Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences 9780367405625, 9780367815707

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Images, Figures, and Tables
Introduction
Part I The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification
1 Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects
2 Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch
3 On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze
4 Not Wholly Human: Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan
5 Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics
Part II Vision, Perception and Gazes
6 Inside the Gaze
7 Perception and its Objects
8 Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception
9 The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds
Part III Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Inhuman Gazes
10 Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches
11 The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Schizophrenia
12 Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative
13 From Excess to Exhaustion: The Rise of Burnout in a Post-modern Achievement Society
14 Phenomenology of Blackout Rage: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes
Part IV Beyond the Human: Divine, Post-human, and Animal Gazes
15 Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze
16 What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now?
17 Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty
Part V Sociality and the Boundaries of the Human
18 Voice and Gaze Considered Together in ‘Languaging’
19 Disability and the Inhuman
20 Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness
21 What Are You Looking At? Dissonance as a Window Into the Autonomy of Participatory Sense-Making Frames
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Perception and the Inhuman Gaze

“This volume brings together diverse areas of philosophical and interdisciplinary research around the richly ambiguous theme of ‘the inhuman gaze,’ which raises fruitful questions concerning the status of the transcendental subject in phenomenology, the nature of embodiment and perception, our understanding of psychopathology, the meaning of objectivity, and our ethical relationships to others like and unlike ourselves. It is a timely and exciting volume of essays with both a compelling focus and an impressive scope.” – Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University, USA

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization, and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of psychiatry, and social cognition. Anya Daly is Honorary Fellow and Teaching Associate at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a former IRC Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland. Fred Cummins is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin, Ireland. James Jardine is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and a former IRC Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland. Dermot Moran is the Inaugural Holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College, U.S.A. and Full Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

How Propaganda Became Public Relations Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public Cory Wimberly Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland Edited by Clara Fischer and Áine Mahon Inference and Consciousness Edited by Anders Nes with Timothy Chan The Complex Reality of Pain Jennifer Corns Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell Corijn van Mazijk Social Functions in Philosophy Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives Edited by Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel Microaggressions and Philosophy Edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy A Constructive-Engagement Account Bo Mou Perception and the Inhuman Gaze Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences Edited by Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

Perception and the Inhuman Gaze Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences Edited by Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of the Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40562-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81570-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsviii List of Images, Figures, and Tablesxi Introduction

1

PART I

The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification19   1 Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects

21

DERMOT MORAN

  2 Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch

44

SARA HEINÄMAA

  3 On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze

63

TIMOTHY MOONEY

  4 Not Wholly Human: Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan

77

DOROTHÉE LEGRAND

  5 Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics CHRISTINIA LANDRY

85

vi  Contents PART II

Vision, Perception and Gazes97   6 Inside the Gaze

99

SHAUN GALLAGHER

  7 Perception and its Objects

109

MAURITA HARNEY

  8 Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception

128

RICHARD S. LEWIS

  9 The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds

143

ANYA DALY

PART III

Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Inhuman Gazes159 10 Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches

161

G. STANGHELLINI AND K. W. M. (BILL) FULFORD

11 The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Schizophrenia

176

MATTHEW R. BROOME

12 Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative

192

ANNA BORTOLAN

13 From Excess to Exhaustion: The Rise of Burnout in a Post-modern Achievement Society

205

PHILIPPE WUYTS

14 Phenomenology of Blackout Rage: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes JOHN PROTEVI

218

Contents vii PART IV

Beyond the Human: Divine, Post-human, and Animal Gazes237 15 Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze

239

SEAN D. KELLY

16 What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now?

254

ROSI BRAIDOTTI

17 Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty

271

DYLAN TRIGG

PART V

Sociality and the Boundaries of the Human283 18 Voice and Gaze Considered Together in ‘Languaging’

285

FRED CUMMINS

19 Disability and the Inhuman

298

JONATHAN PAUL MITCHELL

20 Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness

308

JAMES JARDINE

21 What Are You Looking At? Dissonance as a Window Into the Autonomy of Participatory Sense-Making Frames

324

MARK JAMES

List of Contributors335 Index343

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to many people who have supported the writing and presentation of this volume of essays. First of all, we wish to thank the editors at Routledge and Taylor & Francis for their enthusiasm and timely interventions in the development of this project – Andrew Weckenmann and Alexandra Simmons. The chapters in this volume came out of papers presented at the conference The Inhuman Gaze and Perceiving Otherwise, held at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris from 6–9 June 2018. This three-day multidisciplinary international conference spanning the disciplines of philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and aesthetics inspired many rich and diverse papers. https://theinhumangaze.com/ This conference was funded as part of the Irish Research Council projects ‘The Social Matrix: An Investigation of the Subjective Bases of Violence, Destructiveness, and Ethical Failure’, Anya Daly and ‘The Constitution of Personal Identity: Self-Consciousness, Agency and Mutual Recognition’, James Jardine. The conference also benefitted from the generous support of the School of Computer Science, the College of Science, the School of Philosophy, and the College of Social Sciences and Law, University College Dublin. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of Nora Hickey M’Sichili, the directrice of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, for making available the beautiful venue, which significantly contributed to the success of the conference. The various members of her team ensured the day-to-day running of the conference went very smoothly (thanks to Nathalie Jacquemin, Yann Le Cadre, Stephane Gherbi, Alexandra Zuddas and Benoît Audonnet). We would also like to thank Ambassador Patricia O’Brien, who very generously hosted the reception drinks at the Embassy of Ireland in France. The original work for this analysis first appeared in The Moral Psychology of Anger edited by Owen Flanagan and Myisha Cherry, published by Rowman and Littlefield International (2017).

Acknowledgements ix

Conference Organisers: Dr. Anya Daly – Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy, University College Dublin 2016–2018. Honorary Fellow and Teaching Associate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. James Jardine – Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy, University College Dublin 2017–2018. Professor Dermot Moran – School of Philosophy, University College Dublin; Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy, Boston College; President of the International Federation of Philosophical Studies/ Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie. Associate Professor Fred Cummins – Cognitive Science/School of Computer Science, University College Dublin. Professor Brendan Kelly (conference advisor) – Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University College Dublin. Professor of Psychiatry, Trinity College Dublin. Consultant Psychiatrist, Tallaght Hospital, Dublin.

Conference Assistants: Clémence Saintemarie – Tutor/Teaching Assistant, School of Philosophy,  University College Dublin. Abeba Birhane – Postgraduate Student, School of Computer Science,  Cognitive Science, University College Dublin. Jonathan Mitchell – Postgraduate Student, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin. Mark James – Postgraduate Student, School of Computer Science/ Cognitive Science, University College Dublin. Thanks also to the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne for the use of office space and facilities to coordinate and compile the various documents from authors and editors.

Artwork and Permissions: Many thanks to – Sr. Philippa Rath and the Abbey of St Hildegard, for permission to reproduce the image of – The Iron Mountain, of the Scivias-Kodex by Hildegard von Bingen Abtei St. Hildegard 1, 65385 Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany. Thanks also to medieval historians Dr. Melissa Raine of the University of Melbourne and Dr. Sabina Flanagan who both advised regarding the location of this image for the editors. Many thanks to Sabine Schumann of Gemäldegalerie, Berlin for organising the image and permission to use an image of Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Portrait of a Woman.

x  Acknowledgements Many thanks to the artist Elena Villa Bray for allowing her image of Odradek to be freely used in this volume. Many thanks to Rowman Littlefield International Ltd, for granting permission to reproduce the essay Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics, by Christinia Landry. Many thanks to Rowman Littlefield International Ltd, for granting permission to repurpose a section of an earlier essay by John Protevi for this current publication. The earlier essay – The Berserker Rage. In The Moral Psychology of Anger. Edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan. London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.

Images, Figures, and Tables

Images 15.1 Image of The Iron Mountain, by Hildegard of Bingen from the Scivias-Kodex which belongs to Abbey of St Hildegard at Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany 15.2 Image of Portrait of a Woman by Rogier van der Weyden 15.3 Image of Odradek by Elena Villa Bray

241 244 249

Figures 8.1 Co-constitution through relations 132 10.1 A flow diagram of the process of values-based practice 162 18.1 Left: human eye with white sclera; centre: chimpanzee face; right: ape eyes from Planet of the Apes287 18.2 Proportion of time gazing towards the head of the partner as a function of speaking turn 288 18.3 Common ground (the overlap between the two regions) is continuously negotiated in conversation (suggested by the back-and-forth of the arrows). A greater degree of common alignment is found in liturgy and, in the extreme form of unification, in the recitation of the Credo. 292 18.4 Horizontal eye position viewing a 3-minute clip from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; estimates of interviewer synchrony 295

Tables 13.1 The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) 13.2 Predisposing factors in the development of ‘burnout’ 14.1 Characteristics of the classical self versus the blackedout berserker self

209 210 230

Introduction

[In the gaze] . . . the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception1

Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature.2 The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence, and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world. Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject. This paradox is but one of the angles of investigation in this current collection of essays. Gazes, vision, seeing, being seen, visibility, and invisibility are the focus of analysis and debate across the spectrum of the disciplines represented here, revealing conceptual as well as psycho-social points of tension, conflict and, as stated, even paradox. The diversity of sub-themes encountered in these chapters all revolve around a questioning in regard to perceptions of ‘the human’ and ‘the

2  Introduction inhuman’. This designation ‘human’ can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization, and demonization of what is then designated inhuman or nonhuman and also to set up a more pervasive and founding opposition in ‘Othering’ all that could be deemed inhuman, nonhuman, posthuman, and beyond the human. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one important key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception and its role in understanding others. The fact that perception defines and determines the world of the perceiver, and also that individuals can report entirely different perceptions of the same phenomena and entirely different perceptions of other human beings, warrants closer investigation. The distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode as contrasted with the reciprocal mode, moreover, complicates and deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. Questions motivating and focusing each essay include but are not limited to the following: can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry, and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology, and animal cognition? What can aesthetics reveal about inhuman gazes and perceiving otherwise? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness, or in other habituated aspects of social interaction, play a role in enabling the emergence of an inhuman gaze? These inquiries into what it means to be ‘human’ and conversely ‘nonhuman’, ‘post-human,’ or ‘inhuman’ are relevant to a number of domains from the hard sciences (evolutionary theory, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence) to the human sciences (sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology). And all these domains are enriched and given wider significance through engagement with the humanities and specifically with philosophy. Philosophy furnishes not only theoretical frameworks and alternative pathways of interpretation of the data and findings, but also it is able to situate issues within a metaphysical context. Any research programme that aspires to contribute to our understanding of the human or the inhuman must be willing to work within a radically interdisciplinary framework, as many academic institutions are now recognizing. Such projects inspire questioning and challenges from outside the usual assumptions and conceptual frameworks. The medical humanities, for example, a relatively new research domain appearing in the research statements of many progressive universities, fruitfully exploits this multidisciplinary approach. The essays in this edited collection thus seek to advance these multidisciplinary exchanges by grappling with the

Introduction 3 themes from each of the disciplinary perspectives but at the same time keeping a clear awareness of alternative perspectives and frameworks, which while not necessarily determinate in the given essay, nonetheless remain a positive and broadly encompassing background presence. The problem posed by the Inhuman Gaze as first depicted in Sartre’s famous example and commented on by Merleau-Ponty has commanded the attention of some of the best thinkers across the philosophical traditions. It is hoped that this present collection of essays will make a significant contribution to these debates and extend the dialogue not only to a broader disciplinary audience but also to the wider public. These essays articulate and address many of the major questions inspired by ‘the gaze’ and the nature of perception, setting the issues in disciplinary, historical, ethical, and cultural contexts and interrogating the various lines of argument and investigation from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Part I: The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification In Part I, comprising five chapters, the writers approach the topic through close analyses of the treatment of objectification within the traditional sources of phenomenology, thereby furnishing crucial historical and theoretical context for what follows in the later chapters. The first contributor, Dermot Moran, in his chapter, Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects, brings his extensive scholarship to bear on the historical and philosophical issues raised by Merleau-Ponty’s quotation. Importantly, he acknowledges the destructive potentiality of objectification, but nonetheless argues the case for its sometimes-positive contributions. Drawing on Husserl, Moran proposes that adopting a ‘detached, non-participant spectator’ stance underwrites the theoretical attitude which is essential to both the sciences and philosophy. This capacity to break away from the mythical and natural attitudes, Moran traces back to ancient Greek philosophy. He notes that since Galileo, however, this version of objectivity has been a one-sided objectivity, which has contributed to confusions regarding objectivity in the modern context, such as, most conspicuously, in empirical psychology which has adopted a false ‘detached observer’ position, still in fact caught up in the natural attitude. For Husserl, there has been a confusion between the ‘detached theoretical stance’ and the ‘detached stance of the transcendental spectator’. Moran clarifies the differences and dependencies between notions of objectification in general (with regard to both world and others) and the claims to objectivity. He elucidates Husserl’s aims to establish a new science of subjectivity, not as an absolute subjectivity, such as in constructivist accounts which sacrifice objectivity and the world, but one which adopts a kind of agnosticism, neither absolute faith in the how the world is given to us, nor dogmatic skepticism, by

4  Introduction means of a specific act of willing. What is needed is an objectivity that is correlated to subjectivity without being entirely determined by it; and this is the crux of the problem. Is this even possible? And this is the central point of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s account – it is not possible; a ‘theoretical attitude’, as described by Husserl, is unachievable because we are always caught up in moods. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to this question, defending Husserl, is to suggest a third way by differentiating between the ‘theoretical attitude’ and the ‘transcendental stance’. Nonetheless, as Moran alerts us, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s Ideas II may be taking Husserl further than he wished to go, and whether he succeeds in this defence is still open to debate. In the second chapter, Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch, Sara Heinämaa directly addresses the Sartrean account of the look or gaze (le regard) and contrasts it with an alternative conception of bodily objectification deriving from the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. As Heinämaa emphasizes, Sartre’s discussion of the look has proven remarkably fruitful to the extent that it has been harnessed by a number of contemporary authors seeking to explicate, for instance, experiences of racial and gendered objectification, the structure of self-conscious emotions, and the origins of norms and normativity. Moreover, it remains a seminal account of a specific kind of impersonal objectification, one that uproots the world of the subject gazed at and discloses an aspect of their embodied being that is otherwise inaccessible – namely, that aspect of the self that becomes thematic in the experience of shame. Nevertheless, Heinämaa argues, a significant weakness of Sartre’s account lies in his blindness to (and outright rejection of) a mode of bodily self-objectification that precedes and makes possible the encounter with the gazing other, and for a compelling account of this form of bodily self-givenness we can turn to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Particularly in their investigations of the structure of ‘double sensation’, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty show that our living bodies are given to us as intertwinings of subjectivity and materiality. Accordingly, whereas the fundamental form of bodily experience involved with touch is carefully examined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s account fails to appreciate this form of embodiment and its philosophical significance, led astray by an image of the body projected by an anonymous and inhuman look. Moreover, for Heinämaa, this comparison highlights that bodily objectification is discussed in two different registers in contemporary phenomenology. The Sartrean and Husserlian accounts, she argues, differ in three crucial ways: first, with regard to the type of ‘object’ that is at issue; second, in that they ascribe different axiological dimensions to the state of being bodily objectified; and third, with respect to the conditions under which bodily objectification takes place. The third chapter from Timothy Mooney, On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze, brings the accounts of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty into critical

Introduction 5 engagement with proponents of eliminative materialism, exposing the latter accounts as bankrupt endeavours which cannot do justice to either lived perception or the lifeworld. For eliminative materialism, folk psychological beliefs about the perceiver and the world are so illusory that they cannot amount to anything substantial enough to require reduction to the physical. And once we learn to explain everything through the latter, we can learn to perceive the world as scientific theory bids us think about it. Drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Mooney argues that eliminativism is a hybrid theory relying on empiricism and intellectualism, and it does not count as a philosophy of perception. Episodes of scientific inspection and detached observation cannot get behind lived perception or the lifeworld and can only count as transient gazes. They do not embrace our gearing into the world, and they cannot endure. The fourth chapter in this section, Not Wholly Human: Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan, Dorothée Legrand takes up the consideration of language in general and specifically that as humans we are ‘speaking bodies’. She does so from a perspective informed by both philosophy and psychoanalysis, in considering both responsivity and responsibility. Legrand juxtaposes the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan highlighting the tension between what she characterizes as Merleau-Ponty’s generality of ‘flesh’ and Lacan’s interrogation of the singularizing potential of language which serves both to differentiate subject from object and subjects from each other. As she writes: ‘inhumanity remains irreducible; yet, language is a knife that cuts our bodies out of the inhuman flesh’. The final chapter in this section, Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics, from Christinia Landry offers a rehabilitated assessment of Beauvoir’s book The Ethics of Ambiguity (1976), against Beauvoir’s own later denunciation of her book as being overly theoretical. The key question that motivates Landry’s analyses is whether it is possible to will the freedom of others as Beauvoir enjoins in her book when one’s own moral freedom is curtailed by sociohistorical ideologies, structures, and practices. Through a careful analysis of Beauvoir’s ethics, conjoined with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the visible, Landry affirms that a viable, embodied, existentialist ethics is indeed possible.

Part II: Vision, Perception, and Gazes The historical disputes with regard to the nature and status of perception are currently being revived and reinvigorated with new light being shed on various issues and puzzles from the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. We can trace the disputes back to Plato and his rejection of perception as a reliable epistemic instrument in contrast to reason. Descartes in his meditations pursued a parallel line rejecting perception in his quest for epistemic certainty, and today we have a similar rationalist prejudice

6  Introduction driving the debates concerning the cognitive penetrability of perception and implicit bias. These debates point to more basic underlying questions. What is the relationship between cognition and perception? How can the status of scientific claims be assured if perception is inherently unreliable and perspectival? What kind of creatures are we? Are we computers comprised of software and ‘wetware’? Are we mere machines of prediction? What is the difference in perceiving objects as opposed to other subjects? What is the status of our relationship to others who we encounter in our perceptual field? Can perception be accounted for adequately in objectivist terms, or must we acknowledge the inherent relationality built into the structures and processes of perception? These questions and many more are the backdrop to the more specific focus of the papers presented in this section which interrogate vision, perception and gazes in both the phenomenal domain and the intersubjective domain. Shaun Gallagher opens this section with his chapter, Inside the Gaze, which begins by describing a study which lead to the discovery of a phenomenon known now as ‘anonymous vision’. Drawing on the research of Zahn, Talazko, and Ebert (2008), Gallagher recounts the study of a young man named DP, whose visual experience after deep-sea diving followed by a long flight was significantly altered. His vision was no longer integrated but involved a two-step process; the identification of the object with a subsequent apprehension that he was the one doing the seeing. This case offers challenges to the Immunity to Error by Misidentification thesis (Wittgenstein 1958; Shoemaker 1968) and demonstrates selective loss of self-ownership in visual experience. ‘Someone is seeing the object, but is it I?’ What is particularly interesting for Gallagher’s account is that this anomalous vision related to objects only and not to people. Although our visual perceptions of objects and of other people are more than just visual – enactively involving motor, affective, and evaluative processes – our visual perception of the other person who is gazing back at us is more complex. Gallagher reviews two approaches to this complexity, drawing on Sartre and Levinas, and shows how they both remain relatively abstract. He argues that visual perception of the other’s gaze is always situated and involves complex interactive behavioral and response patterns that arise out of an active engagement which is always more than a simple recognition. He cites empirical studies to show that such social perception is not a matter of me seeing the other’s gaze or face simpliciter, but of seeing that the other sees me. The other’s gaze is not something that can be subsumed into a strictly visual representation of eye direction, for example. It has an affective impact on my own system that sets me up for further response. Drawing on concepts that acknowledge the involvement of embodied and worldly contexts, it is clear that there is something immanent in the gaze – something that elicits an elementary responsivity that characterizes our intercorporeal encounters.

Introduction 7 The second chapter of this section, Perception and Its Objects, by Maurita Harney focuses on the affective and relational dimensions of seeing and being seen as opposed to the ‘spectatorial’ stance of Cartesianism. Harney challenges the traditional accounts of the intentionality of perception, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodied intentionality and also on his later work centred on the notion of nature as ‘flesh’. Importantly, Harney highlights the fact that MerleauPonty’s embodied intentionality is a naturalised intentionality, which links perception not with consciousness but with sensation and movement. Harney’s broad scholarship in the domains of phenomenology, embodied cognition, and biosemiotics enables her to traverse the specificities of this contentious domain and to identify both the points of tension and also resolution. For this approach, she argues that the Umwelt, as described by ethologist Jakob von Uexkull, provides a relational ontology where the origins of normativity can be identified in the relations of reciprocities, affordances, and receptivities operative in nature and where there is a continuity between human and non-human animals. Such an account, Harney proposes, has significant consequences for both the philosophy of nature and the understanding of science. Richard S. Lewis in his chapter, The Technological Gaze, tackles the increasingly important dimension of technology and its transformative role in perception which he proposes adds an ‘inhuman’ element to our own gaze. Lewis draws upon concepts from contemporary fields of inquiry that subscribe to an inter-relational ontology; specifically, critical posthumanism and postphenomenology. He leverages the concept of an embodied and pragmatic technological relation in order to better understand the enabling and constraining effects of this transformation. Importantly, Lewis argues that these technologies continue to covertly mediate our perception of the world even when we are not actively using them. By increasing our awareness, he suggests, we have an increased chance at regaining some of our agency and potentially making betterinformed decisions concerning what and how we invite technologies into our lives. In the final chapter of this section, Anya Daly pursues the exploration of the normative potentialities of perception in her essay, The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds. While on the one hand for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the perception of the other founds morality’; on the other, Daly argues, it is the rationalizing of perception by stripping it of empathic responsiveness, becoming an inhuman gaze, that allows ethical failure. Through his ground-breaking analyses of embodied percipience, Merleau-Ponty offers a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, the objectivist, disembodied, unsituated, purely rationalist view which underwrites all inhuman gazes. Complicating and deepening these analyses, MerleauPonty also draws on gestalt theory, elaborating particularly on the roles

8  Introduction of perspectivism, wholism, and figure-ground structures in the perception of things and of others. It is Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with gestalt theory that informs the key claims of this essay, supported by diverse accounts and analyses of the underlying psychological dimensions and consequences of torture. Specifically, Daly argues that while we can theoretically decompose perception in terms of gestalt structures to better understand the mechanisms of perceptual experience in general, we can also understand how it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze through a rationalizing deconstructive process of perception; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, these are ‘unmade’ for potentially violent and unethical ends.

Part III: Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Inhuman Gazes The history of psychiatry is replete with accounts of ill-thought theories being inflicted on patients; and philosophy has been rendered vulnerable to accusations of obfuscation and irrelevance to the ‘real world’ with some of the extremes of armchair philosophy and far-fetched thought experiments. Bringing these two disciplines more explicitly and rigorously into engagement with each other is proving fruitful in beginning to address these deficiencies. Because of this rapprochement, the beneficial exchanges and mutual constraints between philosophy of mind and psychiatry is gaining recognition and driving rethinking in each discipline. The crisis of legitimacy in psychiatry incited by revelations of inhumane treatment, misdiagnoses, corruption, stigmatization, and conflict of interest has necessitated not only a reappraisal of the metaphysical assumptions underpinning psychiatric theory and practice but also the status of the ‘psychiatric object’, as described. Clearly, the psychiatric context is one in which the inhuman gaze takes on a particularly urgent nature. As Andrew Scull has noted: the lunatic, the madman, the psychotic, the schizophrenic, call them what you will, suffer a sort of social and moral death. Their wishes and will, their very status as moral actors, as agents capable of expressing valid preferences, and exercising autonomous choice are deeply suspect in light of their presumed pathology, as the often dark history of their treatment under confinement abundantly shows. (Scull 2006: 52) Nonetheless, it is crucial to keep in mind that some of the most trenchant criticisms of psychiatric theory and practice come from within the discipline itself as psychiatrists struggle to adapt to the constraints of various contingencies and systems so as to best serve the interests of those under their care.

Introduction 9 The first chapter in this section, Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches, from psychiatrists Bill (KWM) Fulford and Giovanni Stanghellini, explores through two case histories the potential contributions of phenomenology to values-based practice in the context of psychopathology. The first case history, ‘Simon’s story’ (about delusion), illustrates the importance of the ordinary language analytic philosophy that underpins current models of values-based practice in diagnostic assessment. The second case history, ‘Anna’s story’ (about anorexia), shows how phenomenology adds to the essentially cognitive resources of analytic valuesbased practice a depth dimension of conative and affective understanding. This is important, as Anna’s story illustrates the relevance of a phenomenologically enriched values-based practice particularly for treatment. In particular, we focus on how phenomenology (namely, the Sartrean phenomenology of the body) provides resources for understanding how Anna’s ‘anorexic’ values emerge from the psychopathological core of her lifeworld. This is where the issue of the gaze becomes relevant, as we analyze her lifeworld in terms of Sartre’s ‘body for others’, a concept based on the way a person feels in her body when she is looked at by another. Taken together, therefore, these two case histories point to the need in psychopathology for a combined analytic-plus-phenomenological model of values-based practice. The rich range of phenomenological sources available for further development of this combined model is indicated. Psychiatrist Matthew R. Broome’s chapter, The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Schizophrenia offers an insightful historical overview and analysis of objectification in the context of psychiatry; on the one hand, someone with schizophrenia may feel themselves perceived by an Inhuman Gaze, but on the other hand, the complex subjective experiences of mental disorder may be conceptualised as an object for clinical and scientific scrutiny. In the first section, Broome outlines current understandings of psychopathology and how, as an approach, it is crucial to the practice of psychiatry, both clinically and as a research endeavour. In the second section, he discusses the wholly objective somatic focus in psychiatry via Jaspers’ critique of the ‘first biological psychiatry’ of the 19th century and his attempt to reorient psychopathology as a science by drawing on pluralistic methods including biological and hermeneutic approaches. In the third section, he engages with French thinkers (Bergson, Minkwoski, Merleau-Ponty) and how their ways of conceptualising mental life and experience may go beyond Jaspers and allow us to have a psychopathology and a psychiatry that can think coherently about dynamic, indeterminate, and fluctuating mental states. As Broome proposes, psychiatry again finds itself in a period when hard sciences such as neuroscience, pharmacology, and genetics are hugely important; yet, as with the early 20th century, the clinical benefits of decades of neuroscientific research are as yet to lead to improvements

10  Introduction in patient care and clinical outcomes. Broome thus suggests that phenomenological psychopathology may be a means to maintain a focus on the person and to offer a human, alongside an inhuman, gaze. Anna Bortolan’s chapter, Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative, offers an exploration of the notion of ‘the gaze’ and its relation to psychopathological experience from a phenomenological perspective focusing particularly on the dimensions of the sense of possibility (Ratcliffe 2012, 2015), affectivity, and narrative selfunderstanding. Bortolan proposes that Sartre’s concept of the gaze can provide a powerful metaphor for the characterisation of the alterations of experience which mark certain forms of psychiatric illness. Drawing on the work of Matthew Ratcliffe (2008, 2015), Bortolan proposes that these alterations are exemplified in particular by disruptions of the sufferers’ sense of what it is possible for one to experience and achieve. She then investigates how these disruptions can be modulated through the engagement with certain forms of narrative self-understanding, so as to potentially engender changes which can lead to an expansion of one’s ‘possibility space’. Clinical psychiatrist, Philippe Wuyts’ chapter, From Excess to Exhaustion: The Rise of Burnout in a Post-modern Achievement Society, explores the increasing prevalence of burnout in modern society relying on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology as a methodological starting point. After a brief introduction to the core philosophical concepts relevant to his discussion, Wuyts proposes that typical characteristics of today’s work environments and work practices clash with important intrinsic features of the nature of human consciousness, intruding upon the meaning-making activities that sustain us and leading in extreme cases to burnout. Often attributed merely to stress, and Wuyts reminds us that some stress is often a good thing, he however proposes that burnout arises from a cascade of exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a lack of personal accomplishment. As a result, the world of work becomes increasingly dehumanizing, erasing ‘the soul’ of professional activity and leaving the employee exasperated, lost, and cynical. Next, he explores factors beyond the professional sphere that contribute in significant ways to the development of burnout. He argues that burnout should not be considered inevitable as the mere endpoint of an individual’s career in crisis, but rather that burnout has become a concerning widespread sociological phenomenon that can only be explained by a broader interpretation of the loss of meaning in modern existence. Levinas points out that every human being’s existence is defined in ‘the face of the other’, and Wuyts identifies the root of burnout in the loss of this mutuality, where the achieving subject competes now with itself, shorn of the sustaining relation to the other. The final chapter in this section, from John Protevi, brings us to yet another signature manifestation of early twenty-first century distressed

Introduction 11 existence with his compelling essay – Phenomenology of Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes. Protevi presents an exploration of the perceptual-motor effects and possible episodic memory inhibition in extreme cases of the ‘berserker rage’, informed by empirical research. He initially locates berserker rages in a taxonomy of aggressive behavior and defines it as an out-of-control reactive aggression triggered by blocked flight in a high-danger situation. Protevi offers a brief summary of the military implications of berserker rage and suggests how this phenomenon might be mapped out neurologically. The ‘Human Self-Domestication Hypothesis’ currently being worked out at the intersection of anthropology and biological psychology provides important theoretical context. Discussion of the most extreme manifestations, the so-called ‘blackout rages’ in which episodic memory is inhibited or attenuated, comprises the second part of the chapter. Here, Protevi seeks to establish its phenomenological implications; what exactly are we to say about an ‘experience’ of which we have only a partial ability to reconstruct, and even then, of which the use of ‘flipping a switch’ or ‘automatic pilot’ are prevalent terms?

Part IV: Beyond the Human: Divine, Post-human, and Animal Gazes The Inhuman Gaze can be taken as a stimulus, a goad, to enjoin us to consider the relation between seeing and being seen when one or both poles of that relationship are not assumed to be human. As Rosi Braidotti reminds us, inhumane and inhuman are not equivalent terms. In the three contributions assembled here, we meet the non-human, the in-human, and the post-human; and yet in each case we must consider not a gulf that separates but the challenge to see ourselves as continuous with and, in some sense, co-constituted by that inhuman other. Sean Kelly in his chapter, Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze, considers what it means to be looked upon not by another person but by God. This theme is explored through two elaborate examples. In the first, we are teleported back to the renaissance to a Benedictine community at Tergensee in the Bavarian Alps and the writings of Nicholas de Cusa. Kelly invites us to consider the mystical experience of being gazed upon by God as constructed from the work of Nicholas of Cusa, cardinal, theologian, and philosopher of fifteenth-century Germany. Cusa, accused of ‘mystical heresy’, encouraged monks under his tutelage, such as those at Tergensee, to become aware at all times of being seen by God, an experience which he associated with a profound joy and sense of wonder. Kelly writes: ‘In his divine infinity, as the coincidence of opposites, Cusa’s God is the essence of what is inhuman. And yet to gaze upon him, and to be gazed upon by him, is the highest form of human being’. In order to instill this pervasive mood of joy and wonder, Cusa would

12  Introduction have his monks act out a series of exercises that made use of the gaze of a portrait that seemed to follow the viewer as he moved about the room. To be viewed by God in this mood is to become aware of one’s dependence upon him/her/it, which may be a route to the experience of love, but may also, as Kierkegaard describes this divine omnivoyance, induce a sense of risk and even terror. Kelly’s second elaboration of the theme of omnivoyance begins with Nietzsche’s disquiet and dislike of this allseeing God. God’s ever-present gaze, for Nietzsche, is in bad taste, even indecent. To tease out this non-devotional experience of omnivoyance, Kelly discusses a short story by Kafka that presents a debased image of God, an alienated figure, Odradek, whose viewpoint seems to serve no purpose beyond persisting. The story is poetic and defies summary; it is juxtaposed in this chapter with the contrasting mood of wonder evoked by Cusa, and as Kelly enjoins, it is in the recognition that either disquiet or wonder are real possibilities for us and that the contingency at the base of these moods depends on our sensitivity towards the practices capable of evoking them. The chapter, What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now?, from Rosi Braidotti, explores the multiplication of meanings and understandings of the human in contemporary academic and public discussions. She begins by situating these debates within the post-human turn defined as the convergence between post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism. The former critiques the universalist ideal of Man as the measure of all things, while the latter critiques species hierarchy. She then moves on to explore the post-human turn within a vital neo-materialist framework that envisions all living matter, including the human, as part of a dynamic continuum. This invites us to see the capacity for thinking as a distributed activity, related to both organic entities – like a healthy and sustainable environment – and to inorganic ones – technology, digital, and telecommunication networks. Thinking is the stuff of the world and not the prerogative of humans alone. Braidotti concludes by exploring post-human knowledge production in the new post-humanities, which she approaches as a critical and affirmative regeneration of the field, and not as symptoms of a crisis. What are the parameters that define posthuman subjects of knowledge? To what extent do new contemporary developments, such as environmental and digital humanities, introduce new visions of the human? What is post-human ethical accountability in post-human scholarship today? Dylan Trigg’s chapter, Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty,  looks at the theme of animality as it figures across the evolutions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre. Merleau-Ponty gave consideration to the animal and its relation to the human throughout his career. Trigg traces a path from the early framing of animality as categorically distinct from the mode of being of the human to later attempts to develop a language appropriate to the intertwining, the Ineinander,

Introduction 13 of the animal and the human. Merleau-Ponty’s later development of an ontology of the flesh provides a means of teasing out the co-constitutive relation between the two, such that humanity and animality appear as variants on a theme within a common world – not identical, but constitutively entangled. This approach resists the more usual contrast drawn in which the animal is constructed as radically other or as quasi-human, both of which, as Trigg alerts, ‘instrumentalise the animal for the sake of developing an epistemic or ethical value critical to human identity, and for this reason renders the animal a surface upon which our own gaze is reflected back’ (Trigg 2020). Trigg concludes that the idea of animality is irreducible to both animal and human but is instead marked out as the anonymity of (inhuman) life itself.

Part V: Sociality and the Boundaries of the Human In the final section of the book we encounter perspectives that explore a number of dynamics involved with the constitution of human sociality, as well as various social processes that serve to marginalize or dehumanize specific individuals or groups. The explorations begin by considering how this intricate collective dance is brought into being in our patterns of vocal and visual interaction (Cummins) and how the production of the default human leads to the double exclusion of non-normative bodies (Mitchell). This disjunctive normalizing is becoming ever more conspicuous in the mutual entanglement of bodies and technology that allow many of us to live in an illusion of relative autonomy that is invisibly scaffolded by technologies and practices that have become normative. But this production of the human has the effect of making all the more visible those accommodations and variations required when non-normative bodies act, leading to reduction, objectification, and the elimination in advance of any genuine ethical encounter between equal subjects. For the disabled person, the inhuman gaze might be construed as providing a way to better recognise those processes through which both humanness and disability acquire their mutually defining form and thus provide a route to transformation of both categories. The opening chapter of this section, Voice and Gaze Considered Together in ‘Languaging’, invites us to consider language, not as commonly understood, with its symbol manipulation and syntactic structures, but languaging, broadly considered as the whole-body activity that facilitates mutual coordination in face-to-face situations. As a reaction against an overly intellectual, rationalist view of language as a form of symbolic message passing, with syntax and lexis at its disembodied core, some recent work has begun to flesh out the notion of languaging, which points to many forms of embodied social interaction that give rise to the temporally extended coordination required to ground shared ideologies and shared worlds. Following Tomasello et al. (2007), the visibility of

14  Introduction gaze direction is mooted as a driver in the evolution of languaging, and past studies have examined in intricate detail how conversational interactions are constituted, in part, by a careful choreography of the eyes. Extending this work, Cummins in this chapter, considers the neglected area of joint speech or chorusing, where a body of people utter identical words in unison, as in rituals, prayer, protest, or on the football terraces. Under these conditions, it seems the obligatory link between voice and eyes is broken, as the unity of expression no longer demands sensitive visual negotiation between individuals. Developing this train of thought further, Cummins examines a related contrast which arises in comparing unison speech with the activity of jointly watching a film. In the former, the voices are synchronised, and the eyes are free. In the latter case, gaze is roughly synchronised across many individuals, while the voices are silent. Thus, as Cummins notes, we can identify three points that differ in their relation to the construction of a shared world: unison voices (eyes free) in which we enact a common subjectivity; the dancing eyes and voices of dialogue – a dyadic interplay; and the linked eyes and silent voices as we consume a shared narrative representation. In the second chapter to the section, Disability and the Inhuman, Jonathan Paul Mitchell asks us to consider how the category of ‘the human’ is often called upon without concern for how that category is established in the first place and how it is sustained. Correlatively, to call something ‘inhuman’ invites consideration of what that term means. It might denote something that falls short of, or violates, the properly human. Alternately, it could indicate something outside the human category. In each case, some notion of human is already presumed. Mitchell offers an insightful analysis of such presuppositions and the exclusions these entail: in particular, he elaborates on how certain ways of being become associated with the inhuman, how these associations are involved in the constitution of what is understood as properly human, and the deleterious effects for those associated with the inhuman. He addresses these concerns in three stages. First, he sketches how common understandings of disability might be thought of as ‘dehumanising’. Next, he outlines why responses to dehumanisation that appeal to the category of the human, or to humanity, are inapt. Disability is commonly understood in terms of dependency or diminished autonomy. This not only places disabled people in an ambiguous position with respect to the human, but also contributes to the very notion that ‘normal’ humans, at least in principle, are autonomous. Thus, while formally within this category, disabled people also fail, in these terms, to meet one of its central membership criteria – autonomy. Finally, Mitchell offers an insightful discussion of the relationship between bodies and technology to outline some alternative and positive aspects of an inhuman gaze. He suggests that all bodily activity is more or less technologically enabled, but that the distribution of these technological resources generally benefits typical bodies

Introduction 15 and overlooks atypical bodies. These arrangements contribute to the purported autonomy of the normal human. Noting this contingency of the human (and that it has an inhuman, technological, dimension) loosens its metaphysical grip. This makes possible inhuman futures that are more hospitable to bodies that cannot or will not meet human criteria. The final two chapters in this section make up the final part of the volume and all take up themes that, while significant, are underrepresented in contemporary discussions of social understanding and interaction. Like Mitchell’s chapter, moreover, these two contributions serve to effectively challenge any suspicion that phenomenological and cognitivescientific approaches to sociality are insensitive to, or even inherently unable to grapple with, the broader historical and political horizons of social experience and engagement. The chapter from James Jardine explores the constitutive role played by affect in the formation of corrosive interpersonal attitudes and marginalising social relations. Through employing phenomenological analysis of social experience, Jardine seeks to illuminate the cultural and political significance of affect as it intertwines with perception. Mark James’ chapter considers the inhuman gaze as a form of social dissonance and asks what it reveals about the otherwise invisible sense-making frames that normally structure meaningful social encounters. James’ approach engages the time-honoured insight that the implicit normative structure of human activity becomes most explicit in situations of breakdown and employs this strategy to explicate the undertheorized normativity of embodied interaction. In the third chapter of this section, Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness, James Jardine aims to clarify the affective dimension of certain interactions that lead to a sense of ‘social invisibility’ amongst social minorities, drawing upon and developing themes from Honneth, Fanon, and Husserl. Jardine first locates and analyzes the specific phenomenon by way of Honneth’s treatment of social invisibility as evident in behaviour that, while in some sense evidently responsive to an immediate interpersonal context, nevertheless expresses an attitude of nonrecognition towards certain persons immediately present. Drawing upon Fanon, amongst other authors who have considered racializing modes of affective perception, it is then argued that Honneth’s analysis underestimates the role of certain (dehumanizing) emotional responses in conveying to persons their ‘invisibility’. Jardine then argues that Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the emotions can be drawn upon to further clarify the role played by affect in enabling an ‘invisibilising gaze’ to emerge. On the one hand, Husserl offers a phenomenological elucidation and clarification of the manner in which emotional experience contributes an evaluative component to our perceptual experience of others. On the other hand, Jardine proposes that the misrecognition involved with social invisibility can be better understood by developing Husserl’s conception of a certain kind of ‘blindness’ that can afflict emotional life. Accordingly,

16  Introduction Jardine argues that a socially invisibiling gaze can emerge when the visual regard is accompanied by affective construals that are led astray by the misfunctioning of emotive habits and that Husserl’s work might be able to shed light on how such habits operate, as well as on the possibility of their emergence and transformation. Mark James’ chapter, What Are You Looking At? Dissonance as a Window on the Autonomy of Participatory Sense-making Frames, suggests that our everyday social interactions are organised according to participatory sense-making frames, which James understands as autonomously organised habitual structures that shape our being together at multiple timescales. While such structures remain mostly transparent to us, such that we have the experience of being well situated, James argues that this transparent background is disclosed when incompatible frames come into conflict, leading to experiences of what James calls ‘social dissonance’. He proposes that the inhuman gaze is one example of social dissonance and that understanding it as such can reveal certain aspects of our ‘human’ being-in-the-world-together that it both compromises and brings into relief. James’ analysis highlights a number of background structures and processes implicit within unproblematic and dissonant social interactions alike at the same time as it delineates an approach to cognitive science that is sufficiently sensitive to the role of habit in the constitution of human sociality.

Concluding Comments All contributions in this volume have tackled key questions across diverse disciplines and philosophical perspectives motivated by the theme the inhuman gaze, highlighting the fact that we are inextricably interpenetrated and co-constituted by the gaze of others. The themes of the human and the gaze lead inexorably to considerations of the boundaries of the human, of the other, and to broader consideration of socialities of various sorts. By pursuing the links between the (in-, post-, non-) human and gaze, we find ourselves confronted with issues that reach to the core of our shared existence and our shared world. More than ever, this question of what it is to be ‘human’ demands urgent attention, not only in light of the increasing influence of dehumanizing and exclusionary ideologies, but also as we enter the age of the Anthropocene, in which anthropogenic climate change, environmental destruction, degradation, and exploitation is causing the extinction of many species and which has the very real potential to cause our own extinction. While much important work has focused on proposing solutions to these pressing political and environmental crises, the current volume sheds light on a number of underlying questions that still remain neglected: questions concerning the nature of human subjectivity and the role of objectification

Introduction 17 in defining ‘the subject’; how we are to understand the psychology of the gaze and perception, and the breakdown and corruption of these in various situations; and what the affective, habituated, and linguistic aspects of our sense of one another as human and sentient beings might consist in. Accordingly, this edited collection aims to clarify the phenomenological, psychological, and sociological character of perceiving others as human or inhuman, in tandem with its expression in various social phenomena. It is hoped that the multidimensionality of the themes, the intersections, the exchanges, and the points of tension will generate constructive insights, connections, reconfigurations, and future research directions.

Notes 1. [Dedans le regard] ‘autrui me transforme en objet et me nie, je transforme autrui en objet et le nie, dit-on. En réalité le regard d’autrui ne me transforme en objet, et mon regard ne le transforme en objet, que si l’un et l’autre nous nous retirons dans le fond de notre nature pensante, si nous nous faisons l’un et l’autre regard inhumain, si chacun sent ses actions, non pas reprises et comprises, mais observées comme celles d’un insecte’ (Phénoménologie de la Perception 1945: 414). 2. It has been suggested that perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s target here is Descartes, not Sartre. In our considered view, taking into account the broader textual context and on consultation with Merleau-Ponty scholars of the highest caliber, it is clear that Sartre is the direct target and indirectly the Cartesianism which persists in Sartre’s account.

Reference List De Beauvoir, Simone. 1947. Pour une Morale de l’Ambigüité. Paris: Gallimard. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Bernard Frechtman (trans.). New York: Citadel Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 2006. The Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). Reprint. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Ratcliffe, M. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ratcliffe, M. 2012. The phenomenology of existential feeling. In S. Marienberg and J. Fingerhut (eds.) The Feeling of Being Alive. Berlin: de Gruyter, 23–54. Ratcliffe, M. 2015. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scull, Andrew. 2006. The Insanity of Place—The Place of Insanity. New York and London: Routledge. Shoemaker, Sidney. 1968. Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy, 65: 555–567. Tomasello, M., Hare, B., Lehmann, H., and Call, J. 2007. Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: The cooperative eye hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution, 52 (3): 314–320.

18  Introduction Trigg, Dylan. 2020. Beyond human and animal: Metamorphosis in MerleauPonty. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Zahn, R., Talazko, J., and Ebert, D. 2008. Loss of the sense of self-ownership for perceptions of objects in a case of right inferior temporal, parieto-occipital and precentral hypometabolism. Psychopathology, 41: 397–402.

Part I

The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology Perspectives on Objectification

1 Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects Dermot Moran

Phenomenology as a Transcendental Science of Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity What marks out classical phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) from other contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as from the methodology of the natural sciences, is its post-Kantian commitment to recognize and retain the ineliminable contribution of subjectivity to the constitution of objective knowledge of all forms. Phenomenology insists on the primacy of the first-person perspective and the critique of any narrow objectivism that ends up being what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘la vue de nulle part’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 82), or what Thomas Nagel elsewhere calls the ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). The human capacity to take a stance that transcends our situated, localized, subjective perspective is precisely what makes objective science possible. On the other hand, this very capacity risks occluding the underlying contribution of subjectivity that makes knowledge possible in the first instance and within which human beings necessarily dwell. Nagel summarizes the issue well: An objective standpoint is created by leaving a more subjective, individual, or even just human perspective behind; but there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint, however much it may extend our understanding beyond the point from which we started. A great deal is essentially connected to a particular point of view, or type of point of view, and the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to outright denial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all. (Nagel 1986: 7) What is left behind, as phenomenology rightly insists, is the irreducible, subjective manner of our experiencing itself, our subjective and

22  Dermot Moran intersubjective experiences in the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt), which is not the same as the world as studied by the natural sciences. There have been many critiques within the classical phenomenological tradition – perhaps most prominently in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of ‘the look’ (le regard) in his Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1995) – of various forms of objectification that arise from the subject-object structure of human intentional comportment and go on to deny or supress the subjective component. Indeed, on some accounts, every form of objectification has been readily characterized as inherently dominating, distorting, and even as repressive. Kierkgaard’s ‘truth is subjectivity’ is the banner for such anti-objectivist approaches. However, classical phenomenology, especially in the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, has a much more nuanced approach to the capacity of first-person subjectivity to transcend itself through intentionality into gaining a ‘detached, non-participant spectator’ stance, which Husserl sees as essential to the ‘theoretical attitude’ (die theoretische Einstellung, Husserl 1954: 301, 308, 310, 331) that was, he claims in his 1935 Vienna Lecture, inaugurated by the ancient Greeks (Husserl 1954: 326). The subject inescapably occupies a first-person perspective but is also capable of taking a reflective stance of its own conscious life and hence is capable of occupying another stance which gives it self-consciousness of its own experiences and can qualify them with respect to others’ experiences and indeed come to constitute an overall objective stance. Phenomenology, in its mature Husserlian formulation, moreover, not only insists on subjectivity as ineliminable but goes much further in defending a transcendental science of subjectivity. It is even – as Husserl puts – an absolute science of transcendental subjectivity. As Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations § 13: A science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our field of vision: a science of concrete transcendental subjectivity, as given in actual and possible transcendental experience, a science that forms the contrast to sciences in the sense of, positive, ‘Objective’ sciences. Also among the Objective sciences there is indeed a science of subjectivity; but it is precisely the science of Objective subjectivity, the subjectivity of men and other animals, a subjectivity that is part of the world. Now, however, we are envisaging a science that is, so to speak, absolutely subjective, whose thematic object exists whether or not the world exists . . . at the beginning, this science can posit nothing but the ego and what is included in the ego himself, with a horizon of undetermined determinability. (Husserl 1950: 68–69, 1967: 30) Here Husserl characterizes transcendental phenomenology as a science that is ‘absolutely subjective’, and he contrasts this absolute (i.e. fully

Defending the Objective Gaze 23 grounded) science with all positive sciences of subjectivity. Positive sciences of subjectivity, for Husserl, mean chiefly the then-emerging science of empirical psychology, and, presumably, all other human sciences, including the then nascent sciences of sociology and anthropology, but also economics, law, and political science. These ‘positive’ sciences of subjectivity all treat the human being objectively as a ready-made item in nature (as Husserl puts it). One can think of evolutionary studies that trace the origins of humanity from their hominid ancestors, focusing on such objective features as the evolution of a bipedal, upright stance. For Husserl, such positive sciences, while incredibly powerful, have an inevitable tendency to naturalize human existence, understanding it as an animality with specified forms of behaviour that can be studied in more or less the same manner as the observation of animals. For human beings to look at themselves ‘objectively’ as animals among other animals in a material, biological, and zoological world is straightforwardly to objectify the human, and it is also to obscure the nature and origin of this objectifying gaze itself. Even as empirical psychology practices a kind of detachment, it still approaches the human subject in a naturalistic way. While Husserl thinks all such objectification has a legitimate place in the procedures and methodology of the positive sciences, he also thinks this methodological approach is deficient and one-sided and needs to contextualized and clarified by a transcendental science of subjectivity. Husserl argues forcefully there is an urgent need to make the natural and human sciences more aware of the dependence on the subjective dimension. There is a need to recover objectivity-correlated-to-subjectivity. After all, who is the one looking at human behaviour from the objective standpoint? How is this objective standpoint conceivable? It has to come to self-knowledge of itself as a standpoint and hence as an achievement of subjectivity. For Husserl, the natural and objective sciences, therefore, need a transcendental justification. Or, Husserl puts it, subjectivity (for which Husserl often uses the Cartesian shorthand of the ‘ego’ or the ‘cogito’) is not a mere piece or ‘tag-end of the world’ (Endchen der Welt), as he puts it in his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950: 63, 1967: 24). Subjectivity is, Husserl says, rather ‘for’ the world rather than just ‘in’ it. Husserl speaks of human beings as ‘in the world’ and ‘for the world’. Constituting consciousness is both ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’. Indeed, ‘the paradox of subjectivity’ – explored in the Amsterdam Lectures (Husserl 1997), in the Crisis (Husserl 1970), and elsewhere – is that human beings are both for the world and in the world. For Husserl, human being is both ‘a subject for the world’ and ‘an object in the world’ (Husserl 1970: 178).1 Subjectivity is, Husserl insists, more than what is manifested naturally in the world; it is also the transcendental source of all ‘meaning and being’ (Sinn und Sein) for Husserl. That means that the subject is not just an object or a substance but a meaning-source, a vital centre which not only

24  Dermot Moran distributes all sense but also confers ‘being’ on its intentional objects in varying ways. Husserl lays out the problem clearly in the Crisis § 53: Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything that exists at all, is resolved, can obviously be nothing other than humankind; and the latter is undeniably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (Husserl 1970: 179) Husserl maintains, then, that phenomenology is a transcendental science that must trace every objective entity and event, that is, every senseformation, back to the transcendental ego (at least according to the ‘Cartesian way’), that is, to transcendental subjectivity, or, more generally, to transcendental intersubjectivity. Everything is constituted by the transcendental ego. Husserl writes in Cartesian Meditations: In the absolute and original ego of the reduction the world is constituted, as a world that is constituted as transcendentally intersubjective in every transcendental Ego. (Husserl 1950: 239, 1967: 64, § 29 (addition)) For Husserl, then, transcendental subjectivity, working within the network of transcendental intersubjectivity (and the interconnection between these two calls for a further clarification of intentional constitution), is a source of our consciousness of the objective world and its contents, so transcendental subjectivity cannot be simply another extant part of the world.

Transcendental Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity (The ‘We-Community’) Husserl proclaims in his Crisis of the Human Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology § 50 (Husserl 1970) that transcendental subjectivity can only be thought within an overall context of intersubjectivity. This passage may very well be the inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘The Cogito must find me in a situation, and it is on this condition alone that transcendental subjectivity will, as Husserl says, be an intersubjectivity’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxvi). Husserl writes: [S]ubjectivity is what it is – an ego functioning constitutively – only within intersubjectivity. From the ‘ego’ perspective this means that

Defending the Objective Gaze 25 there are new themes, those of the synthesis applying specifically to ego and other-ego (each taken purely as ego): the I-you-synthesis and, also, the more complicated we-synthesis [Wir-Synthesis]. (Husserl 1954: 175, 1970: 172) The mature Husserl, struggled many times to elucidate the relationship between transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, often – as in the Cartesian Meditations – resorting to the Leibnizian conception of a ‘monadology’, transcendental subjects belong to a sphere of transcendental intersubjectivity (see Schutz 2010; Zahavi 2001, 2005). For instance, Husserl writes in the Crisis § 69: But each soul also stands in community [Vergemeinschaftung] with others which are intentionally interrelated, that is, in a purely intentional, internally and essentially closed nexus [Zusammenhang], that of intersubjectivity. (Husserl 1954: 241, 1970: 238) The individual subject, the solus ipse, the self on its own, is at best a thought construction and an abstraction – what is concrete is transcendental intersubjectivity. In his 1928 Amsterdam Lectures, Husserl is insistent that everything has to be traced back to transcendental intersubjectivity as the sole ‘absolute ground of being’ (Seinsboden): Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only selfsufficient ontological foundation [der absolute, der allein eigenständige Seinsboden]. Out of it are created the meaning and validity of everything objective, the totality [All, cosmos] of objectively real existent entities, but also every ideal world as well. An objectively existent thing is from first to last an existent thing [Seiendes] only in a peculiar, relative and incomplete sense. It is an existent thing, so to speak, only on the basis of a cover-up of its transcendental constitution that goes unnoticed in the natural attitude [aus einer in der natürlichen Einstellung unmerklichen Verdeckung der transzendentalen Konstitution]. (Husserl 1968: 344, 1997: 249) It is not my intention here to delve further into the tricky problematic of the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Husserl’s oeuvre. This would require an entirely different line of investigation. Here I am introducing transcendental subjectivity as an intersubjectivity to get a sense of the manner in which the first-person perspective is never just a single point of view but is already integrated into an infinite network of other points of view, the open-ended ‘nexus’ (Zusammenhang) of intersubjectivity and what Husserl calls the ‘we-community’ (WirGemeinschaft, Husserl 1954: 416).

26  Dermot Moran

Embodiment and Embeddedness as Necessary for Transcendental Subjectivity Unfortunately, the problem of nature of subjectivity only gets deeper. There is much disagreement about the status of Husserl’s transcendental ego, and this disagreement already began with his earlier ‘realist’ students, such as Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, as well as by Martin Heidegger, who quite deliberately abandoned the language of transcendental subjectivity in favour of his dynamic account of concrete human existence or Dasein. On the other hand, post-Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, whether in Heidegger or indeed in Merleau-Ponty, retains a commitment to a transcendental approach, involving a critique of naturalistic objectivism and seeks to re-formulate the transcendental ego, either as Heidegger’s Dasein or as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body-subject’ (corps sujet). Husserl himself always insists that the transcendental ego is also embodied in the world. Going some way to meet the positions of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, transcendental subjectivity, in Husserl’s conception (especially as articulated in Ideas II, Husserl 1989), is not just plural and intersubjective, it is also essentially ‘embodied’, ‘incarnated’, or ‘enfleshed’ in the natural, social, and historical world. The subject is embodied and ‘enworlded’ or ‘mundanized’ (mundanisiert). Husserl uses a range of words for this ‘embodiment’ (Leiblichkeit), including: corporealization (Verleiblichung), incorporation (Verkörperung), and becoming human (Vermenschlichung). Husserl’s student Gerda Walther (1923) contributed the word Einbettung – ‘embedding’ – to first describe human being-in-the world, which Heidegger later characterized as In-der-Welt-sein. For Husserl, and this deepens the problem, the objective world is a product of an active, intentional, embodied agent acting within a historical open plurality of other subjects who already belongs to a world and is world-forming. All classical phenomenologists, then, stemming from Husserl, are clear that human beings are not just in the world in some material, spatial, and temporal manner but are also ‘world-forming’ or ‘world-making’ in a real sense (Heidegger uses the term weltbildend). To be a human being is to be in a world, which is in some respects the extension of one’s intentional existence. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, ‘being-in-theworld’ is an existentiale of Dasein (Heidegger 1962). Human beings are not just naturalistically in the world, occupying it, they are also worldmaking or world-forming. The ‘world’ is not just an a priori context for human intentional existence and flourishing; the ‘world’ as such is an extension of human existence, more or less as the spider’s web is spun from the spider’s own body. One of the great challenges of phenomenology, then, is to think of the human being not just as an individual, embodied in a ready-made world, but as a transcendental subjectivity caught up in the activity of making

Defending the Objective Gaze 27 the world in which it is embodied and embedded. The subject has always to be seen from more than one perspective.

The Natural and the Transcendental Attitudes Attempting to think of the world both as an objective milieu and as belonging to the constituting character of human existence calls for a double viewpoint. One has to oscillate, in Husserl’s terminology, between the natural and the transcendental attitudes. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty deftly summarizes Husserlian phenomenology in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ (reprinted in Signs, Merleau-Ponty 1964), where he talks about the tensions between the natural and the transcendental attitudes. As humans we live in this tension. The transcendental and the natural attitudes ‘see-saw’ back and forth (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 164). One cannot simply move to the transcendental attitude and adopt it as a permanent attitude. All life pursues its normal course in the natural attitude (in what Heidegger calls ‘everydayness’, Alltäglichkeit). In fact, the everyday world as we normally experience it, and which appears to be given just exactly as it is, is exactly the ‘product’ or ‘achievement’ (Leistung) of a very specific attitude, an attitude blind to itself, that Husserl names ‘the natural attitude’ (die natürliche Einstellung), introduced in print in Ideas I (Husserl 2014: 48). According to Husserl – as he articulated in ‘Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy’, his Lecture to the Kant Society in Frankfurt in 1924 (Husserl 1974) – for millennia people lived unquestioning with a deep conviction and orientation towards the world which Husserl was the first to identify and name as the ‘natural attitude’: The natural attitude is the form in which the total life of humanity is realized in running its natural, practical course. It was the only form from millennium to millennium, until out of science and philosophy there developed unique motivations for a revolution. (Husserl 1974: 20) Husserl elaborates: If we begin with human life and its natural conscious course, then it is a communalized life of human persons who immerse themselves in an endless world, i.e., viewing it, sometimes in isolation and sometimes together with one another, imagining it variously, forming judgments about it, evaluating it, actively shaping it to suit our purposes. This world is for these persons, is for us humans, continually and quite obviously there as a common world surrounding us all; obviously there it is the directly tangible and visible world in entirely immediate and freely expandable experience. It embraces not merely

28  Dermot Moran things and living beings, among them animals and humans, but also communities, communal institutions, works of art, cultural establishments of every kind. (Husserl 1974: 19) The natural attitude is styled by Husserl as a ‘basic belief’ (Urglaube), a fundamental, unquestioning faith or blind trust in the givenness of the world as it is. It is pervaded by a naïve and direct realism. To this extent, Husserl acknowledges that realism is the first orientation of the human mind. The world is ‘really there’. But once we identify that what we take to be pure unmediated givenness of the world is in fact the world as it is correlated with a very specific attitude or stance, which Husserl baptizes ‘the natural attitude’ (die natürliche Einstellung), then we lose our naivete about the natural attitude. Our eyes lose their ‘blinders’ (Scheuklappen), and we see the world from the standpoint of transcendental life. We are already in some respect outside that attitude – we are taking a transcendental stance towards the natural attitude once we identify it and name it as such. The systematic bracketing of the natural attitude is the first step towards transcendental phenomenology. There is no doubt that Husserl did not think one could do phenomenology properly unless one adopted the transcendental stance of the pure ego. In Cartesian Meditations § 15, he distinguishes between natural and transcendental reflection (Husserl 1960: 33; see Hopkins 1989). Transcendental reflection operates under the epochē and hence adopts the non-participating spectator stance: In transcendental-phenomenological reflection we deliver ourselves from this footing, by universal epochē with respect to the being or nonbeing of the world. The experience as thus modified, the transcendental experience, consists then, we can say, in our looking at and describing the particular transcendentally reduced cogito, but without participating, as reflective subjects, in the natural existencepositing that the originally straightforward perception (or other cogito) contains or that the Ego, as immersing himself straightforwardly in the world, actually executed. (Husserl 1960: 34) Phenomenology requires transcendental reflection. For this reason, Husserl could never have accepted the idea of a ‘naturalized phenomenology’ (see Petitot et al. 1999; Zahavi 2009; Moran 2014). Phenomenological description carried out within the natural attitude is entirely legitimate, but it is not fundamental because it does not question its own stance and its legitimacy.

Defending the Objective Gaze 29 Husserl is endlessly fascinated with how we break through such a comprehensive, all-encompassing attitude as the natural attitude and suspend its inbuilt credence or acceptance (Urglaube). The point is that there is a kind of viewpoint encapsulated in the natural attitude: it is an attitude that is not aware of itself as an attitude. In that sense, it is a kind of ‘non-view’ view – not precisely the view from nowhere but the idea that our experience simply ‘tells it like it is’ – and that there is no mismatch between subjective experience. For this reason, Tom Nagel, too, thinks of subjective experience as so direct that it is unaware of itself, and it therefore thinks it is a ‘view from nowhere’.

The Breakout From the Natural Attitude to the Theoretical Attitude In the Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl 1970) Husserl has a historical story about the emergence of the theoretical attitude from the natural attitude. He believes that an original ‘breakthrough’ of (Durchbruch, Husserl 1954: 319), ‘break-out’ (Aufbruch, Husserl 1954: 318) from, or ‘break-into’ (Einbruch, Husserl 1954: 267, 318), of the natural attitude took place in ancient Greek philosophy, led by a ‘few Greek eccentrics’ (eine Paare grieschischen Sonderlingen, Husserl 1970: 289), as he puts it in his Vienna Lecture, whose sceptical questioning led to the profound distinction between reality and appearance, between the world as such and the phenomenon of the world as it appears. The ordinary realm becomes a realm of doxa, a world of appearance, semblance. Now, it is irrelevant for our purposes here whether this ‘Greek’ breakthrough was the only one accomplished in the ancient world. One could argue for a similar breakthrough in ancient Indian philosophy, for instance, which also developed a mature scepticism. In point of fact, Husserl himself thinks only the Greeks actually achieved a breakthrough that broke through the panoply of the religious worldview and established a new form of universality. Be that as it may, for our purposes the key point is that, for Husserl, the disruption of the natural attitude by ancient Greek thinkers (he means specifically the Pre-Socratics and Sceptics) inaugurated a new way of thinking about the world, that led to the development of theoria as a kind of ‘wonder’ or ‘astonishment’ (thaumazein) at the world. This wonder is the source of Greek philosophy, and, of the theoretical attitude. One stands back from one’s beliefs and asks – is this really how it is? This is the birth of what Husserl calls ‘the theoretical attitude’; sometimes, as in Ideas I – he sees it as part of the natural attitude (see Husserl 2014: 9). Eventually, the theoretical attitude gave birth to modern Western (and now global) science, beginning with Euclid’s pure geometry (as opposed to practical applications of geometrical knowledge in land-surveying as employed by ancient Egyptians)

30  Dermot Moran as a kind of universal, ideal truth, valid for all times. Husserl writes in his Vienna Lecture that the theoretical attitude brings about a new way of understanding that goes beyond worldviews: In other words, man becomes a nonparticipating spectator, surveyor of the world; he becomes a philosopher; or rather, from this point on his life becomes receptive to motivations which are possible only in this attitude, motivations for new sorts of goals for thought and methods through which, finally, philosophy comes to be and he becomes a philosopher. (Husserl 1970: 285) In this lecture Husserl distinguishes the two forms of theoria but nevertheless sees them as interrelated. The one arises from the other. He writes: We must clarify the transformation from original theoria, the fully disinterested seeing of the world (following from the epochē of all practical interests, world-knowledge through pure, universal seeing) to the theoria of genuine science, the two being mediated through the contrast of doxa and episteme. Incipient theoretical interest, as thaumazein, is obviously a variant of curiosity [Neugier], which has its original place in natural life as an intrusion into the course of ‘serious living’ either as a result of originally developed life interests or as a playful looking-about [Umschau] when one’s quite immediate vital needs are satisfied or when working hours are over. Curiosity (here understood not as a habitual ‘vice’) is also a variant, an interest which has separated itself off from life-interests, has let them fall. (Husserl 1954: 332, 1970: 285)2 With the discovery of theoria, detached looking, a new form of theoretical life is inaugurated. No longer is the world simply accepted as it is, but people begin to live their lives oriented towards a new goal of the ‘truthin-itself’. The general idea of truth-in-itself becomes the universal norm (Husserl 1970: 287). Put in a Kantian manner, humans learn to live under theoretical norms that they formulate for themselves and which they recognize as binding on them (Moran 2002). No longer is life lived blindly. One is now in a theoretical, reflective culture. One has, to paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, entered the space of reasons. Fast forwarding several millennia, the theoretical approaches of modern scientists such as Galileo and Descartes not just endorsed this ontological distinction between appearance and reality but deemed appearance to belong to the ‘subjective-relative’ domain (so-called secondary properties), whereas ‘true’ reality (i.e. the primary properties which were determined to be fixed) was apprehended by the modern mathematical method. Thus, for Galileo, the book of nature is written in numbers; and

Defending the Objective Gaze 31 for Descartes, apparent properties of physical objects (the famous example of the block of wax in Meditation Two) such as colour and solidity do not belong to the object as such whereas extension does. Husserl discusses in some detail in the Crisis, the structural nature of what he calls ‘Galilean science’ (Husserl 1970: 23) as transforming the nature of the scientific method. According to Husserl, ‘through Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature itself is idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics; nature itself becomes – to express it in a modern way – a mathematical manifold’ (Husserl 1970: 23). The modern scientific outlook differs from the Greek philosophical attitude because it now understands what is real in terms of an a priori grid or framework (Heidegger’s Gestell) that forces nature to conform to its ideal laws. For Husserl, this scientific objectivism has powerful results but it inevitably will run up against the fact that its own status as an attitude has not been validated. A transcendental turn is needed stimulated by a universal epochē. Theoretical life on its own is a variation on the natural attitude, but the transcendental attitude is a radical return to the subject which seeks to validate and ground all attitudes. Transcendental phenomenology, then, no matter the major disagreements concerning methodology between Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, maintains that human subjectivity has a peculiar character, which means it is never (as Husserl somewhat disparagingly calls it in his Cartesian Meditations) a mere fragment or ‘butt-end of the world’ (Endchen der Welt, Husserl 1950: 63). Indeed, Husserl’s critique of Descartes is that he collapsed back into realism about the pure ego once he had discovered it. Descartes made the decisive breakthrough to transcendental subjectivity, but then immediately mistook it for a res cogitans, a thinking substance, and collapsed back into naïve metaphysics instead of exploring the domain of transcendental subjectivity. In contrast, Husserl claims to maintain the transcendental breakthrough by remaining in the transcendental attitude. Transcendental subjectivity is a new, infinite realm to be explored. It is a realm of motivations, intentional implications, and horizons that will undergird the positive sciences. Husserl always stressed the breakthrough to the transcendental attitude and the dangers of relapse which could take the form of a ‘transcendental psychologism’, a mistreating of the very essence of subjectivity, which Husserl discusses in Formal and Transcendental Logic § 99 (Husserl 1969: 250ff.). One of the great discoveries of Husserlian phenomenology is that the world as revealed by the natural attitude is not the world as such – the world as it is in itself – but precisely the world as intentionally correlated with the natural attitude. Furthermore the notion of the ‘world-in-itself’ is itself an idealist ‘substruction’ (Husserl 1970: 127). As Husserl asks in his 1924 Kant Society address: But how is the ‘being-in-itself of the world’ to be understood now, if it is for us nothing other, and can be nothing other, than a sense

32  Dermot Moran taking shape subjectively or intersubjectively in our own cognitive achievement – naturally including the character ‘true being’, which is conceivable only of senses? (Husserl 1974: 23) Before considering the relation between the theoretical and the transcendental attitudes, let us take a moment to consider the nature of attitudes in general.

The Nature of Attitudes in Husserl ‘Attitude’ (Einstellung) is one of Husserl’s operative rather than thematic concepts (to invoke Eugen Fink’s distinction, Fink 1981). In the Vienna Lecture Husserl defines an attitude as a style of life: ‘a habitually fixed style of willing life comprising directions of the will or interests that are prescribed by this style, comprising the ultimate ends, the cultural accomplishments whose total style is thereby determined’ (Husserl 1954: 326, 1970: 280). As Sebastian Luft has shown, Husserl borrows the term attitude (Einstellung) from nineteenth-century psychology, where it is used to mean ‘mind-set’, to refer very broadly to the overall ‘view’, ‘outlook’, or ‘stance’ of consciousness towards the world (Luft 1998). The Neo-Kantians (including Heinrich Rickert) made use of a related concept which they referred to as standpoint (Standpunkt, Staiti 2014: 83–107). The Neo-Kantians already had the notion of a ‘standpoint’ from which objects can be viewed, and they understood objectivity as an achievement of subjectivity. A standpoint is not subjective but was an ideal construction oriented to a theoretical goal, in other words, a teleological construction (Staiti 2014: 88). Moreover, the Neo-Kantians did not have Husserl’s notion of attitudinal change (Einstellungänderung or Einstellungwechsel, Staiti 2014: 84). Clearly, Husserl thought of phenomenology as itself only possible through a radical shift in attitude brought about by a ‘universal epochē’ (Husserl 1954: 395). Husserl distinguishes many different attitudes – including the natural attitude, the transcendental attitude, the mathematical attitude, the psychological attitude, and the aesthetic attitude. Every object is constituted through a particular subjective accomplishment that requires a specific standpoint. Thus, art approaches objects from one perspective and science from another. In general, the Neo-Kantians considered science to be a value-free standpoint, whereas ethics necessarily involves attention to value. Attitudes are adopted for particular purposes and are essentially teleological, although the natural attitude has a certain a priori hold on humans and cannot be said to be freely adopted, unlike the theoretical attitude and the scientific attitude built on it. According to Husserl, it is an essential attribute of conscious subjectivity that it can freely adopt different attitudes or approaches towards the world – as indicated earlier,

Defending the Objective Gaze 33 the theoretical attitude, the psychological attitude, the mathematical attitude, the aesthetic attitude, the scientific attitude, and so on. An attitude, for Husserl, is an all-encompassing stance towards objects whereas a ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung, Weltvorstellung) has a more existential connotation and suggests a way of living in relation to the world. There is, for Husserl, an indefinite number of attitudes that can be freely adopted. All motivation, willing, knowing, and acting take place within an overall attitude that is guided by specific interests. There is also a certain layering or stratification of attitudes, e.g. the scientific ‘theoretical’ attitude is actually a version of the natural attitude in that science has an attitude of realism and belief towards the objects it studies (Husserl 2014: 9). Primarily and most of the time, for Husserl, as he articulates in Ideas I §§27–31 (Husserl 2014: 48–55), humans are in the natural attitude (die natürliche Einstellung), which is characterized by having directedness towards the world in a ‘general positing’ (Generalthesis) and with an overall belief in the reality of things and of the world, what Husserl calls ‘belief-in-being’ (Seinsglaube). In Ideas II §§ 34 and 49 (Husserl 1989), Husserl introduces the ‘personalistic attitude’ (die personalistische Einsellung) according to which we interpret human beings as persons subject or amenable to reasons is actually more basic that the natural attitude. We are primarily in a personal surrounding world (personale Umwelt, Husserl 1989: 148). Husserl describes the personalistic attitude as follows: [The personalistic attitude is] . . . the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with another in greeting, or are related to another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion. (Husserl 1989: 192) The personalistic attitude is even more concrete than the ‘natural attitude’ or it is the natural attitude if one considers it to apply to the world of culture and spirit: This surrounding world is comprised not of mere things but of useObjects (clothes, utensils, guns, tools), works of art, literary products, instruments for religious and judicial activities (seals, official ornaments, coronation insignia, ecclesiastical symbols, etc.). And it is comprised not only of individual persons, but the persons are instead members of communities, members of personal unities of a higher order, which, as totalities, have their own lives, preserve themselves by lasting through time despite the joining or leaving of individuals, have their qualities as communities, their moral and juridical regulations. (Husserl 1989: 191)

34  Dermot Moran As Husserl explains it in his 1925 Phenomenological Psychology (Husserl 1977) lectures: I direct my interest purely toward the personal, that means, purely toward how persons behave as persons and behave toward one another, how they define themselves and others, how they form friendships, marriages, unions, etc. . . . If I do this, nature as nature is never my theme in all that, neither the physical nor the psychophysical. (Husserl 1977: 168) Generally speaking, as Staiti points out (Staiti 2014: 98), Husserl discusses attitudes in terms of certain contrasting pairs, e.g. natural versus phenomenological attitude, naturalistic versus personalistic, practical versus theoretical, evaluative versus disengaged, and so on. In his Vienna Lecture Husserl contrasts the theoretical attitude discovered by ancient Greek philosophers with the mythic-religious attitude which is a practical attitude towards the world. Husserl also speaks of an ‘attitude-switch’ (Einstellungwechsel) or ‘attitude alteration’ (Einstellungänderung). It seems to belong essentially to the nature of intentional consciousness to be able to adopt a stance towards things and also to be able to modify or alter that stance. It is an essential feature of consciousness that alterations or changes in attitude can be brought about freely. It is possible to undergo a complete reorientation of attitude, and the phenomenological epochē is a special form of this change of attitude that is necessary in order to enter the phenomenological attitude. Husserl speaks of the ‘natural-scientific attitude’ and the ‘naturalistic attitude’ (in Ideas II) and acknowledges that there are also ‘evaluative and practical attitudes’. The natural attitude can evolve into the narrower ‘naturalistic attitude’, which is all too prevalent in contemporary natural and social sciences, as Husserl predicted. Husserl offers several different descriptions of the scientific objectivist attitude. He does not use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, the view from nowhere (la vue de nulle part). In particular Husserl takes issue with a misleading version of the ‘detached observer’ position that is exemplified in twentieth-century empirical psychology (which is still embedded in the natural attitude). The natural attitude is reified or rigidified into the naturalistic attitude. The naturalistic attitude treats the activity of cognizing subjectivity as neutral – as a mirror and not as an active intervention that is responsible for the constitution of the object. A change of attitude is necessary for phenomenology – it brings a new perspective, which is both subjective but also ‘objective’ in that it is aware of its constituting function as an attitude.

Husserl on the Breakthrough to Objective Science With the ‘Theoretical Attitude’ As we have already seen, Husserl in his mature years placed a great deal of emphasis on the emergence or ‘breakthrough’ (Durchbruch) – or

Defending the Objective Gaze 35 ‘break-into’ (Einbruch) – into the ‘theoretical attitude’ (die theoretische Einstellung), which is responsible for modern science. The theoretical attitude is a ‘breakthrough’ from living in the mythical natural attitude. It was, for Husserl, a historical breakthrough of ancient Greeks (as he says in his 1935 Vienna Lecture): We must clarify the transformation from original theoria, the fully disinterested seeing of the world [Weltschau] (following from the epochē of all practical interests, world-knowledge through pure, universal seeing [Welterkenntnis aus blosser universaler Schau]) to the theoria of genuine science, the two being mediated through the contrast of doxa and episteme. (Husserl 1954: 332, 1970: 285) However, according to Husserl’s diagnosis, the modern natural (and following them the human) sciences, since the time of Galileo, have developed a methodological form of objectivity that is one-sided because it deliberately excludes the input of cognizing subjectivity. Scientific knowledge has focused on the object of knowledge and has deliberately denied or overcome the subject of knowledge. The biggest issue, and one which has largely been ignored by commentators, is the confusion in Husserl between the detached theoretical stance practiced in the sciences (which is still part of or arises from the natural attitude and the very special kind of detached stance of the transcendental onlooker on the other side of the epochē). There are, it seems to me, two forms of detachment present in Husserl’s discussions, and they need to be disambiguated. There is, first of all, a ‘natural attitude’ which can also support a theoretical attitude, and there is the disciplined post-reduction detachment of the transcendental spectator. In the remainder of this paper, I want to clarify the difference between these two forms of detachment. Let us consider what Husserl has to say about the ‘disinterested spectator’ or ‘onlooker’ (der uninteressierte Zuschauer), or, what he also called the ‘non-participating’ spectator (unbeteiligter Zuschauer).

The Disinterested Spectator (der uninteressierte Zuschauer) or ‘Non-participating’ Spectator (unbeteiligter Zuschauer) The mature Husserl uses a number of formulations, including: ‘disinterested spectator’ (uninteressierter Zuschauer, Husserl 1970: §69), ‘non-participating spectator’ (unbeteiligter Zuschauer, Husserl 1954: 331; Husserl 1968: 314), ‘pure theoretical spectator’ (Rein theoretische Zuschauer, Husserl 1954: 346), ‘sheer transcendental spectator’ (bloss transzendentaler Zuschauer, Hua IX 341), and ‘uninterested onlooker’ (uninteressierten Erschauer, Husserl 1991: 103). In his 1919 Natur und

36  Dermot Moran Geist lectures, Husserl says about the kind of exclusion required for the transcendental attitude: No knowledge, which we gain as phenomenologists, can depend on some knowledge or other from the excluded sphere. (The absolute independence has been secured of pure consciousness, according to its essential formations, from whatever scientific judgments of the dogmatic sciences of possible externality. The alteration of our attitude did not obliterate the external, the so-called objective in the usual sense, briefly put, the world as such is transformed into worldphenomenon, the worldly sciences into sciences of phenomena. We ourselves, i.e. each ego reduced as phenomenologically researching ego, are changed firstly, so to speak, into pure viewing [augenhafte] subjects. (Husserl 1991: 103)3 Husserl is very clear that this is a very peculiar mode of consciousness – the ego splits from itself and views its own subjective achievements. Furthermore, according to Husserl, human beings become ‘receptive to new forms of motivations only recognizable in this attitude’ (Husserl 1954: 331, 1970: 285): In other words, the human being becomes a nonparticipating spectator [zum unbeteiligten Zuschauer], surveyor of the world [Überschauer der Welt]; he becomes a philosopher; or rather, from this point on his life becomes receptive to motivations which are possible only in this attitude, motivations for new sorts of goals for thought and methods through which, finally, philosophy comes to be and he becomes a philosopher. (Husserl 1954: 331, 1970: 285) In his later works, from the 1920s on (the term does not appear in Ideas I), Husserl frequently speaks about the attitude of the ‘detached’, or ‘nonparticipating’ spectator or onlooker (unbeteiligter Zuschauer, Husserl 2002: 9), or, again, ‘disinterested’ spectator (uninteressierter Zuschauer, Husserl 2002: 11; and see especially Cartesian Meditations § 15, Crisis § 45, § 69). Perhaps the exemplary discussion of this concept is found in the Vienna Lecture. The disinterested spectator stance only becomes possible when the transcendental epochē has been performed to be free of practical engagements and interests and is in a position to understand the natural attitude precisely as an attitude or stance. The disinterested spectator, in its transcendental version, according to Husserl, has broken free of the bewitchment or entrancement of the natural attitude which is permeated by what Husserl calls an unexamined or naïve belief in the actual existence and reality of the world precisely in the manner in which

Defending the Objective Gaze 37 it is given in straightforward natural experience. The uninterested or disinterested spectator or observer no longer is captivated by the fundamental belief in the world or the general thesis of the natural attitude. As Husserl writes in his 1919 Natur und Geist lectures: For me as a phenomenologist things with all their value predicates, beauties, purposefulness, scientific utilities, and so on, are not actualities but purely phenomena. (Husserl 1991: 104)4 The disinterested spectator (i.e. the transcendental phenomenology) is focused on seeing the world as a constituted accomplishment, the harmonious unfolding of a stream of subjective appearances. In other words, the transcendental phenomenologist is supposed to be able to see the world as the outcome of the process of constitution by the transcendental ego. Husserl always underscores how difficult it is to achieve this epochē of everything worldly. He writes in the Crisis § 52: Our epochē (the one determining our present investigation) denied us all natural worldlife and its worldly interests. It gave us a position above these. Any interest in the being, actuality, or nonbeing of the world, i.e., any interest theoretically oriented toward knowledge of the world, and even any interest which is practical in the usual sense, with its dependence on the presuppositions of its situational truths, is forbidden; this applies not only to the pursuit, for ourselves, of our own interests (we who are philosophizing) but also to any participation in the interests of our fellow men – for in this case we would still be interested indirectly in existing actuality. No objective truth, whether in the prescientific or the scientific sense, i.e., no claim about objective being, ever enters our sphere of scientific discipline, whether as a premise or as a conclusion. (Husserl 1970: 175) He is clear here that the transcendental stance of the disinterested spectator is entirely different from the theoretical attitude as such.

Husserl on the Inhuman Gaze: The Stance of the Transcendental Disengaged Spectator But problems remain – especially about the unity and diversity of the ego that is performing these different stances. Husserl’s student Eugen Fink, in particular, questioned the ontological status of this transcendental spectator in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation. He compares Husserl’s theoretical attitude of the non-participating spectator to that of the figures in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who have managed to escape from

38  Dermot Moran the cave and see the sunlight and then return to the cave and see it for what it really is. According to Husserl, this ‘universal epochē’ is supposed to bring about a thorough-going objectivity – including release from the grip of the natural attitude, and hence from everything human and worldly. This is the truly ‘non-human’ or ‘inhuman’ aspect of the epochē. Husserl speaks about this epochē already in Ideas I as a kind of ‘inhuman’ stance – a suspension of everything human: However, if I carry out the phenomenological ἐποχή, if the ‘ego, the human being,’ along with the entire world as it is naturally supposed, is suspended, then the unadulterated experience of the act with its own essence still remains. (Husserl 2014: 154) It is clear the reduction brackets the lifeworld and all human actions. As Husserl writes in his Amsterdam Lectures (April 1928): The faith we have in our experiencing, which is at work in whatever specific consciousness one is now having and is precisely there in an unthematized and concealed way, naturally belongs, along with all its further modes of position-taking, to the phenomenological content of that moment of mental process. But such belief is, as such, only disclosed and not participated in by me as phenomenologist; as a moment of mental experience, it becomes thematic for me through the fact that I take up the phenomenological focus, which means that I move out of the naive and natural practice of taking this or that position, to one of holding back from it and I become, as mere spectator, an observing ego. . . . This describes in substance the necessary and consciously practiced method of access to the realm of pure phenomena of consciousness, namely that peculiar change of focus which is called the phenomenological reduction. By means of it our gaze was directed toward a principal aspect of pure phenomena of consciousness, which is the noematic (and about which traditional psychology did not know what to say). Through the phenomenological reduction intentional objectivities as such were first laid open. They were laid open as an essential component of all intentional processes and as an infinitely fruitful theme for phenomenological description. (Husserl 1997: 223) Husserl often describes this purification of everything human – this is an advocacy of a special kind of inhuman gaze. But I [must] immediately add that the universality of the phenomenological epochē as practiced by the phenomenologist from the very beginning, the universality in which he or she becomes the mere

Defending the Objective Gaze 39 impartial observer of the totality of his conscious life-process, brings about not only a thematic purification of the individual processes of consciousness and thereby discloses its noematic components; it further directs its power on the ego of consciousness, which it frees of everything concretely human, everything animally real . . . Rather, it has now itself become the intended real thing as intended only; it has become a noematic phenomenon. (Husserl 1997: 223–224) Husserl thinks that transcendental phenomenology takes a step beyond the human, beyond what Kant calls the ‘empirical ego’ and treats its own life as a ‘phenomenon’ (i.e. as the result of a constituting activity). He writes about the difference between transcendental phenomenology and any kind of psychology: While the psychologist as psychologist was from first to last included in the topic in apperceptive form as a person in the world, the phenomenologist as phenomenologist, on the other hand, is for himself no longer I, this particular person; rather, as person he or she is put in parentheses, is himself/herself a phenomenon. For his transcendental ego, he or she is a phenomenon of egoic being, of egoic life-process [Ich-Seins und Ich-Lebens], which in the radical epochē remains continuously demonstrable as precisely that ultimately functioning subjectivity whose previously hidden accomplishment is the all-embracing apperception of the world. (Husserl 1997: 246) I have been focusing on Husserlian phenomenology. But we can find much the same kind of transcendental detachment in Heidegger’s analyses in Being and Time. For Heidegger, the theoretical attitude is not ‘absolute’; the attitude of the mere spectator (often seen as the model of the knowing subject) is not primary. Rather our practical engagement with things in the course of our projects is paramount. Heidegger thinks that the very fact that our being in the world is governed or mediated by ‘mood’ goes against the ‘idea of knowing the “world” absolutely’ (Idee einer absoluten ‘Welt’-erkenntnis, Heidegger 1962: 177). As Heidegger points out, even the purest theoria has not left all moods behind (Heidegger 1962: 177). Indeed, Heidegger offers an interpretation of theoria as a ‘tranquil tarrying alongside’ (im ruhigen Verweilen, Heidegger 1962: 177). Heidegger makes the point that pure detached theoretical viewing (as takes place in objective science) is not a view from nowhere but in fact is a very specific stance of its own. Heidegger writes in Being and Time, § 69: In characterizing the change-over from the manipulating and using and so forth which are circumspective in a ‘practical’ way, to

40  Dermot Moran ‘theoretical’ exploration, it would be easy to suggest that merely looking at entities is something which emerges when concern holds back from any kind of manipulation. What is decisive in the ‘emergence’ of the theoretical attitude would then lie in the disappearance of praxis. . . . ‘Practical’ dealings have their own ways of tarrying. And just as praxis has its own specific kind of sight (‘theory’), theoretical research is not without a praxis of its own. (Heidegger 1962: 409) The critique of the view from nowhere, then, is found both in Husserl and Heidegger, as well as, of course, in Merleau-Ponty.

