CONTENT
On
the Phatic Function
On Phatic Overload, Being-in-the-World, and BA
On Western Angeletic Conceptions
On Messengers and Messages
On Learning From Each Other
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
ON
THE PHATIC FUNCTION
RC Some Japanese schools are thinking about
prohibiting the use of mobile phones because they are being misused for
bullying but also for prostitution, particularly of young girls, as
well as for
other kinds of wrongdoings.
MN This
is a very important and serious problem
for us. I don’t know about prostitution, but it is true that young
Japanese
girls as well as young boys in high school, in junior-high school or
even in
elementary school, are under great influence from mobile phones and the
internet in various ways. It is easy to talk about the ‘bad influence’
of this
new sort of CMC or communication, but what is important in these cases
is to
see why younger generations (and also older generations) are so much
interested
in communication using these new tools. I think that one of the
attractive
characteristics of mobile phones for boys and girls is that they
provide them
with means with which they can communicate among themselves without
being
disturbed by their parents or family members. Another aspect of the
attractiveness of mobile phones seems to be the “phatic function”
(Jakobson
1960).
According
to Kiyokazu Nishimura, a Japanese scholar dealing with media,
aesthetics
and dramatic expression such as Kabuki
(classical Japanese dance-drama), mobile phones give to young and old
generations a sense of connection with friends, peer groups, etc. The participants want to get
connected all the time or they want to feel the potential connection
with
others by sending e-mails or by just keeping their mobile phones on
(Nishimura
1999). In my view, we need to create some sort of shared field among
the
participants in which various aspects of communication such as
persuasion,
transmission of information, greeting and so on can take place. In
direct or
face-to-face communication, we use various sorts of facial expressions
such as
eye contact or gestures while on the phone we use verbal expressions
such as
‘can you hear me?,’ ‘isn’t it?,’ ‘right?,’ and so on. These
utterances
and facial expressions have nothing to do with the content or essence
of the
communication, but at the same time they are indispensable when
communication
itself occurs.
In
my view, in order for communication to take place, we need a shared
field or Ba (= place). In order to keep or create this Ba, we need
such utterances and facial
expressions that can be seen as meta-communication. They determine or
characterize the nature of communication taking place in accordance
with or
under the influence of this ‘meta-communication.’ In my view, using
mobile
phones or being engaged in communication via SMS provides the
participants with
a certain sort of phatic function or meta-communication. We need a
certain sort
of meta-communication when we talk with each other or are engaged in
interactive actions. We always say such things, ‘this is just a joke,’
‘honestly speaking,’ ‘are you teasing me?’ These utterances are
something that
determines the situations within which a variety of deeds, interactive
actions,
or talks can occur.
The
concept of Ba as used by Kitaro
Nishida or Bin Kimura means a place where the subject and the object or
mono (things, objects) and koto
(events, human interpretation of
objects and experiences) encounter. Take for instance the
following poem (haiku) by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694):
Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu
no oto
An
ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water
With
this poetic expression, we experience some sort of oneness (Ichinyo)
of the poet, frog, old pond,
sound of jumping frog, Basho’s ears, our own ears. In this case, Ba is the place where these mono, koto,
kotoba (words, expressions)
come together. In the case of communication by mobile phone or the
internet, Ba might be considered as the place
where meta-communication and communication come together (Nakamura
1998; Kimura
1994).
According
to Ervin Goffman, otters’ play is dependent upon some kind of phatic
function
or meta-communication: ‘this is just playing, so never bite me
seriously’
(Goffman 1974). Of course, the phatic function is not dependent on
speech in
this case. According to Nishimura, and I think so too, we are now
facing
serious confusions at the level of meta-communication. For example, we
can't
live alone, but we have to live by sacrificing others to live a better
life, or
as Fromm pointed out, we need freedom and on the other hand we fear
freedom and
escape from freedom (Fromm 1941). In the case of younger generations in
Japan, we
are half Westerners but remain
dwellers in the ‘Far East.’ This is
perhaps
the case with older generations too. We dislike too close friendships.
We like
individualism imported from Western cultures, on the one hand, but
we always feel that we are hurt by loneliness, on the other. We
are facing
a kind of confusion or collapse of meta-communication. Japanese youth
often
hurt each other or sometimes even ‘kill’ others by teasing (death as
the result
of bullying) and excuse this by saying: ‘hey, this is just a game!’
It
is true that we need a sense of connection or of sharing the situations
in a
various ways, so that people don’t have much difficulty in
understanding a kind
of phatic function, and in some cases they seem to seek new sorts of
phatic
function or meta-communication to keep their communication active all
the time.
In my own view, Japanese web-sites are full of information or
utterances that
remind us of the younger generations’ need for a simple form of
meta-communication. Japanese web-sites are full of blogs whose titles
are: ‘You
see, I’m here’ (Boku ha koko ni iruyo).
Mobile phones are a token of a need for easy meta-communication. In
this sense,
we Japanese face the situation which might be called phatic overload.
In the
cases of the prostitution of young girls, some people prefer to use
terms such
as enjyo-kousai, which means
‘aid-receiving friendship.’ But who gives aid for what and who receives
what?
