The Gift of Logos : Essays in Continental Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781443818254, 9781443817585

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The Gift of Logos

The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy

Edited by

David Jones, Jason M. Wirth and Michael Schwartz

The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy, Edited by David Jones, Jason M. Wirth and Michael Schwartz This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by David Jones, Jason M. Wirth and Michael Schwartz and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1758-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1758-5

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Logos and its Gift David Jones, Jason M. Wirth, and Michael Schwartz Part One: The ArchƝ of Beginnings— Muthos, Logos, and Madness Chapter I .................................................................................................... 11 Ulysses at the Mast Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Chapter II................................................................................................... 27 Pan’s Death and the Conspiracy of Logos: Plato’s Case against Myth David Jones Chapter III ................................................................................................. 45 Blanchot, Madness and Writing Brian Schroeder Part Two: The Question of Ethics Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 63 Elisions: Ontology and the Ethics of Omission Duane H. Davis Chapter V .................................................................................................. 95 The Ethical and “Beyond Being” in Levinas Michael Smith Chapter VI ............................................................................................... 101 The Immanent Ethics of Gilles Deleuze Ronald Bogue

Part Three: Meditations on Globalization Chapter VII.............................................................................................. 115 The Global Displacement of Western Modernity Bret W. Davis Chapter VIII ............................................................................................ 133 Living in an Age of Excess and Extreme Poverty: Of Giving, Buying, and Squandering James J. Winchester Chapter IX ............................................................................................... 143 Out of Latin American Thought—From Radical Exteriority: Philosophy after the Age of Pernicious Knowledge Alejandro Vallega Part Four: Past Looking –– Looking Today Chapter X ................................................................................................ 163 Sartre and Foucault on History: The Diary and the Map Thomas R. Flynn Chapter XI ............................................................................................... 171 Poison and the Great Health: Nietzsche and Master Hakuin Jason M. Wirth Chapter XII.............................................................................................. 181 Introspection and Transformation in Philosophy Today Michael Schwartz Contributors............................................................................................. 195 Index........................................................................................................ 201

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume of essays is dedicated to those participants of over more than a decade of philosophical conversations of the Georgia Continental Philosophical Circle. This Circle of philosophers eschewed the common practices of grandstanding, defending one’s territory at all costs, meanspiritedness, self-absorption, professional elitism, and a parochial, selfserving but philosophically indefensible delimitation of philosophy itself. It was in their spirit of recovering and enacting the generosity of genuine dialogue that the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle was established as a kind of Symposium in the old Platonic style where the Logos is indeed realized as a gift from the gods and goddesses. We welcome you to receive this gift of logos, a gift in which the nature of the logos itself is both the occasion of our celebration and the provocation of our philosophical investigations. This volume is a small commemoration of over a decade of the most robust giving and receiving practices and represents the first volume of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Series. The editors of The Gift of Logos are also very grateful to Jenna Thomas-McKie of Augusta State University for her technical support in preparing this manuscript.

INTRODUCTION THE LOGOS AND ITS GIFT DAVID JONES, JASON M. WIRTH, AND MICHAEL SCHWARTZ In his classic work, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Marcel Mauss poses the question “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?”1 Gift giving comes with strings, or ribbons, that tie together our packages of giving and receiving. Sometimes these ties can be burdensome, or even negative— they have strings attached; other times they are aesthetically designed and bind us together—this package of giving leaves us ribboned together, that is, we are tied to and connected with each other; we are interconnected. It is to this giving, to this positive giving and its gift, that this book embraces for this gift is an encirclement that completes itself, ties itself together, as a sublime gift. The sublimity of this gift is what is divine in the human experience; it is the gift of logos that overcomes the différance that keeps us apart, disconnected, and often alienated. Logos, and its gift, bring us together through language, through speech, and through word. We are destined as humans, as Dasein¸ to live in our languages as Heidegger reminds us. For Mauss, the way we exchange gifts builds relationships because all relationships are in some sense negotiated. Gift giving creates a need, often a deep need, even an obligation on the receiver to reciprocate the gift. This reciprocity of gift giving, and the underlying force of the gift to enact a return, provides a means of coming together in families, communities, and as a common people. The implicit sense of the gift is seen in the giving of oneself through the gift—the gift gives the self over to a new horizon, and this horizon is the horizon of the other. In return, the other is now encouraged and even urged inwardly to do the same; the situation of receiving a gift prompts the possibility of return or mimicry of the act of giving that might have not risen yet to the level of awareness.

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Introduction

The receiver is exhorted to move from the inwardness of self to the outwardness of the other. This process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is constituent of the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and our need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses to man and woman, for it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom—for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds. These philosophers also receive the blessings of logos from each other. As Derrida reminds us, this gifting, even the gifting of logos, arrives with the stipulation of the gift and giver’s intent: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or différance.”2 The giver cannot give himself or herself over to the horizon of the other if the giver consciously seeks return for the gift. The exchange must be beyond the debits and credits of the calculative mind; there can be no exact accounting of the nature of the exchange. The exchange must be selfless, unguarded, natural, and seek its telos elsewhere; its mind must not be the calculative, but the meditative mind of das besinnliche Denken that Heidegger suggests. Derrida is aware the exchange makes the gift and its gifting problematic because of the obligatory possibility of the gift. The gift exchange must lead to a mutual interdependence between the giver and receiver, but cannot end in some kind of unauthentic gesturing of return and reciprocity. As Derrida warns, “From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, it sense and essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt.”3 The gift of logos and its debt therefore presents us with the dilemma of a debtless debt; a debt that can only be repaid without the ego’s involvement in the repaying of the received gift. Receiving is more difficult, bears a far greater weight, than the giving of the gift. The dilemma of the debtless debt is to get beyond the expectation of exchange in both giving and receiving. To learn to cultivate both the giving and receiving is to “expect the unexpected” of Herakleitos, for in doing so is not to listen just to him, or to others, but is to “listen to the logos” for therein this experience it will be wise to agree that “all things are one.” To do philosophy in the spirit of the gift of logos is to philosophize in the old

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Platonic style of dialogue, that old Platonic style of and through logos. Then, and only then, will this gift exchange lead us to mutual interdependence between givers and receivers. It is in this spirit that this book and its commemorating of logos were born. More specifically, The Gift of Logos was born out of a desire to expand and experiment with the content, methods, and environment of the philosophical forum and out of a love of philosophy manifested originally in the various meetings of the Georgia Continental Circle and currently in its flowering as, the Comparative & Continental Philosophy Circle. From the beginning, we wished to establish a kind of Symposium in the Platonic style; this symposium would persist in its dedication to keep always in mind that logos is a gift from the gods. In feasting on logos, we tried to remember we were eating, digesting, and eliminating divine flesh, the flesh of the gods and goddesses. The flesh of logos, those words we speak and write about, somehow make us different as a species even though we share so much with all of the world’s other species. This logos we have, or can summon on occasion when the Muses bless us, is somehow beyond us; it mystifies us, seduces us, eludes us, and often plays us for its fools. The foolishness of this logos is our wisdom as Nietzsche reminds us: “At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom.”4 This double movement between folly and wisdom and wisdom and folly drives us to a more robust range of philosophical discourses and attempts to recover and enact the spirit and generosity of genuine dialogue. For more than a decade, this spirit of dialogue assumed many guises. We attempted to make our philosophical conversations as broad as situations allowed and tried willingly to be open to a diversity of voices. We needed not to try too hard, however, since it was natural for us to do so. The Chinese “wuwei” captures this sentiment the best, for wuwei is a disciplined and learned spontaneity appropriate to the context that gives rise to action that appears as no action since nothing is being asserted, only emergence—egos gone, with only logos remaining. This volume commemorates in so many ways more than a decade of these sensitivities and their subsequent activities by featuring new and important works by those who have participated and contributed to our conversations. While it is merely stating the obvious to say that we are possessed by a passion for Continental philosophy, the repercussions of such a passion are less obvious.

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Introduction

Our work together, born of a commitment to the Continental idiom, has branched out in many directions and the sections of this volume indicate the most basic of these trajectories. The Gift of Logos is divided into four parts. Part One, “The ArchƝ of Beginnings—Muthos, Logos, and Madness,” features pieces by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, “Ulysses at the Mast,” David Jones, “Pan’s Death and the Conspiracy of Logos: Plato’s Case against Myth,” and “Blanchot, Madness and Writing” by Brian Schroeder. Part Two, “The Question of Ethics,” includes chapters by Duane H. Davis, “Elisions: Ontology and the Ethics of Omission,” Michael Smith, “The Ethical and ‘Beyond Being’ in Levinas,” and Ronald Bogue, “The Immanent Ethics of Gilles Deleuze.” The third part of the book, “Meditations on Globalization,” investigates the nature of globalization from theoretical and practical perspectives with Bret W. Davis’ “The Global Displacement of Western Modernity,” James J. Winchester’s “Living in an Age of Excess and Extreme Poverty: Of Giving, Buying, and Squandering,” and “Out of Latin American Thought—From Radical Exteriority: Philosophy after the Age of Pernicious Knowledge” by Alejandro Vallega. In the final part, The Gift of Logos looks to today by looking to the past with Thomas R. Flynn’s “Sartre and Foucault on History: The Diary and the Map,” Jason M. Wirth’s “Poison and the Great Health: Nietzsche and Master Hakuin,” and Michael Schwartz’s “Introspection and Transformation in Philosophy Today.” The Continental tradition has always and appropriately placed great emphasis on the Greeks and the first part consists of two discussions of the relationship between muthos and logos. At the heart of this relationship is a set of questions whose answers help determine the nature and fate of philosophical discourse as such. The two essays form an important counterpoint to each other. Both return to Plato—that master and grounder of the logos—and read him against the background of his own philosophical tradition. David Jones finds in muthos the haunting of forces that logos cannot fully accommodate while Marcia Schuback, reading Plato in reverse from the perspective of Homer, finds in Plato’s philosophy the first and most seminal defenses of muthos. Both essays understand that the fate of philosophy is linked to the fate of our understanding of what is at stake in the nature of the logos itself. The nature of logos is taken up by Brian Schroeder in the context of writing. Following Blanchot’s distinction between the book and the work and the writing act, readers are led to the role of the author and the experience of madness framed in discussions of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Levinas.

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As one can see from the essays present in section one, our discussions have pursued an ongoing philosophical investigation of philosophy’s own activity—its limits and possibilities. Such an impulse is directly the concern of the three essays that comprise the first section. All of the essays ask about the nature of philosophical activity in relationship to fundamental practice. At the end of his life, Foucault, writing against the prospect of the imminent totalization of thought, turned to a profound consideration of what he called “practices of the self.” Such practices were local but they re-emerge in our age in direct response to a crippled logos that confuses its movement with an unquestioned movement towards selfuniversalization. Hidden behind such universalization is the assumption that the way of the logos is self-evident and independent. To put the matter bluntly, it seems to be obvious that all that is required for the practice of philosophy is philosophy itself. This posturing of philosophy assumes that philosophy is a wholly autonomous movement and that all that one needs to do in order to participate in its movement is to master the conceptual gymnastics particular to its domain. Philosophy is uniquely suited for the armchair because its movements are exclusively intellectual. This sense of philosophy is already implicitly under interrogation in the second section as it was explicitly so in the first. The discussions so far—discussions in which the stakes of philosophy as such are either implicitly or explicitly at issue—are emphatically ethical. In fact, the question of ethics has guided, both in practice and in theory, much of the activities that have led us to this book. Such thinking is decidedly evident in the next two sections, where six essays are devoted to the question of ethics and living together. The thematic of the “other” is not new to French philosophy, and in this light Duane H. Davis explores the question of ethics in the works of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty. He does not do so simply to curate the record of what these thinkers did and did not accomplish in this respect. Rather, such an analysis is part of his own efforts to articulate a Post-Heideggerian Ethic of Care, a mode of comportment in which we know and welcome (and become) the anguish of being-with-others. Developing an Ethic of Care constitutes an apprehension of and cultivation with the other. Much of this type of ethical discussion these days stems from the growing importance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Michael Smith, a translator of many of Levinas’ works, contributes his reflections of Levinas’ connection of the domain of the ethical to what he dubbed a “beyond being” or an “otherwise than being” or a “better than being.” Ronald Bogue, one of our country’s best Deleuze scholars, dedicates his essay to the implicit ecological (what Deleuze himself dubbed “ethological”) practice that governed his

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Introduction

philosophical work from the beginning. Bogue argues that, although Deleuze never produced a formal ethical theory, his work is an implicitly ethical practice. As such, this essay is an important contribution to our appreciation of Deleuze and the practice of philosophy. In a fundamental sense, the ethical realm is part of a larger social and political structure. As children of modernity, we draw on its resources even in our many attempts to outgrow its limits and excesses. This post-modern condition is taken up by Bret W. Davis who sees in the very questioning of modernity a stepping back from the practices of the technological manipulation of life, the destruction of nature as a result of anthropocentrism, and the homogenization of cultures. This new global context in which we all find ourselves in is engaged directly by James Winchester in his spirited analysis of our own consumer practices. Our unthinking devotion to our own pleasures engages us in practices that take a large but not immediately visible toll on the poor of the world. As we settle into the comfort of our own place in the sun, we do not hear the pain of those whose lives we are helping ruin. The author not only describes the problem, but points to things that we can concretely do in our own lives to begin addressing this issue. The issue of globalization is met head-on in “Out of Latin American Thought—From Radical Exteriority: Philosophy after the Age of Pernicious Knowledge” by Alejandro Vallega. In his essay, he reflects on the much needed interruption of the prevailing philosophical consciousness and the great need to develop thinking from a position of total exteriority. Such an interruption is necessary in order to create a space to see the cultural destruction that is sustained by the Western modern philosophical project. This space of interruption represents an opening to all peoples who have undergone coloniality and continue to suffer its consequences through loss of identity and sense for authentic culture. The point is not to just occupy the existing spaces of identity politics, but rather to transform them through changes in fundamental practices through a total exteriority that engages in situated historical and epistemic hermeneutics that provide a site for the creative interpretative reappropriation of culture. The historical thread of globalization is picked up by Thomas R. Flynn, who has for many years done important and admirable work on Sartre and Foucault, both individually and in relationship to each other. In his chapter, Flynn continues his significant work on the problem of history with regard to these two seminal thinkers. Through an existentialist approach to history, Sartre employs a social ontology to uncover the moral responsibility of historical agents who find themselves thrown into the midst of the impersonal systems of colonialism, ideologies such as racist

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“humanism,” and so forth. For Sartre, the very living history and biography are inevitably intertwined. As Flynn states, “If both philosophers adopt a kind of “nominalism” in their approach to historical intelligibility, Sartre’s is admittedly “dialectical” whereas that of Foucault approximates the positivistic in its drive toward fragmentation and multiplicity.” Although different in their approaches and often arriving at dissimilar conclusions, Sartre and Foucault’s choice of topics is directed toward the ethical direction, that is, to the oppressed and marginalized in society. The need to heal these ruptures encountered in our life-worlds has been implicitly expressed throughout all the essays in this volume and the questions it has addressed. Jason Wirth’s essay also addresses such questions, although his approach is more indirect. In his essay, he explores the “and” that conjoins poison and the great health of Nietzsche and Hakuin, the Rinzai Zen reformer. In doing so, he does not try to locate some ultimately banal coincidences (as if a coincidence was ipso facto enough to recommend it to our attention), but rather he takes up the issue of the relationship of philosophy to fundamental practice (the relationship of thinking to the “Great Health” in Nietzsche and to “Zen empty mind” in Hakuin). In conjoining poison and the Great Health, he explores the extent to which this “and” does more than merely append one to the other. To do so, he suggests, would be simply to list one after, or before, the other. Rather, he wishes to think the inner necessity that governs their belonging together. In thinking this belonging together, the question of philosophy and its fate are connected ineluctably to practice. This question of the nature and fate of philosophy in relationship to practices that are independent of philosophy (but which philosophy ignores at its own peril) is addressed unswervingly by Michael Schwartz’s essay and sets the tone for the conclusion of The Gift of Logos. Do not certain fundamental practices (ancient and modern, western and nonwestern) form the conditions for the possibility of a more robust, more loving, philosophical practice? Does not, as Nietzsche clearly saw, a petty mind produce only petty thoughts, even if such thoughts are nonetheless true thoughts? Are there not base and tepid philosophies that are nonetheless entirely true? Does their truth ipso facto recommend their worthiness and relevance to the human condition? If we want larger, nobler truths, can we assume that our hearts, that our love for truth, are automatically large enough for what we purport to want? Is there not a need for some kind of intervention of fundamental practices that train us to enlarge our capacity for the scope of philosophical experience? To these questions, Michael Schwartz suggests modern philosophy has adopted the medicine of the thinking-cure and that the theoretical

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Introduction

discourse mistakenly thinks it serves the twin task of diagnostic and cure. We have looked repeatedly in the wrong places for the panacea of our ills of alienation, separation, and encounters with the other of others. Such self deception has been at the expense of the explicitly transformative practices and in lieu of normalized training procedures. In this light, philosophy unknowingly has internalized certain habits of modern life. Ours is a spectacular culture—it is a culture of spectators: “not playing sports, but watching them; not cooking gourmet food, but watching the Food Network; not working on ourselves to become more loving, but thinking the terms of love.” Related to the rise in the theoretical stance of philosophy has been the appearance of an inflated sense of individual subjectivity. Such an understanding is echoed in the works of Weber, Lukacs, Heidegger, Adorno, Foucault, DeBord, Habermas, Ken Wilber, and others. Following the lead of others in this book, we end with Schwartz’s warning of the increasing objectification of human being and how such objectification has mobilized a regressive narcissism; the ego has reasserted itself in light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Even postmodern thought (where one would think we should know better) still suffers with exaggerated tones of self-importance. Although not an invective against thinking, nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances, The Gift of Logos concludes with a call to wake up “from the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are.” This transformation is our greatest gift to each other, and to ourselves. To give it voice, is the gift of Logos.

Notes 1

Marcel Mauss, W.D. Halls trans., The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Routledge, 2002, 4. 2 Jacques Derrida, Peggy Kamuf, trans. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, University of Chicago Press, 1994, 12. 3 Ibid., 23. 4 Walter Kaufmann trans. The Gay Science 107, (New York: Random House, 1974).

PART ONE: THE ARCHƜ OF BEGINNINGS— MUTHOS, LOGOS, AND MADNESS

CHAPTER I ULYSSES AT THE MAST MARCIA SÁ CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK

The myth accomplishes a work. The work of myth liberates us not only from everything that already is finished and definite, that is, from all substances, individualities and systems but it even liberates us towards an understanding of the taking place of totality, its birth, vibration and death. This art is the gift of the myths to philosophy. In this sense, the Greeks wove different relations between myth and philosophy that have constituted western history. —Emmanuel Carneiro Leão

Kafka has written a short story about the meeting between Ulysses and the sirens.1 His story offers us an important key to the understanding of the work of myth. In Kafka’s concise, cutting, precise words, the myth appears to have been transformed. Unlike the hero of the Greek narrative, Kafka’s Ulysses behaves just as his shipmates and fills his ears with wax. With deaf ears, Kafka’s Ulysses is no longer the hero who resists the seductive and tempting song of the sirens. Kafka’s Ulysses “has escaped them.” At least Ulysses ought to have escaped them when he, with wax in his ears, could not hear that, for once, the sirens did not sing at all. How does Kafka transform the myth? First, Kafka’s Ulysses doesn’t consider that the song of the sirens pierced everything and that the passion of those who have been seduced by them could shatter other things than chains and masts. As his fellow sailors, Ulysses fills his ears with wax. Kafka’s Ulysses trusts completely his “handful of wax and the fettering chains” and, with innocent happiness, he sails to meet the sirens. Another even more important transformation of the myth is that Kafka’s sirens do not sing when Ulysses sails by them. The title of Kafka’s short story is indeed “The Silence of the Sirens.” With their silence, however, the sirens stage the non-singing, the lack of seduction, which, in Kafka’s words, is

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Chapter I

“an even more terrible weapon than their song.” The transformation was in fact a transposition from the element of myth—that is, from the spoken word with its musical power and enchanting aspect of ‘hearing speak about’—to an illusory deafness. In other words, it is only when Ulysses fills his ears with wax that he can spend his entire life within the illusion that the sirens had sung as he had imagined and expected. As a matter of fact, it is only when Ulysses puts wax in his ears that the sirens become myth, in the common sense of that word—that is, illusion, lie, fantasy, invention, or ideology. Ulysses’ deafness would then be nothing other than the deafness of prejudice towards the truth of myth. At this instant—at the instant Ulysses doesn’t listen to the song of the sirens—only then can myth and truth present themselves as being those elements that are most distant from each other—those that Aristotle taught us to call opposites.2 Kafka didn’t quite change the myth. He simply tells once again Homer’s myth, although with one hugely important addition. He retells, in the myth, both the myth and the long tradition of deafness toward the truth of myth. In his retelling we can see that Kafka shows how myth differs from literature. Literature is not myth. Even when literature uses mythical images, or allusions to myth, literature remains literary; it is not mythical. What then does it mean to remain literary? It means to remain in the element of the letter—in littera’s element—in the system of the alphabet, in the written word. And that means the possibility of transmitting and committing something without needing to hear or speak about it. Written culture lives in another element. It lives in the element of visuality. Illusion is a concept that emerges in the domain of the visual. Auditory illusions are in a way impossible. Kafka’s version of Homer’s myth permits us to identify the incomprehension of the truth of myth with the emergence of the written culture and its creation (literature). But this demands at least one more comment. Myth can only be considered an illusion on the condition that it is possible to produce an exact, literal and immediate image of reality. Being immediate, exact and literal—these aspects characterize the promise of a truth free from all illusion. This is the Promethean promise of the written word. The promise of a word which would be able to preserve something without transforming it, the promise of acting as an ancient charioteer able to drive round and round again, always in the same circular wheel path.3 However, this is only a promise, the promise that the letter should be able to exactly reflect the real. Yet, the real always surpasses the letter and all that is literary. All attempts to exactly reflect the real are doomed to failure. But it is out of this failure that literature is born. Literature doesn’t really emerge from the letter, but in letters as a tiny leaf of grass, born in a block of cement. Literature is

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born out of an excess of the real. That is why literature shows that the real is its own presentation, nothing more, nothing less. In literature, the real presents itself as word. And when the word and the world (the real) show themselves as one, it is no longer possible to suspect that the literal word is an illusion. In literature it is the real that is mythical. When Kafka’s Ulysses fills his ears with wax, thereby signaling that only through such an act does myth become synonymous with illusion, Kafka shows that literature is the way towards the truth of myth. Just as Ulysses’ tale, literature is (in itself) a sailing back into myth. Walking down this Kafkan path into myth, we can perhaps admit that the truth of myth does not exist in some concealed meaning, but in the wondrous identity between myth and the real. “The real is a myth.” This is a statement to which a great number of philosophers today would subscribe. However, I would say that the statement has to be another, namely, that the myth is nothing more, nothing less than the real. In this article we hope to reach an understanding of how myth equals reality. To gain such an understanding, only one path lies before us: to follow once again the path of myth.

***** Let us read Homer’s Ulysses through Kafka’s Ulysses. Homer’s Ulysses doesn’t choose not to hear the song of the sirens. Neither does he choose to fill his own ears with wax. He follows the advice of Circe, the goddess, and let his men tie him to the mast, so that he will be able to listen to the sirens. If we admit that a) how the myth is told, b) who tells the myth, and c) the myth’s content, constitute together an indivisible unity, then we must also follow the myth with such a unified gaze. In the Odyssey’s twelfth song, we can hear the myth being told three times. The first time, the one who tells the myth is Circe, the beautiful sorceress on the island of Ajaja, whom Homer describes as “the goddess of goddesses” (XII, 155) and as the “daughter of the sun (X, 138). The name Circe etymologically relates her to kirkos, which, according to the scholars, seems to have been identical to the circle of nature, with the circle that connects birth to death, and appearance to disappearance in an eternal movement, that is, in the circular movement of the universe itself.4 Circe says the following: So: all those trials are over. Listen with care to this, now, and a god will arm your mind. Square in your ship’s path are SeirƝnƝs, crying Beauty to bewitch men coasting by;

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Chapter I Woe to the innocent who hears that sound! He will not see his lady or his children In joy, crowding about him, home from sea; The SeirƝnƝs will sing his mind away On their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones Of dead men rotting in a pile beside them And flayed skins shrivel around the spot. Steer wide; Keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears With beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest Should hear that song. But if you wish to listen, Let the men tie you in the lugger, hand and foot, back to mast, lashed to the mast, so you may hear those harpies’ thrilling voices; shout as you will, begging to be untied, your crew must only twist more line around you and keep their stroke up, till the singers fade. (XII, 37-55)5

The second time it is Ulysses who tells the myth. He tells the crew what Circe told him. He recounts what he had been told. In this way he again mythifies what Circe had already mythified. Ulysses’ version is narrated in lines 154-164. Ulysses thinks that he himself must tell the myth, because it is necessary that not only one or two men, but the whole crew, should know the destiny that Circe, the beautiful goddess, has divined to him. He addresses them: Dear friends, More than one man, or two, should know those things Circe foresaw for us and shared with me, So let me tell her forecast: then we die With our eyes open, if we are going to die, Or know that death we baffle if we can. SeirƝnƝs Weaving a haunting song over the sea We are to shun, she said, and their green shore All sweet with clover; yet they urged that I Alone should listen to their song. Therefore You are to tie me up, tight as splint, Erect along the mast, lashed to the mast, And if I shout and beg to be untied, Take more turns of the rope to muffle me” (XII, 154-164)6

Circe’s and Ulysses’ narratives are very similar. Lines 162 (Ulysses’ account) and 51 (Circe’s account) in Homer’s original are exactly the same. It is interesting to observe that in this mythical repetition, Ulysses

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does not tell what actually would happen if one listens to the voices of the Sirens. The terrible images of piles of bones, the impossibility of coming back home and meeting one’s family again, are omitted from Ulysses’ narrative. He only says that the divinely beautiful song of the Sirens is insidious and threatening. Already in his narrative, Ulysses flees from the destructive force of the Sirens’ song when he states that their song is dangerous, without describing how. So far, we know through Circe what happens to the one who listens to the song of the Sirens and through Ulysses that their song is insidious and threatening. But what do the Sirens sing? What terrible song is it that emerges from their throats? This is the subject of the third narrative of the same myth that we can read in lines 184-191. The Sirens don’t sing terribly; their melody is not out of tune. They do not really sing at all, nor do they make rhythmical sounds. They sing words. Their song is a saying, phthoggos, melodious words and meanings, a singing saying. What do they say? This way, oh turn your bows, Akhaia’s glory, As all the world allows— Moor and be merry. Sweet coupled airs we sing. No lonely seafarer Holds clear of entering Our green mirror. Pleased by each purling note Like honey twining From her throat and my throat Who lies a-pining? Sea rovers here take joy Voyaging onward, As from our song of Troy Greybeard and rower-boy Goeth more learned. All feats on that great field In the long warfare Dark days the bright gods willed Wounds you bore there, Argos’ old soldiery

16

Chapter I On Troy beach teeming. Charmed out of time we see. No life on earth can be Hid from our dreaming. (XII, 185-191)

Who are those who know so well what Argives and Trojans suffered when the city of Troy in accordance with the will of the gods? It is the myth itself that knows. It is Homer himself, that is, myth itself, singing and knowing what has happened in the suffering, fertile earth. The words sung by the Sirens are nothing more, nothing less, than the retelling of the beginning of the Iliad: Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous, that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss and crowed brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men—carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done. Begin it when the two men first contending broke with one another—The Lord Marshal Agamemnon, Atreus’ son, and Prince Akhilleus.7

The song of the Sirens is nothing more, nothing less, than the myth of myths. There are innumerable interpretations of the myths in Homer, not least of the myth of the Sirens. Félix Buffiere’s book, Les mythes d’Homere et la pensée grecque,8 presents a beautiful itinerary in this long tradition. Since antiquity we have at our disposal allegoric, symbolic, grammatical, moral, theological, and philosophical interpretations of myth. Every interpretation tries to show a new, different and profound fold in the fabric of myth. We can summarize some recurrent features in these very different readings of the myth of the sirens. Some have interpreted the Sirens as the harmony of the stars, others as the insidious force of the soul of the dead. There are those who understood the Sirens as representing the dangers of the pleasures that lead the soul to its destruction. Sirens have also been interpreted as the seductions of poetry and science. One common feature among those different interpretations is that the Sirens represent the forgetfulness of mortal things in which mankind surrenders to the passion for the distant, for the love of “divine and celestial things.” In most of those readings, Ulysses is presented as the wise soul capable of resisting the seduction of distance. The song of the Sirens has in these different contexts of interpretation been taken to represent the Western metaphysical fascination for the celestial, the

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unpronounceable, or the unsurpassable that can only be experienced at the expense of the body (which is the purported home of the humans). This metaphysical passion cuts bones and bodies from the soul, separating them, and scattering them upon the sea. The song of the Sirens would then also mean a kind of song of the distant that seduces mankind beyond its proper finite state, beyond the corporeal, material, and perceptible universe. In these kinds of traditional commentaries on Homer, the attention is generally focused on the terrible powers of the Sirens and the annihilating consequences of their song. Heraclitus (not the “obscure” Pre-Socratic, but an author who, in late antiquity, wrote the so-called “Homeric Allegories”) made explicit the fundaments of the allegorical interpretation of myth. However, he was the only one in late antiquity who identified the song of the Sirens with “immemorial tales from archaic times.” Some of his lines suggest that he has seen the song of the Sirens as myth itself. But in this case myth was defined as an archaic narrative form. How should we read this long interpretative tradition concerning the myth of the Sirens, a tradition that sums up the thinking of the Stoics, Cynics, and all of the various Neo-Platonists? I would say that this long tradition has filled its own ears with wax. It has heard it said that the song of the Sirens was very dangerous, but they have not heard what they sing in how they sing. It is my conviction, as incredible as it may sound, that only Plato has heard what the sirens have sung. They sang both the myth as myth and the myth of the myth. When Plato banishes myth from his ideal polis, he is not really in opposition to Homer. Plato follows Homer, because Homer himself was the first to tell about the danger of myth. It is Homer, and not Plato, who declared that myth is aware of its own intrinsic danger. More than two thousand years of Platonist and Platonic Western culture have transpired. Whitehead’s statement that Western philosophical history is no more than a footnote to Plato’s thought is well known. Almost every tale about Plato’s philosophy affirms that with Plato the occidental tradition matured from myth in order to measure itself by the parameter of logos, of discursive rationality. We have all been taught that with Plato philosophy and poetry divorced each other forever. The proof is to be found in Plato’s statements in the tenth and concluding book of the famous dialogue Politeia (the Republic) in which he banishes poetry in general and Homer in particular. Is not this more than enough proof? Why should we pursue this line of historiographic oppositional thinking? But as every interpreter has to admit, Plato is a misomythos at the same time that he is a myth writer and hence in this sense also a philomythos.

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While not neglecting this paradox9 (that the poet Plato dismisses poetry), the majority of readings that take on the difficult task of discussing this problem in Plato, proceed by interpreting Homer from the point of view of Plato.10 What would happen if we tried it the other way around? What if we interpret Plato from the point of view of Homer? What would happen if we dared write of Homer’s Plato? The time has come to interpret Plato from the horizon of Homer. This was already Kafka’s project. My contribution in this sense is very preliminary. But I will try to follow this transformed point of view, paying attention to the way in which the myth includes knowledge of its own danger. Once again, I can only see one path to follow, namely, that of the mythic tale.

***** The terrible and dangerous song of the Sirens is the myth. But who are the Sirens? In the three narratives of the myth that appear in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, the Sirens are named without epithets. This is unusual in Homer. All adjectives that occur relate to their song. We know that they sing, they seduce, they charm, they destroy, and they devour. We know that their song is sweet as honey (aoidƝ ligurƝ) and that it is divine (thespƝsia). But we don’t really know what they look like and what and who they really are. The only thing we do know is their name (“Siren”). We find the same situation when we try to define “myth.” Circe names the Sirens four times. She says Seirenas, Seirenon, Seirenes, which forms correspond to the accusative, genitive, and nominative forms of the feminine plural. We know therefore that they are in a plural and in the feminine form. The fourth time they are named, Circe uses the dualis—Sireinoiin—and therefore we can understand that they are in the plural, but that there are precisely two of them.11 The Sirens are two in number and in the feminine. In Homer, the naming of the Sirens speaks to the question of duality. But besides specifying the duality, the name of the sirens tells us something else. We should never forget when we talk about myth, that the myth must be heard, that the audio associations belong essentially to myth. In myth the primacy belongs to listening, even when the only access to it is, as it is for us, through writing. It is perhaps even time to admit that the distinction between oral and the literary culture should not be seen as if they were two lands divided by an ideal customs. The myth reminds us that in writing there is listening, and that this is what we mean by “reading.” This is why writing can never completely suppress its audio associations, the echoes and resonances, the elements of listening. Only

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listening (if we accept that a painter is one who is able to listen with his eyes and the musician one who can see with his ears) recognizes the difference in identity and the identity in difference—and it always does this at the same time. That is why sound associations also define myth. If we speak aloud, the old Homeric Greek word he seirƝn, we can hear immediately another Greek word he seirƝ, he seirƗ, which means rope, ribbon, lace, string, and cord. This association is also attested to by Plato himself in the Cratylos (403de). SeirƝn, seirƝ, seirƗ—these words are almost homonyms for rope and cord. Those two words are so alike that Homer cannot use seirƗ in order to say “rope.” That is perhaps why he uses instead desmos, chain, and desmotis, prisoner, which have the same semantic structure that Plato deploys in his Allegory of the Cave. Prima facie the Greek name “siren” says little more than the duality of the double and the possible homonym relation to rope and string. Yet this is already as such a rich site for reflective investigation. The episode of the Sirens consists of several dualities. It has multiple twosomes. Ulysses’ self control depends on the crew, on these others; but among these others, only two tie him to the mast, Eurilokos and Perimedes.12 Why is this doubling so important? Because in the name ‘Siren’’ are co-present the rope and the string, danger and salvation. Because how can Ulysses save himself from the danger of the Sirens’ strings? By being tied to the mast by a rope, by seirƗ. By extension, how can one resist the danger of myth? By letting oneself be tied by the rope of myth. Only in myth is there salvation from the danger of myth. This paradox of myth provides the basis for Plato’s position on myth. To understand his position, it is not enough to read all passages in his dialogues that can argue for his misomythical statements against poetry and Homer. Again, we need to understand Plato with Homeric ears. This first becomes possible when we push ourselves towards Plato’s horismatic ontology, which is Plato’s ontology of the horizon. Our traditional Plato is the one who has bifurcated into the sensible and the supersensible (the intelligible, hyperouranic reality). We have been taught that Plato made us into metaphysical animals by separating a world of transient things (the domain of becoming) from a world of ideas (the domain of being). A metaphysical animal is one who is obsessed by the passion for the unlimited, seduced by the song of the distant, and convinced that principles and beginnings only exist in the heavens above or in profound oceans below. And all this is furthermore allegedly achieved through violent sacrifices of the body, by the self-control of the instincts and the ascetic denial of pleasure. Those who are obsessed with the eternal ideas are supposed to eschew all transient things. To comprehend and esteem a

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human being as a metaphysical animal seems to have resulted in a metaphysical situation in which we exclusively contemplate the essence of things without seeing the actual things themselves. But who has taught us such prejudices? One cannot really blame Plato, who was not really worried about a world of ideas, but concerned fundamentally with the life of difference, distinction, and separation. Plato’s concern was difference in itself. He talks about horismǀs— distinctions—as the horizon out of which things can appear, present themselves as they really are. Plato never sacrifices the presence of things. Plato taught us rather to look at the presence of things from the perspective of their presentation. The essence of a tree, of a stone, of a human being, of animals, of gods, is not altogether separate from the things themselves. The essences are not separate things or ideal things, but rather the horizon from which trees, stones, humans, and animals, can appear, that is, present themselves in their being. Plato’s ontology is an ontology of presentation.13 He discovers that the possibility of being near things depends on first recognizing them as that which they are. The only possibility of recognizing things is for Plato when things appear in their impressive aspect, that is, in their physiognomy. We can only be near things by following their outlines, configurations, borderlines, forms, and aspects, which the classical Greek language expressed with the words eidos and idƝa, the aorist forms of the verb orƗo, to see, glance, and gaze. To follow the “idea” of things signifies following their outlines. But this can only happen when we take a step backwards, as a runner or dancer has to do in order to jump to the nearness of something. This step backward can, however, only be accomplished from a certain perspective. Plato’s outstanding discovery was perhaps nothing more and nothing less than the discovery of a gaze simultaneously able to see the thing and its horizon. Rarely do we look at the horizon. Rarely do we bring together the distances of the heavens and the oceans. The horizon intensifies our sight. And sight is intensified when it surpasses and goes beyond what is seen. It does so not to lose it, to let it slip out of sight, but, on the contrary, to see seeing itself in things, to see things within the horizon of their own appearance. What would happen to our crusty Platonic studies if the appearances and being of words were to be returned to their verbal significations, if we were to learn to pronounce them as the verbal appearance? (The conceptual conjunction of appearance and instant— eidos and eiksafenes—also attests to this fundamental sense of appearing.) Plato is not really concerned about the transcendent. He is rather striving for a seeing with transcendence, that is, seeing what there is to see,

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but from the horizon of wholeness. This clarifies, rather than explains, why we, when seeing a Platonic “one,” always meet a “two.” We simultaneously see things and their horizon. What Plato teaches us is rather that the finite is limited by an infinite and unlimited horizon. How could we conceive the limited without an unlimited openness? Plato shows us that the sum total of being is an outline within the openness of the horizon. Plato does not go beyond things. Rather he goes beyond the gaze that separates things from their horizon and therefore forgets that reality and horizon belong to each other as a dual form. Two Sirens, two—one. The horizon is the open, unlimited space, which opens the limits of things. That could be a summary of Plato’s discovering eyes. This seeing with transcendence, this seeing simultaneously of both horizon and things, the horizon as the reality of things, is also double in itself. In a sense it is an Odyssey of the sight, in which the eyes have to travel away from things in order to return to them with the whole horizon. In another sense, it is a connecting sight that has to tie itself to the limits of things in order not to get lost in the unlimited openness of the horizon. It has always been said that Ulysses’being fastened to the mast allegorizes the conceptual logos, the conceptual rationality. To sail by the Sirens means to sail across the open horizon, to sail across the pure presence of things in their presentation, a deadly threat, because it really can happen that the sight can neglect things, neglect the real, and be swallowed up by the dispersion of the possible. The danger of the horizon’s own openness is the danger of Platonism itself. In the same way as the myth knows its own danger, Plato knows his own danger. In order to be Platonic, that is, to be able to see things from the openness of their horizon, one must let oneself be tied to the base of the mast, to the base of concepts. This is the human beginning place. Is Ulysses, then, the one who lets himself be tied to the concept of logos and, because of this, is able to sail by the myth without being swallowed up by it? How can we understand Ulysses? Does he symbolize the rational survival of the seduction of myth? Who is Ulysses? The abundance of names and epithets for glorious heroes and adored gods is typical for epic poetry. Ulysses is not merely a Greek name. He is the wisest, the most glorious, and the god-like; he is known to be noble and astute, fox-like, celebrated for his sly intelligence. The Greek name Odysseus belongs to the semantic region of the verb odyssomai, to become angry, to be irritated. Ulysses is angered and irritated and therefore dissatisfied. He is the dissatisfied one, the one who does not see better things, but rather the Good itself. I would summarize the humanity of Ulysses as the representation of loneliness in and as the human. He is not

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the figure of a human utopia, but rather the representation of humanity as the strangest utopia. The human being is placelessness as such and not the one who seeks non-existent places.

**** Let us follow the myth once again. In addition to tracing the name Odysseus and its etymological landscape it is important to follow the various verbs, that is, the actions that distinguish Ulysses. He is famous for his divine actions. In the twelfth song of the Odyssey, Ulysses is the one who listens to Circe’s words and who remembers them. He must sail by, flee, and submit himself to trials. All those verbs apply not only to Ulysses, but also to his shipmates. There are, however, two verbs that in this twelfth song appear only in connection with Ulysses. The first one is the verb ethƝlo, which means to desire, to tend towards something, to choose, wish or aim for a telos (a goal). This verb appears with another— to listen—in the sense of desiring to listen: “but if you wish to listen . . .” (line 49). The other verb that distinguishes Ulysses is the verb to tie, which is also used in the verbal composition, “let the men tie you in the lugger” (lines 49-51). To desire to listen and to let oneself be tied are two actions that are expressed each with two verbs. Once again, two opposite actions—one active—wishing, longing, and searching—and one passive— letting oneself be tied. According to Homer’s narrative, it is quite clear that Ulysses’ freedom of choice, wisdom, and self-control, depends on his decision to let himself be tied to the mast by his crew. Ulysses’ control over the situation on board his ship, Ulysses’ control over myth itself, is actually a letting himself be sailed across. It is self-control and self-reliance. Ulysses’ control over myth is described as his hearing Circe’s advice, a listening to the admonishing words of the goddess, a listening to the myth. Ulysses way of control is to obey. If Ulysses stands for logos and reason, it is crucial for us to understand how he does so. He does so by letting himself be tied to the base of the mast in a very precise position. He lets himself be tied in a standing position; not able to untie himself, he allows the limits of the mast to become his own limits. Where does this brief reading of Plato, from the point of view of the myth of the Sirens, take us? Plato doesn’t criticize myth. In the same manner that Xenophanes and Heraclitus did, he criticizes the crude misunderstanding of what myth is. Myth is not really a tale or a narrative. Myth is the presentation of the real, the real presentation of the real. It is reality realized.

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We know quite a lot about the Greeks. But what a god meant to an ancient Greek remains for us an unresolved and difficult question. But even if we cannot understand what a god is, we can at least observe that in the so-called mythical narrative, all of the gods share the trait of making appearances. In the Iliad, we find two very strange lines: “It is very easy for us mortals to recognize when a god has shown himself (Iliad, song 13, line 72). At the same time it is “very difficult for a god to keep away from human collapse” (Iliad, 15, 140-41). In Homer’s and Hesiod’s mythical narratives, a god always appears when the real is revealed. In myth God’s presentation, a divine epiphany, and reality’s manifestation are synonymous. But what are epiphany, presentation, and revelation, other than words? Myth is perhaps the narrative word, but only if we don’t forget that myth is the way in which a god appears, in which the real presents itself. When we search in a Greek dictionary for the word “myth” we can read for instance that ho mythos is “anything delivered by word of mouth.” Myth means saying, tale, language, and speech. In addition, the philosophical tradition has defined myth as stories about the gods, about the divine, about the unspeakable. Myth has been conceived as theogony, which is the genealogy of the gods. In the Christian tradition it becomes very important to define the contents of myth, to prove that myth doesn’t possess any literal meaning, that myth is language in disguise, which talks through image, allegory, and symbol. It holds a hidden truth, a hyponoia. Very early on—and based on Plato’s expressed pronouncements against the poets, the mythologoi—myth was considered as being close to poetry and the proverbial uses of the language. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who published a book about the ancient gods—Les dieux antiques14—based on the work of George W. Cox, defined myth as the “le on dit,” as the “it says” or better, “as one says.” Schelling and Nietzsche demonstrated, however, that myth is not a primitive story about gods that irrational or pre-rational people dreamed up in prehistoric times. Myth shows the real in its abundant force. Myth is the language of gods. What humans are capable of saying about the real depends entirely on whether humans have been struck by the real. It is non-sense to insist on talking in terms of ourselves as being beyond the real (and therefore unreal). What humans can say and tell about the real depends on the reality of the humans. This is perhaps the only meaning in the Greek myths—namely that what is being said, who says it, how it is said, all this constitutes one indivisible unity, that is, the real. These reflections on reading the myth of the Sirens try to show that myth does not constitute an opposition to logos, even in the writings of Plato. As reality’s self-appearance, as divine epiphany, myth is the ever-

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present and undeniable condition of every logos. If we admit at least during this reading, that the security provided by the mast while one sails across the open sea can give us an image of the Platonic conceptual reason, then we should also accept that this security is due exclusively to a letting go, to an allowing oneself to “be sailed” by the open sea. The principle of every instance of sailing is not to move forward, but to be moved forward. The sailor cannot utter a statement such as “Beware of the ocean,” because the ocean is the prerequisite for sailing. By contrast, he can and has to say, “Beware of running aground, beware of surfacing rocks,” because in the ocean it is the surface that constitutes the threat. If the mast’s security tells about conceptual delimitations, then conceptual delimitations can only be conceived in their proper sense by letting themselves be conceived or conducted (moved along) by reality’s open ocean. Plato discovered that the ideas could not be prior to, or immanent, or even subsequent to, the things themselves. The ideas are one with things— a thing’s own visibility. The ideas are nothing more, nothing less, than things in their vigorous presentations as things. Plato did need to expel the poets and mythologoi from his philosophical state. He did need to throw out from philosophical thought the representation of myth as a primitive narrative about the reality of gods. Concept, logos, reason, human knowledge, human prudence, and wisdom—Ulysses—are always epigonal constructions in relation to reality’s violent manifestation. (The Greek gods are always violent.) Plato could do this only by throwing out the poets with poetic means and thereby by throwing out the mythologies about myth. Perhaps Plato’s myth shows that the myth is the acknowledgement of its own intrinsic danger and therefore the only possible salvation. Myth is dangerous. The real is dangerous. Plato shared this understanding with Homer and Kafka. But he also shares this understanding with us. There is, however, one dramatic difference. While Plato, Homer, and Kafka take as their starting point that the real always surpasses us, we (the men of nihilism) are completely convinced and supported by the infinite illusion that we, as rational beings, surpass reality. It is in the determination of life out of rationality and rational goals, that is, the rationalization of life, that we create our illusions, our treasons, and our lies. But if we live in the conviction that we surpass reality, how can we realize the truth of myth? Perhaps by discovering that this basic conviction is an illusion, perhaps by listening to the myths of reason, to the myth of logos, can we realize the truth of myth. Who today does not experience, in the middle of so-called globalization and the New

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World Order, that world events surpass our conceptual and practical reason? Who today doesn’t experience in the middle of the planetary cybernetic society that “evolution,” “society,” “history,” “life,” and “modernity,” all surpass us in all respects. Who today would dare deny history’s power over us, precisely when even philosophy, forgetting the tremendous sense of history as fate and destiny (Nietzsche and Heidegger), can only write a history of concepts and ideas? Gerhard Krüger, one of Gadamer’s colleagues when he was at Marburg, wrote the following lines in an essay about the mythical thought in present times: “Today we say about history what we used to say about the God of the Bible: history places us before our life task, we are responsible towards our history, history controls us.”15 We define ourselves as creatures of history, as creatures predetermined and prejudged by history. But what then is history? This question cannot be answered by summing up all the previous conceptions of history pronounced and defended in the course of the history of philosophy. This answer can only be answered when it is taken into account that precisely in the middle of a planetary and global rationality; reason is impotent to explain why reason should surpass its own reality. Even if we have exchanged the Greek gods and the Christian god for the currency of history, to verified and demonstrated knowledges, we are still incapable of resisting the claims of the real, namely, this very claim of making ourselves present to our own presence. We are incapable of contradicting our own finitude, our incompleteness, which obliges us to make ourselves real. Kafka’s transformation of Homer’s myth shows us that we are incapable of escaping the claims of the real, despite all of our attempts to control the powerful work of myth. Even in the most severe deafness to myth, it is still the real (that is, myth) that surpasses us. Perhaps this is why Kafka’s short story ends as it does. “Maybe he (Ulysses), although this is unconceivable to human reason, really noticed that the Sirens were silent and did meet the gods and the Sirens with the above-mentioned tools as a kind of protective shield.” Perhaps humans do not need to survive. Survival is not necessary. It is only necessary to sail across the open ocean of the real.

