Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality

By Alphonso Lingis

A lyrical and personal philosophical inquiry into the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself.

Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Alphonso Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things.

Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses?

Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226557090

Alphonso Lingis

Alphonso Lingis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Among his several books are The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Foreign Bodies, Deathbound Subjectivity, and Libido: The French Existential Theories.

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Irrevocable

Irrevocable

A Philosophy of Mortality

Alphonso Lingis

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55676-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55693-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55709-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226557090.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lingis, Alphonso, 1933– author.

Title: Irrevocable : a philosophy of mortality / Alphonso Lingis.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018004724 | ISBN 9780226556765 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226556932 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226557090 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Existential phenomenology. | Philosophy, Modern.

Classification: LCC B818.5 .L56 2018 | DDC 128—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004724

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Part I : Outside

Outside

The Weight of Reality

Doubles

Shadows

Part II : Chance

Cause, Choice, Chance

Part III : Passions

The Altiplano

Return of the First Person Singular

Aconcagua

Seduction

Truthfulness

Part IV : Belief

The Stone Axe

Angels with Guns

Belief

Performance

Voyage

Part V : Justice

The Future of Torture

Justice

The System

Truth in Reconciliation

Part VI : Irrevocable

The Babies in Trees

Mortality

Dignity

Irrevocable Loss

Part VII : Gratitude

Gratitude

Appendix: Philosophy’s Tasks

Notes

About the Photographs

Acknowledgments

Part I

Outside

How could you count the warbles in the grey, colours in the fires, thuds in the bush, keep record of the morse of cicadas, seeds, sap, stems?

—Tim Winton, An Open Swimmer

Outside

When we love a woman or a man, our eyes catch on the smile hovering on his lips, the smear of light on her cheeks, the darting of his eyes, the haze smoldering in her hair. These surface effects. Our gaze trails his fingers stroking the leather sofa, sways in the web of her gestures. These surface patterns that take form and disappear. When we embrace a woman or a man, we stroke the truss of the shoulders, feel soft gusts of breath on our throat, tingle the ghost fur of the arms, trawl the pleasure shivering across her or his skin.

We recoil from thinking of the contents of the body we are holding up against our own—the spongy gray lungs, the stomach pouch, the intestines, spleen, liver, the biles.

Contained and also protected by our skin, the inner contents of our bodies are concealed from others and also from us. They keep what they are doing secret. We do feel, vaguely, something of what is going on in there, in a mix of attachment and aversion. We are attached to the beating of our heart and to the crisp air swelling our lungs. We feel distaste in a brief thought of our kidneys, our liver, our pancreas, the slabs of yellow fat, the grisly kinks of our intestines that are pushing along chunks of mush turning brown with dead bacteria. We feel repugnance over substances expelled from our bodies—gases, excrement, vomit, mucus, pus. What we call filth, what provokes disgust outside are things we come upon that resemble what comes out of our bodies or what is inside them.

Box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri, common in the South Pacific, produce and store in their bodies the most deadly venom in the animal kingdom. Contact with only three centimeters of a tentacle can be fatal for an adult human, and people have died three minutes after being stung—faster than from the sting of any snake, spider, or insect. A box jellyfish consists of a four-sided body called a bell from which hang four clusters of fifteen tentacles, each of which has about five thousand stinging cells. This venomous overkill is used to kill fish and shrimp instantly, such that their struggle does not damage the jellyfish’s delicate ten-foot-long tentacles. A box jellyfish has four clusters of six eyes each, four of which, the pit eyes and slit eyes, detect light and shadows, but the other two have a lens and cornea, an iris that can contract in bright light, and a retina. One of these is turned upward and can see objects out of the water. Box jellyfish are able to see tiny objects and their own transparent bodies. By pumping water in and out of their bells, they can move up to two yards a second. Box jellyfish are pale blue in color, which makes them pretty much invisible in the water. So much so that for years nobody knew what was causing swimmers such piercing pain, shock, and heart failure. Since 1954 box jellyfish have been determined to have been the cause of 5,568 human deaths.¹ A group of jellyfish is called a smack.

