Analecta Husserliana: Volume CXXV

Analecta
Husserliana
The Yearbook of
Phenomenological Research
Volume CXXV
Posthumanism and Phenomenology

The Focus on the Modern
Condition of Boredom, Solitude,
Loneliness and Isolation
Edited by
Calley A. Hornbuckle
Jadwiga S. Smith
William S. Smith
Analecta Husserliana
The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research

Volume CXXV
Series Editors
William S. Smith, World Phenomenology Institute,
Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
Jadwiga S. Smith, World Phenomenology Institute,
Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
Daniela Verducci, University of Macerata, Italy
Editorial Board
Francesco Alfieri, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy
Angela Ales Bello, Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, Italy
Gary Backhaus, Harford Community College, Bel Air, Maryland, USA
Carla Canullo, University of Macerata, Italy
George Heffernan, Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA
Calley A. Hornbuckle, Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA
Maija Kūle, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain
Thomas Ryba, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Rajesh Sampath, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
Marie Antonios Sassine, Dominican University College, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Miloš Ševčík, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Francesco Totaro, University of Macerata, Italy
Series Editors: William S. Smith, Executive President, World Phenomenology
Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
Jadwiga S. Smith, Co-President, American Division, World Phenomenology
Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
Daniela Verducci, Co-President, European Division, World Phenomenology
Institute, Macerata, Italy
Founded in 1968 by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Reidel/Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland) Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of
Phenomenological Research is meant to pick up again and continue Husserl's
Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (Halle 1913 – 1930),
hence its name “Yearbook” although as a book series it appears in several volumes
a year. It collects the vast research work gathered at the seminars and international
conferences being held by the World Phenomenology Institute and its four
incorporated International Phenomenology Societies with world-wide scholars.
Analecta Husserliana promotes the aim of an extensive philosophical and
interdisciplinary work to elaborate Husserl's initial idea of mathesis universalis, in
a renovative unfolding of phenomenology. Around the axis of phenomenology of
life and of the Human Creative Condition a variety of ingenious insights and ideas
of phenomenologically inspired philosophies, sciences and humanities meet in an
original interdisciplinary dialogue. Breaking conceptual barriers, they advance
originally the great project of an universal science in a harvest of innovative ideas.
Analecta Husserliana includes an Encyclopedia of Learning (vol.80) and enjoys a
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All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final
acceptance.
Jadwiga S. Smith
William S. Smith
Editors
Posthumanism and
Phenomenology
The Focus on the Modern Condition
of Boredom, Solitude, Loneliness
and Isolation
Editors
Calley A. Hornbuckle Jadwiga S. Smith
Associate Professor of English Co-President (American Division)
Dalton State College World Phenomenology Institute
Dalton, GA, USA Bridgewater, MA, USA
William S. Smith
Executive President
World Phenomenology Institute
Bridgewater, MA, USA
ISSN 0167-7276 ISSN 2542-8330 (electronic)

Analecta Husserliana
ISBN 978-3-031-10413-8 ISBN 978-3-031-10414-5 (eBook)
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Contents
Part I Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity

The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas �� 3
Jadwiga S. Smith
Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time:
Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s
Common Telos of the All�� 11
Randolph Dible

From Boredom to a Posthumanist Fulfillment�� 29
Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith
Experiencing Boredom: A Phenomenological Analysis�� 39
Tõnu Viik
Part II The Body/Technology/Ecology

Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question of Humanism�� 55
Fiachra Long

The Growing Solitude of the Body �� 69
Marie Antonios Sassine

Somatic Dissection and the Journey of Animal-Being�� 79
Roberto Marchesini
“Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women Writers
and the Posthuman�� 91
v
vi Contents
Part III Body, Culture and Society

The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s Idea of Psychical Distance
from the Perspective of Levinas’s Concept of the Aesthetic�� 105
Miloš Ševčík
Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion in Katherine
Dunn’s Geek Love�� 115
Abigail Hess
Humor and Amusement Based on Incongruities:
A Dialectical Approach�� 127
Anna Małecka
Part IV A Shrinking World

The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/Isolation in Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God�� 137
Tony E. Afejuku
Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “Diminishing Boundaries
of a Shrinking World” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River”
from Wild (2012)�� 149
Rosemary Gray
Part V Narrative and Solitude

Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation
of Death and Solitude�� 167
John N. Balsavich
Part VI Aesthetics and Ontology

An Apology for Abstraction in an Age of High Definition
and Photo Realism in the Work of Kandinsky
and the White Shaman Rock Art Panel and Related Rock Art Sites�� 181
Bruce Ross
Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness�� 191
On
Victor G. Rivas López
Contributors
Tony E. Afejuku University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria

John N. Balsavich Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA
Randolph Dible The New School for Social Research, New York City, NY, USA
Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA
Rosemary Gray Department of English University of Pretoria, Pretoria,
South Africa
Abigail Hess Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA
Calley A. Hornbuckle Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA
Fiachra Long University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Anna Małecka AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków,
Kraków, Poland
Roberto Marchesini Director of Centre Study for Post-human Philosophy,
Bologna, Italy
Victor G. Rivas López Meritorious Puebla University, Puebla, Mexico
Bruce Ross Independent Scholar, Hampden, ME, USA
Marie Antonios Sassine Dominican University College, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Miloš Ševčík Charles University, Prague, Czechia
Jadwiga S. Smith World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater,
Massachusetts, USA
Tõnu Viik Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
vii
Part I
Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity
The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger
and Insomnia in Levinas
Jadwiga S. Smith
Abstract Historical temporality of the concept of boredom is counter to Heidegger’s

treatment of boredom as essential to his philosophical investigation of temporality/
time but without the grounding of boredom in historical or cultural milieu or, for
that matter, in psychology or neuroscience. A mood (Stimmung) of boredom does
not have a direct intentional object of its own, but it can accompany emotional and/
or cognitive experiences by giving them a certain coloring or tonality. Heidegger’s
final statements are about contemporary man avoiding or suppressing profound
boredom out of concealment and lack of courage to face the question of oppression
“in this fundamental attunement.” Levinas, on the other hand, sees insomnia as “pri-
mordial opening” to the understanding of “impossibility of hiding in oneself”
(Levinas E (1993) God, death, and time. Edited by Jacques Roland. Stanford
University Press, Stanford, p 209).
Thus, Heidegger’s investigation of boredom parallels Levinas’s investigation of
insomnia as revealing particular states of awareness and consciousness. But, unlike
the Being held captive in a particular mood of boredom in Heidegger’s metaphysics
and the pessimistic evaluation of profiting from the experience of profound bore-
dom, Levinas’s insomnia reveals “the Other within the Same who does not alienate
the Same but who awakens him” (Levinas E (1993) God, death, and time. Edited by
Jacques Roland. Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 209).
Keywords Heidegger · Levinas · Boredom · Insomnia · Awakening ·

Consciousness · Mood · Attunement · The Other · The Being
Two publications on the subject of boredom, one solely devoted to it, were pub-
lished in the United States in 1995: Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Gruudbegrieffe der Metaphysik.
Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit submitted by Heidegger in 1975 and published by
J. S. Smith (*)
World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
e-mail: jadwiga.smith@phenomenology.org
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Switzerland AG 2023
C. A. Hornbuckle et al. (eds.), Posthumanism and Phenomenology, Analecta
Husserliana 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_1
4 J. S. Smith
Klostermann in 1983), and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History
of a State of Mind. Spacks has not a single reference to Heidegger’s treatment of
boredom and its utmost importance to his explication of the fundamentals of meta-
physics. Of course, she was simply unaware of his work at the time of the prepara-
tion of her book on boredom. The reason I mention Spacks’s book is to underscore
the fact that, though Heidegger mentions the importance of the subject of boredom
to “contemporary man,” he is not interested in investigating any historical context of
cultural implications of boredom. For Heidegger, “profound boredom” (tiefe
Langeweile) is his philosophical investigation of Dasein, in which boredom emerges
as the crucial attunement/emotional tonality to which Dasein is already predisposed.
For Spacks, however, boredom is a historically late concept:
an eighteenth-century belief in personal theological obligation giving way to nineteenth-
century fatalism and twentieth-century location of responsibility outside the self. It explores
the ways of subjectivity and the operation of social theory. The story begins in eighteenth-
century England because the concept of boredom begins there. And the narrative comes to
a stop if not an end in the present moment, when comic strips and advertisements as well as
novels and sociological or psychological treatises…attribute to boredom enormous and
essentially unalterable power. (Spacks 1995, ix)
She attributes the emergence of the idea of boredom as related to the development
of the eighteenth-century interpretation of leisure: “It was born in the same era of
the ideas of ‘leisure’ and the pursuit of happiness, and its social and literary func-
tions have charted the development of civilization’s discontents” (Spacks 1995, x).
Spacks speaks directly of the invention of boredom as a “fabrication” in eighteenth-
century England:
It has haunted Western society ever since its eighteenth-century invention. Its twentieth-
century magnification absorbs ever more material for the imaginative writer, in a paradoxi-
cal relation that has intensified since the English fabricated the notion. (Spacks 1995, 272)
Spacks traces the evolving attitudes toward boredom through the lens of literature
and pays particular attention to the gender and class distinctions as crucial to the
ever-changing ethical and aesthetic views of boredom.
Thus, the stress on the historical temporality of the concept of boredom is coun-
ter to Heidegger’s treatment of boredom as essential to his philosophical investiga-
tion of temporality/time but without the grounding of boredom in history/culture or,
for that matter, in psychology of neuroscience. I am introducing Heidegger’s “pro-
found boredom” and Emmanuel Levinas’s “insomnia” in the context of Patricia
Meyer Spacks’s book on boredom in order to stress the fact that as boredom has
emerged as an ever-growing subject of interpretation—from philosophy to popular
culture—so has insomnia become a preoccupation not only of psychiatrists but also
of TV psychologists, popular movies and then also of… philosophy. At the same
time, closer to the end of his investigation of the attunement of boredom, Heidegger
asks a penetrating question: “Has man in the end become boring himself?”
(Heidegger 1995, 161). But he does not want to over-emphasize his answer as
focused on modern history, despite his use of the term “world history”:
The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas 5
we did not pose this question to those who run around in public and give themselves credit
for their achievements, those servants of culture who ape their own inventions; we did not
ask where these people stand in the course of world history, or how far they have come
hitherto and what is to be the outcome in this respect. We did not ask where man stands, but
how things stand concerning man, concerning Da-sein in men. (Heidegger 1995, 161)
On the other hand, Levinas’s progress toward the reinterpretation of Heidegger’s

Dasein as continuous presence and engagement of Being rather than the precarious-
ness of disclosure and concealment is a way of dealing with the present, the embod-
ied present, which leads Levinas to embracing both “transascendence” (engendered
as common, everyday events) as well as transcendence (Infinity), a creating a
uniquely human expression—and thus the infinite interrelated to the sensible.
Levinas, unlike Heidegger, recognizes the rationality of the self, sensibility, and
transcendence. Hence, insomnia is not just a physiological/psychological event but
an awakening of consciousness because the activities and moods of the self origi-
nate and end with the consciousness of self. The awakening of consciousness is,
then, connected to the bodily requirement of sleep, and, in reverse, sleeping is an act
of escaping consciousness. The states of being awakened, asleep, fatigued, indolent,
or being in a state of insomnia allow the clearest illumination of the gap between
self and I. In contrast, Heidegger’s focus on anxiety—though later expanded with
attunements/moods of boredom, joy, awe—seems to be suspended from immediate
bodily connections by his emphasis on Dasein’s framed relationship to time.
Both philosophers stress the role of awakening, though Levinas refers to it much
more directly as connected to sleep. Heidegger speaks of being awakened to the
attunement of boredom, but one can also add another kind of awakening, though not
as directly renewed, that is consciousness being awakened from boredom into the
state of reconnectedness with beings of the world, no longer in limbo, no longer
being left empty as was the case in the midst of boredom. Levinas’s insomnia, how-
ever, stresses not just openness to the world but vigilance for-the-other; it is a pri-
mary ethical meta-category (as discussed in Of God Who Comes to Mind). Insomnia
is the uselessness of a responsibility that introduces God; Levinas calls “relationships-
to-God, the original insomnia of thinking” (Levinas 1986, 120).
Both Heidegger in his treatment of the attunement of boredom and Levinas in his
treatment of insomnia speak of the condition of being overtaken by these moods and
their revelatory impact on Being. Heidegger speaks of the “extremity of the moment
of vision” as prompted by the third kind of boredom he calls “profound boredom,”
and Levinas in his “In Praise of Insomnia,” published in 1976, comments on:
a journey on which we pass through the notion of a witnessing that was not referred to an
experience, a bearing witness in which the infinite in relation with the finite, disquiets or
awakens the finite, which is equivalent to the psyche qua inspiration and which was under-
stood concretely in the sense of an ethical intrigue. (Levinas 1993, 206)
Thus, these awakenings for both thinkers are revelatory as to the apprehension of
consciousness, and they both consider time as a fundamental point of reference in
their respective treatment of boredom and insomnia. Levinas interprets:
6 J. S. Smith
this breaking open of the experience of witnessing, this expiation of the forms by the Other,
as the diachrony of time. This is a time that would lend itself [se donnerait] to our under-
standing to a reference to-God itself [l’a-Dieu meme]—before being interpreted as pure
deficiency or as a synonym of the perishable or the non-eternal. That is, what gives itself to
be understood as that which is diametrically opposed to the traditional idea of God. It is as
if, within temporality, there were produced a relationship with a “term” or end (but is it
properly speaking a term?) that is third to being and to nothingness—an excluded middle or
third, and in this way, alone, a God who would not be thought in an onto-theo-logical man-
ner. (Levinas 1993, 207)
Thus, time for Levinas is not an enemy, so to speak, or does not have to be inter-
preted as a “deficiency,” as a “synonym of the perishable or not eternal.” But, for
Heidegger, boredom reveals the temporality of design as oppressed by “a peculiar
indication of its shortness”; the “while” in German translation of boredom as
Langeweile or “long while”:
That the while becomes long means that the horizon of whiling—which at and for the most
part shows itself to us, if at all, as that of a present, and even then more as what is now and
today—expands itself into the entire expanse of the temporality of Dasein. This lengthening
of the while manifests the while of Dasein in its indeterminacy that is never absolutely
determinable. This indeterminacy takes Dasein captive, yet in such a way that in the whole
expansive and expanded expanse it can grasp nothing except the mere fact that it remains
entranced by and toward this expanse. The lengthening of the while is the expansion of the
temporal horizon whose expansion does not bring Dasein, liberation, or unburden it, but
precisely the converse in oppressing it with its expanse. In this expanse of time it oppresses
Dasein and thus includes in itself a peculiar indication of its shortness. (Heidegger
1995, 152–53)
This oppressive nature of temporality of Dasein is responsible for emerging of the

attunement/mood of profound boredom. Heidegger summarizes his definition of
profound boredom as “the entrancement of temporal horizon”:
entrancement which lets the moment of vision belonging to temporality vanish. In thus let-
ting it vanish, boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly
authentic possibility of its existence, an existence only possible in the midst of beings as a
whole, and within the horizon of entrancement, their telling refusal of themselves as a
whole. (Heidegger 1995, 153)
Heidegger’s vocabulary in relation to temporality and boredom (“perishable,”

“oppressed,” “refusal”) reveals an ultimate sense of inadequacy of exploring the
attunement of boredom to its core. He admits just that:
Yet even this definition, which has arisen from a more penetrating interpretation, does not
tell us much if it is taken as an assertion in which something is supposed to be established,
instead of as a more incisive directive for interpretation, i.e., one more laden with questions,
namely for an interpretation which unexpectedly has left itself behind and brought the
design it has interpreted to the verge of the attunement to be interpreted, yet has never
directly transposed it into this attunement itself. (Heidegger 1995, 153–54)
This definition is based mostly on the third form of boredom and thus cannot claim
to be universal; it is nonetheless this third form which is more essential because it is
“more profound, and thus more essential.”
The first and second form of boredom do not strike one as necessarily paralleling
Levinas’s thoughts, but they are necessary to the presentation of the third form of
boredom, the understanding of profound boredom. This profound boredom has
some crucial points of connection with the ideas of awakeness in Levinas. This first
form is illustrated by Heidegger as “passing the time as a driving away of boredom
that drives time on” at a railway station:
We are sitting, for example, in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway. It is four
hours since the next train arrives. The district is uninspiring. We do have a book in our
rucksack, though—shall we read? No. Or think through a problem, some question? We are
unable to. We read the timetables or study the table, giving the various distances from this
station to other places we are not otherwise acquainted with at all. We look at the clock—
only a quarter of an hour has gone by. Then we go out onto the local road. We walk up and
down, just to have something to do. But it is no use. Then we count the trees along the road,
look at our watch again—exactly five minutes since we last looked at it. Fed up with walk-
ing back and forth, we sit down on a stone, draw all kinds of figures in the sand, and in so
doing, catch ourselves looking at our watch yet again—half an hour—and so on. (Heidegger
1995, 93)
The futility of various diversions we try to occupy ourselves with leaves us in “limbo
by time as it drags” (Heidegger 1995, 99), or to say it more precisely: “The dragging
of time as it were refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything. It forces
it to leave us empty” (Heidegger 1995, 105). Things then, when bound to time, can
leave us empty: “Things can leave us empty only along with that being held in limbo
that proceeds from time” (Heidegger 1995, 105).
The second form of boredom acknowledges not the objective length of time, as
associated with the waiting at the station, but with the depth of boredom, with more
profound boredom. Heidegger distinguishes between being bored by something and
being bored with something. Passing time during a boring evening—being bored
with the evening—is “simultaneously, what we are bored with here is passing the
time. In this boring situation, boredom and passing the time become intertwined”
(Heidegger 1995, 113). So, nothing particularly is boring (unlike the station and all
the fruitless activities to counteract our boredom) during our boring evening.
Instead, “we have something indeterminate that bores us” (Heidegger 1995, 114),
the “I know not what,” which does not create any unease resulting in a search for
some form of occupation, but rather accepts the “indeterminate unknown”
(Heidegger 1995, 116). The time seems to stand still, and we seem to slip away from
ourselves, quite satisfied (Heidegger 1995, 118). But are we really, asks Heidegger,
and his answer is twofold: first, as a result of abandoning ourselves to what we
interpret as an absence of boredom (obstructive casualness captures, ensnaring this
passing of time); and second, leaving ourselves behind, our proper self—an empti-
ness can form a sense of dissatisfaction with all that “chattering.” The time does not
drag then, but “whiles [weilt] and endures,” and manifests itself as “more originary
being held in limbo” (Heidegger 1995, 122). Time stands still but, Heidegger warns,
that we do not make time vanish. Instead, the present stretches as a result of that
casual abandoning of self, with the sensation of the past and future being cut off.
This is “being held in limbo to time in its standing, and is thus the sought-after
8 J. S. Smith
structural moment of being bored with” (Heidegger 1995, 126). Heidegger under-
scores the importance of the second form of boredom because in it: “we are held
more towards ourselves, somehow enticed back into the specific gravity of Dasein
even though, indeed precisely because in doing so we leave our proper self standing
and unfamiliar” (Heidegger 1995, 128).
Finally, in the third form of boredom, the individual relationship to boredom is
lost. It’s no longer “I” or “we” acknowledging being bored, but, instead, we say, “It
is boring for one” (Heidegger 1995, 134). One does not imply any connection to
“name, standing, vocation, role, age and fate” (Heidegger 1995, 135); neither does
it imply any generalizing or concrete distinction. Thus, we are not bored by any
particular beings (first form), and we are not bored ourselves (second form). What
the third form reveals is emptiness, being left empty, “relieved of our everyday per-
sonality,” making “everything of equally great and equally little worth” (Heidegger
1995, 137), ultimately resulting in all encompassing “indifference enveloping
beings as a whole” (Heidegger 1995, 138).
At this point of his discussion of boredom, Heidegger questions the “impoverish-
ment” which exposes the self to nakedness, indifference: “Beings as a whole refuse
themselves tellingly, not to me as me, but to the Dasein in me wherever I know that
‘it is boring for one’” (Heidegger 1995, 143). Thus, the temporality of Dasein is
revealed through the temporal character of profound boredom which is a form of
temporal entrancement.
This temporal entrancement is broken in time “ruptured only through time
itself” (Heidegger 1995, 151). This moment of vision, or “disclosedness for
action,” is a moment of reconnection from Dasein with the temporality of past,
present and future. It is a form of awakening in a Levinasian sense, an act of facing
the world. For Heidegger, boredom has a revelatory value at the moment of its
rupture, its disclosedness for action, but the magnitude of his investigation of
boredom creates an oppressive sense of helplessness. Heidegger is aware of the
danger of interpreting the third form as a form of despair. He objects to such a
view as it would imply a leap into another attunement. Ultimately, Heidegger
stresses that boredom “in the ordinary sense is disturbing, unpleasant and unbear-
able” and should be eliminated (Heidegger 1995, 158). However, one is to appre-
ciate boredom and all other attunements because “[m]oods are something that
awaken pleasure or displeasure in us, something to which we have to react accord-
ingly” (Heidegger 1995, 159).
Heidegger’s endowment, his appreciation of moods, feelings as expressed in
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is quite striking because one is famil-
iar with his earlier works and their emphasis on anxiety and temporality in the
shadow of death. He sees boredom in the ordinary sense as a way of suppressing
profound boredom and thus getting involved, or we could say awakened in the
context of Levinas’s work, though in a superficial way, in the busy activity
of Dasein.
Levinas, on the other hand, is immersed in the ethical relevance of his philo-
sophical investigation of wakefulness. In his stress on the obligation of the self
toward the Other, he perceives insomnia as a state of wakefulness, a heightened
sense of awareness of the Other, resisting the mundane and impersonal. In Of God
Who Comes to Mind (1986), Levinas interprets insomnia as extreme vigilance for-
the-other. Thus, the moment of breaking out of boredom is “disclosedness” of the
self, awakened to beings, reengaged with the world in a self-centered way. For
Levinas, however, insomnia awakens consciousness, it is a form of responsibility
that opens L-dieu (in later Levinas). Unlike the Being held captive in a particular
mood of boredom in Heidegger’s metaphysics and the pessimistic evaluation of
profiting from the experience of profound boredom, Levinas sees insomnia as reve-
latory: “the Other within the Same who does not alienate the Same but who awakens
him” (Levinas 1993, 209).
Heidegger’s final comments about contemporary man avoiding or suppressing
profound boredom out of concealment and lack of courage to face the question
“what oppresses us in this fundamental attunement” (Heidegger 1995, 167). Levinas
on the other hand sees insomnia as prior to intentionality: “primordial opening that
is an impossibility of hiding; one that is an assignation, an impossibility of hiding in
oneself” (Levinas 1993, 209). Insomnia is not just not being asleep. It is a category
escaping categorization “on the basis of a determinant activity” in order to deter-
mine, to qualify the Other: “Insomnia is the tearing of [that] resting within the
identical” (Levinas 1993, 209). Levinas finds in the act of awakening the “spiritual-
ity of the soul… ceaselessly woken up in its state, its state of soul” (Levinas 1993,
210). The formlessness of insomnia reminds one of the state of boredom because of
its lack of intentionality and also because, according to Levinas, consciousness
breaks out of insomnia, not unlike reaching a moment of vision out of profound
boredom.
Levinas affirms the primacy of insomnia, stating consciousness is born out of
insomnia and ultimately leading to the forgetting of the Other, to grasping the ever
anew presence in the process of subjectivity from within. Levinas closes his essay/
lecture on insomnia and its role in the emergence of consciousness with a statement
that cognition is not the only mode of meaning. He states: “It is necessary to put
experience in question as the source of all meaning” (Levinas 1993, 211). He ques-
tions “the resolution of all meaning to exhibition. Thus, the investigation of insomnia
leads Levinas to a statement that emotion or anguish or the representation in phe-
nomenological interpretation are not to be of central importance. He acknowledges
the complexity of the treatment of representation in Heidegger, but he states: “In
Heidegger, the question is much more complex, but we nevertheless still find in him
that idea of monstration and manifestation, which remains the corollary of meaning.
“But we must at least recall the situation of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, in
which the cogito bursts under the impact of something it cannot contain” (Levinas
1993, 212).
10 J. S. Smith
References
Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.
Trans. W. McNeil and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1986. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 1993. God, Death, and Time. Edited by Jacques Roland. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1995. Boredom: The History of a State of Mind. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax
of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester
and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common
Telos of the All
Randolph Dible
Thought builds on time… on many scales.

(Peter Manchester, Unpublished Introduction to The Syntax
of Time)
Abstract This chapter explores foundational issues in the philosophy of time and
space by comparing the phenomenological contributions of Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka and Peter Byrne Manchester. Each of these two philosophers have
revived an ancient paradigm for thinking about problems of continuity in the phi-
losophy of space and time. Peter Byrne Manchester’s 2005 book, The Syntax of
Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from
Iamblichus to Anaximander—the second in the Brill series Studies in Platonism,
Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition—traces Husserl’s phenomenology of
inner time-consciousness back through Plotinus to Aristotle’s philosophy of time,
and thereby reconnects its problematic to the most archaic origins of philosophy in
the Presocratics. Through the philosophical reconstruction of an ancient worldview
on the basis of an insight about the ordering principle of time as a logical syntax,
Peter Manchester uncovers a neglected ancient doctrine called spherics (sphairikē,
or sphairikon logon), which has deep implications not only for time but for all the
dimensions of experience. He names his guiding figure the Sphere of the All, a for-
mulation belonging to his ancient sources. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenome-
nology of life also recognizes a previously unnoticed syntax. For her, it is the
intrinsic functioning of life, which she elaborates in her phenomenology of life as
ontopoietic process. Her extensive account of life’s inner-workings yields a phe-
nomenological cosmology of multiple spheres of being grounded in a “great vision
of the All” (Tymieniecka 2000, 643), much like Manchester’s spherics. The conver-
gence to similar frameworks arrived at independently by these two philosophers is
R. Dible (*)
The New School for Social Research, New York City, NY, USA

Switzerland AG 2023
12 R. Dible
a philosophical synchronicity due to the teleology at play in their phenomenological

thought, common to multiple philosophical cosmologies, but what is more remark-
able is the convergence of their specific functional systems and metrological terms.
This convergence arises from the pursuit of an ancient and perennial cosmology
rooted in a deep synthesis of order and measure. The ancient intuition that the lan-
guage of God is the language of mathematics plays a special role in classical phe-
nomenology, and the recovery of the doctrine of the spheres represents a new
contribution to the synthetic and geometrical side of this intuition. By arriving at a
synthesis of the most fundamental ontological units in these two systems, a new
paradigm of speculative cosmology and transcendental logic emerges from the par-
adigm of the sphere.
Keywords Ancient philosophy · Cosmology · Mathesis universalis · Metrology ·

Paradigm · Phenomenology · Pythagoras · Spheres · Syntax · Synthesis
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, founder of the World Phenomenology Institute and

Analecta Husserliana, and Peter Byrne Manchester, a professor of philosophy at
Stony Brook University and founding member of the International Society for
Neoplatonic Studies, have each in their own way sought to open up the horizons of
the Husserlian phenomenology of time to the dimensions of eternity through mak-
ing explicit its place in the broader context of its most ancient precedents in the
philosophical speculation on time. Each thinker articulates a holistic vision of the
way the total cosmos makes its mark in every ordered and measured part. Manchester
frames time in an infinite sphere called the Sphere of the All, “an all-encompassing
self-referential equality of an intentional kind—a disclosure space” (Manchester
2005, 53). Tymieniecka’s key concept of phenomenological disclosure is the tradi-
tional notion of the unity of apperception, but she extends this Kantian and
Husserlian concept to include in its compass the fundamentally creative functions of
life’s essential individualization (Tymieniecka 2000, 265–80). Tymieniecka’s modal
thematization of life in its elementary operations presents in relief the place of life’s
inner-workings within the big picture of the fullness, or ‘the All’ (ta panta), of pos-
sible fulfillments, and develops outward into a phenomenology of possible worlds
(Tymieniecka 1974, 3–41). It could be said that what Tymieniecka’s modal realism
of the phenomenology of life contributes is a visualization of individualization.
Manchester’s phenomenology of time and Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life
will be shown to have sufficient structural and methodological convergences to
frame a phenomenological place for an ancient paradigm called the doctrine of the
spheres (sphairikē, or sphairikon logon).
The philosophical theory of manifolds (Mannnigfaltigkeitslehre) is at the core of
both Kant and Husserl’s methodology, and this is the song that undergoes modula-
tion to a new key in the phenomenological work of both Manchester and Tymieniecka.
Tymieniecka’s cosmic architectonic presents a vision of the human position in the
All “as the underlying unity of the life of the cosmos and human life” (Tymieniecka
2011, 5). The word “life” has a technical sense in Tymieniecka’s vocabulary. For
Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester… 13
her, life is the unique phenomenon where the disclosure of being to itself occurs
through an implicit ordering principle. But this also happens to be an intuitive
insight that is implied in the common idea that life is a self-promoting and self-
steering part of a total cosmic harmony. Tymieniecka’s technical term for life is
“ontopoiesis,” and it includes the definition of the biological systems term “autopoi-
esis” within its scope, but the usual sense works as well.1 Life is also the subject of
Manchester’s phenomenology of time, specifically the experience of time and the
imagination of eternity by eternal life. Manchester’s primary aim is to expose the
reductive understanding of time as a point on a line by showing how time is, as the
Pythagoreans intuited, the sphere itself.
Manchester’s central motif of the placement of the aperture of phenomenological
disclosure in the Sphere of the All can supply Tymieniecka’s overall corpus—from
the “multi-sphere model” of her earlier work (Leibniz’ Cosmological Synthesis;
Tymieniecka 1964; see also Tymieniecka 1965, and Tymieniecka 1966) to the later
“geo-cosmic transcendental positioning” of Analecta Husserliana volumes
100–115—with a geometrical definition, and with that the beginning of a synthetic
mathesis universalis. Manchester’s allusions to “a lost continent in the history of
philosophy” (Manchester 2005, 56) that he calls “the ancient ‘spherics’” (54), and
“the original phenomenology of the sphere” (53), indicate a lost work, and his
choice of the Stoic formulation “Sphere of the All” gives important first clues to
how the general spherics functions. The phenomenology of the sphere discerned in
the meeting of the phenomenology of time and the phenomenology of life reveals
through methodological and formal coincidences a well-defined clearing for future
phenomenological development. The convergence of Manchester’s and
Tymieniecka’s philosophies implied by the work of weaving together their struc-
tural and methodological coincidences hints at the possibility of developing a more
explicitly convergent phenomenology of life and time, perhaps already discernible
on the horizon.
Over many years of development, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s cosmic architec-
tonic came to define a phenomenology whose method did not limit itself to the
constitution of the given world, but included the human and cosmic creative dimen-
sion of the genesis of the world and its structures. The self-evidence of the given
phenomenal world of the individual is a coherence superseded by an intercoherence
of universal self-evidence at the level of the world order,2 and finally at the ultimate
level of transcendental logic. Her thesis takes the orderliness and universality of
mathematical science as a model for both thought itself and Kant and Husserl’s
1
Tymieniecka engages the autopoietic theory in Analecta Husserliana volumes 60, and 100, and
other contributors to Analecta Husserliana have also compared ontopoiesis with autopoiesis, for
instance Daniela Verducci and Elisa Tona. See also my own study on the topic of the calculus
occluded by Maturana and Varela’s theory, “Ontopoiesis, Autopoiesis, and a Calculus Intended for
Self-Reference,” forthcoming in Analecta Husserliana.
2
World order: the constant, intrinsic pattern of organization, whose presence is arrived at conjec-
turally through “structurally rooted indications concerning the relations… to the world order”
(Tymieniecka 1966, 21).
14 R. Dible
architectonic structures. This universality of self-evidence is a theme whose roots

lie sedimented in the origins of mathematics and within what Burt C. Hopkins calls
“the ancient precedents to pure phenomenology” (Hopkins 2010, 21–83; see also
Hopkins 2011). The Cartesian notion of self-evidence is developed further by
Husserl at the core of his own unfinished task, and in the foundation for his task of
universal science, in the mathesis universalis of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant.
Tymieniecka’s phenomenological realism of possible worlds is a conjectural exten-
sion of the given or indexical universe (“this” universe; the actual universe). This
realism is based on anticipatory evidence of the other spheres in a “multi-sphere
model” that provides a monadological, Leibnizian constitutive scheme that explains
“how the universe is producible or at least possible” (Tymieniecka 1964, 6).
A prototype of Tymieniecka’s Leibnizian phenomenological architectonic and
Manchester’s phenomenological Spherics is in part precipitated in the work of one
of Tymieniecka’s sources, Dietrich Mahnke, a first-generation student of Husserl
from the Göttingen period (Tymieniecka 1964, 96–7). Mahnke was a student of
both Husserl and Hilbert, and wrote a new monadology of his own before eventually
writing the most comprehensive study of the idea of the infinite sphere in his study
of the history of mathematical mysticism, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt
(1937). Present-day phenomenologist James G. Hart also employs a Leibnizian
scaffolding in his intersection of modal realism and phenomenological eidetic anal-
ysis (Laycock and Hart 1986, 104; Hart 2009, 25–32). The extension of phenome-
nology into the All, therefore, is not unprecedented. This is the absolute idea of
Husserl’s infinite task. The Pythagorean harmony of the spheres is an obvious inspi-
ration of Leibniz’ own possible worlds theory. Leibniz’ architectonic scaffold is the
scala naturae, the great chain of being, and has its roots in philosophical cosmol-
ogy. These cosmic roots have inspired generations of thinkers, and could be seen to
condense in the perennial statement deriving from the Book of the Twenty-Four
Philosophers: Deus est sphaera infinita cuius centrum ubique, circumferential
nusquam. God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference
is nowhere. Genealogies of the great philosophers, poets and mystics who have
found inspiration in this definition of the Sphere can be found in Georges Poulet’s
The Metamorphoses of the Circle (Poulet 1966), and in Dietrich Mahnke’s
Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der Mathematischen
Mystik (Mahnke 1937).
The key to the Sphere of the All is another figure, the “Semeion” (sign or indica-
tion) of the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, which expresses the relation between
time and eternity. This mark, first reported by the early Neoplatonist Iamblichus, is
expressed as the vertex of an angle, and the precise wording that Manchester sug-
gests is “a straight line which is broken is the sign, on account of the fact that the
breaking becomes origin of one line, limit of the other” (Manchester 2005, 44).
Manchester’s reading of this vertex is that it is not an angle, and not a point, but a
breaking. Thus, as indication, it is composed not of one broken ray but of two rays,
“each in its own dimension” (45). As mere indication, this is a figureless figure, like
the infinite sphere, and as a kind of privation, it is equally beyond being. The break-
ing occurs in the act of drawing the figure, and can just as well be a “moving
touching” wherein order is communicated from one dimension of time (“persis-

tence in intelligible purposiveness”) to another (“distribution into phases of sensible
motion” [69]). The two-ray touch-and-communication interpretation of this figure
expresses the fundamental discontinuity (breaking) in the fundamental continuity
(sphere) in the essential fact that in order to draw it, “one must decelerate and come
to a stop… in order to begin in the new direction” (63). This two-dimensionality or
double-continuity is Manchester’s distinctive contribution to the understanding of
the relationship of these elements expressing the original topos of time and eternity
as a dimensional construct. This two-dimensionality is the key to opening up our
way of thinking about time to the paradigm of the sphere. Manchester’s goal is not
exclusively to re-figure our thoughts about time and life, but to re-open the dimen-
sion of eternity through the Neoplatonic “engine” of participation (Manchester
2002, 81).
These figures—the sphere and the original angle marking the center—are the
initials of a synthetic way of thinking that was historically lost to the power of
analysis, under whose logistical spell we have fallen deeper and deeper. The ancient
way of thinking starts to disappear when it is first formalized by the very same
thinkers we must return to in order to find the way through the sedimentations of
traditia to the general spherics. In this respect, the historical goal of a new search for
the spherics would be to sort out the place of these geometrical insights in the begin-
nings of the project of the mathesis universalis. The mathesis universalis in the
present context is perhaps best summed up in Descartes’ aim of finding a “pure
science of order and measure… part of which today is called logic,” and which is
similar to Plato’s relation of dianoia to noesis (Kant 1974, lxi). Tymieniecka often
invokes this Husserlian foundational ideal of phenomenology, and Manchester
grounds his phenomenology in a comparatively synthetic paradigm called the
spherics. Since both expressions of mathesis begin with Archytas, a brief genealogy
should begin there.
The ancient arithmetica universalis of Archytas was the first universal mathe-
matics, worked out in about 400 BCE. It was a proportion theory of Pythagorean
harmonics expressed in an arithmology of rational numbers, according to Mahnke’s
student Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann (Hofmann 1957, 15–25). The demonstration of
the existence of irrational linear ratios brought this dream of a rational universe to
an end, and for many this discovery of irrationals represents a break with the
Pythagorean idealism of a harmonious cosmos. The mathesis universalis of the
modern period of philosophical system building revives the dream, and Husserl’s
early ontological philosophy is modeled on the project of a mathesis universalis in
Leibniz’ sense. Husserl’s mathesis universalis is most fully expounded in Formal
and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1969), where it provides a model for a develop-
ment of the formal ontology at work in the general method of phenomenology. But
in his earlier Philosophy of Arithmetic, the arithmetica universalis is inspired by
Newton, who in turn provides a work significantly different from anything still con-
nected to Pythagorean intuitions, making the later model of the Leibnizian mathesis
a more solid connection to the pre-Diophantine mathematics (Husserl 2003, 310).
The key difference between the Pythagorean mathematical intuitions and what
16 R. Dible
comes later is the development of speculative logic and formal ontology with
Parmenides (Manchester 2005, 113–24), and the eventual formalization of analysis.
This difference marks the paradigmatic change with regard to eternity that in The
Syntax of Time Manchester hopes to “operationalize” (86) and reactivate.
“Riding the rails” of the mathesis universalis, as she puts it (Tymieniecka 2009,
176), Tymieniecka initiates a new phenomenological reduction of life based on the
later Husserlian phenomenology of the life-world, and expands the phenomenologi-
cal method to include the constitution of all possible life-worlds. In her phenome-
nology, life is discovered in the baffling simplicity of its initial functional relations
to the manifold of possible dimensional frameworks for worlds. Life itself becomes
the common thread of a science of subjectivity. Tymieniecka’s microcosmic and
metrological concept of life’s primogenital functioning fills the interval between, on
the one hand, living processes in the phenomenal manifold, and on the other hand,
the Archimedean point of the reduction to a continuum of life. The hypostatic reduc-
tion of life to the synthetic a priori necessity of experience affirms the presence of
life in all the possible forms that any kind of functioning might take. Form follows
function, and this ‘functioning’ is the ordering principle of operations behind the
articulation of a unified mathesis universalis. The infinite variety of host vehicles of
life all ride the rails of the same system.
According to the perspective afforded by a unified mathesis in which the final
term of analysis is the first term of synthesis (Kant 1974, lx–lxvii), the phenomeno-
logical realism of possible worlds represented by Tymieniecka’s philosophy stands
upon a twofold mathesis: (1) the eidetic analysis of the structure and order of the
lifeworld represents the ground of the world’s constant form at the arithmetical
level, where the world order and its phenomenal form is interdependent. This is
Husserl’s intuition of essences at the level of the lifeworld. Call this the real living
framework of life. (2) The analysis then proceeds through conjectural inference to
constructive synthesis at the algebraic (the primary algebra or ars combinatoria)
level of free variation upon the re-entry of the given eidetic structure into its own
space. This is Husserl’s free variation in imagination. Call this the imaginary frame-
work of possible life. These two dimensions, the real living framework and the
imaginary framework of life, can be seen as the emblem of the extensive place of
life, standing in the disclosure space of its own self-reference. In their synthesis, the
two dimensions of this twofold express the universal forms of space and time, eter-
nity and temporality, stasis and flux.
The meting out of life in spatiotemporal experience can be graphically indexed,
I suggest, by a two-ray graph of the dimensional crossing of indication embodied by
the Semeion. Illustrated by a carpenter’s gnomon or Kabbalistic Yod (the seed of
creation), this figure is a simple archetype of a ubiquitous crossing of indication, but
its appearances in three areas of the proximal research vicinity are worth mention-
ing. While I am focusing on the Semeion of Archytas the Pythagorean described in
Peter Manchester’s The Syntax of Time, there are other systems that inspire the
perspective of a unity of mathematics in a unified mathesis universalis,3 and also a

geometry of life.4 In these systems, everything hinges on the idea of the hinge—the
path of crossing, common to openness and closure—and just what the idea of the
hinge discloses is the opening of an aperture of disclosure space as the arc of a cir-
cle. In the primitive sense of disclosure, what the circularity of self-reference
expresses is the continuity of radical discontinuity in the act of crossing; a monad of
change and order. The noetic triad at work in the noetic circle is the dynamo of
causality effecting the original synthesis of space and time in the original creative
act of construction.5 The mathesis universalis finds in Tymieniecka’s architectonic
3
The technical details of the mathesis synthesis are inspired by two systems: George Spencer-
Brown’s Laws of Form and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “original geometry.” The right-angle bracket
of the ‘marked state’ operator (the ‘mark’ or the ‘cross’) in George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form
(Spencer-Brown 2008) guides a unified mathesis, but this consideration is beyond the scope of this
presentation. The iconic logic of Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications is a void-based system
that begins by drawing a distinction (“the first distinction”) in an otherwise unmarked state. The
initial consequences of this fundamental operation of crossing the void yield the two laws of form,
the calculus of indications. These indications of the first distinction are signs that synthesize the
construction of a universe, called the marked state, or simply the form. The laws at this level are
called the primary arithmetic. The next level is distinguished by the introduction of variables, and
this is called the primary algebra. Within the primary algebra a new calculus grows inside the cal-
culus, and this is the re-entry of the form into itself, which we experience as the fifth crossing or
fifth eternal order. The five eternal orders correspond to the four dimensions of experience, plus the
void. Husserl’s early work on manifolds and syntaxes sought just such a universal laws of form in
the context of the widest sense of a mathesis universalis. Husserl’s theory of formal manifolds and
Tymieniecka’s work on the universal world-order is vindicated by this achievement of a void-based
eidetics.
4
The other system is Fichte’s “original geometry.” In his geometry, the archaic construction
“UnendlichEk” is rendered by David W. Wood as “infinite polygon” (Wood 2012), but it could also
be translated ‘unending angle,’ comparable to Mahnke’s allmittelpunkt. Fichte’s “living and active
self-consciousness” replaces a perceived “rigid and lifeless formalism” (4) of analytic geometry,
and we shall follow the same spirit here. The working-out of a rigorous deductive system of geo-
metrical elements gives the prototypical form of a general spherics in a way that is, I imagine, more
in line with Proclus’ noetic theory of the geometricals than Euclid’s lost Sphaerica (judging by the
formalism of the Elements) because it expresses the geometry of life. Seeing a point from another
point cannot get to the heart of being a point, on account of the extension of experience. As
Spencer-Brown puts it, being seeing being seeing being seeing being cannot see itself without
going half-blind, the blind side being the future. The ontological procession of dimensionality
characterizes living processes, that is, all experience. Inter-objective relations give no insight as to
the synthesis of life, and neither does pure analysis. Scaled to our world, a living geometry calls on
us to find a way to explore other dimensions and other worlds—the other spheres of being.
5
Manchester’s work on the noetic triad (Manchester 1992) as prefiguring the doctrine of the trinity
and expressing the schema of participation of the one and the many should be researched along
with his insights about the noetic circle in The Syntax of Time (Manchester 2005, 149), yielding a
real “engine of participation” (134; Manchester 2002, 81), the engine of the vehicle of the soul, the
ochema pneuma. For my own part, triangles and circles are never alone, always dynamic, and the
schema ochema is the circular activity of the original angle, which is not a closed form without the
circle, but always indicates three values anyway; the marked state, the unmarked state, and the
distinction. The construction of stereometric form in the Timaeus (53d–55c) can be seen as a
sphere-packing operation if the constituent triangles are understood to be the angles signifying the
centers, radii, and intercoherence of spheres.
18 R. Dible
a common cord, a filium Ariadne, in the phenomena of life, and with it the beginning
of a synthetic mathesis. The synthetic a priori can be understood in this way as form
that is function, that is, life. Although not an explicit theme in Tymieniecka’s own
writings, the initials of a mathesis synthesis are already operational in her theory of
manifolds and analytic of life’s intrinsic timing and spacing. Nor is the mathesis
synthesis an explicit theme in Manchester’s phenomenology of time, but the figure
of the noetic circle and the ultimate frame of the Sphere of the All bear in them-
selves an intentional relation to the explicit theme of an originary angle and the
two-dimensionality of time.
The universality of mathematical insight may be analytic or synthetic in its
expression, but its validity comes from the truth articulated at the level of indication.
The sign or mark of indication is the form of whatever presents itself, as an indica-
tion of its full sphere of being. The initials of the synthetic mathesis universalis are
the relations of the center to the sphere of self-reference. If there is an architectural
atom of form or a monad of time, it is indicated by the actual here and now. And its
truth coincides with its being in the name of the ancient Logos. This is the Logos of
Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, and its ancient economy of eidetic power is
evoked also in Peter Manchester’s phenomenology of time in the emblem of the
sphere, which we shall see is the “whole pie” which we can know through its slices,
or spanned intervals. The fullness of this Logos is indicated by the invocation of the
ancient name of the All (ta panta), which retains the power of reference to both the
totality of the orders of being (the cosmos) and at the same time the postulation of
an indefinite void beyond (apeiron). The suggested initiation of a mathesis synthesis
and its concomitant phenomenology of the spheres are not the product of a compre-
hensive reconstruction of the lost ancient spherics on the part of Manchester or
Tymieniecka, nor of the original force of the Logos. But by harnessing the power of
an a priori mathesis synthesis, the suggested phenomenology of the spheres appears
in the coalescence of Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life and Manchester’s phe-
nomenology of time.
The Syntax of Time takes the spanned interval of the “now” from Aristotle’s writ-
ings on physical time as the fundamental unit of phenomenological disclosure space
whose continuity is guaranteed by the constancy of its scaling and framing, like the
frame-rate of a cinematic production, or the rotation of a reel. The ancient category
of the soul and the modern phenomenological category of inner time-consciousness
provides the consistency of its spanning. The Nu-Upsilon-Nu of the Greek “Now!”
(νυν; nun in Greek) is for Peter Manchester the very “Now!” that the Goddess pro-
nounces to Parmenides in his poem, and it is a form of unity that is not a number
(arithmos) but a measure (metron). In the context of motion, this spanned interval is
the discontinuity and diremption of the opening of the dimension of time itself.
Manchester notes that the character Nu is a continuative consonant, laying out a flux
of potential nows (Nu, Nu, …), with the actual now marked out by pronouncing two
and pronouncing the interval (Y; Upsilon) in between them (Manchester 2005, 94).
Manchester connects the Aristotelian device to its dialectical prototype which he
finds in the gnomonic sign of Archytas. Manchester interprets the figure of Archytas
to express a measure of the spherical unity of continuity and discontinuity, a being

in tune with its becoming (Manchester 2005, 48–9).
The Syntax of Time begins with a first chapter on the topic of two-dimensional
time in Husserl’s time-consciousness diagram of retentional-protentional space and
in the Neoplatonic reception of the Semeion of Archytas. By continuing through
chapters on the relevance of this theme in Plotinus, Aristotle, Parmenides, and
Heraclitus, two-dimensional time is connected to the figure of the Sphere of the All.
The metrical relations of the Sphere and the sign of the center are filled out along
the way. The final chapter brings it all together by reading the famous cosmological
fragment of Anaximander through the lens of Plotinus and Heraclitus, with a new
translation: “for they take amends and give reparation to one another for their
offense, according to the syntax of time” (Manchester 2005, 150). Syntax here
means the coordination of the origin (center) and limit (circumference) in the figure
of a circle or sphere, whereas in our culture we are more familiar with syntax as
linear contextual relations. Syntax is here the analytical form of the circle because
it coordinates the common character of the universal language with the universal
and eternal life that it draws on. This expression of life is meted out like a sentence
of universal programming.
In “Chronos and Kairos” (Tymieniecka 2000, 491–501), Tymieniecka also ana-
lyzes Aristotle’s account of physical time as an interval, with the soul “as the con-
crete principle of life itself,” the synthesizing element indispensable to the space-time
matrix (494). For Tymieniecka, the “inner workings” of life are the fulcrum or axis
of measure and differentiation expressed succinctly in her words, “Life times itself!”
(Tymieniecka 2011, xiii). Her “universal reference system” (xiv) includes functions
she names scanning and spacing, a grid “abstracted,” she says, “from all the singular
steps of life’s timing—the system of time and space coordinates, a stable grid for all
the change that may be drafted on it” (xiv). These “inner workings” carry in their
performance what she calls “a ‘limit,’ a ‘circumference’” (304). A circumference is
a curved horizon, and curvature is precisely what Manchester’s metrology contrib-
utes to Tymieniecka’s. This limit, for Tymieniecka, is the unity of life, but it also
repeats the Pythagorean limit concept of the monas. The One, the monas, is also the
limit, the peras. Its proper contextual framework was theorized in the physical cos-
mology of Anaximander: the Apeiron, the Unlimited. This state is a simplicity
beyond unity, and it shares the equability of formlessness with the other concept of
paramount significance to the Pythagoreans, the indefinite dyad or aoristos dyas. Its
equality and evenness make it the other of two elements of number that are common
to all numbers in the Pythagorean concept of arithmetical genesis. In the Pythagorean
paradigm, these two are not numbers but the non-numerical elements of all num-
bers, and they are the first elements of the ancient arithmetica universalis. It is the
same with Spencer-Brown’s primary arithmetic. All evenness or harmony calculus
or condenses to the ultimate unmarked state, which would be pure and radical noth-
ingness: the absolute infinite, the infinite sphere, or simply the Apeiron.
Tymieniecka continues in the aforementioned chapter, “Chronos and Kairos,”
with the proviso “yet is it not time but life, which comes first to be seen at the onto-
poietic groundwork of existence?” (491). In Tymieniecka’s phenomenology, life
20 R. Dible
may come before time, but the parameters of a disclosure space according to time
within eternity are a necessary step in the philosophy of cosmo-transcendental posi-
tioning that is the guiding concern of her later work. By interpreting both the phe-
nomenology of time in Manchester and the phenomenology of life in Tymieniecka
for their shared concern to express their architectonic systems in metrological terms,
a phenomenology of phenomenology appears: the phenomenology of the sphere(s).
Peter Manchester’s work conforms to a once-extant paradigm he calls “the
ancient Spherics,” a “lost continent in the history of philosophy” (Manchester 2005,
56), which he argues only incidentally resurfaces in his work because its recovery is
underway in Neoplatonic studies. This comment certainly refers to the astronomical
Spherics found in the work of Theodosius and Aristarchus, but may refer to the
rootedness of Platonism in the Eleatic and Pythagorean traditions, where the cos-
mological insights of ancient astronomical civilization are synthesized in theurgy
and theory. It might also refer more specifically to the cosmological doctrines of
Plato’s younger contempory Eudoxus, whose theory of homocentric spheres exerted
influence on Platonism generally and was also influential on Plato’s own later writ-
ings (Plato 2000, xlviii). It is also very likely that the recovery of the ancient
Spherics could refer to the reconstruction of the unwritten doctrines (agrapha dog-
mata) of Plato taught inside the Academy to initiates, the so-called esoteric oral
teachings. Of this latter possibility, Konrad Gaiser’s doctrine of the
“Mathematisierend-analytischen Elementen-metaphysik” or “Dimensionenfolge,”
provides a reconstruction of Plato’s inner-Academic systematic doctrine based on
Plato’s own numerous references, the positive accounts of his successors, but fore-
most through a negative or polemical reading of Aristotle’s critiques of Plato’s oral
teachings. This possibility is especially interesting for the purposes of a synthetic
understanding of mathesis universalis. In this system, tied to the Tübingen interpre-
tation of Plato’s unwritten doctrines, the stereometric form of body and soul develop
from first principles through the geometrical dimensional series represented by the
geometric elements of point, line, plane, and solid.6
Gaiser’s doctrine of the mathematical dimensional series is especially useful for
generalizing the dimensional aspect of Manchester’s phenomenology of time and
Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, and for the metrology of the phenomeno-
logical disclosure space. We might even speculate that this series or schema pres-
ents the corresponding syntax of space, but for a full comparison with Manchester’s
system a further step in Platonic interpretation is necessary, and another
Neoplatonism scholar, Philip Merlan, provides it. The efficient-causal continuity of
the dynamic progression of dimensional synthesis in Gaiser’s dimensional series of
kinetic-geometrical elements corresponds to Merlan’s multi-sphere model of the
Platonic Academic systematic, according to which a series of concentric spheres
6
See Gaiser (1963). For an overview of this doctrine with original sources, see Hans Joachim
Krämer’s (1990) Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles
and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents (trans. John
R. Catan), and the 2012 volume, The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-
Academic Teachings (ed. Dmitri Nikulin; Nikulin 2012).
correspond to different levels of being. As Dominic O’Meara describes it, “each

sphere deriving from the higher and ultimately from two principles, the constitution
of an uppermost sphere” (O’Meara 1998, 21–3). But Merlan’s doctrine of the
spheres of being also provides a doctrine of the unity of being that is a unity of the
multiple spheres, akin to Lovejoy’s famous “great chain of being,” derived from a
Leibnizian “principle of plenitude” (Merlan 1960, 152; Lovejoy 1964, 52–5). In his
book From Platonism to Neoplatonism, Merlan begins his account by characteriz-
ing Neoplatonism with the deduction of the spheres by means of logical implication
from the first principles of an indefinite many and an indefinite one, the latter being
an “ontic indeterminateness, i.e. fullest ‘being’” (Merlan 1960, 1). The Platonic
systematics of Gaiser and Merlan could provide a modern precedent for Manchester’s
reference to an ancient doctrine called the Spherics, and if their interpretations are
correct, they could provide the ancient context we are seeking. But the lost content
remains subject to reconstruction outside the strict jurisdiction of the archeology of
sedimented historical fact. This task lies in the wider domain of Husserl’s reactiva-
tion of original intuitions.
An introductory chapter that was omitted from later drafts of The Syntax of Time
begins with a modern backward-turning perspective on this same ancient Platonic
theme of time as the image of eternity, a theme which Plato attributes to Pythagoras.
In an unpublished version of the introduction of The Syntax of Time,
Manchester writes:
Eternity and time relate as paradigm and image. Once you have seen the paradigm of some-
thing you can then recognize its image, which might otherwise present the common form in
so degraded or misdirecting a way that you would not necessarily even note the phenome-
non that displays it… When something is characterized with regard to a paradigm, thought
is directed in a way more fundamental than by definition. Ahead of definition is identifica-
tion of the thing to be defined. (Manchester, n.d., 5–6)
He continues in this section to frame the ensuing project in the context of the phi-
losophy of science and the branching off of the traditional worldview with the
development in Ancient Greece of speculative logic. His explicit goal is to reani-
mate the imagination and experience of eternity, lost to logical abstraction and
transformed into its negative image of mere timelessness since Boethius. The his-
torical structure of this project of The Syntax of Time is anchored to the paradigm-
shifts represented in the figures of Boethius and Spinoza, as identified in his
encyclopedia entry on eternity:
A certain purely logical interest in the eternity/time contrast, detectable already in Boethius
(responding more to Porphyry than Plotinus) and Thomas Aquinas, was amplified by the
new mathematical spirit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, resulting in the
reduction of eternal presence to a kind of schematic simplicity illustrated particularly
clearly in the system of Spinoza. The effect was to dissociate the speculative notion from its
experiential basis, producing in the end the degraded conception of eternity as lifeless stasis
or logical tenselessness that has been the target of complaint in historicist, existentialist, and
process theologies of the past century. (Manchester 1987, 170)
The contribution to the history of ideas represented by tracing and tying down the
paradigm shifts that transformed the experience of time and imagination of eternity
22 R. Dible
aids in identifying the ancient spherics, but Manchester’s phenomenology of the

disclosure space is created for the purpose of reactivating the original intuition of
the sphere and operationalization of the premise that time is the life of the soul.
Husserl was also concerned with reactivating the original intuitions of mathematical
insights in his project of the origin of geometry. Both Tymieniecka and Manchester
shared Husserl’s concern to return to things themselves, and the sphere of being in
which the things themselves come to presence is the very thing itself that embodies
this return. For the disclosure of dimensions of truth beyond the given phenomenal
universe, such as the truth of mathematical intuition, this return means going beyond
the iconic data of appearance (the image) to discover the true reality of a non-
imagistic original, or paradigm. In the case of the self-referential nature of the
Sphere of the Paradigm, the return is to the self itself which stands as a referential
background of equality and stasis against which the object or the other thing (the
hetero-referent object signified)—stated in full: the world itself—stands in relief,
disclosed. This background state of disclosure space is the manifold of spatiotem-
poral continuity whose phenomenological study Husserl initiated with the theory of
formal manifolds in Formal and Transcendental Logic.
Thus, above all these other resonances, I propose that Peter Manchester intended
his work on syntax in the context of transcendental phenomenology to make its
ultimate contribution to the kind of work that Husserl was engaged in with the the-
ory of possible syntactical unity, and the formal theory of the manifold, as presented
in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Here the term “syntax” carries all its meaning
from the formal analytics of universal judgment forms (formal apophantics, from
Chryspippus’ ancient On The Syntax of the Sayables to modern linguistics and phi-
losophy of language) to the domain of transcendental logic and phenomenology.
“Syntax” refers to the manner of synthesis, in the root sense of syn-taxis; the cosmic
order of operations. Taxis means order, and thesis means position, so in a root sense,
syntax and synthesis present the same wide vision, and in the move from the phe-
nomenologies of life and time to the phenomenology of the spheres and the mathe-
sis synthesis, each of these two terms compliments the other. Manner of synthesis
refers to ‘something about’ the being or event, such as its becoming or ceasing to be.
But that is only the surface situation of ‘something about’ a being or event; its syn-
tax. Beyond syntax is the synthesis of all the ways or manners of being (the multi-
plicity of spheres), and that is the Sphere of the All. The Sphere of the All is the
outermost limit of being in the most encompassing sense: it is the total and solid
omnipresence and fullness of being. Just inside the outermost sphere is a penulti-
mate sphere where just coming to be and ceasing to be give way to duration and
durability, like the memory of a simple arithmetical operation in the electronic cir-
cuit of a calculator. This level is what appears to us as time in the sense of a dimen-
sion of being. Without the addition of appearance or expression, time in itself is in
fact the very manner of being that we referred to before the crystallization of time
into duration, which in fact is the birth of space from time. This is the place in the
Sphere of the All where the intelligible categories of being—space, time, and cau-
sality for Kant, whose tradition of the manifold of intuition we are here following
with Husserl—constitute the continuity of a sphere, or a world.
It is important to recognize these connections because in Husserl’s own develop-

