Publication Details

Published by The Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society. One issue per year. Aims and Scope: EPIS Journal is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to contemporary psychoanalysis. The journal covers theoretical and clinical issues emerging from existential psychoanalysis, phenomenology, traditional psychoanalysis, cultural studies, Critical Theory, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and fictional literature. The journal covers substantive and methodological issues in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including ethical, political, professional, sociological, and historical ideas, especially as they relate to similar professional practice. Articles address theory, method, clinical case studies, previous articles, and research. The journal also has a book review and forum section for critical commentary on the journal itself.

Instructions for Authors

Papers may be theoretical, clinical, empirical, or methodological, between 2,500-7,500 words. Book reviews are up to 2,000 words and letters to the editor no more than 1,000 words. EPIS Journal welcomes manuscripts from any country although the official language of the journal is English. All contributions will be anonymously reviewed, either by members of the Editorial Board or by panels of Independent Reviewers drawn from practitioners, researchers, academics or others who have made significant contributions to the field. Decisions regarding publication will be made by the Editors with advice from the Editorial Board or Independent Reviewers with feedback provided to authors on decisions made. Editors can be contacted by potential contributors wishing to discuss  a proposal or seeking advice or guidance on preparation of a submission.

Guidelines for Manuscripts

Manuscripts must be double-spaced on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, allowing for 1 inch minimum margins. The word count should be stated. The title should be brief and indicate the main topic of the article. A list of up to eight keywords should be supplied, as well as a summary abstract of up to 150 words. Names of authors should be given in full on a separate sheet. Authors should provide brief details (up to 50 words) of professional autobiography. Please include address, telephone, fax, and email as well. Where there are two or more authors, please indicate a single contact for correspondence.

Guidelines for Book Reviews

The main theme should be clearly presented but it is not the purpose of a review to summarize the book. Reviews should evaluate the book in relation to other significant work on the subject. Reviewers should assess the book the author has written rather than use the review as a vehicle for their own opinions, and should include criticisms with reference to specific instances in the text wherever possible. Apart from minor editions the Reviews Editor will not alter or cut without prior consultation with the reviewer. The invitation to review a book, however, does not constitute a guarantee that the manuscript will be published. To submit a book review or a book to be reviewed, please contact the Reviews Editor. Referencing Books and Articles: Use Either the Chicago Manual of Style or the APA depending upon your professional affiliation. Only works actually cited in the text should be included in the references. Indicate in the text by putting inside brackets the author’s name and year of publication. References should be listed in alphabetical order at the end of the article. Publications from the same author in a single year should use a, b, c, and so forth.

Footnotes and Tables

Footnotes are not normally permitted but endnotes may be used if necessary. Tables should be Word objects, delineated clearly and supplied on separate pages, with an indication within the text of their approximate location. Vertical lines should be omitted and horizontal lines limited to those indicating the top and bottom of the table, below column headings and above summed totals. Totals and percentages should be labeled clearly. Guidelines for Graphic Images: Graphic images must be of professional quality and included as separate high-resolution files. Each image must be attached and named chronologically “figure 1,” “figure 2,” etc. Images must not be embedded in the manuscript itself. The approximate location of each image should be indicated in the manuscript with a stand-alone sentence: “Figure 1 approximately here,” etc. Acceptable file formats: Word Documents preferred. For images in other formats, please consult with the editors prior to submission. Maximum image size: 1/2 page (approx. 6” wide by 4” tall). Images that do not conform to these guidelines will be rejected.

Copyright

Manuscripts are considered on the understanding that they are not being considered concurrently by another journal. On acceptance you will be asked to assign copyright in your article to the journal. Consent for reproduction of your article in collections of your work appearing subsequent to the publication will be given without charge, contingent on full citation of your article herein.

Electronic Offprints

Authors will receive stand-alone PDFs of their articles, reviews, or letters, which they may freely disseminate in accordance with the provisions of the copyright agreement. Authors will also receive a complete PDF of the Journal issue in which their contributions appear, which in accordance with the copyright agreement is not for dissemination without the explicit permission of EPIS Journal. Responsibility for Views: EPIS Journal is published under the auspices of the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society (EPIS). Neither EPIS nor its editorial boards hold themselves responsible for the views expressed by contributors.

Address for Correspondence via email

nazarita66@gmail.com kbradref@gmail.com

Editorial Office

EPIS Journal
The Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society

2026 S. 9th W., #4
Missoula, Montana 59801
USA
www.episworldwide.com

Modern Transpersonal Theory: Thematic Configurations and Cognitive-Epistemological Potential

Nataly Nikonovich, PhD

From the consciousness of one’s own deepest nothingness
a person draws new strength, in order to strive to be everything.
M. de Unamuno (1864-1936)

Abstract

In the article, there is presented the theoretical-methodological and conceptual analysis of modern transpersonal paradigms of humanitarian knowledge. There are investigated the main directions and thematic configurations of transpersonal theory; the pluralism of ontologies of transpersonal discourse is explicated. There are structured and differentiated the main stages of formation and conceptualization of the problem field of transpersonal paradigm in a wide range of its modifications: there are identified such varieties as classical (S. Grof, A. Mindell and others) and modernized (J. Ferrer) versions. There was offered consideration of the concept of “peak experiences” by A. Maslow in the cognitive-religious dimension. Theoretical- methodological significance of the discussed paradigms and this subject is the possibility of building epistemology of mythological and religious knowledge, and deeper penetration into “cartography” (S. Grof’s term) of human consciousness in its archetypal and religious forms. Consideration of the questions of religious anthropology, phenomenology of religious consciousness and being within the framework of transpersonal paradigm is theoretical base for solving the problem of ontology of the subject and development of modern interdisciplinary strategies that expand the boundaries of transpersonal theory. There is suggested the idea that such basic areas of humanitarian knowledge as philosophy of culture, ontology of myth and religion, transpersonal theory can be the conceptual core of paradigm synthesis.

Introduction

Transpersonal theory is a productive approach in modern humanitarian science, a new paradigm in the study of mythological-archetypal and religious constantsin consciousness and culture. The theoretical provisions of this paradigm are based on multidimensional study of the states of consciousness that turn out to be filled with content, which has a cultural significance. Traditionally, the appearance of transpersonal paradigm is associated with the works of S. Grof and A. Maslow. In the context of A. Maslow’s existential- humanistic and transpersonal psychology, transpersonal experiences are associated with deep processes that transcend the “Ego” of human and expand the boundaries of their personality. In our previous works, there were analyzed the features of transpersonal paradigm; the ways of synthesis of the theoretical-religious, transpersonal and analytical-psychological approaches were identified (Nikonovich, 2017). From the scientific point of view, the theme of explication of the features and differentiation of paradigms with in the transpersonal theory is interesting. In this study, there is discussed the structuration of approaches with in the framework of transpersonal philosophy, and if we talk more broadly, within the framework of philosophy and anthropology of myth, religion, religious philosophy. There are distinguished the following stages in the development of transpersonal theory: classical (S. Grof, A. Mindell and others) and modernized (J. Ferrer) versions. The modernized version, which contains a certain revision of the conceptual grounds of transpersonal ideas, includes, first of all, the works by J. Ferrer – a modern American researcher, Professor of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the specialist in the field of East and West, Integral and Transpersonal Psychology.

In this article there is postulated the idea that analysis of the methodological potential of these strategies lets to conceptualize the specifics of functioning of religious, mythological consciousness in different angles – transpersonal, psychoanalytical, phenomenological ones, from the point of view of humanistic and existential psychology. In the research there was used the analytical, comparative, cross-cultural, hermeneutical methodology.

Phenomenology of Archetypes and Mythological-Religious Forms as Constitutive Elements of Consciousness and Culture in the Context of the Discourse of the Transpersonal Paradigm

It is advisable to conduct the theoretical-methodological analysis of genesis, development and differentiation of transpersonal approaches on the base of explication of change and dynamics of paradigms in modern humanitarian knowledge– from the analysis of mythological and religious forms, ontology and epistemology of the subject with in the framework of religious philosophy and philosophy of myth, discourse of analytical psychology to formation of the actual transpersonal ideasin psychological and philosophical science.

The transpersonal paradigm presented by S. Grof, a Czech scientist and a doctor, is very important for understanding the essence of the concept of “archetype” and the functioning of mythological-religious consciousness. He is the author of developments in the field of religious experience of the individual.Numerous studies conducted by S. Grof using LSD and techniques of holotropic breathing let to see the functioning of archetypes at the level of the unconscious in a new perspective. Theoretical provisions of this paradigm are based on the multidimensional study of the altered states of consciousness that turn out to be full of cultural content.  The transpersonal approach is significant in psychological and philosophical science. Its use in this article for making a deep interdisciplinary analysis of mythological-religious consciousness is appropriate. S. Grof’s studies show that in such states of consciousness, there is a universal nature of archetypes and mythological forms, which proves C.-G. Jung’s ideas about the validity of archetypes.

One of S. Grof’s achievements is detailed study of a new area of the human psyche – perinatal area, which contains all kinds of human experiences. The personality is formed depending on the nature of perinatal experiences. According to S. Grof, the perinatal area is structured with “Basic Perinatal Matrices” (BPMs). Their content is different, but mostly it includes the motives of death-birth. It is also the level of manifestation of archetypes of different cultures – Mexican, Indian, Ancient, Christian, etc. Perinatal experiences are characterized by the fact that the dilemma of “death- regeneration”, as well as the mythological and cultural images associated with it are the most fully represented in them (Grof, 1985).

One of the most significant and profound experiences is transpersonal experience. The actual transpersonal experiences in the transpersonal approach are the experiences that transcend the person’s “Ego”, which can be called meta- anthropological. Their typical feature is indeterminacy with personality traits. According to S. Grof, they transcend the “Ego” of person. Transpersonal states of consciousnessare characterized by the relationship between external and internal reality, which has the ability to interpenetration. Regression to the unconscious, which occurs in the altered states of consciousness leads to discovery of archetypal primal forms that exist beyond the threshold of consciousness. In addition, in similar experiences, there takes place rethinking of the category of “death”, which stops to be perceived as the end (Grof & Halifax, 1977). It is also important to note that in experiments conducted with consciousness, the time continuumis transformed; the ideas of person about existence and non- existence, form and emptiness undergo changes (Grof, 1985).

Existential-humanistic and transpersonal psychology (A. Maslow) is interesting in the framework of the analysis of specificity of modern transpersonal theory.The studies of American scientist touch not only deep psychological structures of the personality, but also meta-anthropological and transpersonal experiences. In this context, it is interesting to study the so-called “peak experience”. The study of these experiences is important for the discourse of phenomenology and the ontology of religion. A. Maslow’s characteristic of “peak experience” can be extrapolated to the sphere of scientific research of the features and essence of religious experience. This is existential experience accompanied by the sense of completeness of being, harmony, sometimes religiously colored. A person is self-identical in “peak experiences”, which offers opportunities for integration; it is similar to the way the Self appears as the final point of development of personality in Jung’s psychology. The Self is ultimate realization of all human capabilities, the center of their being, to which they should come in their personal development. A. Maslow’s “peak experiences” also fit into the general concept of the phenomenology of religious and mythological forms that we develop on the base of transpersonal philosophy and phenomenology of religion. It should also be noted that B-cognition (in A. Maslow’s terminology) and peak experiences become impersonal, incorporated into the matrix of being. Peak experiences go beyond the boundaries of the Ego and become transpersonal in this sense.

The sacred status of “peak experiences” in various religious types should be discussed in the angle of this study. This is the “substitute of the whole world”, which lies outside the plane of the individualizing consciousness. Here one can draw an analogy with the sacred experience of ancient cultures, which belonged to a specific historical time, but it was universal and meta-historical at the same time. One of the dominant features of “peak experiences” is the change of perception of time. Confirmation of this idea can be found in the works on phenomenology of myth of famous religious scholar M. Eliade and ?gyptologist J. Assmann. According to J. Assmann, the egyptians had a specific concept of time – it is not time-eternity, but it is not time in one’s own understanding (neheh (nhh) and djet (dt)). “Neheh and djet both have properties of our “time”, as well as of our “eternity”, and as a practical matter, either can sometimes be translated as “time” and sometimes as “eternity”. The terms refer to the totality (as such, sacred and in a sense transcendent and thus “eternal”) of cosmic time” (Assmann, 2001, p.74).

Transpersonal theory can be regarded as a meta-anthropology in a number of its statements. In the context of this article, it should be noted that the theme of relationship between transpersonal theory and meta-anthropology implies a deeper analysis and can be the topic of a separate study. Within the framework of humanistic, transpersonal and analytical psychology, as well as religious philosophy, self-identification correlates with the process of self-transcendence, i.e. its implementation is possible due to overcoming the conditionality and limitations of the human “Ego”, raising it to the meta-anthropological level. However, modern post-secular world lives in a different paradigm, which is expressed in a concentrated form in the following thought of M. Eliade: “The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god” (Eliade, 1959, p.203).

The Pluralism of Thematic Specifications of Transpersonal Theory: Classical and Modernized Versions

At the initial stage of creation of the transpersonal theory (developments of S. & K. Grof) conceptualization of ideas of this paradigm took place in the in the course of recognition of the basic non-dualistic constant of culture and consciousness in the form of a single base, which combines transpersonal symbols, signs, and archetypes. Classical transpersonal theory associated with the works of S. Grof, A. Mindell and others, was based on the theoretical assumption of the unity of consciousness, based on the key meanings that exist in the altered states of consciousness.

In the course of further development of transpersonal psychology, there took place the expansion of its conceptual and problem field, which meant assimilation of the humanities (cultural studies, philosophy, etc.) in relation to the problems indicated by transpersonal psychology. This expansion of the problem field of transpersonal psychology meant its transformation into interdisciplinary transpersonal theory. If in the classical version of the transpersonal theory (S. Grof, K. Wilber) the idea of conceptual unity of transpersonal experience es prevailed, then in a later, modernized version (J. Ferrer), this idea is replaced by the idea of incommensurability of the states of transpersonal experience.

Professor of the Department of psychology of East and West in the California Institute of Integral Studies J. Ferrer in his work “Revisioning transpersonal theory. A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality” (2002) offers further conceptualization of the transpersonal ideain the form of localization of introspective spiritual experience.The fundamental idea here is not the unity of spiritual experience, but its thematic specification depending on the type of religious or spiritual system. This approach we designated as a non-classical project of the transpersonal paradigm.

The modernized version of the transpersonal theory is distinguished by criticism of the previous ideas. In the reformed version of the transpersonal theory of J. Ferrer, the thesis that spiritual experience has an inter-subjective natureis questioned. One of the ideas of the criticism of the American scientist is negation of the so-called perennial philosophy – the idea about universal character of spiritual experience. J. Ferrer offers to consider transpersonal reality in terms of participation and multilocality. In his concept, one of the postulatesis the assertion about the plurality of interpretations of this reality. To clarify his ideas, he uses the following metaphor: “The Ocean of Emantipation has many shores” (Ferrer, 2002, p.147). However, it should be noted here that the universalism, which is criticized by this author, is not introduced from the outside, but it follows from the results of transpersonal experience.

J. Ferrer also opposes the subjectivism of transpersonal approach, calling it “intrasubjective reductionism (i.e., the reduction in spiritual and transpersonal phenomena to the status of individual private experiences)” (Ferrer, 2002, p.184). Therefore, the researcher outlines two extreme poles of transpersonal theory – universalism and subjectivism and opposes his “point of view of participatory” to them. Here lies the creative idea of incorporating the individual spiritual and mental experience into cultural-social reality. According to J. Ferrer, the dominant dichotomy of “universalism-pluralism” is typical for the entire preceding transpersonal theory. He criticizes S. Grof’s ideas, because they level out the features of a person’s spiritual experience. In this context it should be noted that the founders of transpersonal theory (S. Grof and others) offered the syncretic model of the individual and the universe, in which the isolated experiences of the individual became the part of one or another mythological-religious view of the world.

To expand the horizons of transpersonal theory J. Ferrer offers to consider transpersonal facts as “multilocal events”, emphasizing their cultural heterogeneous nature.Here, there are the opportunities for symbiosis of culturally-conditioned and personal beginnings. To reveal this idea the researcher uses the term “embodied presence”, in which the ontological and anthropological horizons are united.

J. Ferrer defines his analytical model as contextual, emphasizing the differences of transpersonal experiences. In the sphere of philosophy of religion, his views are continued in the idea of mutual influence of the divine and human, in the sphere of interreligious discourse – in postulating the equivalence of different points of view on the nature of spiritual reality. It can be stated that a later, modernized version of the transpersonal theory, represented by J. Ferrer, shifts to the communicative pole.

Thus, the fundamental difference between two versions of the transpersonal theory – classical and modernized – is the difference of approaches to the problem of cultural determination: if S. Grof and others do not consider transpersonal experience to be culturally determined, then in the subsequent authors, such determination is present. Basic constants of the human psyche, mythological-religious experiences, archetypes and symbols have ontological status in the system of S. Grof and conventional status in the system of J. Ferrer.

The novations in Jorge N. Ferrer‘s works are a critical reflection on the unified spiritual reality, a unified coordinate system of transpersonal experience. Spiritual reality in the view of the scientist becomes not universal, but individualized, conditioned by the diversity of human personality. This contains a significant and cardinal difference of the transpersonal system of J. Ferrer, not only from the previous paradigms in the field of humanistic and transpersonal knowledge, but also the whole system of religious philosophy.

The classical philosophy of religion as a whole is based on the idea of ontology of a single reality (God, sacred, etc.), accessible to the individual in the religious experiences. J. Ferrer builds his concept on the denial of such unified reality, unified ontology, offering instead the multidimensionality of individual intentionalities. This point of view is not unquestionable, but it extends the theoretical perspective of understanding of the considered phenomena and shows methodological potential of the strategies of research of consciousness and culture.

For a more detailed clarification of the novelty of approach of Professor of California Institute of Integral Studies to the analysis of transpersonal discourse, it would be appropriate to make a quote from his work “Revisioning transpersonal theory”: “In other words, as we become more aware of our intrinsic vital connection with the sacred, the transpersonal gradually reveals itself to us as more and more personal” (Ferrer, 2002, Preface, XVIII). This idea is important for both modern religious discourse, and transpersonal discourse. At the same time, here we can notice a kind of “anthropological turn” within the framework of the transpersonal paradigm.This point of view lets to trace the development of transpersonal theory in dynamics, though it is counterpositional to previous versions of the transpersonal theory, and if to consider more widely, it is based on other postulates than classical and even non-classical philosophy and phenomenology of religion.

How does this approach solve the problem of subjectivism? To solve this issue J.Ferrer offers the term “participatory”, which includes the intersubjective context. The scientist offers theview, which we designated as a kind of “transpersonal existentialism”, where the great importance is given to intra-subjective introspection. Ferrer‘s approach contains the criticism of ontologism, which denies the universally significant nature of philosophical and religious tradition. In the framework of this approach, there takes place rethinking and refusal of subjectivist reductionism, which means “participatory knowledge” in this terminology (Ferrer, 2002).

However, there is a debatable question whether this view, which emphasizes the “multilocal transpersonal event”, removes individualistic reductionism. Considering this concept, it is appropriate to discuss methodological problems of the study. The method of elimination of reductionism, according to Ferrer, is “interpersonal verification”.Summary of the views of the American author is the above-mentioned idea-metaphor about “The Ocean of Emantipation has many shores”. This thought is one of the key ideas for understanding of this interpretation model of transpersonal experience. This model can also mean the pluralism of ontologies. Despite many methodological innovations in the J. Ferrer‘s works, it should be noted that he adheres to the classical view on multidimensionality of transpersonal experience shared by many theorists of transpersonal paradigm. According to the views of the Spanish-American scientist, the transpersonal picture of the world includes multidimensionality of transpersonal ontologies, and a view of the world, which can be designated as intersubjective one. An important conclusion from the views of the American author is thattranspersonal theory implies its own epistemology. Here it should be noted that the issues of epistemology of transpersonal theory are raised by R. Tarnas in his work “The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View” (1991), whose postulates of the epistemology of complicity are coherent to the ideas of Ferrer about the point of view of participatory vision.

Solution of epistemological problems is a new vector in the framework of transpersonal theory, which deserves deeper consideration.To some extent, we have done it in the article “El proyecto de la ontologia religiosa de M. Eliade y el problema de la sintesis de los paradigmas” (Nikonovich, 2016), where there were developed the issues of ontology and epistemology of mythological-religious experience, including on the base of achievements of transpersonal school. On the base of concepts of M. Eliade, S. Grof, C.-G. Jung, J. Campbell we created the integrated model of mythological-religious experience: the existential-personal level is complemented by the transpersonal one. There was offered the new approach to the problem of mythological-religious consciousness: it has both psychological and ontological nature. With in the scope of this article, it is important to note that meta-theoretical model of mythological- religious experience, its typology was built, taking into account the theoretical-mythological, transpersonal and psychoanalytic vectors.

The problem of conceptualization of transpersonal knowledge is presented in different angles from different authors. J. Ferrer sees creation of “transpersonal epistemology” one of his tasks. The problems of transpersonal cognition exist in the theoretical-methodological sphere of it. The scheme of the project of “transpersonal epistemology” offered by J. Ferrer, incorporates the following criteria for verifiability of transpersonal knowledge: universal / contextual, absolute  relative a number of other categories (Ferrer, 2002). The cognitive agent, which removes such gnoseological dichotomies, is already mentioned approach of “participatory”, which in our opinion neutralizes the basic dichotomy of “Your/Other”, which can lead to methodological and conceptual pluralism in understanding of cultural and personal differences.

Summing up the analysis of multidimensionality of thematic configurations of transpersonal discourse, we can note the following.The fields of application of the transpersonal theory are extensive – from the ontology of culture to the ontology of consciousness and the unconscious. Further consideration of transpersonal theory is possible on the following headings:

1. Epistemology of transpersonal experience.
2. Cultural aspects of transpersonal experience.
3. Ontological status of transpersonal experience (Nikonovich, 2016, 2017).

Paradigmal analysis is implemented in this section, lets to identify the ontological-phenomenological grounds of the structure of consciousness of subject in connection with cultural manifestations. Consideration of the questions of religious anthropology, phenomenology of religious consciousness and being within the framework of transpersonal paradigm is theoretical base for solving the problem of ontology of the subject and development of modern interdisciplinary strategies that expand the boundaries of transpersonal theory. Research of the problem of transformation of the human personality is also research of the problem of its ontological and existential basein connection with the ontology of the subject, religion and culture.

Conclusion

Speaking about the methodological and cognitive- epistemological potential of the investigated paradigms and strategies of humanitarian knowledge,it should be noted that analysis of these approaches lets to consider such phenomena as myth and religion multidimensionally, in their structural elements and typical features,to model a more complete view of consciousness and its specifics in various modifications. This concerns, first of all, the analysis of cognitive potential of these strategies, which lets to consider the functioning consciousness in different dimensions – transpersonal, phenomenological, etc.

This gives grounds and can be the base of creation of epistemological model of consciousness, the methodology of explication of the features of mechanism of its functioning. It is obvious that analysis of the features of human psyche, including its spiritual constants from the point of view of phenomenology, transpersonal approach, humanistic psychology expands the conceptual and problem field of their multi-vector analysis in different point of view.

We offered consideration of A. Maslow’s concept of “peak experiences” in a new dimension – cognitive-religious. In the article, there is noted that the studies of the founder of existential-humanistic psychology affects not only the  deep psychological structures of the personality, but also experiences that can be called meta-anthropological and transpersonal. Maslow’s dominant ideas connected with the analysis of “peak experiences” fit into the paradigm of development of modern phenomenology of religious and mythological forms, which we developed on the base of transpersonal philosophy and phenomenology of religion.Thus, we can talk about the cognitive, epistemological dimension of the Maslow’s concept.

Theoretical-methodological significance of the investigated paradigms and the given subject is the possibility of building epistemology and phenomenology of mythological and religious knowledge, and deeper penetration into “cartography” (S. Grof) of human consciousness in its archetypal and religious forms. Transpersonal theory has the potential for interdisciplinary synthesis and postulating interdisciplinary strategies.  Interdisciplinary synthesis gives grounds for postulating of interrelated ontology of consciousness and ontology of culture, as well as creation of the typology of mythological-religious experience. It should be also noted that modern transpersonal view of the world includes pluralism of transpersonal ontologies.

Bibliography

Assmann, J. (2001) The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. (Trans.D. Lorton). New York: Cornell University Press

Eliade, M. (1959) The Sacred & the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Ferrer, J (2002) Revisioning transpersonal theory. A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. With a foreword by R. Tarnas. New York : State University of New York Press

Grof, S. & Halifax, J. (1977) The Human Encounter with Death. New York: E. P. Dutton

Grof, S. (1985) Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. New York : State University of New York, Albany

Nikonovich, N. (2016) El proyecto de la ontologia religiosa de M. Eliade y el problema de la sintesis de los paradigmas / Pensamiento Americano. Revista de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales de la Corporación Universitaria Americana. Barranquilla, Colombia, No. 9(16), pp.45-57

Nikonovich, N. (2017) The problems of ontology and epistemology of mythological and religious experience: synthesis of ideas of M. Eliade, C.-G. Jung, S. Grof / Study of Religion [Scientific and theoretical journal]. Russian Federation, Blagoveschensk, No. 1, pp.90-98

Tarnas, R. (1991) The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View. New York: Ballantine Books

Truth and the Beautiful Appearance: The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Psychoanalysis of Otto Rank

Julio Roberto Costa, MS

Abstract

Otto Rank was the only member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society who had a PhD in Philosophy, and this was reflected in his work. Taking this as a starting point, we may have a better understanding of what Rank denominated as illusion, which has always led to a problematic approach. We try to see the question of the illusion by means of Friedrich Nietzsche, who considered the appearance as unavoidable. Taking into consideration its meaning in Nietzsche’s philosophy, we must understand that the problem was not a struggle on overcoming the appearances of the world in search of an essence that would be elsewhere, which presupposes redemption in a future world, or in science—which, according to Nietzsche, can only describe the world, failing in providing meaning. Therefore, Nietzsche values the pre-Socratic Greece, which had the courage to live the appearance as appearance, which was made possible by the aesthetic phenomenon. Art was shaped as a fusion of the Dionysian with the Apollonian, which we can understand as the union of everything that affirms life (the Dionysian element of instinct) with the love of form (the Apollonian element of proportion and measure).

Thus, the question of what was most appropriate was no longer a question of essence, but of what enhances life, where Nietzsche found the art of Greek tragedy as the sublime paradigm. Therefore, many aspects of Otto Rank, once considered obscure, can be better addressed in a new light, including the relevance of the artist in his work.

Introduction

We can consider Otto Rank to be the most philosophical among the first psychoanalysts of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. First, we have the fact that he was not a physician. Second, he was used to reading the great philosophers, mainly Nietzsche, years before meeting psychoanalysis.

The chances are that Freud considered advantageous for psychoanalysis someone outside the medical field and familiar with the great classical works, not only in the form of literature but of theater, poetry and human sciences in general. Therefore, Freud funded the studies of Rank until he attained his Ph.D. in philosophy. In his work, the presence of German idealism, and especially of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, are very relevant. And here, we have important questions regarding phenomena and noumenon, representation and will, as well as appearance and essence.

In this article, I would like to focus on Nietzsche’s influence on Otto Rank, for the aspect that will be quite difficult in his work, which is the illusion. Initially, we need to know that Rank himself was aware of how this could be misinterpreted. Jessie Taft, who was a former student of Rank and then a therapist and translator of some of her works for English, talks about his concern in her introduction to his book Will Therapy.

The reader of psychoanalysis who set eyes on a book by Rank may have the impression that he was extremely subjective, and in favor of escapism, at times when he uses the word illusion. Psychoanalyst Esther Menaker points this out in her book on Rank, Separation, Will and Creativity:

…Rank perceived the subjective nature of reality, the impossibility to humankind to live solely with a so-called  subjective truth, and the need to create illusion in order to survive. He wrote:

‘Our seeking the truth in human motives for acting and thinking is destructive. With the truth one cannot live. To be able to live one’s needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science  and love afford, but inner illusions which first conditions the other. The more a man can take appearance as truth, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier he will be.’ (Menaker, 1996, p. 104).

Menaker continues:

And what of illusion, in Rank’s view? The outer illusions to which he refers are twofold: first, the belief systems that pass in historical succession from one into another, consoling and comforting us as we try to find a meaningful place in the cosmic scheme of things; second, those creations of humankind—art, philosophy, religion and science—from which individuals, singly or collectively, derive meaning. Ernest Becker has expressed it well when he says: ‘man needs a ‘second world’, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. ‘Illusion’ means creative play at its highest level.” (Menaker, 1996, p.105).

Although Menaker shows us the question very precisely in terms of clinical practice, especially in the integrated sense of the self, relevant for example in the treatment of anxiety, one can find the root of the illusion in the strong presence of philosophy in Rank’s thought, which also finds support in the fact that Freud, at the beginning of psychoanalysis, sought to relate the unconscious to the Kantian thing in itself.

To the reader of today, the usual tendency would be to consider that Rank was escaping from Freud’s ideal of having psychoanalysis as a natural science. Although, as we shall see, he was following his philosophical heritage with Nietzsche, and asked the question: Plato or Homer?

In his biography of Otto Rank, Acts of Will, E. James Lieberman shows with clarity of details the influence of Nietzsche on Rank, from his youth. And, according to Lieberman, one must observe Nietzsche as a philosopher in whom poetry played a significant role, not only in his writing but in his understanding of the world. When Nietzsche exalts the will, he does so in accordance with his own subjective experience. It must be considered that Freud sought to observe the will objectively by the model of natural science, even considering that from phenomena we can only have representations—and this according to his struggle to validate psychoanalysis as a natural science.

In the question of the will, however, difficulties arise. According to Lieberman, Freud and Nietzsche agreed on the importance of the irrational, but for Freud, the concept of will could only be linked to a pre-scientific view of psychology, still linked to the theology and the philosophy of morality. If there is a need to apply a deterministic approach of cause and effect, the will disappears, with wish remaining as the expression of the libido and, ultimately, of physiology.

Lieberman tells us that the importance of sexuality was nothing new in relation to psychiatry at the time, although Nietzsche’s narrative of the will would appear to be more philosophical  and poetic than psychiatric or medical. Regarding Kant’s importance, however, we can observe that, at the same time that Freud valued the notion of thing-in-itself as a reality behind appearances—and it was precisely this archeology of reality that he sought—Freud did not penetrated the concept of noumenon, because the objectivity that he sought was within the scientific positivism of his time. This positivistic view, admittedly, sticks to the phenomenon, and what lies behind a certain phenomenon could only be another phenomenon.

However, we have that the Kantian noumenon cannot be known, but can be thought of. This means that symbolism and poetry are free to speak of the noumenon, keeping only the condition that they must not go against the moral imperatives of practical reason.

This, however, is far from subjectivism, which was associated by Kant with the old metaphysics. As an Enlightenment philosopher, he reacted against metaphysics, not only motivated by Hume’s skepticism, but by realizing that subjectivism or idealism were close to the authoritarian dogmatism of his time. According to the Brazilian psychoanalyst Paulo Cezar Sandler, the strict positivism of the Kant era was called by himself “naïve realism,” and still used in our times by Ernest Cassirer and Gaston Bachelard, among many others.

From there, the imaginary is not an illusion in the sense of being a lie in relation to the real, although, connected to practical reason by utility, helps us in dealing with the real, as Hans Vaihinger asserts:

From this it can be concluded: just as science (especially mathematics) leads to the imaginary, so it also leads life to the impossible, which, however, is possible—to absolute responsibility for one’s actions, absolute freedom, good deeds for their own sake (absolutely). You are a human being and you must have these noble feelings. Thus, the imaginary (the absolute, the ideal) is justified despite its unreality. Without this aspect of the imaginary, neither science nor life are possible in its highest forms. (Vaihinger, p. 174).

“Only ideas, albeit practical ones” – A panorama of the Kantian legacy on fiction.

Initially, we have that David Hume wanted to oppose his philosophy to dogmatism. To this end, he adopted an extremely skeptical stance on the certainties that were held as common sense until then, also attacking the possibility of metaphysics, through a skeptical standpoint, based on the limitations of the human capacity in understanding the world.

It was through David Hume that Immanuel Kant went to a certain appreciation for skepticism. However, Kant considered that Hume did not have satisfactory answers to the moral problems. What Kant will do, especially through his books Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, will be to separate skepticism, as a result of human limitations in knowing the world, of moral postulates, which now have an a priori source, separated from the sensible world.

What Kant will put forward is that when speculative reason— that which deals with the world that can be perceived with the senses—tries to penetrate the world of moral reason, it can only create the old dogmatism. Hence, metaphysics cannot aspire to the category of science.

Kant goes on to argue that moral postulates are necessary, but they are just ideas, as, for instance, God, which is not a phenomenon, although these ideas are practical ones, as necessary regulatory principles. Thus, it is necessary to think of morality as a coherent system, which is part of a world that is not the sensible world, but, as Kant named it, an intelligible world, which human beings share, as they are beings endowed with reason. It is important to see that, by means of freedom, each individual could act differently, but the moral law imposes itself on the reason of each one, in such a way that the individuals agree with general rules. All moral actions, therefore, appear as if they spring from the same source, which imposes itself upon the reason of each individual, presenting itself as sovereign, perfect and rational. Such a source manifests itself within each individual as an imperative. We can see that Kant created an important division between the sensible world and the intelligible world.

However, it is important to keep in mind that this philosophy was seen as extremely pessimistic in relation to the culture of his time, especially regarding religion and morality, where it was considered necessary to have a real knowledge about God and the origins of morality. In his book Religion on the Limits of Reason Alone Kant places religion as assistance to ethics, which led him to be penalized by the then Prussian king.

Regarding his context, one must also consider that Kant was an Enlightenment philosopher, and that the separation of church and state was imperative within the new thought, together with the criticism of the “divine right of kings”—which in itself was a threat to the aristocracy as well as to the clergy class that was intimately attached to it. Therefore, we must understand that Kant was regarded as a destroyer. Moreover, for the spirit of his age, to say that we can know nothing on God or on the immortality of the soul—even if these concepts were viewed as necessary postulates of morality—it was a great break with all metaphysics until then.

We see that Kant needed to question those that were considered absolute truths, and that this was fundamental to the creation of Western Modernity. This move also created an instance of fiction, that is, those things that were “only ideas”, although have the attribute of practicality, that is, utility, even if they were separated from the possibility of empirical verification.

It is necessary to remember that all the philosophers of German Idealism will be tributaries of the path opened by Kant in relation to the primacy of thought, and here we have the answer to the British Empiricism of David Hume, that Kant considered unacceptable by its moral consequences. In broad terms, German Idealism will be the defense of moral reason in the face of the skepticism of British Empiricism.

Developments on the Practical Fiction

The philosophers Hans Vaihinger and Jules de Gaultier will make interesting connections between Kant and Nietzsche, precisely on the path that Kant provided. This path will be given by the recognition that those concepts, which are “only ideas”, albeit practical ones, could be understood as fictions that are necessary for life. This does not meant that the act of lying was considered ethical, but that fiction becomes an additional instrument for the relationship with reality, and, moreover, necessary due the limitations of human cognition.

Jules de Gaultier gives us a very clear illustration of this question of utility, offering an insight that could be applied to any human group at the beginning of History:

… the human group itself takes cognizance of itself, of what is harmful and what is useful to it. It is going to do for itself what every scientist does for the chemical bodies that he wishes to preserve…. The human group takes the same measures of defense against the surrounding milieu and against its own inner tendency. Everything useful to it it prescribes for itself, and everything harmful it forbids itself. (Gaultier, 1961 p.7).

Gaultier was deeply influenced by Nietzsche. Thus, he will say that everything that preserves the human group corresponds to the “Vital Instinct”, to the strengthening of potency, health and vitality, including the necessary interdictions—which are the self-imposed law of the group members. At this point, Gaultier is very close to Otto Rank, being faithful to the instinct that leads towards life (from Nietzsche), while admitting restrictions coming from self-determination (with similarities to Kant).

The question of Gaultier passes through the pessimism put on canvas by Schopenhauer, and Gaultier agrees with the solution provided by Nietzsche, that is, it is by the esthetic phenomenon that the human being elaborates, by means of culture, the pains of the world, bringing it to the human experience in a way that does not weakens the will to power. However, Gaultier values Schopenhauer’s pessimism more than Kant’s moral solution in his Critique of Practical Reason.

Following the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism on Schopenhauer’s thought, Gaultier argues that it is by the withdrawal of the veil of Maya that the human being can achieve joy, in the meaning of Nietzsche. What needs to be defeated is the belief that the typical representation of the world, through theoretical reason observing the phenomenon, is a correct view of reality, for in this way the world presents itself as a stage of pain and absurdity. The relief, in Buddhism and Hinduism, comes from the unveiling of this deception of the phenomenon, and the great joy of the individual is to realize that all his torments concerning the problems of life in this world are illusory, for the world, as a phenomenon, is the illusion of the will. By means of creating the work of art, the individual “leaves the stage”, and allows himself to contemplate, as a spectator in the audience, all those vicissitudes and problems that once afflicted him or her. Now those afflictions can be seen with detachment, as the interesting plot of an ancient Homer narrative, beautiful to be heard and witnessed. Thus, we see that pessimism becomes the optimism of the beautiful appearance:

It was shown how the revelation of the unreality of the phenomenon, a cause of suicide in a depressed race, is the pretext for a new life in the western endowed with a superabundance of energy. It was shown… how western sensibility, perceiving life as woe, is following this initiation transformed into an aesthetic sensibility, eager to perpetuate the spectacle, to describe it, to evoke it and how, once informed and taken into confidence, now adores and celebrates Life for its beauty with the same ardor with which, in its state of blindness, it used to curse Life for its cruelty. (Gaultier, 1961 p. 236-237).

It is for this aspect of utility that we must understand the fiction and the illusion.

According to Rank, from the world we can only have representations that need to be interpreted. Thus, here we have the meaning of illusion from the inheritance of Kant’s regulatory principles, and also from the concept of appearance in Nietzsche. Regarding Nietzsche’s acceptance of appearance as appearance, we may have a better understanding of the idea of illusion in Rank.

The Influence of Immanuel Kant in the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis

We must understand that Sigmund Freud was deeply concerned to provide a solid foundation for psychoanalysis as a science. From the accounts to which we have access today, one can see that the influence of Immanuel Kant was relevant. Freud was willing to relate the thing in itself, which is behind the phenomena, to the very unconscious.

