If you take deconstruction seriously, you will, sooner or later, encounter the other

Postmodern spirituality, A dialogue in five parts Part III: The Postmodern Mind – And Its Future Roland Benedikter II: THE RESULT: THE EMERGING OF THE TWO “I”'s Question: Yes, exactly that is the question of the postmodern, “fragmented” subject.

RB: I must be, as my own clear logic teaches me, something like a double being, a double “I”: a normal ego that is an illusion, but also a secret witness that becomes aware of this illusion. There must be, behind the normal ego or “I”, another “I”, which I cannot deconstruct. Question: Why?

RB: Because I cannot make an object out of it. I can try to do that, but I will just become aware that the one who does this trying is the one who would be the one to reach. I become aware that the one who does this trying is the one from which everything else depends. Everything, in the strictest sense of the word. Every sensorial perception, every concept, and every state of ego and “I” I can ever be or imagine. The whole world. But this one cannot deconstruct itself, because he or her is the one who is trying to do the deconstruction. Therefore, that “I” (or witness) must be something like a last, pre-egoistic, pre-conceptual and pre-objective basis for everything else – an “individual, i.e. non-divisible self” or a “permanent origin in itself” (Jean Gebser: The Ever Present Origin, Reprint Edition, Ohio University Press 1986). This “permanent origin” or “pure pre-conceptual life-stream of attention” (Georg Kuehlewind), or, if you want to call it that way, “last meta-conscious basis of postmodern emancipation and every day life” (cf. Roy Bhaskar: The Philosophy of Meta-Reality, SAGE Publications 2002) seems to be the essence you wake up with in the morning.

It is the first think that appears in the morning, then you awake. It seems to produce every concept, every perception, as well as the pictures and illusions of the normal ego which then become a self-reflected mask or “persona”. It is the witness which does the deconstruction of the normal ego. Deconstruction obviously does not happen “from alone”. Somebody has to do it. And this somebody can be only your “other” or “pre-objective” “I”: the “I” behind the normal “I”, the “I” which is able to observe even the illusionary “I” from the standpoint of “the other” (Lévinas), and to deconstruct it from the standpoint of “the other”. Who is it? And what remains, if the normal ego and its world, its beliefs and its reality eventually have been completely deconstructed? That's what a normal human being, a contemporary subject who takes postmodernity seriously, must ask, sooner or later, without any chance to avoid these questions. And then, an answer, for a rationally self-aware, contemporarily enlightend (aufgeklärt) subject must be found through and out of deconstruction, not avoiding it.

Question: Yes, that's what you said. Isn't all that a kind of paradox situation of the postmodern “I”? Kind of a structural, fundamental inner schizophrenia - as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pointed out in “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (1983-1987, 2 volumes), or more recently Judith Butler in “Undoing Gender” (2004)? And - where does this situation lead?

RB: Right. Let me first say: This kind of schizophrenia, this structural paradox of the “two 'I''s” emerging rationally and almost inevitably from postmodern deconstruction, may be, that is my thesis, the most evolved form of rationality and enlightenment (Aufklärung) we currently posses. It leads almost inevitably to a certain kind of borderline synchronicity – of the ego with “the other” in myself. And even if this “other” (whom you may call the witness, or better: a borderline form of the witness) is, in most cases, not fully conscious for the postmodern subject, it starts to be there. Its presence slowly seems to become a reality – the more as deconstruction proceeds as universal method of conduct and self-awareness in postmodern culture. All that, of course, can be something horrible, it can cause a split or a distorsion. And in fact, what we see is that schizophrenia has become, in the last decades, one of the most “popular” diseases in the European-Western world - as, by the way, Rudolf Steiner predicted it for the end of the 20th century as part of the general evolution of consciousness through the splitting up of the consciousness of the subject (cf. a.o. Rudolf Steiner, Collected works Nr. 10, 13 and 300c, Dornach 1955/56-2005).

But despite all this negative outcome, which is undoubtedly there on a very broad scale, all that can, in the whole, maybe also be something productive - some kind of strong evolutionary impulse. Because out of this situation may come, and I would say: almost with necessity, something like a borderline spirituality, as I called it. There is no chance to avoid this kind of “post-egoistic”, mainly negative and at the same time empirical, “post-belief” or “post-metaphysical” spirituality, if you take deconstruction seriously. If you take deconstruction seriously, you will, sooner or later, encounter the other – maybe in distorted forms, maybe as a deeply kathartic experience, maybe as something that frightens or even shocks you and you want turn off your eyes. But you cannot avoid it in the long run. No chance.

Question: But is this true also for, let's say, some very materialistic or (de)constructivistic postmodern theories? Some postmodern theories which are currently dominating cultural theory and academic self-understanding on a broad scale? Do they really produce something like a “double I” with borderline qualities?

RB: Well, the answer may be, at least as far as I can currently see: Yes, increasingly yes. Even if not consciously. You should always remember: Yes, the “two I's” are increasingly produced by postmodern culture, but still not consciously. It's a little bit like the famous advertising sentence of Nike: Postmodernists (and their academic paedagogics) “just do it”; but they don't know exactly what they are doing. They do it out of a strong impulse of equality and liberation, and they generally just wanna see what will be the outcome. That is what most postmodernists would call “a proceeding that is not speculative, but empirical”.