Whoever I Am: On the Quality of Life

Abstract

What is the relation between quantification and the mysterious question of identity? What order of quality is proper to the inexplicable fact that one is oneself? Starting with an examination of the ontological blind spots of counting, this essay investigates the priority of quality over quantity, in connection with the spiritual nature of life understood as the spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. It argues, in face of the forces of quantophrenia and numerocracy, for the importance of recognizing the essentially serial and apophatic structure of identity, the existential sense that all entities are the living question of themselves. As such, no individual may be considered as merely a part of reality. Each is, no less, the totality.

1. That This

I must interrupt to say that ‘X’ is what exists inside me. ‘X’—I bathe in that this [esse isto]. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in ‘X’ … Always independent, but it only happens to whatever has a body. Though immaterial, it needs our body and the body of the thing.

–Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

The structure of the question is implicit in all experience.

–Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Life is a series of experiences which need innumerable forms.

–Meher Baba

Ignorance and indifference regarding the question or mystery of identity are part and parcel of an inordinately or irrationally quantified approach to reality, termed quantophrenia by Pitirim Sorokin now a lifetime ago.1 That we have a word for wayward quantification as a mental disorder is a fitting index of the spiritual nature of the problem, specifically, how it concerns one’s personal inner sense of the absolutely radical fact of individual existence. That there are popular ‘self-tracking’ or ‘quantified self’ movements, largely focused on well-being, which promise a “self-knowledge through numbers” having nothing to do with this question is another.2 Perhaps in an age of numerocracy, it is inevitable that persons will attempt to cure and control themselves through quantification, as if performing reflexively the inversion of private and public, subjective and objective, which such ‘rule’ generates.3 And yet it is just with respect to the non-quantifiable and unexchangeable nature of the individual, the status of everyone as irreparably themselves, that we register the injustice or error of over-quantification: “this world in prey to rampant quantification, or even quantophrenia … represents an affront to the irreducible individual on an intimate level, the level of his or her dignity”.4

Seeing that counting functions as a procedure of familiarization, a translation of multitudinous and multidimensional things into digits we grasp in the medium of homely hands, it seems natural for quantification to blur the question of identity, wherein one faces paradoxically the utter strangeness of oneself. “For the essence of my self arises from this—that nothing will be able to replace it: the feeling of my fundamental improbability situates me in the world where I remain as though [comme] foreign to it, absolutely foreign” (Bataille 1988, p. 69). And this as, the virtuality or seemingness of one’s absolute foreignness, is crucial, being identical with a familiarity nearly too close, too oneself, to recall or conceive—the inescapable vast intimacy of identity itself. The fact that I am myself escapes me by the same circuit wherein I am bound to it, just as “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-meme] (Levinas 2003, p. 55)”. Hear how long Meister Eckhart took to notice his own existence: “I once thought—it was not long ago—that I am a man is something other men share with me … but that I am, that belongs to no man but myself, not to a man, not to an angel, not even to God except insofar as I am one with Him” (Eckhart 2009, p. 131). As this passage implies, it is the counting of one’s being as one of many, as equivalent to those of others, which obscures its special quality, just as when numbering objects, we overlook or forget our recognition of the one whereby we count in the first place. Uniqueness, being one, becomes unit. Or as Stephen Priest states, “Quantification is blind to the first-person/third-person distinction” (Priest 2012, p. 298).

This complicity between quantification and identity-blindness, in the sense of not seeing (the question of) identity per se, is exposed in Nietzsche’s diagnosis of an ancient error: “The discovery of the laws of number was made on the basis of an error already predominant in the earliest times, that several things might be identical (but actually there are not identical things)” (Nietzsche 1995, p. 30). There is convergence between quantification’s suppression, or forgetting, of uniqueness, and stupidity towards the question of identity. Both meet in patterns of thinking that narrowly see things as exchangeable, as members of classes or ones of several, and as summable into greater or lesser values. Both naturalize singularity or take identity for granted, treating the being of an entity, its taking place, as a fact among others. And both, instead of perceiving identity as the question of itself, think of it as something resolvable into a sum, whether quantity or ‘I am’ statement, confusing identity with identification or eclipsing its question with an answer. Yet this old error is actually threefold, comprising not only the illusion of sameness connected with the suppression of singularity, but symmetrically along with it the elision of the serial process of counting, the movement from one to one to one, as well as the overlooking of the presence of unity in the first place, the unarithmetical counting of things as ones through which one counts their plurality into a single number, as presumed in the concept of arithmos.5

Accordingly, to counter inordinate quantification is to ask not simply for a defensive return to the ontological priority of quality, but for attention to the successive movement of spirit that originates and sustains enumeration, the dynamic ground on which counting stands, wherein the one is immanently or always already the series of itself, a series of ones.6 This is the same seriality or one-after-another-ness that mediates the threshold between quality and quantity, as exemplified in the sorites paradox or the fact that measure, “the immediate unity of the qualitative and the quantitative”, is always “a series of measures”.7 Seriality is the dialectical interface of quality and quantity, the quality of quantity and the quantity of quality, an all-pervasive form forever entangled with one’s perceiving of it.8 Without awareness of this interface, critique of quantification will remain stuck in the opposition between quantity and quality, likely leading to some kind of nostalgic ontologizing of substance or to a definition of the qualitative underlying reality of things as something—precisely the dead end which the weird fact of identity or problem of being someone compels us to exit. As Priest sums it up in The Subject in Question: “The essence of the problem is, if we try to answer the question What am I? no ontological answer seems adequate … The problem is saying what is claimed about one of these things when it is claimed I am it” (Priest 2000, 153n11). It is of the quality of identity not only to be questionable, but actually to be, to exist as, the question of itself, as seen in Eriugena’s indication of the divine image: “the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is, and not known what it is … what it is is denied in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is is affirmed” (Eriugena 1999–2009, IV.73). There is something superessential about oneself. There is one “in whose eyes I am made [factus sum] a question to myself”.9

