Behind the Mountains, part 2

Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘I. I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:

‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’

In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends:   

‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’  

In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’  

I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s The Human Province : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:

‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’     

Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous The Philosophy of Money. (Simmel’s text was published in 1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his German Political Philosophy, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.

‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’

Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in The Philosophy of Money – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces:

‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of depersonalization.’

We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’.

‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’     

Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’. 

Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to humanize the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually natural – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:

‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’ 

For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic horror vacui, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’.  

We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.

‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’   

Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:

            ‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.

            “I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’

Tbc.

Martian Time-Slip, part 2

In Martian Time-Slip Dick clearly upholds individual freedom, whether it be in terms of the schizophrenic ‘turn inward to meaning’ or Zitte’s bid for economic freedom. Yet the novel’s representation of mental illness also emphasizes the negative aspect of subjective inwardness. Dr Glaub draws attention to how ‘“in child autism, as with Manfred, there is no language at all, at least no spoken language. Possibly totally personal private thoughts…but no words.”’ Dick stresses how autistic noncommunication cages the subject within privatized existence – a sort of privatization which chills Jack Bohlen despite his experience of an empathy with the autistic boy, when he is ‘caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again and again’. Earlier in the text, when he is exploring the ‘Public School’, Bohlen is troubled by the way in which autism ‘was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavour; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values’. Bohlen thinks that it is important that ‘The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost’, and that ‘His values were fused with some objective human enterprise’. Dick bemoans the divorce of the radically noncommunicative from a communal objectivity, which he thinks of in terms of a taught tradition of values and culture. This divorce also represents the entrance to what Doreen Anderton, in conversation with Bohlen, calls ‘“the Tomb World”’.

‘Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a mouldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.’

Dick thus associates psychotic noncommunication with a condition of total reification, or a freezing within an absence of experience; an absence of change. ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’ Yet despite lamenting the breakdown of the subject’s relation to objectivity in this way, Dick also offers a critique of objectivity in the form of the ‘composite psyche’ represented by the Public School. In this context he once more upholds the individual’s freedom, accusing an unfree society of imposing a diagnosis of mental illness on any child who displays signs of personal singularity:



Paul Klee. Early Sorrow. 1938

‘It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic – that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality.’

Hence whilst Dick bemoans the alienation of the radically noncommunicative from intersubjective objectivity, or ‘the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values’, he critiques their educational institution – the Public School – which represents the ‘link’ to the ‘inherited culture’, and which is there ‘not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines’. ‘It bent its pupils to it [the culture]; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.’ Bohlen views ‘the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School’ as being, on one level, ‘an invention arising from necessity’ – insofar as its very neurosis offers the children a bulwark against their own psychosis, or ‘a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality’. The reified, ‘compulsive-obsessive’ environment which the Public School represents – ‘a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises’ – at least enables ‘a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path’ of psychosis. But Bohlen is also preoccupied by the way in which the Public School environment represents the conversion of ‘inherited culture’ into a form of reified intersubjectivity.

‘[…] Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point – to embalm them.’

It seems to be apparent, therefore, that what the novel’s treatment of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication is focussed on, above all else, is reification. Dick laments reified intersubjectivity just as he laments reified subjectivity. In Martian Time-Slip an important definition of psychosis returns to the vocabulary of jelling or coagulation, to describe the self reified beyond empathy and communication:

‘A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred’s state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.’

It is as if the reified self expands until, become pure 'attention', it wipes itself out. Jameson’s ‘Philip K. Dick, in Memoriam’ concludes with a discussion of Dick’s prophetic treatment of the ‘end to individualism’ which increasingly characterizes society now. In response to the ‘death of the subject’, Jameson sees Dick’s writing as staging a ‘fitful and disturbing reappearance’ of ‘the collective’ – when the collective reappears precisely in the context of our reified intersubjectivity, or ‘the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time, “like a bird caught in cobwebs” (Ubik)’. Jameson reads Dick’s fiction as colliding a marginal collective made up of the vulnerable and the posthumous, with the radically alienating world of digitalized, virtualized intersubjectivity imposed on us by technology and mass media: within this scenario, Dick can attach some sort of redemptive value to the reification experienced by the autistic or ‘half-life’ community.

‘It is a literature in which the collective makes a fitful and disturbing reappearance, most often in a paralyzed community of the dead or the stricken, their brains wired together in a nightmarish attempt to find out why their familiar small-town worlds are lacking in depth or solidity, only to discover that they are “in reality” all immobilized together in some cryogenic half-life.’

As Jameson would go on to stress, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, in Martian Time-Slip Dick upholds the marginal, immobilized collective as the only social formation capable of future mobility. At the end of the novel, Dick presents Manfred Steiner as having been rescued, eventually, by Jack Bohlen’s attempt to communicate with him. In the novel’s climactic scene back-from-the-future Steiner may now be, as Jameson puts it, an ‘android-type prosthetic being’, but this is also Steiner’s (in Jameson’s phrase) ‘final apotheosis’, and a moment in which he can thank Bohlen for his humanity. ‘It lapsed into silence and then it resumed, more loudly, now. “You tried to communicate with me, many years ago. I appreciate that.”’ Though physically quite literally semi-reified, by now Steiner has found a way of releasing himself from the sort of contemporary reified intersubjectivity emblematized by the AM-WEB building, precisely – so Dick suggests – as a result of a developing capacity for communication and relationality. Bohlen asks Steiner, ‘“Did you escape AM-WEB?”’ ‘“Yesss,” it hissed, with a gleeful tremor. “I am with my friends.” It pointed to the Bleekmen who surrounded it.’ Relating to the Bleekmen, as Bohlen had surmised earlier, can enable Steiner to break through reification, by learning how to adjust – to change – precisely through learning how to be true to his own singularity:

‘Perhaps, for the first time in his life, the boy was in a situation to which he might make an adjustment; he might, with the wild Bleekmen, discern a style of living which was genuinely his and not a pallid, tormented reflection of the lives of those around him, beings who were innately different from him and whom he could never resemble, no matter how hard he tried.’  

