The Concept of Irony

Some Reading Notes

Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to Weimar thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the Weimar period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced Weimar era theorists.   

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second Habilitationsschrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.

‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on 161. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]

‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [179. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]

‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [182-83]  

‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [196. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: here)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]

‘In many ways, the Athens of this period calls to mind what Rome was at a later time. Intellectually, Athens was the heart of Greece. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [200-1. Compare the Weimar/ interwar period?]

‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [246-47. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.]

‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [255-56. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating Either/Or, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]

‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [312. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]

‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (>Postscript etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [328]  

Behind the Mountains, part 3

A second radical implication of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation, relates to the way in which it enables his writing to develop its thinking of freedom. In ‘Tobold (II)’ the narrator celebrates the fact that ‘I was a servant! I served!’:

‘My position, consequently, was a good one, which sufficed to set my person to rights. Isn’t it true our lives first take on beauty when we’ve learned to be unassuming, to forget or set aside our own wishes and desires, and instead devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty?’

The dialectic of the precept and liberation here is accompanied by a twinning of self-abnegation and self-exaltation (or self-transcending self-elevation), which Walser proposes in the preceding sentence. ‘So exalted I felt, even, I can say, yes, elevated far above my own person, which I scarcely dignified any more with so much as a hasty glance, or rather a hasty thought.’ Self-transcended, the narrator paradoxically no longer looks down on himself as on an alienated object (with ‘a hasty glance’), and can instead give a ‘hasty thought’ to his serving self. Walser’s sense of transcendence as something that gives one back to oneself, was voiced already in the following statements of the narrator’s towards the beginning of ‘Tobold (II)’.

‘Newly emerged from a terrible weariness of life, I attained fresh insights, began to enjoy living. As Peter, I’d had no real worldview, no true notion of life; […]. Living can be so tiresome when you lack an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision to help you come to terms with the disappointments awaiting you in life. No longer did I chase after fame or the like; the sublime no longer drew my gaze. I had learned to love the small and insignificant, and, armed with this kind of love, I found life beautiful, just, and good. I was delighted to renounce all ambition.’

These lines identify self-abnegation, cast in terms of the renunciation of monetary ‘ambition’, with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, or ‘an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision’. Walser thereby suggests that truly el(ev)ating happiness, true enjoyment of life, can be attained by holding to an inspiring vision of non-elevation. Elsewhere in ‘Tobold (II)’, the narrator identifies the happy condition of non-elevation itself – of ‘modest being’ – with spectatorship of an inspiring vision of others’ happiness. Genuinely fulfilling personal modesty is here contingent upon (liminal observation of) others’ illusory ‘glory’. Walser ironizes the notion that the elevated might really be freer: for him what matters is holding to the transcendental idea of happiness, to the 'glow' that surrounds the aristocratic diners 'playing their roles'. ‘I always took great pleasure in observing the splendour, the glory; for myself, though, I’d always desired a place in the quiet, modest background from which I could gaze with happy eyes up to and into the bright glow.’ The ‘twilight shadow’ is where the ‘common servant’ finds ‘a great benevolence’ and feels ‘most secure, most faithfully sheltered’, precisely because privileged life is viewed as a mere ‘magical spectacle’, at which the narrator ‘thought it lovely just to look on, entranced’. The idealizing worldview - the ‘whole picture’ – is what he ‘found so beautiful and cherished above all else’. But just this idealization of power is what enables him to find freedom in the refusal of power. ‘So I was always conscious of my merit, station, and joy in life, and took extraordinary delight in the modest being I embodied.’

In a short piece from 1917, ‘The End of the World’, Walser’s twinning of self-abnegatory, radical modesty with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, can be seen to expand into what could be called a broader geo-political twinning of apocalypse (or the limit) with utopia (or absolute freedom). In this piece, after ‘imagining the end of the world […] as a sea of bliss in which it could rock forever’, ‘everything looked so prosperous, fine, and free that at once the child was convinced this was the end of the world’. In this context we could also think of the inversion of nature associated by Walser with human conflict in ‘The Battle of Sempach’; when ‘Nature is […] annihilated in a battle’. ‘The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as though from a hell, not the heavens.’ Here, unnaturally, the sun becomes brightest when as if apocalyptically detached from its heavens. Excessive brightness – brightness aspiring to the absolute, pushed to its limit – has already been associated with apocalypse on the previous page. ‘The whole earth, no matter how bright it looked, seemed to him to rumble and thunder in anger.’ Walser sees the earth, like the sky, to be darkened by its own aspiration to dazzle. A conception of the end of the world, for Walser, is inseparable from the conception of a transcendental urge towards brightness, freedom, utopia.

