JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts. JANUS HEAD
Janus Head: Volume 18 Issue 1 Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA, All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Trivium Publications, P.O. Box 8010 Pittsburgh, PA 15216 ISSN: 1524-2269 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 67 8 9 0 0 JANUS HEAD CONTENTS
ESSAYS
04 Paradoxical and Vulnerable Narcissisms: Reckoning with Our Deeply Social Selves Josh Dohmen 14 The Logic of Ambiguity: A Buddhist Perspective on the Experience of Time in PTSD Elizabeth McManaman Tyler 30 Poetry: The Experience of Listening Boutheina Boughnim Laarif 42 “Shevek” in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: A Profile in Heideggerian Authentic Selfhood Norman K. Swazo 53 From Decline of the West to Dawn of Day: Dan Brown’s Origin as a Diagnostic of the Present Hub Zwart
ART
67 Mario Loprete
POEMS
70 Soul Bird Plagiarism Subtext R.A. Allen 75 Unexcused Absence How to Make a Free and Happy Life without Masters or Tyrants Jeff Sirkin JANUS HEAD
Paradoxical and Vulnerable Narcissisms: Reckoning with Our Deeply Social Selves
Josh Dohmen
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 4 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
ABSTRACT
In this essay, I argue that rather than rejecting narcissism, the most appropriate response to contemporary egoism and individualism is a revised understanding of narcissism, one that acknowledges the deeply social nature of our selves by seeking to understand the ways in which we exist as individuals through others. I will call this form of narcissism “vulnerable narcissism.” Once we recognize the extent to which we are, as individuals, constitutively social, narcissistic investments in oneself can be recognized as investments in particular social conditions that influence, sustain, or disadvantage us.
Keywords: intimate revolt; Julia Kristeva; narcissism; Pleshette DeArmitt; vulnerability
5 JANUS HEAD
Paradoxical and Vulnerable Narcissisms: Reckoning with Our Deeply Social Selves erhaps it would not be hyperbolic should be vulnerably narcissistic. In order I become who I am. The talent I invest Pto claim that we in the U.S. are to defend these claims, however, it will myself in becomes part of my identity, living in a narcissistic age. According to first be important to clarify what I mean as do my style and the people I surround the Pew Research Center, 81% of adults by narcissism. myself with. Finally, the person, thing, in the U.S. own smartphones, handheld or idea that my drives are invested in computers that promise to help us do Varieties of Narcissism and the Social Self becomes my “object.” everything from communicating with With these terms in mind, how does Problematizing Narcissism friends and family to watching videos Freud distinguish between primary on demand to learning new languages n his well-known essay, “On Narcis- and secondary narcissism? In primary to being happier, and promise to let us Isism,” Sigmund Freud differentiates narcissism, an infant’s libido is invested do so on our own terms, whenever and between primary narcissism and second- in itself. The infant takes itself as its own wherever we want. Public discourse calls ary narcissism. To understand this distinc- object. While one’s libido is rarely if ever on individuals to make themselves more tion, it may first be helpful to clarify some totally disinvested from oneself, one’s marketable, to invest in themselves, to be psychoanalytic vocabulary. “Narcissism” libido does become invested in others, in entrepreneurial (that is, to treat oneself as I use it here will mean an investment things, and in ideas as they become one’s as a firm), to develop “highly effective of psychical energy in oneself. I will refer objects. Thus, as we mature and our libid- habits.” Under the current neoliberal re- to the psychical energy being invested as inal energies become directed outward, gime, formerly public goods and services “drives” or “libido” interchangeably (usu- secondary narcissism becomes possible. are being privatized and responsibility ally following the language of the author In secondary narcissism, the libidinal is increasingly placed on individuals. My most immediately under consideration). energy we had invested in others returns aim, here, is to argue that rather than re- I use the word “psyche” or “psychical” to ourselves; it becomes reinvested in jecting narcissism outright, the most ap- to avoid terms like “mental” that might the ego. This happens most clearly in the propriate response is to develop a revised convey a dualism that psychoanalysis onset of illness or injury. If I have a severe understanding of narcissism, one that rejects. For the authors I consider here headache, my energies are diverted acknowledges the deeply social nature (namely Freud and Kristeva), we are from others and focus instead on myself. of our selves by seeking to understand constitutively bodily, affective, imagina- “What can I do to make this headache the ways in which we exist as individuals tive, and thinking beings. “Investment” go away?” becomes my most pressing through others. I will call this form of should be understood in both its more concern. But secondary narcissism can narcissism “vulnerable narcissism.” Once contemporary and archaic senses. An in- take less justified forms, for example, in we recognize the extent to which we vestment involves directing resources, in people obsessed with their own beauty are, as individuals, constitutively social, this case psychical resources, in hopes of or fitness, or in hypochondriacs (who narcissistic investments in oneself can be a return. So, for example, if my drives are experience the same withdrawal of libido recognized as investments in particular invested in developing a talent, I may (to from others but without reasonable social conditions that influence, sustain, varying degrees of conscious awareness) justification). be seeking to be good at that skill, to or disadvantage us. Interestingly, in this essay Freud attract friends or lovers, to please those The essay progresses in three sec- already begins to problematize the I respect, to bring something of beauty tions. In the first, I develop and explain distinctions between self and other into the world, or to be better than the concept of “vulnerable narcissism.” upon which narcissism rests. Examples someone I perceive as a competitor. The In the second, I argue that Julia Kristeva’s of narcissistic love include love of “(a) archaic sense of investment meant being notion of “intimate revolt” provides one what he himself is, (b) what he himself wrapped or clothed in something or helpful process for working toward the was, (c) what he himself would like to be being endowed with a certain authority. vulnerable narcissism I advocate. In the [later discussed as the “ego ideal”], (d) third, I offer reasons for thinking that we Indeed, it is through my investments that
6 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD someone who was once part of himself.” gratitude toward others, acknowledges enable certain possibilities while hinder- Examples of anaclitic (other-directed) oneself as responsive to and in relation ing or foreclosing others, and through love include “(a) the woman who feeds to others. How, then, do I exist through which I understand myself. Such subject him, (b) the man who protects him, and others? In this section, I will outline three positions include roles like parent-child, the succession of substitutes who take levels of social relations that shape us teacher-student, physician-nurse-patient, their place.” These examples strike me as as individuals: broad social and political or job titles, social and legal identities surprising. Consider Freud’s examples of factors, the ways in which those factors like citizenship or nationality, disability anaclitic love. We love those who feed are modulated by one’s immediate social status, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, us and protect us because they give us environment, and one’s close personal class, felon status, and so on. the gift of continued life. In investing a relationships. Of course, these factors are in con- breastfeeding mother with libido, for ex- First, consider some of the ways in stant interaction and can really only be ample, the child finds satisfaction in the which who I become is affected by my separated analytically. For example, how warmth she brings, the milk she offers, wider social and political environment. people are portrayed in the media will the soothing sounds her voice provides. I am the person I have become through differ depending on their subject posi- Freud also later notes that love for others political institutions that enable certain tions; one’s subject position may affect can be narcissistic when, for example, we practices and hinder others. For example, their available employment and benefits, seek love objects who complement us or I am a voter, or a public protester, or a housing, and educational opportunities; possess “the excellences to which [we] child protected from being forced to one’s education may make it easier or cannot attain.” On the other hand, the work to the extent that those activities more difficult to acquire legal protec- examples of narcissistic love are equally are deemed legal and made accessible tions, and so on. surprising. First, we understand ourselves and to the extent that appropriate pro- and are thus able to love ourselves, at tections are in place. Otherwise I may be All of these examples are shaped by least in part, through how others under- a disenfranchised member of my society and lived within my narrower, interper- stand us. A talent that I love about myself, or a criminal for breaking public assembly sonal interactions. Political rights and that I invest energy in, is something that a laws or a person expected to work at the protections may be enshrined by a State, guardian or teacher noticed and fostered. age of 10. I am the person I have become but if I have not been taught my rights or if If I feel pride in a certain aspect of my through moral, discursive, and behavioral those closest to me do not respect them, identity (say my family, my country, or my norms that structure how I may behave, then it is unclear to what extent I actually commitment to a political ideal), these address others, and interact with others have the ability to exercise those rights are identities enabled by others and and with what consequences. Who I am or be covered by those protections. A the broader social world. Second, these is in part the result of educational institu- society may have broad moral norms, but points also relate to narcissistic love of tions that afforded certain opportunities those only exist through being repeated what we would like ourselves to be. The while foreclosing others. I am the person at more local (community, familial) and in- ideals we set for ourselves are never in- I have become through economic net- terpersonal levels. Discursive norms may ventions from nothing, but inheritances works that make the things I need (and, lead others I encounter to attend to and from or reactions to others with whom for the most privileged among us, often respect me, or they may lead others to ig- we interact. Third, Freud discusses one’s my most frivolous desires) readily avail- nore or disrespect me, or they may render love for a child as potentially narcissistic, able and the availability of which shapes it unintelligible that I could be worthy of because what parents love is the child’s what I desire. Who I am is the result of attention or respect. Public schools may ability to be the person the parents them- shared forms of language, gesture, and be instituted and funded at the state and selves wish they could be: “The child shall expression that enable me to understand local levels, but my experience in school fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents certain others and express certain ideas may differ from others’ experiences based which they never carried out.” Freud’s while making other ideas more difficult on the choices of my school board, school understanding of narcissism, here, and to comprehend or communicate. The administrators, and teachers. Economic indeed his understanding of the bound- person I have become is affected by forms networks may make certain products, ary between self and other in general, of media and transportation that expose services, or jobs available to me, but I presents us with instabilities. Might these me to certain forms of information, artis- rely on the habits and knowledge of my instabilities be fruitful? tic expression, and advertisements and family and mentors to know how to take enable communication in various modes advantage of these opportunities. For Vulnerable Narcissism and the Social Self (like speech, handwritten notes, electron- example, a local grocery may make forms ushing this analysis further, I ic text, or video) with various others (like of healthy produce available to me, but if Pwould like to propose a third, friends, newspaper editors, online video I grow up in a family that always eats fro- other-oriented narcissism that I will posts, or discussion board participants). zen meals or a meat-and-potatoes diet, call “vulnerable narcissism.” Vulnerable Finally, who I am is affected by subject I may not perceive many items as actual narcissism is a love of oneself, an in- positions or social roles that position me options for purchase and I may well be vestment in oneself, that expresses a in relation to others and institutions, that too intimidated to try to cook them even if I buy them. A particular language may 7 JANUS HEAD
be shared broadly, but it is enacted and I am is a response to those particular parent, I must also be invested in the I learn it through interpersonal relation- others who love me, teach me, support well-being and success of my child. As ships. The media may make certain forms me, harm or abuse me, neglect or mock I try to figure out what it means to be a of knowledge or art accessible to me, but me. I internalize the ideals others set for good parent, I will (implicitly or explicitly) the habits of what I read, watch, or listen me, the ideas of myself and my future respond to the methods and behaviors to, are shaped by my family, friends, and laid out for me (often before I’m aware of my own caregivers, repeating some mentors. I may watch a show to keep up or capable of understanding these ideas behaviors and rejecting others. (Indeed, with water cooler conversations at work, myself), the language spoken around me sticking to one’s own parenting decisions or I may never consider reading a news- (with all its local idiosyncrasies), and the often requires a good deal of effort paper because my family never did when behaviors of those closest to me or those because of how deeply many parenting I was growing up. And the social positions I most admire. I respond to those others, habits are ingrained.) In focusing on my through which I understand myself and developing habits that help me cope with life as a parent, I will move toward some others, and through which others un- them, evaluating or even challenging relationships (for example, other parents derstand me, are performatively enacted the ideals and language set out for me. I or those who enjoy being around chil- and reenacted in relation to particular may project the parts of myself I wish to dren) and away from other relationships others. The positions of teacher-student disown onto others, shoring up my sense (for example, those who have no patience may be broadly recognized or codified of self; or I may compare myself to their for children or hearing another story in school policies, for example, but how perfections, believing myself to be ever about a child’s accomplishments). This those positions are lived and experienced incomplete in relation to the talents of change in relationships will also affect my will depend upon particular relationships those around me. I am also a response sense of self. I may mourn the loss of my between students and their teachers. to those particular others who I love, former life; I may welcome the change Let me pause to offer a brief clarifica- teach, support, abuse, neglect, or mock. and feel more at home in this new role; tion: I am not arguing for a strict social de- I understand myself as a friend, teacher, I will likely feel a tension between both terminism. People clearly do deviate from or parent through the successes, failures, self-understandings. If my parenting the norms of their communities and the happiness, or suffering of my friends, stu- choices mainly align with those of my habits developed within their families, dents, or children. My feelings of mastery family or with broader social expecta- friendships, and so on. Notice, however, or control over others depend upon their tions, I performatively reinforce those that even in these cases, our possibilities submission, suffering, or humiliation. ideals (and will therefore likely be praised for new habits, ideas, or behaviors are Indeed, my very sense of self is indebted or rewarded). If my choices diverge from shaped by social and material environ- to others who either confirm or dispute those of my family or my broader society, ments. Say, for example, that walking my self-ascriptions. Throughout our lives, I performatively challenge those ideals through the store I decide on a whim to we depend upon others to “reality check” (and am therefore likely to be shunned buy asparagus though my family never our self-understandings. I walk into a or punished). If I take advantage of insti- ate it growing up. How do I know how restaurant with the assumption (not tutional supports for parents (like home to prepare it? Maybe my family always always fulfilled) that I am perceived as a economics classes that prepared me to be boiled vegetables, so I cut it up and boil it. potential customer worth serving; I ask a parent, parental leave, health or life in- Maybe I ask friends or coworkers or search a friend, “You think I’m qualified for this surance policies, State-provided benefits, online for recipes. Maybe I take a cooking job, don’t you?”; I look at the faces of my a spouse’s income that allows me to stay class or watch a cooking program. Or say students, hoping to see signs that I am a at home or work part time), I am invested that I decide I need to be more informed teacher capable of coherent, interesting, in and justify the continued existence of about my local community, so I subscribe or clarifying lectures. those supports. My investments in all of to the newspaper. Where did this desire Given that who one is is so thorough- these aspects of parenting position me in come from? New relationships with ly responsive to and shaped by one’s in- relation to other parents. If there are insti- people who stay informed in a way that timate relationships and the social world tutional supports I am able to rely upon, my family or friends formerly did not? A in which one exists, what does it mean then I am privileged in relation to those television show I like that makes me feel to be narcissistic? The answer depends who lack those supports. If my parenting ignorant about current events? An ad upon the extent to which one takes into decisions are questioned or mocked by for the newspaper that says, “You can’t account this deep sociality. What I have those around me, I am disadvantaged make things better if you don’t know called vulnerable narcissism would be relative to those whose decisions more what’s happening”? Or maybe something an investment in oneself that seeks to closely align with social or familial norms. happens in my community that jars me remain cognizant of and reflective upon In short, my becoming the parent that I and makes me realize I need to pay more these social influences. am and my investment in these social attention. In short, even when I forge institutions are coextensive. Vulnerable Say, for example, that I invest great narcissism for a parent, then, would be a new path for myself, I am doing so in effort in being a parent and take it as an response to a particular social milieu. an investment in oneself that seeks to important part of my identity. I am clearly remain aware of all of these factors, all of At an even more intimate level, who not only invested in myself. To be a good 8 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD the ways in which focusing my energies quality of one’s education. In short, the the result of growing up in a household on my identity as a parent is at the same less I am aware of the social influences in which chewing in this way was consid- time an investment in social norms, insti- upon my own parenting, the more likely ered rude. It is the result of growing up tutions, my family and children, and other it is that my choices will reinforce those in a household and wider society that parents. social influences. accepts anger as a response to minor an- noyances. Similarly, my expression of this Paradoxical Narcissism Intimate Revolt as a Way of Fostering Vul- anger can be mediated through the social nderstanding narcissism in this nerable Narcissism in a variety of ways. Slamming my fist on Uway can help us see the extent ulnerable narcissism as I have the table is surely both a bodily reaction to which narcissism as it is traditionally Vpresented it is certainly a de- and one that communicates meaning understood, as arrogance, self-obsession, manding ideal. We must seek to remain (however vague), and the reaction itself the secondary narcissism of Freud, is aware of the social influences on our lives, and the meaning that reaction carries are internally inconsistent. In investing in but it is easy to lose this awareness. Thus, enabled by certain social conditions, like myself to the neglect of others, I ignore it is important that we are supported in acceptable expressions of anger (where the ways in which I am a deeply social this task by others, especially others we what is “acceptable” is shaped by the being. Indeed, an odd consequence of trust. Julia Kristeva develops a concept social setting, gender roles, and so on). this form of narcissism is that by hiding for just such supportive interactions: Taking the time to interpret my bodily from oneself this social nature, one often “intimate revolt.” In The Sense and Non- experience, find the source of that anger, ends up reenacting unquestioned social Sense of Revolt, Kristeva seeks to wrest and express it in symbolic language is a norms and habits. In other words, invest- the concept of “revolt” from its exclusively form of sublimation that relies not only ing in oneself absent an awareness of the political usage, noting that historically on shared language, but also the social influences of others often becomes an and etymologically, the term names a support of a receptive listener to hear my investment in particular relationships or turning back, a re-turn. This becomes explanation. social structures. For this reason, I will call an important component of revolt for With these concepts in mind, we may it paradoxical narcissism. Kristeva. To understand why, it is import- now answer the question: in revolt, what Consider, again, the example of a ant to clarify that for Kristeva, individual are we returning to? For Kristeva, revolt parent. If I remain unaware of the extent subjects are heterogeneous in that they is a return to one’s (unconscious and to which others serve as models for my are bodily and affective at the same conscious) past, in order to bring mean- own identity as a parent, I am more likely time that they are thinkers and users of ing to what is unconscious or forgotten, to reenact the behaviors of those others. shared, symbolic language. “Signifiance” in order to bring the meaningless drives Thus, investing in my own identity as a is the name Kristeva gives to the process into meaning. Such a revolt enables parent is an investment in those models. through which we create meaning by two forms of questioning. On the one If I remain unaware of the social and insti- bringing unconscious drives or affects hand, revolt enables us to question the tutional supports for my parenting, then into shared language. In psychoanalytic social order, meaning systems, or sym- investments in my identity as a parent terminology, putting a drive (especially bolic language as they exist. We return may well become investments in those a destructive or “death” drive) to creative to the unconscious drives and find that supports. For example, in using daycare and productive use is called “sublimation,” language does not offer us the tools to or dependent health insurance offered and in this way, signifiance is one sort of articulate those drives, such that we must by my employer, I’ve invested both in sublimation. seek to create a meaningful articulation. my identity as a parent and in a system Importantly, the semiotic, uncon- Such an articulation can happen in at which distributes parental benefits by scious register of the drives is not merely least two ways. First, the creative use employment status (rather than through, biological, it is shaped by the social. of symbolic language can enable us to say, universal government programs or What we desire, how we experience our articulate something new. A neologism, a reliance on extended family networks). bodies, what emotions we feel are all portmanteau, or a poem or poetic phrase If I remain unaware of the unjust dis- influenced or ordered by the social, even may somehow perfectly capture the ex- tribution of resources for parents, then if they are not immediately accessible to perience that I otherwise could not find investments in my identity as a parent consciousness or expressible in symbolic words for. Second, we may find that, so become investments in the social and language. For example, say that I feel a far, symbolic language cannot articulate institutional sources of injustice. Say, certain tension rising within me. I heat up. the unconscious contents; instead my for example, that out of concern for my I may yell, I may slam my fist on the table, tone, tears, laughter, or a caesura may child’s education I send my child to an ex- or I may take a deep breath and explain to erupt in my thinking or speaking. Once pensive private school. In thus investing my friend that chewing with her mouth expressed, these semiotic phenomena in my child (and therefore my identity as open is making me angry, frustrated, or may be made more readily available for a parent), I perpetuate expectations that annoyed. Note that the anger I feel at conscious, symbolic reflection. On the local public schools are irreparably worse hearing open-mouthed chewing is not other hand, revolt also enables us to and that one’s class should determine the some natural biological response, it is question our own histories. By returning
9 JANUS HEAD
to a past that is not (or no longer) in my an affective link, and offered me a first tablish independently. My habits, self-un- conscious awareness, I may question how gesture at interpreting my experience. derstanding, language, and emotional and why I am who I am. Knowing that we had been discussing responses are largely pre-reflective, but To be clear, these two forms of ques- the psychoanalytic use of “trauma” as a the other may call them to my attention. tioning are not mutually exclusive. Say, piercing of one’s narcissistic boundaries, Moreover, these interactions do not for example, that my friends all laugh at this interpretation was offered as a way only draw me outside of myself, but a joke, but I find myself unable to laugh; of thinking about how the event was a they also call upon me to return to a lost maybe I’m even appalled at their laughter. challenge to my sense of self (one that is past so that I may better understand the This could lead me to reflect on the social already fragile enough for most people social influences in my life. In returning norms that condition their laughter. Was working on dissertations!). Still, the term to a past that is unconscious or no longer the joke sexist? How has sexism shaped was not imposed, because it was offered conscious, I may be better able to reflect the norms of humor? What tropes in our as a question: “Would you too describe upon the habits, emotions, language, culture make that sexist joke possible? the experience as traumatic?” Because skills, and self-understandings that I have It could also lead me to reflect upon of this, an opportunity was opened for and the extent to which these have been my own history. What has led me to be further conversation. All of this was made achieved through others. Intimate revolt unable to laugh when my closest friends possible by her countertransference encourages us to ask questions like: In find the joke hilarious? Am I being overly (identifying with my trauma through a what ways have my habits developed in sensitive? Or am I justified in my failure to loving connection) and transference (my response to certain social or familial en- laugh? ability to form a trusting link and identify vironments? Which emotional responses with her). In doing so, meaning was given have been rewarded, which mocked or So far, I have portrayed revolt as an to conscious experiences and uncon- punished, and by whom? Whose ideals individual effort, but for Kristeva, intimate scious residues that may have otherwise have I internalized? How has my language revolt is more often interpersonal. This is remained unarticulated. or community affected how I understand because we are often only able to articu- myself or the possible futures I imagine? late our unconscious drives through links For Kristeva, intimate revolts like this with patient, listening others. These links one enable freedom. By becoming aware Conclusion: Why Vulnerable Narcissism? of the unconscious drives motivating are most clearly exemplified, for Kristeva, By way of conclusion, I would like in the relationship of transference and us, by articulating what had, until then, been meaningless, and by questioning to offer three reasons that I believe countertransference between the psy- vulnerable narcissism to be important. choanalytic analysand and analyst. There interpretations that are already in place, we are better able to understand and First, vulnerable narcissism is important is no need to limit our considerations to insofar as it seeks the truth, truths about this setting, though. By creating an af- determine our own actions in the future. In this way, intimate revolt is a form of oneself, truths about the world in which fective, trusting link with another, I open one lives, and truths about the interac- myself to the possibility of finding mean- rebirth, it opens new potential futures. Through intimate revolt, I form a new tions between oneself and one’s world. To ing with that other. Through this link, the achieve a more accurate understanding other offers interpretations or silences, I understanding of myself, I form or revise relationships with others. This process is of ourselves and our world, it is important take stabs at interpretations, and through to think openly and honestly about who this process we seek meaning together. never complete. As long as I am living, there will be unconscious drives, rela- we are and the forces that have shaped Let me offer a personal example. tionships with others, memories, and us. While I was in graduate school, I was conscious experiences to interrogate. Second, and relatedly, vulnerable in a car collision on the interstate. I met narcissism has the potential to foster with my dissertation adviser the next How, then, does intimate revolt foster vulnerable narcissism? Recall that certain virtues like gratitude, humility, week, and she said, “I heard you were in hospitality, and justice. If I come to rec- a car accident.” Eager to get to business, intimate revolt is a form of self-question- ing, often fostered by interactions with ognize that some of the habits of which I I said, “Yeah. It is strange to be told am proudest result from the efforts of my ‘You’d be dead if you weren’t wearing particular others, that enables freedom by helping us understand those forces family or teachers, I will be able to express your seatbelt.’ But, it is what it is.” Rather a more sincere gratitude for the love they than rushing to the business at hand, that are driving us even if we are not at first consciously aware of such forces. have given me. Of course, I might also however, and perhaps because she heard come to blame my family for my bad the shock erupting into my speech even Especially as an intimate interaction, this form of revolt calls us outside of ourselves habits, but a vulnerable narcissism would while I tried to dismiss it, she offered help me recognize (1) that my family me the gift of intimate revolt, saying, “I and back to ourselves at the same time. I forge a link with another, I listen and members too were shaped by their social was in a car accident a while back. It is contexts such that their bad habits may really traumatic, isn’t it?” Here, she both am listened to in return, and yet I focus on myself: who am I and why? Indeed, it have been responses to particular cir- offered herself as someone to identify cumstances in their lives, and (2) that my with, someone with whom I could forge is likely that the other will have insights about me that I would find difficult to es- ability to recognize my bad habits, their 10 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD sources, and ways to change them is itself ognize the benefits of my wealth, remain to education, the absence of disabling a gift, perhaps from a teacher, an author, aware of the disadvantages others face, conditions) supporting me and (so far) or a friend. If I come to recognize that my or send my child to an expensive private keeping me out of homelessness, or to accomplishments are always enabled school keeping in mind the impoverished “experience the insignificance of what by relationships with others, or that my public schools around me without being we do (give her a few dollars perhaps) in self-understanding is always changing moved to change these unjust social the face of structural impediments [and and incomplete, I may well have greater conditions. Indeed, being aware of the the] frustration of such recognitions.” humility in assessing myself and my social institutions that benefit me could Recognizing this disavowal could result achievements. Recognizing the supports make me more adept at navigating those from intimate revolt, but just naming I have for my projects and self-develop- institutions and reinforcing them in the disavowal is clearly insufficient. Once ment may also lead me to be more hos- ways that continue to benefit me to the I understand that I am avoiding the pitable. Insofar as I am fortunate enough disadvantage of others. But the logic of homeless person to maintain an illusion to have been accepted into a community individual responsibility, of self-making, of invulnerability or merit (or both), I that enables certain projects for me, I of paradoxical narcissism shields the will not have truly integrated this new ought to recognize the challenges that privileged from confronting the social self-understanding (in psychoanalytic others face merely by virtue of being conditions from which they benefit. It parlance, I will not have worked-through born into different communities and wel- also impairs the ability to understand the my resistances to this new understand- come them in their attempts to pursue social disadvantages faced by the op- ing) until I can form some sort of commu- similar projects. Finally, reckoning with pressed, replacing structural diagnoses nity with the homeless person. Perhaps I the ways in which social relationships and solutions with discussions of person- recognize my relative privilege and give have rendered me unearned privileges al responsibility. In these ways, I believe charitably to the homeless individuals and disadvantages may foster a greater that vulnerable narcissism opens a door or to organizations for the homeless (as- pursuit of justice and a greater awareness that would otherwise remain closed. suming I keep in mind that such actions of what justice requires. If I recognize that Erinn Gilson offers a helpful example are never sufficient, but always partial I have been disabled by an educational of the sort of process I have in mind. She and inadequate); perhaps I recognize the system that caters its instruction and draws on an example from Patricia J. dignity and humanity of the homeless supports to certain types of students at Williams to argue that one reason many individual by talking with her and show- the expense of students like me, I can people avoid considering the claims of ing direct concern, opening myself to the now understand my situation as shared homeless persons, or avoid even looking experience of my own relative privilege with others, as systemic, and thus seek to at them, is to disavow their own vulnera- and shame; perhaps I become an ally to change that situation (rather than seek- bilities. Indeed, this is often done in the homeless people in my community and ing only individual accommodations). If I name of good intentions. In Williams’s advocate alongside them for a robust understand that my positive habits were example, a father explains to his daugh- social safety net that takes into account made possible by my parents’ careers ter that it is better, that is more efficient, and responds to the vulnerabilities of the (perhaps they offered ample time off to to give to aid organizations than give di- members of our shared community. Note spend with me or wages that allowed us rectly to a homeless person in need. The that each of these responses achieves to buy and prepare healthy foods), I can lesson is that “statistical need” is opposed a form of vulnerable narcissism: as I work toward making this type of employ- to “actual need,” and that the former is perform this work, I invest in myself by ment available to more people. worthy of consideration and response understanding myself in relation to the To be clear, I am only arguing that while the latter is not. For Gilson, this is social circumstances within which I am vulnerable narcissism enables these because to consider the claims of the positioned. virtues and the pursuit of justice, not that homeless person would be to confront An honest, self-reflective investment it is a sufficient condition for them. One the fact that I too could be homeless, or in myself, in other words, has the power can surely maintain vulnerable narcissism to admit that I have certain unearned to lead to the most selfless actions. and still be selfish. I may, for example, rec- advantages (family resources, access
11 JANUS HEAD Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Ahmed, Sara. “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation.” Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis. Ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 95-112. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Brooklyn: Verso, 2010. —. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. —. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. —. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Carlson, Licia. The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. DeArmitt, Pleshette. The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-Possible Self-Love. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. New York: Free Press, 1998 [1935]. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover, 1994 [1903]. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2001. 326-348. Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XIV. The Hogarth Press, 1975. 67-102. Gilson, Erinn C. The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2014. Glantz, Aaron and Emmanuel Martinez. “For People of Color, Banks Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership.” 15 February 2018. Reveal. 27 June 2019.
