Acteon's loss of presence

At the end of a busy day out hunting in the woods with his companions and his dogs, the luckless Acteon happened to chance upon the goddess Diana, naked, taking her evening bath.¹ She is fearful of what he will report concerning what he saw—for, as a human, he might reproduce the scene he witnessed to his companions and thus besmirch with the distancing effect of human imagination the unmediated purity of her nakedness. Angry, the goddess throws water from her bath at his face, and he immediately starts to transform into a stag. She unwinds his personhood, so to speak. He first suspects what is happening to him because, as he runs away from the fateful encounter, he is running too fast. He stops to check his image in a pond, where he sees plainly what he has become. He wants to cry out about his ill luck, but all he can muster is a deer's grunt; he can no longer speak as a human. He cries in desperation, for he does not know where to go: his house is now closed to him, and his companions are now his natural enemies. Hearing his groans, his dogs come round, still warm from the day's hunting. He calls out to them—he remembers the individual names he gave each one of them—but they can only see and hear a deer, so they turn on their beloved master with fury. As he dies, he hears his companions goading the dogs and calling out for him to come and witness the kill: “Acteon, Acteon!”

Now, consider. In Ovid's original narrative, it is quite clear that Acteon at first can still think (“his reason alone remains” 2019: 99), but he cannot speak and, because of that, he is no longer a member of human society—he no longer has a home or human companions, for being a person is to share an instituted world with other persons; which means to communicate propositionally. Ovid tells us that tears are streaming from Acteon's eyes in frustration. He can still reason, but for how long? Were it not for his all-too-dutiful hounds, how long would he have remained self-conscious? If he can no longer speak to us, how can he speak to himself? His tears are at first still human, but as they fall down his cheeks, and these get covered by increasingly dense fur, they soon will be an animal's tears. If he were to survive, his tears would dry up.

In this drawing, Freud is suggesting that we can use Acteon's fate as a kind of exercise in counter-evidential imagination: a thought experiment. We can do that because we can communicate with other humans propositionally—because we have that which Diana could not pardon in Acteon: imagination. Humans can imagine a world that has features that are different from the ones they witness. They can do that because they can store meaning in words and objects and then approach that meaning as if it were not made by them. We are scaffolded by the culture within which we live. This is what Diana feared in Acteon's gaze—its transcendence—so this is what he lost when he saw that wondrous sight.

As Acteon's crisis unravels in Ovid's tale, we can easily understand why he should cry: he is puzzled; he is fearful; he feels that the knowledge of who he is is going away from him. As he loses his presence, the presence of the aspects of the world he confronts is somehow also lost. He encounters a world that is increasingly lacking in depth, temporally less mediated, a world the flatness of which no longer casts moral questions at him; a world where time and space are immediate and cannot be suspended for consideration.

Following Ovid's footprints, in this self-portrait, Freud is playing with us by tracing backward for our imagination the path that infants follow when, at around nine months after birth, they go from crying and grunting like an animal to uttering words and making symbolically meaningful gestures; disposing of things in the world as objects, that is, as entities the meaning of which is given, as if external. Freud is experimenting with the possibility of the loss of transcendence.

At this point, we are entitled to ask: are Acteon's tears a sign of unhappiness? Is Freud depicting a tragedy? In other words, would we be unhappy to find ourselves animals again? The question is absurd for it involves what Acteon is losing: self-reflection. His awareness of “being there” (his Dasein, as Heidegger would have it) can only be contemplated in the transcendent world that human imagination provides. There is no evidence that this transcendence that we achieve when we become persons (disposing of the world as if time and space could be turned around) is actually a happier condition than that of an animal that possesses no such capacity. As persons, we do not arise from nothing but from a previous condition of participation in others and, in itself, this is a painful process.

Persons had to be there in the world for persons to emerge in the world. Our early ontogeny as persons is traumatic to the extent that it results from a separation from others who, earlier on, were an integral part of us (see Pina-Cabral 2017: 108–109). An infant's call for company is a response to its increasingly conflicted sense of participation in others. As his condition changed, Acteon was stunned and surprised and quite rightly frightened. Soon, however, if he had not been killed by his hounds, he would have found a more restful way of approaching the world. It is traumatic to emerge as human, for it involves the very sense of betrayal that Diana feared in the likelihood of Acteon reporting what he had seen. I conclude, therefore, that the beckoning smiles of babies are more tragic than Acteon's tears.