Ludwig Binswanger wrote about the presence of Kant in the formulations of Freud, where he reports:

He [Freud] said that we behaved as if the unconscious were a reality in the image of the conscious. But, as a true scientific researcher, he says nothing about the nature of the unconscious, because we know nothing with certainty, or above all, we can only infer from the conscious. He asserts that, just as Kant postulated the thing in itself behind appearance, it postulated, behind the conscious accessible to our experience, the unconscious, but that could never be an object of direct knowledge. (Fulgêncio, 2006, p. 9).

We can see that Freud was working within the Kantian critique on the limits of human knowledge. At the moment of Binswanger’s observation, he saw the unconscious as a thing in itself in the Kantian sense, that is, as an object unknowable in itself, but which must be introduced as a fiction, so that it can be better worked. However, in the sessions of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud will always remain cautious in dealing with philosophical questions. Regarding the aspect of the epistemological approach to the unconscious, it will maintain the differentiation between what appears and what is not directly known. Therefore, what is postulated has a heuristic function, although it cannot be confused with the reality per se.

Thus, it is possible to say that Freud, even building psychoanalysis as a natural science, agreed with the Kantian assumption that the nature of the psyche is that of a set of representations, of the world and of the sensations.

We must now see the contribution of Nietzsche. In common with Kant, we have that the two philosophers dealt with questions concerning duality: phenomenon and noumenon, in Kant, and essence and appearance, in Nietzsche. The connection between the two, in this respect, was studied by Hans Vaihinger, author of The Philosophy of the As If, who adopts a position derived from pragmatism and perspectivism.

Vaihinger has a place in the theory of knowledge due to his concept of fiction as an abstraction that helps in bringing order to the understanding of the world; fiction is, therefore, an instrument for knowledge, such as deduction and induction. Fiction is something that adds to knowledge, being an approximation of reality, rather than being a departure from it. It will be differentiated from the hypothesis by the fact that it is the hypothesis that can be confirmed with the empirical data; however, fiction continues being an auxiliary resource.

Vaihinger’s question is, “How could we achieve the right goals, taking into consideration that we deal only with representations?” What Vaihinger places is that we preserve assumptions even if we are aware that they are only approximations, although, in doing so, we succeed in acting in the world.

Vaihinger will seek the roots of this position in Kant’s work and its continuity in the concept of Nietzsche’s beautiful appearance. It is certain that Nietzsche will fight Kant in many points, just as he fights Schopenhauer, to whom he owes much of his concept of will. However, Vaihinger will consider Kant as the one who discovered, as the thing in itself as the frontier of knowledge, the practical value of appearance, and that it should be accepted as so. Vaihinger will value the practical aspects of fictions, with many examples from mathematics, and with notions as the point, which has no place within the sensible world, but which must be accepted as a convention: for instance, we must believe in the point for the purposes of geometry. Therefore, some concepts need to be accepted as if they were part of our certainties. Vaihinger bridges all this with Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Here we have a passage in which Vaihinger quotes Nietzsche in this context:

…”being ” is a “simplification for practical purposes,” based on the artificial creation of identical cases, it is “an image” that we impute for the sake of practical utility and perspective, because “in us, there is a power that orders, falsifies and separates artificially.” Its products, however, these many “falsifications,” are useful and necessary: for “life is based on such assumptions.” The pretend world of subject, substance, reason, is necessary. (Vaihinger, 2011, p.664).

Nietzsche and the Beautiful Appearance

Having made this bridge between Kant and Nietzsche, let us now turn to the question of appearance in Nietzsche, and his reasons. Nietzsche’s great model was pre-Socratic Greece. He regarded the Greek spirit as highly vulnerable to the pain of existence. Moreover, they were bearers of a pessimistic wisdom, such as that of Silenus, whom Nietzsche quotes in the Birth of Tragedy:

There is an old story that King Midas had hunted for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, for a long time in the woods without catching him. But when he finally fell into his hands, the King asked: “What is the best and most preferable thing for Man?” The demon remained silent, stubborn, and motionless; and then broke out into shrill laughter, uttering these words: “Miserable, ephemeral species, children of chance and of hardship, why do you compel me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear The very best is quite unattainable for you: it is, not to be born, not to exist, to be Nothing. But the next best for you is—to die soon.” (Nietzsche, 2013,p.33).

Given this, how do we understand the creation of Apollonian art? Here we will have an approximation with his understanding by Vaihinger, as Nietzsche will tell us that “life is possible only by artistic mirages”. In the Greeks, art is closely linked with religion, and its virtue is to produce abundance of life, the stimulus to life. Still in the wake of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, pessimism about the wisdom of Silenus, it can be said that, despite the pains of life, one must be seduced to life through beautiful appearances. As Nietzsche shows us, in The Birth of Tragedy. He considers that the Greek gods do not make the apology for a salvation in another world, in an afterlife, but they bring the stimulus to life, which divinizes that which exists. And to deify, here, means to make beautiful.

From the mythological narratives, we realize that the gods of the Olympus were not necessarily good, but they were beautiful—that is, they seduce to life. For its part, beauty is the measure, the proportion, and the elegant moderation, proper attributes of Apollo.

Thus, Apollonian art intended to replace the terrible truth of the world, as Sileno stated, by beautiful forms. This was the elegant and refined measure. However, the disruptive aspect of reality could not fail in being considered. This aspect seemed to be tough and disturbing, subverting the serenity of the Apollonian forms. This element will be represented by Dionysus, who can be terrible and bring back, in the eyes of civilization, the pessimistic wisdom of Silenus.

Apollo, therefore, represented individuation, brought about by proportional and serene forms, for the individual, in order to exist, needed and needs limits and measures. However, Dionysus brings the dissolution of limits into drunkenness, which presents itself as ecstasy. But when the ecstasy ends, there remains only the vision of the absurdity of life. At that moment, the absurdity appears as the truth, but it is a truth that destroys the individual, and, not just the individual, but destroys the State, History and civilization. However, it is important to note that this is not the Dionysus that Nietzsche praises. It was clear how nature, in its raw state, could be destructive. Redemption will have to be done by means of art.

However, if one previously sought to preserve Apollo by placing barriers against Dionysus, this time the art will incorporate Dionysus along with Apollo. Thus, the absurdity of existence will be transformed into a beautiful representation, capable of making life possible.

Therefore, Nietzsche considers that the most important moment in Greek art is the reconciliation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The pure Dionysian is impossible to live, for it leads to annihilation and the feeling of absurdity.  The Apollonian element brings a beautiful appearance to the cruel aspect of nature and redeems it; from now on nature can be lived without leading to absurdity and emptiness. As Nietzsche tells us in his Posthumous Fragments:

“It is not in the alternation between lucidity and drunkenness, but in its simultaneity, that the Dionysian aesthetic state is found.”

Therefore, it is as if Apollo had taught the measures to the barbarian Dionysus, thus transforming it into the Hellenic Dionysus.

We have seen how the Greek world dealt with appearance and essence. Most importantly, to understand the delusion in Rank, is that appearance was not something that should disappear in favor of essence, but appearance and essence, if understood respectively as Apollo and Dionysus, needed to be united in art of tragedy, and, more than that, to be together in life. When tragic art unites beautiful appearance with raw essence, it saves culture from the danger of annihilation.

It is, therefore, the disappearance of the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus that is needed. As the Nietzschean Dionysian is necessarily artistic, the conflict between beautiful appearance and an essential truth that does not allow appearance, that is, which does not allow art, disappears. We must understand that the hero dies, but his death has meaning within a larger picture—thus, the hero dies, but his death is not the victory of the absurd.

As this is the young Nietzsche, the presence of Arthur Schopenhauer is still strongly perceived, in what is, for Nietzsche, the Primordial Unity. As in Schopenhauer, the individual can accept to perish, knowing that life itself never dies. We see, then, that the tragic element of art translates the great wisdom of the ancient Greeks, and there must be some construction, some representation that is not simply an account of the sensible world, as Nietzsche tells us, elsewhere in his Posthumous Fragments:

Only possibility of life: in art. Otherwise we stray from life. The instinctive movement of the sciences is the complete annihilation of illusion; if there were no art, the consequence would be quietism. (Nietzsche apud Machado, 2017, p.59)

The Welcoming of the Will in the Beautiful Appearance

At this point, we can more accurately perceive what Otto Rank tells us regarding illusion: that the human being is necessarily a creator, an artist, a creator of the beautiful appearance.

On this point, the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Machado adds:

One could say that while the “lie” of science would want to find the truth of the world as something other than appearance, the “truth” of art is to believe in the image as image, in appearance as appearance… the superiority of art over science is not to oppose the illusion, it is to affirm life fully. (Machado, 2017, pp. 59-60).

As Rank wrote in his book Will Therapy, we cannot have the direct assurance of the world, but, as a condition for action, the world must be interpreted. This interpretation is not perfect, although we must believe in it. So, we are always believing in interpretations. But, unlike what is commonly considered the “illusion,” this is not a narcotic that brings an escape, but is a tonic for life, and this is Nietzsche’s orientation, which Rank sets in his work.

Thus, concerning the use of the concept of “truth”, these considerations must be taken into account in the context to which they belong. In Nietzsche’s terms, the will to truth, where we have the metaphysical opposition between truth and falsity, belongs to what Nietzsche calls Socratism, as well as post- Socratic Greek philosophy. Equally, it must be understood that this philosophy of truth and appearance, where appearance is the equivalent of error, is a philosophy, according to Nietzsche, of weak men with weak will to power. According to him, it is a Christian morality before Christianity, which would be a “Platonism for the masses”. Nietzsche, therefore, poses as false the metaphysical opposition of values, and values the appearance of form precisely to go against this opposition. Art as appearance goes beyond the ascetic ideal. Thus, Plato becomes the “voluntary of the beyond,” a slanderer of life; in opposition, we have Homer, who makes the exultation of life and the approval of existence.

Thus, it is possible to affirm that Rank followed Kant in the aspect of the ethics, but, in the matter of appearance and the essence, followed Nietzsche. The question of Nietzsche to which Rank follows is that the ultimate criterion of the validity of something is the intensification of life, the strengthening of the will to power. Thus, the ultimate criterion of judgment over knowledge is life; it is not, therefore, an epistemological judgment. As Nietzsche tells us in Beyond Good and Evil:

We do not see in the falsity of a judgment an objection to this judgment …           The question is to know to what extent a judgment is apt to promote life… It is time to understand that the conservation of beings of our species requires that we believe in them. That does not stop these judgments from being false… Let us recognize: no life can exist except for the estimations and appearances inherent in its perspective. (Nietzsche).

This we find repeatedly in Rank, and we can thus understand the differentiation he makes between theory and therapy: theory seeks truth, but therapy must stimulate the will of the patient, in which he must believe in representations and fictions, and this means confidence in his or her own will to power. But as a differentiation from metaphysics and traditional moral systems, it should be noted that these values are at the level of life and the organic force of life. Nietzsche’s question is always: do these values, for example, make a man healthier, more courageous, more vigorous, or make him weaker and sicker? Thus, the question of Rank was to provide vigor to the will of man, as Rank put it, to offer him faith in himself, which is different from faith in society or faith in a reason which imposes itself in a heteronomous way. And it is certain that here, in Rank’s conception, is added the Kantian concept of an a priori morality, but always of a morality that is at the service of the affirmation of the human being—as Otto Rank stated, in a clearly Nietzschean passage, that the true human values are the values of the affirmation of life.

We can conceive, then, that although Rank has affirmed the value of self-determination of the individual, and his ability to choose in relation to the moral law that he possesses a priori, within a space of freedom independently of the great society, the content of the moral law does not imply in an ethics of ascetism. Ethics consists is the affirmation of human life, which unites Apollo and Dionysus.

The difference of Rank is that Rank accepts self-preservation. For Nietzsche, the will to power implies a constant growth, in a constant breaking of barriers. Thus, weak men, where the power is sick, cannot go forward, for they are afraid of losing the little life they have. According to Nietzsche, it is at this point that moral restraints are made, just as we understand the term in its moral and religious contexts. The barriers which are now placed serve to preserve the little life that weak men still have, and this is seen by Nietzsche as demerit and denial. In Rank, the picture is different, as in this passage from Beyond Psychology, we see that Rank embodied the Kantian virtue of temperance: 

The individual … automatically refrained from certain activities which directly or indirectly seemed to threaten his own self. Since the majority felt that way, the aboriginal law appears un-imposed, a requirement of vital importance … We obey the moral law because, with its self-preserving function, it is merely an impression of our moral self. (Rank, 1945, p. 84)

Conclusions

Seeking to place psychoanalysis as a natural science, Freud was not willing to consider the will, seen in his day as a romantic idea. However, he was aware that the object of knowledge of the scientist are phenomena, not reality in itself, which is unknowable. But while he acknowledges that psychic reality is representational, he will not penetrate philosophy in such a way to make a distinction similar to that of phenomena and noumenon, appearance and essence, and so on. Thus, even making references to Kant, he did not arrive at something that would be “only an idea, albeit a practical one,” that is, where utility provides space for the “fiction for practical purposes.”

In Jules de Gaultier’s book, From Kant to Nietzsche, we observe that it is precisely through his pessimism that optimism becomes possible. It is the art that makes the human condition beautiful, from the fact that nature, in its original state, presents itself as cruel, being the Barbarian Dionysius, who, according to Roberto Machado, differs from the Hellenic Dionysus of Nietzsche, which was necessarily artistic, and, according to Vaihinger, assumes the “fiction for practical purposes”.

By his understanding of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Rank will start from the most melancholic aspects of the understanding of the human condition, which leads to the absurdity, to welcome the Kantian value of self-determination. We realize that fiction for practical purposes is always present, not as a lie, but as the imaginary that is justified despite its unreality, with the necessary self-determination to affirm the laws derived from freedom. Therefore, health comes from the union of practical reason with the affirmation of life:

Here we can define self-determination as a voluntary and conscious creation of one’s own fate. This means to have no fate in an external sense, but to accept and affirm oneself as fate and fate creating power. This inner fate includes self-determination also, in the sense of the pleasurable will struggle with ourselves, the conflict which we affirm as long as we interpret it as consciously willed self-creation, and not neurotically as the force of stronger supernatural forces or earthly authorities. (Rank,1945 p. 91-92).

In this way, both with the moral imperative and with the aesthetic phenomenon, the reason of the individual can offer meaning to what would have been only a blind and absurd fate. Now, instead of being a slave to the world of phenomena, the individual can take hold of his destiny, and truly make it a human destiny.

As we have seen in Nietzsche, all these things are not a benzodiazepine that needs to put the individual to sleep; in fact, they are a tonic that leads to action, for the truth that one can have of the world are the representations and their interpretations for the purposes of intensifying life—which are beautiful appearance, or illusion. That is the only way to affirm life to the fullest. Among so many uncertainties in the sensible world, the individual must welcome the will to power that he or she have, which translates into believing in himself or herself, despite the fact that the individual is continually measured as inferior by the parameters of the dominant ideologies—the earthly powers:

The patient needs a world view and will always need it, because man always needs belief, and this so much more, the more increasing self-consciousness brings him to doubt. Psychotherapy does not need to be ashamed of its philosophical character, if only it is in a position to give to the sufferer the philosophy that he needs, namely, faith in himself. (Rank, 1945, p.96).

Bibliography

Costa, MS

Fulgêncio, Leopoldo. Comentários Críticos das Referências Textuais de Freud a Kant. São Paulo: USP, 2001.

Fulgêncio, Leopoldo. Fundamentos Kantianos da Psicanálise Freudiana e o Lugar da Metapsicologia no Desenvolvimento da Psicanálise. São Paulo: USP, 2006.

Gaultier, Jules de. From Kant to Nietzsche. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc.,

1961

Kant, Immanuel. Crítica da Razão Pura. Translated by Manuela Pinto dos Santos and Alexandre Fradique Morujão. Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian, 2001.

Lieberman, E. James. Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Machado, Roberto. Nietzsche e a Verdade. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2017.

Machado, Roberto. Nietzsche e a polêmica sobre o Nascimento da Tragédia. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2005.

Menaker, Esther: Separation, Will and Creativity: The wisdom of Otto Rank. New Jersey: Claude Barbre, 1996.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: O Nascimento da Tragédia. Translated by J. Guinsburg. São Paulo: Schwarcz, 2013

Rank, Otto. Art and Artist. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1989.

—. Beyond Psychology. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1958.

—. Truth and Reality. Translated by Jessie Taft. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1978.

—. Will Therapy. Translated by Jessie Taft. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1945.

Sandler, Paulo Cezar. As Origens da Psicanálise na Obra de Kant. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 2000.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. O Mundo como Vontade e como Representação. Translated by Jair Barboza. São Paulo: UNESP, 2005.

Vaihinger, Hans. A Filosofia do Como Se. Translated by Johannes Kretschmer. Chapecó: Argos, 2011

EPIS Journal

Vaihinger, Hans. A Filosofia do Como Se. Translated by Johannes Kretschmer. Chapecó: Argos, 2011.

The Reoccurring Problem of the Will: Heidegger’s Unfinished Existential Analytic

Bruce Beerman, MA

Heidegger’s view of the will and willing is far from straightforward, and undergoes significant development from 1921 to 1940. I want to consider a few of those developments here, and illustrate why these considerations left Heidegger with an unfinished project.

To begin an investigation into the will demands first that we give some prior consideration to the notion of Sorge (or care). Heidegger considers the care-structure as prior and pre-constituting for the very possibility of willing. In Being and Time he wrote: “Willing and wishing are necessarily rooted ontologically in Da-sein as care.”₁ Further emphasizing throughout Being and Time that: “The Being of Dasein is care”₂ This pre-foundational aspect of care prior to possible willing runs back as early as his 1921 Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.

Allow me then a brief review of some of the central aspects of Sorge/care prior to our examination of will. First, Heidegger demarcates Dasein’s experience of space and time as essentially concernful or care-related. Space is disclosed for Dasein in terms of care, as that to which I orient myself towards or away from.

Both directionality and de-severance, as modes of Being- in-the-world, are guided beforehand by the circumspection of concern.₃

Being-in-the-world is proximally absorbed in the world of concern. This concern is guided by circumspection. . . Whenever we have to contribute or perform, circumspection gives us the route for proceeding with it.₄

This interpretation moves away from a Cartesian schematical picture of space towards one that orients being-there as a relation of having being as an issue, not an “apparent entity” among entities.

The nearest world, the things encountered in it are not placed along the lines of a geometric-mathematical system of points but within environmental contexts of reference.₅

Heidegger also makes it clear that time is interpreted also within the framework of care-giving orientation. Time is not experienced by Dasein as a thing. Time is not clock-time primordially reckoned. Time is temporal: “There is not time without man”₆ he writes. Further stating in Being and Time:

Dasein finds ‘itself’ proximally in what it does. . . in those things. . . with which it is proximally concerned.₇

As time for Dasein is finite, Dasein is lead by concern, to order that time in terms of care(s). We are: “that entity for which being is an issue.”₈

All time we read from the clock is time to…, ‘time to do this or that,’ appropriate or inappropriate time. . . in it [time] there is intended a whole of relations having the character of the in-order-to. We designated by the term ‘significance’ this totality of relations of the in-order-to, for-the-sake-of, for-that-purpose, to-that-end. Time as right or wrong time has the character of significance.₉

Finally, Dasein faces time as one’s own relation to death. Death individuates us, and calls us out of the average everydayness of one’s being—demanding that we give care to what is particularly significant within our own lives. This is referred to as the “call of care,” which is also the call of possibility.

The being of this entity is care; among other things, care means being out for something; Dasein’s concern includes a concern for its own being. As being out for something, it is out for what it still is not. As care, Dasein is essentially underway towards something; in caring it is toward itself as that which it still is not. Its own sense of being is to always have something before itself, which is still not, which is still outstanding. That something is always still outstanding means that the being of Dasein as care, insofar as it is, is always incomplete; it still lacks something so long as it is.₁₀

This sense that there is always still something outstanding— some debt to be paid to one’s self, exists out of this “call of care.”

The call points forward to Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being, and it does this as a call which comes from uncanniness.₁₁

The uncanniness is the void or nullity of Daseins “lack.” Existing without a prescribed concern, but still facing the staggering openness of possibility. Heidegger calls this “the call of conscience” and “guilt” in the face of being as possibility.

Conscience is the call of care from the uncanniness of Being-in-the-world—the call which summons Dasein to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-guilty₁₂

The significance for this is very important for Heidegger’s later consideration of will. Out of the confrontation of care and absolute nullity “the call” is supposed to arrive. However, the call of possibility is contentless. The chasm of void provides no particulars. For there to be possibility for Dasein there must be present a manifestation of the openness of possibility as possibility. What provides this manifestation? How specifically does “conscience” as the call of care provide content. Nullity itself is the absence of content, death as death itself provides no actual meaning nor necessary motivation for exceeding publicness. It may just as well drive me further into the tavern, full of people, noise, and the clamor of “idle talk.”

We see that after the publication of Being and Time Heidegger begins to be concerned about how he had appropriated major conceptions form Kierkegaard—formative notions like: authenticity, angst, guilt-in-the-face-of-possibility, and so-on. In Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time Heidegger’s marginal notions are given in the appendix. His notations show a deep concern about this appropriation, and further illustrate a growing critique of onto-theology:

It is not a matter of chance that the phenomena of Angst and fear, which have never been distinguished in a thoroughgoing way, were constitutive for the scope of Christian theology ontically and also ontologically, although in very narrow limits. This always happened when the anthropological problem of the being of human being toward God gained priority, and phenomena such as faith, sin, love, and repentance guided the questions . . . S. Kierkegaard got furthest of all in the analysis of the phenomenon of Angst, again in the theological context of a “psychological” exposition.₁₃

S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way₁₄

S. Kierkegaard saw the existentiell phenomenon of the Moment in the most penetrating way, which does not mean that he was also as successful in the existential interpretation of it. He gets stuck in the vulgar concept of time and defines the Moment with the help of the now and eternity. When Kierkegaard speaks of “temporality,” he means human being’s being-in-time. Time as within time-ness knows only the now, but never a moment. But if the moment is experienced existentially, a more primordial temporality is presupposed, although existentially inexplicit.₁₅

This is a profound comment; it in my view summarizes the conflict for Heidegger in terms of time, authenticity and will. Heidegger’s reference to the Moment is extremely significant. Heidegger realizes and makes explicit, that Kierkegaard’s notion of time is related to “now and eternity” and states that here “a more primordial temporality is presupposed.”

The problem here is fairly clear. For Kierkegaard the Instant/ Moment is not the confrontation with nullity or nothingness, (as Heidegger is working toward) but precisely the opposite. In the last chapter of The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard writes:

Anxiety is freedom’s possibility. . . Anyone formed by anxiety is shaped by possibility, and only the person shaped by possibility is cultivated according to his infinitude. Possibility is therefore the most difficult of all categories.₁₆

The “infinitude” which Kierkegaard refers to is the very fulcrum of the self. The self which he makes quite explicit in Sickness Unto Death is a synthesis, of 1) the infinite and the finite, 2) the eternal and the temporal, 3) freedom and necessity.₁₇ Kierkegaard makes explicit that the first column is wholly dependent as possibility upon God, stating:

Where does despair come from? From the relation in which the synthesis relates to itself, from the fact that God, who made man this relation, as it were lets go of it; that is from the relation’s relating to itself.₁₈

A person who has no God has no self either. . . for God is the fact that everything is possible, or that everything is possible is God.₁₉

Returning to the last chapter of The Concept of Anxiety:

But for an individual to be formed thus absolutely and infinitely by possibility, that individual must be honest toward possibility and have faith.₂₀

Here we see that possibility itself is determinate upon what Kierkegaard terms “the God-relation.” The Moment or Instant that Heidegger critiques is extremely important, because as Heidegger comments:

Time as within time-ness knows only the now, but never a moment. But if the moment is experienced existentially, a more primordial temporality is presupposed₂₁

The moment is then not temporality as Heidegger attempts to conceive it, but a rupture of the Infinite into the finite. This rupture with the finite and with the temporal is explained by not nullity, but the radical and immanent grace of God. This weighs heavily on Heidegger as he assesses his own debt to Kierkegaard.

From here on Heidegger remains circumspect about the influence Kierkegaard had on his work. He dramatically abandons his earlier notions of: angst, guilt, conscience, and other Kierkegaardian-isms, all of which he now considers too Christian in their orientation.

It is important to return to Kierkegaardian notion of time’s “rupture” in the “event” not only because these are conceptually important as notions within Heidegger’s later work, but also because the Instant is the disclosure of being beyond publicness. Heidegger perceives at this point, that death, and care, as relations to nullity have very little grounding to posit the kind of openness necessary for a rupture with average everydayness. John D. Caputo writes in his essay Heidegger and Theology: Kiekegaard had said a century earlier, the discovery of time and history was Judeo-Christian one. . . Heidegger had baldly appropriated the kairological—the kairos, the appointed time, the “moment” of truth and decision in Being and Time—and kerygmatic conceptions of human existence that he had learned from Christianity in the first  place and that were quite alien to the Greeks.₂₂

Heidegger had written as early as 1922: “I do not behave religiously in philosophizing. . . Philosophy, in its radical self- positing questionability, must be in principle a-theistic.”₂₃

How all this relates to problem of the will is that Heidegger conceives at this point that his underpinnings for the possibility of possibility are not acceptable in Being and Time, especially if they involve a God-relational ontology. For Kierkegaard, Luther, St. Augustine and St. Paul the Moment/Instant of rupture in time IS –ex-ists– out the presence of God (esp. as immanent grace).

Heidegger’s whole notion of the Self as possibility he now believes has to be revised. Yet, many of the most pivotal sections of Being and Time hinge on the possibility of authenticity.

After all, Heidegger’s philosophy is itself an exploration of the possibilities of being i.e. the possibility of possibility.

Throughout Being and Time Heidegger generally avoids using the word will, and prefers instead Entschlossenheit, which is sometimes translated “holding-fast” or “standing firm.” In John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation Entschlossenheit is translated “resoluteness” and works as Heidegger’s substitute for Willens or “will” whose various philosophical associations (esp. to Kant) he wishes to avoid. But later, in Introduction to Metaphysics he makes the relation explicit writing: “To will is to be resolute. The essence of willing is traced back here to open resoluteness (Entschlossenheit)”₂₄ This resoluteness, or will, is constitutively essential for Dasein’s possibility of authentic disclosure.

Existentially, ‘Self-constancy’ signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. The ontological structure of such resoluteness reveals the existentiality of the Self’s Selfhood. Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness.₂₅

Will or resoluteness within Dasien is thus pivotal in terms of the possibility of there existing a moment in which disclosure discloses being as possibility—or there to be a rupture, or manifestation of being’s possibility.

It is essential to remember the relation employed by Heidegger here between Entschlossenheit and Erschlossenheit since resoluteness also contains the character of being-open disclosing and clearing for itself, and is therefore is often rendered “resolute openness.” Dieter Thoma comments:

The new spelling as resolute openness Ent-schlossenheit makes it clear that it is supposed to be a matter of an unlocking of oneself, and thus a “self-opening” or “keeping- open”. . . this was understood in Being and Time as a being- open for oneself, for one’s own Being.₂₆

The issue then of both will and possible disclosure are linked within the ability of Dasein to resolve—in the sustaining of the moment of revelation. Will itself then, makes possible the possibility of “openness.” This becomes hugely problematic for Heidegger, and he comes to see his attempts at ontology during the Being and Time era as “too subjective.”

In 1927, the year Being and Time is published, Heidegger gave the lecture course: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which shows Heidegger’s “turn” from phenomenology. We witness Heidegger’s concern that Being and Time was “too subjective” in its orientation, and that radical questions of ontology where not adequately explored in it from the point of view of Dasien.

The being of the subject must be determined as an entrance into the problems of philosophy, and in fact in such a way that orientation toward it is not one-sidedly subjectivistic. Philosophy must perhaps start from the ‘subject’ and return to the ‘subject’ in its ultimate questions, and yet for all that it may not pose its questions in a one-sidedly subjectivistic manner.₂₇

In 1929 Heidegger publishes Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and simultaneously begins his lectures on German Idealism—often referred to as the “Fichte Lectures.” During this era from 1929-1936 Heidegger writes and gives lectures on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. With the first two thinkers, he struggles with problems inherent when considering will from the point of view of the subject, and in with Hegel and Schelling, the problems faced when considering the will from an “outside” or from a more metaphysical preview.

Heidegger’s encounter with Kant in: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics contains more problems than I could possible detail here, but I want to bring out what I take to be a couple of important reference points in the text. The first involves what Heidegger refers to as Transcendental Schematism—which he clearly considers to be a problem.

The formation of the schema [Schemabildung] is the making sensible of concepts. How is the look of the immediately represented being related to what is represented of it in the concepts? In what sense is this look an “image” of the concept? . . . the content of the empirical look is given as one from among many, i.e., as isolated within what is thematically represented as such. The particular has dismissed the possibility of being just anything. . . it is a possible example of the one which regulates the possibility of being just anything as such that applies to many. In this  regulation, however, the universal has its own specific, clear determinacy. . . dissolving “anything and everything” in contrast to what has been isolated. . . no uniqueness can be demanded.₂₈

The schema-forming making-sensible has as its purpose to procure an image for the concept. . . The pure concepts of the understanding, which were thought in the pure “I think,” require an essentially pure discernibility if in fact that which stands-against in the pure letting-stand-against
is to be capable of being perceivable as a Being-in- opposition. The pure concepts must be grounded in pure schemata, which procure an image for them. Now, Kant expressly says, however: ‘On the other hand, the schema of a pure concept of the understanding is something which can never be reduced to any image whatsoever’ However, if it belongs to the essence of a schema that is to be brought into an image, then the expression “image” in the preceding sentence can only mean a specific kind of image to the exclusion of others.₂₉

As ‘pure image,’ time is the schema-image and not just the form of intuition which stands over and against the pure concepts of the understanding. Hence the schema of notions has a character of its own. As schema in general it represents unities, representing them as rules which impart themselves to a possible look. Now according to the Transcendental Deduction, the unities represented in the notions refer essentially and necessarily to time. The schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, therefore, must necessarily regulate these internally in time. . . Different times are but parts of one and the same time. The representation which can only be given through a unique object, however, is intuition. Hence time is not only the necessary pure image of the schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding, but also their sole, pure possibility of having a certain look. This unique possibility of having a certain look shows itself in itself to be nothing other than always just time and the temporal.₃₀

The possibility of experience, then, is that which a priori give objective reality to all our cognitions. . . in order for an object to be able to give itself, there must in advance already be a turning-toward such an occurrence, which is capable of being ‘summoned.’. . . This turning-one’s- attention-toward. . . is the condition for the possibility of experiencing.₃₁

This critique of Kant is multifaceted, but what I take to be essential is that Heidegger intuits that Kant’s Transcendental Schematism fails the account for two aspects of philosophical concern 1) the being of possibility, and 2) the manifestation of the being of possibility. Heidegger’s growing concern of the “event” the rupture of being as “occurant” into the being or pure possibility. From the point of view of the subject what makes possibility manifest in time? Kant’s mentalistic and conceptual picture of time as “schematism” avoid the way in which Heidegger has already considered time in his earlier work—which is time as care-driven and care-related temporality. That is being-in-the-world is not an experienced “schematism” which has its “measure” like clock-time; but our being as Dasein is experienced as care-orientated time. We don’t experience time as the measure of seconds, the measure of hours or days/months, but as concernful orientation. And yet death itself cannot give us measure either, since we do not know when death occurs. Heidegger is critiquing a cognitive “schematism” of time. If the being of possibility is to be manifest existentially, it must be so in time, but he conceives of Kant’s epistemology as too narrow to provide the “event,” (or the Instant in Kierkegaard’s terminology). That is, what accounts for one instant standing out; receiving emphasis over each and every other in an infinite series?

It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer had already covered much of this territory in his appendix to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation. In it Schopenhauer takes Kant to task for making perception too mentalistic. Schopenhauer’s overall claim is that we experience perception as having preferentiality and that a purely concept driven epistemology cannot account for why some objects-of-perception are given preference—one over the others, or multiplicity. That is, a schematism picture of perception does not explain why one moment within the sequence of time receives emphasis, or why one tiny image within a vast field-of-perception becomes “highlighted.” We tend to wonder how in the series of infinitely dividable moments an occurrence takes place whereby a singular possibility becomes (in that series) manifest as other— that is, as possibility.

The other aspect I wish to examine briefly from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is Heidegger’s critique of the  imagination’s relation to moral personhood, a critique which Schopenhauer also shares.

The moral I, the authentic self and essence of man, Kant also calls the person. In what does the essence of the personality of the person consist? Personality itself is the ‘idea of the moral law’ along ‘with the respect which is inseparable from it.’ Respect is ‘susceptibility’ to the moral law, i.e., the making-possible of a being-susceptible to this law as a moral one. But if respect constitutes the essence of the person as the moral self, then according to what has already been said it must present a way of Being- self-conscious. To what extent is it such? Can it [respect] function as a way of Being-self-conscious. . . ?₃₂

The same problem arises. How does the moral law, as purely formal maxim, receive “respect”—why would it in its pure conceptional constituents have/contain the “property” or being-respectable? If the person and the authentic self arise out of this original “respect” which makes all authentic being possible from whence does it arrive? If the authentic self must will and will with resolve, what constitutes both the event at the beginning, and the power-of-maintaining through time?

Again, it is hard conceive that Heidegger might not be thinking of Schopenhauer’s essay The Basis of Morality. Since in this essay he deals with these same issues. There are three basic criticisms of Kant 1) that even if it is the case that human beings can formulate a formal maxim that is universal, how does its mentalistic constitution in anyway provide force to it? Essentially, how does one come to find interest in a purely formal aphorism? Since the formulation of a logical maxim (as formal) cannot constitute my resolution to hold to it, especially in the face of vast numbers of other competing possible interests. From where does it receive its emphasis?

Schopenhauer’s second criticism is that even if it is possible to conceive of, and mentally resolve to hold-to this moral principle. This does not show that it is possible to maintain it, especially in the face of various conflagrations of life—bodily, social, mental, and appetitive. To will demands a maintaining, or holding-to which must be able to withstand all internal and external tests of time and conflicting force. What Schopenhauer, I think, rightly perceives is that there is a whole gradation problem, both in the emphasis required from the “apparentness” of the categorical imperative in the first place, and the finally a graduation problem when it comes to “resoluteness,” to borrow Heidegger’s term. Kant either never sees this problem, or chooses to ignore it. To resolve both Schopenhauer and Heidegger understand, means the ability to maintain the position of emphasis moment to moment—instant to instant–– with a degree of force that keeps it from being usurped by the endless multiplicity of other competing possibilities. Possibility as possibility requires a force either from within or without to rupture through the “play” of other forces.

Schopenhauer’s final criticism (which again mirrors Heidegger’s own criticisms in the final part of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) is 3) that Kant’s entire foundation for freedom as “autonomy of the will” is ultimately grounded in a theology of the soul as a thinking substance independent of the forces of nature. I do not have the time to examine the specifics of those arguments, but it is important to note the profound emphasis these arguments will have on Nietzsche. These two thinkers will both contribute greatly to Heidegger’s own rejection of onto- theology.

The lectures which Heidegger gave the same year of the publications of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics—the so called “Fichte Lectures,” show Heidegger’s concern that formulating the will from the point of view of subject—as Fichte and Kant do–– is fraught with difficulties. Heidegger now turns toward Hegel and Schelling in order to consider will and the possibility of the event from a more metaphysical distance.

In the lecture given in 1936: Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom Heidegger explores several definitions of, one being: “Freedom as the self-starting of a series of events which needs no foundation.”₃₃ Heidegger writes: Thus, Being in general means in and for itself, Being with itself willing oneself, willing as such. Schelling says ‘In the final and highest instance, there is no other Being than Will.₃₄

Freedom is will. Thus, Being is originally willing. ‘The Will is primal being.’ But at the same time, a limitation becomes apparent here. In that freedom becomes the general determination of all beings. . . Thus, the question arises about human freedom.₃₅

In the central part of the treatise on human freedom, Schelling must deal namely with the question of what man is in the relation to beings as a whole. . . Schelling says. . . ‘Man’s will is the seed—concealed in eternal longing––– of God, present as yet only in the depths–– the divine light of life locked in the depths which God divined when he determined to will nature.’ To understand this passage means to comprehend the whole treatise.₃₆

The animal never gets out of the unity of its determined stage of nature. Even where an animal is ‘cunning,’ this cunning remains limited to a quite definite path, within quite definite path. . . But man is that being who can turn his own essential constituency around, turn the jointure of Being of his existence into dis-jointure. He stands in the jointure of his Being in such a way that he disposes over this jointure and its joining in a quite definite way. Thus, the dubious advantage is reserved for man of sinking beneath the animal. . . the ground of evil lies in the primal will of the first ground which has become revealed. Evil has its ground in the ground independent of God.₃₇

Accordingly, he equates evil with sin. But ‘sin’ can be defined theologically only within Christian dogmatic philosophy. ‘Sin’ has meaning and truth only in the realm of Christian faith and its grace. . . [he] orients the whole question of evil fundamentally to Christian dogmatics. . . This direction of thinking, however, characterizes not only Schelling’s treatise on freedom, but his whole philosophy,  and not only his, but German Idealism, especially that of Hegel.₃₈

Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling leads him to the conclusion that Schelling’s notion of will is onto-theology. The will is manifest as a God-relation, in this case not “subjectively,” as it was given in Kierkegaard, but metaphysically. Both Schelling and Hegel are guilty, in Heidegger’s view, of scuttling the issue of will rather than resolving it, by the use theological- metaphysical underpinnings. Daniel Dahlstrom comments in his essay Heidegger and German Idealism:

Heidegger’s aim in portraying Hegel’s (and later Schelling’s) thinking as onto-theo-ology is to demonstrate how the basic question of philosophy gets sidetracked by the leading question of metaphysics. Onto-theo- logy is thus another way in which Heidegger marks the crossroads at which he stands with Hegel. For Heidegger, the basic question is the question of the sense of being and the answer, at least in part, lies in time.₃₉

Heidegger contends that what is decisive but unthought in Hegel’s argument is the clearing in which entities come to light, a clearing that is not itself explicable by or grounded in any entity, and, indeed, is not any entity at all. This clearing is. . . the event.₄₀

The event must be a rupture in time, it must come about as a presencing which takes emphasis over the multiplicity as other, it must have force to be made manifest. However, the question remains about where the emphasis of force is to reside. In the subject? Or from the world-historical? From whence does this spontaneity in time arise? Heidegger’s reading of Hegel seems to have given rise to the same problem he met with in Schelling. The philosophy of Spirit (by Heidegger’s reading) leaves the constitution of the will within the dialectic of Spirit; Spirit is consciousness coming to itself. Heidegger considers this ontology one still under the western en-framing of onto- theology, and one, after reading Kierkegaard, excluded from the problem of individual willing. The question remains: from  where does the force of will arrive? If Kierkegaard’s notion of the Instant was not satisfying for Heidegger, neither entirely is Hegel’s or Schelling’s. How would the predicates, of the world- historical, as predicates, constitute a rupture in the absence of any particular individual’s acquiescing to the Moment? But Heidegger is certainly closer to Hegel in his later writings than he is to Kierkegaard. He moves away from the emphasizing the individual’s “striving” and begins to conceptualize the event in terms of the possibilities of language and “dwelling.” For example, in The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger expressly reverses his earlier position in Being and Time.