Franziska Moebius. Kinder im Weg. Leipzig 2006.
transit trauma and arrested development

Martian Time-Slip

‘Helio, lowering his book, said, “This child has a speech impediment which I am overcoming.”’

Edward, Spitalfields 1989
by Marketa Luskacova

It is, surely, Dick’s unflinching presentation of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, which brought Patricia Warrick – as Umberto Rossi notes in The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick – to comment on the ‘terrible sincerity’ of the text. For Fredric Jameson, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, the settlements on Mars in Martian Time-Slip represent ‘the most depressing of all his novelistic “realities”’ – though I would add that the settlements presented in A Maze of Death are none too cheering either. The sincerity which Dick achieves in Martian Time-Slip is particularly sobering, I would argue, because it posits the misery involved with mental illness to be an increasingly generalized condition within contemporary life. When Rossi writes that ‘the title of the 1963 novella “All We Marsmen” – that Dick expanded into the novel – might also suggest that it is a story about “All We Madmen (and Women)”’, I would go further and emphasize Dick’s intention in the novel to suggest that, increasingly, We Are All Madmen and Madwomen now. Martian Time-Slip has Jack Bohlen remark that schizophrenia poses ‘“one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced”’; later the text describes schizophrenia as ‘the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man’.   

Mental illness is repeatedly presented by Dick in terms of a breakdown of communication and relationality. He has the psychiatrist, Dr Glaub, observe that ‘“In autism, especially, the faculty of interpersonal communication is drastically impaired.”’ As Rossi comments, in connection with the novel’s autistic protagonist Manfred Steiner and his disturbance in time-sense, ‘the time-slip that allows Manfred to see what will happen also prevents him from communicating with others in the present’. Dr Glaub describes ‘“disturbed persons”’ as ‘“encapsulated individuals cut off from ordinary means of communication”’. Bohlen articulates Dick’s understanding of such noncommunicative isolation:

‘Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with – the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.’

Dick’s understanding of mental disturbance as a confinement within interiority, relates to his sense that contemporary mental illness derives from the influence of the exercise of modern rationality. Manfred Steiner’s father traces his son’s autistic alienation back to the influence of Manfred’s mother’s academic personality, with its detachment from lived sensuous experience, its coldness and lack of love. Her dominative, instrumental rationality has reified her. By contrast, Silvia Bohlen is ‘a genuine mother and woman, vital, physically attractive, alive’:

‘In his own mind, Steiner blamed it all on his wife; when Manfred was a baby, she had never talked to him or shown him any affection. Having been trained as a chemist, she had an intellectual, matter-of-fact attitude, inappropriate in a mother. She had bathed and fed the baby as if he were a laboratory animal like a white rat. She kept him clean and healthy but she had never sung to him, laughed with him, had not really used language to or with him. So naturally he had become autistic; what else could he do?’

Dick consolidates an imputed critique of today’s academic culture and academic reason, when he has Dr Glaub refer to disturbed ‘“minds so fatigued by the impossible task of communicating in a world where everything happens with such rapidity that -”’. Here it is difficult not to think of the purposelessly accelerated, bureaucratized conditions of contemporary academic production – or this society’s ‘publish-or-perish’ privileging of the quantity of academic research produced over its quality – and the damage that these conditions do to our mental health. Martian Time-Slip in fact offers a potent Weberian or Frankfurt School-like prophecy of our existing culture of enforced higher education, intensified social differentiation and career specialization:

‘The ad listed all the skills in demand on Mars, and it was a long list, excluding only canary raiser and proctologist, if that. It pointed out how hard it was now for a person with only a master’s degree to get a job on Earth, and how on Mars there were good-paying jobs for people with only B.A.’s [sic].’

Jack Bohlen further illuminates this vision of a fast-paced, specialized polis, the complexity of which entails an ultimately changeless, reified and reifying, density of experience which threatens our sense of the freedom of the self.

‘“Frankly, Kindly Dad, I emigrated to Mars because of my schizophrenic episode when I was twenty-two and worked for Corona Corporation. I was cracking up. I had to move out of a complex urban environment and into a simpler one, a primitive frontier environment with more freedom. The pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad. […] I went mad standing in line at the bookstore. Everybody else, Kindly Dad, every single person in that bookstore and in that supermarket – all of them lived in the same building I did. It was a society, Kindly Dad, that one building.”’

The novel develops its critique of the modern use of instrumental reason in the course of a conversation in which Heliogabalus describes schizophrenia as ‘“the savage within the man”’, and Arnie Kott responds by calling it a ‘“reversion to primitive ways of thought”’. Helio identifies psychoanalysis, taken as an instance of the sort of modern instrumental reason which would reshape suffering selves, to be a ‘“vainglorious foolishness”’ which is mistaken in its therapeutic mission of restoring the subject to optimum functionality and sense of purpose.

‘“Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister.”

“I don’t get you, Helio.”

“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning . There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”’ 

Dick here suggests that in a real sense mental illness is itself a valid response to the perennial philosophical question of human purpose. Modern instrumental rationality involves an objectivizing use of reason, which latches on to objects to ‘turn to practical use’; in contrast, (rational) irrationality can refuse objectivity and seek not practical purpose, but the impractical purpose of uncovering the absolute grounding humanity. It is in this context of the ‘turn inward to meaning’ that Dick’s conception of irrationality, converges with the conception of existential reason developed in Jaspers’ thinking: as Chris Thornhill notes in his Karl Jaspers, 'transcendence' is for Jaspers 'an inner attribute of truthfully self-interpreting humanity'. Dick’s defence of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning is also supported by the novel’s depiction of the Martian environment; Mars is presented as ideal territory for asocial interior voyagers towards the sources of human value, in a way that recalls a phrase from Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat : the ‘private moon voyage’. Early in the novel, Bohlen judges that his father will adjust to Mars precisely because he is ‘in touch with some level of knowledge which told him how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way’. Then the ‘lonely’ children of Mars appear; frantic yet diffident, Kafka-solitary pursuers of the transcendental beneath the surface. Young hermeneuticians, slightly dazed by the austere immensity of their ‘black-night-without-bottom’, the landscape of their quest.