Notes 1

See Franz Kafka, Das Schweigen der Sirenen, in Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt-amMain: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 351-352. 2 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book II, 1108b 34-36. 3 See Jesper Svenbro’s article, “Hjulspår in Myrstigar” (Stockholm: Bonnier Essä, 1999).

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Porfirius, Est, Ecl I, 41, 60. The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 181-182. 6 Ibid., 185. 7 The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday), 1974. 8 Felix Buffiere, Les mythes d’Homere et la pensée grecque (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956). 9 See Perceval Frutiger, Les mythes de Platon (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930) as well as Karl Reinhardt, Platons Mythen in Vermächtnis der Antike (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960). 10 See J. Labarde, L’Homère de Platon (Paris, 1949). 11 In his translation, Fitzgerald specifically refers to “two SeirƝnƝs.” See 186. 12 Barbara Cassin has a very brief commentary on this “two,” as well as on the force of the “two” in the myths of the Sirens. See her translation of Parmenides, Sur la nature ou sur l’étant (Paris: du Seuil, 1998). 13 See Jan Patoþka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 2002. 14 Stéphane Mallarmé, Les dieux antiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1925). 15 Gerhard Krüger, “Mythisches Denken in der Gegenwart,” Die Gegenwart der Griechen im neueren Denken: Festschrift für Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Paul Siebeck, 1960), 121. 5

CHAPTER II PAN’S DEATH AND THE CONSPIRACY OF LOGOS: PLATO’S CASE AGAINST MYTH DAVID JONES

Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas Can ye listen in your silence? Can mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands With a wind evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When news of Pan’s death reached the shore the Greeks must have asked: Who killed the great god? Was it murder? An accident? Our questioning might take the forms: Did poor Pan die a natural death, one of old age and senility? Is it possible that great Pan lives immortally still somewhere in the depths of our collective psyche? In the first century, Plutarch relates the story of Pan’s death in the De Oraculorum defectu (ʌİȡ‫ ܜ‬IJ‫ޒ‬Ȟ ‫ۂ‬țȜİȜȠȚʌ‫ܟ‬IJȦȞ ȤȡȘıIJȘȡ‫ܝ‬ȦȞ; 419 a-e). Thamus, an Egyptian captain, hears a voice and responds on its third call. The voice instructs Thamus to proclaim Pan’s death upon their approach to Palodes. All aboard were astonished, including the captain himself, at the night sky’s injunction. Perplexed, Thamus decides to allow fate resolve his dilemma and ease his uneasiness with proclaiming the death of such a propitious god: if a good wind prevails they would sail pass Palodes and not proclaim the death of the horned and goat-footed divinity, but if all were still, the empty void between his vessel and Palodes would be filled with the proclamation of Pan’s demise. And as fate would have it, there

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was no breeze on Pan’s ill fated night and the water was smooth, glass-like, and mirrored the heavenly sky; it was now time for a different god, the Sky-God, and “there was a great wailing at once, not of one person, but of many, tainted with wonder.”1 The announcement of Pan’s death traveled across a calm sea as would the sound of a bell on a very clear and still night. But who was it who yelled out of the night’s nothingness to Thamus, who like Moses, was minding his own business and tending to his duties? Whose voice journeyed through the darkness of the nearly timeless night announcing Pan’s murder? For murder it was. This event, surely announced the beginning of the Christian era; but had this he-goat of gods not furtively been murdered earlier by a renegade group of philosophers in Athens, much earlier than the first century CE? And was Pan not just one of the many gods to die a premature death before Thamus’ proclamation? The Greek gods were immortal, yet they died young; their deaths were savage, but the shadows of our most forgotten ancestors were to follow Plato, a philosopher of the new age, and the one to whom we would be destined to footnote, into his high-noon.2 Much like Plutarch who borrows Thamus, the Egyptian sea captain, from Plato’s Thamus, the Egyptian king—who fears writing will destroy the soul’s capacity to remember in the Phaedrus (274d-275c),—we are yet to be finished with the Greeks. Yet we have tried our best to kill their texts that arrive to us through time, often in tattered and fragmented form finding their ways often from the Greek to Arabic to Latin and to Greek again so we can translate them ever anew—we, the scholars, who still feel some sense of obligation to their mind. The Greek mind remains, in so many ways, our mind. Investigating our inheritance from the Greeks gives us insights into why our problems are indeed philosophical problems, often left unresolved in the transmission of their words, of their logoi, to us. Scrutinizing this inheritance of ours makes us think we might find some provisional directions for our exit from the proverbial “fly-bottle.” Within it, however, we remain buzzing about, hitting the transparent sides that keep us contained within the translucent structures of our conceptual projections. Perhaps there are no longer any philosophical problems worth discussing without those ancient philosophical texts that provide us with our lost meanings. In comparison to other ancient western cultures that display mythologies of the same intricacy, the ancients of Greece retain such an exalted status and privileged position because they were the only ones who were the undeserving witnesses of mythology’s moribund trajectory of being so systematically overcome by the new trend that went by the name of

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philosophy. This trend permitted the emergence of rational thought and science, which eventually became the cornerstones of modernity. Yet the overcoming of mythology by philosophy was a violent reaction against the pathos of the Greek psyche. The principles and models of this move from muthos to logos moved away from the imagination of the apparent world, the world as appearance, to the conception of a new real world of abstraction. But can we inherit the Greek mind without also being haunted by her lost soul? The first successful attack against Homer and Homeric values—and consequently the silencing of the mythopoetic voice—is from the philosopher who adamantly opposed the inclusion of poets in his ideal republic. What follows is an exposition of Plato’s ironic adieu to myth. This adieu is ironic because Plato himself cannot repress completely his own mythopoetic voice even when that voice gains its greatest expression in his most logos-oriented moments that is so brilliantly articulated by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s “Ulysses at the Mast” in this section. In many ways, Plato does indeed continue to hear the Siren’s calls as he’s tied to the mast of philosophical grounding, but a sail of new and stronger fabric is cast with him, and this well-built sail will be full of wind as it moves philosophy along into the uncharted seas of the future. Perhaps his supplanting of the mythic pan-theon, the all-gods, with a solitary logosgod is unintentional; but nevertheless, without him the new course could not be steered and he would thereby set an unalterable course for his intellectual heirs, their progeny, and for us. This course, now old, was once nascent; at the time, it was a course that would map out an ulterior world and a self no longer at home in this newly unveiled other world; this course must have appeared strange to Plato’s cultured contemporaries, for Pan was then only “a dead god walking” with the silent news of his end taking time to reach and traverse the night skies over Palodes. Pan’s death would be like the distant light of dead stars reaching their far off destinations of indifference. Such truths, like the light of distant stars, take time. But Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God was about another god, the god born from Pan’s ashes.

From Myth to Logic The movement from muthos to logos is not exact because the words bear such close relationship.3 This relationship is further clouded because the words have no etymological relation to each other. Their relationship is in their sense and use. A muthos is anything delivered through words or speech. A muthos can be a speech to an assembly as we find it being used

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in the Odyssey and it can also be applied to any conversation between individuals.4 In Homer, a muthos is always a tale, narrative, or story about someone or something in the past; a muthos is historical. However, this historical dimension is in opposition to an ergon, a deed or action that literally happens.5 This opposition is not one of truth versus falsity; rather, it is a tension between the verbal utterances of an act and the act itself. One can, however, speak about an ergon. Locutions about an ergon or erga are more literal because of the word’s connection with business practices, work, or the result of work. Hence, ergon is always in opposition to epos, a pledged word, promise, advice, and so forth, that is, that which is yet to be made actual. We would not expect one to “mutheomai” an ergon, we would expect one to “legǀ” an ergon6 in a world where the verdict on individual conduct depends on how closely word matches deed, how one speaks and then acts.”7 Legǀ, the verbal form of logos, usually pertains to the here and now, that which is actual.8 The relation of legǀ to the actual gives it a sense of definiteness that telling a story does not have, and cannot have. The telling of a story allows imagination its freedom to play with the facts—those things we make up about reality—of the story. Legǀ was used for what oracles declared because there was a definite meaning, albeit hidden at times, in the oracle’s response.9 At first glance we might expect mutheomai to be used in connection with oracles, but from the Greek perspective, at least prior to Plato, oracles provided definite answers, though often obscure, to definite questions.10 Even Socrates’ distantly removed experience with Delphi (had he ever been there himself?) and his allegiance to Apollo, his patron god, give a clear and definite answer to Chaerephon’s question in Apology 21a concerning who is the wisest of all. Socrates, the literate man who wrote nothing, might have found himself at a juncture (if he were of mind to be paying attention) in the transitional stage between the conclusive death of orature and the genesis of a written tradition. Socrates does straddle the fence of the old ways and the new. He is the man who will give us the “Myth of the Cicadas” in the Phaedrus and who will have Thamus proclaim his truths about writing in the same dialogue. And we must not forget—we have the written book to remind us—that the Phaedrus ends with a prayer to Pan. This event must have been bewildering to the contemporary youth of Athens. Young Athenians, most of whom were reading and writing, such as the young Plato, looked up to a man who in many ways represented the old days as much as he championed the cause of the future, the man who wrote nothing. Socrates’ move away from the outer-directed perspectives of the Presocratics and their en-souled world to the inner-directed

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perspective of the human soul needed the expression that could be given only through a logos. Although Socrates is a great storyteller, a muthos seems not to work as well for him; he needs to find a level of consciousness that is conducive to his move away from the unconscious-participatory mode of myth to the conscious-observational mode of philosophy. In the Dialogues, Socrates’ prize student is willing to bequeath him this level of consciousness in his many portrayals of the father of western philosophy. Plato will speak for his philosophical father in written logos. The distinction between muthos and logos is further beclouded by both words being rendered as “speech” or “account.”11 One might expect the move from myth to philosophy to be as clear and illuminating as Plato’s portrayal of the philosopher’s experience, but this is not the case because such deeds take time to manifest clearly and are subtle in nature and expression. The transition from myth to philosophy was a gradual process and not an unambiguous development in spite of the radical coup de théâtre of the poets by Socrates, Plato, and company.12 The poets held an esteemed position in Greek society and Plato needed a rather sustained and forceful argument suggesting that the poets do not deserve, or even belong in his New Republic; but as it turns out, he gives his friends of wisdom a rather unconvincing one. The poets need banished because they knew not what they did, and why they said what they did. But it was not until the Christian era that the connotation of muthos changes to one of complete falsity, that is, muthos as legend, tale, something that was fabulous (like the Latin fabula).13 This connotation can occur only after logos has gained its greater ontological status and received its Platonic attributes of being penetrating, discerning, astute, sagacious, and wise—all personal characteristics of his teacher, who would be the physical embodiment of a new and future era. Heraclitus was the first to introduce the word logos with any philosophical significance. If there is a central theme to his philosophy, it can be found in this word. We soon realize, however, why Heraclitus has the epithets “The Obscure One” and “The Riddler” when we try to discern what he means by his logos. After Heraclitus, the word logos is not used in any philosophically significant way until the Sophists employ it as a term meaning reason, which they usually used with orthos (right) orthos logos, right reason. Orthos logos was construed as a way of arguing effectively. The Sophists’ use of the term was only methodologically cast, however. Before the Sophists, Anaxagoras, either following or misunderstanding Heraclitus, spoke of an ordering principle of intelligence that directs the world. This principle was, however, not logos, but nous. Logos has been

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transformed, appropriated by the active intellect of nous and with this (mis)appropriation interiority becomes more firmly established and pronounced in the knowing self. Knowing oneself became the proper domain of doing philosophy and with this domain in its place, the external world would forever be something out there. Both Plato and Aristotle follow Anaxagoras (not Heraclitus) and postulate nous, and not logos, as the organizing principle of a rational universe. Heraclitus’ logos was too emergent for them; it was too natural, immanent, and dependent on its conditioned being by the constituent oppositional forces of the world’s becoming. It is only a rational, that is, a logos-oriented universe that could support nous as a governing principle. What is presupposed in their organization is a prior transition from some kind of mythic ontology to a more rational ontology—an ontology of muthos besieged by an ontology of logos.14 This identification of nous and logos was first presented in the Epinomis, a dialogue that has been the subject of a long debate concerning its authenticity. It is unlikely Plato wrote the Epinomis because it is doubtful that he would have wished to add it, as the name indicates, to his Laws, which he was writing at the time of his death. It would have been a short appendage that adds little, or nothing, to the more fully developed Laws. Its significance here, however, is not related to its authorship. Our main concern is with Plato’s contribution (and to a lesser extent with Socrates’) in affecting a transition in the ontological structure, and hence psychological structure, of the Greek worldview we inherit. Most likely, Aristophanes of Byzantium grouped the Epinomis with the Laws and Minos about 200 BCE, some one hundred and forty years after Plato’s death. The following passage is not so important for its content—it is about astronomy (those laws of the stars)—but for its identification of logos and nous as the governing rational principle of the universe. The Athenian has just finished discussing the eight brotherly (cognate) powers of the heavens and their brotherly lots (fates): “And when we give back their honor, to one we do not [give back] a year and to another we do not [give back] a month, and to others we do not arrange some portion or some time in which each passes through to its pole, completing the cosmos, the most god-like logos is placed in order to be seen . . .” (986c; italics added). The author of this passage places the divine logos for all to see fully as a god greater than all other gods conceived, and this god will not allow any graven images before it for this is a God of the One, not one of the gods of the many. This new god will be called Reason and reality its unwitting consort. Moreover, this divine logos will be connected with the eyes or the eye of the soul (the nous of the logistikon) and connected with

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vision. In the Politeia (508d3) Socrates tells Adeimantus, one of Plato’s brothers in the dialogue, to: . . . then see (noei) this of the soul in this way; whenever, it fixes itself on that which is shone by truth and that which is, it considers (enoƝse) and also discerns (egnǀ) and appears to have mind (noun); but whenever it is mixed with darkness (skotǀ), the coming-to-be and destroying, it opines and also dims, changing opinions up and down, and in turn it seems likely not to have mind (noun).

The bodily sense that comes closest to thought (noƝma) for Plato is the sense of sight; this sense is connected most directly to the sun and the light of consciousness from Socrates’ patron god, Apollo: Which of the gods in heaven can you have be the cause and authority of this, whose (day) light makes our sight see in the most beautiful (kallista, ideal) way and seen objects to be seen?

Adeimantus replies: “For it is clearly visible that your question refers to the sun” (Politeia 508a1). From the perspective of Socrates, sight gains its capacity to see from the sun: “The sun is not sight, but being its cause is seen by it” (508b6). The Sun is the source of sight and it is analogous to the Idea of the Good, the source of all that the eye of the soul can come to see: knowledge, truth, and beauty. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in the dialogue will give the sun even further expression as the source for all that is. Plato always uses the Attic nous instead of logos in contexts of this sort (except in the suspicious Epinomis whose author is perceptive enough to see how Plato is thinking). Nous is both mind and perception and is formed from noeǀ, which means to perceive with the eyes and to think in an absolute sense. The connection of nous (Homeric noos) with vision was made as early as Homer, but with a different sense. In Homer, noos is always presented in a spatial and quantitative way. Homer never goes beyond this sphere into a non-physical form of expression as does Heraclitus and Plato. For Heraclitus, it is the introduction of depth to soul and a new level of intensity that extends beyond Homer. For Plato, nous is less, or not at all, connected with the body as it was for Homer. Nous has been abstracted as the highest part of the soul. 15 As the highest part (Plato) or power (Aristotle) of the soul, both Plato and Aristotle use nous as that which is capable of reasoning, that is, visually perceiving; this type of reasoning is related intricately to and woven into the visual apparatus. Under the aegis of knowing as seeing, the oral tradition is fated. Ironically,

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the scope of the new philosophy will initiate itself as the preparation of one’s own personal death. Even though Plato may not have written the Epinomis passage quoted above, it is certainly not contrary to the spirit of his New Republic. At Politeia (440e6) he writes: Then is it therefore other from this, is it a form of the logos, so there are not three but two forms in the soul, the logos-making and the desire-making [logistikon kai epithumƝtikon]? Or just as there are three breeds held together in the polis, the money-makers, the allies (helpers), the counsel-makers, and so in the soul is there this thumos-form [thumoeides], being by nature an ally to the logos-making part, if not destroyed by evil rearing? Necessarily, he said, there is a third. Yes, said I, if it should come to light as something other than the logos-making part just as it has come to light to be other from the desiring-making part.

The logos-making part of the soul is heralded as that part of the soul that must be served by the soul’s other parts that are more intimately associated with the body: the thumoeides or spirited-form of the soul and the epithumƝtikon or desiring-part. The passions of the soul must be regulated by the logistikon because it is the fundamental ontological category that designs all existence and contains some portion of the divine principle in itself. After making his play for logos, however, Plato’s shadow side shows itself in 441b7. Here he invokes Homer for some support and authority: “He struck his breast and reproached his heart with word [muthǀ]” (Od. XX, 17-18). Plato goes on to explain how Homer clearly has Odysseus reflect on his unreasonable anger as the women were going off to bed with their suitors and as he, alone in his bed, speaks to his heart: “Now Heart endure; even a more dog-like thing you once endured.” Plato correctly assesses Odysseus’ inner struggle—Odysseus does indeed repress the rumblings of his passionate heart, but for him this act is discontinuous with the other parts, or more specifically, the other persons of his soul. Odysseus is open to personifying—Athena later comes to him and gives him restful sleep—but Plato is not open to such incarnate visitations from the gods. For Plato the logistikon is a faculty, or part, of the soul and is not one of the many persons of the soul politic.16 Plato strikes at the Greek breast and reproaches its mythic heart with word, but his word is different from Homer’s muthǀ. Plato does not usually convene poets or mythographers for support of his philosophical doctrines because he wishes to dismember them with his new penetrating philosophical vision because they are the ones who tell “the greatest lie about the greatest things” (377e, 7). The poets, therefore,

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should have sanctions imposed upon them if they fail to conform to the Republics’ rules of censorship: (1) no god should be portrayed as not being good, for the gods are now only good—380c; (2) no god is allowed to change shape in either word or deed, or by signs in either visions or dreams—382e. The reason for this severe legislative action against the gods is that the darkness of the appetitive part of the soul, that which is farthermost from the light of the Good and the logos-making part of the soul, has cast a shadow on the rest of the poet’s psyche, making him blind to the Truth and Beauty of the cosmos. Plato cannot have the urgency of desire or multiple agencies that Homer and Hesiod portray the gods as having in his well-ordered society and world because such unpredictability leaves only a world of possibility, of unknowing and radical change. For this world runs counter to Plato’s world of immutability, immortality, invariability, inflexibility, and even sublimated eros. In Politeia 390c, Plato tells us that “to have Zeus, making plans when he is the only one awake while all the other gods and men are asleep, forgetting all of them through his aphrodisiac desire, and so struck seeing Hera that he is not even willing to go into the house, but wants to fuck her there on the ground . . . .” And he has Adeimantus confirming Socrates’ point when he replies: “No, by Zeus, that does not appear fit to me.” Would not Zeus think his name uttered in vain and “struck his breast and reproached his heart with word [muthǀ]” and said “Endure now heart, more dog-like you have endured before” (390d)?

Socrates’ Adieu to Myth Personifying was crucial to the mythopoetic voice and to the imagination of the Greeks and we can sense the significance of this voice is beginning to escape Plato. As James Hillman writes in Re-Visioning Psychology: By imagining through and beyond what the eye sees, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in personified forms . . . [P]ersonifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic—children, madmen, poets and primitives.17

Even before the realization of his perfect society, Plato seems prematurely to set himself up as some kind of philosopher king who would see his people through the shadowy caverns of myth to the promised land of a reasonable and enlightened civilization.

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In the opening lines of the Phaedrus, we see a strong example of Socrates’ and Plato’s adieu to myth and mythologemes when Socrates informs Phaedrus that “I myself have no frivolous time (skolƝ) at all for them [mythologemes]; the ground for which, my friend, is this—I am not yet able to know myself as the inscription at Delphi enjoins; so it appears to me laughable [geloion], when as yet I am un-knowing to explore such exotic things. On which account, I surely leave these things alone to bid farewell (chairein) to them” (229e, 4). This adieu to myth in the Phaedrus is not a total farewell, however. Because of the nature of the dialogue, what is bid farewell are those old myths: Pharmacia and Boreas, the Centaurs and the Chimaera, the Gorgons and Pegasuses and “a plethora [of monsters] of other inexplicable and absurd natures.” Plato cannot give myth or mythmaking a total or absolute send-off because he will later in the dialogue find it necessary to set Socrates himself as a mythographer in two of his own myths: Theuth and the myth of the invention of writing that is brought to us by Thamus, and the myth of the cicadas.18 Moreover, there is the more logos-oriented myth of the soul, the charioteer and his two horses (246a-247c), devised by Plato to explain the soul’s inner struggle. Such tactics are not uncommon for Plato because each time he has difficulty explaining something in the form of a logos, he resorts to a mythmaking of his own.19 The mythological perspective of viewing the world has become something of a joke for Socrates; it is something laughable (geloion) and is only for those who like to engage themselves in the zigzag path of frivolity (skolƝ). The word skolƝ is related to skǀlion, which was a song sung at banquets. Each guest sung a part of the skǀlion while holding a myrtle branch that he then passed across the banquet table in a nonprescribed manner to anyone he wished; such an act could be spontaneous and frivolous. The person with the newly acquired myrtle branch would be obliged to pick up the song wherever it left off. This type of song did not have the tonality of the harmonious logos Socrates wished to hear, nor did it have any particular telos that needed to be reached. The song had too many modulations and was left open to chance and luck and depended upon the various levels of philosophical preparation and different states of the banquet guests, many whom would be besotted Bacchanals. The song resembled the child’s playing the board game of Heraclitus, which had its own vision of eternity. Like Heraclitus’ game, the skǀlion cannot provide the oneness of harmony that the sober Socrates (who drank more than anyone, but never was seen oinǀdƝs) desires in the Poleitia (399a, 4). This frivolity tortures him with its many discordant voices that may or may not

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remember the prescribed verses; or worse still, the singers may improvise their own words in spontaneous, inspirational, and unthought out ways. When Plato uses the word “skolƝ” he invokes skǀlion, which playfully says even more to an ancient Greek listener and reader. Skoliǀn with the accent on the last syllable means twisted, crooked, and winding; consequently, the term comes to mean unjust or unrighteous. The double meaning of the accent suggests for Socrates this circuitous path of frivolity is not the most expeditious and judicious passage to seeing the unobstructed light of the telos of the Idea of the Good; such discordant and chaotic frivolity has no real purpose and goal. Having more serious concerns in mind, such as knowing himself as the oracle enjoins and constructing the good society, Socrates must look away from the world of myth, from the world of his Ionian predecessors, and even from the world itself. His looking away from the world promotes the unintentional severing of the soul’s relationship to its body and to its world; Socrates anatomizes soul from its own materiality and its world and situates the body and world in the margins of his concern; knowing the body and natural world and our relationship to them becomes an immaterial matter for Plato. The word chairein, farewell, (229e, 4) captures the many shades of Plato’s adieu to myth: {a} to rejoice, be glad—Socrates rejoices at his dismissal of myth; {b} to say good-bye, farewell—Socrates bids farewell to mythological thinking; {c} to put aside—Socrates puts aside the thisworldly by dismissing the previous outward directed perspective of a mythic-participatory mode of being in the world and welcomes a new interior world of the soul born from its transcendent home in some distant pattern world. Socrates’ renouncement of myth redirects focus away from the psychological/mythical and natural world. He replaces an ontomythos with an ontology (ontologos). He accomplishes this redirection by laughing at the frivolity of an earlier mode of existence where trees and the countryside had something to teach us. As Phaedrus says to Socrates, Whereas you, my excellent friend, strike me as the oddest of men. Anyone would take you, as you say, for a stranger being shown the country by a guide instead of a native: never leaving town to cross the frontier, nor even, I believe, so much as setting foot outside the walls.

Socrates replies, You must forgive me dear friend; I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.20 (Phaedrus, 230d5)

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The open space surrounding Phaedrus and Socrates is the empty place of Pan’s absence between them. Even here, in the countryside, far away from the city, Socrates isn’t completely paying attention to what’s around, nor where he’s from; he is attentive to only where he is going. The psuchƝ, or soul, which was once characterized as a relation in the world, becomes like well-walled Athens in the Politeia (434d). Its highest part, the logosmaking part, is disenfranchised and sealed off from its place in the world. Subsequently, Plato seeks the soul’s relationship to a world beyond, the Intelligible Realm, which is appropriated later in the more pedestrian heaven of Christianity. Socrates, who hardly ever left the walls of Athens and its agora, flees from the open spaces in fear. Even our word agoraphobia has come to mean fear of open spaces and not the agora that is often packed with others. Socrates’ phobia possesses him with a new demonic force. We find him more relaxed, freer, and open in the Phaedrus as he fills the natural sounds of the world around him with logous. This is becoming the demonic force of Socrates’ truth. This demonic force was expressed as alƝtheia, the Truth, which discloses Socrates’ mask of a new type of hubristic knowledge, a knowledge that allows him to express himself in laughing logomania. This “laughter” of Socrates is a mirror image of the violent laughter (philogelǀtas) that Plato wishes to rid from the Kallipolis. His Ideal State would not allow “lovers of laughter either. For when a man lets himself go and laughs mightily, he also seeks a mighty change to accompany his condition” (Politeia 388e3).21 Socrates’ malevolent laughter distorts and perverts the meaning of myth. More specifically, his laughter is aimed ultimately, even though perhaps unwittingly, at the frivolous earthly Pan, that hairy horned ebullient and animated old roaming man-goat deity who dances and plays his pipes for the nymphs; Pan, that protuberant member of the Dionysian entourage who is intimately connected to his world and its multifarious multiplicity, is dismissed as one discharges a reviled intruder. Plato forever dries up the seminal teachings of the mythological oracles and nature philosophers of Ionia. The outcome of his logomania is our impoverished and repressed relation to the human body and to its natural world—one that ultimately finds its apotheosis in the madness of the nineteenth century Nietzsche, who is the first to warn us of the perils of our lost world and our lost souls.

Transcending Muthos In order to make a clearer distinction between muthos and logos, we need to turn to the Gorgias. It is here that Plato makes his clearest

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statement with respect to his word usage. At 527a5 Plato has Socrates speaking to Kallikleis concerning Judgment Day and here we listen in to Socrates just finishing his account: Probably then this seems to you like an old wives’ myth [muthos] told and thought slightly of, and there is no wonder if you think slightly of this, if in some way our investigating could discover something better and truer; but now you see, that you three, who are the wisest of all the Hellenes, you and Polus and Gorgias, cannot show by argument that we ought to live another life than this life, which is also brought to light as useful there [in the other world]. But in all of these logois while the others were being refuted, this logos alone rests, that we should be most cautious in doing an injustice than having an injustice done to us, and of all things a man should care for (study) not what seems (dokein) to be good, but what is (einai) good, both in one’s own life and with people. (My emphasis)

Even though Plato uses “muthos” through the persona of Socrates, he does neglect it, or drops it, for the more important form of logos. According to Plato, myths can be refuted because they are open to multiple levels of interpretation—this is one characteristic of a myth that qualifies myth as myth and not as a logos. It is through this basic move that Plato discloses the truth of his double nature. In this disclosure, he contaminates the purity of Presocratic philosophy. In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche writes that with “Plato something entirely new has its beginning. Or it might be said with equal justice, from Plato on there is something essentially amiss with philosophers when one compares them to that ‘republic of creative minds’ from Thales to Socrates.”22 Plato catches himself in the above Gorgias passage: “Probably then this seems to you like an old wives’ myth,” but do not worry because I have a real reason (logos) for you because “in all of these arguments (logois) while the other ones were being refuted, this reason (logos) alone rests.” Now we have come to the essential meaning, to the real matter at hand, which comes out clearly and cannot be subject to interpretation: we should prefer unjust acts performed against us as opposed to us inflicting them on others. One can picture Athenians who viewed plays of real human passion by Sophocles and Euripides and who were cultured in mousikê muttering aloud with abject apathy, “Oh, really!”23 Myth offers up the world as an imaginal space through polycentric personifications of possibility. The act of personifying is the cache of feelings it portrays; this act raises the status of all things to persons to be encountered. There are no concepts surreptitiously hiding behind the masks of images in myth; there are only persons. Likewise, the projection of symbolization onto the imagery of myth (mytho-logy) is the

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logos-oriented attempt to find a means of understanding some alien time. The move to logos itself is the move to symbolization where the symbol of the Truth, Reason, Noumena, Essential Reality, and so forth encompasses the totality of the manifold nature of self and world. The symbolization of time into Eternity or becoming to Being where time and becoming are frozen in the timelessness and immutability of the being of eternity are also consequences of the move to the logos god. What divides Plato’s double soul is that he has a sole message in mind while wishing to silence the multifarious voices of the ancient past. In other words, he has a singular symbol (the Idea of the Good) that will somehow include in its purview all the many nuances and subtleties of myth. What is accomplished, however, is the delimitation of the tradition he finds himself in and the circumscription of his philosophical posterity—all philosophical questions became only footnotes to him and the space of the world changes when time is given over to eternity and becoming to Being. With the move to logos, the world and self are set in order. The verbal form of logos is legǀ {a}—to lay in order; and with this laying in order philosophy lulled the world to sleep with the boredom of an essential reality, a reality denuded of its personae and marauded of its imaginal possibilities; legǀ {b}—to lay itself down, to be discovered (not imagined); legǀ {c}—to speak, tell or account; this ordered given reality awaits our discovery as Other and we need to invent an unpoetic and proper language to speak it, that is, to give it philosophical logos. We will be tempted by science, and even more incredibly by the social sciences, in this regard. The logos-god had a precursor in ancient mythic times. Apollo, the patron god of Socrates, prophesies the new age through these immortal words: “Socrates is the wisest of all.” Socrates only hears of this pronouncement second-hand; he does not even go to Delphi himself— perhaps he had never been to Delphi in his life! His childhood friend Chaerephon is the bearer of the “good” news for modern Athenians. Instead of traveling to the oracle himself and posing the question that changes the course of European thought, Socrates decides to “prove” the oracle wrong or doubt its veracity. His approach to the indictment of being the wisest of all is problematized. His approach is an omen of things to come; his approach is a premonition of the dialectic, a logos governed manipulation of language and knowledge. First, Socrates interviews a reputed wise man and then works his way through the ranks of Athenian society until he reaches those who are skilled with their hands. At each rank, the conclusion drawn is always the same—they think themselves wise, but really they are not. The poets are too inspirational; the skilled

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workers think they know it all, and so on. What makes this fable interesting for us is not the conclusion that Socrates draws from his investigation—that he is indeed the wisest because he knew that he did not know—but the manner in which he comes to his conclusion. Why is the oracle’s pronouncement a problem for Socrates in the first place? And why did it need to be resolved?

The Oracle of Soul Socrates does not go to the oracle and ask for himself because in his heart he was no longer a believer in the old ways and their ancient wisdom—he engaged himself in the new way, the dialectical, the reasonable, and/or logical approach to life’s many mysteries—his approach is one of distance. He is even so boldly insolent to proclaim: “So of myself I asked again on behalf of the oracle whether I might accept this [that I am the wisest of all] if I am just as I am, not being wise nor having wisdom like the others nor ignorant or having ignorance or having both [wisdom and ignorance] like the others. I replied to myself and therefore to the oracle that I was useful (better, advantageous) just as I am.”24 Socrates has subsumed the role of the oracle; Socrates has become our oracle. With his action, everything changes—the human soul becomes an oracle to itself and must always be protected, saved, and worshipped; the world and its many creatures have been purloined of soul; soul has been “abstracted” from each living creature, especially from those of us who aspire to remain half goat and half human. Lifetimes later, a deprived Descartes would look for the site of soul in animals and conclude that only humans have soul. But for poor Descartes, our souls had to be housed somewhere even if they found their homes in our pineal glands! Where else, we might ask, could Descartes have exercised so ludicrously his genius without this inherited task? Knowing oneself for the Socrates of the Apology was to know and care for the soul. Although this caring seems innocent and innocuous, knowing oneself for the logos-oriented Plato meant defining the human soul in specific and precise terms: the appetitive, spirited, and the logos-making part. With the human precisely individuated and the individual soul clearly defined, there are now other human tripartite souls out there in the perfect society; beyond that society portends some alterior natural world, one that seems so different from our essential being. Caring for the soul in the Phaedo, a dialogue where Plato gives greater expression to his own logos tenor, means separating the soul from the body. In one of the less logosoriented dialogues, the Symposium, Plato actually apprises us how this

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separation can take place and furnishes a map for the soul’s ascent to the transcendent realm of absolute Beauty/Good, but to do so we must sublimate our eros, that godly resonance we all have that “softens the sinews and overpowers the prudent purpose of the mind” (Hesiod, Theogony II, 120). We only can imagine the innocent ingenuousness of Socrates as he turns away from the causes and origins—from those originary moments of cosmogony—to the goal, purpose, and meaning of life, to teleology. As a result, his direction is seduced inward and finds itself in opposition to the outwardly direction of his predecessors. In mythic terms, with this directional change came an Apollonian distance, the distance that only an archer can experience and achieve. The world, separate and discrete, became an apparent entity apart, a target for the arrows of our understanding. This Apollonian distance is initiated because of the soul’s new definition; there is now a firmly established cosmos to the soul; the soul has become an oracle unto itself; the soul has now gained a self; the soul has become self. Who (or what) can now contact the oracle? Is it only the oracle itself? Not only does the world become distanced, the self ultimately finds itself distanced from itself when it asks: Who is this self that is investigating itself? From there begin the deluge of cascading questions that will preoccupy and distract western philosophers for years to come—questions that often render meaningless the pursuit, and love, of wisdom. Apollo was Socrates’ patron god, not because Socrates revered him, but because Socrates now was losing his ability how to revere a god. In the hands of his most capable logos loving student, a new god was raised from the ashes of myth’s smoldering pyre. Unintentionally, this directional change would open the world to the proselytizing and converting spread of Christianity and Islam. Such a shift in the wind’s direction would seal the wonderfully idolatrous oracles of western wisdom forever. But I’m certain our friend of wisdom died conflicted, and won’t we all. To which god did he pray as he felt the hemlock moving up his body? I doubt it was the logos-god. At the end of the Phaedrus Socrates asks an important question: “Phaedrus, oughtn’t we first to offer a prayer to the divinities here?” “To be sure.” “Dear Pan, and all ye other gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may not war against the spirit within me. May I count him rich who is wise.” “. . . Let us be going.”

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And let us, be going.

Notes 1

De Oraculorum defectu, 419d. Robert B. Palmer’s Introduction to Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Dallas: Spring Publication, 1981) also uses both the poem by Mrs. Browning and Plutarch’s story used here as a prelude to this paper. However, what I discuss is quite different from either Otto or Palmer. All translations from Greek are mine. 2 See W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 94 n. 16. 3 See W. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos (Aalen: Scienta Verlag, 1966) for an exhaustive discussion of the comparison of muthos and logos. Unfortunately, this work has not been translated into English. 4 In Homeric Greek, the verb used for speech is mutheomai and in later Attic Greek the verb is legǀ. The noun logos appears only twice in Homer (Iliad 15.393 and Odyssey 1.56). 5 Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Henceforth LSJ. 6 This statement is conjecture on my part. One would expect, however, that this statement is true based on the relationship between ergon and epos and logos and muthos according to LSJ. Even if this statement is not true, it gives us a means of understanding the greater issue at hand—the move from a mythic ontology to a philosophical one. 7 Victor David Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and The Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 47. 8 LSJ. 9 LSJ. 10 This position is, for the most part, contra Fontenrose. See J. Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 233-239 for a different perspective on this issue. 11 LSJ. 12 See F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957) for a fully developed argument in support of this statement. 13 Muthos as false account is a judgment based upon predisposed perspectives of modern and contemporary scholars. Such a distinction would have meant nothing in the classical period. 14 It might be argued that a “mythic ontology” is not an ontology at all, that is, there is no such thing as an ontology without a logos oriented perspective (“logos” is contained in the word). This may be true, but for lack of a better word I shall retain the often overused “ontology.” One may be inclined to employ “mythic psychology,” but this might be misleading and be subjected to the same reservations as “ontology.” Here, and following, ontology is used as the fundamental way in which the world is structured according to the way in which it

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is imagined. This is not so unlike Kant. On occasion, I may refer to this as “ontomythos” to vividly display the sense that I wish to get across. 15 See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982), chapter 1. 16 It is interesting to note that Aristotle uses the word dunameis, powers, which is usually translated, perhaps misleadingly, as “capabilities.” 17 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 14-15. 18 For a discussion of the dynamics involved between myth, logos, and writing in the Phaedrus, see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 19 The Timaeus (27b, 7-end) is one such example. For a discussion of Platonic myth see Robert Zaslavsky, Platonic Myth and Platonic Writing (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981). Zaslavsky provides a useful list of myths designated as myths by Plato: Politeia - 2.359c, 6; 2.376d, 9; 2-7; (6.501e, 2); 3.414b, 8; 8.565d, 4; 8-9; 9.588b, 1; 10.613e, 6. Phaedo - 60b, 1; 110a, 8. Minos 318c, 4. Theaetetus-155e, 3. Gorgias - 492e, 7. Timaeus - 22b, 3; 27b, 7. Statesman - 268d, 5. Laws - 1.636b, 7; 1.644b, 6; 4.711d, 6; 4.712e, 9; 4.719a, 7; 6.773b, 4; 7.790b, 8; 7.809b, 3; 9.865d, 3; 12.943d, 4. The non-mythical writings, that is, where muthos does not occur, are the Parmenides, Euthyphro, and Symposium. 20 R. Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 25. 21 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 66. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Gateway, 1962), 34. 23 Ironically, by becoming so directed toward one telos, Plato who desired the purity of the essential truth becomes impure (mixed) by exhibiting the struggle he found himself in during Athens’ “decline.” This is why Nietzsche can write, “Plato is the first mixed type on a grand scale, expressing his nature in his philosophy no less than in his personality. Socratic, Pythagorean and Heraclitean elements are all common in his doctrine of Ideas. This doctrine is not a phenomenon exhibiting a pure philosophic type.” Ibid., 34. 24 See Apologia, 19e-23a. My emphasis.

CHAPTER III BLANCHOT, MADNESS AND WRITING BRIAN SCHROEDER

Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the nonarbitrary character of judgments. —Nietzsche, The Gay Science In the time of the historiographer interiority is the nonbeing in which everything is possible, for in it nothing is impossible—the “everything is possible” of madness. —Levinas, Totality and Infinity But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident; only my innermost being was mad. —Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

In many ways the thinking of Maurice Blanchot moves between that of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas—each of these thinkers is an interlocutor in some “infinite conversation.” Nietzsche, the great thinker of immanence, calls every previous form of self-identity, rationality, legality, and morality into question while Levinas, the thinker par excellence of ethical transcendence, aspires to the Law, despite its absolute unattainability. Blanchot’s work, however, is testimony to the undecidability that subtends all thinking about madness, and thus also its relationship to law, sovereignty, the self, reason, and above all, for him, writing. Disrupting the (imagined) unity of philosophical discourse, Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing style (a style adopted by Blanchot in his later work) neutralizes the apotheosis of previous metaphysical and epistemological systems by plunging the “new” reader into the irreversible eternal swirl of (no) return. Nietzsche’s aphoristic gesture pummels the goliath Metaphysics with the power of the smallest word (one is reminded here of Luther’s

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mighty battle hymn) that unleashes the overwhelming force of pure difference in immanence. Since the time of Nietzsche’s madness and writing, thinking has never been the same: scrambling to recoup its losses, or madly dancing on the verge of some nihilistic precipice, laughing as it sways and totters, writing, ever writing, and blurring the once neat boundaries between philosophy and literature, truth and falsity, and testimony and fiction. Prior to his own madness, or perhaps in the madness prior to his incoherence and later silence, Nietzsche wrote that madness is thinking itself, a thinking ineluctably bound to the will to truth. We are always already mad, and the greater part of our madness consists in perpetually deferring an imagined madness to come. For Blanchot, this deferral, this postponement, takes the form of writing as a most peculiar form of madness. But what is madness? Different societies, to be sure, have their own definitions, as well as the medical, legal, religious, and moral complexes to make and enforce such determinations. Does the fact, however, that the differing definitions of madness among cultures not indicate that madness is a fundamentally relative concept that resists the very either/or logic on which its definition is predicated? No stranger himself to madness, Nietzsche writes that an ever-changing veil disguised the “most terrible reality” for the ancient Greeks. This veil or mask was the phenomenon of the world that hid the chaos of existence. To look behind the mask or veil is to invite madness. According to Michel Foucault, “madness is much more historical than is usually believed, and much younger too.”1 We know that at one time in Europe those who were considered mad were able to roam freely throughout the villages and cities; they were, in fact, often considered to be the mouthpieces of divine truth, a status that extends back to ancient Greece. Society neither affirmed nor negated the mad; they were integrated into the social structure. With the growing influence of positivism in the eighteenth century, however, madness “became a fact concerning essentially the human soul, its guilt, and its freedom; it was now inscribed within the dimension of interiority.”2 Madness soon lost its social status and its world became the world of exclusion, evolving into illness and finally into mental illness, which “is simply alienated madness, alienated in the psychology that it has itself made possible.”3 The resulting psychology of positivism, basing itself on total rationality, that is to say, on the law of non-contradiction, no longer saw the need or necessity for the irrational. Therefore, madness often came to be understood only in relation to the purely positive pole of reason, identified with the interior

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life, with the soul; madness was reduced by psychology to a mere issue of morality and thus, eventually, to an issue of law. But this experience of unreason, in which “Western man encountered the night of his truth and its absolute challenge was to become, and still remains for us, the mode of access to the natural truth of man.”4 Much like Nietzsche’s genealogy, Foucault’s archaeology seeks to restore that which has been considered unintelligible (the senses, passions, instincts, etc.) to its proper place in the nexus of reason and unreason. To be human is to be constantly confronted by the possibility of madness, that is, the possibility of not being understood. Madness is not the mere negation of normality, for what is normality but a societal interpretation? Sanity/madness is a relative distinction; it implies the degree of difficulty in understanding the other person. And the history of the matter is that sanity has been determined in the last two centuries not by a societal consensus, but rather by small groups who hold the reins of power at particular given moments that dictate the legal and moral standards of the day. Blanchot’s personal history reflects the relativity of holding a given position. An apologist for fascism during the first half of his life, he completely reversed his political stance after the Second World War and embraced the radical left. He frequently lamented his earlier views and chastised others, notably Heidegger, for not publicly repudiating their own prior associations with far-right politics. One can only speculate whether such a tremendous reversal in worldview does not carry with it the continual haunting of guilt and remorse that can easily drive one to a certain type of madness.