Conclusion In Husserlian phenomenology, a great deal of emphasis is placed on gaining the right mode of access to the phenomenon. Phenomenology proceeds in reflection and indeed in special transcendental reflection under the epochē. This higher stance is that of the non-participating spectator, but it is not the invisible spectator of the third-person ‘view from nowhere’. It is a new and higher kind of objectivity, one that is aware of how objectivity arises from subjectivity. Husserl then does defend objectivity and indeed, often quite provocatively, he also defends the ‘inhuman’ gaze brought on by the transcendental epochē. Phenomenology, then, is not a modern version of Kierkegaard’s ‘truth is subjectivity’. It does not reduce everything to subjectivity if subjectivity is understood in a worldly or mundane way. Husserl thinks the ‘theoretical attitude’ is itself built on the natural attitude but is determined by a purely theoretical ‘interest’. Husserl maintains the universal epochē is detached from all positiontaking. It is not critique in the Kantian sense, and most definitely not skeptical doubt in the Cartesian sense. It is a kind of deliberate absence of position-taking that is really achievable and which, for Husserl, brings about a new higher ‘objectivity’. The inhuman gaze, then, has its place in the phenomenological method. One must, however, be vigilant not to conflate the objective theoretical attitude (born in Greece and exemplified par excellence in the modern natural sciences) with the very special kind of non-participating spectator stance of the transcendental ego reflecting on its own intentional and sense-constituting activities.

Notes 1. Husserl’s use of the German terms für sich (‘for itself’) and in sich (‘in itself’) both echoes Hegel and anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of human existence as ‘for itself’ (pour-soi), seeking impossibly to objectify itself as en-soi. 2. Incidentally, Husserl’s discussion of wonder and curiosity here is close to that of Heidegger in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962: 216–218). Heidegger treats wonder as a fundamental mood that governs our approach to the world.

Defending the Objective Gaze 41 Curiosity is a kind of detached rootlessness that has cut off our original ‘concern’ for ourselves in the world. 3. Keine Erkenntnis, die wir als Phänomenologen gewinnen, kann abhängig sein von irgendeiner Erkenntnis der ausgeschalteten Sphäre. (Die absolute Independenz des reinen Bewusstseins nach seinen Wesensgestaltungen von irgendwelchen wissenschaftlichen Urteilen der dogmatischen Wissenschaften möglicher Äußerlichkeit ist festgestellt worden.) Die Änderung unserer Einstellung ließ das Äußere, das im gewöhnlichen Sinn so genannte Objektive, nicht verschwinden, kurz gesagt verwandelte sich die Welt schlechthin in das Weltphänomen, die Weltwissenschaften in Wissenschaftsphänomene. Wir selbst, d.h. jeder reduziert als das phänomenologisch forschende Ich, verwandeln uns zunächst sozusagen in rein augenhafte Subjekte oder, wie wir auch sagen können, in radikal unbeteiligte Zuschauer der Welt und aller sich uns geistig darbietenden möglichen Welten mit all den einzelnen Dingen, Kulturobjekten, Kunstwerken, Büchern, Menschen, Vereinen, Staaten, Kirchen, Sprachen, Sitten usw. Und aller darauf bezüglichen Wissenschaften, wie selbstverständlich. Husserl, Natur und Geist, Mat. Band IV, Husserl 1991: 103. 4. Für mich als Phänomenologen sind die Dinge mit allen ihren Wertprädikaten, Schönheiten, Zweckhaftigkeiten, wissenschaftlichen Nützlichkeiten usw. keine Wirklichkeiten, sondern reine Phänomene. (Husserl, Natur und Geist, Materialen Band IV, Husserl 1991: 104, my translation)

Reference List Fink, Eugen. 1981. Operative concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology. In William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Winters (eds.) Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology. William McKenna (trans.). Dordrecht: Springer, 56–70. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. John Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). New York: Harper and Row. Hopkins, Burt. 1989. Husserl’s account of phenomenological reflection and four paradoxes of reflexivity. Research in Phenomenology, 19 (1): 180–194. Husserl, Edmund. 1931. Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (trans.). Paris: Armand Collin. Husserl, Edmund. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Stephan Strasser (Hrsg.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. W. Biemel (Hrsg.). Husserliana, Vol. VI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1967. Cartesian Meditations: Introduction to Phenomenology. Dorion Cairns (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1968. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. W. Biemel (Hrsg.). Husserliana, Vol. IX. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Dorion Cairns (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. David Carr (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

42  Dermot Moran Husserl, Edmund. 1974. Kant and the idea of transcendental philosophy. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (trans.). Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 5 (Fall): 9–56. Husserl, Edmund. 1977. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester 1925. J. Scanlon (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (trans.). Husserl Collected Works, Vol. III. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 1991. Natur und Geist—Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919. M. Weiler (ed.). Husserliana Materialen, Band IV. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31): The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article. The Amsterdam Lectures “Phenomenology and Anthropology” and Husserl’s Marginal Note in Being and Time, and Kant on the Problem of Metaphysics. T. Sheehan and R.E. Palmer (trans.). Husserl Collected Works, Vol. VI. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 2002. Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktionen: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935). Sebastian Luft (Hrsg.). Husserliana, Vol. XXXIV. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. D.O. Dahlstrom (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Luft, Sebastian. 1998. Husserl’s discovery of the natural attitude. Continental Philosophy Review, 31: 153–170. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. R. McCleary (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A. Landes (trans.). London: Routledge. Moran, Dermot. 2002. Making sense: Husserl’s phenomenology as transcendental idealism. In Jeff Malpas (ed.) From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental. London: Routledge, 48–74. Moran, Dermot. 2014. Defending the transcendental attitude: Husserl’s concept of the person and the challenges of naturalism. Phenomenology and Mind, 7: 37–55. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Petitot, Jean, Varela, F.J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J-M. (eds.). 1999. Naturalizing Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1995. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Hazel Barnes (trans.). London: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred. 2010. The problem of transcendental intersubjectivity in Husserl. Schutzian Research, 2: 13–43. Staiti, Andrea. 2014. Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walther, Gerda. 1923. Phänomenologie der Mystik. Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag.

Defending the Objective Gaze 43 Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. Elizabeth A. Behnke (trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood—Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2009. Naturalized phenomenology. In Daniel Schmicking and Shaun Gallagher (eds.) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Dordrecht: Springer, 2–19.

2 Two Orders of Bodily Objectification The Look and the Touch Sara Heinämaa

Introduction Several discussions of the self-other relation in contemporary phenomenology draw upon Sartre’s concept of the look or gaze (le regard) and his related analysis of shame, as presented in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s early account informs current discussions of the origins of norms and normativity (e.g. Katz 2013; Crowell 2015a, 2015b; Loidolt 2019; Crowell 2020), but it also guides theorization of self-directed social emotions and the foundations of human intersubjectivity (e.g. Darwall 2006; Karlsson and Sjöberg 2009; Salice and Sánchez 2016a, 2016b; Skirke 2016; Dolezal 2017). Moreover, Sartre’s account of the shame-inflicting look finds novel applications in the fields of phenomenological ethics and political philosophy. These involve targeted discussions of gender and race as well as general analyses of the conditions of subjection, alienation and reification (e.g. Gordon 1995; Alcoff 2006; Guenther 2011; Ngo 2012; Staudigl 2012; Ahmed 2014; Dolezal 2015; Bergoffen 2018).1 The wide application of Sartre’s concepts is not surprising, since these concepts open an experiential-philosophical perspective on human relations, liberating the examination from the limits of strictly conceptual studies, on the one hand, and merely empirical theorization, on the other hand. His analysis sheds light on the complex intentional structure of shame, the intricate dialectics of the self-other relation, and our dependency on others in our self-identifications and self-evaluations (cf. Zahavi 2014). However, on closer inspection, Sartre’s conceptualization turns out to be more complicated than it may at first seem. Some commentators, for instance, argue that Sartrean shame is actually not an emotion at all but is a mode of being (Kirkpatrick 2016; cf. Dolezal 2017). Others draw attention to the fact that the Sartrean look does not have any visual or perceptual form but is merely manifested or indicated by perceptual givens (Zahavi 2002, 2012; Van der Wielen 2014; Crowell 2015b). Still others contend that the look that shames us in the Sartrean manner is not issued from our fellow human beings but is an effect of language (Reisman 2007: 207ff.; cf. Sartre [1943] 1965: 485–486; Zahavi 2002, 2010).

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 45 This paper clarifies the type of bodily objectification effected by the Sartrean look (Sections I and II).2 It draws a parallel between Sartre’s concept of objectification and another phenomenological concept, introduced by Edmund Husserl and developed further by MerleauPonty (Sections III and IV). The comparison highlights the fact that ‘bodily objectification’ is discussed in two different senses in contemporary phenomenology. Whereas the Sartrean concept accounts for the objectification of consciousness as human body, the Husserlian concept concerns the objectification of consciousness as living body (Leib, corps vécu, corps vivant), independently of the categories of human and animal. Whereas Sartrean objectification is essentially alienating and ‘degrading’, Husserlian objectification is evaluatively neutral, allowing for different axiological construals and both degrading and elevating variants. Finally, Sartre argues that the objectification of consciousness as human – epitomized by the shame-inflicting look – is our fundamental form of objectification and that it essentially depends on other consciousnesses. In contrast, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe a basic perceptual process in which consciousness constitutes itself as a living thing independently of other consciousnesses, human or other. Thus, Sartre argues that consciousness cannot be objectified without the assistance of other consciousnesses, while Husserl and Merleau-Ponty contend that an original form of perceptual self-objectification conditions all experiences of other selves.

I.  The Look The most striking feature of Sartre’s account of the shame-inducing look or gaze is its quasi-religious terminology. This feature has been noted by several commentators (Westphal 1998; Mulhall 2005; Cataldi 2011), and it has also been analyzed in detail by some scholars (Kirkpatrick 2013, 2017). For our comparative purposes, it is crucial to pay attention to certain characteristic paragraphs and formulations. In the chapter dedicated to the analysis of the look and the existence of others, we find Sartre arguing as follows: ‘For example, if I am wholly engulfed in my shame, the Other is the immense, invisible presence which supports this shame and embraces it on every side’ (Sartre [1943] 1956: 360). Formulations such as this suggest that the other whose look elicits shame in me and thus allows me to realize the second structure of my being – my being-for-others, in addition to my being-for-itself – is not any fellow creature participating in worldly affairs with me but instead operates as an invisible and immeasurable arbiter or judge, comparable to the God of Judeo-Christian religions. The onlooker is not a tangible concrete person but an immense presence that engulfs me and my surroundings from all sides. Thus conceptualized, the look is not the lateral and horizontal gaze, stare, or glimpse that we know from our daily dealings, but

46  Sara Heinämaa it is a dominating survey that is cast from above and overlooks the scenery. It is vertical, hierarchical, and global. Correspondingly, the other consciousness who objectifies me in this manner is not anyone whom I can perceive face-to-face or in flesh and blood and who simultaneously is able to see, hear, or touch me. Rather the onlooker is someone who is able to dominate my perceptual field comprehensively, judge all my practical undertakings, and thus delimit my world and everything contained in it, fellow creatures included (Sartre [1943] 1956: 350–355). As such, the Sartrean look is not just emotionally disturbing or practically paralyzing but is fundamentally unsettling. It both objectifies me and puts me under its spell. The religious overtones of Sartre’s discourse on the shame-inflicting look are not restricted to vertical characterizations of the self-other relation, also familiar from the works of other early phenomenologists, most significantly Scheler ([1913–1916] 1973; cf. Steinbock 2014) and Levinas ([1947] 1987, [1961] 1969; cf. Crowell 2015a, 2015b). In addition to being cast from above, the Sartrean look shames us by disrobing and denuding us and by dragging us down. We read: Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general [a feeling] of being an object: that is, recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of original fall, not because of the fact that I have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have ‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 384) Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in the state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state as objects. (Sartre [1943] 1998: 384) We all have perhaps experienced a violent emotion of shame at some point in our lives and felt its disabling power, or at least such experiences are possible for us and we can identify with depictions of them, whether literary or visual.3 The emotion is familiar not just from religious contexts but also from educational, military and medical settings, as Foucault’s archeological accounts so poignantly demonstrate (Foucault [1963] 1973, [1975] 1977; cf. Flynn 2005: 37–38). Sartre, however, is not describing an experiential possibility but claims to identify a necessary structure of all human experiencing. The shame-inflicting look is not just characteristic of certain psychological, cultural, or social situations or of specific historical eras but cuts across all such particular instantiations and fundamentally characterizes us as human.4

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 47 This vertical structure is clearly depicted by the already well-known example that Sartre gives of the look in Being and Nothingness. I am secretly observing what happens in a room by peeking through the keyhole in a closed door. Being wholly immersed in my voyeuristic activity and completely focused on the events of the room, I suddenly hear approaching footsteps in the hallway. The simple auditory percept – the footsteps – changes the whole structure of the setting. It opens a new vertical dimension in the scene and exposes me and my dealings to alien judgement. The source of this judgemental look is not seen or heard but is merely indicated or manifested by sensory givens. So experientially or phenomenally, Sartre argues, the look does not operate as a perceivable object or element within my world or a common world with others. Rather than belonging to my world or our world and contributing to its contents or structures, the look reorganizes the world and disrupts its unity (Sartre [1943] 1965: 391–394). The dark corner in the hallway which, before the echo of the footsteps, marked a convenient hiding place now presents itself as a risky refuge and trap; the keyhole that framed an exciting scene shrinks into a gap that delivers mere relics and remains; the stairways that offered an escape are suddenly populated by potential meddlers and sneaks. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window epitomizes the emotional shift elicited by such reorganization: when the direction of the lurking gaze is turned back on the two amateur detectives, an innocent curiosity is replaced by anxiety and panic. Roman Polansky’s The Tenant elucidates the upheaval even more poignantly by presenting a voyeur who first is occupied with his secret investigations but, when shaken by the rebuke, reprimand, and berating of his malicious neighbors, finds himself picking dirt in a hole in a wall. What is disclosed is not an eventful scene but a tomb of human teeth.

II.  Eyes as ‘Ocular Globes’ To describe the comprehensively destructive operation of the look, Sartre introduces the metaphors of hemorrhage and the drain hole (Sartre [1943] 1956: 343, 345, 350; cf. 473–474). The look is not a spotlight or an opening from which a foreign illumination falls onto me and my occupations. Rather, it functions as a center of negative energy that draws all living sense out from my world, channels it through unknown routes, redirects it to unexpected areas, and thus establishes a reorganization of the world, alien to me. The eyes of our fellow beings, the eyes that meet our eyes in the perceptual field, merely operate as manifestations of this power, not as its sources. More precisely, as mere sensory organs, eyes cannot ‘look’ at us in the Sartrean sense; they merely refer to the overturning look. And the look, rather than a feature, function, or relation of any concrete worldly

48  Sara Heinämaa being, is the very structure of our own givenness to others in embodiment (Sartre [1943] 1956: 340–341). To clarify the relation between eyes and the look, Sartre resorts to the methodological concepts of Husserl and Heidegger. He argues that the experience of the look ‘destroys’ and ‘disconnects’ the positing of the eyes as worldly existents. On the basis of this, he argues that the other’s ‘look hides his eyes’ and that eyes merely ‘seem to look’ at us ([1943] 1956: 346, 359, 368). The reasoning proceeds as follows: [F]ar from perceiving the look on the objects which manifest it, my apprehension of the look turned toward me appears on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which ‘look at me.’ If I apprehend the look, I cease to perceive the eyes; they are there, they remain in the field of my perception as pure presentations, but I do not make use of them; they are neutralized, put out of play; they are no longer the object of a thesis but remain in that state of ‘disconnection’ in which the world is put by a consciousness practicing the phenomenological reduction prescribed by Husserl. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 346, cf. 369) Sartre combines here two operations distinguished by Husserl. On the one hand, the concept of ‘neutralization’ suggests that the look redirects the intentional focus of experience from one kind of givenness to another kind. In this case, the outcome of the look would be analogous to that of picture-consciousness or sign-consciousness (Sartre [1943] 1956: 421, 434; cf. Husserl 1950b: 225ff., 261ff., 1980).5 Through sensory givens and percepts – color patches, markings on the page, auditory gestalts, or traces in sand – we would discover the look as an abstract structure or an essence. On the other hand, the parallel Sartre draws between the look and the phenomenological reduction suggests that the look involves a total annihilation of the world. For this outcome, the mere destruction of my world or the perceptual world would not suffice; what is required is a suspension of all sense of the world in toto (cf. Husserl 1950b: 91–92, 109–110). On the basis of this convergence, the look would figure as an extra-mundane or other-worldly fact or event (Sartre [1943] 1956: 368–369, 377). Sartre does not decide between these alternative formulations but combines both in impressive but paradoxical statements: ‘[T]he world flows out of the world and I flow outside myself. The Other’s look makes me be beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst of the world which is at once this world and beyond this world’ (Sartre [1943] 1956: 350). The look is neither general nor individual, neither plural nor singular, Sartre argues, but is ‘prenumerical’ ([1943] 1956: 374–375).6 This entails that the stares, gapes, ogles, and leers of our fellow beings merely operate as individual instances of otherness and our universal exposure to it.

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 49 None of such particulars, nor any combination of them, is needed for us to feel the look and experience the inevitably accompanying shame.7 The look can equally well be indicated by auditory givens, such as the steps that I hear approaching. But even more: the look does not even need a living ‘substrate’, human or animal, but can be manifested by mere material things.8 Thus, it can be felt in an empty forest and in solitary confinement, and felt as intensively in isolation as in the spotlights on a theater stage. A suddenly cracking branch, a movement of curtains, and a monitoring automaton all manifest the unavoidable and inescapable orbit of the look and do so equally effectively as the staring eyes of our fellow men and women (Sartre [1943] 1956: 346–347, 350).9 This is very different from the inhuman look described by MerleauPonty in Eye and Mind. Whereas perceivable things and events can merely manifest the Sartrean look and serve as its contingent substrates (Sartre [1943] 1956: 346), they return our own look to us in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. Painters, Merleau-Ponty argues, are in the business of tracing the routes and paths of human vision and trailing the movements that human eyes have to make in order to detect their targets. Thus, painters are able to feel counter-looks emanating from things and can experience things staring back at them (Merleau-Ponty [1960] 1964a: 167). This ‘inhuman look’ is intra-worldly. Its possibility is grounded in the fact that both our perceiving bodies and the perceptual things participate in the reflexive structure of the sensible world (Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1975: 134–135, 141–149; cf. [1960] 1964b: 168). Sartre also uses the term indication to describe the relation between a concrete eye and the look. He says, for example, that eyes ‘prove’ my condition as human in so far as they operate as indications of my givenness to another consciousness (Sartre [1943] 1956: 374). But he immediately emphasizes that this must not be taken to mean that the eye would refer to some separate existence or entity behind the look. So, despite religious language, the look is not issued by any divine being or any supreme power (Sartre [1943] 1956: 340–341, cf. 356). Rather, the verticality of the look is a structural feature of my own being for others, my very own relatedness. It is ‘an intermediary which refers from me to myself’ (Sartre [1943] 1956: 347; cf. Zahavi 2014: 212–213). Thus defined, shame is not an emotional response to the concrete look of a specific person or a group of specific persons but is rather responsive to the general fact of our bodily being-for-others (Sartre [1943] 1956: 367). It is paradigmatic for Sartre, not because it would be the most self-conscious of all human emotions or socially the most significant, but because it clearly and undeniably discloses that particular mode in which consciousness is exposed to alien judgemental consciousness in general (cf. Zahavi 2014: 218; Van de Wielen 2014, 60). What is shameful is not any particular act or concrete relation but the comprehensive deflection by which consciousness discovers its limits. The objectification or

50  Sara Heinämaa mundanization of consciousness, necessary for humanity, is thus conceptualized as disgrace and profanation. And Christian or religious sentiments as well as ordinary experiences of shame in the absence of concrete others serve as mere examples of this fundamental form of human self-consciousness. The Other does not appear to me as a being who is constituted first so as to encounter me later; he appears as a being who arises in an original relation of being with me and whose indubitability and factual necessity are those of my own consciousness. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 367, cf. 392, 398–399)

III.  Shame as an Existential Experience Sartre’s discussion of the look has two crucial implications for our understanding of our embodiment and bodily objectification. First, in Sartre’s analysis, no positive emotion – joy or delight, for example – let alone any epistemically significant affect, such as wonder or curiosity, can have the same existential role in our lives as shame, since none of these emotions disclose our vulnerability, powerlessness, and finitude as bodily beings, but on the contrary all demonstrate the vitality and power of our bodies. Whereas shame paradigmatically is or involves a paralyzing experience of basic bodily exposure, attraction and desire are invigorating and energizing experiences. The epistemic emotions of wonder and curiosity may first halt us, but this effect is merely momentary and is immediately followed by an eager approach towards the object or else an anxious escape from it. Thus, positive and epistemic emotions fail to disclose the stagnating and alienating character of our bodily being, the fact that this aspect of our being is not in our control and that we do not have direct access to its significance (Sartre [1943] 1956: 473). More fundamentally, the intentionality of shame differs in a crucial way from the intentionality of basic emotions, such as joy and delight, as well as epistemic emotions, such as wonder and curiosity. The main focus of this emotion is not in external objects, things, events, or persons, but in ourselves, our own acting and being, even though this self-focus is essentially mediated by otherness. On this basis, Sartre juxtaposes shame with guilt and pride (Sartre [1943] 1956: 350ff). But guilt is intentionally too focused to epitomize the comprehensive impact of the look, and pride, operating in the positive register, fails to capture the devastating, emptying effect of the look, the havoc that it brings about in our world. Thus, in Sartre’s analysis, it is shame that awakens us to our true condition as embodied beings and that discloses the structure of this being as beingfor-others. Existentially or ontologically considered, guilt and pride are just derivative emotions, grounded on pure shame (Sartre [1943] 1956: 383, 386–387).

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 51 Second, Sartre’s description of the look implies that bodily objectification issues from and depends on the other; in this way, ‘my body as an object’ is alien to my consciousness, which exists for itself (Sartre [1943] 1956: 302; cf. Zahavi 2014: 213). He argues: [T]he discovery of my body as an object is indeed a revelation of its being. But the being which is thus revealed to me is its being-for-others. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 403) Thus the Other has not only revealed to me what I was; he has established me in a new type of being which can support new qualifications. This being was not in me potentially before the appearance of the Other, for it could not have found any place in the for-itself. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 302–303) In Sartre’s analysis, our bodies figure in two distinct registers of being: on the one hand as ‘thingly’ beings for others, and on the other hand as action-potentialities for ourselves. My hand, for example, is a ‘bundle of bones and muscles’ for the doctor who studies its physical condition, whereas it presents itself to me as a power of writing, playing, grasping, and caressing. My toes may appear as unusually long and narrow to a shoemaker and as tensed and distorted to a physiotherapist, but for myself they present possibilities of climbing and dancing. For Sartre these two registers remain separate even though both characterize my being: ‘I am present to [my thingly body] without it being me and without my being it. What I cause to exist here is the thing “leg”; it is not the leg as the possibility which I am of walking, running or playing football’ (Sartre [1943] 1956: 403, 462–463; cf. Rae 2009: 56–57; Gyllenhammer 2010: 50–51). This is in direct contrast to the analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Both argue that human beings experience their body originally as intertwinements (Verflechtung, entrelac, entrelacement) of consciousness and thinghood and that this form of self-experience is independent of all our experience of both concrete others and abstract otherness. Experientially, a human body is neither a mode of pure consciousness or subjectivity nor a mere thing or physical object but a dynamic entwining or interlacing of consciousness and thinghood, subjectivity, and objectivity. According to both, all experiential givenness of others and otherness depend on the prior establishment of this structure of intertwinement, essential to our bodily self-givenness. Thus, it is not the case that I can experience myself as a thing thanks to others, but on the contrary, I can experience others because I have a body with ‘thingly’ qualities. Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty argue that the fundamental form of our bodily self-objectification is constituted on the basis of the phenomenon of double-sensation. This is the phenomenon in which the sensing,

52  Sara Heinämaa moving body turns to touch itself. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre explicitly denies the relevance and significance of this phenomenon to our understanding of embodiment. To get to the crux of the matter, we need to look closer at the phenomenon of double sensation and illuminate its intentional structure.

IV.  Objectification in Double Sensation Double sensation is a phenomenon in which two motivationally related systems of kinesthetic and tactile sensation, both marked by the same self, operate at the same time but are localized as apart from one another. This entails that both kinesthetic sensations and touch sensations are necessary for the constitution of the living body as well as a motivational interplay between them.10 However, Husserl also argues that none of these factors is sufficient, separately or together. What is essential to the phenomenon of double sensation is that the touch sensations involved can be apprehended in two alternative ways: one and the very same sensation can be apprehended either as my own lived-through sensing or alternatively as presenting the qualities or features of an external object (cf. Husserl 1950b: 75, 88, 1952a: 147, 155, 1952b: 14). If I press my hand against a cliff on a warm summer morning, I can focus either on the warmness of the stone or else pay attention to the sensation of warmth that at the same time spreads and intensifies in my palm. When I touch my own elbow, instead of a cliff, then my apprehensive possibilities are doubled. I can alternate between two attentive foci in two separate locations, one in the grasping hand and the other in the grasped elbow. Double sensation is thus double in the sense that it involves two different complexes of two kinds of sensations (kinesthetic and tactile) and, in addition to this, also two ways of apprehending these sensations (Husserl 1952a: 145–146, 153–154). Four apprehensive options in toto belong to the phenomenon. Husserl writes: ‘In the case of one hand touching the other, it is again the same [double apprehension], only more complicated, for we have then two [touch] sensations, and each is apprehendable or experienceable in a double way’ (1952a: 147, 154). The two hands pictured by Husserl in the second volume of Ideas (1952a) do not just operate as examples of sense organs but epitomize the intentional structure of double-sensation that, in Husserl’s analysis, is necessary for the constitution of all living bodiliness, whether human, animal, or other. Merleau-Ponty adopts this basic analysis of doubling and develops it throughout his whole œuvre. In The Visible and the Invisible, he introduces the image of the two lips constantly touching and uses it to describe our fundamental sensible bond with the world and its things. We read: The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines [ébauche] of which

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 53 it is made, its two lips [lévre]: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born by segregation and upon which it, as a seer, remains open. (Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1975: 136) The necessary role of double sensation is further illuminated by MerleauPonty in Eye and Mind by imagining a tactile-kinesthetic system which, by some ‘baneful arrangement’, could not touch itself or any of its parts. Think, for example, of the egg-shaped creatures pictured by Plato in his Symposium or the isolated brain kept alive in a vat in Hilary Putnam’s thought experiment. Such systems, Merleau-Ponty argues, are not ‘flesh’ (chair) enough for the constitution of living bodiliness, despite the synthetic unities of the tactile and kinesthetic sensations constituting them (MerleauPonty [1960] 1964a: 163; cf. Husserl 1952a: 150, 156; Moran 2009). What is lacking is the apprehensive structure of double-sensation that constitutes the body as a sensing-sensed duality. In Husserl’s own words, Touching my left hand, I have touch appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense [softness], but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form. The indicational sensations of movement and the representational sensations of touch which are objectified as features of the thing, ‘left hand’, belong in fact to my right hand. But when I touch the left hand I also find in it, too, series of touch-sensations, which are ‘localized’ in it, though these are not constitutive of properties. . . . If I speak of the physical thing, ‘left hand’, then I am abstracting from these sensations. . . . If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes body, it senses. (Husserl 1952a: 144–145, 152)11 Thus constituted, the living body is a two-fold dynamic structure in which the sensing and the sensed are intertwined or interlaced. It is not a chasm by which pure subjectivity encounters its other or a limit that it endlessly approaches without ever crossing over. Rather, it is a subjective objectivity that perpetually re-establishes its own thinghood by moving and sensing.12 Its constitution takes place independently of the intervention of others. On the contrary, Husserl argues, the sense of other selves is constituted on the basis of the sense of one’s own embodiment. The original givenness of a living body can only be the original givenness of my living body and no other. The apperception ‘my living body’ is essentially the first and the only original one. It is only when I have constituted my living body that I can apperceive living bodies as such. This [latter] apperception is necessarily a mediate one. (Husserl 1973b: 7, cf. 1950a: 112–113, 142–143, 1952a: 80–82, 85–87, 163–166, 171–175, 1954: 108, 109–110, 220, 217, 1973a: 7)

54  Sara Heinämaa It was mentioned earlier that Sartre rejects the phenomenon of double sensation in a categorical way in Being and Nothingness. This happens after the analysis of the look, in the subsequent chapter titled ‘The body’: [W]hen I touch my leg with my finger, I realize that my leg is touched. But this phenomenon of double sensation is not essential: cold, a shot of morphine, can make it disappear. This shows that we are dealing with two essentially different orders of reality. To touch and to be touched, to feel that one is touching and to feel that one is touched – these are two spheres of phenomena which it is useless to try to unite by the term ‘double sensation’. In fact, they are radically distinct, and they exist on two incommunicable levels. (Sartre [1943] 1956: 403) Sartre thus argues that the phenomenon of double sensation is ‘inessential’ since it can deliberately be made to disappear by the injection of anesthetic drugs and by the manipulation of external conditions.13 Moreover, our capacity of self-touching is susceptible to injuries and illnesses, as Merleau-Ponty’s own analyses demonstrate: a paralyzed limb or a body part appears to the patient without sensations and may be construed as a living thing or animal fastened on her body (e.g. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 66, 131). We are familiar with similar conditions from everyday life: our arm, which in the evening moved and sensed in an ordinary manner, may appear in the morning, after being pressed by our weight during the night, as an inert thing accidentally attached to our body. Such putative counter examples do not, however, challenge Husserl or Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of double sensation and its role in the constitution of living bodiliness. The living body is not a stable or fixed formation but a dynamic whole. Its structure, organization, and contours do not necessarily accord with those of the objective body, given equally to all subjects, or the physiological organism, defined by natural scientific concepts. Thus, an organ which an external observer would attribute to a person may not belong to the person’s living body due to disturbances in sensibility, kinesthesia, or bodily memory. On the other hand, external things such as tissues, instruments, and machines can be inserted and attached to human organisms, and living bodies are able to incorporate such attachments into their kinesthetic systems (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2005: 126–130; cf. Slatman 2014). More precisely, the fact that a fully constituted human being may lose some or most of her sensibility, either temporarily or permanently, does not undermine the constitutional argument put forward by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Neither is this argument shaken by the more threatening fact that in death each human person eventually loses all her sensibility.

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 55 In their alternative analysis, the basis of our bodily existence is not in the other consciousness nor in any things, utensils, or instruments but in the double structure of sensing that originally constitutes the perceptual field and ourselves as central parts of this field. This is the foundation on which we can intend other bodily selves, human and animal, and also our own bodies as experienced by such others; the foundation on which we hear ourselves crying or shouting and others calling and addressing us. We do not have two bodies, one signifying mere thinghood and the other pure potency, separated and connected by an abyss. It is the very same leg that kicks and shakes, the very same fingers that tremble and prepare for grasping and greeting. It is the same tongue which is capable of tasting and participating in the formation of vowels and consonants and the same lips that wrinkle and wither but still bend to whistle, speak, and sing.

Notes 1. Some of these sources also draw from the early arguments by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Franz Fanon (1952), as well as from Sartre’s own discussion of anti-Semitism (1946) and from de Beauvoir’s ethical discussions of the self-other relation (1947). 2. By ‘bodily objectification’ I mean the basic process in which we come to experience ourselves as bodily beings or spatial things. Bodily objectification does not entail that we would thereby be reduced to mere material things or physical objects. Neither does it imply any naturalistic or objectivistic characterization of us as physiological organisms, psychophysical entities, or ‘minded bodies’. We could also speak of the subject’s mundanization and her appearance as a worldly object. However, since we cannot assume that Sartre and Husserl agree about the conditions of worldly experience, such terminology might compromise the aimed comparison. For this reason, I have decided to use the term objectification. 3. Illuminative examples range from Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve (1425) and Rembrandt’s Judas Repentant (Returning the Silver Pieces 1629) to contemporary works by female artists, such as Maria Lassnig’s Hospital (2005) and Jenny Saville’s self-portraits. In contrast, Aleah Chapin’s series of group-portraits presents shameless joy. A curious variant is Ben Austrian’s Shame on You!, which pictures a dog shamed in front of a newly born chick. 4. One obvious reference point here is Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially paragraph §38 on falling (Verfallen) and thrownness (Geworfenheit) (Heidegger [1927] 1993). 5. In the second volume of Ideas, Husserl suggests that a neutralization of perception is involved with the empathetic experience of the other’s living body as a field of expression (1952a: 244–245, 256–257; cf. Jardine 2020). 6. The anonymity of the Sartrean look must be kept distinct from the two other forms of indeterminate intersubjectivity discussed in phenomenology. The look should not be assimilated with the ‘open intersubjectivity’ that, according to Husserl, characterizes all concrete perception and apperception as a horizontal (anticipatory) structure (e.g. 1973b; cf. Zahavi 1996a, 1996b). Neither should it be equated with the practical intersubjectivity built into the givenness of all cultural things, from utensils and instruments to ritualistic

56  Sara Heinämaa and ceremonial symbols and works of art (e.g. Husserl 1950a: 123, 90ff., 1952a: 188, 197ff, 1989: 97–98; Heidegger [1927] 1993: 164ff.). Both these forms of intersubjectivity characterize the givenness of a world, whereas the look marks a fundamental upheaval of the world. 7. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explicitly sets his own analysis of the self-other relation apart from the Sartrean one by writing: ‘The problem of the other is always posed by the philosophies of the negative in the form of the problem of the other, as though the whole difficulty were to pass from the one to the other. This is significant: the other is not here an other; he is the non-I in general, the judge who condemns me or acquits me, and to whom I do not even think of opposing other judges’ (Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1975: 81, n. 14).   Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is already well-known for its brief but sharp critique of the inhuman character of the Sartrean look or gaze (le regard), which divorces perception from communication and understanding. The main steps of this critique are crucial to Merleau-Ponty’s own analysis of the self-other relation and are thus worth citing at length: ‘The other transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact the other’s gaze transforms me into a [subjectless] object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. Transcendental subjectivity is a revealed subjectivity, revealed to itself and to others, and is for that reason an intersubjectivity. . . . This is the price for there being ‘other people’ for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the violent act which is perception itself’ (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2005: 323). For an analysis of the affective and emotive dimensions of the gaze that surveys humans as insects, see Heinämaa 2020. 8. Being and Nothingness presents several examples of things that may manifest the look: footsteps heard in the hallway, the rustling or crackling of branches in the forest, a farmhouse on the top of the hill during an attack on the battlefield, a moving curtain in a window. Some of these percepts are purely visual while others are auditory and still others are multisensory and synesthetic. Sartre also refers to our experience of robots and automata of different sorts.   In this, Sartre’s discourse draws heavily from Descartes’ Meditations. More precisely, the source is in the second meditation in which Descartes describes himself having observed moving things on the street, dressed in cloaks and hats, and on this basis concluded that the perceived beings must be human, only to realize afterwards that they could equally well be automata. (For Husserl’s alternative analysis, see, 1966: 33, 72, 350–351, 431–432, 1973b: 124, 1984: 458–459, 137–138.)   The Cartesian setting is reframed in Sartre’s early short story, ‘Erostratus’ (1936), which tells of a man who arbitrarily decides to kill six random people. The story opens with a Cartesian scene, only flavored with a misanthropic zest: ‘You really have to see men from above. I put out the light and went to the window: they never suspect for a moment you would watch them from up there. They’re careful of their fronts, and sometimes of their backs, but their whole effect is calculated for spectators about five feet eight. Who ever thought about the shape of a derby hat seen from the seventh floor? They neglect protecting their heads and shoulders with bright colors and garish clothes, they don’t know how to fight this great enemy of Humanity, the downward perspective. I leaned on the window still and

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 57 began to laugh: where was this wonderful upright stance they’re so proud of: they were crushed against the sidewalk and two long legs jumped out from under their shoulders. . . . Sometimes I had to go down into the street. To the office, for example. I stifled. It’s much harder to consider people as ants when you’re on the same plane as they are: they touch you’ (Sartre [1936] 1975: 41; cf. Sweeney 2016: 58–59).   In light of this early description, the account of shame that we find in Being and Nothingness performs a reversion: the perspective of the onlooker is changed to that of the targets, the indistinctness of the insect-looking others is transformed into the anonymity of the gaze, and the onlooker’s sense of superiority and unlimited power is recast as the target’s experience of degradation and captivity. 9. Sartre studies perceiving eyes merely as manifestations of the shame-inflicting look. Historical-philosophical studies, however, reveal also other functions that eyes have in experiences of shame: when shamed, we do not just tend to hide ourselves from alien looks but also tend to cover our own eyes in order to hide our feeling. The story of Oedipus displays an extreme version of this second function of human eyes: to cover his desperation, the shamed king blinds himself (Päällysaho 2020). At the same time, the story draws attention to a third function of eyes: their role as witnesses of the deeds that inflict guilt and shame. When the shamed king strikes his eyes, he cries to them: ‘No longer will you behold such horrors as I was suffering and performing’ (from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, quoted in Päällysaho 2020). 10. Husserl calls kinaesthetic sensations also ‘indicational’ (anzeigende) and touch-sensations ‘presentational’ (präsentierende) (1952a: 146, 154, cf. 1973c: 135–138). 11. The living body is not a merely material thing or a physical object studied by the natural scientist. Unlike the elements of the scientific universe, living bodies are essentially egoic, qualitative, and affective. The physical object, on the contrary, is a further constitutive achievement which depends on living bodies and their capacity to establish empathetic, communicative, and practical connections between themselves and work in concert. More precisely, the physical object can only be constituted by highly specialized communities of bodily selves. Its constitution depends, most importantly, on the usage of human language, or a language formally and categorially similar to human languages, but in addition to this also the application of the advanced methods of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. 12. At the most basic level of constitution, the sense of the living body (Leib) as a perceptual unity is not a linguistic or conceptual achievement for Husserl but results from ‘aesthetic syntheses’ (Husserl 1952a: 20–24, 22–26, cf. 7, 9, 18, 20, 1973d: 106–109). This means that the primary sense of the living body is not dependent on linguistic communities and their public criteria of success and failure of objectification. One crucial implication is that Wittgensteinian arguments against private language cannot single-handedly disqualify Husserl’s account of bodily self-objectification. 13. More precisely, Sartre also rejects Husserl’s discussion of sensibility (Sartre [1943] 1956: 415ff.) and his account of the constitution of the other body (Sartre [1943] 1956: 464). At the end of the same chapter he returns to the topic of double sensation and declares: ‘To have hands, to have hands which can touch each other – these are two facts which are on the same plane of contingency and which as such fall in the province of either pure anatomical description or metaphysics. We can not take them for the foundation of a study of corporeality’ (Sartre [1943] 1956: 469).

58  Sara Heinämaa

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60  Sara Heinämaa Husserl, E. 1980. Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, Zur Phänomenologie der Anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898– 1925). Eduard Marbach (ed.). The Hague, Boston, MA, and London: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Ursula Panzer (ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. [English trans.: Logical Investigations, Vol. II. J.N. Findley (trans.). London and New York: Routledge, 2001.] Husserl, E. 1989. Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1922–1937. Hans Reiner Sepp and Thomas Nenon (eds.). Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Jardine, J. 2020. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person. Cham: Springer. Karlsson, G. and Sjöberg, L. Gustav. 2009. The experiences of guilt and shame: A phenomenological-psychological study. Human Studies, 32 (3): 335–355. Katz, Claire E. 2013. Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kirkpatrick, K. 2013. Jean-Paul Sartre: Mystical atheist or mystical antipathist? European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 5 (2): 159–168. Kirkpatrick, K. 2016. Is shame an emotion? The Oxford Philosopher. https:// theoxfordphilosopher.com/2017/06/21/is-shame-an-emotion/#more-951 Kirkpatrick, K. 2017. Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, E. [1947] 1987. Time and Other. R.A. Cohen (trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Original: Le temps et l’autre. Paris: PUF. Levinas, E. [1961] 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Original: Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Loidolt, S. 2019. Experience and normativity: The phenomenological approach. In Antonio Cimino and Cees Leijenhorst (eds.) Phenomenology and Experience: New Perspectives. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 1995. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). London: Routledge. Original: Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1960] 1964a. Eye and mind. In James M. Edie (ed.) The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 159–190. C. Dallery (trans.). Original: L’Œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1960] 1964b. Signs. R.C. McClearly (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Original: Signes. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1964] 1975. The Visible and the Invisible. Claude Lefort (ed.). Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Original: Le visible et l’invisible. Claude Lefort (ed.). Paris: Gallimard. Moran, D. 2009. The phenomenology of personhood: Charles Taylor and Edmund Husserl. Colloquium, 3: 80–104. Mulhall, S. 2005. Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ngo, H. 2012. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington.

Two Orders of Bodily Objectification 61 Päällysaho, P. 2020. Ethics of Shame in Ancient Greek Tragedy. PhD thesis, University of Jyväskylä. Rae, G. 2009. Sartre & the other: Conflict, conversion, language & the we. Sartre Studies International, 15 (2): 54–77. Reisman, D. 2007. Sartre’s Phenomenology. London: Continuum. Salice, A. and Montes Sánchez, A. 2016a. Feeling ashamed of myself because of you. In C. Durt, C. Tewes, and Thomas Fuchs (eds.) Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture—Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Salice, A. and Montes Sánchez, A. 2016b. Pride, shame, and group identification. Frontiers in Psychology, 7 (557): 1–13. Sartre, J-P. [1936] 1975. Erostratus. In The Wall (Intimacy) and Other Stories. Lloyd Alexander (trans.). New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 41–54. Original: Érostrate. In Le mur. Paris: Gallimard, 1939, 79–99. Sartre, J-P. [1943] 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Hazel E. Barnes (trans.). New York: Washington Square. Original: L’être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J-P. [1946] 1995. The Anti-Semite and the Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. George J. Becker (trans.). New York: Schocken Books. Original: Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Paul Morihien. Scheler, M. [1913–1916] 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (eds.). Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Original: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (mit besonderer Berücklichtigung der Ethik Immanuel Kants), I–II, Neuer Versuch der grundlgung eines etischen Personalismus. Maria Scheler (ed.). Halle: Niemeyer. Skirke, C. 2016. Shame as a fellow feeling. In Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran (eds.) Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the “We”. London: Routledge, 187–201. Slatman, J. 2014. Our Strange Bodies: Philosophical Reflection on Identity and Medical Interventions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Staudigl, M. 2012. On the phenomenology of embodied desocialization. Continental Philosophy Review, 45 (1): 23–39. Steinbock, A. 2014. Moral Emotions. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sweeney, K.Q. 2016. The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre’s the Wall and Other Short Stories. Lanham and London: Lexington. Van der Wielen, J. 2014. The magic of the other: Sartre on our relation with others in ontology and experience. Sartre Studies International, 20 (2): 58–75. Westphal, M. 1998. Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism. New York: Fordham University Press. Zahavi, D. 1996a. Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität—Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. [English trans.: Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique. Elisabeth A. Behnke (trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001.] Zahavi, D. 1996b. Husserl’s intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 27 (3): 228–245.

62  Sara Heinämaa Zahavi, D. 2002. Intersubjectivity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Alter, 19: 265–281. Zahavi, D. 2010. Shame and the exposed self. In Jonathan Webber (ed.) Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism. London: Routledge, 211–226. Zahavi, D. 2012. Self, consciousness, and shame. In Dan Zahavi (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 304–323. Zahavi, D. 2014. Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3 On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze Timothy Mooney

In the Western philosophical tradition, the dream of a direct and infallible contact with reality at its deepest level was first articulated by Parmenides and is associated most famously with Plato, who posits an intellectual intuition of the forms as they are in and of themselves. As we also know, the latter is willing to criticise such a dream in a sustained auto-critique. In certain strains of monotheism, moreover, we encounter the notion of a divine awareness for which everything else lies in complete and open view. God is that being who sees into all things and all hearts. As the conceit and guiding idea of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’, this notion in its modern incarnation is of the scientific determination of reality without remainder. If the ideal of a panoptical perception is of a translucent object shot through by an infinity of gazes that leave nothing hidden, the ideal of scientific perception is of an object that is fully determined in theoretical terms, adequately comprehended as an intersection or meeting point of causalities. On this view, everything is ultimately determinable in principle if not yet in fact (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 71–74). The contemporary notion of perception proper as directed towards the fully scientific image has been popularised by Paul and Patricia Churchland and was foreshadowed by Richard Avenarius. In Part I of this essay I begin by explicating the eliminativist view of perception in broad strokes. I concentrate on Paul Churchland’s Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), since this is the best known and indeed the classic manifesto of eliminative materialism. This approach has the remarkable aim of overcoming what it characterises as our neolithic legacy. Beliefs about world, experience, and self are eliminated rather than reduced to causal processes, since they will be supplanted by properly scientific accounts showing that they have no purchase on true being in the first place. With a dramatic shift in and expansion of human perceptual consciousness, we shall at last be in contact with such being, having fully emerged from the cave of unknowing. In Part II, I address the phenomenological response which will stress the irreducibly perspectival character of perceptual experience and knowledge. It will also stress the indispensability of the lived world or

64  Timothy Mooney lifeworld within which experience and knowledge take root and grow. And our bonds with this world do not comprise a totality that can be brought to light and dispensed with. This is not to espouse primitivism and the conversion of illusion into fate, for an approach drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty can do more. It can show that the eliminativist gaze is and must be a transient one. Any perceiver who is able to negotiate a world and who is motivated to do so works with beliefs that cannot be jettisoned on the one hand and that are eminently warranted on the other. Two such fundamental beliefs – that the world is a realm of possibilities and that some of these are for oneself and for others – are inseparable from one’s awareness of agency. And this in turn cannot be divorced from one’s sub-reflective gearing into the macroscopic milieu.

I John Scanlon has pointed out that Avenarius first posited the supposedly ‘natural’ conception of the world in 1891. It is against this that Husserl was writing when he began to sketch out our naturally lived attitude in 1913 (Husserl 1982: 51ff). According to Avenarius, I take myself as existing with my thoughts and feelings in the midst of an environment whose component parts stand in various relations of dependence to each other. In this environment there are fellow human beings who speak and act like me, who seek out and avoid things, and who explain the reasons for their deeds and omissions. They are creatures like me, and I am a creature like them. For Avenarius, however, the claim that their movements and sounds have more than a mechanical significance is a mere hypothesis. All that can properly be experienced is the coordination of the central nervous system with its surroundings. Instead of traditional reflection or psychological introspection, we should open up our skulls. Were a multitude of mirrors to be arranged in the right ways, I could perceive the functioning of my own nervous system and those of others. The level of scientific perception and none other can be the object of rigorous knowledge (Avenarius 1912).1 As Scanlon remarks, this cure would repress subjectivity so completely as to leave a world from which we are effectively alienated. The being that approaches and shakes my hand is no longer to be regarded as a psychophysical unity that is aware of me and of the wider world (Scanlon 1988: 225, 227–228). I have referred to Avenarius because his stark vision anticipates what contemporary eliminativism takes as our perceptual bedrock. For Paul Churchland, even the physicalist strategy of reduction or translation of certain beliefs into causal processes stops short of scientific rigour. This is because our everyday beliefs in a self and its world are so illusory that they cannot comprise anything reducible to the physical level. They are the naively theoretical posits of a folk-psychology that can someday be replaced by a fully scientific

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 65 account of how things are. Embracing this fully scientific account would alter our perceptual lives radically. Our perceptual judgements are, as we know, laden with theory and cannot provide a conceptually neutral level of factual information. But they should still be laden with the best theory available. This does not have to mean that a foundation at the level of judgement is absolute, so we are not denied a continuing and critical contact with reality. A network of belief retains systematic causal connections with reality, and these connections also carry information about reality. Churchland points to a possible objection – namely, that the common-sense conception is narrower and less powerful than the scientific one, but not fundamentally false. Though partial and selective, it is not a misrepresentation. But as an attempt to explain the facts, however, he sees it as misconceiving them fundamentally. The Ptolomaic question of what makes the starry sphere of the heavens turn was one that ruled out of court any theory that denied the motion around the earth and the very existence of that sphere (Churchland 1979: 34–36, 43–44).2 Once we explain the movements of the planets and their distances from each other and the sun, following Copernicus and his successors, a substantial transformation in the processing of visual information will become possible. We can learn to actually perceive the world as scientific theory bids us think about it. And it is just this sort of transformation writ large that should apply to all of our habits of perception. Our sense apparatuses should be understood as instruments for detecting and measuring, and the workings of the central nervous system and the brain as explanations of those conscious activities that are furnishing these explanations. If this is a startling shift, there will be the satisfaction of perceptually apprehending reality in ways that reflect more deeply and accurately its structure, that bring us closer to the ideal of seeing it as it ‘really is’ (Churchland 1979: 36). On this eliminativist view, those of us who have been educated scientifically can gradually come to identify the taxonomy of pre-scientific beliefs embodied in interpretative functions, the functions that were implanted in childhood when we learnt to look and think and talk as our elders did. As and when these components of our ‘Neolithic legacy’ are evaluated and criticised and replaced with scientific accounts, our imagination will be bound less and less by the commonsense taxonomy that we can correctly hope to transcend (Churchland 1979: 35, 39). Scientific explanation can demythologise perception and ultimately deliver a consistent materialism without denying the mental, but without the burden of defending persons, or psychophysical identities with beliefs. Any theory positing persons is another illusion, part of a moderately detailed folk-psychology about what makes us function. So is the very idea of a belief, which can be displaced together with desires and propositional attitudes. This is by virtue of the ever-advancing tide of neuroscience. The most positive ramification of eliminativism for its proponent is that, with a ‘richly possible’ shift dramatically changing and

66  Timothy Mooney expanding the range and depth of our perceptual consciousness, ‘we shall be properly at home in our physical universe for the very first time’ as Churchland puts it and expects (Churchland 1979: 35, 15, 91–93, 111, 1981: 70–72, 90).

II For some this vision is quite understandably unappealing and dangerous. But the fact that a theory has consequences that are unpleasant and fearful does not make it untrue. Some criticisms of the theory are applicable to physicalism in general – namely, that it explains neither our first-hand experiences nor our everyday beliefs. Other objections refer to the fact that, in the absence of a conclusive theoretical command of everything that includes a comprehensive neuroscience, the theory is itself a mere belief and not one that is adequately justified. Merleau-Ponty’s approach would highlight the same deficiencies. The whole thrust of eliminativism is to dismiss our finitude, our situatedness, and expose the inherently inadequate nature of perception. It supposes that scientific reflection can be carried fully into everyday practice and utterly change our perceptual lives. In fact, eliminativism combines both strands of what Merleau-Ponty calls objective thought – the empiricist or scientific realist thesis that everything is explainable physically and the intellectualist or conceptualist thesis that the conceptual scheme within which we operate can determine the way that we experience things. Once our concepts match up with the causal processes, we will have abolished the distinction between appearance and reality. But this reflective project of attaining a comprehensive scientific gaze is doomed from the outset, not least because it passes over our finitude: [O]f all philosophies, only phenomenology speaks of a transcendental field. This word signifies that reflection never has the entire world and the plurality of monads spread out and objectified before its gaze, that it only ever has a partial view and a limited power. . . . [T]he meditating Ego can never suppress its inherence in an individual subject who knows all things from a particular perspective. Reflection can never make it the case that I cease to perceive the sun on a hazy day as hovering two hundred paces away, that I cease to see the sun ‘rise’ and ‘set’, or that I cease to think with the cultural instruments that were provided by my upbringing, my previous efforts, and my history. Thus, I never actually bring together or simultaneously awaken all of the originary thoughts that contribute to my perception or to my present conviction. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 62) Eliminative materialism is committed to a telos posited in the intellectualist version of objectivism. The complete making-explicit of the universe

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 67 is presumptively achieved in an ideal dimension that we are tantalisingly close to actualising. In their own inimitable way, eliminativists ‘judge what is by what ought to be, or by what the idea of knowledge requires’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 62). Such a view has complete faith and confidence in conceptual presentism, that is to say, in a pan-archaeological and panoptical mission of search and destroy that will unearth and enumerate all so-called folk-psychological concepts and matching beliefs. Like the proverbial vampires, these will be arrayed before the scientist’s gaze and wither away in the full daylight of unprejudiced presence. For the phenomenologist however, the forgotten but still operative convictions or sedimented beliefs and correlative modes of practical comportment passed down to us either explicitly or unawares cannot be assembled and simultaneously brought to consciousness, and some cannot be reactivated at all (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 62–64, 249–252). Our beliefs and practices are interwoven with an historical and socio-cultural lifeworld that lies behind us rather than in front of us. It is a background rather than an object, and as such recalcitrant to comprehensive thematisation by the scientistic excavator. The phenomenologist assigns it its proper dignity in recognising that the most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction (Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxvii). We live in the certainty of a world whose significance cannot be finally unpacked because it is the horizon of horizons for every attitude within which objects can be given in the first place (Husserl 1970: 142–143). As with the past, so with the future – or more properly the possible futures – of humanly effected changes that will in their turn feed into our evaluations of this or that historical past and serve to modify its current significance. Our lifeworld is inherently open-ended and evolving, so no taxonomy is feasible and no description can be final (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 361–362, 475–476). As stated, thus far, none of this amounts to an adequate response. We have to be able to distinguish between beliefs whose loss would be of no great consequence, those that must be carefully qualified, and those that are eminently justified. As Jerry Fodor has contended, purely folkpsychological beliefs are mere platitudes and can easily be dispensed with. But other everyday beliefs should always be acted on, like the conviction that the risk of sunburn is at its greatest when the sun is at its highest. Here we mix truth and illusion, since we do see the sun as rising and setting for much of the time. This is hard to avoid, since the motion and rest of things and my own movement and stasis are experienced as relative to something that does not move or rest. I do not encounter the earth as a body at rest, since there is nothing further in experience that it rests on, and it is not encountered as a body in motion, since it is never experienced as arriving or departing from anywhere (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 453). Yet science with its technically enhanced observations and predictive accuracy does tell me that it orbits the sun in a moving galaxy in an

68  Timothy Mooney expanding universe; here, an appeal to lived experience is weak indeed when we look for something more than a motivational story about our everyday comportment. Other convictions operative in experience do not mislead us, and in looking for causal stories beneath them we should not thereby end up displacing them. Fodor has pointed out that many of our everyday beliefs about things and others are not only justified but have the deductive structure of science, if not of research science. Thus, we are right to believe that water is something that we can drink, bathe in, and sail on. When we go on to separate the fresh water that we can drink from the seawater that we cannot, this belief precedes the scientific theoretical knowledge of the sodium chloride that is dissolved in the latter (Fodor 1987: 3–7, 20–21). Here he is touching on something that phenomenology can and does say more about, foregrounding as it does our beliefs about things in nature and about the artefacts that we encounter and that some of us fashion ourselves. In thematic perception we cannot help recognising that the cup is for drinking water out of and the boat is for sailing on it (Husserl 1989: 193, 197–199). Phenomenology will also explore our unthematic dealings with implements. Before getting to this, however, I want to turn to the idea of an enduring scientific gaze that might displace its folk-psychological predecessor. If we could achieve a complete elimination, according to Gregory McCulloch, we would change ourselves beyond recognition in the process. We would no longer talk about furniture, for it does not describe the true and ultimate structure of reality. We would stop up our eyes and our ears to keep out the false colours and noises because secondary qualities are not really in the things themselves, and we would stop regarding others as persons because folk-psychology is radically misleading. For McCulloch, this cannot be regarded as an intellectually responsible, balanced, or sane reaction to the undoubtedly immense advances of contemporary science McCulloch 1995: 219–220). The problem is as much with eliminativism’s coherence and plausibility as with what some would see as its sinister implications. Churchland advocates what he calls a sober position on the social side. The mass social changes resulting from a radical elimination are not feasible in the short term and must proceed gradually over centuries. Concepts that are used in common sense can evolve towards whatever counterparts they may come to have in the wider conception supplied by science. Expressions in the less adequate theory will be redefined in terms of the expressions of its more adequate and comprehensive successor (Churchland 1979: 36). It might be thought that this would meet a certain objection – namely, that the world of such future perceivers (allowing that it could count as a world) would be heterogeneous to ours, and therefore unrecognisable as a world. If we could suddenly perceive it just as they do, we could never occupy both standpoints simultaneously, that is, experience both their world and our own. In principle neither could

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 69 be recognised as a world that differs from the one that is ours at the time. An incremental story would have the advantage of letting us imagine our journey towards such a future standpoint. Perceiver A may not recognise F’s, but can recognise C’s, who in turn can recognise D’s and so on. With privileged individuals Churchland takes things as much less sober. Those who are educated properly have no need to stop up their eyes or their ears. Secondary qualities can now be comprehended through colour science and acoustics and so forth, and as sensational phenomena they do function signitively in that they allow us to get to the underlying reality. In our perceptions we can go through them and beyond them. But if we strip away these qualities without remainder, it will surely be impossible to apprehend an intrinsic nature lying behind them. As Whitehead puts it, such a nature would be ‘a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’ (Whitehead 1985: 68–69, 61–65, 72–73). The eliminativist will retort that we do not require the provision of sensuous presentations all the way down. In properly beholding the colours and sounds we are drawing on the formulae and equations that express their causal substrata, knowing how they are illusory (if useful) by-products of the relevant substrata in both perceiver and perceived. In Churchland’s view it is both a highly instructive and an entertaining diversion to perceive the ‘theoretical’ in the ‘manifest,’ to seek ‘to make it emerge like a chameleon suddenly perceived against the background’ (Churchland 1979: 36). We intuit genuine reality in scientific interpretations, seeing beyond and behind the domain of images that, as described in the Timaeus ‘is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is’ (Plato 1963: 1161, Timaeus 28a).

III I now turn to the question of practical perception in the natural attitude that does cease to underpin the scientific attitude. On the ambitious eliminativist narrative it is ‘richly possible’ that everything in the co-present background of the perceptual field could be finally interpreted by way of scientific concepts. Anything coming into earshot or sight or contact in this field or the next one could be grasped through exclusively scientific filters. It is not obvious to me that this leaves space for the falsification of scientific theories, since it appears to anticipate a total consensus on the part of natural scientists about the best causes and explanations, and about those appearances that best point to these explanations and are to be comprehended through them. But even granting total agreement, the appearances and the ways to zone in on them – either unaided or with state-of-the-art equipment – are not going to be the same for the neuroscientist, the chemist and the meteorologist in their respective practices. Each theorist is unlikely to grant that another discipline delivers the conclusive story about his or her region of natural reality. In this way

70  Timothy Mooney activities that are tacitly found in the lifeworld (and to be considered below) appear to be banished without notice from the scientific universe, activities of approximating towards different perceptual optima for different interests. And if eliminativism posits an ideally unified perceptual field it will also flatten out scientifically interpreted perceptions, showing at the very least the virtue of consistency in having already flattened out those of the illusory lifeworld. The eliminativist might well say that this interpretation is a parody of what is actually being projected. Of course we will have to switch between different scientific ways of looking, and of course these switches will take time, even for a chemist who is also a meteorologist. But our future comportment between our episodes of systematically perceiving the scientific image by way of the manifest image need not be nonscientific or ascientific. Extensive socialisation and training would have been undergone to stop folk-psychological theories making unsought and unwelcome re-appearances on the margins of awareness. Eventually no such psychology would survive for us to lapse back into. Given an adequate education in the centuries to come, virtually everyone could be tacitly employing scientific concepts in between systematic observations, the ones supplanting what was once called practical action. We could perceive in total conformity with these normative concepts, following them implicitly all the while rather than explicitly working with them. Such a reply makes us recall the persisting presumption that MerleauPonty discerns in such scenarios. Objectivism in general judges what is by what ought to be, as if the latter were somehow realised somewhere (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 62). What ought to be for the eliminativist is a community of perceivers in which the scientific gaze is bridged by scientific habitualities. We can someday reach this promised land, or get so close to it as to make no difference, though it is not shown in any great detail how we might gradually get from here to there. As I understand it, the hypothetical completion of eliminativism presumes ongoing social cohesion along with scientific and technological progress. But if scientific concepts were to alter appearances to the extent that persons could not be perceived (psychophysical identities with beliefs as well as feelings and memories feeding into their joys and hopes and fears and regrets), empathy and sympathy would narrow down drastically. It is somewhat difficult to understand how such beings could comfort and encourage each other as we ourselves recognisably do and as we recognisably fall short of doing. Our present-day responses to and somatic and linguistic expressions of needs that were not translated into strictly scientific terms would have no sense. In the scientific gaze, all dispositions to render assistance involving lifeworld beliefs as opposed to neurological, chemical and biological determinants and the certain knowledge of them would have been eliminated. Gone too would be trust in another’s truth telling and in their being an enthusiastic and valued member of one’s team. Trust is invoked

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 71 in the most basic of enquiries. When we want to know where someone will be next week, as Fodor contends, we should just ask her without turning to physics or neuroscience (Fodor 1987: 4–6). It is a truism that we cannot trust everyone, and we are wise indeed when we avoid certain locales in the metropolis and in the countryside. In our daily journeys, moreover, we find ourselves threatened by things no less than by others, suggesting quite strongly that our every attitudes and our shifting between them can never become redundant. Taking an example from Scanlon and shunting it into the future, we can imagine a self-driving truck approaching at high speed from the right as I am driving onto a roundabout. Spotting it is not atheoretical, since I quickly surmise that its sensors are not working (the objectifying aspect of the experience). I also grasp that it is extremely threatening to life and limb (the evaluative aspect of the experience), and that it calls for braking and evasive action (the practical aspect of the experience). As Scanlon helpfully adds, the purely theoretical attitude is not to be recommended whilst driving a car into an intersection, for it deliberately avoids the practical and evaluative dimensions (Scanlon 1988: 230–231). We only seem to get away with it in research institutes and observatories because they are remarkable safe environments for most of the time. This suggests that the founding scientific universe to be putatively lived within could not bear very much contact with macroscopic contingencies. But even in safe spaces like these we never actually leave the natural attitude of world belief, our belief in the things and the people we are engaged with against the background of the lifeworld. In this vein Husserl imagines a scientist explaining that a piece of platinum is in truth an atomic complex of such and such a nature, endowed with these or those states of motion. As she speaks and weighs the sample, she is working within two attitudes at one and the same time. On closer examination the natural attitude can be seen to underpin the scientific attitude, for it can only begin from the former, remain within it pre-reflectively, and conclude with the theorist turning her gaze back to practical matters in the taken for granted lifeworld (Husserl 1989: 193, 1997: 3–4). The scientist is not at all unsure about her audience, the sample she is holding, the equipment she will use to weigh it and what is to be demonstrated in the process. Nor is she unsure about the water that she looks forward to drinking on the one hand and cooling down with on the other when the session is over. In our driving and demonstrating and drinking we make use of beliefs that none of us can help espousing, beliefs to the effect that certain things indicate or facilitate certain outcomes and that the world more widely goes beyond its bald actuality. For those who are not laid low by depression or grief or serious illness or injury, the world that we take for granted is ordinarily encountered as a realm of possibilities. Every phenomenal field is at once a transcendental field for an active and engaged perceiver.

72  Timothy Mooney To be in the world is to have a sense of the different ways in which things might be encountered as significant, as perceptually and practically accessible and as available to others. In perceiving and imagining things I am at once pointing to possibilities experienced as proximate or remote, that I might bring about by myself, that others might bring about by themselves, or that we might for that matter bring about together. And in phenomenology we find an explication of our correlative and somatically founded senses of possibility and agency. Zoning in on what is possible for me, Husserl identifies different modalities of perceptual and imaginative awareness whose significance is founded on the experience of my body. When I form an image of a griffon, I might take such a being to be logically possible, but do not take it as something that can move into my perceptual field or be brought to presence by me. I do not intend it as capable of perceptual fulfilment. When I imagine hanging my new picture in my sitting room, however, I anticipate the action and its outcome as a practical possibility. I can fulfil it straight off once I assemble the right equipment. My bodily skills or what Husserl calls my kinaesthetic capacities have made an essential contribution to the implicit sense and explicit meaning of the imagined appearance (Husserl 1989: 273–275). To predelineate with my own lived body as a positive potentiality – which is more than an empty and undetermined ability – is to have the sense of immediately available agency that is constitutive of the relevant situation. This sense seamlessly facilitates the envisaged appearance of the sitting room once the picture has been hung just there. If I am to imagine a practical possibility or outcome, on this story, my bodily capacities must have founded the sense that ‘I can’ or ‘I am able to.’ If I am not actually in my sitting room, but imagining it from my workstation, the ‘I can’ will be in the mode of the ‘I could,’ as what I could do if I were on the scene (Husserl 1989: 267, 277–279). No purely physical or neuroscientific explanation will ever bring this sense of available agency to light, and it is ordinarily unthematic. Seamlessly inhabiting the imagining of a practical possibility, the ‘I can’ is for the most part a pre-reflective awareness, the presumptive ability to actualise what is imagined that is founded on the acquisition and sedimentation of the relevant skills (Husserl 1989: 13, 272–273). Through my founded and founding ‘I can’ I am able to entertain my choosing a particular course of action and go on to choose it. Husserl points out that only a practical possibility of which I am explicitly conscious can be a theme of my will; it must be foregrounded as a positive potentiality. I cannot will as an immediate or proximate outcome anything beyond my competence, and it is only between practical possibilities that I can decide. The arcing forward into possibility of somatically constituted intentionality is presupposed when I have something towards which or against which I can exert myself.

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 73 The eliminativist position is that the beliefs in choice and available agency are to be eliminated. Along with them would disappear any regret or remorse that one might experience after doing or failing to do this or that. But these eliminations hardly count as anything more than stipulations, and it is unclear how a being that had no awareness of its capacities or those of others could ever consciously do anything or understand anything being done by others. Outcomes could hardly be envisaged by that being in the first place. And what colours my conscious intentions and brings them into action, according to Husserl, is a living or effective or operative intentionality that underpins everything I learn about things. In its operation ‘[it] carries me along; it predelineates; it determines me practically in my whole procedure, including the procedure of my natural thinking,’ though he notes that it may be undisclosed and quite beyond my cognitive grasp (Husserl 1969: 234–235).3 It is this notion of an operative intentionality that Merleau-Ponty develops with the help of Paul Schilder amongst others (Schilder 1923: 64–65, 86). When I launch into a concrete or practical movement, or when I am asked to perform an abstract movement that is an end in itself, say an arabesque drawn out in mid-air, how it will be executed is simply not an issue, requiring no consideration whatsoever. The request is apprehended as an immediate possibility because the straight-off fulfilment of the goal will be taken care of through a motor intentional plan. What will guide the movement is an action solution that my body schema or holistic system of postural organisation has prefigured sub-consciously. The observable changes in my posture will have been projectively organised from the start (MerleauPonty 2012: 140–141; see also Kelly 2020, 242, 251f9). Ordinarily we have several ‘holds’ on our bodies, since they are instantly available for a large variety of possibilities that we may envision in any one context. When some possibility is pursued, what I have entitled an action solution is the plotting out of particular deployments of head and trunk and limbs to achieve the desired outcome. Working as it does with vision, this motor intentional plan of action for the body is in one and the same blow a route to realisation, since it predelineates the path to be taken through the perceptual field. It articulates space and the things within it into practical vectors and lines of force, and in so doing it constitutes an anisotropic spatiality of situation as opposed to a scientific spatiality of indifferent position (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 102, 115). This can be seen when I prepare to use my bicycle. Having unlocked it outside the library building, I lift it up and out of its stand before riding off on it. In this action there is no need for me to visually locate my arms and calculate the trajectory or route that the one will take towards the handlebars and the other towards the underside of the saddle. No such objectifying location and calculation can be taking place in any event, since my eyes are focused on those parts of the bicycle that afford its being lifted. The final positions of each arm is already anticipated in its movement, and

74  Timothy Mooney as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘I have no need of directing it toward the goal of the movement, in a sense it touches the goal from the very beginning and it throws itself toward it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 97). More than this I do not have to plan or survey the ways that my hands are opening to take their holds on handlebars and saddle. Each limb is already adapting itself to the shape and size of its target before reaching it, sketching out in advance the form of the latter (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 78). The limb is manifesting a pre-comprehension of what is to be attained, an orientation towards the appropriate outcome. The reaching and grasping and lifting upwards and outwards are at one with my desire and my efforts, constituting an internal relationship between the intention and the action, between the thought of readying the bicycle for riding and its execution. And a similar story can be provided for the cycling itself. Through all of these endeavours I am exhibiting what Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard have called topokinetic and morphokinetic accuracy (Cole and Paillard 1995: 256). In Heideggerian terms I am encountering the world of things skilfully and circumspectively. In employing them I am seeing through and around them towards the outcomes that they afford (Heidegger 1962: 95–101). Both consciously and unconsciously, I am geared into the macroscopic features of things and into practical and often pleasing outcomes, and I cannot help but privilege certain orientations and pathways in my landscape. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, my skilled and habitualised body always and everywhere runs ahead of me: We must in effect distinguish between my explicit intentions, such as the plan I form today to climb these mountains, and the general intentions that invest my surroundings with some value in a virtual way . . . my projects as a thinking being are clearly constructed upon these valuations . . . Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body and a world, I sustain intentions around myself that are not decided upon and that affect my surroundings in ways I do not choose . . . freedom makes use of the gaze along with its spontaneous valuations. Without these spontaneous valuations . . . we would not be in the world, ourselves implicated in the spectacle and, so to speak, intermingled with things . . . There is an autochthonous sense of the world that is constituted in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence and that forms the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 464–466) On this account our practical concepts of possibility and impossibility and ease and difficulty must themselves follow on our gearing into the macroscopic world, even if they will bear development as we develop our technologies for climbing and cycling and so forth. In the lived world, moreover, there is no one thematic appearance of a thing that is evidently and continually ‘realer’ than another. We can and do work with divergent

On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze 75 perceptual optima as we go through our days. In perceiving a country house and its lands, the optimal appearances for the builder are achieved in examining its mortar and bricks and joists, and for the buyer and seller in walking around it and through its rooms. Optimal appearances will be different again for the architect or garden designer. The optima can neither be understood from outside a profession nor warranted from within it in abstraction from their somatic approximation. Even with a flower, the project of sketching it or smelling it or examining it botanically is found in one’s posture towards and distance from it (Husserl 1997: 97–99, 106–107). On the foregoing account, our act intentionalities as we traverse the milieu are inseparable from the operative intentionalities manifested in and through our bodies. Because the practical beliefs informing our perceptions are not free-floating, the project of establishing an enduring eliminativist gaze would have to uproot our bodily comportment no less than our concepts. The aforementioned positing of a world of causes that we could live within owes at least as much to science fiction as it does to philosophy. And this is what the eliminativist does not recognise. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, the scientific universe is not a world, rather a theoretical substructure that is in principle unperceivable and uninhabitable. To take it as a world is to hypostatise it into a metaphysically transcendent reality (Husserl 1970: 127–129; MerleauPonty 2012: 25–26, 456). And the eliminativist seems not to notice that the supposedly generalised scientific interests and relevant ways of seeing have not been sundered from our affective and aesthetic lives. Hence the references to the satisfaction of apprehending reality as its deepest level and to our properly being at home in the physical universe when tracking the movements of the planets or when looking at neuronal firing. And more than this there is ‘much beauty and endless intrigue to reward the determined observer’ (Churchland 1979, 35–36). Such words suggest that our human situation has the stubborn habit of coming in the back door after being ejected from the front. We believe it is good to gaze in certain ways, that some are better than others, and that the good news should be spread. But some enterprises are misconceived from the start. It is a forlorn hope that everyone can and should look as the eliminativist conceives of ourselves as looking, and that we can do so for all of the time. Which is not to deny that phenomenologically sensitive and instructive stories might be provided about the partial eliminations that are to be found inside scientific attitudes as abstractive wholes for part of the time.

Notes 1. Avenarius 1912: 4–5, 7, 9, 20. Quoted and summarised in Scanlon 1988: 225–228.

76  Timothy Mooney 2. Churchland 1979: 34–36, 43–44. In his later thought Churchland lays ever more stress on neuroscientific and connectionist theories of mind. So far as I am aware, however, he has not retracted any of the claims made in this early work. 3. Husserl 1969: 234–235 (trans. slightly emended).

Reference List Avenarius, Richard. 1912. Der menschliche Weltbegriff, 3rd ed. Leipzig: Reisland. Churchland, Paul. 1979. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchland, Paul. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78 (2): 67–90. Cole, Jonathan and Paillard, Jacques. 1995. Living without touch and peripheral information about body position and movement: Studies upon deafferented subjects. In J. Bermüdez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan (eds.) The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 245–266. Fodor, Jerry. 1987. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press and Bradford Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Dorion Cairns (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Fred Kersten (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 1997. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Richard Rojcewicz (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. McCulloch, Gregory. 1995. The Mind and Its World. London and New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A. Landes (trans.). London and New York: Routledge. Plato. 1963. Timaeus. In Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.) Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Benjamin Jowett (trans.). Princeton, NJ: The Bollingen Foundation and Princeton University Press. Scanlon, John. 1988. Husserl’s Ideas and the natural concept of the world. In Robert Sokolowski (ed.) Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition: Essays in Phenomenology. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Schilder, Paul. 1923. Das Körperschema. Berlin and Heidelberg: Julius Springer. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1985. Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association Books.

4 Not Wholly Human Reading Maurice MerleauPonty with Jacques Lacan1 Dorothée Legrand

Confronted with the ordeal of inhumanity, why should we speak? In order to survive, to survive humanly, that is to say: in order to survive as speaking bodies, bodies prey to language. Yet, confronted with inhumanity, isn’t it impossible to speak? Is it even possible to speak of the inhuman? Against inhumanity? With the inhuman? From inhumanity? Speaking is necessary. Literally: it must never cease – it must never cease in particular when and where it becomes impossible: when and where it is confronted with the inhuman, with the unsayable, with that which never ceases to be unspeakable. Speaking is necessary when speaking is impossible. In other words: it is humanly necessary to respond to the unsayable. That is the proposal I would like to unfold here. I will do so alongside Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan. ‘The human is precisely that which can see the inhuman’ (MerleauPonty 2010: 128). Isn’t it striking that in philosophy it is sometimes necessary to recall explicitly, as if we would forget, the fact that, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, there is ‘something else’, something other than humanity? Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, the ‘pre-human’ can be defined only by its reliance on the ‘armature’ of human’s experience: the inhuman is nothing without its ‘contours’ and ‘limits’, its ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ defined humanly. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, there is nothing like an inhuman nature in itself, radically cut off from humanity; rather there is an inhuman world ‘ready’ to be humanly perceived. Such is the ontological priority which Merleau-Ponty gives to perception, that is, to human perception. Merleau-Ponty’s gesture towards the inhuman shall not be thought of as a ‘nostalgia for origins’. On the contrary, as the psychoanalyst J.B. Pontalis has emphasized: ‘it is in the present, in the lacunary fabric of the unfinished present that the originary is to be recaptured’ (Pontalis 1977: 69). In his own terms, what Merleau-Ponty proposes ‘is not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effective fusion with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and even reprehend our language’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 122). If the human can see the originary inhuman,

78  Dorothée Legrand it is not by stripping himself of his humanity that he could do so; rather, it is by taking the inhuman into human experience, by letting the inhuman inscribe, institute, concretize, materialize, incarnate, express itself. No inhuman originary fabric exists in itself without the threads which are woven together, humanly organized (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 173). To perceive the originary inhuman fabric would thus not involve unstitching our human fabric but rather to associate one thread to another to allow the fabric to come into our experience. Thus, our life is specifically human insofar as it is entangled with inhumanity. And if Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy were therapeutic, it would encourage us to realise this entanglement of humanity and inhumanity. In other words, Merleau-Ponty encourages us to dream: he encourages us to let our dreams run not only during our nights but also throughout our waking life. Here, if dreams are the royal road to the unconscious it is in the sense that they are a privileged manner of being humanly inhuman, inhumanly human. Merleau-Ponty characterizes an ‘oneirism of wakefulness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 194), thereby tackling the carnal unity, the unity of the flesh that ties together nights and days, unconsciousness and consciousness, the real and the imaginary, inhumanity and humanity. Merleau-Ponty’s oneirism of wakefulness positions his phenomenological ontology at twilight: between wolves and dogs, neither fully one nor fully the other, or partially both. This location between night and day may capture what is most characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s position: the night is never pitch black. There is a tendency in Merleau-Ponty’s scholarship to interpret this twilight by considering that there is always some light in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and that is certainly the case. Yet, in a merleau-pontian guise, the other side of the coin shall be considered too: if the night is never pitch black, it does not only mean that the day never entirely collapses, it also means that the day is always grey and that there is always more darkness to come. For Merleau-Ponty, the night is the realm of sleep, and sleep is a ‘regressive behaviour’, it involves a ‘change of structure of the subject’ as it pulls the subject into a state of ‘dedifferentiation’: the body becomes ‘indistinct’, consciousness becomes indeterminate. Sleep is a ‘way out of antinomies’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 167–168, 176–177, 196). Yet, to dream is not to sleep. To dream is to ‘compromise sleep with wakefulness’. On the one hand, like during sleep, in dreams, ‘the rule is [. . .] indistinctness and the exception is differentiation’; on the other hand, while sleeping keeps the world apart, dreaming is a mode of being conscious of something. Yet, unlike intentional consciousness, the dream immerses the dreamer into ‘a pseudo-world where subject and object are indistinct’ (MerleauPonty 1968: 197, 205, 209). It is this ambiguity which Merleau-Ponty is interested in and specifically, the dream is ambiguous, Merleau-Ponty says, insofar as it contains ‘everything’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 243). The dream, Merleau-Ponty says, is an ‘exhibition of concretions’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 207): the

Not Wholly Human 79 oneiric world is like the ocean into which the dreamer would have drowned and out of which he would reappear ‘with in his hand a piece of seaweed as a concretion of the sea’. The sea is the unconscious: this ‘totality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 247) is the raw material of the dream, just like it is the governing principle of any perception. This totality that runs through the dream is also the very fabric of our waking life, and thus, with Merleau-Ponty, we must recognize that ‘the dream is not an act that is circumscribed in time’. The unconscious, for Merleau-Ponty, is this preobjective, presubjective basis of any perception, it is a red thread running throughout the fabric of our whole perceptual existence. One perception or another is merely a ‘concretion of a much wider visible world’, a seaweed or another coming out of the same sea, a local expression of the unified world that is ‘everywhere’. Yet, to be humanly conscious is to withdraw from the open sea: we refuse our oneiric passivity, we seek to escape from the equivocity of dreams into the positive distinctiveness of wakefulness. Objective and subjective reality is an escape out of the realness of inhuman desubjectivation. Thus, relative to humanity, unconsciousness is an excess, and contrastively, relative to inhumanity, consciousness is a deficit. The seaweed is extracted out of the plenitude of the open sea, and, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘its particularity is only what is lacking in order to be everything in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 165). ‘Sa particularité n’est que ce qui manque au monde pour être tout’. This sentence could be translated as follows: ‘its particularity is only what is missing to the world to be everything’. It is in this sense that perceptual consciousness is always lacking, it is always lacunar, indefinitely. It is not enough to remark, as Husserl did previously, that an object can be approached only progressively and always partially. Certainly, the perception of an object will never give access to the whole object. But also, and most importantly, the perception of an object will never give access to the whole world, to the world as a whole. Structurally, the presence of a delimited object in the field of human consciousness is its very absence as an unlimited participation in inhuman unconsciousness. Thus, the field of conscious perception is a ‘hollow fullness: presence, yet absence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 174). A delimited object presents itself as a presence and yet this presence cuts out the plenitude of the world as a whole. The whole is never graspable fully. Like the horizon, the totality promised ‘over there’ is never reachable. I am never ‘there’ yet and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is a never-ending movement towards one’s integration in the totality of the undifferentiated world. Yet, we sometimes wake up and escape from the oneirism of our dreams. We sometimes float and allow our body to be carried by the open sea, but thus far, each time, we have returned to the shore. The integration of consciousness and unconsciousness is never fully achieved. And such incompleteness is what it means to be humanly conscious, that is: if consciousness is conscious of something other than itself, it is open

80  Dorothée Legrand to what it is not, open to what is not conscious yet, there is always more to be conscious of; full consciousness is never achieved, and the price to pay for reaching full consciousness would be to close off consciousness, that is, to make it collapse onto itself. Thus, insofar as consciousness is an openness, it is exceeded, it calls for more, always more. That is to say: consciousness is never-endingly carried away towards an unfulfillable totality. This totality is the fabric of possibilities. What’s actually conscious always points at another possibility, not yet present, but always possibly presentable. Thus, the other name for Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman unconscious is: the possible (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 255). Merleau-Ponty’s consciousness is human’s openness to the inhuman unconsciousness, and following his philosophy encourages us to considering the ‘liberation of the unconscious’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 161), to reveal the pathway from delimited objectivity to wide preobjectivity, from isolated subjectivity to impersonal presubjectivity, from difference to indifference, from the efficacy of the day to the blurriness of the twilights, from humanity to inhumanity. The barrier that differentiates subjects and objects from each other does not exist in itself, but is only the effect of an operation of isolation below which we are led by our dreams, and by our waking perception alike if we allow ourselves to follow the red thread of unconsciousness that runs through it. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, and I would add, Merleau-Ponty’s ethics is an invitation to dream the inhuman: an invitation to let our body unleash the open sea instead of holding it tight as a solidified seaweed. Yet, we must hear Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor precisely here: the dream is like the open sea, he says, and the dreamer drowns. Heading for the open sea. Heading for inhumanity. Worstward Ho.2 Since the beginning of his work, Merleau-Ponty is explicit: ‘Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation’ (MerleauPonty 2012: 223). We must hear this stupor: the stupor of depersonalization, the stupor of drowning into the inhuman sea – and we must now hear that this is not a mere metaphor but the most concrete situation that faces each of us right now, as the Mediterranean Sea has become a graveyard. We must hear that drowning into the inhuman is what MerleauPonty’s phenomenological ontology and ethics may lead to, as it aims at rupturing individualism in favour of generality (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 121). This generality is what Merleau-Ponty has called inter-corporeity, which, he says, is what would have been revealed by psychoanalysis (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 121). Yet, I believe psychoanalysis is precisely that which can resist against dehumanization, against generalization, against depersonalization. Specifically, it is designed to singularize the subject. And this term – ‘singularize’ – captures, I believe, captures the unbridgeable difference between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Much has been said, and a lot remains to be said about the encounter – the missed

Not Wholly Human 81 encounter we often say – between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan. I will not detail this history here, but rather focus on one difference only, which is both at once ontological and ethical, and which can be said with this one word: singularity. One cannot extract Merleau-Ponty’s ontology from his phenomenology. Everything which Merleau-Ponty names – oneirism, unconsciousness, inhumanity – has an explicit ontological status. Yet, for Lacan, psychoanalysis is a position according to which ‘ontology is a shame’ (Lacan 1971–1972: 226): ontology is a shame if it imposes the reduction of the subject’s singularity on to the universality of Being, whereas the ethics of psychoanalysis, on the contrary, demands that the clinician resists against such reduction. The subject for whom the psychoanalyst opens his door and his ears, this subject is singular. After Giorgio Agamben, we may say that this singular subject is whoever: whoever one is, one matters.3 No exceptional quality justifies that a subject matters. Rather, a subject, any subject, transcends his phenomenal qualities, and matters, structurally. This subject cannot be merged into the set of all subjects, as one among many, and yet, he is not a particular case, he is not an exception. This subject who is neither universal, nor exceptionally particular, this singular subject is the very one who the psychoanalyst meets – each time unique. And to encounter this subject, the psychoanalyst is required to suspend any reference to the set of ‘all subjects’, be it to include universally or exclude particularly the one who presents himself and asks to be heard. If anyone, Emmanuel Levinas, by systematically suspending the subject’s reduction, will have given a philosophical relevance to this subject, singularly whoever: ‘Here the unicity of the ego first acquires a meaning – where it is no longer a question of the ego, but of me. The subject which is not an ego, but which I am, cannot be generalized, is not a subject in general; we have moved from the ego to me who am me and no one else’ (Levinas 1991: 13–14). Merleau-Ponty’s dreamer, his general body, his flesh characterizes whatever subject, in the sense that any subject could be substituted by any other. Thus, like the subject of science, and like the transcendental ego of Husserlian phenomenology, it does not matter which one it is, it matters anyway. We can say as well that the subject of psychoanalysis matters anyway. Yet, this now means that each one matters, and it does matter which one it is, insofar as this subject is without substitute, without equivalent, irreducibly singular, one-by-one. To put it in a Lacanian way: as irreducibly singular, the subject is pastout: not-all. With Lacan, it is necessary to realize that the subject is unconceivable as part of a whole. Without losing his uniqueness, without being reduced to a generality, he cannot be integrated into the set of all subjects. As he is pastout, not-all, the subject is excessive, the subject is an irreducible excess impossible to merge into the whole. As the subject

82  Dorothée Legrand is pastout, not-all, one subject and another cannot be integrated into a whole, consciousness and unconsciousness cannot be integrated into a whole. In other words, the subject does not compose a whole with himself nor with another. Thus understood, Lacan’s pastout names a discontinuity constitutive of the subject. The subject is constituted away and against any totalitarianism, away and against universalism, and yet, at the same time, the subject is constituted away and against any particularism, exceptionalism. Such a subject is the one I intend to consider here with the term singularity. With Lacan’s pastout, we understand that the unconscious specifically marks the impossible totalization of the subject with himself and others. Contrastively, as we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, the unconscious is a totality, the totality of possibilities. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of the unconscious is diametrically opposite to Lacan’s. Yet, far more interesting than any list of terminological differences between the two authors, reading Merleau-Ponty after Lacan helps to underline – what André Green already remarked: Merleau-Ponty’s manner of thinking is a constant challenge to totality. In Lacan’s words: Phenomenology of Perception cannot ‘be situated in the striving towards an absolute knowledge’ (Lacan 1993: 74). We must remember that, if Merleau-Ponty conceives of the unconscious as ‘the fabric of possibilities’, by the same token, his philosophy is built upon an impossible, and maybe only one: the totalization of possibilities is impossible. Even though, and precisely because the unconscious is the totality of possibilities, the unconscious as a whole is impossible. Such is the phenomenological impossible: the actuality of consciousness is constitutively exceeded by the unconscious as the fabric of possible consciousness, that is to say, the impossible totalization of possibilities is that which structures consciousness. Thus, we may be tempted to say that phenomenological consciousness is pastout, not-all: it is constitutively partial, lacunar. Likewise, we may like to say that Merleau-Ponty’s unconscious is pastout: it is constitutively pierced by any concretion that emerges into consciousness, by any actualisation of the possible. Yet, this translation is unsatisfying: Merleau-Ponty’s psychoanalysis of nature cannot be seen as a seed that could be planted into the soil of lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather, it is right here, with the conception of the subject as pastout, not-all, singular, that the most important fracture opens up between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology and Lacan’s theory of psychoanalytic practice. The gesture that Merleau-Ponty executes untiringly is a ‘movement towards integration’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 135) and ‘all that is partial is to be reintegrated’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 90), he says. Yet, Lacanian psychoanalysis seems to have been developed to counter such a movement towards integration. Admittedly, Merleau-Ponty resists the phenomenological temptation to conceive of consciousness as a totality, but if Merleau-Ponty’s thought is a resistance to totality, at the same time, it

Not Wholly Human 83 is a gesture towards totalisation. In his own words, he is animated by an ‘appeal for totality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 139): call for totality to which Lacan replies with a call for detotalization: pastout. Lacan could not follow Merleau-Ponty’s move towards the disintegration of singularity to the advantage of the generality of the flesh to which anyone participates while no one participates singularly. On the contrary, the ethics of psychoanalysis requires that any dedifferentiation between subjects and between objects be countered; dedifferentiation ought to be countered insofar as it would absorb the subject into a generality that erases any proper name. The unspeakable totality, Lacan will have named it: the real, the impossible, and Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically consists in working with the real, against its totalization: the aim is to border the open sea, to inscribe, to write, to draw a shore. Marking, inscribing a littoral, for Lacan, is not drawing a simple frontier, to build up a wall which would artificially divide in two parts an otherwise homogeneous territory; rather, the littoral is the mark of a territory that composes with what is foreign, it is the drawing, or the writing, the inscription of a composite territory where foreignness is constitutive. This is why one must speak: to give the real a limit, to de-totalize the unspeakable. Speech, and specifically, free association allows the psychoanalyst and the analysand to suspend the requirement to give a fixed meaning to any isolated element that perceptual consciousness would differentiate, and from this suspension, they work with what is given as it is given there: they work with the words as they are addressed by one to another. This material, that is to say, the signifier, the word as it can be heard, speech as an act is what singularizes speaking bodies, as it singles them out of the unspeakable real where they are undifferentiated. Speech is specifically that which makes the difference: it constitutes nonin-different singularities. Merleau-Ponty quotes Lacan in The Visible and the Invisible: vision, Merleau-Ponty writes, is ‘structured as a language’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 126). Yet Lacan says exactly the opposite when he differentiates the symbolic realm from the imaginary and from the real: this differentiation means that for Lacan, everything is not structured as a language. For Merleau-Ponty, contrastively, language is ‘an absolutely universal theme’ insofar as it carries the inhuman ‘language of life’. Strangely enough, ‘the philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire “work” is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 125). What the philosopher seeks, what Merleau-Ponty seeks, is ‘a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak [. . .]. It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words

84  Dorothée Legrand he would not assemble’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 125), but a language that germinates in the ‘great mute land which we never leave’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 126). Yet, Merleau-Ponty recognizes another manner of speaking, a language that ‘cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 125). Such a cut renders language a ‘regional problem’, as it concerns the ‘technical relation between a sound and a meaning which are joined only by express convention and are therefore ideally isolable’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 126). In my view, a psychoanalyst does work with such a language: on the couch, language is a knife that cuts our bodies out of the inhuman flesh. The origin splits, and the psychoanalyst must accompany this non-coincidence, this differentiation. We could think this last sentence comes from Lacan, yet – and this illustrates how fruitful it may be to read Lacan and Merleau-Ponty together –, it is Merleau-Ponty who wrote: ‘the originating breaks up, and philosophy must accompany this break-up, this non-coincidence, this differentiation’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 124).

