Read an Excerpt

In the Absence of Human Beauty

Philosophical Fragments

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

– It is not that our search for satisfaction has its limits, but that satisfaction is itself a limit.

– The face is the one thing that cannot be incorporated into a fetish.

– The souls of the dead grieve for their bodies, temporarily.

– We fail to know the Other. I wonder what success would mean?

– Poetry cannot be entered from the outside.

– Where should the Other find any sympathy if not in you? You are irreplaceable – "appointed" or "elect" in the vocabulary of one recent philosopher – in at least this sense. You cannot delegate this responsibility.

– That which is now no longer exists. It never did.

– One of Jean-Paul Sartre's more arresting passages in L'Être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique most meticulously describes a solitary walk through the park. In our little journey without purpose, we take in the damp grass, the soggy municipal bench, and then, with a psychological (and perhaps even an ethical) jolt, we immediately become aware of the presence of another person in the park; the park we had hitherto felt or imagined to be wholly deserted. What we (or, at least, what some) can tend to think of as our default epistemological position is shattered and we are momentarily unsettled; we realize instantly that we are co-visible: suddenly, we are awkwardly aware of what Sartre technically terms a 'secondary centre of reference'. We become cognizant of another point of view specifically on what we see: the grass and the park bench on a steep, uninhabited hill are acknowledged by the other but we know that they are acknowledged by this particular other in a different way from the way that we grasp them; they are organized (or apprehended, or synthesized, or are being seen) quite differently by, or from, his or her standpoint, and we now have to take this standpoint explicitly into account: both into an ontological account of the world as well as into moral account. The world – as is the case in Heidegger's Being and Time – is now grasped as 'mine too'. Taken to its most extreme, such a simple epistemological acknowledgment of an other can lead to a diversion of psychic energies from their normal and typically egotistic functioning and a self-destructive attachment – a cathexis is the psychoanalytic term, a crystallization is the metaphorically botryoidal term invented by Stendhal in De L'Amour – to this other. This moment of diverting libidinal energy directly to the other and away from the self highlights an unhealthy diminution of our feelings of power and self-worth, a poverty of confidence in the quest for self-preservation that finds its ultimate limit in the outer shores of abandonment; an abandonment that we – with some justification – call love.

– Religion and existentialism perhaps converge in the following proposition: one must concentrate on the purity of the act.

– It's obvious at first glance that the phenomenon which checks my vision is frequently only vision once again; the vision of another subject with a vision of his own. The face – the ineffaceable but still ineffable fact of bodily expression – is the sight of subjectivity.

– The battle of the wills is worked out on the plane of the gaze.

– Both husband and wife appear to the observer together. Harry, inside the town house, walking around, is wearing a linen bathrobe, or dressing gown. His hair is wet, though not actually sopping. He is newly shaved and has possibly even missed a bit, under the chin. Phillipa is just entering the house through the front door and has had an evening out, attending, as it happens, a lecture on the measures necessary for the ecological protection of the future of the planet. ("Fascinating stuff" Harry had commented, earlier that day.) Phillipa is, externally, wearing a stylish trench coat with a check lining and is, internally, emotionally electrified: "What a sensational speaker." "Who?" "Alexander Feuchtwanger, of course." "Oh." "You know who I mean?" "Never heard of him." "You're sure you haven't heard of him?" "He hasn't come to my attention." "How was your evening?" "My evening?" "How was your bath?" "One of the best." "Sorry?" "It was literally one of the best baths that I have ever had." "One of the best baths you have ever had? "Yes, that's more or less what I said."

– She turns away from her husband and looks toward the long hall mirror, initially to glance at the state of her own hair but, for a second, she looks into the mirrored, living green of her own eyes and continues speaking. In the mirror (within its limits), Harry is out of sight. Yet he is still listening attentively to every single word that she utters. He wouldn't want to come between her and her precious emotions.

