Okri 2012, 92, ll. 1–2) poeticizes Heraclitus’s river insights in its dialogue on the change/ no change dichotomy. This, in turn, is a reflection on the tension between Nature’s ebb and flow and humankind’s “iron will. Our willed philosophies” (92, l. 32) vainly bent on trying to stem cyclical change, coupled with the hermeneutics of being-towards-death (to invoke Heidegger’s term). The implication is that a mythic conjunction between poetry and ontopoiesis might awaken the superconscious – “beyond culture” – to its true value and so to our relation to the cosmos. The motif of the “diminishing boundaries/ Of a shrinking world” (92, ll. 24–25) within a theme of the inexorability of mutability deals with the “great and ultimate” questions, to use Husserl’s phraseology (Husserl 1970, 299). Such questions are implicitly pondered over in Okri’s poem. Although her viewpoint is one of Philosophy rather than Phenomenology of Life, Nicoletta Ghegi expresses the project as being, “… to reappropriate the role, drawing from psychology and the other sciences (i.e., anthropology, psychoanalysis, etc.) of being, the ‘indicator of the sense or meaning of living’ or, as Aristotle said, to teach one to reach that which is generally called wisdom” (2014, 4). Okri’s eco-phenomenological thrust points to the wisdom of “beingness,” in particular, as testified in the poem’s nexus: “But the river flows, and so must we./ Change is the happy god Heraclitus/ Glimpsed in the golden river” (2012 94, ll. 79–81). Non-duality, reciprocal interdependent relationships and the concurrence of being and logos are also integral to African thought (see note 17) as reinforced by Okri’s statement in an interview with Hubert Essakow about his Booker Prize novel: The Famished Road is fed by the dreams of literature. I devoured the world, through art, politics, literature, films and music, in order to find the elixir of its tone. Then it became a perpetual story into which flowed the great seas of African dreams, myths, fables of the world, known and unknown … The novel was written to give myself a reason to live (Okri 2016, 2).

Okri’s Heraclitan preoccupation with the metonymic river of life is manifest in the flow of “the great seas,” above, and in this poem, as well as in his opening gambit to The Famished Road (1991, 1997a, b), which reads: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry” (1997a, b, 3).7 A ­comparable  ff  Compare Wole Soyinka’s drama, The Road:

6 7

“Samson: … May we never walk when the road waits, famished” (Soyinka 1965, 60) – the allusion is to the myth of Ogun, the Yoruba god of the road, who feeds off the remains of road accidents, causing such accidents when he is hungry. And the insights into the inevitability of death encapsulated in: Prof.: But there is this other joke of the fisherman, slapping a loaded net against the sandbank. [Looks around him.] When the road is dry it runs into the river. But the river? When the river is

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philological strategy – that of transforming symbolic phenomenon into structural ones through syntactic juxtaposition – is revealed in Heraclitus’s archaic sense of identity in opposition as in “The road up/down, is one and the same” (Heraclitus in Prier 60). For Okri, the river “became” a road that “was once” a river (1991, 1997a, b, 3), indicative of the conflation of time, future and past coalesce. In eco-feminist discourse, the “river beneath the river,” which runs through the psychic “Otherworld” [below consciousness], is perceived as the Divine Feminine or, as Clarissa Estés notes, the “Wild Woman archetype … the One Who Knows” (1998, 26), and from whom all instinct and deep knowing emanate. As already quoted, not only does Okri state in the poem under discussion that “Poets pray to the goddess of surprise” (93, l. 27), but, correlating with the notion of a divinely feminine muse, he picks up on the metaphysical and geophysical nature of the poetic enterprise, asserting that “[p]oetry is also the great river of soul murmurings that runs within humanity” (2011, 4). He avers that, “Poets merely bring that river to the surface for a moment, here and there, in cascades of sound and suggested meaning, through significant form” (ibid.). Lines from Stanza 3 of Okri’s poem highlight this aspect: And as we keep. Things the same, the river. Works beneath us. The god works ironies. On our lives…. (2012, 92, ll. 13–17).

The river motif thus encompasses both heightened sensibility and the “law of change and decay” that underpins natural and human life, endorsed in: … The river runs, Fields unfurl strange. New mushrooms, libraries yield. New books in the charged. Margins of the old (2012, 92, ll. 17–21).

Here, the “charged margins” of old texts perhaps allude to the glosses, such as those encountered in ancient texts, dictated by “reason,” an indictment of a propensity towards the rational as opposed to the intuitive imaginary, while the “strange/ New mushrooms” allude to an increasingly dark and barren earth, a no longer fructifying wilderness that is at once eco-phenomenological and mystical. The implicit indictment prefigures the realization that the old dogma (“iron philosophies” and “willed philosophies” [Okri 2012, 92, ll. 22, 32]) perpetuates a metaphorical delimitation and contraction of our world in what follows: parched what choice is this? Still it is a pleasant trickle–reddening somewhat–between barren thighs of an ever patient rock. The rock is a woman you understand, so is the road. The know how to lie and wait (Soyinka 1965, 58). In this play, the Professor is a well-to-do forger of driver’s licences and so an accessory to road accidents. His quest is for the meaning of “the word,” “which may be found companion not to life but Death” (Soyinka 1965, 11; original emphasis), a veiled indictment of organized religion as “the final gate to the Word” (1965, 93; original emphasis) and of the elusiveness of complete knowing.

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And reason, trapped in iron philosophies, Turns on itself, and prowls. The diminished boundaries. Of a shrinking world, Shrinking because of the horror. Of the devils at the gates (92, ll. 22–27).

The chiasmus in the last lines in this excerpt (“Of a shrinking world,/ Shrinking because of the horror”) encapsulates the resonances of a poetic imagination confronted by the horror of the “diminished boundaries,” in other words, of our “destruction of the environment,” quoted at the outset. In Hegel’s reading of Heraclitan thought – and, as evidenced in these lines, to Okrian understanding too – the most pertinent characteristic is “the structure of an oppositional logic divorced from, but regulating entirely, the objective world of naïve sense perception” (Prier 1976, 59–61). However, Okri suggests that poets have, through imagination, a way of re-­ entering his notion of the “wild,” where they can “pray to the goddess of surprise” (l. 28; already quoted) and where, related to such numinous experiences, poets know that “Love is ... unchanging” (2012, 93, ll. 29–30; quoted earlier), to counter the “horror” of humankind’s destructiveness. The implication is that it is possible through the capacity of those who are poets to resist a mindset that is “trapped in iron philosophies” (l. 22; quoted earlier) and so resist changing beliefs, ensuring that “Old ways [are] kept/ Old” (92, ll.7–8). Poets have been suggesting their connection to means other than those of ordinary mortals in accessing extraordinary realities for a long time – easily since the hieratic functions of priests in their relation to the divine were taken on by the “inspired,".8 In this poem, Okri creates, imaginatively, the distant beginnings of observations made by the cosmologists about the mysterious contradictory phenomenological reality of the world. Long ago, a number of elite men in antiquity were beginning to question that phenomenological world in all its apparent illogicality and to substitute for the religious and mythical explanations of the great poets such as Homer, other causes than divine intervention or a deus ex machina. Okri declares that “Change is a god that Heraclitus saw/ In the ancient river” (2012, 92, ll. 11–12). To reiterate, this reading of “Heraclitus’ Golden River” rests on Okri’s own particular notion of “wild” as that space where energy meets freedom, art meets the elemental, where chaos is honed. For Okri, as already intimated, “wild” is perceived from an ontopoietic or heightened consciousness perspective; it is “our link with the stars” (Wild: see also Okri’s novel, Starbook [2007] and Gray 2013). This cosmic aspect accords with what the American poet Robert Frost called “wildness,” that “wild place” or “the unconsidered land” where life itself “… sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces” (Baym 1965, 716)9 and to which the poet must retreat in solitude and in silence, to spark and, by extension, to fuel his or her creativity.  Homer’s invocation to the muse was already ancient in the eighth century BC.  See Baym, Nina (1965, 713–732). She argues that what Frost uncovers in his investigation of nature is a sombre truth, the law of “change and decay.” 8 9

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The creative imagination at work in this poem is all too evident in its treatment of its subject matter, viz. the unfathomable nature of existence. Through poetry and the manipulation of the truths of the imagination, rhetoric can play its true role of revealing – through its manifestation – the relationship of things to things. One may, through a consideration of rhetorical devices, thus arrive at a better understanding of self, and so, of Life. Consider, for example, the deployment of paradox, itself a reflection of the syntactic opposition of rational/artistic, in “…The words rang/ Through the great hall/ As they have resounded/Silently through bygone ages” (Okri 2012, 92, ll. 2–5). The onomatopoeic “r” alliteration clanging “silently” is, at once, suggestive of subliminal indoctrination and, reminiscent of the muezzin’s call, of organized religion’s resistance to change. This is implied in “the great halls” (92, l. 3), presumably of culture or received knowledge and in the evocation of a desert setting in “The air is dryer where no change/ Is better” (ll. 6–7), where, as noted, “Old ways are kept/ Old” (ll. 7–8). The “bygone ages” which Herodotus (a key author for Okri) describes in his famous histories are useful to contextualize Heraclitus and the milieu and world in which he lived and worked. Heraclitus is an Ionian Greek, not a Mainland Greek. Okri is particular. Generally, Ionia in its extent is conveniently demarcated by historians so as to include the cities of the Ionian dodekapolis (league of 12 cities) named by Herodotus (1.142).10 It stands on the west coast of Asia Minor and although it was Greek speaking from the time of the Luwians, the Achaeans and Mycenaeans had occupied it since the twentieth century BC. Nonetheless, Ionia shared much in common with all its Anatolian neighbours and the successive invaders who had come before – war craft, building styles, ideas, ways of honouring the gods. Okri’s emphasis in the poem is on “gates” (92, l. 27) for keeping devils or demons out of the city and, according to various cultural legends, city “walls” (93, ll. 38, 42, 49, 50) were built by “giants” (93, l. 38). The poem is replete with imagery of ruins of bygone empires and dynasties such as those Heraclitus himself would have observed and travellers in modern Turkey can still see. Cities that have gates and walls suggest technological expertise and a level of civilization which was prized in antiquity. Yet, Okri highlights the irony of Nature’s way in: The giants who built walls Meant to be proof against Time and the desert ravages Found in their sleep That the walls had become Change, had moved, had dissolved; Or worse, that the feared things Had seeped in underfoot, Or through the air; Or changed the frontiers Of their rigid dialogue (2012, 93, ll. 38-48).

 Phokaia, Chios, Erythrai, Klazomenai, Teos, Lebedos, Kolophon, Ephesos, Samos, Priene, Myous, and Miletos (Hdt. 1.142). 10

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The earlier description of “iron philosophies” (Okri 2012, 92, l. 22), reiterated through a variation with “the frontiers/ Of their rigid dialogue” (ll. 47–48), is evidently the poet’s commentary on the madness of swapping one set of ideologies for another equally vain and rigid set which, in time, will trap the very invaders themselves and will turn them, paradoxically, into giants who must build walls of a different kind again and again. Okri’s meditation on the destruction wrought over time on cities that were, erstwhile, centres of civilization and places where the greatest thoughts could emerge, is skilfully brought up to date in the reference to “our age” (2012, 94, l. 61), while invoking the past through the imagery of “oases,” alluding to the oasis cities of antiquity which were bombed and ransacked. It is no longer the greedy devils and demons full of their unvirtuous “thumos” as Heraclitus describes it: “It is hard to fight against rage/ passion/ desire; for whatever it wants it buys at the expense of soul” (Kahn 1979, 77). Now, great kings and emperors do not conquer; rather “the unlucky, the unfortunate,/ The dispossessed (ll. 58-59), who are full of “rage“ at the “Protected places, illuminated/ By time” (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 56–57), do. These are the fanatics who blow up temples like those of ancient Palmyra, a great oasis city in Syria with monumental ruins. Arguably too the paradox in “Walls invite invasion” (Okri 2012, 93, l. 49) could possibly allude to fellow nature poet, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with its telling line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (Frost 2014, l. 1). In this latter poem, walls, irrationally erected between two orchards (apples and pines), are mysteriously eroded by natural forces and/or wild hares.11 As symbolic of unnatural physical barriers, walls are emblematic in English poetry. Their collapse may be wrought by erosion or a conscious force in nature, as in Frost’s poem, or by divine intervention, as illustrated in Hadrian’s Wall, for instance. Built by the Roman invaders of England, from west coast to east, to protect the Roman settlers from the indigenous Celts and Picts, the famed Hadrian’s Wall could, in its ecological transfiguration, be that which is evoked in the irony of. Walls end up trapping within the demons. Meant to be kept out: for. The demons merely turn into. The giants, grow in them. Like silent cancer (Okri 2012, 93, ll. 50–54).

After the departure of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons referred to the remnants of the Roman constructions with awe and wonder as the work of giants, destroyed by “Wierds,” the pre-Christian Fates, as captured in Michael Alexander’s translation of an Old English fragment, which reads: Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it. The stronghold burst …

 Robert Frost’s (1874–1963) iconic nature poetry appears to correlate with that of Okri. His message in “Mending Wall” (2014) – that something is amiss in a world of walls/ unnatural barriers – is endorsed in Okri’s “Heraclitus’ Golden River.” 11

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Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen, The work of Giants, the stonesmith’s. moulderith.12

The multiple intertextual nuggets appear to be intentional. There is, of course, also the wall of Jericho that “fell beneath itself” in the late fifteenth century BC [the late Bronze Age], rendered in Biblical mythology as “fell flat” (Joshua 6: 20) to indicate the miracle of the Israelites’ conquest of the Canaanites. In the earlier quoted stanza, the reference to “the feared things” that “Had seeped in underfoot” (Okri 2012, 93, ll. 44–45) is suggestive of the walled city of Jericho that had within it a copious natural spring, much as did Ephesus.13 These ambiguities serve to place interpretation beyond any specific cultural context. Calling for knowledge of self, discussed earlier, the need to reflect upon existence is suggested by other teasing allusions, such as the reiteration of “the devils at the gate(s) (Okri 2012, 92, ll. 8-9, 27). One wonders: Is the allusion to the Christian dogma of Hell Fire? Does this evoke Heraclitus’s view of fire as the source and nature of all things, and the transformation of elementary bodies, emblematic of natural change, as indicated in his belief in “The turnings of fire: first sea, and of sea half is earth, half fireburst” (B31 [a]). Or, is this perhaps an allusion to the origin of the Big Bang theory; or is it the Canaanites’ fear of the nomadic Israelites as harbingers of change and decay; or is it rather Heraclitus’s Ephesus now lying in ruins, with its Maeander a dry river bed? As is characteristic too of Heraclitan scholarship, interpretative difficulties abound! This reading illustrates Okri’s propensity to pack multiple meanings into seemingly simple phrases. Every logos is meant to be experienced in order to decipher meaning. Hegel too endeavours to describe the incorporation of the objective world into the phenomenological state of consciousness in terms of human experience. He is quoted by Prier as saying that “experience is called this very process by which the element that is immediate, unexperienced … externalizes itself [i.e., is felt by the subject as ‘external to himself’], and then comes back to itself from this state of estrangement, and by so doing is at length set forth in its concrete nature and real truth, and becomes too a possession of consciousness” (Prier 1976, 59–61). This kind of linguistic density and resonance characterizes Okri’s treatment of his oppositional theme of change/ no change, which is most tellingly reflected in his use of the coincidence of opposites. The penultimate stanza, for instance, points to an idyllic Arcadian scene of the Augustan peace that followed the Roman civil war, “It is natural to want calm places/ Where stillness grows./ It’s natural to want/ Virgil’s spreading beeches” (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 75–78). The image of the “spreading beech,” which offers shelter from the weather, echoes the earlier part of the poem. In Part 1, the image of an oasis in the desert (discussed earlier) prefigures this  Quoted in Peter Straus (2012, 20). The reference to stone smiths is probably to the late AngloSaxon building with stone rather than wood  – a legacy from the Roman occupation of Briton/ Britain. 13  Wood, Bryant D. Web. 1–17. May 22, 2016: 1–17. The Walls of Jericho. http://www.biblearcheology.org/post/2008/06/The-Walls_of-Jericho.aspx/. Accessed May 28, 2016. 12

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“calm” place, a shelter from the inclemency of the desert of Asia Minor. In the reference to Virgil and the Augustan peace, Okri centres the poem on the longed-for idyll of a benign state where the age-old pursuits of bucolic citizens can be pursued. Hence, it is “natural” to hanker after Virgil’s beeches. Both the oasis and the beech trees convey the notion of ethical composure (not structurally contrived as in neo-­ Marxists’ Corbyn or Sanders) but sensed from within and lived out from that inner conviction. The images imply a posthuman democracy of soul and mind perceived and reflected as the composing unity of nature.14 Such glimpses of a constructed, well organized state in perfect balance, a piece of paradise, are in contrast to the preceding stanza’s man-made destruction wrought by “ambition” (Okri 2012, 93, l. 70) and the detritus of “wars” (l. 72), and serve to highlight the inexorability of change. This epiphanic vision is thus coupled with an enumeration of ecological changes, such as continental drift and cosmic chaos in: All around, leonids, planets. Stars are whirling. The cosmos shrinks and grows. It dreams and flows. Beneath the immutable spell of change (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 62–66).

