2nd Review of Ben-Aharon's 'The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art' (2011)

             In the new book, “The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art” (2011) the philosopher, independent researcher, and social activist, Yeshayahu (aka Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon has provided a carefully built introduction to what he calls the process of singularization.  He borrows, twists, and reconfigures a wide variety of concepts from a dizzying array of thinkers over the last 50 years, in order to provide an alternative to Ray Kurzweil’s project of preserving human consciousness through computers.  Kurzweil thinks that merging human and machine, that is, virtualizing human consciousness, is a positive step forward for humanity, while Ben-Aharon argues that a totally different kind of virtualization is possible.  It is not that Ben-Aharon has any irrational fear of computers, but he has found a distinctly human way, a healthy way, to use new ideas from the 20^th and 21^stcenturies in order to transform the face of the human and the world altogether.  He argues that by artistically and scientifically transforming our thinking about the human being and the world, we can grow beyond the traditional and incorrect notions of subject vs. object, inner vs. outer, life vs. matter, thinking substance vs. extended substance and others.  Through this we find and create a new world and a new human constitution. As a foundation to reorient the reader’s ideas, he starts off the book with cutting edge concepts from physics and biology, especially the notions of open systems from Prigogine and extended mind from Bateson and others, along with new notions of the mutual interaction between genome and environment as outlined by West-Eberhard.
               But Ben-Aharon does not simply imagine that by merely changing our ideas can we change the world and create a new stream of human becoming or a post-organic human.  (Who would want to become some kind of human floating out nebulously in space, without a real center or a real ground anyway?  Isn’t this a crazy, totally, impractical postmodern idea?  In the book, Ben-Aharon addresses these questions in a decidedly human way).  Instead, his research over 30 years has convinced him that there is a new Event happening since the middle of the 20^th century, which is already changing the nature of the human being and the world.  In his earliest books, he investigated this Event in terms of Judeo-Christian and Anthroposophical terminology, but here he avoids and transforms that language altogether, using instead the language of postmodern philosophy.  There is a new creative impulse which has produced real opportunities for growth but also a deep split in the inner nature of the human being.  By pointing to this destabilizing impulse in the concepts of science, history, philosophy and art, he gives a convincing and subtle interpretation of contemporary psycho-social problems on one hand, while giving an explanation of the source of new ideas in a wide variety of fields.  There is, what he calls, a ‘loosening’ of the life and formative forces from their organic foundations in the physical body.  This causes a real psychological division in the human being, which has led to many of the tragic events, existential crises, and nihilistic viewpoints of the past 100 plus years.

Some people may have trouble accepting the complex terminology of Deleuze, Levinas, and Badiou, for example and may wonder what Ben-Aharon’s notion of virtual really means.   Everyone can picture the purely electrico-mechanical virtual reality produced through our computers and video games, but is it so clear what Ben-Aharon means by virtual?  He seems to be staying close to Deleuze’s definition as something that is like an idea, but not strictly visible in the world.  It has a potency and an infinite potential, and a certain kind of reality.  You can experience it, in the same way you can experience someone else’s concept or memory, but it is not actual.  Although he rarely uses the word, Ben-Aharon seems to be equating it with a ‘spiritual’ dimension inside the activity of thinking, but it is not a Platonic Idea, and not a return to Platonism or theological ideas or even an Intelligent Designer.  Ben-Aharon vehemently argues against any such approach.  He argues that biology and research into AI, perception and cognition has already shown us that thinking, meaning, and consciousness happen in the actions of the outer world, and not just inside the skin of the human being.  Humans can meaningfully become in the streams of the evolving life in the whole environment.  Humans can think inside the activity of the world, inside the motions of his society, and in real healthy meeting with other people each day.  The human is not just something happening inside the surface of our skin, and the world is not just something happening inside a dead, meaningless motion of energy.  These are incorrect concepts, as many fields of research are already showing.  Ben-Aharon uses these productive ideas to move his own project forward.  The human mind can think and be conscious inside a pure realm of conceptual development, which is just as real as what is encountered in perception.  But there is no little man sitting inside the brain absorbing and controlling it all.  The same human consciousness can think, feel, and act inside the changing nature of the artistic work, whether it be a canvass, a musical instrument, pure vibrations of sound or linguistic forms.

          I offer 4 excerpts from this brilliant book below:                               
CHAPTER 1 – Science:  
“Placed in the whole context of our study thus far, we can say:  human becoming, understood as evolution becoming conscious of itself, brings to expression nature's general strategy of evolution as a whole.   This "strategy" is indeed remarkable, because it makes evolution possible by means of ever recurring phases of involution.   Meaning that the more evolved beings are those that have managed to integrate and embody in their bodily plans, organs, and functions, more of the universalizing, neotenizing, characteristics.
            “We evolve "higher" and further by “going back” to our primitive, less specialized, more open, beginnings, and take our next jump ahead not from the pinnacles of our most complex and sophisticated tips, but from our most embryonic sources.  This is because those sources are far richer in potentials, and open for adaptive variations and selections, than the already formed specializations of an advanced evolution.   This is the reason why we discover that neoteny and related phenomena (juvenilization, paedomorphosis, fetalization) are not chiefly  primate or human phenomena, but universal; they show themselves so clearly in human becoming only because they are everywhere present in nature, and as many new researches are finding out, they are indeed far more central to evolution than was previously thought.”