Knowing that remains a willing, and willing that remains a knowing, is the existing human being’s entrance into and compliance with the unconcealedness of Being. The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of the subject, but the opening up of the human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of Being. However, in existence, man does not proceed from some inside to some outside; rather, the nature of Existenz is out-standing standing-with the essential sunderance of the clearing of beings. Neither in the creation mentioned before nor in the willing mentioned now do we think of the performance of act of a subject striving toward himself as his self-set goal.₄₁

This tendency in the late Heidegger—especially within the French appropriation certainly leads on the path toward the postmodern “death of the subject.” Although the Cartesian subject may have deserved its demise. The death of the subject in-total is rather an absurd hypothesis. To assume that the subject has no contribution of will, and subsists only as a painted marionette for history and bio-power, seems to contradict history itself, and even our most basic experiences. The will may be diminished, as compared to Kant or Descartes, but this does not signify the total absence of the contribution of individual will. The outcome in hyperbole of such views are typified in the philosophy of Alain Badiou, who states:

For Heidegger, ‘Dasein’—and, ultimately, ‘existence’—is the name for ‘human reality’, the historical destiny of thought and the crucial, creative experience of the becoming of being itself. I am going to propose, on the other hand, a concept of being-there and of existence without making the slightest reference to anything like consciousness, experience, or human reality. . . ‘Existence’ is not a specific predicate of the human animal.₄₂

Both the event and its appearance, for Badiou, having nothing to do with human beings at all. Human beings are only incorporated into “truth-procedures.” Being’s emphasis belongs not to the subject, but their subjugation into the mathematical/ logical appearing. The Cartesian or Kantian subject may have certainly had its western onto-theological underpinnings, whose roots needed to be cut, or augmented, but the farcical notion of philosophizing from the mathematical/logical “view from nowhere” is equaling or more preponderantly absurd!

Heidegger’s abandonment of both the subject, and of the will, as conceptualized within the western tradition, reaches its summation, I think, in his encounter with Friedrich Nietzsche 1936-1940. At the end of writing four volumes, Heidegger can neither imbibe Nietzsche drives theory of the will, (which involves biologism—he thinks), or accept Nietzsche’s conception of being as will-to-power. Ultimately writing in the final volume:

As an ontology, even Nietzsche’s metaphysics is at the same time theology. . . The ontology of beings as such thinks essentia as will to power. . . Such metaphysical theology is of course a negative theology of a peculiar kind. Its negativity is revealed in the expression ‘God is dead.’ That is an expression not of atheism but of ontotheology.₄₃

Thus, the notion of will itself, never escapes, in Heidegger’s estimation, the problems of ontotheology—even in Nietzsche! In the final volume and final lecture entitled: Nihilism and the History of Being Heidegger writes:  Even if the essence of willing which is thought here is obscure in many respects, perhaps even necessarily obscure, we can see that, from the metaphysics of Schelling and Hegel, back beyond Kant and Leibniz to Descartes, the being as such is at bottom experienced as will. Of course, that does not mean that the subjective experience of human will is transposed onto beings as a whole. Rather, it indicates the very reverse, that man first comes to know himself as a willing subject in an essential sense on the basis of a still unelucidated experience of beings as such in the sense of a willing that has yet to be thought. . . Those connections cannot be explained here, however.. . What was said about nihilism proper in describing Nietzsche’s metaphysics. . . that the ground of nihilism proper is neither the metaphysics of will to power nor the metaphysics of will, but simply metaphysics itself. . . The essence of nihilism is historically as metaphysics, and the metaphysics of Plato is no less nihilistic than that of Nietzsche. In the former, the essence of nihilism is merely concealed; in the latter, it comes completely to appearance. Nonetheless, it never shows its true face, either on the basis of or within metaphysics. These are disturbing statements. For metaphysics determines the history of the Western era. Western humankind, in all its relations with beings, and even to itself, is in every respect sustained and guided by metaphysics. In the equation of metaphysics and nihilism one does not know which is greater—the arbitrariness, or degree of condemnation of our entire history heretofore. . .If metaphysics as such is nihilism. . . is incapable of thinking its own essence, how could metaphysics itself ever encounter its own essence?₄₄

If we recall that the problem of nihilism for Nietzsche constitutes a problem of values i.e. that “the highest of all values are now de-valuing themselves” then the problem of will is central. What shall I will as having value? What is the ultra- reality of valuing a value?

If predicates of themselves cannot constitute value, and formal qualities of an axiom cannot yield it (Schophenhauer’s critique of Kant), if Spirit (Hegel), primal Will (Schelling), and even will-to-power (Nietzsche) are all onto-theology, how should we constitute the possibility of will? What is the openness, or event, by which an individual, or an entire culture, appropriates a metaphysics. . . Is willing possible?

Perhaps today, more than ever, we feel our in ability to will; our inability to hold to a resolve. Our problem today is not reducible to en-framing or cybernetics. We face the problem of pure multiplicity. It is not simply that a “rational choice” will yield our resolve—the profound profusion of meanings in the age of globalization, digitalization, and hyper-consumerism swamps us. In the age of the Anthropocene we wonder about our own extinction. The “nullity” stands out in front of us. In an age when it seems most necessary to will one thing,—can we will at all?

Endnotes

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univeristy of New York Press, 1996), 181
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 465.
3. Ibid, 143.
4. Ibid, 216.
5. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, 229.
6. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 17.
7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 155.
8. Ibid, 381.
9. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 262.
10. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, 308.
11. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 325.
12. Ibid, 335.
13. 13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univeristy of New York Press, 1996), 404-405
14. Ibid, 407.
15. Ibid, 412-413.
16. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2014), 188.
17. Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 43.
18. Ibid, 46.
19. Ibid, 71
20. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2014), 189.
21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univeristy of New York Press, 1996), 413.
22. Charles Guigon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 336.
23. Ibid, 334.
24. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 22.
25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 369.
26. Richard Polt, ed., Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 223.
27. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 155.
28. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 68-69.
29. Ibid, 71 (my italics)
30. bid, 73-74.
31. Ibid, 83.
32. 32 Ibid, 110.
33. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press), 83.
34. Ibid, 95.
35. Ibid, 99.
36. Ibid, 53.
37. Ibid, 144.
38. Ibid, 145-146.
39. Herbert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, ed., A Companion to Heidegger (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 77.
40. Ibid, 77.
41. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 65.
42. Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto For Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Malden: Polity Press, 2009), 44.
43. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volumes Three and Four, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harpercollins, 1987), 210.
44. Ibid, 205-206.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Second Manifesto For Philosophy. Translated by Louise Burchill. Malden: Polity Press, 2009.

Dreyfus, Hubert, and Mark Wrathall, ed. A Companion to Heidegger. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Guigon, Charles, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstader. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche Volumes Three and Four. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harpercollins, 1987.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstader. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Heidegger, Martin. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Polt, Richard, ed. Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

Nature, Otherness and the Death-Drive or the European Destruction of “Paradise”₁

Michel Valentin, PhD

Preface: Allegory of the New World

Amerigo Vespucci awakens the sleeping America

(Replica by Theodor Galle after Johannes Stradanus)
—United States Public Domain₂

Introduction

Two main issues negatively affect the study of past colonial events.The first one is problematized by Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History when he privileges materialist history over positive or evolutionary history because the latter tends to offer a closed, homogeneous, linear perspective of history as well as an overall belief in a continuous positive, development of civilization glorifying the “winning side” of history, while ignoring its “losing side.” He emphasizes the fact that, contrary to history’s positive evolutionism, historical materialism cannot help to notice that:

“Without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (Thesis VII)

He also shows that the past contains the future, that any important historical, genuine event also carries a latent yearning for redemption. The crimes of past events, even if repressed (not acknowledged, legitimated or forgiven) imply their resurgence/re-emergence in the present, albeit as guilt or unsettled debt, in symptomatic or traumatic forms. History is a text writing/narrating itself. It receives its signification retroactively via its readership. As for an individual, the past of a culture or civilization is filled out with the present which fits with the Freudian notion that the unconscious is located outside of time. Here the collective unconscious and the individual unconscious run on parallel tracks.

Slavoj Zizek adds:

“With Benjamin, in contrast, the ‘perspective of the Last Judgment’ is the perspective of those who have paid the price for a series of great historical triumphs; the perspective of those who had to fail, to miss their aim, so that the series of great historical deeds could be accomplished; the perspectives of hopes deceived, of all that have left in the text of history nothing but scattered, anonymous, meaningless traces on the margin of deeds whose ‘historical greatness’ was attested to by the ‘objective’ gaze of official history.”₃

The second problematic issue is the Western obsession of separating history from anthropology, i.e. the study of the conditions of change and evolution of civilizations characterized by speed, from the study of static, conservative, native societies (“the people without history”) characterized by repetition.₄ Lévi-Strauss’s use of the expression “people without writing” in Totemism or The Savage Mind meant to avoid this epistemic mistake by showing that so-called “primitive people” are capable of disinterested and intellectual thinking in ways similar to a Western philosopher or scientist.

So with this in mind, let us look at the different ways the “winning side of history” narrates the “losing side;” i.e. what miscellaneous explorers, historians, or authors have written about the destruction of what many called “paradise,” about  the spoliation and destruction of “those who were here first.” ₅We will focus especially on the destruction of Hawai’i. Using tools borrowed from psychoanalysis and phenomenology (especially the concepts of abjection linked to “otherness” and jouissance) we will try to understand the causes of this annihilation. We will also refuse to hypostatize or essentialize violence as such, by considering it as a relational concept and a utilitarian tool of domination.

The Western and Abrahamic Notions of Paradise

Paradise denotes a place of timeless harmony. The Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, or the perfect state of the world prior to the “fall from grace,” that will be restored in the “World to Come,” accessible after death if one is among the “happy blessed ones.”

The word “paradise” comes from an Old Iranian word “*paridayda” (“walled enclosure”), that the Greeks modified into paradeisos (“enclosed park”). In Hellenistic Greek, “paradeisos” (??????????), was also used in the Septuagint. ₆These meanings of “paradeisos” entered into Late Latin as “paradisus,” then into French and Anglo-French, and later, Middle English, as “paradis.” Though originally used in theological senses in English, “paradise” also referred to more earthly states and places of delight as well.

In Islam, Firdaus (Arabic: ?????) is the literal term meaning paradise, but the Quran generally uses the term Jannah symbolically referring to paradise. However “Firdaus” also designates the highest layer of heaven. Often compared to the Christian concept of Heaven, Jannah (Arabic
Jannah; plural Jannat)—literally meaning “garden,” is the mythological final abode of the righteous and the Islamic believers, and the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Hawwa lived.

There are Abrahamic ambiguities tied to paradise’s “timeless non-space,” since it refers both to a “here and now” on earth  as well as to a “beyond in after-life.” It also refers to the eternal dwelling place for the righteous’ souls as well as the place of resurrection of bodies. These ambiguities are reflected in the fact that many European explorers perceived “paradise” to be of this world, i.e. on earth.

Caught between the dystopia of real life and the utopia of Imaginary solutions—what was known in Medieval times as “le merveilleux”, a Western myth, incarnating the contradictions inherent to Semitic civilizations, was invented a posteriori to explain the origins (or lack thereof) of man and woman. Paradise belongs in an everlasting present located in another realm, called “the beyond”, although many in Medieval Europe thought its location to be earth-bound as the travel-log book of Christopher Columbus’s Third Voyage shows.₇ So it should not be surprising to see many European travelers describe the lands and islands upon which they happen to stumble, as being paradise on earth.

In 1445 the Portuguese navigator Dinís Dias reached the mouth

of the Sénégal, which “men say comes from the Nile, being one of the most glorious rivers of Earth, flowing from the Garden of Eden and the earthly paradise.”₈

For Christopher Columbus, the South American landmass was not a “fourth” continent, or an unknown part of the world, but rather a land already “known” by Christendom whose location was until now undiscovered: the terrestrial paradise of Biblical tradition. In another letter (to Prince John’s nurse, written in 1500),₉Columbus refers to having reached a “nuevo cielo e mundo” (“new heavens and world”) and that he had placed “otro mundo” (“another world”) under the dominion of the Kings of Spain:

“I have found a continent in that southern part; full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us.”₁₀

In the log-book of his Third Voyage (1498-1500), he writes:

“Holy scriptures testifies that Our Lord made the earthly Paradise in which he placed the Tree of Life. From it there flowed four main rivers: the Ganges in India, the Tigris and the Euphrates in Asia, which cut through a mountain range and form Mesopotamia and flow into Persia, and the Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows into the sea at Alexandria.

I do not find and have never found any Greek or Latin writings which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise, nor have I seen any world map which establishes its position except by deduction. Some place it at the source of the Nile in Ethiopia… Not that I believe it possible to sail to the extreme summit or that it is covered by water, or that it is even possible to go there.

For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God’s leave… I do not hold that the earthly Paradise has the form of a rugged mountain, as it is shown in pictures, but that it lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear, and that by gradually approaching it one begins, while still at a great distance, to climb towards it… All these provide great evidence of the earthly Paradise… If this river does not flow out of the earthly Paradise, the marvel is still greater… All these islands produce precious things, because of the mild climate which comes to them from heaven and because of their proximity to the highest point of the earth… I am firmly convinced that the earthly Paradise truly lies here…”₁₁

What is also interesting is that Columbus had discovered that the earth is not a perfect round sphere:

“I was greatly surprised by this behavior of the Pole Star and spent many nights making careful observations with the quadrant, but found that the plumb line always fell at the same point. I regard this as a new discovery, and it may be established that here the heavens undergo a great change in a brief space.

I have always read that the world of land and sea is spherical… I have found such great irregularities that I have come to the following conclusions concerning the world: that it is not round as they describe it, but the shape of a pear, which is round everywhere except at the stalk, where it juts out a long way; or that it is like a round ball, on part of which is something like a woman’s nipple. This point on which the protuberance stands is the highest and nearest to the sky… The other hemisphere resembles the half of a round pear with a raised stalk…, like a woman’s nipple on a round ball.”_{12 13}

The discovery of what European explorers named “paradise” alternates between desire and hatred, adulation and perversion. For many, it is as if the jouissance contained in this “paradise on earth,” exemplified by the mode of life of its native, naked, innocent inhabitants, was unbearable to them—which may explain the rape-destruction of this paradise. The texts of Montaigne, Blake, Melville, Stevenson, London and Slavoj Zizek illustrate this peculiar and paradoxical reaction as far as the “Hawaiian paradise” is concerned.₁₄

Radical Alterity

At the end of the 15th century and during the 16th century, European voyagers and explorers encountered a radical alterity,

which produced an epistemological rift (to use a Foucauldian term borrowed from his archeological/ genealogical method) and gave rise to the invention of a new “otherness’ in the Western psyche.

This invention draws our attention to the ontological topology built by the West between civilized society and non-civilized society behind which lurks wilderness, between its policed inside and its lawless outside, between the human and its nonhuman other. How does the former ban, defeat, abandon, or legitimate, domesticate, territorialize the later? More fundamentally, what does the encounter with ontological otherness bring to the notion of “the human”?

Followed by merchants and colonizers, whom William Blake will call men of “mechanical talent” in search of slaves and commodities (which the same Blake will call “allegoric riches”), Europe exploited this alterity to death (102,103). ₁₅Blake, here, is the precursor (albeit in poetical form) of Weber’s critique of instrumental reason, with his theory of rationalization, and Horkheimer and Adorno (of the Frankfurt School), with their theorizing of the world-historical processes of reification. That is to say, natives of all places will pay an extraordinary tribute to European instrumental rationality or the cognitive-instrumental relation between subject and object (what is usually called “modernization and progress”). European technical know-how and scientific discoveries only made the discourse of power and knowledge more efficient, implacable, and global. These were put at the service of a colonization with one goal: to extract the maximum gold, silver, and raw products necessary to maximize the surplus-value of the whole “Columbian exchange,” (phrase coined by the historian Alfred Crosby, describing the interchange of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the Americas following Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean in 1492). This transfer and accumulation process will help Western Europe jump-start the capitalist and industrial revolution of the end of the 17th century and 18th century.

From the start, Columbus is clear. He is obsessed with finding gold using Indians as free labor:

“The captain who went to Cibao found gold in so many

places that no one dared to guess the number… they found it in more than fifty streams and rivers, and on dry land also…. Our sovereigns therefore can certainly consider themselves henceforth the richest and most prosperous on earth, for nothing comparable has [[ever]] been seen or read of till now in the whole world. .. the ships… will be able to carry away such quantities of gold that anyone who hears of it will be amazed…”

“The Indians returned to their obedience and again served the Christians, and goldfields were discovered in such plenty that everyone resigned the royal service and set up on his own account, industriously extracting gold, a third part of which was given to the Crown…, one man extracted, in a single day, five marks of fair-sized gold grains, and among them was one worth more than 196 ducats. The Indians were very docile and much afraid of the Admiral. So anxious were they to please him that, to oblige him, they voluntarily became Christians, and if an Indian chief had to appear before him he endeavoured to come clothed.”₁₆

This reduction of the other was also, although later, accompanied by an ontological de-centering which dislocated European culture, drove it away from its locus, and forced it to stop considering itself as the culture of reference, as Derrida mentions while criticizing structuralism in Writing and Difference. From Montaigne’s Of Cannibals (the first anthropological text) in the Essays, and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Bases of Inequality Among Men, to 19th century writers such as Melville and Stevenson, and later, theoreticians such as Sigmund Freud with his Totem and Taboo, and Lévi- Strauss with his Mythologiques, which form the basic texts of structural anthropology, the best among Western thinkers tried to (re)define and analyze “l’état de nature” (“the state of nature”),₁₇ the savage as “the child [who]is father to the man” as A.A. Brill explains in his Preface to Totem and Taboo,₁₈ and the notion of taboo (“holy dread”, as “uncanny, dangerous, forbidden and unclean” supplement) which forms the disturbing kernel of any culture.₁₉ These philosophers, writers and anthropologists all bear witness to the obfuscated presence of an image mirroring the existence of a dark dimension amidst the heart of our own civilization, gnawing at its underbelly. Through this interplaying reflective subject/object image, be it the Oriental civilized or Persian (i.e., the bizarre)₂₀ or the “Noble Sauvage” (the innocent wild man), it is our own image which is reflected, but in an obverse fashion, showing the negative side of our “civilized nature”. Let us not forget that, as the French playwright Antonin Artaud reminds us ironically,₂₁ in Asia whiteness is the color of death.

After having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands (named in 1595 for Peru’s Viceroy) and sojourning among the Typee cannibals in 1842, hence the title of his novel, Melville wrote:

“The term “savage” is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the islands in a similar capacity.” (145,146)

Melville carries on:

“But the continual happiness, which so far as I was able to judge appeared to prevail in the valley, sprung principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at one time experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence” (147, 148)

The discovery, by Europe, of totally different “others” with radically opposite (and seductive) modes of existence came as an “initial surprise” to quote Michel de Certeau.₂₂ Consequently, Europeans apprehended these “savage others” as something belonging to a different “human reality.” But, to make matters worse, concepts inherited from the Medieval period, aggravated “natives’ ontological lack” (or “soulessness”) in the European mind. Timothy Reiss remarks in The Discourse of Modernism that the notions of “person” and “self”, of “will” and “intention,” “are utterly different from what will be found by the time of the Renaissance…”, and “anything like discursive control of the ‘other,’ whether an event in the world, as object or person, or as concept humanly originated, could simply not be enunciated” (72). Pushing further what Reiss writes about the theorization of modern subjectivity and sovereignty, these concepts will have to await the end of the Renaissance (with Montaigne and the “Valladolid question”),₂₃ and later the Enlightenment period, before they produce a significant, critical, discursive dimension.

The concept of “other” is itself the result of a confusion in French between the Latin alius and alter (with the consequence that alius is the alien (as other of/in me) while the alter ego (present in the French language around 1838) is not the other in/of me but a second me (as proof of the collusion between identity and self-presence). The misrecognition, conceptual impossibility, and religious predetermination of what the other meant, explain (while, of course not justifying), the European genocide of the other. The other is in the subject, more than the subject itself, in ways unknown to the subject.

Ever since those genocidal centuries, Western conceptual thought and consciousness, pricked by guilt and haunted by the massacres it perpetrated, strained to turn the negative reality of its history into a redeeming positivity by forging the intellectual and philosophical tools of a universal liberationist discourse. Of course, modern anthropology scrutinized its object differently from previous discursive practices, but to which use could this new knowledge be put, since it was too late? We now know that we have destroyed a whole humanity and whole ways of being that could have made the total difference in the contemporary predicament our postmodern societies find themselves, as Montaigne indicates. Could we still venture to say that the “Noble Savage” did not die for nothing, since an ethics, a psychology, and a philosophy developed out of his sacrifice, for our own good? Most discoveries in history are destructive for the discovered.

Later, the structuralist anthropologist Lévi-Strauss affirmed in Race and History that anthropology, as the knowledge of conquered savage societies since the XVIth century, is “une entreprise, renouvelant et expiant la Renaissance, pour étendre l’humanisme à la mesure de l’humanité”—“an expiatory enterprise renewing the Renaissance by extending humanism to the measure of the whole of humanity”(24).

Paradise

The destruction of the other is harder to understand when we realize that the locus of the other was often described as idyllic or paradise-like. What could have corresponded with the notion of Paradise did exist not too long ago in the South Seas, the Central Pacific and the West Indies, and even the Americas.₂₄

But as soon as Paradise was acquired, it was destroyed; and, as we know, there is no Paradise regained, except, perhaps as recovery of a historical perspective as Milton’s Paradise Lost exemplifies.

As a product of Near- and Middle-Eastern geo-cultures and mythologies, Western monotheism conveys a millennial sense of tragic doom and foreboding disaster, with its inherent and constitutive brand of imperialism and Sado-Masochism allied to the idea of a god’s chosen people, as Freud explains in Civilization and its Discontent: “the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence”(89). As such, it was based on a peculiar apocalyptic dimension already well-anchored in Semitic civilizations.

But these doom-based religions have nothing to do with the experience, mentalities, and sensitivities of South and Middle Pacific islanders, the West Indies and other “paradisiacal” islands. When first discovered by Europeans, Polynesians seemed to offer images of a humanity in its infancy, as writes the anthropologist Alfred Métraux in L’Ile de Pâques. During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the Maoris and other Polynesian groups were known in the West for leading a free and joyous life whose bliss Westerners as diverse as the American writer Melville, the French artist Paul Gaugin (ex commodity trader) and the anthropologist Victor Segalen tried to re-capture, emulate or analyze. For them, the Bible had it wrong all along with its notion of original sin. Even mixed- discourses, meaning those discourses (Foucauldian meaning) by white men who, after having “gone native” and enjoying and profiting from the style of life, sexual largesse and tolerance of indigenous cultures, still dared to blatantly display a dismissive attitude of superiority towards natives (racism), strangely betrayed a dimension of awe and respect towards Pacific islanders’ culture—as for instance, the (partly autobiographical) novels of Pierre Loti (a name bestowed to him by Tahitians); or the novels of Joseph Conrad-although Conrad never lived among natives as such. That is to say that they both inscribe themselves within a certain ambiguity, the ambiguity of desire towards the other, which Saïd doesn’t recognize as such in his famous and seminal treatise Orientalism, meaning that he only focused on Western desire’s negative side. From Melville to Mark Twain, to James Michener’s Return to Paradise (1951), American writers were among the first to recognize that paradise existed in Hawai’ian or Tahitian waters.

What is harder to understand is the Western reaction to the discovery of Paradise in spite of what Stéphane Yerasimos masterfully explains in his Introduction to Marco Polo: Le devisement du monde:

“Dans la vision du monde le merveilleux perçu en tant que réel laissera sa place au réel perçu en tant que merveilleux C’est pour réaliser ce merveilleux que partiront les grands explorateurs du XVe siècle et leurs successeurs. Le réaliser, c’est-à-dire le matérialiser, le convertir en richesses à piller, en main-d’oeuvre à asservir. La vision apocalyptique de l’inconnu reculera avec les limites du merveilleux débité en colonies, protectorats et autres zones d’influence. L’apocalypse, la proclamation du bonheur sur terre, à atteindre par l’anéantissement ou l’asservissement de l’Autre, l’inconnu, l’infidèle, ne seront plus pour demain, elles s’installeront dans le quotidien.”—“In the [new] world vision, the [medieval] real of the wonderful will mutate into the wonder of reality… It is to actualize the wonder of reality that the famous explorers of the XVth century and their followers will travel. To actualize this wonderful reality, means to concretize it, to transform it into riches to pillage and labor to enslave. Confronted by the expansion of this wonderful reality turned into colonies, protectorates and zones of influence, the [medieval] apocalyptic vision of the unknown will regress. The apocalypse, the proclamation of earthly happiness and its fulfillment via the annihilation or the enslaving of the Other, the stranger or the unbeliever did not wait. They became the daily staple” (32).

The Hawai’ian Paradise

Like any Pacific island glimpsed from far away, over the sea, over the horizon, Oahu offers itself like one of these drinks for which Hawai’i is famous. Topped by green ridges surrounded by yellow, blue, and aquamarine, it comes as a gorgeous spectacle worthy of a dream, a psychedelic mental space, a place of escape from everywhere and everybody, of the type fantasized in Western art (such as Claude Monet’s Nympheas). It emerges  as a Western fantasy, as the arch-place of maternal desires (What German ontology would call an “Ur-platz”), the “true place” that makes Western children, when still unspoiled by our societal mores, cry out: “it’s like paradise!”

Like an “Image of truth new born,” Hawai’i comes up, from where

“Doubt is fled & clouds of reason

Dark disputes & artful teasing” are gone, and where

“Folly…[and] endless maze” are no more—or so William Blake would have written of Hawai’i in his Songs of the Ancient Bard. A Proustian time-space where time appears to have been regained, a utopian time-warp from which fear, mediocrity, disease, and meanness have been banned—the type of place that motivated Gauguin to emigrate to Tahiti, Hawai’i’s sister- archipelago.

The fate of the Polynesian paradise (such as Hawai’i’s for instance) underlines the importance of anthropological thought in the critique of totality.

Melville wrote in Typee:

“In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve—the heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people” (144).

He carries on, in quasi Rousseauistic terms,

“life is little else than an often interrupted luxurious nap. There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that man has created to mar his own felicity. There are no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no debts of honor… no deeds of any descriptions; no assault and battery attorneys… no poor relations everlastingly occupying the spare bed chamber, no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars, no debtors prison; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; to sum it all up in one word—no MONEY” (151,152).

Melville’s text echoes Montaigne’s descriptions:

“It is a nation, would I answer Plato that hath no kind of traffic like, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts,

no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparel but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle” (220).

As well as Mark Twain’s sensations, in one of his speeches:

“No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so lovingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it always remains the same. For its balmy air is always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surf-beat in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumey palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago”(121).

Even, as late as 1906, Jack London wrote in The Cruise of the Snark upon sailing into Honolulu:

“It was the Snark’s first landfall—and such a landfall! For twenty-seven days we had been on the deserted deep, and it was pretty hard to realize that there was so much life in the world. We were made dizzy by it. We could not take it all in at once. We were like awakened Rip Van Winkles, and it seemed to us that we were dreaming. On one side the azure sea lapped across the horizon into the azure sky; on the other side the sea lifted itself into great breakers of emerald that fell in a snowy smother upon a white coral beach. Beyond the beach, green plantations of sugar-cane undulated gently upward to steeper slopes, which, in turn, became jagged volcanic crests, drenched with tropic showers and capped by stupendous masses of trade-wind clouds.

At any rate, it was a most beautiful dream… and then the ocean burst suddenly into life. Flying fish cleaved the air in glittering squadrons. In five minutes we saw more of them than during the whole voyage. Other fish, large ones, of various sorts, leaped into the air. There was life everywhere, on sea and shore… A big school of porpoises got under our bow and began cutting the most ridiculous capers… A big sea turtle broke the surface with his back and took a look at us. Never was there such a burgeoning of life…” (46, 47).

The French anthropologist Victor Segalen tried to recapture not only Gauguin’s Tahiti through his trips and writings, but also the last remnants of a disappearing race under the yoke of European Christian civilization. Segalen was saving the memory of what he considered to be the ex-kingdom of happiness, the place where Westerners could have their private golden age, because, contrary to popular belief, happiness had a history as he writes to his friend Henry Manceron:

“Pendant deux ans en Polynésie, j’ai mal dormi de joie. J’ai eu des réveils à pleurer d’ivresse du jour qui montait J’ai senti de l’allégresse couler dans mes muscles.” (“During two years spent in Polynesia, I couldn’t sleep for joy. I often woke up crying with drunkenness at the dawning day… I felt pleasure run into my muscles.”)₂₅

These paradise-like islands worked for French and European artists and aesthetes (the discontented of civilization)₂₆ as “war machines” against what they felt was European petit-bourgeois mediocracy, neo-Puritanism and utilitarian ugliness. These paradise-islands allow them to escape the boundaries of strict Judeo-Christian morals and political mores and give a freer reign to their rebellious and anti-conformist sense. Following Gauguin’s example, Victor Segalen wrote Les Immémoriaux in order to recreate the Tahitian and Polynesian worlds that corresponded to Segalen’s own golden age period. Gauguin impressed his contemporaries not only through his paintings, but also through his radical life style, as portrayed by Somerset Maugham, for instance, with his novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). For Segalen, Gauguin was a Maître-du-jouir (master of extreme pleasure—title of Segalen’s “joyful drama, written in honor of Gauguin), a high priest of sensual and sexual pleasures, a restorer of ancient myths, opposed to any notion of original sin and narrow Christian morals, in touch with nature and also his quasi-“Nietzschean” super-nature; a combination of human feelings and cosmic forces, as Freud explains in Civilization and its Discontent:

“a feeling of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—-as it were, ‘oceanic’…, the feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (723).

But, here, before succumbing to Gauguin and Segalen’s seductive discourse, we must avoid the “fatal flaw of precipitate historicization”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it in The Ticklish Subject:

“Those who want ‘free sexuality delivered of the Oedipal burden of guilt and anxiety’ proceed in the same way as the worker who wants to survive as a worker without a capitalist; they also fail to take into account the way their own position is ‘mediated’ by the Other. The well-known Mead-Malinowski myth of the free, non-inhibited sexuality reigning in the South Pacific provides an exemplary case of such an ‘abstract negation’; it merely projects into the spatio-historical Other of ‘primitive societies’ the fantasy of a ‘free sexuality’ rooted in our own historical context. In this way, it is not ‘historical’ enough: it remains caught in the co-ordinates of one’s own historical horizon precisely in its attempt to imagine a ‘radical’ Otherness—in short, anti- Oedipus is the ultimate Oedipal myth” (72).

After his journey and sojourn in Polynesia, Segalen (like Gauguin) became violently hostile to Christianity and to Western morality and values. For Segalen, Tahiti was a matrix of joy and beauty, but also a reason to lament because not only was Paradise being destroyed by European colonization, but the natives’ decadence resulting from this destruction was used to mirror the West’s own decadence (e.g., Flaubert with Salammbo through the mirror of Oriental decadence, Victor Segalen with his Immémoriaux—describing the Maoris’ decadence when their language was devalued and desacralized). As Melville pointed out in Typee, Paradise was destroyed:

“…the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual, existence than the self- complacent European… the voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life— what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? She may “cultivate his mind” –may “elevate his thoughts”—these I believe are the established phrases—but will he be happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian Islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking—“Are these, alas! The fruits of twenty-five years of enlightening?

In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, through few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve—the heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people” (144, 145).

Sexual Paradise’s Destruction: Civilization as “Siphylization”.

The South Seas were destroyed because contrary to the Western, Christian, and like Oriental paradises, they were sexed and sexual. It, of course, allowed in a first move, the satisfaction of the pent-up prurience of white explorers and seamen and re-enforced their mythic projection on the natives—which they often perceived as a vulnerable, innocent, pliable, submissive, tender matrix of otherness; the other of m(o)ther.

In Western minds the appeal of Paradise’s bounty is paradoxically set in metonymic proximity to the lure of sexual bliss, as exemplified in Pierre Loti’s exotic novel Le marriage de Pierre Loti (1882), a strange compilation of autobiographical memories, sensual and sexual bliss and racist commentaries. This “novel” corresponds to today’s novel of sexploitation, a mixture of the masculine “Lolita syndrome” with Pacific innocence, sexual permissiveness and a tropical, abundant, “natural” proliferation of sensual pleasures. The myth is still prevalent as shown by the importance of Bangkok in sex tourism.₂₇

Paul Gauguin notes in Noa Noa₂₈ :

“This similarity of the sexes make their relations the easier. Their continual state of nakedness has kept their minds free from the dangerous pre-occupation with the “mystery” and from the excessive stress which among civilized people is laid upon the “happy accident” and the clandestine and sadistic colors of love. It has given their manners a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown to them” (47).

And in Oviri:

“Le sol tahitien devient tout à fait français et petit à petit tout cet ancient état de choses va disparaître. Nos missionaires avaient déjà beaucoup apporté d’hypocrisie protestante et enlèvent une partie de la poésie sans compter la vérole qui envahit toute la race (sans trop l’abîmer ma foi)»—«The Tahitian soil becomes little by little totally French and the ancient state of culture is going to disappear. Our missionaries, who had already imported Protestant hypocrisie are wiping out poetry without taking into account syphilis, which has invaded the whole race (without damaging it too much though)»—translation mine (75,76).

But sexuality, gendering and race are, as we know, inter-related issues. After the U.S. toppled the kingdom of Hawai’i, Hawai’ian culture and population went into a tailspin from which they never recovered. What is left of the Hawai’ian population (resulting from what is called the “racial de-Hawai’ianization” of the islands) is miscegenated. There are only about 7,000 “pure” Hawai’ians left.₃₀

Like a critical stone diachronically skipping over the waters of time past, Gauguin’s colonial critique is amplified by Dougherty’s modern comments, “because of the white man’s diseases transmitted to Hawai’ian women, the act of interracial sex became a death sport for Hawai’ians… Idyllic Polynesian love had vanished. Hawai’ian women were rendered barren by the white man’s diseases and their bodies bartered for cash” (76), comments echoing Mark Twain’s past remarks in The New York Tribune:

“The traders brought about labor and fantasy diseases… in other words, long, deliberate, infallible destruction, and the missionaries brought the means of grace and got them ready. So the two forces are working harmoniously, and anybody who knows anything about figures can tell you exactly when the last Kanaka will be in Abraham’s bosom and his islands in the hands of the whites. No doubt, in fifty years a Kanaka will be a curiosity in his own land.”₃₁

Alfred Stevenson, who, like the cineaste Robert Flaherty, wanted to document the destruction of the Polynesian civilization, wrote that Calvinist missionaries

“showed a haste to get rich. The married protestant missionary makes money, he buys land, he builds houses; he dies, his son succeeds him, and the son is seen to till and sell the acres of the disinherited Hawai’ians”₃₂

Flaherty did not want to repeat the films, Moana (1920) and White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), whose stories Hollywood (MGM) had forced him to idealize and aestheticize. About the Marquesans, Flaherty was ready to tell the true story, i.e., the denunciation of the degrading impact of white civilization on the South Sea natives, as Frederick O‘Brien laconically laments in White Shadow in the South Seas,

”They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emotional and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The rule of the trader crushed all these native feelings. To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live. With the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food was not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by commands, taxes, fines and the novel and killing incentives of rum and opium. The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women to sell their charms. Happiness and wealth were destroyed because the white man came here only to gratify his cupidity” (162).

Consequently, Robert Flaherty, with Friedrich Murnau, shot Tabu in 1927.₃₃

Montaigne had already hit the nail on the head, in the middle of the 16th century, when, in Of Coaches (Essays), he wrote about what will become the truth of the European discovery of the other:

“Our world has lately discovered another…. As large, well peopled, and fruitful, as this whereon we live; and yet so raw and childish, that we are still teaching it its ABC; ‘tis not above fifty years since it knew neither letters, weights, measures, vestments, corn nor vines; it was then quite naked in the mother’s lap, and only lived upon what she gave it…

I am very much afraid that we have greatly precipitated its declension and ruin by our contagion; and that we have sold it our opinions and our arts at a very dear rate. It was an infant world, and yet we have not whipped and subjected it to our discipline, by the advantage of our natural worth and force, neither have we won it by our justice and goodness, nor subdued it by our magnanimity. Most of their answers, and the negotiations we have had with them, witness that they were nothing behind us in pertinency and clearness of natural understanding (…) and the beauty of their manufactures, in jewels, feathers, cotton, and painting, gave ample proof that they were as little inferior to us in industry. But as to what concerns devotion, observance, of the laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and plain dealing, it was of use to us that we had not so much as they; for they have lost, sold, and betrayed themselves by this advantage over us.

As to boldness and courage, stability, constancy against pain, hunger, and death, I should not fear to oppose the examples I find among them, to the most famous examples of elder times, that we find in our records on this side of the world. For, as to those who subdued them, take but away the tricks and artifices they practiced to gull them, and the just astonishment it was to those nations, to see so sudden and unexpected an arrival of men with beards, differing in language, religion, shape, and countenance, from so remote a part of the world, and where they had never heard there was any habitation, mounted upon great unknown monsters, against those who had not only never seen a horse, but had never seen any other beast trained up to carry a man or any other loading; shelled in a hard and shining skin, with a cutting and glittering weapon in his hand, against them, who, out of wonder at the brightness of a looking-glass or a knife, would truck great measures of gold and pearl; and who had neither knowledge, nor matter with which, at leisure, they could penetrate our steel: to which many be added the lightning and thunder of our cannon and harquebuses, enough to frighten Caesar himself, if surprised, with so little experience, against people naked, except where the invention of a little quilted cotton was in use, with other arms, at the most, than bows, stones, staves, and bucklers of wood; people surprised under color of friendship and good faith, by the curiosity of seeing strange and unknown things (…) Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander, or the ancient Greeks and Romans; and so great a revolution and mutation of so many empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently evolved, rooted up, and made plain and smooth whatever was rough and savage among them, and that would have cherished and propagated the good seeds that nature had there produced; mixing not only with the culture of land and he ornament of cities, the arts of this part of the world, in what was necessary, but also the Greek and Roman virtues, with those that were original of the country? What a reparation had it been to them, and what a general good to the whole world, had our first examples and deportments in those parts allured those people to the admiration and imitation of virtue, and had begotten between them and us a fraternal society and intelligence? How easy had it been to have made advantage of souls so innocent, and so eager to learn, having, for the most part, naturally so good inclinations before? Whereas on the contrary, we have taken advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and toward all sorts of inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners. Who ever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate? So many cities leveled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearls and pepper? Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public animosities engage men against one another in such miserable hostilities, in such miserable calamities” (284-286).

