Critique of Pure Interest: Non-Duality and the Problems of Western Idealism

Friday, February 12, 2021

Non-Duality and the Problems of Western Idealism – Part 2: Berkeley and Kant

In my previous post I discussed Eastern non-dual spirituality and how it focuses on the Enlightenment experience of non-dual consciousness as the way to Liberation. I explained in particular how the key to non-dual consciousness lies in recognizing that one’s individual person is part of the object side of experience (together with the ‘outside’ world) and that therefore the individual person cannot be the true subject of experience – this true subject being rather non-individual consciousness free from the subject-object duality of individual and outside world. The immediate intuition of this non-dual, non-individual consciousness is what the Enlightenment experience in Eastern spirituality is all about. In this post I will turn to the topic of Western Idealism. Despite all the similarities with Eastern spirituality concerning the fundamental status of consciousness, the Enlightenment experience of the non-individual nature of non-dual consciousness is conspicuously lacking in Idealist philosophers from the West. The theoretical lesson to be learned from the Enlightenment experience is therefore also lacking in Western forms of Idealism. Although Western Idealists acknowledge the fundamental status of consciousness, they keep falling back – mostly as a matter of habit – into the familiar model of individual consciousness with its subject-object duality of individual and outside world. Hence, the question of the “external reality” outside of consciousness kept reasserting itself for Western Idealist thinkers, simply because of their unfamiliarity with anything like the Eastern Enlightenment experience of non-individual consciousness. In this post I will show how this problem emerged for the first Idealist thinkers in the West, namely Berkeley and especially Kant, who exerted the most influence on later Idealism. In a later post I will do the same for Kant’s successor in German Idealism, Fichte.

The turn to subjective consciousness in early modern philosophy
To understand why Western Idealism never really broke free from the paradigm of individual, subjective consciousness, we have to take into account the history of Idealism in Western philosophy. We must see how it emerged from the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in the 17th century. With this “New Way of Ideas” (as John Locke called it), philosophers started to focus on individual consciousness as the epistemological foundation of all knowledge, including knowledge about the “external world” outside the individual. This is, however, quite a complex story which we cannot fully narrate here; that would take us too far afield (for the full story, see here and here). In the following, therefore, I will give a short summary of the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in early modern philosophy and how this gave rise to Idealism in Berkeley and Kant.

The turn to subjective consciousness – taking place with thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume – was occasioned by two main cultural forces: (1) the generally felt desire for certain knowledge and the Cartesian solution of the self-evidence of subjective self-consciousness (“cogito ergo sum”), and (2) the rise of atomism in physical science and the subsequent realization that sensible qualities such as color, sound and smell cannot be objective properties of ‘external’ physical objects but must be merely subjective phenomena in individual consciousness.

These two developments conspired to lock the individual knower up inside the confines of his subjective consciousness, cutting him off from the outside world. Descartes’s cogito argument seemed to show that certainty can only be found within consciousness, whereas the other development – the scientific insight that sensible qualities are not objective properties – led to the idea that we never experience anything outside of our own consciousness anyway. The general picture that thus arose was of the knowing subject as ‘imprisoned’ inside his “circle of consciousness”, with physical objects impinging on it from the outside, causing subjective perceptions within the circle. As the Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld summarized the situation: “We have no knowledge of what is outside us except by mediation of the ideas within us.” (Arnauld 1964 [1662]: 31)

The Way of Ideas and the problem of skepticism
Although the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in 17th century philosophy was motivated by the desire for certain and scientific knowledge, the irony of the situation was that it produced a radical skepticism that seemed to undermine science (a skepticism that became rampant with Hume’s attack on causality). For if certainty pertains only to what is inside consciousness, how then can we know what is outside, the external reality? If all we know with certainty are the contents of consciousness, how then can we know whether these contents correspond to external objects? After all, as the problem was frequently put, we cannot step outside our consciousness in order to inspect its correspondence, or lack thereof, with the outside world. Thus, the very medium that should give us cognitive access to external reality – namely, sensory experience – became a “veil-of-perception” hiding reality. As Barry Stroud put the problem in his classic work on skepticism, summarizing the upshot of the New Way of Ideas: “We are restricted to the passing show on the veil of perception, with no possibility of extending our knowledge to the world beyond. We are confined to appearances we can never know to match or deviate from the imperceptible reality that is forever denied to us.” (Stroud 1984: 33-4)

Berkeley and Kant: Idealism as solution to skepticism
It was in response to this skeptical threat that modern Idealism emerged in Berkeley and Kant. As both of them pointed out, the skepticism invited by the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness was premised on the assumption of a reality external to consciousness; simply strike that assumption, they argued, and the threat of skepticism vanishes. If reality is ‘just’ a product of the mind, then surely its knowability can pose no problem? Berkeley and Kant, then, attempted to solve the problem of skepticism by cutting the Gordian knot: there is no “external world” outside of consciousness, the only world to be known is the phenomenal world appearing in consciousness.

Thus Berkeley saw himself as restoring common sense when he expounded this Idealist principle that “to be is to be perceived” (“esse is percipi”). In his view, the Way of Ideas had violated common sense by seeing the object of sense experience as something radically different from the sensible qualities appearing in experience: “Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our sense. Hence arises Scepticism and Paradoxes.” (Berkeley 1969 [1713]: 3) His principle that “to be is to be perceived” allowed him to say that the object of sense experience simply is the bundle of sensible qualities experienced, and nothing beyond that. Thus he could restore the common-sense belief that when we eat a cherry, and see its redness, taste its sweetness, etc., we are perceiving the cherry itself, not just its appearance as distinct from the real thing: “I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it […]: it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry.” (Berkeley 1969 [1713]: 117)

In a similar manner Kant dealt with Hume’s skeptical attack on causality. Hume had undermined the notion of causality – which is so crucial for physical science – by pointing out that we only experience the sense impressions caused by external objects, not those objects themselves. Thus, we only observe the regular connections between the sense impressions, but this gives us no certainty about the nature or even the existence of causal relations between the external objects. As Hume said: “Thus not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connection of causes and effects, but even after experience has informed us of their constant conjunction, ‘tis impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we should extend that experience beyond those particular instances, which have fallen under our observation.” (Hume 2003 [1739-40]: 66)

Kant was deeply disturbed by Hume’s attack on causality. His respect for the physical science developed by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton was so great that he simply could not stomach Hume’s dismissal of causal laws. Where Hume went wrong, according to Kant, was in his assumption that causality, if it exists at all, must be a feature of external reality, in other words, that causal connections must be connections between real objects, independent of our consciousness. But, as Kant argued, such external objects are “nothing to us”. Objects become something for us, i.e. they become accessible to us as experienceable and knowable objects, only if they conform to our forms of cognition, and causality is one such form. Raw sensations do not yet give us experiences of objects. The sensations have to be ordered by our forms of sensory intuition (space and time) and our forms of conceptual understanding (the categories, prime among which is causality); only then do we experience a single, ordered, integrated reality consisting of interconnected objects. Hence Kant’s Idealism: the world to be known by us is not an “external world” outside of consciousness, but a construction within consciousness, an ordering of sensory material by means of cognitive forms such as time, space and causality.

