The fetus is no Fichtean: Contra Sloterdijk’s subjectivism

“Hearing and responding to the mother’s voice are the first steps towards subjectivity in the fetus, to intentionality, the subjective focus on something.” (See: On the female body as sound box) Here begins an epistemological operation that conditions all forms of consciousness: the differentiation of figure and background (as it is called in in Gestalt psychology and phenomenology). The intentional focus on an object always involves a non-intentional awareness of a background against which the ‘figure’ (Gestalt) of the object appears, like actors standing out against the background of a theater stage. As the actors command attention, the stage setting recedes to the background of attention. Without this receding background, no object can appear on the foreground, in the ‘spotlight’ of conscious attention. The same holds for the mother’s voice: it is able to attract the attention of the fetus because the ambient noise – the fetus’s auditory milieu so to speak – recedes into the background. The soprano of the mother’s voice contrasts with the monotonous sound of the flowing blood, the thumping of the heart, the gurgling of the digestive system – just as in music the higher notes of the melody and solo soar above the rhythmic bass (it is therefore a legitimate and interesting question to what extent the basis for human musicality is laid in the womb). The maternal milieu of the fetus is therefore – qua medium of the mother’s voice – necessarily a vanishing mediator: something that recedes to the background so that something else may appear.

A precocious case of auditory intentionality?

The nihilation of the background: Heidegger vs. Sartre

Sloterdijk describes this primordial differentiation of figure (the mother's voice) and background (the uterine ambient noise) as the fetus’s first act of subjectivity, or at least as an act that underlies the subjectivity of the fetus:

“Turning a deaf ear and listening are original modes of pre-subjective ability… With this primordial choice between devotion and rejection, the first distinction in communicative behavior comes into force.” (Sphären I, p.512)

With this subjectivist description of the primordial differentiation of figure and background as the fetus’s first intentional act (“primordial choice”, “Urwahl”), however, Sloterdijk ignores an issue which should be familiar to him as a phenomenologist from the Heideggerian school, namely the dispute dispute between Sartre and Heidegger in their respective interpretations of the figure-background differentiation.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre offers – based more on Husserl and Hegel than on Heidegger – a strongly subjectivist interpretation of this differentiation as an active 'nihilation’ of the background by the human subject. Sartre's phenomenological basis for this position is set out in the famous and wonderfully Parisian example of ‘the café where Pierre is not’:

“When I enter this café to search for Pierre, there is formed a synthetic organization of all the objects in the café, on the ground of which Pierre is given as about to appear. This organization of the café as the ground is an original nihilitation.” (Being and Nothingness, Philosophical Library, New York 1956, p.9).

The café where Pierre is not

The intentional directedness of the human subject on an object (e.g. Pierre) always involves such a ‘nihilation’ of the environment (the café) in which the object must appear: the environment must recede into the background for the object to appear up front. According to Sartre, it is man wo accomplishes this nihilation. Thus “man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.” (Idem, p.24)

In the Letter on Humanism Heidegger discusses Sartre’s subjectivist interpretation of the background nihilation, criticizing it as a prime example of the modern humanistic overestimation of the subject. According to the ‘anti-humanist’ Heidegger, the ‘humanist’ Sartre (who did indeed say that “Existentialism is a humanism”) does not understand that the human subject only becomes a subject – i.e. an intentional being, focused on an object – through the nihiliation of the background against the backdrop of which the object can appear. One could say that this Heideggerian point is exactly what is shown by the example of the mother’s voice calling the fetal subject: the fetus only becomes an intentional subject through the nihilition of the uterine background noise thanks to which the mother’s voice can attract its attention. In general terms: a subject’s intentional directedness at an object becomes possible through this nihilation, which can therefore not be an act by the subject. Rather, as Heidegger argues, this nihilation is an ‘autonomous’ proces (or rather an heteronomous proces, since it subverts the subject’s autonomy): it is an anonymous ‘happening’ that constitutively precedes human subjectivity. Thus nothingness is not brought into the world by man, as Sartre says. According to Heidegger, it is exactly the reverse: nothingness brings man into the world.