The Neuter, the il y a, Transcendence Blanchot is trapped in the madness of a paradoxical oscillation between resignation and desire. Immersed in the totality, he is resigned to the inevitability of finitude and death and to the maddening absurdity of what he will term “the neuter” (le neutre)—the anonymity of language that belongs to no one, which is neither a concept nor a space. Nevertheless, he is inexorably drawn, through the irrepressible force of an infinite desire, to the thought of exteriority, a beyond—he is drawn to transcendence and it is there he finds himself on common ground with his life-long friend, Levinas. Though not the same, the neuter and Levinas’ notion of the il y a share a fundamental similar dimension: both thoughts lead toward a certain apprehension of nothingness in the sense of the absence of God, or the

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positivity of being.5 “The there is [il y a],” writes Blanchot, “is one of Levinas’ most fascinating propositions. It is his temptation, too, since as the reverse of transcendence it is thus not distinct from it either . . . as absolute indetermination . . . it draws us toward the uncertain outside.”6 A presence of absence is not a negation of presence; rather this presence of absence points metaphorically beyond the totality of being and nonbeing where the (non)concepts of the neuter and the il y a are neither affirmations nor negations of being. The totality is neither total nor final; it is not the All. The neuter disrupts the sameness of the totality and offers a glimpse of transcendence; it offers us the non-Night beyond the Day. Yet, the neuter “does not allow itself to be grasped either in terms of immanence or in terms of transcendence, drawing us into an entirely different sort of relation.”7 The neuter is the non-space of a language, a Saying that invokes the madness accompanying the irrecoverable Order beyond that of the luminous Day. Despite his attraction and desire, Blanchot is still deeply suspicious of the term “transcendence,” which is either “too strong—it quickly reduces us to silence—or, on the other hand, it keeps both itself and us within the limits of what it should open up. . . . Transcendence within immanence: Levinas is the first to devote himself to this strange structure (sensibility, subjectivity) and not to let himself be satisfied by the shock value of such contrarieties.”8 Furthermore, he notes, there is an uncanny connection between the terms transcendence and transgression.9 Yet while he can write of the metaphysical desire for the absolutely other as transcendence, and understand such transcendence as ethics itself, Levinas recognizes the madness of which Blanchot writes so forcefully: “The being that wills does not exhaust the destiny of his existence in his will. This destiny does not necessarily imply a tragedy, for resolute opposition to the foreign will is, perhaps, madness, since one can speak to the Other and desire him.”10 This line of thinking leads Levinas to inquire elsewhere of Blanchot: “Is madness a way out or is the way out madness? . . . An outside conceived of in the impossibility of the outside—thought producing the desire for the impossible outside. In which respect it is madness, or our religious condition.”11 Blanchot demonstrates in The Madness of the Day12 and The Instant of My Death13 that incessant writing, even in its quasi-repetition, is a way to address this impossibility of the outside and mask the chaos that threatens the order that both protects and destroys. Elsewhere, he refers to this ceaseless writing as “worklessness” or “unworking” (désoeuvrement)14— the production of the absence of work, not the work itself, even though writing writes through the work and throughout the work.15 Writing does

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not mark a beginning or an end, which is one reason why these two stories can be read together. In both narratives, the “instant” assumes a certain “lightness” that is experienced in the impossible necessity of death as dying, which produces not a state of happiness but rather an ecstasy of sorts—a release. The madness experienced by the hospitalized patient/prisoner in The Madness of the Day is a madness that he confronts as the day, as light, as bound to a purely rational world of sane existence. The same hospitalized narrator of the story has experienced a disaster. He has been blinded and is being treated for crushed glass in his eyes, while also being interrogated about how exactly this happened, an event that he cannot (or will not) recall, to the great frustration of his physicians and the authorities. Noting that “the disaster takes care of everything” and relating the disaster directly to forgetfulness (even, perhaps, to the immemorial), Blanchot describes the relation between the disaster and madness: “The disaster: not thought gone mad; not even, perhaps, thought considered as the steady bearer of its madness.”16 What does the image of crushed glass signify? One the one hand, it produces the blindness that both maddens and protects; on the other hand, the crushed slivers of glass fragment a supposedly “clear” vision of the world and of one’s identity, so that that fictional and the testimonial are confused—that is, brought together and at the same time perhaps unable to be adequately distinguished. But who is the I (je) that narrates these stories? The madness that the hospitalized man confronts is one concerning his own identity, hence his inability to adequately remember the events that lead up to his blinding.

Book-Writing, Worklessness, Nonegoity According to Blanchot, culture is connected to the book. This refers not only to the empirical book that fills our libraries but also to the Book, which is “still to be read, to be written, always already written and thoroughly penetrated by reading.”17 The absolutizing of the book, which assumes different forms such as the Bible, the logic of identity, the Hegelian system, and the law of the State, represents the apex of the movement of the metaphysics of presence. Though the book is the “condition for all reading and all writing,” it is also “a ruse by which writing goes toward the absence of the book”18 which “revokes all continuity of presence just as it eludes the questioning borne by the book.”19 The absence of the book refers to an impersonal exteriority or alterity that is “enclosed” within the book and yet is more than the book. On Blanchot’s account, writing is “a relationship established not between

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the writing and production of the book but, through the book’s production, between the act of writing and the absence of work.”20 Blanchot’s distinction between the book and the work is crucial to his interpretation of the writing act. The book is determined by a sense of temporal finality. The work, on the other hand, is always in process. It is a “hesitation” between the book and the Book which is still to be written, “and then between the work as presence and the absence of the work that constantly escapes, and where time deranges itself as time.”21 Bookwriting thus discloses its operation within a teleological framework, but the work, unlike the book that claims to be whole, knows itself to be incomplete. The book, in its highest sense, is the receiver and gatherer of a determinate form of knowledge, and thereby resists the neuter. The work, on the other hand, embraces the neuter in its desire to move beyond the book, thus opening itself to a standpoint of “non-knowledge.”22 Writing as worklessness produces the absence of the work (but not the Work itself). Likewise, writing writes through the book in order to produce the book, but it does not come to rest in the form of the Book as its ultimate destiny; writing cannot take any respite in its telos. Yet neither the book nor the work constitutes the end of writing. Neither the book or work summons one to write; rather, this summoning is the attraction of pure exteriority, which is neither an outside nor exterior form of any ideal presence inscribing itself by leaving a mark or a trace of some sort whereby one is able to refer back to an origin (archƝ). “When we begin writing,” writes Blanchot, “we are either not beginning or we are not writing: writing does not go along with beginning.”23 Writing disrupts the time-space of the book. Producing the absence of the work and moving toward the absence of the book, writing, as nonabsent absence and off-center center, ruptures the time (presence) of the book as well as the space (center) of the book. Writing as worklessness “designates (in the neutral) the disjunction of a time and a space that are other, precisely that no longer affirms itself in relation to unity,”24 thereby ensuring the impossibility of the accomplishment of the Work. Writing that writes for the Work reveals plural authorship. It signals the death of both the author and the I or ego-self that writes in the name of the author. The proper name no longer has any meaning in writing that writes for the Work. Mallarmé, says Blanchot, is brought to the brink of madness because the Work as book (as total and hence final) leads him outside his name.25 Similarly, Nietzsche, who shares this same insight on writing, is led outside his name. It no longer mattered whose name he affixed—Nietzsche, Dionysus, or the Crucified: “I am every name in history.”26 Unlike the book, which is produced by writing and able to be

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designated by a signature, the work knows no single author. That is why, while “the book can always be signed, the work—Festivity as disaster— requires resignation, requires that whoever claims to write it renounce himself as a self and cease designating himself.”27 Writing on Blanchot (and is Nietzsche ever far away?), Levinas sheds some possible light on Nietzsche’s identity question: “The creator is he or she whose name is obliterated and whose memory has faded away. ‘The creator is without power over his work.’ To write is to break the bond uniting the word (parole) to myself—to invert the relationship that makes me speak to a thou—‘to echo that which cannot cease speaking.’”28 The fragmented and diffused “I” that (not who) writes loses its claim to a fixed identity in the process of writing. This plural “self” is what (not who) disrupts the space-time of the book. Nietzsche recognized the fictional constitution of the ego-self all too clearly in the thought of the eternal recurrence. Blanchot speculates that this may be a/the source of Nietzsche’s “madness”: Nietzsche, certainly, can be born before Hegel, and when he is born, in fact, it is always before Hegel; from this comes what one is tempted to call his madness: the relationship necessarily premature, always anticipated, always not now, thus without anything that can assure it by founding it on an actuality—whether this be of now, of the past (original) or of the future (prophetic). When one is content to say that madness is a reason ahead of reason, one wrongs both madness and reason. . . . And Nietzsche always comes after, because the law he brings supposes the completion of time as present and in this completion its absolute destruction, such as the Eternal Return, affirming the future and the past as the only temporal authorities. . . . The madness of the “everything that comes again.”29

Nietzsche’s madness is an altogether “other madness,” outside of any proper designation, for here language transgresses the law, always formed by the past, pronounced by the present and questioned by the future. But this future is a future infinitely returning and thereby shattering any form of past and present. How does one respond to such a conception of time? How does one respond to the identity of the self that is continually shaped and altered by such temporality? According to Blanchot, “writing alone can respond to the demand, on condition that discourse as logos having realized itself, takes away any foundation on which writing could declare itself or support itself and exposes it to the threat, to the vain glamour, of what no one henceforth would dare name: mad writing.”30

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Writing, Madness, Law As that which contains and is exteriority, writing is always “from out of the exteriority of writing and against the exteriority of the law, and always the law draws upon what is written as a resource.”31 Thus is the relation between writing and the law laid bare. Blanchot says that writing becomes law “as soon as the exteriority of writing slackens.” What is this slackening? [It is] the appeal to the oral force . . . taking form in language by giving rise to the book—written discourse—[in which] exteriority tends to appear: at the highest level as the exteriority of the Law, on the highest level, and, at the lowest, as the interiority of meaning. The Law is writing itself, writing that has renounced the exteriority of interdiction (l’entre-dire) in order to designate the place of the interdict. The illegitimacy of writing, always refractory in relation to the Law, hides the asymmetrical illegitimacy of the Law in relation to writing.32

When writing, in response to aurality, becomes written discourse in the form of the book, the exteriority of writing (that which makes the production of the book possible at all) “slackens” into the exteriority of the book; or, to put it in a quasi-biblical manner, “falls” (tombe) into the exteriority of the book. This kind of writing results in a reification of the writing process and produces, as a product of the book, a totalization of meaning. Thus the book raises itself to the level of the Book by attempting to assert itself as the absolute of the Work. This self-elevation of the book results in an exteriority that refuses to acknowledge an even more primordial exteriority than its own. Writing is “illegitimate” in relation to the book, which is now set up as Law and Truth, and “hides” the actual lawlessness of the Book’s claim, that is, the “asymmetrical illegitimacy of the Law in relation to writing.” And yet, paradoxically, “the law saves us from writing by causing writing to be mediated through the rupture—the transitiveness—of speech.”33 We need law to protect us from writing as we need masks to protect us from the chaos of existence (Nietzsche) or the horrific anonymity of the il y a (Levinas). As writing moves toward the absence of the book, that is, toward what is beyond the book (both in an anterior and posterior sense), it produces in its wake both the book and the absence of the work. This is worklessness. Writing never completes itself and always remains outside of itself. There is an exigency of writing that precedes any law, rendering the law illegitimate before it is even stated. And “even if it is reasonable,”

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states Levinas, “[the law] is not [a] saying [dire], but [is a] necessity that imposes itself without speaking and that is deaf to all discourse—that is, to all apology, plea, or complaint.”34 The law applies to no one in particular, not because it is universal, but because, in the name of unity, it is the principle of separation itself. The law seeks to establish itself as the bridge between the one and the many, between the rule and the exception. The law protects the many from the one and the one from the many. According to Blanchot: Such is perhaps the law’s august falsehood: having “legalized” the outside in order to make it possible (or real), it frees itself of every determination and every content in order to preserve itself as pure inapplicable form, a pure exigency to which no presence can correspond, even though it is immediately particularized in multiple forms and through the code of alliance in ritual forms so as to permit the discrete interiority of a return to self, where the infrangible intimacy of the “thou shalt” will be affirmed.35

In Hegelian metaphysics, for example, reason (Vernunft) is caught in a double-bind, as Jacques Derrida notes, and this is its “lie”: seeking to situate itself as objective, reason actually reveals itself to be subjective in origin. The self-positing and self-confirmation of reason/law as the highest order of being betrays itself as merely the desire of consciousness to assert itself as sovereign, to raise the human subject to the level of God, a move that Sartre deemed bad faith.

Madness, Law, Psychology Nietzsche contends that humanity’s “greatest danger” is madness, or in his words, “the joy in human unreason.” If humanity had not held on to rationality as strongly as it has, he maintains, it “would have perished long ago.” Reason is necessary; it is one of the protective masks that shields against the horror of chaos; it shields against being without purpose or end. Thus our “greatest labor so far has been to submit to a law of agreement—regardless of whether these things are true or false.”36 However, reason elevated to the status of the universal is just as mad, just as dangerous, as total immersion into unreason. For that reason, it is as necessary at times to don the mask of Apollo as it is to bear the laurels and thyrsus of Dionysus. To the ancient Greeks, to refuse either mask absolutely was indeed to invite madness, and certainly to transgress the law, as Euripides’ Bacchae so frighteningly demonstrates. In a well known passage, Jacques Lacan declares, “Not only can human existence not be understood without madness, it would not be

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human existence if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of our freedom.”37 But it is the language of the Law that defines madness, writes Blanchot, “which, at best, assigns the role of that which would precede it, that which would always be before the law, although the law in itself implies the impossibility of anything that would be anterior to it. That is why there is not madness, but there will be madness. . . .”38 The reification of the alliance between truth and reason as Law is just as mad as plunging into complete irrationality. Truth does not consist in the eradication of unreason; truth is the double-sided edge of the abyss of reason and unreason. Just as psychology “can never tell the truth about madness,” claims Foucault, “because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology,”39 so too does law fail to convey the truth of writing since it is writing that contains the truth of law. According to Blanchot, “the exteriority that becomes Law falls henceforth under the Law’s protection; the Law, in turn, is written, that is to say, once again falls under the custody of writing.”40 Thus the link between psychology and law is established and maintained. As psychology holds no meaning without reference to madness, so does law hold no meaning without reference to writing. Writing that does not write the Work, but rather writes the book as Work, is writing that becomes Law; such writing is writing that is reified as the Book. If writing is understood analogically as the movement of chaos,41 of the neuter, even of originary difference, then the solidification of writing as the Book/Law is ultimately an attempt at the totalization of the meaning of being. Such solidification is an act capable of resulting in violence of tremendous proportions as history has proven time and again. As that which moves toward the absence of the book—that is, toward and through the Work that can never be completed—writing is never able to produce the Book legitimately. The book that becomes law legislates what is to be considered moral or immoral and sane or insane; among its other guises it assume that of positivist psychology. As a system of pure presence, such a discourse establishes itself as supreme by attempting to limit being by de-scribing being in purely intelligible terms. By doing so, it aligns itself with a far older tradition that negated the world of unreason, such as the world of body, in favor of a beyond accessible only to the dimension of interiority, that is, to the soul or mind. This negation of exteriority, of the body, is a reflection of the attempt to limit the exteriority of writing, of the neuter, of originary difference, of chaos, of the il y a, and of being itself. Writing, the “insane game,”42 is prior to any affirmative or negative determination; it is antecedent to the formation of any rule, principle, fact, law or structure, and as such, before

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any moral (though not necessarily ethical) determination. The madness of writing is an infinite, non-teleological movement. Unlike the claim of phenomenology regarding intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, writing (infinity), in relation to the work (being), is preeminently a relation of non-adequation. Writing does not find its true being in the form of the book. Always present in the book and yet unable to be completed, the work celebrates its own impossibility, and is its own doom. Writing (as) the “disaster” actively produces the absence of the work as unworking or worklessness and becomes “the indeterminacy that lies between reason and unreason.”43 The resulting Dionysian celebration of the Work is Mallarmé’s insane game.

Madness, Reason, Truth Is madness merely the inability to be understood? Or is madness the attempt to furnish a ground, a reason, or promote some permanence in an impermanent world? Do we need to seek the Truth, at any cost? In The Madness of the Day, Blanchot writes: Men want to escape from death, strange beings that they are. And some of them cry out “Die, die” because they want to escape from life. “What a life. I’ll kill myself. I’ll give in.” This is lamentable and strange; it is a mistake. Yet I have met people who never said to life, “Quiet!”, who never said to death, “Go away!” Almost always women, beautiful creatures. Men are assaulted by terror, the night breaks through them, their work turns to dust. They who were so important, who wanted to create the world are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.44

In seeking the “truth” of Isis, Nietzsche perhaps realized the illegitimacy of the claim of “male rationality,” of the metaphysics of light and its superiority to that of the “night” of “female irrationality.” “The castration or not of logos as ratio,” Derrida writes, “is a central form of this debate around metaphysics. It is also a fight around poetics (between poetry and philosophy), around the death or future of philosophy. The stake is the same.”45 The truth of the veiled goddess Isis is paradoxically also the emasculation of the rational logos of the Light, of Truth itself. While in the standard version of the myth it is Seth, in other versions (and are these older or simply patriarchal versions?), it is Isis who breaks the law and murders her consort, the great lawgiver Osiris. She then recovers all the pieces of his dismembered body except for one—his reproductive organ, which is devoured by an oxyrhynchus fish. Thus does the Law-Truth

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remain, but now only as a shade, a trace of the light, that is confined in the hinterland of the beyond, in the realm of the dead. “The law is the shadow,” writes Foucault, “toward which every gesture necessarily advances; it is the shadow itself of the advancing gesture.”46 Is it madness to step outside the bounds of rational discourse and metaphysics so we may find the temple of Isis and dare to lift the veil and ask the most damning of questions in a rational, male dominated world: “Perhaps truth is a woman—how’s that [wie]?”47 Does a certain madness eventually arise in questioning the self-proclaimed authority of Reason, of the Father, of the State or of the Law? Does a particular madness not arise in questioning the self-proclaimed authority of the Author of the Book? Or is it the case that this certain type of madness, the inability to communicate, which is to say, the inability to engage fully and meaningfully in the interpretive process, is the declaration of the supremacy of rational discourse above all other discourse? Is it not madness on the part of reason when it asserts itself as the sole referent and criterion of sane or intelligible discourse? In an essay on Foucault, Blanchot writes: “What threatens us, as well as what serves us, is less reason than the various forms of rationality, an accelerated accumulation of rational systems, a logical vertigo of rationalizations that are at work and in use in the penal system as well as in the hospital system, even the school system.”48 Conceivably, madness, then, does not begin with the questioning of being and reason, which is arguably an underlying assumption of many who officially define madness; rather, madness is the consequence and product of the reification or totalization of being qua Reason. The reification or completion of writing—of book-writing—has resulted in the production of the book as Work, the Book, which, by virtue of its unique status, has proclaimed itself both Lawgiver and Law. Thus has Reason not attempted to protect and assert itself by donning a permanent mask that, in its delusion, deemed “reality” as the Real? Perhaps it is not the questioning of the book or of the book’s author that constitutes madness; quite possibly madness is produced in reason’s limiting of the chaotic or textual nature of being that permanently inscribes itself as the Book. In the final analysis, it is not the neuter case, nor chaos, the il y a, or even absolute exteriority that is maddening. What drives us to madness is rather the attempt to dominate or comprehend being in such an absolute manner. Herein lies the meeting place in the thinking of Blanchot, Nietzsche, and Levinas; a place that threatens our safety and serves us so astonishing well in our subterfuge of writing.

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Notes 1

Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 69. 2 Ibid., 72. 3 Ibid., 76. 4 Ibid., 74. 5 Although these concepts appear in numerous places in their respective works, on the neuter see in particular Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 72-77; on the il y a, see Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 57-67. For sustained analyses of the neuter, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 127-142; Christophe Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” in Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis, eds., After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 13-34. On the relationship between the neuter and the il y a, see Simon Critchley, “Il y a—Holding Levinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire,” in Carolyn Bailey Gill, Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 108-122. On the relationship in general between Blanchot and Levinas, see Arthur Cools, Langage et subjectivité. Vers une approche du différend entre Maurice Blanchot et Emmanuel Lévinas (Louvain: Peeters, 2007); Lars Iyers, “The Unbearable Trauma and Witnessing in Blanchot and Levinas,” Janus Head 6, no. 1 (2003): 37-63; William Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2005); Joseph Libertson, Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Gary D. Mole, Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 6 Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” trans. David B. Allison, in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 49. 7 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. with foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 463. 8 Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” 48. 9 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 27. 10 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 230. 11 Emmanuel Levinas, “On Maurice Blanchot: Exercises on ‘The Madness of the Day,’” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 162. 12 Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1981). For Levinas’ reflections on this story, see his “On Maurice Blanchot: Exercises on ‘The Madness of the Day,’” in Proper Names, 156-170.

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Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 14 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 420ff. 15 For an excellent treatment of this topic, see Paul Davies, “The work and the absence of the work,” in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, 91-107. 16 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 3. 17 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 423. 18 Ibid., 424. 19 Ibid., 423. 20 Ibid., 424. 21 Ibid., 425. 22 On this crucial term, see Leslie Hill, “After Blanchot,” in After Blanchot, 16-18. 23 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 426. 24 Ibid., 428. 25 See ibid., 428-429. 26 The statement is found in Nietzsche’s last letter to Jacob Burkhardt dated January 6, 1889. 27 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 429. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, “On Maurice Blanchot: The Poet’s Vision,” in Proper Names, 132. 29 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 21-22. On Nietzsche’s madness, see also 40, 121-122. 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 426. 32 Ibid., 431. 33 Ibid., 432. 34 Levinas, “On Maurice Blanchot: Exercises on ‘The Madness of the Day,’” in Proper Names, 163. 35 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 433. 36 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 130 [II, 76]. 37 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), 215; translation modified. 38 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 21. 39 Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 74. 40 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 432. 41 I discuss the concept of chaos with particular reference to Nietzsche’s philosophy in my Altared Ground: Levinas, History, and Violence (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 133-138, 140-141. 42 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 422, 424, 428, 429. 43 Ibid., 424. 44 Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 7. 45 Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” revised trans. J. P. Leavey, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, ed., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 43.

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Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” trans. Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 35. 47 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface. 48 Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 116-117; also in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, 80-81.

PART TWO: THE QUESTION OF ETHICS

CHAPTER IV ELISIONS: ONTOLOGY AND THE ETHICS OF OMISSION DUANE H. DAVIS

Ce que je cherche à faire, depuis longtemps déjà, c’est préciser le rapport de l’ontologie avec une éthique possible. —Jean Beaufret1

Existential phenomenology has transformed the problems of ethics from the usual parameters of deontological, utilitarian, or virtue ethics by inquiring into the nature of situated human existence. It would seem that such philosophers manifest symptoms of a schizoid personality disorder, insofar as they are caught between the relative goals of the existentialist traditions and the apodictic goals of phenomenology. There are more interesting oppositions to be examined here alongside these epistemological ones. In practical (i.e., ethical and political) philosophy, existentialism has fashioned terms of engagement and authenticity of the moment, which seem to be at odds with phenomenology’s reflective route toward secure intentional connections. Of course, the existential phenomenologists were inspired by this challenge and proceeded in an undaunted manner, calling for a radical new direction for ethics—it would be a prescriptive description. Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty each appropriated aspects of the rigid orthodoxy of Husserlean phenomenology, while tempering it with the existentialist rejection of metaphysical foundations.2 Their approach also entailed an intersubjective analysis rather than any subjective route to intentional connections as in orthodox phenomenology. In each of these cases, what resulted was a turn toward ontology. This ontological turn was undertaken for the related purposes of (1) the destruction of traditional ontic approaches to ethics, and (2) the disclosing of aspects of existence in

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the human situation that were essential in order to re-think ethics. It is my contention that this ontological turn was the bane of the tradition—at least as it has been undertaken heretofore. Ironically, in spite of its explicit critique of a metaphysical dualism and a critique of philosophies of consciousness, the ontological turn prevalent in existential phenomenology belies the promise of existentialist engagement—which is outwarddirected consciousness—in favor of a self-consciousness (despite its claims to the contrary). I will begin by articulating the various manners in which these existential phenomenologists promise, and fail, to develop an ethics. Specifically, I will: (1) illustrate how the self-consciousness of the ontological turn doomed this tradition’s aspirations to develop any practical philosophy; (2) consider whether either Sartre’s or MerleauPonty’s existential politics count as an exceptions to this failure; and (3) suggest a direction for further inquiry that might avoid the problem in a new account of care.

The Ambiguity of Ethics The destruction of traditional approaches to ethics by making an appeal to ontology in existential phenomenology begins with Heidegger, but is ubiquitous in the tradition. Heidegger addresses the question of ethics in Being and Time (1927) and more thoughtfully in his Letter on Humanism (1947). His early position is that ethics must be grounded in a fundamental ontology. That is, the questions of ethics, “What ought I to do?” are subtended by the more fundamental question of the meaning of Being. Ethics, as a member of the group of interpretations of our existence, seems more urgent and “closer to us” than fundamental ontology; but the value of the former depends upon the latter. The question remains whether these interpretations were carried out in as original an existential manner as their existentiell originality perhaps merited. Only when the fundamental structures of Dasein are adequately worked out with explicit orientation toward the problem of Being will the previous results of the interpretation of Dasein receive their existential justification.3

Heidegger stresses that we must not be misled by the rhetorical aspects of his analytic of Dasein in Being and Time, such as the call of conscience, authentic existence, care, concern, etc. These are not ethical terms, he insists, and give no practical direction. Rather they concern the possibility

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of Dasein becoming concerned with its own existence, which is the precondition for ethical and political considerations.4 The celebrated Kehre first announced and enacted in the 1930’s gets another decisive formulation in the Letter on Humanism. It is a turning away [a repentance?] from an anthropological dimension of his thinking that he had located subsequently in Being and Time. In that work, Heidegger thought that he had focused too much on the Being of human beings. Yet, as Heidegger later asserted in his introduction to Richardson’s whopper of an analysis of his thought, he has not abandoned Being and Time to the ash heap of history.5 Indeed, in a provocative sentence, Heidegger maintains that his early thinking is the only aperture upon his later thinking, and that his early thinking becomes possible only insofar as it is contained in his later thinking (H, xxii). We can see this clearly in his droll assertion that “ethics . . . begin[s] to flourish only when original thinking comes to an end” (LH, 195). So, as in Being and Time, only when the task of thinking Being is complete can ethics receive its due. Yet things are more complicated than he previously implied, as the rest of the essay reveals. Thinking is—this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a “thing” or a “person” in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mögen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. (LH, 196)

Once again we see Heidegger employing rhetoric that flirts suggestively with some ethical implications of ontology. Here he has mentioned not only the loving, favoring, and enabling character of thinking, but a propriety established about thinking Being—it is, after all, the proper essence of enabling. But Heidegger goes further than his analysis in Being and Time, and explicitly addresses the relation between ontology and ethics: Soon after Being and Time appeared a young friend asked me, “When are you going to write an ethics?” Where the essence of man is thought so essentially, i.e., solely from the question concerning the truth of Being, but still without elevating man to the center of beings, a longing necessarily awakens for a peremptory directive and for rules that say how man . . . ought to live in a fitting manner. (LH, 231)6

Heidegger seems to acknowledge that ethics has an urgency that is troublesome to defer until the ontological project prepares us. Yet

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Heidegger makes it clear that this urgency associated with ethics in no way frees us from the task of thinking Being (LH, 232). Indeed, there is little question that ethics will be undertaken ontologically—if not reduced to ontology. If the name “ethics,” in keeping with the basic meaning of the word ethos, should now say that “ethics” ponders the abode of man, then that thinking which links the truth of Being as the primordial element of man, as one who eksists, is in itself the original ethics. However, this thinking is not ethics in the first instance because it is ontology. (LH, 234-5)

Yet there is more to be said here. Heidegger comes to locate the trouble not only in ethics as it has been conceived traditionally, but also in ontology—even in his own earlier work—since talk of ontology invokes language which risks conceptualizing Being. It is important to note that Heidegger only regrets that this language led readers into error. He regrets having been misunderstood, and not that he was conceptualizing Being in Being and Time. So he answers the question of the relation between ontology and ethics by deconstructing the question to reveal that the terms in which it is posed mislead us into thinking that ontology is theoretical and that ethics is practical. (Now where could we have gotten an idea like that?) Heidegger enjoins us to rethink this problem beyond the restrictions of the misleading terminology to see that thinking Being is neither theoretical nor practical but must occur prior to this distinction.7 And this is the answer: the relation of ontology and ethics is that ontology must be reformulated in such a way that thinking Being occurs prior to its abstraction into an ontology which is separable from ethics. So, according to Heidegger we do not want ethics. We do not want ontology. We want to think Being.8 Yet, as is too often the case, there remains something suspiciously unrepentant about Heidegger’s turn [Kehre] insofar as it remains a transcendental project of a different sort. I have referred to this maneuver as a “second-order idealism” in other contexts. What I mean is this: we are directed to turn away from the fundamental ontology espoused in Being and Time since it might mislead us into conceptualizing Being. Indeed, as we move from the talk of care in the first part of that book to disclose its primordial meaning as care-structure in the second part, we might well surmise that fundamental ontology was establishing a fundament—and that this fundament was established through a transcendental reflection. Yet Heidegger does not try to retrieve the value of an existential ethics with which he flirted in the rhetoric of care in his analytic of Dasein. Instead, he goes precisely the wrong direction—ultimately toward thinking

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Being qua Being.9 He has forsaken the engagement of existentialism in favor of the purity of the new sort of a priori—thinking Being as prior to ethical praxis and even prior to conceptualizing Being. Thinking is not merely l’engagement dans l’action for and by beings, in the sense of the actuality of the present situation. Thinking is l’engagement by and for the truth of Being. (LH, 194)

Thinking had moved away from traditional subject-oriented thinking in Being and Time. Now it has moved away from any anthropocentric thinking. In fact, it seems to have precious little to do with us at all. Thinking Being is the new version of his ontology, which hypnotizes by a spiraling transcendental self-consciousness. It merely replaces the selfconsciousness of the subject with the self-consciousness of metaphysics. [Contrary to humanistic ethics à la Sartre], the necessity and proper form of the question concerning the truth of Being, forgotten in and through metaphysics, can come to light only if the question, “What is metaphysics?” is posed in the midst of metaphysics’ domination. (LH, 202)

Even though Heidegger was the first of the existential phenomenologists to see the value of rethinking ethics along ontological lines to avoid the errors of metaphysical ethical systems, the manner in which he does this leads us in a forbidding direction. If Heidegger has escaped theory, it is only to the rarefied air of meta-theory.10 Heidegger’s ontological direction is promising only insofar as it does not regard itself as transcending the realm of ethical praxis, the realm of the promise. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism can fruitfully be read as a response to Sartre’s interpretation of existential phenomenology. Heidegger seems to be anxious to establish room between his own position and Sartre’s. In short, he seems to say, “If Sartre is an existentialist, them I’m not!” (To which one might reply, “Tant pis!”) Sartre’s Being and Nothingness ends with an unfulfilled promise. Unlike Heidegger’s deferral of ethics in favor of fundamental ontology or thinking Being, Sartre states that ethics is “a pure, and not an ancillary reflection” which will situate the abstract reflections of his phenomenological ontology. Yet if this ethics is so crucial, one wonders why it took Sartre until page 798 to get around to it. Presumably, Sartre saw his position as an advance over Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and a new direction in existential phenomenology that insisted that thought be situated in the world. Thus, Sartre’s position seemingly lends itself to the development of a practical philosophy, and specifically an ethics. Yet

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all we have along these lines are his unpublished Notebooks for an Ethics,11 and the always promising but rather vague intimations of the essay-anthem, Existentialism is a Humanism. The Notebooks reveal Sartre struggling with Hegel, primarily, as he tries to adapt the dialectic of Being and Nothingness in such a way that it better describes the situation where ethics is possible. One can see Sartre valiantly attempting to appropriate Hegel’s idea of a concrete universal without surrendering the particular to the status of a systematic sublation.12 These notebooks are vibrant and revealing reflections—but they reveal Sartre turning from the individualism of his early work to his later social and political positions rather than developing an ethics. We do not have time to offer an extensive analysis of any aspect of Sartre’s thought, much less of the evolution of his dialectic. Suffice it to say here that he resituates his dialectic in a social context in his later thought.13 Nonetheless, his dialectic remains preoccupied with self-consciousness as a result of his ontological analysis of the existential situation. A hallmark of Sartre’s existentialism is the engagement of the individual within the context of the world, and more specifically of the author within his or her situation. This is referred to as a situated or a committed literature. And this style of writing was meant to spontaneously emerge from a way of living. Such writing both reflects the situation the author and a reader are in and addresses itself to change and revolution rather than settling for the safe accuracy of benign description. Unfortunately, this is not always successful. The famous literary critic Edmund Wilson once said of Sartre that this style came off as a contrived and self-conscious attempt at realism rather than as effective realism: “. . . a virtuosity of realism and a rhetoric of moral passion which make you feel not merely that the fiction is a dramatic heightening of life but that the literary fantasy takes place on a plane which does not have any real connection with the actual human experience which it is intending to represent.”14 (I sometimes describe this in my classes as a “William Shatner sincerity,” though nowadays that metaphor may be as superannuated as its focus.) If I may, I would like to extend Wilson’s point to Sartre’s philosophical posture in general. Sartre is offering a phenomenological description of the existential situation such that we see our essence revealed as nothingness—pure possibility and freedom engaged in a hellish dialectical relationship within its own determined world. Based upon this analysis, we can see that the authentic thing to do is to will one’s freedom. He would later characterize this authenticity provocatively as manifesting anguish, abandonment and despair. And though Sartre is

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clearly not guilty of denying the affective and ethical connotations of these terms in his work as Heidegger had done, he still defines them entirely in terms of his ontological inquiry. His ontology may be more situated than Heidegger’s, but it tries too hard to be engaged—it protests too much— and ultimately leaves us without the ethics he promised would really situate ethics in terms of practical engagement. Maurice Merleau-Ponty did no better, I am afraid, than Sartre in developing an ethics in the context of his own existential phenomenology. In a note from sometime around 1952 or 1953, Merleau-Ponty describes a movement away from his own early phenomenological analysis of perception toward a new vista that his premature death would prevent him from articulating. The study of perception could only teach us a “bad ambiguity,” a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a “good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics.15

This “metaphysics” evolved into an ontological re-thinking of physis— and talk of a “flesh of the world” where “Wild Being” was not a totality, but best thought of as an eruption or a divergence. As promising as I maintain that his later ontological work may be for ethical and political speculation, the sad fact is that he never wrote an ethics and never reformulated his politics along these lines. And though from the unpublished notes and manuscripts I have seen it is clear that ethical and political reformulation were on his horizon as he left his work unfinished, it is also a sad fact that, for him, the ontological reflections seemed to be of primary importance as he prioritized his tasks. One might claim [as I have] that Merleau-Ponty is articulating his ontology in engaged terms, and so is not guilty of the same reflective spiraling self-consciousness we have witnessed in the other existential phenomenologists.16 Yet when one sees him describe this project as an “endo-ontology,” a “reversibility,” and as “a fundamental narcissism,”17 it is difficult to completely exonerate Merleau-Ponty from this charge. One of my students, Ms. Alexandra Morris, put this succinctly in another way in a discussion of MerleauPonty’s purported engaged ontology in the essay Eye and Mind. There, I have argued, Merleau-Ponty is articulating his ontology in concrete and particular aesthetic terms. She pointed out that it is significant that the

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reader cannot attach any special significance to any of the illustrations he included—“it could be this work by Klee or that one, it doesn’t really matter.” So much for the particular and concrete! Perhaps the error of omission of these illustrations in the early English translation is less egregious than the error of omission of an ethics on Merleau-Ponty’s part. We will return to the practical promise of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological position in the context of his political position in the next section. Since we have much more published material dealing with politics than ethics, it seems prudent to defer our final assessment until his political position has been considered. Simone de Beauvoir is the only one of the existential phenomenologists to have published an attempt to realize the possibility of an ethics. Her Ethics of Ambiguity is the only work published by the author as an explicit attempt to address this perpetually deferred promise.18 She explicitly claims her existentialism provides an analysis of the ambiguity of human existence, which is the only approach, which could merit the name of an ethics. “Therefore,” she claims, “not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has a place” (EA, 33-34). Traditional approaches reduce or eliminate the ambiguity “by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality” (EA, 8). Instead, her analysis of existentialism’s ethics “is experienced in the truth in life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men” (EA, 159). Yet, upon examination, her work falls short of what its title promises. That is, the reader will feel he or she is entitled to more. The truth be told, it is a derivative work in an important sense. Although it makes some sense to say that the existentialist clique was close-knit enough that it is less significant who published the ideas, since they flew fast and furiously around the café tables where they emerged, mise en scène. Hence the charge of this work being derivative of another work in which she was fundamentally involved would be ludicrous. But this line of thinking is more appropriate for corporate copyright lawyers than philosophers. And this work does little more than re-hash Nietzschean platitudes and advertise Sartre’s position from Being and Nothingness. It hardly extends Sartre's position. At best it is a supplement. This does not contradict the certain fact that Simone de Beauvoir is an important philosopher. But it does nothing to her credit to lionize her for a work that is simply not her best, and to claim that it is a significant advance when it is not. As I have argued elsewhere, de Beauvior ought not to be reduced to a Sartrean

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acolyte. Her original and significant contributions to philosophy lie elsewhere.19 This point is worth a brief excursus. Her work became more and more effective—more situated and committed—as she found her voice in her novels and essays. Simone de Beauvoir enjoyed an initial success with her novels, such as L’invitée (She Came to Stay), Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others), and Les mandarins (The Mandarins). While her meteoric literary fame was welldeserved, it has certainly been eclipsed by the attention resulting from her essays concerning the social status of women, sexuality, politics, aging, and death. Through her own style of committed literature, she has chronicled the myriad social changes of post-war twentieth century Europe. She is often seen as a pioneer of contemporary feminist writing. With her classic Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), a style emerged which was unique among her existentialist cohort as she began a tradition that describes the human predicament “in a different voice.” While subscribing both to existentialism and Marxism, neither existentialism’s theoretical emphasis upon freedom and authenticity nor Marxism’s emphasis upon class conflict were sufficient to account for woman's plight as a secondclass citizen in a male-dominated world. Indeed, she foresaw an important threat within the promise of both of these schools of thought: they must not be allowed to reduce the issues of woman's suffering into generic existential, social, nor economic terms. Finally, her four volumes of autobiographical reflections offer a valuable inside look into the world of a woman coming to recognize her own outstanding abilities, as well as the personal longitudinal account of aging, sexuality, her relationship with Sartre, her friendships, as well as the changing intellectual, political, and public scenes in France and elsewhere. The four volumes of her autobiography are Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), La force de l’âge (The Prime of Life), La force des choses (The Force of Circumstances), and Tout compte fait (All Said and Done). These volumes offer a genuine and often courageous personal account from the perspective of a woman engaged in a lifelong struggle to speak, write, and live in a way best described as honest and free. One might well be able to extract or construct an existential ethics from her novels, essays, and autobiography. Yet her own attempts to articulate an ethics early on in the 1940’s are plagued with the abstract ontological turn she too often accepts uncritically from Sartre. The focus of her analysis is the ambiguity in the human situation where we are both consciousness of the world and a part of that world,

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subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and facticity. This fundamental ambiguity demands that the meaning of our existence never be fixed (EA, 129). We must will freedom, above all, in our struggle to make our lives meaningful. This all nicely displaces traditional ethics, which codify universal principles and virtues; yet it is more concerned with the situation where ethics emerge than with developing an ethics. It offers a wonderful description, but little prescription. This is because, as with Sartre, her main positive practical point, the imperative to will our freedom, is based upon an inward ontological reflection, self-consciousness, reified as Being-foritself. Or, to put it another way, she maintains that “an ethics of ambiguity will deny a priori that . . . individual freedoms [of individual existants] can forge laws that are valid for all” (EA, 18).20 Traditional metaphysical ethical systems may have made errors of commission which debilitated human spirit and led to nihilistic abnegation of freedom and responsibility; and we may have these issues pointed out most poignantly in the existential phenomenological tradition’s ontological turn. Nonetheless, this same tradition is guilty of an error of omission in the glaring omission of an ethics. It has rejected the usual parameters of ethical discussion and produced an ambiguity of how ethics ought to be conceived—a theoretical meta-ethics resulting from the selfconsciousness associated with ontological reflection. In order to remedy this, ontological thinking must be seen to be a task situated squarely in the realm of ethical praxis.

Dialectics of Adventure: The Anguish of History My idea is of an ensemble contra a monism of history and not an indivision of history, contra the idea of a positive history which deploys itself, and not the idea of a history which eliminates the contradictions to the end, which is not different from itself, or rather which is unique . . . 21 —Maurice Merleau-Ponty The concept of history represents a capital acquisition of philosophy, on condition that one does not employ it as an anti-metaphysics. Far from replacing metaphysics, on the contrary, it incomparably brings to light the most fundamental of metaphysical questions . . . There is a discovery of history, but it is not that of a thing, of a force, or of a destiny. It is a discovery of an interrogation, or, if one wishes, of anguish.22 —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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The discovery of History is itself a historical factor: passage from eternity . . . to the past . . . from the past to the present . . . from the present to the necessary future . . . (NE, 32) —Jean-Paul Sartre

The question can now be rethought as to whether Merleau-Ponty’s or Sartre’s existential politics offer an exception to the elision of practical thought that we have associated with existential phenomenology’s turn toward ontology. I will compare Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s political positions with respect to their attempts to understand history from an existential perspective—more specifically, their different understandings of the status of history as historical event and of the anguish of history. Their diverging political positions are, I argue, directly related to a divergence in their ontologies. I will begin, however, with a brief discussion of the development of the political positions of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. We will, in effect, discover their history here. This will provide the background to explicate their political differences in terms of the contrast between their understandings of the discovery of history as event. And in the end, their interpretations of the discovery of history as event and of history as anguish reveal important differences between the ways they understand human existence in general. That is, it calls into question what existential ontology is for each of these thinkers. An examination of this parallel divergence shows more promise for Merleau-Ponty’s position than Sartre’s. However, neither thinker sufficiently developed the connection between his political position and his ontology in their respective published works. What significance must we attach to these statements that the discovery of history is an event within history? What does it mean to claim that history is disclosed within an historical context? If the emergence of history is situated within history, how can history guide us as we strive to discern proper action; and what limitations does this impose upon historical-based propriety? If those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, how can we do anything else by being attentive to it—since history seems to be essentially a recursion? How can history be of use to us in the discernment of proper action if it is fascinated with itself? Is history the ultimate narcissism? One of the greatest understatements possible to utter would be to state that the manner in which one interprets this recursion in/of history is politically significant. It should come as no surprise, then, that the political differences between the two French existentialist philosophers quoted above become clearer by examining their interpretations of this recursion.

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It was no accident that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre began to move in opposite political directions as they began to develop different interpretations of the discovery of history as historical event. Sartre’s politics were regarded as more radical. For Sartre, history seems to be forever leading us somewhere. However, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation led to a more radical understanding of human existence than Sartre’s. It is my contention that by examining what existential ontology is for these two thinkers, the practical [i.e., ethical and political] promise of Sartre’s philosophy is impaired by his more conservative existential ontology. Ultimately, what may be at stake here is the relation between history and ontology. Here is a hint: as you read this part of the essay, it will be important to keep in mind that an historical appeal ultimately explains the significance of these ontological accounts; but then the significance of the discovery of history is explained in terms of their ontologies.