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
I will say a bit more about Kant’s Idealism, because it was – much more than Berkeley’s – a crucial influence on subsequent Idealistic thinking, and also because the persistence of the paradigm of individual consciousness becomes especially clear in Kant. The first thing to note here is that Kant’s Idealism extends only to the forms of empirical reality, not to the sensory material structured by these forms. This is why Kant calls his philosophy “transcendental Idealism”, the term “transcendental” being his technical term for what pertains to the a priori forms of cognition: “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general.” (CPR, A12) In extension, Kant speaks of the “transcendental subject” as the subject who applies the a priori forms of cognition to the sensory material.

Ultimately, the necessity of the sensory objects to conform to our forms of cognition has to do with the fundamental role Kant accords to self-consciousness in experience and knowledge. According to Kant, a process or state in my consciousness counts as an experience or belief only if I can be aware of it as my experience or my belief, thus only if it belongs to the unity of my consciousness – a consciousness that forms a unity precisely because it is mine, i.e. because all episodes and states in it are related to me as their underlying subject. For a mental episode or state to be mine, then, I must as it were be able to prefix it with the qualifier “I think…”. By prefixing “I think…” (or “I see…”, “I hear….” etc.) to a mental content, I indicate that the content belongs to the unity of my consciousness. As Kant puts it:

“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me… The thought that these representations […] all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite them in a self-consciousness […].” (CPR: B132, B134)

According to Kant, the ultimate function of the forms of space and time and the categories of the understanding is to effectuate this unity of self-consciousness (a unity that Kant therefore calls “transcendental”, since it underlies the application of the a priori forms of cognition). Only by placing all my mental episodes and states within a unified spatiotemporal network of causal relations can I recognize those episodes and states as mine, as belonging to my (self-)consciousness. The resulting integrated unity of empirical reality, then, is for Kant only a reflection or projection of the transcendental unity of self-consciousness unto the unorganized manifold of raw impressions. The unity of the object, and thereby the object as such (because there is no object without unity), is really a manifestation of the unity of the subject’s self-consciousness.

The paradigm of individual consciousness in Berkeley and Kant
To repeat: Berkeley and Kant attempted to solve the problem of skepticism posed by the epistemological turn to consciousness by simply striking the assumption of a world outside of consciousness; hence their Idealism. This is, however, only one side of their story, for the jettisoned assumption of a reality outside of consciousness came right back through the back door of their systems, in the form of God for Berkeley and the thing-in-itself for Kant. Here we begin to see how Western Idealism never really broke free from the paradigm of individual consciousness and how this paradigm kept dictating the theoretical problems that Idealist thinkers were supposed to solve.

Even if Berkeley and Kant argued that “objective reality” – reality as the object of sensory experience and rational knowledge – exists only as a phenomenon within consciousness, they still felt they had to posit a cause for that phenomenon outside of consciousness: God for Berkeley, the thing-in-itself for Kant. Why? Well, so they reasoned, sensory objects do exist only within our consciousness, but we nevertheless have no awareness of having produced them; their appearance within consciousness is independent of our will, in contrast to those mental states that we can freely create ourselves (such as thoughts and fantasies). Thus, although sensory objects exist only within consciousness, they must nevertheless have a cause outside of our consciousness.

In this vein, Berkeley admits that humans have perceptions “whereof they themselves [are] not the authors, as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operations of their will” – perceptions, then, that have an external cause. But since, according to Berkely, all being is being perceived, the being of that cause must be relative to a perceiving consciousness outside of us, another mind that installs those involuntary perceptions within our minds – and for Berkely this can only be the mind of God, “the supreme spirit which excites those ideas in our minds” (Berkeley 1995 [1710]: 44-45).

Kant reasoned much in the same way, though he ended up by invoking an unknowable “thing-in-itself” rather than God as the cause of the sensory material appearing in consciousness. Kant agreed with Berkeley that although Idealism avoids skepticism by placing “objective reality” within consciousness, it still needs to explain the external origin of the sensory material out of which “objective reality” is created. As said, according to Kant, the sensory material becomes an experienceable and knowable object for us only when it is ordered by our a priori forms of cognition (space, time, causality). With respect to those forms, then, we are active, “spontaneous” as Kant put it, meaning that we freely impose the forms on the sensory material. But with respect to the sensory material itself, we are passive, “receptive”, meaning that the sensory material arises in consciousness because we are “affected” from the outside. Here Kant agreed with Berkeley that human beings experience sensations “whereof they themselves [are] not the authors, as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operations of their will” (Berkeley 1995 [1710]: 44). Hence the well-known dichotomies drawn by Kant between spontaneity and receptivity, a priori and a posteriori, cognitieve form and sensory material, etc. It is to account for the alleged passive, receptive side to our consciousness that Kant felt necessitated to invoke something outside of consciousness, the thing-in-itself, as the cause of the sensory material appearing within consciousness. It was only in line with his Idealism when he then declared this thing-in-itself to be completely unknowable to us, given that the only reality we can know – according to Kant – is the phenomenal reality constructed in consciousness.

Kant on “inner” and “outer sense”
As I said above, it is here that we start to see how Western Idealism never really broke free from the standpoint of individual consciousness, thereby creating insoluble problems for itself. The point is that the sensory passivity of consciousness holds only for individual consciousness, i.e. for the individual subject who stands over against his object, the external world. Thus, the sensory passivity of consciousness still presupposes the subject-object duality. But hasn’t this duality been overcome once consciousness is recognized as the condition for the appearance of both subject and object, in the sense of the individual and his world? And doesn’t it then follow that this consciousness, that precedes the appearance of subject-object duality, is itself free from subject-object duality and is thus “non-dual”, as Eastern spirituality says? But if this is so, if consciousness is prior to the subject-object duality, why then attribute receptivity to consciousness when the very idea of receptivity clearly presupposes this duality? The lingering attachment of Western Idealists to the idea that there is a receptive side to consciousness is a clear category mistake, a confusion of the transcendental consciousness with the individual consciousness (which is better called the “individual mind”) which is just one of the appearances within transcendental consciousness.