ment, we can see that phenomenology was built from the ground up, upon the pure
formal analytics of a mathesis universalis in the classical sense that reaches through
Leibniz and Descartes back to the ancient rationalist dream of the Greeks, the arith-
metica universalis. It is upon the basis of the order that already constitutes the flux
of life that a first order of unity and then a second order of variability emerges. This
simplex of order is not apparent at once, but appears for the second intentionality
(intentio secunda) of the dianoetic act of thetic coherence, the sphere of images that
is the gnomonically projected layer of reality we know as the imagination. “The
timelike is,” writes Manchester, “motion taken twice, in comparison to itself
(spanned) and hence already in comparison to all other motions” (Manchester
2005, 97). This ‘not once’ of order is the ‘not once’ of time. The emergence of
ordered thought or coherence (and any hypostatized first thought, first order, or first
time) repeats the order of eternal dynamics, according to the syntax of time. The
idea of syntax implies time, but also space, and finally space-time coordination or
continuity. Building on the notion of the syntax of time, a synthetic and metric
mathesis universalis develops in the vision of the sphere.
Leibniz sought a common or universal characteristic in the structural core of the
phenomenal universe. In their introduction to Kant’s Logic, Hartman and Schwarz
give an extensive overview of the modern conception of the mathesis universalis as
established by Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. They describe the end of analysis
sought by Leibniz as the primitive or primary concept “from whose combination all
the rest are made” (Kant 1974, lxxvi). He never reached this final term of analysis,
but if he had he would have discovered the first term of the progressive synthetic
method. What is suggested by Archytas’ Semeion is a fundamental operation of
crossing that characterizes disclosure. I would like to suggest that this fundamental
operation of crossing is, in the context of the mathesis universalis, Descartes’ ideal
of a “simple nature,” which Hartman and Schwarz describe as “the identification
[and distinction] of analysis and synthesis, the result of analysis and the beginning
of synthesis” (lx). Husserl’s pure analytics sought just this in a theory of forms as a
systematic theory of syntactical structures or “form-laws of possible coexistence or,
equivalently stated, laws of possible syntactical unity” (Husserl 1969, 335). This
project of a “higher theory of forms” or of eidetic universalities or eidetic laws—all
formulations of the pure analytics of the hypothesized mathesis universalis (336)—
is precisely what is achieved in the pure mathematics of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of
Form, where the unity of mathematics is expressed according to a rigorous deduc-
tive system of the consequences of the act of crossing called the first distinction. The
ontology of Laws of Form is a meontology, an ontology of the consequences of there
being nothing. This most economical unity of mathematics deserves to be inter-
preted as the mathesis universalis because it seems to satisfy all the requirements
offered by the ancient and modern philosophers. A unified mathesis is necessary to
confirm the metrological connections of the phenomenologies of Manchester and
Tymieniecka in a way that establishes the synthetic method of the spheres.
Based on the analytic logistic of Laws of Form, my proposal for a reconstructed
general spherics is the unified and two-fold mathesis of the phenomenology of the
24 R. Dible
spheres discussed earlier, called the mathesis synthesis. It may be more or less iden-
tified with the convergence of the phenomenologies of time and life, because unlike
the familiar phenomenology that is limited to the phenomenal universe given to the
senses (the phenomenology of sense), it is not distinct from transcendental logic.
This is because a phenomenology of the spheres concerns itself with the form of the
path (the hodos, of this new method, or meta-hodos) common to both the order of
derivation of transcendental logic and the order of operations of constructive syn-
thesis. As a reconstruction of ancient doctrine, it might be the reconstituted coher-
ence of the noetic doctrine of the geometricals. In Proclus’ commentary on the
Timaeus, he employs the graphic representation of the center of a circle and its
periphery to express the relation of time and eternity, but this image suggests that
the circle is constituted by the revolution that draws the line. Instead, the sphericity
of the total and complete sphere itself produces world order analogous to the way
black holes reduce world order. The parameters of the disclosure space are gno-
monically projected onto the perimeter through a centripetal force of intentionality
radiating through the center, much like how the reference beams of laser holography
create stereometric resonances in interference patterns. For every parametric point
of reference that develops in such techniques, there is a whole sphere of circumstan-
tial interference that contains and constitutes it through coherent superposition. As
the self-referential frame of reference for the disclosure space, the sphere and its
center frame the implicit angle of re-entry into its own phase space by the arc of its
unmarked sphere. In the mathesis synthesis, every mark is the arc of a sphere of
being which draws the forms we discern in experience by what might be called
circumferential inference. The logical construction of metrological form produces
the given phenomenal universe as an image of its sphere of being, an image of
the All.
In an unpublished introduction to The Syntax of Time, Peter Manchester writes,
“I must now turn about and admit that our title itself, ‘the syntax of time,’ is meant
to suggest a convergence of linguistics and physics” (19). He accomplishes this by
“[making] Plotinus available as a channel for recovering the phenomenological
dimension of the Greek physics of time as it is forever made important in Aristotle…
The goal of this study is to reanimate the old identification” (18–9), against the
reductive identification of modern analytic geometry. He does this to bring physics
through transcendental phenomenology, back from what is merely evident to us. His
goal is to return physics to its original Aristotelian aim towards what is evident by
nature. In Manchester’s view, Heraclitus’ Logos anticipates a “logic of natural
necessity” in Aristotle, which in turn is a gloss on Anaximander’s protean proposi-
tion that things find cosmic justice, resolve their differences, and arrange them-
selves according to “the syntax of time (he tou chronou taxis)” (26). The Greek taxis
is rendered as syntax because in Anaximander it is not a serial ordering in succes-
sion by which things arrange themselves to resolve their differences. It is a pattern-
ing or structuring of affairs, more like the syntax of speech and listening than the
conventions of writing. The syntax of expression and spontaneous interpretation
follows the logic of natural necessity, the Logos. Thus the syntax of time is not the
logic of words and deeds (the opinions of mortals), but the Logos of nature and
cosmos. By manipulating language to modulate the power of the Logos through

language, Heraclitus invents speculative logic: “Most precisely, he anticipates what
comes to flower in Parmenides and Plotinus: the practice of speculative logic as
physics. The same procedure in our time is called transcendental phenomenology”
(n. d., 27).
In Volume 100 of the Analecta Husserliana, the primordial feature of life, the
logos of life, is recognized as sentience in the sense of the operative sentential com-
putation of a universal calculus ratiocinator (Leibniz’s counterpart to the character-
istica universalis). In this context we get a direct sentential sense of the logos, in the
context of the mathesis universalis, which here is called the “common modality of
all differentiation” (Tymieniecka 2010, 14). In the prologue to Volume 100 she
refers to phenomenological life as “the sentence of the logos of life—a thread run-
ning through the divine script” (Tymieniecka 2009, xxix). Here the complete sen-
tence of life, “logoic sentience” (xxix), like a continuous contour drawing, indicates
that the innumerable rays of differentiation all come from the same elemental opera-
tion and proceed with the order of a sentence complete with a universal alphabet and
a universal syntax. Here, as well as in Volume 105, the ontopoietic process of life is
described as “laying down the flesh and cornerstones of the ultimate and primary
mathesis universalis,” fleshing out the architectonic implied by the idea of a lan-
guage of universal manifestation, as conceived by Kant, Leibniz and Descartes, but
also the long-standing geometrical tradition initiated by Archytas, Diophantus,
Euclid, and others, at the root of the theory of manifolds and the universal world-
order. As the following quote makes clear, she recognizes in this universal language
both an alphabet and a syntax:
In its universal alphabet are signs ciphered by the infinitely versatile transformability of the
constructive processes of individualizing beingness. In its syntax are the laws of the modal-
ity of life together with its arsenal of constructive devices—all of which remind one of a
spider’s spinning its web, for even so, life spins its sense along the track of its life-timing
and -spacing. Suspended upon its existential becoming—like a spider upon its web—the
self-individualizing in the ontopoiesis of beingness differentiates through a sequence.
(Tymieniecka 2010, 14; Tymieniecka 2009, xxvii–xxviii)
As we just saw, the syntax of time is not like the syntax of written language pre-
cisely in that it is not like a serial ordering in succession, but a logic of natural
necessity. Manchester’s thesis is that time is more than the sequence whose repre-
sentation is the domain of the variable ‘t’ in Cartesian analytic geometry, but instead
is a sphere in its vertical descent from the eternal presence of the Logos. Having
reached the Archimedean point of life’s universality, Tymieniecka’s phenomenol-
ogy of the Logos connects the given to the immediate source of its articulation in the
life that constitutes it, the Logos of Life. What is most immediate is the inherent
cosmic position that is taken for granted in the classical undertaking of the transcen-
dental constitution of experience, in the very folding action of the manifold. This
activity of passive synthesis with its totality of external horizons flows around all
things, and all things are sedimentations of this universal flux and original spring of
life. We experience the sediment at the bottom of the river in the inimitable way we
do, in virtue of this flux, and the flux itself remains hidden by its multiplications and
26 R. Dible
additions of constitutive construction within the transparency and silence of its con-
tinuity. Tymieniecka recognizes intelligible calculation in the natural ordering of the
flux, and recognizes the all-encompassing continuity of expression. The classical
conception of the mathesis universalis still holds, even if we pursue the direction of
the mathesis synthesis, and there is no better metaphor for the resonant computa-
tions and communications within the continuum of life-worlds than a universal
mathematical language.
For Tymieniecka, the articulations of this universal language are the articulations
of life’s inner workings and constructive progress. She writes that “life spaces and
times itself” (Tymieniecka 2010, 107) along what she also calls the “spacing/scan-
ning axis” (107). These functional terms express the hidden articulations of life
which inhere in all experience, structuring individualization. To make sense of the
birth of my own subjective experience from the span between the cosmological
singularity and the totality of the relevant sphere of being within the Sphere of the
All, the birth is visualized as being a sum and product of the operations of differen-
tiation. Life times itself, and in so doing is a product issuing from itself in its indefi-
nite yet structured analysis of pure self-reference—life squared, cubed, etc.—and I
would add that life adds to itself, spatializing the fullness of the thetic Sum in the
indefinite synthesis of its creation, the poiesis of its radical novum. These mathemat-
ical operations are concatenated in vital self-reference, whose remainder accounts
for life: the logos of life speaks and observes through the aperture of the soul, which
is called in the phenomenology of time the disclosure space.
In Manchester’s phenomenology, the spanning of the disclosure space is the fun-
damental unit, but the spans are scaled in the harmonic sense, and framed by the
form of the sphere, whose telos is the Sphere of the All. In the logic of natural neces-
sity, life as the unfurling of experience and as the totality of the lifetime is a spanned,
“Cosmetic Array” (Manchester 2005, 49), scaled according to the syntax of time in
the perimeter of the sphere where the array is synthesized as the unity of a cosmos.
In the synthetic method of a phenomenology of the spheres, finally, this unity is
placed, positioned, in the framework of the spheres whose ultimate frame, the out-
ermost frame, is the Sphere of the All. Tymieniecka writes that this elemental ray of
the logos of life proceeds in its constructive advance according to “a dianoiac
thread” (Tymieniecka 2009, 31), the very same dianoia which Peter Manchester
names syntax. Tymieniecka finally does employ the construction “the cosmic sphere
of the all,” in the summary on the back of Analecta Husserliana Volume 114,
Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. The Life-World, Nature,
Earth: Book Two, but the allusion to the Stoic formula is incidental
(Tymieniecka 2013). With such convergences and coalescences, the continued proj-
ect of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenological cosmology can be
advanced and enriched by adding to this great vision of individualization, the
vision of Peter Manchester’s synthetic, syntactical paradigm of the infinite sphere.
Rounding off the cosmic architectonic, and grounding its method in the figura para-
digmatica of The Syntax of Time, we are tempted to note that like eternity itself,
nothing coheres like the spheres.
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From Boredom to a Posthumanist
Fulfillment
Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith
Abstract When speaking of the posthistorical, one is also speaking of posthuman-

ism, so that the question becomes “On what basis can one speak in these terms? And
what are their main characteristics?” I begin with statements that include these
questions, and answer by exploring the theme of negativity put forth by Giorgio
Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Negativity generates negative phenomena and contexts that lead to negative feelings
and states of mind. It also includes such phenomena as boredom, solitude, loneli-
ness, and isolation, which I consider in this order to show the similarities and differ-
ences among these phenomena and pose the question whether they can influence
one another. I conclude by examining whether these phenomena are symptoms of a
posthumanist nihilism or if they can bring forth changes in our human, insurmount-
able finitude. If so, a different ethics arises that sets aside the humanism of the past
and puts in its place a posthuman way of being-in-common based on co-existence.
Keywords Posthumanism · The body · Boredom · Solitude · Fulfillment
Fortunately, we humans possess a language that sheds some light on the topic of
negativity, a concept that is most fruitful in understanding the related concepts that
make the core of this study. Negativity, as conceived of by Giorgio Agamben, is
“ironic self-negation” (Agamben 1993b, XVI), but these few words, though they
remind us of the self-referentiality that has become the protagonist of so many con-
temporary philosophical studies, are not sufficient to understand the whole range of
negativity. For a start, according to Agamben, the contemporary philosopher looks
for unity; that is, for meaningful and relevant connections beyond language’s frag-
mented words.
Let’s first point out that, contrary to the system adopted by the ancient Romans,
the words of the alphabet are now written separately one from the other—a fact that
says a lot about the phenomena under consideration. Agamben’s consistent approach
M. T. Goldsmith (*)
Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA

Switzerland AG 2023
30 M. T. Goldsmith
ends up by becoming “an inquiry into the void,” since philosophy has no object on
which to lay its foundations (Agamben 1993b, XIX); what is lacking is a being
capable of sustaining a positive (not positivistic) approach to what is called philoso-
phia perennis. After having distinguished ethics from morality, the first being a
collective and external domain and the second being a mere personal and inner
conviction, Agamben speaks of a planetary humanity formed by “a singularity with-
out identity,” an entity unworthy of an ethical denomination and consequently prey
to the emptiness that ensues (Agamben 1993a, XI–XVI). Out of negativity one can
only identify negative phenomena such as boredom, solitude, loneliness, and isola-
tion—all of which share a common origin, a worn-out subjectivity that cannot pro-
vide us with a permanent, stable ethics. It is, then, worth enquiring whether there are
similarities and differences among these phenomena and, if there are, what is their
nature and what is their relation to each other. These phenomena (known since
antiquity as conditions and part of a humanity outside of the accepted ethos) have,
with modernity acquired a relevance all their own, since negativity has become the
theme of posthumanism’s pervasive nihilism. However, we are not confronting a
mere historical issue, which could easily provide us with the hope that a solution is
just a matter of time: nihilism is pervasive, capable of affecting the most hidden
aspects of human experiences.
The most significant of these phenomena is boredom, the first step leading to
nihilism and consequently the most pervasive condition leading to other negative
phenomena; paradoxically, boredom is the “richest” source of negativity. Boredom
has been a topic considered by a number of philosophers since at least the nine-
teenth century, but before taking into account the theories of Kierkegaard and
Schopenhauer, I look at some of its different modes I believe as being relevant to
understand this “concept.”
The first consideration concerns the fact that boredom is above all a lack of self-
determination: the will is passive and the bored person’s rejection of alterity ends up
by being subjected to that of the other, not seeing in the other anything worth taking
seriously. Because of this negative attitude, the individual leads a boring life char-
acterized by constant repetitions, a routine that can go so far as to wear out the
person in question. The daily life is the case in point; but there is another type of
boredom which is not so detrimental to the individual, and this is the boredom that
occurs following a demanding and strenuous work that has occupied the whole
person; then rest becomes welcome, but this rest is a form of boredom since it does
not occupy in any way the individual, and is lived as being slightly painful; it can be
beneficial after all, considering that this type of boredom generally does not last
long, sooner or later the individual in question will resume his/her activity or a dif-
ferent kind of activity as compared to the previous one.
There is a uniformity in the general approaches to the theme of boredom in the
sense that they are all negative, more or less strongly described. Boredom is there-
fore a state of being that requires negativity as an explanation beyond the differ-
ences among philosophical theories.
Schopenhauer and his almost-contemporary poet and philosopher, Giacomo
Leopardi, often mention this condition: boredom is a sort of destiny and state of
From Boredom to a Posthumanist Fulfillment 31
mind that sooner or later besets all of us by isolating a person without necessarily
revealing itself in the presence of other people; one remedy, for instance, is consid-
ering the constant invasion, the omnipresence of the screen which does not, as some
may think, provide a remedy; its function is, in fact, to distract momentarily from
the emptiness that lies at the bottom of human life, but instead leads inevitably to
boredom. In the end, boredom corresponds to a refusal of the world, which is con-
sidered unworthy of attention, and is also the result of an unstable state of mind.
However, boredom becomes philosophically significant, just like nihilism, since it
indicates the unwillingness and passivity of an empty being, the ultimate state of the
meaningless.
Having begun his philosophical career with a dissertation of irony, Kierkegaard
immerses himself in a-systematic theory which includes all possible descriptions of
what a human being can encounter. Concerning boredom, he begins by saying “I …
proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring” (1987, 285); Kierkegaard
talks about boredom as if we were dealing with a contagious disease affecting all
humanity, even the people who engage themselves in activities of any type. What
they produce is destined to provoke boredom, Kierkegaard considers boredom to be
a mode in which everyone is exposed, some cases, I add, can be worse than others.
Such a universal principle does not allow any solution except an activity which
provides very little satisfaction. Here, we have a reversal of positions: for Kierkegaard
activity is not a positive remedy, whereas for Schopenhauer activity leads to a par-
tial advancement from the negative aspects of boredom.
As a universal phenomenon, the concept of boredom has an important philo-
sophical tradition; for Kierkegaard, who saw in the figure of Don Juan the personi-
fication of boredom, it is the corrupting root of all evil, which does not necessarily
cure suffering since it is at the very core of humanity and in particular it is at the core
of the aesthetic life as opposed to the ethical and the religious stages of life. In
Kierkegaard’s words: “Boredom is the demonic pantheism” that “consumes every-
thing” (1987, 290 and 37) instead of accepting human truths. In the end, we are
indeed facing a powerful negativity, since boredom generates repulsion (285). In
fact, these words are followed by a series of ironic statements explaining why
humans were created and why Adam and Eve were led to sin, and why the
Babylonian tower was built. They were all ways to defeat boredom, thus showing
the incapacity of accepting the unknown; however, these were mere palliatives and
as such they demonstrate that they were doomed to fail.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s different approach describes the role of boredom in his
masterpiece The World as Will and Representation. According to him, “Boredom is
anything but an evil to be thought of lightly” (1969, 313); in fact the will is a univer-
sal principle, the tyrannical force of human life, making humans willing beings, in
contrast to animals, the bored individuals fall prey to boredom when their desires
and activities come to an end, then boredom predominates with all its negative
aspects. It follows that boredom is for Schopenhauer’s strong language “life-
destroying,” (1969, 64), and even stronger: when the will is not active and is unoc-
cupied we fall into the “torture and misery of boredom” (1969, 203–4). Given
Schopenhauer’s premises and overall philosophy of the predominance of the will as
32 M. T. Goldsmith
the principal characteristic of life, it would be difficult to argue with him without
agreeing with his metaphysics.
Another point to consider is that boredom has, philosophically speaking, no
defenders, they all consider boredom in negative terms, although there are differ-
ences within this uniformity. Giacomo Leopardi is a case in point, since his view is
ethical and socially oriented in the widest possible sense, therefore secular rather
than religious. As a particular type of suffering, boredom denies pleasure taking
hold of the whole human being and resulting in a nihilism that destroys the very
fabric of the social world. It is, and remains, a negative phenomenon compared by
Leopardi to hatred (1983, 549). He writes that boredom “does not involve pain; it
involves the totality. It can become an all-pervasive indifference. And indifference
is not suitable to man,” since the human world demands human involvement (551).
Instead, the bored person is condemned to a self-imposed loneliness, to a void
deprived of any form of vitality; given this lack, boredom and loneliness—under-
stood as the avoidance of stimuli—go hand in hand, although their concepts differ
when considered philosophically, since loneliness, if prolonged, can well be the
result of an objective situation and not a choice.
The discussion of boredom has attracted those philosophers who, more than oth-
ers, have raised the issue of subjectivity: What can be more subjective than the
boredom resulting from an indifference vis-à-vis the world? Boredom is “mine!”,
one can think, but as a useless possession it plunges the individual into nothingness;
that is, into an unwanted, meaningless mental void incapable of any significant
development. In so doing, it joins forces with a solitude that promises the absence
of suffering from the presence of an unwanted human diversity; everything for the
bored individual is evident: after a disappointing otherness there is nothing to dis-
cover and nothing to admire, with the consequence that living is to passively accept
an uncreated void that rests on insubstantiality. Given these dismal considerations,
boredom, solitude, and loneliness are indications of a tragic worldview; more spe-
cifically, they are all different but related answers to the human, overhuman, or
posthuman conditions. The posthuman has thus found a “place” [locus] where to
situate the inner side of what used to be called the human condition; at the moment
when everything (or almost everything) is disclosed, when the satisfaction of
desires, or lack of them, dominate, then boredom enters the scene to put a person in
a state that is between melancholy and cheerfulness (Leopardi 1983, 609).
Time has changed Kierkegaard’s and Leopardi’s views, so that a new posthu-
manism requires different answers to the phenomenon of boredom. Nowadays what
is needed is a time-specific perspective inclusive of the wisdom provided by con-
temporary philosophers. The question is whether the fragmentary world of images
that follow one after another is perhaps a way to eradicate boredom, but aren’t the
images themselves boring? Paradoxically, the images of the screens surrounding the
Planet seem to be more interesting than the tangible world, whose reality is taken
for granted or put aside as being irrelevant; both the material world and the ubiqui-
tous virtual world are boring, almost irrelevant, so that the result is that truth itself
becomes ambiguous. The screen suspends the solitude of the present moment but,
with its endless repetitions, it bores people again and again, so that the screen
isolates and does not change in any fundamental way the present, impassive human
world. The posthuman condition offers phantasmatic experiences, whose ultimate
meaning leads to indifference. However, not everything has changed: according also
to the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, boredom is a negative form of
solitude, which, if brought to the extreme, becomes isolation and unhappiness.
Jankélévitch speaks of boredom as a kind of disease—not terribly serious, but quite
common; a disease that is not justified by life itself or by nature. As a matter of fact,
life is in and of itself movement demanding activity, whereas boredom is a “futile
sadness,” a kind of monologue that “isolates its victims and makes them inert”
(Jankélévitch 1963, 62–63). When solitude and boredom are found together, they
are difficult to untangle; solitude makes humans live in a different dimension and
can be voluntary or involuntary, whereas isolation is generally involuntary. As to the
feeling of loneliness, it puts the whole person in a state of dismay, since it can be
caused by a lack of interest on the part of other people; yet, there is also a positive
solitude called “beata solitudo,” and this is an additional point that differentiates
Jankélévitch from the previous considered thinkers. Jankélévitch reminds us that
after having been surrounded by a crowd, people can actively and eagerly seek soli-
tude, withdraw into themselves far from possible negative experiences. This is a
psychological state of mind, when solitude is welcome and is lived as a state of
repose. As a result, solitude becomes a choice, and sometimes even a choice for life
when it coincides with the avoidance of company, due to the belief that it is the right
answer to the noise of the world. However, it is worth mentioning that solitude is
also an ontological condition that is not a matter of choice; it is the solitude all
human beings have within themselves, due to the uniqueness that at times makes us
melancholic or resigned to the point that extreme solitude may coincide with a
solipsistic state of mind leading to hubristic consequences. That is probably why
society as a whole has been critical of such a response to human life that should be
lived accepting its variety and enjoyment, whereas extreme solitude is typical of a
posthumanity that suffers from an undesired loneliness, loneliness that per se is a
passive, self-induced feeling, a step away from isolation. Jankélévitch does not con-
tradict previous evaluations of loneliness, but he adds concrete considerations to the
positive aspects of loneliness the characteristics of which make life open to different
possibilities.
Instead, the undesirable aspects of solitude which can erupt suddenly and are
therefore unwanted and unexpected, are far removed from the enjoyment of which
Levinas speaks in Totality and Infinity. In a conversation with Philippe Nemo, pub-
lished in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas tackles the topic of solitude in order to deny its
existentialist significance and to introduce instead an ontological difficulty. Levinas
says: “I cannot share my existence” (1985, 57). Such an apparently simple state-
ment indicates that “Solitude … appears … as the isolation which marks the very
event of being. The social is beyond ontology” (1985, 57–58). On this point Philippe
Nemo mentions the monad that he himself is: “I am monad inasmuch as I am …
without doors or windows” (1985, 59). However, solitude “is only one of the marks
of being,” as Levinas says (1985, 59); it is thanks to enjoyments that we elude it, but
if there is sociality, and there is, it does not have the same structure of knowledge.
34 M. T. Goldsmith
Clearly then, for Levinas solitude is one with isolation, since they are not separate
ontologically. In an early work Time and the Other, Levinas clearly distinguishes
ontology from anthropology and psychology; only the ontological approach is truly
philosophical and therefore rational; after this premise Levinas can go as far as
introducing the theme of solitude and loneliness in order to connect it to the solip-
sism that he defines as the “very structure of reason” (Levinas 1987, 65); consis-
tently, worth quoting are Levinas’ words: “Knowledge does not surmount solitude.
By themselves, reason and light consummate the solitude of a being as a being, and
accomplish its destiny to be the sole and unique point of reference for everything”
(1987, 65). Isolation is suffering and solitude—extreme passivity, and therefore
tragic. Nevertheless, there is useful suffering and there is useless suffering, and only
the latter prevents us from enjoying life (Levinas 1991, 100–07). In the section of
Totality and Infinity entitled “Affectivity and the Ipseity of the I,” Levinas writes:
“We are catching sight of a possibility of rendering the unicity of the I intelligible.
The unicity of the I conveys separation. Separation can be solitude and enjoyment—
happiness or unhappiness” (1969, 117–18). Qua ipseity (ipseitas), the I stands for
the singularity and the uniqueness of the individual; as conceived by Levinas, it is
not so much a concept but rather an indication of interiority, whose solitude makes
it separated from the totality. There is also another instance that confirms the soli-
tude of the body and that manifests the originality of Levinas’ thinking, I refer to a
specific part of the body that emerges in his work: the Face, or Visage, of the other,
which is to be understood as even provoking the Other (with a capital O), and as
absolute transcendence that is barely mediated by language (Levinas 1969, 194–5).
In Levinas’ words: “The face resists possession, resists my powers” and “puts the I
in question” (1969, 197 and 195). The face-to-face marks the beginning of an ethi-
cal world, even though the human face (human by definition) and its expressions
are—if thought of from the ontological viewpoint—an enigma, since the face, and
I quote, is “the infinity of the other” (1969, 213). As such, I add, it can never be bor-
ing and remains mysterious.
In his work Time and the Other Levinas says, “to be is to be isolated by existing”
(1987, 42) and also: “I see the other. I am not the other. I am all alone” (42). Yet, as
mentioned, despair can be alleviated by sociality, which, however, cannot be a solu-
tion that nullifies the ontological reality of solitude; it can only mitigate the feeling
of loneliness for a limited period of time. In fact, there is a distinction that should be
made while discussing the early Levinas: his work De l’existence à l’existant helps
us to understand the difference that obtains if we distinguish between “solitude” and
“loneliness”; as mentioned above, solitude is an ontological state that cannot be
eradicated, but there is also loneliness, “being alone,” which is a more subjective
state, a feeling. The “proximity” or distance between the two states cannot be
ignored so much so that Levinas writes that it is impossible “de se défaire de soi
même” (2013, 127); there cannot be proximity between ontological solitude and a
temporary feeling, since they are situated on different planes. A further distinction
must be made between the I (Je) and the me (moi) (2013, 129); the moi tries to
attenuate loneliness, its world is the world of desire and materiality, but there is
nothing definitive in this world, which does not coincide with the world of light and
solitude (2013, 122). Moreover, it is the boredom of the moi (2013, 128) that is part
of the realm of social exteriority and materiality; the I and the me differ radically
and pursue different aims. The moi is connected to the materiality of the individual
person, who cannot escape his/her ontological situation.
Given the precarious harmony of a posthuman world (but is it still right to call it
a world?) and given the generalized loneliness that follows from, or is preceded by,
boredom, these two phenomena become almost indistinguishable from isolation;
both can be a matter of choice; that is, of an active refusal to be part of an indifferent
environment. If this is the case, then solitude and isolation are beyond good and evil,
and so is boredom.
The more the posthuman condition changes human lives, both biological and
mental, the more contemporary philosophy tackles the virtuality of our environ-
ment. Well aware of this situation was Jean Baudrillard, whose radical positions
went beyond Levinas’ humanism to speak of a world that has been killed by the
virtual reality of the screen, the presence of which gives us an illusory world of
simulacra, whereby reality and communication are reduced to networks of termi-
nals (Baudrillard 1995, 16). Today’s posthumanism—and I quote Baudrillard—is
“affiliated more and more with the preservation of the individual and of humankind
as a genetically defined entity” in such a way that the limits of the human and the
inhuman tend to fade away (2000, 21). No Übermensch in sight.
Given these insightful considerations, solitude, self and other have become simi-
lar to nonexistence; no wonder that solitude, loneliness, and isolation have changed
dramatically, just as human experiences and lives have and are approached in differ-
ent dimensions, with the consequence that humans have found different ways of
considering what is relevant to living; old theories have lost their previous signifi-
cance, yet their essence has remained the same. What has changed is the way con-
temporary human beings relate to the phenomena that cause them, so well detected
by Baudrillard. On these themes, the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy identifies the
point within which different possibilities emerge; the most important one concerns
the immanence that intrinsically connects the singular and the plural dimensions of
a life lived. Nancy’s conception of humanism relegates it to the past, thus differen-
tiating himself from Levinas’ humanism; in Nancy’s words humanism is only “the
postulation of the meaning of man … humanism deliberately (willfully) goes no
further than man’s will. The inhumanity of his world is not terribly surprising”
(1997a, 25). What consequences can be drawn for our topic from these words is
carefully discussed by Nancy, who mentions boredom in order to contrast it to the
threat posed by the old opposition “happiness/unhappiness,” a distinction going
back to at least the nineteenth century; in addition Nancy equates boredom to a
totally anachronistic nihilism, adding that here and now there is no time for nihilism
(1997b, 145). Responding to Levinas on the issue of the totality, Nancy does not
hesitate when he writes: “Sense is singularity in the collective or worldly sense of
what makes of the totality of the existent the singular absolute of being” (1997b,
68); in other words, the present world involves each individual in a more pressing
world. What is clear from this statement is that multiplicity and the singular,
although distinguishable, are always immanently interrelated, and we should not
36 M. T. Goldsmith
forget that “Finitude is not a privation” (1997b, 29), a statement that excludes any
sentimentality on our part. Given these arguments, Nancy is ready to ironically dis-
miss the idea of solitude as a Romantic anachronism; solitude is “a thought of sub-
jective supposition that touches its own abyssal character, incapable as it is of even
perceiving that it still states its topos precisely in common” (1997b, 72).
An immanent combination of singularity and multiplicity allows Nancy to
emphasize what it means to be “with,” claiming that there is a commonality of being
that keeps humanity from being isolated; this situation is almost a “given,” a matter
of overcoming alterity in such a way that there is a “being-in-common,” notwith-
standing the nihilism that seeps into the “human project”; the fact itself that there is
a human project leads to the conclusion that a “new” form of humanism changes
what was called the “human condition.” This project is humanism itself, and, in fact,
Nancy writes: “The man of humanism can never be there where he is, but only in his
project and as project” (1997a, 34). Specifically, the project is nothing other than the
Faustian project that makes us hesitate between a “yes” and a “no,” and yet it is
determined in the end to pursue that which is initially “given.” However, and most
important, for Nancy, nihilistic tendencies of such determination indicate a libera-
tion from the philosophical question of the subject that has occupied the minds of so
many philosophers since at least Descartes; in changing the old Cartesian dictum
“ergo sum” to “ego cum,” Nancy elucidates and dissolves the old topos of subjectiv-
ity, and with it a subjectivity centered on a singularity that cannot be attained in full.
Given these considerations, it is clear that his position differs from that of Levinas,
who thought that humanism is the recognition of an essence and therefore a neces-
sary “attribute” without which there would be no significant human life; moreover,
and not surprisingly, Levinas, contrary to Nancy, puts forth the human at the cen-
ter—not of the universe, I specify, but of ethics.
The questions concerning humanism lead us to ask what these two philosophers
have in common, whether we are facing a human or overhuman finitude, an unsur-
passable essential humanity or a posthumanity plunged into a common finitude; for
Nancy, no thinking being would be so unlimited to be considered eternal in absolute
terms; to think otherwise would be not only hubristic but also self-defeating. Even
a resuscitated Übermensch—with all his supposed charisma—would be unable to
master, once and for all, the posthumanist, constant changes about to happen at
every moment and then build an interminable static utopianism instead of approach-
ing a possible plural fulfillment. Such fulfillment is and remains only a possibility,
there is no certainty that a totality of being can be achieved; finitude is the last
“stage” both of the individual person, and of the totality in which a person dwells
but from which he/she is separated by an act that produces the uniqueness of the
I. For Levinas, this act does not exclude transcendence, whereas Nancy’s position
remains faithful to immanence, whereby even his theory of the being-in-common
that he puts forth is declared to be finite as is the search for sense which has turned
out to be unattainable.
The question whether these two antithetical positions are consistent with human-
ism should be further clarified by considering that Nancy’s position calls for a new
posthumanism. On this point, Nancy does not hesitate; in his L’oubli de la filosophie
(1986, 72) he writes: “Humanism is by now that which makes man flee,” whereas
Levinas’ position embraces a more traditional but profound humanism.
References
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Hardt. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1993b. Stanzas—Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. Le crime parfait. Paris: Éditions Galilée.
———. 2000. The Vital Illusion. Ed. Julia Witwer. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1963. L’aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux. Paris: Éditions Montaigne.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1987. Either/Or—Part I. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leopardi, Giacomo. 1983. Zibaldone di pensieri. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity—An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
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———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
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———. 1991. Entre nous—Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset.
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Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E.F.J. Payne.
New York: Dover Publications.
Experiencing Boredom:
A Phenomenological Analysis
Tõnu Viik
Abstract The paper presents a phenomenological investigation into experiencing

boredom in everyday life. The analysis is grounded in several concrete experiences
that the reader is invited to participate in and imaginatively stage for him or herself.
Based on these thought experiments, and theoretically proceeding from the work of
Husserl, Heidegger and others, the paper argues that boredom has to be seen as a
particular way of experiencing time, namely, experiencing it as being non-eventful.
The characteristic feature of experiencing a situation as eventful depends on the
possibility of filling the time of the situation with meaning by colonizing and
domesticating it with narratives, purpose, usefulness, etc., whereas in boredom we
are facing the not yet domesticated, not yet cultivated, not yet narrativized time that
is perceived as empty, uncanny, and unhomely. The time of boredom is experienced
as “not mine,” and, in its most alienating form, as inhuman.
Keywords Boredom · Phenomenology · Event · Meaning · Husserl · Heidegger
It has probably happened to all of us that we have been bored by particular things,
people, events, or situations. If we have to stand in a long queue, or have to wait for
a delayed departure, it is likely that we consider these episodes boring. Our children
tend to complain about being bored whenever they have nothing exciting to do, or
when they have to do something they don’t like doing. Some people claim their
whole lives to be boring. According to an empirical study by Alycia Chin and others
(2017), 63% of the US population experienced boredom at least once across the
10-day sampling period. The study also concludes that boredom is more prevalent
among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. Some authors, phil-
osophical and literary, have insisted that the world is essentially a boring place, or
that human life as such is a boring endeavor, or that experiencing boredom reveals
something fundamentally significant about our life. Yet some other authors claim
T. Viik (*)
Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: tonu.viik@tlu.ee

Switzerland AG 2023
40 T. Viik
that boredom is not a universal psychic feature, but a cultural and historical phe-
nomenon of Western civilization that emerged about 200 years ago (see Svendsen
2005, 11–15).
Phenomenologists sometimes distinguish between two main types of boredom.
One is a feeling that is related to a particular thing, person, or event. Standing in a
long queue, having to listen to an annoying person, dealing with something that is
not interesting, having to wait for departure, etc. are good examples of this type.
Another type is a boring mood that is not related to particular things, events or cir-
cumstances, but is a way in which the subject perceives his or her life as a whole and
relates to the world in general. Heidegger famously argues for the second type of
boredom in Being and Time, claiming that a mood (Stimmung) reveals how one is
“there” in the world. Thus, the mood is one of the possible ways that define one’s
whole existence and her entire mode of being present in the world (Heidegger 1993,
§29, 134). Husserl has also argued that mood is a general feature of a subject’s atti-
tude towards the world that is not derived from the experience of any particular
object or situation. However, as he points out, a mood still “illuminates” the objects
that are given in the experience of this subject by giving them a particular “tonality”
or “colouring“. If we are in a good mood,” claims Husserl in one of his manuscripts,
“then any this or that catching our eye looks friendly, loving, and rosy” (M95).1 If
we apply this to boredom, then it has to be considered a feature that characterizes
the human subject rather than some objective particularities of the world that have
the feature of being boring.
In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger (1995) distinguishes
between as many as three kinds of boredom, but only the first one – being bored “by
something” – corresponds to what we commonly consider an instance of boredom
in our daily lives (Heidegger 1995, §18c–§38, see also Ratcliffe 2009, 357–358).
Heidegger’s third type of boredom resembles his description of boredom in Being
and Time. It is an all-encompassing attitude of the subject without a particular inten-
tional object or situation that she is bored about. The second one has an intentional
object (a dinner party), but one of the peculiar characteristics of this type of bore-
dom is that the situation is only felt boring in retrospect, while it feels quite pleasant
and satisfying during the event (Heidegger 1995, §24, 109). Heidegger considers
the two latter types of boredom more “original” or more “profound” (Heidegger
1995, §24a, 107, §37, 160), but such forms of affectivity are not commonly experi-
enced in everyday life. I am not sure whether the second type of boredom in
Heidegger would not be better categorized as a retrospective regret about time that
was not spent well (when one is reminded of other possible options). And I am also
not sure whether the profoundest form of boredom in Heidegger is actually not a
remnant of a romanticized idea of aristocratic idleness, belonging to a whole range
of literary and philosophical clichés from the times of the dawn of Western
aristocracy, or whether it is indeed a timeless and universal form of affectivity that
1
Mood is discussed by Husserl in M-manuscript from the years 1900–1914. He also discusses the
structure of mood in the manuscript A VI 34, written in 1932, titled “Zur Lehre von der
Intentionalität in universaler oder totaler Betrachtungsweise” (A VI 34,1931).
Experiencing Boredom: A Phenomenological Analysis 41
can be achieved by philosophical elites. However this may be, the scope of my
investigation here will be limited to experiences of boredom that are commonplace
in the natural attitude. I will not be dealing with types of boredom that are concep-
tualized in philosophical or literary theories, and perhaps less commonly experi-
enced in everyday life.
I will start my analysis with concrete experiences that I will ask the reader to
participate in, thus grounding my analysis in the phenomenological evidence of
what can be “felt,” or at least imagined to be felt when a particular type of experi-
encing boredom is imaginatively staged for oneself. I see this as part of a phenom-
enological investigation of everyday life that concentrates on sense-making
processes that we routinely carry out in the natural attitude. Attempting a phenom-
enological analysis also means that I am not interested in an objective explanation
of boredom – as it might be attempted in psychology –, but I will describe boredom
“from inside,” i.e. in the way it is experienced from the first person singular point of
view. In other words, I am interested in the contents and essential features of a sub-
jective experience of boredom rather than its neurological, biological, or psycho-
logical explanations. This phenomenological approach is experimental in the sense
suggested by Don Ihde (1986), who has argued for a strategy of conducting
“experience- experiments” for carrying out phenomenological analysis (Ihde
1986, 14).
Let us start with the following thought-experiment: imagine yourself having to
listen to a reading of a book in a foreign language that you do not know. You attend
to the voice, but you understand nothing of its semantic content. Imagine that the
reading is carried out in a socially controlled situation like a lecture room where
everybody is expected to sit still, deal with nothing else during the presentation, and
to be attentive to the speaker. The reading goes on and on. Imagine also that you
have no smart phone or computer to entertain you. It is likely that after a short while
you will feel bored. You become aware of your body, you start shifting your position
in the chair, you become conscious of the conflict between what you would like to
do and what is expected of your behavior. You let our eyes wonder around in the
auditorium, and start observing the room and other people. Soon it becomes literally
impossible to keep your attention focused on the voice of the speaker. You look at
the watch once and again, and will most likely be disappointed, because less time
has passed than you had hoped for. The prospect of doing what is expected of you,
and even keeping the appropriate body posture, feels like a task that requires increas-
ing effort and endurance. If you know that the reading will indeed continue for a
long time, you start feeling a very specific type of discomfort that is both bodily and
mental. You are fatigued, your body feels like a burden to be carried through every
passing minute of which you are increasingly aware. There is a sense of helpless-
ness in acknowledging you being in an inescapable situation that is facilitated by the
auditorium, the speaker, and time. It feels that they have captured, silenced, and
imprisoned you; all you can do is to yield to their power and wait for the time
to pass.
Why do we feel discomfort in situations like this? Is it because nothing catches
our interest or excites us, or because the chairs are uncomfortable? Is it because our
42 T. Viik
brain has released progesterone or melatonin into our bloodstream, or because we

don’t understand the language, or because of the social coercion? Is it because of the
conflict between what we want and what is expected of us, or is it because of the
afternoon hours?
Before attempting to answer these questions, let us change the scene a bit.
Imagine that we are still sitting in the same auditorium, but instead of a presentation
in a foreign language we are now attending to a presentation in English. But this
time it is a telephone book that is read out. Now we understand each word and sen-
tence, and yet we will very soon, in fact in a matter of minutes, become bored again.
The reason why we feel discomfort seems to be similar: we are expected to focus
our attention on something that is simply not relevant to us and therefore fails to
attract our interest. It seems that if the content of the presentation were engaging, or
at least somewhat interesting, it would be much easier to mobilize ourselves to fight
the fatigue and the discomfort of the chair.
Now let us make the situation more tolerable: imagine that we are attending, in
the same auditorium, to a lecture on phenomenology, or a poetry reading. In this
case some people become bored as quickly as all of us would in the previous two
examples, but others might not be bored for an hour or two. What constitutes this
difference in experiencing one and the same situation by these two groups of peo-
ple? It obviously has to do with the degree to which they are interested in the content
of the presentation. In the first scenario described above, when we have to listen to
a lecture in a foreign language, we cannot be interested because we miss the content
of the talk altogether. All there is left to attend to is the speaking appearance of the
lecturer. In the case of the telephone book reading, we are capable of attending to
the semantically given content of the talk, but this content feels most likely pointless
in the form of an oral presentation. But in the third scenario, if we happen to be
interested in phenomenology, it is likely that we will experience certain readiness,
willingness, or even desire to attend to the content of the talk. In this case we will
find ourselves making an effort to understand what is said, how what is said at the
moment coheres with the previous claims of the speaker, and how all of this relates
to what we already know about the subject. Sometimes our thoughts wander away
and we miss a part of the talk, but this wandering has very different temporal quali-
ties in comparison to our mind’s wandering when we are bored. In the latter case
time slows down, but here it speeds up. We wish to have more time to contemplate
the contents of the talk. It still happens that we miss some parts of the talk when
taking a mental detour. But it feels as if it is our excitement about some of the ideas
that actively pushes our attention away from the lecture, being so interesting that,
once again, we cannot focus. However, this time our inability to focus is not because
the talk is uninteresting. Rather, it feels so significant that it almost forces our mind
to think about the relevant implications. Even our bodily reactions show that it mat-
ters to us.
Affective engagement with the content of the talk can include feelings of intel-
lectual excitement, satisfaction, and approval, but also negative feelings of dissatis-
faction or disapproval. In either case, when emotions are engaged, we are
experiencing something opposite to boredom. In such situations we experience
willingness and motivation to make an effort to attune ourselves to the content.

More precisely, it feels like the content actively attracts our interest, and we are just
responding to its quality of being interesting.
However, if we didn’t know what phenomenology was, and if we did not have
any motivations to find out, we would probably be bored just as quickly as when
listening to the presentation of a telephone book. Being engaged with a reading of
poetry seems to have a slightly different set of requirements for making it interest-
ing. We can feel engaged and enjoy the reading even if we are not invested in the
particular topic or contents of the poem. Our attention can rather be drawn to the
artistic use of language and the aesthetic qualities of linguistic content. However, in
order to enjoy it we must be able to appreciate poetry as a literary genre and must
have learned to value it in the past.
Thus, the feeling of boredom in the four cases described above seems to be
dependent on whether the situation offers something that relates to our past intel-
lectual activities. If nothing in what is presented connects to our existing mental and
cultural investments, it feels not interesting, and we’ll get bored. Thus, what is bor-
ing seems to form a vast domain that is left over from the tautology of being inter-
esting at the moment because we have found it being interesting in the past. There
must have been, of course, moments in the past when these particular mental and
cultural investments were created, and it is not necessary that they must have been
interesting and exciting at that time. Nevertheless, the existence of these mental
investments has created the possibility of our present excitement about the subject.
Certainly some other situations can be imagined where we feel captured and
interested without being previously engaged with the subject, but let us turn back to
our four examples and concentrate on the particular moment of the onset of bore-
dom – the very moment when we cannot pay attention anymore; the moment when
what is presented simply slips away from the conscious focus, when our mind wan-
ders towards other things. It seems that this process takes place almost against our
will or is at least not initiated by it. What can we say about this moment from the
phenomenological point of view? What happens when we lose attention? How do
things fade away from the focal point of our consciousness?
This fading away seems similar to falling asleep, which, as we know, is notori-
ously difficult to control. We can try to force ourselves to sleep by willfully imitat-
ing the sleeping mode – lying down, relaxing our muscles, breathing slowly, freeing
our mind from (worrisome) thoughts, etc. – but when we finally fall asleep, this
feels not like an act that is carried out by our mind. All insomniacs know that we can
purposely only help to facilitate sleep, as if only to mediate and prepare the circum-
stances for it to take place. The very falling asleep itself occurs as if independently
of us; it seems to be the result of an event that our mind and body passively yield to,
rather than actively carry out. We seem not to have any agency in making this event
actually take place.
It might be argued on this basis that falling asleep is not an act of consciousness
at all, even though it radically alters the mode of our consciousness. Perhaps it is
something that our body does to the mind, not vice versa? The same applies to wak-
ing up from sleep. It seems to be an action of our body, rather than our mind. Perhaps
44 T. Viik
experiencing boredom is a similar event in the sense that it is initiated by our body
rather than our consciousness? For we can mindfully attempt to resist boredom, but
our mind cannot really stop its initiation by the body. If so, then phenomenology as
a study of consciousness might be inadequate for understanding the process of
being seized by boredom, and we would have to study our physiological and neuro-
logical processes instead.
This line of arguing, however, assumes a sharp division between conscious and
bodily states and acts. While we can certainly make a meaningful distinction
between acts of conscious deliberation and unconscious bodily processes, a sharp
contrast between mind and body is less convincing when consciousness is viewed
more widely than being a self-reflective, rational and voluntary kernel of the human
mind. According to Husserl most of the work of consciousness in the natural atti-
tude is in fact characterized by “passivity”, i.e., by the feature of us not being an
active and conscious designer of the sense-making activities that our consciousness
is carrying out. On the contrary, the workings of our consciousness and sense-
making in everyday life are to a large extent habituated, automated, intersubjec-
tively and culturally conditioned (see Viik 2016). The habituation and automation of
the processes of consciousness is constituted both on the level of individual past
experiences and social normativity: a conditioning that Husserl respectively calls
“primary” and “secondary passivity.” We also know that our consciousness is
embodied in the sense that conscious activities necessarily involve the body, and in
the sense that various bodily activities tend to involve consciousness. Thus, while
admitting that certain bodily processes may play a role in experiencing boredom
(for when we are bored, we are always bodily situated and bodily participating in
something), I propose not to draw a sharp line between our bodily and conscious
activities in experiencing boredom. Rather, boredom needs to be seen as a type of
embodied, physically and socially situated mode of consciousness.
We can also make use of Husserl’s theory of affectivity that characterizes the
natural attitude. As he proposes in Ideas I, we perceive things not just as having a
cognitive identity (that enables us to recognize the object and distinguish it from the
rest), but also as having “value-characteristics” (Wertcharactere) and “practical
characteristics” (praktische Charactere) that belong to these objects. As a result,
most of the things and events that we encounter are experienced not just as being a
particular “this” or “that,” i.e., as having a cognitive identity, but also as being beau-
tiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable, useful or futile, and,
of course, practically or aesthetically interesting or not interesting (Husserl 2009 58).
Boredom, as we saw above, appears when we experience something as being not
interesting. Does it mean that we have to first evaluate something as not interesting
in order to feel bored by it? If so, the question of boredom becomes dependent on
the affective component of our conscious activities - it kicks in when we ascribe the
value of “not interesting” to a thing or a person that we perceive. Applied to our
thought-experiment it would mean that a lecture on phenomenology, or a poetry
reading is first judged or valued as not interesting, as a result of which it will be
experienced as boring. This “judgement” or “evaluation” is most likely carried out
passively. We feel as if we just react upon the attractiveness or unattractiveness that
characterizes the event itself, but in fact this reaction depends on our meaning-
bestowal activities.
If so, the question becomes how to analyze phenomenologically the non-
interesting: something that is de-valued, or given a negative value as not being wor-
thy our attention. The sphere of non-interesting is notoriously difficult to approach,
because it is by definition something that stays at the margins of consciousness. It is
much easier to turn the question around and try to understand what we perceive as
interesting, for what is experienced as interesting seems to be the very opposite of
what is experienced as boring. Sean Desmond Healy writes that the word “boring”
became widespread at the same time and increased in frequency at the same rate as
the word “interesting” which we hear a lot in our times (Healy 1984, 24).
What strikes our consciousness as interesting? We know from the psychological
studies of attention that our mind automatically attends to objects with certain fea-
tures. For example, within the visual field we are automatically attuned to objects
that are more intense in colour or contrast. We are also automatically attuned to
objects that move, as opposed to objects that stand still. Or, within the auditive field
we automatically attune to sounds that are unexpected. Imagine hearing a loud
sound that resembles the trumpeting scream of an elephant. Our minds are built so
that it is impossible not to pay attention to it. Moreover, we automatically attend to
things, postures, and images that signal a possible threat or reward. This feature of
our mind is extensively exploited in advertising when marketed goods are associ-
ated with visual images of attractive human bodies, for example. We also involun-
tarily attend to images that are violent or bizarre, as well as visually or cognitively
paradoxical.
Thus, there is a range of objects that capture our attention involuntarily. Such
objects are outstanding in contrast and colour; they exhibit movement, unexpected-
ness or surprise, or they hint towards a possible threat or pleasure, or are violent or
bizarre. From here, we can draw a list of opposite features that must consequently
form the features of the non-interesting. These would include being monotonous
and repetitive, having no perceptual emphasis, not moving, not indicating any threat
or pleasure, being ordinary, understandable, and corresponding to our expectations.
Besides, as we are social and cultural beings, the sphere of non-interesting includes
social, cultural and linguistic objects, works, situations, and messages that have no
relevance to our personal, social, and occupational investments, either mental or
material.
But are the features of the non-interesting really the features of the boring? Let
us carry out another thought-experiment. Try to recall the formatting style of the
title of this paper. You probably saw it if you are reading this sentence here, and you
might be able to remember what the title said without turning the pages or scrolling
the screen back to it, but you probably did not pay attention to its formatting style,
perhaps because you were focused on its conceptual content. Thus, your mind prob-
ably “judged” the formatting style of the title as not being extraordinary, and conse-
quently as not worthy of dedicated attention. Does this mean that that it bored you
during the reading of the paper? Most likely it did not. Even though you must have
46 T. Viik
“registered” it while reading the title, it probably just “fell out” of your mind as soon
as your eyes moved on towards the first paragraph.
Thus, while it is true that what is interesting draws our attention, we are not
allowed to conclude that being boring equals failing to catch our attention. What we
are not attending to, and what we do not notice consciously, is not yet boring. We
know from psychology and cognitive science that attention has to be selective
regarding the variety of perceived stimuli in order to be able to concentrate on the
area where attention is most needed at the moment. Our mind cannot focus on
everything and process all the information available, because we are quite limited in
terms of how much data can be processed at each moment. Therefore, psychologists
often define attention as the process of selective allocation of the limited processing
resources of the mind, as already proposed in 1890 by William James in his
Principles of Psychology. Attention, he argues, “is the taking possession by the
mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously pos-
sible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are
of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively
with others” (James 2012, 1:403).
Thus, we have to acknowledge that even though we tend to make a connection
between what is not interesting and what is boring, this connection cannot be main-
tained from the psychological and phenomenological point of view. Regardless of
whether the criteria of interest have been formed by evolution, social circumstances,
cultural habituation, or personal past experiences, training and education, it is not
the case that everything not meeting these criteria is experienced as boring. For
when we are actually bored by something, we attribute to it a negative value, while
we obviously do not carry out value-judgements regarding things that we do not pay
attention to. Only the things that we are capable of noticing can be attributed some
value or practical worth. All the rest swims in the ocean of silent and pre-meaningful
existence that is unreached even by forgetfulness and oblivion.
Let us imagine a small rock, or even better, a temporary cloud formation on a
distant planet that has not been, and never will be, discovered. It never was and
never will be experienced “as something” that could be attributed a positive or nega-
tive, practical or aesthetic value. For such a thing to be classified “as something”
that is not significant, and hence not interesting, would mean considering it irrele-
vant for somebody, but for that it must first be turned into an object of consideration
and be perceived or cognized as such. But the vast majority of things in the universe
are never given this chance. From the phenomenological point of view, this cloud
formation has a pre-meaningful existence that is not even nothing – it is literally not
a thing at all. It is just an exemplar of pre-meaningful no-thing-ness that has no
characteristics attached to its silent and nameless, unidentifiable being in the mean-
ingless desert of pure existence.
Such a thing is certainly not boring, for what is experienced as boring must mini-
mally be experienced “as something,” and it needs to be continually present in the
sensory field of our experience for some time. All our four examples included such
identifiable and continuously enduring objects that were constitutive of the experi-
ence of boredom: a presentation in a foreign language, the reading of a telephone
book, a lecture on phenomenology, and a recitation of poetry. Their continuous

presence was obviously among the necessary conditions for experiencing boredom.
As they were all auditive objects and formed examples of the same type, let me
invoke a yet different case of boredom, experienced and described by Lars Svendsen:
… The things that surround us do not seem to offer us anything. Exactly what should they
offer? When we wait at an airport, we get information about arrivals and departures, we can
buy sandwiches, a cup of coffee, slip into the smokers’ lounge, read newspapers … So why
is waiting at airports so deadly boring, when airports actually provide so many possibilities
for whiling away the time? The answer is that an airport often denies us the possibility we
want most of all – to get on a plane at the scheduled time so we can leave the airport itself.
The airport is only there to be left. (Svendsen 2005, 119)
This echoes Heidegger’s example of waiting at the train station as his first type of
boredom (1995, §23, 93–105). As Heidegger explains, we are not bored by the
things themselves that we encounter at the train station (timetables, the station
building, a road running along in front of the station with rows of trees on either
side), but by the fact that “we are left empty” by these things (Heidegger 1995, 104).
The things do not function for us. They are of no use or interest, for they are given
in a way that does not correspond to what we want to do, namely, to take a train and
to leave the station. Similarly, in Svendsen’s case the airport is boring not because
its interior and shops necessarily fail to attract our interest, but because they keep
occupying our mind while not being of interest to us at the time given.
The same is true about the telephone book reading or a lecture on phenomenol-
ogy when experienced as boring. The situation of dealing with these objects is bor-
ing precisely because the non-interesting continues to define the situation of our
embodied and situated existence that is stretched out over a certain time interval. It
almost hurts that we cannot free ourselves from the presence of the non-interesting.
What should belong, we feel, to the silent and nameless desert of pure being keeps
constituting the content of our experience and in doing so keeps accruing a more
and more negative meaning and significance. Thus, we can say that boredom is a
bodily situated state of discomfort or dissatisfaction arising from a forced connec-
tion between restrictive physical circumstances and the contents that are given in
our experience within these circumstances. It is a temporal and situational conflict
between practical necessities (in the case of traveling) or social coercion (in the case
of the lecture) and the freedom of our mind, its desire to move forward.
Let us look more closely into this feeling of discomfort. We just said above that
the discomfort stems not so much from the uninteresting character of the objects
themselves as from a conflict between the persistence of these objects and the sub-
jective desire to be freed from their presence. What I would like us to pay attention
to is that this conflict is given to us in the form of a specific time experience. A bor-
ing lecture is not just a prolonged presence of the semantically boring content that
we are forced to experience. It is also an uncomfortable stretch of time that we will
have to endure.
When experiencing boredom, we become conscious of time. This is why, as time
passes and the feeling of boredom evolves and deepens, we tend to check our watch
more and more often, wishing that more time had passed already. It is common that
48 T. Viik
we overestimate how much time has passed when we are bored. Boredom makes the
subjective time stretch out and endure longer than it normally would. In retrospect,
however, situations experienced as boring seem short. When we are ill, for example,
we wish the hours and days to pass faster, but when we look back, these hours and
days barely feature in our memory. We remember us being sick, but a week spent ill
at home afterwards feels a short period of time because it was probably not eventful
and did not contain much to remember. The exact opposite happens when we spend
a week on a good holiday. Time flies quickly as we experience it during the holiday,
but in retrospect we have a lot to remember, and afterwards the time of this week
seems longer than usual.
A famous literary example illustrates this effect of subjective time stretching.
Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann,
visits his cousin at a sanatorium in Berghof, and decides to stay there for a short
while. In his first week, there is a lot to take in. He has to learn the routines of the
sanatorium life and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants. Afterwards, the rou-
tines are repeated daily and weekly, whereas not that many new people arrive at the
sanatorium. As the same events happen to the same people each day, Castorp soon
loses track of time. Life in the sanatorium is so repetitious and monotonous that
longer time periods seem not to flow at all, and each day seems to last forever. Time
stops running and comes to a standstill. As a result, Castorp barely notices that he
ends up spending seven years of his life in the Berghof sanatorium. Time becomes
wrapped up in retrospect, while being stretched out during each day he spends there.
Mann accentuates the impression of this time paradox by making the description of
the first sanatorium week long and detailed, while the book runs through the rest of
the years with relatively less numerous pages. Thus, the time of the first week is
literally stretched out in reader’s experience, while the rest of the book literally
shortens the time of reading.
When we are bored, it is also the case that time stretches out during the event,
and this prolonged duration tends to collapse into nothingness in retrospect. The
time of a boring lecture, when it is experienced as uneventful and monotonous, will
almost come to a standstill during the lecture. This time is, however, short in retro-
spect, because it did not contain anything meaningful or significant that would later
form the contents of our memory of the event.
When a period of time is filled with meaningful things taking place, it is experi-
enced as an event. During an event, a lot can happen, and the time flows in accor-
dance with what is happening, harmonizing the contents of the event with its plot,
rhythm, speed, and duration. The episodes composing the event are subject to the
same logic. Each of them runs ideally in such a speed that the meaning and the
temporal characteristics of its contents harmonize. As a result, the time of the event
is experienced as having the character of a “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). When
the event is experienced as flowing, the meaning of its constituent episodes and their
contents, their practical and value-characteristics, come to the fore in the experience
and “fill” it up. The corresponding stretch of time is experienced as eventful, because
it is filled with things happening. The same contents form the memory of the event
afterwards.
When experiencing boredom this is obviously not the case. The temporal charac-
ter of the event is experienced as the opposite of that of the flow. It is the time of the
event itself that comes to the fore in the experience, rather than the contents of its
constituent episodes. But this time feels uncanny and alienated. It feels alienated
because it cannot be made meaningful for the subject experiencing it. It is not just
because we are “held in limbo” and being “paralyzed” by time, since all our other
projects (that normally make our lives meaningful) are put on hold and experienced
as “refused” by the situation (Heidegger 1995, 100, 140). It feels alienated also
because we are experiencing time itself instead of its contents (that could fit or not
fit our projects). It is certainly true that what is going on during a boring event can-
not be harmonized with the protentive and retentive projections that we have about
our life, but there is something beyond these restrictive circumstances that makes a
boring situation uncanny.
The uncanniness characterizes the time itself as it reveals itself in the experience
of boredom. I agree with Heidegger in his view that what is at issue here is “the
question of what time itself is” (1995, §23, p. 105), but I depart from his analysis in
two ways. I maintain that the uncanniness of time becomes experienced already in
the first type of boredom, while it does not open up any “authentic possibilities” of
our Dasein regarding understanding itself, its finitude, or the world (1995, §34,
p. 153). Whether such “authentic possibilities” may open up in experiencing bore-
dom by philosophers is not under question here.
Thus, the time experienced in everyday cases of boredom in the natural attitude
reveals itself as uncanny and unhomely. I agree that when experiencing boredom
there is nothing meaningful to do during the time given. We are “held in limbo,” as
Heidegger puts it, all things appearing as empty and ephemeral. But the essential
characteristic of the situation lies precisely in its impossibility to be turned into
something meaningful, not even into a philosophical project of understanding our
existence. It is because boredom opens up the very meaninglessness of time – either
a period of a particular duration, or, perhaps for philosophers, of time as such. But
even if it is just a relatively short stretch of time, it is still time in a peculiarly
uncanny form that does not allow itself to be filled with any meaning whatsoever. It
is time in its pure form as if it were an alien force that would not allow itself to
be tamed.
Normally, our time and particular temporal durations are filled up with mean-
ings; we colonize and domesticate time by narratives, by purposeful activities, by
taking care of our lives, of others and ourselves, our practical needs, etc. But here
we have time itself in its pure form that does not allow for these purposeful activities
and acts of meaning-bestowal. It is a strange dimension of the world that has no
more meaning in itself than the spatial dimensions do. We have no better answer to
the question why there is time than to the question of why are things in a three-
dimensional space.
We all participate in a life-long collective effort to turn our spatial surroundings
into an organized habitat, and we attempt to fill up the time of our days with what is
purposeful and meaningful, or what is exciting and pleasant. We are used to filling
and organizing time both on the practical level by our deeds and undertakings, and
50 T. Viik
on the mental level by attributing various meanings to its different stretches and
durations. But in experiencing boredom, time is experienced as devoid of all mean-
ing and purpose, and hence it is unpleasant and not exciting. It is given to us in an
alienated form, revealing its unhuman and uncanny nature, for in boredom we are
facing the time that is impossible to domesticate, cultivate or even narrate. The time
that we are given in experiencing boredom exhibits nothing more than the pure
“emptiness” of time itself, with nothing attached to it.
As we know, there are other experiences of time that make it “flow,” and yet other
that make time “pass,” or be “spent well” or “not well.” But only in boredom the
uncanny face of time itself is revealed. Boredom brings time to the fore of the expe-
rience through its coercive conflict with the freedom of our consciousness. Thus, in
boredom we are stuck with time that cannot be forgotten or moved to the margins of
our consciousness or domesticated by meaning-making and significance – some-
thing that we as cultural beings, as homo symbolicum, are used to doing with time.
We are forced to have a glance at the time as it is without any cultural form, meaning
or significance.
This is an uneasy situation, because we are much more comfortable with narra-
tives than with time itself. And that is why it is so tempting to watch television or
surf on the internet when we are bored or just tired – not because it necessarily
offers us something interesting, but because it fills up the time that we might other-
wise experience as uncanny. If we did not watch television or surf on the internet,
we would need to try to make time meaningful with our own efforts, but now these
devices do it for us. They organize the time we are given with a minimal effort from
our part. This is obviously handy in moments of boredom, but also in other circum-
stances when time is difficult for us to endure.
Acknowledgments This research was supported by the European Union through the Estonian
Research Council project, Landscape approach to rurbanity” (PRG 398).
References
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2017. Bored in the USA: Experience Sampling and Boredom in Everyday Life. Emotion 17
(2): 359–368.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:
Harper & Row.
Healy, Sean Desmond. 1984. Boredom, Self, and Culture. Rutherford and London: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
———. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2009. In Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth
Ströker. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Ihde, Don. 1986. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. New York: State University of
New York Press.
James, William. 2012. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Courier Corporation.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2009. The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life. In The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie, 349–372. Oxford: Oxford
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Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. Trans. J. Irons. London: Reaktion Books.
Viik, Tõnu. 2016. Understanding Meaning-Formation Processes in Everyday Life: An Approach to
Cultural Phenomenology. Humana Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (31): 151–167.
Part II
The Body/Technology/Ecology
Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question
of Humanism
Fiachra Long
Abstract The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seemed to agree with

