I concluded my previous essay, Wounded Being and The End of Organic Life with this assertion:
A clear connection is being made between what we see outwardly physically today, i.e. the destruction of organic life and the wounded angel or despairing goddess or, as I would say today, wounded being. Wounded being and the end of organic life are one and the same, or two ways of viewing a unity! What may constitute a path through to another future? How is another possible future being prepared, even as the destruction of organic life accelerates before our incredulous eyes?
I want to pursue this question further here. My dreams have suggested a connection between organic life and being. But how can this connection be said? The perspectives that give rise to each concept are so utterly different, even mutually exclusive, so that saying or thinking their connection, or even unity, seems impossible, tantamount to disclosing another mode of being altogether. And yet, disclosing such a world is imperative to our finding a path to another future, as I said in my previous essay.
The rhetoric of organic life belongs to a perspective that we could call onlooker consciousness. Noam Chomsky is a leading proponent of this Enlightenment style of consciousness and he also is deeply concerned with the impending end of all organic life, so we can turn to his discussion of the problem, along with his proposed solutions, in order to get a better understanding of the style of consciousness he represents, and the rhetoric that it generates, i.e. the rhetoric of organic life and its possible “rescue.”
In a recent interview, Chomsky addresses a momentous decision, the likes of which has never been posed to human beings, “we have now reached a point where we have to make a decision as to whether the species is going to survive in anything like its current form of organization.” His interviewer says in response, “you don’t appeal to emotion very often (as a basis for action). You appeal to listeners’ and readers’ reason. So I assume that you believe that as a species we are we are capable of rationality even though we so often don’t follow that.”
Chomsky affirms this belief and goes on to speak of “huge efforts” within the media, advertising industry, and politics, to undermine rationality, “to turn you into an utterly irrational creature”. Although he privileges rationality in the style of the Enlightenment, he tells us that it is not always a driving force in our existence. “Society so sick it cannot deal with obvious issues sensibly …” Always the historian, Chomsky then takes us:
Back to the Enlightenment and see people like Adam Smith or David Hume. They took it for granted that solidarity, sympathy, were core elements of human nature … All of that ended with Capitalism which is ‘get what you can for yourself and kick everybody else in the face’. And now that is claimed to be human nature. Is it?[3]
Chomsky asserts his belief that Enlightenment ideals in fact constitute true “human nature” and that the ideology of modern Capitalism and its definition of human nature is therefore a perversion, driving us over the precipice.[4] He cites for example the pathological view of human nature privileged by Economist James Buchanan: “the ideal situation for any person is to be the owner of everything and have everyone else be his slave.” True human nature, as interpreted through the perspective of the Enlightenment, is rooted in an “onlooker” structure of consciousness that privileges calm reason, or rationality, and eschews emotion, instinct, or the affects.
When Chomsky speaks of a “momentous decision” we need to make regarding our survival as a species, he is speaking as a mouthpiece of the Enlightenment, which has this “onlooker” capacity to stand completely (i.e. psychologically) outside Life, able to contemplate Life as an abstract whole (e.g. our species). The rhetoric of this style of consciousness is that of wholes, or abstract totalities. We can view the entirety of our species as from outer space. The rhetoric of worlds springs from this style of consciousness. We have to be psychologically beyond any world in order to perceive it as a world, the environment, organic life, or inorganic matter, etc. In fact “matter” itself is about as abstract a concept as you could find.
Perhaps unnerved by Chomsky’s descriptions of our imminent demise as a species, the interviewer pleaded for some hope: “The climate change crisis can seem so overwhelming its easy to feel despair … things are very unpredictable … is this where we can get some hope, (i.e. in the unpredictability)?” Chomsky’s predictable response to this plea offers hope simply by reinforcing his belief in the efficacy of the Enlightenment style of consciousness that he is: “We can have pessimism of the intellect but we should have optimism of the will!”
This onlooker structure of consciousness has dominated our Western culture for centuries. It can only make decisions regarding the future by means of reflection, making decisions removed from Life, followed by willed action in Life—a kind of imposition of the will on Life, from above. We are now seeing the consequences of actions in the world that are willed by the onlooker consciousness. Although Chomsky freely blames our predicament on Capitalists and those in power, he apparently does not understand that we all share this structure of consciousness and that any solution offered by this structure only serves to maintain itself in power (i.e. in the claimed absoluteness of its perspective on life—removed, “beyond”, calm, reflective, able to make and implement decisions and impose them on life, etc.)
According to Chomsky (and many others of course) we have arrived at an unprecedented point in history, which he calls the Climate Crisis—a crisis that could end our species and all life on earth. In accordance with how the onlooker consciousness must think, he tells us that the way through the crisis lies in a decision—the kind of decision that must made by the onlooker consciousness (reflection, calm decision, followed by willed action) in order to “save the world”. In this way Chomsky, as an outstanding mouthpiece of onlooker consciousness, is asserting that the only center of moral agency lies in him (or other such mouthpieces). Only the onlooker consciousness can do something about our crisis. Only it knows what to do.[5]
But there is a problem.
