Concentric Space as a Life Principle Beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur

Inclusion of the Other

Paul Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138306936
• eBook ISBN: 9781351392617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

Concentric Space as a Life Principle beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur invites a fresh vision of human experience and search for life meanings in terms of potential openings through relational space. Offering a radical spatial rereading of foundational ideas of influential thinkers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur, it argues that these ideas can be rethought for a more fundamental understanding of life, self and other.

This book offers a radical reconceptualisation of space as an animating principle for life through common, although previously hidden, features across the thought of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur. It offers a fresh spatial interpretation of key themes in these thinkers' works, such as compassion, will to life, Dionysian rapture, will to power, selfovercoming, re-valuation of values, eternal recurrence, living metaphor and intersubjectivity. It proposes a spatial restructuring of experience from diametric spaces of exclusion towards concentric spaces of inclusion for an experiential restructuring towards unifying modes of experience. This spatial rereading of these major figures in philosophy directly challenges many previous understandings, to offer a distinctive spatial-phenomenological framework for examining a life principle.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduates engaged in the study of philosophy, wellbeing, education and human development. The book's interdisciplinary scope ensures that it is also of interest for those in the fields of psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and culture studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A protolanguage of space as concentric and diametric space

The question of a veil of space must be identified and opened to engage with a life force, so that space is no longer a sterile medium for experience and thought. Habits of space need to be exposed to interrogate the ripples of space invading conceptual foundations of a life principle.

There is a spatial system of relations, a primordial spatial discourse pertaining to life that is embedded in the seminal works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur – and yet overlooked by each of them. All three thinkers invoke a prior spatial discourse implicitly in their works. Like Wordsworth, who crossed the Alps without realising it, they have opened the door to a prior level of understanding. However, they have not directly walked through these gateways. Passing through the frames of these doors brings with it a reverberation, a movement that rustles the foundations of each of these thinkers’ works so that the prior spatial discourse opens up their texts, unsettles their basic assumptions and invites reconstruction of each of their understandings of a life principle.

This questioning involves space as a protolanguage – a protolanguage examined for illustrative purposes as imbued within basic concepts in the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur, with implications for understanding inclusion of the Other and a life principle in spatial terms. The question of the vista of protolanguages that are not dependent on language was an implicit, albeit not primary, concern for both Nietzsche and Ricoeur.¹ Whereas Nietzsche’s Birth of tragedy sought engagement with a universal prerepresentational language of music, purportedly prior to language through the Dionysian, Ricoeur’s Rule of metaphor took a number of tentative steps towards uncovering a spatial system prior to language, akin to a protolanguage, although he did not take this further step. Similarly, key concepts of Schopenhauer regarding overcoming the boundaries of the principium individuationis to attain a prior mode of experience and his conception of compassion offer spatial understandings that can be construed as precursors to the proposed spatial protolanguage. A sustained argument for a protolanguage of space was not directly brought to the fore by any of these thinkers, although each offered works replete with spatial imagery.

A primordial prelinguistic spatial discourse, a protolanguage of space, as seeped itself into language but prior to language is being postulated in this book. Specific spatial systems of interaction are being argued to reside not only within language but as being also silently woven into fundamental concepts, in the assumption structure of key understandings of life and inclusion. This spatial questioning is not reducible to traditional issues such as space as an object or medium of perception, to space as an a priori category of understanding, to spatial metaphors and imagery in philosophical language or to a space for play of meaning within language.

Nietzsche seeks an inversion of Platonism, as one of his many reversals, to advocate for the primacy of the sensuous world over a supersensous world of Platonic ideal forms. This is resonant with Schopenhauer’s commitment to the vitality of the body in his libidinal materialism. Likewise, with his emphasis on the flesh, Ricoeur’s Oneself as another invokes a concept that challenges abstraction, while moving in the direction of the primacy of embodiment. Nietzsche not only reverses the supersensuous–sensuous diametric opposition; he puts into question the very assumptions of truth–illusion, reality–appearance for both realms, as he treats the aesthetic as being more primary than the true, even for the sensuous realm. For him, a truth of the sensuous is perspectival and constructed, while being beholden to a will to power prior to a will to truth. Yet Nietzsche’s challenge to Platonic metaphysics has left him open to Heidegger’s accusation that he is still locked within metaphysics as the last metaphysician. Reversing relationships within a diametric opposition still rests within the same structure.