Here, Chaos, the theory of how the universe is organized according to laws that we do not easily understand is envisioned as a “spell.” The mysterious flux of the universe in the Heraclitan oracular fragments is typically poetic. Okri’s cosmogony of wonderment, wedded as it is to his comprehension of mankind’s destructiveness, both dovetails with and modifies Heraclitus’s philosophy of human affairs, likewise expressed in didactic literary form as in: “You must recognize that war is common, strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity” (B80). Okri evidently attributes cosmic destructiveness to humankind’s perpetuation of a futile heroic ethos of valour and courage – what he consolidates into “ambition” – as precipitating the demise of dynastic and imperial achievements; they “cave in,” “give up the ghost,” and lives “collapse” (94, ll. 67–70) as “wars eat up fathers and frail sisters” (94, l. 72). In Okri’s ascetic ideal, humanism can contribute nothing to his society of knowers as long as it remains fixated on the image of strong and opinionated men. Insisting on the redemptive role of poetry, which comprises “the magic of listening” (Okri 2011, 3) to those who can access the “wild,” Okri writes in A Time for New Dreams: In a world of contending guns, the argument of bombs, and the madness of believing only our side, our religion, our politics is right, a world fatally inclined towards war – we need the voice of poetry that speaks to the highest in us (2011, 3; emphasis added).

 In Virgil’s Eclogues, Tityrus is beneath a beech tree that comes to symbolize the wisdom of rural restraint and peace as in much seventeenth century poetry and discussed later in this chapter in terms of sophrosyne. 14

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Conclusion The necessary destructiveness of war returns the argument to the initial Okri extract on the need for knowledge of self, as well as to the opening of The Famished Road (quoted earlier), now seemingly alluding to the wrath of Ogun, Yoruba god of the war and the road (an African correlative of the Roman Mars or Greek Deimos), but also, by extension, to the Greek anathematizing of “unhallowed speech” in governance: “And roads break out/ Into unhallowed speech” (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 73–74).15 As the messenger of the gods, Ogun is the mouthpiece for the ancestors, and so arguably for antiquity or the pre-Homeric conception of moderation or excellence (sophrosyne) that is encapsulated in the aphorisms of the Seven Sages: “Know thyself,” “Nothing in excess,” “Measure is best” (Kahn 1979, 27–32), reiterated in Okri’s pivotal injunction to know oneself and his plea to “Spread illumination through this darkening world” (2012, 94, ll. 82–83; quoted earlier). Okri thus keeps the Heraclitan illusory material intact, but conflates logos, the guiding principle for Heraclitan cosmology that he calls “fire,” with the river’s flow, making Nature’s “change” the guiding principle of this poem, as exemplified in the lines: “The river makes all things/ Dance to the music they/ Never understood at the time” (2012, 93, ll. 35–37; emphasis added). The acoustic resonance here recalls the Shamanistic trance dance, a universal in deep antiquity and expressed in more modern times by such examples as the Khoi/San ritual to heighten consciousness in order to heal society, encapsulated in Okri’s plea to “spread illumination ….” It is the river transformed from being a metonymy for change to a metaphor for Logos, the guiding principle that makes “ta panta,” all things, dance to a music, which “they” could not have understood at the time. The ambiguous use of the pronoun “they” makes this statement particularly enigmatic. Nevertheless, Okri infers that poets are engaged in a ritual of prayer to “the goddess of surprise” and the road/river should not utter blasphemous words at this time. Of course, the poet Okri stages a model of the world in the kind of powerful suggestions that ritual makes about social reality under the aegis of divine authority. This might not be fulfilled, as he reminds us in the rhetorical question posed in A Time for New Dreams: “Who can weigh a word on a scale, even against a feather of truth?” (2011, 5) – a veiled allusion to Egyptian mythology and the judgement of the god Anubis (Spence 1915, 1925, 119). This is countered with an oppositional adversative: “And yet,” suggestive of the need to re-dream the world and Okri’s fascination with and knowledge of antiquity, a tribute enshrined in the title to this poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River”: “… see how much words weigh in the heart, in the imagination, in dreams, echoing down the ages, as durable as the Pyramids” (Okri 2011, 5). The appeal to the senses of sight and sound culminates in one to the ontopoietic intellect, invoking another of the four basic elements of the cosmos: “Words, lighter than air, are as mysteriously enduring as lived time” (Okri 2011, 5). And, so, at the conclusion of the poem the poet admonishes us to 15

 This legacy can be seen in the Christian marriage rites.

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Spread illumination through this darkening world. Spread illumination through this darkening world (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 82-83).

His choice of “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything” as epigraph to his collection, from Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt steers all things” (B64) does, however, indicate recognition of a guiding force of the world that, in turn, is a correlative of an African epistemology of holism and enlightenment, captured in the term Ubuntu  – which translates loosely as “I am, because you are”.16 Daniel Graham clarifies the cosmic thrust in the context of Heraclitan thought: “The fiery shaft of lightning is a symbol of the direction of the world” (Graham 2014, 8), the thunderbolt being an attribute of Zeus, the storm god/ a.k.a. of Life. Okri’s explication of the power of poetry, in its exalted condition as “a descendant of the original word [read Logos] which mystics [read poets] believe gave the impetus for all creation” (Okri 2011, 5; additions added), coupled with his insistence that “[p]oetry incarnates that which shapes, changes, transforms” (ibid.) transmutes Heraclitus’s thunderbolt into a metaphor for poetic agency. This is captured in Okri’s belief that “Poetry hints at the godlike in us, and causes us to resonate with high places of being” (ibid.). Okri concedes that, “The ancient oracles may be silent; and we may not believe in the many ways the gods speak to us, or through us” (ibid.). And, as is customary in Okrian oracular sayings, he follows this with a qualification, introduced with the adversative “but” in: “But living means that we are the focus of many pressures: the demands of society, the strange pressures of being itself, of yearnings, inexplicable moods, dreams, and of feelings powerful with all currents of mortal life” (Okri 2011, 5). He clinches his cyclical argument on the ecological dance of Life in his closing couplet with an appeal for sophrosyne, an evocation of the “wild,” where “chaos” can be “honed”: No change is good, dancing Gracefully to change is better (2012, 94, ll. 84–85; emphasis added).17

So, what is ultimately significant in Okri’s treatment of the oppositional change/ no change dichotomy, that is, of his dialectic of opposites [Gegenstände], is that the poet reinvests the words with a numinous power they had lost. His speculative method of thought, as witnessed in the hierarchical and heuristic progression of this  Kamwangamalu (1999, 25–26) argues that ubuntu is integral to pan-African philosophy and he shows that it has multiple phonological variants, for example umundu in Kikuyu [Kenya], bumuntu in KiSuma and KiHaya [Tanzania] and gimuntu inKiKongo and giKwezi (DRC). Mogobe Ramose (2001, 3), however, while acknowledging the Ubuntu is a fundamental ontological and epistemological category of thought, delimits its significance to the Bantu-speakers of South Africa. The relevance of the term to the present discussion is that, morphologically, the prefix ubu- indicates a general state of being, whereas –ntu means “a person.” The composite word thus signifies two aspects of being, encapsulating both self and other, that is, an indivisible interrelatedness. 17  Compare Okri’s self-reflexive comment on his Famished Road trilogy: 16

Dancers’ limbs twist and thread/ In this highly atmospheric/ Conclusion to an elemental/ Trilogy that veers between the/ Airy and the grounded (Okri in Essakow, 2016, 3).

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two-part poem, not only allows Okri to deal validly with his overt as well as deeper subject matter – the inexorability of change and the need for enlightenment, but also to embed a collection of Heraclitan ideas that permits the coexistence of change and no change, and so of Being and Not-Being on an equal footing, making quite clear the necessity of a new interpretational stance and a new attitude to “beingness” through an ontopoietic epistemic ecology  – beyond culture and below consciousness.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2002. On the Contemporary Relation Between Philosophy and Music. In Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert. Berkley: University of California Press. Aquileana. 2015. Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites. https:// aquileana.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/guarda5.png/. Web. 31 October 2015. Baym, Nina. 1965. Robert Frost’s Nature Poetry: An Approach to Robert Frost’s Nature Poetry. American Quarterly 17 (1): 713–732. Essakow, Hubert. 2016. Terra Review – New Ben Okri. Guardian 15 (March): 1–3. Estés, Clarissa. 1998. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. Johannesburg: Random House. Frost, Robert. 2014. North of Boston. Cambridge, Massachusetts: David Nutt. Ghigi, Nicoletta. 2014. Towards a New Enlightenment: Metaphysics as Philosophy of Life. In Phenomenology of Space and Time. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 3-10, Analecta Husserliana. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer. Graham, Daniel W. 2014. Heraclitus. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm. edu/heraclit/print/>. Web. 1-6. Accessed 31 October 2014. Gray, R. 2009. Apologia pro Ben Okri’s in Arcadia: A Neglected Masterpiece. English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 26 (1): 65–71. ———. 2013. When Chaos is the God of an Era: Rediscovering an Axis Mundi in Ben Okri’s Starbook (2007). Research in African Literatures 44 (1): 128–145. Greaves, A. 2010. The land of Ionia: Society Recovery in the Archaic Period. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Husserl, E. 1970. In Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortäges, ed. I.  Husserliana and B. Strasser. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Kahn, C., ed. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamwanggamalu, N.M. 1999. Ubuntu in South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Perspective to a Pan-­ African Concept. Critical Arts 13 (2): 24–41. Lazaridis, N. 2007. Wisdom in Loose Form. The Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in Collections of the Helenistic and Roman Period. Leiden: Brille. Okri, Ben. 1991, 1997a. The Famished Road. London: Vintage. ———. 1989, 1997b. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix. ———. 2007. Starbook. Chatham: Random House. ———. 2011. A Time for New Dreams. Chatham: Random House. ———. 2012. Wild. Croydon: Random House. Prier, A. 1976. Archaic Logic: Symbol and Structure in Heraclitus, Parmenides and Empedocles. Mouton: The Hague. Ramose, M.B. 2001. An African Perspective on Justice and Race. Forum for Philosophizing 2: 1–27. Soyinka, Wole. 1965. The Road. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1976, 1995. Myth, Literature and the African World. New York & London: Cambridge University Press. Spence, Louis. 1915, 1925. The Myths of Ancient Egypt. London: George G Harris & Co. Straus, Peter. 2012. From Beowulf to Prufrock: One Thousand Years of English Writing. Cowies Hill, KwaZulu-Natal: Solo Collective. Wood, Bryant. 2016. The Walls of Jericho Web. 1-17. Accessed 22 May 2016. http://biblearcheology.org/post/2008/06/The-­Walls-­of-­Jericho.aspx/

Part V

Narrative and Solitude

Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation of Death and Solitude John N. Balsavich

Abstract  In the paper, I deal with three novels – Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – to explore the issue of facing death while being the last man or woman in existence. The Last Man is a first-person narrative that chronicles the gradual destruction of the human race by a plague. The third person narration in The Year of the Flood portrays the character Toby trying to make sense of her solitary condition on top of a rooftop spa, all while under the impression that she is the only person left alive in the whole world. Finally, in The Road the nameless father struggles to ensure the survival of his son in a world that has given into cannibalism. To explore the effects solitude has concerning the theme of death, I consider Emmanuel Levinas’s God, Death, and Time and Time and the Other. Levinas is essential because of the stress he places on the ethical and meaningful relationships we enter into as being part of society. Furthermore, Levinas argues that death has a societal feature due to the fact that there are traditionally survivors to remember the departed. The notion of solitude, which is a prevalent theme in each of the three novels, removes that societal context, thus resulting in the last man or woman having to face death alone. The paper, therefore, takes a critical examination of what it means to understand one’s own morality in the absence of others through ideas relating to the issue of suicide, the burden of being the final survivor, and finally the question as to who ultimately remembers the last person. Overall, it is the objective of this paper to explore the ways in which the last man or woman, not only makes sense of his or her solitary conditions, but also confronts his or her own mortality in the absence of others. Keywords  Death · Funeral · Humanity · Levinas · Memory · Solitude · Suicide

J. N. Balsavich (*) Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_14

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The idea of being the last human being on earth is a prominent and noteworthy theme found within the genre of post-apocalyptic literature. For the paper, I explore the theme of being the last man or woman in three novels, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1828 Reprint 1994). Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2005), in order to examine how each character must confront the fact that he or she faces the issue of mortality while in various states of solitude. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man focuses on the loss of the human race by a plague as observed by the narrator Lionel who eventually becomes the only remaining human. In Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, a bioengineered epidemic has annihilated the majority of the human race, forcing the character Toby to remain in seclusion in an abandoned spa. As a result of being confined to the spa building, Toby believes herself to be the last remaining human in the world. Finally, the nameless father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road grapples with the decision as to whether or not to take the life of his only son in order to spare him from being killed and eaten by the roaming hordes of cannibals that make up the world. The investigation of death under the condition of solitude is explored through three issues. The first relates to the question of suicide and why the last person does not simply end his or her own life now that he or she is alone. The second issue concerns the last person’s role as being the ultimate survivor of the human race, and thus having the responsibility to carry on the memory of the departed. Finally, the third issue deals with the question of who performs the act of burial for the last person. It is this confrontation of one’s own mortality, within the understanding that the last man or woman faces the possibility of dying alone, which ultimately results in a challenge for the last person in narrating his or her experience. To aid in the exploration concerning the relationship between death and solitude, the paper considers two works of Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time and Time and the Other. In God, Death, and Time Levinas acknowledges that one’s relation to death is, “made up of the emotional and intellectual repercussions of the knowledge of the death of others” (Levinas 2000, 10). Levinas understands death as being a part of alterity, and this idea of understanding death in a societal context is a repudiation of Martin Heidegger’s thoughts concerning the topic. For as Levinas explains, “Heidegger calls death certain to the point of seeing in this certitude of death the origin of certitude itself, and he will not allow this certitude to come from the experience of the death of others” (Levinas 2000, 10). In other words, Heidegger sees death as being a solitary experience unique only to the person who is experiencing it. In refuting Heidegger, however, Levinas points out that, “The love of the other is the emotion of the other’s death. It is my receiving the other – and not the anxiety of death awaiting me – that is the reference to death. We encounter death in the face of the other” (Levinas 2000, 105). Stressing the societal feature of death, Levinas argues that, “It is for the death of the other that I am responsible to the point of including myself in his death….The death of the other: therein lies the first death” (Levinas 2000, 43). In other words, death is something that is encountered in the ethical responsibility we have toward other people as a result of our interactions with them. Furthermore, in Time and the Other Levinas insists that, “This approach to death indicates that we are in relation to something that is absolutely other...as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not