To stand with the priority of quality summons the question of the one who quantifies, requiring in Tillich’s terms the essentially involved “existential attitude” towards knowledge, which the detached mood of quantitative measurement, “inadequate … to reality in its infinite concreteness”, steers clear of.10 To clean the atmosphere of quantophrenia’s miasmic fog, not only must “I reject the idea that the meaning of ‘existence’ can be fully or relevantly captured by the language of quantification”, but I must resuscitate or inspire its breathing subject, affirm the qualitative being of whatever is alive to the open, beginningless, and endless nature of reality, and the intimate question of one’s identity with(in) it (Gabriel 2015, p. 8). So we speak of ‘quality of life’ not because we are alive and also like qualities, but because quality itself is a liveness, just as for Hegel determinate being [Dasein] is quality itself and “something … is … the beginning of the subject” (Hegel 2010, p. 89).11 Specifically, this means foregrounding at once the singularity, the individuality, and the seriality of beings, all the principles which tend to be suppressed in the process of considering them quantitatively or summing them up. The inevitable impossibility that I am, that anything is itself, comprises all three of these principles. For to be oneself, to exist as a specific individual, is simultaneously to be one of many (one among the other unique individuals) and one in many, this singular line flowing through innumerable experiences and forms, such that it is always more true to affirm ‘I am that I am’ than to say ‘I am what I am’. Similarly, Proudhon unites individuality and seriality into a “metaphysical axiom”: “That alone is durable, living, useful and beautiful, which is serial; that alone is of natural and permanent institution, which has its ordination in itself, cujus lex in ipso est” (Proudhon 2023, III.vi.308). Or as Eckhart says, “Only that which is without principle properly lives”.12 Contrariwise, “A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing”13 (Tillich 2000, p. 124). Life is properly improper, the condition of being at home being out of place in the limitless line of itself. It not accidental that the inevitable impossibility of individuality is illuminated, as per Sartre’s classic example of the social series (from PIE root *ser- ‘to line up’), as a situation of being in line: “Consider all the people of the past (if you like, in a long line), add to that all present and future people (again, if you wish, in a line). Now consider yourself. It is a striking and puzzling fact that out of all the people there have been, are and will be, you yourself are one of them” (Priest 1991, p. 220). To put it in medieval terms, seriality is like a mirror in which Nature’s production of individuals in order to preserve species reflects God’s generation of species in order to create individuals.14 Or, discarding the frame of any such intention behind manifest reality, seriality is simply the immediate form of individuality’s infinity.15

The wish of this essay, then, is to articulate and appreciate the priority of quality over quantity in a manner that overcomes the dialectical opposition of these fundamental categories and thus steps past—or at least sideways to—the logic of another “renaissance of the qualitative” (Neuenschwander 2013). I see the opposition between quality and quantity as ultimately false, meaningful only as a means or tool for tuning understanding of their hierarchical relation. Specifically, I will consider the priority of quality as identical with the essentially spiritual nature of life as the spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. The form of identity proper to this priority is apophatic and serial, true to our actual existential situation of being the question of oneself or not knowing who you are in the whole unbounded line of beings: “Here, being neither oneself nor someone else …”16 (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 137). Indicatable yet indicable, present and inexpressible. Being such, breathing and bathing in that this, is qualitatively at odds with substantivism, insofar as it “holds that talk about this and that cannot be part of a proper description of what things are”, and on par with indexicalism, the view “that any enclosed realm described by substantives has something beyond it—beyond is a constituent of reality as much as an ingredient of thought” (Bensusan 2021, pp. 15, 19). Analogously, seriality is the open and anonymous order of unity or wholeness, the dimension where oneness is independent of sameness and difference, as shown, for instance, in Aristotle’s definition of the soul and in Young’s recuperation of social seriality as collectivity without the requirement of shared attributes or common identity.17

The connection between quantification and the question of identity may be clarified further by considering their shared relation to classification as an ontological sorting process whereby it is decided what things are and are not.18 Quantification depends upon classifying beings as the same or different, on grouping them into categories within which they are considered or defined as exchangeable or identical. Even if we do not count things explicitly, the simple act of classifying individuals as ones of a group, of defining them by categories, is already a rudimentary form of quantification, because groups and categories are essentially structured as multiplicities or aggregates that bear a certain magnitude and vague cardinality, just as “assumption of multiplicity always presupposes that there is something that occurs multiple times”19 (Nietzsche 1995, p. 30). Correlatively, simply to name or designate a being as a particular kind of thing, to call it something (as opposed to pointing to it), is a proto-quantitative act, not only because the entity is thus rendered countable, but because it is now the member of the set of somethings designated by that name, part of a group, the multiplicity of which, even if lacking actual form or concrete order, is informed and ordered by the essential capacity of names to signify multiple entities for the multiplicity of beings who use them. Thus, categorization projects onto its object the group dynamics of nomination itself, a dynamics in which the collective power of multiplicity in is play, along with the relative quantitative distinctions of greater and lesser which multiplicities are subject to. It is telling in this regard that the word category originally signified accusation and, more literally, declamation in an assembly (agora), underscoring how categorization, like public accusation, draws upon the power of multiplicity to include an individual as being in, or excluded from, the vague ordinality of a group. The word class (from PIE root *kele- ‘to shout’) similarly bears the trace of the collective power of the call (to arms). In short, categorization facilitates and/or enforces quantification by defining individual beings as countable members of multiplicities, members who, by the collective force of the act of categorization itself, bear a quantitative sense, even if the intention is solely to sort, and not count, them.