Notes 1. This text was first presented at the conference “The Inhuman Gaze and Perceiving Otherwise”, Paris, 6th-9th June 2018. 2. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho. 3. As proposed by Giorgio Agamben, ‘whatever being’ means ‘it does not matter which’ but also, and more precisely, it means: ‘being such that it always matters’ (Agamben Giorgio, The Coming Community, Theory out of Bounds, Volume 1, trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p. 1).

Reference List Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. The Coming Community, Theory Out of Bounds, Vol. 1. Michael Hardt (trans.). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1983. Worstward Ho. London: Calder. Lacan, Jacques. 1971–1972. Séminaire XIX: Ou pire, le savoir du psychanalyste. Inédit (unpublished). Translations are my own. Lacan, Jacques. 1993. Merleau-Ponty, in memoriam. In Keith Hoeller (ed.) Merleau-Ponty and Psychology. Wilfried Ver Eecke and Dirk de Schutter (trans.). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 73–81. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond the Essence. Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. A. Lingis (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity. Course Notes from Collège de France (1945–1955). Trans. L. Lawlor and H. Massey. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. D.A. Landes (trans.). Oxon: Routledge. Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. 1977. Merleau-Ponty, présence, absence. In Entre le rêve et la douleur. Paris: Gallimard. Translations are my own.

5 Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics Christinia Landry

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity argues the ideal ethical relationship is one whereby we will the freedom of others; she terms this moral freedom. A few years later Beauvoir’s rigorous investigation of woman’s sociohistorical situation troubles moral freedom: How is it possible to will the freedom of others if one’s own freedom is attenuated? Indeed, Beauvoir’s careful attention to the history of women’s lived experience in The Second Sex seemingly belies her lofty existentialist ethics. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Beauvoir denounces The Ethics of Ambiguity as overly theoretical.1 Despite the fact that Beauvoir’s attention to woman’s situation complicates her ethics, it is my contention that her moral philosophy be revived, so that it may assume its much deserved place in the Western canon. Unpacking Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity and then outlining her account of the gaze in The Second Sex, while borrowing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the visible, allows me to pull together her two distinct readings of intersubjectivity from the 1940s. The result is a viable (embodied) existentialist ethics.

Willing the Freedom of the Other Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in response to criticisms levelled at existentialist ethics. Arguing against Existentialism’s critics she takes on, most notably, the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. She concludes that their moral systems do not adequately account for the human reality as a situated one; something with which the Existentialist is particularly concerned given their starting point of being-in-the-world. Abstract ethical theories privilege a fundamentally rational, disambiguated, and disembodied human being. Instead, Beauvoir strives to highlight the importance of lived experience hence her later denouncement of her ethics as overly theoretical. In her short ethical treatise, Beauvoir provides a viable way of fostering reciprocity while remaining mindful of the complexities that shape the human reality. She unpacks the main principles of Existentialism such as freedom and facticity and with these concepts as central she formulates her argument in favour of willing the freedom of others.

86  Christinia Landry Beauvoir claims, we do not merely value the projects with which we engage, but we also value the freedom to engage; and our freedom to engage is tied to the freedom of others. She (de Beauvoir 1976: 67) argues: ‘We can see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.’ It is not enough to claim that others provide the parameters (the facticity) for our projects, but rather one must be able to pursue one’s projects and others must have the concrete ability to respond. We need others to recognize our projects insofar as they may validate our being as subjects. Unfortunately, as Sarah LaChance Adams explains, this does not entail that appreciation and/ or collaboration between free beings will follow.2 The other may simply be disinterested in my project or more seriously, if the other is oppressed it may not be possible for them to mount their own projects or for them to genuinely collaborate on mine. But here’s the catch: freedom (from oppression) hinges on my (and other’s) projects and thus appeals to us to consider the repercussions of our actions on them (de Beauvoir 1976: 61, 65–66, 83, 96).3 We need others to have the capacity to respond! Accordingly, we must constantly interrogate our own projects to appreciate how they impact others, after all Beauvoir (1976: 133) concludes, ‘morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.’ We may, as Beauvoir does, take this imperative further still and argue that it is not enough to simply question the impact of our projects on others, we must also will them free so that they may act with or against us. Engaging the other on these grounds requires calling on our original mode of being (disclosure (dévoiler) or ‘wanting to disclose being’ [de Beauvoir 1976: 12]).4 Disclosure is an intentional movement wherein consciousness attends to being. Beauvoir qualifies our desire to disclose being through a particular attitude; she explains, ‘What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being’ (1976: 41). This, for Beauvoir, is the attitude of the ‘free man,’ one cultivates moral freedom insofar as one discloses oneself to the world as a generosity – as a space of possibilities wherein meanings are not yet fixed, where attitudes and projects are negotiable. It is the movement in which one fosters the unveiling of the world pausing before it and by so doing meets the world in the particularity of the situation, in the particularity of the moment. Interestingly, Beauvoir (1976: 41) claims, ‘in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existing.’ Despite its potential for joy, this original mode of being (disclosure) is particularly challenging to inhabit given that it shores up our interconnectedness with and vulnerability towards others. We open ourselves to the world in a desire to disclose being and in this opening, we may be presented with the possibility for reciprocity. However, we are also presented with the possibility for violence – a closing off of our horizons. The fact that human beings jointly inhabit and constitute the world means, as a material being-in-the-world, one may also be ‘a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things’ [or

Beauvoir and the Gendered Gaze 87 others’ projects] (de Beauvoir 1976: 7). Nonetheless, Beauvoir is optimistic about accepting such an existential predicament given that it is this weight of the world – the tenuousness of our engagement with embodied others, that allows for the pleasure of existing (1976: 12). Consider Beauvoir’s beautiful description of disclosure: By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not [sic] appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. (1976: 12) As Beauvoir demonstrates, Existentialism may, as some critiques claim, be a philosophy of anguish, but it is also a philosophy of joy. The ability to experience joy may be attributed to the ambiguous nature of consciousness; one has the ability to disentangle oneself from the world (hold the world at a distance) – and yet, render the world present in all its affective textures. There is an ethical fullness to disclosure that is described by Debra B. Bergoffen (1997: 92) as ‘a pure willing of relationship,’ it is a will that ‘expresses itself as an attentiveness to otherness – as the simple desire of revelation. Beyond that it has no aim. Hence its delight.’ We attend to others (as Beauvoir attends to the sky, water, or snowfield) so they in turn may attend to us, and will that we are more than a brute being, a material thing in their world that exists to be crushed. This possibility for collective disclosure – the willing that there is existence – sky, water, snowfields, or even others – and that this existence is inexhaustible, insofar as meaning is inexhaustible, requires understanding oneself as a lack of being. One cannot be wed with that which one contemplates. It must remain at a distance; it must remain other. Indeed, moral freedom may be founded in disclosure given that this way of attending and appealing to otherness is congruent with willing the freedom of others. Beauvoir theorizes: To will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure (dévoiler) of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. (1976: 135)

88  Christinia Landry According to Beauvoir, the pleasure of being present in/to the world carries a shared moral imperative: willing the freedom of others (1976: 73). Indeed, at first blush, Beauvoir’s ethical imperative appears overly idealistic. The degree to which one’s freedom is willed by others will vary. Further, appreciation and collaboration from some will be more valuable than that from others given one’s situated commitments. Unfortunately, there is no law of exchange in interpersonal relations by which to gauge reciprocity – the mutual willing of the other’s freedom. Moreover, much of what is exchanged is done so implicitly; thus, such exchanges fall outside of a quantifiable realm of currency. We cannot always liberate others from their situation nor may we always garner the recognition that we are a free being (de Beauvoir 2011: 6).

Realizing an Existentialist Ethic: From Oppression to Generosity The second sex marks a new moment in Beauvoir’s moral philosophy, a moment preoccupied with the concrete sociohistorical positioning and constitution of woman as the inessential Other.5 The conceptual tools she employs in her exhaustive history of sexism create a break from her earlier existentialist ethics.6 In order to revive her ethics in light of woman’s situation, I draw from her work on the visible. First, the gaze of the Other in Beauvoir’s feminist bible may serve to reiterate our contemporary patriarchal relationship with others. This reading is apparent in her appropriation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘the look,’ a reading firmly rooted in G.W.F. Hegel.7 This particular reading gestures towards the ethic of the project; an appeal to assert oneself without regard for the freedom of the other. Subsequently, in this reading we find a disavowal of moral freedom which I will only cursorily explore taking for granted the reader’s familiarity with Sartre’s look. Second, and consonant with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the visible, the gaze may act as an appeal to explore and open new possibilities for relating to one another. This second reading gestures towards disclosure. In this reading, we may envision Beauvoir gazing up at the sky, down at the water, out over the snowfield, or perhaps even at the other; willing an expression of being. I will explore this reading more fully than the first, championing it, and by so doing, I will call into question Beauvoir’s 1950’s claim that her ethics of ambiguity, in the face of the history of women’s situation, is simply untenable.

Beauvoir and Sartre on the Look Now certainly in Sartre’s reading of ‘the look’ there is no room for reciprocity between gazers. He beautifully and yet unequivocally writes: ‘I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as

Beauvoir and the Gendered Gaze 89 I shall never see it’ (Sartre 1956: 475). Sartre’s reading of the look asserts mastery of the visible and of the Other. It is this reading of the gaze on the body that connects Beauvoir’s thinking on intersubjectivity in The Second Sex to Sartre’s thinking on ‘intersubjectivity’ in Being and Nothingness: A phenomenological essay on ontology. Consider Beauvoir’s account of man’s gaze upon the girl: She first of all fears this gaze that engulfs her. Her modesty may have been taught her, but it has deep roots; men and women all know the shame of their flesh; in its pure, immobile presence, its unjustified immanence, the flesh exists in the gaze of another as the absurd contingence of facticity, and yet flesh is oneself: we want to prevent it from existing for others; we want to deny it. (de Beauvoir 2011: 392) Similar to Sartre, Beauvoir acknowledges the possessiveness of the gaze and the negative affect which it engenders. However, Beauvoir argues, girls and women experience the shame of their flesh differently than boys and men given the sociohistorical linkage between woman and the body (2011: 159–213). She argues, for the female human being a different type of shame, one which relies on the visible, is introduced through sexual maturation. Beauvoir begins: The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment, she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh. (2011: 321) In becoming flesh for the Other, the girl’s world, once an open horizon of possibilities (of freedom to engage), begins to close down. Others grasp her as a thing, an object. After years of being gazed-upon this understanding of her body, her self, solidifies; the gaze of the Other takes hold as the girl becomes a woman, a being who is accustomed to existing as flesh for others.8 After prolonged exposure to this gaze on her body, her subjectivity (her possibilities for freedom) emerges as bound up in the ways in which she is for the other. Sartre’s reading of the look takes on a sociohistorical texture in Beauvoir’s work. Beauvoir (2011: 16) explains, woman no longer struggles to achieve the moral ideal – to be a freedom in a world of other freedoms – but rather comes to rest in her objectivity; ‘there is a degradation of existence into ‘in-itself,’ of freedom into facticity.’ A question presents itself: may she return the look as Sartre suggests one is want to do to overcome one’s

90  Christinia Landry being-for-others? Indeed, may she exist as a being who may will both herself and others free? If we are faithful to the parameters set out in the Introduction to The Second Sex it is possible for the female human being to return the look, if sexism is abolished; but it comes at the cost of the freedom of the Other (as it does for Sartre).9 This oscillation from gazer to gazed-upon or from subject to object may serve as a reformulation of her ethics of ambiguity, a new ‘existentialist morality’ (de Beauvoir 2011: 17) grounded in Sartrean (Hegelian) ontology, one that draws heavily from the ethic of the project. Conversely, Beauvoir’s new existentialist morality may be read optimistically if she is simply describing how the look operates under patriarchy, such a reading yields to imagining and working towards her earlier ethics.

Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on the Gaze Beauvoir’s appeal to the landscape (the sky, water, and snowfield) to ‘think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone’ (1976: 12) does not seamlessly map onto our gazing at others. Such an invitation to others may be risky given the history of bodies and the ways in which some bodies may and do harm other bodies. However, I think Beauvoir’s notion of disclosure may be impervious to the look as it is conceived in The Second Sex – the look that grasps and reduces and possesses. Instead, the look that is implicit in The Ethics of Ambiguity is a gaze that cannot possess others; others necessarily remain ‘foreign, forbidden’ (de Beauvoir 1976: 12), held at a distance much like the sky, water, and snowfield. In her ethical treatise, Beauvoir argues the gaze requires a space between the gazer and the gazed-upon to function.10 There is no coincidence between two and there may be no possession. In this sense, such an exchange is unlike the hand that reaches out and grasps the sensuous object. Instead, to gaze upon another being they must be held at a distance. This clearing between oneself and the other must remain open so as to allow for a questioning, ranging over, and dwelling on; to allow for seeing.11 Accordingly, she writes: ‘I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me’ (de Beauvoir 1976: 12). This space between two is necessary insofar as the sky is not merely given through my look; it reveals itself to me in the particularity of the situation; I gaze at sunset, daybreak, or midday. Therefore, there is no passive sky that waits to be cast into being through my look rather there are constitutive capacities in all that we see. Indeed, the appearance of something or perhaps even someone, as I want to suggest, unfolds as an expression of being, as a particular way of being in the world alongside me similarly to the sky that is differently painted each evening. Let me extend my reading with the assistance of Merleau-Ponty. It is through the gaze of the Other that one recognizes that one is for the

Beauvoir and the Gendered Gaze 91 Other as the Other is for oneself. It is in this space between two that we find, in the words of Laura U Marks, the seedling of an ‘intersubjective eroticism’ – a promiscuity between gazers.12 Indeed, one is both a fleshy being as seen by the Other and a consciousness in a fundamentally transparent and yet, thickly embodied, affective and affected, way. As Merleau-Ponty clarifies: In order to conceive of him as a genuine I, I would have to consider myself as a mere object for him, which I am prevented from doing by the knowledge that I have of myself. But if the other’s body is not an object for me, nor my body an object for him, if they are rather behaviours, then the other’s positing of me does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, and my perception of the other does not reduce him to the status of an object in my field. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 368) Therefore, the other is not symmetrical to me, but they are not completely alien to me either; they disclose being (behave) alongside me. There is an encroachment between two without coincidence, without possession; the other remains a freedom. Beauvoir’s theoretical perspective on distancing in The Ethics of Ambiguity is concrete in the work of Merleau-Ponty as he corporealizes disclosure, as he fleshes out intersubjectivity. This reading allows us to extend Beauvoir’s thinking on disclosure beyond the inter-subjective-objective world into the intersubjective world as described in Phenomenology of Perception and further in The Visible and the Invisible. We are vulnerable through our gazing insofar as we acknowledge that by gazing, we are also gazed-upon; our projects, the way in which they are disclosed, and the freedom required to take them up are also under consideration. Merleau-Ponty (1974: 280–311) explains: ‘It is not a self through transparency, like thought, which only thinks its object by assimilating it, by constituting it, by transforming it into thought. It is a self through confusion, narcissism, through inherence of the one who sees in that which he sees, and through inherence of sensing in the sensed – a self, therefore, that is caught up in things.’ This intersubjective eroticism – a messy encroachment of affective beings – is rooted in the body as a body that can both see and be seen, touch and be touched, disclose and be disclosed; it is a body that is an ‘openness’ onto the world, a ‘stage where something will take place’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 263). Consequently, we understand what we are because we are also inextricably out there in the world with/in the other as a disclosive being. Therefore, Sartre, and at times Beauvoir, are not completely wrong in their formulations; the body of the Other, like one’s own body, is never fully apparent but, it may not be completely exhausted into thought or into objectivity either. The body of the Other cannot merely be made

92  Christinia Landry object through the gaze which is because the body is a manifestation of a unique sociohistorical situation that overlaps, but never collapses into one’s own situation. The Other necessarily remains a subject, a subject who discloses the world in ways that are both similar and distinct from the ways in which we disclose the world. It is in this bodily coping with the world through one’s own projects and the projects of others whereby reciprocity is consummated (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 370–371). For instance, the other offers up names of constellations and points out a planet that we mistakenly think is a star. She fearlessly runs into the sea diving under the wave refusing to stumble through the waves like we do. We share with her the pleasures of snowshoeing through the snowfield, showing her how to plod along without sinking. We do not become one with her in this sharing of the world nor do we become subject to her object or object to her subject, rather different ways of disclosing the world may be honoured in this sharing. Nonetheless, there is a loss of singularity and a realization of belonging in our coexistence with others. We look up at the sky, dive under the wave, or plod through the snowfields together. This understanding is a realization of Beauvoir’s moral freedom as it asserts both a commitment to the other and an appreciation of oneself as a lack of being. Beauvoir (1976: 23–24) explains, ‘man also wills himself to be a disclosure of being, and if he coincides with this wish, he wins, for the fact is that the world becomes present by his presence in it. But the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to keep being at a certain distance, to tear oneself from the world, and to assert oneself as a freedom.’ Being in the world with others demands embracing the tension inherent in willing the other free and success in that willing yields joy. Consequently, we must understand ourselves as necessarily caught up with others.13 We cannot simply turn our gaze on the other and reduce her to an object. We cannot do this because this is an attenuated view of the capacities inherent in the visible or more generally, in the sensible. In fact, there is simultaneity and mutuality between gazers that cannot be deprived of its affective, embodied thickness. Sara Heinämaa rightly claims, the body – that which we gaze upon – is an expression of a psychic life; it cannot simply be reduced to one’s own self-reflective consciousness (Heinämaa 2003: 32). Undoubtedly, then ‘Solitude and communication must not be the two terms of an alternative, but rather two moments of a single phenomenon, since other people do in fact exist for me,’ Merleau-Ponty reasons (2012: 376). Indeed, we recognize others as human beings, as factical and as free, and not simply as objects of thought. Recognition of self and others does not happen through a unidirectional gaze. Instead, following Merleau-Ponty’s insight, recognition of another’s subjectivity and of one’s own subjectivity happens through a rather confused messy unfolding whereby we mutually recognize the reversibility of our perceptions calling into question one’s sociohistorical positioning as

Beauvoir and the Gendered Gaze 93 fixed; subject and object, man and woman. Recognition cannot happen in an ossified look that sculpts the other into existence. Instead, recognition requires promiscuity. It requires getting caught up in the projects of others and appealing to others to do the same. Our relationship with others is not polemical in nature, but rather it is fundamentally disclosive. Disclosure, as described by Beauvoir and implicit in the work of Merleau-Ponty,14 fosters a space of generosity that allows one to remain an embodied subject with other embodied subjects insofar as one is a subject through reciprocity and ultimately, through ambiguity – an opening onto the world, a willing of freedoms.15 We must abandon the desire to fashion, possess, birth, sculpt, and produce others and instead engage them, welcoming them in their plentitude, in their sociohistorical depths, just as Beauvoir welcomes the sky, the water, and the snowfield. It is only through the fantasy of possession wherein we see the world as an object of thought that we are able through false hope to remain an island unto ourselves and even this affective closure is doubtful.16 Merleau-Ponty (1968: 269) explains, ‘The other is no longer so much a freedom seen from without as a destiny and fatality, a rival subject for a subject, but he is caught up in a circuit that connects him to the world, as we ourselves are, and consequently also in a circuit that connects him to us.’ To conclude, the visible, if understood as a phenomenological plentitude and not simply as a battlefield, appeals to us to imagine new ways of acknowledging and engaging others. It is a way in which we may overcome a metaphysics that reifies particular subjects and ossifies others. This engagement requires understanding that no situation is ever fully determined nor is it ever completely closed off to negotiation; freedom may always intervene. Therefore, it is not the case that we must fight for the space to carry out our own projects or apotheosize the projects of others, but rather we must recognize the possibilities inherent in each and every interaction; possibilities for appreciation and for collaboration, for willing the freedom of other embodied subjects so that we may in turn be free. However, this engagement and understanding can be forged only if we will the other free. Indeed, we, along with Beauvoir, must honor our original way of being in the world as disclosing beings; we must leave space for others to return the gaze.

Notes 1. Beauvoir’s account of the Algerian war brought her to the realization that her ethics of ambiguity was overly theoretical. However, we do not have to simply take her word for it, as we can see the movement away from this abstract formulation in her late 1940’s work Force of circumstance. 2. Sarah LaChance Adams (2014: 159–160) explains, we need others as appreciators and collaborators to genuinely be free. 3. This of course, cannot make us act morally; however, the degree to which any moral system may persuade us to act morally is questionable. Instead,

94  Christinia Landry what I am arguing is that Beauvoir shows us how our reliance on others may guide our actions as contemplative beings. 4. Beauvoir (1976: 12) explains, ‘There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being”.’ Beauvoir contrasts disclosure with wanting to be that which is disclosed. Beauvoir introduces a new conception of intentionality into the phenomenological tradition from which her thinking emerges. 5. In my paper, the ‘Other’ (with a capitalized o) signifies the Hegelian complement to the Self. This reading is adopted by Beauvoir in The second sex. 6. The proposal that there are two philosophical threads running through Beauvoir’s The second sex is not new. Debra B. Bergoffen forwarded this proposal in 1997. She argues that one voice links Beauvoir’s ethical thinking to Being and nothingness and the other voice links her ethical thinking to The ethics of ambiguity. I certainly agree with her reading. However, Bergoffen’s work focuses on the erotic whereas my focus is on the visible, a much safer realm for founding an ethics of ambiguity. 7. There has been much debate regarding Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s intellectual relationship. For a robust collection of earlier essays see Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and the second sex: feminism, race and the origins of existentialism. 8. See also Bergoffen’s (Re)counting the Sexual Difference (2003). 9. The notion that two subjects may not simultaneously enjoy freedom – one subject necessarily subverts the other – is criticized by Céline T. Léon (1996) as a masculinist perspective that, she argues, Beauvoir forwards in The second sex. 10. Merleau-Ponty uses the term chiasm (chiasme) to describe the perpetual pregnancy between subject and object – perceiver and perceived – that allows for an effectual closure by which perception occurs. This term is apt given Beauvoir’s attention to distancing as key to disclosure. See Maurice MerleauPonty, ‘The intertwining – the chiasm’ in The visible and the invisible. 11. The question of blindness is particularly pressing here. I approach the visible through Merleau-Ponty who explains the ‘visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it. . . . Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world’ (1968: 134). Although Merleau-Ponty stresses that we inhabit a visible world, it is not necessary that one must see with one’s eyes to engage in the visible. Even someone who is blind is visible for others and encounters others who are in turn visible for others. This affects the way in which a person who is blind expresses herself and appropriates the world around her. The visible is relevant to her becoming and in this way she is very much caught up in the visible. Moreover, a person who is blind may ‘see’ in a myriad of ways. Indeed, visibility overlaps with other senses and hence can migrate into other perceptual areas. This is the reason why many people who are blind are able to ‘see’ with their cane; their sense of vision is located in their fingertips and thus migrates to the tip of their cane. For more on touch and visibility in Merleau-Ponty see Cathryn Vasseleu (1998). 12. Laura U. Marks writes on the co-constitutive capacities of the gaze and the resultant overlapping of two: ‘The act of viewing is one in which both I and the object of my vision constitute each other. In this mutually constitutive exchange, I find the germ of an intersubjective eroticism’ (2000: 183). 13. According to Gail Weiss, we are ambiguously intersubjective insofar as our subjectivity arises from our being-with-others (1999: 172).

Beauvoir and the Gendered Gaze 95 14. The question of influence is one that should be addressed here. I am not arguing that Merleau-Ponty used Beauvoir’s notion of disclosure. In fact, Phenomenology of perception was published in 1945 a year before the first appearance of The ethics of ambiguity in Les temps modernes. Instead, I want to suggest that Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty have an intellectual affinity and thinking them together may provide insight into some of her more challenging concepts like that of disclosure. For more on their philosophical connection, see Monika Langer (2003). 15. Christine Daigle explains, ‘It is only because the human being is ambiguous in the way that Beauvoir describes that her appeal has the ability to resonate and generate a responsivity that entails a duty to act’ (2014: 198). 16. I thank Dr. Lisa Guenther for pointing this out to me in an earlier version of this paper.

Reference List Bergoffen, Debra B. 1997. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bergoffen, Debra B. 2003. Simone de Beauvoir: (Re)counting the Sexual Difference. In Claudia Card (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Cambridge University Press, 248–265. Daigle, Christine and Jacob Golomb (eds.) 2009. Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Daigle, Christine. 2014. The Second Sex as appeal: The ethical dimension of ambiguity. Philosophia, 4 (2): 197–220. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1968. Force of Circumstance. Richard Howard (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Bernard Frechtman (trans.). New York: Citadel Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. LaChance Adams, Sarah. 2014. Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a ‘Good’ Mother Would Do. New York: Columbia University Press. Langer, Monika. 2003. Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on ambiguity. In Claudia Card (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Cambridge University Press, 87–106. Léon Céline, T. 1996. Beauvoir’s woman: Eunuch or male? In Margaret A. Simons (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Beauvoir. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 129–159. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Claude Lefort (ed.). Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1974. Eye and mind. In John O’Neill (ed.) Phenomenology, Language and Sociology. Carlton Dallery (trans.). London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 280–311.

96  Christinia Landry Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A. Landes (trans.). New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Hazel E. Barnes (trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. Simons, Margaret A. 1999. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Vasseleu, Carolyn. 1998. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. New York: Routledge. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge.

Part II

Vision, Perception and Gazes

6 Inside the Gaze Shaun Gallagher

Seeing Without an I I’ll start with a case that motivates some philosophical questions. Zahn, Talazko and Ebert (Zahn, Talazko and Ebert 2008) document a case of ‘anonymous vision’. The subject (DP, a 23 year old male) initially complained about ‘double visions’, the onset of which followed a long overseas flight after a holiday during which he engaged in deep sea diving. Examination revealed that he did not literally have double vision (i.e. he did not see objects in double). Rather he described a two-step process involved in seeing. When looking at or concentrating on a new visual object, he is able to see the object as a single object, but the way he perceived had markedly changed in a way which he had never experienced before. It appeared to him that he was able to see everything normally but that he did not immediately recognize that he was the one who perceives and that he needed a second step to become aware that he himself was the one who perceives the object. (Zahn, Talazko and Ebert 2008) This is a curious case that, as Zahn et al. suggest, challenges the principle of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) – the idea that I cannot make a mistake about who is experiencing X when it is I experiencing it (Wittgenstein 1958; Shoemaker 1968). Wittgenstein claims that it doesn’t make sense to ask: ‘Someone is seeing the object, is it I?’ But this seems to be just what DP asks himself. Accordingly, Zahn et al. suggest this case shows an exception to IEM, and selective loss of the sense of self-ownership specifically for visual experience. Testing of DP showed no psychiatric conditions; no attention or executive deficits; no problems with action; an intact sense of agency; normal proprioception and sense of body ownership. Clearly, however, on the basis of one case one can draw only limited conclusions (see Gallagher 2015 for further discussion). Moreover, Zahn et al. were unable to follow

100  Shaun Gallagher up or to get more details about DP’s phenomenology. But there is one further item of interest in their report: DP’s problem was confined to the perception of objects. In perceiving other people and their movements, DP’s visual perception did not manifest this two-step process. His social interactions and communications were all unhesitatingly normal. DP did not report having trouble recognizing others, or that his experience of others was not his own. Literally, this is all we know in this regard: [He underwent] no apparent changes in his perception of other people’s movements. . . . Social interaction and communication were normal which was also confirmed with the patient’s parents with whom he was currently living. (Zahn, Talazko and Ebert 2008: 398) For the purposes of this chapter I want to focus on this difference between object perception and social perception in DP, and more generally. I take the case of DP (to which I return in the conclusion) to motivate a philosophical starting point, and granted the scarcity of empirical data, not as evidence in support of any conclusion.

The Other’s Gaze Let’s begin by noting that, even on a strictly neuroscientific account, visual perception of objects is not just a passive sensory process: vision activates dorsal stream processes that anticipate potential actions that we can make towards an object (Goodale and Milner 1992). When we perceive a particular use object, for example a tool or instrument, canonical neurons in the pre-motor cortex are activated. Canonical neurons are neurons that activate when we reach out to grasp the tool, for example. They play the role of motor neurons that contribute to a motor preparation process for the specific action. The very same neurons activate when we simply see the tool (Fadiga et al. 2000). Perception in this regard is sensory-motor. The neuroscience is consistent with enactive accounts of sensory-motor contingencies (Noë 2004), as well as with ecological accounts of affordances (Gibson 1977), phenomenological accounts of the ‘I can’ (Husserl 1989), the notion of Zuhandenheit (Heidegger 1962), the notion of motor intentionality (Merleau-Ponty 2012), as well as pragmatic accounts found in thinkers such as Dewey, Booth, Caruana, and Steiner (Dewey 1938; Booth 2017; Caruana 2017; Steiner 2017). Perception is affordance-based; I see things in terms of what I can do with them. There is a difference, however, between object perception and person perception, reflected in the neuroscientific distinction between canonical neurons and mirror neurons. The phenomenological difference is this: objects do not return one’s gaze – they don’t respond in the same way as other people (or some non-human animals). They don’t allow for a full-out

Inside the Gaze 101 reciprocal interaction. I can push a stone, but the stone doesn’t actively push back. More specifically, the other’s gaze does something to me – it elicits certain responses from me – even when it is not a returning gaze, as when the other does not direct her gaze towards me. For example, empirical studies show that subjects who follow another person’s gaze looking towards (or away) from objects evaluate such objects as more (or less) valuable than those objects that do not receive attention from others. When combined with emotional expression (positive or negative) on the other’s face, one gets a stronger effect (Bayliss et al. 2006, 2007; Fichtenholtz et al. 2009). The other’s gaze is a prime for action; it activates motor and action-related areas (the dorsal premotor cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, the inferior parietal cortex, the superior temporal sulcus), not only when we see someone reach for an object, but also simply if we see them gaze at an object (Friesen, Moore and Kingstone 2005; Pierno et al. 2006, 2008). Gaze following also leads to shared attention. The other person’s gaze guides attention: even at 8-months infants follow the direction of gaze behind a barrier, indicating an understanding that the agent sees something that the infant does not (Csibra and Volein 2008; Frischen, Bayliss and Tipper 2007).

Seeing Eye to Eye When I see the other person gazing at me, in eye-to-eye contact, something much more complex happens. Consider the following two accounts. I won’t give you the detailed analysis here, but I’ll simply try to say why I find these accounts abstract. The first account is Sartre’s analysis, and especially his examples. They focus on what the other’s gaze does to me from the outside – even without me seeing or meeting the other’s gaze. Sartre was influenced by Hegel’s oppositional concept of recognition (or its failure), which tends to reduce social perception to an alienated experience of being an object to the other, and self-consciousness to an ‘exclusion of every other’. Here is Sartre, summarizing Hegel: Thus the primary fact is the plurality of consciousnesses, and this plurality is realized in the form of a double, reciprocal relation of exclusion . . . it is by the very fact of being me that I exclude the Other. The Other is the one who excludes me by being himself, the one whom I exclude by being myself. (Sartre 1956: 236) Sartre’s peeping Tom example fits this model. A person is caught in the act of peeping through a keyhole. He hears the floor creak; he feels the unseen gaze of the other turning him into an object – a peeping Tom. Through the gaze of the other I am set up within a world that is made alien to me. . . . For the Other’s gaze embraces my being and

102  Shaun Gallagher correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole. All these instrumentalthings in the midst of which I am, now turn toward the Other a face which on principle escapes me. (Sartre 1956: 261) Social relations (in everyday inauthenticity or bad faith) are defined in oppositional, alienating terms where subjects are viewed as objects. The shock of the encounter with the Other is for me a revelation in emptiness of the existence of my body outside as an in-itself for the Other. Thus my body is not given merely as that which is purely and simply lived . . . [it becomes] extended outside in a dimension of flight which escapes me. (Sartre 1956: 352) This is not the whole story for Sartre, but the presupposition at the start of a story where there is no face-to-face.1 I take his account to be onesided in this way. His examples are also one-sided in that they focus on the external, objectifying effects of the other’s gaze. The second account, in contrast, is found in Levinas. What I see in the other’s face is irreducible to its objective properties, its physiognomy, shape, color or morphological features. Rather, I see significance that transcends any such properties. As I meet the other’s gaze the other transcends subject-object categorization, resists being simply a physical object. At the same time the other resists being simply an epistemological subject – she is not equivalent to being an invisible mind, a set of mental states that we might be able to reach through processes of inference or simulation. If for Sartre the gaze is judgemental, for Levinas it is imperative – it makes an ethical demand (see Gallagher 1996). In contrast to Hegel and Sartre, the face-to-face is not oppositional; complete oppositional arrangements are disrupted by the transcendence of the other. I experience this transcendence, as Levinas writes, ‘when the face has turned to me, in its very nakedness. It is by itself, and not by reference to a system’ (Levinas 1969: 75). For Levinas, the face is characterized by proximity and distance at the same time. The ethical proximity of the other’s face cannot be measured in physical geographical terms, the way the nearness of an object might be measured. Its closeness demands a response, and some form of respect (see Bower 2016, 2017). Yet, even in its closeness there is something distant in it, irreducible to its physical proximity. The other’s gaze, or face or body is never the totality of the other. The abstraction in Levinas’s account is that despite the specificity ascribed to the other, the gaze or face is without context – it transcends context – its demand is indeterminate – something ‘beyond understanding’ (déborde la compréhension). For Levinas, the ethical is an unconditional imperative (Peperzak 2003).

Inside the Gaze 103 There is much more in Sartre and Levinas relevant to these considerations that I cannot explicate here; there are, in fact, pointers to the point I now want to make – so my quick reading may seem unfair to them. But it gets me to this point: The gaze, properly viewed, is never abstract and never without context. It is always an intrinsic aspect of a face, and a body, and a situation, and when I see the other gazing at me – when I meet the other’s gaze – lots of things happen, to me and to the other.

Elementary Responsiveness The perception of the other gazing at me, or more generally face perception, presents not just objective patterns that we might recognize or identify as specific emotions. This contrasts with the assumption behind a lot of experimental paradigms where the task is to simply look at the photo of a face and ‘name that emotion’ – as if the full phenomenon of responding to the other is to identify their emotional state. Rather, perceiving the other involves complex interactive behavioral and response patterns arising out of an active two-way engagement with the other’s gaze (Jarick and Bencic 2019) – not a simple recognition of facial features, or a simple recognition of emotions, but an interactive affective response. To flesh out the notion of gaze, let’s start with the infant, who responds differently to ‘things’ that are agents (persons) and things that are nonagents (objects). They respond in a distinctive way to human faces, that is, in a way they do not respond to other objects (Legerstee 1991; Johnson 2000; Johnson, Slaughter and Carey 1998). Infants focus on their caregiver’s eyes very early and although an infant may start to follow the other’s gaze, usually the caregiver is looking at the infant, meeting her gaze. In these gaze encounters infants share emotions, e.g., exchange smiles when playing with a toy in joint attention with another; they get visibly upset if the other person they are interacting with assumes a passive face (Messinger and Fogel 2007). The gaze, in such instances, is neither a passive observation nor a disorganized glance; it appears, at the very least, as an active, interested questioning – and we experience it as something to which we need to respond. I’ve called this elementary responsiveness (rather than ‘recognition’, as in Hegel and Honneth [Hegel 1997; Honneth 1995] for reasons I explicate elsewhere [Gallagher 2017a, 2017b, 2020]). What do I experience in cases where I meet the other’s gaze? It’s not a matter of me seeing the other’s face, simpliciter, but of seeing that the other sees me (or quite literally, seeing the other seeing me). The other’s gaze is precisely not something that can be subsumed into a strictly visual representation of eye direction since it has an affective impact on my own system that sets me up for further response (Cavallo et al. 2015). My perception is not just the activation of retinal and cortical neuronal processes that lead me to believe something about the other person. Indeed, activation

104  Shaun Gallagher of early visual processing areas in the brain reflects more than simple feature detection; neurons in the visual cortex (V1) anticipate reward if they have been relevantly attuned by prior experience (Shuler and Bear 2006). Moreover, perception of the other’s face activates not just the face recognition area and the ventral visual (recognition) pathway, but also the dorsal visual pathway, that is the visual pathway that leads directly to motor areas and primes action (Debruille, Brodeur and Porras 2012). In other words, my face-to-face, eye-to-eye perception of the other person presents me with social affordances, priming my response. Visual perception is informed with affective value from the start. More generally, Barrett and Bar have shown that ‘responses signalling an object’s salience, relevance or value do not occur as a separate step after the object is identified. Instead, affective responses support vision from the very moment that visual stimulation begins’ (Barrett and Bar 2009: 1325). Simultaneous with the very earliest part of visual perception the perceiving organism initiates a host of muscular and hormonal changes – sensory-motor patterns that include involvement of organs, muscles, and joints associated with prior experience, integrated with current exteroceptive sensory information helping to guide response and subsequent actions. Changes in the perceiver’s breathing, muscle tension or stomach motility have an effect on perceptual experience even if they are recessive to what the perceiver experiences – a somatic-affective context associated with previous experiences. This prenoetic-physiological-affective background conditions not just object perception, but also my perception of other people. Take away some of it and I don’t see things or other people in the same way. A good example of this is found in Book I of Plato’s Republic. Cephalus, the aged father of Polemarchus, describes the fading away of the pleasures of the body, leaving him more in control of his weakened passions. This new-found ‘virtue’ in old age is likely due to testosterone depletion which reduces libido and changes one’s sexual perception of the other. Quite literally, the other to whom a perceiver would be sexually attracted doesn’t look as sexy as he or she would if the perceiver’s testosterone levels were still intact. The gaze of the other, however, does not diminish, regardless of whether it is the gaze of a sexually attractive other, the gaze of an old man, or the gaze of an enemy. My perception of the other’s gaze solicits a global bodily activation; I perceive with my whole body in a way that elicits a response. Accordingly, we see others through the affective responses that they generate in us. My entire system is activated in its own motoric, hedonic and affective ways – involving heart rate, respiration, hormones, and so on, all of which have an effect on my perception. Such effects are much greater if there is the potential for interaction, that is, if one is gazing into the eyes of a real person who is gazing back; in this situation it

Inside the Gaze 105 includes a synchronization of specific brain areas across the brains of both subjects (Hirsch et al. 2017); but it also includes, as Merleau-Ponty describes, a more full-bodied, affectively rich intercorporeity (MerleauPonty 1968). The reversibility that Merleau-Ponty finds in one’s own two hands touching, and in the hands of two different subjects touching each other (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 141–142, 317) equally belongs to mutual gaze: I not only see you, I see you seeing me. This establishes, as MerleauPonty suggests, ‘an internal relation that makes the other person appear as the completion of the system’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 368).2

Conclusion: The End of the Gaze The fact that the other returns the gaze, and that this strongly registers in our perception (as Sartre makes clear), provides part of the basis for regarding the other not as mere object or (as Levinas makes clear) even as a subject understood as an epistemological (or Cartesian) subject who is a mere bearer of mental states. Rather, I see meaning and emotion in the other’s gaze, face, and bodily comportment. Merleau-Ponty, rather than Levinas or Sartre, suggests the correct angle on these issues in his appeal to Valéry, which qualifies the idea that there is a completion of a system. As soon as gazes meet, we are no longer wholly two, and it is hard to remain alone. This exchange (the term is exact) realizes in a very short time a transposition or metathesis – a chiasma of two “destinies,” two points of view. Thereby a sort of simultaneous reciprocal limitation occurs. You capture my image, my appearance; I capture yours. You are not me, since you see me and I do not see myself. What I lack is this me that you see. And what you lack is the you that I see. And no matter how far we advance in our mutual understanding, as much as we reflect, so much will we be different. (quoted in Merleau-Ponty 2007: 196, emphasis added) To return to our starting point, seeing without an I, in the case of DP, is only momentary for his perception of objects – perhaps it’s a process of elimination, and there are no other candidates to whom to attribute his vision. In the case of seeing the other person, however, without delay DP sees with an I, which is ‘the me that you see’ – an I that he does not experience in seeing a gazeless object, but one that he experiences because the other sees (or potentially sees) him, and is ‘the you that I see’. The question that is motivated by the case of DP: Is the I that sees the other different from the I that sees only objects? In response to this question, Merleau-Ponty could easily accept a revision to his own statement: ‘to see a face . . . is to have a certain hold on it’ – something that Levinas might resist. One could rather say: ‘to see a

106  Shaun Gallagher face is for it to have a hold on me.’ For Levinas, at the end of the gaze there is no end, no completion; the gaze veers off towards infinity. Sartre might say that in an authentic relation, at the end of the gaze there is no-thing, that is, pure subjectivity or a kind of human transcendence. On concepts that acknowledge embodied and worldly contexts, however, one can also say there is something immanent in (inside or at the end of) the gaze – something that elicits an elementary responsiveness that remains closer to our intercorporeal encounters – an immanence that is not nothing, but also not everything.

Notes . Sartre adds provisos about good faith, e.g., 1956: 70n9. 1 2. Most of this response may be below the threshold of consciousness, and it may also be the case that social or institutional arrangements that lead to the reification of others can eliminate much (or all) such responses. This is a topic that I will not address here (see Gallagher and Varga 2014).

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7 Perception and its Objects Maurita Harney

I.  The Feeling of Being Looked At In the ancient sewers of Istanbul, there is a pillar whose base is the head of Medusa. However, Medusa’s head is on its side – why? Workmen lived in fear of being turned to stone when looked at by the eyes of the mythical character. Ancient peoples believed that looks (like the evil eye, or Medusa’s glare) could petrify, kill, maim or in some way harm the recipient of the look. They are tapping into an important but much-neglected aspect of visual perception – namely, what it means to be seen or looked at, or what it feels like to be the object of another’s gaze. It shows how being seen or looked at can generate emotions such as fear, shame, oppressiveness, etc. The idea of an ‘evil’ eye or stare here implies an ethical dimension as well. The ethical dimension is explicit in the idea of the inhuman gaze – or one understanding of that phrase. It raises the question: is there a possibility of ‘perceiving otherwise’? What might this ‘otherwise’ mean? In Sartre, the Gaze (which derives from Hegel’s master/slave relation) is a metaphor for the fundamental conflict in our encounter with others arising from the ambiguity of the being-for-itself (the other as a subjectivity like me) and the being-in-itself (the other as not-me, among objects in the world). It is strikingly dramatized in his description of the eavesdropper who finds himself being looked at – that is, subjected to the gaze of an observer. From the point of view of the eavesdropper, ‘I’ become an object for ‘the other’. It is a felt ambiguity. For Sartre, the gaze is an attempt to deprive another of her subjectivity or freedom – to possess the other. This anecdote is useful, first, in suggesting that seeing or looking in the form of inflicting the gaze is something that we do. And, second, it suggests by implication that there can be an ethical dimension to looking at or seeing. This dimension has been a fruitful preoccupation of post-Sartrean scholars: the gaze can be gendered, as in ‘the male gaze’ (see Landry 2020); it can be technologized as in the instruments of surveillance and control discussed so eloquently by Foucault, especially in his later works such as Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977). In

110  Maurita Harney short, the gaze can be an instrument of power. These might be seen as the contemporary versions of Medusa’s gaze. But while in moving from the ancient world to the 20th and 21st centuries, socio-political imperatives have replaced superstition as the ground of normativity; the origins are nonetheless traceable to the phenomenological ‘feeling of being looked at’. The phenomenon of ‘the gaze’ is usually discussed not within the context of perception, but rather within the framework of our intersubjective relations with others, be it the phenomenological ‘being-for-others’ or other broader areas of social inquiry such as cultural or political studies. However, these debates, which I will not be dwelling on here, are also part of a philosophy of perception, one which, for Merleau-Ponty is grounded in a philosophy of nature. It is this aspect that is the main focus of my paper. This is consistent with the view convincingly argued by Anya Daly (Daly 2016) that questions of ethics, of how we should live and what we should do presuppose a metaphysics, a theory of being, and for this reason, it makes sense to explore the metaphysical aspects of perception more generally. This is particularly so in the case of MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of the gaze where, as Shaun Gallagher describes it, the gaze presents us with a unique form of reversibility in the form of the object’s ‘having a certain hold on’ the perceiving subject (Gallagher 2020: 105 – 106). However, it is a different ‘gaze’ that motivates this essay. My concern is partly with the ‘gaze’ associated with the ‘spectator view’ of knowledge or, more precisely, some of the assumptions and also some of the consequences of this. Within the Western philosophical tradition, broadly speaking, there is a tension between two interpretations of the intentionality of perception, the phenomenological approach which emphasises the affective reciprocity or connectedness of subject and object, and the ‘scientific’ approach associated with the Cartesian-derived epistemological framework, sometimes associated with the ‘spectator’ view of knowledge, and the postulate of an idealised observer, predicated on an attempt to dichotomise subject and object, perceiver and perceived, knower and known. This is what might be called the objectification of nature. The Gaze as described by Sartre paradoxically reflects both of these aspects: there is objectification of the kind we find in the epistemological sphere of traditional ‘scientific’ approaches, but at the same time, at the affective level, a connectedness in the form of a reciprocity between the subject and the object of seeing, such that the ‘object’ of the gaze is interdependent with, rather than (scientifically) independent of, the perceiver; in the words of Gallagher, as an ‘interactive affective response’ (Gallagher 2020: 104–105). This ambiguity, whereby the ‘object’ of perception is something that can be experienced as felt (i.e. by way of feeling), is best explained by a re-thinking of the notion of intentionality.

Perception and its Objects 111 For Merleau-Ponty, these features of reciprocity and affectivity characterise all perception, not just the perception of ‘the other’. Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty further stresses the embodied nature of these relations: ‘I looked, I am seen, supposes the analysis of the reciprocity of seeing and being-seen which is grounded on corporeity as listening and speaking’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 280). So, before we can talk about the problem of ‘the other’ we must examine the seeing-being-seen relation understood as a corporeal one. In this respect, we part company with Sartre whose account draws on his notions of human freedom and transcendence, notions which don’t fit easily into the embodied and enactivist framework developed by Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. In this chapter, I wish to challenge some of the long-standing assumptions about the intentionality of perception by exploring Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodied intentionality and its relation to his ontology of nature as flesh as developed in his later works. In doing this, I wish to draw out some important implications of his philosophy of nature and some consequences for our understanding of science. Brentano’s characterisation of intentionality as ‘the mark of the mental’ (Brentano 1973) has not served us well when it comes to the intentionality of perception. In recent years it has been appropriated by those drawn to an information-processing model of mind where the intentional object must be understood in terms of representations. But underlying this is a dualism inherited from Descartes who separates perception from feeling and ties it to a theory of knowledge. The ‘object’ of perception is then understood as in some sense a representation of the world governed by considerations of truth and falsity. Descartes’ separation of res cogitans from res extensa provided a metaphysical basis for his dualism of mind and body, a dualism that becomes a principle of division between mind and nature, man and animal, culture and nature. Humans are endowed with agency by virtue of their possession of mind or consciousness, and because of this are elevated to the status of the rational, knowing subject; animals, lacking consciousness, are mere machines subject to mechanical and deterministic laws of cause and effect. Correlatively, as MerleauPonty himself observes, this dualism, with its implied hierarchy of beings, also becomes a weapon of exclusion whereby ‘children, madmen, (the infirm) and primitive peoples’, lacking rationality, are all relegated to the category of beast and thus, mere machines (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 54). By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s account of intentionality as motor or operative intentionality replaces Descartes’ ‘I think’ with ‘I can’ and is a key to his thesis that intentionality is embodied, embedded, and enactive. It is an account which elaborates and develops further the insights of Husserl in his later Ideen II. Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s earlier works focus on intentional behaviour, the broader metaphysical implications of this embodied intentionality are more fully developed in his later The Visible and the Invisible and Nature, which mark his ‘turn to the object’.

112  Maurita Harney I suggest there is a continuity between his earlier and later works, allowing us to see that the intentionality of perception belongs not to a philosophy of mind but to a philosophy of nature. Side by side with Merleau-Ponty’s own thesis is his critique of ‘objectivism’ – the view of nature that arises from a Cartesian-derived separation of subject and object, this separation providing fertile ground for the growth of a positivistic ontology and a mechanistic view of science. The consequences of this are significant, leading as they do, to new understandings of the nature of science and relations of culture and nature. In The Philosopher and Sociology (1964), Merleau-Ponty states: ‘As long as I cling to the ideal of an absolute spectator, of knowledge with no point of view, I can see my situation as nothing but a source of error’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 109). This is a criticism of the theory’s neglect of the multiperspectival view of perception, which is part of the ‘objectivist’ philosophy implied by the spectator view of knowledge: ‘philosophy is indeed, and always, a break with objectivism and a return from constructiva to lived experience, from the world to lived experience’ (MerleauPonty 1964: 112). He explicitly rejects the idea that this leaves us with the Cartesian subject by transporting us into ‘the rarefied atmosphere of introspection or into a realm numerically distinct from that of science. It no longer makes philosophy the rival of scientific knowledge but an intersubjectivity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 112). It should also be noted here that Merleau-Ponty is not setting up a rival theory in opposition to the scientific attitude. Nor is he rejecting the ‘scientific attitude’ out of hand, and I shall return to this later. But, in the meantime, there are lessons to be learnt from considering the metaphysical roots of these two attitudes or orientations and the traditions to which they belong. It appears that the term spectator view of knowledge, although it has Kantian overtones, originated with pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who criticised such a theory for seeing the knower as a passive receiver of data, arguing instead from a pragmatist point of view that knowing and perceiving involve action. Whilst this is convergent with MerleauPonty’s enactivist view of perception and knowledge, it is not identical to it. One should note, in passing, however the fruitful discussions that are emerging about the connection between pragmatism and phenomenology, especially through a shared interest in enactivist philosophies (see, for example, Gallagher 2017: 50ff., 70–81; Harney 2017; Sachs 2017). For Merleau-Ponty, objectivism presupposes a commitment to the idea that subject and object are discrete and determinate entities, locatable in space and time, which exist separately (as partes extra partes) and only come into relation by way of externally imposed relations, such as mechanical causation. For the objectivist, nature is an exteriority (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 10). In identifying the ‘scientific’ with the stance of the detached observer, there is an assumption that we, the human perceivers, can stand outside of nature – that we are not part of the subject

Perception and its Objects 113 under study. This positivistic view of physics requires the elimination of subjective or anthropomorphic elements from the physical. The first and most important quality of all scientific ways of thinking must be the clear distinction between the outer object of observation and the subjective nature of the observer. Other forms of scientific inquiry, such as biology, have not been immune to these principles, as we shall see. As Adam Loughnane (Loughnane 2016: 49) points out, the difference here, between the phenomenological and the objectivist or scientific approaches to perception, is traceable to an underlying clash of metaphysics. For the objectivist, the Cartesian-derived representationalist view of perception is a consequence of an underlying metaphysics which assumes a radical discontinuity between subject and object. Seeing is said to be the reception of visual data that in some sense cause mental representations. Underlying this is a positivistic ontology whereby the description ‘objectivity’ requires that the object be measurable, observable, quantifiable – all properties which are excluded by the (Cartesian) ‘subjective’ (Loughnane 2016: 50). For Loughnane, ‘this framework leaves no room for the negative, for the invisible, the un-seen, or the perceptually absent features, such as memories, imaginings, fears, anticipations or desires to be included as part of the visual’ (Loughnane 2016: 50). These are the features of our experienced perceptual relationship to the object and cannot be understood except in relational terms. They are features which are a key to the phenomenological approach which rests on a metaphysical continuity of subject and object, a connectedness that is manifest in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that, in every case of seeing, there is a reciprocal ‘being seen’: to see is to be seen; perception can never be a ‘view from nowhere’ but is always multiperspectival. There is always an implied view from other perceivers – what Husserl calls ‘open intersubjectivity’. This is not something added to what I see but is constitutive of it. As perceptual beings, we are in effect born into a world of intersubjective relations of reciprocity, and this is the case irrespective of whether I am perceiving another person or an inanimate object. The implied intersubjectivity of all perception is in turn explained as intercorporeity or participation in the flesh of the world. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1968) is premised on the idea of a biological intentionality in the form of Ineinander – an intertwining – of the sensing and the sensible, exemplified in Husserl’s celebrated example of the touching and the touched. When I touch one hand with the other, I experience this as both the subject and the object of the experience in the unity of my own body. But this is only possible through the ‘medium’ of flesh. In his The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty develops the notions of Ineinander and intercorporeity to explain the unique relations of the sensing and the sensible constitutive of intersubjectivity in the human world. The inter-relationship between the touching and the touched experienced within the unity of my own body is the basis for the

114  Maurita Harney emergence of subjects and objects more generally. In his Nature lectures (2003), Merleau-Ponty extends this to describe our relations first with non-human animals, and then with nature generally: ‘flesh as an element of Being corresponds to Nature conceived as a matrix or source of minds and bodies, subjects and objects’ (Hamrick and van der Veken 2011: 77). This is why, in perceiving another person, that other person appears as ‘the completion of a system’, the ‘system’ here being intertwined sensory, intercorporeal relations: ‘we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 354, 1968: 142–143). MerleauPonty’s ontology of the flesh means that these intersubjective relations are part of a more general ‘system’ of intercorporeal being. Flesh grounds the metaphysical continuity of subject and object and at the same time establishes the continuity of humans and nature. If, as the objectivist position entails, the natural world can be understood as that which excludes humans, a separation is carved between humans and nature and between the cultural and the natural world. As a consequence, we have a conception of nature viewed through the lens of the prevailing orthodoxy of Western Galilean-Newtonian science. When Galileo announced that ‘the Book of Nature’ is written in the language of mathematics, he thereby excluded the qualitative from nature. This mathematicisation of nature cleared the ground for the mechanical view of natural processes commonly attributed to Newton. According to this view, processes in nature are governed by laws which are universal, timeless, and immutable. These laws enable us in principle to explain and predict the behaviour of everything in the universe on the basis of mechanical causes. Aristotle’s ‘final’ causation is excluded from this view, leaving only a mechanised version of his ‘efficient’ causation. The Galilean-Newtonian view results in a reductionist science in which all phenomena are said to be subject to deterministic laws, and where all that occurs in nature is in principle predictable. It is a view in which spatiality and temporality take the form of a set of co-ordinates – a mathematical abstraction. Physicist Lee Smolin, a critic of this view, calls this the ‘block universe’ and sees it as a product of ‘timeless naturalism’ (Smolin 2015). Timeless naturalism holds that the fundamental laws of nature are timeless and immutable, and it assumes that the universe’s history is the result of deterministic and immutable laws acting on initial conditions. In the physicists’ version, the ‘block universe’ means that ‘nothing can ever be truly novel because any observable measuring of a property of the universe at a future time can be expressed as a function of observables at any earlier time, by inverting the equations of motion’ (Smolin 2015: 3). On this view, the irreversibility of time is denied, and possibilities must be seen as future eventualities rather than a dimension of present reality. In short, it is a view which denies the reality of possibility, meaning, temporality, and final causation.

Perception and its Objects 115 A very different picture of the natural world emerges from MerleauPonty’s account of perception. Merleau-Ponty rejects the Cartesian dichotomy of subject and object, pointing out that ‘whenever the higher forms of consciousness and judgment are studied, it is almost always in terms of the thinking subject defined as the pure power of bestowing significations and the capacity of absolute survey’ (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 3). Here, in his later works, he urges instead a return to the ‘sensible world’ and ‘sensible consciousness’ which, through perception, creates for the philosopher a new understanding of our relation to being. ‘For the meaning of a perceived object when picked out from all others still does not stand isolated from the constellation in which it appears; it is articulated only as a certain distance in relation to the order of space, time, motion, and signification’ (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 3–4). The groundwork for this return to the sensible is laid down in his earlier Phenomenology of Perception (1962), where he develops his account of embodied intentionality through the notions of operative and motor intentionality (MerleauPonty 1962: 110). Motility is, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘basic intentionality’: ‘consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think that” but of “I can”.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 137). ‘Even if, subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of those transpositions, equivalents, and identifications which make space an objective system and allow our experience to be one of objects’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 142). Merleau-Ponty’s embodied intentionality is articulated through the notion of Umwelt, which serves to link perception with sensation and movement.

II. The Umwelt Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll is an acknowledged source of inspiration in Husserl’s Ideen II, and becomes a constant reference point for Merleau-Ponty throughout all of his works. Von Uexküll’s account of the animal’s relation to its environment (von Uexküll 1957) provides the key to his notion of embodied and enactive intentionality. Uexküll coined the term Umwelt to describe an organism’s environment or milieu: The Umwelt marks the difference between the world such as it exists in itself, and the world as the world of a living being. It is an intermediary reality between the world such as it exists for an absolute observer and a purely subjective domain. It is the aspect of the world to which the animal addresses itself, which exists for the behaviour of an animal, but not necessarily for its consciousness. (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 167)

116  Maurita Harney The animal’s environment understood as Umwelt is not some static, meaningless backdrop but something which means something to the animal in terms of food, threat, reproduction, etc., and this meaning or significance is expressed in the movement of the animal as it seeks out and moves towards some things and recoils from others. In the words of Merleau-Ponty, Umwelt is ‘the world implied by the movement of the animal’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 167). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone points out the importance of enactivism in Husserl’s work in the form of animate being. She states: ‘forms of life find meaning in their surrounding world and those meanings are kinetically articulated in their moving bodies’ (Sheets-Johnstone 2012: 72). Meaning is in the movement, not in the mind. Biologist, Jesper Hoffmeyer states: ‘Even an amoeba is capable of choosing to move in one direction rather than another. It will, for example, generally gravitate toward the richest source of nourishment’ (Hoffmeyer 1996: 48) The Umwelt teaches us that at an ontological level, organism and environment cannot be understood atomistically as separate entities, but only relationally, that is to say, in terms of dynamically changing relations of reciprocity in nature. Merleau-Ponty calls this motor or operative intentionality (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 110, 143–144). These relations of reciprocity take the form of affordances relating to my possibilities and potentialities for acting: just as a chair as a chair-to-be-sat-on affords sitting and a cricket ball as a ball-to-be caught affords catching, so, too, water affords swimming for the fish, air affords flying for the bird, earth affords walking for humans. Organism and environment form a system of reciprocities, and the potential for acting are part of this system. Potentialities in the form of ‘I cans’ are real by virtue of their being part of these relations. When Merleau-Ponty states that ‘nature is the expression of an ontology’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 204), his starting point is living things as meaningful or meaning-bearers: ‘there is nature wherever there is a life that has meaning, but where, however, there is not thought . . . it is the autoproduction of a meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 3). It is our animality, not mind, thought, or intellect, that is ‘the logos of the sensible world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 166). Any suggestion of anthropomorphism or of a deity as a source of meaning is thus removed. It is Nature itself – animate, creative, evolving – that is responsible for generating meaning. The relational and dynamic ontology of the Umwelt affirms that intentional relations are embedded: the living organism cannot be considered in isolation from its milieu including other living things. Moreover, these relations are embodied: they are primarily a naturally occurring biological phenomenon rather than the product of human mental activity. And they are enactive: they are expressed in movement and the potentiality for movement – the ‘I cans’. This is a pre-conceptual or pre-reflective

Perception and its Objects 117 intentionality – a property of sense perception in the form of touching, looking, smelling, hearing, feeling – activities that serve to connect us with rather than separate us from non-human animals. The dynamical aspect of the Umwelt relations cannot be reductively explained by efficient or mechanical causation such as stimulus-response mechanisms. Seemingly ‘mechanical’ responses can appear to be automatic, but according to this ecological view, they are more accurately explained in terms of patterns of behaviour that become sedimented through repetition – an expression of ‘the habitual body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 78–79). Understood this way, there can be no commitment to determinism. Living things are not on a trajectory to a pre-determined future, although the range and nature of possible actions will be constrained by factors both internal to their biological constitution and externally in the particular environment. Von Uexküll’s Umwelt is the inspiration behind a growing area of interdisciplinary research known as biosemiotics. Premised on the understanding that meaning is a feature of all living things, biosemiotics draws on the semiotic theory of American pragmatist philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce to develop a non-reductionist approach to biology and related disciplines. It is understandable that practitioners in this area express a keen interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty (see, for example, Harney 2015). Merleau-Ponty ceases to use the word intentionality in his later works because of its ties to subjectivity and consciousness but, by re-casting it as the embodied, as motor, and as operative intentionality of the Umwelt, he is already affirming that intentional relations are part of nature, not the mind, in the Cartesian-derived sense which separates mind from nature. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘turn to the object’ in his later philosophy shows that a philosophy of nature where movement or animation is primary, is a logical ‘destination’ for this notion. Moreover, there is arguably a further justification for retaining intentionality, and this can be found when we take a closer look at the origins of that notion, albeit a non-orthodox one, and one which pre-dates the formulation of Brentano as the ‘mark of the mental’. Brentano did acknowledge the influence of Scholastic philosophers as well as Aristotle in his formulation of his intentionality thesis. But we should add a missing link here – namely, the thoughts of those Arabic philosophers who translated and further developed the works of Aristotle and paved the way for the Scholastics. In the writings of Averroës and Avicenna we find considerable attention given to the notion of what we would call intentionality in the form of the object of perceptual activity, but one which allows us to tie intentionality to the sensory and the sensed rather than (or in addition to) mind and cognition. This is what has been called the ‘intentions of the sensible’.

118  Maurita Harney

III.  Intentions of the Sensible In Aristotle’s philosophy of being in de Anima, the ‘powers of the soul’ form a nested hierarchy: first, the vegetative being of plants, with powers of nutrition and reproduction; second, the sensitive being of animals, with added powers of sensation and movement; and third, the intellectual being of humans, with further added powers of thought and rationality. Of these, by far the richest category is that of sensitive being, where we find Aristotle’s view of perception. ‘Sensitive being’ – the being of animals whose powers are also shared by humans in the form of pre-intellectual capacities – includes the capacity to make discriminations, e.g. dark from light and the capacity to originate local movement (Aristotle 1961: Bk. III-8). According to Aristotle, we perceive things through the senses or sensations – seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, etc. Far from being passive receptacles, the senses are characterised by a kind of pre-intellectual, or sensed, knowledge. It is in the realm of sensitive being that we find a grounding for the idea of a biologically-based approach to intentionality and, with that, an insight that helps us make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s statement that ‘animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 166). It was the Arabic philosophers of the early Middle Ages, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës), who sought to develop a theory of cognition by extending and elaborating the insights of Aristotle’s theory of perception as it related to the powers of sensitive being (Black 2004: 311). For Aristotle, the objects of perception were said to comprise not just those ‘directly’ sensed – such as ‘the white thing’, but also those ‘incidentally’ perceived such as ‘the son of Diares’. Incidental, here, means that the son of Diares is contingently, not definitionally, connected to this white thing. For the Arabic philosophers this class of perceptual powers became the topic of considerable debate, and a special faculty known as the estimative faculty (wahm) was introduced to account for them. The objects of the estimative faculty included the ‘intentions of the sensible’ (ma’ānt) (Avicenna 1952: ch III: 30; Black 1993: 220). The celebrated example of this is the hostility of the wolf that is perceived by the sheep. ‘The estimative faculty . . . perceives the non-sensible intentions which exist in the particular sense-perceptible objects, like the faculty existing in sheep judging that the wolf is something to flee from and that this child is something to have affection for’ (Avicenna 1959: I.5, 43). The hostility of the wolf is not the same as the perceived brown thing, but nor is it, being a capacity of animality rather than rationality, something inferred. The judgement here is pre-intellectual, pre-conceptual. The intentions of the sensible include properties relating to appetition and affection – such as pleasantness, painfulness, hostility, friendliness, etc. (Rahman 1952: 84).

Perception and its Objects 119 These ‘intentions of the sensible’ are relational properties in two important respects. First, the hostility, although not visible in the same way that ‘the brown thing’ is, is nonetheless not something inferred. It is ‘directly’ perceived, and as such its status as an object of perception consists in its relationship to the biological dispositions or concerns as these are enacted in the perceiver. It is an intentional relation in the embodied sense we have been concerned with. Evan Thompson uses the example of bacteria swimming up the sugar gradient to make this point: ‘while sucrose is a real and present condition of the physico-chemical environment, the status of sucrose as a nutrient is not . . . [I]t is a relational feature, linked to the bacterium’s metabolism. . . . Sucrose belongs to the physical order; sucrose-as-nutrient belongs to the living order’ (Thompson 2007: 74, 158). So, organism is intentionally related to sucrose-asnutrient, or wolf-as-predator, and the relation here is clearly ‘embodied’ in the sense of biologically based. Second, these relations are practical in nature, being expressed in the movement of the animal towards what provides nourishment or away from the object that threatens (and hence serves self-preservation) (Black 1993: 220). That is to say, these relations are enactive. It is worth noting here that Gallagher’s description of enactivism in the case of our encounter with other people can be validly extended to perceptual encounters in the non-human world: [O]ur perceptions of the other’s behaviors are enactive, which means that we perceive others in an action-oriented way – we perceive them in terms of how we can respond to them or in terms of our ongoing interaction possibilities. (Gallagher 2017: 170) Notions of the estimative faculty and the associated ‘intentions of the sensible’ were hotly debated at the time – with Averroës and Gaunilo, for example, disputing the nature, scope, and attribution of this faculty. These debates continued through to the Scholastics, Aquinas included. In recent times, these debates are no less heated, with disputes about the translation of ma’ānt as ‘intention’, its links with contemporary understandings of intentionality adding a further level of complexity (Harney 2019: 148–149). Aquinas, it should be noted, restricted the estimative faculty to non-rational animals identifying it with ‘natural instinct’ rather than cognition (Barker 2012: 204), a shift resulting in a shrinking and impoverishment of the cognitive dimension of the perceptual or the sensed, and arguably one that accelerates the process of reducing the capacities of animals to those of the ‘beast-machine’. In retrospect however, the ‘intentions of the sensible’ can serve to illuminate and extend Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodied intentionality, recasting it as a property of all living things by virtue of their meaningful sensorimotor engagement with the world, and through this integrating it

120  Maurita Harney with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of Nature as flesh. There is, moreover, a consistency between this approach and recent claims concerning ‘collective’ or ‘distributed’ intentionality as intersubjectively constituted rather than a property of individual acts. Gallagher, for example, describing intentionality as an exercise of operative intentionality in the interaction between two agents observes: ‘in this kind of interaction there is a bodily intentionality distributed across the interacting agents, an intentionality that couldn’t be realized without there being an actual interaction. . . . [I]ntercorporeity involves a reciprocal, dynamic, and enactive response to the other’s action, taking that action as an affordance for further action’ (Gallagher 2017: 77). On the primacy of the intersubjective and the idea of the individual as emergent from social relations, biosemiotician Hoffmeyer adds a biological contribution: ‘living entities became intentional systems – subjects in a sense – because they had established channels for an integration of other-reference (through surface receptors) with self-reference’ (Hoffmeyer 2010: 386). Self-reference, in a biological sense, grows out of other-reference.

IV. Temporality Living things are ‘future-directed’ in the sense that the intentionality of their actions – fleeing from the wolf or selecting nutrients involve an orientation to some anticipated future state of affairs. In the human sphere, this anticipatory behaviour is most evident in goal-directed activities like writing a paper or shopping for the weekend, but it is also characteristic in quasi-automatic ‘instinctive’ behaviour like unthinkingly and expertly dodging large puddles or manoeuvring a path around other pedestrians in a busy street. Human emotions – hopes, anxieties, and fears – are all expressions of anticipation. Our enjoyment of music, literature, and cinema are primarily anticipatory, as are my interactions with others in business negotiations and in character assessments of people as brave, loyal, generous, etc. This temporal dimension is one familiar to phenomenologists for whom the future is understood as an horizon of the present; it is not determined but a matter of possibilities: ‘the past continually serves as the horizon and background of our present experience, and when absorbed in action, our focus, the centre of our concern, is not on the present, but on the future goals that we intend or project’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 85–86). This orientation towards the future is evident in the seeking behaviour of living things; for example, doing x in order to find nutrients or reach light, defend itself or its young (survive as an individual organism), or reproductive success (survive as a species). All behaviour can be seen as a form of seeking. Here, intentionality as telos or teleology comes into play: to say the deer takes flight because it fears the predator cannot be

Perception and its Objects 121 understood reductively as a mere mechanical response – a ‘reaction’ – to a stimulus, as in the case of a thermostat. Rather, the deer flees the scene in order to avoid the predator which it associates with the noise. The turtles come ashore in order to lay eggs. The hooded plover pretends to be injured in order to lure the predator away from her chicks. This seeking behaviour is a feature of all living things, and explanations of it require reference to goals, ends, or purposes – the future states of affairs being aimed at. Intentions, goals, and purposes presuppose temporality. What living things anticipate and what organisms seek in the form of nutrition or survival are future possibilities. These future possibilities can be said to play a causal role in affecting the present actions of the organism. However, as ‘causes’ they cannot be seen as deterministically related to my present actions because of their status as possibilities and because there can be more than one possible way of achieving those ends. They are, in the terminology of Aristotle, cases where ‘final causation’ operates. To adequately explain behaviour of living things, it is necessary to expand our notion of causation to include Aristotelean final causation in addition to efficient causation. Traditionally, biology has conformed to the physics-based principles of mechanistic science in which there is no room for final causation, and where efficient causation is construed in a narrowly mechanistic way. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the failure to distinguish final and efficient causation that yields ‘the mechanical’: ‘finality and causality are no longer distinguished, and in this indistinction is expressed the image of “the machine” ’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 10). As a result, all behaviour is seen as nothing but a reaction to past events. Because of this, certain contradictions arise, especially in the light of recent advances in theoretical biology arising from evolutionary theory and related studies in ethology, ecology, and neuroscience. The reactive model can’t account for the novelty and creativity in the emergence of new forms, and yet this is a feature of living things exhibited for example in new forms produced at species level by evolution. These processes are of their very nature unpredictable, hence conflict with the principles of mechanistic biology which assumes a deterministic universe governed by general laws. Theoretical biologist and mathematician Robert Rosen is highly critical of what he calls the ‘reactive paradigm’, a physics-dominated paradigm which sees our present behaviour solely as a reaction to past events. In this, final causation has no part. It assumes a notion of cause as mechanical and linear, but it also assumes that causes necessarily precede and determine their effects. As an alternative, Rosen proposes an ‘anticipatory paradigm’ and introduces this with the counter-intuitive claim that a future state of affairs – one that doesn’t even exist yet – can causally affect a present state of affairs. Rosen gives the example of seeing a bear when I am walking in the woods. I respond by immediately getting out

122  Maurita Harney of the way. Why? Because I can foresee a variety of unpleasant consequences arising from failing to do so. Here, ‘my present behavior is not simply reactive, but rather is anticipatory’ (Rosen 2012: 7). For Rosen, anticipatory behaviour is ubiquitous, being exhibited in all living things from the microscopic to the higher mammals. The idea that the future can play a causal role in our lives and the lives of other living things conflicts with a set of deeply-entrenched assumptions that our present behaviour is nothing more than a consequence of, or a reaction to, past events, be they genetic or environmental factors or both. For Rosen, this was good enough reason for rejecting the reactive paradigm or at least augmenting it with some of the lessons learnt from the laws of thermodynamics. Rosen’s anticipatory paradigm incorporates a much richer notion of cause, admitting an Aristotelean notion of final causation as well as efficient causation. It sees anticipation as a feature of complexity and recognizes that behaviour that is complex, non-linear, and dynamical cannot be adequately represented using the tools of Newtonian mechanics. Complex systems include a broad range of phenomena such as weather patterns, the economy, voting behaviour, brain plasticity, and the behaviour of living things generally. The scientific explanation of dynamical complex systems requires references to the laws of thermodynamics and acceptance of what Smolin calls ‘temporal naturalism’ and the irreversibility of time, these being consistent with the phenomenologists’ idea of temporality, and the future as a set of genuine possibilities. Change is seen as evolutionary rather than a series of mechanically generated outputs. This, in turn, means that we are dealing with a world of inherent unpredictability. In the words of complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman, it is a world which cannot be reduced to a set of ‘entailment relations’. Kauffman coined the expression Adjacent Possible to describe how a dynamical system progresses through a space of possibilities, only one of which is actualized, and none of which is determined by its antecedent conditions. Studies of complex systems and their transformations through time imply an underlying metaphysics congruent with the idea of ‘the universe as an ever-unfolding “process ontology” of “possibility space” ’ (Kauffman and Gare 2015: 215). It is also congruent with the idea that the ‘future’ for all living things are their relational possibilities for action, not a series of outputs mechanically generated by antecedent conditions and fixed natural laws. Kauffman’s ‘Adjacent Possible’ is ably demonstrated by biosemiotician Don Favareau in his everyday example of human conversation where the linguists’ notion of the ‘relevant next’ plays a part (Favareau 2015: 589– 590). Here, social and cultural affordances in the form of understanding what constitutes conversation rather than mere successive monologues, consist in the possibilities of responding or initiating utterances at each stage of a conversation according to expectations of the other, as well as the taken-for-granted assumption that the other shares these expectations and ‘the rules’ for continuing. These expectations keep changing partly

Perception and its Objects 123 in relation to feedback, setting, mood, distractions, cultural differences, memories of past encounters, etc., and these will open up but also constrain certain possibilities for future utterances. So, too, will the conventions for carrying on a conversation which provide cultural affordances that can both shape the direction that the conversation will take, but will also constrain it. But at no point is a future intervention predictable. Conversational interactions can be seen in terms of the emergence of a range of possibilities for continuing the conversation (i.e. an array of ‘I cans’) all of which are in some sense shaped by antecedent conditions but none of which is entailed by those conditions. Possibilities act as both constraints and enablers of what can be said next. In this sense, the future of the conversation process is always open. At each point something novel emerges. It is in this sense that social and cultural processes, even the simplest everyday processes like conversation, can be seen as exhibiting novelty and creativity – but this is because of, not in spite of, their continuity with processes of evolution in the natural world. Rosen, writing in the late 1970s, sought to develop mathematical models of the behaviour of living things and might be seen as a pioneer of those studies that have come to be associated with the modelling of ‘the predictive brain’. It is no accident, however, that he calls his monograph, ‘Anticipatory systems’ rather than ‘Predictive systems’. Anticipation is not the same as prediction; prediction, in the form of predictive modelling, deals with probabilities by way of error reduction; anticipation is about possibilities. Predictive models which are abstractions from the lived world, seek to model behaviour which is inherently unpredictable. For this reason, models of human behaviour will always be incomplete. Recognition of this difference between the ‘anticipatory’ and the ‘predictive’ means that, for Rosen, any representations or models of the behaviour of living things will be incomplete. Hence, as Rosen recognises, a separation of the representation from what is represented must therefore be maintained. When Merleau-Ponty states that ‘the idea of Nature as exteriority immediately entails Nature as a system of laws’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 10), he is effectively making the same point – namely, about the relation of our view of nature to science and scientific explanation. ‘What we thought earlier as orientation is now only mechanism’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 10). When objectivity is seen not as an interpretation of the natural world but as a representation of it – and the only reliable representation, at that – then the result is scientism, defined by Trish Glazebrook as: the preclusion of other ways of thinking by the representational thinking of the sciences, and the marginalization, displacement, and devaluation of other methodologies and bodies of knowledge by the scientific standard of objectivity that has become epistemologically dominant in modernity. (Glazebrook 2012: 18. See also Harney 2015: 661–662)

124  Maurita Harney Throughout his works, Merleau-Ponty keeps a close eye on scientific developments of his day, whether these be in psychology, ethology, or as in his most recent lectures on Nature, cybernetics and theoretical physics. Quoting Neils Bohr, he remarks that there are affinities between phenomenology and the conceptions of contemporary physics, which expose the error of the metaphysics underlying ‘a mechanistic psycho-physiology’ (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 93–94). However, philosophy is not science: ‘In [his] attempt to get a firm grip on things, the scientist discloses more than he sees in fact. The philosopher must see behind the back of the physicist what the physicist himself does not see’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 86–87). Part of this will be the view of nature that informs the science. It is from this basis – which is, of course, a philosophical one – that the error of scientism can be exposed. This also enables us to see that what has in some cases been seen as an anti-science stance attributed to some phenomenologists (e.g. Husserl’s opposition to the ‘natural attitude’) is, in fact, a form of anti-scientism. Dermot Moran’s very nuanced exploration of Husserl’s criticism of scientific objectivity in relation to the spectator stance makes, I believe, an analogous point – namely, that the ‘objectivist’ stance to which Merleau-Ponty, like Husserl, objects is scientistic rather than scientific (Moran 2020: 22–23). As a result, apparent conflicts between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in respect of the ‘natural attitude’ are arguably neutralized. Referring to changes over history in the conception of nature, Merleau-Ponty states: ‘Scientific discoveries did not provoke changes in the idea of Nature; rather, the change in the idea of nature allowed for these discoveries’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 8). Merleau-Ponty’s conception of nature as one that includes humans requires that we have to broaden our conception of science. In doing this, we relinquish the certainty of the Galilean-Newtonian mechanistic model of explanation, augmenting this with the lessons learnt from laws of dynamic complex systems. The result is a philosophy of nature and natural relations which requires reconceptualising the relationship between culture and nature and between humanities and science. It is not the bridging of ‘two cultures’, science and the humanities, but a reconceptualising of what we mean by each, and through this re-configuring their relationship to each other. This means a non-reductionist approach in the sciences and mathematics, exemplified in the biological sciences by biosemiotics. It also calls for a re-thinking of traditional humanist philosophies based on the separation of humans from other species and the hierarchies and biases implicit in the privileging of ‘man’ or ‘the human’. In short, it requires a re-thinking of what it means to be human and our relationship with nature.

Conclusion ‘The feeling of being looked at’ reminds us that perception as objectification, be it of another person or of nature, is something that we do. It also

Perception and its Objects 125 reminds us that the perceptual relation is one of reciprocity; it is always perspectival; it is primarily affective. It is a relation that is grounded in intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity implies an openness – an array of possibilities none of whose actualisations are entailed by antecedent conditions. The gaze can be seen as an attempt to deny this openness by seeking to reduce the other to the level of object, as one object alongside others, as exteriority, thereby attempting to deny what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘ambiguity and incompleteness [that] are . . . written into the very fabric of our collective existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 2008: 79–80). As Daly points out, Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, however his philosophy provides fertile ground for others to do so. Daly herself draws on Merleau-Ponty’s relational ontology and the role of empathic intersubjectivity to open up a range of ethical questions relating to the inhuman gaze (Daly 2016). Likewise, Gallagher’s suggestion that ‘to see a face is for it to have a hold on me’ (Gallagher 2020: 105–106) is most appropriately seen not as an ethical directive, but as a prompt for exploring further the ethical implications of the unique phenomenon of responsiveness and responsibility that face-to-face encounters with other people give rise to. Merleau-Ponty often links the seeing/seen relation with that of speaking/listening. It is important to remember that these are not confined to one-on-one relations. The relation of speaking/listening can take the form of shared conversations – conversations open to hearing the voice of silenced minorities, for example, and hence opening up possibilities for new ways of seeing and, perhaps of perceiving ‘otherwise’. Merleau-Ponty’s study of nature is not a study of knowledge or a study of science. It is, in effect, a theory of Being (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 204) – it assumes the status of metaphysics, and as such, can provide a basis for exploring questions about what we, as humans who are part of nature, should do and how we should live. It is, in short, the basis for developing ethical norms. Because nature is inclusive of humans, his ontology of nature provides a basis for an approach to ethics in a way that is not available to the objectivist viewpoint. It will, however, be an ethic founded not solely on the exercise of reason but on Ineinander – on the relational ontology which sees humans as related to each other and to the natural world, where relations between humans take the form of empathic resonance, and where the future consists in possibilities which, though constraining, are also enabling and are non-deterministically related to actions.