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confirmed by death but broken by it” (Levinas 1987, 74). For Levinas, death finds its meaning in our interaction with others, and it is through this societal understanding of death that ultimately results in one’s solitude being broken. In the novels that the paper looks at, the issue of solitude means that there is an extreme limitation of other humans for whom the last man or woman can enter into relationship with. Shelley’s Lionel is the last man after the plague renders the human extinct, Atwood’s Toby believes herself to be the last one because she is too afraid to leave her spa rooftop, and the father’s solitude in McCarthy’s novel is self-imposed since he is unwilling to have any sort of connection with anyone else for fear that they might kill him and or his son. Without anyone to have a relationship with, how can death find any meaning? Thus, the condition of dying in solitude ultimately hinges upon how the characters in each novel project his or her situation as being the last one. One crucial aspect that each character faces concerns the question of whether or not to give into the temptation of suicide. The issue of suicide emerges in part because the future is unknowable for the last man or woman since there is no other person for whom he or she could have a meaningful relationship with. Levinas’s account of the future is one that emphasizes the relationship a person has with society: “The future is what is not grasped, what befalls us and lays hold of us. The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future” (Levinas 1987, 77). Thus, the future for Levinas is understood in the context of alterity, and the removal of that that societal context results in a challenge to the conceptualization of the future on the part of the last man or woman. This removal of others ultimately becomes a source of anxiety for the last person, and thus is a contributing factor to thoughts of possible suicide. In The Last Man, Lionel is unable to bear the death of his fellow man and at one point in his narrative addresses an invented reader to proclaim: “My reader, his limbs quivering and his hair on end, would wonder how I did not, seized with sudden frenzy, dash myself from some precipice, and so close my eyes forever on the sad end of the world” (Shelley 1994, 275). In mentioning the possibility of ending his own life, Lionel is directly addressing an invented reader in order to describe the horrors of having to witness the death of so many people. He asks, given the circumstance of what he is witnessing, why he does not end his own life? There is a suggestion present that Lionel is perhaps asking for a reason or justification to kill himself. This is a question that ironically cannot be answered by anyone, thus contributing to Lionel’s melancholy. At the end of the novel, after Lionel becomes the last man, the question of suicide re-emerges causing him to reflect on the fact that, “Many times I had delivered myself up to the tyranny of anguish – many times I resolved a speedy end to my woes; and death by my own hands was a remedy, whose practicability was even cheering to me” (Shelley 1994, 456–457). The tyranny of anguish that Lionel delivers himself to means that the thought of ending his own life has greatly occupied his mind. When the plague is at its peak and the human race is dying out, he talks about committing suicide because he is unable to watch the suffering of his fellow man. Finally, near the end of the novel, the thoughts of suicide return prompting Lionel to question: “Why did I continue to live -- why not throw off the weary weight of time, and with my own hand, let out the fluttering prisoner from my agonized

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breast?” (Shelley 1994, 464–65). Lionel is asking a question but sadly there is no one to provide him an answer. He is the last man, and as a result of his new solitary condition he has to resort to addressing an invented reader. It is as if he is asking permission or trying to find justification to end his own life now that he is all alone. He needs the validation of others to justify the possible action that he desires to take. And yet, he does not take his own life. This perhaps refers to what Levinas says about the concept of suicide in Time and the Other: “Death is never assumed, it comes. Suicide is a contradictory concept. The eternal immanence of death is part of its essence. In the present, where the subject’s master is affirmed, there is hope” (Levinas 1987, 73). In living there is an awareness of death, and one cannot live without the knowledge of his or her eventual passing. Suicide ends up negating the immanence of death and therefore negates what it means to be human. Lionel does not kill himself and the reason for this is because he comes to see himself as the last representative of the human race, and thus the last chronicler of mankind. If Lionel ends his life, then the entire human race would become extinct, and there would be no one to remember or record the story of the human race. By not giving into the temptation of suicide, Lionel is able to keep alive the memory of mankind. The thought of suicide also weighs heavily on Toby mind as she spends her days locked away from the outside world, believing herself to be the only living human being left alive. This belief in being the only one left causes Toby to realize that, “She could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?” (Atwood 2009, 96). This thought occurs after Toby comes to the realization that the past is closed off to her while the future remains unknown. This wondering about an uncertain future combined with her belief that those she knew and loved are most likely gone, trigger within Toby thoughts of ending her own life if it need come to that. However, unlike Lionel, who, at the end of his novel becomes the last man once everyone else has died out, Toby does eventually come across other people. One such person is Ren who Toby knew during her stay with the Gardeners, a group of environmentalists who believed man’s destructive nature would lead to their eventual extermination. However, Ren is injured, and as she sleeps, Toby contemplates a mercy killing to put her out of her misery; she “considers the powered Death Angels. It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A blessing” (Atwood 2009, 357). This is the first person that Toby has encountered after believing herself to be the only person left in the world. Ren could be a companion for her, and yet she questions whether or not she should kill her as an act of mercy. Toby is therefore planning on putting to death someone that could break her solitary condition. She may have decided against committing suicide herself, but if she chooses to kill Ren, then she condemns herself back to her state of solitude, thus becoming stagnate and unable to move forward. In The Road, the father does not consider ending his own life because he is already aware that he is dying. Instead, the issue of death is turned towards his son as the father wrestles with the decision whether or not he should kill his son to spare him from suffering the horrors of the world. In terms of suffering, Levinas points

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out in Time and the Other that, “In pain, sorrow, and suffering, we once again find, in a state of purity, the finality that constitutes the tragedy of solitude….in suffering there is the proximity of death” (McCarthy 2006, 68–69). If the father does kill his son, then he is putting to death the next generation and thus the possibility of humanity continuing onward. The question weighs heavily upon his mind that it causes him to lash out at God: “Are you there...Will I see you at least? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God” (McCarthy 2006, 11–12). The father’s frustration with God over what he has to endure underscores his current predicament of being burdened with the decision to kill his son in order to spare him from the horrors of the world. The moment in the novel that finally forces the father to make a decision concerning the life of his son occurs after the two of them come across a house where people are being kept as livestock for purposes of cannibalization: “Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands” (McCarthy 2006, 110). This horrific atrocity is further accentuated when the novel directs the reader’s attention to a mattress on which “lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous” (McCarthy 2006, 110). As these victims call out for help, the father knows he cannot do anything for them, and further knowing the danger that he and his son are now in, quickly makes his escape. The scene of inhumanity that the father witnesses, along with the understanding that this fate could befall his son, prompts him to command the boy to kill himself. He instructs his son, “You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying. Do you understand?” (McCarthy 2006, 113). The father cannot bear the thought of his son being killed and eaten by cannibals, and as a result of this fear he commands the boy on how to take his own life. It is with this moment that the full weight of the potential hopelessness of the world is felt, as this is a world in which fathers are forced to take the lives of their sons. The son does not obey his father’s command, and this hesitation about taking his own life causes the father to realize that he himself might have to perform the unthinkable deed: “Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire….Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kill him. Quickly” (McCarthy 2006, 114). The full significance of this scene is one that underscores the father’s frustration with God, his feeling of abandonment, and finally the decision to whether or not to kill his son. However, the father does not give in and commit the act of murder against his only son. He instead makes a promise to him that, “I wont leave you...I wont ever leave you” and that, “He began to believe they had a chance” (McCarthy 2006, 114). In this crucial moment of deciding not to kill his son, the father fulfills the first commandment that Levinas highlights in God, Death, and Time: “Death opens to the face of an Other, which expresses the command ‘thou shalt not kill’” (Levinas 2000, 106). The father’s thoughts up to this point in the narrative have been occupied by death, and perhaps he now realizes that the state of the world is one in which death is even more prominent and inescapable than it was in the past.

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However, in spite of this knowledge, the father does not take the life of his son vowing instead to never leave him. At the end of the novel, the father asks his son to tell him a story, to which the boy says he has no stories to tell since his father already knows everything about him. This causes the father to reply, “You have stories inside that I dont know about,” to which the son asks, “You mean like dreams?” and the father says, “Like dreams. Or just things that you think about” (McCarthy 2006, 268). The exchange ends with the father realizing that even though both he and his son have experienced and witnessed horrible and unthinkable things, they are both still alive: “Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here” (McCarthy 2006, 269). The significance of this moment is one that underscores the fact that the father and son have not given into the act of suicide or infanticide. They have chosen to reject these possible choices for themselves, deciding instead to embrace living in spite of the difficulties they face. The second topic for consideration is the burden of the survivor as the one who carries on the memories of the departed. According to Levinas in God, Death, and Time, “In the guiltiness of the survivor, the death of the other is my affair. My death is my part in the death of the other, and in my death I die the death that is my fault” (Levinas 2000, 39). There thus exists a connection between the living survivors and the deceased in which the living has a responsibility to remember the departed. Jacques Derrida also takes up this idea in his final seminar, The Beast vs. Sovereign, Volume II: “I can then, I must then only carry the other in me, and address myself to him or her in me, promise her or him in me to carry her or him in me...Where there is no longer any world between them for them, at the end of the world that every death is” (Derrida 2010, 169–70). The responsibility of being the survivor and therefore remembering the deceased is now in the hands of the last man or woman. About halfway through his narrative Lionel makes the claim that, “I am not immortal; and the thread of my history might be spun out to the limits of my existence….I must complete my work” (Shelley 1994, 239). This remark foreshadows that Lionel is going to be the last man which causes him to ascertain that he must continue to chronicle all that is happening. In other words, his ultimate burden is to take on the role of being the final narrator for the human race. At the end of the novel, after the entire human race is extinct, Lionel narrates, “Fate had administered life to me...she had bought me for her own; I admitted to her authority, and bowed to her decrees” (Shelley 1994, 465). This revelation comes after Lionel asks why he continues to live, and questions if it is right for him to just end his life. In choosing not to take his life, however, Lionel is able to accept his role of being the final representative of the human race. His moment of clarity as to what his purpose now is relates to what Levinas in God, Death, and Time maintains is the survivor’s role in the death of others: “The death of the other who dies affects me in my very identity as a responsible ‘me’....My being affected by the death of the other is precisely that, my relation with his death. It is, in my relation, my deference to someone who no longer responds, already a culpability -- the culpability of the survivor” (Levinas 2000, 12). In other words, even though one is emotionally affected by the death of another person, being a survivor means continuing onward. Lionel now understands

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that fate has saved him from the plague, and that he has an obligation as the last representative of the human race to carry on in their absence. Lionel’s understanding that he is to be that last representative of the human race causes him at last to acknowledge that he must record his own story. At the end of the novel, he proclaims, “I also will write a book...for whom to read? -- to whom dedicate? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, ‘Dedication To The Illustrious Dead. Shadows, Arise, and Ready Your Fall! Behold The History of the Last Man” (Shelley 1994, 466). Upon making this decision to write his story Lionel adds, “I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this ‘world’s sole monument,’ a record of these things, I will leave a monument of the existence of Lionel Verney, the Last Man” (Shelley 1994, 466). The announcement of writing a book for which there is no audience to read it may in fact be the ultimate moment of Lionel’s solitude. He knows that there is no one left to read the book, and yet he is going to write it anyway. He therefore becomes the final chronicler of the human race and writes a narrative with the full knowledge that there is no audience for the story. Lionel’s purpose is not to take his life but rather to tell his story as the Last Man and to be that final representative of the human race. Toby’s purpose also emerges at the end of The Year of the Flood. However, throughout most of the novel her thoughts are turned towards the past that remains inaccessible to her. In one scene, after watching a creature known as a Liobam walking around the outside of her parameter, Toby’s thoughts turn to her old friends: “How Pilar would have enjoyed seeing those, she thinks. Pilar, and Rebecca, and little Ren. And Adam One. And Zeb. All dead now. Stop it, she tells herself. Just stop that right now” (Atwood 2009, 95). The appearance of the Liobam causes Toby to remember the past and the people she once knew. This is a moment of brief nostalgia that is broken when she realizes that most of the people she knew and loved are probably dead. Eventually she realizes the error of what she has been doing: “It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it” (Atwood 2009, 96). The significance of this moment is that Toby understands that she is wasting time by mourning about what cannot be undone. She comes to the realization that, “She can’t live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future” (Atwood 2009, 96). Toby’s fixation on the past is engendered by her fears and inability to venture out into the uncertain and hostile world, and thus escape her state of solitude. Unlike Lionel, who truly becomes the last living person, Toby does eventually come across people that she once knew, including Ren whose injuries result in Toby wrestling with the decision as to whether or not to administer to the young girl a drug that would end her life. In regard to the decision facing her, the question emerges: has Toby spent too much time in solitude that she cannot see herself with anyone else and thus feels the need to put the other to death? Fortunately, Toby’s compassionate side wins out as she does not kill Ren. The narrative describes that Toby’s “homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren out into the meads for the pigs and vultures….Just to have a second person on the premise – each a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time – just

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this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house. I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby” (Atwood 2009, 360). Her desire to have someone to break her solitude is what ultimately prevents Toby from taking Ren’s life because it is at this moment that Toby finally comes to the understanding of just how alone she has been. Humanity is dependent upon the interactions people have with each other, and it this interaction that formulates the ethical responsibility that Levinas argues is prominent before all else: “The grandeur of modern antihumanism….consists in making a clear space for the hostage-subjectivity by sweeping away the notion of the person. Antihumanism is right insofar as humanism is not enough. In fact, only the humanism of the other man is human” (Levinas 2000, 182). In the end, since Toby does not resort to killing Ren, she is able to uphold Levinas’s obligation of recognizing the humanity of another person. By choosing to let Ren live, Toby gains a companion thereby breaking her state of solitude. Her condition of solitude was the result of her own belief that she was the only one left alive in conjunction with her inability to move on from the past. Moreover, Toby’s comments on being a ghost implies a recognition on her part that she has been hanging too much on to the past. It is only after she comes across another person that Toby’s solitude breaks and she is able to find meaning again. The meaning and purpose for Toby is to no longer live in the past but instead to live in the present along with other people. She is thus able to regain that human connection that Levinas promotes as being fundamental to the human experience. In The Road, the father’s attempts to hold on to any sort of meaning proves to be nearly impossible in the face of the devastated and inhuman world that he and his son inhabit. Even though the world is a dangerous place, there are still moments in which the father and son can talk with one another and one of these conversations reveals to the reader an attempt on the part of the father to keep alive some sense of meaning in a world ostensibly without any. It is during one of these moments that the son says to his father, “And nothing bad is going to happen to us.” To which the father replies, “That’s right.” The son: “Because we’re carrying the fire” The father: “Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire” (McCarthy 2006, 83). During the course of their travels, the father has repeatedly told the boy that they are special because they carry the fire. For the father, the fire symbolizes the last hope for humanity that he believes he and his son represent. This belief in the fire becomes something for the father to hold on to in order to make it through the day to day existence of a world descended into death and cannibalism. Out of the all the characters in each of the novels, it is only the father who passes away. As he is dying, he tells his son, “You need to find the good guys” (McCarthy 2006, 278). All throughout the course of the novel the father avoided interacting with others out of fear that they would harm him and his son. Now, however, the father instructs his son to find others which causes the boy to ask his father: “Is it real? The fire?” The father informs him that, “Yes it is” (McCarthy 2006, 278). The father’s realization that he is at the end of his life connects to a comment Levinas makes in Time and the Other: “What is important about the approach of death is that at a certain moment we are no longer able to be able. It is exactly thus that the subject loses its very mastery as a subject” (Levinas 1987, 74). The father is fully aware

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that he is dying, while at the same time understanding that his son is going to live on without him. Although he accepts this, the boy’s fear of being without his father causes him to cry out, “You said you wouldn’t ever leave me.” To which the father replies, “I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did” (McCarthy 2006, 279). In the end, the father is able to let go of his son and, by doing so, guarantees that the human race is going to live on, not only because his son is alive, but because the father is finally able to trust his fellow man again. By telling his son to find others, and thus placing his trust back in his fellow man, the father is able to abide by the responsibility that Levinas claims in God, Death, and Time is of the utmost primacy concerning one’s encounter and interaction with another person: “The other concerns me as a neighbor. In every death is shown the nearness of the neighbor, and the responsibility of the survivor, in the form of a responsibility that the approach of proximity moves or agitates” (Levinas 2000, 17). The father is able to not only trust that his son is going to continue carrying fire but that there are in fact good people out there for his son to encounter who will take care of him just like the father did. The full restoration of humanity takes place during this moment as the father is finally able to place his trust back into his fellow man. The last issue under consideration concerns the issue of burial, and who ultimately remembers the last person once he or she passes away. Levinas places emphasis on the need for another person to verify the death of the other as well keeping the deceased in one’s memory. His view on the funeral is one that, “transforms the deceased into a living memory; the living thus have a relationship with the deceased and are determined in their turn by his memory” (Levinas 2000, 88). In addition to Levinas’s view on the funeral, Derrida argues for the important role the cemetery plays as being as place in which, “the survivor is able to verify each time that the dead one, identified by his or her proper name inscribed on the tomb, really is who he or she is, where he or she is, that he or she rests or reposes in the right place, in the place of the dead, a place from which he or she will not return” (Derrida 2010, 165–166). For both Levinas and Derrida, there exists a relationship between the living and the dead in which the living carries on the burial rites of the deceased while also keeping the departed alive in their memories. At one point in his narrative Lionel mentions that, “The massive portals of the churches swung creaking on their hinges; and some few lay dead on the pavement” (Shelley 1994, 319). The church is a place where the funeral rites of the deceased are traditionally performed. However, in The Last Man the plague that diminishes the world’s population now means that the church has lost this function of being in charge of the funeral rites since there is hardly anyone left to perform these tasks. The comment on how the portals swung on hinges and that few lay dead indicates that the church has not been fulfilling its responsibility to the dead for some time. The purpose of the church when it comes to honoring the dead has lost its value due to the diminishing human population. This ultimately foreshadows that once everyone is gone, there will be no one left to give Lionel a funeral for when he eventually passes. There are attempts made by some of those still remaining to hold on to the value of burial, while recognizing the importance that the survivor plays in respects to the