This might be referred to as distorted phatic overload which is
motivated by
simple greed, in one way, and by a sense of poverty of communication or
human
relations, in another.
Lovely
puppets attached to mobile phones of school girls symbolize this
complicated
situation in Japan.
They mean ‘we are not bad girls, we are just girls worthy of someone’s
aid.’
ON PHATIC OVERLOAD,
BEING-IN-THE-WORLD and BA
RC Phatic overload can be
ontically understood as
arising from individual loneliness. But if we interpret moods not just
as
subjective states of mind but, following Heidegger, as ways of
experiencing our
being-in-the-world or Ba, loneliness
reveals what is stated by the utterance: ‘You see, I’m here,’ that is
to say,
the very fact of the ‘here’ of Being or the Ba
of existence.
The
intention of sending a message to a receiver is mostly represented as
being the
sender and the receiver originally separated from each other and
connected by a
medium. This is clearly portrayed in Claude Shannon’s communication
scheme (Shannon 1948). It is
interesting to remark that Shannon
does not define the concept of message used in
this scheme. His concept of information as possible selections from a
repertoire of physical symbols is the opposite to the ordinary meaning
of
information as communication of something new. Warren Weaver remarked:
The word
information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not
be
confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not
be confused
with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded
with meaning
and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent,
from the
present viewpoint, as regards information. It is this, undoubtedly,
that Shannon means when he says, “the
semantic aspects of
communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects.” But this does
not
mean that the engineering aspects are necessarily irrelevant to the
semantic
aspects. (Shannon and Weaver 1949, p. 8)
Shannon’s mechanism of communication – dealing with
the engineering problem of getting a message of encoded symbols from a
sender
to a receiver through an electromagnetic medium so that it can be
reliably
reconstructed at the receiver’s end – can only work because there is
something
common to the sender and the receiver beyond or underlying their
physical
separation. In the case of humans, senders and receivers share a common
world
or Ba. Shannon’s
scheme is a world-less or Ba-less
representation of human communication. On the basis of this abstraction
– ‘abstrahere’ means to ‘draw off’ – there
is no structural difference between this technical model of
communication of
two technical systems, the metaphysical model of a divine sender
communicating
messages through angels to human receivers or the Cartesian model of an
isolated mind seeking to communicate with the external world or with
other
separated and encapsulated minds. What is excluded is not only the
shared world
but also the moods in which human senders and receivers experience
their common
being-in-the-world itself. As Heidegger taught us, this emotional
tonality is a
pre-theoretical experience of embeddedness that precedes the separation
between
subject and object. This is the reason why I think it is important to
develop
an intercultural philosophical angeletics in order to be aware of this
Western
bias as well as to describe different ontic angeletic situations and
forms of
sharing the world.
MN Phatic
overload is just what I wanted to
stress. Nothing is being said, no clear content or reference, at least
on the
surface level, exchanging utterances such as ‘can you hear me,’ but
just the
fact of being in communication with another person. They always want to
know
whether they are in communication or not and they always feel constant
anxiety
about not keeping in contact with the outer world. The phatic function
is
closely related with the use of mobile phones, blogs or SMS that
provide them
(us) with moods (or illusions) enabling them (us) to have a feeling as
if we
were always in contact with the outer world. In the case of Boku
ha koko ni iruyo, ha and yo mean
‘isn’t it?`’ Therefore, Boku
ha koko ni iru-yo means ‘I'm here, you see’ or ‘isn't
it?’
‘Here’ seems to be their position(s) immersed in some sort of ‘moods’
in the
dimension of their being-in-the-world with others.
In
my view, this ‘here’ = Ba = place
reflects several aspects of Japanese cultural and existential
situations:
(1)
strong orientation toward a life in which meanings can be shared with
others;
(2)
emptiness of human existence sometimes leading to suicide or metal
illness;
(3)
explicitly and implicitly shared contexts in which various types of
phatic
function as well as communication can be realized;
(4) Ba interpreted as
‘in-between’ (Aida)
combined with Mu (nothingness).
I
want to add an explanation to Ba as
the fourth aspect. As I explained above, Ba
as discussed by Kitaro Nishida or Bin Kimura means the place where the
‘subject’ and the ‘object’ or mono (things,
objects) and koto (events, human
interpretation of experiences) encounter each other. In my view, these
remarks
show typical cases of Japanese ways of understanding the world
pre-ontologically and existentially.