Reference List Aristotle. 1961. De anima. W.D. Ross (ed.) with introduction and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

126  Maurita Harney Avicenna. 1952. Psychology. (Kitāb Al-Najat Book Two, Chapter VI) F. Rahman (trans.). London: Oxford University Press. Avicenna. 1959. De anima: Being the Psychological Part of Kitāb Al-Shifā’. F. Rahman (ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Barker, Mark J. 2012. Aquinas on internal sensory intentions: Nature and classification. International Philosophical Quarterly, 52 (206): 199–226. doi:10.5840/ipq201252218 Black, Deborah L. 1993. Estimation (Wahm) in Avicenna: The logical and psychological dimensions. Dialogue, XXXII: 219–258. Black, Deborah L. 2004. Psychology: Soul and intellect. In Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy: Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 308–326. Brentano, Franz. [1874] 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1st ed. C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell, and L. McAlister (trans.). London: Routledge. Daly, Anya. 2016. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Favareau, Donald F. 2015. Creation of the relevant next: How living systems capture the power of the adjacent possible through sign use. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119 (3): 588–601. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Gallagher, Shaun. 2017. Enactive Interventions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Inside the gaze. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge, 99–108. Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Glazebrook, Trish. 2012. Why read Heidegger on science? In T. Glazebrook (ed.) Heidegger on Science. New York: State University of New York Press, 13–26. Hamrick, W.S. and van der Veken, J. 2011. Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Thought. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Harney, Maurita. 2015. Naturalizing phenomenology: A philosophical imperative. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119 (3): 661–669. Harney, Maurita. 2017. Peirce and phenomenological naturalism. In Arran Gare and Wayne Hudson (eds.) For a New Naturalism. Candor and New York: Telos Press, 124–143. Harney, Maurita. 2019. Intentionality: Evolution of a concept. In P. Wong, S. Bloor, P. Hutchings, and P. Bilimoria. (eds.) Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics. Memorial Volume for Max Charlesworth. Sophia Studies in CrossCultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, 30: 139–153. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 1996. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Barbara J. Havilland (trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2010. A biosemiotic approach to meaning. Zygon, 45 (2): 367–388. Kauffman, S.A. and Gare, A. 2015. Beyond Descartes and Newton. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119 (3): 219–244. Landry, Christinia. 2020. Disclosure and the gendered gaze in Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception

Perception and its Objects 127 and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge, 85–96. Loughnane, Adam. 2016. Nishida and Merleau-Ponty: Art, ‘depth,’ and ‘seeingwithout-a-seer.’ European Journal of Japanese Philosophy, 1: 47–74. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception]. Colin Smith (trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. The philosopher and sociology in Signs [Signes]. Richard C. McCleary (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 98–113. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible [Le visible et l’invisible]. Claude Leforte (ed.). Lingis, Alphonso (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1970. The World of Perception [Causeries, 1948. Edition de Seuil, 2002]. Oliver Davis (trans.). Oxford: Routledge Classics. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. [La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.] Compiled with notes by Dominique Séglard. Robert Vallier (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2008. Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960 [Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.] John O’Neill (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Moran, Dermot. 2020. Defending the objective gaze as a self-transcending capacity of human subjects. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge, 21–43. Rahman, F. 1952. Avicenna’s Psychology. London: Oxford University Press. Rosen, Robert. 2012. Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations, 2nd ed. New York: Springer (1st ed. Pergamon Press, 1985). Sachs, Carl B. 2017. Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology. New York and London: Routledge. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2012. Connections. In Donald Favareau, Paul Cobley, and Kalevi Kull (eds.) A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer. Tartu: Tartu University Press, 71–74. Smolin, Lee. 2015. Temporal naturalism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B, 52: 86–102. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. von Uexküll, Jacob. [1934] 1957. A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. In Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Claire H. Schiller (ed. and trans.). New York: International Universities Press, 5–80.

8 Technological Gaze Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception Richard S. Lewis Introduction In this age of ubiquitous technology, what are the ways that technologies affect human perception, and how can we become more aware of their mediating effects? This chapter brings a unique perspective to the inhuman gaze, identifying a component of our own human perception that is transformed by technologies. I will show that our human gaze is transformed by the technologies in our lives, causing us to perceive the world through our temporal experiences with technologies. Rather than a Sartrean (1992) or Merleau-Pontian (2002) approach to using the concept of the gaze in order to refer to an objectifying or inhumanizing effect on the human subject from something or someone other than the human themselves,1 I use the term to describe how our perception is transformed through both our historical and potential uses of technologies, adding an ‘inhuman’ element to our own gaze. While technology has often been considered as other-than-human, an object to our human subject, there are many contemporary fields of study founded on relational ontologies, which challenge such views. In these relational ontologies the human is always in relation, is constituted by those relations, and is therefore no longer conceived as an autonomous or standalone individual. Under this view we can recognize that we are constituted and transformed by the technologies we use, and these transformations continue to mediate our perception of the world, even when we are not actively using the technologies. I use the temporal concepts of sedimentation – our past experiences – as well as the future potentiality of technologies in order to better understand the intrasubjective transformation caused by technologies. My research is situated at the intersection of two interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, which focus on how human subjects are never standalone individuals but are always in relation. The first is postphenomenology,2 a field with strong phenomenological ties that is based within philosophy of technology and investigates human-technology relations (Ihde 1990; Rosenberger 2012; Van Den Eede 2012; Verbeek 2005; Wellner 2015).

Technological Gaze 129 The second is critical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2019; Haraway3 1987; Hayles 1999; Wolfe 2010), which focuses on going beyond both a human-centered (anthropocentric) and humanist notion of the human subject as autonomous and exceptional. In both, rather than the Cartesian subject/object split, the human-technology relation is understood as an entangled relation with shared agency that co-constitutes both the subject and the world (Ihde 1990), or what Andrew Pickering referred to as the ‘dance of agency’ (1995: 21). However, as some of the agency is moved away from the subject and into objects, Tamar Sharon points out that disciplines such as postphenomenology seem to focus more on ‘breathing life into objects . . . than delving into the implications of having breathed life out of subjects’ (2014: 9). She proposes that we take a closer look at what is going on with the subject. I take on Sharon’s challenge in order to understand the transformational effects of technologies that occur within the subject. I use the concept of a technological gaze to describe the transformation within the human subject that stems from our technological relations and which affects our perception of the world. This transformation is based temporally on the sedimented effects of our experiences with technologies and their future potential uses, allowing for a deeper understanding of their in-use mediation. Importantly, becoming aware of these transformations gives us an opportunity to reclaim some of our agency when it comes to deciding upon what technologies we invite into our lives.

Leveraging Concepts From PostPhenomenology The field of postphenomenology is ‘a nonfoundational and nontranscendental phenomenology which makes variational theory its most important methodological strategy’ (Ihde 1995: 7). The founder of this philosophical style of analysis, Don Ihde, describes it as phenomenology combined with pragmatism (2012: 117). The field has developed an approach to understand technological relations through pragmatic case studies, using four types of relations: embodied, hermeneutic, alterity, and background. Rather than Husserl’s variant analysis to discover what is invariant (an essence), postphenomenologists view technologies as being multistable, meaning that technologies can be perceived (and used) in many different but not unlimited ways (Ihde 2012; Whyte 2015). This approach moves the focus away from perceiving technologies – or Technology – in an essentialist, reified, or transcendentalist manner more exemplified by Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1977) and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964). The claims made by postphenomenologists tend not to be ‘about the absolute foundations of reality or knowledge, and never about the “essence” of an object of study. Instead, postphenomenological claims are posed from an embodied and situated perspective, refer to practical problems, and

130  Richard S. Lewis are empirically oriented’ (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015: 1). Verbeek framed this philosophical perspective by stating, ‘the challenge posed by empirical studies of technology to the philosophy of technology is to understand technology not only in terms of its conditions of possibility but in terms of concrete artifacts, and yet to continue to pose philosophical, and not merely empirical, questions’ (2005: 6). Postphenomenology focuses on describing and understanding the ways in which our relations with specific technologies constitute ourselves, the technologies, and the world. Ihde states: [I]n each set of human technology relations, the model is that of an interrelational ontology. This style of ontology carries with it a number of implications, including the one that there is a co-constitution of humans and their technologies. Technologies transform our experience of the world and our perceptions and interpretations of our world, and we in turn become transformed in this process. Transformations are non-neutral. (Ihde 2009: 44) Ihde’s quote makes two important points. The first is that we, as human subjects, are constituted (transformed) by our technological relations. The second point is that these transformations themselves are not neutral. While they don’t completely determine our actions, they do continue to influence our perception of the world. Melvin Kranzberg, a historian of technology, says, ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’ (1986: 545). This non-neutrality balances the extremes of perceiving technology as either being deterministic (technologies control how we behave) or neutral (technologies have no effect on our behavior). Similarly, as technologies both enable and constrain, so do the words we use. While I will use the words subject and object, I do not mean them in a Cartesian manner. Rather, I subscribe – as does phenomenology, postphenomenology, and critical posthumanism – to an interrelational ontology (cf. Ihde’s quote above), where the subject is not stand-alone but always in constituting relations. Kenneth Gergen states, ‘there is no isolated self or fully private experience. Rather, we exist in a world of co-constitution’ (2009: xv).

Mediation and Embodied Relations One of the fundamental concepts of postphenomenology is how technologies mediate and constitute our selves and the world. This concept is represented by the formula I-technology-world (Ihde 1990; Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015). While the term mediation highlights the in-between role that technology performs between a person and the world, several postphenomenologists have pointed out that the term can erroneously

Technological Gaze 131 imply that the person and the world are already independently established before the mediation takes place. Instead, both subject and world (as well as the specific technology) are constituted through the mediating role of the technology; a transformation of subject, technology, and world takes place in the emergence of the relation (cf. Barad 2007; Lemmens 2017; Sharon 2014; Smith 2015; Van Den Eede 2012; Verbeek 2005). As Verbeek states, ‘When analyzing the mediating role of artifacts, therefore, this mediation cannot be regarded as a mediation ‘between’ subject and object. Mediation consists in a mutual constitution of subject and object’ (2005: 130). This constituting role of technological mediation is how I intend the word mediation to be understood throughout this chapter. Postphenomenologists have explored the specific ways of describing the constituting relations that exist between subjects and technological objects. There are four standard types of relations: embodied, hermeneutic, alterity, and background.4 The embodied relation, which I refer to below, is where the subject perceives the world through an aspect of the technology. This is captured by the formula: (I – technology) → world The typical example of this relation is a pair of glasses. We perceive the world through the glasses, and the technology changes our perception of the world. We are not focused on the technology itself, but rather the technology enhances (and constrains) our abilities.

Co-Constituting Technologies The embodied relation formula can help researchers analyze the coconstituting aspect of specific technological objects and describe what is enabled and what is constrained when they mediate our experience and perception of the world (cf. Ihde 1990; Rosenberger 2014; Van Den Eede 2012; Verbeek 2005; Wellner 2015). By shedding light on effects that might be hidden, we can better understand how both our lifeworlds and ourselves are transformed by technologies. As Ihde points out, ‘There is no “thing-in-itself.” There are only things in contexts, and contexts are multiple’ (1990: 69). Technological objects are always objects-inrelation, and both the subject and technology are constituted in specific relations (Figure 8.1), what Karen Bard calls ‘intra-action’ (2007: 33). In order to push back against the tendency to perceive a separation between subjects and objects, I have developed a symbol to visually capture this co-constitutionality: The Deltas represent the change or constitution that happens as the relation with the technology (symbolized by the wave) comes into existence. Subject, technology, and relation are all constituted in the moment, reflecting what Barad describes as phenomena, which ‘are the ontological

132  Richard S. Lewis

Figure 8.1  Co-constitution through relations

inseparability of agentially intra-acting components . . . [and are] basic units of reality’ (2007: 33). Barad states: ‘Agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (2007: 33). Ihde (1990, 2003b, 2012) points out that technologies are multistable, and that only when a technology is used in a specific way that it – at least for that moment – becomes constituted in a stable manner along with the user. Figure 8.1 shows the irreducible co-constituting relation and repudiates the concept of a stand-alone subject or object. In the following section I will look more closely into the constitution and transformation of the subject.

Posthuman Subjects and Temporal Transformations The technological gaze is a mediating embodied relation based not upon the specific technological objects in-use, but on the transformations of the subject that occur because of those objects. Our perception of the world is affected by these transformations. First, it is helpful to define precisely what human subject we are discussing. I use the concept of the posthuman subject – as understood through critical posthumanism (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2019; Hayles 1999; Haraway 1990) – in order to understand that ‘the human is not a stand-alone individual engaging with a world of discrete objects, as has been the belief since the enlightenment, but a posthuman “coming-into-being” with socio-cultural materiality’ (Hasse 2019: 355–356). While my focus in this chapter specifically analyzes technological relations, these are not the only relations that contribute to the constitution of the subject. There are many socio-cultural relations5 (such as power and normative relations) that are continually contributing to the subject. However, it is outside the scope of this chapter to discuss these further. Second, it is the temporality of our existence that leads to the technological gaze. Graham Harman suggests that for Heidegger, ‘time is the ultimate concealed layer of everything’ (2007: 48). This means that time ‘refers to the mysterious way in which everything that appears or comes to presence is shadowed by a bottomless depth of concealed reality – every moment is an event, and an event is never fully visible, definable,

Technological Gaze 133 or describable’ (2007: 48). One of Heidegger’s concepts in Being and Time is countering the concept of presence, predicated on the Aristotelian concept of time, which situates the present as separate from the historical past and the future that has not yet come to pass (Heidegger 2010: §6 & §26; see also Derrida 1982). Instead, Heidegger’s belief is that a more authentic understanding of time is as a unity of past, present, and future – an ‘ecstatic openness’ (Sheehan 2014: 266). Similarly, I am interested in bringing the past sedimentation and future potentiality into the mediating relation of technology in a manner that we can leverage to increase our awareness.

Posthuman Subject Constitution In order to explore a new intrasubjective aspect of postphenomenology, moving the focus from the object to the subject, it is helpful to briefly clarify the subject itself. What does it mean to be constituted by the technologies we use? This constitution is the transformation that Ihde discusses as being non-neutral (2009: 44). It is a way of becoming with each relation. Postphenomenology and critical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2019; Haraway 1990; Hayles 1999) have many similarities; however, in general, while postphenomenology concentrates on technologies (objects), posthumanism concentrates more on the subject. That said, they are both anti-essentialist and both are relational, concentrating on situated and embodied beings-in-the-world. Both are amodern, eschewing Cartesian dualism and the idea of an autonomous and independent individual. The subject here is not static but a process, constantly being constituted through its relations, a human becoming rather than solely a human being. The continual process of becoming for the subject fits within critical posthumanism’s concept of exploring an ethics of becoming rather than of being (Braidotti 2013). Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson create the case from an anthropological view that we are biosocial human becomings (2013). Ingold states that we should ‘think of ourselves not as beings but as becomings; that is, not as discrete and pre-formed entities but as trajectories of movement and growth’ (2013: 8). In addition, rather than thinking of ourselves as simply becomings-in-relation (a singular relation), it is more accurate to see ourselves as becomings-in-relations (plural). We are always and already multi-relational becomings. Even with a single technology there are multiple relations that are not static but dynamic and emergent, interrelating with all the other relations – i.e. socio-cultural relations – that comprise the subject. By becoming more aware of these transformations, we can retain or regain some of the agency that is lost through the non-neutral effects of technological mediation, thereby taking a more active role in our interactions with technologies.

134  Richard S. Lewis

Sedimentation Sedimentation is the first temporal concept I introduce. Sedimentation is the idea that our past experiences of a phenomenon influence the current experience of the same phenomenon and has its origins phenomenology (Husserl 1973; Merleau-Ponty 2002). Merleau-Ponty states that our previous experiences offer: a ‘world of thoughts,’ or a sediment left by our mental processes, which enables us to rely on our concepts and acquired judgments as we might on the things there in front of us . . . without there being any need for us to resynthesize them. . . . But the word ‘sediment’ should not lead us astray: this acquired knowledge is not an inert mass in the depths of our consciousness. (2002: 149–150) Sedimentation has been understood as a way to describe how our experiences with technologies allow the technologies to become transparent and recede into the background – an embodied relation. Merleau-Ponty describes a blind man’s cane ceasing to be an object, and ‘no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight’ (2002: 165). In postphenomenology, sedimentation has typically been materially linked – both as a material object and through an embodied understanding of sedimentation – often focusing on the physical skill developed in using a particular technology. Our experiences with technologies become increasingly sedimented within us the more we use them, eventually causing the object to recede into the background. Another example is when we first start learning to drive a car; our concentration is nearly completely absorbed by the car as we attempt to operate it. However, as we become more and more habituated through experience, the car begins to become ‘transparent’, receding into the background of our awareness and becoming an extension of ourselves while we use it to move from one place to another (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Merleau-Ponty 2002; Verbeek 2012). Robert Rosenberger uses sedimentation ‘to refer to the particular level of habit, the particular degree to which the past provides meaning to the present, in a given human-technological relation’ (2012: 85). Sedimentation also ‘provides the pre-perceptive context that enables our current perceptions to occur with immediate meaningfulness’ (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015: 25). In other words, our current experiences are mediated through the specific experiences we had in the past. A few years ago, I noticed an instance of my perception being transformed by technology as I was walking through a riparian preserve in Arizona. In an attempt to create a relatively unmediated experience

Technological Gaze 135 with the birds and landscape, I had intentionally left my camera behind. As I am a nature photographer, this was a unique experience. While I walked, I began to notice that even without my camera, I still perceived and framed my experience through the filter of what would make a good photograph. I realized that this both enabled me to be more aware of my surroundings – specifically, looking for owls and raptors and noticing the light and interplay of shadows – as well as limited how I perceived. I was looking for things, not just looking. I wasn’t immediately experiencing the natural world around me; rather, I was experiencing the natural world as mediated through the sedimented aspect of taking photographs. Instead of focusing only on how we bodily and skillfully relate to technologies in-use, I leverage the concept of sedimentation in order to understand the transformations that have occurred and continue to influence us even when we are not materially using those technologies. By focusing specifically on the intrasubjective mediating relation of sedimentation, we can better understand how sedimentation contributes to the constitution of the subject. This, in turn, enables us to have a deeper understanding of how our relations with technologies constitute us beyond simply when we use them.

Potentiality Another time-related aspect of technological mediation that complements the concept of sedimentation is Asle Kiran’s concept of technological potentiality. While sedimentation captures our historical experience with technologies, potentiality captures the mediation of potential future experiences with technologies. Kiran looks beyond ‘technologies in-use’ (2012: 78) and broadens the mediating influence of technology, stating, ‘technological shaping of the lifeworld happens in terms of possible technical mediations, not just actual technical mediations’ (2012: 79). This links to intrasubjective mediation since it moves away from discussing the specific mediating effects of the technologies in-use and explores the mediating transformations of how we potentially can use specific technologies. Adding Kiran’s (2012) potentiality within the intrasubjective technological mediation completes the past-present-future entirety of being. Sedimentation (experience) and potentiality make up the past and future influence, and both are a part of the subject’s constitution in the present. Without sedimentation and potentiality, there would only be the hereand-now interaction with technology, and only the things themselves would mediate the subject-world, co-constituting in real time, always, and only in the present. But that isn’t how our lifeworld works. In any present moment, we are connected with both our history and our future. While past and future might not exist in the present, they do exist intrasubjectively through their relations and carry their own mediating effects.

136  Richard S. Lewis Using the two concepts of sedimentation and potentiality helps to create a more complete framework for understanding how technologies mediate and constitute the human subject, going beyond simply an in-use mediating aspect.

The Technological Gaze The focus of this chapter is to identify and understand the transforming effect of technologies in our lives beyond their immediate use. In order to accomplish this, I employ the term technological gaze. Using these particular words to encapsulate this concept is not without its own set of challenges given the enabling and constraining effects of language. Gaze tends to be visually focused, rather than referring to perception more generally. However, the technological gaze is appropriately in keeping with the Inhuman Gaze focus of this book, and I believe both uses of gaze refer more to a general perception rather than focusing simply on sight-based perception. Some researchers have used the concept of a technological gaze to focus on power-relations (Zimmer 2008); on aspects of a colonial gaze (Zhang, Gajjala and Watkins 2012); in advertising (Campbell 2007); and on how technologies influence our understanding of disease (Hofmann 2001). For me, the concept of the technological gaze arose while conducting a postphenomenological case study on museum selfies (Lewis 2017). I realized that postphenomenology seemed to capture only two of the three mediating relations that I was personally experiencing. The embodied relation accounted for me seeing through my smartphone while taking the museum selfie, and the hermeneutic relation accounted for the selfie as an object to be ‘read’ by my networked community and myself. However, when I was walking around the museum and not taking selfies, I noticed that I was perceiving and relating to the museum and its objects through what I thought would potentially make a good selfie, which exemplified the technological gaze. The selfie-as-a-concept (the selfie gaze) seemed to appropriate some of my perceptual intention in a very postphenomenological way, not absolutely determining, but not neutral. I noticed that some of what was constrained was the museum object’s own context and history6. What was enabled was the creation of a new relationship between me and the museum object, a relation less dependent upon the museum curator or the object’s own history and more influenced by my desire7 for self-construction and by the prospect of sharing the final image on social media. The technological gaze can be portrayed with a variation of postphenomenology’s embodiment relation, since we perceive the world through the immaterial aspect of the technological object. To frame this, we can modify the embodied relation formula: (I – technology) → world, to (I – technological gaze) → world

Technological Gaze 137 The sedimented and potential aspects of the technological gaze are deeply interwoven. Our experiences provide our imaginations with the material needed to create potential new experiences. The technological gaze can be summed up as referring to this transformation of the posthumanist subject due to both our historical experiences with specific technologies and the potentiality of those technologies, which continuously inform our perception of the world. Understanding the technological gaze as an embodied relation allows us to pay attention to this embodied but immaterial aspect of the technological objects in our lives. Bringing our awareness to this effect on our perception foregrounds an aspect of technologies that usually remains hidden, giving us an opportunity to make decisions about the technologies we use by better understanding the consequences of using – or being used by – them. For instance, we might ask how our use of GPS maps on our smartphone changes the way we perceive and engage with a new city? The technological gaze is an immaterial aspect of a technological object. This concept can begin to be developed within the subject as soon as awareness of a technology enters a person’s lifeworld. The more sedimented a technology, the more influence the technological gaze can have on our perception of the world; this is demonstrated when we see the world through the concept of the photograph even before we look through the camera. The world has not changed. What has changed is our perception of, our relation with, and our intention towards the world. We perceive the world through a specific technological framework. This technological gaze frames our interaction with the world around us, affecting how we perceive the world and thus, how we interact with it. There is a close affinity between the technological gaze and Heidegger’s Gestell (or enframing), which he uses ‘as the name for the essence of modern technology’ – causing us to perceive the world as a standingreserve (1977: 20). However, my use of the technological gaze remains pragmatic, emerging from specific uses of technologies. It is ontically rather than ontologically focused. This stays clear of describing a reified ‘Technological Gaze’ and instead focuses on a ‘technological gaze’ that is always situated and embodied, specific to a particular person, in a particular moment, and in relation with a particular technology.

Conclusions While we are seeing technological artifacts converge with the human subject, in this chapter I have explored a way that we can conceptualize technology beyond the artifact as a part of the human subject. The concept of the technological gaze allows us to reflexively consider how our perception of the world is transformed by the existence of the technologies in our lives, even when we are not using them. This leads to the importance of becoming aware of the effects of technology. As Yoni Van Den Eede states: ‘From McLuhan to Heidegger to

138  Richard S. Lewis Ihde to Latour to Feenberg, then, a thread can be said to run, uniting them in one great perceptual project: the spotting of blind spots, and the accompanying attempt of remedying them’ (2016: 108). This awareness is valuable, allowing us greater agency, without which we risk living as objects ourselves (Puech 2016: 173). Or, as Sartre states: ‘Insofar as I am the object of values, which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved’ (Sartre 1992: 358). How we perceive the world is being influenced by the technologies in our lives. The technological gaze gives us a tool to help our own personal awareness, allowing us to self-monitor the effects of technologies beyond the actual artifacts. In an interview where he discusses Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, John Culkin notes: ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us’ (1967: 70). I believe that tools – technologies – shape us in two ways: 1) the mediating effects of the technological objects themselves in-use, which is the concern of most postphenomenological investigations; and 2) the technological gaze which is created through our past experiences and our future potentiality with specific technologies. These concepts can help us better understand how the technologies we interact with on a daily basis mediate and co-constitute both ourselves and the world. The addition of the technological gaze can also be perceived as a part of a complex mediating process. The way we perceive the world through the technological gaze can vary depending upon the context of the situation, how we are feeling, whether we are stressed or relaxed, what is currently motivating us, our particular upbringing, etc. There might be a tendency to think that a specific technology influences us in a singular manner. Even with the concept of multistability, we may have the tendency to consider that only one variant is acting upon us at a time, co-constituting ourselves and our lifeworld. Instead, there is always a complexity of entangled relations at work. The technological gaze can enable us to have an expanded understanding, as well as an ability to reflectively comprehend specific effects of technologies, allowing us to more intelligently decide which technologies we invite into our lives and how we use them. This is not to discount or ignore the mediating relations stemming from our actual use of material technologies, but rather to add another layer in order to expand the methods of investigation available to us. To conclude, we can consider whether there is an answer to Sharon’s (2014: 9) question, asking what happens to the human subject when we breathe life into technological objects? I believe that the objects, to which we have given agency, breathe some of their own life into us. We are transformed through our unique histories with specific technologies. This, in turn, creates new potential and changes the way we perceive the world.

Technological Gaze 139

Notes 1. A few other specific examples are: the male gaze (Mulvey 1975), the feminine gaze (Butler 1990), the imperial/postcolonial gaze (Kaplan 2012; Said 1978), and the socio-political gaze of power relations (Foucault 1977). 2. The founder of postphenomenology, Don Ihde, began as a phenomenologist, writing Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (1976) and Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (1977). However, with Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1979) he more fully identified as a philosopher of technology, and today is ‘engaged in technoscience studies’ (2003a: 132). He has described phenomenology as his albatross (2003a) as he continues to use many phenomenological aspects, such as embodiment, relationality, and variation analysis. It is the author’s view that instead of viewing the ‘post’ in postphenomenology as being outside or beyond phenomenology, especially as phenomenology has a long tradition of being interpreted in various ways, it is better to consider postphenomenology as a more specific version of phenomenology, one that concentrates on technological relations in a non-foundational and multistable (variant) manner and primarily focuses on philosophical case studies of technologies. How far Ihde moved from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or Heidegger is not easily answered as it depends on which Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or Heidegger – as well as which version of Ihde – one analyzes. For a more in-depth overview of postphenomenology, see Rosenberger and Verbeek (2015) Postphenomenological Investigations (1–41), which offers a concise introduction and field guide to postphenomenology. 3. While Donna Haraway does not use the term posthumanism, her Cyborg Manifesto (1990) is typically considered one of the foundational texts of critical posthumanism. 4. Some researchers have suggested other relations to complement the four. For example, Peter-Paul Verbeek has described a cyborg relation (2008). 5. Cultural relations in postphenomenology are reflected in Don Ihde’s use of cultural hermeneutics, or macroperception (1990: Chapter 6) and also the socially constructed “Body 2” in his book Bodies in Technologies (2002). 6. This was also being constrained by the museum itself and how the museum contextualized the specific object. 7. Merleau-Ponty (2002) might refer to this as a Husserlian protention, or what precedes and frames my experience.

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140  Richard S. Lewis Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Dreyfus, Stuart E. 1986. From Socrates to expert systems: The limits of calculative rationality. In Philosophy and Technology II. Dordrecht: Springer, 111–130. Ellul, Jacques. 1964. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage books. Ferrando, Francesca. 2019. Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2009. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Haraway. Donna. 1987. A manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies, 2 (4): 1–42, doi: 10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538 Harman, Graham. 2007. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing. Hasse, Catherine. 2019. Posthuman learning: AI from novice to expert? AI & Society, 34 (2): 355–364. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The question concerning technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. William Lovitt (trans.). New York: Garland Publishers, 3–35. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hofmann, Bjørn. 2001. The technological invention of disease. Medical Humanities, 27 (1): 10–19. Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don. 1995. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ihde, D. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ihde, Don. 2003a. If phenomenology is an albatross, is post-phenomenology possible? In D. Ihde and E. Sellinger (eds.) Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 15–26. Ihde, Don. 2003b. Postphenomenology—Again. Aarhus: Department of Information & Media Studies. Ihde, Don. 2009. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ihde, Don. 2012. Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Prospect. In T. Ingold and G. Palsson (eds.) Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1–21.

Technological Gaze 141 Ingold, Tim and Palsson, Gisli (eds.). 2013. Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2012. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Kiran, Asle H. 2012. Technological presence: Actuality and potentiality in subject constitution. Human Studies, 35 (1): 77–93. Kranzberg, Melvin. 1986. Technology and history: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’. Technology and Culture, 27 (3): 544–560. Lemmens, Pieter. 2017. Thinking through media: Stieglerian Remarks on a possible postphenomenology of media. In Yoni Van Den Eede, Stacey O. Irwin, and Galit Wellner (eds.) Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on HumanMedia-World Relations. Lanham: Lexington Books, 185–206. Lewis, Richard S. 2017. Turning our back on art: A postphenomenological study of museum selfies. Kunstlicht, 38 (4): 92–99. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Puech, Michel. 2016. The Ethics of Ordinary Technology. New York: Routledge. Rosenberger, Robert. 2012. Embodied technology and the dangers of using the phone while driving. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11 (1): 79–94. Rosenberger, Robert. 2014. Multistability and the agency of mundane artifacts: From speed bumps to subway benches. Human Studies, 37 (3): 369–392. Rosenberger, Robert and Verbeek, Peter-Paul (eds.). 2015. Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations. Lanham: Lexington Books. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1992. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. 1943. Hazel E. Barnes (trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. Sharon, Tamar. 2014. Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated Posthumanism. Dordrecht: Springer. Sheehan, Thomas. 2014. What, after all, was Heidegger about? Continental Philosophy Review, 47 (3–4): 249–274. Smith, Dominic. 2015. Rewriting the constitution: A critique of ‘postphenomenology’. Philosophy & Technology, 28 (4): 533–551. Van Den Eede, Yoni. 2012. Amor Technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Technology. Brussels: VUB Press. Van Den Eede, Yoni. 2016. Blindness and ambivalence: The meeting of media ecology and philosophy of technology. Explorations in Media Ecology, 15 (2): 103–112. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park: Penn State Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2008. Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human-technology relations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7 (3): 387–395.

142  Richard S. Lewis Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2012. Expanding mediation theory. Foundations of Science, 17 (4): 391–395. Wellner, Galit. 2015. A Postphenomenological Inquiry of Cell Phones: Genealogies, Meanings, and Becoming. Lanham: Lexington Books. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2015. What is multistability? A theory of the keystone concept of postphenomenological research. In Jan Kyrre Berg O. Friis and Robert P. Crease (eds.) Technoscience and Postphenomenology: The Manhattan Papers. Lanham: Lexington Books, 69–81. Wolfe, Carey. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Zhang, Yahui, Gajjala, Radhika, and Watkins, Sean. 2012. Home of hope: Voicings, whiteness, and the technological gaze. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 36 (3): 202–221. Zimmer, Michael. 2008. The gaze of the perfect search engine: Google as an infrastructure of dataveillance. In Web Search. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 77–99.

9 The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds Anya Daly Introduction [In the gaze] . . . the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. The Phenomenology of Perception (2006: 420, 2012: 378)

Merleau-Ponty is here both referencing the infamous Sartrean scenario of the voyeur caught in the act of peering through a keyhole1 and also in a more general sense alluding to Sartre’s pessimistic account of human relations – that the encounter between persons is one that is inherently conflictual, a battle to resist objectification through objectifying the other first. And further, Merleau-Ponty observes, the very possibility of objectification depends on our capacities to ‘withdraw into the core of our thinking nature’. By cancelling empathic availability and affective responsiveness in advance such objectifications open up the possibility of violence, negligence, and ethical failure (Daly 2016). Nonetheless, as stated in the introduction to this volume, objectification can serve positive ends in certain occupations which necessitate compartmentalization, separating affectivity from pure cognition so as to be strictly task-focused; and as Moran (2020: 23) has argued the capacity of objectification is an achievement of subjectivity. In this essay I wish to focus on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the role of perception in our ethical engagement with others. While on the one hand for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the perception of the other founds morality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 26), on the other, it is the rationalizing of perception by stripping it of empathic responsiveness, becoming an inhuman gaze, that allows ethical failure (Daly 2014, 2016). Through his groundbreaking analyses of embodied percipience, Merleau-Ponty offers a powerful critique of the view from nowhere (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 2012;

144  Anya Daly Nagel 1986), the objectivist, disembodied, unsituated, purely rationalist view which underwrites all inhuman gazes. Complicating and deepening these analyses, Merleau-Ponty also draws on gestalt theory, elaborating particularly on the roles of perspectivism, wholism, and figure-ground structures in the perception of things and of others. It is Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with gestalt theory that informs the key claims of this essay. Specifically, I will argue that while we can theoretically decompose perception in terms of gestalt structures to better understand the mechanisms of perceptual experience in general, we can also understand how it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze through a rationalizing deconstructive process of perception; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, these are ‘unmade’ for potentially violent and unethical ends (Scarry 1985; Schulz 2007; Daly 2016; Guenther 2018). Merleau-Ponty’s initial approach to the problem of objectification is to reinstate the significance of embodiment and perception; there are no disembodied, acosmic gazes, no views from nowhere, nor God’s-eye-views; these are objectivist fantasies. He outlines his aims thus: The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind. I have tried, first of all, to re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness. These philosophies commonly forget – in favor of a pure exteriority or of a pure interiority – the insertion of the mind in corporeality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively, with perceived things. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 3, 4) Merleau-Ponty’s account of incarnated consciousness highlights the fact that the relation of the subject to her environment is neither that of an ‘automatic machine’ responding with ‘pre-established mechanisms’, nor is it a pure thinking, rational consciousness supervening on the thing-like body and giving structure to our experience of the world and entities. Furthermore, a theory of the body is already a theory of perception and a theory of intersubjectivity. This is important on three counts: first, the kind of body we are with regard to the physical facts of shape, structure, proportions of head, orientation and placement of eyes, feet, knees, limbs, and fingers and thumbs constrains and enables our engagement with the world and determines what counts as a relevant world for us; the physiognomy of a species gives access to very particular perceptual worlds and these worlds serve to shape and inflect the capacities of the species; there is mutual co-determination. Second, because we are incarnated consciousnesses, our bodies are our points of view on the world; and so, perception is inherently perspectival and in Merleau-Ponty’s

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 145 analysis this does not reduce perception to a relativism (Merleau-Ponty proposes a multiperspectivalism as discussed later in this chapter). Third, embodied percipience determines our situatedness – temporally, geographically, socially, and culturally. All these analyses thus contribute to Merleau-Ponty’s project to challenge the traditional objectivist account through a deeper analysis of perception.

Responding to the Traditional Account of Perception According to the traditional understanding, perception involves a modular process of inside-out, to outside-in, to inside-out; the eye mechanism engages with the external phenomena, the sense data enters the retina, the visual cortex processes this information to create a representation in the brain, this representation informs the perceiver about the external world, and the perceiver can then act. This is an overly complicated and cumbersome approach which fails to take account of the full powers of perception and exaggerates the role of representation in order to support a cognitivist view. Shaun Gallagher incisively captures the inadequacies of the representationalist account thus: [T]he non- (or minimal) representationalist view contends that if we are in the world, we can access the environmental detail relevant to our needs, there seems no need to create an internal representation of that detail. Just as it would be odd to call or text my friend on her cell-phone when she is standing right in front of me, so it would be odd to think that although the world is immediately present, we need an internal representation of it in order to perceive it. (Gallagher 2008: 168) Simply, from the phenomenological perspective, the world is its own best representation. Representation, while essential for the higher cognitive/ reflective modes of belief, memory, conceptualization etc., is not necessary for the pre-reflective engagement with the world, which is by far the most common way of approaching the world. What is also often overlooked in the traditional modular accounts is that perception is paramount for there to be any experience in the first place. Perception is our opening onto the world; it is not just one modality of intentionality alongside the other intentional modalities (cognition, memory, imagination, belief, anticipation, etc.). Following Merleau-Ponty, I have argued elsewhere that perception is ontologically and epistemically basic (Daly 2016). Correlatively, the perceived lifeworld is primary and is our first access to reality; perceptual structures underlie and support all higherorder modes of consciousness such as rationality, imagination, and culture, but not in a reductive manner; none of these are reducible to perception. This is Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of The Primacy of Perception.

146  Anya Daly He writes: ‘The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis [of the primacy of perception] does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 13). So we can see that Merleau-Ponty is not rejecting rationality out of hand but rather as he puts it ‘bringing it down to earth’, locating it within the overall economy of conscious processes rather than presiding over them, and further, emphasizing the crucial role the perceiving body plays even in the exercise of reason and the understanding of concepts (MerleauPonty 2012: 154, 211, 2006: 176, 237). Although the world of perception is the core of our life, we have the tendency to forget this because critical thought appears autonomous in that it can stand back and capture perceptual experience in words, ‘bare propositions which it discusses, accepts or rejects’, and all the while this higher order process loses the awareness of the perceived world which underlies and gives meaning to ‘the verified true and the false’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 3; see also Harney 2020: 111). Early last century gestalt2 psychologists of perception identified aspects of perception which do not fit the traditional picture, key to which is the constancy hypothesis – which proposes that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the external sensory stimulus and the internal perceptual content. This is an error that feeds into both empiricism and rationalism, reducing perception to either sensation or judgement respectively (Carman 2009; Mooney 2020: 66). Both of these traditions fail to recognize that the world is so much more than a source of stimuli and a product of intellectual judgements; it is first and foremost the place of undertakings and projects, a field of possibilities, the context in which we act as Merleau-Ponty so cogently described in his notion of the ‘I can’, thereby opposing the Cartesian ‘I think’ (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 2012; Noë 2004; Gallagher 2020, this volume). More recently neuroscientists Melvyn Goodale and Andrew Milner (2017) have thoroughly debunked this traditional account with their discovery of the two streams of visual perception (dorsal and ventral) which empirically track central phenomenological insights (i.e. operative and thetic intentionality). Nonetheless, the traditional account surprisingly persists and continues to overtly and covertly inform some of the philosophical debates centered on perception. In contrast to the inside-out, outside-in, inside-out modular traditional approach, gestalt theory emphasizes that the principles of proximity, similarity, continuity, and closure structure our perceptual experience; that perception is perspectival; that we perceive wholes prior to perceiving the parts; and that we perceive in terms of the structures of figure-ground, thereby adding a normative dynamic to perception. While Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of ideas from gestalt psychology was not uncritical, he nonetheless effectively integrated aspects of gestalt theory

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 147 into his philosophical analyses (Heinämaa 2009; Sheredos 2017). In brief, his criticism of gestalt centers on its tendency to reify the structures and processes of perception and also that, as an empirical discipline, gestalt psychology relies on reasons and causes and does not adequately address motivational aspects of perception and its meaning value.3

Perceptual Gestalts: Making Others and Making Worlds Perception is not reducible to brute sensation, nor does it qualify as a pure cognitive mode; rather it is the embodied, percipient subject’s direct and primary engagement with the phenomenal and social worlds.4 There are two pivotal insights from gestalt theory that Merleau-Ponty uses to support his claim for the primacy of perception. First, brute sensations are unfindable in experience; there are no isolated sense-data – they are always in the middle of a field – a visual field, an auditory field, a tactile field etc. (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 4). Things are always in some context or environment. So too with subjects; we always belong to a wider sphere of intersubjectivity – whether at the level of family, community, nation, species, or animality. And second, because perception is always shifting from figure to ground, from focus to context, from self to other and back again, it is at the most fundamental level, relational. This inherent relationality of perception is what underwrites the meaningfulness of physical events and social encounters. Merleau-Ponty sets up this idea of inherent relationality first with regard to things: To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves. . . . Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can ‘see’; the back of my lamp is nothing other than the face which it ‘shows’ to the chimney. I can therefore see an object insofar as objects form a system or a world and insofar as each of them treats the others around it like spectators of its hidden aspects and a guarantee of their permanence. (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 79, 2012: 70, 71) Elaborating on his distinction between the differing orders of perception and cognition, Merleau-Ponty asserts that: ‘Perception does not give me truths like geometry, but presences’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 14). In the earlier description, we can see that the hidden aspects are grasped as present, rather than that they exist. The grasping of the hidden sides is not an intellectual synthesis determining the veracity of what exists, but rather a practical synthesis generated through vision and movement. Truths of geometry are amenable to an intellectual synthesis and can be

148  Anya Daly grasped in totality; presences, however, can never be totalized; there is always more to discover: [T]he perceived world is not a sum of objects . . . our relation to the world is not that of a thinker to an object of thought . . . the unity of the perceived thing, as perceived by several consciousnesses, is not comparable to the unity of a proposition, as understood by several thinkers, any more than perceived existence is comparable to ideal existence. . . . We experience a perception and its horizon ‘in action’ rather than by ‘posing’ them or explicitly ‘knowing’ them. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 12) Further to these analyses, we can say that the grasping of the hidden sides is not only not an intellectual synthesis, nor is it only a practical synthesis as Gallagher has demonstrated drawing on Husserl and MerleauPonty. He proposes that it is not possible ‘to provide an adequate account of object perception without taking intersubjectivity into account . . . [because there is] an implicit intersubjectivity built into the perceptual experience’ (Gallagher 2008: 171). While it is possible to say that the hidden sides are possible perceptions for myself at another vantage, Gallagher stresses that the hidden sides are co-existent and co-present in virtue of a ‘plurality of possible subjects’ or in Husserl’s term – an ‘open intersubjectivity’ (Gallagher 2008: 172). And there is yet a further sense, elaborated on notably by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that others are already implicated in object perception in that we arrive in a world of things and others that is already inhabited, and it is through interactions with others that we are initiated into the meaning and use-value of these things. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Whenever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too and with this comes others who are caught in it; we are of the world’ (1964b: 15). Thus, the social permeates perception through and through. Perception also has an intrinsic normative dimension. The normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the phenomenal domain demonstrates the conditioning role that context/environment can play in the perception of things; the perception of a landscape is conditioned by the light and mist, and once the mist disperses and the sun shines through strongly, the landscape is perceived differently. So too with the various perceptual illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer lines or the moon appearing larger at the horizon than when in mid-heaven, the conditioning power of the context is essential to the efficacity of the illusions. The perceptual gestalt incorporates both the figure and the ground, the ‘something’ and the context; it is impossible to find one without the other. The gestalt is ‘the birth of a norm, not realized according to a norm; it is the identity of the exterior and the interior, not the projection of the interior into the exterior’ (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 70; 2012: 62). Normativity is not something imposed from either inside or outside but is intrinsic to perception, which

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 149 is always in the mode of gestalt (see Kelly 2005). In other words, these gestalts have a normative structure due to the shifting attention between figure and ground, between self-awareness and other-awareness; the perceptual ground or environment prescribes the perception of the figure (more determinate or less determinate), and so too the intersubjective context has a prescriptive impact on the subjective experience. In the intersubjective domain this conditioning by the environment is brought into sharper focus. The more tightly constrained and entrenched the social environment, the more its power to obscure and distort; blacks in the nineteenth-century southern states of the U.S.A. were viewed as constitutionally suited to slavery, and any attempt to escape was pathologized as drapetomania; women within patriarchy are perceived as inferior, weak, deceptive, passive and best suited to serving male gratification; and in twenty-first century Australia, boat refugees are perceived by many as a threat to national security. There is no shortage of examples from history or the present media that we could cite. Importantly, such perceptions allied to power structures and media become coercive and pernicious. Challenge and change the social environment, and you change the perception. And so, it is in this way that I have proposed (Daly 2016, 2019) the possibility of going beyond rationalist ethics to discover a deeper level of ethical susceptibility by revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, thereby establishing the view from everywhere – a view grounded in a multiplicity of perspectives. MerleauPonty reflects this approach when he writes: We observe it [morality] in an experience, which is the perception of others. . . . Just as perception of a thing opens me up to being, by realizing the paradoxical synthesis of an infinity of perceptual aspects, in the same way the perception of the other founds morality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego, of a common situation, by placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field of another and all the others. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 26) This is how Merleau-Ponty is able to universalize his ethics and thereby avoid reduction to a relativist monocular perspective (Daly 2016). Moral consideration is thus never a purely internal and private deliberation but already implicates a multiplicity of perspectives, ‘all the others’: historical, present, and even future perspectives.5

Perceptual Gestalts: Unmaking Others, Unmaking Worlds In this section I aim to show how the analyses and understandings of perception in terms of gestalt principles can serve to illuminate what is happening in violence and ethical failure – that the gestalt structures

150  Anya Daly and processes of perception can be deconstructed and corrupted to serve destructive ends to engender the unmaking of others and worlds (Cf. Heinämaa, 2020: 48). I begin by detailing some examples of extreme objectification, dehumanization, and demonization, highlighting the decon­ structive processes at work in each case. Some of the most infamous and well-documented cases of brutal torture and inhumanity are those of the witch trials of medieval Europe. Lyndal Roper’s historical analysis of the context and development of the ‘witch craze’ presents in harrowing detail many of the documented cases of the dark history of Christian religious ideology in constructing the identities and worlds of witches, while simultaneously deconstructing them as godly, ensouled human beings: As late as 1747 Magdalena Bollmann of Marchtal was interrogated on suspicion of witchcraft. She did not confess. . . . Bollmann was tortured with thumbscrews, on the rack, and on the ‘bock’, the bench on which she was stretched and whipped. She was stripped and shaved, and needles were inserted into areas around her genitals. . . . The interrogators had determined to torture the woman to death since she would not confess. Yet throughout, they represented their behaviour as a religious act. They hung her up, her hands tied behind her back, and let her hang there ‘for the duration of five or six Our Fathers’, and burnt her with the blessed Easter candle ‘partly under her nose, partly under her two big toes’. The way in which they employed holy objects looks less like confidence in the sanctity of their office than an attempt to employ the counter-magic of the Church to shield themselves not only from the power of the Devil, but also from a full awareness of what they were doing; they could believe they were carrying out religious rituals, not inflicting pain. (Roper 2004: 49, 50) And in more recent times: imagine a scene in which a punishment is enacted according to the more literalist retributive interpretation of sharia law.6 A man with his entire family surrounding him – his wife, his children, his mother, his father, brothers and sisters – is strapped onto a surgical table and is about to have his eyes gouged out for a crime. Imagine what he is feeling and how he can anticipate his future existence; unable to see his own face, the faces of those he loves, the sky, the trees, his home. What might the members of his family be feeling – knowing their shared existences would be changed forever, no longer the gaze of the father or husband, but just empty sockets and the burden of needing to care for a blind person? What must the person secretly filming this terrible event be feeling – urgency to capture this event for a wider global audience, repugnance and fear of discovery? But also I wonder how the ‘surgeon’ could perform this deed. What would it take for him to carry

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 151 this out? What would it cost him psychologically, emotionally, and morally to perform such an act? If we accept the view that we are perceptual, embodied, intersubjectively constituted beings, how can such deeds be possible? These descriptions are of events sanctioned by church authorities and the law of the land. Torture in all its various manifestations, and contexts was claimed by Victor Hugo in 1874 to no longer be practiced, and he had good reason at the time to make such a claim (Peters 1996). Now, however, from the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century, torture has been a routine procedure in one out of three countries (Peters 1996) and is used in 141 countries (Amnesty International 2014). This is despite the fact that the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has been ratified by an overwhelming majority of countries since its adoption in 1984 by the United Nations General Assembly. There are manuals detailing how to go about training and programming someone in the dispositional attitudes and the subtleties of the techniques: how to execute the torture most effectively, maximizing pain, humiliation, trauma, identity fragmentation, vulnerability and minimizing fatalities. The CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual is just one of many (in Schulz 2007). Here we see many of the progressive features of training, the gradual movement from one worldview (human, civilian, empathic, caring) to another (inhuman, torturer, cruel, detached). The subject (the conscript/ recruit/torturer-to-be) is progressively desensitized while the object (the subversive/Communist/terrorist/victim-to-be) is progressively dehumanized, objectified, stripped of any identity except the demonizing labels of the dangerous enemy who will take your life if you do not protect yourself. (Schulz 2007: 145) [T]he very process of routinization of torture involves a kind of continuous and dynamic distortion of facts and events which, in the end, amounts to the construction of a new reality. This socially constructed reality – the routine of torture, replaces objective reality with one that is presumed to exist. In doing so, it also supplants conventional morality, substituting in its place the ideological dictates of the authority structure within which torture occurs. (Schulz 2007: 148) Merleau-Ponty’s analyses give us a new way to understand such acts – through perception and perceptual gestalts. Recall that for MerleauPonty perception in its usual functioning gives us not truths but presences, including the presences of fellow creatures. It is my contention that through the inhuman gaze, presence is annulled at both poles; it is

152  Anya Daly replaced with a pure totalizing rationality on the part of the perpetrator and the victim is replaced with the idea; the totalizing ideology and the idea of a witch, a sinner, or a political dissenter. The inhuman gaze deconstructs the perceptual gestalt: there are no fields, only a pure totality, and everything is absorbed into the monocular perspective of the ideology; there is no shifting attention between figure and ground, between self and other; wholes are deconstructed into disconnected atomistic parts; no human beings immersed in meaningful lives, only resistant, dehumanized, demonized entities, only body parts – such as eyes that must be gouged out, testicles crushed, young children tortured in front of mothers, arms dislocated from their sockets while chained up for lashing, electrical prods inserted in orifices, along with all the other diabolical techniques in the torturer’s repertoire. The ‘plurality of subjects’ which before afforded all the possibilities of perception and worlds is now irrevocably corrupted; the already inhabited world of familiar meanings and familiar objects of use are subverted and are now deployed for fiendish purposes – the unmaking of worlds and the destruction of identities. But there is a paradox in torture, a maddening paradox which slowly but surely tortures the torturer: to effectively torture, to effectively dehumanize, the torturer must exploit the very humanity of both himself and the victim. He must draw on his experience of being human in order to more effectively corrupt and break this down; he must recognize in the victim the very particular aspects of human value and vulnerability so as to exploit these to the most vicious effect, and he must be able to recognize when the torture is likely to go too far and end in irretrievable madness or a fatality (Daly 2014: 239). This paradox in torture maps exactly the same paradoxical structure of the more general objectification in human relations (cf. regarding the role of ‘designation’ in Mitchell, 2020: 298); without ignoring the moral repugnance of torture, nor discounting the profound and devastating consequences of torture, we can say it is ultimately self-defeating in that in inflicting inhuman harm, the torturer also harms himself. Why? Because as Merleau-Ponty has discovered, we can never escape sociality; sociality is irreducible. Just as perception already implicates the body, so too as argued previously, perception already implicates intersubjectivity – perception, body and intersubjectivity are thus equiprimordial. [W]e must rediscover the social world, after the natural world, not as an object or a sum of objects, but as the permanent field or dimension of existence: I can certainly turn away from the social world, but I cannot cease to be situated in relation to it. Our relation to the social, like our relation to the world, is deeper than every explicit perception and deeper than every judgment. It is just as false to place us within society like an object in the midst of other objects, as it is to put society in us as an object of thought, and the error on both sides consists in treating the social as an object. We must return to

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 153 the social world with which we are in contact through the simple fact of our existence, and that we inseparably bear along with us prior to every objectification. (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 421, 2012: 379) And so ‘we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being’ (Daly 2014: 227).7 Although in the short term, it may seem the torturer is impervious to all he is inflicting on the victim and in fact it seems to bring immense pleasure and the privileges afforded by power, there are increasing numbers of documented cases indicating that long term consequences ensue: paranoia, nightmares, hauntings, physical and nervous collapse, alcohol and substance abuse, sleeping disturbances, breakdown in trust, posttraumatic stress disorder, domestic violence, breakdown in the sense of self, suicide, and moral injury engendering ‘toxic levels of guilt and shame’ (Peter 1996; Rejali 2007; De Pillis 2014; Muller 2016; Dee 2017; Shay 2014, in Protevi 2020). Another name for burnout [suffered by torturers] is vicarious trauma. Symptoms can include ‘difficulty managing emotions; feeling emotionally numb or shut[ting] down’; difficulty sleeping or oversleeping; physical problems; losing ‘a sense of meaning in life and/or feeling hopeless’; relationship problems; excessive worrying; increased irritability or aggression; ‘destructive coping or addictive behaviors’; lack of participating in enjoyable activities; and avoidance. (Office for Victims of Crime, in Dee 2017)

Conclusion Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics as such; however, as I have demonstrated in earlier writings, there are significant textual references which give indications of how his ethics might have developed if he had lived long enough to pursue this project. The three axes of his vision – perception, the body, and intersubjectivity are key to the elaboration of all aspects of his philosophical interrogations, including the unwritten ethics. In the earlier writings, I have focused on these three axes in conjunction with his non-dualist ontology to elaborate the beginnings of a Merleau-Pontian ethics (Daly 2016). In this current essay, I have chosen to focus specifically on the role of perceptual gestalts to reveal how through a rationalizing deconstructive process it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, the structures of perception are broken down and subverted so as to ‘unmake’ others and worlds for violent and unethical ends. The consequences of cultivating the inhuman gaze rebound on the ‘gazing’ perpetrator as much as the objectified, dehumanized other; this, I have shown, is demonstrated in

154  Anya Daly the testimonies of both victim and perpetrator in the cases of torture. Not only do these analyses and cases support Merleau-Ponty’s prescient insights into constitutive sociality but also my claims for the unavoidable and compelling demand of the ethical.

Notes 1. ‘Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice, I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Some is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure. . . . First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self that is most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me. . . . I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other’ (Sartre 2003: 284). 2. Christian von Ehrenfels, a student of Franz Brentano, coined the term gestalt which literally means – shape, figure, form; ‘it also refers to a structure or complex . . . an indivisible whole, whose elements have value only in relation to the whole’ Clausewitz in Smith (1988: 4). 3. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of gestalt: while he is appreciative that gestalt theory has revealed the structures of perception, perspective, holism, and figureground organization, he rejects the reifying tendencies which aim to determine fixed laws, principles, and norms of truth. Correlatively, his pre-predicative lived perception cannot be accurately captured in terms of reasons and causes; the gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, continuity, and closure can all according to Merleau-Ponty become thematic only after the perceptual engagement. He writes: ‘The unity of the object is established upon the presentiment of an imminent order that will suddenly, respond to questions that are merely latent in the landscape. It will resolve a problem, only posed in the form of a vague uneasiness; it organizes elements that until then did not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, as Kant said insightfully, could not have been associated’ (2006: 20; Merleau-Ponty 2012: 18). 4. See O’Shea (2018) for a discussion of William James’ work on the distinction between the percept and the concept. As Husserl noted, James’ work was inspirational for some of his own thinking; but as O’Shea alerts, James failed to fully ‘account for percepts as immediate cognitions of reality’ (2018). 5. Herein lies the philosophical explanation for why future generations must be central in moral considerations, notably as we have seen with the current climate change crisis. 6. Attending a lecture given by human rights lawyer Julian Burnside a number of years ago at Melbourne University, the author was deeply disturbed by the presentation of footage, secretly filmed by a guard, of this very situation taking place in Iran. To be clear, this particular punishment was enacted according to a literalist interpretation of Sharia Law, which experienced a revival towards the end of the 20th century in some countries; notably Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. The term Sharia means ‘the clear, well-trodden path to water’ or simply ‘the way’. It is based on the Koran, the life of the Prophet Mohammed and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), that is the expert interpretations by Islamic scholars. While the more infamous understandings of Sharia derive from the literalist interpretations promoted by various Islamist movements involving the notion of ‘retaliation in kind’ or ‘an eye for an eye’ retributive justice, the more accurate understanding includes very socially oriented moral

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 155 principles more in keeping with modern Western morality and very strict constraints in the implementation of the law. Nonetheless, since 2013 there have been more than 1,800 executions in Iran, as well as numerous floggings and amputations. For more detailed information about the various interpretations of Sharia, see Hussain 2003; Krayem and Farache 2008. 7. ‘ [C]ontrary to the social world I can always avail myself of my sensible nature, close my eyes, stop up my ears, live as a stranger in society, treat others, ceremonies and institutions as mere arrangements of colour and light, and strip them of all their human significance. Contrary to the natural world I can always have recourse to the thinking nature and entertain doubts about each perception taken on its own. . . . But I can fly from being only into being’ (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 419, 2012: 377).

Reference List Amnesty International Report. 2014. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/ 5/12/torture-report-amnesty.html Carman, Taylor. 2009. Merleau-Ponty and the mystery of perception. Philosophy Compass, 4 (4): 630–638. Daly, Anya. 2014. Primary intersubjectivity: Empathy, affective reversibility, ‘self-affection’ and the primordial ‘we’. TOPOI. Special Issue: Embodiment and Empathy: Current Debates in Social Cognition, 33 (1): 227–241. Daly, Anya. 2016. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Daly, Anya. 2019. A phenomenological grounding of feminist ethics. Society of the British Journal for Phenomenology, 50 (1): 1–18. Dee, Melinda. 2017. Effect of Torture on the Torturer. https://law.utah.edu/ effect-of-torture-on-the-torturer/ De Pillis, Lydia. 2014. This is how it feels to torture. Washington Post, December 11. www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/12/11/this-is-howit-feels-to-torture/ Gallagher, Shaun. 2008. Intersubjectivity in perception. Continental Philosophy Review, 41: 163–178. Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Inside the gaze. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Goodale, M.A. and Milner, A.D. 2017. Two visual pathways—Where have they taken us and where will they lead in future? Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, PMID 29288012. doi:10.1016/j. cortex.2017.12.002 Guenther, Lisa. 2018. Unmaking and remaking the world in long-term solitary confinement. Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 1 (1): 74–89. Harney, Maurita. 2020. Perception and its objects. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Heinämaa, S. 2009. Phenomenological responses to gestalt psychology. In S. Heinämaa and M. Reuter (eds.) Psychology and Philosophy. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 8. Dordrecht: Springer.

156  Anya Daly Heinämaa Sara. 2020. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch. In Daly, A., Moran, D., Cummins, F., and Jardine, J. (eds). Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Hussain, Jamila. 2003. Islam: Its Law and Society. Alexandria, NSW, Australia: Federation Press. Kelly, Sean D. 2005. Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty. In T. Carman and B.N. Hansen (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 74–110. Krayem, G. and Farache, H. 2008. Grim picture of sharia hides its useful aspects. The Sydney Morning Herald. www.smh.com.au/national/grim-picture-of-sharia-hides-its-useful-aspects-20080218-gds1hs.html Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 2006. The Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). Reprint. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. Donald Landes (trans.). New York and London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964a. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. James Edie (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964b. Signs. Richard McCleary (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mitchell, Jonathan. 2020. Disability and the Inhuman. In Daly, A., Moran, D., Cummins, F., and Jardine, J. (eds). Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Moran, Dermot. 2020. Defending the objective gaze as a self-transcending capacity of human subjects. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Muller, Robert T. 2016. CIA torture techniques harm interrogators as well. Psychology Today, August. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/talkingabout-trauma/201608/cia-torture-techniques-harm-interrogators-well Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Office for Victims of Crime. 2017. The Vicarious Trauma Toolkit. Office of Justice Programs. https://vtt.ovc.ojp.gov/what-is-vicarious-trauma O’Shea, James. 2018. Percepts and concepts and the function of cognition. In Alexander Klein (ed.) Oxford Handbook of William James. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peters, Edward. 1996. Torture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Protevi, John. 2020. Blackout rages: The inhibition of episodic memory in extreme berserker episodes. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Rejali, Darius. 2007. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roper, Lyndal. 2004. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. Yale University Press. E-book. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq4f7 Sartre, J.P. 2003. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Hazel E. Barnes (trans.). London: Routledge.

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts 157 Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schulz, William F. and Mendez, Juan E. (eds.). 2007. The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/ detail.action?docID=3442063 Shay, Jonathan. 2014. Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31 (2): 182–191. Sheredos, B. 2017. Merleau-Ponty’s immanent critique of Gestalt theory. Human Studies, 40: 191–215. Smith, Barry. 1988. Gestalt theory: An essay in philosophy. In Barry Smith (ed.) Foundations of Gestalt Theory. Munich, Vienna: Philosophia Verlag.

Part III

Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Inhuman Gazes

10 Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford Introduction Although developed in the early years of the twenty-first century (Fulford, Peile and Carroll 2012), the philosophical origins of contemporary, values-based, psychiatric practice are found fifty years earlier in midtwentieth century ordinary language analytic philosophy as exemplified by the work of J. L. Austin (1956–1957), R. M. Hare (1952), and others of the ‘Oxford School’. Extended initially to the language of medicine by Fulford (1989) and combined with empirical social science studies (Colombo et al. 2003), values-based practice emerged as, in effect, a practical output from the then newly resurgent field of philosophy of psychiatry (Fulford et al. 2003). The ordinary language philosophical origins of values-based practice underpin many of its unique features. As summarised in Figure 10.1, these include its premise, a number of the training exercises supporting development of its key clinical skills, its links with evidence-based practice, and its particular ‘dissensual’ approach to balanced clinical decisionmaking. In this form, values-based practice has found ready application across a range of issues initially in mental health, including diagnostic assessment (National Institute for Mental Health in England and the Care Services Improvement Partnership 2008) and recently in many other areas of healthcare, such as surgery (Handa et al. 2016). The approach has also been adopted in a number of countries around the world. Yet for all its positive impact in healthcare, values-based practice has been and remains an evolving field, receptive to well-grounded critique and open to further development in both its underpinning theory and practical applications (Loughlin 2014). It is on the potential for further development offered by phenomenology that we focus here. The chapter is divided into three main sections. Section I looks at analytic philosophy of values as illustrated by the story of Simon; Section II then shows through the story of Anna how phenomenology enriches the philosophical resources of values-based practice; Section III generalises the argument

162  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford Premise of Mutual Respect for Differences of Values Key Process Elements: • 4 Clinical skills • 2 Aspects of the model of service delivery • 3 Strong links between VBP and EBP • Partnership in decision-making

Together these support

Balanced dissensual decisions made within frameworks of shared values

Figure 10.1  A flow diagram of the process of values-based practice

of Section II by indicating the wide range of further phenomenological resources available to support the ongoing development of values-based practice. Our conclusion is that the particularly acute values challenges presented by psychopathology demand the full resources of a combined model of values-based practice in which ordinary language analytic philosophy and phenomenology work together in partnership. On first inspection bringing together ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology might seem an unpromising approach. After all, ordinary language philosophy (of the kind from which values-based practice has been derived) and phenomenology represent philosophical traditions, respectively of Analytic and Continental philosophy, that for much of the 20th century were firmly at odds one with the other. Yet the 21st century has seen a growing reconciliation between these two great traditions – in philosophy in general and in philosophy and psychiatry in particular (Fulford et al. 2003). There are furthermore methodological parallels. Ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology both encourage close attention to language use, and both encourage close attention to language use, particularly as exhibited in case studies (Austin 1956–1957). It is to one such case study that we turn next.

I.  Analytic Values-based Practice First Case Study: Simon’s Story Simon (aged 40) was a senior, black, American lawyer from a middleclass, Baptist family. Before the onset of his symptoms, he reported sporadic, relatively unremarkable, psychic experiences. These had led him to seek the guidance of a professional ‘seer’, with whom he occasionally consulted on major life events and decisions. But aside from this he had given up on his religious background. His story was that his hitherto successful career had been threatened by legal action for malpractice from his colleagues. Although he claimed

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 163 to be innocent, mounting a defence would be expensive and hazardous. He responded to this crisis by praying at a small altar that he set up in his front room at home. After an emotional evening’s ‘outpouring’, he discovered that the candle wax had left a ‘seal’ (or ‘sun’) on several consecutive pages of his Bible, covering certain letters and words. He described his experiences thus: ‘I got up and I saw the seal that was in my father’s Bible and I called [a friend] and I said, you know, “Something remarkable is going on over here.” I think the beauty of it was the specificity by which the sun burned through. It was . . . in my mind, a clever play on words.’ Although the marked words and letters had no explicit meaning, Simon interpreted this event as a direct communication from God, which signified that he had a special purpose or mission. From this time on, for a period of about 18 months, Simon received a complex series of ‘revelations’ largely conveyed through the images left in melted candle wax. He carried photos of these, which left most observers unimpressed, but were, for him, clearly representations of biblical symbols, particularly from the book of Revelation, (the bull, the 24 elders, the Ark of the Covenant, etc.). At other times he described thoughts coming into his head: ‘The things that come are not the things that I have been thinking about. They kind of short-circuit the brain and bring their message.’ All these experiences meant nothing to Simon’s family or friends, but for him they signified that ‘I am the living son of David . . . and I’m also a relative of Ishmael and . . . of Joseph.’ He was also the ‘captain of the guard of Israel.’ He found this role carried awesome responsibilities: ‘Sometimes I’m saying – ‘O my God, why did you choose me?’ and there’s no answer to that.’ His special status had the effect of ‘increasing my own inward sense, wisdom, understanding, and endurance’ which would ‘allow me to do whatever is required in terms of bringing whatever message it is that God wants me to bring.’ He expressed these beliefs with full conviction: ‘The truths that are up in that room are the truths that have been spoken of for 4,000 years.’ When confronted with skepticism, he commented: ‘I don’t get upset, because I know within myself, what I know.’ From this account it is clear that Simon was experiencing what in psychopathology is called ‘delusional perception’ (symptom 82, Wing, Cooper, and Sartorius 1974: 172–173). Psychiatrists traditionally consider delusional perception to be evidence of a serious psychotic disorder (such as schizophrenia). The World Health Organisation’s diagnostic classification, for example, the ICD (International Classification of Diseases, World Health Organization 1992), requires that Simon be diagnosed in this way. Yet the way his story developed suggests a very different interpretation. For it turned out that Simon’s experiences proved to be empowering rather than disabling. With their guidance he won his case against his accusers, his reputation as a lawyer was in consequence

164  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford greatly enhanced, and he used the money he made to establish a research trust for the study not of schizophrenia but of spiritual and religious experiences. Analytic Values-Based Practice and Simon’s Story The positive rather than negative outcome of Simon’s story takes us directly to the challenge of values in psychopathology. For the essential difference between understanding Simon’s story negatively (as a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia) or positively (as a religious or spiritual experience) consists not in the nature of his experiences as such (he really did have delusional perception) but rather in how the impact of these experiences on his life is evaluated. This is of course an arguable claim. It is a claim that sits at the heart of the long-running debate about the concept of mental illness, a debate that, as has been argued elsewhere (Fulford 1989), in turn sits at the heart of the even longer-running debate about the logical relationship (the relationship of meaning) between fact and value. Rather, however, than pursuing the issues by way of these general philosophical debates, we will remain focused on the resources of ordinary language philosophy by turning from the ICD to the American Psychiatric Association’s classification, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, American Psychiatric Association 2013). The DSM and ICD follow broadly similar approaches to psychiatric diagnostic classification. Both in particular aim to embody the best of scientific psychiatry. A key difference, however, is that DSM makes explicit the importance of looking not just at symptoms but at the impact of symptoms on the life of the person concerned. Thus, in the DSM, a diagnosis of schizophrenia requires, in addition to the presence of relevant symptoms (like delusional perception in Simon’s story), a ‘level of functioning in one or more major areas, such as work, interpersonal relations, or self-care, (that) is markedly below the level achieved prior to the onset’ (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 99, emphasis added). Now Simon, as we have seen, showed (in relation to his work as a lawyer at least) an enhanced level of functioning: he won his case. His level of functioning therefore, at least in this area of his life, was above (or at any rate not as required by the DSM, below) the level previously achieved. The DSM thus allows for the possibility, at least, that Simon’s experiences should be understood (as he himself understood them) in spiritual or religious, rather than in pathological, terms. So far, many will say, this is just common sense. There are different ways of understanding Simon’s experiences. We may or may not agree with Simon’s understanding of them. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility that his experiences were spiritual rather than psychopathological in nature. Yet the opportunity for acknowledging such common-sense possibilities is

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 165 opened up here by the DSM’s Criterion B. And – here is the punch line – the DSM’s Criterion B involves one or more value judgements. What is required by the DSM is not just a change in function (this would indeed be a value free determination) but a change for the worse. The importance of this diagnostic value judgement moreover has been made evident not by way of general argument (philosophical or clinical) but consistently with the principles of ordinary language philosophy, by the evaluative language adopted by the DSM itself. Again, we do not wish to enter here into the debate about the right way to understand Simon’s experiences. Our point is simply that the language of the DSM shows the importance of values at the heart of psychopathology. Identifying values in this way at the very heart of our psychopathological concepts (as reflected in the language of scientific psychiatry) raises many challenges, theoretical as well as practical. Key among these is the challenge of how to proceed when values conflict. This is evident, again, in the language of the DSM. Thus, the passage cited earlier speaks of functioning not only at work but also in other areas such as self-care and interpersonal relations. In Simon’s story, as we have seen, his work functioning was enhanced. But supposing we discovered that Simon’s interpersonal relations and/or self-care had deteriorated. The DSM criteria would then have presented us with conflicting values (with some areas of good functioning and others of bad functioning). This is where values-based practice of the kind described in our introduction comes into play, offering as it does a well-defined process for balancing conflicting values in clinical contexts. The process elements summarised in Figure 10.1 are directly applicable to balancing conflicting diagnostic values of the kind (potentially) arising in stories like Simon’s. Similar applications of values-based practice have been described for other areas of psychopathology such as depression (Fulford, Crepaz-Keay and Stanghellini, forthcoming) and voice hearing (Crepaz-Keay and Fulford, forthcoming). An ordinary language study, moreover, by the North American philosopher and psychiatrist, John Sadler, has shown the pervasiveness of values throughout the DSM (Sadler 2005). Yet important as the insights into diagnostic values provided by analytic values-based practice may be, they fall short of those needed to meet the challenges raised by treatment. It is to such challenges as presented by eating disorders, and the role of phenomenology in meeting them, that we turn with our next case study, the story of Anna.

II.  Phenomenological Values-based Practice Second Case Study: Anna’s Story Anna (a fictional name, see also Stanghellini 2017 for further discussion) is a young woman in her twenties who came to the attention of mental

166  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford health services at the insistence of her family with a story of progressive weight loss. Focusing for the moment as with Simon’s story on the language of the DSM, her clinical picture satisfies the relevant three criteria for anorexia nervosa (American Psychiatric Association 2013). She shows: A) significantly low body weight for her age due to ‘restriction of energy intake’; B) ‘intense fear of gaining weight or of becoming fat’; and C) ‘disturbance in the way [she experiences her] body weight or shape, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or persistent lack of recognition of the seriousness of [her] current low body weight’. Anna also shows a number of associated features noted by DSM: her ‘self-esteem . . . [is] highly dependent on [her] perceptions of body weight and shape’. Also, ‘weight loss [is] . . . viewed [by her] as an impressive achievement and a sign of extraordinary self-discipline, whereas weight gain [was] perceived as an unacceptable failure of self-control’. Like many others, Anna (as the DSM puts it) ‘lacks insight’ into her condition and was brought to ‘professional attention by family members’. In therapy Anna exhibits a troubled experience of her body from a first-person perspective (Stanghellini et al. 2015). As she puts it, ‘I don’t feel my body. It changes in shape and consistency according to situations.’ She compares her body to a ‘wobbling liquid whose shape changes when I’m in the presence of other people.’ She expresses shame and disgust for her body. Yet, surprisingly perhaps, she seeks identity through the others’ gaze that ‘makes me sense my body from without myself.’ And, again, referring to an occasion when a group of young men looked at her as she passed them in the street, ‘I realized that I had a sensation of “unity” when I felt they were watching me. It was as if their looks were “condensing” me. I “focalize” myself through their gazes.’ Phenomenological Values-based Practice and Anna’s Story With Anna’s story (as with Simon’s) the resources of Analytic Valuesbased Practice are sufficient for initial diagnostic purposes. Thus, attending to the language of the DSM, we see that its Criterion C is essential to the diagnosis. This is because the DSM’s first two criteria, A and B, (as cited earlier) would apply equally to non-pathological states of fasting (e.g. in athletes, fashion models, or religious observance). But Criterion C (like Criterion B in Simon’s story) requires one or more value judgements. This is how the criterion (as cited earlier) reads with the values highlighted. Anna shows, ‘Disturbance in the way [she experiences her] body weight or shape, undue influence of body weight or shape on selfevaluation, or persistent lack of recognition of the seriousness of [her] current low body weight’. Once again then, as with Simon’s story, values are integral to the DSM diagnosis of anorexia. In Anna’s story, moreover, the need for valuesbased practice for balancing conflicting values becomes evident in her

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 167 story as described, specifically in the further evaluative language to be found in the DSM’s associated features for anorexia. As cited earlier and with the relevant value words once again highlighted, these read: (Anna’s) ‘self-esteem . . . [is] highly dependent on [her] perceptions of body weight and shape’. Also, ‘weight loss [is] . . . viewed [by her] as an impressive achievement and a sign of extraordinary self-discipline, whereas weight gain [was] perceived as an unacceptable failure of self-control’. But these are Anna’s values and, so described, Anna’s values are in conflict with everyone else’s values, as expressed in Criterion C. This is why people with anorexia are often as the DSM puts it, brought to ‘professional attention by family members’. In Anna’s story, moreover, in addition to conflicts between her own and other people’s values, there is evidence of further conflicts within her own values: recall that in contrast to her positive values just cited she also ‘feels shame and disgust’ about her body. The resources of analytic values-based practice are sufficient as in Simon’s story for balancing these and other conflicting values in the initial diagnostic assessment of stories like Anna’s. With Anna’s story, however, these resources fail when it comes to understanding the origins of her values, and, hence, to developing an effective approach to treatment. This is where phenomenology comes into play. The guiding idea is this: phenomenology provides a theoretical and practical resource for understanding how Anna’s values emerge from the psychopathological core of her lifeworld (Stanghellini and Mancini 2017; Stanghellini 2020). There are of course many phenomenologies on which one might draw in understanding the origins of Anna’s values (we will return to some of these). By way of example, however, Sartre’s (1986) three-way phenomenology of the body provides a helpful framework that, as we see, is directly relevant to the contingencies of treatment. The starting point for this Sartrean account is the way that from a first-personal perspective Anna experiences her body inconsistently in terms of sudden, abrupt, and therefore scaring paroxysms. This in turn entails a fleeting feeling of selfhood and an evanescent sense of identity. This vulnerable awareness of herself is disturbing and generates the need to find alternative ways of appraising herself. Like others with such disorders, the alternative means of self-recognition Anna adopts is feeling her body through the gaze of Others. Obviously, this coping strategy is not voluntarily adopted. But Anna herself expresses it in comments like ‘I realized that I had a sensation of “unity” when I felt they [a group of young men] were watching me.’ Here then is Sartre’s ‘lived body for others’ in play. Anna is unable to gain a secure or consistent sense of her body and identity in the way most of us do, within a first personal perspective. This is Sartre’s ‘subjective body’. Nor is Sartre’s second lived body, the ‘objective body’, helpful – this is the body as described, for example, in medical textbooks. But Anna’s experience is by contrast precisely captured by Sartre’s third

168  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford category of lived body, the one that reflects his insight into the way our bodily identity is constructed through the gaze of others, the category he called the ‘lived body for others’. This then is Anna’s experience. Her body feels ‘wobbling’ and without definite shape or identity, until she finds herself, as when she passes a group of young men, caught in the gaze of others. There are other strategies that people with these disorders may adopt to regain a secure sense of bodily identity. Anna shows one of these. She identifies herself through a passion for thinness. This is an effective strategy because passions represent a phenomenological rupture in the fleeting character of our emotional and bodily life. The consolidation of this passion and of its related value is expressed in the need to compensate for the disturbing, shameful, and anxiety-provoking aspects of her fleeting sense of embodiment, selfhood, and identity. These insights from phenomenology provide a depth dimension of understanding of Anna’s experiences and of those with similar disorders. If we want to understand what it is like to live with anorexia or bulimia, it is a mistake to see the values of people like Anna as merely imperfect cognitions or as irrational or delusional beliefs about one’s body or nutrition. Anna’s values amount to a kind of religion that goes beyond the rationality/irrationality divide. This religion is about the worth of life and the way to make one’s life meaningful. Food has a moral value: it is a sin and a temptation. Fatness has a moral value too as indicative of laziness, lack of self-care, and of self-control. Thinness is more valuable than anything else (including health) because it means to Anna that she has an identity, a set of stable and recognizable values, and a life-project – and having an identity and a life-project is more valuable to her even than being alive. Strict rules are needed to avoid doing wrong and being led astray. Starvation is the unique salvation practice since it is the only available practice to achieve a stable sense of identity. So, where do these phenomenological insights take us with treatment? First, with the origins of Anna’s values thus identified, it will be clear that there will be no way of convincing her (and people like her) that their values of thinness and fasting are wrong, since, given the reality (for them) of their need to experience their own body as an object being looked at by others, they are right. As just indicated, this is in a very real sense their religion. Instead of tackling their presenting symptoms head-on, therefore, the aim of therapy is to help them make sense of their drive for thinness and starvation by putting them in touch with the core psychopathological anomaly from which these symptoms stem – namely, their difficulties in feeling their own bodies in the first-person perspective and in thus sustaining a stable and continuous sense of themselves as embodied agents. Giovanni Stanghellini has developed this approach in the form of a values-based therapeutic interview (Stanghellini and Mancini 2017). This

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 169 aims to put people like Anna in touch with their underlying values as a step towards developing more effective and less destructive coping strategies. A further development of this model of treatment, Stanghellini has coined the ‘PHD’ approach, which combines phenomenological, hermeneutic, and dynamic methods of analysis (Stanghellini 2016, 2017, 2019; Stanghellini and Mancini 2017). Just how widely applicable Sartre’s particular ‘lived body for others’ phenomenological model may be remains to be seen. Anorexia, after all, is highly variable in presentation, and anorexia itself is only one of a wide variety of eating and feeding disorders. But the question is at least one that, presented in this form, is amenable to empirical testing. It is indeed an advantage of this phenomenologically informed approach that it is open to such testing. Stanghellini has, furthermore, developed an interview schedule called IDEA (Identity and Eating Disorders schedule, Stanghellini et al. 2012) that is currently being applied across a range of feeding and eating disorders. Potentially important, however, as the contribution of phenomenology may be, it is important to emphasise that this does not thereby remove the need for analytically derived values-based practice. To the contrary, it shows the need at least in cases like Anna’s for a double engagement with it. Values-based practice is required for engagement first with the values challenges of her presenting symptoms. In this respect the engagement is similar to that required in Simon’s story. But with Anna, values-based practice is also required for engagement with the origins of these values challenges in underlying areas of her core psychopathology. What is required, then, in mental health -– at least in cases of the kind exemplified by Anna’s story – is a combined values-based practice drawing equally on the process elements of analytically derived values-based practice and the depth dimension of understanding provided by phenomenology. In the final section of this chapter, we outline some of the further resources from phenomenology available to support the future development of this combined analytic-plus-phenomenological form of values-based practice.

III.  Further Phenomenological Resources In this section we broaden out the approach illustrated by our two case studies. Our aim is to explore the potential for generalising this approach based on a wider understanding of the relationship between analytic philosophy and phenomenology as sources for developing the clinical applications of values-based practice to psychopathology. Generalising, then, we can say that analytic values-based practice of the kind illustrated by both Simon’s and Anna’s stories is essentially cognitively focussed, each of its elements being clearly spelled out and its process as a whole being representable in explicit flow diagrams of the kind shown in Figure 10.1. These are its strength. It is explicit, clear, and replicable across a wide range of conditions. But values-based practice in day-to-day

170  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford reality – exercised by real people facing the acute values challenges of psychopathology in everyday clinical contexts – gains content not from such cognitivist structures alone but from the affective and conative dimensions of decision-making. This is where phenomenology in filling out these affective and conative aspects of decision-making adds key elements of understanding to values-based practice. Clearly, a comprehensive account of phenomenological work on values is beyond the scope of this chapter. We will, though, illustrate the potential of phenomenology in this area with three exemplars: Husserl, Scheler, and Ricoeur. As we will show, each of these seminal figures (although using perhaps different terms of art for their respective ‘philosophy of values’) offers ideas and insights that in different ways help to make explicit the affective and conative dimensions of value-based practice. Husserl’s Value Theory Writing in the nineteenth century, Edmund Husserl (1908–1914) takes us directly to the role of phenomenology in values-based practice by framing his value theory within a general account of mental phenomena as comprising not just cognitive but also affective and conative elements. What is valued, according to Husserl, is framed cognitively (it is perceived, remembered, imagined, etc.); but attaching value (valuing something as good, or bad, or with indifference) always involves affect. That valuing is, for Husserl, essentially an affective process; it is important not just for values-based practice but also for ethics. Indeed, Husserl considered ethics to be essentially a matter of emotional experience. His understanding of ethics was thus quite different from that of contemporary bioethics in which it has become, at least in its practical applications, largely a matter of cognitively defined general principles reflecting what are taken to be rules of right conduct. In emphasizing the affective as against cognitive aspects of valuing, Husserl (along with many other phenomenologists) closely parallels the focus in values-based practice on process. Also parallel is the importance in Husserl’s phenomenology of what he called ‘comparative affects’ (affects that value something as being better or worse than something else). In Husserl’s phenomenology, then, corresponding with the balanced outputs of values-based practice, comparative affects are essential to the conative processes of deciding and choosing. Scheler’s Value Theory In linking values with persons, Max Scheler’s value theory coincides with the focus of values-based practice on complex and conflicting values. Scheler (1927) recognized that persons experience themselves at one and

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 171 the same time at different levels, caught ‘in-between’ the possibilities of good and evil, of spirit and flesh, of God and animal life. The importance of this ‘in-between’ experience in relation to the complex and conflicting nature of values in values-based practice is wellillustrated by Scheler’s richly detailed account of shame and repentance (Scheler 1987). Thus, where in values-based practice the complex and conflicting nature of values are contingently derived, in Scheler’s account they are analytic – they emerge as a necessary consequence of the tension between the animal and the divine by which the human condition is uniquely characterised. First, as to the complexity of values, Scheler argued that this tension (between the animal and the divine) results in our values being necessarily ‘stratified’: his stratifications included a range of complex values, the Holy and Unholy (the Divine, for example), psychic values (the Beautiful and the Ugly, Right and Wrong, Truth and Falsehood), vital values (Noble and Vulgar), sensual values (the Agreeable and Disagreeable), and values of utility (Economics, Government). The, second dyad, shame and repentance and with them the conflicting nature of values, then emerges from this account as a further necessary, rather than contingent, aspect of the human condition. Shame in Scheler’s account is based on an imbalance or tension between spiritual personhood and embodied needs: ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’, ‘eternity’ and ‘time’, ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ are in tension. Being human means living simultaneously in these two orders of being. Being human thus means experiencing the tension between them. It from this same tension, Scheler argued, that the possibility of repentance arises. Ricoeur’s Value Theory Like Scheler, Paul Ricoeur (1950) shows how values necessarily come into conflict one with another. He derives this conclusion by a different route, however (by way of his concept of motivations), and this takes him beyond Scheler to a positive account of how value conflicts may be resolved. This in turn corresponds with and illuminates the outputs of contemporary values-based practice in balanced decision-making within frameworks of shared values. Ricoeur’s value theory involves three basic elements: motivations, feelings, and imagination. He took values to be based on motivations ranging from bodily motivations (covering basic needs such as thirst and hunger) to motivations of pure reason (including the capacity to transcend our bodily needs). His account of how we resolve value conflicts then relies on the two other elements of his value theory: feelings and imagination. Ricoeur took feelings to be spontaneous beliefs about what is good or bad. These highlight motives and, according to their relative strength, produce actions. For instance, I decide not to follow the bodily motive of hunger where this is outweighed by the rational motive of shaping up.

