Steven Brutus, PhD

It is good to be with you all today and to
have a chance to practice philosophy with you.

For the next few minutes I am going to jump in to the philosophy of mathematics—what some people call the foundations of mathematics—asking the big question ‘what is mathematics?’—working through some of the classical and newer arguments in the field.?

At the end of my talk today I am hoping that I will have laid out some good questions for discussion—also to get some critical feedback regarding my main thesis on the question. Between now and then let me jump into the arguments and see where the evidence leads.

Let’s begin with some history on the question. Some traditional answers to the question ‘what is mathematics?’ are that mathematics is about abstractions; about mental con- structions; about symbols; or hypothetico-deductive systems; or that it reduces to logic. None of these ideas ever entirely won the day, or overcame objections, or satisfied critics—the jury is still out, as it has been for the past several millennia, and has pretty much stayed where it is now since Gödel first published his Incompleteness theorem, in 1931.

So let’s catch up with the discussion and bring it up to date to Gödel, and what has happened since his time, including some very recent attempts to ‘unify’ mathematics.

Pythagoras must have thought that the world was made of mathematics in some sense—made of numbers—numbers conceived as assemblies and ratios of units of magnitude— which is why this whole way of thinking fell apart immediately after Pythagoras’ later discovery of irrational numbers, which cannot be expressed as whole number ratios.

Plato was drawn more to the process of abstraction behind the conception of number—not five oranges or pencils or people but the abstract notion ‘five’ they have in common. Plato originates the tradition of answering the question ‘what is mathematics?’ by talking about a special kind of object called a “form” (eidos) or abstract object. Thus among the things that exist are mathematical objects; these are abstract (non- spatiotemporal); and they exist independently of intelligent agents. This view is variously called Platonism or Mathematical Platonism or Object Realism. The basic ‘realist’ claim is that the mind discovers inhering structures in the universe—‘forms’ or ‘ideas’—rather than inventing them. Thus we invent symbols— which are arbitrary—and by using them we discover realities— which imply necessity—we invent the language but discover the structure of reality. Some of the things we discover to be real are material and concrete. Some are immaterial and abstract.  Thus mathematics is about the real world but more narrowly is about the most abstract elements of reality. Mathematics is the science of pure thought.

Plato introduces the term chorismos (separation) to help identify what he is talking about. He says that the way we learn mathematical principles shows us their purely noetic quality— they are separate—they cannot be sensed but are intelligible— they are seen and comprehended by being demonstrated—and so because they are the main examples of what we can learn about the world when we try to demonstrate exactly what we know, they are not just ta pragmata, things insofar as we have to do with them practically, but ta mathemata, things insofar as we are able to learn about them—mathematical things—things that we are able to demonstrate and to teach others exactly as we have learned.

Aristotle’s view is that abstract properties reside in the objects from which they are abstracted. This means that mathematics is not about something chorismos or separate. Aristotle is not disputing the import or truth of results in mathematics, but the nature of mathematical thinking, “so that our controversy is not about their being but about their mode” (Metaphysics 1076 a 36). He argues that mathematical truths are not separate from but are dependent on human beings. He argues that a number, e.g. three, has no independent nature, but is just a way of talking about something being “so many,” as for example so many trees (Metaphysics 1080 a 15). In the Physics he expresses this idea by saying that “to be a number is to be some number of given things” (221 b 14). He argues that the chorismos thesis implies that—since they are separate—abstract objects would have to exist prior to sensible things, but he thinks it makes much more sense to think that sensible things exist before anything can be counted and thus have a “number” (Metaphysics 1077 a 15).

Aristotle thinks Plato is making the same mistake in jumping from five oranges and five people to the abstract idea ‘five’ as he makes when he jumps from ‘man’ to ‘men’ to ‘Man.’ There is no idea of Man separate from human beings—this is just a confusing way of talking about properties of the biological species ‘man.’ This is just a way a talking and does not imply any metaphysics—it’s just semantics.

When we talk about ‘mathematics’ this is just shorthand for properties in the real world. Thus, beginning from Plato’s ‘realism,’ Aristotle offers the first ‘nominalist’ correction.

This is the background for Aristotle’s discussions about first principles in the Organon and in the first chapters of the Physics, where he discusses what we should consider real and that reality cannot be one in the sense in which Parmenides argued (185a 20).

According to tradition, Euclid’s discussion of first principles in the first book of the Elements continues Aristotle’s line of thinking in the Organon. What Aristotle calls “hypotheses of existence” Euclid divides into definitions (horoi), postulates (aitêmata), and common notions (koinai ennoiai). In a sense, Euclid is collecting together in one place everything that people had learned about mathematics in all the ancient schools—the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, Platonism from the Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Euclid develops the classic example of developing a structure deduced from principles, so much so that for medieval thinkers like John of Salisbury, Walter Burleigh and Occam, mathematics simply is the Euclidean demonstrative method from basic axioms.

What impressed Euclid’s more distant successors was not his demonstrative system but his building process itself—thinking of mathematics very narrowly as the process Euclid undertakes \e.g. in his first proposition: Book I Proposition 1—to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line segment. Euclid does not say whether or not a triangle exists; he begins talking about points and lines as a matter of course and applies his postulates until the thing is done (hoper edei poiesai, L. quod fieri) or the statement is proved (hoper edei deixai, L. quod erat demonstratum). Thinkers like Brouwer and Heyting developed so-called “intuitionist” mathematics from Euclid’s process of gradually assembling an object of study (in his words “to poetize”—poiesai, ‘make,’ and deixai, ‘show,’ ‘bring to light’) in order to bring it about and make use of it—thus e.g. to show geometrically how to build an equilateral triangle—a view called constructivism today.

After the classical age, the great names in mathematics emerge in the Islamic world—Al-Khwarizmi, Alhazen, Omar Khayyam—from whom we get zero, negative numbers, letters to symbolize quantities of different kinds, the use of the unknown, the method of rebalancing equations and cancelling terms, and the general strategy of reduction to simplest terms, which came to be known by Al Khwarizmi’s name—algorithmic compression—thus laying out the first principles of algebra (Ar. al-jabr, ‘reunion of what is broken’). Russell once explained in a beautiful phrase that “in algebra the mind is first taught to consider general truths” and that the whole point of mathematical education is to hone exactly this ability to deal with strictly abstract truths. Alhazen makes the jump to experimental reasoning and Fibonacci introduces the Hindu-Arabic number system to the West—together laying the foundations of the scientific method.

This brief history—antedating the modern world— motivates mathematical realism, nominalism, logicism and constructivism—the foundational ideas in the subject. This demonstrates for us that the philosophy of mathematics is dominated by ideas from its history, before the revolutionary work in mathematics begins in the Enlightenment.

The new language of algebra made it possible to collect all mathematical knowledge within a single language—what Descartes calls ‘analytic geometry’—a language made entirely of abstract expressions. But then this form itself opens up as an object of study—i.e., thinking began to abstract from abstractions. Thus in a sense Euclid abstracts from experience in conceiving the idea of a mathematical point, but Bombelli (1572) is simply experimenting with ways of finding roots for equations when he stumbles on the idea of the imaginary number. He is trying to think about the number line extended into 2D and conceives of vectors in the complex plane. Here I am trying to make the point that the history of mathematics is driven by formal problems—in response, thinking creates new tools—these new tools then inauguate a new round of thinking about foundations.

Leibniz fills many pages of notes with approaches for calculating the area under a curve— in 1675 he develops a fresh approach with some definitions—he defines the idea of a constant; of a variable; of a dependent variable and an independent variable; and the idea of the function that relates them. He defined the derivative of a function as the rate of change of a function with regard to its independent variable. Thus a function y of a variable x, like y = f (x) takes various values given various inputs, which he conceives as ordered pairs (x,y) of points on a Cartesian plane—later as triplets (x,y,z) on a 3D grid. He defines the derivative of a function f ‘(x) = dy / dx—the change of y over the change of x—and defines the differential as any such arbitrary change in the value of x, thus computing the differential dy = f ‘ (x) dx. Extrapolating, he conceives the differential as an infinitesimally small change in value, which he expresses mathematically as the symbol d as we do today. He conceives the integral, symbolized with the elongated s symbol f as we do today, as the sum of a sequence of subdivisions, i.e. of differentials, as the anti-derivative, an idea known today as the Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus. Thus the area under a curve is the integral of the differential slices under it to the x-axis:

A=f(x)dx

Newton, who also discovered these “principles of calculus” independently, immediately saw that they have physical meaning. If we think of a point moving in space as a variable y coordinate along an extending x-axis, the rate of change of the area bounded by the curve is this very curve itself. Thus the tangent to the curve at any arbitrary point is its instantaneous rate of change—an infinitesimal increment of time—the derivative f ‘ (x) is the slope of the tangent to the curve y = f (x) at any arbitrary point on the abscissa.

Newton models the physical universe as made up of bodies each having some form of attraction to one another, as natural weight or mass or heaviness (in Latin gravitas), as the earth attracts the moon, the sun the earth, and an apple falls to the center of the earth. By observation, neither the moon nor the apple moves in a straight line at constant speed. Therefore an attractive force exerts an acceleration on a distant body (an important form of which is the acceleration of falling objects near the surface of a body due to gravity). Now velocity is the rate of change of distance with respect to time—the derivative of the distance function (rate times time equal distance)— acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time—the second derivative of the distance function—and so we have constructed mathematical tools for describing what Newton calls “the system of the world” interrelating any object in the world, the forces acting upon it, and its motions.

That is:

∑F = 0 ↔ dv/dt = 0  [law of inertia]

F = m dv/dt = ma [impulse, instantaneous application of force, is (J = ∫F dt)] Fa = – Fb [to every action an opposite and equal reaction]

That is:

An object at rest will stay at rest unless a force acts upon it— an object in motion will not change its velocity unless some force acts up it. Force is the derivative of momentum over time—momentum is mass * velocity—thus force is mass * acceleration. These are what Newton calls the “mathematical principles of natural philosophy”—Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—a work first published in 1686. The Principia defines philosophy as “arguing from phenomena to investigate the forces of nature.” Newton says that he is cultivating mathematics (excolo) in so far as it relates to philosophy, which implies that mathematics is something we have to work on to practice and to improve.

Newton remarks that his discovery of universal gravitation demonstrates that things that seemed to have nothing to do with one another—falling objects and the motion of the planets—were forms of one principle. Magnetism and electricity were later understood to be forms of one thing— electromagnetic (EM) waves—light was later recognized to be an undulation of EM fields—space and time were seen to be aspects of the same continuum—spacetime—ST— then gravity was seen to be a kind of curvature of ST. Thus from the initial problem of finding roots for algebraic equations—a set of problems inherited from Al Khwarizmi—Leibniz and Newton ended up inventing an entirely new language for understanding the physical universe—the basic mathematics of change.

Even within his lifetime, Newton’s principles were applied to astronomy, mechanics, civil engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, hydraulics, hydrostatics, optics, lens grinding, architecture, ship-building, and the design of cannons, bridges and clocks.

This raises the following fascinating question—why has this mathematical method of regarding nature been so spectacularly successful? This method arose out of nowhere simply through trying to respect the basic rules for maintaining algebraic closure over basic operations.

How can we explain the amazing match between pure theory and practical applications?

The tradition of modern German philosophy, beginning with Leibniz and Kant, and carried on by writers like Husserl, Weber, Jaspers, Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, make this the central question in the philosophy of mathematics—Arendt concludes her studies with the admission that the greatest perplexity in the entire state of affairs we are looking at is that completely fictional and arbitrary ideas can and do describe actual physical processes and thus can be seen to “work.” She says: it’s as if our methods outpace our understanding—mathematical truth may not even be comprehensible to human reason.

And so with Newton we have a second, major puzzle in the philosophy of mathematics—something on the order of Pythagoras’ terrifying discovery of irrational numbers.

Kant thinks he knows the answer to this question. He thinks that he has learned it from Galileo. Galileo says famously that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics. Kant agrees and says even further that there is only so much science in a thing—that is, knowledge of a thing—as there is mathematics in it. But Kant says that he is making a Copernican turn—overturning the basic premises of understanding. Thus he says it is not that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics, but that we must bring a new template for understanding reality by thinking mathematically. “Reason has insight only into that which it produces after its own design” (KdRV B xiii).

Kant’s new idea is that mathematical statements are a priori synthetic judgments.

That is: mathematics is a priori, rather than a posteriori—it is ‘before’ (it is prior, i.e. it must be assumed beforehand) rather than ‘after’ (meaning what occurs in experience). This ‘before’ structure becomes the main subject of thinking about mathematics for centuries afterwards—trying to understand mathematics as a mental projection.

Husserl uses many different terms to talk about ‘before’ structure—“forerunner ideas”—the “already-made world”—the “bases from which” we develop every concept we have. He looks for a way to talk about the primordial pre-reflective laying out of the world, which he conceives as a kind of embedded power coeval with the advent of language.

He sees that the act of creating a structure in a symbolism immediately becomes independent of the objects the structure was intended to model—a brand new development begins within the new medium itself—this ‘transformation’ is the key. Husserl’s student Heidegger calls it “the fundamental presupposition for knowledge”: “Ta mathemata, mathematical things, are things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance. Thus we already know in advance what counts as a physical object, we already know the plant-like character of plants, we already have an idea of what counts as an animal and the animal-like characteristics that alert us that what we are looking at is an animal. Thus the kind of learning that we are talking about—ta mathemata, things insofar as they can be learned —- is an extremely peculiar kind of seeing and taking in which we are taking something we already have.”

Thus the mathematical project anticipates the essence of things—it defines the advance blueprint for the structure of things in relation to everything possible—it is the basic guide which at the same time is the fundamental measure for laying out the universe.

Heidegger explains further that the mathematical method of getting at a thing—the mode of access appropriate to axiomatically pre-determined basic planning—works via the cycle of hypothesis-experiment-output, designed to posit conditions in advance and then, by applying reason and, gradually, using instrumentation, to pose key questions that observation alone can answer. For this reason he says that the mathematical project skips over things in order to look for facts. This is Kant’s great achievement—the achievement of the Enlightenment—the spirit of experimental natural philosophy.

If the question is, why this works?, we can begin to see that in many cases it doesn’t—we try something and it doesn’t work out—it’s just a cycle of experiments and results. In a sense, Kant offers the precedent for getting away from thinking about mathematics as a body of knowledge—he wants us to consider the proposition that mathematics is something that human beings do. There is a verb buried somewhere in mathematical thinking—a function or an action—this is what Heidegger means by “skipping over.”

But then even this formulation is misleading since it invites us to make an important mistake, that of essentializing into a single basic ability or faculty what is in reality an enormously complicated array of techniques that are very different from one another.

The word ‘mathematics’ is plural in most languages, which suggests that whatever else mathematics may be, it is not one thing, but many. So a next step in reasoning is to accept that mathematics is a big collection—more like a toolbox than a language—which must include things like counting, measuring, abstracting, demonstrating, applying techniques like differentiation or integration or graphing, or taking an average. Going with the toolkit metaphor, let’s examine this more closely. The reason we are reaching into the bag is to do something—to solve a problem—so we are looking around for a tool—we have a bunch of tools but we need the right one for the job.

So to begin with there is the world, and we are going to use mathematics to solve a problem in the world, which means that mathematics is something we bring with us to experience—we carry it with us and make use of it when we need to—which is why Plato thinks of mathematics in terms of anamnesis, or recollection—calling a thought to mind—just as Aristotle thinks of mathematics in terms of the most basic categories by which we orient ourselves in life—mathematical ideas are forerunner ideas—or overall a set of tools by which we take the measure of a thing, examine it and ask questions.

Set Q1 = ( <abc>, <cab>, <bca>)

Set Q2 = (0c, 2π / 3c, 4π / 3c)

Set Q3 = (1, 2, 3)

In a sense what we are talking about here is modeling—we are trying to come up with a mathematical model for something that is happening in the world—and so the point of talking about the toolkit is to emphasize that there is always more than one way to do this. Look closely at the idea of a mathematical model. A mathematical model is a different thing than the thing it is meant to model. Consider an example. Think of an equilateral triangle T standing upright with vertex a at the top, with vertices denoted <a,b,c>. Now rotate the triangle counter-clockwise from the top around its midpoint. It has three upright positions with a vertex pointing upwards: the beginning point 0, then rotated 2 π over 3, and then rotated again 4 π over 3 radians. Now if we consider this simple scenario as a situation in the world, we could say that in this situation S, in the observable universe, there are three physical states possible—modeled as various abstract states Q. But immediately we see that we can model these three states in the following different ways:

The point is that the identical situation in the universe can be managed by different modeling assumptions. Note that the abstract states could be a number, but might not be a number. From the standpoint of nature, there is no preferred description between Q1, 2, 3 … but in some cases one kind of Q may make more sense or be more helpful to use. Sometimes it is useful to count; sometimes to imagine. It’s as if: adopt this convention, and then see where you get. Note also that the universe goes on all by itself whether we create abstract states to model its observable events or not—the labeling conventions have to do with us, not with what’s out there in the universe. Just as all three Q sets can work to describe a triangle’s rotation around its axis, so we can model extremely complex processes equally well and usefully with dissimilar tools.

I think this is what Cantor meant when he said that the essence of mathematics is freedom. In mathematics we are able to imagine any situation we like and then try to get at it by making wildly different kinds of assumptions. This is why mathematics is so freeing—we don’t even have to be constrained by reality— we simply construct a tool and see what it does. Sometimes we look in the kit and reach for the wrong tool—whatever we try doesn’t work—yet this is not a problem in itself but is good information—this is the important thesis that Imre Lakatos put forward in the 70s—that it’s unhelpful to expect too much or to have too highfalutin’ an idea about what we are doing— mathematics is simply heuristics—what we’ve been taught is wrong—mathematics is not about eternal truths—we are simply trying out ideas and seeing what works.

Now in order to see more of what is going on in mathematics and to see more into the nature of mathematical modeling, and maybe also to get a little closer to answering the question, what is mathematics?, I thought that it made sense to choose something to look at in the world and then try to build up a mathematical system as a wireframe for it to begin examining it. And so in an earlier draft of this paper, I developed a mathematical model of love—roughly a problem in dynamics, or in systems that evolve in time—as a system of differential equations—which I will not take the time to spell out here today (see notes to this essay following page 10). With a few assumptions, I made a start in modeling the environment in which people fall in love, a frictionless or a resisting medium, and I spelled out some problems with mate choice, romantic styles, the complexity of emotional reactions and influences on mood, general sociability and romantic outcomes, and the likelihood of divorce vs. long-term relationships. Arguably my results have some predictive power and might even be applied in real-time scenarios on the model of a control system. Knowledge like this could perhaps help a person estimate risks and make better decisions in his love life. But I think it would be odd to say that, because of such calculations, I now understand love any better. Perhaps I have gotten a little closer to seeing some patterns of love and some of how it works.

I think what is most obvious here is that there is nothing in the mathematics of love that directs how this knowledge should be used—evidently mathematical tools can be used for good or ill and, as nearly all the philosophers seem to tell us, from Plato through Grothendieck, the deep problem in mathematics is the moral one—i.e. what this knowledge is for.

At this point I think I can offer a helpful analogy. In physics there is something called “the Copenhagen interpretation,” which is something that Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg created in the 1920s to help people interpret all the new data being gathered about quantum processes and how to go about controlling them. This interpretation was accepted at the time and is widely accepted today as the working model for understanding interactions at the smallest scales we can measure. Yet the Copenhagen interpretation remains fundamentally problematic in that it cannot explain or reconcile the particle- wave duality—it basically just gives up on this question. So we have a useful scientific theory that allows us to make predictions that are confirmed by experiments, but one that is philosophically unsatisfying—more accurately, it is philosophically incoherent. We have a method that works but no real understanding of what it means. I think this is roughly the situation we are in with mathematics today—mathematics is various methods and a long list of different kinds of heuristics, theses, and formalisms—thus we have methods that work but no satisfying comprehensive idea of what mathematics is.

Probably the most important single result in contemporary mathematics is Gödel’s discovery of the incompleteness principle. Gödel noted (as we have above) that the entire history of mathematics takes the position that mathematics is something a priori—it represents the basic instruction-set or blueprint for the universe and therefore is something that we ourselves bring to experience, as a basic condition, before we actually ‘have’ any experience at all. Thus as Wittgenstein said there can be no surprises in mathematics. But Gödel’s discoveries did come as a surprise. It is surprising to learn that a mathematical proposition might be true even though there is no possible way of proving it. As it turns out, we know things we cannot prove—no system of axioms is capable of generating all the truths of mathematics—which Gödel interpreted to mean that we have a kind of intuition for truths that sweeps beyond the reach of any logical system. Ultimately mathematics is about this power rather than any of its creations.