* * * * Let us begin with a bit of history on the way to discussing the discovery of history. What could be more appropriate? Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were two of the leading figures in the intellectual scene in Paris at the end of World War Two. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were the founders and co-editors of the political and philosophical journal, Les temps modernes. This journal was perhaps the most important voice of the new Left for a number of years in conflicted post-war France. France was caught between the imperialistic superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. There was a powerful tradition of socialist and Marxist sympathy among French intellectuals before, during, and after the war that seemed at odds with France’s alliance with the United States under de Gaulle. Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s aim was for their journal to provide a forum for an independent critical voice to emerge from the Left as France struggled to understand and define its role in international politics. Their long and productive relationship was severed in 1953 over their diverging attitudes toward Marxism and various Marxist regimes. Merleau-Ponty drastically changed his assessment of Marxism over the decade following the war as he constantly called his own position into question. Earlier, in 1947, in his first important political work, Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty espoused an engaged but critical “wait-andsee” attitude toward Marxism. Everyone, of course, criticized this! The Marxists condemned the work as a tepid turning-away from the progress

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that needed to be made. Meanwhile, those on the Right saw it as an unacceptable approval of Stalin’s terroristic tactics. Sartre, always a reliable source for anecdotes, recounts a moving and important moment in the French intellectual scene which nicely characterizes the variety of unfavorable and powerful reactions which Humanism and Terror caused. We know what a scandal it created everywhere. Communists vomited on it, who today, don’t see a thing wrong with it. But above all, it caused a fine commotion on our Right . . . This was viewed as a sectarian condemnation of all opposition to Stalin. Within a few days, Merleau became the man with a knife between his teeth. When Simone de Beauvoir visited the editors of the Partisan Review in New York, they didn’t bother to hide their dismay. We were being manipulated. The hand of Moscow held the pen of our father Joseph. Those poor people! One evening at Boris Vian’s apartment, Camus took Merleau-Ponty aside and reproached him for justifying the [Moscow show] Trials. It was most pitiful. I see them still. Camus, revolted, Merleau-Ponty courteous and firm, somewhat pale, the one indulging himself, the other refusing the delights of violence. Suddenly, Camus turned his back and left. I ran after him, accompanied by Jacques Bost. We found him in the deserted street. I tried as best I could to explain Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, which the latter hadn’t deigned to do. With the sole result that we parted estranged. It took six months and a chance meeting to bring us together again. The memory is not a pleasant one for me. What a foolish idea it was to offer my services in this affair. It is true. I was to the Right of Merleau-Ponty, and to the Left of Camus. What perverse humor prompted me to become the mediator between two friends, both of whom, a little later, were to reproach me for my friendship for the Communists, and who are both dead, unreconciled?23

Yet, as Sartre foresaw—at least in retrospect, Merleau-Ponty was not saying that we should just kick back and see what happens, come what may! It is important to understand Merleau-Ponty’s position here in the context of his earlier work, as well as in the context of his own actions. Earlier, condition in his earlier work, Phenomenology of Perception,24 he had disclosed an important idea of ambiguity. We were neither absolute free subjects, nor inert objects. The analysis of humans which reduces us to mind or body belies this ambiguity. Instead, his analysis described human existence in terms of lived-bodies, or bodies we live through, which exist ambiguously between these constructed poles of pure subject and object. Humanism and Terror applies this ambiguity to the political evaluation of Soviet Marxism. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty is reacting to both Soviet propaganda used to encourage an uncritical acceptance of its style of rule in the name of Marxism, and to a critique—more a caricature—of Marxism by Arthur Koestler, which was being praised and

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used by Western reactionaries to dismiss Marxism. His analysis is not non-committal, as his critics sometimes implied. Instead, he demands that we respect the integrity of “a refusal to commit oneself to confusion removed from truth.”25 He merely points out that our commitment to Marxism must be provisional, since the urgency to commit is the product of political propaganda on both sides there and then. We cannot meekly surrender to those who would claim that history has culminated in this moment in such a way that it is impossible to resist absolute commitment to the one position, or to the other. Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin all agree with Marx that the forces of history are manifest in the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and must lead to the revolution which will liberate the workers from their shackles. This revolution will create a new human who, for the first time, is not driven to alienation by exploitation, greed and selfish desire. They demand complicity in the name of the eradication of the alienation of humanity. But at the same time, Koestler portrays the Marxist vision as one which “history is no longer the living element of man, the response to his wishes, the locus of revolutionary fraternity. It becomes an external force which has lost the sense of the individual and becomes the sheer force of fact” (HT, 16). They also demand complicity in the name of a manifest destiny of human nature. Our current position, Merleau-Ponty writes, is neither “the simple repetition of human eternity nor merely the conclusions to premises already postulated” (HT, 188-189). Likewise, one must look to Merleau-Ponty’s actions during the years that followed his account to see what he meant. He did not retire to some disinterested position, but engaged in a great number of international conferences with philosophers, politicians, and party leaders. He also contributed countless editorials and opinion pieces concerning political issues of the day during this vigilant period of “wait and see” Marxism, during the advent of his evaluation. We will discuss one of these articles later in this section in the context of a critique of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of history. Certainly, one must admit that he was not retired to a neutral corner. He was actively engaged as a leading intellectual of his day in the political arena. My point here is that he saw the need to act within the context he was asked to evaluate, as well as the value of that action in waiting to make any evaluation. Later, in his 1956 work, The Adventures of the Dialectic, he disavows his support for Marxism in favor of a “new liberalism,” after observing a fundamental disparity with regard to the notions of liberty assumed by Marxist theory and the liberty it allowed for in practice. According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre had shown, in articles published recently in their

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journal, that the Communist Party suffered the fate of any institution, it denied freedom (individually defined, as usual). But it was the indispensable institution whereby freedom could be realized. Sartre, who did not join the Party in order to evaluate freedom clearly, advocates that one has a duty to preserve the goals of the Party at all cost. This, MerleauPonty thought, provided a profound analysis of Marxism in a way Sartre did not comprehend. Sartre’s own analysis relegates the promise of Marxism to “pure action”—to the realm of ideals. However, the promise of Marxism was to be its materialistic nature. This exile of promise to the realm of ideas does two things: first, it mystifies action in the name of an ideal so that anything could be justified; and second, it denies the importance of the action. Neither of these can be acceptable consequences; and yet both seem to follow from Sartre’s analysis of dialectical materialism. Merleau-Ponty is willing to accept Sartre’s analysis; but thinks it is unconscionable to support the Party, as Sartre did. Must we say that of course we can no longer expect either the accession of the proletariat to management, to politics, and to history or the homogenous society—in short, what the dialectic promised—but that, anyway, that was only the final “optimistic twaddle” which experience has eliminated and that communism remains on the right road, that it is the proletariat’s only chance, offering in the present a progressive regime and, for the future, a revolutionary perspective? (AD, 165)

Although Sartre was known for a more radical political stand, much of this was due to his penchant for being “l’enfant terrible.” He seemed to grab every opportunity to stand in the limelight in some sensationalistic and contentious manner. It is important to understand their relationship that we not misconstrue his position as merely advocating the party line. Sartre speaks of being attacked as an existentialist by “the communists” for denying that the ultimate meaning of life could be found in the revolution to end class struggle. Existentialists, Sartre reports, are charged with ushering in a quietism that discourages people from throwing their weight behind the revolutionary cause, because their philosophy is too pessimistic.26 His critics took his bait, and did not take his hyperbolic proclamation that “life is essentially meaningless” as an imperative to give life meaning. The point here is that Sartre was by no means a mainstream member of the French Communist Party. One of the things which originally had united Sartre and Merleau-Ponty was their desire to let the voices critical of the Right emerge spontaneously and authentically rather than as a part of a program.

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Nonetheless, Sartre’s political perspective began to move steadily toward a more radical position and steadily to the Left. Sartre moved in the opposite direction of Merleau-Ponty in his own political thought, and came to see Marxism as the sine qua non of contemporary thought.27 His analysis turned toward understanding social praxis as a whole without positing a totalizing subject in his mammoth Critique of Dialectical Reason. Recently, a series of letters written in 1953 between the two philosophers were discovered and published where each expresses his opposition to the other. (An English translation of these letters appears in my anthology.28) The controversy was ignited by Sartre’s insistence that Merleau-Ponty should not publish in their journal an article he had written which was highly critical of Sartre’s political position. (Perhaps this article was a version of the chapter of Adventures of the Dialectic, which bears the title, “Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism” [AD, 95-201].) There are three letters. The first, from Sartre, informs Merleau-Ponty that the article will not be able to be published in Les temps modernes since, in effect, that would be counter-revolutionary. Sartre writes that Merleau-Ponty should not take this personally, and that they will always, of course, be friends. In the long second letter, Merleau-Ponty resigns his position as co-editor, states explicitly that the logic by which Sartre justifies the suppression of the article is precisely what is wrong with his political position in general, and that Sartre could only speak of friendship in condescension as he silenced Merleau-Ponty’s voice. The third letter is Sartre’s response, and is very brief. It is a simple acceptance of the resignation and a denial of some of the charges Merleau-Ponty has levied against him. After these volatile letters were exchanged, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty rarely spoke except at conferences and public lectures. They never reconciled their differences, as Sartre went on to endorse Maoists and other radical factions who claim to represent Marxist ideology. Perhaps it was this lack of reconciliation which moved Sartre to write a scathing and spiteful one hundred-page obituary for his former friend after Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961.

* * * * The next task is to elaborate upon the somewhat tendentious account of the political differences between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty given above. Specifically, this section concerns the relation between the differing interpretations of the discovery of history within history and the aforementioned differences in politics. After a very brief (and polemical)

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account of Sartre’s position, Merleau-Ponty’s account of anguish will be contrasted with Sartre’s. Sartre defines the subject as a hole in Being—Being for-itself which inevitably objectifies Being-in-itself. All I can do is to turn my gaze outward; but I can never see the Other as the Other. All that is revealed is an object for me. It is almost true that, for Sartre, the subject that is the source of the gaze has no peer. However, Sartre’s paradigmatic example of such intersubjective encounters is, of course, that of a voyeur peering through a keyhole (BN, 347-354). He objectifies the couple as he watches in fascination, reducing their love to an object of jealous curiosity. He alone is free action, negatively implicated as a “subject” by its spectacle. Thus not only am I unable to know myself, but my very being escapes— although I am that very escape from my being—and I am absolutely nothing. There is nothing there but a pure nothingness encircling a certain objective ensemble and throwing it into relief outlined upon the world, but this ensemble is a real system, a disposition of means in view as an end. (BN, 349)

And herein lies the problem from which Sartre never escaped. His intersubjective encounters—even taken to the next level, when he is caught—merely are reduced to this dialectical economy—pure gaze suddenly reduced to an object—but not seen from the Other’s view, only as an object for the objectified Other. For the peering-through-the-keyhole is not reducible without exchange to the culprit in the hallway. But neither was the peering-through-the-keyhole reducible without exchange to the jealous voyeur. In an effort to clear up all of this by being as cryptic and provocative as only Sartre can be, he states that he cannot even be defined as being in a situation because he is his own nothingness. In this sense—and since I am what I am not and since I am not what I am—I can not even define myself as truly being in the process of listening at doors. (BN, 348)

This analysis of the situation remains mired in a dialectical interplay between being and nothingness—facticity and freedom. One cannot be reduced to the other. But by the time Sartre began to work out his promised ethics, he realized that the now infamous dualism that subtends this model could not support any practical philosophy. Freedom to choose must not be abstractly and intellectually construed as removed from its context of choice. And that context, as Sartre came to see, is ineluctably historical, and is not distinguishable from the choice. Thus, in his Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre feverishly turns his attention to developing

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a “collective subjectivity” and a “detotalized totality” (NE, 15 & passim). And it is through extended reflections upon history rather than an abstract freedom that Sartre hopes to find a better place to develop his ethics. History is neither objective nor subjective. It is incomplete. It is always in the making by individuals for one another. It is discovered within itself— much as the voyeur was discovered: Oh my God! There’s a history in the hall gazing in at us! Existential ontology is itself historical. There is an initial event, that is, the appearance of the For-itself through a negation of being. Ethics must be historical: that is, it must find the universal in History and must grasp it in History. (NE, 6)

The main difference here is that Sartre initiates his dialectic at a social level through history once he realized that he could not get there from the individualistic analysis which characterized Being and Nothingness. Ultimately, Sartre lost interest in this project of validating the existential ontology in an ethics that was to be “a pure and not an accessory reflection” (BN, 798), and turned his attention more from ethics to politics. Hence we have the Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than the ethics. The Critique was written, in the translator’s words, “quite hastily”— which is a polite way of expressing that, by Sartre’s own account, it was written under the influence of amphetamines.29 Nonetheless, it is one of the most thorough analysis ever undertaken of social groups. Also, he continues his attempts here to characterize the historical basis of political propriety. He attempts to articulate historical agency as a totality of all human action, or praxis, without positing history as a totalizing historical agent. Late in the Critique, Sartre characterizes history as that which guarantees that “for each of the adversaries, this struggle is intelligible; or rather, at this level, it is intelligibility itself. Otherwise reciprocal praxis would in itself have no meaning or goal” (CDR, 816). These questions bring us at last [!] to the real problem of History. If history really is to be the totalization of all practical multiplicities and of all their struggles, the complex products of the conflicts and collaborations of these very diverse multiplicities must themselves be intelligible in their synthetic reality, that is to say, they must be comprehensible as the synthetic products of a totalitarian praxis. (CDR, 817)

Here, Sartre lays claim to the force of history which emerges within history as that force which—and Sartre is just inconsistent on this—either totalizes or partially totalizes the significance of an individual’s or a group’s actions. One way or another, he clearly means for it to provide a

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ground or standard. He states that it provides “an intelligible totalization from which there is no appeal” (CDR, 817). Sartre is using emergent history to provide the same kind of universal dimension he always sought in his earlier works. Since he begins his analysis at the social level here, history emerges as a social phenomenon. Nonetheless, his depiction of history is still mired in the dualistic dialectic of his earlier work. As we shall see, this is due to his reliance upon an inadequate existential ontology.

* * * * * Merleau-Ponty said that history is discovered as anguish.30 What does it mean to characterize history as “anguish”? How, precisely, does the anguish of history allow for a pluralistic understanding of culture? How can anguish serve to situate individual acts within a socio-historical nexus, and thereby allow for judgments of moral propriety? Unfortunately, ‘anguish’ is the final word of the article from which the epigram above of Merleau-Ponty’s was taken. He does not explain in detail what he meant by claiming that history is discovered as anguish. However, we can extrapolate an explanation from other works of his. Let us begin, however, by explaining Sartre’s use of the term by way of getting at a contrast between their political thought in terms of history. Sartre’s notion of anguish was adumbrated in Existentialism is a Humanism is indicated here mainly as a point of departure (EH, 345-369). Anguish, Sartre tells us, is what an authentic individual does when he or she realizes abandonment and despairs over it. I anguish over the fact that my choices as an individual affect not only me, but lots of others; and I anguish that there is no way to avoid this. I bear responsibility for each other individual; and there is no way to make it all work out in a manner proper for everyone. My choices are mine, I make them, but they happen in a world that I share with others. Right away it becomes obvious that it is impossible to be purely authentic in this model if this is all that is said. I can anguish all the day long; but no matter what I do, by my choice, I will be encroaching upon another’s freedom, and hence upon my own. Therefore I seem to be mired in inauthenticity. This may be fine as a simple description, but it does little to help us determine propriety in practical judgment. Just as with his student mentioned in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” the only advice Sartre gives us here is that we must choose. And, oh yes, whatever we do—it will be wrong, or at least not all right.

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But if anguish was intended to be the intersubjective element of authentic behavior before in Sartre’s account, we might see a movement from Sartre to Merleau-Ponty’s observation that history was to be understood as anguish as a natural development here. That is, we might be able to retrieve something of Sartre’s authenticating anguish for understanding Merleau-Ponty’s cryptic quote. Merleau-Ponty is describing anguish as that means by which history authenticates our action. Anguish, as an affective attunement which bespeaks the situation of the individual within the universal, accounts for without appealing to a monolithic notion of history, but also without forsaking the openness upon the world which history affords us. Anguish is characterized by three integrated aspects: finitude, temporality, and intersubjectivity. Anguish bespeaks finitude. It is because we are finite that choice is meaningful. If we were not finite creatures, there would always be more time to do everything. We must choose; and we must choose in such a manner that we are implicated by our choices within a contingent, historical context. Anguish bespeaks temporality. I choose in a world that has a past calling to be interpreted and with future possibilities opening before it. When I say history is anguish, it is to be understood temporally. I anguish over the indeterminacy of the past insofar as I am responsible for determining its significance; and at the same time I anguish over the factical determinacy of the past insofar as it limits me. Likewise I anguish over the indeterminacy of a future which I must determine; and at the same time I anguish over certainties of the future which exist as possibilities now. In the recently published course notes, La nature, Merleau-Ponty discusses these temporal possibilities—with respect to Bergson and Malraux: Bergson . . . spoke of a “retrograde movement of truth”: when we think something to be true, it is retrospectively that this truth appears to us to be true. The remodeling of the past by the present, this “metamorphosis,” as Malraux said, could designate something arbitrary, but could equally indicate that contemporaries do not have, in their time, a complete knowledge. There are, in the history of culture, some realities which one can say do not exist ready-made at present, and which one needs for the future.31

These realities are the historico-realities of which he spoke earlier in the same article, “The Discovery of History.” History emerges within a historical context as a narrative that is enabling for the future. This

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indicates a contingency implicit is every reality. This is why, when looking backward, we often say, “Oh—that’s what really happened.” And, anguish bespeaks intersubjectivity. I am implicated by my actions as an individual. My actions are carried out in a particular style, and implicate me as a focus of experience and responsibility. Of course, my subjectivity thus delimited is at once called into question by its own possibilities; and insofar as it is recognizable as subjectivity, it is in the process of transcendence. As I have argued elsewhere, this is due to the reversible nature of my subjectivity.32 What this means is that I am with others in such a way that, to put it most provocatively, in principle I am the others. My actions define me for myself and for others, are called for by others and partially determined by me as well as by them, and literally develop the contours of subjectivity by which I will say an action befits me. History as anguish, then, must be seen in all three of these aspects: finitude, temporality, and intersubjectivity. It is that horizon which I share with others at the very moment that I determine its unique value for me. Anguish straightforwardly expresses my discriminations whereby I affirm or deny interest and responsibility for others as I delimit myself as an individual who cares. History as anguish, then, surely has a universal dimension. So let us consider a potential objection. Levinas has criticized any transcendence within a unifying history as impoverished since it fails to respect the alterity of the Other. History as a relationship between men ignores a position of the I before the Other in which the Other remains transcendent with respect to me . . . . History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgment is borne upon it. When man truly approaches the Other, he is uprooted from history.33

Surely we will do well to heed his words and to be aware of this danger. I am not calling for a monolithic plenum of history that obviates difference in the cold fusion of indifference. Understanding history as anguish is to acknowledge that we are passionately concerned about the world in which we dwell with others. Anguish bespeaks finitude. It is not a proclaimed intelligibility or adequation. Rather, it is an expression of differing, and yes, deferring in perpetuity any conferring of absolute and totalizing universal history. But we must go still further than this. We must recognize the divergence and emergence of others as differing, and see that precious and accursed difference as the only means we have to relate to one another.

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The shared anguish of history, far from neglecting the uniqueness and alterity of the Other, is the only means we have of respecting it. That respect is not an abstract commodity. Here is the important point: this respect of difference in anguish is care manifest as human praxis. The divergence and emergence as care—anguishing care—is who I am. History, as anguish, is the interested, engaged actions and choices by which we literally make a difference. History must be the horizon in which I and the Other figure as subjectivity; yet that backdrop is such that as subjectivity neither I nor the Other can be completely figured-out. Such a task is both alluring and impossible. However, as Merleau-Ponty noted, we must reject the abuse of history as not only as a positive science but as an anti-metaphysics. History as difference, posited uncritically, remains an absolute. There is a false comfort in the positivism of difference with which we must contend. History conceived as difference requires absolution. Let us anguish over the popularity of anything so facile. Merleau-Ponty writes, in his mitigated praise of Weber’s notion of history in Adventures of the Dialectic, that Weber was driven to do his very best work by developing a critical schema of history while heeding the tension between “evaluative history” and “objective history.” Both aspects are crucial to our understanding of history, while neither allows us historical understanding. Evaluative history involves the threat of totalization—pronouncing judgment without being attentive to particularity, while promising the ability to account for the relevance of history to the present. Objective history involves the threat of historicism—isolating the present from the past such that no value judgments of other times concern us, while promising the ability to maintain the integrity of a particular time or culture. “The dramas which have been lived” remind us of our own, but are not our own. History is not an external god, a hidden reason of which we have only to record the conclusions. It is the metaphysical fact that the same life, our own, is played out both within us and outside us, in our present and in our past, and that the world is a system with several points of access, or, one might say, that we have fellow men.34 I think that this historical situation into the world—sharing an openness upon the world with others such that we care about ourselves and our world, and making meaningful choices within it which affect not only ourselves—this is a rough and ready description of history as anguish. This will need to be developed in terms of an existential ontology in the final section; but it already gives a place to contrast Sartre and MerleauPonty.

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* * * * * We have associated the politics of each thinker with his understanding of the discovery of history. The final task of linking the discovery of history to existential ontology in each thinker will be mercifully brief. It calls into question the relation between ontology and history. History, as recursion, is Being called into question “The economics on which [historical materialism] bases history is not, as in classical economics, a closed cycle of objective phenomena, but a correlation of productive forces and forms of production, which is completed only when the former emerge from their anonymity, become aware of themselves and are thus capable of imposing a form on the future” (PhP, 171). Merleau-Ponty wrote this very early in his career, in the mid 1940’s. But already we see that there is no room in his understanding of history for anonymous sinister forces that guide us toward our destinies. Already in this work, The Phenomenology of Perception, he has given a preliminary expression of the ontology he would begin to develop explicitly only at the very end of his career. It is precisely this dilemma [a forced choice between purely idealistic or purely empirical explanations of history], which the notion of existence, properly understood, enables us to leave behind . . . An existential theory of history is ambiguous, but this ambiguity cannot be made a matter of reproach, for it is inherent in things. (PhP, 172)

Later on, of course, Merleau-Ponty used a different language to express this ambiguity. He recast it in ontological terms. Instead of an ambiguity between these opposing terms, he describes a reversibility between moments of Being as they diverge. The ambiguity we spoke of earlier allows us access to the existential ontology of the later works, as well as a place to contrast Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Ambiguity between the subjective and objective dimensions of our existence is crucial for Merleau-Ponty. We can make use of each of these perspectives in our lives. We do not want to reduce one to the other. And as Merleau-Ponty developed his account of history, he tried to make more explicit how he hoped to avoid the dialectical totality Sartre sought. Eventually, he called his own re-vamped understanding of ambiguity the principle of reversibility. He stressed that it was an ontological notion— that it had to do with the reversibility of existence. Ontology is the account of existence from within existence—Merleau-Ponty’s term for it was “endo-ontology.” Reversibility is a “lateral, pre-analytic participation” within a world. It is the ability to be something else, always latent. For

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Sartre, it seems that my ability to transcend my existence must be grounded in something external which mandates an activity. For MerleauPonty, on the other hand, history is the activities and the openness upon activities. The account of Being is the account of the divergence of beings for Merleau-Ponty. Anguish is a fine name for the divergence and differentiation at the heart of what we call Being; and it if a fine description of what we see as an openness in Being, an historical perspective. Sartre’s ontology, on the other hand, had always sought to account for individual transcendence in history—some method of getting outside of the freedom of the individual perspective his dualistic ontology led him to maintain. History, then, grounds us as a strange sort of ontological foundation. It contains in principle the meaning of all human action. The fact that Sartre said that it does so without becoming a personified agent does not preclude an appeal to history as a guide or a force guiding action. And this is the crucial difference between their ontologies: Sartre’s ontology grounds action in history as history grants the possibility of giving meaning to our lives; while Merleau-Ponty allows for ontology and history to be coextensive and coeval. For Merleau-Ponty, the appeal to history is nothing other than the appeal to the divergence between reversible beings. Merleau-Ponty is often thought to have had his final say in print regarding Sartre’s politics in his 1956 book, Adventures of the Dialectic. Unfortunately, while this important work documents Merleau-Ponty’s change in alliance with Sartre and with the Marxist movements of his day, it was written before Merleau-Ponty’s turn of thought toward the later ontology could bear upon the exposition of the “new liberalism” he espoused. Perhaps this is why Merleau-Ponty’s explication of the position here is sometimes criticized as being ambitious, but a bit thin. On the other hand, in a chapter of the unfinished manuscript which was published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty offers an explicit critique of Sartre’s ontology from the perspective of his own new ontology; but Merleau-Ponty fails to extend the critique specifically to Sartre’s politics in either this chapter dealing with Sartre’s ontology or in the working notes selected for inclusion with the manuscript. However, the notes and manuscripts Merleau-Ponty left behind have been collected under the supervision of his student, Claude Lefort and have been reorganized by Lefort’s student, Stephanie Ménasé, among others. These notes have been kept on special reserve in several boxes in the Occidental Manuscript Reading Room in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Most of the notes have been bound and microfilmed. It is fitting that

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these boxes were locked away behind two large doors with mirrors in the center of the reading room, since when we read the notes, we inevitably see, to some degree, ourselves. This is because of the often-fragmentary nature of many of the notes. We are all familiar with these from the oftentimes enigmatic working notes selected by Lefort for publication in The Visible and the Invisible, and in the lecture notes for the courses Merleau-Ponty taught late in his life which have been recently published in La nature, and the various notes de cours that continue to emerge. In these notes, Merleau-Ponty often fails to give a complete context for the thought, often writes in sentence fragments; and since he was no doubt writing very quickly and for himself, his handwriting is very difficult to decipher in many places. Indeed, I joked with Claude Lefort that I would one day write a book about reading the manuscripts that would bear the title, Le lisible et l’illisible. These notes are hastily scrawled on whatever paper he had on hand—everything from his own and his wife’s stationery to café napkins to the memos that littered his mailbox to the back of a conference name badge. Nonetheless, we also see more than ourselves— we see new images and explanations of the vibrant thought of MerleauPonty. These notes contain a wealth of information that is only now being explored. A close reading of these notes will be instructive and essential for understanding the political implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, as well as for understanding the important and dynamic relationship between the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology was above all else a lived-ontology—an ontology of engagement designed explicitly against the abstruse intellectualism often ascribed to the philosophical tradition. In these notes, Merleau-Ponty, in the context of an explicit criticism of Sartre’s politics, states that politics is not a plan or a strategy, but a way of being in which we are liberated. This ushers in, he thought, an ontological account of a new liberalism that differs from the over-determined individuated account of freedom Sartre worked with. The ambiguity and anguish of history of which Merleau-Ponty speaks can be explained in these ontological terms. It is not exactly a matter of reconciliation between opposing points of view he took during his career; but it can be understood as the ontology he developed to better explain differences he was already trying to articulate in political terms and historical terms earlier—but without giving precedence to one over the other. History as anguish stresses an opening—liberation onto and into a world that has a variety of perspectives that bear upon one another. History, as recursion, is Being called into question . . . As an opening in the divergence of beings, it calls many things into question and leads

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Merleau-Ponty to equate freedom not with non-Being or with some ideal totalized Being, but as interrogation of perspectives within Being. To be and not to be: that is to question.

Perceptions of Phenomenology I hope that I have made it clear in the opening of this essay that, in spite of certain limits, I see much promise in the existential phenomenological tradition. Yet, as the second section showed us, although there is surely promise visible in Sartre’s and especially in Merleau-Ponty’s political positions, neither thinker adequately developed the connection between ontology and practical philosophy. Sartre remains mired in a dualism, while Merleau-Ponty never was able to develop the political implications of his ontology. What I hope to do very briefly in this last section is to indicate another direction for existential phenomenological reflection to proceed. There exists a certain specter of stoicism haunting phenomenology. I take the basic spirit of stoicism to be that one can best understand the world around us by rejecting the allure and vicissitudes of the external world in favor of the safety and security of internal rational reflection. If one were so inclined, a nice monolithic history could be constructed from Zeno of Citium to Husserl to validate this point. For our purposes here, a simple whispered rumor will have to do. People have been condemned for less. If I had the power, I would exorcise phenomenology of this specter of stoicism. I think my reading of the existential phenomenological tradition is what they were roughly attempting—in friendship and admiration, of course. The way I read the existential phenomenological tradition, this is roughly what they were attempting—in friendship and admiration, of course. The usual incantations of existentialism have been recited over and over trying to make the specter flee. Mood is a defining existential condition. We are condemned to freedom—or is it condemned to meaning? The one thing we can learn from the phenomenological reduction is that no complete reduction is possible. Unfortunately, it has not worked. While the ideas of an apodictic rational knowledge germane to pure transcendental subjectivity have surely been made to flee, the awful selfconsciousness of the ontological turn has replaced the old spirit. Apparently these spirits are legion. Heidegger seemed to want to say that to do fundamental ontology, and later to think Being, was to make possible a new ethics. Unfortunately he held that the converse was not true. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and de

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Beauvoir all held that ethics was essential to the ontological turn, but they never seemed to get around to doing it very well. But it might be possible if we could offer a new perception of existential phenomenology that is outwardly-directed rather than inwardly-directed. This will call for a closer look at the phenomenological notion of intentionality to see how it might be “existentially recovered.” And this will have to be done in concrete practical terms. Intentionality is the basis of understanding the relation between individual subjectivity and its world. Many of the problems of seventeenth and eighteenth century early modern philosophy began with an artificially isolated notion of subjectivity. Early twentieth century thinkers observed that some related problems can be avoided by observing the fundamental connectedness of subjectivity and its objects of knowledge, which was for them the relation to the knower and the known. That connection is one of intentionality. That is, as Edmund Husserl observed, “consciousness is always consciousness of” some object. One does not need to establish the existence of the world, after all; one needs to understand one’s intentional relations within that world. Consciousness already contains a tacit awareness of its world. However, this intentional connection has been rightly problematized in existential phenomenology such that subjectivity involved in the intentional relation can no longer be equated with consciousness. Instead of an abstract intellectual notion of intentionality, intentional relations came to be seen in embodied, affective, physical terms. I wish to go even further—I argue that a proper understanding of the intentionality will entail its articulation as a moment of care. I am currently working on a book that will bear the title, Care. What I am developing in this book is a radical re-thinking of the intentional connections between subjectivity and its world. The basic thesis is that our personal identity both betrays care, concern and interest about the world and is determined by them. This intentional relation is radical in two senses. First, far from being some idealistic one-directional constitutive intentional relationship, care is an intentionality of the multiple insofar as it recognizes the malleability of subjectivity engaged within its world as well as the influence of subjectivity upon the world about which it cares. Care is also radical in the sense that it is an existential conception of intentionality. I mean by this that the intentional relationship is not merely a matter of ideas within consciousness, nor even the outward-directedness of consciousness in action. Care is as much affect as effect, and reinserts the intent into intentionality. It is a richer intentional relationship, which must be understood to include physical, emotional, spiritual, as well as intellectual engagement, since these are all aspects of the way we care

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about our world. Furthermore, it can be described most meaningfully in terms of concrete engagement, and not only through the self-conscious reflection we have already seen has its limits. Let us adumbrate five interrelated moments of care, each of which reveals a unique aspect of the intentionality of the relationship between subjectivity and its world. These five moments of care are: language, being, nature, space, and time. In each of these moments of care, reversible subjectivity stands in a peculiar relationship within its world by virtue of its participation and engagement within a universal while standing out from it. Just to scratch the surface here—and surfaces are made to be scratched, my language betrays a style which implicates me as an individual who cares about his world in a certain way, and in that way becomes an individual, while it simultaneously implicates a world with certain linguistic conventions, idioms, and other institutions which influence my cares and values. My face is shaped by the habits of speech I develop, as my speech becomes recognizably mine due to the configuration of the flesh from which it diverges. My use of language changes the world as the world shapes my very identity as an individual. One of the most important consequences of this radical understanding of intentionality as care is that it mandates a practical (i.e., ethical and political) approach, which corrects the traditionally abstract and intellectualistic approaches to understanding intentionality. For example, the investigation of space as a moment of care reveals that the spatiality of the world I live in is partially determined by my interests, intent, and concerns. This is true from understanding my body to my nation as spatial phenomena. The mathematization of space, which was the hallmark of early modern thought, is revealed as an abstraction of a more fundamental lived spatiality where I care about things and people, and vice-versa. Thus, every space is revealed as a place wherein I am engaged practically with others and within institutions. Every space is already constituted as an ethos and a “polis.” My spatiality as embodied subjectivity is constituted by me, and likewise constitutes me as an individual subject who is already an ethical and political agent who belongs, who bears responsibilities and makes demands. Care, in my sense, is not a metaphysical substratum, nor is it a structure. It is only the implied horizon necessary for understanding divergence and differentiation. Care is not self-consciousness since the self does not exist outside of care. Nor is it pure or idealized engaged consciousness, since I am always involved, for better or for worse, within this consciousness as me, and never as a disinterested spectator.

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We are all aware of the limited value of self-consciousness. There are times when it can be devastating and debilitating and intrude in our lives. When I saw the boys laughing at me, suddenly I became too selfconscious to dance. We all know those moments when a relationship turns from ecstatic bliss to awkward self-consciousness. Instead of living in the relationship it becomes a topic of conversation and reflection. Hitting a baseball is downright impossible if one attends to every minute movement when swinging the bat. Skiing self-consciously could well cause an avalanche! Yet, of course, none of us would be in this room if we held that there was no value to self-consciousness. It is not merely the allure of irony that demands that I speak of care in these very self-conscious terms and in this very self-conscious style. There are times when self-consciousness makes consciousness meaningful, but it is never my achievement alone. I see my daughter’s eyes light up, see her smile, and hear her giggle as I push her on the swing. It is through her eyes, and not mine alone, that I see myself as a good father in that moment. There is a latent doubling-over at the heart of our existence; but that may be appropriate to the situation or it may not be. My point is that it is wrong to assume a posture of reflective self-consciousness could lead us to practical thought in some purified form. Phenomenology has asked us to reflect upon the contents of our consciousness to purify our knowledge. Existential phenomenology has asked us to reconsider how we do that; but became entangled in another form of self-consciousness as a result. My only hint at a direction is that we must remember the promise of engagement—unreflective consciousness—as it lends meaning for self-consciousness and vice-versa. Both can be figure to the other’s ground. Edward Casey has tried to get at something like one aspect of this in his recent work on the phenomenology of the glance. Just as the glance can reveal a depth that a sustained gaze can miss, I can learn more about someone from a smile that we share than an entire evening of sustained reflection. And yet the smile may take on more meaning after subsequent reflection…. When we think of our intentional relations as care, we are forced to recognize practical value and danger in that effervescence of life as it is lived as well as in the reflection possible about such experiences. But most importantly, we are forced to see that these are always compromised that I never am neither pure consciousness nor pure self-consciousness. It is imperative that we remember that the patriarch of Western metaphysics, Socrates, who turned to the Delphic oracle for inspiration to “know thyself,” also claimed that he knew nothing at all.

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Notes 1

Jean Beaufret to Martin Heidegger, “Letter On Humanism,” trans. David F. Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 231. Henceforth LH. I want to express my thanks to the colleagues who have invited me to speak on issues related to this essay over the past few years: The Georgia Continental Philosophy Circle, the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Wabash College, and the International Human Science Research Council. In addition, I would like to thank the University of North Carolina at Asheville for its generous financial support of my research in Europe. Finally, I especially thank my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at UNCA for their friendship and professional encouragement. 2 Albert Camus offered an existential critique of any metaphysical appeal as well, but he rejects phenomenology rather than appropriating it. Cf. his Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961). It is also worth noting that many existentialists also defer the problem of ethics. Kierkegaard relegates ethics to the rational and the universal realms (subordinate to the religious), while Nietzsche seems to dismiss ethics as a perverse nihilism. 3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 14. [Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 16.] 4 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294. 5 Martin Heidegger, in his introduction to William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1963), xvi. Henceforth H. 6 Note the similarity to Kant’s worrying over the dialectical nature of reason. Hegel reacts against Kant by embracing this term, which was intended to be pejorative. Nonetheless he reacts in Kant’s terms. Likewise, Heidegger lament here must be seen squarely in this same tradition. Or, ironically, this longing that is necessarily awakened is not at all the same as Kant’s famous awakening from his dogmatic slumber. Heidegger’s awakening is less the emergence from oneiric uncertainty and confusion than the stirrings of the shadow in our dreams . . . 7 Ibid., 236: “The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction.” Cf. also 239: “Thus thinking is a deed. But it is a deed that also surpasses all praxis.” 8 Of course, there exists an amazing and rich secondary literature as to how to account for the development of Heidegger’s thought. I have cited only Richardson’s work here so far and there is no time to catalogue all of these works here. I only want to mention an amazing little essay by Calvin O. Schrag, “The Three Heideggers,” in his Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany: State University of New York Press Press, 1994), 159-173. Schrag gives a much more charitable reading of Heidegger’s development than mine, but shares my suspicion that there remains a transcendental nature to Heidegger’s project despite his claims to the contrary. And so my account is indebted to Schrag’s insight, though we articulate it in different ways for different purposes. It is also interesting

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to note Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger here in the rejection of ethics for a higher calling. Schrag has made much of Heidegger’s indebtedness to Kierkegaard in his important work, Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961). 9 Cf. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1972). 10 One might also compare Albert Camus’ criticism of Heidegger’s position as “philosophical suicide” in his passionate essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Henceforth NE. 12 Cf. his discussion in the same volume of a “detotalized totality,” for example. 13 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. J. Rée (New York: Verso, 1976). Henceforth CDR. 14 Edmund Wilson, “Jean-Paul Sartre, the Novelist and the Existentialist,” New Yorker, August 2, 1947, 58, as cited in Marjorie Grene, An Introduction to Existentialism (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1959), 114. It might be fun to use Baudrillard’s hyper-real to deconstruct Sartre, given this penchant for overdetermined realism that tries too hard. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 11. 16 Cf. my “Reversibile Subjectivity: The Problem of Transcendence and Language,” Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ed. M. C. Dillon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 31-45. I indicate that Merleau-Ponty might hold some promise in this direction. 17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Henceforth VI. 18 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1994). Henceforth, this work will be cited as EA. 19 Cf. my encyclopedia article on Simone de Beauvoir in The Encyclopedia of the Essay (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998). 20 The problem here is her claim to know this a priori. 21 This is a note from 1958 [Bôite n. 3] on special reserve in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. I wish to thank Mme. Suzanne Merleau-Ponty for her kind permission to allow my access to these unpublished materials. [The transcription and translation are mine. When I first worked on these manuscripts, the pagination was confused—there were multiple page numbers on many pages from various attempts to reconstruct the order. These manuscripts have since been paginated and bound, as explained below.] 22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Discovery of History” in “‘Les fondateurs’ and ‘La découverte de l’histoire’: Two Short Pieces Excluded from ‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’” trans. D. H. Davis, Man and World, volume 25, n. 2 (1992), 207. It should be noted that another translation by Michael B. Smith exists in a very important collection: Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), 126-128.

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, trans. B. Eisler (New York: George Brazillier, 1965), 253-254. [This volume, to clear up a needless ambiguity, was originally published as Situations IV in French in 1964 (with the exception of one chapter that appeared elsewhere originally).] 24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Henceforth PhP. 25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. J. O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 186. Henceforth HT. 26 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian, 1975), 345-369. Henceforth EH. 27 Cf. Sartre’s Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1963), passim. 28 The Dehiscence of Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications, ed. Duane Davis (Amherst: Humanity Books, Prometheus Press, 2001). 29 The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Library of Living Philosophers, volume .XVI, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1981), 11. 30 I am following my own analysis of anguish that originally appeared in “Ontology and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Later Philosophy,” Chiasmi International, New Series, volume 3, 81-102. 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature: Notes Cours du Collège de France [établi et annoté par Dominique Séglard], (Paris: éditions du Seuil, 1995), 101 (my translation & my emphasis). 32 Cf. “Reversible Subjectivity.” 33 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 52. 34 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 22. Henceforth AD.

CHAPTER V THE ETHICAL AND “BEYOND BEING” IN LEVINAS MICHAEL SMITH

Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy moves toward “a beyond being” (or “an otherwise than, or better than, being”). This “beyond being” involves something related to, but somewhat different than, what is normally referred to as an ethics. But we are so accustomed to using being as synonymous with what is real or important or true that it is very difficult to ascribe the proper sort of importance to ethics without equating it with being. Being (including nothingness, which is tributary to being) seems to constitute a rather obvious basis for one possible sort of ethics. From it we could derive a good, better and best. Such an ethics would seem to spring quite naturally from ontology, and constitute a branch of it, as it were. True, the “values” derived from being may not always be welcome. God, if deemed necessary at all, would be the Supreme Being. We could assess good and evil on the basis of the outcomes of behavior—in strict deontological consequentiality. Good might by and large be equated with being, and evil (as in Neo-Platonism) with its lack. Less satisfyingly perhaps, “might” would tend to constitute “right,” as history, surveying the struggle for domination or survival, progressively “judged” unsuccessful behavior out of existence. Altruism, if conceivable at all, would be either delusional behavior or a psychologically dubious form of auto-satisfaction. Humanity, subject to a kind of metaphysical Stockholm syndrome, would legitimize if not idealize its masters, the dominant forces of nature or the City. One could, setting out from being, develop an ethics similar to that of the Greek philosophers in which moderation, stoicism, or hedonism would configure a system of virtues.

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When we consider the proximate and contingent factors that led Levinas not only to divorce ethics from being, but to give it priority over ontology, it seems rather odd that such a move should be the result of his critique of Heidegger. This seems odd because Heidegger’s ontology supplies a context more amenable to ethics than, for instance, the ontology of a truncated Cartesian dualism—be it the materialism of the late nineteenth-century positivists, or the physicalism that is still in the ascendant in this country today. Perhaps Heidegger’s attempt to incorporate the human, or the world of the “who,” into a broadened ontology, convinced Levinas that any ontology was bound to be insufficient to that task. In a move not uncommon in philosophy, Levinas may have decided that ethics presented such a difficulty to ontology that it was better to start out from ethics, thereby positioning what could not be derived at an axiomatic level. What is somewhat misleading about this way of putting things is that we are so accustomed to thinking of ethics as a code of conduct to be applied after the protagonists have been fully instituted within an ontology that the very term ethics evokes too flimsy and derivative a set of notions to function as “first philosophy.”

Exasperation as a Philosophical Method When asked during a discussion about his philosophical method, Levinas responded that it was “emphasis,” “exaggeration,” or “exasperation.”1 A very odd method! Rather than justifying an idea by furnishing it with a foundation in another idea, this would be a new way of passing from one idea to another, his version of the via eminentiae, a technique of medieval theologians for speaking of God: the ineffable, the infinite. When we consider that the domain, if we can speak of a domain in this case, in which Levinas’ philosophy situates the source of ethics is infinity, it is understandable perhaps that a well-balanced, moderate way of expressing ideas is not to be expected. It is in the realm of being that we must try to do justice to the multifarious reality that corresponds to our thoughts by presenting a balanced account. One example Levinas gives of this passage from one idea to another by emphasis or hyperbole is the movement from the thesis, not to an antithesis or a synthesis, but to an exaggerated thesis: from the position to its superlative, exposition, or exposure, making oneself appear. Going a step further, beyond visual appearing is the expressing of oneself through language. We have moved from the ontological to subjectivity, to consciousness (or conscience?) which is that “to which being calls” (GW, 89). Levinas gives another

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example: the movement from responsibility to substitution (GW, 89). If I am responsible for the other, I can go further and substitute myself for him or her. Yet a third example is adduced. Passivity as the opposite of activity describes the receptivity that the British empiricists attributed to the mind, but there is a passivity that goes further. After all, to reception is already a kind of activity. The passivity beyond all passivity is suffering, and a suffering that cannot even assume itself. It is eventually a “denucleation” of the self, a sundering of ipseity. “Otherwise” than being is a way, a manner, the perception of which is triggered by excess: the quantitative is seen as a qualitative, a “way.” For example, evil can make itself known in the realm of being as excess: Quite remarkably, that which is purely quantitative in the notion of excess is shown in the form of a qualitative content characteristic of the malignancy of evil, as the quiddity of a phenomenon . . . Within the pure quality of the phenomenon of evil, the intuition that consists in catching sight of the how of the rupture of immanence is a view that appears to us as rich intellectually as the rediscovery, at the beginning of phenomenology, of intentionality . . . (GW, 128)

It is because this sort of perception is an “intuition” in the phenomenological sense that Levinas continued to consider this technique within the realm of phenomenology, however radical a departure it represented from the Husserlian reduction. The Talmudist Georges Hansel makes the following observation about Levinas’ use of extremes: Nevertheless it should be pointed out that Levinas’ thought is a complex construction in which an extreme idea is counterbalanced by the extremity of another. This is the opposite of an equilibrium obtained in a mixture, in which sharp contrasts are dulled down.2

Perhaps it is by bearing in mind this movement, so pervasive in Levinas’ thought, that we can understand the following statement by that philosopher—a statement that seems prima facie a contradiction pure and simple: Ethics is before ontology. It is more ontological than ontology; more sublime than ontology. It is from there that a certain equivocation comes— whereby ethics seems laid on top of ontology, whereas it is before ontology. (GW, 90)

If we are to understand how ethics can be more ontological than ontology, yet at the same time accept the notion of ethics being “otherwise than

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being” or “beyond essence,” we must understand being as not becoming fully itself until it transcends itself. This would be the opposite movement of the one that Levinas describes when he shows how the said is both the fulfillment of the saying and a falling of the saying into the immanence of being. “Traduire, c’est trahir.” To translate is to betray. Here translation is meant to represent all forms of expression. Betrayal is the price we pay for the portrayal of intention. I will say, tentatively, that exaggeration and emphasis are the road back from the manifest and clearly defined realm of immanence, from philosophy’s “indiscretion vis-à-vis the ineffable” toward a pre-original (or an-archic) ineffable infinite. I say this only tentatively, however, because it may not do justice to the “rupture” between these two realms. Levinas never tires of showing the intransigence and absoluteness of the eidetics of ethics by quoting the Jansenist Blaise Pascal. They have used concupiscence as best they could for the general good; but it is nothing but a pretense and a false image of charity; for at bottom it is simply a form of hatred. “This is my place in the sun.” That is how the usurpation of the whole earth began.3

The “at bottom” of the first quotation, and “the whole earth” in the second, show that it is in the movement toward the absolute that ethics declares itself. This is not to say that ethics is not reflected in the form of a legitimate meliorism in the realm of being. This is quite clear from Levinas’ statement that commerce is better than war (OB, 5), for example, or that there is a reasonable sort of peace that can be achieved by counterbalancing aggression. A strikingly succinct statement of the way in which the “beyond being” affects being is the following one: The meanings that go beyond formal logic show themselves in formal logic, if only by the precise indication of the sense in which they break with formal logic. The indication is the more precise in the measure that this reference is conceived with a more rigorous logic. The myth of the subordination of all thought to the comprehension of being is probably due to this revealing function of coherence, whose law-like character formal logic sets forth, and in which the divergence between meaning and being is measured, in which the metaphysical hither side itself, contradictorily enough, appears. But logic interrupted by the structures of what is beyond being which show themselves in it does not confer a dialectical structure to philosophical propositions. It is the superlative, more than the negation of

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categories, which interrupts systems, as though the logical order and the being it succeeds in espousing retained the superlative which exceeds them: in subjectivity, the exorbitance of the null-site, in caresses and in sexuality, the “excess” of tangency—as though tangency admitted a gradation—up to contact with the entrails, a skin going under another skin. (OB, 187)4

This substantial footnote is helpful in that it shows how disorder or disturbance can be deciphered within being as a trace of the infinite, particularly as immanence is constrained (or tortured—in the sense in which exorcists thought to “constrain” the devil, forcing him to speak) by formal logic. Then the note shows exaggeration at work, and the superlative qua trace within immanence of what transcends it. Subjectivity is the “no place” within ontological spatio-temporality, and a moretangent-than-tangency is analyzed in a topology of sexuality.

