Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event

Being Shaken is a multifaceted meditation by leading philosophers from Europe and North America on ways in which events disrupt the complacency of the ontological paradigm at the personal, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and political levels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137333735

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Introduction: The First Jolts

Santiago Zabala and Michael Marder

Philosophy is a rather peculiar endeavor, if only because, unlike the positive sciences, it admits of no progress. On the contrary, the bone of contention among the discipline’s most illustrious representatives, from Greek Antiquity onwards, concerns who is capable of regressing further and better to the undisputed first principles – an Aristotelian term, which remains applicable to thinkers before and after Aristotle. Why this obsession with origins, beginnings, or underlying causes? Why are these concepts so seductive for human understanding? And, also, why is philosophy bent on asking the question Why? and, subsequently, on explaining the world with reference to a single all-encompassing element, concept, or force?

Without a doubt, part of the answer has to do with whatever the philosophical mode of inquiry inherited from mythology, from which, despite its best efforts, it perhaps never completely detached itself. All muthos is a muthos of origins, progeniture, creation, or derivation from a source, which is operative in everything that has emanated from it and which, at the same time, remains unaffected by these emanations. Asking, Why? we, more often than not, nostalgically strive to look back to the contrived simplicity of this lost origin, powerful enough to give an account of the most diverse phenomena and, ultimately, of everything – of beings in their totality. In fact, in the hands of a metaphysician, phenomena invariably turn into epiphenomena, fleeting and contingent expressions of the root cause beneath, behind, or above the world of the here-and-now. The metaphysical explanation of Being precludes the coming of the Event, as something both unforeseeable, irreducible to the dominant cause – effect correlation, and untranslatable into mathematical formulae. On its own terms, metaphysical philosophy confronts us with a choice: Being or Event? A systematic ontology or the inexplicable and even more obscure reflection of mythology?

Nonetheless, the terms of this either/or choice are hopelessly skewed. Metaphysical ontology has much more in common with myth than does the disturbance associated with the Event. Like mythology, metaphysics acts to reassure the scared child in us. As soon as we utter or hear Why? we expect to satisfy our infantile curiosity and to pacify our disquietude with a Because, an explanation which makes sense and is internally consistent and non-contradictory, one in which the questioning impulse itself would be extinguished. We ask such questions in the hopes of receiving a determinate answer, appropriate to what we already know and expect. The question turns into an answer not yet given, a potentiality to be actualized in the response. This, then, is the deeper reason for the tyranny of the question Why? in philosophy: in aiming at the final (or, better, the most fundamental) Because, itself not subject to further questioning, metaphysicians have sought to provide secure, stable, and authoritative grounds for continued thinking and action, if not for the entire edifice of natural, social, and human sciences.

Granted: the search for indisputable foundations could be precarious and could entail radical doubt, as in the case of Descartes, or the reduction (bracketing) of what had been previously taken for granted, as in the philosophy of Husserl. But once the philosopher’s promised land was reached – be it in the form of the cogito, of the transcendental eidetic sphere, or whatever else – the indisputable single cause of everything formed the basis for the rest of the philosophical project. More importantly, it created an unshakable foundation for anything that could ever be thought, if not anything that could ever be. An authoritative reference to foundations inevitably slid into authoritarianism.

Are we, then, calling for radical skepticism, constantly unhappy with the positive theories and conclusions, whatever their content? Not at all. Skepticism is still (or already) a philosophical game, a valorization of the negative movement of thought, all the more insulated from the world wherein it unfolds. Rather than skepticism, what is required is an experience – and we would like to accentuate this experiential dimension – of the shakenness of all foundations, certainties, and principles for thinking and acting alike. This experience would constitute the Event whereby Being as a whole would be shaken as a consequence of the traumatism and the shock we would undergo.