Gödel’s thesis precipitated the third crisis in the foundations of mathematics—the crisis of incompleteness—inspiring many ‘rescue’ attempts to unify mathematics on new principles—just as Pythagoras’ problems with irrationals and Leibniz’s problems with infinity drove the earlier history of mathematics—from which we get e.g. Bombelli’s imaginary numbers and Cantor’s set theory—some recent attempts are Category theory from the 1940s, Grothendieck’s Scheme theory from the 1960s and the Langlands program from the 1970s.

For the present, there is no consensus about the subject—we are pretty much where Gödel left us. But I think Gödel has given us some ideas about how to think about mathematics as the big collection—the toolkit—which I have been calling the Grab Bag Mind—the GBM—for a while. The GBM is full of funny little tricks and schemes, which to me seem like data-collection devices of different sorts.

Some things about the GBM that seem important to me—and I guess this is my thesis—are that it’s just a bunch of resources. It’s not a language—Galileo was wrong about this. It’s not a portal into reality. It’s not mere logic or stuff we build. But it’s not just a bunch of symbols either. It is a set of tools. It’s important not to confuse the model with reality. It’s important not to confuse the tool with reality. We get caught up with the tool when we stop thinking about it as a tool. Since there are lots of tools, there is more than one way to attack a problem. Tools help us think—we shouldn’t waste too much time trying to defend a tool—the idea is simply to use the tool and see where we end up. Tools help us think, but on the other hand they can’t replace thinking. I think the idea of the GBM makes it easier to see that we cannot fit everything we are doing into one category. So the GBM is bigger than attempts to systematize it. Somehow the GBM stretches beyond whatever the GBM has been up to now—it (if we can call it an it) tries new things.

I think Newton is right that mathematics is something we have to cultivate—i.e. the toolkit keeps changing—Socrates is not operating with the same tools that we are—and so we have to keep coming up with new resources and new tools. Experimenting—trying new things—is the recombinant DNA of everything that the GBM has come up with up to now. At so the end of this reasoning is the insight that there are some things that are just beyond what we are able to reason about up to now—i.e, there are some things that the GBM has not found a way to detect.

This leads us to some important conclusions and this is where I will finish up in my reflections. First of all, mathematics is a tool and does not tell us what to use it for. Intelligence is logically distinct from motivation: an ability to figure out how best to get from A to B says nothing about what to do when you get there. Reason can be a means to attaining our most important goals (e.g. seeing the truth) but can also be co-opted into mere means-to-end calculations. Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt all saw this—they all tried to pry apart the cheap version of understanding (which they all call “positivism”) from a more sophisticated one (which Heidegger, e.g. calls “meditative thinking”).

This result leads to the last reflection. In his Art of Discovery, from 1685, after having invented the calculus, Leibniz expressed the hope that one day a truly universal form of calculation might replace opinion and thus put an end to all disagreement:

“The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us simply calculate, to see who is right.”

Great as he was, what Leibniz says here represents a fundamental mistake in thinking about the subject. Disagreements are as fundamental to mathematics as are computing sums. Disagreeing is another kind of mathematical tool—another ‘data collection device’—another way of sending out some signals and getting some feedback when they come back. The point is that we cannot replace judgment with mere calculation.

We cannot endow any system with everything we have learned, with all our good sense and experience, and thus be done with human judgment. To try to do this would be like trying to replace wisdom with a kind of machine—which would be insane. In a way, the world we live in is a world constantly flirting with exactly this insanity—we are trying to make things so easy for ourselves that we risk farming out our very soul.  There is no Copenhagen solution for philosophy. There is no point in just going on, even if we don’t know what we are doing. The point is to know exactly what we are doing, and to try to act for the good. Therefore it is essential that we focus on our own human-friendly purposes and not on replacing ourselves with any machine intelligence.

The tools are there for us to use—theyare not there to spare us the problem of thinking, but to free it up—we just have to get back to the process of seeing where a hypothesis gets us. And it is also worth saying that the most important tool we have is our moral sensibility—the question,

what is this for?—why are we doing this?—what do we hope to accomplish?

It’s important to stress that we are not locked in to looking at something happening in the world in one and only one way— but this is not a problem but actually an advantage. We only get to see what we think about, what we ask about and examine— we have lots of ways of doing this—and it seems very clear that there is more to see than any one method can ever reveal. The point is to go on with our problem-seeking, constructive, experimental, imaginative way of interacting with the world, rather than trading in the toolbox—since it’s just a box of tools—with the conviction that there is only one truth—that there is only one reality—that there is only one thing to see and one way to see it.

So to conclude, there is no general answer to the question, what is mathematics?, because the GBM keeps evolving—the GBM is what we make it—which means that pretty much everything we have been taught about this subject is wrong. We don’t have a clue what mathematics is. Minimally it is many things. It is not at all obvious what we should do with it. We don’t know which tool to use at which moment. And so the big conclusion from studying the philosophy of mathematics is to go on with life—to go on learning—to go on cultivating mathematics—to go on in everything we are trying to interact with, understand and improve—as a form of philosophical questioning.

Notes

On the background for Pythagoras, see Proclus, Commentary on Euclid.

On the background for Mathematical Platonism, see:

A History of Greek Mathematics, Thomas Heath (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).

The Development of Logic, William Kneale and Martha Kneale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), Chapter 3.

Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, Jacob Klein (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968).

Øystein Linnebo, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ platonism-mathematics/, 2009.

Regarding Husserl, see:

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931), § 64.

Edmund Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), II, g.

“Mathematics and mathematical science, as a garb of ideas, or the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories, encompasses everything which, for scientists and the educated generally, represents the life-world, and dresses it up as objectively actual and true nature. It is this garb of ideas that we take for true being. But this is actually only a method. Thus Galileo is a discoverer who also conceals a great deal” (ii, h).

Robert Sokolowski, “Edmund Husserl and the Principles of Phenomenology,” in the collection edited by John C. Ryan, Twentieth Century Thinkers (Staten Island: Alba House, 1965), pp. 134-157.

Regarding Heidegger:

Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, translation by Barton and Deutsch (Chicago: Gateway, 1967), Part B, 1, section 5 (pp. 65-107).

“Ta mathemata, mathematical things, are things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance. Thus we already know in advance what counts as a physical object, we already know the plant-like character of plants, we already have an idea of what counts as an animal and the animal-like characteristics that alert us that what we are looking at is an animal. Thus the kind of learning that we are talking about—ta mathemata, things insofar as they can be learned —- is an extremely peculiar kind of seeing and taking in which we are taking something we already have” (73).

“The mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things” (75).

Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1989), 2:6, 4:8, 66:91

Regarding Arendt:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Press, 1958). Arendt quotes Alexander Koyré, Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Alfred North Whitehead, E.A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Ernst Cassirer, Jacob Bronowski, and thinking from working scientists of her day including Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.

“In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, man placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself” (265).

Further:

Anton Chekhov, Notebooks of 1921: “there is no national
multiplication table.” Wittgenstein ends up in the untenable place of social constructionist idea mathematics in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (notes from 1937-44; see e.g. note VI, §67, 72) and in On Certainty (notes from 1950-51, e.g. § 204).

Wittgenstein’s student R. L. Goodstein introduced the new operation “tetration” in 1947.

Kaufman, E.L., Lord, M.W., Reese, T.W., & Volkmann, J. (1949). “The discrimination of visual number”. American Journal of Psychology. The American Journal Psychology. 62 (4): 498–525; Adrian Treffers, Freudenthal Institute, Holland,

<k-5mathteachingresources.com/Rekenrek.html>

Keith Devlin, Mathematics: The Science of Patterns (New York: Holt, 1996).

Wise RJ, Green J, Buchel C, Scott SK. Brain regions involved in articulation. The Lancet, 1999; 353:1057–61.

Hillis AE, Work M, Barker PB, Jacobs MA, Breese EL, Maurer K. Re-examining the brain regions crucial for orchestrating speech articulation. Brain, 2004; 127-35.

My friends Kevin Boileau, Gary Wolfe, Eric Springsted, Peter Boghossian and David Webber read earlier drafts of this essay and provided me valuable comments. I appreciate their help very much but have to own my own errors wherever I have taken a wrong track in the above.

Nature as Interlocutor: Dialogues with Our Landscapes

Annalee Ring, MA

Introduction

Plato writes, in the Phaedrus, that “[he] is devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach [him]—only the people in the city can do that.”₁ This view of nature as having nothing to say, as voiceless, has been inherited throughout most of the European tradition of philosophy. This promotes a kind of anthropocentrism: that rather than learn from nature, human beings can only learn from other human beings. In the inheritance of this idea throughout the history of philosophy, nature has been devalued, as seen in ancient and medieval hierarchical ontologies which subjugate nature, modern philosophy’s mechanistic understandings of nature and other life, and in the commodification of nature in contemporary lifestyles. I will argue against Plato’s claim using Merleau- Ponty (and the Merleau-Ponty scholars: Ted Toadvine, Donald Landes, Jonathan Singer, and David Abram); nature is not voiceless, rather, we are in constant conversation with our landscapes and we can learn from these conversations. Reasons to consider nature as a potential interlocutor (rather than as incapable of teaching) include lives of belonging to one’s environment instead of isolation, relational knowledge instead of abstracted knowledge, holistic approaches to experiencing the world instead of atomistic ones, and an overall sense that one’s own flourishing and the flourishing of the community are interrelated.

Part 1 of this argument will detail Merleau-Ponty’s description of perception as a kind of communication achieved when we attune our senses to our environment. Embodiment entails perceptual communication; so it is that nature becomes our interlocutor in a kind of dialogue. Toadvine suggests we should interpret this perceptual dialogue we have with our environment as literal. Toadvine and Landes write on the reversibility of language and landscapes, that language emerges out of a relationship with a landscape, and that landscapes in turn are expressive. Singer’s writing on consciousness in animals, argued from a Merleau- Pontian stance, describes a radical community. He writes, “[there] are as many consciousnesses in the world as there are living bodies.” Animals, plants, rivers, or landscapes can be considered conscious. Abram argues that we are in a dialogue with all living beings due to our shared corporeality. In such a radical community, our ecosystem speaks and communicates with us; we are able to learn from nature.

Merleau-Ponty is not the first thinker to suggest that we speak with our landscapes and our larger natural community. The Diné (a North American indigenous group who reside in the Southwestern states, also known as the Navajo) have a long tradition of communicating with their environment. In Part 2 their traditional philosophy will be added to the argument (against Plato’s claim that one cannot speak with or learn from nature) because the Diné have a strength that Merleau-Ponty’s work does not share. That is, their philosophy of language and nature emerged out of a positive relationship with their specific environment which promoted mutual flourishing. There is much that phenomenology can learn from the Diné, as the Diné traditionally did not abstract themselves from or objectify their natural environment. Their traditions are often parallel to phenomenology’s intentions in its emergence. When combined, the Diné and Merleau-Ponty can undermine the tradition of European philosophy which abstracts, alienates, and objectifies their natural environment.

However, while their philosophy provides resources for phenomenology, it should not be assimilated with Merleau- Ponty’s. Rather, applied phenomenology with the methodology of play can point out weaknesses and strengths in both their tradition and Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Playful world traveling, a concept of feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, will be used in place of a traditional epoché, as it allows for the preservation of difference and ambiguity. I will play with three concepts found in Merleau-Ponty and the Diné (1) landscapes as conversant; (2) landscapes as animate; and (3) radical community with one’s natural surroundings via intercorporeality.

Methodology

Rather than the traditional epoché, this paper will use a modified form of Merleau-Ponty’s applied phenomenological approach, with influences from Lugones, whose concept of “world-travelling,” allows for a kind of playfulness between communities and cultures. As we shall see, wedding Merleau- Ponty and Lugones allows for the preservation of difference and the recognition that we exist in a plurality of “worlds.” Lugones’ approach calls for a form of “traveling” or entering into communities that does not seek to merely dominate or know but focuses on coming into authentic contact with others—both human beings and our wider natural community. Lugones writes about her experience of being a woman of color in the U.S., wherein she is required to “travel” from the world of her culture to the world of the mainstream. Mainstream U.S. culture is an often-hostile world for minorities and people of color insofar as it “arrogantly perceives”₂ and constructs particular identities as being “outside” the norm or as inherently worthless/foreign or strange. “World-traveling” to the mainstream culture is necessary for outsiders or people of color to avoid the hostility of arrogant perception; they leave behind their worlds in which they are at ease or at home. However, Lugones suggests that this seeming limitation of “world-traveling” for minorities and people of color actually has a significant subversive consequence as it conditions a kind of flexibility and creativity in its practitioners. She writes, “This flexibility is necessary for the outsider but it can alsobe willfully exercised by the outsider or by those who are at ease in the mainstream.”₃ Lugones’ concept of “worlds” and “world-traveling” is therein open, worlds can be flexible, one can travel to several worlds, being an outsider in one, and an insider in another. Lugones argues this willful (as opposed to mandated) exercise of “world-travelling” can be a powerful, enriching and life-altering strategy for the oppressed, given that the practitioner uses it as a source for self and other discovery. Consequently, world-traveling allows for a relating contact with the other, a playful experience of the other’s world, and an enriching “being-with”. Lugones explains,

“…without knowing the others’ ‘world,’ one does not know the other… through travelling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover that there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, resistors, constructors of visions even though in the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file- awayable, classifiable”.₄

Through Lugones’ concept of world-traveling, we can actually connect with each other, which is not possible through the lens of arrogant perception. Lugones writes, “only when we have travelled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subjects to each other.”₅ This paper hopes to “playfully world-travel” to the Diné world, instead of arrogantly world-traveling. It hopes to preserve their identity as subjects, as resistors of
colonial attempts to remove their language and culture, as lively beings who live a complex lifestyle. Importantly, playful world- travel does not erase the differences in worlds, it allows for plurality of worlds. Lugones writes, “The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case  the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged.”₆ Play can be a tool, as Lugones’ world-traveling suggests, to travel to other worlds. Consequently this paper modifies applied phenomenology to include playful world- traveling. This method will allow for difference and pluralism rather than assimilation. The change from the epoché to play allows for an applied phenomenology that world-travels in order to be-with the other rather than to suspend or construct the other. In brief the following paper will put Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of language and nature in play with Diné philosophy of language and nature. The contact and dialogue between Merleau-Ponty’s applied phenomenology (modified with Lugones’ concept of playfulness) and the Diné will offer an alternative to damaging and destructive views of nature as seen in hierarchical ontologies, abstracted and atomistic ways of knowing, and alienated ways of being-in-the-world.₇

Part 1

Merleau-Ponty radicalized the tradition of phenomenology in his placement of the human in relation to the things themselves, in de-centering the human mind from the forefront of being, and in locating the human as an experience in and of the world, rather than the consciousness as an ‘inner’ or inside realm. In his version of phenomenology, the body becomes the locus, the human being is embedded in the world’s web of relations, and he negates hierarchical ontologies for a relational, lateral one. Abram, a Merleau-Pontian ecologist, describes the tradition of phenomenology as,

“originally intended to provide a solid foundation for the empirical sciences, the careful study of perceptual experience unexpectedly began to make evident the hidden centrality of the Earth in all human experience; indeed, phenomenological research began to suggest that the human mind was thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our forgotten relation with the encompassing Earth.”₈

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy acknowledges this relation between the human being and the interconnected earth as vital. In Phenomenology of Perception, he articulates perception as a kind of communication, achieved when we acclimate, or attune our senses to our environment. He writes, “sensing is this living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life.”₉ Abram writes that, perception “is a sort of silent conversation that I carry on with things, a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my verbal awareness—and often, even, independent of my verbal awareness.”₁₀ He continues: perception “is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures.”₁₁ To perceive is to attune oneself with what one is always already in relationship with, with what one is among. The body’s senses communicate with the world in such a way that the body is not an object in the world, but rather is a “means of communication with it.”₁₂ Merleau-Ponty further writes that “the appearances of things are always mediated by our body… the setting of our own life must in fact be all of nature. Nature must be our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue.”₁₃ We communicate with our environment through perception, through our bodies. Toadvine’s book, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, interprets this dialogue as literal and as foreshadowing Merleau Ponty’s later ontology as seen in The Visible and the Invisible. Toadvine writes that,

“While it may seem easiest to interpret this notion of ‘dialogue’ metaphorically, Merleau-Ponty indicates that this description is intended literally [especially seen when he writes]: ‘It can literally be said that our senses question things and that things reply to them”_{14 15}

Perception as an ongoing dialogue is part of the intentional threadwork that relates us to our world. Merleau-Ponty writes, this dialogue between the subject and object, where the subject takes up the sense scattered across the object and the object gathers together the subject’s intentions, namely physiognomic perception, arranges a world around the subject that speaks to him on the topic of himself and places his own thoughts in the world.₁₆

This is vital to Merleau-Ponty’s argument that the we already perceive the world as a meaningful whole. A living being “transforms the physical world, makes ‘food’ appear over here and a ‘hiding place’ over there and gives to ‘stimuli’ a sense that they did not have.”₁₇ The examples of sense Merleau-Ponty gives are aspects of our landscape that living beings recognize through perception as existential necessities. Our bodies communicate with the landscape through our senses in part by granting the landscape a sense which it would not have on its own.₁₈ Landes explains, “the act of perception itself arranges the perceived things into a world of meaningful relations, and relations are not part of the ‘objective world’ prior to its perceptual reality.”₁₉

This emergence of a sense through the relationship of perception turns perception into an expressive act; he writes, “All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primordial expression.”₂₀ Merleau Ponty considers perception as expression because, as Landes writes, “Perception, then, is a creative taking up of that which solicits, and thus perception is expression.”₂₁ And further, while there is a sense to the objects in our world, it is a reciprocally formed sense between the body and the world. Toadvine writes that “expression is not a creation of the subject but is formed at the confluence of the body and the world.”22  The expression is not imposed onto the world by the subject but emerges in the relationship between the embodied subject and nature. Toadvine writes that “perception is the discovery of a sense that is not of my making, the response to a demand placed on my body from the outside, a manner of being invaded by an alterity, which is why the figure of dialogue is appropriate.”₂₃ This is in part the case because “the natural thing is irreducible to what appears in our sensible encounter with it” even though there is a symbiosis between the world and the body.₂₄ The sensible is inherently expressive, and “its expressive capacity always exceeds the resonating powers of my body” which is how, although revealed in such a way as to be attuned to the body, nature is not anthropomorphized completely.₂₅

Toadvine writes, “this expressive capacity of nature is indeed ‘intertwined’ with bodily existence, but in an important sense precedes and makes this bodily expression possible.”26 This dialogue “between the body and nature is the event of their correlation, their entanglement in an ongoing process of expression.”27 In Merleau-Ponty’s last work, Visible and the Invisible, perception becomes intertwined with expression even further. The dialogue, as Toadvine articulated earlier, becomes  a literal expression of language. Merleau Ponty writes, “the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth a variant of speech before our eyes.”28

Merleau-Ponty suggests landscapes speak, in both the ongoing dialogue we have with nature as well as his description of landscapes as overrun with words. Merleau-Ponty writes that “the natural world is the horizon of all horizons, and the style of all styles, which ensure my experiences have a given, not a willed, unity beneath all of the ruptures of my personal and historical life.”₂₉ Nature is the “style of all styles” which allows it to be expressive, to be something from which one can take up the gesture and assimilate its style. Toadvine writes, “Style, understood as nature’s own self-expression through embodied life, therefore offers us a means to understand Cézanne’s remark that ‘the landscape thinks itself in me.’”₃₀ This is dependent upon Merleau-Ponty’s view that rather than imposing our own powers of expression onto the world, that “the body’s powers of expression are derivative from those of nature” so that, rather than “being constituted by the expressive powers of the body, we find that the thing is a node within… nature’s own system of expression.”₃₁ One example of this in Merleau-Ponty’s work is his description of “our contemplation of the sky as the sky’s own self-contemplation within us.”₃₂ Merleau-Ponty writes,

As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue such as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself₃₃

If our powers of expression are derivative of nature’s, and nature expresses itself in embodied life, it is worthwhile to think of the landscapes around us as conversant, as speaking, as interlocutors. In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, nature can teach the human being, can be an interlocutor for the human being, can be a part of nature’s own contemplation. Human contemplation and nature’s contemplation are similar in kind; contemplation is not reserved for the human being alone.

