“I want an absolute transformation –however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change it all” –Susan Sontag
Nowadays a screeching silence almost celebrated has taken over the space that there is in between people, and what is that space where human beings dwell if not the world –there´s a popular idea among political scientists that it is human discourse what construes the concept of action in public life and it is the lack of (public) space in between the core symptom of worldlessness and the primary symptom of the destruction of the human world such as in the totalitarian movements. The silence between likeminded people is also a symptom, if not of disdain then of shame or of shameful disdain: the empathy of the skeptics. I will not run the risk of writing an apology of silence because it would sound rather ridiculous in my position; neither will I indict anyone, for this could only furnish doubtless evidence of my ignorance and even when that is unequivocally the world´s way of judging, I will not assume a position with which irreparably I would have to abandon the community of sinners, “impatience is the worst of all sins, even worse than arrogance”[1]. Apologetic texts after the fashion of Socrates trigger a sense of mistrust in me; it is that kind of teaching with universal ambitions freely imparted to the mobs with an already familiar method –find the logical fallacy, never mind the ambiguity! Lastly in the syndicate of sinners I feel the least comfortable, for the only stylistic resource available for confessions is actually confessing, and “every confession of love is a betrayal[2]”. If I knew how to write –“anyone who refuses to be praised just wants to be praised twice[3]”, I would do it in the style of Lessing and Montaigne; my text would resemble the polyphony of a theater play or a Biblical tale, an only character split in various marks but keeping the pitch of one only voice, “for Walter Benjamin, truth is an entirely acoustic phenomenon, so that for him, it was Adam and not Plato the first philosopher[4]” and leaving enough space up for commentary. What is peculiar about this common place is not the systematic exposition of a difficult topic but rather that something interesting philosophically is happening there in the text that might lead to the desired suspension of judgment[5], but it might as well net –this task belongs not with the writer but with the reader and interpreter. “It is not the truth that someone possesses or believes he possesses but the honest effort he has made to reach the truth, his search, what causes his mental faculties to be enlarged, and is only this what perfection means. Possession makes us passive, lazy and haughty[6].” Here there´s also a narcissistic instinct on the table, for even when all works by an author or an artist are works of empathy, the need to hold onto them as works in spite of the existence of a real recipient, informs us subtly that the empathy is also directed toward ourselves, be it in the form of consolation or reconciliation with the story itself that is being told, “all sorrows can be borne if they are put into a story or tell a story about them”[7].
Not long ago I heard a musical piece that led me to somewhat materialize things I had been thinking through in the course of some weeks, but unable as yet to reach concrete ideas, “I only realize the past is beautiful because one never realized an emotion at the time. It expands later, and therefore we never have complete emotions about the present, but only about the past”[8]; this piece was a composition by Wojciech Kilar, titled “Love Remembered” (1992), in this piece the present materialized temporarily as if in an image against all odds and prohibitions, especially counter to the fact that love as a sentiment alien to the world but socializing par excellence, and the refusal to let the present be destroyed by human constraints on history -“time and tense are not the same[9]”, is to choose without leverage the destruction of the objective personality and the individual person; through this process the human person turns himself in to being the self, that is, to the oblivion of himself within the vast fields of the memory in function of remembrance. This alone is a paradox within the composition, for love is always a memory and an immediate reference –“Hegel determines being as the immediate indeterminate”, to an original image prior to the repository