How Am I Called Upon by the Planet?
Read from a distant planet, the majuscule script [Majuskel-Schrift] of our earthly existence would perhaps seduce the reader to the conclusion that the earth was the ascetic planet par excellence, an outpost of discontented, arrogant and nasty creatures who harboured a deep disgust for themselves, for the world, for all life and hurt themselves as much as possible out of pleasure in hurting.[1]
I
Every day, different structures call upon us in different ways, a phenomenon that Louis Althusser called interpellation.[2] We are called upon by the state—interpellated by the state—as citizens. We are called upon by a digital platform as users. We are called upon by religious figures as members of the community of believers. We are called upon by the hetero-patriarchal society as beings that must conform to the gender binary and to the associated behavioral expectations. Each mode of interpellation thus comes with a mode of subjectivity that furthermore implies a mode of belonging—a community, a form of polis. Analogously, one may ask: how am I called upon by the planet? The answer I will argue for in this essay is the following: from the planetary perspective, I matter as a member of a particular layer of the planet—the biosphere. To be a member of the biosphere means to be a biological organism, i.e. a body. And to be a biological organism means to carry a certain template of existence inherited from the planet. This template boils down to constantly renegotiating the boundary between interior and exterior. As an autonomous entity, an organism achieves a degree of separation from the outside, but it still needs the outside for its existence. After all, an organism is a metabolism: a self-sustaining process that maintains stable conditions in its interior by an intake of outside resources and the disposal of waste energy or material back into the environment.[3] The organism’s boundary is thus always perforated—it is not a wall but a filtration membrane, a tactical interface.
Curiously, the constitution of the planet itself follows this metabolic template—it is an intense, dynamic, temporary crystallization of the evolution of the solar system. Any planet thus seems to be much more an open-ended historical process rather than a stable object—its relative stability is a result of being constantly traversed by external energetic-material flows. To situate humans in this metabolic landscape, one may begin by probing the two figures of philosophical anthropology as devised by Annemarie Mol. The first is the figure of a walker—a being that moves through the landscape, traversing various geographies, perhaps sporting a gorpcore jacket and a pair of brand new Vibrams. The second is an eater—a category of creatures that “move their surroundings through their bodies”.[4] As Mol says, walking and eating open up very different exemplary situations from which to borrow metaphors that populate philosophical thinking: while walkers take a slightly privileged position with respect to the environment—observing, conquering, ascending—eaters are all about “ingesting, stocking up on energy, feasting, stilling hunger, taking pleasure, and so on”.[5] Guided by the obvious metabolic connotations of this figure, one thing that happens when you move the environment through you is that you give up a degree of your autonomy. The precondition of this action is porosity, an openness towards the exterior. Instead of being perfectly isolated, immunised, you invite the outside to influence you: the outside a.k.a. what you eat, breathe, what microbiological particles enter your blood circulation, etc. Each metabolic act is a little occupation by the outside, if you will.
II
Compare this now to the situation of an athlete—the third figure I would like to propose as a complement to Mol’s walkers and eaters. Athletes exist in a strange superposition of activity and passivity, of being hijacked by their bodies while also controlling them. Take the case of Simone Biles, the best artistic gymnast of our era, who withdrew from the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Her withdrawal gives us a picture of the vulnerability of the human body under conditions of peak physical performance. Her own words are telling of the loss of control over the body, of feeling imprisoned inside her own body.[6] However paradoxical this may be to hear from one of the best athletes in the world today, philosophically speaking, the point is well taken—the interlacing of activity and passivity seems to be central to any athletic performance. Any practice depends on repetition. Training is no different. You do thousands of reps until you get the movement right. Far from being the training as a training of will, it is a body programming, conditioning of the body for the sake of movement’s reflexive automation. The better you get in any physical sport, the more you give yourself up to the physics of the movement, to the inertia of your body.
What is going on here? Is it you? Or is it your body exercising? How much is there of your will and how much of the deterministic laws of nature? Seen from the first-person perspective, there may indeed be a sense of deprivation of agency. But at the same time, your agency increases as you add a new skill to your portfolio. The crucial point is that your ego, yourself, is here in the position of an observer, and the real work is done by something outside you yet still somehow you. The self here is the foam on a wave, present yet with no power, just a mere passenger. There is an inevitable, almost omnipresent moment of exteriority in our bodily experience, a moment that is profoundly voiding the meaning of humans-qua-organisms as full, self-contained individuals. How far can this voiding go?