Heidegger’s critique of humanism when he delivered a Conference address at Elmau
in 1999. He rejected, however, the way Heidegger used the metaphor of a shepherd
to explain the proper essence of the human and developed a counter-position and a
contrary understanding of shepherding that he considered truer to contemporary
times. During his speech, Sloterdijk used some examples from Plato’s Statesman to
support a distinction between good breeding and civility and thus implied that
humanistic education had to incorporate efforts to promote biomedical improve-
ments in the human condition, effectively broadening the work of education centred
traditionally on the “reading of good books.” Did Sloterdijk then commit himself to
some kind of eugenic programme? He immediately denied this. Did his view
amount to a logical progression from Heidegger’s position or was it a radical depar-
ture? To clarify this question, this paper first sketches out Heidegger’s argument as
put forward in the Letter on Humanism, then notes Sloterdijk’s response to
Heidegger’s analysis before finally attempting to identify some key differences
between these writers on the issue.
Keywords Heidegger · Sloterdijk · Humanism · Shepherding · Taming ·

Fallenness · Boredom
The extraordinary success of Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 book, Critique of Cynical

Reason, tapped into what Andreas Huyssen described as “the pervasive malaise and
discontent in contemporary culture” and sold over 40,000 copies in a few months
(Sloterdijk 1987, ix). Described by some reviewers as “simplistic, faddish, preten-
tious, anti-theoretical,” and “regressively irrational,” this text was nevertheless wel-
comed by the philosophical community as a general critique of the Frankfurt School.
On foot of this success, Sloterdijk presented a paper on humanism in Basel in July
F. Long (*)
University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
e-mail: f.long@ucc.ie

Switzerland AG 2023
56 F. Long
1997 before being invited to present before a group of German educators at Elmau
Castle, the Bavarian castle of G7 summits, in 1999. His talk, since known as the
Elmauer Rede, was published first in Die Zeit in 1999 but not without raising a
storm of controversy for what commentators took to be his advocacy of eugenics, a
claim he swiftly denied. Thomas Asshauer (1999), for instance, summed up
Sloterdijk’s project as “The Zarathustra Project” in response to a number of articles
that appeared in the Frankfurter Rundshau and the Süddeutsche Rundshau, notwith-
standing Sloterdijk’s own retort calling these interpretations “lies and hallucina-
tions” (Sloterdijk 1999). This controversy kept dogging Sloterdijk throughout his
career but also ensured his national profile. Areňas (2003) has given an excellent
chronology of this debate.
The paper in focus here with the provocative title Regeln für den Menschenpark
appeared as a chapter in Nicht Gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger (2001). The
English language translator of this chapter, Mary Varny Rorty, described Sloterdijk’s
version of humanism as Hobbesian. Did this view also apply to Heidegger’s
account? Heidegger’s reluctance to invoke the concept of humanism in response to
Jean Beaufret’s invitation in 1946 may well have amounted to tacit support for the
Hobbesian view of nature. Had World War II with all its atrocities not finally
exposed the barbarism at the heart of our supposed civilization, and therefore did we
not suffer from a deep-rooted, if unacknowledged, tension in ourselves between
civilization and barbarism? On the other hand, Sloterdijk’s imposition of a
Hobbesian template on Heidegger’s analysis may not have been justified. It could be
argued that Heidegger remained a kind of optimist. Besides any admission that
Hobbes was correct, the audience responded poorly to Sloterdijk’s use of the con-
cept of “good breeding” in the context of education, especially when he prioritized
good “breeding” over good “reading” as the key to achieving victory for civilization
over bestiality. Listening to this speech, educators had to conclude that humanistic
education required biomedical enhancement as an educational strategy where pos-
sible, in addition to the “reading of good books.” But did this not make the educa-
tional process complicit in promoting an eugenicist agenda?
The implications of this question for the philosophy of education is not my topic
here, even though I attempted to look at it elsewhere (Long 2017). Instead, I want to
look more closely at Sloterdijk’s rejection of Heidegger’s rejection of humanism.
One difficulty in doing this is that Sloterdijk’s polemical tone colours his texts. He
does not like being bounded by purely logical rules. Another difficulty is Heidegger’s
known antipathy towards modern technology, an antipathy that Sloterdijk does not
share. A third difficulty is their apparent agreement to abandon humanism in the
sense that the cumulative wisdom of tradition might be sufficient to launch human
beings on the path of truth. Are our authors fundamental allies on the question of
humanism? To achieve some insight into this question this paper first sketches out
Heidegger’s argument as proposed in the Letter on Humanism, then notes Sloterdijk’s
response and modifications to it, before finally attempting some conclusion about
the future of humanism arising from this interchange of views.
Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question of Humanism 57
Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as published begins by refusing to limit action to

production. Instead, he loads us straight away with the charge that we are simply
still not “thinking.” The relevance of “thinking” for humanism is set out at the start.
To think in Heidegger’s sense is to accomplish man’s relation to Being, to stand, as
it were, in the House of Being and to dwell there. This is the essence of the human.
It is what separates us from all other animal life: “it concerns the relation of Being
to man.”1 But what does this mean? If it is “thinking” that allows this relation to
happen, then it does not reflect thinking in the sense Plato or Aristotle bequeathed
to us, thinking as techne, thinking as production, thinking as theoria, thinking as a
form of science in competition with other sciences. Instead, for Heidegger, “think-
ing” is a practical task, a pneumatic (spiritual) not a productive act.
Heidegger wonders why we need the word “humanism” at all. He remains scep-
tical about any project that might want to return us to metaphysical thinking, even
though his exact manner of describing the metaphysical is sometimes difficult to pin
down. Sometimes he objects to metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense of substance
where substance attributes reality to some underlying substrate, process or pattern.
Sometimes the metaphysics he challenges refers to the modern Cartesian pattern,
namely the object side of the subject-object relation. For this reason, Heidegger
objects to the “modern metaphysics of subjectivity” because it prevents Language
per se from exercising its function. Instead, Language constrained by this rubric is
twisted to serve “our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination
over beings” (Heidegger 2011, 151). Thinking, in contrast, presents us as nameless
beings who should be dedicated to listening to Being in whose environment indi-
viduals have little to say, for it is not up to them to originate any talk.
For Heidegger, humanitas first raised its profile in the Roman Republic,
and Sloterdijk will amplify this observation with decorative descriptions and witty
observations about the contrasts between butchery on the battlefield or in the amphi-
theatre and the sensitive stoical advice offered to one another by the litterati.
Heidegger does not elaborate on this kind of detail. For him slaughter and bestiality
are repugnant and should not be celebrated even in a negative way. And yet human-
ism, because it has been unable to break free of the metaphysical presuppositions of
classical and more recent philosophy, has understandably tried to frame its thinking
around constructions of civilization, all noble in their own way but lacking an essen-
tial truth ingredient. For Heidegger, the exception has been the poets, especially
Hölderlin (1770–1843) whose work has attempted to describe that realm beyond
traditional humanism’s reach (Heidegger 2011, 153). By contrast the humanisms of
Marx and Christianity are to be rejected while Sartre’s existentialism is also to be
rejected. These attempts do not expose the essence of man to his true destiny but
effectively impede the realization of this destiny due to the obstacle posed by their
forms of metaphysics, the metaphysics of production in the case of Marx, the
1
I use Frank A. Capuzzi’s translation in conjunction with J. Glenn Gray in Krell (ed.) 2011, p. 147.
58 F. Long
metaphysics of salvation in the case of Christianity, the metaphysics of subjectivity

in the case of Descartes and Sartre. So one clear reason why the word “humanism”
has lost its meaning today is the widespread prevalence of metaphysics in which-
ever form it is presumed to take.
Heidegger now wonders if the term “humanism” should be retained at all, even
if everyone agrees that civilization rather than barbarism describes human beings.
Heidegger not only wants to sidestep traditional humanism, but to do so exposes
him to the unwarranted charge of supporting inhumanism. He also wants to avoid
locating the human in logos (science or logic) and this leads to the charge of irratio-
nalism. Neither the charge of inhumanism nor irrationalism is justifiable in his case,
or so he argues, but alongside these he also wants to sidestep linking the human
essentially to “values,” another metaphysical term. Indeed he supports Nietzsche’s
proposal to revaluate all values in the light of the death of God but is he then an
atheist? He argues not. To consider god a “value,” even the “highest value” is prob-
lematic and “a degradation of God’s essence” because it returns the god concept
once more to the realm of metaphysics. On the contrary to think against value is
precisely what is needed to enable the truth of the clearing of Being to become
operative and for God to be understood in its true light. Heidegger is non-committal
about the existence of God but he is very insistent on the existence of ek-sistence,
the thrown reality of a being who can think in the openness of Being. “Only from
the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought,” he writes (Heidegger
2011, 172).
Heidegger is particularly sensitive to the description of the human as a rational
animal, a metaphysical description that is not exactly false but, like most metaphysi-
cal descriptions, is not entirely accurate either. By centering on the principle of
animalitas (zōon) as the base principle, we are presuming that our animality is what
sets us off as real whereas Heidegger contends that it is man’s ek-sistence that is
man’s basic reality principle. Ek-sistence means standing in the Clearing (Lichtung)
of Being and is the most distinguishing mark of the human being. Only humans are
capable of this “essence” which means that the potentiality of Dasein adumbrated in
Being and Time which can be activated in the project of Dasein’s life as a being
among other beings is not the touchstone for what is truly human. We are not simply
potentialities for being in some fuller sense, animals who are not yet what they are
meant to be but rather a kind of being different from animal life. Heidegger claims
that our being is closer to the gods and that “the essence of divinity is closer to us”
(Heidegger 2011, 156), closer to us than the environment-constricted forms of life
enjoyed by animals.
Given that the human essence does not have a specific description, its proper
operation is not kept in view by actualising some range of potentialities in oneself
but by holding open the space of Being, a space which allows truth to appear. Only
“thinking” can keep this space open. The essence of the human is to be the shepherd
of Being. Heidegger, however, uses this metaphor simply to indicate the shift in
emphasis in his current reflections from Being and Time where he was concerned to
offer an analytic of Dasein. Now in Letter on Humanism “what is essential is not
man but Being” (Heidegger 2011, 161). What shimmers in the background in Being
and Time as signalled in Dasein’s ontological understanding of being has now come
into focus as a manifestation of the human essence. Heidegger now spends several
pages justifying his earlier text in the context of his current presentation of Being
after the turn. He explains how his previous project in Being and Time had opened
up the question of Being as he is now presenting it, but that now his concern no
longer centres on the issue of Dasein but on the Clearing of Being. Being has always
been “the transcendens pure and simple.” It is now generally only poets who under-
stand this. He mentions a recent lecture on Hölderlin’s “Homecoming” in 1943 but
he could easily have referenced his entire lecture courses given during the winter
semester 1934/1935 on Hölderlin’s Germanien and Der Rhein (See Krell 2011,
xxxvi, Dreyfus and Wrathall 2007, 11). The poets reveal the extent of man’s home-
lessness on the planet. Even if Dasein is mainly preoccupied with beings and caught
up in the cares of life, it is only the ek-static character of the human that enables his
own truthfulness to appear as the shepherd of Being, the one who engages in the
adventure of holding open the Clearing of Being:
Eksistence, in fundamental contrast to every existential and “existence,” is ecstatic dwelling
in the nearness of Being. It is the guardianship, that is, the care for Being. (Heidegger
2011, 167)
This oft repeated claim changes the traditional meaning of humanism which incor-
porated the assimilation of competencies, skills and values into a moral life follow-
ing contours set down by Plato and Aristotle. (Heidegger 2011, 171) To understand
existence through the lens of logos is once again to set up a picture of man as the
measure of all things. He complains that humanism draws down everything to its
own human measure and pulls Dasein back from the “question concerning the truth
of Being.”
Heidegger claims that a precedent for these insights can already be found in the
pre-Socratics. The Heraclitus fragment ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn suggests a defini-
tion of humanism as dwelling in nearness to the gods. This fragment shows how
ēthos becomes the dwelling place in which Being can appear but over which the
human has neither executive control nor any constructivist power. The human can
“think” Being but not “construct” Being. It is possible to draw some theological
conclusions from this insight but readers need to be wary. Just as Heidegger is at
pains to say that his account cannot be claimed to be atheistic simply because the
issue of God is thought to be derived from the shepherding role of the human in the
Clearing of Being, so we need to be wary of suggesting that this structure enables
theism as presented in traditional Judeo-Christianity. The most authentic dwelling
place of man lies “beyond” the metaphysical, in a sphere beyond all values from
which point all values are revaluated, a sphere of essential (positive) nihilism where
Being can appear. The question for Heidegger is why the essence of the human is to
preserve, indeed to shepherd, such a value-free event as Being itself. Heidegger
might have the concluding word:
Yet Being—what is Being? It is It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experi-
ence that and to say it. ‘Being’—that is not God and not a cosmic ground. Being is farthest
than all beings and is yet nearer to man than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art,
60 F. Long
a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from
man. Man at first clings always and only to beings. (Heidegger 2011, 159)
There is no mention of Plato’s Statesman in Heidegger’s Letter. Nor is there any

inkling that the battle between barbarism and civilisation presupposes a Hobbesian
turn. Nor is there a clear link with Judeo-Christianity. Indeed the advent of Being in
the Clearing can announce malign as well as benign forces. On the other hand, there
is no support for the biological enhancement of humans, chemical or mechanical.
When Heidegger suggests the idea of “taming” it is in the guise of Verfallenheit
(Fallenness) and the tendency of Dasein to become preoccupied with its own affairs,
with its daily encounters with other beings. However, the Fallenness of the They is
a positive feature of Dasein’s being as presented in Being and Time. “The ‘They’ is
an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein’s positive
constitution” (#27, BT 167; GA 2 129). He repeats this positive evaluation of Falling
in #38 (BT 220; GA 2 175) although he also notes the possibility of a certain tran-
quilization (Beruhigung) that “aggravates” (steigert) this Falling and can lead to
alienation, if one’s potentiality-for-being is ignored. Heidegger uses expressions
like temptation (Versuchung), as well as tranquilization and a “downward plunge”
(Absturz), and this language is mingled with other religious phrases like “drunk
with sin” (in der Sunde ersoffen) to add some negative connotations to Fallenness.
Fundamentally, however, this feature is positive. Sartre, however, advocates a rup-
ture from all entanglements with being en-soi. This is not Heidegger’s view. Even in
the Letter on Humanism, Verfallenheit although linked to ensnarement and a turning
aside from “an ecstatic relation of the essence of man to the truth of Being”
(Heidegger 2011, 160) bears none of the ultra negative meaning attributed to Sartre’s
en-soi or “taming” in Sloterdijk’s later account.
Given a Sloterdijk twist, “taming” does not announce the need for courage in
order to face up to the “homelessness” of humans in view of their ek-static vocation
to “think” but becomes part of the many options people use to refuse the technolo-
gies available to improve themselves while making strenuous efforts to stick with
conventional breeding behaviours in the interest of the established elite. Even the
most basic husbandry could not support such a strategy. This suggestion on its own
angered the audience at Elmau.
Sloterdijk’s Argument
Sloterdijk holds that humans are fundamentally beasts and require taming in order
to be civilised. Humanism is invoked as a response to this dark side of human
beings. In “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” lit-
eracy, as we have seen, is identified as the element identified by ancient Greek and
Roman educators precisely for this purpose, to convert the beast to civilized ways
(Sloterdijk 2009, 12). An exchange of letters between literate leaders became a
privileged means of establishing friendship (and power management) among the
ancients. What civilised people wanted in those days above all, in the opinion of
Sloterdijk, was to send one another “inspiring messages” of the kind that engen-
dered a type of “club fantasy” (Sloterdijk 2009, 13) or even “sorcery” by which
humans could bewitch themselves into believing that the civilised veneer described
their underlying reality. General humanism (Sloterdijk provocatively uses the term
“national humanism” echoing the ill-reputed phrase “national socialism”) operated
as a bewitching process, effective in the age of literacy, but watered down now in the
age of mass media, radio and television. After 1945, Sloterdijk suggests, attempts
were made at the revival of different kinds of humanism based on value or produc-
tion. Humanism took a Christian or Marxist form or even sought to establish once
more the heady Enlightenment notion of development, but to no avail. The shock of
war and the ineffectiveness of “values” in the light of that war pointed rather to an
underlying “biological indeterminacy” and “moral ambivalence” in the human
being (Sloterdijk 2009, 16).
We need to remind ourselves of Sloterdijk’s twin claim here: first, that humanism
is a form of (dishonest) “taming” that tips the balance in favour of civility and away
from bestialization (Sloterdijk 2009, 16) to which he wants to oppose a kind of
transhumanism; second, that he uses Heidegger’s letter in support of the Hobbesian
view of man and his own critique of “metaphysical” forms of humanism. Sloterdijk
may be correct in assuming that in 1946 Heidegger did not know if he had friends
and felt quite isolated and devastated not only by the war but by being forbidden to
teach. He had also by this time lost belief in the centrality of Dasein as a privileged
location, adequate to the exploration of Being. His attempts at both the justification
of his arguments in Being and Time and their clarification in the light of objections
raised against them could not deflect Sloterdijk from the latter’s main claim, notably
that “the pattern of the literary society became the norm of political society.” Surely,
he surmises, the correspondence instigated by Jean Beaufret in his letter to Heidegger
could also serve as an example of this traditional form of supportive contact between
intellectual leaders in society? Pity if this particular exchange of letters had lost its
force in keeping with all literary enterprises. Sloterdijk paraphrases Heidegger’s
objection to the term humanism:
Why should humanism and its general philosophical self-presentation be seen as the solu-
tion for humanity, when the catastrophe of the present clearly shows that it is man himself,
along with his systems of metaphysical self-improvement and self-clarification, that is the
problem? (Sloterdijk 2009, 17)
While both of our writers disagree with the Biblical notion that “man is born in the
image and likeness of God,” Sloterdijk basically disagrees with Heidegger on the
issue of human self-improvement. Self-improvement is possible, Sloterdijk
will argue, but there is now no possibility of achieving a general consensus based on
the exchange of written words because present societies are “postepistolary” and for
that reason “posthumanistic.” In such an environment, friendships cannot be based
on a common consensus on what it means to be human. To Sloterdijk, Heidegger’s
reflections had opened up a way of thinking of the human which bypassed the tradi-
tional accounts of Christianity, Marxism and even Sartrian existentialism. Sloterdijk
62 F. Long
is right to suggest that Heidegger’s work deliberately directed itself against

Aristotle’s conception of man as a “rational animal.” He also qualifies Heidegger’s
position as “hermetic” (Sloterdijk 2009, 18) without further elaboration, and notes
how Heidegger seems to situate the human in a special category of being, neither
animal, nor divine, but closer to the divine than to the animal. For this reason,
humans now have the special position of shepherd or guardian of Being, but
Heidegger’s shepherd of Being imposes “radical constraints” on human behaviour
because it dampens biological change, keeping it quiescent and focused mainly on
a receptive listening to the voice of Being (Sloterdijk 2009, 18). Contrasted with the
current appetite for strong men, Heidegger preaches the ascetic ideal of restraint, the
“disarmament of subjectivity,” the mitigation of the political and technological
ambitions of biological man in favour of a more quiescent attitude appropriate to the
shepherd of Being. Sloterdijk’s mocking tone about this “shepherding” function,
however, indicates a profound objection to Heidegger’s “hermetism.”
Indeed this now leads to the crucial question. Because Sloterdijk links education
to a taming ambition, an ambition which according to him in times past found itself
exercised in the exchange of letters between friends and therefore subject to the
many constraints and conventions of literacy expression, how can the situation of
the human in the “house of Being,” in the Clearing (Lichtung) of Being, become
anything other than another taming strategy in this negative sense? The simple
answer is that it cannot. Faced with this answer Sloterdijk develops his own solution
with occasional reference to the categories of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Sloterdijk agrees with Heidegger’s rejection of Aristotle’s rational animal
hypothesis and prefers the designation “shattered animality.” He accepts the
Heideggerian trope of environment and world in order to indicate that humans have
fallen out of an “environment” and into a “world” and he agrees that we find our-
selves in-the-world, oriented towards Being or experiencing the Clearing (Lichtung)
of Being, as Heidegger describes it. These Heideggerian terms are combined in
Sloterdijk’s analysis to deliver a controversial connection between domesticity and
theory-building, as if domestic environments were a denial of the practice of human
beings to stand in the broad light of day. Does a problem not seem to be announced
when literacy or the taming of thinking due to the proper use of words should be
linked to the “hermetic” profile of the human who stands in the Clearing of Being
but refuses to act for change? (Sloterdijk 2009, 22).
Sloterdijk connects Heidegger immediately to Nietzsche’s view about a possible
collaboration between ethics and genetics in breeding politics, but in so doing he
takes a step away from Heidegger to propose a tongue-in-cheek image of society as
a “human zoo,” a zoo in which humans deliberately place themselves:
In city parks, national parks, provincial or state parks, eco-parks—everywhere people must
create for themselves rules according to which their comportment is to be governed.
(Sloterdijk 2009, 25)
Sloterdijk’s use of Plato’s Statesman or Politicus in this context is puzzling. Certainly

Plato’s text explains the technique of division-making as a theoretical act that estab-
lishes expertise and begs the question about the proper expertise required for
political leadership. Even though human qualities are required for leadership, these
are relatively understated. The assumption is that cognitive expertise will lay the
foundation for good political leadership. The Stranger who is the principle inter-
locutor with the young Socrates in this dialogue elaborates on the various domains
of expertise that might exist in the community. By means of the philosophical
method of “division,” the hope is to distil these forms of expertise until we are left
with what is foundational to all expertise per se and thus the human cognitive quali-
ties foundational to a just society. A contrast is made, separating a previous era
when the gods supposedly gifted human leaders with these leadership qualities in
contrast with our current time when humans need to make do with what they can
learn themselves. Now that the gods have fled, to use a poetic phrase, no City-State
at the time of Plato currently boasts such a leader, but rather States are run by “imi-
tators,” sophists who mimic the governance all states ideally require. Written laws
permit the management of a state even if no currently living person has total belief
in these laws.
Plato however knows nothing of the “death of god.” If “courage” becomes a tell-
ing quality in state leadership against mediocrity, it is because it manifests the
“divine, when it comes to be in souls, that opinion about what is fine, just and good”
(Statesman 309c).2 The human cannot rely on itself alone “because it is in the nature
of courage that when it is reproduced over many generations without being mixed
with a moderate nature, it comes to a peak of power at first, but in the end it bursts
out completely in fits of madness” (Statesman 310d). The Stranger’s solution for the
art of statesmanship is to weave together the woof and weft of courage and modera-
tion in a single society marked by friendship and agreement (Statesman 311c). But
this is the humanist manifesto that has been proven to fail. Plato’s advice will no
longer work.
It is not the stability offered by the gods acting in the background that impresses
Sloterdijk, for he does not mention these elements, nor indeed the exchange of let-
ters by the well-educated. Instead, it is the image of herding and taming that cap-
tures his attention. Normal husbandry requires the promotion of proper breeding and
the avoidance of chimeras and beasts. “Taming” is not tranquilization but rather the
active function of biological selection. Hence in Sloterdijk’s case, biomedical
enhancement dandles like a real prospect in front of our eyes without moral com-
ment but with the slightest hint of approval. His support for a Nietzschean-inspired
idea of self-breeding as a proposed ideal is the remedy endorsed for his underlying
Hobbesian view of man. Otherwise we are left with a life that is “nasty, brutish and
short” without reprieve. These are not palatable thoughts for a group of German
educators.
2
I use Rowe’s translation in (Cooper 1997).
64 F. Long
Conclusion
Here I want to make two concluding remarks.

In summary then. For Heidegger, the ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn (Heidegger 2011,
174) normally translated to read “A man’s character is his daimōn” is explained as
the space (ēthos) in which the god (daimōn) can appear. This is a region of the
Clearing of Being—Heidegger’s central theme according to Krell (Krell 2008). The
human is to be situated outside animal nature, precisely because humans stand
closer to the gods than to animals. Moreover, Aristotle’s description of man as the
zōon logon echon [the animal who has reason] is inadequate as a description of the
human (Heidegger 2011, 154). Humanism has faltered because humans have never
been rational enough. Not only is Heidegger explicit about his rejection of a meta-
physics of nature to describe mankind but he is not in any way hysterical when he
contends that our way of being is closer to the divine than to animals.
The first point of difference between Heidegger and Sloterdijk therefore is the
relevance of the gods in both accounts. For Heidegger the gods are central; for
Sloterdijk they are the product of “hysterical” thinking. Although Sloterdijk accused
Heidegger of crypto-Catholicism on several occasions in his article, Heidegger’s
connection with religion is perhaps better described by Hans Jonas who suspected a
link in Heidegger’s thought with gnostic sources. Jonas noted three elements in this.
First and in general, the gnostic mind believes that there is some secret link
between man and god (the gods or God), even if this god does not appear as the
revealed God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Sloterdijk picks up on the secrecy of
this link by issuing a disparaging remark about Heidegger’s unspoken ambition to
serve as chief shepherd of Being. Second in contrast with this secret vocation (appli-
cable to all humans within this neohumanism), man finds himself ambiguously
bound to nature and to bodily being with all its laws and patterns obliging humans
to conform to these same patterns and laws. This distracts the human being from his
true destiny as a “spirit” (pneuma) called to achieve a higher spiritual state of being.
In both our authors, there is a sense in which the body is not that important, in
Heidegger’s case because our life is more properly “pneumatic,” in Sloterdijk’s case
because our biological conditions can be and should be improved. Linked to this
issue is the third element, namely, that no trustworthy pattern of life can follow from
observing the laws of nature or from the logos of humans because these laws work
constantly to bind and thwart our spiritual instinct. Therefore nature is no guide to
leading a human life as such and so the animal rationalis category is unworthy of
the human. As children of light, Heidegger can no longer feel at home in the world
and so a sense of homelessness anticipates the eventual release of death into a hap-
pier state of being. In the meantime, true believers live by means of a gnostic anti-
nomianism (lawlessness) that gives only notional assent to nature’s laws but refuses
to be bound by the current state of human knowledge/science because they flatter to
deceive and do not present the human in its proper light (Jonas 2015, 331). Jonas
sums up these thoughts:
In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger argues against the classical definition of Man as “the
rational animal,” that this definition places man within animality, specified only by a dif-
ferentia which falls within the genus “animal” as a particular quality. This, Heidegger con-
tends, is placing man too low…What is important for us is the rejection of any definable
“nature” of man which would subject his sovereign existence to a predetermined essence
and thus make him part of an objective order of essences in the totality of nature. In this
conception of a trans-essential, freely “self-projecting” existence I see something compa-
rable to the gnostic concept of the trans-psychical negativity of the pneuma. (Jonas
1992, 333–34)
For Heidegger, in the view of Jonas, modern man has been thrown into an “indiffer-
ent” world which does not care whether humans achieve their proper destiny, a type
of absolute vacuum or, as Jonas describes it, “a bottomless pit” (Jonas 2015, 338)
whereas for Sloterdijk, the life of man is essentially Hobbesian. Heidegger’s solu-
tion is the Mandaean move into a Clearing where the pleroma of Being can at last
demonstrate its relevance for man’s being quite apart from the ensnarement of
Dasein’s being in everyday affairs. Sloterdijk’s solution is biological enhancement
guided by nature but not bound to its evolutionary limitations.
This leads us to the issue of taming and domestication and may explain why
Sloterdijk writes disparagingly about Heidegger’s shepherd while also supporting
the idea of good breeding. Heidegger’s almost reverent tone for the shepherd’s work
contrasts with the mocking tone of Sloterdijk who rejects the passive behaviour of
Heidegger’s shepherd (Sloterdijk 2009, 18). Indeed he mocks Heidegger’s (unspo-
ken) claim to be a prophet of Being, ministering to a “church of scattered single-
tons” (Sloterdijk 2009, 19) because for Sloterdijk humanism must take its shape
apart from such a liturgy of passive control. Sloterdijk considers that Heidegger’s
proposed exit from environment to world will develop “psychotic animals” and so
they scramble back to patterns of taming to reassure themselves and keep them-
selves sane. They become self-taming animals. Domestication is what humans
desire above all, domestication that expresses itself in theme parks, zoos, bubbles,
globes, comfort zones, artificial environments that make up for what we have lost as
“shattered” animals. We generate for ourselves protected spaces and forms of lan-
guage and theory that immunize us from a reality over which we despair of having
any control, a reality which induces in us general passivity with respect to the bio-
logical conditions of our being. These words, categories, theories hem in the human
spirit and make it smaller. Schooling also follows the same project of taming
(Sloterdijk 2009, 23), for schooling has lost any ambition to promote the human
as such.
Reviewing the controversy raised by his Human Park speech (die Elmauer Rede)
some time later, Hans Jürgen Heinrichs asked Sloterdijk whether his speech actually
supported “people breeding” and whether indeed humans should have the right to
improve their natural condition. Sloterdijk explained in response that there are two
models of shepherding. On the one hand there is a pastoral and idyllic image of the
shepherd as a passive observer, a guardian of the flock as presented. On the other
hand there is a breeder of animals, an improver of resources, a promoter of new and
improved realities:
66 F. Long
Whereas Heidegger is attached to the Christian and peasant semantics of the good shep-
herd, I took it on myself to recall the image of the nomad pastor, that of the disturbing and
evil shepherd, and, no doubt, I did so in a much too laconic form. (Sloterdijk 2007, 129)
His response to Heinricks, however, exposed the kernel of the difference between
our two writers. While both agree that there needs to be an antinomial struggle
against nature and all its limiting effects (a biological struggle), only Sloterdijk
interprets this struggle as a need to make some positive interventions in the biologi-
cal conditions of the human being. While Heidegger speaks of moderation and
mindfulness (Besinnung), a kind of thinking that cannot bypass our own proper
human energies, moderns, to use Sloterdijk’s words, “are Pelagians or semi-
monotheistic humanists, most often they are vague atheists equipped with a vague
trousseau of quasi-transcendent human rights” (Sloterdijk 2007, 106). Sloterdijk,
including himself among that number no doubt, promotes the same neo-gnostic
indifference towards the conditions of nature as Heidegger does. Perhaps I am
unfair to imply that Sloterdijk must take up a position for when human tinkering
goes wrong, if nature as we know it becomes untenable, if oceans rise up to swamp
populations, if the sun’s radiation bleaches crops and bodies, if climatic conditions
finally make it impossible to live in the world. In those circumstances, self-
improvement, which is part of the cause of climate change, will be pretty pointless.
The reason I side more with Heidegger in this debate comes from his reflections
on the way boredom arises in the ordinary everyday lives of human beings. There
seems to be a fundamental ontological challenge which pushes us out of our every-
day cares while at the same time revealing the extent to which we are bound to them
(Heidegger 1995). This point is perhaps not too obvious. We need to accept the limi-
tations of our “nature” in the natural world.
In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger describes his experi-
ence of sitting in a quiet rural railway station, waiting on the next train with four
hours to wait. The wait is intolerable and the delay begins to weigh heavily on him.
He looks at train timetables and tries to imagine himself going to this destination or
another. He walks around. He looks at the clock and notes that the time has gone
slowly. He goes out and counts the trees planted outside in a line. He takes out a
book to read but puts it away after a short time, unable to concentrate. He tries to
scribble some notes but sets this aside too. He needs to know why he is so distracted
and ultimately bored. He surmises that the experience of waiting has knocked him
out of connection with things and that he now for a time at least had been also
knocked out his normal temporal rhythm. He notes how things have withdrawn
from him in this state and have thrown him back on himself. Try as he might—to
open a book, to take out a notepad and pens, even to walk up and down, these
actions seem fruitless to shift a more dominant mood of boredom.
Thinking about this experience, Heidegger focuses on his connection with things
in normal circumstances. These things themselves have lost the power to hold him
connected and withdraw (hingehalten). Then as they release him, he is thrown back
on himself, being left empty in the process (leergelassen). The question may be how
this experience relates to time because when one is bored time weighs heavily. One
is left restless, so perhaps it is some relation to time itself that is behind the experi-
ence of boredom. Perhaps some action or actions will provide the antidote to this
mood. But actions, like things, don’t help. They are chosen in the hope that they will
while away the time and dispel the feeling of boredom being experienced but whil-
ing away the time manifests boredom (Gelangweiltwerden). Boredom has revealed
a crack in our everyday preoccupations with those things that bind us to them
because now we have been let go and have been released into an experience of time
that is truly boring.
Heidegger describes an even deeper experience of boredom following a house
party which he enjoyed, a form of boredom which seemed to occur in hindsight as
he found himself alongside the party, a kind of being bored alongside (sichweilen
bei), an unspecified boredom feeling (GA 29/30, 173). It is a boredom that occurs
while one is alongside the flow of life where things do not withdraw, where one is
not left empty, where time does not weigh heavily on one’s shoulders but where
nonetheless a sense of dissatisfaction with oneself arises afterwards. One becomes
bored with oneself. A sense of ontological failure begins to mount within us, as if
we too like animals have been ensnared by the attractions of the everyday and have
reneged on our true potential as humans. Animals which are “poor in world” or
weltarm do not experience this pull because they are entirely given over to the envi-
ronments that sustain them. Not so human beings.
We note how Fallenness (Verfallenheit) has ensnared us in the preferred familiar
environment of a tamed existence. Boredom or a deep dissatisfaction with ourselves
motivates us as humans to change our lives, as Rilke once famously said, for it is on
this condition alone that our human life stands or falls. On this point at least both
Sloterdijk and Heidegger agree. The difference, however, is that while Heidegger is
willing to accept reality as he finds it, for it will soon be left behind, Sloterdijk will
not rest until humans have reinvented themselves as much as they can. It might be
possible to label Sloterdijk’s approach hyper-humanist provided one acknowledges
the dismissal of human nature underlying it. The Letter on Humanism revisits these
reflections on boredom from the perspective of the turn because now what is authen-
tic to the human spirit is the ability to “think,” a process that is awakened in us when
we fail to recognise or enact our function as shepherds of something, call it nature
or Being.
References
Arenas, L. 2003. El fin del hombre como fin? Cronica de la polemica Sloterdijk-Habermas. Pasajes
12: 70–81.
Asshauer, Thomas. 1999. The Zarathustra Project. Die Zeit, September 2.
Cooper, John M., ed. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett.
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Mark A. Wrathall, eds. 2007. A Companion to Heidegger. Vol. 35,
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell.
68 F. Long
Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Conceptxs of Metaphysics. Translated by William

McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Edited by John Sallis. In Studies in Continental Thought.
Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
———. 2011. Letter on Humanism. In Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell.
London/New York: Routledge.
Jonas, Hans. 1992. The Gnostic Religion. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
———. 2015. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of
Christianity. Beacon Press.
Krell, David Farrell, ed. 2008. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London/Toronto/Sydney/New
Delhi/Auckland: HarperCollins.
———, ed. 2011. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London/New York: Routledge.
Long, F. 2017. Transhuman Education? Sloterdijk’s Reading of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism.
Journal of Philosophy of Education 51 (1): 177–192.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eltred. Vol. 40, Theory and
History of Literature. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1999. Frankfurter Rundshau. 31 July.
———. 2007. Neither Sun nor Death. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
———. 2009. Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism. Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 12–28.
The Growing Solitude of the Body
Marie Antonios Sassine
Abstract The paper suggests that while the body is the impassable frontier between
us and the Other, it is at the same time a privileged means for recognizing our own
and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility. The body, however, is growing more soli-
tary in the post human times that we are entering. Interactions with others rely less
and less on corporeal presence. Abstract mediated contact is becoming the norm and
is frequently favoured as a more convenient and liberating form of sociability. But
are there fundamental differences between these modalities of presence—the virtual
one and the full physical presence—that deserve attention? This paper argues, draw-
ing on phenomenological analyses by Husserl and Patočka and on insights from
Nietzsche, that a growing ‘solitude of the body’ is reverberating into a gradual
absence of the Other and that this phenomenon is translating into narrower and
more subjectively defined notions of community and common world. The sugges-
tion here is that Patočka’s call for a phenomenology of corporeity is ever more
pressing and relevant.
Keywords Jan Patočka · Husserl · Nietzsche · Solitude—body · Spatiality—

modalities of presence—phenomenology of corporeity
Does the body have its own language, one that relies on an alphabet of the senses,
situating us, orienting our attention, opening up horizons of sense and meaning that
are not available to disembodied communication? Does the human body, in the full-
ness of its experience of space and time here and now, allow the Other to emerge in
ways that nourish the imagination required for empathy, for compassion, for tran-
scending the limits of individuality? The claim here is that the body speaks a mys-
terious and meaningful language that is not captured by discourse. Its subtle
expressions and gestures are part of the fabric of proximity and presence. This
sphere of communication is inevitably excluded more and more in the forms of the
technologically driven sociability that populate our world. As these forms become
dominant, we are, I think, at risk of losing parts of ourselves and closing off
M. A. Sassine (*)
Dominican University College, Ottawa, ON, Canada
e-mail: marie.sassine@dominicanu.ca

Switzerland AG 2023
70 M. A. Sassine
important possibilities in our relations to others. The reason for that, I suggest, is
that we overlook the body, that assumed part of who we are, as a fine and distinctive
instrument of knowledge: the body is constantly and instantaneously recording,
sending, and reacting to subtle messages about our situation and our world. The
limits, therefore, that technologically mediated interactions impose on the body’s
experience of the world may never be noticed, but our relation to ourselves and to
others may be irrevocably weakened.
The knowledge the body provides is part of a unified set of physical and mental
impressions that are not available through mediated mechanisms. The body’s very
force is in what it recounts about a present moment, now, in its vitality and compel-
ling immediacy as opening up potential horizons of ‘my’ world. This world of open-
ended presence is marked by possibilities of surprise, and mystery. The body itself
is the perceptual window onto this open-endedness. It is the point of orientation
relative to what is manifest, to what appears or lies concealed. The body deciphers
what is revealed, but its grasp and expression go beyond what discourse divulges.
This body, whether it be broken, compromised, or thriving, is the site of my experi-
ence of the world, of otherness. It is now falling silent, growing more solitary.
Spatial Presence
The body is that enigmatic boundary between us and the Other. But it is also an irre-
placeable portal to recognizing our own and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility,
whether it is detected in a fleeting anxiety of the eyes or in the touch of a comforting
hand. Our experience of suffering in the body is immediate and visceral. It can be a
sure basis for empathy, as it can connect us to the experience of all other human beings
and to the suffering of animals. Pain, sorrow, hunger, thirst, and fear, as well as com-
fort, ease, or joy are all felt in the body. The clarity and decisiveness of sensible experi-
ence can be a path to joining us empathetically to all sentient beings.
Bodies are capable of recounting what is being experienced in ways that supple-
ment, replace or shed light on discourse. Oftentimes, even when no words are
exchanged, there can still be eloquent communication in what the body reveals. At
the end of The Winter’s Tale, for example, when the story of the wondrous events
that have come to pass produces a stunned silence, the Bard tells us “They seemed
almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; There was speech
in their dumbness, language in their very gestures” (Shakespeare, 1978, The Winter’s
Tale, Act 5, 2, 12–15). But no such speech can be heard, or such gestures observed
in the absence of the body. Even the most sophisticated virtual communication is
not attuned to the body’s fleeting and varied language. And that is not simply a tech-
nological challenge; it is the nature of disembodied sociability. Its achievement is
precisely to escape the potentially messy immediacy of an unplanned and concrete
emergence of an embodied Other. It creates a communicative space that allows us
to choose how and when others will engage with us—through which medium or
platform, framed in what specific way, and at a time that suits us.
The Growing Solitude of the Body 71
To speak about the body, though, is not to hearken to old dichotomies of body
and soul. It is simply to recall that human beings live a specific and subjective expe-
rience of corporeity. Corporeity is the profound sense of situatedness in the precari-
ous and ephemeral here and now. It marks the movement of life. And the body’s
experience in grief and joy, in illness and pain, in hampered movement or in the
freedom of the dance provides differing and shifting perspectives of how I and my
world, I and the Other, shape and affect one another. Corporeity is thus the site and
the opening to a variety of horizons, which in their overlapping unity provide a
brighter, more profound picture than any abstracted and mediated virtual experi-
ence, no matter how sophisticated. As Nietzsche puts it in The Will to Power section
dealing with Principles of a New Evaluation: “Essential: to start from the body and
employ it as guide. It is the much richer phenomenon, which allows of clearer
observation. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the spirit” (1968,
289, 532). It is precisely the richness of bodily phenomenon with its promise of
unique perception that is jeopardized when it is replaced by abstract
communication.
The modes of presence that are becoming common currency as a basis for socia-
bility do not bring into play the many observational capacities of the body. They are
forms of presence that rely on an instrumentalized mediation of the senses: the
components of the senses that can be removed from the immediacy of time and
space. What remains is the body as an object, reduced from the more mysterious
phenomenon of subjective experience to one that can be virtually transmitted. Jan
Patočka (1998, 5) describes the objectified body as being “The body we experience
through the senses, which is distinct from us, not the body which differs from all
others in my lived experience by being mine, by being the null point of my orienta-
tion, by my being able to draw away from (and approach again) all bodies-in-space
except my own body.” This body that is not mine, from which certain operations of
the senses can be abstracted and captured as mathematically available functions, is
the one that dominates our communication with one another today. It is a body to
which the Other is revealed equally as another object, removed from the limits of
time and space. There is, of course, great freedom in this liberation from limits,
from the brokenness that can constrain our access to the world and to the Other. The
experience of the Other, though, becomes limited to what these mathematical func-
tions allow and to what they exclude. As a shared space and time becomes less and
less necessary to the dominant forms of communication and sociability, the risk is
that the richness that bodily presence endows to our being together will gradually
fade from our experience.
Movement Toward the Other
The body as object is not, however, a contemporary scientific invention. It has its
roots in Western philosophical history. This ‘third person’ body, as Patočka (1998,
9) calls it, is the one we encounter in philosophy right from its Greek origins.
72 M. A. Sassine
Indeed, beginning with Plato, the very senses of this body are placed in a hierarchy
according to their freedom from immediacy, to their affinity with abstract concepts.
Sight and hearing are deemed to be of the highest order as their reach extends
beyond what is near. Most importantly, sight and hearing can clearly distinguish and
seize quantity; they are closer to the mathematical, to the harmonies of music, to the
Logos of discourse, to the clarity of geometry and number. The mathematical inter-
vals in a scale can be heard but also repeated ad infinitum; geometric proofs can be
seen over and over. Unlike taste, smell or touch, sight and hearing are not tied to the
momentary and passing. For precisely that reason, they point to a realm of clarity
and permanence, to what is timeless and universal, in short, to number. The very
capacity that sight and hearing have to capture what is distant and quantitative
makes them better candidates for technological operations than the other senses.
Touch, taste, and smell are closer to the flow of time and to space, which with every
movement provides new and varied perspectives.
Our technologically enabled disembodied communication today is part of our
philosophical heritage and is based on the potential mathematization of hearing and
seeing. Husserl argued in The Crisis that the growing ‘technisation’ in the sciences
was based on a mathematization of nature itself and operated on the basis of dis-
tance from real things. It had lost its sources in genuine presence and attention to
experience in the life-world. Our modes of communication simulate presence and
proximity, but they lose the spatiality of what is near and far, what calls for move-
ment or withdrawal. Nietzsche sees movement in the body as revelatory of inner
life. He compares the body to a regent who does not need to know every activity in
order to rule. The body is the ruler of a country rich with differing activities but
bound together in a unity: “The most important thing, however, is: that we under-
stand the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, thinking—
and that, wherever we see or divine movement in a body, we learn to conclude that
there is a subjective, invisible life appertaining to it. Movement is symbolism for the
eye; it indicates that something has been felt, willed, thought” (Nietzsche, 1968,
271, 492). The body speaks through movement.
Movement is orientation in spatiality, and spatiality is central to us, to the bodies
that are ours, to our relation to the world and to others. To be conscious of our own
human embodiment, to be present to it in the Other, is perhaps a way also to becom-
ing more humane. For we cannot simply escape the limits of the body and all it
might suffer, we cannot shed it or render it abstract. Empathy is nourished by the
simple recognition of subjective experience as embodied.
“Our body,” Patočka says, “is a life which is spatial in itself and of itself, produc-
ing its location in space and making itself spatial. Personal being is not a being like
a thing but rather a self-relation which, to actualize this relation, must go round and
through another being” (1998, 31). For us as spatial beings, proximity, as presence
in the temporal and spatial modes, is an experience that allows otherness to reveal
itself in fresh and unexpected ways, opening up to a past and future, to a far and
near. Proximity brings in play the mystery of the Other as presence, multi-layered,
opaque, and transparent. This recognition of the Other calls upon receptivity and
movement from us. It implies a shared space and time, a common world of
embodiment. How does the abstraction and absence of proximity alter our relation-
ship to the Other?
Patočka (1998, 36) reminds us, “Nietzsche says that the Thou is older than the
I. The I aiming outward in the sense of a centrifugal energy, preoccupied with things
while overlooking itself—that is only an I with some reserve, since the fullness of
the I, the personal I is always the correlate of Thou.” The personal I that is over-
looked is the I of the body that is mine, the one I inhabit. The Thou is older and more
apparent in this experience because the body is assumed. But the Thou is a way to
the I, to our own corporeal life, to bringing it to light, to vitalizing it, to imbuing it
with sense. The embodied I, however, has generally been overlooked in favour of
the body as object, the body that philosophy has examined. This is the body that
science has studied and abstracted into the various technological extensions of the
senses that now structure a large part of our experience and personal relations. For
the body as object, there is no Thou, there is no spatiality. It is a free impersonal body.
Science has allowed the unanchored ‘soul’ abstracted from this body to find easy
company in books, in music, in its unimpeded wandering when and wherever it
wants. This is no mean achievement and certainly it can add depth and breadth to an
individual life. But it is perhaps too easy to forget that the body that is mine remains
confined to what it can touch, smell, taste, hear or see, as part of a unitary experi-
ence of what is near and what is far. That body can measure its solitude. It has to
move to arrive at another whose embodied experience remains similar but entirely
different though real and felt. This movement is meaningful; it is permeated with
soul. Indeed, as Husserl (2002, 252) says, “The Body is, as Body, filled with soul
through and through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and
going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing etc. Likewise so is every
human performance, every human production.”
Performances and productions, the arts in general, have much to teach us about
the captivating mystery of the body, its intelligence, its precise language. This is not
a language that can be captured and formalized. It can only be learned through prac-
tice and refinement of observation. It requires movement towards the other and
receptivity to the other. The Otherness that we seize in gestures and expressions
cannot be abstracted because it belongs to a specific moment and space. It is woven
into an experience of the Other as body filled with soul.
Stravinsky, writing in the early forties, bemoans the passivity and the indiffer-
ence that the wide availability of music was encouraging in listeners, who no longer
had to exert themselves, to move from their own space to hear good music: “The
time is no more when Johann Sebastian Bach gladly traveled a long way on foot to
hear Buxtehude. Today radio brings music into the home at all hours of the day and
night. It relieves the listener of all effort except that of turning a dial. Now the musi-
cal sense cannot be acquired or developed without exercise. In music, as in every-
thing else, inactivity leads to the paralysis, to the atrophying of faculties” (1994, 135).
We do not often think of the senses as requiring cultivation, nurture, and practice,
in short—an education. But the poets understand the dullness that can overcome a
body and fundamentally alter its experience of the world and others. In the words of
C.H. Sisson (1996, 8):
74 M. A. Sassine
My errors have been written in my senses

The body is a record of the mind
My touch is crusted with my past defences
Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind.
Perhaps it is time to consider the consequences of living in a world that rarely
calls on the full exercise of the senses working together in a body that it fully pres-
ent. The individual body in question may well be one in which one or more of the
senses are not functional, or only partially. That is irrelevant to presence. That body
will nonetheless experience the world through the body that in ‘mine’, and that
means a unified and specific form of corporeal presence, one that determines the
quality of my movement toward the Other.
Even if the movement toward the Other is only in the flicker of an eyelid, it
would still signify an active presence, a movement that is seeking a reciprocally
attentive response in a shared place and time. Many will be familiar with the French
journalist Jean-Dominique’s Bauby’s memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, trans-
lated into English as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. After a massive stroke,
which left him with ‘locked-in-syndrome’, his only remaining movement and means
of communication was his left eyelid. The book is the product of what he was able
to communicate to a ‘transcriber’ about his experience of being imprisoned in his
body and the poignant reflections and memories it inspired. One of the truly remark-
able elements of that extraordinary story is what it recounts about presence and
attention, on the part of Bauby, communicating elegantly and beautifully through
the movement of one eyelid, and on the part of his interlocutor, the ‘translator’, who
produced the singular manuscript. To speak about the risks of the senses becoming
blunted and etiolated is, therefore, not to exalt a form of sensuality, but to emphasize
the subtle dimension that the senses make available through presence and attention.
To live in a body in which only one eyelid is subject to conscious control is to live a
specific corporeal existence, but it remains an experience of the world that can be
communicated to an empathetic person who is attentive to the language of the body.
As Husserl (2002, 247) puts it: “I hear the other speaking, see his facial expressions,
attribute to him such and such a conscious lived experiences and acts, and let myself
be determined by them in this or that way. The facial expressions are seen facial
expressions, and they are immediately bearers of sense indicating the other’s con-
sciousness, e.g., his will, which in empathy, is characterized as the actual will of this
person and as a will which addresses me in communication.”
The performing arts, in particular, bring into relief the subtle corporeal dimen-
sions of this empathetic communication. Practice in the sustained use and discipline
of the senses seems to enlarge capacities of perception, of empathetic understand-
ing. We have always known intuitively that an educated ear, a musician’s ear, hears
more, that a visual artist’s eye sees more, that a wine connoisseur’s palate tastes
more. There is knowledge associated with the senses, specific to the instrument
developed Each sense reveals something different about the world, and in a very
different way from pure intellectual grasp. The senses as instruments of knowledge
are what is risk in a post-human age. “And what magnificent instruments of
observation we possess in our senses!”, cries Nietzsche (2003, 3, 46). Their knowl-
edge reveals the Other beyond language through empathetic understanding of cor-
poreity. The body is not a coarse and blunt mechanism superseded or simply animate
by the soul or mind. For Stravinsky again, the distinguishing mark of the “thorough-
bred artist” is that every subtle movement is part of the performance, part of the
refined and insightful interpretation. The attentive listener, as well, is not a passive
spectator but can also see the music in the bearing and movements of a performer:
“An experienced eye follows and judges, sometimes unconsciously, the performer’s
least gesture.” These gestures are full of sense and meaning. “The dancer is an ora-
tor who speaks a mute language. The instrumentalist is an orator who speaks an
unarticulated language” (Stravinsky, 1994, 128).
The movements of the body, the expressions, the gestures are one with the soul
and reveal the psychic life in the way that language does, perhaps slightly more so
as they are often unconscious. The body is the site of contact and sense, of sensibil-
ity. It is inexhaustible in its referral to further horizons. If the body falls mute, is
something of the Other also lost? Is a language forgotten, fallen into disuse?
“Concerning the experience of others,” Husserl tells us, “every person, in virtue of
his Body, stands within a spatial nexus, among things and to each body for itself
there pertains the person’s entire psychic life, grasped in empathy in a determinate
way, so that therefore if the Body moves and occupies ever new places, the soul too,
as it were, co-moves” (2002, 176).
Phenomenology of Corporeity
Patočka, pursuing Husserl’s enquiries on the body, thinks that a phenomenology of

corporeity is what is required to adequately reflect the body as subject. Perhaps
more than ever in these disembodied times, the difference between real presence
and abstract contact is worth considering. We all know it is easier to send a few
words through the ether than to sit quietly and helplessly with a suffering human
being, to simply live out situations where words fail. In “I can be somewhere only
through a body, otherwise it is not I but only thought of an I,” says Patočka (1998,
12). The thought of an I seems to be getting steadily more confused with the fullness
of bodily presence. Prescient Nietzsche, comparing Modernity to digestion and
nourishment, describes the growing and relentless onslaught on the senses such that
“impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking
anything deeply. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men
unlearn spontaneous action, they merely relate to stimuli from outside.” For
Nietzsche, the consequence is: “Artificial change in one’s nature into a “mirror”;
interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested” (1968, 47, 71). To be
interested only as surface means to remain unchanged, unmoved in any profound
way. It also means that the senses do not get much practice or exercise in the subtle
reading of another’s physical presence. The sustained and receptive attention
required for the empathetic consciousness to flourish is rarely called upon. In any
76 M. A. Sassine
case, the choice for physical presence, for traditional sociability, may no longer be
available as the spaces and occasions that require concrete bodily presence grow
scarcer. In these post-modern times and post-human times, we can be everywhere
and, therefore, frequently nowhere. We can be with everyone, therefore so often
with no one.
As experiences involving the senses diminish, and as the effort required to exer-
cise and refine their functions becomes unnecessary, there is an impoverishment of
the intelligence of the senses. This impoverishment means the body is more iso-
lated. And as the Other is rarely encountered through the proximity of shared expe-
rience, even when such meetings happen, the solitary body may be less able to
perceive and to understand the language of the body or to speak it. Patočka’s call for
a phenomenology of corporeity seems a promising avenue for exploring the conse-
quences of the vanishing elements of mystery and surprise in inter-subjective
relations.
While Patočka recognized that Husserl opened up the way the way to a phenom-
enology of corporeity, he did not think he went far enough because “Husserl did not
reach the radical question—what is a human? The way from the transcendental
subject to humans leads through corporeity” (1998, 70). Ultimately, a phenomenol-
ogy of corporeity would need to address that specific question. What is a human,
what is a human body? It would need to discern and to explore the experience and
the meaning of embodiment. Integral to this phenomenology would be the emer-
gence of the Other and of empathy relative to modes of presence and to the open-
ness or closure of horizons. A phenomenology of corporeity would need to pursue
what Nietzsche thought philosophers were beginning to do when he proclaims:
The evidence of the body—Granted that the “soul” is an attractive and mysterious idea
which philosophers have rightly abandoned only with reluctance—perhaps that which they
have since learned to put in its place is even more attractive, even more mysterious. The
human body, in which the most distant and most recent past of all organic development
again becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond which a tremen-
dous inaudible stream seems to flow: the body is a more astonishing idea than the old
“soul.” (1968, 347–348, 659)
Husserl and phenomenology have certainly opened up the path to enquiring about
the mystery of the body. Scientific progress, though, despite its very focus on the
physical, has managed to abstract and reduce the experience of the body. The enig-
matic and captivating human body as a way to ourselves and to the Other is being
cast aside and replaced with the body as object, as third party removed from the
limits of space and time. Heidegger approaches the subject of body from a different
perspective. He looks at how a body becomes that—just a body, indistinguishable
throughout the universe. He says that for the ancients there were specific kinds of
bodies that had distinct motions—upward, downward, straight line or circular—
according to their nature, earthly or celestial, and to their place and time. He uses
Newton’s First Law of Motion (Every body continues in its state of rest, or uniform
motion in straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed
upon it) to explain mathematization and the way it differs from the ancient use of
mathematics. Heidegger (1967, 89) says: “How about this law? It speaks of a body,
corpus quod viribus impressis non cogitur, a body which is left to itself. Where do
we find it? There is no such body…. This law speaks of a thing that does not exist.
It demands a fundamental representation of things which contradict the ordinary.”
Today the same question can be asked of the human body, the one that gives itself
over to mediated capture through the algorithms of virtual presence. As relations
become more ethereal, fleeting and epidermal, as the mysterious embodied human
gives way to the transparency of the post human, it may be worth enquiring at what
cost. If the body is shot through and through with soul, as Husserl suggests, then a
phenomenology of corporeity, now in these post-human times, may help us deter-
mine what we are gaining in disembodied being-with-others and what part of our
soul we may also be losing. If to be human includes the fullness and mystery of
bodily experience, do we not lose parts of ourselves and part of the experience of the
Other in the growing solitude of the body?
References
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. Le scaphandre et le papillon. Paris: France Loisirs.

