In This Issue of KRITIKE: an Online Journal of Philosophy

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) i-v

Editorial

In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

Paolo A. Bolaños

he Editorial Board of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy is happy to release the journal’s eighth edition, marking the culmination of T the year 2010. The essays in this edition tackle, in varying degrees but all of sterling quality, issues on language and hermeneutics, society and the problem of commodification, mediated psychopathy, education, postcolonial discourse, political resistance, the reception of critical theory, and also on more philological treatments of the works of Plato, Nietzsche, and Kant. The interdisciplinary character of these essays and the cross-pollination of theoretico-critical discourses demonstrated by them are not to be missed. The so called “linguistic turn” in Western philosophy has an indefinitely long and complex history. The phrase was itself coined by the Austrian philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle, Gustav Bergmann, during the early 20th Century, to refer to the philosophical study of language, understood by Analytic philosophers as propositional logic. This philosophical preoccupation with language, however, cuts through the Continental-Analytic divide. As a matter of fact, Plato already mentioned the significance of speech in philosophy in the Timaeus and also took issue with the normative character of names in the Cratylus. A similar concern about language reemerges during the 18th Century via the works of Johann Georg-Hamann, who analyzed the constitutive function of language in thought. This is followed through by the Hermeneutical tradition, championed by Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher. The philosophical study of language is carried over by more contemporary hermeneutical philosophers, especially Paul Ricoeur. The hermeneutics of symbols is the theme of the first essay, under the Articles section, written by Alexis Deodato S. Itao. At the outset of his paper, Itao attempts to recast Ricoeur as a “critical theorist” who is committed to a notion of “social transformation” and “progressive politics.” This, Itao does, not to undermine Ricoeur as a hermeneutical philosopher, but to argue that Ricoeur’s “critical theory” is grounded in his hermeneutics. In other words, with a hermeneutical philosophy based on the dialectical and constitutive role of language (expressions) in the formation of the subject, Ricouer, Itao maintains, is able to reinforce the critical stance of his project—one which veers away from a naïve conception of consciousness as immediate. Consciousness is never immediate because it is necessarily conditioned by language. Itao argues that this critical (suspicious) outlook on consciousness and language, far from a complete

ii IN THIS ISSUE OF KRITIKE denial, salvages the “symbolic” character of our conceptual “idols” (e.g., Cartesian Cogito); these symbolic images are the bases of any reflection, our “faith” in them allows us to recover meaning. Finally, Itao argues that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic suspicion over symbols could instigate reflection over the flighty contrast between “political passion” and “political vocation.” Meanwhile, Angelo Bottone’s “The Vanishing Mediator and Linguistic Hospitality” begins with an important insight from Ricoeur: translation is “a paradigm of the attitude towards the other.” This means that the ethical purpose of language becomes the normative basis for any kind of hospitality. Bottone’s aim, however, is to contrast Ricoeur’s statement to that of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, who thinks that Europe should act as the “interpreter of the world.” According to Bottone, the affinity between Ricoeur and Balibar is undeniable, but, nevertheless, there are important differences. The essay shows that language, more specifically the dynamics of languages in Europe, is at the centerpiece for both Ricoeur and Balibar. For Balibar, the main concern is about the construction of a form of democracy which could accommodate the various languages in Europe, which translate into the myriad of cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, and political positions. For his part, Ricoeur is concerned about the possible “mediation” of a polymorphous Europe. It is clear from Bottone’s discussion that both Balibar and Ricoeur are proposing a kind of “global” citizenship, wherein inclusivity, rather than exclusivity, is the normative ground. This inclusive gesture is only possible through a non-opprobrious ethico-political gesture that conditions the possibility of socio-political change, such as, the “vanishing mediator” (Balibar) or “linguistic hospitality” (Ricoeur). Nonetheless, the basic difference, according to Bottone, is that Balibar’s vanishing mediator argument tends towards a kind of nihilism of identity, crippling the very possibility of ethnic-to-ethnic dialogue; while Ricoeur acknowledges the ontological status, and, hence, the socio-political importance of dialogical interpretation wherein the very ethnicity of the interpreter becomes a starting point of true dialogue. In the third essay, Daniel Hourigan focuses on the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Diary; more specifically, on how the “violence of language” is illustrated in the novel; what is key, however, is how Hourigan shows the reflexivity of the style of Palahniuk, as the novel is presented as “a type of auto-critique of Palahniuk’s own systemic violence against traditional narrativisation that creates a unique system of relations between the reader and the story.” Hourigan notes that Palahniuk’s narrative style, “minimalist aesthetic,” resembles the Romantic tendency of accepting chaotic nature, the very substratum of civilization or our mundane everyday life. According to Hourigan, the critical performance of Palahniuk’s narrative is gleaned from his deviation from traditional narrative techniques to the use of experimental gestures, such as, repetition of key themes and intentional misspelling. Towards the end, Hourigan observes that the Diary is Palahniuk’s attempt to transgress a social code via a critical “misuse” of language. The essays “The Mystical Force of Money” by Edward Erikson and “Commodity, Sign, and Spectacle: Retracing Baudrillard’s Hyperreality” by

P. BOLAÑOS iii

Daryl Y. Mendoza share a common trajectory: the critique of the commodification of society initiated by Karl Marx. For his part, Erikson analyses the nature of money via a rereading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and Capital. To be more precise, Erikson veers away from the usual reading of these Marxists texts as Marx’s “scientific” studies of the money-form and, instead, presents a somewhat sophisticated hermeneutic that blurs the line between literary and scientific. Out of this rereading, Erikson wants to “un-cover the transformative force and violence implicit in the concept of money as the universal exchange form.” Erikson’s method is worth noting: a teasing out of the figurative language and literary tropes and their tensional relation to the scientific and descriptive language in Marx’s works. Aside from the tensional relation between the figurative and descriptive in the works of Marx, Erikson also shows how language itself functions to animate commodities, that is to say, inert commodities are given a human face through language. Mendoza, meanwhile, offers us a comprehensive reconstruction, in spite of the author’s caveat that his exposition is not in-depth, of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “hyperreality.” In the process of reconstructing the notion of hyperreality, Mendoza focuses on the semio-linguistic study of commodity, a move beyond the Marxist analytic. Mendoza seems to be arguing that Marx failed to analyze the linguistic basis of commodity fetishism. Moreover, Menodza shows that from a semio-linguist reading of the problem of commodity, more precisely, the prognosis of the proliferation of “sign” in society or the “complexification of the abstraction of the exchange form” or the construction of “social consciousness bombarded with images, amplified by Mass Media,” a relationship of “spectacle” is set in place, wherein socio- political relationships are reduced to “appearances” or “brand names and labels”—“subjects to objects, and subjects to other subjects.” Ultimately, what the essay of Erikson and Mendoza rehearse is the critical point also emphatically forwarded by neo-Marxists like George Lukács and Theodor Adorno: the continuous reification of society, where concrete objects are replaced by phantom labels. Roland Paulsen’s “Mediated Psychopathy—A Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Representations of Aggression” is a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of “psychopathy” from several standpoints: sociology, psychology, and philosophy. In order to narrate the story of the possible “ideological” content in the prevailing discourse on psychopathy, the author reconstructs the popular notion of psychopathy based on several accounts in newspapers. From this, the paper seems to be arguing that there is a tendency for the prevailing discourse to take the invariable nature of psychopaths as a given, thereby resulting in a “reified” image of aggression warranted by the language of biology and psychiatry. Paulsen makes a very good job in reconstructing the biological-psychiatric account of psychopathy and his use, albeit selective, of critical insights primarily from the Frankfurt School tradition is well-founded. The essay of Rhoderick John S. Abellanosa seeks to develop a reflexive-analysis of Richard Rorty’s philosophy of education via an exposition

iv IN THIS ISSUE OF KRITIKE of the latter’s “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching.” As a matter of fact, Abellanosa’s paper attempts more than just an exposition of Rorty’s philosophy of education. Quite implicitly, there is also the attempt to introduce some basic themes in Rorty’s oeuvre, such as, the nature of truth and knowledge, the reception of the Pragmatic tradition, and Rorty’s relation to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Abellanosa’s discussion of these basic themes in Rorty paints what he deems as Rorty’s philosophy of education. The overall thrust of the paper is the effort to contextualize Rorty’s view of education to counter the specious view that Rorty succumbs to vulgar relativism because of his relentless critique of the established articles of faith of traditional education. Rorty’s, Abellanosa notes, is an earnest attempt to subvert dogmatism by exposing the intricate relationship between the humanities and the sciences. At the end of the paper, it is argued that Rorty advocates a form of education oriented in the community, “a process which every individual must be involved in and take responsibility.” “Kant’s Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time- Consciousness, and the Unconscious” by Ben Mijuskovic addresses “the question concerning the ultimate premise of the Transcendental Analytic in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” Mijuskovic attempts to shed light on Kant’s notion of consciousness via Lebnizian lenses, highlighting consciousness’ dynamic quality, continuity, and unconscious aspects. The underlying theme of the paper is the phenomenon of human “loneliness,” and Mijuskovic speaks of loneliness within the context of the temporality of human consciousness and its psychological effects. According to Mijuskovic, “the epistemological status of temporal consciousness is inextricably intertwined with human consciousness,” which implies that the human soul is solitary, insular, and monadic, that is to say, the utter loneliness of man. Meanwhile, Kristian Urstad declares that, although there is no explicit mention of the name of Callicles, one of Plato’s characters in the Gorgias, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s corpus, there is strong evidence that some of the latter’s famous doctrines were inspired by imageries set forth by the character of Callicles in the dialogue. Urstad, then, presents a comparison between Nietzsche and Callicles, specifically, on their similar views on “happiness and its various components or relations,” such as, pleasure and courage. Urstad notes that both Callicles and Nietzsche regard happiness or the good life to be “marked by a significant amount of pain, discomfort, and labor.” They, however, differ in their conceptions of power. Nietzsche, for Urstad, offers a more comprehensive account of power. In “Narratives and the Dialogue of Cultures of Knowledge: A Perspective on the Experience of the West and Africa,” Uchenna Okeja recounts the tendency towards “dialogue” between cultures of knowledge in various academic fields, posing a kind of progress in academic fields. This tendency, according to Okeja, also involves a challenge: “This challenge is that of narratives of the various cultures of knowledge that have given birth to ossified discursive historicity that effectively operate behind the scenes of the dialogue.” The essay is, therefore, a problematization of the normative

P. BOLAÑOS v foundation of narrative (that is, telling a story about a group people) and dialogue (the attempt to bridge essentially different worldviews). Okeja seems to be arguing that the Western bias against black people lurks behind any attempt to describe the African people and their culture, as well as any attempt at a dialogical encounter; the latter is haunted by the subtle language of racism. Okeja concludes that the Western story about Africa—via the narratives of anthropology, literary people like Conrad, and philosophers like Kant—is a “testimonial” or “hermeneutical” injustice. Because each instance fail to listen to Africa and the African people. The last essay under the Articles section by Cetin Balanuye seeks to present a Deleuzian critique of two contrasting forms of political resistance in Turkey (particularly the widespread Islamization of Turkish society), between the composer Fazil Say and the daburka player Misirli Ahmet. As artists, the reactions of Say and Ahmet could be deemed as aesthetic; nonetheless, Balanuye argues that there is a stark difference between Say- and Ahmet’s aesthetic resistance to the degradation of political life in Turkey. According to Balanuye, while Say expresses his political misgivings through “expression- opinion,” Ahmet expresses his through “expression-becoming.” Following Deleuze, Balanuye argues that the political force of expression-becoming is more powerful compared to expression-opinion because the former is seen as the materialization of resistance via the artwork (where the artist becomes the artwork itself, thus, the very embodiment of resistance) while the latter could be deemed as an “escapist” gesture. The last piece in this issue, under the Denkbild section, is the third installment of F.P.A. Demeterio’s sixth-part Philosophical Fiction on “Critical Theory in the Philippines.” Demeterio’s “Elixirs and Fabulous Potions” is a continuation of the life-story of Peter Mariano, presented as a sub-story about the blatant commercialization of education in the Philippines. This sub-story focuses on the struggle of Faith Contreras-Fernandez, an Instructor of Industrial Chemistry, with the established status quo—a struggle Faith shares with many Filipino scientists—lack of funding from the government, the obliviousness of the present order to true scientific progress. To close this Editorial, I would like to express my gratitude to the following individuals who graciously helped out in the completion of this eight edition: my colleagues from the UST Department of Philosophy, Jonathan Villacorta, Tracy Ann Llanera, and Carlos Luz; Dr. Oscar Bulaong and Dr. Mark Calano of Ateneo de Manila University; Renato Manaloto of the University of the Philippines-Diliman; and Dr. Robert Sinnerbrink of Macquarie University, Australia. My gratitude also goes to Marella Ada Mancenido-Bolaños for her gentle reminders. Finally, on behalf of the KRITIKE Editorial Board, I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the UST Department of Philosophy, headed by Prof. Dr. Alfredo P. Co, for granting subsidy for the publication of future issues of the journal.

Department of Philosophy, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 1-17

Article

Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Symbols: A Critical Dialectic of Suspicion and Faith

Alexis Deodato S. Itao

Introduction

ritical theory, which started in Germany through the members of the Frankfurt School1 in the early 1920’s, has inspired a number of non- CGerman philosophical schools and philosophers to establish their own unique critical theories. Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), who is one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers in France, is one of those who fashioned a “unique version of critical theory.”2 David Kaplan reveals that Ricoeur is even “committed to a conception of philosophy as critical theory resulting in personal and social transformation and progressive politics.”3 However, Ricoeur’s philosophy as a whole has mainly been considered hermeneutical, that is, one concerned mostly with questions involving interpretation. Emerita Quito ascertains, for instance, that “Ricoeur’s entire philosophy finally centered on hermeneutics.”4 Likewise, Don Ihde confirms how hermeneutics eventually became the “guiding thread which unites” all of Ricoeur’s diverse interests.5 Indeed, Ricoeur devoted much of his writings in

1 Douglas Kellner relates that “the term ‘Frankfurt School’ refers to the work of the members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) which was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Under its director, Carl Grünberg, the institute’s work in the 1920s tended to be empirical, historical, and oriented towards problems of the European working-class movement.” “From the mid-1930s,” Kellner continues, “the institute referred to its work as the ‘critical theory of society’… [an] attempt to found a radical interdisciplinary social theory rooted in Hegelian-Marxian dialectics, historical materialism, and the critique of political economy and revolution theory.” See Douglas Kellner, “Frankfurt School and Philosophy,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 444-456. 2 David M. Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 7. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Emerita S. Quito, The Philosophers of Hermeneutics (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1990), 85. 5 Don Ihde, introduction to Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. by Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), ix-x.

2 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS dealing with the problems of hermeneutics. No wonder why he is one of the “giants of hermeneutic philosophy.”6 Since Ricoeur has largely been identified with hermeneutics, it is therefore without any surprise that he is very seldom associated with critical theory – a regrettable case since his hermeneutics actually holds the access to his critical theory.7 That is why Kaplan himself, who authors Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, laments how until today “very little attention has been given to [Ricoeur’s] conception of the relationship between hermeneutics and critical theory.”8 In line with Kaplan’s remark, this paper will explore the critical side of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics within the sphere of his interpretation of symbols. It is hoped that through this venture some of the aspects of the frequently ignored, disregarded, and forgotten relationship between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and critical theory, will be brought to light.

The Meaning of Symbols and the Need for Interpretation

To better appreciate the totality of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical project, it is important to begin with a brief acquaintance with his conception of man. Following Heidegger,9 Ricoeur conceived of man as a linguistic being whereby it is in and through language that man expresses himself and manifests his being; in other words, it is by means of language that man relates with other beings and with the world.10 “Man then,” Ricoeur contends, “seems to be no more than language.”11 The various linguistic expressions that man creates in a way define him. That is why, in general terms, language serves as the route to self-understanding.12 And yet, language itself poses some problems. No single language is simple; as it were, language by nature is complex. The vast array of words that constitute a certain language alone are by and large polysemic.13 In any case, Ihde recounts that “although every word is already latently rich in polysemy, for Ricoeur the hermeneutics of language centers upon certain

6 Don Ihde, “Paul Ricoeur’s Place in the Hermeneutic Tradition,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Illinois: Open Court, 1995), 59. 7 Cf. Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 7. 8 Ibid., 2. 9 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of the most important contemporary philosophers from Germany, known the world over for his contributions in the fields of phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and even theology. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (London: Harper and Row Publishing, 1972); idem, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 10 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 256. 11 Ibid., 265. 12 “Language… is mediation; it is the medium, the ‘milieu,’ in which and through which the subject (man) posits himself.” Ibid., 256. 13 “All words used in ordinary language have more than one meaning.” Ricoeur, “The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem,” in ibid., 76.

A. ITAO 3 privileged words, those of the symbolic word.”14 So there, “the location of the hermeneutic problem for Ricoeur takes its specific shape in words which have symbolic significance.”15 That explains why, in Ricoeur’s original16 usage, hermeneutics is primarily the interpretation of symbols. What, then, are symbols? In his own definition, Ricoeur stresses:

I define ‘symbol’ as any structure of signification in which a direct, primary, literal meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary, and figurative and which can be apprehended only through the first.17

At the outset, a symbol is any structure of signification because every symbol is a sign or a particular linguistic expression that expresses, conveys, or communicates a meaning.18 However, while every symbol is a sign, “not every sign is a symbol.”19 Whereas mere signs hold only manifest meanings, symbols on the contrary carry much deeper, latent meanings behind the patent ones. This is why opacity characterizes all symbols because their latent meaning is not directly manifested and hence, not immediately discernible. In any event, “this opacity constitutes the depth of the symbol”20 and indicates that every symbol is “an enigma” in the sense that they are something like a puzzle which challenges the interpreting intelligence to penetrate into its depth “slowly and with difficulty.”21 Moreover, a symbol’s indirect, secondary, and figurative meaning can be apprehended only through the first because its primary meaning is what serves as the gateway towards its secondary meaning.22 That means that symbols are those signs possessing double or even multiple meanings but whose latent meanings are accessible only by means of the patent ones.

14 Ihde, introduction to Ricoeur, ibid., xiv. 15 Ibid. 16 Paul Ricoeur later in his writings redefined hermeneutics from symbolic interpretation to textual interpretation. The over-all presentation of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in this paper, however, covers only his earlier conception of hermeneutics as “the interpretation of symbols.” Hence, this paper does not discuss hermeneutics as “the interpretation of texts.” For details on his later conception of hermeneutics, see Ricoeur, From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. by John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 17 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 13. All the words and passages rendered in italics in this paper are italicized by Ricoeur himself in the primary texts. 18 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 14. 19 Ibid., 15. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 16. 22 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 18.

4 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS

Going further, Ricoeur’s treatment of symbols eventually and inevitably leads to his treatment of interpretation because “where symbols are involved, interpretation becomes necessary.”23 Symbols and interpretation, so to speak, are “correlative concepts”24 inasmuch as “the symbol gives rise to thought.”25 So what is interpretation? Highlighting his very own definition, Ricoeur declares:

Interpretation… is the work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning.26

In plain language, interpretation is simply the process of deciphering the meaning of symbols. It arises out of the need to make sense out of symbols. Its goal is therefore to have the hidden meaning of symbols uncovered, brought to light, deciphered, and understood. That is why Ricoeur himself “decided to define, i.e. limit, the notions of symbol and interpretation through one another.” 27

The Hermeneutic Conflict: Suspicion versus Faith

Albeit every symbol calls for interpretation, no single method of interpretation is sufficient to completely uncover the real meaning of a symbol. “There is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis,” Riceour claims, “but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation.”28 As a result, there arises a conflict of interpretations. This conflict of interpretations represents two opposite polarities: on one pole, there is the hermeneutics that demystifies and reduces any form of illusions that cloud over the real meanings of symbols; on the other, there is the hermeneutics that seeks to recover and restore the real meanings of symbols. These two opposite polarities provide for hermeneutics as a whole a “double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.”29 Consequently, it is by virtue of their underlying motivations that the two opposite polarities are called the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of faith respectively. Thus on the whole there is in hermeneutics

23 Quito, op cit., 85. 24 “There is interpretation wherever there is multiple meaning, and it is in interpretation that the plurality of meanings is made manifest.” Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 13. 25 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 347. 26 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 13. 27 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 9. 28 Ibid., 26-27. 29 Ibid., 27.

A. ITAO 5 this double possibility: the possibility to interpret symbols with suspicion on one hand, and the possibility to interpret the same with faith on the other.30 The first possibility in hermeneutics then is to proceed with an “exercise of suspicion.” 31 But which particular symbol are we going to take as our starting point? Ricoeur avers that we begin our suspicion over consciousness itself, or more precisely, over the “so-called immediate consciousness.”32 The foremost reason behind is that immediate consciousness represents the problematic cogito or the self-asserting subject in the metaphysics of Descartes.33 The cogito, Ricoeur relates, is “mediated by the entire universe of signs.”34 Naturally, it is necessary to first take into account these signs before the cogito can assert itself. In other words, the only way for the cogito to fully comprehend itself is by “deciphering its expressions.”35 This means “that the short path of the intuition of the self by the self is closed… only the long path of interpretation of signs is open.”36 The main problem is that the cogito is a solipsistic and narcissistic subject. It claims that it can directly understand itself even if it bypasses its expressions.37 But as Ricoeur argues,

the pure act of the cogito, insofar as it posits itself absolutely, is only an abstract and empty truth, as vain as it is invincible. This positing of the cogito remains to be mediated by the totality of the world of signs and by the interpretation of these signs. This long detour is, precisely, suspicion.38

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 32. 32 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 18. 33 René Descartes (1596-1650), regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy, considers metaphysics as the core philosophical discipline upon which all the other sciences are rooted. His entire metaphysical project is encapsulated in the Latin expression he popularized: “Cogito, ergo sum” (literally “I think, therefore I am” but sometimes also translated as “I think, therefore I exist”). This assertion implies that insofar as the activity of thinking is present, there is existence. In other words, the existing individual is a thinking subject. That is why, in later references, the word cogito has simply come to mean “the thinking subject.” Now as a thinking subject, the cogito is at the same time a conscious subject, that is, one conscious of the fact that it exists. Consciousness is therefore characteristic of the cogito. Hence where there is the cogito, there is consciousness; similarly, where there is consciousness, there is also the cogito. That explains why consciousness represents the cogito. 34 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 265. 35 Ricoeur, “Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,” in ibid., 149. 36 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in ibid., 264- 265. 37 Ibid., 242. 38 Ibid., 244.

6 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS

The hermeneutics of suspicion, then, invalidates the cogito’s solipsistic claim of self-understanding. It likewise renders as “false consciousness”39 immediate consciousness because immediate consciousness is representative of the pretentious cogito. So what suspicion does is not really to deny the existence of consciousness but its immediacy, that is, “its pretension to know itself completely from the very beginning, its narcissism.”40 Three renowned thinkers, namely, Marx,41 Nietzsche,42 and Freud,43 had already considered immediate consciousness as false consciousness. Ricoeur hails them as “the three masters of suspicion” because they wanted “to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”44 The first master of suspicion was Marx. One of Marx’s goals was that of liberating the people from the bondage of religion. “Religion,” he argues, “is the opium of the people.”45 Because religion is such, it creates multifarious illusions in the minds of the people, making them believe that the miseries in life must be borne with resignation and serenity because salvation and glory await those who suffer without qualms. But in Marx’s belief, there is no glory in living a miserable life; it is an illusion to wait for a salvation that will never come. As such, life’s miseries must not be taken in kindly; rather, miseries are supposed to be eliminated from life and so, religion must be eliminated.46 Second was Nietzsche. Like Marx, Nietzsche also made his own critique against religion. “What Nietzsche wants,” Ricoeur remarks, “is the increase of man’s power, the restoration of his force.”47 For this reason, all that Nietzsche had for religion was contempt because all it does is to discourage men from attaining power and encourage them to be contented in weakness and fragility instead. Moreover, Nietzsche made it known that the so-called “virtues” that religion promotes like meekness, gentleness, humility, submissiveness, etc. are all plain reflections of “slave morality.”48 “Thus Nietzsche unmasked religion,” attests G.D. Robinson, “to reveal it as the refuge of the weak.”49

39 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., 18. 40 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in ibid., 324. 41 Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was an eminent German political philosopher whose writings inspired the main ideas of 20th century communism that first arose in Soviet Russia and subsequently in different parts of the world. 42 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was another German philosopher who became a huge influence to the tradition of existentialism. He was also popular for his criticisms against Christianity, most markedly for his widely-quoted dictum “God is dead.” 43 Sigmund Schlomo Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neuropsychologist most famous throughout the world as the founder of psychoanalysis or the psychoanalytic theory. 44 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33. 45 Karl Marx quoted by G.D. Robinson, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique,” in , 23 February 2008. 46 Ibid. 47 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 35. 48 G.D. Robinson, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique,” in , 23 February 2008. 49 Ibid.

A. ITAO 7

Last was Freud. Not unlike Marx and Nietzsche before him, Freud also lambasted religion. In his demystification of religion, Freud disclosed that it is no more than a mere outward show of men’s inner “nostalgia for the father”50 – for a father image who is always there to run to – and which indicates a deep-seated “desire for protection and consolation.”51 In other words, Freud believed that religion does not really offer something supernatural but only a natural “compensation for the harshness of life.”52 And so Ricoeur touched upon the three masters of suspicion not for their forthright criticisms against religion per se, but more because behind their criticisms, “all three begin with suspicion concerning false consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering.”53 Ricoeur thus credited Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for having given birth to the hermeneutics of suspicion. All three uniquely developed the hermeneutics of suspicion. Moreover, the hermeneutics of suspicion is also considered as a hermeneutics of demystification. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in fact “represent three convergent procedures of demystification.”54 But what the hermeneutics of suspicion demystifies and puts to light is not only the falsity of immediate consciousness but also the very thing which accounts for this falsity itself. By and large, what falsify consciousness are the layers of illusions and prejudices that mask the genuine cogito or the “ego of the ego cogito.”55 For this reason, the hermeneutics of suspicion involves “unmasking”, “reducing”, and “destroying” these various illusions “to deconstruct the false cogito, to undertake the ruin of the idols of the cogito.”56 As such, the hermeneutics of suspicion is also a form of “iconoclasm,” that is, the destruction and elimination of the presence of idols.57 All in all the whole point of this laborious exercise of suspicion is to show that immediate consciousness, the false cogito, “is at the same time true symbol.”58 “Thus the idols must die,” Ricoeur insists, “so that symbols may live.”59 Here, at end of suspicion, is the possibility of the hermeneutics of faith which aims at the recollection and recovery of meanings in symbols. The hermeneutics of faith, standing opposite to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is characterized by an attitude of openness and willingness to listen

50 Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 459. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 458. 53 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 34. 54 Ibid., 33. 55 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 17. 56 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in ibid., 242. 57 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27. 58 Ricoeur, “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 270. 59 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 531.

8 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS to what the symbols say.60 Ricoeur’s use of the word “faith” to designate this particular hermeneutics is intentional. As he explains,

The contrary of suspicion, I will say bluntly, is faith. What faith? No longer, to be sure, the first faith of the simple soul, but rather the second faith of one who has engaged in hermeneutics, faith that has gone criticism, postcritical faith… It is a rational faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks, through interpretation, a second naïveté. Phenomenology is its instrument of hearing, of recollection, of restoration of meaning. “Believe in order to understand, understand in order to believe” – such is its maxim; and its maxim is the “hermeneutic circle” itself of believing and understanding.61

Ricoeur thus clarified that the hermeneutics of faith is a hermeneutics whose operation is basically governed by the act of believing, or simply, by the belief that the symbol which calls for interpretation is saying something truthful, meaningful, and worthwhile. Obviously, no meaning can be recovered without the prior act of believing. That is why, the hermeneutics of faith is also known as the “hermeneutics of belief” because it is a hermeneutics that “hears”, or better yet, “listens to” the meaning given out by the symbol.62 Furthermore, this believing that is the mark of faith signifies not only listening and openness, but also “obedience” to what the symbol says.63 Thus it proceeds by restoring, recovering, and recollecting the real meaning of the symbol. This makes this hermeneutics in a way akin to the phenomenology of religion which deals with sacred symbols which are believed to be carriers of truth.64 The phenomenology of religion’s task includes the “restoration of the sacred;”65 as such, it demands faith in order to fulfill its task. Indubitably, it is solely by faith that the sacred symbols become the pathway to the Sacred, to the Wholly Other.66 Hence, the sacred symbols always call for belief. Aside from the phenomenology of religion, Ricoeur also modeled the hermeneutics of faith upon Rudolf Bultmann’s67 style of Biblical exegesis, that

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 28. 62 Ihde, introduction to Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, xxv. 63 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27. 64 Ibid., 30. 65 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 331. 66 Cf. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 530-531. 67 Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884-1976) was a noted German Protestant theologian and New Testament scholar. He was Heidegger’s colleague at the University of Marburg where both taught together in the early 1920’s. Bultmann remained in Marburg until 1951while Heidegger transferred to Freiburg in 1927.

A. ITAO 9 is, upon the hermeneutics of demythologization68 which “consists in a new use of hermeneutics… [by means of] boring under the literal meaning [of mythical symbols].”69 Primarily intended as a method of Biblical exegesis, demythologization is essentially an endeavor to capture the “kerygma” or the divine message found in Sacred Scriptures that needs proclamation.70 Essentially, the kerygma always demands to be listened to. For that, there is always a need for faith in order to fully heed its message. So like the phenomenology of religion and Bultmann’s demythologization, the hermeneutics of faith is a hermeneutics that is constantly attentive to symbols in order to recover, restore, and reinstate their real meanings. It is a hermeneutics that does not cease in believing and understanding that symbols continually offer a truth that needs to be obeyed, embraced, and cherished.

Reflection, Dialectic, and the Resolution of the Hermeneutic Conflict Deeper into his study of symbols, Ricoeur realized that,

the interpretation of symbols is worthy of being called a hermeneutics only insofar as it is a part of self- understanding and of the understanding of being; outside this effort of appropriating meaning, it is nothing. In this sense hermeneutics is a philosophical discipline.71

Hermeneutics, therefore, is not all about interpreting symbols; rather, “starting from symbols,” hermeneutics is a philosophical enterprise that aims at self-understanding.72 Hence, symbols call not only for interpretation, but also for “philosophic reflection”73 which seeks out an understanding of man

68 In his brief account of Bultmann’s hermeneutics, Richard Palmer laments that demythologization is quite “an unfortunate choice of term” because it somewhat suggests that in interpreting the Sacred Scriptures, one has to “bypass the mythical elements” therein when in truth demythologization considers in these mythical elements the original meaning of the Scriptures. That is why, Palmer emphasizes that demythologization, notwithstanding the unfortunate name it has come to be called, fulfills its true goal not in bypassing, not in doing away with, but in restoring, in recollecting, the real meaning of Scriptures mediated by means of various mythical symbols. See Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 48-52; Ricoeur for his part was equally aware how the word “demythologization” might easily be misunderstood. For that reason, he readily distinguished demythologization from demystification and clarified that the task of demythologization is the “restoration of the myth’s intention” rather than its destruction which is the task of demystification. See Ricoeur, “Preface to Bultmann,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 381-401. 69 Ibid., 389. 70 Ibid., 382. 71 Ricoeur, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., 30. 72 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” in ibid., 299. 73 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 38.

10 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS himself “according to symbols,”74 that is, in terms of the “signs [which] are the means, the milieu, and the medium thanks to which a human existent seeks to situate, project, and understand himself.”75 For that reason, Ricoeur maintains that “the intermediary step, in the direction of existence, is reflection, that is, the link between the understanding of signs and self-understanding.”76 To be specific, however, how does Ricoeur really define reflection? Highlighting its importance, Ricoeur asserts: “Reflection is the appropriation of our effort to exist and of our desire to be, through the works which bear witness to that effort and desire.”77 So reflection is primarily an appropriation, that is to say, an act of making one’s own, or simply, an act of owning, claiming, or taking hold. Ricoeur elucidates further:

The concept of appropriation signifies that the original situation from which reflection proceeds is “forgetfulness”; I am lost, “astray” among the objects of the world, separated from the center of my own existence… Whatever may be the secret of this separation, this diaspora, it signifies that I do not originally possess that which I am.78

From the explication above, the “effort to exist” and the “desire to be” appropriated in reflection mean only one thing: the ego, its truth, or its existence which the cogito has covered up and hidden. According to Ricoeur, “we term it effort in order to stress its positive energy and its dynamism; we term it desire in order to designate its lack and its poverty.”79 So “effort and desire” are two sides of the same coin. Reflection, therefore, is the process of grasping the ego “in its effort to exist or in its desire to be.”80 The most important point, however, is that

reflection is not intuition; or, in positive terms: reflection is the effort to comprehend the ego of the ego cogito in the mirror of its objects, its works, and ultimately its acts. Now, why must the positing of the ego be recomprehended through its acts? Precisely because the ego is not given in psychological evidence or in intellectual intuition or in mystical vision. A reflective

74 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 299. 75 Ricoeur, “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” in ibid., 169. 76 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., 16. 77 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 46; idem, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 329. 78 Ibid., 328-329. 79 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., 21. 80 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in ibid., 329.

A. ITAO 11

philosophy is precisely the opposite of a philosophy of the immediate. The first truth – I think, I am – remains as abstract and empty as it is unassailable. It must be “mediated” by representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments which objectify it; it is in these objects, in the largest sense of the word, that the ego must both lose itself and find itself.81

So self-understanding does not come via the direct route “of the intuition of the self by the self”82 because “understanding the world of signs is the means of understanding oneself; the symbolic universe is the milieu of self- explanation.”83 Reflection then operates by way of interpreting these signs, these various symbolisms that define man himself. This is the reason why “reflection must become interpretation” because the only access open to man in understanding himself is the pathway of symbolism.84 But then again, if reflection is to be equated with hermeneutics, the conflict of interpretations presents itself anew. On a positive note, however, “reflection will provide the structure for handling any hermeneutic conflict.”85 This structure is the triadic structure of “dispossession, antithetic, and dialectic”86 which represents the three stages of reflection based on the dialectic method of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).87 Dispossession – or “disappropriation”88 as Ricoeur would also say – parallels to Hegel’s notion of “thesis” although it holds a totally different meaning. At any rate, dispossession proceeds by shifting the “place and origin of meaning” from consciousness to the unconscious.89 The stage of

81 Ibid., 32; idem, Freud and Philosophy, 43. 82 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 264. 83 Ibid. 84 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 46. 85 Ibid., 42-43. 86 Ibid., 495. 87 Hegel’s dialectic of triads holds that every thesis – that is, any positive claim – always stands opposed by an antithesis – that is, a negative claim – so that there is always a resulting clash of opposites: thesis versus antithesis. In reality, however, Hegel maintained that it is only in its antithesis that a thesis finds its true meaning; similarly, it is only in its thesis that an antithesis can be fully understood. What Hegel was saying in effect is that a thesis and an antithesis are bound to each other by an underlying reciprocal relationship. Subsequently, the conflict between thesis and antithesis has to be reconciled by taking both as two inseparable parts of a whole. Thus a thesis and an antithesis are united to each other in a synthesis which ties them both together as one. In summary, Hegel’s dialectic of triads is the process by which a thesis is related to its antithesis, an antithesis to its thesis, by a synthesis which ends their opposition in their reconciliation. The meaning of dialectic hence, from Hegel’s perspective, is the bringing together of opposites into a relationship with each other. For a concise discussion of Hegel’s dialectic, see William S. Sahakian, History of Philosophy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 188-197. 88 Ricoeur, “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 172. 89 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 494.

12 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS dispossession makes use of the hermeneutics of suspicion where false consciousness is demystified and is no longer taken as the source and origin of meaning. On the other hand, in dispossession the hermeneutics of suspicion is employed for another task: that of going back towards the ego of the ego cogito by way of regression. As such, the stage of dispossession signifies a return to the arché, the original subject, the forgotten ego. Thus the hermeneutics of suspicion becomes “archaeology of the subject” in the stage of dispossession.90 The second stage of reflection is the antithetic stage which likewise parallels to Hegel’s “antithesis” from which Ricoeur obviously derived the name. If dispossession is the stage of suspicion, antithetic is also the stage of faith and concerned with “the return to the simple attitude of listening to symbols.”91 Notably, this stage shows how reflection truly runs contrary to intuition because it takes symbols as the starting point in its “reconquest of the truth of the concrete subject.”92 In other words, it carries on without losing “respect [to] the original enigma of symbols.”93 That is why this stage literally reinstates the real meanings of symbols. Then starting anew from symbols, it makes progression towards the “reappropriation of the true subject.”94 So this stage assigns another task to the hermeneutics of faith: that of bringing to the surface the telos of the subject according to the real meaning of the symbol by which it is deciphered. Hence in the antithetic stage, the hermeneutics of faith becomes “teleology of the subject.”95 The third stage of reflection is the stage of dialectic which holds “the key” to the resolution of the conflict of interpretations.96 This stage is so much like Hegel’s “synthesis” that brings about the reconciliation of the opposition between thesis and antithesis by taking both opposites as intimately related to each other, as a unity. “This dialectic,” Ricoeur reveals, “is the philosophical ground on which the complementarity of rival hermeneutics… can be established.”97 Such is the importance of dialectic in that Ricoeur even gave this warning: “Outside the dialectic of archeology and teleology, these interpretations confront one another without possible arbitration or are juxtaposed in lazy eclecticisms which are the caricature of thought.”98 Through a process of dialectic then, the dichotomy between the two polarities in hermeneutics is finally overcome by relating the two to each other,

90 See Ricoeur, “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 171-176. 91 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 494. 92 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 244. 93 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” in ibid., 300. 94 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in ibid., 244. 95 Ricoeur, “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” in ibid., 174. 96 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 494. 97 Ricoeur, “A Philosophical Reinterpretation of Freud,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 161, 175. 98 Ibid., 176.

A. ITAO 13 by taking them as one “profound unity.”99 And so this stage marks the resolution of the conflict of interpretations: where two interpretations stood previously as rivals and opposites, now they are one and complementary. In any case, the dialectic stage always remains a call of necessity. As Ricoeur himself admits, “[the] two hermeneutics, opposed as they are, coexist… [because] each is legitimate within its own context… [ergo] it is necessary to set up a dialogue between them and demonstrate their complementary functions.”100 More than anything, dialectic is the culmination of reflection and the hermeneutics of symbols. So here, after passing through the rigorous test of suspicion and the penetrating gaze of faith, the subject who was dispossessed and reinstated, put to death and restored to life, now finally stands with hope at the threshold of “the promised land” of ontology101 where he shall be at home again, no longer alienated from himself.102

Conclusion

The questions that call for answers at this point are these: Does the hermeneutics of symbols contain a critical side? If yes, how does it relate to the ongoing conversation that is critical theory? Ricoeur’s revelation is telling. For him, the peculiar trait of the hermeneutics of symbols is its being “in the line of critical thought.”103 As such, its function is therefore also critical. This critical function, however, is made “more authentic and more perfect” by no other than its very own “appropriative function.”104 So simply put, reflection is the critical side of the hermeneutics of symbols inasmuch as appropriation is an act that is proper only to reflection. But in what sense is reflection critical or a critique? Ricoeur explains: “Reflection is a critique in the sense that the cogito can be recovered only by the detour of a decipherment of the documents of its life.”105 By all accounts then, dispossession denotes a critical moment in reflection, “the critique of the false cogito, the deconstruction of the ego ideals

99 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 54. 100 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 322-323. 101 The term ontology, etymologically derived from the Greek words ontos (ὄντος) – which means “being” – and logos (λογος) – which means “study” – literally and traditionally refers to the “study of being qua being.” Ricoeur, however, veers away from this literal and traditional understanding of ontology. Still following Heidegger, Ricoeur conceived of ontology as a particular state of being wherein the subject is getting hold of a more meaningful existence. Thus in line with Ricoeur’s conception of ontology, the dialectic stage represents the stage of eschatology where reflection points to “an eschaton, an ultimate end toward which” the subject is headed to. Ontology, therefore, as the “promised land” of the subject, is also its very own eschaton. Cf. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,” in ibid., 332-334. 102 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in ibid., 24. 103 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 350. 104 Ibid. 105 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 17-18.

14 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS which form a screen between the ego and myself.”106 This is why dispossession literally signifies “destructive criticism.”107 Conversely, however, dispossession does not connote a totally negative criticism. This critical moment points to another critical moment: the moment of “the recovery of meaning.”108 “Thus,” Ricoeur relates, “the time of restoration is not a different time from that of criticism; we… seek to go beyond criticism by means of criticism, by a criticism that is no longer reductive but restorative.”109 Yet as expected, the ultimate critical moment in reflection is dialectic, the moment where a critical suspicion is conjoined with a critical faith to decipher the various symbolisms through which the final goal of self-understanding is reached. So again, reflection is the critical side of the hermeneutics of symbols. One important implication it carries is that, through a critical dialectic of suspicion and faith, reflection can eventually emancipate the subject “from abstraction, idealism, solipsism, in short, from all the pathological forms of subjectivism.”110 Incidentally, this implication is to some extent similar and related to critical theory. As David Rasmussen writes, “critical theory rests on the… assumption that reflection is emancipatory.”111 Of course, the meaning of Ricoeurian reflection is not totally the same with critical theory’s meaning of reflection – that’s a given. But I argue that if we dig deeper into Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols, we will find that the similarities are larger underneath than the differences on the surface between Ricoeur’s notion of reflection and the notion of reflection in critical theory. As stated earlier, for Ricoeur reflection is a tool that can emancipate man from all pathological forms of subjectivism. Similarly, in critical theory reflection has also the same function, i.e., the emancipation of every individual member in the society from various “rational pathologies” or “ideological infections” that can give rise to “social pathology.”112 Moreover, Rasmussen also describes this reflection in critical theory as “critical reflection.”113 As noted earlier, for his part Ricoeur sees reflection as critical because it is suspicious about the claims of consciousness. In the same way, reflection is critical in critical theory precisely because of its mistrust of consciousness. As

106 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in ibid., 244. 107 Ricoeur, “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” in ibid., 270. 108 Ibid. 109 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 350. 110 Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 245. 111 David Rasmussen, “Critical Theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas,” in Twentieth- Century Continental Philosophy, Vol. 8, Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. by Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1994), 212. 112 As individual rational pathologies tend to accumulate and build up into social pathology, critical theory is thus ultimately employed as a tool of emancipation from social pathology and, in effect, as a tool of social transformation. See Axel Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. by Fred Rush (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 336- 360. 113 Rasmussen, “Critical Theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas,” in Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, 211.

A. ITAO 15

Julian Roberts notes, “consciousness projects systems, deductions, and conclusions, but reflection is always ready to relativize those conclusions once more.”114 In other words, critical theory itself also makes use of the hermeneutics of suspicion.115 But since critical theory is essentially a social theory, Ricoeurian reflection can truly claim affinity with critical theory only in view of its potential advantage for society. And so in keeping with the objectives of critical theory, one particular social problem that Ricoeur gave attention to is “the enigma of political power.”116 Ricoeur saw it as a problem because the appropriation of political power can either create a tyrant or a “true magistrate.”117 How does reflection resolve this problem? In appropriating political power, Ricoeur counsels that it is important to begin by “mistrusting political passion and seeing in it an escape or disguise.”118 On the other hand, it is always wise to combine mistrust with openness because this political passion could also be an “authentic political vocation.”119 Now what about our political leaders? Do they merely have a political passion or do they really have an authentic political vocation? That’s something that calls for reflection.120 Finally, Hegel, Marx and Freud who are the main inspirations of critical theory – and, to some degree, Nietzsche – are also the very same men from whom Ricoeur derived the critical ideas of his hermeneutics of symbols. This fact alone speaks that there are still several areas where the critical side of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols intersects with and relates to critical theory. Whatever these areas are, that remains an open field for other researchers to explore. At this point, I would like to conclude by acknowledging that, while critical theory itself aims to revolutionize society in order to realize social transformation, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols does not immediately aspire for social transformation by any direct means. Nevertheless, through a patient and continuing reflection, I am sure that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols holds a great potential of its own in realizing future social transformation.

Rogationist Seminary College-Cebu, Philippines

114 Julian Roberts, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, 69. 115 See Stephen K. White, “The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science: A Pragmatist Turn,” in ibid., 317. 116 Ricoeur, “Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 144. 117 Ricoeur, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” in ibid., 112, 114. 118 Ibid., 114. 119 Ibid. 120 Leovino Ma. Garcia contends that for Ricoeur, “political reflection is not an optional detour but an obligatory route in an ontology of the person.” See “The Political Structure of Society: Paul Ricoeur’s View on Politics and the State,” in Contemporary Social Philosophy, ed. by Manuel B. Dy, Jr. (Quezon City: JMC Press, 1994), 37.

16 HERMENEUTICS OF SYMBOLS

References

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (London: Harper and Row Publishing, 1972). ______, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Honneth, Axel, “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. by Fred Rush (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Ihde, Don, introduction to Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. by Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). ______, “Paul Ricoeur’s Place in the Hermeneutic Tradition,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Illinois: Open Court, 1995). Kaplan, David M., Ricoeur’s Critical Theory (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2003). Kellner, Douglas, “Frankfurt School and Philosophy,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Garcia, Leovino Ma., “The Political Structure of Society: Paul Ricoeur’s View on Politics and the State,” in Contemporary Social Philosophy, ed. by Manuel B. Dy, Jr. (Quezon City: JMC Press, 1994). Palmer, Richard E., Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Quito, Emerita S., The Philosophers of Hermeneutics (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1990). Rasmussen, David, “Critical Theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas,” in Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, Vol. 8, Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. by Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2004). Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. by Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). ______, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. by John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). ______, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. by Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). ______, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

A. ITAO 17

Roberts, Julian, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. by Fred Rush (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Robinson, G.D., “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique,” in , 23 February 2008. Sahakian, William S., History of Philosophy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968). White, Stephen K., “The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science: A Pragmatist Turn,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. by Fred Rush (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 18-25

Article

The Vanishing Mediator and Linguistic Hospitality

Angelo Bottone

n We, the People of Europe? Balibar argues for a Europe as the interpreter of the world, a ‘vanishing mediator’ translating languages and cultures. IRicoeur in his last works has considered translation as a paradigm of the attitude towards the other, holding the view that the ethical purposes relating to linguistic hospitality are the model for any kind of hospitality. I intend to contrast Balibar’s vanishing mediator with Ricoeur’s concept of linguistic hospitality. In spite of the fact that Étienne Balibar and Paul Ricoeur practically ignore each other in their works, I found some striking similarities in their thoughts regarding the role of languages and translation in Europe. In my paper, I will highlight these common views, with the intention of also showing their differences. Étienne Balibar published in English in 2004 a collection of essays written during the previous decade, with the title: We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, where he discusses the possibility of giving a concrete meaning to the idea of a European citizenship and thus, of giving content to the project of a democratic Europe. Although the book is mainly focused on political theory, a reflection on translation and the role of languages in the construction of the citizenship in Europe is treated, particularly in two of the essays: Difficult Europe: Democracy under Construction and Europe: Vanishing mediator? In the first of these two essays Difficult Europe: Democracy under Construction, he enumerates four ‘worksites of and for democracy’, i.e. places where democracy is under construction.

These sites constitute, in my view, domains of initiative and reflection with a view toward a new citizenship in Europe, in the sense of an intellectual matter that needs to be worked in order to give body to a true ‘European public space.’1

They are: justice (the building of a juridical order more advanced than national states), reorganization of ‘labour time’ (the convergence of trade

1 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 156-157.

