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Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jspecphil.27.3.0220

1527-9383

Adriana Cavarero,

Classical Philosophy and Thought

At the very beginning of the history of philosophy, with Plato, we are told the strange story of some men dwelling in a cave and looking at shadows. Immobilized by chains since childhood for all their lives, they are forced to sit on the cave's floor and are impeded from standing up. Hence, whoever they are and whatever they do, the label Homo erectus as a general category denoting the vertical posture of the human animal is decidedly unfit for their position. The strange story, however, goes on and recounts how one of them, by managing to get rid of the chains, for the first time rises to his feet. The familiar feature of Homo erectus, intended not as an extinct hominid species but as the postural human standard, eventually enters the picture. But we are, of course, only at the beginning of the story and have to be patient before reaching the crucial moment of its plot. Our upright hero, in fact, turns and starts to walk and, after a difficult ascension that allows him to exit the dark cave, succeeds in standing, vertical and motionless, under the midday sun that shines outside, in order to contemplate the luminous idea of the Good. He is Plato himself, actually, the true philosopher, the contemplator: the prototype of the Philosophus erectus species. And it is precisely this new model of the human, resulting from a distinctive philosophical “orthopedy,” that ultimately enters the tale, disclosing its real meaning. In other words, the strange story is not that strange after all: it narrates how philosophy inaugurates itself by celebrating theory as a perfect and solitary verticality that makes the concepts of rectitude, rightness, uprightness, and erection coincide.Far from being malicious or provocative, the point I just made rests on serious philological and etymological grounds. All of the terms I mentioned above—rectitude, rightness, uprightness, erection—and the like originate from the Latin rectus, which derives from the Greek orthos: both meaning “right,” “straight,” “intended as vertical.” There is a long and noticeable thread, woven within the history of truth, that starts with the Greek orthos logos, proceeds then to the Latin recta ratio (right reason), and leads up to right—Recht, droit, derecho, diritto—and then to uprightness, rectitude, correctness, and, not least, erection. The axis is vertical, not horizontal. The philosopher, of which the Platonic contemplator is the archetype, knows it for sure. Steadily balanced on its vertical posture, the philosophers' subject does not lean, does not bend, does not incline; it stands upright, very confident with the correctness of its erection. Thus, it is not only a matter of unmasking the notorious symbolical role of the phallus. The question is indeed more complicated.And, of course, I do not need to remind you of Foucault's analyses of the various straightening dispositives in Discipline and Punish or the fact that, in English, heterosexuality is coded as “straight.” Nor need I remind you that Heidegger, by interpreting the myth of the cave, accuses Plato of replacing the concept of aletheia, “truth,” with that of orthotes, “correctness.” Actually, from a philosophical perspective, the topic is not only complicated but of some importance. Yet, as it is worth noting—and this is exactly my point—neither Heidegger nor Foucault ever properly engaged in a specific inquiry on the very issue that comes here to the fore, namely, that of the structural complicity between the various systems of truth constructed by philosophers and the verticalized geometry or topography that frames them. This is true not only for Heidegger and Foucault but also for other scholars: although crucial, the issue is largely ignored or neglected by critics. In my opinion, on the one hand, such a lack of intellectual curiosity is, at least, surprising, but, on the other hand, it means that, in spite of the few traces left by rare critical incursions, the territory for speculating on the link between philosophy and verticality is basically unmapped. Possibly as wide as the entire history of philosophy, and almost limitless, it still has aspects to be explored. Given that no detailed map is available, whoever dares to explore it needs therefore to ponder the difficulty of the enterprise and choose a strategy.As for my strategy, I tried already to make it clear, at the beginning of this essay, by citing Plato and his Philosophus erectus in order to indicate a credible starting point or a significant resource for exploration. Notwithstanding my passion for Plato and ancient philosophy in general, however, I will now leave the Greeks aside and focus, rather, on modernity. In order to go deeper into the question, I will concentrate on two important authors, taken as representative of early and late modernity: Immanuel Kant and Elias