172  G. Stanghellini and K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford Imagination in Ricoeur’s phenomenology takes us beyond the immediate satisfaction of a bodily motive. It allows us to compare one motive with another and to balance their respective satisfactions. Ricoeur’s account thus provides a rich account of the process by which in values-based practice balanced decisions are made between conflicting values. His theory also provides an account of the premise of valuesbased practice in mutual respect that is rooted in the mutuality of human relationships (see Fulford and Stanghellini 2019).

Conclusions We have explored through two cases the potential of phenomenology as a resource for values-based approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of psychopathology. Our first case study, the story of Simon, illustrated the power of contemporary models of values-based practice, as derived from ordinary language analytic philosophy, to make explicit the values inherent in the differential diagnosis between delusional disorder and religious or spiritual experiences. Our second case study, the story of Anna, showed a similar operation of analytic values-based practice in illuminating the diagnostic values inherent in anorexia and related feeding and eating disorders. Adding, however, the resources of phenomenology – specifically the Sartrean concept of the ‘lived body for others’ – provided a depth dimension of understanding, illuminating the origins of Anna’s values, and hence leading to a more nuanced and effective approach to treatment. We have also indicated the wider applications of the ideas illustrated by our two case studies. In Section I we noted the extent of the diagnostic values evident in other conditions (such as voice hearing and depression) and indeed throughout major classifications of mental disorders such as the DSM. In Section II we indicated the extensive development of both therapeutic resources and phenomenologically informed empirical studies, exploring the lifeworld of people with feeding and eating disorders. Section III was taken up with a brief exploration of the value theories respectively of Husserl, Scheler, and Ricoeur by way of an indication of the extent of the resources potentially available from phenomenology to enrich the underlying theory and practical impact of values-based practice. All of which, as we have emphasised, is not to suggest that phenomenology should replace analytic philosophy as the foundation of values-based practice. Yes, phenomenology provides a depth dimension of affective and conative understanding of values. But this should be seen as complementing the cognitive elements derived from analytic – specifically from ordinary language analytic – philosophy of values in a combined model of values-based practice. As we noted in our introduction, a combined model of this kind would build on the many methodological and other

Values-based Practice in Psychopathology 173 points of contact between these two traditionally opposed disciplines. We continue therefore to work together towards a combined model of values-based practice in which analytic and phenomenological resources work together in a combined model that is fit for purpose in meeting the particularly acute values challenges presented by psychopathology.

Further Information For further information on all aspects of values-based practice, please see the website for The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care, St Catherine’s College, Oxford at valuesbasedpractice.org.

Acknowledgements Simon’s story in Section I is based on one of a number of cases collected by Mike Jackson as part of his doctoral work and published with philosophical implications in Jackson and Fulford (1997). Anna’s story in Section II is an amalgam of cases from the extensive work on feeding and eating disorders carried out by Giovanni Stanghellini and partially included in Stanghellini (2017). Some of the material in Section III is adapted from the authors’ earlier paper, Fulford and Stanghellini (2019).

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11 The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Schizophrenia Matthew R. Broome In this chapter I will explore what the Inhuman Gaze, a powerful expression of Merleau-Ponty’s, may mean for psychiatry and schizophrenia. This term refers to where the other person transforms one into an object, and in turn, I transform her into an object. Neither are understood, but both are observed. A denial of personhood is a common charge against psychiatry and one that has been addressed by philosophers and clinicians, including Merleau-Ponty himself. Before turning to the origins of phenomenological psychopathology, I will first outline our current views on psychopathology and how these attempt to marry an inhuman with a human gaze. Here, I will outline Karl Jaspers’ attempt to recreate psychiatry and psychopathology in a way capable of addressing the whole person, as against the neuropathological-driven practice of his day. I will then move on to a somewhat distaff tradition in phenomenological psychopathology and the work of Bergson and Minkowski, exploring how this work relates to Merleau-Ponty’s views of experience. I will discuss Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Objective Thought’, proposing that this may help us resist the Inhuman Gaze in psychiatry.

What Is (and Isn’t) Psychopathology One of the recent surprises in the history of ideas is the rebirth of interest in the philosophy of psychiatry that followed closely on the heels of ‘the decade of the brain’, the advances in neurosciences, and the ‘second biological psychiatry’. With empirical scientific advances comes the pressure to think deeply about their significance, their place within existing knowledge, and how these new findings stand in relation to understanding abnormal human existence and treating persons affected by mental disorders. The historical moment now, just over one hundred years after the publication of the first edition of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology and after the ‘decade of the brain’, is similar to the conceptual terrain in which Jaspers found himself in the early twentieth century and the ‘first biological psychiatry’ (Shorter 1997). Psychiatry is intensely interested in the quality of the experiences our patients relate to us (Ratcliffe

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 177 and Broome 2011; Broome 2009; Stanghellini and Broome 2014), their relationship to the classificatory systems we employ, and how in turn such experiences can be investigated scientifically and correlated to brain morphology and function. Phenomenological psychopathology is thus increasingly central to these discussions. Psychiatry’s domain of investigation is that of mental disorders, and at present, such disorders are mainly defined by changes in experience and behaviour, and hence at the level of the person. Therefore, psychopathology, as the discipline that assesses and makes sense of abnormal human experience and behaviour, should be at the heart of psychiatry. In contemporary usage, the term psychopathology is employed in a number of different ways. A common way to use it is to conflate psychopathology with symptomatology – the study of isolated symptoms in view of their clinical (that is, diagnostic and aetiological) significance. Psychopathology is about that, but not just about that. Whereas symptomatology is strictly disease or illness oriented, psychopathology is also person oriented since it attempts to describe the special modes of a patient’s experience and his relationship to his experiences and to the world. Biomedical science, indeed, was built on the transformation of a complaint into a symptom. This allowed medical science to see in a complaint the effect of a cause situated in the human body – for example, as an anatomical anomaly or biochemical imbalance. This may overshadow the fact that a complaint, allied with a cause, has a meaning. Thus, a person may not only seek elimination of her complaint, but also fulfilment of her aspiration to understand how this complaint fits into her wider existence. Biomedical science, nonetheless, is built on (at least) partial exclusion of the subjectivity of the patients and the meaning their symptoms hold for them. A psychopathological approach does not exclude seeing abnormal phenomena as symptoms caused by a dysfunction to be treated or ameliorated but additionally includes the exploration of personal meanings alongside the search for causes. Psychopathology focuses on the experiencing subject as a whole. The person of the patient is an active partner in the diagnostic process, capable of interpreting her own complaints. Here, it can be seen that with phenomenological psychiatry is a possible way to keep the human gaze present alongside a biomedical inhuman gaze in psychiatry. A second sense of psychopathology is when used as a synonym for nosography. The latter outlines provisional and conventional characteristics of a syndrome (i.e. a combination of symptoms empirically and statistically aggregated) and thereby serves the goal of a clinical diagnosis. However, psychopathology is not merely about diagnosis. Psychopathology promotes radical attention to the person’s whole field of experience, rather than a restricted focus on symptoms selected according to their putative diagnostic relevance. The existing classifications of mental illnesses are merely provisional diagnostic conventions. Since no

178  Matthew R. Broome biomarkers of putative nosological discontinuities are available, our taxonomy is necessarily based on exclusively psychopathologically defined syndromes. Hence psychopathology has become the main method of linking symptoms and diagnosis. Yet if psychopathology is conflated with nosography, only those symptoms that are supposed to have diagnostic value are investigated, in a sort of nosography-focused twilight state where we wear clinical blinkers structured by contemporary classificatory systems (Andreasen 2006; Harrington 2019). The dominant focus on diagnosis disregards the attention to real people’s experiences. As a consequence, clinical utility is confined to ad hoc bits of information useful for clinical decision-making. This blinkering to only view the phenomena relevant to diagnosis excludes the scrutiny of the manifold manifestations of what is really there in the patients’ experience, the essential prerequisite to understand the worlds they live in, and closes us off to the discovery of new psychopathological knowledge. Phenomenological psychopathology is thus at the heart of psychiatry. There are at least six reasons for that: 1. Psychiatry is a heterogeneous discipline. Practitioners approach their discipline from many different angles, as for instance neuroscience, sociology, genetics, epidemiology, psychodynamic therapy etc., each of which has its own language, methodology, and practice. Psychiatrists therefore need a common ground and a joint language if they want to understand each other. Phenomenological psychopathology develops a field of knowledge in which theoretical assumptions are minimised and the forms and contents of the patient’s experience are prioritised. 2. Psychiatry aims at establishing rigorous diagnoses. Phenomenological psychopathology is still highly useful in a field where the major disorders cannot be neuroscientifically defined as disease entities, but are exclusively syndromes that can be defined according to characterising symptoms such as, notably, abnormal subjective experiences. 3. Psychiatry is about understanding disturbed human experience, rather than simply assessing, diagnosing, and classifying it. Phenomenological psychopathology functions as a bridge between human sciences and clinical sciences, thus providing the basic tools to make sense of mental suffering. The dominant focus on diagnosis and on those symptoms deemed relevant for nosographical diagnosis disregards the attention to real people’s experiences. This excludes the scrutiny of what is relevant from the patients’ perspective and of the manifold manifestations of their vulnerability and sufferings (see also Parnas and Gallagher 2015; Daly and Gallagher 2019). 4. Psychiatry addresses abnormal human subjectivity. Phenomenological psychopathology attempts to define what is abnormal, rather than taking for granted common-sense views as it is sometimes the

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 179 case with mainstream diagnostic concepts. Phenomenological psychopathology is about remembering that mental health clinicians do not sit in front of a broken brain – we sit in front of a suffering person. Indeed, mental disorders are primarily disorders of the human psyche (see also Fuchs 2018). 5. Psychiatry is about caring for troubled human existence, rather than judging, marginalising, punishing, or stigmatising it. Phenomenological psychopathology connects understanding with caring and endeavours to establish an epistemological as well as ethical framework for this. This framework is a dialogical one. The kind of clinical practice promoted by phenomenological psychopathology is fundamentally a quest for meaning. It encourages the patient to unfold his experiences and his personal horizon of meaning, helping him to reflect upon them and to take a position with regard to them. In this framework, the clinician promotes a reciprocal exchange of perspectives with his patient, and clinician and patient cooperate in the co-construction of a new meaningful narrative that includes and, if possible, integrates contributions from both the original perspectives. The clinician tolerates diversity and potential conflicts of values and beliefs, and facilitates coexistence when it is not possible to establish consensus (Broome 2009). 6. Psychiatry looks for a way to connect first-person subjective experience with impersonal brain functioning. Phenomenological psychopathology is about bridging understanding (Verstehen) and explanation (Erklären) in research as well as in clinical settings. As the science of abnormal subjectivity, psychopathology relies both on explanation that allows the formulation of general rules by observing events, experimenting, and collecting numerous examples and on understanding the achievable only by sinking oneself into a singular situation. Phenomenological psychopathology in itself is prior to any causal accounts addressing subpersonal mechanisms. At least in part, some of the questionable results in neuroscience research are perhaps the effect of insufficient knowledge in psychopathology. Basic psychopathological knowledge is a prerequisite for research in explanatory psychopathologies, and it can give new impulse to epistemologically sound biological psychiatry. This agenda was already hoped for in the early 20th century by Karl Jaspers, the founder of psychopathology as the basic science for psychiatry. Hence, the basic purpose of phenomenological psychopathology is first and foremost to empower clinicians with a systematic knowledge of the patients’ experiences, with the capacity to investigate and classify them, and to use valid and reliable terminology when reporting abnormal mental phenomena. Phenomenological psychopathology is ‘open’ to an unusual extent, in that it reveals aspects of experience that other approaches

180  Matthew R. Broome tend to overwrite or eclipse with their strong theoretical and ontological claims. Hence, as well as serving as a shared language it may also reveal new knowledge and modes of distress and experience. For phenomenological psychopathology an experience is not viewed atomistically and in isolation: a symptom is the expression of a profound modification of human subjectivity and its form (more than its content) reveals the underlying characteristic of this type of global change in the patient’s basic structures of subjectivity (see also Gallagher and Daly 2018). Phenomenological psychopathology aspires to respect the phenomenon rather than to offer a specific theory. For example, psychoanalytic or cognitive psychopathologies, in contrast, start with a theoretical model that explains psychopathological phenomena. These accounts risk taking for granted the possession of a rigorous knowledge of the patient’s abnormal mental phenomena – i.e. the basic endeavour of psychopathology. Thus, phenomenological psychopathology must be clearly demarcated from explanatory psychopathologies. In order to causally explain a phenomenon, it must be first clearly demarcated from similar phenomena. As mentioned above, some of the lack of progress in a neuroscientifically-informed psychiatry may be in part due to the effect of insufficient knowledge in psychopathology. Indeed, the former head of the NIMH, Thomas Insel, has written: I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs – I think $20 billion – I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I hold myself accountable for that. (Insel 2013, quoted in Prochaska JO, Norcross JC, 2018) Significant correlations between abnormal phenomena and biological findings are more likely to be found if clear-cut demarcations between abnormal phenomena have previously been delineated. Basic psychopathological knowledge is thus a prerequisite for research in explanatory psychopathologies, and it can give new impulse to epistemologicallysound biological psychiatry. In addition to the contribution that descriptive phenomenological psychopathology gives to the standard approach based on the assessment of symptoms, phenomenological psychopathology also engages in characterizing mental disorders in terms of subtle, abnormal phenomena that are reported by patients when asked about the way they experience and act in the world they actually live in: structural changes in experience. The attention to anomalies in the patients’ experience, for example, of time, space, body, self, and otherness, may provide a useful integration

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 181 and adjunct to the traditional symptom-oriented approach, since the experiences and behaviours of patients are not confined to their symptoms. Systematic explorations of these abnormal phenomena can be used as pointers to the fundamental alterations of the structure or framework of subjectivity characterizing each type of mental disorder. Also, it may provide a key to understand the meaning contexts of mental disorders, and the lived-world of the individual. Hence, on this characterisation, phenomenological psychopathology hopes to keep meaning and the person present alongside biomedical and neuroscientifically-infomed psychiatry – the human and the inhuman gaze. These contrasts are not new, however, and the origins of a systematic psychopathology arose from the backdrop of the first biological psychiatry.

Karl Jaspers on Psychopathology and Neuroscience Karl Jaspers was an influential philosopher-psychiatrist, a friend of Husserl, Weber, Heidegger, and Arendt, and his General Psychopathology, first published in 1913, has had a profound influence on psychiatry. This work came out of a reaction to a form of the Inhuman Gaze dominant in nineteenth-century German psychiatry, with the individual suffering mental health problems being seen almost wholly through the lens of neuropathology. Eric Engstrom’s rich book Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany (2003) charts Wilhelm Griesinger’s reforms to psychiatry in the decades before Jaspers’ General Psychopathology and in particular the shift from asylum and alienist-led psychiatry to one based in university clinics, with a concurrent emphasis on laboratory science and the investigation of the brain. Today, Griesinger tends to be more known as a historical contributor to theories of schizophrenia, with his conception of Einheitpsychose (unitary psychosis), but his impact may have been greater in his role in modifying the way psychiatrists were trained and how clinical practice took place. As part of this shift, the subject matter of psychiatry also changed. On Engstrom’s account, academic psychiatrists drew less on the clinical experience of admitted patients, but, in the 1870s and 1880s, on more basic scientific techniques, with a resultant shift in the object under investigation. Their observations were directed not so much at institutionalized patients, as at histological specimens, and vivisected animals. They drew less upon skills derived from years of asylum experience and more upon practices and techniques learned as students and honed in rudimentary laboratory facilities. Their ideal was not the practicing alienist, but rather the diligent researcher who spent long hours in front of the microscope and at the autopsy table. The psychiatric

182  Matthew R. Broome knowledge that they extracted from their objects of study was the product of disciplined laboratory conduct in handling microscopes and specimens, in opening the cranium, in applying electrodes. For them, psychiatry was a natural science with its own rigorous techniques and modes of observation. (Engstrom 2003: 89) This vivid picture from Engstrom is helpful to bear in mind: these are the academic psychiatrists of the generation just before Jaspers, those who trained in the last decades of the nineteenth century prior to Jaspers’ writing of the General Psychopathology. Engstrom goes on to note that Griesinger referred to alienists as ‘fossils from a distant past’ (Engstrom 2003: 90) and indeed, the younger psychiatrists chose not the title of ‘alienist’ (Irrenheilkünstler) but rather that of ‘cerebral pathologist’ (Engstrom 2003: 90). With this paradigm and ideological shift, the bright young psychiatrists saw their object of study not the person or the patient but rather the brain or nervous system, and further, a nervous system that was viewed through complex histopathological techniques. Engstrom cites the Jena Professor of Psychiatry, Otto Binswanger (Nietzsche’s psychiatrist), writing in 1892 of the scientific optimism of the prior two decades: A degree of disdain for imponderable psychic influences became the norm. This [scientific] progress literally intoxicated the heads [Gemüter] of many; in heated efforts to derive the cause and manifestations of all normal and pathological life processes from the fundamental precepts of biological research, from chemical, physical, and mechanical processes, the old facts derived from observing nature [Naturbeobachtung] were jettisoned as irrelevant and unproven, and hence inexplicable ballast as they could no longer be fitted into the framework of so called exact research. (Engstrom 2003: 98) What Binswanger is already picking up on is that the zenith of biological psychiatry was short-lived: the spectacular advances of the 1860s and 1870s (for example, Alzheimer describing the disease which now bears his name, and the spirochaete bacterium Treponema pallidum identified as the causative agent of General Paresis of the Insane) were not continued into the 1880s, and psychiatrists were accused of overextending neuroscientific theories into mental illness and charged with a term that Jaspers uses, brain mythology. Hence, Jaspers’ concerns regarding the somatic dominance of psychiatry were very much of their time and part of a wider concern as to the ideological excesses of the 1860s to 1880s. In his own philosophical autobiography, Jaspers (1981) echoes some of the historical trends Engstrom notes (his training with Nissl) and reflects

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 183 on the disappointment in the promise of biological psychiatry that he and his colleagues keenly felt: The realization that scientific investigation and therapy were in a state of stagnation was widespread in German psychiatric clinics at that time. The large institutions for the mentally ill were built constantly more hygienic and more magnificent. The lives of the unfortunate inmates, which could not be changed essentially, were controlled. . . . In view of the exceedingly small amount of knowledge and technical know-how, intelligent, yet unproductive psychiatrists, such as Hoche, took recourse to a sceptical attitude and to elegant sounding phrases of gentlemanly superiority. In Nissl’s hospital too, therapeutic resignation was dominant. In therapeutics we were basically without hope, but we were humane and kind and prevented, as far as possible, any calamity which might unnecessarily result from the condition of the mentally ill. (Jaspers 1981: 16) Jaspers describes much of the psychiatric literature as ‘unfounded chatter’ (Jaspers 1981: 16) and criticizes the obscurity, jargon, and lack of common theoretical language in discourse. Jaspers offers a diagnosis of this difficulty of psychiatric thinking: psychiatry had forgotten that its subject was man, rather than his body. As such, Jaspers describes how he turned to philosophy, philology, social and cultural science, and psychology and utilized the thought of Husserl, Dilthey, and Weber (Broome et al. 2013; Jaspers 1981), emphasizing the importance of methodological reflection and pluralism regarding theories. Hence from a more widespread theoretical disaffection, Jaspers launched his attempts to diagnose the crisis in psychiatry and to reground its practice, and to move from an Inhuman to a Human Gaze. From the opening of The General Psychopathology, Jaspers (1959/1997) is clear that: ‘The psychiatrist as a practitioner deals with individuals, with the human being as a whole’ (Jaspers 1959/1997: 1), and further that: Psychopathology is limited in that there can be no final analysis of human beings as such, since the more we reduce them to what is typical and normative the more we realize there is something hidden in every individual that defies recognition. We have to be content with partial knowledge of an infinity which we cannot exhaust. (Jaspers 1959/1997: 1) Here are two themes on the scope of psychiatry and psychopathology that go against the model of psychiatry as ‘cerebral pathology’, as

184  Matthew R. Broome described earlier. First, psychiatry is about the human as a whole and as an individual, a theme linked to Jaspers’ neo-Kantian heritage (Broome 2009), and second, it is limited, partial, and incomplete. He goes on to describe psychopathology’s subject matter as ‘actual conscious psychic events’ (Jaspers 1959/1997: 2) but stresses the importance of somatic events as causes of mental states and goes on to describe the relationship between mind and body. Throughout his work, Jaspers endorses a pluralism which stresses the importance of studying both psyche and soma, mind and body/brain, yet it fears that with seeming neurological advances, we choose to limit our understanding of people and of disorders at the level of person, and the psyche recedes. This worry is brought out more explicitly by Jaspers (1959/1997) later in the introduction in his discussion of the ‘somatic prejudice’. He defines this ‘prejudice’ thus: Tacit assumptions are made that, like everything else biological, the actual reality of human existence is a somatic event. Man is only comprehensible when he is understood in somatic terms; should the psyche be mentioned, this is in the nature of a theoretical stop-gap of no real scientific value. A tendency arises to discuss all psychic events as if their essence were something somatic, already in one’s grasp, or as if such a concept merely pointed the way to discoveries of a somatic nature. (Jaspers 1959/1997: 18) For Jaspers, having stressed the unity and equal importance of psyche and soma, he addresses the prejudice that the soma and its study is the locus of true scientific endeavor and that this in turn leads to ‘resignation’ when considering matters psychologically. Indeed, the psyche is a ‘theoretical stop-gap’ and will vanish and be eliminated through the endeavors of the somatic researchers. As a warning of this view, again resonant with contemporary scientific psychopathology, Jaspers gives an example of the ‘somatic prejudice’ as ‘all psychological interest in schizophrenia will vanish when the morbid somatic process that underlies it is discovered’ (Jaspers 1959/1997). Jaspers endorses the term Brain Mythologies to denote the target of the criticism of this use of non-empirical, fantastic, theoretical, ‘pseudoscientific’ explanatory accounts and entities. Jaspers here remains not anti-science, or anti-neuroscience specifically, but coherent with his later views on science more generally, ecumenical and pluralistic. His reason for emphasizing the ‘somatic prejudice’ is not to limit biological research or critique it but rather to challenge its hegemony and dominance. As such, Jaspers maintains his view of the unity and inter-dependence of the psyche and soma, a unity where emphasizing one element of investigation (‘neurology’) over another (‘psychopathology’) is not warranted. Towards the close of General Psychopathology, when discussing nosology, Jaspers reiterates the ongoing theme that summarizes his relationship

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 185 to biological psychiatry. That is to say, one that values it, but one that is cautious of such an approach being hegemonic and instead advocates both an independence, to some extent, of psychopathology from neuroscience but also a pluralism of method to understand mental illness: We must guard against any one viewpoint becoming an absolute even if such a viewpoint proves fruitful for research and might now and then even be decisive for radical therapy. The fact that a classification of disease entities into generic groups – a diagnostics proper – is not applicable to the psychoses but only to cerebral processes has probably led to our seeing in brain research not only one task among many but the task of psychiatry. On the other hand the poverty of the so far recognised relationships between abnormal events in the brain and abnormal psychic events, the restricted outlook for further results in psychopathology and the self-evident assumption that psychopathology has to deal with psychic life may all have led psychopathology to reject, sometimes perhaps a little too abruptly, this over estimation of anatomy and of the somatic for psychiatry. As brain research is nowadays still more firmly anchored as a science than psychopathology this is perhaps an understandable rejection on the part of psychopathologists who are still too much on the defensive. (Jaspers 1959/1997: 577) To conclude this survey of Jaspers’ views on neuroscience, as expressed in General Psychopathology, we can say a few things in summary. In no sense is Jaspers anti-science or opposed to biological psychiatry. However, what he is clear about is that such work can never be the sole means to understand the psyche and mental illness. Jaspers constantly warns throughout the General Psychopathology of one mode of study being dominant and blocking out others, and this theme of scientific pluralism is one that Jaspers continues in his later philosophy. What he constantly reiterates are the problems in a psychiatry that is purely based upon the study of the brain and how this impacted on the German psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Jaspers offers his General Psychopathology as a cure for psychiatry’s ills and a call to remember that its object of study is the person and not just the brain. To achieve this, and to maintain the Human Gaze, psychiatry needs to draw on neuroscience alongside the methods of sociology, history, and philosophy, and firstperson accounts of experience.

Bergson, Minkowski, and Merleau-Ponty The philosopher Henri Bergson is not commonly acknowledged as an influence on phenomenological psychopathology. Yet Bergson’s work was a direct influence upon the French psychiatrist Minkowski, as well as the philosophers Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In particular,

186  Matthew R. Broome it was Bergson’s early work, translated as Time and Free Will, that has impacted upon psychopathology. Here, Bergson offers a sustained critique of how mental life is viewed, and specifically how the tools and ways of thinking about the physical, external world have been imported into the discourse of how we think about our mental life. For Bergson, using the language of mechanism in the domain of the living is, as it were, a category mistake (Guerlac 2006). Newtonian physics presents a world of quantity, of measurement and mathematization, and importantly for Bergson, the idea of reversibility. Equations can be reformulated in the opposite direction, reversed, yet, we are unable to draw this parallel with mental life; and for Bergson, time (and thinking in time) is irreversible. The quantitative differences in the physical world, captured in measurement, are, Bergson argues, not present in mental life, where the differences that occur are those of quality. The dominant psychology of Bergson’s day leads to the danger of thinking of these distinct qualities as quantitative differences in intensity and hence, trying to measure them (ibid)¸viewing them as differences in degree rather than kind. From these concerns about the science of psychology, Bergson’s important work uses these insights to discuss the living, the nature of consciousness, and importantly, time and free will. Bergson situates his own work as a response to Kant: praising Kant for his Newtonianism and demonstrating the importance of external apperception in the experience of space, but argues against Kant and Kantians employing these insights in thinking about inner life and also in their seeming conflation of space with the radical alterity that is time. Unlike space, time is not a homogenous milieu (ibid). Minkowski kept close to Bergson’s view of the human being as a dual entity comprising ‘Intellect’ and ‘Intuition’. Minkowski thought we could improve our metaphorical understanding of nosological entities such as schizophrenia and depression by drawing upon Bergson’s philosophy. Schizophrenia, according to Minkowski, could be understood as an atrophy of intuition in Bergson’s sense (a loss of contact with the flow or duration of life) and a hypertrophy of intellect (a coming to the fore of representational, static, geometrical capabilities). He called this a ‘morbid dualism’. Vital contact with reality appears to be linked with the irrational factors in life. . . . The blind, the mutilated and the paralysed may be able to live in even more intimate contact with their environment than individuals whose sight is intact and whose limbs are whole; schizophrenics, on the other hand, can lose this contact even with an intact sensory-motor apparatus, memory or intelligence. The vital contact with reality is in touch with the depths, with the very essence of our personality, in which it links with the world around us. These considerations lead one to conclude that vital contact with reality concerns the intimate dynamism of our life. We can never achieve

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 187 this through the rigid concepts of spatial thought. Metaphors, not definitions, hold pride of place in this sphere of our life. Only they can impart some clarity to the notion of vital contact with reality. Intelligence and instinct, i.e. the part of our mind dealing with solid inert and spatial aspects of reality on the one hand, and the part dealing with temporal and dynamic considerations on the other hand, are normally fused harmoniously. . . . But can this harmony be undermined by pathogenic influences? These various comparisons establish what is a fundamental difference between the intellectual impairment in general paralysis and schizophrenic deterioration. We must not confuse them. In the former case the deficit is in static mental functions; in the latter dynamic factors bear the brunt of the morbid process. (Minkowski 1927) Depression was, Minkwowski thought, also a sort of morbid dualism but one in which disturbances in the flow of duration gave rise to a lived materialism. These metaphysical characterisations Minkowski seems to take on the one hand as metaphors but on the other hand as basic disturbances, or ‘generating disorders’, from which the ‘symptoms’ of the mentally ill derive. For Minkowski, a model of the human being as a whole (a philosophical anthropology) enabled a philosophical psychopathology. Minkowski shares the phenomenological approach of Jaspers insofar as he too is descriptive and careful to avoid interpretations in terms of psychological constructs or folk ideas (what Minkowski calls ‘ideo-affective’ aspects) but diverges from Jaspers’ belief in a theory-neutral and a value-neutral psychopathology – seeking rather to advance beyond description and press a knowledge exchange between psychiatry and philosophy. Minkowski argued against atomistic conceptions of the symptoms of mental illness, but rather to attempt to ‘seize underlying structure’ of symptoms. This underlying structure constituted the essence of disorder, for Minkowksi the trouble générateur (generating or generative disorder). It is thus that the idea of generating disorders arises in psychopathology. The mental syndrome is for us no longer a simple association of symptoms but the expression of a profound and characteristic modification of the whole human personality. (Minkowski 1933) As in this quote regarding Minkowski’s conception of schizophrenia, the trouble générateur is the ‘loss of vital contact with reality’. This manifests as hypertrophy of static factors and atrophy of dynamic factors. These factors Minkowski lists as demarcating between the intellect and intuition respectively; the immobile and the flowing; the dead and the living;

188  Matthew R. Broome space and lived time, such that in schizophrenia there is hyperthropy of intellect, immobility, the dead, and space and atrophy of intuition, the flowing, the living, lived space. Returning to Bergson, one can see here the emphasis on Newtonian external space being dominant here in Minkowski’s conception of schizophrenia, and seeing it as an Inhuman Gaze itself, stripped of dynamism and ambiguity, what he refers to as a ‘loss of vital contact with reality’ and a ‘pragmatic dementia’. Merleau-Ponty’s views on the Inhuman Gaze are also useful tools in thinking about psychopathology – both with Jaspers in allowing us to think of psychiatry as a discipline in which keeping the person present is important, but also as with Minkowski, as a guide to thinking about the structural changes in experience which may underpin and cohere the symptoms of mental illness, and in recognising Bergson and Minkowski’s understanding of mental life and psychopathology. Merleau-Ponty has been taken up by philosophers of psychiatry more generally with his work having an impact in how we both think about the nature of mental disorders and their treatment: The relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied subjectivity to the practice of psychiatry is thus that it offers the possibility of combining a humanistic approach to mental disorder with the recognition of the important role of pharmacological and other ‘physical’ treatments in helping psychiatric patients. It does so by seeing human beings neither as disembodied minds nor as complex machines, but as living organisms whose mental life is embedded in their biological existence. (Matthews 2004: 198) Here, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s writing on Objective Thought in The Phenomenology of Perception. He argues that this mode of thought is an everyday conceptual framework and is connected to perception, and yet it is one he argues against and which we should try and resist, as such a mode of thought doesn’t correctly capture our experience (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 81). Merleau-Ponty is famous for arguing against the possibility of attaining a full Husserlian reduction (Merleau-Ponty 2006: xv) and indeed sees Objective Thought as hard to resist. If we can ascertain the phenomenology correctly, we will be aware that a perceiver is not presented with a world all at once, but rather comes to it through a process of exploration and discovery. We experience indeterminate ambiguous phenomena, not yet crystallized into defined objects. Yet, consciousness is blind to its processes of perception and passes over phenomena to focus on the objects emerging from perception. And this for Merleau-Ponty is Objective Thought – the world we experience is reified as determinate and objective, to that which is the ‘end-product’ of perception, a world of determinate entities standing in external relation

The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 189 to one another and where the whole is formed by its constituent patents and reductive analysis is possible. Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see. ‘There is in natural intuition a sort of “crypto-mechanism” which we have to break in order to reach phenomenal being’ [Scheler] or again a dialectic whereby perception hides itself from itself. But although it is the essence of consciousness to forget its own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’ to be constituted, this forgetfulness is not mere absence, it is the absence of something which consciousness could bring into its presence: in other words consciousness can forget phenomena only because it can recall them, it neglects them in favor of things only because they are the cradle of things.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 71–72, 2002: 67–68) This prejudice towards Objective Thought in the external world also relates to how we think about our own mental life (here the influence of or resonance with Bergson seems relevant) and that when thinking about consciousness and experience we think of objects rather than dynamic, indeterminate processes.

Conclusion Psychiatry has to balance science and biomedicine with person-centered meaningful care. Both currently and at the beginning of the 20th century, the insights and methodological commitments of phenomenological psychopathology have been employed to this end, thereby resisting the tendencies in psychiatry to fall into the Inhuman Gaze. However, the prior nosological certainties of our diagnostic systems are now more questioned: issues of transdiagnosis, staging, relationship with development, and the continua and fluctuation of symptoms, experiences, and disorder are all important scientific and clinical questions under scrutiny and debate (Broome, Fusar-Poli and Wuyts 2013; Marwaha et al. 2016). This ambiguity and dynamism in how we see disorders arise, coalesce, and remit could benefit from Merleau-Ponty’s insights into indeterminacy and his caution against the temptation to fall into Objective Thought by characterising our experience as comprised of clearly-demarcated objects. Here we can see the debt to Bergson. With Minkowski too, we see the French tradition offering contemporary insights; computational psychiatry (Brugger and Broome 2018; Humpston and Broome 2020) moves away from an atomistic conception of symptoms experienced, but instead it sees them as interrelated and embedded within an overall context of patients’ selfhood and relationship with the world, thus echoing Minkowski’s gestalt-conception of psychopathology.

190  Matthew R. Broome Phenomenological psychopathology is a means by which psychiatry can resist a wholly Inhuman Gaze and counter the possibility of turning our patients into objects. And it is worth bearing in mind that for Merleau-Ponty the Inhuman Gaze works in both directions – we too should be reminded that clinicians are more than biomedical clinicians and that their work may carry rich sources of personal meaning for them too.

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The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry 191 Jaspers, K. 1981. Philosophical autobiography. In P.A. Schlipp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 3–75. Jaspers, K. 1997. General Psychopathology, 7th ed. J. Hoenig and M.W. Hamilton (trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marwaha, S., Thompson, A., Upthegrove, R., and Broome, M.R. 2016. Fifteen years on—Early intervention for a new generation. The British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science, 209 (3): 186–188. Matthews, E. 2004. Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject and psychiatry. International Review of Psychiatry, 16 (3): 190–198. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945/1962/2002/2006. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). London: Routledge. Minkowski, Eugène. [1927] 1987. The essential disorder underlying schizophrenia and schizophrenic thought. In John Cutting and Michael Shepherd (eds.) The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. J. Cutting (trans.) and republished in Broome, M., Harland, R., Owen, G.S., and Stringaris, A. 2013. The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press, 143–154. Originally published as Chapter 2, Le trouble essentiel de la schizophrénie et la pensée schizophrénique. In La Schizophrénie. Paris: Payot. Minkowski, Eugène. [1933] 1970. The notion of a generating disorder and the structural analysis of mental disorders. In Eugène Minkowski (ed.) Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 220–271. N. Metzel (trans.) and republished in Broome, M., Harland, R., Owen, G.S., and Stringaris, A. 2013. The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press, 102–116. Originally published as Le Temps Vécu: Etudes phénoménologiques et psychopathologues, 1933, in the series Collection de l’Evolution Psychiatrique. J.L.L. D’Artrey (ed.). Parnas, J. and Gallagher, S. 2015. Phenomenology and the interpretation of psychopathological experience. In L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson, and C. Cummings (eds.) Revisioning Psychiatry Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–80. Ratcliffe, Matthew and Broome, Matthew. 2011. Existential phenomenology, psychiatric illness, and the death of possibilities. In Steven Crowell (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 361–382. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521513340.018 Shorter, E. 1997. A History of Psychiatry. New York: Wiley. Stanghellini, G. and Broome, M.R. 2014. Psychopathology as the basic science of psychiatry. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 205 (3): 169–170. doi:10.1192/ bjp.bp.113.138974

12 Overcoming the Gaze Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative Anna Bortolan

Introduction Moving from a phenomenological exploration of the role of the gaze in psychopathological experience, this chapter investigates the relationship between the sense of possibility (Ratcliffe 2012a), affectivity, and narrative self-understanding. After having provided an outline of the notion of the gaze through Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, I move to illustrate how mental illness may be associated with an alteration, and, in particular, an impoverishment, of one’s sense of possibility, rooted in the presence of certain background affects. I then set to explore how engaging with selfnarratives can engender experiences which have the potential to transform those affects and lead to an expansion of one’s sense of possibility.

I.  The Gaze in Phenomenology In phenomenology the notion of ‘the gaze’ has often been associated with processes that involve ‘objectifying’ attitudes – namely, the tendency to reduce something to an object, or to take it as a mere object. An object in this context is something that possesses a specific set of characteristics which it is not capable of transcending. An object, from this perspective, does not possess phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, and agency. The gaze is particularly problematic when its target is a subject, as subjects are – or have the potential to be – phenomenally conscious and self-conscious agents who have the capacity for transcendence. But how, more exactly, is this to be characterised? This point can be elucidated by looking at Sartre’s work, where the concepts of both gaze and transcendence are explored from a philosophical and, in particular, phenomenological perspective. Sartre (1989) distinguishes between ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘beingfor-itself.’ The former – an example of which is provided by material objects – is the mode of being of entities which are not conscious of themselves and are defined by the specific set of characteristics which apply to them. What distinguishes a house, a pen, or a paper knife (Sartre 1948) is

Overcoming the Gaze 193 its function and a host of features with which this object is endowed, and which makes it the particular object that it is. ‘Being-for-itself’, on the other hand, is the mode of being exemplified by subjects, who are conscious of themselves and are not defined uniquely by the facts which are true of them or their characteristics. Rather, they are capable of conferring meaning to these facts and characteristics. Sartre acknowledges that a number of physical, psychological, and historical features identify and differentiate us, shaping in important ways who we are and what we can do (cf. 1995: 481–552). I was born at a particular time and place, within a certain culture and family history, and I possess distinctive bodily and character traits and a personal story moulded by particular encounters, opportunities, and challenges. These features – which are encompassed by what Sartre refers to through the notion of ‘facticity’ – also amount to limitations or constraints, as, depending on them, there will be certain things that it will be difficult or impossible for me to do or achieve. Despite this, human beings, according to Sartre (1948, 1989), are never completely defined by the processes associated with either nature or nurture, as they have the capacity to take a position with regard to the meaning that their features have in their life projects. We cannot choose the concrete factors that make up our ‘situation’, but we can attribute to them a particular value and weight, choosing which influence and role they should play in our life. This is the capacity to ‘transcend’ one’s facticity, and it is what Sartre considers to be at the core of human beings’ radical freedom. In this context, the notion of ‘the gaze’ or ‘look’ has to do with alterations in the experience of transcendence. These can be brought about in different ways, but in Sartre’s work a paradigmatic example is drawn from the examination of certain forms of interpersonal relation. In addition to ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’, Sartre indeed identifies a third mode of being that he calls ‘being-for-others.’ Central to this is an experience of oneself as the object of another’s consciousness, as it is the case, for instance, when someone who has been peeping through a keyhole realises that someone else is looking at him and feels shame (1989: 259ff). Despite this being the go-to example for the illustration of Sartre’s conception of the gaze, the dynamics which are integral to the latter do not concern only cases of voyeurism or ‘self-conscious emotions’. On the contrary, Sartre’s view is that objectification is common to all kinds of interpersonal relations – including positive ones – because it is inherent to becoming the focus of someone else’s consciousness (Danto 1975: 103–106). From this perspective, by the mere fact of perceiving me, conceiving of me, or relating to me in certain ways, the other would indeed constrain the possible ways in which I can transcend my facticity. For the other, I am only one of the possible versions of myself, a specific set of my possibilities, and, in virtue of this, my freedom to embrace any other way of transcending my situation is challenged. As explained by Sartre:

194  Anna Bortolan ‘I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities. . . . The Other as a look is only that – my transcendence transcended’ (1989: 263).

II.  The Gaze and Psychopathology The concept of the gaze and the dynamics associated with it can be relevant to psychopathology for various reasons. In the first place, the experience of mental-ill health itself can be the object of the gaze of the other. This might happen, for example, when mental illness is conceived first and foremost as a neurobiological phenomenon, as a malfunctioning of the brain, with lack of or insufficient consideration for its rich first-personal dimension. This can happen both in the actual presence of another (e.g. when receiving a diagnosis from a psychiatrist) or when coming into contact with certain socio-cultural representations of one’s illness (e.g. in films, songs, and other media). From this perspective, what is objectified is the illness itself, insofar as it is reduced to its physical underpinnings, while its multifaceted lived dimension is not given adequate consideration. A second way in which the gaze can be involved in psychopathology has to do with how others might relate to the person who is suffering from mental ill-health. As prejudices, lack of understanding, and stigma concerning mental illness are still widespread, those who experience psychopathological disturbances might be objectified by the attitudes of other people towards them. This might be the case when someone is seen, talked to, or interacted with first and foremost as a ‘mentally ill person’, as someone who is entirely defined by her or his mental illness. The forms of the gaze I have considered so far with regard to the experience of psychopathology all take place in the context of relationships between individuals – namely, when someone is the object of the gaze of another, or multiple others. However, dynamics similar to those associated with the gaze in psychopathological conditions can also take place in ‘impersonal’ contexts. In these cases, a process of objectification is still present but is not brought about by another person. Rather, the objectification depends on the dynamics intrinsic to the psychopathological predicament itself. As outlined earlier, the objectifying nature of the gaze amounts to the weakening or loss – mediated by the presence of another – of one’s capacity for transcendence. This, as previously mentioned, is not the absence of limitations or constraints on one’s situation, but rather the ability to take a stance towards such limitations and constraints and to project oneself beyond the ‘facts’ which define one’s circumstances. A phenomenological analysis of the experience of mental ill-health suggests that often this is marked by the presence of transformations analogous to those engendered by the gaze. This is exemplified in particular by alterations in the sufferers’ sense of possibility (e.g. Ratcliffe 2012a, 2015) – namely, the sense of what it is possible for one to experience and

Overcoming the Gaze 195 achieve. As such, the notion of the gaze becomes a very powerful metaphor for the characterisations of the phenomenology of certain forms of mental illness. Classical and contemporary phenomenological analyses have drawn attention to how the ability to entertain certain intentional states – be these cognitive, affective, or volitional in character – is rooted in undergoing particular non-intentional background affective orientations. These are felt states which are not directed to any specific intentional object, but which make it possible for one to have such discrete intentional states. Conveyed with the notion of ‘mood’ by Heidegger (1962) and ‘existential feelings’ by Ratcliffe (2005, 2008), such background affects involve an experience of one’s relationship with the world and make it possible for things to be salient or meaningful for us in various ways.1 Things can appear to us as having distinct kinds of significance (Ratcliffe 2010b: 355) for example, they can be interesting, useful, exciting, threatening, beautiful, annoying, bearable, alien, familiar, important, banal, and enticing. According to the phenomenological perspective I am drawing on, what makes it possible for things to appear as significant in such ways is the presence of certain affects, which ‘attune’ us to the world, moulding our relationship with it. To highlight this feature of moods, it is helpful to consider an example discussed by Heidegger himself (1962). He draws attention to how, in order to feel fear towards a particular object, one already needs to be experiencing the world and one’s position in it in a certain manner. In particular, the world needs to harbour for me certain possibilities (i.e. it must appear as a place in which it is possible to be endangered or threatened). What enables is a particular mood – namely, a mood of ‘fearfulness’ (1962: 180; Ratcliffe 2013b: 163). Fear as an intentional state, in other words, is made possible by the presence of a mood, which is prior to it. As suggested by Ratcliffe, when in the grip of a particular mood, the person loses (or acquires) the capacity to experience specific kind of emotion and not just some particular instances of them (Ratcliffe 2010a, 2010b). For example, if the mood of fearfulness was absent, the possibility of undergoing the emotion of fear itself would not be present. The phenomenological notion of ‘mood’ includes states that are described as such also in everyday, commonsense understanding, for example anxiety. However, as illustrated by the example of fearfulness, it also is suggested that affective states that we would normally conceive of as ‘emotions’ can have the form of ‘moods’ or ‘existential feelings.’ This is the case, for instance, with boredom, guilt, or joy (Heidegger 1962; Ratcliffe 2010a, 2010b). In addition, Ratcliffe suggests that there are other affective states – generally overlooked in the literature on emotions – that have a structure analogous to that of moods (cf. 2008). These are experiences like feelings or reality and unreality; feeling distant from the world

196  Anna Bortolan or at one with it; feeling in control or overwhelmed (2005: 45). Ratcliffe uses the notion of ‘existential feelings’ to describe such experiences which he conceptualizes by refining the Heideggerian notion of ‘mood.’ The experience-shaping role of certain background affects is referred to by Ratcliffe through the notion of ‘pre-intentionality’ (2010a). In Ratcliffe’s opinion, existential feelings determine the range of intentional states one can entertain, and, as such, which possibilities – for thought, emotion, and action – the world is experienced as harbouring. Ratcliffe and other scholars have suggested that a number of psycho­ pathological conditions can be understood as involving alterations of one’s sense of possibility. As observed by Fuchs (2007: 428): ‘psycho­ pathology may be regarded as a narrowing or deformation of an individual’s lived space, as a constriction of his horizon of possibilities, including those of perception, action, imagination, emotional and interpersonal experience.’ From Ratcliffe’s perspective, modifications of one’s possibility space are grounded in transformations of one’s background affective orientations, and these dynamics have been investigated through a phenomenological exploration of different forms of mental ill-health. Among these, a significant amount of research has been devoted to the exploration of the phenomenology of depression, and this will also be the focus of the present investigation. Given the scope of this analysis, it will not be possible to provide an exhaustive summary of the affective alterations which have been argued to mark depression. However, I will consider two examples of relevance to the topic of this study: existential feelings of guilt and existential feelings of hopelessness. Ratcliffe (2010a, 2015) provides an account of the particular form that experiences of guilt can take in cases of severe depression. While guilt often has an intentional structure (i.e. feeling guilty about something), Ratcliffe observes that it is also possible for guilt to not be directed to any specific object: in these cases, we just feel guilty, without there being anything in particular we feel guilty about. The latter form of guilt, Ratcliffe suggests, can also take an all-encompassing and irrevocable character (2010a: 607), being a feeling through which we experience ourselves as absolutely and irredeemably culpable. Such a profound and wide-ranging feeling of guilt has the power to constrain cognitive and affective processes, as, for the person who experiences it, it becomes very difficult to consider the possibility that they might not be culpable. First- and second-person reports highlight how feelings of guilt of this kind – which exemplify the pre-intentional structure of existential feelings – may be a central feature in the experience of severe depression. Another affect which, according to Ratcliffe, may acquire an existential character in the context of depression is the feeling of hopelessness (2012b, 2015). In this regard too we can distinguish between intentional and non-intentional forms of experience. Feelings of lack or loss of hope

Overcoming the Gaze 197 can indeed be directed to particular (Ratcliffe 2013a: 598–600): for example, my capacity to finish a certain assignment on time, or that certain measures against climate change will be undertaken. Hopelessness, however, can also be devoid of any object, and, in some cases, be an allencompassing, generalised experience. In these cases, hopelessness can take the form of an existential feeling, significantly constraining the range of possibilities that one may experience as open to oneself. Ratcliffe argues that this is the cases in some instances of severe depression, where sufferers struggle to conceive of their condition as something that could eventually be overcome, and rather see it as ‘inescapable’ and ‘eternal’ (2012b: 121; 2013a: 606). The idea that the disturbances of experience which mark severe depression entail a significant narrowing of one’s possibility space and a felt inability to transcend one’s present condition is corroborated by first-person reports of the illness. For example, in her memoir of depression, Brampton describes her experience in the following terms: For two years I had seen nothing, no chink of light, no sense of possibility that I would ever be well again. I was not interested in the future, I was interested (if that’s a word that could possibly be applied to my furious, nihilistic despair) in the present, in the unendurable pain I felt, which was a pain that seemed to me then to be endless. (Brampton 2009: 242) Negative transformations of one’s sense of possibility mediated by existential feelings pose a distinct personal and therapeutic challenge, as it is unclear through which means they can be reverted. As illustrated earlier on, existential feelings have a pre-intentional character – namely, the ability to constrain the range of intentional states which can be undergone. As such, the presence of certain background affective orientations may make it very difficult to entertain cognitive, affective, and volitional states which are in contrast with them. For instance, an existential experience of hopelessness, as previously discussed, might lead to the inability to feel hope with regard to specific possibilities, as well as to think or desire that something could change in ways usually anticipated by hope. Existential feelings thus have the capacity to profoundly shape our cognitive and practical lives, and it is very important to understand whether and how we might be able to control and change them. How can we challenge and modify existential feelings and the possibility space we experience if the repertoire of mental states and possibilities that are available to us tends to be consonant with the existential feelings we are experiencing? An idea that seems promising to draw upon in this context emerges from research in philosophy and psychology concerning the role of narratives in the recovery from mental ill-health.

198  Anna Bortolan It has been argued, for example, that engaging in certain forms of autobiographical storytelling can play a significant role in enabling therapeutic change. This idea has been explicitly developed and incorporated in the theoretical and practical framework put forward by the ‘narrative’ and related approaches to psychotherapy (e.g. Angus and Greenberg 2011; Payne 2006), but it seems to be echoed more broadly by other accounts of change in both ordinary and psychiatric experience. Being able to modify the stories that one tells about one’s past, present, and future is considered to be not just an effect of the transformation of one’s experience, but also something that can drive it. This, as suggested by Pickard (2015), appears to be related to the ability of stories to reveal to the author something new or unexpected, or, in other terms, to ‘surprise’ the author. As Pickard explains: On the one hand, it [narrative] explores the impact of the past on the present, thereby securing the resource such understanding offers. But, on the other hand, because narrative can be full of surprises, because anything can happen in a story, it yet invites the possibility of freedom from the past and agency in the here-and-now so as to allow patients to author their future. It can therefore in its telling create a sense of hope..... (2015: 1324) Creativity and imagination are central to storytelling, and it is by fostering them that the engagement with self-narratives can facilitate and sustain positive change. This is particularly the case with regard to the treatment and management of mental ill-health, since, as outlined earlier, psychopathological disturbances may be associated with the sense that no change is possible and that the patient’s painful situation is inescapable. As Payne explains, in narrative therapy individuals are encouraged to focus on what is for them ‘untypical’ and ‘it is through the untypical that people can escape from the dominant stories that influence their perceptions and therefore their lives’ (2006: 7). As such, narratives appear to be able to counteract the dynamics which are exemplified by the metaphor of the gaze by disclosing and illustrating a range of possibilities which is wider that the one previously salient to the person.

III. Narratives and the Expansion of One’s Sense of Possibility A body of theoretical and empirical research thus suggests that engaging in the construction and communication of certain self-narratives can have a positive effect on the person’s sense of possibility. These insights therefore support the idea that narrative self-understanding of a certain kind can engender affective transformations which can expand the range of thoughts, emotions, and desires that can be experienced by the person

Overcoming the Gaze 199 and thus the set of possibilities that one’s world is perceived as harbouring. While the consideration of these views goes some way in enabling us to target the question which was raised previously – namely, that of how mental states which are in contrast with one’s existential feelings can be engendered – it seems that more is needed in order to adequately address it. It is indeed unclear exactly in virtue of which dynamic it is possible for narratives to exert such an influence on one’s affective background orientations and space of possibilities. Let’s go back to the example discussed before. Consider the case of someone who is in the grip of an existential form of hopelessness, which prevents him or her from being able to conceive of the present situation as one which could be transitory, and to think of the future as a time in which different thoughts, emotions, and desires could be central to his or her life. How could engaging with stories that portray present and future circumstances differently have an effect on the person’s feelings? Wouldn’t it be natural to expect that such stories were dismissed as inaccurate and unrealistic, thus preventing them from exerting any transformative influence on the person’s experience? In other terms, it seems that, if we accept the evidence provided by philosophical and psychological research on the therapeutic value of narratives, we still need to explain how such narratives can be powerful enough to engender emotions and other mental states that contrast with one’s predominant background affective orientations. Research across philosophy and psychology has highlighted various ways in which linguistic and narrative processes can shape affective experience (cf. Bortolan 2020; Colombetti 2009; Hogan 2011; Pennebaker 1997). The stories we tell, for example, can induce a range of emotional responses, enhance or mitigate specific positive or negative affects, and strengthen our sense of being in control of our emotions. The consideration of the impact that narrative self-understanding can have on one’s sense of possibility, however, poses additional challenges, as it needs to be clarified how the narratives can trigger or support emotions which are in tension with one’s background affective orientations. While it is undoubtable that narratives can trigger a variety of emotions, it is unclear whether and how narratives could engender emotions that are not “allowed for” by one’s existential feelings. I want to suggest that light can be shed on this question through the consideration of the role of emotions in the engagement with fictional narratives. Research in the field of aesthetics has investigated various ways in which affectivity can be involved in the fruition and appreciation of works of art, including literary and other forms of fiction (cf. Robinson 2005). In this context, attention has been drawn to the capacity of narratives to generate a variety of emotions in the audience, and looking at some of the mechanisms at the core of these dynamics may enhance our understanding of how healing self-narratives work too. Both positive and negative emotions can be experienced in response to events undergone by fictional characters. We may like or dislike

200  Anna Bortolan characters, rejoice when they succeed or feel sad when misfortunes befall them. We may hope, fear, feel excited, be discouraged, feel surprised, become worried, or feel disappointed upon apprehending how their stories unfold. This is the case despite us knowing that what we are reading or watching is not real. We know that the successes and setbacks, comedic and tragic twists and turns that we witness are not taking place, but we are, nevertheless, emoted by them; this is the case also when it is not the first time that we are reading or watching a particular piece of work. At this point, one could wonder how it might be possible to establish a parallel between emotional responses to fictional and autobiographical narratives. One might indeed claim that the dynamics which are in play when we engage with self-narratives and fictional stories are not comparable. In what way, it can be asked, could the manner in which I respond emotionally to a narrative about myself be similar to the way in which I respond emotionally to a story about someone who I know does not exist? I don’t want to claim that such a parallel applies to all instances of narrative self-understanding. Rather, I want to suggest that it holds in particular for those self-narratives that involve a significant imaginative component, insofar as they require the narrator to: a) take a different or unusual stance on past or present events; or b) to narrate events that have not yet taken place in a way that does not align with the subject’s predictions concerning the future. Narratives of the first type are, for instance, the ones through which some events which have already occurred are conferred a different meaning from the one the narrator was previously inclined to confer on them. An example relevant to the focus of this study would be a narrative produced by someone who experiences existential guilt in which the narrator no longer describes herself as culpable. An example of the second type of narrative, on the other hand, could be a story in which a person who experiences existential feelings of hopelessness depicts herself as achieving things in the future that she would not otherwise consider herself capable of achieving. In these cases the author of the story and the main character coincide, while relating to a fictional character involves relating to someone different from oneself. However, this asymmetry is weakened if we take the perspective of the narrator of the self-narrative in the particular contexts which we are considering. For the person who feels existentially guilty or hopeless, a version of herself who is not culpable or has the ability to live a different type of life is, in a very tangible sense, experienced as fictional. Those narrated selves are selves whose lives take place outside of the narrator’s experienced sense of possibility: the lives they live are felt to be different from the life one actually lives, and, as such, they involve versions of oneself that are experienced as fictitious rather than real. It thus becomes clear how there might be a parallel between the way in which we respond affectively to ourselves as the protagonists of our self-narratives and to fictional characters. This is the case when there is a perceived gap between the self who is narrating and the

Overcoming the Gaze 201 narrated self, a gap which requires the narrator to imagine herself as different from what she takes herself to be. The existence of such similarities between the engagement with the stories we tell about ourselves and fictional narratives suggest that there may be a parallel between the affective dynamics which are in play in these cases. As such, the exploration of the ways in which we relate affectively to fictional characters can shed light also on some of the dynamics which are at the core of narrative self-understanding. Carroll (2011) identifies six different forms of affective relationship which might exist between the audience and the characters of fictional works. While I think that the consideration of each of them could contribute to our comprehension of how emotions are triggered by the engagement with certain self-narratives, for the purpose of this study I will only focus on two: ‘emotional identification’ and ‘coincident emotional states’. Instances of ‘emotional identification’ and ‘coincident emotional states’ have one feature in common: in both, the audience experiences an emotion which is analogous to the emotion experienced by the character. For example, the character is happy or worried, and so is the audience. Crucially, what is different in the two sets of cases is the cause of the emotional experience. In emotional identification, what prompts the emotional response in the audience is the emotion experienced by the character: the audience, in other terms, experiences the emotion because the character is, or is imagined to be, in that state (2011; 167). In ‘coincident emotional states’, on the other hand, the audience’s emotion is triggered by the imaginative immersion in the character’s circumstances. It is because these circumstances are depicted as possessing features which are relevant to certain emotions (e.g. they are threatening or tense) that the audience responds emotionally to what is narrated.2 Carrol acknowledges the existence of occurrences of emotive identification – which he refers to as the “infection model” – in real life (167). However, he is sceptical about the ability of this model to account for the structure of affective relations between audiences and fictional characters. Independently of the position that one may take with regard to this question, it is arguable that emotional identification could be particularly difficult in the instances of narrative self-understanding that this study is investigating. As previously highlighted, the self-narratives whose workings need to be accounted for are cases in which the narrator, due to the presence of certain background affects, struggles to identify with her narrated self. As such, even if it was generally possible to identify with the characters of a fictional story, it could be argued that this form of affective relationship to the characters of a narrative is precluded in the case of certain self-narratives. As discussed before, for those who experience themselves as irredeemably culpable or radically hopeless, identifying with a narrated version of themselves who is innocent or can enjoy a brighter future might not be possible. However, drawing a

202  Anna Bortolan parallel between the engagement with fictional and self-narratives does not seem problematic in the case of coincident emotional states. As stated earlier, in these cases the audience and the character experience the same emotions; however, importantly, the cause of the audience’s response is not the character’s emotional state, but rather the depiction of the relevant circumstances as emotion-eliciting. As such, whether the audience can or cannot identify with the character is not important, since what triggers the emotion is the situation and not the emotion of a character with whom the audience should presumably experience a certain degree of identification. In the case of the guilt-free and hopeful narratives we have been considering, for example, a positive emotion could be triggered in the narrator not because he or she identifies with her narrated self but rather because of the way in which the circumstances are portrayed. For example, a story in which the protagonist does not feel inherently culpable is likely to be one in which interpersonal relationships flourish and characters feel free to engage in a variety of fulfilling and pleasurable activities. In these cases, it would not be necessary for the narrator to identify with the protagonist in order to be ‘emoted’ in similar ways. The emotions would indeed be triggered by key features of the narrated situations – for example, the presence of individuals who are nurturing and caring or the rich and enjoyable character of the pursuits in which the protagonist would engage. Similarly, stories in which hope is present would likely include the description of circumstances and events which are capable of eliciting positive emotions: for example, the prospect of a success at work or of a thriving family life. In these cases, identifying with the protagonist of the narrative would not be necessary in order for the narrator to respond emotionally to the narrated circumstances. Scenes of professional and personal fulfilment are, by themselves, capable of inducing happy or joyful emotional reactions, and this would be the case independently of whether a process of identification with the relevant character is present.

Conclusion The analysis conducted in this study has stemmed from the acknowledgment that an erosion or diminishment of one’s sense of possibility can be a key aspect of the experience of psychiatric illness. I have started by suggesting that the phenomenological notion of ‘gaze’ provides us with a powerful metaphor to describe the experiential alterations which mark certain psychopathological disturbances. In particular, I have suggested that an ‘objectifying’ dynamic may be present in some form of mental illness, where a person experiences herself as no longer capable of transcending her present situation. I illustrated how disruptions of one’s sense of possibility have been associated with disturbances of certain background affects, and, in particular of ‘existential feelings’. Such feelings have been argued to possess

Overcoming the Gaze 203 a ‘pre-intentional’ character – namely, to constrain the range of intentional states that one can entertain, thus fundamentally impacting upon the sense of what it is possible for one to experience and achieve. I have then endeavoured to investigate how existential feelings might be modulated so as to facilitate an expansion of one’s possibility space, and I have sought to clarify why engaging in certain forms of narrative self-understanding can be beneficial in this context. In particular, I have tried to shed light on how certain self-narratives can trigger emotions which are in contrast with one’s existential feelings. I have suggested that a promising way to tackle this question relies on establishing a parallel between the way in which we relate to ourselves as the protagonist of certain self-narratives and the way in which we respond affectively to fictional characters. In this regard, my focus has been specifically on the processes through which we can come to experience the same emotions as the characters of the stories we tell. I have suggested that one account of the affective relationship between the audience and characters of fictional narratives may need to assume that the audience is capable of identifying with the characters. This, I have argued, might not always be possible in the case of self-narratives, as one’s narrated self might be perceived as too alien from one’s present self to identify with. However, identification is not the only process through which the audience can come to experience emotions analogous to those undergone by the characters. Through a discussion of Carrol’s concept of ‘coincident emotional states’ I have indicated how emotions might be triggered by the description of certain emotion-eliciting features in the character’s circumstances, rather than by identificatory processes. I have claimed that this is the way in which emotions which are in contrast with one’s existential feelings can be elicited when engaging with certain selfnarratives, thus shedding light on one of the mechanisms through which transformations of one’s sense of possibility could be engendered.

Notes 1. While he agrees with Heidegger with regard to the particular role played by certain background affects in our cognitive and practical life, Ratcliffe’s account of existential feelings also differs from Heidegger’s accounts of moods in various respects (cf. 2010b, 2013b). What is relevant for the purpose of this analysis, however, are the aspects that the two theories have in common. 2. This way of depicting a situation is referred to by Carroll as ‘criterial prefocussing’ (2011: 169).

Reference List Angus, L.E. and Greenberg, L.S. 2011. Working with Narrative in Emotion‑Focused Therapy: Changing Stories, Healing Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Brampton, S. 2009. Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression. London: Bloomsbury.

204  Anna Bortolan Carroll, N. 2011. On some affective relations between audiences and the characters in popular fictions. In A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds.) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 162–184. Colombetti, G. 2009. What language does to feelings. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16 (9): 4–26. Danto, A.C. 1975. Sartre. London: Fontana. Fuchs, T. 2007. Psychotherapy of the lived space: A phenomenological and ecological concept. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 61 (4): 423–439. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hogan, P.C. 2011. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Payne, M. 2006. Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Counsellors. London: Sage Publications. Pennebaker, J.W. 1997. Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8 (3): 162–166. Pickard, H. 2015. Stories of recovery: The role of narrative and hope in overcoming PTSD and PD. In J.Z. Sadler, K.W.M. Fulford and C.W. Van Staden (eds).  The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1315–1327. Ratcliffe, M. 2005. The feeling of being. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12 (8–10): 43–60. Ratcliffe, M. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ratcliffe, M. 2010a. Depression, guilt and emotional depth. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 53 (6): 602–626. Ratcliffe, M. 2010b. The phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life. In P. Goldie (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 349–371. Ratcliffe, M. 2012a. The phenomenology of existential feeling. J. Fingerhut and S. Marienberg (eds.) The Feelings of Being Alive. Berlin: De Gruyter, 23–54. Ratcliffe, M. 2012b. Varieties of temporal experience in depression. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 37 (2): 114–138. Ratcliffe, M. 2013a. What is it to lose hope? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12: 597–614. Ratcliffe, M. 2013b. Why mood matters. In M.A. Wrathall (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time. New York: Cambridge University Press, 157–176. Ratcliffe, M. 2015. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, J. 2005. Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.. Sartre, J.P. 1948. Existentialism and Humanism. P. Mairet (trans.). London: Methuen. Sartre, J.P. 1989. Being and Nothingness. H.E. Barnes (trans.). London: Routledge. Tangney, J.P. and Fischer, K.W. 1995. Self-Conscious Emotions. The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride. New York: The Guildford Press.

13 From Excess to Exhaustion The Rise of Burnout in a Postmodern Achievement Society Philippe Wuyts

Introduction The increasing prevalence of burnout pathology in modern society is a concerning phenomenon which warrants further investigation. In this paper, we will first look into its history and explore how its complex psychopathology has been described since the term burnout was coined in the 1970s. Second, we will look into the important interplay of personality features and work-related factors. We will discuss how current management practices, modern technology, and globalization have exacerbated processes of dehumanization in many occupations as evidenced in the tyranny of exploitative institutions which have reduced the human value of employees to meeting ever more demanding and oftentimes unrealistic performance expectations. Finally, we’ll explore how the reasons for an increase in burnout pathology extend far beyond changes in the professional sphere and how it can be considered an evident outcome of the profound crisis of the Western individual searching for meaning in a postmodern world. We will postulate that, rather than a disease in the classic sense, burnout is a complex multifactorial syndrome that affects the modern individual who is caught between a self-referential project of existential purpose-seeking and the drive for limitless growth and excess of today’s globalized neoliberal capitalist society.

I.  Science-fiction or Science-fact ? By way of illustration, we can take an excursion into an aspect of science-fiction which is very rapidly becoming science-fact. Applied science may be considered as the game of order-versus-chance (or, order- versus-randomness), especially in the domain of cybernetics – the science of automatic control. By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves. In medicine, communications, industrial production, transportation, finance, commerce, housing, education, psychiatry, criminology and law we are trying

206  Philippe Wuyts to make foolproof systems, to get rid of the possibility of mistakes. The more powerful technology becomes, the more urgent the need for such controls. . . . The use of powerful instruments, with their vast potentialities for changing man and his environment, requires more and more legislation, licensing and policing, and thus more and more complex procedures for inspection and keeping records. Great universities, for example, have vice-presidents in charge of relations with the government and a large staff of secretaries to keep up with the mountains of paperwork involved. At times, the paper-work, recording what has been done, seems to become more important than what it records. (Alan Watts 1966, 2009: 41–42)

It is rather unusual for a disorder to be better known by lay people than medical professionals, yet over the course of the last few decades ‘burnout’ has received much more attention in the popular press than in the medical field. While Burnout is now listed in the ICD-10 (coded Z73.0, 1; WHO 2016) and defined as ‘a state of vital exhaustion’, its diagnostic validity has been under scrutiny ever since its very early conception decades ago. To many health-care professionals, burnout remains a rather elusive concept or even a pseudo-scientific notion rather than a well defined clinical disorder. Others question whether it is any different from major depressive disorder or secondary stress syndrome or whether it is similar to compassion fatigue syndrome. The latest edition of the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5) published in 2013, a taxonomic and diagnostic tool published by the American Psychiatric Association, touted by many as being ‘the Bible of psychiatry’, does not include a diagnosis of burnout. This is surprising on two counts: even though since the original publication of the DSM, dating back to 1952, new disorders have been added with each subsequent publication, burnout is not included as a diagnosis; and, despite the DSM 5 being criticized for being overly inclusive and for excessively medicalising behaviour merely considered outside the norm, burnout is still conspicuously absent. In contrast to the suspicious scrutiny burnout receives in the world of psychiatry, burnout and stress-related disorders receive great attention in epidemiological studies, occupational health organizations, and in board rooms and health ministries around the world. According to the European Agency, 50–60% of absence from work is related to stress and one in four workers is affected by ‘Professional Stress Syndrome’ (Cox, Griffith and Rial-Gonzalez 2000). Stress-related absences cost $3.5 billion each year in Canada (Williams and Normand 2003). In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive reported that 12.5 million working days were lost

From Excess to Exhaustion 207 from work-related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2016–2017. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, wrote in his book Dying for a Paycheck: How modern management harms employee health and company performance: The aptly-named American Institute of Stress claims that workplace stress costs the American economy some $300bn each year. A recent study estimated that there were 120,000 extra deaths annually in the US from harmful management practices, and that extra health-care costs were $190bn each year. That would make the workplace the fifth leading cause of death, worse than kidney disease or Alzheimer’s. (Pfeffer 2018: 2) Thus, burnout prevention and intervention programs have blossomed, and specialised consultants have addressed a huge gap in occupational and health programs with ‘employee assistance programs’ and ‘stress and time management programs’ to face this modern epidemic. Estimates of the economic cost of burnout to individuals, multinationals, and society runs to billions of U.S. dollars each year in developed countries. A research project, titled The BoSS Study, into the prevalence of burnout in psychiatry residents across 22 European countries found burnout rates of 37% (Beezhold et al. 2017). In another survey conducted by Medscape (February 2019) with over 15,000 American physicians, 42% suffered from burnout. Interestingly, a systematic review of physician suicide, presented at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) conference 2018, showed that the suicide rate among physicians is 28 to 40 per 100,000, more than double that in the general population. It was posited by the researchers that physicians who die by suicide often suffer from untreated or undertreated depression or other mental illnesses. But in their attempts to clarify this staggering number, stigma and easy access to lethal means were posited as essential explanations, and no reference was made to essential work-related stressors that typify the medical profession or to high numbers of burnout more specifically. Only recently has it become more widely accepted that rates of burnout are soaring and that their human and economic cost pose a huge burden on modern Western society – to the individual (mental and physical health concerns), employers (absenteism, presenteism, low productivity, etc.), and society as a whole (low QoL and a decrease in GDP).

II.  An Historical Perspective The first mentioning of an individual suffering from ‘burnout’ probably dates back to the Old Testament. In Chapter 18 of Book 1, it states: ‘The prophet Elijah, bold and courageous, is victoriously facing all kinds of odds. He experienced God’s supernatural strength to face extraordinary

208  Philippe Wuyts challenges of famine and drought.’ It states further that ‘the hand of the Lord was on Elijah.’ But in Chapter 19, after Elijah faced misfortune and felt judged and due to fear of the crowds had to flee, he had become fearful, exhausted, and depressed, and he wanted to die. A more recent twentieth-century literary figure, ‘Query’, a renowned architect in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, falls victim to a terrible attack of indifference; he no longer finds meaning or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a ‘burnt-out case, a leper mutilated by disease and amputation’ (1960). The first notion of burnout in scientific literature dates back to 1974, when Herbert Freudenberger, a psychiatrist working at an outpatient clinic for addiction and substance dependence in New York City, diagnosed himself and members of his staff as suffering from ‘burnout’ after they had become not only exhausted but cynical and disengaged due to a chronic and excessive workload. In his paper Freudenberger described how burnout was the endpoint of a cascade in which several symptoms and behaviours gradually presented over the course of time. He described 12 separate phases (Freudenberger 1974) – not necessarily sequential: 1. The Compulsion to Prove Oneself: demonstrating one’s worth obsessively. This tends to hit the most conscientious, responsable, and enthusiastic employees. 2. Working Harder: the inability to switch off. 3. Neglecting Needs: erratic sleeping, disrupted eating patterns, and a lack of social interaction. 4. Displacement of Conflicts: problems are dismissed. The individual may feel threatened, panicky, and agitated. 5. Revision of Values: Values are skewed, friends and family are dismissed, hobbies are seen as irrelevant. Work becomes the only focus. 6. Denial of Emerging Problems: intolerance and agression. Collaborators/ clients or patients are perceived as stupid, lazy, demanding, or undisciplined; social contacts harden; first signs of cynicism arise; problems are viewed as caused by time pressure and work, not because of life changes. 7. Withdrawal: social life becomes very small or even nonexistent. The need to feel relief from stress strengthens, often with the use of alcohol/drugs. 8. Odd Behavioral Changes: friends and family become increasingly concerned. 9. Depersonalization: seeing neither self nor others as valuable, and no longer perceiving their own needs. 10. Inner Emptiness: feeling empty inside and to overcome this an increase in maladaptive behaviours such as overeating, promiscuity, alcohol, or drug use.

From Excess to Exhaustion 209 11. Depression: feeling lost and unsure, exhausted. The future starts to feel bleak and threatening. 12. Burnout Syndrome Freudenberger’s twelve-phase model describes the cascade of events, symptoms, and behaviours that typify the escalation towards burnout. While mostly descriptive in nature, it is a useful tool to detect the early stages and understand the slow and gradual process towards burnout. However, it does not define burnout or clarify its etiology and pathogenesis, which would be required to translate it into a well-defined medical condition. The first systematic studies into the symptom dimensions of burnout were conducted by Christina Maslach at U.C. Berkeley, California, in which she conducted research with health care professionals. She defined burnout psychopathology along the following three axes: exhaustion, depersonalisation, and lack of accomplishment and development. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a self-administered questionnaire contains 22 items with which to detect burnout.

Table 13.1  The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) 1. I feel emotionally drained from my work. 2. I feel used up at the end of the workday. 3. I feel fatigued when I get up in the morning and have to face another day on the job. 4. I can easily understand how my recipients feel about things. 5. I feel I treat some recipients as if they were impersonal objects. 6. Working with people all day is really a strain for me. 7. I deal very effectively with the problems of my recipients. 8. I feel burned out from my work. 9. I feel I’m positively influencing other people’s lives through my work. 10. I’ve become more callous toward people since I took this job. 11. I worry that this job is hardening me emotionally. 12. I feel very energetic. 13. I feel frustrated by my job. 14. I feel I’m working too hard on my job. 15. I don’t really care what happens to some recipients. 16. Working with people directly puts too much stress on me. 17. I can easily create a relaxed atmosphere with my recipients. 18. I feel exhilarated after working closely with my recipients. 19. I have accomplished many worthwhile things in this job. 20. I feel like I’m at the end of my rope. 21. In my work, I deal with emotional problems very calmly. 22. I feel recipients blame me for some of their problems. Maslach C, Jackson SE. Maslach Burnout Inventory (Human Services Survey) Palo Alto, CA. Consulting Psychologists Press. 1981 Maslach C, Jackson SE, Leiter MP. Maslach Burnout Inventory Manual. Palo Alto, CA; Consulting Psychologists Press. (3rd edition) 1996

210  Philippe Wuyts

III. In Search of the Etiology and Pathogenesis of ‘Burnout’ The causal and contributing factors involved in the development of burnout are multifarious. (Kaschka, Korczak and Broich 2011). Furthermore, in addition to there being several symptom clusters and that pathogenesis may be unclear, it is important to distinguish disposing, moderating, triggering, and perpetuating factors that contribute to its development (Burisch 2010). A multifactorial perspective of personality-related and environmentrelated etiological factors has proved plausible and practicable. It is Table 13.2  Predisposing factors in the development of ‘burnout’ Disposition and ‘Personality Traits’ Internal (personality related) and external (environmental) etiological factors for burnout Internal factors/personality traits • High (idealistic) expectations of self, high ambition, perfectionism • Strong need for recognition • Always wanting to please other people, suppressing own needs • Feeling irreplaceable; not wanting/able to delegate • Hard work and commitment to the point of overestimation of self and becoming overburdened • Work as the only meaningful activity, work as substitute for social life Situation ‘work environment’ External factors • High demands at work • Problems of leadership and collaboration • Contradictory instructions • Time pressure • Bad atmosphere at work: bullying • Lack of freedom to make decisions • Lack of influence on work organization • Few opportunities to participate • Low autonomy/right to contribute opinions • Hierarchy problems • Poor internal communication (employees/employers) • Administrative constraints • Pressure from superiors • Increasing responsibility • Poor work organization • Lack of resources (personnel, funding) • Problematic institutional rules and structures • Lack of perceived opportunities for promotion • Lack of clarity about roles • Lack of positive feedback • Poor teamwork • Absence of social support Kaschka, Wolfgang P., Korczak, Dieter, and Broich, Karl. 2011. Burnout: A fashionable diagnosis. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International , 108 (46): 781–787.

From Excess to Exhaustion 211 proposed that the precondition for the development of burnout is a complementary interplay of factors immanent in the individual’s personality, on the one hand, and those conditioned by the environment, on the other hand. As such, it is suggested that overly conscientious and perfectionist individuals are more prone to over-exert themselves when faced with excessive demands, to gradually develop symptoms, and finally to develop a state of extreme exhaustion and burnout. This hypothesis is in line with the stress model, first coined by Hans Selye in the 1950s (in ‘The stress of life’) who conceptualized the physiology of stress defining three separate states: 1. The initial alarm state. 2. Followed by a phase in which a set of responses (‘general adaptation syndrome’) is marked by increasing stress resistance to arrive at the stress resistance state. 3. Finally, followed by a pathological phase with decreased stress resistance as a result of ongoing, unrelieved stress, the person arrives at the exhaustion state. When exposed to a certain stressor for a given time, the organism is required to adapt, which in turn improves resilience against the particular stressor. Hence the organism’s capacity to face the stressor increases. This is an essential feature of living organisms applied in exposure treatment and performance-enhancing exercises. However, the model implies a need to allow time for the adaptation to take place so that improved resilience can be established. As such, a need for adaptation emphasizes the importance of a time-limit exposure to the stressor. The stressresilience model states that when facing stressors chronically, necessary adaptation cannot take place and the limited resistance becomes depleted, leading to exhaustion. While this stress model explains well how an organism can reach a state of exhaustion and as such captures an essential symptom dimension of burnout, it fails to explain the dimension of cynicism and lack of accomplishment – the second and third symptom dimensions of burnout. Furthermore, modern research has demonstrated that simply increasing stress resistance through specially devised interventions – such as timemanagement techniques or relaxation techniques – often fails to substantially decrease burnout rates in many companies (Bährer-Kohler 2013). While such primary prevention measures may have some benefits, they may simply attempt to render the stress resistance of the employee higher, so that the development into exhaustion is delayed or avoided, rather than really preventing burnout. In order to understand the relation between the three symptom dimensions better and to establish a model that captures the pathogenesis of burnout, Van Dierendonck and colleagues (2001) compared different causal models for burnout development. In their best-fitting model, the

212  Philippe Wuyts perceived (lack of) accomplishment influenced feelings of depersonalisation, which then influenced emotional exhaustion. As a result, the authors suggest that a sense of personal accomplishment functions as a core resource in handling the strains of the job; that is, a reduced sense of personal accomplishment diminishes a person’s coping ability when facing difficulties. Depersonalisation is thus suggested to be an insufficient coping mechanism. Emotional exhaustion becomes the endpoint of a long cascade that has been preceded by feelings of self-doubt, lack of meaning and accomplishment, and feelings of detachment and cynicism. As such, it is posited that, other than certain personality traits, factors in the work environment, and chronic stress, the individual’s perceived self-worth is an essential determinant in burnout pathology development. In other words, an individual’s subjective, perceived, and valuebased self-assessment plays a crucial part in whether he or she is prone to developing burnout symptomatology when facing adverse work-related circumstances. But if this is the case, then why is burnout such a common but recent pathology? Which particular characteristics of life in the modern Western world exacerbate and contribute to the increased prevalence in burnout pathology? Is there a dimension missing in the current conceptual framework? As Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter have stated: ‘Burnout is the index of the dislocation between what people are and what they have to do. It represents an erosion in value, dignity, spirit, and will – an erosion of the human soul. It is a malady that spreads gradually and continuously over time, putting people into a downward spiral from which it’s hard to recover’ (1997).

IV. The Modern World of Work – Global Capitalism in the Digital Age Looking more closely to the world of work in Western society, several important changes are challenging the modern individual at work today. First, the introduction of technology has fundamentally reshaped the work environment. The digital age, in which computers, the Internet, smartphones, and social media dictate communication and are now implicated in business processes in all sorts of ways, has introduced a novel kind of superpower in the world of work. The intrinsic characteristics of technology, for example allowing instant dissemination of infinite amounts of information, do not abide by the same laws by means of which biological organisms, that is, human beings, function. Multitasking or the need to simultaneously conduct several tasks, for example, poses an impossible demand on the human mind, which requires singular and focused attention to effectively engage with a multitude of diverse problems (Compernolle 2014). The constant influx of emails, phone calls, and the need for

From Excess to Exhaustion 213 constant availability or hyperconnectivity disrupts any focused attention and space for reflection or contemplation. Technology does not tolerate the idleness that benefits the creative process. Previously only doctors were on call; now everybody is. Due to the abundance and pervasiveness of information in the digital age, the separation between work and personal life has become increasingly blurred over the last few decades. Simultaneously, the emergence of a globalized neoliberal capitalism has enabled corporations to expand to multinational and global status by applying economies of scale, using global supply chains, improved automation, and big data to render business processes more efficient and requiring that employees be constantly available in the modern ‘gig economy’, while reaching ever more customers in a growing global population. This move has led to the implementation of novel management strategies and an increasing focus on unlimited growth and bigger profits, pressing for ever higher productivity, efficiency, and cost effectiveness from their employees. Additionally, the increased power of corporations in a globalized neoliberal capitalist society advocating an ever-increasing need for consumption has disseminated, implicitly and explicitly, a new logic of ‘consumption for happiness’, with a great and often disruptive impact on the individual consumer’s psychology and behaviour. According to Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, it is intrinsic to a capitalist society to allow technology to become a self-propelling, self-reproducing mechanism. He argued that capitalism is in itself based on domination, manipulation, and exploitation of man and nature and that the spread of technology is based on the same underlying motives (Marcuse 2001). Luis Suarez-Villa (2001, 2009, 2012) has posited that we live in an age of ‘technocapitalism’; that is, an evolution of market capitalism rooted in rapid technological innovation. The imperative of technological innovation now dictates organizational agendas as never before. The rise of the sharing economy, with companies such as Uber, and the power of social media, with companies such as Facebook, are direct examples of this alliance and the incredibly rapid and overwhelming evolution that technocapitalism has brought into the globalized market. Another fundamental aspect intrinsic to neoliberal capitalist society is its notion of meritocracy, suggesting that it allows for fair and just competition and that those who deserve success can achieve this by a mix of talent and hard work. In The Rise of Meritocracy, first published in 1958, Michael Young created a dystopian world in which merit would become the central tenet of future society (Young 1958, 1994, 2017). While it was meant to be a satire, it became a political philosophy seen by some as a basis for a just society. In an interview years after his book was published, Young stated: ‘If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get’ (Young 2001). Along the same

214  Philippe Wuyts logic, it can be deduced that those who do not achieve what they want, have little if any merit, putting the essential emphasis on the individual’s control over his own destiny and further enhancing a worldview defined by competition, individualism, and materialism. In a nutshell, modern man must assume full responsibility for his or her own success in life. However, modern society is increasingly unequal in most Western countries (Piketty 2014). While the well-off in this world have attained levels of unprecedented wealth, the poor and middle class have not shared the same progress. With the idea of meritocracy being so widespread and strongly advocated by the wealthy, the majority are indoctrinated that with the right talent and hard work ‘becoming wealthy’ is a perfectly feasible and attainable objective, which is clearly in disagreement with most research, showing that social mobility is in fact very limited. And so paradoxically, while modern man lives in a world of increasing abundance, increasing inequality, competition, and individualism generate a continuous sense of perceived scarcity. As Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) poignantly illustrated in Scarcity: why having too little means so much, perceived scarcity captures the mind in ways previously overlooked and leads to ineffective use of limited resources and poor decision-making. Hence, in the race for more, the individual often ends up with less.

V.  Modern Man Lost in a Burnout Society How can it be that in a world of unmatched abundance and opportunity, those individuals, educated, conscientious, ambitious, and primed to succeed are most prone to fall into a dangerous cascade ending in burnout? What makes the drive to success in our modern world so potentially perilous? In our world of hyperconnectivity infused by a meritocratic logic, personal identity and professional identity seem to have blurred into each other. In order to thrive the individual is not only encouraged to compete relentlessly and outperform peers but, as a sign of even greater commitment, assumed to identify with his professional achievements as a substitute for the fulfilment of the meaning of life itself. ‘Professional dedication’ and ‘personal identification’ seem to have become interchangeable. Paradoxically, as David Graeber argues in his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, close to 40% of modern employees agree to having a ‘bullshit job’, that is, ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’ (Graeber 2018). But if one’s identity is so strongly defined by one’s professional success, which comes at enormous cost through its relentless pace and constant pressure for progress, while simultaneously perceived as intrinsically

From Excess to Exhaustion 215 meaningless, the individual finds himself confronted with a profound existential void. The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han stated in Burnout Society that ‘the absence of the relation to the other causes a crisis of gratification’ (2015). Gratification presupposes the instance of the other and in his absence the structure of gratification disappears, leaving the achievement subject stuck in self-related performing and narcissistic self-absorption. Emmanuel Levinas (1974, 1978) stated that the existence of each man is defined in confrontation with the face of the ‘other’. To be called upon by the other, the individual is confronted with the absolute responsibility of his existence, obliged to respond to the other and the world as a whole. While that responsibility may seem oppressive, it could also be perceived as an essential significance of existence. The gaze of another being calls upon me, engages me into the act of existence, and fills it with meaning. The self-referential imperative of expansion, transformation, and self-reinvention functions as an absolute competition against the reality of the individual’s given life itself. The achievement subject competes with himself, no longer in obvious relation with the other. He claims to liberate himself into a ‘project’, and as such, the achievement subject projects himself onto the ‘egoideal’, or ultimate self-representation. Existence becomes objectified as a project of self-idealization according to Byung-Chul Han (2015). Hence, confronted with a perceived absence of the other and following Sartre’s proposition that man’s existential position is defined by its radical freedom and absolute obligation for a self-defined choice and purpose (Crowell 2017), the achievement subject finds himself lost and exhausted as a result of a failed search for meaning in a self-referential project of self-definition. And so, as stated by Byung-Chul Han (2015), ‘burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary selfexploitation’ (2015).