Being Described and Related to its Other In a very late text (1991), the Author’s Preface to Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other gives us a description of being, the being that is clearly no longer a ne plus ultra, and one that carries definite attributes. This being is described in largely negative terms, although from another perspective it is quite “positive,” giving characteristics to being according to the three modalities of its manifestation. Origin of all violence, varying with the various modes of being: the life of the living, the existence of human beings, the reality of things. The life of the living in the struggle for life; the natural history of human beings in the blood and tears of wars between individuals, nations, and classes; the matter of things, hard matter; solidity; the closed-in-upon-itself, all the way down to the level of the subatomic particles of which physicists speak.5

All summaries and clarifications tend to be reductive, and it is tempting if not inevitable, in the course of making plain a Levinasian “message,” to fall back on the familiar two-world hypothesis: being and beyond being qua heaven and earth. Such a picture of things might be viewed in very simplistic or concrete terms, as if these were adjoining countries one could visit—one now, one later. Such a view, acknowledged or not, and despite Nietzsche’s disdainful description of such “Hinterwelten” (worlds behind or beyond the present world), is difficult to avoid, once we have characterized being and at least evoked its other by way of contrast. The difficulties of expression raised by such a “domain” (and this term itself may as well serve as an example of the improprieties

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of language into which we are drawn in discussing an otherwise than being) form a large part of Levinas’ last major work, Otherwise than Being (1974). The important point here is to show what effects the two-world (or separate domain) hypothesis would have on ethics. In the Hobbesian domain of being such as it is described by Levinas, above, there is little hope that altruistic behavior will be rewarded. Hence a different domain, or at least an agency from which moral imperatives could be issued, seems necessary. But the Torah, as Levinas says, quoting tradition, was given to men, not angels: the latter neither need it nor could they understand it. As in the Torah, in which events and injunctions are given side by side, it seems that ethics can only have meaning when both worlds are thought together, though not necessarily as one. Judaism (“May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,” says the Kaddish) configures the beyond being temporally, in a future that we must help bring about speedily by repairing the world (tikkun olam). Ethics is not constative, but desiderative and jussive.

Notes 1

Of God Who Comes to Mind (1986), trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89. Henceforth GW. 2 “Ethics and Politics in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Levinas in Jerusalem: Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics, Joelle Hansel, ed. (Springer, 2008), 59-74. 3 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), vii. Henceforth OB. 4 Translation rendered slightly more literal. 5 Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (1991), trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xii.

CHAPTER VI THE IMMANENT ETHICS OF GILLES DELEUZE RONALD BOGUE

By the time of his death November 4, 1995, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze had published twenty-three books touching on subjects as varied as painting, metallurgy, mathematics, geology, anthropology and cinema. As someone who valued the discipline and history of philosophy in his own idiosyncratic way, he had commented on many key figures and prominent issues in the Western philosophical tradition. Seldom, however, did he directly address the topic of ethics, despite its centrality in what is conventionally considered to be “philosophy.” Yet there is a sense in which all of Deleuze’s work is concerned with ethics, in that ethical principles inform his basic conception of thought and what it means to think. My object in this essay is to provide a rudimentary sketch of a few of those ethical principles. Giorgio Agamben has suggested that we may reconstruct a genealogy of modern French philosophy along two lines of descent, a “line of transcendence” from Kant through Husserl to Levinas and Derrida, and a “line of immanence”1 from Spinoza through Nietzsche to Deleuze and Foucault, with Heidegger participating in both lines of descent. The theme of transcendence is perhaps most strikingly evident in Levinas, whose philosophy focuses on the confrontation with the radical Other. The Other is transcendent in that it is necessarily “otherwise” than Being, and hence for Levinas ethics precedes ontology. The motif of immanence, by contrast, is constant in Deleuze—indeed, he argues in What Is Philosophy? that the entire history of philosophy may be read as an effort to establish a “plane of immanence.”2 Deleuze regards Spinoza as “the prince of philosophers,” since he is perhaps the sole philosopher to make “no compromise with transcendence” (WP, 49). For Spinoza, ethics is ontology, a point Deleuze stresses when he observes that Spinoza’s magnum opus of pure ontology is titled Ethics, and when he asserts that Spinoza’s Ethics is

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really an “ethology,” that is, a science of the species behavior of humans in the natural lifeworld. I believe that for Deleuze, as well as for Spinoza, ethics is ontology, and that for this reason his ethics is best conceived of as an immanent ethics.3 We may first approach the ethics of Deleuze’s thought through three themes, which may somewhat artificially be associated with stances toward the past, present and future: amor fati (the past); vice-diction (the present); and belief in this world (the future). In his early book Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Deleuze argues that Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati, or “love of fate,” provides an ethical principle that may replace Kant’s categorical imperative: whatever you will, also will its eternal return. What Deleuze means by this dictum is made evident in his discussion of chance and the throw of the dice. Most gamblers are bad players who want to control chance. They throw the dice and only affirm the outcome that they like. If they shoot craps, they roll again in an effort to overcome the unlucky roll and erase its consequences. Nietzsche’s good players, by contrast, roll only once, and whatever the result, they affirm that result and will its eternal return. In this way, good players avoid the ressentiment of finding the world guilty of frustrating their desires, and thereby genuinely affirm the play of the world. This Nietzschean principle of amor fati takes on a specifically Deleuzean cast in The Logic of Sense (1969) when Deleuze relates the concept to a Stoics ethics of the event. Central to Deleuze’s thought is the distinction between the virtual and the actual. The actual consists of the commonsense world of discrete forms, Newtonian space and chronological time. The virtual is a dimension of self-differentiating differences, one that is real without being actual, immanent within the actual without being reducible to it. It is a domain of individuating metamorphic processes, of a disorienting “spatializing” space, and a floating time of a simultaneous before-after. The virtual perpetually passes into the actual, that is, becomes actualized, but it is not thereby exhausted or erased, for it continues to subsist or insist within the actual. The virtual eludes our commonsense understanding, but it impinges on us in moments of vertigo when rational spatiotemporal coordinates are scrambled and a pure “event” emerges. Consider the growth of a biological organism. The single-celled ovum is traversed by multiple gradients, zones of potential division, any one of which may be actualized through fertilization. Once cell division is initiated, an individuating process occurs whereby virtual differences become actualized in specific forms (two cells, then form, then eight), but the individuating process of becoming precedes the actually individuated

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forms, and that process continues throughout the life of the organism as cells are formed, nourished and replaced. The virtual is a kind of structure of self-differentiating differences that unfolds itself into the actual but remains elusively “present” within the actual, hovering over its surface, as it were. The virtual is something like the “problem” of which the actual organism is a specific solution, and at every point in the ongoing emergence of the organism the problem of that structure of selfdifferentiating differences persists, or insists, as a set of co-present zones of oscillating variation and potential becoming. The virtual organism is a sort of verbal infinitive, “to become dog,” “to become frog,” a differential structuring immanent within the actual dog or frog, passing into the actual in a dynamic becoming at every point of the creature’s emergence, yet persisting as a problematic field of differential vectors. The world is an egg, says Deleuze,4 and everywhere the virtual is passing into the actual while remaining immanent within it. Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche’s amor fati is an ethic of willing the virtual, of willing the virtual “event,” which is immanent within the actual and which impinges on us in moments of disequilibrium and disorientation. The quintessential event, says Deleuze, is the battle, something that hovers over the battlefield like a fog, everywhere being actualized in the bodies of the soldiers, but nowhere specifically present except as a kind of unfolding “problem” of that battle.5 The event of the battle is an infinitive, a “to battle,” anonymous, elusive, outside conventional time, a floating immanent aura guiding the processes of actualization but becoming manifest only as a kind of secondary emanation from the bodies that actualize it. Deleuze’s ethic is one of being worthy of that which happens, in other words, of willing the event (LOS, 148-153). What soldiers should affirm in the battle is not so much any specific outcome as the pure event of the battle, the virtual “to battle” that plays through any of the diverse actualizations of the battle that may take place. To be worthy of what happens is to will the virtual event immanent within one’s ongoing actualization in the world. In identifying this ethic of the event with amor fati, I am stressing its orientation toward the past. To be worthy of what happens is to will the difference, multiplicity and chance of the virtual and thereby avoid ressentiment and affirm the past events that have shaped one’s present. But one must also act in the present, and Deleuze by no means advocates a passive acceptance of everything that befalls us. One’s orientation toward the present in Deleuzean ethics we might approach through his concept of “vice-diction” (DR, 189-191), as opposed to contra-diction.6 Vice-diction is the process whereby one identifies and engages the virtual events immanent within one’s present world, whereby one “counter-actualizes” .

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the virtual. Deleuze divides this process into two complementary movements, “the specification of adjunct fields” and “the condensation of singularities” (DR, 190), which he likens to an Empedoclean expansion and contraction of love and hate. The specification of adjunct fields requires an outward exploration of the virtual networks of multiple connections that come together in each present moment, as well as a critique of our representations of that present moment. The virtual eludes our commonsense representations of the world, and only in moments of disequilibrium and disorientation do we sense the virtual in its passage into the actual. One task of vice-diction is to respond to this moment of disequilibrium, this unsettling “event,” first by undoing conventional representations of our situation, and second by teasing out the proliferating interconnections among self-differentiating differences that are enveloped in this particular moment of disequilibrium. Each unsettling element of a disorienting experience reveals what Deleuze calls variously a “zone of indiscernibility,” a “line of continuous variation,” or a “singularity,” a singular, remarkable difference that generates the regular forms and shapes of the commonsense world. The virtual may be conceived of as an infinite plane of singular points, each a zone of indiscernibility or vector of continuous variation, and the process of specifying adjunct fields consists of connecting singularities and thereby exploring the expanding surface of that infinite plane. But vice-diction involves a second moment as well, a condensation of singularities whereby one experiments on the real. We might say that vice-diction’s first moment, the specification of adjunct fields, entails an assessment of the configuration of singularities in the grand dice-throw of our present situation, and that vice-diction’s second moment, the condensation of singularities, involves a reconfiguration of singularities as we make of ourselves and our situation a second dicethrow. The object of vice-diction is not simply to comprehend the virtual differences at work in our world but also to transform them, or rather to enter into the play of virtual differences and experiment with them. Such an experimentation is a condensation of singularities in that it is an effort to engage the infinite plane of singular points and contract those points into a single event, an explosive big bang that creates new, unpredictable configurations of singularities. Vice-diction thus entails both a process of exploring and hence constructing connections among differences, and a process of undoing connections in an effort to form new ones. The concept of amor fati, then, allows us to think of the virtual in terms of an attitude toward the past, an absence of ressentiment and an affirmation of the sequence of virtual events that have come to form the actualized state of the present situation. Vice-diction frames the virtual in

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terms of the present moment, in which one explores the connections enveloped in the event that impinges on one’s situation and then experimentally induces metamorphic alterations of that situation. Yet implicit as well in this second moment of vice-diction is an attitude toward the future, an affirmation of the possibility of creating something new. One of the controlling themes in Deleuze’s work is that of “thinking otherwise,” of finding ways of inventing new possibilities for life, and such possibilities issue not ex nihilo but from the virtual lines of continuous variation immanent in the real. The creative side of vicediction, the experimental activation of the disruptive potential of the virtual, implies an orientation toward the future which we may label, in Deleuze’s words, a “belief in this world.” In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) Deleuze argues that the classic cinema testifies to a bond between humans and the world, whereas the modern cinema does not. “The modern fact,” Deleuze remarks, “is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.”7 The “power of modern cinema,” when it ceases to be bad cinema, is to restore “our belief in the world” (C2, 171) not “another world” or a “transformed world,” but “this world, as it is” (C2, 172). The world as bad film is the world of clichés, of received opinion (doxa), of that which goes without saying, of static forms and institutions, of intractable facts and inevitable results—in short, a tired world devoid of possibilities. What the great modern directors restore to us is a world within which something new can emerge, and they do so by activating virtual self-differentiating differences immanent within the real. In this activity, cinema directors do as any other artists and as do any other creators—philosophers, scientists, politicians—they experiment on the real, on the virtual’s immanent lines of continuous variation. And when they do so, they affirm the creative potential immanent within the real and thereby exhibit a belief in this world. Deleuze’s immanent ethics is ultimately an ethics of the virtual, and what I have called amor fati, vice-diction and belief in this world are simply three ways of looking at the virtual. Amor fati is a backward glance that affirms the virtual within the events that have culminated in the present. Vice-diction is a topical survey of proliferating virtual connections and an activation of their potential for reconfiguration through a condensation of singularities. Belief in this world is a view through the present and toward the future, one that envisions nothing specific in that

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future, but that trusts in the possibilities immanent within the real to produce something genuinely new. To this point, my focus has been on the ethics of the individual, with little direct reference to the individual’s relationship with others—a decidedly odd emphasis, one might think, given Deleuze’s enduring hostility toward the notion of the autonomous subject and any subjectgrounded thought. How, then, might the social implications of an immanent ethics be considered? Three Deleuzian motifs suggest themselves: the body as domain of speeds and affects; the other as disclosure of the possible; and the invention of a people to come. Throughout his writings, Deleuze returns frequently to a remark by Spinoza that we do not yet know “what a body can and cannot do,” and hence, we do not know the extent of “the body’s capabilities.”8 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Deleuze offers his most succinct explanation of the significance of this remark. Deleuze points out that Spinoza defines the body in two ways: in terms of relations of slowness and speed between an infinite number of particles; and in terms of a body’s capacities for affecting and being affected. By characterizing the body in terms of differential speeds, Spinoza emphasizes the body’s participation in a single “plane of immanence,”9 a dimension of rhythms, movements, pauses, accelerations, and decelerations, in which each body’s form and function emerge as secondary products of kinetic relations among particles. By approaching the body in terms of its capacities, or powers, of affecting and being affected, Spinoza imbues the plane of immanence with a pervasive affectivity generated through interactions among multiple forces. In this analysis of bodies as affective rhythms Deleuze finds the theoretical foundations of “what is today called ethology” (SPP, 125), the study of animal behavior (a notion that in Deleuze’s use might better be labeled “ecology”). The tick, for example, has limited capacities for affecting and being affected, its world determined solely by its receptivity to light (as it climbs a stalk or branch), to heat (as it senses an approaching mammal), to butyric acid (the substance excreted from the follicles of mammals), and to limited tactile stimuli (specifically, those provided by the hair and skin of its prey). The tick’s powers select a world, picking out a highly restricted set of relational elements, excluding everything else. The tick combines with its world, taking in certain substances (light, scents, blood), emitting others (anticoagulants, bacteria), connecting with some organisms, defending itself from others, and ignoring the rest. The tick’s relations with its selected world constitute a type of musical counterpoint, its diverse powers forming a point in counterpoint to each of the elements with which it is capable of forming a connection.

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Humans, like ticks, select a world and form contrapuntal relations with that world’s elements. In the case of humans, however, the selected world is much wider and fuller than the tick’s, and the elements with which our powers can combine are in large measure unspecified. We do not know what a body can do, what connections the powers of the body make possible. We must therefore experiment with our bodies and seek those relations that increase our capacities. What is important to note is that the ethical imperative in bodily experimentation is not that of an increase in power over a world, but an increase in powers of affecting and being affected, a responsiveness to a selected world and an openness to interaction. As Deleuze insists in his Spinozistic reading of Nietzsche,10 will to power manifests itself as a desire for power over others only in the reactive mentality of slaves, of those who seek to restrict others’ powers and to close themselves off from competing forces. The affirmative will to power, by contrast, seeks to extend its capacities through reciprocities of forces that combine in interconnecting affirmations of one another, and this is the will that Deleuze discerns in Spinoza’s ethology of bodies as configurations of speeds and affective intensities. Deleuze argues that Spinoza’s account of the body calls us not simply to an experimentation with the individual body in its connections with a selected world but also to the formation of more complex collective bodies, social assemblages of differential speeds and affective intensities. Rather than merely testing the relations that augment the powers of individual bodies or threaten their dissolution, we must also determine the powers that may emerge in the generation of compound bodies. It is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities. How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world? … Now we are concerned, not with a relation of point to counterpoint, nor with the selection of a world, but with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense. (SPP, 126)

The ethical question for Deleuze is not “what must we do?” but “what can we do?” What assemblages allow the formation of collective bodies that expand their capacities that open new modes of affecting and being affected? This question is not one of imposing limits from without, but of exploring potential for growth from within. In this sense ethics is immanent to the creation of worlds, a matter more of mutual affinities and intensities among bodies than of mutual duties and obligations.

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Yet is there no duty to the other in an immanent ethics? Not in the sense of a necessary restriction of one’s powers, or of the other’s, but perhaps a form of duty, a certain ethic of responsiveness or attentiveness, may be seen as consistent with Deleuze’s general ethical orientation. In Difference and Repetition (DR, 259-261), Deleuze remarks briefly on the Other as expression of possible worlds, taking as his example that of a terrified face which I perceive without perceiving the cause of its terror.11 That face serves as a sign, not as signifier to signified, but as the moon’s visible surface to its dark side. The face points toward possible worlds yet unspecified, and if I am to encounter that sign, rather than simply classify it (ignore it, reject it, imitate it), I must enter with it into the composition of a world enfolded in its possibilities. To do so, I must construct a plane of immanence in which I and Other are no longer fixed entities, but instead residual points of emergence within an unfolding ensemble of speeds and affects. The actualization of a specific world that arises from the unfolding of the other’s possible worlds may eventuate in a discrete self and a definite other, but the encounter itself, in which possible worlds become manifest, opens up in a dimension of apersonal affects and speeds. The encounter, if it is genuinely an encounter, is a dislocating meeting of affects, the terror of a screaming face, the startled reaction to that terror. And if it is to be a productive encounter, it will be one of mutual disturbance, in which possible worlds yet unspecified in the terror and in the shocked reaction to that terror interconnect and interact to generate an actual world.12 The duty to the other (if one must speak of duty) is to affect and be affected, to suspend, as much as one can, the categorization and comprehension of the other, and then open oneself to the undetermined, hidden possible worlds that are expressed in the affective signs of the other. The practical consequences of this openness to the other may be discerned in Deleuze’s remarks in a 1985 interview on the need for “intercessors” in various domains—in philosophy, the arts, science, and politics. “Intercessors are fundamental. Creation’s all about intercessors. Without them nothing happens. They can be people—for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists—but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda.”13 To intercede,14 for Deleuze, is not simply to advocate for the other, but also to “go between” (Latin: inter + cedere), to assist the other by intervening in the other’s world and producing creative interference (in the sense of an interference between sound or light waves). Deleuze says that “Félix Guattari and I are one another’s intercessors” (N, 125), and they are so in that they do not fully understand one another. Deleuze argues that the notion that truth is created

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is “obvious in the sciences, for instance. Even in physics, there’s no truth that doesn’t presuppose a system of symbols, be they only coordinates. There’s no truth that doesn’t ‘falsify’ established ideas” (N, 126). When he and Guattari interact as mutual intercessors, each falsifies the other, “which is to say that each of us understands in his own way notions put forward by the other” (N, 126). The generative process of their collaboration requires an openness to the other’s different understanding of a concept, and a subsequent development of understandings through a mutual undoing of each other’s initial understandings. Intercession is a form of positive dissonance, made possible through an openness to interferences that disturb one’s regular harmonic vibrations. Intercessors falsify one another in various ways, via divergences in concepts (philosophy), sensations (the arts), theoretical models (the sciences), strategies (politics), via interventions across boundaries delimiting conventional fields of activity, and so on. “These capacities of falsity [Ces puissances du faux, literally, “These powers of the false”] to produce truth, that’s what intercessors are about” (N, 126). Deleuze relates the process of intercession not only to individual creativity in diverse domains but also to the formation of community, to “the constitution of a people” (N, 125-26). Deleuze frequently cites Paul Klee’s observation that the modern artist cannot simply engage “the people” since it is precisely “the people” that is missing. Hence, Deleuze sees the need to fashion a “people to come” (WP, 218), a future, yet-to-be collectivity that has a genuine cohesiveness and functionality. As we saw earlier, Spinoza’s notion of the body as a composite of differential speeds and affects invites a conception of community as a compound body, one in which the point and counterpoint of multiple organisms produce a larger “symphony of Nature.” Such a compound body is not something stable but an essentially dynamic, metamorphic process, a mutual becoming-other of multiple bodies engaged in unpredictable unshapings and reshapings of one another. A people to come “are not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-revolutionary.”15 The object of art is to fashion a people to come, and to do so artists engage in what Deleuze calls “fabulation,” an activation of the “powers of the false” that dissolves conventional social categories and codes and invents new possibilities for life. Artists cannot fabulate alone, however. They must have intercessors who help them undo their own presuppositions, intercessors who themselves enter into fabulation with artists in the formation of a collectivity as process. Nor is the creation of a people to come the responsibility of artists alone. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari delineate philosophy from non-

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philosophy by emphasizing the differences between philosophy, the sciences and the arts, but they conclude that all three domains meet in the common goal of inventing a people. The three domains extract from chaos the shadow of the ‘people to come’ in the form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth: mass-people, world-people, brainpeople, chaos-people—non-thinking thought that lodges in the three, like Klee’s nonconceptual concept or Kandinsky’s internal silence. It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly accompanies them. (WP, 218)

Clearly, the partition of Deleuze’s immanent ethics into discrete components is artificial at best. My assignment of amor fati to the past, vice-diction to the present, and belief in this world to the future is designed only to highlight shades of emphasis in these interrelated concepts, no one of which can be understood outside a single conception of time as the unfolding of the immanent event. My separation of individual from collective motifs in Deleuze’s ethical thought is likewise merely provisional, for the individual taking form in amor fati, vice-diction, and belief in this world is always merging with a multiplicity in formation. The body of differential speeds and affective intensities is inseparable from the world it selects, and its contrapuntal relations are always available for the constitution of compound bodies of indeterminate size. The Other is never a single other, but always the sign of many possible worlds, and in a genuine encounter self and other mutually dissolve in a plane of immanence from which emerges an actual world, itself a multiplicity. The invention of a people to come is the goal of philosophy, but also of thought in general, whether in the arts, sciences, politics, or any number of other domains, for the invention of a people is one with the creation of possibilities for life. To think and to act creatively is to enter into the creative unfolding of the cosmos, to participate in a metamorphic experimentation on ourselves and our world in the hopes of bringing forth something new that enhances our capacities for affecting and being affected. Deleuze’s ethics is immanent in that it is inseparable from the universe’s ongoing self-creation, from the virtual event’s perpetual actualization of possible worlds.

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Notes 1

Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220-39. 2 Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Henceforth WP. 3 For an extended treatment of the theme of immanence in Deleuze’s thought, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (London: Continuum, 2003), 46-66. Much of my discussion follows from Smith’s incisive analysis. Henceforth BDD. 4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 251. Henceforth DR. 5 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 100-101. Henceforth LOS. 6 In LOS, 150-52, the concept goes by the name of “counter-actualization.” 7 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 171. Henceforth C2. 8 Spinoza, Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley and ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). [Ethics III, 2, scholium (280).] 9 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 122. Henceforth SPP. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 85. 11 Deleuze and Guattari also discuss the concept of the other and the screaming face in What Is Philosophy? (16-19). My own analysis of the Other combines elements found in both Difference and Repetition and What Is Philosophy?. 12 I am indebted to James Williams (BDD, 208-10) for pointing out the ethical implications of Deleuze’s discussion of the Other. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 125. Henceforth N. 14 Martin Joughin translates “intercesseurs” as “mediators” in Negotiations, certainly a legitimate rendering of the French word. I have substituted “intercessors” for “mediators” in my citations of his translation since in my judgment “intercessors” suggests more strongly the notion of intervention than does “mediators.” 15 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.

PART THREE: MEDITATIONS ON GLOBALIZATION

CHAPTER VII THE GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT OF WESTERN MODERNITY1 BRET W. DAVIS

A Post-Modern Dilemma Modernity radically displaces us; it strips us of the diversity of our local roots and relocates us in a progressively homogeneous space of technological and economic calculation. There is, to be sure, much to be applauded in the spread of the modern ethos; the technological advances and political freedoms it brings are undeniably significant. And yet, even its most cherished beacons also caste their shadows. Modernity distributes the right and material means to pursue happiness, at the same time as it threatens to reduce this pursuit to a hedonistic satisfaction of base desires. Modern information technology promises to make knowledge available to everyone, as long as all are reeducated to speak its idiom and play by the rules of its language game. Modern society breaks down the walls of parochialism, and yet in the process it displaces us from the local contexts which were the bearers of meaning, tradition and community. However, let us be clear from the beginning that there can be no simple retreat to the pre-modern. A reactive opposition which thinks in mere counter-terms offers no viable solution to the displacements of modernity. Nostalgia is a symptom that perilously suggests that we should or even could simply retreat from the march of progress. We find a related problem today in the often violent (re)assertions of national and/or ethnic identity, assertions which generally have more to do with a regressive xenophobia and hyper-conservatism than with any genuine attempt to creatively rethink and preserve the sense of locality. Hence, we must not simply rebel and in haste assert some contrived form of the “anti-modern.” It is not only that there is much to be valued in

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such modern institutions as those of human rights and modern medicine, but also that any movement which merely opposes modernity simply plays the role of “antithesis” in modernity’s own dialectical economy of progress; the “anti-modern” simply reassures one that the rote repetition of modern tropes is still more important than the more difficult task of selfquestioning. It is thus not in rejection of the Enlightenment spirit of emancipation (which indeed effectively broke the bonds of feudal and parochial hierarchies and raised to consciousness ethnic and class inequalities), but through its radicalization—even to the point of selfcritique—that we question modernity. “We” are children of modernity, and draw on its resources even as we attempt to outgrow its limits and excesses.2 Nevertheless, these limits and excesses of modernity are real. In questioning modernity, one finds oneself recoiling from the hubris of such practices as the technological manipulation of life, the anthropocentric destruction of nature, and the quasi-imperialistic homogenization of cultures. The post-modern, in the sense in which this much debated term will be used here, is much more of a condition than a creed. It is a state of finding oneself in mourning for the loss of local places of habitation, while at the same time aware of the dangers of nostalgia. The post-modern is thus a consciousness of the dilemma of modernity, that is to say, an awareness of being caught between two horns or “pinched between two boards” (as the Japanese word for dilemma, itabasami, literally means): between an acute sense of the displacing and disorienting effects of modernity on the one hand, and an acknowledgement of the dangers of any simple re-placement for this loss, on the other. There is one deceptive trait of modernity which shall be of particular concern to us here. Modernity is not only the non-place or the anti-place; modernization does not only strip a culture of its place or sense of locality. Modernity too has its roots; it too has a particular history in a particular location. We see this most clearly in the fact that in non-Western cultures “modernization” is inseparable from “Westernization.” A critique of “the place of modernity” involves showing that its banner of “universality” is often a mask covering up a quasi-imperialistic expansion of a particular locality. This is not to doubt that this expanding locality has much to offer other lands; but by systematically reducing the other-developed to the under-developed, and a different-knowledge to a lack-of-knowledge, the West not only displaces the non-West, it also loses the opportunity to learn from its encounters with these other places and their cultures. From the other side, “globalization” comes to mean for non-Western countries, not a

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sharing of insights or a dialogue concerning differences, but a discarding of the devalued old for a seat in the hierarchy of the new. To speak of a “global displacement of Western modernity,” however, is not only to call attention to the distressing fact that the various local cultures of the world are being progressively dislodged by the spread of modern Western culture; it is also to call for a thoughtful response—as distinct from a violent reaction—to this displacement by means of critical and self-critical conversation. Reflecting on the “global displacement of Western modernity” is not just meant to summon a nostalgic mourning of the loss of the local places that are being steadily uprooted by the unilateral extension of the modern Western ethos; it is also meant to help call for a multilateral dialogue on how to carefully yet radically displace or decenter the “displacing place” of Western modernity itself. Displacing the hegemony of this displacing place, the local places of the globe could then learn to build a dialogical unity-in-diversity, a circle of exchange without a center, wherein modern Western culture too could find its proper place.

The Modern Loss of Place The displacement (or “disembedding” as Anthony Giddens puts it3) of communities and individuals from meaning-bestowing localities and traditions, and their relocation in a passive “absolute space” which yields to anthropocentric calculation rather than submitting humans to the guidance/dominion of nature and tradition, is an often remarked characteristic of modernity. In great historical as well as phenomenological detail, Edward Casey has most thoroughly treated this loss of place, and it is to his work that I shall turn in this section.4 In tracing the fateful disappearance of place over the course of the history of Western thought, Casey shows how, despite the fact that place was a primary category of thought for the ancient Greeks, the modern “grand narratives” of space and time have usurped the place of place. Casey writes: “In the past three centuries in the West—in the period of ‘modernity’—place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed.”5 This modern usurpation was prepared in part by fourteenth-century theologians who identified God’s immensity with the unending universe, an identification which led to the disempowerment of place (locus) and its replacement by “space” (spacium). “From here it is but a short step to the Renaissance preoccupation with the outright physical infinity of the universe.”6 Building on Descartes notion of space as indefinite “extension” (extensio), “Western philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries assume that places are merely momentary subdivisions of a universal space quantitatively determined in its neutral homogeneity.”7 This conception of an infinite homogenous space then left no room for local places other than as “sites” which have their uniqueness only in terms of their coordinates on a grid of calculation. As opposed to, for example, the Navajo culture in which personal identity is intimately bound to the unique traits of the land on which one dwells, “for the modern self, all places are essentially the same: in the uniform, homogeneous space of a Euclidean-Newtonian grid, all places are essentially interchangeable. Our places, even our places for homes, are defined by objective measures.”8 Our age is one where cities and whole cultures are being restructured according to a sight which sees only sites; places to experience local cuisine are replaced by familiar fast food chains designed for minimum temporal and economic expenditure; pathways which bend with the terrain are replaced by bulldozed highways in order to get us to the next site/sight faster. This fixation on speed is another essential feature of our modern displacement. Casey illustrates how the idea of infinite homogeneous space, which already “suggests the possibility of unlimited control,”9 in turn gave way in modernity to a certain metaphysical priority of time. Beginning with Leibniz and Kant and stretching as far as Bergson and the early Heidegger, modern philosophy is characterized by a kind of “temporocentrism”; “time is conceived in such a way that everything else is made subjacent to it, beginning with place and ending with space.” We thus find “the long arm of modernism” in the ruling notion of “linearized time—the time of ‘progress’ and of infinite succession.”10 Modern temporocentrism has led to our contemporary “dromocentrism”; that is to say, “not just time but speeded-up time (dromos connotes ‘running,’ ‘race,’ ‘racecourse’) is of the essence of the era.”11 In the end, as in the “space-time continuum” of modern physics, homogenous space and linear time, or their technological anthropocentric (in)versions, are complementary in their formation of modern life as one which excludes a genuine consideration of place. “We calculate, and move at rapid speeds, in time and space. But we do not live in these abstract parameters; instead we are displaced in them and by them.”12 Whether one is left floundering behind, crushed on the beaches, or successfully riding the wave of the information technology revolution, we increasingly find ourselves without place. Those who can “surf” the internet (which means first of all those who can economically afford the computer “surfboard”) can be “virtually” almost anywhere, but more and more “really” nowhere; our homes are transformed into log-on sites; our bodies, experienced as nothing more

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than unfortunate reminders of spatial and temporal finitude, are progressively reduced to machines of desire and consumption. Casey writes that as “moderns and postmoderns in the Eurocentric West, we too are displaced persons …. Our symptoms … of place pathology in present Western culture are [in fact] strikingly similar to those of the Navajo: disorientation, memory loss, homelessness, depression, and various modes of estrangement from self and others.”13 We too are in need of rethinking locality and place. For, as Casey argues, “[place] brings with it the very elements sheared off in the planiformity of site: identity, character, nuance, history.”14 “If it is distinctly postmodern to wish to return to place,” writes Casey, “this is so even if the most promising patterns for the return are often distinctively premodern in inspiration.”15 He claims elsewhere that not only “pre-modern,” but also the “non-modern” traditions of non-Western cultures can often provide this inspiration.16 Indeed, two of his most important sources for rethinking place are the Native American cultures and the Japanese poet Bashǀ.17 It is important to note here that the loss of place is not merely a matter of the loss of homeland or Heimat narrowly conceived. Travel between places is intimately connected with dwelling in place.18 Finding (one’s) place is perhaps as much a matter of experiencing other places/places of others as it is a matter of rediscovering one’s home by way of what Hölderlin called “homecoming through the foreign.” And certainly there should always be room for those who choose rather to homestead in (what was initially) the foreign. To problematize modern hyper-mobility must not be taken to mean that we should freeze traditions and persons in their isolated locals, but rather that we should rethink the nature and pace of movement and change as part of rediscovering and rethinking place.

Questioning the Space of the Global The condition of post-modernity calls on us not only to critically and creatively rethink many Western traditions, which were at times hastily discarded under the banners of progress and science, but also to open ourselves beyond the Eurocentrism of modern discourse to an appreciation of and dialogue with other localities and their cultures. But in this reaffirmation of the local how can we rediscover our sense of place without falling into either an eclectic relativism or a reactionary provincialism? On the other hand, what kind of global space would allow for the non-exclusive co-existence of a plurality of localities? What is “globalization,” and what should it mean? Does it merely negate local cultures, traditions, languages; does it simply preserve them in

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rigid distinction; does it perhaps “negate and preserve,” that is aufheben them into a larger “concrete universal?” Or could globalization be thought in the direction of, to use a phrase from Gadamer, a dialogical “unity in diversity?”19 And yet before considering its possibilities we must take a realistic look at its present actuality. As Fred Dallmayr writes, it is commonplace today to speak of globalization as “the steady emergence of a worldwide community or ‘cosmopolis.’” But it is “equally commonplace to note the directional bent of this process: its close linkage with Westernization.”20 While many people in non-Western cultures may in fact tend to uncritically embrace the importation of Western customs, there is an attitude of ambivalence on this matter in the minds of many others. For on the one hand the “shrinking of the world” into a “global village” means an increase in cross-cultural communication and an overcoming of provincialism and xenophobia. And yet, on the other hand, the perceptive eye cannot fail to see that the “common ground” on which cultures are meeting is neither neutral nor balanced. Despite the gradual increase of a genuine interest in non-Western thought and practices (not to be confused with—though by no means always easily separated from—the more problematic influx of fashionable “ethnic” commodities), the West is not becoming in any significant sense “non-Westernized”—at least not anywhere near the degree to which the non-West is becoming Westernized on every level from clothing to education and even to language. Following the philosophical loss of faith in the “grand narrative” of single-track historical development (where Westernization would simply be equatable with “progress”), the phenomenon of “globalization” has thus begun to appear much more questionable.21 We see this ambivalence clearly in the case of the de facto rise of English as the “international language.” While genuinely facilitating an increase in cross-cultural communication on the one hand, on the other hand it inevitably installs a hierarchy within the space of international dialogue. Moreover, as English words flood into other languages, this hierarchy gets internalized, such that even to speak ones own language one has to defer to the authority of the English language. Such power relations are in turn reproduced among the speakers of a non-English language, where English words can be rhetorically employed to create a false sense of objectivity and persuasiveness, even when, or precisely because, the meaning is not wholly understood by the listener (and at times by the speaker as well). Could there ever be a truly unbiased universal world, a global village which is not founded on the quasi-imperialistic22 expansion of a particular locality? In this regard, we must ask ourselves whether the current world

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order resembles the model of a “universal empire” more than a true “cosmopolis.” Casey marks an important distinction between the “universe” and the “cosmos.” “‘Uni-verse’, universum in its original Latin form, means turning around one totalized whole. … In contrast, ‘cosmos’ signifies the particularity of place; taken as a collective term, it signifies the ingrediency of places in discrete place-worlds.”23 A true “cosmopolis,” therefore, promises a unity-in-diversity, wherein differences are shared and respected in a centerless dialogue. And yet, as Casey claims, the history of the medieval-modern West is rather “a tale of the gradual ascendency of the universe over the cosmos.” The totalized whole of the universe, he argues, is “the passionate single aim of Roman conquest, Christian conversion, early modern physics, and Kantian epistemology.”24 This movement is reaching a kind of climax in the shrinking of the world into a “global village,” not in any positive sense but as that “placeless place” which nevertheless has its center in a definite culture and location. This “encroachment of an indifferent sameness-ofplace on a global scale,” Casey suggests, is a crisis which paradoxically may serve to bring with it “a revitalized sensitivity to place.” Shock in the face of the homogenization of global space, to the extent where at times one cannot tell which city or even which country one is in, “makes the human subject long for a diversity of places, that is, difference-in-place, that has been lost in a worldwide monoculture based on Western (and, more specifically, American) economic and political paradigms.”25 As we have stressed above, and as Casey too is quick to point out, this longing must not, above all, give way to reactive and superficial assertions of uniqueness; for such reactive particularism undermines not only the unity of hegemony, but also that of dialogue. Yet how can we construct a place of dialogue which would bring cultures together without forcing one to speak the idiom of the other? Even if we admit that at some level the line must be drawn such that “liberal democracy” (as itself a particular attempt to create this neutral space) is not only a respect for differences but must at times also be “a fighting creed,”26 how do we keep the extension of this Western democratic space from imposing its own cultural order of place?

A Global Circle without a Center? How do we make the global space a place of dialogue and not one of coercive (overt or subtle) conformity? In this regard Habermas, for example, attempts to salvage and fulfill what he sees as “the unfinished project of modernity” by rethinking reason

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dialogically. He does this by locating rational discourse not in the early modern model of subjective consciousness, but in the inter-personal realm of communicative action. He attempts to deduce certain norms of argumentation from the communicative use of language as such, thus formulating a “universal pragmatics” with rules that everyone—in so far as they wish to enter into linguistic communication—is obligated to observe, regardless of their cultural beliefs and practices. Such universal imperatives include commitments to comprehensibility, to truth, to appropriateness (with regard to existing norms and values), and to sincerity. In this manner he attempts to deduce a normative structure for the creation of an impartial democratic space wherein dialogue could take place between conflicting concrete cultural forms of life.27 And yet Habermas’s critics, such as Lyotard who stresses the radical heterogeneity of “language games” even at the level of their most general rules,28 have forcefully pointed out elements of a Eurocentric modernity which remain in his thought. Habermas has been criticized for privileging one specific form of communication, namely that of rational argument between “validity claims,” and one specific type of human being, namely the rationally autonomous agent, in other words, the modern (Western) subject. In this regard it is not surprising that his universal pragmatics is augmented by an evolutionary and teleological view of society which aims at modernization (and by implication Westernization). On the other hand, the staunch critics of modernity who (overly?) stress the radical alterity of the participants in any dialogue (in this regard note that Lyotard’s “agonistics” assumes that “to speak is to fight”) are sometimes criticized for undermining the possibility of mutual understanding (or even mutual letting-be) as such. While vigilantly respecting the unassimilatable otherness of cultures, their thought at times threatens to have the side-effect of legitimizing a retreat back into a nondialogical assertion of particularity. In this regard, however, we should note that Derrida writes that a stress on the otherness of other cultures must be thought together with a critique of reified self-identity, and thus in the direction of “neither monopoly nor dispersion,” that is, beyond both terms of the false choice of “either Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism.”29 Although we cannot here enter further into this ongoing debate,30 I would like to add to it the following point. Together with the self-critical attempt of Western thought to locate a place for global dialogical encounter, should we not also be actively open to possible non-Western resources for this endeavor? That is to say, non-Western traditions should not only be allowed in once the place for encounter is established, but

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from the beginning need to be included in the “dialogue concerning the very terms and place of dialogue.” Somewhat exceptional among Western philosophers and political theorists in this regard,31 Dallmayr attempts to look beyond the Western horizon for resources for thinking the place of global dialogue. He finds one such resource in the East Asian Buddhist notion of nothingness or emptiness (sunyata). Contemporary democratic theory, he writes, has discovered “a hollow or negativity in the heart of democracy,” that is, it has begun to articulate “popular democratic sovereignty in terms of an ‘empty place.’”32 Claude Lefort, for example, writes that of all the regimes known to us modern democracy is “the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and to have maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real.”33 Connecting this idea with the central notion of East-Asian Buddhism, particularly as it has been developed by Nishida Kitarǀ and other philosophers of the Kyoto School, Dallmayr suggests that “just at the time when Western-style democracy is experiencing a worldwide affirmation allowing us to speak of a process of global democratization, democratic politics discovers in itself a non-actuality or a hidden hollow, a hollow whose understanding can be greatly assisted by the rich Buddhist legacy of sunyata.”34 In dialogue with Western philosophy Nishida develops this East Asian Buddhist notion in his philosophy of the “place of absolute nothingness.” Although at times he refers to this place as the highest “universal” (ippansha), in direct contrast to the centered totality of the universum, the ultimate “universal” of “absolute nothingness” is said rather to be “the world as the self-determination of a circle with no circumference and no center.”35 Nishida’s successor Nishitani Keiji, who no longer uses the “metaphysical language” of “universals” at all, speaks in this regard of the “field of emptiness” as a circle without a circumference whose “center is everywhere.”36 This tradition indeed promises to help us think an empty place which is not merely a negative vacuity, together with a notion of self-emptying which is not merely ascetic or passive, but which is a concrete practice of overcoming ego/ethnocentrism and opening up to a unity-in-difference with others. Of course, there certainly does not exist a ready-made political theory of emptiness in the East which would satisfy the demands modern democratic theory—and indeed, given the actual historical applications and misapplications of this fundamentally religious notion in the arena of politics, we must proceed carefully when making these connections.37 Nevertheless Dallmayr points to an interesting possibility for an Eastern contribution to the construction or discovery of a place for global

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dialogue—a democratic and dynamic empty place that would let local places both maintain their uniqueness as well as freely interact to form new discourses, traditions, places.