The
following views reflect these ways of understanding the world, i.e., Ba. According to Toshihiko Izutsu,
Dougen, a famous Zen-Buddhist priest (1200-1253) of the Kamakura
period, tried
to bring Being – which is dried up by the process of articulation of
beings or
by grasping the essence based on the process of articulation of beings
– into a
state of ‘articulating beings without grasping the essence.’ He,
Dougen, also
tried to bring Being into its original fluency (Izutsu 1991). Izutsu
interprets
Basho’s haiku from the same perspective. Words, frog, pond, the sounds,
the
poet, and the readers of Basho’s haiku, are gathered in the situation
of a
changing process of articulation and inarticulation. Words, people,
events,
things and experiences are related to one another as a fluid or active
process
of interchange of articulation and non-articulation of things. Yujiro
Nakamura,
a Japanese philosopher who attempts to combine traditional Japanese
thoughts
with modern Western thought, suggests that Kitaro Nishida tried to
regain the
meanings of beings based on Mu
(nothingness) or ‘predicative substrata’ (‘substratum’) which contrasts
with
subjective substrata. In this sense, Mu
is understood not as mere emptiness but as the source of beings (Yu) on which articulations of beings are
founded. According to Nakamura, the oneness of Mu and
Yu, or the oneness
of subjects and objects, the oneness of events (Koto)
and words (Gen)
needs Ba (or Bamen = place, field)
where a ‘coming together’ of subjects and
objects, events (Koto) and words (Gen) is
possible. This Ba or Bamen includes,
as Nakamura stresses, citing the work of Motoki
Tokieda, a Japanese linguist (Tokieda 2008), things, scenes, subject’s
attitudes, subject’s feelings, and subject’s emotions (Nakamura 2001).
The
traditional Japanese self-understanding is based on a place of secret
inner
minds which seem to be sustained by traditional emotional sensitivity (mono-no-ahare). People can share the
meanings of this traditional emotional sensitivity, but the sadness
coming from
it is confined to each person. This is a kind of fragile relationship
between
persons with fragile minds that underlies the desire to share the same
meanings
of existence in this world whilst at the same time keeping apart from
each
other. Most of my graduate students from China say that they don’t
have the
expression Iba-sho-ga-nai which means
‘I don’t have a place for myself.’ This seems to show a difference
between Japanese
and Chinese culture with regard to understanding Ba,
although the Chinese don’t use this term. This is an
interesting topic for intercultural angeletics.
Japanese Ba seems to reflect
the plurality
of
the Japanese life-world, culture and society. To put this another way,
we might
say that Japanese people live in mental situations leading them to
constant
pursuit of the meaning of life and human relations as well as to
meta-communication or shared cultural, existential contexts determining
their
life, human relations and ways of communication. Tsuji’s research
provides us
with interesting data on these problems (Tsuji 1999). This research,
done in
1999, is based on samples of Japanese university students. His
interpretation
of these data can lead to misunderstandings in some ways. I try to
interpret
the data as follows:
1.
Students with an orientation toward strong and constant friendship and
with an
orientation toward moderate, not strong but also not weak, i.e.
constant,
friendship in good balance are characterized by less use of certain
sorts of
phatic expressions such as te-yuka.
(= what I would say). For example: ‘Are you ill? Do you have a cold?
‘Well,
what I would rather say (te-yuka), is
that I’m a bit tired’ (toka-iu-kanji).
Or: ‘Did you enjoy that movie?’ ‘Well, I’d say, that movie is kind of (toka-iu-kanji) not so good or not so
bad.’
2.
Students who seem to want to know ‘what is a good friendship’ or who
want to
keep a sense of a related situation via mobile phones or face-to face
contact
tend to use more frequently such phatic expressions, te-yuka
and toka-iu-kanji.
3.
Students who have contradictory attitudes toward communication by
mobile phone,
that is to say, students with views such as ‘phones can make the
distance of
human relations or friendship shorter compared to face-to-face
communication’
have at the same time these views: ‘When I use phones, I feel it easier
to talk
with friends about a lot of things with which I have difficulty in
face-to-face
situations.’ and ‘I feel talking with friends over the phone a comfort
because
I can cut the communication whenever I don’t want to continue it.’
In
my view, these findings about phatic communication in Japan suggest the
fact
that we should take into account the Japanese Ba or
Japan’s cultural and existential situation when we move on to
the interpretation of concrete problems related with intercultural
angeletics.
In
order to understand some problems related with Japanese phatic
communication
and with intercultural angeletics, we should take into consideration,
using
this as an example, the Japanese orientation toward or the pursuit of
the
meaning of good communication, good human relations and good human
living. The
expression Boku ha koko ni iru yo
which we see in Japanese society today as a theme of private blogs,
words of
popular songs and so on, seems to reflect this orientation toward or
pursuit of
meaning. It seems that mobile phone use symbolizes people’s wondering,
‘what
are good human relations and good communication for?’ Under such
circumstances,
Japanese people are likely to be motivated to use mobile phones or
communication via blogs which are characterized by ambiguous meanings,
that is to
say, indirect and mediated communication on the one hand, and
communication
rendering human relations direct and lacking in distance on the other.
The
devices which make human communication meaningless and at the same time
meaningful through a variety of occasions for phatic communication
without concrete message-exchange – for example, te-yuka
and toka-iu-kanji
– mean a lot of things and also nothing at all. I discussed the
meanings
of Japanese blogs, Japanese popular songs, the Japanese sense of
privacy (as
subject matter for communication via SMS or blogs) in my papers (Nakada
2009,
2008; Nakada and Capurro 2009).
I
think that our thinking in the ‘Far East’
throws light on Western views about angeletics itself. What is exactly
meant,
from the point of view of angeletics, by the original connection
between a
sender and a receiver? Merleau-Ponty suggested that we human beings
have ‘the
original connection’ among ourselves in the dimension of our bodily
existence.
And as you know, his studies on aphasia and agnosia are strongly
associated
with Jakobson's studies on language and aphasia (Merleau-Ponty 1945).