Canetti. To tell it briefly, my task is, on the one hand, that of examining how the concept of verticality affects their constructions of the subject and, on the other, that of imagining how a different geometry could succeed in inclining the arrogant uprightness of this very subject. Thus, basically, my analysis articulates in two parts: the first dedicated to deconstructing the vertical subject that inhabits modern individualist ontology, the second dedicated instead to featuring an inclined subjectivity in order to revisit what we could call a relational ontology, calling on vulnerability and dependence for illumination.For a start, I will thus turn to Kant and interrogate his notion of the vertical subject by confronting it with a creature that, by definition, does not stand upright at all: that is the newborn, the infant, the child. Not very surprisingly, a “more or less selfish old bachelor,”1 Kant does not like children. He complains that, because of their “deficiency” of reason and intellect, they disturb “the thinking section of the community by banging, shouting, whistling, singing and other noisy pastimes.”2 “Furthermore, when the child tries to speak”—Kant notices—“the mangling of words is so charming for the mother and nurse” that “this inclines them to hug and kiss him.”3 A good educator, obviously, would not reward the lack of rationality displayed by the human being as a child. And yet, mothers and nurses reward it with a warm hug; so, at the end of the day, according to Kant, the core of the matter lies in their natural inclination “to comfort a creature that ingratiatingly entrusts himself entirely to the will of another.”4 In short, it is not the children's noise as such that bothers Kant but, rather, the very connection between maternal inclination and infantile dependence. The question has a strict philosophical profile. Here, infancy, as a status of minority and dependence, stands against the background of the Kantian paradigm of an autonomous, free, and rational “I” who masters his or her inclinations and who, most of all, does not need others to incline toward or lean over him or her. Kant's complaint about the natural inclination of women toward the human creature in need fits precisely this picture centered on the normative and vertical I. To put it shortly, Kant blames children because they are not yet adult, and he blames women because they are naturally inclined to take care of a creature that depends on others and, more precisely, on women themselves. Between mother and child—where the child, in Kantian terms, is still a larva of a not-yet-autonomous I—there is an alarming complicity and also, interestingly enough, a question of exquisite geometry due to the prevalence, in this scene, of the oblique line on the vertical one. Namely, the maternal inclination toward the infant ends up delaying the fundamental process that, by superseding human dependence, eventually produces an autonomous I, a moral legislator of the “authentic self,” steadily balanced on its internal axis and standing typically on its feet, vertical, upright: the Homo erectus or, better, as I should prefer to put it, its Kantian version, the Philosophus erectus.In his ethical and anthropological writings, Kant discusses the topic of “inclination” (Neigung) under the rubric of desires, namely, affects pertaining to humans as natural beings, as, in a word, animals. For him, inclination is a sort of “habitual sensible desire,” a habit, “a physical inner necessitation to proceed in the same manner that one has proceeded until now.”5 This, according to Kant, stimulates the arousal of disgust in us because “the animal in the human being jumps out far too much: … here one is led instinctively by the rule of habituation, exactly like another (non-human) nature, and so runs the risk of falling into one and the same class with the beast.”6 In Kantian terms, of course, the problem is particularly alarming. Whereas as natural being, man is an animal of the species Homo sapiens, as a rational and moral being—that is, as a proper human—man is totally repelled at the idea of associating with beasts. In this light, Kant's impatience with mothers and children becomes, thus, more comprehensible: vis-à-vis the zoological boundary between humans and animals, both mothers and children are borderline figures. Mothers are so because, by nurturing and raising their little ones, they show a natural inclination that aligns them with the females of other species. Children, for their part, are, substantially, still young little beasts.However, in an extraordinary passage on the issue of freedom, Kant seems to withdraw precisely this last equation. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he writes: “Even the child who has just wrenched itself from the mother's womb seems to enter the world with loud cries, unlike all other animals, simply because it regards the inability to make use of its limbs as a constraint, and thus it immediately announces its claim to freedom (a representation that no other animal has).”7 Quite obviously, as Kant clarifies in a footnote, the newborn cannot possibly have a representation of freedom. How could he? Having just come into the world, he has no representations at all. What he has, yet, according to a strange expression of Kant, is “an obscure idea” of freedom: an idea that determines so strongly the child's desire to be free, that it appears a real and unmistakable passion—communicated through a cry at the moment of birth and, not much later in infancy, through tears and desperate weeping. Disturbing the “thinking section of the human community,” the newborn cries, according to Kant, because he perceives the condition of “illiberty” inherent in the incapability of governing his own body—or else, to put it more precisely, because he perceives his lack of autonomy. Thus, obscure as it may be, the idea of freedom is innate in the human animal—who, in fact, through that first, highly annoying, emission of sound, manifests it clamorously. The cry expresses neither an ostensible grief of separation from the maternal womb nor a touching request for motherly help on the part of a helpless and dependent creature. It is, on the contrary, a cry of indignation for not having been scooped out already perfectly autonomous—that is, free. In Tzvetan Todorov's words, “If the newborn child cries, it is not to demand what is necessary for life and existence; it is to protest against his dependence in regard to others. As a Kantian subject, man is born longing for liberty.”8 In this respect, a good family man like Hegel appears to be more cautious. By focusing on the same phenomenon, Hegel says that, through the scream, the child externalizes the feeling of his needs, and in particular, he bears witness to a condition of dependency and neediness far greater than that of animals.9 For Kant, the annoying infant shriek, instead, expresses rage at being impotent and incapable of self-determination. The emphasis is fatally placed on autonomy. Moreover, the capricious behavior typical of infancy and early childhood confirms Kant's general assumption that the child's impulse “to have his own way and to take any obstacle to it as an affront is marked particularly by his tone, and manifests a maliciousness that the mother finds necessary to punish, but he usually replies with still louder shrieking.”10Do not let yourself be misled by the half-ironic, half-benevolent tone of the Königsberg philosopher. The problem is seriously philosophical—as well as plausibly biographical. Maybe Kant, in his old age, has forgotten that he was a child too, or maybe he never had the opportunity to care for a baby or for other vulnerable and defenseless creatures. Maybe he never leaned on someone or inclined himself toward another. Since “birth and early childhood, for centuries belonged exclusively to a women's universe,”11 Kant lacked the direct experience of the situation and its pathologies. This is true for many philosophers, of course, but given his insistence on the category of autonomy, the phenomenon, in Kant, becomes particularly relevant. Even the mere hypothesis of a structural dependence in the human—let us say in the human animal as an infant—is for him a serious preoccupation. This is why the philosopher dares to claim that the baby cries because she already has an obscure idea of freedom. And this is why, here and elsewhere, in the work of Kant, the interpreter can perceive, as Foucault would have it, “the presence of a deaf, unbound and often errant freedom which operates in the domain of originary passivity.”12Kant's contemporaries tell us that the philosopher, as a person, was sociable and agreeable: within the limits of his Königsberg he was, one could say, a cosmopolitan. As a moral philosopher, instead, he seems to have been obsessed with the model of an autistic “I” that legislates and obliges itself, a vertical and steady I, displayed on the entire surface of the earth, standing side by side with other equally autarkic I's, one the exact replica of the next. They are perfectly homogeneous, and their sum guarantees the universality of moral law. The political order corresponding to this arrangement ensures, as Kant claims, perpetual peace.I have here accused Kant of a speculative prejudice against the human condition of vulnerability and dependence, one that announces itself, with the cry of the newborn, at the scene of birth. But the term vulnerability belongs to our vocabulary, not to Kant's, of course. Up to Lévinas, in the history of philosophy, the word vulnerability is virtually absent, and attention to the vulnerable is only a recent acquisition. Although, together with Judith Butler and other contemporary scholars calling on relational ontology, I am very interested in vulnerability; here I will set this issue temporarily apart and postpone its examination in order to focus a little bit more on Kant and reflect on his version of Philosophus erectus.