Walser’s imbrication of the limit and transcendence seems to me to be echoed by Karl Jaspers’ theorization of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence available to those in existential crisis. As Thornhill summarizes in his book on Jaspers, for Jaspers ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ Thornhill quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’

For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘Being […] is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’ Jaspers’ conception of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence practiced by those in crisis, rests on the view that, subjectively, such implosions (as Thornhill notes) are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. The narrator in ‘Tobold (II)’ indeed decides to reflect upon self-abnegation, identifying it as a decision to ‘devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty’. Continuing his self-hermeneutic, he emphasizes too that to freely and decisively act upon such radical modesty, and ‘forgo heaven’, is to interpret the possibility of transcendence ‘many times more beautiful’:

‘For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into a heaven many times more beautiful?’    

We can view Walser’s writing as a whole in Masquerade and Other Stories as itself a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence, undertaken by a vulnerable adult. In linguistic terms, the transcendence at which it aims is, surely, the sort of visionary register to which Bernofsky points when – in her translator’s preface – she quotes from Walser’s ‘Meine Bemühungen’ (‘My Efforts’) of 1928-29. There he comments that in his late work he was ‘experimenting in the linguistic field in the hope that there existed in language an unknown vivacity which it is a pleasure to awaken’. This vivacity is in language but also beyond it, as Walser hinted already in his piece ‘Tableau Vivant’ from 1909. ‘Words won’t venture anywhere near the description of this dynamo. He sings, or something around him seems to be trembling with sounds. Behind the mountains, bells are ringing.’ Walser’s staged tableaux and prose masquerades are also aiming at transcendence in terms of an ideal ‘whole picture’, or ‘dream’, the construction of which they often dramatize. I am thinking here in particular of these marvellous lines in ‘The Aunt’:

‘Gradually I came into the mountains and soon reached an isolated village ringed all around by high crags; this was the birthplace of my mother. It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial. The whole world, and I as well, appeared wonderfully old and young; earth and earthly life were suddenly a dream; I felt everything was perfectly comprehensible, yet also utterly inexplicable.’



Karl Hofer, 'Montagnola' (c. 1930)

What better description could there be of the goal of Jaspers’ hermeneutic process working towards (in Thornhill’s words) ‘a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’? Walser here captures the existential uncertainty – the sense of the ‘utterly inexplicable’ – which, for Jaspers, accompanies any decisive hermeneutic bid for a transcendental cognitive unity at the limit of knowledge. As Thornhill observes in Karl Jaspers, whilst Heidegger argued that language (as Thornhill puts it) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained 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’. Thornhill, moreover, describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’ – a term which seems to parallel Walser’s ‘whole picture’ or ‘dream’:

‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere appearance of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’

Walser’s lines in ‘The Aunt’, therefore, seem to me to exemplify what Jaspers would call an aesthetic cipher. Ciphers, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill writes) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. (Walser: ‘It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial.’) Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance of transcendence that it is interpretable as transcendence’. As I have argued elsewhere, you could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.

Behind the Mountains

The world of the prose pieces of Robert Walser’s assembled in the collection Masquerade and Other Stories is one of those who hold to ‘modest being’, as Walser phrases it in ‘Tobold (II)’. It may be easy, at first sight and when one is aware of Walser’s own history of depressive illness, to confuse such modesty – perhaps particularly when expressed in terms of an abdication of agency or occupation – with mental incapacity. In his ‘Introduction’ to the collection, William H. Gass describes Walser’s eventual institutional mode of existence, when he deliberately abandoned his lifelong, modernist vocation of obscurity.

