Thinking when Standing

Alongside solitude, Nietzsche’s remark that “I am one thing, my writings are another” also materialises in the human body of the philosopher. A startling fact: the body language of certain academic philosophers remains unaffected by their thoughts! Think of the academic who commands an unyielding and static presence to the thoughts they articulate. The appearance is not a question of an absence of “emotion” or even a question of timidity. Rather, what appear is a literal embodiment of the body as the “one thing” and the thought as “another.”

(Max Klinger, "The Philosopher")

What is the phenomenology of this relation between thinking and the body? The question wouldn’t have much urgency to it, were it not for the content of philosophy itself. My own reason for dimming the lights and opening the windows during teaching is because sustained, engaged thinking literally gives me a vertiginous headache. Once in a while, I must pace the room and inhale some cold air. But the pain is not because of the arduousness of teaching itself, but because if we are to seriously contend with the possibility that the world we come into contact with is altered by our very perception and touch with it, then our body must take full responsibility for being on the frontline of this crevice.

“The world is my representation.” Schopenhauer’s thought alone demands the body take heed. In doing so, the body is obligated to express the level of this thought through its failure to “hold sway,” to cite Husserl. Does thinking becoming desensitized to the corporeal weight of idealism and thus remove all evidence of its presence from the human body? If not, then holding out into the nothingness of “endless space” must constitute some kind of threat to pre-reflective embodiment. Schopenhauer agrees: “For a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space.” Standing and thinking: a tense combination, which Schopenhauer, with his acute sensitivity to transience and the mutability of matter, gave full reign to by making the body the centre of the universe—paradoxically a universal body to be denied.

(Giorgio de Chirico, "The Conquest of the Philosopher")

But there is one final question: how did it occur that standing and thinking failed to gain the dignity that walking and thinking have? And here, we can think of the tradition of the Stoa and the Stoics. The relation between the Stoa as a place and the Stoics as historical philosophers is, of course, far from arbitrary. The philosophy of Stoicism, practised in the public arena of the Stoa, is inextricably bound with the act of walking. And indeed Greek philosophy more broadly is surrounded by the halo of thinkers who walk. Yet this motion remains incomplete without attending to the gesture of standing after walking.

It seems to me that the cessation of movement—both physical and mental—is a privileged moment, in which the felt experience of thought comes to the surface. I would claim that cognition catches sight of the demand placed on the body, which was otherwise dormant during the time of walking. A vision unfolds: Countering the great tradition of thinkers who walk, there thus marches a legacy of thinkers who cling to the walls when struck by the lens of thought, neurotically ensuring their body remains intact despite the vulnerability of the empirical world around them. But the legacy is a precarious one, since standing soon gives way to a febrile state, which can be identified as "sitting." Here, something profound and unnerving occurs: the being whom, according to Schopenhauer, “throng, press, and toil, restless and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time,” is no longer redeemed by walls and doors, and must gather his thoughts from down below. Yet the sitting is an admission to an end, a rupture in continuity and self-poise, which standing up will never regain. The body is marked by its refusal to stand and think in one place. Once more, I must make recourse to my “anti-hero” Gustav von Aschenbach who embodies the genesis of this end perfectly:

Thinking in Solitude

“I am one thing,” writes Nietzsche, “my writings are another.” I have never fully understood this claim. Are we led to believe that Nietzsche the man is even more “dynamite” than his writings, or, is the man a more “humane” counterpart to the dynamite? Either way, this apparent divorce between the “one thing” of the self and the otherness of writing is somehow peculiar to philosophy. Quite unlike any other, philosophy is a form of writing that engenders itself toward a special form of awkwardness. This is the awkwardness of philosophy itself: of the grand gesture to turn inwards (Heraclitus: “I searched my nature”), breaking down all that culture and life has imposed upon the pre-reflective self, only to produce concepts with nothing more than a contingent relation to the everyday world. The lack of material evidence in philosophy remains a vulgar problem: consequentially, philosophy is a highly self-conscious discipline (see this discussion of Heidegger by way of an example).

“I am one thing, my writings are another.” Yes, it is for this reason of awkwardness with regard to oneself, that the association between thought and solitude has such a deeply engrained bond. The Kantian “nobility” of human thought (and more so aesthetic experience) is predicated on the idea of the subject cultivating a detachment from his own self (And solitude is invariably the domain of "his" solitude). The same could also be said of Husserl – both thinkers invent a mode of solitude, in which access to the external world is at the assent of the lone subject. And yet Kant was social, “he liked a drink”. Immersion in the world of social affairs did not undermine the unity of his thought, at least not until the very end. Schopenhauer’s solitude becomes more problematic, however. Accusations that he is one thing, but his writings are another become ammunition for those who think that writing and self ought to be formless, and that without this passage, conceptual uncertainty follows.