– In some of his most exploratory philosophical fragments, Wittgenstein gave an articulate voice to the notion that the solipsist could not, in principle, achieve the ability to think privately and, as a consequence of his inability, couldn't even advance his own opinion: that is, he couldn't even articulate his own philosophical position; for, of course (of course?), thinking itself uses words – and how would a single individual, metaphysically entirely on his own, be able to really know that he was using words acceptably? This (at least, apparent) indiscriminate dismissal of a certain privacy of thought can be set side by side both with Søren Kierkegaard's theological claim that God does not think and with Kant's original idea that God's mode of being is 'intellectual intuition', a manner which does not use or involve discursive – hence linguistic – thought. (The Kantian and post-Kantian identification of God's thought with His creation remains constant to the traditional doctrine of Divine simplicity.) It might be urged here that God is omniscient, anyway – so this whole human idea of following rules has no application to Him, save an analogous or metaphoric one – still, might this omniscience be rendered more humanly understandable by figuring it as a mode of creating rather than thinking? Is this even intelligible? Is the point that it should not be? – But didn't God create man in God's own image? – Yet aren't we prohibited from the creation of idols?

– "Yes, it is unquestionable that medieval debates over the naming of God and the unknowing associated with Him and his Infinity have resurfaced in recent debates over the Other." Phillipa claimed. Harry added: "Perhaps the time has come for us to envision a new religion, a religion without language." Phillipa chastened him with one of her dismissive looks. "Do you want us to all troop down to Mass and sit there in silence?" said the man in the purple jacket.

– Surprisingly, the concept of a pilgrimage still appears to be a potent one. It has certainly long since outstripped its purely religious usage. Such a cultural shift is typified by the examples of two different, over-excitable people that I have recently overheard. Both were referring, on separate occasions, to a personal "pilgrimage" they'd made to the Galapagos Islands! (Why not Westminster Abbey, where Darwin is, in any case, buried?) Such a crypto-religious account of their scientific travels would have displeased Nietzsche, who pinpointed the "search for truth" as the last refuge of the religious "ascetic ideal". In these contemporary "scientific" "pilgrimages", the traveller seems to have somewhat naively separated the power of the scientific discoverer from the nature of the scientific discovery itself, unless such pilgrims are (highly improbable though it might seem) attempting an arch reference to a sinister religious pilgrimage to the heart of nihilism itself, a black ritual to honour the competition that grinds out the breeds.

– We immediately assign reality a subject of experience, – "I". Our eyes, our fields of vision, our bodies: these are frequently to be found at the dead centre of the real, as a dimension of manifestation. (One thinks of the basic structure of philosophical investigation in modernity from Descartes through empiricism to Husserlian phenomenology.) I already say "our" rather than "mine" because it is intuitively natural to then go on to accept the proposal that reality embraces the existence of others. (The Daseinanalytik embraces Mitsein without fanfare.) Others surround us but they are usually explicitly noted only – a point that Levinas, above all others, has driven home – insofar as they incommode us. (Like broken implements: they are in need.) But the leap from the abstract acceptance of others to fully keeping in mind that the Other does not revolve around us but actually possesses a full subjectivity, too (that is, the leap to our sense that he occupies a point that is of no essential ontological or ethical difference to ours) is an ongoing practical process of learning a certain moral truth. (And how long does learning to take on board a moral truth take?)

– To raise the faces of others out of the anonymous buzz that is presented to our senses, one must be able to afford to allow or grant an expressive tendency to certain representations; which is, in itself, a partly moral affirmation in the guise of a purely epistemological one. One must acknowledge or read the expressive tendencies of the Other. The morally-existentially foundational element of the intersubjective encounter is evident, to give but one example, in Totality and Infinity by E. Levinas, who straightforwardly declares that: 'To recognize an other is to recognize a hunger'. This admission that others seem to be acknowledged only insofar as they trouble us couldn't be made in starker terms. To raise faces out of the mere murmur of data, it is enough to assume a certain responsibility for helping them in their need (which, it is at least tacitly admitted, as expressed is already embodied); to pity them – as Wittgenstein once said – already being a conviction. More generally, one could say that the other appears only insofar as it makes such a moral appeal. Levinas does not hesitate to say this, accordingly introducing the splicing of his position with a metaphysics of expression (a metaphysics that will not generate any criticism from the present author). He does so, for example, in the following citation: 'Expression manifests the presence of being, but not simply by drawing aside the veil of the phenomenon. It is of itself the presence of a face and hence appeal.' Hunger; appeal; Otherness.