It seems to me that this category mistake emerges clearly in Kant when he introduces the distinction between “inner” and “outer sense” into his Transcendental Idealism. This distinction is really Kant’s acknowledgment that the subject-object duality is merely an appearance within transcendental consciousness. For Kant, “inner sense” designates the psychological self-experience of the individual person, the sensing of individual mental states such as thoughts and feelings. It is through inner sense that the individual mind (“Gemüth”) “intuits itself or its inner state” (CPR, A23/B37). Correlatively, “outer sense” is for Kant the sense through which the individual mind senses the outside world; with the outer sense “we represent to ourselves objects as outside us” (CPR, A22/B37). Now, the crucial move on Kant’s part here is his recognition that transcendental consciousness is prior to both inner and outer sense: not only the objects appearing in the outer sense but also the objects appearing in the inner sense are just phenomena constructed by consciousness. Thus, Kant stresses emphatically that the psychological self-experience of inner sense is certainly not to be confused with the transcendental self-consciousness underlying all experience, the unity of the “I think” that unifies all what appears in consciousness (CPR, B153).

Kant’s category mistake: the receptivity of the transcendental subject
It follows that the transcendental subject, the I that holds together all phenomena in the unity of its self-consciousness, is not the individual self whose mind is experienced through inner sense and whose sensory affection by an external world is experienced through outer sense. But if this is so, why then does Kant attribute this sensory affection – this “receptivity” – to the transcendental subject? Clearly, Kant commits a category mistake here. The only evidence we have for the existence of receptivity comes from the phenomenal realm, from the dichotomy of inner and outer sense, thus from the experience of the individual person as limited and affected by his external world. So by attributing receptivity to the transcendental subject, Kant is confusing the phenomenal and the transcendental: he is attributing a phenomenal property (receptivity) to the transcendental precondition of all phenomenality, the transcendental subject.

In his own terminology, Kant is guilty here of an “amphiboly”, which is his term for the mistake he detected in his empiricist and rationalist predecessors, namely the confusion of the a priori and a posteriori. According to Kant, rationalist philosophers tended to mistake a posteriori givens with a priori products of the mind; here Kant targeted above all Leibniz with his extreme claim that all concepts are “innate”. Conversely, empiricist philosophers tended to make the opposite mistake of seeing the a priori as a sensory given; here Kant targeted philosophers like Locke who saw all concepts, including a priori concepts such as causality, as deriving wholly from sensory experience.

For Kant, seeing the truth in epistemology hinged on avoiding such “amphibolies”, thus on distinguishing clearly between a priori and a posteriori and on assigning each its proper role in cognition. In this way, Kant aimed to steer a middle course between empiricism and rationalism by recognizing both the spontaneous and the receptive side of consciousness. But isn’t it clear now that Kant’s own middle course is itself predicated on an amphiboly, and indeed a rationalist amphiboly, such that an a posteriori given (the receptivity of cognition) is mistaken for an a priori insight in the nature of transcendental consciousness? This is what Kant’s account of the distinction between inner and outer sense makes clear, namely that the duality of subject and external object – and thus the sensory affection of the former by the latter – is a phenomenon appearing in transcendental consciousness and therefore not a property of this consciousness which pre-conditions all phenomenality.

In this sense, Kant’s recognition of the phenomenal nature of the inner sense / outer sense duality should have clearly shown to him the non-dual nature of transcendental consciousness itself. That is, it should have made it perfectly clear to him that the transcendental subject, whose self-consciousness unifies all phenomena, is a non-dual subject, i.e. a subject without an external object (“one without a second” in the language of the Upanishads). The fact that Kant didn’t see this, that he continued to attribute – amphibologically – the phenomenal property of receptivity to the pre-phenomenal transcendental subject, testifies to the strong hold that the paradigm of individual consciousness exerted on Idealist philosophers in the West.

References
-Arnauld, A. (1964 [1662]), The Art of Thinking. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
-Berkeley, G. (1995 [1710]), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
-Berkeley, G. (1969 [1713]), Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Chicago: Open Court.
-Hume, D. (2003 [1739-40]), A Treatise of Human Nature. Mineola: Dover Publications.
-Kant, I (1998 [1781-87]), Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Stroud, B. (1984), The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 comment:

Aagtje en de NachtschadeFebruary 21, 2021 at 11:41 PM
Great analysis!
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The (onto)logical monstrosity of the placenta

According to Luce Irigaray: “One of the distinctive features of the female body is its toleration of the other’s growth within itself without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms.” (Irigaray 1993, Je, tu, nous, p.45) The toleration by the mother’s body consists in the fact that it renounces the immediate relationship with the fetus and allows this relationship to be mediated by a third, the placenta, which is related both to the mother through the uterine wall and to the fetus through the umbilical cord. The placenta can play this intermediating role thanks to its special anatomic status as a hybrid, a fusion of fetal and maternal tissues. From a biological viewpoint, the placenta is a synthesis of mother and fetus – a synthesis, however, which is relatively independent of both, since it functions as an external and independent organ. In one sense, the placenta is an organ belonging to both mother and fetus; in another sense, it belongs to neither, since it is literraly placed between them. It is this hybrid nature that enables the placenta to act as a filter and sluice between the separate blood circulations of mother and fetus (hence mother and fetus can have different blood types – a transfusion of foreign blood is normally extremely dangerous).

At the same time, however, this hybrid nature of the placenta seals its fate as a vanishing mediator – that is to say: its fate as waste, as the material leftover of the process of pregnancy and birth. There is a certain logic to this discarding of the placenta. The purpose of pregnancy is, after all, the production of child and mother as separate, autonomous beings. In light of that purpose, the placenta must appear as an (onto)logical monstrosity, a mythical Chimera, an incarnate contradiction that threatens the logical consistency of reality itself. This monstrosity appears concretely and strikingly in the bloody and shapeless mass which is the afterbirth. This grotesque mass cannot not be a skandalon (Greek for obstacle) for the tertium non datur of normal reality where the binary logic of A or not-A prevails: each being is one or the other, but not something in-between. Contrary to this binary logic, the placenta says insolently: tertium datur, there is a third between mother and fetus. Hence the placenta must disappear, must be buried or simply thrown away, in order to restore the logical consistency of our familiar reality. As the medium between mother and fetus, the placenta must have this monstrous character of being in-between, this incestuous fusion of fetal and maternal tissues (and in that sense, one can ask if not every medium of communication necessarily shares in this monstrosity). But for the very same reason, the placenta must necessarily disappear in the mutual mediation of mother and child as separate beings. In this mediation, the placenta is the vanishing mediator. Thus the “loss of the middle” – so deplored by conservatives – has here a positive function, constitutive of reality as such.

