One philosophical idea is essential
in Eastern as well as in Western philosophy: the idea of All-Unity. The
ambition to grasp the world “as a whole” through a phenomenon so powerful that
it is able to unify all diversity within it, is linked to one of the most
primordial philosophical impulses or instincts. In India, truth is thought of
in relation to “the unity of things,” and such ideas of the whole universe being
manifest in each atom are recurrent. Classical and modern Indian philosophy
(Advaita Vedanta) sees Brahman (the Absolute) as a single reality, and systems
like the one of the Yogâcâra conceive reality as undifferentiated.
In the West,
Parmenides’ “One Being” and Heraclitus’ logos
represent the starting points of philosophy. These ancient ideas of All-Unity,
although indirectly and by first passing through Plato’s dialectics, are
present in Western “rationalist” philosophy as well. But the most explicit use
of the idea of All-Unity has been made by Russian philosophers of the 19th
century.[1]
Here it became a major philosophical concept, culminating in Vladimir
Soloviev’s vseyedinstvo (All-Unity)
in the form of a cosmic process claiming to be the “soul of the world.”
While “All-Unity”
can be found at the beginning of many philosophical reflections, it can also be
found at many a reflection’s end. What can be added, aspired or examined, once
this All-Unity has been spelled out and officially given the status of an
ultimate philosophical truth? Well, in principle, still two more things can be
done: (1) All-Unity can be transformed into a more sophisticated dialectical,
cosmological, monadological system; and (2) All-Unity can be defended against
diverse attempts to formulate the world as nothing more than a random
accumulation of single elements. In Western philosophy both things have been
done in various, often highly sophisticated ways. Spinoza, Bruno, Eckhart, and
finally Hegel are the best known examples. However, the overall impression in
these philosophies is that All-Unity is conceived of as simultaneously
attractive and repulsive. In other words: it is not seen as an end in itself.
Spinoza, for example, held that even though there is only one substance, this
substance has infinite attributes. A large part of Western philosophy is indeed
nourished by a stimulating tension between descriptions of the world composed
of clearly definable singularities on the one hand, and a unifying All-Unity on
the other. In this sense, All-Unity as the expression of an ontological or
existential self-contradictoriness, or even of an aporia simultaneously
affirming the existence of single elements and
their unity (an idea widely reflected by Idealism) has been philosophically
fruitful. If, however, the philosophy of All-Unity does nothing more than
negate any difference it becomes, in contradicting “reality,” mysticism.[2]
As “mystic” must be understood the attempt to think “All-Unity” as a
self-sufficient intellectual phenomenon, carrying with it the “end of
philosophy,” meaning the dull repetition of identical intellectual models.
The last time the
idea of All-Unity was put forth straightforwardly occurred during Romanticism
with its nostalgia for the unity of God, nature and man. In some respects, this
discredited, for our age of science, further attempts to grasp any All-Unity.
On the other hand, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit announcing the “End of History,”
remains attractive even today. Yet, the fact to consider a uniform unity as “real”
and as the culmination point of philosophical thought still represents nothing
more than pure mysticism.
One of the questions
to be asked in the present article is if the current spreading of Virtual Reality
and of “cyberspace” cannot be linked to visions of an all-unifying end of
history. Margareth Wertheim is convinced that “in a quite
literal sense, cyberspace is outside the physical complex of matter-space-time
that since the late seventeenth century has increasingly been held as not just
the basis of reality, but as the totality of the real.”[3]
The question is thus: does Virtual Reality represent the idea of a
non-physical space enabling man to grasp the world as a whole?
It is interesting to
examine a phenomenon whose connection with problems of All-Unity as much as
with Cyberspace has generally gone unnoticed: perspective. Modern science
discovered and elaborated the definition of subjects, elements, substances, and
the structures between them. Of course, all this was only possible on the firm ground
of a fixed perspective from which
subjects, elements, and so forth, could be perceived. This does not only
concern natural sciences but an entire Weltanschauung,
including art, society, and religion.
