The Listening Self

Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics

David Michael Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429514210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1989. In this interdisciplinary study, Dr Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfilment based on the development of our capacity for listening. This book should be of interest to advanced students of critical theory, psychology, cultural studies, ethics, continental philosophy, ontology, metaphysics.

CHAPTER 1

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The Historical Call to Our Hearing

Part I
Narcissism: The Ego’s Rise to Power

Man’s kinship with the gods is over. Our Promethean moment was a moment only, and in the wreakage of its aftermath, a world far humbler, far less grand and self-assured, begins to emerge. Civilization will either destroy itself, and us with it, or alter its present mode of functioning.

Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps¹

When Protagoras proclaimed that Man is the measure of all things, he was claiming for Man a power, an authority, that seems not to have been claimed before. And yet, it would be unwise, I think, to hear in his words the same meaning they would affirm had he been the first to utter them at the dawn of the modern epoch. For Protagoras would still have conceded, I think, that our capacity to measure is ultimately extremely limited. What I suggest he meant was that, of all those things which are within the compass of our experience, we are necessarily the measure. On this reading, which makes his assertion shocking enough for his time, his statement does not deny that the extent of our measure is finite and that there may be things beyond our measure: things of which, given our mortal condition, our unavoidable finitude, we must for ever remain ignorant. As I read Protagoras, his assertion is not necessarily in conflict with the sentiments expressed centuries later by Pascal, who also wrote about this question of measure, and about the ‘ratio’ of heart and intellect, and who told us, in his Pensées, of his vision of ‘terrifying spaces’, an immeasurable abyss that shatters the composure of reason.

Man may be, then, as Protagoras declares, the measure of all things; but we of today have abolished all sense of how limited this measure really is. Without a God, without any sense of a transcendent dimension against which to measure our measuring, all limits are removed. As I argued in ‘The horizon’s embrace’ (The Opening of Vision), by way of commentary on these words of Protagoras and on the feelings that moved Kant as he contemplated ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral la w within me’ (The Critique of Practical Reason): having built our lives in such a way that we have lost sight of the horizon, and so flooded our dwelling-places with man-made lights that we have obliterated the sky of the night, the presence of the immeasurable, our vision is no longer moved by a sense of the proper measure.

In a note included in Daybreak, Nietzsche wrote:

My eyes, however, strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move; the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring … is all of it an error.²

Nietzsche does more, here, than acknowledge that we are the measure of all things; rather, he asserts and accepts it – accepts it in a way that neither Protagoras nor Pascal ever could. What exercises Nietzsche – and this is the point that places him in the eye of the storm, the very centre of nihilism – is that the measure we have made for ourselves, the measure we have assumed for ourselves, is tragically, unjustifiably small. For Nietzsche, Man is the absolute measure – and we have no reason, only an ancient, groundless, fear, to set limits on this measure.³

Beginning with the Renaissance, the first phase of ‘modernity’, a certain ‘narcissism’ emerged in western culture. Struggling on behalf of a ‘universal Reason’, the Enlightenment unwittingly reinforced it, for the unconditional value of ‘Man’ was the battle-cry of the revolutionary progress that was made in the light of Reason. In the unfolding of our modern history, however, the self-defeating tendencies within this culture of narcissism have increasingly prevailed over the more constructive and progressive. This narcissism has figured in the hegemony of a paradigm of knowledge, truth, and reality that now encourages a very aggressive, very destructive will to power. This will to power equates reason and justice with power, represses the body of feeling, denies the life of the spirit, reduces the Self to an ego which is socially adaptive but fragmented and self-alienated, and empties the Self and its world of all meaning and all value.

Thus, we can now begin to see that, after the first and most glorious phase of modernity, during which time western culture broke away from its medieval past and basked in the sun of a healthy self-affirmation, an ‘excessive’ pride, a culture of narcissism, gradually elevated Man to the position occupied by God. In many ways, of course, the original spirit of modernity, the spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was extremely benevolent: a necessary phase in the progressive evolution of western society and culture, as well as a life-affirming moment for the individuation of the Self. In the modern spirit that awakened in the Renaissance, there was a noble assertion of emancipation from dogmatic, coercive authority and a passionate assumption of responsibility for the daily course of public life. But the historical form this spirit subsequently took – an inflation of Man’s power – has increasingly revealed the fact that it is concealing within itself a constellation of dangers.