For the full text of this essay, see: Between mother and child: On the necessary monstrosity of the placenta

What is the Critique of Pure Interest?

How can I be free and yet do justice to the other? After all, to be free (autonomous) is to be the source of one’s own values. So how can I be autonomous without neglecting the intrinsic value of the other? Conversely, how can I respect the value of the other without losing my freedom by falling into heteronomy? In short, is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?

And is there a better term for this new form of freedom – this third between autonomy and heteronomy – than “pure interest”? For as has been pointed out by many others (notably Martin Heidegger and William Desmond), the original Latin verb “interesse” carries a nice ambiguity. Literally it means “being between” (“inter” = between, “esse” = being). From the Middle Ages to the present, however, the verb “interesse” gained a second meaning, namely (and obviously) that of having an interest, of finding someone or something interesting. The ‘nicety’ of this ambiguity is that it suggests how our ‘interests’ (stakes, desires, investments, passions) are always expressions of our inter-esse, our being between others. Thus we already start to see how the concept of interesse can be used to grasp that sought ofter new form of freedom, the third position between autonomy and heteronomy. Being between others, we are fundamentally influenced by them, our desires and passions are directed at them, our love and energy (and not to forget a lot of money!) are invested in them. One’s ‘free will’ is therefore always already tuned to and by the other: autonomy and heteronomy mingle. Here the ambiguity of “interest” helps us even further, since it can mean both private or self-interest (autonomy, egoism) and selfless interest in the other (heteronomy, altruism, the law of the Other – compare the Kantian “interesseloses Interese” towards beauty). With “pure interest” I want to designate the coincidence of all three aspects of interesse: 1) being in-between, 2) self-interest, 3) selfless interest in the other.

This pure interest is pure in three respects: a) ethical, b) transcendental, c) utopian:

a) It is pure in the ethical sense of being free from selfishness and domination of one by the other: in their being-in-between self and other exist only in relation to each other (their existence is the ‘happening’ between them) so that self-interest (autonomy) and the interest of the other (heteronomy) coincide.

b) It is pure in the transcendental (Kantian) sense: the relationship between one and other is ontologically prior to their empirical existence as different beings – thus their interrelation is the transcendental precondition their empirical existence.

c) It is pure in the utopian sense: the ethical ideal, although contained in the transcendental structure of being-in-between, is never fully reallized in practice, at the empirical level of human existence, where selfishness and domination are indeed the order of the day – in that sense, the actuality of human existence lags behind what it potentially is: thus pure interest remains pure, utopian potency.

In my view, this discrepancy between the transcendental and empirical levels of existence explains the utopian tendency in human history, the emergence and slow development of egalitarian relationships in human society – in short: from the Athenian ideal of democracy for some (not slaves) to the modern ideal of democracy for everyone to the postmodern ideal of anarchic pluralism...

The aim of the critique of pure interest is to further this utopian (messianic, revolutionary) development, that is, to fully unleash the powers of this pure potency. It is first and foremost a critique in the Kantian sense: an investigation into the transcendental interrelation that underlies the possibility of pure interest at the empirical level. The critique of pure interest, in other words, asks the question: How is pure interest empirically possible? How can autonomy and heteronomy go together to form a new form of freedom? In my view this question is crucial to the postmodern and (neo)conservative times we live in, dominated by economic and cultural crises and the growing importance of communication technology for the network societies in which we live, where to be connected (i.e. to be between) is everything.

My guideline – my original inspiration so to speak – in this critique of pure interest is what I call the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator. It hinges on the intuition that the transcendental precondition of pure interest should be sought in the vanishing mediator. I borrow this concept from (post)modern philospophers like Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, although I use it in my own rather idiosyncratic way. For me, the vanishing mediator is what makes the sought after third between autonomy and heteronomy possible. This third requires a reconciliation between self and other, such that the will of the self and the value of the other become mutually enforcing instead of being in conflict. And this reconciliation requires a mediator, a medium that provides the common ground on which self and other can meet. Now the Marxist-Christological wager of my critique is the claim that this mediator must be essentially vanishing in order to do its job. Otherwise the medium will remain between self and other, blocking their full coming together.

This is in fact a general truth about media: in order to function properly as media, they have to disappear in the process of mediation. Spoken language is a good example: it makes intersubjective communication possible because it disappears in the act of communiction. If it didn’t disappear, speech would literally become a wall of sound standing between us, directing attention to itself rather than to the notions and feelings of the communicating subjects. In a sense, then, the theory of the vanishing mediator is also a theory about communication and media in general. Yet my focus will mainly be on the vanishing mediator as a medium between the divergent interests of self and other, making a third between autonomy and heteronomy possible.

So what does this have to do with Marxism and Christology?

First of all, notice that this view of the vanishing mediator finds its most paradigmatic expression in the messianic figure of Christ as the divine mediator. Christ had to disappear from the midst of men, that is, he had to die on the cross, in order to reconcile mankind with God and with itself.

So is this simply a believer’s blog? Do I offer nothing more than faith, albeit helped by the handmaiden of philosophy? Do I make religion the master of rationality? Am I nothing more than one of those dangerous and potentially violent fundamentalists?

Not at all… Well, at least that’s not my intention. Note that my quest is for a third between autonomy and heteronomy (in other words: this elusive ‘third’ is my Holy Grail). And this places my undertaking squarely between autonomous, critical thought on the one hand and heteronomous, dogmatic faith on the other. That is, on my quest for the vanishing mediator I have to straddle the fine line (or war zone) between rationality and religion, between concept and intuition, between critique and domatism, between cold logic and emotion, between head and heart, between yang and yin, between modernity and pre-/postmodernity… Exactly how this balancing act will work out is something I am anxious to find out. Hence this blog.

And hence my use of the nice oxymoron “Christology” – a term that combines the autonomous rationality of logic with the heteronomy of faith in Christ (after all, “Christology” means the logos of Christ). This conjunction of rationality and religion is precisely the mode my investigation must take, as I explained above. Of course, the same oxymoron can be found in the term “theology” but obviously my focus on Christ implies the primacy of “Christology”.

But why a Marxist Christology?

Well, first of all, notice that my problem statement – “Is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?” – is decidedly dialectical. The reconciliation of the opposition between self and other (or thesis and antithesis) is nothing more or less than the core business of the dialectical method as practiced by Hegel and Marx. In fact, the very term “mediation” derives from the dialectical tradition in philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx (all four philosophers will figure prominently on this blog).