This same structure of consciousness has brought us the knowledge that there lies beneath our onlooker consciousness a reality that determines the unfolding of life and is immune to any decision made by the onlooker consciousness. We typically call this reality the causal body, the realm of affects, emotions, our genetic structure, instinct, or evolution—our biological ground! Nietzsche discovered this reality philosophically in the 19th century. He turned the philosophical tradition on its head by showing how all our metaphysical notions of truth, morality, epistemology, spirit are grounded in our biological systems and are nothing in themselves (“God is dead”). Taking his cue from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche demonstrates how our biological lives are constant willful striving and that:
Life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting (BGE 259).
Nietzsche astoundingly foreshadows modern psychology by asserting that our psychological being is “caused” by our biological ground. This claim spelled the end of any metaphysical assertion of causation (the Creator etc.)
[E]very sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically a guilty perpetrator who is receptive to suffering—in short, some living thing on which, in response to some pretext or other, he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy: for the discharge of affect is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at relief, namely at anesthetization—his involuntarily craved narcotic against torment of any kind. It is here alone, according to my surmise, that one finds the true physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge, and of their relatives—that is, in a longing for anesthetization of pain through affect….[O]ne wishes, by means of a more vehement emotion of any kind, to anesthetize a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unbearable and, at least for the moment, to put it out of consciousness—for this one needs an affect, as wild an affect as possible and, for its excitation, the first best pretext.[6]
Following Nietzsche’s breathtaking pronouncements, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology gave us a language of this reality lying “beneath” that of reflective consciousness (the onlooker), for the first time. It is the realm of ordinary living in which we are daily immersed, intelligently or understandingly coping with the things of the world, prior to any reflections on what we are doing. The descriptive language of the phenomena of existence does not involve any of the binaries that so bedevil our onlooker consciousness (i.e. when it thinks about these matters)—inner/outer; spirit/matter; mind/body; subject/object, etc.
Until relatively recent times we have lived comfortably with the knowledge (gained from the perspective of the onlooker consciousness) that this other reality, our being, pursues its own biological ends, using us as it “sees fit”. We understand this causal body as serving the interests of the species, (through mutation and adaptation) not the interest of individuals, or any one perspective or style of consciousness. Onlooker consciousness can notice or describe this being, but cannot influence it in any way by virtue of being a style of consciousness that stands outside being. Heidegger understood this difference in terms of the “oblivion of being” or its silence—its lack of language. Thus, onlooker consciousness, with its assessment and abstract rhetoric of the emergency of our times, seems to have no linguistic connection at all with living being, which remains without a language, without any way to say its woundedness![7] As Dreyfus says, when we are immersed in being, coping intelligently with life’s tasks, we often cannot say how we do what we do (e.g. an athlete who cannot say how he or she acted in such an inspired moment.)[8]
Where could we look to find some hints of a new birth, a new way to language being, in its woundedness, or rather, a way for being to language itself into its consciousness?
I recently found such a hint when I went to an art exhibit recently showing the works and life of Frida Kahlo. Here is a short summary of this remarkable woman and artist:
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most adored artists of our time. Her autobiographical paintings were a new approach to exploring female experience that would influence generations of women artists. When young she was in an accident that defined her life and art. Recovering from a broken spine, pierced womb, and multiple other injuries, she began to paint. Today she is a national treasure in Mexico, and an icon throughout the world.[9]
Kahlo married Diego Rivera, a prominent and controversial artist of the times. As I entered the gallery, the first display I saw was this quote from Rivera. He describes Kahlo as:
The only artist
In the history of art who tore open
her chest and heart
to reveal the biological
truth of her feelings
I had finished my essay Wounded Being and the End of Organic Life just shortly before this exhibition and so was “primed” to receive this message from Rivera.
Rivera’s penetrating insight had opened me up to Kahlo’s art as a portrayal of organic life gaining voice, or coming to be, through the artist Kahlo. Her work maybe was, at the time, as Rivera claims, the only art form to date that begins to give speech to the biological truth of our feelings or of our psychological being. And this speech is one of intense suffering, as we can see. This language is graphic, unsparing, and almost unintelligible.[10] Onlooker consciousness would find it completely unintelligible because biological reality is mute, simply a resource for us to exploit as we will. We just see a ghastly mess! But Kahlo as a mouthpiece is showing us that our biological substrate is seeking to language itself into existence through the artist, and she may be the first to portray this mystery.