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departed. The character Lucy, whom Lionel and his company pick up during their travels out of England, is one such character. Lionel explains that, “Lucy, in desert England, in a dead world, wished to fulfil the usual ceremonies of the dead, such as were customary to the English people when death was a rare visitant” (Shelley 1994, 364). Even when the human population is dying out, there are still attempts made by some to hold on to certain values. In The Last Man, the human value of remembering departed by giving them a proper burial is practiced by Lucy in her attempts at fulfilling the role of the survivor in relation to the dead. She performs this act because it not only means something to her, it enables her to preserve a sense of humanity in a world absent of others. In other words, human values such as the funeral are being maintained even when the old word is vanishing. Another example of the importance of burial is provided by Lionel who comments: “We repined that the pyramids had outlasted the embalmed body of their builder. Alas! the mere shepherd’s hut of straw we passed on the road contained in its structure the principle of greater longevity than the race of man” (Shelley 1994, 389–99). Buildings, which are constructs of mankind, contain no meaning if there is no human to occupy other, and thus conceptualize a purpose for them. Moreover, the pyramids are also connected to the church in that they both become places that have a connection to the dead and the issue of remembrance. Once the human race is gone, however, what value do these places hold? It is because Lionel remains as the last man, that he is able to conceptualize a purpose for these buildings. By accepting his role as being the survivor of the human race, it becomes his responsibility to not only remember mankind, but to remember and uphold the value that mankind gave to certain buildings such as the church or pyramid. In The Year of the Flood, the issue of memory and the role of the survivor when it comes to the burial of the dead no longer belong to the human race but instead becomes subsumed by the animal. When the dangerous bio-engineered creatures known as the Pigoons attempt to break into Toby’s rooftop spa, she observes these creatures acting in a manner that raises the possibility in her mind that they are having a funeral for a Pigoon that she previously killed out of self-defense. Toby questions, “Could the pigs have been having a funeral? Could they be bringing memorial bouquets? She finds this idea truly frightening” (Atwood 2009, 328). Perhaps Toby is scared by what she is witnessing because these animals have challenged her role of being the survivor whose job it is to remember the departed. Burial not only serves as a way in which the deceased are remembered, it also allows the living to move on with their own lives. The Pigoons, by engaging in the human act of the funeral, serve as a painful reminder to Toby that she has not moved on from the past. When Toby does leave behind the rooftop spa, and to her surprise encounters other people, she is finally able to give to the departed the rite of burial. This moment occurs when Toby, after meeting up with Ren, is forced to kill her old boss Blanco. In the past, Blanco was an abusive man who threatened to kill Toby after she refused his sexual advances. When she does eventually encounter Blanco, she ends up administering a poison called the Death Angels mainly as a form of mercy killing, as his injuries are too severe for any medical help. After she is done with the act, Toby says, “May his Spirit go in peace…. Such as it is, the fuck-pig” (Atwood 2009,

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382). Toby ends up performing what Derrida claims is the importance of the survivor in remembering the dead: “The dead one is both everywhere and nowhere….in the mournful survivor who can only let himself be invaded by a dead one who has no longer any place of his or her outside….this is both the greatest fidelity and the utmost betrayal, the best way of keeping the other while getting rid of her or him” (Derrida 2010, 169). Although she despised Blanco for the fear he inflicted, she is still able to acknowledge the importance of granting another person some form of a funeral rite. Finally, the issue of burial and memory is played out in The Road where right from the beginning the narrative establishes that, “The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind” (McCarthy 2006, 9). The opening of the novel describes the conditions of the new world by comparing the city of mankind to that of an apparition or as an image of death due to the fact that the city of man is vanishing. In addition to the city of man vanishing, the greyness of the world comes as result of the increased amount of ash that now liters the land: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and from in the void….The city was mostly burned. No sign of life….everything covered with ash and dust” (McCarthy 2006, 12). The idea of ash and dust being so prevalent suggest that nothing is buried in the world but instead is cremated and reduced to ashes. As a result of this cremation, there exists little to no grave site to visit in order to remember the dead. In other words, the function of the graveyard as being the space in which the living can visit with the dead no longer exists. The comment on temporal winds also invokes the passing of time and connects to the idea that time itself is dying out. In other words, the memories of the past world have been reduced to ashes. This ubiquitous ash covers everything, symbolizing the primacy that this inexorable death now has in the world. Following the father’s passing at the end of the novel, another man comes across the grieving son. After having an exchange with each other the son suspects that he can trust this other man. Before leaving, however, the son mentions to the other man that, “we cant just leave him here” (McCarthy 2006, 285). The other man wants to get going but the son remains adamant that his father’s body not be left out in the open. He says, “I dont want people to see him” (McCarthy 2006, 285). The man argues some more which prompts the son to ask, “Could we cover him with one of the blankets?” (McCarthy 2006, 285). Although the other man wants to get going, the son does not want to leave his father’s body out in the open for fear that the body could become food for cannibals. The son wants to give his father as close to a proper burial as he can, and his desire to do so underscores the human value of remembering and paying respects to the deceased. In God, Death and Time, Levinas stresses the importance of the burial rite as being, “a deliberate relationship of the living with death, through their relationship with the deceased. Here, death is thought and not simply described. It is a necessary moment in the conceptual progress of thought itself, and in this sense it is thought” (Levinas 2000, 86). Although though the world has changed immensely, the son still recognizes the importance of burying the dead.

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Eventually the other man consents to letting the son pay his last respects to his father. The son does so and says to his deceased father, “I’ll talk to you every day…. And I wont forget. No matter what” (McCarthy 2006, 286). Although brief, the son is able to give his father a proper goodbye. In the end, the son is able to keep alive his father’s memories and performs what Derrida argues is the responsibility that the survivor has in remembering the deceased: “I can then, I must then only carry the other in me, and address myself to him or her in me, promise her or him in me to carry her or him in me...Where there is no longer any world between them for them, at the end of the world that every death is” (Derrida 2010, 169–170). If the father had killed his son, there would be no one to bury the father when he eventually died. The father not only guarantees the survival of the human race by telling his son to find others and form that connection that is fundamental to what it means to be human, he also enables his own funeral to happen because the son is alive to fulfill that role of burial. Moreover, since the son finds others, he is no longer the last man like his father was, a man in his own self-imposed solitude because of his refusal to interact with others. The father’s solitude is thus broken for the son once the latter comes across other people and is able to form that bond of human connection that Levinas promotes as being so prominent in defining our own humanity. All three novels tackle the theme of being the last person in existence, and it is through the prism of death that the characters in each of the novels are able to recognize, and in some instances, regain their humanity. For Lionel, there is a sense that being the last person in existence means having a responsibility to the departed to carry on and to give testament to the memory and accomplishments of the human race. Toby herself must survive in a world that is empty of humans but as seen the emergence of new creatures, some of whom have taken on the responsibility of honoring their dead, a task that Toby has neglected. Finally, despite the horrific and inhuman conditions of McCarthy’s novel, there is a sense that humanity has been restored due to the fact that the son is able to place his trust in others. The responsibility that the living has in relation to the dead, as explored by Derrida and Levinas, are prominent themes in each of the novels as they grapple with the idea of being the last person in existence.

References Atwood, Margaret. 2009. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books. Derrida, Jacques. 2010. The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A.  Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2000. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Edited by Jacques Rolland. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York: Vintage Press. Shelley, Mary. [1828]1994. The Last Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part VI

Aesthetics and Ontology

An Apology for Abstraction in an Age of High Definition and Photo Realism in the Work of Kandinsky and the White Shaman Rock Art Panel and Related Rock Art Sites Bruce Ross

Abstract  In a period of high definition, photorealism, and postmodern deconstruction the experience of art making, its theory, and its art itself have drifted away from some understandable connection to the process of art creation as a connection to some psychologically deep inspiration. Abstract art as conceived and practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, which included in his later stage beyond representation or abstractions of representation jumbled gatherings of biomorphs with no connection to representation may be compared to the White Shaman rock art panel with its gathering of seemingly abstract geometric images as well as transformed representational imagery, much like the related Fate Bell Shelter rock art and Three Rivers Petroglyphs. Kandinsky would claim his expressed abstractions are prompted by his psyche. The artist or artists of the White Shaman panel of the lower Pecos River operated under transformed consciousness and Shamanism. Kandinsky’s “unconscious, spontaneous expression” and “expression. .. of inner feeling” may be compared to the probably hallucinogenic connection to the other world in the White Shaman panel. Such connections and abstractions and transformations could be related to the “total theater” of Diaghilev and the contemporary rave dances in which consciousness is heightened by sensory overload. The cybernetic capacity of the computer age has worked in another direction and even “objectified” consciousness itself. Keywords  Abstract art · Wassily Kandinsky · The white shaman panel · Representation in art · States of consciousness · Spirituality in art The history of painterly art may be regarded as a movement from representation, with landscapes dominating, to versions of abstraction. Current gestures in culture seem to emphasize a hyperreality return to representation. Early on in the Western philosophy of aesthetics Plato suggested the metaphysical problematic of B. Ross (*) Independent Scholar, Hampden, ME, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_15

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representation by asking the question: “What is the art of painting designed to be— an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear—of appearance or of reality?” (Weitz 1966, 9) and concluding this thought with, “The real artist, who knew what he is imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations” (Weitz 1966, 10). But what is reality? What is its connection to the representational world? Plato’s answer to these questions centered on idealized forms the representational reality mirrored. A modern resolution of this problem in the West is posed by discussions of the psychosomatic energetic patterns of the human artist in relation to the representational world. Dr. Masaru Emoto examined a basic energetic pattern termed hado: “Hado is the intrinsic vibration pattern at the atomic level in all matter. The smallest unit of energy. Its basis is the energy. It is the basis of human consciousness” (Ishak 2005). Toyoko Matsuzaki in a book on healing with hado, develops the scope of the term: “Everything—including you, your pets, the flowers in your garden, and the mug on your desk—is like an antenna that receives hado. After circulating inside the body or other material, hado returns to Mother Nature again” (Matsuzaki 2005, 3). In Japanese aesthetics aware or “touchiness” is the experience of feeling connected to and elicited by the representational world as a kind of pathos. Hado might explain the psychodynamics of this aesthetic. Analogically, of the American sixties it was retrospectively expressed that to understand the period’s art, music, clothing, and so forth one had to understand the use of hallucinogens. Hado which is a version of the Chinese Qi when released from humans, other animate realities, and even from inanimate realities like rocks, discloses information about those realities (Matsuzaki 2005, 3–4). Hado is translated as “wave motion”. The artist Maya Lin produced an environmental installation which I visited at Storm King Mountain sculpture museum called “Wave Field” that consisted of grass covered large mounds lined one after another. An example of environmental art, such as installations by Andy Goldsworthy, “Wave Field” and her related work expresses the inner workings, call them abstractions, of the natural world. It seems evident that the abstract painting of Wassily Kandinsky as well as the petroglyphs and pictographs of North America may be related to psychodynamic energy. The issue of states of consciousness was on the minds of both Kandinsky and the anonymous creators of rock art in relation to what they created and come to bare on issues of representation in all its permutations. In his Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky addresses this: ... the number is increasing of those men who put no trust in the methods of materialistic science when it deals with those questions which have to do with “non-matter,” or matter which is not accessible to our minds. Just as art is looking for help from the primitives, so these men are turning to half-forgotten times in order to get help from their half-forgotten methods. However, these very methods are still alive and in use among nations whom we, from the height of our knowledge, have been accustomed to regard with pity and scorn. To such nations belong the Indians, who from time to time confront those learned in our civilization with problems which we have either passed by unnoticed or brushed aside with superficial words and explanations (Kandinsky 1997, 13).

Kandinsky was influenced by the writings of Madam Blavatsky, the modern proponent of Theosophy, the exploration of spiritually grounded divine force and related

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writings. Through Theosophy, Kandinsky would have a grounding in abstraction that he would express through his art. Likewise, the apparent entoptic background of rock art would come to play in his understanding of abstraction. Kandinsky was also influenced by new directions of atonal music and after a concert by Schoenberg painted one of his “impressions” paintings, a rendering of representational reality by means of particularized feeling. In his consequent correspondence with Kandinsky, Schoenberg asserts: “Art belongs to the “unconscious”! One must express “oneself”! Express oneself “directly”! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these “acquired” characteristics, but that which is “inborn,” “instinctive”. .. This is my belief!” (Bergman 2009, 12). One recognizes here Kandinsky’s three designations for his paintings: the impression, “a direct impression of outward nature”; the improvisation, a “largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the non-material nature”; the composition, an “expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing” (Kandinsky 1997, 57). Here Kandinsky organizes gradations of artistic expression not unrelated to the aesthetic mechanisms that override pure representation in art. He thus suggests that “one may see in the objects about. .. not only what is purely material but also something less solid; something less “bodily” than in the period of realism” (Kandinsky 1997, 9). He further explains abstract aesthetics as the elimination of the single plane so that “the material object was made more abstract” (Kandinsky 1997, 44). Basically, he is revolutionizing the idea of representation in painting by placing the emphasis on the subject and their feeling rather than the object and its seeming materiality. By doing so he is drawing closer to those creators of rock art. Kandinsky’s fully developed approach to abstraction centers on biomorphs, groups of images resembling living organisms. He would claim that such images are projections of feeling into the future and which are not bound by materialist representational identification: “That which has no material existence cannot be subjected to a material classification. That which belongs to the spirit of the future can only be realized by feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road” (Kandinsky 1997, 12). When those of his period and beyond suggested such imagery is reminiscent of primal culture art, they were almost certainly unaware of rock art, but rather costume and designs on pottery and other objects, and probably unaware of any symbolic intention therein. Yet most certainly Kandinsky’s aesthetics of “feeling” referred to a deeper state than is commonly understood by this word. To understand Kandinsky’s relation of feeling to the spirituality of art, one might contrast the connection of visual representation, the emotional charge of music and dance, and an enhanced mode of feeling to the intended and understood structure such as spiritual law. In fact through his awareness of primal cultures and modern directions in art as well as his knowledge of Theosophy and its applications Kandinsky was aware of two basic approaches to spirituality, both of which could lead to psychosomatic realities. When he examines the importance of color and states that it “can advance or retreat, and can make of the picture a living thing, and so achieve an artistic expansion of space,” he is addressing the kinetic quality of the eye in relation to color and of the ear, psyche, and body in relation to music and

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dance and the art such events produce (Kandinsky 1997, 44–45). So he consequently undervalues ballet whose “external motives-the expression of love and fear, etc. are too material and naïve for the abstract ideas of the future” and perhaps overvalues Isadora Duncan for her connection “between the Greek dancing and that of the future. .. [making her like painters] who are looking for inspiration from the primitives” (Kandinsky 1997, 50). The seeming free form of Duncan can be related nonetheless to the sensory overload for its time of Diaghilev’s “total theater” fusion of the arts as well as in the more recent period Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus Dance Theater, trance dance, and raves. There are two distinctions here, then, one that focuses in the psychosomatic aspect of art expression and the other that focuses on intentionality of consciousness and the diminishment of basic sense perception. Masaru Emoto asserts: “Everything is eternally moving and vibrating—on and off, at an incredible speed” (Emoto 2009, 40). When this truth is experienced on the psychosomatic level, it evidently transforms representational materiality. When experienced on an intentional level it perhaps approaches metaphysical mystical experience. Emoto cites the enigmatic declaration of the Heart Sutra: “That which can be seen has no form, and that which cannot be seen has form” in this context (Emoto 2009, 40). Emoto the scientist would see energy, hado, as the only true form, not representational reality. A Buddhist would see Buddhist law as the only true form not representational reality. Kandinsky the artist would see true form in heightened feeling, perhaps a kind of altered state. Shamanism is a worldwide spiritual practice that is centered on a high level of respect for nature as a whole and the spirits which inhabit it. Some Shamanic cultures are structured by animal totems and even primal gods, often one for Earth and one for Sky. Many such societies include aspects of trance states, such as the vision quest rite of passage for males, the use of hallucinogens, sacred dancing and singing, and, for the shaman, various other worldly tasks. The shaman also might incorporate other worldly elements in their activities as a tribal physician. Until the late modern period Shamanism was considered an aspect of a hunter and gather existence with pictorial symbolism representations of such an existence. Kandinsky was interested in such cultures’ use of color and abstract patterns. Where those abstract patterns came from was probably also his concern. The entoptic theory of visual hallucinations to explain abstract imagery and patterns as a central component of Shamanism began to replace the older view. This new approach was conceived by David Lewis-Williams, Professor Emeritus and Senior Mentor of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It began to dominate thinking about Shamanism, particularly through the work of anthropologist Dr. Jean Clottes, expert in prehistory, a leading authority on rock art, and editor of International Letter on Rock Art, and Professor David Whitley, former chief archaeologist for UCLA’s Institute of Archaeology, a leading expert on prehistoric art and culture, and the United States representative to UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites. Perhaps an understanding of hado could enhance this approach. According to Matsuzaki:

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Hado enters all things on the earth, circulates inside the material, and then returns to the air. When hado goes through materials, both the hado and material are changed; in other words, hado leaves its own essences in the material, and the material adds its own characteristics to the hado while it circulates inside. After hado returns to the air in Mother Nature, the influence of the material is diluted and purified (Matsuzaki 2005, 17–18).