These famous pages constitute a blue-print for an indictment of the whole exploration and colonizing enterprise of the West and are echoed by Herman Melville’s Typee:

”The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white man as the most ferocious animal on the face of earth” (145).

Melville adds:

“But, it is needless to multiply the examples of civilized barbarity; they far exceed in the amount of misery they cause the crimes which we regard with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow creature”(145).

Paradise did not collapse because, as Greg Dening writes in History’s Anthropology:

“The Hawaiians themselves could not escape their own collapse of time. Their past of 1782-1792 was conjoined with their present of 1838 when it was inscribed in their written-down history. The Past that I confront in making History of Hawaiian Natives and European Strangers making History is out of specific time” (11).

It happened in Hawai’i, in specific time, because of an arcane complex of grossly unequal, brutal interactions, orchestrated by Anglo-American colonial interests between: 1) the Hawai’ian monarchy itself manipulated by Westerners; 2) the Hawai’ian government as it was manipulated by local American tycoons, missionaries, and trading endeavors (whaling industry, sugar, pineapple and cattle industry); and 3)British and US colonial rivalries.

In its diachronicity, the text of the colonial history of Polynesia shows the same synchronicity of effects and affects as a violent text characterized by the following rhetorical tropes: irruption, rupture, hiatus, apocope, syncope and disappearance… The same destabilizing and stultifying complex of genocidal de-culturation more or less existed, with local variants, on all other Polynesian and South Seas Islands as Melville indicates:.

“To be sure, in one of their efforts at reform they had slaughtered about a hundred and fifty of them [Tahitians] at Whitihoo.”(19).

According to Newton A. Rowe,

“The administration of justice in Savaii during 1923 and 1924 amounted to a scandal I should think without modern parallel in a British possession” (226).

Why the Destruction of Paradise? Ethics and History or The Psychoanalytic Explanation via Psychosis and Abjection.

It is now redundant to lament the traumatic loss of innocence as Jack London writes later in The Cruise of the Snark:

“Tahiti is one of the most beautiful spots in the world, inhabited by thieves and robbers and liars…” (46, 47).

One has to analyze deeper.

The history of Hawai’i allows us to bring to the surface the symptomatic dimension of Western History (arranged in grand sequences of progress and regress by the Hegelian concept of “world spirit”), and points out the deeply neurotic (and in many instances psychotic) kernel of Western civilization. It allows us not only to map a devaluation of what has been valued so much, Western civilization, but also, more productively, to map out the latent psychological motives behind the manifest content of the ostensible economic and political act of colonization.

As we now know, public content, social causation and private psychological motives are not disconnected. The Western insistence on ethics deals with a subject that resides at the sorest spot of the body politic, of colonization. Not only because it functions as a marker of the abyss between Kantian rules and actual behavior, as if only serving to re-enforce and delineate the immense gap existing between theory and practice, the ideal and its shortcomings; but also because it underlines the complex sets of contradictions and paradoxes that are intertwined within the very Western praxis of ethics. Nowhere is this nexus more absurdly and tragically compelling than in the Occidental history of the Americas and the Pacific Islands (Polynesia).

The origin of the unconscious is sexual and political (since intrapersonal, intersubjective and inter-relational). Consequently, traumas have to be brought to the surface, analyzed, remembered, and shared.

But in order for societies and subjects to learn to modify “their collective and individual cultural psychology”, in  order to cast out destructive or “evil” behavior (criminal, genocidal behavior as defined by the UN Human Rights Commission Remembering in 1947), it is not enough to remember the past., by itself, becomes easily reduced to a form of moral ‘a-toning’ or taming,

which smacks of a pedagogy of prosthetic and orthopedic morality. It “dresses things up” but does not “re-dress” anything and does not offer any explanations. It is therefore imperative to learn how to look at the traumatic past from a different perspective. It is the way the gaze is informed by critical, textual theory that is important, not only the gazed-at-object or subject.

In the Western cultural (individual and communal) super-ego, natives used to exist (and still exist up to a certain point) in a state of quasi-unconscious reproach to the precepts of this prevailing cultural super-ego. When brought to conscious knowledge (in both meanings of the word), in the 16th century (immediately after the “discovery”), “native reality” clashed with these precepts. Then, two things happened:

1)The spectacle of what the Europeans perceived as Indian innocence, bliss, happiness, hospitality…, seductive at the beginning (especially when Europeans benefited from it), aroused in European psyches, a fundamental lack-in- being and the loss of the Christian jouissance/jouis-sens (enjoyment/meaning—“sentiments” which always arouse old demons).₃₅

The unbearable, impossible, intolerable jouissance of the naked, “feminine,” “promiscuous,” “infantile,” “free-loving,” “unproductive” other had to be annihilated; through, for instance, the “missionary position” which corresponds to the imposition of Christian beliefs and ethics (and work-ethics through enslavement) on Islanders. It is a Western missionaries’ super-egoic demand made on the natives’ relations towards each other. Missionaries expected that it would produce especially important results for a renewal of the Christian faith (as the Jesuits’ experiments in Paraguay show). ₃₆It is as if one wanted to achieve through the other, what one could no longer achieve at home (in corrupt “old Europe”). Ethics, here, become a form of self-therapy: one actually administers the cure to oneself through the other. Again the other is but a pretext. The more the native ego seems to narcissistically enjoy, the more he is considered as rebellious, the more severe the commands and the prohibitions of the civilizing super-ego, and the more violent the super-egoic injunction of the “missionary position”. This ideological and moralistic behavior a posteriori explains 
this famous sentence from Montaigne in his Raimond Sebond’s Apology:

“Notre religion est faite pour extirper le vice; elle les couvre, les nourrit, les incite” –“Our religion is made so as to wipe out vices; it covers them up, nourishes them, incites them” (283).

2) Natives’ ways of being (or not being) arouse feelings of admiration or abjection in many Westerners. This testifies to the struggles of a Christian soul which can only be extolled through the utter glorification or degradation/destruction of the other’s body, since the Grand Autre (Big Other), as immaterial Ideal, has no body. This paradox is constitutive of the construction of the sublime in art. It has been said by Lacanian theorists that the image is a mode of disappearance of the Other as “Thing,” (das Ding) in so far as the aesthetic object is not a thing/object but a special mode of apparition of the Other. But the “Thing” still lurks behind the aesthetic, valorized or canonized object. Never before has it been illustrated in such a cruel and scopically theatralized manner by colonialism through the polar dichotomy: bon sauvage/ “devilish savage” as illustrated by De Bry’s engravings. In this case, it is as if a quasi-postmodernist status (synchrony informing diachrony) seemed to inform and unify in a quasi-similar scopic regime, the Renaissance viewer and the contemporary spectator.

Primary drives invoked by these acts of utter degradation have invaded the scene of representation as if matters generally left to the repression of the unconscious had burst through the normative scene. In many cases, the Native (or Indian) is made to represent this paradoxically “terrifying” Thing (das Ding, coming out of the Lacanian Real) via the insertion of his/her image (often perceived as pagan-worshipper and devilish by the early Conquistadors) into the thin interstitial space, the in-between the object and the Thing, anxieties and discovery, the subject and his abject. Native human sacrifices and cannibalism provoked terror in the early discoverers who in turn terrorized native others. Not only were the natives put in the position of the other while at the same time forced to recover the gap (i.e. pay the price for the lack their presence opened up wider in the European psyche) “their otherness” made in the subjectivity of the European self, but the missionaries forcefully destroyed the Other of the natives (their God) and replaced it with another Other, i.e. the Christian God. Also, the encounter with the “new world” shook the European concept of God in its foundations for a while. The impact of the new territories and their creatures/inhabitants on European psyches, unlike anything seen before, caused the Europeans to doubt God for a while, before God’s re-affirmation came back with a vengeance. Extreme violence quickly displaced the bliss and marvel of the first encounter, as the vengeance which followed Columbus first colony’s destiny shows. God suddenly appeared more powerful, impressive and mysterious, especially since He allowed the total conquest of the “child-like” Indians.

From the beginning, the native other was un-nameable (hence their nickname of Indian –i.e. from India), because it was first misrecognized (Indian in the Americas), then misnamed (savage, barbarian, pagan, uncivilized, or metonymized: Pend d’ Oreille, Gros Ventre, Nez-Percés …) and misapprehended. Its peculiarity was un-sayable. Its status could not be chartered by a system already based on otherness-exclusion in the European Subject. The otherness was quickly tainted by abjection which oozed through the “molar lines” (Deleuze) innervating the psychic and somatic body and threatening to corrupt the purity of the Occidental body of the Master, channeling through the death-drive. In order to perform this task of “ethnic cleansing”, the Indian had to be turned into a pure object of abjection (sub/ ject /ab/ject /ob/ject) and a sacrificial matrix whose hairless body was already scarified. This amounts to a liquidation of her/his body which corresponds to a psychotic disturbance at the level of the European inter-subjective relations, made possible by the intrusion of the “ob-scene” through The Thing. The “Medieval ob-scene”, is mis-en-scène (staged) a last time by Rabelais before becoming the Renaissance’s repressed. It re-emerges from the background and invades the center in the colonies or in times of war in Europe through the death- drive (i.e. extreme fatalist violence, and/or apathy to its spectacle). In Lacanian terms (schema L), what Europeans inflicted on the body of native others is caused by a regressive, infantile defense-formation itself provoked by the powerful, seductive, specular image of “Indian otherness” which made the European psyche regress to the Imaginary mirror-stage of psychic development, when the ego, in order to defend its threatened integrity, must destroy the competing other’s image. Human aggression stems from that developmental stage and dimension. Hence the torture, bleeding, morselling, roasting of the native body. The morselled-out native body is the projection of European imaginary fear of body-dismemberment.

The problem of the objectification of the other is not a problem of object versus subject but the projection of abjection onto the other and its consequential reduction to an “abject object”. This lies at the core of the racist and fascist discourse, already a by-product of the Renaissance conquest of the New World, and tragically unites diachronically the Occidental discourse of/upon the other, from the Spanish exactions to the racial and racist Western discourses of the 19th century. The Native/ Indian was put in the working position of anastasis, i.e., of abolishing its own subject while expressing its otherness as object. Post-Renaissance man invented the Indian by positing him/her as an “it,” like a perspectival focal point of disappearance of the Western man’s own ego. The sacrificial Indian mirrors as in a pictorial mise-en-abyme (interior duplication) the Post-Renaissance man’s de-composition.

This also points to the jouissance of the psychotic European “Master-Subject” (be he Portuguese, Spanish, French, Protestant victim or Catholic victimizer, or vice versa), who is already erring in the “future” land of fascism. De Bry’s engravings for instance provide graphic examples which must not be read as the realist or even realistic rendition-depiction of an anthropological enterprise before the letter; as for instance a certain discourse on native cannibalism (The Caribs) which would have contaminated the Spanish and by extension, European, conquerors themselves. As Tom Conley puts it in his commentary upon De Bry’s engravings, “a metaphoric second order of language is embedded under seemingly transparent signs which define fields of both discourse and visibility” (23). European mythic language and obfuscated self-reflexivity speak under the surface of these “singularities”. Something deeper lies (in both meanings of the verb) beneath the self-enclosing and self-legitimizing capsules and is invested in the allegory of these images.

The “Image of the Indian” here functions as a pretext. Its situation of other, set in another world, topsy-turvy (at the antipodes), offers the space of a sub-text. Its liminality provides a free subliminality for the safe and securing voyeuristic enjoyment of what Europe had in fact invented and exported. To avoid going through the ordeal of looking into it himself, the European projected his own lack onto the Indian as Montaigne explains.

The collective body of the European forms a leaking vessel. It conjures up a wholeness paradoxically comprised of a fullness of holes. In certain instances, the only “solution” is to psychotically fill up where it lacks. This partly explains the violent proliferation of images of mutilation, bodily scattering, violation through orifices’ penetration, etc. The impossibility to know (of) the other is compensated by anthropophagia, which is a magical, archaic (primary) way of ingesting the other experienced as an Imaginary and irremediable loss and lack, (at the level of object a, to use Lacanian terminology). What, in the minds of the European conquistadores and colonizers, was perceived as a feminine-type of passivity in the behavior of the Indians, provoked intense psychotic acts of aggression among the Europeans. This “ir-reason” arousing from foreclosed “ir-real” drives, had to be compensated metaphorically, and also less metaphorically, i.e. metonymically at the level of the mouth, the anus and the stomach. De Bry’s representations of cannibalism among the Amerindians in fact conjure up a fantasy of cannibalism of the European onto the Amerindians.

The gentility and openness of the first Amerindian populations directly clashed with the aggressive activities culturally defining European manliness (the knight). To repeat the words of Julia Kristeva, the Other occupies the place of the Mother. In the Occidental discourse, the Indian is given a strange space which tends to invert the chora. It is Plato’s term (Timeus, 48-53) standing for the prohibition placed on the maternal body (incest taboo) which tends to prevent auto-eroticism. This space ends up in producing in the Occidental conqueror and colonist an effect which tends to mix the “pleasure principle” with the “death drive.”

What the psychotic discourse tells us without mistake is that, fundamentally, the image has nothing to do with unity or identity.

3) Once natives are destroyed, one witnesses feelings of Christian guilt through the redeeming of the sacrificed natives who then serve as introspective mirror for Western ontology— for instance Gauguin’s famous sentence in his equally famous painting (“D’où venons-nous? (Where are we coming from?), Que sommes-nous? (Who are we?), Où allons-nous? (Where are we going?). It functions as signifier of lost paradise and innocence, reminiscent of Blake’s project. This is, of course, re-enforced by the sense of guilt as explained by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents:

“…any kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction, results, or may result, in a heightening of the sense of guilt. A great theoretical simplification will, I think, be achieved if we regard this as applying only to the aggressive instincts, and little will be found to contradict this assumption. For how are we to account, on dynamic and economic grounds, for an increase in the sense of guilt appearing in place of an unfulfilled erotic demand?” (85).

In order to study the Fall of man from Grace and Paradise (one’s fall) one has to cause the other to fall as Greg Dening explains in History’s Anthropology:

“Natives in anthropology were as revealing of human nature as Strangers, and that was an affront to somebody who thought human nature was enshrined in Adam Smith” (98).

• The special unbearable jouissance of the Aztecs and the Mayans with their rich city life and human sacrifices, of the Amerindians, of the Pacific Islanders, the tribal and ritualistic life of the African negro, brought about, in the European psyche, a confrontation with the Real (the unbearable, unspeakable hard kernel within reality—e.g. Kurtz’s “Horror” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). The West was already embarked in a pursuit/discovery of the Real which amounted to a total annihilation of otherness carried on with a self-destructive fury, since the Real thing is another name for the void.

This European, unconscious passion for the Real, which is self- destructive, activates aggression—hence the infinite bodily pain (from rape and torture to genocide and enslavement) inflicted on the body of the “native other” or the Negro’s body as if the slave’s body was immortal in its infinite capacity to endure ill- treatment. On it was inscribed the corps-jouissif (enjoying body) of the native matrix.

5) Two types of economy and exchange confront each other in the discovery/invention of the other. Two different modes of being, way of enjoying, and “world-sense-making” confronted each other—the European one being more restrictive, focused, and less tolerant than the other.

European civilizations are characterized by a restricted (market) economy and a symbolic exchange; the native ones by a libidinal (general) economy, or an economy of the gift—i.e., the impossible, unaccountable act that subverts the closed economy of the West.

The restricted, symbolic exchange-based and market-economy characteristic of a European civilization and closed mentalities could not make place for the libidinal, general economy of Indian civilizations more open since based on the “dépense” (spending), and the sumptuary economy of the gift (Marcel Mauss, George Bataille and structural anthropologists). By European standards, the “act of the gift” was unaccountable and subversive of European values and class-distinction; of its closed/restricted economy. In fact, it came as a living reproach (especially when sexual); and especially since the native gift of total opening/welcome to/of the other precludes any actual counter-gift, compensation, returns or thanks—unless one practices a gift-based economy oneself. The European symbolic system and economy had no place for the native libidinal/total/ excessive gift. At first, the only way Europeans paid back the Indians was to throw trinkets and bells at them: derision and mockery in exchange for “essentials,” water, food, sex, and gold. Therefore logically, this native-gift-libidinal-economy induced enjoyment and profiteering at first, then resentment, and then horror (at oneself for having benefited from their “gift,” then at the “native others” for having let them pollute the European self). To avoid having European subjectivity and logic blown apart, European logic had to turn the chairs around and blow the other apart; its raison-d’être. Then the European death-drive took over: perverse or psychotic terror directed on the Indian body accompanied by the passivity and indifference of most explorers/colonists to the spectacle of the horrors inflicted on the Indian body. The only way to re-pay an unpayable debt (a “non-economical expenditure”) was to go onto the other side of things (what Bataille calls the part maudite—accursed share).

The exchange changed nature. It left the Symbolic realm to dwell on the fringes of the Real domain; to pass onto the Other scene (i.e. the unconscious scene) not the scene of the other: blood against gold and silver—a pound of flesh against ounces of gold.

The pure gift of the native libidinal economy precluded any actual counter-gesture, allowed for no compensation, no return thanks, and, besides, cannot even be acknowledged as gift by definition. This, of course, blew European logic apart, since its economy and logic had no place for the libidinal/total/excessive gift. It induced resentment. In a way, European violence can be understood, in the unconscious scene (not the scene of the other but the Other scene) as the non-economical expenditure or repayment of an Imaginary and Symbolic debt so incurred. It then took the tragic form of an unconscious passage à l’acte (irrational acting out).

Conclusion

Although, if one wants to find an equivalent negative dimension in Hawai’ian and Tahitian ontology (in fact more fatalistic and realistic than negativistic), their islands (the land and its metonymy: power, autonomy, equilibrium, vital force and danger—i.e., mana) were always in danger of being repossessed by the sea. As Kaopulupulu, one of the chief priests of Hawai’i (murdered in 1792 during internal tribal wars for supremacy of the islands), said to his son, while making a pact with him to die, in a strange premonition, as reported by Dening:

“Take a deep breath and give your body to the sea. The land is the sea’s” (11).

That is to say that anything that ever threatens Hawai’I (hurricanes, tsunamis, gods, white men…) can only come from the sea, from beyond the horizon:

“It was mythic History he was making. He called on deep metonymies to sustain it. “Land”—legitimate authority, native people, nurturing force—was being possessed by “sea”—usurping power, violence, strangers from afar. In the later memory, his History was seen as prophecy. Native Hawai’i would be possessed by European strangers” (54).

As Samuel Kamakau reports, Kaopulupulu prophesized,

“White men would become rulers, the native population would live like fishes in the sea [meaning landless], the line of chiefs would come to an end, and a stubborn generation would cause the native race to dwindle” (76).

In fact, we could here add Dening’s remark:

“all over the Polynesian Pacific the European Strangers came in the lightning and thunder of their arms. All over the Pacific, and in Hawai’i, there was an easy appropriation of the myths of thunder to the Strangers. There was an easy sacramentalizing of their symbols of power to signs of divine presence” (39).

One should, however, distinguish between Hawai’ian cosmology (where sea and land interact) and a special, vague and ominous threat located beyond the horizon. In that aspect, Pacific Islanders’ beliefs were more prophetic than negative, as such, and can be compared to the Meso-American Indians’ prophecies who expected white, bearded gods to come back from the East. When Captain Cook came ashore in Hawai’i in 1779 (third voyage), he and his men were believed to be gods. In fact, Cook had willingly entered the game, pretended to be one, in body and mind:

“an impression of wonder and of dread having been made, Captain Cook and his men found little difficulty in having intercourse with the people as they chose” (21).

Hawai’ians who participated in the killing of three crew members from Cook’s Daedalus, in Waimea bay (Oahu island), in 1792, said later:

“Say, they are groaning, perhaps they are human. And we thought they were gods because of their sparkling eyes… [upon seeing the Daedalus fire his guns in retaliation]… We probably will be saved because these gods have died or they would have stayed and all of us would have been killed,” (Dening, 21).

By playing God, Cook was taunting death—and death he did receive, because there is a price to pay for playing God. By entering into the Real, he got an answer from the Real (to use a Lacanian term) but in an inversed manner. The death of God was already in the air: the French Revolution will vote the death of the King (God’s representative on earth) one year later (1793). Ironically, the Pacific Islands were the last place on earth where the white man could still play God.

Cook died Feb 14th 1779 in the Kealakekua Bay on the West coast of the island of Hawai’i. Victor Segalen’s quote in his Immémoriaux shows that official Western history clashes with numerous other Western renditions of the same event, pointing to the covering-up of the negative side of Western colonial history:

“Nous avons tous pleuré sa mort. Nous avons séparé ses os, détaché et brûlé la chair, comme nous faisions pour nos propres chefs lorsqu’ils mouraient. Nous le prenions pour le dieu Rono, nous l’ adorions come tel et après sa mort nous avons vénéré ses os.» (We all cried his death. We sorted out his bones, flayed them and burned the flesh as we do for our own chiefs after their death. We thought he was the god Rono and we adored him as such. After his death we adored his bones) (249).

Although Hawai’ians were afraid to become like “Amerindians, a race without history,” (Dening, 59), their civilization was destroyed by the same enemy and the same pattern of cause- effects.₄₁ In a remote age, Moses liberated his people by giving them their religion and their laws. Westerners liberated Hawai’ians from themselves (“primitivism” and “tribalism”) by bringing them Christianity, syphilis and death, i.e., “civilization”, or what some French anthropologists called “syphilization”.

Endnotes

1. Part of this essay was read for the Epis 2018 CONFERENCE— from Missoula via Zoom, July 27-28 2018.

2. Amerigo Vespucci (~1454-1512) proved that Columbus had run into a new world and not Asia as the latter believed. In his honor, the new continent was named after him.

3. Slavoj Zizek. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso 1989. 160, 161.

4. Why did the rise of Europe between 800-1400 A.D. turn into an economic and military superiority directed towards the greedy, bloody conquest of the “non-white other?” Eric Wolf’s Europe & the People Without History (1982) criticizes Jared Diamond’s response to Yali’s question “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” in his Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). He criticizes Diamond who thinks that European superiority is due to pure geographical contingencies, as well as Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) who attributes the economic/technological/cultural weaknesses of conquered peoples/cultures to their isolation. But Wolf himself ignores the socio-cultural and economic-political European framework which forged at the end of the Middle-Ages a specific mode of aggressive subjectivity and rationality and a “pre-technological,” “pre-modern” capitalist system with its inherent, implacable logic of total and global expansion/exploitation. Their conjugated effects brought to Europe wealth accumulation via free labor (slavery) and surplus-value (gold/silver/raw materials). One had to wait for Franz Fanon to initiate a long process of deconstruction indicting the whole production of Western subjectivity and colonial exploitation with its episteme of alter-ego-inferiorizing.

5. Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. Knopf. 1991. Front page inscription.

6. An early Greek translation of Jewish scriptures in reference to the Garden of Eden.

7. iii Jean Delumeau. History of Paradise. University of Illinois Press: Urbana. 2000.

8. Eric Axelson. Prince Henry the Navigator and the Discovery of the Sea Route to India. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 127, No. 2. Jun. 1961. Blackwell and The Royal Geographical Society/ Institute of British Geographers. 145-155.

9. Columbus 1500’s letter to the nurse (in Major, 1870. 154)— Columbus located Paradise at the mouth of the Orinoco river.

10. Allegory of the New World by Amerigo Vespucci. Mundus Novus letter. 1503.

11. Christopher Columbus. The Four Voyages. J.M. Cohen’s translation. Penguin Books. 1969. 220-224.

12. Christopher Columbus. The Four Voyages. J.M. Cohen’s translation. Penguin Books. 1969. 217-218.

13. Nasa satellite-photos of the earth, showed that the globe is not only oblate—wider at the equator than pole-to-pole, but also egg or pear shaped— slightly wider just south of the equator. “He made the earth egg-shaped.” Quran (79:30).

14. Longer version of a paper read at the PAMLA Conference on History/ Anthropology/ Literature criss-crossings, San Francisco State University, November 5-8 2009.

15. A Memorable Fancy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

16. Christopher Columbus. The Four Voyages. J.M. Cohen’s translation. Penguin Books. 1969. 157, 259.

17. “Its inhabitants [of Nukuheva, in the Marquesas] have become somehow somewhat corrupted, owing to their recent commerce with Europeans; but so far as regards their peculiar customs and general mode of life, they retain their original primitive character, remaining very nearly in the same state of nature in which they were first beheld by white men.” Herman Melville. Typee. New York: Signet Classic, 1964. 24.

18. Sigmund Freud. Preface of the Translator to Totem and Taboo. A Vintage Books. Knopf. New York. 1946. P.xiv. Freud himself was guilty of reductionism, in that he believed in a Comte-like scheme of progress, postulating an early animistic phase of human civilization followed by a religious one, then superseded by the age of sciences.

19. Freud equates the primitivism of human societies with the childhood of individual infancy. By the same token, taboo and neurosis shared the same structure, as if obsessional neurosis was a private religion.

20. Montesquieu. Les Lettres Persanes. 1721.

21. Antonin Artaud. The Theatre and its Double.

22. Michel de Certeau. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. U. of Minnesota: Minneapolis.1986.

23. The “Valladolid Controversy” (1550–1551) held in Valladolid (Spain) opposed two main attitudes towards the Americas’ conquest. The Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas (Mexico) Bartolomé de las Casas, influenced by the School of Salamanca’s Humanism argued that the Amerindians enslaved by the encomiendas’ system had a soul, and consequently were free men. Since free in the natural order, they deserved the same treatment as other men, according to Catholic theology, and therefore could not be enslaved. Opposing him was the fellow Dominican Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who, also based his arguments on Humanism and Aristotle. He insists that Indians were natural slaves, and therefore could be reduced to slavery/ serfdom in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. Natives’ humanity had already been established by the papal bull Sublimus Dei (1537), banning slavery, but without success. King Charles V of Spain wanted to prohibit the harming of natives, and called a Junta (Jury) of eminent theologians to issue a ruling on the controversy. Las Casas’s position found support from the monarchy and the Catholic Church, who wanted to control the power of the encomenderos, while Sepúlveda’s arguments defended the colonists and landowners’ interests. Las Casas objected, arguing that Aristotle’s definition of the “barbarian” and the natural slave did not apply to the Indians, who, as rational beings, should be Christianized without coercion. In the end, both parties declared they had won the debate, but neither received the outcome they desired. The conclusions reached by the Pope’s envoy paradoxically opened up Africa to the slave-trade of Blacks by European and New World colonists, i.e. what is known as the “triangular commerce.”

24. For more on the topic, consult Steve Nicholls. Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 2009.

25. Letter to Henry Manceron, Sept. 23 1911.

26. John Laffey. Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its Discontented. Black Rose books: Montreal,1966.

27. Remark made by Chantal Spitz in « Rarahu iti e autre moi- même ». First published (abridged version) in the Bulletin de la Société des Études Océaniennes—285/286/287, a special issue devoted to The Marriage of Loti (apr.-sept.2000), p. 219 to 226. The integral version is published in Ile en Ile. Print.

28. Gauguin wrote the romanticised journal Noa Noa (Tahitian for “fragrance”) accompanied by a series of ten woodcuts, to examine his Tahitian experience.

29. Oviri, 1894. Water color monotype heightened with gouache on Japan paper on board (private collection).

30. In 1960 the U.S. Census eliminated the category called Hawai’ian, and listed the few remaining Polynesians of Hawai’ian birth under the heading Others, although the U.S. census for 1990 lists 138,742 “Hawai’ians” in Hawai’i. In 1980 only 7,816 “pure” Hawai’ians were registered.

31. Mark Twain. New York Tribune. January 9, 1873. Quoted in the California Journal, Aug. 6, 1869. Print.

32. From a never published and never finished work entitled The South Seas. Quoted by Michael Dougherty. To Steal a Kingdom. Island Style Press: Waimanalo, Hawai’I, 1992. 175. Print

33. Tabu (1931) is a film first conceived by two great filmmakers, but essentially made by only one, Tabu is the last great silent film (released four years after the end of the silent film era). Tabu had a complex genesis. It started with the impossible task of combining two radically different approaches: the one of Robert Flaherty (an American documentarist) and the one of F.W. Murnau (an expressionist, supernaturalist German film-maker). After selecting the location (atoll of Bora-Bora in the South Seas), collaborating on the story, and doing some preliminary photography, Flaherty withdrew, leaving Murnau to finish this tale of forbidden love and implacable retribution in an earthly paradise. Non-trained natives were used as actors. The movie was shot in 1927. This very beautiful movie completes a spiritual trilogy begun with Nosferatu (1921-22) and Sunrise (1927–Murnau’s other films of young couples drawn asunder by phantoms. The cameraman Floyd Crosby won an Academy Award® for his cinematography. Murnau was killed in a car wreck just before Tabu’s release. All the more tragic is the fact that Murnau’s original, uncut version was never publicly seen, until Milestone Film & Video’s restoration in 1990.

34. Illustations by Theodor de Bry and sons of the “Spanish Black Legend” by Bartholomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos… Frankfurt, 1598.

35. “I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their customs. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.” Christopher Columbus. The Four Voyages. J.M. Cohen’s translation. Penguin Books. 1969. 139.

36. Something Roland Joffé’s film Mission (1986) tried to illustrate.

37. De Bry’s Grands Voyages in Brazil and his illustration of the Spanish “Black Legend”—1596.

38. Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection (Power of Horror) provides more details on the psychotic process.

39. Biblically (without intent to make a bad pun).

40. Victor Segalen. Les Immémoriaux–Cycle Polynésien. Robert Laffont: Paris, 1999 Print

41. Even today, one can read posters and fender-stickers claiming that Hawai’ians are not Indians, a term used by most Westerners until the mid-19th century.

Works Cited

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double.

Blake, William. A Memorable Fancy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). Penguin Books: New York, 1958. 102,103.

Blake, William. The Voice of the Ancient Bard in Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Bigelow, A. ed. Mark Twain’s Speeches. Harper & Brothers: New York, 1923. Print.

Conley, Tom. Theatres of Cruelty: Wars of Religion, Violence, and The New World. Commentary on the Newberry Library Slide set # 14 Chicago. 1990. University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1994.Slides & Print.

Dening, Greg. History’s Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch. University Press of America. Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania: New York, 1988. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Writing and Difference. Print.

Delumeau Jean. History of Paradise. Print.

Dibble, Sheldon. History of the Sandwich Islands. Lahainalun: Dole Collection, 1843. Print.

Dougherty, Michael. To Steal a Kingdom: Probing Hawai’ian History. Island Style Press: Waimanalo, Hawai’I,1992. 51. Print.

Flaherty, Robert & F.W. Murnau. Tabu. 1931. Film.

Freud, Sigmund. Preface of the Translator to Totem and TabooA Vintage Books. Knopf: New York, 1946. xiv. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. 1918. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Norton and Cy.: New York, 1962. Print.

Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: a Journal of the South Seas. The Noonday Press: New York, 1957. Print.

Paul Gauguin. Oviri: Ecrits d’un sauvage. Idées/Gallimard : Paris, 1974. Print.

Kamakau, Samuel. Ruling Chiefs of Hawai’i. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961.

Kristeva, Julia. Power of Horror. Laffey. John.

Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its Discontented. Black Rose books; Montreal, 1966. Print.

Lévi-Strauss,Claude. Race et Histoire. Internal document Unesco. Document: Paris, 1952. Print.

Also, in Les Sciences Sociales sont un Humanisme in L’apport des Sciences Sociales à l’humanisme de la civilisation technique (Unesco: Paris, 1956) and The Three Humanisms.in Race and History. 1956 Print.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques. 1964-1971. Print.

Nicholls, Steve. Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009. Print.

London, Jack. The Cruise of the Snark. National Geographic Classics: Washington, 2003. Print.

Maugham, Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. 1919. Print. Melville, Herman. Typee. A Signet Classic: New York, 1964. Print.

Montaigne (de), Michel. Essays (III). 1580. Print.

Montaigne (de), Michel. Of Cannibals Essays. Tr. John Florio. 1910. London and New York, 1965. Print.

Montaigne (de), Michel. Des Coches(‘Of Coaches’). Essay (III) Translated by Charles Cotton. Doubleday and Cy.: New York, 1947. Print.

Montaigne (de), Michel. Apologie de Raimond Sebond. Essays (II.xii) Garnier (Editions M. Rat): Paris, 1958.Print.

Montesquieu. Les Lettres Persanes. 1721. Print

O’Brien, Frederick. White Shadow in the South Seas. Grosset & Dunlap. 1928. Print.

Reiss, Timothy. The Discourse of Modernism. Cornell University Press: London, 1982. Print.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Bases and Inequality Among Men. 1754. Print.

Rowe, Newton. Samoa under the Sailing Gods. Print.

Segalen, Victor. Les Immémoriaux–Cycle Polynésien. Robert Laffont: Paris. Print.

Spitz,Chantal. « Rarahu iti e autre moi-même » in Bulletin de la Société des Études Océaniennes. Special issue (285/286/287) devoted to the Mariage de Loti (april-september 2000). Print. Integral version published in Ile en Ile .

Twain, Mark. New York Tribune. January 9, 1873. California Journal. Aug. 6. Print.

Yerasimos, Stéphane. Introduction to Marco Polo. Le devisement du monde. Le Livre des Merveilles.I. La Découverte: Paris, 1998. Print

Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology. New York: Verso, 1999. Print.

Marx and Humanized Nature

Tom Jeannot, PhD

“One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.”
— Marx, “Private Property and Communism” (p. 90).

In a standard presentation of philosophical naturalism, two distinctions are basic: the distinction between reductive and non-reductive or pluralist forms; and the distinction between method and ontology.₁ Inside this typology, the philosophy of Karl Marx can be read as a non-reductive, humanistic form of naturalism, in method as well as ontology.₂ His non- reductive naturalism can be interpreted as a naturalized Hegelianism executed in three internally related dimensions: a humanist philosophical anthropology, the theory of historical materialism, and the critique of political economy. In the course of his writing across four decades, Marx’s vocabulary becomes more “naturalistic” as it becomes less “Hegelian,” but his intellectual conversion to Hegelian philosophy in 1837 remains a permanent deposit in his thought as a whole.₃ Finally, all of Marx’s philosophical views are predicated on his humanism, which is also the presupposition of his philosophy of science (his philosophical grounds for the development of a critical science of human social relations).₄ Marx is not incidentally but essentially a humanist. The basic text of his humanism is the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. This humanism informs The German Ideology, the basic text of historical materialism, as well as Capital, the basic text of the critique of political economy.

By contrast with the non-reductive form of naturalism elaborated by Marx, it appears that in our time, the reductive form is in the ascendancy. In the domain of contemporary analytic metaphysics, physicalism (the theory that “everything is physical” without remainder) is the dominant theory. In the    domain of political economy, inside and outside of Marxian theory, the economist’s version of physicalism is the dominant theory as well. In Marxian economics, physicalism is defined as “physically based analysis” or the “physical quantities approach” illustrated by Ian Steedman’s Marx After Sraffa (1977), according to which “technology and workers’ real wages are the sole proximate determinants of value, surplus-value, prices of production, average profit, and rates of profit.”₆ This Sraffian approach to Marx interprets the terms and relations of his value theory solely as physical quantities. By virtue of its high pedigree, the physicalist interpretation of Marx has cachet as well as a firm foothold on the theoretical architecture of twentieth-century Marxian economics. Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) reconstructed the classical economic theory of David Ricardo. The following year, in his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, Paul Samuelson flatly asserted, “Karl Marx can be regarded as a minor post-Ricardian.”₇ The tendency to regard Marx as a neo-Ricardian political economist rather than the fierce critic of the science of political economy is disturbingly well established. In a recent sign, Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013), meant both to locate (or confine) Marx in his nineteenth-century context and to make his life and thought accessible to a lay reader, concludes his chapter on Marx, “The Economist,” this way: “Far from opposing the mainstream political economy of his day, the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, and their followers, Marx had embraced it and promoted his own work as the most advanced and correct version of their approach…Marx was an orthodox political economist, who rejected most socialist criticisms of Ricardo.”₈ The argument of this paper is not only that this is not Marx’s theory; but also, to the point, that like Sraffa and Steedman, Ricardo is essentially a physicalist in his economic theory. Therefore, in our lexicon, he is a reductive naturalist who reduces the humanity of working people to factors of production and physical inputs into a process in which only physical quantities play a role. What Ricardo overlooks is precisely what Marx profiles.

The principal interest of this paper is the collision of Ricardo with Marx in their rival conceptions of science. Ricardo’s science is the physicalist science of political economy. Marx, on the other hand, is attempting to work out a “truly human” science, a critical science of human social relations, which takes the form of a critique of political economy. The collision is a collision between a physicalist conception of human science on the one hand, and a phenomenological conception on the other hand. Marx has a phenomenological conception, which he develops by way of his criticism of Hegel.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes that for Hegel, the “estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression of the real estrangement of the human being—in knowledge and thought. Instead, the real estrangement—that which appears real—is from its innermost, hidden nature (a nature only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real essence of man, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology” (p.113). This passage is subtle. It appears in the context of Marx’s decisive criticism of Hegel (“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” pp. 106-25). Marx alleges that Hegel substitutes an estranged self-consciousness for real human estrangement. Does Marx therefore propose to quit philosophy, as many have argued? More pointedly, does he propose to abandon the science of phenomenology? On balance, the answer is likely to be no. Marx’s thought as a whole, by virtue of his many confessions, is better thought of as a critically corrected Hegelianism, unlike Feuerbach’s abandonment of Hegelianism and his return to the pre-critical standpoint of the Anglo-French materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the immediate context of the quoted passage, Marx agrees with Hegel that the aim of phenomenological science is “surmounting the object of consciousness” (see pp. 113-15). But for Hegel, or at least Hegel at his worst, this movement is a process of thought alone; of philosophy and theory. For Marx by contrast, it “is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: itis the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective” (p. 115). Marx’s phenomenological science is therefore a scientific investigation into “the subjectivity of objective essential powers.” It is not a “Cartesian” phenomenology of thinking but a post-Hegelian phenomenology that pivots from thinking to acting.