of memories, to an absolute past that precedes all earthly experience; the image can be always repeated and is repeatable in the specific course of a life but it is not a trustworthy image insofar as it is itself part of the immediacy of this existence, and the original image is unrepeatable and unreachable –just like an epiphany, it is a total objetivation of life. “Existence, unlike essence, can´t be relied upon… Life exists in the mood of relation. It doesn´t possess Being or nothing, but exists in relation to both[10]”. This is in the sense that this existence or whatever we do in it is not reliable as experience for eternity or for the grasping of the original image of memory´s archives, since our life experience is not reliable we can´t mature our attitudes too much, nor do we have access to our essence in quantitative terms –all what essence can do for us is to qualitatively validate an specific hunch, a moment of intuition as absolutely true or absolutely false, terms barely applicable to the everyday reflex of our activities. Considering this all, I feel not ought to apologize for my interpretive failings notwithstanding, and my intention is to essay something more than just a hope and desire –“intellectual desire is just like sexual desire[11]”, to understand specific life situations and not value it but validate it as human experience; it is my opinion that this is what all the philosophy of our age has so vehemently aimed for. The immediacy of any life situation makes one think with secular grace about the inherent fragility of all human bonds… The path of everyday contact leaves us with nothing but vague and unrepeatable but strong, then in casual contact we are still not at the level of empathy but merely in recognition of the other –and all specific persons are “the other”, the principle of alterity; then at last the fragile human bond that through love releases man from his fundamental solitude and turns the world over to him for his pleasure and enjoyment. Through the human bond we turn over to the world a non concrete object of our belonging and become one with the world, leaving behind the essential original images. “When I tell someone “I love you”, my emotion becomes external to myself, it is set free to enter the individuality of another person, and it can transform its course in the future regardless of whether that love is accepted or not, and at the same time it transforms my own individuality. A specific love with specific moral and emotional content, with specific attitudes and behavior, is related to an order of the objetived world, to the erotic conventions of the age, emotional expectations, etc.[12]”-
“My faults: To censor others for my own vices, to make my friendships into love affairs, to demand that include (and exclude) everything.[14]” In the encounter with another human being, people tend to establish parallel motifs without being aware of their intentions: they want to create a character, a “dramatis persona” and to transform an everyday situation into universal experience. It is a matter of essence: The legitimacy of the human bond consists in recognizing himself abstractly with another person, recognize his ideal being while acting it out, the blurring of the line between a creative act and everyday life; without indulging to commit the worst aesthetical sin of which Lessing warns us –that there´s nothing easier to represent than extremes, that is why the painter of the scene where Pentheus is sensually devoured by his own mother will only have reached its authentic reflex if it succeeds in capturing the moment right before he is devoured when the eyes of the mother are still loving and full of grace. Only one moment later the hero will be already dead and the temporal sequence of the painting will have lost all capability to evoke anything. This reminds me of Edward Hopper, the American abstract expressionist, whose magic is found not in the lasting duration of an image as in the case of the French expressionists in which the image alone was a constant commentary on reality; Hopper´s secret is the anatomy of the second, a Messianic moment that avoids at any price the destruction of the present even if only possible at the price of a radical loneliness, and this is not just chosen solitude of the ascetic or the philosopher but an imposed loneliness without negative emotional content and it is a great burden for everyday men and women.