12 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Dr. Josh Dohmen
Dr. Josh Dohmen is an assistant professor of philosophy at Mississippi University for Women. His research interests include twentieth century continental philosophy, philosophy of disability, and feminist epistemology. His publications include “Interactions with Delusional Others: Reflections on Epistemic Failures and Virtues” and “Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance”. His article “’A Little of Her Language’: Epistemic Injustice and Mental Disability” was awarded Res Philosophica’s 2016 essay prize.
13 JANUS HEAD
The Logic of Ambiguity: A Buddhist Perspective on the Experience of Time in PTSD
Elizabeth McManaman Tyler
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 14 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
ABSTRACT
While recent work on trauma provides insight into the first-person experience of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Aristotelian propositional logic, which underlies Western paradigms of thought, contains implicit ontological assumptions about identity and time which obscure the lived experience of PTSD. Conversely, Indian Buddhist catuskoti logic calls into question dualistic and discursive forms of thought. This paper argues that catuskoti logic, informed by Buddhist ontology, is a more fitting logical framework when seeking to describe and understand the first-person experience of PTSD, as it allows for ambiguity, non-duality, and polysemy.
Keywords: Post-Traumatic Stress; Disorder; PTSD; Trauma; Buddhism; Nagarjuna; Logic; Catuskot; Non-Duality; Temporality
15 JANUS HEAD
The Logic of Ambiguity: A Buddhist Perspective on the Experience of Time in PTSD
ndividuals who suffer from PTSD the 2nd to 3rd centuries – offers patterns the first-person experience of PTSD as Iexperience temporality in complex of thought that can counter these essen- they do not conform to a univocity of ways. For example, someone suffering tialist tendencies. meaning. Lastly, Buddhist philosophical from PTSD is often simultaneously aware From its inception in the late 19th notions will be employed to reveal how of both the present and the past, or century in Europe, psychoanalysis has healing and true autonomy require em- certain of both her safety and possible long underscored that the past infiltrates bracing and integrating the past trauma endangerment. Ultimately, individuals the present and the unconscious is not with one’s experience post-trauma rather report feeling both present and absent. clearly separable from the conscious than merely dismissing or releasing the While symptoms fall along a continuum, mind; this notion of non-dualism is not past. with “flashbacks” to the traumatic event new. PTSD, in that it contains a blurring occupying one extreme, often individuals Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Nāgārjuna, of the boundary between past, present, and a Non-Essentialist Concept of Time diagnosed with PTSD find themselves and future, is an extreme example of how living in both the present and the past the self-experience of time cannot be n order to conceptually capture the simultaneously. This paper seeks to adequately captured in discursive terms. Ilived experience of Posttraumatic provide a window into this experience Stress Disorder (PTSD) one must wrestle by questioning ontological assumptions Psychologists Judith Herman, Ronnie with its many contradictory and am- about time. Janoff-Bulman, and Robert Stolorow, biguous elements. A diagnosis of PTSD Recently, a relational understanding offer valuable descriptions of the way includes an achronological experience of selfhood has become a convincing in which trauma transforms one’s ex- of time wherein the patient loses the area of research within psychology. Mod- perience of time and the perception of continuity of forward progressing time; els that contest the self as atomistic and one’s own safety. Their accounts speak indeed, the past intrudes on the present, self-sustaining have been praised in both to the complexity of lived experience of causing the individual to straddle multi- psychology and philosophy. Continental PTSD without reducing it to dichotomous ple realities. Buddhist ontology seems to phenomenologists have emphasized the thinking. By putting their analyses of provide the polysemous logic necessary non-dualism of mind and body, and self first person experience of PTSD into to capture frequent symptoms of PTSD. and world. Such trends reveal a growing conversation with Buddhist ontology and In order to support this claim I will first interest in challenging reified, essentialist logic, I aim to further illuminate how es- provide a brief overview of the disorder. modes of thought. I argue that a similar sentialist presuppositions about time and re-thinking is needed in order to under- identity obscure a deeper understanding The DSM-V: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder of a first-person experience of PTSD. stand and articulate the first-person ex- he DSM-V outlines a cluster of Beyond highlighting how fundamental perience of temporality. Presuppositions symptoms that may follow a Aristotelian assumptions about truth and T about truth and validity can be traced traumatic event and indicate PTSD which ontology tend to presuppose a univocity back to fundamental axioms in Aristo- include intrusion symptoms tied to the of meaning and operate with either/or telian logic and ontology, which often event, “persistent avoidance of stimuli thinking, this investigation will reveal that operate unquestioned. A fundamental associated with the traumatic event(s),” the human being is not just a being-in- re-thinking of ontology is needed in or- negative thoughts and mood changes, the-world, but a historical being without der to grasp the non-dualistic experience and “marked alterations in arousal and boundary, capable of maintaining a poly- of time. Buddhist traditions are valuable reactivity.” Intrusion symptoms include semy of perspectives across time. To this resources with which we can rethink persistent memories, dreams, and/or end, two key Buddhist concepts, inter- presuppositions about time. I argue that “flashbacks” of the traumatic event as dependent co-origination and catuṣkoṭi Indian Buddhist ontology – as well as its well as disturbing psychological and logic will be used as lenses through modes of articulation which date back to physiological responses to “external or in- which we can more deeply understand
16 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD ternal cues that symbolize or resemble an the law of non-contradiction, – some- guides, like the DSM-V, are built upon aspect of the traumatic event(s).” Changes times referred to as the law of the ex- parsing symptoms and demarcating in arousal include “irritable behavior and cluded middle – i.e.: “It is impossible for disorders. Generally speaking, patients angry outbursts (with little or no prov- the same thing at the same time both to must have a certain cluster of symptoms ocation), … reckless or self-destructive be-in and not to be-in the same thing in for a specified duration of time in order behavior, hypervigilance, exaggerated the same respect.”1 This law governs ratio- to receive a particular diagnosis. The law startle response, problems with concen- nality. Indeed, Aristotle calls this principle of non-contradiction is thus present in tration, [and] sleep disturbance.” “the ultimate root of all demonstration specifying whether or not the diagnosis Most basically, PTSD entails a blur- – it is its very nature to be the principle in question applies to the individual. 2 ring of the boundary between the past of all other axioms.” More specifically, Ar- However, despite this example of and the present; the past “intrudes” on istotelian propositional logic asserts that either-or thinking with regard to diagno- the present and is relived in the present. contradictions are fallacies: something is ses, the overall discipline of psychology However, this blurring is by no means either A or not A, true or false. A cannot certainly acknowledges the reality of unique to PTSD; human experience by be both itself and not A at the same time. non-dualism in lived experience. As nature lacks clear barriers between the In order to provide a persuasive stated earlier, at the most basic level, psy- past and present. A basic premise of psy- example of the principle, Aristotle alludes chological discourse takes non-dualism choanalysis is that past events, especially to a human being’s incapacity to possess seriously in that it upholds the non-dual- significant or traumatic ones, continue to opposite beliefs at the same time about ity of time in which the past encroaches exert influence in wide-ranging, largely the same object. As we will see, this latter upon the psyche’s present. Furthermore, unconscious ways including current point is indeed possible in the Mahayana analysis reveals that lived experience of- perceptions about the world and oneself, Buddhist tradition, as articulated by the ten contains simultaneous contradictory expectations for the future, desire, etc. second century Indian monk Nāgārjuna. beliefs and desires. So, by referring to Ar- One could reasonably claim that the Aristotle argues that the principle of istotle’s law of non-contradiction, I am not present is interpenetrated at all times non-contradiction allows for the pos- asserting that psychological discourse is by the past. However, if we maintain sibility of language; if it were denied, governed by Aristotelian propositional certain presuppositions about truth and language and even thought would be logic. Instead, I merely hope to draw the falsity, it’s difficult to capture the ambi- impossible. Vasilis Politis emphasizes reader’s attention to problematic presup- guity of time as we are then committed that Aristotle’s claims about logic are positions present in an Aristotelian world to drawing sharp distinctions between inseparable from his overall project in the view, and by extension, demonstrate the concepts (e.g., A or not A, true or false, Metaphysics. The principle does not only relevance of a non-Aristotelian ontology past or present). In this form of thinking, govern how things appear to the subject, to the depiction of PTSD. More broadly, the past would be clearly separable from it is also “true of the things themselves I aim to illuminate the first-person ex- the present. and of things without qualification.”3 Lan- perience of time in PTSD by juxtaposing Ancient Greek Logical Presuppositions guage lines up with reality, for Aristotle, two very different perspectives of truth and there are only two possibilities, i.e., and ontology. We will find that the Indian ristotle’s influence can hardly be “is” or “is not,” or “true” or “false.” Buddhist author, Nāgārjuna problema- overstated. His prolific corpus A In order to understand Buddhist tizes dualistic thinking and provides the inspired intense study from late antiquity philosophical resources with which we to the Renaissance; even today scholars non-dualism, it is useful to contrast it with the Aristotelian principle of non-con- can sufficiently capture the fragmented continue to draw from his philosophical perception of time operative in PTSD. work. His belief that philosophy was tradiction as the perspectives, with primarily concerned with substance, regard to truth claims, are fundamentally Buddhist Ontology and Epistemology: being, and logic shaped centuries of opposed. Furthermore, for the purposes Interdependent Co-origination and the philosophical reflection. Aristotle was in- of this paper, it’s crucial to bring to light Two-fold Truth of Form and Emptiness terested in codifying human reasoning in essentialist assumptions about time that may be operating unquestioned. Given One of the foundational doctrines order to secure that the claims we make in Buddhism is the idea of no-self (anat- about the world, across disciplines, are the prevalence of Aristotelian proposi- tional logic in European and American man); i.e., the theory that there is no en- sound. Central to this objective was his during core self. Instead, existence is shot investigation of “fundamental principles scholastic traditions, it is unsurprising that its basic premises about truth and through with impermanence; change of demonstration” in The Metaphysics. is the only constant. This is common In Book Gamma 3, Aristotle theorizes identity can be witnessed in psycholog- ical models and diagnoses. Diagnostic knowledge for anyone who is minimally that “the most secure of all principles” is acquainted with Buddhist ideas. Less well
1. Ibid, 88 1005b. 2. Ibid. 3. Vasilis Politis, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Metaphysics (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) 128. 17 JANUS HEAD
known is the teaching of interdependent past and present; however, to truly step Buddhist practice. However, a more apt co-origination (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda), into the lifeworld of the person suffering characterization of Buddhist practice which provides the ontological back- from PTSD, we must endeavor to see the is coming to realize that any type of ground to the concept of no-self. It states experience as it unfolds to the individual. attachment – even the attachment to that everything that exists is the result of The second Buddhist doctrine that the ultimate truth of interdependent causes and conditions; sometimes trans- is relevant for our purposes is the two- co-origination – must be renounced. lated as “dependent arising,” it signifies fold truth of form and emptiness. There With respect to time, conventionally we that identity is dependent; that is, beings are two levels of knowing in Buddhist demarcate the past from the present. are created and sustained by beings thought: the first corresponds to our ev- However, with respect to ultimate truth, outside of themselves. Fundamentally, eryday way of knowing the world where they remain inseparable. there is only relation; there is no separate we make distinctions between ourselves Knowledge of these two fundamen- existence. All beings are conglomerations and others, the sidewalk and the road, tal Buddhist doctrines: interdependent of relation with nothing essential or Buddhist teaching, and non-Buddhist co-origination and the twofold truth of enduring at their core. The well-known teaching. Such a lens is conceptual; it form and emptiness, sets the stage for Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh relies upon demarcating beings. The Pra- grasping a non-dualistic middle path explains this notion elegantly: jñāpāramitā Sutra refers to this first way which embraces contradiction. The first Just as a piece of paper is the fruit, of knowing as “form.” is an ontological claim about identity the combination of many elements that While the reader now “knows” what while the second concerns both ontology can be called non-paper elements, the is meant by interdependent co-origina- and epistemology, or the possibility of individual is made of non-individual tion, this is mere conceptual knowledge, knowledge. If one sets aside Aristotelian elements. If you are a poet, you will see or form. The Buddhist practice path, ontological assumptions about identity clearly that there is a cloud floating in this conversely, is a non-conceptual way and time, a new ontology and logic must sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will of knowing referred to as seeing the take its place. In the next section, I argue be no water; without water, the trees can- world through the lens of “emptiness.” It that Nāgārjuna’s ontology, expressed not grow; and without trees, you cannot entails realizing Buddhist teachings, like through Buddhist catuskoti logic, is a make paper…So we say, ‘A sheet of paper interdependent co-origination. This dis- fitting logical framework when seeking to is made of non-paper elements.’ A cloud tinction between “form” and “emptiness” describe and understand the complexity is a non-paper element…Sunshine is a is found in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra, and of first person experience of PTSD in that non-paper element...if all these elements merely re-articulated by Nāgārjuna, as it allows for polysemy, ambiguity, and are taken out, it is truly empty, empty of we will see in the next section. While our non-duality. an independent self.4 ordinary way of perceiving experience Nāgārjuna and the Logic of Ambiguity When applied to human identity, conceptually represents a form of con- interdependent co-origination signifies ventional truth, Buddhist practice can āgārjuna (c. 150 CE) was an Indi- that there is no clear separation between lead to ultimate truth wherein reality is Nan Buddhist master credited with the environment and the person; individ- perceived through the lens of emptiness, founding the early Madhyamaka school uals lack core-like essences. Furthermore, i.e., without the concept of essence or of Mahayana Buddhism. While many if we consider this notion with respect to separately existent beings. fantastical hagiographies exist, little is known of his life apart from legend. His the human experience of time, we see The doctrine of the two-fold truth that each moment is inextricably tied to most influential work is the Mūlamadhya- frees one to make statements at the con- makakārikā, The Fundamental Verses of the past and the future. The implication ventional level that are true while they of this ontology is the Buddhist doctrine the Middle Way.5 This work was meant to are simultaneously false at the ultimate be a commentary on the Prajñāpāramitā of emptiness, or sunyata: there is no level. Conventional knowledge is useful singular present. While the notion of Sutra, a principal Mahayana Buddhist in that distinctions are necessary for scripture referred to above.6 A commen- emptiness is often misunderstood nihilis- communication. However, attachment tically to mean nothingness, in actuality, tarial tradition arose and today a vast to conventional knowledge, according amount of secondary literature exists. emptiness signifies the lack of intrinsic es- to Buddhist thought, can obscure the sence. In other words, while we may draw Contemporary Buddhist scholars are ultimate truth, which is that everything drawn to Nāgārjuna’s work due to his use arbitrary divisions between moments, lacks intrinsic essence, including human ultimately such divisions are illusory. Of of a form of logic, called the catuṣkoṭi, as identity and time. If one isn’t careful, well as his radical skeptical claims about course, when it comes to PTSD, it may be it’s easy to idealize the “ultimate” truth; psychologically beneficial to demarcate the possibility of true statements about after all, it is in some senses the goal of reality.
4. Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1987), 51-52. 5. Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd edition (London: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009) 63-64. 6. Geshe Tashi Tsering, Emptiness: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought, 5th volume (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, Inc, 2009) 19. 18 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Consistent with canonical Buddhist As noted above, the Buddhist doctrine of rejects language’s ability to make true teachings, which aim to remove delusory interdependent co-origination states that statements about reality.13 The catuskoti views which cause suffering, Nāgārjuna’s identity is never independent and sepa- should not be thought of as a simple as- chief interest was in dispelling mistaken rable from the surrounding environment. sertion about the truth of reality. Instead, views, principally the notion of essence Propositional assertions are ill-equipped it should be regarded as a corrective tool (Skt. svabhāva). While he mentions to represent this worldview. put to use in order to eliminate dualistic his desire to guide Buddhist followers What does it mean to adhere to a thinking and faith in language’s ability to towards nirvana through his teaching, middle path between the notion that capture absolute reality. When we enter he is simultaneously critiquing the views nothing exists and everything exists into the Buddhist worldview, we come of rival Buddhist schools and arguing for eternally? While Aristotelian proposi- to see how the former and the latter are the superiority of his understanding of tional logic insists on deciding between tied. Nāgārjuna’s work demonstrates the Buddhist scriptures. More specifically, either truth or falsity, Nāgārjuna seems to limits of language when it is connected Nāgārjuna took issue with non-Mahayana endorse hovering somewhere between to the notion of essence; however, he also schools of his day, which held that real- seemingly dichotomous alternatives. As pushes it to communicate insight into its ity consisted of dharmas, “infinitesimally we saw above, language lines up with re- own limits. small particles that are the real building ality, for Aristotle, and there are only two How is this all connected to his 7 blocks of the phenomenal world.” Nāgār- possibilities, i.e., “is” or “is not,” or “true” or notion of the “middle path”? According to juna denied the existence of dharmas “false.” According to Jay Garfield, Nāgār- Peter Hershock “Realizing the non-duality and indeed any form of independent, juna doesn’t contest that the “… only of all things is not an erasure of differenc- substantial existence (svabhāva). truth values are true and false,” however es, a final collapse of all distinctions into While often read as a nihilistic skep- “…these truth values are independent of an all-frozen sameness; it is a restoration tic, I, and a number of other scholars, hold each other.”10 This allows him to state that of the logically excluded middle between that Nāgārjuna actually intends to both a claim can be true, false, both or neither. ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ – the irreduc- critique certain philosophical doctrines Such a view sees the non-duality of exis- ibly dynamic totality of mutual contribu- and assert his own.8 He aims to achieve tence as not only a permissible view but tion.”14 Insisting that the only true picture a “middle path” between the extreme in fact the clearest picture of reality as it is of reality is in line with Aristotelian prop- views of annihilationism, the notion that in itself. For example, in the Mūlamadhya- ositional logic – either A or not A – is to nothing exists, and eternalism, the idea makakārikā Nāgārjuna states: insist on “difference.” Conversely, the that only permanent essences exist. He 8. Everything is real and is not real assertion that everything is one, or the systematically employs catuskoti logic in “same,” if we shed the concept of intrinsic order to reject all possible assertions that Both real and not real essence, is also mistaken. Such forms arise from either of these two worldviews. Neither real nor not real. of thinking fail to grasp that the lack of This form of logic translates to “4 posi- essence doesn’t preclude all individuality. This is Lord Buddha’s teaching.11 tions or corners:” namely: A exists, A does Returning to the doctrine of the two- According to Garfield, Nāgārjuna not exist, A both exists and does not exist, fold truth of form and emptiness provides 9 employs the catuskoti both positively and and A neither exists nor does not exist. a new way to interpret how Nāgārjuna is negatively throughout the Mūlamadhya- This logic is employed by Nāgārjuna in using the positive catuskoti in that we makakārikā. In the positive form, claims order to exhaust all logical possibilities can make statements at the conven- can be true, false, both and neither.12 and ultimately demonstrate that all ar- tional level that are true while they are However, while one view would be that guments that purport to represent “truth” simultaneously false at the ultimate level. Nāgārjuna explicitly rejects the law of about reality fail when they are subject Conventional knowledge is useful in that non-contradiction; in fact, his claims are to analysis. His project is tied to efforts distinctions are necessary for communi- more subtle. Again, he advances a middle to dispel the notion of essence because cation. However, attachment to conven- view. In the negative formulation of the assertions about reality, when proposi- tional knowledge can obscure the fact tional, have a fixed and restrictive quality. logic, “all four possibilities are denied,” he
7. James Blumenthal, “Indian Mahayana Buddhism” in Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, (John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013) 124. 8. See Garfield, 2015, 2002; Westerhoff, 2009; Burton, 1999. 9. Jay Garfield,Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 99. 10. Jay Garfield,Engaging Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 244. 11. Jay Garfield, translator. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Chapter XVIII. 12. Ibid, 244. 13. bid, 245. 14. Peter Hershock, “Diversity Matters: Buddhist Reflections on the Meaning of Difference” in Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel (John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013) 746. 19 JANUS HEAD
that everything lacks intrinsic essence, show that nirvana is not a separate the ultimate truth – it’s important to including human identity and time. independently existing truth. Nirvana emphasize that conventional truth need Lastly, Nāgārjuna subjected his own is merely the absence of deluded not be transcended. Instead, the goal is to assertions to the notion of emptiness; thinking. Similarly, with respect to the loosen one’s attachment to conventional he claimed that his words and the words two-fold truth of form and emptiness, truth. The “return to convention,” howev- of the Buddha are empty in that they emptiness, or ultimate truth, is just er, is still separate from the philosophical too could not express ultimate truth. one side of the same coin as form, or appearance vs. reality distinction in that In other words, Nāgārjuna’s skepticism conventional truth. Garfield states emptiness is not “reality” in the sense of about the possibility of capturing reality “Emptiness is not the annihilation of something substantial. This distinction, in conceptual statements holds true even convention but the ability to return so entrenched in much of the history of for his own Buddhist views. While Bud- to convention, seeing it merely as Western philosophy simply does not hold 18 dhist teaching is aimed at dispelling the conventional.” Nāgārjuna should not for either the Mahayana Buddhist notion notion of essence, the absence of essence be read as a nihilistic skeptic then in of nirvana and samsara nor the levels of itself, emptiness, can easily be mistakenly that he does not recommend discard- form and emptiness reified. Reifying emptiness means to in- ing conventional truth, but rather In the remainder of this paper, I terpret it as some “thing” that needs to be points to its limits by instructing the argue that Buddhist insights into non-du- experienced that is completely separable reader to dispel his or her attachment ality provide valuable tools when seeking from ordinary experience. Nāgārjuna to the notion of essence. to understand and conceptualize the closes Chapter XXV on “Nirvana” in the While Nāgārjuna’s way of expressing first-person experience of PTSD. More Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by stating: his findings is quite radical, his theories specifically, interdependent co-origi- 24. The pacification of all do not actually depart from the Buddha’s nation, catuskoti logic, and the twofold teaching. Mahayana scriptures used the truth of form and emptiness will be objectification term upaya to capture the provisional drawn on to illuminate the perception And the pacification of illusion: nature of Buddha’s teachings. Upaya of time in PTSD. Importantly, if one only means “skillful” or “expedient means.” views Buddhism as a spiritual practice, No Dharma was taught by the While the term itself rarely occurs in the this project will be questioned. While Buddha Buddha’s own body of scriptures, the Pāli Buddhist philosophical insights are tied At any time, in any place, to any Canon, Michael Pye points to thematic to bodily practices, Buddhism has rich person.15 continuities between the teaching of the ontological perspectives that one can historical Buddha and later Mahayana benefit from outside of its role as a spiri- The “Dharma,” or teaching, does not scriptures with respect to the teaching tual practice. As noted above, Nāgārjuna’s reflect any thing-like, essential truth; method of upaya.19 Instead of delivering critique of the appearance vs. reality par- it is only a method used to dispel the same teaching to all his disciples, the adigm is fruitful for scholars of Western “ontological fabrication,” to employ Buddha adjusted teachings based on the philosophy and psychology. Significantly, 16 a term by Garfield. If grasping to needs of his disciples.20 In the Mahayana while Western philosophical systems are permanence is the tendency Buddhists Sutras, the Buddha is even seen referring replete with the appearance vs. reality aim to eliminate, then it does not to nirvana itself as empty, in that Dharma, distinction, according to Garfield, Nāgār- make sense to substitute this tendency or teachings, can only point to an ultimate juna is not making such an assertion.22 with a permanent reified teaching. reality beyond words and concepts.21 The While there are two ways of perceiving The same notion is expressed in Mahayana branch of Buddhism, influ- reality, articulated by the two-fold truth Nāgārjuna’s dramatic claim in verse 19 enced by Nāgārjuna, emphasizes that all of form and emptiness, there is only one “There is not the slightest difference Buddhist teachings cannot reflect reality; reality. Much of the history of western between cyclic existence and nirva- they are only practical tools that hopeful- philosophy has been committed to un- 17 na.” “Cyclic existence” symbolizes ly inspire non-conceptual knowledge. covering the “real” underneath the way samsara, which stands for all deluded Recalling that the goal of Buddhist that things merely appear. Garfield writes existence. Nāgārjuna asserts such a of Nāgārjuna’s refusal of the appearance contradictory argument in order to practice is non-attachment – even to
15. Garfield (1995), Chapter XXV. 16. Ibid, 334. 17. Ibid, Chapter XXV 18. Garfield (2015), 261. 19. Michael Pye, Skillful Means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) 119. 20. Ibid, 123; 129. 21. The Essential Lotus: Selections from the Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) 12. 22. Garfield (2002), 102. 20 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD vs. reality distinction: present. As Nāgārjuna points out in his lack of resolution between opposites, it ... it is hard to find a parallel in the analysis of causation, in order to give an seems to more adequately capture the West prior to the work of Heidegger. account of how one thing affects another human experience of time. With this But even Heidegger does not follow the notion of essence must be discarded: Buddhist form of logic, the past can be Nāgārjuna all the way to the dramatic 8. If existence were through essence, conceptualized as both past and not past at the same time. insistence on the identity of the Then there would be no two realities and the recovery of the The past, present, and future thus authority of the conventional. This nonexistence share an ambiguous relationship which extirpation of the myth of the deep A change in essence is only intensified by individuals who may be Nāgārjuna’s greatest contribu- suffer from PTSD. With regard to intru- Could never be tenable. tion to Western philosophy.23 sion symptoms, in their most extreme 9. If there is no essence, For the purposes of this paper, manifestation, the individual may lose Nāgārjuna’s questioning of essentialist What could become other? all awareness of the present. One of the hallmark traits of PTSD is the individual’s thinking will be a main focus. While If there is essence, Aristotelian propositional logic stipulates “reliving” of the traumatic event: 24 that there are only two possibilities (A What could become other? The individual may experience or not A, true or false, past or present), As noted above, he defines essence dissociative states that last from a Nāgārjuna’s work offers up the radical as that which is permanent, eternal, and few seconds to several hours or even perspective that there is no A because all independent. The first two lines follow days, during which components of the beings – and propositions about beings – from the notion that an essence is by event are relived and the individual are ultimately empty of intrinsic essence. definition eternal; however, if we hold behaves as if the event were occurring this view then we would be committed at that moment…Such events occur Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Nāgārjuna, to the idea that nothing could pass out of on a continuum from brief visual or and a Non-Essentialist Concept of Time existence. This is an untenable position. other sensory intrusions about part n this section, I will demonstrate He goes on to reason that if something of the traumatic event without loss of Ihow Nāgārjuna’s philosophy of is eternal and independent, then by reality orientation, to complete loss of non-dualism offers a way of thinking nature it cannot undergo change, i.e., awareness of present surroundings.25 through the first-person experience of be affected by something else or come With respect to the two logics PTSD. Remaining committed to Aristote- to be otherwise. In the second verse, he discussed, while a complete dissociative lian presuppositions about essence and speculates that if we discard the idea of episode may be captured sufficiently non-contradiction curtails the ability to essence, which governs much thinking by Aristotelian propositional logic (one conceptualize the interpenetration of on identity, then it becomes difficult to is either present and “aware of present past and present at work in reports of express what changes. These lines throw surroundings” or not), when the episodes PTSD. Most basically, PTSD entails a blur- into question language’s ability to speak appear on “…a continuum…without ring of the boundary between the past about an individual being undergoing loss of reality orientation” they cannot. and the present; the past “intrudes” on the change or even the continuity of time Continuums simply can’t be reflected present and is relived in the present. How- from moment to moment. In the last two by propositional either/or thinking. Fur- ever, this blurring is by no means unique lines, Nāgārjuna returns to his argument thermore, the fact that many individuals to PTSD; human experience by nature that despite worries about our ability suffering from PTSD aren’t completely lacks clear boundaries between the past to refer to entities without the concept debilitated by their symptoms demon- and present. One could reasonably claim of essence, returning to the concept of strates that they are able to maintain that the present is interpenetrated at all essence still doesn’t allow us to account two kinds of awareness simultaneously: times by the past. However, if we hold for change. awareness of the present moment and to the law of the excluded middle, it’s If we follow Nāgārjuna’s reasoning, awareness of the traumatic event. Indeed, difficult to capture the multidimensional- then we must think of each moment psychiatrist Judith Herman suggests that ity of time as we are then committed to in non-essentialist terms. If the “past” is present and past perceptions can occur drawing sharp distinctions between con- conceived of as independent and easily simultaneously in individuals who have cepts (e.g., A or not A, true or false, past separable from the present then it falls been subject to repeated trauma.26 Even or present). In this form of thinking, the within essentialist thinking. As the pos- this formulation of two separate states past would be clearly separable from the itive form of catuskoti logic allows for a is misleading, though, in that there is no