In the light of these remarks so far, the conceptual framework of this paper locates Marx in the landscape of non-reductive naturalism; a naturalism that is at the same time a humanism. This humanistic naturalism or naturalistic humanism stands in contrast to the reductive forms of physicalism or materialism. This contrast comes out sharply in rival notions of science, a physicalist science that eliminates subjectivity and a phenomenological science that takes its point of departure from subjectivity. As far as economics is concerned, either it is a human science or it is a physical science. The latter renders the subjectivity and humanity of working people invisible; the former brings them out from hiding onto center stage.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx explicitly identifies humanism with naturalism.₉ He writes, “consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both.”₁₀ A philosophically astute understanding of Marx’s thought as a whole requires his interpreters to work out the sense of this basic claim. Moreover, in the manuscript on “Private Property and Communism,” in one of his most audacious speculative moments, Marx links this form of naturalistic humanism or humanistic naturalism to the idea of communism. He writes,

Communism … [is] … the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully-developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man— the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution (p. 84).

For Marx, then, if they are not quite synonymous, communism,
humanism, and naturalism are cognate terms jointly constituting a common field of internal relations.

In support of this conclusion, two premises are decisive: first, a human being “is directly a natural being” (p. 115); second, however, a human being “is not merely a natural being: he is  a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being” (p. 116). A human being is a “species being…because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being” (p. 75). On the platform of these complementary premises, natural being and species-being,

Marx works out a complex philosophy of human nature by way of adapting the discursive idiom of Hegelian philosophy and condensing it into five dense manuscripts (see pp. 70-125).₁₁

By his own lights, Marx’s method is not a “dialectic balancing of concepts,” but a “grasping of real relations.”₁₂ This distinction is tantamount to a distinction between idealism and realism, versus the standard distinction (in Marxism) between idealism and materialism. In brief, Marx’s trouble with “idealism” is that it reduces “thinghood” to a “posit” of “self-consciousness” (see pp. 112-15). But his trouble with “materialism” is that it performs just the opposite reduction.₁₃ Marx therefore turns Hegel’s own dialectical criticism of one-sidedness against each side of this polarity between self-consciousness and things. In the 1844 Manuscripts, in the course of delineating what can be called the fallacy of reductive or “abstract” thinking, he uses the term, “abstraction” (see pp. 121-25)₁₄; meaning, in this context, the reduction of real things to mere “thought-entities” (see p. 124).₁₅ Marx alleges this mistake against both right-theological Hegelians and also the alternative versions of left-Hegelian atheism (Bruno Bauer’s on the one hand, Ludwig Feuerbach’s on the other). Among the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach openly breaks with Hegel and embraces materialism. However, as Marx writes in his Theses on Feuerbach, “Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity” (p. 143); “Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity” (p. 144); the result of a merely “contemplative materialism” (p. 145) is as equally mistaken as idealism, by virtue of the same fallacy. Both sides abstract from the nature of human action. One side abstracts human beings from nature. The other side abstracts nature from human beings. In their degenerate forms, both sides merely juggle concepts, when the point is to grasp “real relations.”

Therefore, in the “Postface” (1873) to the second German edition of Capital (1872), Marx distinguishes between the “method of presentation” and the “method of inquiry.”₁₆ The method of inquiry “has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction.”₁₇ The failure of Hegel’s epigones to draw this basic distinction in method is what leads them in the first place to a mere “dialectic balancing of concepts,” the look of an a priori construction, or a castle in the air; a mistake that Marx assigns to Hegel himself in the 1844 Manuscripts. He writes, “There is a double error in Hegel” (p. 110), inasmuch as Hegel conjoins an “uncritical positivism” with an “equally uncritical idealism.” The result is “that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world”—a merely conceptual movement that leaves everything just the way it is (p. 111).₁₈ In particular, the Young-Hegelian “demand to change consciousness,” as Marx puts it in The German Ideology, only “amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world- shattering’ statements, are the staunchest conservatives… [They] are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world” (p. 149).

Still, for Marx, Hegel himself is a Janus-faced philosopher: his dialectic has a “mystificatory side”—that is, it mystifies human social reality in the way just indicated, which amounts to an uncritical ratification of the existing order of things or an idealization of what exists—but it also has a “rational form.” Marx writes,

The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive way…. In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.₁₉

If the ratification, transfiguration, and glorification of existing human social reality is the fundamental mistake of philosophical idealism, then Marx’s critical correction can be called “materialist” in the limited sense in which he discovers the materialist conception of history, the sense of which is briefly clarified below. The outcome of this critically corrected Hegelianism would be the dialectic in its “rational form.” It has become customary in Marxism-Leninism to call Marx’s philosophy as a whole “dialectical materialism.”₂₀ However, if we take him at his word in the 1844 Manuscripts, his naturalism or humanism is neither “idealism” nor “materialism.” It is also clear that Marx does not repudiate Hegelianism überhaupt.₂₁

For our purpose of the methodological clarification of Marx’s naturalistic humanism, a more appropriate nomenclature than dialectical materialism would be “ideal-realism” or critical realism.₂₂The point is not to diminish the critical, ideal, and speculative dimensions of Marx’s thought, but just the opposite, as against the prevailing signifier.₂₃

The propositions Marx enlists in his philosophical anthropology and philosophy of science can be classified and distinguished as descriptive or empirical, critical, explanatory, speculative, and normative. All of these conceptual dimensions crystallize in Marx’s conception of species-being (Gattungswesen). “Species- being” has been subject to a variety of interpretations. In order to secure our bearings in this exposition, we can start with the  road-stroke’s character of Marx’s philosophy of human nature as a whole. First, the first principle and foundation of Marx’s humanist anthropology is freedom, by which he means the self- activity and self-development of a self-creating, self-interpreting animal: the greater the scope and extent of human self- development; the greater the self-development of human active potencies or generic powers₂₄; the fuller will be the measure of modalities of action that are universal and free.₂₅ In this general conception, the Aristotelian metaphysical categories of potency and act are as indispensable to Marx as they were to Hegel.₂₆ Second, Marx’s principle of freedom conditions his philosophical aim, as a philosopher of action or praxis: the aim is the fullest possible measure of human emancipation, by way of the enactment of the latent generic powers seminally at work in a human being’s being aboriginally a species-being, which in turn constitutes the specific difference of her humanity. In On the Jewish Question, on the aim of human emancipation, Marx writes, “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself….Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power” (p. 46).₂₇Third, on a world-historical scale, Marx’s theory of human development as a process of self-development can be characterized as a process of humanization, beginning subjectively with the concrete, sensuous activity of human and humanizing forms of perception, sensibility, and thought; moving through the objective enactment of these forms in the existing empirical world, as “[thinking] and being are no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other” (p. 86); and concluding objectively to the conception of a “humanized nature” (p. 89).₂₈The arc of self-development that Marx inscribes in his anthropology is most broadly characterized as a historical process of becoming of self-realization and self-actualization.

The theme of self-actualization is more or less common to a variety of forms of humanism, including Aristotelian humanism, Renaissance humanism, pragmatism, and mid-twentieth-century existential humanism. (“Enlightenment humanism,” the object of the Heideggerian and postmodern critiques of humanism, is not among these forms.)

With the principle of freedom, the aim of emancipation, and the social and historical process of humanization in hand, it should be understood next that Marx’s conception of species- being does not denote any sort of collective entity (p. 86).₂₉ Rather, individual human beings are capable of being “universal and free” and “beings for themselves” by virtue of the exercise and development of species-wide generic powers or active potencies; the dynamism that belongs to the individual as social; or in other words, to a social individual (see p. 112).

That is, Marx’s position is a version of individualism, but it is worked out by way of reversing the counterposition, appropriated by classical political economy, of an atomic individualism.₃₀ (“Enlightenment humanism” incorporates “atomic individualism.”) Marx’s critique of atomic individualism, in turn, is a major aspect of his critique of political economy.

Once bourgeois, capitalist, commercial society comes fully into its own in the wake of the industrial revolution, after a centuries-long gestation, Marx concludes (in Capital) that human beings are “henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action.” Marx then goes on to link this social atomism to the fetishized world of the commodity-form. He continues, “This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men’s labour universally take on the form of commodities.  The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes.” ₃₂

For Marx, the opposite of a fetishized world would be a humanized world. In the fetishized world of human social relations constituted by capitalist production, “individuals are dealt with…only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.”₃₃ “To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things.”₃₄ This form of social organization of the process of production is predicated on a conflation of persons with things and a reduction of persons to the status of things. Social agency then appears to reside in “the dominant subject of [the capitalist] process,”—“independent of [human beings’] control and conscious individual action”— something no longer human, but the apparition of the abstract form of social wealth, “capital” or “self-valorizing value,” which appears to act autonomously. Marx writes, “For the movement in the course of which [value] adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.”₃₅ In fact, however, this apparition of the goose that lays golden eggs turns out to conceal the real relation: namely, the domination of past, objectified, dead labor over living, human labor-power.₃₆ Marx’s theoretical purpose in the critique of political economy is to demystify this “occult ability.” Where the fetish prevails, persons are reduced in their humanity, their status as persons, to the level of mere factors of production; a system of physical inputs and outputs by virtue of which “the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social.”₃₇

The commodity-form is a “social hieroglyphic” because it possesses this “double form, i.e. natural form and value form.” ₃₈The former is sensible; the latter is not only suprasensible but concealed from view. Therefore, it is only natural, in the pre- critical attitude, to conflate the value form with the natural forms in which commodities appear; or to fail to recognize the historically determinate character of the form of social relation that constitutes value as the abstract form of the wealth of capitalist society.₃₉

Hence, 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.”₄₀ By comparison with the “coarsely sensuous objectivity” of a physical object, Marx writes that the objectivity of value is “phantom-like.”₄₁ Therefore, “we may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-evidently that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity.”₄₂ By way of this displacement of the basic social relation, in which labor is only indirectly and not directly social, the social character of the living individual is hidden from view, both practically and theoretically. Consequently (post festum), it is read out of account from the science of political economy Marx criticizes. This science of political economy is a science of things, a physicalist science, but it is not a properly human science.

At issue for us is the question of what is “natural” and what is not to the species-being and species life of the human animal. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx answers this question by way of his theory of alienation (estrangement, abstraction). As alienated labor is the basis of capitalist society, so the abstract, reductive form of thinking is a hallmark of bourgeois thought, showing up in the premises of the science of political economy, which takes itself to be a natural science. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, the method of political economy entails a naturalization or “eternalization of historic relations of production.”₄₃ In the critique of political economy, the keyword, value, is the abstract form of social wealth, the form of wealth that prevails in capitalist production and circulation. Since this form of wealth is historically specific and determinate, it is a mistake to think of its signifier, money, which is “the true need produced by the modern economic system” (p. 93), as likewise “natural” or “eternal,” i.e. valid, or the “true need,” for all forms of society.

A fetishized world is reflected in the fetishized thought of this world. In a demystified understanding, by contrast, Marx writes:

It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities— the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man—given socialism—receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth—the other human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is emotion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being (p. 91).

It would follow from this distinction that what is natural to the human animal are her natural needs, determined as necessary or essential to her being as a species-being, and grounding the distinction between wealth and poverty, such that what political economy takes for naturalness is a falsification and a systematic distortion, an ideological construct or mystification.

If a humanized world is the opposite of a fetishized world, we find Marx imagining, conceiving, and projecting an idea on the speculative outpost of his thought about what a humanized world would be (the communist idea); which would be the objective of a science, in turn, that rose to the full measure of our humanity. Marx assigns himself this speculative task early and returns to it often at various milestones. Briefly, the operator is negation.₄₄ The method is radical.₄₅ Proposing to take our humanity by its root, Marx conceptualizes the possible world in which it would be fulfilled. From a logical point of view, the propositions or judgments projected into the limit-situation take the form of counterfactual conditional claims in the future-perfect tense of the subjunctive mood.₄₆ Such speculative projections are thought-experiments.₄₇

We can find a prima facie illustration in the conclusion of Marx’s Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique (1844), where he poses the question, suppose we had produced as human beings?

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature…. My work would be a free manifestation of life.₄₈

In this passage, we can note first that Marx writes in the first and second person, establishing an I/thou (or a “directly social,” as opposed to an “indirectly social”) relation; second, that he writes about the individual, i.e. the social individual; and third, that he identifies “my true nature” with “my human nature,” in what can only be taken in the normative way of the “truly human,” where what is truly human is “a free manifestation of life.”

Compared to the actuality of capitalist life, communism is an ideality, but it entails an idea that exercises final causality. Before we consider how so, let’s first consider some other speculative milestones of Marx’s philosophy. For example, he writes in the Communist Manifesto (1847-48) that “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (p. 491; emphasis added). In Capital (1872), by way of an explicit conceptual reversal of the world of the commodity and money fetishes, he writes, “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.”₄₉ Finally, in the farthest speculative outpost of the communist idea, when the “horizon of bourgeois right” is “crossed in its entirety,” Marx writes in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) that the principle of justice that would prevail in such a world would be, “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs!” (p. 531). A communist society, the society of the social individual, would therefore be both a fulfillment of humanism and also a fulfillment of naturalism.

By contrast, the myth of the atomic individual is a mirage of seventeenth and eighteenth-century European philosophy. It would have been inoperative and unrecognizable in Greek antiquity or medieval Europe; and it would be inoperative and unrecognized again in a post-capitalist, socialist form of social organization. Hegel had already confronted this myth in his own philosophy, which Marx in turn appropriates, criticizes, and transforms. Marx’s philosophical transformation of Hegelianism, in turn, pivots on the critique of ideology, which is the critical component of the theory of historical materialism. Marx’s hypothesis of an objectively fetishized world of human social relations can be indirectly verified by investigating how these relations are reflected in corresponding forms of understanding and self-understanding. These forms can be classified as either ideological or critical. ₅₀ Ideologies are systematic distortions inasmuch as they mystify social reality. Criticizing such distortions is therefore the key to a demystified understanding of human nature and the process of humanization natural to the species-being of the distinctively human animal.

The basic phenomenological figure of such systematic distortions is the one Hegel draws in the Phenomenology of Spirit of a topsy-turvy, upside-down, or “inverted world” (die verkehrte Welt).₅₁This figure is fundamental to Marx’s thought. In The German Ideology, he writes, “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their
circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process” (p. 154). The method of historical materialism has the aim of demystification. The critique of atomic individualism is an integral moment of this process, a process of reversal of the counterposition, the result of which is the social individual. Not only with respect to its object but also with respect to itself, ideology induces a “rupture” in the “actual life-process,” “[as] if this rupture had made its way not from reality into the textbooks, but rather from the textbooks into reality, and as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations!” The materialist conception of history is not a “dialectic balancing of concepts.” Rather, “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat find its intellectual weapons in philosophy” (p. 65).

If negation and critique push speculation, speculation also pulls critique and negation.₅₃ To this point, we have examined Marx’s notion of species-being, as it relates to the social individual, in the dimensions of description, criticism, explanation, normativity, and especially in the speculative dimension. We have asked what is human in his philosophy of human nature. We should now pose the question of what is natural in it. For both terms, in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx takes the acting subject as his point of departure.₅₄ The acting subject draws upon a wealth of generic or essential powers with the prospect of humanizing the social and natural world in which she finds herself situated. Marx argues that in the regime of capitalist private property, the self-development of this wealth of powers is diminished and truncated. He writes, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (p. 87).₅₅ On the other hand, he continues, “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human” (p. 87).

Marx proceeds next to an account of the objectivity of self- confirmation (pp. 87-88), which he grounds in turn in the  subjectivity of the acting subject. He writes:

…looking at this in its subjective aspect: just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear—is no object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers and can therefore only be so for me as my essential power is present for itself as a subjective capacity—for this reason, the senses of the social man are other senses than those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility … either cultivated or brought into being. For…the humanness of the senses…comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present (pp. 88-89).

Marx projects this “labour of the entire history of the world down to the present,” incorporating “the entire wealth of previous development” (p. 84), to its speculative limit. He writes,

[The] human essence of nature first exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with man—as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him—as the life-element of the human world; only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature—the true resurrection of nature—the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment (p. 85).

By “nature,” then, Marx means “the life-element of the human world.”

The key notion in Marx’s conception of the “life-element” and “life-activity” of the species-being of the social individual is the notion of “life” itself. In the life of the species, of course, Marx includes biological and zoological life (life is the object of the science of biology and species-life is the object of the science of zoology). This is life in its corporeality or materiality. In this respect, Marx writes:

The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature (p. 75).₅₆

If successful life therefore entails the successful metabolic regulation of the natural relationship between the organic and the inorganic body of a social individual, then the life of a society predicated on alienated labor, the atomized society of the atomic individual, engenders a world of estrangement. In such a world, Marx continues:

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form (p. 75).

This general circumstance of human estrangement and self- estrangement in capitalist society, an “inverted world” under the general condition of alienated labor, is a world that fails in the social task of successfully regulating the metabolic relation between human beings and nature in every conceptual dimension (materially and intellectually; empirically, theoretically, speculatively, and normatively). This general state of affairs can therefore be understood as pathological, as a form of social pathology.

To understand why the idiom of pathology is appropriate to the context of Marx’s writing, we can note that any empirical or clinical description of a pathological state of affairs, an illness, presupposes an underlying normative understanding of what a healthy outcome would be. As Marx develops his thought, he tends to exchange the technical philosophical vocabulary of Hegelianism for the technical terms and relations of the science of political economy. Correspondingly, as a philosopher, he also develops a more natural way of stating fundamental philosophical theses. For example, in Ch. 7 of Volume One of Capital, he distinguishes between “the labor process” in general, for all forms of social regulation of the natural metabolism, and the “valorization process” in particular, which is the specific difference between capitalist and other actual and possible modes of production. Marx begins the chapter by considering “the labour process independently of any specific social process.” He writes:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body…in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his sovereign power.₅₇

To this point in the quoted passage, Marx writes as if he has achieved a sound lay appropriation of an essentially biological and zoological understanding of human species-life.₅₈ However, he continues:

We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. An immense interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity from the situation when human labour had not yet cast off its first instinctive form. We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it…. The simple elements of the labour process are (1) purposeful activity, that is, work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work.₅₉

In this second part of the passage, Marx does not depart from a scientific understanding but comes instead to the flashpoint of the decisive difference between reductive or abstract forms of naturalism and a non-reductive, humanist form. At issue is not a scientific but a fundamental philosophical disagreement. It would be more convenient for reductive naturalism (physicalism or materialism) if these references to “mind,” “conscious purpose,” and “will” were only manners of speaking; then the claim to an “ideal existence” would amount to nothing more than the banality or the tautology that all ideas are, after all, only ideal. But an elision of the difference at stake would only obscure Marx’s meaning and blunt his point; namely, the sense in which labor is “an exclusively human characteristic.”

From the humane point of view, the opposite of which would be inhumane, we can take the fundamental category of a naturalistic humanism or a humanistic naturalism as Marx takes it in the 1844 Manuscripts, where the keyword is “life,” i.e. the milieu of the “life-element” and “life-activity” of a “species-being,” irreducible to its animality alone. Contrasting the animal with the human, Marx writes,

The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life- activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being (p. 76).

A social individual is latently and seminally a species-being because she exercises conscious and purposeful life-activity, a modality of action different in kind from the forms of life-activity of other animal and insect species, even where they are also social organisms. The purpose animating the life-activity of a species-being is, in sum, the “free manifestation of life.” The opposite condition is essentially the condition of unfreedom.

Marx’s development of the notion of life inscribes a series of terms and relations that begins with subjectivity and the acting subject, “real, corporeal man” (p. 115). He achieves this standpoint in the 1844 Manuscripts and bases the theory of historical materialism on it, as he develops the latter in The German Ideology. In The German Ideology, he writes, “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” (p. 149). He continues, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life” (p. 150). Therefore, “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (p. 154). Finally, these considerations direct Marx to the fundamental thesis of historical materialism: “Life,” the fundamental category, “is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness” (p. 155).

On this platform of corporeality—the organic bodies of individually existing human beings and the “inorganic body” of the natural world—the series of terms and relations Marx inscribes in the 1844 Manuscripts begins with “life-activity,” locates the “life-element” in which this activity takes place, identifies human “life-activity” as “self-activity,” develops “self-activity” as “self-development,” and concludes to the process of humanization that would come to fulfillment in a “humanized nature.” In the light of this series, it is evident that Marx incorporates a biological and a zoological outlook.₆₀ But he also supersedes such an outlook by incorporating it into the primary denotation of “life,” a framework category of his thought as a whole, in relation to subjectivity as his point of departure. The primary denotation of “life” in Marx’s usage is not biological or zoological but phenomenological. A hundred years before Sartre, Marx already writes “an essay on phenomenological ontology.”₆₁ Moreover, this claim returns us to the sense in which Marx is a “Hegelian” philosopher. The phenomenological figure of “life” appears early in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in connection with “the truth of self-certainty” and the phenomenology of “desire.” Hegel writes of the “determination of Life as it has issued from the Notion.”₆₂ If the phenomenological figure of life appears early in Hegel’s Phenomenology, it makes a late appearance in the Science of Logic as a notion (Begriff). As a notion, it belongs to Hegel’s second volume on “Subjective Logic” (a logic of subjectivity), appearing in the culmination of the work as a whole in “Section Three,” the final section on “The Idea.”₆₃

In other words, in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx anticipates that a “truly human” science would be phenomenological in nature.₆₄ That is, a truly human science would not be a physicalist science. It is the burden of this paper to account for this difference. The phenomenological sequence of development that Marx works out proceeds from “life” to “labor” and from “labor” to “praxis.” This is how labor comes to be the crucial mediating term of Marx’s thought as a whole.

Marx takes his own point of departure from his critical correction of what he takes to be Hegel’s “idealist” mistake. But he is still writing within the compass of Hegelianism. He writes,

The outstanding thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final outcome—that is, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle—is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible by his really bringing out of himself all the powers that are his as the species man— something which in turn is only possible through the totality of man’s actions, as the result of history—is only possible by man’s treating these generic powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement (p. 112).

Through our own conscious existence and self-activity in the life-element, as social individuals, we make ourselves, by way of the self-development of the generic powers latent in our humanity and distinguishing it as human. This human development, as a totality, is, for Marx as for Hegel, the “movement of surmounting the object of consciousness” (p. 113). The opposite of this surmounting would be “thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought devoid of eyes, of teeth, of ears, of everything” (p. 124).

Marx proceeds to write that the “science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology” (p. 113). As we have seen, as Marx proceeds to develop his criticism of Hegel in this manuscript—not only of Hegel’s phenomenology but also his philosophy of mind (the concluding volume of the Encyclopedia)—he essentially charges Hegel with the fallacy identified above as the fallacy of abstract thinking, a failure of concretion.₆₅ His criticism of Hegel’s Phenomenology is better regarded, not as an abandonment of the science of phenomenology, but, in its account of the acting subject, as a critically corrected form of phenomenological investigation. Marx’s critical correction of what he takes to be Hegel’s mistake leads him to pivot from thought to action, with the fundamental aim of bringing theory and practice together, in order to overcome the inevitable antinomies of a merely theoretical, merely abstract approach of theory apart from practice. Theory and practice, in turn, are integrated in conscious, purposeful activity, i.e., labor or work. Marx’s pivot to action is what warrants his identification of humanism with naturalism and his claim, on the speculative outpost of the communist idea, to have worked out “the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man”: “communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” The theoretical oppositions Marx lists in this particular passage are existence versus essence, objectification versus self-confirmation, freedom versus necessity, and the individual versus the species. In the subsequent passage that introduces the idea and the ideal aim of praxis, Marx writes,

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one (p. 89).

To the extent that Marx succeeds, then, what he succeeds in achieving is the successful transformation of the “knowing subject” of German idealism and Hegelian philosophy into the “acting subject” of a post-Hegelian philosophy of praxis, through a successful reconstruction of “the science of phenomenology.”

The transformed premise of this reconstituted science is threefold: the actually existing individual human being is a social being in her animal nature; as a social individual, she is a species-being, a being “for herself” capable of “universal and free” modalities of action; finally, as a species-being, she aims to be fully a zoon politikon in the realized Aristotelian sense. The notion of species-being is a developmental, teleological notion.₆₆ In the Grundrisse, Marx writes, “The human being is in the most literal sense a [zoon politikon], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of  society. Production by an isolated individual outside society… is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.”₆₇ Moreover, if the claim that species-being is a phenomenological notion is correct, then Marx correctly differentiates the “historical life-process” from the “physical life-process” in the theory of historical materialism (p. 154).₆₈ Human beings are naturally species-beings, as they are also naturally political animals. However, these are not identical or coincident notions. Marx writes, “human beings become individuals only through the process of history. [A human being] appears originally as species-being, clan being, herd animal—although in no way whatever as a [zoon politikon] in the political sense.”₆₉

The conceptual distance between our being aboriginally species-beings and our becoming “political animals” (in the sense in which Marx recasts Aristotle) inscribes the arc of historical development. Marx’s phenomenological distinction between the animal being of a herd animal and the species- being of a social individual enables him to differentiate the “historical life-process” from the “physical life-process” (p. 154). That is, the life-process itself of human life is not merely physical. By locating the species-being of the human animal inside history, Marx does not step outside of nature. Rather, the herd animal becomes a human animal by virtue of her enactment of the generic powers that distinguish her humanity as a historical as well as natural being.

These generic powers are the active potencies of her species-being actualized world-historically (through the development of the productive forces and social relations of the labor process). A human being isa species-being on her way to becominga “political animal” in Marx’s Aristotelian sense of “an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society”; but she is also aself-individuatinganimal, an animal bursting with all of the capacities that can be realized in “a free manifestation of life,” being realized through our own self-activity and in the course of our own self-development. This is the sense in which, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes his aphorism, “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (not the other way around).₇₀ Marx was impressed with Darwin’s discovery and did not doubt evolution or its mechanism of natural selection; but his aphorism encodes the difference that history makes. As a humanist animated by a speculative vision of a possible future alternative to capitalist society, Marx introduces the telic categories of his phenomenological humanism into his philosophy and theory of history. It is not surprising that Marx’s phenomenology would anticipate future developments in the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century. For example, it may anticipate not only Husserl’s conception of the “lifeworld,” but also his characterization, in The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology,of phenomenology as a historical-teleological method of investigation.₇₁ The telos of history, for Marx, is the coming-to-be of freedom and a truly free society.

---

^[

These generic powers are the active potencies of her species-being actualized world-historically (through the development of the productive forces and social relations of the labor process). A human being isa species-being on her way to becominga “political animal” in Marx’s Aristotelian sense of “an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society”; but she is also a self-individuatinganimal, an animal bursting with all of the capacities that can be realized in “a free manifestation of life,” being realized through our own self-activity and in the course of our own self-development. This is the sense in which, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes his aphorism, “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (not the other way around).^[i]Marx was impressed with Darwin’s discovery and did not doubt evolution or its mechanism of natural selection; but his aphorism encodes the difference that history makes. As a humanist animated by a speculative vision of a possible future alternative to capitalist society, Marx introduces the telic categories of his phenomenological humanism into his philosophy and theory of history. It is not surprising that Marx’s phenomenology would anticipate future developments in the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century. For example, it may anticipate not only Husserl’s conception of the “lifeworld,” but also his characterization, in The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, of phenomenology as a historical-teleological method of investigation.₇₁ The telos of history, for Marx, is the coming-to-be of freedom and a truly free society.

In 1844, Marx develops a reconstituted science of phenomenology turning on “life-activity,” in which the primary denotation of the framework category of life—or the lifeworld—is also what Merleau-Ponty calls the world of lived experience. For Marx as for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, this point of departure is a “return to the things themselves.” Merleau-Ponty writes, “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign- language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”₇₂

On this basis, beginning with subjectivity, Marx works out his critique of the science of political economy. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he writes, “Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production” (p. 73). The direct relationship between the worker and production is the directly social labor of the social individual. In capitalist production, however, this directly social relationship is deformed by the interposition of the law of value that constitutes the commodity-form in the dominant social relation that prevails at the point of production.₇₃

Concerning scientific method, the relevant contrast is the contrast between the physicalism of the science of political economy and the humanism of a reconstructed phenomenological science. Concerning this distinction, Marx writes, “one basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie” (p. 90). The lie consists in the reductive or abstract approach of a putatively human or social science that reduces persons to things. Working people count as mere factors of production, whose radical difference from non-labor inputs is obscured and concealed from view. The political economy of David Ricardo exemplifies this obscurantism. As we noted at the beginning, it is an irony of contemporary Marx scholarship that Marx “the economist” is still often presented as a “radical Ricardian” or a “neo-Ricardian.” The main reason why this way of interpreting Marx’s critique of political economy is mistaken is that Ricardo’s science is a physicalist science of human social relations in the all-pervasive realm of economic activity inside capitalist society.

We can conclude by turning in the most direct way to Marx’s essential criticism of political economy as a physicalist science. He concludes the first chapter of Volume One of Capital by writing:

Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself. Hence the pre-bourgeois forms of the social organization of production are treated by political economy in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre- Christian religions.₇₄

What counts most here is the question political economy fails to ask: “why this content has assumed that particular form”; namely, the form of value. Marx does ask this question. He asks, “Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity?” He answers, “Clearly, it arises from this form itself.”₇₅ But this is the form that political economy fails to grasp. Marx argues that the economists are “misled by the fetishism attached to the world of commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour” that takes the form of a social relation between things. In this first chapter, Marx also criticizes Aristotle, “the great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form,” for failing to solve the riddle of money: “Aristotle…himself tells us what prevented any further analysis: the lack of the concept of value.”₇₆ Therefore, Aristotle concluded that equality in exchange is “’only a makeshift for practical purposes.’… Such a thing, in truth, cannot exist.”₇₇

In the Grundrisse, Marx writes, “It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity—not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour.”₇₈ Smith’s scientific advance on his predecessors is double-sided. On the one hand, he discovers that “labor as such” is the source of the wealth of a society. On the other hand, he fails to distinguish between “past, objectified labor” and “living labor-power,” under a circumstance when the domination of dead over living labor is a signature characteristic of capitalist production. The classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo is predicated on a labor theory of value, but if we slur Marx’s theory together with the respective versions of Smith and Ricardo, we will miss Marx entirely.

Smith and Ricardo advance on Aristotle, but they too lack a concept of value (i.e., a “concept” in Marx’s Hegelian sense). Ricardo takes the equality of exchange (the exchange of equivalent values, “x commodity A = y commodity B”₈₀) as the exchange of equivalent embodied-labor ratios, but, failing to ask the question “never once asked,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse that Ricardo “never investigated the form of the mediation.”₈₁

With [Ricardo]…wage labour and capital are again conceived as a natural, not as a historically specific social form, for the creation of wealth as use value; i.e. their form as such, precisely because it is natural, is irrelevant, and is not conceived in its specific relation to the form of wealth, just as wealth itself, in its exchange-value form, appears as a merely formal mediation of its material composition: thus the specific character of bourgeois wealth is not grasped—precisely because it appears there as the adequate form of wealth as such, and thus, although exchange value is the point of departure, the specific economic forms of exchange themselves play no role at all in his economics….as if exchange value were merely a ceremonial form, which vanishes in Ricardo just as money as medium of circulation vanishes in exchange.₈₂

Because Ricardo treats the distinction between use-value and exchange-value as “natural” and therefore valid for all forms of society, he does not grasp that it belongs only to a historically determinate mode of production and a specific form of social organization. This is why Ricardo too lacks a concept of value, whereas the “exact development of the concept of capital is necessary” in order to grasp “the foundation of bourgeois society.”₈₃ By comparison with the science of political economy prior to Marx, Marx stakes a claim to the priority of discovery like Darwin’s discovery of the principle of natural selection, except that the latter belongs to the science of biology, while Marx’s scientific discovery belongs to a science of human social relations irreducible to any physical science, since the concept of value is precisely not a physicalist concept. Marx understands that the “sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the relation must bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself.”₈₄

It takes a critical theory of society in order to discover the concept of value because its discovery requires a demystification of the appearance of naturalness. Ricardo is not a historical materialist. Because he too lacks a concept of value, he treats capital merely as the possession and accumulation of physical quantities. He fails to distinguish physicalist categories from the “phantom-like objectivity” of Marx’s concept.

Therefore, he fails to distinguish the antediluvian forms of capital—merchants’ capital and usury—from the historically determinate, specifically capitalist social forms of production and circulation. He recognizes that exchanges are exchanges of equivalent values, but because he lacks the concept of value, he also fails to explain surplus-value and profit. He makes equal exchange depend on embodied-labor ratios and he grasps that rising productivity produces a physical surplus. But he confuses the surplus product with surplus-value itself. (He does not distinguish between the “natural” and the “value” form of commodities.)

In other words, Ricardo takes the “physical quantities” approach that distinguishes the neo-Ricardian and Sraffian interpretations of Marx’s theory of value widely held in twentieth-century Marxian economics. The technical details of this mistake are beyond the scope of this paper, but the philosophical point is that there are two sciences here, not one.₈₅ As Marx writes in the 1844 Manuscripts: “Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker and production” (p. 73). From Capital, we have already noted Marx’s view that the “economists are misled by the fetishism attached to the world of commodities.” Within the analytic framework of the first chapter of Volume One, we can locate the precise mistake of this physicalist science as a failure of inference. In the first section, Marx summarizes the distinction between the use-value and exchange-value of commodities; the distinction he inherits from the classical science. But he has a different scientific purpose. Capital is a critique of political economy. The science Marx aims to develop is a critical, not a positive science. Chapter One ends with the fourth and final section on commodity fetishism, but the understanding of the classical economists is fetishized or mystified from the bottom up, beginning with their own fundamental categories. A mystified understanding of something both overlooks and conceals it (like a crime and its cover-up).

What the economists miss is an analytic entailment of their own distinction, which Marx presents in the second section on “The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities.” In just this connection, Marx makes his claim to scientific originality.

He writes, “I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation.”₈₆ The further elucidation entails the distinction between “concrete” and “abstract” labor: on the premise of a labor theory of value, concrete labor is an entailment of use-value and abstract labor is an entailment of value (the form of appearance of which is exchange-value). Abstract labor, in turn, is the historically specific difference that specifies capitalist production, because it crystallizes the social relation that prevails at the point of production, governed by the law of value or “socially necessary labor-time.”₈₇ Because Ricardo overlooks this analytic entailment of his own framework categories, he fails to distinguish between concrete and abstract labor (“human labour-power expended, without regard to the form of its expenditure”₈₈). He therefore also fails to distinguish between a physical surplus and surplus-value.

This is the outcome we would expect from a physicalist science of human social relations, as opposed to Marx’s phenomenological science and the critical theory of society it engenders. “One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.” A reductive, physicalist science is a science that eliminates subjectivity, whereas Marx’s critical theory is based on the acting subject; and Marx’s philosophy is a philosophy of the subject and a philosophy of praxis.

For the difference this makes, I will close with what I hope you will forgive as a long quotation from Raya Dunayevskaya’s classic Marxism and Freedom (1958).

The failure of the Ricardian theory to explain the exchange between capital and labor, on the basis of its own primary law of labor value, meant the disintegration of that school. It was a fatal failure for it could not explain how it is that labor—the source and creator of all values—becomes the poorer the more values the worker creates. Utopian  socialism could move nowhere because it remained a prisoner of the economic categories of Ricardo.

Marx broke through the barriers both because he split the categories created by classical political economy, and created new categories. He rejected the concept of labor as a commodity. Labor is an activity, not a commodity. It was no accident that Ricardo used one and the same work for the activity and for the commodity. He was a prisoner of his concept of the human laborer as a thing. Marx, on the other hand, showed that what the laborer sold was not his labor, but only his capacity to labor, his labor power.

Two principles are involved here, one flowing from theory and the other from practice. By splitting the old category, labor, into (1) labor as activity or function, and (2) ability to labor, or labor power, the commodity, Marx forged a new theoretical weapon with which to investigate the new material forces that developed outside the old category. The very term, labor power, opened all sorts of new doors of comprehension. It enabled him to make a leap in thought to correspond with the new activity of workers….

Capitalists and their ideologists think always of expanding productivity by more perfect machines. What happens to the worker as a result, well, that is just something that “can’t be helped.” Their governing principle is to keep their eyes on economies and the expansion of machinery. That said, Marx is “quite in keeping with the spirit of capitalist production.”

At the opposite pole from these, Marx was concerned with the worker’s “own personal productiveness.” That is the class line which he draws. Starting from these premises— so strange to the intellectual and so natural to the worker who has worked in large-scale production—Marx was able to discover that what is involved in the cooperation of many workers is a productive force….

New powers are not easily imagined or created. It requires a revolution in thought to understand them, as it requires a revolution in society to create them. ₈₉

Endnotes^[

1. See David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = https://plato.standford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/naturalism.
2. In the lexicon of this paper, the term “physicalism” denotes the reductive form of naturalism, as opposed to non- reductive forms. Inside physicalism, a question arises as to whether the physicalist thesis is a linguistic thesis, as Neurath and Carnap held, or whether it is a metaphysical thesis, as Quine and Smart held (see Daniel Stoljar, Physicalism [Routledge, 2010], pp. 21-25). This distinction inside physicalism resembles the broader distinction within the typology of naturalism between method and ontology. Linguistic and methodological versions abstain from metaphysical or ontological commitments, as a self- imposed discipline. On the other hand, Marx’s view of the relation of method to ontology is like Hegel’s. As Alain Badiou brings out in Logics of Worlds (Continuum, 2006), Hegel’s philosophy is both onto-logical and onto-logical. Likewise Marx. Also, inside physicalism, the question arises as to whether there are non-reductive forms of the physicalist thesis (see Stoljar, pp. 160-62). In this paper, I will assume without argument that the answer is no. Moreover, the answer, no, would lead us to conclude that the non-reductive forms of naturalism are not physicalist; and therefore that Marx is not a physicalist, as will be argued here. Additionally, concerning nomenclature, the coherence of this paper depends upon a demonstration that the distinction between “analytic metaphysicians’ physicalism” and “economists’ physicalism” is not equivocal. While no attempt at demonstration is proffered here, in previous papers I have argued that the discursive transposition from the former to the latter is not equivocal. See “Philosophical Implications of Temporal Single-System Interpretation” (Radical Philosophy Association, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, October 2012); “Social Control and the Dictatorship of the Factory Clock” (Radical Philosophy Association Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, November 2014); and also see “Beyond Naturalism: A Personalist Integral Humanism” (Creighton University, Omaha, NB, April 2018).

