Alienation Part One: Space, Time and Place

"Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature 

flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is 

called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and 

external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of 

motion, which is commonly used instead of true time.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, 

remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable 

dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by 

its position to bodies: and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space."
-Isaac Newton

Wimpy: "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
Popeye: "Today is Tuesday. You owe me for last week's hamburger."
Wimpy: "When I say 'Tuesday,' I always mean 'Tuesday a week from today.' "
Popeye: "When are you going to pay me for last week's hamburger?"
Wimpy: "Tuesday."

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time

is that we are still not thinking.”
-Martin Heidegger

This topic is so massive, so key to what is going on in Western Civilization in the modern age, that one post is not going to do it justice. This is the sleeping giant at the foot of our skyscrapers, the leviathan that shakes our sleeping cities. Probably the topic needs a whole book written about it to do it justice, but I will do what I can.

When I say "alienation", I am talking about a whole series of related processes with more or less the same or similar causes:

• Sensory/Perceptual alienation
• Intellectual/Linguistic alienation
• Spiritual alienation
• Means of life/economic alienation
• interpersonal alienation
• extrapersonal/extrahuman alienation, alienation from nonhuman existence and nature
• alienation from the forces of life and death

These phrases might not make much sense right now, I just want to get them out there now so you can kind of refer back to them. The first two are closely related and can be considered key to the whole thing in certain respects, so that will be the first thing we talk about.

We imagine that our perception of time and space to be a universal human constant, and in fact Immanuel Kant the very influential philosopher believed that our concept of time and space were hard-wired into our minds. There are three dimensions of space, one directional dimension of time (a sort of arrow or one-way sign pointed towards the future), and that both space and time in themselves are featureless and uniform, essentially numbers in Euclidean space. In other words, space and time in a Euclidean and Newtonian sense exist in a realm not immediately accessible to the senses, which we can nevertheless overlay as it were on the sensory realm. While Einstein threw a few twists into that idea of space and time, it is still essentially the idea of space and time Western 'civilized' persons live in. Time in itself is featureless, space in itself is featureless. Even Einstein in a sense did not fundamentally overthrow this paradigm. It is however an invention, an invention that began in a particular place and time and came to its full power in a particular culture. As David Abram correctly points out, it is an invention of alphabetic culture: in other words it would likely not have arisen in a culture that uses pictograms of various sorts for written language. I want to give full props to David for germinating most of my ideas on sensory/perceptual/intellectual/linguistic alienation. Read his books, seriously, just do it.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Contrast this conception of time with that which is held in various forms by most oral cultures. From Native Americans to Australian aboriginal peoples, time is held to be not linear but cyclical. Or rather, literally a sort of circle, or that these sorts of circles of time also delineate circles of space in a coherent, not separate, whole. This is easier to see if you think about the circle that the Sun travels overhead from dawn to dusk and back through the other side to dawn again, or the multiple circles of the Moon, both traveling a circle in the sky and traveling other cycles in its face as it waxes and wanes. Climb a mountain, and you see the circle of the horizon. There is the circle of the cardinal directions: north south east and west. Think about it. When you perceive directly, without overlaying a mathematical framework over it, do you ever perceive time and space as separate things? No you don't, you perceive time and space as aspects you can separate out, but aspects that in their original form are whole and unified. In fact our actual experience is one of perpetual becoming, with the past not receding into an abstract dimension but in fact burying itself in the humus, as it were, of the present. You experience the future as the manifold potentials of the present. Maybe things you are planning right now in this moment, and if you can open your mind to such experiences, things the world and the beings around you are planning or which are pregnant in their beings to be brought forth. Nowhere in our actual experience is a Euclidean or Newtonian view of space or time to be found.

Early Western researchers into the language of the Hopi people were perplexed at the fact that their language had no definite terms for past or future. In fact their view of time, so strange to us, is pretty much the default understanding of pre-literate peoples. There is the present, which is in a permanent state of becoming or unveiling, and there are the potentialities in people and plants and animals and places which set the stage for how this endless becoming will manifest next. With extreme difficulty in overcoming their Western perceptual framework, some Western philosophers (phenomenologists) came around to somewhat the same understanding. The phenomenologist Martin Heidegger described the actual perception of time and space as a continual unveiling of mystery.

“Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Which is an extraordinarily dense way of saying that the endless moment of becoming is a participation inherently. There is no objective observer, you are immersed and saturated and actually one with this chiaroscuro process of the present in which things move from the pole of potential to becoming and back again. Revealed and hidden and revealed again, inherently in motion, inherently not a static point on a timeline or a chart. The concept of space in cultures like the native Australian peoples is the same, which is to say that actual spaces/places (in contrast to abstract space) contain their own potential spaces as well as the present "becoming" space. Our concepts of space and time are what makes it so hard for Westerners to understand the aboriginal concept of the Dreamtime, which most Westerners sort of imagine as being a mythic past of totemic ancestral spirits. This attribution would make sense in a culture with a sense of time as creating unique historical moments as it passes in an arrow from past to future: problem is that the aboriginal people of Australia had no such concept. In fact the Dreamtime is an actual part of the landscape, the landscape being like a sort of book or series of story songs which can be evoked. When young aborigines do their walkabout, they are actually re-enacting this story or reality as they walk, turning this resident potential space and time into a sort of actual space and time. If you will, the landscape is like the tape in a cassette tape player and the human is reading out the information in this space as he walks. This storied space is something that existed/exists in Native American cultures and other oral cultures worldwide, and something that Westerners couldn't understand since all space was more or less the same and said nothing to them. So for Westerners, getting kicked off your land was an inconvenience and a financial cost: for the natives in North America and in Australia, getting kicked off your land was an existential trauma on a scale that we have a hard time comprehending. Aborigine mothers, when their babies gave their first kick in the womb, they place that child in a landscape of the exact place where that happened and what that place means in the landscape of oral mythology of that place. So in Newtonian space, all space is the same: in Aboriginal space, every space is unique, as unique as every person or possibly even more so since the person falls into place in his particular mythic but very real space. 

Okay, lets get back to us. Us meaning back to cultures either directly descended from or strongly influenced by Western Civilization, which really means most of the world now. Our bodies still inhabit this mysterious real spacetime, in fact cannot inhabit anything else, but we are largely unaware of it because our minds inhabit this abstract Newtonian spacetime. This not only alienates us from our own animal bodies, but also strips our experienced reality of meaning. Because, after all, in the Western view all spaces are essentially just space. A homogenous, neutered, mathematical entity. Moreover, anything non-human is essentially not a matter of interest except as relates to human activity, so that the landscapes in this Newtonian space are only raw materials for human enterprises. Not a potent, powerful existence with its own independent life, its own stories and language even. This neutered spacetime also robs human beings of any connection, any sense of belonging, to a particular non-human environment. In such a neutered space, they are merely a contingent point on a grid. Without place, meaning is confined to the narrow window of human preoccupations which becomes more and more self-referential and unreal. The simplest definition of alienation is not belonging anywhere. Of course this is usually casually understood as not belonging in a human social context, but that is because we have lost the understanding that there is a much larger context. Not belonging in the world, because we have subtracted the real world from our lives. 

How did it come to this? The very first people who had a linear sense of time, of history, were probably the Hebrews, and they not coincidentally were one of the first users of an alphabetic written language. Their history was the story of the unique actions of their God in their history at particular and non-repeatable moments in history. The invention of the alphabet begins in the intersection of Egyptian and Canaanite/Phoenician cultures, or in other words exactly the theater of action of the Hebrews in Egypt and as they left Egypt. The earliest known alphabetic script is Proto-Sinaitic, used by Canaanite workers in an Egyptian mine in the Sinai, an alphabetic version of Egyptian. The Egyptians themselves did not use this alphabet as far as is known, the people who used it were either the Hebrews themselves or Canaanites in close proximity to Hebrews, Canaanites being a kindred Semitic people. The first widespread use of this alphabet were among the Phoenicians (Canaanites) who became known as the main propagators of alphabetic writing, and the Hebrews. Not coincidentally, the Hebrews were the bearers of the first religion in which the Book was central. With alphabetic writing, writing no longer referred to actual pictured objects but to sounds in human mouths, and so it became removed from actual objects in the world. The Book also allowed them to maintain their myths and traditions when they weren't actually in Israel, which was most of the time. It was a stand-in, in a sense, for the more concrete stories that the land itself contained and it referred back to them: the Torah was a portable homeland. 

"Being Jewish means exiling yourself in the Word, and, at the same time,

weeping for your exile."
-Edmond Jabes

At the same time, clearly, Judaism was a very place-centered religion. The Temple was central, a sacred place, THE sacred place. They got rid of their tabernacles in the desert as soon as they could and built a real and, they thought, permanent temple in Jerusalem. Judea itself was the chosen land. The Hebrews wept continually in their various exiles. They had synagogues as a second-best option while they were in exile from Israel, which was practically all the time: it was a temporary replacement for the Temple. They did not believe that their redemption consisted of living in heaven, they had no such concept, but rather that they would bodily live in a restored Israel some day. Their Messiah was not an unworldly mystic like Jesus was, but a political figure that would lead the restored physical literal Israel. Jesus was very fundamentally influenced by another people who would become very important in this story later on: the Greeks. He lived in close proximity to Hellenistic culture, as did his earliest disciples. However we are getting ahead of ourselves. While the Hebrews were frequently alienated in actual fact from the Holy Land in the same way that the Cherokees were physically alienated from the Smoky Mountains in Southern Appalachia, and while the existence of the Torah in their alphabetic language began to supersede the importance of the actual place Israel, they were not yet conceptually alienated from that land and in certain ways still aren't. That conceptual alienation would have to await the cultural superpower of that region: the Greeks. 