Could the entoptic imagery of primal cultures be in some sense a response to this process of hado? Shamanism is in part determined by altered states while hado seems a natural universal process. In the entoptic process abstract forms appear in the psyche and are transformed into representational imagery consistent with the given culture. Its artistic expressions are thought to represent various aspects of this process. In the East hado or Qi has long been identified as balls of energy seen by practitioners of martial arts and high level meditators. This energy ball, something like an aura, could be used to enhance one’s own energy. Other than drawings of this ball in contemporary manuals, there are perhaps no serious “artistic” renderings of it, but its hands-on use in healing is well known, as in Reiki. Accordingly, Kandinsky notes of abstraction and color: The revolt from dependence on nature is only just beginning. Any realization on the inner working of colour and form is so far unconscious. The subjection of composition to some geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely abstract basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and aimless. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that he can test colours for themselves and not only by external impressions (Kandinsky 1997, 46–47).

He emphasizes this need to understand color as such, “This neglect of inner meanings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic power is called ‘art for art’s sake’” (Kandinsky 1997, 3). Thus, he created a scheme for color that links them to emotion and even kinetic effects (Kandinsky 1997, 36). This “inner meaning” of color and of form he sees in Cézanne: Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate (Kandinsky 1997, 17). In his scheme of color, for example, he sees red as an abstraction or “within itself” that primal and traditional cultures see as “beautiful” within the green of nature (Kandinsky 1997, 40).

Color for him is important for its “psychic effect” which “produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance” (Kandinsky 1997, 24). The metaphysical intention in his approach to the arts is simply stated “In each manifestation is the seed of a striving towards the abstract, the non-material” (Kandinsky 1997, 19). One could say, for Kandinsky, that such striving is the action of and presence of hado, that which cannot be directly perceived, only its effects, perhaps in heightened states like entoptic experiences. Abstraction in art would therefore be a manifestation of presence somewhere between representation and the ultimately unconceivable, as in a heightened state. An emphasis on the use of color to convey this are found in his paintings: “The Blue Mountain” (1908); “Mountain” (1908); “Improvisation 9” (1910); “Improvisation 11” (1910); “Boat Trip” (1910); and “Glass Painting with Sun (Small Pleasures)” (1911) where treatment of form overrides color.

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Kandinsky was interested in the psychology of the spirituality which was expressed in painting as abstraction, something gained by higher feeling somewhat detached from materiality. In fact, he regarded such art as opposed to and “higher” than nature. Inspiration, one could say, was more revelatory of spirituality than representation (Klee 2015, 6.6). In fact, he begins Concerning the Spiritual in Art by linking this thought to primal cultures, however overstated: “Like ourselves these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form” (Kandinsky 1997, 1). In an article that examines the entoptic understanding of primal culture trance states, Mary Roach notes that David Whitley in his Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief cites a paper that Kandinsky wrote in a psychological journal in 1881 on entoptic experience related to a migraine and that Kandinsky studied Shamanism and subconscious in relation to its effect on art (Roach 1998). Kandinsky addresses the idea of abstraction divorced from material reality that substantiates Whitley’s implication. In relation to Maeterlinck’s writing Kandinsky notes: The word may express an inner harmony. This inner harmony springs partly, perhaps principally, from the object which it names. But if the object is not itself seen, but only its name heard, the “mind” of the hearer receives an abstract impression only, that is to say as of the object dematerialized, and a corresponding vibration is immediately set up in the “heart” (Kandinsky 1997, 15).

Kandinsky structured many of his paintings on geometric forms. Sounding a bit like Pythagoras he states, “Or form remains abstract, describing only a non-material, spiritual entity. Such non-material entities, with life and value as such, are a circle; a triangle; a rhombus; a trapeze, etc., many of them so complicated as to have no mathematical denomination” (Kandinsky 1997, 29–30). Yet, the relation of abstraction in its many expressions to primal culture, specifically to Shamanism, is conclusively established by David Whitley: Less appreciated are the influences that entoptic forms and Siberian shamanism had on Kandinsky. Prior to writing On the Spiritual in Art, he spent time in Siberia with Russian ethnographers working with shamans and learning about the shamans’ centrality of inner visions. This clearly affected his thinking. It could be argued that Kandinsky influenced the development of contemporary abstract art largely through a rediscovery of the kind of artistic inspiration experienced by shamans (Whitley 2006, 72–73).

Examples of Kandinsky’s abstraction, some including recognizable geometric forms, some suggesting the density of rock art imagery in given panels, and, even, some suggesting the use of color in a given culture’s style, such as the Chumash pictographs in California, are: “Picture with a White Form” (1913); “Black Lines 1” (1913); “Bright Picture” (1913); “Small Pleasures” (1913); “Untitled” (First Abstract Watercolor)(1910); and “Wall Painting for Edwin R.  Campbell, no.3” (1914). Many of the abstract forms in Kandinsky’s art are the shape of living forms, but these painterly forms do not exist in external reality. They may be termed biomorphs because of their shape. Some are in works that emphasize color, some are in works that seem related to dream images, and some resemble imagery in rock art. Examples

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of Kandinsky’s biomorphs are: “Overcast” (1917); Small Dream in Red” (1925); “Sky Blue” (1944); and “Around the Circle” (1940) and “Twilight” (1943), which resemble the density of some rock art. One, “Upward” (1929), even seems an abstract human portrait, if not an abstract self-portrait. Such a portrait, if it is, would reflect a central element in rock art, the transformation of representational form within altered states of consciousness. In March 2015 I visited two key rock art spots in the Lower Pecos River area of Texas, The White Shaman Panel and the Fate Bell Shelter and revisited the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site in New Mexico. The first two rock art sites are 4000 years old and created by a long vanished culture. The latter site which has more than 21,000 glyphs dates from 900 to 1400  AD which were created by the Mogollon culture. The three sites together are obviously important and are grouped together by themselves in a vast area in and above Texas, one of only six rock art sites in continental United States chosen by Jean Clottes for his map of important world rock art cites (Clottes 2002, 13). Further, Clottes begins the related discussion of Shamanism with a reference to and image from The White Shaman Panel (Clottes 2002, 113). I have photographed a section of Clottes’ photo to emphasize the importance of transformation under trance states in rock art, here a shaman who has become a bird. Another aspect of transformation is death, symbolized in this panel by an upside down human. A rendering of the complete White Shaman Panel clearly reveals the transformative imagery (Boyd 2003, Plate 2). This site and related sites in the lower Pecos are important because of their unusual size for rock art panels and the impressive mural-like art itself. Further, Carolyn E. Boyd discovered a relation of this panel to the Huichol of Northwest Mexico and their annual search for the hallucinogen peyote, a central aspect of Huichol spirituality and references to other hallucinogenic local plants at related sites (Boyd 2003, 76–78). Her rendering of the White Shaman that is the true focus of the panel shows him emerging from an arch in a heightened state at the bottom (Boyd 2003, 68). He has transformed into an anthropomorph with a human body and deer antlers covered with black dots. Boyd discovered the Huichol hunt is depicted here. In Huichol belief the original god is a deer that transformed into peyote. At the end of the hunt the Huichol shoot the peyote (at the upper left) as they had shot the deer god (at upper right). The black dots on the deer’s body and the shaman’s antlers are symbols of peyote. Boyd has a close up rendering of the emerging shaman reaching with an atlatl and branch with each arm toward peyote fruit (Boyd 2003, 47). Another rendering is from the nearby Fate Bell Annex (Boyd 2003, 101). It depicts a transformed anthropomorph holding a stalk of Datura, another mind altering plant. She also renders a similar anthropomorph with peyote dots on its antlers at Fate Bell Shelter (Boyd 2003, 78). At that shelter I found an image of a Datura stalk near suggestive black dots as well as a representational depiction of a spiked Datura top. At one of the informative signs at Fate Bell Shelter was a painting of what seemed a Datura top in transformation (A). Another sign (O) shows a transformed shaman with black and orange wings and an antlered head standing among three human figures. The wings may represent energy exchanged with the two humans on either side of the shaman. Three Rivers Petroglyph site is filled with geometric forms and images of transformation. In one

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an anthropomorph bends over a solar or entoptic form above a transforming face. A death mask with entoptic dots over it suggests transformation. Many of the petroglyphs are impressive, clearly rendered entoptic, geometric forms. One depicts mountain sheep heads among or growing out of plant stalks. Other glyphs present tailed animals with geometric forms centered on their bodies, a representation of transformation. A similar presentation is a top view of an insect-like creature covered with transformative dots. One petroglyph is an entoptic transformative geometric form, a kind of biomorph, next to a stick figure human with upstretched arms. Other similar rock art were viewed on field trips at the 2013 annual American Rock Art Association meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The clustered geometric forms, albeit one or two stick figures and a serpent, sometimes resemble Kandinsky’s biomorph figures in their abstract universe. Other examples of such clustering are from the Chidago petroglyphs near Bishop, California and the Caso Range petroglyphs near Ridgecrest, California, the latter with many transforming human figures (Whitley 2006, 76, 51). Other examples that clearly suggest Kandinsky’s biomorph’s are Rocky Hill pictographs near Exeter, California, where a top figure is explained as a “shaman’s mark” by contemporary Native Americans and Painted Cave pictographs near Santa Barbara, California, where a Chumash representation of a centipede, a creature bringing bad luck, is represented (Whitley 2006, 161, 171). Ultimately, clear indications of rock art symbols in an expression of an entopic state do not negate the spirituality of that state nor its expressions. Kandinsky’s abstractions and biomorphs are clearly products of feeling drawn from the psyche and as such are easily defined as spiritual, just as an untrained child’s drawing is coming from somewhere that may also be termed spirituality. In effect, Kandinsky was on the right track. The implications are that altered states of consciousness provide insight into the inner dimension of our world and spirituality. The state of consciousness itself seems to be the key element here. There also seems, particularly in these rock art sites, a need to express this state in art, design, myth, and so forth. In other words, representation in art for Kandinsky up to his period failed to do this, excluding those in the various experimental art movements up to the Bauhaus, some of which were inspired by various spiritual intentions. His turn to mannered representation, altered representation, and finally abstract forms seem influenced by such approaches found in rock art and altered states in Shamanism. He actually felt that primal cultures expressed only inner truth and the modern age up to his time were subject to a deadening materialism (Kandinsky 1997, 1–2). His solution was to evoke abstract forms, a dismantling of representation and its seeming correlative materialism through, perhaps, altered states akin to shamanic ones. Other directions in art were also dismantling representation, perhaps for similar reasons. Is this the correct solution? In our present time high definition and photo realism dominate popular culture and escapist computer games and melodramatic animation and overdone attempts at heroic drama populate television and computer screens as a byproduct of the postmodern condition. It seems that Kandinsky’s biomorphs have not reversed materialism. Perhaps finding a way to meaningful altered states that evoke a kind of spirituality might offer a resolution and yet maintain the artistic freedom Kandinsky

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was after. The cybernetic reconstruction in the computer age has worked in another direction and perhaps objectified materialist culture in a manner Kandinsky would never have imagined and perhaps even “objectified” consciousness itself. Yet the numerous impressively constructed animated features, freshly conceived pattern work, small enigmatic independent films, environmental installations, and cleverly constructed dance pieces point back to Kandinsky’s aim and forward to something evolving into whatever beauty was thought to be. Yet, in a TED talk “What Makes a Good Life?” Robert Waldinger, Professor at Harvard Medical School and the current director of the Harvard Happiness Study research project on this topic, begun in 1937, commented that millenials, who are young adults now, want two things: the first is money and the second is fame. Perhaps Reality TV and very visible and successful young performers encourage these desires. If so, the materialization of consciousness may well be underway. Nonetheless, that energy that permeates the universe, each living thing, and each inanimate thing, call it Qi, hado, Shiva, apeiron, Word, atoms, or spirit, inclines one to term that “whatever” as spirituality, whether it expresses beauty or something that approaches it.

References Bergman, Elizabeth. 2009. Intersecting Lines. New York: Carnegie Hall Playbill. Boyd, Carolyn E. 2003. Rock Art of the Lower Pecos. College Station: Texas A&M. Clottes, Jean. 2002. World Rock Art. Translated by Greg Bennett. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Emoto, Masaru. 2009. The Hidden Messages in Water, Trans. David A.  Thayne. Hillsboro: Beyond Words. Ishak, Amir Farid. 2005. The Power of Hado. The Star. 25 September 2005. https://www.thestar. com.my/lifestyle/health/2005/09/25/the-­power-­of-­hado Kandinsky, Wassily. 1997. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M.  T. H.  Sadler. New York: Dover. Klee, Zentrum Paul. 2015. Klee & Kandinsky. Bern. Matsuzaki, Toyoho. 2005. The Healing Power of Hado. Hillsboro: Beyond Words. Roach, Mary. 1998. Ancient Altered States. Discover Magazine. June 1998. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-­earth/ancient-­altered-­states Weitz, Morris. 1966. Problems in Aesthetics. New York: Macmillan. Whitley, David S. 2006. Cave Painting and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief. Amherst: Prometheus.

On Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness Victor G. Rivas López

Abstract  The thesis that I uphold in this dissertation is double: I start from the idea that there is a special kind of feeling that I call tragic and that belies both what I call “natural” feeling and the current experience thereof, an experience that implicates a return to a selfish or narcissist conception of individuality. To prove this, I shall divide the dissertation in three sections: in the first one, I meditate on the phenomenological framework of feeling, music and history that leads to a tragic experience of time; in the second section, I set out in broad outline how tragedy opposes metaphysics, Christianity and romanticism so as to make comprehensible why man is essentially a weak or rather an insubstantial being that gets his identity beyond the would-be natural or egotistic identity of his; in the third section, I dwell upon some events of the last century that are supposed to symbolise a radical change in the perception of humanity and I choose one of them for the reasons that I give there so as to confirm the precedent approach. This way, the phenomenological exposition provides the indispensable thread to weave the cultural interpretation and vice versa. In a brief colophon, I epitomise the whole conceptual development to emphasise that this is not an exegesis of Nietzsche’s thought (which is moreover obvious in view of the freedom wherewith I move through the initial and the last phases of its development) but an application thereof to the understanding of the present sense of man through the notions of feeling and weakness that I use both in an ontological and a critical sense. Keywords  Insubstantiality · Music · Tragedy · Becoming · Post-humanism

L’homme, étranger à soi, de l’homme est ignoré. Que. suis-je, où suis-je, où vais-je et d’où suis-je tiré? Voltaire. V. G. Rivas López (*) Meritorious Puebla University, Puebla, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_16

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On the Rightness of Feeling It is very meaningful that when Nietzsche began the radical transvaluation of every philosophical and cultural ideal that is the kernel of the first phase of his philosophy, his starting point had been the Dionysian feeling that he perceived in the music of Wagner, which for him was the simultaneous announcement of an unheard-of experience of man and, on the other hand, of the rebirth of Greek tragedy and of the heroic pathos that the former vindicated: “What is it really that here becomes audible? Precisely this right feeling, the enemy of all convention, all artificial alienation and incomprehension between man and man” (1997, 215). The first feature that stands out in this passage, the idea of a “right feeling,” is not as easily understandable as it could prima facie seem, above all because it contradicts the usual way of thinking about feelings, which is worth setting out. It is more often than not taken for granted that feeling is by nature almost ineffable because it lies in the “inner” or purely subjective perception that someone has of his true self, of someone else’s or, by and large, of any other being’s, whether it is a thing or an event. According to this common sense notion, feeling implies to put at stake that inner perception face to the so-called objective identity of the person or thing that arouses it, which leads to insurmountable distortions because there is no way to grasp that identity and span the abyss that separates interiority from the rest of reality. This is due to the fact that feeling is, by nature, egotistical: the lover can know that his beloved is this or that but he loves her all the same because she is wonderful for him. From this perspective, feeling represents the way someone configures by himself or spontaneously his innermost link with reality despite what reason says, which would in principle explain why it is impossible to express it convincingly or to define it clearly: even when someone is utterly sure of what he feels and expresses it zestfully, he is likely to be in straits if he is asked to explain it since he must in that case bring to light something that binds imaginatively his elusive self and the equally elusive self of the other person so as not to speak of the rest of reality. Now, independently of the questionable validity of this approach, it shows that the common vision of feeling implies that everyone has a hazy experience thereof, for he could otherwise express it clearly and enrich his whole existence with an imaginative ground. Consequently, sentimental conflicts are very usual and most people are in the doldrums. But how could, for instance, a love relationship go on well if the feeling that nurtures it is taken as a thing beyond comprehension and is simply left to the clash between the incidental course of existence and the inner self, which works more or less effectively in the conflicting social dynamics but rarely leads to the goal that people are supposed to be after, namely, happiness, merriment and pleasure? From a superior standpoint, how could a feeling be creatively expressed if one does not have the least inkling of its existential sense? The fact that some people are utterly incapable of clarifying what they feel corroborates that the social experience of sentimentality, and above all of that that refers to oneself (as self-respect, for instance), reaches port or sinks by unfathomable causes and not by its dynamism.

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In the light of this, the emphasis on a “right feeling” for the part of Nietzsche must be considered one of the most original aspects of the first phase of his philosophy, for it refers to the exigency of a true consciousness of the expressive possibilities of sentimentality that are nevertheless passed over even for people that consider themselves really critical or unprejudiced. Thus, what Nietzsche aims at is the deep conscious of feeling that overcomes any natural drive that one is incapable to comprehend, let alone to recreate. Still more, the rightness at issue requires laying aside once and for all the objective/subjective dichotomy that feeling is supposed to stand for and reinsert the latter in a more comprehensive experience of consciousness and of human relationships, which is solely possible when it has grown up through a rigorous reflection over its expressive strength, reflection that in accordance with Nietzsche is indispensable for every truly philosophical or artistic work. However, there is a hindrance for this to be carried out, namely, that the social shallowness is reinforced by Romanticism, which in the eyes of Nietzsche symbolises the worst vision of sentimental dynamics insofar as it upholds in general that although feeling is alien to reason, the artist can spontaneously enjoy and understand it no matter how coarse or irrational he can be as a social subject: he can communicate the highest feelings even without his being reflexive, and the same happens regarding thought, for the artist is or must rather be able to understand the depth of existence (Schenk 1979, 25-26). In utter opposition to this, Nietzsche asserts that feeling must be right, which implies self-consciousness, reflection and also mastery so as to escape the sloppy level of the natural wants and of the objective/subjective approach to them. Because of this, it is not surprising that the most radical conception of the existential transcendence of feeling is not for Nietzsche the romantic one, but the tragic one that unmasks the contradictions of common experience and of Romanticism and demands a right measure for feeling. What is axial in all this is not (as the natural attitude supposes) that a feeling is overwhelming and unsettles every aspect of the own existence; what really matters is that it is the source of a clearer perception that goes beyond the own self so as to embrace the whole of the cosmos. This is all the more evident in the next feature that demands to be clarified: that a right feeling is enemy of convention. It has just been seen that rightness and clarity are rather exceptional in the field of sentiment, which compels to resort to an expedient so as to express them on the level of social intercourse, and that is precisely the function of convention, which works more effectively in accordance with the usual value of the feeling (let’s say, that of tenderness in motherhood) or with the peculiarity of the realm where it takes place (i.e., the loyalty to your comrades-in-­ arms during a battle). On this score the most interesting instance is that offered by love, the feeling par excellence for the modern culture since it is supposed to get what would be almost impossible, namely, to identify as if by magic the “true self” of the person with that of someone else. And this is hardly explainable because (as it has just been mentioned) the diffuse subjectivism that governs social and individual relationships assumes that individuality is a thing in itself that cannot properly be known, let alone communicated, which is why it must resort to a conventional element, such as those phrases and symbols that with their loudness try to span the would-be gap that separates everyone from the rest of reality. However, it is obvious

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that more than throwing a bridge over such an improbable abyss, convention is for concealing the flatness of the average social intercourses, their being the mere illusory adjustment of subjectivism to the adamant law of coexistence in the light of which any sentimental effusion is completely superfluous, for socioeconomic constraints or instinctive wants are enough to keep people together. But if this is so, convention is doubly absurd: firstly, because it exaggerates and distorts a natural feeling or rather want that does not require so much gaudiness to be expressed and, secondly, because it strengthens subjectivism. That is to say, convention spoils both the social coexistence that can go on without a true recognition and, on the other end, the personal balance for which feeling must be a means to articulate imaginatively the phenomenological complexity of the world. And that is not all: convention is above all perceptible in the so-called refined aesthete that resorts to the utmost creations of art to express his sentimentalism in a sublime way. In other words, convention does not refer to the kind of the symbol that one uses, but to how the latter disfigures sentimentality through the imposition of a subjectivist idealization. Let us proceed to the third feature that the passage mentions, that of the “artificial alienation” and the incomprehension, which in accordance with our analysis derive from the same source: the subjectivist or falsely substantial approach to the self. There is of course a non-philosophical, psychological sense of the phenomenon that lies in the natural rivalry with others, but that is not what Nietzsche has in mind; he refers rather to how the numberless natural differences of the individuals become clear opposition when their hazy thought prevents them from agreeing. A wrong way of feeling brings about inevitably a confuse way of thinking and valuing oneself, others and reality, and that is doubly evident in an epoch of unrestrainable subjectivism wherein everyone claims the right to impose his natural wants and perceptions over everyone and everything else. The issue has, nevertheless, another aspect that is worth dwelling on since it links directly with the existential function that music carries out: that whereas the “artificial alienation” strengthens the misery of egotism, a right sentimental expression lessens it because it emphasises the want of a conscious measure in a world where the fellow beings must be taken into account. The vicious circle of selfishness is solely broken when one realises that every kind of experience, no matter how intimate, sublime or outlandish it can be, is by principle a configuration of reality that does not hinge on an questionable psychological perspective but on the sense that it carries out in the integration of the own self in the lifeworld. To return to our hobbyhorse: in the case of love, this means that independently of the anecdotic content of the feeling (whether it was lived in a relationship or it was merely imagined, whether it was happy or it was baleful) love has a sense of its own that is the factor that settles the value of experience in one’s eyes and allows consequently recognising others and overcoming the alienation, whose artificial nature is then obvious. Oddly enough, it is not, for instance, the fact of living with someone else what reveals the value of love, but how that leads the people involved therein to a truly personal feeling of loneliness or of company that does not stem from the general ideas about either of them (for instance, love leads to a happy company that will last forever) but from a sense, a

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phenomenological essence that can be fulfilled in unforeseeable ways. And this distinction between the essential phenomenological framework of feeling and the empirical content thereof must be taken into account so as to comprehend the artistic value that the former will have in the eyes of Nietzsche.

On the Dialectics of Feeling Needless to say, it is practically impossible to define the sense at issue on the level of natural feelings and wants (such as attraction or compassion), for the all-­ embracing drive of existence that is experienced through the empirical content prevents everyone, even the most lucid one, from being fully conscious of what he feels and of how that implies a total compromise with others and with himself (which would be the same as to have a “right feeling”). For instance, how can one undergo love or hatred and simultaneously grasp their essential sense independently of their empirical unfolding? This, of course, belies the simplistic identification of self and feeling that has been the touchstone of the whole romantic tradition from its Rousseauian foundations onwards (Hartle 1983, 60). But it is a lot more important for the present purpose that the difference between the right and the natural sensibility has to do throughout with the fundamental part that music plays in the constitution and experience of feeling, that Nietzsche sets out as follows: “music reaches out to its corresponding necessary shape in the world of the visible, that is to say, to its sister, gymnastics; in its search for this it becomes judge over the whole visible world of the present” (1997, 216). This axial function of music embraces even the natural feeling, which is so much aroused by the former in dance and above all in singing, surely the most potent expedients that music has to bring to light the irrepressible drive of existence. Thus, music reveals a sui generis imaginative and ontological completeness that belies the subjectivist appraisal of the self: while a couple dances, the two persons move as a unit and not as two individuals linked incidentally, and the unit prevails even if they do not get to mark their respective rhythm and stumble because of the mistake of one of them (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 410). For the people involved in the dance, the dynamism never is individual, let alone subjective in the deprecatory sense of the word. Music integrates so in a phenomenological unity elements that would be alien one another without it, and that shows a kind of aesthetic transcendence or rather fullness that explains why music must be judged with aesthetical principles other than those used for judging any other art (Nietzsche 1999, 86). What would those principles be? Doubtlessly, they would implicate somehow or other the action of that interpersonal or existential drive that Nietzsche calls “Dionysian,” which opens out through the natural feeling but transcends it by the phenomenological unity that music expresses (Nietzsche 1999, 118). Now, together with this, there is another reason for philosophy to deal necessarily with music, i.e., that the latter is the sole art able to express that sui generis feeling that cannot be called but historical or, even more properly, tragic. What is meant by this is certainly hard explaining but can be instantiated (at the cost of a lengthy

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digression that will require the reader to be very patient for it is worth standing it) by the link of time and sense that provides the transcendental basis of the modern culture from the French revolution onwards. In fact, the latter and the Napoleonic Empire that is its culmination embody each to its own (beyond their having been events that have taken place in determined time-space coordinates) an unheard-of experience of liberty and fate that uprooted the entire system of existential goals and values that was founded on a would-be theological providence so as to impose violently a new one founded on the limitless reach of man under the aegis of liberty. This brought about perforce an equally radical transformation of feeling for it put everyone in another imaginative plane regarding himself and the rest of reality, and the best proof thereof is the nexus existing between the events at issue and the apparition of romantic or sentimental subjectivity (in substitution of the Christian or theological one, of which romanticism is a reformulation). Even more, from the French Revolution onwards, the sense of existence has not ceased to change and impose over everyone the demand of begetting a sensibility according to the more and more accelerated rhythm of history, which somehow or other sparks off a permanent unbalance between what is felt and how it is symbolised in the socio-­ historical dynamism. There is so a host of sentimental and existential possibilities that were utterly unknown before Romanticism and that are, again, hardly understandable, whether concerning specific situations as family and religion or, above all, concerning history itself. In other words, history, the endless process of readjustment of existence and self beyond the theological ground, is for the first time the framework of feeling in spite of its being simultaneously absolute and unforeseeable (or perhaps because of that). Still more, since this process is by principle contradicted by the natural or psychological limitations of the individual and by the cultural restrictions of the present regarding the total course of history, the feeling that expresses it cannot be objectified or concretised and that is why it must be considered tragic, if the latter term is taken as a synonymous of an unsurpassable unbalance that must however be solved through art, at least in accordance with what Nietzsche sets out in the very dawn of his thought (1999, 114). Thereat, on speaking of “tragic” or, which is the same, of “historical” feeling I do not mean the anguish sparked off by the consciousness of the own finitude, let alone the dramatism inherent to the romantic pretension of a substantial self able to assert itself through thin and thick by its sheer willpower over the fathomless senselessness of existence; what I mean is the absolute consciousness of time that instead of being made up for with the promise of a post mortem survival (as Christianity has so far intended to do) or of merely changing existence into absurdity (as the shallow vulgarisation of existentialism proclaims) reveals the insubstantiality of the self, its reduction to the strength of a world where it proliferates a sense that notwithstanding its absoluteness is not expressible through any objective language or any ad hoc representation (which is why only music can judge it). The sense meant is then that of the whole of existence that is intuited in a certain moment, although it never is identifiable and communicable on the level of natural coexistence since there is no adequate formulation thereof, and its comprehension depends on the way art and

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very concretely music integrates the irreducible otherness of existence beyond the natural sensibility. This singularity of tragic feeling points at two intimately related aspects: firstly, the abyssal difference that springs between the alternation objectivity/subjectivity and language; secondly, the relativeness of any lived experience face to any other, which compels to put in inverted commas the idea of an ideal fulfilment or expression. Still more, insofar as sense proliferates instead of sinking and the communication is faster and faster despite the universalization of gibberish (which could by the bye be interpreted as the vulgar version of the tragic feeling that we deal with in this section), the risk of miscomprehension rises everywhere too and, obviously, rightness is more necessary but also harder to experience than ever. At any rate, it has been seen that it is rarely, if ever, obtainable on the level of natural wants, which shows why the self does not overcome the inexhaustible unfolding of temporality either through a substantial subjectivity (as romanticism would uphold) or through an absolute spirituality (as Hegelianism would contend), let alone through an empirical efficacy (as shallow individualism would state it). Contrary to what all these solutions (above all the last one) affirm, the self embodies the drive of history thanks to its being only an appearance that must be expressed as concretely as possible, and this is why there is no substantial object of tragic feeling despite the total rightness that it gets thanks to music, which carries us back to the difference between the empirical content of experience and the essential sense thereof. Needless to say, in either case man must discern the essence of feeling through his subjectivity or with a general representation or value. This is harder nowadays because of the imbrication of history and sense that everyone undergoes as the crushing demand of rightness that solely music makes feasible.

On the Nexus of Feeling and Music Due to this, there are two contradictory possibilities for a time like ours: either strengthen the objective/subjective framework of natural feeling and of its conventional symbols that lead inevitably to a universal flatness and boredom that everyone tries uselessly to conceal with sentimentalism or (from a critical perspective) follow the course of the tragic feeling that implies the reduction of sense and self to an appearance. On this score, it is worth noting that if the tragic feeling seems prima facie to be practically the same as the existentialist anguish (insofar as both of them are irreducible to an objective representation and put the self at stake), there is an abyssal difference between them, namely, that whereas the former springs together with history, anguish (at least in the standard Sartrean version thereof) is underwent as the psychological reaction to an absolute freedom that cannot be fixed by any circumstance and remains in an unfathomable transcendence (Sartre 1943, 481). In other words, if tragic feeling opens out history through the self, anguish changes its insubstantial difference into an insurmountable absoluteness. This makes seeing why, although anguish itself is on the very border of natural feeling and

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senselessness and belies consequently convention, it is so easily expressible according to the worst dramatism (which is furthermore what happened when existentialism was all the rage), whereas the tragic feeling is by definition alien to it since it means a temporality that lightens the self instead of confronting it violently with reality, which is doubtlessly why Nietzsche identifies self, appearance and serenity in the Apollonian drive that allows experiencing and sharing the Dionysian whole that is not stricto sensu identifiable with any object in particular (1999, 18). In other words, the tragic feeling is a lot more comprehensive from a psychological standpoint than the existential anguish. This last remark allows us to retake the reflection on music. It has been seen that the latter articulates natural feeling within an existential unity that, as it comes about in dance or in singing, goes on through the imaginative fusion of the people involved. Another example of this would be the part that background music plays in the lightening of any activity, even of the most abstract or boring one, as it can be to wait for someone to arrive; in this case, music assuages impatience on providing you with a train of images that can be effective enough so as to efface annoyance. This shows that also in the case of a feeling that strengthens so potently the self and represents negatively the others (as impatience does), music reveals and structures the phenomenal diversity of the world and even makes possible to reconsider the actions of others since it diverts you from any individualistic state of mind. Due to this, the deepest reason why music is axial for philosophy is (as Nietzsche so cleverly saw the issue) that it breaks the vicious cycle of the objective and/or subjective representation so as to express the right phenomenological framework of lived experience beyond the empirical content thereof, which is moreover the very essence of the tragic feeling. On recreating the whole of time intensely but without objectifying it, music plays a decisive part in the configuration of the self in the world because reveals a sui generis transcendence that is not at all theological. This is so because music, unlike any other art and, above all, unlike painting and literature, dispenses with any representation and just expresses an existential sense that everyone understands thanks to its rightness and despite its never being explainable without further ado (Scruton 1998, 59). More concretely, this means that music as such always transcends the specific import of the lyrics (in the case of the choral music, of opera or of the popular song), of the programme (in the case of the ballet or of the music composed for a civic commemoration like the anthems of any kind) or even of the physical quality of sound (which are instead so useful when one tries to attract someone else’s attention) to make one experience an unmistakable feeling whose tragic sense does not have anything to do with sorrow or anything of the kind but with the whole of existence that appears through a right modulation (Scruton 1998, 67). Since tragedy, as it has been stated, lies in the impossibility of integrating sense and self either objectively or subjectively, it is logic that it goes on hand-in-hand with music, which is its perfect inversion because it integrates sense and self but at the cost of their substantiality. Thus, there is both in tragedy and in music a similar sentimental overflowing that does, however, without dramatism because it does not pass through representation, but though a total image of the self in the world.