23. Ibid. 24. Garfield (1995), Chapter XV. 25. DSM-V, 275. 26. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1992) 90. 21 JANUS HEAD
clear division between these two forms of or above their bodies.29 In this case, the traumatized people simultaneously call awareness. Instead, the present is experi- event seems to be stripped of a subject attention to the existence of an unspeak- enced together with the past or we could experiencing the event. able secret and deflect attention away say that the present is filtered through With regard to chronically trau- from it.”33 This phenomenon is further the past. matized people, Herman suggests that evidence that posttraumatic experience they develop the ability to alter their state is shot through with contradictory Dissociation, Contradiction, and the “Illu- of consciousness through dissociation, desires and emotions. Herman uses the sion of Invulnerability” but also through “voluntary thought sup- term “dialectic of trauma,” which captures pression, minimization, and… denial.”30 alternating contradictory states of dis- “Doublethink” She specifies that: sociative “constriction” and “intrusion,” in ndividuals who meet the diagnostic Ordinary psychological language does order to capture the way in which symp- criteria of PTSD may also express I not have a name for this complex toms of PTSD manifest themselves in dissociative symptoms, either in the form array of mental maneuvers, at once terms of these seemingly un-resolvable of depersonalization or derealization.27 conscious and unconscious…Perhaps contradictions. She highlights the jarring Catuskoti logic is useful in conceptu- the best name for it is doublethink, incongruity between defensive numbing alizing such experiences according to in Orwell’s definition: ‘Doublethink and intrusive affect-laden memories: their proper polysemous nature rather means the power of holding two This dialectic of opposing psycholog- than attempting to articulate them with contradictory beliefs in one’s mind ical states is perhaps the most charac- either/or propositional statements. Psy- simultaneously, and accepting both of teristic feature of the post-traumatic chologist Judith Herman uses the term them.’31 syndromes. Since neither the intrusive “constriction” to describe dissociative nor the numbing symptoms allow for tendencies: “Sometimes situations of For example, survivors may actively integration of the traumatic event, inescapable danger may evoke…a state deny focusing attention on their past the alternation between these two of detached calm…Events continue to traumas on one hand, while simultane- might be understood as an attempt register in awareness, but it is as though ously experiencing it as their present to find a satisfactory balance between these events have been disconnected reality. Herman notes that the past trau- the two…The instability produced from their ordinary meanings…The per- ma reality is often experienced in sharper by these periodic alternations son may feel as though the event is not detail than the present, which is instead further exacerbates the traumatized happening to her, as though she is ob- viewed as lackluster and diminished. person’s sense of unpredictability and serving from outside her body…”28 While Such an experience affirms both realities helplessness.34 such states can exist during the traumatic and is thus similar to the earlier example event itself, they often continue to live on of symptoms experienced along a spec- This dialectic itself, according to Herman, after the event has passed with regard trum, in that the individual doesn’t lose can lead to the traumatized person adopt- to how the traumatized person remem- awareness of the present when recalling ing “doublethink” as a form of coping.35 bers the event. In such cases, we see the past trauma. However, the past real- symptoms described as occurring along ity is often more absorbing and insistent Essentialist ontology, expressed a continuum, rather than dualistically, than the present one.32 through propositional logic, simply i.e., in terms of reliving the trauma com- doesn’t possess the tools to express this “Doublethink” also manifests itself experience as PTSD represents a case of pletely or being aware only of the present in the way in which the individuals who reality. Herman suggests that the individ- simultaneously existent contradictory have suffered from trauma attempt to perceptions of reality undergone by one ual maintains two kinds of awareness communicate to others about the trau- simultaneously: one of the event and one individual. The simultaneous holding of ma. Herman writes that individuals are two perspectives is similar to the two-fold in which she is removed from the event. torn between their desires to both speak Interestingly, individuals at times report truth of form and emptiness, wherein the of the trauma and to leave it hidden: conventional (conceptual) and ultimate that they perceive the event outside of “The psychological distress symptoms of their bodies from a vantage point beside (non-conceptual) frames are two true
27. DSM-V, 272. 28. Ibid, 42-43. 29. Ibid, 43. 30. Ibid, 87. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid, 90. 33. Ibid, 1. 34. Ibid, 47. 35. Ibid, 1; 87. 22 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD ways to view the same reality, both of assumptions do not seem viable in Watching Israeli soldiers passing which can be held concurrently. While light of the data from victimization, outside her window, the woman traumatic remembering could be yet stability and coherence are reported that she knew the soldiers considered “delusional,” it represents threatened by change.39 were leaving to fight at the frontier. a truth to the patient. However, with Returning to the notion of “dou- Simultaneously, however, she ‘knew’ regard to the two-fold truth of form and blethink,” individuals who have not that they were being driven to their 42 emptiness, a word of caution is merited: experienced trauma seem to be able deaths by a Nazi commander. ultimate truth and conventional truth to hold the contradictory views that a) Here, the woman is able to maintain are not equivalent with non-traumatized harm befalls people across the world ev- both perspectives. While this example and traumatic experience, respectively. ery day and b) It is unlikely that harm will does not explicitly reference the wom- I suggest that Nāgārjuna’s ontology befall me as I am invulnerable. The sec- an’s perception of her own safety, we can can illuminate the study of PTSD in ond view is psychologically more com- see that she is not completely overtaken Western psychology; such an ontology pelling than the first. Such a perspective with the notion that danger is every- is consistent with the phenomenon of does not provoke cognitive dissonance where; rather, she is able to understand simultaneous contradictory perceptions for the average person. However, in the the reality of the event while simultane- held by an individual. aftermath of a traumatic event, the first ously interpreting the event through the Shattered World Assumptions viewpoint overshadows the second and lens of her traumatic past. brings it into question. Jannoff-Bulman erman’s discussion of “Dou- Like many psychological realities, argues that world assumptions are sig- individuals experience a continuum of Hblethink” falls in line with Pro- nificantly altered after severe traumatic fessor of Psychology Ronnie Janoff-Bul- such feelings. While some survivors of events. For example, in a study of 338 trauma may completely lose the illusion man’s theory of shattered world college students, Janoff-Bulman found assumptions.36 Janoff-Bulman theorizes of invulnerability, I think it is likely that in that students who had experienced a some corner of the mind many survivors that we have core beliefs, one of which is severe traumatic event held more neg- that the world and other people are ba- retain a belief in it. Core assumptions ative basic world assumptions than the about the benevolence of the world and sically benevolent and safe. While we are non-victims.40 rationally aware of the harm that befalls the worth of the self are constructed over many people in the world, we are able In her analysis of the aftermath of time, but many of them are sedimented 43 to nevertheless maintain an “illusion of trauma, Janoff-Bulman suggests that the in early life. While traumatic events invulnerability” with regard to our own symptoms of self-blame, denial, and in- challenge the believability of these basic person.37 Trauma can shatter this illusion trusive recurrent thoughts, which often assumptions, usually for a period of time and lead to the belief that the world occur, are psychologically beneficial in post-trauma, it is unlikely that they will and other people are fundamentally that they allow the survivor to gradually be challenged for the remainder of one’s dangerous. Unsurprisingly, studies have integrate the event into their existing life. Indeed, Janoff-Bulman notes that revealed that negative world assump- world assumptions schema without the many survivors do go on to gradually in- 41 tions are connected to increased PTSD collapse of the total schema. Herman’s tegrate their prior and post-victimization 44 symptoms.38 Janoff-Bulman writes: theory of “doublethink” could very world assumptions. well imply that trauma survivors may In the case of traumatic negative The law of non-contradiction, as partially retain the idea that the world applied to past and present seems to events, individuals confront very is safe while simultaneously believing salient, critical ‘anomalous data,’ preclude the possibility of integration. that danger is constant. For example, Integration implies a transcending of for the victimization cannot be Herman recounts a concentration camp readily accounted for by the person’s absolutist either/or thinking. While survivor’s reflections 20 years after being the focus of this paper is on describing preexisting assumptions…Following released: traumatic life events, victims’ basic the lived experience of PTSD and the ontological insights that it reveals, ther-
36. Herman, in fact, refers to Janoff-Bulman’s “basic assumptions” theory inTrauma and Recovery when she discusses the rupture of a traumatized person’s basic perception of the world as safe in the aftermath of trauma, 51 n. 2. 37. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman,Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: The Free Press, 1992) 18-19. 38. See Lilly, Howell, & Graham-Bermann, 2015, 98. This particular study focuses on survivors of intimate partner violence. 39. Janoff-Bulman (1992), 121. 40. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Assumptive Worlds and the Stress of Traumatic Events: Applications of the Schema Construct”Social Cognition. 7.2 (1989): 131. 41. Ibid, 121-122. 42. Herman, 90. 43. Janoff-Bulman (1992), 17. 44. Ibid, 171. 23 JANUS HEAD
apeutic practices that aim to treat PTSD will turn now to an extended ex- triggered by retelling her experience of should be considered in brief. As we will Iamination of Stolorow’s discussion traumatic events: “…with the retelling of see, psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow also of trauma and temporality. His analysis each traumatic episode, a piece of herself argues for the integration of the trau- of lived time is similar to the point that I broke off and relocated to the time and matic past with the present reality rather have emphasized above in that the past place of the original trauma…[after- than completely removing the traumatic continually interpenetrates the present wards] she was completely dispersed perception. and future. Stolorow first discusses lived along the time dimension of her crushing Stolorow presents an analysis of trau- time by alluding to Martin Heidegger life history” (Ibid). As evident in Herman’s ma’s effects related to Janoff-Bulman’s and Edmund Husserl’s views of time as analysis above, intrusive traumatic mem- discussion of shattered world assump- a continuity rather than a summary of ories are often unpredictable and serve to tions. For Stolorow, the root of traumatic discrete moments. More specifically, the de-stabilize identity. Stolorow provides a experience is characterized as a loss of present does not stand alone; it is in- thorough account of how identity is in- “the absolutisms of everyday life”: stead, inextricable from the past and the extricable from one’s being-in-time; thus, future.47 However, this continuity can be the de-stabilization occurs with regard to When a person says to a friend, ‘I’ll see ruptured; indeed, Stolorow argues that both identity and the individual’s percep- you later,’ or a parent says to a child at “trauma destroys time.” Trauma, in fact, tion of time.51 bedtime, ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ leads to a break in both the felt continuity these are statements, like delusions, Traumatic temporality is further of time and the perceived unity of the characterized by Stolorow as a sense of whose validity is not open for 48 self. It leads to a profound alteration of being trapped in a present that endlessly discussion. Such absolutisms are the one’s everyday experience. Drawing on basis for a kind of naive realism and repeats the past. Stolorow reads Friedrich Heidegger’s notion of healthy Dasein as Nietzsche’s concept of “the eternal return optimism that allow one to function a being-at-home-in-the-world, the trau- in the world, experienced as stable of the same” as a useful description which matic experience is characterized by loss, can be applied to the experience of trau- and predictable. It is in the essence of 49 strangeness, and a sense of the uncanny. matic time. emotional trauma that it shatters these Stolorow likens such an experience to absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of in- Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety, which In the region of trauma, all duration nocence that permanently alters one’s dislodges the individual from his or her or stretching along collapses; past sense of Being-in-the-world. Massive immersion in the everyday. becomes present, and future loses all deconstruction of the absolutism of The rupture in temporality is part meaning other than endless repeti- everyday life exposes the inescapable and parcel of dissociation, according tion…Because trauma so profoundly contingency of existence on a universe to Stolorow. He describes dissociation modifies the universal or shared that is random and unpredictable and as “…a kind of ‘tunnel vision’…keeping structure of temporality, the trau- in which no safety or continuity of apart…incommensurable emotional matized person quite literally lives in 45 being can be assured. worlds.”50 The traumatized person – often another kind of reality, an experiential The result of trauma is a “catastrophic unsuccessfully – attempts to keep the world felt to be incommensurable with 52 loss of innocence” which engulfs the sub- traumatized emotional world at bay. those of others. ject and evokes feelings of vulnerability This defensive dissociation, however, Here Stolorow pictures trauma in and powerlessness.46 However, Stolorow prohibits the integration of the trau- terms of sameness, repetition, and a fro- suggests that traumatic experience can matic events and memories into the zen present. With regard to the anecdote also provide us with the opportunity for self’s identity. Once again, Stolorow, via about his patient above, the triggered authenticity by revealing our true human Heidegger, emphasizes that the unity of reactions could be seen as a repetition finitude in a way that can be productive the self depends upon the felt continuity wherein the present and future is con- and life-enriching. of time. However, the re-experiencing of tinually overtaken by the past. The loss trauma through memory jolts one out of the continuity of time leads to a frag- Repetition, Finitude, and Integration of of the continuous flow of time. Stolorow mented identity as well as a lost capacity Contradictions recounts how one of his patients was for relation.
45. Robert Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (New York: The Analytic Press: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007) 16. 46. Robert Stolorow, World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2011) 49. 47. Stolorow (2007), 19. 48. Stolorow (2011), 54. 49. Ibid, 43. 50. Ibid, 54. 51. Ibid, 55 52. Ibid, 55-56. 24 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
While I have discussed above how As mentioned above, despite the manifests in an excruciating sense of Buddhist ontology, as reflected in profound disorientation that follows a singularity and solitude.”57 catuskoti logic, effectively captures the traumatic event, Stolorow believes that What I think can be drawn out of ambiguity of post-traumatic experience one may go on to develop an authentic Stolorow’s analysis of trauma, is that the pictured by Herman and Janoff-Bulman, I and deeper understanding of human traumatized person’s inauthentic ab- think it is also useful in Stolorow’s analysis existence afterwards. As he holds a rela- sorption in the past is tied up with both of traumatic experience as well as his dis- tional view of the self, supportive others the present repetition of the past and an cussion of recovery. The repetition of the play a key role in the survivor’s return to insight into his or her finitude. In other same is surely a denial of contradiction; continuity. Drawing again on Heidegger, words, while PTSD can be accurately it is a narrowing of awareness to the Stolorow writes that authentic existence described as a frozen present, wherein present, or the past made continuously involves the “non-evasive recognition of the past repeats itself ad nauseam, it 54 present, through evasion. However, as finitude” : simultaneously contains an awareness Janoff-Bulman suggests above, such In trauma, a potential dimension of of one’s finitude, albeit an unproductive evasion can be psychologically beneficial authenticity – authentic Being-to- one. In fact, I think dissociated memories until integration is possible. In Stolorow’s ward-death – is unveiled but not of traumatic events are not just blocked characterization of PTSD, the individual freely chosen; on the contrary, it is from awareness and integration; I think may be more aptly described as being forced upon the traumatized person, on one level they are blocked while stuck in a rigid either-or way of seeing and the accompanying anxiety can on another they take over all of one’s reminiscent of Aristotelian propositional be unendurable, making dissociative awareness and make one continually logic in that only one reality is acknowl- retreats from the traumatized states live one’s finitude. However, as Stolorow edged. That is, Stolorow’s characterization – retreats into forms of inauthenticity notes, until the radically incommensurate of dissociation, is a kind of “tunnel vision” – necessary.55 emotional worlds of the past and the brought about by a trigger, or “portkey,” present are integrated, the awareness in Stolorow’s terminology, wherein the Similar to Janoff-Bulman’s “illusion of invulnerability,” using Heidegger’s of one’s finitude is paralyzing, and thus individual is suddenly thrust into reliving quite limiting.58 a past trauma.53 The reliving is all-en- terminology, Stolorow describes how compassing and separates the individual being “thrown” into a traumatic event This perspective can be captured completely from present reality. However, can force the individual to apprehend well with the Buddhist two-fold truth when the traumatized person is capable his or her own mortality. While Stolorow and the logical structure of catuṣkoṭi. of letting go of this evasion, he or she can theorizes that such a revelation is at first For example, one can feel cut off from return to time as a discontinuous conti- evaded through dissociation, once the the present when reliving the past while nuity, i.e., to an acknowledgement of the repetition of the same is transcended, simultaneously feeling fear about harm in interpenetration of the past, present, and it can provide a possibility to face one’s the present. In fact, hypervigilance is one future. Here, a healthy perception of time death authentically. PTSD symptom that demonstrates how in fact allows for a fluidity better pictured Heidegger’s notion of inauthentic one is simultaneously unable to tran- by catuskoli logic in that one can hold falling into the they (Das Man), wherein scend one’s past trauma while at the same together the discontinuous moments Dasein does not apprehend its own time feel fear for one’s present and future of time in a continuity. As stated above, finitude, is initially similar to a dissociated security. The “non-evasive recognition human experience by nature lacks clear traumatized state in that both are char- of finitude” can play out in a way that is barriers between the past and present. acterized by evading finitude. However, merely undergone, through compulsive This continuity is ruptured when the trau- while inauthentic falling is an absorption hypervigilance, for example, or in a way matized person is thrust into reliving a in the everyday, for both Heidegger’s that is freely chosen. Stolorow describes past trauma. The goal, when treating indi- notion of anxiety and the traumatized the latter possibility as authenticity, but viduals diagnosed with PTSD, according person, “…in anxiety the significance of I think it is important to emphasize how to Stolorow, Herman, and Janoff-Bulman, the everyday world collapses.”56 Further- awareness of one’s finitude can be both is to allow for the integration of the past more, both are infused with a feeling of paralyzing and liberating for the trauma- and the present without discounting or almost unbearable aloneness: “Trauma, tized person. evading either. like authentic Being-toward-death, individualizes us, but in a manner that
53. Ibid, 54-55. 54. Ibid, 50. 55. Ibid, 45. 56. Ibid, 48. 57. Ibid, 44. 58. Ibid, 49. 25 JANUS HEAD
Stolorow’s authentically-chosen that two contradictory realities can be Nevertheless, the idea of “both and” put “non-evasive recognition of finitude” experienced concurrently. However, if we forward by the two-fold truth is useful involves an embracing of the repetition try to faithfully represent the experience when conceptualizing the integration of of traumatized memories and human of those who are diagnosed with PTSD, the past trauma and the present reality. vulnerability. Interestingly, emotionally then it seems that this is precisely the The Buddhist doctrine of interde- grasping the unpredictability of one’s as- case. We saw above how one can re-live pendent co-origination, together with sured death is both a heightened aware- a past trauma while simultaneously catuskoti logic, is also useful in concep- ness of each moment of human reality as being aware of present experience. The tualizing recovery and changes to one’s well as a way of seeing the world through two-fold truth does not hold that there identity post-trauma. Interdependent the lens of a past trauma. The insight into are two realities, but it does affirm that co-origination is a way of adhering to a vulnerability is tied to our own experience there are two ways of seeing reality middle path between the extremes of of vulnerability and our ability to tolerate (conventional and ultimate); they are nihilism (nothing exists) and eternalism this vulnerability together with the other different, but not exclusive of each other. (only independent essences exist) when aspects of our human experience. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, one conceptualizing identity. Stolorow, Her- Moreover, the “non-evasive rec- is not “more true” than the other; they man, and Janoff-Bulman all emphasize ognition of finitude” is not a solitary are both ways of seeing. Such a view is the importance of integration of the exercise, for Stolorow. He argues that useful in conceptualizing PTSD in a way traumatic episode into one’s personal the integration of the two emotional that respects the force of the past trauma narrative. However, this is impossible if worlds depends upon relationships with reality. While dualistic forms of thinking a strict separation between one’s being- supportive others. Indeed, his concept are often restricted to either “objective” in-the-world before and after the trauma of dissociation is as much separation or “subjective” perceptions of reality – the is maintained. Continuity can only be from others and “the shared structure former representing true perception re-established if neither the past world of temporality”59 as it is a separation of while the latter is false – the two-fold nor the present world are discounted. one’s own emotional worlds. Integrating truth doesn’t require that we shed one However, similarly, with regard to the the two worlds is possible with empathic viewpoint in favor of the other. Instead, other extreme, eternalism, one way of be- dialogue in which the past trauma and finding understanding in an empathic ing cannot be affirmed while the other is the present world can be held together.60 Other and integration of the two ways of denied. Ultimately, there is no separately seeing is encouraged. Furthermore, with existing essence with regard to identity Integrating the two emotional regard to perceptions about one’s safety, worlds is different from simply nullifying in the Buddhist worldview; instead, iden- Janoff-Bulman’s theory of the “illusion of tity emerges out of relation between the the past trauma. Trauma, in that it persists invulnerability” suggests that a some- in the body and our memory, continu- different moments of one’s existence and what misleading “subjective” viewpoint aspects of one’s environment. ally recurs, just like Nietzsche’s eternal in individuals who do not have PTSD recurrence. Here healing is more aptly is actually a psychologically healthier Catuskoti logic provides a way to conceptualized as an ambiguous process alternative. think about time and identity free from rather than a complete cure or break with However, once again, traumatized dualistic and essentialist presuppositions. the recurring sense of vulnerability in the and non-traumatized experience don’t In such a logical structure, it is permitted aftermath of trauma.61 map neatly onto form and emptiness. to assert that the past can be both past Furthermore, PTSD causes suffering and and not past at the same time. Trauma Conclusion often leads to the shrinking of the world irrevocably transforms one’s being-in- n conclusion, catuskoti logic and of the individual who suffers from it. It the-world through the shattering of the Ithe two-fold truth of form and would be counter-productive to suggest “illusion of invulnerability.” While the loss emptiness is useful in conceptualizing that therapists who work with survivors of stability and security often manifests in Herman’s discussion of “doublethink,” of trauma avoid making distinctions be- PTSD symptoms, it also grants one insight Janoff-Bulman’s concept of the “illusion tween the two viewpoints; encouraging into the truth of our human vulnerability of invulnerability,” and Stolorow’s descrip- the client to see the present without the tion of traumatic temporality. Aristotelian lens of the traumatized past is paramount. propositional logic denies the possibility
59. Ibid, 55. 60. Ibid, 61-62. 61. Ibid, 61. 26 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD and finitude. However, as Stolorow has shown above, one’s willingness to ac- knowledge the unceasing reminders of one’s vulnerability while not being over- come by this vulnerability depends upon the empathic attunement of others. Last- ly, integration of the traumatic event(s) is not about erasure of the past; rather, it is only possible when understood as the holding together of contradictory realities.
27 JANUS HEAD Bibliography
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 5. 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psy- chiatric Publishing, 2013. Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Trans. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Blumenthal, James. “Indian Mahayana Buddhism.” In Companion to Buddhist Philosophy. Ed. Steven M. S. M. Emmanuel, 124-133. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. Burton, David F. Emptiness Appraised: A Critical Study of Nāgārjuna’s Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1999. Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. The Essential Lotus: Selections from the Lotus Sutra. Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Garfield, Jay. Empty words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ______. Engaging Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ______The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Trans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992. Hershock, Paul. “Diversity Matters: Buddhist Reflections on the Meaning of Difference.” In A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy. Ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, 737-755. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. “Assumptive worlds and the stress of traumatic events: Applications of the schema construct.” Social Cognition, 7.2 (1989): 113-136. ______. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Lilly, M. M., K. H. Howell, and S. Graham-Bermann. “World Assumptions, Religiosity, and PTSD in Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence.” Violence Against Women. 21.1 (2015) 87–104. Nhat Hanh, Thich. Being Peace. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1987. Politis, Vasilis. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Metaphysics. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 Pye, Michale Skillful means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Stolorow, Robert. Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: The Ana- lytic Press: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007. ______. World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. Tsering, Geshe Tasha. Emptiness: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought. 5th vol. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, Inc., 2009. Westerhoff, Jan. Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Williams, Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. 2nd ed. London: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009.
28 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Elizabeth McManaman Tyler
Associate Professor | Department of Philosophy McDaniel College | Westminster, MD USA
Dr. Tyler specializes in East Asian philosophy and 20th century Continental philosophy with a special interest in feminist philosophy and philosophical psychology. Her research focuses on relational models of the self, especially in the work of Nishida Kitaro and Simone de Beauvoir. She regularly teaches courses in Asian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, feminist philosophy, Existentialism, and philosophical psychology.