The alphabet was not a Greek invention, but they would take it places no one else ever would. At one time the Greeks were an oral culture, and then at some point they picked up the alphabet from the Phoenicians and started writing down their epic myths such as those attributed to Homer. The process of writing them changed them however, and they began to abstract the stories from the spirits of the local places in which the stories took place. The stories stopped being in a sense the land talking about itself through people, and became people talking about people. Stories in the modern sense. Human beings stood front and center in this new alphabetic stage, the alphabet referring not to places or things but to sounds in the human mouth, a transcription of actual speech not a description of what the speech is about. This new abstraction into a human mental sphere began to manifest in the intellectual breakthroughs of the Greeks in geometry and mathematics, and their philosophy stopped being people talking about life but people talking about ideas and abstract concepts. You can see this process coming to completion in Plato's dialogues, wherein Socrates was the first person to really master the implications of what this meant for intellectual debate. For as long as Socrates analyzed and debated the content of the ideas themselves rather than what they actually meant and represented, his dialectic was essentially unassailable and his opponents must have been profoundly confused as to what was going on and how they were being beaten not on substance but by the words themselves. It was as if the alphabetic language itself was ganging up on them under Socrates' guidance, they still being centered in the real and non-conceptual world. 

In the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, it is like you can see this transformation taking place. It is the only Platonic dialogue to take place in nature rather than in the city. Socrates at one point says that he didn't like to go outside the city because he couldn't learn anything from trees and could from people, pointing out very clearly this perceptual shift, because of course people living in an oral culture could learn all sorts of things from trees and often did. 

Anyway, there are a number of clearly pre-Platonic things going on, Phaedrus at one point swearing on a plane tree and Socrates at one point getting a warning from the gods. It is the closest Plato gets to actually confronting his real adversary. Interestingly, Phaedrus carries a written copy of a speech about love that Socrates is keen to read and not have Phaedrus recite to him, but Phaedrus is keen to recite it orally to him. Phaedrus here clearly is a stand-in for an earlier way of being in the world, a closer way with nature and an oral communication of wisdom. Socrates is initially very enthusiastic about being in nature for what almost seems like the first time, but also along the way during their walk disparages mythology and proclaims that the only fit study for human beings is human beings. He also says that Phaedrus is leading him into nature with the promise of letting him read the text in question, somewhat in the manner of a person leading a donkey with a carrot.

Socrates' reaction to the text is that it does not read well as text, despite the fact that the text is a transcript of a speech by Lysias who is a renowned orator. Again, the conflict between the oral word and the written word, with Socrates deprecating by implication the oral word. Phaedrus challenges Socrates to do better, and with some cajoling and threatening Socrates complies. He proceeds to deprecate apparent (sensuous) beauty and rhetoric (beautiful oration) in favor of those concepts that are most removed from the flesh: in other words both love and beauty are pure platonic Forms (abstract ideals) and have nothing to do with actual bodies or things. While Socrates at several points pays lip service to various gods and mythological beings, it is clear that the only things that are actually real to him are these pure Platonic Forms. Complete abstractions without any corresponding sense data, in fact if there were sense data for them they wouldn't be Forms. Sense data is only a degraded and downgraded reflection of these Forms. Here you see Socrates, or at least Plato, setting up the straw man of a living inhabited vibrant and mythological world and knocking it down with concepts derived from words without actual referents. Mathematics as applied to words.

Western Civilization just went onward from there and never looked back. And this new conceptual understanding was powerful magic, so powerful we forgot it was magic and take it for reality itself. It made whole new worlds of fascinating things possible, and whole new worlds of horrific things possible. Astronauts and Dachau,  Chemistry and Colonialism, Electricity and Genocide. None of which I even care to judge here, that is not the point. Clearly Western Civilization initiated an entirely new epoch in the human experience and ignited entirely new potentialities. Problem is, its dragons and demons have been growing all this time in the dark, unconfronted, unacknowledged. And its shadow, its demon, represents all the reality that Western Civilization has been trying to cut out from under its own feet in the proud imagining that it can stand entirely alone in its world of Forms, in its abstractions of space and time, and that demon of unrecognized reality is coming up to bite us harder and harder. The environmental crisis, a clear consequence of disregarding the life of the land. Greater and greater social, economic and psychological alienation, greater and greater sociopathy and psychopathy as people are being alienated even from other people. A clear consequence of people disregarding the life of human beings as living beings instead of rational machines. And as Heidegger's quote suggests at the top of this post, we cannot even address the problem properly because we cannot acknowledge the reality of its sources. The source is in fact Reality itself. To recognize the reality of its sources is itself to begin to address the problem, but it is also to begin to unravel the Western paradigm that has dominated some part of the Western world for twenty five centuries. It is to question our very foundations, and that we are very loathe to do. But do it we must, or like every other civilization we will meet our death.