A. BOTTONE 19 union struggles and the associative movements around projects to reorganize ‘labour time’ on the European scale), democratisation of borders (the negotiation of the movements of circulation and migration of populations on the planet, in order to carve out a universal right of circulation and residency, including reciprocity of cultural contributions and contacts between civilizations) and culture. Culture, and above all language, is a worksite of and for democracy insofar it is not merely an instrument of communication, but a trans-individual ‘bond’ that produces its own forms of identification and counter-identification. Balibar addresses a well-known and debated question: Which is the language for Europe? It cannot be English because English is more than just a European language but, at the same time, it is less, as it is spoken by the majority and it is ‘threatened with breaking up into several relatively separate idioms’. Balibar maintains that the only credible answer will be found not in a code but a practice, better, in ‘a constantly transformed system of crossed usages’, which is translation.2 In an endnote to the text he clarifies that

…the ‘community of translation’ is also not that in which everyone speaks or understands everyone’s else language, but, on the contrary, that in which the role of the ‘interpreter’, depending on the situations and configurations of exchange, is capable of falling on anyone in turn, passing from the ‘majority’ to the ‘minority’ position.3

I find it particularly interesting that in this essay translation is defined as the “concrete metalanguage made up of all the equivalence and all the attempts to overcome the ‘untranslatable’ between idioms”. So, the language of Europe will be not an idiom but a meta-language, a social practice that builds a European public opinion and, consequently, democracy. From a sociolinguistic point of view, Balibar notes, the major performers of this praxis are intellectuals and migrant workers, at the opposite sides of society. In the very last pages of his book, in the essay Europe: Vanishing mediator?, Balibar discusses again issues concerning languages and translation, but on a more symbolic level. He argues for a Europe as the interpreter of the world, translating languages and cultures in different directions. Its role is that of a ‘vanishing mediator’, a dialectical figure that permits the passage from old to new, a transitory institution or community that creates the conditions for a new society and a new civilisation pattern. In this essay Balibar is answering an appeal from American intellectuals, asking European intellectuals to act as a counterweight to the current US Government’s ideology and political power, or as a mediator between subjects involved in current conflicts. Balibar proposes a paradoxical ‘antistrategy’: Europe is presented not as a

2 See Ibid., 177-178. 3 Ibid., 272.

20 THE VANISHING MEDIATOR counterweight, as one could expect, to the US hegemony. He believes that “We must displace the call, we must call in return upon the Americans to think in different terms, we must question the very presuppositions of the demand”.4 Rather, he proposes this ambiguous figure of the ‘vanishing mediator’ that creates “the conditions for its own suppression and withering away”5 but, without which, no transition from old to new would have been possible. This is what Europe should be. Europe, he recognizes, is not capable to influence and mediate conflicts and historical processes but it can “use its own fragilities, and indeterminacies, its own ‘transitory’ character, as an effective mediation in a process that might bring about a new political culture. … Or perhaps, even more paradoxically, […] offer itself as an instrument that other forces in the world, aiming to a transformation of politics, could use and expand to cope with the crisis.”6 I am not interested here in considering the particular case of how to contrast the US hegemony but, rather, in the analysis of how Balibar conceives translation and the role of intellectuals in Europe. Even if the concept of a vanishing mediator is not further clarified, Balibar associates it to the role of translators. Europe, he holds, is not the only region in the world where translations are made but, due to its specific history, “nowhere –not even in India or China- was it necessary to organize to the same degree the political and pedagogical conditions of language exchanges”.7 Balibar believes that this old institutional practice of translation in Europe can be expanded in two directions: firstly, by including new elements in the group of languages taught and practised, and secondly, “by stretching the idea of ‘translation’ from the merely linguistic to the broader cultural level”.8 Moreover, the idea of the vanishing mediator is a way to restore the political function of the ‘organic’ intellectuals (organic in the Gramscian sense). “They would continuously broaden the horizon of their translating capacities. … Intellectuals would ‘disappear into their intervention’, as Luis Althusser used to say. They would be necessary, but without monopoly. They would be border lines themselves.”9. Paul Ricoeur, in the last years of his life, specifically dealt with the question of translation in some discourses and short articles that were collected and published in 2006. For many years his only lecture available in English on this topic was Reflections on a new ethos for Europe, written in 1992, where he also addresses the question of languages in Europe. Ricoeur treats the same problem as Balibar: how to get beyond the nation-state and respond to a political situation without precedents. Ricoeur proposes to formulate the challenge in terms of what he calls ‘political imagination’. The necessary transfers of sovereignty in support of a rather new entity, the European Union, cannot be successful on the institutional level

4 Ibid., 233. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 234. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 235.

A. BOTTONE 21 without the changes in attitudes of the ethos of individuals, groups and peoples. He offers three models of what he calls ‘integration of identity and alterity’. Firstly, Ricoeur maintains that the plurality of European languages is a sign of the pluralities of histories, cultures, and traditions in the continent. The only possible form of European cultural citizenship is therefore not a unique language, which would hardly be accepted by all peoples, but the practice of translation that respects differences and identities recognizing their value. This is the first model of integration and he seems to be in complete agreement with Balibar. “Europe is and will remain ineluctably polyglot”, Ricoeur maintains, pluralism is “indefinitely desirable to protect”10 The theoretical pattern of the dialectic between identity and alterity that he applies at numerous levels, I propose to call the ‘unity mediated by plurality’. It is worth recalling that in his masterpiece Oneself as Another11, Ricoeur considers the ‘other’ to be not only any other human being, but all possible forms of alterity that the self meets: its own body, its conscience. Language can be added to these possible forms, and translating becomes an experience of alterity as in translation we experience the ‘other’ in foreign languages but also in the problems we find when using our own language. Common difficulties which are met in translation arise not only from the fact that we speak different languages but from the fact that we speak a language. It is the language itself that implies ambiguity, misunderstanding, inexpressibility, concealment, falsity. The ‘other’ is already in ourselves. There is no perfect translation because there is no perfect language and even if we were all speaking the same language, we would still have the same difficulties. These reflections on ‘the other in oneself’ allow Ricoeur to exalt plurality. He claims that language (le language) exists nowhere else than in languages (des langues), analogously humanity exists nowhere else than in many cultures, but there is only one human race thanks to the fact that transferences of meaning, even if difficult, are possible from one language to another. Translatability is a universal principle, an a priori of communication. Translation becomes therefore, the ground for a communal coexistence and, in this particular case, a model for a European citizenship. This implies, for Ricoeur, on the institutional level, the promotion of the study of the living European languages, while on the more broad spiritual level, the extension of the spirit of translation to the relationship between the cultures themselves.

The other two models, which I will mention briefly, are the model of exchange of memories and the model of forgiveness. An integration of identity and alterity presupposes an exchange of narrations, where different subjectivities are involved. Our European history is constituted through divergent, often opposed public accounts of the same cruel events. If the

10 Richard Kearney ed., Paul Ricoeur The Hermeneutics of Action, (London: SAGE, 1996), 4. 11 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as another (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 317-355.

22 THE VANISHING MEDIATOR identity of a group is not fixed but built through narration, as Ricoeur maintains, to practice at the cultural level the gesture of hospitality that characterises the work of translators, means to put ourselves into listening to other peoples’ customs, fundamental beliefs, deepest convictions and try to express them in our own language. In other words, to translate their stories and our stories. Ricoeur defines this gesture as ‘narrative hospitality’. Strongly related to the exchange of memories is the need for forgiveness, a forgiveness without forgetting without which no mutual understanding is possible. I will focus on the first one of these three models. The original French title of Ricoeur’s essay was in a questioning form: Quel éthos nouveau pour l’Europe? Which new ethos for Europe? He answers: “We could speak of a translation ethos whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the gesture of linguistic hospitality”12. This is the first, brief concurrence of the concept of linguistic hospitality, a concept that he developed in his later writings. In his lecture Défi et bonheur de la traduction, linguistic hospitality is regarded as the pleasure of dwelling within the language of the other and, conversely, the pleasure of hosting the word of the foreigner in one’s own house.13 “It is really the matter of living with the other in order to take that other to one’s home as a guest.”14. Ricoeur in his last works has considered translation as a paradigm of the attitude towards the other, holding the view that the ethical purposes relating to linguistic hospitality are the model for any kind of hospitality15. For example, writing on the ecumenical dialogue between Christian churches, he proposes to consider different religious confessions as foreign languages that need to be studied in order to translate them from inside. Despite the remarkable convergence of views, the different outcomes of Balibar’s vanishing mediator and Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality have to be clarified. I will try to provoke a dialect interchange between these two key concepts. The ‘vanishing mediator’ mentioned by Balibar, is a concept elaborated by Fredric Jameson in his essay on Max Weber as a storyteller16. It is defined as “a catalytic agent that permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms”.17 Its essential function is the mediation of changes. So far, we could say that Balibar and Ricoeur agree on the relevant role of languages in the elaboration and the exercise of citizenship: we are not citizens,

12 Kearney, op. cit., 5. 13 Paul Ricoeur, On translation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 10 14 Kearney, op. cit., 5. 15 Ricoeur, On translation, 23. 16 See Fredrick Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory Volume 2: The Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), 3-34. 17 Jameson in this essay maintains that Protestantism assumes in Weber the function of a vanishing mediator because once it “has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene” See Jameson, op. cit., 25 See also Slavoj Žižek and John Millbank The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Boston: The MIT Press, 2009), 38 where Žižek presents Christ as the vanishing mediator.

A. BOTTONE 23 but we can become citizens and the practice of translation, taken in its broadest sense, functions as mediation in the processes of creation of citizenship. The point of divergence between Ricoeur and Balibar, if my understanding is correct, lies in the vanishing characteristic of this mediator. It seems to me that Balibar provides no enough support and clarification to the idea that at a certain moment the mediator has no further reason for being and therefore it disappears from the historical scene. Let’s consider his examples: Why should Europe create the conditions for its own suppression and withering away? Only because is not able to react from a political point of view to the American initiative? Why should the European intellectuals disappear in their intervention? Is it true that, as Balibar says, “without this ‘vanishing’ mediation no transition from the old to the new fabric of society would have been possible”?18 I find in Balibar a nihilistic element that eventually destabilizes his proposal. In order to definitively overcome the state-nation and avoid any temptation to build a European citizenship grounded on forms of ethnicity, he tries to elaborate an anti-identity strategy, where the only goal of the mediator, be this mediator the intellectuals or Europe itself, is to let the others talk. Once this has happened, this mediator’s work has been completed. But this is not the case of translators! He clearly holds a distorted view of the work of translator. As Ricoeur has taught us, even when mediating, the subjectivity of the translator is present and active. His or her identity is not necessarily a negative element if it is open to host, if it is inspired by linguistic hospitality. On the other hand, there could be no subjectivity, and therefore no mediation, without identity. To transport these thoughts in our discussion, we can state that Europe does not come from nothing, so why should it become nothing? Why should Europe vanish? No act of self-sacrifice is necessary to let the other come into being. If we conceive of Europe as an interpreter, it should be a mediator of differences rather than a vanishing one, it should listen to the others and tell their stories in its own words, inside and outside herself. I believe we should talk not of a vanishing mediation but a renewing one and, on this respect, Ricoeur once again enlightens us with his conception of ‘tradition’, a tradition that goes beyond clichés and anathemas. I wish to finish with his own words:

It is necessary for us to have gone through the ethical requirement of translation – what I call linguistic hospitality – and through the requirements of the exchange of memories – narrative hospitality- in order to approach the phenomenon of tradition in its specifically dialectical dimension. Tradition means transmission, transmission of things said, of beliefs professed, of norms accepted, etc. Now such a transmission is a living one only if tradition continues to form a partnership with

18 Balibar, op. cit., 223.

24 THE VANISHING MEDIATOR

innovation. Transmission represents the aspect of debt which concerns the past and reminds us that nothing comes from nothing. A tradition remains living, however, only if it continues to be held in an unbroken process of reinterpretation. It is at this point that the reappraisal of narratives of the past and the plural reading of founding events come into effects.19

School of Arts, Dublin Business School, Ireland

References

Balibar, É., We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship? (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004). Bottone, A., “Translation as an Ethical Paradigm in the Work of Paul Ricoeur,” in S. Kelly and D. Johnston eds., Betwixt and Between: place and cultural translation (Cambridge, Cambridge Scholar Press, 2006). ______, “The Ethical Task of the Translator in Paul Ricoeur,” in Paschalis Nikolau and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi eds., Translating Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (London and New York, Continuum Books, 2008). Eco, U., The Search for the Perfect Language, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997. Jameson, F., The Ideologies of Theory Volume 2: The Syntax of History (London, Routledge, 1988). Kearney R. ed., Paul Ricoeur The Hermeneutics of Action (London, SAGE, 1996). Read J., “Writing in the Conjuncture.” in Borderlands 1 (3). Online document at URL Accessed 19.12.2010. Ricoeur, P., “Quel éthos nouveau pour l’Europe?” in Koslowski P., (ed.) Imaginer l’Europe. Le marché intérieur européen, tâche culturelle et économique, Paris, Cerf. ______, Oneself as another (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992). ______, “Défi et bonheur de la traduction,” a lecture given on the occasion of conferring of the Prix de Traduction pour la promotion des relations franco-allemandes, to the Institut Historique Allemand of Paris, on 15 April 1997. ______, “Le paradigme de la traduction,” an opening lecture given to the Faculté de Théologie protestante de Paris, October 1998, later published in Esprit 253, 8-19. ______, “Du Concile de Trente au Colloque de Trente,” a lecture given at the conference Lutero e i linguaggi dell’Occidente, Trento, 29-31 May 2000. ______, La traduzione Una sfida etica (Brescia, Morcelliana, 2002).

19 R. Kearney ed., op. cit., 8.

A. BOTTONE 25

______, Sur la traduction (Paris, Bayard, 2004). ______, On translation (London and New York, Routledge, 2006). Žižek, S. and Millbank J., The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Boston, The MIT Press, 2009).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 26-32

Article

Palahniuk’s Tyranny of Language and Ontological Minimalism

Daniel Hourigan

his paper reflexively focuses Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Diary on the violence of language and civilisation. Palahniuk is a contemporary T American author whose prose follows a style synonymous with other writers such as Gordon Lish, Amy Hempel, Tom Spanbauer, and Mark Robinson, and the broader literary movement of American Minimalism that has Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound as its progenitors. Many, if not all, of Palahniuk’s narratives portray scenarios of domestic terrorism. But rather than write this terror using a simple third-person narrative voice, Palahniuk writes with a Minimalist aesthetic that is properly ‘Romantic’ in its acceptance of chaotic Nature as an authentic existence which is barely concealed by either civilisation or mundane everyday life. In essence, Palahniuk’s domestic terrorists expose what we dare not admit to ourselves. The contention of our discussion below is that Palahniuk’s Diary is a type of auto-critique of Palahniuk’s own systemic violence against traditional narrativisation that creates a unique system of relations between the reader and the story. Before we can turn directly to Diary it is first necessary to outline what exactly ‘minimalism’ means in terms of the prosaic techniques that Palahniuk’s deploys in his writing. Broadly speaking, literary Minimalism distils a concentrated narrative by discarding regular techniques of descriptive narrativisation in favour of more experimental methods. These methods include: the repetition of key themes and motifs, intentional misspelling and misphrasing, an amoral narrativisation that eschews any terms of valuation, and the avoidance of abstractions such as time and measurement. In short, the term ‘Minimalism’ metaphorically reflects the way that this literary style uses a minimum of narrative construction.1 And while these Minimalist techniques work at the level of Palahniuk’s narrative they also serve to construct a world for the reader by laying it bare and without moral judgement or regular methods of measuring narrative space. Very briefly, Diary is the story of a failed artist called Misty Wilmot and the ‘coma diary’ she keeps for her loathed husband Peter Wilmot. The narrative is set on Waytansea Island where an inter-generational plot to revitalise the island becomes sublimely terrifying and deadly. The narrative is littered with references to art history, psychoanalysis, anatomy, and other

1 Chuck Palahniuk, Non-Fiction (True Stories) (London: Vintage, 2004), 145.

D. HOURIGAN 27 disciplines that neatly fit into discussions of artistic production, technical skill, and art criticism. In a critical light, Palahniuk’s Diary is a narrative work that provides an auto-critique of Palahniuk’s approach to language at the level of its narrative and the deployment of its words. This auto-critique can be seen initially in the way that Palahniuk’s prose operates by revealing the excesses and deficiencies of language because it is written in the Minimalist mode outlined above. This Minimalism emphasises the failure of words to directly correspond to their meanings by undermining the suppositions of a given statement. In one example, the emphasis appears as follows: “‘An eighteen-year-old girl,’ what does that mean?”2 Numerous other examples abound in the work,3 but as these other examples are far too numerous to discuss at adequate length we will focus on a few select examples in this discussion. The critical point, however, is that this Minimalist condition of the prose points to an aesthetics insofar as the language used by Palahniuk entrenches the reader in an aesthetic cocooned in the aesthetics of prose. In Diary this is revealed in the endless self-analysis of signification through Freud and Jung, graphology and Stendhal syndrome, anatomy and phrenology, to name a few.4 This self-analysis is not merely part of the story; it is part of the formal composition of the narrative itself. At the level of narrative, the aesthetics of Palahniuk’s prose are in-aesthetic, somewhere between aesthetic judgement (the act of reading) and the non- aesthetic (the mechanics of understanding the prose) that hollows out the usual rules of description because it is a Minimalist work written in a Minimalist style. At a more formal level of composition this means that the usual descriptive mode of narrative fiction is auto-critical of its own purpose. The aesthetics of the prose provide this auto-critique in its constant references to the insufficiency of language in a work composed of language. Herein, Diary is a work of fiction that exposes its composition because it constantly attempts to stand outside itself as though it were excessive, too much for language to dominate in its own terms. Given the excessivity of Diary outlined above, the prose of Diary subsequently becomes ontologically problematic because it destabilises language itself. Because Diary is written in a Minimalist style, the narrative disclosure of the world in the book by way of language is not pinned on a suspension of disbelief. Instead, the elucidation of doubt by way of questioning the sufficiency of language leads Diary to situate language as a purely formal problem to be solved at the level of the reader because they are engaged in understanding the language presented. This ontological purification of language reflects what Freud termed displacement and condensation: the rejection of description in the signification of Diary-as-a-story (its Minimalism) displaces this ‘narrative work’ onto the pared down composition where it condenses as the ‘reader’s work’. Herein Minimalist prose offers no judgements to orient the

2 Ibid., 144. 3 Ibid., 4, 24, 29, 32-33, 51, 54, 56, 64-65, 103-105, 124, & 134. 4 Ibid., 56, 64-65, 103-105.

28 TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE reader’s subjective sensibility and instead forces this sensibility/subjectivity to make sense of the narrative. This procedure is what makes Palahniuk’s prose properly focused on an in-aesthetic excess against the distant narrative form of third person voice, ultimately only allowing a point of view from the position of an ‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘we’ for the fantasisation of the reader. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud announces this type of condensed position of the reader as a signal for the expression of “a merely wishful common element” in place of “a displaced common element.”5 Applying Freud’s insight to Diary, it is clear that the position Palahniuk puts his readers in is a materialist fantasy: a position that exceeds the materialist concern with aesthetics by burrowing deeper into the question of the subject-as-reader. We can simplify this insight as follows: accepting that Palahniuk’s writing is real and comprehendible this work always presupposes its audience wherein these readers are a ‘wish’ of the writing anchored in the general dynamics of its material composition but this wish becomes invisible when we look directly at particular sections of Diary. The instability of language that is accentuated by Diary necessitates the reader’s engaging in ‘work’ to keep the narrative comprehendible. Yet such labour is clearly not at the level of the narrative but instead at the level of conceiving of language. It is worth underlining this point because Palahniuk ostensibly rejects language as a tool that the speaking being uses. Rather, it points to the way that signification—at least in the Minimalist mode—speaks through the speaking being. If ‘less becomes more’ for Palahniuk, I would be tempted to add that ‘language speaks us’. The condensation of the displaced ‘narrative work’ in the reader’s imagination fundamentally changes the time of the narrative: we go from marking the passage of time through the judgements of the prose itself to barely a hint of duration except through the intervention of the reader’s reflection. This reflection brings us to the fourth procedure of Palahniuk’s prose: that this sense of time which arranges narrative sense is speculative. We should understand speculation here with all of the importance given to it by German Idealist philosophers such as Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel: Minimalist prose is jarring to read because time itself is marked by the intervention of judgement. And the only reason the reader intervenes is because they must. Diary skewers the reader through its in-aesthetic excesses, such as its litany of anatomy; to quote one such instance:

By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember… The ‘orange peel’ texture of your chin, these ‘popply’ bumps are caused by your mentalis muscle. Your ‘pouting’ muscle. Those frown lines you see every morning, getting deeper, running from each corner of your mouth down to the edge of your chin, those are called marionette lines. The wrinkles between your

5 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by James Strachey (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1991), 434.

D. HOURIGAN 29

eyebrows, they’re glabellar furrows. The way your swollen eyelids sag down is called ptosis. Your lateral canthal rhytides, your ‘crows-feet’, are worse every day and you’re only twelve fucking years old for God’s sake. Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about. This is your face.6

This fourth procedure binds the reader’s speculative imagination to the interiority of the narrative. If one finds themselves reading this passage and reflecting on their face then we are ‘in’ the aesthetics of Diary. A study of Palahniuk’s novel Diary goes awry if it merely situates itself to debate the aesthetics or formal representations of the work. This reading misses that Palahniuk already forces the reader to consider their own identification with the narrative, the condensation of judgement in their imagination. The in-aesthetic excess promoted by Palahniuk’s writing violently destabilises the literary narrative voice to produce an insidious ambiguity: when should the reader’s judgement intervene? Romantic Minimalism short-circuits this ambiguity by situating the reader’s judgement in a speculative void— speculative because it is the conception of language that is at issue, not the diegesis. The reader is void because the usual problem of reading wherein ‘you never see the bullet coming’ is substituted by the properly speculative intercession of the reader’s judgment. Palahniuk brings the reader into his stories to labour in service of the narrative even though the reader stands outside the book itself. This labour is ‘speculative’ in that it marks the passage of time and morality: past, present, and future; and is underwritten by the logic of displacement and condensation. Moreover, this short-circuit leads Palahniuk to reveal that the craft or techne of critical judgement is ‘effervescent’ rather than deliberative or intentional. Such a framing of judgement is already given to us by Freud’s analysis of dreams, and herein it flag that Palahniuk writes the reader’s fantasisation into the belly of his work through the effervescent manifestation of an in-aesthetic excess. One may do well to ask, however, what then is characteristically violent of these four procedures? We are dealing with words on a page and the corporeality of reading after all, not the violent bloodshed of armed conflict. Contemporary thought tends to understand ‘violence’ as an action marked by immense force and often destruction yet here we are charging Palahniuk with creating a ‘systemic violence’ that effectively introduces violence into his narratives in such a way that it exceeds polite description. The violence in Palahniuk is bound up with his techne, the way he writes and the underlying structure of this writing as it is approached by the reader. I am making use of this old Greek word, techne, for its philosophical import as it distinctly facilitates the making and unmaking of artistic processes. In this framing, systemic violence is not the result of description but of the formal character of the structure that permits description in the first place. And herein the curious feature of Palahniuk’s writing is that it explicitly unveils three levels of violence

6 Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (London: Vintage, 2004), 4.

30 TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE in its formal character: the violent chaos of the Romantic vision of sublimely charged Nature, the violence of civilisation in the way that it facilitates social and political terror, and the systemic violence of forcing the reader to intervene in Minimalist prose.7 With the former Romantic vision and the latter Minimalist mode already elaborated upon, it is now necessary to turn to the ‘middle term’ as it were: the violence of civilisation that makes space for social and political terror. Palahniuk’s writing is often cast as ‘nihilistic’. But this labelling of nihilism is imprecise. The nihilistic procedures of Palahniuk’s plots, narratives, and characters are always revealing the chaotic vortex beneath the austere assurances of civil society. This recourse is foremost Romantic, not nihilistic. And Diary eschews nihilism through its endless references to the poetic mania of Peter Wilmot. In Diary, we are told that the character of Peter Wilmot, Misty’s comatose husband, spent time prior to the opening of the narrative refurbishing houses, and in these houses he hid rooms covered with fanatical raving. These rooms, these dark places, bob up to the surface of Diary with a sense of untimeliness. Peter has entered the resident’s homes in good faith and vandalised the space, motivated by his being overwhelmed by the terror that Waytansea Island’s families intend to perpetrate. Peter’s rooms are what Palahniuk refers to as a ‘chorus’, a recurring theme that brings forward the kernel of the narrative. But what is being repeated here? The rooms of Peter Wilmot are dark places where the entire space has been overtaken by someone’s graphic mania. To quote:

These summer people, poor Misty, she tells them, Mr. Wilmot wasn’t himself for the last year or so. He had a brain tumor he didn’t know about for—we don’t know how long. Her face still pressed to the hole in the wallpaper, she tells this Angel Delaporte how Mr. Wilmot did some work in the old Waytansea Hotel, and now the room numbers jump from 312 to 314. Where there used to be a room, there’s just perfect, seamless hallway, chair molding, baseboard, new power outlets every six feet, top-quality work. All of it code, except the room sealed inside. And this Ocean Park man swirls the wine in his glass and says, ‘I hope room 313 wasn’t occupied at the time.’ Out in her car, there’s a crowbar. They can have this door-way opened back up in five minutes. It’s just drywall is all, she tells the man. Just Mr. Wilmot going crazy.

7 Here one can observe the Lacanian coordinates of Palahinuk: Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

D. HOURIGAN 31

When she puts her nose in the hole and sniffs, the wallpaper smells like a million cigarettes came here to die. Inside the hole, you can smell cinnamon and dust and paint. Somewhere inside the dark, you can hear a refrigerator hum. A clock ticks. Written around and around the walls, it’s always this same rant. In all these vacation houses. Written in a big spiral that starts at the ceiling and spins to the floor, around and around so you have to stand in the center of the room and turn to read it until you’re dizzy. Until it makes you sick.8

These houses that contain Peter’s rooms perform the function of civilisation: they are domestic spaces that solidify an attachment to a place, a time, a history. But it is as though the possibility of Peter’s rooms was always there, hiding in plain sight: all the island’s families knew about the planned terror, all the mainland visitors to Waytansea Island were implicated. The history of the homes carried this within the very act of dwelling inside them. Therefore, rather than positing the existence of discrete spaces of violence and violent acts, the reading of systemic violence allows us to capture the sense in which civilisation is itself the space of violence and terror. Peter Wilmot’s lost rooms, his dark places, are the realisation of a possibility always-already present in the structure of Waytansea Island’s civility. The key to unfurling Palahniuk’s writing is to engage with its formal character because here we find the limits of the conditions of his aesthetics and therein the event of violence. This critical gaze also facilitates the understanding of the nature of systemic violence in Palahniuk’s novels. Diary is but one instance where we can observe how the Romantic Minimalist methods of Palahniuk enable him to write scenes of terror without passing judgement, shifting this labour onto the reader. Palahniuk’s other books, such as Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, and, more recently, Pygmy, have their narratives disclosed in a space delimited by Palahniuk’s Romantic Minimalism. In this disclosure, we encounter an in-aesthetic excess that interrupts the narrative by pushing the reader to intervene and pass judgement from within the narrative’s aesthetics. In an odd way, Palahniuk writes love and romance but in a violent way. The romantic content of his stories is always attached to the transgression of one or other social code, and this narrative process is supported by the hermeneutics of Diary in its critique of language. But what I have tried to demonstrate above is how this transgression is not subversive: the possibility for violence is enabled by civilisation itself and Palahniuk’s literary Minimalism fosters a criticism of civility for refusing to acknowledge the immense forces that it barely conceals and repeatedly fails to regulate. To the Palahniukian perspective, the violent chaos of the Romantic vision of sublimely charged

8 Palahniuk, Diary, 26-27.

32 TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE

Nature bubbles up to the surface of civilisation in acts of violence and terror. This perspective becomes visible when we critically engage with Palahniuk’s writing. The systemic violence of Minimalist prose forces the reader to intervene and create a ‘time for judgement’, a purveyor’s critique of civilisation. If, as readers, we never see the bullet coming, a critical engagement with Palahniuk’s Diary shows us just how blind to systemic violence we really are. We cannot go back to some idyll third-person narrative once we know this, and this is what makes the work of Palahniuk valuable in both fictional and critical terms.

School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia

References

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by James Strachey (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1991). Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (London: Vintage, 2004). ______, Non-Fiction (True Stories) (London: Vintage, 2004).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 33-44

Article

The Mystical Force of Money

Edward Erikson

All things exchange for fire, and fire for all things – Heraclitus

hen Marx broaches the question of money in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he does not turn to the political Weconomists for an explanation, as one might expect, but rather to the poets and playwrights. In a reading of William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens Marx tells us that “Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money.”1 The play follows the decent of Lord Timon from riches to wretchedness as usurers redeem their debts and exhaust the Lord’s estate. As the play unfurls, Timon undergoes a traumatic transformation from a kind hearted and compassionate aristocrat to seething misanthrope. Timon is exiled from Athens and takes shelter in the forest outside the city. Then, in a twist of fate, he stumbles upon a new found fortune. Lord Timon ironically proclaims “Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist!... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, wrong, right, base noble, old young, coward valiant…”2 Marx quotes from this scene in the Manuscripts and suggests that money, the real nature of money, appears replete with its many magical powers. Money makes possible a universal exchange of both tangible objects that meet each other in the marketplace as well as the intangible human qualities such as courage, beauty, intelligence, etc. Timon himself displays all these qualities when he is wealthy and their opposites when he is poor. We discover in the money-form King Midas incarnate: it transforms all that it touches so that one who possesses money takes on the qualities of money itself. The universal exchange crushes difference and reduces all to a single denomination. In the Manuscripts Marx’s writes “what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality.”3 The money-form sets the limits and bounds of one’s own horizon. “If I have no money for travel” Marx’s writes, “I have no need for travel…If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study.”4 The singularity of money, he argues, becomes the sole delimiting factor for social, cultural and economic relationships.

1 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988), 137. 2 Ibid., 137. 3 Ibid., 138. 4 Ibid., 139.

34 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY

According to some readings, Marx moves away from these literary descriptions and humanist concerns in Capital Vol. I and turns instead to a scientific engagement and explanation of the value-form of money. Ernest Mandel writes, “Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth.”5 Thus, we find the “real nature of money” re-presented in Capital in an algebraic cloak. Marx writes “The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this simple form…x commodity A = y commodity B.”6 Marx seeks to explain away the ‘dazzling’ quality of the money-form through an analysis of this simple equation. But even when the mystery has been lifted, the mystical force of money remains. I suggest that traces of the ‘dazzling’ form and the humanist concerns linger in the figurative and performative function of language in Capital. I seek to draw out these traces by reading the origins of the money-form in Capital Vol. I through the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. A reading, I suggest, that disrupts the scientific discourse that Mandel argues frames Capital, blurring the line between literary and scientific. Theorists have indicated a sharp distinction between Marx early and late work. Some draw the line between alienation theory and economic determinism, others, such as Louis Althusser, as an epistemological break in The German Ideology. Kojin Karatani, however, argues that such a division overlooks “the incessant transpositions and turns”7 in Marx’s thought. Karatani writes “Marx’s thinking should be read in reference to the “micro- differences” within similarities and proximities.”8 Following Karatani, I examine the micro-differences and similarities between these two texts in order to un-cover the transformative force and violence implicit in the concept of money as the universal exchange form. I tease out the figurative language and literary tropes, focusing specifically on the tension between the scientific and descriptive language of Marx’s work. I argue that the performative function of language animates commodities so that they appear before us as humans; and, conversely, cast upon humanity the thingly likeness of the commodity.

Beyond the Bounds of Science

The (Un)Natural form of Value We encounter the commodity in the market place donning money like a carnival costume mask. Commodities, however, are not born in the market place; rather, Marx tells us, “Commodities come into the world in the form of use-values or material goods, such as iron, linen, corn, etc. This is their plain, homely, natural form.”9 He immediately qualifies this statement, writing, “they

5 Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” in Capital, Vol. I (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 17. 6 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 139. 7 Kojin Karatani, Transcritique (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 161. 8 Ibid., 164. 9 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 138.

E. ERIKSON 35 are only commodities because they have a dual nature…”10 Marx indicates that commodities are first and foremost a concrete object with a particular or specific use. Yet, his conception of the natural form of the commodity points to a contradiction: commodities come into the world not as their natural form but as both a natural form and a value form. They bear both a material body and an immaterial value. According to his analysis, commodities would not be commodities without this dual nature. Thus, they are always-already unnatural. If we abandon the distinction between natural and unnatural, it becomes increasingly evident that both the function and value of a commodity are determined by social convention not the intrinsic qualities of the items themselves. In other words, use-value as well as exchange-value depends upon society. What is the meaning then of this distinction? Why does Marx cast commodities in the light of natural form? The social constitution of the commodity contains an immediate problem for the notion of scientific analysis. Marx writes “The objectivity of commodities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that ‘a man knows not where to have it’. Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects.”11 While the physical form (natural) immediately presents itself to us as an object, the immaterial or exchange value eludes us. Marx playfully turns to Shakespeare’s Henry IV to point to the mysterious mystical form of value, the very thing that evades the scientific eye. He goes on to write, “We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.”12 The literary allusion momentarily releases Marx from the discourse of scientific objectivity. The quote suggests that something else may be operating within the exchange value of a commodity that exists outside the bounds of science. Marx, however, does not linger long in this space. While it is not immediately visible, he writes “commodities possess an objective character as value only in so far as they are all expressions of…human labour.”13 Thus he locates an objective measure of value operating within the realm of the social. The problem persists for the physical form of the commodity. The quote begins by taking the physical, natural form for granted. We can grasp it therefore it exists. The contradiction implicit in the origin of the commodity, however, suggests that the natural form requires closer examination. The natural form provides a foil against which the mystery of the immaterial form appears to us. While Marx relies upon the distinction between the natural and social to explain why the objective quality of one form (the material) is present while the other form (immaterial) is hidden, the distinction remains problematic. The material form of the commodity, as I have suggested, is not determined by its objective physical characteristics, but by its

10 Ibid., 138. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

36 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY use. Thus, it too operates purely in the social realm. Why then is one form visible and the other concealed? Alongside the natural and unnatural form, a figurative distinction implicitly persists between the homely form (natural) and dazzling form (social) which may be more telling. The figurative distinction indicates the opposite from that of scientific analysis. While the objective characteristics of the natural form can be measured, weighed, objectified and analyzed, the adjective homely suggests that the physical form goes unnoticed or overlooked. Conversely, the value form may be invisible to the scientist, but all eyes are drawn to the dazzling quality of the commodity. Thus the figurative language produces a tension within in the text. While adjectives may be deployed to sweeten the descriptions, we find that they can also produce alternative and competing meanings. Natural and homely, for example, are not synonymous. While natural objects are of the earth, they too may be magnificent, dazzling or awe- full. Homely, qualifies the term natural rather than complementing it. It suggests that the natural form is plain, commonplace, etc. and consequently, unworthy of attention. It dismisses the “natural form” of the commodity. Thus, it is not just overlooked, but unworthy of looking. The dazzling form suggests the opposite. The word dazzling signifies a strange hypnotic power. The value is not invisible, but rather hyper-visible. The figurative language points to a non-objective quality present within both the physical and value form of the commodity. It allows Marx to take up a dual position in the text: at once to be a scientist, yet to observe that which the scientist cannot see. The money form bears a certain analogy to adjectives: they are both an epidermal form. Just as we encounter Marx analysis wrapped up in adjectives, value too is covered-over by the money-form. Marx’s expressed aim is to strip away the skin and reveal a deeper truth: the blood of our flesh and marrow of our bones. He promises to break the captivating spell by stripping the commodity of the money-form and revealing value for what it is: congealed labour-power. Nevertheless, the mysterious force of money persists: not beneath the skin or behind the veil as he seeks to show us, but in the veil itself, the very thing he wishes to discard.

Behind the Dazzling Veil The mystery of the value-form is bound up in corporeal manifestation of value. Money simultaneously covers and un-covers value. At once we can grasp the money-form, touch it, worship it, yet the whole time, the objective value of the commodity remains out of reach. What is more, the dazzling form of money further obscures the objective value. In order to dissolve this mystery Marx turns to the origins of the money-form, a task, he claims “never even attempted by bourgeois economics…”14 Marx writes, “we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will

14 Ibid.

E. ERIKSON 37 immediately disappear.”15 The story of the origin that unfolds is both historical and algebraic. The money-form and the commodity are intimately related, yet have two different origins. The commodity ostensibly originates from the earth (natural form), while the money-form grows out of the commodity itself. Marx writes, “The simple commodity form is…the germ of the money-form.”16 The origin of money, then, is revealed in the “simple” equation:

x commodity A = y commodity B or: x commodity A is worth y commodity B

The equation, however, poses a unique problem of translation and analysis. Specifically, how are we to read the equal sign? The equation immediately appears to us in two forms: one as expressed equality via the mathematical symbol and the second as the translation into English as worth. Yet, an expression of worth differs significantly from that of equality: the former is an expression of value while the latter is an expression of properties. Furthermore, in Marx’s description and analysis that follows, the symbol takes on at least one other meaning: equivalence. Are we then to read these three concepts as interchangeable? The issue of worth and equivalence are connected to the expression of value. The equation suggests that value is co-constituted within the relationship between commodities. Marx writes “the linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed.”17 Thus each commodity simultaneously embodies both value and an expression of value. Commodities are made equivalent, in so much as one is capable of expressing the value of another. Furthermore, the expressed value signifies the worth. The two commodities, however, are not equal. Marx writes “I cannot, for example express the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is not an expression of value.”18 The value statement is only meaningful in so much as the two materials differ. In other words, value can only be expressed through difference. While the two commodities meet each other as “equals”, as capable of mutual exchange, they are not equal in objective measure (size, shape, weight, substance). Not only is there an expressed inequality, the value relationship depends upon this inequality. The equal sign, perhaps, points to a deeper reality. Marx writes, “In the expression of value of the linen, the usefulness of tailoring consists, not in making clothes, and thus also people, but in making a physical object which we at once recognize as value, as a congealed quantity of labour.”19 Regardless of the material difference between the two commodities their value originates from the same place: labour. More specifically the equal sign points to the

15 Ibid., 139. 16 Ibid., 163. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 Ibid., 140. 19 Ibid., 150.

38 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY direct relationship between value and the expenditure of labour power. The polysemus equal sign allows Marx to play upon the concept of equality in a way that problematizes the concept of value. At the same time, this veil of equality reveals the mystery of money: the universal exchange value. The value-form develops out of the relationality between commodities but then becomes crystallized in the money-form. While Marx has uncovered the common denominator of commodities (labor), a mystical force remains in the function of money as the universal exchange form. Marx further seeks to explain away the mystery by turning to the historical context in which the money-form arises. He maps the shift of the expression of value from commodity to money. Marx notes that while nomadic peoples were the first to develop money, the concept of money reached fruition at the end of the seventeenth century during the French revolution. He writes, “Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, in the shape of the slave, but they have never done this with the land and the soil.” And then adds, “Such an idea could only arise in bourgeois society.”20 Capitalism marks the moment when the money-form comes to encompass the totality of society. The analogy between human slavery and capitalism hints at the nature of capitalism itself. Money contains the power and force to extend the system of slavery over all life. Money itself has become the master. The analogy echoes the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 where Marx writes ‘Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life.”21 In both Capital and the Manuscripts money is a medium through which everything passes. Money asserts a powerful force that commands all things, commodities and humans alike. In examining the process of transformation from a commodity to money-form, Marx writes, “what appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money.”22 Money is the universal form of exchange value. While it takes the form of value, it is not the object of value itself. Nevertheless, these two concepts (value and value-form) have often been mistakenly conflated within the money form. Marx himself comes close to committing the very error of which he warns the reader. He notes that certain commodities, such as gold and silver, are “by nature” best suited for the money-form. Again, the discourse of natural and nature becomes highly problematic. Precious metals are no more or less suited for money that numerous other materials (linen, iron, stone, paper, etc.) The emphasis of the natural form places undo significance on the form itself ignoring the social context which has granted this material primacy. Thus Marx seeks to lift the veil of mystery surrounding the money-form, but he adds to this mystery by suggesting the gold and silver are imbued by nature to occupy the value-form.

20 Ibid., 183. 21 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 136. 22 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 187.

E. ERIKSON 39

Marx’s argument comes to turn upon this false conflation. He writes, “the physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money.”23 The concept of money appears before us in a capitalist system as if it had existed from time immemorial. By locating value outside of the money-form within the exertion of labour power Marx dispels this conception of the money-form. Marx, however, does not disprove the magical quality through empirical science; rather he renders it absurd and dispels it via irony (“Hence the magic of money). Marx plays with the scientific discourse by interjecting literary tropes. In one sense, this play may point to the outer limits of scientific inquiry, but in another sense it merely suggests an extra-scientific element operating in the text. By stripping gold and silver of their magical properties Marx reveals a fundamental violence at work within the relationship between people and commodities. At the heart of the commodity lies the severed and alienated labour-power that has been extracted from the worker. The trope of irony allows the language to communicate violence with a force that extends beyond the words themselves. While a scientific discourse tends to nullify violence by abstracting capitalism in algebraic equations or by reducing everything to an objective measure, irony exposes a barbed edge. Marx lifts the dazzling veil, as he promises, yet the mystery and the magic of the money form persist. The question then remains: Does the force of money as universal exchange depend upon this magic or has Marx scientific analysis simply described in algebra what Shakespeare depicted so elegantly? I turn here to the treatment of the commodity itself and suggest that a mystical force remains tied to the universal exchange regardless of Marx’s analysis. The presence of the mystical force points to a deeper relationship between people and commodities than Marx’s analysis explicitly states.

The Night of the Living Dead

The Personification of Commodities “Commodities come into the world…” Marx tells us, yes, they come into the world, but they do not come to us as newborns as one might infer; but rather, returning from the dead. We encounter commodities in Capital, not as passive objects, but lively creatures. Marx’s use of figurative language animates the dead labour instilled in each commodity. He endows them with human-like thoughts, language, emotion, agency, etc. The trope of personification pushes commodities into the human dimension and conversely, binds humans with the world of the commodity. Thus, the humanist concern that ostensibly faded from view in Marx’s later work remains present in Capital, though hidden, in the figurative language and particularly in the trope of personification. In Capital, not only do commodities speak, but they speak with a language all their own. Marx suggests that a commodity “reveals its thoughts

23 Ibid., 187.

40 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities.”24 This description brings up an array of questions, but bears at least two consequences for the sake of this reading: it presents commodities with human-like qualities and, perhaps connected; it grants the commodity a certain measure of agency. The metaphor of language points to the internal logic and relationality of capitalism: the function of universal exchange. On the one hand commodities communicate with and through each other an expression of value. On the other hand the money-form communicates the value of the commodities to the marketplace. Thus commodities communicate to each other in a private language (a language all their own) and to people through the one universal language (money). The twofold level of communication binds humans and commodities by a common language so that each appears as the other. At the same time it suggests the possibility of miscommunication (the translation between the private and public language). The value form of money becomes the universal expression of value for humans as well as commodities. Just as the value of linen can be expressed by a coat, so too can the value of humanity be expressed by a commodity. Thus, not only does it draw into comparison commodities and humans, it renders them equivalent. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx writes, “Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.”25 We see here an equivalency but also a distortion. There is communication, but also miscommunication. Marx writes that the commodity “reads all prices backwards, and thus as it were mirrors itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which provide the material through which it can come into being as a community.”26 Money gains life through a perverse dyslexia where the exchange value takes precedence over the use-value. The power of language grants commodities a certain semblance of agency. The verb to speak, to read, to think etc. are all connected to a concept of language, an engagement with language and tied to a notion of autonomy. There is a tension, however, within the text: commodities have agency yet are rendered passive. What’s more, we discover that the commodity is made passive through force. Marx writes “Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.”27 Marx explicitly locates commodities as objects antithetical to humanity. Nevertheless, there remains a semblance of agency in this statement. He writes, “if they are unwilling” the turn of phrase suggests that they have the power to do the very thing he says they cannot do: resist. Such resistance not only points to their extra-thingly power but also to

24 Ibid., 143. 25 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 140. 26 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 205. 27 Ibid., 178.

E. ERIKSON 41 the force implicit within the money-form. The money-form may not be the Rosetta stone that allows us to translate the language of commodities, but rather an external imposition forced upon them, a translation provided by the colonist. The personification suggests that the fate of commodities may mirror that of humanity. The violence enacted upon the commodity becomes a metaphor for the violence enacted upon the people through the appropriation of their labor-power in a capitalist economy. Marx, of course, gets caught up in his own metaphor of language and again we find ourselves trying to reconcile contradictions. While Marx tells that commodities speak, just a few pages later he writes “If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-values may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value.”28 The statement implies that commodities cannot speak, that they do not possess language. Nevertheless Marx goes ahead and tells us what they would say if they could speak. Marx is less a translator and more a medium conjuring the essence of a ghost. The contradiction reveals that Marx’s observations regarding the nature of the value-form of capital are never-not-yet scientific but metaphoric. Such an observation disrupts the way in which one may traditionally read capital as a text of political economy or as a faithful description of capitalism. By adopting figurative techniques, Marx comes to reveal a deeper nature of the value-form of money: a mystical force that resists objectification. Beyond the commodities capacity for language resides the realm of emotion. Not only do commodities speak, but they display other human qualities as well. Marx writes, “We see then that commodities are in love but that ‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’”29 The metaphor of love describes the phenomena of the social division of labor and the effect it has had on prices. Marx writes, “What was yesterday undoubtedly labour-time socially necessary to the production of a yard of linen ceases to be so today.”30 Each commodity expresses the value of the other, but these values have been manipulated by the capitalist. Thus, Marx extends the capacity of human emotion to the commodity. The metaphor suggests the very dazzling nature of the money-form: all things exchange for money. Love becomes money, money becomes love. Moreover, the analysis marks another Shakespearean intervention. The quote comes to us from Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unlike the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, however, the quotes he draws from Shakespeare, et al remain implicit allusions rather than explicit exegesis. Marx no longer tells us that the ‘real nature of money’ reveals itself to us in these literary texts, yet the sentiment remains inferred.

28 Ibid., 176. 29 Ibid., 202. 30 Ibid.

42 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY

The Commoditization of Humanity The commodity appears as a mirror reflecting back upon us our own image. Marx writes “There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity…between the conversion of things into persons and persons into things.”31 The mystical force of money appears in the mirror image: it transforms people into commodities by reducing them to a function of labor- power and rendering them exchangeable. This transformation takes place on both a figurative and a literal level: first, figurative language implicates people in the discourse of commodities through imposition; second, labor power circulates in the market as a commodity. The commodity seduces us. It requires the human hand to fulfill its function as a commodity and thus implicates us in the world commodities. Marx writes, “Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right.”32 The relationality of commodities permits them to communicate, yet people are the necessary medium through which communication is made possible. Commodities place an imposition on their owner: they require humans to place them in relation with one another. Out of this process of exchange, Marx suggests, comes the money-form. He writes, “Money necessarily crystallizes out of the process of exchange, in which different products of labour are in fact equated with each other, and thus converted into commodities.”33 Yet money remains a secondary not a primary function. It does not permit the exchange, but merely facilitates the exchange. Nevertheless, the money-form reveals for the first time the equivalence of humans and commodities by bringing them together under a single, universal- form of value. The transformative nature of money presented within Timon of Athens, returns again in Capital, although, with a minor difference. In Capital, Marx no longer talks about money specifically (one commodity form) but commodities generally. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx’s writes “Money is the supreme good, therefore so is its possessor. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am presumed honest. I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid?”34 Here we see the mirroring at work. The image of money reflects back upon its beholder so that the person takes on the quality of the material. In Capital, however, Marx writes “the natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities.”35 Similarly, the laws of one are manifested in the other. Humans take on the nature of commodities just as commodities take on the nature of money. With the former, the value of people is expressed by money; with the latter people become commodities that circulate alongside other commodities.

31 Ibid., 209. 32 Ibid., 178. 33 Ibid., 181. 34 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 138. 35 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 180.

E. ERIKSON 43

The figurative blurring of humans and commodities complements some of Marx’s broader observation of capitalism. He notes, capitalism “arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power…Capital, therefore announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.”36 Thus, capitalism arises at the moment when humans enter their labour-power into the market as a commodity to be bought and sold. Here, we find the personification of commodities and the commoditization of humans. Perhaps then, we might revise the classic distinction between a young humanist Marx and an old empirical Marx: It’s not that Marx’s humanist concerns disappear in Capital, but rather, there is no longer a measure of humanity left to concern oneself with.