In order to understand the consequences of landscapes as expressive, or speaking, it is important to recognize one of the most essential components of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression, that language is the accomplishment of thought,₃₄ acts as the body of thought, which gives it a sensible, incarnate nature. Merleau-Ponty writes that, “the word and speech must cease to be a manner of designating the object or the thought in order to become the presence of this thought in the sensible world, and not its clothing, but rather its emblem or its body.”₃₅ One cannot strip language off of thought, as if language were an accompaniment of thought, instead of the necessary basis for thought. Merleau-Ponty writes, “speech or words carry a primary layer of signification that adheres to them and that gives the thought as a style, as an affective value, or as an existential mimicry.”₃₆ Words have an existential presence to them, which is why “language is much more like a sort of being than a means.”₃₇

One consequence of this is that if language and thought are interrelated as Merleau-Ponty argues, and if nature is literally
speaking as Toadvine suggests, then this speech implies a kind of thought. Therefore, if in addition to expression, a requirement for being an interlocutor is thought, then in Merleau-Ponty’s view, nature meets this requirement as it has a kind of thought, consciousness, or subjectivity. The world communicates with us and in this way the sensible world “is described as active, animate, and in some curious manner, alive.”₃₈ Making sense of the landscape as alive puts into question what subjectivity might be, and how we could know a subjective being behind the appearances we see. Singer explains that “Interiority” is not quite as “interior” as it has traditionally been conceived, and that we do not need to infer the presence of an Other ‘behind’ behavior or a living body any more than we need to infer the presence of an animating thought ‘behind’ an instance of language_.39

We do not have to be concerned by interiority, subjectivity, or consciousness of the world around us because for Merleau- Ponty, “every living body is a form of subjectivity.”₄₀ Singer writes that, “Mindedness and behavior—just like thought and language—are immediately cogiven, yet not reductively equivalent”₄₁₄₂ Mind and behavior are not equivalent, not identical, but imply one another, as thought and language do too. Things that behave in turn have a mindedness. The tree that responds to the lowered sunlight levels, whose leaves change color, could be thought to behave. The river that moves over rocks in a rhythmic manner, is behaving in response to the specific placement and size of rocks; the river would behave differently if its relations changed, as is seen in a beaver family damning a river, which would change the flow of the water, not to mention the interconnected life in the river.

This relationship between mindedness and behavior, however, does not necessitate clear or unambiguous communication. Singer describes his father’s relationship with their family dog, that they know based on his behavior that he loved them. It becomes complicated when one understands the sense of the gesture but not the nuances of it, as dog owners can attest to when a behavior indicates pain, but not the specifics of what is causing them pain in particular. This lack of clear expression can be attributed to nature as a whole as well, seeing as sensible things have a depth to them that is inexhaustible to the individual perceiving them. Nature does not express itself entirely at once, in a transparent manner. Rather, Merleau-Ponty writes, “What is proper to the visible is, we said, to be the surface of an inexhaustible depth: this is what makes it able to be open to visions other than our own.”₄₃ All visible things have this depth, which is one of the reasons Merleau-Ponty argues that the human being does not constitute the world. The world is inexhaustible to the perceiver, parts of it will remain opaque.

The concept of the visible leads to another paradox in Merleau- Ponty’s work: the sentient sensible. As described in his Prospectus, “The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.”₄₄

In order to perceive, one must be perceivable. Everything in the sensible world is participating in this shared world, is coexisting in the sensible world. This is most apparent in the sense of touch, in that when one touches one is also touched,₄₅ but, Merleau-Ponty argues, the “delimitation of the senses is crude”₄₆ and that “it is no different for vision.”₄₇ Because the seer is participating in the visible, “the seer is caught up in what he sees… the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things.”₄₈ The historically divided subject and object can no longer exist as a dichotomy, as a bifurcation; “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.”_{49 50} To perceive is to be perceived, and vice versa. Merleau-Ponty writes,

It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same world.₅₁

Being is a radical participation, a being-with, which creates a kinship or a familial resemblance between all participants in the sensible world. Things are open to a perceiver through coexistence in the same world and due to a mutual participation in the shared world. Merleau-Ponty writes, if it touches them and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to the order of things as the world is universal flesh.₅₂

Belonging to this shared world is unquestionable for the perceiving subject. The human subject cannot extract themselves from the world as “my body is made of the same flesh as the world.”₅₃ Singer explains that the intersubjective now becomes the intercorporeal. He writes,

If subjectivity is essentially incarnate, and if (as Husserl argued) subjectivity is always already intersubjectivity, then intersubjectivity is essentially intercorporeality_.54

If the human body is composed of the same material as the sensible world, then, “this common carnal inherence in the world sets…[human beings and] all living beings in contact—in community—with one another.”₅₅

Because everything partakes of the same material, and because any sensible matter has a depth or perhaps a consciousness inherent in it, the human being is dethroned from the heights of the hierarchical ontology. Abram explains that in Merleau- Ponty’s body-based phenomenology, “we find ourselves in the midst of, rather than on top of, this order.”₅₆ Merleau-Ponty writes that, the “concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body.”₅₇ This is not to be reductionist toward the human animal, but it is to focus on the wonder of the world and our relationship with it. Instead of thinking of the human being as the rational animal, or the being for whom the world is intelligible, Merleau-Ponty would want to emphasize the human being is a sensible sentient, similar in kind to the rest of the sensible. Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is no intelligible world, there is the sensible world.”₅₈ And the sensible world cannot be condensed into an intelligible world, as “the world is there prior to every analysis I could give of it.”₅₉

Merleau-Ponty further elucidates, “I do not perceive any more than I speak—perception has me as has language.”₆₀ The relation between perception and language is so intertwined for Merleau-Ponty that the scope of perception is that of the scope of language. This could be interpreted as an ability; Merleau- Ponty explains that if one is not a philosopher or a writer, then the sensible world “will offer you nothing” which entails that “one does not know how to speak.”₆₁ This echoes his earlier work in which language is sensibly present, or has a material nature.₆₂ For those who attune themselves to hear it, the voice of the landscape cries out. It can teach us. Merleau-Ponty writes, “to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says.”₆₃

One weakness of Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology,₆₄ which is why he must be paired with the Diné experience of the world in particular, is that phenomenology is the result of a history of philosophy that continuously alienated the human being from the surrounding landscape. In phenomenology’s emergence, Husserl advocated for the suspension of a form or content distinction as found in Kant, and for the suspension of both the inner and outer, appearance or reality, distinctions as seen in Descartes. Phenomenology’s origin was largely in response to modern philosophers, who thought that the mind categorized things into concepts, that the human mind imposed its own structures of understanding onto the surrounding world. Their frameworks failed to account for the sensible, as the sensible was either an illusory appearance or noumena. Husserl advocated to “return to the things themselves” and to remove the epistemological and ontological inheritances from our traditions through the epoché. This was also largely in response to modern science, whose knowledge is abstracted through atomizing the world, reducing the world to mechanical or mathematical pieces, and decontextualized from the whole. Phenomenology was a return to the concrete, sensible world rather than the world of abstraction and universalization as seen in philosophy and science throughout ancient, medieval, and modern thought. Phenomenology originated through the desire for the subject to be in relation to the things themselves. Phenomenology also responded to hierarchical ontologies that lead to such a devaluation of nature, wherein the human being no longer had ethical duties towards their landscape or ecosystems of which they are a part, and in which the human subject is elevated as something other than a natural being.

Due to the fact that phenomenology arises out of a tradition that has alienated the human from their environment, and that Merleau-Ponty’s work arises from within this history, the Diné language and ontology have a strength in that their thought is outside of this tradition and that their language and ontology emerged in relation with their landscape in particular. It becomes clearer that although phenomenology attempts to reunite the human being with nature in a meaningful relationship, its emergence is contingent upon the philosophy that came before it. Phenomenology has to work hard in order to make the human being relate to their environment, as this integration comes about only in later phenomenology as seen in late Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s work. The claim that one is an indistinguishable part of nature, or that nature is an interlocutor in dialogue, has to be defended and argued in the European tradition of philosophy, although this claim is central to Diné philosophy.

Part 2

Diné ontology provides the strength of emerging out of a positive experience of nature, rather than emerging out of a response to an alienating tradition. Diné ontology can provide phenomenology with examples of humans intertwined with their environment, as these readings of Merleau-Ponty strive to do. Diné philosophy is a philosophy of praxis, which can demonstrate to phenomenology a specific lifestyle resultant of their relational ontology of interwovenness with their environment. Diné traditional beliefs can also demonstrate a specific manner in which one can converse with their landscape. These readings of Merleau-Ponty can be seen as having parallels to Diné thought. I will focus on three examples: (1) Robert McPherson’s description of the Diné traditional teaching of the wind as speaking, (2) Grace McNeley’s etymology of the Diné word “ket,” and (3) Robert Begay’s description of the landscape as familial and alive.

Robert McPherson, a historian specializing in Diné traditional teachings, writes about the complex nature of Holy Wind. Holy Wind is believed to be partially responsible for the creation of life in the Diné origin story, instilling animation in human and animal bodies.₆₅  The Wind is still responsible for animating life on earth, as “during the fourth month after conception, this
Holy Wind enters the body, giving animation to the fetus.”₆₆ The Wind also communicates with people, as the Wind that enters a person’s body in order to animate them, “communicates with the air outside the body.”₆₇ This type of communication can be dialogue. McPherson writes, “Many Navajo Myths tell of Holy Wind whispering in the ear of a protagonist in need of assistance, warning of future problems, or helping with protection.”_{68 69} Human beings can learn from this dialogue, as the Wind can “warn of bad events that will take place in the future” as well as “gather bad gossip and conversation and report it to the Holy People,” who are responsible for creating life in this world, creating the Diné, and teaching the Diné rituals. McPherson writes,

Holy People should not be taken lightly. They provide warnings and help a person learn. Claus Chee Sonny believes the gods want humans to know the songs and prayers, but this can only be achieved if the “wind people want to communicate them to you.”₇₀

The Wind can communicate in order to help the Diné, but also act in the interest of the Holy People. If the Holy People “do not want some [people] to have this power” the Wind will not communicate or share its knowledge. However, “when treated respectfully… winds accurately communicate future events.”₇₁ This is in part because the wind acts as a messenger between the Holy People who were stationed in order to animate specific geographic areas. McPherson explains,  

Talking God, Growling God, and Sun Bearer placed throughout the land many of the holy people who were to be prophets and teachers of men in the future. The wind acted as messenger between these spirits and people.

Divination, or the receipt of this communication, is based on consulting the wind or animals with acute hearing such as wolves, coyotes, badgers, and members of the cat family.₇₂

Holy People were placed throughout the Diné landscape and use the wind to communicate amongst themselves. If the Diné are respectful towards and listen to the Wind, they can hear the dialogue coursing through their landscape, and learn from the Holy People who reside in natural landscapes.

One example of a Holy Person placed inside of a landscape, in order to both animate nature and teach the Diné, is Female Pollen Figure in the Black Mesa Mountains. Mamie Salt, a Diné elder, explains,

It is said to be the body of the Female Pollen Range lying there. It is there to protect the people. The Navajo people were told by the Holy Ones to leave it alone. Now the coal companies who hire Navajos have come in and are strip mining the mesa, desecrating it. This coal is said to be the blood of the Female Pollen figure lying there. This coal is considered sacred.₇₃

Mamie Salt identifies an important sacred landscape for the Diné, but as we shall see, the whole of the landscape is sacred. Robert Begay, a Diné environmentalist, explains the belief that the landscape is alive and is familial: In the Navajo version of creation… the earth was created and adorned with plants; the sky was created and clouds decorated it. The mountains were molded and all animals were given a place to reside. The oceans, springs, rivers, ponds, lakes, and all other types of water were created, and acting as a vast circulatory system, they sustain the earth. Furthermore, all the deities took up a place of residence through the world and universe (at locations we now call Sacred Places or Traditional Cultural Places). Most important, the earth is a deity with a humanlike physical anatomy, and just like the human body, the earth reacts to an injury that limits its power to function. The earth, as our mother, protects and nurtures us, and in times of need we turn to her for healing and protection. Furthermore, just as the human body has specific parts for specific tasks and powers to function properly, in the same manner specific landscapes or natural features (or a combination of features) have specific powers to assist the Navajo with their existence.₇₄

The earth is itself animated, as a mother figure, and is full of deities that are powerful. The landscape acts or behaves in order to protect and care for the Diné, and the Diné in turn protect and care for their landscape. This idea can be seen as parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s description of the sensible sentient, and the landscape as behaving and having a kind of consciousness. Robert Begay further writes on the philosophy of nature as animate,

The Colorado River is also considered to be a living entity which runs through the Glen and Grand Canyons and acts as a natural boundary for the Navajo people, who thus depend on it for protection. The Colorado River, with its vast tributary system, is a source of power. This power is summoned when the songs of the water are sung in certain ceremonies, such as Tl’eeji. Offerings are deposited into the river or in certain places throughout the canyon. These offerings also summon the deities that reside in locations within the canyon, to protect, to heal, and to bring rain.₇₅

The Diné see the river, canyons, and water as alive and as behaving, protecting, healing, and caring for the Diné, who in turn care for their natural environment. The Diné are in a kind of dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s work, but whereas Merleau- Ponty describes in a more abstracted way that all bodies are forms of subjectivity, the Diné have concrete descriptions of the Earth and its natural features as alive and as behaving.

Merleau-Ponty’s work on intercorporeality could be considered parallel to Diné thought on the intertwining of Diné with their landscape and deities. Grace McNeley, a Diné writer, explains how the Diné understand the interweaving of their people with their landscape and deities through the etymology of a Diné word: The Navajo term ket—derived from ke, meaning “feet” and “root system”—expresses the concept of having a foundation for one’s life in the earth, much as a plant is rooted in the earth. Let us visualize the central root [extends] all the way back to Asdzaan Nadleehi, ‘Changing Woman’—who is Earth Mother herself. Developing from this main root is the complex web of kinship relations extending back even to ancestors and including clan relations, the extended family and the immediate family. Tied to this system are material goods, familiar surroundings and livestock. This webbing of earth, of ancestors, of clan and familiar surroundings all constitute a Navajo home, enabling those within it to flourish, to thrive. These thoughts reflect the objective bonds between the land and the people who have customarily produced food and met other basic needs from the land. The flow of family labor into the land produces livestock and crops that each family member consumes. The land, water, air, and sunlight that go into the family’s food become the people’s flesh. Among these substances are also the essences of the immortal beings like Changing Woman. By consuming the products of the land, one also incorporates the essences of the immortal beings into one’s flesh._{76 77}

McNeley illuminates the sedimentation of a rich history and culture into a single word “ket.” Her etymology portrays the widespread influence that dialogue with a natural landscape can have. McNeley describes Earth as the root, the foundation for one’s existence. The Earth, deities, and Changing Woman are identified: deities are not elsewhere, but can be called upon, and are in relationship with the Diné and are incorporated into natural surroundings. Their intimate relationship with nature is shown in their description of living things as a web of interrelated beings. The distinction between self, nature, and deities, is ambiguous in this worldview as the environment (the land, water, air, sunlight, animals) becomes one’s own body.78 Even deities become a part of one’s flesh. The Wind,  as described previously, also demonstrates an intercorporeal ontology, as it animates the Diné and other living beings. For the Diné, one is not distinct from their environment, as the environment is part of what composes one’s body.₇₉

The Diné belief that nature is animate, that one communicates with the Wind, that mountains are embedded with deities, that the Earth is an animate mother figure, that coal is the blood of Female Pollen figure who is embedded in the Black Mesa Mountains, and that rivers are alive can be seen as parallel with Merleau-Ponty. Importantly, similarities between these two philosophies do not equate or assimilate the Diné with Merleau- Ponty as both have strengths and weaknesses the other does not have. One strength of Diné thought (unlike Merleau- Ponty’s) is that it developed out of an intimate relationship with a particular landscape, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s thought emerged as a correction to the European history of philosophy and is in some ways conditioned by that history. One strength that Merleau-Ponty has which is not necessarily present in Diné traditions, is the ability to uphold ambiguities, pluralism, and differences, especially seen when his work is combined with playful world-traveling.80

Because of the differences in strengths and weaknesses in these philosophies, it is necessary to combine the two to undermine Plato’s claim that one cannot learn from nature, as Merleau- Ponty alone does not provide a praxis or particular examples and the Diné provide particular examples but do not think of nature as inexhaustible to subjects. Diné traditional philosophy wedded with Merleau-Ponty refutes Plato’s claim that one cannot learn from nature. There is a twofold consequence to this wedding: (1) Nature is not voiceless, as the history of the European philosophy considers it; and (2) the human being cannot be made distinct from nature in its ability to express, in its sentience, or in its consciousness. The anthropocentrism found in ancient and medieval hierarchical ontologies, in modern philosophy’s mechanistic understanding of nature, and in contemporary commodification of nature is undermined in the combination of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and Diné traditional philosophy. When combined, the Diné and Merleau- Ponty subvert the tradition of European philosophy which abstracts, alienates, and objectifies the natural environment. Further, these philosophies allow for a relationship with our natural environment that places us within it rather than above it; and would allow for a being-with, a belonging to a radical community that considers other beings as expressive. Instead of only learning from other human beings, nature, landscapes, and trees can teach us ideas that do not have anthropocentrism at their heart.

Endnotes

1 John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, Plato Complete Works (Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), Phaedrus, 230e.
2 María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,”
Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19, 4.
3 Lugones, 3.
4 Lugones, 18.
5 Lugones, 17.
6 Lugones, 16.
7 One of the premises of this paper is that hierarchical ontologies and atomistic ways of knowing lead to alienation from one’s environment andisolation from one’s radical community. It will not be argued for in this paper, due to the limitations of space, but an argument from this can be seen in my work: “Nature’s Self-Expression and Linguistic Attunement: The Diné Sing the World,” (Gonzaga University, 2018).
8 Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a more- than-human world, xi.
9 Ibid, 52.
10 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-than- Human World.
11 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More- than-Human World, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 54.
12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 122.
13 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 334.
14 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 369, 372.

15 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature.
16 Ibid, 134.
17 Ibid, 195.
18 Merleau-Ponty writes that “the thing can never be separated… invests it with humanity” (POP 334). And, we make sense of being human through other beings and our landscape.
19 Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, 81.

20 Ibid, 67.
21 Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, 81.
22 Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 19.
23 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 59.

24 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 59.

25 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 59.
26 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 59

27 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 51.
28 1908-1961. Merleau-Ponty Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes. (Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 155.
29 Ibid, 345.
30 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 15.

31 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 60.

32 Todvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 60.

33 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 248-9.
34 See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 183: “Speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech accomplishes thought.”
35 Ibid, 187.
36 Ibid, 188.
37 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 43.

38 Ibid, 55.
39 Singer, “The Flesh,” 102.
40 Ibid, 103.
41 Jonathan Singer, “‘The Flesh of My Flesh’: Animality, Difference, and ‘Radical’ Community in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Philosophy,” in Animal Ethics and Philosophy : Questioning the Orthodoxy (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015).
42 Singer, “The Flesh,” 102.
43 Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Claude Lefort, and Alphonso Lingis. The Visible and the Invisible: followed by working notes, 143.
44 Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Thomas Baldwin. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: basic writings, “Prospectus of his own work,” 34.
45 See: Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes, 133-139.
46 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes, 133.
47 Merleau-Ponty, 133.
48 Merleau-Ponty, 139.
49 Merleau-Ponty, 139.
50 This undermines the traditional European philosophical concept of sight as something which empowers the seer over the seen, and that sight is something that can objectify its object. Rather, Merleau-Ponty shows that the visible is a realm which one is within when they see, not as an ultimate seer, but as a visible thing that participates in the visible.
51 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 136.
52 Ibid, 137.
53 Ibid, 248.
54 Singer, “The Flesh,” 109.
55 Ibid, 104.
56 Abram, The Spell, 49.
57 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Dominique Séglard, and Robert Vallier. Nature: course notes from the Collège de France, 208. 58 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 214.
59 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, lxxv.
60 Ibid, 190.
61 Ibid, 252.
62 See Phenomenology of Perception, especially “The Body as Expression, and Speech.”
63 Ibid, 155.
64 Another being that Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeality and radical community is a more universal, less situated version, as it arises not in attunement with any one landscape in particular, but from an abstracted perspective.
65 Robert McPherson, Dinéjí Na’Nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 16.
66 McPherson, 16.
67 McPherson, 16.
68 McPherson, 16.
69 The Wind from each of the four directions have different prayers, songs, and personalities. See: McPherson, 17.
70 McPherson, 18.
71 McPherson, 18.
72 McPherson, 18.
73 Klara Kelley and Harris Francis, Navajo Sacred Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 29.
74 Robert Begay, “Doo Dilzin Da: ‘Abuse of the Natural World,’” American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2001): 21–27.
75 Begay, “Doo Dilzin Da: ‘Abuse of the Natural World,’” 23-24.
76 Klara Kelley and Francis Harris, “Places Important to Navajo People,”
American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1993), 158.
77 This harkens Parsons-Yazzie’s thought that there is much to be learned from individual Diné words.
78 Brown explains, “The Navajo see little distinction between the Yei [(the Holy People)], animals, natural forces, and humans.” See: Farella, The Main
Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy, 121.
79 This idea of intercorporeality within the Diné tradition can also be seen in accounts of the Diné people being created out of the skin of Changing Woman. 80 For a more detailed account of this argument, see my work “Nature’s Self- Expression and Linguistic Attunement: The Diné Sing the World,” (Gonzaga University, 2018).