———. 1998. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Trans. Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf.
Heidegger, Martin. 1967. What is a Thing? Trans. W.B. Barton, Jr. and V. Deutsch. Chicago: Henry
Regnery Company, Gateway Edition.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
———. 2002. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,
Second Book. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York:
Random House Vintage.
———. 2003. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London:
Penguin Books.
Patočka, Jan. 1998. Body, Community, Language, World. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Edited by
James Dodd. Chicago and Lassale: Open Court.
Shakespeare, William. [1623]1978. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by Peter
Alexander. Great Britain: Collins London and Glasgow.
Sisson, C.H. 1996. Selected Poems of C.H. Sisson. New York: New Directions Publishing Company.
Stravinsky, Igor. 1994. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Somatic Dissection and the Journey
of Animal-Being
Roberto Marchesini
Through others the earth becomes warm, loving, benign. Others

are therefore the original demonstration and not a mere
external need; they are our anchoring to existence, the
relationship with what in the world is already prepared for us.
Jan Patočka
Abstract The post-human proposal undoubtedly represents a deep break within

traditional philosophical thought. However, it would be wrong to consider it a kind
of anti-humanism, as it is rather a redefinition of the humanist canon based on some
shifts related to: (1) the ontological definition of the human condition; (2) the inter-
pretation of the character of animality; (3) the referential or co-factorial meaning of
otherness; (4) the anthropopoietic meaning of techne. If one wanted to synthetically
translate those shifts into a “paradigmatic node,” one could say that, from a post-
humanist viewpoint, human predicates are based neither on the human being nor
iuxta propria principia. That is, they are not grounded in an autarchic, autopoietic
and, ultimately, reflexive concept of ontology. The human is considered to be the
result of an introjective relationship with otherness, so that the predicate emerges
from the point of connection as a dialogical product. In other words, human predi-
cates are considered emergent, and not emanative. In a post-humanist vision, human
emergence is not realized through a disjunctive view and or a purification of other-
ness, that is, by the virtue of human self-absorption – as in the Cartesian cogito –
but, on the contrary, takes place in the welcoming openness to otherness. Therefore,
the human is the outcome of a hybridization, an anthropo-decentralizing event, an
epiphany that introduces new perspectives of being. Otherness here plays the role of
activating some existential dimensions that are not previous to the dialogical-
conjugative act. One could say that the human condition is realized at the margins
and through some marginalizations.
R. Marchesini (*)
Director of Centre Study for Post-human Philosophy, Bologna, Italy
e-mail: estero@siua.it

Switzerland AG 2023
80 R. Marchesini
Keywords Animality · Ontology · Ontopoiesis · Post-human philosophy ·

Phenomenology of life
Introduction
Life is about relationships developing over time, synchronized and incomprehensi-

ble causalities that constantly demand remote explanations of the text. Life shows
its corpuscolarity in the here-and-now and yet also expresses an undulatory nature,
a choral Dionysian flow deriding any explanatory attempt. Life is a succession of
thresholds connecting seemingly distant worlds, in the ambivalence of processes
that seem closed in on themselves and open systems, poetics that arise as fractalic
references to an otherness that is constantly redefining itself. Life is a relation-
ship (Tymieniecka 2009), an itinerary drawn by heteronomy, a creative process that
uses dialogue to address the uniqueness of the real.
By contrast, a relationship can never be an objective interface between two
beings, aiming to bring out a content. It is rather a “construction of predications” –
that is, propositions that, just like a painter with a palette of colours, collect world
contents so as to realize themselves. These predications emerge thanks to the “how”
of the encounter – that is, depending on the reciprocative milieu substantiating, or
rather sharing, the act of giving. Perception therefore refers to a previous experience
such as immedesimation, anthropomorphism, or the somatization of the instrument.
It reconnects otherness to something concerning me and, at the same time, trans-
forms this previous experience so as to reach a state concerning us (Marchesini
2014). I call this being-in-relation a “mirroring process” or ontopoiesis through
hybridization.
Ontology is the result of a relationship – that is, a process neither intrinsic to the
subject nor already given. The human as experience in the world therefore arises
from the capacity of suspending a kind of immersion in the real and opening new
passages of intersection and connection to the world. The human does not manifest
itself in a fractalic and anthropoplastic reproduction, claiming to be the measure and
subsumption of the real, but rather in inaugurating new levels of reality by the
hybridization with external entities. In this sense, it is possible to say that the human
should never be considered a defined or definable entity, but rather a constantly
negotiable position, destined to transcend itself in the very act of being-there. One
can say that the human cannot help participating.
However, this does not mean to neglect the human condition itself, turning it into
an anodyne and empty liquidity, subject to any predicate whatsoever, as if otherness
were the container and the human being were an amorphous content. Hybridization
can take place because the human being has a peculiarity, a certain structure or
nature, whatever it may be called. However, this is a virtual structure – one that
demands and agrees to be organized by the dialogical coordinates that it encoun-
ters – rather than a deterministic essence/substance that is self-realized and self-
explanatory. The human condition cannot be obtained by opposition – which would
Somatic Dissection and the Journey of Animal-Being 81
lead one to invent some counter-terms so as to position it – but rather by references,

that is, connective structures. Therefore, this means starting from the animality of
the human being and recognizing those predicative redundancies (which are not
insufficiencies, but quite the contrary) that allow for the heteronomic organizational
plurality. It also means that any attempt of internal recognition is doomed to fail and
only gather the dust, so to speak, of the human experience.
One cannot perceive oneself without a decentralizing process – that is, an ecstatic
evenience of suspension. This process, however, cannot be an autopoietic result, as
it would increase gravitation. For this reason, any self-explanatory – but also self-
descriptive – attempt might be misleading. The subject can perceive himself
because, thanks to otherness, he has already transcended himself in the predicative
expression. Therefore, to relate to the world means to participate in a mirroring
process – understood as donation of/to otherness – that involves the entire body in
several moments, but always as predicative emergence. One can therefore say that
the those engaging in dialogue – as entities enucleated by the dialogue – do not own
the predicate, which is rather the outcome of the mirroring process. The predicates,
therefore, cannot be obtained through internal recognition.
Furthermore, this predicative emergence should not be confused with the tradi-
tional essentialist formulas, that is, mimesis and polemos, to stick to the most com-
mon canons. Mirroring does not refer to the objective predicates of beings but rather
to the “how” of the dialogical process – that is, the modalities of mutual donation
between beings in relationship with each other. For this reason, the appearance of
otherness does not refer to a merely phenomenal being extraneous to my Dasein. In
fact, it is rather an epiphany – that is, a place for the ontological transformation of
the self. This encounter does not leave one unaffected in one’s essence – which,
besides, should make one reflect on the resulting inconsistency, the risk of circular-
ity, the endless regress, and the petitio principii of any attempt to found Dasein juxta
propria principia.
The risk of solipsism, highlighted by Husserl’s reflection, lies within an ontopoi-
etic conception based on a withdrawal that is phenomenologically irresolvable –
that is, that gives rise to tautological recursivenesses from which it is difficult to find
a way out. The emergence of subjectivity within the relationship indicates, instead,
that every presence is always reference and every self-perception is always the
result of a decentralizing into the other. Consequently, the perception of others
never refers to an object but is always a “transfiguration into the other” realized
through a diachronic matrix. This matrix aims to reproduce by resonance an iden-
tificative sense that does not necessarily belong to individual experience, so as to
then reach a condition that exceeds the boundaries of the individual. Therefore,
individual experience becomes a temporary connection, not even a parenthesis, in
this flow of subjective becoming within the singularity of its relational trajectory.
Hence the need to better define the very concept of referential relationship, dis-
tinguishing it from its traditional meanings. Reference is a state of acceptance and
introjection of otherness and, simultaneously, a self-giving to otherness. Thus, onto-
poiesis is an emergent threshold rather than the realisation of a disjunctive process.
The subject, therefore, does not bend or project himself through mirroring, but
82 R. Marchesini
rather welcomes otherness through a kind of possession-welcoming of it and by

being in ecstasy within it. By doing so, the subject can suspend the ego and partici-
pate in a condition that transcends it. It is a process that transcends into immanence.
Mirroring is neither a liberation nor an emancipation from the body, but rather a
liberation-emancipation of the body that can thus reorganize itself and increase its
virtualities through mirroring.
To shift from a reflexive ontology to a relational ontology means to take into
account the referential meaning of relationship, as well as the epiphanic effect of
otherness and, in particular: (a) the transformational journey of animal becoming,
along the two axes of animal emancipation and theriomorphic hybridization as rev-
elation of the over-human; (b) the somatic dissection operated by the technopoietic
infiltration as acquisition of new virtualities (the body without organs) and of a
predicative reorganization. This leads to a significant paradigmatic shift from a
humanistic conception of Dasein to a post-humanistic conception based on a hyb-
ridative emergence.
Relational Ontology
One’s presence in the world is a continuous process of mirroring the other, a being-
with that implies a somatic communion, an ecstasy within otherness, a shared nature
of bodies harmoniously aligned on the same level of relationship. Otherness gives
itself through an affective process that is first of all an impression, a motion of co-
sentience (rather than appearance or noematic content) and, simultaneously, an
epiphany – that is, a revelation of existential dimensions virtually accessible for the
self, a threshold to escape from one’s individual boundaries, a suspension of such
boundaries and a participation in something that transcends the self. Thresholds are
never anodyne holes along the bastions of identity, but rather interfaces, filters that
allow for the mirroring process. It is therefore important to consider ecological
thinking not as a description of the living, but rather as a paradigm that interprets the
living and its poietic skills. Life is creativity, as somatization of relationships and
transformation of dialogues into flesh. Therefore, a threshold is the place of percep-
tion as experience and visitation of otherness.
Life is not made of separate entities, but rather of connecting thresholds. Life is
a continuous seminar of relationships. It is a flow that, just like a flame in need of
oxygen, goes upwards and produces ever-changing figures that – unable to repeat
themselves – throb in their singularity and take space through the hybridization with
the world. As a result, inspiration is never an inner search of the outline of a poetics.
It is always an opening up to the world, a “being available” to the other. The narcis-
sistic self would like to deny this exchange, hiding the threshold connecting it to
otherness, building a limes around its world and thus defining a metabolic domain
where only interchanges are allowed, but nothing more. Nevertheless, inspiration
lies precisely in the ability to open up this flow, release that threshold and activate
the bidirectional meaning of the Latin hospes. This is well exemplified in the
concept of shelter that was one of the most important conceptual turning points of
Edith Stein’s thought: her literal recommendation to “make space” for otherness.
Life means expanding within the world, as an act of inclusion and of self-
donation, rather than of submission. Inspiration, therefore, means recognizing one-
self within alterities. This mirroring requires suspension, the exercise of epoché. It
is not a coincidence that people often speak of inspiration in terms of possession,
ecstasy, alienation. However, it is necessary to make a clarification. These processes
do not disconnect subjectivity from the body – that is, they do not nullify corporeity
but, on the contrary, release it. The body, freed from the chains of the reflexive self,
can open up to otherness. Obviously, I am here relating to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(Merleau-Ponty 1962), Michel Henry (Henry 1973) and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
(2012). Desire, as need to participate – that is, as hospitality towards the other and
openness of thresholds for the dialogical singularity – is the driving force of subjec-
tivity. Creativity is not driven by a deficiency; it is not the obvious conclusion of a
gravitational languor or a need that demands to be compensated in order to give rise
to a kind of blissful autonomy. On the contrary, creativity continuously reproduces
the non-equilibrium that is at the root of life. This non-equilibrium is desire as
“being-for-the-relationship,” which is the very foundation of subjectivity.
In my opinion, the core of the problem lies within the several meanings of the
concept of relationship. Claiming to be the result of the relationships with otherness
can lead to some dangerous misunderstandings, if the essentialist principle of indi-
viduation remains the same. The word “relationship” is too general and open to
various (I’d say divergent) interpretations. According to the classic argumentative
dialectic, relationship means comparison, uncertain background, evolution by con-
trast, rejection. This then gave rise to some broad and inadequate, albeit very com-
mon, translations in which the term relationship is used in situations that would
actually require better terms such as reaction, response, interaction, interface, frui-
tion, projection. Going beyond all of this, there are at least two conceptions of rela-
tional state that are very different from what I mean by relational ontology, which is
not based on the inclusion of the other but, conversely, of the epiphany of otherness.
Let’s look at the first one. For example, one may think of a predicative reduction
of the being by which the latter exchanges its identity with the predicate of relation-
ship, thus annihilating itself to being nothing more than a mere “term of relation-
ship” with otherness: you are nothing but somebody’s brother, father, friend. In this
case, the relationship is no longer a transaction, but only a positionality towards the
dyadic plurals that can be contracted. There could be a lot to say about this interpre-
tation, which relates to individualism itself more than one would expect. On closer
inspection, the subject in relationship with the other is like a sun around which
revolve the planets of otherness, which would therefore be identified according to
the predicate of relationship. This interpretation of the relationship (which I would
define taxonomic) is actually dismissive and deprives it of its productivity. The rea-
son for this is very simple: we continue to think of the individual as an impenetrable
and monadic universe that can relate to otherness, but is never contaminated by it.
In other cases, the relationship is translated into infusion: transmission of con-
tents that, as such, transcend the plasma membrane of the individual. This is the
84 R. Marchesini
focus of the debate between those who consider this process a reduction of owner-
ship or weakening of identity, and those who, on the contrary, interpret it as an
increase of sovereignty over the contents taken. However, the relationship is once
again denied a status of its own, its specific productivity. In my opinion, the relation-
ship is more like a projection into the other, able to show new hybrid existential
dimensions, or something reminiscent of a possession that transforms the individu-
al’s predicates by reorganizing its inherent contents. Being in a relationship, doesn’t
mean looking at otherness as a phenomenon, but rather being inclined towards its
hybrid redefinition. In the relational encounter, the other-than-oneself is transformed
into other-in-oneself and undergoes a metamorphosis that profoundly alters its con-
tents. Within the relationship, otherness is always epiphanic: it becomes annuncia-
tion and revelation of an unexpected way out of one’s heritage, and offers the
individual a break so that he can transcend himself. To consider the relationship as
a simple transfer of contents means to degrade epiphany to mimesis: no longer an
interpretation and representation of otherness, but a simple assimilation of/in it.
This transition entails a series of metamorphoses that lead one to talk about a
post-humanist approach. I would like to mention some of them: (1) the overcoming
of essentialism, that is, the containing and gravitational concept of being within a
model; (2) the rejection of the dichotomic-disjunctive model that defines a being
through the construction of impenetrable domains; (3) overcoming the exclusive
dialectic based on a universal concept of belonging; (4) the virtual view of being,
which does not mean cancelling the internal predicates, but reinforcing the impor-
tance of the organization operated from the outside; (5) the relational interpretation
of the predicative outcome, which should therefore not be assigned to the characters
of beings in a relationship with each other, but should be considered emergent
from them.
This is the meaning of what I call “heteronomy of identification.” Individuation,
therefore, is a process of decentralization and reorganization in line with the support
of otherness. It is not a gravitation that transforms the identitary expression into an
orbitation fixed around its nucleus. However, it is neither a nullification or erosion
of the heritage itself: the past is not washed out, but rather enriched and allowed to
leap onto a new reorganizational orbital. Furthermore, it is also a recursive event, as
it is possible to talk of a fractal (that is, diachronically developed) structure of intro-
jections of otherness. Because of this, singularity is nothing more than a historical
path of encounters, where each one of these reorganizes the heritage and produces
a new relational matrix for future encounters. This critical point leads one to mis-
conceive what has been said so far as a weak declination of identity. I do not think
that to admit the relational meaning of identification means to give an image of
transparency of it. To look at one’s relationships means to give voice to all those
presences in-self, that is, to what they represented in the how of the encounter.
The epiphanic contents of the encounter do not correspond to the phenomenal
predicates of otherness but rather to the relational ones – that is, what otherness was
able to reveal. Contents are therefore not transmitted as such and otherness is trans-
formed into a space of decentralization – that is, a space for the emergence of new
existential dimensions for the self, interpreted on the basis of the contents of
heritage one has. Each introjection of otherness changes the threshold of relation-
ship with otherness and, therefore, the becoming does not deny heritage but rather
reorganizes it.
Emancipation from Animality and Animal Epiphany
The interpretation of animal otherness is paradigmatic for the understanding of

those mechanisms of removal and reduction that do not allow one to deal with the
more general issue of hybridization. Typically, the non-human is subjected to the
following nullifications of its potential presence to the dialogue (Marchesini 2016):
(1) reification, that is, the negation of its subjectivity, which may find several forms,
the most common being lack of will, non-possession of logos, instinctive irrational-
ity, inability to achieve high levels of intentionality; (2) transformation into a regres-
sive figure, believing the animal to represent the past and the domain of animality to
represent the heritage; this idea must be rejected in order to fully appeal to the
human dimension. This denies the heterospecific an effective presence to the
encounter; (3) alienation, that is, the prejudice that the existential level of other spe-
cies is unknowable, with the consequent inability to effectively communicate and
establish a relationship, believing the different umwelten to be separate monads; (4)
projection, that is, the transformation of the heterospecific into a mirror that there-
fore does not mitigate but rather strengthens the subject’s narcissistic tendencies,
with the consequent arbitrary construction of the other’s identity and positionality,
which is in fact denied effective participation to any (even basic) form of the rela-
tional encounter.
Animal otherness, subjected to these operations of denial and removal, is dis-
tanced both from the relationship and from revelation. The threshold with the ani-
mal source, designated to open up to recognition (the awareness of animal-being)
and epiphany (one’s reflection in heterospecific otherness) therefore undergoes a
final rejection, and what would normally allow one to participate in animality is thus
removed. When animal otherness undergoes these forms of humiliation and rejec-
tion, part of the reflection always collapses. First of all, the human being tends to
deny both the presence and the substance of its animal-being: (a) animality thus
does not become a dimension allowing for a specific declination of the human, but
rather the shore to leave behind so as to let the human emerge; (b) the animal drive
is translated into heritage, projected into the past and considered a sort of ancestral-
ity that rises from the depths and muddies the waters presence, rather than the rea-
son for Dasein.
At this point, a redefinition of the character of animality is necessary. One has to
abandon the reclusion inside the res extensa – the animal as automaton – that
becomes a monadic bubble in the Umwelt and poverty-in-world in Heidegger’s
thought. If animality is deprived of any character of subjectivity and turned into a
mere mechanical functionality of some automatisms, trained by phylogenesis and
ontogenesis, then it is clear that any predication of the human will seek comfort
86 R. Marchesini
within an emancipation from animality and not within the expression of its animal-
ity. This is why I speak of “emancipation of animality” from the captivity in which
it was kept by Descartes. This is why, in the field of philosophical ethology, I call
into question the meta-predicative structure of animal-being, that is, animal
ontology.
Animality is a creative, and therefore relational, presence in the world that takes
place through the diachronic construction of states of singularity. Animal-being thus
means constantly transcending the past and to rearrange heritage according to coor-
dinates given by the here-and-now. In this regard, the animal is not immersed in the
present but rather builds its own present arbitrarily. For this reason, I speak of ani-
mal Dasein: if the animal were an automaton, she would freeze at the first change!
However, given the singularity of the real – it offers similar, but not identical, occur-
rences – the animal has to be present and able to interpret the “margin of originality”
provided by its here-and-now. The individual is an actor playing a certain script.
Therefore, animal-being means “conjugating reality according to specific coordi-
nates” or, in other words, establishing a unique dialogue with the world. This dia-
logue, however, should not be compared to a mechanical function – even if it is
instructed by specific endowments, be it innate or learned. Endowment as such can-
not bring out interpretation, which, on the contrary, is the core skill to manage the
“margin of originality.” Endowment is a set of tools, not of automatisms.
Animal subjectivity – which thus also defines human subjectivity – is a modal
expression of body, as Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1962) had well understood,
and as we can see in Fancisco Varela’s enactive conception (Varela 1999). It can be
linked to the condition of “being a body” that shows a plurality of relational levels
expressing themselves through internal organizational dynamics and specific per-
ceptive inclinations actively addressed to external reality. So, it is possible to say
that subjectivity is not an amodal condition but an intentional structure requiring
external specification. It means recognizing Dasein within animality. On the other
hand, if it is true that every specific animal taxonomy indicates a specific immersion
in the world, then it is also true that the umwelten have a significant degree of homo-
logical and analogical overlapping. Therefore, one is never facing separate worlds,
but rather universes constantly dialoguing with each other.
This is what allows for the theriomorphic hybridization. The humanistic approach
denies the dialogic loans established with other species to construct one’s own iden-
tity, passing its predicates off as mere emanations, autarkic outcomes, characters
produced independently – that is, realized either by expressing the predicative sig-
nificance or by compensating imaginary shortcomings. In this way, one recognizes
that different cultures emerge through an intercultural exchange – that is, through
mutual reflection. And yet, when it comes to going to the source and discussing
anthropo-poiesis – that is, the emergence of the human dimension realized within a
cultural matrix – an arbitrary Rubicon is drawn, which does not allow other species
to contribute to the construction of the human. Hence the humanist claim to con-
sider the human, as autopoietic dimension of predication, the autarchic outcome of
the action of Homo sapiens and, at the same time, the claim that man can only be
understood through internal recognition.
Actually, the very deep dialogue between human and animal otherness, which
has always existed, has left many traces of loans and reflections, especially in the
cultural dimension. In other words, animal otherness is part of us not as expression
of animality – as this is implicit in the human condition of animal-being – but
because it is the matrix of the human reorganization defined anthropopoiesis.
Animal epiphany derives from a dialogical event with a non-human otherness capa-
ble of decentralizing the human being into a new hybrid condition. This means that
the anthropopoietic process should not be considered a gravitation on the human.
Nor should it be considered an emphasis or epiphenomenon concerning predicates
related to the human being as a species and phylogenetic heritage. Rather, it is a
process of decentralization.
Epiphany must be understood as a moment in which the human being, in rela-
tionship with otherness, goes beyond the phenomenon (the animal as other-than-
oneself) in order to access an epiphanic – that is, annunciating – event (the animal
as other-within-oneself), which is able to point at a new existential dimension.
Before showing us “how to fly” – that is, the flying techniques – birds have shown
us that “it is possible to fly” – that is, they introduced us to a new inflection of pres-
ence in the here-and-now. In this regard, epiphany has operated a decentralization
from the existential dimensions present in heritage and therefore opened the way to
the over human not as power but rather as revelation and abandonment.
Technopoiesis and Somatic Dissection
Poetics arise suddenly – almost by a spontaneous gemmation – whenever the body

frees itself from the sclerotic connections imposed on it by the predominance of the
past over singularity, by a reluctance to make space for otherness, by a partial clo-
sure of mirroring thresholds, by a drastic decrease of desire. These restrictions may
also derive from a dominant heritage and, sometimes, are driven by the subject’s
limited ability to act. Indeed, also the anatomy of species – establishing specific
relationships among the histological levels – can limit a body’s poetic potentialities.
Sometimes, it may happen that an event or support operate a kind of disjunction
among the parties, a real dissection: Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Therefore, the process of actualization is reversed and
a relevant virtuality that allows for new mirroring declinations is recovered. The
body therefore takes on new predicates, accesses new experiences, opens new
epiphanic thresholds, connects to new coordinates of desire. This is not an enhance-
ment of the body, but rather a reorganization of the somatic fabric on a new matrix-
level offered by otherness.
If subjectivity is a somatic dimension – that is, modal and not amodal – it is nec-
essary to understand what “being a body” means, where individuality is a creative
process that uses a variety of pre-rational levels, as was well explained by Anna-
Teresa Tymieniecka in her “Phenomenology of life” (Tymieniecka 2007). The body
is a matrix of relations with the world and the predicate emerges precisely from
88 R. Marchesini
these relationships. Therefore, it can never be deduced through an internal recogni-

tion. The body, enucleated from its multiple relationships, is not a body but a corpse.
The liminality of the body, therefore, should not be understood as a disjunctive-
protective border, but rather as “relational threshold” that brings out its being, its
presence, in a process of “making space” through dialogue-connection with other-
ness. The connective coordinates define the possible relational accesses even before
any specific performativity.
It is necessary to go beyond a narrow interpretation based on the dichotomy
between humanity as absolutely liquid or totipotent (the human as indefinite and
protean condition) and humanity as defined by strict conditions that lead to predica-
tive significance (the human as a given condition whose every predicate is its ema-
native outcome). If, on the contrary, one considers heritage as a “dimension of
specific virtuality,” that is, contained within a range of possibilities that are not
necessarily achievable motu proprio, then one can understand the meaning of the
heteronomic organization actualized as dialogical emergence with otherness. To see
heritage as a dimension of specific virtuality means to accept the openness to tran-
scendence that grounds Dasein, without falling into the fallacy of self-explanation
or total indefiniteness of the human. Indeed, this would deny the ultimate meaning
of reference, because it is not possible to start a dialogue without a condition.
The heritage identifies some ranges of “virtuality”: the human being cannot be
changed into anything whatsoever, nor can he transhumanize into something
beyond, not linked to what came before. Therefore, in a post-human perspective it
is wrong to believe that: (1) the technological support has only a probiotic, exonera-
tive, ergonomic, disjunctive, amniotic function, as in the humanist tradition; (2) the
support could be independent from its hosting body, so as to determine a total over-
coming of it, leading the human being to a condition that has nothing to do with
humanity, as it is in transhumanism. The support unveils new shapes of humanity
and introduces new predicative dimensions. Each technopoiesis is a reorganization
of some somatic connections: a real dissection able to bring out new predicative
structures that either recover inherent virtualities or produce new declinative inno-
vations. Therefore, it is not an enhancing bacterium, but rather a virus that repro-
grams the infected cell. It does not comply with some morpho-functional coordinates
of the body but, on the contrary, bends the body onto its performative guidelines.
Furthermore, the revealing conception of techne should not be seen as emer-
gence of the human peculiarity, but rather as a revelation of new existential anchor-
ages to the world – that is, new connections and conjugations to otherness. This
revelation is therefore participatory, convivial – even tender, I would say – rather
than a disjunctive, distinctive, purgative disclosure of otherness that brings out the
human by contrast. In this regard, the technopoietic process makes the human being
more and more conjugated, vulnerable and in need. These states translate into predi-
cation in the strict sense. The human being reveals himself by expressing his need
of otherness rather than by rising above otherness so as to dominate it.
Hence the clear gap between the humanistic vision that considers the human
being as an a priori condition, metric and subsumptive of world, and a posthuman
reading that considers the human being as a work in progress that is neither a
measure of the world nor of herself – that is, of the emergent predications. The
humanistic conception referred to human centrality – the Vitruvian image – that
necessarily lead to a universal to be translated anthropoplastically, transforming
other beings into orbitals. A posthumanistic vision, instead, avoids any conception
of human autopoietic and self-sufficient centrality. Hence the very different concep-
tions of heritage and of the relationship between organ and techne. The resulting
explanatory structure, in fact, needs an internal source so as to substantiate that
relationship.
The humanistic reading of techne thus underlies the exonerative character of the
tool called to relieve the body from its function and, in this way, protect it both from
the arduousness of the performance and from the difficulties caused by a supposed
impropriety or original deficit of the biological equipment of the human being.
Nevertheless, this idea is countered by the fact that – if techne compensated for
some ab origine lack – one should be faced with a deceleration process of the tech-
nopoietic act instead of an evolution that is growing exponentially. On the contrary,
the acceleration that characterizes technopoiesis can only be understood by admit-
ting a progressive expansion of instances: techne is a flywheel of connections and,
therefore, a stimulus of needs.
The body is not deficient, but overabundant – that is, open to dialogical creativity,
eager to conjugate to the world, like a tree expanding according to the organizational-
directional coordinates of light. The ergonomic and compensatory idea, pursued by
the myth of incompleteness, fails to account for the effect of disorientation and
instability that every technopoiesis produces on human ontology. It is a condition of
non-balance, fibrillation, yearning, as if each technopoietic act distanced us from a
gravitational centre that would otherwise stabilize each individual orbit. Techne
therefore encourages – instead of curbing – a process of exuberance, because it
opens up new world-connecting channels. Technopoiesis is like falling in love that
makes us more powerful, but also more vulnerable. Techne does not make us more
impervious and self-sufficient, but rather more conjugated to the world and more in
need of otherness. Techne is not a fractalic and projective emanation of human
predicates, but rather the outcome of a dialogue with otherness. Therefore, techne
will not produce a protective amnios, but open new exchanges of somatic exposure
to world.
Whenever a technique or technology penetrates a body – as techne is always
infiltrative even when it seems external – it reorganizes the latter’s virtual coordi-
nates, just like a virus. The emerging predicates are therefore the result of a dissec-
tion of the body, a real disjunction of its parts, able to release them and thus enhance
their declinative paths. The technological dissection does not only break up the limi-
tations implied by the correlation between the parts, but also initiates a liquid
somatic condition, an epoché of umwelt coordinates, thus opening up spaces for
experimentation within a plurality of dimensions of animal-being.
In this sense, the technopoietic suspension and the journey inside animal-being
have a common root, even though one is led to consider these two areas as disjoint,
distant or perhaps even antinomical. Eccentration is an expansion of experience, an
augmentation of the immersive horizon, a new self-perspective. One is suddenly
90 R. Marchesini
faced with many journeys-experiences in animal-being: the thrill of flight, the cho-
reography of dance, the connection between new perceptual accesses, the expres-
sion of new harmonics and so on. It is a shamanic and a technological experience.
Hence the feelings of instability, anxiety and excitement, power and vulnerability,
social chaos and loneliness – all together – that characterize our contemporary
world so pervaded with technopoietic somatizations that decentralize the human
being from his phylogenetic core.
Once again, the human is found in his vertigo, in his reaching for the sublime, in
his endless pilgrimage, his need to overcome himself. But also in his immense need
of the world and his never-ending search for love.
References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Henry, Michel. 1973. The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Marchesini, Roberto. 2014. Epifania animale. L’oltre uomo come rivelazione. Milano: Mimesis.
———. 2016. Etologia filosofica. Alla ricerca della soggettività animale. Milano: Mimesis.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press.
Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. 2007. Phenomenology of Life: From the Animal Soul to the Human
Mind, Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer.
———. 2009. The Case of God in the New Enlightenment. In The Fullness of the Logos in the Key
of Life. Book I. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer.
———. 2012. Christo-Logos: Metaphysical Rapsodies of Faith. In The Fullness of the Logos in
the Key of Life. Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer.
Varela, Francisco. 1999. Ethical Know-how: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
“Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women
Writers and the Posthuman
Abstract Numerous encounters of sense perception and materiality, which decen-

ter the human and open up experience to radical alterity, permeate Romantic-era
texts. Through various encounters with the nonhuman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary
Robinson, and Charlotte Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on
why it wasn’t always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence.
Their poetry reveals a sensitivity to the limits of humanism by investigating uncanny
entanglements with nonhuman beings. These encounters invoke a pre-reflective
engagement with the world. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
embodiment and posthumanist understandings of ecomaterialism, this essay
explores the “strange kinship” between the human poet and nonhuman poetic sub-
ject. Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith critique dichotomous rationale, deconstruct
species supremacy, and challenge human essentialism. By invoking the primacy of
embodiment, these Romantic-era women writers offer shared corporeal investiga-
tions that move toward a posthuman ethos.
Keywords Romanticism · Posthumanism · Embodiment · Perception ·

Ecomaterialism · Merleau-Ponty · Barbauld · Robinson · Smith
In “The Caterpillar” (1816), Anna Letitia Barbauld’s speaker experiences a fleshy

encounter that exposes her to an uncanny entanglement with the nonhuman. Having
slaughtered “whole families” without hesitation, the speaker finds that a “single
wretch,” to whose race she has “sword perdition,” forces her to feel the caterpillar’s
“individual existence” and, subsequently, a “fellowship of sense with all that
breathes” (Barbauld 1994, 14, 20, 24, 26, 27). Her initial contact is sensory, pre-
reflective; it’s an experience of the body that captures her attention and prevents her
from killing the creature. In Merleau-Ponty’s (2003) phenomenology, this experi-
ence constitutes an “inter-animality” that unites species through the embodiment of
C. A. Hornbuckle (*)
Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia, USA
e-mail: chornbuckle@daltonstate.edu

Switzerland AG 2023
92 C. A. Hornbuckle
perception (189). This “strange kinship,” as he deems it, is part of an ontological

structure consisting within a lateral continuum (271). In other words, the human and
nonhuman intertwine through a shared horizon of being. Moving beyond the ideal-
ism of Husserl and human exceptionalism of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on
embodiment suggests, as Louise Westling (2014) has pointed out, a “biological con-
tinuity” with the natural world that challenges “anthropocentric arrogance” and
“restores us to our place in the community of animals and the wider biological com-
munity” (4, 5). In her poem, Barbauld posits an openness to the radical alterity of
nonhuman animals, and even though that awareness can never be fully grasped, it
can be intuited through the inter-relationality of perception, behavior, and matter.
Her investigation, I would argue, contemplates an ecological sensibility that moves
toward a posthumanist understanding. As her speaker contemplates the intrinsic
value of the caterpillar, she challenges the essentialism of human agency and privi-
lege. And Barbauld is not alone in this endeavor.
We see similar encounters of sense perception, which decenter the human, in the
poetic works of Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Mary Robinson’s “The
Linnet’s Petition” (1775), for example, features a bird speaker who successfully
petitions for his freedom, but not before leaving his mistress to revisit a “strange
extasy” embodied within a conflicted primacy of bodily contact (2000, 70). In “To
the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection” (1804), Smith’s speaker laments the
absent vitality of a fire-fly, who is now a mere specimen of scientific collection,
estranged from its natural habitat, no longer capable of thriving in a dynamic envi-
ronment. The speaker experiences a “kindred merit,” but one of estrangement that
“weeps alone,” as she keenly charts how its “living luster” has become enslaved
through ostentatious display (Smith 1993, 3, 70). By exploring the sensory, material
animalistic encounters of the human poet and nonhuman poetic subject, Barbauld,
Robinson, and Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on why it wasn’t
always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence. These strange
human and nonhuman encounters elicit a relationality worthy of respect. However,
before turning to the poetry, I will first discuss posthumanism and then outline
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights to show how these British women
writers orient us toward a posthuman ethos.
In a way, Romantic-era women writers were always posthuman by virtue of their
marginalized status. Posthumanist understanding allows us to see the fallacies of
not only man as measure of all things but also the privileged positionality of
European, white, male discourses of humanism, itself. Posthumanism deconstructs
human essentialism and places the human within a spatiotemporal as well as bio-
logical spectrum of existence, one in which humans are only a part, a miniscule part
in comparison to the multitude of mineral, plant, and animal species on the planet.
Moreover, humans have allowed language and neural complexity to position them
as superior to all other species, and that simply isn’t the case. In fact, we have so
much to learn from the bioenergetics, biosemiotics, chemical signaling, and epigen-
esis of other species, and posthumanist investigations are helping us to think about
how we can learn from nonhuman beings on their terms, instead of our own. As
Cary Wolfe (2010) points out, posthumanism underscores a continuum of existence
“Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women Writers and the Posthuman 93
well before and beyond human experience. Posthumanism, he maintains, “comes

both before and after humanism”: before in “that it names the embodiment and
embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological
world” and after in that it “names a historical moment in which the decentering of
the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic net-
works is increasingly impossible to ignore,” pointing, thus, “toward the necessity of
new theoretical paradigms” (xv, xvi).
Furthermore, Rosi Braidoitti (2013) notes how humanist discourse excluded
marginalized others; the standard for the unitary subject excluded women, non-
white, nonheterosexual, underprivileged, indigenous, and nonhuman beings.
Building her posthumanist groundwork from an anti-humanist perspective, Braidotti
emphasizes a bioegalitarian point of view: the posthuman “deconstructs” “species
supremacy, but it also inflicts a blow to any lingering notion of human nature,
anthropos and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and non-
humans, or zoe” (65).1 In other words, she advocates that posthumanism must inter-
rogate the notion of “‘Man’ and his others” and disempower that dialectic (65). She
also situates posthuman subjectivity in an “ethics of becoming” through symbiosis,
embeddedness, relationality, and multiplicity, which is, however, “still grounded
and accountable” (49). The term “accountable” is key here because a posthumanist
ethos cannot devolve into computational strong emergence. Matter and mind consti-
tute an interdependence of which we have yet to recognize or even know. We exist
in a complex spectrum of being that depends on relationality, contextuality, social-
ity, and community.2 Drawing extensively from Spinoza’s ideas on monism and
Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on vitalist materialism, Braidotti emphasizes a post-
anthropocentric turn to usher in new epistemological and ontological paradigms.
This turn also involves a “radical estrangement” from human-centered concepts of
morality, transcendence, innateness, and universality rooted in humanist discourse
(Braidotti 2013, 92). Historically, these have derailed us from realizing our geopo-
litical imperatives—to all species, including the planet, itself. Additionally, posthu-
manism doesn’t necessarily abandon the human; rather, it takes the human out of its
historic isolation. Serenella Iovino (2016) claims that the posthuman is “the onto-
logical narrative of the human in its infinite paths of entangled becoming with its
others” (12). The human component is a small part in a much larger fabric of exis-
tence. It’s at this juncture of entanglement that I call upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas
about inter-animality before turning back to the Romantic-era women writers, their
1
For Braidotti, zoe is the mindless vitality of life carrying on, everywhere. Braidotti writes, “for me
there is a necessary link between critical posthumanism and the move beyond anthropocentrism. I
refer to this move as expanding the notion of Life towards the non-human or zoe” (50).
2
While outlining the limitations of strong emergence and panpsychism, cognitive scientist Michael
Silberstein encourages us to think of matter as contextual, not the sum of its computations or as
intrinsically mental. Contextual emergence looks at how “things emerge from the web of relations
in certain contexts” (36:45). Contextual emergence, in other terms, is cultural, environmental, and
mental; it is a relational story of mind and matter. See also Braidotti 26, 52, 59.
94 C. A. Hornbuckle
sensitivity to the limitations of humanism, and their embodied perception of nonhu-

man beings.
In the second (1957–1958) and third (1959–1960) courses of his unfinished
Nature notes, Merleau-Ponty investigates the notion of “inter-animality” in which
he argues that humans and animals exist in shared world of Being (2003, 173, 189).
They are given together, each opening up to the other by virtue of their “corporal
schema” (2003, 208, 224, 225). “The world and the others,” he writes, “become our
flesh,” and “[t]he flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world”
(2003 211, 218, 1968 127, 136). Perception, as such, is an embodied phenomenon
experienced within a lateral ontological structure (2003, 239, 268, 271, 273, 1968,
125). By emphasizing that a “lateral union of animality and humanity” exists within
the logos of the sensible, Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that humans and animals
perceive one another through bodily sensation in a biological spectrum uneclipsed
by power differentials (271). As Kelly Oliver (2008) points out in “Strange Kinship:
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals,” “[a]nimal bodies and cultures emerge
concurrently with human bodies and cultures precisely because there is continuity
between the physical world, biological life, behavior, and consciousness”(114).
Regardless of our conscious state, we’re always already responding to others,
human and nonhuman, and the environment in which we’re situated, our Umwelt,
which I’ll discuss later. Notably, Merleau-Ponty rejects Cartesian dualism as well as
species hierarchy rooted in a logos, as such: “We study the human through its body
in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason,
but rather, in short, in the Ineinander [in one another] with the animal” (2003, 214).
He goes on to write that the “meditation of our ‘strange kinship’ with animals” “is
to be understood as our projection-introjection, our Ineinander with Sensible Being
and with other corporeities” (2003, 271, 1968, 133). We might instinctively feel,
intuit, or reflect upon a sense of kinship with nonhuman others; this “shared embodi-
ment,” as Oliver also mentions, “includes both reflective and unreflective conscious-
ness” (114). On this note, I’d like to turn back to Barbauld’s “The Caterpillar” while
keeping in mind this “strange kinship” and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
embodiment.
When Barbauld’s poetic speaker claims that the caterpillar makes her “feel” and
“recognize” its “individual existence,” she embarks on an investigation of sense
perception that speaks to what Merleau-Ponty, in The Visible and the Invisible, spec-
ulates as “kinship opening upon a tactile world” (Barbauld 1994, 25, 26; Merleau-
Ponty 1968, 133). Even though, in this earlier work, Merleau-Ponty was less
interested in animals, we can see how much of the phenomenology of perception,
embodiment, and intertwining of flesh manifest in his Nature notes, and, thus, I
would suggest that his underdeveloped and fragmented thoughts on “strange kin-
ship” are ripe for ecoposthumanist analysis. Notably, Merleau-Ponty clearly intends
not to equate flesh and matter; they’re disparate in his phenomenology. The inter-
twining of flesh is perceptual, not material (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 146). Barbauld
operates on both levels in her poem “The Caterpillar.” The “light pressure of [the
caterpillar’s] hairy feet” causes the speaker to stop and endeavor to preserve its life
despite her having recently engaged in mass extermination of its species (8). The
moment of becoming tactilely engaged opens up the speaker to its presence, effec-
tively giving the caterpillar a kind of agency that alters intention. She “cannot harm”
this “single sufferer”: “Present’st thyself before me, I relent” (1, 36, 28). The crea-
ture’s life is no longer expendable. Confessing that she has “crushed whole fami-
lies” and poisoned them with “vials of destruction,” she realizes that she had done
so without remorse, but now the caterpillar’s individuality impresses its existence
on her (20, 22). That bodily awareness brings to bear an increased awareness of life
and commonality “with all that breathes” (27). In this experience of “inter-
animality,” sense and sentience intertwine in chiasmic relationship. Barbauld breaks
down the subject-object dichotomy, putting her speaker and the caterpillar on a lat-
eral horizon of shared kinship. The “world and the others,” Merleau-Ponty writes,
“become our flesh” (2003, 211).
From a posthumanist perspective, we’re invited to think of the myriad of inter-
and intra-species molecular, biological, chemical, and electromagnetic signaling
interacting within the fold of matter and perception, a complexity that precedes
conscious understanding, but reminds us that a human body and a caterpillar’s body
are both separate and non-separate entanglements. The closest Barbauld’s speaker
can get to this awareness is consciousness of the caterpillar’s “light pressure” on her
arm (8). In a Kantian sense, that moment is already paradoxically compromised in
its recognition. Nonetheless, as she gazes upon its “velvet sides, “scann[ing] [its]
form with curious eye,” the speaker’s embodied perception invites a sensibility that
honors the nonhuman (6, 3). In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007)
argues that matter is ontologically constituted by entanglement. She calls this
“agential realism,” by which she means that the “world is an open-process of mat-
tering through which mattering itself acquires meaning and form through the real-
ization of different agential possibilities” (141). From this perspective,
bodies—human and nonhuman—“are not entities with inherent boundaries”; they
are “phenomena that acquire” boundaries through “dynamic structuration” (Barad
2007, 172). Agency, in other words, doesn’t depend on the human. Moreover, recent
neurobiology has shown that insects not only have complex neural activity and learn
to respond to stimuli in unique ways, but they also exhibit signs of cognitive behav-
ior regardless of brain size. In “Cognition with Few Neurons: Higher-Order Learning
in Insects,” Martin Guirfa (2013) observes how fruit flies and bees seem to have
“attentional processes” by which they regulate behavior (288). Flies exhibit associa-
tive behavior that is trainable (Guirfa 2013, 286). Bees exhibit concept learning that
involves learned relations and choice (Guirfa 2013, 289). Both have dopaminergic
neurons that “may modulate selective attention” (Guirfa 2013, 288). The neurosci-
entific implications of these studies, as Giurfa notes, ushers in a greater appreciation
for the “cognitive sophistication of the miniature brains of insects,” especially since
traditional biology has often “overlooked the enormous richness of invertebrate
behavior” (291). Barbara Webb (2012) carefully notes that “cognition should not be
an umbrella term for all neural processes”; nevertheless, the insect brain is a “prom-
ising place in which to further unravel the mechanisms of cognition” (2720, 2721).
For Barbauld and other Romantic-era women writers, the insect brain wasn’t, of
course, of the utmost concern, but respect for life and empathic feeling were.
96 C. A. Hornbuckle
As she concludes the poem, we see Barbauld parsing the human capacity for
sympathetic identification, and, in effect, the limits of humanism. Her speaker
reveals that “capricious Pity, /Which would not stir for thousands, melts for one”
(39–40). The lone warrior, having escaped “from the field” of battle, managed to
obtain amnesty, but the “horrid war” against pests will prevail (36, 30). The engage-
ment with this creature is ephemeral. This caterpillar will survive and “[d]epart in
peace” by virtue of its individual presence (2). However, the speaker questions her
gesture, thus claiming, “‘Tis not Virtue, /Yet ‘tis the weakness of a virtuous mind”
(41–42). As Barbauld undercuts the purity of her speaker’s actions, she also exposes
the anthropocentric strongholds of her time. If one’s moral standards were absolute,
then the salvation of this particular European tent caterpillar might extend to the
entire species, the Malacosoma neutria, otherwise known as the Lackey moth.3 But,
for Barbauld’s time, as well as our own, those standards are still anchored in human
imperatives. In “The Caterpillar,” Barbauld is acutely aware of the paradoxical
nature of her speaker’s spontaneous sympathy (41). In “Pests, Parasites, and
Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and ‘The Caterpillar,’” Alice Den Otter (2004)
makes a compelling case for how Barbauld “reverses” the image of benevolent
“pest-controller” only to launch a more “subtle tirade against the vanity of British
sympathies” in terms of hospitality, war, and dissent (222). Den Otter explores how
the ambiguity embedded in the final claim of the poem positions Barbauld to show-
case the caterpillar and war narratives as “mere rhetorical performances, designed
to win assent from the audience so as to reinstate her political voice of righteous
prophecy” (224). As Den Otter, and many others have noted, Barbauld often uses
undercutting wit that calls into question or problematizes her poetic arguments
(226).4 Such ambiguity embedded in the final claim of “The Caterpillar,” Den Otter
notes, presents “a relative ethics that shifts as circumstances shift, presenting an
assumed order that nevertheless is disjunctive, disrupting conventional analogies
and comfortable sensibilities with a subversive style and an abrupt conclusion that
provokes serious thought” (230). By questioning humanism on multiple levels,
“The Caterpillar” reminds us not to take for granted even our seemingly “virtuous”
acts and to be mindful of all their implications (42). We can never truly do justice to
another species, but we can, at the very least, make sincere attempts to try. As Frans
de Waal (2009) notes, if we want to understand empathy, we “need to start thinking
from the bottom up” (15).5
Like Barbauld, Robinson depicts an intertwining of flesh and feather to explore
the (un)limits of self and other. In “The Linnet’s Petition,” Robinson features a bird
3
Den Otter makes a strong case for how Barbauld was most likely referring to the tent caterpil-
lar (214).
4
Isobel Grundy notes how the multiplicity of Barbauld’s literary voices “resist dichotomy, encom-
passing both poetry and prose, and within each mode embracing public oratory and domestic chat,
intense seriousness and sly humour, the self-deprecating, the professionally confident, and the
overtly ambitious” (23-24). Louise Economides shares how Barbauld “raise[s] serious questions”
beneath her “playful veneer” (84).
5
The Age of Empathy (2010).
speaker who petitions his mistress, Stella, to set him free. Having endured captivity
in a “gaudy cage,” finding himself “without a cause confin’d,” the bird wins over his
mistress’s pity (5, 41, 27).6 He appeals to her, as well, by pointing out how much
pleasure he voluntarily imparted to her when he could freely choose to rest
“[b]eneath [her] window” or “charm” her from the “myrtle bow’r” (37, 39, 38).
Advocating for his freedom, the bird tells Stella,
Ah! what avails this gaudy cage,
Or what is life to me,
If thus confin’d, if thus distress’d,
And robb’d of liberty. (41–44)
Upon hearing his plea, Stella is moved by “kindred pity” (66). Recalling when she
first “caught the flutt’ring thing,” she remembers having “felt strange extasy” (69,
70). Much like Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about “strange kinship,” the “strange extasy”
that Robinson explores in her poem immerses her poetic subjects in a momentary
intertwining of flesh, of the same body and not the same, of the visible and the invis-
ible. The subject-object divide momentarily breaks down, as Robinson reveals the
experiential encounter of embodied perception as well as its interpretive measure.
Ted Toadvine (2009) notes that this kind of inter-animality constitutes both con-
nection and estrangement. In his conclusion to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of
Nature, Toadvine points out that “[t]o be a part of nature as chiasmic intertwining is
never to find oneself at home, therefore, but always to be rent by the play of an
inside that opens onto an outside” (135). New materialist theories reveal the elision
of boundaries among different bodies of matter. Hannah Bergthaller’s “Limits of
Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from Systems-Theoretical Perspective” shows
how entities are always already embedded in complex systems having agency
beyond the “halo” of human telos (2014, 38). Providing a brief overview of autopoi-
esis, from biology and cognition to social ecology and material ecocriticism,
Bergthaller points out how systems can self-organize, assimilate, and demonstrate
both “emergent and distributed” agency apart from what we think of as individual
volition or “external determination” (37). “The new materialists,” Bergthaller com-
ments, “rightly remind us that humans are not really ‘individuals,’ that they are not
‘indivisible units’ but temporary confederacies of material agents of different kinds
and sizes (many of which, one should add, constitute autopoietic systems in their
own right)” (48). As we see in Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining of flesh, which oper-
ates through the fabric of perception, matter is enmeshed in complexity far beyond
cognitive measure. In “The Linnet’s Petition,” the moment Stella feels the “strange
extasy” upon catching the bird, the bird is giving itself in a form of resistance (70).
The human and the animal are interconnecting well beyond cognitive perception.
6
“The Linnet’s Petition” is also a mimetic response to “The Mouse’s Petition.” Robinson began
writing poetry in her early teens, but in her Memoirs, she recounts how much Barbauld’s poetry
influenced her: “I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the
woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures” (qtd. in
Feldman 590).
98 C. A. Hornbuckle
Those “confederacies of material agents” are at work through the inter-animality of

perception (Bergthaller 2014, 48; Merleau-Ponty 2003, 189). This encounter elicits
a “strange kinship” that highlights an uncanny embodiment, which is fleeting, as
Stella’s perception of her feeling evolves into the cognition of “never [knowing] so
great a bliss, /As when she set him free” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 271; Robinson
2000, 71–72).
Throughout the poem, Robinson creates a tension between animality and human-
ity that forces her human subject to recognize the linnet’s agency in its own right.
The linnet outlines several reasons why he should not be ordained to such a “fate”
(18). By revealing to her his loss of happiness, condemned to “despair” and “every
joy bereft,” the linnet sets in motion a kind of reverse sympathetic identification (49,
52). Instead of directly encouraging her to imagine a similar fate, he beckons her to
pity his “unhappy” circumstance: “So may you never feel the loss, /Of peace, or
liberty” (57, 59–60). The linnet doesn’t wish upon her the same fate. Instead, he
points out that her actions could have much larger ramifications. His story unfolds a
history of species superiority that, at least for a brief moment, forces the human
subject to open herself to a much broader horizon of experience. In “Toward an
Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty,” Rosalyn Diprose
(2009) investigates intercorporeality as ethical possibility in a posthuman world.
Considering the symbolic nature of corporeality in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenol-
ogy, she notes how the intertwining of life (of the human and nonhuman) serves as
a perceptual event that can enable humans to be more receptive to moments of
entanglement with the nonhuman: “While Merleau-Ponty does not elaborate, we
could conjecture that, as an ethical principle, ‘wonder’ involves being receptive to
the multiplicity of becomings encountered in our entanglements, and, to take up his
work on the ‘event,’ being receptive to the transformations other entities or persons
effect in us” (15).7 Here, Diprose is referring specifically to a comment Merleau-
Ponty makes about wonder, but her point speaks to the ethical implications of recep-
tivity, reciprocity, and responsibility. The plea that Robinson’s linnet makes beckons
his mistress to encounter what Merleau-Ponty deems a “participation in and kinship
with the visible” (1968, 138). The linnet causes Stella to experience “[e]ach tender
feeling wrought” (64). Stella must physically experience her imposition reflected
back to her—at least for an instance. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]hat the presence of
the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh” (1968, 127). Robinson’s
linnet, in other words, galvanizes an entanglement that exposes the hypocrisy spe-
cies supremacy, thereby enabling the human to witness its “anthropocentric arro-
gance” (Westling 2014, 5).
Similarly, in “To the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection,” Smith demon-
strates how knowledge of nonhuman others is severely compromised when seen
only through a human lens without regard to their ecological embeddedness. Her
speaker, with “kindred merit,” laments the death of a Jamaican firefly, now existing
7
Diprose’s comment here refers to a passage in “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A
Prospectus of His Work” (15, note 54).
in isolation, as spectacle for the cabinets of the curiosi (70).8 Musing upon the fire-
fly, now alienated from its natural habitat, she journeys through an imaginary tour
of its native land, highlighting the scenes upon which this firefly’s bioluminescence
no longer shines: “How art thou alter’d! since afar, /Thou seem’dst a bright earth
wandering star; /When thy living lustre ran” (1–3). She goes on to explore a myriad
of tree and plant species, through which, when alive, the firefly may have flown:
“majestic trees,” such as “Guazume” (Theobroma guazuma, [or the] Great Cedar of
Jamaica)* or “Swietan” (Mahogani)*; the savory quality of “Pimento’s” (Myrtus
Pimento, [or] Jamaica All-spice)* “glossy green”; “rustling fields of maize and
cane” (Saccharum officinarum)*; “Granate’s” (Punica granata, [or] Pomegranate)*
“scarlet buds”; cocoa’s “avenue”; “the green Banana’s head” (Musa Paradisiacus,
[or] Plantain or Banana)* or “Shaddock’s loaded bough [a.k.a. “forbidden fruit]”*;
or the aromatic “wave” of “Coffee’s” (Coffea arabica)* “fragrant bough”;
“Plumeria’s” (Tree Jasmin)* “luscious bloom”; or “Plinia’s” (Plinia pedunculata)*
“mild perfume” (4, 5, 6, 12, 16, 38, 40, 13, 15, 16).9 By honing in on a Caribbean
environment teeming with diversity, Smith’s speaker emphasizes the sheer empti-
ness resonant in this disembodied firefly, thereby underscoring the grave necessity
of studying nonhuman animals or organisms in their own environments.
Furthermore, “To the fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a collection” invokes the absence
of Umwelt, or what Jakob von Uexküll deems as the symbiotic relationship between
an animal and its environment. Put differently, Smith has to recreate an Umwelt of
which the firefly is conspicuously absent. An organism is best understood when tak-
ing into consideration the environment in which it operates and to which it responds.
Uexküll claims, “We no longer regard animals as mere objects, but as subjects
whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting” (qtd. in Buchanen 2008,
2). In Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty, and Deleuze, Brett Buchanen (2008) explores how Umwelten are enmeshed
within a “symphony underscored by rhythms and melodies,” consisting of an “artful
play of interconnections” that reaches “outward for greater accompaniment” (28).10
Contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Umwelt in The Structure of Behavior,
Buchanen further notes that the openness of the Umwelt, and not the infinity of the
world, is the hidden source and ontological horizon of the embodied animal sub-
ject” (115). Smith’s firefly, now divorced from its Jamaican habitat and decontextu-
alized within a display of “vaunting OSTENTATION,” becomes an object of
instrumental value—a remain for human use—but whose intrinsic ecological value
is extinguished (65).
In other terms, effective ethology presupposes structural ontologies interacting
with environmental phenomena, and as Smith’s poem demonstrates, taking the
8
The eighteenth-century term for people who collected rare specimens on a fairly wide scale is
“curiosi” (sg. curioso).
9
Smith carefully footnotes the Latin names. The asterisks denote Smith’s footnoted terms, which I
have not included in quotation marks so as not to confuse citations from the verse.
10
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[e]very organism,” said Uexküll “is a mel-
ody that sings unto itself” (159).
100 C. A. Hornbuckle
firefly out of the milieu in which it operates and to which it responds negates scien-
tific and aesthetic integrity: “Never Naturalist shall view, /Dart with coruscation
bright” (36–37). The collector’s cabinet cannot recreate the biodiversity of which
the firefly used to be a part. Smith shows how the natural historian is alienated from
accurate study, equipped only with a “faded form” to which “no spark remains” (49,
50). Conversely, Smith’s speaker acknowledges a “kindred merit” with the firefly,
one that invokes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “strange kinship” (Smith 1993, 70;
Merleau-Ponty 2003, 271). She feels its estrangement and alienation. With Smith,
we find this “merit” rooted in marginalization of gender, as well (70). As many
scholars, such as Theresa M. Kelley, Donna Landry, and Mary Ellen Bellanca have
noted, eighteenth-century women writers were excluded from canonical science,
but they, nonetheless, took up natural history in their writing and art, providing
alternative views about the natural world; they “demonstrated that poetry could also
be natural history” (Landry 2000, 489).11 With remorse, Smith’s female speaker
pays tribute to the firefly’s essence, and like her own “modest worth,” as poet,
“[u]nmark’d, unhonor’d, and unknown,” she presents a kinship that dignifies nonhu-
man worth or merit (67, 68). Ironically, Smith’s poetry is the naturalist’s best access
to the firefly’s existence. Only through poetic representation, which invokes an
imaginary journey through the senses, can the naturalist observe the nonhuman
individual that once was. By commemorating the Jamaican firefly in a poetic
Umwelt, equipped with Linnaean binominal taxonomy and detailed notes, Smith
offers a “corporeal schema” that is, perhaps, more posthumanist than humanist
(Merleau-Ponty 2003, 208, 224, 225).
Smith’s “kindred merit,” Robinson’s “strange extasy,” and Barbauld’s “fellow-
ship of sense” all place the human on an ontological spectrum of embodiment that
breaks down the dialectic between human and nonhuman (Smith 1993, 70; Robinson
2000, 70; Barbauld 1994, 27). In effect, these writers level hierarchies implicit in
Enlightenment humanism, firmly entrenched in Cartesian dualism, Baconian sci-
ence, and Newtonian physics, and invite us to reconsider their poetry through a
posthumanist lens and ethics of understanding. By focusing on the intertwining of
fleshy encounters, Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith acknowledge a kinship that is
accountable to the world; it is relational and embedded (Braidotti 2013, 49). This
kinship, existing within vast a fabric of being, is both strange and familiar, some-
thing to be experienced but never truly known. The Ineinander, rests, as Merleau-
Ponty notes, in a “projection-introspection” (1968, 133). For British women
Romantic-era writers, the poetic imagination was word made flesh. David Abram
(2010) notes so eloquently,
11
For example, Theresa M. Kelley notes how Smith incorporates and challenges Linnaean nomen-
clature by disabling its “rigid binomialism” with common names (239). Mary Ellen Bellanca notes
how Dorothy Wordsworth, “[l]ike other women writers” “used anthropomorphism to imagine feel-
ing for, and confer subjectivity on, other living things” (134). Furthering Lawrence Buell’s concept
of “dual accountability,” Bellanca notes how nature journals constituted “an intricate triangle of
observers’ perceptions, cultural beliefs, and reference to material reality” (41).
To acknowledge this affinity between air and awareness, however, is to allow this curious
possibility: that the awareness that stirs within each of us is continuous with the wider
awareness that moves around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds. Every organ-
ism partakes of this awareness from its own unique angle and place within it, imbibing it
through our nostrils or through the stomata in our leaves, altering its chemistry and quality
within us before we breathe it back into the surrounding world. (223)
We, humans, have so much to learn about this continuity. And Barbauld’s,
Robinson’s, and Smith’s poetry, like many poems of the Romantic era, invite us to
perceive reciprocal relations of embodiment, Ineinander with the nonhuman, and
imagine beyond the boundaries of the human (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 214).
References
Abram, David. 2010. In the Depths of a Breathing Planet: Gaia and the Transformation of
Experience. In Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of
Crisis, ed. Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, 221–242. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Edited by William McCarthy
and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Bellanca, Mary Ellen. 2007. Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Bergthaller, Hannes. 2014. Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn form a Systems-
Theoretical Perspective. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann,
37–50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Buchanen, Brett. 2008. Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press.
De Waal, Frans. 2009. An Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York:
Three Rivers Press.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2009. Toward an Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-
Ponty. Parrhesia 8: 7–19.
Economides, Louise. 2016. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature.
New York: Palgrave.
Feldman, Paula R., ed. 1997. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grundy, Isobel. 2014. ‘Slip-shod Measure’ and ‘Language of Gods’: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range.
In Anna Letitia Barbauld: New perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy, 23–36.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Guirfa, Martin. 2013. Cognition with Few Neurons: Higher-order Learning in Insects. Trends in
Neuroscience 36 (5): 285–294.
Iovino, Serenella. 2016. Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism: Introduction. Relations:
Beyond Anthropomorphism 4 (1): 11–20.
Kelley, Theresa M. 2003. Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and ‘Material’ Culture. In Romantic
Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman, 223–254. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Landry, Donna. 2000. Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807. Huntington
Library Quarterly 63 (4): 467–489.
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden Fisher. Boston:
Beacon Press.
———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes form the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Oliver, Kelly. 2008. Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals. Epoché 13 (1):
101–120.
Otter, Alice G. Den. 2004. Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and ‘The
Caterpillar’. Studies in Romanticism 43 (2): 209–230.
Robinson, Mary. 2000. Selected Poems. In Peterborough, ed. Judith Pascoe. Broadview: Canada.
Silberstein, Michael. 2015. Matter, Mind and Meaning. Lecture. Filmed October 12, 2015 at
Wesleyan University. http://videos.wesleyan.edu/detail/video/4568092549001. Accessed 30
Apr 2016.
Smith, Charlotte. 1993. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford
University Press.
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University Press.
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New York: Fordham University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Part III
Body, Culture and Society
The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s
Idea of Psychical Distance
from the Perspective of Levinas’s Concept
of the Aesthetic
Miloš Ševčík
Abstract In this paper, I analyse Edward Bullough’s standard concept of psychical

distance as a general aesthetic principle from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’s
philosophy of the aesthetic. First of all, I point to the peculiarities of Bullough’s own
description of psychical distance. He emphasizes that distanced content, that is, the
content of aesthetic phenomena, comes upon us as a “revelation,” which is neither
subjective nor objective, neither individual nor general, neither personal nor indif-
ferent. Distanced content is thus outside the correlation, which forms experience as
emerging from subjective intention to an object. Further, I point out that Levinas
describes such a revelation of the “outside” as “exoticism” of the aesthetic event.
This exoticism means extracting a thing from the realm of objects, which is the
world, and suspending the relationship between the thing and the subject. I, how-
ever, also highlight Bullough’s statements that with a distanced attitude, we inter-
pret affections as characteristics of phenomena that have a “postulating” character.
Such a view is, surprisingly, compatible with Levinas’s idea of the essential aes-
thetic category of rhythm. My intention is thus to demonstrate that Bullough sensi-
tively circumscribed the fundamental features of the aesthetic, which are recorded
by Levinas.
Keywords Bullough · Levinas · Art · Aisthesis · Exoticism · Distance
It is fair to say that Edward Bullough’s essay “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in

Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” (Bullough 1912) is a canonical work of twentieth-
century aesthetics. Various ideas of this essay have been interpreted and employed
in aesthetic theories many times. Some have criticized and rejected Bullough’s
statements; some have shown the stimulating nature of Bullough’s concept despite
its limitations and, sometimes, obscurity; others have tried to employ Bullough’s
concept productively, and have been profoundly approving, though seeking to make
M. Ševčík (*)
Charles University, Prague, Czechia
e-mail: milos.sevcik@ff.cuni.cz