‘The children had a large-eyed, haunted look, as if they were starved for something as yet invisible. They tended to become reclusive, if given half a chance, wandering off to poke about in the wastelands. […] When he flew by ‘copter, Arnie always spotted some isolated children, one here and another there, toiling away out in the desert, scratching at the rock and sand as if trying vaguely to pry up the surface of Mars and get underneath…’

 

The novel’s foregrounding of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning has a sociopolitical correlate in Dick’s characteristic vaunting of repairman Otto Zitte’s doomed bid for personal economic freedom.

‘He hated the big racketeers, too, same as he hated the big unions. He hated bigness per se; bigness had destroyed the American system of free enterprise, the small businessman had been ruined – in fact, he himself had been perhaps the last authentic small businessman in the solar system. That was his real crime; he had tried to live the American way of life, instead of just talking about it.’

Of course these statements are representative of Dick’s typical populist celebration of, in Jameson’s words (in his ‘Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam’), ‘small employees such as record salesmen, self-employed mechanics and petty bureaucrats […] caught in the convulsive struggles of monopoly corporations and now galactic and intergalactic multinationals’. Darko Suvin, Rossi records, has interpreted the AM-WEB building in Martian Time-Slip as a reference to the ‘American Web of big business, corrupt labour aristocracy and big state’. The novel’s defence of an individual’s freedom, in the face of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties of reified intersubjectivity which manifest in our contemporary convergence of monopoly capitalism and bureaucratic statism, is clear.     

To be continued.

Existential Communication, part 3

We can now begin to see more clearly why Thornhill summarizes Jaspers’ philosophy of communication as a ‘doctrine of committed existential relativity, which charges all absolutizing or totalizing world-views with a primary falsehood’, and which tries to give an account of human freedom which ‘resists’ both Kantian ‘formal-idealist’ and Heideggerian ‘objectivist’ preconditions. Thornhill emphasizes that the precondition of truthful existence is for Jaspers ‘a recognition of uncertainty, and this uncertainty is given exemplary form in speech’. Speech for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, is ‘an activity in which consciousness is liberated from its prior (juridical) reification in idealism, but in which it also maintains a distinction against the objectively instituted orders of freedom posited by more avowedly anti-idealist thinkers’, such as Heidegger. Referring to the second volume of Philosophy, Thornhill cites Jaspers’ argument that the ‘necessity of existential communication’ is always an expression of freedom, and it is therefore always ‘objectively incomprehensible’. As we have seen, Jaspers suggests, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘The more I decide  to act in accordance with the unconditioned logic of my existence (ideas)’, ‘the more I disengage myself from any objective a priori certainty about what it means to exist, or about the final truth of my existence’.  Jaspers argues, moreover, that because speech is (in Thornhill’s words) ‘by character relative, uncertain and interpretively open’, it constitutes ‘the only medium in which human existence can describe or enact its own relative, uncertain and interpretively open relation to its ideas’. This is why, to summarize, ‘whilst Kant reflects both the foreclosure and the possibility of metaphysical truths by outlining a doctrine of equal, universal, and anti-authoritarian law as the foundation for free, truthful humanity’, Jaspers, ‘for very similar reasons, outlines a doctrine of tolerant communication’.

In order to understand more fully how such a theory of tolerant communication underpins Jaspers’ conception of worldly human freedom and liberalism, we can return to his thinking on revelation, and the relation of his thought as a whole to contemporaneous political theology. Jaspers’ ‘most central interest’ in theology, Thornhill notes, is revelation; revelation is ‘at the heart of all his debates with his theological contemporaries’. Jaspers viewed revelation as it is generally conceived by religious thinkers, Thornhill writes, as ‘the key example of a hypostatic belief-system, which confers falsely absolute objectivity on its contents, and which is absolutely at odds with his own existential theory of transcendent(al) uncertainty’. Jaspers therefore sought to reconceive of revelation as - in Thornhill's words - 'an ongoing and uncertain aspect of human existence, which must forever be relatively, spontaneously and communicative(ly) redisclosed'. Such a relative and spontaneous interpretation of revelation is for Jaspers the basis of true belief; of 'philosophical belief'. Thornhill identifies Jaspers as outlining here a 'tantalizingly unexplored position in the broad tradition of theological/anthropological inquiry', because he is seeking to supplant the typical model of submission to concretized 'revelation as law, or as the ground of law', with his own model of an ongoing, uncertain hermeneutic realization of the originary truth which revelation constitutes. 'The reinterpretation of this truth is not a mere re-declaring of primary truths, but a course of reflexive and communicative human fulfilment.' Jaspers' assertion that the originary truth which revelation constitutes is, as Thornhill puts it, 'a truth which is internal to the experiences, thoughts and words of people', along with his sense that 'the realization of the primary truths of revelation still awaits completion', hence introduces a liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, or the possibility of free human praxis to the religious concept of revelation. Jaspers' opposition in this way to acceptance of concretized revelation as law, Thornhill notes, was 'directed very generally against Catholic theologians, and very specifically against the conservative Protestant theologians of inter-war Germany'. It also offers 'a striking counterpoint to certain more conservative perspectives in Jewish political theology': Thornhill references Leo Strauss.      