Let us consider an instance of what we mean when we refer to the shakenness of Being, which is opposed to the metaphysical ideal of impermeable foundations and which exceeds the purview of skepticism. In the First Meditation, we find Descartes seated by the fireplace in a winter gown, contemplating his hands in the glow of fire, and doubting whether or not this entire scene is but a dream. Would the comfortably seated philosopher have doubted his own existence were he to extend his hand a little further, just far enough to feel the unbearable heat of the fire, if not to be burnt by it? To what extent is the stability of the cogito indebted to the physical setting wherein the meditations were actually practised? In the Fourth Meditation, the French thinker considers the possibility of burning his hand only to reject the unexamined attribution of heat to fire and to bring both pain and heat back to the ground on which they are experienced: the cogito. Be this as it may, a hypothetical re-staging of this crucial episode in the history of philosophy gives us a good glimpse of the shakenness of Being. Were Descartes to burn himself, would he not have concluded, I am in pain, therefore, I am (in my finitude, on the verge of non-being)? And what about all those who are constantly put into question regarding their Being in a situation of war, starvation, or physical or psychological trauma? Denied the luxury of questioning their predicament in a skeptical mode of inquiry, they find themselves and their world shaken to the core. The point is to realize that their world is also ours and that all of Being is shaken by injustice. The extreme, the limit of experience, or the emergency is not a marginal occurrence easy to ignore; it is what upsets every rule, makes the ground underneath our feet tremble, and announces it as ground in the first place.

When Plato enshrined the Idea of the Good as the highest of Ideas, one that, beyond Being, turned into the condition of possibility for Being, he perhaps had a premonition of how ontology itself suffered from injustice. At the same time, the Platonic search for the secure grounds for thinking has proven to be one of the most fateful in the history of metaphysics. The Ideas became the soil for the growth of the inverted heavenly plant – Plato’s designation of the human – all the while material existence was devalued as a pale shadow of true, eidetic Being. Metaphysical ontology packaged itself as transcendentally indifferent to actual history, impotent to produce any effects in the realm of Ideas. This means, among other things, that philosophy immunized itself against suffering and against the passage of time; even the destruction of the entire planet would not change anything in eidetic reality, according to Plato’s as well as to Husserl’s philosophical schemes. Although, between these two bookends of the metaphysical era, Being was invoked by various names (Essence, God, Substance, the Thing or the Real, Subject, Spirit, the Will), it maintained its unshakable façade, kept its transcendental indifference to whatever was in Being, and provided the first and the last response to the question Why?

One obvious, albeit crude, alternative to the philosophical search for firm grounds is a renewed emphasis on the experience of groundlessness, tantamount to an external critique of this dominant tradition and to the advent of nihilism. And yet, does groundlessness not revert into a new ground, mimicking the very features of metaphysics it has supposedly overcome? A mere reversal of values – shifting the weight from certainty to uncertainty, from firm foundations to purely vacuous and unfounded ways of thinking – is never sufficient. The non-metaphysical Event without Being is as deficient, in its allegiance to pure empiricism (but how un-metaphysical is that?) as the metaphysical Being without the Event. Ultimately, the Event without Being paves the way for the evasion of ethical responsibility or, at best, for empty systems of normativity that pride themselves on having overcome the ontological moorings of metaphysics.

Take, for example, the quintessentially modern name for Being as such: the Subject. In and of itself, it is already a ground that is particularly unhinged or ungrounded, since it lacks, precisely, the objective foundations that are so prominent in all the previous variations on metaphysical ontology – for example, Ideas, Essence, and Substance, and so forth. When the subject is at issue, we might hear the very question Why? differently, without expecting it to be dissolved in a determinate response. What keeps the questioning drive alive is a barely perceptible shift in emphasis from the so-called objective facts to their interpretation, from Being to the meaning of Being, from explanation to hermeneutics. When meaning is at stake, no answer is exhaustive, because a set of additional questions constantly shadows it: For whom is this response meaningful? Who is it that raises the question? Who interprets? And who responds? Every interpretation worthy of the name entails this double movement of asking about something and, at the same time, about someone – the questioner him- or herself. What would it mean to maintain the uniqueness of this word who, refusing to reduce it to another what, that is to say, declining to describe the subject according to anthropological, sociological, or other objective categories? To insist on the subject as a someone (or, perhaps, more or less than one), as a who, is to shake the metaphysical tradition that has enthroned subjectivity from within, on its own terms, right at the level of its foundations.