Martin Heidegger

For Heidegger, Being is the originally receding background that makes the world appear to man and which thus makes man himself appear as directedness at the world (Dasein as being-in-the-world). For Heidegger, then, Being is in a sense identical to Nothing, as it is the original nihilation that makes everything appear. Hence Heidegger’s notorious formula: “The Nothing nothings.” Heidegger’s ontological distinction, the difference between Being and beings, should therefore be understood in the context of Heidegger’s de-subjectivization of the figure-background differentiation, which becomes manifest in his critique of Sartre. This desubjectivization was precisely one of his innovations in relation to phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, where the notion of figure-background differentiation originated. Because of this desubjectivization, Heidegger could think the Being of beings in negative terms such as absence, disappearance and forgetting – as the original “hiddenness” that underlies the “un-hiddenness” of beings. Truth as the dis-closure of beings, what the Greeks called alethei, thus presupposes a primordial forgetting (lethe).

Peter Sloterdijk

Uterine noise as incarnation of Being?
Heidegger’s insight into the constitutive importance of negativity for the intentional relation between subject and object is surprisingly absent from Sloterdijk’s phenomenology of the sphere-forming relationship between the subject and his significant other. This becomes especially clear, as we have seen, in Sloterdijk’s subjectivist description of the appearance of the mother's voice to the fetus through the active ‘nihilation’ of the ambient noise in the uterus. According to Sloterdijk: 

“the field of insignificance [i.e. the background of uterine ambient noise, PS] comes into existence first through the turning away of the ear from the annoying presences of noise; these are thereby “posited” [“gesetzt”] as non-informative or indifferent and are subsequently excluded from wakeful perception.” (Sphären I, 513)

But – to repeat the Heideggerian point – precisely because the fetus’s first hearing of the mother’s voice is the beginning of its intentional subjectivity, this nihilation of “the field of insignificance” cannot be an intentional act by the fetus. The receding into the background of the uterine noise first presents the mother’s voice to the fetus, who is thereby lured into subjectivity, that is, into intentional directedness at the voice. It can therefore not be the case that the “field of insignificance” arises only after the “turning away of the ear” which thereby “posits” the field as “non-informative or indifferent”, as if we were dealing here with a Fichtean “arch-positing” (“Ursetzung”) of Self and non-Self – a Fichtean connotation that is also evoked by Sloterdijk’s use in this context of the terms “primordial choice” (“Urwahl”, p.512) and “primal act of the self” (“Urhandlung des Selbst”, p.513). To be sure, there is no ‘Fichtean fetus’ – the fetus is not some ‘absolute I’ who conjures out of himself by means of negation the very (m)other in which it can come into existence…

           Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Such a relapse into the subjectivism of German idealism can, of course, not be Sloterdijk’s intention. Hence the quotation marks around “posited” in Sloterdijk’s claim that the uterine ambient noise is “…“posited” as non-informative” (p.513). The quotation marks obviously indicate that the positing involved should not be understood in its traditional, philosophical, idealistic sense, as the self’s positing of the non-self through negation. But how then should we understand the nihilative ‘positing’ of the uterine ambient noise? If the nihilation of the uterine noise can not be an act by the fetus, who or what else brings about this nihilation? Should we here – following Heidegger's ontological critique of Sartre’s humanism – speak of Being hiding itself in order to make the mother’s voice present to the fetus?

But if so, doesn’t this then have the embarrassing – that is, embarrassing from a Heideggerian perspective – consequence that Being here ‘appears’ in the ontic guise of a specific being, namely in the guise of the ambient noise in the uterus? Doesn’t this violate the strictness of Heidegger’s ontological distinction between Being and beings? Is it possible for Being to ‘do its job’ in the form of a being, albeit a being that disappears as a vanishing mediator? Does Being need to be incarnated in vanishing mediators?