In art and
architecture, the invention of “perspective” has become most famous. The use of
perspective in Renaissance painting was certainly more than an artistic device
creating the illusion of naturalist spatial depth. “Perspectivism” presents
itself more like a dogmatic subjectivism attempting to reconstruct the world
within a geometric system by relying on one single point of view.
“Perspectivist rationalism” confines imagination to relatively narrow limits.
It therefore runs the risk of failing to grasp reality since reality is neither
geometrical, nor can its “whole” experience be covered by what is visible from
one single point of view. In opposition to this, it is obvious that
non-perspectival approaches strive towards All-Unity. In pre-17th
century Byzantine paintings for example, which were not yet influenced by
linear perspective, the point of view from which an object is seen appears as
moving and changing. Still, the aim of an art which ignores perspective
is not simply to address, by moving around and constantly changing the
perspective, a possibly high number of different mosaic glances, but rather to
grasp the essence of reality itself.
Perspectival and
non-perspectival paradigms are also present in approaches to society and religion.
Russian philosophers of the 19th century insisted that
Western-European philosophy had “invented” the idea of the “isolated
individual” able to exist independently of a communitarian “Whole.” This
critique of “secular” society is closely linked to theological conceptions.
Certainly, God is “all in all” (Cor. XV 28). However, from an Eastern-Orthodox
point of view, in Western Christianity, God became a concept. It no longer incorporated the inner
drama of life and became, in the words of Nicolai Berdiaev, “equivalent to
an unstirring stone.”[4] Through
the loss of the “tragic aspect within god” (Berdiaev) the inner drama and
dynamic stirring related to religious experience, were replaced by a single,
static, idolizing gaze dependent only on one single perspective.
For Berdiaev, this Western-Christian God is
more “scientific” than his Eastern-Orthodox one. Of course, as so often in
philosophical discussions about “Unity,” the Western approach can rightfully
insist that it has not lost the idea of All-Unity entirely. While Berdiaev
claims that his God is able to embrace All-unity only because He embraces the
“whole life” of human beings, Western Christianity can claim that it is just
the more abstract approach to theology that is helpful in grasping the “whole
world” within one concept.
In general, in modern Western civilization,
the perspective vision of the world is supposed to signify a “progress.” The
“unperspectival” way of seeing the world that was current before the
Renaissance is equated with a kind of weakened state of consciousness. Lack of
perspective means to be unconscious of the space that one lives in and of one’s own position within that space. On a
social level it can be associated with an ancient, clan-like existence in which
“the individual” as a social entity has not yet been discovered.
According to this model, perspective had to
be installed as a means to show the way out of an All-Unity in which all cats
are gray and that comes close to a kind of drunken mysticism. Once perspective
leads us out of this “All-Unity,” the whole is not necessarily lost because it
can always be retrieved in the form of an abstract whole. What is lost,
however, is a certain dynamic of (social, visual, theological) positions that
is usually sparked off through the confrontation of one perspective with both
other perspectives as well as with the phenomenon of the whole on the other.
In 1949, the German philosopher Jean Gebser
published a book called Ursprung und
Gegenwart that was translated into English only in 1985 under the title The Ever-Present Origin[5].
Gebser understands the antithesis of perspectival and unperspectival seeing as
logocentric and believes that it will soon be overcome because at the end of
the 20th century man’s concept of reality will undergo radical
changes. Gebser’s idea is that in Renaissance, “although man’s horizon
expanded, his world became increasingly narrow as his vision was sectorized by
the blinders of the perspectival world view. The gradual movement toward
clearer vision was accompanied by a proportionate narrowing of his visual
sector. The deeper and farther we extend our view into space, the narrower is
the sector of our visual pyramid.” (p. 23) However, the imprisonment of vision
and consciousness though perspective will soon come to an end, as evidenced by
Picasso’s aperspectival way of painting. Gebser finds that in a drawing from
Picasso from 1926…
…space and body have become transparent. In this sense the drawing
is neither unperspectival, i.e., a two-dimensional rendering of a surface in
which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional
visual sector cut out of reality that surrounds the figure with breathing
space. The drawing is “aperspectival” in our sense of the term; time is no
longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a forth dimension. By this
means it renders the whole visible to insight, a whole which becomes visible
only because the previously missing component, time, is expressed in an
intensified and valid form as the present. It is no longer the moment… (p. 24)
In this drawing, as in Picasso’s Guernica, spatiality is almost abolished
(p. 28), leaving only a “pure present,
the quintessence of time.” Some of
Picasso’s works “are almost devoid of any depth and any central point of
illumination,” and express the “eternal present” and not just a temporal
moment.