It is critical, therefore, that the utility and inevitability of classification not blind us to its coercive capacity as an instrument of quantification and numerocracy. This requires that one not mistake the sorting of beings for reality or the fullness of truth, but see it for what it is, a more-or-less necessary fiction or representation. As Nietzsche observes, “without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live” (Nietzsche 2002, p. 7). Yet it is precisely the coercive power of classification which is blindly embraced when we not only sort ourselves and others into categories for whatever reason, but actually identify the being, essence, or lives of ourselves and others with the conceived substance or somethingness of those categories. The issue is that classification, like accusation, insinuates itself into the subject of identity, coloring and occluding its intrinsic ‘questionality’, or who-am-I-ness, with the collective force of the category. Now it is ‘known’ what something is, now it is ‘decided’ who someone is, with all the quantitative power or ‘strength in numbers’ entailed in membership in and/or exclusion from a group. Now your life is ‘a life’. But nothing is identical to what it is. Everything moves with the beyond within it. Even the nothing or “nonbeing itself”, says Pseudo-Dionysius, “longs for the Good which is above all being” and by “repelling being … struggles to find rest”20 (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 73). Telling myself who or what I am kills the question that I am (at least without some impervious, apophatic skin of extreme circumspection which understands the imperfection of all answers, holding to the vertiginous quality of existence and standing in the infinite seriality of everything). Quantification and occlusion of the question of identity intersect in identification, the horizontal, substantive, and relative form of identity, as opposed to the vertical, indexical, and absolute truth of identity per se, the unmasterable fact or fate that I am I and you are you. And this (congested) intersection is all the more inevitable in an auto-quantifying world driven by and committed to the dynamics of majority and minority, to relations between the few and the many, wherein identification, confused with identity itself, carries the force of increasing or decreasing the weight or importance of a being by connecting it quantitatively to some logically defined group. “For as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command”21 (Nietzsche 2002, p. 86). What the self-sorting, peopled world of identitarian entities massively suppresses is the original, inescapable meaning of sort itself, the unaccountable lot of being oneself, which is best formulated as a question (who am I?) rather than a certainty, and which bears an essential link to seriality, sharing the latter’s verbal root (from *ser- ‘to line up’). My lot is to be here, whoever I am, in line with everyone else. But by classifying everything into countable and orderable categories, it is as if people take impotent vengeance on the divine weirdness of individuated existence, assuming the role of beings who stand apart from the untraceable line of reality and are able to decide what is what. Between quantophrenia and blindness to the mystery of identity stands a will to sort everything out, starting with the power to call oneself this or that. But why this pressurized need to be someone, to belong to a category of countable beings, to amount to something? Why not classify only weakly, gently, without forcefully identifying entities with their shared attributes, and just let everything be whatever it is, the whole series of itself? Why think of ourselves and others in such a way that there is no more room for anything to be everything and/or nothing but only what it putatively is, no more spaceless space for this/that mysterious non-thing called life or the soul?

As far as I can see, it is only from the perspective of a self-unknowing serial one that there is a proper place to welcome and speak of the individual soul or someone who in truth knows who they are talking about when they say “this is my body”. The self-knowledge we lack is immeasurable, for “what is lacking cannot be counted” (Eccles. 1:15), or as St. Jerome translated the line, “the number of fools [stultorum] is infinite” (Eccles. 1:15).22 In turn, identifying being with something, defining ourselves and others as this or that, renders life as an object of calculation, with all the unfixable consequences of a world of fixed things.23 Stultus is from PIE *stel-, ‘to set, be stiff’. In sum, the intellectually and scientifically unanswerable question of one’s identity asks everyone to loosen up about their ‘ownmost’ essential stupidity and follow wheresoever it leads: “If the fool would persist in his folly …”.24