Re-Reading Capital

Reading Capital through the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 problematizes the concept of scientific objectivity. While Marx dabbles in the discourse, the play between literary descriptions and scientific observation ultimately causes the distinction between the two to collapse. Scientific observations appear to us packaged in literary allusions, metaphors, adjectives, irony. The figurative nature of the text reveals as much about the nature of capitalism as the more traditional reading of the classical political economists. The language allows Marx to capture a particular emotive quality that helps render the abstract real. The figurative language reveals a fundamental violence at the heart of capitalism which is expressed in the universal exchange form: Money, like fire, exchanges for all things. The reading suggests first and foremost that the money form is not a passive medium as economists have suggested. Furthermore, that the significance of the money form resides in the form itself, not some concealed truth. A return to the analogy between the adjectival form and the money- form may help. One can strip all the adjectives from the work (and perhaps some social scientist might try) in order to locate the necessary truth upon which the text of Capital turns. In doing so, the meaning of the text itself would be fundamentally altered. While Marx attempts to strip away the money-form in order to reveal a deeper nature of value, a labor theory of value, the effort detracts from the problem of money itself. By focusing on the surface features and literary elements of the text, an alternative reading opens up in which to approach the money-form: to reclaim rather than reveal the ever-present mystical force of money.

Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United States

36 Ibid., 274.

44 MYSTICAL FORCE OF MONEY

References

Althusser, Louise, Reading Capital (New York: Verso, 2009). Colletti, Lucio, “Introduction,” in Early Writtings, by Karl Marx (London: Penguin Books, 1992). Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx (New york: Routledge, 1994). Karatani, Kojin, Transcritique (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005). Mandel, Ernest, “Introduction,” in Capital Vol. I, by Karl Marx (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1990). ______, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988). ______, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Walter J. Black, 1937).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 45-59

Article

Commodity, Sign, and Spectacle: Retracing Baudrillard’s Hyperreality

Daryl Y. Mendoza

Introduction

he explicit expression of the reality problematic in Jean Baudrillard was first mentioned in his monumental 1976 work “Symbolic Exchange and Death”1 and was further elucidated in an essay published a few years T 2 later entitled “Precession of Simulacra.” It is in these two works where Baudrillard argues how contemporary culture and society has come to the point in which the real has disappeared and is replaced by models “more real than the real.” The thesis surrounding this diagnosis of current condition is what he calls Hyperreality. At the onset, the aim of this paper is not to present an in-depth exposition of Hyperreality but rather to present its possibility. Though there maybe instances in which this paper will be able to present some fragments on Hyperreality but this serves only as corollaries to the elucidation of its possibility. The manner in which this paper will proceed is through a rough retracing of the possibility of Hyperreality in the works that preceded both “Symbolic Exchange and Death” and “The Precession of Simulacra” since it is in these earlier works of Baudrillard that prefigured the path towards the reality problematic. Through examining certain works before 1976, what this paper will give are lampposts that will hopefully help navigate the introduction of Hyperreality in Baudrillard’s work. This paper will therefore show that the reality problematic inaugurated in “Symbolic Exchange and Death” should be understood in its relation, both as a continuity and break, to the general concern of his neo-marxist phase,3 i.e., the Marxist problematic of the commodity as the organizing principle of

1 This was first published in France in 1976. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, “L’ échange symbolique et la mort” (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976). For the English translation cf. Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death” trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant and Intro. Mike Gane (London: Sage, 1993). 2 This is the first essay in Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” which was first published in France in 1981, cf. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacres et simulation” (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981). For the English translation cf. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation” trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 3 This phase may have spanned the works from “The Systems of Object” and culminating with “The Mirror of Production.”

46 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE society, only this time, analyzed from the standpoint of semiology or what Baudrillard calls “semio-linguistics,” pioneered by de Saussure and elaborated by Barthes.4 This paper will further present that Baudrillard’s attempt to become more radical than Marx in analyzing the commodity has paved way for certain subversions, i.e., Baudrillard’s reversals of dominant-dominated binary opposites: Production and Consumption, Use-value and Exchange value, Base- structure and Super-structure, which are located within Marx’s critical discourse. These reversals lead to the saturation of Marx’s very critique and through this illuminates a new problem which cannot be grasped by its own logic. It is this very obsolescence, exhausted out of Marx, that leads the path from the commodity to the reality problematic –a new problematic that requires a new analytic. But clearly, without the exhaustion of Marx and the commodity problematic, Hyperreality will not be possible. It is from this retracing, that this paper hopes to shed light to the very possibility of Hyperreality from the Marxist discovery of the Commodity form, to de Saussure’s Conception of the Sign and to the Spectacle brought to fore by the Situationists and finally to Baudrillard’s Hyperreality, the pathos of a society that has gone beyond alienation.

Production, Consumption, and the Commodity Problematic

Baudrillard’s concern in his earlier books, particularly “The System of Objects”5, “The Consumer Society”6, and “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign”7 revolves around the problem of the commodity and its role in society and culture. This commodity problematic retraceable back to Marx’s general thesis in “Capital” argues that the underlying logic of capitalist societies is the accumulation of wealth through “immense collection of commodities” in which “the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.”8 Baudrillard, though liberated from the 19th Century Industrial confines of which Marx was in, and contextualized in the post-world war II era

4 Barthes, coming from de Saussure’s structural linguistics, liberates the Sign inherent within de Saussure‘s close-system to encompass not merely linguistic forms but also social and cultural forms in general. He presents this in his pioneering works on semiology and culture, from fashion to popular culture. Cf. Roland Barthes, “The Fashion System” trans. by Mathew Ward and Richard Howard (USA: University of California Press, 1983). and Roland Barthes, “Mythologies” trans. by Annette Lavers“ (London, Paladin, 1972). This form of semiology, i.e., the application of the sign system to culture, outside the close-system of de Saussure, exerted tremendous influence on Baudrillard’s overall work. Thus he is indebted to Barthes for his pioneering analysis of the Sign in culture. 5 Jean Baudrillard, “The Systems of Objects” trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). 6 Jean Baudrillard, “The Consumer Society: Myth and Structure” trans. by Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998). 7 Jean Baudrillard, “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign” trans. and intro. by Charles Levin (USA: Telos, 1981). 8 Karl Marx, “Capital” Vol I. trans. by Ben Fowkes and Intro. Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, 1990), 125.

D. MENDOZA 47 where advances in science and technology, has paved way for newer forms of analysis to the commodity problematic, follows this problematic particularly in the field of communication. Coming from this, Baudrillard’s analysis still follows the central problem of commodity as “the structural problem of all societies”9 but it anticipates the importance of the role of communication in the analysis of the commodity. Thus, Baudrillard’s analysis of the commodity form looks at the problematic in the lens of “semio-lingusitics” anticipating the importance of communication in the analysis of social phenomenon which Marx was unable to do. Baudrillard supplements Marxist analysis of society with de Saussure and Barthes’ semiology. This is because as Baudrillard reexamines Marx, he found that the latter was unable to grasp a more elementary form than the commodity. Although it is “the structural problem of all societies”10 it is according to Baudrillard not the most radical. In paraphrasing Mcluhan, he contends that:

Marx, in his materialist analysis of production, had virtually circumscribed productive forces as a privileged domain from which language, signs, and communication in general found themselves excluded. In fact, Marx does not even provide for a genuine theory of railroads as “media,” as modes of communication: they hardly enter into consideration.11

Thus, with this supplementation, Baudrillard analyzes the commodity from a more radical perspective, to consider it not merely as a material object but as a vehicle of communication, a Sign. In doing so, he found it necessary to invert certain dominant assumptions in Marx. For instance, the privileged status accorded by Marx on production, arguing that the production of material life is “the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history,” which in turn gained Marx the title of being a “historical materialist” because for him, “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.”12 This privileging of Production for Marx also serves as a primary starting point that later will ground his interpretations of the world and his critique of the capitalist society. Baudrillard however inverses this analysis and argues that the analysis of the commodity in contemporary societies should no longer be based on production but rather it should be positioned to its opposite, i.e., consumption. According to him, consumption is not merely the

9 Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971), 83, cited in Baudrillard, “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” 5. 10 Ibid. 11 Marshall Mcluhan,“War and Peace in the Global Village” (New York, 1968), 5. Cited in Baudrillard, “For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” 164. 12 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” ed. and intro. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 16.

48 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE passive recipient of production13 through satiation of needs but rather it is an active endeavor in “the manipulation of signs”14 towards the creation of the “person” and its integration within the system. The relationship between the subject which consumes and the object being consumed is what he calls “personalization.”15 It is the objectification of the subject and the subjectification of the object.16 Consumption acquires for the person Signs in the object being consumed which in turn determines his status in society. In his “Systems of Objects” and “The Consumer Society” he elucidates in length how consumption creates and determines a person’s identity within a capitalist society. In a section of the former, he shows how man, the interior-designer, manipulates signs in domestic space to reflect his subject. He arranges the objects according to “function”, or its “ability to be integrated into a system,17” thus “color, form and so on- no longer have any value of their own, but merely a universal value of signs. The order of Nature is everywhere present in the system, but present only as signs.”18 For instance, the seemingly trivial choice between natural or synthetic décor and its arrangement within domestic space already speaks of a “cultural ideology analogous to that of the aristocratic myth itself in the social world”19 specifically on how “warmth” is signified: synthetic wood or natural wood thus, synthetic warmth or natural warmth. The former speaks of a lack of “time,” the absence of a history of wealth, while the latter speaks in a form of an “aristocratic” ideology, the wealth to acquire natural wood, to burn and to waste as opposite to the former. In the same form of analysis Baudrillard approaches the car-object in a psychoanalytic of its sign, he argues that:

depending on the way it is used and its particular features (from the racing ‘spider’ to the luxurious limousine), the motorcar may equally be well invested either with the meaning of power or with the meaning of refuge: it may be a projectile or a dwelling- place. But basically, like all functional mechanical objects, it is experienced – and by everyone, men, women and children – as a phallus, as an object of manipulation, care and fascination. The car is a

13 Thus, according to Baudrillard: “Consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production.” Baudrillard, “Systems of Objects,” 217. 14 “…consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse. If it has any meaning at all consumption means an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs.” Ibid., 218. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 This is unlike the Marxist paradigm where the species-being (Gatungswessen) of man, the meaning of a human person is related and derived to his production while Baudrillard argues the opposite; the meaning of a human person is derived through what he consumes. This is his concept of “personification.” 17 Baudrillard, “System of Objects,” 67. 18 Ibid., 68. 19 Ibid., 39.

D. MENDOZA 49

projection both phallic and narcissistic, a force transfixed by its own image.20

The point is that the consumption of décor or of a car, the consumption of a commodity in general, is not consumption based upon a need, which in Marx is formalized as the Use-value. It is a consumption of what it signifies and how the consumer consuming the sign is integrated within the system. This is why, in the anticipation of communication as an important perspective in analyzing society, Baudrillard necessitates this inversal of priority, from the original conception of Marx on production to consumption. Coming from this transference of importance in the production- consumption spectrum, a corollary appears. In having presented the necessity of the sign process within the Marxist framework, Baudrillard went further to elaborate on the value founded upon the introduction of the sign process within Marx’s analysis which is linked with the importance already accorded to consumption. He calls this value, the Sign-value, and it is this value that is central to his notion of Consumption for it is “the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as a sign-value and where signs are produced as commodities.”21 As the sign-value is introduced and the marriage between semiology and Marxism is further elaborated, we are again in the juncture in which Baudrillard inverses two related concepts within Marx’s philosophy: the use-value and exchange-value. It is from this inversion that the role of the sign-value interlinked with consumption is better elucidated.

Beyond the Use and Exchange Value: The Myth of Needs and the Reign of the Sign

When Marx bifurcated needs into primary and secondary needs, the former is premised on an “anthropological minimum” while the latter is founded on the “post-survival threshold.” From this he is able to cement the concept of the Use-Value. Because the Use-Value is subjective, 22 it therefore requires a value that is objective that standardizes the utility of an object. (This object may be useful for you, but this is junk to me.) In order to find a standard value for exchange, Marx introduces the Exchange-Value. The exchange – value is merely secondary to the use-value for the former merely standardizes the latter, since the latter is already inherent in the object. The exchange-value is the appearance, the “socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects.”23 But according to Baudrillard, this form of analysis in our contemporary society no longer follows. He argues that the core of which a commodity's value is determined is

20 Ibid., 74. 21 Baudrillard, “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” 147. 22It is dependent upon the person's need hence, it is merely “dangling in mid-air” Marx states it as: The usefulness of a thing makes it use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. Cf. Karl Marx, “Capital,” 126. 22 Ibid., 125.

50 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE not by the use-value or the value in which a subject satiates a need, but by the exchange-value. In here, he again subverts two conceptually related terms in Marx. He argues that there is really no more "objective" value of a commodity because the exchange-value only uses the use-value, as a mere alibi for its existence. The exchange-value uses the use-value as a legitimizing factor that initiates the exchange process. This reduction of the use-value as an imaginary excuse for the exchange-value has rendered it as a value that is non-objective and use-less. How is this so? The use-value operates on the assumption of need. Precisely because an object is needed then it is accrued with a use-value. But according to Baudrillard, needs and everything that possesses a use-value only occurs within a system of exchange since the use-value cannot be realized without its exchange-value. Within this system of exchange, and coming from the importance of communication that Baudrillard earlier presented, the commodity therefore not merely possesses an exchange -value but a Sign value.24 Thus with the eclipse of use-value, exchange-value exchanges not just the inherent utility in objects but already what it signifies in a system of integration. This is the value that Baudrillard supplemented in the analysis of society. Thus, primary needs, which possess the premise of an “anthropological minimum” according to Baudrillard is merely a myth, and that needs are always secondary since a primary need is a concept organized to ground the system of exchange, similar to the Signified in the semiotic process.25 But here we witness a spiral, Baudrillard cites Marx in saying that: “Production not only produces goods; it produces people to consume them, and the corresponding needs.” Thus, when one "needs" he has to enter the realm of the social, and when he enters he does not only exchange a commodity, but also language, concepts and signs. In this realm, primary and secondary needs blur, so far as I want to “eat” to satiate my hunger, I may chose not to, or I may choose to do so,26 and

24 The Sign-Value, is that value which loads a commodity with a sign of prestige. As Use-Value is that utility, exchange-value that of Equivalence, the Sign-value is that of difference. By consuming a sign-value one is able to differentiate oneself from another. 25 As Marx’s description of the system of exchange is possible only when there is the use-value, de Saussure’s semiological process is only possible when there is the signified, both being essential points to their respective systems. 26 Baudrillard even notes that in psychoanalysis, eating, is a form of compensation for the lack of love And how this is acted upon is mediated by signs in the system. In the 6th footnote to “The Ideological Genesis of Needs” he states: “But it is well known that eating can satisfy an oral drive , being a neurotic substitute for lack of love. In this second function, eating ,smoking, collecting objects, obsessive memorization can all be equivalent… Desires, on the other hand, is signified throughout an entire chain of signifiers. And when it happens to be a desire for something experienced as lost, when it is a lack, an absence on which the objects that signify it have come to be inscribed, does it make any sense to treat such objects literally, as if they were merely what they are? And what can the notion of need possibly refer to, in these circumstances?” cf. Baudrillard, “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,”69. In interpreting Baudrillard, Pawlett reechoes the statement in that: “Drives such as aggressiveness and erotic cravings, are processed through signs. Increasingly sexual and aggressive drives are promoted by the consumer system; we are encourage to realize our desires , to indulge our cravings.” Cited in William Pawlett (January 2008) “Against Banality- The Object System, the Sign System and the Consumption System,” in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies Vol. 5,

D. MENDOZA 51 if I do so I have to face the tyranny of choice, or what Baudrillard calls "discretionary income"27, one chooses what to consume in which the limitation is income. In contemporary society, one could no longer consume the food- commodity in its raw sense, one always consume its sign-value inherent in the commodity as it is exchanged in the current system. Hence, when one chooses a restaurant, it is hardly a choice governed by need in the context of survival, it is a choice prompted by the spectacle of the image and the limitation of income. To choose between fast-food over five-star dining, between Chinese or French cuisine is a choice for signification rather than a choice for survival. Another example would be Bread. There is no such thing as a generic loaf of bread, not even homemade bread is generic in a sense since the ingredients, the qualities, the brands, the labels, that it takes to create the bread, is loaded with Signs. Signs are interchange in society, anything up for exchange, also possesses this Sign-value. The raw object is nowhere to be found; the raw object which is ideally what the primary need correspond to is blurred with the presence and ubiquity of the Sign in our times. Baudrillard even asks: “Is loss of status- or social non-existence less upsetting than hunger?”28 With this, needs become problematic in the political economy. There is no such thing as an “anthropological minimum” this premise was only created as an ideology by the System as to convince man of a primary need, which in turn convinces him of a secondary need that crosses what the primary needs encapsulate; the drive for meaning, in which meaning is found in consumption. He writes:

Even before survival has been assured, every group or individual experiences a vital pressure to produce themselves meaningfully in a system of exchange and relationships. Concurrently, with the production of goods, there is a push to elaborate significations, meaning with the result that the one-for-the-other exists before the one and the other exist themselves. Thus, the there could be a million possible motivation of one's consumption of a certain good, but what lies underneath is always a meaning. This meaning does not exist in the relation of the subject and the object in rational ends (needs) but in difference and signification. One's difference from another person through his consumption of objects loaded with signification that determines difference.29

No.1 available from: January 2, 2010. 27 Discretionary Income, is an income derived by Capital, allowing you to choose what to consume with it. Cf. Baudrillard,”For a Critique of a Political Economy of the Sign,” 81. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Baudrillard, For a Critique, 74-75.

52 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE

Baudrillard’s radical analysis of Marx’s critique of society through the supplementation of semio-linguistics, has introduced the importance of the Sign in political economy. As the sign-value begins to overshadow both exchange-value and use-value, so do all commodities become an Image. For Baudrillard, as signs proliferate, needs no longer arise from objective and stable origins as objects transmuted to signs become Ideological. Baudrillard states that: “needs could no longer be defined in the naturalist-idealist thesis (need as objective and rational) rather they are defined as function induced by the internal logic of the system – there are only needs because the system needs them”30 This last statement necessitates a revisiting of Marx’s moment of inverting his Master to stand on his feet, his theory of the Base Structure and Super Structure. How could the concept of needs be ideological if need is located as an assumption in the Base Structure and ideology in the Marxist conception as “false-consciousness” is located in the Superstructure? Here, Baudrillard once again radicalizes Marx’s analysis, and presents how this spectrum, the material life and Consciousness, is de-leveled. In this stage, the reality problematic in Baudrillard slowly crystallizes, to replace the commodity paradigm that serves as the theme in his earlier analysis of society.

Ideology and the Spiral: The Spectacle and Beyond

With the proliferation of Sign in society, the political economy stands on the stage where the commodity’s sign-value serves as the basis for the analysis of political economy. It is in this juncture that signs and images slowly reduce reality into appearance. For the Situationists, this is exactly what they call “The Society of the Spectacle.” When Marx formulated the development and abstraction of the exchange-value in his “Capital”, he presented its progress from “simple-isolated” towards a general form of exchange which, as he would conclude, is with money.31 Contemporary society however has done greater progress in the abstraction of the exchange form when it introduced Credit cards and the Stock exchange, to name a few, in society.32 Unlike money which is still subjected to foreign exchange rates, Credit cards, a form higher than money in terms of abstraction, surpasses the foreign exchange, i.e., it is capable of exchanging in any foreign currency unlike money which has yet to be further transmuted to a specific currency to realize its power to exchange. This complexification of the abstraction of the exchange form also accentuates its status from a material objects towards pure image. In history, when 1 coat was equivalent to 20 yards of linen, to its more general form in which 1 coat or

30 Baudrillard, For A Critique, 82. 31 Cf. Marx, “Capital,” 139-163. 32 The abstraction of the commodity form and its relation to Debord and Baudrillard echoes the discussion made by Steven best. Cf. Steven Best, “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord and Postmodern Theory” in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (UK: Blackwell, 1994), 41-67.

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20 yards of linen or 10 lb of tea is equivalent to 2 ounces of gold33 the exchange form is still an object – money in a concrete form. In contemporary society however, it has gone beyond its concrete form, it has become an image, exchange form as digitality. With this general form of exchange, the economic mode of production signified by pure image has become transparent with the images and spectacles of social life. This coalescence of economy and culture becomes the commodification of Society as a whole. Hence, Debord writes: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”34 Political economy now revolves around images as the form of exchange in commodities – the relationship between the consumer and commodity is mediated with the image or spectacle. The value of credit can be transmuted to anything in the society of Spectacle. Thus, the “universalization of the commodity form is seen to be the reduction of reality to appearance… commodification.”35 So, capital is not merely the mirror which is reflected to society, but that capital becomes immanent in social life, the general form of exchange has become culture itself. Debord writes: “The Spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”36 Thus, the mode of production and the social consciousness bombarded with images, amplified by Mass Media, becomes a relationship of spectacle. Society has transformed the relationships of subjects to objects, and subjects to other subjects, into a relationship based on what can be shown – appearances, between brand names and labels. For Debord: “what appears is good; what is good appears”37 The consumer society as Baudrillard thought of, is consonant to Debord’s society of spectacle. Baudrillard, heavily influenced by the Situationists, comes from this analysis. Even as early as “The System of Objects,” he already wrote on the significance of the spectacle of the image in commodities through advertisements. He writes:

We consume the product through the product itself, but we consume its meaning through advertising. Picture for a moment our modern cities stripped of all signs, their walls blank as an empty consciousness. And imagine that all of a sudden the single word GARAP appears everywhere, written on every wall. A pure signifier, having no referent, signifying only itself, it is read, discussed, interpreted in a vacuum, signified despite itself – in short, consumed qua sign. .. Advertising’s true referent is here

33Ibid., 162. 34 Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” trans. by Ken Knabb (London: Aldgate Press), thesis 1, 7. 35 Best,. “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord and Postmodern Theory,” 50. 36 Debord, “The Society of Spectacle,” thesis 34, 17. 37 Ibid., thesis 12, 9.

54 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE

apparent in its purest form: like GARAP, advertising is mass society itself, using systematic, arbitrary signs to arouse emotions and mobilize consciousness, and reconstituting its collective nature in this very process.38

This reduction of the world into signs being exchange with each other, and the hyperbolic image as the spectacle, forms the sign mediated-relationship between subject and object. This relationship however being mere appearance is an illusion. The Spectacle is an illusion of the real world of oppression and exploitation of the system itself. At least for Debord, the spectacle is a part of how the entire political economy works, as considered by Marx. It is a progression of Marxist analysis and thus still holds that the appearances in culture are veils of the real world of estrangement. The Situationists continues to follow the logic of a structural Marx in which social consciousness is determined by material life. Revisiting Marx’s theory of Infrastructure and Superstructure, he argues that those who control the mode of production are able to shape social consciousness; the ruling ideas are propagated, maintained, and originates from the ruling class, who clings to their class interest, in order to maintain the status quo. Thus:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.39

He further argues that “the phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence40” These “corresponding forms of consciousness”, these ideas is what Marx call, Ideology. Ideology here is a pejorative to its original conceptions by de Tracy,41 in that, ideologies are

38 Baudrillard, “Systems of Object,” 198. 39 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” 39. 40 Ibid., 14. 41 Destutt de Tracy was the first to give the term ideologue in 1796, which refers to a “science of ideas.”

D. MENDOZA 55 products of the system itself propagated to insinuate its survival, and its survival is dependent upon class antagonism and the establishment of the status quo. Ideology is a necessary illusion, or “false consciousness” that masks the original state of life in society. As, Louis Althusser, defined to us succinctly, Ideology is a “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”42 Ideology, by being a misrepresentation propagates the illusion that there is no alienation occurring in the system. This veil of illusion allows for the system to continually function, sedating the laborers from realizing their present miserable condition and their possibility of emancipation. Debord, like Althusser, believes that the spectacle is an illusion, a “false consciousness.” By raising the commodity into a more abstract form, it has for Debord become an image, accentuated, a spectacle. And yet for him, it is still located properly within the political economy. For, Debord and Structural Marxists like Althusser, there is still the optimism for liberation from “false consciousness” to reality. But according to Baudrillard, this is fiction. It is in here where Baudrillard, although coming from the analysis of the Situationists, also break away from. He radicalizes the Situationist’s analysis of society. Baudrillard argues that the sign-form, the image, which at first – through analysis- stems from economic-exchange, cannot merely be enframed so long within the cage of political economy. As signs, it transmutes everything into signs, i.e., as soon as an object is conceived as a sign it extends itself to other objects, it signifies other objects and therefore rendering them also as signs. The very conception of the Sign, particularly the Signifier, initiates a semiotic process that affects the entire structure of society and culture. Everything is reduced to sign. This is precipitated by modern forms of Mass communication and the commodification of culture. In this mad propagation, signification can no longer retrace itself merely as a product of the mode of production in Marx, for according to Baudrillard, even the mode of production is merely a sign of something else. Perhaps Baudrillard’s analysis of this point in which the signifier could no longer locate its signified can be owed to Derrida’s earlier lecture on the scandal in the “history of structure.”43 As Derrida presented a rupture in Structure, particularly in Levi-Strauss, so did Baudrillard with Marx. And such is why Baudrillard argues that Marx’s analysis was not radical enough. If the

42 Louis Althusser, Ideaology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in “A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader” ed. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 52. 43 Derrida in his famous 1966 lecture in John Hopkins states: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist- thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling” .Jacques Derrida, “Structures Signs and Play in the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 278.

56 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE very fundamental assumptions of Marx: “needs” “labour” and “production”44 are mere signs, then they can be reduced as ideological concepts created by the system itself to insinuate its survival. But this becomes the problem, for if the entire movement of material history, together with its critique, is grounded upon these key axiomatic concepts in the Marxist discourse which are merely sign’s signifying other signs in an infinite exchange, then what then is the future of Material History? He writes:

in a work, man is not only qualitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy. In the last instance, the system rationalizes its power here. And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labour power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the “inalienable” power of creating value by their labor.45

With this Marx, according to Baudrillard, tried to turn the order of Capital using its own ideological phantasms. Baudrillard argues that: Marx really “changed nothing basic: nothing regarding the idea of man producing himself in his infinite determination,”46 “Production, labor, value, everything through which an objective world emerges and through which man recognizes himself objectively – this is the imaginary”47 The progress of the commodity form from its material beginnings towards both its radicalization, and the same time, its abstraction has led the entire structure of historical materialism to become “a giant simulation model” which the “’dialectical’ generalization of this concept is merely the ideological universalization of this system’s postulates.”48 At this point, production in Marx ceases. There is nothing more coming to be, no more production; everything is reproduced by the system49 as a sign. This is the juncture which Baudrillard calls the “End of production,” when the distinction between the Super and Base structure collapses. And with it, the entire structure of Marxist discourse. The very concepts that grounds Political Economy as structure, begins to leave its own confines. Political Economy has become a model to the violence that it once propagated. There is

44 Baudrillard presented a deconstruction of these important foundations of Marx’s Historical Materialism in his work “The Mirror of Production.” Cf. Jean Baudrillard, “The Mirror of Production,” trans. by and intro. Mark Poster (USA: Telos Press, 1975). 45 Jean Baudrillard, “Mirror of Production”), 31. 46 Ibid.,33. 47 Ibid.,19. 48 Ibid.,33. 49 Even here, the term “system” no longer refers to that which has logic, a beginning and an end. This system is neither aleatory nor deterministic. In his later works, Baudrillard would talk about this in length.

D. MENDOZA 57 therefore no more Political Economy, in the sense that Marx imagined: no more labour, no more needs, no more production. Political economy here, and all its concepts, are reduced as simulations, that assure us of the reproduction of its violence in a “dialectical equilibrium.” Political economy and its critical discourse once sought Nature as its “great referent”, now it has become its own reference. From the “Revolution of the Law of Value”, he writes:

From now on political economy is the real for us, which is to say precisely that it is the sign’s referential, the horizon of a defunct order whose simulation preserves it in a ‘dialectical’ equilibrium. It is the real and therefore the imaginary, since here again the two formerly distinct categories have fused and drifted together.50

Once, the mode of production was the hidden reality, and social consciousness, with ideology, its appearance. Now, ideology itself no longer knows what it hides. Social Consciousness is the Mode of Production. “Needs, “Labour” and “Production” these are no longer the reality that grounds the system; they are the imaginary that propagates the system. Earlier, Needs was presented to be mythical. While Labour, according to Baudrillard, “shines through non-labour,”51 because through wages, the system buys back labour in non-labour, i.e., non-work is the venue to consume through wages. It returns back the capital that was expended and continues to circulate the spiral of income and expense, labour and play, re-production and consumption. This is the point when the whole system short-circuits. The beginning was merely a phantasm, the reference is erased, and the end merely an illusion.52 For Baudrillard, already leaving the neo-marxist embrace, leaving behind the analysis of Debord and others, considers that any attempt to talk about emancipation or alienation will be futile, because the system itself is no longer grounded upon a “great signified”, a presence, or the real – emancipated from what? Everything has become a circular play.

50 Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” 31. 51To think of the opposite of labor, which is play or non-labour, as an escape from the assembly line of Political Economy, is a lapse to illusion. He writes: “Although the concept of non-labor can thus be fantasized as the abolition of political economy, it is bound to fall back into the sphere of political economy as the sign, and only the sign of its abolition. It already escapes revolutionaries to enter into the programmatic field of the “new society.” Cf. Baudrillard, “Mirror of Production,” 41. 52 As a minimal note, Baudrillard in a later work joined the discussion on the “apocalyptic turn” of philosophy. He argues pass the eschatology of Fukuyama by presenting that before history can end, it disappeared. Coming from his analysis of systems in his earlier work, the book’s thesis in a question may be posed: If the system is lost in its self-referentiality, Hyperreality, then how could it ever meet its telos? Thus he writes: “ History will not come to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism, ethnic group, conflicts, ideologies –are indefinitely recyclable…History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable” Cf. Baudrillard, “The Illusion of the End” trans. by Chris Turner (California: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27.

58 COMMODITY, SIGN, AND SPECTACLE

At the beginning, Baudrillard supplemented communication within the Marxist framework in order to understand and diagnose the social condition of late capitalism. It is this very supplementation that has led him beyond Marx, beyond alienation and production. It has led him to the analysis that society, conceived radically through signs, implodes into a reality “more real than the real.” This is Baudrillard’s Hyperreality. Hence, he writes: “We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.”53

Department of Philosophy, University of San Carlos, Philippines

References

Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972). ______, The Fashion System, trans. by Mathew Ward and Richard Howard (USA: University of California Press, 1983). Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. by Charles Levin (USA: Telos, 1981). ______, Mirror of Production, trans. by Mark Poster (USA: Telos Press, 1975). ______, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004). ______, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993). ______, The Consumer Society: Myth and Structure, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998). ______, The Ecstacy of Communication, trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze, ed. by Sylvere Lotringer (USA: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series, 1988). ______, The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner (California: Stanford University Press, 1994). ______, The Systems of Objects, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Ken Knabb (London: Aldgate Press). Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978). Lukacs, Gyorgy, History and Class Consciousness, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971). McLuhan, Marshall, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York, 1968).

53 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication” trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (USA: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series, 1988), 22.

D. MENDOZA 59

Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol I., trans. by Ben Fowkes and Introduced by Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, 1990). ______, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947). Pawlett, William, “Against Banality- The Object System, the Sign System and the Consumption System,” in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5:1 (January 2008), . Steven Best, “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord and Postmodern Theory,” in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (UK: Blackwell, 1994).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 60-86

Article

Mediated Psychopathy—A Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Representations of Aggression

Roland Paulsen

hen concepts such as “terrorism,” “fanaticism” and “extremism” proliferate epidemically among the popular explanations of human Waggressiveness, bluntly exposing their inherent hollowness, other concepts stay in the background, influencing, without necessarily being mentioned, our view of aggressiveness. Psychopathy is such a concept, and its pretensions to explain are quite extraordinary. “Psychopaths make up a significant portion of the people the media describe,” the world-leading expert on psychopathy (or at least the most quoted one), Hare, asserts:

Serial killers, rapists, thieves, swindlers, con men, wife beaters, white-collar criminals, abusers, gang members, disbarred lawyers, drug barons, professional gamblers, members of organized crime, doctors who’ve lost their licenses, terrorists, cult leaders, mercenaries and unscrupulous business people […] Read the newspaper in this light [i.e. in the light of the theory of psychopathy] and the clues to the extent of the problem virtually jump off the page.1

This advice of Hare has lately been taken seriously in mass media. Given the skepticism with which the concept of psychopathy has been treated earlier, and given the lack of substantial change regarding both the diagnosis (identification of the disease) and the aetiology (what is considered to cause the disease), the revival of the concept deserves some discussion. In 1947 the Swedish psychiatrist Gerle asserted the bankruptcy of the concept of psychopathy: “This concept is like the emperor’s new clothes, it is a nothing.”2 Before World War II, a biological model of aggression and especially deviant aggression dominated. The concept of psychopathy, which explains aggressive behavior as rooted in the individual’s biology (earlier in shape of the skull, bodily fluids, blood etc. and nowadays in genes, chromosomes, or

1 R. D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths (New York: Guilford, 1995), 6. 2 I. Sahlin, “Psykopatibegreppets Renässans,” in Ord och Bild, 4:5 (2002), 62.

R. PAULSEN 61 in minimal brain damages or the like), was gaining in popularity during the second half of the 19th century and was widely prevalent during the 1920s. The concept was also used by some scientists after World War II but this research was then ill reputed (outside certain academic institutions) while more sociological concepts such as the Frommian authoritarian character gained in public confidence. In the criminal journalism during the 1970s, for instance, an emphasis on social reforms to counteract criminality reflects this general attitude as Pollack has pointed out.3 During the last decade however, the concept of psychopathy has experienced what Sahlin describes as a renaissance—both in scientific and popular contexts. Again, the focus is on individual biology. Pollack asserts that the journalism of this decade is marked by “provincial populism.” Violence as such is the news and its reasons are increasingly neglected—“background analysis are uncommon in the media texts […] Explanations of crime are in the media based on evil, criminal gangs, ethnicity and racism.”4 In this climate of relative lack of social criticism, the revival of the psychopath seems understandable and not very surprising. When it enters popular culture, however, observing this development as a fact does not serve any critical purpose, as Nelkin and Lindee argue.5 We need to analyze in detail the ideological content of the concept of psychopathy and what it involves when popularized as today. What causes for aggressiveness are pointed out? How does the notion of psychopathy teach us to deal with aggressive people? These questions structure the first part of this article and will serve as a foundation of critical analysis of the notion of responsibility, the role of power, and overt and hidden values in the psychiatric discourse.

Sources and Implentation

Critical research on the concept of psychopathy has so far focused on scientific literature, which surely gives a good picture of the discourse.6 As Lukács puts it, “you do not have to read a philosopher to get your world view affected by him […] There is secondary literature, there are articles, reviews and journals, radio lectures and much else.”7 Still, we consider these concrete popularizations to be of great interest. In popular media we might for example find scientific theses formulated more bluntly or perhaps even in a way that distorts their meaning. To understand the ideological impact of a scientific theory we therefore have to analyze some of its concrete popularizations. Data for our analysis has been obtained via database searches (Westlaw

3 E. Pollack, En Studie i Medier och Brott (Stockholm: JMK, 2001). 4 Ibid., 336. 5 D. Nelkin and M. S. Lindee, The DNA Mystique (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1995). 6 J. G. Murphy, “Moral Death: A Kantian Essay on Psychopathy” in Ethics, 82:4 (1972), 284-298; Sahlin, op cit.; R. J. Smith, “The Psychopath as a Moral Agent” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45:2 (1984), 177-193. 7 G. Lukács, Förnuftets Banemän (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1985), 8.

62 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY

International, Mediearkivet and Presstext) for all available published articles pertaining to the diagnosis of psychopathy, beginning in January 2003, up to and including January 2006. The study includes texts from media scientific reporting in newspaper written for a wide general readership in two countries: Sweden and the UK. The reason we have chosen the material from two countries is that the articles that treat psychopathy (the diagnosis) specifically are too few in each country during the selected period to provide empirical saturation. From these combined sources about 50 texts have been collected, and from these a final 20 have been chosen for detailed analysis based on the frequency of the keywords “psychopathy” and “psychopath.” Most of the analyzed articles are feature articles that distinctly discuss the phenomenon of psychopathy; we have only found one article that belongs to the genre of criminal journalism. The intention of this paper is to attempt a reconstruction of the discursive framework of these articles. Although this is a critical discourse analysis, the notion of “discourse” that we refer to, has more in common with the Foucauldian one than with the notion(s) present within what is usually referred to as CDA.8 Since the phenomenon of psychopathy is primarily discussed within the field of science, the focus here will be on the intertextuality between analyzed articles and texts from more scientific genres9 such as psychology, sociology and philosophy. Intertextual analysis, according to Fairclough, draws attention to how “texts selectively draw upon orders of discourse—the particular configurations of conventionalized practices (genres, discourses, narratives, etc.).10 This occupation with the provenance of the order of discourse11 which suits our interests stated in the introduction, touch upon the more archaeological analysis conducted by Foucault with the purpose to “set statements in their discursive frameworks.”12 “Intertextual analysis crucially mediates the connection between language and social context,” as Fairclough puts it, and especially when exposing what is often the best proof of power relations embedded in a text, namely the “absences.”13 As we search for the origins of the media order of discourse in the scientific genres already mentioned, we will also put forward some alternative approaches to psychopathy in each genre.

8 N. Fairclough, Media Discourse (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). 56; S. Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997), 17; R. Wodak ed., Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Sage, 2002), 9. 9 Genre should here be comprehended in the Bakhtinian sense, i.e., constituted by its addressivity – to whom the utterances constituting the genre are addressed. M. M. Bakhtin, “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,” in N. Coupland, and A. Jaworski eds., The Discourse Reader (Surrey: Routledge, 1999), 132. 10 N. Fairclough, (1999) “Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis,” Ibid., 184. 11 Ibid., 191. 12 Mills, op cit., 49. 13 Fairclough, “Discourse and Text,” 185.

R. PAULSEN 63

This investigation of the “intertextual potential”14 of the media order of discourse will be quite extensive. According to Fairclough textual analysis often misses what is excluded in the text. A possible explanation could be the vast (often technical) knowledge required to perform a genuine intertextual analysis. Such analysis requires much work and is, unlike most of the critical discourse analyses, deductive rather than inductive in character. Here, the use of Fromm’s sado-masochistic character as a contrast to the theories of psychopathy will serve as a tool in our analysis. However, we are not intending to present the accurate theory of psychopathy, only to prove that relevant information in the subject is omitted and that these absences may indicate ideological media representation of an important matter to the public.

Lay Preacher Aetiology

A problem, both in clinical and everyday situations, is that psychopathy is a double, almost contradictory diagnosis. The psychopath is a monster, but his terrible characteristics are hidden behind a “mask of sanity” as Cleckey has described it.15 He is partly described as extremely empathic and manipulative—“A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone’s heartstrings”16—partly as a socially disabled “child” (as the Harvard psychologist Kegan has described it) unable to learn socially accepted codes and values. The diagnosing procedure may easily end up in what Popper terms a close circle argument.17 If we suspect someone for being a psychopath, both crimes and deeds can be used as proofs of psychopathy. We may never falsify the diagnosis since it is impossible to know when the presumed psychopath is being manipulative and when he reveals his “true self.” Psychopathy can also be difficult to distinguish from other diagnoses. According to Hare, even clinicians are confused as for the difference between psychopathy, sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder which are the most adopted diagnoses of criminals in psychiatry.18 In her widely acknowledged The Sociopath Next Door, Stout uses the terms sociopathy and psychopathy interchangeably as if they represented the same phenomenon. Hare on the other hand, asserts with the Bible of psychiatry (DSM IV) behind him, that psychopathy is more deeply rooted than sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder since it is defined not only by a cluster of socially deviant behaviors, but also by personality traits. This means that we should not be amazed if journalists writing about psychopathy adopt biological models for human

14 Ibid., 205. 15 H. Werlinder, Psychopathy: A History of the Concept (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978), 164. 16 R. D. Hare, “The Revised Psychopathy Checklist: Descriptive Statistics, Reliability, and Factor Structure,” in Psychological Assessment, Vol. 2 (1990), 339. 17 Cf. Sahlin op cit., 68. 18 Hare, Without Conscience, 25

64 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY behavior. The naturalizing of human phenomena is an ancient phenomenon that is now advancing—an advance observed by many scholars.19 Still, nurture is considered to be of some importance for the outbreak of psychopathy—nature and nurture are in “interaction” with each other, it is said. In the following paragraph, we will discuss how this interaction is explained. Furthermore, we will look into how media, despite the stress on biology, explain why psychopaths often are successful in climbing the hierarchies of society. Eventually we will analyze—in detail—how the psychopath’s genetic predispositions are supposed to differ from the general set of genes.

The “interplay”

“Evidence that psychopaths are born, not made”;20 “Beware the psycho who’s born mean”;21 “Psychopaths ‘inherit anti-social traits’”22—these headlines indicate quite clearly what dominating explanation of psychopathy is circulating in the media. Psychopathy has for a long time been considered a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with environmental forces. Cleckley, for instance, commented that “during all my years of experience with hundreds of psychopaths […] no type of parent or parental influence, overt or subtle, has been regularly demonstrable.”23 Thanks to the development of psychodynamic and behaviorist theories (and probably the critique from the anti-psychiatry movement) biological theories about psychopathy have, however, been somewhat modified. Today the standard explanation is that psychopathy originates in interplay between biological factors and environmental forces.24 This more balanced view is also adopted by the newspaper journalists to some extent. We see it in reservations about the evident importance of the environment, often expressed in one sentence while the main part of the article treats why biological factors are so important to the study of psychopathy. In the Economist one can read that biologists have come to understand “what was blindingly obvious to most laymen—which is that rather than being shaped by nature or nurture, most behavioral traits are an interaction between the two.”25 In the next sentence we read: “Nevertheless, one or the other can still be the

19 P. Brodwin, “Genetics, Identity and the Anthropology of Essentialism,” in Anthropological Quarterly, 75:2 (2002), 323-330; Nelkin & Lindee, op cit.; J. Rifkin, The Biotech Century (London: Victor Gollancz 1998); J. Radden, “Commentary on ’Psychopathy, Other-Regarding Moral Beliefs, and Responsibility’” in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 3:4 (1996), 287-289; P. R. Wolpe, “If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response” in Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 7:3 (1997), 213-230. 20 Economist, 050528. 21 Birmingham Post, 040911. 22 Daily Telegraph, 050525. 23 Quoted in R. D Hare, Psychopathy: Theory and Research (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), 97. 24 Hare, Without Conscience, 166 25 Economist, 050528.

R. PAULSEN 65 dominant factor.”26 Another example is given in where the psychiatrist Jan- Otto Ottoson, without being questioned about it, ticks off the importance of environmental factors in the following way:

Of course, childhood plays an important role in these people’s lives, as in everybody else’s. But biology is also very important. The psychopaths often suffers from a function disorder in the brain: Reduced blood-flow in the frontal and parietal lobes, reduced serotonin-level and increased dopamine-level and so forth.27

What in the environment that plays the important role is impossible to tell from the articles that we have analyzed. The most concrete environmental factor is presented in another interview with a psychiatrist: “For instance to watch many and extreme films containing violence. To a fragile personality these films might hurry up the course of event.”28 As will be seen from the examples, the greater part of the explanations is devoted to the abnormal biology of the psychopath and, but not to the same extent, how much percent of the disease can be explained by biology (80 % according to the Economist and the Birmingham Post).29 These percentages are all based upon twin-studies where identical twins are compared with fraternal twins with the aim of investigating how important identical genes are for the development of certain diseases. In these investigations the only part of nurture that can be measured and explained is, however, behavioral differences according to the individual (not the common) environment—the existence of the behavior as such, why anyone can behave as psychopath in our society, is not discussed in the analyzed articles.30 Psychopathy simply appears as a “fact of life”; an unavoidable problem, still necessary to be dealt with by means of psychiatry. This reduction of nurture is of course an achievement of the psychiatric discourse and when reading what Hare, among others, means when he speaks of interaction between nature and nurture, this becomes still more obvious. Hare rejects categorically the psychodynamic “cycle of abuse” theories saying that those who have been victims of violence in their childhood easily turn into perpetrators themselves. Hare even rejects the more far- reaching theory of detachment disorders that also pay attention to subtle forms of detachment in infancy that might lead to deviant behavior later in life. Such disorders might lead to anti-social behavior, even though some people seem to be invulnerable,31 but not to psychopathy. “While some assert that psychopathy is the result of attachment difficulties in infancy, I turn the

26 Ibid. 27 Svenska Dagbladet, 030929. 28 Borås Tidning, 040418 29 Economist, 050528; Birmingham Post, 040911. 30 Cf. T. Holmberg, Vetenskap på Gränsen (Malmö: Arkiv, 2005), 102. 31 Hare, Without Conscience, 170.

66 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY argument around: in some children the very failure to bond is a symptom of psychopathy.”32 The child is born with psychopathy, Hare asserts, and this is important to acknowledge, he proceeds, since many parents to psychopaths unjustly suffer from guilty conscience about something they are completely innocent of33—“their psychological guilt trip to find out where they went wrong is not very likely to be fruitful.”34 Still poor parenting or adverse childhood experiences cannot be completely disregarded in the study of psychopathy. The environmental factors play, according to Hare, an important role in shaping what nature has provided. “No amount of social conditioning will by itself generate a capacity for caring about others or a powerful sense of right and wrong” Hare declares.35 These capacities are learnt by “normal” persons but to learn these affective properties is exactly what the psychopath is incapable of. To sum up, we see in the psychiatric discourse that individual childhood experiences might, at the utmost, influence the shape and behavioral aspects of psychopathy, while the remaining part of what we refer to as environmental forces on the whole is ignored. In the press, this lack of sociological analysis is even more striking. Behind the phrases about “interaction” and “interplay,” we ultimately find the old biological model of Cleckley leaving the importance of society unrecognized. A good summary of where the dominating research in the aetiology of psychopathy stands today, is given in Helsingborgs Dagblad: “Neither himself [the Swedish psychiatrist Sten Levander] nor Hare pretends that the childhood is unimportant, but psychopaths would go astray even in an utopian society.”36 The role of society is not discussed anymore than that. Apparently, nurture is considered in the quotation, but whatever could point towards societal encouragement of psychopathy is not on an explicit level discussed in the least—neither by the interviewed psychiatrists, nor by the writing journalists. Yet, we touch upon the subject when non-criminal psychopaths who are socially “successful,” are being treated.

Successful Psychopaths

The closest we get to the importance of social structures to the development of psychopathy, is when the psychopaths’ often-successful careers are being discussed. Psychopaths are not necessarily criminals, one points out repeatedly, but examples of the legal kind of psychopaths and what they concretely might be up to are not given. “There are many similar core personality characteristics in criminal psychopaths that are found in other walks

32 Ibid., 173. 33 As Kärfve points out, these guilt relieving explanations of parental behavior and dysfunctional families are also prevalent when the child suffers from the ADHD/DAMP-label. E. Kärfve, Hjärnspöken: Damp och Hotet mot Folkhälsan (Stockholm: Symposion, 2000), 156. 34 Hare, Without Conscience, 173. 35 Ibid., 174. 36 Helsingborgs Dagblad, 030918.

R. PAULSEN 67 of life,” Hare says in the Evening Standard.37 In the Independent he goes more into detail: “[Psyhopaths’] ability to manipulate others without remorse, coupled with a veneer of charm, can also make them extremely successful in many walks of life, including business.”38 In an article in Expressen, where, oddly enough, Hare is not mentioned (though still quite present), we can also read: “studies indicate that one of 20 employers and one of 40 employees are psychopaths.”39 In Dagens Nyheter the share of psychopathic bosses is deemed 10—20 %.40 Does not this suggest that psychopathy is encouraged and stimulated by Western capitalism? Even if so, it remains out of the question in the analyzed articles. Instead we learn that also the social selection of these people is a natural phenomenon: “[S]ome of us are born with psycho genes. The fact that natural selection has allowed them to persist would suggest that, in milder forms at least, psychopathy might be useful.”41 The problem seems to be that society is not controlling the “laws of Nature” sufficiently. The survival of the fittest is the principle of nature, not, as Spencer once suggested, a mark of civilization. The civilization stands on the contrary alone as the single authority able to counteract the principle of natural selection. This is ironically proved by the psychopaths’ success. If the number of psychopaths were allowed to grow unrestrained, there would be no relative advantage of being a psychopath:

Though the genes in question have yet to be identified, this result suggests they are too abundant to be there by chance--in other words they are being kept in the population by natural selection because psychopathic behavior confers a selective advantage. If it does, such an advantage probably pertains only when psychopaths are in the minority (a state of affairs known to biologists as a balanced polymorphism).42

If we do not protect ourselves against nature, nature may accordingly interfere with social processes. In nature there is, however, an immanent logic guaranteeing that psychopathy does not become too prevailing. The same logic also seems to have been adopted by the heralds of civilization. Hare does not want to eliminate psychopathy as such: “The idea is not to give this people the boot. Some organizations would value some of the traits, such as being remorseless.”43 The purpose of the psychiatric science is to control the disease and only as long as it is remains uncontrolled, psychopathy constitutes a problem.

