Speed, impact and fluidity at the barrier between life and death

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes 1 Hegel describes the “Concept” (Begriff ) as a kind of brush fire that suddenly detonates the whole field of being: “[The notion] is form spiritually impregnated, in which the finite, through the universality in which it relates itself to itself, spontaneously catches fire [sich in sich entzündet], posits itself as dialectical and thereby is the beginning of the manifestation of reason” (Science of Logic 43). The conflagration of the system is not so much an “already” as the beginning of an infinite acceleration. 2 In 1800, Xavier Bichat, in his Traité de la vie et de la mort, began with the principle, “Life consists in the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted” (10). Hegel's Philosophy of Nature refers to various passages in Bichat's texts, beginning at § 354, and it would be interesting to explore the various ways in which the principle above plays a role in Hegel's text. Bichat's principle also plays an important role in Michel Foucault's reading of the history of biology: “Bichat relativized the concept of death, bringing it down from that absolute in which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irrecoverable event: he volatized it, distributed it throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths that are so slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself” (The Birth of the Clinic 147–48). Gilles Deleuze emphasizes this passage in his treatment of Foucault's late work (Foucault 145). Bichat thus provides one of the important lines of transition between Hegelian and postmodern philosophies of nature. 3 References to Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and Phenomenology of Spirit are according to section number. 4 Graham Priest contrasts Russell's extrinsic definition of motion (as “the occupation of different places at different times” (339)) with Hegel's intrinsic account in which a thing can at the same time be both here and not here (340). Priest's argument for Hegel is based on particle physics and “paraconsistent” logic (342). His argument comes down to the idea that “In a continuum distinct points themselves merge together” (341) and that points “spread” “over very small temporal distances” (342). Priest chooses to describe points on continua even though he notes that he hasn’t discussed Hegel's account of the “contradictory unity of the discrete and the continuous” (342), and this omission at times makes it seem that Priest is presupposing the dialectical origin of time and motion that the spread on a continuum is supposed to explain. 5 “Motion is the Notion of the true soul of the world” (261). 6 There are a number of helpful articles on Hegel's conceptions of gravity in Petry's Hegel and Newtonianism. None of these bears directly on the issues of the present paper. However, the article by Dieter Wandschneider, “The Problem of Mass in Hegel” (249–65), has a particularly useful discussion of circular and gyratory motions in relation to temporality. 7 To the extent that motion is the tendency towards impact, “motion consists in being in one place while at the same time being in another, and yet not being in another, but only in this place” (265). 8 Of course, we know in general about the dialectic that each level of being kills its precedent, and that each in turn seeks its own proper death. 9 John N. Findlay reads in this passage an argument for self-reflection through defecation. First, if assimilation is aggression towards the environment, then defecation is the expulsion of one's own aggression. Second, expulsion defines the expelled items as preliminaries, so that what is retained will have the status of polished results, “like writers tearing up drafts after their manuscript has been typed” (98) (this would not be the first observation to suggest a connection between word processing memory and anal retentiveness). Third, if defecation is the model for ex-pressing oneself through language, it would follow that in defecation one “adds a little gratuitous beauty” to what is expelled (98), as bees produce honey, or as children take pleasure (as Findlay notes through Freud). Hegel's own suggestions concerning the soul in defecation focus more on anger than pleasure, but Findlay's suggestions have a similar force. Mark C.E. Peterson construes the argument from defecation to selfhood somewhat differently. On his reading, the animal first digests the other, then identifies itself with that digestion process, thereby distinguishing itself as self-reliance from itself as digester-of-other. Hence its expulsion of what it has eaten counts as expelling its digestive process from itself, hence expelling the simplicity of its dependence on externality (57). Peterson uses this argument to show how empiricism should understand externality not as theoretical data to cognize but as real things to assimilate. (In fact, the aspect of eating that makes the animal into a true empiricist is not the act of injecting the object into its body, but the act of turning parts of the object into excrement.) Peterson concludes that digestion “sets the stage” for sexual differentiation and species reproduction (62). He doesn’t go into detail concerning this move, but in fact the “stage” is an apt metaphor for the way he has been construing the argument. For defecation appeared as the animal's mode of presenting its self-subsistence to itself. As it re-presents or re-enacts its digestive process externally, it makes itself visible in another individual of the same ideal type, namely as species reproduction. 