Rethinking the Place of the Local But how would local places preserve and creatively develop their own particularity without falling into localism; and, on the other hand, how would they “globalize” themselves without dissolving into the placeless place of Western modernity? Rounding out the suggestion that Nishida’s thought of “the place of absolute nothingness” can assist us in thinking the open forum of global encounter, let us ask what Nishida’s thought offers with regard to thinking the dynamic role of local traditions in a possible global unity-in-diversity.38 Nishida affirmatively characterizes the modern age as one of globalization, but nevertheless warns that modernity threatens to lead to a one-sided negation of local traditions. While on the one hand stressing that history always proceeds by way of individuals creatively negating tradition, on the other hand he argues that knowledge and individuality, not to mention community, cannot exist without tradition. Tradition is a dynamic process wherein “the new is guided by the old and, at the same time, the new changes the old.”39 But the modern world, Nishida claims, is one in which the original dynamic “unity in contradiction” of the subjective and objective is split apart, giving rise to the one-sided stances of “naturalism” and “subjectivism.” Both of these misunderstand and depreciate tradition, and thus fail to see in it “the principle of the constitution of historical reality.” It is only by grasping tradition as a “catalyst” for the creative formation of historical reality that true individuality is born. Hence, in the modern world when humans simply negate tradition, they also negate the possibility of true individuality. Instead the modern world threatens to become merely “an immanent world which is nothing but the expansion of the ego.”40 While not proffering any simple retreat from the tradition-negating effects of modernization (indeed he sees this negation as a necessary stage in the formation of a “global humanity” which transcends self-enclosed ethnic particularities),41 Nishida also argues that we must go beyond this stage of negation by creatively developing the local traditions in the different regions of the world. Ultimately this development is not a retreat from globalization, but is for the sake of “contributing to world culture.” This ultimate goal is not, he clearly states however, a matter of a universal

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world culture which would cancel out the uniqueness of individual traditions. A culture which has lost its particularity, he says, is no longer a culture. Rather, the ideal is that “the various cultures, while maintaining their own individual standpoints, would develop themselves through the mediation of the world, whereby a true world culture would be formed.”42 We must then go beyond the modern one-sided negation of tradition to recover that dynamic and creative development of tradition which alone lets us, to some extent, transcend the limits of our local perspectives and enter into global dialogue. Once again however, as Nishida warns, we must at the same time be aware of the danger of simply reasserting an exclusive provincialism. For example, while the Japanese resistance to the very real threat of Western political and cultural imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century may indeed be understandable,43 the reactionary assertion of “Japanism,” and in particular its emulation of Western imperialism in the attempt to forcefully take over and represent its Asian neighbors in what was called the “East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” was deeply problematic.44 Fighting a conceptual war simultaneously on two fronts (against Western and Japanese ethnocentrism), Nishida wrote that “until now Westerners have thought that their own culture is the most superior human culture that exists, and that human culture inevitably develops in the direction of their own culture—hence as Easterners and other peoples who are lagging behind advance forward they must become the same as [Westerners].”45 Even some Japanese, he notes, think this way. And yet, Nishida objects, “there is something radically different in [the culture of] the East.” The development of the West will subsume this difference no more than the East will subsume the West. Even if humanity does share a common root, an “ur-culture” of multiple possibilities, development is a matter of diversification, not homogenization. Globalization should thus rather be thought of as many limbs of the same tree supplementing each other in both their deep-rooted commonality and their irreducible diversity. In the attempt to walk a middle road between Eurocentrism and Japanism, or rather in an attempt to escape this pendulum swing altogether, Nishida claimed in that turbulent time that the Japanese must not “simply boast of their particularity,” as this entails an odious “strict exclusion of that which is different,” but rather must think what unique contribution to world culture can be made from the particular standpoint of the Japanese cultural heritage.46

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Globalization: Cultural Imperialism or Multilateral Dialogue? Let us return in conclusion to the contemporary situation. Although it is important not to lose sight of the very real political and technological contributions that the West has made to other cultures, it is also important to note that these can be mixed blessings. “Technology,” for its part, is not merely a neutral tool, but rather a powerful cultural attitude toward the world which displaces traditional conceptions of human beings and nature. Heidegger, for example, understood modernization/Westernization to be a matter of an irresistible spread of “technology” as that “way of revealing beings” which reduces them to “standing-reserve” (Bestand)—i.e., stockpiles of material to be ordered about by humans who hubristically posits themselves as “lords over the earth.” In this context Heidegger speaks critically of the “Europeanization of the world” as leading to the “disappearance (for the moment or for always?) of the regional-ethnically [landschaftlich-volkhaft] grown national cultures in favor of the preparation and ordering of a world-civilization.”47 The globalization/Westernization of cultures that we are today witnessing is largely a quasi-imperialistic expansion of a locality, and regrettably not the unity-in-diversity that one would hope it could be (and which it often pretends to be). It is not a world united by way of attunement to the earth as our shared natural environment, much less to the uniqueness of each locality and individual within the “place of absolute nothingness,” but is rather the largely one-directional spread of one particular regional culture, one universalizing “place of being.” And even if this contemporary “quasi-voluntary cultural colonialism” is indeed preferable to previous politically coerced forms of cultural unification— for at least Westernization today proceeds formally according to the rule of consensus (even if informally it subtly institutes and internalizes a hierarchy which, as Foucault and others have taught us, can be more powerful than any external coercion)—it is still highly problematic. Why is globalization as a quasi-imperialistic cultural homogenization problematic? Let us summarize here in conclusion three reasons: 1) The loss of local cultures leaves the local inhabitants displaced, progressively relocated in the cyberspace of a world hierarchy. “Modernization” spreads like an irresistible drug the particularly modern Western (and above all American) problem of displacement, the history and effects of which we have discussed above.

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2) This loss of the rich diversity of cultures48 is a loss for all of us in that local cultures, in some ways analogous to the disappearing rain forests, harbor untold sources for understanding and responding to problems that we must face together and in dialogue. This is not to say that diversity is an absolute good, for in many cases the benefits of modernization may in fact outweigh the expenses of cultural homogenization or even a degree of cultural colonization. And yet, on the other hand, the culture of Western modernity should not be offered as an absolute good, but rather needs to be presented in all its ambiguities, which means not only selling its solutions but also self-critically exposing its problems. One of these problems is precisely the loss of place that was our topic here, and one of the tasks for intercultural dialogue involves a recovery of a sense of local place which neither succumbs to global conformism nor falls back into an exclusive regionalism. 3) Finally, then, globalism thought as homogenizing universalism— which in fact ends up instituting a hierarchical cultural relation— is problematic in that it builds up a pressure which can explode, or rather “implode” back into a reactive assertion of ethic or national particularism. Unless we find a way to open up a place for genuine global dialogue (i.e. neither a one-sided monologue nor a mere agonistic argument), we are destined to live in the pendulum swing between “the (mutually reinforcing) dystopias of global bureaucracy and of xenophobic fragmentation or exclusivism,” that is to say, in “a world rent by the competing pulls of Western-style universalism and bellicose modes of ethnocentrism.”49 Globalization should not mean an uncritical homogenization according to Western or American models of knowledge and culture; it must rather be the creation of a place of dialogue, a place wherein different perspectives can be shared and respected, and a dynamic and malleable place which is itself constructed in the ongoing course of this pluralistic conversation. The “global displacement of Western modernity” is thus to be understood finally as a dialogical critique of the way in which Western modernity displaces us, that is, the way it undermines local cultures while re-placing them in a cultural hierarchy that itself suffers from an internal dissolution of place. This loss of place is a problem that Westerners need to face together with people of non-Western cultures, learning with and

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from them, and not only unquestioningly contributing to the spread of the increasingly placeless place of Western modernity.

Notes 1

An earlier version of this chapter was published as “The Displacement of Modernity” in Dokkyo International Review 14 (2001): 215–235. 2 In this regard it is true that the very values by which we shall problematize the phenomena of “cultural imperialism” have particular historical and cultural provenances, including “the liberal values of respect for the plurality of ‘ways of living.’” See John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 6. 3 See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 17ff. Also see ibid., 40–43, where Giddens considers the possibility of “reembedding” or the “recreation of locality” in the space of globalizing modernity. 4 Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 5 Casey, Getting Back Into Place, xiv. 6 Casey, The Fate of Place, 333–334. 7 Casey, The Fate of Place, 134. 8 Cisco Lassiter, “Relocation and Illness: The Plight of the Navajo,” in David Michael Levin, ed., Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 226, quoted in Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 38. 9 Casey, The Fate of Place, 338. 10 Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 8. 11 Casey, The Fate of Place, xiii. 12 Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 38. 13 Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 37–38. 14 Casey, The Fate of Place, xiii. 15 Casey, Getting Back Into Place, The Fate of Place, xiv. 16 See Casey, The Fate of Place, 201. 17 See Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 280ff. 18 The last chapter of Getting Back into Place, where Casey discusses Bashǀ’s autobiographical account of his journeys, is given the appropriately ambiguous subtitle: “Homeward Bound: Ending (in) the Journey.” 19 Gadamer claims that “Unity in diversity, and not uniformity or hegemony—that is the heritage of Europe” (Thomas Pantham, “Some Dimensions of the Universality of Philosophical Hermeneutics: A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 9 [1992]: 132, as quoted in Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], xiii). Gadamer suggests that

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such unity in mutual respect for differences is in fact the “true heritage of the European humanities [Geisteswissenschaften].” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Das Erbe Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 30–31 and 35–62. While welcoming the new opportunities for overcoming intolerance and increasing mutual understanding, Gadamer warns that “The tendency today toward a unification and a blurring of all differences must not seduce us into the error of thinking that the rooted pluralism of cultures, languages, and historical destinies can truly be or even should be suppressed” (ibid., 58–59). On the contrary, he claims, it is not an erasing of differences but is rather “the strength of the certainty of one’s own [cultural] existence that leads to the possibility of tolerance.” 20 Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 175. 21 See Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 143–144 and 154–55; Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 150ff.; and Cornelius Castoriadis, “Reflections on ‘Rationality’ and ‘Development,’” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis, 175– 218. 22 I have been writing “quasi-imperialistic” in this regard because the “coercion” involved in contemporary “cultural imperialism” is largely different in kind from that of the political and economic varieties of “imperialism proper” (even though it is complexly intertwined with the history of the latter). The former is often now less a matter of one group willfully imposing its culture on another, and more a matter of a complex structural and institutional usurpation in which both the colonizer and the colonized participate largely unconsciously and/or quasivoluntarily. Tomlinson is thus right to criticize and qualify the notion of “cultural imperialism” when it is used rhetorically to impute an act of overt coercion where matters are far from this simple. And yet in my view, however, he goes too far in his tendency to reduce the import of the various discourses of cultural imperialism to “(in some cases inchoate) protests against the spread of (capitalist) modernity” (Cultural Imperialism, 173). For alongside the temporal-historical interpretation that Tomlinson stresses, it is in fact still necessary to also understand cultural imperialism in “spatial synchronic” terms (see ibid., 84). Modernization is still very much a matter of Westernization; and this not only because the West happened to “get their first,” but also because the cultural space of the West continues to dictate the very terms of what it means to be temporally modern. Moreover, while I share Tomlinson’s concern with the problem of paternalistically imputing a “false-consciousness” to the non-Westerner who eagerly imports Western culture (see ibid., 116ff.), a hyper-sensitivity to this danger of “speaking for others” should not allow us to fall back into a kind of anti-intellectualism or laissez-faire endorsement of, for example, subliminal marketing and uncritical consumerism. Perhaps Westerners who wish to seriously pursue the problem of cultural imperialism should not only confess their inability to understand and speak for anything non-Western, but should also make genuine efforts to learn other cultural idioms—even to the point of risking their own identity—just as so many non-Westerners continue to do with respect to the West. Only when the respect for the limits of one’s understanding of the Other is coupled with the (never-ending) practice of extending these limits will a multi-angled critique and a pluralistic dialogue become genuinely possible.

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Casey, The Fate of Place, 78. Ibid. 25 Casey, The Fate of Place, xiii. 26 See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 62. 27 Jürgen Habermas, in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); and Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990). 28 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv, xxv, 10 and 72–73. 29 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 13 and 41. 30 With regard to the debate over Habermas’ work, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Fredrick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995); and Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., The Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 31 Even Cornelius Castoriadis—while criticizing the way the West “thought of itself, and proposed itself, as the model for the entire World” (Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 180)—claims that Western culture does have one single “superiority” in that “It is the only one to have taken an interest in the existence of other cultures, to have interrogated itself about them and, finally, to have put itself in question, to have relativized itself … and it is starting from this that we think” (ibid., 200). And yet do not other cultures harbor this, or rather alternative possibilities of “taking an interest” in others? Moreover, as Castoriadis himself points out, has not the “interest” of the West in other cultures been problematically bound to a history of imperialistic subjugation and, even in its better moments, theoretical objectification? This problem too is where “we” start to think. Can we learn to think the very terms of global coexistence together with non-Western ways of thinking? I am sympathetic with Castoriadis when he concludes that the key to future transformations of society lies in neither idealizing nor vilifying either the West or the non-West, but in a dialogical junction between the two (see ibid., 218). 32 Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 176. 33 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 223-226, quoted in Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 194. 34 Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 195. 35 Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj [The Complete Works of Nishida Kitarǀ] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978), vol. 7, 208. 36 Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 158. 24

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Dallmayr writes of “the dangers and predicaments besetting any overt politicization of Buddhism, that is, any attempt to transform Buddhism from a stance of vigilant nonattachment into an instrument of manifest politics” (Beyond Orientalism, 196). In this regard we also need to critically reflect on the attempt of some Kyoto School philosophers to de-absolutize the Emperor of Japan by thinking of him as merely a “symbol of absolute nothingness.” 38 For two helpful accounts of Nishida’s thoughts on local tradition and globalization, see Agustín Jacinto Zavala, “Tradition and the Problem of Knowledge in Nishida Philosophy,” Dokkyo International Review 14 (2001): 91– 118, and Fujita Masakatsu, “Nihon-bunka, tǀyǀ-bunka, sekai-bunka: Nishida Kitarǀ no Nihon-bunka-ron” [Japanese Culture, Asian Culture, World Culture: Nishida Kitarǀ’s Theory of Culture], in Higashiajia to tetsugaku [East Asia and Philosophy], ed. Fujita Masakatsu et al. (Kyoto: Nakanishiya Press, 2003). 39 Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj, vol. 14, 384. 40 Ibid., 382. 41 See Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj, vol. 11, 457. 42 Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj, vol. 7, 452–453. 43 For a thorough history of this imperialistic threat, see K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (Great Britain: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959; reprint, USA: Collier Books, 1969). 44 Although Nishida clearly attempted to “resist from within” the totalitarian and imperialistic tendencies of the Japanese government at that time by engaging in what Ueda Shizuteru has called a “tug-of-war for the meaning of words” and slogans, his thought itself does not remain wholly innocent of this problematic scheme of the “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” The most problematic text in this regard can be found in Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj, vol. 12, 426–434. While in today’s political context (where we are threatened with the two extremes of global uniformity and reactionary national isolationism) the idea of regional spheres of cultural identity-in-diversity may appear to be an novel option worth consideration (indeed, the European Union is a kind of attempted “Co-prosperity Sphere”), in the context of Japanese imperialistic expansionism (where Japan was appointing itself as leader and arbiter of the regional sphere of Asia) this notion was perhaps irredeemably problematic; and hence Nishida’s loss of the semantic tug-of-war inevitable. On the hotly debated issue of Nishida and other Kyoto School thinkers’ positions with regard to Japanese imperialism, see James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), and Chris Goto-Jones (ed.), Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008). 45 In this paragraph and the next I will be quoting and summarizing mainly from Nishida Kitarǀ zenshnj, vol. 14, 402–406. 46 I have written in more depth and detail on the cross-cultural philosophies of the Kyoto School in Bret W. Davis, “Toward a World of Worlds: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and the Place of Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” in Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy, ed. James W. Heisig (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2006); Bret W. Davis, “Turns to and from Political Philosophy: The Case of Nishitani Keiji,” in Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, ed. Chris

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Goto-Jones; Bret W. Davis “The Kyoto School,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/kyoto-school/; and Bret W. Davis, “Dialogue and Appropriation: The Kyoto School as Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” in Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, ed. Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder and Jason M. Wirth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 47 From Heidegger’s letter to Takehiko Kojima published in Hartmut Buchner, ed., Japan und Heidegger (Meßkirch: Jan Thorbecke Verlag Sigmaringen, 1989), 223. In his “Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” Heidegger goes so far as to say that the “delusion [that the incontestable dominance of European reason is confirmed by the success of the rationality which underlies Western technological progress] is growing, so that we do not see how the Europeanization of humanity and of the earth attacks at the source everything that is of an essential nature” (On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 16, translation modified). 48 As an indication of the rate of this loss, it is predicted that during the present century at least half of the world’s 5000 languages will become extinct (see Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the Worlds Languages [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]). I have not found an estimate for the degree to which the remaining languages will have become thoroughly saturated with English vocabulary. Derrida discusses this difficult contemporary problem in a passage from a recent work that is worth quoting here. “Today, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages. They must learn the language of the masters, of capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better. A tragic economy, an impossible council. I do not know whether salvation for the other presupposes the salvation of the idiom” (Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 30). 49 Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 59.

CHAPTER VIII LIVING IN AN AGE OF EXCESS AND EXTREME POVERTY: OF GIVING, BUYING, AND SQUANDERING JAMES J. WINCHESTER

Of Giving I enjoy a good bottle of wine, particularly when it is coupled with a great meal. Actually I like to change my wines with each course. On occasion, I go to a restaurant that serves a different wine with every course. The wines are always superb and well matched. At $130.00 a person, I cannot afford to go there very often, but should I go there at all when two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Peter Singer argues that if we can, at little cost to ourselves, save the life of another, we are ethically obligated to do so.1 For Singer it does not matter if that other is a small child in our immediate vicinity or an adult half way around the world. If you accept Singer’s claim, it has important consequences for the way that many of us in the developed world lead our lives. Singer asks why we go out to expensive meals, drive expensive cars and live in expensive homes when we could be giving this money to save the life of others. Peter Unger, building on Singer’s work puts it this way.2 Unger argues that a $250.00 contribution to an aid agency like UNICEF or OXFAM can save the life of a child. Many children in the third world die from dehydration. Children under two are particularly susceptible. Given that one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water, and two billion do not have access to sewage systems, diarrheal diseases are rampant. Young children without access to clean drinking water are particularly susceptible to diarrhea and subsequent dehydration. Oral rehydration packets cost less than a dollar and are very effective in saving

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lives. Given that these aid agencies have large overhead costs, one must assume that the cost of delivering these services will be high, but $250.00 per life saved is a reasonable estimate. Even in the United States there is no guarantee of having enough to eat. In 1999, in the middle of the longest economic expansion in US history, 31 million people grappled with hunger or the fear of hunger”3 So for the price of dinner for two at a “fine” restaurant I could save a child’s life. Buy a ten-thousand dollar car instead of a thirty five thousand dollar car and we could save 100 children. Is the comfort of a Lexus worth the life of a child? More precisely, is the comfort of a Lexus worth the lives of 100 children? Singer argues that saving the life of another person is not simply a nice thing to do—it is not charity, but rather it is our duty. To spend money on things that we really don’t need is not just frivolous, it is morally wrong. He argues that we are morally obligated to give money away at least until we have sacrificed something of moral importance. One could even argue that we should give away money until we had to sacrifice something of equal moral worth. Singer admits that he himself does not live up to either of these standards. He gives away 20% of everything he earns, but by his own reasoning he should be doing more. He offers his argument that he should be doing more not merely as a form of self flagellation, but rather as an attempt to use reason to reform life. Using reason to figure out what one should be doing is the first step toward actually doing it.

Of Buying Some of those living on two dollars a day use to be the ones that helped me to wake up each morning. I like to start my day with a good cup of coffee. I am not alone. Coffee is one the largest traded commodities in the world—55 billion dollars a year. It is second only to oil. I have been known to pay more than two dollars for a cup at my local coffee shop and more than $10.00 a pound from a mail order house in San Francisco. That Sumatran that I ordered from San Francisco was really good! The laborers who grow and pick the coffee are often lucky, so I have read, to have $2.00 a day on which to live. We live in a strange world. Some of us spend on a single cup of coffee what others have to live on for an entire day. Many in the world have next to nothing—not enough to eat, not even clean water—even as some of the world’s poor produce many of the goods we consume every day. Like many Americans I try to keep my weight down and prevent heart disease by jogging. The World Health Organization recently reported that there are approximately 170 million children in poor

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countries that are underweight because of lack of food. “While more than a billion adults in the United States, Europe and middle income countries are thought to be obese or overweight.”5 In doing my best to reduce the number of overweight by one person, I buy Nikes for my three times a week jog. Who sews my shoes together and how much do they make? I would not knowingly buy a product made with slave labor, but by several accounts I am buying products that are made by workers who may not be making a living wage. John Arthur has argued against Singer that entitlements must be an important part of the moral equation. He argues that we should give some of what we make to help others, but are entitled to keep what we earn. Given that we have earned the two hundred thousand our house costs we are entitled to live in it. Given that we have earned the thirty or forty thousand the Lexus costs—or at least we have earned the monthly payments—we are entitled to drive one. Given that we earned the two hundred and fifty dollars that it costs to take ourselves and our significant other out to the Ritz, we are entitled to that meal, even if this means children will die. But are we entitled to these things? Have we have earned the right to pay $2.00 for a cup of “good” coffee, or $80 for a pair of sneakers, if we are buying a product that was made by someone who earns less than a living wage? Take the example of coffee. Worldwide coffee prices are in the pits. Vietnam has started to sell large amounts of coffee on the world markets and this has produced a glut in supply. Prices have dropped. Many farmers are receiving less per pound than it costs to grow the beans. Coffee beans are literally being left to rot on the bushes. Small farmers are particularly hard hit. In some countries land reform has made it possible for some farmers to own their own land. Some of these small farmers are losing everything that they have spent their life to accumulate. Many small farmers have worked for years eating little else but rice and beans trying to make a living out of growing coffee. Even in good years it is difficult to be a small farmer, these are catastrophic times for small coffee growers. Considering the desperately poor circumstances of many of the people who are growing the beans for our morning wake up call, how moral is it to drink a cup of coffee? There is something that most of us could do, buy fair trade coffee. Fair Trade is a certification that the growers of the coffee have received a livable wage. The extra money that fair trade brings is also used to improve the crops and half of the extra money is used to promote education, health and clean water. I buy fair trade coffee at my local health food store. You can also buy it on the Internet and recently it is showing up at more and more grocery stores. As I have said, I use to buy my coffee

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by mail order from San Francisco. At twelve dollars a pound the Sumatran coffee I used to buy was very good. My local health food store’s fair trade coffee costs less—eight to ten dollars a pound so I am saving money. Fair trade coffees from different countries are available including Peru, Indonesia, Columbia, and Mexico and as well as multiple roasts—French, espresso, and light. It is, to my palate, very good—perhaps not quite as good as what I bought before, but I am saving a few bucks. I am a convert to fair trade coffee. It is a rather painless way to try to help the farmers. My niece who has studied international relations and international business, extensively, suggests that buying fair trade coffee is really not doing much to help. In some sense of course she is right. But then again if I not only buy fair trade coffee, but convince all of you to buy it as well and you in turn convince your friends then perhaps things might change. My niece recently sent me an article from the Financial Times that stated that World wide fair trade items represent about 250 million dollars worth of trade.6 It is a small amount of the world’s total trade, but the more we think of it perhaps we will see it as an idea whose time has come. In England fair trade coffee is sold in supermarkets and has captured 6% of the coffee market. There has been a remarkable increase in the number of companies in the United States offering fair trade products. In 1999 there were 33 companies offering these products. Today there are more than 20,000 retail outlets offering Fair Trade certified products including Dunkin Doughnuts and my local supermarket. This is a movement that is not just limited to coffee. There are fair trade bananas, teas, juice, and coco. In a similar vein, some oriental rugs come with certificates that claim they have not been made by child labor. My children’s soccer balls are made in Pakistan, and have a claim written on them that child labor was not used to produce them. Of course we must insure that systems are in place to verify these claims. I am not at all averse to paying extra to insure that the people who make the things that I buy are making living wages. I really don’t want to wear clothes that are produced by laborers who are not making a living wage. And I think that there are many others who feel the same way. The problem is that many of us do not know very much about the means of production behind the products that we consume. A quick glance at the clothes and shoes we are wearing today will probably testify to the extent to which we live in a global market. Our supermarkets are chocked full of products from around the world. There are intense debates about the effects of globalization and I am not arguing that globalization is all bad, but we as consumers have the possibility to shape the course of globalization. I am rather trying to spur ethical reflections on the responsibility of the world’s rich to the poor. My

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question is: Do we want to buy products—coffee, clothes, shoes, or, for that matter, hamburgers, that are produced by people who are not making living wages? When we have the option, is it not our duty to seek out products that we know pay people a living wage? This seems like a very easy question to answer. I am not demanding that we buy only products produced by workers who make as much as well paid workers in the United States. I am only arguing that whenever possible, we should seek out and promote products that are produced by workers who receive a living wage. Exactly what constitutes a living wage will vary greatly from place to place. Clearly workers in the United States need to earn more than workers in Haiti. We could argue, for example, as to whether or not those working in fast food restaurants at minimum wage are receiving a living wage. I do not think that minimum wage workers are receiving living wages and I therefore do not feel entirely comfortable buying food in such restaurants. Given the choice, I will glad pay a bit more to eat in a restaurant that pays its help more and provides health insurance. Is it acceptable to continue to buy crops and products that are grown or manufactured by people who are not making living wages? The case for fair trade is particularly strong given the minimal cost of supporting these initiatives. Some people could argue that they don’t have the time to research each product that they buy in order to know whether or not the workers who produced it have received a living wage. But in the case of coffee someone has done the research. I know of no one who claims that fair trade coffee does not do what it claims to do. The success of fair trade suggests that there is a market for treating workers well. Price, in a market economy is not the only thing that matters. Consumers have long paid for the prestige of wearing designer labels many may very well pay for humane treatment of workers. The fact almost all major clothing manufactures have protocols for the treatment of workers shows that this issue is of concern to the producers. Cambodia is one country that is trying to market itself as a country that protects its textile workers. Consumer demand for goods produced in accordance with international labor standards is a market-based solution. The solution is not only to boycott the products of slave labor, but to create a market for those producers that treat their employees well. Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange argues that Nike could guarantee all of its workers in Indonesia a living wage by diverting less than 3 percent of its advertising budget.6 These wage increases could also be paid by very modest increases in the price of the products and surveys have suggested that consumers would be willing to pay a bit more to insure that workers receive a living

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wage. According to a survey done by Global Exchange, 84% of Americans would be willing to pay an extra dollar for an article costing $20.00 to assure that the article was not produced in a sweatshop.7 Within the United States there are enormous differences between rich and poor and many of the poor work either directly or indirectly for the rich. It is doubtful whether those working, for example, in fast food restaurants, cleaning companies or other low paid jobs in the United States are making a living wage. Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the Unites States has suffered under an avalanche of bad publicity lately. Several of their stores were being cleaned by illegal immigrants who worked seven days a week for below minimum wage. Target has recently settled a similar lawsuit. Wal-Mart has also been attacked for how it treats its sales force. There is a class action law suite pending against Wal-Mart alleging that it discriminates against women in its promotion practices. Barbara Ehrenreich reports in Nickled and Dimed: On not Getting By in America that she was not able to make ends meet on her Wal-Mart salary even though she had a car, did not have any children to support and worked a second job. She also told the stories of how difficult it was for others working there to survive on their salaries. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported that more than ten thousand employees of Wal-Mart relied in the State of Georgia on the state’s sponsored health insurance. Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the state, but the next largest employer had only 734 of its employees on the program.8 This is consistent with Ehrenreich’s recent report that more than half of Wal-Mart employees cannot afford the company’s health insurance.9 Clearly Wal-Mart is concerned about its image. Recent Wal-Mart advertisements on National Public Radio stress that Wal-Mart offers opportunities for career advancement and supports local communities and businesses. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but the advertisement is a telling sign of where the company’s believes its public relations problems lie. I am not arguing that these workers must receive the same wages that workers in the US receive. I am only arguing that workers throughout the world earn enough to support themselves and their families—a living wage. Exactly what constitutes a living wage is vague, but clearly the wage must allow workers to obtain food, shelter, health care and some leisure time. Paying living wages also provides for enhanced stability within nations. Capitalism cannot function very long when the only thing workers have to lose is their chains. Individuals should think about the patterns of their consumption, but we should also prod governments to act to insure workers’ rights.

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Given the choice, I think most people would be willing to pay a bit to insure that workers receive a living wage. The reason that the living wage movement has not gone further than it has is that we are often ignorant of the plight of others. It is much easier to accept the status quo when we have no direct knowledge of the suffering of others. It is all too easy to forget the suffering of the world—to forget the human cost that has gone into making the things that we eat, and the clothes that we wear. To the extent that we are ignorant of the suffering of the world it is easy to ignore it, but the more we become aware of the vast inequalities and the suffering that accompanies these inequalities the easier it is to see that we really ought to do something about it. It is particularly easy to see to the extent that we discover that people living in desperate conditions are supplying us with many of the products in particular food and clothing that we eat and wear. Doing a little research into the products that we buy and supporting the living wage movement is a rather painless way to do something. But this is perhaps only the beginning of our obligations.

Of Squandering The way that many of us in the United States are currently living robs the world’s resources to sustain our wasteful life styles. There is clearly enough food in the world to go around, but we in the United States feed a great deal of food to animals and this is a particularly wasteful way to live. Instead of using this grain to feed people we are wasting it on feeding cows. Only 11% of the energy we feed to cows goes into the production of beef. Each citizen in the US consumes one ton of grain. In India citizens consume less than one quarter ton. We waste energy by growing corn and then feeding it to cows. We use 33 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced while a small farmer in Mexico produces 83 calories of energy for every calorie of fossil fuel used. Iowa has lost more than half of its topsoil in less than a century.10 We are using up topsoil and the large underground water reserves to irrigate the Midwest’s production of grain. Cows fart large amounts of methane gases—20% of methane gases that are released into the atmosphere every year come from the farting of cows. This is the most potent of all greenhouse gasses— “methane traps 25 times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide.”11 We in the US pollute the world disproportionately. Oil, water, topsoil, and ozone are only a few of the natural resources that our wasteful lifestyles are rapidly depleting. Perhaps nothing illustrates the squandering of the world’s resources as much as the cars we drive. These cars are not only using up nonrenewable

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energy sources, but are contributing to global warming. A few argue that the scientific arguments for global warming and its affects are inconclusive, but the overwhelming consensus of reputable science suggests that we are causing the seas to rise because of the cars we drive and the power that we use. As the seas rise because of this warming, many low-lying areas are becoming unsuitable for habitation. Singer writes that as many as 70 million people living in Bangladesh could be affected by the rising seas and an equal number could be affected in China. Millions of farmers in Egypt, living close to the Nile could also be affected.12 It seems self evident that we should not waste the environment nor should we contribute to making some of the most densely populated land on earth uninhabitable.

Conclusion Stories of oppression make up a large part of our cultural heritage. The cruelty of Pharaoh to the Jews, the slave masters of the South to their slaves, the cruelty of the industrialists to the workers, are just a few of the stories that have come to encapsulate evil, but how much of our own lives is built on the exploitation of others? How many of the products we buy are produced by exploited workers? How many of the meals that we are served are prepared by the working poor from products that are produced by using up the earth? The problem of global inequalities is not just a problem of how much we the wealthy give, it is a problem of how much we are using of the world’s resources and how much of the comforts of our daily lives are purchased at the price of exploiting others. The more I think about this the less I go out to “fine” restaurants and the more I look for fair trade items and the more I give to alleviating the world’s abundant misery. We are justifiably saddened by the loss of life that occurred in the United States because of the events of September 11—3,062 according to the latest statistics.13 But consider that 30,000 children die every day before the age of five and the vast majority of these die from easily preventable diseases such as malaria and diarrheal diseases which are brought on by the lack of clean water. The more aware we become of the world’s poverty and the more aware we become of how the poor help us to maintain our lifestyles, the more pressing it becomes for us to figure out ways to reduce it.

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He makes this argument in many places. See, for example, his recent work, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Henceforth OW. 2 Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 The New York Times, September 10, 2000, 20. 4 As reported in The New York Times, Thursday, October 31, 2002. 5 See The Financial Times, March 5, 2002, 11. 6 Benjamin Medea, “Wages and Living Expenses for Nike Workers in Indonesia, Global Exchange,” September 1998. See: www.cleanclothes.org/companies/nike19-98. 7 “An Economic Analysis of Sweatshops in Developing Asia” This study was done by Global Exchange (WWW.GLOBALEXCHANGE.ORG). . 8 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 27, 2004. 9 Barbara Ehrenreich “Wal-Mart Invades Earth,” The New York Times, July 25, 2004. Ehrenreich contrasted Wal-Mart to Costco, another large retailer that insures 90 percent of its employees. 10 See Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? (Amherst and New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), 45. Henceforth HWL. 11 See HWL, 44-45. 12 OW, 18. 13 The New York Times, February 17, 2004, 12.

CHAPTER IX OUT OF LATIN AMERICAN THOUGHT — FROM RADICAL EXTERIORITY: PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE AGE OF PERNICIOUS KNOWLEDGE ALEJANDRO A. VALLEGA

“Contempt and disregard for what I ignore” is the lemma of the curious philosophers of destruction —Eduardo Galeano, To Be Like Them Latin America.... Its true history, its true reality, is a feast of creation. —Eduardo Galeano, To Be Like Them

Introduction The following pages intend to open a space for new directions in philosophical thought, namely a space that is not determined by the history, practices, and conceptual expectations of the subjective rationalism that sustains Western modern philosophy. With this intention in mind, I will not offer a detailed critique of Western thought and will outline some specific characteristics of modern philosophy as viewed from a Latin American perspective. This perspective takes its departure from the Western modern tradition by arising from what I will call total exteriority, and in doing so, it allows us to see the pernicious character of modern philosophy for those beyond the Western centers of economic, political, military, and epistemic power. Since my central aim is to call readers’ attention to the existence of other spaces and possibilities for thought, I will first make explicit some of the practices and expectations that organize modernity and obscure and deny other possible forms of thought.

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I will then explain how one might relocate thought in light of the recognition of total exteriority in Latin American philosophy. Finally, I give some specific examples of what philosophy might be as and how it might be conceived as thought from a position of radical exteriority.

Pernicious Knowledge: Augusto Salazar Bondi In his seminal essay, “The Meaning and Problem of Hispanic American Philosophic Thought,” Augusto Salazar Bondi offers a historical critique of Latin American philosophy; his critique is aimed to open the path for a Latin American thought born of its specific situation.1 Salazar Bondi concludes that the history of Latin American philosophy has been a series of unauthentic ideas, that is, it is characteristically seen as a series of imitations and repetitions of European and North American ideas. From whence, though, does this unauthenticity result? Salazar Bondi recognizes that philosophy is not a matter of creative universal ideas, but rather, “it cannot fail to be the manifestation of the rational conscience of a community.”2 As he explains, philosophy is “the conception that expresses the mode in which the community reacts before the whole of reality and the course of existence, and its peculiar manner of illuminating and interpreting the being in which it finds itself installed.”3 In other words, philosophy is the articulated expression of a living culture. Moreover, for Salazar Bondi culture is “the organic articulation of the original and differentiating manifestation of a community.”4 In this sense, culture would not refer to works of art, literature, and other such cultural artifacts, but these forms would be the organic articulation of a people’s lives, the expression of a living community. As Salazar Bondi indicates in his essay, because culture stands for the original and differentiating manifestation of a community, under culture we must now include the people’s frustrations, alienation, mystification, and authenticity.5 What this means is that philosophy arises from a rich and dense cultural existence, and it may be authentic only if there is an authentic cultural life that in recognizing the existential level of a community and distinct individuals may sustain, and even require, a certain conceptual articulation. Inversely, we cannot forget that this also means that culture and existence in their fullest living manifestations require articulate conceptual expression.6 Given this way of understanding philosophy, Salazar Bondi can conclude that the unauthentic character of Latin American philosophy ultimately arises from an unauthentic culture. As he says, “It is not strange that a community which is disintegrated and lacking in potential should produce a mystified philosophic awareness.... Our thought is defective and

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unauthentic owing to our society and our culture.”7 The emphasis on culture is crucial here, since more often than not culture is overlooked in our concern with economic imperialism or philosophical issues.8 Salazar Bondi goes on to explain that the weakness of Latin American thought results from the systematic appropriation and domination of Latin America’s cultural existence by a series of nations that compose the economic, political, and conceptual center of power. These nations, mother countries, and great industrial and economic powers develop in Latin America a “culture of domination.”9 It is because of such cultures of domination that authentic culture and its thought remain impossible, and this is why Latin American thought reveals “a misshaped society and a defective culture.”10 As the Peruvian thinker explains, “The dominated countries live with a view to the outside, depending in their existence upon the decisions of the dominant powers, that cover all fields of expression.” Salazar Bondi’s essay closes with a distinct call for a movement that would be capable of “articulating itself with the rest of reality and provoking a change.”11 In this sense, the task of thinking would require a transformative creative turn, and this turn would only be possible through the destruction of the structures of cultural domination that have condemned Latin American consciousness to its present state of limbo and its defective imitative and self-destructive attempts at self-articulation. If we follow Salazar Bondi’s analysis, we may then conclude that a Latin American situated thought must turn to Latin America’s concrete existential and cultural experiences in order to articulate, challenge, and transform the very way Latin America configures and understands itself. This is a twofold task that involves the interruption of the consciousness and structures that oppress Latin American existence and the concrete recognition and configuration of an authentic Latin American thought. This is, of course, the path open to all peoples and countries undergoing coloniality, as is the case for Latin America. Before moving towards a turning or departure from philosophy as defined by modern Western rationalist subjectivism, that is, towards other spaces for thought, and in order to begin to interrupt the consciousness that is taken as a matter of fact and the natural situation for all philosophical thought, we must more specifically identify in what way, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, cultural destruction is sustained by the Western modern philosophical project.

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Modern Philosophy as Pernicious Knowledge In light of Salazar Bondi’s analysis appears a difficult question: what is the relationship between colonialism and modern philosophy? While it is not a given that philosophical knowledge is determined by economic and political interests as those of colonialism, it is the case that the project of a modern rational subjectivism and the deployment of its transcendental knowledge seem to go hand in hand with colonialism, liberalism, neoliberalism, and globalism. I would agree that unlike these movements, philosophical thought does not seek by definition economic or political power as its primary aim, but it is critical to recognize that philosophical knowledge is never beyond issues of power. Conceptual knowledge in its articulations of senses of beings is always a source of power, and the configuration of practices and institutions that will sustain specific ideas are clearly instruments of power. At the same time, even this type of framing of the issue does not tell us how we may understand modern philosophy in relation to colonialism. The issue is one of a certain set of dispositions and expectations with respect to the very configuration of what one may call philosophical questioning. This set of expectations and practices may be broken down into various elemental aspects: 1. The ontological attitude—all responds to one Being or totality. 2. The phenomenological attitude—only that which I see I may know; and that which I see may be taken as given to a transcendental consciousness for its understanding, calculation, and manipulation. 3. The subjective rationalist attitude—the meaning of all ways of being is given to the Western rational subject, that is, to a particular transcendental consciousness and way of knowing that is preserved by its tradition and history. 4. The appropriative attitude—the idea that all that is beyond the Western tradition is “its other” and as such is available for reason as its negativity, which means, available for it to determine its meaning, and ultimately its value. “The other” living being, the other culture, and their sense are held in question by Western modern reason.

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(I leave the association of these attitudes with specific philosophers and systems in Western philosophy to the discretion of the reader.) These observations do not call for the abandonment of reason, nor science, but are aimed at making explicit certain attitudes or dispositions that trap and limit philosophical thought under the project of modern Western philosophical rationalism and subjectivism. We may anticipate two classic academic responses (or objections) from modern rationalist transcendentalism to these observations: These responses will serve to illustrate the limiting character of the modern project and as such will provide a transition to the next section. The two replies are: (1) we must make differentiations, philosophy is not power, and (2) we should recognize the positive contributions that modernity had given the rest of the world. In terms of the first response, as eluded above, philosophy might not begin by seeking power, but as articulated knowledge it is as powerful as any economic, military, or political weapon. Indeed, one must wonder if the first objection is out of naïveté or whether it is an attempt to keep the central place of power within the modern Western tradition. In either case, the danger of knowledge as power is imminent. Concerning the second objection, the observations about the four dispositions above does not intend to abandon fundamental ideals such as those of rational understanding, humanity, rights, and freedoms, that is, those ideals that are partly European and North American and identified with the fundamental accomplishments of Western philosophical thought. In the same vein, the great contributions for Latin America have consisted in the importation of ideas and practices that have little coherence in terms of the realities of the continent. They have been disastrous, whether they be the French Comtism that accompanied the American revolutions or the predatory systems of the Chicago School of Economics. In short, liberty, fraternity, equality, and yes, even reason, are central to the thought Latin Americans seek, but they must take the form that demands the cultural and existential reality of the place of Latin America. Otherwise, as we saw in Salazar Bondi’s analysis, these ideals may frankly turn into empty imitations or fictions for such peripheral nations as those of Latin America.

Total Exteriority But the question how any unsettling of the modern modalities of thinking and the tradition may happen still remains. Here we may begin by turning to Immanuel Wallerstein’s economic, historical-political, and sociological theory of “world-systems.”12 In addition to terms of

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economical organization, Wallerstein shows in both historical and sociological terms how the world is organized in terms of a center and its periphery. The center is composed of the nations that hold world political, military, and economic power. The periphery is made up of those peoples who serve the interests of the central powers—nations and peoples who are exploited, but at the same time depend on the center for their subsistence (this may occur within specific nations functioning as a “world” in terms of a general world system.) One may want to keep in mind at least two distinct elements that configure the center of the system in epistemic terms: One is the Western modern tradition, particularly in terms of a transcendental subjective consciousness and the dispositions that sustain its claim to knowledge as mentioned above. The other is the ground or construction of the central place of the Western modern mind at the center of all senses of beings. This entails the creation of a racial epistemic divide. As Anibal Quijano has shown, the colonization of the Americas resulted through the configuration of a racial-epistemic divide that operates as the backbone for the continuous exploitation of Latin America and other peripheral peoples even after decolonization to this day.13 The system works through logical correlations in terms of color, assigned work, wages, social function/place, and ultimately the assigned epistemic capacity for a specific “natural” race (or gender). Indeed, in light of Quijano’s analysis, Wallerstein’s theory may be extended to show how all epistemic and cultural ordering is determined from the center. As a result, a dependency cycle sets in where all meaning comes from the center, and that center is manifested in terms of Western culture. In terms of epistemic and cultural colonialism, that which does not correspond to the demands of the Western modern tradition is considered and thought as nothing, as meaningless, and incapable of self-determination. Thus, culturally and conceptually the periphery must be taught and developed in the image of Western modern ideals and for the sake of serving those ideals.14 Wallerstein’s theory offers a way by pointing to a periphery that is not just the other of the center but a total exteriority. Besides the center and its other appears the sheer exteriority of those lives and cultures being brought under coloniality. This happens because the other of the center also appears in its own lives, which are not determined or “naturally” subsumed under the categories of the center or modernity. To be clear, total exteriority does not mean an unknowable transcendent other, but rather a concrete experience that occurs outside the economy of the center and its other (whether it be in the periphery or within the center). In this sense, total exteriority indicates a distinct place of departure for encountering

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the Western tradition.15 One should also keep in mind that this exteriority does not refer to the exotics to which Latin Americans and other peripheral peoples have been reduced. In order to further develop and understand in concrete terms this sense of total exteriority, we may turn to the work of Enrique Dussel.16 Dussel identifies this total exteriority in his work by recovering its concrete living force, the claim to life of the one who is deemed less than nothing by Western thought: the expendable labor force, the destitute, the indigenous, the woman in macho societies, orphans, the exiled, the collateral victims of contemporary wars, the faceless migrating lines photographed by Salgado, and the massacred who first become present in the work on Africa of Alfredo Jaar. These figures refer to that living experience that has no value for Western modernity, not even negativity in the dialectical sense. What this means is that the appeal to the excluded does not mean the excluded are recognized as a weight on the center as a matter of guilt and handouts; nor does it mean the responsibility of the center for its other, that is, for the poor and meaningless other who the center may chose to accept, feed, and educate. Dussel recognizes the living force, and hence the cultural force, that in being in total exteriority opens the possibility for speaking out of a register that, although may be inseparable from the Western modern tradition (as is the case with Latin America), is no longer determined by Western modern rationalism. Although this is not the place to develop extensively the discourse of the other, I wish to mention at least two significant aspects of this turn. First, we are not speaking of “the other” of contemporary Western thought. This figure of “the other” works as an ambiguous metaphor, on the one hand, as the opening of Western modernity towards the periphery. One finds this positive sense of the other for Western thought in Levinas and Derrida for example. But when viewed from radical exteriority, one sees that, on the other hand, the metaphor serves to secure the situating of total exteriority under the appropriative concerns and formulations of Western colonizing rationalist discourses. In this sense, neither Derrida nor Levinas move beyond Western modernity. Second, engaging in thought from total exteriority may ultimately be traced to a shift that happens at the level of conceptual sensibility, or on the basis of experiences that may be articulated in terms of an aesthetic sensibility that is unbounded from any specific political ideology or strategy grounded on already operative structures and practices that sustain the epistemic subjects and spaces that occupy such political discourses. Unlike much of today’s identity politics in the USA, the point is not to occupy the existing spaces but rather to transform them through changes in practices. Through

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these changes of practices we can arrive at the undoing and reconfiguring of the epistemic subjects and issues that organize one’s sense of reality, phenomena, and the expectations of what may be understood as articulate thought.17 In other words, the turn to the periphery and recognition of its living claim and force opens the door for the recovery of the cultural and existential ground for conceptual knowledge. This is what Salazar Bondi has identified as the fundamental element that undergoes the pernicious force of the center; once recovered, it may be the foundation for the development of other configurations of thought. As we saw earlier in the discussion of Salazar Bondi, the task of the recovery of the cultural ground for the articulation of existences not determined by the Western European and North American Cannon occurs at various levels: 1. The critical recognition and appropriative destruction of the pernicious epistemic categories in place—whether they be external or internal to those peoples who live under coloniality—includes recognizing the immediate operation of the system in our everyday lives, critiquing the system at the institutional levels, and critiquing the relationship between the West and the periphery. With this recognition one may be able to begin to resituate and think in departure from the Western tradition. 2. In light of this critical stance or consciousness one may move to the recognition and the cultivation of local cultural, historical, and existential grounds. Once the operative ideals and practices that sustain coloniality are exposed, other alternative structures grounded on local experiences must be given articulation and carried on. 3. Thus, the first two levels lead to the conceptual articulation of the being of those excluded and oppressed living cultures. Of note, we are not looking for original culture or for an ontological or unchanging sense of being, but we are looking for the practices and organic expressions of living communities and their distinct configurations of identities. What this means is that one looks to recover the living cultural practices beyond the stereotypical representation of peripheral cultures when represented for and by the center.18

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In the concluding part of my discussion, I indicate some of the kinds of sites and issues for developing a thought from total exteriority, and then indicate the implications of this thought for philosophy in general.