The
phatic function might be considered to be the only function that birds
have in
common with human beings. This is very interesting too. Then we human
beings
and other creatures would have 'the original connection' in the
dimension of
the phatic function! But each function, understood as a basic mood,
makes the
world openness or ontological dimension, manifest in different ways, at
least
in the case of Dasein. In your contributions to angeletics you refer
several
times to Niklas Luhmann’s distinction between message (Mitteilung) or
meaning-offer (Sinnangebot), information (Information) or the process
of
meaning selection, and finally understanding (Verstehen) or integrating
the
selected meaning into the system (Luhmann 1987). According to Luhmann,
these
three dimensions constitute the concept of communication. In this model
there
is an original and recursive relation between sender and receiver. This
means,
if I understand you correctly, that the phatic function is an essential
element
of communication because it enables a distinction to be made within the
process
of communication itself each time when a selection of a meaning takes
place.
This implies also that ‘to communicate is to communicate is to
communicate’ or
that communication is a self-referential process that is at best
expressed by
the phatic function. Or at least we might be able to see the phatic
function
from Luhmann’s viewpoint. Is my understanding correct?
ON WESTERN ANGELETIC
CONCEPTIONS
RC As you know, Jakobson’s
“communication model”
distinguishes between the phatic function, the message, the context and
the
code. These distinctions go back to Karl Bühler’s “organon model”
in which the triadic
relation between sender, reference and receiver can be of a different
nature
depending upon whether the signs represent something (“Darstellung”),
or
express something about the sender (“Ausdruck”) or make an impact on
the
receiver (“Apell”) (Bühler 1978/1934). Since Niklas Luhmann we
know that the message
(“Mitteilung”) is a meaning-offer and has no definite content until the
receiver
makes his/her choices. Cybernetics has taught us that every receiver
can turn
into a sender. Lacanian psychoanalysis underlines the indefinite and
indefinable
nature of “the object” addressed in the long run by human desire. No
less
important is the role of the psychoanalyst as “the other” that enables
the
analysand to take a detour to himself/herself. This relationship,
called the
transference phenomenon, takes place from both sides. In other words, I
am
suggesting that the psychoanalytic experience is not only centred on
the indefinite
object of desire, as Lacan stressed, but also on the angeletic
experience of
the analyst as a messenger who passes on the message coming from the
analysand
or, more precisely, from his/her already understood (i.e.
pre-conceived)
being-in-the-world that Freud called ‘the unconscious.’ The original
messenger
or medium is not something (!) in-between a sender and a receiver, but
it is Ba or being-in-the-world itself,
although seen or experienced differently in Japan and the West, if I
may
simplify this complex intercultural issue. We can distinguish roughly
the
following conceptions:
1) metaphysical
(theocentric) angeletics: God as sender - angels/poets as
messengers -
humans as receivers;
2) anthropocentric and
technocentric
angeletics: humans
as senders - technical media as messengers - humans as receivers
technical
(artificial) and/or human senders - technical (digital) media as
messengers -
technical (artificial) and/or human receivers;
3) ontological angeletics: Being as sender - ‘here’ of Being as
ontic-ontological messenger, sender and/or receiver - Being as receiver.
The
ontological conception is the only one that thinks the original
relation or
encounter (“Ereignis”) between Being and “being here” or Ba.
To speak about Being as ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ could be
misunderstood as a kind of ontic phenomenon separated from the “here”
or Ba. I shall try to explain this issue
later.
As
you know, in Being and Time
(Heidegger 1976), Heidegger called the original relation between
understanding
and pre-understanding of the “here” of Being the “hermeneutic circle”
(Heidegger 1976). But given the fact that existential understanding is
not
primarily a theoretical, but a practical activity concerning all kinds
of
relations happening in the shared world-openness, it would be better to
speak
of an ‘angeletic circle’ or a relation between message and messenger,
as
Heidegger proposed in one of his late writings (Heidegger 1975). Each
interpretation is based on a process of message transmission. Which
means that
hermeneutics presupposes angeletics. Hermes is first and foremost a
messenger,
no less than an interpreter and translator. Of course, a philosophical
angeletics is no less ambitious than twentieth century hermeneutic
philosophy.
We should also make a distinction between an ontic or empirical science
of
messages and messengers, and a philosophical angeletics. As an
empirical
science, angeletics is not necessarily reduced to the phenomenon of
human
communication but can include also all kinds of messages and messengers
in the
natural sciences.
Let
me further explain what I understand by angeletic philosophy and,
correspondingly,
by a philosophical angeletics, using other Heideggerian themes, without
going
into a detailed textual analysis or exegesis of Heidegger. But perhaps
I should
use the term ‘angeletic thinking’ instead of ‘angeletic philosophy’
insofar as
thinking is a possible historical response to the call of Being
(Heidegger
1971), whereas philosophy in the Greek tradition is a doctrine or
teaching
about the forms (idea, eidos) of
beings qua beings. From this
perspective, thinking is originally angeletic, whereas philosophy is
‘in-formational’ (Capurro 1978). Heidegger explains this inversion and
transformation
of the relationship between subject and object into Being and Dasein by
saying
that, while modern subjectivity has a “representation” (“Vorstellung”,
‘idea’,
‘image’) of a tree, thinking exposes itself to the “call” (“Ruf”) of a
tree
itself that, so to speak, “introduces itself” (“der Baum stellt sich
uns vor”)
(Heidegger 1971, 16-17). This second experience is possible because we
and the
tree have a common ground, namely the earth (“die Erde”) which is not
in our
heads but in the world (ibid.). As Jean-Luc Nancy, following Heidegger,
remarks, philosophy and particularly hermeneutics can be understood as
the
presentation of a message. The task of thinking is of the kind of being
a
messenger (Nancy 2001, 94-95; Capurro 2002).