Kahlo was steered towards her vocation as artist and mouthpiece through unimaginable trauma to her body, as the short passage above describes. Mostly bedridden and in pain, with the support of Rivera’s mentoring, she began to paint. She came to know loneliness and solitude, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” Kahlo was thus opened up to the suffering of our biological foundations. Note that connecting suffering with biology is a new thinking, disclosing a new mode of living and rhetoric from within her art form. Onlooker consciousness knows nothing of this connection. Kahlo found her way to this new mode by a forced descent from onlooker consciousness to her participation in the suffering of wounded being. Her art expresses this participation. Wounded being had found a mouthpiece through which it could speak its suffering into existence, perhaps for the first time.
Kahlo’s descent into the biological foundations of her existence seems to be the sine qua non for becoming a mouthpiece for being today—now wounded and mute being, since our onlooker consciousness can only perceive such woundedness and muteness in terms of abstractions—biological destruction, loss of species, devastation of the environment, global climate crisis, as I have said.
I have also found my way to such participation with being when I too was recently laid low with an extraordinary level of pain for about a year. I kept notes as I descended, when I could. I will share here two moments in which being spoke through me as I lay prostrate with a screaming, inflamed, and infected skin, in agony. The first begins with an intense dream of my descent to my biological substrate:
I am taken to the Cross, where I am slowly nailed to it. Anita knows I am going. I feel the slow penetration of nails. The man slowly inserts one on my chest sideways and draws it through like a sewing needle. Does the same with my left arm bicep muscle. The quality is of relentless, impassive certainty that this is what is happening. I am to endure it, It goes on for some time. There is no sadistic pleasure or horror. It is simply a doing to me! At last I look up and in the blue sky visions break through and I see sacred geometry. Then they are dragging me down the street, and they drop me there, leaving me on the street alone, no help. Abandoned casually as if nothing mattered to them about what happened. They just did their job and are now finished.
Following this dream, my symptoms accelerated and intensified to the point where, one day, I began screaming, of all things, “forgive me!” Over and over this voice wailed out through and by me, intertwined with screaming in pain (the pain of the Cross). Not, “forgive them Father for they know not what they are doing” but “forgive me!”
I was left with this question: Is this a new form of forgiveness that may come into the world through the individual who suffers the woundedness of being—an advance on the form of forgiveness that Jesus’s death ensured? As I read the passage over and over, I had a sudden insight: Forgive me! This formulation advances the mystery of forgiveness in that “them” and “I” are now united, whereas, for Jesus, his purity (without earthly stain) and human’s sin (i.e. earthly existence, being) were kept separate.[11] The disjunction between the collective and the sacrificed has been overcome in actual experience, and so forgiveness can flow into the individual rather than being only available in potentia as in Jesus’ time.
I sent my musings to a dear friend who, in typical fashion, told me how his psyche responded. I was to take a look at a book by Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins. I did so and found this startling passage:
There are depths within depths. For a proper forgiveness is so full a matter of the spirit that it leads to the very centre of the union. It is an exchange of hearts. To forgive an other involves, sooner or later, so full an understanding of the injury, and of its cause, that in some sense we ourselves have committed the injury; we are that which injures ourselves. And to be this we must very greatly have got out of ourselves; and this is the means and seal of the Church. The Church consists only of those who have so gone out of themselves … The final reach is to the Union; the inGodding of man.[12]
Now, several years later, tremblingly re-reading these memories, I ask if the speech of wounded being can only happen as onlooker consciousness “descends to the Cross” and participates in the woundedness sufficiently for “forgiveness” to emerge. This forgiveness seems to be the first speech of wounded being to itself: Forgive me!
The second moment I will briefly share here rose up as I continued in my symptoms for several months more. I was driven to take up the pen and write some poems. I called them Poems of Death.[13] [14] Here is one, to close for now.
effortless winged flight
where you pass
day becomes night
black hole in the sky
rent by your eerie cry
many glance up
feet safe on the ground
some gaze in
ready to die
fewer take wing
plunge down through the wound
that you may be heard
where cry becomes word
[1] This essay reveals some recent experiences that I have not shared previously. The memories still leave me shaking as I write.
[3] My transcription.
[4] Chomsky obviously does not know about or rejects Heidegger’s profound understanding of the essence of human nature as “world disclosing”, so that no one interpretation of human nature can have an absolute claim.
[5] The one decision that this structure refuses to think is that of its own death, which it must do if it could only acknowledge that its perspective is relative, only one among many others. See below for further discussion re: death.
[6] Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals. III:15.
[7] Heidegger says in Contributions, we have no words that belong exclusively to be-ing (the being of beings).
[8] Hubert Dreyfus is an eminent spokesman for Existential Phenomenology.
[9] http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/artboards/frida-kahlo-diego-rivera/
[10] As a language we can perceive animal elements, death, tissue, organs, … What kind of speech is forming here?
[11] “them” and “I”: being and onlooker consciousness?
[12] P. 189
[13] I later produced a small art piece that you can see on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Sho_xunqQ
[14] See my book Poems of Making Poems of Death. Available on Amazon.