Cartesian metaphysics, reflecting the ambiguous tendencies latent in this culture of narcissism, conceived the Self as a (tacitly masculine) ego supremely sure of itself. Much can be said for the ontology of Cartesian thought. Its self-grounding self-assurance generated a method which freed us from dogmatic authority, and even its mechanistic picture of Man and world, without which the physical sciences and the sciences of Man could not have advanced, should for ever deserve our admiration. But this metaphysics of isolated subjects and objects bequeathed to us a Self locked into a world of self-defeating, virtually schizophrenic dualisms. The ‘human’ was split apart into animal-being and pure rationality, nature and culture, body and mind, matter and spirit, inner and outer, subject and object, ego and other, individual and society, private and public, feeling and reason. And Reason, the absolute method of a self-grounding subject, was identified with the clarity of logic, the exactness of mathematics, and the objectivity of physics, so that, by the middle of the twentieth century, it could be totally identified with instrumental validity. At the same time that western science denied the spiritual dimensionality of Man, reducing the human being to a machine of flesh and blood, it coupled with western humanism to inflate our collective sense of what we are capable of. With the power of science, we have created political economies that actively promoted the unscrupulous ‘self-made man’ and all forms of egotism, charted the course of world-wide colonialism, institutionalized social exploitation and domination, and found encouragement for our collective fantasies of planetary omnipotence and omniscience.

As a characterization of the western lifeworld, ‘narcissism’ signifies the rise to power, the self-assertion, of an ego-logical subject which can only be adequately understood if we recognize its masculinity, its patriarchal origin, its predominantly bourgeois personality and politics, and its obsessive will to power, to mastery, control, and domination. The ‘Self’ which has risen to power in the modern world is unmistakably, as Horkheimer and others have argued, a masculine, bourgeois ego.⁴ In The Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer boldly tied together the development of the modern ego, the rule of the patriarchy, the dominance of the masculine gender and character, the instrumentalization of Reason, the domination of nature, the domination of people, the will to power, and the symptomology of nihilism:

the ego is felt to be related to the functions of domination, command, and organization …. Its dominance is manifest in the patriarchal epoch …. The history of Western civilization could be written in terms of the growth of the ego …. At no time has the ego shed the blemishes of its origin in the system of social domination.⁵

Narcissism, then, is a symptom of nihilism: a symptom that has increasingly displayed its latent self-destructiveness, its latent nihilism. The glorification of Man, Man as ultimate will to power, has encouraged technocracies of social domination and cultural fantasies of an absolute control over nature. Our cultural fantasies have been channelled into sciences and technologies that require total objectivity and impose it everywhere. This has meant, in time, as Nietzsche already realized in his life span, the death of God – and an increasing forgetfulness of Being, through its domination, reduction, and reification. The cultural experience of the death of God – or, more broadly conceived, the end of absolute finalities – has been a decisive factor in our pervasive sense today of drifting without purpose: our sense, that is, of homelessness and rootlessness. It has also meant the negation of any ultimate, transcendent source, any irrevocable guarantee, of meaningfulness – any unshakable foundation for knowledge, any absolute authority in truth, any fixed point of focus for the projection and mirroring of personal, social, and cultural ideals. We are compelled to live ‘groundless’ lives. In The Will to Power, where Nietzsche diagnosed the historical advent of nihilism, he noted, for example, a loss of ‘faith’ in the categories of reason. But now, this disillusionment is deeper and more perplexing, for we have begun to realize that Reason itself – the universal Reason of Enlightenment emancipation – has a darker, more negative aspect which we had not suspected. This aspect appears in the ‘rationalization’ of bureaucratic technocracies and in a rational universalism which is deaf and blind to all differences – especially those it cannot subsume without violence. In our time, Reason itself – or rather, Reason reduced to the question of techniques – has become an instrument of domination and violence.⁶

It is now becoming painfully clear that the institutional authority of science and technology has successfully effected a reduction of human beings to the dual status of subjectified, privatized egos and subjugated, engineerable objects. Thus, ironically, the rule of narcissistic subjectivity has inaugurated and institutionalized a rule of objectivity – a reduction of the Being of beings to the condition of objecthood – that turns out to be inimical to genuine subjectivity.

In The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing contends that ‘if our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive’.⁷ Today we are seeing and hearing this kind of rage. At the same time that the rule of objectivity is subjectifying the Self by detaching us from our body of lived experience, nullifying the validity of personal experience, and undermining our trust in what we actually experience, the rule of objectivity also objectifies the Self, reducing it to a machine and subjecting the once all-too-human subject to the terror of machines out of control.

The face of narcissism shows us its delusions of omnipotence; but this face is really just a mask. The face it conceals is the face of depression and despair. Suffering through the death of God and the loss of the traditional sense of Being, our society has increasingly experienced itself as living in a historical condition of extreme abandonment and deprivation. We have failed, somehow, to grow beyond the culture of ego-logical narcissism. Not surprisingly, symptoms of collective depression have begun to constellate: emptiness, deadness, despair, narcotization. The culture of narcissism has led us to nihilism, the negation of meaningful Being; and this, in turn, has been felt as a deep sense of immeasurable, unnameable loss: a ‘loss’, as Heidegger interprets it, ‘of Being’, a cancer of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Opening Conversation
• Introduction The Gift and the Art
• Chapter 1 The Historical Call to Our Hearing
• Chapter 2 Zugehörigkeit: Our Primordial Attunement
• Chapter 3 Everydayness: The Ego’s World
• Chapter 4 Skilful Listening
• Chapter 5 Communicative Praxis
• Chapter 6 Hearkening: Hearing Moved by Ontological Understanding
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index