As
you know, Heidegger’s so-called ‘turn’ (“Kehre”) has to do with the
view that
(human) existence (Dasein) is addressed by Being instead of conceiving
Dasein
as ‘projecting’ or casting his/her being. Of course, both perspectives
are
closely related and already addressed in Being
and Time (Heidegger 1976). But for Heidegger, human existence or,
to put it
in more neutral terms, the structure he calls Dasein or the Here of
“Being”
that seems to be characteristic only of a particular kind of beings,
namely
ourselves, is derivative not only with regard to knowledge but also in
its very
possibility of being. This can be expressed in simple terms by saying
that we
human beings are finite beings and are aware of our givenness as well.
We know
that we were born and that we will die, as well as of the “in-between”
(“Zwischen”) of our lives (Heidegger 1976, 374).
Heidegger
uses the term “Es gibt” (‘there is,’ ‘it gives’) in order to express
what we
can call the ontological angeletic phenomenon (Heidegger 1976a). Being
is the
original sender and receiver whose encounter (Ereignis) with Da-sein or
‘Ba’ as messenger enables a world, that
is to say, an ethos or cast of living
to emerge. But the expression ‘there is’ or ‘it gives’ makes it clear
that
Being is not any kind of subject, especially not a divine one, sending
and receiving
messages. (Sheehan 2001) It is in original unity and difference with
its Here.
And vice versa: the messenger that receives the message of/from Being
is in
itself – or as him/herself in the case of human Dasein, the only one we
know
about – a ‘disclosure’ (aletheia =
truth) or messenger of Being. The message is the world.
Dasein
announces its facticity with the phatic dialogical (!) function: ‘You
see, I’m
here’ (Boku ha koko ni iruyo). In his
late writings, on several occasions Heidegger uses a tautological style
such as
“language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”) to underscore the
self-referential
phenomenon of Being that cuts off, so to speak, the monologue of the
(human)
subject, especially when such monologue is conceived entirely as an
inter-subjective dialogue, leaving aside its ontological dimension. In
the
‘Dialogue with a Japanese’ he makes a distinction between “speaking
about”
(“Sprechen über”) and “speaking from” (“Sprechen von”), that is to
say, between
language as a tool for conversation vs. language as the messenger of
Being. In
the last sentence of the Tractatus
Wittgenstein uses this distinction but he seems not to be aware of it:
“What we
cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence” (“7 Wovon man nicht
sprechen
kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”) (Wittgenstein 1975, 85).
Wittgenstein is
phatically speaking “from” Being – the standard English translation
says
“about” instead of ‘from’ – by saying that it is not possible to speak
“about”
– literally “over” it – because Being is not an object (and of course
it is not
a subject), or it is an ‘object’ or “la Chose” (or “l’a-chose”) in the
Lacanian
sense (Lacan 1986). It ‘is’ or ‘it sends itself’ as the in-between of
Da-sein
letting messages pass through. In contrast to language as a tool,
poetic
language allows us to speak “from” Being in a kind of relation where
the messenger
hears what language ‘dictates’ (Latin dictare,
German dichten) or sends to him/her.
Humans as the Here of Being are messengers of Being, letting beings be
what
they are. Heidegger calls humans “messengers” (“Botengänger”)
(Heidegger 1975,
155). He writes:
The
messenger must already come from the message. But he must also already
have
gone toward it. (“Der Botengänger muß schon von der
Botschaft herkommen.
Er muß aber auch schon auf sie zugegangen sein.”). (Heidegger 1975, 150, my translation RC)
The
usual German term for messenger being Bote,
“Botengänger” seems to underline the pure dynamic fact of bringing
the message.
It is the opposite of the kind of messengers we call ambassadors (Botschafter). There is an original unity
and difference between Being and Dasein beyond or prior to any ontic
separation
of sender, message, messenger and receiver. Unity and difference
between Being
and Dasein mean nothing more and nothing less than that we cannot not interpret or ‘cast’ the meaning of
Being by casting or projecting – Heidegger calls it “Entwurf” – not
only what
beings are, but primordially and practically our own existence. I think
that
today this double-bind casting of Being is done from a perspective of
the
digital. I call it therefore digital ontology (Capurro 2010) following
basic
insights of the Australian philosopher, Michael Eldred (Eldred
2009/2011).
