The Crisis Is Here

Part 1: The Crisis is Upon Us

I’m at Harvard for a conference called “Human Transformation in a Time of Crisis.” The crisis feels far off, likely because the sun is skimming lightly through slow-greening trees— rare weather for an early May in Boston. In spite of the sunlit greenery outdoors, a session or two is described as “heavy” by other conference-goers. 

I walk from the trees into the airy cool of the beautiful Gutman library to attend one such session. Arriving a bit late, I shuffle to a free table in a large classroom, sipping the cold brew provided by the conference organizers as a gentle blonde walks us through the details of the polycrisis: an intersecting set of political, social, technological and climate crises—the rise of fascism, conniving billionaires, melting glaciers, the whole nine yards of apocalyptic doom. He sits on a chair in front of a set of alarming statistics and answers questions with a measured intelligence— this man is clearly a meditator, I think— just before he stops us midway to inhale, exhale deeply. 

Heavy? I found the whole presentation quite relaxing, and not just the presenter’s gentle demeanor. Not relaxing in the way of hot baths, weighted blankets, or crystal singing bowls, but relaxing in the way of collective acknowledgement: we gather here today to see the truth without flinching. 

And the strange feeling arises that this truth-seeing alone is the work of human-earth transformation— nothing more, nothing less. Not truth-seeing as opposed to action, but rather, fearless seeing as the invisible source that sustains right action— an action that addresses crises at the surface and at the roots, both disease and symptoms. 

I’m already writing philosophically, so you may suspect that I am about to pivot from concrete solutions to empty theorizing about “personal transformation”— practice mindfulness, be kind,  get to know your neighbors. All perfectly reasonable suggestions, but rightfully suspect as a central focus— an emphasis on individual morality is just too convenient for the aforementioned conniving billionaires. Besides, any further reification of the Western capitalist subject is ontologically suspect, as this radical individualism is both symptom and perpetrator of the current climate crisis. We need collective solutions because we have never been individuals.

But as pragmatic as I believe myself to be, my speciality is not political or economic theory. I can only endorse the solutions that seem rational and just, supporting the thinkers and doers who are implementing them. As a philosopher of technology and science through the phenomenological method, I specialize in the experiential.

And yet, as phenomenologists from Merleau-Ponty to Nishitani emphasize, the deeply experiential is neither personal nor wholly subjective, but rather a site in which subject-object, self-nature, human-technology, you-me are entwined in a single shared sensating Flesh (Merleau-Ponty) and are at times wholly dissolved (Nishitani). I give my students squares of chocolate to illustrate levels of sensory immediacy: close your eyes and open your mouth: without the intervention of thought, is there a “you” eating the “chocolate”? No—there are only sensations: sweetness, smoothness, saliva, warmth. It’s only with the introduction of language that we are compelled to split the sensation in three: me, chocolate, and a verb between. In direct experience, there are no subjects and objects—just verbs weaving, waving vastly. 

In some ways, a philosophy of the immanent is the most difficult to read, write, and think, because we aren’t used to theorizing the proximity of the flesh. What is most real is most taken for granted. Of course, doing phenomenology also requires critical distance— the distance of language and the distance of suspending our presuppositions about the world (what Husserl calls the “bracketing” or epoche). About this I’m not naive: we don’t reach the closest structures of experience through theory, including phenomenology. But we can point to them. 

This pointing to deep experience has never been more urgent— through language, meditation, art or social action (preferably all of the above). Because experience is inherently non-dual and infinitely mysterious, cultivated contact with this ungraspable truth is the antidote to selfishness, nihilism, and the hubris of the technoscientific worldview that threatens to annihilate the complexity of human and non-human life alike.

So my argument begins: at its deepest levels, transformation occurs not in the individual or the social but in the direct experience that precedes them both. To put it pithy: we save both ourselves and the earth at the level of experience in which we are not yet two.

Part Two: A World Asleep

Let us shift scenes to another room: larger but utterly suffocating. 

After the conference ended, we drove from Massachusetts to Connecticut to take a ferry back to Long Island. Rain leaked from a sagging, slate gray sky as we parked on the lowest level of the ferry. We unburied our jackets from the trunk and took the stairs to the passenger area. Rows of yellowish, fluorescent-lit booths hosted people peeling back yogurt lids and hummus cups, biting into plastic wrapped deli sandwiches and Mrs. Field’s cookies. My eyes flick to an abandoned counter in the corner, a few mayonnaise-rimmed deli sandwiches squatting behind clouded glass.