“It is absolutely surprising”—Hannah Arendt writes in her Denktagebuch—“that in the Critique of Pure Reason and in Kant's moral works he never speaks of the so-called fellow men. In truth, he focuses exclusively on the self and on reason that works in solitude.”13 Shortly told, in Kant “what is moral borders the space in which I think. It is solipsistic in principle.”14 Such a mark of solipsism, which according to Arendt is particularly problematic, could perhaps be elucidated if we frame it within another sentence from Arendt, taken from her essay “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” where Kant is again a major object of investigation. In occasionally reflecting on the term inclination and trying to provide a rigorous definition of it, Arendt writes: “Every inclination turns outward, it leans out of the self.”15 Faithful to the etymological root of the term—from the Greek verb klino, which means “to bend, recline, lie down”—the definition has the merit of immediately displaying the geometrical context it implies and presupposes. What Arendt helps us to understand, in fact, is that the very concept of inclination demands the self to incline “toward others, be they objects or people,” and that this bending self is precisely an “I” that, by assuming an oblique position, leans out of the vertical axis that allows one to stand erect on one's own basis as a perfect autonomous subject. Differently told, by turning the subject outward, every inclination unbalances it and displaces the internal barycenter on which the autarkic and self-sufficient figure of the Kantian moral I as well as the various historical samples of the Philosophus erectus species are constructed.Not by chance, in the same essay, Arendt writes: “There exists a crucial problem in this moral concern with the self. How difficult this problem may be is gauged by the fact that religious commands were likewise unable to formulate their general moral prescriptions without turning to the self as the ultimate standard—‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ or ‘Don't do unto others what you don't want done to yourself.’”16 As for the categorical imperative of Kant, it even worsens the schema, of course. Here, in fact, the new protagonist is an I, rid of any obedience to divine precepts and therefore to heteronomous laws, who acts as the absolute legislator of him- or herself: “an integrally autonomous person.”17 No wonder, therefore, that this I demands an internal redoubling in order to perform a dialogical monologue in which he gives orders to himself. “Thou shalt,” notoriously sounds his Kantian imperative formula. If this I had a gene—and were not, as he is, pure form—we could thus bet it would be a “Selfish gene,” methodologically separable from the “Altruistic gene,” which plausibly affects the inclined subjectivity embodied by mothers and nurses. To be sure, charged by Arendt of being solipsistic, the Kantian moral subject is rigidly encapsulated in its formal rectitude, vertical, upright, and does not incline at all toward objects or people, in particular toward special people like newborns or children. If observed from a geometrical perspective, the Philosophus erectus of Kant and the stereotypical figure of the mother inclined to infants, as a matter of fact, cannot cope: they are mutually exclusive.Among the philosophers who contribute to weaving the fundamental threads of individualistic modern ontology, Kant is, of course, an author of some importance. Basically—if you allow me to be very schematic—he belongs to the optimistic stream of modern individualism. Although he calls most of all on the concept of autonomy, his notion of the free and rational individual can be easily inscribed in the liberal tradition inaugurated by John Locke. Elias Canetti, the author I am now going to focus on, is more a Hobbesian scholar that a Lockean one, instead. His vision of the individual is definitely cynical and pessimistic. And his version of the Homo erectus model, shaped in the egoic figure of the survivor, is decidedly impressive.Notoriously, Hobbes's configuration of the subject insists on the idea of a violent and aggressive individual, whose motor is, at all times, self-preservation. The axiomatic presupposition of violence as an essential feature of the human and of murder as distinctive of the human animal, already dominant in a venerable political tradition, reaches a degree of particular emphasis in Hobbes's individualistic ontology. Self-preservation, according to him, consists of killing in order not to be killed. Interestingly enough, the category of equality, which he elaborates and consigns to modern political theory, is constructed on the same basic postulate. “They are equals”—Hobbes writes—“who can do equal things one against the other, but they who can do the greatest thing, (namely kill) can do equal things.”18 Tellingly, the natural site for the application of the formula is the war of all against all: a general and perpetual carnage in the course of which the living and the