///The initial idea for this post was to critique existentialism (de Beauvoir particularly, but whatever critique applies to her typically applies to Sartre ten-fold) for its reliance on reference to modernist categories, while affirming the value of its direct political approach, which Aztec philosophy seems to lack. It quickly became evident that 1) doing both is beyond the scope of one post, and 2) I do not have the knowledge of Aztec ethics necessary to speak to how it might fit in here. So the post is simply about problematizing dialectical negation in de Beauvoir, and how Aztec becoming can serve as a useful way out.
If I had more time, it would be interesting to explore how de Beauvoir justifies the will to freedom and the necessity of revolt in ontological terms, which to me is a bit suspicious, and see how it might relate to her reliance on dialectical negation. It also occurred to me that it’d be cool to, if I had the time and space, reframe my approach so it reads a bit less like I’m using indigenous metaphysics to patch up Western philosophy by exploring what happens to de Beauvoir’s system when we make the shift from lacking-being-in-order-to-be to monistic becoming, and what happens to ethics when we take the noun-less ontology of Aztec philosophy seriously (gender, race, selfhood, political programs, etc.). So apply the sort of socio-political analysis that de Beauvoir is doing to Nahuat ontology, and Nahuat flux/becoming to de Beauvoir’s dialectical approach, and then work with some other materials (D&G have obvious relevance here) to close it out. But again, obviously, that’s well outside the scope of what I have room for and what I have knowledge of. Point is—I’m aware of the problematic aspects of the approach here, but I’m treating this as a sort of groundwork that I might take somewhere else later, so in the interests of brevity and completion I’m gonna bracket that concern for now.
If you have any thoughts applying to the above (or below), please reach out over e-mail, on twitter, or make a post in the forum page.\\\
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Becoming-Jaguar: Escaping Dialectical Negation Through Monistic Process-Metaphysics
“To be, or not to be? That is the question.” –Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Hamlet
“Essence is not found in A, nor in B, but in X, where X is A in the process of becoming B.” –Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
I. The Negation of the Negation: Making Oneself a Lack of Being in Order to Be
Writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it” (de Beauvoir [1947] 2018, 12). In his book Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie writes that Aztec metaphysics holds that, “All existing things are…constitutionally unstable and ambiguous…reality itself is irreducibly ambiguous” (Maffie 2015, 13). What we are herein dealing with is not so much a comparative analysis where one philosophical approach is dul(l)y compared with another, nor one in which one is selected in favor of another, and that selection is defended. Rather, my aim in this post is to facilitate a brief cross-cultural (and cross-spatio-temporal) dialog regarding metaphysics and ontology in French existentialism and Aztec monism, to find common ground in their understanding of ambiguity and duality, and to see what a taking-seriously-of Nahuat monism might do for de Beauvoir’s dialectal system. In this post, I aim to explore existentialist ontology and track existentialism’s problematic reliance upon negation and defunct modernist categories (albeit in terms of their rejection) and to see whether and how an intervention in de Beauvoir’s dialectical negation utilizing the process metaphysics of Nahuat philosophy can provide a way out.
The idea common to both these philosophical approaches is the idea that existence is ambiguous, that contingency and change are the only “fixed” things. For de Beauvoir, ambiguity arises from the dialectic between transcendence and facticity, between consciousness, mind, freedom, and the future on the one hand, and material reality, body, responsibility, and the past on the other. She writes,
“[Man] asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing” (de Beauvoir [1947] 2018, 6).