Another strategy, which has been particularly successful in twentieth-century philosophy, is to show that the supposed metaphysical ground is not deep enough, that something or someone else underpins it, makes it possible, and, in the same stroke, un-grounds it. The case-in-point here is the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who finds the termination of phenomenological reduction in constitutive transcendental subjectivity, which makes sense of and bestows meaning on the world, premature. When we wish to signify something, we do so, at bottom, for the Other; the address to the Other is, therefore, the ground of the phenomenological ground, of autonomous subjectivity, of intentionality, of the life of consciousness. Hence, ethics as the disavowed condition of possibility for thinking, knowing, and acting. And yet, the otherness of the Other is not a secure foundation that may be added to the list of names for Being that have emerged from the metaphysical tradition. As with Plato’s highest Idea of the Good, it brings forth, enables, lets germinate everything that is in Being, as well as Being itself, all the while withdrawing from the grasp of metaphysical ontology. This ethical withdrawal of the Other produces Being itself as always already shaken, disturbed, destabilized.

In more concrete terms, this implies that before having the chance to ask the question Why? we find ourselves put in question by the Other, who motivates the possibility of speech in us. To be called into question is not only to be prompted to justify oneself but also, and more significantly, to ask about the meaning of the world or of Being from the standpoint of the one who is already targeted by the Other; it is to inquire not in a sovereign, autonomous, and active fashion but in a way that entails undergoing, with a heavy dose of passivity, that questioning which arises elsewhere, in a place other than one’s intentionality. This is what we mean by the Event, thanks to which Being is produced as already shaken, ungrounded, or unhinged. When in response to Why? we hear, Because of the Other, or, For the Other, the questioning impulse is far from getting extinguished; rather, it burns even more intensely in us. The one who responds in this way responds without responding, without giving a final answer that would correspond to a determinate entity or cause. As a result, neither thinking nor ethical action loses touch with the restlessness that motivates them and keeps them alive.

Note that even though we have effectuated an internal break with metaphysical ontology – the Other is not yet another name for Being, equivalent to Ideas, Essence, and so on – we have still not made progress. Or, more precisely, we are not claiming that the Event that arises within and overflows the history of metaphysics somehow renders this history antiquated, reducing it to a pile of books by the classics that will quietly gather dust on our shelves. Philosophy, and indeed thinking itself, does not move in a linear fashion, leaving the process in which it is made behind. Nor is it possible to throw away the ladder one has used to climb to the heights of understanding. We will be able to resonate with the world shaken by injustice only if our own understanding, too, is shaken, that is to say, if the ladder we climb constantly trembles beneath our feet. The metaphysical tradition cannot be thrown away either in part or as a whole, because, in the vacuum left in its wake, the worst excesses of metaphysics will be unconsciously repeated, as the repressed makes its return. Much of contemporary analytic philosophy that prides itself on having broken with the tradition falls precisely into this trap.

Theodor Adorno’s fragmentary, aphoristic project in Minima Moralia, appropriately subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life, is a fitting companion to Levinas’s ethical philosophy, which, similarly, correlates a traumatized thought to the broken world. If we heed the lesson of these two thinkers, we will realize that only a logos which is pathological and disturbed (but, at the same time, disturbing, stirring discontent with the ideologies that support the status quo) has the right to pursue the philosophical project today. The pathos of this logos expresses how logos suffers with and for the victims of historical, political, and economic injustice, or, at least, how it is called forth into existence by this suffering. Convoked by the need to fight against injustice, thought finds in this need the most powerful Why? – a question that no longer harks back to a mythological origin but that interrogates the sense and the nonsense (the absurdity) of the contemporary world. Aristotle was right when he crowned political thought as the queen of philosophy and of the sciences: the raison d’être for any worthwhile thinking and action is none other than fighting against that injustice which both corrodes and constitutes the ontology of the present. But it is also inevitable that, in this fight, one would take sides, even (and especially) if one claims to speak in the name of neutrality, armed with the instruments of a disembodied, dispassionate rationality that prides itself on being non-metaphysical, purely formal, or de-ontological.

