Dehumanization and Human Fragility: A Philosophical Investigation

By Primavera Fisogni

When the trade center collapsed in New York, I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper La Provincia di Como, in Italy. If I cannot forget that day, it is not only because that major event shuttered me, but in reason of the cognitive limits that I could experiment. For the first time in my professional career, I realized that a further theoretical step was asked in order to throw light on evildoing. This philosophical investigation is aimed at exploring the loss of humanity from a phenomenological perspective integrated with a metaphysical approach. It collects and develops a decade of theoretical researches, mainly published in Italy, focused on the anthropological aspects of global terrorism from which I moved further to explore human fragility. Despair, sloth, and the pain of traumas are explored in part II of the investigation that ends with the story of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch intellectual who was able to flourish in the midst of the Nazis hell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491885000

Primavera Fisogni

Primavera Fisogni (1963), Italian philosopher and journalist, is currently editor at La Provincia daily newspaper in Como (Italy). She was educated at the Catholic University of Milan, where she graduated in classics and in theoretical philosophy. She took the PhD in metaphysics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, directed by Spanish scholar Lluìs Clavell. Her essays are mainly aimed at exploring the premoral origins of evildoing (Terroristi. La persona nell’agire eversivo, 2004; L’inaridimento dei terroristi, 2009; Dehumanization and Human Fragility, 2013) and are focused on the phenomenology of dialogue (Incontro al dialogo, 2006). As a feminist thinker, she explores theoretical arguments for the female priesthood in the Catholic Church (A Love Life in a Sexless Condition, 2011). She was awarded as a reporter in 2002 and 2009. As a philosopher, she won the Prize Leggere Donna for her investigation about terrorism.

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/27/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8499-7 (sc)

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Contents

Introduction

Preface

DEHUMANIZATION

Chapter I. The Role of Sensing in the Making of the Human Act

1 Limits of Descartes’ Paradigm

2 The Quaestio 15—Ia-IIae Pars of the Summa Theologiae

3 Consent: the Key of the Human Act

4 Indifference as a Consequence of a Lack of Sensing

5 A More Complex View on Morality

6 Relation Between Sensing and Acting, from Thomas Aquinas to Phenomenology

7 Sensing and Emotions

Chapter 2. Dehumanization of Global Terrorists

1 An Open Question: Are Terrorists Insane?

2 How Can a Person Be Said Psychotic? Being-in-the-World and Mental Illness

3 Sensing the World

4 Islamic Terrorists and Their Ideological Being-in-the-World

5 How Ideology Works in Terrorists’ Wrongdoing

6 Loss of Being as a Result of Self-Deliberation. The Case of Terrorists

7 Psychotics and Their Being-in-the-World

8 The Experience of Void in Psychosis

9 Terrorists and Psychotics. Different Origin of the Intimate Deficiency

Chapter 3. A Relation Between Ordinariness of Terrorists and the Blurring Definition of Terrorism

1 Global Terrorism: a Challenging Issue

2 Ordinariness of Terrorism: a Question for Philosophy

3 Lone Wolves? How Global Terrorism updates the Concept of Enemy in the Social Media Age

The Brothers Tsarnaev

Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale

Updating the Concept of Enemy

Internet and the iPhone Screen, the New Front for Global Terrorists

4 Evildoing and the Communication of an Intimate Dryness

5 Ineffability in Wittgenstein’s Perspective

6 Other Kinds of Ineffability: Pain and Temporality

7 Ordinariness and the Blurring Definition of Terrorism

HUMAN FRAGILITY

Chapter 4. Human Fragility as a Failed Relation to the World of Life

1 Vulnerability of the Human Condition

2 When the World Disappears.

The World of Life and Its Theoretical Frame

3 Space and Self-Identity in Guardini

4 Space and Self-Identity in Heidegger

5 Corporeal Schema and Sense in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought

6 Space and Sense: Perspectives and Limits of Guardini, Heidegger and Merlau-Ponty

Chapter 5. Loss of World and the Origin of Despair

1 Global Crisis and the Rise of Despair

2 Despair: its Relation With Space in the Experience of Biblical Job

3 Sloth: Toward the Soul’s Death

1 Sloth Between Sorrow and Laziness

2 Sloth and the Inability to Act

4 Dry at Heart. Desertification of Personal Life

Chapter 6. Pain: a Lawless Intentionality

1 A Sensitive Knowledge, a Theoretical Enigma

2 The Pain of Lost Memories. Temporality and the Treatment of Traumatic Memory—Trauma and Emdr Treatment

3 A Phenomenological Point of View

4 The Role of Memory and the Lived Experience of Time

5 Intentionality and the Time of Consciousness

6 The Role of Attention in Changing One’s Memory

7 Temporality of Trauma Memories—Nonconscious, unconscious, pre-conscious

8 Temporality and Therapy: Differences between Freudian Psychoanalysis and Emdr

9 Temporality of the 8 Phases of Emdr

Phase 1: History and Treatment Planning

Phase 2: Preparation

Phase 3: Assessment

Reprocessing

Phase 4: Desensitization

Phase 5: Installation

Phase 6: Body Scan

Phase 7: Closure—Phase 8: Reevaluation

10 Comments

Chapter 7. How to Flourish in the Midst of Hell. Etty Hillesum, the Loving Heart of the Barracks