Chapter 2. History -  “The most essential observation here is that what is individualized is precisely the universal.  The human individuality feels and experiences herself as a universal human being, precisely by dint of experiencing herself as a private personality.  We come to realize that it lies in the nature of the case of modernity itself  that the universal is individualized in so many people on one hand, and that the individual is perceived as individual only because she is rooted in universals, on the other.  But privatization of the universal and generalization of the individual means a mutual reversalfor both.  Universal force and power is put in the service of a personal, private ego, and the same personal ego feels itself enlarged by this into universal dimensions.  Transforming universal into individual means nothing less than individuation (or privatization) of the universal, which transforms and reverses the universal and makes it into a personal private possession.  At the same time, the universalization of the individual allows the personal self, the ego, to expand its private egotism and make it universal egotism.  Egotistic universality, on one hand, and universal egotism, on the other, merge together in this double reversal.  In other words, modernity means exactly this:  placing the content and force of the universal (God, Nature, or Idea) into the hands of the individual, private human personality, gives it increasingly powerful means to control, change, and realize this force in its economic, political, and cultural life and to use it in its research, utilization, and manipulation of nature.” 

 Chapter 3, Philosophy:  “The new representation will be different, because it carries in it a re-mark of a real difference between the virtual and actual and therefore will provide an improved envelope of cognitive or social embodiment, with new elements and possibilities.  For example, it will be, pictorially speaking, more pliable, flexible, and more open for variations and transformations.  This means the cognitive or social forms created in this way, will also be much more easily discarded when their function is over, because the virtual that they actualize and never forget, will remind us of the vastly richer variations and differentiations also available to express this event, when changing circumstances demand it.
“The whole process of re-actualization is done consciously, without losing sight and forgetting the potential of the reserved event.  We attach and tab the potential of the reserved event to the re-actualization process, but keep it strictly separated from it, maintaining its existence on a higher floor or field of consistency.  We let it hover above and accompany the whole re-actualization process as a cloud of the unborn, without letting it deplete its reserved virtual force in physical realization.  The consummated re-actualization process and the reserved virtual force are like two identical twins that have been divided at their virtual conception like Castor and Pollux and separated in the moment of conceptual or social realization.  But as all twins do they retain a secret connection through a quantum-like non-locality and remote affiliation that continues to resonate and vibrate, also from afar, disjunctively, after the earthly birth and cosmic death of Castor. 

“We operate here with a capacity that allows us to "remember" non-locally and non-timely the event and its virtual origin in our virtualized memory during the whole series of these stages of re-actualization and realization, in the same manner - only consciously - that is done by all natural organisms.” 

Chapter 4, Art – “The reason for this is that particularly in our age, in order to become a properly tuned and conductive instrument of cosmic forces of becoming, the artist’s sensitive constitution registers the physical’s body illness and death processes much more strongly than any other “normal” person.  The artist cannot but feel intensely the physical body’s death and virtualization process and the labor pains of an emerging embryonic invisible baby body.  She is mothering a newly conceived creative offspring, fructified by the cosmos, and therefore she becomes aware to what extent the organic body almost dies when it is preparing itself to receive and conceive a cosmic influx of becoming.  It becomes dismembered inwardly, and precisely in this way begins to transfer virtualized forces. Its dismembering creates a super-conductive substance that transfers inorganic fluidity, intensity and flexibility.  A common threshold experience, the feeling that the ground falls away under one’s feet, for example, is a result of this.  For each of us, naturally, as we grow older, the body disturbingly falls apart all the time, the connectivity of tissues, the adhesion of muscles and the cohesion of the blood are hollowed out, dismembered inwardly, and so forth.  But the artist experiences also, not always in clearest consciousness, how his solid and robust physical body begins to become a hive-like buzzing multiplicity, or better, a swarm-like assembly of independent and miniaturized cellular, molecular and microscopic particles and germs.  The artist experiences how her own body doesn’t belong to her anymore, how it seems to be contagioning, cohabitating and conspiring with others, becoming others’ lives, invading any last possibility of privacy and autonomous inwardness.  But in reality what is happening is that the body is being truly in-spired, hankering to liberate its bound organic life and spread it over and above its bodily organic limits, and is therefore often felt to be constantly threatening to expose and explode its organic form and also the subjective soul sensibilities and functions.
 “However, when understood from the other side of the threshold and not through psychoanalysis, this process is precisely the body’s healthiest way of rejuvenation, of re-linking with terrestrial and cosmic forces of elemental life, through which the falling apart of organic connections between cells, tissues, organs and limbs, is compensated by vigorous non-organic bodily formation processes and vitality.”