We are thus left with two epicenters, whence the tremors that shake Being itself emanate. On the one hand, these tremors are felt on the obverse of the metaphysical tradition, which is not entirely successful in its struggle against the abyss that extends beneath its laboriously constructed grounds. Much of Western philosophy is born in response to, or as a reaction against, the destabilizing force of contradiction, of otherness, of what cannot be fully mastered and dominated. On the other hand, they derive not so much from the violence of thought that suppresses radical difference, as from historical violence, usually taking the form of dispossession: the material deprivation of countless multitudes, the uprooting of entire populations expelled from their homelands by the forces of occupation, the denial of the very right to live to those who engage in political protests ... Still, we would be gravely mistaken if we were to compartmentalize and classify the violence of thought as purely ideal and, conversely, historico-political violence as real. Indeed, this type of classification itself would be violent and thoroughly metaphysical. It is not that philosophy is free to engage with or disengage itself from the world; the presumed disengagement of abstract thinking is complicit with the very palpable violence it silently tolerates or actively supports by means of a conceptual-ideological apparatus it constructs, such as the early modern assertion that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. In the absence of visible signs of being shaken, the philosophy, which has claimed for itself neutrality and objectivity, a strict adherence to facts and a dispassionate mode of inquiry, has simply immunized itself to the shakenness of world-historical Being. Such philosophy has already made the all-important decision and has responded to world-shattering violence by refusing to respond, by turning a blind eye to it.

But what, exactly, is the nature of this unavoidable decision? Do we wake up one fine morning intent on fighting injustice and reflecting the broken ontology of the present in a damaged, traumatized way of thinking? Beyond a shadow of doubt, such sudden conversions remain possible and, more often than not, they can be traced back to a specific historical trigger event, for instance, the war in Vietnam that politicized a whole generation of academics and segments of the general public in the United States. Being shaken is call for action enough; the trigger event functions as a kind of jolt, bypassing conscious mediations, or cognitive decision-making processes, and opening the one thus jolted to the tremors of Being that resonate in and through her or him. Far from an autonomous agent, the subject is decided into existence when it is shaken out of the slumber of complacency, or, at the extreme, when its existence is threatened as such. We might say that, at the current historical conjuncture, to exist is to be shaken, while, conversely, the repressive incapacity or the unwillingness to be affected by the tremors of Being entails an impoverishment of existence itself, its tranquilization (as it is called in Sein und Zeit) and nullification. Without the experience of shock, which is perhaps synonymous with modernity itself, and shakenness, there is no experience, only sensation.

The ontological nexus of Being and Event is no different from this concrete, ontic example. The Event is nothing separate from Being; it is nothing but Being’s own shakenness, nothing but the Nothing that internally undoes Being at every single moment. The thought of pure Nothing, or of death, for that matter, is a shock, which metaphysical ontology, formal logic, and logically based systems of signification are unable to absorb. But this is not, in the first instance, what we are referring to here. Instead, what is at issue is, on the one hand, the philosophical tradition’s realization of its complicity with, or legitimation of, historical violence (Hegel’s reduction of Nature to the Other to be negated and transformed by Spirit is exemplary in this respect) and, on the other hand, the sheer excess of certain elements of this tradition vis-à-vis its own metaphysical orientation (e.g., Plato’s Idea of the Good beyond Being). Being shaken is the (theoretical and practical) history of Being – a history of its, that is to say, our enacted interpretations that, instead of extending in a continuous chain, are themselves fissured, quivering and vibrating within the confines of the tradition that cannot fully contain them.

Doing justice to the thought of the past, thinking through the concept of justice, and pursuing political and economic justice today: these three imperatives belong together, mutually support and reinforce one another. Hence, when it comes to the discipline itself, we can no longer compartmentalize philosophy into the distinct fields of ethics, epistemology, politics, metaphysics, etc. Nor can we decouple it from the world of immanence, the messy reality here-below. From the hither side of metaphysics, reaching out to Parmenides, the pre-Socratic thinker of the unity of Being and thinking, we thus say: Being shaken and shaken thought are one and the same in their openness to absolute difference.