37 Evening Standard, 040112. 38 Independent, 040112. 39 Expressen, 030403. 40 Dagens Nyheter, 060104. 41 Birmingham Post, 040911. 42 Economist, 050528. 43 Independent, 040112.

68 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY

The Uncivilized Man

Conflict between civilization and the untamed nature runs all through the analysed reporting on psychopathy. In this section I will discuss more in detail how the psychopath biologically differ from what is normal. Nelkin and Lindee maintain that before science replaced religion, the equivalence of the psychopath who also hided his evil behind good appearances, was not a product of “bad seed” but of a bad soul.44 When this abstract unity, the soul, disappeared from the scientific theories, the equally very abstract DNA was eventually introduced as an unavoidable factor for both science and philosophy. In this way, the fatalism characterising some of the religious theories about the human being was being maintained and quite liberally applied in many modern theories. The psychopath and the “dark soul” are, however, different from each other in many ways. Especially since the dark soul was considered the devil’s own invention put into the image of God, while psychopathy on the other hand is thought to be representing something fundamentally human—an aspect of humanity that society fortunately has been able to keep in check. Cesare Lombroso was an Italian physician who lived during the 19th century. He is generally considered the founder of modern criminology. A central point of departure for his theories was the notion of the born criminal (delinquente nato). Lombroso was heavily influenced by the evolutionist currents of his time and thought that some people were inferior beings whose higher nervous centres—where the moral sense was supposed to be situated—were not as developed as in the civilized man. These higher nervous centres were considered to have developed in man at a very late date and sometimes the evolution could take a step back and create individuals who were hopelessly destined to become criminal. These individuals, Lombroso asserted, shared their biology with primitive people—they were simply unsocializable savages who happened to be born among civilized people. “Lombroso could— ignorant of ‘savages’ as he was—find many parallels between them and the extreme criminal: various ways of killing human beings, promiscuity, pederasty, inclination to tattoo oneself, etc.”45 The similarity between the born criminal and the psychopath is striking—both concepts represent individuals who for biological reasons are unable to socialize into society and internalize its alleged norms. They are strictly speaking not mean people—just primitive men whose human nature cannot be restrained by society. Just as Lombroso would link the born criminal to the childhood of civilized people, modern psychiatrists view psychopathy as a form of developmental delay. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, for instance, has argued that behind Cleckley’s “mask of insanity” lies not insanity but a young child of nine or ten. “The basis for this theory is twofold,” Hare writes:

44 Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 41. 45 Werlinder, op cit., 72.

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“similarities between the EEGs (recorded brain waves) of adult psychopaths and those of normal adolescents; and similarities between some of the psychopath’s characteristics—including egocentricity, impulsivity, selfishness, and unwillingness to delay gratification—and those of children.”46 In an interactionist model drawn up by the sociologist Harrison G. Gough, the psychopath is similarly defined as deficient in the normal role-playing abilities.47 The psychopath is simply a person who is unable to socialize or who at least has great problems in doing so. “According to Sten Levander there is only one assured cure for those who have developed full psychopathy, and it is time. The extreme traits tend to fade away at the age of 25 and after 40 it goes faster and faster. They eventually learn the social rules, even if it’s a slow business. A psychopath at the age of 75 is very rare”—ends an article in Dagens Nyheter which serves as a good example of the view of the psychopath as an unadjusted child.48 The reason for this difficulty to socialize is yet unknown, but the theories are, as already stated, all based on the model in which genetic heritage amounts to “the brain of the psychopath treating emotional information differently than the normal population.”49 The interesting part of this socialization theory is that it does not only make assumptions about the nature of the psychopath but also about human nature as such. Quite contrary to the Rousseauan humanism, the basic assumption seems to be that there is a self-destructive element in humanity that must be kept in check by people collectively controlling each other through what we call society. This assumption is to be found in some Freudian and Nietzschean currents, in the founder of sadism, Marquis de Sade and originally in the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, the human being, like all other animals, primarily follows the instinct of self-preservation. In order not to end in devastating civil war, mankind has decided to restrain this instinct by delegating all individual power to the state (represented by an absolute, irremovable sovereign, Hobbes argued). The most important consequence of the instinct of self-preservation is, according to Hobbes, in each man an endless striving for power. “A general inclination of all mankind” he writes, “[is] a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”50 As Murphy comments “the men he [Hobbes] imagines in a natural state (motivated only by the egoistic desire for personal satisfaction and the preservation of their own lives) are all

46 Hare, Without Conscience, 168. 47 H. G. Gough, “A Sociological Theory of Psychopathy,” in The American Journal of Sociology, 53:5 (1948), 362. 48 Dagens Nyheter, 060104. 49 Svenska Dagbladet, 040331. 50 T. Hobbes, Leviathan (St. Ives: Penguin Classics, 1968), 161.

70 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY psychopaths”51 and as long as obedience, or to use a more modern term, “social norms” have not been established, man remains a psychopath. These sorts of evolutionist theories are difficult to refute within the frame of positivist science from which they originate. “From Hobbes to Hitler” Fromm writes, “who explains the wish for domination as the logical result of the biologically conditioned struggle for survival of the fittest, the lust for power has been explained as a part of human nature which does not warrant any explanation beyond the obvious.”52 Once nature or “the cruel Queen of all wisdom” as Hitler called it, is accepted as the fundament of human behaviour, it is easy to even in the most flagrant evidence that society is corrupting man (and not the opposite), assign it to human nature.53 The most astonishing results presented by Stanley Milgram in his study of obedience, have for instance been read as empirical evidence of the obedient aspect of human nature, not of modern living individuals brought up in Western capitalism.54 The sociological (and historical) imagination of which the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote is here completely absent. And for good reasons—“the one who has secured the right to define the notion of Human, holds trumps” as the Swedish sociologist Joakim Israel asserts.55 Still, neglecting to analyse the social circumstances under which individuals live their lives, implies in itself not only an assumption about human nature, but also a sociological assumption, namely that nothing can make man behave differently from how nature has already programmed him. What Hobbes and the modern neurologists are saying when asserting that the psychopath essentially is a non- socialized man, is that society (in form of collective obedience, social norms, democracy etc.) does not deprave man additionally to how nature has already created man, but on the contrary, alone, guarantees human peace. In the next section where I will analyse the hitherto devised strategies for treating psychopaths, this sociological assumption will be discussed more in detail.

The Treatment

Psychopathy is a disease that is generally (i.e. amongst the leading expertise) considered “untreatable.”56 To quote some journals: “it cannot be treated”57 or, at least, “there is no proof that psychopathy can be treated”;58 or to quote Hare: “there is little convincing scientific evidence that psychopaths

51 J. G. Murphy, “Moral Death: A Kantian Essay on Psychopathy” in Ethics, 82: 4(1972), 293. 52 E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Owl Books, 1941), 146. 53 Ibid., 226. 54 Cf. M. A Hogg and G. M Vaughan, Social Psychology (Gosport: Pearson, 2005), 252; M. Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 63. 55 G. von Heijne and J. Israel, Skapelsens Herre eller Genernas Slav? (Stockholm: Ordfront, 1985), 7. 56 North Devon Journal, 051013. 57 Dagens Nyheter, 040507; Svenska Dagbladet, 030919. 58 Dagens Nyheter, 040310.

R. PAULSEN 71 respond favorably to treatment and intervention.”59 The conception of the incorrigibleness of psychopathy is obvious in every newspaper discussing the problem. This, considering the logic of the psychiatric discourse, is not very surprising—since human nature is hardly influenced by social forces at all, the effectiveness of therapy remains rather minimal. Psychopathy is an “inborn and incurable disease”60 as it says in one paper, and “some studies suggest that earlier attempts to put psychopaths through therapeutic programmes may actually have made them more dangerous” another one reads.61 Still the newspapers hardly breathe any desperation. That a mode of treatment has yet not been found does not mean that it never will be. Today, the media lay stress on spotting the behavior as soon as possible which, since it is innate, means quite early. How to treat the problem once disclosed is not obvious. “Psychopathic offenders create stark choice” Hare says to the Observer, “do we simply keep them in prison until they are old enough to pose little risk? Or do we find ways to teach them more pro-social ways... to satisfy their needs and wants?”62 In this part, these questions will be carefully discussed from what the articles say. To begin with, we will however discuss where the responsibility is considered to be—in the psychopaths, in their parents, in the mental health services or elsewhere? The function of psychiatric control and power will subsequently be discussed in detail. As we shall see, power is cherished both in the psychiatric discourse and by psychopaths. This leads us to the question of whether the psychopath is as incapable of adopting dominant values as it is generally assumed. In an attempt to answer this question, we will make a distinction between a-values and b-values—values that are officially preached and embedded values that structure social behavior.

Who to Blame

In relation to the completion of the draft map of the human genome (June, 2000), publicly known as the Human Genome Project, many commentators feared a new segregation based on genotype could unfold out of the newly gained genetic information.63 This apprehension was, and still is, quite misdirected. Exactly which genes that cause a human behavior whichever remains utterly unknown and there are good reasons to doubt that such knowledge will ever occur.64 Yet, a cultural segregation based on the belief that man is predetermined by an individually inherited nature, may occur irrespective of scientific progress. What we need to ask ourselves is if this really

59 Observer, 051120. 60 Helsingborgs Dagblad, 030918. 61 Observer, 051120. 62 Ibid. 63 P. McCann-Mortimer, M. Augoustinos, and A. LeCouteur A., “‘Race’ and the Human Genome Project: Constructions of Scientific Legitimacy,” in Discourse & Society, 15:4 (2004), 409; Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 165; Rifkin, op cit., 160. 64 Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 199; Rifkin, op cit., 157.

72 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY would constitute a new sort of segregation? Even in the merithocratic system of assessment there is an idea of a strong, gifted class of individuals, and a “genetic underclass.” The only thing differentiating our cult of heredity from what the future possibly holds in store is that today the wheat is sifted from the chaff primarily by means of education and labor, whereas, in the future, a feudal system based on family may be revived if the gene cult is driven to an extreme. “What if other genetic research should provide cast-iron evidence of genetic links to such traits as alcoholism, aggression, psychopathy or other antisocial behavior?” a chronicler in the Sunday Times asks.65 “Who will have access to the data? How will it be used? Will anyone profit from the findings?” In this kind of criticism of the biologist paradigm, the gene as a holy icon has already been adopted. It is not a question of whether the heredity theory is true or not—only of how the enormous information might be used. In Sweden, 1,835 psychopaths—mostly women—were sterilized during 1941- 1953, according to Sahlin.66 What violation and manipulation of human nature is not to be expected when the renaissance of the concept of psychopathy coincides with what Rifkin has termed the “biotech century”? Sahlin believes the revival of the concept of psychopathy is connected with a trend to individualize social problems and search for solutions in inhumane methods of manipulation.67 From the analyzed material we have found that in the contemporary discourse of psychiatry, no individualization of psychopathy or genetic manipulation to prevent the spreading of the disease is actually suggested. Psychiatry is no longer as isolated as before; it is defending itself against external discourses—to a certain degree, one might add. For instance, the criticism that the psychopathy label may become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” when negative expectations are subtly conveyed to the individual (a criticism delivered by Sahlin68 among others) is open-heartedly discussed by Hare who even admits that the psychopathy diagnosis might harm and that it should not be used if there is even a slight hesitation about its convenience.69 In the same way one avoids, both in specialist literature and in newspapers, to individualize the problem, at least on an explicit level. On the contrary, the attack is upon the individualization found in psychoanalysis where, one asserts, parents have been throughout accused—“the parents of a young psychopath who have turned their lives upside down, in spite of their frantic attempts to understand and nurture him or her, will find it doubly difficult to bear when society unfairly blames them for the problem.”70 Since the influence of nurture is reduced to what the abuse cycle theories amount to, all who try to focus on social causes behind psychopathy can be charged with individualizing the problem to the parents. The biologists themselves do not blame the parents in

65 Sunday Times, 040621. 66 Sahlin, op cit., 70. 67 Ibid., 73. 68 Ibid., 71. 69 Hare, Without Conscience, 161. 70 Ibid., 173.

R. PAULSEN 73 any way—not even for having children in the first place. Since we cannot know how and which genes are being passed on, there is (so far) no public discussion of the responsibility of the parents. Parents therefore find the biological explanations of diseases including psychopathy, as a relief from guilt.71 “One per cent of the population is psychopathic”72 Hare says to the press and nobody can be accused of this. Not even the born psychopath—he cannot help he is born as he is. Nature is the reason—no one can be held responsible for brain dysfunctions, as Kärfve points out.73 This is why it might be appropriate to say that the soul has been “biologized.”74 Instead of viewing children as possessed by the devil, children are nowadays possessed by their “evil” genes, and although the stigmatization process will certainly inflict harm the children are not to be morally blamed. What consequences might follow out of this complete naturalization of the problem? In brief, we are not dealing with an individualization of aggressiveness, but with an essentialist and even fatalist belief that mother earth governs human behavior. It is not unreasonable to imagine that this fatalism might lead us, and especially our children, to the same state of uncertainty and brooding on who we are as in the Calvinist movement of the 17th century.75 How can we be sure that we are the talented ones? The intelligent ones? The ones meant to succeed? Or the ones with ADHD? How can we be sure of our sexuality? How can we be sure of not being psychopaths? A perpetual self- examination is apt to develop out of this fatalism and is probably quite scattered already—empirical research needs to be done here. As we shall see, society willingly provides the tools and categories for this kind of “soul- searching.”

Power and Control

Taking the long view, one might say the striving to dominate the human body constitutes the final point of what Francis Bacon regarded as the great project of civilization: “to ‘squeeze’, ‘mould’ and ‘shape’ nature, in order to ‘enlarge the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”76 As Adorno and Horkheimer argues in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, this will to dominate nature has become an axiom for the Western civilization. It has become so fundamental, the original motive for it (to increase human happiness) has been forgotten while the means (domination over nature and

71 Cf. Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 142; Kärfve, op cit., 79. 72 Evening Standard, 040112; Birmingham Post, 040911. 73 Kärfve, op cit., 212. By giving in to biological essentialism, gay rights activists have accordingly won much of the increasing legitimacy of homosexuality. This, however, has not been realized without criticism from queer-feminism. Cf. Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 121; Wolpe, op cit., 214. 74 Wolpe, op cit., 217. 75 Cf. M. Weber, Den Protestantiska Etiken och Kapitalismens Anda (Lund: Argos, 1978), 52. 76 In Rifkin, op cit., 170.

74 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY other human beings) lingers on.77 “The means is fetishized: it absorbs pleasure,” they observe. “Just as the goals with which the old system of rule had veiled itself, are rendered illusory by enlightenment in theory, the possibility of abundance removes their justification in practice. Domination survives as an end in itself […]”78 The will to emancipate man from his nature, or, perhaps more correctly, to make his nature harmonize better with the demands from society, is an integral part of what Marcuse succinctly describes as the “domination of man by man through the domination of nature.”79 Even if some of the scientific projects indicate that this form of manipulation of the human being through nature (i.e. through the body) is something highly desired, the study of how psychopathy is treated in the dominant psychiatric discourse teaches us that these rather advanced forms of manipulation—especially gene manipulation—are not considered as realistic alternatives. What we, on the other hand, recognize is an attitude towards the psychopath as if he was a natural phenomenon, an unchangeable thing. What we recognize is a tendency to equal domination of man with domination of nature. Modern domination of nature is not as conspicuous as domination of man. The biological aetiology should perhaps make gene manipulation more material to the discussion than it is. But there are no tools for this kind of manipulation and even if psychopathy is considered to originate in the genes, no one knows or even claims to know which genes we are dealing with. Even if some prophesying chroniclers fear that the question of gene manipulation may become urgent in the future,80 it is not even mentioned in the scientific reporting. The fear of being associated with eugenics is furthermore too great to speak in favor of forced sterilizations or the now employed but still quite controversial electro-shock therapy. The closest we get to any suggestion of domination over man through his body in the dominant discourse is via medication; a relatively imperceptible modification of the brain, allegedly momentary and therefore legitimate to advocate in public. As for the rest, the modern project to dominate nature is primarily used as a pretext for exercising power over both potential and diagnosed psychopaths. The first step is to reduce the psychopath to a natural phenomenon. Since psychopathy is described as a biological complaint, the one-dimensional positivist reduction of the psychopath to an unchangeable object without any potential to transcend his own limits, gains increased credibility. Just as parents are told they should not take so much responsibility for their children since the children’s genes ultimately determine their behavior and future achievements, society cannot answer for helping psychopaths to get rid of their psychopathy.

77 T. W. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2002), 72. 78 Ibid., 82. 79 H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 158. 80 Sunday Times, 040621.

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“Predisposition helps to construct a philosophy of limits” Nelkin and Lindee assert.81 Central to this philosophy is that man—every man—remains limited by nature and that every attempt to make him transcend his inherited limits is doomed to fail. In a speech to a group of police chiefs in 1981, President Reagan blamed the belief that changing the environment could change man into the better to be responsible for crime. What prevented justice was, according to Reagan, “a belief that there was nothing permanent or absolute about any man’s nature.”82 This belief is completely in contrast to the philosophy of limits.83 Instead of caring about changing society, the philosophy of limits says we should protect society against the harmful aspects of human nature. Once the philosophy of limits is established, social domination over man thus appears as domination over nature—as an absolute necessity. The focus both in specialist literature and popular media concerning the handling of psychopathy is not upon how to eradicate the disease but upon how to spot it as early as possible. The extensive instructions (however vague they may be) given to the newspaper readers on how to recognize a psychopath especially at the place of work but also in the private sphere, therefore serves a practical purpose. Since psychopaths will always exist, people must learn to be on their guard against each other, “for if we can’t spot them, we are doomed to be their victims both as individuals and as a society,” Hare explains.84 And we better spot them as early as possible. If you should find a psychopath at your place of work, “the only solution if you want to retain your self-confidence and develop as a human being, is to leave,” the management expert Lars-Olof Tunbrå says to Expressen.85 To spot psychopathic children is not only a task of the authorities; “we must all dare to interfere if we see a child loafing about on his own, torturing animals, beating his friends, setting fire on things or pilfering. These are early hints of warning.”86 It often starts with the steeling of property: “it can begin with pilfering at the age of six and then it continues with the pinching of cellphones, robbery and assault, and if the worst comes to the worst it can end with crimes such as rape and murder.”87 Despite the bestial acts that psychopaths are associated with, psychopathic children are all victims of their own nature and in need of help. “A child with risk behavior must get help to structure his existence and learn to handle social situations” the psychologist Britt af Klinteberg says to Dagens Nyheter.88 “Then they can get on relatively

81 Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 136. 82 Ibid., 132. 83 Cf. Marcuse’s definition of the human essence: “those potentialities which emerge as the highest on the basis of the attained level of the productive forces and of knowledge.” Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 163. It should be added that when Marcuse taught at the University of California, Reagan, who then was the governor of California, campaigned to have Marcuse dismissed. 84 Hare, Without Conscience, 6. 85 Expressen, 030403. 86 Svenska Dagbladet, 040331. 87 Borås Tidning, 040418. 88 Dagens Nyheter, 031015.

76 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY well in life. Today society has difficulty in identifying and helping this group of children. Britt af Klinteberg is of the opinion that the knowledge about hints of warnings and special needs should be disseminated to day nurseries, schools and parents as soon as possible.”89 If the disease is not revealed at this early stage, the next “filter” should be in recruitment to labor market and especially to chief appointments. Besides his standards checklist, Hare has for this very purpose developed “the 107- point questionnaire known as a ‘B-scan’ which stands for business scan.”90 The purpose of this scan is, according to the same article, to enable “companies to spot potential managers who are likely to turn violent or defraud the company.” “The purpose is to warn the employers”91—to help “companies keen to weed out the psychopaths.”92 The risk that this kind of security activity produces psychopaths is treated by Hare in Without Conscience, but not at all in the newspapers. The importance of informing the public about what might be indicating psychopathy is too important for such scruples to be mentioned. Still, the discourse is not plain enough to be charged with advocating a “totalitarianism of hazard prevention which takes the right to prevent the worse and, in an all too familiar manner, creates something even worse,” as Ulrich Beck describes postmodern risk prevention.93 Primarily since the discourse avoids proposing inhumane methods of treatment. Even if “one might be able to use brain imaging to identify ‘psychopaths’ before they had committed a crime”94 the question remains what to do once the psychopath has been disclosed. Very few articles (three to be exact) treat this problem and we may consequently be unsure of what treatment is actually proposed. It seems the identification (i.e. the stigma) is supposed to put the psychopath into safe custody all by itself, which probably is true. In one article, however, psychiatry proposes what might be called the hard way: the Belgian suspected of murder and pedophilia, Marc Dutroux was judged a “perfect psychopath” and consequently particularly insusceptible to psychological treatment: “to treat a psychopath is impossible and even dangerous and therefore it is best he should never be released, the verdict says.”95 Otherwise, a more cautious attitude is adopted, either by simply declaring that no treatment has so far been able to present any positive results, or by discussing what seems to be the most popular solution of today’s psychological problems: cognitive-behavioral therapy combined with psychoactive drugs.96

89 Dagens Nyheter, 031015. 90 Independent, 040112. 91 Birmingham Post, 040911. 92 Evening Standard, 040112. 93 U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 80. 94 Guardian, 050402. 95 Dagens Nyheter, 040507. 96 A quick search of “cognitive behavioral therapy” in Pressarkivet and Mediearkivet (dated 03.12.05) reveals that 47 of the 50 most recent articles are unreservedly positive to CBT.

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We could only find one article in The Observer where an entirely positive attitude towards the therapeutic part is expressed.97 In the article, we find a report from a prison where a quite unique experiment is carried out. “For the first time in the world, a large-scale, sustained attempt is being made to develop and evaluate treatments for men usually regarded as untreatable: recidivist, violent psychopaths.” In this article, we have to do with more of a behaviorist discourse than in the other ones. The naturalist view of humanity is, however, the same as in the psychiatric discourse. As Fromm points out, none of the psychiatric discourses takes an interest in the motives and background of the offenders.98 Not only biological factors are considered in the explanation of mental illness, but also social causes in the form of learning. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, a human being can learn a kind of behavior or thought pattern that sometimes is inconsistent with what is socially acceptable. When changing this behavior, no interest for the character is necessary: the personality of the psychopath is considered immaterial—what matters is only the behavior in itself. Hare’s thesis that nurture cannot do anything except shaping the disease99 is therefore, in a way, also present in the behaviorist discourse and equally the Cartesian view of man as a mechanical, programmable computer: “cognitive behavioral therapy tries to make an offender aware of the way he processes data, in order to change it.”100 This entirely behaviorist form of therapy is in a way similar to the chemical methods of psychiatry and the two kinds of treatments are usually combined. In another article, positive effects of psycho drugs are presented: “here and there in Sweden serotonin-uptake-inhibitors are given to youths with incipient psychopathy, and this reduces their aggressiveness and impulsivity.”101 The psychopath’s distorted picture of the world is, however, intervening too much for psycho drugs to be effective:

At the same time, it’s difficult to make them take their medicine. Also psychological help in form of therapy is difficult to offer persons with this kind of disorder. – Psychotherapy aims at change, and the psychopaths are often happy with their lives. The excitement and stimulation make them feel good. Besides, they have a black and white picture of the world. They think the world consists of oppressors and oppressed, and that if they change their behavior they might become part of the latter group—which, of course, they do not want.102

97 The Observer, 051120. 98 E. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 44. 99 Hare, Without Conscience, 203. 100 Observer, 051120. 101 Svenska Dagbladet, 040331. 102 Ibid.

78 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY

To sum up, in all articles there is a view of the human being and especially of the psychopath as fundamentally unchangeable because of nature as the determining factor. We might possibly reshape the psychopathic nature to a certain limit but what we really should look after is a deepened control over nature through early spotting of the psychopath, but what to do once the young psychopath has been detected remains unclear. The psychopath label is probably enough of an instrument to put the psychopath into safe custody. As the quotation above indicates, the psychopath is difficult to treat because of his biology. Biology makes him think that the world consists of oppressors and those who are oppressed and that his behavior in this world is rational.103 To control psychopathy is therefore a part of the Enlightenment’s domination of nature—a part just as evident as the human control over fire. To change society is not an alternative—only more power makes the psychopath manageable. The naturalization of psychopathy indicates something Adorno & Horkheimer did not articulate, namely that the domination of nature after all is more legitimate than the domination of man. The belief that “advances in neuroscience and genetics will make it increasingly hard to separate ‘us’ from our biology”104 will therefore pave the way for more use of power in the in the name of Science. The psychopaths become remarkably similar to what Bauman terms the dehumanized objects of bureaucratic operation: “dehumanized objects cannot possibly possess a ‘cause’, much less a ‘just’ one; they have no ‘interests’ to be considered, indeed no claim to subjectivity […] It is not the objects of bureaucratic action, but its subjects who suffer and deserve compassion and moral praise.”105 In the next part, we will approach the link between this dehumanization and the origin of psychopathy.

B-Values

In this part we discuss “that other form of madness,” as Foucault calls it, “by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non- madness.”106 We have stated that the psychopath is considered non-socialized and by nature incapable of adopting the norms of society which creates problems since the non-socialized person, according to the same discourse, carries an innate badness in the form of endless striving for power. We would now like to enter deeply into which these norms of society actually are. In a critical article on psychopathy, Smith asks whether the psychopath’s values really are as remarkably different from ours as it is causally assumed.107 To be able to discuss this question properly, we must, he asserts, make a distinction between a-values: those values certain societies idealize and would like to think are practiced—and b-values: those that widely prevail. In the

103 Observer, 051120; cf. Hare, Without Conscience, 203; Stout, op cit., 12. 104 Guardian, 050403. 105 Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 62. 106 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), ix. 107 Smith, op cit.

R. PAULSEN 79 psychiatric discourse, a-values are principally taken for granted. To exemplify we might look at how Milgram explains why the participants in his experiment showed symptoms of being heavily under pressure. According to Milgram his subjects got into a conflict situation because they felt caught between obedience to authority and a behavior pattern learned from childhood on: not to harm other people (indeed an a-value). This explanation is criticized by Fromm drawing on what he believes is a b-value: “Have we learned ‘not to harm other people’? That may be what children are told in Sunday School. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems that on this score, the conflict is not as sharp as Milgram assumes.”108 The purpose here is not to refute the a-values taken for granted by psychiatry, even if such a task would not be very hard to execute. Instead, exclusively based on our analysis in this article, we would like to investigate which b-values the psychiatric discourse itself denotes, and then put these values in relation to the dominating description of psychopathy.

Authoritarianism

The first and most important value that spring from the psychiatric discourse is: might is right. It is not by changing the fundaments of society that we prevent the spreading of psychopathy but by confirming the collective power over the individual which implies early control, diagnosing, stigmatizing, isolation, medicine and perhaps cognitive-behavioral therapy. This power- glorifying value can, as Horkheimer & Adorno assert, be traced back to the birth of civilization or, as Fromm formulates it, the changeover from the matriarchal society to the patriarchal society in which man no longer interacts with nature but learns to dominate it and, as a consequence, other men.109 The striving for power is, according to Fromm, what characterizes the sado-masochistic character. The sado-masochistic (or authoritarian) character derives pleasure both from submission to higher authorities and from imposing authority on lower strata. This devotion to power is a direct consequence of, and an individual reproduction of the authoritarian society (which includes both capitalist and so-called socialist societies) and is, according to Fromm at the bottom of all from anti-Semitism to necrophilia.110 The concept of the sado-masochistic character is a concept just as universalizing as the concept of psychopathy and both concepts claim to explain the same sort of behavior. Nevertheless, the two concepts represent two entirely different paradigms and are therefore dialectically in close relation with each other. While the concept of the authoritarian character derives all human malice from society, the concept of psychopathy views the untamed nature as the problem. A careful

108 Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 53 109 E. Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Owl Books, 1990), 47. 110 Cf. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 148; The Anatomy of Destructiveness, 326; The Sane Society, 152.

80 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY analysis of the diagnosis of psychopathy might however reveal a common denominator in both concepts, namely the striving for power. The b-value that “might is right” which all the diagnosed psychopaths beyond any doubt have observed in their surroundings, not least in both the diagnosing procedure and the following “treatment,” virtually knocks out all of the most important a- values that the psychopath offends against. Even if the psychopath’s longing for power is not emphasized in the newspapers, Hare mentions it at several occasions in his book111 and it is in no way proved irrelevant in psychiatric literature. In fact, the striving for power is the only common quality one could possibly see in the psychopaths described by Hare and mentioned in the analyzed articles. As we have sought to prove elsewhere,112 the other attributes either vanish or are contradicted among the texts contributing to the discourse. Some of literature’s most notorious bad guys bear witness to this striving for power. Instead of paying attention to Camus’ relatively harmless character Mersault (described by Murphy as a “perfect psychopath”113) who do not care about neither a- nor b-values and therefore not inclined to offending against any of them, the student of psychopathy should perhaps read Camus’ Caligula whose chief character derives his sadistic pleasures, directly from the striving for power: “I live, I kill, I exercise the mad power of the destructor, beside which the power of the creator looks like a cheap imitation. That is happiness.”114 “Desire for power after Power that ceaseth onely in Death” as Hobbes writes,115 also appears in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as leading driving force of a high-profile case of psychopathy: “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,” O’Brien says while torturing the principal character Winston. “Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power […] Power is not a means, it is an end […] The object of power is power […] ‘We are the priests of power’ he said. ‘God is power’ […]”116 With the risk of being over-explicit, one might also quote Balzac’s clearly psychopathic character Vautrin who, disguised as a priest in Illusions Perdues, proclaims: “I believe in God, but I believe even more in our system, and our system only believes in temporal power […] I like power for power’s own sake!”117 Words we would undoubtedly hear from any eloquent psychopath.

111 Hare, Without Conscience, 5, 38, 100, 104, 216 112 R. Paulsen, Explaining Psychopathy (University of Stockholm: Department of Sociology, 2005). 113 Murphy, op cit., 289 114 A. Camus, Caligula suivi de Le Malentendu (Saint-Amand: Folio, 2003), 148. 115 Hobbes, op cit., 161. 116 G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Suffolk: Penguin, 1972), 211. 117 Honoré de Balzac, Illusions Perdues (Bourges: Garnier Frères, 1967), 718.

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Essentialism

If power glorification embraces both the discourse of psychopathy and psychopaths, another common denominator is the deep essentialism that makes all egalitarian efforts appear utterly stupid. Some people are born with an “indifference to punishment.”118 Hence, people are and will always be more false than others. This view of man is very explicit in the media discourse. Sometimes it is even formulated as a direct attack on every egalitarian philosophy that takes for granted that all men are born as equals: “Biological— innate—explanations of criminality has not fitted the sociological and political tradition here [in Sweden] where the environment is considered to be the determining factor,” Helsingborgs Dagblad writes.119 In an earlier article from the same newspaper, we find a quotation of psychiatrist Levander in which he clarifies how egalitarian ideals are in the way of biological explanations: “When one explains this [how psychopathy is genetic], the Swedish social-democracy reacts with: ‘What? That does not fit our map!’”120 Resistance against one- sided biological explanations of human behavior seems however not to be an entirely Swedish phenomenon. In the not so social-democratic US, a psychologist gives a nearly identical explanation to why his theory of inherited shyness has been questioned. “Kagan has been defensive about his findings, suggesting that as a society Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that biological differences exist among children because it violates egalitarian ideologies,” Nelkin & Lindee observes. “Yet,” they add, “the response to his work was hardly ‘reluctant.’ It has been extensively and enthusiastically covered and broadly generalized in the mass media.”121 These quotations clearly points out a threat against the psychiatric discourse, namely the “egalitarian ideologies” which suggests that the value of equality is incompatible with genetic essentialism. This is not very surprising but, on the contrary, logical. If we judge one group of people anti-social by nature and without any potential to change, how can this group of people still be as worthy of the same dignity as the rest of us? According to Murphy, they simply cannot; since psychopaths are “morally dead […] we have no moral obligations to them and thus our moral response to them is to be on a par with our moral response to animals.”122 Genetic essentialism has rightly been compared to eugenics and its reification, not to say misanthropic reductionism, is beyond any doubt also prevalent among psychopaths themselves.123 It was not for nothing that Adorno made the observation that the interviewees who scored high on the fascism scale in the well-known study of the Authoritarian Personality, all assumed

118 Observer, 051120. 119 Helsingborgs Dagblad, 030918. 120 Helsingborgs Dagblad, 011128. 121 Nelkin & Lindee, op cit., 140. 122 Murphy, op cit., 294. 123 B. Müller-Hill, “Truth, Justice and Genetics,” in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43:4 (2000), 578; Wolpe, op cit., 218.

82 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY

“the eternal and intrinsic badness of human nature” whereas the low scorers had much greater confidence in the innate potentialities of the human race.124 Among the high scorers on the ethnocentrism scale, the suspicion of utopian theories was also salient (“one has to be ‘realistic’”) and so was the tendency to equal communism with the Stalinist Regime and even with plain war125—which nowadays should be quite prevalent in view of the influence of authoritarian editors. Despite anthropological proof that Hobbes natural man is remarkably missing in the least civilized men,126 the psychiatric discourse has fervently maintained the same misanthropic view of the human being it had 150 years ago. The psychopath might then ask: why should I try to change when, in the end, I cannot get rid of my deviant nature? Besides, is it possible to have feelings of solidarity with creatures whose nature I do not share? To psychopaths who have been labeled as children (which is most likely to befall children of the socio-economically underprivileged, as both Smith and Sahlin observe127) an even more relevant question might be: why any “fellow-feeling” and “playing by the rules” in a society that has so radically reduced my possibilities to realize my potentialities? When the psychiatric misanthropy is as widespread and accepted in the cultural sphere as it is today, we should not be surprised if the psychopath, as one of Sade’s sadistic characters, makes the following confession on his deathbed: “I only regret that I did not sufficiently recognize nature's omnipotence, and my only remorse concerns the mediocre use I have made of the faculties (criminal to you, all elementary to me) that nature gave me to serve its purposes.”128 In the view of man as fundamentally barbarian and of some men as more barbarian than the rest of us, unable to change, we find seeds of the psychopath’s callous attitude towards his fellow beings. The lack of empathy— or sympathy strictly speaking—is an inseparable aspect of biological reductionism; just as society does not care about the psychopath’s childhood and his reactions to whatever he has been exposed to, the psychopath does not care about others’ background and feelings. To psychiatry, and to the psychopath, people appear as things, as natural phenomena, as animals. Only from the dominating view of psychopathy can we draw the conclusion that psychopathy is nothing but an exaggerated extension of widely accepted values, and not discontinuous with what is normal, as Jaspers once asserted.129 Since these values are so conspicuous in the psychiatric discourse we should perhaps ask whether it is any wonder that clinical treatment of psychopaths to date have uniformly failed? “The psychopath is not ill nor even seriously out of phase when functioning within a society where b values are

124 T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton & Company, 1969), 696. 125 Ibid., 723. 126 Cf. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 136, for a summary of this research 127 Sahlin, op cit., 64; Smith, op cit., 193. 128 D. de Sade, Œuvres 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 4. 129 Smith, op cit., 183.

R. PAULSEN 83 both practiced and legitimated in the marketplace,” as Smith eloquently puts it; “insofar as the prevailing values of a society continue in the b direction then the psychopath has indeed learned from experience and is an important source of moral agency for that society—is heavily socialized, not antisocial personality.”130

Conclusion

Not very surprisingly, psychopathy is primarily described as a biological form of deviation in the analyzed articles. Social aspects of psychopathy are mentioned; there is an “interplay” between nature and nurture, but the role of nurture seems to be limited to deciding what concrete expressions the inherited psychopathy assumes. Being a natural phenomenon, psychopathy is generally assessed to be untreatable. The only way to handle psychopathy is to spot it and stigmatize the individual as early as possible. After that, it remains unclear what ought to be done: either lock them up or try to drill or medicate the behavior away. Even if psychopathy is biological and inherited according to the dominating discourse, parents' consciences are never burdened with guilt of any kind. Psychopathy is the result of neither family nor society; it is a natural disaster for which no one can be blamed. The psychopath is an animal, unable to apprehend and accept conventional values, but still appearing to be as human as anyone else. Hence, psychopathy is not even a tragedy; it is simply a fact of life that the Enlightenment project (i.e. technology) will eventually wipe out if people only learn to put enough faith into “evidence-based” sciences such as genetics and neurology. In comparison with the sociological and psychoanalytical theories mentioned above, striving for power is, in the popularized version of the psychiatric discourse, not the cause for aggressiveness but means to stop aggressiveness from disseminating. This power glorification is, just as the biologist reduction of psychopaths to animals, formulated in philanthropic terms. Since psychopaths lack fundamental qualities that characterize the human being, they only constitute a threat to humanity and are fully comparable with an earthquake. If, however, the psychopath is a human being, the psychiatric discourse appears in a different light. The authoritarianism and mutilating essentialism that psychiatry then could be charged for, differ radically from the values psychiatry is supposed to defend, and prove that the psychopath is not antisocial but, on the contrary, extremely socialized and in tune with the values of his society. It is worth noting that we have been able to draw this conclusion entirely from the study of how psychopathy is treated in the dominating media discourse. No parallels have been drawn between individual aggression and governmental aggression. We have not derived psychopathy from the alienating production of capitalism or its reifying competition that, thanks to

130 Ibid., 193.

84 MEDIATED PSYCHOPATHY our system of education, is particularly prevalent at the individual level. The fact that the occurrence of antisocial personality disorders (including both sociopathy and psychopathy) is about ten times higher in US than in Taiwan,131 has not been discussed. Nor the fact that psychopaths stand out as heroes during wartimes. No parallel has either been drawn to Machiavellian management literature where psychopathic traits are described as virtues. This seems to us a virtue of our account. Future research in the field of psychopathy should consider these and similar social phenomena more carefully than what has been done here, and notably, as we have tried to prove, in the dominating discourse.

Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden

References

Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M., Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2002). Adorno, T. W., et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton & Company, (1969). Bakhtin, M. M., “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,” in The Discourse Reader (Surrey: Routledge, 1999). Balzac, Honoré de, Illusions Perdues (Bourges: Garnier Frères, 1967). Bauman, Z., Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). Beck, U., Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). Birmingham Post, 040911. Borås Tidning, 040418. Brodwin, P., 2002) “Genetics, Identity and the Anthropology of Essentialism,” in Anthropological Quarterly, 75:2 (2002), 323-330. Camus, A., 2003 Caligula suivi de Le Malentendu (Saint-Amand: Folio, 2003). Dagens Nyheter, 031015, 040217, 040310, 040507, 060104. Daily Telegraph, 050525. Economist Newspaper, 050528. Evening Standard, 040112. Expressen, 030403. Fairclough, N., “Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis,” in The Discourse Reader (Surrey: Routledge, 1999). Fairclough, N., Media Discourse (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). Fromm, E., Escape from Freedom (New York: Owl Books, 1941). ______, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). ______, The Sane Society (New York: Owl Books, 1990).

131 Stout, op cit., 136.

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Gough, H. G., “A Sociological Theory of Psychopathy,” in The American Journal of Sociology, 53:5 (1948), 359-366. Guardian, 050403. Hare, R. D., “The Revised Psychopathy Checklist: Descriptive Statistics, Reliability, and Factor Structure,” in Psychological Assessment, 2 (1990), 338-341. ______, Psychopathy: Theory and Research (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970). ______, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths (New York: Guilford, 1995). Helsingborgs Dagblad, 030918. Hobbes, T., Leviathan. (St. Ives: Penguin Classics, 1968). Hogg, M. A. & Vaughan, G. M., Social Psychology (Gosport: Pearson, 2005). Holmberg, T., Vetenskap på Gränsen (Malmö: Arkiv, 2005). Independent, 040112. Kärfve, E., Hjärnspöken: Damp och Hotet mot Folkhälsan (Stockholm: Symposion, 2000). Lukács, G., Förnuftets Banemän (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1985). Marcuse, H., Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Allen Lane, 1969). ______, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). McCann-Mortimer, P.; Augoustinos, M.; LeCouteur A, “‘Race’ and the Human Genome Project: Constructions of Scientific Legitimacy,” in Discourse & Society, 15:4 (2004), 409-432. Mills, S., Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997). Müller-Hill, B., “Truth, Justice and Genetics,” in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43:4 (2000), 577-583. Murphy, J. G., “Moral Death: A Kantian Essay on Psychopathy,” in Ethics, 82:4 (1972), 284-298. Nelkin, D. & Lindee, M. S., The DNA Mystique (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1995). North Devon Journal, 051013. Observer, 051120. Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty-Four (Suffolk: Penguin, 1972). Paulsen, R., Explaining Psychopathy (University of Stockholm: Department of Sociology, 2005). Pollack, E., En Studie i Medier och Brott (Stockholm: JMK, 2001). Radden, J., “Commentary on ’Psychopathy, Other-Regarding Moral Beliefs, and Responsibility’,” in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1996), 287-289. Rickert, J., “The Fromm-Marcuse Debate Revisited,” in Theory and Society, Vol. 15, No 3 (1986), 351-400. Rifkin, J., The Biotech Century (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998). Sade, D. de, Œuvres 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Sahlin, I., “Psykopatibegreppets Renässans,” in Ord och Bild, 4-5 (2002), 61-76. Smith, R. J., “The Psychopath as a Moral Agent,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45:2 (1984), 177-193.

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Stout, M., The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005). Sunday Times, 040621. Svenska Dagbladet, 030919, 030929, 040331. von Heijne, G. & Israel, J., Skapelsens Herre eller Genernas Slav? (Stockholm: Ordfront, 1985). Weber, M., Den Protestantiska Etiken och Kapitalismens Anda (Lund: Argos, 1978). Werlinder, H., Psychopathy: A History of the Concept (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978). Wodak, R. ed., Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Sage, 2002). Wolpe, P. R., “If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response,” in Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 7:3 (1997), 213- 230.

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 87-104

Article

Rorty’s Philosophy of Education: Between Orthodoxy and Vulgar Relativism

Rhoderick John S. Abellanosa

ichard Rorty once said that the search for objective truth is [not] the search for correspondence to reality [instead] it is a search for the Rwidest possible inter-subjective agreement.1 This statement, among many others, is a reason why some of his commentators consider his philosophy to be relativist, although it is safe to say that this observation may be due to the lack of an informed understanding of relativism, its epistemological underpinnings and nuances. To totally label Rorty as a relativist and nothing else is, I believe, more of an oversimplification of his not so uncomplicated thoughts; labels which if not well nuanced or contextualized, would surely fall short of capturing the expanse of the philosopher’s fundamental contentions.2 Yet the concern over relativism’s effects in the practical dimensions of life is understandable. This is especially true if the said-to-be kind of relativism is espoused by a philosopher whose influence has started to sink-in to the different fields of the contemporary intellectual world. Rorty is, perhaps, a good example of this, for without doubt his philosophy (i.e. particularly his epistemology) has arguably shaped the currents of the philosophy of education. Thus, this paper seeks to develop a reflexive-analysis of Rorty’s philosophy of education, most particularly those that he has articulated in the essay “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching.”3 The said essay reflects

1 Richard Rorty, “Does Academic Freedom have Philosophical Presuppositions; Academic Freedom and the Furture of the University,” in Academe (November-December 1994), 52. 2 Rorty would not even admit the label relativist. In Philosophy and Social Hope, he makes use of the term “so-called relativists”. Apparently, the usage of the term “so-called” highlights that the charge of relativism is not an admitted or acknowledged categorization by Rorty, in fact, it rebounds to those who would prefer or insist to call the American pragmatist as such. Substantiating this using the philosopher’s own words, “[w]e so-called relativists refuse, predictably, to admit that we are enemies of reason and common sense. We say that we are only criticizing some antiquated, specifically philosophical, dogmas. But, of course, what we call dogmas are exactly what our opponents call common sense.” Philosophy of Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1996), xvii. 3 For brevity sake, the said essay may be cited in this article as HGST. It is compiled together with many other philosophical essays on education by Steven M. Cahn of the Graduate

88 RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION the complexity of his thought. I believe it is not the best work to read if the goal is to initially understand the “essential Rorty”. Nevertheless, it is a well- crafted essay and a good piece for a student of philosophy of education to be introduced in a more direct way to some basic themes of Rorty’s perspectives on perennial issues in education like truth and its nature, the curriculum, etc. Apparently, Rorty’s philosophy is a serious indictment to the existing classical philosophical viewpoints on education, some of which have been treated de facto as dogmatic statements by some camps in the tradition.4

Philosophy, Knowledge, and Education

The best entry point to understand any philosophy of education is to know and familiarize the gist of the philosopher’s philosophy. This modest attempt to do the same with Rorty’s philosophy of education is not an exception. Let us begin therefore, this enterprise of knowing his educational philosophy, with a relatively brief discussion of his philosophy. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty says that:

P]hilosophy is not a name for a discipline which confronts permanent issues, and unfortunately keeps mistaking them, or attacking them with clumsy dialectical [i]nstruments. Rather, it is a cultural genre, a ‘voice in the conversation of mankind . . . which centers on one topic rather than another at some given time not by dialectical necessity but as a result of various things happening elsewhere in the conversation . . . or of individual men of genius who think of something new . . . or perhaps of the resultant of several forces.”5

Philosophy cannot and should not claim to possess unquestionable methods. Neither should it claim that its object of study is a non-time-bound reality: unchanging or eternal. As regards methodology, Rorty seems to contend that philosophy cannot account for everything that is fundamental in all genres of human thinking. Political Science for example is philosophical due to the fact that it developed from the positivist tradition. As a social

School of The City University of New York. See Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy of Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997), 522-536. 4 To formally set the parameters of the discussion, this paper does not aim at expounding the individual major writings of Rorty (e.g. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature); primarily, limit in space prevents such. It does not mean however that we have relegated to the periphery the many important works of the American philosopher; more than certain, the major works are important. It is just that, among others and for pragmatic reasons, the objective of this endeavor prevents the necessary length and breadth – to provide a fairly sufficient space for a substantial discussion of the far reaching themes of the focused philosopher’s several works. 5 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 264.