We can now see more clearly how what I am calling Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, enabled him to reconceive historical freedom and responsibility. Thornhill helpfully distinguishes Weber's concept of historical responsibility (as 'a means of securing worldly authority'), from Jaspers' conception of historical responsibility as 'an essentially communicative attitude and mode of praxis'. For Jaspers, Thornhill explains, a human's 'unique historicality [...] only legitimizes itself insofar as it reflects forms of commonality and experience, the disclosure of which requires truthful communication'. In its emphasis on 'the transcendentally communicative essence of historical uniqueness', Jaspers' thinking is indebted to Dilthey's transcendental historicism. Here we could also remember how Jaspers' concept of (philosophical) belief, as Thornhill writes, 'always contains an interpersonal communicative dimension'. 'The disclosure of human transcendence in revelation only truly becomes revelation as it is spoken by people amongst themselves.' This is because of the tolerant quality of communicative humanity; because 'only in an uncertain, relative and communicative disposition towards others can I begin to explain my own unstable experience of myself as possible transcendence'. One freedom enabled within Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication is thus the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities; yet for Jaspers such tolerant hermeneutic communication also enables us to think possibilities of historical freedom and responsibility. Indeed it enacts historical freedom and responsibility: in Jaspers' view, (philosophical belief entails that) particular historical moments of transcendentally interpretive conversation clear space for histories of openness and equality. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, 'bases his hermeneutic on the conviction that God - as a quality of human transcendence - is hidden, and that all qualities of God can only be suggested as non-formal, non-material ways of being between people'; moreover, the 'hiddenness of the interpreted truth founds a way of being towards others in liberality, tolerance, freedom and historicality'.   

Thornhill shows how Jaspers’ concern with the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities, or with the freedom of human thought to access what Thornhill calls ‘the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence’, underpins the theory of democratic republicanism expounded by Jaspers in later works such as his 1961 book The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, asserted that ‘democracy has its legitimacy over other forms of government because it provides a situation in which human thinking is able to develop its own resources of tolerance, culture and responsibility’. Democratic order ‘at least offers the chance that human thinking might communicatively open itself towards others in committed historicality and responsibility’. The sort of responsible truthfulness embodied and enacted by hermeneutic communication is not possible in non-democratic orders (such as have come to determine the education system now); democracy alone ‘is able to sanction a sphere of free communication which is not directly regulated by the technical, political or ideological imperatives of state and economy’. Whilst Jaspers thought that in non-democratic orders, as Thornhill writes, ‘the access of human thought to the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence is invariably obstructed by the imposition of technical and ideological commands on the processes of human thinking’, like Arendt, Jaspers in Of Truth indicated that ‘human thought and action, if unregulated by technical strategy, create a world of spontaneous but utterly committed historicality and responsibility’.

Thornhill goes on to expound the relation of Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence to his democratic humanism. Thornhill argues that in their conceptions of the human, Heidegger and Lukács take up positions which are ‘closely united against Jaspers’. For Jaspers, Thornhill maintains, both Lukácsian totality and Heideggerian Dasein see human truthfulness as ‘an objective unity of knowledge’, in which ‘the elusive diremption of ideas and objective life, which (for himself) always defines true humanity, is superseded by a unifying practical, and thus anti-humanist, authoritarian ontology’. For Jaspers any attempt – such as Heidegger’s or Lukács’ – ‘to postulate a mediated (ontological) totality in historical knowledge’, is ultimately to resort to what Thornhill calls ‘a falsely mystical notion of uniform truth, in which knowledge is fixed in inner-worldly practical objectivity and endless time’. Lukács, Heidegger and Jaspers, Thornhill notes, all conceive of ‘the totality or unity of knowledge, in which reflection is perfectly united with its phenomena, as the ultimate ground and motive of human thinking and of humanity’. Yet for Jaspers objective totality ‘is always false totality’, and the riven, failing, non-objectified process of communicative transcendence which works towards unified knowledge never achieves such totality. ‘Any attempt to collapse the primary antinomy of human being into the processes of a unitary worldliness, he thus implies, destroys the truth of humanity itself.’ Thornhill adds: 

‘[Jaspers] always indicates that these unities of knowledge and reason can never be finally realized, and that meaningful humanism is always the consequence of the exteriority of unified knowledge to objective human praxis. Because the unity of knowledge cannot be reached, he implies, humans must define themselves communicatively in the uncertain historicality of relativity and tolerance, which reflect (but do not fulfil) a striving for totality or unity.’ 

Thornhill explores how Jaspers’ view of communication as ‘a gradual event of interpretation in which consciousness experiences, interprets and begins to articulate its own possible founding totality’ (in Thornhill’s words), points towards Habermas’ ‘development of communication as a means of salvaging reason from its idealist reification’. The critique of neo-Kantianism underlying Jaspers’ theory of communication has ‘exemplary character for subsequent communication-theoretical innovations’, because whilst, for Jaspers, communication becomes ‘the medium in which the ideal/metaphysical components of human-being can be disclosed’, it remains ‘of fundamental importance’ for him that ‘these elements are never pre-stabilized as a prior unity of being’. Jaspers’ existential-hermeneutical approach, Thornhill sees, anticipates Habermas’ communication theory’s critique of the idealist process of reification, when Jaspers implies that speech is ‘a mode of agency in which human reflection places itself in relation to underlying ideas, but does not formalize these as unitary components of its own original structure’. Whilst never categorically abandoning ‘the idealist precondition that human consciousness has an ideal structure against being itself’, and thus holding to Kant’s recognition that ‘the true is not real, and that human praxis is not true praxis unless it is motivated from sources which are outside itself (by ideas)’, Jaspers resists the reificatory result of Kantian idealism ‘merely to trace the ideal limits of human consciousness against the sources of its truth’ (in Thornhill’s words). Kant’s formal-rational attempt to define the relation of consciousness towards truth does not, for Jaspers (Thornhill writes), ‘give a sufficiently full account of the diverse ways in which human-being can experience and articulate its origin, unity and ideality’.