As humans who emerged as animals within our mother's wombs, we possess an intentional type of consciousness—a basic mind, which is not contentful. But then, as we participate in human dwelling environments during infancy, our minds come to be scaffolded by personal modes of objectification; we learn to perceive in objects more than what is immediately provided by the stimuli we encounter. As Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin put it, “what is gained is an ability to perform operations that previously required the manipulation of external symbols but have now become possible in the absence of external symbols” (2013: 152). In the process, we construct an internal arena of presence and action, a self. Notwithstanding, basic mind and scaffolded mind, as modes of being active in communication, remain superimposed in our personal worlds: we are always both animals and persons.

In Ovid's tale, Acteon returned to the earlier condition of an animal; he lost his aptitude for scaffolded thinking. Freud's self-portrait, therefore, works like an uncovering of his own animality: his face grows fur, his ears distend, his horns rise above his forehead. His drawing uncovers the animality in himself in much the same way as Acteon's arrival in the bucolic scene uncovered the hunting goddess's sensuality. The drawing depicts an encounter within himself with that which Freud always was, but which was somehow transcended by his presence as a person. Nevertheless, unlike Acteon, Freud has not lost his capacity for transcendence (for rising above immediate experience), so his self-portrait is an ethical dilemma, a kind of apology. Being an animal does not mean to be beyond the call of co-responsibility; but it does mean not to be able to reflect upon the imagined consequences of our actions. Freud is naughtily contemplating what it might be like to abdicate from self-knowledge and to move beyond moral responsibility. That is the drawing's punch, as it were.

Personhood as emergent

Twentieth century science arose out of a Christian view of human becoming that saw personhood as an absolute condition, closed onto itself: created, not emergent. This was the tragedy of Charles Darwin's own discovery of our inherent and historical animality—and the reason why he withheld it from those around him for so long. Previously, the human condition had been seen as an unmediated process. God was supposed to have created our minds (our souls) conjointly but separately from our bodies. To this day, Darwin's discovery is still troubling people who find it difficult to move out of easy oppositions. Contrary to creationists, however, most of us have come to see that humans are engaged with the world concurrently in two distinct but mutually implicit forms: intentionally, which means to engage the world in a basic and direct participatory manner so as to promote life; propositionally, which means to interact with the world by leaning on the objectifications that other humans have produced in the world and, thus, as if one were separate from the world. This awareness of our double form of being social, however, should not encourage us to believe that the tragic passage Ovid's story exemplifies is unmediated—that there is nothing between a basic consciousness of the world's affordances and culturally scaffolded reflexive consciousness.²

On closer inspection, we can see that Ovid's tale is not one of a sudden encounter with a crisis point. The transformation occurs in steps and through intermediate points. This is why we speak not of creation but of emergence. Rather, what Ovid describes is a process of metamorphosis, where Acteon slowly unravels his personhood through a gradual descent from transcendence. In life there are no sudden jumps, as living entities can never get rid of the ground of their own emergence. As Jacques Derrida puts it, “Immediacy is derived. Everything starts from the intermediary, this is what is ‘inconceivable to reason’” (Derrida 1967: 267, my translation).

There are those who feel that the concept of emergence is a philosophical dark horse, explaining little. I do not agree since, as I use it here, it describes a worldly affordance, a piece of empirical evidence—persons do emerge in the world. Biologically, however, it is a challenge, since it proclaims the ultimate impossibility of tracing all the determinations that gave rise to the capacities at stake (both those of personal transcendence and those of animal self-awareness). It is an argument for the irresolvably underdetermined nature of the complex processes of institution that life depends upon. As Philip Ball puts it, “cells are inherently ‘social’ entities, acquiring their raison d’être only in relation to others and depending on signals from their neighbors to sustain them” (Ball 2018: 212). The complexities of emergence both at the organismic and cellular levels cannot easily be accounted for in deterministic terms. Such processes are cybernetic, to the extent that they are overlaid and based on recurrent feedback processes between the newly emergent entity and the grounds of their emergence: “Staying alive is not a matter of luxuriating in the state of aliveness but is a relentless task of keeping balls in the air” (Ball 2018: 50).