10 Hegel does suggest an explanation for why animals don’t give birth as soon as they are born. (That's because higher species have stages of growth in their own lives that correspond to lower species, therefore it takes a higher species some time to get to the stage of life corresponding to its own species, from which it can then reproduce that species.) But that explains only our slowness to procreate, not our slowness to die afterwards. 11 A different answer to this question can be found in de Beauvoir, who suggests that for women the menopause “breaks the iron grasp of the species” (32). Like Hegel, she describes the body (particularly the female body) as having the otherness of the species within it. We might think of the reconciliation of self and otherness in the body, after menopause, as the de-utilization of the body that makes a kind of “third sex,” a freedom from generification within the structures of sexuality. 12 “In this hostile relation to others, in which they are reduced to inorganic nature, violent death constitutes the natural fate of individuals” (370). 13 John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, chapter 4. See also my paper, “Locke, Fichte and Hegel on the Right to Property.” 14 In other contexts, Hegel exhibits more caution about mesmerism. In the Philosophy of Mind, § 406Z (116), Hegel is skeptical about its effectiveness for diseases involving states of consciousness. For the key to mesmerism is that it requires an external person's mind taking control of the patient's mind. The mesmerist may fluidize the other person's organism, but mesmerism is a hindrance to fluid intersubjective relations between the two. 15 Eric von der Luft refers to this as the “antinomy” of medicine (34). It tries to cure the person at the physical level, the level at which it is ill, despite the fact that at that level the person can only die (ibid.). Von der Luft suggests that medicine plays a role similar to that of phrenology, namely as a transition point where idealism has become expressed in empirical facticity, but then must give rise to Spirit once again. 16 Kojève also emphasizes this point, though in a different way. When he says that for Hegel “man is a mortal sickness of the animal” (137), his point is that human self-transcendence always takes place within the finitude of natural mortality. In this way, he argues for an equivalence of dialectical philosophy, a “philosophy of death,” and atheism (124). The capacity for suicide, namely the capacity to expose oneself to death by an act of will (151), is the act that for a brief time allows humans to differ from Nothingness (156). 17 If we were undertaking a complete account of death in Hegel, this might be the place to analyze the phenomena of mortuary architecture, cults of the dead, and the mourning of ancestors. According to Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the work of mourning succeeds if it transforms hetero-affection into auto-affection. Mourning is thus a way of hastening the death of others in order to delay it for oneself, to arrive at a stage at which the dead can bury the dead. Here again it takes an effort to lose interest in dead categories. 18 This argument would, of course, have to be set in the context of the unfolding of the theme of death throughout Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. For a sketch of that development, see John Burbidge's seminal paper concerning Hegel and death, “Man, God, and Death in Hegel's Phenomenology.” 19 Something like this takes place when, having woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the thought of non-existence, we make ourselves think about something else. Switching categories in this way is a line of escape that clearly does not make death less inevitable. But neither is it simply a comfortable self-deception. The fact that a human can choose to stop caring about death itself indicates the separability of the categories of life and interest. 20 This will explain how to reconcile Hegel's statement at the end of the Philosophy of Nature that the individual “dies of its own accord” (375) with the following statement from his Philosophy of Right: “Just as life as such is immediate, so death is its immediate negation and hence must come from without, either by natural causes, or else, in the service of the Idea, by the hand of a foreigner” (§ 70). Death by one's own hand and death at the hands of another turn out to be the same thing insofar as the hand that kills is by definition the externality of one's own life. This would make a kind of tautology out of the situation. Suicide will count as dying from an intrusion of externality and being murdered will count as a lack of resilience within the victim. But that is the kind of self-contradictory tautology that all of the life and death barriers will express. Disease, similarly, always comes from an external source in spite of also always being the complaint of a malingering hypochondriac

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