This is why, Thornhill sees, speech emerges within Jaspers’ thinking as an ‘eternally unfinished event (not a prior or ideal unity) in which humans relate most truthfully to their own practical and epistemological determinants (ideas)’; humans ‘become truthful through the spoken disclosure of a relation to their ideas, not through the prior formalization of this relation’. For Jaspers, speech ‘transposes the foundation of idealism into an ongoing experienced process: in speech, the human relation to truth (ideas) is not realized before, but through experience’. This process – that of reflexivity, as it is redefined within Jaspers’ ‘communicative-hermeneutical reconstruction of Kantian notions of reason’ – is ‘not a solitary cognitive agency, but a practically self-clarifying, and essentially other-including way of disposing oneself towards the truths of experience’:

‘Existentially committed speech, he claims therefore, is a mode of interaction in which human experiences can disclose and interpret their transcendent(al) components. [...] Speech is […] therefore conceived by Jaspers as a medium of ideal praxis, in which practical reflection and ideal self-illumination originate from each other, and in which the ideas of human knowledge clarify themselves through the praxis of human experience.’

Crucially however, Thornhill maintains that though this quality of existential communication as ideal praxis ‘generally opens the ground for a communicative critique of formal reason’ such as Habermas’, it does not enable his existential philosophy to ‘move seamlessly into the positive hermeneutics of speech later associated with Habermas’. Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant’s epistemology ‘only as a negative hermeneutic of possible unity’ means, Thornhill argues, that Jaspers does not – unlike Heidegger, Arendt and Habermas – ‘see spoken reason as the foundation for positive agreement, or for the positive disclosure of the world. Rather, he sees truthful speech as the elucidation of the inner transcendent(al) possibilities of consciousness.’ Such an elucidation is a negative one. Thornhill suggests that Jaspers ‘actually moves close to a negative-hermeneutical counterpart to Adorno’s negative dialectics’, in that Jaspers’ negative hermeneutics can be seen as ‘a way of imagining the metaphysical unity and totality of consciousness as a condition which (against Kant) cannot be formally excluded from reason, but which (against Hegel) cannot be stabilized as an objective order of knowledge’. ‘Such unity, thus, can only be negatively interpreted, as truthful absence’. Because Jaspers’ communicative existentialism holds that – perhaps rather as for dysfluent speakers – ‘at no time […] can speech place consciousness in a unitary relation to truth’ (as Thornhill puts it), Jaspers, like Adorno, can be seen developing a philosophical position ‘subverting both Kantian epistemology and Hegelian phenomenology, which does not incorporate consciousness in positive or juridical form, and which sees the truth of consciousness only in the self-interpretation of fleeting appearances’.       

Existential Communication, part 2

Thornhill usefully underlines the differences of Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence from Hegelian and Heideggerian theories of communication. Thornhill argues that viewed from Jaspers’ position, Heidegger’s philosophy is ‘deficient both in communication and transcendence, for it construes both speech and transcendence as everyday operations in which consciousness always produces its own unity as a system of inner-worldly meanings’. Heidegger and Jaspers alike see transcendence as ‘a moment of communicative disclosure in which the [Kantian] formal separation of the elements of reason is overcome’, and in which ‘the practical experiences of being are thoroughly reflected as a unity of lived knowledge and meaning’. For Heidegger, the unity of knowledge obtained through the transcendence of Dasein is (Thornhill notes) ‘an immanent unity, in which thinking and acting are plurally reflected as the world, and outside which there is no transcendental recourse for judgement or ethics’. Yet Jaspers argues – Thornhill sees – ‘that the practical relations of Dasein are ultimately superseded by the communicative self-reflection of individual existence in a logic of progressive transcendence’. Like Heidegger, Jaspers certainly (Thornhill writes) ‘conceives of transcendence as communicatively interpretable, and therefore embedded in worldly relations of praxis and experience’. Yet he also ‘overcomes idealism by transposing pure and practical reason into a deferred unity of knowledge, in which consciousness (as transcendence) ceaselessly interprets and experiences its own ideal forms’. This means that, contra Heidegger, Jaspers – and here Thornhill refers us to the second volume of his Philosophy – ‘states unequivocally that existential communication has its (albeit deferred) outcome in the overcoming of worldly finitude, immanence and objective plurality in a reflected totality of knowledge’.

For Jaspers, Thornhill states, speech is ‘the medium of disclosure in a transcendent(al) phenomenology, which encompasses all forms of human thought and experience, all cognitive and practical life’. Truthful speech, ‘by its own inner logic’, is for Jaspers ‘the mode of human agency which interprets the possible unity of the ideal and the practical moments in human-being’:

‘Heidegger, however, argues that language defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world, and it thus expressly excludes all ideal components from experience. Jaspers, in contrast, claims that language always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity.’

In this sense, and whilst Heidegger offers a practical-linguistic critique of ‘the epistemological stasis of Kant’s transcendental reason’, Jaspers ‘remains a Kantian’; truthful speech, Jaspers’ arguments imply, ‘always derives its truth from its disclosure of a horizon in which reflection positions itself around ideas’.   

Thornhill goes on to note that, particularly as evolved later in his 1947 book Of Truth, Jaspers’ concept of communicative reason, ‘although primarily influenced by Kant, is […] also strongly indebted to Hegel’. Jaspers shares with Hegel the view that, as Thornhill writes, ‘All worldly interaction […] involves a communicative disclosure of common knowledge, in which the immediate subject/object antinomies of consciousness and self-consciousness are overcome through the shared processes of self-clarification and recognition’. Yet, Thornhill stresses, Jaspers’ Kantianism ensures that for him, Hegel’s ‘communicative phenomenology of common life’ is exceeded by transcendent(al) phenomenology, or ‘only ever a subsidiary moment in Jaspers’ philosophy of transcendent(al) unity’. Jaspers only suggests, Thornhill sees, that the ‘communicative processes of objective, social and historical recognition which Hegel elaborates in his phenomenology’, are ‘the preconditions of the higher levels of unity, which cannot be objectively formed, and which are thus conceived in Kantian terms’. ‘The modes of communication which effect the objective formation of general consciousness and spirit only constitute a mediated foundation for the subsequent establishment of higher unity in non-worldly transcendence.’  