The ambiguity fundamental to the human condition arises from a paradox, namely that man is at once a being who can project themself into the future by deciding to act in a certain way, while also being subject to forces beyond their control, whose actions are limited and partially determined by contingent societal and material restrictions. In the future, man is pure potentiality; however, in the past, she is fixed — it is therefore the present, the now of action, in which his condition is ambiguous. However, in all of these temporalities, man is nothing, a lack of being: the past is over, fixed, and cannot be changed — it is no-thing; the future has not occurred, has no factic existence — it is no-thing; and the present is a perpetual undertaking, it is by nature never finished; if an action is stopped, it is in the past and is no-thing, and if it is continued, then it is continued into continuity, without ever being fixed as some-thing, being therefore also no-thing. It’s all nothing, all the way down — pure negation of being. And yet, man exists, and for de Beauvoir, this means that she be-s, that she has being. De Beauvoir writes, “Sartre…fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be …” (Ibid., 8). What is at work here is a nebulous definition of “being”: man has being in the sense that to be is to exist, and man certainly exists; however, “to be” in the modernist sense also means to be fixed, to be definable, to be something definitive, singular, and categorically stable. And, since existence is a continuous undertaking that never ceases until death, man never achieves being in this objective, fixed sense, man never co-incides with themself: “[F]or a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself…the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning…[T]here can be a having-to-be only for a being who…questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself and who has to be his being” (Ibid., 9). The distress fundamental to the human condition is the realization that one possesses agency, that one can to an extent choose how to act and what to do. In order to act, to be or do anything, one must first move, undertake the task of existence, and nothing in movement is ever fixed, nothing in motion has singular, definable being. Therefore, as de Beauvoir writes, “Man…is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being” (Ibid., 10). So, for de Beauvoir, one uproots oneself from the world in order to make oneself present in and to the world, and the world present to one in order to openly engage with the world. Through this movement of negation, one positively discloses oneself: “It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is a…type of attachment to being which is not…‘wanting to be’ but rather ‘wanting to disclose being’” (Ibid., 11). For de Beauvoir, through the nullification of oneself as a static, fixed thing in the world, one in fact engages in being existent, which means one moves in the ambiguous zone between transcendence (willed projection of oneself into the future) and facticity (the fixed conditions under which one must act). For de Beauvoir, it is through the negation of a negative (non)-existence that man positively discloses himself to the world:
“[Man’s] being is lack of being, but this lack…is precisely existence…we have here a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established. Man makes himself a lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence…And the condemned action, insofar as it is an effort to be, finds its validity insofar as it is a manifestation of existence” (Ibid., 12).
Since to be is to have fixed definition, clear and opaque contours, and an element to oneself that is unchangeable, man, in existing in continuous motion, in unending change, makes himself a lack of being — man negates the negative concept of static fixity, a non-existent objectivity, in order to be a being who moves through ambiguity, undergoing incessant transformation. In choosing definitively to do something, man undertakes an endeavor to bring into reality some goal which is never fully realized, a transcendent ideal which is never made real. In order to be a doctor, for example, one must attend medical school and receive a certificate to practice medicine — however, one is not then a doctor: one must then practice medicine, actively and continuously, in order to be a doctor; yet, still, this “being a doctor” is continuous, always a projection of activity into the future and an active performing of a function in the present — the moment this activity ceases, one simultaneously ceases to be a doctor. At no point in this progression has one definitively co-incided with the projected ideal of “being a doctor,” a state which one might occupy which statically fixes them as a medical practitioner: in order to be a practitioner, one must negate the state of being a practitioner, and actively practice doctoring — in this way, one makes oneself a lack of being in order that there might be being at all. In order to disclose being, one must reject and negate having being, and engage in a perpetual reaching, grasping for being, perpetually projecting oneself into the future by continuously performing an activity within the factic conditions of an ever-elusive but inescapable present. Through a negation of a negative fixity and a transcendent projection into the future, one performs within the factic contingencies of the present in order to disclose being — thus proceeds de Beauvoir’s model. So it is clear, I hope, that in her model of transcendental projection, de Beauvoir is not a naïve teleologist, stating that man works incessantly toward a final end point; rather, man projects a goal onto the future and works toward it without ever truly co-inciding with it, and it is that working toward, that active unfolding, through which man ultimately discloses being through a movement of negating the empty, negative category of objective being. Existential activity, for de Beauvoir, is “refusing to set up as absolutes ends toward which my transcendence thrusts itself, and…considering them in their connection with the freedom which projects them” (Ibid., 13) — disclosing being, then, for de Beauvoir, is a movement by which one aspires to an end which is negated from the outset as a true end, disclosing oneself through the performance of activity toward an end point which is originally negated as an end point.
“To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself [discloses an active, existent movement] only to the extent that he…remain[s] at a distance from himself [negates the fixed, static achievement of any definitive “self”]” (Ibid., 12).
