The modern world can be a lonely place. Global market forces have dispersed families over wide geographical areas, tight-knit communities have been replaced by frenetic urban environments, while faster travel has allowed people to find employment further from their homes, removing the need to maintain social bonds with work colleagues. The patterns of life that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries have left many people uprooted.
As well as the myriad opportunities for isolation afforded by our social geometry, critics of modernity have claimed that modern loneliness stems from dysfunctional elements in our fundamental philosophy. The various stories leading to this conclusion are long and often complex, full of twists and subplots, but one thread common to all is a criticism of the Cartesian notion of the self, which they argue is as misguided as it is endemic.
Cartesianism is the idea that the world can be split fundamentally into subject and object, or more accurately, that each one of us can take it as a given that reality divides into what is called ‘I’ and everything else. Once this is granted a host of philosophical problems fall out: disparity between the certainty I can have of my own existence and of the outside world’s, mind-body dualism, solipsism, brains in vats, inverted spectrums, zombies – you name it. The picture is of points of subjectivity peering out into external reality, and this sets the stage for a philosophy that takes as its business properties of entities and the relations between them.
That Cartesianism is really endemic (i.e. that it is lodged in the worldview even of those who have not considered it explicitly) is not without some justification. There is a reason why Descartes’ Meditations is often treated as an entry point for Western philosophy. You can explain the cogito (I think, therefore I am) to just about anyone – the problem is easy to grasp, its terms familiar, its conclusion intuitive. The Cartesian mode is so tempting because in a sense we already occupy it, and to philosophise within it is to scrutinise the familiar.
One criticism of Cartesianism attacks the status of the subject/object distinction itself. The challenge is not that it is a false or meaningless dichotomy, but that it is not basic as assumed – rather than being fundamental to consciousness it lies on top of it. Consider infants before they are able to recognise themselves in the mirror, or our distant ancestors who experienced the first stirrings of awareness, or even regular adults engaged in non-reflective activity. Before there can be self-consciousness, so the reasoning goes, there must be consciousness from which it can arise. Teasing out the logical structure of this pre-subjective consciousness has been a major theme in the philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, all of whom concluded (in their various ways) that what resides there reveals the Cartesian problems as either badly formulated or irrelevant. The programme is summarised by Alexandre Kojève [1]:
Before analysing the “I think,” before proceeding to the Kantian theory of knowledge – i.e., of the relation between the (conscious) subject and the (conceived) object, one must ask what this subject is that is revealed in and by the I of “I think.” One must ask when, why, and how man is led to say “I. . . .”
A more recent attempt to excavate the pre-subjective realm comes from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose three-part work Spheres is currently being translated into English (the first book Bubbles was published in 2011, and is considered here). Uniquely among those who think about such things, Sloterdijk is concerned with the spatial aspect of consciousness, and presents his philosophy as a response to the prevalence of temporal themes in many 20th Century works, and to Heidegger’s Being and Time in particular.
For Heidegger it all begins with being-in-the-world. Consciousness is first of all consciousness within an environment, and Being and Time grapples with all the questions that flow from this. The question that Sloterdijk wants to answer – and claims Heidegger has missed – is how we can make sense of this existential ‘being-in’ that underpins ‘being-in-the-world’? It can’t be some spatial relation between objects, as with the screw in the jar, because this object metaphysics is exactly what Heidegger wants to reach beneath. Sloterdijk writes [2]:
[…] Heidegger already discloses the crux of the existential analysis of spatiality early on in his investigation; what he calls being-in-the-world is nothing other than the world “inside” in a verbal-transitive sense: living in it and benefitting from it already have been explored in prior acts of attunement and reaching out. Because existence is always a completed act of habitation – the result of a primal leap into inhabitation – spatiality is an essential part of it.
So according to Sloterdijk, Heidegger’s project rests on an unexplored notion of interiority. The task he sets himself is to go back to the start of the ‘existential analytic’ and take it in the direction he thinks Heidegger should have in the first place.
It’s important to keep in mind that the aim here is to explore structures deep down in the guts of perception. Sharing with the psychoanalysts a penchant for digging up material in unexpected places, Sloterdijk scours history for spatial motifs, veering off into lengthy diversions on the mythology of eggs, Trinitarian theology, early Renaissance painting, the discredited science of animal magnetism, Freud’s analysis of melancholy, and the Homeric tale of Odysseus and the Sirens, among others.