dead are both on stage. Given the situation, the living should therefore be called the dead-to-be. Canetti, instead, calls them survivors.As we read in his masterpiece Crowds and Power and in other minor works, the champion of humanity is, for Canetti, the survivor—that is, a living man who stands, straight up, in front of a dead man, who lies horizontally on the ground. On Canetti's account, the living man never considers himself greater than when confronted with a dead man, someone who never stands up again; at that moment he feels he has grown a little taller: “The moment of survival is the moment of power. Horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. The dead man lies on the ground while the survivor stands. It is as though there had been a fight and the one had struck down the other. In survival, each man is the enemy of every other, and all grief is insignificant measured against this elemental triumph.”19 If, for Hobbes, human life consists of “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceased only in death,”20 for Canetti, it consists of a surviving featured as perfect verticality in front of the death of the other. Unlike Hobbes's natural individual, who is caught in the perpetual movement of his desire for power, Canetti's survivor is a static figure, immobilized in the moment of his verticalization before the dead body, a moment, for him, of unparalleled triumph.Canetti wrote in the second half of the twentieth century; Hobbes's fantasy of the state of nature had already been superseded by mass wars brimming with corpses. After the carnage, curiously enough, the survivor also experiences an elating “sense of invulnerability.” “Something of the radiance of invulnerability,” Canetti writes, “surrounds every man who comes back alive from war.”21 The whole picture looks very coherent. Basically built on the relationship between the man who lies down and the man who stands up, Canetti's geometry is organized on two main coordinates: the verticality of the survivor and the horizontality of the dead. For the individual, in Canetti's theater of late modernity, there are two basic and related postures: the upright one, which turns mortality into a temporary but elating experience of invulnerability, and the horizontal one, which turns mortality into its perfect and, so to speak, enjoyable realization. Do not forget, however, that the whole narrative, as in the case of Hobbes, can properly work only if it is framed within an imagery of war or, more precisely, of killing and being killed. And do not fail to notice that the human condition of vulnerability, in both systems, collapses immediately into that of killability. At the end of the day, thus, what is on display is not the mortal as such but, rather, the killable, that is, the individual who manages to survive his or her incumbent murder and the individual who instead does not. Strictly connected, vulnerability–mortality–killability, as a sort of semantic chain mastered by the last term, constitutes the very logic here at work, a logic made up of the axiom of violence that pessimistic individualism inherits from the old but everlasting figure of the warrior and applies to scenarios of modernity.Evidently, with Canetti and his Hobbesian passion for surviving death, we are far from Kant and, going back in time, from Locke and what is known as the classical liberal tradition. Yet, as it is worth noting, if observed from a geometrical point of view, the general picture allows some exemplary lines of convergence to surface. The most remarkable one is, of course, the axis of verticality, which is revealed to be so adaptable to modern individualism as to cast a significant light on both its optimistic and its pessimistic versions (if not on all of its versions, multiple and irreducible to my simple binary scheme as, in truth, they are). Given my thesis on the paradigm of erection as a distinctive mark of philosophy as such—no matter the philosopher or the system that reconfigures it—this could seem, in a way, prejudicially obvious. I dare to claim, however, that, far from being a useless exercise, the strategy of testing the archetype of Philosophus erectus on Kant and Canetti has produced some valuable and interesting results. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize them in a few points.Solitary and solipsistic, the Kantian moral I, in whom verticality and autonomy coincide, manifests a motivated alarm for the phenomenon of inclination and therefore fiercely contrasts either the various inclinations—passions, impulses, desires—that affect the human animal or the stereotypical attitude of mothers and women to incline toward the vulnerable creature depending on them, the newborn, the child. As a matter of fact, as Canetti suggests, it is a question of postures. The liberal individualistic scenario, impersonated at its best by the Kantian autonomous I, and the traditional if not stereotypical scenario of maternal care call on different postures corresponding