Conclusion Despite growing interest in both popular press and scientific literature, ‘burnout’ remains a contentious and elusive phenomenon to many today. Even though burnout is a relatively young condition, its cost and impact on the individual, the employer, and society as a whole have become astronomical. In this chapter, we posited that the interplay of certain predisposed personality traits and an adverse work environment underlie the development of burnout pathology through a gradual exhaustion of the normal stress adaptation mechanisms to eventually give way to a wide range of symptoms and behaviours that constitute the development of the burnout syndrome. As such, it has been claimed that burnout cannot simply be captured by any typical etiology and pathogenesis for it

216  Philippe Wuyts cannot be contained as a strictly biological, neurological, or psychological phenomenon. However, this two-way interactive model does not explain the important rise in prevalence of burnout in today’s Western society. In this chapter, we explore how a self-evident belief in meritocracy and the pervasiveness of technology in a globalized neoliberal capitalist marketplace have shifted Western man’s sense of identity and search for meaning in life towards an oppressive ideology of limitless self-development and achievement. It is in this projection, conceived as an act of individual freedom, that the ego, confronted with the boundaries of reality, tries to attain an elusive ideal of ultimate self-actualization. The individual caught up in a perpetual chasing, increasingly exerts himself and ends up caught in deep existential doubt as his meritocratic illusion becomes shattered. ‘And so the achievement subject exploits himself until he burns out’ (Byung-Chul Han 2015). Stripped of transcendental value and having lost the sense of being-with-others, the individual falls victim to feelings of exhaustion and emptiness, and he or she becomes ‘dehumanized.’

Reference List The American Psychiatric Association. 2013. DSM-5: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm Bährer-Kohler, Sabine. 2013. Burnout for Experts: Prevention in the Context of Living and Working. New York: Springer Science and Business Media. Beezhold, J.N., Beezhold, K., Malik, A., Lydall, G., Podlesek, A., and Jovanovic, N. 2017. Psychiatry trainee burnout in the United Kingdom: The Boss study. European Psychiatry, 41 (S297). Burisch, Mattias. 2010. Das Burnout-Syndrom: Theorie der inneren Erschöpfung. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. E-book. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-662-06456-6 Compernolle, Theo. 2014. Brain Chains: Discover Your Brain, to Unleash Its Full Potential in a Hyperconnected, Multi-Tasking World. Theo Compernolle and Compublications, E-book. www.amazon.com.au/BrainChains-Discoverpotential-hyperconnected-multitasking-ebook/dp/B00M039OUM#reader_ B00M039OUM Cox, T., Griffith, A., and Rial-Gonzalez, E. 2000. Research of Work-Related Stress. Report to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Crowell, Steven. 2017. Existentialism. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2017 edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2017/entries/existentialism/ Freudenberger, Herbert. 1974. Staff burn-out. Journal of Social Issues, 30 (1): 159–165. Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster. Greene, Graham. 1960. A Burnt-Out Case. London and New York: Penguin Random House.

From Excess to Exhaustion 217 Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Erik Butler (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Originally published Berlin: Matthes and Seitz, 2010. Kaschka, Wolfgang P., Korczak, Dieter, and Broich, Karl. 2011. Burnout: A fashionable diagnosis. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, 108 (46): 781–787. Levinas, Emanuel. 1974. L’autrement qu’etre. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff. [English trans.: Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978.] Marcuse, Herbert. 2001. One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. In Douglas Kellner (ed.) Towards a Critical Theory of Society: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 2. London and New York: Routledge. Maslach, Christina and Leiter, Michael P. 1997. The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint. Mullainathan, Sendhil and Shafir, Eldar. 2013. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much. London: Penguin Books. Pfeffer, Jeffrey. 2018. Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employees’ Health and Company Performance—And What We Can Do About It. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, chapter 7 Inequality and Concentration, 237–270. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Originally published Le capital au XXI siècle, 2013. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Selye, Hans. 1957. The stress of life. The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 39 (2): 479. Suarez-Villa, Luis. 2001. The rise of technocapitalism. Science Studies, 14 (2): 4–20. Suarez-Villa, Luis. [2009] 2012. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism, 3rd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. van Dierendonck, Dirk, Schaufeli, Wilmar B., and Buunk, Bram P. 2001. Toward a process model of burnout: Results from a secondary analysis. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 10 (1): 41–52. doi:10.1080/13594320042000025 Watts, Alan. 1966, 2009. The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. London: Souvenir Press. Williams, C., and Normand, J. 2003. “Stress at Work”. Canadian Social Trends. Statistics Canada. http://www.statcan.ca:8096/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=11008X20030026621. The World Health Organisation. 2016. ICD-10. International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision. https://icd. who.int/browse10/2016/en Young, Michael. 1958/1994/2017. The Rise of the Meritocracy. New York: Routledge. Young, Michael. 2001. Down with Meritocracy. The Guardian. London. www. theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

14 Phenomenology of Blackout Rage The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes1 John Protevi Introduction The berserker rage is a fascinating – and to many people repugnant – phenomenon. While there are certainly cultural variations in its triggers, and it can be modulated by breathing exercises and conscious attentionfocusing, its full expression seems to exhibit cross-cultural similarities: snarling, spitting, grimacing, screaming, along with prolonged and hyper-intense but not very precise no-holds-barred fighting, with a fairly sudden crash landing as the episode concludes, sometimes in the most intense cases bringing with it a ‘blackout’ or impossibility in recalling the details of the episode. This profile leads some to posit its evolution in selection for effective reaction of prey mammals. While predation is often conducted in a cool, stalking, manner until the final leap – which even then can have precise targeting of the vulnerable parts of the prey – prey behavior under extreme stress (when fight rather than flight or freeze occurs) is often a reactive lashing out at what moves in the attack zone to which the prey has access. In this paper, I follow the leading idea of an inhuman gaze to explore the perceptual-motor effects and possible episodic memory inhibition in extreme cases of the ‘berserker rage’. I first locate berserker rages in a taxonomy of aggressive behavior as out-of-control reactive aggression triggered by blocked flight in a high-danger situation. I then sketch its military implications and present a plausible neurological substrate, as well as locate it in relation to the ‘Human Self-Domestication Hypothesis’ currently being worked out at the intersection of anthropology and biological psychology. I then zero in on the most extreme manifestations, the so-called ‘blackout rages’ – or in technical terms, ‘Transient Global Amnesia’ (TGA) – in which episodic memory is inhibited or attenuated, even though there is retention of affective-charged sensory fragments. Here I have two objectives: first, I will present recent research on the neuropsychological mechanisms at work producing TGA; second, we will work out its phenomenological implications, using discourse analysis of

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 219 the first-person reports of berserkers in interviews as well as the secondand third-person testimony of witnesses. In doing so we come upon the recurrent theme of an inhuman gaze in which the berserker seems to be transformed or even possessed, so that their eyes gleam or flash in compelling and disturbing ways. What then are we to say about an ‘experience’ of which we have only a partial ability to reconstruct and in which the use of flipping a switch or automatic pilot are prevalent terms in those reconstructions? We here face the paradox of a phenomenological report of an experience whose episodic details seem lost even if an affective tone is left behind to be available for voluntary recall or indeed to arise unbidden with sometimes debilitating effect.

I.  Taxonomy of the Berserker Rage The berserker rage is a highly intense reactive aggression behavior pattern eluding full conscious control (Protevi 2017). Hence the emotion term rage in ‘berserker rage’ is tricky, as the extreme cases are blind or blackout behavior with no recall of a subjective experience. So, in this paper ‘berserker rage’ should not necessarily be taken to imply an emotional experience, even though many violent episodes do have a feel to them that can be recalled. The berserker rage is a classical means for enabling close-range killing behavior; it is close-to-automated state that unleashes extreme violence on almost anything in its path. (Note the reference to ‘autopilot’ and ‘felt something switch’ in Vaughan 2015, an interview with Robert Bales, a berserker.) It can have both reactive, proactive, and redirected dimensions, insofar as it deals with immediate threats but can then go out in search of threats to eliminate or passive and helpless victims on which to vent (Bales’ victims were unarmed civilians). It has accompanied military action for all of recorded history, starting with its most memorable invocation in Homer’s description of Achilles in the Iliad (Shay 1994; Cairns 2003). While some dis-inhibiting anger is needed in many closerange encounters for those who have not mastered the techniques for cold-blooded engagement, unleashing the berserker rage is associated with many problems in the contemporary military. Its hyperactive threatprocessing fits poorly in counter-insurgency operations, both urban and rural, as it can lead to civilian atrocities (as in the case of Bales), and it is closely associated with PTSD (van der Kolk and Greenberg 1987). In close combat, fear, anger, and aggression are always intersecting in various dimensions and intensities. Although we have to beware of any simple models, in general, anger-mediated aggression depends on the surmounting of the first flash of fear and the avoidance of the final surrender of full-fledged freezing. In the psychological literature, a three-fold distinction among types of aggression is common: reactive, proactive, and instrumental. 1) Reactive aggression is a quick if not automatic attack

220  John Protevi on a close-range, inescapable threat that nonetheless offers the chance of being overcome by attack; the chance of winning is crucial here in avoiding freezing (Blair 2012; Siegel and Victoroff 2009); 2) Proactive aggression is a consciously controlled attack in order to eliminate a future threat (Siegel and Victoroff 2009; Wrangham 2014); and 3) Instrumental aggression is a consciously controlled attack on those that do not pose present or future threats in order to gain various rewards (Nelson and Trainor 2007: 536). We propose the following links of these types of aggression to variations in anger. First, there is appropriate anger, which is associated with adaptive reactive aggression that is calibrated accurately to the threat; contrast this with hyperbolic anger, which is associated with maladaptive reactive aggression that comes from those with a low threshold of threat detection and poorly calibrated threat estimation, problems often acquired by previous trauma.2 Second, instrumental aggression tends to be accomplished in cold-blood; this can be associated with psychopaths (Nelson and Trainor 2007; Blair 2010, 2012; Hirstein and Sifferd 2014), but can also be produced by people who have undertaken various training procedures to control fear and anger and produce an emotional dominance over their victims (Collins 2008 discusses techniques employed by professional hit men). Last, proactive aggression, when subjects are not completely successful in using self-calming techniques, is intermediate in intensity between hot reaction and cold instrumentality. Proactive aggression often needs some angry arousal, as one is attacking to eliminate a future threat to those in whom you are emotionally invested; thus, linking the image of the one to be protected and the image of the threat kicks up anger. In this way, proactive aggression is less intense than reactive aggression but is not cold-blooded instrumental aggression either. This is not the whole story, however, as Barash and Lipton distinguish reactive aggression or retaliation (attacks directed back at the aggressor) from redirected aggression, which sometimes targets the kin of the aggressor (Barash and Lipton 2011: 39). Redirected aggression provides a costly, honest signal of continued potency that increases the chances of non-victimization in the future. The proximate explanation of redirected aggression is relief from stress hormones from the adrenals. Barash and Lipton hypothesize that prolonged stress, especially social subordination stress, burns out the pituitary-adrenal axis and produces lower testosterone and serotonin and higher cortisol. There is thus a hypothesized reduction in bad hormonal effects for those able to engage in redirected aggression when retaliation is not possible. With this in mind, we can recognize a few basic dimensions to military anger, always keeping in mind two things: first, that anger is contrary to simple fear and to paralyzing freezing; and second, that both fear and anger are contrary to calm self-possession. Anger can be linked to quick reactive retaliation or self-motivated returned aggression; to quick or

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 221 planned redirected aggression aiming to harm the kin or comrades of the enemy; to proactive or preventive aggression, either retaliatory or redirected, designed to protect self and others; and to vengeance or thirdparty mediated retaliatory or redirected aggression. Experiences of anger in each of these dimensions also vary in intensity, from white-hot flashes to the sort of simmering ‘baseline resentment’ among U.S. soldiers in Iraq for wrongs ranging from 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s treatment of civilians and the latest atrocity (Sherman 2005: 90; cited in Flanagan 2016). This fluctuating background anger is amped up by the death or wounding of comrades; here there is a narrow temporal/spatial/attachment focus on wrongs done to the ‘band of brothers’. There can also be resentment at the betrayal of a moral code by superiors (Shay 1994, 2003, 2014). Of course, there is also the hot flash of anger at being trapped and in mortal danger yet with a chance of overcoming the foe.

II.  Neuropsychology of Berserker Rage While Jaak Panksepp (1998) invokes rage as a pan-mammalian ‘basic emotion’ resulting from the triggering of subcortical neural circuits homologous between humans and other mammals, such that rage is triggered in us when we are put into the situation of a trapped prey animal, we have to nuance this picture. Human anger is dependent on situational analysis: for many soldiers, being trapped cuts off fear-mediated flight and thus pushes them toward rageful fighting, but often only when the situation is analyzed as winnable, even if dire, as otherwise panicked freezing might kick in or conscious surrender be chosen. We will examine four paradigms for emotion. For Paul Griffiths, the concept of ‘affect program’ is the key. Panksepp ties such affect programs to evolutionarily inherited ‘basic emotion’ circuits. Departing from both Griffiths’ and Panksepp’s focus on specific modules or circuits are two ‘constructivist’ accounts: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s radical constructivism and Joseph LeDoux’s moderate constructivism. We will adopt LeDoux’s position. From a cognitive psychology perspective, the berserker rage seems like a candidate for an ‘affect program’, which for Griffiths (1997) is a modularized, automatic, behavior pattern (recall the notion of ‘autopilot’ the recent American berserker Robert Bales mentioned [Vaughan 2015]). From this perspective, extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or ‘affect program’ that attenuates if not eliminates conscious control. ‘Affect program’ draws on a computer metaphor in which the body is hardware and rage is the software, but with no pre-reflective self-awareness. Affect programs are emotional responses that are ‘complex, coordinated, and automated . . . unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction’ (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place

222  John Protevi (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor’s notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be ‘mandatory . . . opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] . . . and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]’ (93; my comments in brackets). From his ‘basic emotion’ perspective, Panksepp cites studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous subcortical ‘rage’ circuits in humans and other mammalian species (1998: 190). Panksepp proposes an adaptationist story for rage agents given their utility for prey, further sharpening the difference between rage and predator aggression. While a hunting attack is an instance of proactive or instrumental aggression, rage reactions are a prey phenomenon, a vigorous reaction when pinned down by a predator. Initially a reflex, Panksepp claims, the rage action pattern developed into a full-fledged neural phenomenon with its own circuits (1998: 190). The evolutionary inheritance of rage is confirmed, for Panksepp, by the well-attested fact that infants can become enraged by having their arms pinned to their sides (1998: 189). Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes a radical constructivism. Feldman Barrett (2017) insists on a strong neural globalism, which, with her insistence on holism, emergence, and degeneracy (same outcome from different mechanisms), results in a strong nominalism, such that no ‘fingerprint’ of necessary circuits can be identified for either emotion instances or even emotion categories (2017: 35–41; see also Pessoa 2017 for a similar distributed network approach to emotions). For Barrett, emotion concept construction occurs via bottom-up summarizing of singular experiences, drawing on neural inputs from multiple brain sites mapping the body and other higher and lower intra-brain regions; each of these ‘core affect’ experiences is tagged with culturally specific emotion terms. Hence there is a high-level, cortical/semantic component to emotion concepts, which are constructed from these multiple inputs. Such summarizing produces concepts as abstract but nonessential capacities that don’t exist as enduring, locatable, actual firings, but only exist as potentials for actualization. Given Feldman Barrett’s strong holism, emergence, and degeneracy, concept creation is the progressive construction of a virtual field: virtual because emotion concepts do not exist as things do but inhere in the manner of potentials. For Feldman Barrett, an emotional episode is the actualization of the potential concept. It occurs as prediction, a top-down simulation that ‘unpacks’ concepts, constructing an instance of the concept that assembles its components from occurrent inputs and checks the assemblage against the prediction. This actualization occurs in a degeneracy mode, such that no single set of neural firings is necessary for each instance of

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 223 the concept. Hence the concept is a virtual diagram with multiple mechanisms for the actualization of instances. In Deleuzean terms, it is an ‘abstract machine’ with multiple machinic assemblages for its actualization/individuation/integration/differentiation (Protevi 2013). We classify Joseph LeDoux’s work as moderate constructivism. Contra Feldman Barrett, he identifies specific neural circuits, so he is a moderate constructivist; but contra Panksepp’s notion of pre-programmed basic emotional circuits, he is a constructivist, insofar as he says that there is a ‘recipe’ for emotions constructed by working memory agent – in LeDoux’s terms, a bricoleur. For LeDoux, threat detection evokes nonconscious defense states, but not emotions. These states are produced from a ‘recipe’ of nonconscious elements (senses, brain arousal, body feedback, and memory) assembled by a working memory bricoleur to produce conscious emotional feelings (LeDoux 2015: 228). The neural circuitry of the rage reaction is recapitulated by LeDoux (2015: 93ff.) in the following way. Sensory processing follows a fast ‘low’ road and a slower ‘high’ road. In the fast or low road, the lateral amygdala feeds the central amygdala and the basal amygdala. From the central amygdala, we get defensive behavior (initial freezing), physiological support in the autonomic nervous system, hormonal output via the pituitary, and brain arousal neuromodulators (norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, and others [LeDoux 2015: 90; see also Nelson and Trainor 2007]). The slow or high road allows regulation of these first responses by the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Note the first reaction is freezing (see also Blair 2012), so that to activate learned responses, you have to inhibit freezing (LeDoux 2015: 101). LeDoux’s full action model builds on the early reactions, adding connections from basal amygdala to the nucleus accumbens of the ventral striatum in the pre-frontal cortex (2015: 102–103). At this point, past freezing, and when flight is unavailable or cognitively unacceptable, then rage is the last resort. The defensive circuit seems to be amygdala/hypothalamus/periaqueductal gray (LeDoux 2015: 89; see also Blair 2012; Siegel and Victoroff 2009). Along with supporting physiology, the defensive rage reaction is an ‘innately programmed reaction pattern’ (LeDoux 2015: 89). Interestingly, the hippocampus, which is an important part of risk assessment, creates environmental maps, especially spatial relations (LeDoux 2015: 106). Might it be the case that overstimulation here accounts for the very narrow focus or tunnel vision reported by some berserkers? LeDoux’s final suggestion relevant to us is that the BNST (bed nucleus of the stria terminalis) ‘sits at the crossroads between defensive circuits involving the amygdala and accumbens and risk-assessment circuitry involving the septohippocampal circuitry and prefrontal cortex.

224  John Protevi It thus may coordinate the two systems, balancing which dominates behavioral control, depending on the degree of uncertainty’ (LeDoux 2015: 107). The berserker rage might then be caused by a BNST-mediated lock-in of the defense circuits, outlasting or overpowering controlled threat response and moving on to super-charged hot reactive or redirected aggression-seeking behavior (as opposed to the ‘warm’ proactive or ‘cold’ instrumental forms of aggression). It’s possible to bring together the perspectives of Griffiths, Panksepp, and LeDoux, but not Feldman Barrett. However, we can say that a berserker rage is a highly intense reactive aggression behavior provoked by threat detection to the extent that conscious, subjective control is severely attenuated, resulting in an automatically running ‘affect program’ with the limit case being the inhibition of episodic memory, thus earning the name ‘blackout rages’ (LeDoux 2015: 124 allows for use of ‘affect program’ terminology; on ‘redout’ rages, see Swihart, Yuille and Porter 1999; clinical work with blackout rage is recapped in Potter-Efron 2007).

III.  Evolutionary Account of Berserker Rage The Human Self-Domestication (HSD) hypothesis is one of the most interesting new developments in anthropology. The HSD hypothesis concerns the evolution of reactive aggression control (Hare 2017). As we have seen, reactive aggression occurs with blocked flight after threat detection, and berserker rage is out-of-control reactive aggression. But HSD cannot be perfect; it can increase the cortical means of behavior control and raise danger detection thresholds for defensive behavior activation in a large portion of the population. Still, the genetic disposition to develop defensive motivational circuits remains for many, so for them the circuits themselves are present and able to be activated, and there will also be ontogenetically-induced variation in control and thresholds. All that means that, given the right circumstances, instances of blind rage behavior are still possible in many members of the human population. According to the HSD hypothesis, ‘later human evolution was dominated by selection for intragroup sociality over aggression’, and because of this, ‘the reduced emotional reactivity that results from self-domestication and increased self-control created a unique form of human tolerance allowing the expression of the more flexible social skills only observed in modern humans’ (Hare 2017). The HSD hypothesis is an advance on the ‘emotional reactivity hypothesis’ which states that: Human levels of cooperative communication were a result of an increase in social tolerance generated by a decrease in emotional reactivity . . . an increase in tolerance in humans allowed inherited cognitive skills to be expressed in new social situations. Selection

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 225 could then act directly on revealed variance in these newly expressed cognitive abilities. (Hare 2017; with reference to Hare and Tomasello 2005a, 2005b) The HSD predicts neurological changes in humans (‘interaction between subcortical and cortical pathways’; as well as increased serotonin, which is known to inhibit impulsivity and reactive aggression [Nelson and Trainor 2007]) producing self-control via reduced reactivity and increased inhibition, which ‘creates the human-specific adaptation for more flexible tolerance and unique forms of human social cognition’ (Hare 2017). The HSD brings up the question of the last common ancestor (LCA) for the lineages now represented by Pan (chimps and bonobos) and Homo (humans). For Hare (2017), the HSD ‘also led to enhanced cooperation in intergroup conflicts.’ This pushes the HSD towards an assumption of a relatively chimp-like LCA (Vaesen 2014; Gonzalez-Cabrera 2017). If the last common ancestor was more chimp-like than bonobo-like, then evolutionary human emotional development allowing complex social life is primarily about top-down cortical anger/aggression control of emotions oriented to domination. But if there were significant bonobo-like traits in the LCA, we would have developed capacities for bottom-up pacific emotions (joy in cooperation, helping, and caring) at the same time as those for top-down anger control. When circumstances permit, humans are remarkably pacific and sharing towards both in-group and out-group, relative to chimpanzees. Is this because we have learned ways to suppress our dominance-enabling hair-trigger temper and violent reactive aggression, so that we can appreciate when cooperation is the rational choice? Or is it because we also genuinely and positively have an emotional structure that provides joy in care and cooperation, in peace and sharing? Do we merely settle for cooperation when punishment for domination attempts are too costly, or can we directly experience, and hence desire, joy in care and cooperation, even at times beyond kin and the in-group? A ‘chimpocentric’ view like the HSD emphasizes anger control as the condition for later development of care and cooperation. Although we are tempted to question that, the HSD still has some fascinating implications. Note that a prime selection pressure for self-domestication in early humans is capital punishment (CP) in unsegmented foragers (Wrangham 2014). There is an interesting dialectic here: the acephalic social structure of forager bands is reinforced (and possibly initially produced, if we are chimpocentric) by the CP killing of murderers qua would-be dominators, while that same structure produces the need for CP, as, without an alpha to impose conflict resolution, individual conflict can result in murder, hence the need for CP (Boehm 2012).

226  John Protevi Forager CP is a paradigm case of ‘warm’ proactive aggression (Wrangham 2014), but the targeted killers are those hot-heads exhibiting poor control of reactive aggression or those cold-blooded bullies whose instrumental aggression is used to dominate others. CP thus selects for the ability to carry out the controlled anger/proactive aggression complex that enables war when social circumstances permit. CP is language-mediated, group-oriented, and premeditated, though sometimes achieved by taking advantage of spontaneous opportunity. We should note that Kelly (2000) distinguishes single CP from ambush by multiple people. This latter case is on the way to war, as it requires a perceived duty to enact group vengeance. Once we couple group duty on the side of the victimized avengers to group liability on the side of the offenders, we have set up a feud, an intermediate form of violence on the way to war as fully anonymous inter-group violence.

IV. Neuropsychology of Stress-related Transient Global Amnesia Normal threat memories occur with the encoding of pre-frontal cortex (PFC) narrative consciousness of what happened, along with an affective tagging performed by the amygdala activating defensive motivational states. Using LeDoux’s moderate constructivism, we then see the constructed emotional state available for conscious recall: ‘I was angry when that happened.’ However, in the ‘blackout rage’, we speculate that very intense defensive motivational states will crowd out PFC encoding and hence prevent the formation of narrative memory. So, in these states there’s nothing ‘there’ to encode for episodic content. There are a number of mechanisms proposed to account for stressinduced Transient Global Amnesia (TGA). A popular one is hippocampus damage in hyperarousal states from stress-related cortisol exposure. A piece of evidence here is that the CA-1 region of hippocampus has glutamate uptake blockage in stress episodes (Popoli et al. 2012). So even if the PFC had encoded episodic detail, that content wouldn’t be encoded in the hippocampus. However, critics of the hippocampus damage theory point out that the amygdala and the medial PFC play very important roles in stress. These critics call for a systems analysis of stress and hippocampus: ‘It may be a time for stress research to shift its focus from the usual neurochemical emphasis to systems-level and neural computation approaches to capture the multifaceted nature of stress’ (Kim, Pellman and Kim 2015). An example of such a systems-level analysis is the ‘temporal dynamics model’ (Diamond et al. 2007). The key concept in Diamond et al. (2007) is the distinction in phase in emotional memory encoding. In Phase 1 we see that ‘plasticity in hippocampus and amygdala are activated for a short time by a strong emotional learning experience’. In Phase 2, however, the

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 227 ‘induction of new plasticity [is then] suppressed’. Here we see a mechanism for a shift from narrative memories to flashbulb memories should an emotionally intense event occur during Phase 2. With strong emotionality, the hippocampus shifts from a ‘configural/ cognitive map’ mode to a ‘flashbulb memory’ mode. This underlies the long-lasting, but fragmented, nature of traumatic memories. The key is that events occurring in Phase 2 (post-stress) may not be well encoded; given that the PFC is weak under severe stress, it can be the case that narratives are not supplied. So, the shift from narrative to flashbulb memory encoding underlies the fragmentary nature of post-stress memories to the point of episodic memory failure or TGA but with retention of affectivecharged sensory fragments. With flashbulb memories we see a strong emotional experience, sometimes accompanied by more or less coherent narrative memory, but sometimes not, if the experience is too intense. In these latter cases, only sense fragments tagged with amygdala-produced affect get through metaphorically; post-stress amnesia blackouts are when you look right at the flashbulb, so that all that is encoded for recall or flashback are ‘intense implicit components interwoven with fragmented declarative recollections’ (Diamond et al. 2007).

V.  Phenomenology of Blackout So far, we have classified berserker rage as an episode of hyper-intense pre-emptive aggression whose neurological profile includes a threat-activated defense state that attenuates conscious control. We then moved to sketch a possible evolutionary path, via the Human Self-Domestication hypothesis, that accounts both for the possibility of rage behavior but also its rarity, and then tied all that to an account of the neurological basis for ‘blackout rages’ or episodes of Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) using Diamond et al.’s (2007) ‘temporal dynamics’ model. We now move to an account of the phenomenology of blackout, an endeavor that is made intrinsically difficult by the gaps in narrative memory shown in TGA cases. Based on cases from his practice, the clinical psychologist Ronald Potter-Efron proposes three scales of rage episodes; we will re-order these from his presentation to move from least to most extreme. First, there is moderate rage, described as ‘losing control’, in which the subject retains a feeling of ownership of action, even if she cannot control herself. She is herself, just behaving badly and unable to stop of her own accord. The second scale is something like ‘being possessed.’ There is still a subject, but it’s a different one than one’s normal self. You’re not just out of control; you’re someone else. The third and most extreme scale is the limit case of ‘blackout’ rage (or TGA as we have elucidated it). The subject loses awareness of action and has no ability to spontaneously construct

228  John Protevi coherent memory narratives, but must instead infer responsibility from testimony and evidence about what happened (Potter-Efron 2007: 157). The first scale, ‘losing control’, can be called, using terms from Shaun Gallagher (2005), ‘ownership without agency’ – that is, the person can recall that he owned the experience, that it was him, but what is recalled is a lack of volition, in which he can’t assume responsibility for stopping, but can only note that a stoppage occurred. ‘When Ricky rages, he loses control over what he says and does. Notice however that even in the midst of this rage episode, he didn’t lose total control (“I didn’t even try to stop. I did stop, though.”).’ (Potter-Efron, 44). Here is another analysis of the attenuation of voluntary control such that the rage becomes the subject, as it were: ‘When Ricky rages, he becomes instantly furious, so angry that he cannot keep his rage from taking over control of his mind and body.’ We claim that such a phenomenon of ownership without agency is the ‘automatic pilot’ that the American berserker Robert Bales mentions. Potter-Efron continues: The ‘I snapped’ is a sign [of] a mini-rage. It felt to him, just for a moment, that he wasn’t exactly himself. Not that he completely lost conscious awareness, nor did he lose his sense of his normal self. Yes, he was himself, but at the same time, he could sense right then that he was also not quite himself. He had an incomplete transformation. The second scale is that of ‘becoming someone else’ (the mundane expression for the Greek mythological trope of ‘possession by Ares’). Potter-Efron offers the following clinical evidence for this second state. Second-person observation shows that the body changes its appearance as the berserker shows an inhuman gaze: ‘Friends tell Ricky when he is raging: “It’s your eyes,” they say. Ricky’s eyes get weird when he rages, looking both glazed over and brilliant.’ From the first-person perspective of second-scale episodes, we see the testimony of someone feeling he is no longer himself. Not just himself without normal control, but someone else: ‘Ricky admits that he feels like a different person when he rages, as if he were somebody else.’ The ‘he feels like’ and the ‘as if’ mark this as still ownership; it’s recognition of behaving in non-ordinary ways, poetically expressed as ‘becoming somebody else’. There is still a ‘he,’ Ricky qua pre-reflective self, that feels like he – Ricky – is acting abnormally. So, there’s still the ability to compare these actions to the expected actions as characteristic or not of Ricky. The third scale is blackout rage. Potter-Efron writes of ‘Ricky’ that ‘sometimes he blacks out, unable later to remember much or all of what he has done’. Here we see the partial or full inhibition of episodic memory and the loss of a feeling of ownership, which we can attribute to either a disruption of pre-reflective self-awareness or to an inability to reflectively access that pre-reflective state (Zahavi 2005; Gallagher and

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 229 Zahavi 2019). To flesh out our account of blackout rage, we will turn to the case of Robert Bales we have previously mentioned.3 Robert Bales claims he doesn’t remember setting fires during his rampage, but in the trial, he says, ‘I must have done it, it’s the only thing that makes sense.’ So here there is a bivalence of the ‘I’ as agent constituted after the fact by inferences, and the ‘I’ as narrative self who now incorporates this action into the life story even without direct memory of it. Diamond et al. (2007) point to the role of later inferences: ‘The reconstructed memory would therefore be a hybrid representation of information processed by the hippocampus (and amygdala) in a fragmented manner at the time of the experience, in conjunction with post-event reconstructions of the memory.’ From a long-form magazine story on Bales, with extensive interviews of him: The other soldiers wanted to simply haul the tree into a burn pit. To Bales, this would not do. He wanted to destroy the thing himself. Finally, on the morning of Saturday, March 10, 2012, after fixating on this symbol of failure for three days and mostly sleepless nights, Bales went at the tree with a hand axe. It took him eight hours – in full view of the entire base – but he eventually succeeded in chopping it to bits. “This tree was used to hurt my friends, man,” Bales told me recently, recalling the episode in an odd, detached tone. “It was used by the enemy. I had to see it go, you know?” Later that evening, Bales would turn his rage to less symbolic targets. Shortly after midnight, under cover of a deep rural darkness, Bales slipped away from the base and walked to a nearby village, where he killed four Afghans, including a 3-year-old girl. Then, after returning to his base to reload and telling another soldier what he had done, Bales left again to murder 12 more in another village just down the road. Of the 16 people he killed, four were men, four were women, and eight were children. The youngest was 2. (Sherwell 2012) But this phrase turn his rage makes the rage the possession of Bales. That’s the deep logic in which actions are attributable to continuously active subjects that ‘being possessed by Ares’ calls into question. We can say that in such extreme cases that the ‘subject’ is split. It is both a seat of moral responsibility and a center of autobiographical narrative – ‘ “I” did that’ and a simple abiding substance to which accidents can accrue – the rage belonged to Bales. So yes, in the history of the substance that is Bales, a rage episode occurred, so we can say ‘his rage’. But it wasn’t willed, which is what the first, moral, and autobiographical subject presupposes.

230  John Protevi From our discourse analysis of Bales’ testimony we propose five ‘selves’ of the blacked-out berserker: 1) a level of pre-reflective self-awareness allowing ‘ownership’ of actions; 2) the body agent performing the behavior (recalled later as ‘automatic pilot’); 3) the abiding substance to which blackout rage happens as an event recounted in second- or third-person history (‘you did it’/‘he did it’); 4) the ‘I’ as agent constituted after the fact by inferences (‘It’s the only thing that makes sense’); and 5) the ‘I’ as narrative self who now incorporates this action into the life story even without direct memory of it (‘I did it; I must have done it’). What’s missing is the ‘true self’, the ‘I’ as classical subject: the seat of moral responsibility for actions consciously taken and able to be recalled in a first-person autobiographical narrative in which one directly ‘owns’ one’s actions, acknowledging them as products of one’s will. Here events belong to the self, a unitary self that provides a focus for all five aspects that come apart in the blacked-out berserker. The phenomenology of such a dispersed subjectivity must then include, no matter its difficulties, reconstructing memories and forming integrated selves. This is for its subjects no mere philosophical exercise but the working through of trauma. Normal memory recall often has gap-filling inferences/testimony. So, the post-stress amnesiac may assume ownership of the episode’s contents at first by conscious inference, and then perhaps by reconstruction, so that she may ‘remember’ them. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has extensive clinical experience with veterans of the U.S. armed forces suffering psychological trauma. Some of that

Table 14.1 Characteristics of the classical self versus the blacked-out berserker self CLASSICAL SELF: unified along five aspects

BLACKED-OUT BERSERKER: five dispersed selves

Pre-reflective self-awareness: that which allows ownership of action Self-conscious agent: “I’m doing this.” Abiding substance to which self-conscious events accrue: “my life history” Agent continually selfconstituting: “I recall doing this sequence at that time.” Narrative self: “I did that for the following reasons.”

A loss of pre-reflective self-awareness or an inability to reflectively access it. Body-agent available in first-person recall only as ‘automatic pilot’ or ‘someone else’ Abiding substance to which events accrue via second- or third-person testimony: ‘You did that’ or ‘He did that.’ Agent constituted after the fact by inferences: ‘I must have done this: it’s the only thing that makes sense of the evidence.’ Narrative self who now incorporates this action into the life story even without direct memory of it (‘I accept that I must have been the one to do this because of my rage.’)

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 231 is PTSD from being under continual stress; they are suffering from what was done to them, from what they underwent. Some of Shay’s patients, however, suffer from what Shay calls ‘moral injury’, or psychological disturbance stemming from the soldier’s actions. Shay feels that some of this damage can be ameliorated when soldiers can partake in self-narratives coupled to ritualized expiation, so that the soldier feels less isolated and recognizes he was fulfilling a socially recognized role. As we have seen, however, some combat trauma experiences cannot be easily narrativised. When they can be reconstructed with the help of therapeutic intervention and guidance, by narratives that piece together fragmentary memories with the help of inference from other people’s testimony, these narratives can help restore the connections among the ‘five selves’ we discussed: Severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness. When a survivor creates a fully realized narrative that brings together the shattered knowledge of what happened, the emotions that were aroused by the meanings of the events, and the bodily sensations that the physical events created, the survivor pieces back together the fragmentation of consciousness that trauma has caused. (Shay 1994: 191) Hence, for Shay, it’s not simply isolated narratives inside the soldier’s head that work. It’s being able to share stories of the events that provides relief by the ‘communalization’ of trauma. [The] paradox that narrative temporality can never be completely true to the timeless experience of prolonged, severe trauma . . . disappears when . . . narration is a step in the survivor’s move to communalize the trauma by inducing others who were not there to feel what the victim felt when he or she was going through it. (Shay 1994: 191)

Conclusion We have discussed the complexities of understanding how the berserker rage is experienced by perpetrators. When they assume the inhuman gaze, who exactly is the subject of that gaze, who is looking outward? We don’t wish to underplay the moral complexity of therapy for those who have performed atrocities; do we as a society really wish to make it easier for people to return to ‘normal lives’ after showing what they are capable of?4 There are two things to say here: first, one can offer both deontological and utilitarian reasons for such therapy. Deontologically, berserkers are human beings and deserve the dignity both of care and help

232  John Protevi in understanding what they have done. And from a utilitarian perspective, the rates of domestic ‘collateral damage’ in the form of violence and substance abuse that occurs with untreated berserkers suffering from the physiological and psychological trauma of PTSD and ‘moral injury’ might be lessened by therapeutic intervention. Second, however, all our moral notions, to the extent they are tied up in notions of personal responsibility that rest on the capacity to keep agency and ownership together, are put to the test by cases of the transformed and sometimes dispersed ‘selves’ we find in various scales of berserker rage episodes. So, a self that can take responsibility is not a given in these cases; it must be produced through processes of narrative construction trying to tie together affect-laden sensory fragments, second- and thirdperson testimony, and inferences. It’s an open question, we believe, whether berserkers should feel themselves, at the end of those processes, to be guilty, or whether acknowledging the damage the ‘rage agent’ has done and appreciating the dangers to self and others of allowing such states to recur is enough. While some berserkers avail themselves of ‘neurological exculpation’ by referring to analyses of the ‘my brain made me do it’ kind, others do feel guilty. We should remark upon the tenacity of retrospective guilt produced through passage from ‘I must have done that, it’s the only thing that makes sense’ to ‘My God, what have I done?’ even when the practical agent of the act of killing can be acknowledged as a ‘rage agent’. We can see a ‘centripetal power’ to subject constitution, a power that draws to an abiding, conscious, directly memorialized, and narratively accessible autobiographical self, responsibility for acts it never really committed, acts that were performed by another software program running its hardware, acts committed while ‘possessed’ by ‘someone else’, acts performed while the agent exhibits an inhuman gaze. Thus, it seems some people who have experienced berserker rage episodes paradoxically just cannot help taking responsibility. In other words, to heighten the paradox, they are irresponsible in taking responsibility, in taking upon themselves moral agency, when practical agency lies elsewhere, in the ‘rage agent’ that for a time ‘possessed’ them. Questions for future research concern the genealogy of this powerful motivation for subject construction and the assumption of moral responsibility when seemingly exculpatory explanations based on deep neurological processes are at hand.

Notes 1. The material presented here for a new analysis focussing on blackout rage, which is the aim of this chapter, comes from research for an earlier publication titled Berserker Rage (2018: 148–152) – see reference list.

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 233 2. See Flanagan 2016 for a criticism of this basically Aristotelian position on the appropriateness of some forms and intensities of anger; although he does not advocate a universal condemnation of all forms of anger, he does propose a smaller range of appropriate forms than is the contemporary American norm. 3. The Robert Bales case was multi-factorial, but we can note that one of the soldiers he was charged with protecting had lost a leg hours before Bales committed the massacre. The Bales massacre occurred in Afghanistan in March 2012. Bales was a staff sergeant charged with providing base security for combat troops. He killed 16 civilians in two villages near base in two trips at 3 a.m., dressed in Afghan clothes over his military uniform. Three other factors besides the injury to one of his soldiers are mentioned: a) alcohol and steroid use; b) mefloquine, a malaria drug with possible psych effects (Miller 2013); and c) domestic and financial trouble, as three days previously house was put up for sale in an ‘underwater mortgage’ in which the property was listed for less than what they had paid for it in 2005, and less than what they owed the bank (Sherwell 2012). 4. It may seem obscene or perverse to cite in the discussion of the fragmented subjectivity of berserkers, who are the perpetrators of violence, Susan Brison’s beautifully poignant and philosophically rich memoir Aftermath (Brison 2003) as it recounts the author’s struggles to reconstruct a narratable self of the traumatized victim of sexual violence. Nonetheless, it is an astounding work of philosophy and essential reading for any discussion of narration as the recovery of self.

Reference List Barash, David and Lipton, Judith. 2011. Payback. New York: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017. How Emotions Are Made. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Blair, R. J. R. 2010. Psychopathy, frustration, and reactive aggression: The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex. British Journal of Psychology, 101: 383–399. Blair, R. J. 2012. Considering anger from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Wiley Interdisciplinary Review of Cognitive Science, 3(1): 65–74. Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins. New York: Basic Books. Brison, Susan. 2003. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cairns, Douglas. 2003. Ethics, ethology, terminology: Iliadic anger and the cross-cultural study of emotion. In S.M. Braund and G.W. Most (eds.) Ancient Anger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11–49. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Diamond, David M., Campbell, Adam M., Park, Collin R., Halonen, J., and Zoladz, Phillip R. 2007. The temporal dynamics model of emotional memory processing: A Synthesis on the neurobiological basis of stress-induced amnesia, flashbulb and traumatic memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson law. Neural Plasticity. Article ID: 60803, 33 pages. doi:10.1155/2007/60803. Flanagan, Owen. 2016. The Geography of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press. Hare, Brian. 2017. Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual Review of Psychology, 68: 24.1–24.32.

234  John Protevi Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan. 2019. Phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/self-consciousnessphenomenological/ Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ivan. 2017. On social tolerance and the evolution of human normative guidance. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https:// doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axx017 Griffiths, Paul. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hare, Brian, and Tomasello, Michael. 2005a. The emotional reactivity hypothesis and cognitive evolution: Reply to Miklósi and Topál. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9: 464–465. Hare, Brian, and Tomasello, Michael. 2005b. Human-like social skills in dogs? Trends in Cognitive Science, 9: 439–444. Hirstein, William, and Sifferd, Katrina. 2014. Ethics and the brains of psychopaths. In Charles Wolfe (ed.) Brain Theory. London: Springer, 149–170. Kelly, Raymond. 2000. Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kim, Eun Joo, Pellman, Blake, and Kim, Jeansok J. 2015. Stress effects on the hippocampus: A critical review. Learning & Memory, 22: 411–416. LeDoux, Joseph. 2015. Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Anxiety and Depression. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Greg. 2013. A gruesome war crime renews concerns about a malaria drug’s psychiatric side effects. Wired. www.wired.com/2013/08/mefloquinerobert-bales/all/ Nelson, Randy, and Trainor, Brian. 2007. Neural mechanisms of aggression. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 8: 536–546. Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press. Pessoa, Luiz. 2017. A network model of the emotional brain. Trends in cognitive science. Published online March 28, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. tics.2017.03.002 Popoli, Maurizio, Yan, Zhen, McEwen, Bruce, and Sanacora, Gerald. 2012. The stressed synapse: The impact of stress and glucocorticoids on glutamate transmission. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13: 22–37. doi:10.1038/nrn3138 Potter-Efron, Ronald. 2007. Rage. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Books. Protevi, John. 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, John. 2017. The berserker rage. In Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan (eds.) The Moral Psychology of Anger. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 139–156. Shay, Jonathan. 1994. Achilles in Vietnam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shay, Jonathan. 2003. Odysseus in America. New York: Scribner. Shay, Jonathan. 2014. Moral Injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31 (2): 182–191. Sherman, Nancy. 2005. Stoic Warriors. New York: Oxford University Press. Sherwell, Philip. 2012. Sgt Robert Bales: The story of the soldier accused of murdering 16 Afghan villagers. The Telegraph. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world

Phenomenology of Blackout Rage 235 news/northamerica/usa/9150641/Sgt-Robert-Bales-The-story-of-the-soldieraccused-of-murdering-16-Afghan-villagers.html Siegel, Allan, and Victoroff, Jeff. 2009. Understanding human aggression. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32: 209–215. Swihart, Gayla, Yuille, John, and Porter, Stephen. 1999. The role of state-dependent memory in “Red-Outs.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 22.3–4: 199–212. Vaesen, Krist. 2014. Chimpocentrism and reconstructions of human evolution (a timely reminder). Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 45: 12–21. van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Greenberg, Mark 1987. The psychobiology of the Trauma response. In Bessel van der Kolk (ed.) Psychological Trauma. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 63–87. Vaughan, Brendan. 2015. Robert Bales speaks: Confessions of America’s most notorious war criminal. GQ. www.gq.com/story/robert-bales-interview-afghanistanmassacre Wrangham, Richard. 2014. Did Homo Sapiens Self-Domesticate? http://www. uctv.tv/shows/CARTA-Domestication-and-Human-Evolution-RichardWrangham-Did-Homo-Sapiens-Self-Domesticate-28902. Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Part IV

Beyond the Human Divine, Post-human, and Animal Gazes

15 Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze Sean D. Kelly

The inhuman gaze, in at least one interpretation, is the gaze of whatever is deemed inhuman. Things are inhuman, the gaze of others may be inhuman, and in an important sense the gaze of God may also be considered ‘inhuman’. In this chapter, I explore and wonder at this last form of inhuman gaze by juxtaposing the medieval understanding of the ground of being with a more familiar early 20th century understanding. Nicholas of Cusa, in the 15th century, proposed using the apparently omnivoyant gaze of certain icons to help those under his care to experience the world as replete with the gaze of God. In Kafka’s work, by contrast, we meet a debased image of God, one in which God is presented as an alienated and estranged, but never dying, useless entity. The point is not that either of these experiences is correct. It is instead that there is something extraordinary, something wonderful, in the possibility of such a radical transformation in human experience over the course of history.

I The year is 1453, October. In an ancient monastic community, nestled along the banks of Lake Tergensee, in the Bavarian Alps, the brothers have finally received a promised and much anticipated treatise. It has been sent by the Bishop assigned to overseeing the reform of their mountain diocese,1 the great Renaissance figure Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). Nicholas’ visit to Tergensee the summer before, from June 22–27, 1452, had been met with enthusiasm by the Benedictine community there.2 The cardinal, Cusa, had received his red hat from Pope Nicholas V, a famous humanist, in 1450. He was delighted to encounter such an open regard for his ideas in this community. The enthusiasm of the Tergensee monks stood in stark contrast with the attacks Nicholas had been receiving for several years already regarding what his interlocutors considered to be a ‘mystical heresy’. This alleged heresy took at least two forms. One early complaint about Nicholas’ views, for instance by the Heidelberg theologian John Wenck (ca. 1395–1460), claimed that Nicholas had rejected the laws of

240  Sean D. Kelly Aristotelian logic, laws that stood at the foundation of all traditional late medieval scholastic theology. Nicholas admitted this was true but explained that the rejection was carefully circumscribed. Take the principle of non-contradiction, for example. This applied in the usual ways, according to Nicholas, when dealing with discrete entities: it is logically false of any entity S that it could be both P and not-P for some discrete property P. But God lies beyond all distinction, according to Nicholas: He is not an entity distinct from other entities but is rather the ground of all entities, while not being an entity Himself.3 Indeed, in His infinity, God is the coincidence of opposites according to Nicholas, and to treat Him as simply another being, another entity, is a form of idolatry.4 As a result, the principle of non-contradiction does not apply to God, in Nicholas’ view, nor to the mystical union with God that is the very goal of the Christian life. A second complaint about Cusa’s mystical theology was more complicated. It centered on the question of the respective roles of affect and intellect in the mystical revelation of the divinely hidden God. The terms of this debate had been set already in the 13th century when Albert the Great, the famous teacher of Thomas Aquinas, argued for an intellective rather than an affective reading of the mystical union with God. The lesson of the mystical tradition for Albert is that ‘it is necessary to be united to God through intellect and to praise him by word’ (McGinn 2005: 13).5 Albert’s intellective form of mysticism stood in contrast with an affective form that grounded the mystical ascent to union in an experience of love that stands beyond all cognition (McGinn 2005: 443). This debate, depending as it does upon many and detailed interpretations of the work of the original fifth-century mystic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, extends beyond the purview of this chapter. What is interesting to us, instead, is the way it impinges on many neighboring debates and in particular on the question of what it means to see God, in His divine hiddenness, in the form of the face-to-face vision that is promised in several Biblical texts.6 In His divine infinity, as the coincidence of opposites, Nicholas’ God is the essence of what is inhuman. And yet paradoxically to gaze upon Him, and to be gazed upon by Him, is the highest form of human being. The treatise that Nicholas sent to the community at Tergensee in October of 1453 is devoted to the exploration of this kind of inhuman gaze. The goal of Nicholas’ book is to provide a series of exercises in seeing, hearing, moving, and speaking that will lead his monastic audience towards what he calls the ‘wonders which are revealed beyond all sensible, rational, and intellectual sight’ (Hopkins 1985: 680). It is to prove to them, in other words, the ‘ready accessibility of mystic theology’. De Visione Dei – On the Vision of God – is the title by which we now know this treatise. The genitive form of the Latin word for God – Dei – is purposely ambiguous. God is both the subject whose vision is directed towards us, at all times and from all places, and also the object of our own vision in the mystical experience.

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 241 The gaze of God is inhuman, for Nicholas, not only because God, as the coincidence of opposites, is not an entity. It is moreover because, as a result, there is no single place in space or time from which God gazes upon us. Or rather, He gazes upon us from every place at once – His gaze is omnivoyent. The vision of the all-seeing God is a staple of mystical visionary texts. One thinks, for instance, of the ‘Vision of the Iron Mountain’, from

Image 15.1 Image of The Iron Mountain, by Hildegard of Bingen from the Scivias-Kodex which belongs to Abbey of St Hildegard at Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany. Permission kindly granted by Sr. Philippa Rath.

242  Sean D. Kelly the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179).7 At the bottom of the mountain stands a figure who represents the Timor Domini, the fear of God. The image is a reference to the line in Psalm 111: Initium sapientiae timor Domini.8 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The figure representing the fear of the Lord in Hildegard’s vision is a body covered entirely with eyes. God’s inhuman and omnivoyant gaze upon us is the beginning of wisdom, in the mystic tradition, because to experience the world as replete with God’s vision is to experience oneself as looked over by, cared for, and in that way dependent upon God. But the inhuman gaze, in its omnivoyance, is not entirely reassuring, either: in revealing our dependence upon God, and in this way, therefore, our finitude, it essentially involves the recognition of our lack of control over ourselves and the world and the fear and anxiety that go along with that. The trick of Christian faith, on such an account, is to recognize this utter lack of control while at the same time finding certainty and joy within it. It is an impossible, an absurd, a paradoxical task. Søren Kierkegaard describes it well. It is like, he says, the dancer who, having leapt high into the air, lands straight into a definite position with absolute and unwavering certainty. Indeed, even in the very midst of the leap, at the utter apex of its riskiness, he has already assumed with certainty the final position. ‘[S]o that not for a second’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself’ (Kierkegaard 2003: 70). God’s particular kind of inhuman gaze, in this tradition, grounds the possibility of such a leap. The temporal nature of this leap, in Kierkegaard’s description, is notable. It is as if at every moment of his life the person of faith experiences that moment – even in its utter riskiness, indeed in full recognition of its utter and irrevocable finitude – as a moment that already has in it the future certainty of the unwavering position in which he will land. Indeed, in some paradoxical sense, he recognizes this future position as the one in which he has already landed, despite that event’s nevertheless remaining in the future. This forward-aiming experience of the present is at the foundation of Augustine’s description of time in Book XI of the Confessions, and it grounds his understanding of the Christian virtue of hope. But it has a more prosaic application as well. When Merleau-Ponty describes the temporality of the act of grasping an object – ‘from the moment of its initiation,’ he says, ‘the grasp is already at its endpoint’9 – he too is describing the way the future is already involved in the present (see also Mooney 2020: 73). And Nicholas’ Christian form of this proleptic present, replete with its anticipatory joy, is grounded in the knowledge of God’s omnivoyant gaze. The trick, then, the beginning of wisdom, is to be able to recognize that gaze as inhabiting the whole of everything that is. This is quite a feat. It is one thing to be able to see that the chair is black or that the snow is white. It is one thing to be able to see Beatrice’s

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 243 green eyes or Mary’s dark hair. But to see all of that – indeed to see every property of every object as being the way it is – and at the same time to experience in and through each and every one of these objects the very essence of the vision of God: that is quite another thing. It is as if, one must say, everything looks to be the same but nevertheless one experiences it all as utterly different. One experiences not only what it is now, but also the certain joy towards which it is proceeding. And that is precisely the gestalt shift that Nicholas’ exercises are meant to bring about: a shift in the experience of the whole. And these exercises crucially depend upon an icon, a painting, of a figure that sees. Along with his treatise, Nicholas sent to the monks at Tergensee an icon, a picture. The picture itself is of a type that Nicholas says he has seen elsewhere. He lists a now lost painting by Roger van der Weyden10 along with several others. What these images all have in common, and what Nicholas finds notable about the icon he has sent to Tergensee, is that the image they depict contains a peculiar feature: it is ‘of someone omnivoyant, so that his face, through subtle pictorial artistry, is such that it seems to behold everything around it’ (De Vision Dei, ch. 2: 680). Using this icon Nicholas prescribes a practice that the community of monks is to engage in. This practice has three phases.11 First, having hung the icon upon the north wall of an appropriate room, the brothers are to stand around it, a short distance from it, and observe it. Each brother will have the solitary experience of being looked upon by the image in the painting. Each is to relish and marvel at this experience of being seen in all his particularity by such a being, or at any rate by the image of such a being. He is to luxuriate in the experience of seeing himself being gazed upon. This experience of being seen by the image is not identical with the experience of being seen by God. But it is sufficiently similar that Nicholas hopes, by analogy, the monks will achieve the second experience by means of the first. For one thing, both the icon and God are manifestations of the inhuman gaze. But more importantly, the icon’s gaze will eventually become, through the kind of miraculous transformation inherent in Nicholas’ exercise, the site of the very gaze of God himself. Or at least it will become one of the infinitely many places from which one experiences such a gaze. Second, having achieved this experience of being seen, having felt the vision of another upon you, the monks are to take up a different position in the room. As each reaches his new position, he is to attend to the way the icon’s gaze still seems to be upon him. Knowing that the icon is stationary, each monk begins to feel a sense of amazement, begins to marvel at, the ‘changing of the unchangeable gaze’. Moreover, if the monk fixes his sight upon the icon while walking from one point to another, he should notice the way the icon’s gaze ‘proceeds continually with him’ and does not desert him. ‘He will marvel’, Nicholas writes, ‘at how the icon’s

244  Sean D. Kelly

Image 15.2 Image of Portrait of a Woman by Rogier van der Weyden. Permission kindly granted by Sabine Schumann, Picture Research, bpkBildagentur, Berlin, Germany.

gaze is moved immovably’ (De Vision Dei, ch. 4: 681). The gaze seems directed at the monk in all his particularity, at and throughout whatever points in space and time he happens to occupy. Finally, there is an intersubjective aspect to the experience as well. Although one could not possibly use the resources of one’s imagination to apprehend the fact – it is beyond what one could conjecture on one’s own – nevertheless at the same time the gaze is following one monk, it is following each of the others as well. To gain the experience of this

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 245 phenomenon, one needs only to partner with another monk, stand some distance apart, and walk towards one another. As the partners walk in opposite directions, each is to behold the continual gaze of the icon upon himself. When they meet, and share their experiences, they will marvel at the way the gaze moves simultaneously in opposite directions. ‘You too?’ each will exclaim to the other. And through the belief they have in the description of one another’s experiences – this trust in the sincerity of one another’s speech seems to be crucial – each will come to experience this impossible possibility, that the gaze of the unmovable face not only moves continually, but it moves continually in every direction. Nicholas summarizes the effect as follows: And while he considers that this gaze does not desert anyone, he sees how diligently it is concerned for each one, as if it were concerned for no one else, but only for him who experiences that he is seen by it. This impression is so strong that the one who is being looked upon cannot even imagine that [the icon] is concerned for another. [The one who is pondering all this] will also notice that [the image] is most diligently concerned for the least of creatures, just as for the greatest of creatures and for the whole universe. On the basis of such a sensible appearance as this, I propose to elevate you very beloved brothers, through a devotional exercise, unto mystical theology. (De Vision Dei, chs 4–5: 681–682) I conclude this first part of the paper with some observations about Nicholas’ conception of the inhuman gaze in its godly form. The point of mystical theology, as Nicholas conceives it, is to bring about the actual experience of the presence of an infinite and infinitely inhuman God, an experience that cannot be had without amazement and wonder. Wonder is, as Heidegger insists, an affective experience of the whole, a mood that pervades everything and stands as the background to and determination of what can be presented as a thing at all.12 The inhuman gaze of God in the mystical theological tradition is pervasive in precisely this way. Because of this, one cannot achieve its experience through imagination or cognition, which are spontaneous acts of the will directed at particular objects. Rather, one must undertake the practical exercise of moving through the world with others attentive to and opened upon the continuous and non-locatable experience of being seen. This reflective experience of seeing oneself being seen is, in its essence, potentially tied up with the mood of wonder. It is one of the many kinds of experience of ourselves as opening out upon the world that can be tied to wonder in this way, even if this is a particular form locatable at a particular point in the history of medieval

246  Sean D. Kelly Christianity. Indeed, the relation between wonder and seeing oneself seen is built into the very vocabulary of medieval Latin. It is not an accident that the Latin verb miror, mirari, miratus sum – from which our English noun mirror derives directly – means to be amazed at, to look at with wonder. In this way, perhaps, the medieval practice of mystical theology is linked to the original conception of philosophy. As Plato and Aristotle both remind us, philosophy itself begins in wonder (Plato Theaetetus: 155d; Aristotle Metaphysics: 982b12). If Heidegger is right, then we should read this beginning as an experience of the whole – an experience of everything that is. In particular, it is an experience of being astonished that everything that is, is there at all, and that it is there in the way that it is. This experience would have involved essentially, at the beginning of philosophy, an experience of the contingency of being – of its not having to have been the case that there is what there is, or that there is what there is in the way that it is. This experience of the contingency of being – and the related experience of our dependence upon its being that way – evokes an overall experience of wonder that perhaps gives us a clue to what it might have meant to say that philosophy begins in wonder. If this is right, it may help to explain Pierre Hadot’s famous claim (Hadot 1995) that from the earliest times philosophy in the Ancient World was not a mere intellectual pursuit but a way of life. If the wonder at the beginning of philosophy essentially involves a sensitivity to the contingency of what is and its way of being, then this sensitivity is not achievable through imagination or cognition, but through practice. Whatever the status of Hadot’s claim, however, it seems certain that by the time of the High Middle Ages, philosophy had become something quite different. Indeed, in his commentary upon Book X of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Albert distinguishes explicitly between philosophy and the kind of mystical theology he is interested in: The philosopher contemplates God insofar as he takes him in some kind of demonstrative conclusion, but the theologian contemplates him as he exists beyond reason and understanding. . . . The theologian depends upon the First Truth for its own sake and not because of reason, though he has reason too. Hence, the theologian remains in awe, but not the philosopher. (Super Ethicam ad Nichomachum, Liber X, lectio XVI [Op. Col. XIV.2:775.3–13]. In McGinn op cit: 18) Nicholas’ devotional practice of attending with others to the omnivoyant gaze of an inanimate object is one of the ways that the inhuman gaze may ground the possibility of awe or wonder.

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 247

II This brings us to the second, and shorter, part of my exploration. It begins with the observation that wonder is not the only possible mood in which to experience the inhuman and omnivoyant gaze of God. One might come to experience it instead, and to experience the aspect of our finitude that it brings to the fore, not with wonder but with a certain kind of impatience. One might, for instance, experience it as an inappropriately felt limitation upon human possibility. Friedrich Nietzsche feels the possibility of an all-seeing God this way. He tells a characteristic story in the Preface to the Gay Science. Commenting upon a famous poem by Schiller about some Egyptian youths who sneak into the town center to uncover a perpetually and symbolically veiled statue, Nietzsche writes: And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything. ‘Is it true that God is present everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I think that’s indecent’ – a hint for philosophers. (Nietzsche 1974) Nietzsche’s aim is the opposite of Nicholas’. Nietzsche believes that there is something indecent, appalling, something in bad taste, about the idea of a God who sees everything. And he believes that the related idea of a pure and unveiled truth is naïve. Truth understood in this way is tied inexorably to the idea that God’s view reveals things as they are, reveals, as Nicholas says, ‘the substance of things’. But the will to truth, the will to see things in their unvarnished form, as one might in the context of the mystic union with God – this will to truth is a kind of madness, a kind of disease for Nietzsche. Indeed, it is a disease that hides the true health of humanity, the health grounded in a positive nihilism that recognizes no limitation or boundary that the world places upon us, seeing it instead as a canvas upon which one must paint a masterpiece. ‘Give style to one’s existence!’ Nietzsche exhorts (Nietzsche 1974: §290). Experience the

248  Sean D. Kelly whole not as thoroughly invested with the omnivoyant gaze of God but as the unbounded sea waiting for us to will a meaning upon it (Nietzsche 1974: §124).13 Like Nicholas, Nietzsche recognizes that one cannot bring about this gestalt shift, this change in the mood of existence, through an argument. Nietzsche’s writing – from his genealogies to his aphorisms to his parables and poetry – are all meant to ‘soften the heart’ of his reader, to use Montaigne’s lovely phrase (de Montaigne 2003: 3).14 Like Pascal before him, Nietzsche knows that one cannot will oneself to a whole new mood, nor can one be argued into it. To achieve a whole gestalt shift in our experience – to bring it about that people see the world as fully replete with God’s gaze or indeed as fully lacking it – one must use rhetoric and practice, not argument and will. Furthermore, one must be called to bring about such a change, experience it as necessary or ‘needful’, as Nietzsche himself does when he aims to bring about our experience of ourselves as the site of will to power. ‘For one thing is needful’, he writes. ‘[T]hat a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art’ (Nietzsche 1974: §290). Nicholas and Nietzsche both experience the world as already demanding of them that they bring others to see it in the way they do. And in a sense, they were both successful – the world looked different, as a whole, after Nicholas’ work took root and after Nietzsche’s did as well. It is Nietzsche’s success, for instance, that explains Camus’ ability to articulate so well the experience of our existence as absurd: on the one hand demanding the world to be meaningful and significant, while on the other hand recognizing its utter incapacity to be that way. And it is why in the contemporary world we can come to have experienced the utter lack of God’s infinite and inhuman gaze, or else to have experienced it as having taken an utterly debased form. Perhaps the best example of this is found in a short story by Kafka, a story that was central to Adorno’s argument for what he called an ‘inverted theology’.15 In the story, Kafka presents the debased image of God in a creature called Odradek. Far from being omnivoyant, Odradek sees the world from a completely neglected and estranged point of view. His gaze too is inhuman, however, not because it is omnivoyant as the gaze of Nicholas’ God was, but because it is the never-dying manifestation of a suffering that makes our own actual despair seem insignificant. The story portrays, as Adorno writes, ‘hell seen from the perspective of salvation’ (Adorno 1983: 269). I end with this story not because I think, as Adorno does, that the mood of estrangement in which Kafka experiences the world is the correct one. Nor do I think, as some nostalgic types might, that the mood of wonder at God’s omnivoyance in which Nicholas experiences the world is to be retrieved. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of these opposites that

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 249 strikes me as worthy of note. Perhaps, in the recognition that both of these moods are possibilities for us, and that therefore each is contingent and dependent upon both our practices for evoking them and our sensitivity for the need to do so, we can find the courage to stand in wonder before what is. Perhaps, in other words, we can manage to adopt the posture of the phenomenological reduction, as Merleau-Ponty understands it: the posture of ‘wonder in the face of the world’.16 I end therefore, with Kafka’s story, in its entirety, which is called ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. It is short. The Cares of a Family Man Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word. No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat starshaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not

Image 15.3 Image of Odradek by Elena Villa Bray. The artist has generously made this image available through the creative commons.

250  Sean D. Kelly only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of. He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him – he is so diminutive that you cannot help it – rather like a child. ‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance. I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful (Kafka, ‘The Cares of a Family Man’).

Notes 1. Michel de Certeau. See pp. 2–3 for some discussion of the context of Cusa’s De Visione Dei. Certeau’s paper brought about a revival of interest in Nicholas, who had been introduced to the modern world by Ernst Cassirer in his 1927 book Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, first translated into English in 1963. For a more recent philosophical account, see Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen: Nicholas of Cusa’s Contribution in De Visione Dei.’ 2. See McGinn 2005, Chapter 10, ‘Nicholas of Cusa on Mystical Theology,’ pp. 432–483, esp. p. 452 for the description of Cusa’s ‘great legation.’ 3. See McGinn, (op. cit.) p. 446 for a brief discussion. This kind of non-ontotheological account of the ground of being bears an important, and non-accidental, family resemblance with Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, and

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 251 his proposed alternative to it. Heidegger’s position is often traced back to his reading of Meister Eckhart’s (1260–1328) mysticism, and indeed, Wenck drew an explicit connection between the ‘learned ignorance’ that Nicholas proposed as the key to mystical theology and the ‘detachment’ (Gelassenheit) that Meister Eckhart had described nearly two centuries earlier. Wenck heaped vitriol upon them equally. He says, for instance: ‘From this it is clear how much poisoning of knowledge and morals this most abstract understanding, called learned ignorance, or in the vernacular “detached living”, has caused’ [From Wenck, De Ignota Litteratura, 31: 22–24. Quoted in McGinn 2005: 447]. The importance of Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit for later Heidegger is well-known. It would be interesting to think of Heidegger’s discussion, however, in the context of Nicholas’ work. 4. See McGinn’s discussion (op. cit.) at p. 443. Nicholas’ idea that God is the coincidence of opposites recalls Kierkegaard’s related account of God. For Kierkegaard, God is that all things are possible. It would be worthwhile to think more about the relation between the possibility of all possibilities and impossibilities, on the one hand, and the coming together of all things and their opposites on the other. 5. Super Mystica Theologia 2 (Op. Col. XXXVII.2: 465:8–9). Quoted in McGinn, op. cit., p. 13. 6. The power of seeing God and the face of God – see, Exodus 33:20; Matthew 5:8; John 3:2; John 1:18; Isaiah 6:5; Hebrews 4:13; Ezekiel 1:1; Genesis 46:2; Genesis 32:30; Psalms 68:2. 7. Hildegard von Bingen. The title Scivias is from the Latin phrase Sci vias Domini: ‘Know the Ways of the Lord’. The passage describing the vision of the Iron Mountain (Scivias I.1) reads as follows: I saw the likeness of a great mountain the colour of iron, and on it sat a figure in great brightness, so bright that it dazzled my eyes. Light-filled shadows stretched out on either side: they were wings of astounding breadth and height. And before this figure, at the roots of the mountain, there stood an image covered with eyes, and because of the eyes I could not make out the human form beneath. And in front of her was the figure of a child dressed in a pale tunic and white shoes. I could not see her face because of the bright light pouring down on her head from the man seated on the mountain. But many living sparks sprang forth from the man on the mountain and hovered round these figures most pleasingly. In the mountain itself many small windows were visible, at which there appeared the faces of men, some pale, some pure. 8. Something close to this line is repeated at Proverbs 1:7: timor Domini principium scientiae sapientiam atque doctrinam stulti despiciunt. The fear of the Lord is the foundation of knowledge; It is fools who scorn wisdom and instruction. And again at Proverbs 9:10: principium sapientiae timor Domini et scientia sanctorum prudentia. The first step to wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and knowledge of the Most Holy One is understanding. 9. ‘While listening to beautiful music: the impression that this movement that starts up is already at its endpoint, which it is going to have been, or [that it is] sinking into the future that we have a hold of as well as of the past – although we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated retrospection – Retrograde movement in futuro: it comes down towards me entirely done’ (Merleau-Ponty 2001). 10. Nicholas recalled, ‘Rogier van der Weyden’s self-portrait (now lost except as a copy in a tapestry in the Brussel’s town hall), the eyes of which seemed to follow the observer no matter where one stood’ (Smith 2004: 41).

252  Sean D. Kelly 11. The three phases of the exercise are described in De Visione Dei, chapters 3–5, pp. 680–682. 12. See Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions in Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”. This is the lecture course from 1938. See especially the discussion of wonder, and its distinction from curiosity, in Chapter 5, pp. 131–164. 13. See §124 of The Gay Science for some discussion of the freedom of the sea. 14. See Essay 1, ‘We reach the same end by discrepant means’, the initial essay in Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 3. 15. See Peter Gordon’s book Adorno and Existence for a discussion of Kafka and Adorno. 16. ‘Perhaps the best formulation of the reduction is the one offered by Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink when he spoke of a “wonder” before the world’ (2006: xv, 2012: lxxvii).

Reference List Adorno, Theodor. [1967] 1983. Notes on Kafka. In Prisms. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Aristotle. 350 BCE. Metaphysics. W.D. Ross (trans.). http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html Cusa, Nicholas. [1453] 1985. De Visione Dei. In Jasper Hopkins (ed.) Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study. Minneapolis, MN: The Arthur J. Banning Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1987. The gaze of Nicholas of Cusa. Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 17 (3): 2–38. de Montaigne, Michel. 2003. Complete Essays. M.A. Screech (trans.). London and New York: Penguin Books. Gordon, Peter E. 2016. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Arnold Davidson (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Heidegger, Martin. [1984] 1994. Basic Questions in Philosophy: Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kafka, Franz. [1948] 1971. The cares of a family man. In The Complete Stories. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (trans.). New York: Schocken Books, 469–470. Kierkegaard, Søren. [1843] 2003. Fear and Trembling, 1st ed. Alastair Hannay (trans.). London: Penguin Classics. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2016. Seeing or seeing oneself seen: Nicholas of Cusa’s contribution in De Visione Dei. The Journal of Religion, 96 (3): 305–331. McGinn, Bernhard. 2005. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 2006. The Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). New York and London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. [1945] 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. Donald Landes (trans.). New York and London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2001. Deux notes inédites sur la musique. Two Unpublished Notes on Music. Leonard Lawlor (trans.). Chiasmi International, n.s., 3: 18.

Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze 253 Mooney, Timothy. 2020. On eliminativism’s transient gaze. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (eds.) Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1887. The Gay Science. 1974. Walter Kaufmann (trans.). New York: Vintage Books and Random House. Plato. Theaetetus. Benjamin Jowett (trans.). http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/theatu. html Smith, Pamela H. 2004. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16 What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? Rosi Braidotti

Introduction Discussions about the human, and more specifically what constitutes the basic unit of reference to define what counts as human, are not what they used to be. For instance, the questions ‘What do you mean by human?’, ‘Are we human enough?’, or ‘What is human about the academic humanities?’ are not ones that we – humanities scholars – have been accustomed to asking. Tradition and the force of habit encourage us to delegate to anthropologists and biologists all scientific discussions about ‘Man’, while we in the humanities just take it for granted. Our focus is Mankind, or civilization (always assumed to be Western), and the question of human rights. Of course, ancient disciplines like philosophy do question the identity of the human, but repeatedly re-cast it in the dominant format of the ‘Man of reason’ (see Lloyd 1984, 2004) within the entrenched protocols and methods of disciplinary thinking. There it conventionally falls into a pattern of dualistic oppositions that define Man mostly by what it is not (that is to say not a woman/animal/earth-other). Man coincides with his transcendental consciousness, whereas woman coincides with immanence, and animal with non-rational, instinct-driven life. John Mullarky (2013) wittily observes, for instance, that the animal provides an index of death for Derrida, an index of life for Deleuze, and an index of de-humanization for Agamben, to name just a few of the attempts to grapple with defining these entities. What is evident is that these binary oppositions are fundamental – definition by negation – and moreover they are structured within a humanistic vision of Man as the rational, thinking being par excellence. This paper seeks to interrogate these issues in light of the recent debates informed by postphenomenology and critical posthumanism; the key motivating question – what counts as human or inhuman right now?

Two Starting Assumptions To begin I would like to clarify two key assumptions that often insinuate themselves into the discussions without explicit acknowledgement. First, the designation ‘human’ is not a neutral term. Being recognized as human has been, and continues to be in certain circumstances, a privilege that

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 255 only some can afford to take for granted, while others have to fight for it. This term human is not merely not neutral, it is politically charged: it is a term that indexes access to rights-of-passage, of citizenship, of belonging, and is power-driven. The second assumption that we must foreground is that the posthuman condition encourages us to move beyond these habits of designation and the philosophical anthropocentrism they entail: we simply cannot start from the centrality and the exceptionalism of the human as the thinking being and uphold the old dualities that separate him from the animals, the robots and the weird monsters that Descartes obsesses about (Daston and Park 1998). But this acknowledgment of the non-exceptional nature of the human does not inevitably throw us into immoral disconnection from our own kind, it does not plunge us into the abyss of neobestiality or the terror of extinction. There has to be some other middle ground, another milieu. Posthuman scholarship is constructing new middle grounds to come to terms with this challenge (Braidotti 2019).

Methodology My method is materialist, but not in the reductive sense of the materialism defended in recent times by philosophers such as J. J. C. Smart, D. M. Armstrong and David K. Lewis (and those who have developed their own materialisms in response to these thinkers) or even the current neurocentrism (‘You are your brain’) that is dominating the human sciences; rather the materialism I draw on is materialist in the sense of being embodied, embedded, and situated, that is to say accountable. This approach, while also being conspicuous in enactivism and its progenitor phenomenology, is drawn from the feminist tradition of the politics of locations (Rich 2003) and standpoint theory (Harding 1986, 1991), also known as situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). I have reworked this feminist approach with a vital form of materialism in a nomadic philosophy of becoming (Braidotti [1994] 2011). This approach emphasizes the need to think from your own lived experience, not from some abstract, disembodied and dis-embedded position. Immanence, not transcendental universalism, is a more relevant way to approach the issue of the human. But that does not mean that we fall headlong into relativism: feminist philosophy has replaced discriminatory categories based on Eurocentric, masculinist, anthropocentric, and heteronormative assumptions, with robust alternatives. This produces grounded, cross-over positions and knowledge claims that can accommodate both the fact of material embodiment and the differential perspectivism central to this approach.

The Question of Definitions I have defined ‘the posthuman condition’ as our historical condition and not some future dystopia (Braidotti 2013). Furthermore, to be very clear,

256  Rosi Braidotti I approach the posthuman as an affirmative condition, not as a terminal crisis. The posthuman condition is the convergence, across the spectrum of cognitive capitalism (Moulier-Boutang 2012), of post-humanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other. The former focusses on the critique of the humanist Eurocentric ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal ‘measure of all things’, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and human exceptionalism. Equally inter-disciplinary in character, they are linked to separate social movements and to different theoretical and disciplinary genealogies that do not necessarily follow from each other. You can be critical of western humanism and remain perfectly anthropocentric (Said 2004) or critique anthropocentrism but cling to humanistic values (Bostrom 2014). The convergence of these critical positions is not a harmonious synthesis; it is a highly contentious domain, and it is currently producing a chain of theoretical, social, and political effects and a qualitative leap in new conceptual directions. The controversies notwithstanding, I want to stress the convergence factor, in view of the increasing forms of new segregation that are occurring in contemporary scholarship, such as, the work on AI, on the Anthropocene, on the new political economy of post-work, on climate change, on extinction, etc. These are all are producing their own respective takes on the human/non-human independently of one another. But what remains problematic is that these new separations do not help construct the kind of trans-disciplinary task force we would need to address the complexity of issues confronting us in the posthuman predicament. The posthuman predicament confronts us with a fundamental tension: ‘we’ may well be confronting the threats and challenges of the third millennium together, but ‘we’ are not One, or the Same; we are differently positioned in terms of power, entitlement, and access to the very technologies that have come to define us. ‘We’ are not a homogeneous, unitary notion, but a complex and diverse one, which reflects the multiple differences that compose ‘us’. ‘We’ – the human and non-human inhabitants of this particular planet – are currently positioned between the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab 2015) and the Sixth Extinction (Kolbert 2014). To describe these locations as contradictory does not even begin to approximate the tensions and paradoxes they generate. Neither universalistic notions of ‘Man’ nor exceptional claims for ‘Anthropos’ are credible assumptions to explain how knowledge is being produced and distributed in the era of high technological mediation and ecological disaster, also known as the Anthropocene. Again, let me stress that this awareness need not lead us to relativism but rather to differential materially located positions: the neo-materialist politics of immanence (Deleuze 2003). This is also known as perspectivism – a notion dear to anthropologists (Descola 2009) that Spinoza and Leibnitz explore in philosophy and one that feminist (Haraway 2016), black, post-colonial, and indigenous thinkers are developing today (Viveiros de

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 257 Castro 1998). Unless one is at ease with such multi-dimensional complexity, one cannot feel at home in the 21st century. In what follows I detail some of the key aspects of this neo-materialist politics of immanence.

The Double Structure of the Present The present, contrary to common assumptions, is neither a point in time nor a static bloc, but a continuous flow pointing in different directions at once. As nomadic subjects-in-process, in perpetual becoming, thinking about the present confronts but also exceeds the immediate conditions we inhabit. The actual and the virtual encompass both the loss and the regeneration, as part of the continuum generated by a philosophy of immanence and dynamic processes of becoming, not of transcendence. I invite you accordingly to think of the posthuman present as both the record of what we are ceasing to be (the actual) and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming (the virtual). It is not a binary opposition but the simultaneous occurrence of multi-directional processes: and it is this compounding complexity which is shaping what it means to be human and ‘inhuman’ right now. What is happening to our sense of being human today, in this ‘posthuman’ age, marked by scientific and technological advances on the one hand, and by the recurrence of structural injustices and exclusions, climate change, and global warming on the other?

The Anthropocene and Climate Change The Anthropocene is the geological time during which humanity’s negative effect upon the planet’s health and sustainability has reached empirically measurable levels (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The impact is multi-layered, and it mobilizes our multiple ecologies of belonging (Guattari 2000), triggering unprecedented problems of an environmental, social-economical, as well as affective and psychical character. My position is that the posthuman condition includes, but also exceeds, the specific framework of the Anthropocene, which is a popular – albeit controversial – notion in the scientific community. The crisis of the Anthropocene is in fact compounded by the combination of fast technological advances on the one hand and the exacerbation of economic and social inequalities on the other, making for a multi-faceted and conflict-ridden landscape. In some way, simply referring to the Anthropocene begs the question. New notions and terms are needed to address the constituencies and configurations of the present and to map future directions. We need more conceptual creativity – a renewed trust in the cognitive and political importance of the imagination. Moreover, even as a relative neologism, the Anthropocene has already become another meme: Anthropomeme (Macfarlane 2016), spawning

258  Rosi Braidotti several alternative terms, such as Chthulucene (Haraway 2016); Capitalocene (Moore 2013), Anthropo-scene (Lorimer 2017), Anthrobscene (Parikka 2015), Plastic-ene (New York Times 2014), Plantationcene (Tsing 2015), and Mis-anthropocene (Clover and Spahr 2014). The terminological vitality here reflects the speedy and self-replicating mental habits and discursive economy of our times. It also expresses both the excitement and the exasperation involved in attempting to account for the posthuman predicament within the Anthropocenic frame. I propose therefore to widen the picture and add some complexity by looking at the posthuman as a convergence. To analyze it, I propose to focus on the issue of subjectivity – what kind of subjects are we becoming in this internally fractured context? At the core of our predicament is the unprecedented degree of technological mediation we have reached and the intimacy we have developed with the technological devices. The posthuman condition, with its distinctive combination of speedy transformations and persistent inequalities, is planetary and multi-scalar (Fuller 2005; Terranova 2004). It affects social and environmental ecologies as well as individual psychic and shared emotional landscapes. But because ‘we’ differ in our materially embedded positions of power/access/entitlements, ‘we’ experience the Anthropocene in dramatically different ways. Wealth, class, race and ethnicity, gender and sex, good health and physical abilities all affect our relationship to the spectre of extinction – of humans as well as non-humans. To some, this apocalyptic vision is unthinkable (Ghosh 2016) but also unstoppable as a dramatic planetary issue (Lovelock 2009; Latour 2017) affecting all the human and non-human inhabitants of the planet – fish, bees, animals, and plants (Alaimo 2016). The excess and waste of capitalist consumption (plastic, discarded electronic devices, etc.) and the ravages of extraction economies are the main cause. To others, however, this fear of extinction looks like a massive attack of white (Bignall, Hemming and Rigney 2016; Whyte 2013; Todd 2016), middle-aged, anthropocentric panic (Klein 2019). While for yet another constituency, the posthuman is a pretext for enhancement (Bostrom 2014), space-travel, techno-immortality, genetic enhancement (Kurzweil 2005), gender reassignment (Halberstam and Livingston 1995), cyborg implants, etc. What is becoming increasingly evident is that one way or the other, this particular conjuncture forces us to address what binds us together, to what an extent we can say that “we” are in this predicament together. One of the most important and complex intersections in this discussion is between European philosophy, transnational environmental justice (Nixon 2011), and indigenous epistemologies (Moreton-Robinson 2003, 2009; Todd 2015; Whyte 2016, 2017), especially in Australia. The point is this: we need to learn to address these contradictions not only intellectually, but also affectively and to do so in an affirmative manner. This conviction rests on the ethical imperative that I draw

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 259 from contemporary readings of Spinoza by Lloyd (1994, 1996) and Deleuze (1988, 1990). It is important to be worthy of our times, the better to act upon them, in both a critical and a creative manner. We should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mind-sets and established values. We need affirmative values. At the same time, ‘we’ should acknowledge that our current sense of togetherness is fractured and fraught with contractions. And so, there is an urgency underscoring all efforts to construct a sense of subjectivity/citizenship that can help us here and now.

General Melancholia It is undeniable, however, that the posthuman condition makes for swinging moods, which alternate moments of euphoria at the thought of the astonishing technological advances ‘we’ are accomplishing and periods of anxiety in view of the exceedingly high prize ‘we’ – both human and non-humans – are paying for these transformations. We are caught in contradictory pulls and spins that take their toll emotionally and psychically and call for constant negotiations with the technological apparatus that seems to control our existence. As inhabitants of this planet, alongside many non-human ones, we are fatally attracted to the depiction of self-destruction. The imaginary of science-fiction disaster is alive and well in the context of posthuman issues, as illustrated by the success of movies such as ‘Collision Earth’ (2010), Mad Max ‘Fury Road’ (2015), the game ‘Fallout 4’ (2015), ‘The Wave’ (2015), ‘Geostorm’ (2017), and just last year ‘The Wandering Earth’ (2019). Catastrophe films make huge financial gains because they are a much sought-after genre. They play a significant role in shaping the social imaginary about the posthuman convergence, notably on the Anthropocene side. Serious social thinkers from different political backgrounds, however, such as Habermas (2003), Fukuyama (2002), Sloterdijk (2009), and Derrida (in Borradori 2003) have also expressed concern bordering on moral panic about the status of the human in our advanced technological times. Recently, Pope Francis (2015) joined this debate, supplementing Catholic dogma on Natural Law with Naomi Klein’s analysis of the destructive role of capitalism (Klein 2014). My argument is quite the opposite: while it is undeniably true that the technological devices today are very alive and the humans quite inert (Haraway 1988), the evidence provided by posthuman scholarship shows not only a ‘crisis’, but also a remarkable upsurge of inspiration and action. This can be shown by the range and quality of the posthuman scholarship being produced, but also by the mass mobilization of youth

260  Rosi Braidotti and others across the globe. We need only mention the impact of Greta Thunberg (2019) on politicians to honour their climate change commitments and implement more vigorous measures to tackle the emergency. Though on the other side of the equation, we can lament the extraordinary and reprehensible greed, ignorance, and ethnocentrism that has seen voters across the globe and tragically in Australia give support to rightwing, climate-change-denying leaders. The catastrophic bush-fires of the Australian summer of 2019–2020 – as well as Black Saturday 2009 – will for years to come bear harrowing testimony to the dangerous ‘inertia’ alerted to by Haraway (1988).