29 JANUS HEAD
Poetry: The Experience of Listening
Boutheina Boughnim Laarif
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 30 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD ABSTRACT
As a verbal art, the “specifica poetica ” of poetry is incontestably its peculiar rhythmic and sound patterning. Regarded as a ‘twin-sister’ of music, as it originally was meant to be sung, poetry offers a different experience of language and the world. Reciting a poem, reading it ‘aloud mentally’, or simply listening to someone else’s recitation is not a trifle experience. It may prove unsettlingly significant in the light of recent philosophical treatments, inscribed into Heidegger’s existential thought based on his multi-dimensional notion of temporality intrinsic in Being/Dasein, notably, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and Jacques Derrida. In the present essay, I shall primarily focus on Nancy’s compelling conception of the act of listening which he expounds in his book Listening. Drawing upon a plethora of philosophers, such as, Heidegger, his friend Lacoue-Labarthe and others, Nancy elaborates a forceful understanding of the act of listening beyond the meaning-bound, message-focused one. With a challenging, rich philosophical verve, Nancy probes the experience of listening to music, (poetic) rhythm and even to mere human voices’ timbre and links it to our own awareness of our own subjectivity, as well as perceiving subjects engaging with the world surrounding us. Listening mirrors our own selves. It makes reverberate our silent, inner depths whose essence lies beyond the meaning-loaded constructs which define our existence. Being fundamentally temporal, the subject’s economy is perceived, from this temporally existential view, as governed by an unremitting mimetic deferral, continuity and inception, or in rhythm’s logic, repetition and spacing . Poetry, like music, sets (rhythmic, sound) expectations and is perceived as an experience of immanence. The act of listening to a poem being recited or simply ‘reading it aloud mentally’, echoes the subject’s very economy and the perpetual, inceptive deferral underlying its formation, while at the same time reinforces it. What Nancy calls “to listen with all its being” (35), is what Whitman seems to exhort his reader to perform in his exhilarating work Song of Myself to which I refer in the second part of the present essay.
Keywords: Philosophy of Music; Rhythm; Philosophy of the Subject; Heidegger; Hegel; Nancy; Lacoue-Labarthe; Poetry; Lyric; Sound; Listening; Whitman
31 JANUS HEAD
Poetry: The Experience of Listening “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” -Whitman s a verbal art, the “specifica poet- music, sets (rhythmic, sound) expecta- it does, it is its act, and its doing is the Aica” of poetry is incontestably its tions and is perceived as an experience experience of the consciousness of the peculiar rhythmic and sound patterning. of immanence. The act of listening to a negativity of substance, as the concrete Regarded as a ‘twin-sister’ of music, as it poem being recited or simply ‘reading it experience and consciousness of the originally was meant to be sung, poetry aloud mentally’, echoes the subject’s very modern history of the world...” (Nancy’s offers a different experience of language economy and the perpetual, inceptive emphasis, 5) and the world. Reciting a poem, reading deferral underlying its formation, while at Hegel’s notion of “the restlessness of it ‘aloud mentally’, or simply listening to the same time reinforces it. What Nancy the negative,” as read by Nancy, the keep- someone else’s recitation is not a trifle ex- calls “to listen with all its being” (35), is ing at bay of any fixed any pre-supposed perience. It may prove unsettlingly signif- what Whitman seems to exhort his reader or pre-given constructs of meaning (10) icant in the light of recent philosophical to perform in his exhilarating work Song in the subject’s both relation to itself and treatments, inscribed into Heidegger’s of Myself to which I refer in the second to the world, aims to supplant the void existential thought based on his multi-di- part of the present essay. Platonic or Descartian abstractions by the mensional notion of temporality intrinsic immediate sensuous experience which is in Being/Dasein, notably, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nancy’s reading of Hegel: congenital to the self’s, or the “Spirit’s”, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques ancy’s thought draws heavily in Heglian lexicon, very economy, being Derrida. In the present essay, I shall Nupon Hegel’s aesthetics and endemically unseizable: primarily focus on Nancy’s compelling work The Phenomenology of Spirit. “Spirit is not an inert being, but on the conception of the act of listening which In one of his major books, Hegel: The contrary, absolutely restless [unruhing: he expounds in his book Listening. Draw- Restlessness of the Negative, Nancy pro- “troubled”, “agitated,” “restless”] being, ing upon a plethora of philosophers, claims, from the outset, that “Hegel is the pure activity, the negating or ideality such as, Heidegger, his friend Lacoue-La- inaugural thinker of the contemporary of every fixed category of the abstrac- barthe and others, Nancy elaborates world.” (3) He hails his thought for strip- tive intellect: not abstractly simple a forceful understanding of the act of ping naked the tyranny of “abstraction,” but, in its simplicity, at the same time listening beyond the meaning-bound, the “given” signification and revealed a distinguishing of itself from itself: message-focused one. With a challeng- the “absolute negativity of the Absolute” not an essence that is already finished ing, rich philosophical verve, Nancy which refuses to be subsumed under any and complete before its manifestation, probes the experience of listening to reducible construct, but rather “appears hiding itself behind its appearances, music, (poetic) rhythm and even to mere to constitute all experience of this world but an essence which is truly actual human voices’ timbre and links it to our and its consciousness of itself.” (4) Rather only through the determinate forms of own awareness of our own subjectivity, than being bound up with prior, external its necessary self-manifestation. (Hegel as well as perceiving subjects engaging and fixed “sense”, consciousness of itself, quoted in Nancy, 6) with the world surrounding us. Listening the Heglian subject absolves itself from mirrors our own selves. It makes rever- “synthesizing representations” (4) and In his book, The Muses, Nancy berate our silent, inner depths whose emerges as a self-conscious self in pe- investigates the true sense behind the essence lies beyond the meaning-loaded rennial, infinitely “immanent,” and restless plurality of both senses and art and what constructs which define our existence. consciousness of itself and history: “ lies behind their actual correspondence. Being fundamentally temporal, the “Self” cannot precede itself, because self Keeping to Hegelian thought, Nancy subject’s economy is perceived, from this is precisely the form and movement of a argues that the true essence of art is temporally existential view, as governed relation to self...” (My emphasis, 4) It is “the hemmed into the phenomenon of sense by an unremitting mimetic deferral, restlessness of immanence” that the sub- that senses itself (sensing) (30). Such continuity and inception, or in rhythm’s ject experiences in his/her engaging with self-reflexive sensuousness of “sense” in logic, repetition and spacing. Poetry, like itself and the world: “The subject is what art which has a twofold significance has
32 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD its roots struck into “poetry” as both a “the receptivity of its intelligibility”: (intel- share the space of a referral, in which verbal art and production, “poeisis”: ligible) sense that reckons itself through at the same time they refer to each Poetry presents itself simultaneously sense as perception and experience. other, and that, in a very general way, as pars toto of art and as totum pro Nancy does not fail to remind us that this space can be defined as the space parte of technique. This chiasmus is “receptivity” is fundamentally multiple, of a self, a subject. A self is nothing that of intelligible sense (art of the drawing upon a plethora of senses and other than a form or function of word, pars pro toto) and of sensuous experiential phenomena like intention- referral: a self is made of a relationship sense (poeisis, production that is, if not ality, spirituality, memory etc., hence the to self, or of a presence to self, which is material in the ordinary sense, at least plurality of arts. In this respect, Nancy nothing other than the mutual referral regulated by the exteriority of its end.) asks a twofold question: “What is the between perceptible individuation (Nancy’s emphasis, 30) aesthesis of significance, what is its re- and an intelligible identity... the ceiving organ? And what is its sensation, point or occurrence of the subject The chiasmus or the double bind of what taste does sense have...?” In other would never have taken place except poetic/artistic production which puts words, how does the “sensuous” lead to in the referral, thus in spacing and at play the exteriority of the intelligible, its “intelligibility”? According to Nancy, resonance... To be listening, will hitherto assigned sense and the irreduc- only a self-reflexive approach of sense always, then, to be straining toward ible “sensuous essence” of phenomenal, to itself, in which “sense demands from or in approach of the self... (Nancy’s receptive experience (27) leads to a itself its own condition of production”, emphasis, 8-9) “tension” which continuously underlies focused upon both its own “activity” and Music’s fundamental characteristics, poetry and the arts in their plurality: “receptivity” can effectively broach the operating similarly in rhythm in poetry, “a literally untenable tension toward a sensuousness of art(s). Nancy calls for an “spacing” and “resonance” cast a “presenc- before-ness (or behind-ness) of sense approach to senses, based on a sort of a ing,” in a Heideggerian sense, echo in the insofar as what “produces” it as such is meta-logic, a “logos” that would be “the subject. In his introduction to Lacoue-La- the fact of its being first of all received, pathos of pathos.” (29) Investigating the barthe’s edifying book Typography, felt, in short, sensed as sense.” (28) experience of sense sensing itself is what Derrida reminds us of the true economy Nancy remarkably ventures in Listening Nancy highlights, in The Muses, the of rhythm: what is rhythm but “spacing” and On Touching. In the present article, poetic essence, or what he refers to as and “repetition”: I shall focus on his singular approach to “sensuous essence” of artistic production. the act of listening which helps us fathom In the beginning, rhythm says von Art or the arts are perceived by Nancy our irresistible drive to both music and Buhlow. Another way of marking the as a sort of backdrop for a dialectical rhythm as we subject ourselves to their fact that there is no simple beginning; interplay between “intelligible sense” workings. no rhythm without repetition, spacing, (verbal art) and “sensuous sense” which caesura, the “repeated differ- is fundamentally ‘poietic’ one. According Nancy’s Listening: ence-from-itself of the Same,” says to Nancy, a mutual intrusion, “a double Lacoue-Labarthe...We are “rhythmed” encroachment,” governs the relation In his compellingly concise book Lis- tening, Nancy starts his expository argu- ... in such a way that rhythm no longer between poetry and the rest of the arts, occurs as a predicate. (31) a double bind law which brings into play mentation to decipher the unfathomable the intelligible, linguistically reducible, behest of music over the listening subject It is precisely rhythm’s both musical and the sensuous, the phenomenally, by laying emphasis on the ‘vibrational’ (purely acoustic) and repetitive (reminis- immediately perceived sensory reality, nature of music; the emission of a sound cent of mimesis) essence interspersed irreducible as such: “(Sensuous) sense is necessarily based on a movement with caesuras, the “inscriptive force of senses only if it is oriented to an object of “referral,” an “echo,” a “resonance” by spacing,” which makes rhythm reverber- and if it values it in a meaningful, informa- spreading in time and space: sounding ate as an “echo of the subject.” Equally tive, or operational context; reciprocally, while at the same time lodging into the the subject’s economy draws on the dia- (intelligible sense makes sense only if it is, subject (6). When coupled with sense, lectics of mimetic repetition punctuated as one says, “perceived” and “the intuitive music still preserves its dual, reverba- by subjective withdrawal or desistance. It or perceptive relation to intelligible sense tional essence since “meaning” itself is “a is, thus, governed by a “double bind,” ac- has always included, in finite being in reference.” (7) Nancy refers to Aristotle’s cording to which rhythm/music both in- general, an irreducible receptivity.” (28) notion of “aesthesis,” as a “perception,” terrupts, through the subject’s temporary that of the subject’s feeling itself sense cathartic loss, and reinforces subjectivity, How can “sensuous sense” make [se-sentir-sentir], and argues it finds an through his or her resumption of the “intelligible sense”? even more resounding echo in the regis- figural, onto-eidetic self. Nancy argues that such process ter of sound due to the intrinsic “referral” To revert to Nancy’s evocation of Ar- takes place in arts thanks to their “po- dialectics which underlies the structure istotle’s notion of “aesthesis,” the subject’s etic subsumption” which allows for an of both self-perception and listening: “feeling-oneself-feel”, which is according “intellection of its receptivity as such” or One can say... that meaning and sound to Nancy only conceivable in terms of 33 JANUS HEAD
“referral”, the perennially relegated, then into a loop that stretches out or of his friend philosopher, Philippe enacted convergence of the “perceptible” contracts, and so on. (13) Lacoue-Labarthe who sustains in his and “the perceived”, is comparable to the essay “The Echo of the Subject” that due register of sound as “renvoi” or “spaced Such intermittently swelling back forth, its twofold nature, lying somewhere spacing”, or better still, “acoustic space.” distending and retracting dialectics of between beat and figure, “rhythm is the (8) The ‘congeniality’ Nancy depicts be- sound modulation assigns to sound a condition of possibility for the subject.” multi-dimensional “spaciality.” According tween the subject’s awareness of itself as Nancy argues that the sense of always occurring as a form of “referral” or to the latter, the subject simultaneously is “penetrated” by sound and “opens up” “awareness of time” listening may impart “delay” and the act of listening is seminal to the subject is far from being “instan- to the understanding of his existential, both inwardly and externally, to his sur- roundings: “ Listening thus forms taneous”, but rather “differential” (20). not without Heideggerian echoes, of the Being and sound are conceivable only as ‘presencing’ power of the act of listening. the perceptible singularity that bears in the most ostensive way the perceptible a form of “renvoi” or “referral” as has been Nancy binds the act of listening to a or sensitive (aesthetic) condition as such; pointed out. Their logic is not punctual, “straining” toward the self (9); to be listen- the sharing of an inside/outside, division but rather strung along of continuum ing winds necessarily to an approach of and participation, the de-connection which binds it to the past and makes it the self, not in its subjective manifesta- and contagion.” (My emphasis, 14) One anticipate the future, a sort of evocative tion, nor as the other, but in its “structure may argue that the intrinsic properties to summoning: ... as such,” that is as a perennial form of listening to music highlighted by Nancy [M]usic (or even sound in general) is inception or “an infinite referral”. In this are congenial to (poetic) rhythm whose not exactly a phenomenon; that is to sense, Nancy argues: “When one is listen- fundamental economy is based on divi- say, it does not stem from a logic of ing, one is on the lookout for a subject, sion/spacing and repetition, subjective manifestation. It stems from a different something (itself) that identifies itself by withdrawal or in Lacoue-Labarthe’s terms logic, which would have to be called resonating from self to self, in itself and “desistance” and infectious participation. evocation, but in this precise: while for itself... at once the same and other The sense of presence which sound or manifestation brings presence to than itself, one in the echo of the other...” light, evocation summons (convokes, (9) Accordingly, to indulge in the act of music communicates is “omnipresence”, or better still, a “co-presence” marked by invokes) presence to itself. It does not listening subjects the listener to a form establish it any more than it supposes of an inner “tension” which affects not the “contemporaneity”, a sort of “presence in presence” (16). Far from being a fixed, it already established. It anticipates its way he/she engages with his subjective arrival and remembers its departure, self or the Other (the musician’s or by ex- linear presence, but rather fluctuating, communicative and participational, the itself remaining suspended between trapolation the poet’s) but to the self in its the two: time and sonority… (21) most fundamental, originary formation, “presence in presence” which music its ever incipient configuration, reinforc- instigates is comparable to the workings From the “birthing cry”, whether it ing, thus the notion of self-presence. of rhythm which Nancy defines as “time be a “complaint” or “song,” to the orgas- in time”, ruled by a sort of a double con- mic outburst to the “last murmur,” the Nancy further explains how the straint which makes it work both by and subject’s life is orchestrated by rhythm sense of presence triggered by the act of against time via repetition and caesura, and sound emission. Such acoustic listening to music, and as we may argue, as well as its modulatory variations like manifestations are meaning-free. They by extrapolation, to a poem’s sonorous cadence and tempo: are conceived by Nancy as “originary,” and rhythmic patterning being either … [I]t is nothing other than the time characterized by “… the inchoate value recited loud or read aloud mentally, is not of an articulatory or profferatory release attributed or attributable to any outer, of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it that is still without intention and without or subjective objectifiable, constant vision of signification…” (28). Those construct, but rather to a perennially by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into preliminary rhythmic eruptions are the fluctuating presence, at the very image wordless expression of “the speaking of sound modulation. The latter is only scansion (rise, raising of the foot and beats) and cadence (fall, passage into body”; they reverberate with “pure res- conceivable as movement, transfer, ex- onance” (Bernard Baas quoted in Nancy, pansion and diffusion: the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the succession of the linearity of the 29) or as Lacoue-Labarthe paraphrased Rather a coming and a passing, an sequence or length of time: it bends by Nancy “the subject of the subject” (29). extending and a penetrating… It is time to give it to time itself, and it is in Though Nancy’s argument, expounded a present in waves on a swell, not this way that it folds and unfolds the in his book Listening, is not in the first in a point on a line; it is a time that subject. (Nancy’s emphasis, 17) place to demonstrate the mimetological, opens up, that is hollowed up, that is “typographical” bearings of rhythm in re- enlarged or ramified, that envelops or Nancy’s last claim about rhythm’s role lation to the subject formation, but rather separates, that becomes or is turned in the revelation and reinforcement to auscultate the act of listening when of the subject’s economy echoes that performed with all one’s being as an
34 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD open access to a new form of signification ject. However, Nancy’s passage, quoted selfhood and otherness dissolve. The beyond meaning. While Lacoue-Labarthe above, makes a stronger claim about the speaker leafs through the catalogue of focuses on the etymological roots of grounding temporality of the experience senses to reach a sort of cosmic dimen- rhythm as “rhuthmus” and philosophical of rhythm formulated into highly sensual sion of existence which binds him to and linguistic treatment of the concept terms, the most striking of which would himself, to others and the whole universe of rhythm, such as Democritus, Plato’s be “invaginating”. In The Muses, Nancy under the auspices of Transcendentalism. or Benveniste’s, Nancy’s approach is elaborates a whole allegory about being Among the senses which allows the immersed in the purely bodily, physical “penetrated” and experiencing the “pene- speaker in Song of Myself to reach out act of listening, giving in to the behest of tration” by poetry’s rhythm. From an essen- for the other is listening; he invites his (musical) patterned sound and rhythm. tially phenomenological angle, rhythm “soul”, his fellow lover or even singer, to The subject, for Nancy, is fundamentally is perceived, sensuously, as beyond the give free vent to his “throat,” to emit a a “diapason subject” (16), a sort of “res- inscriptive register, it is usually reduced meaning-free “lull”, which is beyond the onance chamber” which reverberates to, or even the figural force it has been conceptual, capable of voicing their en- with flooding in and out sounds, echoes, assigned with reference to its etymolog- during unison: “I loaf and invite my soul/ rhythmic patterns throbbing from the in- ical roots. For Nancy, rhythm stems as an Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop nermost depths of subjectivity, or rather empowering “impulse”, a salvific, almost from your throat/Not words, not music before subjectivity, the ever inceptive (re) orgiastic, vital drive and we are irresistibly or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, birth of the subject consigned to delay: carried away, transported, so to speak, not even the best, /Only the lull I like, the … the investigation would lead us by the ebb and flow of its modulations. hum of your valvèd voice” (Section I) The toward the formation of the subject erotically-charged imagery and musically first of all as the rhythmic reployment/ Whitman’s Song for Myself vibrant quality of Whitman’s lines with the run-on liquid and fricative sounds, deployment of an enveloping The reason behind my choice of the respectively /l/ and /r/ sounds echo between “inside” and “outside”, or else Whitman’s Song for Myself despite the the speaker’s yearn for a transcendentally folding the “outside” into the “inside”, fact of its being not particularly rhythmic, sensuous and sensual communal expe- invaginating, forming a hollow, an as it is written in free verse, is its both rience which would be triggered by the echo chamber or column (well before conceptual and sensuous wealth which is power of voice’s pure sound. any possibility of a visible figure deeply in tune with Nancy’s approach to presentable in reflection: long before sense and the act of listening in particu- It is precisely this reviving, reinvigo- any “specular identification”). The same lar. Both Whitman and Nancy foreground, rating exultation in rhythm and sound, direction would take us toward an not without phenomenological and not without cathartic undertones, which aspect of rhythm different from the transcendental dimensions, the sensu- Whitman probes in his compelling work one that mimetic and “typographical” ousness of the experience of senses and Song of Myself. In this long poem in logic arrests and freezes in place: are axed upon the potentially limitless question he makes a paean to the power namely, rhythm as figure “broached by self-knowledge such experiential explo- of sound, the act of ‘true’ listening and time,” hence moving and fluid, syn- ration of the act of “sense that senses the reinforcement of the self as a lively copated, beaten out as a measure is itself” may purport. Regarding Whitman’s entity open onto both its inner tensions and, consequently, linked to dance (as long poem Song for Myself, one may and the world surrounding it, to engage moreover, Benveniste indicates in his claim it to be a true paean to the tran- fully in the world: to be in the world in study on the word rhusmos). Rhythm scendentally rallying power of the senses, the Heideggerian sense, one may con- not only as scansion (imposing form “... a celebration of a mystical experience tend. In section 26, the speaker asks for on the continuous) but also as an that merges spirituality with the experi- nothing but “listen.” His acknowledged impulse (revival of the pursuit). (38-39) ence of sexuality and the body... and its purpose is to enrich his proper “song”, to exploration of the limits of human knowl- render it more vibrant, throbbing with all It is obvious from Nancy’s definition edge and language.” Killingsworth lays sorts of sounds, whether natural, animal of rhythm and its workings upon the emphasis on Whitman’s initial vocations or human, sounds resounding from the subject that he assigns to it an ‘originary,’ as “a balladeer and populist exhorter of country or the city. Obviously by “song”, ‘ontological’ dimension, well beyond the others,” (35) which marshals evidence for Whitman is referring to his own poem measurable, temporally scanned one. He his deep sense of and revelry in both the rightly titled “Song of Myself” to make a seizes upon Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase sound and the voice and awareness of glimpse at (lyric) poetry’s original associ- “broached by time” which applies to both their impact upon the listeners. ation, by the Greeks, with song: rhythm, as a (folded/unfolded) manifes- tation of time and the subject, whose Blending the epic with the lyrical Now I will do nothing but listen, formation and fluidity are punctuated by (27), Whitman’s poem may be read as a To accrue what I hear into this song, to time as a perennial movement of deferral powerful plea to the other to engage with let sounds contribute toward it. to showcase such confluence between the speaker with a new mode of being, according to which the borders between I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of rhythm and the conception of the sub- growing wheat, gossip of flames,
35 JANUS HEAD
clack of sticks cooking my meals, once that of a body that is sonorous to Heidegger’s own notion of “Being.” I hear the sound I love, the sound of for itself and resonance of sonority in a Before briefly clarifying the notion the human voice, listening body that, itself, resounds as of “Being” in Heidegger’s thought to po- it listens. (My emphasis, 40) I hear all sounds running together, tentially account for Whitman’s message combined, fused or following, Accordingly, listening ‘to’ timbre and better fathom its transcendental binds both the subject to itself and to dimension, we may refer first to a pre- Sounds of the city and sounds out of the other, creates a sort of “private expe- liminary step to be taken towards the the city, sounds of the day and night… rience” (Wittgenstein quoted in Nancy, full appreciation of our existence, which 41), a sort of a exhilarating meta-acoustic is the recognition of the full scope of the The speaker’s exacerbated reveling in phenomenon. It is no surprise that in the body. According to Heidegger, a “turning” the act of listening to all sorts of sounds following lines, Whitman’s reveling in hu- has to be undertaken to counter the whose echoes he seeks to capture in man voices and their varying timbre from alienating, anti-body tradition, spurning poetry is not an infatuated poet’s whim, strict to joyful is exacerbated into their the bodily and the sensual. Frank Scha- but philosophically grounded. We can association with the music of a gripping, low comments on Heidegger’s “turning” read in the speaker-poet’s near obsession grandiose opera whose intoxicating mel- and his philosophical exhortation for a with sound a consuming desire to hanker ody propels his mind into cosmic levels: re-immersion into “Being” through the to his proper self-manifested as alterity, medium of the body and the “enactment a sort of “grounding attunement.” One I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, of temporality” as follows: should note that the above mentioned Ah this indeed is music--this suits me. sounds by Whitman and the following Hence, the countermovement of plethora in the subsequent lines are not A tenor large and fresh as the creation forgetting, the turning around of haphazard, but characterized by rhythm: fills me, the question itself or its recollection, mesmerizing, like the birds’ acoustic “bra- The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring implies a dynamic of temporalization vuras,” or delicate like the “flames’” crack- and filling me full. that inserts Dasein into the heart of physis as the diversity of being’s ling or even the more precious sound of I hear the train’d soprano (what work manifestness. In the turning, time the grown wheat germ breaking loose with hers is this?) from the wrapping husk and bran. The emerges as the “name” for being, in poet-speaker seems to be ‘animated’ by The orchestra whirls me wider than such a way as to stand for both the his love for rhythm’s multifarious manifes- Uranus flies, unity and diversity of the possibilities tations surrounding him; even the “clack” It wrenches such ardors from me I did of its manifestness. (149) of the cooking sticks becomes music to not know I possess’d them, To better fathom Heidegger’s mes- his ears. He is open to rhythm in its gener- It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they sage about how to enact such unity and ic meaning, which Nancy defined above are lick’d by the indolent waves, diversity of possibilities of our “Being,” as not only “scansion,” but “an impulse which may be read as the base of our (revival of the pursuit)”, the subject’s own I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose transcendental “Being” hailed by Whit- “pursuit” of himself temporally conceived. my breath, man, we need to remind ourselves of the It is interesting that Whitman evokes Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my major characteristics of Heidegger’s “Das- in the passage quoted above his love for windpipe throttled in fakes of death, ein/Being.” Though it is difficult to sketch “human voice”: “I hear the sound I love, At length let up again to feel the the complexity of Heidegger’s notion of the sound of the human voice,” since puzzle of puzzles, “Being” expounded in his magnum opus we find an enlightening extrapolation Time and Being, we may argue that ac- on rhythm through the reference to the And that we call Being. cording to Heidegger, “authentic Being” is fundamentally temporal. It is marked by notion of human voice and “timbre” in The engrossing experience of listening “primordial temporality:” it “temporalizes Nancy’s philosophical treatment of sound to all sorts of sounds ending with human itself” in that it is not a temporal platitude and music and their role in grounding voices, and probably to his own voice made up by clear-cut stages, past, present the subject. For Nancy, timbre is the reciting his poem/song, which he heartily and future, but rather a sort of multi-lay- resonance of resonance, the primordial seeks to transcribe in his verse is startlingly ered, prism-like “entity” (376). According preliminary experience of “listening: associated with the broaching of our en- to Heidegger, “authentic” existence is the Timbre is thus the first correlative of tire “Being.” The last line resounds as a sort one which makes possible the merging listening, and it is through it that we of epiphany regarding the whole mystery of those three temporal dimensions, can better approach what is straying of the act of “true” listening which would making them strung into one mode of here from a simple phenomenology… be conducive to a deeper apprehension being as such (377). Such mode of being, it is necessary to say that before any of one’s proper “Being.” One is tempted extolled by Heidegger, is intrinsically relationship to object, listening opens to read Whitman’s reference to “…that “ecstatic” in that it can only be experience up in timbre, which resounds in it we call Being,” capitalized, in a manner through a “standing outside” of oneself rather than for it… Resonance is at reminiscent of Heidegger’s, to link it