Towards Philosophical Thought from Total Exteriority In light of what was said above, we can identify five crucial implications of the uncovering of a Latin American view from total exteriority. These implications touch on the question of the relationship between a thought from total exteriority and philosophical thought in general.

Implication One Out of total exteriority one sees the impossibility of speaking in terms of one being and its historical destiny. We may begin by looking at October 12, 1492 and by considering in that inceptive moment not only does an unknown continent enter into European history, but European history and onto-theological metaphysics simultaneously are forever transformed as well. By entering a world they could not conceive before or articulate thereafter, Europeans themselves would be altered in ways they never could have fathomed. Hernán Cortés in his Cartas de Relación, a series of letters written to the King and Queen of Spain relates the story of how the peninsula today known as Yucatán came to have its name, and in doing so makes the argument that would give him the name of discoverer of Mexico.19 According to Cortés, the conquistadors who had arrived to that land before him had met a number of natives and had asked them for the name of the place, the name by which the conquistadors came to identify and claim possession of the new found land. He then explains that when the Spaniards had asked the natives for the name of the peninsula, the natives could only say Yucatán, Yucatán, which literally means, “I don’t understand anything.”20 With this “naming,” with this mark of not understanding, worlds open. On the one hand, voiceless or sequestered worlds eventually were gathered under the perplexing name Latin America. On the other hand, we find a transformation within European existence itself that remains to this day almost completely concealed. In this doubling, one discovers a Europe that in inscribing Yucatán into its historical and ontological discourse now speaks in tongues since it does not understand what it names and persists in naming without understanding. It is here in Western history and onto-theological thought in their naming—in giving a place and identity to the named—ultimately

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point to nothing except their inadequacy in terms of the temporality and the ontological way of recognizing and giving articulation to existence. This inadequacy is not a result of the encounter of Western history with its other, with a stranger that can be recognized and inscribed as in opposition to Western history. And as such, it is not a matter of improving the rational Western apparatus. But, we may ask, why is this the case? Yucatán speaks the inadequacy of that very Western ontological and historical tradition when confronted with what is not its other; what Yucatán speaks is simply, and literally, barbarous and is beyond its appropriative historical writings and its allocation of existences under the requirement for a single history and original identity.21 To phrase what Yucatán speaks in terms of a break in the historical dialectic: Yucatán marks a space of non-recognition, a non-dialectical space. This marking of a nonrecognized and nondialectical space occurs because the native does not appear to the Western modern mind as native in any way other than as that as what (and who) is not understood. More specifically, the native appears as its other, that is, as that which is included by exclusion as the Western modern project constructs its exotic non-rational other. In this sense there is no knowledge that may be understood as a fulfilled rational consciousness. In general the issue for us is the unsettling suffered by Western history and onto-theological thought as this thinking makes its claim to what it does not understand and cannot subsume. At this point, Yucatán becomes part of Western historical writing and understanding, and with this the conceptual structure of values and the modality of the very configuration of identity that has oriented the West from the outset is undone. Yucatán, not understanding, belongs now to Western history and its metaphysics of identity. Much like the plague that came to Europe by way of a ship that never seemed to touch European ports, the deconstruction of Western history and metaphysics already begins when Yucatán is taken over as part of what belongs to the identifying instrument that is the history of the West.22 In positive terms, one may look at the recovery of this moment of irreparable or radical difference as a call for thinking in terms of being in distinctness rather than in terms of universals; one may look at the recovery of this moment in terms of histories and peoples’ concrete lives, instead of in the terms of a single historical destiny.

Implication Two Given the double origin of the modern world one might, or even should, begin the reinterpretation of the history of Western philosophy

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from the experience of the excluded. One notable example is the way in which we understand the arising of the modern transcendental subject at the center of philosophical knowledge. From whence did this determination of philosophical knowledge come? Traditionally, we trace modernity to Descartes and Kant’s second Copernican revolution: these instances are understood as the critical uncovering of the power of the rational mind in its intuiting of transcendental concepts. In this sense, Europe becomes the center of the world by being the site of the discovery of reason, and with it human dignity and freedom. But in light of what we have explored above, one may begin with another story: One may trace the rise of the Western modern transcendental subject to its dense histories, which are those histories populated by the excluded. The modern transcendental subject asserts itself precisely through its construction of the difference between its self-identity (ego cogito sum) and its other. Thus, the question is: When and how does “the other appear”? For once the other appears, the modern subjective rational consciousness may take its seat at the center of all meaning. One may begin to trace the configuration of “the other” by once again going back to 1492. In August of that year, the decree of Granada results in the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Spain. As Enrique Dussel has argued, this is the first time in their history Europeans are freed from the East. At the same time, the East has always been with the Europeans, so the sheer “otherness” of European rational consciousness cannot be derived from the East. Hence the other appears as the barbarian and cannibal and the rise in fear of the non-rational over and against rational is perpetuated in perniciousness. Europe, and later North America, will build and sustain their project of modern rationalism against this fear of the barbaric other. In October, 1492, two months after the decree of Granada, Columbus encounters the new world. Thus begins the construction of “the other,” and the project of a central modern Western consciousness is now on its way. Such an account is compelling in part because it explains the violence of Europeans towards the indigenous in the form of the Spaniard, Portuguese, and so forth by their desires for self-edification. At the same time, this account also explains the imaginative fascination Europeans had with the new world. Ultimately, behind their passionate appropriation was the desire for the production of a self and its dark double, Caliban, the other of reason.23 These seemingly mere historical facts take philosophical weight if one considers that here one uncovers another way of being at play in the very configuration of the modern philosophical project. In other words, when viewed from the vantage of total exteriority, modern Western

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thought may only be understood in light of the history no one ever taught, that is, the hidden history of modernity’s underside. As a distinct example of this radical hermeneutical task, one may think of the need for a recovery of the history of modern philosophy in light of its radical periphery, that is, by reconsidering its origins but not according to the monolithic myth of Western rationalism as founded by Descartes and then nurtured through the enlightenment and French revolution. The recovery of this hidden history would understand itself rather in its full engagement with such fundamental elements of modernity as African, Caribbean, Sephardic, and Arab cultures and thought.24 Such broadening of the history of philosophy does not mean the reduction of reason to the irrational or some exotic other; it simply points to experiences and thinking that even today remain buried by the powerful ignorance of a few who willfully strangle life out of philosophy rather than depart from their seats of knowledge and power.

Implication Three In thinking from radical exteriority we find ourselves engaged in a situated (historical and epistemic) hermeneutics that takes the hermeneutical context as the site for the creative interpretative reappropriation of culture and ultimately of our distinct existences through conceptual articulation. A single document that may serve as a case for discussion is the Codex Telleriano-Remensis from circa 1550. A document much like Yucatán, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis does not have a place; and as a result, its lacking of place, its displacement, indicates so much.25 In its pages one finds Aztec pictographic language, Latin, and Castilian alphabetic writing side by side in a manner that challenges the very idea of a single historical consciousness bounded to alphabetical writing as the rarefied form of knowledge and reason. We find in that insurmountable difference between pictographic language and alphabetic writing a site of interruption—the interruption of the appropriation of existences that Walter Mignolo has clearly shown takes place in The Darker Side of the Renaissance through the rise to supremacy of alphabetical writing and that specific way of understanding all senses of beings.26 At the same time, we can also find in this moment, as well as in the other examples mentioned in this section, a possible crisis, that is, a possible moment of decision unbounded by Western onto-theological history. By virtue of their asymmetric encounters with the Western tradition’s historical conceptual structures, these are sites, places, moments, and opportunities for a beginning to unfold. Such a beginning, I would suggest, may be an articulate thought in its diversifying identities, a thought unbounded and fecund in its situated

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exteriority. Such a situated exteriority does not keep one out of the center, but shows us to be at that fluid margin that is human existence today with its evanescent borders, perpetual migrations, and immediate proximities in radical exteriority.

Implication Four This hermeneutical space out of exteriority is grounded by a radical phenomenology that occurs as thinking arises as the articulation of situated thought, that is, as thought situated in concrete experiences and needs. In terms of a cultural critique, the work of Enrique Dussel, Santiago CastroGomes, Anibal Quijano, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres may serve as examples of what Santiago Castro-Gomes has called the decolonizing turn. In terms of a cultural recovery of the fertile ground for philosophy, one may begin by studying the constant reinvention of identities that occurs from the chronicles of the conquistadors through to the Latin American boom and today’s writing in Latin America by always creating identities out of displacements, be they Spaniards in uncharted territories, García Márquez or Juan José Saer in Paris, or Luis Sepúlveda with his Historias Marginales or Patagonia Express. Latin America has lived at the limit of history and in radical disseminating in différance for more than five hundred years. The rich folkloric traditions still found in Latin America’s music, oral traditions, poetry, dance, and the geometry of its ancient ruins and textiles, all offer fertile ground for nascent thought not against reason, but as the unfolding of the underside of the rational. A two-hour walk through the MALBA in Buenos Aires attests to a contemporary artistic tradition second to none. But in engaging culture I am also thinking of other dimensions: the simple sentence “estamos aquí” that declared the presence of the indigenous Zapatista movement of Chiapas at the central square in Mexico City and Evo Morales’ transformation of the constitution in Bolivia in light of the needs of the indigenous populations. In these cases it is the voice of the indigenous people that becomes a source of renewal for the configuration of ideas of equality, freedom, and truth. One may also think of the ethical claim to human rights in the name of the concrete praxis of motherhood of Las Madres de Mayo. In this case the other is not a figure of poverty and incapacity without historical consciousness that fits so comfortably as the justification and exaltation of Western historical power and its wealth. What is at stake here is the diversified and diversifying historical consciousnesses that demand as much action as concern-full reticence. Such consciousnesses will never find sufficient articulation by participating

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in a single universal history, nor in the deferral of the articulation of identity in deconstruction’s challenge to its Western metaphysical father.

Implication Five Lastly, in light of the last observations we may think of this thinking from, in, and through total exteriority as an ethics that recognizes life before productive calculative value. Such exteriority articulates the ethical imperative in terms of the concrete need for affirming life, rather than leaving the ethical to a subjective consciousness and its dispensations. In this sense, one may begin to think an ethics from a sense community and not from subjectivity and its devastating solitude, which is radically exemplified by Western life today.

Conclusion With this general discussion I have wanted to indicate a direction for thinking beyond the Western colonizing tradition without abandoning the task of the conceptual articulation of existences in their hermeneutical and phenomenological manifestations. Pernicious knowledge appears then as the perpetuation of a thinking that insists on reducing distinctness to its requirements for being and the senses of being, and in doing so denies the very openings for the transformative movement of thought in its exposure to phenomena. Our discussion seeks then to open a path for the broadening of philosophical knowledge through a thinking that finds itself through rich and diversifying histories, and in light of experiences that in their concrete distinctness expose philosophical thought once again to irreparable astonishment and wonder. If philosophy is to have a voice today, if it is going to give articulate conceptual form to the distinct and complex lives that compose our worlds, I believe it will be out of undergoing critically and creatively its situation, and this means rediscovering and finding languages to give articulation to senses of being in light of encroaching, fluid, unbounded, and stupendous horizons.

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Notes 1

Augusto Salazar Bondi, “The Meaning and Problem of Hispanic American Philosophic Thought,” Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century, Ed. Jorge E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004). I refer to the essay as M & P. 2 M & P, 390. 3 M & P, 390. 4 M & P, 391. 5 M & P, 391-392. 6 “Philosophy... in an integral culture is the highest form of consciousness....” M & P, 395. 7 M & P, 395-396. 8 The obscuring and erasure of political, economic, and social identities by virtue of the construction of a cultural epistemic subject carried out by Western modern rationalism throughout the world is undeniable. At the same time, this “cultural subject” and sense of culture must de differentiated from the culture that gives organic expression to the existential lives of peoples and communities beyond hegemony of Western culture. In other words, as I have indicated elsewhere, “the other” of Western thought must be recognized from beyond the Western problematic of subjectivity, that is, as a figure that situates and erases alterity in the name of an other that always belongs to Western rationalism from Hegel to contemporary discourses of alterity. 9 M & P, 395. 10 M & P, 395-396. 11 M & P, 397. 12 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and the subsequent volumes II and III. Also see Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism With Capitalist Civilization 2nd Ed. (London: Verso, 1996). 13 Quijano, Anibal “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” Coloniality at Large Ed. Mabel Morana and Enrique Dussel (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008), 181-224. 14 Culture becomes a matter of imitating Western patterns and the creation of a cultural epistemic subject that works for the center. 15 Distinct in contrast with “other” indicates a thinking that begins to articulate itself out of what has been ignored by the Western modern project; such thinking is expressed by the Latin distinguere, which means to annihilate. 16 Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, Tr. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1985). Available on line from Servicio CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 1996/2002. 17 If one wishes to begin to understand indigenous movements in Latin America, this is a fundamental point. As a friend said to me recently, “The indigenous do not want to be someone else; they do not need to take the places of the power

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structures in place. Their movements in entering Latin American politics today concern articulate distinctness.” 18 For example, Carmen Miranda with her fruit hat, the Latin lover, the happy working people in the fields, and the naive natives of the Andes with their pan flutes are all epistemic subjects that hide the social, economic, political, and cultural realities of Latin America. 19 Hernán Cortés, Cartas de Relación, “Preámbulo” (Mexico: Porrúóa, 1993), 3. 20 Ibid. 21 Enrique Dussel points to the distinctness of Latin American thought as it engages its experience and situation: “…from the shadow that the light of being has not been able to illumine. Our thought sets out from non-being, nothingness, otherness, exteriority, the mystery of non-sense. It is then a “barbarian” philosophy.” Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, Tr. Aquilina Martines and Christine Morkovsky (Mary Knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985), 14. Also published in Jorge E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century (N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004), 428. 22 Antonin Artaud, “Le théâtre et la peste,” Le théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 23 1542-1551- Bartolomé de las Casas (Dominican missionary), Destruction of the Indias, written in 1542 and edited in 1551: chronicle of the violent destruction of indigenous culture and life in the Americas on the hands of the conquistadors. The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) concerned the treatment of natives of the New World. Dominican Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others; Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, insisted the Indians were natural slaves, and therefore reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. 24 One crucial example is Ibn Rushd, or Averröes as he is more commonly known, (1126-1198, Cordoba, Al-Andalus (711-1492)), who is considered the father of secular philosophy, and in this sense leaves the deepest imprints in the inheritance Al-Andalus leaves for the development of modern Western thought. Among Ibn Rushd’s positions four seem immediately apparent: 1. Theology is separated from science; 2. All humans partake of the same intellect; 3. Existence precedes essence; 4. Averröes rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy. He rejected the Ptolemaic model and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. He writes on the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion: “To assert the existence of an eccentric sphere or an epicyclical sphere is contrary to nature. [...] The astronomy of our time offers no truth, but only agrees with the calculations and not with what exists” (Owen Gingerich (April 1986). “Islamic astronomy,” Scientific American 254 (10), 74.). One might also keep in mind the intellectual and cultural life of Al-Andalus, the major center for the translation of the ideas that underlie Western modernity, with its 70 libraries, some of them with up to 600,000 books. 25 Codex Telleriano-Remensis, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1995). I have recently come across the fine work on the codex by José Rabasa, vide "Elsewheres: Radical Relativism and the Limits of Empire,” Qui Parle16:1(2006): 71-96. “Franciscans and Dominicans Under the

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Gaze of a Tlaculio: Plural-World Dwelling in an Indian Pictoral Codex" (Morrison Inaugural Lecture Series, University of California at Berkeley, 1998). 26 Mignolo, Walter, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

PART FOUR: PAST LOOKING — LOOKING TODAY

CHAPTER X SARTRE AND FOUCAULT ON HISTORY: THE DIARY AND THE MAP THOMAS R. FLYNN

As Robert Maggiori has observed, it is difficult to separate Sartre and Foucault. Despite their generational difference or perhaps because of it, one tends to associate their names in death as was done so frequently while they were alive. Despite a shared sense of social commitment that occasionally brought them together in public, they were often sharply critical of each other’s philosophy whether directly or indirectly through colleagues. Seen as the models of existentialism and (post)structuralism respectively, their differences were emblematic of the incompatibility of these two philosophical “styles.”1 Nowhere is that discrepancy more sharply drawn than in their respective approaches to the philosophy of history. Though it is Foucault who favors the spatial metaphor, it was Sartre who captured the telling image: history should be likened to a motion picture whereas Foucault (in Les mots et les choses) “replaces the movie with the magic lantern show”2 Both thinkers were philosophical historians. Sartre favored the totalizing power of dialectical reason and the sustaining praxis of social individuals (individuals-in-relation) to whom responsibility could be ascribed in a moral sense. This last was a defining feature of his thought and of Existentialism in general. From beginning to end of his public life, Sartre was a moralist, though scarcely a moralizer. Accordingly, his existentialist “psychoanalyses” of Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert and others including himself, carried a moral message [usually an assessment of bad faith (Flaubert) or authenticity (Genet)] and were ingredient in his approach to historical intelligibility. As he said apropos a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the challenge for the historian was to discover “an internal relation of comprehension,” in this case, between German war

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policy and the Kaiser’s withered arm.3 The moral and the epistemic dimensions of his accounts, though distinct, overlap. Foucault, on the other hand, advocated a spatial approach that stressed transformations and displacements, rules of discursive formation, nominalist inversions of standard causal relations, and impersonal reference points that chart the limits and mark the lines of fragility of a practice. Not only does this characterize his “archaeologies,” it applies to his subsequent “genealogies” and “problematizations” as well. If Sartre’s approach to history is that of the dramaturge, Foucault’s is that of the cartographer, as Deleuze famously observed. So it is not inappropriate to contrast their respective theories of history in terms of the diary and the map.4

Elements of an Existentialist Theory For the sake of brevity and to facilitate the comparison, let me focus on three features of Sartre’s theory of history as formulated in the social ontology of his Critique of Dialectical Reason and applied in his existentialist “biographies,” most notably The Family Idiot. The first is what I would call the threefold primacy of praxis, namely the priority he accords to “free organic praxis” (human action in its dialectical relation with its sociohistorical situation) in the fields of epistemology, ontology and ethics. The intelligibility of history is not primarily that of impersonal forces or unintended consequences, though Sartre respects such factors and locates them in his ontological category of the “practico-inert.” Rather, existentialist history concentrates on the method of compréhension (Verstehen), a hermeneutic of the agent’s lived experience of the risk of choice and the pinch of the real. How, for example, did the young Flaubert choose to live his situation as the second son of a provincial bourgeois professional, who desired to pursue the “imaginary” in a society of collective bad faith. More than mere illustration, biography is integral to an existentialist approach. It is this dialectical practice of interiorization and exteriorization of objective circumstances that enables us to grasp the historical agent’s experience of the phenomenon in question while presenting more than simple “psychohistory,” though, of course, this is present as well. The second feature of existentialist history is its reliance on what Sartre calls the “progressive-regressive method.” After effecting a careful phenomenological description of the matter at hand as its initial, descriptive stage, this procedure moves in dialectical fashion between existential psychoanalysis (the progressive moment) and historical

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materialism (the regression to sociohistorical conditions of possibility) to help us understand the individual in his concrete situation; for example, Flaubert as the author of Madam Bovary or this Martiniquais prize fighter on this boxing card in Paris on this particular evening (an example from the Critique). In quasi-Hegelian fashion, Sartre offers these as examples of the “singular universal.” The social dimension is essential; history is not just biography writ large. But past praxes, sedimented as practico-inert in current institutions, attitudes and practices, are mediated and rendered concrete by the agent’s immediate social environment (for example, his family and circle of friends or antagonists). An existentialist account will examine how the historical agent shapes and is shaped by these mediating factors that condition his choice in question. As Sartre remarks apropos of history, “The men History makes are never entirely those needed to make History.”5 Finally, existentialist history is openly imaginative and evaluative. Though grounded in responsible research, it is not mere rapportage but “creative disclosing” (dévoilement)—an expression Sartre used for “committed literature” but which applies equally to his “committed” history.6 He conveyed this sense when, after reconstructing the situation in which the young Jean Genet was caught stealing and decided to become the thief he was taken for, Sartre remarks: “That is how it happened, in that or some other way.”7 The phrase “or some other way” indicates that Sartre’s interest lies less in the historical details than in the “moral” of the story—for example, in Genet’s “choice” of imaginative literature. Adopting for his Flaubert study Raymond Aron’s description of a historical narrative as “a novel that is true” (un roman vrai), Sartre is clear that history, as he conceives and practices it, is not value-free. On the contrary, it is committed to the social struggle against oppression and exploitation. Its “objectivity” rests in its willingness to be candid about the values it espouses. In fact, Sartre has rejected the positivist dream of value-free science since at least Being and Nothingness (1943). So an existentialist approach to history, while employing the social ontology to uncover the moral responsibility of historical agents in the midst of impersonal “systems” like colonialism and ideologies like racist “humanism,” utilizes the hermeneutic of existential psychoanalysis as sketched in Being and Nothingness to reveal and dramatize the lived experience (le vécu) of the individual. For the Sartrean existentialist, “living” history and biography are inextricably intertwined.

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Foucault’s Poststructuralist Mapping of History If we compare Foucault’s approach with the three characteristics of existentialist history just mentioned, we find obvious contrasts but several interesting similarities. Regarding the first feature, where Sartre sees praxis Foucault attends to practice, both discursive and nondiscursive. The former he understands as a socially sanctioned set of rules for the formation and transformation of a series of statements/énoncés (that is, discourse). Non-discursive practices denote such objects as institutions, traditions, and habits as well as the power-relations for which his genealogies of the penal system and the category of “sexuality” became known. Though Sartre admitted that he had not formulated a philosophy of language, adding that one could be gathered from his various writings, the linguistic and what we might call the “social unconscious” figure centrally in Foucault’s archaeologies and remain operative in, if not central to, his subsequent genealogies. That is not the case for Sartre, despite his appeal in later life to “le vécu” and to “compréhension” in a manner redolent of the unconscious. As for the progressive-regressive method, Foucault would explicitly reject its Hegelian inspiration. In fact, I would argue that his adoption of a “spatialiazed” mode of reasoning via graphic images, tables, diagrams and such “iconic arguments” as his close analyses of Velasquez’s “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things and Bentham’s “Panopticon” in Discipline and Punish is a strategy for avoiding what he calls “the neurosis of dialectic” with its rage to dissolve difference in identity, the other in the same, and struggle in consensus. If both philosophers adopt a kind of “nominalism” in their approach to historical intelligibility, Sartre’s is admittedly “dialectical” whereas that of Foucault approximates the positivistic in its drive toward fragmentation and multiplicity. But it is in the domain of the imaginary and the evaluative that their respective paths toward historical intelligibility converge. Despite accusations of “cryptonormativity” leveled by Habermas and others, Foucault’s “histories” are clearly “committed” in a manner not unlike that of Sartre. Their choice of topics is directed toward the oppressed and marginalized in society: in Foucault’s case, the mentally ill, the prisoner, the pervert. And their intended effect is emancipatory. Even if Foucault is reluctant to prescribe specific cures for social ills (a failing he attributes to Sartre), the force of his histories is critical; it creates options by underscoring the contingency of social relations heretofore presumed necessary.

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And he shares the sense of Sartre’s “roman vrai” when he refers to his works as “fictions” that nonetheless have something to do with the truth and especially when he acknowledges to an interviewer that, had he wanted to write a standard history of mental illness in the age of Reason, he would not have produced Madness and Civilization.8 In order to articulate the primacy of spatialized reasoning in Foucault’s thought, I construct an iconic argument of my own in my recent book, turning the compass and ruler on his oeuvre and sketching an “axial” reading of his writings along three distinct and irreducible poles (those of knowledge, power, and subjectivation) that enclose a field called “experience” but which do not meet in pyramidal fashion as would be the case in a dialectical project such as Sartre’s. Rather they form the sides of a prism and encourage an approach to Foucault’s work that is “inclusively disjunctive” (Deleuze). His contrast with Sartre then can be graphed as that between the prismatic and the pyramidal.9

Concluding Assessment: Diary or Map? One must admit at the outset that Foucault’s theoretical strengths and weaknesses complement those of Sartre. Where the latter is strongest, viz., in the ascription of moral responsibility to individuals either alone or in series or groups, one finds Foucault’s chief liability. He often writes as if the individual were of little archaeological or genealogical interest. And when he does make public statements accusing specific individuals of crimes or moral failures, they lack the theoretical background that surrounds Sartre’s remarks in that regard. Conversely, Foucault’s strength lies in his careful analyses of impersonal structures (epistƝmƝ) or practices or strategies (without a strategist) that constitute certain types of individual (e.g., the “disciplinary individual”) or establish rules for action, modes of perception and forms of rationality. It is commonly admitted that Sartre failed to give social and economic structures their due, when it came to parsing the situation or explaining the phenomenon that Weber and Marx called “objective possibility.” So intent was he on preserving the individual’s freedom and moral responsibility that he was suspicious of what Althusser called “structural causality” and famously skeptical of the Freudian unconscious drives and motives. But to speak of “complementarity” suggests totalization of some sort and that would seem to award the palm to Sartre and his dialectical reason. While Sartre is willing to allow for a duality of “reasons,” namely, the analytic and the dialectical, related roughly as the static to the dynamic, he would oppose the Foucaultian insistence that there is a multiplicity of

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rationalities, none of which is timeless or universal. He would do so chiefly, I believe, on ethical grounds: the multiplication of rationalities seems to dissolve the unity of a life (the Sartrean “project”) requisite for ascriptions of responsibility in a moral sense. It likewise seems to reduce the revolutionary imperative to a mere hypothetical recommendation. If Foucault in his last lectures and published writings indicated a heightened sense of reflective freedom and self-constitution, and if his Nietzschean understanding of an aesthetic of existence resembles Sartrean authenticity enough to be noted by three distinguished interlocutors,10 this may not reveal the return of his (repressed) Existentialist past but it does suggest that many of the existentialist values and concepts, which he allowed to be ignored by the blinders of polemic, were never far removed from his peripheral vision. That, at least, is the upshot of my axial reading of his oeuvre and its diagnostic comparison with the Sartrean project of seeking reason in history.

Notes 1 Robert Maggiori, “Sartre et Foucault,” Libération nouvelle série, n. 967 (samedi 30 juin et dimanche 1er juillet, 1984), 24. 2 “Remplace le cinéma par la lanterne magique” (“Jean-Paul Sartre Répond,” L’Arc 30 [October, 1966], 87). 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Septembre 1939-Mars 1940 nouvelle édition, augmentée d’un carnet inédit (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 548; English translation of the original edition by Quentin Hoare as The War Diaries, November 1939-March 1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 301. Henceforth WD. 4 I have done so in a two-volume study that inspired this essay: Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and volume 2, A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 2, The Intelligibility of History [1985 unfinished], trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1991), 221. 6 See my “Committed History” in The Ethics of History, ed. David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf Makkreel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 230-46. 7 “Cela s’est passé ainsi ou autrement.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet. comédien et martyr (Paris; Gallimard, 1952), 26; trans. by Bernard Frechtman as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), 26-27. 8 “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Michel Foucault, Essential Works, volume 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1997), 242; “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” Dites et écrits, volume IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 44.

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See my Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, volume 2, A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, chapter 7, “Pyramids and Prisms: Reading Foucault in 3-D.” 10 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault, Essential Works, volume 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 262.

CHAPTER XI POISON AND THE GREAT HEALTH: NIETZSCHE AND MASTER HAKUIN JASON M. WIRTH

This essay commences by announcing in its title an initial paradox, poison and what Nietzsche called “the Great Health,” and it does so not to rehearse dully the obvious, insisting that if you want to be healthy, if you want a really great amount of health, you should avoid poison. I want rather to address the “and” that conjoins poison and the great health. In conjoining them, I want to explore the extent to which this “and” does more than merely append one to the other, as if one were simply listing things. I want to think the inner necessity that governs their belonging together, as if “poison” and “the Great Health” were two different ways of thinking the same. Secondly, my essay announces a second “conjunction,” namely Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Hakuin (1686-1769).1 What does Nietzsche and his godless joviality have to do with the great, almost singular, reformer and rejuvenator of the Rinzai tradition? They obviously could never have met each other and Nietzsche knew little about Buddhism. What little he knew, he considered deplorable, as if fundamental practice stemmed from the desire to opiate oneself and thereby desensitize oneself to a reality that one could not directly embrace. Nietzsche called reactive nihilism, the enervation after the death of God in which all action is vain, “European Buddhism.” Furthermore, the Zen tradition and its great masters were wholly unknown to Nietzsche and his contemporaries. Yet it is my contention that Nietzsche and Hakuin have much to say to each other. By means of a telling example, members of the justly renowned Kyoto School have always contended that Nietzsche inadvertently had a profound Zen sensibility. Tanabe Hajime, in his magnificent Philosophy as Metanoetics (1946), claimed that Nietzsche

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was a Daoist sage and that “beneath the exterior garments,” Nietzsche had “the heart of a sage overflowing with infinite love.”2 Nishitani Keiji wrote an early book on Nietzsche and drew careful attention to his proximity to the Zen tradition. “Even though there may be in Nietzsche a radical misunderstanding of the spirit of Buddhism, the fact that he considered it in relation to nihilism shows how well attuned he was to the real issue.”3 It is therefore my present task to bring these two strange conjunctions into greater clarity. I will begin by a consideration of two thematics in Nietzsche’s Gay Science, namely “poison” and “the Great Health.” I then turn to Hakuin, a master of many poisons, skillfully administered from the great overflowing sea of his own great Zen health.

The Great Health and the Great Poison In the second aphorism of the second (1887) edition of The Gay Science (originally published in 1882), Nietzsche asks pointedly, “What is it to us that Herr Nietzsche has again become healthy?”4 The passing of time makes this question even more pointed. What do we care about Nietzsche’s health? He is dead anyway. And don’t we care more about the book at hand than the cholesterol level of the person who wrote it? Why would Nietzsche’s health make a difference to us? But this is to assume that we already know what is at stake in health as such. Nietzsche, with his failing digestive system, chronic headaches and nausea, increasing blindness, and impending madness, claimed that he was the only healthy person in Europe. In a letter to his mother (dated July 9, 1881), Nietzsche explained that he was refusing to honor modern medicine uncritically and that he was not going to heed his mother’s demand that he seek “new treatments.” He had become “his own doctor” and one day “humans will say of me that I was a good doctor—and not just for myself.”5 As Nietzsche experimented upon his sickness, he concluded that it was not just a sickness, but the emergence of a new form of life. In an 1885 Nachlaß fragment, Nietzsche reflects that: Every absolution comes suddenly, like a seismic shock: the young soul must see what comes to pass with it. This first eruption of force and the will to self-determination is at the same time a sickness that can destroy the person. (KSA 11, 665)

Nietzsche celebrated this discovery of the double-sided eruption of health (sickness as a sign of ever new forms of health) in the first aphorism of The Gay Science. He announced an effusive gratitude for an unexpected convalescence [Genesung] and speaks of the Trunkenheit der Genesung,

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the drunkenness of convalescence (KSA 3, 345). What kind of recovery is this that is experienced as a drunkenness that exceeds the conventional limitations of an all-out bender? Towards the end of the Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote magnificently of what he called “the Great Health [die große Gesundheit].” It was the mark of “the new ones, the nameless ones”: And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we Argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but we are, healthier than one likes to permit us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy. (KSA 3, 636)

Nietzsche was healthy even in his sickness. His health was not the absence of sickness but rather a health beyond the duality of health and sickness, a Great Health, a kind of Übergesundheit, a trans-healthiness, that governs the manner in which one is sick and healthy. Such a health is not found. It is not the result of jogging and tofu. It is unleashed. “This art of transfiguration is precisely philosophy” (KSA 3, 349). This transfiguration is not a single act, but rather a type of activity. Health is not the achievement of a particular state of being. One is always ever again healthy, on the way to the overflow of life that is the eternal return of the Great Health. Philosophy is the self-displacing life of this health. In this way, one could say that the Great Health divides sentient beings into an immanent typology of the fundamentally healthy and the fundamentally sick. Someone who is of the sickly type is both sick in a sick way and healthy in a sick way. Their alleged health, the things that they celebrate when they celebrate health, is yet another symptom of their sickness. To speak to this type of the Great Health is simply to make them sicker. Nietzsche’s poison, his philosophical shipwrecks, is lethal to the sick. It is destruction without an eruption of new life. In this sense, sickness always carries with it among its many symptoms, the following, quite revelatory, indication. Sickness is the inability to hear anything healthy about the Great Health. With the “Great Health,” however, one is sick in a healthy way and one is healthy in a healthy way. Even death itself—or perhaps more frightening: madness—belongs to what is joyfully affirmed in the Great Health. In the remarkable pages that follow, Nietzsche responded to the misery and distress of the modern human. Nietzsche marked this “misery [Not]” with quotation marks, signaling the things that distress and invade the alleged health of the modern human and therefore the things that the supposedly “healthy” ones avoid. But to avoid distress is to become

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further distressed. “The recipe against ‘misery’ is called: misery [Das Recept gegen ‘die Not’ lautet: Not]” (KSA 3/414). The line of escape unleashes die Not contained within the parameters of “die Not.” It releases the joy of the affirmation of pain beyond the seriously maintained distinction between pain and pleasure. This Übernot beyond Not and Unnot is the eruption of pure affirmation, of love.

The Poison at the Heart of the Snjtra In his teishǀ [Zen commentary] on the beginning of the last line of the incomparable Heart Snjtra, which reads, “Therefore, I preach the prajñƗpƗramitƗ [Perfection of Wisdom] mantra,” the equally incomparable Rinzai Zen reformer Hakuin Zenji retorted, “Well, what have you been doing up till now?”6 Hakuin was already famous for being a severe critic of lazy, “do-nothing Zen”—he was a kind of Rinzai Luther in his chiding of self-absorption and various Zen “indulgences” and slothful shortcuts. But is Hakuin’s impious retort not too much? Hakuin is not excoriating a vain monk or corrupt priest or dogmatic and routinized Rǀshi. He is admonishing the Heart Snjtra, the “heart piece” or shingyǀ of the prajñƗpƗramitƗ snjtra, which is chanted on an almost daily basis by all Zen practitioners! How can he disrespect perhaps the most concise and direct formulation of ĞnjnyƗta, or emptiness, namely, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”? Is this not going too far? In fact, Hakuin had earlier in his teishǀ responded to this celebrated formulation of ĞnjnyƗta by exclaiming, “Phuh! What could a little pipsqueak of an Arhat with his measly fruits possibly have to offer? Around here, even Buddhas and Patriarchs beg for their lives” (HC, 29). Pipsqueak of an Arhat? Buddhas begging for their lives? The Heart Snjtra as slothful teaching? What manner of teishǀ is this? What manner of “reading” the Heart Snjtra is this? What are we to make of Hakuin’s freewheeling poison and his own Great Health? After upbraiding the Heart Snjtra for the torpor of its teaching, Hakuin continued, “It’s like having a teetotaler forcing wine down your throat. You don’t get the real taste of the drink swilling cup after cup” (HC, 83). Teaching the Heart Snjtra—just simply announcing that this is a good teaching and a true and wise doctrine—is like swilling wine. It is not rooted in a deep, intimate, longitudinal experience of ĞnjnyƗta. To put this in more properly philosophical language, ĞnjnyƗta is more than a true proposition that is as such because it accords with the nature of things. It is more than a fact about the world. It is more than a warranted idea about the ideata given in human experience.

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In this sense, the Snjtra, despite being at the heart of the prajñƗpƗramitƗ, is about much more than prajñƗ or wisdom. It is rather, literally at the heart, forming not only the core wisdom, but also the very cardiovascular root of its manner of speaking. It speaks from the heart about the heart of things. It is a core discourse and hence in the idiom of prajñƗ, but it is more fundamentally expressive of the no longer repressed heart [kokoro]. After all, “shin (kokoro)” simultaneously names both the intellect and the heart. In a way, it is the love of wisdom (the literal meaning of the Greek philosophia) as the revelation of the wisdom of love. A connoisseur of wine, a master of enological wisdom, so to speak, is first and foremost a lover of wine and it is the love of wine that orders and gives contour to the demands and skills and practices of knowing that enable the pleasure of drinking wine. In this sense, Hakuin, that irrepressible critic of “intellectual Zen” and “book Zen” and “cocktail party Zen” and “Philosophy 101 Zen,” is a kind of paradoxically crass and sophisticated dharma wino, continuously drinking from the well of dharma and knowing and acting from its intoxicating transformation of the experience of things. This is further evidenced by the dramatic setting of the Heart Snjtra. Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s most accomplished and most prajñƗ rich disciples, requested that Kannon (Chinese Kuanyin, Sanskrit Avalokiteshvara), the Bodhisattva of compassion and here also referred to as Kanjizai, the Bodhisattva of Free and Unrestricted Seeing,7 speak to the “heart [shingyǀ]” of the prajñƗpƗramitƗ. The dramatic setting of Hakuin’s teishǀ further complicates the discourse, for Hakuin is speaking from his own Zen heart and experience about what is at the heart of the Heart Sutra, which is furthermore about what is at the heart of the prajñƗpƗramitƗ. Furthermore, teishǀ itself is, in a way, to speak from the heart, but in the deeper sense of speaking from mushin, from one’s Zen mind. It is to speak from the heart-mind (shin, kokoro) of one’s Zen mind (mushin) and thereby to speak from the depths of one’s Zen experience. The tei of teishǀ means to “offer or present” while shǀ names the act of recitation. Hence, teishǀ is not a “lecture” as the term is customarily translated. It is not the transmission of information but a presentation, traditionally during sesshin (the “gathering” of shin or kokoro, that is, an intensive session of meditation, lasting multiple days) of one’s mushin or Zen mind. Moreover, this mushin cannot be acquired, as if one were simply adding on a preferred predicate to one’s subject position. One only sees the moon when the house burns down. Mushin, the dharma that cannot be

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directly transmitted, requires the gaining of a loss, the acquisition of a shipwreck that unblocks the Zen mind, the “original face,” that was already there. It unblocks what Linji famously called “the true person of no rank.” To borrow an analogy from Søren Kierkegaard, it is as if we were starving because our mouths were so filled with food that we could not close them. The last thing that we need is more food. Rather we need to lose something, to shed our toxic condition. Kierkegaard was explosively (toxically) direct about this in a footnote in the Concluding Unscientific Postscripts to Philosophical Fragments (1846): When a man has filled his mouth so full of food that for this reason he cannot eat and it must end with his dying of hunger, does giving food to him consist in stuffing his mouth even more or, instead, in taking a little away so that he can eat? Similarly, when a man is very knowledgeable but his knowledge is meaningless or virtually meaningless to him, does sensible communication consist in giving him more to know, even if he loudly proclaims that this is what he needs, or does it consist, instead, in taking something away from him?8

In a similar sense, one can think of Hakuin’s teishǀ as a kind of beneficent poison, a liberating reproach. After all, Hakuin called this teishǀ the Dokugo shingyǀ, something like the Poison Words for the Heartpiece. It is a kind of toxic teishǀ, a cataclysmic destruction of the shingyǀ—as well as everything else, including the reader or auditor, even the universe itself— in order to release the sublimated force and life not only within the shingyǀ, but within all sentient beings. In this light, we can see that Hakuin’s venom seeks to occasion what the MahƗyƗna tradition dramatically called the Great Death. Hence, Hakuin upbraids the Heart Snjtra for becoming preoccupied with impermanence per se. When Kannon tells Shariputra that all things are empty appearances, Hakuin objects that “It’s like rubbing your eyes to see flowers in the air.” That all things are illusory is itself ipso facto illusory! “If all things don’t exist to begin with, what do we want with ‘empty appearances’? He is defecating and spraying pee all over a clean yard” (HC, 37). The Heart Snjtra is not therefore merely transmitting a philosophical doctrine. Rather it, too, like Hakuin, speaks from the depths of Zen experience that open up in the wake of the administration of medicinal toxins. “Unable to return for ten full years, you forget the way you came” (HC, 83). The depths of Zen experience obscure the means of its awakening—philosophical or otherwise—as its force overwhelms any of the paths or means used along the way. Hakuin asks, “So who is the wine

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for? We’re all drunk to the gills” (HC, 83). In this reactivation of a kind of drunken original face—a primordial but heretofore sublimated drunkenness—one encounters something like what Nietzsche once called Übermut—drunkenness beyond sobriety and drunkenness. This is not to say that satori makes one drunk. Rather, one was already drunk before one began drinking. Zen teaches that one begins originally drunk on the dust of the world, intoxicated by one’s stubborn attachments. In this sense, Zen wine sobers one up for the possibility of real drunkenness. This is therefore not the sad person’s embrace of drunkenness to escape sobriety. The latter simply reaffirms, via a brief vacation into the spasmodic enthusiasms of inebriation, that one is fundamentally a sober person and only occasionally and accidentally a drunken person. One is drunkenly attached to the dust of one’s sobriety. Rather Hakuin’s poisonous barbs unleash the drunken and recklessly compassionate heart of Being itself. Satori is not a wise investment of one’s time that provides a salutary return. It is the eruption of the drunken forces of unrelenting compassion that give everything to the Other and demand nothing in return. This was not always Hakuin’s experience and hence he sometimes lamented that he had begun Buddhist practice in an effort to avoid damnation. When Hakuin was young, his mother took him to a Nichiren (1222-1282) temple in Hara, where he learned of the horrors of hell. The priest spoke vividly of the Eight Scorching Hells and “He had every knee in the audience quaking, every liver in the house frozen stiff with fear. As little as I was, I was certainly no exception. My whole body shook in mortal terror.”9 Hakuin wanted satori because he did not want to go to one of the Eight Scorching Hells. Satori sounded like a good thing to get out of life, a good experience to have. Yeh, I “did” satori and I feel much better. Hakuin later did a remarkable calligraphy that reads “Homage to Hell, the Great Bodhisattva.”10 Why did Hakuin speak of Hell as a force of compassion? On the one hand, it was the idea of Hell that first drove Hakuin to meditate, although this motivation was itself born of the ego. Even though it was the ego that drove Hakuin to seek satori, it was a use of the ego in which the ego is eventually used against itself. The great MƗdhyamika philosopher ĝƗntideva taught that one has to use the kleĞas or defiled emotions against themselves. One has to be impatient in one’s desire to cultivate patience. One has to be angry at anger and learn to hate hate. In so doing, one inaugurates a movement that overcomes its origin. Hakuin’s ego drove him to meditate but meditation overcame the ego of the one who had originally sought the Pure Land of satori.