1 A Case-Study

2 A Young Woman in the Concentration Camp

3 The Experience of Positive in the Darkness of Abjection

4 Evil as a Consequence of the Loss of Being

5 The Love’s Path: a Disposition to Sense Unto the End and to Suffer Actively

6 Pain and Love. A Revolutionary Attitude

7 Sensing and Loving, a Metaphysical Perspective

Conclusions

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

For Bernardino Marinoni

INTRODUCTION

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won’t work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

Etty Hillesum

Primavera Fisogni’s book leads us into an unusual path. On the firm basis of Aquinas’ moral philosophy, and, above all, Aquinas’ ontology, this investigation fits very well in a classical philosophical genre that is experiencing a valuable renaissance, in Europe as well as all over the world: Philosophical anthropology. It is here a philosophy of the extremes: from dehumanization (as a process) to human fragility (as a condition, or, maybe, pre-condition of existence), from the experience of pain and loss to the historical situations when both dehumanization, and human fragility, emerged massively. In particular, over the most anti-human century (the 20th) and in the dark continent (Mazower) of Europe as well as in the USA. Fisogni offers us a very original perspective, by dealing at the same time with Aquinas’ ontology and philosophy of knowledge, and with brutal example of dehumanization (the terrorists), and human fragility (the victims of loss, and terrible diseases, and those of the Nazi camps).

Dehumanization is a process (as well as the result of that process) in which the passivity of the subject is twofold. When and why we lose our human features, and we are prone to become things, in a movement well known to Marxist classical philosophy and before that to Hegel, that of Verdinglichung (Adorno), the transformation of the organic into the inanimate, death, but also alienation. While dealing with terrorists, Fisogni places this process into the realm of the individual choice, different from that of sheer necessity. Why then to become alienated to the extreme of forgetting all our humanity, and to violently sacrifice, for the sake of a vague ideal, the life of others? Thus, dehumanized individuals turn regular persons into things by killing them. Human fragility is the objective correlate of dehumanization. We can incur, willing or not, into a dehumanization process, right because we experience our fragility. At the same time, to be frail is the most human of human characteristics. By fully accepting this condition, we can experience the greatness of our plight, to be able to face absolute evil, and to be resilient in extreme situations: for instance, concentration camps for Etty Hillesum, the last of the individual heroes mentioned in this book.

Fisogni is well aware of the challenges of interdisciplinary research. However, she can reconcile, within a single treatment, Aquinas and Hillesum, Heidegger and the most advanced trends in Italian moral philosophy and metaphysics. She can combine first-hand interviews with such as Ilya Prygogine and Martha Nussbaum, reflections on her personal experience of traumatic events, re-readings and interpretations of moral philosophers, political theorists (Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, up to A. J. Vetlesen and N. H. Kobrin). Her book, therefore, offers a combination of personal experience, historical reflections, confrontation with past and present masters. The presence of Italian contemporary philosophy is not overwhelming, but certainly strong. What is indeed surprising, is her approach, that includes reflections of medical therapies, such as EMDR, dealt with in a constant parallel with Husserl’s theories of intentionality. Clearly, this book is more a piece of Lebensphilosophie than a sheer scientific treatment of it. To read it therefore is to delve into the realms of a philosophy deeply related to personal experience.

As a historian, I normally tend to apply categories such as dehumanization to particular situations in mankind history. As recent early modernists have pointed out—such as Giovanna Fiume—the slave is a typical case of (controversial) de-humanization. Turned into a thing by external representations (and relevant attitudes) even though she or he is and forever will be a human being. As this book makes clear, however, the dire century known as Novecento has seen new forms of dehumanization. The new slave, which is the inmate in a concentration camp, for instance. On the other end of the spectrum, the same bureaucrats and SS that were the actors in the genocide. The banality of evil, from Hannah Arendt to Jacov Lozowich, is one of the key moments of reflection in this book. Its conclusion, the door to hope opened by Etty during her last months of life in a concentration camp, sheds a positive light on the conclusion drawn by Fisogni. The human will always prevail over the dis-human, human fragility is a gate to immense gains in the realm of spirituality, and self-understanding: ultimately, this realm will introduce re-conciliation in the world. Dehumanization will be no longer possible.