At times Bubbles can seem like a huge exercise in metaphor mining, and it’s easy to forget that the end goal of all the poetic manoeuvring and peculiar asides is a genealogy of self-consciousness. We often talk about our ‘inner’ selves, in contrast with the ‘outer’ world. Under Sloterdijk’s view, our use of the words ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is not a metaphorical shorthand for some deeper concept of selfhood, but actually reveals the crux of what we mean when we use the word ‘I’. (What we call ‘the self’ is nothing more than the innermost interior.) The shift in perspective that allows Sloterdijk to treat selves as interiors gives him the basis of his whole positive project, linking selfhood with the consciousness of social interaction: being in love, having a circle of friends, occupying an in-group, participating in a nation. All of these – Cartesian subjects included – share the same experiential structure: they are interiors, protected from exterior contaminants by porous walls.
Provocatively re-imagining the whole of history as a kind of immunological project, Sloterdijk offers his diagnosis of modernity. The defining moment came when the Copernican revolution forced humankind to face the fact that it was surrounded by an empty space of inconceivable magnitude [3]:
Living in the Modern Age means paying the price for shellessness. The peeled human being acts out its epochal psychosis by replying to external cooling with warming technologies and climate policies – or with climate technologies and warming policies. But now that God’s shimmering bubbles, the celestial domes, have burst, who could have the power to create prosthetic husks around those who have been exposed?
The Cartesian self is a bungled attempt to immunise ourselves from the cold, cosmic exterior the scientific age has given us no choice but to acknowledge. What makes it bungled is that it has overreached – before we were located in the shared interior of God (however illusory that may have been), but now we have contracted the inside so tightly that we have each ended up in our own bubble, left to communicate at a distance through the membranes of our subjective spheres. By adopting a Cartesian paradigm, we immunised ourselves from each other.
To be sure, there are shades of the common anti-Enlightenment presumption that modern Westerners are all miserable and alienated, whether we admit it or not. But Sloterdijk’s project is a positive one, to his credit, and he has as many middle fingers for those who dwell in a haze of post-everything snark as he does for the Cartesianism he sees as bound in with the Enlightenment. Where his vision really comes to life as a productive philosophy is in the concept of ‘transference’, which is simply the idea that interiors are things which can be moved between. The implication is that selves (and other spheres) are not fixed but changeable, and can be moulded, shattered, and built afresh. The extent of what we consider or, more importantly, feel as the boundaries of our selves is flexible.
Building on this idea, Sloterdijk devotes numerous pages to exploring the phenomenology of strong relationships. What began as a push back against an obscure passage in Being and Time ends up becoming a rather un-Heideggerian study of intimacy. What distinguishes an intimate relationship from a normal social exchange is that it is a true merging of selves: a transference of each individual into a shared interior. The problem for Sloterdijk to solve is what it means for an interior to be cohabited, i.e. what it is that distinguishes an intimate sphere from a lonely sphere with a sole inhabitant (i.e. a Cartesian subject). To this end he deploys yet another homegrown concept: dyadic resonance, in which the two inhabitants of a sphere – the co-subjects – are thought of as being the stable points or ‘poles’ of a unity, something like the nodes of a standing wave. The metaphor of acoustics is one that Sloterdijk uses often, portraying spheres of intimacy as dynamic, oscillating unities, and implicitly characterising Cartesian subjects as static single-polarities.
As may be apparent, Sloterdijk doesn’t really argue for his ideas so much as sling them at you all at once. Bubbles is a rambling, preposterous book – disarmingly insightful at times and downright silly at others. Many philosophical links are left tenuous, and psychoanalytical handwaving is rife. But underneath all this is a simple message. Read charitably, Sloterdijk’s ‘spherological poetics’ is a way of provoking us to recognise that the human experience is primarily a shared experience. Sloterdijk wants us to worry less about the limits of subjectivity, and to channel our energies into opening up the intersubjective space. Bubbles may not amount to a convincing philosophical system, but what it does offer – at times with great panache – is a new language for talking about something which we already understand is deeply important to us, and in this the potential for seeing it in a new way.
Refs:
[1] Alexandre Kojève – Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (p36)
[2] Peter Sloterdijk – Bubbles (p334-335)
[3] Ibid. (p24)
The Platopus 