Spots and zigzags of gaudy colors cover the sides of coral fish; gold plumes stream over the backs of birds of paradise; lacey crests tipped with white circles spread over the heads of Victoria crowned pigeons; stripes, different on each one, cover the bodies of zebras; manes fluff about the heads of golden lion tamarins. These surface colors and patterns have no relationship with the functional parts of their bodies; they do not outline lungs, stomach, or muscle systems. They are snares for the eyes. They are organs to be seen, Adolf Portman explained.² Or they are screens set up against eyes, such as the camouflage colors of ground-nesting female pheasants. The mottled browns of the plumage of the Malay great argus pheasant hides him in the forest, but in courtship he opens the three-foot-long decorative feathers of his wings into a complete circle in front of him and performs complex dance steps before a female. Watching him perform, we murmur: he knows how he looks to her; he knows he is gorgeous.

We know that we are frowning, expressing skepticism, looking surprised or sarcastic. We know that our expression looks quizzical, shocked, or ironic. But we have no view or feeling of the muscle contractions and dilations, nervous circuitry, and pulses of blood behind our skin that engineer those surface expressions. Our expressiveness, our convictions, attitudes, character, our personality are on our skins. Remove the skin and you remove the expression, the attitude, the personality. At the Body Worlds exhibition by Gunther von Hagens cadavers are on display that were preserved not by replacing the blood with formaldehyde but by replacing the blood, body fluids, water, and fat with liquid plastic. There we see that those whose faces are skinned are now anonymous. We cannot imagine what these individuals were like.

We move, we act by not seeing how we move. We dance when we stop watching where we are putting the right foot, then the left foot; we type not looking at where we are pressing with our fingers. When we move, we look outside. We scan the environment for open spaces and for pathways toward objectives in the distance, catching sight of moving obstacles. We can see the environment about us because we do not see anything behind our skin.

By looking at the surfaces of the body of another human, we envision what he is looking at, where she is going, what he is going to pick up and manipulate. We accompany his or her life. In embracing a woman or a man we sense the commonality of life in us. The life in us likewise understands the life in other species. We look for what the vultures are circling over, we follow the inquisitive dog, we feel the misery of the caged puma. There is an inner desolation in a human life that speaks to only human voices and grasps only human hands, caresses only human bodies.³ Evolved in Earth’s ecosystems, our life is destined to know life, to answer the voices of lambs and wolves, meet the gaze of owls and octopuses, fondle the faces of cats and zebras, skip and soar with robins and albatross, hum and chant with bumblebees and locusts, creep and shimmer with caterpillars and silverfish. In the ocean we scull our fins and swim with the fish. The one word we use—life—to characterize all of them indicates that our bodies deeply feel kinship with the bodies of other animate species.

But when we come upon jellyfish, we find ourselves at the limit of what the life in us can understand. We cannot imagine what it would be like to try to climb a ladder, to pick up things, to sit down if our bodies, like those of box jellyfish, were transparent. If we could not help seeing our glands secreting biles, our intestines processing our last meal, our nervous circuitry throbbing and producing dilations and contractions in bundles of muscle fibers, we could not imagine how we could move and act among the things spread out about us.

The Weight of Reality

Having arrived on a night flight, I slept late and did not get to Giza until almost noon. Tourists were climbing into air-conditioned buses to be taken to air-conditioned restaurants for the next couple of hours. The local guides were gathering in the shade of the pyramids to siesta. I headed for the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Looming massive in the cloudless white sky, thousands, millions of huge stone blocks. All the pictures had not conveyed, indeed had excluded, the sense of mass and weight that now stopped me. Several guides saw me and came after me; I gave them thirty pounds each—some five US dollars—to not guide me. I crawled up the tunnel to the tomb room. There was a fluorescent bulb on either side spreading a cold light across walls and ceiling. In the middle the now empty sarcophagus of the pharaoh. I paced the room and found it is some thirty-five feet long, seventeen feet wide; the ceiling was about twenty feet high, consisting of nine flat stone slabs. I intoned a mantra that the stone walls resounded. There was nothing for the eyes to scrutinize; they drifted in the stillness. The sense of the enormous weight of stone above this room pressed down on me. Moving from one side to the other, I felt it everywhere in the tomb room. I forced myself to think of the five thousand years that this hollow had endured, think that the nine stone slabs of the ceiling had held back the weight of the thousands of stones above them. But the weight of the stones continued to fill my mind and crushed any movements of thought about what this tomb room was, who this pharaoh was, how the pyramid was built. I was in a space without past or future, in a present that did not pass, a dead time. I lay on the floor next to the empty sarcophagus of the pharaoh.