So this is the paradox which de Beauvoir claims defines man, a paradox which she cannot cognitively reconcile and from which she cannot escape. “Being” has been overdetermined by the modernist tradition following from such canonized philosophers as Descartes and Locke, among others, as an immobile and definitive conjugation of static fixity — so in order to authentically be, in order to exist, this immobility is negated in precisely the movement by which man discloses themself. Fair enough. But is this negation necessary?
To be sure, if to be is to be objectively fixed, then we are a lack of being; simultaneously, if to be is to be existent, then we always have being: but is there a way out of this contradiction? What is the status of the original “being” which is negated, and why does it haunt so eerily de Beauvoir’s method and ontology? Can a consistent metaphysics exist which escapes the modernist trap of dualism, of being versus being, of mind (transcendental projection) and body (factic necessity)? My claim is that ontology needn’t be caught in polar dialectics, an affirmation arrived at through the negation of the negative, facticity opposed to transcendence, the clash of which produces the Real of active action(1). If we approach ambiguity from the point of de facto flux, which I do believe de Beauvoir attempts to do, then there is no necessity for a dialectic, no inevitable movement of affirmation-negation-production — the unfolding of the Real becomes a process of the production of production, an immanent and continuous unfolding which never finishes, indeed which does not understand the category of “finishing,” which moves via a dehumanized “creativity,” via the continuous production of relations between things and sets ad infinitum, “weaving” reality in an on-going production of a tapestratic continuum. What happens if “being” as such is wholly and actually negated, on the conceptual level? (The sense of negation I’m after is similar to the negation involved in “getting over” one’s ex: as the truism goes, “if you’re angry with your ex, you’re not over them” — that is, if you continue to define your current status in terms of a bitter rejection of the relationship and the partner, you haven’t in fact moved past it or them: much like the subject embroiled in ressentiment, you still define yourself in terms of that which you reject.) If this sense of negation is taken seriously, what becomes of us, our existence, our relations?
In this sense, existentialists, de Beauvoir of course included, were “on the right track,” as it were, but to me “post-modern"(2) in the literal sense of the term — they post-cede modernism and encounter it via a movement of rejection and negation which is nevertheless therefore defined by modernist concepts, albeit in negative terms. It is after-modernism, but is not definitively toward any extra-modern novelty. Existentialism rejects modernism on modernism’s terms, literally: de Beauvoir’s disclosure of being is a rejection of modernist being, but again inescapably in terms of modernism’s conception of being. Indeed, modernism is rejected, but with nowhere else to turn except away, modernism looms large, haunting its own negation(3). Positive conceptions of this “post-modern” approach which don’t rely on a negation of modernism itself are few and hard to come by, and existentialists’ reachings for beyond-modernisms frequently regress into neo-modernisms(4). To be sure, de Beauvoir’s project is, to me, more admirable than many of these, and indeed seems to imply a metaphysical ontology of immanent process, however trapped in its negation of modernist terms. However, I also do not think one can wholly attribute these trappings to a lack of development that would indeed arrive later to the continental tradition, for they are found elsewhere, and long before: for example, in the conceptual metaphysics of the Nahuat peoples of central and south America, approximately referred to by James Maffie as the Aztec people.
II. Beyond Being: Shamanistic Becoming in Aztec Process-Metaphysics
So, what to do with existence if one wants to truly do away with an ontology of being? What to do if one wants to do away with the fundamental question of western ontology as such (what is x?)? And, more relevant to our project, what can an alternative metaphysical ontology do for and to a system such as de Beauvoir’s, what novel space does it produce which can be moved into? My claim is that the process-metaphysical conception of “becoming” found in Nahuat philosophy provides an alternative articulation of immanent unfolding which does not depend upon a negation nor a rehabilitation of a category of “being.” As Maffie writes of the Nahuat metaphysical system, “Reality is characterized by becoming—not by being or ‘is-ness’” (Maffie 2015, 12). What is meant by this?