‘His mind pleads incompetence. Asylums are asylums. There he can guiltlessly surrender his fate and pass his days at the behest of others. He will no longer need to write in such a way that its public obscurity is assured. He will no longer need to write. The daily walk will suffice.’

Yet, in the course of his description of the narrator’s unemployment in ‘Marie’, Walser places depression – or the radical form of modesty which is a personal refusal of occupation – in dialectical relation to an impulse towards freedom. Even as he is ‘confined, restrained, imprisoned’ by, or reified within, his obsessive negative thought patterns, Walser’s narrator ‘should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world’. However self-ironizing, repetitious and concentric Walser’s depressive’s prose may be here, this conjunction shines out: ‘I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free.’

‘Sometimes I did in fact reproach myself most sternly about my idleness, but without being too terribly worried about it. Employment was always on my mind; I resolved to get to work, but for all that was still a long way from working, and instead kept running around jobless, without anything at all in the way of occupation. Melancholia and pensiveness held me strangely captive; all day long I was unable to free myself from any number of thoughts, found myself bound by my ideas. I was, so to speak, both prisoner and prison, felt confined, restrained, imprisoned. I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free. […] I should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world, but then again didn’t have the least desire, the slightest urge to do so, though I was by no means really too indolent.’       

Precisely the unfreedom of the narrator in ‘Marie’, the way in which he is crippled by his depression, conditions his particular form of freedom, which consists of an impulse towards freedom or a desire to be free: the ‘certain ardent searching and longing’ upon which Walser expands on the following page. Walser’s hyper-irony notes that this longing too is a mode of unfreedom, though one that we ‘should not even strive’ to escape. Indeed, as (in) a sort of beneficient infinite recursion, it is itself ‘desirable’, and more so than any utopian end-point:

‘Around this time I went for a walk across the mountain with an honest, straightforward man. I vividly recall a good and most agreeable conversation we had along the way, in the course of which the person in question, my walking companion, pursued a train of thought according to which we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.’

The physical activity of exploring nature – the mountain walk – is an appropriate stimulant of these cogitations on this ‘ardent searching and longing’: in later pieces Walser explicitly conceives of longing in organic, natural terms. ‘The One of Fairy Tales’ has the phrase ‘The mountain fire of longing’. A 1927-28 ‘Prose Piece’ ends with this sentence:

‘Waves and branches have snakelike shapes, and there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.’

 

Whilst this prose piece highlights the passivity of a plant’s experience of longing, other pieces of Walser’s, such as ‘Fritz’, do emphasize human active longing and its attendant agencies. Fritz would dazzle his potential employer with his general positivity, his resolve and ‘willingness to lay it on as thick as possible’, in order to satisfy his ‘profound longing for rewarding and long-term employment’. Yet his ironical attitude towards all this is reinforced by the page’s typography.

‘She remarked that only ardent

OPTIMISTS

who had a mind to go all the way could be taken into consideration, whereupon I replied I was resolved to be every bit as ardent and to go ever bit as far as I thought would please her; she’d be astonished. I was beyond all doubt an optimist.’

The narrator of ‘Tobold (II)’ again foregrounds longing, ardency and resolution: ‘Some day what I have long wished to do should and must be achieved.’ With this emphasis on will and courage, Walser here could be said to promulgate a radical decision theory:

‘That an act requires courage is, in my opinion, enough to make it worthwhile, that is, healthy and honest. Whether or not the enterprise has a chance of succeeding strikes me, as I said before, as irrelevant. What really counts, what has weight and significance, is showing courage and firmness, not failing to undertake some day the thing you’ve proposed.’

Yet because decisive undertaking is more about pure will than carried-through, practical action or the achievement of an objective goal, and because Walser’s narrators tend to verbalize or theorize undertaking rather than actually undertake anything, it is easy to describe Walser’s creations as passive, depersonalized selves, as does Gass.

‘Walser’s narrators (and we can presume, in this case, Walser himself) have become will-less wanderers, impotent observers of life, passive perceivers of action and passion. Only on the page, will the Will risk the expression and exercise of its considerable means.’ 

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

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...