References

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

Begay, Robert. “Doo Dilzin Da: ‘Abuse of the Natural World.’”American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2001): 21–27.

Brown, Joseph Epes. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cooper, John M., and D. S. Hutchinson. Plato Complete Works. Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

Kelley, Klara, and Francis Harris. Navajo Sacred Places.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

———. “Places Important to Navajo People.” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1993).

Landes, Donald. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression.New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Lugones, María. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19.

McPherson, Robert. Dinéjí Na’Nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012.

Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961., Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes. Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012.

———. Signs. Evanston, Ill.: Evanston, Ill. Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Ring, Annalee. “Nature’s Self-Expression and Linguistic Attunement: The Diné Sing the World.” Gonzaga University, 2018.

Singer, Jonathan. “‘The Flesh of My Flesh’: Animality, Difference, and ‘Radical’ Community in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Philosophy.” In Animal Ethics and Philosophy : Questioning the Orthodoxy. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015.

Toadvine, Ted. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature.Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Fly Fishing Back to Nature: Tourism, Technology, and Therapy

J.W. Pritchett, PhD

Abstract

Recent research has shown that fly fishing tourism reduces symptoms of PTSD, Depression, and Stress. Fly fishing literature claims that this is due to a reduction in technological activity. However, fly fishing is a gear-centric activity. In this paper I use the radical phenomenology of Erazim Kohák and Gabriel Marcel’s concept of techniques of degradation to argue that fly fishing enacts a disruption of broader cultural norms of abstraction. This disruption reveals a more visceral and intimate relationship between humanity and the non-human world, despite its gear-centric culture.

Keywords: Fly Fishing, Tourism, Phenomenology, Technology, Recreational Therapy, Erazim Kohák, Gabriel Marcel

You are standing hip-deep in an ice-cold fast moving rocky mountain stream. The water tugs at your legs and yet you aren’t wet. The waders take care of that. If you were barefooted the algae on the rocks would prove slick as snot and yet you don’t slip. Your super soft and sticky vibram soled boots take care of that. You aren’t even blinded by the glare of the sun on the pool up ahead. The polarized sunglasses take care of that. You wave around a graphite composite stick anchored by an ultralightweight die-cast aluminum reel with clicking drag. You might even don the mesh truckers cap to finish the ensemble. All of this to present a piece of feather to an unsuspecting trout, which you are going to let go anyway. These are the experiential givens of the modern fly-fishing trip. I am an avid fly fisherman that, before marriage and children, used to get over 150 days a year on the water. I know these experiential details intimately.

I was not surprised then when I read recently that fly fishing tourism had been shown to have therapeutic effects on patients with PTSD, depression, and perceived stress₁. I have sought the consoling presence of rivers many times. What did surprise me, however, was when I started to dig into the small but fascinating world of academic fly fishing literature and found a thriving discourse on the role of technology. The scholars who investigate fly fishing generally agree that it facilitates a more authentic relationship to nature. ₂ Tom Mordue argues however, that this relationship to nature is rooted in the practice of “eschew[ing] the overuse of technology as compromising [fly fishing’s] integrity.”₃ Indeed Mordue’s assertion parallels my own work in this very journal in which I argued that by engaging in a radical phenomenology of practical bracketing, by setting aside one’s artifacts and technology, we become more open to the natural world. ₄ However, it is clear to me, that fly fishing is anything but a neo-luddite rejection of technology. In fact, fly fishing, in both media and practice is a gear-centered culture. One needs to only take a cursory glance through any fly fishing magazine to see that connection with nature, and the gear that  promises to make it possible, cannot be divorced. The latent assumptionsis that if you have the right stuff you will be able to go just a little bit farther, connect a little more authentically, be a little more wild. In this article I argue that it is not in the eschewal of technology that fly fisherman find connection with nature but rather in the bracketing of broader social norms of abstraction. I use Gabriel Marcels’ concept of techniques of degradation and Erazim Kohák’s radical phenomenology to show that by enacting even partially alternative practices of engagement the fly fishing tourist opens herself to a deeper connection with the natural world.

Fly Fishing Historically and Socially:

Fly fishing in the West has its roots in 16th and 17th century England. The publication of Dame Juliana Berner’s Treatise of Fishing with an Angle (1496) and Izaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) marked the birth of recreational fishing and defined many of its core traits including the retreat to nature, fair chase, and rugged individualism. Over time, the use of a fly to chase salmonids over other “coarse” fishing methods developed a distinct social status and class association. By the 19th century fly fishing had become a gentleman’s sport like wing shooting and fox hunting to such an extent that the popular television show Downton Abbey depicts fly casting as an activity of civility that separated the newly monied middle class from the landed gentry. Indeed, even today, the right to fish for Atlantic Salmon in Scotland belongs to the Crown. 

United States saw a similar division between fly and bait casting in the 19th century but with a distinctly frontiersman masculinity undivorceable from American nationalism. As Washabaugh and Washabaugh argue, “to travel into the wilderness was considered to be an almost patriotic act.”₅ Yet, despite the ruggedness of the social imagination surrounding fly fishing, it remained a luxury and leisure for the wealthy. The 19th century saw the advent and proliferation of expensive wilderness fishing lodges which concentrated both fly fishing activity and culture around high class service providers. Mordue notes that this manifest a paradox in which, “in practice, but wholly in terms of social class distinctions fly fishing in the USA retained a sense of masculine individualism but was a means of conspicuous consumption where the angling tourist exercised power over local land and people.”₆ As with most aspects of American culture, there was a democratization of fly fishing after the second world war with the growth of the middle class and the decreasing cost of manufactured goods. Yet, fly fishing retains an air of elitism and conspicuous consumption. Private ranches often charge thousands of dollars per person for all- inclusive fly fishing vacations on private waters. Trips to exotic tropical destinations, or to Kamchatka, Russia can run even more expensive. The startup costs for just the gear can run close to two thousand dollars.

Of course, phenomenologically speaking, these prices and experiences exist within a thick matrix of what sociologists call actor networks: “Fish; rivers; lakes; other fisheries; lodges; fishing equipment; maps; books; magazines; websites; audio visual equipment; transport systems; communication systems such as telephones, email, the media; buildings; airports [and I might add pit-toilet latrines … all] the variety of places and spaces play their roles in fishing actor networks.”₇ But, as Heidegger argued, we must accept that our artifacts, even our mental artifacts, are not objective. Our tools present a loaded sense of the world to us and they become “most dangerous when we consider them neutral.”₈ A chainsaw can reduce a forest to timber in our perception as surely as a dam can reduce the Rhine to a standing power reserve. How then can a fly rod and waders facilitate a closer connection to nature rather than simply revealing nature as a standing reserve of fishing thrills?

A Brief Phenomenology of Technology

Heidegger wrote what is arguably the central phenomenological treatment of technology: the essay The Question Concerning Technology. In it he interrogates the essence of technology and concludes that technology offers the world to us as standing reserve. Standing reserve, we might translate to mean natural resources. They are the useful bits of the natural world. The timber, minerals, power, etc. that are out there waiting for us to harness and control for our use. It is our technology, our artifacts that reveal those resources to us in experience.

Erazim Kohák offers a parallel, but original contribution to the phenomenology of technology. He draws directly from Husserl’s identification of the intentionality of perception. All artifacts, material or mental, are designed with an intentionality in mind. Kohák follows Husserl’s identification of the intentionality of perception and the role of the consciousness in perceiving. For Husserl, to state that consciousness is intentional is to say that it is directed towards an object. So that every time I am conscious, I am conscious of something: my desk, my fatigue, my fly-fishing vacation: “perceiving, that is, is not a passion, something that happens to a subject, but something a subject does to and with the world.”₉Thus, Kohák proceeds by reiterating Husserl’s methodology of the epoch? or bracketing:

“Our first step does need to be a bracketing of the thesis of the naturalistic standpoint which, over the last three centuries, has become so familiar as to appear ‘natural.’ We need to suspend, for the moment, the presumption of the ontological significance of our constructs, including our conception of nature as ‘material,’ and look to experience with a fresh eye, taking as our datum whatever presents itself in experience, as it presents itself and only insofar as it presents itself, using the totality of the given as the starting point.”₁₀

His principal concern is the possibility of perceiving a moral content or instruction in the extra-human world, which he considers an impossibility under the commonsense attitude of science:

“We have, in effect, mistaken the development of our conceptual technology for a progress of knowledge, step by step substituting our constructs for experienced reality as the object and the referent of our thought and discourse. Those constructs, however, were designed for a particular purpose, that of the manipulation of our physical environment, and the composite image of reality they present is, appropriately, one of a system of manipulanda. In a nature so conceived, from which the dimensions most crucial to lived experience, those of value and meaning, have been intentionally bracketed out as ‘subjective,’ there is no more room for a moral subject. “₁₁

The more we permit the scientific posture to characterize the uncritical commonsense attitude of our basic experience, the more our perceptions will inevitably be characterized by objects lacking in moral content or instruction because our scientifically characterized intentionality posits a world without moral significance. In the same way, science necessarily posits an objective world outside, beyond, and inter-personally inaccessible to the subject. Science creates the perception of a person unable to connect in any meaningful way with the non-human world since the non-human world is understood as meaningless matter in motion.

These commonsense attitudes, however, are the target of the initial Husserlian phenomenological epoch?, in which the philosopher aims to bracket the intentional constructs of perception in the attempt to see clearly what is given in experience. By bracketing the commonsense attitude, the philosopher presumably would be available and receptive to the moral Evidenz of creation if there is any given in experience.  However, according to Kohák, this original and initial epoché is insufficient because our intentional concepts are no longer merely theoretical but are in fact manifested in our technology:

“With the expansion of our technology, we have, in effect, translated our concepts into artifacts, radically restructuring not only our conception of nature but the texture of our ordinary experience as well.”₁₂

Artifacts, or techn?, as products of human effort necessarily embody the intentionalities of their designer; thus, our artifacts are themselves manifestations of our commonsense attitudes. We, according to Kohák, find ourselves in a situation, where even after we affect the initial phenomenological epoché, we are “surrounded by artifacts which indeed can teach us nothing but what we have programmed into them.”₁₃ Furthermore, finding ourselves—even in the midst of the epoché—surrounded by objects of our own design, the objects of our everyday lived experience impose their inherent intentionalities upon our perception. This feedback loop undermines the efficacy of the initial phenomenological epoché.“Our constructs,” Kohák argues, “are no longer merely conceptual. We have translated them into artifacts which effectively hide the sense of our lived experience from us.”₁₄ If Kohák’s analysis is correct, then when we aim to consider the ethical significance of the more-than- human world, we are severely inhibited, even after effecting the epoché. Our lives are saturated with artifacts that manifest the conceptual technologies we used to undermine the ethical significance of creation in the first place:

“Figuratively, we are all in the position of the child who has never seen, never mind milked, a cow, and whose lived experience constantly provides an experiential confirmation for the assumption that milk comes from a supermarket cooler. In such a context, the attempt at a phenomenological bracketing, no matter how it theoretically sounds, will inevitably prove practically futile. The Sachen selbst, the very stuff, of our daily experience will reintroduce the very constructs we have bracketed.”₁₅

In our contemporary context, Kohák argues, our technological apparati fundamentally insulate our perceptions from the givens of the natural world. Instead, our perceptions are saturated with objects that manifest the intentionalities of their design.

It is insufficient to engage in the initial bracketing of the intentional constructs of the commonsense attitude. In order to clarify one’s perceptions of the more-than-human world, Kohák argues, one must engage in a second epoché—a bracketing of our artifacts: “The proposal for phenomenological bracketing does acquire a new, radical dimension, as not only a conceptual, but a practical bracketing as well, a bracketing of artifacts.”₁₆Thus, Kohák radicalizes Husserl’s proposed epoché to be not simply a bracketing of conceptual constructs but also an embodied, practical, bracketing of our techn?.

Accordingly, the last time I wrote for EPIS I called for a wilderness practice that engaged in embodied, practical, bracketing of our artifacts to clarify our perception of the natural world. I worked under the premise that our artifacts hide from us the true nature of the non-human. You can understand then, how these studies showing fly fishing facilitating closer relationships with nature despite its profound techno-emphasis motivated me to clarify my approach. Gabriel Marcel’s concept of techniques of degradation helps to ease this seeming conflict between the gear-centric culture of fly fishing and its ability to establish more authentic connections with nature.

Gabriel Marcel and Techniques of Degradation

Marcel defines technique as a “group of procedures, methodically elaborated, and consequently capable of being taught and reproduced, and when these procedures are put into operation they assure the achievement of some definite concrete purpose.”₁₇ Marcel’s concern is not the technique itself, it is of course authentically human to apply one’s reason to effecting particular objectives. His concern is when a person becomes a “prisoner of his techniques” in a manner akin to one being a slave to one’s habits.₁₈Marcel argues that the technician becomes a prisoner of his techniques when he comes to understand the technique independent of its purpose or desired outcome: when it becomes an end in itself. Imagine, for instance, the engineer who values artificial intelligence rather than the problems to which AI may be applied. Or, we all know the university administrator who values the forms, procedures, and chain of command over the results of successful research and quality education.

Ultimately, in Marcel’s analysis, technique gains ultimate hold upon humanity when people begin to think of themselves on the model of their own techniques. Doctors who understand patients as biological machines or philosophers who think of the mind as a bio-computer: “It is also becoming more and more obvious that when man seeks to understand his condition by using as his model the products of his own technical skill, he infinitely degrades himself.”₁₉ Heidegger makes a similar observation when he argues the technology will necessarily reveal humanity itself as standing reserve.₂₀ Marcel already saw these techniques of degradation becoming dominant when he was writing in the late 40’s and early 50’s. A society in which humans are understood according to our techniques is a society of what Marcel calls “submen” or “beings who tend more and more to be reduced to their own strict function in a mechanized society, though with a margin of leisure reserved for amusements from which the imagination will be more and more completely banished.”₂₁ Marcel has in mind the government bureaucrat, reduced to his role as a cog in the administrative machine, a paper-pusher and form-filler despairing of opportunity and vitality in life yet placated by radio, cheap literature, and other mass produced forms of entertainment. This is an early vision of the contemporary office administrator’s life ruled by email, forms, and structure. A form of work so abstracted from any real purpose as to seem meaninglessly arbitrary. Yet, these workers are paid well enough to afford Netflix, HBO, and the internet that makes them possible.

Marcel argues that this degradation applies to public discussion as much as to individuals. In fact, the degradation of public discourse is an essential feature of the degradation of individuals in Marcel’s mind:

“To dispose of your opponent, or to put him down for the count, it is enough in France-today, to stick an obnoxious label on him and then to fling in his face, as one might a bottle of acid, some gross accusation to which it is impossible for him to reply; your opponent being  completely confounded by such tactics, it will be said that he admits your case and capitulates.”₂₂

This degradation of discussion, rooted in and essential to the degradation of humans, results in a practice of circular passions and propaganda “the propaganda incites the passions, the passions in their turn justify the excesses of the propaganda.”₂₃ Within the pantechnism of mechanical society, people are further reduced from their functions as workers to their function as consumers of both propaganda, in the form of media, and mass produced objects:

“Technical progress, considered from the consumers point of view, encourages a kind of laziness, it also fosters resentment and envy. These passions centre themselves on definite material objects, whose possession usually does not seem to be linked to any definite personal superiority […] where a frigidair or radio-gramophone are in question, the very ideas of ‘having’ and ‘possessing’ acquire a sense which is at once provocative of bad feeling and spiritually hollow.”₂₄

Marcel advanced this argument nearly 70 years ago when the most dangerous technology was the “satanic” radio. And, it is important to note that he insists the techniques of degradation are wielded by both capitalists and communists. This seems a prophetic analysis. In a world where the President of the United States could tell us our most patriotic duty was to go shopping; when the internet, cable news, and social media accelerate and distribute partisan passions and propaganda at unimaginable speeds and extent; where wars in the Middle East can increasingly be conducted from a computer console in Kansas have we humans not been enslaved to our techniques?

Fly Fishing Reconsidered

What then of Fly Fishing? Both anecdotally and in the data it appears that fly fishing can function to facilitate deeper connections with nature and therapeutically reduce mental stress. And yet the fly fishing tourist is still reduced in marketing, media, and culture to a consumer of fly fishing gear and propaganda. The techniques of degradation work to reduce the fisherman to be ever envious and discontent with her lot in life, ever striving for one more fish, one more exotic locale, and one more fish-pic for Facebook or Instagram. The guides, the shops, and the manufacturers share in an old-boys club of elitist arrogance and condescension that further reduce the tourist to an inauthentic interloper, a rich city-slicker happy with a mediocre trout. The gadgets and gear insulate the angler from fully visceral contact with the non-human, non-technological world. All of this occurs and yet, despite itself, fly fishing promises something transformative.

I have known many gearheads in the fly fishing world who, as Marcel would say, let the technique become independent of its purpose—the impulse to buy the next best reel, the next best rod, the most excellent waders. The pursuit of excellence in the gear become its own self-justifying practice. Fishing was no longer about the experience in the wild; it was about technical mastery. Yet, once back on the river, the gear recedes to the background of our awareness and the water and the unrevealed fish come to the fore.

Perhaps, to simply go fishing, to stand in a river and feel the pull of the current, to get cold feet, to sling flies requires a “technique” that elevates rather than degrades. While it is evident that the fly angler does not practically bracket  gadgets or contemporary technology, she still does bracket the techniques of contemporary culture. No matter how much fly fishing is manipulated by the manufacturers, guides, magazine printers and retailers to reduce the angler to a consumer of gear for the promise of connection with nature, in the end the angler still has to step into the stream. To step into a stream is to step away from a desk, computer, and email. To step into the river is to step out of one’s role as consumer, bureaucrat, and standing reserve. To step into a river is to step into a role more visceral and primordial. It is impossible to fish in abstraction.

It is this visceral embodiment that fishing requires which distinguished it from other forms of nature tourism. Franklin argues that tourists are defined by the visual:

“The pressures of tourism combined with management strategies to minimize environmental damage further renders anything other than the gaze as problematic: Picking wildflowers, making off-track forays, disturbing rocks or forest or fore-shore litter and so forth are discouraged, minimizing visitors’ experience of touch and taste.”₂₅

Other aspects of nature tourism can be largely disembodied, viewing spectacles of wildlife and mountains through a camera lens, windshield, or interpretive center. Franklin argues that hunters and anglers cannot be identified as tourists because of the necessarily embodied nature of their activities. Kip Redick makes a similar distinction between the aesthetic tourist and the pilgrim. The tourist, he argues, “journeys to experience a preconceived landscape.” The pilgrim, alternatively, pursues an “encounter in the countryside.”₂₆ However, an activity like fly fishing transcends these distinctions.

Fly fishing can never be predominantly visual. The angler’s senses are overwhelmed by the tension and vibrations of the line, the sounds of water and rising fish. Similarly, the fly fisherman can never predetermine her aesthetic experience. While the angler, by definition, pursues fish, it is the fish that reveals itself at the moment of the take. Fishing is always an encounter in which the fish is an active self-revealing participant. For the angler, every cast becomes an act of faith: a physical enactment of commitment to the presence of fish not yet seen. Even a tourist, temporarily present and merely financially invested, enacts behaviors more akin to encounter than to observation. These behaviors are both a bracketing of our society’s commonsense attitudes and a disruption of our techniques of degradation. On the river fishermen are no longer mere standing reserve to be exploited by corporate human resources departments. The fly fishing tourist, not matter how wealthy, will still get fish slime on her hands and bugs in her hair. She will still get cold. She will still cast, with hope, to spots holding no fish. The angler is going to deny the sedentary nature of visual entertainment. In the end, the angler, if she is actually going to fish, has to get wet. There is a necessary physicality to being on the water that simply cannot be reduced to a technique of degradation. This necessary physicality reveals a more primordial human existence in the world—one not dominated by our feats of engineering and technology. For ultimately, despite all the degrading efforts to package, promote, and profit from the fly fishing tourist, in the end you really can fly fish your way back to nature.  