Thornhill also emphasizes how the grounding of Jaspers’ communicative existentialism in his concept of a deferred unity of knowledge – in which consciousness (as transcendence) ceaselessly interprets and experiences its own ideal forms – enables him to think beyond the sort of formalized models of humanity posed by Weber and Kant himself. Thornhill argues that law (for Kant) and communication (for Jaspers) are ‘parallel terms in which humanity can relate itself to its humanly metaphysical substance’. Crucially, however, Thornhill sees, whilst in law ‘the possible legitimacy of human-being’ – or the transcendent source of human legitimacy – is ‘always established as an a priori unity of form’, in speech ‘this same unity is infinitely deferred, and reflexively contingent upon its local contexts and contents’.

Weber’s attempt to ‘supersede Kant’s formal humanism’ through his ‘anthropological critique of Kant, transposing formal law into the lived moments of committed interpretation and charismatic politics’, is for Jaspers – Thornhill maintains – not successful. ‘Like Kant, Weber still conceives of human integrity on the basis of a realized unity of law.’ Such a realized unity of law, Jaspers intimates, reappears in what Thornhill calls the ‘anthropology of politics’ which Weber counterposes to Kant’s ‘anthropology of legality’. Because Weber’s anthropology produces ‘a doctrine of law-giving authority, which remains on the level of reified material organization’, as Jaspers suggests (in Thornhill’s words), it merely perpetuates the ‘reified juridical form’ of politics. Thornhill writes that for Jaspers, speech is ‘the form of idealism as content’: in processes of communication human truth shifts from being captured as reified form – when consciousness freezes itself in a realized unity – to being that which is spontaneously and freely produced or disclosed, when the subject places itself in an open, tolerant relation to other subjects.  Jaspers seeks to supplant the form of anthropologies with the content of an existentialism conceived as unstable, ongoing transcendental activity of interpretive speech:

‘Against this background, Jaspers’ theory of communication is not only conceived as a counter-term to theoretical anthropologies based in law, but also to theoretical anthropologies based in politics. His communicative existentialism thus proposes a way beyond the antinomies of Kantian metaphysics and Weberian sociology, towards a conception of human-being in which humanity cannot be resolved as either the form of politics or the order of law, but in which the human discloses its integrity in constant deferral and unresolved experience.’

As we have seen already, Thornhill likewise argues that Jaspers’ ongoing, experiential or communicative idealism offers a way of thinking beyond the sort of formalized model of humanity represented by Heideggerian Dasein. Jaspers, Thornhill writes, sees Heidegger as a philosopher who, ‘like Weber, Dilthey and Simmel before him, solves the reification of consciousness in Kantian idealism merely by recreating the transcendental subject as an inner-worldly objective unity of consciousness’, which ‘invariably sediments itself as a falsely realized hypostatic order’. Thornhill maintains that Jaspers’ thinking shows that, insofar as it is ‘the form of thinking in which formalized consciousness indicates, accepts and yet aestheticizes the limits of its own existence, and so remains closed to the totality of transcendence’, Heidegger’s ontology never escapes the antinomies of Kantianism, such as reflection and experience, and simply ‘sustains and exacerbates the reification of consciousness initiated by transcendental idealism’. ‘Indeed, ontology (for Jaspers) merely reorganizes the transcendental illusions of idealism as Dasein, for Dasein directly reflects an internally congruent system of apparent meanings, which, limited against other totalities, constitute the arena of human validity.’ Jaspers’ thinking, like Adorno’s, thus critiques Heidegger’s ontology as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the metaphysic of the reified world’. Thornhill argues that Jaspers suggests that Heideggerian ontology, with its allegedly false supersession of formal idealism, implies the upholding of a formalized historical subject – a subject wherein metaphysics has simply been translocated into ‘an objectively realized, ontological unity of human reflection’:

‘Jaspers clearly shares Heidegger’s belief that idealism formalizes human existence by separating reflection from experience. However, unlike Heidegger, he also believes that the reification of thought and experience in idealism cannot be corrected via a historicization of the human subject, through which the formal/juridical relation of thought to being is replaced with a formed historical unity.’   

Whilst sharing Heidegger’s diagnosis of the idealist antinomy of (reified) thought and (reified) experience, then, Jaspers returns us to the idealist truth that – as Thornhill puts it – ‘the unity of consciousness (truth) cannot be determined or elaborated in objectivity’. Quite simply, Jaspers ‘refuses to dismantle the metaphysical superstructure at the heart of Kant’s idealism’:

‘On the contrary, the primary value of Kantianism is, he argues, that (despite its formalism) it still sustains a conception of human life and human agency, in which humanity is only fleetingly explicable as a series of decisively transcendent possibilities, which are falsified wherever they are objectified, and which are appreciable only as they are openly communicated.’

Rather than seeking to think beyond idealism, its antinomies and reifications, in practical ontology, or by posing an objectively realized, ontological unity of human reflection, Jaspers suggests that the formality of idealism can only be overcome through a hermeneutical reconstruction of Kant’s theory of consciousness itself. Jaspers thus develops his communicative idealism, ‘for which the unity of consciousness is never resolved’ (as Thornhill notes). Yet Jaspers’ hermeneutic-experiential idealism is also ‘an ideal theory of self-interpretation’ in which the transcendent(al) forms of consciousness can be ‘disclosed through particular experiences’; it is a practical (self-) hermeneutic ‘in which the ideal form of consciousness (its unity) is always engaged in interpreting itself as content’. Thornhill’s reading enables us to set the praxis of such a nonreifying, communicative idealism in contrast to that of Heidegger’s reifying, historicizing ontology.     

To be continued.

Existential Communication

Here I want to lay out some noteworthy features of Jaspers’ theory of existential communication, as outlined by Thornhill in his writings on Jaspers. An obvious virtue of Thornhill’s comparative, synoptic method of intellectual history is that it enables us to begin to situate Jaspers’ work on existential communication in relation to the communication theories of a range of philosophers.