3. The notion of an “intellectual conversion” is taken from Bernard Lonergan. Marx’s “Letter to His Father” of November 10, 1837 is a shoe that fits. In The Marx-Engels Reader 2/e (Norton, 1978), the editor Robert Tucker titles his selection from Marx’s letter, “Discovering Hegel” (pp. 7-8). For Marx, this discovery is philosophically decisive. “Permanent deposit” is taken from John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930), in The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (U. of Southern Illinois Pr., 1981-91) 5; Dewey writes that “Hegel had left a permanent deposit in [his] thinking” (p. 154). The extrapolation to Marx is by design, since Dewey is also the architect of a non-reductive form of naturalism, which, in terms virtually identical to Marx’s, is likewise a naturalistic humanism or humanistic naturalism. See Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works 1; especially the first chapter on “Experience and Philosophic Method,” pp. 10-41. Page numbers for subsequent quotations from The Marx- Engels Reader appear in parentheses

4. Lenin was not wrong to identify the three sources and component parts of “Marxism” as German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. However, a more integral presentation of Marx’s philosophy as a whole can be worked out in the three internally related dimensions of his humanism (his philosophical anthropology or philosophy of human nature), historical materialism, and the critique of political economy.

5. See n. 2 above.

6. See Ian Steedman, Marx After Sraffa (Routledge, 1985; orig. 1977). For criticism, see Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (Lexington, 2007). The quotation is taken from Kliman, p. 35.

7. See Paul Samuelson, “Economists and the history of ideas,” The American Economic Review 52 (1962): 12.

8. See Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (Liveright, 2013), p. 462. Marx did reject what he and Engels called “utopian socialism.

9. In this paper, “what Marx means by …” claims are not intended as oracular discernments of Marx’s intentions; they are interpretations of his body of work as a whole. The basic approach is hermeneutic and textualist. The criterion is not “knowing Karl Marx’s inner thoughts” but fidelity to the text as a whole (or on the whole, all things considered). The interpretation here is oriented by the Marxist- Humanism worked out by Raya Dunayevskaya, who sought to recreate the “original Marxism of Marx for our age.” In this interpretive dispensation, Marx’s humanism is the key to his thought as a whole; and, in particular, to the critique of political economy, the body of work that gravitates in the orbit of Volume One of Capital.

10. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, included in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 115.

11. On “estranged labor”; “private property and communism”; “the meaning of human requirements”; “the power of money in bourgeois society”; and the “critique of the Hegelian dialectic and philosophy as a whole.” In this selection, Tucker leaves out “Antithesis of Capital and Labor. Landed Property and Capital,” and “Private Property and Labour,” which come between the manuscript on alienation and the manuscript on communism. In the manuscript on “Private Property and Labor,” Marx shows how physiocracy overcomes mercantilism’s fetish of precious metals by discovering the inner connection between wealth and labor. But here wealth is in the form of land and labor is agricultural labor. If the fetishists are like Catholics, then Marx cites Engels, who “was right to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy” (Struik, ed.,p. 128). Smith takes the next step, by incorporating industrial wealth and the factory system into his conception of “labor in general” (p. 131). But this is the complete generality of estranged or alienated labor. Therefore, Marx writes, “Because [the political economists] make private property in its active form the subject, thus simultaneously making man—and man as something unessential—the essence, the contradiction of reality corresponds completely to the contradictory essence which they accept as their principle. Far from refuting it, the ruptured world of industry confirms their self-ruptured principle. Their principle is, after all, the principle of this rupture” (pp. 129-30). Other manuscripts omitted from Tucker’s selection include “Wages of Labor,” “Profits of Capital,” and “Rent of Land.” See The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik (International Publishers, 1964)

12. For the distinction between a mere “dialectic balancing of concepts” and “the grasping of real relations,” see Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 89- 90. For the purpose of this paper, the passage in which this distinction appears is worth quoting in full: “Thus production, distribution, exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism; production is the generality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together. This is admittedly a coherence, but a shallow one. Production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accident, and the latter may therefore promote production to a greater or lesser extent; exchange stands between the two as formal social movement; and the concluding act, consumption, which is conceived not only as a terminal point but as an end-in-itself, actually belongs outside economics except in so far as it reacts in turn upon the point of departure and initiates the whole process anew” (p. 89). The “regular syllogism” Marx presents is faithful to the “first figure of the syllogism” in Hegel’s presentation in the Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Humanities Pr., 1969): “I-P-U is the general schema of the determinate syllogism. Individuality unites with universality through particularity” (p. 667). Hegel remarks that the “rationality” of the syllogism “is not a makeshift; on the contrary, in contrast to the immediacy of relation that still obtains in the judgement, it is the objective element; and the former immediacy of cognition is rather the merely subjective element, whereas the syllogism is the truth of the judgement. Everything is a syllogism, a universal that through particularity is united with individuality; but it is certainly not a whole consisting of three propositions” (p. 669). If the syllogism is an integral unity of three terms internally related to one another in a single true judgment, then the object of affirmation or denial in judgment is not an “abstract” but a “concrete universal,” i.e. an individual.

Following Hegel, Marx writes, “The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (p. 101). Furthermore, he writes that it is “correct to begin with the real and concrete,” not as a “chaotic conception of the whole,” but as “a rich totality of many determinations and relations” (p. 100), the determination of which is “obviously the scientifically correct method” (p. 101). In this paper, the concrete universal most under consideration is “species-being,” which denotes an individual (the object of a true judgment in the syllogism). Like Hegel and Marx, Lonergan also writes that the object of judgment is always a concrete matter of fact or value (against deductivism, formalism, or logicism). The upshot is a method of scientific or critical realism. Karl Popper called his philosophy of science “critical rationalism.” Popper’s critical rationalism can be critically contrasted with Roy Bhaskar’s “critical realism.” But Lonergan also calls his position “critical realism.”

Here I am extrapolating from Lonergan to Marx by way of Hegel on the concrete universal. Marx’s philosophy of science is a realism of scientific discovery. As Darwin really discovered natural selection, Marx claims to have really discovered the “law of value” operative in in the bourgeois, capitalist, commercial form of society (or social organization). Having briefly set out what Marx takes to be the scientifically correct method, let’s return to the paragraph in which Marx organizes the elements of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption into a regular syllogism (the scientifically correct method of political economy). Next, he writes, “The opponents of the political economists—whether inside or outside its realm— who accuse them of barbarically tearing apart things which belong together, stand either on the same ground as they, or beneath them. Nothing is more common than the reproach that the political economists view production too much as an end in itself, that distribution is just as important. This accusation is based precisely on the economic notion that the spheres of distribution and of production are independent, autonomous neighbors. Or that these moments were not grasped in their unity. As if this rupture had made its way not from reality into the textbooks, but rather from the textbooks into reality, and as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations!” (pp. 89-90). Marx’s conclusion is that both parties are wrong, the political economists and their critics, by virtue of making the same mistake, i.e. treating the sphere of production as separate from the sphere of distribution, the former “determined by general natural laws” and the latter by “social accident.” If this were correct, then the “general natural laws” of political economy would be subject neither to history nor to conscious social control and transformation, whereas what is historically malleable would be merely accidental. But this twofold conclusion is the opposite of what Marx takes to be the correct conclusion. In turn, the false conclusion is based on an ideological distortion by taking its point of departure from an “eighteenth-century idea” of an “independent individual” (see pp.83-85). This is the ideology of the atomic individual and social atomism. Taking the atomic individual for its point of departure leads political economy to mystify social reality by virtue of its “eternalization of historic relations of production” (see pp. 85-88). This naturalization or eternalization of a specific, historically determinate mode of production, capitalist production, is a “bad” naturalism inasmuch as it conflates nature with history and fails to differentiate what is distinctive about the natural animal who is also a human and historical animal. This difference is the difference between leaving humanity out and bringing humanity in. Finally, if the correct scientific method moves from reality into the textbooks and not vice-versa, then in philosophy, it would be the epigones of Hegel whose aim
was “the dialectic balancing of concepts” rather than the ”grasping of real relations”; a shallow, degenerate form of dialectic exhibited, for example, by Proudhon. See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

13. In the context of the Young Hegelian aftermath of Hegelian philosophy and theology beginning with Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1835, “materialism” is Feuerbachian materialism. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (International Publ., 1941; orig. 1888), Engels writes, “Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity…we all became at once Feuerbachians” (p. 18). This is the origin of the Feuerbach legend: the view that “Feuerbach…forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception” (p. 7). On this basis, he launches “dialectical materialism” as the putatively correct view (the critical correction of Hegelianism); he writes: “Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content” (p. 24). This sounds Marx-like, especially in the light of Marx’s own figure of the camera obscura in his critique of ideology (in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 154) and his own use of the metaphor of Hegel’s dialectic “standing on it hand” in the “Postface” to the second German edition of Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 103. In context, however, Marx takes Feuerbach’s repudiation of Hegelianism to be a relapse to a pre-critical standpoint and a return to the outlook of Anglo-French materialism, which he excoriates in The Holy Family (1844). In the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx calls Feuerbach’s materialism the “old materialism” (in The Marx-Engels Reader, see pp. 143-45), sharply distinguishing it from his own “new” materialism (“Thesis X,” p. 145). What Marx means is best understood with respect to the naturalistic humanism, humanistic naturalism of the 1844 Manuscripts. But in that case, it seems like a good terminological recommendation simply to drop the word “materialism” altogether. It is difficult to think of philosophical debates more sterile than the nineteenth-century debate between “idealism” and “materialism,” as it would have been understood by Engels. In other words, as Stoljar points out, the thesis that “everything is mental” is essentially indistinguishable from the thesis that “everything is physical” (see Physicalism, pp. 43-44). In the lexicon of this paper, “materialism” is synonymous with “physicalism,” and physicalism denotes the reductive form of naturalism, whether methodological or ontological. In “Thesis I,” Marx writes, “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively” (p. 143). The fundamental point concerns the ineliminability of subjectivity and the acting subject—the principal point to be made in this paper. Materialism or physicalism is reductive by virtue of both its methodological and also its ontological elimination of subjectivity

14. “Abstraction,” for Marx, can be either reductive—as in his use of the term here—or enriching, as when Marx writes (in the “Preface” to the first edition of Capital) that “in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both” (p. 90). In this latter context, the power of abstraction is the conceptual power of grasping the intelligibility immanent in the object under investigation. Concerning the fallacy of “abstract thinking” in the context of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx orchestrates his criticism with respect to the architecture of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and its three basic terms: logic, nature, and mind. He writes, “the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement—i.e., comprehending itself abstractly. Logic (mind’s coin of the realm, the speculative or thought-value of man and nature—their essence grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence their unreal essence) is alienated thinking and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking. Then: The externality of this abstract thinking … nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it—its self- loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as abstract thinking—but as alienated abstract thinking.

Finally, Mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin—the thinking which, as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic, and religious mind, is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and relates itself to itself, as absolute knowledge in the hence absolute, i.e., abstract mind, and so receives its conscious embodiment in a mode of being corresponding to it. For its real mode of being is abstraction” (p. 110).

15. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes, “For Hegel the essence of man—man—equals self-consciousness” (p. 113). On this predicate, Marx assigns eight theses to Hegel’s phenomenological method of “surmounting of the object of consciousness” (pp. 113-114). He then locates what he takes to be Hegel’s basic mistake in the second of these theses. He writes, “As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thinghood. Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood is thus established through this alienation…. And since it is not real Man, nor therefore Nature—Man being human nature—who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man—self-consciousness—thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-consciousness” (p. 114). On the other hand, “It is only to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e. material) essential powers should have real natural objects of his essence; as is the fact that his self- alienation should lead to the establishing of a real, objective world—but a world in the form of externality—a world therefore not belonging to his own essential being, and an overpowering world. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise” (p. 114). What makes the matter seem mysterious, however, is that (according to Marx) Hegel’s purpose is to derive thinghood from self-consciousness in “the act of positing,” rather than beginning with the premise of real human beings in their real, active lives. Marx draws out this distinction as follows: “But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness can only establish thinghood—i.e., establish something which itself is only an abstract thing,
a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any essentiality vis-à-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary, it is a mere creature—something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but a confirmation of the act of positing in which is concentrated for a moment the energy of the act as its product, seeming to give the de-posit—but only for a moment—the character of an independent, real substance” (pp. 114-15). This mere seeming, of course, is a false semblance. By contrast, Marx states what he takes to be the correct procedure. “Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective” (p. 115). The relevant distinction is the distinction between the “act of positing” and the subject who, so to speak, “posits.” On the basis of this distinction, we have grounds to say that the heart of Marx’s realism is the “objectivity of subjectivity.” He concludes that “this objective being does not fall from his state of ‘pure activity’ into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being” (p. 115). It would be wrong to call Marx’s way of establishing a point of departure for philosophy “materialism” in any ordinary sense of the term, for materialism makes the opposite mistake by attempting to derive self-consciousness from “matter,” which is only nature taken abstractly. Accordingly, Marx writes, “But nature, too, taken abstractly, for itself— nature fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man.

It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly… Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature” (p. 124)! “Nature as nature—that is to say, in so far as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it— nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions, is nothing—a nothing proving itself to be nothing–is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled” (p. 124)

16. See Marx, Capital 1, p. 102.

17. Ibid., p. 102. The method of inquiry is empirical research. The method of presentation is conceptual or theoretical understanding. If it were not too misleading, we could say that empirical research is the “materialist” side of Marx’s thought and that his formation of concepts is the “idealist” side. In the section of Capital on commodity fetishism, Marx succinctly restates their relation: “Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the result of the process of development ready to hand” (p. 168)

18. For a fuller context, Marx writes of Hegel’s Phenomenology, “Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the criticism really contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phenomenology as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works—that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world” (p. 111). Two questions should be distinguished. One, what is Marx’s critique of Hegel? The other, does Marx have Hegel right? This paper addresses the former but not the latter.

19. Ibid., p. 103.

20. In his entry on “dialectical materialism” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2 (Macmillan, 1967), H.B. Acton writes that dialectical materialism is “a title first devised by G.V. Plekhanov…in 1891” (p. 389). But this is incorrect. See n. 9 above. Ch. IV of Ludwig Feuerbach carries the title, “Dialectical Materialism,” the upshot of his Anti-Dühring (1878) and Dialectics of Nature (1883). A mistake like this might be made by someone who identifies “Marxism” with “Marxism-Leninism” and takes a point of departure from the “Russian Marxism” on which Lenin initially cut his teeth. Especially once this body of thought degenerates into Stalinism and ossifies, it would perhaps be a matter of secondary importance to read Marx and Engels for themselves

21. It should be emphasized that Marx and Feuerbach are very different thinkers and also that unlike Engels, Marx was never a “Feuerbachian.” See n. 13 above.

22. See n. 12 above; “ideal-realism” is a title Charles S. Peirce appropriated from his father, Benjamin Peirce. See Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Indiana U. Pr., 1998). For Peirce’s appropriation of Hegel, see What Pragmatism Is (included in The Essential Peirce, Peirce Edition Project (eds.), Indiana Univ. Pr., 1998; orig. 1905). Peirce writes: “The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which, however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked up to him as the great vindicator of their truth.… For pragmaticism belongs essentially to the triadic class of philosophical doctrines, and is much more essentially so than Hegelianism is” (p. 345). As to pragmaticism itself, Peirce writes, “Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose” (p. 333).

23. A locus classicus of Marx’s critique of materialism is the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), included in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 143-45.

24. Marx’s expression is “generic powers.” Identifying these powers with “active potencies” brings Aquinas to mind. Whereas Aristotle does not draw the distinction between “passive” and “active” potency, Aquinas does, owing to the influence of Neoplatonism on this thought, as well as his own creative originality, which measures his distance from Aristotle, most acutely for the notion of “existence.”

25. For freedom as self-development, see James L. Marsh, Critique, Action, and Liberation (SUNY Pr., 1995).

26. Hegel’s fundamental interlocutors were Kant and Aristotle. Indeed, Hegel gives his last word to Aristotle. The concluding volume of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, the Philosophy of Mind, concludes with an epigraph from Aristotle’s Metaphysics xii, 7: “And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e., the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we ourselves sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God” (Ross translation).

27. In The Human Condition (U. of Chicago Pr., 1958), Hannah Arendt distinguishes among human activities labor, work, and action. She criticizes Marx for reducing a human being to a laboring animal, as she sees it, without regard to the other, more humanly important modalities of action. There is room for this criticism in a common enough reading of Marx. But Marx is neither a reductionist nor a positivist. It is sometimes said that Marx treats a human being as nothing other than Homo economicus, whereas his critique of political economy is nothing less than a critical repudiation of Homo economicus.

28. Although “humanization” is not Marx’s own term, it has entered into the Marxian lexicon by way of thinkers like Paulo Freire, who writes of a dialectic of humanization and dehumanization in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum, 1996). Freire writes, “I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved. It is this tormenting theme which gives our epoch [its] anthropological character…In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of dehumanizing oppression, it is absolute necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which people are reduced to things” (p. 84).

29. Here Marx writes: “What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of ‘Society’ as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being…. Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality—the ideal totality—the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself; just as he exists in the real world as the awareness and the real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human life-activity.”

30. See n. 29 above.

31. Marx presents “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” in the fourth and concluding section of the first chapter, “The Commodity,” of Capital 1, pp. 163-77. In the first section, Marx presents “The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value),” pp. 125-31. An analytic entailment of the distinction between use-value and value, unnoticed by political economy, follows in the second section, namely, “The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities.” Here Marx presents the important distinction between “concrete labor” (the analytic entailment of use-value) and “abstract labor” (the analytic entailment of value). With this distinction, Marx claims the originality of discovery. He writes, “Initially the commodity appeared to us as an object with a dual character, possessing both use-value and exchange-value [i.e., the ‘form of appearance’ of value]. Later on it was seen that labour, too, has a dual character: in so far as it finds its expression in value, it no longer possesses the same characteristics as when it is the creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation” (pp. 131-32). In the third section, “The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value,” Marx derives the money-form of value from the commodity-form of value, beginning with “The Simple, Isolated, or Accidental Form of Value,” “x commodity A = y commodity B” (pp. 138-63). Finally, after Marx concludes this scientific presentation of the law of value operative in capitalist production— namely, that what “exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or labour-time socially necessary for its production” (p. 129)—he turns to the philosophical criticism of the fourth section, in which he accounts for the “mysterious,” “mystical,” and “enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity” (p. 164). His explanation discloses the “secret” of the commodity fetish.

32. Marx, Capital 1, p. 187.

33. Ibid., p. 92.

34. Ibid., pp. 165-66. In context, dinglich is best translated literally as “thing-like.” Things, in context, are best understood as physical objects.

35. Ibid., p. 255.

36. Ibid., see p. 342. Not only are working people not the dominant subjects in capitalist society; neither is the figure of the capitalist. Marx writes, “As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

37. Ibid., p. 165.

38. Ibid., p. 167, p. 138.

39. This is the form of social relation that prevails at the point of production, which, in capitalist production, is governed by the socially necessary labor-time required to produce articles in the commodity-form. The conflation of the natural with the value form of the commodity is afundamental mistake Marx addresses in the methodological introduction to the Grundrisse, under the heading of “Eternalization of historic relations of production” (pp.85-88; see also n. 8 above). Marx takes John Stuart Mill as exemplary. He writes, “But none of this is the economists’ real concern in this general part. The aim is, rather, to present production—see e.g. Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding. In distribution, by contrast, humanity has allegedly permitted itself to be considerably more arbitrary.

Quite apart from this crude tearing-apart of production and distribution and of their real relationship, it must be apparent at the outset that, no matter how differently distribution may have been arranged in different stages of social development, it must be possible here also, just as with production, to single out common characteristics, and just as possible to confound or to extinguish all historical differences under general human laws. For example, the slave, the serf and the wage labourer all receive a quantity of food which makes it possible for them to exist as slaves, as serfs, as wage labourers. The conqueror who lives from tribute, or the official who lives from taxes, or the landed proprietor and his rent, or the monk and his alms, or the Levite and his tithe, all receive a quota of social production, which is determined by other laws than that of the slave’s, etc. …” (p. 87). Here Marx also writes, “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (p. 87).

40.  Ibid., p. 138.

41.  Ibid., p. 128.

42. Ibid., pp. 138-39.

43. See Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 85ff.

44. Hegel and Marx both adopt Spinoza’s maxim that all determination is negation.

45. In an important paragraph from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: Introduction (1844), Marx writes: “It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. What proves beyond doubt the radicalism of German theory, and thus its practical energy, is that it begins from the resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being—conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: ‘Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!’” (p. 60).

46. Or what Alain Badiou calls the “future anterior” in Being and Event (Continuum, 2005).

47. This is the form of inference Peirce names “abduction.”

48. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/ james-mill/, retrieved 07/21/18.

49. Marx, Capital 1, p. 171. Marx continues, “All the characteristics of Robinson’s [Robinson Crusoe’s] labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual.” Marx takes Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe as an icon or the phenomenological figure of the atomic individual, under the condition of social atomism. In the methodological “Introduction” of the Grundrisse, Marx takes his point of departure, against Ricardo, from “the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades” (p. 83). The subtitle of this first subsection of the “Introduction,” “(1) Production,” is “Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas” (p. 83).

50. See Max Horkeimer,” Traditional and Critical Theory (1937).

51. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (OUP, 1977), pp. 96-103.

52. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 90.

53. In Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism (SUNY Pr., 2004), Anne F. Pomeroy accounts for the lure of the future as follows: “The conceptual pole operates ‘freely’ within the data and its formal elements, entertaining diverse combinations, eliminating unwanted contrasts, choosing the relational configurations of its past as its achievement. The present activity is, therefore, dipolar: both reproducing the objective datum in physical feeling (how the object is efficacious in the present) and simultaneously entertaining the possibilities presented
those objective contents as its potential relational arrangements and valuations with reference to the subject as achieved ‘value’ for its own future objectivity. Thus, the present contains a vital reference to the future. In fact, the present is active, productive, creative, and processive only by virtue of such reference. It is precisely the conceptual entertainment of those relational complexes potential within the forms of the datum and the self-realization of the individual as an achievement of such relational complex that is the subjective activity as present. The present is productive of novelty because the heightened operation of the conceptual pole allows for the entertainment of yet unrealized possibilities in the constructive becoming of the individual” (p. 118). Moreover, “Through such conceptual activity, alternate formal possibilities for relational configurations of the given data are entertained as available with conscious reference to the future efficacy of the intensive pattern (production) as data for the world to come. Therefore, the self-world-creativity that is the productive activity of human being is essentially free (1) by virtue of the conscious (and hence self-conscious) conceptuality operative within it and (2) by virtue of its self- creative conscious reference to purpose as self-production for others” (p. 134).

54. See n. 11 above. In the Hegel critique of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx distinguishes “the act of positing” and the “subject” of this act. He accuses Hegel, in effect, of eliding this distinction. This elision is a mystification because it fails to denote the “real subject” who “posits”: it could be “God,” “History,” “Society,” “Man,” an “Individual,” or some other equally abstract term, such as “Matter.” In the passage quoted in n. 11, Marx writes, “it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process; it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective” (p. 115). What is at issue is “subjectivity.” For Marx, the acting subject is “real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature” (p. 115).

55. See Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (Harper & Row, 1976). There is a lot of confusion concerning Marx’s view of capitalist private property—by which he means primarily the class monopoly of the bourgeoisie on social means of production—and other forms of property and property- relations. We can take Marx at his word when he writes, “on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence” (p. 79).

56. To avoid confusion, perhaps it should be said that Marx’s distinction between “organic” and “inorganic” here is not the distinction of chemistry. Rather, an individual lives in her own organic body; in fact, she is this body. Because she is a physical, corporeal being, she is fully a natural being and so she fully belongs to the world of nature. (Marx is not at all a “Cartesian.”) “Nature” as her “inorganic body” is therefore internally related or necessarily connected with her individual “organism.” The use of “organism” here could lead down a path (outside of Marxism), among other possibilities, either to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism or to Dewey’s pragmatism and the latter’s theory of “experience” as a transactive field including “subject” and “object,” or in the terms he prefers, “organism” and “environment.”

57. Marx, Capital 1, p. 283.

58. As it would have been hard for a nineteenth-century natural scientist not to agree with this much, mutatis mutandis, we can say the same thing about a twenty-first century natural scientist. By this point in his development, Marx achieves a more or less accessible, natural, and perhaps even obvious way of stating things, unencumbered by Hegelian jargon. In other words, to this point in the passage, Marx writes nothing to offend a “scientific” sensibility; nothing a biologist or zoologist might not also say.

59. Marx, Capital 1,pp.283-84.

60. In The German Ideology,Marx goes on to write, “Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins” (p. 155). By “speculation” in context, Marx means unfastened, ungrounded speculation. He writes, “in direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven” (p. 154). However, he does not mean to zero out the speculative dimension of his own thought. Hence, in writing about the starting point of “real, positive science,” grounded in “real life,” his standpoint is reminiscent of Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves, which is also the spirit in which he asserts that transcendental phenomenology is the “true positivism.”

---

61. The subtitle of Being and Nothingness. We might also say that a century before Sartre, Marx has already written a “critique of dialectical reason.”

62. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (OUP, 1977), pp. 104-11; Hegel presents life immediately before his presentation of “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” the phenomenological figure that virtually everyone agrees is relevant to Marx’s own conception of things (“history” as the history of freedom struggles; freedom struggles as struggles of classes in conflict).

63. See Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Humanities Pr., 1976), pp. 761-74. The culminating section on “The Idea” includes three chapters: “Life”; “The Idea of Cognition,” which differentiates between the “theoretical idea” and the “practical idea”; and “The Absolute Idea,” i.e., the unity of the theoretical with the practical idea (the basic idea of praxis).

64. Canonical uses of the term, phenomenology, include Hegel’s; C.S. Peirce’s, whose pragmaticism, critical common- sensism, or ideal-realism takes a phenomenological point of departure (Peirce also uses the term, “phaneroscopy”); the various figures of the twentieth-century phenomenological movement, the major representatives of which include Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur; and with a little jerrymandering, also the existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir. In the various nineteenth and twentieth-century developments of post-Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard is often recognized both as a successor to Hegel and as a forerunner of existential phenomenology properly so-called, as a current in Marx scholarship recognized a long time ago. See, for example, Robert Heiss, Hegel Kierkegaard Marx (Dell, 1963). What these various philosophical strains share in common is that they are philosophies of the subject. For this reason, the thought of Bernard Lonergan can also be included in the list.

65. The fallacy can also be named, from Whitehead, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It may appear less odd to include Whitehead in this paper if we turn to the “reformed subjectivist principle” of Process and Reality. Along with Hegel and Max, Peirce and Dewey, Whitehead criticizes “Cartesian” approaches for their failure to distinguish between “perception in the mode of presentational immediacy” and “perception in the mode of causal  efficacy.” In the reformed subjectivist principle, Whitehead demonstrates the priority of the latter over the former. In another way, in Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes something’s being “present at hand” (zuhandenes) from it’s being “ready to hand” (vorhandenes), where “ready-to- handedness” is the primitive or primary term from which “present-at-handedness” is derived.

66. A noteworthy feature of the standard philosophical interpretation of the physical sciences is that they exclude telic categories from their lexicon.

67. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 84. He continues, “There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics…” Later, he writes, concerning needs, “The fact that this need on the part of one can be satisfied by the product of the other, and vice versa, and that one is capable of producing the object of the need of the other,and that each confronts the other as owner of the object of the other’s need, this proves that each of them reaches beyond his own particular need, etc., as a human being, and that they relate to one another as human beings; that their common species-being is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere—that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals. For example. A hive of bees comprises at bottom only one bee, and they all produce the same thing” (p. 243).

68. For a phenomenological interpretation of historical materialism, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s note on historical materialism in the Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Humanities Pr., 1962), pp. 171-73.

70. Ibid., p. 105.

71. See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1970). One way into transcendental phenomenology is by way of Husserl’s critique of psychologism. This paper takes no stand on psychologism, nor on the issue of whether Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology is necessarily inconsistent or irreconcilable with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The modest point is only to notice some anticipations in Marx’s thought that make the phenomenological interpretation of the 1844 Manuscripts plausible and cogent.

72. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix.

73. For the law of value, see Marx, Capital 1, p. 129: “What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is…the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”

74. Ibid., pp. 173-75.

75. Ibid., p. 164.

76. Ibid., see pp. 151-52.

77. Ibid., p. 151; Marx quotes Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V, Ch. 5.

78. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 104; emphasis added. Smith’s labor theory is a theory of command over labor rather than the expenditure of labor-power. The former belongs to a bourgeois outlook; the latter belongs to a working-class outlook.

79. See above, n. 36. Marx also criticizes Smith in another respect. When “wealth” is meant in the sense of “use-value,” “Labour…is not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother” (Capital 1, p. 134).

80. Marx, Capital 1, p. 139.

81. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 327.

82. Ibid., p. 331.

83. Ibid., p. 331. In shorthand, “capital” can be defined as “value-in-motion.”

84. Ibid., p. 331.

85. Some of the technical issues that arise in the interpretation of the quantitative dimension of Marx’s theory of value concern single-system versus dual-system interpretations of the relation of prices to values; simultaneous versus temporal valuation of inputs with outputs; the transformation problem; whether the Okishio theorem is proved; and controversies on Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The fingerprints of physicalism are all over these controversies. See Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital.”

86. Marx, Capital 1, p. 132.

87. The fundamental premise of Marx’s critique of political economy in general is the twofold premise of the determination of value by labor-time (DVLT), the magnitude of which is measured by socially necessary labor-time (SNLT).

88. Marx, Capital 1, p. 128; and see p. 137.

89. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom (Humanity Books, 2000; orig. 1958), pp. 108-09. Dunayevskaya (1910- 1987) was an American revolutionary and philosopher. It was her revolutionary activism in the nineteen-twenties, thirties, and forties that led her to philosophy. She was an autodidact, which in one way proves the naturalness of philosophy to the human animal.

Consciousness: A Perspective of Reality

Gary Kolb, PhD

Introduction

Psychologists and philosophers explain the term ‘consciousness’ differently. Rocco Gennaro describes consciousness well when he says that trying to explain ”the nature of consciousness is one of the most important and perplexing areas of philosophy, but the concept is notoriously ambiguous” (2012, p. 1). He states further that consciousness is arguably the most central issue in current philosophy of mind (Gennaro, 2012). As a matter of fact, it is also central in psychology. Philosophy and psychology differ to some extent in their views of the definition and utility of consciousness. Perhaps consciousness involves each of the professions in different ways, especially in the applicability of the term. I hope to draw out and focus on the primary differences. Philosophy is the discovery of finite points of research, the available selectivity and continuous, never-ending search for more information concerning a subject and object relationship. In many ways, psychology appears to be a derivative of philosophy, but it has the more practical focus of dealing with and explaining human behavior.

Early Theories

Early psychologists equated consciousness with mind and defined psychology as the study of mind and consciousness (Atkyson, et al., 1987). The early theories of mind were dualism and materialism (or physicalism). Dualism represents a conscious mind or a conscious mental state that is non-physical, whereas materialism (or physicalism), views the mind as the brain, or that which is caused by neural activity (Gennaro, 2012). The former may lean toward a primarily philosophical view and the latter primarily toward the psychological view. Psychologists tend to accept the mind/brain view, which can be utilized by practioners to reinforce and modify client behavior. Philosophers view consciousness in a more finite way that involves the process of relationship between a subject and his or her environmental object of focus. It is interesting that these two theories can overlap. However, they are also differentiated in the two fields of practice. There is a cross-over between the two fields of philosophy and psychology in the unique studies of consciousness in neurophysicological or physical terms, and also cognitive theories of consciousness whereby conscious mental states are reduced to some type of representational relation between mental states and the world.

There are many familiar objections to both materialism and dualism (Gennaro, 2012). One is that materialism cannot truly explain just how or why some brain states are conscious, and the distinction between mind and matter is not explained. On the other hand, dualism faces the problem of explaining howa non-physical substance or mental state can causally interact with the physical body (Gennaro, 2012). Most contemporary theories of consciousness try to explain state consciousness or what makes a mental state or a conscious mental state (Gennaro, 2012). Philosophers sometimes refer to conscious states as phenomenal or qualitative states. Philosophers often view such states as having qualitative properties called qualia (pronounced kwa’ lee uh). Although this view is debated, they are perhaps most frequently understood as the felt properties or qualities of conscious states (Gennaro, 2012).

Gennaro continues by making a distinction between phenomenal consciousness (phenomenality) and access consciousness by borrowing the insight of Block (2012). Block defines access consciousness as a mental state’s relationship with other mental states; for example, a mental state’s availability for use in reasoning and rationality that guides speech and action (Gennaro, 2012). Therefore, visual perception is access conscious because it carries visual information that is generally available for a person to use, whether or not it has any qualitative properties. Access consciousness is more a functional idea that is concerned with what mental states do (Gennaro, 2012).

A Historical Perspective on Consciousness

Western philosophy involves important writings on human nature and the soul and mind which date back to the work of Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle (Gennaro, 2012). Descartes (1596-1650), a medieval philosopher, and his successors in the early modern period of philosophy, focused on consciousness and the relationship between the mind and body (Gennaro, 2012). Descartes argued that the mind is a non- physical substance that is distinct from the body. He viewed consciousness as essential to thought. John Locke (1689-1775) also believed in the connection between mentality and consciousness (Gennaro, 2012).

Historically, scientists studied the human brain and behavior objectively. This ignored consciousness, since a person’s conscious experience cannot be directly observed (Farthing, 1992). More recently, research on consciousness has taken off in many important directions (Gennaro, 2012.) In psychology, with the notable exception of the virtual banishment of consciousness by behaviorist psychologists (e.g. Skinner, 1953), there were also those deeply interested in consciousness and various introspective (first-person) methods of investigating the mind. To name a few: Wilhelm Wundt (1897), William James (1890), Alfred Titchener (1901) and Franz Brentano (1874/1973) all had a profound effect on some contemporary theories of consciousness. Gennaro offered that phenomenological philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger used introspectionist approaches, but none of them had much scientific knowledge of how the brain works (Gennaro, 2012).

The relatively recent development of neurophysiology is partially responsible for the unprecedented interdisciplinary research interest in consciousness, particularly since the 1980’s (Gennaro, 2012). Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the ultimate nature of reality (Gennaro, 2012). There are two broad traditional and competing metaphysical views concerning the nature of the mind and conscious mental states: dualism and materialism (Gennaro, 2012). Dualists believe that in some sense the conscious mind or a conscious mental state is non-physical. On the other hand, materialists hold that the mind is the brain, or, more accurately, that conscious mental activity is neural activity (Gennaro, 2012).

Materialists view the brain, a material thing, as the most likely physical entity to identify with the mind. Dualists tend to believe that conscious mental states or minds are radically different from anything in the physical world (Gennaro, 2012). Gennaro points out that historically there has been a clear link between dualism and a belief in immortality. Therefore, among dualists there tends to be a more theistic perspective than among materialists (2012). Belief in dualism often has an explicit theological motivation (Gennaro, 2012).

Philosophy

Some of the most important questions concerning the mind, the brain, and consciousness originated in philosophy (Farthing, 1992). Philosophers were concerned with determining what things really existed and the essential nature of those things. Consciousness is one of the most difficult of all scientific problems because it is an active process that requires theorizing about diverse and individualized experience (Farthing, 1992).

Although defining consciousness is difficult, if not impossible, there are some features of consciousness that describe it. Consciousness is always directed toward something and its characteristics are true of all types of consciousness: voluntarily directed when a person is awake, drug-induced, or biologically triggered during sleep (Tolaas in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). It is a continuous process of transformation between internal and external spaces (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). Conscious is ever-changing. James referred to it as a “stream of consciousness (Symonds, 1949). Neural processes are relevant to consciousness (Siegal, 2007). Consciousness of something lies beneath the reflective act of self-knowledge and nothing can be known or spoken about unless it comes through consciousness (Tolass in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). Knowledge and consciousness are correlated (Giorgi, 2009). Consciousness is described by sensory perception or mental images and through experience (Siegal, 2007). Finally, it involves a living organism capable of intentional, goal-directed movement, since willed motor activity is a necessary condition of consciousness (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1976).

Phenomenology is concerned with the difference between how things appear and those things as they actually are (Boileau, 2006). Some phenomenologists, including Husserl, originally investigated subjective experience as a way to discover how consciousness observes pure reality (Boileau, 2006).There is an objective reality that is independent of conscious awareness, but is available through the senses. A person’s experience in the world is a product of an interaction between the world and the person’s mind (Boileau, 2006). Each person’s interpretation of the world is unique and a person’s perceptions vary over time.

Phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre contributed a great deal to the study of mental imagery. Mental images are not pictures (Tolaas in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). They are not framed, they occupy the field of vision, and they are usually dynamic rather than static. Primary images have four main characteristics: image-consciousness; perceiving and imagining; the image as nothingness; and spontaneity (Tolaas in Wolman& Ullman 1986). The function of a mental image is representation. When a person sees an object, it is a special kind of image-consciousness, either imagined or conscious. It is a synthetic organization, a special relationship between the object and the consciousness (Tolaas in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). When a mental image of something observed is created, the object is perceived in profiles. The object may be the total of the profiles, but a mental image can never reveal more that the consciousness the person has of the object (Tolaas in Wolman  & Ullman, 1986). Altered states of consciousness, such as dreaming, are primarily mental images.

Psychology

Although the psychology of consciousness and the philosophy of mind have important connections, consciousness is notthe same as the mind (Farthing, 1992). The mind is a broader concept that includes mental processes that are both conscious and unconscious. It can be divided into three levels: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious (Symonds, 1949.)The mind originates from brain function and a relationship between a stimulus and a response of the nervous system (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). The brain is the only organ that is programmed to continue to develop through embryogenesis (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1986).  According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, memories, impulses and desires are part of the unconscious, and are not available to consciousness (Atkysen, et al., 1987). Thoughts and impulses that have been repressed to the unconscious can only reach consciousness indirectly. Freud believed unconscious desires and impulses cause most mental illnesses. The goal of psychoanalysis is to bring the repressed material to consciousness. According to Symonds repression excludes thoughts, feelings, and wishes, and may be the most important defense against unacceptable impulses (1949). Janet’s theory of dissociation states that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to bring repressed memories to consciousness. However, dissociated memories and thoughts can reach the conscious level (Atkysen, et al., 1987). They are more like memories of the preconscious or subconscious.