By developing a Christology of the vanishing mediator, I am decidedly on the side of the materialist Marx as opposed to the idealist Hegel. As an idealist, Hegel wanted to think the Absolute (that is, God) as subject, not as object (see Hegel’s preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit). In contrast, the Christology of the vanishing mediator aims to understand the Absolute neither as subject (as Hegel did) nor as object (as Hegel accused Spinoza of doing) but rather as what happens between subject and object (or self and other). In this perspective, dialectical negativity – which Hegel saw as the fundamental activity of the subject towards the object – turns out to be an autonomous process that constitutes and therefore precedes both self and other. Hegel’s notorious negation of the negation can thus be reworked as the self-negation of this absolute negativity (in Christological terms: the self-sacrifice of God) which thereby functions as the vanishing mediator in the meeting of self and other. As I hope to make clear in the rest of this blog, this is all in line with Marx’s turning inside out (Umstulpüng) of Hegel’s dialectic.

But in order to give a preliminary clarification of the Marxist aspect of my Christology, it is perhaps better to focus on the ethics that follows from it. This is an ethics of imitatio Christi, the passionate imitation of Christ as vanishing mediator. Following Christ, we should spend ourselves, give ourselves completely as vanishing mediators for those around us. More generally, we should let all vanishing mediators do their job, that is to say: we should let them vanish. Unfortunately, due to its greed and idolatry, mankind (and Western man in particular) is often unable to let go, to accept loss as an inevitable, necessary part of reality. We hold on to the vanishing mediator, turning it into our possession, thereby frustrating its proper function. People are generally unreconciled because they make the mediator their private property, which thus becomes a stumbling block rather than a reconciler. For many centuries the Church has done this to Christ himself, unable to accept the vanishing nature of Christ, turning him into an idol justifying the Church’s imperial claims. But in modern times this sickness of mankind, the inability to let go of the vanishing mediator, has taken the form of capitalism. For in modern social life, money is the means of exchange, the mediator par excellence (next to language). And there is nothing wrong with that as long as money is allowed to do its job: to vanish from one’s pocket during one’s exchanges with others. But in capitalism, money is accumulated in capital. The vanishing mediator no longer vanishes but keeps returning for ever growing profits. Thus robbed of its proper function, the mediator adds to the strife among men instead of solving it. Hence our duty to spend ourselves with revolutionary passion, to give ourselves as the vanishing mediators of modern social life by breaking the stiffling power of capital. In that sense, Marx was the greatest imitator of Christ in modern times!

This Marxist commitment adds a second meaning to my critique of pure interest, which is not just a critique in the Kantian sense (an investigation into the transcendental condition of freedom between autonomy and heteronomy) but also a Marxist critique of pure interest in the economic sense, namely the return on investment.

In my future posts, I will publish fragments that elucidate different aspects of my Marxist Christology. I have been working on this theory for more or less ten years now, originally inspired by the Dutch philosopher Henk Oosterling and his musings on “the between” (though he would probably recoil in horror if he saw the direction I am taking with this concept). Some of the other thinkers that inspired me were Martin Buber on the dialogical between, Heidegger on the ontological between, Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on the agonistic between, Voegelin and Desmond on the Platonic between (metaxy), Kant on imagination as the mediator between understanding and sensibility, Derrida on différance, René Girard on the scapegoat mechanism, Sloterdijk on intersubjective spheres, Plato on dialogue, Aristotle on topos and middle term, Žižek obviously though I find his treatments of the vanishing mediator to be far from systematically satisfying (which holds for all of his thought), and last but not least Hegel and Marx. All these philosophers (and many others) will be discussed in future posts. Finally I would also like to mention Taoism as major source of influence.

The critique of pure interest – that is, the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator – is still in statu nascendi. This blog traces its development. Hence, the fragmentary nature of what I am about to offer on this blog. It is systematic, but it is not a system. In a sense what comes out on this blog is a procession of the many turts I have accumulated over the years… Not a very refreshing image, but to the point nevertheless. Shit is one of the most important vanishing mediators in human life. No good metabolism can do without it. In that sense Christ can be defined as divine Shit…

Marx on "sensuous activity"

The notion of praxis enables Marx to conceive of the interrelation between human subject and material object as a fundamental, ontological interaction, in which neither is primary and on which both are dependent. It is this ontological orientation that allows Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach to refer to “the thing, reality” itself as praxis, as the realm of sensory activity in which man and nature determine each other reciprocally. Thus the relation between man and nature (subject and object) should, according to Marx, be understood as an internal relation, where the relata do not exist independently, in contrast to an external relation, where the relata influence each other alternately while actually remaining separate. This ontological significance can also be seen from Marx’s notion of “sensuous activity” if it is taken in the epistemological sense of sensory perception. One could say that this epistemological sense is integrated in the comprehensive social-practical sense of “sensuous activity” as the human collaboration in working upon nature. After all, in his labor man also senses himself and his encounter with the world: he sees his objects and tools, he experiences fatigue and the resistance of matter but also the pleasure of his activity and the beauty (or ugliness) of the worked upon object. This esthetic aspect of labor is important to Marx: truly human, ie unalienated labor is for him as much artistic activity as it is the satisfaction of basic human needs, and the unalienated product of labor is ultimately also a work of art. Thus aisthesis (Greek: sensory experience) forms an integral part of Marx’s notion of praxis.

The ontological ambiguity of sensory qualities
So what about the ontological interaction between subject and object that occurs in praxis? Does this also occur in the aisthesis of sensory perception? In fact, it does. This is exactly what Kant tried to explain when he focused on the interaction of receptivity and spontaneity in sensation, where a fusion takes place of subjective activity and passivity before the object. This fusion is shown in the ambiguous nature of sensory qualities such as color, sound, smell, taste, warmth and tactility. On the one hand, such “qualia” are inherently subjective because they exist only in a subject’s perceptual awareness of them. Thus Berkeley’s idealistic formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) surely applies to qualia, which is the reason why the philosophical tradition speaks of them as mere “secondary qualities” (as opposed to an object’s primary qualities, ie those that exist independently of the perceiving subject). Yet, on the other hand, qualia also have something undeniably objective about them, bound as they are to some external object whose properties they are (thus we say: the rose is red, the water is warm). Thus qualia are like a joint membrane between subject and object where they meet and enter into each other. William Desmond, the author of Being and the Between, is one of the very few philosophers who notice this strange ontological status of qualia between subjective and objective. He writes: “secondary qualities have an unyielding equivocity, since their ontological status is finally uncertain. For this status is distributed between “something” in the thing itself, its powers, and the relativity of that “something” to mind.”

Marx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.