2. Everyone First!

The common, and now classic, way of countering inordinate quantification and its unfortunate consequences is by appeal to the category of quality, construed as quantity’s opposite and/or correlate, the suppressed content or integrity which is counted in quantification, paradoxically at the expense of its own privation. Concern over the loss or relative devaluation of quality in a world of universal quantification is legible from many directions and is especially germane to Romanticism.25 For Goethe it pertains to the flight of mathematical knowledge from experiential reality and the consequent need for an attentive, intrinsic science of quality: “quantity and quality must be looked upon as the two poles of visible being; which is … why the mathematician raises the language of his formulas high enough … to include the immeasurable world together with the measurable and calculable world … now everything appears tangible, within reach and mechanical”.26 For Marx, it pertains to the alienating temporal commodification of labor under capitalism: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything” (Marx 1955). For Guénon, it pertains to the inversion of matter over form, substance over essence, and the consequent descent of rationalism into the homogenizing hegemonic materialism of the modern West: “the reduction of quality to quantity is intrinsically nothing but a ‘reduction of the higher to the lower’, and some have very rightly attributed this very character to materialism: to claim to derive the ‘greater’ from the ‘lesser’ is indeed one of the most typical of modern aberrations”.27 For Kula, it pertains to the demise of a “traditional mentality”, the local, negotiable, and discretionary methods of measure of which attest to the “dominance of qualitative over quantitative considerations in the social thinking of preindustrial societies”.28 For Evola, it pertains to the “infantile” character of American individualism, which is “open to every kind of standardization”: “the ‘open-mindedness that some would ascribe to Americans is the counterpart of their formless interior life. The same goes for their ‘individualism’ … Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy”.29 For Hayek, it pertains to the blindness of scientism: “the common tendency in the study of social phenomena to attempt to disregard all the ‘merely’ qualitative phenomena and to concentrate, on the model of the natural sciences, on the quantitative aspects, on what is measurable … is the result of an entirely unfounded prejudice” (Hayek 1955, pp. 50–51). For Lukács, it pertains to the spatialization of time in modern life: “time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space” (Lukács 1968, p. 90). For Lord Northbourne, it pertains to the very possibility of meaningful existence and action vis-à-vis our insignificance on the cosmic scale: “if human life has any significance at all, it is not in the domain of quantity but in the domain of quality … To accept the perishability and dependence of ourselves and of the entire universe of forms … is a necessary prelude to the understanding of our situation, and such an understanding is indispensable to effective action. It seems that for the present our achievements in the domain of the quantitative and perishable have obscured from us our dependence on the qualitative and imperishable, thus confusing our sense of direction and frustrating much well-intentioned action” (Northbourne 2008, pp. 39–40). For Corti, it pertains to the prospect of engineering neuroprosthetic hands, integrating the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world into artificial organs, organs more in tune with the actual nature of embodiment: “The point is to try to get science to focus on, include and discuss qualitative methods and the qualitative dimension in its approach to the world. I am not convinced that we need to reconstruct the scientific image of man if we want to take into account also raw feelings … I will argue … for the possibility of constituting a quanto-qualitative view in the analysis of upper limb prostheses” (Corti 2022, p. 200). For Barthes, it pertains to the essence of bourgeois mythology: “The quantification of quality … By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply” (Barthes 1982, p. 153). Similarly, as Sandoval and Haraway observe, the hyper-pervasive figure or logic of “the more, the better” is “crucial to the affect of postmodernism globalization [sic]—the subject immersed in sensation, in stimulation, in the hyperreal … It is a figure of the ‘new world’ postmodern order in its neocolonial mode” (Sandoval 2000, pp. 202, 122). No less is this blind equation of quantity with goodness “a social and psychological dynamic … in the university”, where the “valuing of quality through the quantity of effects produced … economizes scholarly intelligence itself”30 (Sandoval 2000, p. 122)—as performed in this academic amassing of passages.

There is plenty of truth in this pattern of concern. It confirms, overall, that there is something totally precious and intrinsically valuable in the lifeworld of beings, something no less internal than external, which cannot and will never submit to quantification, simply because it is not so, because one’s own vivid overwhelming existence is pure validation of a principle commonly grasped as ‘quality’, the meaning of which is immediately and unquestionably indifferent to more and less, greater and smaller. As Meher Baba explains, quality pertains to the totality of dignity, the inherent standing of all in identity with reality, one with the spiritual infinity of the truth inside all things: “Spiritual life is not a matter of quantity but of inherent quality of living. Spiritual infinity includes in its scope all phases of life. It comprises acts which are great as well as acts which are small. Being greater than the greatest, spiritual infinity is also smaller than the smallest, and it can equally express itself through happenings irrespective of whether they are outwardly small or great … There are no gradations in spiritual importance, when all life is lived in the shadow of eternity … The infinite Truth which is latent in everything can reveal itself only when life is seen and accepted in its totality” (Baba 1967, I.168).31 In other words, quality concerns not only the phenomenon and nature of spirit in life, of something vitally valuable which stands below and above and beyond the bounds of quantitative measure, but the essential openness and non-separation of everyone as entities capable of revealing and realizing the endless truth of everything by living (directing and experiencing one’s existence) in the face of life’s totality, “the shadow of eternity”. Quality of living, in this sense, is more fundamental than ‘quality of life’ in the common sense, as it has to do with the “inherent quality of living” per se, as distinct from the external manners of living which draw from it.32 Like the proverbial sweetness of life to itself, this spiritual quality of living regards one’s recognition and savoring of everyone’s being truly first in the order of reality’s infinity: “the spiritual infinity of the Truth has room for the paradox that one person can be regarded as the totality itself. Therefore one person is not only capable of being looked upon as equal in importance to two or more persons but even as equal to all … Since everyone in creation is not only in spiritual infinity, then everyone is first in importance and no one is second”.33 The unitary quality of spiritual infinity thus contradicts the flatness of generic equality (from aequus, level, even, or flat) which ranks beings as the same by identifying them as just or merely themselves, or worse, as members of a shared category, each no greater than the other.34 In comparison to irony, which is constituted by the individual’s self-suspending negation of totality as the unified sum of all things, the sincere quality of spiritual life is connected to the individual’s identifiability with the totality, not as a quantified whole, but as the endless reality, the unboundedness of which each life manifests by and in its own event, a spectacular ‘uncircumscribable sphere’ before which everyone has, and is, a front-row, first-person seat.35 Not only is there everything, there is you—and you are it! Spiritual life as quality of living is thus not so much anti-ironic as sincerely hyper-ironic, suspending the totality as such by recognizing its identity with everyone and everything, with simple disregard for questions of external scale or importance, and happily investing itself in “happenings irrespective of whether they are outwardly small or great”. The spiritual quality of living is inherent because life contains what contains it; life moves in the specular and chiastic circuit of spirit whose being is nameable as an X or transposition between self and all: “You are because God is. God is because you are”.36