Humans
as messengers are then not primarily, as we believe especially since
modernity,
senders and/or (digital) receivers of messages, but are originally
messengers
of Being, the message itself being the world as a casting of Being
arising from
the encounter between Being and Dasein. This inverted relationship with
regard
to anthropocentric modernity allows us a heteronomous relation to
Being,
becoming who we are, that is to say, in Lacanian terms, a divided or
“crossed-out” (“barré”) subject (Lacan 1971, II, 168) or a
subject
characterized by the finitude of its being addressed by the Other
(Lacan 1971,
108) that can annihilate him/her. Loneliness and anxiety are moods
through which,
as Heidegger taught us, we discover the truth, that is to say, the
finitude of
being-in-the-world-with-others. We receive and pass on – and sometimes
try to
bypass – the message of Being because we are originally the Here of its
disclosure.
Although
we mostly live immersed in the given openness of everyday existence,
exchanging
messages and maintaining communication through the phatic function, we
have the
potentiality to grasp a given (historical) disclosure of Being as a
possible
one, that is to say, to change its truth. For this it is necessary that
the
message of Being is perceived as such — as a gift of the ‘it gives’. An
example
of this at the level of an ontic region is the so-called paradigm
change in
science where the pre-ontological messages (facts) that are supposed to
prove
or falsify a theory are re-interpreted when the theory, with all its
biases,
pre-conceptions and pre-suppositions, its instruments, institutions,
traditions, etc., is put into question (Kuhn 1970). The radical
questioning of a
given world-openness by a messenger of Being that makes explicit this
ontological or structural relation between Being and messenger, can
lead to
strong opposition from the defenders of the status
quo and – to condemnation of the messenger, as in the case of
Socrates.
This opens the debate as to which are the ethical criteria for making a
distinction between a messenger of Being and its opposite (a
charlatan), with
all degrees in between. One important criterion for this difficult
ethical task
that is always endangered by manipulation and self-deception is whether
the
messenger maintains critically the openness of Being or proclaims an
absolute
truth. Another criterion is whether other messengers also remain
critical with
regard to the alternative casting of Being as passed on to them, or
whether
they develop from there, say, a political ideology, a mere worldview or
a
theoretical dogma (I thank Michael Eldred for an enlightening e-mail
exchange
on this issue).
ON MESSENGERS AND
MESSAGES
MN If my understanding is
correct, I think that
your angeletics is something I've been thinking about for a long time
since my
years as a university student. I've struggled with the problem why a
lot of
people are influenced by fiction or the imaginative representation of
the mass
media, even though they know the difference between the reality (facts)
and the
fictions (copies of reality). This problem can't be solved if we think
that
facts (or messages of some facts) are the first (original) and the
mediated
portrayal (news, dramas) are the copies of the first-hand realities.
This kind
of ontic thinking, which is typical for most scientific authors and
scholars,
seems to cause difficulties for them if they try to understand the deep
background of the bad/good influences of media as well as other forms
of
artistic expression such as poems, dramas, games and so on (these are
all
copies of reality in a way). At first, I tried to solve this problem by
getting
hints from Kant’s “Urteilskraft” (power of judgement) or
“Einbildungskraft”
(power of imagination), or from distinctions between reality and
actuality in
Bin Kimura, or the discussions of optical illusions and so on, but
after some
years' struggle, I understand that the presupposition that fact is
first and
expression is second, is the main problem itself. And now I know that
we have
to think about the presupposition that the message of Being is first
and the
(human) messenger is second.
Your
remark about the inverted relationship between message and messenger is
very
interesting in this sense, but some Japanese poets such as Basho seem
not to
invert the relations message and messenger, facts and expressions, mono (the objects or beings) and koto
(language, expressions, objects expressed
by words). They rather try to see the not-divided situations that
consist of
ambiguous beings of objects and words, mono
and koto, person (artist or audience)
and objects. In this sense, they don’t ask where the separated things
and
phenomena come from, but how is the
unity of objects and persons, mono to
koto and so on? This is my personal understanding.
Now,
I feel that we are close to the core questions of mediated and
aesthetic
expressions as well as of communication itself. Don’t you think so?
There are
no scholars around me who are interested in this kind of
ontological/hermeneutical
discussion/thinking but luckily some of my students seem to be fond of
my talks
related to phatic function or ontological explanation of CMC or
computer
mediated communication. The theme of the thesis of one of my
undergraduate
students is “ontological views on the use of the mobile phone.”
I
wonder how we as messengers can send this kind of discussion to a
broader range
of possible receivers. I wonder also how we can relate this kind of
discussion
to the problems of information ethics and robo-ethics in an academic or
theoretical as well as in a practical way in order to address difficult
matters
such as youth's wrong-doings as an expression of the loss of identity,
or the
loss of sense of fundamental relations between human beings, the
poverty of
meaning in our minds and so on.
I
am also thinking about comparing the phatic function in different
cultures.
Some of my graduate students come from various countries. For example,
I think
it will be very interesting to ask the students from China:
‘Explain the role of
Confucius as a messenger.’ According to Hideo Kobayashi (Kobayashi
1961), what
we can learn from the Confucian tradition is the importance of active
wisdom. I
think that active wisdom is important because the meanings of some
messages, as
we discussed, are not determined merely by messages themselves or the
literal
contents of messages/utterances separated from the relations between
messages
and messengers or the phatic function (keeping-in-touch) of
communication.