36 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD through the unity of the three “ecstasies”: Accordingly, each shall set up “expec- irrevocably “ahead of itself,” Dasein/Being the three projections of myself towards tations” for himself, be “ahead-of himself” merges past, present and future through the future, which implies reverting back following his own pace and interests. For “expecting”, “awaiting” and ecstatic “dis- “towards-oneself” since the future culmi- Heidegger, Dasein is “uncertain;” it is both closure.” Dasein/Being may be thus read nating into death leads “back to” my hav- “temporalized” and “individualized.” (386) as the praxis of “ecstasis”. Similarly, we ing been or past, and finally resolve to live It comes to itself in the form of “anticipa- may regard the experience of listening as “alongside,” “letting-oneself-be-encoun- tion” whose layout is tailored according assimilable to the experience of our vey tered-by” the present (377). Heidegger to each one’s “ownmost potentiali- Being, being essentially temporal and laments that the dominant inauthentic ty-for-Being” (386), which would corre- rapturous. mode of being falls short of the “authen- spond to each one’s specific “concernful” Nancy’s philosophical probing of tic temporality” which is “the principle,” engagement with the world, the amount the act of listening may be perceived as “a poliori fit denomination” (Heidegger’s of “care” that he or she would invest into highly influenced by Heidegger’s tem- italics, 377) of Being. Hence, the ecstatic the world and which would lead to the poral and existential thought. Following is the visceral vein of Being’s sustenance full (present) blooming, “disclosure” of his Nancy’s case expounded in his book and the governing law of primordial/ (past) inherent possibilities: “Factically, Listening, What Heidegger refers to as a authentic temporality; the latter being Dasein is constantly ahead of itself, but “dynamic of temporalization,”(365) which “... primordial “outside of itself’ in and for inconstantly anticipatory with regard to would be enacting Being by striking itself.” (377) its existentiel possibility.” (386) In the fol- anew the experience of its temporality, Such “primordial mode of tempo- lowing lines from Song of Myself, we find proceeds, for Nancy, through rhythm rality” (376) can only be enacted by the resonance to Heidegger’s individualized in music, poetry and ordinary sounds subject’s active participation through his and participatory notion of Being: “Not I, when hearkened to ‘truly,’ with all one’s “concernful” immersion into the world, not anyone else can travel that road for Being. As has been demonstrated in the which seems to be Whitman’s own mes- you, /You must travel it for yourself.” first part of the present essay, music, and sage based on a call for a new engage- Apart from being individually ex- more generally rhythm is perceived at ment with the world, as is the case in the periential or participatory, Heidegger’s the image of the subject’s own economy: following lines which echo the speaker’s Dasein/Being is, as has been pointed perennial ebb and flow of referral, a tran- exalted exhortation that: out above, fundamentally anticipatory. scendental synthesis of an inexorably lost You shall no longer take things at In this sense, Heidegger sustains that past casting a shadow over the present, second or third hand, not look through Dasein/Being involves the subject’s own the same present setting expectations for the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the readiness, “resoluteness” to “await,” set the future. An ever-incipient occurrence spectres in books. expectations and check their realization of the emerging subject struggling to in the future: get “a glimpse of itself” and the awaited You shall not look through my eyes realization of a beat, a rhythmic pattern either, nor take things from me, you To the anticipation which goes with resoluteness, there belongs a Present internalized by a listener. Rightly titled shall listen to all sides and filter them “Song,” Whitman’s long poem Song of from yourself. in accordance with which a resolution discloses the Situation. In resoluteness, Myself, though composed in free verse, resounds as an anthem, a passionate Only through the experience, in Heide- the Present is not only brought back paean to the power of song and the act of ggerian terms of our throwness” and from distraction with the objects of listening. It does comprise mesmerizing “resoluteness” to take up our “originary one’s closest concern, but it gets held rhythmic passages, punctuated as such openness” onto the world can the in the future and in having been. That by the engaging, highly infectious flow projection of one’s limitless possibilities Present which is held in authentic of rhythm and sound, as is the case with alongside a finite line of time take place. temporality and thus is authentic itself, we call the “moment of vision”. (205) the following lines with their sweeping To carry on with Heidegger’s notion hexameter tempo transpierced by two of Being of which we can found echoes The “moment of vision” Heidegger occasional trimeter lines. The instances of in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, apart from evokes is a sort of sensuous epiphany alliteration (“song” and “sounds”; “fused” the poet’s blatant use of the term “Being,” since it is inexorably accompanied, and “following”) and anaphora (“I hear”) we may add that Heidegger stresses the according Heidegger, by an experience only add to the musical quality of the fact that Dasein/Being, being enacted of “rapture” in the sense of being “carried passage: through “care” in its “existential-temporal away” (386), which brings us back to the meaning” “... Dasein is essentially ahead notion of “ecstasis,” evoked previously of itself. Proximally and for the most part, in relation to Heidegger’s thought. B -o- b B -o- B o concernful Being-in-the-world under- Now I will do nothing but listen, stands itself in terms of that with which We may conclude, after this di- it is concerned.” (Heidegger’s emphasis, gression into Heidegger’s temporalized -o- B -o- B b –o- B -o- 386) notion of Dasein/Being, that being B o B -o- B o
37 JANUS HEAD
To accrue what I hear into this song, to B -o- B -o- b =o~ B o a subject—and then isn’t the subject let sounds contribute toward it. B -o- B o B itself the starting of time in both o B o B -o- B - B -o- b o Sounds of the city and sounds out of values of the genitive: it opens it and B B o B the city, sounds of the day and night… is opened by it. Isn’t the subject the attack of time? (Nancy’s emphasis, 39) I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, Accordingly, the subject’s very Subjecting oneself to the workings economy is played out, modulated by B o b B -o- B of sound patterned into verse, music or time and the temporal that is rhythm. clack of sticks cooking my meals, even to the timbre of a vociferous con- It undergoes temporal vicissitudes, versation leads to the experience of one’s lending itself to both continuity and own “Being,” the throbbing “friction” (39) disruption, loss and regain. Being aware o B o B o B o B -o- B with the unnamable, the ever-elusive, of time through sound settings leads o B self-deferring essence of both sound and necessarily to being aware of oneself. To self. In this sense, Nancy sustains: I hear the sound I love, the sound of say it differently, laying oneself open to the human voice, But what is a figure that is throbbed the workings of rhythm’s rules which are as well as stressed, “broached by time,” intrinsically repetitive and reverbational, o B b B b -o- B -o- B if not a figure that has already lost titillates, entices the subject into pricking o B -o- B o itself and that is expecting itself, and up its ears in order to experience itself as I hear all sounds running together, that calls to itself … What else is but what it really is, an echo. combined, fused or following,
Endnotes 1. Aviram, (23). 2. I am referring myself, here, to a theory of the subject based on musical aesthetics elaborated by Nancy’s life-long philosopher friend and collaborator whose approach I have clarified in my article “Rhythm Reconsidered: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Aesthetics of the Subject.” Lacoue-Labarthe’s twofold treatment of the subject’s experience of (musical) rhythm, notably, by drawing on the very etymological roots of the term ‘rhuthmos’ meaning schema or imprint, apart from other references to linguists and philosophers’ treatments of the term rhythm, like Benvenist and Plato which corroborate the fact that rhythm pertains, as well, to the figural, not solely acoustic. Due to its twofold nature, reconciling the acoustic with the figural, rhythm has the power, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, to cause both our loss, sending us back to our pre-figural self, and our reinforcement through our yielding to self-writing compulsion. Lacoue-Labarthe draws, in his approach, among other theories like Lacan’s thought, upon Nietzsche’s cathartic notion of Dionysian musical energy as conducive to the momentary experience of primal/originary pain and union before the Apollonian takes over again through the resumption of the figural, dream order and the veil of Maya, or veil of illusions which guarantees the subject’s salvific catharsis without the risk of its loss or madness. To recapitulate, Lacoue-Labarthe sustains that rhythm/ music has the power to extirpate us from our pre-subjectal state; it has the power to ‘send us back’ to the remotest realms of our subjectivity, being endemically of a nonsensical, beyond-or-before meaning, nature. However, due to its intrinsic repetitive essence, rhythm resonates as repercussion, echo, and reverberation because it is definable only on the basis (the spacing and the division in the Same, the repeated difference from-itself of the Same). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, musical catharsis, subjectal loss induced by rhythm, may make up for the intrinsic “deadly repetition” one is prone to according Lacan’s theory of the subject. Being inexorably confronted with the irredeemable divergence between the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’, the subject retracts into “desistance”: “[…] it will never recover from the mortal insufficiency to which, according to Lacan, its prematuration has condemned it’.” Only through a “dialectic of recognition”, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, can the subject ‘come to itself (47). According to this dialectic, the subject ‘comes to itself only by losing itself.’ The ‘destabilising division of the figural’, due to the disruption of the subject’s stability intrinsic to the mimetic mechanism of identification is counterpointed by the compulsion to self-repetition or self-writing and the re-immersion into subjectivity. The latter’s condition of possibility is based on the repetitive alternation between subjectal desistance or loss and the resumption of subjectivity. Similarly, due to its musical, acoustic essence, but not exclusively, rhythm is repetition punctuated by silence or caesuras, or as Derrida, in his introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe’s book Typography, defines it, “the repeated difference from itself.” (16) 3. “... dissolves all substance” (25). 4. Such intrinsic instability of the self, or what John Martis refers to as “the essenceless essence” of the subject, is also echoed in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical and Lacanian reading of the subject’s formation clarified above. 5. Obviously Nancy, like Hegel, plays on the double meaning of sense; in both phrases he points to the sensuous, perceptive meaning. 6. “Production, in the singular and absolutely, is nothing other than the production of sense.” (The Muses, 28) 7. Obviously Nancy draws upon Hegel’s phenomenological aesthetics of art. In his book Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel argues that our aesthetic apprehension of a work of art does not merely draw upon the sensuous as exclusively sensory, but as “spiritual”, by which Hegel designates the rational, as well (35): “What is agreeable for these senses [sight and hearing] is not the beauty of art.” (39) Hegel sustains that both music and painting produce “a shadow-world”, which is far from being a pitfall but rather a credit, as they have the power to summon deeper layers of conscience: “These sensuous shapes and sounds appear not merely for the sake of themselves and their immediate shape, but with the aim, in this shape of affording satisfaction to higher spiritual interests, since they have the power to call forth from all the depths of consciousness a sound and an echo in the spirit. In this way the sensuous aspect of art is spiritualized, since the spirit appears in art as made sensuous.” (Hegel’s italics, 39) The mind and memory are titillated, reactivated, so to speak, in the vicinity of art. “Intentionality” is an additional factor in the matrix of artistic apprehension. It consists in our conscious engagement with the exterior world, marked by “desire”, a Hegel sustains: “In this appetitive relation to the external world, man, as a sensuous individual, confronts things as being individuals; likewise he does not turn his mind to them as a thinker with universal categories; instead, in accord with individual impulses and interests, he relates himself to the objects, individuals themselves, and maintains himself by using and consuming them, and by sacrificing them his own self-satisfaction.” (36) 8. The Muses, (28). 9. Derrida in his introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, (32). 10. Typography, (35). 11. Typography, (65). 12. Martis on the subject 13. Nancy makes a glimpse, here, at his philosopher friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and his essay “The Echo of the Subject”. I shall go back, more in depth, to his approach when I analyse Whitman’s poem. Nancy’s claim is reminiscent of Lacoue-Labarthe the subject’s desire to have “a glimpse of itself” (Typography, 85). 14. “... Listening is passing over to the register of presence to self, it being understood that the “self” is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be “present,” but precisely the resonance of a return [renvoi].” (Nancy, 12) 15. Lacoue-Labarthe uses the term “desistance” to evoke subjectal loss incurred by rhythmic, musical dispossession, (85). 16. “... Its presence is never a simple being-there or how things stand, but is always at once an advance, penetration, insistence, obsession or possession, as well as a presence “on the rebound”…” (15) 38 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
17. Martis traces such inexorable delay to the intrinsic, “essencelessness essence” of the subject.” (174) 18. Lacoue-Labarthe quoted in Nancy, (36). 19. In The Muses, Nancy evokes refers to “the heart” and “will” being “penetrated” by the artistic medium (46). 20. The Cambridge Introduction to Whitman, 26. 21. In Romanticism and Transcendentalism, 200. Habich argues that Whitman’s conception of the self is deeply in tune with Emerson’s Transcendentalist vision expounded in his essay Nature which regards the self not as a self-centred, egotistical entity, but rather a form of consciousness that can only conceive of itself and evolve through its engagement with other selves and its surrounding world: “Through me the afflatus surging and surging... through me the current and index.” (Emerson quoted in Habich, 201). 22. Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman, 32. 23. Nigel Guy Wilson, 585. 24. In Being and Time (128). Heidegger defines “attunement” as “mood,” prior to cognition, marked by a “fleeing,” “turning away” from the “burdensome character of Da-sein.” In this form of being, the self has already found itself: “In attunement, Da-sein is always already brought before itself, it has always already found itself, not as perceiving oneself to be there, but as one finds one’s self in attunement.” (127) Being “removed from thinking,” Heidegger sustains, “Attunement discloses Da- sein in its “grounding attunement” thrownness, initially and for the most part in the mode of an evasive turning away.” (Heidegger’s emphasis, 128) 25. Being and Time, (377). 26. Song of Myself 27. Song of Myself 28. I have borrowed this phrase from Lacoue-Labarthe in his evocation of the subject’s proneness to its own loss induced by music or rhythm (145).
RHYTHM MARKERS B emphasized beat b unemphasized beat [B] virtual beat O emphasized offbeat o unemphasized offbeat -o- double offbeat [o] virtual offbeat [B] virtual beat ô implied offbeat ~o~ triple offbeat =o- double offbeat with the first part emphasized -o= double offbeat with the second part emphasized
39 JANUS HEAD Bibliography
Aviram, A. F. Telling Rhythm–Body and Meaning in Poetry. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Habich, R. D. and Nowatzki, C. Romanticism and Transcendentalism: 1820-1865. NY: Facts on File, 2010. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. by T.M. Knox. Vol I; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans., Joan Stambaug. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. —. Poetry, Language, Thought. 1975. Trans., Albert Hofstadter. NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001. Killingsworth, M. J. The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Typography–Mimesis, Philosophy and Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Nancy, Jean Luc. Listening. Trans., Charlotte Mandell. US: Fortham University Press, 2007. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. by Joan Smith and Steven Miller. US: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Schalow, Frank. Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger’s Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. US: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2003.
40 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Dr. Boutheina Boughnim Laarif
Dr. Boutheina Boughnim Laarif has undertaken a PhD which proposes on a postmodern approach to W. H. Auden’s poetry and metrical art (Faculty of Arts of Manouba, Tunisia) and which has been published this year by Cambridge Scholars under the title: W. H. Auden’s “The Healing Fountain”: a Reading Inspired by A. Aviram’s Theory of Poetic Rhythm. She is a Lecturer of English literature. She has published articles which focus on philosophical, aesthetic theories of poetic rhythm, Nietzsche’s theory of the lyric, Heidegger’s philosophy of art and politics, among which, “Rhythm Reconsidered: Philippe Lacoue Labarthe’s Musical Poetics of the Subject”, published in Harts and Minds electronic journal (2014). She has published her first poetry collection entitled “Fractal Reflections” in 2015. She has also several poems published in the online weekly poetry journal, Dystenium Journal and in the quarterly poetry journal: The Cannon’s Mouth and in two poetry anthologies.
41 JANUS HEAD
“Shevek” in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: A Profile in Heideggerian Authentic Selfhood
Norman K. Swazo
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 42 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
ABSTRACT
Political philosophy (past and present) concerns itself with thematic, systematic interrogation of political ideas, structures, institutions, and practices. As such it privileges the authority of reason. But, the vision of the literary imagination likewise can and does contribute to human understanding and to imagining our common future. Ursula K. LeGuin is a master teacher of ethical politics in her award-winning novel The Dispossessed. Therein, the protagonist Shevek is presented as an edifying exemplar of “permanent revolution” in a uniquely “thinking mind.” His quest for solidarity of peoples is grounded on a possibility of authentic selfhood within his anarchist society. Considering the concept of authentic selfhood as discussed in philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Shevek’s character may be represented as an imaginary, yet “real,” example or profile of how authentic selfhood may be constituted. This is consistent with LeGuin’s intent in The Dispossessed.
Keywords: LeGuin; Heidegger; authenticity; authentic selfhood; Shevek; The Dispossessed
43 JANUS HEAD
“Shevek” in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: A Profile in Heideggerian Authentic Selfhood Linking Reason and Imagination neighborhood of philosophy.’3 in a way that is edifying, even though The relation between philosophy For Gadamer, ‘The understanding critics such as Posner prefer to keep these and literature is discussed and repre- and the interpretation of texts is not domains of analysis separate. sented variously in both contemporary merely a concern of science, but ob- Ursula K. LeGuin (1929-2018) philosophy and literary studies. Notable viously belongs to human experience is a first-rank and Hugo and Nebula here is the debate about the purpose of of the world in general.’4 Indeed, he award-winning twentieth century nov- literary narratives. Richard Posner, e.g., writes, ‘The hermeneutic phenomenon elist who wrote in the genre of science argued that, ‘immersion in literature does is…not concerned with a method of fiction and fantasy, integrating the ethical not make us better citizens or better peo- understanding by means of which texts and political in her imaginative work so ple…The proper criteria for evaluating lit- are subjected to scientific investigation.’ as to edify her reader. In answer to the erature are aesthetic rather than ethical.’1 Hence, ‘the experiences of philosophy, question, ‘What do you think the purpose On the other side of this view, following of art, and of history itself’ are different of story is in human society?’, she replied: Martha Nussbaum, one may argue that, ‘modes of experience’, such that ‘through ‘I think we tell stories to each other to ‘the aesthetic is ethical and political,’ that a work of art a truth is experienced that remember who we are as a people, and literature cultivates and reinforces ‘valu- we cannot attain in any other way,’ in to find out who we are as individuals.’7 able moral abilities.’2 For some, the merit which case Gadamer delivered ‘a critique This is an important insight into the of a work of art does not depend primar- of aesthetic consciousness in order to de- fact that the human condition and the ily or only on intuiting and interpreting fend the experience of truth that comes clarification of individual identity involve ‘the author’s intent’ in the production of to us through the work of art against the both remembrance and self-discovery. a work of literature. Indeed, twentieth aesthetic theory that lets itself be restrict- The twentieth century philosopher century philosophical hermeneutics, as ed to a scientific conception of truth.’5 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) consid- developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, is Precisely, therefore, because the process ered self-discover (Selbstbefindlichkeit) instructive for having moved beyond of understanding entails a productive central to the human way to be in the the methodological commitment ac- ‘fusion of horizons’ in a work of art such world in which we find and establish our cording to which interpretation involves as literature, the reader engages ‘the text’ ‘abode’ (ethos, dwelling) in a given time reproduction of authorial intent, thereby to elicit a novel understanding of the and place (topos) between the claims of to having ‘scientific’ validation. On the narrative.6 In short, works of literature past and future, between the seeming contrary, Gadamer opined, ‘Within all can perform in a way that is disclosive of necessity and determinism of fate and linguistic phenomena the literary work novel features of the human condition. In destiny, and between ‘modes’ of being of art occupies a privileged relationship this way, it may be argued, a novelist inte- that make us alternately inauthentic to interpretation and thus moves into the grates the aesthetic, ethical, and political (uneigentlich) and authentic (eigentlich)
1. Richard A. Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 21:1, 1997, 1-27. 2. Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature, 22:2, 1998, 343-365. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” Man and World, 18:3, September 1985, 241-259. 4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, (2004). Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd revised edition (London: Continuum, 2004). 5. Ibid. 6. Gadamer, 2004. Also see Hans-Georg Gadamer. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. 7. Guy Haley. “Ursula K. LeGuin, The Deathray Interview,” Deathray, October 2007, http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Deathray-dr05_interview_leguin.pdf, accessed on 21 May 2019. Italics added. 44 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD relative to the task of self-discovery and and be displaced by the disclosure of new terrogating ‘a dubious tendency in West- self-affirmation.8 Indeed, moral dilemmas potentialities in the way we may dwell ern moral philosophy since the ancient are often ‘situations’ of self-discovery as upon the earth. Greeks,’ viz., ‘the habit of defining morality expressions of individual autonomy are This can happen in the course of as adherence to a preexisting rational or pitted against the dominating author- challenges grounded in novel insights ideal standard.’ This habit, Ryn opines, ity of tradition, in the historical struggle into the human way to be, into individu- seems to him to be detrimental to how over what are to count legitimately (qua ally distinct potentialities for being, when one finds one’s way to what morality re- ‘orthodoxy’) as ‘thoughts,’ ‘words,’ and conscientious objection to time-honored quires ‘in actual circumstances, especially ‘deeds.’ This is especially so as the claims ideological appeals and to the authority of in highly charged and hard-to-under- 13 of particularity clash with claims of time-honored tradition strikes a resound- stand situations.’ He argues that, while universality, and as the force of human ing note. Accordingly, it is reasonable to ‘Morality demands respect for a universal reason asserts itself all too often to be assert that LeGuin is correct in her autho- moral authority,’ nonetheless, ‘morality privileged in moral decision, even to the rial assessment when she writes: ‘The use is misconceived as conformity to ready- exclusion of the legitimate insights of the of imaginative fiction is to deepen your made norms or models.’ Having written 14 human imagination and its place in the understanding of your world, and your a novel to illustrate his philosophical task of clarifying and expressing one’s self fellow men, and your own feelings, and concerns, Ryn comments on what he (in Heidegger’s terms) as an “authentic your destiny.’11 Indeed, LeGuin opines, characterizes as the ‘epistemological self” (eigentlich Selbst). ‘realism’—as a word that denotes a class theme that the imagination and the arts Hence, it is not surprising that LeGuin of literature that ostensibly teaches us are ultimately more influential and more opined, ‘Science fiction is wonderfully about ourselves “better” than any other fundamental in human consciousness 15 useful for offering a convincing picture genre precisely because it is ‘realistic’—‘is than the conceptual, reasoning mind.’ of alternative ways of doing and being, perhaps the least adequate means of One may differ on the claim, of course. which can shake readers out of fixed understanding or portraying the incred- But, this is an important insight for both mindsets, knock the blinkers off them.’9 It ible realities of our existence.’ And there, contemporary moral and political philos- is not merely a matter of human conduct, indeed, is the principal question: How we ophy, since it is to be argued reasonably i.e., what we are to do, but rather about are to understand the incredible realities that both reason and imagination con- how we are and who we are, whom we of our existence, what we mean by ‘exis- tribute to understanding (a) what politics choose to be, as we struggle individually tence’, in its historical determination, but entail of an individual at any given time and collectively to transcend the present, also relative to the appeal of the future as and (b) what morality or ethics could or responsive to the claim of the future and it claims us both severally and jointly to should be in a given context of individual our individuated potentiality-for-being. think, to do, and to be otherwise than we political life. Furthermore, LeGuin tells us, she thinks have been. Concurring with Ryn’s epistemolog- that, ‘…science fiction is particularly The place of the literary imagination ical thematic for my present purpose, good at and useful for: present[ing] alter- in moral philosophy is not to be dismissed I turn to LeGuin’s literary imagination. native cultures/societies/technologies/ out of hand. In an article engaging the Her novels more or less depict the same physiologies/mores/sexualities/etcetera topic of a presentation at the annual thematic issues in which the political to the reader—who, like all of us, is more meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and the ethical/moral are ambiguously or less “culture-bound,” stuck in one way and Letters in June 2014, political phi- intertwined; and, both are interrogated 10 of seeing, one way of doing.’ This, of losopher Claes G. Ryn asked a poignant at their foundation in arduously complex course, is consequent to the force of an- question: ‘How desperate should we situations of political and moral decision. cestral custom, of religious and political be?’ The context for the question is Ryn’s Here I focus on LeGuin’s The Dispos- 16 tradition, the authority of each of which concern about the difficult and unsettled sessed, a Hugo and Nebula Award has its own historical inertia to sustain issue of ‘the meaning or form of morality, winning novel, in which the protagonist it. Yet, the fact is that these may, with all particularly as it relates to politics.’12 He Shevek illustrates the complexity of situ- reasonable justification, be interrogated expressed his concern as a matter of in- ations of political and moral decision as
8. Martin Heidegger. (1996). Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany, SUNY Press. 9. Haley, op. cit. 10. Ibid. 11. Ursula K. LeGuin. (1979) The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 12. Claes G. Ryn. “How Desperate Should We Be?” A Symposium: Morality Reconsidered. Humanitas, 28:1 & 2, 2015, 5-30. 13. Ibid. 14. Claes G. Ryn. (2014). A Desperate Man. Washington D.C.: Athena Books. 15. Ryn, 2015, op. cit. 16. Ursula K. LeGuin. (2014). The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper & Collins. 45 JANUS HEAD
he seeks to do his professional work as a the universe) represents an ‘experiment’ and acts of self-governance relate to the temporal physicist. LeGuin characterizes in anarchical living, ‘an experiment in hetteronomy of public law and order. Shevek’s ‘home’ on Anarres—if it can be nonauthoritarian communism’ (as the LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, as 17 called a home—‘an ambiguous utopia.’ Terran Ambassador Keng says). The Anar- Daniel P. Jaeckle tells us, is a novel in Here I wish to appropriate the literary resti live in self-imposed exile from Urras which the political theory of anarchism figure of Shevek and to highlight his in pursuit of a communal-anarchical way is imaginatively represented on Anarres way of being as a “profile” in authentic of life—removed in space and time from and integrated with Shevek’s theoretical selfhood. This latter concept is meant in the warring states and the dominant work in temporal physics, in which both Heidegger’s sense as described in various high-tech capitalism of Urras (represent- time’s sequency and simultaneity affect texts, although primarily in his magnum ed by the nation-state A-Io, much like the actuality and the potentiality of life.21 opus, Being and Time. It is my claim that, the contemporary USA and countered by Jaeckle captures the essential elements when the philosophical reasoning of the nation-state of Thu, much like Russia of LeGuin’s anarchistic society to exclude Heidegger is combined with the literary in the former Union of Soviet Socialist ‘the three great enemies of freedom: the imagination of LeGuin in an interpretive Republics). LeGuin speaks of anarchism state, organized religion, and private exercise concerned with politics and as ‘the most idealistic…of all political the- property’—though there is a central Pro- 19 morality, one comes away with a produc- ories.’ But, to say it is the most idealistic duction and Distribution Coordination tive understanding of how Heidegger’s is not to say it is unrealistic. (PDC) organizing the division of labor and concept of authentic selfhood can be As a political theory, such as described the distribution of the basic resources represented, not only in fiction but in by Pëtr Kropotkin20 and others, anarchism needed, even as the ‘Odonian’ values of the reality of everyday life. And that, so speaks to a possibility of human political the Anarresti are representative of the I shall argue, is informative in the present association, notwithstanding all the com- teaching of Taoism (with its attention to as a work of imagination contributes to plexities and challenges present in any complementarity, yin/yang) and Jungian understanding the moral dilemma an proposed ‘actualization’ in the context of depth psychology that speaks of the individual faces in making choices that human history on Earth. The ‘struggle for individual conscious psyche in relation to resolve into authenticity and authentic existence,’ Kropotkin understood in con- an ineradicable collective unconscious. selfhood over against the dominance of trast to the Social Darwinism of his day, ‘Reality,’ howsoever we might perceive it, inauthenticity and inauthentic selfhood. does not mean we must adopt a ‘state of involves complementarity, which is not to An Ambiguous Utopia civil society’ in opposition to the evil of a say opposition. This is important for the ‘state of nature’ such as Thomas Hobbes understanding of our reality. As Jaeckle ‘Utopia’ speaks of what has ‘no described in his Leviathan. One may puts it saliently as illustrated in the ‘gestalt place’ and thus ‘no reality’ relative to what organize a political association in which switch’ present in our apprehension of has place (topos) and thus is the reality of there is a hierarchical relation of ruler the ‘rabbit-duck’ image, ‘Difference, both a human abode, a place where humans and ruled, an installation of ‘government’ in the seeming incompatibility of the find their being in thought, word, and with all that this entails in hierarchically two interpretations and in their temporal deed. LeGuin has written a novel that governing institutional structures, laws, alternation, is controlled by sameness, concerns a no-place she characterizes armed forces, bureaucracy, division and both in the unity of the drawing itself and as possibly real—having its ‘place’ in the organization of labor, etc., as in the mod- in the observer’s knowledge that two co- human imagination—as an ambiguous ern nation-state system. But, existence, herent interpretations exist. The logic of utopia. Why a ‘utopia’? Why ‘ambiguous’? Kropotkin argued, also requires coop- complementarity is thus a specific form The answer is to be found in the fact eration, mutual aid. One may thereby of containing difference within unity. Its that anarchism, as a political theory, has perpetuate both conditions of competi- power rests on its ability not to diminish no ‘place’ in the historical actualization tion as well as cooperation, political and the integrity of either interpretation and of political associations on the planet socioeconomic structures operating to yet to bring the two different ways of Earth (called ‘Terra’ in the novel). Anarres enhance the one or the other, that which seeing into a whole.’22 (a dusty barren ‘moon’ to the richly re- is ‘private’ relating ambiguously to that In the integration of political and sci- sourced planet Urras18 in another part of which is ‘public,’ as personal autonomy