Bio-power and Necro-politics There is much to feel mournful about, but at least some of the manicdepressive moods we are in are a direct effect of the new economy based on bio-genetic and media and information technologies. Advanced capitalism is a spinning machine that perverts global nature as well as global culture (Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000) and subsumes all living materials – human and non-human – to a logic of commodification and consumption. The acceleration in the consumption of commodities to prop up our quantified selves, while promising to deliver hyper-individualism and uniqueness, makes for an unsustainable system – a ‘future eater’ (Flannery 1994) – that erodes its own foundations and sabotages the conditions of possibility for its own future. It might be argued this is nothing new; however, what is new is the speed of the flows of change and the scale of coercive consumption. This acceleration is marked by rapidly changing fashions and ‘next generation’ items, the planned obsolescence of our electronic devices, the overwhelming information overload, as well as the unsustainable speed and pressure of our working lives (see also Wuyts 2020, this volume). As some have cogently argued, what constitutes capital value today is the informational power of living matter itself, its immanent qualities and self-organizing capacity. The bio-genetic structure of contemporary capitalism, supported by global information networks, enhances the ability to generate profits from the scientific and economic comprehension of all that lives – humans and non-humans alike. This includes many classes of disposable humans: underpaid, often unregistered migrant workers who service and provide the manual labour in agriculture, building, transportation, and assembling work. These ‘disposable’ workers constitute the digital proletariat of today. This real-life exploitation co-exists with higher degrees of technological mediation and automation, causing distressing levels of social and economic disparity. The trend is manifest also in what were previously privileged occupations such as those in our government and educational institutions. Again, we note the same paradox of a sophisticated technological apparatus coexisting with the brutal

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 261 casualisation of a precarious work force from whom economic value is mined and extracted to support the privileged few at the top of the corporate hierarchy. Universities in the age of neoliberal governance are not exempt from this (Gill 2010): the existence of a large under-paid untenured staff being often justified as a means of not burdening the university/ institution with expensive academics so as to invest in technologies, new ‘smart’ buildings, and the research time of the chosen few (Silvester 2019). The exceptionally high level of technological mediation we are experiencing is inscribed within the profit axiom. Knowledge about the vital power of matter gets transposed into data banks of bio-genetic, neural, and mediatic information. ‘Data-mining’ includes profiling practices and risk assessments that identify different types or characteristics as strategic targets for investment, but also for our security and surveillance practices. Advanced capitalism, however, is equally ruthless in its exploitation of non-human resources. Our culture has moved even beyond what Vandana Shiva calls ‘bio-piracy’ (1997) and its global proletariat onto more advanced mastery of living matter – through synthetic biology, stem-cell research, gene-editing, robotics, and bio-engineering. Today we re-create lifelines by codes of a bio-genetic and informational nature. Writing and editing code is what we do best. Technological mediation is our second nature – from de-extinction to genetically modified food, Facebook, and Wikileaks. This produces a new political economy: ‘the politics of Life itself’ (Rose 2007), also known as ‘Life as surplus’ (Cooper 2008) or quite simply as the post-genomic economy of ‘biocapital’ (Rajan 2006). The true capital today is the vital, self-organising power of converging technologies whose vitality seems unsurpassable. Examples are synthetic biology, stem cell research, nanotechnologies, robotics, and the neural sciences. The advances are staggering. Artificial meat was first made in 2013 at Maastricht University in the Netherlands from real meat stem cells grown in a lab and mixed with calf serum. The first prototype cost $325,000 but by now that price has dropped to just over $11 for one synthetic burger ($80 per kilogram of meat). It is claimed that these technological advances will bring to an end the exploitation of natural resources and even allow for de-extinction (Minteer 2015) and re-wilding practices (Frasier 2010; Monbiot 2013) in a way that formalizes the de-naturalization of matter. Although this idea is in equal parts liberating and problematic, I am struck by the slightly disgusted reactions it is often met with in public debates. Genetically recombined food? Artificial meat? Most humans shrink at the thought of having their food de-linked from the material animals, plants, or organisms that till now have produced it. A visceral kind of eco-nostalgia seems at work here. The paradoxical result of mining the basic codes of life itself is that it induces, if not the actual erasure, at least the blurring of the categorical

262  Rosi Braidotti distinction between the human and other species when it comes to profiting from them. Seeds, cells, plants, animals, and bacteria – but also codes, algorithms, and networks – fit into this logic of commodification, alongside various specimens of humanity, producing an opportunistic form of post-anthropocentrism that spuriously unifies all the species under the imperative of profit. Evidently, the excesses of the Capitalocene threaten the uniqueness of Anthropos, as well as the sustainability of the planet as a whole.

The Inhuman(e) A few decades ago, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1989) alerted us to the dehumanizing inhumanism of contemporary capitalism and its reductive objectification of humans through technological mediation. But Lyotard also stressed the potential for another kind of inhuman, as the creative capacity to reinvent the human beyond the grand narratives of Eurocentric humanism. As for Deleuze, the actual and the virtual work together in redefining the kind of humans we are capable of becoming. The contemporary world, however, has more than its fair share of inhumane cruelty to account for. The brutality of new power relations has established a necro-political mode of governing, which targets not only the management of the living but also multiple practices of managed decline and dying. Consider the generalized material destruction of human bodies, populations, and the environment through the industrial-scale warfare led by drones and other unmanned vehicles. Think also of the global effects of migration as a result of dispossession, wars, expulsions due to climate change, and terror (Sassen 2014). The refugee camps and other zones of detention are multiplying, as are our militarized borders and humanitarian interventions. Whole sections of humanity are downgraded to the status of infra-humans, extra-territorial, like the refugee and the asylum seekers, whom we treat as alien others, not meant to be here at all. The in-human(e) aspects of the posthuman condition is one of the reasons why I want to foreground the question of the subject and subjectivity, so as to work out what the posthuman may mean for our collective self-understanding and ethical accountability. It is called the ‘necropolitics’ of today – the managed destruction of life (Mbembe 2003). Let it be clear therefore that, far from marking the extinction or the impoverishment of the human, the posthuman condition is a way of reconstituting the human – for some as a return to neo-humanist universalism coupled with forms of enhancement; for others a down-sizing of human arrogance coupled with the acknowledgment of solidarity with other humans. There are many dynamics of subject formation coming into being in this posthuman conjunction, as a result of the dislocation of the grounds on which the human used to be composed and experienced socially.

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 263

Becoming Posthuman The posthuman transition does take a lot of hard work, and our hearts may fail at the thought of what this might demand of us. The feeling of dispossession is acute, with so much information, knowledge, and thinking power now being produced and situated outside the traditional container – which used to be the human mind, embodied in an anthropomorphic frame. What happens when thinking, reasoning, assessing risks, and opportunities are done by algorithmically driven computational networks instead? And when so much of life, living processes of cell formation and spitting, is operated synthetically via stemcell research? Test-tube babies? Artificial meat? As the IA and robotics industry are cloning the neural and sensory systems of other species – dogs for scent, dolphins for sonar, bats for radar, etc. – the human body strikes us as a rather old-fashioned anthropomorphic frame, not quite suited to contain the fast-moving intelligence of our technologies. Obviously, the image of the container is inadequate and needs to be replaced by flows and processes instead. But a switch to process ontologies conceals deeper conceptual challenges: neither on one hand, the holistic organicism reminiscent of early twentieth-century proto-fascist philosophies of Life; nor on the other hand, their polarized opposite – the dismissal of subjectivity altogether, in favor of protocols on non-human reason, is equal to the challenge. What I propose is a shift towards posthuman subject positions, not in order to passively accommodate these transformations, but on the contrary, so as to be able to affect them and shape them in the direction of ethically affirmative and politically sustainable alternatives. Indeed, ‘we’ (the human heirs of western post-modernity) are increasingly burnt out and fatigued while ‘they’ (the technological artefacts we have brought into being) are smarter and more alive than ever (Haraway 1992). Questions about life, living, liveliness, smartness, and of being and remaining alive – and possibly growing even smarter – emerge as necessary and painful knots of contradictions in the multi-layered ecologies that structure the posthuman predicament. Being a posthumanist, I contend, is a non-nostalgic way of acknowledging this pain, of extracting knowledge from it, and re-working it affirmatively.

Posthuman Knowledge Production What is the question of the posthuman? It is a multiplicity, not one single question. It is producing a range of posthumanist positions in keeping with the wide range of humanist positions I already highlighted – for example, insurgent posthumanism (Papadopoulos 2010), speculative posthumanism (Sterling 2012; Roden 2014), cultural posthumanism

264  Rosi Braidotti (Herbrechter 2013), literary posthumanism (Nayar 2013), trans-humanism (Bostrom 2014), meta-humanism (Ferrando 2013), and a-humanism (MacCormack 2014). There is already a posthuman manifesto (Pepperell 2003) and a post-humanities book series (Wolfe 2010). A significant alliance between queer theorists and the science fiction horror genre constitutes a fast-growing posthuman feminist strand. Since the 1970s, feminist writers and literary theorists of science fiction (Kristeva 1980; Barr 1987, 1993; Haraway 1992, 2004; Creed 1993) supported the alliance between women, as the others of Man, and such other ‘others’ as non-whites (postcolonial, black, Jewish, indigenous, and hybrid subject) and non-humans (animals, insects, plants, tress, viruses, and bacteria). Queer theorists, ever alert to the opportunity of exiting the Oedipalised sexual binary system, have equated the posthuman with post-gender and proposed an explicit alliance between extraterrestrial monsters and freaks, social aliens, and queer political subjects (Halberstam 2012). Queering the non-human is now in full swing in a series of variations that include re-thinking sexual diversity based on animal and other organic systems (Giffney and Hird 2008). An array of alternative sexualities and multiple-gender systems have been proposed but also degrees of sexual indeterminacy or indifferentiation, often modelled on the morphology and sexual systems of non-human species including insects (Grosz 1995; Braidotti [1994] 2011, 2002). The creativity and exuberance of the field is such that I attempted to provide a full overview of contemporary enquiries in a new Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018). The institutional answers are equally diversified and dynamic. The Oxford trans-humanists led by Nick Bostrom have set up the Future of Humanity Institute, devoted to human enhancement. The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk attempts to strike a more egalitarian note. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Swedish project of the Post Humanities Hub, directed by Cecilia Asberg, makes a strong social democratic point about equal access and participation in these new technologies. The federally funded German Anthropocene and Technosphere projects, based at the German National Museum and HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin, are collaborating with a vast array of academic institutions, combining the arts, research, and activism in a very innovative manner. Posthumanist research institutes and groups exist now in universities as different as Brock in Canada, N.Y.U., and West Sydney. A Journal of Posthuman Studies already exists, based at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Korea, as does the Trans-Humanities journal. A website on Critical Posthumanism is operated by the Critical Posthumanism Network at the university of Bern. Posthuman scholarship constitutes a trans-disciplinary field that is more than the sum of its parts and points to a qualitative leap towards the construction of different subjects and fields of knowledge – the critical

What Counts as Human/Inhuman Right Now? 265 or nomadic posthumanities (Stimpson 2016). So, this need not be a crisis, but it is in fact a huge growth area. I spoke of ‘creativity’ to designate the proliferation of posthuman terms, concepts, and titles – with an exceptionally high level of neologisms. But is this even the right term? Is this a sign of vitality or a schizoid spin (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)? What kind of accelerations is contemporary posthuman scholarship caught in? What are we to make of this proliferation of discourses? I see it as a paradox of over-exposure and evanescence, which are best read in the context of the complex temporality of the posthuman convergence. As stated at the beginning of this paper, to do justice to the complexity of our times we need to think of the posthuman present as both the record of what we are ceasing to be (the actual) and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming (the virtual). This is not a binary opposition, but the simultaneous occurrence of multi-directional processes: complexity is indeed the issue. As nomadic subjects-in-process, in perpetual becoming, thinking about the present makes us confront but also exceed the immediate conditions we inhabit. If the present is a complex process, critical philosophy cannot stop at the critique of the actual (of what we are ceasing to be) but needs to move on to the creative actualisation of the virtual (of what we are in the process of becoming). The interplay between the present as actual and the present as virtual spells the rhythms of subject formation. In other words, the posthuman predicament is constructed by a major paradox because there is widespread production of knowledge and speculation both in the academy and in society about a category – the human – at the very time when this category has lost all consensus and self-evidence. The paradox at work here is the simultaneous over-exposure and evanescence of the ‘human’ in posthuman discourses and practices: the category emerges as urgent just as it enters a terminal crisis. It does not even hold as a category, other than as an expression of anxiety about survival, plus the fear of loss of privileges. This paradox is not only logical but also ethical-political, and it can be put as a polemical question: ‘Whose crisis is it?’ To what an extent can one speak of an undifferentiated humanity (‘we’) that is allegedly sharing in a common condition of both technological mediation and crisis and extinction (‘this’)? Think, for example, of the classic posthumanist example of Foucault’s (1970) image of the face of ‘Man’ drawn on the sand by the seashore, which is gradually erased by the waves of history. Is it about extinction or renewal? Never mind the social constructivist point about ‘Man’ being a recent invention – what matters here is how Foucault’s genealogical method grapples with this conceptual paradox: it is at the moment of its dissolution that ‘Man’ becomes thinkable as such and emerges as a present concern. Up until that moment it had not surfaced to the critical eye because it functioned as an implicit dominant notion.

266  Rosi Braidotti Maybe this is why, as I stated at the beginning, we have not been trained to question directly the identity of the human in the humanities – this was simply not a question. This is another kind of middle-ground, or milieu, which points to the future – that is to say, to what we are capable of becoming in and out of what we are ceasing to be. On the basis of vital neo-materialism, a number of consequences emerge. It is a becoming other than the Homo Universalis of humanism or other than the Anthropos of anthropocentrism. To cope with it, we need a subtler and more diversified affective range that avoids the polarization between mourning (apocalyptic variant) and celebration (euphoric variable) in relation to humanity as both a vulnerable and an insurgent category. What we do need above all is to develop a specific form of complexity proper to the humanities. The humanities are the subtle, not the soft, sciences. What we do have is complexity, embodied and embedded diversity, and multiple becomings. We are facing the conceptual challenge of having to hold simultaneously in our minds potentially contradictory ideas like materialism and vitality, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction. The task consists in tracking the multiple, grounded, and hence specific and diversified ways in which we are becoming knowing subjects, as ‘otherwise other’ than the dialectical oppositions and pejorative differences posited by classical humanist ‘Man’ and the supremacist assertions of ‘Anthropos’. What this means for the task of posthuman thinkers is that we must be worthy of our times – to interact with them in order to resist them, to differ from them especially when they perpetuate injustice and negativity. We need to detox our thinking from the poison of negative passions like resentment, envy, hatred, despair, but also sheer tedium. The ethical ideal is to aspire to the joyful affirmation of virtual possibilities, of what ‘we’ are capable of becoming. We have to labor towards becoming a new kind of subject that is both immanent to the world – that is to say confident about the world – but critical of its injustices and negativity. Such a subject can only become actualized together with others, in praxis, and action in the world, confronting our differences the better to equalize them.

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17 Beyond Human and Animal Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty Dylan Trigg

Introduction ‘The other’s gaze’. so Merleau-Ponty writes by way of an indirect critique of Sartre, ‘transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 378). In passages such as these, one would be forgiven for thinking that Merleau-Ponty, while not exactly sharing Heidegger’s perspective on animals as worldless, nevertheless exhibits a fundamental ambivalence with respect to human-animal relations. After all, in this passage from Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that an animal’s gaze is objectifying insofar as it precludes a genuine encounter between human and animal, and for this reason leaves little space for shame, embarrassment, or any other exchange that is more than that of an objectifying gaze. From a critical standpoint, reflections of this sort would seem to conform to the worry that phenomenology in its treatment of animals is anthropocentric to the extent that animality is only understandable as a deficient mode of human existence, a point that is reinstated when Merleau-Ponty frames the dog’s silence in terms of a human mode of communication, writing that: ‘A dog’s gaze directed towards me causes me no embarrassment. The refusal to communicate, however, is still a form of communication’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 378). More pressingly, the worry would be that phenomenology’s engagement with the animal is motivated less by a desire to understand the animal as an organism on its own terms anterior to one’s own experience and more to situate the animal in relationship to our own innermost essence. One thinks here above all of Derrida and his reflections on the very usage of the word animal, writing that: Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give. . . . They have given themselves the word in order to corral a

272  Dylan Trigg large number of living beings within a single concept: ‘the Animal,’ they say. And they have given themselves this word, at the same time according themselves, reserving for them, for humans, the right to the word, the name, the verb, the attribute, to a language of words, in short to the very thing that the others in question would be deprived of, those that are corralled within the grand territory of the beasts: the Animal. (Derrida 2008: 400) Taking this reflection from Derrida seriously, the question I would like to pose in this essay is whether phenomenology can (i) negotiate with the concept of animality without reducing it to an inhuman humanity, or, (ii) glorify it as a form of fluid kinship, in which the animal somehow serves as a guide for being human. Both of these modes instrumentalise the animal for the sake of developing an epistemic or ethical value critical to human identity, and for this reason renders the animal a surface upon which our own gaze is reflected back. How to avoid this reduction? To address this question, I turn to the figure of the animal in MerleauPonty’s philosophy. I begin here by considering Merleau-Ponty’s early thoughts on animality, which seem at first glance to be reflective of a tendency to frame the animal in terms of a deficiency. Much is made in Merleau-Ponty scholarship concerning the arc of his philosophy and whether the later thought marks a break from the earlier thought or otherwise deepens it. Of his account of human-animal relations, we are perhaps exposed to the clearest indication of a revision in his thought that indeed constitutes a break. By the end of his life, there is a reversal in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, evidenced by the notion of inter-animality and a ‘strange kinship’ between animal and human, which marks both a point of commonality and divergence between the species and ultimately indexes a ‘wild being’ irreducible to both human and animal. What we will see is that far from appropriating the animal in order to privilege human existence in epistemic and moral terms, Merleau-Ponty’s intervention into the human-animal relation is compelled by a motivation to underscore a continuum between the species, which challenges rather than reinstates the unity of human existence.

The Figure of the Inhuman From the outset, the theme of the inhuman and its adjoining gaze runs throughout Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. True to the currents of his evolving thought, the term inhuman (together with its relation to the animal) is subject to a series of revisions, with each phase marking a critical development in his philosophy. Already in The Structure of Behaviour, MerleauPonty devotes a significant amount of attention to the animal as a ‘vital order’ of life (Merleau-Ponty 1963). What we find in his early thought

Beyond Human and Animal 273 is an account of animal existence that appears to reinstate a hierarchical framework of human-animal relations such that ‘vital behaviours’ peculiar to animality disappear once they are integrated into human order; thus he writes that ‘Man can never be an animal: his life is always more or less integrated than that of an animal’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 181). Much of these early reflections are indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Scheler, and, more specifically, to Scheler’s notion that human existence is marked by a spiritual endeavour that is defined by its contrast to life as a set of biological processes lacking the self-reflexivity, orientation toward truth, and capacity to augment the surrounding world in a way that is peculiar to the spiritual realm. Here, spirit is understood in Scheler’s sense as a reflective gesture that breaks the ecstatic immersion in the world characterising animal existence. But what is notable in this early foray is that Merleau-Ponty departs from Scheler’s insistence that spirit involves the negation of life. For Merleau-Ponty, the movement from animal to human is a question of integration rather than negation, and it is the gesture of integration that distinguishes Merleau-Ponty’s account of animality. The important point to note here is that the integration of life into spirit – or as Merleau-Ponty will rephrase it in Phenomenology of Perception, the prepersonal into the personal – is never complete, but always involves an excess that is resistant to the process of spiritualization or personalization. Life is never left behind once integrated into the soul or spirit. Rather, life inheres at a latent level, functioning as a past that is never absolutely present (Merleau-Ponty 2012) and thus retaining an entire ‘milieu’ peculiar to the organism that I inherit by dint of being a bodily subject. Nothing is annulled in this preservation, but for the most part the retention of a never-absolute past occupies a silent presence in the living body, and it is only in cases of bodily – and thus mental – disintegration that the function of integration becomes clear (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 208). If life takes place at a bodily level, then in ‘cases of disintegration’, so Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘the soul and the body are apparently distinct’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 209). This apparent distinction is not carried out at an ontological level. Rather the advent of dualism that appears for us in moments of disintegration is strictly experiential. Bodily disintegration – be it illness, ageing, neurological disorders, or psychopathological cases – reveal what Merleau-Ponty will describe elsewhere as the ‘inhuman secret of the bodily mechanism’ that is operational throughout perceptual experience (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 66). In such moments, the personal body reveals a level of impersonal existence that is ordinarily concealed in everyday life, but which functions as an anonymous and autonomous source from which sense and meaning emerge. Only then does the body depart from the sense of being ‘one’s own’, revealing itself as having a thinglike quality that is for the most obscured by an aura

274  Dylan Trigg of familiarity. Seen in this way, if bodily disintegration gives voice to an immemorial life that dwells silently within perceptual life, then this does not mean this impersonal existence is peculiar to moments of disintegration. More pervasive than this, the autonomy of anonymous life marks a substructure of perceptual life from the outset, and it is the theme of anonymity that proves central to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the liaison between the human and the animal.

The Anonymity of the Body The genesis of Merleau-Ponty’s account of anonymity is motivated by a desire to account for the structure of perception, where perception is governed by a field of meaning and sense, unifying temporality into an overarching arc of significance. The point of departure is a question that runs throughout his work – namely, who is it that perceives? We generally respond to this question in a self-affirmative way. It is I who perceives the lighthouse appearing from the fog; it is I who perceives the bottle being in front of me and the door a few steps away. I take it upon myself to move through the world, inching and manoeuvring in an intuitive sense. I grasp things, I solicit memories from experience, and I anticipate events that may or may not come to fruition. I look at my own body; it is a mass of space organised into parts, and these parts carry with them an affective energy that are seized with an atmosphere of ownership. My body is the zero point of my directional awareness and sense of self-integrity. Suffering from sickness, I feel my body dissent from me. During moments of fatigue, my body has gone astray, as have I. When it returns to me, then I simultaneously return to myself, to that place where I feel at home in an otherwise uncertain world. Other situations present themselves. A human being has lost his limb. It has been severed and is now an independent object. In the face of this absence, the limb does not remain a mute presence within the life of the amputee; instead, it returns in the form of a phantom presence. Of its own accord, the limb returns to the amputee. In the face of this spectral apparition, life slowly and unevenly regains a familiar tonality. Movement is regained, and sensory experience is reconsolidated into an overarching whole. Other phantoms, less corporeal in nature, appear amongst the wreckage. Phantoms unfold in the midst of where other people once stood: ‘The amputee senses his leg’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘as I can sense vividly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not here before my eyes’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 83). The production of such phantoms is not a pathology to be erased, but a gesture of refortifying the past into the present. The response is no less active in everyday life, as Merleau-Ponty has it: ‘What refuses the mutilation or the deficiency in us is an I that is engaged in a certain physical and inter-human world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 83).

Beyond Human and Animal 275 But who – or what – is this ‘I’ that provides a restorative function in the world? Who is it that enables me to function in the world, to institute meaning, and to integrate a bodily mass of organs into a synthesis capable of walking from one corner of the room to another? And who, above all, is the subject of perception? It is a question that compels Merleau-Ponty’s thought forward. In Phenomenology of Perception this question will be met with several responses. Central to each of them is the notion of an ‘organic thought’ that mediates between the personal and the impersonal, the physical and the psychical, and the human and animal. The notion of an organic thought captures Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on how human existence is characterised by an overarching sense of unity, subtended to at all times by a prepersonal level of corporeal perception, which serves to both cohere the past into the present while at the same time developing an intentional arc that establishes the ‘unity of the senses’ (MerleauPonty 2012: 137). Merleau-Ponty puts the issue as follows: ‘Prior to stimuli and sensible contents, a sort of inner diaphragm must be recognised that . . . determines what our reflexes and our perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the zone of our possible operations, and the scope of our life’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 81). This prepersonal – or, impersonal – inner diaphragm determines not only a highly complex relation to the world, but also the levels and sub-levels of human subjectivity. Indeed, it is thanks to the body in its anonymity and generality that the personalised ‘I’ is able to be situated in the world in the first instance. For Merleau-Ponty, the organisation of the body is not reducible to thematic experience but instead hinges at all times on another layer of intentionality that renders thematic experience possible in the first place. These ‘regions of silence [which] are marked out in the totality of my body’ generate an ambiguous depth in his phenomenology of the body, ambiguous not only in the sense of being a particular kind of object, but also in the sense of never being entirely possessed by the subject, both temporally and spatially (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 84). In an especially critical passage, he writes as follows: A margin of almost impersonal existence thus appears around our personal existence, which, so to speak, is taken for granted, and to which I entrust the care of keeping me alive. Around the human world that each of us has fashioned, there appears a general world to which we must first belong in order to enclose ourselves within a particular world . . . my organism – as a pre-personal adhesion to the form of the of the world, as an anonymous and general existence – plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 86)

276  Dylan Trigg This peculiar structure of an ‘almost impersonal existence’ that keeps me alive renders the body a double-sided entity. Just as it reveals itself to me as an expressive and irreducibly personalised body, so it simultaneously evades me. We are subjected to our bodies in a quite literal way, as Merleau-Ponty has it, ‘my life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 86). Critically, the impersonal existence that forms an arc in and around personal existence only does so partially. Thus, that Merleau-Ponty speaks of an ‘almost impersonal existence’ is worth noting (MerleauPonty 2012: 86). As an ‘almost impersonal existence,’ my body is never entirely anonymous but nor is it unquestionably singular; rather, it is a strange hybrid of rhythms, habits, and processes that are conceived in the midst of finite life and which simultaneously belong to an older order of Nature. ‘Personal existence’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is intermittent’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 86), and behind the surface of being a discrete self who is identifiable with ‘one’s own’ body, there exists another kind of existence, elemental and indifferent to the self that assumes a relationship to it.

Inhuman Nature On this point, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the inhuman basis of bodily existence deepen a set of reflections conceived in his early account of aesthetics. Thus, in his early treatment of Cézanne, he will speak of the ‘inhuman character’ of his paintings, referring to the sense in which faces are painted like objects, a tendency born of the painter’s alienation from humanity (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 70). In the same essay, MerleauPonty will also speak of Cézanne’s paintings as performing an epoché of the surrounding world, and therein ‘reveal[ing] the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 76). What we find in the essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ is Merleau-Ponty seeking to frame the painter as a phenomenologist of sorts, tracing the point at which things come into existence (Merleau-Ponty 2007). The necessary ‘alienation of his humanity’ positions Cézanne in relation to a ‘primordial world’, which finds its roots in an origin that has yet to distinguish as having a particular form. In a rich account of this dehumanised world, Merleau-Ponty writes as follows: Cézanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped of the attributes which make it ready for animistic communions: there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy, the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness. (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 76)

Beyond Human and Animal 277 What Merleau-Ponty finds in Cézanne’s world is a confirmation of what phenomenology itself seeks to locate: the renewal of a world, which is grounded in a non-phenomenology ‘beneath constituted humanity’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 76). Beneath humanity, the world goes on as it did before, but is now suffused with what he will characterise as an ‘inhuman character’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 70). Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of aesthetics is predicated on the sense that the painter is able to articulate the kinship between the human and the inhuman, without the two ever becoming united. Of this kinship, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter – the feeling of strangeness’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 77). Strange because while the human and the inhuman encounter each other, there is always something anterior to the inhuman that can never entirely be integrated into subjectivity. This resistance to experience – a resistance toward phenomenology itself – attests to the anteriority of the inhuman within the human. Already, we see this intertwining of the human and inhuman install itself in perception, in subjectivity, and in objects themselves. At this stage in his thinking – roughly the years from 1945 to 1951 – Merleau-Ponty detects the central task of phenomenology as conceiving of that which is prior to reflection, a primordial sensibility, which is taken up in art as if the artist were speaking ‘as the first human spoke’ (a phrase, incidentally, that reappears in Phenomenology of Perception when Merleau-Ponty speaks of first-hand speech as being the voice of ‘the first man who spoke . . . who reawaken[s] primordial experience anterior to all traditions’) (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 78, 2012). There is a clear rapport here with the phenomenology Merleau-Ponty was developing in 1945, which was already deviating from the focus on lived experience as the endpoint of philosophical reflection toward what he will refer to as a ‘non-human [presence] hidden within [things] [which] is unaware of us, it remains in itself . . . hostile and foreign . . . a resolutely silent Other’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 336). Passages such as this indicate the direction Merleau-Ponty’s thought was taking, especially as he reassessed the relation between human and animal. Whereas MerleauPonty had originally conceived of a separation between the animal and the human, denying that we share a common world owing to the integration of spirit into life, as his thought will advance, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ambiguous integration of the animal into the human will only deepen.

Primordial Indivision In a series of radio interviews three years after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty critically re-evaluated the classical idea of animals as a set of ‘wheels, levers, and springs’, the understanding of which is either situated in relation to the human or otherwise conceived as a ‘blind mechanism’ (Merleau-Ponty 2008: 54). Against this dogma, Merleau-Ponty reconsiders the relation between animal and human by

278  Dylan Trigg way of the worlds they occupy. If the world in which animals exist is an incoherent system, then the world of the human is distinguished only by its striving for a coherence which is never attained (Merleau-Ponty 2008: 56). As such, ‘normal’ existence is exposed at all times to ‘abnormalities’ which human beings are never exempt from. Critically, this admission that human existence never transcends its incoherent roots leads to a moral imperative – namely, that instead of ‘masquerade[ing] as divine law [adult thought] should measure itself more honestly, against the darkness and difficulty of human life and without losing sight of the irrational roots of this life’ (Merleau-Ponty 2008: 56–57). The notion of an irrational root at the heart of human existence will prove central to Merleau-Ponty’s late reworking of the human-animal relations, as is evident in his lectures on nature. Even in their fragmented and incomplete form, these lectures mark the decisive account of Merleau-Ponty’s mature reflections on animality, and their importance is framed not only by their own intrinsic worth but also by providing a context for the burgeoning ontology he was developing during the time. This is especially true of the third course from the lecture notes, written during 1959 and 1960 and thus dovetailing with the writing of The Visible and the Invisible and the concept of the flesh. What we find in these lectures is not only a reconsideration of animality in light of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, but also a reconceptualization of the body itself. Key to this final reworking is Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an Ineinander with ‘animality and Nature’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 208). With this notion of an Ineinander, Merleau-Ponty posits the lateral continuity between animal and human by charting the emergence of the human within Nature. To this extent, the approach is consistent with his philosophy as a whole – namely, a genetic (or better), archaeological analysis of the process of individuation prior to the instituting of culture. Thus, in his introductory remarks, Merleau-Ponty will speak in enigmatic terms that ‘before being reason, humanity is another corporeity [and] the concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body’ (MerleauPonty 2003: 208). This leads him to develop the idea of an Ineinander as the common source from which human and animal emerge. Critically, whereas there had been a tendency in the earlier Merleau-Ponty to distinguish human from animal in terms of what the latter lacks (spirit) and the former retains (reason), in the final works this approach is countered by a desire to approach the relation at the point of contact. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in short, in the Ineinander with the animal (strange anticipations or caricatures of the human in the animal)’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 214). In order to avoid the tacit duality that blighted Merleau-Ponty’s earlier philosophy – a problem that he himself famously notes when reflecting on the ‘insoluble’ beginning point of Phenomenology of Perception – he

Beyond Human and Animal 279 must now begin again from another conceptual stance: that of the flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 200). The concept of the flesh, which forms the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature, offers a way to think about the human-animal relation in terms of an overcoming that does less to integrate the animal into the human and more to underline their co-constitutive relation. In a footnote to the lectures, Merleau-Ponty suggests the illustration of an Eskimo mask to unfold this relation. What characterises these masks is their ‘double nature’, with the animal and the human ‘inscribed on the same side, presented either simultaneously or thanks to a dispositive of mobile flaps opening and cutting in on each other, alternatively’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 307). The mask is notable not only as a visual illustration of the inseparable relation between animal and human, but also because it marks the existence of a time, in which the separation was not yet conceived. In his reflection on this object, Merleau-Ponty writes of a ‘Primordial indivision and metamorphosis. . . [an] extraordinary representation of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 307). Does this appeal to a bi-directional liaison lead to a romanticizing of the animal as a figure of redemption, prior to the split engineered by mechanical thinking? The question can be posed in light of Derrida’s concern that the word animal is employed as a device that consolidates anthropocentric thinking into a humanised lens. The response has either been to deny the animal as having a world, and thus inhabiting a biological zone deprived of language, or otherwise to elevate the animal to an ineffable in-itself, a creature that indexes a state-of-being prior to the advent of self-consciousness. This bi-directional exchange between animal and human is not a call for a union of identities, nor is it an appeal to radical difference. Rather, it is with the language of variants that we get a sense of what is at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Readers of his final work will know that the word variant populates The Visible and the Invisible in abundance. The word’s importance stems from the sense that it accounts for the identity of singular things while at the same time situating those things within a common source; that of the flesh. Thus in the final manuscript, he will write the following: When we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. Rather, we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence . . . of which our body . . . is a very remarkable variant. (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 136) The ontology of the flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to draw the animal and the human into the same common world without reducing them into a

280  Dylan Trigg non-differentiated whole. If there is a difference between different organisms, then the difference is fluid rather than rigid or hierarchical. It is for this reason that the movement from animal to human is less an evolution and more a metamorphosis, structured at all times by the notion of the flesh as an elemental invisibility that underpins the strange kinship we have with animals in the first instance. Just as human beings are immersed in the flesh of the world, so the same is true of animals; both are intertwined in what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘a spatial and temporal pulp where the individuals are formed by differentiation’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 114).

A Strange Kinship Given the shifts in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought, when he returns to the relation between the human and animal, he does so in terms of a ‘lateral’ relation ‘that does not abolish kinship’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 268). What distinguishes Merleau-Ponty’s late thought on animality is that he presents us with a kinship that suggests the possibility of the animal and human living not merely alongside each other, but also within each other. As such, this kinship is ‘strange’ because it involves a non-linear temporality that is resistant to lived experience despite being constitutive of it, as he says: ‘Animality and human being are given only together, within a whole of Being that would have been visible ahead of time in the first animal had there been someone to read it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 271). In this respect, human existence ‘appeared between pre-types,’ as if prematurely formed and caught between a brute existence and the image of that existence (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 272). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty explicitly aligns the talk of ‘pre-hominids . . . in the Age of the Reindeer’ with the existence of a child ‘of whom we cannot say at what moment of ontogenesis that he is a human being’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 272). Merleau-Ponty is concerned here with the figuration of humanity as a particular expression of life. As a phenomenology that is situated at the limits, the strange kinship between animal and human involves a ‘metamorphosis’ that both unfolds in time while also folding back on its own materiality. Thus, Merleau-Ponty will speak of a ‘rigorous simultaneity’ between bodies, which implicates both a ‘natal past’ and a ‘phylogenetic’ history, which is never fully captured by human reflection despite being taken up in the human body (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 273). As such, the prehistory of the subject is also a prehistory of an irreducible alterity. On both a micro and macrocosmic scale, development and evolution take place as a non-linear metamorphosis, whereupon there is always something outside of oneself that installs itself into the mirror, and thus returns to us a reflection of something strange, dreamlike, and fundamentally other.

Beyond Human and Animal 281 In the final note in the incomplete The Visible and the Invisible, we have a sense of where Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of inhuman animality would have gone were it not ended prematurely by his death. Presenting a sketch of the manuscript as a whole, Merleau-Ponty conceives of a philosophy of nature that entails we he terms ‘man-animality intertwining’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 275). In the same text, the concept will also appear as that of ‘interanimality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 172) a term that has its roots in the third course in his lectures on nature, where he will offer a fuller elaboration of the concept, writing that: ‘What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality. The species is what the animal has to be, not in the sense of a power of being, but in the sense of a slope on which all the animals of the same species are placed’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 189–190). In effect, Merleau-Ponty leaves us with the prospect of a democratization of life, thus anticipating not only Derrida’s critique of anthropocentric thought but also trends in contemporary continental philosophy that valorise realism as being equivalent with a critique of anthropocentrism. In the final thought of Merleau-Ponty, we come to the edge of phenomenology, to the point at which human existence is defined as much by a sense of the body as one’s own as it is a brute corporeality that transcends personalized perception and points toward the ‘pulp of the sensible’ common to all life (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 268).

Reference List Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That I Am. David Willis (trans.). New York: Fordham University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. Richard McCleary (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behaviour. Alden L. Fisher (trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the College de France. Robert Vallier (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2007. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine (eds.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2008. The World of Perception. Oliver Davis (trans.). London and New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. Donald Landes (trans.). London: Routledge.

Part V

Sociality and the Boundaries of the Human

18 Voice and Gaze Considered Together in ‘Languaging’ Fred Cummins

From Language to ‘Languaging’ Gaze is by no means a purely human phenomenon. Any animal with jointly directed eyes may be described as exhibiting gaze, which makes the independently rotating eyes of the chameleon so perplexing, and thus well suited as a comic vehicle in animated films. Many conversations we might have about gaze will begin by assuming specific affective qualities to any instance of gazing, or, more potent yet, mutual gaze. Here, it seems is the confrontation with the other. Here is the locus at which we fuse, touch, and acknowledge each other, or, conversely, at which we refuse to open up, creating a rift between us. But we have just leaped somewhat rashly from the impersonal mode of observation, used to pick out patterns of the gaze of chameleons and persons alike, to the qualitative, phenomenological theatre of social intercourse. I wish, in this contribution, to abide a while at the surface and to begin by considering gaze in the impersonal mode, from without, but to do so in order to interrogate the relation between gaze and that most human of characteristics, language. To do so, it will be necessary to first note that the term language picks out different objects of interest, depending upon the manner in which it is initially framed. One way to approach language is to ask about the means by which humans pass messages among themselves. It is this capacity that has led to the characterisation of language as a distinct system, involving several related sub-domains, such as phonology, morphology, and syntax. This view of language gave rise to the structuralist revolution (de Saussure 1916) at the start of the 20th century and led directly to the development of the generative programme in linguistics in the 1960s (Chomsky 1957, 1965) Whether structuralist, generativist, or their several competitors, such fields set out to understand an abstract system, largely independent of the incarnate context in which it is used, expressed indifferently in speech, writing, or sign and facilitating the encoding and decoding of such messages. To be linguistic, within any such account, is to be defined by categorical contrasts, and the language system is understood as a set

286  Fred Cummins of such contrasts, at the level of sound (phonology), structure (morphosyntax), and meaning (formal semantics). The basic unit to be understood is the sentence, such as ‘The cat sat on the mat’, and the sentence is a product of a specific instance of a language, in this case English. This broad approach has informed most of the formal academic study of language since its introduction. This characterisation of language is built upon a Cartesian background in which minds are individual, discrete, personal, and unobservable (Cummins 2018). Many interesting questions and answers can be formulated within such approaches. This essay is not the context to pursue and critically appraise these approaches. But the aspirations of many linguists to develop an account of language that is continuous with advances in psychology and the social sciences, on the one hand, and biology, on the other, remain largely unfulfilled, not least because the relation of psychology and the social sciences to biology is as contested as ever, and probably even less secure than it seemed 50 years ago. The framing that is required to characterise language as encoded message passing is not obligatory, and alternative frameworks that emphasize the importance of the body, of the intersubjective, and of mutual entanglement in concrete situations of embodied co-presence, are also available (Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo 2011; Chemero 2011). One can approach the broad topic of language in a rather different fashion though. If we begin by asking what it was that so radically transformed our species in the 5 or 6 million years since the last common ancestor of the genus homo on one side, and our relatives the chimpanzee and bonobo on the other, it is not clear that we are talking about the same thing as before. It is difficult to document where anything that we might consider as human language enters the picture, but the earliest evidence we have of humanlike capacities for symbolism and ritual, as evidenced in cave art, bone flutes, bodily ornaments, and the residue of rituals, goes back no more than 100,000 years and probably considerably less. This is a tiny amount of time within which processes of biological evolution might work, and a comparison of human and chimpanzee anatomy does not reveal any obvious differences that might be responsible for the emergence of language. It is notable that for almost all of the time in which language has existed, it has found expression in an oral mode among participants who are in each other’s bodily presence. The very earliest forms of writing are no more than 5,000 years old, while widespread literacy is much more recent, extending back no more than 500 years or so. These are very recent innovations and just as an investigation of writing itself would not start with emojis, so an inquiry into the transformation of the species would do well not to begin by abstracting away from the embodied context of face-to-face exchange. In this matter, Tomasello and colleagues have brought to our attention one small biological change within our lineage that, while it can

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 287 carry only a limited explanatory burden, serves to bring to the fore the manner in which the voice and the gaze work together (Tomasello et al. 2007). Human eyes have a white sclera, against which the iris and pupil stand in stark contrast, which is very different from the almost uniformly dark appearance of the ape eye. Figure 18.1 illustrates the difference, and adds, for good measure, a Hollywood creation. The ape in the right panel is from the film Planet of the Apes, and its white sclera subliminally conveys a human-like intelligence or cunning. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to the direction of gaze of others. Apes too are interested in where other apes are looking, but they must rely upon the cruder signal of head direction rather than eyeball orientation (ibid). One consequence of this is that human infants are cocooned in a web of joint attention from their earliest days (Baldwin 1995) learning to look where their peers and caregivers look, and, by about the age of 18 months, learning to direct the gaze of caretakers to a spot of their choosing. This sharing of attentive focus offers itself as a suggestive locus for a radical change in the patterning of social intercourse, ensuring a great deal of alignment in the concerns of interactants. When we look at how gaze is employed in adult conversation, we see a delicate dance that usually goes unnoticed. When one person starts a speaking turn,1 she frequently looks away, while the other, currently in the role of listener, is more likely to continue looking at the face of the speaker. As the exchange continues, gaze is employed to encourage, or resist, the alternation of the roles of speaker and listener. Even blinks are drawn into the fabric of the interaction. Figure 18.2 shows data from a study in which eight dyads conversed freely for 15 minutes each (Cummins 2012). The plot shows the proportion of time each participant (speakers are indexed by letter, dyad by number) gazed towards the face of the other when he was speaking and when he was listening. In every case, gaze towards the other is more likely when listening than when speaking. Such considerations open up the way to a more expansive characterisation of vocal interaction and interpersonal coordination, noting other co-occurring features that are frequently observable. Once we admit gaze

Figure 18.1 Left: human eye with white sclera; centre: chimpanzee face; right: ape eyes from Planet of the Apes

288  Fred Cummins

Figure 18.2 Proportion of time gazing towards the head of the partner as a function of speaking turn. Data from Cummins (2012)

into the salient aspects of linguistic communication, we are drawn inexorably to also consider co-produced manual and head gestures, which elude a classically linguistic description, but which are inevitably present in conversation, even among blind discussants or when speaking on the phone. There are many other aspects of the voice itself that do not lend themselves to categorical description and symbolisation, such as the tempo of speech, the intonation contour, the rhythm of production, and the tone of voice. All of these loosely grouped under the heading of ‘prosody’ have attracted a great deal of attention in the strongly empirical world of phonetics, despite the difficulty of assimilating them under a symbolic linguistic description. None, of course, are represented in writing. Finally, the purposes to which the voice is employed, and its relation to the context in which it is used, all require scrutiny. Collectively these considerations encourage a broader view of vocal communication that we might term languaging, rather than language, in recognition of the obvious possibility that we are not picking out a single ‘system’, but rather identifying many ways in which different forms of mutual coordination arise and in which participants (sometimes speakers, sometimes listeners, sometimes neither or both) become dynamically entangled as they interact. But dyadic conversation does not exhaust languaging, and the study of vocal coordination and communication has focussed almost exclusively on such conversation. Most of my work over the last 15 years has explored a rather different use of the voice, attending to those situations in which multiple people utter the same words at the same time. I call such speech joint speech (Cummins 2018).

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 289

Joint Speech It has been my experience that whenever joint speech is found, there is something interesting going on. Joint speech is very common, but it is not found indifferently everywhere. It is found primarily in several highly specific domains of social organisation, and these domains play an important role in founding the many social identities we have adopted. The practices in which joint speech arises serve to create and sustain a common lifeworld. The first, and largest, domain is that of ritual and prayer. Praying or chanting aloud together is found within most religious traditions. Secular rituals too employ joint speech, as when swearing a collective oath of allegiance together, whether it be to the United States of America or to the Islamic State. Prayer and ritual admit of a dizzying variety of forms and purposes, but it is evident that joint speech is reliably present in such activities. Another domain that is picked out by this simple definition is that of protest. Protesters the world over chant in unison as they make manifest their grievances. Despite the radically different overt purpose of protest, many of the surface features of joint speech in a religious or official context are also found in protest demonstrations. Thus, we may find alternation between leader and follower in call and response. The cherished intricacies of a liturgical text or a political argument may best be enunciated by a leader, while participation in the collective act of uttering is made possible by the jointly spoken indication of generalised assent, e.g. as ‘Amen’ in the church or ‘Right on!’ in the street. A third domain that becomes apparent is the use of chant in the eager expression of group identity among sports fans. Not every sport has a chanting tradition. Soccer famously does, rugby has a very different singing tradition, while tennis fans do neither. But where fans indulge in chanting, it is an important vehicle for making manifest group membership. (Tennis, of course, is not based on teams that persist over generations.) The final broad domain in which joint speech is predictably found is in the education of young children. Here, as with ritual and prayer, there is great variability in the specifics as we move from one culture and country to another, but in each case, joint speech will be used to marshal the collective attention of young children, to inculcate culturally valued texts, and to aid in rote memorisation. Joint speech occurs in many other situations as well, both formal and informal, and it serves many purposes. However, these four domains speak to the centrality of the associated activities in establishing, enacting, and proclaiming identity, concern, and belonging, and it is clear that when joint speech is at work, it is collective concerns, not individual ones, that are in play. Cummins (2018) provides an overview of the topic, summarising the scant scientific work done that does address joint

290  Fred Cummins speech, and further resources pertaining thereto can be found at https:// jointspeech.ucd.ie. Evidence of liturgical structure employing joint speech can be found as far back as 2600 BCE in the Temple Hymn of Kesh, a Mesopotamian text regarded as perhaps the oldest literary text in existence. This text, which survived more or less unchanged for one thousand years, even as the ambient language switched from Sumerian to Akkadian, has a clear verse-chorus structure, with identical recurring lines at the end of each verse, suggesting that chorusing was well known long before writing emerged. This is independently supported by the observation that joint speech is found in every human society, including those that are purely oral in character. How remarkable then that the science of language, linguistics, has not made joint speech an object of concerted study at all. In fact, before its thematization (Cummins 2018), no single term existed to pick out the collective simultaneous uttering of identical words. But when we examine the obvious simple structural features that reliably characterise joint speech across these several domains, it becomes clear that joint speech will not fit into the mould crafted for the exchange of encoded messages. Happily, the more expansive term languaging allows us to avoid such narrow definitional anxieties. In joint speaking, there is no longer a distinction between speakers and listeners. With this simple conflation of roles, most of the concepts used to characterise language are rendered useless. What is more, the texts that are spoken together are typically known by all who participate, though they been authored elsewhere. This contrasts starkly with the emphasis on the creativity of natural language, which has played such a significant role in establishing the generative tradition in linguistics. However, it aligns with the keen observation of Rappaport (1999) that one of the defining features of ritual, understood as a foundation for human society, is the ‘performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’ (emphasis mine). Another feature of joint speech, which is not obligatory, but so prevalent that its absence is more remarkable than its presence, is repetition. It is not enough that something be said, it must be said again and again. The act of uttering reveals a performative dimension to joint speaking, drawing our attention to the fact that something is happening in the uttering, something no written trace could replace, which is of urgent importance to those who take part. The role of rosary beads among Catholics has its counterpart in the prayer beads or mala of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Sikh traditions too, once more showing how the observable characteristics attending joint speech transcend the extravagant cultural variation exhibited by the attendant activities. As we survey the many and varied activities that the definition of joint speech picks out, another important characteristic comes to the fore.

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 291 Where it is entirely conventional to distinguish between speech and song, apportioned to the distinct domains of language and music, respectively, no such partition can be maintained when looking at joint speech and associated practices. Some joint speech is clearly spoken and has the prosody of read text, as when an oath of allegiance is read one time only by initiates at a naturalisation ceremony. This particular purpose requires that the words be spoken aloud and collectively, but its function is entirely instrumental. The speaking of the words a single time is a performative act in the strict sense of Austin (1962) in that the status of the speaker is changed by the act of uttering. However, this particular situation is somewhat anomalous, and lacks the much more common feature of repetition that usually accompanies activities of prayer, of protest, and even of support for one’s home team. When a short phrase is repeated over and over, the prosody (i.e. the more musical aspects of the voice) become exaggerated. Stresses acquire a greater degree of temporal regularity with heightened contrast between strong and weak syllables. Strongly enunciated stresses are frequently combined with gestures such as bowing, fist pumping, or clapping. A repeated intonation contour may undergo a perceptual shift from speech to song simply through repetition (Deutsch, Lapidis and Henthorn 2011). Furthermore, although some instances of joint speech are clearly musical in a strongly aesthetic sense, e.g. the plainchant of monastic communities, many other instances occupy an odd and poorly documented space that is neither clearly musical, nor non-musical, and which has many of the characteristics of formal ritual without the attendant formality and explicit ideology. The familiar act of singing Happy Birthday comes to mind. The words are sung, but the resulting sound is never heard as music in an aesthetic sense. As familiar as this little ritual is, it is worth drawing attention to its coordinating function in drawing all participants into the collective performance, such that refusing to join in would be considered anomalous. Although not part of any institutional agenda, the ritual nonetheless is part of the means by which the individual is identified, demarcated, and with that, celebrated, within a community.2 Languaging may thus be continuous with a broad notion of musicing, a term that now invites consideration of situations of joint coordination beyond the practices of performance and participation we usually associate with the term music. That the boundaries of music are not given, but are constructed in a culturally specific manner is obvious and is well illustrated by the prohibition of many forms of music within the austere Wahhabi form of Islam, which lives alongside the use and propagation of sacred monophonic chants, as found, e.g. in the propaganda of the Islamic State or in the adhan call to prayer. We can now note the role of drums as used sometimes in the coordination of teams of rowers, or the use of working songs among slaves and chain gangs, further

292  Fred Cummins suggesting that a sharp demarcation between languaging and musicing would obscure rather than reveal the import of such activities.

Joint Speech and Gaze We noted earlier that the gaze in a two-party conversation is a constitutive part of the mutual dance and negotiation that unfolds. Disturbance to this patterning is familiar from the gaze behaviour of people on the autistic spectrum (Hutt and Ounsted 1966), which has informed diverse approaches to the characterisation of the attendant social difficulties such people face (Baron-Cohen, Baldwin and Crowson 1997; Dickerson et al. 2005). We might place this dynamic negotiation alongside the far less contentious sharing of common ground among participants in a ritual such as a liturgy. As indicated in Figure 18.3, this alignment among participants reaches an extreme in the recitation of the Credo. Viewed in this light, we might expect the patterning of gaze to depend strongly on the manner in which understanding is being arrived at through dialogue, negotiation, and argument or emerging from common alignment with common purpose. Indeed, what we find is that the gaze in joint speech is markedly different from the patterning of gaze in dialogue. We can distinguish two principal ways in which gaze is employed when people utter in unison. In one case, there is a common central focus, such as a leader, priest, a blackboard, or just a person with a bullhorn. In this

Figure 18.3  Common ground (the overlap between the two regions) is continuously negotiated in conversation (suggested by the back-and-forth of the arrows). A greater degree of common alignment is found in liturgy and, in the extreme form of unification, in the recitation of the Credo.

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 293 case, all eyes are turned towards this central element, but there is no negotiation anymore, no back-and-forth or jockeying for the floor. This is an obvious, but potentially overlooked, basic structural property of many such situations. As with so many of the reliable features of joint speech, it is a common characteristic that transcends domain, from the temple to the street, the stadium to the classroom. Coming back to our speculations about the role of the signal available through the white sclera of the eye, this is a situation of exaggerated joint attention, ensuring that those who participate share, at least transiently, a common outlook on the world, its opportunities, and its threats. Such situations can be differentiated from joint speaking occasions in which there is no obvious central figure. Here, uniquely in situations of languaging, the eyes are uncoupled from the voice and are free to roam independently. This is probably the case in many situations in which Happy Birthday is sung, where a cake can provide an optional central element, but typically participants are not obliged to stare at the person being celebrated and may allow their gaze to roam more or less freely. It is the case in a moving street protest, as participants march with common direction, and it seems to frequently be the case in collective prayer, such as recitation of the rosary or celebration of kirtan. I have argued that we might usefully regard the joint silence observed after tragedy (and frequently held in a sports stadium) as a limiting case of joint speech in which the verbal content is reduced to nil, but the participatory element remains as strong as ever. During such silences, there is no particular constraint on the gaze. The integration of joint speech into rituals of many sorts means that gaze may be caught up in the group choreography, and group gaze may be strongly constrained. Thus, we find collective gaze shown by those practicing the Maori Haka, and this is aimed with precision at those they stand against, while synchronized head movements and collective gaze are a signature feature of the Balinese Monkey Chant. In all of these cases, we can see that the dialogical dynamic that inheres in conversational exchange is absent in joint speech, thereby radically altering the relation between the voice and the gaze. Of course, for all of these situations of dialogue or chorusing, the voice and the gaze are merely two prominent identifiable contributors to what is a whole-bodyand-context involving process of mutual coordination, but such identifiable characteristics offer us a secure means of empirically distinguishing among classes of activity, with markedly different relations for the purposes of participants. As we move from the narrow preoccupation of traditional linguistics with an abstract, bounded system of oppositions to the broader and largely uncharted territory of languaging, such landmarks may allow us to retain the analytic frame of mind required to make such interactions intelligible, without prematurely collapsing them into a single domain of theoretical construction.

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Joint Gaze? Speaking is usually thought of as something done by one person at a time, and a reframing of our consideration of speech to focus instead on joint, synchronised speaking has made it clear that the practices in which joint speaking arises are precisely those that serve to enact social identities, as fans, as passionate believers in a cause, as a people, or within a religion. There is no claim here that joint speech achieves this in any mechanistic fashion. Rather, by attending to where, when, how, and why joint speaking occurs, we provide a valuable lens into the means by which social identities are enacted and collective subjectivities arise. Can we pursue a similar strategy with gaze? Gaze is obviously normally considered as something associated with a single viewer, though we can readily recognise the highly charged nature of mutual gaze between two individuals. In the pursuit of this investigation of language and languaging, then, I wish to conclude by indulging in a little speculation about the possible role of synchronised gazing by very many people. We already noted that gaze is aligned and unified among many individuals during certain rituals and situations of common attention. However, we might extend this line of thought to consider a situation in which the voice is mute, but the eyes of many people are strongly coordinated. This is the case when viewing cinematic images on a large screen. If one could observe not the movie but the eyeballs of the viewers in a cinema, it seems certain that they would be very strongly aligned in what looks like an act of collective sense-making. Alfred Hitchcock appositely said that he enjoyed playing his audience like a piano. Some evidence that this is, indeed, the case can be found in a study by Hasson et al. (2004), which revealed a high degree of temporally correlated activity in several cortical areas of subjects watching a single clip from the movie The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Leone 1966). Hasson et al. (2004) claimed that they were revealing a ‘surprising tendency of individual brains to “tick together” during natural vision’. While recognising and seeking to understand the emergent synchrony in the firing of neurons across subjects seems like a compelling task for the empirical scientist, and we might applaud the technical challenges overcome in recording such synchrony, one might reasonably object that the very concept of ‘natural vision’ is deeply problematic, especially in a situation in which immobile viewers consume highly constructed, technically intricate forms of media. But reading brains is something of a black art that demands a kind of Cartesian orientation foreign to the spirit of the present discussion. We could choose rather to stay once more at the surface, and look instead at the eyes themselves, as different viewers watch the same film clip. Figure 18.4 shows the horizontal movement of the eyes of ten subjects as they watched a 3-minute clip from the same movie, as captured

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 295

Figure 18.4 Horizontal eye position viewing a 3-minute clip from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; estimates of inter-viewer synchrony

by an eye tracker (unpublished data of my own).3 Below the movement tracks themselves is a computation of the synchrony among two independent groups of five subjects: points at which the two lower traces lie above the dotted line are ones where we can confidently say that viewers’ direction of gaze is strongly coordinated.4 Sergio Leone, the director of the film, is renowned for his stark cinematography which makes it very clear just what the viewer is supposed to be attending to. This provisional foray into gaze and film cannot be presumed to generalise to arbitrary cinematographic material. However, it does demonstrate that, under specific viewing conditions, we can observe the yoking of the eyes as the voice is silenced and gesture stilled. Synchronised voices and synchronised gaze both suggest that there is a story yet to be told about the body as a medium through which collective sense-making occurs. In the sparring and dialogue of interpersonal interaction, we may be striving for common understanding, or we may be asserting an individual stance and distinguishing ourselves from others. But in joint speaking, there is a collectivisation of sense-making, and in the associated practices we can see the laying of the foundation of a common social life and the enactment of a collective subjectivity. This seems to have been a constitutive part of human society as far back as we can peer in history and may provide one clue as to why speech became such a powerful medium in the construction of a common human world.

296  Fred Cummins Treating gaze in a similar fashion provides food for thought (and nothing more is being claimed here). The forms of media change over time at an ever-accelerating rate. Cinema has without question been a potent part of this evolution of media, and its persistence and refinement are testament to its efficacy in yoking together the sensibilities of people engaged in otherwise quite disparate lives. In a very short period, we have become immersed in a world of moving images that we read with a vocabulary developed, trained even, in cinematographic terms. The qualitative leap in interpersonal coordination we have tentatively associated with the facilitation of joint attention at the origin of our species may not be the only such leap we are capable of. While this essay is a very preliminary sketch of this rich research domain, it is clear that the syntax and semantics of the image, and the moving image, provide fertile ground for further discussion than we can attempt here. Nonetheless, our consideration of joint speech and joint gaze may provide an impetus to consider how our shared world arises, in part, through such synchronisation in sense-making.

Notes 1. To speak of turns in conversation is somewhat misleading. Players in chess and speakers in formal debate take turns. Conversation partners alternate in a manner more reminiscent of boxing opponents, opportunistically taking and defending the floor and negotiating its relinquishing. 2. It may be worthwhile to ask which collective gatherings support the singing of Happy Birthday and which do not. It would be inappropriate in a transactional social context like a supermarket, but it may be a form of solidarity among workers in a commercial office or factory. 3. In an unpublished pilot experiment conducted at University College Dublin (2017), subjects sat at arms’ length from a computer screen with built-in eye tracking cameras as they watched several media clips. Eye movements were recorded in the horizontal and vertical directions separately. Only horizontal movements are shown here. Recordings were done at 60 Hz. 4. Synchronisation among viewers must here be understood to be with respect to film time, rather than time indexed by clocks and calendars.

Reference List Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baldwin, D.A. 1995. Understanding the link between joint attention and language. In C. Moore and P.J. Dunham (eds.) Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. Erlbaum, 131–158. Baron-Cohen, S., Baldwin, D.A., and Crowson, M. 1997. Do children with autism use the speaker’s direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language? Child Development, 68 (1): 48–57. Chemero, A. 2011. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. [1957] 2002. Syntactic Structures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Voice and Gaze Together in ‘Languaging’ 297 Chomsky, N. [1965] 2014. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Cummins, F. 2012. Gaze and blinking in dyadic conversation: A study in coordinated behaviour among individuals. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27 (10): 1525–1549. Cummins, F. 2018. The Ground from Which We Speak: Joint Speech and the Collective Subject. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. de Saussure, F. [1916] 2011. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press. Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., and Lapidis, R. 2011. Illusory transformation from speech to song. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129: 2245–2252. Dickerson, P., Rae, J., Stribling, P., Dautenhahn, K., and Werry, I. 2005. Autistic children’s co-ordination of gaze and talk: Re-examining the ‘asocial’ autist. In K. Richards and P. Seedhouse (eds.) Applying Conversation Analysis. Springer, 19–37. Hasson, U., Nir, Y., Levy, I., Fuhrmann, G., and Malach, R. 2004. Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science, 303 (5664): 1634–1640. Hutt, C. and Ounsted, C. 1966. The biological significance of gaze aversion with particular reference to the syndrome of infantile autism. Behavioral Science, 11 (5): 346–356. Leone, S. 1966. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Los Angeles, CA: United Artists. Rappaport, R.A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., and Di Paolo, E. 2011. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, M., Hare, B., Lehmann, H., and Call, J. 2007. Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: The cooperative eye hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution, 52 (3): 314–320.

19 Disability and the Inhuman Jonathan Paul Mitchell

Introduction To call something inhuman invites consideration of what that term means. It might denote something that falls short of or violates the properly human. Alternately, it could indicate something outside the human category. In each case, some notion of human is already presumed. I am interested here in such presuppositions and the exclusions these entail: in particular, how certain ways of being become associated with the inhuman, how this association is involved in the constitution of what is understood as properly human, and the deleterious effects for those associated with the inhuman. I address this in three stages. First, I sketch how common understandings of disability might be thought of as ‘dehumanising’. Next, I outline why responses to dehumanisation that appeal to the category of the human are inapt. Finally, by considering the relationship between bodies and technology, I outline some alternative and positive senses of the inhuman.

The Inhuman as Dehumanisation ‘Inhuman’ can denote that something is dehumanising or that it lies outside of the category ‘human’. In the first sense, it could refer to the kind of inhuman gaze proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012). This pins another down as an object, denuding them of their full significance, and thereby precludes the conditions necessary for a fully human ethical relation. At first blush, this sense of inhuman as dehumanising seems promising for a conceptualisation of disability experience.1 Disability theorists consistently argue that much of what disables people is not their minds or bodies – which are merely somehow atypical – but the likes of unsatisfactory accommodations, discriminatory attitudes, unavailability of rewarding work, and cultural stereotypes. They also aver that such circumstances obtain because disability is primarily defined through a diagnostic medical gaze (Oliver and Barnes 2012; Thomas 2007). Apprehended thus, atypical embodiment is transformed: reduced to abnormal

Disability and the Inhuman 299 bodily properties and their supposedly harmful entailments, and viewed as an objective deviation from a putative human norm. Here, disability is a problem that inheres in an individual body (Shakespeare 2014). Thus, appropriate responses are interventions to correct that individual body, or personal resolve to overcome its deleterious effects. The aforementioned disabling socio-political dimensions are effaced. Significantly, this medical modality operates well beyond its jurisdiction to inform lay conceptions of disability. These also operate through a prism of objectification to produce what we might call ‘anticipatory perceptual norms’ about what is a complete or correct human embodiment: in everyday existence, to encounter bodily anomaly is to see divergence from purportedly objective species normality. This, we might say, renders disabled people multiply inhuman: it reduces disability to the body, when it has causes originating in human relations; it identifies that body as a deviation from a normal human form; it leads to denial of human goods and possibilities; finally, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, the reduction to bodily properties thwarts a fully human ethical encounter. Calling such treatment inhuman – where inhuman means dehumanising – might imply that a corrective would recognise disabled people within the scope of humanity. Then the aforementioned conditions would be recognised as unjust, and steps would be taken to eliminate them. Where disability is concerned, however, the notion of humanity warrants some scepticism. The human is typically understood to possess at least one essential attribute – intellection, autonomy, empathy, capacity for moral deliberation – that specifies what it is and does naturally and that distinguishes it from nonhuman animals, objects, and so on. While specifics vary with cultural context, social formations are permeated with ideas about such attributes that imply what is normal or natural for humans. They are embedded in technologies and institutions, habituated in behaviours to form part of a background that, while itself unexpressed, nonetheless conditions everyday expression, perception, and action (Esposito 2015). So robust, ubiquitous, and implicit are ideas about the human that it seems simply to be part of the furniture of the world. However, ‘Man’, Merleau-Ponty suggests, ‘is an historical idea, not a natural species’ (2012: 174). The very idea of the human as distinguished by some essential characteristic is a historically-specific effect of knowledges and practices that obfuscate their own constitutive role (Foucault 2012). Roberto Esposito (2012b, 2015) suggests that the human acquires its apparent solidity thanks to practices, knowledges, technologies, and so on, that, in various domains, articulate a boundary separating human from nonhuman. This boundary-making concurrently delineates the human: it does not carve nature at its joints but rather produces the reality of what it circumscribes. While candidate ideas for what distinguishes humanness vary, these have a common thread. In each, some distinctively human characteristic separates it from other living beings. To be

300  Jonathan Paul Mitchell understood as, say, self-sovereign, the human must be differentiated from inhuman dimensions: nonhuman organisms, manufactured objects, the material world. It must especially be differentiated from its own ‘mere’ bodily – and as such, not entirely human – aspects (including basic functions and desires). This internal division is staged not only within, but also between, bodies. Importantly, then, one never simply is human but must be validated and valued as such. Put differently, the qualities that are said to define the human are implicit membership criteria (Frost 2016). The category coheres in part through identification of inhuman aspects of individuals who otherwise would be considered human and in virtue of which they are deficient in some properly human characteristic. We need not recall the egregious failures of this category to realise that what counts as human is not always self-evident. Finally, this differentiating function is not necessarily totalising, and it can produce instances of qualified humanity (Esposito 2012a): those validated as human in some respects and not in others because they lack or are compromised in some characteristic possessed by the fully and properly human. This brings us to the tension between disability and the human. At least since modern thought, autonomy has been an important marker of humanness. Here, human subjects, as rational, are independent and self-determining. They can detach themselves from external constraints to deliberate about aims and direct their bodies to realise these. Autonomous action, then, transcends context and appropriates the body. For Esposito, this anthropological description does not identify essential human characteristics: it produces the human-nonhuman boundary, and thereby the contours of the human itself. Those who are properly human can transcend and appropriate their merely organismic and biological dimensions. Those falling short of this ideal are more or less ‘trapped in and by the body’ (Frost 2016: 7), their humanness qualified. Whether or not this is philosophically persuasive, it lines up with a common story about disability. Here, while a disabled person may be human in principle, to be disabled is to be subject to some biological condition that diminishes the purported human power to transcend mere bodily demands and engage in free activity. On this account, then, disabled bodies render people dependent: they are both subjected to their own bodily exigencies (unable to appropriate their body) and less capable of tolerating, integrating, or reshaping influences that come from outside (unable to transcend the world). If the human is defined by transcendence of the biological, disability inclines in equal measure towards the brute body and away from the properly human. Disability, then, is one constituent of the human-inhuman gap, where that gap is enacted within one and the same body. Understanding disability thus, through the human, produces a tension: such an atypical body both is human, while failing in some respect to be fully human.

Disability and the Inhuman 301 Consequently, strategies based in recognition of common humanity will fall short. Recognition as ‘human’ implies inclusion and amelioration of conditions; but since disability has already been identified in this account as a lack of or deviation from full humanity, such amelioration will likely imply restoration or correction of what is ‘missing’ from that body (if this is even practicable), rather than social transformation (Moser 2000). More broadly, the very terms of the human – that it coheres by excluding aspects, including disability, that are designated as inhuman – mean that disability cannot be fully integrated within it. Were the category expanded, it would still produce failures. Since some body or mind will always fall short of the human ideal, its inclusion can only be formal or partial. By denying or qualifying the humanity of those falling outside its bounds, the human can reduce and objectify just as much as the aforementioned dehumanising frame.

The Inhuman in the Human If disability is bound up with articulation of the human, humanist resources are inadequate with regard to ethical questions concerning atypical bodies that overspill conventional human parameters. A human gaze is insufficient that takes the human as given. It does not sufficiently question human values and especially their entailments. It is better to relinquish appeals to the human, to instead give a positive valence to the inhuman. When applied as I have so far discussed, the inhuman plays an oppositional role. It is something to be repudiated: the human is what it is because it is not inhuman. However, inhuman might instead describe a perspective that is not already committed to and contained by the human, that refrains from taking this entity as self-evident or given, as a fait accompli. A first step towards relinquishing the oppositional and comparative stance comes by attending to ways that the purported gap between human and nonhuman is continually traversed, and by recognising that the very dimensions that humanism must repudiate as inhuman – the biological, the animal, the technological – are instead fundamental features of embodied existence. Indeed, the human is not characterised by transcendence of supposedly inhuman dimensions. It no more transcends the body than the body transcends the world. Bodies are embedded and constituted within multi-dimensional networks with discursive, material, institutional, and technological dimensions. I will discuss one such dimension: technology. I take this to mean anything fabricated, whether a stone axe or a pathway, a smartphone or an algorithm. This implies ubiquity: every human milieu is technological. Even quotidian activities involve contributions from technical objects and occur against nigh-imperceptible technological backgrounds (Ihde 1990). Without such contributions, many activities would be different or even impossible: driving requires a car and also drivable roads (Scully

302  Jonathan Paul Mitchell 2014). Significantly, technologies do not merely extend autonomy understood as a dispositional human capacity that pre-exists technological relations. They are, as actor-network theorists contend, participants in the action (Latour 2005). As such, human autonomy is already inhuman: what humans can do meaningfully depends upon relations with nonhumans with their own characteristic agencies. This has implications for disability. First, if human action always involves technology, humans do not transcend material exigencies. Agency is not about achieving disconnection, but rather having the right connections (Moser 2006). Further, since humans have from inception been involved with technologies ‘that have played an active role in the very process of the constitution of the human’ (Zylinska 2010: 157), the originary notion of the naturally bounded and self-sufficient human collapses (Introna 2014). Finally, this might mean that disability, with its interdependency and technological involvement, is no failure of the humanist ideal, but a limpid illustration of the condition of bodies in general (Shildrick 2012). That these claims are not generally accepted has much to do with how technology is organised. This brings us to a second aspect of an inhuman orientation. By forgoing any commitment to the objective status of the human, this can attend to processes by which that category acquires form. These processes of formation involve technologies that, while ubiquitous, are not distributed equally. This asymmetrical technological distribution is embroiled in the production of ability and disability (Moser 2006; Moser and Law 1999) and of the human-nonhuman boundary. Over time, technologies have been harmonised with bodies to permit certain skills and abilities. However, such developments have been uneven and normatively patterned: they have organised the world around a privileged human ideal. Hence everyday objects and milieus are congruent with typical bodies (Malafouris 2016) that can act spontaneously and assume, with good reason, that their actions will reliably be supported. Furthermore, such activity generally occurs without marked disruption, while technological contributions disappear from view. Atypical bodies, by contrast, have only recently been considered in the organisation of technological human milieus, and even then, only inconsistently. For them, technological supports are absent, inapt, or inconsistent (Moser and Law 1999). Consequently, they cannot act with comparable spontaneity. As such, technological relations en-able typical bodies and dis-able atypical bodies. This assertion is of a piece with a central claim of disability studies: that disability is not ‘a lack . . . or flaw located in bodies’ (GarlandThomson 2011: 591), but it is produced by the inequitable arrangement of a social world that disables merely atypical bodies. I am also suggesting something similar about ability: this is likewise not a natural attribute, but it is rather produced in local and concrete practices involving relations between bodies and technologies. There is still more to be said. The

Disability and the Inhuman 303 relational aspect of both ability and disability is not recognised because technological arrangements also articulate the human-inhuman boundary along the axis of independence and dependency. Although technologies are a persistent dimension of all bodily activity, they silence their own contribution and afford spontaneous activity only for typical bodies. Such individuals seem unambiguously human – independent, capable of transcending and appropriating their body – even as their actions involve technological support. For atypical bodies, humanness looks compromised: they seem anchored to bodily exigency, and thus uniquely affected by nonhuman aspects of themselves, and are vulnerable to or dependent upon things outside themselves. Furthermore, technology use is framed differently for typical and atypical users. For the former, technologies seem to complement, augment, or extend pre-existing human abilities. For the latter, technologies compensate for human abilities that the person is thought to lack: they depend upon ‘prosthetics’ to approximate what comes naturally to fully human subjects (Kafer 2013). The human-inhuman line is articulated once again.

Inhuman Futures We have seen how an ostensibly inhuman dimension, technology, instead exists ‘within’ the human, and participates in the realisation one of its most vaunted attributes. Yet how technologies are organised occludes their participation, thereby reconstituting the privileged status of the putatively normal and autonomous human. Nevertheless, while the human remains a potent organising category, acknowledging its contingency in this way loosens its metaphysical grip upon the present, and more importantly, indicates that it might be otherwise in the future. This leads to my final sense of inhuman, as a future difference from the human. An inhuman future is one in which the oppositional human-nonhuman boundary has lost its force. Before addressing this, I will consider the future as imagined from within the existing normative contours of the human. Here, a good future is one wherein whatever allows human flourishing is increased and whatever prevents or diminishes this is attenuated or eliminated. Disability often counts as such an impediment and has no place in a good future. Alison Kafer calls this a ‘curative imaginary’: ‘an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention’ (2013: 27). When cured or rehabilitated, disability validates existing ideals of human progress. Prosthetics use, for example, can seem to confirm the redemptive power of technology (Nelson, Shew and Stevens 2019: 11) to overcome disability. When un-cured or un-rehabilitated, disabilities fall outside or impede progress. In general, as ‘obstacles to the arc of progress’ (Kafer 2013: 28), steps should be taken to remove disabilities from the future.

304  Jonathan Paul Mitchell This is evident in bioethical imaginaries whose moral imperative demands future people who are ‘longer-lived, stronger, happier, smarter, fairer’ (Harris 2010: 8), where these are taken fairly uncritically as straightforward goods. It is also apparent in medical practices – that also involve imaginaries about what is a good future – whereby pre-natal diagnosis allows selective termination for Down syndrome, a ‘missing’ hand, or other somatic characteristics taken to stray too far from the human ideal (Nelson, Shew and Stevens 2019; Mills 2014; Garland-Thomson 2011). Importantly, the desire that something improves in the future implies that it is wrong or lacking in the present. To positively imagine a disabilityfree future is simultaneously to contend that disability is wrong in the present. Another boundary is drawn, between a flawed, still-inhuman present, and a better, more human, future. This framing imagines the future by extrapolating what is valued in the present (Grosz 2004): the future should be like the present, only better. Not only are existing values a yardstick that determines what the future can become; the imagined future also influences the present. When present values are projected uncritically into the future, there can be a mutually reinforcing looping effect. Disability is taken as an obstacle to progress; a disability-free future is imagined; this imagined future confirms that disability is bad in the present. This closed loop of values fails to take stock of what and who must be cast aside or denied to sustain its narrative of progress and its attendant imagined future. As Kafer (2013: 29) notes, where emphasis is upon elimination of disability in the future, resources flow towards curing – that is, preventing – future disabled people and away from ‘the needs and experiences of disabled people in the present’. Within this imaginary, disability has no place in either present or future. This understanding presumes to broadly know what the human is and ought to be, then projects this into the future that, as such, is already somewhat determined by or contained in the present. This does little to displace the values that create the problem at hand. To deny the human its organising role in the future requires an imagined future that is not already contained within the present (Grosz 2004): an inhuman future that is not already organised by the human. This requires not only different values, but a different view on temporality, especially the relationship between present and future. We find this in the thought of Henri Bergson (1988). Here, as the present passes, there is continual polarisation into what comes to pass (the actual present) and other eventualities that, while not actualised, are prolonged within the present as untapped potentialities (the virtual past). While the actual describes what can be directly experienced, the virtual is just as real. As events occur and time passes, actualisations and virtualities accrue. Since it conserves a multiplicity of potentials for every actualisation, this virtual past always exceeds the present. Moreover, while such potentials are related to what has already been actualised, this relationship is not

Disability and the Inhuman 305 one of resemblance or identity. The crucial point is this: relations in the present are replete with potentials that are indeterminate, pluripotent: they exceed present conditions and can counter, bypass, or transform them. These potentialities provide the resources for something different to happen, for the future to differ from the present. The present is filled with potential lines of divergence that can become other categories, other groups, other futures (Grosz 2004). The future is not contained in the present, nor does it repeat it or progress from it logically; instead it is ‘full to overflowing’ (May 2005: 61) with potential to differ from it. An inhuman gaze attempts to do justice to this openness of the future: to endeavour not to see through human eyes, to not already be orientated by present human values. Such an orientation has several aspects. First, it involves a broad commitment to the idea that the future can differ profoundly from what already exists in the present. There is no necessary connection or resemblance between what exists now and what will come to pass. This not only means that the future is not determined by anything in the actual present. If the future does radically differ the present, and if it is affirmed as such, present and future values cannot resemble one another and so cannot be mutually reinforcing. Looking to the future more concretely, burgeoning biotechnological developments will surely transform capacities in ways that overspill all extant humans, engendering new, yet inconceivable, entanglements and enablements. To hold open an inhuman future implies that proposed interventions need not be made to replicate existing functions and can respond more imaginatively to bodily demands. Second, it recognises that lines of divergence and innovation are already at work in the present. Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) note many ways that disabled people continually make and remake worlds – tinkering with their prosthetics or making bespoke curb ramps – and often reject technologies that assimilate to human norms in favour of more fitting, local, and piecemeal solutions. Nelson, Shew, and Stevens discuss ’transmobility’, which involves ‘the ability to move between various modes of mobility’ and ‘to move beyond traditional forms of movement’ (2019: 2). Rather than viewing unconventional motilities as deficient in comparison to a human norm, they emphasise how disabled bodies have many ways of moving – more, even, than typical bodies – that are creative, liberating, pleasurable, and playful. Their emphasis upon inventive technological configurations underscores how there is no definitive motility for any body, even those that do approximate human criteria. All are plural, mixed, enabled to move by their connections. Not only are such somatechnical ensembles more adequate descriptions of bodies than the solitary consciousness inhabiting a bounded organism, but a simultaneously richer and more modest autonomy should relinquish the will to individual self-mastery to affirm connections with other bodies and technologies. This also shows how many bodies that fall outside

306  Jonathan Paul Mitchell human parameters (bodies that a curative imaginary would remove from the future) instead thrive in the present. This does not mean that they do not experience discrimination, which should be challenged whenever encountered. Finally, an inhuman orientation affirms all such bodily and technological practices on their own terms. It follows the trajectory of bodily movement in its concreteness, allowing it to be adequate to itself. It does not deny its singularity by pressing it back towards existing anthropocentric criteria. In this way it can be an exemplar: not of the correct way to move, but of the fact that potentially boundless ways of moving exist.

Concluding Remarks An inhuman orientation aims to deny the human its normative organising force, not by opposing it, but by trying not to be contained by it. It does not reject specific practices outright but is concerned where goals seem too obvious, are decided too quickly, especially where concepts of the human are – explicitly or implicitly – at work. It is sceptical of practices that proceed from abstract types rather than concrete embodiments, from individual autonomy rather than interdependence, and especially of aims to restore or integrate based on full humanity. It spurns ideal form or function for the absolute singularity of bodies and multiple and diverse modes of living. It affirms what is new in the present without asking whether this resembles the human. Finally, an inhuman future does not come after the human. It is not a desired end, but an ongoing process of revaluing and avoiding the anthropocentric prejudices structuring everyday thought and action.

Note 1. In this chapter I am not considering cognitive disorders, psychiatric illness, or mental health, but for the most part, physical disability and activity.

Reference List Bergson, H. 1988. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Esposito, R. 2012a. Biopolitics and philosophy. In Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Rochester: Fordham University Press, 67–78. Esposito, R. 2012b. Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. Cambridge: Polity Press. Esposito, R. 2015. Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View. Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, M. 2012. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Frost, S. 2016. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. London: Duke University Press.

Disability and the Inhuman 307 Garland-Thomson, R. 2011. Misfits: A feminist materialist disability concept. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 26: 591–609. Grosz, E. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. London: Duke University Press. Hamraie, A. and Fritsch, K. 2019. Crip technoscience manifesto. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5: 1–33. Harris, J. 2010. Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Ihde, D. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Introna, L.D. 2014. Towards a post-human intra-actional account of sociomaterial agency (and morality). In P. Kroes and P-P. Verbeek (eds.) The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Dordrecht: Springer, 31–53. Kafer, A. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malafouris, L. 2016. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. London: MIT Press. May, T. 2005. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mills, C. 2014. The case of the missing hand: Gender, disability, and bodily norms in selective termination. Hypatia, 30: 82–96. Moser, I. 2000. Against normalisation: Subverting norms of ability and disability. Science as Culture, 9: 201–240. Moser, I. 2006. Disability and the promises of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal. Information, Communication & Society, 9: 373–395. Moser, I. and Law, J. 1999. Good passages, bad passages. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 196–219. Nelson, M.K., Shew, A., and Stevens, B. 2019. Transmobility: Possibilities in cyborg (cripborg) bodies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5: 1–20. Oliver, M. and Barnes, C. 2012. The New Politics of Disablement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scully, J.L. 2014. Disability and vulnerability: On bodies, dependence, and power. In C. Mackenzie, W. Rogers, and S. Dodds (eds.) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 204–221. Shakespeare, T. 2014. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. London: Routledge. Shildrick, M. 2012. Critical disability studies: Rethinking the conventions for the age of postmodernity. In N. Watson, A. Roulstone, and C. Thomas (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies. London: Routledge, 30–41. Thomas, C. 2007. Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zylinska, J. 2010. Playing god, playing Adam: The politics and ethics of enhancement. Bioethical Inquiry, 7: 149–161.

20 Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness James Jardine

I don’t know what white people see when they look at a negro anymore, but I do know, that – I realized when I was very young – that, whatever he was looking at, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It was something he was afraid of, it was something to which he was attracted, or which he found repulsive. But it wasn’t me. I was not a man. James Baldwin1

Introduction The unsettling, humiliating, and often threatening experience of feeling oneself invisible before the gazes of other people in one’s social world – succinctly captured in the above excerpt from a 1960 television interview with the African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, but still today routinely lived by some members of social minorities and other (historically or contemporarily) oppressed groups – has obvious potential as a theme for collaborative efforts between social theorists and phenomenologists. The present chapter proposes one way of approaching such a collaborative engagement, drawing in particular upon three authors who offer detailed analyses of social visibility and its potential pathologies: Axel Honneth, Frantz Fanon, and Edmund Husserl. The specific phenomenon will first be located by way of Honneth’s account of the manner in which social invisibility becomes manifest – namely, in behaviour that expresses an attitude of nonrecognition towards other persons immediately present. As we shall see, Honneth ultimately suggests that the recognitive dimension at issue here – that is, what is conspicuously absent in invisibilising social interactions – involves patterns of bodily expression that convey a (positive and context-appropriate) emotive attitude towards the other. Accordingly, his account implies that affect plays an essential role in enabling us to see others in an affirmative or recognitive (rather than merely cognitive) fashion, such that it is the presence of certain affirmative emotional expressions that conveys to others their social (rather than merely literal) visibility. While this emphasis on the affective preconditions of social visibility strikes me as promising, in the

Social Invisibility 309 second part of the chapter it will be suggested that Honneth’s account of social invisibility is limited by its sole focus only on those cases where a mere lack of emotional responsiveness to others is present. For, as thinkers such as Fanon and Baldwin emphasise, one’s invisibility before others becomes manifest primarily in those cases where one witnesses the emergence of actual (dehumanizing) emotional responses to one’s perceptual presence. While the essential relationships holding between perception, valuing, and emotion remain largely unexplored in the work of Honneth and Fanon, the third part of the chapter will consider these relationships phenomenologically by drawing upon Husserl’s unpublished writings on affect and social experience. As Husserl’s fine-grained analyses show, our emotive responses to perceptually present others are lived as embodied and evaluative attitudes which target others in their perceptual presence and simultaneously as ways in which we see others as having new forms of (affective and axiological) significance. Moreover, I will suggest that the form of nonrecognition involved with social invisibility can be understood as a specific and accentuated manifestation of a broader danger implicit within affective life that I will term emotional blindness. My account of this phenomenon draws upon Husserl’s discussion of what he terms ‘blind’ or ‘inauthentic’ emotional responses: that is, cases of affective intentionality that evaluatively construe their intentional object in a fashion that is responsive more to certain preconceptions or associative horizons than to the matter concerned as it actually documents itself in experience. More exactly, it will be suggested that the inhuman gaze which provokes a sense of social invisibility typically manifests an instance of emotive response (be it fear, disgust, or sheer indifference) that is ‘blind’ in this sense. In other words, I will argue that the manner of looking that conveys to others their social invisibility – or what could be termed an ‘invisibilising gaze’ – is infused with affective construals that, while sometimes partially co-responsive to social perception and understanding, are contaminated by associative configurations that lead the gazing person’s feelings astray.