Heidegger responds to Nietzsche,

A path must be cleared for a new interpretation of the sensuous on the basis of a new hierarchy of the sensuous and nonsensuous. The new hierarchy does not simply wish to reverse matters within the old structural order, now reverencing the sensuous and scorning the nonsensuous. (Vol. I: 209)

Quite apart from issues of the nonsensuous as distinct from the supersensuous, and the need to go beyond hierarchy as such, Heidegger’s vital point here is on the need to shift the very structure underlying the sensuous–nonsensuous diametric opposition: ‘A new hierarchy and new valuation mean that the ordering structure must be changed’ (Vol. I: 209, italics in original). Heidegger needed to go further to recognise that this change in the ordering assumption structure is a spatial questioning. Diametric opposition is not only a projected structure, it tends to be overlooked that diametric opposition is also a space.

A change to diametric opposition is a change to diametric space, to modify this diametric spatial structure into another spatial mode of relation. Moreover, this spatial questioning implicates a questioning of inclusion of the Other, inclusion of the counterpole (whether the relegated counterpole of the sensuous for Plato or the supersensuous for Nietzsche); a spatial-structural alternative is needed to a diametric exclusion and subservience of one pole to the hegemony of the Other. This questioning of conceptual foundations requires a protolanguage of space pertaining to movement from exclusion towards inclusion; it raises the question of a shift not only beyond binary oppositional thinking, but beyond diametric spatial thinking and diametric spatial experience.

Heidegger is quite dismissive of spatial concerns in Nietzsche: ‘Viewed as a whole, Nietzsche’s meditations on space and time are quite meagre. The few thoughts concerning time that inch beyond traditional notions are desultory’ (Vol. II: 90). However, there is a need to challenge this view through analysing space at a different level of explanation in terms of the assumption structure of Nietzsche’s seminal concepts. In doing so, an integrated structure for Nietzsche’s seminal concepts can be found, in contrast to Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche, which highlights structural concerns but not in terms of space: ‘[A]t the outset we are utterly unable to take up one single unequivocal anticipation of the articulated structure in which “eternal return”, “will to power”, and “revaluation of all values” would cohere as one, all of them with equal originality’ (Vol. II: 168). The current argument is one that seeks to offer such an integrated structure – as a spatial structure – for these core dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought, while commencing with interrogation of rapture as a major concern of Nietzsche in BT. Moreover, a spatial level of description is being postulated that is not merely reducible to space as subjective projection.²

An elision has taken place in the history of Western thought, an elision pertaining to space that runs conceptually prior to Platonic metaphysical assumptions of ideal forms in a realm of the supersensuous that gain primacy over the sensual world. This suppression of a spatial questioning, alongside a surreptitious reliance on spatial assumptions, needs to be brought to the fore. Space offers a relation prior to thingness, prior to the reus of the real. Is space not the most obvious mediator between the material and symbolic, the sensory and supersensory world? This obviousness has been additionally glossed over by a Cartesian prejudice that space is a nonentity, a merely static noninteractive phenomenon. Space needs to be seen as intimately entwined with a life principle. Interrogation of a life principle rarely tends to embrace the pulse of space.

The question of inclusion of the Other is not only a structural one but also a spatial one. It is fundamentally a question of restructuring the projection of us/them. This us/them structure frames understanding of the supposed norm versus the Other. The Other becomes a reification shorn of animation, a static category rendered passive and inert in this role as mere object of the gaze from the vantage point of the supposed norm. This process of Othering is prominently challenged by de Beauvoir in The second sex to critique a construct of ‘woman’ in terms of a male reference point as the norm. Similarly, Said’s Orientalism offers an excoriating assault on Western projections onto Eastern cultures that construct the East as the Other; the other is dehumanized of lived experience, as a static lifeless exhibit in ‘an imaginary museum without walls’ (1978: 166). Like the construct of ‘woman’ as the second sex, Eastern cultures become defined abstractly in unitary terms of contrasts with a Western culture as norm. Both de Beauvoir and Said appeal to a background implicit life principle, through associating its excision with a principle of dynamic exclusion bringing ‘the Other’; this exclusion renders concrete groups and individuals inert and lifeless, as abstract categories of the Other.

The exclusion process in the us/them projection rests on a diametric binary opposition, a projected structure of diametric space. For inclusion of the Other, as distinct from exclusion of the Other through diametric space, again a different space is needed, a space of difference, a structure of differential relation. This different space to foster connection with and inclusion of the other encompasses a different mode of experience, a different dimension of being. This different space is argued in this book to be one of concentric spatial relation.