Endnotes

1. Jessie L Bennet, Jennifer A Piatt, Marieke Van Puymbroeck, “Outcomes of a Therapeutic Fly-Fishing Program for Veterans with Combat-Related Disabilities: A Community- Based Rehabilitation Initiative,” Community Mental Health Journal, 53, no.7 (2017), 756-765; Elizabeth Jane Vella, Briana Milligan, and Jessie Lynn Bennett, “Participation in Outdoor Recreation Program Predicts Improved Psychosocial Well-Being Among Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Pilot Study,” Military Medicine 178, No. 3, (2013), 254-260; Rasul A. Mowatt, and Jessie Bennett, “War Narratives: Veteran Stories, PTSD Effects, and Therapeutic Fly-Fishing,” Urbana 45, No. 4, (2011), 286-308.
2. See: Tom Mordue, “Angling in Modernity: A Tour Through Society, Nature and Embodied Passion,” Current Issues in Tourism 12 No. 5, (2009), 529-552; Samuel Snyder, “New Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 No. 4, (2007), 896-922; Adrian Franklin, “Neo-Darwinian Leisures, The Body and Nature: Hunting and Angling in Modernity,” Body and Society 7 No. 4, (2001), 57-76; David Fennell, “Fly-Fishing on Vimeo: Cas(t)ing the Channel,” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 22 No. 1, (2017), 18-29.
3. Mordue, “Angling,” 540.
4. See Justin Pritchett, “A Radical Phenomenology of Wilderness Spirituality,” Presenting EPIS Journal 2 (2013).
5. William Washabaugh and Catherine Washabaugh, Deep Trout: Angling in Popular Culture, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000), 73.
6. Mordue, “Angling,” 538.
7. Mordue, “Angling,” 546.
8. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2011), 217.
9. Kohák, Idea and Experience, 121.
10. Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22.
11. Ibid., 18.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 10.
14. Ibid., 22–23.
15. Ibid., 23.
16. Ibid., 22.
17. Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G.S. Fraser, (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2008), 61.
18. Ibid., 62.
19. Ibid., 73-74
20. Heidegger, “Technology,” 231.
21. Marcel, Mass Society, 53.
22. Ibid., 54.
23. Ibid., 55.
24. Ibid., 43.
25. Franklin, “Neo-Darwinian Leisures,” 66.
26. Kip Redick, “Interpreting Contemporary Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey or Aesthetic Tourism Along the Appalachian Trail,” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 6 No.2(2018), 82.

An Introductory Daseinsanalytic Reading of Sergius Pankejeff’s Ontological Trauma

Loray Daws, PhD

Abstract

The Wolf-Man remains one of Sigmund Freud’s most enduring and critically reviewed case studies, and his ‘successful’ treatment was seen as an important milestone in the validation of the psychoanalytic approach to the neurosis. Given the Wolf- Man’s prolific academic following, the aim of the current paper will be a very selective reading on Mr. Pankejeff’s own autobiographical accounts concerning his history, the important figures influencing his psychological vitality, as well as later difficulties in sustaining mutually satisfying relationships with especially women.

Introduction

As articulated by the great Harry Guntrip (1969), the one thing an infant cannot do for him or herself is the provision of ontological security – this remains the sole domain of the relationship with the Other. Countless psychological and psychoanalytic theories have found creative and poignant metaphors to illustrate their awareness of the importance and danger of being in relation to another. Even before the infant’s psychological and spiritual birth (Bail, 2007; Balint, 1969, 1986), the soon-to-be-named (the infant embedded within the womb and domain of the maternal and paternal imaginary and symbolic) remains in large part psychically absent at its own creation. None can ensure in and for themselves their own birth as an infant. Our births are the result of fate, of an union never of our choosing, in itself an unconscious potentiality. As existential analysts we frequently encounter psyche sentiments such as “I did not ask to be born”, “why am I here?”, “I never felt I truly existed”, which are heartfelt communications from our fellow travelers, articulating a shared (for most mostly an unthought known) human dilemma. For a human soul / psyche to survive and flourish, to live relatively free and not ‘endure’ the encapsulating crypt of Winnicott’s False Self, R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, J.P. Sartre’s Nothingness, or James Masterson’s abandonment depression, an enduring nourishing rhythm of faith needs to be cultivated throughout life in relationship to self-other, and the lived-world (Daws & Bloch, 2015; Eigen, 1986, 1996). In short, the unique human being’s Being, constituted as an ontic-ontological structural unity within the Eigenwelt, Mitwelt and Umwelt, may suffer and endure various – if not an infinitely textured – variation of ruptures, tears, lacks, pressures, and much more. Daseinsanalysts, psychoanalytis and depth psychotherapists all serve as faithful scribes (with of course our philosophers, poets and theologians) to the soul’s grammar – its ontic-ontological facticity and potentiality. More specifically, the ontological characteristicsevident in Daseinanalysis, i.e. being-at-all (Facticity / Factizität); being-understanding-of-Being (Seinsverständnis); being-in-time (temporality / Zeitlichkeit); being-in-space (spatiality / Raumlichkeit); being-in-a-mood or being-attuned (moodedness or attunement / Befindlichkeit or Gestimmtheit); being-embodied (bodyhood / Leiblichkeit); being-as-care (Sorge); being-with-others (sociality / Mitsein); being finite (Endlichkeit); and being-toward-death (Sein sum Tode); among others, may all reflect the said compromises, limitations, ruptures, and reversals, greatly impacting the experience of ontological security.

A Synoptic Reflection Note on R.D. Liang’s Concept of Ontological Security and Insecurity

According to Laing’s understanding of ontological security:

“A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole and, in a temporal sense, continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.

It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity, of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties.” (1960, p. 39).

Laing’s description provides the reader with the essential ontic- ontological descriptors of ontological security. The ontologically insecure person desperately struggles to maintain a firm sense of self, of reality and of personal identity. Precarious  and compromised, the ontological insecure individual remains sensitive and deeply affected by the very nature of living. Even more relevant and painful are, for at least Laing, the exposure to three distinct but interrelated forms of lived-world anxieties: engulfment, implosion, and petrification. Space prohibits a detailed discussion, although, given the current reading of Mr. Pankejeff’s ontological insecurity, it may be important to provide a synoptic summary. For Laing the precarious sense of self evident in the ontological insecure person forces a vigilance stance towards the world as an attempt to protect the self from the felt colonization of being with another. Relationships may be needed but they are dreaded as they imply the loss of identity (being engulfed). All thought, feeling, and behavior may be in service of preserving existence, even at the expense of loneliness and exhaustion:

“The individual experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous desperate activity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen… The main maneuver used to preserve identity under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation. Thus, instead of the polarities of separateness and relatedness based on individual autonomy, there is the antithesis between complete loss of being by absorption into the other person (engulfment), and complete aloneness (isolation). There is no safe third possibility of a dialectical relationship between two persons, both sure of their own ground and, on this very basis, able to “lose themselves” in each other… To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered, stifled in or by another person’s supposed all-embracing comprehension. It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation.” (1960, p.44) (italics added).

There remains an inherent terror (implosion or Winnicott’s impingement), of being impinged and obliterated, leaving the ontological insecure individual petrified and reliant on depersonalization (amongst other mechanism) as a way to protect the self from being turned into a not-me, a self devoid of subjectivity, identity and vitality. Guntrip’s (1969) schizoid clients frequently articulate experiences of feeling like a puppet on a string, treated as an automaton, turned to stone, ignored, even being soul murdered (Fabricius, 1999; Shengold, 1989).

Protection from daseins-icide may be varied, as mentioned, and for Laing depersonalization remains an effective technique even at the risk of a de-emotionalized reality, i.e., treating the self and others as ‘emotionless’, which in turn further threatens one’s existence and brings the ontological insecure person into needing the other to paradoxically confirm his / her existence. The very techniques used to ensure existence may create an existential cull-de–sac, Sartre’s no exit. With Laing’s descriptions in mind, I turn to selective autobiographical sections as described by Mr. Pankejeff himself.

Sergius Pankejeff’s Ontological Voice

Mr. Pankejeff’s autobiographical accounts introduces to the reader a Russian émigré, 83, and known as the Wolf-Man to the psychoanalytic world (a set therapeutic identity) and the only son to an estate owner. Mr. Pankjeff’s birth location description is followed by a childhood memory of observing, through a crack in the fence, the noisy gesticulations of gypsies evoking a revelatory private thought; “This scene created an impression of indescribable confusion, and I thought to myself that the goings-on in hell must be pretty much like this.” (1971/1991, p. 5) (italics added). The childhood memory of indescribable confusion (bewilderment) is followed by further descriptions of loss and physical vulnerability, i.e., his father selling the beloved estate (before age 5); his Nanya (nurse) relating to him his battle with pneumonia and his physicians all but given up on his chances of survival as an infant; his suffering from malaria as well as a memory of at least one bout of pneumonia; experiencing fever without pain; of having red hair and it turning brown to the dismay of his mother (his mom kept a lock of his red hair as a relic); and being a relatively quiet phlegmatic child until the introduction of the English governess, Miss Oven, that lead to a complete change of nature (irritability, nervousness and severe temper tantrums). The arrival of Miss Oven also coincided with his parents traveling, leaving Mr. Pankejeff with his Nanya, grandmother, sister and Miss Oven. Although the maternal grandmother was to oversee the children she did not resume protective responsibilities.  Mr. Pankejeff mentions that his grandmother was aware of Ms. Oven’s ‘harmful’ influence, but remained passive and awaiting the return of the parents, whose return “was delayed over and over again” (1971/1991, p.6). Mr. Pankejeff goes as far as to write that Miss Oven “who was either a severe psychopath or often under the influence of alcohol, continued her mischief for several months. It is difficult to know exactly what went on. I can remember and our grandmother confirmed that angry quarrels broke out between my Nanya and me on the one side and Miss Oven on the other.  Evidently Miss Oven kept teasing me and knew how to arouse my fury, which must have given her some sort of sadistic satisfaction.” (1971/1991, p.6). Furthermore, and serving as a possible theme of identifying with the aggressor;

“Unlike me, Anna apparently got on with Miss Oven fairly well, and even seemed to enjoy it when Miss Oven teased me. Anna began to imitate Miss Oven and teased me, too. Once she told me she would show me a nice picture of a pretty little girl. I was eager to see this picture, but Anna covered it with a piece of paper. When she finally took the piece of paper away, I saw, instead of a pretty little girl, a wolf standing on his hind legs with his jaws wide open, about to swallow Little Red Riding Hood. I began to scream and had a real temper tantrum. Probably the cause of this outburst of rage was not so much my fear of the wolf as my disappointment and anger at Anna for teasing me.” (1971/1991, p.7).

In this stunningly introductory first few pages of his own childhood memories the reader can sense an individual of immense sensitivity, struggling with themes of deracination and uprootedness, lack of true parental support and protection, being over-stimulated and provoked, experiencing perceptual and affective confusion (later expressed somatically), exposed to intimate acts of betrayal from his own body (being ill and fragile), his sister, and his adult protectors (largely absent parents and grandparent, physicians giving up on him, a compromised governess). It is meaningful to understand his description of the gypsies as a possible first representation of the caesurian ‘crack’- the external world experienced as overstimulating, the protective psychic shield (caul) ruptured, exposing Mr. Pankejeff to the experience of a hellishly noisy otherness, inducing indescribable confusion and bewilderment. Given Mr. Pankejeff’s description of his immediate Kairos cosmos, the famous wolf dream (rather nightmare) may serve as creative glimpse into his feeling of security (nightmare as petrification), his infantile idios kosmos:

“I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time). Suddenly the window opened on its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.” (Freud, 1918, in Pankejeff, 1971/1991, p. 173) (italics added).

For Daseinsanalysts in general, the wolf dream-nightmare would not follow classical Freudian instinctual interpretations, as this case is so well known for, but in essence would be held as a special form of existence (Kunz, 2014). That is, for the dreamer and the one to experience the nightmare, the wolf dream holds and reveals Mr. Pankejeff’s ontic-ontological dilemma. The dream reveals all that there is, and the dreamer’s relationship with what is revealed should always be explored from his or her own autochthony. Dreams also reflect the basic emotional attitudes and moods as evident in day-to-day living. Given the discussion on ontological insecurity and reading the nightmare as a special form of existence and basic emotional attitude and mood as seen in day-to-day living, the nightmare may be more self-evidentiary than initially held. Freud was known to say that man can be wolf to man. The predatory and animistic anxieties to be faced and mastered by a child is well known and in my reading communicates a ontological need for tender and welcoming gestures from caretaking others (Daws, 2015; Eaton, 2015; Eigen, 1986,1996). Given the debate to follow, the nightmare may also communicate, or contain, the object relations artefacts and grammar of failures in welcoming gestures and tender contact₁. The frightening and terror inducing wolves were frequently held by many analysts as representing the various care-givers in Mr. Pankejeff’s world, the governesses and family members that played an important role in his psychological development. Again I turn to Mr. Pankejeff’s own creativity as answer:

“There is a Russian proverb which I told S (Sigmund Freud). He liked it. Here’s how it goes in German: ‘When a child has seven nannies, he lacks an eye.’ That means that when that many persons concern themselves with you, responsibility keeps shifting around. And that is really the situation in which I found myself after Freud’s death. Because I don’t know whom to believe now” (Pankejeff in Obholzer, 1982, pp. 172-173).

I may even risk a re-interpretation in the absence of Mr. Pankejeff’s confirmatory reply to me and state this differently (ontologically): ‘When a child has seven nannies, he lacks an I.’ How did the possible lack of an ‘I’ come about? In terms of Dasein, is there a symbolic link between the act of being able to see, to behold (eye) the ‘I’ in the midst of so many others? If there are so many other ‘eyes’ (I’s) on me, can I see the ‘I’ for myself, especially if the eyes through which I amto be discovered are themselves existentially desolate and destructive? In an attempt to address this ontic-ontological question I will for this next section focus on the governesses as described by Mr.Pankejeff, his immediate family, and his wife. The discussion is hoped to reveal, as contained within his original autobiography, important descriptions of self – feel in relationship ‘with’ his body, otherness and general ‘mood’.

Mr. Pankejeff’s autobiography continues from Miss Oven who was experienced as over-stimulating, if not sadistic, to her dismissal and being followed by Miss Elisabeth, who although was clearly less provocative did however expose Mr. Pankejeff to further over-stimulating experiences: “I really don’t understand what gave Miss Elisabeth the idea of reading us Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as this book with its horrible details of mistreatment of the Negroes was certainly no suitable reading matter for children. Some of the descriptions of the Negroes punishments even disturbed me in my sleep.” (1971/1991, p.8) (italics added). These relationships did stand in contrast with his relationship to his Nanya who was described as “a peasant woman from the period when there was still serfdom. She was a completely honest and devoted soul, with a heart of gold. In her youth she had been married, but her son had died as an infant. So she had apparently transferred all her mother love from this dead son to me” (1971/1991, p.8). Again psychoanalytically speaking one could speculate about Mr. Pankejeff being the recipient of depersonification (Rinsley, 1989), becoming a stand-in for another’s loss. Mademoiselle, whose principal object of education was to teach her pupils good manners and etiquette, later followed Miss Elizabeth. Mr. Pankejeff also mentions: “My sister Anna soon recognized Mademoiselle’s inclination to dominate, and knew how to escape her excessive influence very skillfully. Mademoiselle did not hold this against Anna, but compensated by paying more intention to me than to Anna, which was not at all to my liking.” (1971/1991, pp.16- 17). Although certainly a typical socio-cultural arrangement given the Pankejeff’s fortune and affluence, the reliance on governesses and nannies also brings into view the presencing of the parents. Mr. Pankejeff writes: “As our parents were often away, my sister and I were left mostly under the supervision of strangers, and even when our parents were home we had little contact with them.” (1971/1991, p.8) (italics added). Despite such a description the time spend with his father remains colored by pleasant memories, especially time spend playing the board game called ‘Don’t Get Angry, Man.’ It is also important to mention that Mr. Pankejeff’s father’s absences were also due to his treatment for manic depressive psychosis, an affliction that seemed to follow intervals of three to five years and was treated by the famous Professor Emil Kraepelin, who would himself later diagnose Mr. Pankejeff as manic-depressive, a diagnosis Sigmund Freud did not agree with and rather settled on an obsessional neurosis (1971/1991).

Concerning the maternal matrix, Mr. Pankejeff describes his mother as calm, quiet, with excessive bodily concerns:

“Since my mother, as a young woman, was so concerned about her health, she did not have much time left for us. But if my sister or I was ill, she became an exemplary nurse. She stayed with us almost all the time and saw to it that our temperature was taken regularly and our medicine given us at the right time. I can remember that as a child I sometimes wished I would get sick, to be able to enjoy my mother’s being with me and looking after me.” (1971/1991, p. 9).

Given his maternal and paternal experiences, as well as being left to governesses and nannies, it is very important to understand Mr. Pankejeff’s relationship with his sister Anna. Although later articulated by Freud that incestuous realities₂ were evident between Anna and Mr. Pankejeff, one does however read in his autobiographical account that her suicide in 1906 had the most profound impact on Mr. Pankejeff’s idios kosmos. After Anna’s suicide by poisoning, Mr. Pankejeff describes his state of mind as being severely depressed, feeling paralyzed, empty and suicidal, and the world becoming increasingly unreal. The mourning process saw Mr. Pankejeff desperately reviving Anna in switching university courses similar to that of Anna (process of appersonation). It was during this time that Mr. Pankejeff was first diagnosed with neurasthenia₃, and later with manic-depressive psychosis. The latter diagnosis followed after 1907 when Mr. Pankejeff’s father committed suicide, a mere year after his beloved sister Anna, by taking an overdose of sleeping medication. It is of interest to read the oral component in both suicides.

It was during his recuperation in a sanatorium that Mr. Pankejeff became entranced by his wife to be, a hospital sister named Therese. He explains it as such:

“Whereas then the main symptom of my condition had been the ‘lack of relationships’ and the spiritual vacuum which this created, I now felt the exact opposite. Then I had found life empty, everything had seemed ‘unreal,’ to the extent that people seemed to me like wax figures or wound-up marionettes with whom I could not establish any contact. Now I embraced life fully and it seemed to me highly rewarding, but only on condition that Therese would be willing to enter into a love affair with me.” (1971/1991, p.50).

Given various descriptions throughout his autobiographical work it does seem that Therese proved a stable figure through most of Mr. Pankejeff’s adulthood, and as such, it was again a tragic psychological concussion when Therese committed suicide (by gassing herself) leaving Mr. Pankejeff bereft, somatically and cognitively compromised, and in need of a further psychoanalysis. Fate can certainly prove truly tragic as Anna, Mr. Pankejeff’s father as well as his beloved Therese all committed suicide through oral means. During this stage of analysis Mr. Pankejeff’s psychotic like somatic complaints provides the reader some understanding of Mr. Pankejeff’s bereft state. Also evident in his interviews with Karin Obholzer, Mr. Pankejeff’s later relationship with women continued to prove highly ambivalent, if not master-slave like. His interviews sees an important pattern of establishing contact with women in need (similar to what he described in his courtship of Therese, which Freud interpreted as reaching through to the woman), the relationship suddenly proving (turning?) too demanding if not engulfing activating a need to distance (during such phases he would placate by providing financial support at his own expense), in turn stimulating fears of abandonment and reunion thoughts, feelings and behaviors (mainly through guilt), finally settling on feeling hopelessly trapped (Sartre’s no exit). These periods were also known to stimulate various psychosomatic sensitivities, preoccupied states of mind, and excessive reliance on advice as what to do (with the relationship), all culminating into the experience of ‘having a breakdown’:

“Well, and then I had a complete breakdown. Suddenly, the whole neurosis was there and despair and not knowing what to do. Suddenly this fear of losing her… I had promised marriage to this woman…. She was so happy, and suddenly I tell her, ‘I can’t.’ Terrible guilt feelings. What was I to do? I went home in the greatest despair and had this idea, an absurd idea — after I had promised to marry her and now didn’t, want to, and with the idea of employing her, she doesn’t want that, I had this idea: I’ll sign part of my income over to her. It was about 350 or 300 schillings at the time. I’ll sign that over to her.” (1982, pp.193-194).

Space prohibits a deeper exploration and articulation of Mr. Pankejeff’s body-mind-other adaptations within such interpersonal dilemmas, although it can be mentioned that Mr. Pankejeff’s psychoanalytic processes did describe the body serving as signifier in communicating and mediating interpersonal stresses and strains, as well his deep affectional hunger. The interpersonal patterns described do however repeat (the repetition compulsion) until Mr. Pankejeff’s passing, and as Obholzer writes, Mr. Pankejeff seemed to have settled into a type of Sartrean melancholy concerning his relationship with others.  