Faced with the routine nature of the observation that each one of us has become first a self-aware animal entity and, later on, a person, the complexity of the process of emergence seems too misty; we strive for a more mechanistic, determinative account. Yet, these days, many of us have come to believe that the understanding of emergence requires that we move beyond a Newtonian, deterministic conception of physics and adopt “a contemporary and indeterministic account of the physical world, . . . part of what is often called the orthodox interpretation of quantum phenomena” (Hattiangadi 2005: 79). This involves a layered conception of world, “a stratified structure of ‘levels’ or ‘orders’ of entities and their characteristic properties” (Kim 1993: 87). Being alive means to move, at the same time, on many levels of emergence. The direction of influence (the determination) is not always upward, from the more basic to the more elaborate levels. In emergence, there is “downward causality” too, that is, the emergent features affect the levels of being out of which they have emerged in a complex cybernetic process.

As Jagdish Hattiangadi explains, “though a whole is always composed of its parts, sometimes the types of things that constitute the parts cannot be fully described in all causally relevant respects without describing how they interact with the types of things that are wholes as wholes that are composed out of them” (2005: 87). If we consider persons to be emergent entities, then this means that we cannot explain the occurrence of personal emergence without considering the previous existence of persons. The apparent circularity of the argument has to be resolved in an evolutionary fashion, that is in terms of historically occurring chance events: “Any . . . emergence will need to evoke a chance event or events that lead to the formation of a particular configuration of lower-level things” (Hattiangadi 2005: 84).

This means that, in studying human social life, we are forced to account for entanglement in its two principal forms: (a) as indeterminacy, that is, persons cannot ever fully rid themselves of their intentional foundations in animal life, and (b) as underdetermination, that is, the propositional, symbolical thinking of persons interacts with the forms of human communication that gave rise to it. Karen Barad proposes that, rather than characterizing sociality as a network of interactions, thus assuming “that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction,” we should adopt the notion of intra-action, which “recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. . . . the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don't exist as individual elements” (Barad 2007: 33).

This insight is the main lesson that informs contemporary processualist philosophies of biology. As Richard Campbell puts it, “given that everything is fundamentally in process, the challenge is to explain the emergence and apparent stability of enduring things” (2015: 2). There is implicit here a critique of a concept that is so deeply engrained in our cosmology that we find it hard to go without it: that is, the very notion of matter, as we inherited it from Aristotle. Moving onto a processualist view of biology does not mean to abdicate from its empirical basis or, somehow, to succumb to some sort of spiritualism. On the contrary, it is an indispensable move if we are to bypass the challenges posed by mind/spirit dualism.

In Vicky Kirby's words, “our corporeal realities and their productive iterations are material reinventions. Life reads and rewrites itself, and this operation of universal genesis and reproduction is even internal to the tiny marks on this page, which are effective transubstantiations” (2011: 1, emphasis in original).

Consciousness

When we look into Acteon's troubled eyes in Freud's drawing, we are prone to believing that his mind is an integral whole, a self-enclosed totality. We think of our own self in such atomistic terms, as if it were an integral organ—so we export that to our understanding of others. As we consider Acteon's humanity fading, we fancy that we see him succumbing to a world of mindlessness. This, however, is completely wrong in at least two regards. Primarily, some form of conscious (not reflexive) awareness of the world characterizes all vertebrates and our human capacity to create maps of our environment is shared with other animal species. In fact, of late, we have even come to know that evolution is complex and that processes of convergence can occur, which mean that animals who are not primates can approach some of the effects of personal emergence among humans more closely than other primates. They do this through processes leading to modes of experience that are largely unfathomable to us at this point, for our view of what constitutes cognition remains profoundly person-centric.

Second, we are prone to treat consciousness as one integral self-enclosed totality, while in fact, it is constituted out of a series of interacting processes of diverse nature. Perception and awareness, for example, can arguably be considered different kinds of processes and much still needs to be done in understanding how they come together into the image of wholeness that each one of us constructs to themselves, but which is nothing but a passing construct, a figment of our scaffolded imagination, an internal arena of presence and action.

Moreover, we must get rid of the idea that mental capacities are essentially individual capacities, for they are profoundly dependent on forms of social participation among different kinds of entities. Sociality is not something that is superimposed on life: it is life's very condition. Live beings are relatively stable structures in a world in constant flux. Sociality is the very process of perpetuating the stability of certain kinds of structures. As animals and as persons, we work at creating the conditions in the world that favor our own existence. The atomistic proneness to focus on individuals, on species, and on groups hides the complexity of the social interaction, both among members of the same species and in the complex process of bringing together one member. While, on the one hand, being in company is a condition for being human; on the other hand, as people, we interact with other species within our body and outside our body and that interaction is a condition for our remaining alive in the world. Our organisms are collective entities that depend on complex processes of interspecies communication.