Writes Maffie, ““[A]t the heart of Aztec metaphysics stands the ontological thesis that there exists at bottom just one thing: [teotl, which is] dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self re-generating sacred power, force, or energy” (Ibid., 12). Nahuat metaphysics is a monistic system, which means that it holds that all reality consists of a single substance, an energy or force which is identical with everything that exists. Within this system, what we might consider discrete, stable, things lose (or, better, never had to begin with) their specificity, their fixity: “Process, movement, change, and transformation define teotl…To exist…is to become, to move, to change…all existing things are defined in terms of becoming [and are] essentially dynamic: always moving, always changing…processes rather than perduring objects, entities, or substances” (Ibid., 12). Here we can already see an intuitive kinship with de Beauvoir’s ontology: there is no “being,” no fixity, no perduring “objectivity,” because there are no discrete “objects.” Yet, there is also no lack, because in Nahuat metaphysics there is truly no “being” — it doesn’t exist even conceptually, for to be is to be-fixed, and “that which is real is that which…changes, transmutes, and moves” (Ibid., 43). The category of being is irrelevant, it can’t be applied, even in terms of its negation—there is nothing to lack. Being simply isn’t around to be negated. For the Nahua, everything is productive of something, everything is constantly transforming, and any “thing” is merely an inundation of appearing and disappearing relational patterns as elements within a single system, their very transformation being productive of the whole which is itself productive of everything that is — reality as such constitutes and is constituted by the production of production. If everything is teotl, then everything is relational, moving parts held together only by relations which undergo constant movement and transformation: “Teotl is the weaver, the weaving, and the woven…Aztec metaphysics conceives of [reality] as a grand weaving in progress and conceives teotl as its grand cosmic weaver” (Ibid., 14). Teotl, and therefore reality, is a singular tapestratic continuum, constantly undergoing a process of weaving — what’s more, “Aztec metaphysics embraces flux, expiry, and change by making them defining characteristics of reality” (Ibid., 43). When flux becomes the a priori condition of reality, there is no fixity to negate, no objectivity to escape from, no contradiction to reconcile. De Beauvoir responds to the dualism of modernism with a dialectics of “post-modernism,” wherein the collision of opposing terms render a productive ambiguity—yet, still, contradictory dualism haunts her dialectics. Aztec monism, on the other hand, “affirms that reality consists of a…third kind of stuff that is neither mind nor matter…This…stuff is electricity-like energy…Mind and body…are simply…facets or aspects of teotl…The...dualism of mind and body is replaced by an indigenous notion of a pluralism of vital forces” (Ibid., 48). This should not be taken as a synthesis of transcendence and facticity, as it seems de Beauvoir maintains ambiguity is. While Aztec metaphysics does contain an aspect of duality, this should not be confused with a dualism—these dualities, called inamic pairs, are not two poles, or opposites which synthesize: they are dual facets of teotl which produce inundations of the monistic substance which is teotl. As Maffie writes,
“[T]he mere existence of binary complementary properties does not entail the existence of essentially different binary substances…not every difference…is… an essential difference[, and] need not be rooted in a metaphysical difference…[inamic pairs are] ultimately derivable from and understandable in terms of the single stuff of teotl. [Inamic pairs] are simply two different intensities, coagulations, or condensations of teotl’s energy-in-motion” (Ibid., 51).
Furthermore, “the…becoming of reality…consists of the…struggle (agon) between inamic partners…All existing things are constituted by th[is] agonistic unity…and are consequently unstable and ambiguous” (Ibid., 13). Again, we see an intuitive kinship with de Beauvoir’s system: as a result of the process of engagement between dualities, a fundamental metaphysical ambiguity is rendered. Indeed, de Beauvoir sees mind and body similarly. She critiques dualism by saying that its adherents “have established a hierarchy between body and soul which permits of considering as negligible the part of the self which cannot be saved” (de Beauvoir [1947] 2018, 6). However, critiquing dualism for its hierarchy of substance is not the same as critiquing it for its maintenance of a metaphysical distinction between substances. Still, for de Beauvoir, there is a dualism (or rather a dialectic which stinks of dualism) of mind and body, of facticity and duality, albeit a dualism without hierarchy. Like she rehabilitates being by establishing it in terms of its negation of modernist being, she rehabilitates dualism by attempting to divorce it from its hierarchical implications. Again, our goal is not to use Nahuat metaphysics to deconstruct and critique de Beauvoir’s ontology, but instead to show how her project shares much with Aztec philosophy, and to suggest that, even so, her system contains a dependence on problematic modernist categories that an application of Nahuat principles might help to remedy.