On becoming the Wolf-Man – an example of ontological compromise formation.

Daseinsanalytically I hope some of the areas accentuated, especially in Mr. Pankejeff’s own words, reveals the various demands and losses placed on him from a very early age. Over and under-stimulation (Freud’s ‘affectionate abuse’) supported a dipsychic dilemma, a split soul, so to speak. Primordial trust in the self-world-other, as well as Mr. Pankejeff’s primordial sense of psychical-sensory continuity (rudimentary pre-symbolic

self), needed for a secure sense of being, in Winnicottian terms ‘going on being’, may have become compromized. Mr. Pankejeff’s narratives accentuate a relationship to a psychical- sensory history characterized by continual physical illnesses, over-stimulation, neglect, possible seduction, and maternal hygeaphrontic care. That is, the exposure to fateful illnesses, a psychosomatic mother, if not a genetic endownment given his father’s manic depressive illness may all have played a defining role in the original body-self experiences. As Mr. Pankejeff’s psychical-sensory continuity₄ (bodyliness) remained inherently fragile, embrionic, and sensitive to rupture, combined with the fact that the very object[s] of rupture were needed to ward off not feeling disconnected (objectlessness, void, abandonment depression) and unintegrated (empty, porous, being engulfed) various endopsychic and interpersonal strategies to ensure survival may have been activated to facilitate a rudimentary sense of ontological security. Ontological insecurity is largely evident in Mr. Pankejeff’s hyperactivating and deactivating attachment strategies and his parataxic psychosomatic concerns. Borrowing from two analytic traditions – that is, neo Kleinian and family systems theory (psychoanalytically informed) on bipolarity as well as hygeaphrontic parenting, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1949) describes a childhood characterized not only by multiple parenting, but also non- introspective parents who rely on the prospective child as an extension of their needs. This could create in the child an acute, if not chronic, subjective feeling of defenselessness5 and insecurity, which is only alleviated by stimulating clinging or insulating behavior:

“That the manic-depressive has been subjected to multiple guidance in infancy and childhood and usually by non- introspectively interested grown-ups [the ‘white’ wolves signifying absence although predatory attentive?], that there is not one significant person responsibly related to the child, and that the child is not really important to anyone in its own right [no eye in service of a child’s ‘I’] create a great and specifically colored insecurity in him… He does not cease to look for a significant person to whom he can be important, and he clings to him when he believes that he has found someone [Pankejeff’s breaking through to the women ala Freud].” (Fromm-Reichmann in Wolpert, 1977, p. 285) (italics added).

Davenport and associates (1979) studied six families where at least one member was diagnosed as manic-depressive. They found very similar tendencies: (a) fear of loss and abandonment, (b) multiple parenting, (c) difficulty with domineering, depressed and/or withholding mothers, (d) general avoidance of affect, (e) massive use of denial in an attempt to manage hostility and anxiety, (e) unrealistic expectations and rigid conformity, and (f) difficulty in initiating and maintaining affection within and from outside the family system. According to Ablon, Davenport, Gershon, and Adland (1975), the most salient interpersonal and dynamic themes found in later bipolar research emphasised symbiotic relational realities and failed separation-individuation patterns, domineering mothers, absent father figures in oedipal development, and added the ‘later’ effects especially on marriage such as difficulties in modulating hostility. It is held that pre-oedipal stresses in the family of origin re-creates similar relational constellations in the marriage and general family life. Given such environmental demands, parental non- capacity to grasp the autochthonous needs of the infant-child, combined with affectional abuse, sensitive endowment and fateful illnesses, as earlier mentioned, the infant may be left to develop defences against such early body-ego disruptions known as second-skin formations (Bick, 1968, 1986). Second skin formations involve autistic-contiguous efforts to create sensory continuities through a variety of measures that may include self-mutilation, psychosomatic adaptations, and obsessions, all realities found in Mr. Pankejeff’s history and adaptation to separations and stresses. Importantly too is the level of anxiety experienced that remains largely primordial. All symptoms may in fact serve as attempted solutions against deeper ontological terrors, that of non-existence, falling apart (Mr. Pankejeff’s experienced various somatic delusions and a psychotic delirium in his psychoanalytic treatments₆), and being abandoned to an incomprehensible hellish world. As Laing himself wrote the ontological insecure person remains preoccupied by preserving rather than gratifying himself. Mr. Pankejeff’s relational patterns, hyper- activating and de-activating strategies may indicate the Langian realities of engulfment, petrification and isolation, followed by using the body as defense (one example; by being physically ill the mum- nurse could be revealed), scribe and refuge.

Conclusion

It was the aim of the current paper to return, in very limited fashion, to the autobiographical work of Mr. Sergius Pankejeff in an attempt to explore the concept of ontological insecurity, if not ontological trauma. Editorial demand forecloses a Sartrean analysis worthy of the Flaubert studies, and as such, the reader is cautioned against any finality given Mr. Pankejeff’s ontological strains and adaptations. As stated earlier, Mr. Pankejeff’s autobiographical work as well as the work of Freud and other analysts support our continual study into the various ontic-ontological dimensions of being fully human.

Endnotes

1. The nightmare reveals to the dreamer and caretaking others ontological concerns in need of understanding. The nightmare can be read as revealing being-understanding-of-Being (Seinsverständnis), being-in-a-mood or being-attuned (hoodedness or attunement/Befindlichkeit or Gestimmtheit), being-embodied (bodyhood/Leiblichkeit), being-as-care (Sorge), being-with-others (sociality/Mitsein), being finite (Endlichkeit), and Being-toward-death (Sein sum Tode).
2. Mr. Pankejeff agreed with Freud’s reconstruction in his interview with Karin Obholzer concerning possible incestuous activities. Given the current paper Laing does however also add in his book “The Divided Self” that many ‘incestuous’ ways of being in the world, although certainly traumatic, are also desperate attempts at ontological security. See case I entitled Mrs. R (1960, pp.54-57);
3. “Her fear of being alone is not a “defense” against incestuous libidinal phantasies or masturbation. She had incestuous phantasies. These phantasies were a defense against the dread of being alone, as was her whole “fixation” on being a daughter. They were a means of overcoming her anxiety at being by herself. The unconscious phantasies of this patient would have an entirely different meaning if her basic existential position were such that she had a starting-point in herself that she could leave behind, as it were, in pursuit of gratification. As it was, her sexual life and phantasies were efforts, not primarily to gain gratification, but to seek first ontological security. In love-making an illusion of this security was achieved, and on the basis of this illusion gratification was possible.” (Laing, 1960, p. 57).
4. Please see the work on depletion depressions by Galatzer-Levy (1988). As Kohutian psychoanalyst Galatzer-Levy described various defects in the self of the cycloid (bipolar) patient, namely (a) a defensive warding off of a depletion depression; (b) the use of language as reflecting a disconnection between affect and experience; and (c) a unifying hypothesis integrating endowment and environmental/ parental failure. Furthermore, according to Galatzer- Levy’s clinical approach, the cycloid patient struggles with severe separation trauma, and in a desperate attempt to ensure others for intra-psychic equilibrium (referred to as ‘selfobjects’), inherent needs and wishes may be restricted, constricted, denied, and/or limited. This (seemingly) ensures constancy, but at the expense of true self-expression and psychological vitality.
5. See Thomas Ogden’s autistic- contigious mode, Paul Ferdern’s ego feel, and Harry Stack Sullivan’s prototaxic experience.
6. Dynamically one could wonder if this process is very similar to what is referred to as lack of endopsychic insulation, a crack in the (de)fence towards the world. Also review Hammersley, P., Dias, A., Todd, G., Bowen–Jones, K., Reilly, B., & Bentall, R.P. (2003). Childhood trauma and hallucinations in bipolar affective disorder: prelimenary investigation. British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, p. 543- 547.

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Anthony E.J. (1975). The influence of a manic depressive environment on the developing child. In E.J. Anthony, T Benedek (Eds). Depression and Human existence (pp.279-315). Boston: Little Brown.

Bail, B.W. (2007). The Mother’s Signature. A Journal of Dreams. Beverly Hills, California: The Masters Publishing.

Balint, E. (1993). Before I was I. Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. London: Free Association Books.

Bick, E. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 49, 484-486.

Bick, E. (1986). Further considerations on the function of the skin in early object relations. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 292-299.

Bloch, S., & Daws, L. (2015). The Living Moment. Essays in Honor of Michael Eigen. London: Karnac.

Cohen, M.B., Baker, G., Cohen, R.A., Fromm-Reichmann, F., & Weigert, E.V. (1954/1977). An intensive study of twelve cases of manic –depressive psychosis. In Wolpert, E.A. (1977) (Edit). Manic depressive illness. History of a syndrome (pp. 291-344). New York: International Universities Press, Inc.

Davenport, Y.B., Adland, M.L., Gold, P.W.,  & Goodwin, F.K. (1979). Manic depressive illness: psychodynamic features of multigenerational families. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 49, 24-45.

Daws, L. (2015). Eigen’s transformational aesthetic: Wounded nourishment, primary process work and the purple period. In Bloch, S., & Daws, L. The Living Moment. Essays in Honor of Michael Eigen. London: Karnac.

Eaton, J. (2015). Becoming a welcoming object: personal notes on Michael Eigen’s impact. In Bloch, S., & Daws, L. The Living Moment. Essays in Honor of Michael Eigen. London: Karnac.

Eigen, M. (1986). The psychotic core. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc.

Eigen, M. (1996). Psychic deadness. Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc.

Fabricius, J. (1999). Internal ‘Soul Murder’: An Impediment to Psychic Development. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 15, 476-487.

Galatzer-Levy, R.M. (1988). Manic–Depressive Illness: Analytic experience and a hypothesis. In A. Goldberg (Ed.). Frontiers in Self-Psychology. Progress in Self Psychology. (Vol. 3) (pp. 87-102), Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Guntrip, H. (1969). Schizoid phenomena, object relations and the self. London: Karnac.

Holzhey-Kunz, A. (2014). Daseinsanalysis. London: Free Association Books.

Laing, R.D. (1960). The divided self. England: Pelican Books.

Obholzer, K. (1982). The Wolf-Man sixty years later. Conversations with Freud’s controversial patient. New York: Continuum.

Ogden, T.H. (1986). The matrix of the mind. Object relations and the psychoanalytic dialogue. London: Jason Aronson, Inc.

Ogden, T.H. (1993). Projective identification and psychotherapeutic technique. New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc.

Pankejeff, S., & Gardiner, M. (1971/1991). The Wolf –Man by the Wolf-Man. New York: The Noonday Press.

Rinsley, D.B. (1989). Developmental pathogenesis and treatment of borderline and narcissistic personalities. Northvale New Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc.

Shengold, L. (1989). Soul murder: The effects of childhood abuse and deprivation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wolpert, E.A. (1977). Manic depressive illness. A history of a syndrome. New York: International Universities Press, Inc.

Loray Daws, PhD, Reg. Psych., FAPA

Loray is a Registered Clinical Psychologist with the Health Professions Counsel of South Africa and a Registered Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, Canada. He graduated from the University of Pretoria and served as a full time lecturer from 1998 to 2006.  Academically, as well as clinically, Loray’s areas of interest include Mastersonian psychoanalysis and its various research and clinical applications to developmental trauma, philosophy and ethics of mental health and the question of human freedom and agency, and integrating various existential theorists with psychoanalytic traumatology. Never far from the academic field Loray serves as assistant editor for the Global Journal of Health Sciences, evaluator and international advisory board member of the International Journal of Psychotherapy (IJP), assistant editor and psychoanalytic candidate at EPIS (Existential Psychoanalytic Institute and Society) and has published various articles and chapters on dreaming, psychosomatic disorders and the disorders of the self. Loray supervises and teaches in South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and Turkey as faculty member of the International Masterson Institute.

J.W. Pritchett, PhD 

Justin W. Pritchett holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from the University of Aberdeen. His current book project, Cultivating Wilderness:  A Phenomenological Theology of Wilderness Spirituality and Environmental Ethics investigates how spiritual experience in the wilderness effects future practices of ethical behavior towards the non- human world. Justin is a certified fly-fishing guide and spends his free time wandering the wildernesses of Wyoming and Montana. He lives in Laramie, WY with his wife, son, three- legged cat, two dogs, ten chickens and hundreds of plants.

Annalee Ring, MA 

Annalee Ring is a master’s candidate in philosophy at Gonzaga University and is beginning a doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Oregon this fall. Her specialization is in phenomenology of expression and nature, Native American philosophy, and hermeneutics. She is particularly interested in the relationship between language, nature, and ontology.

Steven Brutus, PhD

Brutus is a graduate of St. John’s College (with honors). He studied at The University of Paris, Heidelberg University, and completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Claremont Graduate University (CGS fellow). Brutus started teaching in the 80s and continues today at Portland State University in Portland. Some of Steve’s works are Important Nonsense, Lines of Thinking in Aesthetics, and Criticism and Healing. Steve began working in philosophical counseling in the 1980s and has written extensively about the application of philosophy to therapy.

Julian von Will, PhD        

Born in Seattle, Washington, Julian specializes in the philosophy of mind, theories of consciousness and epistemology comprising Kant, German idealism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He’s a clinical sexologist and psychotherapist. He has a book coming out on Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of idealism, entitled Inverted World. He has earned four graduate degrees in philosophy and clinical sexology from America (Loyola, University of Chicago,) Europe (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium) and Asia (The University of Hong Kong). He spends time between Seattle and Hong Kong.

Daniel O’Dea Bradley, PhD  

Daniel O’Dea Bradley is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. He teaches a variety of courses in the areas of Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Philosophical Anthropology, Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Technology. His research focuses on environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and the phenomenology of religion, particularly questions of presence, desire, illusion, and the sacred. He often draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Richard Kearney, and Teresa of Avila, among others.

Ellie Ragland, PhD           

Ellie Ragland is Professor Emerita of French and English and Frederick A. Middlebush Chair at The University of Missouri. She has taught seminars on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory there for 25 years and will be giving a public seminar in the future. She is author of nine authored and edited books on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and over 100 articles. The first to have written an English book on Lacan which appeared in 1984, she is also the first to have founded an Anglophone Lacan journal. She is currently a practicing psychoanalyst and member of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

Gary Kolb, PhD   

I am a therapist and have worked full- time at Harbor Crest Behavioral Health hospital inpatient treatment center for chemical dependency for 15 years. I have both a PhD and a Psy.D. and have  a private psychotherapy practice. I am also a psychoanalytic candidate at the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. I have been married for 43 years to the same woman, raised 8 adopted children, and re-assemble old car parts in my spare time.

Tom Jeannot, PhD      

Tom Jeannot joined Gonzaga’s Department of Philosophy in 1986. He specializes in Marxism and Critical Theory, philosophical hermeneutics, classical American philosophy, and ethics. He is currently working onthe thought of Bernard Lonergan, personalism, and the Catholic Worker movement.

Michel Valentin, PhD    

Michel Valentin is teaching French literature and textual/critical/ postmodern theory at the University of Montana (Missoula). Valentin teaches and applies Lacanian theory to the unravelling of any textual surface (graphic, written, filmic…). He also uses theory to enhance the socio-cultural critique of our contemporaneity and publishes in his area of expertise. He is a long-time EPIS member.

Bruce Beerman, MA  

I’ve been teaching philosophy at Gonzaga University since 2011. My areas of interest are: Kant, Heidegger, and Phenomenology.

Julio Roberto Costa, MS

Sociologist (M. S.), University of Brasilia, Brazil. As a graduate, studied Social Constructionism and relations between Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis. Worked as a professor in many universities in Brazil. For 15 years, conducted field research on rural low-income communities, developing integrated actions with diversified social actors, such as farmer’s associations, local governments, unions, NGOs and social movements. Conducted in-depth studies of the work of Otto Rank, whose books he became acquainted with still as an undergraduate student.

Nataly Nikonovich, PhD  

Senior Research Fellow of the Center of History of Philosophy and Comparative Studies, Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Eastern Europe (Republic of Belarus), is an expert of the scientific journal “Philosophical horizons” (Kyiv, Ukraine). Author of the monograph “Theoreticalanalysis of M. Eliade’s philosophy of myth: basic ideas and cognitive potential”, more than 40 works on philosophy and methodology of culture, the theory of myth, philosophy and phenomenology of religion, modern Western philosophy, comparative studies, published in Spain, Colombia, etc. Nataly Nikonovich developed the new methodology of culture, on the base of M. Eliade’s phenomenology of myth and religion.

A Semiology of Capitalism & the Pursuit of Reflection for a Future Psychoanalysis: Remarks

The theme of the EPIS conference this year involves the natural & indigenous roots of a progressive psychoanalysis, applied phenomenology, and anthropologically transformative critical theory. Some of our papers this summer address this directly; others indirectly, but all contribute to the whole.

While looking to past theories in psychoanalysis and phenomenology is important, this conference will focus on new, creative ideas, concepts, and theories. The goal is to produce presentations and papers that explore innovative work in psychoanalysis and phenomenology that refer to natural and indigenous roots of our civilization and cultures within it.

Our hope is to produce papers that explore alienated relationships between the living world, life, and the given, and our contemporary understanding of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This involves, necessarily, critical theory, applied phenomenology, praxis, and potentials for transformative change, individually and collectively.

In short, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory are useful discourses that can tell us who we are, who others are, and how we see self, other, and world. However, much of psychoanalysis has not fairly treated these larger structural factors, like capitalism, like the semiology of capitalism (and production). I am suggesting that this conference theme is to encourage good thinking and good papers on how we can DO phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory within a dominant metaphor or discourse – which is a semiology of capitalism. I think there is plenty of evidence that demonstrates we prioritize this metaphor over ALL others, including the value of life, culture, etc. I am suggesting that we need to pay close attention to how these STRUCTURAL factors, including dominant metaphors and dominant discourses, affect our very ability to DO psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and critical theory. That brings me to my questions concerning reflection in the introduction. I think the questions are important. By postulating a hermeneutics of suspicion in which we cannot fully trust what our mind thinks or how we reflect, we might be able to navigate to a truer level of reflection, a reflection that provides more truth or insight about the nature of humans beings. Humanism is in a mal-mentalized, chaotic tension right now. As such, humanism as we know it – in my view – must be transformed radically into something very different. This means we must transform our anthropology. I believe that we cannot do this and continue to be inebriated with what we think of as individualism or autonomy…for God’s sake, deep discourses provide the matrix of all practical thinking positions…our choices just a semblance of freedom…Thus, we must interrogate reflection. We must bracket what we think of as reflection —- both you and I – and others – and re-think reflection in a way that sidesteps desire, which is at the very heart of classical and contemporary psychoanalysis….

We are concerned here with subjectivization–the topological cultural space within which we become selves. This necessarily triggers a dialectic between voluntarism and structuralism; our possibility for self-constitution; and the power exogenous forces have on this dynamic interplay. It seems clear that we are structuralized by semio-capitalism–that the overarching semiology concerns capitalism, accumulation, and commodification as the main hermeneutic allocation of value in our politics and culture. Within this hermeneutic, some examples of subjectivity include the faithful, the obscure, the reactive, the anxious, the violent, the complacent, the courageous, the responsible, the just, and those who seek solidarity. These terms, of course, transverse taxonomies such as the DSM, and therefore have the meaningful resources of several discourses and domains. But they all tangle with truth and goodness and are, therefore, subject to a psycho-analysis.

We see in this semio-space the potential further erosion of the fictions of autonomy and individualism given that choices and perceived freedom are already pre-structured. Thus, what appears as a set of free choices by a unique individual is already constrained by a homogenous-homologous structure that exists both unconsciously and consciously within the situation and context of these choices. Therefore, we must consider that the brain and the mind are plastic and can, therefore, be affected and shaped by the mental environment. This is the cultural, political, and social situation along with its domains such as the neuro-electric and the neuro-physical. These exogenous forces create neurological limits to the brain and derivatively, limits to the imagination.

In contemporary culture, we are seeing the profound structural and self-constituting effects of the violent penetration of capitalist exploitation into Internet technology, government, bureaucracy, corporations, multiple social and cultural domains, and individual bodies. It also affects the topology and matrices of self-structure that presence themselves in human communities. Currently, this onslaught of capitalist violence causes noospheric chaos, de-mentalizations, fragmentations, and splitting between emotion and cognition. In order to help us adjust to these conditions, psychiatry and psychopharmacology re-program and mollify the effects of this capitalist violence. This re-programming minimizes singularity, which is the uniqueness of each person, transforming it into the homogenous structure that prefigures what we perceive as individual and free. This, in turn, supports our neurotic subjectivizations and obsessions to capital and the ensuing neural exploitation. This is the submission of our minds to a semiology of capitalism.