I heard a sound in the tunnel; someone was coming. I got up and left the room. On the way down I crossed a bearded foreigner on the way, a lone backpacker. Outside I thought to look at my watch: I had been inside two hours. The guides were still dozing in the shadow of the pyramid. My eyes were dazzled by the sun and saw only the shadows and the sands rolling in dunes unto the horizon. Shadows cast by the pyramids but that did not weigh upon the ground, sands made of stone but drifting in the weak but steady wind.

Astronauts in a state of weightlessness observe the stars in outer space and planet Earth rotating in the void. When we read about the universe as physics and chemistry, electromagnetism, and astronomy represent it, it gives us a strange sense of weightlessness; it is a representation where all things, and our bodies, are clouds of infinitesimal energy units in frantic motion.

Things in our environment that we pick up, throw, or shove have weight. This weight is not the same as the force of a mass pressing upon another mass that science measures and conceptualizes as gravity. The weight of a crystal bowl is not simply pressure on the elasticity of our muscles and limbs; it is felt in our sensibility. The feeling is a qualitative sensation not localized in the muscles and tendons actually being stretched. The whole body feels the weight of things; a gallon of cider is felt to have the same weight when lifted with one hand or with both, with a foot, and when laid on one’s back. A rock is felt to have the same weight when lifted under water in a pond and when held in the air. The weight is felt to be not in the body that feels it but in the crystal bowl, the armchair.

Weight is felt in the sensibility and even in the mind. The weight of a backpack encumbers our mind that is working out a plan for the rest of the day or rehearsing what we will say to our lover with whom we have had a serious quarrel.

The weight of a book or an armchair lifted is not measured in units, pounds, or kilograms; too heavy is beyond what the body can hold; very light is a weight that the body barely registers. Yet what is beyond what the body can hold is perceived as having weight, roughly gauged and compared—the weight of the rocks in the Ryōan-ji Garden in Kyoto, of the pillars of Stonehenge, of a fallen sequoia.

In looking at things we see successive surfaces of things; in touching things we feel only stretches of them across moments of time. But the weight of a chainsaw, of a bag full of books is everywhere, unsegmented, in them. The sense of weight is a sense of the whole thing, which holds itself together and separate, disconnected from other things. Unarticulated, without internal structure, cohesive without coherence, the weight of things is not grasped and appropriated in concepts, is opaque and alien. The hands that hold the weight of a statue or a big dictionary are sense organs that do not apprehend the sense—meaning and direction—of things; they are receptive of, affected by the opacity of the substance of things. They are sense organs that are not considering but pondering.

We deal with the weight of things. Hands drop and toss, arms heave and hurl. They make things projectiles and are projectiles.

Things weigh in their settings. A truck abandoned in the weeds sinks into the ground. We have to go down steps to enter the Santísima Church in Mexico City; it has sunk more than nine feet since it was built. During the last Ice Age, beginning a hundred and ten thousand years ago, Scandinavia was covered with ice up to three kilometers deep; its weight pushed the land mass down into Earth’s fluid mantle. Since the end of the glacial period ten thousand years ago, the Scandinavian land mass has risen 275 meters—900 feet. The postglacial isostatic rebound, geologists call it.

The weight of things, the import of things. We have a primary sense of importance; in everything we do, to perceive is to perceive the important and the accessory or irrelevant. We distinguish between what is important for us and also what is important for an industry, an institution, a culture, or an ecosystem and what is simply important, that whose importance is perceived in it, whose importance is intrinsic. Importance of the Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon at Teotihuacán, whose forms repeat that of the mountains all about them, linking the continental plate and the luminaries of outer space. Importance of the great ruby-red rock Uluru that commands the vast deserts of central Australia as the heart of the continent. Importance of a wilderness, of a herd of elk. Nonsignifying, density in itself, there is importance in weight, weight is in importance.