White page anxiety

Is the blank white page – as the abyss of meaninglessness into which the blocked writer falls – not a perfect image (an imageless image) of the nothing in contrast to which something can appear? Is the tumbling of the blocked writer into this white abyss not a kind of death, a ‘symbolic’ death, in which on the one hand the authorial ego disintegrates, but which at the same time opens up in the writer a radical freedom – the freedom to create sense out of the nothing of non-sense? And the writer who in this way conquers his writer's block, precisely by embracing it, by writing from the depths of the abyss of meaninglessness that lies before him – is this liberated writer than not also an accomplice of Being? Doesn’t his disintegrated ego become an empty space – as a kind of internalization of the white page – in which reality can come to appearance? Doesn’t his writing then coincide with the ontological productivity of Being itself? And doesn’t this explain the pure desire to write, to write for the sake of writing, as a desire to participate in Being, to let the blank page be the place where the Event of reality can take place, no matter what happens exactly?

The attraction of the abyss
In the light of these questions there is a remarkable agreement between writer’s block and what Sartre calls the “attraction of the abyss”. Sartre describes the well-known experience of standing in front of a gaping depth (e.g. before a ravine in the mountains or on the roof of a tall building) and having the seemingly irrational inclination to go to the edge, to defy the fear and vertigo and to look straigt into the deep – an inclination which can even take the frightening form of an urge to actually throw oneself into the depth. The abyss repels but it also draws us. Thus we go back and forth, oscillating between safe distance and deadly closeness. Sartre explains this attraction of the abyss in a semi Heideggerian (for mainly Hegelian) way, such that it is our own groundless freedom that attracts us in the abyss: by defying death, we prove our freedom, our radical independence from all external authority, even the authority of biological life as such. In a more Heideggerian way we can understand the attraction of the abyss as not just revolving around our freedom but also – in relation to that freedom – as revolving around the experience of Being itself, of the miraculous fact that there is something rather than nothing. In the liberating light of threatening death, our being in the world here and now appears so much more intense. This intensity of the experience of Being – this ontological “Steigerung des Lebens” (Nietzsche) – is the ‘object’ of our desire as we approach the edge of the abyss.

It is, I think, the same desire that binds the blocked writer to his blank page. His suffering is exactly the oscillation described by Sartre, between revulsion and rapprochement, between getting up and walking away from the white abyss on his desk and getting back to it in order to finally write something – the oscillation between the apparently sane thought “Isn’t it better to call it quits? For I have nothing to say” and the seemingly aburd thought “I can’t stop, for I have nothing to say”. What repels the blocked writer in the white page, the senseless nothing that emerges out of it, is also what attracts him, because the Being of beings is experienced all the more lively in contrast to the nothing. This is one of the paradoxes of being a writer, of being someone who experiences his “Steigerung des Lebens” by withdrawing from the bustling life (the vita activa), retiring into a lonely room, reducing all his movements to the the minimal movement of a pen on paper or fingers on a keyboard. Behind this solitary confinement in a room, however, lies an even greater paradox, namely that the “Steigerung des Lebens” in writing becomes that much greater the more the act of writing itself fails, the more the writer runs aground in writer’s block. The more intense the blank page as the abyss of meaninglessness reveals itself to the writer, the more intense his experience of Being becomes. The more blocked he is, the more ‘in touch’ with the Event he becomes. The less he can say, the more his words express the ontological productivity of Being as such.

A clearing in a forest of letters
Heidegger describes thinking about Being as a Holzweg, a dead end ‘wood’-road through a forest, made by foresters and leading to an empty spot, a clearing (Lichtung) where the trees have been felled. Heidegger’s point is that ontological thinking is a similarly dead-end road, in the sense that it does not lead to rational conclusions about ‘things’ (beings) that can be put into words. Ontological thought rather results in a conceptual void or silence in discourse. Like the empty, bright spot in the forest makes – by way of contrast – the dark, dense forest all the more present, so the silent void in which ontological thinking results makes the experience of Being all the more emphatic. But the writer who runs aground in writer’s block – isn’t he travelling a similar dead-end Holzweg? The blank page at which the blocked writer arrives after struggling through a forest of text – is this not also a kind of clearing? And here of course I do not primarily mean the clearing left by the actual trees that had to be felled to make the paper possible. Although that’s surely a nice image of what I mean.

Communism as a loss of center? “...we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.” This reminds me of the famous thesis of the heretical Dominican and priest Giordano Bruno, to the effect that in an infinite circle the center is everywhere. Impressed by Copernicus' discovery that the universe revolves not around the earth but the earth around the sun, and on the basis of the hypothesis that our sun is only one star among many other stars, Bruno arrived at the idea that the universe is infinite and consists of many solar systems similar to our own. To compensate for the earthly loss of the center position as it were, Bruno implied that the earth is still in a sense the center, because “we can assert with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.” (1584)

Isn’t this a comforting thought? The center is here and now. I am the center of the universe. Everything revolves around me. And yet everything revolves not around me but around you and him and her and them... At the same time the center is always elsewhere. Wasn’t it because of this revolutionary idea that Bruno was burned as heretic at the stake? Officially, he had to burn for the heresies of docetism (the denial of Jesus' humanity) and pantheism. But didn’t his Copernican heliocentrism and decenterment of the earth play some rol in his condemnation by the Church, as is often suspected? That the earth – and hence man – is not the center of creation was something the Church could not accept. Thus, however, the Church ignored the essential ambiguity of Bruno's thesis that in an infinite circle the center is everywhere – so always elsewhere, but also always here. The center position is shared with others – and that's exactly what the Church could not and still can not do: share the centre. Or is my reading of Bruno's thesis too hippie-like, too multi-cultural, too positive, too optimistic, too communist (shared ownership of the medium)? For how can the center be both here and elsewhere? Is this not the same thing as saying that there is no center at all? Isn’t Bruno’s thesis the beginning of the modern “loss of the center” which in later centuries has been and still is so regretted by conservatism? Because - oh Lord! – without a meaningful, powerful, commanding, controlling transcendent center so-called “permissive society” degenerates into the chaos of anarchy! Just read Yeats’ The Second Coming:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The empty throne in modern art In fact, I never really understood the conservative jeremiad about the loss of the center. Of course, I also see that our society is in serious difficulty: on the one hand there is shocking self-enrichment, on the other hand there is poverty, hunger, war, alienating individualism, loss of self in drink and drugs... “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” indeed. But is this due to the loss of the center? I doubt it – and I doubt it especially in the context of Christian conservatism, where the topos of the lost center originates. One locus classicus in this regard is the book Verlust der Mitte (1948) by the art historian Hans Sedlmayr. In this book he analyzes how the central position of man – religiously founded in the divine status of the man Jesus – slowly disappeared from modern art. Was every art form until the 18th century part of a sacred Gesamtkunstwerk in which divine man occupied the central place (a Gesamtkunstwerk formed by the complex of church and palace), in the following centuries the various art forms gained a life of their own: they became ‘autonomous’ by breaking away from the sacred and humanistic context of Christianity. Harking back to Blaise Pascal – “Leaving the middle means leaving humanity” – Sedlmayer analyses this development as a dehumanization of art. From then on, the inhuman comes to the fore in modern art: the indifference of nature and matter, the rapacious development of technology and industry, the self-reflective and abstract forms of autonomous art. In this way, Sedlemayer says, art reflects a broader social process of loss of the center, the downfall of Christian humanism. Art is not able to reverse that process (with respect to underlying social processes, art is powerless). Nevertheless, according to Sedlmayr, modern art has the crucial task of keeping the memory of the lost center alive for future generations: “Then at least the awareness must stay alive, that the lost center is the throne left empty for the perfect human, the Godman.”