R. ABELLANOSA 89 science, it comes from the grand project of the Enlightenment where science was exalted. It therefore, has a specific epistemology and a political ontology in all analyses or readings of political life. In this sense, political science is presupposed by philosophical principles (e.g. libertarianism, democracy, Marxism); at its very core, political science is a positivist and empirical political philosophy. The above explanation on philosophy in relation to political science or any other discipline for that matter would only be acceptable however if there are no arguments anymore as to the nature of philosophy. But the “very nature” of philosophy is what Rorty would like to argue against. Philosophy is not and cannot be what its defenders think of it that is, an autonomous discipline or that sort of “technical or professional philosophy.”6 We cannot conceive of the mind as a mirror that can reflect, whether clearly or not so clearly, the reality that is outside of it. More so, it is not possible to think of philosophy as beholden to the principle adequatio et rei intellectus (adequation between the intellect and the thing). Rorty seems to have vindicated Heidegger in the belief that although we have witnessed through the centuries the battle of giants in philosophy (e.g. Plato v. Aristotle, Empiricism v. Rationalism, etc.), the most fundamental question has been long forgotten.7 Rorty’s sources of inspiration or influence in thinking are revealed in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; he calls them heroes: Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey.8 A glimpse into the philosophical ideas of the said heroes would reveal that Rorty after all has not been alone, to some extent, in his views and sentiments on philosophy and philosophizing. Tartaglia in his book Rorty and the Mirror of Nature – explains that “other than their being the most romantic, the farthest out, and the most prophetic” – they “are all opposed to representational conceptions of the mind and knowledge, that is, to the Mirror of Nature idea.”9 Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of

6 James Tartaglia, Rorty and the Mirror of Nature (London: Routledge, 2007), 3. 7 In Being and Time, Heidegger says, “This question has today been forgotten. Even though in our time we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again . . . Yet the question we are touching upon is not just any question. It is one which provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from the on as a theme for actual investigation. What these two men achieved was to persist through many alterations and ‘retouchings’ down to the logic of Hegel. And what they wrested with the utmost intellectual effort from the phenomena, fragmentary and incipient though it was, has long since become trivialized.” Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 2. Here, I am not suggesting that Rorty completely follows Heidegger. On the other hand it is not my contention also that Heidegger’s philosophical problem is the same with that of Rorty. These beside the point, my usage of the word “vindicate” in the statement Rorty “has vindicated” Heidegger means that there is a parallelism between how the two looked at philosophy. In my view, they both understand philosophy as a constructed system that has accumulated a set of propositions that constitutes its canonized problems. The clearly significant difference of Heidegger from Rorty is the former’s fundamental concern, i.e. Seinsfrage [the fundamental question concerning Being]. 8 Tartaglia, op cit., 19. 9 Ibid.

90 RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION philosophy is his contribution and relevance to Rorty. One can see an evidence of Wittgensteinian influence in Rorty’s position that philosophy should dissolve rather than solve problems; a position that calls for the interrogation of the conviction that philosophy has the capacity and role to essentialize things. On the other hand, Heidegger’s place in Rorty’s philosophy is the former’s “desctruction” in Sein und Zeit, which is what the latter employs in his method of historical deconstruction; something which is evident in his view of philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. Then the third hero is Dewey, whose contribution and influence on Rorty is pragmatism. In his debate with Jurgen Habermas, and Leszek Kolakowski on the challenge of relativism, the transcript of which was published as a book Debating the State of Philosophy Rorty says:

The philosopher I most admire, and of whom I should most like to think of myself as a disciple, is John Dewey. Dewey was one of the founders of American pragmatism. He was a thinker who spent sixty years trying to get us out from under the thrall of Plato and Kant.10

Rorty’s “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” is an attempt to address the problem of “how education might be conceived if one starts from the Nietzschean rather than the Platonic assumptions.”11 This question suggests that a philosophy of education may not be a continuous or uninterrupted narrative like the common presentation of the history of philosophy. Both Plato and Nietzsche are concerned with the search for truth. The former found it in the World of Forms while the latter believes that it is in the Will to Power. Should it follow that just because Plato lived centuries earlier than Nietzsche, philosophy should begin with him? At the onset of the essay, Rorty points out that “any philosophy professor asked to talk about education can be expected to begin by noting that the word education means “like bringing out” and then talking about Plato’s recollection. Thus, philosophy (and philosophy of education specifically) in Plato stands on the ground of an ultimate reality (the world of forms) and that the human mind possesses something which is “like that reality” – in the words of Rorty, “there is a natural attunement between Reason and the nature of things.” This is something that has been deeply embedded in the centuries-tradition of Western philosophy, more so up to Kant who hoped to provide philosophy a “secure path of science.”12 Opinions not so favorable to Rorty’s philosophy have developed as a consequence of his anti-Platonic notion of truth; his anti- Platonist hermeneutics or endeavor has been denounced by some scholars as

10 Josef Niznik and John T. Sanders, Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolakowski (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger), 32. 11 Steven M Cahn, Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy of Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997), 523. 12 Tartaglia, op cit., 2.

R. ABELLANOSA 91 one that espouses relativism (vulgar relativism for that matter).13 The reactions against Rorty’s philosophy mostly generate from the fear that without anything objective, everything ends up possible and/or allowable. If all things are allowable, and that all concepts are in no way objective, what is the significance of education? Why study and teach things that after all are fluid or changeable? In response to the objection discussed above, the American pragmatist draws insights from Gadamer and Dewey, and builds a formidable argument on the foundations of their philosophies, without compromising his view on truth as non-objective (and merely a product of inter-subjective agreement) and the (still) uncontested necessity of education within and for a community. But why Dewey and Gadamer? The simplest answer to the question is that there is a point of convergence between Dewey and Gadamer and that is antifoundationalism. Dewey is a pragmatist, and as one he does not subscribe to the belief in an objective or unchangeable truth.14 Gadamer on the other hand developed his hermeneutics as interpretation which cannot be subjected to any rigid and frozen set of rules. In the words of Rorty himself:

I want to offer an account of the common elements in Gadamer and Dewey’s thought which enable them to defend themselves against such charges. I shall argue that both men put in place of Reason – the Platonic organ for detecting truth – is a sense of tradition, of community, of human solidarity.15

At this juncture let us briefly acquaint ourselves with the general overview of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Dewey’s pragmatism. We shall then return to Rorty’s synthesis of their points of convergence and try to figure out how his appropriation of both has successfully served as a defense against his critiques.

13 One of those who openly labels Rorty as relativist is Charles Taylor. According to Taylor, “ . . . Rorty’s whole coping with foundationalism, realism, antirealism, and such-like issues cannot but exacerbate his vulnerabilities to this kind of capture. Essentially Rorty’s view resembles certain kinds of relativisms and nonrealisms . . .” Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy” in Charles Guignon and James Hiley eds., Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 171. Habermas, on the other hand, labels Rorty’s neopragmatism as a sophisticated version of present historicism. In Habermas’ view, the Rortian pragmatism continues as a third phase of the dialectics of anti-platonism. Habermas asks, “Does Rorty succeed in finishing with the philosophical language game as such? While pretending to do so, he seems only to start another round of the same game. If this observation is correct, the assumption about the inclusive nature of world-disclosing languages, the founding of antifoundationalism, is up for reconsideration.” Josef Niznik and John T. Sanders, op cit., 18-19. 14 This statement however is not a claim that Rorty is in no way different from Dewey. Guignon and Hiley for example believe that Rorty breaks from Dewey in the belief that science has a privileged status among language games. One can see evidences of this contention in his essay “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” in Classic and Contemporary Reading in Philosophy of Education. 15 Rorty, HGST, 254.

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Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hermeneutics

From a Gadamerian point of view, philosophy is hermeneutics – it is a search for truth, it cannot be a search for an objective truth. To understand something means to understand it within the context of the thing’s historicity. What is sought to be understood may be an event or a person, but one thing is sure: the process is hermeneutic and not any application of a rigid analysis of an object coming from an unquestionable ontology. According to Quito, “truth eludes the methodical individual; method retards and subverts truth. Truth therefore can be reached not methodically but dialectically.” With utmost clarity, he has stressed his aim in coming up with a hermeneutic enterprise:

I did not intend to produce an art or a technique in the manner of earlier hermeneutics. I did not wish to elaborate a system or to describe, let alone, direct the methodical procedure of the human sciences. Nor was it my aim to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in these fields in order to put my findings to practical ends . . . my real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.16

In explaining his point, Gadamer says that there are four humanistic concepts in hermeneutics: Bildung, senus communis, taste, and judgment. Bildung (culture) – has the connotation of “natural form” but in its most profound sense, it refers to the proper human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities. Thus, the more preferred equivalent for Bildung is formation. Formatio as Bildung however is not the same with formation that is the non-active undergoing of a process in the hands of the formator. It is according to one commentator “in the Hegelian sense, the rising to the universal”17 which requires leaving behind one’s particularity, overcoming one’s limited perspective, and assuming the widest horizon possible. If Bildung, as Gadamer says, is an avenue to truth, hence, constitutive of any endeavor at understanding a text or an object of interpretation, then one should go beyond the self in order to enter the other. In this sense, hermeneutics should necessarily involve the “entire history in its interpretation.” According to Emerita Quito, “every single individual who want to raise himself out of his natural being to the spiritual world would have to make the, customs and institutions of a people his very own.”18

16 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), xvii. 17 Ibid., 13. Also cf. Dennis C. Villarojo, The Ontological Conditions of Understanding: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Light of the Encyclical Fides et Ratio (Rome: Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, 2001), 112. 18 Emerita Quito, Philosophers of Hermeneutics (Manila: De La Salle Press, 1990), 54.

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Sensus communis – is not “common sense” as few interpreters understand it. Instead, it is that sense of what is right and the common good that is to be found in all men. Such is acquired through living in a community and is determined by its structures and aims. Knowledge in this light, is neither acquired through method, nor through the knowledge of the universals; rather, it is learned from the insights of the traditions of the community which expresses its “collective wisdom.” Knowledge is therefore acquired by living in a community, and not just any living but involvement, passionate participation if we may; and not just any community but concrete community also. In the words of Emerita Quito, “sensus communis is the virtue of social intercourse.”19 Judgement – is what enables the individual to discriminate among events. It is more than the act of the intellect, which makes decisions based on objective criteria. According to Weinshimer in his commentary on Gadamer’s hermeneutics, “judgment is like a common sense in that it . . . cannot be logically certified.”20 It is like an act of prudence. In Gadamer’s own words, “[i]t cannot be taught in the abstract but only practiced from case to case, and is therefore more an ability like a sense. It is something that cannot be learned, because no demonstration from concepts can guide the application of the rules.”21 Judgment is significant in hermeneutics because the process of understanding a “spirit or life science” cannot be insured by stringent and frozen rules as these rules may just destroy the very “life” that one seeks to understand and appreciate. Taste – can only be understood in relation to the three other humanistic concepts. There is no exact definition of taste; no accounting of it or any general criteria.22 It may be understood as certainty in judgment, hence the perfection of judgment.23 But taste cannot be such also if it does not come from the community, so that it involves the whole. The interpretation of the whole is not possible without any taste of the whole – a holistic assessment of the entire community or event that comes from the community. Taste therefore cannot be such apart from the Bildung. It is on the other hand, characteristically in close affinity with sensus communis and judgment. Hermeneutic reflection is necessary when we deal with human beings whose experiences cannot always be categorized, labeled and artificially studied. Quito (1990) commenting on the hermeneutics of Gadamer, says that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is this openness to the other. The German philosopher’s method is actually inspired by Martin Heidegger, who believes that man is not just an animal rationale but more than such, a Dasein. Dasein is capable of asking the very question of his there-being. Dasein’s horizon is Being and the horizon of Being is Time. The existential analytic of Dasein

19 Ibid., 55. 20 Joel Weinshimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 75. 21 Gadamer, op cit., 31. 22 Quito, op cit., 57. 23 Villarojo, op cit., 118-119.

94 RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION therefore necessarily involves the explication of his historicity and temporality.24 Drawing from the insights of Gadamer, Rorty explains one of his themes in the essay HGST – “education [is] aiming at a sense of human community, and of this community as foundationless, supported neither by sciences nor by history, but only by hope.”25 This statement can be understood better if one goes back to the four humanistic hermeneutical concepts of Gadamer, in the context of which education may be understood as a hermeneutic enterprise. From Gadamer, we now proceed to Dewey, whose philosophy is also used by Rorty as a framework in his philosophy of education. Here it is argued that the limits of Gadamer’s hermeneutics are complimented by Dewey’s pragmatism. While Gadamer has provided an anti-Platonist framework, yet its privileging of play over method is at the same time the reason for its inability to be relevant to those who are in search for a pragmatic philosophy. Apparently, the point being driven here is while it is important to avoid essentializations, as in the case of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, nevertheless this does not mean that we should not hold on to anything clear and instead consign to mysteries and conundrums. On this note, we turn our focus to Dewey’s pragmatism.

John Dewey and Pragmatism

Dewey considers the philosophies since Plato as problematic. For him, philosophers were confused between the “nature of knowledge” and the “function of knowledge.”26 A philosophy that myopically preoccupies itself with the question on the nature of knowledge is a “spectator philosophy” and devoid of experience, which is what should enrich philosophy – in fact it is what philosophy should be. As a pragmatist Dewey has taken by heart “the refusal to accept the correspondence theory of truth and the idea that true beliefs are accurate representations of reality.”27 In the light of the Deweyan notion of knowledge, and the prescription that has been generated from it – on how education as a process must be done, it is important to highlight that values do not have any ontological source. The gradations of relevance we place upon things are not grounded on anything metaphysical; hence, we cannot essentialize values. The mind discovers values in the same way as it discovers facts. Thus, for Dewey, the scientific method is

24 According to Heidegger, “In analysing the hitoricality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because ‘it stands in history,’ but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being.” Being and Time, 428. 25 Rorty, HGST, 530. 26 Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy, 6th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1999), 366. 27 Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105.

R. ABELLANOSA 95 very important as it consists the “observation, reflection, and testing . . . deliberately adopted to secure a settled, assured subject matter.” As Dewey said in his Democracy and Education:

Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they centre in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of thinking.28

A critique hurled against pragmatism is that it does not have any organ for truth.29 As such it is an anti-thesis to the classical notion of truth, where there is a subject and an object, and the former has the capability of grasping an objective truth about the other. Does it mean to say therefore that humanity has to succumb to what is exactly the opposite of what the erstwhile system of thought has established? Religious instruction can be cited here as an example. Why would American universities still offer Religious Studies in their Divinity Schools if it has been obviously known that the once-upon-a-time metaphysical foundations of the proofs for a Supreme Being’s existence – are flawed? Coming from Dewey, a possible answer to this question is that, it is not so much about the philosophical certainty or the soundness of the metaphysical truth, but in the fact that still religious communities contribute something to society, and these contributions remain to be part of human culture. It’s not so much about the universality or the universalizability of the ethics subscribed to by a religious sect, but in what this specific kind of ethics may offer to help improve society. As what Dewey says in Democracy and Education:

Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking this measure, we should avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement.30

28 As cited by Rorty in HGST, 527. 29 Ibid. 30 John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” in Steven M. Chan, Classic and Contemporary Reading in Philosophy of Education, 289.

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Another objection to pragmatism’s dismissal of truth within the context of truth as adequation comes from the argument that a realist epistemology stems, ultimately, from common sense! For example, should Aristotle’s characterization of man as a political animal – an essentialization of man if it is evident that the in every persons there is a disposition towards politics. Ergo, isn’t this a vindication of the ontologically laden statement “man by nature is a political animal?” Why call such an Aristotelian premise an essentialization of man, when it is simply a set of words that speaks of a universal human experience? To this objection, Rorty has this reply:

Common sense distinguishes between the apparent color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between non-dairy creamer and real cream, and between fake Rolexes and real ones. But only those who have studied philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are really real.31

Rorty’s distaste for essentialism typically evidences the Deweyan influence. Dewey’s distinction, for example, between the nature and knowledge and the function of knowledge is evident a central problem in Rorty’s view of philosophy, where he considers the discipline, not as the erstwhile metaphysical queen of the sciences, thus the value of philosophy is not in its capacity to tell us the answers to the ultimate questions about the world, but in the very fact that it is a dialogue and dialogue is a necessity among humans and their community. In the philosopher’s own words, “philosophy is not a name for a discipline which confronts permanent issues, and unfortunately keeps mistaking them, or attacking them with clumsy dialectical Instruments. Rather, it is a cultural genre. ‘a voice in the conversation of mankind’.”32 This brings the discussion back to Dewey whose understanding of truth is not essentialist but pragmatic.

Hermeneutics, Pragmatism, and Rorty’s Philosophy of Education

Drawing from the thoughts and insights of Gadamer and Dewey, Rorty has come up with a philosophy that is a hybrid of the well-mixed chemistry of Gadamerian hermeneutics and Deweyan pragmatism. Thus, his description of learning in one of the essays is as follows:

31 Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 105. 32 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 264.

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Learning is not a process of helping us to get in touch with something non-human called Truth or Reality (other-worldly, objective, ultimate, unchanging) rather it is what keeps us in touch with our potentialities.33

Gadamer’s hermeneutics as articulated in his sensus communis, as well as Dewey’s pragmatism, both support the view that truth/true assertions are not anchored on some absolute and other-worldly reality, but are simply successful moves in the social practice of what Wittgenstein calls a language-game. Rorty argues that truth is linguistically conditioned, and as such, what may be called by some as objective truth is nothing but a true statement in a certain milieu or cultural context. As what he says of this topic in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, “truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”34 As Guignon and Hiley remark “vocabulary or language” is the “pivotal concept” of Rorty’s version of pragmatism.35 The validity of his contention could only be tested if the most common objections against it would be discussed. As in a litmus test, where the nature of a substance is known by the very color it reveals, the pragmatic approach to truth could be better understood if what the critics say of it, would be examined from all angles. The two objections against Rorty’s notion of truth as an output of “hermeneutics and pragmatism” are the “argument from moral confrontation” and the “argument from moral evil.” Such objections are basically the same problems raised against the hermeneutic and pragmatic philosophies of Gadamer and Dewey respectively. What best summarizes the objections against Rorty is the question, if there is no objective truth then how come there are certain things or experiences universally shared by humanity? In HGST, Rorty specifically identifies this universally shared experience, namely “perceptual confrontation” and “moral evil.” The first argument is based on perceptual confrontation, which basically contends that there is human experience, and it is replete with facts that are universal, meaning to say, they are not just peculiar to one person. Expressed interrogatively, why should we argue against a truth arrived at inductively or against a true statement in the face of a clear and present perception? Simply or pejoratively put, why go around and complicate what is obvious? To this kind of objection, Rorty has this reply, “the paradigm case of truth is the one in which our beliefs are refuted by experience – where, for example, the negative result of a crucial experiment explodes a theoretical edifice. Hard, objective, truth is typified by the brute factuality of that disconforming observation.”36 Furthermore truth is not a matter of

33 Rorty, HGST, 525. 34 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. 35 Guignon and Hiley, Richard Rorty, 14. 36 Rorty, HGST, 525.

98 RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION correspondence. Coming from Heidegger, the American pragmatist argues that one should not confuse correctness with truth because the two are not the same.37 Within the context of Rorty’s philosophy, the pragmatist and the hermeneuticist join in saying that confrontation with perception is not an illustration of the nature of truth. The second argument against Rorty’s notion of truth is the reality of moral evil. Using Hitler and Stalin as examples, Rorty poses the argument that if there is no objective truth, the two dictators would be justified in their evil acts, for the simple reason that they can create some definitions and construct – their own language games in order to support and legitimize their political agenda. The immediate response to the second objection is that there is no question that there are moral acts, in like manner there are immoral acts. This premise is based on a certain standard of morality, the validity of which comes from a moral tradition; even morality therefore is a product of the community’s consensus, which is linguistically conditioned. To oppose an evil is a moral virtue, but the certainty that is supposed to ground or support such opposition is not; it is a non-sequitor to use the need to oppose evil in proving that there is an existence of objective value/s.38 In this light, it can be said as a matter of initial synthesis that education is not a process of recollecting some kind of an objective value or absolute truth, say one that exists in the world of forms. Rather, it is the process of inventing something which will improve (Dewey  pragmatic) our “tradition” (Gadamer  hermeneutics), i.e. “what we have been told.”

Humanistic and Scientific Education: The Rortian Perspective

In HGST, Rorty seeks to address the question of what educational apparatus should be relied upon in order to provide a process of understanding that is neither dogmatic or Platonic nor vulgar relativism. In his view, both the humanistic and scientific dimensions of education have important roles to play in the balancing of the educational process. For one, the humanities (as it was first conceived during the renaissance) and science (enlightenment) were movements that envisioned at emancipating man from authority; they started as revolts against authority.39

Humanistic Hermeneutic Scientific Pragmatic

EDUCATION

37 Ibid. 38 Rorty, HGST, 526-527. 39 Ibid., 528.

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Liberation is the process of removing any attempt of capturing or imprisoning reality with a single vocabulary. Coming from Rorty, it may be argued that a genuine liberal education is not just a reaction as limited as humanism during the enlightenment, or like that of the scientific enlightenment that heralded positivism. Again, using the liberative values of both humanism and scientific education, he came up with a hybrid concept of education, which is a continuum of “successive attempts to create a sense of communal purpose.”40 In the philosopher’s own words:

From the pragmatic and hermeneutic point of view, both “the scientific method” and “the Great books” are shibboleths. There is no such thing as “the scientific method outside of moral virtues – willingness to accept experimental disconfirmation, willingness to listen to alternative theories, willingness to scrap an old paradigm and begin again with a new.41

But the set of “moral of virtues” Rorty is talking about is not the same with the morals Aquinas speaks of in his ethical system, which is based on Natural Law, and not even Kant’s categorical imperative. A morality based on the/an absolute is beside the point, because “Truth is not everywhere the same”. It is not everywhere the same because language is not everywhere the same and, human existence is essentially “linguistic” and “historical.”42 Is Rorty’s philosophy, which speaks of hermeneutics and pragmatism as philosophies that stand beside each other and in constant dialogic, a synthesis in the Hegelian sense of both philosophical camps? My answer is in the negative, and I argue for this position because to say that it is a synthesis in the Hegelian sense means that Rorty has come up with a new method and thereby suggested to displace or replace the old one which is not the case. To further see the relevance of Rorty’s philosophy, it is necessary to locate his context, and that is the strongly pragmatic tradition of America (whose pragmatism ends up in the forms of individualism and materialism; to add, in the most pejorative senses of the terms). This is what our philosopher tries to say in his work Consequences of Pragmatism:

So Pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness,

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 529. 42 Ibid.

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the do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge of man which says that “there is no such things” as Truth or goodness.43

Rorty’s Challenge to Education

Where education for Plato is the recollection of a truth that has pre- existed before us, for Rorty it is a communal enterprise, a process which every individual must be involved in and take responsibility. Truth is shared, and every member of the community should be involved in the process of finding it. There might not be one truth held by everybody in the community, as there might be more than one community holding on to one truth. Each community may, as our philosopher believes, worship “one hero” – say Einstein, Shakespeare, Freud, or even Plato. In this set-up, the students will see that what they are studying, examining, conceptualizing – comes from a certain tradition, and in that tradition there were people who attempted to solve the problems of their own time; some of them succeeded, others have not. Aristotle for example is one hero in the history of the ancient world who addressed the questions on ethics, human nature, politics, etc. But what we can draw from Aristotle is the lesson, that he made a great and systematic attempt to earnestly and rigorously analyze the problems of his day and their possible solutions. To some extent, he succeeded. His success however has been divinized by many, stretching it too far, and making a set of dogmatic propositions out of it. For Rorty, hero worship is needed by the educational process. Just because there is no objective truth, does not mean that we have become like that proverbial mosquito inside the bottle who does not know where to move out. There are heroes in every discipline and they tell us what they have done before; for us people of today, the challenge is to identify our own problems and own them by looking up to those who were before us, and then try to communally come up with our own responses and solutions to our problems. There is also a need therefore for disciplines to mutually dialogue each other, but other than this, they must also mutually dialogue with each other. In the greater scheme of things therefore, there cannot just be one hero. Using Nietzsche, Rorty believes, that in the community of today, “the difference between science and literature fades out” such that “[t]he fighters against their time who are our models may include Goethe as well as Galileo, Woodsworth as well as Darwin, Holderlin as well as Marx and Freud.”44

43 Richard Rorty, “Consequences of Pragmatism,” in Marxists Internet Archive , 10 March 2010. 44 Rorty, HGST, 531. Here I would like to quote what Rorty says of philosophy, which I think should also be true to the importance of heroes in education despite the rejection beforehand of the notion of an ontologically eternal truth. Thus, “I am all for getting rid of canons which have become merely quaint, but I do not think that we can get along without

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Rorty’s philosophy of education sheds light to some of the problems that have been with this country’s educational system for quite some time; among these problems is the question concerning the role of the Liberal Arts.45 For example, the so-called technical experts and curriculum designers of the country’s higher education commission have reduced the number of units of philosophy and the social sciences courses to give way to the growing number of units of their disciplines’ major courses (e.g. Engineering, Nursing, etc). One typical case was the merger of two social science courses46 in a certain professional curriculum, perhaps on the pretext that some lesson contents of the two disciplines are interchangeable; and with the need to add a few major subjects, then all the more is the move to merge (i.e. the one on political science and history) apparently justified. Coming from Rorty, the said kind of attitude of our higher-education- experts; their kind of thinking, develops in our educational system a unitary if not mono-logic discourse that is characterized by lack in critical depth. The country may have been producing graduates who are good in the necessary technical-know-how of the discipline but at the expense of the other domains of knowledge like philosophy and the social sciences. This situation reflects the lack of understanding among some of our so-called “education experts” – that the process of education is not the same with the process of canning tunas in factories. The whole process is not just about the production of technically good engineers, architects, and accountants. It is also about them as being part of a system, which is by nature intellectual, social, and political – culturally and historically bound by certain ideals.47 An educational system that merely produces people with good technical know-how and nothing more, would end up simply having human resources who may be scientific in the naturalist and materialist sense of the terms, but wanting in the other aspects of human life; people so heavily influenced by the homogenous scientific training might even be antagonistic, or to say the least negative in perception to the humanities, which for them are inferior in method. Our universities may produce Communication and Linguistics graduates who are good in verbal gymnastics but, beyond which, (are) lacking in analytic depth, impoverished in terms of social awareness, and

canons. This is because we cannot get along without heroes. We need mountain peaks to look up towards. We need to tell ourselves detailed stories about the mighty dead in order to make our hopes of surpassing them concrete.” Cf. Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73. 45 This part of the discussion refers to the situation and condition of education in the Philippines. 46 The courses being referred to are Political Science and History. 47 I think no official of DepEd or CHED, who has sworn oath before the President of the Republic (the head of State), thinks that education is not for the State. Any official who believes or thinks that we educate people not for the State but for something else, might just be too ridiculous in flippantly thinking that we are in some condition of life similar to that of Mel Gibson’s Mad-max, i.e. state-less.

102 RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION inadequate in terms of political facts. The output that this over-all situation yields is one where there is a constellation of individuals who know much of a few; where each stands on his own existential space without any realization of his significance in the greater scheme of things. This kind of situation reminds us, according to Rorty, that “[c]ritical thinking is playing off alternatives against one another, rather than playing them off against criteria of rationality, much less against eternal verities.”48 Rorty’s philosophy of education is one which privileges the process that the community undergoes in search for truth rather than the claim that there is an objective truth the consequence of which is the marginalization of the voices of many groups, and the devastation of minority groups (e.g. disciplines, cultures). It looks at education as a community activity where both humanistic and scientific camps come into the fore not in order to launch some unilateral critique against each other. Not any unilateral critique, because science nor any specific discipline, does not enjoy any privileged cognitive status over and above the humanities and vice-versa. In this sense, education is now a space other than being a mere process where disciplines meet and evaluate each other, without obliterating tradition, but instead mindful of the need to create a community. In the very words Rorty used to explain his point:

We do not lift ourselves out of history by doing laboratory experiments any more than by reading St. Thomas – we merely, with luck, get some new suggestions about how to solve our problems. This means that neither education in science nor education in the humanities has any claim to centrality.49

Conclusion

When Rorty debated with the critical theorist Jurgen Habermas and the Marxist Leszek Kolakowski on the state of philosophy, particularly on the topic, the “challenge of relativism” – the American pragmatist shared with wit his understanding of truth this way:

I take Platonsim and Greek thought generally to say, [t]he set of candidates for truth is already here, and all the reasons which might be given for or against their truth are also already here; all that remains to argue the matter out. I think of romantic . . . hope as saying, [s]ome day all

48 For this assessment to be fair, I also would like to believe that those in the liberal arts must try to reach out and apply their oftentimes abstract concepts to the actual and practical sphere. This way, their theories could be validated. For example those disciplines that are into policy studies (e.g. Political Science) should also see to it that the environmental policies are scientifically informed. 49 Rorty, HGST, 529.

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of these truth candidates, and of these notions of what counts as a good reason for believing them, may be obsolete; for a much better world is to come—one in which we shall have wonderful new truth candidates.50

If there is no absolute truth, if there are no eternal values fixed by some unquestionable essences, then what’s our destiny, what face of humanity are we going to create? Rorty’s answer (I think) would be: that is “the task of education.” This is what the opening statement, of this essay, in its depth profoundly means, that the search for truth is the search for the widest possible inter-subjective agreement.

Department of Political Science, University of San Carlos, Philippines

References

Cahn, Steven M., Classic and Contemporary Reading in Philosophy of Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997). Dewey, John, “Democracy and Education” (selection) in Classic and Contemporary Reading in Philosophy of Education,” in Steven Cahn, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997). Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979). Guingon, Charles and David Hiley, Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Niznik, Josef and John T. Sanders eds., Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolakowski (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996). Quito, Emerita, The Philosophers of Hermeneutics (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1990). Rorty, Richard, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ______, Philosophy of Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1996). ______, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” in Classic and Contemporary Reading in Philosophy of Education, ed. Steven Cahn (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997). ______, “Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions: Academic Freedom and the Future of the University,” in Academe (Nov.-Dec. 1994). ______, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ______, The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

50 Niznik and Sanders, op cit., 51.

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______, “Consequences of Pragmatism.” [article online]: Available from: http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/reference/subject/philosophy/wo rks/us/rorty.htm. ______, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979). Stumpf, Samuel Enoch, Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy, 6th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1999). Tartaglia, James, Rorty and the Mirror of Nature (London: Routledge, 2007). Taylor, Charles, “Rorty and Philosophy” in Charles Guignon and James Hiley, eds., Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Weinshimer, Joel, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Villarojo, Dennis, The Ontological Conditions of Understanding: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Light of the Encyclical Fides et Ratio. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pontificia Universitas Sanctae Crucis, Rome, Italy (2001).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 105-132

Article

Kant’s Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time-Consciousness, and the Unconscious

Ben Mijuskovic

n what follows, I shall address the question concerning the ultimate premise of the Transcendental Analytic in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I Ibelieve the candidates can be reduced to two dominant but opposing principles, one grounded in immanent time-consciousness and the other in the unity of consciousness. In pursuing this goal, I intend to view consciousness through Leibnizian lenses by focusing on its dynamic activity, continuity, unity, and unconscious aspects. Thus, in the first edition Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declares that the complexities of the Subjective Deduction “have cost me the greatest labour” in formulating the foundation for his entire epistemological edifice, for his transcendental Deduction of the Categories.1 As he presents it in these early passages, the principle is grounded in the indubitability of (individual) temporal consciousness.2 Nevertheless, half a dozen years later, in rethinking the critical and substantive starting point of his system, he then announces instead that it is rather the transcendental unity of self-consciousness or apperception upon which he will base his entire epistemic foundation.3 In what follows, I wish to support his initial reflections concerning the epistemological status of the temporal nature of consciousness and conclude with what I consider to be a critical psychological consequence about the irredeemable quality of human loneliness, which I believe follows directly from subjective and immanent time-consciousness.4 But allow me first to start with the key Kantian concept of the synthetic a priori5 and to draw a distinction between its “logical” use versus its epistemological status as it functions in temporal consciousness. For Kant, the

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), A xvii, A 97-104. 2 Ibid., A 99. 3 Ibid., B 131. 4 See Ben Mijuskovic, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979). 5 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 1-2; A 77-79, 105-106, B 2-6; B 102-105; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), Preamble, Sections 2-3.

106 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS term synthesis implies relation, connection, combination between separate and distinct concepts or entities; between subject and predicate terms in a judgment; or a substance and its accidents. Beyond that, synthesis means unity, binding, togetherness. There are various forms of synthesis in Kant and in a moment, I will discuss some of them. A priori concepts and judgments are (1) universally true and true in any conceivable universe; (2) they are necessary, indicating that any opposite assertion implies a logical or real contradiction; and, further (c) they are pure or non-sensuous. There are various forms of synthetic propositions displayed in Kant’s writings. Empirical judgments are factual claims, which are contingent and a posteriori: “Konigsberg was the capital of Prussia.” But the important judgments are those containing concepts that are both synthetic and a priori. These may be consciously accessible as subjective conditions underlying thought itself, as in the syntheses of apprehension in intuition, reproduction in the imagination, and recognition in a concept;6 or they may be objective presuppositions, as in the Deduction of the pure concepts of the faculty of the understanding, which result in the continuity of human experience and/or the transcendental unity of apperception.7 It is important to notice that the famous cluster of relational syntheses, the categories, are always active, and thus “spontaneous” sources of relation and hence unity.8 And in so far as they are active, they necessarily exhibit temporal features. As such, they constitute conditions presupposed as unifying agents in all human experiences, both scientific and ordinary. By contrast, Kant considers synthetic a priori metaphysical judgments that deal with human ideals and aspirations, particularly the three postulates regarding the conceivable or possible existence of a transcendent God, a noumenal will, and a supersensuous immortality as meaningful but without any temporal referents precisely because they point to a noumenal realm, which is “outside” or “beyond” the human representations of time and space.9 Although the above form meaningful concepts, judgments, and arguments, they are nevertheless cognitively vacuous or empty due to their completely non- sensuous content. They are outside the limits of possible knowledge, in so far as the faculties of sensibility (Transcendental Aesthetic) and understanding (Transcendental Analytic) define such limits. Thus, the judgment, “The soul is immortal,” is both synthetic and a priori but not knowable because it cannot be encountered in any possible experience. Similarly the purely rational, transcendent principles and proofs, presented in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideals, in the Dialectic, as well as the ethical formulations discussed in the

6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 97 ff. 7 See Ben Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Idea and Argument (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). 8 In the idealist tradition, the term “spontaneous” signifies that which is independent of matter and sensation. 9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 3 = B 7; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 122-133.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 107

Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, involve no temporal implications. Thus, for example, although the categorical imperative is a synthetic as well as an a priori ethical principle, directing us always to act so that our subjective maxim (the will) can become a universal objective law legislating for all rational beings in any conceivable universe, again, time is not a constitutive feature in this principle. The will and the law are related a priori and yet there is no reference to phenomenal time in this command or, for that matter, in any of the above concepts, judgments, or arguments for the existence of God, the freedom of the will, or the immortality of the soul Obviously, although the category of causality intrinsically involves temporal characteristics, a more instructive insight into the temporal aspects of synthetic mental activities is provided by the example of mathematics offered by Kant in both the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) as well as the second (or B edition) Introduction to the Critique (1787). There are, of course, contemporary philosophers who follow Leibniz and Hume in distinguishing a priori or analytic propositions, consisting of those in which the predicate term is already contained in the subject concept, from synthetic a posteriori or empirical statements, ones in which the predicate term adds a significant and novel element to the proposition—Hume’s “relations of ideas” as opposed to “matters of fact.” Kant, rather controversially however, affirms the genuineness of synthetic judgments a priori in mathematics and geometry. Accordingly, in the Prolegomena section titled “How Is Pure Mathematics Possible?” he states that “arithmetic achieves its concept of number by the successive addition of units in time.”10 Kant is convinced this is the case because math involves a further temporal process since “higher numbers” depend on an additional synthetic activity of progressively counting units in time. (Critics have indicated that the sense of psychological discovery is no proof of logical novelty.) For Kant, the computational factor is based on a mental “construction” and mathematical additives appear to be both synthetic and temporal at once. A non-temporal construction would be a contradiction in terms. Perhaps what Kant has in mind is that if a primitive tribe could only count to the number seven, they would also possess the concept of five; but in advancing to the proposition 7 + 5 = 12, the twelfth digit would consist in an additional synthetic, temporal progression. In any case, my point is that in this instance Kant is obviously identifying synthetic activities with temporal processes. Kant is simply making explicit this element of time-consciousness in the operations of mental activity. Clearly, the example must have considerable probative value, since he states it in the Prolegomena and retains it in the second edition Critique.11 Schopenhauer, who agrees with Kant in his identification of synthesis and time, insists “[t]hat arithmetic rests on the pure [a priori] intuition or perception of time” and that this activity is not only synthetic but a priori as well.

10 Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Section 10. 11 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 15 ff.

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It can be demonstrated…as follows. All counting consists in the repeated setting down of unity; merely to know always how often we have already set down unity do we mark it each time with a different word; these are the numerals. Now repetition is only possible through succession, but succession, thus one thing after another, depends entirely on the intuition or perception of time. It is a concept that is intelligible only by means of this; and thus counting is only possible by means of time. This dependence of all counting on time is also betrayed by the fact that in all languages multiplication is expressed by “time.”12

Later, in the Introduction to the second edition Critique, Kant once more reiterates that synthetic propositions a priori are possible in mathematics because synthesis occurs when combining acts go “outside” or beyond prior numbers, as for example, when we transcend the immediacy of moments in time and “see the number 12 come [i.e. become, progress, develop] into

12 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover), II, iv, 34-35. See also: Charles Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, & Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), pages xi-xii. Cf. Jean Piaget, A Child’s Conception of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), pages 54-55. Piaget faults Kant for essentially conceiving time as a form of passive intuition; he is somewhat more sympathetic when Kant views it in “schematic” terms involving the faculty of the imagination (pages 37, 300). In any case, Kant’s method is fundamentally “transcendental” and not empirically genetic, as we shall see. Edmund Husserl, in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), in section XIII of the Appendix, titled “The Constitution of Spontaneous Unities as Immanent Temporal Objects—Judgment as a Temporal Form and Absolute Time-Constituting Consciousness,” distinguishes between 2 x 2 = 4 as meant, as an intentional meaningful object, and 2 x 2 = 4 as a process of judging. “Let us consider: instead of directing my glance of attention toward what is meant as such, I direct it toward the judging, toward the process in which it comes to be given to me that 2 x 2 = 4. A process goes on…Therefore, we have a spontaneous act of forming, which begins, goes forward, and ends (page 182)…The judgment here, therefore, is an immanent process of unity in immanent time” (page 184). See Robert Sokolowski, “Immanent Constitution in Husserl’s Lectures on Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 24:4 (1965): “The first and most fundamental unification comes from the temporal flow” (page 536); again, “One of the reasons why immanent objects must be extended in time is that such extension gives the individuality and unity, which they must have in order to be experienced. An immanent object is individualized, it is made into a determined, distinct unit, only because it fills a certain section of the time flow, because it is constituted in certain temporal phases” (page 538). I will contend that time-consciousness precedes the unity of consciousness and thus functions as the condition for the latter. This insight first appears in germ in Leibniz, attains fruition in Kant, and finds its mature expression in Husserl. For Husserl’s concept of the synthetic a priori, see Gaston Berger, The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pages 25-26; and Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), page 115. According to Husserl, there is even a sensory “material” a priori.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 109 being.”13 Synthesis not only “takes” time, it is time, since consciousness is temporally structured in its most intimate and essential nature.14 For the analytic tradition, 7 + 5 = 12 is simply a tautology, while in Kant’s geometric proposition, “The shortest distance (quantity) between two points is a straight line (quality),”15 it is even more difficult to see how this is a synthetic judgment a priori. But I believe the addition example does expose and illuminate Kant’s inner thoughts and so I have recruited it in the interest of clarification as an instance of the synthetic a priori. However, the salient issue is not whether Kant is right about mathematics, or geometric constructions, but whether he is correct about the temporal aspects of synthetic acts, which are always relational, discursive, mediate. Certainly, other philosophers have invoked the synthetic a priori with considerable effect and success. Plato summons it in the Meno when he analogizes the relation between color and shape as identical to the assertion that Virtue is Knowledge of the Good; Hegel enlists it in his dialectical, essentially temporally-structured interplay between Being and Consciousness (all the categories of the Science of Logic are synthetic and a priori); Husserl introduces it in describing the eidetic difference between thoughts, as given completely when they occur at all, while, by contrast, objects always appear as essentially restricted to incomplete perspectival aspects; and, finally, Sartre maintains that Being and Nothingness, the in-itself and the for- itself, are inseparably related to each other as color and extension, or sound, pitch, and timbre, are to each other (Conclusion to Being and Nothingness). But Kant is captivated by the temporal nature of consciousness, namely that unlike space, whose external parts lie outside one another, the elements of time are essentially continuous with each other, and there can be no time without a fusion, a melding of past, present, and future. This insight, I believe, is grounded in the twin Leibnizian theories of dynamism and continuity, the latter expressed in the principle that neither nature nor consciousness makes “leaps,” that not only is there a seamless continuity in the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy) but in the “chain” or, more precisely, the stream of consciousness as well. It may be remembered that in Leibniz’ paradigm of self-consciousness, all awareness is essentially temporal by virtue of the fact that the soul is always active. Both in the New Essays on Human Understanding and The Monadology, especially sections 1-21 of the latter, there is an emphasis on the simple, immaterial nature of apperception, its unity, its continuous identity, its (temporal) dynamism, and its unconscious activities. Against the Cartesians and Locke, Leibniz declares, in the New Essays, that the

13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 15-16. 14 Aristotle defines time as the measure of physical motion through space; Newton posits time as an independent container, virtually a “substance” or an attribute of God, infinite and eternal; while Leibniz offers two rather different models: (a) one which is implicit in his subjective, immanent, and dynamic description of self-consciousness; and (b) the other grounded in a relational ordering between monadic perceptions or points, as argued in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence; See Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pages 4-8. 15 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 16.

110 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS soul thinks continuously, since “no substance can lack activity” and that in deep sleep and even in death each soul remains aware at some minimal level.16 Later, in exploring the notion of the unconscious, I will go on to contend that there is an underlying and hidden species of thought, of thinking, that is unconscious—or more precisely non-conscious—and creative, since it is productive of internal time-consciousness. Its foundational acts and generative powers are responsible for all our “surface” or conscious states of awareness. And if this is so, it can only occur if the mind is “simple,” unextended, immaterial precisely because no materialist, behaviorist, empiricist, or phenomenalist theory—in principle—can account for the unconscious. In other words, for Kant, consciousness itself rests on acts that are non-conscious and in principle irretrievably so. Thus, the difference between the unconscious acts, in the Freudian sense, and the non-conscious, in the Kantian sense, is that the former are in principle retrievable and the latter are not even though they are constituted by the very dynamic forces which allow us to think at all.17

As previously intimated, essentially there are two serious applicants for an indubitable starting-point: (a) the unity of self-consciousness; and (b) consciousness of time. Both have strong features recommending them. The first position is championed by a number of commentators while the second is defended by Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and vigorously advocated by Norman Kemp Smith.18 In this controversy, I am inclined to side with the latter group

16 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. by Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), preface. 17 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pages 179, 273); hereafter cited as NKS. See also: Mijuskovic, Ben “The Unconscious in Plotinus, Cudworth, Leibniz, and Kant,” Philosophy and Theology, 20:1 & 2 (2008), 53-83. 18 Commentators who neglect Kant’s first edition emphasis on time-consciousness include H. J. Paton, in Kant’s Metaphysic f Experience (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965): “This transcendental ground is transcendental apperception, and it is not derivative, but ultimate or ‘original’” (I, 396-397); basically, Paton denies that Kant’s investigations can be described as “psychological” in character and he dismisses the possibility of any unconscious factors being operative (I, 458); S. Kroner, Kant (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960), pages 59, ff.; P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen & Co., 1966), pages 91 ff.; A. C. Ewing, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967): “What is the premise of the whole argument of the transcendental deduction? It is, I think, simply that there occurs awareness of a manifold in time. I further think that the addition of the words in time, is not necessary for the main argument of the transcendental deduction” (page 72); T. D. Weldon, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pages 154-157; R. Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1982), pages 34-35; and Powell, C. Thomas, Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), passim. In general, the analytically-oriented British tradition appears to favor the more “logical” second edition. By contrast, Jonathan Bennett displays some sympathy for Kemp Smith’s treatment in Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pages 45 ff.; and Fredrick Copleston, in A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1964),VI, ii, 34, briefly mentions time. None of the commentators listed above discuss the unconscious, let alone assign a substantial role to it.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 111 for five reasons. First, I believe it is immune from Hume’s sceptical attack on the self (see below). Second, I am convinced that time-consciousness presupposes the unity of consciousness but not the other way around. Third, the Second Paralogism compromises Kant’s own positive assertions about the unity of consciousness as expressed in the second edition of the Critique.19 Fourth, time-consciousness essentially implies mental, dynamic acts, whereas a unity of consciousness could be immediate and hence non-temporal; but a non- temporal human consciousness is a contradiction in terms. And, fifth, I believe the origin of internal temporality is grounded in unconscious acts and there is sufficient textual support for this view, while the unity of consciousness outlook seems to neglect this important factor. Nevertheless, both premises exhibit persuasive advantages and in fact lead directly to a model of self- consciousness as intrinsically monadic, insular, and hermetic; together they condition an image of lonely man, which I find to be ultimately indubitable. In a previous article, titled “The Premise of the Transcendental Analytic,” published in the Philosophical Quarterly, I discuss Robert Paul Wolff’s interpretation of Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception,” which he proposes as the indubitable starting point and I now wish to offer some remarks on its interesting contentions.20 But let me first start with Hume’s sceptical account of the self, even though it is uncertain whether or not Kant was aware of it, because the important point is not whether Kant was cognizant of Hume’s views, in A Treatise of Human Nature, but that nevertheless he provides a powerful answer to Hume.21 It may be remembered that Hume presents an empirical and phenomenalist paradigm of the “self” as a construction of qualitatively simple impressions and complex ideas with both being classified under the generic title of perceptions, perceptions which are essentially mental in their nature. These perceptions are ultimately caused by the constant motion of (external) material particles in space with the consequence that the “self” dissolves into a bundle of discrete atomistic impressions, each pursuing the next with, in his famous phrase, an “inconceivable rapidity.” Thus Hume declares:

We must separate the question concerning the substance of the mind from that concerning the cause of its thought; …[and] when apply’d to the operations of

19 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 352, B 131. 20 Ben Mijuskovic, “The Premise of the Transcendental Analytic,” in The Philosophical Quarterly, 23:91 (1973), 156-161. 21 The issue of Kant’s possible familiarity with Hume’s Treatise is taken up by Kemp Smith in his Commentary, pages xxv-xxvii. I interpret Hume as a phenomenalist, whose thesis is that the “self” and the “external world” are the result of nominalistic constructions of immediate sense data coupled with an imagined psychological belief in the identity of the “self” and “independent” objects.

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matter, we may certainly conclude, that motion may be, and actually is, the cause of thought and perception.22

From this follows Hume’s analysis of the disintegration of the self and his attack on metaphysicians who attempt to establish personal identity based solely on the soul’s immaterial simplicity, unity, and identity. His positive position follows.

But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.23

But when Hume admits to an awareness of a temporal succession of perceptions—which includes both impressions and ideas—he surrenders all that is required for the establishment of personal identity. It is not required that

we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.24

All that is necessary in order to establish the genuine presence of a singular self is that there is some self-conscious awareness of a passage of time, of a succession of “perceptions,” and that these transitory thoughts are recognized as mine—I am self-aware of their passage—because otherwise I could not be transitionally aware of their migration. Now we can profitably turn to Wolff’s interpretation and see how he views Kant’s answer to Hume while relying on the concept of the unity of consciousness as his guiding principle. According to Wolff, we can gain an insight into the meaning of what is involved in a unified consciousness, and how the various elements are constituted or related to each other within awareness, by recruiting a trick suggested by Franz Brentano [James?]. Let us imagine that we have two pieces of paper on which identical sentences are written. The example Wolff chooses is “The unicorn is a mythical beast.” The first piece of paper is cut into equal pieces and divided among six men, Jones, Brown, etc., with each conscious only of a single word. The second sheet, however, is left intact and given to a seventh man, Smith. It follows that

22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), Of the Immateriality of the Soul, page 248. 23 Ibid., 252. Consult, however, Hume’s later admission that there may be a unity after all, Appendix, 633, ff. 24 Ibid., 251.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 113

Now every word of the sentence is contained in the consciousness of some member or other of the group of six. Similarly, every word of the sentence is contained in Smith’s consciousness. But the two cases are absolutely different, for while in the former it is true that the separate parts of the sentence are contained in some consciousness, they are not contained in the same consciousness, and hence there is no unity of consciousness of them as there is in the case of Smith….25

Wolff then proceeds to comment on the example from William James:

The fact is that one consciousness of twelve words is not the same as twelve consciousnesses of one word each. Following Kant’s terminology, we may characterize the difference by saying that the one consciousness of all twelve words binds them together, or conceives them as a unity.

Accordingly, Wolff concludes that the ultimate and undeniable premise of the first edition Deduction, indeed of the argument of the entire Transcendental Analytic, in both editions A and B, is the proposition “All the contents of my consciousness are bound up in a unity.” Wolff then continues by citing the critical passage as confirmation of his interpretation but notice it is from the second edition Critique.