During human encounters, suspended hours in the waiting room of the human bond, there´s zeal and desire in people to hold onto some specific images of the encounter and make them essential, throwing them back to an absolute present. The human expectation for inter-subjectivity is always concrete and constant but it refers to something in essence not concrete, the expectation is a radical need that can´t be satisfied without transcending existing social structures, the radical in that need can´t objectived within a determinate temporal index or be used to lessen the importance and legitimacy of non-radical everyday needs, a radical need is a constant and never immanent need. “I think this is the cause of la debâcle: Not only as a scholar am I weaker than I thought –however this is possible and even probable- but also as a person. There´s something missing in me. I need people –and even need warmth. And warmth is something that comes about in me only with great difficulty (contrariwise to the easiness with which I start a conversation or being a superficially intimate relationship with just about anybody) so that it is practically impossible to find it. And I miss it badly. It´s not true what I´ve been repeating for years: That I need nobody, that I can live anywhere. I don´t think anyone can. The question is: Could I take advantage of this malaise I feel in order to higher my intellectual productivity? I´m afraid not. And with this the verdict would be already pronounced. There´s only one thing I don´t understand: Why didn´t I need here Baumgarten and Leo? Why didn´t I care that they´re gone? Deep down I think I´m even glad that they´re gone. The truth is that it´s not them what I´m missing. Neither someone determinate, it is something not concrete, warmth. It seems that I am cynical to the point that this warmth could come no matter from whom. But there´s something missing to make this happen; maybe that I wouldn´t show myself so indifferent not only in the metaphysical sense in regard to where I live and with whom, but also in empirical reality. But this is how things are: In the metaphysical sense I am absolutely unfaithful, stateless, etc.; however in reality I am loyal and down to earth. Of course –because in his external relationships every person acts with the metaphysical essence of his being (it is well expressed: ens realissimum) –everyone behaves toward me as if I were unfaithful, whereas in reality I´m a loyal and disgraced lover…[15]”
What is most radical about Hopper´s painting and the reason why I turned to Lukács (and will return to him later) is that it is this silence precisely, and the silence of any inter-subjective experience in always Angst-ridden but people are able to draw from those isolated and almost alienated images great knowledge about their lives, and in that sense the people embalmed in those images remain a constant aesthetic motif for life, regardless of the silence. People tend to question themselves about the nature and effect of other people´s absence in their everyday lives and the flow between altering the future with the imagination in order to destroy the present and hold onto the Hopperian moment –at once lonely and nourishing; that is how I came to question the nature of love in the public and private realm, after realizing the toxic effect of people´s absence in my own everyday life, but this was only so when in the company of other people. In the privacy of my solitude, I was part of that imaginary community of friends, dead and live philosophers and other experiences always present in one´s work and the only acceptable public of one´s queries. The invisible witnesses of creation. The question found no possible but the motif remained timeless, “you have become the eternal motif of all my paintings”. The everyday was temporarily suspended by the absence of images that could evoke the original experience, and by the frustrated desire to know more, to enter the acoustic phenomenon of dialogue, of which the end of an encounter leaves us bereft from. The images and the bodies turned sepia and then vanished, not without previously having captured a moment or two for the repository of the memory about one´s own life. What remains is not concrete, the radical solitude in Hopper´s painting, and a whole world built on the basis of that dialogue went up in smoke without leaving traces, a letter or an specific conversation (perhaps a note already lost); there might be an indirect dialogue through other people and other channels. This hasn´t been the by-product of lie, because a lie is aesthetically false, but rather the absence of an authentic dialogue by means of which the channels of the human bond might be left temporarily open or close up for good.
But no matter what, I kind of dislike the idea that a person be an aesthetic motif and not something sufficiently concrete –this is in itself a contradiction; I will illustrate with a commentated story: In an interview from the year 1964 Hannah Arendt was asked about her decision to study philosophy and she explained that that decision had been clear to her since she was 14 after the experience of having read Kant, Jaspers and Kierkegaard; it wasn´t a decision about choosing a career but between either studying philosophy or throwing herself into a river. Everyone who has traveled the path of philosophy seems obvious that has abstained himself from choosing the river, but even during and after (I´m not sure there´s an “after” and the “before” I omitted allegedly –“a man of seventy years must have many things to tell about his life, but if he has been a philosopher all his life soon he realizes with surprise that he has no past[16]” –all moments of thought are always in the present tense) one realizes he hasn´t actually understood much and advises others with certain haughty reservation about the advantages of having thrown himself at the river. Sometimes it is the person himself that is transformed into the river and not without risk because in choosing the river we confuse aesthetics with beauty and eventually drown because the only consolation of aesthetics is the turn toward one´s own death. The decisionist jump at the river must be moral in nature, for there´s no such a thing as collective conscience and every person is summoned to make individual choices, the moral jump (or lapse of faith) is the only way available to find reconciliation and not only consolation, in having lived our own lives. The experience of silence to which we referred before is a form of self-imposed solitude, and probably also of cowardice. When we close the door to the possibility of transcending from the basis of those moments cut out from reality itself. In this sense all fundamental experiences: birth, freedom, love, death, pain; turn into images unattainable to everyday experience and thus we tend to replace the totality of human experience for sheer moods –in a present tense emotionally abstract and sensorially empty.