3. Is a Bone

Quality of life is essentially spiritual (from spiritus, ‘breath’) in two interpenetrating senses, both positive and negative: (1) in the positive sense of belonging to ontologically permeable, living and breathing beings who at once witness as if from outside and immersively are their own experience of being in a world, of existing in and as the very eyes of this wild totality; and (2) in the negative sense of being non-reifiable, neither reducible to, nor definable as, an objective thing, whether materially (materialism) or immaterially (animism).37 The relation between the spiritual quality of life and the ‘equatability’ of everyone with all is revealed in the two’s shared contradiction of reification, which, as Gabriel and Žižek show, is the means and end of irrational quantification as the natural consequence of non-reflective knowing, of science that forgets its own being, in particular, the evident fact that quantification itself is a spiritual exercise, an activity of objectifying inwardness: “The fetishism of quantification and of the logical form prevailing in much of contemporary philosophical discourse is characterized by a lack of reflection on its constitution … Reification mistakes its own activity of setting up its world (in the sense of a framework in which determinate things can appear) for the activity of something external to it to the effect that the world appears as the given par excellence … Reification is the problem and it begins where reflection denies access to itself” (Gabriel and Žižek 2009, pp. 14, 77). The anti-spirituality of reification, which is continuous with the error of enumerating different beings as identical things, lies in its being a false form of objectivity, a picture that denies its having been taken, an auto-contradictory refusal of the objective fact that the spirit of life is, first and foremost, objective, that the quality of life per se is associated with its ability to experience itself as self-objectifying spirit: “Life objectifies itself, it realizes itself in animal bodies which in turn are capable of manifesting expressions. The inwardness of life is only realized in its outward manifestations” (Gabriel and Žižek 2009, p. 77).38 From this comes our natural delight in activity, which as Dante says, amplifies in a certain way the being of the agent by manifesting his own image [propriam similitudinem explicare].39 That activity has for us has this unavoidable musical quality, that “without activity pleasure does not arise, and every activity is completed by pleasure”,40 that movement and music are twin sciences,41 demonstrates the inescapable imperative to harmonize quantitative perception with the priority of qualitative truth.42

Spiritual freedom is not freedom from materiality, but precisely the life of freedom through matter: “The life of the spirit … is a life of positive freedom in which the spirit infuses itself into matter and shines through it without submitting to any curtailment of its own claims … The life of the spirit is a unified and integral existence which does not admit of exclusive or unrelated compartments” (Baba 1967, I.130).43 The very failure of materialistic progress to produce happiness, to generate free spirits out of well-provisioned bodies, all the daily deaths of the dream of materialism, proves this.44 And because the spirit of life is integral and integrating, a ‘synaesthetic’ symbiosis of inside and outside, its self-expanding gravity is to receive and project, for better or worse, the quality of itself into all things. It cannot not do so, as “[t]here is no unbridgeable gulf separating the finer aspects of nature from its gross aspect. They all interpenetrate one another and exist together”45 (Baba 1967, III.55). “Whether they desire it or not, all persons are constantly acting and interacting upon each other by their very existence”46 (Baba 1967, II.92)—a fact that digital networks materialize too clearly, not merely as media of quantitatively mutual influence on individual opinion and behavior, but more profoundly, as a single global device for factualizing truth itself, territorializing the experiential quality of science or the event of knowing per se.47

If the division at the heart of science (from PIE root *skei- ‘to cut, split’) is between knower and known, and the destiny of knowledge is to unite them, to realize a knowledge of reality coincident with self-knowledge, then the sign of scientism is precisely that quality of excising the lived being of the knower, cutting out the substance of the one who knows from the order of knowledge via representations or illusions of participation.48 This is reflected with parodic effect in the domain of conspiracy theory, in which the externality and inaccessibility of the truth—the truth is out there—is united with the shared alienation of speaking or breathing the out-there truth together (con + spirare). But the knower cannot walk out of the room of science’s universe; the spiritual quality of knowledge remains (t)here, for as Heidegger said, “severing also is still a joining and relating”.49 Experience does not stop just because it is mistrusted or discounted.50 The task, then, is to capitalize on the dialectically necessary and constantly impingent return of science to life, or for the being of the knower to give place to the cornerstone of quality, “the stone which the builders rejected” (Psalm 118:22).51 This means to recollect and elevate what escapes our categories. “Has not the moment perhaps arrived to remember when the living being was not yet either a god or a man or an animal, but simply a soul, that is, a life?” (Agamben 2004, my translation).

Where reflection denies access to itself, to the fact of its own coming-to-be, is also where it denies to others identical access, depriving of spirit the thus-constituted ‘world’. This is evident in how the modern sense of death follows the demotion of the factical from the that to the what, such that a lifetime is no longer seen in the halo of its having been. The dead are deprived of the past’s everlasting quality and open significance, other than whatever novel meaning they may acquire via reinterpretation by the living.52 Without room to breathe between the poles of being (that and what), the dead are no longer recognizable as the ones who were themselves, as per Virgil’s self-introduction in Dante’s Inferno: “Non omo, omo già fui” (Inferno 1.67) [Not a man, I was formerly a man] (Alighieri 2011). In other words, it looks as if being itself has been historicized away, as if the dead will no longer have been, should they be forgotten. This may help to explain the modern fixation with counting the dead.53 The modern sense of death stands in denial of the truth that, as Rosenzweig says, “when a form of the world dies … it is made eternal” (Rosenzweig 1998, p. 55).

The relationship between quantification and this denial is dramatized in Wordsworth’s poem, “We Are Seven”, in which the reification of life and death is countered via the eternality of number in the spirit of a child who tallies her dead siblings in the present tense. “A simple child …/That lightly draws its breath,/And feels its life in every limb,/What should it know of death?” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1969, p. 63). The feeling of life-in-limb knows that everything that happens happens forever, which means, at the same time, that nothing ever happens, that non-happening is the universal location where things properly take place. The indissoluble unity of the child’s “seven” reflects the ever-green, non-quantifiable singularity of each life: “Their graves are green, they may be seen”. These lines, while, in an adult manner, trying to instruct the child in the factuality of death, only slip through her response into another, present sense of they: “The little Maid replied,/‘Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,/And they are side by side.’” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1969, p. 64). A life never need recur to continue, because its form lives forever, whether or not it is lived again.54 The grave, the corpse, the bone, only testify to the ever-present fact that someone forever will have been. Alternately, we may grasp the concept that that which is an individual is never born and never dies. “A body came into the world, but it wasn’t you” (Howard 1995, p. 164). There is a sense in which ‘Socrates is dead’ means that ‘Socrates is.’ (Coomaraswamy 1977).