The Unity of Consciousness. It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.26

Interestingly enough, Kant himself offers a strikingly similar example in the A edition Second Paralogism when he criticizes the errors of metaphysical psychologists, the pure rationalists. Their argument purports to provide knowledge of a noumenal entity and it is therefore rejected by Kant.

25 Wolff then quotes William James, who expresses the same point in the following fashion: “Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence,” The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), I, 160. The underlying and hidden assumption is always the same: Senseless matter cannot think because matter is essentially composed of distinct parts which intrinsically defy unification; material substances, consisting essentially of disparately composed aggregates, can never constitute a true unity but merely a nominalistic one. 26 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 131-132.

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At bottom, the real issue for the dogmatists is twofold; the first consideration concerns their negative conviction that “senseless matter cannot think”; and secondly their related positive contention that the soul, as a thinking substance, along with its intellectual predicates or attributes of separate thoughts, must be immaterial, unextended, “simple” in order for thought to be possible as a multiplicity in unity. Again, I must be aware that my thoughts are my thoughts and not yours; and unless they are unified in one and the same consciousness, I could not know this Kant’s exposition of the metaphysicians follows:

This is the Achilles of all dialectical inferences in the pure doctrine of the soul. It is no mere sophistical play, contrived by a dogmatist in order to impart to his assertions a superficial plausibility, but an inference which appears to withstand even the keenest scrutiny and the most scrupulously exact investigation. It is as follows.

Every composite substance is an aggregate of several substances, and the action of a composite, or whatever inheres in it as thus composite, is an aggregate of several actions or accidents, distributed among the plurality of the substances. Now an effect which arises from the concurrence of many acting substances is indeed possible, namely, when this effect is external only (as, for instance, the motion of a body is the combined motion of all of its parts.) But with thoughts, as internal accidents belonging to a thinking being, it is different. For suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be a part of the thought, and only all of them taken together would contain the whole thought. But this cannot be consistently maintained. For representations (for instance, the single words of a verse), distributed among different beings, never make up a whole thought (a verse), and it is therefore impossible that thought should inhere in what is essentially composite. It is therefore possible only in a single substance, which, not being an aggregate of many, is absolutely simple [i.e. immaterial, unextended].

The so-called nervus probandi of this argument lies in the proposition, that if a multiplicity of representations are to form a single representation, they must be contained in the absolute unity of the thinking subject.27

27 Ibid., A 351-352, italics mine.

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The fallacy committed by the Second Paralogism, according to Kant, is that it falsely argues from the merely logical unity of the subject in representation to the actual simplicity of the subject in itself. However, if we compare B 131-132 with A 351-352, we can see that if Kant appeals to Wolff’s interpretation, then the foundational premise of the Analytic, or more specifically the Deduction of the Categories, is grounded in a rational principle embedded, in turn, in a doctrine which assumes that the soul as a substance, along with its predicates, is immaterial, simple, and hence intrinsically unified. In short, our premise is based on a synthetic a priori demonstration arising or following from a noumenal substance and established by an argument from the Dialectic, which Kant explicitly disavows. Kant is well aware here that the rationalists are engaged in two contentions: (a) negatively, that “senseless matter cannot think” and (b) positively, that only a simple, immaterial substance can unify diverse elements in one consciousness. Thus, the impossibility of matter being able to think and the soul’s simplicity are inextricably connected.28 But merely because it appears to be a rationalist argument, it does not mean that it is false. It certainly is the case that separate words are “strung” continuously together in individual consciousness. After all, the example of the diverse men is an empirical one. Did Kant recognize the compromising nature of these conflicting passages in A versus B and elect to delete the earlier Second Paralogism account because he thought it weakened his position in B 131-132? It is a fact that both the first edition Paralogisms and the first edition Deduction were completely recast for the second edition. And yet, there is much to recommend the argument from the unity of consciousness. More recently, a study titled, The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology, consisting of some fifteen scholarly articles, committed solely to discussing Kant’s Second Paralogism, has been published. In their volume, the editors, Thomas Lennon and Edward Stainton, present Kant’s proof in the following syllogistic form:

P1: Unification of representations takes place. P2: Only a simple, unified substance can unify representations. Therefore, C1: The human soul or mind is a simple, unified substance.29

28 As a parenthetical note, Kant also criticizes the simplicity argument not only in failed demonstrations to prove the unity of consciousness but also in inferences designed to establish the immortality of the soul in A 357 and throughout the Paralogism section in the B edition as well; and he insists that a simple soul could nevertheless be completely extinguished by diminution or “elanguescence” (B 414). In brief, the immortality of the soul cannot be demonstrated by pure reason. 29 In their Introduction, the editors are kind enough to acknowledge my contribution in the following words: “What remains surprising, however, is that so little work has been done before on the Achilles argument. Ben Lazare Mijuskovic’s pioneering work was the first in modern times to draw attention to the importance of the argument, but aside from the subsequent work he has done…there is little else in print.” Thomas Lennon and Edward Stainton eds., The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology (Springer, 2008), 2.

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Perhaps two comments are appropriate in this connection: (a) presented in this fashion, the “argument” appears to be a tautology; and (b) the “unification,” to which the editors refer, makes no reference to temporal factors. But without the incorporation of temporal synthetic structures, it is difficult to grasp the dynamics involved in the unification. In any case, it is a rich and complex work providing many important insights into the complexities and strengths of Kant’s thought.

III

Some 90 years ago, Norman Kemp Smith proposed that immanent time-consciousness should serve as the ultimate premise of the Analytic precisely because it is both indubitable and immune to Hume’s objections. Thus, as Kemp Smith argues, whereas Descartes doubts the reality of the external world and Hume questions the metaphysical reality (actually continuous identity) of the self, clearly Hume—as we have shown above—is forced to admit a “running” re-cognition of a temporal succession of impressions as they follow each other within the same “medium” of consciousness. Accordingly, Kemp Smith states that our starting point “must lie beyond the sphere of all possible controversy”:

we are left with only three forms of experience— experience of self, experience of objects, and experience of time. The two former are open to question. They may be illusory, as Hume has argued….Consciousness of time, on the other hand, is a fact whose actuality, however problematic in its conditions, and however mysterious in its intrinsic nature, cannot, even by the most metaphysical of subtleties, be in any manner or degree challenged. It is an unquestioned possession of the human mind. Whether time itself is real we may not be metaphysically certain, but that, whatever be its reality or unreality, we are conscious of it in the form of change, is beyond all manner of doubt.30

Conceivably it is open to Hume to contend that “within” a single, immediate frame of consciousness, “one” could be uniquely aware of a qualitatively simple impression, perhaps in the form of a concentrated absorption in a monochromatic shade of blue.31 Could this singular experiment constitute an awareness of time? The answer is certainly not

30 Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,’ 241, also cf. 242-243. It is this “mysterious” element of time that I claim is grounded in non-conscious activities lying beneath the purview of direct awareness. See Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, & Time, 252; cf. 61, ff. 31 Cf. Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 6.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 117 without any consciousness of change occurring within awareness. Could it serve as an instance of a unity of consciousness? Possibly, although it would be the consciousness of a clam. Kant, of course, would reject any such possibility, since all human consciousness entails a mutually conditioning relation between changing representations of the self and a contrasting realm of objects. For Kant, a primary epistemological principle is that the phenomenal self is mutually conditioned by the empirical (concept of the) object.32 In any case, according to Kemp Smith, the Subjective Deduction in the first edition virtually identifies time with the synthetic activities. Hence Kemp Smith’s commentary repeatedly emphasizes the “generative processes” in the creation of immanent temporality.33 It is this spontaneous, creative aspect, this continuous activity that, as we shall see below, is indebted not only to the Leibnizian concept of a dynamic consciousness but also to one whose source lies deep in the unconscious. According to Kemp Smith, these thoughts are more properly termed non-conscious rather than unconscious as in the psychoanalytic meaning of the term. If so, then we have a continuous span from the non-conscious, to the unconscious, then the conscious or perceptive, and finally to the rationally self-conscious or apperceptive. The non-conscious possibility is signaled by Kant’s following hesitant utterance:

This schematism of our [faculty of the] understanding, in its application to [phenomenal] appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.34

This leads Kemp Smith to claim that the threefold transcendental syntheses35 not only occur in time but that indeed they are generative of time and I would further argue that they thus constitute the relatively hidden structure necessary for the unity of self-consciousness. But obviously since they can be consciously described, it brings up the question of their own underlying occult activities. In such a case, the “unknown roots” of thought would spontaneously generate, or virtually create, the threefold synthesis of sensuous intuition, productive imagination, and unifying understanding consciously described in A 99 ff. All this would necessarily involve time in a fundamental sense. And, as Kemp Smith comments: “When so viewed, the imagination is virtually regarded as an unknown supersensuous [i.e. noumenal] power.”36 The imagination on this account functions as a mediating agency between the

32 By contrast, for Hegel, the self is mutually conditioned by other selves. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), “Lordship and Bondage.” 33 Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,’ 239-241. 34 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 141 = B 181. 35 Ibid., A 98 ff. 36 Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,’ 77, 265.

118 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS passive nature of the sensory and the spontaneous activity of the understanding. As we recall, Kant is in this section struggling to hypothetically “deduce,” to epistemologically justify how the faculty of thought itself is possible. Recall that Kant earlier had confessed that the Deduction of the Categories had been the most difficult task in the writing of the Critique and that this “deeply grounded” search had cost him the greatest labor of all.37 Further, as Kemp Smith informs us:

The subjective enquiry is mainly interested in the conditions generative of experience, and finds its natural point of departure in the problem by what processes a unified experience is constructed out of a succession of distinct happenings.38

In any event, cognition as a unity is a datum of awareness that follows rather than precedes time-consciousness. Speculatively we can assert that the infant, in some primordial sense, is aware of the passage of time through change, of the feeling of time through alterations of pain and pleasure, but because of Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” it has no cognitive awareness of the unity of selfhood; it cannot, at this stage, distinguish “the self” from the other, the mother. For Kant, as previously stated, apperception indicates a form or structure of temporally successive awarenesses, which are reciprocally constituted by a phenomenal self in constant relational opposition to an empirical realm of objects. (This is why Hegel criticizes Kant’s finite categories as incapable of true development.) These two mutually reverberating elements, as representations, reflect against each other. The self thus becomes aware of itself through change. Further, the self can only become self-aware through and within the mediating agency of internal time. For Kant, all consciousness is judgmental and all judgments depend on relations that are forged in and through time (again, the section on the Schematism). Similarly, the relation of substance and accident requires not only an additional mental activity of fusing predicates to a subject but beyond and in addition to those acts, the mind must bind and retain the predicates as attached to the “supporting” concept of an object as it changes in and through time. Although the relation of cause and effect is presented as a conditioning or transcendental one, the fact remains that it can only occur under the condition that the same mind and its thoughts are able to move from one state of awareness to the next. Although Kant may at times, as in the Aesthetic, argue that intuitions are immediate and passive “givens,” certainly concepts are mediate and therefore temporal. Before returning directly to Kant’s reflections on immanent temporality, let us offer a general comment, which will help us to contextualize the ensuing discussion. First, Kant assumes that self-consciousness or

37 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A xvi-xvii. 38 Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,’ 240.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 119 apperception always indicates a temporally successive (as opposed to a logically or syllogistically “successive”) awareness of a sequence. In a critical passage in the first edition Subjective Deduction, just preceding the threefold transcendental syntheses, Kant announces:

Whatever the origin of our representations, whether they are due to the influence of outer things, or are produced by inner causes, whether they arise a priori or being appearances have an empirical origin, they must all as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense. All our knowledge is thus subject to time, the formal condition of inner sense. In it they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation. This is a general observation which, throughout what follows, must be borne in mind as quite fundamental.39

Once more, William James may serve conveniently as a helpful companion in our search for an encounter with the Self. To be sure, fourteen years later, however, James radically challenged the reality of the self, along with its implicit dualism of mind and matter, in his paper, “Does Consciousness Exist?” (1904). By invoking his doctrine of neutral monism, in which he describes “the mind” as merely the contextual intersection of two independent histories, the autobiography of the person and the continuum of a room, James dramatically, eliminates the self as a substance. Nevertheless, a decade and a half previously, James, who had closely studied Kant’s Critique, and especially the first edition Paralogism sections, posited an indubitable stream of thought—of consciousness—in his “study of the mind from within” in The Principles of Psychology. According to James, in the earlier writing, he insisted that “Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.”40 Further, quoting with approval Shadworth Hodgson, he announced that “Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be conscious at all.”41 Incidentally, in these passages, James also credits the subconscious as forming a “secondary personality.”42 Further, the advantage in legitimatizing the immanent temporality of (self-)consciousness is that one is able to incorporate both (a) time consciousness and (b) the unity of consciousness together since, in order to be aware of time, we must be able to hold together, bind, synthesize the mental activities and meanings of past, present, and future in one and the same “stream of thought.” By contrast, it can be argued that analytic or “innate” propositions may be immediately, directly, intuitively—and therefore non- temporally—apprehended as, for example, in the proposition that A=A; or

39 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 98-99. 40 William James, The Principles of Psychology, two volumes (New York: Dover, 1950), I, 224. 41 Ibid., I, 230. 42 Ibid., I, 227.

120 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS even in regard to the intuitive immediacy of the Cartesian cogito. For Descartes, time is essentially unreal, since it depends on God’s continual interactive agency in re-creating the universe, along with every individual soul, at each moment of time (Meditation III). Once more, because for Kant, all phenomenal knowledge is relational and synthetic, it follows that it necessarily involves a discursive element, which further intrinsically implies a temporal element or “ingredient.” A thought restricted to sheer or absolute immediacy, as we have already noted, would not be a human thought at all.43 Kant’s reflections on time take on various forms in different sections of the Critique. In the Aesthetic, he presents it as a pure, non-empirical passive form of sensibility, immediately given in consciousness rather than actively thought. It serves as a possible matrix for organizing presented sensations or “units,” which function as the ideal “material” content of our experiences. In the Analytic, in the Second Analogy, temporal distinctions are presented as critical in drawing a distinction between an objective temporal order and a subjective temporal sequence, as in the example of the house and the moving vessel, since our haphazardly roving perceptions of the house are conceived as if they are grounded in and initiated by the subject while, by contrast, our perceptions of the traveling ship are conceived as if they are founded independently of the observer in the descending motion of the boat itself as it drifts downstream. And still, in the Third Paralogism, Kant seeks to make sure that an argument in behalf of a continuous personal identity, extending all the way into the afterlife, cannot be established on an a priori ground and based on an inference concerning the soul’s immaterial nature. But even in this last and critical context, Kant is not denying that consciousness of temporal activity occurs in the mind—as in his analogy of the separate steel balls—but only that the uninterrupted transmission cannot be demonstrated by pure reason as occurring through the same identical continuous self. Thus, although for Kant the rationalist metaphysician is unable to show that active states of cognitive awareness are communicated in an uninterrupted, continuous fashion to succeeding states of the same self, as the analogy of the failed transmission of consciousness between separate steel balls indicates; nor whether a real or noumenal transition occurs between elements of the same self; it is nevertheless the case that each steel ball “experiences” some sense of internal time.44 Consequently, the Third Paralogism states: “That which is conscious of the numerical identity of itself at different times is in so far a person.”45 As the italicized phrase indicates, Kant is asserting that at least minimally there must be some consciousness of “different times” in each temporally finite steel orb. Hence, Kant is not denying that there is awareness of time in each of the metal spheres but only that it cannot be demonstrated rationally that it extends beyond a brief period of consciousness. In short, pure reason cannot establish that the immateriality or simplicity principle is sufficient to prove either

43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 131-132. 44 Ibid., A 363a. 45 Ibid., A 362.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 121 continuous personal identity or the immortality of the soul. Mental change occurs but cognition is not necessarily attached to a continuous self-sufficient to establish either the personal or moral identity required for ethical responsibility or for the immortality of the soul. This permits him to refer to “each and all of my successive determinations” in a positive, as opposed to a metaphysical, way; and it further allows him to invoke a critical admission that “in the whole of time in which I am conscious of myself, I am conscious of this time as belonging to the unity of myself” (A 362). As James expresses it:

How is this possible unless the Thought have a substantial identity with a former owner,—not a mere continuity or a resemblance…but a real unity?...The ‘Soul’ of Metaphysics and the ‘Transcendental Ego’ of the Kantian Philosophy, are…but attempts to satisfy this urgent demand of common-sense.

It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmission like this actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows, knows its own predecessor, and finding it ‘warm,’ in the way we have described, greets it by saying: “Thou art mine, and part of the same self with me.” Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—of all they contain and own. Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls had held, and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and ‘adopting’ it, which is the foundation of the appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of the self. Who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possess the possessor possesses the possessed.46

The point of all this, of course, is that it is impossible to speak of (self) consciousness independently of the awareness of internal time. In other words, James’ focus here in the Third Paralogism centers on the issue of temporal

46 James, Principles, I, 339-340.

122 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS continuity whereas in the Second Paralogism his interest lies in the unity of consciousness. How utterly tortuous and complicated Kant’s views on time are can be appreciated by consulting his comments in the Preface to the Second Edition, where he tries to unravel the prior intricacies “concerning the concept [sic] of time” in the Aesthetic and the “false interpretations placed upon the paralogisms charged against rational psychology.”47 In sum, the advantage of legitimizing the immanent temporality of (self)-consciousness is that the former is able to incorporate, subsume both (a) time-consciousness and (b) the unity of consciousness, since in order to be aware of time, we must be able to bind and hold together, to synthesize the mental activities and meanings of past, present and future, whereas it can be argued that analytic or identical propositions are, by contrast, immediately, directly apprehended. As suggested above, one could argue that in the statement A=A, there is an immediate unity of consciousness without a temporal factor being involved even implicitly. But for Kant, of course, there is always at least the relation of knower and known and the reciprocating, reverberating process of observed or experienced change between the two “poles.”48 At this point, in order to further our discussion, it may be helpful to draw on a distinction made eloquently clear in a passage from Charles Sanders Peirce, who came to philosophy as a student of Kant. In the citation below, Peirce distinguishes two elements of consciousness, sensations and thoughts, those that are directly and immediately apprehended—and thus virtually “absolutely” transient—from those that are indirectly, mediately, relationally, discursively synthesized or comprehended.

[W]e observe two sorts of elements of consciousness, the distinction between which may best be made clear by means of an illustration. In a piece of music there are the separate notes, and there is the air. A single tone may be prolonged for an hour or a day, and it exists as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a sense from which everything in the past was completely absent as the future itself. But it is different with the air, the performance of which occupies a certain time, during the portions of which only portions of it are played. It consists in the orderliness in the succession of

47 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxviii, B xxxix, note a. 48 Although Kant’s categorical relations are dyadic, clearly Hegel goes out of his way to stress triadic ones thus highlighting their clearly temporal quality as, for example, in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s initial stages or “moments” of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason (1807) as well as in the opening triad of the Science of Logic (1812-1816), which shows the mind dialectically “moving” through the “bloodless dance” of the categories, as they progress through and within Being, Nothing, and Becoming.

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sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some [temporal] continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us. We certainly only perceive the air by hearing the notes; yet we cannot be said to directly hear it, for we only hear what is present at the instant, and an orderliness of succession cannot exist in an instant. These sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness. Some elements (the sensations) are completely present at every instance as long as they last, while others (like thought) are actions having beginning, middle, and end, and consist in a congruence in the succession of sensations which flow through the mind. They cannot be immediately present to us, but must cover some portion of the past or future. Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.49

As the metaphor of the melody indicates, the connecting medium that extends the synthetic process is a temporal one. Music is intrinsically temporal—and perhaps that is why Schopenhauer considered it as a passage providing ingress into ultimate reality.

49 Charles Sanders Peirce, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Essays in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Vincent Thomas (New York: Liberal Arts Press. 1957), pages 37-38; brackets mine. Notice the term “flow’ in the quotation, a metaphor which will apply to the “indivisible stream of consciousness,” in James, to the pure duree reelle of immanent time in Henri Bergson (Mijuskovic, 1977), as well as to the phenomenological approach of Husserl. See Husserl’s early formative explorations regarding the temporal structures of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pages 23, 30-31. Like Peirce, Husserl employs the example of the notes and the melody in order to provide an insight into the fusion of the diverse elements constituting the immanent flow of consciousness. Internal objects are experienced through “temporal profile manifolds” (Robert Sokolowski, The Foundation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), pages 82-83, 99, 108. Later, in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl affirms the presence of “active synthesis” and “active genesis” as embedded in temporal noetic acts (Sections 37-39). Thus, the description of the flow of time serves as a common metaphor not only in Peirce and Husserl’s phenomenological orientation but also in the pure duration of Bergson as well. As Professor Sherover indicates, in his second study on Time, “Husserl is following the picture of the Leibnizian monad concerning itself, not with ‘reflections’ of the ‘external’ world constituting the content of consciousness, but with the internal structure by which that content is constituted; by ‘bracketing such content, it then undertakes to examine the ‘reflecting’ structure itself….One way to approach his analysis, then, is to view it as an attempt to explain a puzzle—how an object which is intrinsically dynamic can retain its continuing identity in a consciousness which is inherently temporal and continually in the process of changing.” Charles Sherover, The Human Experience of Time: The Development of Its Philosophic Meaning (New York: New York University Press, 1975), page 447.

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To be sure, Kant’s model of self-consciousness, of course, is radically different from Descartes’s noumenally accessible cogito in Meditation II; and much richer than Leibniz’s pure monadic apperception in the opening sections of the Monadology. Both the Cartesian and Leibnizian paradigms of consciousness are metaphysically noumenal, transcendent for Kant. Nevertheless, Leibniz’ emphasis on the dynamic aspects of thinking forms an important transition into Kant’s underlying presuppositions as well as his descriptions of synthetic acts. I now wish to return to my previous claim that the genesis of this temporal factor originates in the non-conscious. In order to fully appreciate this, let us retreat and unravel some pre-Kantian influences. And in doing so we shall return to a point suggested earlier about the role of the unconscious in Kant. According to Leibniz, the cornerstones of his metaphysical assumptions can be summed up in four essential principles: The simple or immaterial nature of the monad; its dynamism; its continuity; and its unity, by which latter he means the monad’s constant activity. As I argued in my article on the unconscious in Leibniz and Kant, Leibniz believes that God creates each individual soul ex nihilo. Once created, the soul exists continuously. (Only God can annihilate, i.e. return to nothing, a soul once created.) Just as Leibniz is pledged to the ontological “Great Chain of Being” paradigm, wherein God creates as much reality as compossible, from the very lowest to Himself, just so he is likewise committed to the “continuous chain of consciousness” assumption wherein monadic consciousness displays a continuous spectrum from the non-conscious to the self-conscious. All this follows from the fact that once created, the soul has at least some activity, for to exist is to be active and in humans this would include its fetal state as well as its originary cellular existence. Following Leibniz, Kant agrees that at least human consciousness involves entities which are essentially active centers of awareness, exhibiting various degrees of extended cognitions from unconscious petitio percipi to perceptions of “outward” objects and then on to full-blown self-conscious or reflexive apperceptions. Thus, Leibniz declares, “I maintain that substances (material or immaterial) cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, that activity is of the essence of substance in general.”50 This is why Kemp Smith proposes that

50 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and otherPhilosophical Writings, edited by Robert Latta (Oxford: Oxford University Press), page 397. “Material” here resolves into immaterial simples, unextended monads. Sections 10 and 11 postulate continuous alterations within the monads. On Leibniz and time, see Sherover, The Human Experience of Time, pages 106- 107, 111-114. Lancelot Whyte writes that Christian Wolff may have been the first writer to fully analyze and appreciate unconscious factors than any previous thinker on the subject. Whyte also credits him with explicitly stating that “non-conscious activities must be inferred from those of which we are conscious.” Whyte then goes on to quote Wolff. Let no one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware…That is a prejudice, which impedes the understanding of the mind, as we see in the case of the Cartesians.

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Discursive activities are conscious processes and are under our control; the synthetic processes are non- conscious; only their finished products appear within the conscious field.51

Again:

Leibniz, it is true, taught the existence of subconscious perceptions, and so far may have seemed to have anticipated Kant’s recognition of non-conscious processes; but as formulated by Leibniz that doctrine has the defect which frequently vitiates its modern [Freudian] counterpart, namely that it represents the subconscious as analogous in nature to the conscious, and as differing from it only in the accidental features of intensity and clearness.52

Differing from Kemp Smith, I believe both Leibniz and Kant posited non-conscious activities below the subconscious, else from where would unconscious and conscious acts derive? They are there as soon as God has elected conception to begin in its cellular form. Again, there can be no dynamic activity apart from time. Kant would have had access to The Monadology and the New Essays, which latter consists of an imaginary (eventually interrupted) dialogue between Locke and Leibniz. This work was of great interest to Kant (as were the controversial Clarke- Leibniz correspondences discussing the metaphysical and scientific nature of space and time). In the Preface to the work, Leibniz speculates on a number of critical issues, which would have elicited a resonant response from Kant, topics such as (a) the depiction of the mind as a dynamic, active substance, whose essence is the capacity to live, feel, react, and think continuously; (b) its power to create concepts from its own internal resources, spontaneously and independently of a world of external matter and passive sensations; (c) the controversy between Locke and Bishop Stillingfleet over the possibility of “thinking matter”; and (d) the role of the unconscious.53 In rational human

Insofar as something exists in us than we are conscious of, we must bring it to light by inferences from that of which we are conscious, otherwise we should have no ground to do so [italics Wolff’s]. The Unconscious Before Freud (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), pages 101-102. Kant, of course, was very familiar with Wolff’s work. 51 Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,’ 179. 52 Ibid., 273; cf. xivii. 53 Professor Andrew Brook maintains that “Kant’s models and methods dominated the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century” and further that Freud’s theory of the unconscious is thoroughly Kantian: “Kant thought that a large and in many ways the most important part of the operation of the mind is ‘unconscious’—not open to introspection,” and that “Freud shared Kant’s concept in

126 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS beings, these four factors are grounded in activities that manifest and develop themselves temporally and thereby underscore the difference between the mind and the external movement of matter in space. Thus, the ability of the mind to create the meanings of past, present, and future along with the denial that materialism can account for the mental; and the ascription of a generative power to the unconscious would have directly impressed and influenced Kant. Obviously, in principle, we are not in a position to inspect the non- conscious or its processes directly but we can nevertheless infer certain factors to the extent that we can surmise that both the non-conscious and the conscious share in mental activities. For, if we grant that the (self-)conscious mind is active, as all rationalists and idealists in fact do, then it cannot be maintained that the non-conscious, as well as the retrievably unconscious, if they exist, could possibly be inactive. In brief, an active consciousness cannot arise from an inactive non-consciousness any more than thought can arise from senseless matter. And it is clear, from the selections cited above, and his comments regarding the difficulties encountered in the Subjective Deduction, that Kant believes that there is something that lies “beneath,” precedes, and conditions explicit awareness. For the above reasons, I believe Kant remains committed philosophically to a Leibnizian paradigm of the mind as active and temporally structured.

As previously discussed, there are two quite different roles synthesis plays in Kant. The first is engaged in supporting the temporal structures of human experience as they are expressed in our ordinary and scientific lives. And the second function may be termed metaphysical and it is charged in performing its task among noumenal but meaningful concepts, ideas that are important in ethical, spiritual, and ideal contexts. In prior publications, I have traced the conceptual history and incidence of a Platonic and Neo-platonic argument as it has surfaced, and continues repeatedly to arise, in the rationalist, idealist, phenomenological, and even analytic traditions in Western thought. The form of the proof is fairly straightforward. It begins with the premise that both the soul or mind and its essential attribute of thought are immaterial and therefore unextended, devoid of externally related parts, i.e., simple (Plato, Phaedo, 78B; Plotinus, The Enneads, V, 7). In turn, this assumption has generated and entailed no less than seven different conclusions: Accordingly, the simplicity principle has served in

how the mind can tie experience together, and even used Kant’s term ‘synthesis’ as his name for the process.” In addition, the author credits Freud with an “awareness of the Kantian doctrine of the noumenal base of inner sense.” Andrew Brook, “Kant and Freud,” in Prehistory of Cognitive Science (Basingbroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pages 117-118.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 127 demonstrations for: (1) the immortality of the individual soul; (2) the unity of self-consciousness; (3) continuous personal or moral identity; (4) metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical idealism; (5) the freedom of self-consciousness; (6) the “grounding” of conceptual meanings and relations as based independently of empirical sensations and the “association of ideas” principle; and (7) a paradigm of immanent time-consciousness. Because of all this, I think it is fair to say that what I have called the Simplicity Argument has served as the most important premise and argument against metaphysical materialism.54

54 Mijuskovic, Ben, “Descartes’s Bridge to the External World,” Studi Internazionali di Filosofia, III:3 (1971), 65-81; reprinted in Rene Descartes: Critical Assessments, edited by Georges Moyal (Crom Helm Publishers, 1996), II, 312-328; “Hume and Shaftesbury on the Self,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 21:85 (1971) 324-336; “The Premise of the Transcendental Analytic,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 23:91 (1973), 155-161; The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of the Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Argument (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); “The General Conclusion of the Transcendental Analytic,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XII:3 (1974a), 357-364; “Marx and Engels on Materialism and Idealism,” Journal of Thought, 9:3 (1974b), 157-168; “Locke and Leibniz on Personal Identity,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XIII:2, (1975a), 324-336; “The Simplicity Argument and Absolute Morality,” Journal of Thought, 10:2, (1975b), 123-134; “The Simplicity Argument in Wittgenstein and Russell,” Critica, VIII:22 (1976a), 85- 103; “The Simplicity Argument versus a Materialist Theory of Consciousness,” Philosophy Today, 20:4 (1976b), 292-304; “Hume on Space (and Time),” Journal of the History of Philosophy, XV:4 (1977a), 387-394; reprinted in David Hume: Critical Assessments, edited by Stanley Tweyman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994), II, 61-70; “The Simplicity Argument and Time in Schopenhauer and Bergson,” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch (1977b), pp. 43-58; “The Simplicity Argument and the Freedom of Consciousness,” Idealistic Studies, VIII:1 (1978a), 62-74; “Brentano’s Theory of Consciousness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXXVIII:3 (1978b), 315-324; “Loneliness and Time-Consciousness,” Philosophy Today, XXII:4 (1978c) 276-286; Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1979); “The Simplicity Argument and the Unconscious: Plotinus, Cudworth, Leibniz, and Kant,” Philosophy and Theology, 20:1-2 (2008); “The Argument from Simplicity: A Study in the History of an Idea and Consciousness,” Philotheos, (2009), pp. 228-252; the last article is an extension and a reply to Thomas Lennon’s and Edward Stainton’s The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology (Springer, 2008), which focuses solely on the “unity of consciousness” argument, Kant’s Second Paralogism in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); Kant calls it the Achilles, the most powerful of all arguments in the rationalist arsenal concerning the doctrines of the soul; and “Hegel’s Categories of Life, Desire, and Recognition, as Displayed in Infant Consciousness, and Their Relation to Loneliness,” EIDE: Foundations of Ontology, forthcoming. See also, Michael Bobo, The Simplicity Argument in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Roderick Chisholm and Richard Swinburne (Carson, CA: CSU Dominguez Hills, 2010). The preceding are all entailed by the following underlying principle and proof: “The essential and complete nature of mind, generally speaking, seems to consist solely in thinking, and, as such, it must be unextended, simple (with no parts), and essentially different from the body and therefore immaterial. This was Descartes’ argument in a nutshell, ultimately drawing a strong ontological conclusion (regarding the distinctness of mind and body) from a starting point constituted by epistemological considerations.

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Kant is deeply involved in the preceding issues and although he may try to disown them while wearing his scientific garb, he nevertheless is spiritually robed with them in his most secret stirrings. It is not simply a matter that he has denied knowledge in order to make room for faith but rather that idealist, immaterialist convictions continue to shape his arguments at vital turns precisely because he finds them deeply convincing. Hence, although in the first Paralogism, he criticizes the rationalist’s arguments for the immortality of the soul, he remains committed to its conceivable reality in the Critique of Practical Reason; although he criticizes the inference for the unity of consciousness in the Second Paralogism, he defends it in the second edition Deduction (B 131-132); although he rejects the third Paralogism argument for continuous personal identity, he advocates for it as a condition of eternal rewards and punishments; although in the Fourth Paralogism he denies the validity of its proof for idealism, he remains a subjective idealist in all his thinking; although he advocates in behalf of a strict physical and psychological determinism in the phenomenal sphere, he insists that freedom of the will is not only possible but necessary for morality. In short, even though Kant is an epistemological conservative, he is intellectually and spiritually dedicated to a set of underlying immaterialist conditions, including a model of the mind which spans a spectrum of activities from the non-conscious to the self-conscious. As both Kemp Smith and H. J. Paton have emphasized, Kant in many respects remains under and within the monadic umbrella of Leibniz. Both thinkers believe the soul is active, dynamic, that it expresses itself in a temporal dimension. For Leibniz, not only does the soul continuously think, but just as critically the soul is apperceptive as opposed to merely perceptive. Self-consciousness is “inward bound,” whereas consciousness is “outward bound.” This reflexive paradigm

As Ben Mijuskovic observes, in this type of argumentation, “the sword that severs the Gordian knot is the principle that what is conceptually distinct is ontologically separable and therefore independent.” Mijuskovic, in locating this form of reasoning in its historical context, also notes the presence of the converse of its inference: “If one begins with the notion, explicit or implicit, that thoughts or minds are simple, unextended, indivisible, then it seems to be an inevitable step before thinkers connect the principle of an unextended, immaterial soul with the impossibility of any knowledge of an extended material world and consequently of the relation between them.” That is, this time an epistemological conclusion (regarding an epistemic gap between mind and body) is reached from a starting point constituted by an ontological consideration (regarding the distinctness of their nature).” The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, edited by Joel Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Guzeldere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), page 10. A word of caution is here advisable. Generally speaking, the simplicity premise identifies the immaterial with the unextended, as in the use which we will go on to discuss in this essay. However, certain thinkers, like Henry More, the English Platonist, and Isaac Newton believe that the immaterial may nevertheless be extended, as in spiritual and visual apparitions; or as in the Newtonian conception of an absolutely empty space and time. In Plato’s Timaeus, Space, as the nurse or womb of all Becoming, shares with the realm of Forms the essential attribute of immateriality while at the same time, like the physical world, it partakes of the attribute of extension; thus it serves as a tertium quid connecting the two.

B. MIJUSKOVIC 129 reverts back to Plato’s definition of thinking as the soul’s internal dialogue with itself, Aristotle’s description of the Unmoved Mover, and Descartes’ cogito. However, it is Leibniz who defines consciousness as a multiplicity in unity through time. And both Leibniz and Kant presuppose a sphere of thought that is unconscious. In effect, what Kant takes away with one hand in the Paralogisms, he restores with his other hand elsewhere. In this paper, I have endeavored to show that the epistemological status of temporal consciousness is inextricably intertwined with human consciousness from the very start. But whether one agrees that time- consciousness or the unity of consciousness best represents Kant’s ultimate premise, one thing is clear: both principles can only conclude in the absolute solitary, insular, monadic existence of the human soul. Indeed, the Cartesian cogito, the Leibnizian windowless monad, and Kant’s subjective idealism all go in one direction—the utter loneliness of man.55 Finally, elsewhere I have claimed that loneliness, like internal time- consciousness, exhibits synthetic a priori meanings (and feelings) consisting of (a) narcissistic entitlement; (b) hostility toward the self and/or others; (c) anxiety of either the Freudian or existential variety; (d) depression; and (e) a sense of failed communication.56

Department of Philosophy, California State University at Dominguez Hills, United States

55 Elsewhere I have argued in behalf of an existential image of man and I have postulated the fear of loneliness, along with the drive to avoid it, as the most basic universal motivation in all we feel, think, and do. See Mijuskovic, Ben, “Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Psychiatry 40:2 (1977), 113-132; reprinted in The Anatomy of Loneliness, edited by Joseph Hartog (New York: International University Press, 1980), pp.65-94; “Loneliness and a Theory of Consciousness,” Review of Existential Psychiatry and Psychology, XV:1, (1977), 19-31; “Loneliness and the Reflexivity of Consciousness,” Psychocultural Review, 1:2 (1977), 202-213; “Loneliness and the Possibility of a ‘Private Language,’” Journal of Thought, 13:1 (1978), 14-20; “Loneliness and Time-Consciousness,” Philosophy Today, XXII:4 (1978), 276-286; “Loneliness and Personal Identity,” Psychology, 16:3 (1979), 11,-20; Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979); “Loneliness and Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic Review, 66:4 (1979-1980), 480-492; “Loneliness and Communication,” in Man and His Conduct edited by Jorge Gracia (Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 198), pp. 261-269; “Loneliness and Suicide,” Journal of Social Philosophy, XI:1 (1980), 11-17; reprinted in Geriatrics and Thanatology, edited by E. Prichard (New York: Praeger Press, 1984), pp. 148-160; “Loneliness and Human Nature,” Psychological Perspectives, 12:1 (1981), 69-77; “The Sociology and Psychology of Loneliness,” International Review of Contemporary Sociology (1984); “Loneliness, Anxiety, Hostility, and Communication,” Child Study Journal 16:3 (1986),227-240; “Loneliness and Counseling Adolescents,” Adolescence, XX:84 (1986), 941-950; “Reflexivity and Intentionality,” The Psychotherapy Patient, 4:3/4 (1988), 39-50; “Loneliness and Adolescent Alcoholism,” Adolescence XXIII:91 (1988), 503-516;“Loneliness and Intimacy,” The Journal of Couples Therapy, 1:3/4 (1990), 39-48; reprinted in Intimate Autonomy: Autonomous Intimacy, edited by J. Brothers New York: Haworth Press, 1991), pp. 39-48; “Loneliness, Atomistic Societies, and Organic Communities,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare XIX:2 (1992), 147-164;; and “Theories of Consciousness, Therapy, and Loneliness,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 13:1 (2005), 1-18. 56 See Mijuskovic, “The Phenomenology and Dynamics of Loneliness,” Psychology, 33:2 (1996), 41-51

130 UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

References

Bennett, Jonathan, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Berger, Gaston, The Cogito in Husserl's Philosophy (Evanston, II: Northwestern University Press, 1972). Brook, Andrew, “Kant and Freud,” in Prehistory of Cognitive Science (Basingbroke, UK, 2006). Copleston, Fredrick, A History of Philosophy, VI, ii (New York: Doubleday, 1964). Ewing, A. C., Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). ______, Science of Logic, 2 volumes, trans. by W. H. Johnston ad L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, trans. by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). ______, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. by James Churchill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966). James, William, “Does Consciousness Exist?” ______, The Principles of Psychology, two volumes (New York: Dover, 1950). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956). ______, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1958). ______, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). ______, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950). Kemp Smith, Norman, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). Kroner, S., Kant (Baltimore: Ballantine Books, 1960). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. by Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). ______, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. by Robert Latta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Lennon, Thomas and Edward Stainton, The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology (Springer, 2008). Levinas, Emmanuel, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Lovejoy, A. O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

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Mijuskovic, Ben, Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1984). ______, “Loneliness and a Theory of Consciousness,” in Review of Existential Psychiatry and Psychology, XV:1, (1977), 19-31. ______,“Loneliness and Adolescent Alcoholism,” in Adolescence XXIII:91 (1988), 503-516. ______, “Loneliness, Anxiety, Hostility, and Communication,” in Child Study Journal 16:3 (1986), 227-240. ______, “Loneliness, Atomistic Societies, and Organic Communities,” in Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare XIX:2 (1992), 147-164. ______, “Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Psychiatry 40:2 (1977), 113-132. ______, “Loneliness and Communication,” in Man and His Conduct, ed. by Jorge Gracia (Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 198), 261- 269. ______, “Loneliness and Counseling Adolescents,” in Adolescence, XX:84 (1986), 941-950 ______, “Loneliness and Human Nature,” in Psychological Perspectives, 12:1 (1981), 69-77. ______, “Loneliness and Intimacy,” in The Journal of Couples Therapy, 1:3/4 (1990), 39-48. ______, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979). ______, “Loneliness and Suicide,” in Journal of Social Philosophy, XI:1 (1980), 11-17. ______, “Loneliness and the Reflexivity of Consciousness,” in Psychocultural Review, 1:2 (1977), 202-213. ______, “Loneliness and the Possibility of a ‘Private Language,’” in Journal of Thought, 13:1 (1978), 14-20. ______, “Loneliness and Time-Consciousness,” in Philosophy Today, XXII:4 (1978), 276-286. ______, “Loneliness and Personal Identity,” in Psychology, 16:3 (1979), 11- 20. ______, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Idea and Argument (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). ______, “The Premise of the Transcendental Analytic,” in The Philosophical Quarterly, 23:91 (1973), 156-161. ______, “Reflexivity and Intentionality,” in The Psychotherapy Patient, 4:3/4 (1988), 39-50. ______, “The Sociology and Psychology of Loneliness,” in International Review of Contemporary Sociology (1984). ______, “Theories of Consciousness, Therapy, and Loneliness,” in International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 13:1 (2005), 1-18. Paton, H. J., Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, two volumes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965).

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Peirce, Charles Sanders, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Essays in the Philosophy of Science, ed. by Vincent Thomas (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957). Piaget, Jean, A Child's Conception of Tie (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971). Powell, C. Thomas, Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Rachel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, two volumes, trans. by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). Scruton, R., Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Sherover, Charles, Heidegger, Kant & Time (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 197). Sherover, Charles, The Human Experience of Time: The development of Its Philosophic Meaning (New York: New York University Press, 1975). Sokolowski, Robert, “Immanent Constitution in Husserl's Lectures on Time,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 24:4 (1965). ______, The Foundations of Husserl's Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). Strawson, P F., The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen & Co., 1966). Weldon, T. D.., Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). White, Lancelot, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978). Wolff, Robert Paul, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 133-141

Article

Nietzsche and Callicles on Happiness, Pleasure, and Power

Kristian Urstad

lthough there is no mention of him in his published works, there is little doubt that some of Nietzsche’s most famous doctrines were A inspired by the views expressed by the character Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias. Though many have been keen to notice the resemblance between their moral, societal and political views, little, if any, attention has been given to the kinship between their views on happiness and its various components or relations. What I would like to try to do in this paper is to draw out these similarities. In so doing, I hope to also show where it is they might be seen to diverge in important and interesting ways. Nietzsche clearly rails against the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure is understood as a particular sensation marked by the absence of any pain or discomfort. He, for instance, describes Epicurus, who conceived of pleasure (ataraxia) as the absence of all physical and mental discomfort, as “representing a state in which one is neither sick nor well, neither alive nor dead.”1 Part of the reason for this is simply because he does not take such an account to be the correct construal of the experience of pleasure. For Nietzsche, pleasure cannot be divorced from pain, rather, they are “twins”2, in so far as one cannot have one without the other. He states that pleasure and pain are “so knotted together that whoever wants as much as possible of the one, must also have as much as possible of the other…”3 Far from discouraging, or a recipe for misery, Nietzsche thinks this “play of resistance and victory”, this overcoming of moments of pain and suffering, is how the feeling of joy (Lust) is attained.4 Joy, for him, seems to be closely akin to happiness, it is the conscious state of being man ultimately desires.5 What is important to see about Nietzsche’s conception of joy or happiness is not only that it contains a component of pain (“in all joy pain is

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) 437. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1974), 338. 3 Ibid., I, 12. 4 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 699. 5 Nietzsche’s own terminology for happiness is far from rigid or consistent. Walter Kaufmann interprets him as holding that happiness is that state, not necessarily conscious, towards which all people strive, and joy, the conscious aspect of this state. See Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), Chapter 9.

134 NIETZSCHE AND CALLICLES included”6), but that it is intimately bound up with the notion of power.7 Nietzsche conceives of power as not only an overcoming of moments of suffering but as a total sort of self-overcoming, exhibited in those who are strong enough to maintain their mastery in the face of fervent desires and passions and ultimately in those who are able to sublimate their impulses, to “organize the chaos,” and give “style” to their character.8 Before going any further with respect to Nietzsche’s characterization of power, let me now turn to Callicles’ views on pleasure and happiness. Not unlike Nietzsche, Callicles also repudiates the notion of pleasure as a state free from pain or travail; and he does this at both the conceptual level and on a large scale, that is, as applied to life as a whole. At Gorgias, Socrates asks Callicles to confirm the following:

Then do you see what follows, that you say someone is distressed and enjoying at the same time, when you say he is thirsty and drinks?9

Callicles’ subsequent endorsement indicates that he upholds a remedial or replenishment conception of pleasure, one which involves the assuaging of a pain or the filling of a lack. Pleasure (drinking), in other words, entails the acceptance of distress (thirst), since the pleasure is proportional to the magnitude of the lack that is being replenished. But, for Callicles, pleasure is not only connected to the experience of pain at the conceptual level of desire-satisfaction. He also takes pain or distress as part and parcel of his conception of the happy life. Beginning at Gorgias 493a, Socrates recounts to Callicles a myth he heard once from a wise man, where he connects up the soul with desires in the person living licentiously with a leaky jar which is insatiable because it can never be filled. He presumes that the life of the intemperate man, he who tries to keep his leaky jars full, is one which requires constant work, turmoil and suffering. The temperate man, on the other hand, having filled up his sound jars, needs to give no further thought to them and can relax and rest easy. He concludes by asking Callicles,

Now if this is how each man’s life is, do you say that the intemperate man’s life is happier than the orderly man’s?10

6 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 658; see also Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), IV 19. 7 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 688; Daybreak, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 113; On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000), III 10. 8 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 290. 9 Plato, Plato: Gorgias, intro. And commentary by E.R. Dodds (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 496e5. 10 Ibid., 493a. (italics added)

K. URSTAD 135

Callicles’ response is an emphatic yes. He offers the following explanation:

For that one who has filled up has no pleasure at all any more. It’s what I was saying just now – living like a stone once he has filled up, with no more enjoyment or distress. No; living pleasantly is in this – in having as much as possible flowing in.11

What Callicles appears to be saying here is that, if one, like himself, opts for a life full of desires, then, within that life, one cannot have pleasure without pain, that they will be present in somewhat equal proportions. Indeed, he explicitly acknowledges this when he tells Socrates that when one has been “filled up”, there is “no more enjoyment or distress (lupe)”. What Callicles is advocating is a life where one is continually replenishing, and not simply replenished (and so experiencing neither pleasure nor pain), where one is constantly emptying and filling, and not simply filled. The happy man then, according to Callicles, is not someone who experiences pleasures and no pains; rather, he knows very well that his objective of “having as much as possible flowing in” demands a requisite amount of accompanying pain or distress. Thus, though they differ in important details, at the most basic level both Nietzsche and Callicles take the good life to be one marked by a significant amount of pain, discomfort, and labor. Callicles’ reference to “living like a stone” is interesting and brings us, I believe, to another point of similarity between his views and those of Nietzsche, especially with respect to the latter’s outlook on, not only adherents of religion – in particular, of Buddhism – but what he calls the “last man”. Nietzsche spurns the Buddhist’s aim of Nirvana because he sees it in part as a yearning for the complete extinction of all consciousness and for the negation of life, will, and activity.12 The Noble Truths of Buddhism declare that life is suffering. Suffering comes from passion and desire, which ought, according to the Buddhists, to be eliminated. Nietzsche sees this as culminating in the attempt to extirpate the passions, a state which, as we have seen, he vehemently opposes. Equally objectionable for Nietzsche is the so-called “last man”, a term he uses to describe the opposite type of individual to his superior and ideal being, the Übermensch,13 and a class to which he thinks the majority of modern men belong. The last man does not seek an active life, but a secure and comfortable one. He is content to lead a life of passive acquiescence and he wants to avoid pain at all costs. He has few preferences and no big desires; he is, in effect, apathetically neutral.14 Nietzsche sees in both forms of life signs of weakness and resignation. Nirvana and the comfortable existence of the last

11 Ibid., 494a-b. (italics added) 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 7. 13 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Prologue 3,4. 14 Ibid., Prologue 5.