I must admit that I find this a beautiful, fascinating image: the lost center in modern art as an empty throne – a throne that by its very emptiness refers to the missing king. But it is also this image which for me manifests the paradox of Christian conservatism. For the lost center as the empty throne of the divine man? Is this not par excellence the empty cross, referring to the removed, dead body of the Godman Christ? Is this divine throne not Golgotha, the “mountain of skulls” on which the crucified Jesus throned, crowned with a wreath of thorns? (And this in turn reminds me of the negative theology of the Indian logician Adi Shankara, who paints a picture of Nirguna-Brahman as a God without attributes, sitting on a mountain of negations. Isn’t Golgotha that mountain? Isn’t the cross of Jesus precisely the cross of negation, referring back to the crossed out being of his mortal flesh?) A picture means a thousand words, they say. Is this not true here? Doesn’t the picture of Golgotha make clear in one stroke that the center as the throne of the divine man must be empty, that this emptiness necessarily follows from the core of the Christian doctrine? For was the sacrifice of Christ as Mediator not necessary to eliminate human sinfulness, to reconcile man with God and thereby with his fellow man? Is the loss of the center in this sense not precisely the condition of the unity of the Christian community, its unification in the Holy Spirit?

Hegel on Christ In this regard Christian conservatives should have listened better to one of their heroes, namely Hegel (who could sublate all earthly contradictions in the thought of the Absolute Spirit, thereby in practice leaving everything as it was, to the delight of the Prussian regime). In the Geist des Christentums Hegel explains that as long as Jesus lived among his followers, he formed a “dividing wall” (“Scheidewand”) on the one hand between the followers themselves, and on the other between them and God:

“As long as he lived among them, they were only believers; for they were not based on themselves; Jesus was their teacher and master, an individual center on which they depended; they did not yet have their own, independent life; the Spirit of Jesus ruled them; but after his removal this objectivity, this dividing wall between them and God, also fell away; and the Spirit of God was able to revive her whole being.”

In this regard Hegel was undoubtedly one of the German children of Luther, who deprived the Catholic priest of his mediator function in order to make the relationship between believer and God im-mediate. In this Protestant sense, Jesus is portrayed by Hegel as “the good priest” who makes himself superfluous and disappears into the relation between God and man (in other words: the only good priest is a dead priest, or in terms of Yeats: the only center is a good dead center). But one would underestimate the importance for Hegel of Jesus as vanishing mediator if one sees here only the influence of Luther. In fact, the concept of the vanishing mediator is an intrinsic part of Hegel’s dialectic, which is after all the atoning mediation of opposites. To truly bring opposites together, the mediator must – like Jesus – disappear from their midst. This is clearly argued by Herbert Scheit in his book Geist und Gemeinde: Religion und Politik von Zum Verhältnis bei Hegel (where I encountered this link between Hegel’s dialectic and his conception of Jesus for the first time). Concerning the above passage of Hegel on the necessity of Jesus’ disappearance, Scheit notes:

“This applies to every mediation, if it really wants to earn that name: mediation implies not just a third, a middle, it sublates itself in the unit of the mediated ones, which is then a “mediated immediacy”.”

Vinculum vincolorum For Hegel, then, the goal of every mediation is what he calls “mediated immediacy”, the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. In that sense one can say, referring to Hegel, that the vanishing mediator is a universal given, or rather a universal absence, a disappearance that is ‘active’ in every process of mediation. In the light of this universality of the vanishing mediator, should we not also say – to return to Bruno’s thesis – that the center of the universe is not everywhere but nowhere, as a constitutive loss that connects everything? In that respect it seems significant that physicists refer to the four basic forces underlying the universe (gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) preferably as “interactions”. This is because the “forces of nature” alsways manifest themselves as interactions between objects, reciprocal mediations in which energy is exchanged. If we take the idea of the vanishing mediator seriously, should we not say that these interactions, which form the causal network of the universe, presuppose just as many vanishing mediators? And should we not also say that these mysterious media are as many incarnations of God, the dying middle that holds everything together, precisely through his death? Do we not arrive here at a Christological cosmology, in which Christ – the dying God – acts as the universal mediator? As Paul says about Christ: “In him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1: 17)

This is admittedly not a very original idea. To my knowledge, a similar cosmological interpretation of Christianity can already be found in the work of the French Catholic-pragmatist philosopher Maurice Blondel, who in this context spoke of “panchristism” – an idea that only rarely shows up in his published work, however, and exercised little influence on other thinkers (an important exception is Teilhard de Chardin). From the little that Blondel has written about it, it becomes clear that he assigns to Christ a cosmic function: without the intervention of the Incarnate Word, nothing in the universe can have a stable existence. More interesting than Blondel’s rather vague and inchoate ideas about panchristism, however, is his reference to Leibniz in this context. Blondel used Leibniz’s notion of the vinculum substantiale – the substantial chain – to denote the cosmic, connecting function of Christ, who is the vinculum vincolorum, the chain of chains.