– Flesh is the very fabric of human expression. And expression does not externalize the purportedly wholly "inner self" as much as constitute it. As a matter of fact, nothing is hidden. The enigmatic Wittgensteinian space between the Other and myself is the very space of expression. It appears to have been Schopenhauerian expressivism that gave Wittgenstein a superior explanation for the unity of mind and body that mainstream modern philosophy, after Descartes, had been spectacularly unable to provide (since that particular philosophy had, by its very adoption of a mind/body categorization, driven a wedge between the inner and the outer human being). The only path out of this philosophical impasse intrinsic to ontological dualism is to retrace one's steps, abandon the mainstream division of mind and body and to embrace instead a (forgotten, or neglected, perhaps a Schopenhauerian) non-causal expressivist account of the body as an expression or manifestation of the willing self and certainly not of the inner, detached 'mind' – a category that was idealistically privileged not only by Descartes (but when seen through Schopenhauer's eyes is nothing but a mere instrument).

– I catch sight of the Other without being able to pinpoint her essence in the exact features of her face. She shimmers under, glints in or hovers over her face. This experience – this epiphany – is to be taken as point of departure. Our acknowledgement of the Other (prompted and located by the flicker of expression), our address to them, certainly our sympathy for them, isn't impeded by their otherness.

– It cannot be seen – so it must be read.

– The Other is the permanent reality of expression, until the terrible day when his face acquires an unprecedented solidity.

– One way to attempt a straightforward explanation of expression would set off as follows: it isn't that her happiness is located in there somewhere behind the smile: in the skull beneath a face that offers us a symptom of it (in a secret system of life in which thoughts and feelings circulate in a cold vaccum of abstraction and inspection). No: our vibrant emotions, in line with all other feelings to a greater or a lesser degree, are ventilated in – that is simply to say, expressed through – our beaming faces. There is nothing essential to the subject sealed deep within the tissue that cannot, in principle, be expressed in and upon the countenance and the flesh. A flickering uncertainty of the features is an uncertainty (of the "mind"). Similarly, our uneasy grimaces are a very part of our being troubled – not mere superficial masks that may or may not fail to cover it. Countless other examples will bring us to the same conclusion. We can, for example, invoke conclusions found in the phenomenology of Max Scheler here, in addition to the insights of Schopenhauer, Levinas, Cavell and Wittgenstein, amongst others. We can even move further afield – to zoosemiotics, for example – so as to reinforce this point. For, leaving our own species (just for a moment), we might point out that the dog's wagging tail and his fawning, devoted demeanour toward his master is as about as expressive of the feelings of a being as one could possibly imagine (a point about canine expression that had not gone unnoticed by either Schopenhauer or Max Scheler). Real contact between human beings – and even between humans and dogs – appears, therefore, to occur in the gaze – and there isn't much that is more obvious than that we do make eye contact with dogs – and on the trembling flesh and in that wagging tail. The "real" being isn't as isolated and anonymous as we would sometimes like to believe.

– That we recognise what is being expressed in the wagging of a dog's tail effectively disposes of the theory that understanding expression involves imitating it. Expressive phenomena already provide access to the life of others, without invoking further excitement involving a whole slew of concepts such as projection, mimicry etc.

– We must be awake to an acceptance of our body, to both its limits and its highly revealing capacities. This is an acceptance that cannot, in any case, be relinquished upon this Earth. (Except, perhaps, in the deepest of sleeps.)

– Levinas notes somewhere (I am unfortunately unable to relocate the reference) that: "To sleep is to suspend physical and psychic activity." I might immediately add that there does exist an explicit thesis to the contrary: "There is no such thing as sleep" – this was the bewitching thesis of Devorah Baum and if it departs from the 'sleep-as-suspension' proposal in its intuitive sensing of the impossible possession of outright psychic respite, it nevertheless coheres both with the empirical fact that Rationalism enters into philosophy only by means of a dream and that Empiricism exits philosophy, by contrast, by means of every dream that has ever presented us with clear and vivid impressions.

– The stream of consciousness has interruptions. The body has replacements.

---

Excerpted from In the Absence of Human Beauty by Matthew Alun Ray. Copyright © 2014 Matthew Alun Ray. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---