Switzerland AG 2023
106 M. Ševčík
Bullough’s solution to the problems of psychical distance more precise and persua-
sive or trying to apply it in directions that were omitted by Bullough himself. The
most famous campaign against the concept of psychical distance was led by George
Dickie (1964). Allan Casebier (1971) sought to employ the concept productively
when he differentiated between emotional and attentional distance with respect to a
work of art. Sheila Dawson (1961) had a highly positive and welcoming response to
the concept.
The variety of approaches to Bullough’s concept of psychical distance suggests,
on the one hand, the noteworthiness of this theory, its persuasiveness, fair-
sightedness, and profundity, and, on the other hand, its intricacy and ambiguity. In
my paper I follow several remarkable passages of Bullough’s essay, which may
serve as a new basis for the interpretation of Bullough’s theory. My interpretation
goes beyond what Bullough explicitly says in some passages of his essay; however,
this interpretation highlights what is suggested by other claims of Bullough and,
mainly, by the manner he employs – and also his refusal, as I seek to demonstrate –
to use the fundamental terms. My intention is to show that the specific manner
Bullough employs and refuses the fundamental terms points to the fact that what is
psychically distanced is beyond the subjective and the objective. I argue that what is
psychically distanced is thus exotic, as Levinas says when describing the nature of
aesthetic event.
To present the fundamental features of his theory of psychical distance Bullough
uses the example of a passenger on a ship surrounded by dense fog. The situation of
the passenger is, on the one hand, a source of fear and worry, because it is poten-
tially or even actually dangerous, but, on the other hand, this situation becomes the
source of intense aesthetic enjoyment, if the psychical distance starts to take effect.
The key part of Bullough’s description of the passenger’s situation is as follows:
It is a difference of outlook, due – if such a metaphor is permissible – to the insertion of
distance. This distance appears to lie between our own self and its affections, using the lat-
ter term in its broadest sense as anything which affects our being, bodily or spiritually, e.g.,
as sensation, perception, emotional state or idea. Usually, though not always, it amounts to
the same thing to say that the Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are the
sources or vehicles of such affections.
Thus, in the fog, the transformation by Distance is produced in the first instance by putting
the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self – by allowing it to
stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends – in short, by looking at it “objec-
tively,” as it has often been called, by permitting only such reactions on our part as empha-
sise the “objective” features of the experience, and by interpreting even our “subjective”
affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon
(Bullough 1912, 89).
From a certain point of view, an interpretation could be offered which would high-
light the fact that, because of the intervention of psychical distance, the person’s
mental perspective is broadened since phenomena and their corresponding affec-
tions are disconnected from the practical self, from the needs or aims of the practical
self. In such an interpretation, the aesthetic self thus remains; it is different from the
practical self and emerges because of the distancing of the practical self from objects
The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s Idea of Psychical Distance from the Perspective… 107
and affections. According to such an interpretation, the aesthetic self looks at things
and feels affections objectively, that is, with no relation to the practical purposes of
the usual self. But it is clear that whereas in the first part of the cited passage, the
presence of the self, that is, the personality, is admitted, in the second part of the
passage, the presence of the self is called into question by putting the subjective
nature of affections into quotation marks. In this passage, it is also suggested that,
with distance, affections should be attributed to phenomena rather than to personal-
ity. The objectivity of phenomena, however, is put into quotation as well, and this
clearly indicates the inadequacy of this description. I conclude that because of dis-
tance, a situation emerges in which the employment of the terms “subjective” and
“objective” is inadequate. I argue that, in this particular situation, Bullough is
ascribing the central role to affection. On the one hand, the term “affection” is used
to describe everything the subject experiences or conceives; but this term is also
used to describe the movement of the expropriation of all experiences and mental
creations of the subject.
This expropriation is, after all, confirmed by Bullough in the passage which
emphasizes that aesthetic experience has its centre of gravity not in the self, that is,
the person or subject, but in itself, that is, in the experience or the object that medi-
ates the experience. It is for this reason that “whether I like it” in matters concerning
beauty is “like a somnambulist being called by name” (Bullough 1912, 108). Such
a question, Bullough says, “throws the whole aesthetic mechanism out of gear”
(Bullough 1912, 108–109). He then makes the following “paradoxical” statement:
“the more intense the aesthetic experience, the less one ‘likes,’ consciously, the
experience” (Bullough 1912, 109). So, according to this statement, the most intense
aesthetic absorption is the less conscious; it is an experience similar to that of a
somnambulist and not the experience of the actual or waking self. I would add,
however, that it is highly questionable to discuss the somnambulist self as if it were
endowed with powers similar to those of the waking, actual self, as if it were con-
scious of its experiences and feelings and able to conceive of notions or visions in
the same way. Another way to put the question is: can beauty be considered an
object of an experience, if that experience is gained by the conscious, waking, or
actual self? I suppose that the answer must be no: it cannot.
The suddenness or unexpectedness of the commencement of psychical distance
and the nature of the emerging distanced sphere is reflected in Bullough’s term
“revelation” (Bullough 1912, 90). On the one hand, this revelation consists in
“impressions apart from our own self which is impressed” (Bullough 1912, 89),
Bullough thus supposes that such impressions are not felt by the subject and can be
described as subjective only if subjectivity is put into quotation marks. On the other
hand, Bullough also suggests that revelation consists in aspects of objects, which
“do not touch us immediately and practically” (Bullough 1912, 89). Thus, such
aspects belong to objects “objectively” only if this objectivity is put into quotation
marks, because such an objectivity of the revelation of aspects of objects is not
compatible with the objectivity we approach as the practical or recognizing self or
the subject.
108 M. Ševčík
According to Bullough, such a revelation of the distanced sphere embraces vari-

ous types of qualities of phenomena. In his famous example of the ship in dense fog,
Bullough speaks about a “veil surrounding” the passenger “with an opaqueness as
of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into
weird grotesqueness” (Bullough 1912, 88). He also describes “the curious creamy
smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of dan-
ger” (Bullough 1912, 88). He also suggests, however, that such a hypocritical denial
is combined with the “strange solitude and remoteness from the world” (Bullough
1912, 88–89). Finally, he claims that this remoteness from the world may, in its
“uncanny mingling of repose and terror,” acquire “a flavour of concentrated poi-
gnancy and delight” (Bullough 1912, 89). I would emphasize that, in this descrip-
tion of Bullough’s, the aspects of a situation which we would tend to classify as
objective are mingled with the aspects that we would tend to term as subjective. But
the qualities peculiar to such a situation cannot properly be ascribed either to objec-
tive relations or to subjective states. The situation affects the passenger as a revela-
tion which does not relate to him or her as to the self of practical or theoretical
activity or the self of affective experience. The situation, then, goes beyond the
correlation of the subjective and the objective. In this description of Bullough’s,
qualities of colors and shapes are mingled with affections of delight and terror; the
qualities of the situation are thus both subjective and objective, that is, they are sub-
jective and objective only in quotation marks; otherwise they are neither objective
nor subjective. According to Bullough, the qualities of the situation establish rela-
tions that go beyond relations observable from the perspective of the subject both in
the objective and the subjective domain.
Going beyond both the objective and the subjective in the distanced sphere in this
way is repeatedly emphasized in Bullough’s essay. For example:
no work of Art can be genuinely “objective” in the sense in which this term might be
applied to a work on history or to a scientific treatise; nor can it be “subjective” in the ordi-
nary acceptance of that term, as a personal feeling, a direct statement of a wish or belief, or
a cry of passion is subjective. “Objectivity” and “subjectivity” are a pair of opposites which
in their mutual exclusiveness when applied to Art soon lead to confusion (Bullough
1912, 90).
The reality of art could thus be conceived as ambiguous, neither subjective nor
objective. But Bullough’s claims in this essay indicate that he intends to conceive of
the situation of distance not as ambiguous, but as simple. It seems that the ambigu-
ity of this situation is suggested by the unsuitability of the traditional terms Bullough
uses. He is clearly struggling to demonstrate that it is necessary to dismiss inherited,
traditional terminological pairs and to regard the distance as something that merges
traditional dichotomies because it surpasses them. He says: “Art has with equal
vigour been declared alternately ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic,’ ‘sensual’ and ‘spiritual,’
‘individualistic’ and ‘typical’. Between the defense of either terms of such antithe-
ses most aesthetic theories have vacillated. It is one of the contentions of this essay
that such opposites find their synthesis in the more fundamental conception of
Distance” (Bullough 1912, 90).
For example, Bullough states that “the appeal of Art is sensuous, even sensual,
must be taken as an indisputable fact”; but such a ‘sensuousness of Art’ is freed
from the “grossly personal and practical elements” by the action of Distance
(Bullough 1912, 107). Bullough says that the “sensual side of Art” is “purified,
spiritualized, ‘filtered’ by Distance” (Bullough 1912, 107). The “transmutation” by
Distance (Bullough 1912, 107), which Bullough speaks of, means the development
of the spiritual on the basis of the sensuous; the penetration of the appeal of the
spiritual is derived from the unfiltered sensuous in its personal and practical appeal,
but such a sensuous is filtered by distance. The distance thus creates a sphere that is
outside the spiritual and the sensuous as traditionally conceived, the sphere where
the spiritual and the sensuous are undistinguishable from each other or, rather,
where something different from both the spiritual and the sensuous appeals. If
Bullough’s statements are taken at face value, the sphere created by distance is out
of reach both of spirit as an ability to generate immaterial realities as thoughts,
notions, and images and of the ability to intend practically and personally bodily
objects. I would emphasize that a similar analysis could be conducted on other pairs
of contradictory terms, from which Bullough intends to delimitate the distanced
sphere. Clearly, Bullough has serious difficulty presenting the simplicity of the
nature of the distanced sphere. This difficulty becomes particularly evident, for
example, when he approaches the problem of the relationship between the general
and the concrete. He returns to this problem several times, as if he senses that the
solution he has come up with were insufficient. In one passage of the essay, he
opposes generality in art, and identifies it with undesirable abstractness; in other
passage, he renders the generality of art as being in opposition to abstractness, and
he states that such generality is fundamentally connected with art. Bullough thus
ascribes to art the non-abstract, or in fact the non-general generality, together with
individuality free from personal concreteness.
I certainly do not wish to say that it is impossible to find in Bullough’s investiga-
tion something different from what I have just sought to emphasize, or even contra-
dictory to what I have sought to highlight. The intricacy and incompleteness of
Bullough’s statements present the interpreter with a task that can be discharged in
many different ways. It is even probable that Bullough himself would view with
suspicion the interpretation that I have tried to suggest. After all, he conceives of
distance as psychical; he speaks of distance as the “essential characteristic of aes-
thetic consciousness,” as a “special mental attitude towards the experience,” and as
an “outlook” upon experience (Bullough 1912, 118). From such expressions, one
could easily derive the assumption that the subject-object relation or correlation is
the fundament of any discussion on distance. Nevertheless, I would argue, the spe-
cial intellectual sensitivity or clairvoyant intuition, which is perhaps typical of inge-
nious thinkers, led Bullough a bit farther. He is constantly dissatisfied with all the
terms he uses, as if what he wanted to grasp by means of these terms (which he both
uses and shows to be problematic) remained ungraspable.
I wish now to show that Bullough’s original, clairvoyant concept of psychical
distance is surprisingly similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s description of the aesthetic
event and that such a similarity could be observed in several respects. I highlight
110 M. Ševčík
that both thinkers emphasize the expulsion of subjectivity from the process and
results of artistic creation, and they show that such a creation has a postulat-
ing nature.
At the most general level it should be emphasized that if the distanced sphere
emerges as a revelation detached both from object and subject, then this revelation
is outside the common correlation by which the experience is formed and outside
the intentionality of the subject towards the object. The revelation of such an outside
is described by Levinas as the revelation of the “exoticism” of the aesthetic event.
In his Existence and Existents (Levinas 2001), published in 1947, Levinas states
that the “exoticism” of art or of the aesthetic event in general is identical with
extracting things from the realm of objects and suspending the relationship between
the thing and the subject. Levinas says:
Things refer to an inwardness as parts of the given world, objects of knowledge or objects
of use, caught up in the current of practice where their alterity is hardly noticeable. Art
makes them stand out from the world and thus extracts them from this belongingness to a
subject. […] What is called the disinterestedness of art does not only refer to the neutraliza-
tion of the possibilities of action. Exoticism modifies the contemplation itself. The “objects”
are outside, but this outside does not relate to an “interior”; they are not already naturally
“possessed”. A painting, a statue, a book are objects of our world, but through them the
things represented are extracted from our world (Levinas 2001, 46).
In his concept of the exotic, Levinas approaches the nature of the relation of the
artistic “representation” to the world. Things are part of our world, but they are
extracted from our world by means of artistic representation. The nature of artistic
production thus lies in extraction, in the presentation of things without any relation
to the objective pole of experience and any relation to the subject as well. Levinas
describes this extraction as an absence of forms, because forms transmute exterior-
ity into inwardness. Colors, sounds, or the world of the artwork do not refer to
objects, do not cover objects that are graspable and conceivable by subject; on the
contrary, they uncover things in their exotic exteriority. It is precisely in this absence
of the transmutation of the exteriority into inwardness that the aesthetic event
emerges. This absence of the appropriation of an object by a subject is described as
aisthesis, sensation (Levinas 2001, 46–47). Sensation does not lead to the objective
order, and for that reason also presents an obstacle to the establishment of the “sub-
jective order” (Levinas 2001, 47). In this context, Levinas points out that the
endeavor to preserve true exoticism in the artistic sphere is identical with the strict
removal of the “servile function of expression” of the personality from the artwork.
The artistic sphere is the result of the expulsion of the expression of the soul of the
artist or the soul of the “landscape or things” (Levinas 2001, 49).
I point out that similar references to the expulsion of the soul or of inwardness
from the aesthetic sphere also appear in Bullough’s considerations on psychical
distance. He emphasizes that artistic production is neither the direct nor the indirect
expression of the artist’s personality (Bullough 1912, 113); it is not a reflection of
the artist’s “experiences or convictions” (Bullough 1912, 114). It is a “fundamental”
mistake, he says, “to identify straightway the artist and the man”. Bullough says that
such identification does not correspond to the “interpolation of Distance” which lies
between the conception of the artist and the conception of man (Bullough 1912,
114). Such a nonhuman nature of the artist and his or her production is illustrated by
the example of the process of dramatic production. Bullough emphasizes that in this
process that the fundamental difference and incongruity occurs between the “emo-
tional idea” (that is usually suggested by the actual experience) and the dramatic
“situation” that is made up of the “interplay of certain characters” (Bullough 1912,
115). During this process, the “man’s” emotional idea – that is, the reflection of a
concrete and practical self – “condenses itself” into a dramatic situation, or is
“sucked up” by the characters (Bullough 1912, 116). But the artist is altogether
“powerless to direct or even to influence” (Bullough 1912, 115) this process. In this
respect the artist is a passive participant in the process of production. The life of this
passive artist is incompatible with the life of the active man; when the man dies, the
artist is born. The result of this change is the “distanced finished production,” the
artist’s sphere “divorced” from “actuality” (Bullough 1912, 116). In this divorce,
the “personal affections”– “whether idea or complex experience” – are “separated
from concrete personality,” are filtered by the “extrusion of its personal aspects” and
by the “throwing out of gear of its personal potency and significance” (Bullough
1912, 116). The artist’s sphere includes filtered and thus intensively appealing affec-
tions. The reason for this intensive appeal is that distanced affections are free from
a restrictive connection with the personality of an artist and the actuality of the
models of artistic production.
Concerning the artist’s inability to control or even to influence the process of
modeling it, however, the artist’s sphere is akin to the sphere of the spectator of art.
The distanced sphere is endowed with a particular “quality” of appeal, which is
inherent in the relation both of the artist and the spectator to art (Bullough 1912,
117). Bullough says that this relation of “mere beholder” or “producing artist” is
“impersonal” and thus “personally intensive” (Bullough 1912, 117). The appeal of
the distanced sphere is of a “postulating character” because it is beyond the “sphere
of individual interests” both of the artist and the spectator (Bullough 1912, 117).
This intensive, postulating appeal of art, which is neither subjective nor objective,
does not concern the personality of the artist or the spectator.
This postulating nature of the impersonal aesthetic sphere is also suggested by
Bullough’s considerations of on the aesthetic appreciation of color. He argues that
aesthetic appreciation differs from the appreciation of color, which relates to the
personal enjoyment of the “organic” effects of color (Bullough 1912, 110). If this
type of appreciation prevails, anyone, when asked why he or she likes a certain
color, will reply that it is because the color strikes him or her as “warm or cold,
stimulating or soothing, heavy or light” (Bullough 1912, 110). The aesthetic appre-
ciation of color, by contrast, does not result from such organic effects and personal
enjoyment. In aesthetic appreciation, the qualities of colors are attributed with a
“kind of personality”; they are “energetic, lively, serious, pensive, melancholic,
affectionate, subtle, reserved, stealthy, treacherous, brutal” (Bullough 1912, 110).
For Bullough such “characters” of colors are neither “mere imaginings,” nor “acci-
dental associations”; they “follow definite rules in their application” (Bullough
1912, 110). In aesthetic appreciation, organic effects are transformed into
112 M. Ševčík
“attributes of colours” (Bullough 1912, 110). By means of “distancing,” personal

affections are transformed into impersonal ones, into affections of colors. In the
aesthetic sphere, affections and qualities are attributed with personality even though
such affections and qualities, of course, have no real personality. Such an attributed
impersonal personality even postulates the way it is characterized.
I propose that a parallel emphasis on the postulating character of the aesthetic
sphere is also present in Levinas’s considerations of rhythm. Rhythm is a general
aesthetic category, because it captures a fundamental feature of the aesthetic sphere;
it expresses the fundamental passivity of both the artist and the recipient of the art-
work. In his 1948 essay “Reality and its Shadow”, Levinas maintains: “Rhythm
represents a unique situation, in which we cannot speak of consent, assumption, or
freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is a
part of its own representation” (Levinas 1989, 132–133) According to Levinas, this
catching up and carrying away occurs not “despite” subject, because in rhythm
there is no longer a subject; rather it occurs in the “passage” from subject to “ano-
nymity” (Levinas 1989, 133). Rhythm is not unconscious, because its automatic
character remains “present”; but it is not conscious either, because, in rhythm, con-
sciousness is “paralyzed in its freedom,” “totally absorbed in the playing” (Levinas
1989, 133) According to Levinas, rhythm thus reveals that the aesthetic sphere is
“outside the conscious and the unconscious,” because it is a sphere of the objective
position of the subject or a sphere of the “exteriority of the inward” (Levinas 1989,
133). The fundamental passivity of participating in the subordination to rhythm is
evident in the recipient, who dances to a song, listens to poetry, or admires a picture.
But it is also present in the artist. The “possessed or inspired,” maker of a song, a
poem, or a picture “listens to a muse”. Levinas argues that what is called the “artist’s
choice” is the natural selection of facts and traits. The artistic creation is governed
by its artist’s freely taken decision; it is “solicited” by rhythm emerging in reality
(Levinas 1989, 133). Rhythm always resounds “impersonally” (Levinas 1989, 133).
But the impersonal nature of rhythm is different from objectivity, which, by con-
trast, is graspable and conceivable, because the aesthetic sphere insists on the
absence of the object, as if the “object had died, were degraded, were disincarnated’
(Levinas 1989, 136). The representation is broken up both in classical works, which
are only seemingly attached to objects, and in modern works, which purposively
destroy objects because they want to be “pure painting” or “pure poetry” (Levinas
1989, 134).
Similarly to Levinas, Bullough emphasizes the postulating character of the dis-
tanced sphere as a fundamental feature of both the artist’s and the spectator’s con-
tact with this sphere. The overwhelming appeal of the aesthetic sphere cannot be
correctly described using the traditional terminological opposites, because it goes
beyond both subjectivity and objectivity, and also beyond both the individual nature
of experiences and the abstract nature of concepts.
I have tried to demonstrate that Bullough insistently suggests that the nature of
the distanced sphere lies somewhere between these opposites; yet he offers no new
terms for a more suitable description of this “in between” area. These terms, how-
ever, are provided by later thinkers, of whom Levinas seems to be one of the most
significant. My suggestion from this point view is that the distanced sphere, as
described by Bullough, is exotic in the sense of in between the subjective and the
objective, or rather outside of the subjective and the objective. The distanced sphere
is the sphere of the revelation of aisthesis.
References
Bullough, Edward. 1912. ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle. British
Journal of Psychology 5 (2): 87–118.
Casebier, Allan. 1971. The concept of Aesthetic Distance. Personalist 52: 70–91.
Dawson, Sheila. 1961. ‘Distancing’ as an Aesthetic Principle. Australian Journal of Philosophy
39: 155–174.
Dickie, George. 1964. The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude. America Philosophical Quarterly 1
(1): 56–65.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Reality and its Shadow. In The Levinas Reader. Edited by Séan Hand.
Translated by Alphonso Lingis, 130–143. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2001. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion
in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love
Abigail Hess
Abstract In Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love, the freaks do not hide. Geeks are
sideshow performers who are the result of human interest in the manipulation of
bodies. Dunn’s exploration of the human perception of freakish bodies should be
studied in the context of posthumanism, which requires to give the body a more
crucial role as the vehicle for perception of the spaces through which it moves.
Particularly, I am writing to join the posthuman conversation to Dunn’s work using
ideas primarily originating from thinkers who were influential to modern posthu-
man studies, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault as well as
Carey Wolfe, Katherine Hayes, and Donna Haraway who are actively engaged in
the posthuman discussion and have taken the chance to distinguish posthuman
thought from other forms of literary criticism. By delving into the alignment of
social and physical spaces through which freakish bodies exist and disappear, where
they are safe and where they are in danger, we can we further understand what it
means to be human.
Keywords Dematerialization · Embodied experience · Reflexivity · Hayles ·

Foucault · Freakshow · Merleau-Ponty
The presentation of freakish bodies in carnivals and sideshows used to be quite

common but began to disappear as medicinal science found names and causes for
many of the performers’ conditions. Audiences have experienced guilt and discom-
fort at viewing individuals who could now be considered handicapped or exploited
by show managers. The movement of the freakish body from performative stages to
disguised, hidden states within communal space takes a similar course to thinker
Michel Foucault’s (1977) study of how punishment moved its focus away from the
body to the mind—or soul—in the “non-corporal system” of the shadow box prison
(16). In Katherine Dunn’s (1983) novel Geek Love, the freakish body is transferred
back onto a public stage, portraying bodies that are bestial, surgically altered and
A. Hess (*)
Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA

Switzerland AG 2023
116 A. Hess
preserved. Dunn pushes her characters and their bodies to their extremes until they
are almost unrecognizable as human, testing for the fragile stitching where the
freakish body is allowed to be observed and where it should be hidden. In doing so,
she explores the spaces of inclusion and exclusion of the freakish body, which
pushes the boundaries of social acceptance and pushes freakish bodies into the
realm of isolation. Dunn’s novel resists the modern American cry for the polite pro-
tection of the disfigured that ultimately leads them to seclusion. Although her frank
and unrelenting writing makes readers uncomfortable, by keeping the tortured body
centered, in visceral detail, Dunn reveals hidden social systems through which the
body is punished today.
This punishment echoes the works of Michel Foucault, whose idea is important
for the analysis of Geek Love. But before Foucault wrote about the panopticon of
the prison, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) wrote Phenomenology of Perception and
discusses many ideas of the body and its crucial role in human experience eventu-
ally used by posthumanism. He advocates for the body as a prerequisite for a con-
scious understanding of the self, soul, and true method for interacting with the
world. He asks, “Can I not find in the body some threads that the internal organs
send to the brain and that are instituted by nature in order to give the soul the oppor-
tunity to sense its body?” (78). For Merleau-Ponty, we must search for this method
of perception that takes the body into consciousness, an introspection of the physi-
cal. Otherwise, we are doomed to an existence where “Consciousness of the body
and of the soul are thereby repressed, and the body again becomes that highly pol-
ished machine that the ambiguous notion of behavior had almost made us forget”
(78). Ultimately inspiring Michel Foucault, who eventually popularized embodi-
ment, Merleau-Ponty’s writing is crucial as we understand how the bodily experi-
ence, especially the estranged experience within a freakish body like those of
Dunn’s characters, tell us more about humanity as they move through the world.
Foucault agrees with Merleau-Ponty that the body has a crucial role to play in
determining the consciousness of life and self. Rather than focusing on the body as
the perceiver, Foucault is interested in the ways the body has been used as a subject
to be perceived. Part one of Michel Foucault’s (1977) Discipline & Punish: The
Birth of the Prison is called “Torture” and is broken into two chapters, “The Body
of the Condemned” and “The Spectacle of the Scaffold”. In his introduction Foucault
recounts a particularly violent public execution of an individual who is burned, torn
apart with metal forceps, drawn and quartered, and then burned again. He doesn’t
leave out the excruciating details of how the executioner struggled to rip apart the
strips of skin and muscle or how the horses were not strong enough to quarter the
body and the executioners had to saw the limbs to start them off (3–4).
Foucault (1977) places this vivid example in the forefront of his reader’s mind
and then traces the history of the movement from public execution and torture to the
impenetrable modern prison system where punishment is blocked from the public
eye and operates separate from it. Public punishment was deemed to be grotesque,
offensive, and a social recreation of the criminal’s crimes. And so, once moved to
the shadow box of the prison, punishment became “a less immediately physical
kind” (8) that shifted its focus from the body and “physical pain” (8) to an
Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love 117
amorphous idea that uses the body as an “instrument or intermediary: if one inter-
venes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the indi-
vidual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property” (4–9). For
Foucault, there is also a tremendous, if not equal, horror in moving punishment
away from the body to the mind—or soul—in this new “non-corporal system” (16).
Dunn’s (1983) Geek Love is packed with freakish bodies either born fantastic, or
created by the Binewski family themselves through genetic manipulation. Olympia
Binewski, the narrator, is an albino-hunchback-dwarf born from one of her parents’
experiments with self-selection. Her mother consumes a regimen of chemicals and
other drugs during gestation in the hopes of creating a sideshow freak, interesting
enough for a single-act in the family carnival. Alas, Olympia is deemed ugly by her
family’s standards, but is not freakish enough to have her own show like her flipper-
limbed brother Arturo, the Aqua Boy, or her twin Siamese sisters Iphy and Elly. And
so, she must prove her devotion to her family and their Fabulon by finding her own
unique talent, using her alluring voice to draw in the crowd as an apprentice to her
father, the outside barker whose role is to attract an audience from the midway into
the freak show tent.
While Mrs. and Mr. Binewski have no physical deformities of their own, their
children cannot easily hide their unique bodies in public. Even though Olympia
does disguise herself in public life as a grown woman with a hat, glasses, and “goat
wig” (Dunn 1983, 12) she still gets stares from passersby on her daily route to work.
In Merleau-Ponty’s introduction of Phenomenology of Perception, he acknowledges
the limits of embodied perception and how he “can see one object insofar as objects
form a system or a world, and insofar as each of them arranges the others around
itself like spectators of its hidden aspects and as the guarantee of their permanence”
(1945, 71). Because we live in a multi-dimensional world, we can only notice sides
of objects, the outer shells and angles of passersby on the street. Understanding that
there is more to perceive than what a single gaze allows helps to create the world in
association with other passersby in the same plane. Although only part of Olympia
can be perceived and although she covers most of her body while in public, her
physical difference is still unmistakable. Bestial bodies are so misshapen from the
normal human body that they are at once noticeable; they meet a threshold of change
in shape that causes onlookers to gawk and disrupts passersby in action.
Roger Lund explores the possible causes of the human disassociation from
dwarfs, hunchbacks, and persons with physical deformities. He looks mostly at
writings by authors and poets during the eighteenth century, which he calls a “cal-
lous” (2005, 92) age where mockery of the deformed was very common by persons
of all classes and associations. Lund argues that deformed persons were considered
inhuman during this time period because their bodies do not follow the argument of
design, which dictates that nature “display[s] a visible and unmistakable beauty and
order” (2005, 94). Because deformed bodies are often not symmetrical, they cause
a disturbance in the observer’s view of nature and stand out annoyingly like a warp
in a glass or a wrinkle in a shirt (2005, 94–95). The difference between a bestial
body and a normal one, is that the shape is distorted enough to cause a repeated
experience of disturbance.
118 A. Hess
Thus, Olympia describes the stare of the passerby as the “ice moment” (Dunn
1983, 14) where the observer notices the freak, pauses, and is immediately ashamed
at having done so. A similar experience happens when an observer passes a beggar.
Eyes are diverted, and a sense of guilt is felt. However, the passerby feels guilt at the
beggar for not donating money or offering any help, while the passerby of the freak
feels guilt for noticing their existence in the first place, the fact that they are differ-
ent from other unobtrusive bodies around them. This noticing is not a conscious
mental act; instead, the experience is much like Taylor Carmen’s (2012) description
in the forward of Phenomenology of Perception, it derives from “skillful bodily
responsiveness and spontaneity in direct engagement with the world” (5). Somehow,
the recognition of freakish bodies is highly attached to the normal plane of percep-
tion stationed by the structure of the body norm. Olympia is a dwarf, and because of
this bodily deformity, her movement exists on a lower plane than that of most other
passersby. In the same way that one might notice the swift movement of a mouse
scurrying across the floor from the periphery, Olympia’s stature attracts attention
with her isolated intersection across the bottom of the normative plane of sight.
In Olympia’s description of this occurrence, thawing out of the ice moment
involves sharing the experience with others and coming up with a reason for the
interruption. They ask, where did these freaks come from? Olympia imagines they
suppose her and her mother “are residents of an institutional halfway house, or that
the circus is in town” (Dunn 1983, 14). Here, Olympia strikes upon two spaces in
which the bestial body is expected to be found. The ice moment does not occur
under settings where the bestial body is meant to be the primary focus. In what
Merleau-Ponty (1945) calls the “object-horizon structure” (70) or perspective,
Olympia’s body uses this structure as a means to recede into the background or
unveil herself into the foreground. In the introduction to Phenomenology of
Perception Donald Landes (2012) notes “the movements of the body or the apparent
sizes of objects do not cause the structures of the visual field, but they motivate
them” (39). Olympia’s difference in size and shape motivates her unveil. Because of
her freakish body, she has less control of where and when she moves between the
hidden and active lines of sight. In either case, because her figure is highly unique
from those around her, she is ultimately isolated everywhere, whether she hides in
the shadows or when she is drawn into the light.
Lund (2005) notices that the eighteenth-century public culture was less guilty
about laughing at physical deformity and traveling sideshows, which were much
more popular than they are today. Dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins,
the armless, and the limbless found wealth and security in displaying their unique
bodies. Branded as anatomical wonders and dressed for high-class society, these
freaks found employment where, otherwise, they would not be able to. As medicine
advanced throughout the twentieth century, doctors found causes for the conditions
of famous freaks like the pinheads or people with large growths or missing digits.
Instead of marvels, freaks were more rightly deemed patients. And this understand-
ing allowed for less bestial bodies to be born with advances in prenatal care. The
sideshows all but disappeared as they offended the public’s collective sentimental-
ity. Rachel Adams (2001) opens Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural
Imagination by arguing that even “During the period of their decline, [sideshows]
maintained a firm hold on the imaginations of many Americans who had visited
them in better days. This imaginative afterlife gave rise to a certain paradox: as
actual freak shows were evicted from culture, their representational currency multi-
plied, granting them symbolic importance” (2). Adams describes this afterlife as a
world where the average person yearns to see the spectacular, the bally line, the
freaks on stage. Cultural memory of the sideshows spikes curiosity, but shows them-
selves are gone and the proper space in which the masses are allowed to stare has
been stripped away.
In Dunn’s novel (1983), the freaks live during this time after the sideshows were
no longer actively traveling across the country. The deformed are primarily civilians
rather than performers and the average person does not see the bestial in public or
daily life. The Binewski family lives normally within the confines of their trailer
(the domestic home) or the sideshow (the stage). One day, when Mrs. Binewski tells
her children that they will all go out to the store together, the eldest, Arty, asks her
“Do you think it’s a good idea if we all go” (56)? He then makes a point to choose
his wheelchair rather than the rubber pads for his belly that he uses to slither across
the ground and clarifies, “It’s easier in public” (57). Arty knows he can’t use the
mode of transportation that he prefers in his domestic life, because it will never have
been seen before by the inhabitants of the outside word. His small comment fore-
shadows the extreme reaction from the social world. Dunn does not just re-invoke
the ice moment, instead, one of the most commonplace public spaces—the store—
becomes the most dangerous place for the freak children. As they get out of the
family van, they are seen by another man in the parking lot who, horrified by the site
of the creatures filing from the vehicle, grabs his gun and opens fire, trying to kill
them all (58–59).
There is blood and smoke, tears, a mother begs for her children’s safety, all nar-
rated by Olympia when she was only six years old. The drastic change between
spaces of safety and danger, of living and trespassing are immediately made appar-
ent by the extremity of the situation. In this scene, Arturo, who chooses to publicize
himself as being a combination of man and seal, morphs further into this hybridity
as he senses the danger before it happens and is ultimately hunted like animals are.
In What is Posthumanism, Wolfe (2010) acknowledges the posthuman interest in the
human-animal relationship and argues that “we can no longer talk of the body or
even, for that matter, of a body in the traditional sense” any longer (23). Dunn
(1983) exaggerates this hybridity as the children are instantly mourned as both chil-
dren and the hunted, freaks, and an endangered species. Though Dunn is not directly
exploring the notion of posthumanism, this work could be important posthuman
analysis as scenes like the parking lot shooting show how the freakish body’s move-
ment through space changes characters from a human family to desperate animals.
As the spaces become more dangerous, the characters morph from their confident
personas as super-humans to sub-human prey.
As an adult, Olympia travels the city alone, in semi-disguise, moving as quickly
and quietly as possible. She spends time only at her work as a radio personality,
where her body is invisible, and her home where she is solitary. While she grew up
120 A. Hess
in the carnival, she could reveal herself freely, living within community of her fam-
ily. There, her bodily presence was wanted and fit the pattern of randomness that a
freak show provides. If Olympia and her brothers and sisters were to stand in a line
up, the eyes focusing on them would move erratically across their drastically dispa-
rate heights, sizes, colors, and shapes. Within the randomness, Olympia could live
in the background. Inside the city, she must actively work to change her appearance
to go unseen.
In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles (1999) writes of the conflict-
ing experience of the “embodied” and “weightless” human experience, where indi-
viduals are familiar to their temporal and physical existence as well as a transcendent
one “made possible in part by the near-instantaneous transfer of information from
one point on the globe to any other” (394). She is wary of the trend to consider the
weightless experience superior for its sense of freedom, unbound by time, space,
and pain, and forewarns doe-eyed thinkers, arguing that there is an influential human
“connection with direct sensory experience” (395) that would be lost in a com-
pletely unembodied existence. But as a radio voice, Olympia does this daily. She
uses technology to assert her presence and spirit dissociated from her body. However,
the physical world and city that she is a part of continues to exist outside of the radio
studio. Each time she leaves the studio, her body rematerializes, only to wish she
could hide herself again. Although Olympia is able to live, if only during working
hours, as a bodiless voice, as information flowing though waves from the station’s
tower, what she really needs, is to find a space when she can exist in safety, rather
than a new medium through which to exist.
One night, as she often would, Olympia secretly follows her daughter, Miranda,
who is completely unaware of her heritage or her mother’s existence. This night, she
goes to a strip club where Miranda works as a dancer. The club specializes in women
with small deformities that are fetishized, like Miranda’s small pig’s tail at the base
of her tailbone. There is a topless contest that night and in a savage moment, much
like The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s contest for the Pope of Fools, Olympia is
unwantedly pulled onto the stage and her bestial body is exposed (Dunn 1983,
18–21). In his second section of Torture, “The Spectacle of The Scaffold,” Foucault
argues that the public execution needs to be “spectacular” and “seen by all almost
as its triumph” (1977, 34) to be successful in its purpose, that being to scare off or
warn the public of committing crimes. The stage creates a space where Olympia’s
deformed body can become spectacular, as it is presented as a unique object worth
viewing, rather than a disability that should not be identified:
The college girl, dumbfounded, is still pumping away with her mouth open, her knees and
arms still following an old order to dance, as her mind is pummeled by what I am, and what
they have done to me, and wondering if I am in on it…How proud I am, dancing in the air
full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor
hoptoads behind me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but
I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born (Dunn
1983, 20).
Dunn (1983) allows Olympia this one triumphant moment where she can safely be
proud of her body and re-materialize in the most indelicate of places, the stage of a
strip club. The extremity of the indecency of the situation provides the spectacle that
Foucault mentions. Not only is she on display, but she is naked and proud where
many would think she never could be. Geek Love toys with the social delineations
of space where the bestial body has power and where it does not. Within the audi-
ence she was nothing, unwanted, merely surviving in secrecy. On the stage, she is
purposefully exposed and exuberant.
Dunn’s freaks wish to gain control of this power; in their attempt to do so, they
ultimately explore the same questions as Merleau-Ponty on the issue of gaze: “We
must attempt to understand how vision can come about from somewhere without
thereby being locked within its perspective” (1945, 69). Throughout the novel, the
Binewskis have power when they are located in the carnival or the stage, but they
are isolated once they move out of these spaces. Near the end of the novel, a reporter
asks Olympia if she had the power to magically make her family “physically and
mentally normal” (Dunn 1983, 282) would she do it? She responds in the negative:
“That’s ridiculous! Each of us is unique. We are masterpieces. Why would I want us
to change into assembly-line items? The only way you people can tell each other
apart is by your clothes” (Dunn 1983, 282). Here, Dunn creates two planes of human
isolation. What Olympia says is true. The normal body can also feel alone amongst
a sea of other normal bodies. In the moments that the freakish body is on the stage,
it isn’t just powerful, it is also coveted. While the freakish body is isolated amongst
the masses as a unique shape, normal bodies can also feel isolated amongst the
crowd. Each body fights to either come in or out of focus, to be seen or go
undisturbed.
Merleau-Ponty readdresses the question of how gaze truly works and how
humans access the world within the space of their vision. In the essay “Eye and
Mind,” Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes an existence where moving about and
viewing objects does not ultimately prove to the subject that they are separate from
the object. Instead, the act of seeing joins the subject to what is being seen. Here, the
body, “because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.
Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are
part of its full definition: the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (1964,
125). If I were to invite an audience into this world view as the barker of a sideshow,
I might describe the world beyond the tent to be just as relevant as vertebrae and
neurons. All the objects of the world working together to house life and allow for
being as skin covers the body and binds it together. That’s sensational billing, a sug-
gestion offered to the audience that Olympia is trained to provide. But a such vis-
ceral description of the world would most likely enrage an expecting audience once
they would walk into the world beneath the sideshow tent and see that the world is
still exactly as they know it, objects resting on other objects, and their own separate
bodies moving amongst them, all cold strangers to each other. But if, the audience
could understand the world as Merleau-Ponty’s connected body, perhaps Olympia,
her brother, and sisters would be more easily perceived as human and to the same
extent of the audience members themselves.
While freaks can have any number of variations from the average human body,
Merleau-Ponty describes a particular physical configuration in where the human
122 A. Hess
body would no longer perceive like a human. This amounts to a forced reallocation
of the eyes from the front of the face to the sides of the head “like certain ani-
mals…with no cross-blending of visual fields” (1964, 125). Merleau-Ponty argues
that this type of configuration “would not reflect itself; it would be an almost ada-
mantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would
be no humanity” (1964, 125). Humanity devoid, because the fish or horse-headed
human would not be able to see their limbs, would not allow for shared lines of sight
where the eyes join focus, and would not see a fully connected world. However,
Merleau-Ponty doesn’t grant that a girl who is born with eyes on either side of her
head ceases to be a human girl. The correct configuration of body parts clicking to
place like Barbie and Ken dolls does not define the human. Instead, Merleau-Ponty
suggests that humanity exists in the space between “the see-er and the visible,
between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and
hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when
the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undo-
ing what no accident would have sufficed to do” (1964, 125). In other words,
humanity exists within an active perception of and connection to the world. This
human interaction with the world does not merely take place between what Aristotle
would conceive of as the space between the rational soul and the body, with a syn-
apse from the mind to the limbs. Rather, humanity exists between the viewer and the
viewed, and spontaneously between all pieces that make up the body, cells, tendon,
bone, hair in association with space and other objects. For Merleau-Ponty, humanity
is movement toward the calling from the worldly body that makes up all things.
The freaks in Dunn’s novel do not just include the born freaks of the Binewski
family. Dunn also incorporates freaks that are created through a warped kind of
medicine, people who chose to become amputees in order to feel less isolated
amongst the masses of normal bodies. Arturo creates his first cult follower by catch-
ing ahold of her fear, the same sense of isolation of being a normal body amongst
other normal bodies. She is an obese woman, and Arturo asks her if what she really
wants is to be beautiful, to be loved, or to be “all right” (1983, 177–179). Arturo’s
confidence in his freakish body is instantly attractive while he is in his tank, sur-
rounded by an audience there to see only him. When he asks her again what it is she
wants, she replies, “I want to be like you are!” (1983, 178). The Arturians find peace
because they believe that by removing the body parts that made them fearful of
judgment, and by giving up any hope of having a perfect body, all that will be left is
peace. Without limbs they can’t do anything, but also don’t want to do anything or
feel like they need to prove something. Their catch phrase becomes “Peace,
Isolation, Purity” (1983, 227).
The Arturians search for the disembodied experience that Katherine Hayles men-
tions has become more popular with the rise of technological advancements. She
notes that in both liberal humanism and cybernetics “Embodiment has been system-
atically downplayed or erased” (1999, 4). The Arturians are looking for an existence
that will ultimately separate themselves from the psychological problems associ-
ated with the body, but ultimately, their real troubles are a sense of isolation inside
their bodies. The Cartesian separation of body and mind and all other bodies is what
mistakenly holds them captive. In his introduction to Phenomenology of Perception,

Claude Lefort explains why Merleau-Ponty’s work argues against this sense of iso-
lation where humans often find themselves: “the body and its surroundings cannot
be defined in isolation, if every attempt to describe the constitution of one presup-
poses a reference to the constitution of the other, and if every relation of cause to
effect or means to end can only be determined in function of a certain given mean-
ing of ‘configuration,’ then the classical distinction between the subject and the
object is no longer viable” (2012, 23). The Arturians did not need to try and lose
their physical bodies to find peace and community; rather, if they lived more like
Dunn’s freaks, in glory of their bodies, in a community constructed by appreciating
bodies, and in understanding of the embracing nature of the universe, they would
have been fine.
Dunn (1983) continues to play with the irreversible and the eternal by introduc-
ing freaks as preserved bodies of the once living or barely born. In the business of
the carnival, Mr. and Mrs. Binewski are frugal with their resources. Through the
many attempts to create the perfect freak, the mother gives birth to six infants that
were so deformed they did not survive. They are kept bottled and set on display like
science experiments in “the Chute…six clear-glass twenty gallon jars…each lit by
hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice
tape” (1983, 52). It is the Binewski women’s task to tenderly clean the jars daily and
to remember that the preserved children are still part of the family, to be loved and
cared for as any of them (1983, 52–55).
Although shocking, Dunn’s Chute is a tribute to what used to be a common trav-
elling show across America throughout the 1800–1900s. In his book, Secrets of the
Sideshows, Joe Nickell has a chapter dedicated to what he calls “curios” (2005, 320)
or preserved bodies. Preserved fetuses and infants were referred to as “pickled
punks” (2005, 322) by carnies, and in later years the specimens in these displays
were often not real at all but made of rubber, in which case their name changed to
“bouncers” (2005, 325). There was a hierarchy of value according to show manag-
ers, who would pay the most for the pickled punks that were born alive, the next
highest for those that were real, and the least for the rubber bouncers, which would
then also differ in levels of realism (2005, 322–326).
The most horrifying aspect of Dunn’s Chute is not only that the fetuses are real
or that two of them were born alive—one was named Apple and lived to the ripe age
of two—but that the maternal mother is the one who keeps and displays them. While
the death of a newborn is normally a private affair and display of the body would be
sacrilege, the Binewskis believe that their unique bodies are the most important
aspect of themselves, and by displaying their dead, they give them a chance to be
fantastic, a wonder even in death. This act of preserving the dead became family
tradition even before the jar children. After Olympia’s grandfather died, his last
wish was to remain with the carnival forever, and her parents happily stuck his urn
atop the generator truck as a shrine (Dunn 1983, 7). While the children of the chute
are greatly valued, they only exist together as part of the blow off--a freebie to view
after the main shows. The Binewskis do share the same tendency as the 1800s show
manager to rank their acts according to their proximity to life. The living are more
124 A. Hess
valuable. Olympia remembers how her mother would repeat over and over, “We had
such hopes for her” (Dunn 1983, 54) to the jar child that would have been marketed
as a Lizard girl, with a flat face and large tail.
The patron’s experience of the Chute also forces the audience to think about the
strangeness of birth and development of even normal bodies. Walking through the
Chute’s dark tent itself evokes the image of birth—of coming out from the dark to
the light, wide world. They pass by children in different forms of development, like
a stages of conception poster where the fetus must grow, split, combine, and enclose
correctly, with infinite mistakes possible. While many pickled punks in American
sideshows did contain deformed fetuses, normal looking fetuses were also an attrac-
tion, as the normal developmental stages of the fetus do look alien or amphibian, as
the fishy groupings of cells bulge and grow limbs. The Binewski family display is
even stranger as all of their potential children, like the Lizard girl, also show the
potential for freakishness. One with two heads, another with no bones, and one that
is not even self-contained. This one the children secretly call “the Tray” and Olympia
describes it as “a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached”
(Dunn 1983, 54). Within the Chute, the freaks seem even less human because they
are still, inanimate objects. It is more of a museum than a show, where the jars are
to be studied, closely. The jar itself, though transparent, creates a contained space
and more visible separation between the observer and subject. Here, the audience is
meant to fear the simple possibility of creating one of these monsters themselves as
they look at the two-headed baby, or the Tray, or they can view the normal develop-
ment of the body, and see how it is just as freakish, for a time.
Apple, the jar child who lived until she was two, seemed to have little physical
deformity other than lazy eyes. She was almost completely unresponsive to stimuli
however, and most likely had a severe cognitive disability. As an almost normal
looking child, she had no place in the family sideshow. Olympia mentions her death
nonchalantly, in a blameless, practiced way: “A pillow fell on her face” (Dunn 1983,
54). Although there is some mystery to Apple’s death, which is almost a family
folklore, it is clear that Dunn’s characters are ready to murder their children if they
are not born to the freakish standards of their parents. Apple was more valuable to
Mr. and Mrs. Binewski as a pickled punk than as a daughter. While Mrs. Binewski
may have condoned the murder, she is still, eerily, a caring mother to her jar chil-
dren. Once made a freakish curiosity through preservation, Apple can safely reside
at the carnival. By creating an extreme distortion between the mother’s role of pro-
tector and executioner, Dunn shows how the space of the carnival can be just as
dangerous to average bodies as the outside world can be to the bestial.
There is a point where Olympia, in her early teens, upset that her secret crush did
not return her love, imagines herself dead and that her family would cremate her and
set her urn next to her grandfather’s in tribute to her memory, but the thought is
discarded after she imagines them preserving her “in the Chute in the biggest jar of
all and I’d float naked in formaldehyde and the twins would bicker over who had to
shine my jar” (Dunn 1983 172). Small, white, and underdeveloped, Olympia does
look like the pickled punks without the glass around her. To be placed there would
mean she was a failure, like the others, who had so much potential—we had such
hopes for her—but ultimately could not survive.
In Dunn’s novel (1983) the grotesque descriptions of bodies paired with the
extreme behavior of the Binewski family’s flipped value system that prefers the
freakish body over the norm, highlights and underscores the inhumane systems in
place that subjugate freakish bodies to specific, confined spaces. To regulate the
populace’s discomfort at running into a freak on the street, the hospital, television,
freak show stage, and museum have become the only spaces where freakish bodies
can materialize completely and live safely in the physical realm. Otherwise, they are
forced to dematerialize, and in accordance with social etiquette, the observer ignores
their existence. “Not staring” becomes a denial of existence and a reflexive motion
toward the all but disappearance of the freakish body in popular society. Dunn has
layered her novel with freaks who are the Binewski family’s conscious experiments.
They are developed, born, and created using modern technology and medicine.
While many critics have considered her extreme treatment of the body to be gro-
tesque, in actuality, she touches on the many ways that the human body is increas-
ingly transformed by our technologies and forces us to understand our bodies in
conjunction with objects, animals, and the physical spaces through which we wander.
Surgical bodies also maintain spaces that are isolated from normal society. Like
the physical freak that may have a genetic disease, the patient of surgery undergoes
a grace period where they are treated as breakable objects. The leg cast, neck cone,
and sling are all visual indicators that a person is not their normal self and should be
treated much like an invalid. Staring at a person’s shaved head and scar after brain
surgery is disrespectful in the same vein as staring at a bestial body. The difference
between the surgical body and the bestial is that the surgical body will heal, and they
can return to normal society once again. However, in Dunn’s novel (1983), surgery
is always irreversible. It leaves its mark on the body, takes away pieces of it, and
adds new pieces that are essential for the body to continue to exist.
After the shooting in the store parking lot, the shooter is sent to a mental hospital
and eventually returns to his house, shoots his wife with a shotgun and turns the gun
on himself (Dunn 1983, 215–17). But he doesn’t die. Instead, modern medicine
somehow saves him. As a result, he becomes an awkward contraption. With most of
his face gone, his is half tubes and bags of liquid powered by a squeezable air pump.
In public, he wears a covering over his horrible face and is forever after called “the
Bag Man” (Dunn 1983, 217). The Bag Man is a freak both because his physical
body is mangled and altered forever after his many surgeries, and because he is a
visible failure of death. The lingering feeling of death surrounds him as his IV-like
bags dangle in place of his face. He is a walking hospice, only alive with the help of
machines that are now part of his body. The Bag Man is the human cyborg, part
man, part tube and machinery. In What is Posthuamnism? Wolfe (2010) notes that
critics must transform their understanding of the human from the mind to include
the ways in which the body and the artificial parts of the body “‘bring forth a world’”
and speaks to “the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire
of the human itself” (25). Dunn’s character, the Bag Man, exhibits the next step in
human evolution, surpassing the historical animal-human relationship toward what
126 A. Hess
will ultimately be the human descendent, the immortal, the cyborg. His prosthetic
body defies the old world of blood and flesh, and “brings forth” a new definition of
life, forever after carried forth by machines.
References
Adams, Rachel. 2001. Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American cultural imagination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, Katherine. 1983. Geek Love. New York: Warner Books.
Foucault, Michel. [1977]1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Pantheon Books. Citations refer to the Vintage. 1995 edition.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How we Became Posthuman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lund, Roger. 2005. Laughing at Cripples: Ridicule, Deformity, and the Argument from Design.
Eighteenth Century Studies 39 (1): 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2005.0051.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1945]2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Citations refer to the 2012 edition.
———. [1964]1994. Eye and Mind. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and
Painting, Johnson, Galen A (ed.), 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Citations refer to the 1994 edition.
Nickell, Joe. 2005. Secrets of the Sideshows. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Humor and Amusement Based
on Incongruities: A Dialectical Approach
Anna Małecka
Abstract Since the ancient times, the problem of humor has constituted a chal-
lenge for the philosophers – from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Hobbes,
to Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Freud and Bergson – to quote but a few examples.
In the paper, the discussion of one of the most inspiring philosophical type of reflec-
tion upon humor is based on the so-called incongruity theory, as pertinently describ-
ing the sources and mechanism of humor. The discussed theory encourages to
assume the dialectical standpoint, in the view of which humor appears to be rooted
in two mutually contradictory interpretations of a given situation, leading eventually
to their paradoxical synthesis. It is exactly this perversity and astonishment with the
specific adequacy of joining the juxtaposed semantic layers (traditionally excluding
each other) that the charm of humor relies upon. Through the feeling of amusement,
this process leads to a temporary suspension of the one-track stereotypical approach
to the phenomena which constitutes the main determinant of boredom, and offers an
outlook via the prism of unexpected paradoxical relationships.
Keywords Humor · Laughter · Amusement · Philosophy of humor · Dialectics of

humor · Incongruity theory · Humor from phenomenological point of view
The question of humor, however unserious it may seem at the first sight, since the
ancient Greek times has engaged most serious philosophical analyses. Assuming
the universalist and essentialist approach, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, through
Descartes and Hobbes, to Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Freud and Bergson – to
quote but a few spectacular examples – attempted to explain the complex mecha-
nism of humor, expecting that the insight into the nature of humor would facilitate
a better understanding of human nature, in particular the human quasi-cognitive
relation to the world, its creative potential, and, indirectly, the paradoxical character
of reality itself. In many ways, humor seems akin to philosophy: parting from the
A. Małecka (*)
AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Kraków, Poland
e-mail: amm@agh.edu.pl

Switzerland AG 2023
128 A. Małecka
practical aspects of life, abandoning the commonsensical approach for the sake of
fresh and astonishing solutions, searching for unobvious though often crucial mean-
ings and perspectives. As John Morreall notices: “To have cultivated a philosophical
spirit or rich sense of humor is to have a distanced, and, at least potentially, a more
objective view of the world” (John 1987, 2). Accordingly, in the present article, a
specific aspect of humor and laughter will be considered: “laughter at or about
something, that interests the philosopher” – to quote Roger Scruton (Scruton 1987,
157). In the phenomenological spirit, paraphrasing the same author we can consider
humor to be an intentional object of the amused state of mind, finding its expression
in laughter (Scruton 1987, 157–158). Accordingly, humor can be perceived as the
basic concept in relation to its accompanying phenomena such as amusement, the
comic, wit, and laughter.
In the history of humor research, three main groups of methodological trends can
be distinguished: the so-called superiority theory, the incongruity theory and the
energy release theory. The theory of superiority was introduced by Plato and
Aristotle and fully developed by Hobbes who argued that laughter is an expression
of enjoyment evoked by a sudden feeling of the subject’s own superiority over oth-
ers or in relation to the subject’s previous position. This theory was (and rightly so)
repeatedly criticized. As Hutcheson noted, we do not always laugh at other people’s
failures, and, additionally, there are many situations in which such failure is by no
means a cause of laughing; therefore the feeling of superiority is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition of perceiving a given situation as ridiculous (Tave 1960,
55–58). Similarly, the relief theory, whose leading heralds were Herbert Spencer
and Sigmund Freud, does not adequately capture the essence of humor. In accor-
dance with the physiological concept, laughter is nothing else but a liberation of
excess of accumulated neural energy, and plays mainly a therapeutic function. It
would be difficult, however, to identify humor-related amusement with the release
of energy. As Roger Scruton points out, both the energy release and the superiority
theories are inadequate: “The mistake of ‘superiority’ and ‘release’ theories alike, is
to find the meaning of humor in what it does for the subject, rather than in how it
represents the object. Humor is not, normally, self-directed. Indeed, one of its values
lies in the fact that it directs our attention unceasingly outwards” (Scruton 1987,
169). From the phenomenological point of view, amusement involved in humor may
be considered a mode of reflection which presents its intentional object in a specific
enjoyable light. Thus, the group of incongruity theories which focus on the so-
understood intentional object within the “humorous experience” seem to be more
pertinent. They find in humor a potential of opening fresh perspectives and amazing
perverse insight into reality, thus coping with the feeling of boredom petrified by
stereotypical approaches.
The interpretations of humor in terms of incongruity have had a long tradition.
Also, several modified versions of this group of theories prove popular in contem-
porary philosophically oriented studies in humor. Unlike other research orienta-
tions, such concepts attempt at discovering the distinctive features of humor
mechanism, indicating its paradoxical and quasi-cognitive character that indirectly
enables the discovery of the contradictory nature of reality itself. According to this
Humor and Amusement Based on Incongruities: A Dialectical Approach 129
theory: “What amuses us is some object of perception or thought that clashes with
what we would have expected in a particular set of circumstances” (Morreall
1987, 6).
The very concept of “incongruity” is also replaced by related terms such as
inconsistence, contrast, conflict, incompatibility, and even contradiction. These
theories refer to the incongruity between our expectations resulting from the bag-
gage of experience and knowledge, and the reception or imagery of a particular
thing or event; the incompatibility of elements put together, a simultaneous recogni-
tion of things traditionally belonging to different reference systems. Through the
feeling of amusement, such process leads to a temporary suspension of one-track
recognition of phenomena, offering a look through the prism of the dialectical rela-
tionship between the opposing elements.
The Historical Overview
In the history of philosophy, several intriguing contributions to the vastly under-

stood incongruity theory of humor can be found. It is Aristotle who first draws atten-
tion to the problem of inconsistency between the initial part of the humorous
narrative and its outcome. Even though in the spirit of the superiority theory he
states that essentially we laugh at human weaknesses, in the Rhetoric he remarks
that laughter may indeed constitute a reaction to many different types of inconsis-
tencies, and not solely the imperfections of others. He says in a manner that is well
known as Kantian, that surprise lies at the root of laughter: “One way for a speaker
to get laugh is to set up a certain expectation in his listeners and then to hit them
with something they did not expect” (Morreall 1982, 16). Also, Cicero, in an akin
way, says that laugh is evoked by a situation “when we are expecting to hear a par-
ticular phrase and something different is uttered” (Cicero 1875, II 63).
It is Francis Hutcheson, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, who is
commonly considered the father of the incongruity theory. Opposing Hobbesian
superiority theory popular at that time, he proposes his own concept of the associa-
tion of ideas, explaining the source of humor in terms of “bringing together of
images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as resemblance in the principal
idea” (Hutcheson 1997, 233). For the first time we encounter here a dialectical rec-
ognition of the humor operation. The opposites joined together on a superior level,
initiate a humorous situation. Contrary to Hobbes, Hutcheson considers the result-
ing laughter to be good-natured. Moreover, the underlying incongruity is regarded
as a positive value, illustrating the diverse abundance of life.
Hutcheson analyzes the humorous inconsistency on the example of burlesque,
with its juxtaposition of such contrasting ideas as: grandeur, dignity, sanctity, per-
fection, and meanness, baseness, profanity on the other side. Mark Akenside, on the
other hand, generalizes this principle to “some incongruous form, some stubborn
dissonance of things combin’d” (Tave 1960: 71). The main role in the reception of
130 A. Małecka
the ridicule, however, is assigned to the emotion consequential to that perception,

and – in opposition to Hutcheson – Akenside considers that emotion to be scorn.
The Scottish successors of Hutcheson include Alexander Gerard, who says that
“[the object of] that sense, which perceives, and is gratified by the odd, the ridicu-
lous, the humorous, the witty; and whose gratification often produces, and always
tends to mirth, laughter, and amusement (…) is in general incongruity, or a surpris-
ing and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety in things” (Alexander 1759,
66). And wit, humor, and ridicule turn to constitute skillful imitation of odd and
incongruous originals (Tave 1960, 75). As an imitator, humor metaphysically
implies the incongruity inherent in reality itself.
Another Scottish thinker who continues the study in the role of incongruity in
relation to humor is James Beattie. In his Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous
Composition, the author synthetically describes the essence of incongruity in the
following way: “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuit-
able, or incongruous parts or circumstances considered as united in a complex
object or acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the
mind takes notice of them” (McGhee and Goldstein 1983, 40). Beattie exposes the
principle of joining together the incompatible elements, and it is exactly this unusual
dialectical unification of non-matching aspects that can astonish and thus evoke
laughter.
In his famous definition, Kant defines laughter as “an affection arising from the
sudden transformation of a strained expectation to nothing. This transformation,
which is certainly not enjoyable by the Understanding, yet indirectly gives it very
active enjoyment for a moment” (Kant 2007, 133). The inconsistency between the
expectation evoked by the beginning of the joke, and the lack of satisfying this
expectation as a result of a sudden turn in the punch line is exposed here. As an
example, Kant presents the following story: “The heir of a rich relative wished to
arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed:
‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful
they look’” (Kant 2007, 133). Laughter is a reaction to the absurd, to a situation in
which – as Kant says – the intellect remains disappointed. Instead of satisfying a
desire for cognition, the subject gains a feeling of enjoyment allowing for regaining
the balance of vital power. The author of the Critiques argues that humor is related
to the originality of the spirit, a talent to acquire a certain disposition of mind in
which judgments that are different from usual ones (or even contradictory to them)
are formulated about things, though in compliance with some rational principles.
Humor would mean, therefore, a special ability of mind to perceive phenomena in
an original way, “inverted” in relation to everyday reception, differing from both the
intellectual cognition and the aesthetic experience of beauty.
Continuing this track of interpretation, Arthur Schopenhauer finds the cause of
laughter in a sudden feeling of the “incongruity between a real single object and the
concept under which, from one point of view, it has been rightly subsumed”
(Schopenhauer 1969, 59). The more correct is this subsuming from one point of
view and the larger and more spectacular inconsistency from another, the more
ridiculous the effect of contrast is. In laughter, the inconsistency between the
abstract concept and the object designated by it is recognized. Thus, laughter leads
to realizing that abstractions are not able to satisfactorily meet the subtle variation
of the concrete. Yet, as Scruton notes, “the real incongruity of which Schopenhauer
speaks lies not between object and concept but between points of view” (Scruton
1987, 161) – the view that will be later developed by another Arthur, namely
Koestler.
Schopenhauer also draws attention to another truly philosophical aspect of
humor related to sublimity. Humor arises from the sublime mood which is in con-
flict with the outside world; the mood which tends to grasp the world with the same
concepts that define subjective sensations. The incongruity between these concepts
and their objects leads to the perception of the ridicule which hides the profound
seriousness. Thus, real humor, unlike irony begins with a smile, and ends in a most
serious reflection. Such is the dialectic of the ridicule and the serious – not uncom-
mon in the philosophical reflections on humor.
Similarly, William Hazlitt in the Lectures on the English Comic Writers states
that laughter alongside crying is an indicator of human condition suspended between
tragedy and comedy. It constitutes a reaction to the contrast between our expecta-
tions and the actual situation: “Ridicule is necessarily built on certain supposed fact,
whether true or false, and on their inconsistency with certain acknowledged max-
ims, whether right or wrong” (Hazlitt 1841, 34).
The existential-dialectical and ultimately theological approach to humor is out-
lined by Søren Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments. Humor, which he interprets in terms of comicality, results
from contradictions which are inseparable from existence, and both the comic and
the tragic are rooted in them. The comic differs from the tragic by the lack of pro-
found suffering. The humorist recognizes the suffering in life but “turns deceptively
aside and revokes the suffering in the form of the jest” (Kierkegaard 1941, 400).
Hence, in the experience of humor one is aware of the possibility of evading the
contradiction, and therefore it is not painful.
Comicality so understood has its background in existence, and humor lies at the
confinium (border territory) between the sphere of ethicality and religiousness; due
to the strong sense of contradiction it constitutes the last stage of existential con-
sciousness before faith. The Absolute manifests itself through the dialectic, and
humor has its modest part in this revelation.
George Santayana also speaks in the dialectical spirit, remarking that wit by
“discovering common traits and universal principles assimilates things at the poles
of being” (Santayana 1955, 153), and thus refers the feeling of amusement to an
incongruous image. Even Henri Bergson in his famous essay on Laughter stresses
the basic contrast that underlies the comic situation: namely between spirit and life
on the one hand, and inert matter on the other; flexibility and rigidity enforced on
the body and mind (Bergson 1918). The notion of incongruity is here limited to the
incompatibility between mechanism and life. Laughter is supposed to serve a thera-
peutic function, leading to the correction of criticized social behaviors.
132 A. Małecka
ontemporary Theories of Humor Referring to the Concept