The call of the mother: Towards a feminist Christology (part 1)

The fetal awakening “During the course of things one comes to self-awareness. Like a sleepwalker wakes up during his walk as he bumps up against something...” (See my first post.) That’s obviously an exaggeration. In reality, man’s coming to self-awareness is a gradual process that begins in the womb and only peaks in late adulthood (to fizzle out and die in the latter part of life, at least for most people). Likewise, language – as the milieu in which consciousness is rooted – is something you slowly grow into. As I said, it starts in the womb. Hearing and responding to the mother’s voice is one of the first steps towards subjectivity in the fetus, to intentionality, the subjective focus on something. As Peter Sloterdijk writes: “In listening [to the mother’s voice, PS] the ear accomplishes the primal act of the self: All later acts of I can, I want, I come necessarily hook up with this first movement of spontaneous life… This going-outside-itself is the first gesture of the subject… It accomplishes the birth of intentionality from the spirit of listening…” (Sphären I, pp.513-515) There is also an imprinting of the mother’s voice in the fetal brain, enabling the child after birth to recognize the mother’s voice and thereby laying the basis for vocal interaction with the mother and thus for linguistic competence as such (in this context Sloterdijk speaks strikingly of “acquired acoustic universals” and “Platonic ideas of hearing” – Sphären I, p.518).

The good Matrix In this sense one can say that the mother’s voice calls the fetal subject into being. Should we not say then that God – as the one who calls man into being – is primarily a woman? From a psycho-genetic perspective, that seems a lot more obvious than the Judeo-Christian identification of God as man, as father and lord. The born child recognizes in the voice of its mother the voice that revived it in the womb. The voice of the mother evokes in the child – in a quasi-Platonic anamnesis (compare Sloterdijk on the Platonic ideas of hearing) – the memory of its original milieu, the womb, the swaying warm darkness where it came into being and grew until it was ready to come into the world. This arch-memory is reinforced by drinking at the breast. The sucking child feels the warmth of its mother’s body and hears again her heartbeat, the reassuring basso continuo that accompanied the maternal soprano, singing the child awake in the womb. And while the mother’s milk satisfies the child and lures it into sleep, the child feels again – always too short – that “oceanic” arch-feeling (Freud), that being one with the nurturing milieu from which it emerged. Isn’t then the uterus the real “divine milieu” (Teilhard de Jardin)? If man has a natural conception of God – or perhaps better: an intuition, a pre-linguistic sense of God – must this natural God not be a woman, the Great Mother, the Matrix? The early 19th century theologian and philosopher Schleiermacher saw the “feeling of absolute dependence” as the experiential basis of all religion. But isn’t this feeling first and foremost the oceanic feeling of the fetus in the caring milieu of the mother, whose voice calls the fetal subject into being?

The palimpsest of Genesis How strange – how nightmarish – is it in this regard to read Genesis, the original text of the Jewish and by extension the Christian tradition? The voice that calls man and all of creation into being (“And God said, Let there be light ...”) is here not a melodious female voice, but a heavy, menacing male voice, the voice of the Father and the Lord, the jealous God of vengeance. In light of the natural conception of God as female, reading Genesis is like looking at a beautiful woman who, when she opens her lovely mouth to speak, suddenly produces a man’s voice! Monstrous, grotesque! (Later on she even appears to have a beard ...) 

Thus Genesis reads like a palimpsest, a text written over on an older text, which is now hidden, erased. But scratch the top layer of ink away and you find the remains of the original text . This also holds for Genesis: Scratch the voice of God the Father away and you can again vaguely hear the voice of the Great Mother. “Adam, where are you?” God asked. And Adam replied: “Here I am.” (Genesis 3:9) Jewish philosophers like Buber and Levinas explain this passage as the founding text of the typically Jewish dialogical relationship between God and man: God calls human beings into existence, and man answers, man is the answer. Human existence is and remains answering to the original call of God. Thus it is throughout the Old Testament. Throughout the history of Israel, God intervenes and participates in the “conversation which is man” (Hölderlin). But isn’t this history based on a falsification of the beginning? The voice that calls the human being into existence is primarily not the voice of man but of woman, the mother, the original milieu of the fetus. It is the mother’s voice to which the fetus originally directs itself. That voice and the fetal response form the original text, the arch-dialogoue behind the palimpsest: “Adam, where are you? Here I am.”