III
One answer lies in Indian and Chinese philosophical traditions, especially the Yogācāra Buddhist school of thought. Vasubandhu, historically its leading thinker, claims that it is not the body but the mind that is fundamentally an empty container.[7] In his philosophy, emptiness is tantamount to the illusory nature of both subjectivity and objectivity. One of the great modern commentators of Yogācāra was the 20th-century Chinese philosopher Xiong Shili, whose legacy I have encountered thanks to Anna Greenspan, my colleague at NYU Shanghai, who has studied Xiong’s philosophy in relation to her work on media theory with Chinese characteristics.[8] According to Xiong, reality is non-dual: substance and illusion collapse into one process, which he calls the Great Function. He uses the metaphor of waves and ocean to get the message through: every wave has the ocean as its “true source”, yet the ocean manifests only through the waves, and hence there is no real dichotomy between the wave and the ocean.[9]
Interestingly, such Buddhist perspectives received a quite serious reappraisal by contemporary philosophy of mind. Thomas Metzinger has spent the past years conducting extremely unorthodox research—he has been collecting accounts of no-self experiences of professional meditators. The goal? To identify the core aspects of what he calls minimal phenomenal consciousness, which would help him determine whether any sense of self is needed to have conscious experience. According to Metzinger, in the case of homo sapiens, and likely a host of other species, including primates and dolphins, the unavoidable feeling of having a self (what Metzinger calls phenomenal self-model) results from a special form of darkness—namely the inability of the organism to perceive its representations of the world as internal constructs.[10] Self-consciousness arises from the organism’s identification with its self-model—a model that is part of the organism’s internal representation of the world. This identification is essentially a form of misrecognition: the organism mistakes itself for its virtual model. This confusion is not an error but a functional adaptation, as it enables efficient interaction with the environment while filtering out countless processes and operations that the organism does not need to be consciously aware of. Having a self is not a metaphysical fact but a cognitive trade-off, a useful heuristic to avoid the information overload that would inevitably lead to paralysis of the organism’s decision-making capacities and the ability to act upon them.
IV
As it turns out, according to Metzinger, the sense of self does not always accompany conscious experience. Consciousness arises as a property of experiences themselves, and they are only afterwards stitched together into a coherent narrative of how to relate to this imaginary center of the experience, that is the self. To that extent, consider one of the many accounts of no-self experience that Metzinger and his team collected: “[T]here’s no personal point of view, it’s the world point of view, it’s like the world looking, not ME looking, the world is looking.”[11] Now, replace “world” with “planet”, and you hit home. Through manifold metabolic exchanges humans are embedded in as organisms, humans are linked to the planet like their non-cancellable umbilical cord. The task is to learn to see this: and to learn to see this, one must put the self aside first, to let it temporarily dissolve in a generic metabolic substrate of the planet. Metzinger sees this planetary dimension of selflessness too. At the end of his recent book The Elephant and the Blind, he calls for the cultivation of Bewusstseinkultur (or consciousness-culture, in more or less plain English). As he says, self-knowledge of ourselves as selfless creatures is the kernel of this culture, producing an ethical standpoint thoroughly consonant with my argumentation:
Our species does not respect humanity as a whole, neither in the present nor in the future. Collectively, we lack the ethical integrity, the quality of compassion, and the capacity for rational action that would have enabled us to avert medium- and long-term catastrophe at moderate medium- and short-term cost. We are causing an enormous amount of future suffering, and we are doing so knowingly. Very soon, therefore, it will no longer be possible to respect the behavior of large segments of humanity. We will no longer be able to take ourselves seriously, for our behavior does not change even when we clearly recognize that it must.