In section 1.3, Maffie writes that “[Teotl is] a process of artistic creation and…a process of shamanic form-changing or shape-shifting” (Maffie 2015, 38). The role of the “shaman” is the role of the creative, active, perceived element of teotl: “The cosmos [that which we perceive] is teotl’s nahual…that is, teotl’s ‘guise’…or ‘mask’” (Ibid., 39). However, in Nahuat culture, a mask is not a deception or a fakery. Much like in monistic Hinduism, where deities are considered “avatars” of, or windows into, the single divine substance (Duperon 2017), for the Nahuat shaman, “the person who dons a mask is not regarded as someone impersonating [something] but as someone who…literally [is] becom[ing] that thing” (Ibid., 40-41). Without a dualism, without a distinction between appearance and reality, there is no category of “fakery.” When the shaman ceremonially engages in a becoming-jaguar, the shaman does not make himself a lack of anything—he does not negate his being-human in order to attain a being-jaguar: “Since…teotl’s generation…of the cosmos [is] a process of shamanic transformation…[w]hen transforming himself into, say, a jaguar, a shaman does not simply assume the guise or external form of a jaguar. The shaman literally [is] becom[ing] a jaguar” (Ibid., 41). The shaman is engaging in the production of a jaguar, wefting jaguaristic elements into their own pattern (itself an inundation of teotl) and is engaging in a becoming which is not appropriative nor deceptive — because what is is teotl, because appearance is a result of the perception of teotl which is also teotl, there is no place for guises, masks, or fakery — contra Plato and the dualistic basis of Western metaphysics, appearance is in fact reality (in a manner of speaking). Writes Maffie, “Aztec philosophy’s metaphysics of becoming maintains that that which is real is that which [is] becom[ing], chang[ing], transmut[ing], and mov[ing]” (Ibid., 43). There is no negation because everything is productive, everything is creative, everything that is is engaging in a process of creating new relationalities, new productive syntheses — and this, I claim, is what de Beauvoir aims to do when she declares that “man makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being” (de Beauvoir [1947] 2018, 10) — the second being, the one that is existent, is one which is “chang[ing], transmut[ing], and mov[ing]” (Maffie 2015, 42). However, if we truly wish to do away with modernist being, then there is no simultaneous movement which is a negation of the first being, which is being-fixed, being-static: this implied movement exists only conceptually and never in reality. If we claim that there never was any static being, any fixed being, then there is nothing to negate — there is only a becoming which is positive, affirmative, and productive. There is no “authentic” being which negates an “inauthentic” being, because no such dichotomy exists: if teotl (everything) is everything (teotl), then the non-existent inauthenticity never had an existence to negate. And this is not merely a linguistic correction: when the focus is put onto negation, then positive affirmation becomes a side effect of negation, production becomes a result of a making oneself a lack. What is missed in this system is that production has always been and is always being produced by the process of the production of production, the self-becoming of teotl, the incessant transformative motion of the weaving of the woven by the weaver of the weaving of the woven…. In order to complete de Beauvoir’s system of radical immanence, of absolute contingent and relational activity springing forth from the networked fabrication of intersubstantivity, one must do away with — not negate — the category of being as such, in favor of a becoming, an unfolding, an “interlacing warp and weft” of transformative motion-change, the radically immanent, rhizomatic self-productive production of production (of production of production of production…).
Works Cited
1. de Beauvoir, Simone. [1947] 2018. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman.
2. Duperon, Matthew. 2017. Lectures in Introduction to Asian Religion.
3. Maffie, James. 2015. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. University Press of Colorado.
(1) Indeed, what is “fixed,” what is “factic” to begin with? The role of the past is one of a continuously warping narrative projection which bears an increasingly weird relation to the present, and/or it is circumstances which have transpired which continue to be causally efficacious in the present — the past is defined by a temporal relationship which itself is not fixed, not objective, not factic.
(2) The term “post-modernism” will be used thusly throughout, and therefore should not be taken as synonymous with “post-structuralism.”
(3) If position and direction are spatially relative relationships, then to “turn away” from something positions one definitively in terms of that from which one turns away.
(4) Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” is perhaps the most egregious example of this: despite his best efforts, taken to its conclusions, the treatise renders an uneasy synthesis of Kantian moral necessity (choosing for myself is choosing for all), and a performative Aristotelian virtue ethics (one is a coward if one performs cowardly acts; one is brave if one performs brave acts).