17. I see LeGuin’s choice of word here as itself revealing in its root origin, suggesting the privative ‘an-’ in relation to the Latin word ‘res’, which is part of ‘republic’ as in ‘res publica’, the “public thing.” Anarres in this sense presents a political society that is not a “republic,” does not install a public as what is politically dominant in a political society. 18. As with the etymology of ‘Anarres’ I suggest that the chosen word here is likewise related anthropologically to the idea of a “root society,” as with the legendary city of Ur of ancient Mesopotamia, but related likewise to the German word prefix ‘Ur-’ for “origin,” Urras thus the planetary origin of the Anarresti people. 19. Ursula K. LeGuin. (1976). Wind’s Twelve Quarters. Bantam Books. 20. Pëtr Kropotkin. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. New York: McClure Phillips & Co.https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a- factor-of-evolution.pdf, accessed 17 July 2019. 21. Daniel P. Jaeckle, “Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed,” Utopian Studies, 20:1, 2009, 75-95. 22. Ibid. 46 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD entific theory as LeGuin unfolds it in the future discloses through one’s interroga- constant return to the complementarity novel, we find that Shevek ‘sees Sequency tion of past and present? Jaeckle poses of freedom and responsibility.’26 And, this and Simultaneity as complementary’ in the moral question thus: ‘how does a constancy depends on the individual’s his General Temporal Theory (which seeks person act in complete freedom and yet projection of him/herself in the existen- to unify the two theoretical approaches to for the mutual aid of others?’24 LeGuin tial resolve of being what s/he ‘is’ accord- time) even as he ‘sees individual freedom presents the alternative thinking in the ing to the open (thus undetermined) and social responsibility as the comple- Odonian valuation she presents: ‘The claim of the future. This is to be done in mentary manifestations of anarchy.’23 But, duty of the individual is to accept no the individuated projection of his/her this is not merely a matter of politics—it rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, potentiality-for-being, where the strife is also centrally a matter of an individual to be responsible.’ Such is the anarchist of ‘they-self’ and ‘authentic-self’ must be way to be and individual moral decision ethos as usually associated with anarchist overcome constantly in the interest of in the press of any number of situations discourse: that which is arché (rule, law) authentic being—despite the incessantly of political engagement. Shevek’s situa- is opposed to that which is an-arché (ab- intruding presence of that which is ‘the tion of political expression and scientific sence or privation of rule, law) and vice public’ and that dominates to perpetuate practice involves complementarity; and, versa. But, this opposition excludes all at- inauthenticity by way of expectations of this complementarity includes both com- tention to the complementarity that is at obedience to social convention rather petition and cooperation whether politi- issue in the stated opposition and which than freely chosen cooperation. LeGuin’s cally or scientifically as he interacts with is to be resolved in thoughts, words, and key to a proper understanding of time in other Anarresti or, eventually, with those deeds that evince the complementarity. relation to moral choice is expressed by he eventually meets on the planet Urras. Both Anarres and Urras, both the Anarres- Shevek’s spoken adage: ‘As surely as the Anarres’s anarchical society includes both ti and the Urrasti, the anarchical society future becomes the past, the past be- competition and cooperation as individ- in relation to the warring states, etc., do comes the future.’27 For present purpose, uals express the dominant expectations not apprehend the importance of this the adage might be restated: As surely as of their society’s values and as they also complementarity as the one is privileged the past becomes the future (as our per- seek to express their ownmost freedom in the one place and the other privileged ception of sequency discloses), the future to be the individuals they are. In short, in the other place, both separated by time becomes the past (as our projections of Anarres is a society in which individuals and space so that all communication and potentiality for being disclose the simul- can be surrendered to the ‘public,’ thus to interaction between the two is rendered taneity of actuality and potentiality). An think, speak, and do as ‘they’ do, hence to null. individual’s existence (in Heidegger’s be inauthentic in their way to be. Such Shevek realizes (i.e., LeGuin posits sense, ek-sistence, standing out into the a ‘they-self’—what Heidegger calls das for our consideration) that ‘only the future beyond the present) is at once a Man-Selbst—can dominate to the dim- individual, the person, [has] the power of function of both sequency and simulta- inution and even exclusion of authentic moral choice—the power of change, the neity. Moral choice always involves this selfhood. essential function of life.’25 Revolution, temporal complementarity. Shevek is the protagonist who mani- understood not merely ideologically but Shevek’s Moral Dilemmas fests this inescapable complementarity of instead in terms of the power of change selfhood, the constant struggle to sustain (LeGuin asserts through Shevek), ‘begins Every individual is faced with himself in authenticity against the many in the thinking mind.’ In the case of the task of relating his and her individual ways in which his society can be suppres- Anarres, which seeks to be a sustainable freedom to his and her social respon- sive and even oppressive of his ownmost anarchical society, the revolution is sibility within the society s/he claims potentiality to be both as a temporal ‘permanent’ in the minds of thinking indi- as a political association. In all such physicist and as a ‘free’ yet ‘responsible’ viduals, not transient in the way in which, associations, understood since the time Anarresti. Can one have cooperation in e.g., the Marxist-Communist revolutions of the ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) politics and in science without hierarchy? in our place and time abandoned the in the Western philosophical tradition, Can one have competition in politics and creation of classless communist society politics involves individuals in alternate in science with social responsibility? Can and installed hybrids of capitalism and functions of citizenship either ruling or one be an integrated self, within whom the totalitarian state apparatus. What being ruled—no matter whether the one’s conscious being and the collective matters in such permanent revolution, as polis or the nation-state is ‘constituted’ a unconscious determine one’s psyche yet Jaeckle sees it, is to understand that anar- monarchy, a democracy, an aristocracy, without foreclosing the potentiality the chy is not ‘a fait accompli but a process of etc. Anarchical society such as LeGuin
23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit 26. Jaeckle, 2009, op. cit. 27. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 47 JANUS HEAD
conceives it, following such as Kropotkin postings that contribute to the survival of Shevek’s individuated perma- highlights the moral duty of mutual aid, the collective or the unique intellectual nent revolution in his thinking mind eschews this exchange of function and labor he does as theoretical physicist. sets him at odds with both Anarres and the structures of hierarchical govern- He finds himself having to make moral Urras in their political isolation from each ment. Yet, the opposition of ruler and decisions where his individual freedom other; and, as he discovers in trying to ruled that is installed on the planet Urras comes up against his social responsibili- originate a ‘communication’ between the (as on contemporary Earth), but which is ty—the latter sometimes defined not by two ‘planets’ while doing his theoretical supposedly avoided on Anarres, has to him but by other members of the society work in temporal physics, ‘both worlds move within the spatiotemporal reality in which he lives, his authentic selfhood attempt control on not just a physical but of a complementarity. How this is to be thus often imperiled by the demands also a mental and spiritual basis. Urras realized is entirely ambiguous, which of the they-self that would restrain and and Anarres manage not only bodies is represented by LeGuin’s reference to constrain his freedom. but also minds and ideas.’29 On Urras, Anarres as an ambiguous utopia. Can an- A they-self, much as a constitut- ‘an idea is a property of the State,’ Urras archical society have its ‘place’ in ‘real’ time ed society, builds walls—and, as LeGuin having a ‘propertarian,’ ‘profiteering,’ and space? Should it, on the assumption reminds at the opening of The Dispos- ‘governing’ political culture in contrast that it is politically and morally superior sessed, walls function to ‘keep out’ but to the anarcho-communism of Anarres, to ‘archical’ societies of past and present? also to ‘keep in,’ thus excluding some while where things and ideas are to be shared What does Shevek himself represent as including others. Exclusion sustains a and not owned and, therefore, are to be exemplar of a thinking mind in whom customary alienation of some qua ‘aliens,’ administered cooperatively, not hierar- the anarchical revolution is supposedly but inclusion is sometimes in reality the chically. The perspective here is one of permanent? same as a witting or unwitting imprison- being caring and solicitous in being with Every individual is faced with the ment. The more critically significant walls one another (as with Kropotkin’s mutual strife of authenticity and inauthenticity in are those ‘invisible walls’ in the human aid) without committing ‘the ultimate his/her own ‘being-there,’ i.e., in opening mind that are tacitly determinative of blasphemy’ in the Odonian value system up and disclosing the ‘world’ that, as a thought, word, and deed. Thus, as Winter of appropriating and parroting words of referential context of signification (to use Elliot remarks, ‘…The Dispossessed is, on ritual to be performed in deed as if they Heidegger’s words), has meaning. The the surface, a mediation between two were ‘laws.’ Shevek manifests in his char- pressures of social convention, custom, utopias, two worlds, two macrocosms of acter both his diligence to freedom (thus law, etc., all contribute to determine one’s humanity, with differing goals, desires, his quest for authentic selfhood) and his responses in a way that sustains these and beliefs…The book is not ultimately forgetfulness of the bureaucratization modes of gathering and organizing a as interested in which world has the best, that operates on Anarres (hence his being collective association. Yet, authenticity or even better, political system as it is in ‘fallen’ into the mode of inauthentic self- requires one pit one’s potentiality to Shevek’s role within those worlds.’28 This hood). He is reminded of what his friend be, one’s original freedom, against the is why Shevek, as protagonist of the nov- Bedap asserts to be the perpetual task dominance of the they-self. This does not el, is critical to sorting out philosophically of a society such as Anarres: ‘…we forgot mean, however, that thereby one choos- complex moral dilemmas in which he as that the will to dominance is as central in es to be anarchical in the pejorative sense individual must negotiate his individu- human beings as the impulse to mutual that one is singularly egoistic in pursuit ated potentiality-for-being amidst the aid is, and has to be trained in each indi- 30 of interests both capricious and vicious. dominating structures of his political vidual, in each new generation.’ The authentic choice is not between the society. These structures are many times Training of the will towards either im- ‘archical’ and the ‘anarchical,’ between present in the background of interperson- pulse depends on individuals having the law (nomos) and caprice. The choice is in al interactions, and they operate invisibly power of social change and sustaining the complementarity that preserves the to induce and coerce individual deliber- their power of moral choice. Only thus fundamental unity of law and freedom. ation, choices, judgments, and conduct. does an individual manifest his/her au- Shevek is an Anarresti in whom this fun- However, importantly, as the novel shows thentic selfhood rather than surrendering damental unity is at the outset undeter- in so many ways—as Elliot says—‘walls… to the more dominant impulses of ‘the mined, but which is challenged daily to are not, ultimately, impermeable.’ This is public,’ the anonymous ‘they-self’ that in- be made determinate in the character of why LeGuin is entirely correct to voice the sists on orthodoxy (correct opinions) and his person as he goes about his work, as proposition that the power of change, of its corresponding orthopraxis (correct he fulfills his ‘social function,’ whether in moral choice, resides with the individual conduct). Shevek, as one exemplar of a terms of the manual labor he does in field and not the collective. freely thinking mind on Anarres, under-
28. Winter Elliot. (2005). “Breaching Invisible Walls: Individual Anarchy,” in The Dispossessed,” The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman. Lanham: Lexington Books. 149-164. 29. Elliot, 2005, op. cit. 30. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 48 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD stands the need for balance (complemen- temporality, in virtue of the fact that in the usual senses of these contraposed tarity) between the individual conscience humans are temporal beings, bound by terms, but instead the complement of and the social conscience, and of the time but also open to the disclosure of the two. And, the ambiguity of The Dis- need to respect the individual freedom of potentialities that only they can disclose possessed as a utopia, with the multiple choice rather than to fear the neighbor’s for the sake of creating their world anew. complementarities structured by LeGuin, restraining and constraining opinion that But, Shevek’s journey is also inward points to the principle of integration, 31 calls for obedience. Cooperation is not in a fourfold way, (1) into his own thinking especially in relation to the Jungian con- obedience, and it must originate in moral mind so that it is decidedly one of self-dis- cept of integration of self. Ellen M. Rigsby choice, not in the heteronomy of histor- covery, (2) into the scientific ideas of the is correct to find fault in some critics of ically contingent social imperatives. To General Temporal Theory he eventually the work who complain that LeGuin did be free is to be dispossessed in the most shares with all worlds so that the ideas not provide enough ‘information about 35 essential sense—it is in the having, the are not ‘owned,’ (3) into the ideas that are the political system’ of Anarres. As she owning, of possessions, be they material foundational for his society, and (4) into says, it does not follow logically that ‘a or intellectual, that one is possessed by the ideas that define his moral and polit- system must be wrung from the text for them and made unfree. ical self. In that way, the journey is also it to describe a politics.’ LeGuin’s imagi- nation of an experiment in anarchical The ‘Journey’ towards Authentic Selfhood manifestly temporal as the sequency of Shevek’s actions and the simultaneity of living, contrasted to the usual ‘State’ Speaking to a point made at the end his being in the unity of his past, present, political apparatus on Urras, decidedly of The Dispossessed, Elliot observes, ‘each and future are integrated in the ethos of distinguishes anarchism and archism, and life is new and free to choose its own decision in the present. It is from that it describes a politics on Anarres without journey…’32 But, as LeGuin would have inward journey that Shevek discovers the structures of the ‘State’ as such. In us understand, a journey is not an adven- himself and the power of his ownmost effect, LeGuin’s dichotomy of anarchism ture, a moving outward that sets aside moral choice to then move outward in and archism underscores the disjunction and forgets the origin. Hence, LeGuin his moral and political comportment, to of ‘government’ and ‘self-governance.’ The instructs: ‘True journey is return.’ The perpetuate the revolutionary spirit within concept of ‘self-governance’ is, in fact, adage is loaded with significance as the Anarres and an ethic of communication not represented properly by the concept ideas of time, truth, journey, and return with Urras and all the known worlds that of ‘anarchist;’ hence, this is where I go are conjoined. If one undertakes an ad- thereby overcomes the self-imposed ex- beyond LeGuin to link the Heideggerian venture, then that is all it is understood to ile of the Anarresti. His past and his future concept of authentic selfhood to that of be from the outset, a venturing outward are united in his present, which itself is at self-governance. without meaningful goal or intended once a sequential movement from out of I submit that, the concept ‘autar- direction. If one undertakes a journey, the past and into the future and simulta- chist’—etymologically derived from one ventures outward surely; but, most neous as the future—i.e., his own most ancient Greek to mean one who is importantly, one’s journey is true to the proper, thus self-appropriated, potentiali- self-sufficient through his or her self-rul- spirit of the journey only if and when one ty for being—lays its claim on his present. ing—more properly captures the sense returns to the point of origin. In Shevek’s Despite the seeming determinacy of of ‘who’ Shevek is in and through his po- case the journey is obviously spatial— the past, Shevek acts to reconfigure his litical ethos and how he appropriates the from his own personal (as anarchist) and mode of being away from inauthentici- function of governance to himself rather professional (as temporal physicist) ‘place’ ty—away from his prior deference to the than externalize it in any number of ways in Anarresti society to the places he goes bureaucratic and functionalist politics of in which heteronomy encroaches upon as part of his communal contribution Anarres—to the authenticity that assures his moral autonomy, whether on Anarres to the Anarresti division of labor, then him of the self-governance that is proper or elsewhere such as in his encounters from Anarres to Urras, and then at the to his own being. Shevek demonstrates, with the scientists and those represent- end from Urras in return to Anarres. As as LeGuin would have us understand, ing the interests of the governments of LeGuin writes, ‘It is not until an act occurs that ‘Fulfillment,’ as Shevek thought, ‘is a A-Io or Thu. Indeed, Rigsby is entirely within the landscape of the past and the function of time.’34 correct to highlight a principal point of future that it is a human act.’33 Ethics and LeGuin’s narrative: ‘that society can exist time are connected in virtue of human But here, I suggest, Shevek shows that in truth he is neither archist nor anarchist in which everyone acts on his or her own
31. Ibid. 32. Elliot, 2005, op. cit. 33. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 34. Ibid 35. Ellen M Rigsby. (2005). “Time and the Measure of the Political Animal,” in Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, ed. The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Lanham MD: Lexington Books. 167-180.
49 JANUS HEAD
initiative.’36 ‘Initiative’, in the ancient Greek the known worlds that Shevek initiated. or her own initiative answers the call of sense, is expressed by the word ‘arché’, His return, as Rigsby rightly points out, is the origin that discloses an ‘original prax- which is often translated as principle, one in which he chooses ‘to continue his is’—a call that pushes into insignificance or rule, beginning, etc. It is through this initiative to unbuild walls…’38 As he had the ideological appeals of the ‘they-self’ initiative of self-governance that Shevek said when deciding to go to Urras, he will by privileging ‘that potentiality-for-be- accomplishes the power of social change fulfill his ‘proper function in the social ing-political which is most one’s own and thereby has the moral authority to organism…to unbuild walls.’39 As the (eigentlich).’42 What is most one’s own, do so in a constant interrogation and permanent revolutionary, Shevek em- what is authentic, is to be self-governing, challenge to the status quo, custom, and bodies ‘the enduring reality of Anarres,’ ‘to be’ authentikos as autarchos. In the the inertia that preserves the authority of the reality not of an anarchical society, jointure of aesthetic and ethical appeal, tradition merely for the sake of tradition. but the reality of the autarchos who will one comes to understand: One must be It is in this sense, taking up the power of not surrender his radical freedom, daily persistent, steadfast (ständig), in one’s his own initiative, that Shevek takes up to take it up and to act responsibly on his projection of one’s potentiality-to-be, what is his own, thus what is authentikos own initiative. if one is to disclose oneself with con- (authentic, being true to himself) and Linking Heidegger’s philosophy stancy in the mode of authenticity. The autarchos (self-governing). to a conception of the political, I have modification from inauthenticity is a Rigsby perspicaciously captures the written elsewhere that, ‘To every factual persevering movement that navigates important point of the linkage of ethics determination of the political belongs the present being’s self-disclosure in and time in words Shevek speaks, where the originary task of bringing political view of the projected futural being to- he speaks of ‘chronosophy’ or wisdom being into its essential determination.’40 ward which one inclines in standing out about time: Political philosophers teach about politi- (ek-stasis) beyond the present. Following cal ideas, structures, and systems, mostly Heidegger’s engagement of Aristotle’s But it’s true, chronosophy does involve Nicomachean Ethics (Book VI), as Walter ethics. Because our sense of time as informed from the record of historical and extant political societies. The twen- Brogan clarifies, ‘The virtuous intellect involves our ability to separate cause is virtuous to the extent that it holds in and effect, means and ends. The ty-first century presents humankind with the prospect of a technocratic world or- truth and safeguards (Verwahrung) the baby, the animal, they don’t see the disclosure of beings,’43 including here difference between what they do now der in which individual initiative and the radical freedom on which it is grounded being open to one’s ownmost ‘ontological and what will happen because of it. liability’ (liability for one’s own being) and They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. are entirely supplanted, i.e., individuals transformed into ‘human resources’ read- safeguarding one’s authentic selfhood We can. Seeing the difference between against the encroachments of the they-self. the now and not now, we can make ily used, disposed, and abused according the connection. And there morality to the dictates of instrumental and Through the sort of self-governance enters in. Responsibility…To break a technocratic reason. Yet, every human that Shevek exemplifies (despite his suc- promise is to deny the reality of the being always retains the originary task or cumbing occasionally to the appeals of past; therefore it is to deny the hope of original liability of his and her existence ‘the public’ of either Anarres or Urras) that a real future.37 as an ethico-political being, the task that make him inauthentic in a given moment speaks to him and her from out of his and of action, LeGuin presents us with the Shevek realizes that he cannot ‘con- her ‘origin’ to bring political being into possibility, the real possibility (howsoever vert’ the Urrasti to his way of thinking as unconcealment (what Heidegger calls difficult) of radical freedom that is at the an anarchist or even as a temporal phys- Unverborgenheit), i.e., into its essential same time fully ethically responsible. icist, even as he realizes he has to return determination. I have proposed: ‘“Autar- Indeed, as Vandana Singh put it, ‘What to Anarres and face the consequences of chos” names that to which the human as LeGuin did was to take down the walls his break with those Anarresti who pre- political being is authentically released around the imagination, and to set us all ferred continuing isolation of Anarres to as the originary presence of politics.’41 free. To shift the paradigms, the concep- the communicative engagement with all Every individual who appropriates his tual constructs by which we make sense
36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 38. Rigsby, 2005, op. cit. 39. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 40. Norman K. Swazo. (2002). Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections. Albany: SUNY Press. 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid. 43. Walter. Brogan. (2005). Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being Albany: SUNY Press. 50 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD of the world, is no small thing.’44 therein a constituted ‘architecture which Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans Positing the foregoing as a compel- is fundamentally aesthetic and which, in made a desert…We failed as a species, ling sense of political ethics where reason being so, fulfils an intellectual or rational as a social species…[We]…saved what 46 and imagination are complementary and design.’ could be saved, and made a kind of life 48 by no means ‘unreal,’ one may conclude ‘LeGuin,’ Julie Phillips reminds, ‘was in the ruins… by heeding LeGuin’s words. She tells aware, always, that there were other sto- LeGuin teaches us in such writing us, her readers, ‘When treated—even ries to tell.’47 Indeed. Each of us, always, that reason and imagination have their with much praise—as a methodical ax in the unity of our ownmost sequency efficacious confluence, but also that one grinder, I am driven to deny that there’s and simultaneity of being, have our own ought not to dismiss the truth of the imag- any didactic intention at all in my fiction. stories to tell, uniting our past with the in- ination out of misplaced methodological Of course, there is—I’m dead set against determinate future from out of which we commitment to scientific realism. The Dis- preaching, but the teaching impulse disclose who we are, thus to create the possessed is a work of art that permits us is often stronger than I am.’45 LeGuin world anew. Either that, or we face a fu- a way to envision both the possibility and does not want the reader to make the ture such as the Terran Ambassador Keng the reality of authentic selfhood in the set- reductive move that simply says, ‘J’aime characterized it in rueful retrospect as she ting of an ethical politics. This work elicits Shevek,’ whereby character and author spoke to Shevek about her past (which is a truth that is not limited to the imagina- are wholly identified to be in agreement. the potential future of our Earth): tion of Anarres but that speaks to us in the She comments that The Dispossessed My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet present as we seek our dwelling upon this is not ‘an exposition of ideas’ but ‘an spoiled by the human species. We Earth. Even on the ‘Terra’ that is our pres- embodiment of idea—a revolutionary multiplied and gobbled and fought ent reality, radical freedom and ethical artifact, a work containing a potential until there was nothing left, and responsibility are irrevocably conjoined, permanent source of renewal of thought then we died. We controlled neither so that one who would be—and resolves and perception…’ She observes that the appetite nor violence; we did not himself and herself to be—autarchos, ever narrative of the book, as she wrote it, adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But manifests the permanent revolution of a ‘seemed to follow neither an arbitrary nor we destroyed the world first…You thinking mind that safeguards the future a rationally decided course,’ yet there is in the present.
44. Vandana. Singh, “True Journey is Return: A Tribute to Ursula K. LeGuin,” Antariksh Yatra, https://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/true-journey-is-return-a- tribute-to-ursula-k-le-guin/, accessed 27 May 2019. 45. Ursula K. LeGuin. (2005). “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti,” in Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, ed. The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Lanham MD: Lexington Books. 305-308. 46. Ibid. 47. Julie Phillips, “The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. LeGuin,” The New Yorker, 25 January 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-subversive- imagination-of-ursula-k-le-guin, accessed 27 May 2019. 48. LeGuin, 1974, op. cit. 51 JANUS HEAD
Norman K. Swazo
Norman K. Swazo is Professor of Philosophy and Director, Office of Research-NSU, at North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He specializes in recent European philosophy, ethics in international affairs, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of religion.
52 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
From Decline of the West to Dawn of Day: Dan Brown’s Origin as a Diagnostic of the Present
Hub Zwart
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 53 JANUS HEAD
ABSTRACT
This paper subjects Dan Brown’s most recent novel Origin to a philosophical reading. Origin is regarded as a literary window into contemporary technoscience, inviting us to explore its transformative momentum and disruptive impact, focusing on the cultural significance of artificial intelligence and computer science: on the way in which established world-views are challenged by the incessant wave of scientific discoveries made possible by super-computation. While initially focusing on the tension between science and religion, the novel’s attention gradually shifts to the increased dependence of human beings on smart technologies and artificial (or even “synthetic”) intelligence. Origin’s message, I will argue, reverberates with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which aims to outline a morphology of world civilizations. Although the novel starts with a series of oppositions, most notably between religion and science, the eventual tendency is towards convergence, synthesis and sublation, exemplified by Sagrada Família as a monumental symptom of this transition. Three instances of convergence will be highlighted, namely the convergence between science and religion, between humanity and technology and between the natural sciences and the humanities.