Unfortunately, these capitalist formations disengage our existential experience from deeper cultural and social meaning, for example, by separating the humanities from science, the technical from the social, or the cultural from the natural. This distorts and narrows our noetic–our source of meaning–to one that that is circumscribed and mediated by accumulation and growth, possession and control. The acquisition of knowledge thus becomes a teleological enterprise of assimilating and learning capitalist ideologies and dogmas. In principle, if wedo not understand these foundations then what we perceive as critical thinking and reflection is instead a mass manipulation through power and the way it utilizes language.

Because capitalism becomes the chief semiological fulcrum, we lose the authentic relation to the environment and all the life and being in it. This creates fragmentation and alienation most deeply experienced as a temporal dystonia because the way capital forces us into an experience of time distorts an originary, natural relation to it. This raises the issue of our human anthropology and our relation to the cosmos. Currently, we operate primarily from humanism, in which a) humans believe that they are more ontologically valuable than other life forms and b) humans compete with each other for important goods, and in so doing elevate capitalism and competition above all other values. This creates a valorization of autonomy, individualism, competition, evolution, acquisition, narcissism, and egocentrism, which becomes an unbridled violence contextualized in automation – we have become automatons. This leads to an evental interrogation of the human anthropology and our most basic interpretational structures– our noetic–how we see the world. This opens transcendent space in which can choose to re-define ourselves and shift the source of meaning away from semio-capitalism and all that I have been discussing.

Let us now consider some other dimensions of this problem– what we see that is happening. As we recall, it was not so long ago that the western culture viewed humans as mechanisms. In this schema, we are products of nature, live in space-time interpreted as calculable motion, are embodied, and are controlled by the laws of nature. This is, as I have discussed elsewhere, the borrowing of principles of physics and applying them to human beings. This tends to squeeze out the historical, and the self-constituting aspect in our humanity. What is left is a different sort of temporality that is less based on cultural and social meaning that is free from technology, and that is more based on a de-humanized evolutionary approach that prioritizes power, competition, and other values that emanate from a mechanistic type of humanism.

Thus, the perception of time also shifts in semio-capitalism. Consider that humans have a deep existential capacity for temporality with past, present, and future ekstases. We then layer our historical, cultural, social, and personal interpretations of time on this deep existential structure and ontological faculty. This involves the relation between the ontological and the ontic, but it is important to note that these interpretations structure our thinking and our lives from a deep place. However, if we de-prioritize life, then the historical, cultural, social, and personal are thereby distorted. Instead of temporality being governed by important cultural factors, it is now largely governed by time interpreted as efficiency, productivity, and capitalism. It shifts from the lifeworld to automation; or another way of articulating this is to say that the lifeworld is now completely dominated by semio-capitalism.

Because of our assumptions of neuro-plasticity and neuro- totalitarianism, we can safely become concerned that our structure of temporality has its foundation in a semiology of capitalism. This can conflict with natural life rhythms, historical processes, and human integration with the rest of the Earth. Because these structures are both unconscious and conscious, they affect our very perceptions of them. One concern I have is whether we have any transcendental space left within which to imagine other time-worlds–other interpretations of temporality. Without this critical space, we lack an important thinking dimension of our relationship with the rest of existence–other life forms and the resources of the Earth. Another concern is that with an interpretation of time based on mechanism and automation, we lose the idea of duration. We lose the richness of a life that understands the difference between past, present, and future, and the temporal ekstases of retention, intention, and protention, which allow us a deeper level of introspection and moral consciousness.

Furthermore, in a mechanistic interpretation of temporality, in which time is viewed as motion and space, we prioritize operational thinking which also suppresses deeper thinking  about the construction of meaning. In addition, with time being compressed by the need for productivity and efficiency, there is less time to consider transcendence and change. Thus, there is less capacity for deeper thinking and the consideration of meaning formation.

Let’s take stock. We are facing the issues of time, the nature of our human anthropology or authenticity, thinking, meaning, and a topology of the self, separable concepts, to be sure, but all highly inter-related in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and critical theory. Now that we have mentioned both temporality and the nature of the human anthropology, let’s focus on authenticity, self-structure, and the origin of meaning. Currently, our anthropology is centered on an egology, narcissism, and the possessory self of the Western Enlightenment, which I have written about extensively. In this introduction, however, I want to tie it to an apprehension and experience of the Other and of the given–the given Other. Let’s discuss that self because it is present at these three disciplines that we study and utilize at the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society.

In a civilization that is governed by a semiology of capitalism, consumption, and desire–historically contextualized with a valorization of the fictions of individualism and autonomy– the self is an alienated, isolated structure. To be sure, it is inter-relationally constituted, but in its hubris, it forgets how essential the Other is to its very self-constitution. In this way of being, it sees the world only in terms of its own mental categories; thus, everything is a projection. What it perceives comes from its own mind and therefore not from the world as it is given. Unfortunately, we lose apprehension, experience, and understanding of the Other–who is a radical Other.

We can see that semio-capitalism is a derivative of a metaphysics that attempts to quantify nature then hypostatize it into what we consider to be original reality. In this worldview, even the subject of the subject-object split is reified into a thing–which then becomes subject to an anthropology of mechanism, as I have explained. Modern science fails to inquire into the mode of being of its objects. Here, their meaning is constricted to a picture of the facts, i.e, to no effective meaning at all. Further, there is no meaning in general; it is always meaning for [someone]. Thus, the question of meaning is a study in reflection, which leads us to an examination of reflection itself.

If a semiology of capitalism is based on a subjectivity of desire, it follows that the kind of reflection this sort of subject is capable of would be conditioned by that very desire, or self-interest. Thus, the very topology or structure of the self operates as a set of world parameters within which reflection occurs. More strongly, reflection tends toward self-interest at this level. I argue that self-interest often brings closure to availability and closure to deeper and broader reflection. Thus, when personal interest conflicts with reflection in some way, reflection is at risk for being suppressed or distorted. This is true, of course, unless there is a different kind of reflection, one that is more radical in that it interrogates the attachment we have to our self-interest. Therefore, is it not the case that the reflective self takes its own interest to task? That it thinks against itself? Doesn’t the virtue of responsibility require us to place full attention on the task of reflection itself? Doesn’t this full attention require us to bracket our very own interests and desires as we probe into the transcendent field from which they arise? Without this deeper level of reflection, we cannot be sure that any sort of reflection outstrips self-interest.

This countermove of reflection exposes our capacity for freedom and derivatively for moral autonomy and choice. Being able to step back from a purely egologically-formed self-structure exposes our capacity for transcendence, transformation, and change. Sartre spoke of this as “pure reflection”–pure because it exposes the self-deception involved in usual ego structure. More clearly, we often close ourselves to things and others by not engaging in this purifying thought process and by staying within our “desirous reflections.”

Unfortunately, this means that we create an opaque relationship to reality and do not see or experience things as they really are. One can easily see the moral, epistemological, and other ramifications of this distortive process. The countermove trends toward a different kind of reflection–and truth. This countermove tends toward truth because it opens to the world of others and to things, instead of closing itself to them.

Let us go further in asking about the purpose of reflection. Is it not to correct the distortions and falsities of what appears? For example, I might consider that the way I see things is, in principle, distorted because of my self-interest. Conversely, isn’t it true that reflection gives us an opportunity to see past the distortions to reach what is given? This is not being as such; rather, it is what is given in a way that transcends our personal desires. Doesn’t this possibility require a responsibility to transcend our personal interests, as Patocka suggests? Doesn’t this also require is to live in and entertain the realm of the possible, such realm the future ekstases of a conscious, aware human being? Doesn’t this therefore require us to consider all temporal ekstases and how they relate to one another as source of meaning and context for future choice? Let’s take stock. We have on one hand a self that splits its own being into subject and object, mediated by its own interests and desires; on the other, we have a self that opens itself to the world in an originary way, separate and apart from its own desire. These are two self- structures that have radically different topological- metaphysical structures. One is authentic and consonant with the reality of givenness; the other is self-deceptive and guided by self-interest.

The kind of radical reflection we seek involves this radical opening of ourselves in the first instance. Perhaps this is through Socratic ignorance; perhaps it is through a choice of availability in experience that includes the epistemological. This is a kind of self-choice that is interested in the given. This is the givenness of beings present in situation. Morally and psychologically, this is experience without fear and anxiety; existentially, it is experience without temporality, which includes an understanding of the multiple-worlds thesis, and a presence at the seat of the formation of worlds and time. It simply means to be fully present in the lifeworld–to the given–and most importantly, to be without self-interest. Let’s clarify. What this means is that we can methodically attain an experience in consciousness that overcomes an alienation between the human and the world. We do this by correcting the subject-object dichotomy, and by purifying ourselves of the distortions and self-deceptions of our ego. This requires us to distance ourselves from our ego, while simultaneously creating proximity with the given. This offers us a new Archimedean point, which I will address shortly, which discloses our inter-relationship with all things; and which opens a greater disclosure of the phenomenological field. This is phenomenology.

A problem emerges, however. In completely-purified reflection, we may lose the self as center and locus of moral autonomy and responsibility. As Patocka argues, reflection is dialectical, which attempts to mediate between two extremes. On the one hand, if we are totally alienated from nature because of a possessory, dominating self, then we surely miss the given. On the other, if we are totally merged with nature then we lose the integrity of the self, and therefore our ability to engage in critical thought. This is the critical thought about nature and our place within it; about the transcendental regime that determines how nature is given to us; about other worlds from which the given presences; about the way we allow such presencing in a way that transcends our personal desire and interest. This involves the relation between how we understand the given and how we understand our very self. In this understanding–which is subjective reflection–we attempt to understand ourselves, which is our search for authentic self. At the same time, we attempt to understand the Other in his being. This means we acknowledge the difference. Thus, to the extent we do not understand our essential nature, our human anthropology, we do not understand the Other except in distorted ways, which are often a product of anxiety, fear, and violence.

This means that we must seek a form of resoluteness and responsibility to our own self-understanding and moral development, coincidental with our inter-relationship to all Others. The search of an authentic self lies in that dialectical process of inter-relationship but not just with other humans. It must be with all Others, human and non-human, in order to move beyond our egocentrism and our anthro-centrism. Further, this means that the quest must not just be an outward study of the objective; instead, it must focus inward, on our very noetic structure and our own consciousness of how and to what extent we are presencing in this world, in this situation. It this author’s view that the primary semiological signifier is capitalism, along with its self-topological structure. It is this primary signifier that must be overcome and transcended and replaced by a signifier of life and its presencing. Methodologies toward this goal include phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory–purified from a semiology of capitalism and a noetic architecture of the possessory, acquisitive self. This is the self that pursues a fiction of autonomy and individualism at the ontic level, while not understanding that her choices have been pre-determined by that very noetic and semiological structure. Thus, it is an opportunity for radical reflection, free form both personal desire and interest, and from a semiology that pre- structures what counts as valuable and good.

This brings us to an important intersection in this thinking as it addresses that most important distinction between description and understanding. Is it possible to arrive at an un-interpreted apprehension or experience of the common world of things and Others? If not originary, is it possible to make approximations of this region of awareness through dialectical bracketing procedures? Keep in mind this would require an imaginary process of moving between a scientific view and a purified, translucent consciousness in which this very view is held in suspension, so it can be examined. Let’s now take a case in which we can employ this thinking.

Years ago, I wrote a book entitled Vivantonomy: A Trans- Humanist Phenomenology of the Self which is a good example of this bracketing process, in which we set aside a particular worldview–in this case a deep worldview–in order to examine it and consider other options. In this case, I bracket and challenge western humanism, with its unique anthropology that is structure by capitalism and competition, which serves and supports a self-structure that is possessory and acquisitive, dominating, and egocentric. This can be articulated in the languages of critical theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology each with its own lexicon. For our immediate quest, we want to know what lies at the bottom of the worldviews of autonomy, heteronomy, and vivantonomy, each an inter-relational position with respect to the Other. Both heteronomy and vivantonomy (which is the prioritization of life over purely humanist, self-centered approaches we see in individualism) challenge competition, individualism, capitalism as primary values, and substitute in others that support the Other. In the case of heteronomy, this is the other human. In the case of vivantonomy, this is all sentient Others, both human and non-human. The idea of trans-humanism means to transcend only the interests of humans, and instead, treat equally with ontological equity, all living sentient beings, and all life in general.

The general principles in Vivantonomy that challenge humanism are: 1) that we must not perceive the ontological worth of non-humans to be lower than that of the worth of humans; 2) that we must take responsibility for much deeper an integrated knowledge about the whole of all ecosystems; 3) that we choose a new Archimedean point in which we do not believe that we are at the center of the earth or any universe and that all beings have equal interests and rights that must always be considered; 4) that we recognize all life comes from the same source and that we must commit to solidarity with all life; 5) that we deepen our responsibility and commitment to all Others both human and non-human, and the life environment; and 6) that we work diligently to develop a new human anthropology, source of meaning and noetic, and reality principle. This is the work of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and phenomenology.

We can see that this new view–with the individual and collective foci of vivantonomy and trans-humanism–challenges a semiology of capitalism and its correlates like autonomy, individualism, competition, power over others, possessory and acquisitive programs–all these indicia of western individualism and humanism. By its very nature this view challenges a primary semiology of capitalism. By framing an exploration into the natural & indigenous roots of a progressive psychoanalysis, applied phenomenology, and anthropologically transformative critical theory we thereby create that dialectical space that challenges the current mainstream framework of these disciplines, especially but not only in a clinical sense.

Our hope is to generate ideas that explore those relationships between the living world, life, and the given that are attributable to a semiology of capitalism, through our contemporary understanding of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and phenomenology, as mediated by their indigenous and natural roots. This is not naturalism per se, but involves the question of how we frame an understanding of nature and the natural in terms of these discourses and substantive orientations. This involves, necessarily, praxis, and potentials for transformative change, individually and collectively.

Ultimately, we are in pursuit of the relationship between the self and its projection of the objective–as subject. This is the phenomenon of subjectivization, which can be known psychoanalytically and phenomenologically, even with an over- arching semio-capitalism.

Kevin Boileau
Writing in Missoula, Montana June 2018

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In
Praise
Of Air

I write in praise of air. I was six or five
when a conjurer opened my knotted fist
and I held in my palm the whole of the sky.
I’ve carried it with me ever since.

Let air be a major god, its being
and touch, its breast-milk always tilted
to the lips. Both dragonfly and Boening
dangle in its see-through nothingness…

Among the jumbled bric-a-brac I keep
a padlocked treasure-chest of empty space,
and on days when thoughts are fuddled with smog
or civilization crosses the street

with a white handkerchief over its mouth
and cars blow kisses to our lips from theirs
I turn the key, throw back the lid, breathe deep.
My first word, everyone’s first word, was air.

Simon Armitage

The world’s first catalytic poem developed in collaboration with Professor Tony Ryan at the University of Sheffield.

catalyticpoetry.org

Presencing EPIS

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Published by The Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society. One issue per year. Aims and Scope: Presencing EPIS 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.

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Adorno and the Problem of Systematicity

Daniel Green, PhD Candidate

Key words: Critical Theory, Adorno, Nietzsche, Art, Systematicity, Ideology, Culture, Negative Dialectics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to argue that Adorno is one of the few to answer Nietzsche’s call to a philosophical revolution; and second, that if we view Adorno in this way, as a disciple of Nietzsche, it will aid in refuting the common criticism of Adorno that he fails at his critical project because of his lack of systematicity.

In the first argument, I will establish Adorno’s criticism of traditional metaphysics. This criticism argues that systematic philosophy, or what Adorno often refers to as idealism (probably with the German Idealists in mind), attempts to build an explanation that can exhaustively explain all of reality. Adorno argues that due to the ever changing and heterogeneous nature of reality, this project is impossible. This is because the generalizing tools that philosophy makes use of, such as words, concepts, and systems cannot capture the varied nature of reality. Thus, Adorno argues, these philosophers’ motivation must be something other than truth, it must be a craving for control and certainty.

I will illustrate how this view answers Nietzsche’s claims at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, that metaphysics has always been motivated by subconscious desires that philosophers’ have chosen to ignore. Or, in other words, that the Will to Truth is in fact deluded, for nobody is ever aiming at impersonal truth but looking for some personal gain. Adorno takes this challenge a step further and illustrates how these subconscious, hidden, motivations keep us from being free. He then carves out a new role for philosophy that can free us from these subconscious patterns. Finally I hope this argument, that Adorno’s view of philosophy is a practical application of Nietzsche, will dispel criticisms of Adorno for being unsystematic. For if we are to take Nietzsche seriously, to be systematic, to claim to have the truth, would be to ignore the subconscious motivations for our actions. Thus, in taking Nietzsche seriously, Adorno must carve out a new, unsystematic role for philosophy.

Introduction

In the first section of his work Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche poses a challenge to philosophy that, if taken seriously, would drastically change the methodology, aims, and the very intention for undertaking philosophical work. The main challenge Nietzsche ushers to philosophy consists in an unveiling of what he believes actually underlies what he calls the “Will to Truth.” Philosophers traditionally have engaged in metaphysics in order to arrive at the true ontological make up of reality. A successful metaphysical picture would be objective, universal, and impersonal. It would in no way be influenced by the particular constitution of the philosopher, for then it would not apply to the whole of reality. Nietzsche questions this impersonal nature of metaphysics. He writes, “The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life” (Nietzsche, 4). Here, Nietzsche points to the impurity hiding within the motivation to practice metaphysics, within the Will to Truth. The fault of the metaphysicians of the past lies in their inability to pierce beyond the surface of the mind. What manifests at the surface of the mind, in conscious thinking, as conceptual or logical truth seeking, is actually motivated by an instinctual drive for a certain way of living. As he later writes, “Indeed to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at it is always well (and wise) to ask: What morality do they aim at?” (Nietzche, 5). If we take Nietzsche seriously there are no pure truth claims. To view a metaphysical claim as merely an explanation of the world would be to ignore the depths of the mind, which contain the true motivation for any truth claim, a drive for a certain way of being. Thus, if Nietzsche is correct, all philosophy, or at least all metaphysics, is and has been but an expression of the ethical dispositions or subconscious desires of particular philosophers.

Clearly, accepting Nietzsche’s challenges to philosophy is a tall order. These challenges ask us to reassess everything we know about the motivation and the purposes for undertaking a philosophical project. Thus, while some thinkers have worked with Nietzsche’s insights, many have ignored them or brushed them over, continuing the pursuit of “truth.” One philosopher who I will argue has taken Nietzsche very seriously is Theodor Adorno. More specifically, I believe we can look at Adorno’s outline of the function of philosophy as an attempt to not just take Nietzsche seriously, but also as a way of applying Nietzsche’s ideas in a practical way. Adorno applies Nietzsche’s claims to a practical project: liberation from cultural coercion. He shows us how surface level philosophical or metaphysical claims conceal habitual patterns of cultural conditioning. Adorno also suggests that if we can use philosophy to reveal these concealed aspects of experience, rather than cover them over, we can use it to liberate us from this conditioning. Looking at Adorno’s view of philosophy as an application of Nietzsche’s ideas will have two main benefits. First, it will be helpful in understanding Adorno’s project and his new task for philosophy, and second it will make sense of, and I believe, dispel the main criticism of Adorno, that he is not “systematic” enough, or never comes up with a final theory or framework.1

Adorno on Theoretical Philosophy

Before we can sufficiently argue that Adorno’s view of philosophy is an answer to Nietzsche’s criticism, we must have an in depth picture of his philosophy itself, both at the theoretical level, what exactly philosophy is for Adorno, and at the practical level, in what ways it can be used to liberate us from cultural coercion. To get an initial feel for Adorno’s conception of of philosophy, we can turn to his explanation of music and the analogy he draws between the structure of the two. He writes, “In music the impulse animating the first bar will not be fulfilled at once but only in further articulation…music is a critique of phenomenality, of the appearance that the substance is present here and now. Such a mediate role befits philosophy no less” (Adorno 16). A musical piece is never complete in the present moment. What is graspable never exhausts the musical experience. This is because music is a movement. The piece always extends to what it is not; yet that future that it has not been or the past which it was before are still intimately related in some way to what we are currently experiencing. Similarly, for Adorno, philosophy must be a movement, like music, it can never be “complete,” at one instant in time. It must constantly respond to new information that we receive as our present experience unfolds in unpredictable ways. As we will see in more detail in the following section, traditional systematic philosophical thought cannot accomplish this task because it does not stay open to changing experience. Rather, the traditional philosophical system takes a set of concepts as exhaustive in the explanation of the world and thus they act as a filter. All experience is filtered through these concepts and if there are certain bits of information which cannot fit within this particular conceptual scheme, they get repressed or ignored. For this reason, philosophy must always remain malleable and never complete. In Adorno’s own words, “Its’ course must be a ceaseless self-renewal, by its own strength as well as in friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or position” (Adorno 33). As we will see in more detail later, for Adorno, any type of final, fixed view is a bondage, for it necessarily obscures the changing nature of reality. To be free is to be in line with this ever changing nature as best we can. Philosophy must be a process, for getting stuck in a concept, or in a system, will only increase the weight of our bondage.