All eyes locked into smartphones or ipads as they ate, as if a glance at the food they were ingesting might break the spell of digital rapture. Where are you, I think as we pass the rows of people, probing for the single blaze of a living body, even the dimmest stirrings of presence. Nothing. Or rather, the something that was blindingly present was a frantic, terrified looking away. 

From each other, from the hunger of the animal body, from the rain shedding sheets into the gently rocking sea. We gather here today, I think—looking at the family next to me in which every child and parent entertained themselves individually— to enact our most sacred ritual: the communion of collective dissociation. 

Bodies glazed, senses sedated: the public has become the place where alienated subjectivities enact and ritualize their aloneness through digital distraction. To gather is to enter a collective pact to deaden the senses, dim the mind, look away from the fragile living-dying flesh-lumps that throng us on all sides. 

We take our seats and I retake my silent vow to not use digital devices in public (with the exception of essential meet up texts and maps). Not because I’m a luddite. As a philosopher of technology, I probe the ways we humans have always been cyborgs, shaped inescapability by each technology, including the technologies of speech and literacy. When I pull out a book and read instead of texting, I am merely replacing one technology for another. 

And not because I think I am uniquely disciplined, desiring to parade my accomplishments of self-control. In fact, the very idea that refusing digital distraction requires a feat of self-discipline is trapped in the technological framework, one in which the self is seen as an object to be manipulated, disciplined, and controlled. Even on transcontinental flights (or the hours of waiting before the flight), I sit quietly— not suffering through some heroic act of self-control, as the masochistically named “raw dogging” suggests— but rather relaxing into the self-enjoying nature of time. This is enough, this is enough, the silence proclaims (subtle at first, then unmistakable). And peace descends, breath re-entering the home of the body. 

When the pact of mutual dissociation is so ubiquitous, so complete, I can’t help but harbor hope that this little performance of digital abstention (when joined by other brave souls) could ripple the fabric of complacency, could gently suggest another way. 

So I read a bit of Annie Dillard (“how many tons of sky can I see from the window? It is morning: morning! And the water clobbered with light”). Then I walk out onto the deck and allow a few great gusts of wind to whip through my body. The earth is alive—terrifying so—even in her suffering. Her aliveness bursts past the thickly woven skein of my thoughts, whether I welcome her brightness or not. 

Ocean spray coldens the surface of the skin, emptying my mind of purity: I am the ailing, poisoned earth and I am the very human blindness that I hate. 

I return inside, ready to bear the collective unease with a bit more equanimity— sit on a piss-yellow booth, eyes open and accepting. Accepting the feeling of privatized subjectivities (trapped and inaccessible, calling mutely for a perpetually unmet collapse), accepting the feeling of rejection (of time too hollow to be of use and too empty to be of interest). 

And beneath these ordinary banalities, the terrifying tremor of a wholly other creature. Pressing my ear to the silence of the crowd, skin open to stray signals, the sensation beneath presses closer, more warmly against me, amplifying in velocity until clamoring brightly through the caverns of my inward body. Like the muffled blaze of sun behind clouds, this collective deadening blankets a living creature—red-mouthed and screeching when first unlidded, then softening into an insistent though no less passionate plea. 

Nodding gently, I allow the thing beneath to speak: All of us all of us are endlessly nursing words too terrifying to speak: I want to die I want to die I want to die. 

Part Three: Death Will Save Us All in the End

Maybe here I should pause, like that gentle blond sat squarely in front of his apocalyptic statistics, and invite you to inhale-exhale. Deeply, if you can. Through the wastelands and waterways of your long-unwanted body. 

Unwanted is a harsh word, but true, I think. There is an originary disgust that blinds the body when we’re born. Not born biologically— an uninteresting event, for the infant anyway— but born psychologically, birthed into the terrible weight of self-consciousness. 

No one escapes this feeling of not right, not okay, something is wrong with me. In order to unfold into life, the flesh must infold inwardly into death, an insistent suicidal murmuring of no no no and not this not this not this. 

To be human is to wish the world were otherwise. Wishing for the always “otherwise” denies the fullness of real time while keeping an imaginary future afloat—a perpetually unmet horizon. Hating the here and now, we extend ourselves into imaginary timelines while saying to the truth that is here and the self that is now: die, die, die.