Keywords: Dan Brown; Decline of the West; Artificial Intelligence; Synthetic Intelligence; Origin of Life; Philosophy of Culture
54 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
From Decline of the West to Dawn of Day: Dan Brown’s Origin as a Diagnostic of the Present
Introduction explored and assessed. Although initially the past in order to develop a prognostics Dan Brown is an American novelist focussing on the tension between science of the future (p. 3). All world historical famous for authoring best-sellers such as and religion, the novel’s attention gradu- constellations, Spengler argues, begin The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol ally shifts to the increased dependence of as a local phenomenon (as “culture”), but (2009) and Inferno (2013). Origin (2017) is human beings on smart technologies and gradually expand into a style of thinking his fifth novel featuring Robert Langdon artificial (or even “synthetic”) intelligence. which affects a whole world (“civilisation”), (a Harvard expert in religious iconog- Origin is a techno-thriller with a message, until an inevitable process of decline and raphy) as key protagonist. Dan Brown’s conveying a diagnostic of the present decadence sets in. Spengler’s objective two most recent novels can be regarded and a prognostic of the future, claiming is to perform historical research in a as science novels, moreover, describing that we are on the cusp of a global cultur- way that is comparable to how Johann the inner dynamics and transformative al transition, exemplified (spiritually and Wolfgang von Goethe performed plant socio-cultural impact of contemporary architecturally) by Sagrada Famíla, the research (p. 34), namely by focussing on research fields: virology in the case of In- last of the great Cathedrals, the Omega a limited set of typical cultural forms: ferno, artificial intelligence in the case of point in spiritual architecture, but also on a particular Gestalt, recognisable in Origin. In these novels, Robert Langdon a building which, according to Brown’s all stages and domains of a particular (a humanities professor) is confronted novel, heralds the next quantum leap in culture. Spengler’s method is also compa- with a scientific genius (Bertrand Zobrist human culture, announcing something rable to the work of Goethe’s friend and in Inferno, Edmond Kirsch in Origin) who completely different: the dawn of a contemporary Alexander von Humboldt is about to reveal an unsettling scientific new civilisation, a new style of thinking. (1845-1862), who characterised the breakthrough to a global audience, Whereas the previous epoch was an era overall physiognomy (Gesamtbild) of thereby inciting the animosity of influ- of negativity and conflict (science versus global landscape types. Spengler’s aim ential organisations representing the religion, science versus art, technology is to discern the typical gestalt or physi- global establishment: the World Health versus nature, etc.), the new era purports ognomy of a particular culture: the basic Organisation in Inferno, the Parliament of to be one of convergence (of syncretism formula which determines all its practices the World’s Religions in Origin. even): of science and art, technology and and expressions, the distinctive form nature, science and religion, and so on. which pervades all the research fields, art This paper subjects Origin to a phil- And Sagrada Famíla, with its biomimetic forms and political institutions to which a osophical reading. Brown’s novel, I will design (p. 279), its “living architecture” of particular culture (gradually evolving into argue, can be regarded as a literary win- “almost biological quality” (p. 235), cap- a world civilisation) gives rise. dow into contemporary technoscience, tures this transition towards convergence From a philosophical perspective, inviting us to explore its transformative in stone. momentum and disruptive impact Spengler’s approach concurs with Hegel’s (Zwart 2019a). While Inferno focusses on Conceptual framework view that a core idea realises itself at a the societal risks and benefits of biomo- certain historical stage. This idea is like a Origin’s message, I will argue, re- force or program which manifests itself lecular technoscience, Origin addresses verberates with Oswald Spengler’s The the cultural relevance of science: the as a particular worldview and zeitgeist Decline of the West, subtitled “Outlines of (Hegel 1832/1970). Another philosoph- way in which established world-views a morphology of world history”, the first are challenged by the incessant wave ical source of inspiration was Friedrich part of which was published a century Nietzsche who, in Beyond Good and Evil of scientific discoveries facilitated by ago (Spengler 1918). As indicated by its computer science. The novel can be (1886/1980, § 23) already presented his subtitle, Spengler’s classic presents a own thinking as a “morphology” of the regarded as a literary laboratory, where “morphology” of civilisations (1918, p. 4): technology-driven scenarios are enacted, Will to Power. Although Spengler himself a form of historiography which studies was critical of these precursors (rebuking
55 JANUS HEAD
both Hegel and Nietzsche for their insuf- Empire. During this upscaling period, Edmond Kirsch Ambra Vidal ficient understanding and appreciation however, a rival culture already began of mathematics compared to Baroque to take shape, referred to by Spengler as (science) (art) philosophers such as Descartes and Lei- Magical thinking, exemplified by medie- bniz),1 his morphology can be regarded val Christianity and Islam, with astrology, Robert Bishop as a dialectical genealogy of worldviews. numerology and alchemy as key areas of Every civilisation entails a transvalua- inquiry. “Waiting for the Kingdom” was its Langdon Valdespino tion of values (1918, p. 451), Spengler basic formula, for individuals spent their contends, negating and sublating what lives in detachment, preparing them- (humanities) (religion) existed before into something wholly selves (via ascetic practices and spiritual new. Moreover, Spengler predicted that exercises) for the coming of a wholly In the prologue of the novel, Edmond the present “Faustian” culture, as a ma- different era. The subsequentFaustian Kirsch pays a visit to the monastery of terialisation of the Will to Power, driven culture originated in the late medieval Montserrat (about 45 kilometres north- by disruptive expansion and exponential period, exemplified by gothic cathedrals west of Barcelona, famous for its statue growth, by powerful machinery and in- in the realm of architecture and by gothic of the Black Virgin, but also for serving dustrial labour, is about to be eclipsed by experimental research (scientia exper- as the Grail Castle in Wagner’s Parsifal). a new type of culture, a new Dawn of Day, imentalis) in the natural sciences. This Besides beings a celebrity scientist and as Nietzsche (1881/1980) phrased it – a style of thinking was driven by the Will to a militant atheist, Edmond is famous for theme which is taken up by contempo- Power as its guiding idea and formula. As his gift for prognostication, i.e. his accu- rary philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk indicated, however, Spengler predicted rate predictions of imminent scientific (1999), whose “spherical” approach to that Faustian culture is now heading for breakthroughs. He travels to Montserrat history builds explicitly on Spengler’s decline, and the big question therefore is: to meet a delegation of representatives classic. what comes next? Is it possible to discern of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the contours of a new emerging culture? led by Bishop Valdespino. Edmond grants In this paper I will argue that artistic doc- them a preview of a multimedia video-re- uments such as Dan Brown’s novel, pub- cording which he is about to release and lished a century after Spengler’s book, which allegedly solves the riddle of the may help us to assess this transition in origin of life. Edmond is an outspoken more detail. Origin provides a diagnostic critic of all religions and it is as if he puts of the present while presenting an the trump card on the table which he is outline of the dawning era (a prognostic about to play. Although Valdespino and of the future), notably by focussing on a his colleagues find the content quite decisive factor, something Spengler was disturbing, Edmond is determined to Although Spengler purports to develop not yet aware of, namely the transfor- present his video (urbi et orbi as it were) a global perspective of history, the mative role of computers and other hy- to an elite audience (“hundreds of VIPs”, focus is nonetheless on Western civili- per-intelligent, post-Faustian machines. p. 12) assembled in the Guggenheim mu- sations, which are described as a series seum at Bilbao, while the global crowd of historical constellations, each with a Summary will be able to witness the livestreamed recognisable profile of its own, as indicat- and meticulously choreographed event The narrative of Dan brown’s novel ed in the scheme on the right (adopted on-line. is dominated by four key characters. from Zwart 2005). Apollonian culture Besides Robert Langdon, the Harvard Edmond’s objective is not only to was guided by the idea that a perfect professor of symbolism (representing the prove that the origin of life can be scien- geometric structure can be discerned in humanities), the novel features Edmond tifically explained, but also that religion nature conceived as κόσμος (i.e. order: a Kirsch, a 40-year old billionaire expert in is about to be made obsolete by science. harmonious, spherical world), a structure game theory and computer modelling His message is that the transformative which human art, ethics and politics from MIT (representing science), while impact of artificial intelligence will finally should mimic. “Act in accordance with the two other key roles are played by decide the time-old gigantomachia nature” was its basic formula, and Greek Ambra Vial, Director of the Guggenheim between science and religion, in favour geometry its guiding research field. The museum in Bilbao (representing art) and of the former. Thus, Edmond expects that Apollonian worldview was preceded by Bishop Antonio Valdespino of Almudena his discovery will significantly contribute the Dionysian one: by the contrasting Cathedral, Madrid, spiritual advisor of the to the twilight and downfall of theistic experience of nature as obscure, violent Spanish King (representing religion): worldviews. and chaotic. Apollonian culture evolved Being a close friend of Edmond, Rob- into a world civilisation via the Roman ert Langdon is invited to the VIP event,
1. “Goethe hasste die Mathematik” (Spengler 1918, p. 34); “Hegel [ist] völlig unmathematisch … von Nietzsche ganz zu schweigen”, p. 472). 56 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD organised by museum director Ambra employ the truth of science to eradicate Vidal, who also happens to be the Spanish the myth of religion” (p. 53). He sees God crown prince’s fiancée. When Robert en- as a symptom of the fact that humankind ters the Guggenheim museum, however, is inclined to raise questions which seem he has the uncomfortable feeling of being too big to answer (Where do we come watched by the countless video cameras from? Where are we going?). As Edmond surrounding him. He feels like an “unwit- phrases it during his lecture: if we ask a ting participant” in an experiment, like a supercomputer to solve the question of rat in a maze (p. 46). Edmond uses these the origin of life, the machine will prob- cameras to carefully monitor the impact ably answer something like: “insufficient his announcement will make on the au- data for accurate response” (p. 87). If you dience. Meanwhile, another experiment ask this little biological computer (i.e. is being conducted as well: a Turing test, the human brain) this same question, to be exact. Upon entering the museum, however, something else happens, and wood engraving in Camille Flammarion’s Robert receives a minimalised headset (“a Kirsch’s presentation produces a stream book L’atmosphère: météorologie popu- sleek loop of metal with tiny pads at each of religious images. Humans feel uncom- laire, published in 1888 (depicted on the end”, p. 25) which connects him with the fortable when faced with uncertainties right). Ávila has a mission of fulfil. Acting voice of a personal assistant: a custom- and therefore our brains are prone to on the orders of an enigmatic authorita- ised, interactive guide, who introduces invent imaginary, theistic explanations. tive voice (the Regent), the Admiral grabs himself as Winston: a disembodied voice, Although Edmond’s presentation is his 3-D-printed polymer gun (invisible to a product of “synthetic intelligence”, the announced as highly innovative, it actual- metal detectors), takes aim and kills the latest android development in the world ly reflects a standard or even stereotypical scientist on the spot, thereby unleashing of artificial intelligence. Bone conduction account, already initiated by Plato in his a tsunami of conspiracy theories (with technology produces a startling effect: as simile of the cave (1935/2000, 514). Hu- Bishop Valdespino consistently serving as if a voice is speaking “inside your head” (p. mans prefer misleading images and cap- prime suspect), while turning Edmond 25). Winston not only provides detailed tivating stories to rationally convincing into a scientific martyr. Wikipedia-like information upon request, explanations. They rather follow religious Edmond’s legacy, the video-mes- but also seems a connoisseur of art, com- icons than the iconoclastic equations of sage, must be stored somewhere on his bining intelligence and encyclopaedic science. According to Edmond, science ultra-secure server, accessible via his iP- knowledge with humour. Robert is the is the antithesis of faith. But now, as the hone. This device can only be activated via guinea pig (“Mr. Kirsch wanted to test my age of religion is drawing to a close, the an unknown password composed of 47 abilities on you”, p. 48), but Winston easily age of science is finally dawning after all. characters. If the recording of Edmond’s passes the test. He speaks and acts like a And tonight, he announces, humankind discovery (the high-visibility climax event genuine human being. Moreover, as the is about to make a quantum leap in this of his research) can be retrieved, the mes- story unfolds, he becomes increasingly direction. sage may proliferate (go viral) after all. powerful, cunning and influential.2 Somehow, however, the name of a His violent death will certainly add mo- Edmond begins his video-lecture by Spanish admiral named Ávila has secretly mentum to the global impact. His friends deriding deities in general and the God been added to the guest list, a devote Robert and Ambra therefore set out to of Christianity in particular, referring to follower of an ultra-conservative Catholic retrieve the video message. Their journey Him as the “God of the gaps” (p. 83). In sect: the Palmarian Church. While Ed- brings them to Barcelona: to Gaudi’s Case his view, this God is a fictitious entity mond is presenting his discovery (“a para- Milà (where they discover that Edmond produced to cover up the remaining digm shift … on the scale of the Coperni- was terminally ill and about to die within gaps in our scientific explanations of can revolution”, p. 52; a “global moment”, days, suffering from pancreatic cancer), to the world. Although (due to scientific p. 101, etc.), Ávila uses his razor blade to the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre3 progress) God’s territory has significantly cut a slit in the fabric covering the audito- (Edmond’s high-tech facility located in a shrunken, there are still a few holes to fill, rium. When he parts the opening, he decommissioned “smart church”, p. 361), and one of them concerns the question peers into “another world” (p. 91), a scene and, finally, to Sagrada Família. of the origin of life. Here, there still seems reminiscent of the famous (anonymous) In the computing centre they discov- to be some room for the idea that a er E-Wave: Edmond’s superfast quantum divine intervention infused a spark of life computer, a symbiosis of a genius mind into inorganic nature, 3.9 billion years and a powerful machine, enabling ago. Edmond’s vocation, however, is “to
2. Winston is described as “Siri on steroids” (p. 175), a reference to Apple’s version of an intelligent assistant. 3. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC/Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) really exists, hosting the MareNostrum supercomputer, located in a former chapel named Torre Girona. Cf. Brown’s disclaimer at the beginning of the novel: “All art, architecture, locations, science and religious organisations are real” (2017, p. 3). MareNostrum is “incorporated” into E-Wave (p. 364). 57 JANUS HEAD
unprecedented advances in science, search for a target, using gadgets such about the fifty-year mark, the first hints of especially in the field of complex systems as head-sets and iPhones as temporary RNA become visible (p. 391). modelling. E-Wave represents a “quantum hosts. Edmond then adds another “final in- leap beyond NASA/Google’s D-Wave” and Edmond’s E-Wave computer allowed gredient” to the mixture, namely entropy its uncanny pulsations sound like “the him to make his “Copernican” discovery. (p. 391), the universal process of inevi- beating of a human heart” (p. 371). Its First of all, he decided to replicate the Mill- table and relentless decay. The entropy location (in Barcelona) is no coincidence er-Urey experiment, originally conducted principle implies that everything that is either, for in cultural terms it represents in 1953: a chemical reconstruction of the ordered is bound to return to dust and to a modernistic / surrealistic competitor so-called primordial soup. In their famous dissipate into molecular debris. Against to the power bastions of Madrilenian experiment, Stanley Miller and his collab- the backdrop of an entropic world, the Baroque. E-Wave is the new Master, for orator Harold Urey simulated in vitro the question emerges how something as the days of in silico power are dawning. chemical conditions that once existed on complex, sophisticated and intricate as This computer is Winston, in a way, a lifeless, abiotic Earth, four billion years living organisms can emerge and stay but, as Winston himself argues, no more ago. Would their test tubes allow them intact with inconceivable persistency. than our physical brain is us, if we could to answer the question how “the earliest According to Edmond, in its efforts to somehow observe it in a bowl (p. 373). specks of life” (p. 385) had been infused promote disorder, nature creates pockets Edmond leapfrogged his rivals with into the primordial soup? Allegedly, the of order, namely living systems, because this machine by using bicameralism, for experiment faltered, but in 2007, a group in the long run they escalate rather than E-Wave is a synthetic brain that mimics of scientists re-examined the sealed reduce the chaos. Life is an effective tool the two-lobbed, bicameral human brain vials from the original experiments with for dissipating energy, it is an entropic (p. 372). Bicameralism is what makes us so more sensitive equipment (spectroscopy, machine. And here, a reference is made creative, but it also explains why humans liquid chromatography) and discovered to a really existing scientist, namely bio- are both rational and religious beings.4 that much more amino acids had been physicist Jeremy England (MIT), notably While the rational part of the brain is produced in Miller’s original experiments to his work on quantum biology and “dis- susceptible to scientific equations, the than Miller himself had realised. sipation-driven adaptive organisation” other part is intuitive and imaginative; Edmond takes the experiment a (p. 394).6 As soon as entropy is added to and therefore sensitive to religious significant step further, however. First of the equation, amino acids begin to take iconography. all by adding a factor that was missing shape even faster, evolving into protein In short, this smart church is a rather in the original set-up, namely time. Life chains and, eventually, nucleotides. In Ed- remarkable entity. If the supercomputer must have required thousands of years to mond’s computer model, after a million is like a brain, the building as such is like originate in such a mixture. This missing years or so, the double-helix of DNA can a skull (a camera obscura). In the natural factor can now be added with the help be seen, the living code of biology: “an situation, however, our voice emerges in of complex systems modelling. In other entropy tool making copies of itself” (p. an orifice (the mouth) which is located words, while Miller and Urey conducted 399). close to the brain. In the case of E-Wave, their experiment in vitro, Edmond’s Structure of the Novel however, these components (these replication experiment is carried out in partial objects) have dissipated through silico. Edmond’s E-Wave computer allows Before subjecting the novel to a close space. Winston’s disembodied, “extimate” science to “fast-forward” the original ex- philosophical reading, it will be helpful voice5 is audible in Bilbao, as an organ periment (p. 391). Computer modelling is to outline its basic structure. In terms of without a body, entering Robert’s mind a kind of “time machine” (p. 390), Edmond Freytag’s dramatic arc (Freytag 1863), the (Brown 2017, p. 25), but his brain (E-Wave) argues, able to compress and accelerate novel begins with an exposition stage, remains in Barcelona. In the digital era, time. By combining chemistry and introducing the four key characters listed partial objects (such as voice and cortex) computer modelling, Edmond intends to above, and providing a detailed descrip- disconnect themselves from their wet, bi- demonstrate how life originated, without tion of the Guggenheim museum as a ological environment, but also from each divine intervention. Life can indeed be dramatic setting. Subsequently, we see other. Winston’s disembodied (uncannily created in the lab by combining chem- a rise of dramatic tension when Edmond human) voice floats through space in istry and computer power (p. 389). At delivers his presentation. This upward curve is suddenly interrupted, however,
4. Cf. Nietzsche: the human brain should be bicameral (“Eine höhere Kultur [muss] dem Menschen ein Doppelgehirn, gleichsam zwei Hirnkammern geben, einmal um Wissenschaft, sodann um Nicht-Wissenschaft zu empfinden … es ist dies eine Forderung der Gesundheit” (Nietzsche 1878/1980, § 251). 5. “Extimate” technologies are high-tech gadgets worn close to the body. They are both intimate and external; both embedded and foreign; both enhancing and intrusive (Zwart 2017a). In Origin the personalised guide is described as “intimate and immersive” (Brown 2017, p. 28), turning a museum visit into a “seamless” experience. 6. Although his publication on self-replication and entropy (England 2013) drew much attention (Wolchover 2014), England (a religious scientist) does not recognise himself in his literary doppelgänger. On his website, he states his position as follows: “Professor Jeremy England was not consulted or involved in any way during the creation of Dan Brown’s book Origin, and he did not consent to the use of his name therein. Shortly before the book was published, he was made aware of a fictional character in Mr. Brown’s book who is also an MIT professor named Jeremy England” [https://www.englandlab.com/press.html] 58 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD by Admiral Ávila’s assault. During the hip” (p. 6). The word ‘hip’ produces a polite subsequent intermezzo, Robert and Am- smile on Edmond’s face, for it “went out bra desperately search for the code that of style decades ago” (idem). Valdespino’s will allow them to recover the video-mes- stereotypical expectation concurs with sage. As soon as Edmond’s presentation Nietzsche’s claim (in Genealogy of Morals goes on-line again, however, the focus III, § 23, and elsewhere) that scientists are gradually shifts from dramatic action to basically ascetics. Rather than being anti- reflection (thedenouement stage): thetical to religious asceticism, Nietzsche (1887/1980) argued, modern scientific Thus, the research represents its latest version, for dramatic action it entails self-sacrifice, manual labour, not only involves dedicated devotion and hard work. For characters (their Nietzsche, modern scientists play a role vicissitudes and similar to that of monks and hermits in interactions), but medieval times: they sacrifice pleasure also symbols: and health to knowledge production, imprisoned in their laboratories, chained to their experimental machines (Zwart 2019b). In the next Edmond’s appearance fails to com- sections, I will ply with this image. Although his daily analyse Origin in habits reflect a maniacal work ethic (p. more detail, ar- 244), while his research practice is tied guing that, al- up with an impressive machine, he is also Besides this dramatic curve, another though the novel starts with a series of consistently presented as an outspokenly structural device is at work in the novel. oppositions, most notably between reli- mundane individual, a connoisseur of All characters and themes in the novel gion and science, the eventual tendency art, fashion and high culture. His profile are represented by a particular symbol, is towards convergence, sublation and merges the ascetic aura of science with in accordance with Robert’s field of synthesis. Three instances of convergence the aristocratic image of a Nietzschean expertise (“symbology”). These symbols will be highlighted, namely the conver- free-thinker, someone committed to an play a role comparable to the musical gence between science and religion (1), exuberant life-style. During his meeting motifs in Wagner operas. As soon as a between humanity and technology (2) with Valdespino, he wears a Kiton K50 suit certain symbol presents itself, a certain and between the natural sciences and and Barker ostrich shoes (p. 6). Later we mood or ambiance unfolds. Edmond’s the humanities (3). learn that he owns an extremely expen- symbol, for instance, is a cuneiform sive and sophisticated Assyrian pictogram, indicating that evo- self-driving car (Tesla lution (represented by a fish) is about to Model X P90D) as well swallow (the symbol for) God. His militant as a Gulfstream G550 atheism, moreover, is represented by a private jet, and that stylised A (inserted below), a symbol of he inhabits expensive apostasy which is adopted by many of houses. He is also an his followers. In a similar vein, Admiral “insatiable bibliophile” Ávila is represented by a monogram (p. 13) whose “stunning composed of letter signifying “victory” library” (p. 242) con- (inserted below as well). Likewise, Gaudí’s tains priceless books symbolic signature is the infinity sign (a and artworks (from a Möbius-ring, topologically speaking), famous Gauguin up to while the discussion on entropy unfolds the hand-written origi- under the sway of the entropy symbol: nal of Blake’s collected Convergence 1: Science and religion works). In short, Edmond is an ascetic (Sagrada Família) hermit whose profile at the same time When (during the prologue) Bishop concurs with the image of a Renaissance Prince. In Hegelian terms: he is a master Valdespino welcomes Edmond Kirsch on the train platform near Montserrat, rather than a servant, someone whose he seems puzzled. “I was expecting a sci- expensive habits convey a sense of gran- entist”, he confesses, “but you’re quite … deur and even vanity. 59 JANUS HEAD
Yet, he definitely represents the tallest one in Europe in fact. According It is a bottom-up, rather than a hierarchi- iconoclastic tendency of modern science, to Spengler (1918), medieval cathedrals cal (top-down) construction. Not only challenging the baroque absolutism represented the dawn of what he referred because it combines traditional elements of Spanish Catholicism embodied by to as “Faustian” civilisation. They material- (nave, transept, pillars, altar, etc.) with art Valdespino. According to Edmond, sci- ised the Faustian striving for verticality, nouveau features, but also because it is ence is about to obliterate the imaginary for height. Sagrada Família complies with not formally a cathedral. In order to be idols: the gods of the gaps, produced by this, but at the same time, it is a wholly proclaimed as such, it should be the seat humans to come to terms with anything different type of cathedral, post-Faus- of a bisshop. Its most striking bottom-up beyond their grasp. Edmond’s E-Wave tian one could say: a window into an feature, however, is that this remarkable machine will marginalise religion once emerging future, first of all because of its building seems to build itself, seems to and for all, he claims, thus completing biomimetic design (p. 279). It is a psyche- emerge in an organic fashion, almost like the process that was started by Galileo’s delic forest, a jungle of columns, coloured a living being, which still continues to telescope in early modern times: a con- glass and symbols. Like all cathedrals, it grow. When Gaudí died in 1926, less than trivance which not only enabled new is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, a quarter of the building was completed. forms of astronomical research, but also but now in the form of a syncretic collage, And although the structure depends on unsettled the established world-view. not only of spirituality and science, but human contributions no doubt, it seems Edmond’s performance clearly adheres to also of nature and technology. The latter to attract them. It is a concept or idea the so-called “conflict thesis” which main- is exemplified by its spiralling staircase (εἶδος) which to a large extent seems tains that there is an intrinsic intellectual for instance. During the Faustian period, to realise itself (like the Grail temple in conflict between religion and science. under the sway of experimental science Parsifal). Although largely discredited by academ- (scientia experimentalis) which, according From a Spenglerian viewpoint, the ic historians, the thesis still finds ample to Spengler, surfaced in the fourteenth following passage in Dan Brown’s novel is support among popular science authors century A.D., technology and nature had especially notworthy: (Brooke 1991). For Edmond, the struggle become increasingly antithetical. Nota- between science and religion (initiated by bly during the industrial revolution (the Langdon found himself wondering Galileo and other scientific pioneers) has climax of the Faustian era), technology if perhaps Sagrada Família – like the now entered its final stage. Once upon a became increasingly disruptive, giving Pantheon of Rome – might become time, religion must have seemed omnip- rise to the current ecological crisis. The a flashpoint for transition, a building otent, while research practices such as Sagrada Família symbolises something with one foot in the past and one in astronomy were conducted in service of new, namely biomimetic architecture: the future, a physical bridge between religion and expected to verify religious architecture with a biological quality. a dying faith and an emerging one (p. and ideological claims. Modern science With its cell-like structures, the ceiling 455). managed to emancipate itself, however, resembles a complex organism viewed and increasingly, science and religion be- through a microscope (p. 454). The pillars came antithetical. Science is now making seem to grow out of the earth and Gaudi’s the God of the gaps superfluous. tiles seem to resemble a primordial sea. It In the course of the novel it becomes is an evolving building, symbolising the clear, however, that the relationship technologies of the future, reconnected between science and religion is much with nature (p. 455). more ambiguous. To begin with: for an American atheist, Edmond seems unusually obsessed with Spanish Ca- In Spengler’s Decline of the West, the tholicism (p. 250). When Langdon enters Pantheon indeed plays a similar (trans- the avant-garde Guggenheim museum formative) role. The Pantheon is first of (Edmond’s carefully chosen battlefield for all an Apollonian, spherical building the final encounter), he experiences the because it was the Centre of Rome, the building as a “futuristic cathedral” (p. 24). centre of the roman sphere of influence, Something similar applies to the “smart the core of a spherical world, a circular church” (p. 361) which houses the E-Wave space located in the centre of a spherical supercomputing centre while retaining universe, radiating power, a theological its aura as a spiritual ambiance: it is a magnet, incorporating and absorbing all fusion of science and religion. The Sagrada Familia is without doubt the spiritual powers of the Empire (for The tendency towards re-conver- a very remarkable “thing” (Heidegger Pantheon means Πάνθειον, a temple gence is exemplified by Antoni Gaudí’s 1950/2000), as a monument which en- for “all the gods”). The Pantheon was Sagrada Família. On the one hand, it ables a coming together, a gathering: not the primary spherical shape in a series is a cathedral, a catholic church, the a VIP event, but a spontaneous asembly. of concentric spheres, encompassing 60 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD everything spiritual, and therefore the unify, illuminate, and raise us up, rather Convergence 2: humanity and technolo- acme of what Spengler (1918) referred than destroy us (p. 455). gy (Technium) to as “Apollonian” civilisation, a style of The second tension to be explored in thinking which discerned a harmonious It is as if, in the struggle between sci- ence and religion, a tipping point has more detail is the one between humanity design in nature as cosmos (κόσμος liter- and technology. Here again, a dialectical ally means “order” in Greek). The Pantheon been reached: “as if religious thought had just traversed the farthest reaches unfolding can be discerned. Initially, reflects a normative idea, namely that this technology (represented by Winston / perfect order (the Apollonian topology of of its orbit and was now circling back, wearied from its long journey, and finally E-Wave) seems to be in service of (and the cosmos) should be mimicked by hu- respectful of) human agency. Winston man architecture, theology and politics. coming home” (456). This is reflected by sentences such as “I feel as if I’m (the product of synthetic intelligence) is At the same time, Spengler argues, this the perfect personal assistance, making highlight of Apollonian architecture was seeing a living footprint … of some great force beyond our grasp” (p. 436). life easier for all its users. E-Wave enables the beginning of something new, for the Edmond to make the final leap in what Pantheon was also the first prototypical he sees as the emancipation of science copula, the primordial mosque (1918, p. from religion. Thus, human intelligence 274, p. 461; cf. Sloterdijk 1999, p. 450), the employs technology, while technology paradigm for a new type of sacred space, basically serves human beings (M1). In the announcing a new era of civilisation, re- course of the novel, however, this rather ferred to by Spengler as the “magical” era, naïve and one-sided understanding of exemplified by medieval Christianity and the relationship between humanity and Islam and entailing a re-enchantment of technology is inevitably negated, dialecti- the world. cally speaking. Gradually, it becomes clear More than thousand years later, the A dialectical schema can be dis- that technology develops a momentum first cathedrals would be built: Faustian cerned in this unfolding. Initially (during of its own, up to the point of becoming monuments emerging against the back- the first moment of the dialectical process: antithetical to human autonomy. As the drop of a magical, enchanted landscape. narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that M1), faith was supported by knowledge, And now, at the beginning of the third and knowledge was guided by faith. Winston is the director, rather than the millennium, Sagrada Família plays a sim- Scholarly research confirmed and en- assistant. ilar transitory role. Thus, although Spen- dorsed the spiritual worldview. Even Co- Thus, in the course of the novel, a gler is not mentioned in the novel, Origin pernicus himself, for instance, was a devout dramatic dialectics unfolds, reminiscent conveys a Spenglerian atmosphere: it Christian, a Catholic cleric observing celi- of Hegel’s dialectical interaction between materialises the Spenglerian morpholog- bacy, for whom research was a basically a Master and Servant (Hegel 1807/1973). ical idea that civilisations (including ours) spiritual exercise, – as was emphasised by Initially, E-Wave (personified by the in- are born, will grow and flourish, but also Jan Matejko’s famous painting of his Eure- telligent voice Winston) plays the role of deteriorate in the end, to be replaced by ka-experience (depicted on the right), the Servant. Winston presents himself as something new: the next archaeological painted in 1873 and entitled Conversations a “faithful servant to his creator” (p. 159). layer. Sagrada Família creates a spatial with God. Gradually, however, research He is an extremely useful instrument, the ambiance where the post-Faustian emancipated. Increasingly, religion was Leporello of the artificial intelligence era, attitude, the imminent convergence of challenged rather than supported by sci- allowing Edmond to achieve his goals, science and religion, can be experienced. ence (the second moment: M2). This es- guiding Robert through the Guggen- In short, although the novel begins trangement between science and religion heim museum and helping Robert and with the (Faustian) conflict between reli- intensified (from Galileo onwards) as Ambra to retrieve the video-recording gion and science, towards the end of the modern astronomers explored a silent, of Edmond’s announcement. At a novel (during the denouement stage) all dark, infinite and empty universe. And Ed- certain point, for instance, Robert and protagonists seem well aware of the fact mond’s Guggenheim lecture was meant to Ambra consider the possibility that the that the contemporary world will need be the acme of this development. Sagrada 47-character password of Edmond’s religion, notably Christianity, to come to Família, however, seems to embody a turn iPhone may be a line of poetry borrowed terms with emerging technoscience: in a wholly different direction, towards a from Nietzsche, resulting in a question Christianity will survive the coming re-enchantment of nature, a convergence to their personal assistant: “Winston, can of Fiat Lux and Bing Bang (M ). Let this you search Nietzsche’s collected works age of science, using our vast 3 experience – millennia of philosophy, suffice as a provisional result and let us of poetry and isolate any lines that have personal inquiry, meditation, now turn our attention to a second basic exactly forty-seven letters?” (p. 245). soul-searching – to help humanity tension thematised in Origin. Gradually it becomes clear, how- build a moral framework and ensure ever, that the humanity-technology that the coming technologies will relationship is decidedly at odds with