136 NIETZSCHE AND CALLICLES man are not authentic forms of happiness but substitutes desired by the weak and insipid who are incapable of achieving that state of joyous power acquirable by stronger individuals.15 Their fears and inability to master their drives and desires lead both the Buddhists to resign themselves to another (perfectly painless) world and the last men to settle for the comfortable and secure life. Callicles’ outlook is eerily similar in this regard. A little earlier in their discussion, Socrates rhetorically asks Callicles if it’s wrong to say that those who need nothing are happy, whereupon he receives the following answer:

Yes, for in that case stones and corpses would be happiest.16

There is no reason to take Callicles’ reference to corpses and stones here, and at aforementioned 494a, merely as a kind of shock sarcasm. He is serious about likening those who restrict or abstain from their desires and passions with dead and inanimate objects. According to Callicles, such perceived anemia is definitely not the mark of a superior individual, and falls far short of what it takes to achieve the good and full human life. He defines the superior person as one who is not only wise about public affairs, but who is courageous and able to accomplish what they want without faltering through weakness or softness of soul.17 Moreover, it is someone who is able to:

…let his appetites grow as large as possible and not restrain them, and when these are as large as possible, he (has) the power to serve them, because of his bravery and wisdom, and to fill them with whatever he has an appetite for at any time.18

What the superior person rejects are the virtues of temperance and self-rule (sophrosyne, enkrateia), conventionally understood.19 Callicles calls adherents of conventional temperance fools, for only a fool would voluntarily fail to satisfy a satiable desire.20 The superior individual, on the other hand, is enslaved to nothing at all, ruled by no one, not even by himself. He cultivates and gratifies his desires to the fullest in accordance with the dictates of natural justice, dictates grounded in nature (phusis), entirely disembodied from conventional (nomos) morality.21 Because the majority of people are overwhelmed by large desires or simply incapable of living like this, they invent

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 225; Zarathustra, Prologue 5. 16 Plato, op cit., 492e. 17 Ibid., 491a-b. 18 Ibid., 491e-492a. 19 Ibid., 491d-e. 20 Ibid., 491e. 21 Ibid., 483a-484b.

K. URSTAD 137 bogus virtues like temperance and self-control, praise them, and champion desire-restricted or ascetic accounts of happiness. Not unlike Nietzsche, Callicles sees in the many weakness, fear and resentement. Such desire- restricting virtues are merely symptoms of sickliness, the “lack of manhood,”22 of their convention-bound inventors. Their happiness is but a substitute desired by the weak who are incapable of achieving that state whereby one has cast off all unnatural constraints and given free rein to one’s desires, a state which they, too, would prefer if they had the strength and courage to attain it. This last matter brings us to a final point of similarity between Nietzsche and Callicles, what they both take to be the supreme virtue23 and an indispensable means to happiness – courage. For Nietzsche, courage seems to be not so much about simply overcoming moments of fear. It has more to do with overall assertiveness and execution, with an overflowing sense of resolution and mission in life:24

How does one become stronger? – By coming to decisions… and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided… (when one fails) to listen to one’s most personal requirements…(when one) underestimates oneself…this lack of reverence for oneself revenges itself through every kind of deprivation:… freedom, firmness, courage….25

Part and parcel of such resolution is the ability to pursue one’s ideals not only despite the dangers of failure, but despite the perception of being shamed and ridiculed. The courageous person is not deterred from his goal by social expectations and shame tactics, his constitution is such that he’s able to proceed despite them. This seems to be part of Zarathustra’s counsel when he exclaims “Make yourself hard!”26 Callicles’ conception of courage is quite comparable to Nietzsche’s. For him, courage also has to do with the overall execution and single-minded pursuit of the superior person’s large desires and goals. To reiterate:

…the man who is to live rightly should let his appetites grow as large as possible and not restrain them, and when these are as large as possible, he must have the power to serve them, because of his bravery (andreia)….27

22 Ibid., 492a8. 23 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, IV, 3. 2; Plato, op cit., 492a. 24 See Robert Solomon, Living With Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148-9, for more on this aspect of courage in Nietzsche. 25 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 918. 26 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, iii. 12. 29. 27 Plato, op cit., 491e-492a. (italics added)

138 NIETZSCHE AND CALLICLES

The many, because of their unmanliness, do not have the power to follow through with their desires and projects; and so, concealing their cowardice and powerlessness, they resort to shaming (e.g. calling intemperance bad) those who are courageous enough to do so.28 The Calliclean individual however is “brave”, that is, “capable of fulfilling what they intend” and someone who, inverting the words of Zarathustra, doesn’t give in because of “softness of soul.”29 Not unlike Nietzsche then, courage, according to Callicles, is typified in the individual who remains resolute in his own path and who never weakens from softness of spirit. Where Nietzsche and Callicles differ most significantly is in their respective notions of power. This may not be so obvious however, at least upon a superficial reading. For both provide us with striking examplars of warrior men whose exercise of power involves military power, such as, in the case of Nietzsche, Napoleon and Caesar, and in the case of Callicles, Xerxes and Heracles. And both employ animal imagery, in particular, the image of the lion, to express power. Nietzsche, for instance, speaks of the “magnificent blond beast that prowls in search of booty and victory,”30 and Callicles of the lion whom society vainly seeks to tame.31 However, as briefly mentioned at the outset, Nietzsche does not have in mind anything resembling political power, nor something like power over other people.32 Indeed, he sees in the aspiration to find one’s own power through the oppression of others a sign of petty weakness:

I have found strength where one does not look for it; in simple, mild and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule – and conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me as a sign of inward weakness….33

It is, moreover, the ruler or dictator who is apt to become the slave of his passions. Since he cannot rule himself, he can hardly be said to be powerful. To reiterate, for Nietzsche, true power, which is partly embodied by his Zarathustra, involves the overcoming of oneself, it consists in the mastery,

28 Ibid., 492b. 29 Ibid., 491b (italics added); also see Dodds, 1959, Appendix, 390, for a brief discussion on courage in Callicles and Nietzsche. 30 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, i, II. 31 Plato, op cit., 483e-484a. 32 Gilles Deleuze is adamant that to read Nietzsche’s will to power as a straightforward desire for power or domination is to misinterpret his thought. “In this way the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives:…” See Nietzsche & Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 85. Deleuze quotes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “Desire for power: but who shall call it desire…Oh who shall find the rightful baptismal and virtuous name for such longing! ‘Bestowing virtue’ – that is the name Zarathustra once gave the unnameable.” See Nietzsche, Zarathustra, III, “Of the Three Evil Things.” 33 Kaufmann, op cit., 252, X 412.

K. URSTAD 139 through sublimation, of one’s destructive impulses and desires, with the goal of giving style to one’s character and becoming noble in one’s tastes.34 Callicles also takes power to be an important constituent of happiness,35 however, he clearly conceives of it as rule or domination over others, as a kind of bully’s power. His examples of natural right, for instance, all involve dominance by brute strength and political (Machiavellian) ingenuity.36 He makes numerous meritorious allusions and references to tyrants and rulers throughout his discussion,37 without any indication that we are supposed to understand their power as anything but a kind of dominion over others. A further sign that Callicles is thinking of power along these lines is the blatant confusion he shows at Socrates’ question concerning whether or not the superior man ought not only rule over others but also rule over himself, that is, those desires within him.38 He asks Socrates three times what he means by this question, which is not at all surprising if, as suggested, he understands power as nothing but rule over others. In fact, Socrates goes on to warn Callicles, through his sieve-myths, that the soul of the one who practices no self-rule and gives free reign to his desires, will be susceptible to persuasion and loss of stability and control.39 Socrates is not questioning the external control that the Calliclean individual might be said to possess over others and the environment, but the internal control that he supposedly possesses over himself and his particular desires. In what sense is Callicles’ superior individual internally free from the effects of the pleasures and satisfactions involved in his excessive living? What are the inner resources by which his largely unrestrained life is maintained? Some years earlier, Democritus had insisted upon the important unification or symbiosis between certain external virtues or strengths and internal ones:

The brave man is superior not only to his enemies but also to pleasure. Some men are master of cities but slave to women.40

Callicles is clear on, and unashamedly confident about, the successful execution of the kind of power the superior man has over others, but completely silent in attributing to him any concern, let alone awareness, for the inner, psychological element in this connection. Callicles then appears ignorant of any insight that genuine power involves, as it does for Nietzsche, a kind of complete or holistic self-mastery. Well aware of Callicles’ views, perhaps this

34 Nietzsche, Daybreak, 202, 348. 35 Plato, op cit., 492a-c. 36 Ibid., 483d. 37 Ibid., 483dff, 492b. 38 Ibid., 491d. 39 Ibid., 493c. Also see Kristian Urstad, “Freedom and Happiness in Callicles and Socrates,” in Lyceum, 9:1 (2007) for further analysis of Socrates’ sieve-myths and their warning to Callicles. 40 H. Diels and W. Kranz eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 volumes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1996), B214.

140 NIETZSCHE AND CALLICLES was seen as a weakness in his progenitor’s outlook that Nietszche, in the development of his own position, was able to learn from.41 I have tried to set forth some evidence for the claim that Nietzsche’s doctrines on happiness and its constituents were in some measure inspired by some of the relevant views put into the mouth of Callicles by Plato in his Gorgias. There is, I have argued, strong alignment between their conceptions of happiness or the good life, pleasure, and courage. While superficially they appear somewhat close in their account of power, Nietzsche clearly deviates from Callicles, giving a much more subtle, penetrating and comprehensive analysis – an analysis Callicles appears not to be open to.

Department of Philosophy, University of the Fraser Valley, Canada

References

Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche & Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Diels, H. and W. Kranz eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 volumes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1996). Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966). ______, Daybreak, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ______, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000). ______, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000). ______, The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1974).

41 Little has been said about it, but we might wonder about the specifically political implications of this meaning of power in Nietzsche. Though there is by and large an absence of any identifiable political doctrines in his texts, Nietzsche does occasionally speak (especially in Beyond Good and Evil) about a ‘grand politics’, a ‘new caste’ of superior beings and an ‘aristocratic society’. He is much more explicit moreover, in his rejection of the idea of equal rights, socialism and modern liberal democracry. Prima facie, the political connotations here suggest competition, domination, exploitation or power of overs (as fundamental to the development of a higher existence). But this, it seems to me, is misleading. In line with the central exegesis on power, I suggest that Nietzsche’s seeming politics of domination and his use of the term aristocracy be seen primarily within the aesthetic context of self-perfection, self-cultivation and restraint. It is perhaps suggestive that the virtues Nietzsche praises are not so much political virtues but personal ones – honesty, courage, generosity and politeness, being the cardinal four. Even strength for him is rarely measured in terms of physical strength and prowess, but as health, and as such, a personal, not a competitive virtue. In this regard, Nietzsche seems to follow his intellectual foe and admirer, Socrates, in so far as he largely disregards involvement in politics while making individual virtue and the good of one’s soul the central concern.

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______, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). ______, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). Plato, Plato: Gorgias, intro. And commentary by E.R. Dodds (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 496e5. Robert Solomon, Living With Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 142-154

Article

Narratives and the Dialogue of Cultures of Knowledge: A Perspective on the Experience of the West and Africa

Uchenna Okeja

Preliminary Observations and Introductory Remarks

little story seems very apt as the beginning of our quest for the understanding of narratives and the dialogue of cultures of knowledge. A This story is Chinua Achebe’s adaptation of a Yoruba story. It goes this way: two farmers were working their farms on either side of a road. As they worked they made friendly conversation across the road. Then Eshu, god of fate and lover of confusion, decided to upset the state of peace between them. A god with a sharp and nimble imagination, he took his decision as quickly as lightning. He rubbed one side of his body with white chalk and the other side with charcoal and walked up the road with considerable flourish between the farmers. As soon as he passed beyond earshot the two men jumped from their work at the same time. And one said: “Did you notice that extraordinary white man who has just gone up the road?” In the same breath the other asked: “Did you see that incredible black man I have just seen?” In no time at all, the friendly questions turned into a violent argument and quarrel, and finally into a fight. As they fought they screamed: He was white! He was black! After they had belaboured themselves to their hearts’ content they went back to their farms and resumed their work in gloomy and hostile silence. But no sooner had they settled down than Eshu returned and passed with even greater flourish between them down the road. Immediately the two men sprang up again. And one said: “I am sorry, my good friend. You were right; the fellow is white.” And in the same breath the other farmer was saying: “I do apologize for my blindness. The man is indeed black, just as you said.” And in no time again the two were quarrelling and then fighting. As they fought this time, they shouted: I was wrong! No, I was wrong!1

1 See, Chinua Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers,” in The Massachusetts Review, 14:3 (Summer 1973), 618-619.

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Specifying the Meaning and Contexts of Dialogue

The story above captures, to a certain extent, the scenario of human cognition and the very often claimed certainty thereof. There is always the tendency for the human mind to suppose that what it knows, it knows for sure. But the deception of appearance and the impossibility of knowing everything that can be known pushes the same human mind to doubt what it knows. The case is not very different in the oft invoked dialogue of cultures of knowledge. This kind of dialogue denotes that there is the need for complementary reflection. Like the two farmers in the above story, there is, however, the problem of getting the other parties to come to understand one’s side of the story. The dialogue involved could very easily degenerate into acrimony, so much so that a productive argument is made impossible. The story above shows the effects of ‘absolutist exclusivism’ which very often excoriates the other’s views without even bordering to know enough about what it is all about. So, accounting for the dialogue implied means also accounting for the conditions that make it possible. This, I opine, means looking into the issue of the kind of interaction that would pass as dialogue of cultures of knowledge, for two people quarreling and shouting at each other, are engaged in some kind of interaction or exchange. They, however, cannot claim to be engaged in a dialogue. And this kind of interaction cannot be said to be what the dialogue of cultures of knowledge denotes. In this connection, therefore, it suffices to note that it is not all kinds of communicative interaction that pass for the interaction implied by dialogue. There are presuppositions that necessarily need to be ensured for any meaningful dialogue to take place. Aside the tenets of procedural discourse ethics which emphasize the importance of making sure that one does not commit a performatory self-contradiction in the argumentation process in the quest for rational consensus, dialogue of cultures of knowledge must take into account the foundational epistemologies that stand behind the entire quest. It must seek to articulate the ambit of the postulated otherness in order to determine if this presupposed epistemological framework is plausible. The demand that dialogue of cultures of knowledge must evaluate its presupposed epistemological framework arises due to the fact that the invocation of dialogue itself presupposes a difference since people with the same point of view do not term whatever exchange of ideas they are engaged in as dialogue. They simply are engaged in a discussion. But to dialogue, divergent points of views are presupposed. And these points of view also have subjects representing them. That these subjects representing different points of view seek to dialogue points to the fact that they acknowledge that 1) there is a good inherent in the envisaged dialogue and 2) that they may not possess the fullness of cognition with regard to reality or the aspect of reality under consideration. These preliminary presuppositions of the subjects as they sashay into the dialogical forum could be regarded as the basic normative epistemological framework that spells out the contexts of viable dialogue.

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Without this, the dialogue will degenerate into unproductive soliloquy in the forms of either mutual admiration or misrepresentation. Now the question is: how is dialogue possible? Or, differently put, what are the means by which the subjects represent their points of view in the dialogical process? This, to my mind, almost always takes the form of paradigmatic narratives. In engaging in dialogue of cultures of knowledge, the subjects involved in the dialogue try to make their points of view intelligible and to do this they need to narrate what informs their convictions and conclusions. This means that they, as the narrators, need to fulfill some epistemic-normative demands in order to be considered as credibly representing the point of view of the narratives they present and the narrative itself which is presented must satisfy certain conditions to be considered as authentic. Without claiming to be able to spell out all that these two-tiered conditions are, it suffices to note that the entire quest is to prove the authenticity of both the narrator and the narrated. But with regard to the dialogue of cultures of knowledge, there is meta-narrative behind the entire endeavour which can be regarded as the factors of discursive historicity. The narrator and the narrated make recourse to this meta-narrative in order to establish their authenticity. When these factors of discursive historicity are in themselves impediments to dialogue, the entire dialogical process is jeopardized in such a manner that viability is precluded. This is why, akin to the observation above, dialogue of cultures of knowledge must evaluate from the outset the foundations of its epistemological presuppositions about otherness. This means confronting the factors of discursive historicity behind the scenes of the dialogue since they are the constituent elements at the foundations of the postulated otherness. The dialogue should not shy or explain away the factors of discursive historicity by appealing simply to reasons of moral impertinence or actuality. Rather, I opine that these factors of discursive historicity must be considered in themselves (and not just invoked as paradigms of intellectual moral failure of subjects of a particular knowledge tradition) by way of identifying and critically assessing them with a view to showing that they must be dispensed with for reasons of internal consistency and plausibility. But what is meant by factors of discursive historicity at the foundation of the epistemological presupposition of otherness that, to a very large extent, make dialogue of cultures of knowledge traditions an imperative? Factors of discursive historicity refer directly to ossified conceptual frameworks and other elements of mental constructs of writing or narrating about subjects of a knowledge tradition but not for them. The concept refers to a tradition that creates a repetitive and reductive conceptualization of the subjects of a knowledge tradition by means of telling a single-story about them. To contextualize, factors of discursive historicity could be understood as narratives about Africa that have provided a beacon for a well-developed tradition of writing about Africa. Whereas the discursive nature of these factors consists in the fact that they maintain porous boundaries across disciplines; they move, in

U. OKEJA 145 other words, from one area of intellectual discourse to another with utmost ease, their historicity denotes mainly their claim to authenticity based, not so much on plausible justifications but rather on the fact that all such writings fit into the tradition of writing about Africa. That is, that they conform to the status quo of a perennial intellectual discourse about Africa in the West. These factors of discursive historicity are related to narratives in the sense that they embody the things we look for in narratives as a corpus such as rich relations of consequence. Three areas where these factors have been in committed use are to be found in the subjects of anthropology, literature and philosophy. And in these three fields, the historicity implied comes out vividly.

Representation of the Factors of Discursive Historicity

To embark on the task of accounting for the representation of the factors of discursive historicity behind the scenes of dialogue of cultures of knowledge in a blanket-cover form will indeed be an impossible task. This accounts for the imperativeness of doing this from a context. The chosen context here is the African context. This is due to the fact that it is the context with which I am conversant by the accident of birth and reflective engagement.

Anthropology

Anthropological narratives about Africa display intensely this discursive historicity. Mudimbe accounts that the very name of the continent is itself a major problem. The Greeks named it Libya and used to call any black person an Aithiops. But then the confusion started with the Romans who had a province in their empire known as Africa. Added to this is the fact that their intellectuals used the same word (Africa) for the “tertia orbis terrarium pars” that is, the continent as we know it, being the third, after Europe and Asia. Besides, when the Europeans “discovered” the continent in the fifteenth century, the confusion became complete.2 There would have been little or no problem if the completeness of the confusion referred to was only about the proper way of naming the continent. In naming the continent, typifications of sorts with which the continent has become seamless ensued. And the overriding factor was, from the Greco-Roman epoch to the age of rediscovery and domestication in modern Europe, to underscore the otherness of the African. In historical and descriptive anthropology, the articulation of the otherness of Africa always takes into account a supposed discovery of the continent as its starting point. And this is the emergence of the tradition that says that “Africa was discovered in the fifteenth century. That, at least, is what most history books say. Professors teach it, students accept it as truth. In any

2 V.Y Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), preface to the book, xi

146 CULTURES OF KNOWLEDGE case, why doubt? The media propagate the veracity of the fact in the sagas of European explorers.”3 Though this is accepted almost as a sacrosanct truth, it is often forgotten, nay seldom pointed out that:

. . . taken at its first meaning, this discovery (that is, this unveiling, this observation) meant and still means the primary violence signified by the word. The slave trade narrated itself accordingly, and the same movement of reduction progressively guaranteed the gradual invasion of the continent. Thus, doubtless, it was a discovery in this sense. Yet, one might very seriously wonder, is it really historically true that the continent was discovered in the fifteenth century? We do know what is inscribed in this discovery, the new cultural orders it allowed, and, in terms of knowledge, the texts that its discourses built and whose achievement is to be found in what I term the “colonial library.” Looking again, however, it becomes apparent that indeed the fifteenth-century discovery was not the first contact of the continent with foreigners. Hence that discovery spells out only one viewpoint, the European.4

It is exactly with this way of circumscribing Africa’s coming to be that creates a locus for the articulation of the otherness of the continent. Earlier notions of the continent in European consciousness were not of this proclivity. And this is to be found in the Greek notions of the continent prior to the discovery in the fifteenth century. In fact it has been noted that “contrary to many nations concerned with Africa only for her wealth in gold, ivory, and manpower, two millennia ago the Greeks looked at the Negroes as human beings, with admiration and in brotherly fashion.”5 The information the Greek corpus offers about the African continent was, in actuality, relatively limited in comparison to that available for Asia, for example. Mudimbe, in this light, has suggested two approaches of understanding the Greek description of Africa: the mythic and the anthropological. What was the main concern here for Mudimbe was a critical appraisal of the revision of traditional history in intellectual discourses among black scholars. This, however, need not delay the discussion here since the main concern is with the change in conceptualization of Africa, whereby Africa became integrated in a reductive narrative that re-created it to become both a geography and condition which was not in keeping with the Earlier Greek approach mentioned above.

3 Ibid., 16-17. 4 Ibid., 17. 5 Alain Bourgeois, La Gréce antique la negritude, quoted in ibid., 20.

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This re-creation still had to do with naming and its attendant metaphors. How did this happen? What accounts, in essence, for the epistemological transmutation evident in the cognitive framework of ‘the knowledge of the West about Africa?’ To answer this question, it is important to start with noting that

… in most dictionaries of the sixteenth century, it is Latin nomenclature that reproduces itself. African is the equivalent of Afer, as substantive as well as adjective, and simply designates any person from the continent regardless of his or her colour. It translates Africanus …. For the Romans, Africa designates properly one of their provinces, and Africans, the Afri or Africani, its inhabitants …. Yet, in technical and literary works one finds another meaning, that of a third part of the world… which in this sense is the equivalent of the classical Greek Libya.6

One tag for the continent Aethiops, introduced a textual confusion that conjures an image about the continent. Aethiops, which is the proper name of Vulcan’s son in Greek mythology, is understood as the generic qualification of any dark-skinned person. On the other hand, however, Aethiopia, qualifies the continent: dicta a calore – colore – populorum quos solis vicinitas torret, that is, the land or the continent is called Aethiopia because of – and here it is a textual confusion that raises an image – the heat (calore) or the colour (colour) of the people living near the sun that burns them.7 It is with the onward movement of the characterization of Africa and its heydays in the period beginning with the fifteenth century that images of suggestive evaluations started being articulated in pari passu most discourses about Africa. To voice his recognition of the difficulty involved in proposing this way of understanding and situating the connection of Africa to the normative but negative images, Mudimbe noted that

… there are immense problems involved in designating the eighteenth century as the moment of strategic articulation of the concepts of primitiveness and savagery. Indeed, the great era of exploration took place between 1485 … and 1541…. Information and descriptions about the newly discovered “savages” found their way into the European consciousness, which strives to assert it Cogito toward what “it” defines as radically different.8

6 Mudimbe, op. cit., 26. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Ibid., 28.

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With the foregoing, it should be evident that the transmutation of the articulation of Africa and the nexus this has with varied depictions of otherness was not an accident that intruded upon the intellectual spaceship from the blues. It had its own moments and enabling environment. Also, the time that the transmutation of the epistemological framework of the West’s knowledge of Africa occurred is very informative. This is because the goal was, in its essential part, to legitimize the civilizing mission of the West in Africa. Anthropological inquietude about the African formed the cradle upon which the “colonial library” was built. The fundaments were cast exactly at that point when there was a purposeful transmutation in the framework of the “knowledge of the West about Africa.” Thus, the stereotypes constructed within this period became a founding “science” that determined the veracity of claims to authenticity about the works on the African person. Works in other fields of human knowledge had to conform to this already established “anthropological norm” of writing about Africa to be able to lay any claim to authenticity. This is why the explorers and navigators of preceding centuries, referred to in the above quotation from Mudimbe, met Africans and described them, sometimes without sympathy at all. They did so in the name of a difference and not necessarily because of an intellectual politics of prejudice. It is specifically this difference that is the “anthropological norm” that established a tradition of writing about Africa. As a corollary, in various disciplines, discourses about Africa started taking a definite shape; a shape in consonance with the narrative princints of the anthropological tradition. And, because disciplinary borders are porous, there ensued a progressive domestication of these narratives in the most unprecedented manner. Two areas where this domestication is very evident are literature and philosophy. Though the anthropological narrative is not very visible as being at work in the latter discipline (philosophy), it is nonetheless actively inherent in many of its discourses.

Literature

Chinua Achebe provides an insightful consideration of the subject matter in the area of literature. Achebe sought to demonstrate that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, better than any other work he knows displays that Western desire and need to understand Africa as the eccentric other. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he notes “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”9 The novel opens with the River Thames but the actual story took place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. We are told that ‘going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world.’ These two rivers, Conrad wishes to

9 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann, 1988), 2.

U. OKEJA 149 inform, are very different, one good, the other bad. But, Achebe opines that “that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.”10 The most interesting and revealing passages in Conrad’s novel are about people. Achebe, quoting a passage from Conrad’s novel remarks that the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind lies in the thought of the humanity of African. According to Achebe, “for Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance. ‘Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place,’ he tells us pointedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place.”11 The point here is that there is a place fitting for the fellows – Africans – Conrad is describing. They have to fit into the mould and cast of thinking about them which has been an established ‘science’ during the age of ethnographic, or rather, descriptive anthropology. Against the background of Conrad’s depiction of a Western woman as opposed to an African woman, Achebe notes that

… the difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subtle ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa. In place of speech they made ‘a violent babble of unclothe sounds’. They ‘exchanged short grunting phrases’ even among themselves.12

In all, Conrad kept to this account of Africans, conferring speech on the savages only twice in his entire novel. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them and the other was the famous announcement: ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’ Against this background, Achebe was apt in noting that at first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality, however, they constitute some of his best assaults. For, in the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad’s purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. And while weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear,

10 Ibid., 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

150 CULTURES OF KNOWLEDGE unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter.13 A charge which might be brought forward against Achebe’s reading of Conrad’s novel was not only known to him but was also expressed by him. He was aware that “it might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism.”14 For Achebe, although Conrad made efforts to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story, it is yet pertinent to note that “if Conrad’s intension is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems … totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary.”15 It might well be claimed that Conrad was just a child of his age; that it was not his fault that he flourished at a time when there was this tradition of looking at Africans with prejudice. But like Achebe noted:

Even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain…. Conrad certainly had a problem with niggers…. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description: ‘A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms’ – as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession.16

One striking insight in Achebe’s appraisal of Conrad’s novel which connects the concern here with discursive historicity to the domestication of stereotypes about Africans in literature is this:

Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it…the west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 9.

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Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man’s jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else!17

This tradition of writing about Africa has its grips today, not just on the imagination of the so-called West but also beyond. There are many other books of literature that have domesticated this tradition. The effect is the perpetuation of the narratives of discursive historicity that have become paradigmatic about Africa since the epistemological turn in the framework of ‘writing about Africa.’ A very good study of literatures in this regard was provided by Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow in their book on the subject matter.18 But for our purposes here, the foregoing consideration seems to be adequate. This is because the main aim is not so much with an exhaustive account of literature from this perspective but rather with showing that the stereotypes of discursive historicity did in fact have their day in literatures connected with the very notion or idea of the African continent or the African as a part of the human race.

Philosophy

An influential trinity that stand at the helm of Western philosophy’s domestication of narratives of discursive historicity in relation to the African is to be found in the philosophical figures of Hume, Hegel and Kant. For want of space, only the exemplification of this in Kant will be sought below, however briefly. The late vibrant postcolonial philosopher, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in his study of Kant from the perspective of the colour of reason noted that Kant classified human beings based on the colour of their skin.19 This was because Kant took skin colour as evidence of a racial difference in terms of inferiority or otherwise. Following this train of thought, Kant provided a chart which accounts for the hierarchical order of hues of the skin colour of human beings beginning with the superior down to the inferior. The chart runs thus:

STEM GENUS: white brunette First race, very blond (northern Europe), of damp cold

17 Ibid., 12. 18 Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (London: Waveland Press, 1992). 19 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Post-colonial African Philosophy (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 115.

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Second race, Copper-Red (America), of dry cold Third race, Black (Senegambia), of dry heat Fourth race, Olive-Yellow (Indians), of dry heat20

But why is the chart arranged thus; what does Kant aim at with such a classification? The assumption behind this arrangement is precisely Kant’s belief that the ideal skin colour is the white (the white brunette) and the other skin colours are merely degenerative developments from the original white. To buttress this point, Kant noted that “humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of talent. The Negroes are lower, and the lowest are a part of the American peoples.”21 Full humanity exists only in those with white skin colour for Kant and the blackness of one’s skin could be an indication of stupidity. This is evident in Kant’s claim when, in his evaluation of a statement made by an African, he dismissed the fellow by saying that “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”22 This, then, is the main point that stands at the basis of the discursive historicity about African’s otherness; the assertion of their inhumanity by either withholding or not fully attributing humanness to them. To cap it up, Kant makes evident the discursiveness of his opinions of the African by exhibiting something which is characteristic of this sort of inquiry, namely, the recourse to the tradition of writing about Africa whereby appeal to the established pattern (by quoting supposedly authoritative sources) is what confers authenticity and not the claims of the discourse itself. Thus, in keeping with this sort of narrative tradition, Kant quotes Hume to make his characterization of the African authentic. He writes:

Mr Hume challenges anyone to cite a simple example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality; even among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between the two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour.23

20 Immanuel Kant, On the Different Races of Man, in Earl W. Count, ed., This is Race: An Anthology Selected from the International Literature on the Races of Man (New York: Schuman, 1950), 23. 21 Immanuel Kant, Physische Geographie, quoted in Eze, op. cit., 118. 22 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960) 113. 23 Ibid., 110-111.

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Implications and the Way Forward

What do these factors of discursive historicity mean for the dialogue of knowledge traditions especially with regard to the dialogue between Africa and the west? Among many things, they mean the following: 1) that genuine dialogue between the two traditions is impossible with these factors operating behind the scenes of the dialogue, especially as evident in the presupposition of the epistemological framework at the basis of the current endeavour of the dialogue which postulates otherness as its point of departure and 2) that what is most important in the dialogue of knowledge traditions is that, apart from the insistence that the different traditions should be considered as equals,24 the implicit epistemic injustice should be critiqued in such a way that they will cease to reconstitute themselves in different forms. It is only when this is achieved that there will be viable and genuine dialogue. This is because, insisting only on the equality of knowledge traditions as a fundamental postulate of the dialogue will conjure the picture that these traditions were not equal somehow, sometime ago. But if equality was absent, what then will bring it about? The point about epistemic injustice needs to be enunciated a little further in order to show how it impinges on the quest for dialogue of knowledge traditions. First off, it is pertinent to note that epistemic injustice does not refer to distributive fairness with regard to epistemic goods such as information or education. The meaning of the term consists most fundamentally in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. This could take the forms of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.

Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences…. We might say that testimonial injustice is caused by prejudice in the economy of credibility; and that hermeneutical injustice is caused by structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources.25

Thus, epistemic injustice arises in the context of dialogue of cultures of knowledge when the factors of discursive historicity discussed above leads to an imbalance of narratives. This imbalance could lead to credibility overload,

24 Of course equality of the dialogue partners is imperative. With regard to North- South efforts at dialogue, the big brother attitude of the North needs to be discarded if any genuine dialogue is to take place. For more on this see, Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, 14-19. 25 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, Ethics and Power of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.

154 CULTURES OF KNOWLEDGE credibility deficit or, in some cases, to total epistemic disenfranchisement. In all, however, the way forward will consist in creating a balance of narratives where the epistemological framework of dialogue is based, not on the postulation of otherness, perpetuated by the phenomenon of experts on Africa, but on a just epistemic framework that moves the epistemic center from a one dimensional narrative to a well-rounded narrative. This way, the subjects of the dialogue will ultimately abandon unwholesome thoughts while recognizing the need for epistemic justice and enfranchisement.

Department of Philosophy, Goethe Universität-Frankfurt am Main, Germany

References

Achebe, C., Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann, 1988). ______, “Africa and Her Writers,” in The Massachusetts Review, 14:3 (Summer 1973). Eze E.C., Post-colonial African Philosophy (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). Fricker M., Epistemic Injustice, Ethics and Power of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Hammond D. and Jablow A., The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (London: Waveland Press, 1992). Kant I., Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. by Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974). ______, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). ______, “On the Different Races of Man,” in Count W. E., This is Race: An Anthology Selected from the International Literature on the Races of Man (New York: Schuman, 1950). ______, Physische Geographie, in Kant I., Gesammelte Schriften, (Berlin, Reimer 1900-1966). Mudimbe V.Y., The Idea of Africa (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 155-165

Article

Becoming an Expression in Deleuze: Two Cases from Turkey (Fazil Say and Misirli Ahmet)

Cetin Balanuye

Introduction: I may leave Turkey, my home country . . .

azıl Say’s declaration, outlined above, has appeared in Turkish newspapers as an important sign of Islamization of the society. Thinking F that a liberal Islamist party, AKP, has won the general election for the second time with a greater percentage and strengthened its conservative voice more than ever in the country, the surprising impact of Say’s declaration can be understood. Secular investments which have been carefully made since early twentieth century are thought to be weakened deliberately and principals of Kemalist enlightenment are believed equally be under threat. AKP’s relative success in national economy and increasing popularity in foreign affairs have doubled the effect of fight or flight reaction. Though legally legitimate in all its attempts, AKP has increasingly begun to be perceived as a silent enemy that has been seeking to undermine the very foundation of modern democratic and secular society. The declaration of Fazıl Say has arrived against such a background and many columnists argued that there is always a point if a declaration of this kind is coming from an artist, who is probably more sensitive and alert than all of us to gradual decadence in a society. There is nothing interesting, of course, if we take this event as a simple case that needs to be considered within the context of freedom of expression. What is expressed here, in this sense, is that of an opinion. Say expresses his opinion about recent political events taking place in the country. And, as expected, all reactions that have followed from this declaration can also be understood as other opinions for or against Say’s opinion. So far so good. However, there is something obviously peculiar about Say and his opinion (initial event) and others and their opinions (reactive events), and more importantly about their relevance to each other. Many of the reactive opinions were almost the same with a number of earlier opinions expressed at different occasions and for different purposes other than the present purpose. In other words, although Say’s opinion has caused emergence of many different opinions (difference as a matter of form), these opinions were not exclusively responsive to the initial event (difference as a matter of content. The initial

156 BECOMING AN EXPRESSION event, in this sense, did not bring out any reactive opinion unique to this but only this event. Let me simplify this peculiarity as follows:

Form of Source of Context of Content of the the the opinion reactive opinions opinion opinion

Recent

Mr. Fazıl Turkish

Say “I politics / Opinion 1 think” Secular vs Islamist Recent LOVE OR Turkish Mr. X “I LEAVE politics / think” TURKEY! Secular vs Opinion 2 Islamist Recent Turkish Mr. Y “I politics / think” Secular vs Opinion 3 Islamist

Although the content of reactive opinions are almost the same regardless of what initial opinion has in fact expressed, the tension and aggression aggregates as number of reactive opinions increase. This is to say that initial opinions act like infertile eggs failing to differentiate reactions, and yet causing to increase ideological tension and aggression in the society. Can this picture be changed by changing content of initial opinions? Or, should one think changing the source of initial opinions? Is it possible really to change content of reactive opinions? And, what happens even if this last aim is achieved? Deleuze tells us that it is impossible to be optimistic about answers for the above questions and the impossibility implied in these questions derives neither from source nor from content of opinions. The problem lies in much deeper philosophical presuppositions which require reconsideration of the image of thought.

A Deleuzian Reading of the Declaration

What is wrong with expressing an opinion? Can it be that “I think I might leave my home country…” bears more presuppositions than it seems? What are these presuppositions and are they really not legitimate?

C. BALANUYE 157

In many of his works but particularly in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition Deleuze presents a careful critique of the dogmatic image of thought, one which necessitates employment of certain presuppositions. Holding those presuppositions are in fact brought by the difficulty that philosophy has always urged to overcome, but failed. Failure, in this sense, means appealing to certain presuppositions inevitably. “Where to begin in philosophy has always –rightly- been regarded as a very delicate problem, for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions.”1 Yet this is not an easy task in many cases. Descartes, for instance, as Deleuze rightly remembers in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, is an example of the attempt to avoid from presuppositions of any kind, either objective (explicit) or subjective (implicit). Rationality is never taken for granted by Descartes. He rather attempts to clear at the outset all those possible controversies that might shadow the ground on which most of evidences are later to be constructed. “I think” in this sense is the least loaded assumption that Descartes thinks he can take as the legitimate point of departure. Deleuze, however, reminds that “I think” is in itself a bundle of “implicit presuppositions contained in opinions.”2 He writes: “It is presumed that everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, thinking, and being.”3 What is implied here, I suppose, is an attempt to question the very idea of identity. Much before the identity of things or terms external to “I”, the identity of “I” is in itself needs to be reconsidered. How can one articulate “I” two times one after another without subjective presupposition that what the two articulations of “I” signify is an identical self? As Deleuze argues it will always be taking the risk of being labeled as “idiot” if one resists to ignore the questions of this kind. Taking the side of the idiot (Eudoxus), in this sense, might be the philosopher’s natural acclamation. This does not mean, however, that the philosopher can succeed being completely presupposition-free. Being an idiot, or taking the side of Eudoxus is not something one can easily choose and become, simply because presuppositions arrive much earlier than the conscious choice: “In fact, Eudoxus has no fewer presuppositions than Epistemon, he simply has them in another, implicit or subjective form, ‘private’ and not ‘public’…”4 Yet, Deleuze still asks us to think the possibility of being presupposition-free completely. This is not a simple invitation to the playground of imagination. This is rather a necessary effect of being familiar with the entire Deleuzian ontology, with difference-in-itself and repetition. He defines such an experience and the importance of this as follows:

Someone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything. Not an individual

1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 1994), 164. 2 Ibid., 164. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 165.

158 BECOMING AN EXPRESSION

endowed with good will and a natural capacity for thought, but an individual full of ill will who does not manage to think, either naturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is without presuppositions. Only such an individual effectively begins and effectively repeats.5

Deleuze, in fact, does not want to limit his point with a straight critique of this or that type of image of thought. Rather, what is being criticized here is a necessary result of the two-sided failure, embedded both in our very common sense (habitual thinking) and contemplative faculty (philosophical thinking), the failure in thinking of difference and of repetition. Philosophers in general failed first to imagine that difference should not necessarily be thought in terms of a lack of resemblance between two or more things. They missed that the difference in this non-Deleuzian sense is just a delayed or already crystallized effect of difference-in-itself. Their second mistake was the idea that things might repeat and when we say that a thing repeats it must mean that one and the same thing appears and appears again. Repetition, in terms of this image of thought, is possible without difference, and in a similar vein an absolute difference, which is something more than variation, is also possible between two or more things.6 The first two chapters of Difference and Repetition present detailed objections to this kind of misconceptions as regards the concept of difference and repetition. these ideas. Here is not, of course, the right place to present a satisfactory account of Deleuzian objections to underlying sources of representative thinking. Yet, it is important to note that articulation of “I think” as in the form of expression of opinion denotes the necessary outputs of this two-sided failure. Say’s articulation is in this sense a clear demonstration of the false attempt to represent what cannot be represented. “I” remains as a static and frozen linguistic actualization while what it in fact aims to represent is no longer present, at least in the form that it is supposed to represent. This false attempt, according to Deleuze, is originated in the very act of recognition. Drawing on the famous Cartesian example, Deleuze urges to unfold one of our illegitimate presuppositions, i.e., when we recognize something (a wax) as the same, this will give us the necessary and sufficient condition to call that thing as the same. He writes:

…for the philosopher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities. This is

5 Ibid., 165-166. 6 The so-called ‘absolute difference’ leads us to think of difference between two beings (between two already actualized things); this tendency falls short to grasp what Deleuze understands from difference-in-itself. In order to approach to this particular Deleuzian notion of difference we should not think of it in terms of any pre-existing unity. Rather we need to think entire life within difference, which requires that there is no original position to rely on and then to talk about difference of something as a variation from that original state.

C. BALANUYE 159

the meaning of the Cogito as a beginning: it expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby expresses the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which reflects the subjective identity… it is the common sense become philosophical.7

This is a sad story of thinking, in which thinking has been triggered and managed by common sense, and thinking in the end will be reduced to acts of recognition. For Deleuze, there is “… a costly double danger for philosophy. On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this the piece of wax… But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognize, we are thinking?”8 Thinking, no doubt, cannot be limited to acts of recognition. Yet, if this seems like the only capability which is possible by thought it is because of the ignorance and illusion derived from the dominant image of thought flourished under the terms of representation. Having a list of the basic elements of representation Deleuze keeps on clarifying the effects of this type of thinking. He argues that “The ‘I think’ is the most general principle of representation….”9 By means of the articulation or better to say our almost natural inclination to think of “I” as already self- identical and as also already a special thing different from rest of the world of things, we make our thinking impotent and unable to think difference-in-itself. Nor can we think of ourselves, our faculty of thinking as no more than a temporal actualization within the difference-in-itself. Why is this Deleuzian insight important for our purpose? In Say’s case, “I think I may leave my home country …” appears as an expression of opinion which is fostered by representation. Say, obviously, wants to make his point clear and for this reason he employs the dominant image of thought, that is representative thinking, the only image accessible to him.10 Thus, he leaves the vital role, a mission of representing himself (his Cogito, his interests, or ideas) at the mercy of this particular articulation. He assigns a mission impossible to his articulation ( I think I may …). As expected, then, the articulation fall short in representing the Subject’s presence, nor can it succeed to give rise dynamically new and creative reactions, at least as dynamic as the individual himself. In other words, Say’s statement remains inert.

7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 169. 8 Ibid., 170-171. 9 Ibid., 174. 10 No doubt, I don’t mean that Say is personally responsible for this dogmatic image of thought. Rather, what I am thinking is that his articulation can be read as a vivid example of a general symptom of political escapism without action, a symptom which is perhaps valid equally for any of us who cannot help representing and ignorant of the need to think otherwise.

160 BECOMING AN EXPRESSION

Becoming Percussion

When Misirli Ahmet, another Turkish musician whose original percussion technique has been recognized world-wide for the last ten years, declared that he does not play percussion, he indeed wants to become percussion, this declaration produced no identifiable political results. But I want to argue that this utterance when read from a Deleuzian perspective bears more political implications than most of the other explicitly political utterances, one clear example of which was already discussed above. But, let me present first what makes Ahmet so useful for our purpose in this reading. The musical life of Ahmet can in fact be thought as a bundle of experiences of diverse becomings. Most audiences of Ahmet do realize that what impresses them is not simply what they hear, but also what they see, think, and feel. Or perhaps it is better to say that Ahmet’s musical performance makes a strange influence on audiences/perceivers, by means of which they experience a kind of transformation triggered by a body-in-becoming. This is something similar, but hopefully not as risky as, to what psychotherapists call “counter-transference”, the situation where psychoanalyst unconsciously displaces of her own emotion or mood onto the patient/client. Ahmet’s own experience of becoming while performing, in this sense, disseminates through perceptual interaction and makes influences on others’ sense of themselves. Ethem Zeytinkaya, an audience of Ahmet, puts it as follows: “What is felt while hearing Ahmet is not just a technique which is indisputably superior. The felt is that of the chaotic expression of the rhythmic flow of life with all its uniqueness and infinity embodied through fingers.”11 In depicting his own musical biography for a documentary, Ahmet comments on his own attachment to the percussion instrument. He tells that the rhythm in general and the goblet drum (darbuka) in particular is for him much beyond the ordinary language, it is rather a special milieu for expression. “A milieu that helps me break my taboos, liberate myself. Thus, it is not that ‘I play percussion’, it is rather ‘becoming percussion.” Considered that “the word percussion as a noun in contemporary English is described as the collision of two bodies to produce a sound” (Wikipedia), Ahmet’s becoming percussion can better be grasped. Paul Patton in Deleuze and Political draws on the implications of thinking bodies in terms of encounters and affects: “Defining bodies in terms of the affects of which they are capable is equivalent to defining them in terms of the relations into which they can enter with other bodies, or in terms of their capacities for engagement with the powers of other bodies. In A Thousand Plateaus, what Deleuze and Guattari call processes of ‘becoming’ are precisely such engagements with the powers of other bodies.”12 Ahmet is not in this sense the Subject, who is supposed to make an asymmetrical or one-way impact on drum, but rather he at least while he is

11 Ethem Zeytinkara, Gülşen Saru Mukaddes Mut, A Documentary for Misirli Ahmet (TRT, 2007). 12 Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Politica (London: Routledge, 2000), 78.

C. BALANUYE 161 with the drum enters to an experiment as (not through his) body. Now this encounter is no longer an encounter of two different bodies, each of which is self-identical, actualized and territorialized once for all. In some cases both bodies (think of the case for Ahap and Mobidick of Melville), but in this case at least Ahmet (if not both Ahmet and the Drum) undergoes what Adrian Parr calls “a non-linear dynamic process of change”. She writes:

‘Becoming’ points to a non-linear dynamic process of change and when used to assist us with problems of an aesthetic nature we are encouraged not just to reconfigure the apparent stability of the art object as ‘object’ defined in contradistinction to a fully coherent ‘subject’ or an extension of that ‘subject’ but rather the concept of arts’ becoming is a fourfold becoming-minor of the artist, viewer, art work and milieu. It is in this regard that performance prompts us to consider the production and appreciation of art away from the classical subject/object distinction that prevailed by and large up until the 1960s.13

Ahmet’s becoming-percussion may inspire new virtualities of thinking, thinking both of us and the rest, beyond dominant image of thought. This certainly is no less than taking the risk of losing oneself, leaving the silent comfort of solution for promising yet dangerous horizons of problem. As Ahmet himself remarks “If you like to discover or catch the rhythm you should first loose it…” Problems in this sense are only conditions for a creative open- ended future and can only be posed genuinely when one ceases to represent herself and the world.

A Deleuzian Reading of the Expression For Deleuze, “The Conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.”14 To create is to veer away from representation. You cannot represent something which has been in constant becoming! Creating new and undoing for newer and re-creating for infinite future, and so on is the true critical attitude. The true critique here is not in any sense a true formula written once and for all and to be employed in all programs for resistance. Its political power does not lie in what it tells us. Its power lies in the effect of disclosing itself when we experience what it is to be in constant becoming. Living with and in terms of infinite series of and(s) is the only possibility which will let us stay away from representation. The very idea of becoming, therefore, is in itself political. Its political power is not of the reactive kind. Becoming is rather active, positive and

13 Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2005), 25. 14 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 176.

162 BECOMING AN EXPRESSION affirmative power that undermines the very possibility of representation at the outset. It invites bodies (players of forces) to encounter with each other within the plane of immanence, where non-representation becomes no less than a transcendental condition for becoming. Appreciating what makes Ahmet’s expression so political requires a two-fold realization: First, it inspires us a real sense of becoming other than ourselves. This inspiration in fact is closely related to a Deleuzian objection to the philosophical tradition which takes “being” as the point of departure. To compromise with this objection one needs to imagine what De Landa calls “a universe of becoming without being.”15 He writes: “… a universe where individual beings do exist but only as the outcome of becomings, that is, of irreversible process of individuation.”16 It invokes the times where our individuation is not yet at temporal rest. What I call “I am” is neither a beginning nor an end, it is just a relative slowing down of becoming, actualization or differenciation to be resolved for the new again. Art in general and Ahmet’s case in particular shows us the paths for thinking through individuation, but at the same time reasons for the anxiety this thinking motivates. Halward writes: “In the interest of order and security, people normally take shelter from the creative chaos that is forever raging ‘over their heads’ under a comforting conceptual ‘umbrella, on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions.”17 Artists, on the other hand, are those who are supposed to take this challenge and try (most of the time unintentionally) participating in the very realizationof immanence. Loosing unity and finding back a new temporal residue is just another way of thinking bodies as machines. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures).”18 This thinking is not in any sense a seductive call to abandon the reality. It is not a fantasy. Nor is it a sign of reliance on elusive metaphors. Quite the opposite, this is a call to be unmediated in reality. These breaks, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “should in no way be considered as a separation from reality; rather, they operate along lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them we are considering.”19 In Ahmet’s case, in other words, one can find all aspects of a Spinozist univocal ontology. Thinking of becoming percussion and becoming percussion turn in the end to be one and the same thing: Single substance expresses itself now as thinking and now as body. The expression here, in a sense, denotes a

15 Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002), 106. 16 Ibid. 17 Peter Hallaward, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), 106. 18 Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 1984), 38. 19 Ibid.