I am one thing with my writings. That would be the call of solitude, the impervious shield constructed to ward off all imposters. Graham Harman, in one of his insightful advice posts, points that the solitude of the graduate student in his 20s becomes undignified by his mid-30s, he writes: “There are many self-defeating alternatives, one of which was recently mocked by a very intelligent friend as “the idea of great, heroic, conceptual labor which can only be undertaken by rugged males in conditions of terrible solitude.” Yeah, I remember that phase too, at about age 25. It’s respectable then, but becomes ridiculous and self-defeating if you’re still there at 35.” Irrespective of whether or not this is true —and I suspect it is true —what is interesting is the idea of a temporal threshold, in which solitude suddenly becomes unacceptable, and all such “morbid” tendencies overcome. Does such a point demarcate the transformation of philosophical awkwardness to philosophical legitimacy?

As an endnote, Paul Auster writing on the death of his father: “Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing.” Auster stands before a man shrouded in solitude and his thought is stopped in its tracks: the solitude has taken flight in Auster’s refusal to write. But here Auster gives us a clue: the father is a man of solitude, but it is a solitude not borne of a need to produce – as it is so often cited in the philosophical hero – but present as a force which resists all temporal thresholds: “Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not have to see himself being seen by anyone else.”

The Perceiving Body

Dermot Moran has a nice piece on Merleau-Ponty and seeing here, followed up as nicely by the ever perceptive Fido the Yak. Moran’s piece offers a nice summary of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of ocularcentrism in philosophy. As Moran states, “Seeing can touch: it touches the texture of things. We literally see roughness and smoothness, for example, the coarse texture of the carpet.” We can think here of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to aesthetics as demonstration of this claim, as he puts it in his article on Cezanne: “These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses….We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor.”

Mikel Dufrenne, whose The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is first on my “summer reading list,” is also important here. I have jumped to his discussion of presence and perception. Dufrenne’s line of thought is more or less consistent with Merleau-Ponty: the body’s intentionality is prior to cognition, records the phenomenon of the world, and is capable of perceptive knowledge, thanks to the interplay between the corporeal cogito and the reflective cogito. But Dufrenne is especially good on describing the primacy of the body during aesthetic experience, as he writes: “The aesthetic object is above all the apotheosis of the sensuous….Thus the aesthetic object first manifests itself to the body, immediately inviting the body to join forces with it. Instead of the body’s having to adapt itself to the object in order to know it, it is the object which anticipates, in order to satisfy, the demands of the body” (339). This is truly the act of the body stretching out into the world, asserting itself as the basis of all experience.

To prove this claim, Dufrenne speaks of the embodiment of the artist, offering a brilliant analysis of the phrase “thinking with one’s hands” (see also Elizabeth A. Behnke’s equally excellent article “At the Service of the Sonata”). Dufrenne has us think of the artist’s relation to creativity, the free flowing spontaneity which is possible thanks to the invisible border between creation and the physiology of the hand, writing that: “Each inflection of the melody awakens an echo in his body, as do the subtleties of harmony which means as much for the hand as for the ear. He hears with his fingers” (341, my bold). “He hears with his fingers” – what a truly marvellous image!

The contribution from Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne is especially striking, given the Kantian (and Schopenhauerean) backdrop which privileges cognition over the sensuous realm. Consider Schopenhauer on sight in “certain larvae, worms, and zoophytes” (W2, 84). He writes: “Animals without eyes know only by touch what is immediately present to them in space.” The idea here is one of substitution: the deficiency of blindness limits spatial depth to the scope of touch, thus instigating touch as the primary sense - a manifestly dubious claim.

How is the tension between sight and touch played out during “aesthetic experience?” Is aesthetic experience the mode of affective experience, whereby cognition is divested of its materiality? Is the materiality of the body an encumbrance to the “pure subject of knowing,” to cite Schopenhauer? What then of “losing” oneself in the artwork? Do the eyes perceive independently of the body?

Yet as the Moran article shows, sight is not synonymous with vision. And here Merleau-Ponty shines through directing thought “downward” – a direction at odds with traditional accounts of aesthetic experience. But this is no simple replacement of cognition with the body: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics attests to the “bodily teleology” latent in all appearances. Latency is an important idea. Turning back to Schopenhauer: if we take the aesthetic subject in Schopenhauer as devoid of individuality and thus “elevated” to the “eternal world-eye,” then where does the body dwell if not in a site of disappearance, thus affecting an aesthetics of disembodiment? Yet the body does persist and is returning to, though no doubt in a different mode of being. Soon after, Schopenhauer makes an odd admission: the peacefulness of the nervous system – secured by, among other things, “a peaceful night’s sleep” – alters the susceptibility toward aesthetic pleasure. Does the latency of those embodied conditions manifest themselves as aesthetic experience? That would be a question which focuses on how the passages, anxieties, and reveries of the body become constitutive of the very experience of having transcended the body.