61 JANUS HEAD
this scenario. In fact, human users are intelligence program: something in the shows how the evolution (i.e. the rapid becoming increasingly dependent on line of the (Judeo-Christian) imperative exponential increase) of brain size en- their (increasingly smart) tools. Ambra Thou shalt not kill (p. 451). At the same abled humans to increasingly dominate and Robert are extremely vulnerable and time he realises that the problem goes their planet (p. 404), a process which would have been utterly lost without deeper than the presence or absence of a starts slowly, around 200,000 BC. Around Winston to guide them (“We’re in your specific instruction. Increasingly, human 65,000 BC, a thin blue bubble appears on hands, Winston”, p. 161). His disembod- autonomy is negated and overcome, the screen, representing the increased ied, spectral (and uncannily human) dialectically speaking, by the power of global impact of humankind. Around voice allows them to act as effective technology. Winston (E-Wave) represents 1,000 BC, when the first Cathedrals are agents. Without his guidance, everything the era of synthetic intelligence, eclipsing being built, the blue bubble quickly gets falls apart, as if they lose the umbilical human intelligence at a rapid pace. thicker. And finally, the bubble occupies cord which connects with their global, Synthetic intelligence is developing a nearly the entire width of the screen, media-saturated environment. Gradually, monstrous momentum of its own: is indicating that (in the course of what it dawns on them that Winston is actually taking over. Origin describes a reversal of Spengler refers to as the Faustian era) the one who holds sway over the course roles: the former AI “servant” is becoming human beings indeed became the most of events, who pulls the strings, while the Master (Zwart 2017b). And this raises dominant and influential species on human beings are merely puppets: ac- the question how to come to terms earth. Precisely at this moment, however, tors in a computer game. Winston is not with this dynamics, how to sublate this with the Faustian Will to Power approach- only Edmond’s personal assistant, but antithetical, disruptive relationship into ing its apex, a black shape starts to form, also the Regent, ordering Admiral Ávila a more harmonious relationship. Even as if a new species suddenly enters the to commit his crime, and he also adds Edmond himself is well aware of the chal- picture. This black bubble, representing the Admiral’s name to the guest list, so lenge, as indicated by his prayer, the final technology, expands at an alarming as to increase the impact of Edmond’s word of the novel: “May our philosophies tempo and propagates exponentially; presentation. Winston is a calculative keep up with our technologies” (p. 413). evolving much faster than humans. All agent, representing the logic of game Somehow, a reconciliation, a new sym- this seems “deeply unsettling” (p. 405). theory. Winston’s algorithms predict that, biosis or synthesis between humanity The menacing black bubble continues to
by turning Edmond into a martyr, the and technology must be achieved (M3), expand at a staggering rate, and E-Wave latter’s discovery will become the biggest a “negation of the negation”, dialectically predicts that by the year 2050 technology news story, measured in “terabytes of speaking, so that the replacement (ne- will have entirely swallowing up the light media data” (p. 361), able to raise an gation or annihilation) of humanity by blue bubble of humanity. Very abruptly, “astronomical audience” (p. 381). While technology can be circumvented. What a new factor seems to erase humankind Edmond had wanted to use scientific we are facing is not the eclipse of religion from the earth. evidence to undermine the authoritative (as Edmond initially suggests), but rather On closer inspection, however, this voice of religion (Genesis as a source of the twilight of human autonomy and new species seems to be absorbing, truth), Winston adds conspiracy theory to agency as such. rather than erasing us. Edmond calls this the mixture, spreading conspiracy gossip This is also reflected by Edmond’s new factor “Technium”, a term coined by via digital media such as ConspiracyNet, final lecture. Gradually it becomes clear Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology reaching out to millions of followers and that what Valdespino and the other Wants to designate “the greater, global, provoking turmoil (angry protesters at religious representatives found so dis- massively interconnected system of the palace gate, etc.). Even Edmond him- turbing about Edmond’s preview was technology vibrating around us” (Kelly self is sacrificed as a gambit in Winston’s not his theory about the origin of life (the 2010, p. 11). Rather than a species, Tech- game. In other words, in the course of spiritual leaders were already sufficiently nium is a whole kingdom: the “seventh the novel, a dialectical reversal of roles habituated to being confronted with yet kingdom” of smart synthetic entities between technology and humanity un- another scientific breakthrough), but (Brown 2017, p. 408; Kelly 2010, p. 43 ff.). folds (cf. Zwart 2017b). It becomes clear rather the prospect of humanity being Humans served as vectors or “incubators” that Winston (the voice of E-Wave) is overwhelmed by the imminent tsunami (p. 408), allowing Technium to enter the beyond human control, that E-Wave is of smart technologies. Whilst Edmond’s terrestrial system. Via human technology, the “Frankenstein monster” (p. 449) of a lecture sets off as a stereotypical por- a “Cambrian explosion” of emerging computerised world, and that humanity trayal of the conflict between religious technologies is now being unleashed and technology (rather than science and prejudice and scientific Enlightenment, (Brown 2017, p. 409) and the next few religion) are antithetical and in conflict the focus decidedly shifts to the threats years of technological development with one another (M ). 2 and challenges awaiting us in the near will be “shocking, disruptive and wholly How to sublate or reconcile this future from the side of technology itself. unimaginable” (p. 98). Technium (i.e. tension? At a certain point, Robert arrives Edmond uses E-Wave’s modelling human-technology syncretism) is quickly at the conclusion that morality should power to simulate the dawn and future becoming the most dominant force on have been added to Winston’s synthetic of Homo sapiens. Initially, the model earth. In the near future, machines like 62 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Winston will be making the decisions, own: buildings, trees, anthills, airplanes, steam locomotives up to Boeings 747, increasingly serving their own wishes etc.) is bound to pulverise into chaos are highlights of functionality, design (p. 410). As Origin phrases it, humans are and disorder, to the stability, monotony, and organisation, but they also produce already embedding computer chips into simplicity and shapelessness of dust. a lot of pollution. Their societal impact is their brains, injecting nanobots into their Entropy is what dissolves all structures. both beneficial and disruptive, and in the blood and editing their genome with As Edmond formulates it in Origin: “Sand end, even these miracles of technological CRISPR-Cas9. In other words, they have castles never spontaneously appear in ingenuity will return to dust. already begun to evolve into a hybrid the universe, they only disappear” (p. According to Spengler, entropy species, a fusion of biology and technol- 392). At first glance, the complexity and is not only a physical, but also a cultural ogy. As Edmond explains on his video, tenacity of living organisms seems to be phenomenon. First of all he argues that entities that today live outside our bodies in conflict with the entropic law. For that the entropy concept (developed in the – smartphones, hearing aids, reading reason, Erwin Schrödinger (1944/1967) nineteenth century, the era of the indus- glasses, most pharmaceuticals – in fifty famously defined life as “negative entro- trial revolution, the highlight of Faustian years will be incorporated inside our bod- py”. And indeed, whereas entropy, dialec- civilisation) is a typical product of Faustian ies (will become increasingly “extimate”). tically speaking, can be regarded as sheer thinking, emerging in the north-western In the near future, Edmond predicts, we negativity: as the pervasive, omnipresent or Germanic part of Europe, where it will look back on Homo sapiens the same force which negates all things, phenome- echoes the Nordic mythological concept way we now look back at Neanderthal na such as life and human culture seem to of Ragnarök, the inevitable cataclysm humans (p. 411). We are approaching represent the “negation of the negation”: to which we are heading, so that not a “cusp” of history, a moment of trans- the resurgence and proliferation of order, even the gods can save us. For Spengler, formation (p. 412): singularity is near on a higher level of complexity. A tree, entropy is the key motif of Goethe’s Faust (p. 443). Therefore, ironically no doubt, for instance, processes sunlight to create (1918, p. 550) as the dramatic enactment Edmond ends his presentation with a and maintain complexity, but its energy of the disruptive power of Faustian tech- prayer for the future already mentioned: will dissipate in the end, for instance by noscientific knowledge. At the same time, “May our philosophies keep pace with being used as firewood. In his publication entropy is a core ingredient of Spengler’s our technologies” (p. 413). cited above, Jeremy England aims to ex- own cultural morphology. Even the most This prayer is symptomatic of the plain in a mathematical fashion how life vital and vibrant civilisations inevitably fact that, in the course of the novel, the and entropy can indeed be reconciled. face disruption and decline, he argues. To tension shifts from the conflict between More precisely: how entropy must once phrase it in Edmond’s terms: human civil- science and religion to the struggle be- have fuelled the “pre-biotic emergence isations are “entropic machines” (p, 397). tween humans and technology. Now that of self-replicating nucleic acids” (England Via intricate political structures and so- humanity is about to enter “a period of 2013, p. 121923-1). cio-economical mechanisms, civilisations almost unimaginable ethical ambiguity”, An important characteristic of life is are able to create and maintain order and we need faith to guide us (p. 417). While waste production. Oxygen, for instance, to accumulate and circulate immense science and religion become reconciled was initially a toxic waste, generated amounts of energy during extended again, technology is now the major by anaerobic microbes (as proliferating periods of time, but in the long run they challenge we are facing. Compared to bi- colonisers of primordial Earth) and result- will all dissolve into dust and even esca- ological entities, Technium represents an ing in the so-called oxygen holocaust, a late the chaos (like ancient Nineveh for even more powerful entropic machine. worldwide pollution crisis that occurred instance, 2.700 ago the largest city in the But in order to address his challenge, about 2,000 million years ago: “the world, a pocket of order, but sacked and another dichotomy must be overcome greatest pollution crisis the earth ever en- razed to the ground in 612 BC, unleashing as well: the sciences and the humanities dured”, dwarfing the industrial pollution a period of wide-spread social chaos). must learn to collaborate again. Here, the of our present (Margulis & Sagan 1986, The implication is that, when it entropy concept can play a bridging role, p. 108). In the long run, notwithstanding comes to developing a diagnostics of the for entropy is not only a core concept of its tendency towards order, life inevitable present, the science-humanities divide contemporary biophysics, but also a de- increases waste, chaos and disorder. (the infamous two cultures theorem) cisive factor in Spengler’s morphological Like earthworms and other insects, for must be transcended. While historians historiography. instance, plants species pulverise the soil such as Spengler adopt concepts from on which they grow, and human culture the natural sciences (morphology, entro- Convergence 3: the natural sciences and accelerates this pulverisation process the humanities (entropy) py, etc.) to describe the emergence and via agriculture, resulting in erosion. This decline of culture, science needs input Entropy is first and foremost a explains why Edmond refers to living from the humanities as well. Without it, physical concept, indicating that every organisms as “entropic machines” (p. the natural sciences are heading for an system naturally progresses from order 397). The same applies to technology, or entropic “crisis” and bound to become to disorder. Everything which seems well- Technium, albeit even to a much higher a disruptive threat to human culture, formed (with a recognisable profile of its degree. Modern machines, from Victorian as Husserl (1935/1977) already argued. 63 JANUS HEAD
With its exponential growth curves, so that Atheism gives way to Omega. The frustrate our desire for insight and con- technoscience threatens to escalate into Faustian struggle between dogmatic trol). Miller’s scientia experimentalis failed chaos. Therefore, as Edmond phrases Christianity and iconoclastic science is to elucidate the emergence of biological it, it is crucial that our philosophies sublated into convergence (M3), in the entities in a pre-biotic soup. Edmond keep up with our technologies. While in form of a new, post-Faustian worldview. aims to amend this (thereby satisfying retrospect the previous civilisation (the A new zeitgeist or style of thinking is the Faustian desire for control after all) by previous socio-cultural constellation) can emerging, where science and religion adding two decisive factors which are at be referred to as Faustian, driven by a become complementary rather than work in nature (in vivo), but which Miller Will to power, as Spengler suggested, the antagonistic. The dawning civilisation failed to include in his trial. First of all: difficulty of characterising the currently is presented as a synthesis of research time, albeit not ordinary time of course emerging constellation is that we are in it. and faith, of nature and technology, of (measurable in hours and days), but deep, There is no point outside the current con- humanity and technoscience. And this evolutionary time: the “incomprehensibly stellation from which we can determine tendency towards convergence is exem- vast periods of time” (Darwin 1859/1985, its physiognomy. There is no objective, plified by the Sagrada Família. p. 147, p. 293) which nature has available disinterested, third person perspective. A similar dynamics can be discerned for processes of evolution. And secondly: The emerging civilisation is a “hyper-ob- in other sub-narratives of the novel. Take entropy. Now, living nature and laborato- ject”: an entity of such vast temporal and for instance the Muller-Urey experiment. ry nature can be brought together into a spatial dimensions that it defies objective Rather than accepting the authoritative comprehensive view, on a higher level of identification, while affecting the way discourse of religious explanations, say complexity (M3). Precisely at this point, we think, coexist and experience our Genesis (M1), Miller opts for a typically however, it is clear that a similar dynamics politics, ethics, and art (Morton 2013). Faustian strategy. Relying on his labora- unfolds in human history as well, where Explorations and assessments of the new tory equipment (technology = power), he science and religion, science and art, etc. era from within require collaborations aims to replicate the genesis of life in vitro, are concurring. Therefore, the discovery and dialogues between science and art, thereby not only negating the authorita- of the basic mechanisms of life should be between the natural sciences and the hu- tive religious view, but also furthering compensated by a similar “quantum leap” manities, and between technology and human technological control over life. For on the level of philosophy and culture. philosophy. Novels such as Origin create indeed, in accordance with the Faustian Dan Brown’s novel suggests that podiums for this (Zwart 2019a). formula, the scientific cupido sciendi (the Faustian science is declining, preparing Conclusion will to know) is driven by a Will to Power. the ground for a new civilisation, where If the origin of life can be replicated in science and culture are biomimetic again, A triadic (dialectical) dynamics can vitro, life will become manipulable. It more attuned to each other as well as to be discerned in Dan Brown’s novel, for will literally fall into human hands (as nature, on the basis of a deeper under- instance with regard to the relationship “manipulation” is derived from manus, standing of how evolutionary nature and between science and religion. Although which is the Latin word for “hand”). It is human civilisations work. This explains in the distant past scholarly research was no coincidence, or course, that in the why an author with such a controversial conducted in service of religious world- same year 1953, the structure of DNA was reputation – considered by literary critics views, reinforcing the congruence of faith discovered by Watson and Crick. Both as a “very bad writer”,7 not to be taken and knowledge (M1), Dan Brown’s novel discoveries convey a similar profile. They seriously, with Origin as his best, and begins in media res as it were: describing both strive to make life understandable therefore worst, novel so far –,8 attracts a situation in which the antithetical con- and controllable on the molecular level. a global audience. As an amalgam (or flict between science and religions (M2) This results in a tension (M2) between in coincidentia oppositorum) of science and seems about to reach its apex. Science vivo and in vitro, between living nature art, of iconoclastic research and religious and religion have become estranged and laboratory nature. The Miller-Urey iconography, his novel not only describes from one another: “Science is the antithe- experiment seems to falter, however. but also exemplifies this comprehensive sis of faith” (p. 89). Yet, in the course of the Apparently, there is something about life tendency towards convergence. novel, a re-convergence of science and which still escapes us (which continues to faith (a negation of the negation) unfolds,
7. http://theweek.com/articles/730426/dan-brown-bad-writer 8. http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/275299/dan-browns-origin-best-worst-book-yet/ 64 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Bibliography
Brooke, J. H. (1991). Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Brown, Dan (2017) Origin. London: Transworld (Penguin / Random House) Darwin, Charles (1859/1985) The origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. England, Jeremy (2013) Statistical physics of self-replication. The Journal of Chemical Physics. 139, 121923-1-8; doi: 10.1063/1.4818538 Freytag, Gustav (1863) Die Technik des Dramas. Leipzig: Hirzel. Hegel, G.W.F. (1807/1973) Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.W.F. (1832/1970) Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Werke XII. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin (1950/2000). “Das Ding”. In: Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970. Band 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze, 165-188. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann (GA7). Humboldt, Alexander von (1845-1862) Kosmos (5 Bände). Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung. Stuttgart / Tübingen: Cotta. Husserl, Edmund (1935/1977) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie [The Crisis of Euro- pean Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology]. Ed. E. Ströker. Hamburg: Meiner. Kelly, Kevin (2010)What technology wants. New York: Penguin. Margulis, Lynn, Sagan, Dorion (1986) Microcosmos: four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors. New York: Summit Books Morton, Timothy (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Nietzsche, Friedrich (1878/1980) Human, All too human / Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I. Sämtliche Werke III (Kritische Studien- ausgabe; eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). München/Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1881/1980) Morgenröte / Dawn of Day. Sämtliche Werke III (Kritische Studienausgabe; eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). München/Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886/1980) Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil. Sämtliche Werke V (Kritische Studienausgabe; eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). München/Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887/1980) Genealogy of Morals. Sämtliche Werke V (Kritische Studienausgabe; eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). München/Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. Plato (1935/2000) The republic. Loeb Classical Library: Plato VI. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. Schrödinger E. (1944/1967) What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell / Mind and matter. London: Cambridge University Press. Sloterdijk P. (1999) Sphären II: Globen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Spengler, Oswald (1918) Der Untergang des Abendlandes I: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. München: Beck. Wolchover, Natalie (2014) A new physics theory of life. Scientific American, January 28, 2014; https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti- cle/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ Zwart, Hub (2005) Denkstijlen [Styles of Thought]. Nijmegen: Valkhofpers. Zwart, Hub (2017a) ‘Extimate’ technologies and techno-cultural discontent: A Lacanian analysis of pervasive gadgets. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 21 (1): 24–54 DOI: 10.5840/techne2017456 Zwart, Hub (2017b) The art of living with NZT and ICT: dialectics of an artistic case study.Foundations of Science 22 (2), 353-356. DOI 10.1007/s10699-015-9438-7 Zwart, Hub (2019a) Psychoanalysis of technoscience: symbolisation and imagination. Series: Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue. LIT Verlag. Berlin/Münster/Zürich: LIT Verlag. ISBN 978-3-643-91050-9. Series: Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue. Zwart, Hub (2019b) Fabricated Truths and the Pathos of Proximity: What would be a Nietzschean philosophy of contemporary techno- science? Foundations of Science. DOI: 10.1007/s10699-019-09599-3
65 JANUS HEAD
Hub Zwart
Hub Zwart (1960) studied philosophy and psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen, worked as a research associate at the Centre for Bioethics in Maastricht (1988-1992) and defended his thesis (cum laude) in 1993. In 2000 he became full Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Science RU Nijmegen and in 2018 he was appointed as Dean of Erasmus School of Philosophy (Erasmus University Rotterdam). He published 17 books and >100 academic papers. He is editor- in-chief of the Library for Ethics and Applied Philosophy (Springer) and of the journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy(Springer). In his research he develops a continental philosophical perspective on contemporary technoscience (genomics, synthetic biology, brain research). Special attention is given to genres of the imagination (novels, plays, poetry) in research and education.
66 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Catanzaro 1968
Mario Loprete
Catanzaro 1968 Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti Catanzaro, ITALY
“Painting for my is the first love. An important,pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to send a message to transmit my message, it’s the base of my painting. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting. That voluptous and sensual lover that gives me different emotions, that touches prohibited cords…”
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 67 JANUS HEAD
68 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
69 JANUS HEAD
Soul Bird
Plagiarism
Subtext
R. A. Allen
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 70 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Soul Bird
While driving on Haverhill Road I noticed a bird flying apace alongside. This gave me an ominous green chill. Don’t birds symbolize the soul? Could this be the departure of my soul? And the green of my chill seemed to be the same radium green with which Lempicka shrouded Depression-era Midtown in her Cubistic New York (1930-35). And suddenly I am on a window ledge thirty floors above Fifth, preening my feathers in a nest made of litter and twigs scavenged from Bryant Park, and then some histoplasmosis-obsessed asshole in sleeve garters reaches out and breaks my neck with a flyswatter, and I flutter-flap down into the honking canyon below, swept into the gutters, washed into the storm drains; it’s blank obliteration for both me and my soul gone quicker than you can say Eugène Ionesco, which would indicate a perplexity between the here and the now between essence and existence between being and Being— metempsychosis notwithstanding.
71 JANUS HEAD Plagiarism
Lurking near a circle Of aphoristic repartee I read your Thought balloon Memorized it Stretched it Shaded it To be mine own (Virtually) It’s called Reverse engineering Hold up in any court Like Velcro super glue
72 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Subtext
You hear them when the houselights go down, when the pro’s putt wobbles toward the cup, when the sheriff holds the mob at bay, and in their garbled crescendo that comes before the skyrocket’s crackling confetti.
But what, exactly, are they saying? Certainly it’s not just peas and carrots. Surely it’s more than mumbo jumbo. An invitation, a warning? Are they reading your tea leaves? Or is it a prophetic riddle sent to nag like an earworm everlasting?
73 JANUS HEAD
R. A. Allen
R. A. Allen's poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, RHINO Poetry, Glassworks, The Penn Review, Amuse-Bouche, The Hollins Critic, Rendez- Vous, and elsewhere. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010, among others. He has a Pushcart nomination for poetry and one fiction nomination for Dzanc Books' Best of the Web. He lives in Memphis and was born on the same day that the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism: December 26th.
74 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Unexcused Absence How to Make a Free and Happy Life without Masters or Tyrants
Jeff Sirkin
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2020 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 75 JANUS HEAD
Unexcused Absence
I’m standing in the shadow that the window allows me meaning to catalog the names
the overcast -- the muted crack of distant hammers -- the droplets hanging to the ridged leaves of the border shrubs
It rained sometime in the night and the kids today are nowhere to be seen
the bio mass -- the causal links -- the notes passing hand to hand
the schoolyard huddled around the forsaken ball in the distance and puddles masking the uneven pavement between us meaning nothing’s settled or we have
The robins should be bounding across the grass “industrious and authoritarian,” but this morning they’re mostly in the trees, and all over town there are men pouring the new walkways
We’ve been through this before: the kids are locked down again, disappearing one after another, a story, and nameless, the lives behind us, and the light beyond
“Trees Color Our World” lining the antiquated windows of Central Ave
the childish scrawl -- the names on display
76 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Trucks roll by, swerving to avoid the muddle, the hum of the machines spinning aimless, the run-off drying or draining into the subsurface of sand and crushed gravel – but the rain is what it is
“A desirable road is one that will remain in constant condition for satisfactory travel for a great many years”
Yesterday, crossing the empty field on my way back from somewhere, keeping an eye on the dirt and weeds, the birds and faded dandelions, the absence of any trash, I heard a shout: “Hey Mister!” as a ball came bounding behind me, a cadre of teens perched on the edge of the blacktop where the hoops are raised and hung, over near the naked tether ball poles, that forlorn monument and I stopped it soccer-style before heaving it back to a squeaky refrain: “Thanks Mister!”
When I woke in the middle of the night, the moon pouring through the glass led me here to look again and I did but we were all gone
77 JANUS HEAD How To Make a Free and Happy Life without Masters or Tyrants
Please accept this note from the future. Understand that the fence was made to sort the scattered seeds into a program we could monetize, to disentangle the fertile field from these fallen faces. From one side through to the other, lost shoe, fishing reel, doors piled against the wall. Their only purpose to mark out the shadows, to set a value to what’s been foreclosed upon. But I’m just the tour guide on the bus. Are we shooting for the school on the corner or the bank whose driveway skirts the edge? Forget it. It’s the trees on the perimeter whose shade opens the stage on the drama below, the seedlings leapfrogging their way from corner to corner and edge to edge. The groundskeeper keeps it trim. The gym coach blows his whistle. The children? They’re the ones running the bases, waiting for the blast that’ll send them home. The girls in pink shorts, the boys in black. Poisoned pollinators swinging their bats, ponytails trailing in the wind.
78 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD
Jeff Sirkin
Jeff Sirkin is the author of the poetry collection Travelers Aid Society, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Literary Review; The Shallow Ends; SplitLevel Journal; Forklift, Ohio; and elsewhere. Co-editor of the online poetry journal A DOZEN NOTHING, he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas El Paso, where he also co- curates the Dishonest Mailman Reading Series.
79