An anthropological starting point for consideration of such spaces can move to a terrain far beyond the confines of subjectivism and anthropology, as well as beyond the epistemological commitments of Lévi-Strauss to a structuralist paradigm drawn from structural linguistics. Building on Lévi-Strauss’ (1962, 1963, 1973) account of cross-cultural observations of these structures for myths and physical structures, a diametric spatial structure is one where a circle is split in half by a line that is its diameter, or where a square or rectangle is similarly divided into two equal halves (see Figure 1.1). In a concentric spatial structure, one circle is inscribed in another larger circle (or square); in pure form, the circles share a common central point (see Figure 1.2) – a co-centre.

Lévi-Strauss tended to treat these as structures rather than as spaces or fundamental modes of space.

A fundamental concern with connection pervades key concepts of both Schopenhauer and Ricoeur, whereas expansion of experience as openness and reversal underpins a range of core concepts of Nietzsche. Connection and openness will be argued to be manifestations of distinct structures of experience in spatial terms – concentric space – with reversal a feature of diametric space. It will be argued that these seminal thinkers’ basic concepts are held together through a common silent thread of space, not an inert space but the lost continent of an implicit spatial interplay between concentric and diametric spaces.

Figure 1.1 Diametric dualism

Figure 1.2 Concentric dualism

Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s works are conceptually intertwined, with overt points of affinity and antagonism. Commonalities between these thinkers and Ricoeur are that they all invoke a life conception, at least implicitly, while also interrogating relations between self and another with regard to an axis of inclusion and exclusion. Each offers a challenge to the Cartesian ego, while giving emphasis to experience to challenge dry abstraction and simultaneously seeking also to move beyond the injunction of the Kantian categorical imperative, to act as you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. Significantly, each thinker silently relies on spatial assumptions for their understandings of life and experience. Ricoeur’s particular contribution includes the proximity of his position to a spatial protolanguage and moreover, a spatial protolanguage integrally concerned with a life principle. Concern with inclusion of the Other is a key theme in his work. Kearney characterises Ricoeur as an ‘inveterate mediator’ (2007: 147) between traditions and positions; such a mediating role for Ricoeur can be taken further through recognition of the key role of space as a mediating dimension.

Space and a life principle

By lifeless space, it is meant space that is without movement, lacking not only animation but also being flattened into immateriality as abstraction. Descartes treated space as a lifeless nonentity, as a nothingness. A living space as a dynamic interacting background is in stark contrast with a Cartesian conception of space as ‘empty’ and a ‘mere nonentity’ (Descartes 1954: 200). It is this lifelessness for space that sets a foundation for lifeless space as abstraction. The question arises as to whether even those thinkers who offered a prolonged onslaught on abstraction, on a metaphysics beyond, such as Nietzsche, have overcome or even perceived this problem of lifeless space in their thought.

The shift that is needed for a conceptual movement in space, to apprehend a moving, life-giving space is one that treats thought as a material dimension³ and hence is itself spatial. It attacks not merely disembodiment but the despatialisation into a flattened one- or two-dimensional space that has squeezed the life of breath out of space, out of even thought that seeks to animate life. This book seeks to remedy this despatialisation of thought as exemplified in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur; this despatialisation has been the supporting condition to splinter thought from fundamental experiential projections – from proposed primordial experiential projections of concentric space and diametric space.

Moving space is the breath of thought. Yet space remains inert, flat and without this breath of movement in the foundations of Western thought. This problem of space is a blind spot even in the seminal thought of Nietzsche who did much to challenge the foundations of Western metaphysics and to rattle the cages of traditional assumptions. A breath-embodied thought is needed to address the dimensionality of space and to challenge a ferocious flattening of space. Spatial breath is the pulse of thought, not a denial of spatial breath in the inert space of monism. Space is indelibly interactive and immanent in thought. Even when space is not interacting with the objects of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Features of the spatial protolanguage of concentric and diametric space
• 3. Compassion and space
• 4. Rapture and space
• 5. The spatial background between Dionysian and Apollonian myths
• 6. Power and space
• 7. Space as freedom in experience
• 8. Space as movement: eternal recurrence beyond homogenous time
• 9. Space prior to metaphor
• 10. Space and internalisation of the other
• Index