Essentially, Gebser
anticipates a “new reality” that will be more “intensive” as it is no longer
egocentric but determined by an “aperspectival” structure of consciousness that
has overcome the perspective dichotomy of negation and affirmation. This
consciousness is “a consciousness of the whole” in which “intensity and action,
the effective and the effect co-exist.” (p. 7) It is an “integral reality” as
an “intensive awareness of the world’s transparency, a perceiving of the world
as truth.”
Gebser’s prediction
appears to be amazingly correct, except for the fact that the “new reality” has
not been painted by Picasso or by some other artist experimenting with
perspective; the new aperspectival consciousness of the
whole is provided by Virtual Reality. Here perspective (which still
existed in simulation) is not simply negated but moreover overcome in the way imagined by Gebser, since all exterior points
of view have been replaced with an absolutely “inner” one. Through this new,
integral form of reality, man’s desire to return to
social and spatial unity, a desire that has been so severely negated since
Renaissance, seems to have been fulfilled.
While it is
relatively easy to agree with the correspondence of Virtual Reality with
Gebser’s model, the consequences remain debatable. Liberals have much reason to
remain relaxed, since, given the intellectual stimulation that Virtual Reality
provides in general, it seems to be unlikely that its creation will provoke a
slump into an unperspectival night. Aperspectival reality could function in the service of social, intellectual, and
spiritual dynamism in the way Russian philosophers of the 19th
century, Berdiaev, or Gebser strove after.
Less liberal persons
would still remain skeptical because nothing really indicates with certitude
that the invention of Virtual Reality overlaps with the inauguration of an era
in which “community,” “social experience,” or perhaps even “God,” will be
rediscovered in a new, aperspectival, light. All these items could also be
covered under that kind of mystical All-Unity that in the past has more than
once brought thought to a standstill.
Still liberals can
remain relaxed because they will understand the aforesaid rather as a proof for
the fact that, in principle, nothing is new. All-Unity has once more reemerged
with just as many reasons to be optimistic as there are reasons to be
pessimistic. Everything depends on whether the All-Unity develops along the
lines of a Hegelian monism or of a rather pluralistic empiricism in the sense
of Bergson and William James; and, with the help of some minor regulations, why
should the struggle between monism and pluralism not lead to positive
conclusions?
There is still
another point of opposition to this liberal position. Virtual reality
represents an unprecedented squaring of the circle since it is All-Unity seen from one single perspective. In the worst
case the virtual fusion of perspectivism and unperspectivism will create a form
of aperspectivism so peaceful that it can
bring all personal reflection to a standstill. The main danger is indeed
that “All-Unity with integrated perspective” will be retrieved by an “eat your
cake and have it” attitude that is so common in late capitalism. Would we not
all like to live in an abstract world and still make concrete experiences? This
Aufgehen (transcending) of the abstract in the concrete would truly
signify the end of philosophy and the end of history because: when a single
perspective is “All-unity,” then no
dialectic is possible.
We should therefore
conclude that Gebser was mistaken, and that his idea is to be seen as a typical
product of 20th century “eat your cake and have it” modernism. In
the end, perspective thinking will not be overcome with the creation of an
aperspectival world because this world is too close to abstraction. We need
instead a courageous return to unperspectivism enabling the experience of
tragic shifts from one perspective to the other. Gebser refused such a return
because to him this represented (like icons and pre-Renaissance paintings) a
concession to social primitivism and pre-civilizational paradigms of culture.