The God of Leibniz and the surplus value of Blondel For Leibniz, the vinculum substantiale is the extra relationship added by God to a collection of monads to forge them together into one substance. The fact that Leibniz had to resort to such an emergency measure – for that’s what it is, of course – has to do with a peculiar aspect (a weakness, if you ask me) of his philosophy, the monadology. On the one hand, one finds in Leibniz the famous thesis that every monad reflects all other monads. In that sense, every monad exists only in relation to others, and for Leibniz this interrelationship constitues the harmony of the universe. Thus Leibniz: “Now this coherence or congruence of all created things with each other […] means that each simple substance has relations that express all others, and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe.” On the other hand, one finds in him the equally famous assertion that the monads are windowless, because they are the basic units of reality and are as such timeless, unchangeable and therefore closed off from one another, incapable of mutual influence (because that would imply change in the monades). “The Monads have no windows through which anything can go in or out.” The difficult question then arises, of course, how – if communication between monads is impossible - they can nevertheless stand to each other in harmonious relationships, to mirror each other and form connections in compex substances. Here Leibniz invokes God as the solution (always useful, such a miracle worker). According to Leibniz, it is the Super-Monad God who establishes all relations between the monads. As he writes in the Discourse on metaphysics: “Hence God alone brings about liaison and communication of substances, and it is through him that the phenomena of the ones meet and agree with those of the others and consequently that there is reality in our perceptions.” In short: God is the universal medium of communication! But doesn’t Leibniz make a category mistake when he interprets this mediating God as a Super-Monad? Although God is by His omnipotence distinguished from all other monads, He basically remains for Leibniz a monad among monads, their primus inter pares. Should we not, on the basis of the universality of the vanishing mediator, say that God can perform this mediator function only by escaping the order of the monads? Should we not make an ontological distinction here between on the one hand the ontic order of (complex) substances and on the other the transcendent order of the vanishing mediator, which is constitutively lacking from the ontic order? Isn’t this the surplus value of Blondel's panchristism, his identification of Leibniz’s vinculum substantiale with Christ, the Godman who died on the cross?

For the references to the relevant literature in this essay, see: A rather associative and inquisitive journey to the dead center of the earth (and beyond)

Medium as milieu, milieu as medium

Of course, language is not our only medium. We relate to others by means of numerous media, from the light that allows us to see and be seen to the clothes through which we express our public personalities, from the music that synchronizes dancers to money as a medium of exchange between individuals... In this respect, the postmodern, mediatized network society is nothing new. Digial media are merely the high-tech continuation of the typically human, mediated relation to the other. As embodied, sensory beings, we need to rely on material means in our dealings with others. This contact is never direct, never im-mediate: there is no telepathy. The communication of ‘spiritual’ contents (meanings, intentions) is always materially mediated. The only direct contact possible for us is exactly the contact with the material means or medium through which we reach for something or someone else. The contact with the medium itself cannot be mediated, at the risk of an infinite regression of media (which would make mediated contact with something else entirely impossible). Marx formulates this insight with respect to the technical means of production as follows: “The object of which the laborer takes immediate control [during the proces if production, PS] is not the worked upon object [Arbeitsgegenstand], but the means of production [Arbeitsmittel].” In this sense we can speak of the immediacy of technology to humans.

Immediacy of the medium
But this unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium makes it clear that an immediate contact is strictly speaking impossible. For in the unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium, the medium itself is not the goal of the contact, i.e. the theme of the contact-seeking attention: this intended theme is the other to be reached through the medium. The medium itself is indeed immediately ‘given’ but it is also unthematically ‘given’ to the subject using the medium. The immediate contact with the medium remains unconscious. Conscious contact, however, is always materially mediated. Once the subject becomes aware of his contact with the medium, it no longer functions as a medium but as an object of conscious attention – an object in turn given to consciousness through another medium. A blind man, for example, uses his cane to feel the environment, and in that sense the cane – qua medium – is an extension of his feeling hand and arm, like an antenna, with which he has an immediate but unthematic contact. As soon as the blind man becomes aware of his cane, however, at that moment the immediate contact with it stops and his hand becomes the new medium through which he feels the cane. In turn, the hand stops being the sensitive medium as soon as the blind man tries to feel it with his other hand: the first hand becomes an object, the second hand becomes the feeling medium through which that object is given. In this way one’s conscious contact with one's surroundings – even with one’s own objectified body – is always mediated by a more primary environment, an unthematically given “immediate milieu” so to speak, namely the material medium through which we perceive and interact with others. In the first place that immediate environment – that mediating milieu – is the ek-static body, the unobjectified body that stands out toward the world (Greek: “ek” = out, “stasis” = stand). Our focus on the world – or rather on the other in the world – always starts from the looking, feeling, tasting, smelling and hearing body. “Consciousness is”, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body.” As Merleau-Ponty has shown with abundant detail, that focus on the world through the body always involves a hiddenness, a retreat, a “recess of the body” in unconscious immediacy. The body as the primary medium is never object of conscious attention. As such the ek-static body underlies all the other media we use. Obviously, we use external media always through our bodies: we press our ear to the mobile phone, we move the mouse with our hand, we focus our eyes on the screen. In this sense we can say with McLuhan that media are extensions of our bodies, like the cane of the blind man is an extension of his hand scanning the environment. This partly in the superficial sense that we greatly extend the reach of our bodies by using media: microscopes allow us to see the very small and near, telescopes allow us to see the very large and distant, cranes allow us to lift enormous weights, computers allow us to extend our memory and computing power...

Instrumentalized flesh
But media are also extensions of our body in the more interesting sense that the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body is passed on to the external media we use. The external media share in the unconsciousness of the medial body. The cane, with which the blind man scans his environment, is not itself thematically given but ‘merges’ with the scanning hand. The mobile phone ‘merges’ with the ear through which we hear the other. The mouse ‘merges’ with the hand with which we navigate the computer screen. Even the light, when we see objects, is an extension of the eye: as the medium of visibility, the light shares in the unthematic immediacy of the eye itself – the light that makes everything visible, remains itself invisible and is ‘dark’ so to speak. In this way we can understand Marx’s claim that the entire world as man’s means of living [Lebensmittel] is his “inorganic body”. Merleau-Ponty speaks in this regard of “the flesh of the world”, where “flesh” is synonymous with the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body. In that sense, all the media through which we relate to an other – including light as the medium of visibility – are part of this flesh: the light is luminous flesh, the crane is mechanical flesh, the computer and the mobile phone and the iPad and such are digtal flesh… This ‘mediating flesh’ – the ‘meat of the medium’ – constitutes our immediate environment, our milieu. One could even argue that this is the correct definition of “milieu” as such, namely to be our mediating flesh. A milieu, after all, is an environment in which one is immersed, it surrounds and embeds. And the primary surrounding is the immediate environment, i.e. the flesh of the ek-static body and its mediating extensions. The milieu, then, is first and foremost the environment of media in which one is immersed. From this perspective, the statement above regarding language – that the medium is the milieu – can also be chiastically reversed: the milieu is essentially medium. The above formula of “mediating milieu” is therefore strictly speaking a pleonasm. The milieu is – to repeat an earlier insight – not just a middle position in that we live in the middle of it, but also in the sense that it is our medium and as such is the middle between us and the other. That we live in a milieu, then, means something like: we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.