But why this frantic flight from presence? What so threatens from the Now? The imagined self appears fixed over time—together with imagined futures, imagined successes or failures, imagined loves. Presence un-fixes everything, dissolving certainty into flow. In dissolving the otherwise, presence dissolves also the self.

Full time is un-flattened time, un-controlled time. What to do with this empty, unnameable sea of presence? The mind stiffens at this big nothing where no thought can penetrate. The body blinks: is the empty trustworthy? Hearing no reply, the imagined self rises up to fight. If time cannot be trusted (and trustworthy can only be given, not deserved), then it must be killed. 

Against reality, we take up arms. Ah, but here’s the rub: killing time, we kill only ourselves (the true self anyway, the one that predates the otherwise). Killing ourselves, we deny the violence we inflict on life as such — the one Life in which we burrow for merely a breath: the single great and greening organism we call the “earth.” 

“To be or not to be” is merely the surface question. To be fully requires dying into the not to be. Dying into the emptiness of the otherwise, dying into the very absence of personal death, dying into the perpetual dissolution of time. 

Dying into time without killing time: this is the question. To escape the great deadening, love death. To save the earth, love time. 

Part Four: Technologized time

Hating time, we graft the self onto technical artifacts instead. 

The technological is a means-ends structure. We use this in order to do or get that. The “in order to” holds open linear time by feeding futurity with the scraps of our present lack. 

Technological time is time stretched ahead and held afloat by the future fulfillment of a task. In Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, Lorenzo Simpson argues that the means-ends (teleological) structure of technology contracts time, allowing us the illusion of control. Control of the future, domestication of the unknowable present.

In ends, an escape. In telos, security: “To the extent that telos is security, the ‘domestication’ of time goes hand in hand with the ideal of satisfaction whose project is to annihilate time. For, in lifting the burden of an unmastered, open future, domestication would grant us independence from the flux of time.” (pg. 54)

Would, but cannot. Not ultimately. I hope it need not be said that this is not a tirade against particular technical artifacts— smartphones, TV, the internet, generative AI, all of which could be critiqued and praised only in their specificity— but is rather an attempt to illuminate the particularly seductive narcotic of the technological way of being. 

We do not just manipulate technology: the technological manipulates us. 

“In our yearning to be liberated from the linear time of external history, we find ourselves in thrall to the time of technology. In technology, time is destined to be reified, to be transformed into a commodity to be quantitatively reckoned, distributed and parceled out. Within the context of instrumental action we are always concerned to "save time" and "make time," and we fear "wasting time" and "losing time." Of course it is we who are subject to the pressure to husband time. Clock time replaces the temporal determinations that evolve from the life rhythms of a people. We, too, become instrumentalized. Our own wants and needs are subordinated to the requirements of the technical complex and, specifically, to time.” (page 55)

Only technological time (linear, means-end) can be mastered and controlled (and ourselves self-mastered and self-controlled in turn). Now-time cannot be domesticated, as it wonderfully and vastly exceeds our attempts to fully stretch, elongate, or unfurl across the narrow timelines of our desires. Technological time contracts, while Now-time expands endlessly.

On the ferry, something un-sacred is happening. Transportation, like standing in line, is empty time— is time deemed useless, time pronounced dead on arrival. Here we gather not only to contract but also to kill— kill the silence of the empty, kill the mystery of the future, kill the deadened boredom of the body. 

Why? Terror yes, but also denial of the suicidal impulse that murmurs shamefully beneath. We are dying: that’s a fact. We are killing: another fact. Not just time, but the earth— and thus, crucially, ourselves. 

The suicidal is the most misunderstood of impulses. The one who loves death is not the one who wants to die. The one who wants to die is the one who glimpses death from the corner of the eye and flees, not knowing that death is the dark sustaining force of life, ceaselessly decomposing unreality so presence remains clear and sprightly. Fleeing death, you choose the great deadening instead. 

Meet death without blinking, and life will gleam so achingly bright that each moment will sing through you, spacious and unafraid. Sun unsmothered, how you’ll blink into the noon. Flesh unclosed, how you’ll split free from every pore into the fresh anointed, newly brightened world. Time re-entered, space redeemed by the mere simplicity of being seen, inhabited, sensed to the utmost brim. 

Peace, then. Or some great unblinking being that knows nothing of death, life, or suffering.

To escape the great deadening, love death. To save the earth, love time.