C
of Incongruity
Contemporary literature on the subject provides numerous examples of the theory

of humor in which the theme of incongruity (conflict, contradiction, incompatibil-
ity, paradox) dominates. For Gregory Bateson, humor draws our attention to the
importance of a certain incompatible element which so far has been marginal, and
suddenly comes to the foreground (Bateson 1969). Similarly, Paul McGhee says
that the humorous experience is generally inconsistent with our previous knowledge
or experience (McGhee and Goldstein 1983). William Fry, on the other hand,
stresses the issue of contradiction between the real and the unreal, which occurs in
the dimension of specific experience: the fun. And it is exactly the attitude of enjoy-
ment and amusement, i.e., a pleasant experience, that John Morreall identifies as a
trait distinguishing humor from other reactions to incongruity, such as anxiety)
(Morreall 1982, 133). Similarly, Gӧran Nerhardt emphasizes the fact that the recep-
tion of incongruity must take place in a safe, non-threatening atmosphere if it is to
result in laughter. The essence of amusement may be considered – following
Michael Clark – to rely on pleasure resulting from the perception of incongruity.
The dialectics requires that the contradictory elements are united and reconciled
at a higher level, so that the paradoxical relationship between the incongruous ele-
ments can be found. Essentially, laughter is evoked by the discovery of a certain
striking and essential analogy or relation between the elements or semantic layers
which seemingly are completely unfitting to each other.
The so-called incongruity-resolution theory, proposed by Jerry Suls, may be
regarded as an attempt at such dialectical reconciliation (Suls 1983, 41–44). Suls,
referring to Beattie, finds in his theory an inspiration to think in terms of the unifica-
tion of incongruities. In his two-step model of humor reception, the subject is first
confronted with incongruity, and in the second stage is motivated to resolve it.
Humor arises when the incongruity is resolved: that is to say when the punch line of
the wit shows a special relationship with the initial information.
It seems, however, that it is not so much the resolution of the incongruity that
matters, but rather finding the dialectical relationship between the apparently
incompatible phenomena (either in the present or past experience or in the acquired
knowledge) – a relationship that occurs in a wider perspective, in which both options
paradoxically coexist. And it is exactly this weird relationship that amuses, aston-
ishes, and provides intellectual satisfaction. In this way, humor can transform our
reception of reality, by redirecting the track of our thinking and feeling from the
usual paths towards the so-far unknown horizons.
An interesting theory is presented by the Italian psychologist Giovannantonio
Forabosco, who, in a discussion with Suls, notes that also in the final stage of humor
perception there remain some inconsistencies, which indeed constitute a prerequi-
site of humor: “The resolution of incongruity does not eliminate it – to cite
Władysław Chłopicki commenting on the above Forabosco’s opinion – but it only
contributes to the emergence of an ‘incongruity that makes sense’, ‘a coherent
incongruity” (Chłopicki 1995, 37). In Forabosco’s model, the recipient perceives

the incongruity, then the congruity aspect, and simultaneously the initial and final
incongruities. The reaction of the recipient would be a dialectical reception of both
congruity and incongruity, as some kind of oscillation of thought.
In the contemporary studies of the structure and dialectical essence of humor,
Arthur Koestler’s theory of bisociation constitutes a brilliant concluding comment
on the incongruity issue (Koestler 1967, 35–38). In the light of this concept, all
creativity, any original thoughts and discoveries (in the spheres of science, art, and
also humor) are rooted in the ability to perceive events or ideas simultaneously in
two different, separate and incompatible systems of reference, ruled by conflicting
rules. Thinking in terms of one system, one “logic” or one “domain of discourse”
cannot deliver original solutions. Any creative act requires action on more than one
plane, in more than one system.
The escape from the routinized mode of thinking and behavior is indicated by a
sudden flash of insight, which shows a known situation or event in a new light and
triggers a new reply to it. The act of bisociation unites the separated matrices of
experience; it allows for “simultaneous living in two different planes,” multidimen-
sionally, creatively and interestingly. And it is precisely this violent clash of two
matrices of perception or reasoning, ruled by different rules, that triggers laughter.
A bisociation of a given phenomenon in two traditionally separate systems causes a
sudden oscillation of thoughts from one associative context to another, and emo-
tional tension evoked by it finds its outlet in laughter: “Thus laughter rings the bell
of man’s departure from the rails of instinct; it signals his rebellion against the sin-
glemindedness of his biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit,
governed by a single set of ‘rules of the game’” (Koestler 1967, 63). As the most
common form of humor Koestler lists bisociations of meanings (metaphorical and
literal), the sublime and the trivial (e.g. the sublime form with a trivial contents), as
well as “replacement” – in which the binding concept is transferred from the origi-
nally marginal position to a dominant one, presenting the whole in a completely
new light. The true nature of humor and amusement lies, then, in the perverse asso-
ciation of elements in incompatible frames of reference, which reveals the deeper
and unobvious congruity of apparently incongruous phenomena, creatively enrich-
ing the existence.
All in all, the discussed dialectical concepts which offer the truly philosophical
interpretational perspectives of humor mechanism prove that this exceptional expe-
rience is an important factor contributing to human wellbeing. It provides us with a
temporary rest from the dictate of common sense with its dull schematic solutions,
and can also inspire imagination and creative acts in various domains of life. So
understood humor challenges us to unite elements of multifarious competitive and
even mutually contradictory discourses in an original way, and thus enriches and
refreshes our contact with reality as such.
134 A. Małecka
References
Alexander, Gerard. 1759. In An Essay on Taste, ed. A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell. London.
Bateson, Gregory. 1969. The Position of Humor in Human Communication. In Motivation in
Humor, ed. Jacob Levine, 159–166. New York: Atherton Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1918. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley
Brereton, and Fred Rothwell. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Chłopicki, Władysław. 1995. O humorze poważnie. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Oddziału Polskiej
Akademii Nauk.
Cicero on Oratory and Orators. 1875. Translated by J. S. Watson. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Hazlitt, William. 1841. Lectures on the English Comic Writers. London: John Templeman.
Hutcheson, Francis. 1997. Laughter and Self-Love. In The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology,
ed. Alexander Broadie. Edinburgh: Cannongate.
Morreall, .John 1982. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press.
———, ed. 1987. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Judgment. Translated by John H. Bernard. New York: Cosmo
Classics.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1941.Concluding Kierkegaard’s Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David
F. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Koestler, Arthur. 1967. The Act of Creation. New York: The Macmillan Company.
McGhee, Paul E., and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds. 1983. Handbook of Humor Research. New York:
Springer.
Santayana, George. 1955. The Sense of Beauty. Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory. New York:
Dover Publications, Inc.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. Translated by
E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover publications, Inc.
Scruton, Roger. 1987. Laughter. In The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreal,
156–171. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Suls, Jerry. 1983. Cognitive Process in Humor Appreciation. In Handbook of Humor Research, ed.
Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, 39–57. New York: Springer.
Tave, Stuart M. 1960. The Amiable Humorist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Part IV
A Shrinking World
The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/
Isolation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart and Arrow of God
Tony E. Afejuku
Abstract This essay attempts to assess the highly prominent Nigerian novelist’s
(Chinua Achebe’s) two very famous and rich novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow
of God, as philosophy and literature of significant, perfect thought from the stand-
point of Achebe’s thematic thrust relating to the subject of solitude/loneliness/isola-
tion in both novels. The essay advances and underlines the argument that Things
Fall Apart and Arrow of God are two modern (African) novels which are concerned
with the focused on subject which results from man’s (typified in each text’s hero’s)
alienation from himself, from his land and from his fellow men including posthu-
mans. The essay’s conclusion is that in Achebe’s novels philosophy and literature
offer contending means of gaining access to human nature.
Keywords Chinua Achebe · Solitude/loneliness/isolation · Alienation · Solitary ·

Spiritual · Things Fall Apart · Arrow of God · Jean-Paul Sartre · Albert Camus ·
Stranger · Heroes · Protagonists · Kings · Rebels · Okonkwo · Ezeulu · Umuofia ·
Umuaro · Existentialism · Humanism · Absurd · Passions · Philosophy · Literature ·
Modern novels
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the Nigerian novelist’s first
and third novels, are two African novels that have attracted a great deal of attention
for different reasons1 Many critics especially of the old brigade of African literary
and critical establishment within and outside Africa accept the first as the most pop-
ular novel to come out of Africa mainly on account of its excellently couched anti-
colonial thrust and its universal appeal in this wise. As for Arrow of God, its main
1
The respective editions of the texts studied are as follows: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
(London: Heinemann, 1958, 1965). Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann,
1964, 1974).
T. E. Afejuku (*)
University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria

Switzerland AG 2023
138 T. E. Afejuku
appeal centres on its aesthetic or technical quality, which is superior to Things Fall
Apart’s that, however, trounces it in terms of their universal popularity. In fact,
Things Fall Apart is so universally popular to the extent that it has been ranked as the
fifty-sixth of the best, that is, “the greatest” one hundred novels of all time.2 But both
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God clearly share, unequivocally, the same popular
subjects of culture, anti-colonialism and post-colonialism; however, what I propose
to attempt in this essay is an assessment of the two famous and rich novels as phi-
losophy and literature of significant, perfect thought from the stand-point of Achebe’s
unique thematic thrust relating to the subject of solitude/loneliness/isolation.
The essay attempts to advance and underline the argument that Things Fall Apart
and Arrow of God are two modern (African) novels that are concerned with the
focused on subject which results from man’s (typified in each text’s hero’s) alien-
ation from himself, from his land and from his fellow men including post-humans.
The heroes of the two novels – Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart and Ezeulu of
Arrow of God – are doomed men, doomed figures, who bring ruins upon themselves
through their misunderstanding of themselves and their fellow men in their society
that they equally misunderstand. In fact, they also seem to misunderstand their own
actions, emotions and what their respective societies truly and really expect of them.
The image of each man, of each hero, the image which Achebe immortalizes in each
novel is that of one who is a stranger, an outsider to himself and to his people and
society. Right from the very beginning of Things Fall Apart Achebe presents
Okonkwo as a young man of valour which the hero’s wrestling skills and fearless-
ness underscore. Nothing in his presentation or description explicitly indicates that
his heroic qualities, which he is proud of, will lead to his untoward end. The same
observation is applicable to Ezeulu, the hero of Arrow of God. He is an intellectual,
not in a book sense, but in the sense of his innate gift. Unfortunately, he is not intel-
lectually circumspective enough to know and foresee that he is a stranger in the
locus of his communal or societal or phenomenological existence. Both heroes,
both protagonists, could not see that the posthuman gods they believe in, in accor-
dance with the cherished belief system of their community would not save or help
them in the long run from their people and community and even from themselves
that they battle against as well. We can thus conveniently liken each novel to Albert
Camus’s The Outsider although the French-Algerian novelist’s novel is about a
man, a character, a figure with a totally different temperament from Achebe’s. Also,
the central figure in Camus’s novel belongs to a society and culture totally different
from Achebe’s protagonists. But Camus’s and Achebe’s concern themselves with
men who preside among the ruins of their own existence. The point of this compari-
son is that I am reading Achebe’s novels as philosophy and literature that tend to
affirm that “existentialism is a humanism,” as Jean-Paul Sartre puts its.3 Clearly, this
is the theoretical plank, the theoretical spring-board, of this essay. The existentialist
2
Daniel S. Burt, The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time (New York:
Checkmark Books, 2004), pp. 248–251.
3
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans., Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale UP,
2007), p. 17.
The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/Isolation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart… 139
who cherishes freedom should not deny another of his freedom. Sartre puts this
impressively humanistic idea insightfully as follows:
And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others,
and that the freedom of others depends on our own. Of course, freedom as the definition of
man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is commitment, I am obliged to will the
freedom of others at the same time as I will my own. I cannot set my own freedom as a goal
without also setting the freedom of others as a goal.4
One moral or psychological insight we can glean or infer from these words of Sartre
is that harmonious interpersonal relations in any society will be possible only when
we accept and adopt the wisdom or doctrine or principle contained therein. Achebe’s
protagonists under investigation, as we can interpret them, tend to counter Sartre’s
profound observation with the way and manner that they conduct themselves in the
novels. As African characters, they go against the grain and convention of their
people who advocate respect and harmony for the life of the group and community
they belong to.
If we agree with Bruce King, a first generation critic of African creative writing
and an expert of Nigerian literature, that “Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to
successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into
African literature” (qtd., in Burt),5 we will not be wrong to say that Achebe’s pro-
tagonists under focus in this essay can rightly be studied from the perspective of
Sartre’s quoted words above, which is not essentially pro-African – for Achebe’s
artistry can be seen in the way he creates protagonists who cherish their own free-
dom above the freedom of others. In other words, we are simply stating here that the
philosophy in Achebe’s novels is not far from that of European novelistic conven-
tions even though his ideas and themes express the characteristic communal fea-
tures of his Igbo (Nigerian) people.
Okonkwo has only one passion in life: to succeed against all odds, no matter
what. He does not want to be like his father, Unoka, the flutist, the artist in his com-
munity, who was always in debt and who bequeathed nothing to his children at the
time of his death. He also detests his father’s oratory, the type of oratory that the old
man, as an artist and a dutiful one, employed as an effective weapon against his
creditors. As far as Okonkwo is concerned his father was an efulefu, Igbo epithet for
a waste-pipe, a useless man – who could not, because of his laziness, take a title
from his community. Okonkwo deeply feels ashamed of his father, an agbala, that
is, a dishonourable man who was not better than a woman. In short, Okonkwo fully
resents everything his father stood for, and hates the thought of being called his
father’s son; he detests to be identified with him. He tends to disavow his father’s
humanism while proclaiming his own. Okonkwo, frontline farmer, man of action,
accomplished wrestler and great warrior who always prefers and wishes to be seen
as a strong man who must not be perceived to exhibit any emotion or passion bor-
dering on feminine ones isolated himself from his biological father, whom he always
4
Sartre, p. 49.
5
Burt, p. 248.
140 T. E. Afejuku
also saw as a weakling. He, out of the fear of being thought weak, deliberately radi-
ates emotions of fear in his household. His wives and children must do his bidding –
rightly or wrongly, without qualms. His thought of existential failure isolates,
alienates him from humane passion as the following passage depicts:
As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked
away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry. “My
father, they have killed me?” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his
matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.6
The passage is clear enough and does not need any elaborate commentary along the
line of our discourse. But it needs some qualification. Ikemefuna, “a doomed lad,”
“an ill-fated lad”,7 we are told, is the little boy brought to Okonkwo’s Umuofia com-
munity by members of Mbaino community as appeasement for the killing of an
Umuofia daughter by a member of Mbaino community. Okonkwo becomes his
putative father who is bound to protect him against any kind of harm. But at the
appointed time, Ikemefuna, the scape-goat, the “sacrificial lamb,” is to die,,8 for
“Umuofia has decided to kill him. The Oracle of the Hills and the caves has pro-
nounced it.”9 Should Okonkwo follow tradition, the custom of his people, against
his true passion, and be part of the people to kill him?
In the seventies and eighties many notable critics within and outside Africa
debated the matter. All of them: David Carroll,10 Charles Nnolim,11 Oladele Taiwo,12
G.D. Killam,13 Solomon Iyasere,14 Robert M. Wren,15 and Damian U. Opata,16 in
varying degrees, insightfully condemned Okonkwo’s action – although Opata, the
last named critic of Nigerian letters, postulated that “Okonkwo’s killing of
Ikemefuna is an unconscionable act, but we cannot logically go beyond that to
establish that by killing Ikemefuna he committed an offense.”17 I disagree. I share
the critical perspectives and objective sentiments of the other named critics Opata
6
Achebe, Things Fall Apart, p. 43.
7
Ibid, p. 6.
8
Damian U. Opata, “Eternal Sacred Order Versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of
Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, Research in African Literatures,
18.1 (1987),p.71.
9
Achebe, Things Fall Apart, p. 40.
10
David Carrol, Chinua Achebe (New York: Twayne, 1970), p.44; (London: Macmillan, 1980),
pp. 42–43.
11
Charles Nnolim, “Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic”, Modern Black Literature,
ed. S. Okechukwu Mezu (New York: Black Academy, 1977), p. 58.
12
Oladele Taiwo, Culture and the Nigerian Novel (London: Macmilllan, 1976), p. 118.
13
G. D. Killam, The Writings of Chinua Achebe, rev.ed. (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 20.
14
Solomon Iyasere, “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart,” Critical Perspectives on Chinua
Achebe, ed. C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 102.
15
Robert M. Wren, Achebe’s World: The Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Novels of Chinua
Achebe (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980), p. 44.
16
Opata, “Eternal Sacred Order,” pp. 71–79.
17
Ibid., p.79.
disagreed with. But unlike them and Opata I see Okonkwo as an existential charac-
ter who turns against his passion, against his essence as a human in a troubled world.
Part of Okonkwo’s existential character is to know fear, the type of fear that will
debar him from bringing ruins to his own self. But he alienates himself from his true
passion and embraces a useless passion that turns him into a lonely stranger to him-
self, to his family and to his community. We must not gloss over the following
sentences of the extract quoted above: “Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet
and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak”. Why should Okonkwo
feel powerless over what people think of him, rightly or wrongly? His freedom of
judgement as he demonstrates above is wrong and faulty, and is devoid of the
humanism of existentialism. Clearly, all his actions in the novel move in this direc-
tion. And we must believe that the gods, the posthumans of Umuofia, including the
Oracle of the Hills, are not in support of his useless passion (a passion that is far
more useless than his father’s which he detests). Or why does he suffer the reverses
in the novel? If Okonkwo had glued himself to his true nature, or if he had allowed
his true nature to glue itself to him, he would not have committed the taboo he com-
mits in the week of peace that debars him from beating his wife or any member of
his household; he also would not have been involved in the accidental killing of a
kinsman that forces him into exile from Umuofia. Of course, it was in his seven
years of exile that things fell apart in his paternal community of Umuofia. In other
words, in alienating himself from his true being and essence in the quest to satisfy a
societal or communal perception, we see a man who wants to be free and who at the
same time is enslaved without knowing it. His and his community’s tragedy derives
from this reality that is not his existential reality. It is not surprising that his impetu-
ous killing of the messenger of the imperial force in Umuofia leads him to commit
suicide in the end, a very bad taboo that alienates him from the land, and earth of
Umuofia, the community he craves his passions to satisfy as its hero and leading
light. What an irony that Umuofia consigns his corpse to the bad bush in the end
without giving Okonkwo a befitting burial his status demands! He becomes truly
lonely in the end; he ends as a being that lived in nothingness. He is dazed, too
dazed to see his people abandon him at a momentous time he thinks that they should
unite and fight for the soul of Umuofia, their great community of vibrant and valiant
men. He does not understand his new times which have isolated him, and from
which he has equally been isolated without his being really aware of this reality.
But Okonkwo is an ambiguity, an absurd ambiguity. Do we see him as a pessi-
mistic hero or do we accept him as an optimist betrayed by his wrong passions and
the people, and the community he serves diligently with the passions? Is Achebe not
telling us that Okonkwo’s and his community’s passions are absurd? We do not need
to respond to these questions one by one. What we can call the Okonkwo phenom-
enon is traceable to his attempt to determine freely his existence and himself in
relation to his community, his environment without the wisdom to know or surpass
his limitations. In the worldview of Achebe’s Igbo people, the remote or real cause
of Okonkwo’s actions, inactions and ill-actions that lead him to an untoward end
must, to borrow Chukwugozie Maduka’s words, “reside somewhat in the evil mach-
inations of some enemy. Such an enemy may be other human persons, ancestors,
142 T. E. Afejuku
spirits or even community gods. The power of such enemies to plant death for an
adversary or an offender seems to be boundless.”18 In the context of Things Fall
Apart in which Okonkwo, in varying degrees, offends, for instance, his father’s and
Ikemefuna’s spirits (and even his community’s as well) Maduka’s quoted words
speak volumes.
And to quote Sartre: “Death by the irreducible pluralism of truths and of beings,
the unintelligibility of reality, chance – these are the core components of the absurd”.19
Although these themes are not presented as such in Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s
useless death that underlines his irrational passions, caused or not by his adversaries,
and chance that brought the English imperialist force of destruction to Umuofia,
illustrate, to borrow Sartre’s words, the “nothingness,” “forlornness,” “impotence,”20
and the emptiness of Okonkwo and his Umuofia community at a significant period of
their experience and existence when they ought to have united against irrational
schism that isolates them from one another with the ultimate consequence of their
annihilation. Achebe lays everything lucidly even if not philosophically, that is, phe-
nomenologically bare, for the reader to espy in his tone of literary charm and creative
wonder, a tone in which he introduced his unusually original Nigerian, nay, African
novel to the world in 1958. But why does Okonkwo commit suicide?
Okonkwo’s suicide, as absurd as it is, can be seen from the following African
perspective which John Mbiti, a renowned scholar of African philosophical and
religious thought, explicitly explains:
There are always physical causes and circumstances surrounding every death..... But
African people believe that a particular person will only die from one of those physical
causes because some human or other agent has brought curse, witchcraft, magic and so on.
These are what one may call the mystical causes of death. People often wish to know both
the physical and mystical causes of death: it is not enough for them to find out only the
physical causes. They take much trouble to establish the mystical causes as well and this is
done through diviners and medicine man.21
This perspective is not significantly different from the one Maduka, Achebe’s kins-
man, offers in his earlier quoted words. But it is interesting to observe that
Okonkwo’s suicide must have been witchcraft-induced or magic-induced or curse-
induced – and we say, affirm or infer this from an African philosophical standpoint.
But we must go with Sartre’s insightful observation relating to the subject of
suicide:
The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his
certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusion and without resignation, either.
The absurd man asserts himself by revolting. He stares at death with passionate attention
and this fascination liberates him.22
18
Chukwugozie Maduka, “Funeral Orations as Indicators of What a Good Life Ought to Be,”
Human Affairs (2008), p. 200.
19
Sartre, Existentialism, p. 75.
20
Ibid.
21
John Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 141.
22
Sartre, Existentialism, p. 78.
Without over-labouring the point, Okonkwo’s suicide must be seen, read and under-
stood in this light. He rebels against his people and their world (which is also his
world) by dying the way he dies. He also dies the way he dies because he does not
want the new imperial power in his homeland to commit him to death with imperial
glee, not permissible to his passionate ideal. He resents the rules of the game of the
new, strange political lords in his land. He does not want to be their condemned
prisoner. Instead, he chooses to be his own condemned prisoner who Achebe pres-
ents with impeccable lucidity. But it is out of the question to say or to suggest that
Achebe admires Okonkwo’s chosen path of suicide as an answer to his existential
escape from the problem he has created. Even members of his clan are not happy
with his chosen end that they find strange and absurd as a titled man and hero of the
clan. He does not get from them a decent burial because of his ironically bad and
absurd end.
Achebe’s second novel, Arrow of God, is also an absurd one in which we encoun-
ter a strange traditional, cultural priest, an intellectual one, oppose defiantly his
people, his community and his god, his posthuman benefactor, who is his people’s,
his community’s and his household’s guiding spirit.
Ezeulu is a strange one, an unusual man, an unusual African personage of author-
ity - spiritual and political – who takes the side of the enemy against his people. His
word of honour gives the land in dispute between his Umuaro people and Okperi
community to the latter. The imperial administrator in the person of the figure/char-
acter called Winterbottom is impressed with him – although he finds his conduct
strange. He is fond of the African priest of candour whose odd integrity enchants
him. The reader also is fond of the strange chief priest whose sacred role in his com-
munity compels him to stay straight at all times. But, ironically, his people, led by
his rival priest Ezedimili, hate him for being truthful and for taking the side of
Okperi against Umuaro in the land case. He certainly is a strange one in their midst.
His conduct isolates him from them, from the majority of them. Soon he learns that
no man, however powerful or influential, can take the side of the enemy against his
people and lives thereafter in perpetual peace with himself, on the one hand, and
with his people on the other. The entire conflict of the novel originates from this
strange behaviour and ironically good conduct of the Chief Priest of Ulu who lives
among his strange people. His action of odd, unorthodox, unfamiliar concern for the
enemy underscores the absurdity of the irony of situations and events that accentu-
ate the isolation that axes Ezeulu from his people and which also alienates Ulu, the
god he serves as chief priest, from him.
Very early in the novel Achebe gives the reader his authorial view pertaining to
Ezeulu’s foreshadowed isolation/loneliness which becomes highly transparent as
the novel progresses. Indeed, Achebe succinctly reveals Ezeulu’s absurd paradox as
a person or protagonist through his clever authorial presentation and admonition of
him as seen in the following passage:
Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his powers over the years and the crops, and
therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the
feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose the day. He
was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that
144 T. E. Afejuku
was said to be his. As long as the goat was alive it was his; he would find it food and take
care of it. But the day it was slaughtered he would know who the real owner was. No! The
Chief Priest was more than that, must be more than that. If he should refuse to name the day
there would be no festival – no planting and no reaping. But could he refuse? No Chief
Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare.23
This passage in which Ezeulu ponders his status and role as Chief Priest, in the
words of G.D. Killam, “foreshadows the course that the whole of the action of the
novel is devoted to working out.”24 Ezeulu, the absurd ethical and moral priest, pro-
phetically contemplates what is to come, what is to befall him and the people of
Umuaro. He, as early as this time in the novel, foresees the schism that would iso-
late, alienate him from his spiritual, posthuman benefactors and people. Of course,
he does not wish this to happen, but his absurd, odd hubris disallows him from halt-
ing the inevitable. He clearly realizes that the powers he possesses are borrowed
ones; his spiritual and political authority and powers derive from his people who
gave them to him on loan, and who also make it possible for Ulu, their god and spiri-
tual essence, to endow Ezeulu with awesome powers. In the end he refuses what he
should not or ought not to refuse; he refuses what no Chief Priest before him had
ever refused, he dares what he says he would not dare, and what no Chief Priest
before him had dared; simply, he does what he himself knows cannot and could not
be done without dire, tragic consequences for any transgressor which he proves
himself to be.
But Ezeulu must be understood as an existentialist who is not ready to shy away
from his kind of absurd adventure that alienates him from his god and community.
He foresees his solitude, isolation, loneliness but he refuses to shift ground, an atti-
tude a non-existential critic such as G.D. Killam says “remains a mystery.”25 But
Killam utters these words in reference to what Akuebue, Ezeulu’s best, “perhaps his
only friend,” thinks of the rebellious Chief Priest.26 As Achebe tells the reader,
Ezeulu’s conduct makes Akuebue “afraid and uneasy like one who encounters a
madman laughing on a solitary path.”27 And the path Ezeulu has chosen is a solitary,
lonesome one indeed. The fascinating solitary figure tells Akuebue thus:
I have my own way and I shall follow it. I can see things where other men are blind. That is
why I am known and at the same time I am unknowable. You are my friend and you know
whether I am a thief or a murderer or an honest man. But you cannot know the thing which
beats the drum to which Ezeulu dances.28
23
Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 3.
24
G. D. Killam, “Notions of Religion, Alienation and Archetype in Arrow of God, Exile and
Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith (London and Dalhousie
UP, 1976), p. 153.
25
Ibid., p. 156.
26
Ibid.
27
Achebe, Arrow of God, p.131.
28
Ibid., p. 132.
The protagonist of Arrow of God is a totally odd rebel who is fully self-conscious
of his absolutely solitary role and status as the “unknowable” priest of the deity
whose admonition he jettisons:
‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human
child. Who told you that this was your own fight?29
The “impertinent human child,” the impertinent, spiritual custodian of Umuaro

and their god, who cherishes independence and freedom from both his community
and deity, defies them. He believes that there is grace in the kind of freedom he
seeks, the kind of freedom that exists in the realm of the absurd where he is the only
one who hears the “beats of the drum”30 to which he dances alone. Clearly, the
“beats of the drum “he dances to, as we see in the end, are the beats of the drum for
a man whose fate the material world of his human community and the spiritual,
posthuman world of the gods have perfectly sealed.
His obstinate blindness to what humans and posthumans expect of him leads him
to his untoward isolation in the realm of abhorrent madness, which, however, cannot
but comfort him as a man, a modern man, a figure and hero who is free to be what
he wants to be, and not what anyone else wants him to be.
If one were to be asked to choose between Okonkwo and Ezeulu, if one were to
be asked to make a choice between both protagonists from the standpoint of the
focus and argument advanced in this essay, one would state that both men are obsti-
nate figures who are at peace within their absurd world of obstinacy – even though
they do not eventually share the same temperament. Okonkwo is an obstinate,
impetuous modern man of action, while Ezeulu is an obstinate, cool and calculating
modern man of intellectual bent. Both are arrestingly portrayed as ambiguously
absurd humanists who rebel against the irrational standpoints of their fellow humans
and super-humans in the forms of deities and spirits that influence conducts of
humans. Because they bewilder the inhabitants of the world of humans and the
super-humans by their intense feelings that bind them to their isolated thoughts and
fundamentally absurd world, they cannot but be what they are in the novels under
focus. We cannot but conclude that in Achebe’s presentation of both protagonists,
philosophy and literature offer contending means of gaining access to human nature.
All the sentences, incidents, conversations, dialogues in both novels lead to one
destination: the nature of the absurd man in his absurd universe. The actions of
Achebe’s protagonists in the two novels tend to produce ambiguous outcomes of
despair and failed optimism as we find in the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s
Ambiguous Adventure.31 Despair and failed optimism in the novels lead to death (as
exactly is the case in Things Fall Apart and Ambiguous Adventure); in Arrow of God
they lead to madness, which is a kind of living-dead situation. Each hero’s
29
Ibid, p. 191.
30
Ibid., p. 132.
31
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods (Oxford: Heinemann
Educational Books, 1994).
146 T. E. Afejuku
aspirations and life end abruptly, which emphasizes the absurd universe of the
absurd humans who inhabit it.
But to answer pointedly the question of choice raised in the opening lines of the
preceding paragraph, I must let Achebe speak for me:
Whenever people have asked me which among my novels is my favourite I have always
evaded a direct answer, being strongly of the mind that in sheer invidiousness that question
is fully comparable to asking a man to list his children in the order in which he loves them.
A patter familias worth his salt will, if he must, speak about the peculiar attractiveness of
each child. For Arrow of God that peculiar quality may lie in the fact that it is the novel
which I am most likely to be caught sitting down to read again.32
From the standpoint of this essay, Arrow of God is “the novel which I am likely to
be caught sitting down to read again”. However, in the final analysis, my philosophi-
cal reading and interpretation of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God may be seen
or understood as absurd. But I will still stick to my own understanding and meaning
of the novels without hesitation. They are respectively truthful statements about
man, a fascinatingly strong man, who aspires to be what he wants to be in his world,
no matter the pangs and consequences of loneliness he compels himself or he is
compelled to accept by forces that fail to accept or understand his cravings. To the
best of my knowledge, no study of Achebe’s novels focused on has given them the
perspective I have given here. In fact, in this essay, none of the leading cited critics
of Achebe dwells on the heroes of the two novels from the perspective of their
respective phenomenological worlds of solitude and loneliness. It would be too
tedious to provide any further textual evidence by way of literary review, for
instance, of the critics’ essays, to back up my claim relating to Achebe’s existential
accomplishments. Furthermore, no new studies of the two novels, as contained in
Ernest Emenyonu’s 2004 very well edited two volumes on the great novelist dwell
on the subject that has gained my attention. The essays in general, and in varying
degrees, are centred on different aspects of pre-colonial and colonial history, Igbo
(Nigerian) traditional culture, society, politics and issues of postcolonialism/postco-
loniality and the artistic inclinations of Achebe relating to his novels and short
stories.33
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are profound modern novels that explore
significantly man as a rebel, a passionate, isolated, lonely rebel, without scruples,
against society and also against himself. The protagonists of the two novels are
indisputably kings and rebels of solitude. And their other names are isolation and
loneliness. This is a befitting end to this essay.
Achebe, Arrow of God, “Preface to Second Edition.”

32
Ernest N. Emenyonu, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 1, Omenka: The Master
33
Artist (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004); and Ernest N. Emenyonu and Iniobong I. Uko, ed.,
Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 2, Isinka, the Artistic Purposes: Chinua Achebe
and the Theory of African Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004).
References
Achebe Chinua. 1958, 1965. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.

———. 1964, 1974. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann.
Burt, Daniel S. 2004. The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. New York:
Checkmark Books.
Carrol, David. 1970, 1980. Chinua Achebe. New York: Twayne. London: Macmillan.
Emenyonu, Ernest N. 2004. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. 1. Omenka: The
Master Artist. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Emenyonu, Ernest N., and Inionbong I. Uko. 2004. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Vol.
2. Isinka, the Artistic Purposes: Chinua Achebe and the Theory of African Literature. Trenton,
NJ: Africa World Press.
Iyasere, Solomon. 1978. Narrative Technique in Things Fall Apart. In Critical Perspectives on
Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, 92–110. London: Heinemann.
Killam, G.D. 1976. Notions of Religion, Alienation and Archetype in Arrow of God. In Exile and
Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith, 152–165. London:
Dalhousie University Press.
Killam, G. D. 1977. The Writings of Chinua Achebe. Rev. Ed. London: Heinemann.
Maduka, Chukwugozie. 2008. Funeral Orations as Indicators of What a Good Life Ought to Be.
Human Affairs 18: 197–213.
Mbiti, John. 1975. Introduction to African Religion. New York: Praeger.
Nnolim, Charles, and E. 1977. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic. In Modern
Black Literature, ed. S. Okechukwu Mezu, 56–60. New York: Black Academy.
Opata, Damian U. 1987. Eternal Sacred Order Versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration
of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart. Research in African
Literatures 18 (1): 71–79.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Taiwo, Oladele. 1976. Culture and the Nigerian Novel. London: Macmillan.
Wren, Robert M. 1980. Achebe’s World: The Historical and Culture Contexts of the Novels of
Chinua Achebe. Washington: Three Continents.
Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s
“Diminishing Boundaries of a Shrinking
World” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River”
from Wild (2012)
Rosemary Gray
Abstract Consideration of Okri’s “Heraclitus’ Golden River” occurs here within

an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dia-
lectically twinned tropes – beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s
“One thunderbolt strikes root through everything,” cited as the epigraph to Okri’s
Wild (2012) intimates an African epistemology of cosmic holism, while his concept
of the metaphysical capacity of poetry to transform the earth into mother [Gaia]
sheltered by the sky and under the sun as an inscrutable god, expressed in A Way of
Being Free, foregrounds the relation between the fluidity of artistic creativity and an
eco-phenomenological exploration of “the diminishing boundaries of a shrinking
world.” This interpretation of Okri’s poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” rests on his
own conception of “wild” as energy meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental,
chaos honed. The reading of this poem celebrates mystical unrest viewed from an
ontopoietic appreciation of the sublime. The argument attempts to show that, for
this Nigerian poet, “wild” is perceived in his third anthology from a heightened
consciousness perspective as that which is transcendent – man’s link with the firma-
ment. This cosmic aspect accords with what the American nature poet Robert Frost
called wildness, that wild/ Arcadian place or the unconsidered land where life itself
sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces and to which the poet must
go, alone and in silence, to ignite his/her creativity.
Keywords African epistemology · Cosmic holism · Creative solitude · Culture

and consciousness · Ben Okri · “Wildness”
R. Gray (*)
Department of English University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

Switzerland AG 2023
150 R. Gray
Introduction
This consideration of Ben Okri’s poem “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” from his third
anthology of poetry, Wild, is predicated upon his conception of “wild” as energy
meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental: as chaos honed (Okri 2012, Dust
jacket). My interpretation seeks to celebrate the mystical unrest in the poem, viewed
from an ontopoietic appreciation of the sublime. The argument attempts to show
that, for this Nigerian born Londoner, “wild” is perceived from a heightened con-
sciousness perspective as that which is transcendent – man’s link with the firma-
ment – at once evoking a phenomenological and posthuman reading. This cosmic
aspect accords with what the American nature poet Robert Frost called “wildness,”
that wild/ Arcadian place or the unconsidered land where life itself sways perilously
at the confluence of opposing forces and to which the poet must go, alone and in
silence, to ignite his/her creativity, underscoring the subtheme of isolation/solitude
(Frost 2014, 2). My analysis is thus situated within an epistemic ecology in which
Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes –
beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt strikes root
through everything” (Okri 2012), cited as the epigraph to Wild, intimates an African
epistemology of cosmic holism, while Okri’s concept of the metaphysical capacity
of poetry to transform the earth into mother [Gaia] sheltered by the sky and under
the sun as an inscrutable god, expressed in A Way of Being Free (Okri 1997a, b, 2),
foregrounds the relation between the fluidity of artistic creativity and an eco-
phenomenological exploration of “the diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world”
(Okri 2012, 92); a world symbolized here in the desertification or circumstantial
demise of the city of Ephesus.
Ephesus, the home of Heraclitus,1 stands in the Maeander Valley, southeast of the
mouth of the Maeander (Cayster) River in modern day Turkey. The river flows into
the Mediterranean. Southwest of the city is Mt. Koressus (Bülbüldag), on the east is
Mt. Pion (Panayirdag), and there is a plain of arable land northwards between the
city and river. Ephesus’s harbour lay about four miles inland from the Mediterranean
with a man-made canal cut to run eastward from the Maeander. Heraclitus’s Ephesus
was rich enough to boast one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the
Temple of Artemis, and it later contained the massive Library of Kelsus; as a centre
of trade, it was unrivalled (See Greaves 2010). Then what happened? The river
gradually silted up despite Herculean efforts to keep the canal open and, now, a visit
to the ruins of Ephesus is hot and dusty. But for Heraclitus and his contemporaries
the Maeander was the most significant physical feature of the city’s wealth, trade
and fame. These geophysical aspects were perhaps the impetus behind Okri’s poem,
“Heraclitus’ Golden River,” with its central theme of the change/no change dialectic
and its catalytic river motif.
1
Heraclitus (c. 535 BC – 475 BC) lived during the so-called Archaic Period usually from c. 700 to
494 BC. He was not a philosopher but a sage and cosmologist.
Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “Diminishing Boundaries of a Shrinking World… 151
Okri stands in a long tradition of creative writers moved by the reading of the
pre-Socratic cosmologist, Heraclitus, whose fragments of writing are sufficiently
enigmatic for him to have been given the sobriquet, “the Obscure.” The archaic
thinker made elliptical commentaries on the phenomenological world, especially
about how things change. The statements were not from a rationalist, Aristotelian
viewpoint. Heraclitus’s oracular statements belong to the tradition of “wisdom lit-
erature” which flourished from Babylonia to Ionia and into Sicily and Egypt in
archaic times and tended to the pithy, the contradictory, the obscure (Lazaridis 2007,
219–220, 243). Okri’s own oeuvre displays a similar virtuosity in making pro-
foundly oracular, elliptical statements. Moreover, his speculative Weltangschauung
[worldview], intimating a phenomenological realm between subjective and objec-
tive reality, is in line with Heraclitus’s comprehension of the world. Yet, whereas
readers of the contemporary Okri can make a clear distinction between what is
considered rational, scientific and provable, and set that in opposition to what is
imaginative, poetic and metaphorical, it is more difficult to do so when faced with
the fragments of the Sages in pursuit of wisdom some 2600 years ago. Okri’s is a
bold enterprise to gloss the archaic words of Heraclitus in his poem, “Heraclitus’
Golden River,” in order to bring them within the understanding of a modern reader
in his anthology entitled, “Wild” (2012, 92–94).
This poem speaks to both the tradition of wisdom literature and contemporary
ecological investigations, not to mention our global imperative. The contemporary
audience Okri addresses, however, makes little distinction between urban and wild
except as part of a private tourist programme. Unlike Okri, we tend to take for
granted writing as signs disinvested of their numinous power to give access to potent
wisdom and it is commonplace that our wise folk, like the actress, Udita Goswami,
producer, William Arntz and philosopher, Werner Heisenberg can end up in pseudo-
science films for the masses, such as “What the Bleep Do we Know?”
pistemic Eco-Phenomenology and the River

E
of Creative Inspiration
In an uncanny echo of the film’s title, “What the Bleep do we know?” Okri states in
A Time for New Dreams that the “[t]he universe grows more mysterious around us
even as we find out more about it” (2011, 28). He suggests that the reason behind
this paradox is that “we are taught to see less in ourselves, to ask no questions about
our true inner nature” (2011, 28). Elaborating on the need for self-discovery or what
fellow Nigerian and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka terms man’s “gravity-bound
apprehension of self” as “inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon” (1976,
1995), 3), Okri posits that, [k]nowing ourselves, we will know others. Only by
knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in
our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate
others, the poverty we create and exploit (2011, 29).
152 R. Gray
This excerpt suggests that Okri apprehends big movements in philosophy through
reading and the imagination – so, he goes from the wisdom literature that counsels
self-control to the full blown philosophical idea of “Know thyself.” He thus extends
Soyinka’s ethics. His epistemology, akin to that of Heraclitus, embraces both ethics
and politics. “Knowing ourselves” or exercising our own logos, Okri submits, “we
will know others” and so come to realize that the external logos of the cosmos
entails an “ethical and political scheme in which one is persuaded by the best per-
son, who can only be the one who exercises this capacity best” (Kahn 1979, 24). Put
simply, this implies the dawning of enlightenment by the knowing self, that is,
through self-apprehension.
Indicative of epistemic eco-phenomenology, would be the poet’s green economy
awareness, his deep concern for, and the need to grapple with, current as well as
perennial issues, issues vitally significant to the survival of humankind, at the heart
of which lies a tension between education (what we are taught) and knowledge of
self. “Only through self-knowledge,” Okri insists, “can we reverse the damage we
do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which is only a higher ignorance”
(2011, 29).
What then is the inspirational role of art in countering our “higher ignorance,” in
providing intuitions and/or new ways of thinking to address or redress culturally
imposed indoctrination and man’s destruction of the planet – the frame of Part 1 of
his poem entitled “Heraclitus’ Golden River” (2012, 92–93)? The answer, as implied
in Part 2, resides in a symbiosis of the impetus and equipoise of one-world
consciousness.
An Okri aphorism: “To see a work of art or the truth in a work requires a solid
foundation in ourselves” (2011, 24), coupled with the poem’s reiterated pivotal
injunction to “Spread illumination through this darkening world” (2012, 94, ll.
82–83), encapsulates impetus. His claim in A Way of Being Free that “[t]he poet
turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun the inscrutable god …”
(1997a, b, 2), together with the poetic lines: “Poets pray to the goddess of surprise/
Love is seduced by change,/ Itself unchanging” (2012, 93, ll.28–30), reflects
equipoise.
Ultimately, the poem – as a whole – advocates discretion, which moves to self-
knowledge as a metaphysics of life. Both abstractions are basic tenets of “wisdom
literature.” The proposition is evidently a re-view and revival of a pre-modern,
mythopoeic relationship with Nature as a living, sentient interlocutor, and of life
rather than man as “the measure.”2 This resonates not only with the poem’s title but
2
As Nicoletta Ghigi argues, pointing to the anguish and ‘dis-ease’ that characterize our generation
and the need to re-humanize, to re-appropriate one’s own life and one’s own telos: “To constitute
a metaphysics as a science that makes this telos its own object or to think of a philosophical reflec-
tion that is completely turned toward life and its meaning offers us the possibility of rethinking the
human and to rethink her existence as a true return to authentic existence … as the being to which
we are and in which we participate insofar as we are single personalities endowed with our own
interiority and, above all, our own telos that gives form to life” (2014, 9).
also with Theodor Adorno’s claim that art “suspends self-justificatory, teleological
rationality” (2002, 138), an aspect integral to Okri’s poetic enterprise.
“Heraclitus’ Golden River”
Part 1 of the poem under discussion reflects our “darkening world” of disposses-
sion, “war” and “rage,” while Part 2 is a meditation on the dance of illumination
through knowledge of self and our cosmic oneness. As noted, consideration of
Okri’s poem occurs here within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic
consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes – beyond culture and below
consciousness. Epistemic ecology and the posthuman, suggestive of a mystical
journey of transformation and enlightenment, are melded into a mythic conjunction.
Heraclitus’s oracular fragments inform the thrust of the poem. Its title, for example,
invokes Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux and, by implication, a unity of opposites.
Reminiscent of Okri’s deployment of the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” [I too lived in
Arcadia] – the inscription on the tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s painting of Les Bergers
d’Arcadie – in his 2007 novel, In Arcadia, with its multiple signification,3 Heraclitan
fragments are couched in a comparably complex twinned and epigrammatic style.
Consider, for example, two of the river fragments: “On those stepping into rivers
staying the same other and other waters flow (έτερα και έτερα)” (Dk22B12)4 and
“Into the same river we step and do not step, we are and are not (ποταμοϊς τοις
αΰτοϊς ... είμεν τε και ουκ είμεν)” (B49a).5 As Prier observes,
It is the dyadic phrase έτερα και έτερα that dictates the oppositional nature of the [first]
fragment itself because of the strict sense of disjunction yet identity the words imply. Yet,
everywhere the underlying third term, or the Logos as unity, is symbolized by the river —
the river that … [in the second fragment] unifies life and death, the ultimate opposition for
man (1976, 70).
The relation between eco-phenomenology and the fluidity of artistic creativity fore-
grounds our embeddedness in the cosmos. A close observation of natural forces and
a metaphysics of life, arising from an expectation that the imagination/ creativity
3
See Gray, Rosemary. 2009. “Apologia pro Ben Okri’s In Arcadia: A Neglected Masterpiece.”
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 26, no. 1: 65–71.
4
Graham, Daniel, W. “Heraclitus.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 2 October 31, 2014.
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/heraclit/print/>; and Cleanthus from Arius Didymus from Eusebius. (4)
Web. 1–14. October 31, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/. Accessed April
13, 2016.
5
Anon. “Heraclitus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 5. October 31 2015.
Compare: “No man even steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not
the same man” (Aquileana 2015: 3). Web. 31 October 2015: 1–23. https://aquileana.files.word-
press.com/2014/02/ guarda5.png/. Accessed April 13, 2016.
154 R. Gray
that will bring us into an understanding of the phenomenological wild with its
immense complexity, is at play.6
The opening lines of “Heraclitus’ Golden River” – “Change is good, but no
change/ Is better” (Okri 2012, 92, ll. 1–2) poeticizes Heraclitus’s river insights in its
dialogue on the change/ no change dichotomy. This, in turn, is a reflection on the
tension between Nature’s ebb and flow and humankind’s “iron will. Our willed
philosophies” (92, l. 32) vainly bent on trying to stem cyclical change, coupled with
the hermeneutics of being-towards-death (to invoke Heidegger’s term). The impli-
cation is that a mythic conjunction between poetry and ontopoiesis might awaken
the superconscious – “beyond culture” – to its true value and so to our relation to the
cosmos. The motif of the “diminishing boundaries/ Of a shrinking world” (92, ll.
24–25) within a theme of the inexorability of mutability deals with the “great and
ultimate” questions, to use Husserl’s phraseology (Husserl 1970, 299). Such ques-
tions are implicitly pondered over in Okri’s poem.
Although her viewpoint is one of Philosophy rather than Phenomenology of
Life, Nicoletta Ghegi expresses the project as being, “… to reappropriate the role,
drawing from psychology and the other sciences (i.e., anthropology, psychoanaly-
sis, etc.) of being, the ‘indicator of the sense or meaning of living’ or, as Aristotle
said, to teach one to reach that which is generally called wisdom” (2014, 4). Okri’s
eco-phenomenological thrust points to the wisdom of “beingness,” in particular, as
testified in the poem’s nexus: “But the river flows, and so must we./ Change is the
happy god Heraclitus/ Glimpsed in the golden river” (2012 94, ll. 79–81).
Non-duality, reciprocal interdependent relationships and the concurrence of
being and logos are also integral to African thought (see note 17) as reinforced by
Okri’s statement in an interview with Hubert Essakow about his Booker Prize novel:
The Famished Road is fed by the dreams of literature. I devoured the world, through art,
politics, literature, films and music, in order to find the elixir of its tone. Then it became a
perpetual story into which flowed the great seas of African dreams, myths, fables of the
world, known and unknown … The novel was written to give myself a reason to live (Okri
2016, 2).
Okri’s Heraclitan preoccupation with the metonymic river of life is manifest in the
flow of “the great seas,” above, and in this poem, as well as in his opening gambit to
The Famished Road (1991, 1997a, b), which reads: “In the beginning there was a
river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And
because the road was once a river it was always hungry” (1997a, b, 3).7 A comparable
6
ff
7
Compare Wole Soyinka’s drama, The Road:
“Samson: … May we never walk when the road waits, famished” (Soyinka 1965, 60) – the
allusion is to the myth of Ogun, the Yoruba god of the road, who feeds off the remains of
road accidents, causing such accidents when he is hungry. And the insights into the inevita-
bility of death encapsulated in:
Prof.: But there is this other joke of the fisherman, slapping a loaded net against the sandbank.
[Looks around him.] When the road is dry it runs into the river. But the river? When the river is
philological strategy – that of transforming symbolic phenomenon into structural

ones through syntactic juxtaposition – is revealed in Heraclitus’s archaic sense of
identity in opposition as in “The road up/down, is one and the same” (Heraclitus in
Prier 60). For Okri, the river “became” a road that “was once” a river (1991, 1997a,
b, 3), indicative of the conflation of time, future and past coalesce.
In eco-feminist discourse, the “river beneath the river,” which runs through the
psychic “Otherworld” [below consciousness], is perceived as the Divine Feminine
or, as Clarissa Estés notes, the “Wild Woman archetype … the One Who Knows”
(1998, 26), and from whom all instinct and deep knowing emanate. As already
quoted, not only does Okri state in the poem under discussion that “Poets pray to the
goddess of surprise” (93, l. 27), but, correlating with the notion of a divinely femi-
nine muse, he picks up on the metaphysical and geophysical nature of the poetic
enterprise, asserting that “[p]oetry is also the great river of soul murmurings that
runs within humanity” (2011, 4). He avers that, “Poets merely bring that river to the
surface for a moment, here and there, in cascades of sound and suggested meaning,
through significant form” (ibid.).
Lines from Stanza 3 of Okri’s poem highlight this aspect:
And as we keep.
Things the same, the river.
Works beneath us.
The god works ironies.
On our lives…. (2012, 92, ll. 13–17).
The river motif thus encompasses both heightened sensibility and the “law of
change and decay” that underpins natural and human life, endorsed in:
… The river runs,
Fields unfurl strange.
New mushrooms, libraries yield.
New books in the charged.
Margins of the old (2012, 92, ll. 17–21).
Here, the “charged margins” of old texts perhaps allude to the glosses, such as those
encountered in ancient texts, dictated by “reason,” an indictment of a propensity
towards the rational as opposed to the intuitive imaginary, while the “strange/ New
mushrooms” allude to an increasingly dark and barren earth, a no longer fructifying
wilderness that is at once eco-phenomenological and mystical. The implicit indict-
ment prefigures the realization that the old dogma (“iron philosophies” and “willed
philosophies” [Okri 2012, 92, ll. 22, 32]) perpetuates a metaphorical delimitation
and contraction of our world in what follows:
parched what choice is this? Still it is a pleasant trickle–reddening somewhat–between barren

thighs of an ever patient rock. The rock is a woman you understand, so is the road. The know how
to lie and wait (Soyinka 1965, 58).
In this play, the Professor is a well-to-do forger of driver’s licences and so an accessory to road
accidents. His quest is for the meaning of “the word,” “which may be found companion not to life
but Death” (Soyinka 1965, 11; original emphasis), a veiled indictment of organized religion as “the
final gate to the Word” (1965, 93; original emphasis) and of the elusiveness of complete knowing.
156 R. Gray
And reason, trapped in iron philosophies,

Turns on itself, and prowls.
The diminished boundaries.
Of a shrinking world,
Shrinking because of the horror.
Of the devils at the gates (92, ll. 22–27).
The chiasmus in the last lines in this excerpt (“Of a shrinking world,/ Shrinking
because of the horror”) encapsulates the resonances of a poetic imagination con-
fronted by the horror of the “diminished boundaries,” in other words, of our
“destruction of the environment,” quoted at the outset. In Hegel’s reading of
Heraclitan thought – and, as evidenced in these lines, to Okrian understanding too –
the most pertinent characteristic is “the structure of an oppositional logic divorced
from, but regulating entirely, the objective world of naïve sense perception” (Prier
1976, 59–61).
However, Okri suggests that poets have, through imagination, a way of re-
entering his notion of the “wild,” where they can “pray to the goddess of surprise”
(l. 28; already quoted) and where, related to such numinous experiences, poets
know that “Love is ... unchanging” (2012, 93, ll. 29–30; quoted earlier), to counter
the “horror” of humankind’s destructiveness. The implication is that it is possible
through the capacity of those who are poets to resist a mindset that is “trapped in
iron philosophies” (l. 22; quoted earlier) and so resist changing beliefs, ensuring
that “Old ways [are] kept/ Old” (92, ll.7–8). Poets have been suggesting their con-
nection to means other than those of ordinary mortals in accessing extraordinary
realities for a long time – easily since the hieratic functions of priests in their rela-
tion to the divine were taken on by the “inspired,".8
In this poem, Okri creates, imaginatively, the distant beginnings of observations
made by the cosmologists about the mysterious contradictory phenomenological
reality of the world. Long ago, a number of elite men in antiquity were beginning to
question that phenomenological world in all its apparent illogicality and to substi-
tute for the religious and mythical explanations of the great poets such as Homer,
other causes than divine intervention or a deus ex machina. Okri declares that
“Change is a god that Heraclitus saw/ In the ancient river” (2012, 92, ll. 11–12). To
reiterate, this reading of “Heraclitus’ Golden River” rests on Okri’s own particular
notion of “wild” as that space where energy meets freedom, art meets the elemental,
where chaos is honed. For Okri, as already intimated, “wild” is perceived from an
ontopoietic or heightened consciousness perspective; it is “our link with the stars”
(Wild: see also Okri’s novel, Starbook [2007] and Gray 2013). This cosmic aspect
accords with what the American poet Robert Frost called “wildness,” that “wild
place” or “the unconsidered land” where life itself “… sways perilously at the con-
fluence of opposing forces” (Baym 1965, 716)9 and to which the poet must retreat
in solitude and in silence, to spark and, by extension, to fuel his or her creativity.
8
Homer’s invocation to the muse was already ancient in the eighth century BC.
9
See Baym, Nina (1965, 713–732). She argues that what Frost uncovers in his investigation of
nature is a sombre truth, the law of “change and decay.”
The creative imagination at work in this poem is all too evident in its treatment
of its subject matter, viz. the unfathomable nature of existence. Through poetry and
the manipulation of the truths of the imagination, rhetoric can play its true role of
revealing – through its manifestation – the relationship of things to things. One may,
through a consideration of rhetorical devices, thus arrive at a better understanding
of self, and so, of Life. Consider, for example, the deployment of paradox, itself a
reflection of the syntactic opposition of rational/artistic, in “…The words rang/
Through the great hall/ As they have resounded/Silently through bygone ages”
(Okri 2012, 92, ll. 2–5). The onomatopoeic “r” alliteration clanging “silently” is, at
once, suggestive of subliminal indoctrination and, reminiscent of the muezzin’s call,
of organized religion’s resistance to change. This is implied in “the great halls” (92,
l. 3), presumably of culture or received knowledge and in the evocation of a desert
setting in “The air is dryer where no change/ Is better” (ll. 6–7), where, as noted,
“Old ways are kept/ Old” (ll. 7–8). The “bygone ages” which Herodotus (a key
author for Okri) describes in his famous histories are useful to contextualize
Heraclitus and the milieu and world in which he lived and worked.
Heraclitus is an Ionian Greek, not a Mainland Greek. Okri is particular. Generally,
Ionia in its extent is conveniently demarcated by historians so as to include the cities
of the Ionian dodekapolis (league of 12 cities) named by Herodotus (1.142).10 It
stands on the west coast of Asia Minor and although it was Greek speaking from the
time of the Luwians, the Achaeans and Mycenaeans had occupied it since the twen-
tieth century BC. Nonetheless, Ionia shared much in common with all its Anatolian
neighbours and the successive invaders who had come before – war craft, building
styles, ideas, ways of honouring the gods. Okri’s emphasis in the poem is on “gates”
(92, l. 27) for keeping devils or demons out of the city and, according to various
cultural legends, city “walls” (93, ll. 38, 42, 49, 50) were built by “giants” (93, l.
38). The poem is replete with imagery of ruins of bygone empires and dynasties
such as those Heraclitus himself would have observed and travellers in modern
Turkey can still see. Cities that have gates and walls suggest technological expertise
and a level of civilization which was prized in antiquity. Yet, Okri highlights the
irony of Nature’s way in:
The giants who built walls
Meant to be proof against
Time and the desert ravages
Found in their sleep
That the walls had become
Change, had moved, had dissolved;
Or worse, that the feared things
Had seeped in underfoot,
Or through the air;
Or changed the frontiers
Of their rigid dialogue (2012, 93, ll. 38-48).
Phokaia, Chios, Erythrai, Klazomenai, Teos, Lebedos, Kolophon, Ephesos, Samos, Priene,
10
Myous, and Miletos (Hdt. 1.142).

158 R. Gray
The earlier description of “iron philosophies” (Okri 2012, 92, l. 22), reiterated
through a variation with “the frontiers/ Of their rigid dialogue” (ll. 47–48), is evi-
dently the poet’s commentary on the madness of swapping one set of ideologies for
another equally vain and rigid set which, in time, will trap the very invaders them-
selves and will turn them, paradoxically, into giants who must build walls of a dif-
ferent kind again and again. Okri’s meditation on the destruction wrought over time
on cities that were, erstwhile, centres of civilization and places where the greatest
thoughts could emerge, is skilfully brought up to date in the reference to “our age”
(2012, 94, l. 61), while invoking the past through the imagery of “oases,” alluding
to the oasis cities of antiquity which were bombed and ransacked. It is no longer the
greedy devils and demons full of their unvirtuous “thumos” as Heraclitus describes
it: “It is hard to fight against rage/ passion/ desire; for whatever it wants it buys at
the expense of soul” (Kahn 1979, 77). Now, great kings and emperors do not con-
quer; rather “the unlucky, the unfortunate,/ The dispossessed (ll. 58-59), who are
full of “rage“ at the “Protected places, illuminated/ By time” (Okri 2012, 94, ll.
56–57), do. These are the fanatics who blow up temples like those of ancient
Palmyra, a great oasis city in Syria with monumental ruins.
Arguably too the paradox in “Walls invite invasion” (Okri 2012, 93, l. 49) could
possibly allude to fellow nature poet, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with its telling
line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (Frost 2014, l. 1). In this latter
poem, walls, irrationally erected between two orchards (apples and pines), are mys-
teriously eroded by natural forces and/or wild hares.11
As symbolic of unnatural physical barriers, walls are emblematic in English
poetry. Their collapse may be wrought by erosion or a conscious force in nature, as
in Frost’s poem, or by divine intervention, as illustrated in Hadrian’s Wall, for
instance. Built by the Roman invaders of England, from west coast to east, to protect
the Roman settlers from the indigenous Celts and Picts, the famed Hadrian’s Wall
could, in its ecological transfiguration, be that which is evoked in the irony of.
Walls end up trapping within the demons.
Meant to be kept out: for.
The demons merely turn into.
The giants, grow in them.
Like silent cancer (Okri 2012, 93, ll. 50–54).
After the departure of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons referred to the remnants of the
Roman constructions with awe and wonder as the work of giants, destroyed by
“Wierds,” the pre-Christian Fates, as captured in Michael Alexander’s translation of
an Old English fragment, which reads:
Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.
The stronghold burst …
11
Robert Frost’s (1874–1963) iconic nature poetry appears to correlate with that of Okri. His mes-
sage in “Mending Wall” (2014) – that something is amiss in a world of walls/ unnatural barriers –
is endorsed in Okri’s “Heraclitus’ Golden River.”
Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,

The work of Giants, the stonesmith’s.
moulderith.12
The multiple intertextual nuggets appear to be intentional. There is, of course, also
the wall of Jericho that “fell beneath itself” in the late fifteenth century BC [the late
Bronze Age], rendered in Biblical mythology as “fell flat” (Joshua 6: 20) to indicate
the miracle of the Israelites’ conquest of the Canaanites. In the earlier quoted stanza,
the reference to “the feared things” that “Had seeped in underfoot” (Okri 2012, 93,
ll. 44–45) is suggestive of the walled city of Jericho that had within it a copious
natural spring, much as did Ephesus.13 These ambiguities serve to place interpreta-
tion beyond any specific cultural context.
Calling for knowledge of self, discussed earlier, the need to reflect upon exis-
tence is suggested by other teasing allusions, such as the reiteration of “the devils at
the gate(s) (Okri 2012, 92, ll. 8-9, 27). One wonders: Is the allusion to the Christian
dogma of Hell Fire? Does this evoke Heraclitus’s view of fire as the source and
nature of all things, and the transformation of elementary bodies, emblematic of
natural change, as indicated in his belief in “The turnings of fire: first sea, and of sea
half is earth, half fireburst” (B31 [a]). Or, is this perhaps an allusion to the origin of
the Big Bang theory; or is it the Canaanites’ fear of the nomadic Israelites as harbin-
gers of change and decay; or is it rather Heraclitus’s Ephesus now lying in ruins,
with its Maeander a dry river bed? As is characteristic too of Heraclitan scholarship,
interpretative difficulties abound!
This reading illustrates Okri’s propensity to pack multiple meanings into seem-
ingly simple phrases. Every logos is meant to be experienced in order to decipher
meaning. Hegel too endeavours to describe the incorporation of the objective world
into the phenomenological state of consciousness in terms of human experience. He
is quoted by Prier as saying that “experience is called this very process by which the
element that is immediate, unexperienced … externalizes itself [i.e., is felt by the
subject as ‘external to himself’], and then comes back to itself from this state of
estrangement, and by so doing is at length set forth in its concrete nature and real
truth, and becomes too a possession of consciousness” (Prier 1976, 59–61).
This kind of linguistic density and resonance characterizes Okri’s treatment of
his oppositional theme of change/ no change, which is most tellingly reflected in his
use of the coincidence of opposites. The penultimate stanza, for instance, points to
an idyllic Arcadian scene of the Augustan peace that followed the Roman civil war,
“It is natural to want calm places/ Where stillness grows./ It’s natural to want/
Virgil’s spreading beeches” (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 75–78). The image of the “spreading
beech,” which offers shelter from the weather, echoes the earlier part of the poem.
In Part 1, the image of an oasis in the desert (discussed earlier) prefigures this
12
Quoted in Peter Straus (2012, 20). The reference to stone smiths is probably to the late Anglo-
Saxon building with stone rather than wood – a legacy from the Roman occupation of Briton/
Britain.
13
Wood, Bryant D. Web. 1–17. May 22, 2016: 1–17. The Walls of Jericho. http://www.biblearche-
ology.org/post/2008/06/The-Walls_of-Jericho.aspx/. Accessed May 28, 2016.
160 R. Gray
“calm” place, a shelter from the inclemency of the desert of Asia Minor. In the refer-
ence to Virgil and the Augustan peace, Okri centres the poem on the longed-for idyll
of a benign state where the age-old pursuits of bucolic citizens can be pursued.
Hence, it is “natural” to hanker after Virgil’s beeches. Both the oasis and the beech
trees convey the notion of ethical composure (not structurally contrived as in neo-
Marxists’ Corbyn or Sanders) but sensed from within and lived out from that inner
conviction. The images imply a posthuman democracy of soul and mind perceived
and reflected as the composing unity of nature.14
Such glimpses of a constructed, well organized state in perfect balance, a piece
of paradise, are in contrast to the preceding stanza’s man-made destruction wrought
by “ambition” (Okri 2012, 93, l. 70) and the detritus of “wars” (l. 72), and serve to
highlight the inexorability of change. This epiphanic vision is thus coupled with an
enumeration of ecological changes, such as continental drift and cosmic chaos in:
All around, leonids, planets.
Stars are whirling.
The cosmos shrinks and grows.
It dreams and flows.
Beneath the immutable spell of change (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 62–66).
Here, Chaos, the theory of how the universe is organized according to laws that we
do not easily understand is envisioned as a “spell.” The mysterious flux of the uni-
verse in the Heraclitan oracular fragments is typically poetic. Okri’s cosmogony of
wonderment, wedded as it is to his comprehension of mankind’s destructiveness,
both dovetails with and modifies Heraclitus’s philosophy of human affairs, likewise
expressed in didactic literary form as in: “You must recognize that war is common,
strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity” (B80).
Okri evidently attributes cosmic destructiveness to humankind’s perpetuation of
a futile heroic ethos of valour and courage – what he consolidates into “ambition” –
as precipitating the demise of dynastic and imperial achievements; they “cave in,”
“give up the ghost,” and lives “collapse” (94, ll. 67–70) as “wars eat up fathers and
frail sisters” (94, l. 72). In Okri’s ascetic ideal, humanism can contribute nothing to
his society of knowers as long as it remains fixated on the image of strong and opin-
ionated men. Insisting on the redemptive role of poetry, which comprises “the magic
of listening” (Okri 2011, 3) to those who can access the “wild,” Okri writes in A
Time for New Dreams:
In a world of contending guns, the argument of bombs, and the madness of believing only
our side, our religion, our politics is right, a world fatally inclined towards war – we need
the voice of poetry that speaks to the highest in us (2011, 3; emphasis added).
14
In Virgil’s Eclogues, Tityrus is beneath a beech tree that comes to symbolize the wisdom of rural
restraint and peace as in much seventeenth century poetry and discussed later in this chapter in
terms of sophrosyne.
Conclusion
The necessary destructiveness of war returns the argument to the initial Okri extract
on the need for knowledge of self, as well as to the opening of The Famished Road
(quoted earlier), now seemingly alluding to the wrath of Ogun, Yoruba god of the
war and the road (an African correlative of the Roman Mars or Greek Deimos), but
also, by extension, to the Greek anathematizing of “unhallowed speech” in gover-
nance: “And roads break out/ Into unhallowed speech” (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 73–74).15
As the messenger of the gods, Ogun is the mouthpiece for the ancestors, and so
arguably for antiquity or the pre-Homeric conception of moderation or excellence
(sophrosyne) that is encapsulated in the aphorisms of the Seven Sages: “Know thy-
self,” “Nothing in excess,” “Measure is best” (Kahn 1979, 27–32), reiterated in
Okri’s pivotal injunction to know oneself and his plea to “Spread illumination
through this darkening world” (2012, 94, ll. 82–83; quoted earlier).
Okri thus keeps the Heraclitan illusory material intact, but conflates logos, the
guiding principle for Heraclitan cosmology that he calls “fire,” with the river’s flow,
making Nature’s “change” the guiding principle of this poem, as exemplified in the
lines: “The river makes all things/ Dance to the music they/ Never understood at the
time” (2012, 93, ll. 35–37; emphasis added). The acoustic resonance here recalls the
Shamanistic trance dance, a universal in deep antiquity and expressed in more mod-
ern times by such examples as the Khoi/San ritual to heighten consciousness in
order to heal society, encapsulated in Okri’s plea to “spread illumination ….” It is
the river transformed from being a metonymy for change to a metaphor for Logos,
the guiding principle that makes “ta panta,” all things, dance to a music, which
“they” could not have understood at the time. The ambiguous use of the pronoun
“they” makes this statement particularly enigmatic. Nevertheless, Okri infers that
poets are engaged in a ritual of prayer to “the goddess of surprise” and the road/river
should not utter blasphemous words at this time. Of course, the poet Okri stages a
model of the world in the kind of powerful suggestions that ritual makes about
social reality under the aegis of divine authority. This might not be fulfilled, as he
reminds us in the rhetorical question posed in A Time for New Dreams: “Who can
weigh a word on a scale, even against a feather of truth?” (2011, 5) – a veiled allu-
sion to Egyptian mythology and the judgement of the god Anubis (Spence 1915,
1925, 119). This is countered with an oppositional adversative: “And yet,” sugges-
tive of the need to re-dream the world and Okri’s fascination with and knowledge of
antiquity, a tribute enshrined in the title to this poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River”:
“… see how much words weigh in the heart, in the imagination, in dreams, echoing
down the ages, as durable as the Pyramids” (Okri 2011, 5).
The appeal to the senses of sight and sound culminates in one to the ontopoietic
intellect, invoking another of the four basic elements of the cosmos: “Words, lighter
than air, are as mysteriously enduring as lived time” (Okri 2011, 5). And, so, at the
conclusion of the poem the poet admonishes us to
15
This legacy can be seen in the Christian marriage rites.
162 R. Gray
Spread illumination through this darkening world.