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Now, it will be asked, how can this take place without resorting to any representation? How can there be comprehension  in the absence of an object? How can anything be felt beyond subjectivity? As it has surely been presumed, the answer to these and similar questions lies in rightness, which is the condition sine qua non for a sound articulation of self, sense and world. Rightness is the sole matrix of tragedy and music because in spite of the lack of an objective representation or of a subjective agency it opens out existence through a phenomenological essence independent of the empirical content that it can in a moment have: from this perspective, what matters is, oddly enough, to experience love, not how it is experienced. And the best proof thereof is that when you listen to a piece and dispenses with any representational element such as the lyrics in order to concentrate on the sheer music, it immediately springs as if by magic a right feeling, whether of joy, sensuality, melancholy or whatever, which notwithstanding its essential condition is not the expression of anything or of anyone but that the effect of music itself. On listening, for example, to the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata Les Adieux, one undergoes a powerful feeling that can be labelled as sadness, melancholy or tenderness since there is no a determined representation to orientate the listener but that (independently of the word that one chooses to call it) is evident throughout. And this is not a peculiarity of the concert music, for it appears too in the case of popular music: when one listens, for instance, to a song interpreted in a foreign language and the music is catchy, one will like it although one does not understand what it says because music makes one feel something right. Of course, in the latter case, although the feeling remains at bottom indeterminate, it is very easy to absorb it in the personal psychology, so that it will end up expressing the very concrete interests or circumstances of you, whereas in the former case, that of the concert music, the situation is completely different: one can be in a certain mood and (without modifying or giving it up on purpose) one is smoothly carried away by music to another one that will not however be on the natural level (although it will nevertheless be able to act upon it). And with this condition it is beforehand answered the probable objection that the two instances mentioned, Beethoven’s sonata and the popular song, would be more Apollonian than Dionysian and that therefore they would not be the best possibilities of a truly right or tragic feeling since it is so easy to use them for representing a subjective state of mind. Considering that Apollo only makes sense together with Dionysus, the possibility of resorting to it alone is out of the question and must rather be seen as the very kernel of the worst kind of subjectivism, that of the would­be aesthete that takes music as the representation not of an object but of his daydreams, which he takes as things in themselves, a possibility that Nietzsche links to the “culture of the opera” as a sample of that extreme dramatism that he rejects outright throughout (1999, 112). This last clarification confirms that unlike what is usually called “aesthetic feeling” (that is to say, the feeling that is by principle subjective although not natural since it expresses a purely imaginative process), the tragic one does not reinforce subjectivism because it reveals the transcendence of history (Rivas López 2008, 184-86). Alien to subjectivism and naturalness, the tragic feeling makes understandable that the former are completely useless for any authentic philosophical approach

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to existence. And this is all the more obvious in the last aspect of the Nietzschean reflection that will be remarked on now, that of the sisterhood of music and gymnastics. Once again, before the risk of mistaking a right feeling with a merely subjective effusion, it must be emphasised that it implies redefining the phenomenological link of self and world, whether through the artwork that structures a sense of culture beyond any individualistic standpoint (which in the eyes of the young Nietzsche would by the bye be the title to fame of Wagner’s work) or as the tragic consciousness of the limits of human agency (which will be analysed in the following section of this dissertation). Gymnastics means so the existential or desiderative transformation of man according to the sense that music unveils independently of the natural feeling (but also of the so-called aesthetic one) and of the concomitant values that justify it from the perspective of the individual satisfaction (or rather of the individual failure that is so evident in the preponderance of dramatism). In other words, gymnastics implicates that the radical transvaluation is the spine of the historical process and not solely a daydream of the individual that wants to be really critical without breaking with the conventional lifestyle that an epoch imposes somehow or other over everyone. Now, insofar as this process is carried out at the cost of the self (which is reduced to an appearance that reflects the all-embracing possibilities of the world and that must consequently be right so as not to sink in the empirical content of experience), it must by principle be perceptible in the corporeal dynamism: the body of someone whose sentimentality is right cannot move or act as it does when it expresses a conventional experience of being and coexistence, however much this is dazzling or exciting. Of course, this integration of self and body through gymnastics does not have anything to do with any cult of sport or of the body taken as a mere physical or organic framework of subjectivity, let alone to all the materialistic manifestations of a selfishness hardly concealed. Contrary to this vulgar approach (whose motto is “where there’s a will, there’s a way”) gymnastics widens the scope of the existential transvaluation beyond the subjective experience of body and desire, namely, it makes perceivable for the first time the lifeworld that man shares with every other being and furthermore arouses new feelings that will perforce contradict the conventional system of values of the time. This is why the feeling at issue must be considered tragic even if it agrees with a pleasant vision of existence: let us think of the peace that overcomes you before a landscape whose beauty is however all the more touching rightly because it belies your hectic urban way of living. Mutatis mutandis, the body that expresses that tragic feeling does not need to be misshapen, contorted or maimed; it is enough that it stands out against a subjectivist background so as to look like the image of an unattainable fullness even if it is beautiful and strenuous (as the Greek sculpture shows). Still more, since the desiderative flow opens out the lifeworld, the body itself becomes the expression of a tragic being that challenges the physical standards as it happens when someone looks slender because he practices the virtue of temperance and not because he is bulimic or takes a lot of care of his aspect by fatuity. In a word, when man has got the rightness required to live critically or tragically, gymnastics will change his very body into the always complex expression of that through an unheard-of sensibility (Tanner 2008, 31). And this will give him the right to judge the integrity of the world

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of appearances simply because he has experienced it by himself, namely, by his integration in the becoming of the world.

On Human Weakness The passage to this section will require a light change of perspective, for if the thread of the reflection has so far been the analysis of the aesthetical process through which a right feeling turns into a tragic one thanks to music, it will now be that of the opposition of tragic feeling and Western tradition, which for Nietzsche must be focussed as a decadence that has culminated in the appearance of subjectivity, which has for its part been preceded by that of Christianity. And if philosophy must deal with that decadence, it will have to wreak havoc in the totality of the historical idealizations, above all that of man as a being akin to a rational and benevolent creator and, on the other hand, as a being whose feeling always recreates originally his personal lived experiences. There are so from the onset an unmistakable orientation of the process that has to be founded, that of a radical transformation of human feeling through the return to a pre-subjectivist or philosophical comprehension of existence that passes through a gymnastic integration of self and body and through the experience of tragedy. Thereby, what matters for Nietzsche on praising Wagner’s work is not so much the geniality thereof as the possibility that it revealed for liberating existence from the dramatism inherent to the metaphysical tradition, to Christianity and, last but not least, to the romantic sentimentality, triple manifestation whose common redoubt was the would-be substantial nature of subjectivity, which Nietzsche so eagerly criticised with his theory of the Apollonian or illusory individuality, which has here been alluded to on speaking of the reduction of the self to appearance. For, as the philosopher says, in the Dionysian process, the artist overcomes his subjectivity and forms a unity with the “heart of the world” that is halfway imagination and dream. Thus, the affinity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian drives is once again strengthened so as to lay aside the pernicious influence of any selfish affirmation (1999, 53). From this perspective, dramatism (particularly that of nineteenth century opera, which Nietzsche considers a phenomenon with a sense of its own) is a cultural manifestation of the historical weakening of man that has been brought about above all by Christianity insofar as the latter has always upheld that man will enjoy a ceaseless divine providence and a post mortem timeless bliss provided that he is humble enough so as to renounce his worldly drives and live entirely for the beyond. Christianity weakens man because it makes him believe in a substantial identity and in a final affinity with God, which is why it is not surprising that it has preceded the apparition of the modern subjectivity that is epitomised in the romantic individuality (1999, 21). Contrary to this, Wagner’s work furnishes man with a perception of vital forces and of his insubstantial identity that does not only possible but absolutely obligatory to fight the weakening sparked off by Christianity and romanticism on the ideal plane of history and by the vulgar adaptation thereof to the natural

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wants, where even the meanest individual flaunts his experiencing a good life. For in addition to the religious and the romantic expressions of weakness, there is a profane or rather vulgar one that must be understood for it has taken the place of the former in our time, as it will be shown in the third and final section of this dissertation. Indeed, the question makes indispensable to dwell upon the precise sense of weakness that Nietzsche fustigates, for if it is a consequence of Christianity, it also is an insuperable existential condition of man, who is a being determined throughout by the emotional complexity of existence and not by the abstract force of his individual willpower, which is equally impotent before the other force that man cannot overcome: that of death. Desire and death are the two eminent phenomena before which man is essentially weak, at least while he does not get to integrate them in the temporal becoming that is his very being, which means that he must strive to keep his balance all the time before them since they carry him away when he believes to hold the reins. There are then three eminent and irreducible philosophical senses of weakness: the ontological one, which postulates the inexorable submission of man to an emotional flow that carries everyone away to the final depletion of death; the properly Christian one, which upholds human transcendence at the cost of the endless existential unbalance; and, finally, the romantic one, which affirms a substantial feeling for everyone without realising that that is the same as mistaking an inordinate expressiveness with an artistic creativity. Therefore, weakness must be understood ontologically and critically, i.e., in accordance with the peculiar historical configuration of the world, which in the case of Christianity lies in the affirmation of the mysterious affinity of the theological and the human transcendence (whose final vulgar version would be the figure of the last man that will be retaken straightaway). Of course, since Christianity is not the cause but the consequence of weakness, a post-Christian feeling such as that that Wagner’s work reveals (or seemed to reveal for the young Nietzsche) could by no means aim at the unrestricted sway of man over existence (which would be a contradictio in terminis for it would make him the image or rather the parody of God). Far from that, the overcoming of Christianity would aim at three possible historical and philosophical reformulation of existence: firstly, that of a man liberated from Christianity thanks to a right work on his feeling, secondly, that of a man that were not able to break once and for all the yoke of Christianity even if he were not a believer anymore and, thirdly, that of a being that were not properly human, since humanity is after all the direct cause of weakness and must be overcome for a new existential experience to take place. In other words, and unlike the humanistic vindication of man as the supreme value of culture (vindication that has a lot to do with the own becoming of metaphysics), the tragic or right feeling suggests that man himself (the being essentially weak) can and must be overcome in favour of a being “beyond good and evil,” which is still nevertheless a historical possibility to be carried out. At any rate, this possibility must not make us forget that there is other at hand that is utterly contrary to the critical spirit of philosophy and even to the metaphysical transcendence of Christianity, that of the man that has rejected the Christian religiosity by reasons

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that must still be clarified but just to succumb to weakness in a desecrated world. This possibility has an ominous name: the last man.

On the Becoming of Man A critical comprehension of man such as it must be set out after Nietzsche is defined among these three possibilities, which are, I repeat, both ontological and historical: man beyond Christianity (who only stands his condition thanks to the musical rightness of his feeling), the last man (who has broken off with Christianity but only to reinforce subjectivism and sentimentalism through a brutal alienation that will be retaken in the next section of this dissertation) and, finally, a being that is not any more human and is therefore beyond weakness, at least as man experiences it (that is to say, as a subjectivist representation) or, as it happens with Christianity, in the light of a theological transcendence. The identity of this post-human being remains to be understood in every plane of existence for he shows two apparently opposite faces: that of the superman and that of the child, each one of whom has a physiognomy so alien to any human feature that if they could be perceived they would be likely to look monstrous. However, the opposition at issue vanishes as soon as it is considered that both child and superman are free from the weakness of man just like they are free from the deleterious influence of Christianity, which is feasible thanks to an existential dimension superior to that of earthly ideals, the natural environment of man. This dimension is, firstly, that of the historical process that evinces the insubstantiality of the self and, secondly and more importantly now, the abyssal temporality of the cosmos where everything returns for ever and ever and where the post-human being (who must be conceived in the mutual configuration of the superman and the child), will be strong enough to deal joyously with desire and death (Vattimo 2002, 117). Unfortunately, the eternal recurrence of everything is by principle incomprehensible to man because (despite the existential richness of history that philosophy and music bring to light each to its own) he is culturally and sentimentally subjected to the linearity of time that is founded on the substantiality of self and that ends abruptly in death (Vattimo 2002, 119). Unless, of course, time is experienced through the tragic or anti-romantic feeling in those exceptional conditions that anticipate the existence of a post-human being, such as Wagner’s music seemed to do in a certain moment (Nietzsche 2005, 248). But when art itself is marred by subjectivism (a possibility that romanticism exemplifies), its historical part can also be played by any other phenomenon, which the critical thinker must interpret and integrate within a truly critical relationship with history. The philosopher has in fact to value his present and not as a minor activity; on the contrary, it is an axial task for him to detect the signs that indicate the end of subjectivism and the advent of a new epoch, i.e., of a new way of being; yes, it is a more peremptory duty of the philosopher to determine if man is ready for his own overcoming or if he will regress to a

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Christian feeling without the Christian historical framework, which is the case of the last man and, very meaningfully, of the current culture (Nietzsche 2005, 52). Now, this will not be analysed here because it is beyond the properly tragic feeling whose rightness is the main goal for us. At any rate, it is worth mentioning that there are three important nexuses between the tragic feeling and the eternal recurrence. Firstly, the former always returns exactly as it was originally experienced because it does not hinge on its empirical content or on the psychological constitution, but on its phenomenological essence that is the same as rightness. This means that what is experienced, for instance, through music (concretely, Wagner’s) will always imply the whole of existence and the consequent transcendence of sense regarding the psychological consciousness that can be attained in a certain moment; that is to say, there will be a disparity of experience, feeling and expression that will mark the limit of what one can integrate in the becoming of the own self. Secondly, the eternal recurrence will always clash with the successive or finite temporality of the natural wants and feelings, which will strengthen the critical appraisal of the self and will furthermore belie the idea of the total control of existence for the part of man, which has hereinabove been considered the principal reason why the tragic framework of history cannot be hidden beneath the optimistic idea of a human progress, let alone of a universal welfare. Thirdly, the eternal recurrence, even if it is stricto sensu alien to the critical conditions of existence, is for unmasking the shallowness of the last man that is somehow or other turned into the ground of current culture, which goes hand-in-hand with the sentimentalist and the materialistic visions of the self that, oddly enough, far from releasing man from the anachronistic theological transcendence, have ended up vulgarising it on identifying the ontological fullness of the beyond with the despicable conditions of the present. Thus, although the eternal recurrence cannot be fathomed here because it points to an ontological condition, the superman, completely unlike man, it must be taken into account its influence on the right configuration and the untimely evaluation of existence. And this leads us to the next and final phase of this dissertation.