Hideo
Kobayashi says that if we try to make good use of active wisdom, we
have to get
rid of selfishness. This means that the interpretation of some poems or
novels
can't be separated from the (imaginative) relations between authors and
readers.
In this sense, we can learn how to use active wisdom through active
and/or
imaginative human relations such as the relations between Confucius and
his
disciples. As some scholars suggest, even ‘fake’ interaction with
robots might
have some real influence upon human beings as their partners. According
to an
interesting experimental survey done by Mariko Narumi and Michita Imai,
the
artificial voices of robots with a friendly and sympathetic tone are
found to
influence subjects’ behaviour. The subjects influenced by the utterance
of
robots such as ‘Why don’t you have a piece of this cake?” tend to eat a
piece
of cake offered by robots. Narumi and Imai explain the results of this
research
thus: “We human beings tend to attribute the friendly voice of a
machine to the
imagined inner minds or emotions of the robot.” (Narumi and Imai 2003)
I
remember having heard a story about nodding robots. Even nodding robots
enable
people to communicate more easily, for example, when speaking on the
telephone,
even if the nodding robots are just showing fake agreement. It is
strange that
some autistic patients can communicate with robots more easily than
with human
beings in some cases, according to studies on human-robot-interaction
(Feil-Seifer and Mataric 2008). In my view, we can explain these
phenomena in
such a way. Human communication consists of different levels and in
many cases
patients with, for example, agnosia, autism or schizophrenia, have difficulty dealing with or
understanding
information or meanings at the meta-level of communication. I gained
this
insight from Bin Kimura (Kimura 1994) and Masakazu Yamazaki (Yamazaki
1988);
fake communication with robots might enable patients to deal with the
meanings
at the meta-level more easily because this sort of communication has a
simple
structure. So in this sense, the distinction between fake and real is
not so important.
Hideo Kobayashi did not study Heidegger or Gadamer but he knew that
these
questions regarding the relations between texts and readers are
important. If
we don't forget this ‘truth,’ classical literatures or classic works
will
remain alive in our minds, said Kobayashi. I think that he learned this
through
his own dialogue with the classics of Japan
and China.
ON LEARNING
FROM EACH OTHER
RC I think that we in the West
can and should
learn a lot from your angeletic experiences with robots and
particularly from
the underlying ontological Japanese perspective that does not give to
the human
being such a predominance as in the West, separating from the world as
an
autonomous subject. A de-centred human subject that, strictly speaking
is no
longer (an underlying) subject, but understands him/herself as
being-out-there-in-the-world as messenger for Being’s sendings in the
sense I
tried to explain, might be more flexible in his/her interchange with
other
non-human agents such as robots, being able to translate, if I may say
so, the
world-less phatic utterances of robots as something that mimic
ontically the
ontological experience of loneliness and finitude. By the way, in
Plato's
dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors often answer with phatic utterances
such as:
‘I see,’ ‘I follow you,’ ‘certainly,’ ‘of course’, etc. that allow the
dialogue
to continue or, better, that allow Socrates to pass on ‘his’ ideas that
are supposed
to lead to an existential self-questioning on the part of the partner
and not
to an indoctrination by Socrates’ message. From this perspective,
Socrates is
not a sender but a messenger of ideas that come to him from beyond. As
soon as
such ideas are considered as one’s own they turn into an opinion (doxa) and become the object of endless
discussions. The Socratic dialogue is a place or Ba
where language (logos)
passes through (dia) the
participants’ shared being-in-the-world. This is also Lacan’s
interpretation of
Plato’s Symposium in his seminar on
transference, where he compares the psychoanalyst’s task with the
Socratic
erotic method of letting love messages to pass on (Lacan 1991).
Let
us take an example from your tradition such as The Tale of
Genji or Genji
monogatari (Murasaki Shikibu 2010). In the middle of the tale we
read about
Princess Asagao, daughter of Prince Momozono, brother of the Emperor,
who has
been courted in vain by Prince Genji, her cousin, from his seventeenth
year
onward. Genji is now thirty-three years old. Lady Fujitsubo, the
Emperor’s
consort, loved by Genji, and Asagao’s father have both died. In Chapter
20
Murasaki Shikibu tells the story of the problematic relationship
between Genji
and Asagao. At the beginning of Chapter 21 she writes:
From
Genji came a note in which he said: “Does it not give you a strange
feeling to
witness a Day of Cleansing in which you take no part?” And remembering
that she
was still in mourning for her father, he added the poem: “Little
thought I that,
like a wave in the swirl of the flood, you would come back so soon, a
dark-robed mourner swept along time’s hurrying stream.” It was written
on
purple paper in a bold script, and a spray of wisteria was attached to
it.