For all these reasons, this book offers quite new weapons to tackle evil, be it natural or humanly caused. Evil is seen in the traditional Scholastic sense of lack of good, i.e., lack of perception and above all lack of being. As well as lack of truth: veritas sequitur esse. Fisogni is a holistic thinker, pretty much in the tradition of Aquinas. There is a whole, that of being, that encompasses ontology and morality, perception and intellect, eventually reason and imagination. Among other things, this little book makes once more clear that the traditional division of philosophy, into ontology, moral philosophy, and philosophy of knowledge, is at best outworn, and must be entirely re-conceived. The problem is evil is well more than a problem of morality or ethics. At the same time, the problem of being is the core problem, without addressing it no other gain could be made in the sub-realms of moral philosophy or epistemology.

As a scholar who got his first training reading Adorno and the Kritische Theorie, I am particularly delighted to introduce this investigation. It sheds light on the new agencies trying to (and occasionally succeeding) de-humanize human beings. Terrorist leaders and organizations, for instance. Those are the last expressions of a century where de-humanization reached its peak, well beyond the previous experiences, that I mentioned, of slavery and submission. Once again, veritas sequitur esse. In this fundamental definition by Aquinas lies the spirit of the entire book. Man (woman) is a microcosm: Her/his being cannot be but artificially subdivided into spheres of action. Sensing, perceiving, reflecting, acting, and eventually judging are part of the same microcosm. The legitimacy of a moral system entirely detached from ontology is, here, radically challenged.

As a libertarian scholar, I would be inclined to pinpoint non-human agencies of dehumanization. Not that much ideology, such done by Fisogni, but the state itself (Eichmann) or the dream of new govern of the world (terrorists). This leaves however ample space for new research, and was not, at least originally, in Fisogni’s aims. This book paves the ground for a number of new investigations. This is just one of its multiple merits. Love is just one of the forms of knowledge, at it has been said more than once. Etty Hillesum’s example seals off a disquieting investigation.

Paolo Bernardini

Full professor, Modern History, Insubria University—Como

PREFACE

When the Trade Center collapsed in New York, I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper La Provincia di Como in Italy. If I cannot forget that day it is not only because that major event shuttered me, but in reason of the cognitive limits that I could experiment. For the first time in my professional career—begun in1987, when I was in my early twenties—I realized that a further theoretical step was asked, in order to throw light on evildoing. For it, I began to explore ways to open a wider view into the 9/11 event to fill in some of the lacuna about the origin of dehumanization.

Moving from this urgent matter I decided to focus all my theoretical efforts—books, articles, the dissertation of the Phd in Metaphysics—on the investigation of the anthropological evildoing’s dynamics. I’ve been examining this topic since 2001, with a particular interest to the pre-moral aspects that orient human agency. This philosophical investigation is aimed at exploring the human impoverish from a phenomenological perspective integrated with a metaphysical approach. It collects and develops more than ten years of theoretical researches, mainly published in Italy, focused on the anthropological aspects of global terrorism, from which I moved further to explore human fragility. I consider this essay a sort of notebook to which I deliver insights and philosophical arguments in order to clarify primarily to myself why do people cannot fully live their humanity because of a failed relation to the world of life, a term of the classical phenomenological tradition that recalls the German Lebenswelt. Hence, the main question that lies beneath the essay, is whether a human being can be still said human when emotional or ethical realms are compromised. The result will be fruitful for exploring both dehumanization (Part I) and human fragility (Part II). Another related problem is about the mind of those who are affected by a loss of being: logical operations can be done, however, the conduct is afflicted by disorder and disinclination to a properly human behavior.

The phenomenon of global terrorism throws light on it.

For what concerns the method of the present investigation, I apply the phenomenological reduction to the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. Then I integrate the results to the metaphysics of the human person, in the Aquinas’ perspective. For it I mainly took in consideration the Quaestio 15 of the Ia-IIae Pars of the Summa Theologiae. This essay resumes the achievements of my philosophical investigations between 2004 and 2013. The first chapter (The Role of Sensing in the Making of a Human Act) moves from a paper presented at the Annual Conference of Sphs-Society of Phenomenology and Human Sciences (Chicago, 2007), then the very theoretical heart of my doctoral dissertation (L’inaridimento dei terroristi, 2009); the second chapter (Dehumanization of Terrorists. Analogies and Differences with Mental Diseases) was a cover story of Italian magazine La Rivista di Psichiatria, 2010; the topic of the third chapter (Ordinariness of Terrorists as a Symptom of their Dehumanization) was partly published by the Revista Economica (2011), in Colombia. Part II, aimed at sketching an account of the human fragility develops a phenomenological intuition that I defended in my doctoral dissertation, then published by philosophical journal Eidoteca (2013). In