On the Current Sense of the Last Man It is not superfluous to emphasise once again that although this paper has seemed to be concerned with the exegesis of some Nietzschean theories, its aim is very different since it intends to elucidate the link of our present with the possibilities that Nietzsche adumbrated regarding the tragic feeling and the birth of the superman that will also appear as a child. Therefore, if it were asked if there is a historical phenomenon of the twentieth century that had unveiled the sentimental rightness and tragic sense that Nietzsche was after in his own time?, I think that it would mostly be answered that it is war, especially the World War II, considering that it has utterly changed the theologically-based value of existence that prevailed until the twentieth century, which explains why individualism has so irrepressibly mushroomed all the world over after the war; in a lesser proportion the answer to our question would

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likely to be that it is the apparition and fulminant development of the global communication system that rules nowadays every plane of existence, for it has radically changed the way everyone values the sentimental configuration of self and interpersonal relationships, which explains why the latter have become so hazy and evanescent and so centred on pleasure (Baudrillard 1990, 32). Concerning the first option, it is undeniable that the horrors of the holocaust and of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its satellites reveal as a whole such a dreadful irrationality that the Hobbesian tenet of the natural evil of man or its Rousseauian counterpart of his Edenic goodness (whose mutual Christian source is so evident, by the bye) fall short. After the holocaust, the cruelty that man inflicts upon his fellow beings cannot be justified by resorting to mythical violence or to totemic hatred, let alone to the would-be destiny or racial superiority of a people, which implies that the World War II has really been a demarcation line in the historical comprehension of man (Todorov 2003, 35-36). This notwithstanding, it must be taken into account that since war has from time immemorial been the most constant trait of socio-political demarcation, it is hardly justifiable to take it as the ground of an overcoming of human weakness. Furthermore, although the extermination during the World War II got an unprecedented brutishness that was doubly shocking in an epoch of would-be enlightenment, it reflects that of any precedent usurpation (as that of the native peoples of Africa, America and Asia by the European settlers) or by the local tyrants through Modernism (let us think of Stalin), which has been as atrocious as that of the Nazis or perhaps even worse, so as not to speak of the awful atrocities that the own indigenous people commit one against another (let us remember the slaughters that took place in Rwanda in 1994). What would perhaps be at stake after the World War II is not the theological beyond (as it was until the eighteenth century) but the historical sense of man that agrees with the universality and progress of dignity and liberty, something that was enthusiastically upheld by the Enlightenment, despite every criticism against it (Kant 2009, 5). Viewed in the light of history (and concretely of a tragic interpretation thereof), War aims more at the groundless ideological truisms about progress and modern civilization than at an unheard-of feeling of man that compelled to redefine his being, which would in principle distinguish the World War II as the hecatomb that defined a new era in the becoming of man. Meaningfully, that era is not that of the superman (as the Nazi propaganda seems to have taken for granted) but that of the last man that has substituted history with the illusion of a mythical dimension, that of the universal subjectivist satisfaction, which links directly with the second option that has just been mentioned. It is as clear as crystal that mass media have already revolutionised every aspect of social and individual identity and have taken coexistence to a global level that it would have been unimaginable even some years ago; together with that, they have oddly enough wiped out the very basis of subjectivism, namely, the idea of a transcendent or mental self that can be experienced independently of the surrounding world (which is a very shallow vulgarisation of the Cartesian cogito). That notwithstanding, it must be considered that the mass-media are subjected to an economic, cultural and axiological system that is completely enemy of an original experience of being because more than surmounting subjectivism they have merely changed

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the way of interpreting it, so that the mental determination that is the core thereof has become a digital performance (Baudrillard 1990, 61). It is not surprising that this system had imposed an egotistic and banal framework over thought, communication and by and large immediacy, so that if it is true that it makes feasible a less dramatic experience of the self (just like the one that Nietzsche vindicated), it is not less true that it is more a regression to a raw naturalness (as the very term “mass” indicates) than a phenomenon that demanded to restate the comprehension of man or implicated the rightness of feeling that is the condition sine qua non for the transvaluation of every lived experience. For as Nietzsche also understood before than anyone else, mass (unlike the “common people” that have an identity of their own), agrees with an undifferentiated, opportunistic character that does not hinge on any specific function, and that is why it spreads virulently through the entire society and defile the noblest ideal or sentiment by the simple tactic of reducing it to a subjectivist expression (in the massive sense of this term that must obviously be differentiated from the modern and romantic ones). Moreover, the mass is more ominous as individual than as collective configuration, and although it is usually thought of as an outward framework its essential force is inward for it is embodied by everyone in the must variegated emotional possibilities. This is reflected on the intellectual plane, as Postmodernism so luridly shows on lambasting the “tyranny” of reason in the name of a radical thought that is nevertheless rooted in a naturalistic conception thereof (Butler 2002, 15-16). Oddly enough, a philosophical and cultural position that is supposed to be based on Nietzschean work contradicts from the onset one of the most important affirmation of its would-be source, that of the absolute hierarchical difference between the aristocratic or right feeling and that of the base or hazy one. And that is not all, for the most deleterious effect of alienation that the media spark off in the social sense of individuality is that even the natural feeling sinks into an undifferentiated flow of images and relationships that are not worth structuring because there will be no way to experience them together with someone else. In other words, mass-media stand for the latest phase of the egotistical conception of the self that Christianity and romanticism have for their part propped. Thus, whether as an enterprise of entertainment or as a tool for enhancing coexistence, mass-media are alien to any true transvaluation of existence.

A Critical Option for the Present If the two most probable answers to the question of a tragic feeling have been disappointing, it would be worth analysing a third one that (despite the relevance that according to me possesses) has been passed over by the socio-historical consciousness as well as by the philosophical comprehension of man: I mean the cosmic exploration that got its pinnacle with the first visit of man to the moon and has from then on continued with a succession of other space flights, whether with a human crew or not. Of course, this exploration could be seen as a simple variation of the mass media and economic system that would carry man away to the conquest and

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exploitation of cosmos precisely as it has occurred on earth: after all, as the verbal similarity suggests, “exploration” is not so different from “exploitation”. On the other hand, the phenomenon at issue has hardly had any cultural influence beyond its immediate mass media impact during the 60’s (when it was on every hoarding), let alone the artistic transcendence or the tragic feeling that Nietzsche thought to perceive in some of Wagner’s operas. The cosmic exploration would almost be a minor item in the inexhaustible list of the scientific or rather technological achievements that saturate every aspect of immediacy and are simultaneously for nurturing the ideological image of man, if not as the “master of nature” (an expression that smacks too much of an anachronistic theological usurpation or of a rationalist imperium), at least as the efficient operator and inexhaustible consumer thereof, which is after all what Modernism has seemed to be after since its Cartesian foundation (Descartes 1964-1974, 62). But if this is so, why choose the phenomenon at issue as a breaking point in the historical and cultural framework of existence, as the onset of a totally new era in the framework of feeling? Because of three main reasons: firstly, as the philosophical and artistic tradition shows, the cosmic realm has always been the background of any existential ideal and spirituality and has linked the would-be divine omnipotence with the anthropological supremacy through reason, and the fact of having spread human presence there necessarily implicates a reconfiguration of the sense of existence, if not rightly empirical (I insist on its fugacious impact on the social consciousness), certainly historical in the deepest sense of the word that for me is synonymous of tragic: man cannot perceive himself the same way on the earthly level where everything reminds him of his weakness and mortality as in the cosmic infinity where time seems to dissolve into space so as to make conceivable the eternal recurrence of everything in favour of man himself (and not against him, which would be an image of hell; after all, it is the devil who reveals eternal recurrence to man, according to Nietzsche (2001, 341). Secondly, the very choice of the phenomenon tries to avoid the dramatism that earthly finitude imposes over everyone (especially over the “free spirits” that are pathetic caricatures of the last-man), and with all the more force after the decline and fall of Christianity and of the questionable human imperium that it upheld. Thirdly, the experience of a cosmic dimension of existence breaks the dualistic or Platonic approach to the latter, which makes seeing that the tragic transcendence regarding earth mines the flat optimism of the last-man and his successive personifications so as to reveal the sentimental integration of man with infinitude through the recognition of the total immanence of existence. In the absence of a First Cause or of a supernatural providence that links him with cosmos, man could move through the sidereal spheres that were supposed to be the sublime dwelling of God, which would by itself reveal the exigency of a permanent transvaluation of existence and of the corresponding impossibility of getting a final justification for it. This new sense of human agency would furthermore require to be carried out with a peculiar rightness that must be distinguished from that of the scientific researcher that objectifies nature so as to prove an objective law and, also, from that of the successful entrepreneur that has been able to enlarge his field of action with an ad hoc galactic strategy (Rivas López 2016, 364-66). In fact, although these two images of human agency are apparently

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incompatible one each other, they share a similar indifference concerning the right valuation of existence and resort to the relativity of truth or to the inalienable right of everyone to look after number one from an individualistic standpoint (as postmodernism shows, if not as a theoretical medium, as the spirit of our time). Now, if the phenomenon at issue is otherwise bound with the tragic determination of existence that Nietzsche vindicates, there could also be a completely different interpretation thereof, namely, that of an agency that has transcended the limits of earth so as to go deeply into the ontological framework of the cosmos in order to unveil the eternal recurrence of the same and a new creativeness for man or, rather, for superman, who together with the child and the last man is again outlined against the blurry image of man that the present casts upon the timelessness of existence. In accordance with this, there would be two possibilities for bringing to light the ontological sense of the sidereal exploration independently that the latter had sunk into oblivion almost immediately as a piece of news or as a profitable enterprise: the first one would be the astronomical dimension that makes comprehensible the new vision of man both beyond the traditional contempt for his worldly nature and beyond the would-be anguish before the indeterminacy that all that reveals to him. The second possibility would take a little different approach: the ontological rightness that keeps every element within an orbit or a cycle that goes on harmoniously through the numberless folds of space time. These two senses of the cosmic experience, immensity and rightness, seem to agree mysteriously with human feeling and that is very surely why they have from time immemorial furnished existence with an intelligible framework that has allowed man to change the highest metaphysical ideal, God, into an omniscient creator and/or into a redeemer that has a personal relationship with His creature. Sidereal immensity is then not an abyss as that whose silence so much terrified Pascal, it is a positive feature because it allows man to reflect with care his own self on the luminous surface of heaven. Rightness is again the principal aspect of sentimental experience that establishes an ontological link for man, inasmuch as the existence of his opens out through the phenomenological correspondence of embodiment and consciousness: the cosmos spreads ideally to rationality just like body is expressed existentially as consciousness and vice versa, and the ambiguity of the experience gives cause for the identification of man with the inexhaustible dynamism of the cosmos. Therefore, it is not surprising that the latter can be perceived not any more as the dwelling of God or as the mirror of daydreams about anthropological omnipotence but as the indispensable place of the transfiguration of man into that post-human being that will be free from weakness, a process that is unimaginable on the earth level due above all to the philosophical limitations of existence itself, which includes the action of metaphysics and Christianity as perturbing forces that prevent the advent of a deeper and clearer experience of being. In other words, the integration of the cosmos into the human experience is the condition sine qua non for the overcoming of man to take place, which endows then the exploration of the sidereal realm with an undeniable historical relevance, whose revelation and immediate oblivion is more than meaningful face to the incapability of the present to make the most of the ontological process that history foreshadows. As a matter of fact, just like earth furnishes man with the

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realm for carrying out the transvaluation of every value beyond the obscurantism of Christianity (which would rightly be the aim of a historical philosophy), the sidereal space is the realm for his overcoming into a being beyond good and evil (which would be the aim of a philosophical history). And the originality of this is that it will for the first time be alien to the theological idealisation, however much that is still practically inconceivable for us. For the same reason, it cannot be laid aside the other historical figure that Nietzsche has anticipated, that of the last man, for he comes to the fore together with the child or the superman and even more naturally than them on considering the current possibilities of man to transform radically his valuation of existence and his behaviour towards it. Yes, the last man is closer to us than the other two figures because he embodies the most deleterious kind of weakness, that of a profane Christianity that sanctions earthly existence just the way it is nowadays, namely, as an arbitrary carrying out whose would-be openness to the sentimental possibilities of existence is nevertheless mistaken with an imaginary vision or with the reconstitution at any cost of the substantial self. Or course, since he thinks that existence is just a reflection of his own interior, of his imaginary potency, the last man can adopt the most bewildering attitudes and give the impression that he is as complex as tragic feeling or as sublime as the sidereal realm. But that impression vanishes as soon as the image becomes the reality of a concrete situation, before whose violence the last man resorts not to the irrational idea of his supernatural link with God (for he is not able to believe any more in that) but to the even more irrational sally of the limitlessness of his agency. Yes, the last man cannot do without God no matter how eagerly he tries to do it, and if he does not have a way to recover a lost religiosity, he must canonise his own subjectivity provided that that will allow him to remain in a familiar field, and that can only be made through the reinforcement of a groundless subjectivism. We finally arrive to the radical exigency that history discloses for man, which must be set out as the possibility of expressing the own being through a feeling beyond dramatism, through an idealisation beyond God and through a self beyond subjectivism. On the one hand, that would be embodied by the child or by the superman; on the other, its impossibility would be embodied by the last man. It remains to be seen what option we shall make between these opened ways, although, as Nietzsche has taught us perhaps better than any other thinker, a really deep thought does not give cause for being optimistic. Vale.

Colophon This dissertation has begun with the analysis of the notion of sentimental rightness and has ended with that of the overcoming of man through a radical immersion in the ontological sense of cosmos. The two notions are respectively the first and the last links in the chain that Nietzsche forged for whom were able to span the gap existing between existence and fullness, which in his eyes has been mistaken for

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that of existence and welfare under the distorting influence of Christianity that has furthermore prevented man from comprehending his emotional complexity and also the historical configuration thereof, which is the deepest sense of the human weakness. Contrary to the romantic exaltation of a subjectivist all-embracing drive, Nietzsche affirms a Dionysian whole that man only experiences through an Apollonian appearance, which proves once again his insuperable weakness since he cannot directly embody Dionysus. This imposes the hardest and highest of any human activities, namely, that of judging according to values that hinge entirely on the own capacity of matching with the world of emotional drives that rules over everything, a capacity that must be defined with the utmost rightness so as to get the very relative harmony that man can attain in existence (which will at best be just an appearance). Thereat, rightness, which is usually thought of in relation with conceptual definition, with argumentative structures or with the production of devices and machines, has in reality an original bind with feeling for the configuration of a set of values that make endurable or, rather, desirable existence, taking into account that the eternal recurrence goes hand-in-hand with the own desire of undergoing it. In other words, although Nietzsche was very soon conscious that his first conception of art as the “metaphysical consolation of existence” was not tenable in view of the dislocated cultural dynamism of the modern world, he at any rate upheld to the end the primacy of the aesthetic experience regarding any intellectual or purely conceptual approach to existence. This justifies then that the idea of a right or critical feeling leads to that of a tragic feeling, that is to say, of a way of feeling beyond subjectivism and beyond the modern optimism concerning the final historical agreement between progress and human welfare. In addition to this, it is necessary to emphasise that the idea of an overcoming of the earthly realm in favour of a cosmic fullness, which is axial for the current reflection, must not be mistaken with that of transcendence in the theological sense of the term. Far from that, it must throughout be emphasised that the problem of man is that he is not able to love earthly existence and that is why he is so frequently after a beyond (whether metaphysical or historical) that secures the would-be substantiality of his being. Thus, the overcoming of earth means simply that earth itself must be purged of the poisonous weakness that is exacerbated by the metaphysical or Platonic dualism and by its vulgarisation through Christianity, romanticism and, last but not least, mass-media. It remains to be seen if man will give rise to the superman, for there is no cosmic teleology that makes safe the outcome of the process. But even if he will not, he must all the same revalue earth within the unfolding of the cosmos not as a planet among others, let alone as a warehouse whose stock has by the bye been more and more depleted because of the irrational exploitation thereof so as to satisfy the demands of the current subjectivist way of living. When at the end one reflects on the historical opposition of a truly tragic feeling and the common, too common dramatization of weakness that is the essential cause of subjectivism, one corroborates that in a time of universalised sentimentality (which stands for the worst kind of nihilism inasmuch as it is incapable of nurturing a true consciousness of earthly existence), the part that philosophy must play in culture is no other than reducing phenomenologically the polluted artistic and

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intellectual atmosphere that the illusory self of the throng has hidden from our sight. Iterum vale.

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