To think of individuals in these terms, whether as eternal selves or no-less-imperishable nothings, is correlative to witnessing that, as a life or soul, no one in reality ever does anything, but rather is that which identifies themselves with movements of mind and body.55 In the absence of such perception, the impulse to remember the dead becomes a call to interminable action: We will never forget!—a slogan of blindness to the eternality of the dead. This is a saying of a collectivity which cannot live as already-dead, which thinks of death (under the sign of capitalism) as permanent loss: “all the living awaited the experience of the dead … Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a unique form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated” (Berger 2007, p. 5). Such is the disaster identified by Kundera in the opening of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whereby the illusion of permanent disposability and inherent obsolescence founds a kingdom where forgiveness (and forgetting) is meaningless, resembling our collective production of “the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted” (Kundera 1984, p. 4).

4. Facing the Face

It is a wonderful discovery, like waking from some bad dream, to remember or recollect something that everyone by virtue of their own experienced event knows, namely, that the immediate transcendent quality of everything is always right here, looking at you in the face, that every entity is actually an unveiling that no denial can erase: “The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face … this is the good … Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things”56 (Agamben 1993c, p. 14). The evil habit of the human mind is to recognize this simple inherent good, one comparable to Hegel’s conception of the pure quality of Dasein or determinate being (quality without yet being the quality of something), only once it is quantitatively negated or threatened, to see the taking-place or register the face of something, perceive its truly primary quality, only in light of counting its death or actual reduction to a fact like others, as an objectified good for us. Correlatively, the quantified modern fact is not simply a sensuous particular, but one for which the meaning is tied to interest, to its potential to pay off epistemologically.57 Such is the habit which scientistic quantophrenia, as ironically captured in pseudo-Stalin’s aphorism—“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic”—prescribes: “The science-oriented ideology of our time, which holds that all knowledge ultimately … can be represented in quantitative relations, contributes substantially to darkening our horizon; from this perspective, one cannot understand how objective and simultaneously spirit-independent moral facts … can even exist”58 (Gabriel 2022, p. 189). But spiritual truths (moral, metaphysical, mystical, etc.) are inherently live and situational, not informatic, and thus not quantifiable. They are located on the sacred threshold between objects and subjects, in the zone where each ecstatically includes the other.59

We know in our hearts what is inherently wrong, but override that knowledge with intellectual justifications in denial of the actual quality of life, i.e., according to desires or fantasies which we fear or lack courage not to act on.60 Mentally wedded via desires to the quantified space of reasons, we become bound to disregard the value or good for which there is no reason, that of existence, life, being or reality itself, regardless of however it might appear to us. And yet logically we must see it, divine the taking-place of things, so as to perceive anything at all. This implies that the reduction of being to a fact like others is more properly understood as a kind of blindly willful unseeing, an overlooking-by-seeing-otherwise. As Bonaventure says with respect to our blindness to pure and simple being (purissimum esse): “How remarkable … is the blindness of the intellect which does not take note of that which it sees first and without which it can know nothing” (Bonaventure 2002, p. 115). Even more remarkable is the fact that this stupidity or inattention (not knowing what you are doing while you are doing it) regarding the immanently transcendent quality of being is, no less, and perhaps more deeply, an expression of fear. As Lispector states: “The horror is that we know that we see God in life itself … And if I postpone the face of reality until after my death—it’s out of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him and that way I think I shall not really see Him, just as I only have the courage to really dream when I sleep” (Lispector 2012, p. 154). Accordingly, to grasp authentically the nature and scope of quantophrenia requires relinquishing the too-easy sense that one is indeed and already in all sincerity a lover of quality, when in reality the reverse might be the underlying uncomfortable truth. Just as we are often inadmissibly intimidated by excellence, to encounter superiorly simple being and identity, sovereignly purposeless and beyond reason, namelessly wild and free, is simply frightening and a threat to the self-image of someone who thinks they know who they are and where they are going, who is counting on things in that way. To what extent is quantophrenia, or the mad will to insist upon tallying the immeasurable, actually symptomatic of qualophobia, the fear of quality per se?61

Quantitative understanding, when mistaken for trustworthy experience of reality or dependable determination of what matters, tends to cloud one’s perception of true values, which are not relative, and not dependent upon counting, but qualitatively intrinsic to things themselves, inherently independent of both whatever it is anyone wants to be true and whether they are recognized or not: “True values are values which belong to things in their own right. They are intrinsic, and because they are intrinsic, they are absolute and permanent and are not liable to change from time to time or from person to person. False values are derived from desires or wants; they are dependent upon subjective factors, and being dependent upon subjective factors, they are relative and impermanent and are liable to change from time to time and from person to person” (Baba 1967, III.139).62 Infinite discrimination is needed, then, in order to never stop seeing the difference between the good of the thing and the ‘goodness’ you see or think or want in relation to it. Again, the priority of intrinsic values and its elision are evident in the psychic movement of counting, which, by considering toward the sum, ordering itself into the quantity of co-identified things, overlooks the inherent and integral quality of each thing, on the basis of which counting at first became possible or desirable. Reckoning everything quantitatively, making decisions as if only the numbers counted, ties intelligence to frames of mind in which the very notion of intrinsic value does not compute, where the forgetting of quality is not only experienced tangibly in the degradation of environments and material evidences of spiritual malaise, but more subtly in the less measurable colors of muteness, distraction, and other affects of mere information-transmission which reification imposes on persons by denying the infinity of their spirit or breath as beings transposable with the totality, as if the world were populated with epiphenomenal bystanders and not, as expressed in some Amerindian myths, absolutely original entities: “in the beginning there was nothing … only people” (de Castro 2013; Danowski and de Castro 2017).