Concluding on nudity

When he drew this image, Freud was young. Today, we are privileged because we can study the future work of the painter who made that drawing. By relation to this future, his early work gains increased significance. Considering what came after, we become entitled to interpret this work in a layered manner. First, as a worldly affordance that allows us to explore the permanent fear of undergoing the cultural apocalypse of loss of personhood. But also, second, as a premonition of the way Freud was to lay bare in his subsequent paintings the bodies of persons—men, women, and children. After all, his lifework's principal drive was an act of “denuding.” In this drawing, Freud is providing us in mythical language with a clue on how to read his work. He is telling us that looking into people's naked bodies is, like it was for Acteon, to engineer a “crisis of presence”: to make these persons both very present before our eyes and, at the same time, to make us experience the imminence of their collapse back into entanglement; the unmaking of their emergence as persons. Without transcendence (involving distancing) there is no personal presence. The challenge has to do with time; with our always failed attempt to freeze the processual ambiguity between identification and differentiation: how can I know myself without trying to see myself as other?

In a sermon that he pronounced in 1640 in Bahia (Brazil), the Jesuit writer Father António Vieira speculates as to what the Virgin Mary might have felt after the Annunciation, when she had God growing in her womb. He explains that she felt very ambivalent about it; it made her anxious, since

a presence in order for it to be a presence must have something of an absence. The object of sight, in order for it to be seen, must be present; but if it is glued and united to same potency, it is as if it were absent; in order to be seen, it must be distant from the eyes. Thus, presence, in order to be a presence, must not be intimate, nor totally united, but to the contrary a little distant (Vieira 1959: 10:224, my translation).

Freud goes one step further: he reflects upon what can happen when that absence of presence vanishes. He shows the destructive potential implicit in the permanent possibility of the unraveling of personal transcendence (the absence that makes presence possible). In his paintings, Freud dwells on the traumatic side of our daily lives as persons, which means our personhood is forever incomplete and menaced. Here, I connect again with what was said above about gender. In his paintings, Freud disrobes men, women, and children. By showing us their naked bodies, he is foregrounding the divisive potential of their sex. In his paintings, human bodily sexedness challenges gender, as it bears the potential for a negation of transcendence. Like the Virgin's anxiety concerning her excessive closeness to God's presence, so Freud's paintings show us that our very bodies are menacing our personhood. We must remember that coming to be gendered is part of coming to be a person, and it involves both a division (in that, as gendered creatures, we separate off from those of other genders) and an overcoming of gendered divisions (in that, through the imagination, we are capable of accessing other people's genderedness). Our gendered nature is permanently menaced by our capacity for participation (see Pina-Cabral 1993; 2018).

Becoming naked can be seen, in some way, as the ultimate act of individuality: “there I am, only me and nothing more.” Yet, like Diana's response, the experience of pudicity (however it comes to manifest itself in different contexts—for even nudists experience pudicity) always reminds us that individuality is but a supposition. As persons, we are constitutively social and that means both partible, because we integrate others, and dividual, because our personhood is permanently susceptible to collapse (to crises of presence). We may fancy that, when naked, we are down to essentials—we show all there is to show. But this turns out to be false upon further consideration. There never is absolute nakedness if we remain a person. In particular, in holding back the apocalypse of personhood (that which Acteon did not manage to do) we are always somehow dressed, somehow masked. Like a mask, our personhood both hides and reveals, and it is in that game of transcendental reduction that we build our personal emergence.

By entering a world where only women could exist, Acteon turned into an animal. His personhood did not survive the ultimate separation of genders. As persons, we are intrinsically participatory. As a person (and not a god), Acteon was structurally androgynous (see Pina-Cabral 1993). Thus, ultimate nakedness is deadly for persons, as it necessarily involves a loss of personhood.

To return to Freud's mental experiment with metamorphosis, when Acteon lost his human shape, he lost his home; he lost his companions; and his life became untenable, for he broke with the social web of participation that previously sustained his life. The very dogs he had trained in order to obtain food for his family and friends killed him. Apart from what it tells us about the anxious impression that Freud's work has upon each one of us, as a “thought experiment” Freud's drawing highlights that it is not possible to trace back the intrinsically indeterminate nature of the personal emergence of each one of us; it is not possible to unravel life's history.