This is where the idea of a new, secular form of spiritual practice comes back into play. There actually is something that we can still respect in ourselves and others: the nonegoic form of conscious self-knowledge that gradually reveals itself in contemplative practice. This form of conscious self-knowledge is much deeper than the high-level dignity that rational subjects may (or may not) see and acknowledge in each other, because it creates a much more fundamental relationship between the individual and the community of all sentient beings capable of experiencing it. It is nonconceptual. It is ownerless. It has nothing to do with words or thoughts. Animals may have it. Perhaps future machines should have only this form of self-awareness. The capacity for conscious but nonegoic self-knowledge is something that we can respect in ourselves and others, even if humanity as a whole fails. It has worth, and it can be valued—but first, it needs to be recognized. We have to rediscover it.[12]
The modeling power of the human brain unlocks the potential for empathy and generosity towards agents radically different from ourselves. As we have already learned from Metzinger, the phenomenal self-model is nothing but a subjectively stipulated center of cognitive processes that brings synthetic unity to myriads of mental acts. Building on this hypothesis, researchers in Metzinger’s team have worked on identifying potential states of consciousness that can be at least partially said to be selfless, i.e. lacking the active presence of a self-model.[13] Not surprisingly, such states can be widely found in different forms of ascetic practices. Many of the first-person accounts collected by Metzinger describe how the moment when the mind “recognizes itself” in the meditation coalesces with the disappearance of the egocentric self-model.[14] Other accounts describe minimal phenomenal consciousness as “neither an internal model of a self-as-subject, nor a model of an object”.[15] The recognition of these practices introduces a largely suppressed side of philosophy as a contemplative practice. Bewusstseinskultur thus turns out to be a practical philosophy of mind aimed at taking “an ethical stance toward one’s own mental states”.[16]
V
Recognizing the ethical value of selfless mental states offers an opportunity to see contemplative practices as a training ground for ethical relationships with other creatures and ultimately to the planet as such. Responding to the pounding urgency of the planet’s calling upon us in the situation of climate emergency begins with taking a step back, contemplating the selfless organism that we are; this body that is no-one. Shortly before his passing, Michel Foucault was immersed in preparation for his never-written book, which would address what he called technologies of the self. He focused on the genealogy of these technologies in Greco-Roman tradition, defining them as those practices
[...] which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and semis, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.[17]
These include Stoic self-examination developed by Seneca or a monastic life of voluntary self-disciplination. As forms of asceticism, these practices were the target of repudiation by Friedrich Nietzsche and his affirmative philosophy of life as the realization of the will to power, since to him, they hinder the realization of the organic potential hidden in human creatures. Yet just a couple of decades after Foucault, another German philosopher—Peter Sloterdijk—sees things very differently. Looking at the rise of mass sports culture and the ubiquitous emphasis on training and exercise in both private as well professional domains of human life, Sloterdijk looks at the planet of ascetic creatures with kinder eyes, seeing not a demography of self-flagellating but rather obsessively self-improving organisms.[18] One may ask: if voluntary self-disciplination is so widespread in the human population and if technologies of the self indeed have not been forgotten, shall we look for technologies of selflessness that would match Metzinger’s call for planetary Bewusstseinskultur?
Perhaps having a “self” does matter in some contexts. The sense of identity it yields allows us to take responsibility for our actions or pursue long-term life projects. It seems to be a condition of understanding personal integrity and the value of the individual in the world. But I do not believe it matters in relation to the planet. For the planet, any human matters as a biological organism—and this should be a thing to celebrate, not to brag about. Everything that contemporary biology and neuroscience tell us about the nature of human organism suggests that humans are indeed selfless, in a special sense which does not inevitably imply the pursuit of ascetic allocentrism as opposed to individualist egocentrism, but also why not:[19] beyond the more usual connotation of asceticism as a separation from the world into one’s “inner citadel” (following Marcus Aurelius) lies the opportunity to frame ascetic practice as a tool of self-transcendence
proper.[20] By this, I do not mean surpassing one’s limitations, reaching beyond what was thought for the subject to be possible. Instead, this self-transcendence coincides with the moment of dissolution of the self in a rising tide of exteriority. One can think about it as a radicalization of Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity (itself a very Nietzschean trope, presenting the human as an essentially malleable creature):[21] the self being so plastic it can ultimately mould itself into a position of being no-self, swimming in the metabolic soup of planetary dissolvents. Asceticism can be interpreted as a way to discover the intrinsic selflessness of the human being, which is in the metabolic view the foundational truth of the human’s existence as an embedded, biological creature; and it follows that asceticism is not “just” about shaping oneself but about stepping beyond the act of egocentric self-shaping towards the allocentric position of no-self.