Modernity didn´t live up to its most fundamental tenet and promise: That of creating a wholly human world independent of the natural forces and of God by fully transcending the fragility of human bonds. “I live in frivolous withdrawal, focusing on problems exclusively intellectual –and I await a miracle. But everything results empty and too intellectual: a spiritual soothsaying and not a humble and altruistic wait. That´s why the miracle can´t come. I feel that this whole situation is nothing but the temptation to dwell on the inessential, because I wouldn´t be able to bear the despair that would follow the essential[17]”; and this form of waiting is a Messianic charade, in which having failing is an incontrovertible situation, “I want to be able to be alone, that I find it nourishing and not just a mere waiting[18]”. This kind of solitude seems at first frivolous and narcissistic, following up to here the genius of Sartre: the gates to the world are in principle locked, there´s no alternatives, no viability and everything is in principle lost; we´ve created the world from the unilateral perspective of its ultimate final term and this idea is already too redundantly Christian for my taste.
In the antinomies of melancholy we release ourselves, but we´re not as yet redeemed and it´s really this lack of concretion of the object of our searches what alienates us from other human beings, we become unable to create strong bonds with the world –or at least strong enough to pass through the world, leave it and then enter it once again; and that´s how once upon a time I started to inquire about the nature of radical politics and the failure of utopia as a grand narrative, everyday men forced to be happy at gun point. Perhaps the denial to the tragic sense of radical individuality in its relation to others comes from a frivolous and rather comic anguish: We want to remain alone in hell with the radical need of non-redemption as an open bruise, we want to be alone and without waiting and without hope. “The way Kafka puts it, there´s an infinite amount of hope, but not for us”. This affirmation to Max Brod really contains all of Kafka´s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity[19]”. When the radical individual internalizes hell (this is basically the earth, or an earthly life deprived from expectation –Kafka´s world) he´s not open to take in roommates. When a person throws himself at a river (especially when his motif is negative, that is, aesthetic alone) and he turns himself in to sublimity, to unmediated and tragic experience in the classical sense –in a world prior to the loud words of the one god, having a roommate in the infamous hotel this world is for them, means to accept heartedly the triviality of his own experiment and also to accept that one´s failed by becoming a victim of his own devises. “The Archimedean point: He was permitted to find it only under the condition to use it against himself[20]”. The search for the transformation is in all likeness legitimate but probably useless outside the aggregate of all modes of production and social representation that we call everyday life –this is unavoidable but as a paradox it sets free the forces of the memory. The everyday reflex –that is, the orientation toward the non-extreme is, in Lukács´ aesthetics, a step forward in the return to concretion, something that of course the author himself never experienced in the course of his life. “So it seems that Lukács alienation from the world wasn´t only a consequence of the failure of his relationships with the world, but it was rather constant in spite of his success. Lukács perceived the ideal relationship as one between two individuals that stems not only from the recognition of the capabilities of the other person in his respective life world –poetry, theater, music, philosophy, etc. –but it also had to do with a very metaphysical notion of mutual disclosure. But the satisfaction of Lukács often froze when his ideal wasn´t reaffirmed in the course of a particular relationship. Young Lukács often made this relationships too complicated by elevating his friends to positions of statute much above himself. A very strange cycle of overestimation and eventually deception can be found in all of his personal relationships as it appears clearly evidenced in his journals and letters[21]”.