Communication as passion and transformation:
 P K Dick, Martian Time-Slip, Hebrew edn

Jaspers’ theory of existential communication is perhaps best summarized by Thornhill when, in Karl Jaspers, he describes Jaspers’ ‘philosophy of communication’ as ‘a doctrine of committed existential relativity, which charges all absolutizing or totalizing world-views with a primary falsehood, and which attempts to give an account of human freedom which resists both formal-idealist and objectivist preconditions’. In his SEP entry on Jaspers [here], Thornhill notes that the concept of existential communication was introduced in inchoate form by Jaspers in his early psychological work of 1919, Psychology of World Views. Jaspers argues that, in Thornhill’s words, ‘the freedom of consciousness to overcome its limits and antinomies can only be elaborated through speech’. Speech is posited as ‘a process in which consciousness is elevated beyond its limits through intensely engaged communication with other persons, and in which committed communication helps to suspend the prejudices and fixed attitudes of consciousness’. Thornhill sees that this means that, importantly, ‘Existentially open consciousness is therefore always communicative, and it is only where it abandons its monological structure that consciousness can fully elaborate its existential possibilities.’ With this ‘early doctrine of communication’, Thornhill observes, Jaspers ‘helped to shape a wider communicative and intersubjective shift in German philosophy’, and in this way ‘the resonances of his existential hermeneutics remained palpable in the much later works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur’.

Thornhill underscores the innovatory character of Jaspers’ dialogical model of communication, citing Arendt’s remark that Jaspers is the ‘first and only philosopher who ever protested against solitude’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘The attempt to think existence without relation to other existence merely limits existence to a sub-category of objectifying cognitive systems.’ He goes on, in Karl Jaspers, to quote from the second volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy. ‘The “being of existence is not an objective category”, Jaspers explains’:

‘I can speak out of possible existence, as far as another person hears me – then the existence of both is for each other, but this being-for-each-other is not given for their knowledge. Existence as conviction, belief, absolute consciousness cannot be known.’

Jaspers’ emphasis on dialogue, which derived from his early psychological theorizing and psychiatric work, meant that though it was – as Thornhill puts it in SEP – ‘assimilating Kierkegaardian elements of decisiveness and impassioned commitment’, Jaspers’ version of early existential thinking took Kierkegaard’s ‘cult of interiority, centred in the speechlessness of inner life’, to represent ‘a miscarried attempt to envision the conditions of human authenticity’. ‘The decision for authentic self-overcoming and cognitive unity can only occur, he argued, through shared participation in dialogue.’ Jaspers, like Adorno and Michael Theunissen after him, Thornhill notes, maintained that ‘the closed inwardness of the despairing Kierkegaardian subject remains ensnared in the formal problems of Kantian idealism’. Kierkegaard’s existentialism, for Jaspers, hence ‘fails in its intention to connect reflexivity to experience’, and ‘to provide an account of thinking existence (or existential reason) which is decisively different from formal reason’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, it is ‘only in speech which reflects experience that subjectivity can truly escape the idealist and dialectical formalization against which Kierkegaard protests’.    

Thornhill usefully elaborates on how Jaspers’ theory of communication operates as a critique of the idealist process of reification. He stresses that Jaspers viewed true communication as motivated by a post-metaphysical quest to disclose truth. ‘The genesis of true communication, Jaspers asserts, occurs when we recognize that the transcendent source of human legitimacy (metaphysics) has been obscured, but nonetheless attempt to disclose a distinct realm of essentially human truthfulness.’ Humans, he suggests, ‘become truthful through the spoken disclosure of a relation to their ideas, not through the prior formalization of this relation’. Speech is theorized as (enabling) a type of cognition which can resist reification, without becoming submerged within experience. Anticipating Habermas, as Thornhill notes, Jaspers’ thinking ‘implies that speech is a mode of agency in which human reflection places itself in relation to underlying ideas, but does not formalize these as unitary components of its own original structure’. Speech therefore, for Jaspers, (Thornhill writes) is ‘an eternally unfinished event (not a prior or ideal unity) in which humans relate most truthfully to their own practical and epistemological determinants (ideas)’. In (true) speech, ‘a cognitive process occurs in which thinking is not formally separated from praxis or experience, but in which thinking still maintains a specific inner coherence and identity against pure experience and action’. Speech for Jaspers, Thornhill summarizes, ‘transposes the foundation of idealism into an ongoing experienced process: in speech, the human relation to truth (ideas) is not realized before, but through experience’.

For Jaspers the (post-)idealist development of a human relation to truth is bound up with our freeing from objective certainty. He suggests, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘The more I decide  to act in accordance with the unconditioned logic of my existence (ideas)’, ‘the more I disengage myself from any objective a priori certainty about what it means to exist, or about the final truth of my existence’. This emphasis within his thinking on our freeing from objective certainty, is a central reason why the theory of existential communication represents, as Thornhill notes, perhaps ‘the most important philosophical innovation instituted by Jaspers’, and also ‘the crucial dimension in his transcendental anthropology’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, the ‘progress from worldly orientation towards reflexive transcendence’ is a process in which the subject’s relation ‘towards its own objective positions, ideas and convictions, and therefore also towards its fellow human beings, detaches itself increasingly from any realized or nameable structure’. This coupling of the ongoing process of reflexive transcendence with a freeing from objectivity or formalization, Thornhill sees, is closely related to Jaspers’ theorization of unfinished interpersonal communication:

‘My truth, Jaspers claims, is a manner of being-towards-myself in which I consider myself as a quality which is neither formal, nor purposive, nor objective. The realization of this truth, however, has its only objective outcome in a manner of being-towards-others: only in an uncertain, relative and communicative disposition towards others can I begin to explain my own unstable experience of myself as possible transcendence.’   