The materialistic view of consciousness is that the mind is the functioning of the brain to process information and control action in a flexible and adaptive manner. According to this view, the mind cannot exist apart from the living brain (Farthing, 1992).The mind produces information and controls activity. Its neural processes are relevant to consciousness (Siegal, 2007). Products of the mind include perception, memory, and thinking (Farthing, 1992). Only brain activity is accompanied by states of consciousness, but consciousness is not the same thing as neural activity (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992).

The mind is flexible, not just reflective. It contains separate systems of thought, emotion and ideas, which transfer from one situation to another (Ornstein, 1991). The different centers of the mind appear to act independently of consciousness. It is as if something inside a person decides how and when to move before the consciousness is aware of it (Ornstein, 1991). An unconscious decision center may initiate an action, after which the conscious self can choose to stop it. Instead of a single unconscious, there may be a system of many unconscious minds, each with its own program (Ornstein, 1991). Consciousness, the center of the mind/brain system, may be able to intervene to stop proposals of the separate minds (Ornstein, 1991). For example, when something happens, a person’s sense organs perceive it and there is a spike in  neuronal activity. Half a second later, if the stimulus was big enough or important enough, the neurons are still active and the conscious mind becomes aware of the stimulus. Even when a person becomes aware of a sensory stimulus, it takes half a second to respond which may leave the unconscious mind to initiate any rapid reaction (Ornstein, 1991). Therefore, people may react to things that are unconscious. Another explanation for this delay is that neural structures evolved for one purpose can perform an entirely different function, but may operate relatively slowly in a new context (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992).

Emotions create a state of readiness for action and are primarily a mental process that is unconscious (Siegel, 1999). Siegel proposes there is a coordinating center within the brain that relates perceptions with memory and behavior (1999). Both external stimuli and internal stimuli (memory and imagination) create perceptual representations. These are functionally connected in the lateral prefrontal cortex (Siegel, 1999). Siegel proposes there are left hemisphere and right hemisphere forms of consciousness that are distinct from each other, since the representational process of one hemisphere is unique from the other (Siegel, 1999).

In psychology, when a person makes a sensory distinction and validates it through willed movement, the response is the sensible world of everyday reality (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1986). However, it is only the perceptions that make sense to the person (programmed-appropriate behavior) that generate behavioral responses. Perceptions without corresponding appropriate behavior (learned behavior) will not be actualized. The person will deny, misperceive, repress, condense, distort, and /or sublimate them according to the person’s defense style (Fischer in Wolman & Ullman, 1986).

Conclusion

The definitions of consciousness are many, but there is agreement that it is a human process. A digital machine can never acquire consciousness (Nagal, 2000). Both philosophers and psychologists study consciousness, they approach it differently and come to different conclusions. Philosophy creates theory, while psychology applies theory and puts it into
practice. Both approaches are valuable and can complement each other as in neuroscience. “Analyzing the physiological and molecular process of the brain will not lead to an understanding of consciousness, since consciousness is an emergent phenomenon” (Farthing, 1992, p. 75). An emergent phenomenon, such as consciousness, appears as result of a unique relationship among the parts of an organized system, and cannot be predicted from knowledge of the parts alone. Ornstein suggests that our biological evolution has ended and we need to make conscious changes in the ways we think, relate to others, and identify with the rest of humanity (1991). Our brain gives us the ability to become aware of ourselves. If we can let go of the mind’s work of judgment, awareness may become non-judgmental (Siegel, 2007).

Bibliography

Boileau, K. (2012). Essays on Phenomenology and the Self. Seattle, WA: EPIS Publishing.

Farthing, G.W. (1992). The Psychology of Consciousness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Fischer, R, (1986). Toward a neuroscience of self-experience and states of self-awareness and interpreting interpretations. In B. Wolman & M. Ullman, Eds., Handbook of states of consciousness. NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Gennaro, R.J. (2018). Consciousness. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http//www.iep.utm.edu.

Giorgi, A. (2009). The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach. Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press.

Nagal,T. (2000). What is it like to be a bat? In D.R. Hofstadter and D.C. Dennet, Eds., The mind’s I. New York: Basic Books.

Kosslyn, S.M. & Koenig, O. (1992). Wet mind: The new cognitive neuroscience. New York: The Free Press.

Ornstein, R. (1991). The Evolution of Consciousness: The Origins of the Way We Think. NewYork: Simon & Schuster.

Siegel, D.J. (2007). The Mindful Brain. New York: W.W. Norman Co.

Siegel, D.J, (1999). The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press.

Tolaas, J. (1986). Transformatory Framework: Pictorial to Verbal. In B. Wolman & M. Ullman, Eds., Handbook of states of consciousness. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Nature Versus Nurture¹

Ellie Ragland, PhD

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED)₁ defines “nature” as “The inherent or essential quality or constitution of a thing; the innate disposition or character of a person or animal or of humankind generally. Also, an individual element of character, disposition, etc.; a thing or person of a particular quality or character; a kind, a sort, a class”.₂ One immediately sees why Lacan dismissed this commonly held concept of nature. In his “Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body,” Jacques-Alain Miller makes a further distinction between Lacan’s theory of what constitutes the “essential quality […] of a thing,” and the lumping together of the word “nature” with an animal organism or with biology or trees, and flowers, etc.₃ I will return to that later, but for the moment I shall describe Lacan’s idea of how a thing is constituted. There is no a priori essence or nature of a thing, he argues, following the Existentialist thinkers of the mid-twentieth century. Existence precedes essence, they claimed, thus getting rid of the notion of some innate property of character or mind, and, in the process, dispensing with the idea of an innate soul inhabited by some God. Lacan argues that the Ur-lining of the infantile subject is made up of the real of partial objects-cause-of- desire which give rise to four partial drives: the oral, the anal, the invocatory, and the scopic.₄ These are quickly taken up by the way things are represented to an infant by language and words. Each person is subject-ed to the language which fixates him or her in a way of being. A radically autistic child is torn between being a living body and having no way to re-present this to the other through language. Thus, the drives control his or her life. Current work done in the USA and other countries as well attributes autism to biology and works with autistic children via developmental models of thinking and treatment. Lacanians work with autistics to help them suffer less at the hands of the pure real which makes them bang their heads, or avoid the gaze of the other/Other, or stifle the invocatory drive. Confusion between the mouth as a receptacle for eating and other corporal openings marks the “behavior” of autistic babies. At one moment in history, such children were thought to be bad children or demonically possessed, or whatever cultural metaphor describes the sinthome/symptom that links these three dimensions together—or not as in the psychoses, which include autism—as the particular outcome of a child’s taking on being in reference to her mother’s unconscious desire correlated with some signifier for the function of law which Lacan named “the Father’s Name.”

That the mother’s desire is unconscious enters largely into one’s conception of nurture. The OED defines “nuture” as “Breeding, upbringing, education, as received or possessed by a person [….].The process of bringing up or training a person, esp. a child; tutelage, fostering care […]”. Also, “social environment as an influence on or determinant of personality (opp. Nature)_.5 Thus, one may encounter La Leche League who believes that a mother cannot provide good “nurture” unless she breast feeds, while aristocratic ladies of the past were told they could not nurse their children lest they become feeble. That was the job of wet nurses, etc. etc. Yet, Lacan discovered that the most concerned and apparently nurturing mother may create psychosis in her child if there is not a strong enough Father function to give the child the sense of difference over sameness, or “no” as opposed to a lack of boundaries. Paradoxically, a mother who gives her children much love and a sense of discipline, but for whom the child is not the phallus she lacks, is not all to her, has a better chance of raising a well-adjusted child. That mother may direct her principle love towards her husband, or even towards a career. The point of the mother’s unconscious desire is that she may do everything the “right” way—according to socio-historical conventions– but raise a disturbed child if she unconsciously does not want that child, or unwittingly imposes her distaste for a husband onto a child, and so on. Thus nature is not what it seems to be—i.e. intrinsic—, and nurture is a thorny path that it is not what it seems to be either.

The mirror-stage theory Lacan advanced in the 1930s and 1940s also gives rise to an understanding of how the human being is not unified. This theory was inspired by the French psychologist Henri Wallon (1931) who observed that both chimpanzees and human infants were capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror at around six months of age. What Wallon found significant is that while the chimpanzee would quickly lose interest, the human infants became fascinated and would spend much time entranced by the phenomenon of the mirror image, exploring the seeming connections between their bodies and the reflected image. For Wallon, it was significant that the child had succeeded in distinguishing what one might call two levels of the visual. The child can see parts of itself in the flesh and parts of itself reflected in the mirror. That the child seemed to distinguish these two sights can be understood as pointing to some transition between an imagistic (Lacan’s imaginary) grasp of the world to a representative (or Lacan’s symbolic) one. Lacan developed Wallon’s discovery to argue that the encounter with the mirror is pivotal in the emergence of the child’s identity insofar as one identifies oneself on the basis of an external, reflected image.₆ The result of this early mirror fixation between image and body means that the infant is pushed back and forth between anticipation and insufficiency. That is, the drama of motor to walk and perform other bodily functions smoothly means that humans start out experiencing themselves as incomplete, although the mirror seems to offer a picture of some completion to come.

Culture is filled with images of reinforced bodies, from Robocop to Batman. Such images of fragmentation and orthopaedic reinforcement attest to Lacan’s point that our identity is fundamentally bodily and, thereby, impossible. Rigid identities attest to the rupture of a continuum of inside and outside. The result is that the body in pieces finds its correlate in fantasies of completion. Beyond this the child depends on its mother’s desire, a desire to which it can never be adequate. The opposition of desire and instinctual needs threatens the subject, bearing out Lacan’s claim that there is no natural body or identity. A child matures only by abandoning instinct and negotiating cultural demands, as well as desires. Such a theory belies any belief in an autonomy of self which is so central to so many ideologies. An always distorted and partial idea of self which was introjected cannot be the ground of an autonomous being in the world. The ego, consequently, misrecognizes itself.

Thus, although I am going to speak of the normative, there is really no normal in Lacan insofar as we are all beset with issues. In Lacan’s teaching one is confronted with ways of understanding “behavior” via differential diagnostic categories: the normative (master discourse), the neuroses (obsession and hysteria), the psychoses (autism, paranoia, schizophrenia, manic-depression), and perversion. Although these categories follow Freud, their meanings differ in Lacan’s clinic and theory from those Freud gave them. I will not explain the categories here; however, it is best that they be stated as a way to comprehend the differences between conscious ideas of what one thinks nature or nurture is, and the realization that it is the unconscious which is the master of the game.

It is not surprising that Lacan developed four different kinds of discourses spoken by those who are not psychotic and that these discourses are defined as that which makes a social link. What these discourses have in common is that they all speak from an awareness—conscious or not—that there is a lack- in-being, that one is not a ‘Totalized’ subject as the psychotic believes he or she is. And lack joins being and language to the body.₇ The normative person speaks a master discourse, staying within the field of conscious language and within the terrain of what the social Other determines as ‘right’ or as accepted conventions. This discourse represses the unconscious as fantasy and as the truth of what is excessive in jouissance and, thereby, hides the actual ‘truth’ of the subjet’s symptom.

It is what I refer to as Church or Country Club discourse. It is clean, antiseptic, and lets sleeping dogs lie. This is what Miller describes as “a body of knowledge (savoir), the body that knows what is necessary to survive, the epistemic body. Second, the libidinal body […]. To state it in a third way…[rather than] the ego-body […is] the other, the body-jouissance which doesn’t obey the ego, which is exempt from the domination of the soul as a vital form of the body “₈. It is within this second type of body event affecting language that one finds the hysteric’s discourse erupting into language when she is burdened by her symptom and unleashes her unbridled and unrepressed jouissance. “The symptom,” says Miller, “[is an] event of the body”.₉ Between the master discourse and the hysteric’s, lies that of the university, one which speaks from canned, ready-made concepts wherein truth and knowledge are conflated. The final style of discourse is that of the analyst, the one listening for the non-sense of unconscious truth, the only truth seen as going beyond the lies, misrecognitions, and misunderstandings of conscious, normative discourse.

Given Lacan’s four structures of discourse, one can see how concepts of “nature” or “nurture” would vary depending upon who is speaking to whom. Moreover, the discourse, like the mirror stage—marked by four places and four terms—disrupts any idea of a unity of self in consciousness. Thus, with all the universalising good efforts made by concepts such as “nature” or “nurture,” one always comes back to the reality, with Lacan, that we relate to the in terms of our image of ourselves, even though it is only an image. In psychoanalytic treatment, the goal is to lead the analysand to the point of being “no-thing.” Except for the subjective particularities that one retains from the Other’s desire, one finally realises that one is ‘One’ among all others who are also nothing. Although this is the basis for an initial depression, it is also the moment of freedom from the shackles of signifying identifications that have burdened any subject throughout his or her life. It is, paradoxically, the basis for a sharing of “humanity” one with the other. And this arises from the transference which is love, the only possibility for bridging the impossibilities in being and body.

Ed. by Nancy Gillespie and Jesse Cravens

Endnotes

1. This paper was presented at Humanities Unbound: Psychoanalysis, Life, and Dignity. Norfolk, Virginia, at Old Dominion University, April 19-20, 2018, on the 20th, 2018 and at Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 11 on “Delights of the Ego,” on February 11, 2018 in New York City.
2. OED (vol. 2, 1993) I dedicate this to my medical Dr. brother, Gene, who asked me for a piece on nature vs. nurture.
3. Miller, J-A. Le reel dans l’experience analytique. Unedited seminar of 1998- 1999, sessions of 05/12/99; 05/19,99; 05/26, 99; 06/02, 99. Cf. Miller, J-A. (2001). “Lacanian Biology the Event of the Body,” trans. by Barbara P. Fulks and Jorge Jauregai, lacanian Ink, no. 18, Fall 2010 , pp. 7-29.
4. Lacan, J. “The subversion of the subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1957), Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, et.al. (Norton: New York, 1996), p. 692.
5. OED Op. Cit. p. 1957
6. p.2 of draft ms., A Guide to Reading the Ecrits, Vol. 1, ed. by Calum Neill, Stijn van Heule, and Derick Hoens . Forthcoming in England (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd., in September of 2018.). Cf. also Henri Wallon, La vie mentale, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1938, reissued 1982; L’evolution psychologique de l’enfant. A. Colins, Paris, 1941, reissued, 1974.
7. Miller, “The Symptom and the Body Event,” trans. by Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink, no. 19, Fall 2011, pp. 34-35, taken from Miller’s Seminar of 1998- 1999, Le reel dans l’experience analytique.
8. Miller , lacanian ink, no. 18, p.21.
9. Miller, lacanian ink, no. 18, p. 21.

Fools Crow and a Phenomenology of the Value of Nature

Daniel O’Dea Bradley, PhD

In my view, and those of its founding members, the environmental movement has the potential to be of watershed importance in the intellectual history of the West, by re-orienting our relation to nature, helping us to overcome the alienation of modernity, and in inspiring us to find new ways of reintegrating ourselves with a natural world that is full of a rediscovered goodness. In other words, I believe environmentalism has a great deal to teach philosophy about the meaning and value of nature. In ontology, it challenges the nominalism of modernity, for by valuing the preservation of species it teaches us the value not only of individuals, but of kinds or essences. Further, it challenges the substance metaphysics of modernity, for by valuing ecosystems it teaches us to value lived historical relationships. Most importantly, in questions of axiology, these reorientations emerge from powerful experiences of the natural world that suggest beavers and butterflies, crab apples and cedar trees, mountains, rivers, and ecosystems are not inert collections of matter that have value, and therefore moral standing, only if human beings project their values onto them. Rather they have a value and a beauty of their own, to which we respond—thus challenging the ethical anthropocentrism of modernity.

These ideas were a radical challenge to the mechanistic view of nature of the dominant Cartesian-Kantian modernity, and when these ideas came to academic philosophy in the 1970s it created quite a heady atmosphere. There was of course sadness at seeing our rivers polluted and habitat destroyed and from the beginning these philosophers were called to be activists as well as theorists; environmental philosophy was always already environmental ethics. But there was also joy and great purpose in finding ourselves in a world that was a home, threatened as that home was, and in the vocation of trying to give a philosophical account of the value they found in nature.

While there was a long incubation, this explosion of interest among philosophers in the intrinsic value of nature happened very quickly. Between 1971 and 1975, J. Baird Callicott taught the first course in environmental ethics; John Cobb wrote the first monograph on environmental ethics; Arne Næss published his book on “Deep ecology” explicitly defending the philosophical claim about the intrinsic value of nature; Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term “eco-feminism” linking the flourishing of women with the flourishing of nature; and Homes Rolston III published a book on the intrinsic value of species.

There was a parallel, and indeed slightly preceding, explosion in the general public’s interest in nature, particularly with regard to political and legal issues. In 1962 Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring. In 1968, the Apollo VIII mission took the famous color picture of earthrise over the moon capturing the beauty and fragility of life as seen from space, which was followed in 1972 by the even more famous “Blue Marble” shot of earth taken by Appollo 17. In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon hearkened back to Teddy Rosevelt and declared the 1970s, “the decade of the environment” and created the EPA; in 1973 he signed the Endangered Species Act. In 198o the Global 2000 report commissioned by Jimmy Carter urged protection of the intrinsic value of nature and this was followed more forcefully in 1982 by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.

There were of course a few dissenters, such as John Passmore and others, but from the late 1960s and throughout the 70s it seemed as if the energy and enthusiasm behind the environmental movement, as manifest both among academics and the culture at large, would lead to a radical overturning of the atomistic ontology and anthropocentric axiology of Modern Philosophy. However, this was short-lived. The 1980s and 90s saw a continued erosion of the idea that environmental ethics would lead us to a re-evaluation of our relation with nature, one that would help us to see its intrinsic value. Instead, by 1987 the United Nations’ Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED), had switched from the language of deep ecology or the intrinsic value of living beings, species, and ecosystems to the harsh language of the sustainability of resources as the philosophical reason, the value justifying, ecological preservation. By 1992 the documents produced by “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro take a decidedly “sustainable development” approach, making the conservation of resources the highest priority in environmental ethics.

There are many reasons for this change, and they are often inter-related. One reason is the resurgence of traditional liberalism in the Thatcher/ Reagan counter-revolution, by way of which the ideological supports of capitalism were able to reassert dominance over the emerging environmental thinking, a reassertion that was only intensified with the triumphalism that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the sense that all remaining competitors had been vanquished. Another reason, that I have written about elsewhere,₁ is overwhelming existential despair that arises from the growing sense that the problem of anthropogenic global warming dwarfs the diverse local issues of river pollution, habitat preservation, etc, coupled with the perception that liberal economic systems are impotent to stop the increase in carbon emissions. In the face of this environmental/economic crisis the diversity of views about what type of metaphysics might make sense of the environmentalists’ experience of the intrinsic value of nature came to be seen as a terrible liability. In times of confidence the fact that some philosophers wanted to turn to Spinoza, others to a process philosophy like Whitehead’s, others to Eastern religions like Hinduism, others to sacramental versions of Christianity, and yet others to pantheism or paganism, might have been seen as the manifestation of a healthy, even productive, pluralism. In the face of this despair it seemed like failure.

Whatever the exact role and interrelations between these causes, it is clearly the case that the original promise that environmental ethics would renew our philosophy and give us a new relation to nature, understood as rich with value, has faltered. Within the field of environmental philosophy this has resulted in an influential movement called “Environmental Pragmatism” championed by Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and Bryan Norton, among others. These thinkers argue that we should not be asking the question of the value of nature, which only makes us bicker with each other and wastes our time, when we should be putting our efforts towards policy changes that protect the environment and do not need theoretical foundations to be validated.

Norton starts his essay “Integration or Reduction: Two approaches to environmental values” in the 1996 collection Environmental Pragmatism by saying, “Environmental ethics has been dominated in its first twenty years by questions of axiology”₂, which is exactly why, in my view and that of most early environmental philosophers, the movement is so important. Norton, on the other hand, claims that the preoccupation with axiology is why “an assessment of the contribution of environmental ethics to environmental policy in its first two decades is accordingly bleak.”₃

This wrong-headed attempt to give a philosophical account of the value of nature as a guide to showing us why we should preserve nature and what we should prioritize, Norton calls “applied philosophy,” and he contrasts it with his recommendation to turn to “practical philosophy.” As he explains,

‘Practical philosophy’, as I am defining it here in contrast to ‘applied philosophy,’ is more problem- oriented; its chief characteristic is an emphasis on theories as tools of the understanding, tools that are developed to resolve specific policy controversies…. Practical philosophy does not assume that useful theoretical principles will be developed and established independent of the policy process and then applied within that process. Practice is prior to theory in the sense that principles are ultimately generated from practice, not vice versa… If all disputants agree on central management principles, even without agreeing on ultimate values, management can proceed on these principles.₄

I share many of Norton’s concerns. We do not need to agree on the metaphysical ground of the value of nature before we can co-operate on environmental activism. I also agree that this activism is at the heart of the project. A true environmental philosophy is always an environmental ethics, which in fact is one of the things environmentalism teaches us about the nature of philosophy in general and that aligns it with Marx’s famous criticism: “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”₅ However, in accepting this dictum, we need not give up on questions of axiology that make environmentalism of such importance to the broader discipline of philosophy. In fact questions of value cannot be separated from activism.

First, we do not need to accept Socrates’ moral intellectualism fully in order to agree with the scathing critiques he made of a moral dogmatism that accepts as right what “all the best people” in society agree is right. If Euthyphro has no right to prosecute his father for impiety without first having given careful attention to the nature of impiety, we have no right to impose strict carbon emissions limits on people who do not want them, put coal miners out of work, etc—and I think we all agree that we must do this to save our planet—if we have not given careful attention to what environmental justice is. Further, the deeper ground that prepared for the explosion of environmental ethics in the 1960s and 70s is to be found with people like Aldo Leopold who changed their view on management principles in response to changes in the way they came to see the ultimate value of nature.

Leopold’s account of this transformation, in a short section of The Sand County Almanac called “Thinking Like a Mountain,” has become a classic text that is reproduced in almost every Introduction to Environmental Philosophy textbook and is justifiably considered one of the foundational works of the environmental movement. In this short account, Leopold describes an experience that radically reorients him towards nature. Leopold was a forest manager and tells us that one day he was having lunch out on a high ridge with some fellow Forest Service workers when they saw a Mother wolf with her nearly grown pups. “In those days” he says “we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” and so they quickly shoot down into the valley below and descend to see if they were successful. Leopold continues:

we reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in the eyes— something only known to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.₆

Unlike the way we might expect this story to be told from our Kantian background, Leopold does not come to see that what he had thought was just a machine with only instrumental value was actually a self-conscious being that owns its own dignity. Rather, he came to see something that was good apart from any instrumental value, but also as a part of something good beyond itself, which he associates with the epic view of the mountain, for he goes on to explain how the wolves keep the deer population in check, which allows the vegetation and the forested sides of the mountain to thrive—a harmony that we have not been able to achieve by trying to run too many cattle on land that cannot support it. We have not learned to think like a mountain.

These accounts of a change in one’s deep understandings about value, particularly in response to the distress experienced in the face of threats to the natural world, reveal the revolutionary power of environmentalism in its challenge to Modern philosophy. Other famous examples at the heart of the environmental movement come from John Muir’s distress over the threat to the Yosemite area from sheep grazing and eventually the damning of the Hetchy Hetchy River and Rachel Carsen’s distress over the death of birds and other wildlife from DDT. It is significant that these early pioneers are foresters, wildlife biologists, and adventurers rather than academic philosophers, but in order for their experiences of the value of
nature to speak to philosophical thinking, it will help to give a philosophical account that gives legitimacy to the experience of value, an account that is compellingly provided by Husserlian phenomenology. In other words, if the environmental movement has much to teach philosophy, as I claim it does, the academic study of philosophy, and in particular phenomenology, has much to teach the environmental movement, particularly in the internecine conflict over the importance of axiology.

By understanding The Crisis of the European Sciences as an important entry point into Husserl’s thinking, we can see that phenomenology is as dominated by existential questions of value as the early environmental movement.₇ But what we need more immediately to address the challenge of environmental pragmatism is the epistemology of phenomenology. Norton sees only two processes at work in knowing: abstract theoretical reason and practical, problem oriented reason. Phenomenology teaches us that both praxis and episteme are mediated by lived experience, in which intelligibility is always already embedded. The phenomenological reduction continually asks us to return to examine the ways that our theoretical beliefs emerge out of the way reality gives itself to us in experience—or fail to do so and thus must be corrected. All our concrete engagements with the world, including our pursuit of social and environmental justice, give us new experiences, new encounters with the world, that should always become further opportunities for phenomenological reflection about our understanding of the essential nature of reality—which in turn guide us toward new engagements with the world.

For phenomenologists, this epoche is a careful philosophical practice, but there are experiences in life that allow certain aspects of the reduction to occur without that methodological training. In the Phaedrus, Plato shows how falling in love suspends and calls into question all the things that had once constituted a person’s deepest values; the lover he says, “forgets mothers and brother and friends entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect. And as for proper and
decorous behavior, in which the soul used to take so much pride, it despises the whole business,”₈ thus allowing a vivid encounter with the goodness and the beauty of the lover made possible by the bracketing of our previous theoretical and cultural preconceptions. For the early, and I hope continuing, environmentalists, personal experiences of nature, particularly when the natural world is endangered and its contingency and therefore fragile goodness comes to the fore, can also act like an epoche, suspending our previous beliefs and asking us to look carefully at the rupture between our theoretical understanding of nature and the way it reveals itself to us. This rupture with our previous beliefs allows the prejudices of modernity, which assign an axiological nullity to the non-rational or non- conscious world, to be bracketed and, in turn, allow the natural world to reveal itself as intrinsically valuable and even sacred.₉

This rapprochement between phenomenology and the environmental movement, sometimes called “eco-
phenomenology” is a rich one that has already begun to produce some significant research.₁₀ However, to a large extent this potential has been neglected. This is due to the fact that from the 1970s, phenomenology, under the influence of post- structuralism, has largely moved away from an attempt to give an account of the kinds of beings there are in the world and the ways they reveal themselves towards what Dan Zahavi calls “a phenomenology of the invisible,”₁₁ in which what comes to presence in appearance is treated with suspicion. There are good reasons for this; most importantly, classical phenomenology did not deal very well with the appearances that are illusions resulting from deep and systematic distortions of experience and hidden structures of power. Levinas, Derrida, and other post-structuralists show us how the things we experience are often products of the imperialism of the ego and the prejudices of one’s language and culture. In this tradition illusion is dealt with by deconstructing the objects that these structures create. The metaphors of Abrahamic religion have been powerful in this regard. The objects of experience are “idols”, created by human will to reflect human desires, that lock the ego into a prison of its own immanence. This means that a radicalized phenomenology will require a shattering of those idols so that the self can be open to transcendence, for something outside the loneliness of its own self-absorbed creation. In this way, phenomenology has moved towards a preoccupation with the invisible, the radical other that does not come to appearance. For Levinas, Derrida, and their followers, phenomenology still provides an orientation toward the sacred, but at the risk of an illusory idolatry, the sacred other can never appear. Thus, and characteristically for deconstruction, by way of Derrida’s claim that tout autre est tout autre,₁₂ the sacred becomes indistinguishable from the alterity of the stranger, and otherness becomes the only criterion of value.

Thus the worry about illusion, which is a very legitimate one, has tended towards an iconoclasm very much at odds with an environmental philosophy which wants to experience sensuous nature as valuable, that which we can not only see and hear, but feel and smell and taste. Thus the mainstream phenomenological legacy, marked as it is by post-structuralism, deconstruction, and a hermeneutics of suspicion, has taken its cue from the most iconoclastic forms of the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism and has not been able to deal with pantheism, paganism, or sacramental versions of monotheism—or been much help to environmental philosophy.

I would like to suggest that this over-emphasis on the invisible
and iconoclastic can be corrected by seeing that the tradition has been focused exclusively on overcoming illusion by dismantling the idolatrous nature of the object. In Husserl’s language, the emphasis is on deconstructing the noema in order to encounter a sacred other ‘behind’ it that never comes to appearance. The noesis, the cultural, linguistic, and personal acts of consciousness are understood to be what causes the illusion. But they cannot be improved or purified; all we can do is to set the noema free from their corrupting power. Self- abnegation comes in letting go of my desire for the object as it appears, and the payoff is a relation with a sacred other beyond objectivity that never comes to appearance. Both the rigor and the meaning all lie on the side of the noema.

The tradition of the Lakota Holy Men and Women, and in particular Fools Crow, offers an important starting place for an alternative method for dealing with illusion, one that does not end stuck in a preoccupation with the nothingness of a pure alterity. Fools Crow was a spiritual leader and healer who was born in 1890 and yet still raised in many of the traditional ways of the Lakota. In explaining how he is able to heal, Fools Crow returns often to the metaphor of a “hollow bone.” He says that this helps to describe the way that he must work hard to empty himself of his own thoughts and desires so that the spiritual powers may flow in and through him to help the person who is sick. This offers an alternative to deconstruction, for it integrates the experience of the sacred into the acts of intentionality. For Fools Crow the things we encounter in nature—trees, grass, animals, other people, stones, and stars— are experienced as sacred, imbued with the spirit of Wakan Tanka,₁₃ but so are the ways of being open to them, when we can become like a hollow bone and experience the spirit of Wakan Tanka as our way of being open to reality, as imbuing our noeses themselves with sacredness.

In the tradition of phenomenology we have tended to focus on the self as a natural ecstatic opening toward the world, and we desire to encounter the other as sacred—the work of art, the stranger, the orphan, etc. Fools Crow teaches us that we will never experience the sacred other until we allow the sacred to work in the noesis, or moment of intentionality by which we are oriented towards the world. Fools Crow finds Wakan Tanka, not first in the thing, but first in flowing though himself and thus in a changed orientation toward reality.

It is the interweaving of the physical and the spiritual, nature and grace, the ability to see the world as sacred and as a home, that is, I think the promise that draws so many Europeans and Euro-Americans to Native American religious traditions. As Fools Crow says, “in the old days my people did not separate daily life in the world from spiritual life. Everything was spiritual. We were soaked with it… our attitude was spiritual, and Wakan Tanka and his Helpers were involved in everything we thought and did. This is the way it has continued to be with me and in the lives of other traditional people.”₁₄

Note, here, that Fools Crow interweaves language of the spiritual presence of Wakan Tanka in things he encounters with its spiritual presence in his thoughts and actions—orientation towards those things. It is the first, a renewed appreciation of the sacredness of the world and the things in it that draws western seekers suffering the alienation of Cartesian solipsism and Kantian phenomenalism, but only with the latter, by thinking about a re-orientation of our intentional opening to reality can we understand Fools Crow’s project.

Fools Crow makes a careful distinction between natural power and spiritual power. As he explains:

“apart from when it is being used in a ceremony, spiritual power is not in a person or in a ritual item so that we can say we are powerful or that a ritual or ritual item has power. We can never heal a patient and say, ‘I did that, and you can thank me for it.’ It is the Higher Powers and their Helpers who do this in and through us. We are helpers, too, but only as hollow bones they work through. Most people think that to do and build great things is what really counts. But the greatest and only lasting privilege we have is that in spite of some of the things we think, say, and do the Powers and their Helpers are still willing to work through us.”₁₅

This teaching is clearly related to the recognition of the importance of humility and openness to the transforming power of grace that marks the post-modern tradition in a line running through Marion, Caputo, Derrida, and Levinas back to Kierkegaard, Luther, and Augustine. As Fools Crow explains later, “With Wakan Tanka, everything is possible. Without Him, it is not. Human nature, with its natural power and without the added spiritual power that surrounds us, is such that people do not do what is for their own best good.”₁₆

Clearly this is not some “primitive” or naïve “pre-critical” affirmation of the world as it is experienced. The self must work hard to open itself to a moment of alterity. As Fools Crow explains, in the first step “I think about all the stumbling blocks about me that can get in Wakan-Tanka’s and the Helper’s way when I want them to work in and through me. Then I ask them to remove these things so that I am a clean bone.”₁₇ Again he tells us, “the cleanest bones serve Wakan Tanka and Helpers the best, and the medicine and holy people work the hardest to become clean. The cleaner the bone, the more water you can pour through it and the faster it will run. It is this way with us and power, and the holy person is the one who becomes the cleanest of all.”₁₈

The affinities with deconstruction and the worries about illusion that motivate the hermeneutics of suspicion should be clear. Fools Crow is acutely aware of the danger of illusion. What is of such importance for a contemporary phenomenology that could be of service to an environmental ethics, is that he provides a disciplining of subjectivity in the service of openness to the other that motivates the poststructuralist/ deconstructionist turn away from Heidegger but without banishing the sacred to a realm of radical transcendence beyond phenomenality and thus beyond nature. Thus, Fools Crow’s thinking remains deeply congruous with Husserl’s, in a way that post-structuralism and hermeneutics of suspicion cannot, for in the end, the intentional act and the intentional object become deeply intertwined through the spiritual life, such that the sacralized intentionality does indeed open onto a sacralized world.

We must be resolute in holding onto the ontological priority of the encounter with the sacred in a re-orientation of our acts of intentionality. The holy men and women of old, says Fools Crow,

“learned who their helpers would be, what Wakan Tanka wanted them to do, and how He would help them do it. They also learned, and perhaps this was the most important thing, how to look at things through the eyes of the Higher Powers. ‘Why do you think the medicine people’s dreams have been more powerful than those of other people?’ [asks Mails] ‘As I have already told you but will say again [responds Fools Crow], they have been individuals whose natures and way of life opened them fully to Wakan Tanka and the Helpers… when we serve as bones for Wakan Tanka and the Helpers, we learn to see things in a new and magical light, to look at people and situations in different ways. Visioning is learning to let the Powers show you things though their eyes.”₁₉

But in the end this does, indeed, yield an encounter with a world that is full of goodness and meaning and could be the basis for a renewed relation to nature, as the western seekers had hoped. As Fools Crow continues, “Wakan Tanka and the Helpers cast spiritual light onto things so that I can see them for what they really are,”₂₀ and the results are dramatic; “sometimes I cry because of the great beauty of it all. Ordinary things become extraordinary. What is nothing to someone else becomes marvelous to me.”21 The hope is, of course, that by including a critique of illusion, this can then become the phenomenological grounding of an environmental ethics. We
must save the wolves and the Hetchy-Hetchy valley and Peone Prairie because they are beautiful, extraordinary, marvelous— worthy apart from their value for humans. A philosophical account of what gives them their value takes us beyond phenomenology and into metaphysical debates. Those are worth having, but a phenomenological description of this value is a good place to start.

My appeal in this article to a renewed phenomenology that, inspired by the Lakota tradition, finds a way to avoid being captured by a pre-occupation with the invisible and can thus become the basis for an axiology of nature that defends the claims of environmental philosophy about the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world, is only a prolegomena or perhaps just an evocative invitation. A great deal of work will have to be done to show that the reorientation of the problem of illusion suggested by the work of Fools Crow and his Lakota tradition can indeed overcome the worries about idolatry and the distortion of experience that motivates the heirs to the phenomenological tradition. However, for a phenomenologist inspired by the kinds of experiences of nature that moved John Muir and Aldo Leopold, the work ought to look promising. For by shifting some of the rigor that would suppress the things of experience towards the acts of consciousness by which they are revealed, perhaps we can achieve a disciplining of experience rigorous enough to overcome illusion without letting things go towards invisibility altogether. Then the original axiological promise in Husserl will, indeed, be able to provide a philosophical account that will help defend the claim that experiences of the goodness and beauty of nature ought to play a foundational role in environmental philosophy, thus allowing the movement to fulfill its potential both to inspire us to political and ethical action that will preserve nature, but also to challenge the metaphysical assumptions of modernity thus renewing contemporary philosophy.

Endnotes

1. Please see my chapter, “The Ethics of Sustainability, Instrumental Reason, and the Goodness of Nature,” in Róisín Lally, Ed., Sustainable Technologies in the Age of the Anthropocene. Lexington Books, 2019.
2. Norton, pg. 105.
3. Norton, pg. 106.
4. Norton, pg. 108.
5. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.
6. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pg. 130. [my emphasis].
7. I also develop this idea more fully in my chapter “The Ethics of Sustainability, Instrumental Reason, and the Goodness of Nature,” in Róisín Lally, Ed., Sustainable Technologies in the Age of the Anthropocene. Lexington Books, 2019.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, 252a.
9. By sacred I mean that not only are things good in themselves, but that they also manifest something good beyond themselves that gives rise to them or that is their ground (or is their groundless ground). This act of giving that is revealed by sacred things could be the god of a philosophical theology such as a theistic reading of Plato’s Good beyond Being or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover; it could even be the God of revealed theology, such as the personal Gods “Yaweh,” “Allah,” or “Christ.” But the sacred can also involve a non- theistic interpretation, such as “Being” in Heidegger, “Nature” in Merleau- Ponty, Gadamer’s non-theistic reading of Plato’s “Good beyond Being” etc. So a phenomenology of the sacred does not commit us to God, but it gives us a method to solve many of the problems in environmental philosophy and helps unite theory and policy in an experience of a nature that is good and indeed part of a process of coming into being that is also good.
10. See for example, Bryan Bannon, Ed., Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment, Roman and Littlefield, 2016; Ted Toadvine, “Phenomenology and Environmental Ethics” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, 2017; Iain Thompson, “Environmental Philosophy” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Wiley, 2007;
11. Zahavi, “Phenomenology of the Invisible,” Continental Philosophy Review, No. 32, 1999. Pg. 223-240.
12.  “Every other is wholly other”;
13. Wakan Tanka is a Lakota word sometimes translated as “Great Spirit.” Wakan seems to mean primarily “holy or sacred,” and by extension “great,”  and Tanka means “powers or mystery or spirit.” Any translation necessarily plunges us into complicated debates about Lakota theology and ways it has been influenced by Christianity that exceed the scope of a short discussion. Thus, I think sensibly, many English speakers leave Wakan Tanka untranslated.
14. Pg. 50.
15. P. 50.
16. 67.
17. P. 35.
18. P. 36
19. P. 75-76
20. P. 77
21. P. 77.