Reality extends from the weighty unto the weightless. Trompe l’oeil domes, walls, and pillars of baroque churches, mosaics, gilding, paint—they hide or deny the substance of things and have little weight themselves. A house where the walls are covered with paisley wallpaper, the floors and furniture veneered, the flowers artificial and the dishware plastic appears insubstantial and the inhabitants insubstantial.

Leaves fluttering in the air, feathers, dandelion fluff—we see forms designed in the emptiness, weight diminished to almost imperceptible in them.

Things whose weight appears only as an evanescent allusion—spray, vapors, mists, haze.

Reflections, halos, shadows, glows, glimmers, sparkles exist in the free spaces of the world of weighty things. They delineate the contours of things for us and lead us down paths and to horizons. Reflections, shadows, halos, will-o’-the-wisps captivate the eyes and keep us absorbed in the environment beyond the paths, implements and obstacles, and objectives to which our needs and practical interests attach us. They are glories and menaces that emanate off things.

Ultra-things Henri Wallon called beings we cannot reach, whose weight we cannot gauge: the moon that follows us wherever we go on the paths of the world, the clouds, the sun, the stars.¹ The aurora borealis, neither hovering over Earth as the clouds do nor in the outer spaces of the stars, rippling in some fourth dimension. The Milky Way seen in the night sky, within which all the weighty things on Earth, the other planets, the sun, and the planets about other suns are assembled.

Looking, Martin Heidegger says, is on the move, traveling down paths, surveying implements and obstacles, envisioning objectives, taking them as resources that serve for further objectives, without end. Viewing each thing in its practical context, perception is comprehensive, already understanding. Conceptual understanding envisions things in series and in classes, in spatiotemporal coordinates and in causal relations. Understanding not standing under things is, Heidegger says, in ecstatic movement, advancing, searching, circumnavigating, detouring, manipulating, assembling. Restlessness of spirit.

There is also the understanding that comes with dwelling long with things. A villager in Bali carving wood sculptures. A hiker who camps and ponders the cliff above him as evening falls. An anthropologist participant-observer lives six months, two years in a rural village. A marine biologist over twenty years has recorded the songs of whales in the five oceans. The identifying, calculating, reasoning knowledge exists to serve our experience with things, dwelling with them, pondering them.

Words are not only units of a code, designating concepts; they have pitch, attack, timbre, volume, and duration. They are ponderous, conveying the weight of things, heavy, weighing down things, or light, lightening, trivializing.

The Weight of the World

For objects to take form about us, Immanuel Kant argued, we must first have an intuition of space and time—unlimited space, as conceptualized in the first science, geometry; infinite time. Martin Heidegger argued instead that the space in which we uncover and discover paths, implements, obstacles, and objectives is opened and extended with them. It is a practicable layout, a perceived clearing with depths and horizons of closure. In late writings he says that this clearing opens as skies with sun and night, wind and rain, winter and summer over the closure of earth; opens with movements both directed by the harbingers of goodness, of the divinities, and destined to the abyss of death.²

But if our practical movements blaze paths into the clearing, we do not constitute, project, or call up the presence of the world. We find ourselves destined for the world, cast into it. In its undifferentiated expanse the world from the first affects us, weighs on us. Emotions are affected by the lures and menaces of particular things and situations, but moods, Heidegger explains, are ways we are affected by the subsistence of the world as an undifferentiated whole. Sparkling with possibilities, it energizes us and liberates us; a layout of undifferentiated equivalence, it affects us with boredom; its density and opaqueness oppress us. For Heidegger the clearing of space opens before our practical movements in a world that from the first weighs on us in moods.

But the clearing in which we perceive things is not just, as Heidegger says, a spread of possibility and impossibility, and it is not empty; it is filled with light, heat or cold, humidity or aridity. They are elements, not things, Emmanuel Levinas wrote; they are without surfaces, are qualities without substances, fathomless depths. They are not perceived but given in a sensuous sensibility that finds itself immersed in them, that moves in involution into them, and that vibrates upon itself in enjoyment.³ There is also involution in gloom, which prolongs itself in resignation and finally in morose enjoyment.

Although the elements are formless, they have weight. Air, heat and cold, humidity and aridity lighten or weigh down things. Light may have a light touch that illuminates the weight of things and may also lift the weight of things, such that they float in the radiance of light. Darkness lifts the demands and resistance off things. Things dissolve in the density of darkness that