Thornhill repeatedly returns to the connection which Jaspers’ thinking traces between truth and uncertain communication. ‘Human beings begin to speak truthfully to each other, he implies, when they reflect upon those components to their experience which cannot be objectively explained or categorized, and where their cognitive/experiential forms are radically questioned and altered.’ Or again: ‘The precondition of truthful existence, he explains, is a recognition of uncertainty, and this uncertainty is given exemplary form in speech.’ Jaspers’ communication theory thus suggests a privileging of dysfluency, given that – as Thornhill continues – ‘speech enacts this uncertainty and implies its possible resolution’. It is as if the fraught lived experience of dysfluency, or any other form of ‘failing’ communication, itself points towards a fluency, or harmonious speech, which marks transcendence. He quotes here from Jaspers’ Reason and Existenz : ‘The imperfection of communication and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but transcendence.’

Crucially, Thornhill underlines how Jaspers’ concern with the sort of true, harmonious communication which signals or presages transcendence, separates his theory of communication from both Habermas’ theory of speech-acts and Heidegger’s concept of everyday language. For Jaspers true communication – Thornhill writes – is a ‘particular quality and integrity of the spoken word’, and is therefore ‘not possible in the common contexts of practical life, but only in momentary dialogues, in which interlocutors set themselves decisively beyond their everyday objective forms’. Again citing Reason and Existenz, Thornhill notes Jaspers’ statements that true communication ‘is manifest in the “elevated moments of apparent complete harmony”, which anticipate a “perfect truth and timeless oneness”’. ‘Communication is thus, in its metaphysically valid form,’ Thornhill concludes, ‘a privileged existential harmony between certain people: it is not a uniform means for the interpretive coordination of action’.

Thornhill seeks to explain Jaspers’ work as ‘a seminal position in the development of the transcendental, communicative line of philosophical anthropology, which is directly opposed to the anthropological and political positions which have emerged from Heidegger’s philosophy’. Jaspers’ writings, Thornhill sees, hold a ‘communicative vision of existential totality’ – a totality articulated in phrases such as ‘perfect truth and timeless oneness’. For Jaspers, Thornhill stresses, the ‘attainment of such transcendence’ or transcendental unity is ‘an essentially communicative process, in which free interaction in linguistic or cultural discourse illuminates the limits of objective and categorial fixity’. Speech ‘is always a hermeneutic of possible transcendence, and possible transcendence always requires speech’, precisely because, in its ‘relative, uncertain and interpretively open’ character, human communication is both ‘a reflection of the impossibility of truth’ and, as ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness’, is ‘the only practically possible expression of transcendence’.

Jaspers’ theory of communication, Thornhill emphasizes, is thus integral to his attempt to recuperate the metaphysical as a concrete moment in human life. It is in speech, Jaspers indicates, that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘concrete human existence experiences itself practically as a possibility for radical otherness to its worldly and cognitive forms’, and ‘reflects itself theoretically or metaphysically on that basis’. Jaspers’ communication theory refuses Kant’s ‘formal limiting of human existence against metaphysics’, and what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ ‘metaphysic of communication’ positions itself as ‘an alternative to the limiting of metaphysical contents through the regulative or “legislatory” functions of transcendental reason’. On account of Jaspers’ attempt to ‘radicalize the metaphysical content of idealism’, as Thornhill puts it, and to ‘replace transcendental idealism with an experiential, and thus communicative idealism, in which formal antinomies of reason figure as the vital antinomies of experience’, speech for Jaspers ‘articulates an unrealized metaphysical/anthropological perspective against the realized juridical unity in which metaphysical contents are resolved by Kant’. Thornhill argues that Jaspers’ notion of communication as an ‘experimental corrective to idealism’, represents ‘a crucial innovation in the development of models of intersubjectivity, speech-hermeneutics and the theory of consciousness’. He also proposes that Jaspers’ attempt to ‘think beyond the antinomies of idealism’ by converting transcendental idealism into an experiential/communicative idealism, ‘for which the unity of consciousness is never resolved’, can be identified as ‘an attempt to avoid the (allegedly) false overcoming of idealism in Heideggerian ontology’.

As Thornhill notes, ‘The only path beyond the reification of life and reason in formal idealism is, Jaspers indicates, to retrace the steps which originally led to idealism: thus to reinterpret the metaphysical legacy itself.’ Yet Jaspers, Thornhill writes, clearly ‘stands out as a significant early thinker in the tradition of post-metaphysical, post-idealist intersubjectivism’, because his ‘hermeneutical turn’ replaces the formal cognitive structures of idealism with ‘an interpretive-existential concept of truth, which sees truth as the interpretive and communicative expansion of consciousness, not its formal limitation’. Jaspers’ argument that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the human only begins with the end of idealist reification’, means that humanity ‘can only begin to interpret itself where the form of Kantianism is allowed to unfold as a narration of substantial human becoming, not as a reified set of intelligible relations’. Yet for Jaspers, as Thornhill emphasizes, the communicative freedom or communicative transcendence which represent such personal becoming, can never be realized:

‘The communicative foundation of Jaspers’ […] theories of freedom and transcendence is based precisely on the fact that he does not believe in absolutely valid individual self-transcendence. It is precisely the fact that the particular can never be proclaimed as the universal, that praxis can never be ideal, which grounds Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence.’

Jaspers’ hermeneutic-existential Kantianism holds that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘the antinomy of particular experience and total unity of knowledge cannot be genuinely overcome through any manner of personal experience’: it is ‘only in the existential interpretation of its antinomical limitedness that individual life has any access to the terms of its own transcendence’. Providing an example of such existential interpretation, Thornhill refers to the ‘communicative experiences of freedom’, which offset ‘the given order of human form and function’ by enabling humanity to become – in the early terms of Psychology of World Views – ‘a life in suspension [Schwebe]’, and to detach itself from what Thornhill calls ‘the modes of [reified] inner compulsion which form its life’. Yet such communicative freedom ‘is never realized. The dissolution of objective form occurs only in the relativity of communication, and such communication is principally defined by the fact that it is always incomplete.’

To be continued...incomplete...