Bearing in mind all the previous considerations on the basis of which I can´t reach a verdict, be it on the ground of my ignorance or mere procrastination, I still consider that every human encounter, however brief, is fortunate, and it serves as a bridge to return to the world, even if the casuistry of such fortune is not always shared, but that is external to the seed planted in the contingencies of history. Beyond the aesthetic motifs, we are all wandering in the dark, but the affirmation itself of the undesirable playmate inside the private world, still tells us something about ourselves, about the nature of fear, of shame and also of justice. I turn to Hopper in order to leave it at this point, saying that the silence doesn´t devastate everything but it does turn the images in the painting into something secondary –it is like having a painting still after having lost the canvas and the passé-partout but holding onto the whole conceptual world, of before and after the creation of the work. The same way one chooses a river or a river-person, that´s how we come to choose philosophy, or the friend, what is important here is to make the decision. You can learn many things, even learn to forget, but whenever you return to thinking this is not only an intellectual exercise but a concrete choice on the basis of which nothing ever changes –just like in the case of the essential non-concrete image. There´s no possible quantification here, for whenever we´re touched upon by the everyday reflex and then by a silent robbed moment, there comes about a qualitative change, whether it is saving the present or one´s personality, the future and the past, both absolute and immediate, will have changed forever. A person´s story just like the history of philosophy can never be seen as the accumulation of previous mistakes –that would be making of experience and wisdom nothing but recycling. Perhaps it is truth, not as an aggregate of arguments, but as a singular common effort what can save the aesthetic momentum of death and transform it. The transformation goes far beyond human interests; it concerns the totality of the person. I don´t think that Lukács melancholy is in anyway contradictory or harmful, it attests to a honest and integral effort that accepts paradox and doesn´t deny the anxious wait –it rather finds its foundations in every human contact.
This is precisely what we learn from human encounters: The denial to wait in function of a higher and more sublime, less restricted and less mutable form of life, is doubtless a brave decision and typical of the Greek tragic hero, but empty of all content in the sense that it´s not temporality, it is not an anxious wait: It simply is the slow lane of biological processes. Every human contact by means of which we abandon the loneliness of our thoughts, is in itself a possibility to found the radical of the wait in just about every person without worrying about the consequences that are historically beyond the world and far beyond human reason –we have here made the bond external to ourselves.
This foundation is short of all possible perfection and is necessarily mediocre and absolutely contingent, so that it involves some of Susan Sontag´s poetic resignation, but it is in this resignation that the world is given back to us and what keeps human bonds in their fragility from being completely destroyed, because at all times keep the immediate reference to our own failure and that of all human bonds. All those postmodern men and women that can´t enter (or at least not yet) the world naturally because they´re not thrown in the world to build a home to give the world a child as a reconciliation between biology and existence, will necessarily always remain alienated in bonds that shift in between the erotic and the non-concrete, for life as such as impossible to concretize in such worldless situation. This is why Lukács project will be always frustrated; the reconciliation between form and soul, represents the most sublime and truthful of all human efforts, but we must at this point put it asides, because the melancholy of Lukács without Sontag´s hysterical laughter –that freedom to laugh even about the good god, is an indictment to eternal ennui and an unequivocal turn to one´s own death. But the laughter, when shared, is the most radical transformation possible –In it we keep our own being in fragments, in shreds, and those little fragments however not whole, save us from the anguish of an image we can never again repeat and in giving back the world to us, it gives as a free gift from nowhere an existence that is temporary and incomplete, however bearable. Solitary reconciliation can never laugh, the other as a witness, is always needed.
[1] Franz Kafka
[2] Rahel Varnhagen
[3] La Rochefoucauld
[4] Hannah Arendt on Benjamin
[5] Itzhak Melamed on Lessing
[6] Lessing
[7] Isak Dinesen
[8] Virginia Woolf
[9] George Simmel
[10] Heidegger (and Eugen Fink)
[11] Susan Sontag
[12] Ágnes Heller
[13] George Lukács
[14] Susan Sontag
[15] George Lukács
[16] Etienne Gilson
[17] George Lukács
[18] Susan Sontag
[19] Walter Benjamin
[20] Franz Kafka
[21]Levee Blanc
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