The rule of the desk

When I was around twenty years old, I fashioned for myself a few “rules of life”. One was the “rule of the restaurant”: never order at a restaurant what you could eat at home. That was meant to challenge myself, in new circumstances, to go for the not-so-familiar option. The other rule was the “rule of the desk”: when the desk gets overwhelmingly messy, just put an arm on the short side, move it through to the other side and let everything fall down; then, start, little by little, sorting out what needs to be thrown away and what might be allowed back on the desk. I have never actually done this with my own desk (despite it getting very messy at times), but the basic idea was that sometimes we need a moment of simplification. We cannot analyze everything, so we need to restart from a clean slate.

Philosophers are well acquainted with this gesture. Think about Descartes, who in his First Meditation throws away all the ideas he has inherited from his years in school, until nothing is left besides the fact that he thinks. Later, Husserl would make this gesture (which he calls epoché) the beginning of a proper encounter with what appears as such (the phenomena). It is interesting to recall, though, that many other philosophers have used the thought experiment of a “first beginning” in order to reflect on the foundations of their systems. Think of Hobbes and his “state of nature” as the condition from which politics needs to be understood, or the speechless fear of the first humans envisioned by Giambattista Vico as the state from which language can arise.

More contemplative traditions have used a similar gesture as well. The highest states of contemplation (samādhi in Sanskrit) discussed by the Buddhist and yogic traditions are often described as a zeroing of all experience, until sometimes a paradoxical “experiential blackout” is reached (nirodha, literally “cessation”). That is not the end, but the beginning of one’s awakening to what really is there, beside and beyond all constructions and fancies.

While this might seem a destructive gesture, it can also be very creative. In 1972, Steve Paxton, then a still young dancer and choreographer, together with a few colleagues, started experimenting in the wake of postmodernism with a form of dance that would zero out all intentional choreography, symbols, meanings, stories. What if we move only on the basis of gravity, kinesthetic energy and automatic reflexes in our bodies that we do not plan? That was the beginning of contact improvisation, a form that is now, in its own right, spread throughout the globe and has been integrated into many dance degrees.

Now that I am almost forty, I still use the desk rule from time to time. Especially when beginning a new project, I feel the need to create space, take distance from the past and give the new project the freshness of a new beginning. But, having iterated the performance of this gesture many times, I can also see that the clean slate is never quite so clean. Despite the confidence of Descartes or Husserl, what I have learned and incorporated into my own being remains there, lurking in the background. Even if I am fascinated by the highest forms of samādhi, I also recognize that after each peak there is a descent, after an ego-death a rebirth. When one starts practicing contact improvisation, one is often captivated by the fierce dryness of its inspiring idea, although it does not take long to observe the sprouting of a whole bunch of old intentions, familiar choreographies, well-established patterns. Put shortly: there is no completely new beginning, no absolutely clean slate; something of the past always remains.

However, this resilience of the past might also be precisely what makes the gesture of creating a clean slate still important. Instead of playing with the idea of really getting rid of all past conditioning once and for all, the temporary removal and disavowal of it can become an occasion to engage critically with one’s own past. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra taught that, to really free the creative potential of our will, we should be able to say “yes” to the idea that the past will repeat over and over again, identically, forever. Creativity comes from acceptance, because only through acceptance can we let go of the guilt complex that suffocates creativity. However, this seems to overlook the fact that the very idea of repetition entails difference, and even when we seem to be trapped (or freed?) in the loop of eternal recurrence, small details reveal that what we are living is, in fact, also something new.

What I take to be the most important philosophical lesson I have learned so far is the following. By observing, and going through, these cycles of crowding and cleaning my existential slate, I noticed that there are two complementary phases. I call the first “primary embodiment”, referring to the activity of taking up a form, embodying a certain way of being, learning how to play a certain game. We learn new languages, we learn to write essays, to interact with people in certain social settings, we learn jobs and habits. All of this shapes us, gives us structure, form. At the same time, form can also trap us, constrain and limit what we are. Form can become a fixation, it can harden, or it can simply cease to be effective, functional or appropriate. I learn to behave in a certain way given a certain environment, but what if the environment radically changes? The more we stick to our acquired form, the more we lose in adaptability, flexibility, existential agility. That is why, willingly or not, we often have to take our forms down, to unlearn, deconstruct, move beyond.

I call this second process “deep embodiment” because it still has to do with forms, but instead of positively taking up one, we learn how to move around it, beyond and beside it, using it to see what else is also possible. The form becomes a filter: imagine that you had to do anything except what the form prescribes. It took me a few years to learn how to write an academic paper that would be acceptable for a respectable international journal. However, once I had learned it, the problem became: how else could I also write philosophy? This question became crucial for me, since at some point I felt I was trapped in the eternal recurrence of the same way of writing always the same thing. I felt I could no longer do anything different. Unlike primary embodiment, deep embodiment does not emerge through a fixed pattern; it is by definition a free exploration, with many turns and twists, frequent failures and occasional epiphanies. You cannot predict it, because it does not aim at a precise form, but at exploring the mystery that surrounds any form. It does not aim at knowing something determinate, but at revealing the unknown and unknowable. Yet there is no talk of deep embodiment without some primary embodiment: we cannot deconstruct if we have not first learned how to construct.

The gesture of first accumulating stuff on the slate and then clearing it might well correspond to the rhythmic pulse of primary and deep embodiment: we build and take down, construct and deconstruct. I say “we” assuming that this process is open to all, although I often see people who seem quite comfortable with simply sticking to primary embodiment (and all the seeming certainties that it offers). In a few cases, there are also people really fond of just deep embodiment (and the sense of freedom and unboundedness that it supports). I confess that the distinction between these two poles is just my reworking of what Nietzsche identified, under the masks of Apollo and Dionysus, as the two driving forces of tragic art (and life in general). I think that Nietzsche was essentially right in claiming that the real challenge is not to side with either of the two, but rather to find ways of integrating and balancing them. In doing so, we might learn that our own self is also something like a permanently unfinished masterpiece—indeed, a masterpiece precisely insofar as it remains unfinished. Could this also be the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of the idea of rebirth? We might look at it not necessarily as a soteriological and metaphysical theory that emphasizes how we are “trapped” in a constant cycle of rebirth and redeath, but rather as a way of saying that our story is essentially unfinished, and that it can go on only insofar as it remains so.

In many Indian traditions, awakening is seen as the stepping out of the cycle of rebirth. Nietzsche, from his side, thought that the key to awakening is the realization of the eternal recurrence of the same. What if, instead, the key to awakening is the realization of the unending unfolding of something that cannot be fully enclosed in any ultimate form, but also not entirely dissolved back into a primordial nothing either? How do we learn to live in this tension, and to surf over it? 

(article written for Twijfel, journal of the Erasmus School of Philosophy)