However, being unduly afraid of the unperspectival night, did he not go too far
by offering us a world entirely new and beaming with aperspectival light? More
modest approaches, like that of Bergson, seem to be more useful. Bergson
provided contently a “felt” view of
the world perceived through (still perspectival) intuition, instead of a really
new world in which perspective has been abolished. Gebser’s aperspectival world
remains an utopia. It is seemingly impossible to change the fact that in
reality the world is perspectival as much as it is unperspectival. Human
experiences will always have to be made within a field of tension stretching
between empiricism and intuition. Yet, looking at most recent technical
developments, it seems indeed to be possible to create a world in which all
“unsafe” and tragic experiences have been abolished.
According to Stephen
Perrela, Virtual Reality is the “concrete
realization of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit,” (my italics)[6]
and Michael Heim’s characterizes Virtual Reality as a theological manifestation
of Leibniz’s monad[7] in which we
experience no temporal unfolding, no dramatic shifts or delays, but only a kind
of aperspectival presence. In principle, this returns to the “God as a concept”
theory that avoids the “tragedy of life” in order to replace it with a stagnant
form of reality as abstract as a concept. In this reality, changes of
perspective are not permitted. Already once the Western European mind decided
to avoid these changes by successfully gluing vision to one single point of
view.
It goes without
saying that such a “safe” attitude that counts on absolute abstraction on the
one hand, but still enables concrete experience on the other, is particularly
attractive in contemporary civilization. Through it, a phenomenon like Virtual
Reality comes even closer to dream because also in dream excitement and fun are
imbedded in such a realm of absolute peace that the experience itself adopts
the character of a special form of reality. In this context, it cannot be a
coincidence that the creation of Virtual Reality goes widely in parallel with
the development of a new cosmology available to laypersons through the media
and popular books on science.
Pierre Levy, in his
optimistic evaluation of Virtual Reality, likens Virtual reality to a
“collective subjectivity in a cosmos.”[8] Paul Virilio is convinced that “virtual
space” means to substitute the “real space” of the cosmos,[9]
and Margareth Wertheim writes that “cyberspace creates a parallel world that in
the very real sense is a new cosmos of the psyche [which is] not made up of
atoms or particles, but is ontologically rooted in the ephemera of bits and
bytes, not subject to the laws of physics and […] not bound by the limitations
of those laws.”[10]
It is true that a
reality that has been tested as a cosmological phenomenon is simply “safer.”
The serenity provided by the awareness of being in harmony with a cosmos that
is abstract though still real is dreamlike and, moreover, dispenses us from any
responsibility towards concrete life (“it’s the cosmos, you know”) is indeed
precious. In a recent special issue devoted to “The New Cosmology,” the Scientific American presents diverse
results of astrophysical research that laypersons may hesitate to associate
with scientific learning. In these speculations on the nature of the cosmos,
“being” and “nothingness” become intertwined, “energy” is used metaphorically
rather than as a measurable quantity, and the meaning of the word “exact”
becomes relative par excellence
because “nothing is exact, not even nothingness” (p. 31). A most remarkable
hypothesis is also pronounced with regard to “empty space” that is supposed to
be filled with elementary particles able to “spontaneously pop out of
nothingness and disappear again, if they do so for a time so short that one
cannot measure them directly.” Though the author admits that “such virtual
particles, as they are called, may appear as far-fetched as angels sitting on
the head of a pin,”[11]
his conclusion remains that “empty space is not empty at all” but that it must
be filled with these “virtual particles.” Even more, the entire universe “must
be composed largely of an even more ethereal form of energy that inhabits empty
space, including that which is in front of our noses.” (p. 32)
The reference to
“virtual particles” shows that while theoreticians of Virtual Reality borrow
from astrophysics the technical metaphor of “cosmos”, cosmologists borrow the
metaphor of “the virtual” from theoreticians of Virtual Reality in return. In
fact, nothing could be more virtual. Space itself, because it begins embracing everything (from experiential life-space
to space as a subject for astrophysical research), is defined as an ontological
paradox: simultaneously empty and not empty, (perspectively) measurable and not
measurable, living and dead, or most simply: virtual.