5. Who Am I?

To recognize the quality of life as spiritual, as endlessly other than a breathless thing, means to be real and stand with everyone before everything in the place of each one’s taking-place, in the location of the question.63 In Gabriel’s humanistic terms, “spirit is the capacity to lead a life according to a notion of who we are and who we want to be. We humans locate ourselves at some point in the universe, history, the animal kingdom, culture, the social order, and so on, and whatever we do always stands in relation to this location”64 (Gabriel 2022, p. 179). That, at least, is one more way of indicating the essence of quality, that pure thisness and this pure thatness, which, if it could be defined, may be conceived as a question, the ‘?’ inherent to the heart of all beings. Standing in deictic relation to reality and locating oneself in the question—Who am I? What am I doing here?—are simultaneous movements continuous with the recognition of a universal interiority, as Bensusan shows with regard to the links between indexicalism and perspectivism: “Perspectivism understands that what is common between intentionalities across species is deixis”65 (Bensusan 2021, p. 86). The immeasurable quality of reality, also known as the spiritual infinity of the truth, is inseparable from the ability of beings to become whatever they are via being the question of themselves: “the openness essential to experience is precisely the openness of being this or that. It has the structure of a question” (Gadamer 1989, p. 362). So, the magnitude and endlessness of human questioning suggests that behind and in front of it all lurks ‘ONE’ who unquestionably needs to know: “The unitarian Beyond is an indivisible and indescribable infinity. It seeks to know itself. It is of no use to ask why it does so”.66 Likewise, the original mystery of everything is exposable as nothing more mysterious than the question itself, which renders reality infinitely self-elusive in its self-production: “It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer in the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps … the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question”(Brown 1969, p. 105). Whatever answers are and are not forthcoming, there simply is this place of the question where everything stands.

Whether there is a hidden reality behind all questioning or whether such a reality is only the projection of questioning is a question for elsewhere. The important point is that there is a crucial spontaneous bond between questioning and the experiential spark or spirit of life, just as “Every sudden idea has the structure of a question” (Gadamer 1989, p. 366).67 The being of the question is the elided–revealed unity inside the scientistic schism between experiment and experience. Whatever a proper science of the question might deduce, it makes good sense to assert that life has the quality of a question, and that the quality of life is questionality or the being-question. As the question is the form of life’s connection to itself, so it is the special bond between knowledge and nature: “Every experiment is a question put to Nature, to which it is compelled to give a reply” (Schelling 2004, p. 197). To experiment is to play with experience via manifest or latent, or explicit or implicit, questions. It is an activity in no way limited to the kind of creature who is compelled, and compels itself, to mark its voice with the spontaneous emergence of questions (‘the question arises’) and to subject its own questioning to questioning.68 As a smile is the flashing of the soul, a question is the smile of the mind. Its spark, in whatever form, is the very sign of that spontaneous living quality we find to be, and through which we find things to be, good, intrinsically valuable, and inherently worthy of care and attention.69

And yet, as Fiumara points out, our immediate appreciation of the spontaneous, of what arises of itself (sua sponte), is also something that especially sours in the human psyche in relation to the question of spirit, namely, the problem of mind and body: “there is nothing more attractive or convincing than spontaneity, something admired to the extreme of envy, in whomever it may be recognized. Also, we commonly think of the mind as a creation of our living body … And yet in the admiration of spontaneity we seem to perceive that this mental attitude, conversely, almost shapes and informs our living bodies. There is thus a pervasive question asked here, namely why this potential is not developed, why spontaneity for the most part is evaded or attacked”.70 Note here the sense in which spontaneity is recognized as a kind of meta-quality, or quality of quality, a form that impresses us irrespective of whether we like or dislike, or approve or disapprove of, its subject. It speaks to the fundamental performativity of life, to excellence in living irrespective of ‘whose side you are on.’71 But that tiger-like quality, this ‘alivenness’ of being as the radical, unanswerable question of itself—“What immortal hand or eye,/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”—is unsettling to the mind that wants to think it knows itself, and that it grasps its origin and end (Blake 1967, p. 42). Distaste for spontaneity, the bubbly quality of being, is the mirror image of the fear of death seen as fear of life, the horror, as Bataille says, of “the universal ferment of life”, a repulsion towards the spontaneous generation-cum-decay from which we spring (Bataille 1991, II.80). Loss of spontaneity is like collapsing in the face of contradiction: “the prime casualty of our failure to sustain paradox is our potential for spontaneity”72 (Fiumara 2009, p. 25).