It follows that, after the intellectual achievements, as well as the historical catastrophes, of the past century, the question regarding the meaning of Being will have to be transformed into an inquiry into the sense of the shakenness of Being: the trembling, the disquietude, the shock, the jolts, and the shuddering that come to define the landscape of ontology and experience itself today. It would be futile, at this point, to catalogue in general and in the abstract the different facets of the shakenness of Being, which, instead of representing an empty philosophical exercise, describes the unsurpassable predicament of the global world, as much as of the particular life-worlds, today. It would, however, be useful to consider the patterns formed by ontological shakenness and by the shaking of ontology itself. These patterns, we want to suggest, range from the rhythmic waves of Being’s quivering and vacillation (for example, the resonance between its active and passive modalities, the verb and the noun, as in the title of the current collection), through its more spasmodic – though still regular – trembling, to the discontinuous traumatic jolts, shaping and destructuring, or, rather, shaping by destructuring, our historical onto-topography. Although we are interested in all the countless manifestations of the shakenness of Being, it is this last effect of the abrupt jolts, along with the shock waves spreading from the epicenters of these events, that we wish to accentuate the most.

Two models of the Event are at stake in the various patterns of shakenness. First, the quivering of Being, traceable back to the Platonic khōra – the place in excess of the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, where differentiations occur, thanks to the trembling of this receptacle that groups like with like – is the very vitality of Being, indebted to the rhythmic or regularized repetition of the disturbance, whose residue settles down to constitute ontology proper. These remains of Being, left behind the disturbance, are highly volatile, ready to be displaced with every new Event of ontological trembling that introduces difference into the repetition of the same, and is utterly useless for those who seek a secure support for thinking or action. This is not to say that theory and practice in this condition are invalidated but, on the contrary, that they are finally revitalized in the absence of externally guaranteed foundations.

Second, the jolts of Being are the arrhythmic and unrepeatable shocks that shake up ontology without allowing the debris to settle; they are the singular traumas, both individual and collective, that cast the Event in terms of the irruption of the unexpected and the unpredictable into the normalized, neutralized, and forcibly pacified status quo. The shocks of Being are the emergencies that perturb routine ways of acting and thinking. As such, they may include massive paradigm shifts, resulting in the collective traumas that, as Derrida observed in Specters of Marx, were inflicted on man by the Copernican decentering of the Earth, the Darwinian unseating of the human from the pinnacle of creation, and the Freudian dethroning of consciousness. Or, they may refer to the rather private crises, when the realization of one’s impending mortality transfigures one’s approach to the world, to oneself, and to others. Be this as it may, the traumatism of Being – traumatism interpreted in a very precise ontological way – is the historical configuration of ontology, wherein we find ourselves today.

We might say that the Event always strikes twice, its shock waves always (at least) double, since 1) historical existence is internally shaken by injustices and collective ontological traumas, and 2) the looming of the question of Being on the horizon of each human being is felt as a veritable earthquake in a life thrust out of its complacency by the impending disaster. The quivering of Being further redoubles these two jolts with the persistent unsettling of ontology and the storm of refuse, debris, or discharges, generating the remains of Being. The thought of shakenness must contend with both poles of the Event simultaneously, if it is to be faithful to the ontological trauma obfuscated, concealed, or, more often, normalized by the forces associated with the political, economic, or philosophical status quo.

At the conjunction of Being and Event, filtered through the experience of shakenness, we find not only a reinterpretation of truth, but also of freedom. The refusal to get over the traumatic core of experience, the non-complacency of thought, a lack of pre-established foundations for knowing – all this promises to turn freedom into the only frame of post-metaphysical philosophy. This is probably why Rorty often emphasized that if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself, implying that a rational metaphysical organization should not be the priority for those who are interested in the possibilities that remain alive in philosophy today. The shakenness of Being throws into disarray all pre-delineated paths toward truth, all methods a priori framing and delimiting the experience of the possible. The (disturbing, perhaps) absence of objective veracity is the only admissible frame, permitting the flourishing of freedom; Being shaken, then, is ontology framed by nothing other than freedom.

1

Shaking at the Edge

Edward S. Casey

I

Human beings shake on the edge of high precipices. As I once did in Montana, climbing up to the top of a ridge in the Crazy Mountains whose edge was razor-sharp. Peering down into the abyss on the other side, I began to shake. I wasn’t just trembling, nor was I shuddering, I was actively shaking. My body shook with fear – fear of falling into the vast vale that yawned before me and below me. I was fearful of losing my balance, and so falling into the space below. My shaking, though immediate and involuntary, itself contributed to the likelihood that I would lose my balance and fall face forward. I became dizzy,