C. BALANUYE 163 delirium or in a more Deleuze-Guattarian fashion a Schizophrenizing, the positive tasks of which are revolutionary.20 Second, transformative power of becoming percussion becomes apparent when we realize the implicit link between memory and representation, and recall Deleuze’s emphasis that “becoming is anti-memory”. For Deleuze, “Memories always have a reterritorialization function.”21 Memories, in this sense, re-present and thereby reterritorialize what has already gone. The life that is driven purely by memories would not be creative. Cosmos, for this simple reason, could not have been memory-driven. Infinite creativity of cosmos requires being in a constant state of forgetting. Becoming, in this vein, is the only condition of staying in tune with the cosmic creativity. This is a matter of tango, a tango with life!22 The emphasis here on becoming is not simply a romantic turn that can be held for political hopes of any kind. Political promise of becoming should not be understood in terms of emancipatory hopes. Deleuze writes: “Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the revolution; it passes between the two… And yet ‘how to win the majority’ is a totally secondary problem in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.”23 This is rather an epistemological insight, a claim to truth; however the truth which is not in any sense a-temporal state of mind corresponding reality. The truth here is just a pure novelty. And the elusive novelty that can be expressed only through becoming makes becoming and all its variants political, that is, becoming is revolutionary in so far as it does not lend itself to representation.

Conclusion or Preface

Before making my concluding remarks I should perhaps confess that I share exactly the same feeling with Deleuze and Guattari. Near to the end of the last chapter in Anti-Oedipus they disclose after a long-suffering argument for political bearings of Schizoanalysis that all what they have tried so far might still look like fantasy. They write:

Those who have read us this far will perhaps find many reasons for reproaching us: for believing too much in the pure potentialities of art and even of science; for denying or minimizing the role of classes and class struggle; for militating in favor of an irrationalism of desire; for

20 See particularly the last section of Anti-Oedipus for elaboration of the political promise of Schizoanalysis. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 324. 22 Perhaps, the Spinozist concept of “adequate knowledge” would best be grasped through this metaphor. 23 Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1987), 324.

164 BECOMING AN EXPRESSION

identifying the revolutionary with the schizo; for falling into familiar, all-too-familiar traps.24

If this worry has really a point it must simply be indicating that we deliberately stand at the same side with Eudoxus. Favoring Ahmet’s expression-becoming percussion instead of Say’s expression-opinion, and more importantly appreciating the former’s political force despite the latter’s apparently political message resonates with Deleuze’s understanding of contemporary philosophy and politics. For Deleuze, the time of thinking in terms of “I” or “self” has already ended. Now, philosophy and much before it literature has started a novel thinking, one which rather attends to experimental possibilities of impersonal individuations. He writes:

Many things are happening in philosophy right now, it’s a confused and rich period. No one believes any more in the I, the Self, in characters or persons. This is quite clear in literature. But it goes even deeper: what I mean is, many people have spontaneously stopped thinking in terms of I and Self… What we’re uncovering right now, in my opinion, is a world packed with impersonal individuations, or even pre-individual singularities… 25

And he further adds: “The new novelists talk of nothing else: they give voice to these non-personal individuations, these non-individual singularities.”26 What these new novelists have realized is simply the way to elude control, a new intuition to develop unidentifiable means of resistance. Deleuze emphasizes that “This is really important, especially politically; it’s like the ‘fish dissolved in water’; it’s the revolutionary struggle, the struggle for liberation.”27 All what is stressed here has nothing to do with traditional vehicles of resistance, nor can it be understood within the axioms of dogmatic image of thought. It is just about experiencing a new thinking, a nomadic insight or becoming-intense. Out of this experience it is the hope that repressive effects of representative thinking will lose its target-Subject. Simply because, “…the forces of repression always need a Self that can be assigned, they need determinate individuals on which to exercise their power.”28 Mısırlı Ahmet’s articulation, in this sense, can be read as a fresh start for a creative body politics.

Department of Philosophy, Akdeniz University, Turkey

24 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 414. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands (NewYork: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2004), 137. 26 Ibid., 138. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

C. BALANUYE 165

References

De Landa, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002). Deleuze Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987). ______, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.Lane (London: Continuum, 1984). Deleuze, Gilles, Desert Islands, trans. by Michael Taormina (NewYork: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2004, 09/07/17). ______, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994). Hallward, Peter, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006). Parr, Adrian, “Becoming Performance Art,” in The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2005). Patton, Paul, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000). Zeytinkara, Ethem, Gülşen Saru Mukaddes Mut, A Documentary for Misirli Ahmet (TRT, 2007).

KRITIKE VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2010) 166-182

Denkbild

Elixirs and Fabulous Potions: On Critical Theory in the Philippines Part III (A Philosophical Fiction)

F. P. A. Demeterio

aith Contreras-Fernandez, a much admired assistant professor of industrial chemistry in the same university where Fred Gonzales was F enrolled and where Peter Mirano was teaching, was rushing from her laboratory towards the small function room adjoining their cafeteria. There, a bull session comprising of union leaders from her own university, as well as from the other schools of the university belt, was going on. These militant workers were exploring the implications of the recent move of some powerful taipans of buying their way into the board rooms of a number of educational centers in the metropolis. The Filipinos’ legendary demand for higher education and the country’s robustly growing population added up into an expanding business opportunity that lured these enterprising Filipino-Chinese magnates into investing some of their capitals in the universities, either clandestinely or under the guise of philanthropic advocacy for the betterment of Philippine education. But these union leaders who were closely following that trend were anticipating its chilling aftermath in the form of a brazen and crass commercialization of Philippine education. They were expecting that these taipans would heavily invest on the more tangible buildings and facilities to attract more enrollees, but would secretly clamp on the less tangible capital expenditures such as employee salaries, human resources development, library books and faculty research. In no time, these taipan- controlled universities would be run like their giant malls that appeared externally sleek, neat and flashy, but were actually festering internally with the sufferings of their armies of minimum-wage-earners who were engaged only on a five-month contractual basis. Faith’s highly politicized and ideological dedication to science education had been forged two decades earlier in her class on science, technology and society in that rather elitist Catholic university along España Street. Her professor, a huge cleric who himself was a chemist and who belonged to the same religious group who owned their university, delivered what for her became an unforgettable lecture. Fr. Roberto Castillon was talking about archaic models of science when he compared the European alchemist and the Filipino babailan. In her mind, she could still hear his thundering voice when he stressed: “You know, class, alchemy, with its

F. DEMETERIO 167 obsession for wealth and everlasting youth, is an earthly, materialistic, sexual and individualistic endeavor; the lore of the babailan, on the other hand, with its emphasis on healing, communal safety and bounty, is a spiritual, relational, and collectivist endeavor. If the alchemist is motivated by personal greed to alter nature, the babailan is moved by a sense of social duty to re-establish the harmony and order of nature.” “Come to think of it, modern chemistry did not only kill alchemy but also scorns its memory as an unfortunate segment of its own ancestry. Modern chemists would think that alchemy had been a misguided and superstitious venture. But that is exactly the tricky part, because in a deeper analysis, chemistry actually inherited much of alchemy’s materialism, greed and individualism, giving it a concealed force that is both sinister and destructive to both nature and society.” Then her professor opened her and her classmates’ eyes to the possibility of enriching Philippine chemistry with the spirituality, and the sense of social duty to re-establish order and harmony that are both nestled within the archaic model of the babailan. “Dapat ang kemikong Pilipino ay tatahak sa dakilang landas ng mga babailan; at unti-unti nilang itakwil ang materialismo, kasakiman, at pagka-makasarili, mga katangian na namana ng chemistry mula sa alchemy. Should this happen, the Filipino chemist would cease to blindly serve the interest of multinational corporations, but instead attend to priorities of Philippine society, such as food production, research for affordable medicine, exploration for renewable sources of energy, and the conservation and protection of the environment.” To stress his point, Fr. Castillon strode towards the window, pointed to the rooftop of their Renaissance style building where granite statues of some twelve giants of western humanism were perched: the theologians Vincent de Beauvais, Augustine of Hippo, and Raymond de Peñafort ; the philosophers, Aristotle, Albert of Cologne, and Plato; the tragic writers Calderon de la Barca, Sophocles, and William Shakespeare; and the comic writers Lope de Vega, Aristophanes, and Moliere. He declared to the class: “T’yak na hindi n’yo alam na at least three of these colossal university icons are European alchemists, and it is unfortunate that our chemistry department exists under their shadows. Maybe the time has come for our university to consider replacing these intellectual figures with local ones to be able to send to all our students and alumni a more politically appropriate signal that an unreflected aping at the western models will not propel this nation forward.” Faith understood the point of her professor clearly, but she shuddered at his proposal of actually tearing down these sculptures that have already become part of the cityscape. For her the three alchemists could stay, anyway most of the professors and students of her university were not even aware that the twelve granite figures at the top of their main building were supposed to have their own specific names and identities. “Akala ng marami mga paring Dominikano lang ang mga ‘yan, o ‘di kaya mga decorative figures lang.” In any manner, the ideology that the Filipino chemist must follow the spirituality and social orientation of the babailan was etched emphatically in her heart.

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As Faith expected, the small function room was only filled sparsely by the labor leaders. Eto na naman kami, pa-isa-isang magigiting na unionista! I know rather well how Filipino academicians, like the rest of the country’s professionals, are uncomfortable with the idea of placing their necks in a labor group. They are thinking that this is not only a dangerous spot but something that is suitable only for the lowly factory workers and their left-leaning agitators. With their aristocratic mind frame, they find it self- demeaning to stand out for their rights, to demand for fairer economic and political benefits, and to participate in pickets when necessary. At kung sino sino pa ‘yung ayaw sumali, sila pa ‘yung madalas nagrereklamo sa mababang suweldo ng mga guro! A business management professor from a small university belt establishment voiced out his cynicism that was perhaps born out of weariness and frustrations: “Mga kapatid, I think it could be possible that our group may just be overreacting to the taipans’ academic invasion. We have to remember that tertiary education in the country is controlled by the private sector anyway. There is no certainty that these taipans would be worse than our traditional religious and other private owners. Malay natin, baka nga mas matino pa itong mga intsik na ito.” He suggested that instead of gearing themselves for battle, they could take a less stressful wait-and-see stance. Peter Mirano, Faith’s colleague from the department of languages and humanities, interjected. “Pero mga kasama, in my humble opinion, our good brother’s call to give these taipans the benefit of the doubt is a little bit unreasonable. We all know very well how these moguls are obsessively motivated by profit making, how they circumvent laws to minimize the payment of wages and benefits to their workers and prevent unionism, how they are in the position of giving hefty financial contributions to presidential candidates, and even of fielding their own puppets in the congress. Mahirap magbakasakali sa ganitong sitwasyon.” Peter pointed out that there was no way for anybody to stop their influx, but the educational labor unions could find some means of resisting the further commercialization of Philippine education. Faith could anticipate her friend’s flow of thinking. She stood up and presented to the group the necessity for their labor unions to federalize, and link up with student organizations. With a wider network they could address the dangers and threats of the taipans’ creeping presence easier. “If we, the educational workers, together with our students, can put up a monolithic frontline, we will not only foil these Filipino-Chinese magnates’ profiteering desire, but also convince them to dedicate their legendary business management skills for the development of Philippine tertiary education. We should not exclude the possibility that something good might actually come out from this looming threat. As the Filipino-Chinese themselves would say, the Chinese ideogram for crisis is actually the same as that of opportunity.” The militant educators and labor leaders, including the business management professor, nodded their heads in affirmation of Peter and Faith’s ideas. Even as a college student, Faith was already different from her classmates. In their university, their college of sciences shared their granite- clad main building with the central library, the college of law, the museum, and the central administrative offices, during the day; and with some specters of

F. DEMETERIO 169

Spanish friars, Japanese soldiers, Filipino guerillas, and the former university registrar, during the night. Inside its Renaissance-inspired prewar architecture was a labyrinth of offices, courtyards, stairways, classrooms, mezzanines and laboratories, and it was here where the rest of her classmates spent most of their four-year stint for their bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Faith, on the other hand, ventured outside its massive walls and into the campus’ idyllic gardens, fountains and gazebos, where student leaders from the other colleges regularly converged. Although that intense involvement with student politics had been identified by those close to her as the cause why she was 0.05 points short from bagging the much coveted rector’s award for academic excellence in her college, she never regretted it, for aside from the fact that it was there where she formed a more realistic outlook in life, it was also there that she came to meet Arnold Fernandez, the president of the student council of the college of engineering at that time. Arnold had been a true representative of the rather raucous crowd of engineering students that thrived at the south-eastern corner of their twenty- two-hectare campus. His leadership and activism had been made precarious by his frequent night outs with his friends, more frequent practices and gigs with his band where he played the bass guitar, experimentations with alcohol and drugs, and, of course, his plummeting grades. To the dismay of his jealous clique, Arnold started to change his lifestyle as he spent more and more time with Faith. The fair skinned, petite, curly haired and vivacious chemistry student was overwhelmed by the attention showered on her by this dark, long haired and a little rugged-looking hunk, and finally agreed to go steady with him. It took him weeks to regain his leadership and popularity in his college with his much acclaimed series of forums on socio-political awareness that was capped by a fund raising project for the benefit of a small scavenging community living beside the metropolitan garbage dump-site. But it took him months to appease his musical group with his continuous flow of Tagalog rock compositions. He finally learned to pin down his demons and dedicate his passions to Faith, his studies, campus politics and his musical writing that all manifested in the flames of his creative impulse. From a reckless leader and bohemian artist, he was transformed by Faith’s company and attention into a more self-restrained and disciplined student politician and musician. Like any other young lovers, Arnold and Faith spent much of their time together talking about what is in store for them in the future. But with their keen visions they found it difficult to separate their dreams as lovers from their dreams as Filipino science students. What Faith liked most about Arnold was his sharp and circumspective mind that made him stand out from the rest of the science students who were all deeply mired in the narrow pits of their specializations and who were never bothered by the thought that they were actually condemned from the very start to become minions of the huge multinational manufacturing corporations. Although in the conservative premises of their Spanish frailocratic campus, Marxism and post-colonial critical thoughts were not seriously and systematically discussed, Arnold was able to articulate clearly that the problems that maligned Philippine science were

170 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS intricately tied to the problems of the country’s history, economics and politics. Neither of them could reckon the number of hours they had spent, and the golden brown thin crusts and mugs of beer they had consumed at that American pizza chain in front of their university while pondering on the ailments and prospects of Philippine science. There were many professors in their university who stressed that Filipinos should put an end to the practice of blaming the Spaniards and the Americans of the past for each and every misfortune experienced in the present. Maybe such an ideological trend had something to do with the actual presence of the remaining Spanish clerics in their campus. Mostly old, small, hairy, and flushed with the metropolitan heat, they could be seen prancing about the football field for their late afternoon paseo. Yet, Arnold was insistent that both the Spanish and American colonization had left behind unfavorable structures that were still operational at that time. “You know, Faith, sweetie? I am becoming more and more convinced that the wretched status of science in our country is just an effect of one particular structure that was formed by our four hundred years of political and economic oppression. Hindi tayo dapat maniniwala sa kasabihan na ang nakaraan ay nakaraan na at dapat nang ibaon sa limot. Alalahanin natin palagi na ang nakaraan ay s’ya ring naghubog sa kasalukoyan.” “What exactly is that particular structure that you are wary about?” “I am referring to our economic system that the colonizers had constructed to be a fusion of feudal exportation of raw materials and comprador importation of manufactured goods. Isipin mo nga, Faith, ito ‘yong kabaligtaran ng ekonomiya ng mga ma-uunlad na bansa kung saan raw materials ‘yong ini-import at manufactured goods ‘yong ini-export.” “At ano naman kung ganoon nga, ha, Arnold?” “Ay naku! Malalim ang implikasyon ng ganitong baligtad na sistema ng pangangalakal. Look, the imbalance between the cheap and low technologically produced raw materials on one hand, and the expensive and high technologically produced consumer goods on the other hand, would not only create widespread poverty but also prevent the development of science and technology in the country. Parang dalawang beses tayong pinatay ng sarili nating ekonomiya. Isipin mo nga, Faith, on one side, the absentee feudal landlord does not really care about science and technology for he can gather his harvest using traditional methods and export them as raw materials. On the other side, those multinational and foreign corporations use first world science and technology to fabricate their products. Hence, between the economies of feudal exportation and comprador importation, Philippine science has no place to grow.” Faith saw the clarity of his diagnosis and expressed her view of how futile the government’s expenditure for special science schools was if the dysfunctional tandem of feudal exportation and comprador importation remained in place. “Palagay ko, it won’t matter how many thousands of brilliant students from the public science high schools and technological universities are graduating each year, as long as the Philippine economic system does not have

F. DEMETERIO 171 a career waiting for them, our science and technology will remain underdeveloped. Nag-aaksaya lang pala tayo ng pera.” “Tama ka, Faith. At ang masaklap pa, dahil nga sa kawalan ng opportunity dito, ‘yon nagsisipuntahan sa abroad ang mga graduates nila.” They laughed at the government’s desperate tactic of propagating the myth of Agapito Flores, the alleged Filipino inventor of the fluorescent lamp, that was complete with a ridiculous etymology banked on the phonetic resemblance between the name Flores and the adjective fluorescent. They understood perfectly that the agenda was to make Agapito a role model to encourage young Filipinos to pursue careers in science in technology without even thinking that the fluorescent lamp was a product of more than seventy years of research and development in Europe and America, and could not have been produced overnight by a simple electrician from Guiguinto, Bulacan, in a makeshift kitchen or garage laboratory. “Hindi masamang magbigay ng inspirasyon sa kabataang Pilipino. Pero hindi naman yata tama ‘yong pambibilog nila sa ulo natin!” She commented. It was not that they had totally lost their hope on Filipino ingenuity. Rather, they believed that ingenuity was just a raw force which cannot be harnessed without the economic opportunities, research funding, laboratories, and other support programs. Faith speculated: “The only way to break the vicious cycle of poor science education, miserable condition of science and technology, dependence on imported products, widespread poverty, and back to poor science education again, is to drum it into the heads of the lawmakers that the time has come to legislate laws that would restructure the country’s economic system away from the dysfunctional fusion of feudal exportation and comprador importation. ‘Di ba, Arnold?” But the thought that everything depended on the country’s solons painted shades of despair on the lovers’ faces. They simply could not imagine how the bunch of crocodilian people in the congressional hall, who were too preoccupied in gobbling up their pork barrel funds and throwing the crumbs and morsels to their equally reptilian constituents, could ever think of goading the country towards the complex pathway of development. “’Pag si congressman na ang kasali sa usapan, lumalabo lalo ang patutunguhan natin d’yan!” Arnold stressed. No matter how crisp their analyses were, they were merely two young science students dreaming about their future in an American pizza chain. Three years later, as the economy of feudal exportation continued to diversify into labor and human resources exportation, Arnold distressfully found his own self transmogrifying into a cheap raw material. “Hindi na abaca, hindi na asukal, hindi na niyog ang pangunahin nating produkto ngayon, Faith. Katawan na natin ang ibinibenta natin sa ibang bansa.” Sooner he was working in an American oil company based in Saudi Arabia. In the desert landscape, not even the government crafted tagline of bagong bayani could console the desolation of his spirit. The following year, Faith grabbed a scholarship that was hoisted by the British cultural center in Manila to attract promising young Filipinos, and pursued her higher studies in industrial chemistry in London. She suffered the loneliness, cold, discrimination and the overall feeling of being dislocated, for

172 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS the belief that that was her only chance to experience world class education, thinking that not even the resources and facilities of the prime state university could match what she was having on that side of the globe. Although cruel distance separated them from each other, the lovers remained true to the promises they made some years earlier one early evening underneath a fire tree bough in their tranquil university garden. Faith thought that her involvement with politics was just a phase in her student life that she would eventually outgrow. But she was wrong, a decade after she returned from her graduate studies, she was still in the maelstrom of an even more complicated and dangerous politics. The cold misty weather and the sweet English life only fanned the raging flames in her heart. Her first hand experience of what science and science education were like in Cambridge gave her a point of comparison to sharply see the poverty of their Philippine counterparts, just as her eyewitness’ perspective of the mature Londoner labor unions, ever proud of their ancestry that can be traced back to Karl Marx himself who lived and died as an exile in their city, gave her a similar point of comparison to unmistakably see how disarrayed the Philippine workers were. Thus, back in the country, instead of accepting the job offers from some big corporations or the teaching invitations from the elite metropolitan universities, Faith opted to work in a modest university to carry out a mission of concocting a life and career through blending education, advocacy for the development of Philippine science, and labor politics together with the less fortunate denizens of the microcosm on Recto Street. Faith frowned at the cafeteria manager as she supervised two of her staff members in serving the Styrofoam lunch boxes to the already famished militant labor leaders. Her comrades heartily munched through their bland and greasy fare, too hungry and too naïve to care about the impact of their food containers on the ozone layer and on the global climate. If only they were in a more appropriate situation, she would most probably deliver them a scathing homily on environmental ethics. But all of them were pleased with their scheme on how to jumpstart a federation of labor unions in the university belt and then work on a wider metropolitan linkage. After merely picking on the green vegetables and white chicken meat, Faith whispered to their union president: “Kapatid, I have to go ahead. There is a senior student who has an appointment with me. I think we have accomplished something great today. Maraming salamat sa iyong liderato at mabuhay ang manggagawang Pilipino!” She was actually expecting Fred Gonzales, a chemical engineering student whose research on coconut bio-diesel she was mentoring. She knew him since the time he enrolled in her chemistry 101 subject. Brilliant, hardworking, silent, yet articulate, and a natural born leader, it was very difficult to miss Fred among the sea of students that flowed in and out of her classrooms and laboratory. She developed a close friendship with him because he too was a favorite student of Peter. The three of them had become habitués of the tea houses along Ongpin Street. Often, they were joined by Fred’s lovely girlfriend, Juliana Sandoval, and dormitory buddy, Charles Mendoza, a philosophy student from an elitist school at the southern tip of Recto Street.

F. DEMETERIO 173

She found it very edifying to interact with these folks for they seemed to connect her to those days when she too was a young and spirited radical student. Faith’s laboratory, which she shared with three other professors of applied chemistry, was located on the third floor of the north wing of their science building. Its interior was dominated by ten long tables with battered sinks and rusty water spigots, and surrounded by un-repainted closets carrying thick ancient glassware and an arsenal of probably expired reagents in amber colored bottles and jars. The acrid smell of some stashed compounds thickly permeated its poorly ventilated interior. With just an addition of a fireplace, a cauldron, and a wood and leather bellow, the room could already pass as a filmic or theatrical set of an Arthurian wizard’s den. It was obvious that only the very basic textbook experiments can be done there, and Faith had to use the laboratories of her more fortunate college classmates who happened to work in well-funded universities or in big chemical manufacturing companies and who were kind enough to smuggle her in during off hours. Five minutes before their appointed time, she already saw Fred through the cracked porthole glass of the laboratory door, excitedly holding what looked like a copy of the day’s newspaper. Faith was amused by his obsessive dedication for excellence, for his undergraduate research paper, and for Juliana. She found his behavior and punctuality very similar to her European classmates at Cambridge, Hippolyte Labrunie from Poitiers, Elizabeth Hastings from Birmingham, Wilhelm Schumacher from Strasburg, Hans Koenigpoel from Amsterdam and many others whose names she can no longer pronounce. Like clockwork, she could tell that right at that moment Fred must have come straight from the hospital where his girlfriend was having her OJT. He was designing a system that would make bio-diesel production a cottage industry, where the coconut farmers themselves would be the ones to extract this new fuel in smaller batches and bring them to a central barangay depot for purity testing and storage, and where the town fuel stations would do their collection, mixing with petroleum diesel, and subsequent retail distribution. Fred’s revolutionary intention was to allow the small farmers to benefit directly from this new industry without the intrusion of too many, and often rapacious, middlemen. Fred’s interest in bio-diesel germinated from one of Faith’s classroom anecdote of an American environmental activist who insisted of running his car on bio-diesel that he produced in his garage from waste vegetable oil. Part of his weekly routine was to go around his small town’s restaurants collecting their used deep frying oil. With basic chemistry and kitchen tools he extracted clean bio-diesel from the waste stuff. Faith wrapped up the anecdote with an unforgettable punch line. “Ladies and gentlemen, please take note that the setting is America. I honestly doubt if the same story can happen in our country. In the Philippines, waste cooking oil is one of the many things that can’t just be collected for free. Syempre, kakaiba tayo, five star restaurants sell their used vegetable oils to smaller and less prestigious establishments, who in turn sell them after using to still smaller and less prestigious establishments,

174 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS who in turn sell them to poorer households where they are used as grease to fry the smelly dried fish or to sauté various dishes, until they end up in the human body or in the sewers.” Faith declared to the chuckling students: “There is no such thing as waste vegetable oil in the country.” But Fred was intrigued with the concept, and as he read the local literature about bio-diesel he stumbled on the inconspicuously ongoing research of the Philippine Coconut Authority about the industrial production of CME, or the coconut methyl ester. Upon entering Faith’s laboratory, he immediately spread the broadsheet that he was carrying on the instructor’s desk: “Good afternoon Ms. Faith! I have with me good news and bad news not only for the two of us but for the whole country as well. Ano po’ng gusto nyo’ng uunahin ko?” “Hello, Freddie! Of course, I would like to hear the good news first. That paper is certainly brimming with bad ones. So, shoot, I’m listening!” Fred opened the newspaper to the second page and pointed at an article entitled Bill on Bio-Fuel Finally Signed into Law. “Ma’am, the good thing is that after some years of waiting, the Philippine legislators had finally approved the bill that would require all pump stations to blend their petroleum diesel with coconut bio-diesel. Imagine? After more than a decade of lagging behind the other countries that started to utilize and mass produce bio-diesel in the 1990s, we finally have a law that would hopefully arrest our growing dependence on Arabian oil. ‘Di po ba napaka-meaningful ‘to para sa aking ongoing research?” “That is very nice to hear, Freddie: a major victory for our coconut farmers and environment, I may say! But what is the glitch that came with the new law? Ano ‘yung bad news na nabanggit mo?” “Well, the bad thing is that the law is very conservative in stipulating for the mandatory blend of only up to five percent, when researches here and abroad have already established the safety and efficiency of a ten to twenty percent mixture with petroleum diesel. Noong nabasa ko po ‘to kanina, talagang napamura po ako sa sobrang asar.” “What! Five percent is definitely a joke! Are these so called lawmakers even aware that car manufacturers in Europe are now scrambling to proclaim that their latest model, so and so, can run of even more than thirty percent blend, and that they are racing to create the ultimate model that can run on a hundred percent pure bio-diesel? Palagay ko dalawang bagay lang ang p’wedeng magpapaliwanag d’yan. It is either talagang mga ignorante itong mga mambabatas natin, o di kaya ay nasuholan lang sila ng mga petroleum companies.” “Well, Miss Faith, I’m more inclined to think that the shortcomings of our local version of a bio-diesel law are just a proof how slow and ill-informed the kind of people that we are putting in our legislative halls.” “Yeah, I could not disagree with you. We should not expect too much from a bunch of people whose legislative expertise has narrowed down to the naming and renaming of streets and public schools. Tama ka, Fred, ang sarap talagang magmura. Bloody hell! Holy arse!” “Wow, ang taray po palang pakinggan ang mura ng mga taga Cambridge!”

F. DEMETERIO 175

But no matter how late and how conservative the new law was, for Fred coconut bio-diesel held so much hope for the ailing Philippine economy. Coconut is among the highest yielding oil producing crops, and its cultivation had already been mastered ages ago by the Filipino farmers. The CME, which is the coconut bio-diesel itself, although a little more expensive than the current prices of petroleum diesel, is more energy efficient in terms of mileage, and has less particle emission, making it an economically and environmentally sounder fuel alternative. As an added benefit, the coconut bio-diesel, due to its being a better solvent, could actually clean the engine while running, and its carbon exhaust would be reabsorbed into the photosynthetic carbon cycle of the growing coconut trees. If congress would amend the mandatory blend to ten percent, this would translate into a little more than ten percent reduction of the country’s diesel oil importation, equivalent to billions of pesos in savings, and an incalculable windfall for the local coconut industry. Faith was amazed by the intricate details of Fred’s proposed system of pulling coconut bio-diesel production down to the scale of a cottage industry. In his paper, four or six farmers could put up his designed mill, press, stove, mixing bins, diesel/residue separation device, and storage tanks at affordable costs. These simple machineries could be readily constructed even by small machine shops and iron works stalls. The chemical reagents that would be used in breaking the long molecular chains of coconut oil into shorter molecular chains of coconut methyl ester, and in testing the purity of the finished product, would be packaged in calibrated kits that could be retailed in agricultural supplies store or distributed by the barangay centers. Faith smiled: “Just think of it, Freddie. How ironic it can be to see some coconut farmers transporting their newly extracted bio-diesel to their barangay depots using carabao sleds. That would be a perfect metaphor of the fact that late- modernity and pre-modernity are actually intertwined in this country!” But Fred was quick to qualify. “Ma’am, such imagery would only be a momentary arrangement. Once the system kicks off, in no time, these farmers will be using motorcycles or jeeps. I long to see these farmers transporting their bio- diesel on tankers that are powered by their own CME extracts. Sana po mangyari ito bago pa man tayo pumanaw sa ibang mundo.” “Hanga ako sa ‘yo, Fred. Hindi ka lang pala matalino, may pagkamakata ka rin pala!” His review of related literature thoroughly examined the annual productivity edge of coconut per hectare of land over the other alternatives such as soybean, rape seed, or jatropha; tackled the history of the country’s coconut industry; and looked into how international economists had estimated the annual increases of crude oil prices based solely on the fact its underground supply would most probably not last for another century more. Fred insisted that with the simplicity of coconut bio-diesel production, there is no reason why its knowledge should be kept a secret from the farmers. “Ma’am, in the island where I come from, there is a legend that tells us that the first Visayans came out of two coconuts. I think it is so beautiful to imagine that after so many centuries of oppressions and sufferings, we as a people

176 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS might find our salvation in the very same fruit where we locate our mythical point of origin. For our country, the coconut may not only be the tree of life, but the tree of our destiny as well.” While Fred’s eyes were gleaming with enthusiasm and passion, Faith doused him with a little of her British-bred skepticism. “Keep your cool, young man. Napakamadrama mo! You have to realize as well that coconut bio- diesel would never be the panacea of all the ailments of our national social economy. Hindi ito ang ultimate solution sa lahat ng problema natin.” “Huh, paano n’yo po nasasabi ‘yan?” “Alam mo, Fred, even if our congress would immediately amend the coconut bio-diesel law and stipulate a ten to twenty percent blend, or even a thirty percent blend, a huge capital expenditure still had to be laid out for farm to town roads, and tremendous amount of political will had to be exerted to resist the temptation of importing cheaper algae bio-diesel from the industrialized countries. Hindi ganoon kadali o kasimple, Freddie.” She pointed out. “Kahit na if our country can surpass these initial challenges, there are still a lot more waiting just around the corner. With the immense local demand for coconut bio-diesel, rice lands, sugar fields, vegetable gardens, pastures, and orchards might be converted into coconut plantations. As more and more of the limited agricultural tracts will be devoted to coconut farming, the prices of grain, vegetables, fruits, poultry and meat will certainly skyrocket. Anong magiging saysay ng sangkatutak na CME kung si Juan dela Cruz ay hindi na makakabili ng bigas at ulam?” Faith looked through the laboratory window and sighed that as the local demand for coconut bio-diesel would grow further farmers would be seduced to clear the virgin forests in favor of the oil producing crop and that would mean an ecological disaster was about to come. “Kinikilabutan tuloy ako. Yes, coconut bio-diesel could be a promise for all of us. But we all need to manage it well. Hindi ako uma-asa na basta na lang gagaan ang hirap na nararanasan ng ordinaryong Pilipino.” The lady professor invited her student to think further what could be some of the implications of the coconut industry’s sudden boom in the field of Philippine politics. “Pag-iisipan nga natin ‘to ng mas malalim. The flow of wealth from coconut oil will not automatically make each and every Filipino richer, just as the wealth from petroleum oil did not make each and every Arab richer. The taste of oil money would definitely make the absentee landlords greedier and put up a more formidable resistance against land reform. Kung sakim sila ngayon, lalo pa silang maging sakim. Thus, instead of evolving into a society where small farmers will be tilling their own lands, our unfortunate country could easily retrogress into its feudal past where land will be controlled tightly again by some few elite families. You know it Freddie, as Peter Mirano would always say, when wealth is concentrated on the hands of the few, mapa-may-ari ng lupa man sila, mapa-industrayalista man sila, mapa-kapitalista man sila, o mapa-feudal coconut oil sheik man sila, the supposedly maturing Philippine democracy can also retrogress to dismal patronage politics. Kung baga ang bansa natin ay parang taong tumatanda ng paurong!”

F. DEMETERIO 177

It is at this point where Faith revealed to her student the futility of Philippine science working independently from political activism. “Side by side with the establishment of a local coconut bio-diesel industry is the need for a more emphatic lobbying for real land reform. Without redistributing the feudal lands, the industry might boom, but it would not even alleviate the misery and wretchedness of the poor Filipinos.” “Naintindihan ko po ang ibig n’yong sabihin. Dapat pala talagang makikialam tayong lahat sa mundo ng pulitika, at tutokan ang problema sa lupa.” “Yeah, at hindi lang yan, Freddie, the political activism of the Filipino scientists should not even end with land reform, because granting that the hopeless congress could miraculously iron out a functional land reform program, there is still another danger that the new affluence might only be squandered for imported consumer goods, burying the country deeper into the mire of neo-colonialism. Alam mo? Madaling maakit ang mga kababayan natin sa imported products. Lalo na kung ang mga ito ay mura at abot-kaya. Just take a quick excursion to Divisoria and see how we are lapping up those cheap Chinese goods!” “Nakakapanghina po pala ng loob kung makita natin ang lawak ng problemang hinaharap ng bayan.” But Fred understood the main point of his mentor that the Filipino scientist had to go out from the safe and controlled confines of his laboratory and engage with the socio-political complexities of the real world. Despite its socio-political shortsightedness, Faith was extremely proud of her student’s undergraduate research paper. “Huwag kang mag-aalala, Freddie. Brushing aside all those socio-political factors that we have just tackled, you really have a very good research work. I doubt it if I can see papers of similar quality among our graduate students.” “Ay, talaga po? Maraming salamat po, kung ganoon.” “Walang halong pambobola ‘to. Talagang panatag ang loob ko sa trabaho mo. But we have to improve some of its parts.” She suggested that he expand his recommendations section by proposing that Filipino chemists and scientists should focus not only on establishing a more energy efficient method of extracting the oil from coconuts, or finding some more profitable utilization of the desiccated coconut and grease by-products, or breeding higher yielding coconut varieties, but more so on looking for other kinds of oil producing crops and designing diesel engines that can run on twenty to one-hundred percent coconut bio-diesel. “Remember, young man, that the first diesel engine, created by the German engineer Rudolf Diesel himself, was actually designed to run on one-hundred percent peanut oil. So there is no reason why Filipino scientists cannot work out a machine that would totally subsist on coconut bio-diesel.” Fred scribbled all her suggestions on a sheet of paper that his professor pulled out from her table drawer. He had a glimpse of what looked like a stack of corporate job offers from famous medical and manufacturing laboratories. Faith checked her watch and apologetically told her student that it was already time for her to leave the campus to pick up her daughter at an exclusive high school for girls. “But, Freddie, we can actually continue our discussion

178 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS while going to the parking area. If you would not mind, I can even give you a lift back to your dormitory?” “Oh, that would be great! Madami pa po kasing akong gustong itanong sa inyo. May I carry some of your things, Ma’am?” Basing on the elitist standards, her car may just be a modest Korean made vehicle, but she and Arnold made the tough decision of buying it four years earlier when their daughter, Millicent, entered high school and had to travel back and forth on a daily basis from their suburb home to the metropolis. Thus, while most of her colleagues’ faces were darkened from the heat and sooth of too many jeepney rides, Faith found herself lucky to be driving her own small car. Without Arnold’s sacrifices at the Arabian Desert, she doubted if she could have the luxury of devoting her career in that white collar sweatshop in that microcosm on Recto Street. She was afraid she would have succumbed a long time ago to the tantalizing offers she was receiving from both high end academic and corporate institutions. She realized that her idealist principles--that the youth in that part of the metropolis needed as much scientific training as the youth in the hallowed campuses of the expensive universities, and that it was a shame for them to be deprived of it for the sheer reason that they cannot pay higher tuition fees--could not be actualized without Arnold’s stable financial backing. For that she felt a tinge of envy at the purity of Peter Mirano’s dedication for educating these less fortunate denizens of Recto Street while subsisting solely on his meager assistant professor’s paycheck. In their university, just like in any other less prestigious academic institutions in the metropolis, professors and instructors were stretching their paychecks by taking teaching loads beyond their twenty-four hours per week regular assignment. Some very enterprising ones would carry up to thirty-six or forty teaching hours each week, sometimes spread over two or three different universities. In the United States, teachers like these were called gypsies, but in the metropolis, they were simply known as lagaristas. But the work and stress from such a staggering burden would not only translate into additional wrinkles on their brow, but burn out their teaching zeal and reduce them to spiritless automatons mechanically babbling out lessons from yellowed and darkened notes. More detrimentally, their time and energy for professional enrichment, research and publication were devoured by their extended classroom hours and trips from one university to the next. But with Arnold’s remittances, Faith had easily resisted the temptation of taking an extra teaching load, and instead devoted her time and energy sharpening her modules, writing new teaching materials, and pursuing whatever inexpensive research projects that her own savings can finance. Freed from tight monthly overhead expenses, Faith had the means to explore and experiment with the endless choices of inexpensive and even slightly expensive clothing and accessory items, which further honed her innate taste for style. Fashion is not very different from chemistry, where inexpensive articles are brought together to produce certain blends and contrasts that would project a seemingly expensive but definitely elegant and personalized

F. DEMETERIO 179 statement. If the ultra-anti-colonial Peter Mirano did not allow imported shoes, jeans and jackets in his wardrobe, Faith had a more liberal attitude for foreign products. She never hesitated procuring them as long as they were heavily discounted on sale. The reason why she stood out among her female colleagues, who were financially forced to be contented with their perennially unfashionable apparel of subdued earth colors, was a combination of the facts that she had an eternally beautiful face, that she possessed an agelessly gorgeous body that could make the drabbest smock appear like a designer outfit, and that she was gifted with a cultivated eye for fashion. But as her younger, daring, but less innovative, colleagues pathetically copied her personal presentations, Faith was pressured to explore and experiment some more to be able to stay always a cut above her crowd. But for all her privileges, Faith had to pay dearly by leading a profoundly difficult life of an OFW’s wife. Many Filipinos roguishly think that the greatest sacrifice involved in my kind of life has something to do with sex, or the absence of it. But that is just so silly. Napakababaw naman ng pag-iisip nila! For a Filipina having to forego the carnal pleasures for a number of months in a row is nothing compared to the crushing feeling of being alone and away from that zone of comfort, safety and wholeness at the side of her husband. Faith still wept a river each time Arnold sends home a video recording of his latest love song that he performs with his acoustic guitar. There was that gnawing fear inside her heart that something wrong might happen to him in that vast and unfamiliar wasteland. With her crowd aware that she was an OFW’s wife, she had to constantly fend off the nuisance pack of potential seducers who inaugurate their sinister moves with seemingly innocuous invitations: “Naglunch ka na ba, Miss Fernandez?” “Mag-starbucks naman tayo, Faith.” “There is this very cozy vegetarian restaurant in Malate, Faith. Would you care to have dinner there with me?” But true to her name, she remained ever faithful to her one true love. Although she had the money to spend, Faith had to constantly economize so that every time Arnold was on vacation he would be convinced that she was not squandering away his hard earned bucks. She had to learn in what schemes and in which banks should she invest his savings. Added to these hardships was the stress from appeasing her ever suspicious and jealous in-laws, Arnold’s parents and siblings, with continuous love offerings. Faith and Fred went on with their discussion about his research paper as they drove out from their university. After dropping him in front of his dormitory, she steered towards the Ayala Bridge and made a left turn to the direction of a convent school for girls that was established a century earlier by some German contemplative nuns. At the main gate she saw Millicent already waiting for her on a bench beside the guards’ station. She was almost a perfect copy of what Faith looked like as a freshman chemistry student, lovely and exuberant. Except that Millicent got the darker skin tone and the impressive height of her father. She was growing up so fast, in less than six months she would start her college education. Faith never regretted investing so much of her time taking care of their sweet daughter.

180 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS

“Hi mama, I just finished working on my math and science assignments. It is good that you arrive a little early.” “Well, it is always better to be early, sweetie. Do you need anything for any of your subjects tomorrow? We still have time to drop by that book and school supplies store.” “I don’t think so, mama.” Once inside their car, Millicent immediately picked a compact disc from her collection, musical genres that Arnold was also crazy about. It might be easy to physically rear up their daughter alone, but the task of looking after her psychological growth was more than challenging. Faith had to compensate for the warmth of love, and the feelings of comfort, safety and wholeness that the physical presence of a father normally brought, and at the same time make their daughter understand that her father had to work in a faraway place just for them to have a decent life. She had to make him metaphysically present through her bedtime stories about him, about their past, and about the beautiful and romantic campus where they found each other. During his vacations Arnold, both proud and jealous of the attention she was getting from the neighborhood teens, would play her round-the-clock bodyguard, probably unconsciously compensating as well for his absence for the rest of the year. The rush hour was just about to emerge and Faith estimated that they can reach their suburban village in less than two hours. Had she made the mistake of tarrying fifteen minutes longer in her laboratory their car would surely get entangled for more than three hours in the turtle-paced flow of vehicles. The house that Arnold built for them was a Mediterranean-inspired two-storey structure, with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a carport and a small backyard garden. As they were spending most of their time in their respective schools and on the road, a Boholana housekeeper cleaned it for them and took care of their laundry twice a week. Their home was nothing grand, but compared to Peter Mirano’s cramped quarters in that decaying accesoria it was already opulent and even ducal. Faith was aware that many of her colleagues were not fortunate enough to have a house of their own before hitting retirement age. Arnold always talked about coming home, staying for good, helping her with her advocacy for science education by taking some teaching assignments on math or engineering, and maybe pursuing a higher degree in his field at the country’s prime state university. “Alam mo, Faith? Gustong-gusto ko na talaga’ng dito na lang sa Pilipinas mamamalagi. Gusto kong balikan ‘yong buhay natin dati na magkasama tayong mangarap at kumilos para sa bayan at sa sarili natin. Ito lang halos ang laman ng isip ko habang kumakayod doon sa napakalupit na desierto.” But he always set his time frame in the near future: at the year when they would have paid the mortgage of their home, or a year after they would have settled the monthly installments for her car, or after Millicent would have finished college preferably in the same university where they both studied, or after they would have saved enough for a comfortable retirement. Faith hung on to these

F. DEMETERIO 181 visions and dreams of that day when their family would be physically whole once again, when they could have their breakfast and dinner together day after day, when there would be no more crushing goodbyes at the Centennial Airport, and when she and Arnold would be pursuing their highly ideological advocacies hand in hand, very much like the time when they were still in college. When they drove through the entrance of their village, Millicent was already asleep in her seat. Faith saw a quite unfamiliar sight in front of their home. Blocking their carport was a dark European luxury car. Her heart began to palpitate. Its two passengers, a stocky Caucasian wearing dark glasses and expensive barong Tagalog, and a Hispanic lady in a sleek business suit, were standing beside their vehicle, while their Filipino driver remained inside in his seat. The stocky Causian declared: “Megandeng gaabey pow! Good evening, Ma’am! We are looking for Mrs. Faith Fernandez, wife of Engr. Arnold Fernandez.” Faith nervously rolled down her widow shield. “Good evening, sir, ma’am! I am Faith Fernandez.” She pulled her car behind the foreigners’ automobile, certain now that something had gone terribly wrong somewhere. The stocky Caucasian introduced himself: “I am Richard Cooper, ma’am, the manager of the Manila office of that American oil company where Engineer Fernandez is working, and with me is Miss Salve Gutierrez, our human resources officer. We have something very important to tell you. Could we come inside your home, ma’am?” “Of course, Mr. Cooper and Ms. Gutierrez. This way please.” Faith exerted great effort to keep her voice steady, but her knees already seemed like jelly. Inside their neat and cozy home, with them seated on a couch beneath a Juan Luna reproduction, it was the turn of the Hispanic lady to break to the already terrified mother and daughter the bad news. “Please stay calm, but I have to tell you this. Apparently while Engr. Fernandez was supervising his crew for their routine inspection of a drilling site, a violent ethnic riot broke out between Orthodox Christians and some Islamic fundamentalists. While he was trying to pacify the warring mob a Molotov bomb suddenly exploded in front of him, seriously injuring him. He was fortunate that some of his crew members promptly rushed him to the hospital where his otherwise fatal condition was stabilized just in the nick of time.” Faith’s vision turned blurry and she collapsed while Mr. Cooper and Ms. Gutierrez were still talking about some more details. When she regained her consciousness, she was already in her room being attended to by a puffy-eyed Millicent who prepared a piping hot noodle soup and tea for her, while the visitors were already gone. “Mama, the Americans assured me that papa is doing fine right now. But we will just have to wait until he is ready to take his Manila-bound flight. The lady, Ms. Gutierrez, mentioned that it might take him three more weeks of stay at the hospital there in Arabia. Mr. Cooper left us his direct phone number. Please take some of this warm stuff. We need to be very very strong for this.”

182 ELIXIRS AND FABULOUS POTIONS

The incident in that faraway desert made Faith and Millicent’s daily and weekly routines totally awry. After several frantic calls to Arnold’s company’s Manila base, Faith received an instruction from Mr. Cooper that their company would be the one to take charge of transporting her husband from the Centennial Airport to their suburban home. On the fourth week after the accident, Fred, Peter and Juliana accompanied the mother and daughter in their home to welcome Arnold. When the doorbell chimed, the group rushed outside and was greeted by the Filipino driver. From where they were standing they could see two paramedics lowering down from a white van into a chrome plated wheelchair a pathetic figure of an amputee with a horribly disfigured face. Fred grabbed the chair’s handles and steered it towards the main entrance of the house. Arnold feebly mumbled: “This is my saddest, and also the last, homecoming. But it is a homecoming, nonetheless.” The Filipino driver proceeded to unload his meager belongings, four boxes, a traveling bag, and a leather case containing his acoustic guitar, while the two paramedics were approached by Juliana for their patient’s medical records. Faith’s heart was crushed as she watched their daughter weakly kneeling down in front of the mangled form of the man whom she loved so much and who toiled so hard in a scorching land just for them to lead a comfortable life. She could hear Millicent talking to him: “Papa, we should be happy that you made it through that accident. I will take good care of you. I love you very much.” His smooth dark skin was now permanently scarred by fire, shards and stitches. What remained of his healthy long hair are patches of wiry stubbles. His once muscular and rugged stance slumped helplessly in the wheelchair. Only the faint gleam of a will to survive in his eyes was there to remind Faith that he was the same bohemian artist and reckless student leader whom she agreed to be steady with some years ago underneath a fire tree bough in their bucolic university garden. Her most cherished dreams about their future had just overturned into a harrowing nightmare, as it dawned upon her that the long awaited time had finally come when their family will be physically whole once again, when they could have their breakfast and dinner together day after day, when there would be no more poignant goodbyes at the Centennial Airport, and when she and Arnold would be pursuing their highly ideological advocacies hand in hand. All of these were dumped on her feet with a painful and unexpected twist. But Faith knew that with all the love and hardships they had shared, they could pull through this earth shattering moment of their lives.

Department of Filipino, De La Salle University-Manila, Philippines