It is clear that in spaces as safe as this
one, the most dangerous and potentially tragic experience of all human
experiences had to be ruled out from the beginning: the possibility to meet
another person. This does not mean that one would not meet other people in the
virtual cosmos, but it is difficult to see how these people could still be
recognized as “the other.” In 1967, the computer scientist Michael Polaner
could still complain about “the scientific outlook that appeared to have
produced a mechanical conception of man.”[12]
This statement perhaps best shows the extent technology has advanced since the
1960. The main problem today is not that the Other would be judged as too
“mechanical,” but rather that a mechanically all-unified character of reality
does not even permit the perception of the other as the Other.
Certainly,
cyberspace allows a shared reality with another person to a point that his/her
reality is mine in the sense that it permits me, as says Wertheim, “to
experiment and play with others.”[13] However, in reality this is not true
sharing. “To share reality” essentially means to look at the same things, or
the same symbols from different perspectives. Even more, it is the very
constellation of two persons looking at the same object from two different
perspectives that creates space. At
the moment there is no tragic shift from one perspective to the other, the
Other is lost along with the potential space that could have been created. If
there is no perspective, I cannot adopt the perspective of the Other.
In Japanese Noh-plays
the quality known as “detached viewing” describes a sophisticated self-other
relationship through which experience is shared between the performer and each
member of the audience. “Detached” viewing (the fact that the spectator is
prepared to leave his/her own perspective of the event and to view it with the
supra-perspectival eye of the others), is seen as an achievement of dramatic
art, as a part of the dramatic experience of the Noh-play itself.[14]
The important point is that spatial consciousness is here created “tragically”
through a loss of perspective which, for that reason first of all had to exist,
and the adoption of another, all-uniting perspective.
The “detached
viewing” is reminiscent of Gebser’s aperspectival seeing, but in reality it is
different. It is not the attribute of a synthetically created reality but the
result of real experience. All-Unity that has been obtained in this way, that
is, through a tragic shift from one individual perspective to a larger one,
represents real, mature understanding. Once this shift has been obtained, there
is no return to naïve perspectivism because: once the cake is eaten you cannot
have it. This, however, is probably a less popular thing to claim in the realm
of virtual aesthetics.
1. Russian
philosophers who were interested in the idea of All-Unity are in particular the
pre-revolutionary, “organicist” thinkers Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), Lev
Lopatin (1855-1922) and Semën L. Frank (1877-1950). Especially Frank’s and
Soloviev idea of All-Unity (vseyedinstvo) represents a “unity in multiplicity”
2. A curious case is the Christian
Church which understood any attempts to see the world as an All-Unity as
Pantheism. The only All-Unity it would accept was God who created a world
composed of singularities. In some way, the Church wanted to monopolize
“all-unifying” mysticism and not permit its use outside definitions of God.
3. Margareth
Werthheim: “The Medieval Return of Cyberspace” in John Beckmann, The Virtual
Dimension (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), p. 47.
4. N.A. Berdiaev:
“Iz etiudov o ya beme: etiud 1. Uchenie ob ungrunde i svobodie” (Studies
Concerning Jacob Böhme Etude I: The Teaching about the Ungrund and Freedom) in Put’
1930: 20, p. 47-79.
[5]. Jean Gebser
(1905-1973): The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, London: University of Ohio Press,
1985)
[6].
Stephen Perella: “Hypersurfaces: Social Fluxus” in Beckmann, p. 237
[8]. Pierre Levy:
L’Intelligence collective: pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Paris: La Découverte, 1994), p. 169.
[9]. Virilio: La Bombe informatique
(Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 95
[10]. Werthheim, p. 58.
[11]. Lawrence M.
Krauss: “Cosmological Gravity” in Scientific American (The Once and Future
Cosmos) 12: 2, 2002, p. 33.
[12]. Michael Polaner:
The Tacit Dimension (1967) quoted from Joseph Weizenbaum: Computer Power and
Human Reason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)
[13]. Wertheim, p. 58.