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In the MahƗyƗna tradition, emphasis is placed on training in both wisdom (prajñƗ) and compassion (karunƗ). The Bodhisattvas, for example, were said to surrender their satori and emancipation from the cycles of birth and rebirth (samsƗra) in order to love all sentient beings and to endeavor to eliminate their suffering. Yet it would not be technically correct to speak of this as a duty or obligation. KarunƗ is the free movement of mushin and it does not require deontology. As Nishitani Keiji explained it, “The sun in the sky makes no choices about where to shine its rays and shows no preferences as to likes or dislikes. There is no selfishness in its shining. This lack of selfishness is what is meant by nonego, or ‘emptiness’ (ĞnjnyƗta).”11 KarunƗ was a chief concern of Hakuin. He had been an assiduous practitioner and achieved satori at a relatively early stage. This experience filled him with pride and it was not until much later, after he achieved an even deeper satori, that he realized that satori is not some kind of personal achievement or a job well done. Deep satori is not something that happens to me. In the eclipse of the ego’s reign, it is becoming Other-centered. “When hearsay and book learning satisfy your needs, the patriarchal gardens are still a million miles away. So I beseech you great men, forget your own welfare” (HC, 85)! Hakuin, as we have already noted, relentlessly castigated indolent, selfabsorbed, “do-nothing Zen.” He had no patience for monks who just sat around and meditated. Meditation was for the sake of kenshǀ, Enlightenment, but kenshǀ was not a personal accomplishment. It was the awakening of karunƗ from the ashes of the ego. Reflecting, as we have seen, that his original motivation for meditating had been to avoid hell, he laughed in appreciation when his disciple Tǀrei latter told him that his motivation for meditation was “to work for the salvation of my fellow beings.” Hakuin admitted that this was “A much better reason than mine” (WI, xxii). In his old age, Hakuin became a tireless teacher, working, “To devote my energy to liberating the countless suffering beings of the world by imparting the great gift of the Dharma; to assemble a few select monks capable of passing through the barrier into genuine kenshǀ; to strive diligently toward creating conditions for the realization of a Buddha-land on earth and, in the process, carry into practice Bodhisattva vows” (WI, 84). Hence, Hakuin concluded his teishǀ on the Heart Snjtra by clasping his hands in prayer. “In mind, sweep clear the demons of illusion everyone, and benefit without rest the vast suffering multitudes” (HC, 87). The very image of Nietzsche clasping his hands together and taking the Bodhisattva vows is no doubt absurd, but the dissonance between the image of Hakuin and Nietzsche only emerges when one locates their

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health within some kind of ideology or a superficial coincidence of images. But as ĝankara once insisted, the word “medicine” does not heal anyone. For both it is a new manner of philosophizing that unleashes the Great Health, a manner of philosophizing born of the healthy ambiguity of poison itself.12

Notes 1

The reported dates for Hakuin’s life vary greatly. I thank Jeff Shore for clarifying to me that such inconsistencies are chiefly due to the failure to distinguish lunar and solar calendars of the time. See also Michel Mohr, “Hakuin,” in Buddhist Spirituality: Later China, Korea, Japan, and the Modern World, ed. Y. Takeuchi, J. W. Heisig, P. L. Swanson, and J. S. O’Leary (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999). In keeping with Japanese custom, I cite Japanese names by first listing the family name and then the given name. 2 Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, with Valdo Viglielmo and James W. Heisig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 113. 3 Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), xxxiii. Nishitani further argues that “Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, especially to MahƗyƗna” (180). 4 Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft in the Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), volume 3, 347. Henceforth KSA, followed by volume number and page citation. All translations from Nietzsche are my own responsibility. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), volume 6 (January 1880—December 1884), 103. Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle [trans. Daniel Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)] provides a magisterial philosophical account of Nietzsche’s sickness. See especially chapter 2. 6 Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra, trans. Norman Waddell (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), 83. Henceforth HC. 7 See HC, x. 8 “A Glance at Danish Literature,” Concluding Postscript, part two, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, volume one, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 275. 9 Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, trans. Norman Waddell (Boston: Shambhala, 1999), 9. Henceforth WI. 10 See WI, 11. 11 Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan van Bragt (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1982), 60.

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I return to my consideration of the relationship between sickness and health in Nietzsche’s thought, this time in relation to William James and the question of “healthy-minded” religion, in my essay, “The Varieties of Sick Experience: Nietzsche, James, and the Art of Health,” published in the journal Veritas (Porto Alegre, Brazil), 54:1 (January-March 2009), 101-112. I would also like to mention another helpful and penetrating study of the affinity between the site of Hakuin’s thinking and that of Nietzsche, namely, Graham Parkes’ essay, “Nietzsche and Zen Master Hakuin on the Roles of Emotion and Passion,” in Nietzsche and the Gods, ed. Weaver Santaniello (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 115134. As his title suggests, Parkes concentrates on the complementary place of affective life in both thinkers, not so much to naively suggest that they are both “saying the same thing” but rather that both are “saying something different from what he has usually been taken to be saying” (131) and that, despite the “striking difference in their modi operandi,” both “have in common . . . an appreciation of the vital power of the emotions and a refusal to let that power be lost through the reduction or extirpation of affect” (131). This is a very different Nietzsche than the wild, unruly Nietzschean beast drunk with the ethical carelessness and spiritual sloppiness of exuberant affect run amok. It is also very different from the passive, stoic, unfeeling Zen Master, removed from all feeling and connection to the world. Despite the difference in the question that we bring to these texts, I find Parkes’ approach to be quite complimentary to the current study and note that its questions, on their own trajectory, also come upon the problem of sickness. Parkes rightly claims: “They also have a special connection with pathology, being capable themselves of engendering illness as well as participating in its cure” (125). Finally, for those interested in taking up the issue of Hakuin and the role of sickness, see his remarkable, “Letter to a Sick Monk Living Far Away,” in The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, trans. Philip B. Yampolsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 73-86. Speaking of the failings of errant practitioners, Hakuin laments, “But saddest of all, they make the human body, this thing so difficult to obtain, a slave to their search for fame, and thus bury the unsurpassed Buddha mind under the dust pile of delusions.” Yes, the body, so difficult to obtain!

CHAPTER XII INTROSPECTION AND TRANSFORMATION IN PHILOSOPHY TODAY MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

In Remembrance of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.1 —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

There is no question that modern and contemporary philosophy have developed remarkable conceptual tools and have used these tools to marshal brilliant accounts of who we think we are as we diagnose transcendental and historical sources of human dis-ease, and point towards who we might otherwise become. Through the capacity of radical reflexivity, a gift of modernity, philosophy has seeded a number of interrelated lineages of critique—Hegelian, Marxian, Nietzschean, Critical Theoretic, Foucaultian—that in varying and mutually invigorating ways clarify our conditions of existence, making the tacit background of our practices and lives more explicit, so to re-orient our ways of being in the world. This is an extraordinary achievement, and so very important (given the complexity of modern conditions) because it means that philosophical engagement can and does make a difference for those who are willing to take up its considerable intellectual demands. Nevertheless, there has been a down side to this achievement and a loss for philosophy in modern times. And this has to do with philosophical activity becoming richly and narrowly centered on analytical thought and language-use.

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In On Religion John Caputo points directly to the issue when he notes that Kant treats the ontological argument for the existence of God as a task of textual and logical exegesis, which results in Kant’s demonstration that Anselm’s proof is flimsy, both conceptually and logically. How could Anselm ever have taken this “proof” seriously? Caputo’s answer is that for Anselm the ontological argument was not, as it was for Kant, a matter of cognition alone, but used as part of a ramified spiritual practice.2 We can imagine that Anselm first would have engaged in some preparatory exercise—chanting, praying, being still—allowing any strong sense of a separate self to fall away, opening what in the middle ages was called the eye of spirit (what today might be referred to as the allowing of naked awareness to come forward, the noticing of pure consciousness)3—and then would have made use of the “argument,” not as a proof in and of itself, but more along the lines of the medieval monastic technique of lectio divina—a meditative listening-to rather than a critical analysis of the text. Within the context of a multifaceted practice of self, Anselm would have listened to the “proof” as a devotional aid in the awakening of the soul, the freeing of the pure presence of awareness. In contrast, Kant’s approach to the ontological proof is thoroughly modern, exemplifying a new philosophical concern for and rigor in thinking, one that would come to empower the critical stance, marking an advance in the history of philosophical thought in its commitment to thought’s radical reflexivity—but at a cost that eschews practices and procedures not concerned directly and immediately with engendering clear, critical thinking. Anselm’s use of the ontological argument is located within a long, complex history of Western views and practices of inwardness. Modern philosophical introspection stands within this tradition and Husserl’s eidectic reduction is an exemplary instance.4 What role does introspection play in early Husserl? As presented in Ideen I, the eidectic reduction exercises the mental faculties, especially the imagination, to disclose the eidos or essences located in intentional consciousness. But to what end? Does the method in any clear manner transform that consciousness? Or is it most basically a step in a larger project that has as its overarching telos the building of a theory that demonstrates the primacy of transcendental subjectivity in lieu of physicalist and reductionist psychologisms of the soul? Whatever transformation might occur from using the method, the gleaning of evidence seems to be of utmost intent. In contrast, Anselm’s use of the ontological argument is clearly oriented towards transformation, de-contracting consciousness, and realizing the radiance within. This transformation is not geared towards demonstrating the validity of a theory.

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Foucault’s late work on ethics can shed light on the gap between the meditative procedures of Anselm and the modernity of philosophers such as Kant and Husserl. Towards the end of his famous April 1983 interview with Bert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, which was published as “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” Foucault noted that: . . . we must not forget that Descartes wrote “meditations” —and meditations are a practice of the self. But the extraordinary thing in Descartes’ texts is that he succeeded in substituting a subject as founder of practices of knowledge, for a subject constituted through practices of the self . . . In European culture up to the sixteenth century, the problem [from antiquity] remains: What is the work which I must effect upon myself so as to be capable and worthy of acceding to the truth? To put it another way: truth always has a price; no access to truth without ascesis . . . . Descartes, I think, broke with this when he said, “To accede to truth, it suffices that I be any subject which can see what is evident.” Evidence is substituted for ascesis at the point where the relationship to the self intersects the relationship to others and the world. The relationship to the self no longer needs to be ascetic to get into relation to the truth. It suffices that the relationship to the self reveals to me the obvious truth of what I see for me to apprehend that truth definitively. Thus, I can be immoral and know the truth. I believe that this was an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. With Descartes, direct evidence is enough. After Descartes, we have a non-ascetic subject of knowledge. This change makes possible the institutionalization of modern science.5

Foucault goes on to say in the interview that the ascetical impetus does not simply disappear in modern philosophy, a point which he had made earlier in the 1981-1982 lectures at the Collège de France on L’herméneutique du subject.6 How does the transformative impulse manifest in modern thought? Although Foucault’s remarks on the ethics of truth-telling in the philosophical tradition are fragmentary, they do, I think, begin to clarify the modernity of Kant and Husserl. Kant differs from Anselm in that for the latter understanding the ontological proof of God’s existence requires a prior and ongoing ascetic work on oneself, whereas for Kant, understanding the argument requires no prior labor, but is a matter of exercising one’s cognitive powers as they already stand. Our consciousness, right now, is sufficiently expansive and rational to assess the validity of the argument. In the case of the early Husserl, the eidectic reduction exercises our faculties to disclose a broader truth, that of the primacy of transcendental

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subjectivity. This echoes the pre-modern injunction to work upon oneself as a precondition for acceding to truth. But the introspection here is not assuredly transformative of intentional consciousness, but again, as in Kant, is a demonstration about the workings of consciousness as it already exists; the method is a means of gathering evidence in making and verifying a theoretical point. While retaining spiritual resonances proper to the earlier tradition of inwardness, the Husserlian approach to introspection has much to do with phenomenology’s desire to realize itself as a science with its own methods and introspective evidence proper to an inner rather than outer empiricism.7 If there is a question of identity here it seems to turn on the philosopher’s self-understanding as practitioner of a rigorous science that is rationally open to and able to ascertain evidence about the truth or falsity of claims about transcendental constitution. Whatever ascetical impulses might be found in early phenomenology, the Husserl of the Krisis unabashedly calls for a change in the modern psyche. The opening of that great text argues that the crisis in culture is exemplified by the loss of meaning in the natural sciences. Philosophy’s task is first to ground itself and then, from this self-grounding, secure the moral significance and rationality of the sciences. Philosophical selfclarification is the means for steering European culture in a healthier direction. (Assumed here is modern philosophy’s self-understanding as a more or less autonomous realm of discourse—having striking parallels to modernist art’s self-understanding and self-claimed importance8—a point to which we shall return.) There is a passionate spiritual impulse in the Krisis. Husserl is onto something important in the history of science: the loss of science’s nourishment in the lifeworld. But while such insightful theory clarifies the situation, does it empower our ways of intervening in culture at large in creative, effective, and wise ways? Does such theory in and of itself transform our capacities for re-engaging the world? Or might it more properly be said to provide a new set of beliefs for a consciousness that as such remains the same in its transcendental constitution and agential resources? In the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger’s critique of intentional consciousness in Sein und Zeit, notably the sections devoted to beingtowards-death and authenticity, is a profound expression of modern thought’s impetus to transform. Becoming authentic, as a modification of one’s socialization, gathers and aligns Dasein’s being in the world with the destiny and fate of a community. Yet, in a characteristically modern move (or lack of one), Heidegger never suggests a specific technique to enact, empower, or provoke our seeing into the groundlessness of our received identities and spark awakening into a more authentic life—whereas such

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practices abound in the religious lineages of world. Even in the more mystical dialogue on Gelassenheit, we are given no injunctions or instructions that might enable the “leap” into the Open, the letting go of representation’s subject-object horizon into the more primordial open region where thinking, freed from willing, comes forth in its essence. Here too, the religious lineages in their esoteric strains as well in their contemporary Western offshoots offer “techniques” for releasing the subjective stance: the pointing out instructions in the Dzogchen teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, Self-inquiry as introduced by Ramana Maharshi, the effortless effort of just sitting proper to the Zen “practice” of Zazen, the prayer of union and centering prayer in contemplative Christianity, the yoga of supreme rest as taught by the contemporary American Eli JaxonBear, and more. In each case the “technique” or instruction uniquely helps us notice and release our subjective stance into the Open.9 To be sure, with Heidegger and others in the phenomenological tradition who have taken seriously the call “back to the things themselves,” there seems to be something akin to “pointing out instructions” in their writings—and indeed when de-contextualized, selected passages can operate as such (and often beautifully so). But, by and large, the flow of philosophical discourse pulls attention back into the conceptual unfolding of what is finally a theoretical presentation. To use the Zen metaphor of the finger pointing at the moon: moments in the movement of the text point to the moon, but never quite release this pointing, never advocate that the linguistic-showing be deeply surrendered or suspended; with the consequence that one again notices the finger in lieu of what the finger is gesturing towards, awareness falling back into the content of thought, the instance of pointing out the depths of our primordial beingness and responsiveness functioning primarily as a moment of evidence in a conceptual demonstration that as such mutes potentials in the passage to spur us towards radical self-release and transformation. In general, modern philosophy has forfeited a wide array of techniques of self-transformation, while at the same time, with great brilliance, has increasingly focused upon evidence, critical thought, theory’s import, and skillful language-use. It seems to me that Foucault’s late work on ethics, as a refiguring of Division Two of Sein und Zeit, was pressing towards the historical repetition and recovery of forgotten practices of self in order to empower self-transformation, thereby complementing philosophical reflection.10 The transformative impulse is alive and well in philosophy today. But what is often considered “transformative” is more like a description of heretofore unspecified conditions of thinking and being. The modern

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episteme’s trope of thinking the unthought, first articulated by Foucault in Les mots et les choses,11 underwrites many of the innovations in recent philosophy: social domination as the hidden origin of the moral dualisms of good/bad, good/evil (Nietzsche); transcendental subjectivity as what constitutes the natural attitude (Husserl); the groundlessness of the “I am” as the thoughtless background of the cogito (Heidegger); the question of being as the unasked question behind the tradition’s questioning (Heidegger); the chiasmatic flesh of the world as the source of perception and the fluid subject/object horizon (Merleau-Ponty); power as shaping the historical ways of telling the truth (Foucault); ethics as the unthinkable condition of ontology (Levinas); justice as the undeconstructable fundament of deconstruction (Derrida); and so on. In each case, the theory purports to think the unthought of previous theorizing, which deepens our understanding of the ways of being, knowing, and acting; with the gesture seeming to claim more for itself than re-description, as if the disclosure of the unseen condition, the act of critical reflection, not only thinks the unthought, but tacitly effects a transformation. Thinking discloses anew and effects a transformation in what has been referenced in the disclosure. Redescribing the conditions of thinking and acting, however, does not automatically enact a transformation of capacities. To believe so risks confounding the constative and performative dimensions of language.

Excursus: Meditations on Emptiness A reader might take what has been said so far is an invective against thought—but it is not. One will think so only if attached to modern philosophical intellect-only procedures. Suggesting that thinking has limits for transformation is not the same as saying that thinking is not important—although one can imagine the contemporary philosophical self having a tough time attending to this distinction. Tibetan Buddhism presents an example of how rigorous scholarly thought can be tied to ascetical practices of transformation. The Gelupka order in particular espouses the need for intensive scholarly study tied to discursive meditation. Following the teachings of lineage founder Tsong Khapa, the Lam rim (“stages of the path”) sets forth a series of graded analytical meditations beginning with topics like death and suffering, moving onto to compassion, and culminating on the emptiness of self and other where successful completion of these analytic meditations on emptiness sets the stage for initiation into tantra.12 Briefly set forth, the monk enrolled in a monastic college and seeking a Geshe degree (roughly equivalent to a Western Ph.D.) studies the Asian

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tradition of philosophies of emptiness that descend from Nagarjuna, eventually taking up and immersing himself in the Consequential Middle Way school of analysis (Prasangika Madhyamika).13 Scholarly study at this advanced intellectual stage, which includes regular debate amongst the monks, is not an end in itself, but supports a daily regime of intensive analytic meditations on the emptiness of self and other. Theory is not an end in itself, nor is theory primary. The goal is not to hold onto a new set of beliefs but the radical transformation of the monk through stabilizing the direct “seeing” into the emptiness of self beyond all conceptualization. Such “seeing” leads to direct realization of “no-self” without rejecting or neglecting the importance of intelligent language use. The Tibetan teachings profess that without the meditation on emptiness energized through stable one-pointed attention, there will be little or no transformation in the monk’s consciousness. The rigorous study and debating of theory, in and of itself divorced from meditation, is considered unlikely to spark liberation.

Translation is not Transformation One common response to the claims so far forwarded is to textualize, theorize, or analyze the non-theoretical practices of self as if they were propositions that are true or false, rather than seeing them as exercises that transform our being. Both modern and contemporary philosophy—and the culture as a whole—has the tendency to want to debate and assess such claims about the transformative power of practice without actually taking up the given practice and testing it out. Hidden under the mask of a supposedly tough-minded skepticism is a pre-rational slant that is not truly open to the available evidence—where the evidence in this case is the fruit of engaging the practice. It is like assessing the taste of some exotic, complex food dish by looking over the menu or reading the recipe, rather than eating or cooking the actual food. There is a propensity to move again and again back to cognition and thinking alone, to some form of theorizing. Consider the contemporary fervor and debates about ethics, care, and love for the other in Levinas and the later Derrida. These theories are powerful, and at times quite brilliant and moving; no doubt they redirect us away from the instrumental and administrative rationality of our lives and toward matters of compassion. In this sense they are very fruitful. But—and this is a big “but”—how much does engagement with these theories, our thinking with and about them, in and of themselves, enlarge our capacity to love, really love, to open up and respond to the command of the other? And what about the shadowed and reactive facets

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of our psychic conditioning, which when innocently (and so readily) triggered short-circuit a loving responsiveness no matter how many times we have read and enjoyed a book like Totality and Infinity? Here Ken Wilber’s distinction between translation and transformation is helpful. For Wilber, transformation is an expansion of consciousness that fundamentally reconditions the forms of thinking, feeling, and acting. (And where radical transformation—awakening, liberation, Christconsciousness, no-self, Self—is the dismantling of the solid self-sense altogether.) Translation, on the other hand, is more of a lateral movement, a re-description within the same basic form of consciousness. As Wilber explains: With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief—perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic . . . But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed undermined, and eventually dismantled . . . [For] at some point in our maturation process, translation itself, no matter how adequate or confident, simply ceases to console. No new belief, no new paradigm, no new myth, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish . . . [Yet] in today’s America . . . [the] vast majority of leading edge of horizontal spiritual adherents often claim to be representing the leading edge of spiritual transformation, the ‘new paradigm’ that will change the world, the ‘great transformation’ of which they are the vanguard. But more often than not, they are not deeply transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively translative—they do not offer effective means [to first transform and then eventually] to utterly dismantle the self, but merely ways for the self to think differently. Not ways to transform, but merely ways to translate. In fact, what most of them offer is not a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang or shikantaza or yoga. What most of them offer is simply the suggestion: read my book on the new paradigm. This is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.14

At any moment there are better and worse translations, better and worse re-descriptions of who we are; with translation coming into play even with the dissolution of the solid self-sense. Furthermore, within a given form of consciousness there regularly arises an increasingly skillful exercising of capacities proper to that consciousness, which is an expression of a finer and finer competency. Wilber is not against translation, but is warning about the common confounding of translation and transformation—that translations abound in culture today, and are so often mistaken for transformation. Transformation is a far more demanding task.

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The impetus to transform animates philosophy. In a number of late writings, especially the essay on “What is Enlightenment?,” Foucault speculated that modern philosophy, as a critical ontology of the self, concerns itself with a “way out” (Ausgang) from the present.15 As we have seen, this way out from the present is regularly enacted textually through the trope of thinking the unthought. Philosophy is an analytical-theoretical discourse; and theorizing some change is not the same as effectuating change. Reading Derrida on the primacy of the other is not the same as reconditioning our automatic habits of reacting to and attuning to others; whereas techniques of the heart, as found in most of the world’s wisdom traditions, have proven their effectiveness at achieving deep and stable transformations in practitioners. Engaging in tonglen—a profound and simple Tibetan Buddhist practice of dissolving self-cherishing and awakening the cherishing of others16—will go farther for most people in reconditioning ingrained habits of self-contraction and freeing up compassionate responsiveness than will the analytical reading of a theoretical tome, be it Western or Eastern. Notwithstanding the predictable objections and rationalizations—that texts are performative or that theory and reading are practices in their own right—the only way to find out about the comparative effectiveness of a self-technique like tonglen is to do the practice. None of this is to underestimate the value of reading Levinas, Buber, and Derrida about such matters; it is rather to step in the direction of our getting clearer about acts of translation (which may indeed contribute towards transformation) and explicit time-tested techniques of transforming the self. We need deep translations to set in motion effective transformation and we need them as well to integrate the results of a transformation— contemporary philosophy is a brilliant and unique source of such insights. But philosophical translations are in and of themselves typically non—or weakly transformative in comparison to the numerous non-theoretical practices of self widely available today.17 Following Foucault’s lead, we might speculate and generalize that the philosophical legacy of the Cartesian turn in practices of self has entailed that what “I am” as a philosophical self is fundamentally defined by the “I think.” This legacy results in the philosophical self that sees its mission as gifting the world with critical thinking as the means to diagnose the sources of our dis-ease, and also as the medicine for healing the dis-ease so specified. Thinking has assumed a double duty.

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Modern Philosophy and the Disciplinary University: Illusions of Autonomy While modern philosophy has turned its critical techniques upon culture and society, it rarely has done so upon itself, that is, it has rarely looked at the historical conditions of doing philosophy today. It often presumes something like its own autonomy, the realm where critical thought is preserved. (Foucault, it seems, was preparing to write a genealogy of philosophy, but died too soon.) Not reflecting critically on its conditions of existence, philosophy risks internalizing habits of thought proper to the culture at large. Coarsely stated, pre-modern ascetic practices have been replaced by the modern, administrative and disciplinary training of the university, which are procedures of forming the modern philosopher to align tightly with the normalized social institution of higher education. This has entailed both an advance and a retreat. The post-Cartesian celebration of method and the demand for evidence has had a very positive liberating effect since the pre-modern claim that the Teacher already embodies the Good or Truth via an unquestionable authority could no longer stand absolute in sanctioning the truth-force of philosophical inquiry. The down side has been the focus on cognition-only philosophy, which stresses the skillful use of language and the interpretation of texts. These skills are now stripped of earlier modes of self-work that were never simply false moments to sanction the moral authority requisite to speak the truth. There has been “democratization” in who can do philosophy, with thought, empowered by a radical reflexivity, reaping unparalleled insights into who we are today. This gain has been coupled with the loss of explicitly transformative practices in lieu of normalized training procedures, which entails that modern philosophy has adopted the medicine of the thinkingcure with theoretical discourse serving the twin task of diagnostic and cure. In this light it can be seen that philosophy has internalized certain habits of modern life more deeply than it may wish to acknowledge. As Simmel, Benjamin, and others have argued, modernity is characterized by the hypertrophy of theoretical consciousness in everyday life serving as shock absorber for newly modern threats to the psyche. Ours is a spectacular culture, a culture of spectators: not playing sports, but watching them; not cooking gourmet food, but watching the Food Network; not working on ourselves to become more loving, but thinking the terms of love.

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Related to the rise in the theoretical stance has been an inflated sense of individual subjectivity, about which Weber first talked with such clarity. The iron cage of modernity’s instrumental rationality—subsequently rearticulated and analyzed anew as reification by Lukacs, the Gestell by Heidegger, the totally administered world by Adorno, disciplinary society by Foucault, the society of the spectacle by DeBord, the colonization of the lifeworld by Habermas, and the reign of It/s by Wilber, to name a few of the offshoots of this seminal insight—is what engenders a compensatory and inflated sense of subjectivity. Increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a defensive response, a regressive narcissism, by which the self-sense, the ego, re-asserts itself in light of being leveled by meaningless quantifying forces from without. And this re-assertion, in the face of overwhelming objective forces, entails the mind’s exaggeration of its own powers, with thought often taking on a magical hue—edging towards the delusion that thinking makes it so. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world, philosophy has not been immune from this cast of mind—that theorizing about brings into being. Postmodern thought abounds with exaggerated tones and claims of the importance of the topic under study, and the writer’s insightful theory presented as akin to incarnating a transformation. Again, this is not an invective against thinking, nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances and importance; it is however a serious call to wake up from the delusion that theoretical redescription is somehow the same as transforming who we are. Given these reflections, how might we imagine a way out? The philosophy to come, the philosophy on the way, will retain and keep extending the remarkable intellectual riches of modern and contemporary thought, especially as a critique of current conditions of existence. It will cease overtaxing thought with the additional task of effecting greater depth, care, and wisdom in our souls. For what is called for is a rich mining of the transformative technologies of the world’s wisdom traditions and folding them into what it means to be a philosopher and to practice philosophy—this, in short, is what I take to be the spirit of Foucault’s late work on ethics. This “mining” means not only theorizing about love, but engaging in practices to realize ourselves as more loving human beings; not debating what releasement into the Open was for Heidegger, but of tasting it for ourselves, surrendering the separate selfsense and coming to experience directly what is at stake in words like “being,” “releasement,” and the “step back.” (It demands that we curtail the one-sided philological approach to such terms.)

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Philosophy so imagined will come to unite the modern gift of the radical reflexivity of thought with the pre-modern concern for acceding to, resting in, and emerging anew from the silence and stillness that is the very source of logos—this philosophy to come birthing and nourishing, again and again, a critical wisdom profoundly responsive to what is, energizing our actions for what needs to be done.

Notes 1

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247. 2 John Caputo, On Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 38-42. 3 See Robert K. C. Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and idem, ed., The Innate Capacity: Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4 On inwardness, introspection, and the modern study of consciousness, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1989); and B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 5 Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 278279. 6 L’herméneutique du suject: Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1982 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 27-32, 466-467. 7 On inner empiricism, see Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), Chapter 10; and cf. Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), Chapter 3. 8 For a critical assessment of modernity’s autonomous sphere of art, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 9 The yoga of supreme rest is especially direct and effective. See Eli Jaxon-Bear, Sudden Awakening into Direct Realization (Tiburon, CA: New World Library, 2004), 107-108. For an excellent collection of verbal spurs and pointing out instructions for release into radical openness, see Josh Baran, ed., 365 Nirvana Here and Now: Living Every Moment in Enlightenment (London: Harper Collins, 2003). 10 See Michael Schwartz, “Repetition and Ethics in Late Foucault,” Telos 117 (Fall 1999), 113-132. 11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (New York: Vintage, 1970), 322-328.

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For a comprehensive presentation of the Lam rim meditations, see Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Joyful Path of Good Fortune: The Complete Buddhist Path to Enlightenment (London: Tharpa, 1990). 13 Fundamental is Tsong Khapa’s Lam rim chen mo, its sections on emptiness recently translated as The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, volume 3 (Ithaca, NY and Boulder, CO: Snow Lion, 2002). 14 Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2000), 26, 33. 15 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Ethics, 303-319. 16 Kelsang Gyatso, Joyful Path, 433-440. 17 Integral Institute, located in Boulder, CO., is among the world leaders in gathering and experimentally testing the transformational effectiveness of the world’s spiritual technologies and psychological techniques. See: www.integralinstitute.org, especially its on-line forum Integral Naked.

CONTRIBUTORS

RONALD BOGUE is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. His books include Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 1989); Deleuze on Literature (Routledge, 2003); Deleuze on Cinema (Routledge, 2003); Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (Routledge, 2003); Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (State University of New York Press, 2004); and Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Ashgate, 2007). BRET W. DAVIS is associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is author of Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Northwestern, 2007); translator of Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations (Indiana, 2010); editor of Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010); co-editor with Brian Schroeder and Jason M. Wirth of Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana, 2010); and co-editor with Fujita Masakatsu of Japanese Philosophy in the World (Shôwadô, 2005, in Japanese). DUANE H. DAVIS is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He has published numerous articles on Merleau-Ponty, hermeneutics, existentialism, phenomenology, and recent French thought, and is the editor of: Merleau-Ponty's Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility (Humanity Books, 2001). He received his PhD in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. THOMAS R. FLYNN is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. His main areas of research are in contemporary continental (especially French) philosophy, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and the theory of responsibility. Author of many works, his selected publications include: Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago, 1986); Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason (Vol. 1): Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago, 1997); Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason (Vol.2): A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago, 2005); Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Existentialism

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Contributors

(Sterling, 2009). His edited volumes include The Ethics of History, with David Carr and Rudolf A. Makkreel (Northwestern, 2004); Über Sartre: Perspektiven und Kritiken, edited with Peter Kampits and Erik Vogt (Turia & Kant, 2005); and Dialectic and Narrative, edited with Dalia Judovitz (State University of New York Press, 1993). BRIAN SCHROEDER is professor and chair of philosophy and director of religious studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence (Routledge, 1995) and Pensare ambientalista. Tra filosofia e ecologia (Paravia, 2000). He is coeditor of Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer (State University of New York Press, 2004); Contemporary Italian Philosophy: At the Threshold of Ethics, Politics, and Religion (State University of New York Press, 2007); Levinas and the Ancients (Indiana, 2008); Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (State University of New York Press, 2010); and, with Bret W. Davis and Jason M. Wirth, Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana, 2010). He is presently writing a book titled Atonement of the Last God. MARCIA SÁ CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK is associate professor of philosophy at Södertörn University College in Sweden. Her books include: Lovtal till intet: essäer om hermeneutisk filosofi (Glänta 2006); Para ler os medievais: ensaios de hermenêutica imaginativa (Vozes, 2000); and O comeco de deus: a filosofia do devir no pensamento tardio de F. W. Schelling (Vozes, 1998). In addition to publishing articles in philosophical journals, she translated into her mother tongue Portuguese: Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, Vorträge und Aufsätze, and Unterwegs zur Sprache; Schelling's Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit; and Hölderlin's Hyperion and Theoretical Essays. She is currently working on a book about the philosophy of “sketching” where she explores the difference between thinking and thoughts with thinking analogized to the act of sketching in the visual arts vis-à-vis the telos of art. She is co-editor of Södertörn Philosophical Studies, and publishes in the areas of continental philosophy, German Idealism, phenomenology and hermeneutics. MICHAEL SMITH is professor emeritus of French and philosophy at Berry College. His books and translations include: Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas (Duquesne University Press, 2005); Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. B. Bergo (Fordham

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University Press, 2007); The Possession at Loudun, a translation of Michel de Certeau`s La Possession de Loudun (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Alterity and Transcendence, a translation of Emmanuel Levinas’ Altérité et Transcendence (Athlone Press, 1999); Discovering Existence with Husserl, a translation with Richard A. Cohen of Emmanuel Levinas’ En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Northwestern, 1998); Entre nous: on thinking of the other, a translation with Barbara Harshav of Emmanuel Levinas’ Entre nous (Columbia University Press, 1998); In the Time of the Nations, a translation of Emmanuel Levinas' À l’heure des nations (Althone Press, 1994 and Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994); The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. Galen Johnson (Northwestern University Press, 1993); Outside the Subject, a translation of Emmanuel Levinas’ Hors sujet (Athlone Press and Stanford University Press, 1993); MerleauPonty: Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh Silverman and J. Barry (Humanities Press, 1992); The Mystic Fable, a translation of Michel de Certeau’s La Fable Mystique (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Northwestern University Press, 1990); and Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 19331935 (Yale University Press, 2009). ALEJANDRO A. VALLEGA is an assistant professor of philosophy and co-director of the Latin American Studies Program at California State University, Stanislaus. He was born in Santiago, Chile, and went into exile with his family in 1974. Since then he has lived in Argentina, the United States, Austria, and Italy. His work focuses on Latin American thought, especially on the articulation of thought and its history as it unfolds its consciousness in exteriority (or alterity), that is, beyond and in the periphery of North American and Western European philosophy. His current research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in contemporary Latin American thought. His books include: Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking On Exilic Grounds (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) and Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political (State University of New York Press, 2009). In addition, he is the editor of volumes on Heidegger and on Giorgio Agamben and is the editor of Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation (forthcoming Duke University Press). He is also the head editor for “Latin America of the New World Philosophies Series” of Indiana University Press.

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JAMES J. WINCHESTER is associate professor of philosophy at Georgia College & State University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Turn: Reading Nietzsche After Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida (State University of New York Press, 1994) and Aesthetics Across the Color Line: Why Nietzsche Sometimes Can’t Sing the Blues (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Ethics in an Age of Savage Inequalities that reflects on our ethical responsibilities given the great economic inequalities of the present age.

Editors DAVID JONES is professor of philosophy, editor of Comparative and Continental Philosophy (Equinox) and East-West Connections, director of the Atlanta Center for Asian Studies, and has been visiting professor of Confucian Classics at Emory. His current books include The Fractal Self and the Evolution of God with John L. Culliney and Zhu Xi Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Great Ultimate (State University of New York Press), edited with He Jinli. He is co-editor of Asian Texts — Asian Contexts: Encountering the Philosophies and Religions of Asia (State University of New York Press, 2009) and editor of Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects (Open Court, 2008) and Buddha Nature and Animality (Jain, 2007). A past president of the Southeast Regional of the Association of Asian Studies and present president of the Comparative & Continental Philosophy Circle, he was the East-West Center’s Distinguished Alumnus in 2004-2005. MICHAEL SCHWARTZ is professor of history and philosophy of art at Augusta State University and associate editor of the journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He has published and lectured widely, in both the United States and Europe, in the fields of continental philosophy, art history and historiography, aesthetics and art philosophy, contemplative studies, and systems theory. In addition, Michael is on the Board of Directors of The Forge Institute, serving as that institution's director of Public Outreach Programs as well as a leader in (and cofounder of) a variety of academic and service organizations. JASON M. WIRTH is associate professor of philosophy at Seattle University. His books include a translation of Schelling's The Ages of the World (State University of New York Press, 2000), The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and his Time (State University of New

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York Press, 2003), and the edited volume, Schelling Now (Indiana, 2004). He is currently finishing a book on Milan Kundera and an edited volume with Bret W. Davis and Brian Schroeder on the interface between Continental Philosophy and the Kyoto School. He is associate editor of the journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy, and he publishes in the areas of Continental philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, aesthetics, and Africana philosophy.

INDEX absence, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 104, 173 actual, 20, 30, 52, 68, 102, 103, 104, 108, 110, 123, 187 Adeimantus, 33, 35 Adorno, Theodor, 8, 181, 191, 192 Adventures of the Dialectic, 76, 78, 84, 86, 94 Agamben, Giorgio, 57, 101, 111, 197 alƝtheia, 38 amor fati, 102, 103, 104, 105, 110, 179 Anaxagoras, 31, 32 anguish, 5, 68, 72, 73, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 94, 188 Anselm, 182, 183 Apollo, 30, 33, 40, 42, 53 Apology, 30, 41 appearance, 8, 13, 20, 23, 29, 80, 176 appropriative attitude, 146 Arthur, John, 135 beef, 139 Being and Nothingness, 67, 68, 70, 80, 165 Being and Time, 64, 65, 66, 67, 92 Benjamin, Walter, 190 Blanchot, Maurice, 4, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 52 53 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 book, the, 4, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 172 Book, the, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56 book-writing, 49, 56 Buber, Martin, 189 Buddhism, 123, 131, 171, 172, 179, 185, 186 Caliban, 153 Cambodia, 138

Casey, Edward, 91, 117, 118, 119, 121, 128, 130 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 129, 130 Castro-Gomes, Santiago, 155 chaos, 46, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 110 colonialism, 6, 126, 146, 148, 165 coloniality, 6, 145, 148, 150, 157 Cortés, Hernán, 151, 158 Critique of Dialectical Reason, 78, 80, 93, 164, 168 cultural domination, 145 culture, 6, 8, 12, 17, 18, 28, 46, 49, 69, 81, 82, 84, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154, 155, 157, 158, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190 Dallmayr, Fred, 120, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 131 de Beauvoir, Simone, 5, 63, 70, 71, 75, 93 DeBord, Guy, 8, 191 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 5, 6, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 164, 167, 167, 195, 198 deontology, 178 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 8, 44, 53, 58, 101, 111, 122, 130, 132, 149, 186, 187, 189, 197, 198 Descartes, René, 41, 117, 153, 154, 183 dévoilement, 165 displacement, 115, 117, 118, 126, 154, 155, 164 divine epiphany, 22 duality, 18, 19, 167, 173 Dussel, Enrique, 149, 153, 155, 157, 158, 197

202 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 138, 141 English, 43, 70, 78, 120, 132, 168 Epinomis, 32, 33, 35 ergon, 30, 43 ethics, 4, 5, 25, 48, 57, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 141, 156, 164, 168, 169, 183, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198 constative, 100, 186 desiderative, 100 jussive, 100 ethics of ambiguity, 70, 72, 93 ethnocentrism, 123, 125, 127 Eurocentrism, 119, 122, 125, 157 evaluative history, 84 event, 25, 28, 30, 49, 73, 74, 80, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 110, 140 Existentialism is a Humanism, 68, 81, 94 exteriority, 4, 6, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 69, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 197 Eye and Mind, 69 fair trade, 135, 136, 137, 140 field of emptiness, 123 Foucault, Michel, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 46, 47, 56, 57, 58, 59, 101, 126, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 181, 183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 25, 26, 120, 128, 129 Giddens, Anthony, 117, 128 global displacement, 4, 115, 117, 127 Global Exchange, 137, 138, 141 global inequalities, 140 global village, 120, 121 global warming, 140

Index globalization, 4, 6, 24, 116, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 136, 141 Gorgias, 38, 39, 44 Guattari, Félix, 108, 109, 111, 195 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 121, 122, 130, 166, 191 Hakuin, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 Hansel, Georges, 97, 100 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 49, 51, 53, 68, 92, 157, 165, 166, 181 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 2, 5, 8, 25, 47, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 88, 92, 93, 96, 101, 118, 126, 132, 184, 185, 186, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198 Heraclitus, 17, 22, 31, 32, 33, 36 Hillman, James, 35, 44 history, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 25, 43, 47, 50, 54, 58, 65, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 143, 144, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 182, 184, 195, 196, 197, 198 Homer, 4, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 43 homogenization, 6, 116, 121, 125, 126, 127 horizon, 1, 2, 18, 19, 20, 21, 69, 83, 84, 90, 123, 156, 185, 186 Husserl, Edmund, 63, 88, 89, 97, 102, 182, 183, 184, 186, 197 il y a , the, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 57 immanence, 45, 46, 48, 97, 98, 99, 101, 106, 108, 110, 111 imperialism, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 145 intentionality, 55, 89, 90, 97 interiority, 32, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 69

The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy intersubjectivity, 82, 83 Japan, 116, 119, 125, 131, 132, 179, 195, 196 Japanism, 125 Kafka, Franz, 11, 12, 13, 18, 24, 25 Kant, Immanuel, 44, 92, 101, 102, 118, 121, 153, 182, 183, 184, 196 Kehre, 65, 66 Kyoto School, 123, 131, 132, 171, 195, 196 Lacan, Jacques, 53, 58 Latin America, 4, 6, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 155, 157, 158, 197 law, 32, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 72, 98, 138, 158 Law, the, 45, 52, 54, 55, 56 Laws, 32, 44 le vécu, 165, 166 Lefort, Claude, 86, 87, 123, 130 Letter on Humanism, 64, 65, 67, 92 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 5, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 83, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 149, 186, 187, 189, 196, 197 local cultures, 117, 119, 126, 127 logos, 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51, 55, 192 loss of place, 117, 119, 127 Lukacs, Georg, 8, 191 Lyotard, Jean-François, 122, 130 madness, 4, 38, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 167, 172, 173 Maggiori, Robert, 163, 168 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 155 Marx, Karl, 76, 167 Marxism, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 63, 64, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 186, 195, 197 Mignolo, Walter, 154, 159

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modern tradition, 143, 148, 149 modernity, 4, 6, 25, 29, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 143, 147, 148, 149, 153, 154, 158, 181, 183, 190, 191, 192 myth, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 55, 92, 93, 98, 154, 188, Myth of the Cicadas, 30, 36 mythical repetition, 14 Nagarjuna, 187 Neo-Platonism, 95 neuter, the, 47, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 4, 7, 23, 25, 29, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 70, 92, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 111, 168, 171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186, 198 Nishida, Kitarǀ, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131 Nishitani, Keiji, 123, 130, 131, 172, 178, 179 Notebooks for an Ethics, 68, 79, 93 nous, 31, 32, 33 ontology, 4, 6, 19, 20, 32, 37, 43, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67. 69, 73, 74, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 102, 164, 165, 186, 189, 197, ontology of presentation, 20 Other, the, 1, 2, 5, 47, 48, 50, 79, 83, 84, 97, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 121, 122, 123, 129, 132, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 166, 177, 178, 187, 197 otherwise than being, 5, 97, 100, 101 OXFAM, 133 Pan, 4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 38, 42, 158 particularism, 121, 127 Phaedrus, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44

204 phenomenology, 55, 63, 64, 67, 69, 73, 75, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 100, 155, 184, 195, 196 place of absolute nothingness, 123, 124, 126 Plato, 4, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44 Plutarch, 27, 28, 43 Politeia, 17, 33, 34, 35, 38, 44 postmodern, 6, 8, 115, 116, 119, 128, 130, 191 powers of the false, 109 praxis, 67, 72, 78, 80, 84, 92, 155, 163, 164, 166 presence, 20, 21, 25, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 155, 182 Quijano, Anibal, 148, 155, 157 Radical Exteriority, 4, 6, 143, 144, 149, 154, 155 Ramana Maharshi, 185 rapportage, 165 real, 12, 13, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 37, 53, 56, 68, 79, 80, 93, 95, 102, 104, 105, 106, 116, 123, 125, 164 reason, 1,8, 22, 24, 25, 31, 32, 35, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 80, 84, 92, 93, 121, 132, 134, 146, 147, 153, 154, 155, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 178, 195 recognition, 130, 144, 145, 150, 152 Salazar Bondi, Augusto, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 157 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 5, 6, 7, 53, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 195, 196 self, 1, 2, 5, 8, 19, 22, 29, 32, 40, 42, 45, 50, 51, 53, 67, 68, 69, 72, 88, 90, 91, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 116, 117, 118,

Index 119, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 134, 145, 148, 153, 168, 172, 173, 174, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 198 Simmel, Georg, 190 Singer, Peter, 133, 134, 135, 140, 141 sirens, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16. 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26 skǀlion, 36, 37 Socrates, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 91 soul, 16, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 54, 172, 182, 191, 192 Spinoza, Baruch, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111 subjectivism, 124, 145, 146, 147 sunyata (emptiness), 123, 174, 178, 186, 187, 193 Symposium, 3, 41, 44 Taylor, Charles, 130, 192 telos, 2, 22, 36, 37, 44, 50, 182, 192, 196 The Phenomenology of Perception, 85 Tomlinson, John, 128, 129 total exteriority, 6, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 156 tradition, 4, 12, 16, 17, 19, 23, 30, 33, 40, 54, 63, 64, 71, 72, 74, 87, 88, 92, 100, 101, 115, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 131, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 166, 171, 172, 176, 178, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191 transcendence, 20, 21, 45, 47, 48, 83, 86, 93, 101, 111, 197 transcendent (transcendental), 20, 37, 42, 66, 67, 83, 88, 92, 101, 146, 147, 148, 153, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186 truth, 7, 12, 13, 23, 24, 29, 30, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47,

The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy 52, 54, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 70, 76, 82, 108, 109, 122, 155, 158, 167, 169, 183, 184, 186, 190, 192 Tsong Khapa, 186, 193 twosomes, 19 Unger, Peter, 133, 141 UNICEF, 133 unity-in-difference, 123 universalism, 127 unreason, 47, 53, 54, 55 vice-diction, 102, 103, 104, 105, 110 virtual, 102, 103, 104, 105, 110, 118 virtue ethics, 63 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 147, 148, 157 Wal-Mart, 138, 141 Weber, Max, 8, 84, 130, 167, 191 Westernization, 116, 120, 122, 126, 129

205

wholeness, 21 Wilber, Ken, 8, 188, 191, 192, 193 work, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 23, 25, 30, 31, 40, 43, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 81, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 100, 101, 105, 111, 117, 130, 132, 134, 138, 141, 144, 148, 149, 149, 155, 158, 167, 168, 169, 183, 185, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197 work of myth, 11, 25 Work, the, 4, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 183 worklessness, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55 writing, 4, 5, 18, 24, 28, 30, 32, 36, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 71, 87, 92, 106, 129, 152, 154, 155, 166, 167, 168, 180, 189 Yucatán, 151, 152