to different conceptions of subjectivity. The protagonist of the first scenario is the free and rational individual who stands upright and whose correspondent political model postulates the natural symmetry between equally autarkic individuals standing upright. Let us call it “democracy,” for the sake of brevity. On the opposite end, the second scenario presents us with the issue of a relational subjectivity, structurally asymmetrical and unbalanced, consisting of the paradigmatic exposure of the human as vulnerable to the inclined posture of the other who bends over him or her. As for Canetti and his even more solitary and solipsistic survivor, who stands upright in perfect symmetry with other equally isolated and triumphant survivors, a further and curious problem arises, actually. In Crowds and Power, in addition to the chapter on the survivor where the vertical posture is strictly connected to the horizontality of the dead, Canetti, in fact, dedicates a special chapter to the issue of postures as such and, more precisely, to the topic “Human Postures and Their Relation to Power.” Here, surprisingly enough, commenting on the vertical posture, Canetti writes: “It is [the] pride of the standing up man to be free and not to lean against anything…. [H]e who stands feels always to be autonomous.”22 “One of the most important and useful fictions in English life,” that is, the liberal version of society, Canetti adds, takes profit precisely from this posture: given that “equality within a social group … is particularly stressed on occasion when all alike have, or can have, the advantage of standing.”23 Thus, according to Crowds and Power taken as a wide-ranging work, verticality is confirmed as a structural paradigm allowing rubrication in the same agenda of either the aggressive I that comes from Hobbes or the autonomous Kantian I that belongs to the liberal-democratic tradition.Even more interestingly, as it is worth stressing, within the above-mentioned special chapter focused on various human postures considered per se, Canetti neglects the posture of the one who inclines. Differently told, within the general analytics of human postures elaborated by Canetti, inclination does not play any role whatsoever—which is, after all and in substance, comprehensible and correct. In fact, if the inclination we have in mind is that of the mother bending over the vulnerable child, why insert it in a system focusing on human postures and their relation to power? Aren't women, in principle, as Canetti maintains for sure, methodologically out of the picture?In approaching my conclusion, in order to reframe these questions, I will briefly reflect on the theme of the vulnerable and its link with that of inclination, indulging, for a start, in an etymological digression. The word vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnus, “wound,” and it pertains to the domain of skin, at least according to two meanings that are, to a certain extent, similar but fundamentally different. The primary meaning describes the traumatic rupture of the skin. In its textual context, it is related to violence and mostly to the theater of war, armed conflict, or violent death. It is usually the warriors who wound each other, dealing lethal blows or at least aiming at the infliction of death. This primal meaning generates the semantic range that in the modern languages includes wound in English, Wunde in German, and the Italian verb ferire and the Spanish herir, both contractions of the Latin locution vulnus inferre (to deal the blow that wounds). All in all, the vulnus is the result of a violent blow, dealt from the outside with a cutting weapon that tears the skin. Although the wound can penetrate deeper tissues and be lethal—or, better, although the wound is essentially thematized as lethal—the tearing pertains primarily to the skin, the bodily boundary, the enveloping barrier, but also to the surface through which the body itself meets the outside and is, therefore, exposed.Tellingly enough, however, the essential relationship between skin and vulnus lends itself to a secondary, but very promising, etymological speculation. According to this etymology, the meaning of vulnus, located in the root vel, alludes to hairless and smooth skin, to skin that is the most exposed. Words such as avulsion and avulsed are part of this family. The two etymologies, although framed by different imaginaries, are not totally in contrast: they both deal with skin. By avoiding the figure of the warrior, the second etymology, however, calls on the valence of skin as a site of radical, immediate, hairless, and unprotected exposure. Vulnerable is here, in fact, the human body in its absolute nakedness, emphasized by the absence of hair, cover, protection. The picture is easily enlarged to include the concept of the human in general, and the war scenario, with its cutting weapons but also with its protocol of symmetric violence and lethal outcome, does not appear decisive or necessary anymore. He