Spread illumination through this darkening world (Okri 2012, 94, ll. 82-83).
His choice of “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything” as epigraph to his
collection, from Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt steers all things” (B64) does, how-
ever, indicate recognition of a guiding force of the world that, in turn, is a correlative
of an African epistemology of holism and enlightenment, captured in the term
Ubuntu – which translates loosely as “I am, because you are”.16 Daniel Graham
clarifies the cosmic thrust in the context of Heraclitan thought: “The fiery shaft of
lightning is a symbol of the direction of the world” (Graham 2014, 8), the thunder-
bolt being an attribute of Zeus, the storm god/ a.k.a. of Life.
Okri’s explication of the power of poetry, in its exalted condition as “a descen-
dant of the original word [read Logos] which mystics [read poets] believe gave the
impetus for all creation” (Okri 2011, 5; additions added), coupled with his insis-
tence that “[p]oetry incarnates that which shapes, changes, transforms” (ibid.) trans-
mutes Heraclitus’s thunderbolt into a metaphor for poetic agency. This is captured
in Okri’s belief that “Poetry hints at the godlike in us, and causes us to resonate with
high places of being” (ibid.). Okri concedes that, “The ancient oracles may be silent;
and we may not believe in the many ways the gods speak to us, or through us”
(ibid.). And, as is customary in Okrian oracular sayings, he follows this with a quali-
fication, introduced with the adversative “but” in: “But living means that we are the
focus of many pressures: the demands of society, the strange pressures of being
itself, of yearnings, inexplicable moods, dreams, and of feelings powerful with all
currents of mortal life” (Okri 2011, 5). He clinches his cyclical argument on the
ecological dance of Life in his closing couplet with an appeal for sophrosyne, an
evocation of the “wild,” where “chaos” can be “honed”:
No change is good, dancing
Gracefully to change is better (2012, 94, ll. 84–85; emphasis added).17
So, what is ultimately significant in Okri’s treatment of the oppositional change/ no

change dichotomy, that is, of his dialectic of opposites [Gegenstände], is that the
poet reinvests the words with a numinous power they had lost. His speculative
method of thought, as witnessed in the hierarchical and heuristic progression of this
16
Kamwangamalu (1999, 25–26) argues that ubuntu is integral to pan-African philosophy and he
shows that it has multiple phonological variants, for example umundu in Kikuyu [Kenya], bumuntu
in KiSuma and KiHaya [Tanzania] and gimuntu inKiKongo and giKwezi (DRC). Mogobe Ramose
(2001, 3), however, while acknowledging the Ubuntu is a fundamental ontological and epistemo-
logical category of thought, delimits its significance to the Bantu-speakers of South Africa. The
relevance of the term to the present discussion is that, morphologically, the prefix ubu- indicates a
general state of being, whereas –ntu means “a person.” The composite word thus signifies two
aspects of being, encapsulating both self and other, that is, an indivisible interrelatedness.
17
Compare Okri’s self-reflexive comment on his Famished Road trilogy:
Dancers’ limbs twist and thread/ In this highly atmospheric/ Conclusion to an elemental/
Trilogy that veers between the/ Airy and the grounded (Okri in Essakow, 2016, 3).
two-part poem, not only allows Okri to deal validly with his overt as well as deeper
subject matter – the inexorability of change and the need for enlightenment, but also
to embed a collection of Heraclitan ideas that permits the coexistence of change and
no change, and so of Being and Not-Being on an equal footing, making quite clear
the necessity of a new interpretational stance and a new attitude to “beingness”
through an ontopoietic epistemic ecology – beyond culture and below
consciousness.
References
Adorno, Theodor. 2002. On the Contemporary Relation Between Philosophy and Music. In Essays
on Music, ed. Richard Leppert. Berkley: University of California Press.
Aquileana. 2015. Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites. https://
aquileana.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/guarda5.png/. Web. 31 October 2015.
Baym, Nina. 1965. Robert Frost’s Nature Poetry: An Approach to Robert Frost’s Nature Poetry.
American Quarterly 17 (1): 713–732.
Essakow, Hubert. 2016. Terra Review – New Ben Okri. Guardian 15 (March): 1–3.
Estés, Clarissa. 1998. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman.
Johannesburg: Random House.
Frost, Robert. 2014. North of Boston. Cambridge, Massachusetts: David Nutt.
Ghigi, Nicoletta. 2014. Towards a New Enlightenment: Metaphysics as Philosophy of Life. In
Phenomenology of Space and Time. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 3-10, Analecta
Husserliana. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer.
Graham, Daniel W. 2014. Heraclitus. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.
edu/heraclit/print/>. Web. 1-6. Accessed 31 October 2014.
Gray, R. 2009. Apologia pro Ben Okri’s in Arcadia: A Neglected Masterpiece. English Academy
Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 26 (1): 65–71.
———. 2013. When Chaos is the God of an Era: Rediscovering an Axis Mundi in Ben Okri’s
Starbook (2007). Research in African Literatures 44 (1): 128–145.
Greaves, A. 2010. The land of Ionia: Society Recovery in the Archaic Period. Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell.
Husserl, E. 1970. In Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortäges, ed. I. Husserliana and
B. Strasser. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Kahn, C., ed. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with
Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kamwanggamalu, N.M. 1999. Ubuntu in South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Perspective to a Pan-
African Concept. Critical Arts 13 (2): 24–41.
Lazaridis, N. 2007. Wisdom in Loose Form. The Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in
Collections of the Helenistic and Roman Period. Leiden: Brille.
Okri, Ben. 1991, 1997a. The Famished Road. London: Vintage.
———. 1989, 1997b. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix.
———. 2007. Starbook. Chatham: Random House.
———. 2011. A Time for New Dreams. Chatham: Random House.
———. 2012. Wild. Croydon: Random House.
Prier, A. 1976. Archaic Logic: Symbol and Structure in Heraclitus, Parmenides and Empedocles.
Mouton: The Hague.
Ramose, M.B. 2001. An African Perspective on Justice and Race. Forum for Philosophizing
2: 1–27.
Soyinka, Wole. 1965. The Road. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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———. 1976, 1995. Myth, Literature and the African World. New York & London: Cambridge
University Press.
Spence, Louis. 1915, 1925. The Myths of Ancient Egypt. London: George G Harris & Co.
Straus, Peter. 2012. From Beowulf to Prufrock: One Thousand Years of English Writing. Cowies
Hill, KwaZulu-Natal: Solo Collective.
Wood, Bryant. 2016. The Walls of Jericho Web. 1-17. Accessed 22 May 2016. http://biblearcheol-
ogy.org/post/2008/06/The-Walls-of-Jericho.aspx/
Part V
Narrative and Solitude
Death and the Absence of Others:
A Narratological Investigation of Death
and Solitude
John N. Balsavich
Abstract In the paper, I deal with three novels – Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – to
explore the issue of facing death while being the last man or woman in existence.
The Last Man is a first-person narrative that chronicles the gradual destruction of
the human race by a plague. The third person narration in The Year of the Flood
portrays the character Toby trying to make sense of her solitary condition on top of
a rooftop spa, all while under the impression that she is the only person left alive in
the whole world. Finally, in The Road the nameless father struggles to ensure the
survival of his son in a world that has given into cannibalism. To explore the effects
solitude has concerning the theme of death, I consider Emmanuel Levinas’s God,
Death, and Time and Time and the Other. Levinas is essential because of the stress
he places on the ethical and meaningful relationships we enter into as being part of
society. Furthermore, Levinas argues that death has a societal feature due to the fact
that there are traditionally survivors to remember the departed. The notion of soli-
tude, which is a prevalent theme in each of the three novels, removes that societal
context, thus resulting in the last man or woman having to face death alone. The
paper, therefore, takes a critical examination of what it means to understand one’s
own morality in the absence of others through ideas relating to the issue of suicide,
the burden of being the final survivor, and finally the question as to who ultimately
remembers the last person. Overall, it is the objective of this paper to explore the
ways in which the last man or woman, not only makes sense of his or her solitary
conditions, but also confronts his or her own mortality in the absence of others.
Keywords Death · Funeral · Humanity · Levinas · Memory · Solitude · Suicide
J. N. Balsavich (*)
Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA

Switzerland AG 2023
168 J. N. Balsavich
The idea of being the last human being on earth is a prominent and noteworthy
theme found within the genre of post-apocalyptic literature. For the paper, I explore
the theme of being the last man or woman in three novels, Mary Shelley’s The Last
Man (1828 Reprint 1994). Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), and
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2005), in order to examine how each character must
confront the fact that he or she faces the issue of mortality while in various states of
solitude. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man focuses on the loss of the human race by a
plague as observed by the narrator Lionel who eventually becomes the only remain-
ing human. In Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, a bioengineered epidemic
has annihilated the majority of the human race, forcing the character Toby to remain
in seclusion in an abandoned spa. As a result of being confined to the spa building,
Toby believes herself to be the last remaining human in the world. Finally, the
nameless father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road grapples with the decision as to
whether or not to take the life of his only son in order to spare him from being killed
and eaten by the roaming hordes of cannibals that make up the world. The investiga-
tion of death under the condition of solitude is explored through three issues. The
first relates to the question of suicide and why the last person does not simply end
his or her own life now that he or she is alone. The second issue concerns the last
person’s role as being the ultimate survivor of the human race, and thus having the
responsibility to carry on the memory of the departed. Finally, the third issue deals
with the question of who performs the act of burial for the last person. It is this
confrontation of one’s own mortality, within the understanding that the last man or
woman faces the possibility of dying alone, which ultimately results in a challenge
for the last person in narrating his or her experience.
To aid in the exploration concerning the relationship between death and solitude,
the paper considers two works of Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time and
Time and the Other. In God, Death, and Time Levinas acknowledges that one’s rela-
tion to death is, “made up of the emotional and intellectual repercussions of the
knowledge of the death of others” (Levinas 2000, 10). Levinas understands death as
being a part of alterity, and this idea of understanding death in a societal context is
a repudiation of Martin Heidegger’s thoughts concerning the topic. For as Levinas
explains, “Heidegger calls death certain to the point of seeing in this certitude of
death the origin of certitude itself, and he will not allow this certitude to come from
the experience of the death of others” (Levinas 2000, 10). In other words, Heidegger
sees death as being a solitary experience unique only to the person who is experi-
encing it. In refuting Heidegger, however, Levinas points out that, “The love of the
other is the emotion of the other’s death. It is my receiving the other – and not the
anxiety of death awaiting me – that is the reference to death. We encounter death in
the face of the other” (Levinas 2000, 105). Stressing the societal feature of death,
Levinas argues that, “It is for the death of the other that I am responsible to the point
of including myself in his death….The death of the other: therein lies the first death”
(Levinas 2000, 43). In other words, death is something that is encountered in the
ethical responsibility we have toward other people as a result of our interactions
with them. Furthermore, in Time and the Other Levinas insists that, “This approach
to death indicates that we are in relation to something that is absolutely other...as
something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not
Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation of Death and Solitude 169
confirmed by death but broken by it” (Levinas 1987, 74). For Levinas, death finds
its meaning in our interaction with others, and it is through this societal understand-
ing of death that ultimately results in one’s solitude being broken. In the novels that
the paper looks at, the issue of solitude means that there is an extreme limitation of
other humans for whom the last man or woman can enter into relationship with.
Shelley’s Lionel is the last man after the plague renders the human extinct, Atwood’s
Toby believes herself to be the last one because she is too afraid to leave her spa
rooftop, and the father’s solitude in McCarthy’s novel is self-imposed since he is
unwilling to have any sort of connection with anyone else for fear that they might
kill him and or his son. Without anyone to have a relationship with, how can death
find any meaning? Thus, the condition of dying in solitude ultimately hinges upon
how the characters in each novel project his or her situation as being the last one.
One crucial aspect that each character faces concerns the question of whether or
not to give into the temptation of suicide. The issue of suicide emerges in part
because the future is unknowable for the last man or woman since there is no other
person for whom he or she could have a meaningful relationship with. Levinas’s
account of the future is one that emphasizes the relationship a person has with soci-
ety: “The future is what is not grasped, what befalls us and lays hold of us. The other
is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future”
(Levinas 1987, 77). Thus, the future for Levinas is understood in the context of
alterity, and the removal of that that societal context results in a challenge to the
conceptualization of the future on the part of the last man or woman. This removal
of others ultimately becomes a source of anxiety for the last person, and thus is a
contributing factor to thoughts of possible suicide.
In The Last Man, Lionel is unable to bear the death of his fellow man and at one
point in his narrative addresses an invented reader to proclaim: “My reader, his
limbs quivering and his hair on end, would wonder how I did not, seized with sud-
den frenzy, dash myself from some precipice, and so close my eyes forever on the
sad end of the world” (Shelley 1994, 275). In mentioning the possibility of ending
his own life, Lionel is directly addressing an invented reader in order to describe the
horrors of having to witness the death of so many people. He asks, given the circum-
stance of what he is witnessing, why he does not end his own life? There is a sug-
gestion present that Lionel is perhaps asking for a reason or justification to kill
himself. This is a question that ironically cannot be answered by anyone, thus con-
tributing to Lionel’s melancholy.
At the end of the novel, after Lionel becomes the last man, the question of suicide
re-emerges causing him to reflect on the fact that, “Many times I had delivered
myself up to the tyranny of anguish – many times I resolved a speedy end to my
woes; and death by my own hands was a remedy, whose practicability was even
cheering to me” (Shelley 1994, 456–457). The tyranny of anguish that Lionel deliv-
ers himself to means that the thought of ending his own life has greatly occupied his
mind. When the plague is at its peak and the human race is dying out, he talks about
committing suicide because he is unable to watch the suffering of his fellow man.
Finally, near the end of the novel, the thoughts of suicide return prompting Lionel
to question: “Why did I continue to live -- why not throw off the weary weight of
time, and with my own hand, let out the fluttering prisoner from my agonized
170 J. N. Balsavich
breast?” (Shelley 1994, 464–65). Lionel is asking a question but sadly there is no
one to provide him an answer. He is the last man, and as a result of his new solitary
condition he has to resort to addressing an invented reader. It is as if he is asking
permission or trying to find justification to end his own life now that he is all alone.
He needs the validation of others to justify the possible action that he desires to take.
And yet, he does not take his own life. This perhaps refers to what Levinas says
about the concept of suicide in Time and the Other: “Death is never assumed, it
comes. Suicide is a contradictory concept. The eternal immanence of death is part
of its essence. In the present, where the subject’s master is affirmed, there is hope”
(Levinas 1987, 73). In living there is an awareness of death, and one cannot live
without the knowledge of his or her eventual passing. Suicide ends up negating the
immanence of death and therefore negates what it means to be human. Lionel does
not kill himself and the reason for this is because he comes to see himself as the last
representative of the human race, and thus the last chronicler of mankind. If Lionel
ends his life, then the entire human race would become extinct, and there would be
no one to remember or record the story of the human race. By not giving into the
temptation of suicide, Lionel is able to keep alive the memory of mankind.
The thought of suicide also weighs heavily on Toby mind as she spends her days
locked away from the outside world, believing herself to be the only living human
being left alive. This belief in being the only one left causes Toby to realize that, “She
could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the
lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them
loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?”
(Atwood 2009, 96). This thought occurs after Toby comes to the realization that the
past is closed off to her while the future remains unknown. This wondering about an
uncertain future combined with her belief that those she knew and loved are most
likely gone, trigger within Toby thoughts of ending her own life if it need come to that.
However, unlike Lionel, who, at the end of his novel becomes the last man once
everyone else has died out, Toby does eventually come across other people. One
such person is Ren who Toby knew during her stay with the Gardeners, a group of
environmentalists who believed man’s destructive nature would lead to their even-
tual extermination. However, Ren is injured, and as she sleeps, Toby contemplates a
mercy killing to put her out of her misery; she “considers the powered Death Angels.
It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her
misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A
blessing” (Atwood 2009, 357). This is the first person that Toby has encountered
after believing herself to be the only person left in the world. Ren could be a com-
panion for her, and yet she questions whether or not she should kill her as an act of
mercy. Toby is therefore planning on putting to death someone that could break her
solitary condition. She may have decided against committing suicide herself, but if
she chooses to kill Ren, then she condemns herself back to her state of solitude, thus
becoming stagnate and unable to move forward.
In The Road, the father does not consider ending his own life because he is
already aware that he is dying. Instead, the issue of death is turned towards his son
as the father wrestles with the decision whether or not he should kill his son to spare
him from suffering the horrors of the world. In terms of suffering, Levinas points
out in Time and the Other that, “In pain, sorrow, and suffering, we once again find,
in a state of purity, the finality that constitutes the tragedy of solitude….in suffering
there is the proximity of death” (McCarthy 2006, 68–69). If the father does kill his
son, then he is putting to death the next generation and thus the possibility of human-
ity continuing onward. The question weighs heavily upon his mind that it causes
him to lash out at God: “Are you there...Will I see you at least? Have you a neck by
which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh
God, he whispered. Oh God” (McCarthy 2006, 11–12). The father’s frustration with
God over what he has to endure underscores his current predicament of being bur-
dened with the decision to kill his son in order to spare him from the horrors of
the world.
The moment in the novel that finally forces the father to make a decision con-
cerning the life of his son occurs after the two of them come across a house where
people are being kept as livestock for purposes of cannibalization: “Huddled against
the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their
faces with their hands” (McCarthy 2006, 110). This horrific atrocity is further
accentuated when the novel directs the reader’s attention to a mattress on which “lay
a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The
smell was hideous” (McCarthy 2006, 110). As these victims call out for help, the
father knows he cannot do anything for them, and further knowing the danger that
he and his son are now in, quickly makes his escape. The scene of inhumanity that
the father witnesses, along with the understanding that this fate could befall his son,
prompts him to command the boy to kill himself. He instructs his son, “You put it in
your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying.
Do you understand?” (McCarthy 2006, 113). The father cannot bear the thought of
his son being killed and eaten by cannibals, and as a result of this fear he commands
the boy on how to take his own life. It is with this moment that the full weight of the
potential hopelessness of the world is felt, as this is a world in which fathers are
forced to take the lives of their sons.
The son does not obey his father’s command, and this hesitation about taking his
own life causes the father to realize that he himself might have to perform the
unthinkable deed: “Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It
has to fire….Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being
within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just
so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kill him. Quickly” (McCarthy 2006,
114). The full significance of this scene is one that underscores the father’s frustra-
tion with God, his feeling of abandonment, and finally the decision to whether or
not to kill his son. However, the father does not give in and commit the act of murder
against his only son. He instead makes a promise to him that, “I wont leave you...I
wont ever leave you” and that, “He began to believe they had a chance” (McCarthy
2006, 114). In this crucial moment of deciding not to kill his son, the father fulfills
the first commandment that Levinas highlights in God, Death, and Time: “Death
opens to the face of an Other, which expresses the command ‘thou shalt not kill’”
(Levinas 2000, 106). The father’s thoughts up to this point in the narrative have been
occupied by death, and perhaps he now realizes that the state of the world is one in
which death is even more prominent and inescapable than it was in the past.
172 J. N. Balsavich
However, in spite of this knowledge, the father does not take the life of his son vow-
ing instead to never leave him.
At the end of the novel, the father asks his son to tell him a story, to which the
boy says he has no stories to tell since his father already knows everything about
him. This causes the father to reply, “You have stories inside that I dont know about,”
to which the son asks, “You mean like dreams?” and the father says, “Like dreams.
Or just things that you think about” (McCarthy 2006, 268). The exchange ends with
the father realizing that even though both he and his son have experienced and wit-
nessed horrible and unthinkable things, they are both still alive: “Well, I think we’re
still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here” (McCarthy 2006,
269). The significance of this moment is one that underscores the fact that the father
and son have not given into the act of suicide or infanticide. They have chosen to
reject these possible choices for themselves, deciding instead to embrace living in
spite of the difficulties they face.
The second topic for consideration is the burden of the survivor as the one who
carries on the memories of the departed. According to Levinas in God, Death, and
Time, “In the guiltiness of the survivor, the death of the other is my affair. My death
is my part in the death of the other, and in my death I die the death that is my fault”
(Levinas 2000, 39). There thus exists a connection between the living survivors and
the deceased in which the living has a responsibility to remember the departed.
Jacques Derrida also takes up this idea in his final seminar, The Beast vs. Sovereign,
Volume II: “I can then, I must then only carry the other in me, and address myself to
him or her in me, promise her or him in me to carry her or him in me...Where there
is no longer any world between them for them, at the end of the world that every
death is” (Derrida 2010, 169–70). The responsibility of being the survivor and
therefore remembering the deceased is now in the hands of the last man or woman.
About halfway through his narrative Lionel makes the claim that, “I am not
immortal; and the thread of my history might be spun out to the limits of my exis-
tence….I must complete my work” (Shelley 1994, 239). This remark foreshadows
that Lionel is going to be the last man which causes him to ascertain that he must
continue to chronicle all that is happening. In other words, his ultimate burden is to
take on the role of being the final narrator for the human race. At the end of the
novel, after the entire human race is extinct, Lionel narrates, “Fate had administered
life to me...she had bought me for her own; I admitted to her authority, and bowed
to her decrees” (Shelley 1994, 465). This revelation comes after Lionel asks why he
continues to live, and questions if it is right for him to just end his life. In choosing
not to take his life, however, Lionel is able to accept his role of being the final rep-
resentative of the human race. His moment of clarity as to what his purpose now is
relates to what Levinas in God, Death, and Time maintains is the survivor’s role in
the death of others: “The death of the other who dies affects me in my very identity
as a responsible ‘me’....My being affected by the death of the other is precisely that,
my relation with his death. It is, in my relation, my deference to someone who no
longer responds, already a culpability -- the culpability of the survivor” (Levinas
2000, 12). In other words, even though one is emotionally affected by the death of
another person, being a survivor means continuing onward. Lionel now understands
that fate has saved him from the plague, and that he has an obligation as the last
representative of the human race to carry on in their absence.
Lionel’s understanding that he is to be that last representative of the human race
causes him at last to acknowledge that he must record his own story. At the end of
the novel, he proclaims, “I also will write a book...for whom to read? -- to whom
dedicate? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?)
I wrote, ‘Dedication To The Illustrious Dead. Shadows, Arise, and Ready Your Fall!
Behold The History of the Last Man” (Shelley 1994, 466). Upon making this deci-
sion to write his story Lionel adds, “I will write and leave in this most ancient city,
this ‘world’s sole monument,’ a record of these things, I will leave a monument of
the existence of Lionel Verney, the Last Man” (Shelley 1994, 466). The announce-
ment of writing a book for which there is no audience to read it may in fact be the
ultimate moment of Lionel’s solitude. He knows that there is no one left to read the
book, and yet he is going to write it anyway. He therefore becomes the final chroni-
cler of the human race and writes a narrative with the full knowledge that there is no
audience for the story. Lionel’s purpose is not to take his life but rather to tell his
story as the Last Man and to be that final representative of the human race.
Toby’s purpose also emerges at the end of The Year of the Flood. However,
throughout most of the novel her thoughts are turned towards the past that remains
inaccessible to her. In one scene, after watching a creature known as a Liobam walk-
ing around the outside of her parameter, Toby’s thoughts turn to her old friends:
“How Pilar would have enjoyed seeing those, she thinks. Pilar, and Rebecca, and
little Ren. And Adam One. And Zeb. All dead now. Stop it, she tells herself. Just
stop that right now” (Atwood 2009, 95). The appearance of the Liobam causes Toby
to remember the past and the people she once knew. This is a moment of brief nos-
talgia that is broken when she realizes that most of the people she knew and loved
are probably dead. Eventually she realizes the error of what she has been doing:
“It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning she tells herself. Mourning and
brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it” (Atwood 2009, 96). The sig-
nificance of this moment is that Toby understands that she is wasting time by mourn-
ing about what cannot be undone. She comes to the realization that, “She can’t live
only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any
future” (Atwood 2009, 96). Toby’s fixation on the past is engendered by her fears
and inability to venture out into the uncertain and hostile world, and thus escape her
state of solitude.
Unlike Lionel, who truly becomes the last living person, Toby does eventually
come across people that she once knew, including Ren whose injuries result in Toby
wrestling with the decision as to whether or not to administer to the young girl a
drug that would end her life. In regard to the decision facing her, the question
emerges: has Toby spent too much time in solitude that she cannot see herself with
anyone else and thus feels the need to put the other to death? Fortunately, Toby’s
compassionate side wins out as she does not kill Ren. The narrative describes that
Toby’s “homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren
out into the meads for the pigs and vultures….Just to have a second person on the
premise – each a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time – just
174 J. N. Balsavich
this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house.
I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby” (Atwood 2009, 360). Her desire to have someone
to break her solitude is what ultimately prevents Toby from taking Ren’s life because
it is at this moment that Toby finally comes to the understanding of just how alone
she has been. Humanity is dependent upon the interactions people have with each
other, and it this interaction that formulates the ethical responsibility that Levinas
argues is prominent before all else: “The grandeur of modern antihumanism….con-
sists in making a clear space for the hostage-subjectivity by sweeping away the
notion of the person. Antihumanism is right insofar as humanism is not enough. In
fact, only the humanism of the other man is human” (Levinas 2000, 182). In the end,
since Toby does not resort to killing Ren, she is able to uphold Levinas’s obligation
of recognizing the humanity of another person. By choosing to let Ren live, Toby
gains a companion thereby breaking her state of solitude. Her condition of solitude
was the result of her own belief that she was the only one left alive in conjunction
with her inability to move on from the past. Moreover, Toby’s comments on being a
ghost implies a recognition on her part that she has been hanging too much on to the
past. It is only after she comes across another person that Toby’s solitude breaks and
she is able to find meaning again. The meaning and purpose for Toby is to no longer
live in the past but instead to live in the present along with other people. She is thus
able to regain that human connection that Levinas promotes as being fundamental
to the human experience.
In The Road, the father’s attempts to hold on to any sort of meaning proves to be
nearly impossible in the face of the devastated and inhuman world that he and his
son inhabit. Even though the world is a dangerous place, there are still moments in
which the father and son can talk with one another and one of these conversations
reveals to the reader an attempt on the part of the father to keep alive some sense of
meaning in a world ostensibly without any. It is during one of these moments that
the son says to his father, “And nothing bad is going to happen to us.” To which the
father replies, “That’s right.” The son: “Because we’re carrying the fire” The father:
“Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire” (McCarthy 2006, 83). During the course of
their travels, the father has repeatedly told the boy that they are special because they
carry the fire. For the father, the fire symbolizes the last hope for humanity that he
believes he and his son represent. This belief in the fire becomes something for the
father to hold on to in order to make it through the day to day existence of a world
descended into death and cannibalism.
Out of the all the characters in each of the novels, it is only the father who passes
away. As he is dying, he tells his son, “You need to find the good guys” (McCarthy
2006, 278). All throughout the course of the novel the father avoided interacting
with others out of fear that they would harm him and his son. Now, however, the
father instructs his son to find others which causes the boy to ask his father: “Is it
real? The fire?” The father informs him that, “Yes it is” (McCarthy 2006, 278). The
father’s realization that he is at the end of his life connects to a comment Levinas
makes in Time and the Other: “What is important about the approach of death is that
at a certain moment we are no longer able to be able. It is exactly thus that the sub-
ject loses its very mastery as a subject” (Levinas 1987, 74). The father is fully aware
that he is dying, while at the same time understanding that his son is going to live
on without him. Although he accepts this, the boy’s fear of being without his father
causes him to cry out, “You said you wouldn’t ever leave me.” To which the father
replies, “I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did” (McCarthy
2006, 279). In the end, the father is able to let go of his son and, by doing so, guar-
antees that the human race is going to live on, not only because his son is alive, but
because the father is finally able to trust his fellow man again. By telling his son to
find others, and thus placing his trust back in his fellow man, the father is able to
abide by the responsibility that Levinas claims in God, Death, and Time is of the
utmost primacy concerning one’s encounter and interaction with another person:
“The other concerns me as a neighbor. In every death is shown the nearness of the
neighbor, and the responsibility of the survivor, in the form of a responsibility that
the approach of proximity moves or agitates” (Levinas 2000, 17). The father is able
to not only trust that his son is going to continue carrying fire but that there are in
fact good people out there for his son to encounter who will take care of him just
like the father did. The full restoration of humanity takes place during this moment
as the father is finally able to place his trust back into his fellow man.
The last issue under consideration concerns the issue of burial, and who ulti-
mately remembers the last person once he or she passes away. Levinas places
emphasis on the need for another person to verify the death of the other as well
keeping the deceased in one’s memory. His view on the funeral is one that, “trans-
forms the deceased into a living memory; the living thus have a relationship with the
deceased and are determined in their turn by his memory” (Levinas 2000, 88). In
addition to Levinas’s view on the funeral, Derrida argues for the important role the
cemetery plays as being as place in which, “the survivor is able to verify each time
that the dead one, identified by his or her proper name inscribed on the tomb, really
is who he or she is, where he or she is, that he or she rests or reposes in the right
place, in the place of the dead, a place from which he or she will not return” (Derrida
2010, 165–166). For both Levinas and Derrida, there exists a relationship between
the living and the dead in which the living carries on the burial rites of the deceased
while also keeping the departed alive in their memories.
At one point in his narrative Lionel mentions that, “The massive portals of the
churches swung creaking on their hinges; and some few lay dead on the pavement”
(Shelley 1994, 319). The church is a place where the funeral rites of the deceased
are traditionally performed. However, in The Last Man the plague that diminishes
the world’s population now means that the church has lost this function of being in
charge of the funeral rites since there is hardly anyone left to perform these tasks.
The comment on how the portals swung on hinges and that few lay dead indicates
that the church has not been fulfilling its responsibility to the dead for some time.
The purpose of the church when it comes to honoring the dead has lost its value due
to the diminishing human population. This ultimately foreshadows that once every-
one is gone, there will be no one left to give Lionel a funeral for when he eventu-
ally passes.
There are attempts made by some of those still remaining to hold on to the value
of burial, while recognizing the importance that the survivor plays in respects to the
176 J. N. Balsavich
departed. The character Lucy, whom Lionel and his company pick up during their
travels out of England, is one such character. Lionel explains that, “Lucy, in desert
England, in a dead world, wished to fulfil the usual ceremonies of the dead, such as
were customary to the English people when death was a rare visitant” (Shelley
1994, 364). Even when the human population is dying out, there are still attempts
made by some to hold on to certain values. In The Last Man, the human value of
remembering departed by giving them a proper burial is practiced by Lucy in her
attempts at fulfilling the role of the survivor in relation to the dead. She performs
this act because it not only means something to her, it enables her to preserve a
sense of humanity in a world absent of others. In other words, human values such as
the funeral are being maintained even when the old word is vanishing.
Another example of the importance of burial is provided by Lionel who com-
ments: “We repined that the pyramids had outlasted the embalmed body of their
builder. Alas! the mere shepherd’s hut of straw we passed on the road contained in
its structure the principle of greater longevity than the race of man” (Shelley 1994,
389–99). Buildings, which are constructs of mankind, contain no meaning if there
is no human to occupy other, and thus conceptualize a purpose for them. Moreover,
the pyramids are also connected to the church in that they both become places that
have a connection to the dead and the issue of remembrance. Once the human race
is gone, however, what value do these places hold? It is because Lionel remains as
the last man, that he is able to conceptualize a purpose for these buildings. By
accepting his role as being the survivor of the human race, it becomes his responsi-
bility to not only remember mankind, but to remember and uphold the value that
mankind gave to certain buildings such as the church or pyramid.
In The Year of the Flood, the issue of memory and the role of the survivor when
it comes to the burial of the dead no longer belong to the human race but instead
becomes subsumed by the animal. When the dangerous bio-engineered creatures
known as the Pigoons attempt to break into Toby’s rooftop spa, she observes these
creatures acting in a manner that raises the possibility in her mind that they are hav-
ing a funeral for a Pigoon that she previously killed out of self-defense. Toby ques-
tions, “Could the pigs have been having a funeral? Could they be bringing memorial
bouquets? She finds this idea truly frightening” (Atwood 2009, 328). Perhaps Toby
is scared by what she is witnessing because these animals have challenged her role
of being the survivor whose job it is to remember the departed. Burial not only
serves as a way in which the deceased are remembered, it also allows the living to
move on with their own lives. The Pigoons, by engaging in the human act of the
funeral, serve as a painful reminder to Toby that she has not moved on from the past.
When Toby does leave behind the rooftop spa, and to her surprise encounters
other people, she is finally able to give to the departed the rite of burial. This moment
occurs when Toby, after meeting up with Ren, is forced to kill her old boss Blanco.
In the past, Blanco was an abusive man who threatened to kill Toby after she refused
his sexual advances. When she does eventually encounter Blanco, she ends up
administering a poison called the Death Angels mainly as a form of mercy killing,
as his injuries are too severe for any medical help. After she is done with the act,
Toby says, “May his Spirit go in peace…. Such as it is, the fuck-pig” (Atwood 2009,
382). Toby ends up performing what Derrida claims is the importance of the survi-
vor in remembering the dead: “The dead one is both everywhere and nowhere….in
the mournful survivor who can only let himself be invaded by a dead one who has
no longer any place of his or her outside….this is both the greatest fidelity and the
utmost betrayal, the best way of keeping the other while getting rid of her or him”
(Derrida 2010, 169). Although she despised Blanco for the fear he inflicted, she is
still able to acknowledge the importance of granting another person some form of a
funeral rite.
Finally, the issue of burial and memory is played out in The Road where right
from the beginning the narrative establishes that, “The gray shape of the city van-
ished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back
out of the wind” (McCarthy 2006, 9). The opening of the novel describes the condi-
tions of the new world by comparing the city of mankind to that of an apparition or
as an image of death due to the fact that the city of man is vanishing. In addition to
the city of man vanishing, the greyness of the world comes as result of the increased
amount of ash that now liters the land: “The ashes of the late world carried on the
bleak and temporal winds to and from in the void….The city was mostly burned. No
sign of life….everything covered with ash and dust” (McCarthy 2006, 12). The idea
of ash and dust being so prevalent suggest that nothing is buried in the world but
instead is cremated and reduced to ashes. As a result of this cremation, there exists
little to no grave site to visit in order to remember the dead. In other words, the func-
tion of the graveyard as being the space in which the living can visit with the dead
no longer exists. The comment on temporal winds also invokes the passing of time
and connects to the idea that time itself is dying out. In other words, the memories
of the past world have been reduced to ashes. This ubiquitous ash covers everything,
symbolizing the primacy that this inexorable death now has in the world.
Following the father’s passing at the end of the novel, another man comes across
the grieving son. After having an exchange with each other the son suspects that he
can trust this other man. Before leaving, however, the son mentions to the other man
that, “we cant just leave him here” (McCarthy 2006, 285). The other man wants to
get going but the son remains adamant that his father’s body not be left out in the
open. He says, “I dont want people to see him” (McCarthy 2006, 285). The man
argues some more which prompts the son to ask, “Could we cover him with one of
the blankets?” (McCarthy 2006, 285). Although the other man wants to get going,
the son does not want to leave his father’s body out in the open for fear that the body
could become food for cannibals. The son wants to give his father as close to a
proper burial as he can, and his desire to do so underscores the human value of
remembering and paying respects to the deceased. In God, Death and Time, Levinas
stresses the importance of the burial rite as being, “a deliberate relationship of the
living with death, through their relationship with the deceased. Here, death is
thought and not simply described. It is a necessary moment in the conceptual prog-
ress of thought itself, and in this sense it is thought” (Levinas 2000, 86). Although
though the world has changed immensely, the son still recognizes the importance of
burying the dead.
178 J. N. Balsavich
Eventually the other man consents to letting the son pay his last respects to his
father. The son does so and says to his deceased father, “I’ll talk to you every day….
And I wont forget. No matter what” (McCarthy 2006, 286). Although brief, the son
is able to give his father a proper goodbye. In the end, the son is able to keep alive
his father’s memories and performs what Derrida argues is the responsibility that
the survivor has in remembering the deceased: “I can then, I must then only carry
the other in me, and address myself to him or her in me, promise her or him in me
to carry her or him in me...Where there is no longer any world between them for
them, at the end of the world that every death is” (Derrida 2010, 169–170). If the
father had killed his son, there would be no one to bury the father when he eventu-
ally died. The father not only guarantees the survival of the human race by telling
his son to find others and form that connection that is fundamental to what it means
to be human, he also enables his own funeral to happen because the son is alive to
fulfill that role of burial. Moreover, since the son finds others, he is no longer the last
man like his father was, a man in his own self-imposed solitude because of his
refusal to interact with others. The father’s solitude is thus broken for the son once
the latter comes across other people and is able to form that bond of human connec-
tion that Levinas promotes as being so prominent in defining our own humanity.
All three novels tackle the theme of being the last person in existence, and it is
through the prism of death that the characters in each of the novels are able to rec-
ognize, and in some instances, regain their humanity. For Lionel, there is a sense
that being the last person in existence means having a responsibility to the departed
to carry on and to give testament to the memory and accomplishments of the human
race. Toby herself must survive in a world that is empty of humans but as seen the
emergence of new creatures, some of whom have taken on the responsibility of
honoring their dead, a task that Toby has neglected. Finally, despite the horrific and
inhuman conditions of McCarthy’s novel, there is a sense that humanity has been
restored due to the fact that the son is able to place his trust in others. The responsi-
bility that the living has in relation to the dead, as explored by Derrida and Levinas,
are prominent themes in each of the novels as they grapple with the idea of being the
last person in existence.
References
Atwood, Margaret. 2009. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books.
Derrida, Jacques. 2010. The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington.
Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
———. 2000. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Edited by Jacques Rolland.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York: Vintage Press.
Shelley, Mary. [1828]1994. The Last Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Part VI
Aesthetics and Ontology
An Apology for Abstraction in an Age
of High Definition and Photo Realism
in the Work of Kandinsky and the White
Shaman Rock Art Panel and Related Rock
Art Sites
Bruce Ross
Abstract In a period of high definition, photorealism, and postmodern deconstruc-

tion the experience of art making, its theory, and its art itself have drifted away from
some understandable connection to the process of art creation as a connection to
some psychologically deep inspiration. Abstract art as conceived and practiced by
Wassily Kandinsky, which included in his later stage beyond representation or
abstractions of representation jumbled gatherings of biomorphs with no connection
to representation may be compared to the White Shaman rock art panel with its gath-
ering of seemingly abstract geometric images as well as transformed representational
imagery, much like the related Fate Bell Shelter rock art and Three Rivers Petroglyphs.
Kandinsky would claim his expressed abstractions are prompted by his psyche. The
artist or artists of the White Shaman panel of the lower Pecos River operated under
transformed consciousness and Shamanism. Kandinsky’s “unconscious, spontane-
ous expression” and “expression. .. of inner feeling” may be compared to the proba-
bly hallucinogenic connection to the other world in the White Shaman panel. Such
connections and abstractions and transformations could be related to the “total the-
ater” of Diaghilev and the contemporary rave dances in which consciousness is
heightened by sensory overload. The cybernetic capacity of the computer age has
worked in another direction and even “objectified” consciousness itself.
Keywords Abstract art · Wassily Kandinsky · The white shaman panel ·

Representation in art · States of consciousness · Spirituality in art
The history of painterly art may be regarded as a movement from representation,

with landscapes dominating, to versions of abstraction. Current gestures in culture
seem to emphasize a hyperreality return to representation. Early on in the Western
philosophy of aesthetics Plato suggested the metaphysical problematic of
B. Ross (*)
Independent Scholar, Hampden, ME, USA

Switzerland AG 2023
182 B. Ross
representation by asking the question: “What is the art of painting designed to be—
an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear—of appearance or of reality?”
(Weitz 1966, 9) and concluding this thought with, “The real artist, who knew what
he is imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations” (Weitz 1966,
10). But what is reality? What is its connection to the representational world? Plato’s
answer to these questions centered on idealized forms the representational reality
mirrored. A modern resolution of this problem in the West is posed by discussions
of the psychosomatic energetic patterns of the human artist in relation to the repre-
sentational world. Dr. Masaru Emoto examined a basic energetic pattern termed
hado: “Hado is the intrinsic vibration pattern at the atomic level in all matter. The
smallest unit of energy. Its basis is the energy. It is the basis of human conscious-
ness” (Ishak 2005). Toyoko Matsuzaki in a book on healing with hado, develops the
scope of the term: “Everything—including you, your pets, the flowers in your gar-
den, and the mug on your desk—is like an antenna that receives hado. After circu-
lating inside the body or other material, hado returns to Mother Nature again”
(Matsuzaki 2005, 3). In Japanese aesthetics aware or “touchiness” is the experience
of feeling connected to and elicited by the representational world as a kind of pathos.
Hado might explain the psychodynamics of this aesthetic. Analogically, of the
American sixties it was retrospectively expressed that to understand the period’s art,
music, clothing, and so forth one had to understand the use of hallucinogens. Hado
which is a version of the Chinese Qi when released from humans, other animate
realities, and even from inanimate realities like rocks, discloses information about
those realities (Matsuzaki 2005, 3–4). Hado is translated as “wave motion”. The
artist Maya Lin produced an environmental installation which I visited at Storm
King Mountain sculpture museum called “Wave Field” that consisted of grass cov-
ered large mounds lined one after another. An example of environmental art, such as
installations by Andy Goldsworthy, “Wave Field” and her related work expresses
the inner workings, call them abstractions, of the natural world. It seems evident
that the abstract painting of Wassily Kandinsky as well as the petroglyphs and pic-
tographs of North America may be related to psychodynamic energy.
The issue of states of consciousness was on the minds of both Kandinsky and the
anonymous creators of rock art in relation to what they created and come to bare on
issues of representation in all its permutations. In his Concerning the Spiritual in
Art Kandinsky addresses this:
... the number is increasing of those men who put no trust in the methods of materialistic
science when it deals with those questions which have to do with “non-matter,” or matter
which is not accessible to our minds. Just as art is looking for help from the primitives, so
these men are turning to half-forgotten times in order to get help from their half-forgotten
methods. However, these very methods are still alive and in use among nations whom we,
from the height of our knowledge, have been accustomed to regard with pity and scorn. To
such nations belong the Indians, who from time to time confront those learned in our civi-
lization with problems which we have either passed by unnoticed or brushed aside with
superficial words and explanations (Kandinsky 1997, 13).
Kandinsky was influenced by the writings of Madam Blavatsky, the modern propo-
nent of Theosophy, the exploration of spiritually grounded divine force and related
An Apology for Abstraction in an Age of High Definition and Photo Realism in… 183
writings. Through Theosophy, Kandinsky would have a grounding in abstraction

that he would express through his art. Likewise, the apparent entoptic background
of rock art would come to play in his understanding of abstraction. Kandinsky was
also influenced by new directions of atonal music and after a concert by Schoenberg
painted one of his “impressions” paintings, a rendering of representational reality
by means of particularized feeling. In his consequent correspondence with
Kandinsky, Schoenberg asserts: “Art belongs to the “unconscious”! One must
express “oneself”! Express oneself “directly”! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing,
or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these “acquired” characteristics,
but that which is “inborn,” “instinctive”. .. This is my belief!” (Bergman 2009, 12).
One recognizes here Kandinsky’s three designations for his paintings: the impres-
sion, “a direct impression of outward nature”; the improvisation, a “largely uncon-
scious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the non-material nature”; the
composition, an “expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utter-
ance only after long maturing” (Kandinsky 1997, 57). Here Kandinsky organizes
gradations of artistic expression not unrelated to the aesthetic mechanisms that
override pure representation in art. He thus suggests that “one may see in the objects
about. .. not only what is purely material but also something less solid; something
less “bodily” than in the period of realism” (Kandinsky 1997, 9). He further explains
abstract aesthetics as the elimination of the single plane so that “the material object
was made more abstract” (Kandinsky 1997, 44). Basically, he is revolutionizing the
idea of representation in painting by placing the emphasis on the subject and their
feeling rather than the object and its seeming materiality. By doing so he is drawing
closer to those creators of rock art.
Kandinsky’s fully developed approach to abstraction centers on biomorphs,
groups of images resembling living organisms. He would claim that such images are
projections of feeling into the future and which are not bound by materialist repre-
sentational identification: “That which has no material existence cannot be sub-
jected to a material classification. That which belongs to the spirit of the future can
only be realized by feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road”
(Kandinsky 1997, 12). When those of his period and beyond suggested such imag-
ery is reminiscent of primal culture art, they were almost certainly unaware of rock
art, but rather costume and designs on pottery and other objects, and probably
unaware of any symbolic intention therein. Yet most certainly Kandinsky’s aesthet-
ics of “feeling” referred to a deeper state than is commonly understood by this word.
To understand Kandinsky’s relation of feeling to the spirituality of art, one might
contrast the connection of visual representation, the emotional charge of music and
dance, and an enhanced mode of feeling to the intended and understood structure
such as spiritual law. In fact through his awareness of primal cultures and modern
directions in art as well as his knowledge of Theosophy and its applications
Kandinsky was aware of two basic approaches to spirituality, both of which could
lead to psychosomatic realities. When he examines the importance of color and
states that it “can advance or retreat, and can make of the picture a living thing, and
so achieve an artistic expansion of space,” he is addressing the kinetic quality of the
eye in relation to color and of the ear, psyche, and body in relation to music and
184 B. Ross
dance and the art such events produce (Kandinsky 1997, 44–45). So he consequently
undervalues ballet whose “external motives-the expression of love and fear, etc. are
too material and naïve for the abstract ideas of the future” and perhaps overvalues
Isadora Duncan for her connection “between the Greek dancing and that of the
future. .. [making her like painters] who are looking for inspiration from the primi-
tives” (Kandinsky 1997, 50). The seeming free form of Duncan can be related none-
theless to the sensory overload for its time of Diaghilev’s “total theater” fusion of
the arts as well as in the more recent period Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus Dance
Theater, trance dance, and raves. There are two distinctions here, then, one that
focuses in the psychosomatic aspect of art expression and the other that focuses on
intentionality of consciousness and the diminishment of basic sense perception.
Masaru Emoto asserts: “Everything is eternally moving and vibrating—on and off,
at an incredible speed” (Emoto 2009, 40). When this truth is experienced on the
psychosomatic level, it evidently transforms representational materiality. When
experienced on an intentional level it perhaps approaches metaphysical mystical
experience. Emoto cites the enigmatic declaration of the Heart Sutra: “That which
can be seen has no form, and that which cannot be seen has form” in this context
(Emoto 2009, 40). Emoto the scientist would see energy, hado, as the only true
form, not representational reality. A Buddhist would see Buddhist law as the only
true form not representational reality. Kandinsky the artist would see true form in
heightened feeling, perhaps a kind of altered state.
Shamanism is a worldwide spiritual practice that is centered on a high level of
respect for nature as a whole and the spirits which inhabit it. Some Shamanic cul-
tures are structured by animal totems and even primal gods, often one for Earth and
one for Sky. Many such societies include aspects of trance states, such as the vision
quest rite of passage for males, the use of hallucinogens, sacred dancing and sing-
ing, and, for the shaman, various other worldly tasks. The shaman also might incor-
porate other worldly elements in their activities as a tribal physician. Until the late
modern period Shamanism was considered an aspect of a hunter and gather exis-
tence with pictorial symbolism representations of such an existence. Kandinsky was
interested in such cultures’ use of color and abstract patterns. Where those abstract
patterns came from was probably also his concern. The entoptic theory of visual
hallucinations to explain abstract imagery and patterns as a central component of
Shamanism began to replace the older view. This new approach was conceived by
David Lewis-Williams, Professor Emeritus and Senior Mentor of the Rock Art
Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It began to domi-
nate thinking about Shamanism, particularly through the work of anthropologist Dr.
Jean Clottes, expert in prehistory, a leading authority on rock art, and editor of
International Letter on Rock Art, and Professor David Whitley, former chief archae-
ologist for UCLA’s Institute of Archaeology, a leading expert on prehistoric art and
culture, and the United States representative to UNESCO’s International Council on
Monuments and Sites. Perhaps an understanding of hado could enhance this
approach. According to Matsuzaki:
Hado enters all things on the earth, circulates inside the material, and then returns to the air.
When hado goes through materials, both the hado and material are changed; in other words,
hado leaves its own essences in the material, and the material adds its own characteristics to
the hado while it circulates inside. After hado returns to the air in Mother Nature, the influ-
ence of the material is diluted and purified (Matsuzaki 2005, 17–18).
Could the entoptic imagery of primal cultures be in some sense a response to this
process of hado? Shamanism is in part determined by altered states while hado
seems a natural universal process. In the entoptic process abstract forms appear in
the psyche and are transformed into representational imagery consistent with the
given culture. Its artistic expressions are thought to represent various aspects of this
process. In the East hado or Qi has long been identified as balls of energy seen by
practitioners of martial arts and high level meditators. This energy ball, something
like an aura, could be used to enhance one’s own energy. Other than drawings of this
ball in contemporary manuals, there are perhaps no serious “artistic” renderings of
it, but its hands-on use in healing is well known, as in Reiki.
Accordingly, Kandinsky notes of abstraction and color:
The revolt from dependence on nature is only just beginning. Any realization on the inner
working of colour and form is so far unconscious. The subjection of composition to some
geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely
abstract basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and aimless. The artist must
train not only his eye but also his soul, so that he can test colours for themselves and not
only by external impressions (Kandinsky 1997, 46–47).
He emphasizes this need to understand color as such, “This neglect of inner mean-
ings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic power is called ‘art
for art’s sake’” (Kandinsky 1997, 3). Thus, he created a scheme for color that links
them to emotion and even kinetic effects (Kandinsky 1997, 36). This “inner mean-
ing” of color and of form he sees in Cézanne:
Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence
of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate
(Kandinsky 1997, 17). In his scheme of color, for example, he sees red as an abstraction or
“within itself” that primal and traditional cultures see as “beautiful” within the green of
nature (Kandinsky 1997, 40).
Color for him is important for its “psychic effect” which “produce a corresponding
spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the
elementary physical impression is of importance” (Kandinsky 1997, 24). The meta-
physical intention in his approach to the arts is simply stated “In each manifestation
is the seed of a striving towards the abstract, the non-material” (Kandinsky 1997, 19).
One could say, for Kandinsky, that such striving is the action of and presence of
hado, that which cannot be directly perceived, only its effects, perhaps in heightened
states like entoptic experiences. Abstraction in art would therefore be a manifestation
of presence somewhere between representation and the ultimately unconceivable, as
in a heightened state. An emphasis on the use of color to convey this are found in his
paintings: “The Blue Mountain” (1908); “Mountain” (1908); “Improvisation 9”
(1910); “Improvisation 11” (1910); “Boat Trip” (1910); and “Glass Painting with
Sun (Small Pleasures)” (1911) where treatment of form overrides color.
186 B. Ross
Kandinsky was interested in the psychology of the spirituality which was

expressed in painting as abstraction, something gained by higher feeling somewhat
detached from materiality. In fact, he regarded such art as opposed to and “higher”
than nature. Inspiration, one could say, was more revelatory of spirituality than rep-
resentation (Klee 2015, 6.6). In fact, he begins Concerning the Spiritual in Art by
linking this thought to primal cultures, however overstated: “Like ourselves these
artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in conse-
quence all consideration of external form” (Kandinsky 1997, 1). In an article that
examines the entoptic understanding of primal culture trance states, Mary Roach
notes that David Whitley in his Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of
Creativity and Belief cites a paper that Kandinsky wrote in a psychological journal
in 1881 on entoptic experience related to a migraine and that Kandinsky studied
Shamanism and subconscious in relation to its effect on art (Roach 1998). Kandinsky
addresses the idea of abstraction divorced from material reality that substantiates
Whitley’s implication. In relation to Maeterlinck’s writing Kandinsky notes:
The word may express an inner harmony. This inner harmony springs partly, perhaps prin-
cipally, from the object which it names. But if the object is not itself seen, but only its name
heard, the “mind” of the hearer receives an abstract impression only, that is to say as of the
object dematerialized, and a corresponding vibration is immediately set up in the “heart”
(Kandinsky 1997, 15).
Kandinsky structured many of his paintings on geometric forms. Sounding a bit like
Pythagoras he states, “Or form remains abstract, describing only a non-material,
spiritual entity. Such non-material entities, with life and value as such, are a circle;
a triangle; a rhombus; a trapeze, etc., many of them so complicated as to have no
mathematical denomination” (Kandinsky 1997, 29–30). Yet, the relation of abstrac-
tion in its many expressions to primal culture, specifically to Shamanism, is conclu-
sively established by David Whitley:
Less appreciated are the influences that entoptic forms and Siberian shamanism had on
Kandinsky. Prior to writing On the Spiritual in Art, he spent time in Siberia with Russian
ethnographers working with shamans and learning about the shamans’ centrality of inner
visions. This clearly affected his thinking. It could be argued that Kandinsky influenced the
development of contemporary abstract art largely through a rediscovery of the kind of artis-
tic inspiration experienced by shamans (Whitley 2006, 72–73).
Examples of Kandinsky’s abstraction, some including recognizable geometric

forms, some suggesting the density of rock art imagery in given panels, and, even,
some suggesting the use of color in a given culture’s style, such as the Chumash
pictographs in California, are: “Picture with a White Form” (1913); “Black Lines 1”
(1913); “Bright Picture” (1913); “Small Pleasures” (1913); “Untitled” (First
Abstract Watercolor)(1910); and “Wall Painting for Edwin R. Campbell,
no.3” (1914).
Many of the abstract forms in Kandinsky’s art are the shape of living forms, but
these painterly forms do not exist in external reality. They may be termed biomorphs
because of their shape. Some are in works that emphasize color, some are in works
that seem related to dream images, and some resemble imagery in rock art. Examples
of Kandinsky’s biomorphs are: “Overcast” (1917); Small Dream in Red” (1925);

“Sky Blue” (1944); and “Around the Circle” (1940) and “Twilight” (1943), which
resemble the density of some rock art. One, “Upward” (1929), even seems an
abstract human portrait, if not an abstract self-portrait. Such a portrait, if it is, would
reflect a central element in rock art, the transformation of representational form
within altered states of consciousness.
In March 2015 I visited two key rock art spots in the Lower Pecos River area of
Texas, The White Shaman Panel and the Fate Bell Shelter and revisited the Three
Rivers Petroglyph Site in New Mexico. The first two rock art sites are 4000 years
old and created by a long vanished culture. The latter site which has more than
21,000 glyphs dates from 900 to 1400 AD which were created by the Mogollon
culture. The three sites together are obviously important and are grouped together
by themselves in a vast area in and above Texas, one of only six rock art sites in
continental United States chosen by Jean Clottes for his map of important world
rock art cites (Clottes 2002, 13). Further, Clottes begins the related discussion of
Shamanism with a reference to and image from The White Shaman Panel (Clottes
2002, 113). I have photographed a section of Clottes’ photo to emphasize the impor-
tance of transformation under trance states in rock art, here a shaman who has
become a bird. Another aspect of transformation is death, symbolized in this panel
by an upside down human. A rendering of the complete White Shaman Panel clearly
reveals the transformative imagery (Boyd 2003, Plate 2). This site and related sites
in the lower Pecos are important because of their unusual size for rock art panels
and the impressive mural-like art itself. Further, Carolyn E. Boyd discovered a rela-
tion of this panel to the Huichol of Northwest Mexico and their annual search for the
hallucinogen peyote, a central aspect of Huichol spirituality and references to other
hallucinogenic local plants at related sites (Boyd 2003, 76–78). Her rendering of the
White Shaman that is the true focus of the panel shows him emerging from an arch
in a heightened state at the bottom (Boyd 2003, 68). He has transformed into an
anthropomorph with a human body and deer antlers covered with black dots. Boyd
discovered the Huichol hunt is depicted here. In Huichol belief the original god is a
deer that transformed into peyote. At the end of the hunt the Huichol shoot the
peyote (at the upper left) as they had shot the deer god (at upper right). The black
dots on the deer’s body and the shaman’s antlers are symbols of peyote. Boyd has a
close up rendering of the emerging shaman reaching with an atlatl and branch with
each arm toward peyote fruit (Boyd 2003, 47). Another rendering is from the nearby
Fate Bell Annex (Boyd 2003, 101). It depicts a transformed anthropomorph holding
a stalk of Datura, another mind altering plant. She also renders a similar anthropo-
morph with peyote dots on its antlers at Fate Bell Shelter (Boyd 2003, 78). At that
shelter I found an image of a Datura stalk near suggestive black dots as well as a
representational depiction of a spiked Datura top. At one of the informative signs at
Fate Bell Shelter was a painting of what seemed a Datura top in transformation (A).
Another sign (O) shows a transformed shaman with black and orange wings and an
antlered head standing among three human figures. The wings may represent energy
exchanged with the two humans on either side of the shaman. Three Rivers
Petroglyph site is filled with geometric forms and images of transformation. In one
188 B. Ross
an anthropomorph bends over a solar or entoptic form above a transforming face. A

death mask with entoptic dots over it suggests transformation. Many of the petro-
glyphs are impressive, clearly rendered entoptic, geometric forms. One depicts
mountain sheep heads among or growing out of plant stalks. Other glyphs present
tailed animals with geometric forms centered on their bodies, a representation of
transformation. A similar presentation is a top view of an insect-like creature cov-
ered with transformative dots. One petroglyph is an entoptic transformative geomet-
ric form, a kind of biomorph, next to a stick figure human with upstretched arms.
Other similar rock art were viewed on field trips at the 2013 annual American Rock
Art Association meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The clustered geometric
forms, albeit one or two stick figures and a serpent, sometimes resemble Kandinsky’s
biomorph figures in their abstract universe. Other examples of such clustering are
from the Chidago petroglyphs near Bishop, California and the Caso Range petro-
glyphs near Ridgecrest, California, the latter with many transforming human figures
(Whitley 2006, 76, 51). Other examples that clearly suggest Kandinsky’s bio-
morph’s are Rocky Hill pictographs near Exeter, California, where a top figure is
explained as a “shaman’s mark” by contemporary Native Americans and Painted
Cave pictographs near Santa Barbara, California, where a Chumash representation
of a centipede, a creature bringing bad luck, is represented (Whitley 2006, 161,
171). Ultimately, clear indications of rock art symbols in an expression of an entopic
state do not negate the spirituality of that state nor its expressions. Kandinsky’s
abstractions and biomorphs are clearly products of feeling drawn from the psyche
and as such are easily defined as spiritual, just as an untrained child’s drawing is
coming from somewhere that may also be termed spirituality. In effect, Kandinsky
was on the right track.
The implications are that altered states of consciousness provide insight into the
inner dimension of our world and spirituality. The state of consciousness itself
seems to be the key element here. There also seems, particularly in these rock art
sites, a need to express this state in art, design, myth, and so forth. In other words,
representation in art for Kandinsky up to his period failed to do this, excluding those
in the various experimental art movements up to the Bauhaus, some of which were
inspired by various spiritual intentions. His turn to mannered representation, altered
representation, and finally abstract forms seem influenced by such approaches
found in rock art and altered states in Shamanism. He actually felt that primal cul-
tures expressed only inner truth and the modern age up to his time were subject to a
deadening materialism (Kandinsky 1997, 1–2). His solution was to evoke abstract
forms, a dismantling of representation and its seeming correlative materialism
through, perhaps, altered states akin to shamanic ones. Other directions in art were
also dismantling representation, perhaps for similar reasons. Is this the correct solu-
tion? In our present time high definition and photo realism dominate popular culture
and escapist computer games and melodramatic animation and overdone attempts at
heroic drama populate television and computer screens as a byproduct of the post-
modern condition. It seems that Kandinsky’s biomorphs have not reversed material-
ism. Perhaps finding a way to meaningful altered states that evoke a kind of
spirituality might offer a resolution and yet maintain the artistic freedom Kandinsky
was after. The cybernetic reconstruction in the computer age has worked in another
direction and perhaps objectified materialist culture in a manner Kandinsky would
never have imagined and perhaps even “objectified” consciousness itself. Yet the
numerous impressively constructed animated features, freshly conceived pattern
work, small enigmatic independent films, environmental installations, and cleverly
constructed dance pieces point back to Kandinsky’s aim and forward to something
evolving into whatever beauty was thought to be. Yet, in a TED talk “What Makes a
Good Life?” Robert Waldinger, Professor at Harvard Medical School and the cur-
rent director of the Harvard Happiness Study research project on this topic, begun
in 1937, commented that millenials, who are young adults now, want two things: the
first is money and the second is fame. Perhaps Reality TV and very visible and suc-
cessful young performers encourage these desires. If so, the materialization of con-
sciousness may well be underway. Nonetheless, that energy that permeates the
universe, each living thing, and each inanimate thing, call it Qi, hado, Shiva,
apeiron, Word, atoms, or spirit, inclines one to term that “whatever” as spirituality,
whether it expresses beauty or something that approaches it.
References
Bergman, Elizabeth. 2009. Intersecting Lines. New York: Carnegie Hall Playbill.
Boyd, Carolyn E. 2003. Rock Art of the Lower Pecos. College Station: Texas A&M.
Clottes, Jean. 2002. World Rock Art. Translated by Greg Bennett. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
Emoto, Masaru. 2009. The Hidden Messages in Water, Trans. David A. Thayne. Hillsboro:
Beyond Words.
Ishak, Amir Farid. 2005. The Power of Hado. The Star. 25 September 2005. https://www.thestar.
com.my/lifestyle/health/2005/09/25/the-power-of-hado
Kandinsky, Wassily. 1997. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M. T. H. Sadler.
New York: Dover.
Klee, Zentrum Paul. 2015. Klee & Kandinsky. Bern.
Matsuzaki, Toyoho. 2005. The Healing Power of Hado. Hillsboro: Beyond Words.
Roach, Mary. 1998. Ancient Altered States. Discover Magazine. June 1998. https://www.discover-
magazine.com/planet-earth/ancient-altered-states
Weitz, Morris. 1966. Problems in Aesthetics. New York: Macmillan.
Whitley, David S. 2006. Cave Painting and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief.
Amherst: Prometheus.
On Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness
Victor G. Rivas López
Abstract The thesis that I uphold in this dissertation is double: I start from the idea
that there is a special kind of feeling that I call tragic and that belies both what I call
“natural” feeling and the current experience thereof, an experience that implicates a
return to a selfish or narcissist conception of individuality. To prove this, I shall
divide the dissertation in three sections: in the first one, I meditate on the phenom-
enological framework of feeling, music and history that leads to a tragic experience
of time; in the second section, I set out in broad outline how tragedy opposes meta-
physics, Christianity and romanticism so as to make comprehensible why man is
essentially a weak or rather an insubstantial being that gets his identity beyond the
would-be natural or egotistic identity of his; in the third section, I dwell upon some
events of the last century that are supposed to symbolise a radical change in the
perception of humanity and I choose one of them for the reasons that I give there so
as to confirm the precedent approach. This way, the phenomenological exposition
provides the indispensable thread to weave the cultural interpretation and vice versa.
In a brief colophon, I epitomise the whole conceptual development to emphasise
that this is not an exegesis of Nietzsche’s thought (which is moreover obvious in
view of the freedom wherewith I move through the initial and the last phases of its
development) but an application thereof to the understanding of the present sense of
man through the notions of feeling and weakness that I use both in an ontological
and a critical sense.
Keywords Insubstantiality · Music · Tragedy · Becoming · Post-humanism
L’homme, étranger à soi, de l’homme est ignoré.