Moved by all that was going on around her she replied: “It seems but
yesterday
that I first wore my somber dress; but now the pool of days has grown
into a
flood wherein I soon shall wash my grief away.” The poem was sent
without
explanation or comment and constituted, indeed, a meager reply; but, as
usual,
he found himself constantly holding it in front of him [self] and
gazing at it
as though it had been much more than a few poor lines of verse. When
the end of
the mourning actually came, the lady who acted as messenger and
intermediary in
general was overwhelmed by the number of packages from the Nijo-in
[Genji’s
palace] which now began to arrive. Lady Asagao expressed great
displeasure at
this lavishness and, if the presents had been accompanied by letters or
poems
of at all a familiar or impertinent kind, she would at once have put a
stop to
these attentions. But for a year past there had been nothing in his
conduct to
complain of. From time to time he came to the house and enquired after
her, but
always quite openly. His letters were frequent and affectionate, but he
took no
liberties, and what nowadays troubled her chiefly was the difficulty of
inventing anything to say in reply. (Murasaki Shikibu 2010, 398-399)
Genji’s
letter is written in prose and a direct style while the poem that
usually
accompanies a letter is full of indirect messages including the purple
paper on
which it is written, the bold script, a spray of wisteria and, of
course, the
poem itself. Cultures in the “Far East” as well as in the “Far West” – using the terminology of the French
sinologist François
Jullien (Jullien 2003) – differ on the issue of direct and indirect
style
(Capurro 2011).
Princess
Asagao is in trouble. Should she answer or not? Should she continue a
formal
and, at least for her, meaningless phatic communication? She writes a
“meager
reply” that is brought to Genji by a messenger, a lady, without “any
explanation or comment”. Genji “as usual” does not know what to think
about it
and holds the message “constantly ... in
front of him [self] and gazing at it as though it had been more than a
few poor
lines of verse.” Later on, Genji sends a lot of gifts including letters
and
poems but he must be careful of “taking no liberties”, otherwise she
would stop
the communication. Both Asagao and Genji express through messages and
messengers different kinds of loneliness and other forms of emotional
perception of the Ba of their time.
But, of course, it is Murasaki Shikibu herself who gives such an answer
by
writing this story.
Of
course, an in-depth interpretation of this and many other examples in
this
wonderful tale presupposes an analysis of the structure or Ba
of Japanese society during the Heian period (794-1192),
particularly of the mores and values governing communication with
regard to
gender roles, possibilities of transgressing such mores and roles, the
role of
messengers, the different kinds of messages, including their
materiality and
calligraphy. Some of the moral dilemmas arising from such mores and
values are
made explicit by Murasaki Shikibu, such as Asagao’s doubts about
continuing the
communication and Genji’s concern about not transgressing certain
limits when
sending her gifts and messages. The historian of the Heian period,
George
Sansom, calls such mores “rules of taste” (Sansom 1958).
This
connection between ethics and aesthetics seems to be characteristic of
Japanese
culture to the present day. With regard to the The Tale of
Genji Sansom writes:
The
irresistible amorist is a pessimist at heart, weighed down by a sense
of misfortune,
by the weight of an unhappy karma. At the age of thirty we find him
haunted by
the impermanence of worldly things, and on the point of embracing a
monastic
life. […]. Throughout the story, even in its saddest episodes, there
runs a
thread of delight in beauty. All the love talk is interspersed with
enjoyment
of colour, shape, and perfume, and a continual exchange of poetic
messages. Calligraphy
plays almost as great a part as the tones of a lover’s voice in
arousing tender
emotion. […] In this world of the senses, the words for good and
beautiful are
almost interchangeable. (Sansom 1958, 186-191)
In
other words, The Tale of Genji is an
example of how messages coming from both humans and nature were passed
on
through messengers. And, more radically, how Japanese Ba
during the Heian period was experienced as such a place where
messages pass through. In this sense, we can say that the Here of Being
or the
structure of a culture is at best understood if it is conceived and
lived as a
place where messages pass through instead of being blocked. This is one
of the
lessons of Chinese Taoism. (Jullien 2005) As you know, Japanese society
during
the Heian period was profoundly influenced by China.
MN According to the anthropologist,
Masao Yamaguchi, Genji lives on two
levels in
this world. One is the level of fixed moral rules and the other one is
chaos,
where such rules are invisible and can be violated (Yamaguchi 1983). In
my
view, as son of the emperor, Genji belongs to Ikai
(i.e., a different world, different from Seken) or
the level of chaos, where he,
perhaps unconsciously, goes beyond fixed mores or Seken, that
is to say, the traditional Japanese life-world (Nakada
2008, 2009). In his pursuit of love affairs, he violates, on the one
hand,
fixed mores and, on the other, through the connection between ethics
and
aesthetics, his life reproduces the cultural norms. I
believe that this dualism between chaos (Ikai) and
mores (Seken)
reflects another dualism in Japanese cultural identity, namely, between
an
aspect influenced by ancient China,
in particular, by Confucianism, and another aspect of the genuinely
Japanese
mind symbolized by The Tale of Genji.
One important thing is that Murasaki Shikibu bears witness to this
cultural Ba in reflecting on this dualism.
One
of the difficult questions is, indeed, how to analyse this story from
an
angeletic perspective and how to relate this Ba or
phatic communication to an angeletic perspective. We
are very
close to the
core of problems from which our mutual understanding and some
misunderstanding
arose. I think that our dialogue itself is a realization of an
angeletic
relationship and shows the importance of intercultural angeletics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We
thank Michael Eldred
(Cologne) and John Holgate
(Sydney)
for
their criticisms as well as for polishing our English.
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Last update: April 14, 2024