Irreducible Consciousness and Identity Thinking in Transcendental Idealism

Adorno on Kant

Julian von Will, PhD

“The antinomical structure of the Kantian system expressed more than contradictions in which speculation on metaphysical objects necessarily entangles itself. It expressed something from the philosophy of history. The powerful effect which the Critique of Pure Reason exerted far beyond its epistemological substance must be laid to the faithfulness with which it registered the state of the experience of consciousness.” [ND-381]

Immanuel Kant said that to know nature is to pass through pure forms of mind, faculties of consciousness and abstract ideality not found in nature. A direct unmediated attempt to define and causally relate to objects is incapable of objectification. Subjective presuppositions erect and limit the knowledge of experience. Not between thought and thing, but between ideas and their tension does irreducible consciousness appear hobbling a bootstrap reason. Kant uses time, dictated by a logic of succession, digitalized, past, present and future, to contain the many in the one subject as the condition for possible knowledge. His model of consciousness processing data in a delayed mechanism projecting identity, not entity, guiding the critical path by mask reflection with deduction. A twofold of time and logic precedes concept and object for the ‘right’ over perception. Kant’s transcendental ‘anticipation’ of experience struggles to bridge and unify a composite first principle without binary confusion (paralogism) and circular and regressive reasoning (antinomical). But, according to Theodor W. Adorno: “Antinomy explodes the system, whose only idea is the attained identity, which as anticipated identity, as finitude of the infinite, is not one with itself.” [AE-29-30] His transcendental subject, source for possible experience, falls into opposition before reaching actuality registering an element of truth relating to sensibility. Kant’s own metaphysical presupposition of a priori faculties, however, does not disavows his analytic identitarian based representationalism, it proves it in the negative where objectivity is assured by denying both the subject and world direct knowledge. The epistemological framework of the Critique of Pure Reason fumbles its main point in its categorical setup sublating Being and nothingness, knowing like from unlike into a law of contradiction (like from like) bound to time and its foreknowledge of death framing the subject. Thinking about thinking leads to contrary possibilities warring against each other for eternity and for the moment, forcing possible variations of given reality to a compromise with an indifferent unqualified category ‘of relation’ compelled to agree with an actuality meant to conform to its idea. Kant’s theory of mind is divided as its mode of critical operation, suspending itself from original thoughts and authentic existence to reach neutral ground. Radically, time and logic set to a self-posited deduction trips on its own binary framework unable to relate without domination, desperately trying to escape a dialectical swindle underlying its supposed containment of metaphysics. I will focus on Kant’s subjective deduction and unity of the manifold subject advanced in the first edition and suppressed in the second. He must unify this subject of form before a schematic embrace of the object as content produces judgment. His intrasubjective construct insuring intersubjective agreement never unifies because unity is predetermined to evade individual meanings and their time-bomb scenario no one can agree on and disarm. German idealism, phenomenology and existentialism try to unify this subject of time, logic and conception by carefully distinguishing a theory of self- conscious identity thinking from act, Being and entity to enact a default psychological, originating in the unconscious, exiting a miserable schematic (Hegel). Yet, “Kant can be trusted” (Heidegger) and Adorno adopted the critical process, ontologically and dialectically wrestling the paradox of pure meaning between its projected nature and spirit a sustainable model punctuated by authentic self-delusion.

I will focus on Kant’s systematic self-contradiction, his “performative contradictions” (Habermas) by which the subject functions not despite certain contradictions but by means of them (Adorno). Ironically setting course to agreeing on appearance, curving metaphysical speculation and excessive categorical variation, Kant’s blueprint of pure consciousness holds by a negative, working the Self into the Other to avoid closed identity thinking of self-saming principles. Critical reason is forged by a conflict in possibility not actuality pushing consciousness to self-examination by thinking against itself opening a critical process to the object through subjective presupposition. Kant fails because investigating the instrument of knowledge obscures method with reflection exposing the counterfeit spectacle of anti-nature and second nature production going in a circle of reason. Denied Being in time, the self-temporalizing subject projects a timeless logic perambulating the “slaughter bench of history” (Hegel). Original Self fades in time and contradicts in concept setting up the monotony of Being and nothingness without further determination. I will just sit in this tension spinning the Copernican revolution into rediscovering what it already knew, the concept does not exhaust the thing perceived and observer- observed remain a world apart in the fragile embrace of one- sided agreement. Kant follows an old German expression of listening to Ma when Pa is speaking in his unity of elements escaping the determined lack of choice.

Kant’s epistemology sublates time under logic to demonstrate universals while temporalizing logic to a sense of Self to avoid metaphysical excess. His self-proclaimed “Copernican Revolution” finds the “secret source for the sensible” lying in the mind denied sense. He bridges logic to epistemology through a twofold schematic calling for a third-like synthesis he denies as dialectical inference. In the process of demonstration, the transcendental subject negates itself, as first principle, to evade its own identity thinking as tautology rather than totality. Critical reason dismantles its own subjective course of knowledge and tries to replace with the object it creates. Kant’s theory of consciousness and abstract relation of Self, singularity, captures the paradox of the subject’s fiction turned fact progress of secularization. Kant forges his subject on contrary categories spinning on the law of contradiction forced to a dialectical third against an unattainable thing-in- itself. In the process, diversity is swallowed by adversity into forced pre-determined unties, results and outcomes. What is irreducible about consciousness is its imprisoned self-saming knowledge under categorical relations driven by the delusion of the objectivity of total design.

I will try to show how the Kantian subject is “dialectic at a standstill” (Benjamin, ) a “dialectic in denial” (Adorno) working Being and nothingness into agreement. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in the epistemological section of the Aesthetic and the Analytic logic, his first certainty principle depends on their relation he inverts into criticism, movement and undecidability. The subject thinks against the Self making it appear devoid of sense and referent the neutral ground of Being. Kant’s circumnavigation of cognition and reason demonstrates ‘delimited possibilities’ he limits to the law of contradiction after having deduced the understanding to a binary construct at odds with singularity, unity and truth. The unlike of his categorical understanding is forced into the likeness of logical absolutism closing off possibilities, change and progress. Struggling to gain an original Self in time intuits a past sense of Self reconstructed in a knowledge of Self devoid of original flux and plurality.

Irreducible consciousness lies in recognizing itself, thinking, as the constructor of spirit and nature, arriving at complexity and plurality locked within its own forms. Kant must demonstrate necessity and agreement, epistemologically relate percept and concept through his subject of time and logic. Kant connects the law of contradiction with time and unwittingly making the finite infinite (Adorno). Nothing changes in the self- saming understanding. Subjective idealism, a “failing and a fainting before the Absolute” (Hegel), is required to transcend the transcendental, relate immanent consciousness with transcendent object through a unified subject Kant fails to demonstrate. Simply to make a judgment he must transcend his own machinery. Kant deduced time to one-time singularity projecting time-flow, succession, from an eternal law fixed under logical noncontradiction as the ground of all possible Being. It’s not a bad starting point because communicating more leads to counterfeit excursions away from a mysterious flaw in thinking the whole. He tries to arrange a connection between abstract qualifiers to state an object cannot be in two places at the same time to evade the all or nothing statements driving his critique of metaphysics.

Kant masterfully bends time and logic to form the subject of the understanding, but categorical division turns time into finite and infinite poles to draw a limit to its tautology regressing or progressing
experience into antinomy. His deduction of space and time to the mind finds itself in contrary thoughts forced to relate predetermined unity of twelve categories and one concept of causality as the whole of the understanding. His model ultimately succumbs in a lack of diversity and particularity it promises to know, but the general map of cognition, under the maxim of thinking about thinking, remains ominously true, hauntingly limited from within, even opposed by its own possibility. Kant calls it empty, yet the subject holds the spectrum of possibility within its own meaning, the variations of sense according to what it can and cannot understand (Being and nothingness) dominates a discussion marooned to island mentality against the thing-in-itself. Despite demonstrating the Self from its own categories, Kant suppresses them to time and space in a seesaw action neutralizing the epistemological follow-through and logical process driving his deduction. He capitulates too early to empiricism, says Adorno, and his duty to manifest unity through “the connection of all real properties in a thing is a synthesis, the possibility of which we are unable to determine a priori, by mere concept alone.” [K-A602,B630] Yet, it’s the concept of apperception that makes a theory of judgment possible. And the concept of existence is made by Kant. Advancing and then retracting this concept, agreement remains close to the here and now, engaged with objects and experience as its ‘corrective’ corruption to never question how the nothingness of conceptual order, the unlike, permeates thinking with the object it can never be. The constitutional subject of appearance is semblance, and its singularity based on difference and opposition is forced to reconcile with a first principle and origin alien to consciousness. Fichte notes how consciousness never finds a beginning or an end in its awareness of Self. Yet, at the point where Kant’s elements unite, he drops the bottom out of each faculty turning the ‘concept’ into ‘mythology’ and time into unending regress, the “depths of the soul”, unable to fix a Self. The system radically fractures in its idea meant to synthesize percept and concept. Stigmatized with its own impossibility, Kant calls his epistemology the “totality of the limited”, an ingenious term defining the paradox in his analytic required to synthesize traditional dualism. The analytic is synthetic. However, as Theodor W. Adorno notes, his abstract gets to the concrete by negation, by running up against its own contradiction and semblance, revealing critical reason in a closed system of knowledge, the island of cognition looking out from the coastline the stormy metaphysical sea. Kant dramatically denies logic judgment and his refusal to connect a priori faculty with psychological ‘act’ and individual Being protects experience from a closed system of knowledge. Kant advances constitutional consciousness only to revoke it with the stigma of reproduction.

Transcendental idealism, first philosophy, fights over psychology the nature of mind and wins over naturalism and spiritualism a blueprint of self-generated thought from polarized categories, allowing it pre-reflective status over time and space a constitutional role. Isolating thought, generating a Self from the pure relation of elements, transcendental idealism makes a first step to experience and nature by recognition of presupposition as its critical insight and means to objectivity.

The main argument is on the agreement of appearances and knowledge of objects through laws and structures everyone can agree on. This turns metaphysical and disagreeable by Kant’s lamenting mythologization of the concept. His attempt at a foundational first principle and singularity, unifying the ‘school debate’ of rationalism and empiricism struggles and then subtracts the subject from the equation. What comes out of Kant is a programmed transcendental subjectivity thinking in a certain way and with certain outcomes, that, ultimately, make it unfree and unoriginal despite being the gateway to experience. Kant’s epistemology divides, not between possible and actual reality but between possibilities forced into compromised relations prohibiting progress and evolution. His theory of identity-thinking is disturbing because its rigid and frozen stance, “residue theory of truth” (Adorno) by eliminating possibility. Subtracting possible from the actual, he sublates actuality under possible conditions, transcendentals, finding the one constant in every object and in every experience, the Self, hermetically sealed in a representational system. My reading follows Adorno’s use of Kant’s fractured epistemology to bring out the individual bearing the whole. Hinging on a massive ‘contradiction’ in the history of philosophy, Kant calls ‘amphiboly’, confusing reflection, deduction and perception into a twofold mechanism of truth, Adorno argues Kant speaks for individual thinking the unattainable. Speaks in the negative for a perplexing “consciousness of death” (Adorno) without making ‘nothingness’ into identity, making the “not-I” into a magical source point for advancement. I will focus on his deduction of the understanding and its unity with intuition entangled in contrary thoughts evading their union through amphiboly and paralogism, allowing him, according to Adorno, a backdoor escape from determinism. Kant is subtle, I will jump to the extremes and the bi-polar construct of transcendental subjectivity, highlighting binary understanding forced into logical noncontradiction denied judgement as the source for all possible experience. A “negative dialectic” drives irreducible consciousness to thinking the Self as whole knowing otherwise.

Irreducible consciousness is not in the hand and hides in thought. It’s the basis for the idea of non-local consciousness thinking us. Consciousness is complex, obscured in immediate sense and divided from eternal ideas, finding itself “in a gap”, says Schelling. Kant captures, in a secular analytic, a subject projecting its measure critically between Selves at war for a first certainty principle establishing, paradoxically, intersubjective agreement. Kant ushers in transcendental idealism and describes how consciousness connects with Self allowing us to experience objects within a limited yet constant framework all can agree on but few support as it dismantles its own course of knowledge. Affirming his concept of subjectivity is devoid of object and is therefore metaphysics by his own standard. Epistemology struggles in vain. Reducing space and time to mind, sublating time to logic, he then forbids logic judgment displaces the category ‘of relation’, ideation, with noumenal qualities forcing him to lunge for the empirical to save him. Kant’s subject is divided and here the individual appears bearing the weight of unity in unequal portions. Kant claims a “never before attempted deduction of the understanding” anticipating experience to know it casts an enigma.

Denying access to spirit and nature, he makes a serious claim by resisting these grounds as products of a Self-posited anchor in knowledge having to mediate extreme categories. Taking ownership over knowledge the subject introduces unity as a dialectical construct. He resists his own structure and map of knowledge as determinism, a knowledge already known. Kant’s self-temporalizing logic; deducing pre- reflective subjective universals, anticipating experience turns against itself, recognizing its constitutional role as limited and delusive. But what Kant shows is how thinking wars against itself devoid of objects, with its own logic. Kant brings the war in heaven to the mind where it originates in contrary categories dominated by a third like category taunting his schema. Divided Self withdrawals inquiry against progressive and regressive antinomy based on extending identity infinitely through variations of same-saming categories encompassing avenues of knowing objects from either end (theological or cosmological) up to a unity through its parts (infinitesimal calculus). The subject is not the sum of its parts. Dramatically, Kant denies transcendental subjectivity the ego, individuality and world it appears to be along with the harmonious ideas of freedom, immortality and God to reach agreement. It’s not a thing or spirit, not a soul thing or a thing that thinks, the subject is movement infinite regress of contrary ideas at war with each other on the origin and validity of knowing reality. The abstract is the critical movement against immediate entity or concrete ego repeating itself through the principle of identity, argumentation, logic and reason bent in speculation. Idealism and realism are suspended by drawing attention to identity thinking and formality stuck in fixed ideas. The problem is not a divergence of theory and praxis but their strict homage to identity thinking privileging one over the other by unreflected positivism. Denying the connection between faculty and act, Kant’s model resists ideology and the ‘need’ to ground ideas in what they make known. Kant’s twofold distinction of thoughts are empty and objects unknown makes their connection in and through the subject a vital and precarious endeavor he deliberately sabotaged, leaving its problematic blank in his second edition of Critique of Pure Reason.

Adorno says the “entire Critique of Pure Reason is acted out in a peculiar no man’s land.” [ARC-32] For agreement (epistemology), Kant sublates dualism to mind and then drives a trench through the middle of elements that must unite to form a first principle. [ACR-32] He warns that reason origin lies in unanswerable questions and then goes on to block it at the cost of his epistemology. Adorno argues that Kant’s “construction of transcendental subjectivity was a magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its opposite pole”.[ND-184-5]

His deduction sublates perception under reflection and claims to anticipate reality in all its forms of intuition and knowledge closed from within. Yet, before faith enters, Kant misunderstands his self-saming program in the tension between a priori faculties and offers an escape route through the dual nature of mind. The limit does express mystery in the rout to self-preservation. He plays concept and object against the medium temporal subjectivity to iron out contradictions. For Adorno, “the greatness of the Critique of Pure Reason is that these two motifs clash” forming critical reason. [ACR-66] The Critique of Pure Reason “contains an identity philosophy – that is, a philosophy that attempts to found being in the subject– and also a nonidentity philosophy – one that attempts to restrict that claim to identity by insisting on the obstacles, the block, encountered by the subject in its search for knowledge. And you can see the double nature of Kant’s philosophy in the dual organization of the Critique of Pure Reason.” [ACR-66] The dual structure between the Aesthetic and Analytic turns into the Transcendental Dialectic’s delusional attempt to unify the dilemma of thought and Being through their opposition, the emptiness of thoughts and unknown object leaving the individual further in the semblance of identity.

The Kantian subject appears resisting and criticizing its own process. Here both physics and metaphysics are put against each other to ‘see’ surplus subjectivity express its lordship one way or another. Kant’s model of irreducible consciousness forms what Adorno calls a “force field…[of] abstract concepts that come into conflict with one another and constantly modify one another [and] really stand in for actual living forces.” [ACR- 4] Adorno argues Kant’s critical philosophy functions not despite certain contradictions but by means of them revealing the individual bearing the whole. Kant sublates time to logic in an analytic tormented by dialectical wishfulfillment. His deduction of reality to mind, faculties of time and logic is caught in its own tautology and infinite regress. Successive opposition and forced predetermined unities, framing causality and metaphysical semblance, reveal a universally closed program of thought. Adorno “tries by critical self-reflection to give the Copernican revolution an axial turn” towards materialism through the abstract subject. [NDXX] Adorno says one “understands a philosophy by seeking its truth content precisely at the point where it becomes entangled in so-called contradictions.” [AM-53] These occur in Kant’s Analytic where the “I” is lost in successive Selves of time and frozen and stagnating in immutable ideas patching sufficient reason together into intersubjective agreement. But the subject is never synthesized as appearance, its mediated by fiction, semblance and violence. Kant’s epistemology squares a circle, and, according to Adorno, his “philosophy as a philosophy of origins” turns “into a criticism of a philosophy of origin as such.”[ACR-159] Adorno says the effort to conduct this path critically, means the search for origin “of what constitutes what” will have to “terminate in the proposition that the dialectical path alone is open.” [ACR-159] A dialectic against identity, criticism devoid of judgment, exposes preexisting or predetermined forms of synthesis made whole under force of agreement based on subtracting the individual. But more importantly, provides a corrective to thought’s royalty and to the well-oiled machinery of practical reason’s de-subjectified logical empiricism. Free to reflect the ‘unfreedom’ of identity- thinking, syllogism and technology idealizing and materializing consciousness in the cul-de-sac of reproduction.

German idealism and phenomenology, under the formal intuitions of Husserl and Heidegger, struggle to reinforce the Kantian subject, complete the deduction in a self-reverting ego of Fichte, Self-othering of Hegel, and in the eidetic reduction and Daseinanalytic of Husserl and Heidegger. Here the anticipation of experience is looped, inverted, projected and thrown into the object Kant denies. Adorno remains at the facture, preserving the consciousness of possibility turned off by its own inner necessity and not by actuality or nature. He pushes the abstract subject and Self into the anti-nature of its design made real by modernity to bring it to sense, in the bankruptcy of meaning. Kant leaves it in a “grand ambiguity” and could “not bring himself to stop worrying away at this contradiction.”[ACR-90] Adorno argues, “Kant has shown great wisdom in leaving this question unresolved.” [ACR-145] And it’s this ‘unresolved’ bent in the subject Adorno wields against German idealism and phenomenology. Kant’s twofold schematic to dismantle “the coercive logical character of its own course” applied to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. [ND-7] All center on Kant’s Transcendental Analytic where transcendental synthesis of apperception, the unity of time and logic form the subject of self-consciousness, devoid of entity or spirit. All try to correct Kant’s deduction with dialectical inference the ‘sense ‘of Self, the subject-object Being through the impasse of thought and Being, except Adorno, who builds on the contradiction, defends the abstract and dialectical subject in a standoff with its concept and its immediate Being. Adorno shifts the embattled subject of contrary possibilities to individual actuality by extreme categorial difference denied by identity a route through the minefield of trivial forced unities. The abstract realm houses ‘misrepresentations’, unclear thoughts, indistinct characters forming an antechamber “against thoughts inherent claim of totality”. Irreducible consciousness, resting on ‘second reflection’ thinking against itself opens an escape route (Adorno) in the face of Kant’s retreat to dogma against secular reality’s original authentic Being. The architectonic of reason cannot be an archaeology of primordial dator intuitions, as Husserl seeks, without turning into a mythical entity. Yet subjectivity is always an object while, in the correct analysis, the object is never a subject (Adorno). The First Critique works in the reverse.

The subject is not an object, this is the critical part of transcendental idealism reaching the conscious of Self in its complexity and plurality. And neither is the object a thing-in- itself capable of identifying itself without subjective effort. At the same time, everyone knows how much the subject is an object and this is detailed by a negative in identity thinking making its reflected awareness of difference somehow the very Being of objects it can never be. At the end of the Analytic, Kant brings the deduction to a standoff with reflection and hits pay dirt neutrality in formulating a concept of the impossible. No one doubts the ‘world’, only its knowledge and agreement. Yet, Kant stresses a rigid view that ideas do not exist, and existence is a mere idea, and worse “a mere groping amongst concepts”.

The connection is not made by thinking the relation into an object nor is the object into thought. The break and one-directional path are nonequivalent and successive. Possible experience is not always actual and yet actual experience is always possible. Possible by a knot between contradiction and spaciotemporal flux, embracing Being and nothingness, the mutation and successive coming to be and passing away of appearances permanently order without change and transformation. The singular principle of “no further ground” rests on the abyss of time and emptiness of identity framing the explanatory gap. Kant divides thought from itself before Being and nothingness (successive appearance) make it a fact. But the key to Kant’s subject is how it moves between sense and meaning the truth of Being without identifying it. Time mediates contrary representations as they identify a moving flowing time. Time heals the minds duality by making it disappear. Yet, his Analytic unity of the manifold subject of intuition and understanding refuses to give concepts the objectivity they project while denying intuition the thing itself. He refuses to give the concept its due, support the mediation of labor, and experiential path through speculative means the embrace of this paradox as source to advance. Kant’s identity loses diversity, possibility and then denies actuality, Being-in-itself, with the omnipresent thing-in- itself. The object and nature do not make themselves known. While grounding the possibility for experience in the law of contradiction, he contradicts his system of knowledge with the thing-in-itself opposing the totality of identity thinking against something beyond the lens of categories, concepts and classification. Kant takes logic to time, syllogism to causality and reflection to method to assert his first principle of time- consciousness. He objectifies time through logic to reflect the Self beyond time to establish his universals limited against an unattainable “thing-in-itself.” Mapping the mind, Kant’s system revealed the dialectic in reason and the unfreedom in self-determined thought, categorical poles harmonized by predetermined relations compromising differences to a closed experience of tautology. Kant then runs down possible variations of immediate sense and eternal meaning from logical noncontradiction magnifying time as death and logic as slavery in the quest for necessary agreement. Self-determined freedom, divided soul, despairing over its tautology, on the coastline of an empty horizon, fathoms Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’. Kant deduction of the understand, the second-tier flounders in emptiness without the object it can never be. Kant throws a monkey wrench into his system, blocks pure reason mediating time and logic and gives it to the empirical meant to be explained. Kant turns knowledge into a Faustian contract. Alienated, abnegated, disseminated, the Kantian abstract subject speaks for the concrete person refusing the semblance of ideas and the harden “eminence of the worlds course” (Adorno). Adorno’s critical path works Kant’s model of the understanding into misunderstanding the question, psychotically denying both thought and Being the union of soliloquy and brute force. Adorno twist the transcendental logic into a “logic of disintegration” occasioning the appearance of the subject by criticizing the need for its objectification, attacking the rules of the game.

Pitched battles wage against psychology and ontological correlations as paralogism and admixture scrying for an Archimedean fixed position leveraging the world. Throughout the Analytic, Kant prohibits the subject ego, act and ontological relation leading to hierarchy of Being. The individual is not the source for the universal, it’s not local. Knowledge, identity, predication, says a sum of one hundred dollars does not change, add or subtract by existing or being in my pocket. Real or ideal, identity does not change. Yet, as Adorno notes, Kant also commits an “amphiboly of reflective concepts” with his transcendental deduction, in terms of a priori status denied its correlative a posteriori, the empirical, as mere identity feeding the dialectic resolution of a first principle to a third no more descriptive. Identity also silences the question leading to ideology. Kant builds an elaborate form-content schema with the divided subject of identity struggling to work the postulates and analogies to get to an object. In the commotion. Kant lunges for the object and an obscure empiricism to save him. Kant’s correspondence theory of truth, equivocating subject-predicate to subject-object spatiotemporal succession, mutation and duration (concurrent) affirms the obvious and the mundane. Necessity confirms the status quo.

Thought must confront its abstract relation of Self as Other to gain entry to objectivity ‘free’ of unreflected subjective presupposition. This is the main idea of transcendental idealism; its objectivity lies in confronting the Self with itself to reach nature and experience. The understanding’s predetermined unity, through syllogism of mind projecting the framework for appearances is essentially flawed in realizing its idea as something that exists while being the gate way to existence. Its curt of in the middle of formulating its Being. Its works by premature obsolescence engineering a tantalizing view (desire) set to a funeral march. Slicing the transcendental off the ontological difference of possible and actual reality, Kant’s twofold schema is a synthetic a priori judgment denied its ‘object’ given to mathematics and the quantum metaphysical sway. Kant “despairs” over his unity of the manifold, as Adorno terms it, over the disharmonious concept and design gone wrong prematurely shutting down reason form the understanding and it from intuition. The division of reason into practice, into common sense understanding is a defeat for self-consciousness. Dividing reason leads to unreason, and the age of reason never arrives in the compromise of objectivity to need rather than rebellion. What does arrive is a misused and abused reason, for private interests, unleashing scorched earth dividends. In the blame of reason’s totality, practical reason becomes empiricism with a sense of duty making up for a lack of better design. Kant takes it deeper into possibilities conflicted, flawed and warring factions without beginning or end, where the subject cannot live up to its possibility and the object defies actuality. Kant says metaphysics thinks us and critical reason only contains, never eradicates, surplus cognition calling for an answer with faculties occasioning yet incapable of such a feat. In Kant, Adorno notes: “Not even silence gets us out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie.” [ND-367] Kant says there is little room to maneuver in the deduction as it polarizes and turns in a circle. His critical effort to keep thought pure to capture ‘nature’ finds the mind conflicted with itself unable to relate without subjugation and negation. At the end to his Analytic, Kant’s Appendix speaks the truth in a negative dialectic of thought and Being. The art of reflection, one that comes down to science by showing how “subjective conditions that make the natural sciences possible are identical with those that make metaphysics possible.”[ACR-43] Kant uses this against naturalism forming a cosmology not subject to identity thinking and its regressive infinitudes. But the key lies in the computation of identitarianism, a program of cognition, syllogism and judgment machined into a logical-mathematical causal method turning the world into a “gigantic analytic judgment” (Horkheimer, Adorno). A massive self-saming platform takes hold in knowledge invisible to science and its success in changing the world. Moreover, after Kant, the epistemological constitutive question, the dilemma of self- determinism of reason and consciousness, is no longer asked and now, “in simple tautology, the question is referred back to science.” [P]

Against the backdrop of what Kant calls, “the ancient ruin of systems”, he daringly launches is own system. His subjectivization of objectivity denied objectivity, is the one original thought Kant makes in a determined process. Everything locks into Plato’s Parmenides. Subjective unity ensuring objectivity locks in the ancient dialectic of the “one and the many” and “fixing the flux”. Kant narrowly become trapped in Platonic forms his “transcendental-ontological differential”, as Heidegger notes, clearly dismantles. “Consciousness without an object’ (Fichte), deducing possibility from the law of contradiction resting on the impossible union of Being and nothingness, identifies the subjective constant in all places all the time (omni-conscious). Time is used to mediate contrary categories of Self by making the contradiction go away, disappearing in succession. Yet, truth is divided and infinitely regressed through time. Self-conscious reason is the embodiment of dualism mediating freedom through determinism. This irony of truth, limit to possibilities, is the departure to actuality. Its “true in its untruth” says Adorno, where the subject recognizes its island provincialism. Kant maps a holographic system of conscious reality, a schematic of imprisoned subjectivity, awash in the surplus of its own machinery. His critical twofold schema ruptures in the temporal abyss and ideational tautology, drawing its critical measure to avoid everything and nothing by liquating the subject, prototyping logical empiricism.

Kant’s subject is denied immediate sense and exhaustive predication, and his one proof of the external world, in his critique of material idealism through space, fails to identify the permanence of the Self through object flux. But, while the Analytic draws phenomenal and noumenal differences and transcendental reflect resist the distinction forming an ‘above and beyond’ resolution, Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic implodes first principles of origin and unmitigated validity (Unmittelbarkeit), into the pretense of detectable and correctable paralogism of intellectual intuition and its magic and unresolved incorrect antinomies. Yet, in Kant’s model, the denial of Being, as past or ideal positive construct reflecting the moment, ends up affirming the status quo for forever. In a strange fallout, denying the subject individual Being and finitude makes it infinite by default. The terror of Kant’s island of cognition lies in seeing a little beyond itself the measure to restrict it from knowing transformation. Put another way, it gives and takes away the experience of consciousness. At the point where Kant needs to affirm his identitarian philosophy and concept of self-consciousness (apperception), the “I conjoin”, he spikes it with reflection on the identity of the argument turned machinery and production forging a copy. And experience offers no further predication only variation of categories set to an immutable pattern. A brutal cut is made in the “production-line” (Adorno) of appearance and semblance takes over. The Kantian subject is a duplicate of form, a temporalized copy of successive Selves known, identified, distinguished by fixed timeless predicates and ideas that have no existence. Kant then blocks reason from mediating the understandings relation to intuition and a compromised agreement subtracts the subject operating the twofold. It’s the third faculty determined to dialectically distort an already flawed analytic.

Transcendental subjectivity is self-generating through contrary thoughts compressed in time possible variations of given reality. backing into a time-bomb individual no one can agree on and “no god can endure” (Hegel). Kant’s unity of the manifold subject splits infinitely in origin andcontradicts validity. A standoff between past sense of Self and timeless Self of categories fail to relate in a subject denied Being as tautology. Being quickly ends in negation because its everything. Yet, categorical extremes normalized by temporal succession, logical noncontradiction and causality generate instrumentalism and trivialism. A repeatable continuum of spacetime deduced to ideation, categorical sets and conceptualism fixing the flux of Being and nothing into successive appearances. Yet, again, Kant’s self-inquiry of mind locks into a “giant credit system”, borrow from Peter to pay Paul. But at the source, individual categories, unlike each other, is forced into knowledge by surrendering to a likeness impossible to identify. Kant does not connect subject and predicate in his categorical sets, withdraws the Self from the third category and then weaves time and schema to escape the subjective void. Kant fumbles the synthetic unity of the concept with time, denies the surplus third of categorical synthesis with emptiness and blocks reason’s unity as semblance after having stressed their projected reality. He falls into his own massive “amphiboly of reflective concepts”, he accused Leibniz and Wolff of making, turning immortal thoughts against the foreknowledge of death into the anticipation of life registering his epistemology. His transcendental idealism, its “constitutive logic”, works in reverse, from antimony to limit the analytic and block reason from the object they are by default of …. “Kant’s Copernican turn abstracts from the nonidentity and therein finds its limit.” [CM-254] His system of forms, categories and concepts (transcendental elements) is the ‘many’ unable to unify and be the one. The anticipatory transcendentals work by delay and reproduction into a merry-go-round of reason’s semblance, pigeonholing reality with a limited set of properties to be aware of. Kant detects the simulation. The computation of self-conscious reason stagnates in predetermined unities suppressing individual meanings. Yet, these fractures allow the subject reflective power to think against itself and world not living up to possibilities. Kant’s effort to hold universals in the variation of categories is semblance, hierarchy and privilege misperceiving experience. It becomes a fractal in the prism of apperception, casting reflection into perception. But, Kant captures this at the end of the Analytic turning the categorical unity into a negation with the Appendix on transcendental reflection. Kant makes bold by reflecting against his subject of identity. The dilemma is how to support the Kantian subject on its terms to get beyond it to the object it always was, knowing the difference. How to escape dualism through ruse and irony (Adorno).

Necessity cannot be otherwise to the principle of contradiction backed into temporal succession of object flux. In a roundabout manner, Kant reaches Being and individuality by contradiction not positive deduction. In this trap, Kant’s model, Adorno notes, becomes a powerful ‘existential’ by denying existence and Being the prerogative of unifying the subjective predicament driving it. Existential and ideal predicative distinctions are made in vain, creating auxiliary concepts into tautologies Kant stops by force of contradiction, by the nonidentity driving it. Adorno says, “the Kantian discontinuities register the very moment of nonidentity that is an indispensable part of his own conception of the philosophy of identity.” [TE-11] Locked in a twofold identarian philosophy of self-saming principles and forced reconciliation, the dialectic “is grounded in Kant’s philosophy.” [ACR-145] Yet, Adorno notes, “a dialectical way of seeing is quite foreign to him.” [ACR-125] Refusing Being and existence a predicate and a predicate the thing itself, Kant’s ‘disjointed’ system “still allowed dichotomies such as the ones of form and substance, of subject and object, without being put off by the fact that the antithetical pairs transmit each other; the dialectical nature of that conception, the contradiction implied in its own meaning, went unnoticed.” [ND-136] Yet, Adorno argues, Kant “resigns by equating itself with what should in fact be illuminated by philosophy.” [CM-10] Three attempts to unify the subject, through time, space and the concept, according to Adorno, “expresses a comprehension of nonidentity and the impossibility of capturing in subjective concepts without surplus what is not of the subject. It expresses ultimately the breakdown of epistemology.” [AE-147] Kant’s critique shows “reason’s inner dependence upon what is not identical with it.” [ND-235] Adorno argues, in a different text, that Kant shows how “objectivity itself, that is, the validity of knowledge as such, is created by passing through subjectivity – by reflecting on the mechanism of knowledge, its possibilities and its limits.”[ACR-33] This “deals with an objectivity without being free to dispense with subjective reflection. The subjects are embedded in themselves, in their “constitution”: what metaphysics has to ponder is the extent to which they are nonetheless able to see beyond themselves.”[ND-376]

The transcendental subject avoids the pitfalls of a “thing that thinks” and the concept of a “soul-thing” for their communication in the object, but the ‘parallelism’ is haunting it. Kant’s cleaver critique of paralogism found in rational psychology refuses to equate thought with world as a form of identity and its domination and reification. Adorno brings Kantian apperception to a natural history of the subject in time, labor and exchange. Cultivating the gap between consciousness and Self to get to experience, Adorno preserves the abstract subject as Other to psychological, sociological and ontological products that ‘short cut’ the details they bank on as objective Being or entity. But all along, Kant’s paradoxical effort to limit thought against the notion of the thing-in-itself, “an utterly exposed, out-on-a-limb doctrine, resisting experience and yet conceived as a link to empiricism” by radical negation of its positive identity based theorem. [ND-288] To Kant, what was most disturbing was the tautology and lack of originality in thought. “Without “otherness, cognition would deteriorate into tautology: what is known would be knowledge itself. To Kant’s mediation this is clearly more irksome than the inconcinnity of the thing-in-itself being the cause of phenomena even though the category of causality ends up on the subject’s side in his critique of reason.” [ND-184] The abstract becomes real in its unattainable truth longing for something different. Kant’s a priori are not necessarily deduced, nor enacted in a receptive and spontaneous manner “but are ‘reflected upon’”. [ACR-29] Yet, Adorno will argue, “Kant did not make this the object of reflection.”[ACR-87] He did not see how experience can transform consciousness or how “consciousness of transformation” objectifies itself “mind as Self-transmitted”. [LND-34] [ND-199]

Adorno argues that, in Kant, what “is supposedly most obvious, the empirical subject, would actually have to be considered as something not yet existing; from this aspect the transcendental subject is “constitutive.”” [CM-248] Because one cannot mix identity with Being without tautology, Adorno notes, that irreducible consciousness “derives from Kant’s greater insistence on the data under scrutiny: that you cannot reduce the self to matters of fact that depend for their existence upon a concept of the self.”[ACR-191] According to Adorno, Kant and German idealism make the “living individual person… incarnate closer to the transcendental subject than the living individual he must immediately take himself to be.” [CM-248]

While prohibiting the equivocation of logical process with psychological natural ones, Adorno defends the transcendental subject in this same fashion arguing, the “objectivity of truth really demands the subject. Once cut off from the subject, it becomes the victim of sheer subjectivity.” [AE-72] He argues elsewhere, “unreduced subjectivity is capable of fundamentally more objectivity than objectivistic reductions.” [CM-253] Adorno uses what Kant calls the “physiology of the mind” to criticize naturalistic reduction of mind, ‘intuitive understanding’ and mindless’ psychologizing pushing an automated desubjectified logical empiricism as a reflex of Being. Adorno says:

“the question of the reality of the transcendental subject weighs heavier then it appears in its sublimation as pure spirit and, above all, in the critical revocation of idealism. In a certain sense, although idealism would be the last to admit it, the transcendental subject is more real. That is, it far more determines the real conduct of people and society than do those psychological individuals from whom the transcendental subject was abstracted and who have little to say in the world for their part they have turned into appendages of the social machinery, ultimately into ideology.” [CM-248]

The transcendental subject forbids psych-physical parallels as identity-based variations, differences chaining up to fixed and final Being. Yet, Adorno says the “distinction between the transcendental and empirical subject is beyond Kant.” [TE- 15] Kant ends by affirming the status quo, confirming against possibilities the eternity of the moment and continuity of the actual from a master-salve dialectic in identity thinking the whole.  

Finally, Adorno tries to transcend the transcendental with the poverty and surplus of ideas and gives his computation of the subject: “If one dared to accord its true substance to the Kantian X of the intelligible character, the substance that will stand up against the total indeterminacy of the aporetical concept, it would be probably the historically most advanced, pointlike, flaring, swiftly extinguished consciousness inhabited by the impulse to do right.”[ND-297] To do right in the wrong world marks the difference defining critical self-conscious reason resist both transcendental identity and ontological Being. Kant’s computation of origin and validity checked by polarity and regress disentangles thought’s identity to preserve experience from its limited knowledge and brute existence. It enables a critique of ideology identifying with actuality never changing. Kant restricts identity’s claim over existence as a form of semblance backed by the force of nature conforming to that claim in the negative. This is a real step in clarifying positivism with violence. Adorno says, “Identity identifies with the aggressor.” [LND-13] This is where, as Adorno points out, the “a priori and social interpenetrate”, where the totality of thought is true in the reverse of collective social realization of individuality. No paralogism, the social appears through the abstract subject’s self-negation. The abstract self-destructs in its own terms. Adorno superimposes Kant’s twofold schematic over the individual-social construct to critique ideology and its crude commitment to identity going nowhere fast, its origin a collective “highway of despair” (Hegel). He uses Kant’s abstract subject to critique the real concrete person not living up to rational possibilities through societal hypocrisy. The modern subject captured in Kant’s abstract subject slides into the collective unthought of society. “Beyond the magic circle of identification philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered as a society unaware of itself.”[ND-177] Knowledge reduced to power is the net result of ideology masking the weakness of identity suppressing mystery and misery of life at odds with itself and historical fatalism crowning critical self- awareness.

Quotations

Immanuel Kant

[K-A,B] (1781,1787), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, [1927]

Theodor W. Adorno

[ AE-] (1956), Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo, Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd [1982]

[TE-] (1963), Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. [1994]

[ND-] (1966), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, The Continuum Publishing Company [1977]

[ LND ] (1965/1966) Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity, 2008. (NS IV.16)

[ P-] (1967), Prisms, MIT Press paperback edition, [1983]

[ACR-] (1959), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford University Press [2001]

[ CM-] (1963.1969), Critical Models: Interventions & Catchwords, trans. & with a preface by Henry Pickford, Columbia University Press