Que. suis-je, où suis-je, où vais-je et d’où suis-je tiré?
Voltaire.
V. G. Rivas López (*)

Meritorious Puebla University, Puebla, Mexico

Switzerland AG 2023
192 V. G. Rivas López
On the Rightness of Feeling
It is very meaningful that when Nietzsche began the radical transvaluation of every
philosophical and cultural ideal that is the kernel of the first phase of his philosophy,
his starting point had been the Dionysian feeling that he perceived in the music of
Wagner, which for him was the simultaneous announcement of an unheard-of expe-
rience of man and, on the other hand, of the rebirth of Greek tragedy and of the
heroic pathos that the former vindicated: “What is it really that here becomes audi-
ble? Precisely this right feeling, the enemy of all convention, all artificial alienation
and incomprehension between man and man” (1997, 215).
The first feature that stands out in this passage, the idea of a “right feeling,” is not
as easily understandable as it could prima facie seem, above all because it contra-
dicts the usual way of thinking about feelings, which is worth setting out. It is more
often than not taken for granted that feeling is by nature almost ineffable because it
lies in the “inner” or purely subjective perception that someone has of his true self,
of someone else’s or, by and large, of any other being’s, whether it is a thing or an
event. According to this common sense notion, feeling implies to put at stake that
inner perception face to the so-called objective identity of the person or thing that
arouses it, which leads to insurmountable distortions because there is no way to
grasp that identity and span the abyss that separates interiority from the rest of real-
ity. This is due to the fact that feeling is, by nature, egotistical: the lover can know
that his beloved is this or that but he loves her all the same because she is wonderful
for him. From this perspective, feeling represents the way someone configures by
himself or spontaneously his innermost link with reality despite what reason says,
which would in principle explain why it is impossible to express it convincingly or
to define it clearly: even when someone is utterly sure of what he feels and expresses
it zestfully, he is likely to be in straits if he is asked to explain it since he must in that
case bring to light something that binds imaginatively his elusive self and the equally
elusive self of the other person so as not to speak of the rest of reality. Now, inde-
pendently of the questionable validity of this approach, it shows that the common
vision of feeling implies that everyone has a hazy experience thereof, for he could
otherwise express it clearly and enrich his whole existence with an imaginative
ground. Consequently, sentimental conflicts are very usual and most people are in
the doldrums. But how could, for instance, a love relationship go on well if the feel-
ing that nurtures it is taken as a thing beyond comprehension and is simply left to
the clash between the incidental course of existence and the inner self, which works
more or less effectively in the conflicting social dynamics but rarely leads to the
goal that people are supposed to be after, namely, happiness, merriment and plea-
sure? From a superior standpoint, how could a feeling be creatively expressed if one
does not have the least inkling of its existential sense? The fact that some people are
utterly incapable of clarifying what they feel corroborates that the social experience
of sentimentality, and above all of that that refers to oneself (as self-respect, for
instance), reaches port or sinks by unfathomable causes and not by its dynamism.
On Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness 193
In the light of this, the emphasis on a “right feeling” for the part of Nietzsche
must be considered one of the most original aspects of the first phase of his philoso-
phy, for it refers to the exigency of a true consciousness of the expressive possibili-
ties of sentimentality that are nevertheless passed over even for people that consider
themselves really critical or unprejudiced. Thus, what Nietzsche aims at is the deep
conscious of feeling that overcomes any natural drive that one is incapable to com-
prehend, let alone to recreate. Still more, the rightness at issue requires laying aside
once and for all the objective/subjective dichotomy that feeling is supposed to stand
for and reinsert the latter in a more comprehensive experience of consciousness and
of human relationships, which is solely possible when it has grown up through a
rigorous reflection over its expressive strength, reflection that in accordance with
Nietzsche is indispensable for every truly philosophical or artistic work. However,
there is a hindrance for this to be carried out, namely, that the social shallowness is
reinforced by Romanticism, which in the eyes of Nietzsche symbolises the worst
vision of sentimental dynamics insofar as it upholds in general that although feeling
is alien to reason, the artist can spontaneously enjoy and understand it no matter
how coarse or irrational he can be as a social subject: he can communicate the high-
est feelings even without his being reflexive, and the same happens regarding
thought, for the artist is or must rather be able to understand the depth of existence
(Schenk 1979, 25-26). In utter opposition to this, Nietzsche asserts that feeling must
be right, which implies self-consciousness, reflection and also mastery so as to
escape the sloppy level of the natural wants and of the objective/subjective approach
to them. Because of this, it is not surprising that the most radical conception of the
existential transcendence of feeling is not for Nietzsche the romantic one, but the
tragic one that unmasks the contradictions of common experience and of
Romanticism and demands a right measure for feeling. What is axial in all this is not
(as the natural attitude supposes) that a feeling is overwhelming and unsettles every
aspect of the own existence; what really matters is that it is the source of a clearer
perception that goes beyond the own self so as to embrace the whole of the cosmos.
This is all the more evident in the next feature that demands to be clarified: that
a right feeling is enemy of convention. It has just been seen that rightness and clarity
are rather exceptional in the field of sentiment, which compels to resort to an expe-
dient so as to express them on the level of social intercourse, and that is precisely
the function of convention, which works more effectively in accordance with the
usual value of the feeling (let’s say, that of tenderness in motherhood) or with the
peculiarity of the realm where it takes place (i.e., the loyalty to your comrades-in-
arms during a battle). On this score the most interesting instance is that offered by
love, the feeling par excellence for the modern culture since it is supposed to get
what would be almost impossible, namely, to identify as if by magic the “true self”
of the person with that of someone else. And this is hardly explainable because (as
it has just been mentioned) the diffuse subjectivism that governs social and indi-
vidual relationships assumes that individuality is a thing in itself that cannot prop-
erly be known, let alone communicated, which is why it must resort to a conventional
element, such as those phrases and symbols that with their loudness try to span the
would-be gap that separates everyone from the rest of reality. However, it is obvious
that more than throwing a bridge over such an improbable abyss, convention is for
concealing the flatness of the average social intercourses, their being the mere illu-
sory adjustment of subjectivism to the adamant law of coexistence in the light of
which any sentimental effusion is completely superfluous, for socioeconomic con-
straints or instinctive wants are enough to keep people together. But if this is so,
convention is doubly absurd: firstly, because it exaggerates and distorts a natural
feeling or rather want that does not require so much gaudiness to be expressed and,
secondly, because it strengthens subjectivism. That is to say, convention spoils both
the social coexistence that can go on without a true recognition and, on the other
end, the personal balance for which feeling must be a means to articulate imagina-
tively the phenomenological complexity of the world. And that is not all: convention
is above all perceptible in the so-called refined aesthete that resorts to the utmost
creations of art to express his sentimentalism in a sublime way. In other words,
convention does not refer to the kind of the symbol that one uses, but to how the
latter disfigures sentimentality through the imposition of a subjectivist
idealization.
Let us proceed to the third feature that the passage mentions, that of the “artificial
alienation” and the incomprehension, which in accordance with our analysis derive
from the same source: the subjectivist or falsely substantial approach to the self.
There is of course a non-philosophical, psychological sense of the phenomenon that
lies in the natural rivalry with others, but that is not what Nietzsche has in mind; he
refers rather to how the numberless natural differences of the individuals become
clear opposition when their hazy thought prevents them from agreeing. A wrong
way of feeling brings about inevitably a confuse way of thinking and valuing one-
self, others and reality, and that is doubly evident in an epoch of unrestrainable
subjectivism wherein everyone claims the right to impose his natural wants and
perceptions over everyone and everything else. The issue has, nevertheless, another
aspect that is worth dwelling on since it links directly with the existential function
that music carries out: that whereas the “artificial alienation” strengthens the misery
of egotism, a right sentimental expression lessens it because it emphasises the want
of a conscious measure in a world where the fellow beings must be taken into
account. The vicious circle of selfishness is solely broken when one realises that
every kind of experience, no matter how intimate, sublime or outlandish it can be, is
by principle a configuration of reality that does not hinge on an questionable psy-
chological perspective but on the sense that it carries out in the integration of the
own self in the lifeworld. To return to our hobbyhorse: in the case of love, this
means that independently of the anecdotic content of the feeling (whether it was
lived in a relationship or it was merely imagined, whether it was happy or it was
baleful) love has a sense of its own that is the factor that settles the value of experi-
ence in one’s eyes and allows consequently recognising others and overcoming the
alienation, whose artificial nature is then obvious. Oddly enough, it is not, for
instance, the fact of living with someone else what reveals the value of love, but how
that leads the people involved therein to a truly personal feeling of loneliness or of
company that does not stem from the general ideas about either of them (for instance,
love leads to a happy company that will last forever) but from a sense, a
phenomenological essence that can be fulfilled in unforeseeable ways. And this dis-
tinction between the essential phenomenological framework of feeling and the
empirical content thereof must be taken into account so as to comprehend the artis-
tic value that the former will have in the eyes of Nietzsche.
On the Dialectics of Feeling
Needless to say, it is practically impossible to define the sense at issue on the level
of natural feelings and wants (such as attraction or compassion), for the all-
embracing drive of existence that is experienced through the empirical content pre-
vents everyone, even the most lucid one, from being fully conscious of what he feels
and of how that implies a total compromise with others and with himself (which
would be the same as to have a “right feeling”). For instance, how can one undergo
love or hatred and simultaneously grasp their essential sense independently of their
empirical unfolding? This, of course, belies the simplistic identification of self and
feeling that has been the touchstone of the whole romantic tradition from its
Rousseauian foundations onwards (Hartle 1983, 60). But it is a lot more important
for the present purpose that the difference between the right and the natural sensibil-
ity has to do throughout with the fundamental part that music plays in the constitu-
tion and experience of feeling, that Nietzsche sets out as follows: “music reaches
out to its corresponding necessary shape in the world of the visible, that is to say, to
its sister, gymnastics; in its search for this it becomes judge over the whole visible
world of the present” (1997, 216). This axial function of music embraces even the
natural feeling, which is so much aroused by the former in dance and above all in
singing, surely the most potent expedients that music has to bring to light the irre-
pressible drive of existence. Thus, music reveals a sui generis imaginative and onto-
logical completeness that belies the subjectivist appraisal of the self: while a couple
dances, the two persons move as a unit and not as two individuals linked inciden-
tally, and the unit prevails even if they do not get to mark their respective rhythm
and stumble because of the mistake of one of them (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 410). For
the people involved in the dance, the dynamism never is individual, let alone subjec-
tive in the deprecatory sense of the word. Music integrates so in a phenomenologi-
cal unity elements that would be alien one another without it, and that shows a kind
of aesthetic transcendence or rather fullness that explains why music must be judged
with aesthetical principles other than those used for judging any other art (Nietzsche
1999, 86). What would those principles be? Doubtlessly, they would implicate
somehow or other the action of that interpersonal or existential drive that Nietzsche
calls “Dionysian,” which opens out through the natural feeling but transcends it by
the phenomenological unity that music expresses (Nietzsche 1999, 118). Now,
together with this, there is another reason for philosophy to deal necessarily with
music, i.e., that the latter is the sole art able to express that sui generis feeling that
cannot be called but historical or, even more properly, tragic. What is meant by this
is certainly hard explaining but can be instantiated (at the cost of a lengthy
digression that will require the reader to be very patient for it is worth standing it)
by the link of time and sense that provides the transcendental basis of the modern
culture from the French revolution onwards. In fact, the latter and the Napoleonic
Empire that is its culmination embody each to its own (beyond their having been
events that have taken place in determined time-space coordinates) an unheard-of
experience of liberty and fate that uprooted the entire system of existential goals and
values that was founded on a would-be theological providence so as to impose vio-
lently a new one founded on the limitless reach of man under the aegis of liberty.
This brought about perforce an equally radical transformation of feeling for it put
everyone in another imaginative plane regarding himself and the rest of reality, and
the best proof thereof is the nexus existing between the events at issue and the appa-
rition of romantic or sentimental subjectivity (in substitution of the Christian or
theological one, of which romanticism is a reformulation). Even more, from the
French Revolution onwards, the sense of existence has not ceased to change and
impose over everyone the demand of begetting a sensibility according to the more
and more accelerated rhythm of history, which somehow or other sparks off a per-
manent unbalance between what is felt and how it is symbolised in the socio-
historical dynamism. There is so a host of sentimental and existential possibilities
that were utterly unknown before Romanticism and that are, again, hardly under-
standable, whether concerning specific situations as family and religion or, above
all, concerning history itself. In other words, history, the endless process of read-
justment of existence and self beyond the theological ground, is for the first time the
framework of feeling in spite of its being simultaneously absolute and unforeseeable
(or perhaps because of that). Still more, since this process is by principle contra-
dicted by the natural or psychological limitations of the individual and by the cul-
tural restrictions of the present regarding the total course of history, the feeling that
expresses it cannot be objectified or concretised and that is why it must be consid-
ered tragic, if the latter term is taken as a synonymous of an unsurpassable unbal-
ance that must however be solved through art, at least in accordance with what
Nietzsche sets out in the very dawn of his thought (1999, 114).
Thereat, on speaking of “tragic” or, which is the same, of “historical” feeling I
do not mean the anguish sparked off by the consciousness of the own finitude, let
alone the dramatism inherent to the romantic pretension of a substantial self able to
assert itself through thin and thick by its sheer willpower over the fathomless sense-
lessness of existence; what I mean is the absolute consciousness of time that instead
of being made up for with the promise of a post mortem survival (as Christianity has
so far intended to do) or of merely changing existence into absurdity (as the shallow
vulgarisation of existentialism proclaims) reveals the insubstantiality of the self, its
reduction to the strength of a world where it proliferates a sense that notwithstand-
ing its absoluteness is not expressible through any objective language or any ad hoc
representation (which is why only music can judge it). The sense meant is then that
of the whole of existence that is intuited in a certain moment, although it never is
identifiable and communicable on the level of natural coexistence since there is no
adequate formulation thereof, and its comprehension depends on the way art and
very concretely music integrates the irreducible otherness of existence beyond the
natural sensibility.
This singularity of tragic feeling points at two intimately related aspects: firstly,
the abyssal difference that springs between the alternation objectivity/subjectivity
and language; secondly, the relativeness of any lived experience face to any other,
which compels to put in inverted commas the idea of an ideal fulfilment or expres-
sion. Still more, insofar as sense proliferates instead of sinking and the communica-
tion is faster and faster despite the universalization of gibberish (which could by the
bye be interpreted as the vulgar version of the tragic feeling that we deal with in this
section), the risk of miscomprehension rises everywhere too and, obviously, right-
ness is more necessary but also harder to experience than ever. At any rate, it has
been seen that it is rarely, if ever, obtainable on the level of natural wants, which
shows why the self does not overcome the inexhaustible unfolding of temporality
either through a substantial subjectivity (as romanticism would uphold) or through
an absolute spirituality (as Hegelianism would contend), let alone through an empir-
ical efficacy (as shallow individualism would state it). Contrary to what all these
solutions (above all the last one) affirm, the self embodies the drive of history thanks
to its being only an appearance that must be expressed as concretely as possible,
and this is why there is no substantial object of tragic feeling despite the total right-
ness that it gets thanks to music, which carries us back to the difference between the
empirical content of experience and the essential sense thereof. Needless to say, in
either case man must discern the essence of feeling through his subjectivity or with
a general representation or value. This is harder nowadays because of the imbrica-
tion of history and sense that everyone undergoes as the crushing demand of right-
ness that solely music makes feasible.
On the Nexus of Feeling and Music
Due to this, there are two contradictory possibilities for a time like ours: either
strengthen the objective/subjective framework of natural feeling and of its conven-
tional symbols that lead inevitably to a universal flatness and boredom that everyone
tries uselessly to conceal with sentimentalism or (from a critical perspective) follow
the course of the tragic feeling that implies the reduction of sense and self to an
appearance. On this score, it is worth noting that if the tragic feeling seems prima
facie to be practically the same as the existentialist anguish (insofar as both of them
are irreducible to an objective representation and put the self at stake), there is an
abyssal difference between them, namely, that whereas the former springs together
with history, anguish (at least in the standard Sartrean version thereof) is underwent
as the psychological reaction to an absolute freedom that cannot be fixed by any
circumstance and remains in an unfathomable transcendence (Sartre 1943, 481). In
other words, if tragic feeling opens out history through the self, anguish changes
its insubstantial difference into an insurmountable absoluteness. This makes seeing
why, although anguish itself is on the very border of natural feeling and
senselessness and belies consequently convention, it is so easily expressible accord-

ing to the worst dramatism (which is furthermore what happened when existential-
ism was all the rage), whereas the tragic feeling is by definition alien to it since it
means a temporality that lightens the self instead of confronting it violently with
reality, which is doubtlessly why Nietzsche identifies self, appearance and serenity
in the Apollonian drive that allows experiencing and sharing the Dionysian whole
that is not stricto sensu identifiable with any object in particular (1999, 18). In other
words, the tragic feeling is a lot more comprehensive from a psychological stand-
point than the existential anguish.
This last remark allows us to retake the reflection on music. It has been seen that
the latter articulates natural feeling within an existential unity that, as it comes about
in dance or in singing, goes on through the imaginative fusion of the people involved.
Another example of this would be the part that background music plays in the light-
ening of any activity, even of the most abstract or boring one, as it can be to wait for
someone to arrive; in this case, music assuages impatience on providing you with a
train of images that can be effective enough so as to efface annoyance. This shows
that also in the case of a feeling that strengthens so potently the self and represents
negatively the others (as impatience does), music reveals and structures the phe-
nomenal diversity of the world and even makes possible to reconsider the actions of
others since it diverts you from any individualistic state of mind. Due to this, the
deepest reason why music is axial for philosophy is (as Nietzsche so cleverly saw
the issue) that it breaks the vicious cycle of the objective and/or subjective represen-
tation so as to express the right phenomenological framework of lived experience
beyond the empirical content thereof, which is moreover the very essence of the
tragic feeling. On recreating the whole of time intensely but without objectifying it,
music plays a decisive part in the configuration of the self in the world because
reveals a sui generis transcendence that is not at all theological. This is so because
music, unlike any other art and, above all, unlike painting and literature, dispenses
with any representation and just expresses an existential sense that everyone under-
stands thanks to its rightness and despite its never being explainable without further
ado (Scruton 1998, 59). More concretely, this means that music as such always
transcends the specific import of the lyrics (in the case of the choral music, of opera
or of the popular song), of the programme (in the case of the ballet or of the music
composed for a civic commemoration like the anthems of any kind) or even of the
physical quality of sound (which are instead so useful when one tries to attract
someone else’s attention) to make one experience an unmistakable feeling whose
tragic sense does not have anything to do with sorrow or anything of the kind but
with the whole of existence that appears through a right modulation (Scruton 1998,
67). Since tragedy, as it has been stated, lies in the impossibility of integrating sense
and self either objectively or subjectively, it is logic that it goes on hand-in-hand
with music, which is its perfect inversion because it integrates sense and self but at
the cost of their substantiality. Thus, there is both in tragedy and in music a similar
sentimental overflowing that does, however, without dramatism because it does not
pass through representation, but though a total image of the self in the world.
Now, it will be asked, how can this take place without resorting to any represen-
tation? How can there be comprehension in the absence of an object? How can
anything be felt beyond subjectivity? As it has surely been presumed, the answer to
these and similar questions lies in rightness, which is the condition sine qua non for
a sound articulation of self, sense and world. Rightness is the sole matrix of tragedy
and music because in spite of the lack of an objective representation or of a subjec-
tive agency it opens out existence through a phenomenological essence independent
of the empirical content that it can in a moment have: from this perspective, what
matters is, oddly enough, to experience love, not how it is experienced. And the best
proof thereof is that when you listen to a piece and dispenses with any representa-
tional element such as the lyrics in order to concentrate on the sheer music, it imme-
diately springs as if by magic a right feeling, whether of joy, sensuality, melancholy
or whatever, which notwithstanding its essential condition is not the expression of
anything or of anyone but that the effect of music itself. On listening, for example,
to the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata Les Adieux, one undergoes a power-
ful feeling that can be labelled as sadness, melancholy or tenderness since there is
no a determined representation to orientate the listener but that (independently of
the word that one chooses to call it) is evident throughout. And this is not a peculiar-
ity of the concert music, for it appears too in the case of popular music: when one
listens, for instance, to a song interpreted in a foreign language and the music is
catchy, one will like it although one does not understand what it says because music
makes one feel something right. Of course, in the latter case, although the feeling
remains at bottom indeterminate, it is very easy to absorb it in the personal psychol-
ogy, so that it will end up expressing the very concrete interests or circumstances of
you, whereas in the former case, that of the concert music, the situation is com-
pletely different: one can be in a certain mood and (without modifying or giving it
up on purpose) one is smoothly carried away by music to another one that will not
however be on the natural level (although it will nevertheless be able to act upon it).
And with this condition it is beforehand answered the probable objection that the
two instances mentioned, Beethoven’s sonata and the popular song, would be more
Apollonian than Dionysian and that therefore they would not be the best possibili-
ties of a truly right or tragic feeling since it is so easy to use them for representing a
subjective state of mind. Considering that Apollo only makes sense together with
Dionysus, the possibility of resorting to it alone is out of the question and must
rather be seen as the very kernel of the worst kind of subjectivism, that of the would-
be aesthete that takes music as the representation not of an object but of his day-
dreams, which he takes as things in themselves, a possibility that Nietzsche links to
the “culture of the opera” as a sample of that extreme dramatism that he rejects
outright throughout (1999, 112).
This last clarification confirms that unlike what is usually called “aesthetic feel-
ing” (that is to say, the feeling that is by principle subjective although not natural
since it expresses a purely imaginative process), the tragic one does not reinforce
subjectivism because it reveals the transcendence of history (Rivas López 2008,
184-86). Alien to subjectivism and naturalness, the tragic feeling makes understand-
able that the former are completely useless for any authentic philosophical approach
to existence. And this is all the more obvious in the last aspect of the Nietzschean
reflection that will be remarked on now, that of the sisterhood of music and gymnas-
tics. Once again, before the risk of mistaking a right feeling with a merely subjective
effusion, it must be emphasised that it implies redefining the phenomenological link
of self and world, whether through the artwork that structures a sense of culture
beyond any individualistic standpoint (which in the eyes of the young Nietzsche
would by the bye be the title to fame of Wagner’s work) or as the tragic conscious-
ness of the limits of human agency (which will be analysed in the following section
of this dissertation). Gymnastics means so the existential or desiderative transfor-
mation of man according to the sense that music unveils independently of the natu-
ral feeling (but also of the so-called aesthetic one) and of the concomitant values
that justify it from the perspective of the individual satisfaction (or rather of the
individual failure that is so evident in the preponderance of dramatism). In other
words, gymnastics implicates that the radical transvaluation is the spine of the his-
torical process and not solely a daydream of the individual that wants to be really
critical without breaking with the conventional lifestyle that an epoch imposes
somehow or other over everyone. Now, insofar as this process is carried out at the
cost of the self (which is reduced to an appearance that reflects the all-embracing
possibilities of the world and that must consequently be right so as not to sink in the
empirical content of experience), it must by principle be perceptible in the corporeal
dynamism: the body of someone whose sentimentality is right cannot move or act
as it does when it expresses a conventional experience of being and coexistence,
however much this is dazzling or exciting. Of course, this integration of self and
body through gymnastics does not have anything to do with any cult of sport or of
the body taken as a mere physical or organic framework of subjectivity, let alone to
all the materialistic manifestations of a selfishness hardly concealed. Contrary to
this vulgar approach (whose motto is “where there’s a will, there’s a way”) gymnas-
tics widens the scope of the existential transvaluation beyond the subjective experi-
ence of body and desire, namely, it makes perceivable for the first time the lifeworld
that man shares with every other being and furthermore arouses new feelings that
will perforce contradict the conventional system of values of the time. This is why
the feeling at issue must be considered tragic even if it agrees with a pleasant vision
of existence: let us think of the peace that overcomes you before a landscape whose
beauty is however all the more touching rightly because it belies your hectic urban
way of living. Mutatis mutandis, the body that expresses that tragic feeling does not
need to be misshapen, contorted or maimed; it is enough that it stands out against a
subjectivist background so as to look like the image of an unattainable fullness even
if it is beautiful and strenuous (as the Greek sculpture shows). Still more, since the
desiderative flow opens out the lifeworld, the body itself becomes the expression of
a tragic being that challenges the physical standards as it happens when someone
looks slender because he practices the virtue of temperance and not because he is
bulimic or takes a lot of care of his aspect by fatuity. In a word, when man has got
the rightness required to live critically or tragically, gymnastics will change his very
body into the always complex expression of that through an unheard-of sensibility
(Tanner 2008, 31). And this will give him the right to judge the integrity of the world
of appearances simply because he has experienced it by himself, namely, by his

integration in the becoming of the world.
On Human Weakness
The passage to this section will require a light change of perspective, for if the
thread of the reflection has so far been the analysis of the aesthetical process through
which a right feeling turns into a tragic one thanks to music, it will now be that of
the opposition of tragic feeling and Western tradition, which for Nietzsche must be
focussed as a decadence that has culminated in the appearance of subjectivity, which
has for its part been preceded by that of Christianity. And if philosophy must deal
with that decadence, it will have to wreak havoc in the totality of the historical ide-
alizations, above all that of man as a being akin to a rational and benevolent creator
and, on the other hand, as a being whose feeling always recreates originally his
personal lived experiences. There are so from the onset an unmistakable orientation
of the process that has to be founded, that of a radical transformation of human feel-
ing through the return to a pre-subjectivist or philosophical comprehension of exis-
tence that passes through a gymnastic integration of self and body and through the
experience of tragedy. Thereby, what matters for Nietzsche on praising Wagner’s
work is not so much the geniality thereof as the possibility that it revealed for liber-
ating existence from the dramatism inherent to the metaphysical tradition, to
Christianity and, last but not least, to the romantic sentimentality, triple manifesta-
tion whose common redoubt was the would-be substantial nature of subjectivity,
which Nietzsche so eagerly criticised with his theory of the Apollonian or illusory
individuality, which has here been alluded to on speaking of the reduction of the self
to appearance. For, as the philosopher says, in the Dionysian process, the artist over-
comes his subjectivity and forms a unity with the “heart of the world” that is half-
way imagination and dream. Thus, the affinity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian
drives is once again strengthened so as to lay aside the pernicious influence of any
selfish affirmation (1999, 53).
From this perspective, dramatism (particularly that of nineteenth century opera,
which Nietzsche considers a phenomenon with a sense of its own) is a cultural
manifestation of the historical weakening of man that has been brought about above
all by Christianity insofar as the latter has always upheld that man will enjoy a
ceaseless divine providence and a post mortem timeless bliss provided that he is
humble enough so as to renounce his worldly drives and live entirely for the beyond.
Christianity weakens man because it makes him believe in a substantial identity and
in a final affinity with God, which is why it is not surprising that it has preceded the
apparition of the modern subjectivity that is epitomised in the romantic individual-
ity (1999, 21). Contrary to this, Wagner’s work furnishes man with a perception of
vital forces and of his insubstantial identity that does not only possible but abso-
lutely obligatory to fight the weakening sparked off by Christianity and romanticism
on the ideal plane of history and by the vulgar adaptation thereof to the natural
wants, where even the meanest individual flaunts his experiencing a good life. For
in addition to the religious and the romantic expressions of weakness, there is a
profane or rather vulgar one that must be understood for it has taken the place of the
former in our time, as it will be shown in the third and final section of this
dissertation.
Indeed, the question makes indispensable to dwell upon the precise sense of
weakness that Nietzsche fustigates, for if it is a consequence of Christianity, it also
is an insuperable existential condition of man, who is a being determined through-
out by the emotional complexity of existence and not by the abstract force of his
individual willpower, which is equally impotent before the other force that man
cannot overcome: that of death. Desire and death are the two eminent phenomena
before which man is essentially weak, at least while he does not get to integrate them
in the temporal becoming that is his very being, which means that he must strive to
keep his balance all the time before them since they carry him away when he
believes to hold the reins. There are then three eminent and irreducible philosophi-
cal senses of weakness: the ontological one, which postulates the inexorable sub-
mission of man to an emotional flow that carries everyone away to the final depletion
of death; the properly Christian one, which upholds human transcendence at the
cost of the endless existential unbalance; and, finally, the romantic one, which
affirms a substantial feeling for everyone without realising that that is the same as
mistaking an inordinate expressiveness with an artistic creativity. Therefore, weak-
ness must be understood ontologically and critically, i.e., in accordance with the
peculiar historical configuration of the world, which in the case of Christianity lies
in the affirmation of the mysterious affinity of the theological and the human tran-
scendence (whose final vulgar version would be the figure of the last man that will
be retaken straightaway). Of course, since Christianity is not the cause but the con-
sequence of weakness, a post-Christian feeling such as that that Wagner’s work
reveals (or seemed to reveal for the young Nietzsche) could by no means aim at the
unrestricted sway of man over existence (which would be a contradictio in terminis
for it would make him the image or rather the parody of God). Far from that, the
overcoming of Christianity would aim at three possible historical and philosophical
reformulation of existence: firstly, that of a man liberated from Christianity thanks
to a right work on his feeling, secondly, that of a man that were not able to break
once and for all the yoke of Christianity even if he were not a believer anymore and,
thirdly, that of a being that were not properly human, since humanity is after all the
direct cause of weakness and must be overcome for a new existential experience to
take place. In other words, and unlike the humanistic vindication of man as the
supreme value of culture (vindication that has a lot to do with the own becoming of
metaphysics), the tragic or right feeling suggests that man himself (the being essen-
tially weak) can and must be overcome in favour of a being “beyond good and evil,”
which is still nevertheless a historical possibility to be carried out. At any rate, this
possibility must not make us forget that there is other at hand that is utterly contrary
to the critical spirit of philosophy and even to the metaphysical transcendence of
Christianity, that of the man that has rejected the Christian religiosity by reasons
that must still be clarified but just to succumb to weakness in a desecrated world.
This possibility has an ominous name: the last man.
On the Becoming of Man
A critical comprehension of man such as it must be set out after Nietzsche is defined
among these three possibilities, which are, I repeat, both ontological and historical:
man beyond Christianity (who only stands his condition thanks to the musical right-
ness of his feeling), the last man (who has broken off with Christianity but only to
reinforce subjectivism and sentimentalism through a brutal alienation that will be
retaken in the next section of this dissertation) and, finally, a being that is not any
more human and is therefore beyond weakness, at least as man experiences it (that
is to say, as a subjectivist representation) or, as it happens with Christianity, in the
light of a theological transcendence. The identity of this post-human being remains
to be understood in every plane of existence for he shows two apparently opposite
faces: that of the superman and that of the child, each one of whom has a physiog-
nomy so alien to any human feature that if they could be perceived they would be
likely to look monstrous. However, the opposition at issue vanishes as soon as it is
considered that both child and superman are free from the weakness of man just like
they are free from the deleterious influence of Christianity, which is feasible thanks
to an existential dimension superior to that of earthly ideals, the natural environment
of man. This dimension is, firstly, that of the historical process that evinces the
insubstantiality of the self and, secondly and more importantly now, the abyssal
temporality of the cosmos where everything returns for ever and ever and where the
post-human being (who must be conceived in the mutual configuration of the super-
man and the child), will be strong enough to deal joyously with desire and death
(Vattimo 2002, 117).
Unfortunately, the eternal recurrence of everything is by principle incomprehen-
sible to man because (despite the existential richness of history that philosophy and
music bring to light each to its own) he is culturally and sentimentally subjected to
the linearity of time that is founded on the substantiality of self and that ends
abruptly in death (Vattimo 2002, 119). Unless, of course, time is experienced
through the tragic or anti-romantic feeling in those exceptional conditions that
anticipate the existence of a post-human being, such as Wagner’s music seemed to
do in a certain moment (Nietzsche 2005, 248). But when art itself is marred by sub-
jectivism (a possibility that romanticism exemplifies), its historical part can also be
played by any other phenomenon, which the critical thinker must interpret and inte-
grate within a truly critical relationship with history. The philosopher has in fact to
value his present and not as a minor activity; on the contrary, it is an axial task for
him to detect the signs that indicate the end of subjectivism and the advent of a new
epoch, i.e., of a new way of being; yes, it is a more peremptory duty of the philoso-
pher to determine if man is ready for his own overcoming or if he will regress to a
Christian feeling without the Christian historical framework, which is the case of
the last man and, very meaningfully, of the current culture (Nietzsche 2005, 52).
Now, this will not be analysed here because it is beyond the properly tragic feel-
ing whose rightness is the main goal for us. At any rate, it is worth mentioning that
there are three important nexuses between the tragic feeling and the eternal recur-
rence. Firstly, the former always returns exactly as it was originally experienced
because it does not hinge on its empirical content or on the psychological constitu-
tion, but on its phenomenological essence that is the same as rightness. This means
that what is experienced, for instance, through music (concretely, Wagner’s) will
always imply the whole of existence and the consequent transcendence of sense
regarding the psychological consciousness that can be attained in a certain moment;
that is to say, there will be a disparity of experience, feeling and expression that will
mark the limit of what one can integrate in the becoming of the own self. Secondly,
the eternal recurrence will always clash with the successive or finite temporality of
the natural wants and feelings, which will strengthen the critical appraisal of the self
and will furthermore belie the idea of the total control of existence for the part of
man, which has hereinabove been considered the principal reason why the tragic
framework of history cannot be hidden beneath the optimistic idea of a human prog-
ress, let alone of a universal welfare. Thirdly, the eternal recurrence, even if it is
stricto sensu alien to the critical conditions of existence, is for unmasking the shal-
lowness of the last man that is somehow or other turned into the ground of current
culture, which goes hand-in-hand with the sentimentalist and the materialistic
visions of the self that, oddly enough, far from releasing man from the anachronistic
theological transcendence, have ended up vulgarising it on identifying the ontologi-
cal fullness of the beyond with the despicable conditions of the present. Thus,
although the eternal recurrence cannot be fathomed here because it points to an
ontological condition, the superman, completely unlike man, it must be taken into
account its influence on the right configuration and the untimely evaluation of exis-
tence. And this leads us to the next and final phase of this dissertation.
On the Current Sense of the Last Man
It is not superfluous to emphasise once again that although this paper has seemed to
be concerned with the exegesis of some Nietzschean theories, its aim is very differ-
ent since it intends to elucidate the link of our present with the possibilities that
Nietzsche adumbrated regarding the tragic feeling and the birth of the superman that
will also appear as a child. Therefore, if it were asked if there is a historical phenom-
enon of the twentieth century that had unveiled the sentimental rightness and tragic
sense that Nietzsche was after in his own time?, I think that it would mostly be
answered that it is war, especially the World War II, considering that it has utterly
changed the theologically-based value of existence that prevailed until the twentieth
century, which explains why individualism has so irrepressibly mushroomed all the
world over after the war; in a lesser proportion the answer to our question would
likely to be that it is the apparition and fulminant development of the global com-
munication system that rules nowadays every plane of existence, for it has radically
changed the way everyone values the sentimental configuration of self and interper-
sonal relationships, which explains why the latter have become so hazy and evanes-
cent and so centred on pleasure (Baudrillard 1990, 32). Concerning the first option,
it is undeniable that the horrors of the holocaust and of the genocide perpetrated by
the Nazi regime and its satellites reveal as a whole such a dreadful irrationality that
the Hobbesian tenet of the natural evil of man or its Rousseauian counterpart of his
Edenic goodness (whose mutual Christian source is so evident, by the bye) fall
short. After the holocaust, the cruelty that man inflicts upon his fellow beings cannot
be justified by resorting to mythical violence or to totemic hatred, let alone to the
would-be destiny or racial superiority of a people, which implies that the World War
II has really been a demarcation line in the historical comprehension of man
(Todorov 2003, 35-36). This notwithstanding, it must be taken into account that
since war has from time immemorial been the most constant trait of socio-political
demarcation, it is hardly justifiable to take it as the ground of an overcoming of
human weakness. Furthermore, although the extermination during the World War II
got an unprecedented brutishness that was doubly shocking in an epoch of would-be
enlightenment, it reflects that of any precedent usurpation (as that of the native
peoples of Africa, America and Asia by the European settlers) or by the local tyrants
through Modernism (let us think of Stalin), which has been as atrocious as that of
the Nazis or perhaps even worse, so as not to speak of the awful atrocities that the
own indigenous people commit one against another (let us remember the slaughters
that took place in Rwanda in 1994). What would perhaps be at stake after the World
War II is not the theological beyond (as it was until the eighteenth century) but the
historical sense of man that agrees with the universality and progress of dignity and
liberty, something that was enthusiastically upheld by the Enlightenment, despite
every criticism against it (Kant 2009, 5). Viewed in the light of history (and con-
cretely of a tragic interpretation thereof), War aims more at the groundless ideologi-
cal truisms about progress and modern civilization than at an unheard-of feeling of
man that compelled to redefine his being, which would in principle distinguish the
World War II as the hecatomb that defined a new era in the becoming of man.
Meaningfully, that era is not that of the superman (as the Nazi propaganda seems to
have taken for granted) but that of the last man that has substituted history with the
illusion of a mythical dimension, that of the universal subjectivist satisfaction,
which links directly with the second option that has just been mentioned.
It is as clear as crystal that mass media have already revolutionised every aspect
of social and individual identity and have taken coexistence to a global level that it
would have been unimaginable even some years ago; together with that, they have
oddly enough wiped out the very basis of subjectivism, namely, the idea of a tran-
scendent or mental self that can be experienced independently of the surrounding
world (which is a very shallow vulgarisation of the Cartesian cogito). That notwith-
standing, it must be considered that the mass-media are subjected to an economic,
cultural and axiological system that is completely enemy of an original experience
of being because more than surmounting subjectivism they have merely changed
the way of interpreting it, so that the mental determination that is the core thereof
has become a digital performance (Baudrillard 1990, 61). It is not surprising that
this system had imposed an egotistic and banal framework over thought, communi-
cation and by and large immediacy, so that if it is true that it makes feasible a less
dramatic experience of the self (just like the one that Nietzsche vindicated), it is not
less true that it is more a regression to a raw naturalness (as the very term “mass”
indicates) than a phenomenon that demanded to restate the comprehension of man
or implicated the rightness of feeling that is the condition sine qua non for the trans-
valuation of every lived experience. For as Nietzsche also understood before than
anyone else, mass (unlike the “common people” that have an identity of their own),
agrees with an undifferentiated, opportunistic character that does not hinge on any
specific function, and that is why it spreads virulently through the entire society and
defile the noblest ideal or sentiment by the simple tactic of reducing it to a subjectiv-
ist expression (in the massive sense of this term that must obviously be differenti-
ated from the modern and romantic ones). Moreover, the mass is more ominous as
individual than as collective configuration, and although it is usually thought of as
an outward framework its essential force is inward for it is embodied by everyone in
the must variegated emotional possibilities. This is reflected on the intellectual
plane, as Postmodernism so luridly shows on lambasting the “tyranny” of reason in
the name of a radical thought that is nevertheless rooted in a naturalistic conception
thereof (Butler 2002, 15-16). Oddly enough, a philosophical and cultural position
that is supposed to be based on Nietzschean work contradicts from the onset one of
the most important affirmation of its would-be source, that of the absolute hierarchi-
cal difference between the aristocratic or right feeling and that of the base or hazy
one. And that is not all, for the most deleterious effect of alienation that the media
spark off in the social sense of individuality is that even the natural feeling sinks into
an undifferentiated flow of images and relationships that are not worth structuring
because there will be no way to experience them together with someone else. In
other words, mass-media stand for the latest phase of the egotistical conception of
the self that Christianity and romanticism have for their part propped. Thus, whether
as an enterprise of entertainment or as a tool for enhancing coexistence, mass-media
are alien to any true transvaluation of existence.
A Critical Option for the Present
If the two most probable answers to the question of a tragic feeling have been disap-
pointing, it would be worth analysing a third one that (despite the relevance that
according to me possesses) has been passed over by the socio-historical conscious-
ness as well as by the philosophical comprehension of man: I mean the cosmic
exploration that got its pinnacle with the first visit of man to the moon and has from
then on continued with a succession of other space flights, whether with a human
crew or not. Of course, this exploration could be seen as a simple variation of the
mass media and economic system that would carry man away to the conquest and
exploitation of cosmos precisely as it has occurred on earth: after all, as the verbal
similarity suggests, “exploration” is not so different from “exploitation”. On the
other hand, the phenomenon at issue has hardly had any cultural influence beyond
its immediate mass media impact during the 60’s (when it was on every hoarding),
let alone the artistic transcendence or the tragic feeling that Nietzsche thought to
perceive in some of Wagner’s operas. The cosmic exploration would almost be a
minor item in the inexhaustible list of the scientific or rather technological achieve-
ments that saturate every aspect of immediacy and are simultaneously for nurturing
the ideological image of man, if not as the “master of nature” (an expression that
smacks too much of an anachronistic theological usurpation or of a rationalist impe-
rium), at least as the efficient operator and inexhaustible consumer thereof, which is
after all what Modernism has seemed to be after since its Cartesian foundation
(Descartes 1964-1974, 62). But if this is so, why choose the phenomenon at issue as
a breaking point in the historical and cultural framework of existence, as the onset
of a totally new era in the framework of feeling? Because of three main reasons:
firstly, as the philosophical and artistic tradition shows, the cosmic realm has always
been the background of any existential ideal and spirituality and has linked the
would-be divine omnipotence with the anthropological supremacy through reason,
and the fact of having spread human presence there necessarily implicates a recon-
figuration of the sense of existence, if not rightly empirical (I insist on its fugacious
impact on the social consciousness), certainly historical in the deepest sense of the
word that for me is synonymous of tragic: man cannot perceive himself the same
way on the earthly level where everything reminds him of his weakness and mortal-
ity as in the cosmic infinity where time seems to dissolve into space so as to make
conceivable the eternal recurrence of everything in favour of man himself (and not
against him, which would be an image of hell; after all, it is the devil who reveals
eternal recurrence to man, according to Nietzsche (2001, 341). Secondly, the very
choice of the phenomenon tries to avoid the dramatism that earthly finitude imposes
over everyone (especially over the “free spirits” that are pathetic caricatures of the
last-man), and with all the more force after the decline and fall of Christianity and
of the questionable human imperium that it upheld. Thirdly, the experience of a
cosmic dimension of existence breaks the dualistic or Platonic approach to the lat-
ter, which makes seeing that the tragic transcendence regarding earth mines the flat
optimism of the last-man and his successive personifications so as to reveal the
sentimental integration of man with infinitude through the recognition of the total
immanence of existence. In the absence of a First Cause or of a supernatural provi-
dence that links him with cosmos, man could move through the sidereal spheres that
were supposed to be the sublime dwelling of God, which would by itself reveal the
exigency of a permanent transvaluation of existence and of the corresponding
impossibility of getting a final justification for it. This new sense of human agency
would furthermore require to be carried out with a peculiar rightness that must be
distinguished from that of the scientific researcher that objectifies nature so as to
prove an objective law and, also, from that of the successful entrepreneur that has
been able to enlarge his field of action with an ad hoc galactic strategy (Rivas López
2016, 364-66). In fact, although these two images of human agency are apparently
incompatible one each other, they share a similar indifference concerning the right
valuation of existence and resort to the relativity of truth or to the inalienable right
of everyone to look after number one from an individualistic standpoint (as post-
modernism shows, if not as a theoretical medium, as the spirit of our time). Now, if
the phenomenon at issue is otherwise bound with the tragic determination of exis-
tence that Nietzsche vindicates, there could also be a completely different interpre-
tation thereof, namely, that of an agency that has transcended the limits of earth so
as to go deeply into the ontological framework of the cosmos in order to unveil the
eternal recurrence of the same and a new creativeness for man or, rather, for super-
man, who together with the child and the last man is again outlined against the
blurry image of man that the present casts upon the timelessness of existence.
In accordance with this, there would be two possibilities for bringing to light the
ontological sense of the sidereal exploration independently that the latter had sunk
into oblivion almost immediately as a piece of news or as a profitable enterprise: the
first one would be the astronomical dimension that makes comprehensible the new
vision of man both beyond the traditional contempt for his worldly nature and
beyond the would-be anguish before the indeterminacy that all that reveals to him.
The second possibility would take a little different approach: the ontological right-
ness that keeps every element within an orbit or a cycle that goes on harmoniously
through the numberless folds of space time. These two senses of the cosmic experi-
ence, immensity and rightness, seem to agree mysteriously with human feeling and
that is very surely why they have from time immemorial furnished existence with an
intelligible framework that has allowed man to change the highest metaphysical
ideal, God, into an omniscient creator and/or into a redeemer that has a personal
relationship with His creature. Sidereal immensity is then not an abyss as that whose
silence so much terrified Pascal, it is a positive feature because it allows man to
reflect with care his own self on the luminous surface of heaven. Rightness is again
the principal aspect of sentimental experience that establishes an ontological link
for man, inasmuch as the existence of his opens out through the phenomenological
correspondence of embodiment and consciousness: the cosmos spreads ideally to
rationality just like body is expressed existentially as consciousness and vice versa,
and the ambiguity of the experience gives cause for the identification of man with
the inexhaustible dynamism of the cosmos. Therefore, it is not surprising that the
latter can be perceived not any more as the dwelling of God or as the mirror of day-
dreams about anthropological omnipotence but as the indispensable place of the
transfiguration of man into that post-human being that will be free from weakness,
a process that is unimaginable on the earth level due above all to the philosophical
limitations of existence itself, which includes the action of metaphysics and
Christianity as perturbing forces that prevent the advent of a deeper and clearer
experience of being. In other words, the integration of the cosmos into the human
experience is the condition sine qua non for the overcoming of man to take place,
which endows then the exploration of the sidereal realm with an undeniable histori-
cal relevance, whose revelation and immediate oblivion is more than meaningful
face to the incapability of the present to make the most of the ontological process
that history foreshadows. As a matter of fact, just like earth furnishes man with the
realm for carrying out the transvaluation of every value beyond the obscurantism of
Christianity (which would rightly be the aim of a historical philosophy), the sidereal
space is the realm for his overcoming into a being beyond good and evil (which
would be the aim of a philosophical history). And the originality of this is that it will
for the first time be alien to the theological idealisation, however much that is still
practically inconceivable for us.
For the same reason, it cannot be laid aside the other historical figure that
Nietzsche has anticipated, that of the last man, for he comes to the fore together with
the child or the superman and even more naturally than them on considering the
current possibilities of man to transform radically his valuation of existence and his
behaviour towards it. Yes, the last man is closer to us than the other two figures
because he embodies the most deleterious kind of weakness, that of a profane
Christianity that sanctions earthly existence just the way it is nowadays, namely, as
an arbitrary carrying out whose would-be openness to the sentimental possibilities
of existence is nevertheless mistaken with an imaginary vision or with the reconsti-
tution at any cost of the substantial self. Or course, since he thinks that existence is
just a reflection of his own interior, of his imaginary potency, the last man can adopt
the most bewildering attitudes and give the impression that he is as complex as
tragic feeling or as sublime as the sidereal realm. But that impression vanishes as
soon as the image becomes the reality of a concrete situation, before whose violence
the last man resorts not to the irrational idea of his supernatural link with God (for
he is not able to believe any more in that) but to the even more irrational sally of the
limitlessness of his agency. Yes, the last man cannot do without God no matter how
eagerly he tries to do it, and if he does not have a way to recover a lost religiosity,
he must canonise his own subjectivity provided that that will allow him to remain in
a familiar field, and that can only be made through the reinforcement of a ground-
less subjectivism.
We finally arrive to the radical exigency that history discloses for man, which
must be set out as the possibility of expressing the own being through a feeling
beyond dramatism, through an idealisation beyond God and through a self beyond
subjectivism. On the one hand, that would be embodied by the child or by the super-
man; on the other, its impossibility would be embodied by the last man. It remains
to be seen what option we shall make between these opened ways, although, as
Nietzsche has taught us perhaps better than any other thinker, a really deep thought
does not give cause for being optimistic. Vale.
Colophon
This dissertation has begun with the analysis of the notion of sentimental rightness
and has ended with that of the overcoming of man through a radical immersion in
the ontological sense of cosmos. The two notions are respectively the first and the
last links in the chain that Nietzsche forged for whom were able to span the gap
existing between existence and fullness, which in his eyes has been mistaken for
that of existence and welfare under the distorting influence of Christianity that has
furthermore prevented man from comprehending his emotional complexity and also
the historical configuration thereof, which is the deepest sense of the human weak-
ness. Contrary to the romantic exaltation of a subjectivist all-embracing drive,
Nietzsche affirms a Dionysian whole that man only experiences through an
Apollonian appearance, which proves once again his insuperable weakness since he
cannot directly embody Dionysus. This imposes the hardest and highest of any
human activities, namely, that of judging according to values that hinge entirely on
the own capacity of matching with the world of emotional drives that rules over
everything, a capacity that must be defined with the utmost rightness so as to get the
very relative harmony that man can attain in existence (which will at best be just an
appearance). Thereat, rightness, which is usually thought of in relation with concep-
tual definition, with argumentative structures or with the production of devices and
machines, has in reality an original bind with feeling for the configuration of a set
of values that make endurable or, rather, desirable existence, taking into account
that the eternal recurrence goes hand-in-hand with the own desire of undergoing it.
In other words, although Nietzsche was very soon conscious that his first concep-
tion of art as the “metaphysical consolation of existence” was not tenable in view of
the dislocated cultural dynamism of the modern world, he at any rate upheld to the
end the primacy of the aesthetic experience regarding any intellectual or purely
conceptual approach to existence. This justifies then that the idea of a right or criti-
cal feeling leads to that of a tragic feeling, that is to say, of a way of feeling beyond
subjectivism and beyond the modern optimism concerning the final historical agree-
ment between progress and human welfare.
In addition to this, it is necessary to emphasise that the idea of an overcoming of
the earthly realm in favour of a cosmic fullness, which is axial for the current reflec-
tion, must not be mistaken with that of transcendence in the theological sense of the
term. Far from that, it must throughout be emphasised that the problem of man is
that he is not able to love earthly existence and that is why he is so frequently after
a beyond (whether metaphysical or historical) that secures the would-be substantial-
ity of his being. Thus, the overcoming of earth means simply that earth itself must
be purged of the poisonous weakness that is exacerbated by the metaphysical or
Platonic dualism and by its vulgarisation through Christianity, romanticism and, last
but not least, mass-media. It remains to be seen if man will give rise to the super-
man, for there is no cosmic teleology that makes safe the outcome of the process.
But even if he will not, he must all the same revalue earth within the unfolding of
the cosmos not as a planet among others, let alone as a warehouse whose stock has
by the bye been more and more depleted because of the irrational exploitation
thereof so as to satisfy the demands of the current subjectivist way of living.
When at the end one reflects on the historical opposition of a truly tragic feeling
and the common, too common dramatization of weakness that is the essential cause
of subjectivism, one corroborates that in a time of universalised sentimentality
(which stands for the worst kind of nihilism inasmuch as it is incapable of nurturing
a true consciousness of earthly existence), the part that philosophy must play in
culture is no other than reducing phenomenologically the polluted artistic and
intellectual atmosphere that the illusory self of the throng has hidden from our sight.
Iterum vale.
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Analecta Husserliana: Volume CXXV

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Analecta

Posthumanism and Phenomenology

The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research

ISSN 0167-7276 ISSN 2542-8330 (electronic)

Part I Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity

Part II The Body/Technology/Ecology

Part III Body, Culture and Society

Part IV A Shrinking World

Part V Narrative and Solitude

Part VI Aesthetics and Ontology

Tony E. Afejuku University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria

Abstract Historical temporality of the concept of boredom is counter to Heidegger’s

Keywords Heidegger · Levinas · Boredom · Insomnia · Awakening ·

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

On the other hand, Levinas’s progress toward the reinterpretation of Heidegger’s

This oppressive nature of temporality of Dasein is responsible for emerging of the

Heidegger’s vocabulary in relation to temporality and boredom (“perishable,”

Thought builds on time… on many scales.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

a philosophical synchronicity due to the teleology at play in their phenomenological

Keywords Ancient philosophy · Cosmology · Mathesis universalis · Metrology ·

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, founder of the World Phenomenology Institute and

architectonic structures. This universality of self-evidence is a theme whose roots

touching” wherein order is communicated from one dimension of time (“persis-

perspective of a unity of mathematics in a unified mathesis universalis,3 and also a

to express a measure of the spherical unity of continuity and discontinuity, a being

correspond to different levels of being. As Dominic O’Meara describes it, “each

aids in identifying the ancient spherics, but Manchester’s phenomenology of the

It is important to recognize these connections because in Husserl’s own develop-

cosmos. By manipulating language to modulate the power of the Logos through

———. 1974. Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, The

Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith

Abstract When speaking of the posthistorical, one is also speaking of posthuman-

Keywords Posthumanism · The body · Boredom · Solitude · Fulfillment

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Abstract The paper presents a phenomenological investigation into experiencing

Keywords Boredom · Phenomenology · Event · Meaning · Husserl · Heidegger

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 39

brain has released progesterone or melatonin into our bloodstream, or because we

willingness and motivation to make an effort to attune ourselves to the content.

book, a lecture on phenomenology, and a recitation of poetry. Their continuous

Abstract The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seemed to agree with

Keywords Heidegger · Sloterdijk · Humanism · Shepherding · Taming ·

The extraordinary success of Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 book, Critique of Cynical

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 55

Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism

Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as published begins by refusing to limit action to

metaphysics of salvation in the case of Christianity, the metaphysics of subjectivity

There is no mention of Plato’s Statesman in Heidegger’s Letter. Nor is there any

is right to suggest that Heidegger’s work deliberately directed itself against

Sloterdijk’s use of Plato’s Statesman or Politicus in this context is puzzling. Certainly

Here I want to make two concluding remarks.

Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Conceptxs of Metaphysics. Translated by William

Marie Antonios Sassine

Keywords Jan Patočka · Husserl · Nietzsche · Solitude—body · Spatiality—

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 69

Movement Toward the Other

My errors have been written in my senses

Patočka, pursuing Husserl’s enquiries on the body, thinks that a phenomenology of

Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. Le scaphandre et le papillon. Paris: France Loisirs.

Through others the earth becomes warm, loving, benign. Others

Abstract The post-human proposal undoubtedly represents a deep break within

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 79

Part I Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity

Part II The Body/Technology/Ecology

Part III Body, Culture and Society

Part IV A Shrinking World

Part V Narrative and Solitude

Part VI Aesthetics and Ontology

Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism

Movement Toward the Other

Emancipation from Animality and Animal Epiphany

Technopoiesis and Somatic Dissection

The Historical Overview

ontemporary Theories of Humor Referring to the Concept

pistemic Eco-Phenomenology and the River

“Heraclitus’ Golden River”

On the Rightness of Feeling

On the Dialectics of Feeling