I.  Social Visibility and Invisibility Honneth’s examination of the phenomenon of social invisibility occupies a key function within his broader attempt to establish and motivate a systematic ‘recognition theory’: that is, a reinvigorated form of critical social theory that is sufficiently responsive to the psychological, normative, and political significance of mutual recognition between persons. In this broader philosophical framework, Honneth proposes three basic varieties of social recognition or acknowledgement (Anerkennung) – love and emotional support within intimate personal relationships, respect for each individual’s basic dignity as enshrined in reciprocally accepted legal

310  James Jardine rights, and shapes of social esteem or solidarity that are capable of valuing a diversity of specific identities and attributes (rather than privileging the self-understanding of dominant groups) – before arguing that participating in a nexus of social relationships that embody these three forms of recognition is a necessary precondition for identity-formation and social freedom. Moreover, Honneth contends that it is not only in their presence that such relationships of recognition affect human life but also in their felt absence. That is, socialised human persons possess a repertoire of ‘moral expectations’ delineating the kind of recognition they expect from others; and if their actually experienced social relationships frustrate their recognitional expectations, they will often desire, and feel inclined to (individually or collectively) demand, the transformation of those relationships. The task of Honneth’s recognition theory is then to develop a more general account of the role played by mutual recognition in partially constituting autonomous and fully satisfying human agency but at the same time to gear this theoretical framework towards the thematic elaboration of a number of far-reaching dissatisfactions with historically constituted ‘recognition orders’ – including grievances that have not yet been given explicit political articulation. By means of such elaboration, Honneth’s recognition theory ultimately aims to contribute to the critical development of various political demands, particularly as advanced by progressive social movements seeking to challenge and transform facets of the prevailing social order (which Honneth thematises as ‘struggles for recognition’).2 Since he takes the phenomenon of social invisibility to involve the denial of ‘an “elementary” form of recognition’ (Honneth 2001: 115) – ‘elementary’ primarily because its absence or presence is, as we shall see, already exhibited at the pre-discursive level of immediate and involuntary bodily expression3 – the task of providing a compelling account of this phenomenon is clearly of urgent importance for his broader critical-theoretical project. In order to convey a preliminary sense of the opposed phenomena which his analysis of invisibility seeks to clarify, Honneth gives an initial priority to first-person descriptions of one’s own sense of social visibility or invisibility, a choice that is presumably based upon his belief that these two social conditions leave a deep impression on the persons they afflict – with one’s own social invisibility being something lived through in a particularly visceral manner. Accordingly, he writes that to be socially visible involves living in a social world in which one’s ‘interactive relationships’ with others permit a stable sense that one is ‘affirmed’ or accorded ‘social validity’ with respect to the ‘role of a specific social type’ (2001: 119). This can be helpfully contrasted with the experience of one’s own social invisibility, which Honneth describes as ‘non-existence in a social sense’ (2001: 111). The socially invisible person repeatedly suffers the humiliating experience of encountering others who fail to offer any visible acknowledgement that she or he is someone enacting a specific social

Social Invisibility 311 role, or even that that she or he is a human subject tout court (2001: 114). Honneth’s prime example of such invisibility is the first-person narrator of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man: an African-American man who feels himself rendered ‘invisible’ by the near-constant and ritualized manner in which white Americans ‘look through’ and actively and publicly fail to ‘see’ him as a person. Referring to the distinction between love, respect, and solidarity as three forms of recognition analysed in his more systematic works, Honneth suggests that social invisibility in this sense represents a primitive form of disrespect, inasmuch as it involves a peculiar kind of nonrecognition that refuses to acknowledge the basic humanity of the other person (2001: 123). However, this mode of disrespect clearly differs from more overt forms of disrespect or dehumanization, in that it does not involve the active denial or deprivation of a person’s basic rights (cf. Honneth 1995: 107–121, 133–134). Honneth’s task in his analysis of invisibility is therefore to elucidate what is involved with the specific form of disrespect that generates, in the person disrespected, such a sense of non-visibility. In setting out to achieve this task, Honneth first emphasizes that, at least when contrasted with a more strict notion of invisibility – that would characterize only those entities that entirely lack any visual presence and availability for perceptual judgement – the kind of non-visibility to others reported by the narrator of Invisible Man must be understood as involving invisibility in a somewhat ‘metaphorical’ or ‘figurative’ sense (2001: 111–112). Experiencing one’s own social invisibility before others is not a matter of taking oneself to be wholly invisible to another person in a more literal sense, since it does not entail being completely absent from the other’s visual field. Correlatively, Honneth draws a distinction between ‘literal visibility’ and ‘figurative’ or ‘social visibility’ and aims to clarify what is absent in cases of social invisibility by investigating what more is required, in addition to mere literal perceptibility, for the emergence of social visibility in the context of an interpersonal encounter (2001: 111). Importantly, Honneth claims that the additional recognitive ingredient required for social (rather than literal) visibility will not typically be a particular kind of speech act, one that would perhaps verbally affirm the other person’s visible presence or social validity. Rather, it is often through non-linguistic forms of bodily expressivity – as enhancing or entirely replacing speech acts – that others impress upon us our visibility or invisibility in a social sense, since social statuses of this kind can be conveyed without any linguistic communication being necessary (2001: 119). Accordingly, Honneth suggests that paradigmatic instances of social invisibility involve interactions where one person fails to exhibit, before another, certain context-appropriate bodily gestures and facial expressions; and that the absence of such behaviour is significant for our sense of social visibility because it serves to express, not merely a

312  James Jardine perceptual grasp of our spatial presence, but a certain kind of evaluative affirmation that we ordinarily expect from other people in a given social context. Honneth offers the following examples of such non-linguistic expressive gestures: Even adult persons usually make clear reciprocally in their communications, through a multitude of finely nuanced, expressive responses, that the other is welcome or deserves special attention: a friend at a party is worthy of a sparkling smile or a strongly articulated welcoming gesture, the cleaning lady in one’s apartment is offered a gesture hinting at gratitude that extends beyond the speech act of greeting, and the black person is greeted like all other persons in the train compartment with changing facial expressions or a quick nod of the head. (Honneth 2001: 119) In Honneth’s discussion of such recognitive gestures, a number of intriguing claims emerge, although for the current purposes it will suffice to focus on just two. On the one hand, Honneth argues that such bodily movements can be described as a kind of ‘meta-action’ (2001: 120–121), in the sense that they make it clear to the other person that their agent is willing to act in a particular type of way towards them in the future, hence allowing the other to form an expectation of the kind of treatment she will be in for as the encounter unfolds. Thus, as Honneth puts it, ‘a welcoming gesture among adults expresses the fact that one can subsequently reckon upon benevolent actions’, while ‘the absence of gestures of recognition’ suggests, in the space of the encounter, that the other ‘must be prepared for hostile actions’ (2001: 120). A powerful illustration of someone’s behaviour non-linguistically expressing a total absence of human recognition towards certain others – and thereby provoking a pronounced sense of insecurity in them – can be found in a passage from Audre Lorde’s semi-autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Here, the narrator recollects the anxiety that the cold and hostile gaze of a museum guard generated in her Grenadian mother: She did not know her way in and out of the galleries of the Museum of National History, but she did know that it was a good place to take children if you wanted them to grow up smart. It frightened her when she took the children there, and she would pinch each one of us girls on the fleshy part of our upper arms at one time or another all afternoon. Supposedly, it was because we wouldn’t behave, but it was actually because beneath the neat visor of the museum guard’s hat, she could see pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if we were a bad smell, and this frightened her. This was a situation she couldn’t control. (Lorde 2018: 10)

Social Invisibility 313 On the other hand, Honneth seems aware that, in noting that recognitive gestures serve to convey their agent’s willingness to act in a certain kind of way towards the other in the future, we have not yet fully accounted for the temptation to describe such gestures as giving expression to the other’s visibility. Of course, one could always seek to dismiss the implication that such gestures betray anything significant about their agent’s way of perceiving the other person concerned, an implication which may after all simply be generated by a loose and entirely metaphorical usage of the terms visibility and invisibility in relation to such gestures. But this is not the path that Honneth pursues. Rather, he ultimately argues that regarding the kind of recognition at issue here as involving visibility in a wholly metaphorical sense is an untenable solution; and that what is required, at least for the sphere of interpersonal relations, is rather a broadening of our conception of visibility such that it necessarily requires recognitional, as well as merely sensuous and cognitive, aspects (2001: 125). More specifically, he suggests that the kind of recognition that the gestures discussed here serve to express should be understood as a kind of ‘evaluative perception’, in which the worth or value (Wert) of the other person is ‘directly given’ (2001: 124–126). Honneth draws upon a number of philosophical and empirical resources in support of his proposal that elementary recognition involves a crucial dimension of evaluative perception, but for the present purposes it will suffice to indicate two central motivations for such a claim. First, while such recognitive gestures as sparkling smiles and welcoming nods convey a normative significance that is embedded within ‘the evaluative vocabulary’ of a ‘social world’ (2001: 125) – and in this sense involve a kind of appraisal of the other person’s value or worth, one that further implies a practical willingness to treat the other in a certain fashion as the encounter unfolds – it is nevertheless the case that the recognizing subject does not ordinarily live through an episode of deliberation in which an evaluative judgement is formed on the basis of justifying reasons. Indeed, if such an episode of deliberation were to occur prior to the extension of a recognitive gesture, the person to whom this gesture was extended may well be left with a somewhat uneasy and insecure sense of her or his own social visibility. The attitude of evaluative appraisal conveyed by the recognitive gesture therefore appears to be one of a ‘direct’ or ‘immediate’ variety (2001: 125), and conceiving of this attitude as an act of perception therefore looks, at first glance, more phenomenologically plausible than understanding it as an intellectively-formed value-judgement. In later sections of the paper, it will be suggested that a more detailed phenomenological analysis of the experience of the recognizing subject can allow for a further development of this line of thought. But let me now mention a second motivation for Honneth’s suggestion that elementary recognition constitutes a form of evaluative perception, one that draws more upon the perspective of a subject who is deprived such recognition.

314  James Jardine As Honneth writes, for ‘the affected persons in particular, their “invisibility” has in each case a real core: they actually feel themselves not to be perceived. However, “perception” must mean more here than it does in the concept of seeing, that is, of identifying and cognizing someone or something’ (2001: 113). This thought can be spelled out by reconsidering Lorde’s depiction of a mother who is frightened by the museum guard’s ‘pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if we were a bad smell’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, to paraphrase Baldwin, for those who become the target of a gaze of this sort, whatever it is the gazer is seeing, it isn’t them. That is, the guard’s way of looking is so intimately bound up – at least for the persons to whom the stare is directed – with a construal of the mother and children as base or repulsive, that it seems plausible to stipulate that, from the mother’s point of view, the guard’s attitude appears to render him unable to see, in a quite literal sense, what (or who) is there before him. Let me now briefly take stock of some of the central Honnethian claims regarding social visibility and invisibility highlighted so far. For Honneth, our sense of our own social visibility is something vulnerable to the expressive significance manifest in the gestures and facial expressions of the other people with whom we interact in concrete social situations. More precisely, this social visibility is threatened or undermined, leading to the distressing condition of social invisibility, in the absence of gestures on behalf of others that serve to convey, not merely our own perceptibility in a literal or sensory guise, but also that we have been noticed by others in a more affirmative or evaluative sense. Part of what this means is that such recognitive gestures indicate a motivational willingness to treat others in what Honneth describes as a broadly respectful or benevolent fashion, with the fine-grained practical (or meta-practical) significance of such gestures being dependent upon the specific interpersonal context and the type of gesture extended. But they also serve to convey a particular kind of evaluative stance on behalf of the recognizing person, a stance which is not typically a matter of predicative judgement but which rather shares the immediacy and receptivity of perceptual experience.

II.  Social Invisibility and Affect While I take Honneth’s essay on invisibility to offer a number of interesting and potentially insightful claims concerning the phenomenology of social visibility and invisibility, it strikes me that one of the most intriguing suggestions that emerges in his discussion is one that he does not explicitly develop in this text. Namely, at one point Honneth suggests that recognitive gestures serve to convey a certain kind of affirmative evaluation of the persons to which they are extended, at least in part because they are typically experienced as expressive of a certain kind of emotional stance, one which is held by the recognizing subject and

Social Invisibility 315 directed towards the other person. As Honneth writes: ‘Whether someone smiles lovingly or merely greets one respectfully, whether someone extends his hand emphatically or merely nods his head in a benevolent way, in each case a different type of emotional readiness to engage morally with the addressee is signalled with the expressive gesture’ (2001: 122, emphasis mine). While Honneth does not really expand on this remark, one way of understanding it would be to surmise that what the recognitive gesture most directly expresses is an affective evaluation of the other of one or another form; and that this emotional stance is furthermore immediately intelligible to the person recognized as having motivational consequences – namely, as eliciting in the recognizing subject a desire to treat them in a fashion that is morally delimited by the positive evaluation contained within the interpersonal emotion in question. In the next section, I will argue that phenomenological analysis of affective experience lends support to the thought that our emotional responses to others contribute an evaluative component to perceptual experience, and that this can help clarify Honneth’s suggestion that affect plays a crucial role for sustaining a sense of social visibility in concrete social interactions. But it will first be necessary to consider the implications of this suggestion for our understanding of the central phenomenon under consideration here –namely, social invisibility. Now, a peculiar lacunae of Honneth’s article is that – despite his detailed analysis of what is involved with the gestures and attitudes required for social visibility – the kind of behaviour that portrays others as socially invisible is described in merely negative terms – namely, as involving the simple ‘absence’ of recognitive gestures (cf. 2001: 115–116, 119–120, 123). Yet if we attempt to take seriously (and further elaborate) Honneth’s suggestion that social visibility is conveyed through emotionally saturated bodily expressions, then the possibility emerges that invisibilising activity involves some kind of ‘deformation’ of a person’s affective sensibility as regards (certain) others (cf. Honneth 2001: 126). While Honneth does not concretely spell out what such a deformation of affective perception might involve – or indicate, in positive terms, how this affective deformation could become salient (as denying visibility) in the context of an interpersonal encounter – Danielle Petherbridge (2017) has recently offered a crucial supplement to Honneth’s account that sheds light on just this issue. So as to offer a more detailed and concrete analysis of social invisibility, Petherbridge draws upon an expansive body of writings that address and articulate the lived experience of being perceived in a racialising manner. In such cases of invisibilising perception, the perceiver conveys through their embodied gestures and movements to the person perceived that they are seen as racially other – that is, as instantiating a racial identity constructed and sedimented in the social imaginary of a dominant group (with which the perceiver themselves will typically identify). Moreover, as authors such as Ellison (2001) – but also

316  James Jardine Fanon (2008), Toni Morrison (2007), Alia Al-Saji (2014), and George Yancy (2017) – have illustrated, the invisibilising force of various racialising perceptual habits is paradoxically intertwined with their tendency to impress upon the othered group a highly accentuated form of essentialising visibility, such that racialising social encounters are often characterised by a dialectic of invisibility and hypervisibility (Petherbridge 2017: 106–110). Building upon Petherbridge’s rich and rewarding discussion, I would now like to explore one aspect of the invisibilising gaze that, by my estimation, Petherbridge underemphasises – namely, that racialising perceptual comportment often involves forms of bodily expressivity that, rather than intimating a total absence of emotional responsiveness, actively convey specific (though distorted and alienating) emotional responses to the racialised person. For instance, in Fanon’s famous account of realising that his being-for-others was unrecognizably distorted – through the various racist interpretations permeating his embodied presence in colonial French society – a pivotal role is played by the evident fear and aversion that his bodily appearance elicited in white French people (Fanon 2008: 89–101; cf. Young 2011: 122–148). At least in this case, the invisibilising behaviour does not betray a total absence of emotive expressiveness, but rather intimates an affective evaluation of the other person that actively construes her or him as base, threatening, or repulsive. Accordingly, the affective state of the person gazing is not merely inhibited by – but constitutes and projects – a culturally sedimented and racialising interpretation of the other person. While this emotive attitude is, in a sense, crudely elicited by the perceived person’s bodily appearance, it also further configures her or his bodily presence to the perceiving subject, through the functioning of certain culturally sedimented emotive habits (cf. Al-Saji 2014: 140–141; Yancy 2017: 17–44). To adopt Fanon’s fruitful technical vocabulary, my suggestion here is thus that such emotive habits play a positive and constitutive role in imposing, upon the racialised subject’s lived body, a ‘historical-racial schema’ (2008: 91). Seen from a broader perspective, the (sociocultural) formation of such habits within individual persons serves to disseminate and reproduce societal patterns of nonrecognition and invisibility, patterns that are lived through viscerally by the persons who are thus racialized in the respective social nexus.

III. Husserl on Emotional Blindness and the Phenomenology of Affective Experience In the previous section, it was suggested that, in a number of cases, invisibilising modes of behaviour – as well as visibility-enabling recognitive gestures – possess a (non)recognitional significance, at least in part because they give expression to certain affective states. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to focus on just two issues raised by this

Social Invisibility 317 thought. First, an obvious question to be raised here is whether emotions can indeed be regarded as playing the role that I, following Honneth and Fanon, have suggested we might ascribe to them. That is, the question here is whether emotions can really function as immediate, nondeliberative, and even quasi-perceptual interpersonal evaluative stances; stances that are both intentionally oriented towards other people in our current perceptual field, as well as being ways in which we experience those others as having a certain kind of value or axiological significance. Moreover, if it is granted that emotions can function in this way, then a further salient issue emerges – namely, that of the different personal and social circumstances that account for why we sometimes emotively recognise others, while sometimes denying them recognitive visibility. In this dual assessment of the plausibility and explanatory implications of the suggestion that an elementary form of recognition can be located in certain kinds of interpersonal affect, I will now turn to Edmund Husserl’s work on the phenomenology of emotion. While the emotions cannot be regarded as a major theme in Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, detailed analyses of emotional experience, and its relationship to value and valuing, can be found in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, as well as in his research manuscripts and lectures. Rather than offering here a detailed overview of the issues and problems addressed by Husserl in those writings (cf. Drummond 1995, 2006; Melle 2012; Jardine 2020b), my aim will rather be to indicate certain claims that I find particularly insightful and salient for the concerns of this chapter. Husserl’s writings on affective experience seek to investigate whether, and in what sense, a person’s emotional state might constitute a distinctive form of evaluative attitude, one that is typically directed towards and targets worldly matters – including other people in the subject’s immediate perceptual environment. Furthermore, like the kind of evaluation that Honneth finds implied in the significance of recognitive gestures, Husserl argues that emotive valuing enacts a peculiar kind of subjective activity that needn’t involve – but rather offers an important starting point for – evaluative thinking. But this emphasis on the non-intellective character of emotional valuation does not imply that such experience is devoid of all intentionality or intelligibility. Rather, our emotive responses involve a pre-theoretical experience of things, people, or worldly contexts as valuable (or disvaluable), an experience that is phenomenologically akin to sense-perception but that also introduces novel forms of (felt) evaluative significance that do not emerge at the level of perceptual experience in the strictest and most literal sense (Jardine 2020b). For Husserl, then, the commonplace intuition that emotions are frequently intentional states – that is, states of mind that relate to matters external to the emotion itself, and which also construe those matters in a particular way – is a thought that gains considerable support and confirmation from phenomenological analysis. Moreover, his phenomenological studies of emotional life

318  James Jardine can be regarded as significantly clarifying and deepening this thought, to the extent that they claim to unearth and investigate an evaluative mode of perception that, they argue, is both constitutive of and unique to emotional experience. As Husserl summarizes one of the key findings from his research manuscripts: ‘When I am angry, when I am passionately agitated by the loathsomeness of a person’s way of acting, then the seeing of that person’s loathsomeness resides precisely in the affective agitations themselves, and in the ray of attentiveness (turning-towards-theperson) that passes through such agitations’ (Husserl 2020: 128, transl. and emphasis mine). While I am unable to comprehensively illustrate this here, I take it that Husserl’s explorations of the evaluative content of emotional states, and of their complex intertwinement with perception – including the perception of other people, a theme with which Husserl was much occupied and which also emerges in his writings on the emotions (Jardine 2020a) – have much to contribute to our understanding of social visibility and recognitive modes of affect and perception. For instance, beyond illustrating that, and how, the emotions introduce a (complex and internally differentiated) evaluative component into our direct experience of other people, Husserl’s analyses also explore the role embodiment plays in emotive valuing. Ultimately, he suggests that a number of lived bodily processes and activities experientially contribute to our affective evaluations, in that they transform and enrich the evaluative significance that the matter emoted has for us (Jardine 2020b). Accordingly, it seems to me that Husserl’s writings can be of significant import in further clarifying the relationships that hold between embodied gestures of recognition, emotive valuing, and perception. Moreover, Husserl’s work also sheds light on some of the background conditions that enable the emergence of socially visibilising – as well as socially invisibilising – modes of behaviour in concrete social interactions. Particularly relevant here is Husserl’s distinction between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ in the emotive sphere, or to employ terminology that Husserl occasionally uses, between feelings that disclose value intuitively (Wertanschauungen) and a certain kind of blindness that can afflict our emotions (blinde Gefühle, blinde Affekte).4 To illustrate this distinction, we can consider two different examples of interpersonal affect that Husserl himself discusses. As an example of authentic (or value-disclosive) feelings, consider the case of speaking with a person to whom one already has a profound affective attachment and feeling uplifted by joy as one witnesses their familiar and beloved personality become manifest in their spoken words, tone of voice, and distinctive facial expressions. In this case, we can say that our feelings of affection for the other person – and joy at being in their presence – find a certain kind of fulfilment in what is currently perceptually given to us: here, what we like about this person is not merely taken for granted or

Social Invisibility 319 anticipated, but rather given to us in the other’s bodily comportment (Husserl 2020: 102–103, 113–114). This can be contrasted with modes of affective valuing that are inauthentic or blind in the sense that they assume an underlying interpretation of their intentional object that lacks any grounding in our experience of the concrete matter in question. Rather than finding experiential fulfilment, such feelings rather rest upon an implicit belief or preconception that relates their concrete objects to others with which it is passively associated, as putatively belonging to the same generic kind. One example offered by Husserl of feelings that are blind or inauthentic in this sense is a situation where one dislikes someone simply because she shares a name with a particularly unappealing fictional character. As Husserl writes, ‘What can poor Eulalie do to change that I once read a novel, in which a monstrous woman was called Eulalie?’ (1988: 410, transl. mine; cited in Loidolt 2009: 173). As this example illustrates, while our emotional responses to other people may be lived through as offering an intuitive sense of their value or disvalue, there may well be presumptuous associative apperceptions or intentional elaborations at play in this emotive valuation that lack any grounding in actual familiarity with the specific person concerned (cf. Husserl 1989: 286; Merleau-Ponty 2012: 379). These inauthentic elements of our emotive reaction to the person will draw upon a general and typifying affective sense of other people, one that may be fed by fictional and historical narratives, as well as reinforced by certain emotionally salient and socially propagated images. While Husserl more often describes emotional attitudes that are particularly determined by such associative prefiguring as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘inadequate’, he occasionally describes them as blind modes of affective intentionality (2020: 112–113, 452–453). Emotions are characterised by blindness in this sense, when they project a (pre-predicative) appraisal of an intentional object that is motivated, not by what the object has actually shown itself experientially to be, but rather by a sense of the object that is passively configured through its association with other (real or imaginary) objects familiar to the emoting person.5 In applying this vocabulary to the problematic of social visibility, it seems to me inevitable to concede that not only much invisibilising and alienating social behaviour (such as racialising forms of aversion) but also many cases of positive recognitive response (such as friendliness towards strangers) are characterised by a degree of emotive inauthenticity (or blindness) in this Husserlian sense. However, it seems to me promising to further develop Husserl’s conceptual distinctions by proposing that racialising modes of affective perception are characterised by a specific and accentuated form of emotional blindness, insofar as they involve a style of affective articulation of the other’s perceptual givenness – as sustained through a set of culturally sedimented emotive habits – that essentially distorts the other’s embodied presence, through affectively associating it with

320  James Jardine various demeaning (and in some cases animalising) myths and images. Accordingly, Husserl’s analyses of emotive inauthenticity – as well as his reflections on its habitual-motivational and social circumstances and on the modes of engagement through which we can relinquish our emotive prejudices – may significantly contribute to our understanding of the functioning and genesis of invisibilising perceptual and emotive habits and of effective strategies for interrupting them (cf. Al-Saji 2014).

Conclusion In the first and second parts of this chapter, it was suggested that a person’s sense of her own social visibility is something that can be undermined when other people’s non-linguistic bodily expressions repeatedly convey to her that, while she is in some sense present in the other’s visual field, she has not been noticed in an emotionally affirmative fashion. As we saw in the second part of this chapter, this claim can be further developed by appealing to authors such as Fanon, who emphasise that particular kinds of emotive reaction project an image of the embodied self that is distorted by various racist and racialising preconceptions, images, and stories. In the third part, we saw that Husserl’s work on the emotions can lend a degree of phenomenological credence to the thought that emotions can function as a kind of immediate evaluation of other people that are perceptually present to us, an evaluation that allows us to directly experience such others as having evaluative significance. Husserl’s analyses, then, serve to further solidify Honneth’s intuition that loving smiles and respectful nods of the head convey a kind of immediate and affective valuation of us, in our perceptual presence to others. Finally, it was suggested that developing a Husserlian concept of emotional blindness may be of aid in clarifying the conditions for the emergence of the kind of deformed emotional response generative of social invisibility.

Notes 1. These lines are an excerpt from an interview conducted by Nathan Cohen, on Encounter, CBC-TV, December 11, 1960. In addition, Baldwin (1964) offers a seminal discussion of the role played by socio-historical contexts in racialising and invisibilising forms of perception and affect. 2. For an early and systematic presentation of this model, see Honneth (1995). Particularly important refinements of the account can be found in Honneth (2003, 2014). In addition, see the particularly helpful and illuminating presentations of Honneth’s broader project in Petherbridge (2013), Zurn (2015), and Kauppinen (2002, 2011). 3. The conception of ‘elementary recognition’ found in Honneth’s writings on invisibility is introduced in order to demarcate any form of recognition, insofar as it becomes manifest at the level pre-discursive and pre-reflective embodied engagement (2001: 115, 119–120). Accordingly, it differs subtly from the

Social Invisibility 321 more restricted concept of elementary (or ‘existential’) recognition discussed in Honneth’s lectures on reification, which is explicitly distinguished from love, respect, and solidarity, and understood as a separate and distinct form of recognition (Honneth 2008: 152–153; cf. Jardine 2015, 2017). 4. Husserl mainly develops this distinction in manuscripts and lectures dating (roughly) from the first decade of the 20th century, this being the period in which he was most occupied with the phenomenology of the emotions (cf. Husserl 1988: 343–344, 408–411, 2020: 22–24, 112–113, 271, 450–453). However, this language also reappears in his later writings on affect (cf. 2004: 223, 2014: 282, 286–289, 2020: 510). 5. One important complication in this regard is Husserl’s distinction between ‘affective apperceptions’ or ‘apperceptions of value’ (Gefühlsapperzeptionen, Wertapperzeptionen) on the one hand, and ‘reactive emotions’ or ‘affects’ (reactive Gefühle, Affekte) on the other, these being two distinct kinds of affective intentionality (or ‘intentional feeling’). While affective apperceptions are more intimately united with sensibility and are at play whenever a perceptual object passively affects as (aesthetically) pleasing or displeasing, the higher-order emotional reactions are more active and spontaneous achievements, involving a form of ‘emotive position-taking’. While the affective apperceptions are already passively motivated by the object as (ap)perceived, the reactive emotions have a more complex normative structure, and exhibit a greater responsiveness to the habituated convictions and evaluations of the emoting person (cf. Jardine 2020b). I take that it is this latter mode of affective intentionality that is of most significance for our recognitive responses to others, not only because the most (personally and interpersonally) significant forms of evaluation reside here, and because they have a more richly embodied dimension and are thus in many cases more perceptually salient to others, but also because such reactions imply a far richer horizon of motivating assumptions, and are accordingly more vulnerable to inauthenticity or blindness. However, it is equally important to emphasise that such emotive reactions are, on Husserl’s account, typically motivationally conditioned by the value-apperceptions that comprise the more passive stratum of affective life, and a comprehensive phenomenological account of emotive (in)authenticity must accordingly consider both dimensions.

Reference List Al-Saji, A. 2014. A phenomenology of hesitation: Interrupting racializing habits of seeing. In E.S. Lee (ed.) Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 167–192. Baldwin, J. 1964. Stranger in the village. In J. Baldwin (ed.) Notes of a Native Son. London: Michael Joseph, 151–165. Drummond, J.J. 1995. Moral objectivity: Husserl’s sentiments of the understanding. Husserl Studies, 12 (2): 165–183. Drummond, J.J. 2006. Respect as a moral emotion: A phenomenological approach. Husserl Studies, 22: 1–27. Ellison, R. 2001. Invisible Man. London: Penguin Books. Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. R. Philcox (trans.). New York: Grove Press. Honneth, A. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition. J. Anderson (trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

322  James Jardine Honneth, A. 2001. I—Axel Honneth: Invisibility: On the epistemology of ‘recognition.’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 75 (1): 111–126. Honneth, A. 2003. Redistribution as recognition: A response to Nancy Fraser. In Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (eds.) Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London and New York: Verso, 110–197. Honneth, A. 2008. Reification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honneth, A. 2014. Freedom’s Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Husserl, E. 1988. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre. 1908–1914. Ullrich Melle (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. 2004. Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. Henning Peucker (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachless (1908–1937). Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2020. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Band II: Gefühl und Wert. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Ullrich Melle and Thomas Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer. Jardine, J. 2015. Stein and Honneth on empathy and emotional recognition. Human Studies, 38 (4): 567–589. Jardine, J. 2017. Elementary recognition and empathy: A Husserlian account. Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 5 (1): 143–170. Jardine, J. 2020a. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person. Cham: Springer. Jardine, J. 2020b. Edmund Husserl. In T. Szanto and H. Landweer (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London and New York: Routledge. Kauppinen, A. 2002. Reason, recognition, and internal critique. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 45 (4): 479–498. Kauppinen, A. 2011. The social dimension of autonomy. In D. Petherbridge (ed.) Axel Honneth: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 255–302. Loidolt, S. 2009. Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theories des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Dordrecht: Springer. Lorde, A. 2018. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. London: Penguin Books. Melle, U. 2012. Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In R. Breeur and U. Melle (eds.) Life, Subjectivity & Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A. Landes (trans.). London and New York: Routledge. Morrison, T. 2007. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books. Petherbridge, D. 2013. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham: Lexington. Petherbridge, D. 2017. Racializing perception and the phenomenology of invisibility. In D. Petherbridge and L. Dolezal (eds.) Body/Self/Other: The

Social Invisibility 323 Phenomenology of Social Encounters. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 103–129. Yancy, G. 2017. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, 2nd ed. Lanham and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Young, I.M. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Zurn, C.F. 2015. Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

21 What Are You Looking At? Dissonance as a Window Into the Autonomy of Participatory Sense-Making Frames Mark James Within that zone, where the body’s frequency is identical to the world’s, whatever happens meets with no resistance . . . the soft, moist flannel that one hand is squeezing and the hard edge of the bath that the other hand is supporting itself against, both are within the spectrum that we are open to, so that they almost escape us entirely, in the never formulated yet constant sensation that the world is an extension of the body. Karl Ove Knausgård, Autumn, (2017: 89)

Introduction In the above quote Knausgård suggests that body and physical world resonate such that our worlds function as extensions of our bodies, the range of such extensions apparent in the degree to which the objects of our worlds ‘escape us’. Knausgård’s account is, of course, a literary one. In this chapter I develop a parallel philosophical position, though one concerning our social worlds: our bodies extend into our social worlds, and the range and indeed nature of their extension is recognisable in the ways in which their objects escape us. These social ‘zones’ (briefly adopting Knausgård’s language) depend upon a pre-reflective coupling possible due to processes of habituation, and that can be characterised in terms of synergistically integrating autonomous structures at multiple timescales that are reproduced by the activities they promote. Building upon the work of a number of enactive philosophers – (notably De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Barandiaran 2017) – I introduce the notion of participatory sense-making frames, or participatory frames (PFs) for short, as a generic term referring to such structures. As we will observe, PFs and the activities they motivate can be more or less compatible, and the manner of compatibility at play impacts the experiences of the subjects that instantiate them.

Participatory Sense-Making Frames 325 The gaze of everyday social interactions is one activity that typically resides within the ‘zones’ wherein our social ‘frequencies’ are well aligned; and to this extent it is, I will contend, a manifestation of compatible PFs. As such, it rarely becomes an object of explicit attention. Much like the moist flannel in the bathtub or the temperature on an agreeable day, it ‘escapes us’, and any PF that might be discerned remains transparent; a transparency often accompanied by a feeling of being well situated, of being ‘taken up and understood’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 360–361). However, when we move, or are moved, close to or beyond the limits of our PFs, the opportunity to observe something of their dynamic organisation arises. In what follows, I will suggest that encountering what Merleau-Ponty refers to as an inhuman gaze, is one example in which the limits of a PF are being poked at. By exploring such experiential specimens, we can make visible the organisations that underlie our everyday social interactions, recognising them as undergirded by self-producing plastic structures that are reproduced by the operations they promote (i.e. participatory sense-making frames). I do not have the space herein to provide a thoroughgoing argument for this claim. What I hope to do is make a convincing case that the notion of autonomous participatory frames is a legitimate target for more encompassing investigations. This position also contributes to our understanding of the dynamics undergirding the inhuman gaze and supplies some conceptual tools with which to make intelligible such experiences.

From Participatory Frames to the Inhuman Gaze Participatory Frames Our shared concerns bind us together and allow for the emergence of enduring patterns of being together at multiple timescales. Consider newlyweds lifting furniture into the back of a removal van. As the interaction iterates, patterns of being together are produced and reproduced at multiple timescales, as coordinations of limbs and bodily postures and sets of expectations and anticipations about how activities can and should unfold. At one timescale they coordinate their behaviour in accordance with their most proximal concern, successfully lifting the furniture into the van. Having this shared concern manifests the affordances that allow them to regulate their behaviour so as to guide the furniture into position. And having lifted three chairs into the van today, they do not need the same degree of explicit regulatory activities – in the form of words, nods, grunts, and such – for lifting the fourth and fifth chairs tomorrow. A network of social habits begins to sediment, however vaguely. At another timescale, they are concerned with enacting their identities as newlyweds moving into their first home. Such concerns show up in how they address each other; e.g. a certain caring tone in their voices.

326  Mark James But this caring tone, motivated by their shared identities as newlyweds, also reaffirms those shared identities by feeding back into them, restructuring them. And, at still another timescale they coordinate according to the concerns of being part of the institution of marriage, manifest, for instance, in feelings of conviction that this move will be for the longer term. Again, these feelings and how they permeate the actions of the pair, even when simply lifting furniture into the back of a van together, feed back into the meaning of the institution. These patternings carry forth the concerns that gave them shape and allow the coordination of successive interactions with respect to a set of shared (though often implicit) norms. In this chapter, I will generally refer to these coordinative structures – which when nested together, as we have seen, can possess diverse temporalities – as participatory sense-making frames (PFs). To get a sense for their ubiquity and how they organise our social extension, consider the following more encompassing example. Imagine being the new inhabitant in a house-share with long-term housemates. Entering the situation, you encounter a host of previously sedimented dynamics that characterise their existing relationships. Initially these dynamics strike you as novel and coordinating with them a little strange or dissonant. But before long, you negotiate and sediment novel patterns that now include you, and the new house comes to feel like home. Patterns that once stood out no longer glow with novelty but are transformed and integrated into the perception-action cycles from which you make sense of life within the house. This web of interpersonal entanglements is, of course, ever evolving, however, the emergence of some relatively invariant and overlapping patterns of being together is also readily apparent: from simple social habits, such as you and your housemate having specific sides of the room to lay down your mats when practicing yoga together, to more complex organisations, such as standards of cleanliness in shared living spaces, reasonable levels of noise at particular times, etc. Such coordinating constraints quickly fade into the background of living together but continue to channel your actions as housemates, generating shared expectations and allowing you all to coordinate with respect to a set of shared norms, norms that resurface every now and again when some expectation goes unmet. When you help select the next housemate, you do not see the tangle of relations that they see, but see from these relations, see through them, indeed, even see on behalf of them. You end up with a lived but largely invisible extension into that particular socio-material niche, a web of more or less integrated autonomous structures. To inquire into these dynamics, I explore instances of their perturbation, in particular the example of the inhuman gaze. Heidegger famously made his analysis of the differences between the ready-to-hand and the un-ready-to-hand to illuminate important aspects of our being-in-theworld (Heidegger 2010; Dotov, Nie and Chemero 2010). In this chapter

Participatory Sense-Making Frames 327 I employ a similar method. By analysing examples of social dissonances (e.g. the inhuman gaze) in contrast to felicitous social coordinations (e.g. the human gaze), I illuminate important features of our being-in-theworld-together. This analysis helps disclose organising forces normally left undisclosed and outside our awareness, though nevertheless coordinating the flow of our social interactions; it helps reveal the nature and limits of our social extensions. The Inhuman Gaze Most social interactions take place within familiar patterns; we interact with housemates and family at home, colleagues at work, friends in our preferred café or in their living rooms. And for interactions that happen outside of shared histories, the setting typically supplies an omniavailable register with which to attune. Think of paying a cashier in a supermarket or asking someone for directions. Within such everyday interactions the gaze is not something that we normally notice. Rather, we look upon and are looked upon in ways that affirm (to varying degrees) our participation within the conditions organising such interactions, acting with relatively compatible anticipations towards compatible concerns. I refer to the gaze under such conditions as a ‘human gaze’. The human gaze entails elements of intersubjectivity and empathy and is the default mode of embodied interaction. Part of the background conditions that allow for felicitous social embeddings, it implies a sympathetic readiness; its smooth and invisible coordination allowing us to get on with other aspects of our shared projects. Unless we turn our attention to it, the human gaze goes unnoticed. When gazed upon by others operating from incompatible concerns (an unsympathetic readiness), however, we experience a kind of dissonance. Such examples parallel Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of the inhuman gaze, which one is likely to find oneself under when the gazer has ‘withdrawn into the core of [their] thinking nature’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 360–361). In Gallagher’s interactional theory of social cognition – much inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeality – the primary mode of reciprocal social interaction is one of a kind of intercorporeal resonance (Gallagher 2001; De Jaegher, Di Paolo and Gallagher 2010). In other words, we typically engage each other as expert interactors, and although, like with any skillful engagement we maintain a heedful awareness which might entail some ‘thinking’, we only ‘withdraw into the core of our thinking’ about others when we are strategizing to determine a certain outcome or making them the object of our inquiry. Imagine an adolescent gang that refer to themselves as ‘The Bulls’, after the Chicago Bulls basketball team1. They wear Chicago Bulls hats, jerseys, and jackets, and hang around the streets in groups, cutting an intimidating presence for anyone entering their small town. Consider one

328  Mark James member of the gang, Peter, going about his day. Being quite senior, his relationship to the other members is generally felicitous. Social coordinations flow relatively unencumbered, meeting little in the way of resistance from other members and the locals he encounters; their gazes comprise part of the conditions that allow Peter to feel well situated, that he is ‘taken up and understood’. Now imagine some other young boy visiting the town to lodge some money. Having heard rumors that the pocket money of other ‘non-townies’ was being forcefully appropriated by The Bulls, he is on edge. Turning a corner, he is confronted with a large group of The Bulls on the other side of the street, with the intimidating black and red aesthetics of their attire. Hurrying past but filled with fascination and terror and unable to avert his gaze, he catches the eye of Peter. Briefly locked in a reciprocal gaze, each now transforming the other into an object and denying him, Peter shouts across the street ‘What are you looking at?’ Something about this gaze as experienced by Peter is different from the gazes of the locals and other gang members, and as its recipient, he senses this; he finds in it a limit to his social extension. This gaze, in its lack of intersubjectivity and empathy, produces for Peter a dissonance, and it suggests that something outside of the conditions that a moment before he was comfortably coordinating within is going on; that he has become the object of someone else’s considerations. When gazed upon so, we 1) become sensitive to the environment of our embedding and 2) are motivated to return our situation to some pre-dissonant order. Regarding the former, like how we notice the temperature when it moves outside of some ideal, it implies something about our social extension having some limits or ‘optimal’ which if deviated from makes itself known. Regarding the latter, it implies that our felicitous social embeddings are organised according to norms that tend to reproduce themselves as such; like how when we notice the cold and are motivated to put on a coat. Such descriptions already suggest our social embeddings can be profitably characterised as PFs, however, to further justify these claims we should expand the examples considered beyond the inhuman gaze, acknowledging it as just one specimen of a genus that I refer to as social dissonances.

Social Dissonances Some examples of social dissonances: you find that your housemate has set up her yoga mat on ‘your side’ of the room; someone sits too close to you on an empty train; an Arab man takes the hand of a non-Arab male colleague in public in Ireland (a practice that is traditionally common amongst many Arab men in Arab countries). Social dissonances arise when something that is typically dependable, and thus largely invisible, breaks, in a sense, and like the air conditioner that suddenly

Participatory Sense-Making Frames 329 malfunctions, discloses itself. The common organisational features disclosed in these examples indicate that our felicitous social embeddings depend upon compatible autonomously organised PFs. Before exploring such features, however, we must briefly consider what is meant by something being autonomous in the sense implied. Enactive Autonomy Within the enactive literature, an autonomously organised structure is one that maintains itself as such through interdependencies between processes within it and an ongoing regulated exchange with its environment (Barandiaran 2017). The prototypical example is the living cell (Maturana and Varela 1981), however, other autonomous systems also include habits and networks of habits (Barandiaran 2017; Di Paolo, Buhrmann and Barandiaran 2017), and social interaction (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). For Barandiaran, habits comprise ‘self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor coordination formed when the stability of a particular mode of sensorimotor engagement is dynamically coupled with the stability of the mechanisms that generate it, and which is reinforced through repetition’ (Barandiaran 2008: 281). A habit then, can, as Barandiaran puts it ‘take on a life of its own’, and be ‘both the cause and the consequence of its own enactment’ (2017: 13) The same dynamic organisation is attributed to integrated networks of habits also. The suggestion I am advocating here is that social versions of such habits and networks, with their own self-regulating norms, are precisely what underlie PFs.

Common Organization Features Like a Hunger to be Reduced The psychological experience of so-called cognitive dissonance is often described like a hunger, in that it motivates its own reduction. The first common feature of social dissonances can be described similarly, like a hunger they motivate activities that would reduce the experience of dissonance. More formally, such experiences signal some variable of the system moving away from some ideal or optimal, motivating actions that might return the system to its preferred state. Social dissonances, then, arise within a more general homeodynamic organisation wherein something is seeking to maintain itself as such. In the yoga example, you will likely be motivated to confront your partner (even if you do not actually) so as to reestablish the prior configuration; in the case of the creepy train person, you might be motivated to change seat or ask the person to move over; in the case of the Arab man holding your hand, you may be motivated to withdraw your hand. When Peter encounters my objectifying gaze, he is motivated to aggressively enquire ‘What are you looking at?’

330  Mark James Within enaction we speak of this tendency of the system to maintain itself within some boundaries of viability in terms of adaptivity (Di Paolo 2005). Originally developed by Di Paolo, adaptivity is taken to describe the set of processes by which an autonomous system that senses itself moving towards a boundary or limit will act on its own states so as to restore itself to some prior optimal. In these examples these dynamics seem to be quite obviously at work. However, in the instances described, the systems are not limited to the dynamics of individual embodied subjects in relationship to their environments but are comprised of multiple, coupled, embodied subjects in relationship with their environments. The optimal state depends upon dynamics that loop through other people. Deviations can occur then in multiple-body-environment systems and responding to such deviations (demonstrating adaptivity) is acting according to the self-regulating norms of the autonomous PFs that are so distributed. Subject to Habituation The second feature common to all our examples is that they are subject to processes of habituation. If the dissonance does not reflect the primary concern for acting within a particular situation, the experience of dissonance can eventually fade and whatever organisation was producing it can be transformed, incorporating the previously perturbing feature into its ongoing dynamics. Reminiscent of how the noise of the air conditioner recedes into the background of one’s awareness, the once perturbing feature becomes an implicit part of the conditions that continue to organise one’s situated activities. Again, consider our examples: if your housemate is stubborn enough not to move back, your new side will eventually come to feel like ‘your side’ again; if no one moves on the train, and the other doesn’t do anything truly creepy, like the noisy air-conditioner they will recede into the background too; if you move to Saudi Arabia and have male Arab friends who spontaneously practice hand-holding with you (presuming you are a man), it likely won’t take long before you come to ‘think nothing’ of the practice; or, consider someone who suffers from the coordination disorder ataxia, a disorder wherein one struggles to coordinate the flow of the body, including the gaze, in a coherent fashion. What might first appear to its recipient as a kind of inhuman gaze, in that it produces a dissonant effect for the gazee2, can quickly come to be seen as a manifestation of the coordination disorder and incorporated into the conditions that organise the interaction. This implies that we are constantly organising and reorganising the coordination dynamics that allow us to smoothly engage in social interaction. In Barandiaran’s (2017) account of habits and networks of habits as autonomous entities, he recognises within the structure of habit the

Participatory Sense-Making Frames 331 possibility for this kind of plasticity. Given the scale invariance that is common to complex adaptive systems, it seems plausible that such possibilities relate to social habits also. From the perspective of the situated activities of the embodied subject, as novel dynamics are accommodated into an existing habit structure (or new habit structures are brought forth), there is a transformation in the relational dynamics that reorganizes their social extension in ways that include what previously constituted a perturbation, thus enacting a kind of extension of their social extension. Such regulatory dynamics, I propose, arise largely from inter-regulatory processes working between structures. For instance, if some dissonance arises from activities impinging upon the norms of seating on an empty train, but they do not push some more primary norms away from optimal, then this dissonance does not negatively perturb the self-generated norms that underlie one’s feeling safe, it can simply be accommodated, even transforming the norms of seating on empty trains in the process. For better or worse, one might go from thinking that everyone who adopts such seating arrangements on a train as being a threat to having a more qualified view. Participatory frames, then, are habit structures that coordinate social action at multiple timescales; they are – extending Baradiaran’s account of habits and networks of habits to the social domain – autonomously organised but nevertheless plastic ways of living together with their own self-generated norms that shape the anticipations and expectations of social life and largely depend upon social relations for their production, reproduction, and transformation.

Conclusion What I have explored in this chapter are the background conditions that organise our social interactions and that have also arisen either in interactions with specific others (the housemates sharing the room for practice; Peter and his fellow gang members) or through exposure to social situations of a certain kind (being on the train; holding hands). These conditions, I have argued, motivate ideal forms of activity and thereby reproduce themselves as such. However, if their respective ideals are deviated from, the background conditions manifest tensions that can be reduced by carrying out activities that return the system to some predeviation optimal or by the deviations becoming plastically incorporated within the structures that comprise the situationally relevant frames. What we observe then are situationally self-reproducing structures, mediated through the bodily and inter-bodily dynamics of those that instantiate them but also capable of adapting to accommodate shifting demands. What I hope to have inspired in my reader over the previous pages is a sense for the dynamics that are characteristic of such structures, that

332  Mark James is, that PFs are (multiple-)brain-(multiple-)body-environment configurations that: 1. Arise largely in the presence of recurrently acting towards compatible concerns; and thereafter, 2. Sediment as background conditions that enact explicit and implicit norms that allow for the coordination of collective actions at multiple timescales; by 3. Engendering bodily expectations and anticipations about how spatiotemporal events can and should unfold and moving those who embody them towards their satisfaction; whilst also 4. Being reproduced and transformed (to varying degrees) by the activities that occur during their enactments. Tom Froese writes that ‘[t]he formation of a genuinely collective social memory only requires that people are creatures of habit’ (2018). In this chapter, I have indicated how we might start making sense of that claim: through the recognition of habit-like autonomous structures operative at multiple timescales of human social organisation (i.e. participatory sensemaking frames). As I have suggested, the boundaries of such frames are manifest in the situated dynamics of those who instantiate them. This is often apparent, and the limits of our own inclusion acutely felt, in the gaze of others. All of us have on occasion, and unfortunately some of us more often than others, felt excluded (or worse) in the gaze of others, felt an object beyond the limits of their extension. One promise of the present line of conceptual development, then, is to provide a set of concepts that might allow for a naturalistic account of our social embedding, a cognitive science that helps us make intelligible how the boundaries of the social are manifest in and perpetuated through the subjects who instantiate them. Such an understanding implies a disclosing of the normally undisclosed dynamics that shape our collective actions, and consequently, I speculate, can increase our potentials for the cultivation of more inclusive participatory frames. When we have a sense of the self-producing dynamics that motivate our social behaviours and how our social behaviours participate in their reproduction, those behaviours become all the more meaningful, for we see that they are not separate from the structures in which we act and the limits of their extension, but they are the very means by which they are produced, reproduced, transformed, and extended3.

Notes 1. This anecdotal example is based loosely on some of the author’s own experiences as an adolescent. 2. The author suffers from a mild episodic version of ataxia and this has given rise to experiences of social dissonance with family and friends on multiple occasions due to irregularities in the gaze.

Participatory Sense-Making Frames 333 3. There is significant potential in this account for both psychotherapeutic purposes and for the development of political praxis. As an example of the former: in family constellation therapy (Stiefel, Harris and Zollmann 2002) a group of people are tasked with representing the family members of a client, who is asked to position these representatives in a manner that is somehow representative of the family structure. The therapeutic intervention entails shifting these representatives around the room and in so doing experiences of dissonance are often produced for the client, the objective being for the client to stay with these dissonant experiences and in so doing disrupt the subtle patterning of the unhelpful family structure. The account developed here might not only provide such interventions with a more conceptually rigorous grounding but can also point the way toward the development of additional related practices. As an example of political praxis, the feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed (2017) advocates for the character of the feminist killjoy, someone willing to not laugh at the tasteless joke, willfully giving rise to social dissonance in herself and others and effectively killing the ‘joy’ of the situation. From the perspective being developed here we can see how such actions frustrate the reproduction of the participatory frames that embed the oppressive dynamics the joke reflects, and thus we get a sense of the intersections between the cognitive, the social and the political.

Reference List Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barandiaran, X.E. 2008. Mental Life: A Naturalized Approach to the Autonomy of Cognitive Agents. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of the Basque Country, Spain. Barandiaran, X.E. 2017. Autonomy and enactivism: Towards a theory of sensorimotor autonomous agency. Topoi, 36 (3): 409–430. Bruineberg, J. and Rietveld, E. 2014. Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8: 599. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00599 De Jaegher, H. and Di Paolo, E. 2007. Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (4): 485–507. De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E., and Gallagher, S. 2010. Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (10): 441–447. Di Paolo, E.A. 2005. Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (4): 429–452. Di Paolo, E.A., Buhrmann, T., and Barandiaran, X. 2017. Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dotov, D.G., Nie, L., and Chemero, A. 2010. A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand. PLoS One, 5 (3): e9433. Festinger, L. 1962. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Froese, T. 2018. Ritual anti-structure as an alternate pathway to social complexity? The case of ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico. Material Religion, 14 (3): 420–422. Gallagher, S. 2001. The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8: 83–108.

334  Mark James Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time. J. Stambaugh (trans.). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Knausgård, K.O. 2017. Autumn. New York: Random House. Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F. 1981. Autopoiesis. In M. Zeleny (ed.) Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization. Amsterdam: North Holland, 21–35. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). London and New York: Routledge. Stiefel, I., Harris, P., and Zollmann, A.W. 2002. Family constellation—A therapy beyond words. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 23 (1): 38–44.

Contributors

Book Title: Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences Editors: Fred Cummins Anya Daly James Jardine Dermot Moran Anna Bortolan is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Swansea University. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Aberdeen and a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. Anna Bortolan obtained a PhD in philosophy from Durham University in 2016. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and philosophy of psychiatry, and her work explores, among others, questions concerning the role of affective experience in psychopathology, the relationship between affectivity and moral experience, and the connection between emotions, self-consciousness, and selfhood. Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, Founding Professor of Gender Studies in Humanities at Utrecht (1988–2005), first Scientific Director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies. BA Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD Cum Laude, Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1981; Fellow Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton,1994; Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute 2000–2001. Honorary Degrees Helsinki, 2007 and Linkoping, 2013; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), 2009; Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE), 2014; Knighthood in the order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005. Publications: Nomadic Subjects (2011a), and Nomadic Theory (2011b), Columbia

336  Contributors University Press. The Posthuman, (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), Polity Press. In 2016, she co-edited with Paul Gilroy: Conflicting Humanities, and in 2018, with Maria Hlavajova: The Posthuman Glossary, both with Bloomsbury Academic. www.rosibraidotti.com Matthew R. Broome is Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health and Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, Distinguished Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, and Clinical Research Lead for the West Midlands NIHR CRN. Prior to his current post, he was Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Warwick. Matthew trained in medicine at the University of Birmingham and in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, Bethlem Royal Hospital, and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He has a PhD in psychiatry from the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, and in philosophy from the University of Warwick. Matthew is series editor to the Oxford University Press series, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry and is deputy editor for the British Journal of Psychiatry.   Matthew’s research interests include the prodromal phase of psychosis, delusion formation, functional neuroimaging, the role of GABA in psychotic symptoms, the relationship between autism and psychosis, mood instability, early intervention services, youth mental health, interdisciplinary research, phenomenology, and the philosophy and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience. Fred Cummins is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin. Fred Cummins is a cognitive scientist with background in linguistics (especially phonetics), computer science and cognitive science. Currently, he is co-director of the cognitive science programme at University College Dublin. His recent work has centred around two themes: the first is joint speech, or chant, as a distinguished form of ‘languaging’ that needs to be understood to shed light on how shared worlds and identities are enacted; the second pertains to how an embodied and enactive foundation to epistemology can lead to a radically altered foundation for shared knowledge. Anya Daly is Honorary Fellow and Teaching Associate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, ethics, the philosophy of perception, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, and Buddhist philosophy. She has taught in programs at undergraduate and

Contributors 337 graduate levels at the University of Melbourne, Sciences Po Paris, University Lyon 3, University College Dublin, Monash University. Anya spent five years researching and teaching in France (2005–2010), two years in Dublin at UCD under the mentorship of Professor Dermot Moran on an Irish Research Council Fellowship (2016–2018). Before, between, and now (2019–2020) she has been/is based in her home city of Melbourne at the University of Melbourne. This project (the conference and edited collection) was generously supported by an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford is a Fellow of St Catherine’s College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick Medical School; and Director of the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St Catherine’s College, Oxford (valuesbasedpractice.org). His previous posts include Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, University of Oxford, and Special Adviser for Values-Based Practice in the Department of Health. His publications include Moral Theory and Medical Practice, The Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. He is Lead Editor for the Oxford book series International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry and Founder Editor and Chair of the Advisory Board of the international journal Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP). His Essential Values-based Practice (2012) is the launch volume for a series from Cambridge University Press on Values Based Medicine. Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong (AU). He is also Honorary Professor of Health Sciences at Tromsø University (Norway). He held the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012–18). Publications: Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (OUP, 2017); The Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 2012); How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); he is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Maurita Harney is an honorary senior fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and research interests include phenomenological approaches to nature, biology, and ‘embodied’ cognition. She has a special interest in the relations between MerleauPonty’s phenomenology and biosemiotics, an emerging research area which draws its philosophical inspiration from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce.

338  Contributors Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. She specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and history of philosophy and has published extensively in these fields, especially on embodiment, personhood, intersubjectivity, emotions, and gender. She is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (2010) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003) and has coedited several volumes, including Phenomenology and the Transcendental (2014), New Perspectives to Aristotelianism and Its Critics (2014), and Consciousness (2007). Mark James is a postgraduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin. His academic background since his undergraduate studies has straddled the boundaries between philosophy and psychology. His present efforts can be best characterised as an empirically informed approach to the philosophy of cognitive science. Leveraging insights and concepts from complex adaptive systems science, enactive and ecological cognitive science, and interactional sociology, his PhD is focused on making intelligible the social constitution of individual minds by exploring multiscale processes of habituation, from simple (shared) habits and (shared) routines to modes of being and being together. Other research interests include developing this philosophically rich perspective for the purposes of individual and collective behaviour change and for facilitating more cooperative human relations in this time of great crisis. He also finds the dialectic relationship between theorising and contemplative practice very generative and does his bit to keep it alive. James Jardine is Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, and author of Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person (Springer, 2020). After completing his doctoral studies at the University of Copenhagen, Jardine undertook an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin. His research interests include self-consciousness, emotion, and social experience within and beyond the phenomenological tradition, and his current work (within the Academy of Finland-funded ‘MEPA’ project) investigates dehumanization and other processes of marginalization. Sean Dorrance Kelly is Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University and he is also Faculty Dean of Dunster House, Harvard. Kelly was awarded a PhD in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley, after which he taught at Princeton University in the capacity as Assistant Professor of Philosophy from

Contributors 339 1999 to 2006. Since 2006 Kelly has been based at Harvard University where he served as chair for six years.   His work focuses on various aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific nature of human experience. Recent work has addressed, the experience of time, the possibility of demonstrating that monkeys have blindsighted experience, and the understanding of the sacred in Homer. Currently Kelly is preparing a manuscript on the later Heidegger called The Proper Dignity of Human Being. The book is due out with Harvard University Press in 2021. He has taught courses on 20th century French and German Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Perception, Imagination and Memory, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Literature. Christinia Landry is a contract teaching faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She specializes in existentialism, phenomenology, feminism, and has research interests in medical ethics. She is co-editor (with Sara Cohen Shabot) of Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives. Her work has appeared in such journals as New Review of Film and Television Studies, Clinical Ethics, and PhaenEx. Dorothée Legrand is a researcher in philosophy and a psychoanalyst. Since 2014, she has organised a seminar where she brings together philosophy and psychoanalysis to investigate how a subject is self-consciously and unconsciously constituted, by verbally and bodily transcending himself in the act of addressing and responding to others. In 2019, she published a monograph entitled Ecrire l’absence – Au bord de la nuit (Paris, Hermann). Richard S. Lewis is completing his doctoral research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). He is currently working on an interdisciplinary doctorate in Philosophy of Technology and Communications Studies. He is working to develop a framework for media literacy that brings critical, cultural, and philosophical posthumanism together with postphenomenology in order to better understand the impact of media and technology on the posthuman subject. He is on sabbatical from Prescott College, where he has been faculty since 2005, most recently serving in the role of library director. He earned his Master’s in 2003 from the University of Arizona in information research and library sciences, concentrating on the usability of technology. Jonathan Paul Mitchell is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. His PhD project – ‘De-forming Bodies: Disability, Time, and Becoming’ – critically examines theoretical and

340  Contributors lay understandings of the concept of disability, especially insofar as these contribute to what is taken to be properly human. It draws upon a variety of theoretical resources – including Continental philosophy, critical and feminist phenomenology, and actor-network theory – to reframe what disability is and how it comes into being: not as a natural property that deviates from a proper human form, but as a product of sets of heterogenous relations, elaborated across time, that disable bodies falling outside a human norm.   He is interested in the status of disability relative to what is considered normal or appropriate for humans and in how the ontological statuses of human and disability alike will increasingly be transformed by technological developments. He has taught courses on Ancient Greek and Modern philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, feminist philosophy, and philosophy and literature. He is co-editor of and contributor to a forthcoming special issue of the journal Women, Gender & Research (Kvinder, Køn & Forskning) with the theme ‘Interrogating Disability and Prostheses’. Timothy Mooney is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. His interests include the history of philosophy and the phenomenology and philosophy of embodiment, with particular reference to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. He has edited The Phenomenology Reader with Dermot Moran (Routledge, 2002), and is currently writing a monograph on Phenomenology of Perception. Dermot Moran is Inaugural Holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy, Boston. He has been Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin since 1989 and Visiting Professor at Yale University, Northwestern University, Rice University, and Connecticut College. He is currently President of the International Federation of Philosophical Studies/Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) and a member of the Institut International de Philosophie (IIP) and the Royal Irish Academy. He is Founding Editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (1993) and Co-Editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology (Springer). His research areas include medieval philosophy (especially Christian Platonism) and contemporary European philosophy (especially phenomenology). He has been awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2012, and an Honorary Doctoral Degree from the National and Kapodistrian University in Athens in 2015. He is Honorary Professor at Wuhan University. Dermot Moran is the author of nine monographs (including two translations into Spanish and Chinese), one co-authored book [also translated into Chinese], 15 edited books, 43 peer-refereed journal articles, more than 120 book chapters and encyclopedia entries, and over 250 invited lecture and conference presentations internationally.

Contributors 341 John Protevi is Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy, Louisiana State University. He is the author of Edges of the State (Minnesota, 2019); Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota, 2013); Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009); Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (Athlone, 2001); Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Bucknell, 1994); and co-author, with Mark Bonta, of Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh, 2004). He is also the editor of A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale, 2006). He was the Scots Philosophical Association Centenary Fellow for 2012 and delivered the Niebuhr Lecture at Elmhurst College in 2014. His research and teaching materials can be found at www.protevi.com/john. Giovanni Stanghellini, MD and Dr. Phil. honoris causa, psychiatrist, is professor of Dynamic Psychology and Psychopathology at ‘G. d’Annunzio’ University (Chieti, Italy) and Professor Adjuncto ‘D. Portales’ University (Santiago, Chile). He chairs the Association of European Psychiatrists (EPA) Section on Philosophy and Psychiatry and the Scuola di Psicoterapia Fenomenologico-Dinamica (Florence, Italy). Among his books, all published by Oxford University Press: Nature and Narrative (co-edited with KWM Fulford, K. Morris and JZ Sadler, OUP 2003), Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies. The Psychopathology of Common Sense (OUP 2004), Emotions and Personhood (with R. Rosfort, OUP 2013), One Hundred Years of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology (co-edited with T. Fuchs, OUP 2013), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (co-edited with KWM Fulford et al., OUP 2013) and Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (co-edited with MR Broome et al., OUP 2019). Dylan Trigg is FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. His research concerns phenomenology and existentialism; philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment; aesthetics and philosophies of art; and 19th century German philosophy. Trigg is the author of several books including Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety (2016); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (2014); and The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012). Philippe Wuyts is a clinical psychiatrist active in his outpatient practice in Paris, France. He is consultant to international organisations such as the OECD and UNESCO, to academic institutions such as The American University in Paris, New York University in Paris and INSEAD and to embassies from European and Commonwealth Countries, and the U.S.A. Philippe obtained his medical degree from the faculty of

342  Contributors medicine KU Leuven, Belgium and trained in general adult psychiatry at the UPC KU Leuven and at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, UK. He also obtained a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from EDHEC Business School, France. Philippe has been advocating a more systemic and integrative mental health care vision throughout his career, by drawing from academic disciplines such as continental philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology, logotherapy, contemplative sciences, occupational health psychology and other related fields and by investing in service development, improved education standards in psychiatry and by exploring novel and complimentary treatment pathways, such as psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, to enhance mental health on an individual and a societal level.

Index

Achilles 219 aesthetics 199, 276 – 277, 328 affect/affective 1, 6, 7, 9, 15 – 17, 50, 56n7, 57n11, 75, 87, 89, 91 – 93, 103 – 104, 110, 125, 143, 187, 192, 195 – 199, 201, 203, 218 – 219, 221, 222, 224, 226 – 227, 232, 240, 245, 257, 266, 274, 285, 308 – 309, 314 – 320, 320n1, 321n4, 321n5; and conative 170, 172 Agamben, Giorgio 81, 84n3, 254 agency 7, 64, 72 – 73, 99, 111, 129, 133, 138, 192, 198, 228, 232, 302, 310 aggression 11, 153, 218 – 222, 224 – 227 Albert the Great 240, 246 alienist(s) 181 – 182 Alzheimer, Alois 182 ambiguity 5, 78, 85, 88, 90 – 91, 93, 93n1, 94n6, 109 – 110, 125, 188 – 189 animal(s) 2, 7, 11 – 13, 22 – 23, 28, 45, 49, 52, 54 – 55, 100, 111, 114 – 119, 171, 181, 221, 237, 254 – 255, 258, 261 – 262, 264, 271 – 281; animality 12, 13, 23, 116, 118, 147, 272 – 281; see also interanimality anonymous(ly) 4, 208, 226, 273 – 276; anonymous vision 6, 99 anorexia nervosa 9, 165 – 169, 172 anthropocene 16, 256 – 259, 264 anthropocentrism/anthropocentric 12, 129, 255 – 256, 262, 271, 279, 281, 306 anthropology 2, 11, 23, 218, 224, 279; philosophical anthropology 187 anticipatory paradigm 121 – 122 Aristotle/Aristotle’s/Aristotelian 114, 117 – 118, 121, 125, 240, 246

attitude 67, 86, 308, 313, 314, 316 – 317; natural 25 – 38, 40, 64, 69, 71, 124; personalistic 33, 34; theoretical 22, 28 – 30, 32 – 35, 37, 39, 40, 71; transcendental 27, 31 – 33, 36; scientific 69, 71, 112 Augustine, St. 242 Austin, J. L. 161 – 162, 291 autonomy/autonomously 8, 14, 16, 128 – 129, 133, 146, 273, 300, 302 – 303, 305 – 306, 310, 324 – 326, 329 – 330, 331 – 332 Avenarius, Richard 63 – 64, 75 Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 117 – 119 Avicenna 117 – 118 Baldwin, James 308 – 309, 314, 320n1 Bales, Robert 219, 229 Barandiaran Xabier, E: on habit 329 Beauvoir, Simone de 5, 55n1, 85 – 95 Beckett, Samuel 84 Bergson, Henri 9, 176, 185 – 186, 188 – 189; on temporality 304 – 305 berserker rage 218 – 232 Binswanger, Otto 182 blackout 218 – 231 blindness, emotional 15, 94n11, 308 – 309, 316, 318 – 320, 321n5 blink(s) 287, 288 body 4, 9, 13, 26, 52, 78 – 81, 104, 152 – 153, 221 – 223, 228, 230, 263, 274 – 281, 286, 295, 324, 330 – 331; body and psychopathology 166 – 172, 177, 180, 183, 184; body and the double-sensation 53, 54, 113; body for others 88, 89, 103; body ownership 99; body schema 73; body-mind dualism 11, 144, 184; body-object 46, 51, 54, 102; body-subject 26, 51 – 52, 72, 91 – 93; habitual body 117; living body 45,

344 Index 51 – 55, 55n5, 57n11, 57n12, 92, 273, 316; perceiving body 146 Braidotti, Rosi 11, 12, 129, 132, 133 breakthrough 29, 31, 34 – 35 Brentano, Franz 111, 117, 154n2 burnout 205 – 216; BoSS study, The (psychiatry trainee burnout) 207 Camus, Albert 248 capitalism 212 – 213, 256, 259, 260; biocapital 261; technocapitalism 213 Carroll, Noël 201, 203n2 causation 112, 114, 117, 121 – 122 Cézanne, Paul 276 – 277 chameleon 69, 285 chant(s) 289, 291; Balinese Monkey Chant 293; chanting 289; Credo, the 292; Haka, the 293; Happy Birthday 291, 293; liturgy 290; prayer 289; prosody 288; protest 289; and ritual 289; Temple Hymn of Kesh 290; see also joint speech cinema 130, 296; Hitchcock, Alfred 294; Leone, Sergio 294, 295 comportment 22, 67 – 68, 70, 75, 105, 316, 319 constitution 13, 16, 21, 24 – 25, 34, 37, 52 – 54, 57n11, 57n12, 57n13, 88, 117, 132, 133, 135, 232, 298, 302, 338; co-constitution 130 – 132 constructivism 221 – 223, 226 cybernetics 205 dehumanisation 1, 2, 14, 80, 150, 205, 298 – 299, 301, 309, 311, 320, 338; dehumanized 151 – 153, 216, 276 Deleuze, Gilles 254, 256, 259, 262, 265 delusional 9; delusional beliefs 168; delusional disorder 172; delusional perception 163, 164; voice hearing 165 demonization 1, 2, 151 depersonalization 10, 80, 208 – 209, 212 depression 71, 165, 172, 186 – 187, 196 – 197, 207, 209 Derrida, Jacques 133, 254, 259, 271 – 272 Descartes, René 5, 17n2, 30 – 31, 56n8, 111, 255 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) 164 – 167, 172, 206 differentiation 78, 83 – 84, 223, 280 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 286, 324, 327; on adaptivity 330 disability 13, 14; and the future 305 – 306; and the human 298 – 301,

303 – 304; and the inhuman gaze 298 – 299; and the making and remaking of worlds 305; sociopolitical dimensions of 298 – 299, 302 – 303; technological dimensions of 302 – 303, 305 disclosure 85 – 88, 90 – 95 disgust 166, 167, 309 dissonances, social 327 – 331, 333n3; and habituation 330 – 331; and the inhuman gaze 326 – 328, 330; and participatory sense-making frames 328 – 329 dorsal 100 – 101, 104, 146 elementary responsiveness 103, 106 Elijah (prophet) 208, 209 eliminativism 63 – 66, 68, 70; eliminative materialism 63, 66 Ellison, Ralph 311, 315 embarrassment 271; see also shame embodiment 4, 26, 48, 50, 52 – 53, 136, 139n2, 144, 168, 255, 298 – 299, 318; embodied 4 – 7, 13, 15, 26 – 27, 50, 65, 74, 85, 87, 91 – 93, 106, 111, 115 – 117, 119, 129, 130 – 134, 136 – 137, 143, 145, 147, 151, 168, 171, 188, 255, 266, 286, 301, 309, 315 – 316, 318 – 320, 320n3, 321n5, 327, 330, 336 emotion 308 – 309, 317 – 320, 321n4, 321n5; basic 221; and embodiment 314 – 316, 318, 321n4; and evaluative perception 314 – 318, 320; and habit 316, 319 – 320 empathy 1, 55n5, 70; empathic 1, 7, 125, 143, 151 enactivism 116, 119, 255 Engstrom, Eric 181, 182 epoché 28, 30 – 32, 34 – 40, 276 Esposito, Robert 299, 300 ethics 1, 5, 7, 32, 44, 80 – 83, 85, 88, 90 – 91, 93, 110, 125, 149, 153, 170; ethical 1 – 3, 7, 12, 13; existentialist ethics 5, 85, 88 existentialism 85 – 87, 94n7 facticity 85 – 86, 89, 193 Fanon, Frantz: on racialising perception 15, 55n1, 308 – 309, 316 – 317, 320 feelings, existential 195 – 197, 199, 200 – 203; see also mood Feldman Barrett, Lisa 222 feminist 88, 255 – 256, 264, 333; feminism 94n7 folk-psychology 5, 64 – 65, 68

Index  345 Foucault, Michel 46, 109 – 110, 139n1, 265, 299 Fourth Industrial Revolution 256, 266 frames, participatory sense-making 324 – 326, 328 – 330, 331 – 332; and enactive autonomy 329; and habit 324 – 326, 329, 332; and the inhuman gaze 325, 328; and social interactions 325 – 326, 328, 332; and timescales 325 – 326 Francis, Pope 259 freedom 5, 74, 85 – 93, 94n9, 109, 111, 193, 198, 210, 215 – 216, 252n13, 310 Freudenberger, Herbert 208 Fuchs, Thomas 179, 196 Gallagher, Shaun 6, 99, 102 – 103, 104n2, 110, 112, 119, 120, 125, 145, 146, 148, 178n3, 180, 228; on interaction theory of social cognition 327 gaze, the 1 – 3, 4, 6 – 7, 10, 12 – 13, 15 – 17, 38, 44 – 47, 56n7, 57n8, 64, 66, 74 – 75, 85, 88 – 90, 92 – 93, 99 – 101, 192 – 193, 287, 308; animal gaze 271, 285; and the body 45 – 46, 47 – 49, 50 – 51, 57n8; gazed-upon 89 – 91, 327 – 328, 330; gazer 90, 314, 327; gendered gaze, the 5, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 109, 139n1, 166, 329; and God 12, 45 – 46, 50, 239 – 253; joint gaze 294 – 296; mutual gaze 285 – 296; and objectification 1, 23, 110, 128, 192, 193 – 194, 202; omnivoyant gaze 242, 246 – 248; and psychopathology 10, 194 – 195, 198, 202, 292; scientific gaze 67 – 71; and shame 44 – 46, 49 – 51; technological gaze 7, 128 – 138; and transcendence 192, 193 – 194, 198, 202; and verticality 46 – 47; and the world 47 – 48, 55n6; see also human gaze; inhuman gaze; Look, the (le regard) generative linguistics 285, 290 gestalt 7, 8, 144, 146 – 149, 152, 154n2, 154n3, 189, 243, 248; perceptual gestalt(s) 143, 147 – 149, 151 – 153 gesture(s) 77, 273, 288, 291, 295, 311 – 318, 288 global bodily activation 104 Graeber, David 214 Griffiths, Paul 221, 222 Guattari, Felix 257, 265

habit(s) 16, 65, 134, 276, 316, 319 – 320, 325 – 326, 329 – 332 Hadot, Pierre 246 Hamrick, William 114 Han, Byung-Chul 215 – 216 Haraway, Donna 129, 132 – 133, 139n3, 255 – 256, 258 – 260, 263 – 264 Harney, Maurita 112, 117, 119, 123, 146 Hegel, Georg 40n1, 85, 88, 101 – 103, 109 Heidegger, Martin 21, 26 – 27, 31, 39 – 40, 48, 55n4, 56n6, 74, 100, 132 – 133, 137, 139n2, 148, 181, 195, 196, 203n1, 245 – 246, 251n3, 252n12, 326 Heinämaa, Sara 4, 56, 92, 147 Hildegard of Bingen 241, 242 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 116, 120 Homer 219 Honneth, Axel 15, 103; and critical social theory 309 – 310, 320n2; on elementary recognition 310, 313, 317, 320 – 321n3; on recognition 308, 309 – 311, 312, 313, 320n2; on social invisibility 308 – 309, 310 – 315; on social visibility 308, 310, 311 – 315 horizon 22, 67, 79, 89, 120, 148, 179n5, 196 human, the: historical dimensions of 299 – 300; inhuman dimensions of 301, 302; technological dimensions of 299, 301 – 303 human gaze 9, 176 – 177, 181, 183, 185, 301, 327 humanism 254 –2   56, 262, 264, 266, 301; humanist framing of the future 303 –3   04 humanities 2, 12, 254, 264, 266; medical humanities 2 Husserl, Edmund 3 – 5, 15 – 16, 21 – 41, 48, 55n2, 55n5, 55 – 56n6, 56n8, 57n12, 57n13, 64, 67 – 68, 71 – 73, 75, 76n3, 79, 81, 100, 111, 113, 115 – 116, 124, 129, 134, 139n2, 139n7, 148, 154n4, 170, 172, 181, 183, 188; on double sensation 51 – 55, 57n10; on emotion 309, 316 – 320, 321n4, 321n5; on emotional authenticity 318 – 320, 321n4, 321n5; on experiencing others 45, 53, 55n3, 309, 318 – 319; on the living body 45, 51 – 52, 53, 54 – 55, 57n12 Identity and Eating Disorders schedule (IDEA) 169 ideology 150, 152, 216, 291

346 Index Ihde, Don 128 – 138, 139n2, 139n5, 301 immunity to error 99 indigenous epistemology 256, 258 Ineinander 12, 113, 125, 278; see also intertwining(s) inhuman, the: and dehumanisation 298 – 299; and differentiation from the human 300 – 301; and embodied existence 301 – 303; and imagined futures 303, 304 – 306; orientation 301 – 302, 305 – 306 inhuman gaze 1 – 3, 7 – 11, 13 – 18, 37, 40, 109, 125, 128, 143 – 144, 151 – 153, 176 – 177, 181, 183, 188 – 190, 218 – 219, 228, 231 – 232, 239, 245, 271, 298, 305, 309, 312, 316, 325 – 328, 330; and participatory sense-making frames 325, 328; and social dissonances 326 – 328, 330 intentionality 7, 12, 22, 50, 72 – 73, 94n4, 100, 110 – 113, 115 – 120, 145 – 146, 196, 275, 309, 317, 319, 321n5; and the intentional arc 275 interanimality 272, 281; see also animal(s), animality interconnectedness 86 International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 163, 164, 206 intersubjective 1, 2, 6, 22, 24, 26, 91, 94n12, 94n13, 110, 113 – 114, 120, 149, 244, 286; intersubjectivity 21, 24 – 25, 44, 56n6, 56n7, 85, 89, 91, 112 – 113, 125, 144, 147 – 148, 152 – 153, 327 – 328 intertwining(s) 4, 51, 53, 94n10, 113, 277, 281; see also Ineinander intuition 63, 186 – 189, 317, 320 invisibility, social 1, 15; and disrespect 311; and emotion 309, 315 – 316, 317, 318, 319 – 320, 320n1; and perception 311, 313 – 314; and racialising perception 315 – 316, 319 – 320; and sense of insecurity 312 Jaspers, Karl 9, 176, 179, 181 – 185, 187 – 188 joint attention 287; joint gaze 294 – 296 joint speech 288 – 294, 296 Kafer, Alison 303, 304 Kafka, Franz 239, 248 – 250 Kant, Immanuel 21, 27, 30 – 32, 39 – 40, 85, 112, 154n3, 184, 186

Kierkegaard, Søren 12, 242, 251n4 Knausgård, Karl Ove 324 Lacan, Jacques 77, 81 – 84; pastout 81 – 83 languaging 289 – 293 LeDoux, Joseph 223, 226 Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 10, 46, 81, 102, 105, 215 lifeworld 5, 9, 22, 38, 64, 67, 70 – 71, 135, 137 – 138, 145, 167, 172, 289 Lloyd, Genevieve 254, 259 Look, the (le regard) 4, 44, 56n7, 88 – 90, 193; see also gaze, the Lorde, Audre 312, 314 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 262 Marcuse, Herbert 213 Marx, Karl 85 Maslach, Christina 209, 212; see also table Maslach Burnout Inventory materialist 12, 255 – 257; materialism 5, 63, 65 – 66, 187, 214, 255 – 256 memory: episodic 218, 219, 224 – 228; flashbulb 227 meritocracy 213 – 214 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1 – 5, 7 – 9, 12 – 13, 17n2, 21 – 22, 24, 26 – 27, 31, 34, 40, 63 – 64, 66 – 67, 70, 73 – 75, 77 – 84, 85, 88, 90 – 95, 100, 105, 109 – 121, 123 – 125, 134, 139, 143 – 149, 151 – 155, 176, 188 – 190, 298, 299; on animality 271 – 281; on double sensation 51, 52 – 53, 54 – 55; on the inhuman gaze 49, 56n7, 325, 327; on the living body 45, 51, 52 – 53, 54 – 55; on temporality in action 73, 242, 251n9; on wonder 249 Minkowski, Eugène 176, 185 – 189 mood 11 – 12, 39, 40n2, 123, 195 – 196, 245, 247, 248, 203n1 Moran, Dermot 3, 4, 28, 30, 53, 124, 143 motivation(s) 27, 30 – 31, 36, 171, 313 multistable 129, 132, 139; multistability 138 musicing 291; see also languaging mystical theology 239 – 246 narratives, autobiographical 198 – 199, 200 – 202; and coincident emotional states 203; and emotional identification 200 – 202; and emotions 198 – 199, 200 – 203;

Index  347 and existential feelings 195 – 199, 200 – 203; and imagination 198, 200; and psychopathology 198 – 200, 201 – 203; and sense of possibility 198 – 199, 200, 203; and surprise 198 narratives, fictional: and coincident emotional states 200 – 203; and emotional identification 201, 203; and emotions 199 – 202, 203 necropolitics 262 neuroscience(s) 2, 5, 9, 65 – 66, 71, 100, 121, 178 – 181, 184 – 185 Nicholas of Cusa 239 – 246 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 182, 247 non-coincidence 84; see also differentiation non-participating spectator 28, 35, 37, 40 nosography 177, 178 objectification, bodily 45 – 55, 55n2; and double sensation 51 – 55; Edmund Husserl on 45, 51 – 52, 53, 54 – 55; and the gaze 45 – 46, 47 – 49, 50 – 51; Jean-Paul Sartre on 45 – 51; Maurice Merleau-Ponty on 45, 51, 52 – 53, 54 – 55; and shame 45 – 46, 48 – 49, 50 – 51, 55n3 objective thought 63, 66, 176, 188 – 189 objectivism 21, 26, 31, 66, 70, 112 objectivity 3 – 4, 23 – 24, 32, 35, 38, 40, 51, 53, 80, 89, 91, 113, 123 – 124 object perception 100, 104, 148 Odradeck 248 – 250 omnivoyance 239, 241, 243, 246 – 248 oneirism 78 – 79, 81 ontology 7, 13, 78, 80 – 82, 89 – 90, 111 – 114, 116, 122, 125, 130, 153, 278 – 279 oppression 86, 88 originary 66, 302; the inhuman originary 77 – 78 Other, the 85 – 86, 88 – 94 Panksepp, Jan 221 – 224 paradox 1, 23, 48, 149, 152, 214, 219, 231 – 232, 240, 242, 256, 260 – 261, 265, 316 Parmenides 63 perceptual consciousness 63, 66, 79, 83 perspective 21 – 22, 24 – 25, 27, 32, 34; perspectivism 256

Petherbridge, Danielle 315 – 316 PHD approach (phenomenological, hermeneutic and dynamic method of analysis) 169 phenomenology 1 – 5, 7, 9 – 11, 21 – 22, 24, 26 – 28, 31 – 32, 34, 37, 39, 40, 44 – 45, 55n6, 56n7, 66, 68, 72, 80 – 81, 85, 91, 95n14, 100, 110, 112, 124, 129, 130, 139n2, 143, 161 – 162, 165, 167 – 172, 188, 192, 195 – 196, 218, 227, 230, 255, 271 – 273, 275, 277, 280 – 281, 314, 316 – 317, 321n4 philosophy of nature 7, 110 – 112, 117, 124, 281 physicalism 66 Pickard, Hannah 198 Plato 5, 53, 63, 69, 104, 246 Pontalis, J.B. 77 posthuman 2, 12, 132 – 133, 255 – 259, 262 – 266; posthumanism 7, 12, 129 – 130, 132 – 133, 139n3, 254, 263 – 264 postphenomenology 7, 128 – 130, 133 –1   34, 136, 139n2, 139n5, 254, 339 Potter-Efron, Ronald 227 predator-prey relations 218, 222 prediction (neural) 222 presence(s) 45, 67, 72, 79, 89, 92, 132 – 133, 147 – 148, 151, 189, 194, 245, 273 – 274, 277, 286, 290, 309 – 312, 316, 318 – 320; background presence 3, 192, 197, 201 primates: bonobo 225; chimpanzee 225, 286 Professional Stress Syndrome 206 Protevi, John 153 psychoanalysis 5, 80 – 83; psychoanalyst 77, 81, 83 – 84 psychology 23, 32, 34, 38 – 39, 146 – 147 psychopathology 159, 162 – 165, 169 – 170, 172 – 173, 273; and existential feelings 195, 196 – 197, 199, 201 – 202; and the gaze 194 – 195, 198, 202; and narrative 197 – 203; and sense of possibility 194 – 195, 196 – 197, 198, 199, 200, 202 – 203 queer theory 264 Ratcliffe, Matthew 192, 194 – 197, 203n1 reality 63, 65 – 66, 68 – 69, 75

348 Index reciprocity 85 – 86, 88, 92 – 93, 110 – 111, 113 – 114, 116, 125 recognition 101, 103, 104 reduction 5, 13, 24, 38, 48, 64, 67, 81, 123, 149, 188, 249, 272, 299 religious experience 162 – 164, 168, 172 Ricoeur, Paul 170 – 172 Rosen, Robert 121 – 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 17n2, 88 – 91, 101 – 106, 109 – 111, 138, 167, 169, 215, 271; on being-in-itself, being-for-itself and being-forothers 45, 49 – 51, 192 – 193; on the body 45 – 51, 54, 57n13; on double sensation 52, 54, 57n13; on the gaze (le regard) 44 – 51, 55n6, 56 – 57n8, 193 – 194; Sartrean 1, 4, 9; on shame 44 – 46, 49 – 51; on transcendence and facticity 193 – 194 Scheler, Max 170 – 172, 273 schizophrenia 176, 186 – 188 science(s) 2, 3, 7, 9, 16, 21 – 24, 27, 29 – 36, 39 – 40, 111 – 112, 114, 117, 121, 123, 124; biomedical science 177, 189; pseudoscience 184 scientific realism 63 sedimentation 72, 128, 133 – 136 self-domestication hypothesis 218, 224 Selye, Hans 211 sensation, double 4, 51 – 54, 57n13 sense-making 294 – 296 sensory-motor 100, 104 shame 4, 44 – 46, 49 – 50, 55n3, 57n8, 57n9, 81, 89, 109, 153, 166 – 167, 171, 193, 271; see also embarrassment Shay, Jonathan 230 silence(s) 83, 293 Sixth Extinction 256, 266 song 290, 291 spectator(ial) mode 2, 3, 7, 110, 112, 124; disinterested spectator 35 – 37 Spinoza, Baruch 256, 259 stress 220, 226; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 219, 230 – 232 structuralist 285 Suarez-Villa, Luis 213

subjectivity 3, 4, 14, 16, 21 – 26, 31 – 32, 34 – 35, 39 – 40, 177 – 181, 188, 275 symptom(s) 177 – 178, 180 – 181, 187 – 189; symptomatology 177 synchrony 295; inter-viewer synchrony 295 technology 128 – 139; and ability 302 – 303; and disability 302 – 303, 305; and the future 305; and the human 299, 301 – 303 temporal 128, 132, 134; temporality 132 time 180, 186; lived time 188 Tomasello, Michael 286 torture 150 – 154; torturer 151 – 153 totalitarianism 82; totality 79 – 80, 82 – 83, 148; totalization 82 – 83, 152 transcendental subjectivity 22, 24 – 26, 31 transient global amnesia (TGA) 218, 226 unconscious 78 – 80, 82; unconsciousness 78 – 82 unspeakable, the 77, 83 values based practice 161 – 173 van der Weyden, Rogier 243 – 244 ventral 104 Verbeek, Peter-Paul 128, 130 – 131, 134, 139n2, 139n4 view from nowhere 21, 29, 34, 39 – 40, 143; see also objectivism visibility, social 1, 13:and bodily gestures 311 – 315; and emotion 308 – 309, 314 – 315, 317, 318, 319; and evaluative perception 313 – 314, 318, 320; and literal visibility 311, 314; and recognition 308, 310 – 315, 318, 320 – 321n3 Von Uexkull 115, 117 vulnerability 50, 86, 151 – 152, 178 Watts, Alan 205 – 206 Wenck, John 239 Whitehead, Alfred North 69 witch 150, 152