Adorno’s Opponent: Idealism or the System

Some questions may arise at this point; how can one do philosophy in a non systematic way? Is not the nature of philosophy to explain the world in a positive sense? Do not the very tools philosophy uses, words and concepts, suggest a rigidity of explanation? These questions will be addressed in the sections below. We can begin the process by looking to what Adorno says specifically concerning his opponent: systematic philosophy, or what he often refers to as idealism. Of the philosophical system, Adorno writes, “Every system was such an order, such an absurdly rational product: a positive thing posing being-in-itself. Its origin had to be placed into formal thought divorced from content; nothing else would let it control material” (Adorno 21). Here, Adorno points out two important qualities of the philosophical system, one that it is merely formal, and two, that as a merely formal system, it stands independent of any content in the real world which may have spurred its creation. To understand this one may consider certain systems of mathematics. Initially, they can be seen as mapping and categorizing objects found in concrete experience. We see a number of similar objects, put them in one to one correspondence with certain signs, and call these numbers. Manipulating these numbers can help us understand how to manipulate the objects in certain ways. However, as this system of numbers become more and more abstract, let’s say we start adding in negative numbers, and infinity, it starts to become more difficult to locate the link to our actual experience. Systematic philosophy for Adorno is similar, it may start grounded in dynamic, lived experience, but it eventually runs away with itself, multiplying itself through leaps of logic that reference only components within the system itself.

We next come to Adorno’s last comment in this quote, “nothing else will let it control material.” Here, we can remember Nietzsche’s suggestion that subconscious motivations underly all metaphysical claims. Adorno asks us to look for what the hidden motivation for creating such a formal system could be. He claims that the motivation for creating such a philosophy is not truth or liberation but rather control. To further explain this point Adorno actually cites Nietzsche. He writes, “According to Nietzsche’s critique, systems no longer documented anything but the finickiness of scholars compensating themselves for political impotence by conceptually construing their, so to speak, administrative authority over things in being” (Adorno 20). The motivation for the conceptual or formal system is a desire for control. The philosopher describes the world with concepts that she can understand and make sense of. Thus, if this system and these concepts are taken as encompassing all of reality, the philosopher can rest content, knowing that nothing lies beyond her grasp. She believes she has nullified the danger of unpredictability in life by fitting all that she experiences into her formal filter. As Adorno writes elsewhere, “Whenever something that is to be conceived flees from identity with the concept, the concept will be forced to take exaggerated steps to prevent any doubts of the unassailable validity, solidity and acribia of the thought product from stirring” (Adorno 22). We can look at the motivation for idealism as a type of neuroticism of identity, an attempt to pin down a world and an identity which is stable, which is “mine.” Of course, to liberate ourselves from our bondages, we must truly understand them, not hide them underneath metaphysical concepts. So we must always be on the watch for new forms these bondages may mask themselves as. For this purpose, a system that reinterprets differences as the same, and blocks out new information, trying to force it again and again into the same mold will not do. We need a method of philosophy which is open ended and attentive to change in form, constantly reassessing.

Adorno’s Positive View

As one may predict given his caution when engaging with systematic thought and exhaustive explanations, Adorno’s positive view is less a philosophical system itself and more the carving out of a new role for philosophy. We see that Adorno is critical of philosophy as a cohesive, constructive force, a type of world builder. He writes, “Criticism of systems and asystematic thought are superficial as long as they cannot release the cohesive force which the idealistic system had signed over to the transcendental subject” (Adorno 26). Adorno suggests here that philosophy traditionally gives the power of world creation to the transcendental subject. As an example of this we can look to Kant and his “I think,” which builds the world through the Forms of the Intuition. For Kant, some transcendental subject uses certain logical forms to turn the manifold of sensation into a comprehensible, intelligible world. In more simple language, the subject uses certain logical relations to build a world out of a formless mass of stimuli. For the systematic idealists such as Kant, concepts or logical relations, whose meaning are taken at face value and completely given for the subject, structure the world. This leaves reality easily accessible, explainable, and identifiable for any subject who cares to engage in conceptual analysis. However, Adorno wants to point to a new world “glue” by which the world is constructed. He writes,

“To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn towards nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by reflection. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning.” (Adorno 12).

Here, Adorno is suggesting that the view of the system or the concept as constructive of a completely transparent, understandable world is an illusion. This becomes clear as we look at the nature of the concept, or what Adorno refers to as its “constitutive character,” its origin. We further see that true insight into this “constitutive character” will take a turn towards nonidentity and will reveal the falsity of looking at the concept as a “being-in-itself” as a unit of meaning. Or more simply put, it will reveal the impossibility of taking the concept at face value. A simple way to understand this is that the concept is not transparent, we can never grasp it all it once, because it is partly constituted by that which exceeds our grasp. Once we understand its true constitution we will see that by its very nature, the concept cannot save the philosopher from her fear of nonidentity. In other words, philosophy’s true role cannot be constructive, it cannot be to reveal to us the structure of the world.

To understand why philosophy’s role must be something other than a revelation of the true world for Adorno, we must understand in depth why it is the case that any concept or system cannot totally reveal the world’s structure to us. We must delve into this idea that the concept always contains that which it cannot express. Adorno writes, “The double meaning of philosophical systematics leaves no choice but to transpose the power of thought, once delivered from the systems into the open realm of definition by individual moments” (Adorno 25). Here, Adorno comments that in order for philosophy to succeed we must move away from the idea that the transparent definition, the concept, governs thought. We must realize that it is “individual moments” that have the true power. I believe the way we can understand these “individual moments” and how they relate to the birth of the concept is quite simple. Individual moments can be seen as direct experience; sensation, feeling, drives, a seething mass of desires etc. (what exactly this preconceptual experience consists in is a whole different philosophical discussion) The concept is used to categorize these experiences by fitting qualitatively different experiences into general groups by which they can be called the same. For example, I may call all emotional experiences that lead to passionate outbursts anger, even though all these experiences have different bodily sensational content. Thus, the concept has the result of monotonizing experience, making the different into the same. At the theoretical level, this monotonization occurs because there is no true symmetry between these individual moments and the system or the concept. The system cannot be a substitute for the them. The concept seeks to generalize and the object, or experience, is heterogeneous. This leads to a necessary gap between explanation, which always works in generalizations, and that which is being explained, which is always specific and never general. Thus, a philosophical system must always leave out bits of information, it necessarily creates a gap or an asymmetry between its explanation of reality and reality itself. It is for this reason, as we saw earlier, that metaphysical systems often run away with themselves, and cease to refer to anything in the actual world, discussing only their own formal content.

Adorno’s Practical Project

Before we can truly see what role Adorno has for philosophy other than this, in his opinion, futile constructive project, we must also get a sense for his practical picture, what a genuine philosophical work may look like and how it would liberate us from cultural coercion. We have seen that for Adorno, the comprehensible world is built through inaccurate generalizations. These generalizations are what keep us from being free and can manifest in a number of ways. At a personal, non theoretical level these generalizations manifest as learned responses to stimuli that have been ingrained in us by what Adorno commonly refers to as “The Culture Industry.” We can look at an obvious example, advertisements. If we are particularly susceptible to television commercials, and we constantly see a commercial of people wearing Old Navy jeans who are happy and healthy; whenever we go to the store and see those jeans on sale, that feeling will arise in us. Quite possibly without even being aware of it, we will buy those jeans because they have conditioned within us that expectation of happiness and health. Of course, Old Navy jeans are not going to bring us any kind of lasting happiness or health. This is just an ingrained, irrational, very likely subconscious habit pattern. This is a very gross example, but hopefully we can see the similarity to systematic philosophy, another way in which these generalizations can manifest. Let’s say we are Hegelians, and are convinced that everything is Absolute Spirit. Initially when we are convinced of Hegel’s point we may come to some wonderful, mystical, feeling of the connectedness of all things. Then let us say we leave our office, get in our car and someone cuts us off. Anger arises, yet we tell ourselves, don’t worry this person is also Absolute Spirit, that mystical feeling comes back and represses the anger. Of course, this also is a simplistic example, but like this, systematic philosophy can be used to actually drown out reality. By connecting certain concepts with certain feelings through conditioning, we apply these concepts to the endless variety of experiences of life, homogenize them, and repress or ignore how we actually feel or how things actually appear, in favor of the security of categorizing them under a familiar concept.

The role for philosophy for Adorno then cannot be a constructive role, it cannot build a world, because to build an identity which extends over space and time is to limit and ignore the ever changing nature of space and time. Philosophy must be able to fight both these forms of subconscious conditioning and repression, personal, as with the advertisements, and conceptual, as with systematic philosophy. To see how this can be done let us look to a quotation. What philosophy can do, Adorno calls reconcilement. Of this he writes,

As the subject-object dichotomy is brought to mind it becomes inescapable for the subject, furrowing whatever the subject thinks, even objectively-but it would come to an end in reconcilement. Reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion, it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them…Dialectics serves the end of reconcilement (Adorno 6).

Here, Adorno points out the only possible solution to this puzzle. If the concept or the system is necessary to hold the subject up as in individual existent, then, to reach what is beyond the concept and to stay with “the multiplicity of different things”, the subject must be dissolved. Adorno calls this dissolution of the subject/object distinction reconcilement and names it the goal of Negative Dialectics, his name for this new method of philosophy. Through reconcilement we reach the heterogeneous which is unidentifiable, and we free ourselves from the tyranny of systematic philosophy and of cultural conditioning, which both constantly yet futily try to categorize reality into something we can exhaustively comprehend. Thus, philosophy must serve a deconstructive purpose rather than a constructive purpose. It must reveal the contradiction which lies within any system or any explanation.

Reconcilement: A Phenomenological Picture of the role of Philosophy for Adorno

In parts of his paper The Culture Industry, Adorno parallels for art what the introduction of Negative Dialectics does for philosophy. He outlines how art usually functions to propagate ideology, and then carves out a new, critical role for art. The main difference is that in this paper, Adorno moves away from the purely theoretical and describes what kind of direct experience could lead to reconcilement and what this process would look like. Thus, I believe an exploration of the experience induced by a truly critical work of art will be helpful for getting a concrete phenomenological picture of how reconcilement could be achieved.

Adorno describes traditional artistic pieces as based on a harmonious, unified style. However, the problem with this “feel good” type of art is that it ends up harmonizing the subject with the specific coercive patterns of the time period. For example, Adorno writes, “The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses the different structures of social coercion in those periods” and more generally, “By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology.” (Adorno 103). Here, we see that the hidden function of this work of art is to harmonize us with the existing social order. The work of art which unifies style, which harmonizes, and makes us feel good does all this within the context of our current, comfortable, yet socialized identity. An example of this could be pop music in a club setting. Social coercion has influenced us to think that to have fun we must go pay exorbitantly expensive cover charges at clubs and buy equally expensive drinks. When we get into the club we hear some rap song where the artist raps about how much fun they are having in the club. The rapper may be technically skilled and the beat may be harmonious. Thus, the song affirms these ideological behaviors by pairing them with aesthetically beautiful elements. Our socially constructed identities are reified through artistic experience.

Hopefully, we can see the parallel here to Adorno’s view of traditional philosophy. Just as the stylized, harmonious, work of art reifies our socially constructed identity, the philosophical system does the same. When we identify with a certain philosophical system or set of concepts, we become complacent in the identity which these suggest. Thus, as Hegelians, we can rest content knowing that we really are Absolute Spirit, or as Fichteans that we really are the Absolute I. Sufficiently comforted and numbed by these concepts, we can absentmindedly settle into a set of behavior patterns given to us by The Culture Industry.

If the ideological work of art harmonizes us with a socially constructed sense of identity, then the true work of art must challenge that sense of identity. As we have seen the “feel good” elements of art are not capable of this. They make us happy, complacent, and affirm the comfortable, coerced behavior patterns by ennobling them with a beat. a rhythm, or some other pleasant aesthetic element. Thus, Adorno writes, “The moment in the work of art which transcends reality…does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity” (Adorno 103). The true work of art is not harmonious, is not aesthetically pleasing. The music that pleases the ear tells us that all is as it should be, everything is in order. However, real art wants to tell us viscerally that something is wrong, that somewhere in our identity there is a contradiction, a disharmony; essentially, that the striving for harmony between self and society, between subject and object, the striving for identity at all is a failed project from the start. For examples of this type of art let us look at how most music that is pleasing to the ear works. Usually a certain chord progression is associated with a certain emotion. So notes are strung together into a progression that stimulates the rising and falling of a particular emotion. In the genuine work of art, notes would not be strung together in a traditional progression. Maybe this work of art would take one note from the progression that usually induces joy, one from the sadness progression, one from the fear progression, and string them right in a row. Thus, the listener has no usual emotional reference points for interpreting this experience. She has no choice but to be with her visceral response as best she can, without categorizing or understanding it, because it is so unusual. We see this genuine work of art is unpleasant, is abrasive, it clashes with our structured way of interpreting the world. By conditioning an experience that cannot fit into our comfortable habits, that we cannot narrativize into our personal world systems, this work of art shows us that these comfortable systems and these identities are ultimately illusory.

Just as the ingenuine work of art had significant similarities to systematic philosophy, the genuine work of art is very similar to Adorno’s view of true philosophy. Real art must always be negative, must always provide us with an experience that is so jarring and alien that it cannot be fit into our identities and socially constructed habit patterns. It reveals aspects of experience which were repressed or brushed over by our conditioning. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics must do the same. Although we cannot say exactly what this type of philosophy would look like, for what serves the end of reconcilement will be contingent on a particular time and a particular space, we can point to how this work of philosophy may look. Again we can use the example of an unnatural chord progression. What philosophy usually does is establish conceptual reference points. It tells us that this particular phenomena means this, this other phenomena means this, and this is how they are connected. Just as an unnatural chord progression may force us to experience a type of emotion we cannot categorize, real philosophy must break down, or show us the illusory nature of these connections and categorizations and force us to experience a reality which we cannot categorize or explain.2 Both real philosophy and real art must serve the end of reconcilement, of the breaking down of the harmony of dualities: subject/object, individual/society, inner/outer, to name a few. While the stylistic work of art and the systematic philosophical system affirm these dualities and try to point to a harmony between the two, Negative Dialectics and its artistic counterpart show the futility of this project by making clear there is always an experience or a component of the system which eludes any sort of identification or systemization. Thus, philosophy, if successful, ends in a type of existential death; one sees the impossibility of one’s identity, one’s world picture, and it crumbles; bringing down with it all the ideology which it was based on.

Adorno, Nietzsche, and Anti-Systematicity

This view of philosophy as a destruction of identity leads to an implication which is new for philosophy as a discipline. Under this picture, philosophy is never finished. Philosophy cannot be a truth or a system arrived at, but must be a process of negative response to the social and ideological condition at the time. We need only look to history to see that this is true. As a new order arises, it get incorporated back into the mainstream. For example, the counterculture of the 60’s arose. Yet by the 70’s psychedelic imagery was used for capitalist ends,

2 Examples of this type of philosophy are few and far between. It would also take a good bit of argumentation to illustrate that any work does in fact fall into this category. That being said, I believe a few promising places to look are Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations placed on products to make them seem hip. Similarly, a work of philosophy may initially be revolutionary, be alive. At one moment in time It may reveal hidden motivations and habits in us which we before did not allow ourselves to see. However, over time this new identity, this new system will solidify and become stale, lifeless. We will need to see things from a fresh perspective once again. Of course, we cannot throw out systems and conceptual analysis completely, for we need structure to exist as subjects and get about in the world. However, the system must never be final, it must stay open to constant change. For even if our philosophy is successful, reconciliation is reached, and identity is annihilated, a new one must spring up; for we need dualities, we need subject and objects in order to have a world at all. Thus, once the new world, the new identity, and the new ideology is born, philosophy begins again within this new structure to break this down as well.

Adorno’s view is often criticized on these grounds, that he views philosophy as purely negative, as Critical Theory scholar Bunber puts it, “never lays claim to theoretical status” (Bunber 44). There is no theory here, no set of standards which critics and philosophers alike can work with, no real progress, just an arguably pessimistic picture of a, maybe noble, yet endless struggle against the relentless forces of coercion and ideology. Adorno sought to free us from cultural coercion, critics say, yet failed. He was not able to provide us with a standard or set of standards by which we can always critique culture and thus clearly see where our bondages lie. It is in this spirit, that the next generation Critical Theorist, Jurgen Habermas, comes up with the Ideal Speech Situation. We will not go into the details of this theory here. It will suffice to say that for Habermas, the Ideal Speech Situation serves as an a priori standard by which we can judge every situation. If the situation meets this standard, the participants were acting in an uncoerced way, free of any hidden conditioning. If not, we must work to meet this standard. We see Adorno has no standard or system such as this. So how can we use his thinking to free ourselves?

If we look at Adorno as expanding on Nietzsche’s project, we will see the fallacy of this criticism. To summarize, Nietzsche believes that metaphysical claims or systematic philosophy have not really been motivated by a pure Will to Truth, but rather by subconscious intentions for certain ways of being, or certain comfortable identities. Similarly, Adorno takes the motivations for most of our actions as hidden from our conscious mind. Cultural conditioning associates certain responses with certain general categories of stimuli. However, these responses are artificial and tend to gloss over or repress actual experience. So, at the surface, though it may seem that buying a new pair of jeans is making us happy, this is only a constructed, artificial response, covering up an ocean of sensations and emotions occurring at the depth of the mind. Systematic philosophy, for Adorno, serves this same end of covering up the deeper truth. It uses broad conceptual claims to generalize over a varied, ever changing experience, hiding us from the truth of transience. Thus, for Adorno, cultural conditioning and systematic philosophy work together in different spheres to make experience digestible but monotonous, comprehensible but shallow.

We see that if Adorno was to systematize, to set up some consistent standard like the Ideal Speech Situation, he would be ignoring Nietzsche’s insight. He would be explaining only the workings of the surface of the mind, not penetrating the depths of subconscious motivations and conditioning. This would be to mistake neurotic craving for stability and consistency for transcendental truth. Adorno does not want to solidify and normalize these subconscious motivations but wants to reveal them. Furthermore, as we have seen, once they are exposed, they come back in a new form. Thus philosophy must be a process, it must never be final, constantly searching for the new forms these intentions may be hiding under.

Conclusion

In Nietzsche’s work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra is a wise prophetic figure. He has amassed a band of followers who hope to absorb some of Zarathustra’s wisdom. At one point Zarathustra banishes these followers saying,

Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a student. And why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you! Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers! Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye have all denied me, will I return unto you. (Nietzsche, 113).

In the spirit of Adorno as one of the few true disciples of Nietzsche, we can look at any philosophical system as Zarathustra encourages his followers to look at himself. No matter how much wisdom or truth the system contains, it means nothing if one has not done the work of criticism themselves. The goal of philosophy is not to arrive eternally at some truth, for this is to stagnate. Rather, it is to remain engaged in an endless project of self analysis and self criticism; again and again bringing to the surface the hidden depths of reality. This is really the spirit Adorno is trying to keep alive. He is telling us to always be skeptical, always be critical, even of our own conclusions. What liberated us one day may be hiding some unknown conditioning or motivation the next. Thus, we must constantly be on the watch, not condemning philosophy, but never letting it be finalized. Adorno urges us to use philosophy in the best way we can, even as a generalizing force, to be more open to the multiplicity of life, and to reveal pieces of that multiplicity that, remaining hidden, have kept us from true liberation.

Note

1 For examples of this specific criticism see Rudiner Bunber’s Habermas’ Concept of Critical Theory, Adorno and Mead: Micheal Hoover’s Toward an Interactionist Critique of Negative Dialectics, and Peter Hohendal’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited: Habermas’ Critique of the Frankfurt School

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and E. B. Ashton. Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury, 1979. Print.

Habermas, Jurgen. Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.

Bunber, Rudiger. Habermas’s Concept of Critical Theory.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Helen Zimmern, Emereo, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra a Book for All an None. Translated by Walter Kaufman, The Viking Press, 1970.

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M., 1944. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer. Dialectics of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.