Spontaneity stimulates and is the stimulation of spirit, the impulse prickling that sleepy part of you which would rather remain numb to this vitally decaying predicament of embodied being.73 It echoes, to haunting and/or thrilling effect, what Meher Baba terms “the original whim [lahar]” or “the first ‘word’ uttered by God—‘who am I?’” (Baba 1973, p. 83), this “sudden and spontaneous impulse” whereby “the undifferentiated being of the Absolute” is instantly “astir with the life of innumerable frothy selves who secure their separateness in definite size and shape through self-limitation within the foamy surface of the ocean”74 (Baba 1967, I.57). Here, the original intimacy between quality and question is disclosed at the touchpoint of spontaneity and immediacy, the emergence or first event of existence, which, as Hegel articulates it, belongs to the simple unity of being and non-being.75 So the simplicity of quality, as that suchness about which nothing further can be said, is like the intelligent ‘stupidity’ of the question which, neither knowing nor not knowing, is the verbal analogue of the existential unity of being and non-being, a first word that is at once word and non-word. Quality is the filmy and foamy surface of the absolute’s self-bubbles, the determinate iridescence of the ocean which speaks and breathes in sighs the question of itself. The spiritual nature of quality is revealed in the present suddenness of the question, just as “spontaneity is of the essence of true spirituality”76 (Baba 1967, II.192).

Regarding the socio-cultural question of quantity vs. quality, it is curious and conspicuous that questioning is at the core, positively and negatively, of the expanding human–digital interface and is, furthermore, a threshold for so-called artificial intelligence (Romele 2019). As formalized in the search engine, questioning is the primary way we currently use and are used by Big Data and it is also, as the essence of dialectical understanding and discursivity, that which digital networks seem driven to preclude and degrade into, for instance, behaviors of blind browsing (searchlessly searching for nothing). As Han explains, infocracy, or digital postdemocracy, is marked by the mutual disappearance of questionality and the voice (i.e., spirit) of the other: “My statement or opinion acquires a discursive quality only through the voice of the other. Under conditions of communicative action, I need to be aware that what I say may be challenged by others. A statement that does not have a question mark hanging over it does not have a discursive character”.77 The techno-hermeneutic black-box-like world of research and development, in cooperation with the bureaucracies of numerocratic rule, would seem to be generating outside itself a more and more deceptively transparent, algorithmized world where questions are increasingly unreal, abstract, or always already answered, in contradiction to Socrates’s point (which is the hardest point to understand for those who want others to spend the rest of life quietly minding their own business) that discursive questioning is both the divine will and that which makes life worth living.78

6. Ellipsis

How to bridge the abyss between philosopher and ruler, governor and seer, this uninhabitable, yet vastly peopled, space between the ones who see life as a matter of always having the answer and the ones who see life as a matter of following the question all the way into the truth of its own negativity, who breathe the knowledge of not knowing?79 One thing one may do is learn to recognize the spiritual quality of every thing’s existence and give expression to the sense of life as the living question of itself, which, perforce, entails dequantifying one’s notions of the good or valuable, and holding quantification to the minimum imposed by necessity. As Blake’s hand, transcribing the writing on the wall in Daniel 5:25-28, indicated: “Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth” (Blake 1988, p. 36). This means thinking otherwise than according to numerically quantified determinations of value/success/profit, e.g., the massive framing of collective concerns as a matter of majority or minority, because “manipulation of numbers, however clever, can neither yield right adjustment between the individual and society, nor can it yield true harmony between various groups which come to exist within the society … As long as a social problem is dominated by the idea of numbers and multiplicity there is no lasting solution for it. The One in all cannot be contacted through the multiplication of the many, but only by shedding the false idea of the many”80 (Baba 1967, I.169–70). In essence, one must let fall the whole idea that anything, whether of the same kind or not, can ever be considered as equivalent to another thing, as one of many, except in the pseudo-sense of being the very ‘same’ infinite unity or utterly independent One in all. The very notion of multiplicity as a quantity or number must go, in favor of the serial or “innumerable frothy selves” understanding of reality—a move, or swerve, which has more than enough in common with what one usually does, with life as actually lived in the midst of itself as opposed to narrativized as if from an inexistent superior vantage point.

As suggested by the history of laments over quantification and appeals to the priority of quality, i.e., the record of renaissances of the qualitative, from humanism to Romanticism to modern phenomenology and so on, a proper remedy against inordinate quantification is not to be performed via nostalgia for quality as a lost good or an appeal to become more human again. There is no going back—this is a seduction of the qualitative immediacy of memory/imagination—and such nostalgia even more tragically and perversely spoils the vivid, sacred question or intuition of qualophobia, failing to fathom the depth of everyone’s profound fear of all the present immeasurables which, in their wild and immediately transcendent spontaneity, will never be enslaved to quantification. It is as if life under better, more perfectly managed conditions would somehow make sense, produce lasting happiness, or infinitely coincide with itself. If one needs to catch up to anything, it is to spontaneity itself, which as Fiumara says, is “developed by being capable of resisting the joint threat of outer persuaders and inner agents”81 (2009, p. 20).

In place of further appeals (such as this one) to the principle of quality under the onslaught of rampant quantification, what is called for now is a creative overcoming of the opposition in the form of a qualitative appreciation of every individual, all beings, as no different from the totality, dispelling all illusions of anyone reducibly being merely one more or ‘another’ member of a quantified class: “The One in the many comes to experience itself as one of the many. This is due to imagination or false thinking”82 (Baba 1967, I.35). It is therefore a question of anarchically forgetting at once, via this profound prepositional shift, both the individual and the collective ego: “In social life the recognition of the spiritual infinity of the Truth will mean a challenge to individualism as well as to collectivism. It initiates a new way of thinking in terms of an indivisible totality and it discards all the relative values of comparison in favour of the recognition of the intrinsic worth of everything”83 (Baba 1967, I.171). The crucial importance of such a forgetting, one equal to remembering the one in everyone, is evident in all the ways in which its opposite, the sticky web of toxically pressurized complexes of personal and group identity, is clouding the perception of the limitless anonymous place, the open heart of individuality, beautifully named by Augustine as “my heart, where I am whoever/whatever [quicumque] I am” (Augustine 2006, 10.3.4).84