Paolo Ferrari

II Essay-letter on Absence: detachment (the abstract object), the mind and the cure.

Is it possible today to think of the human species as finished, in the course of extinction along with its History and its knowledge, snatched from the depression and dissociation it has suffered from since the Beginning, and replaced by a new level, a new capacity to abstract - the level zero, or of absence - because of which the freedom of thinking is alive - a thinking no longer subject to the thing, not constrained within a flat and indecorous soma from which it derived through animal evolution which is now completed and no longer necessary?

The Detachment of the Species.

This is the pattern for the formation of species and their characteristics, valid for most scientists and up to the advent of the more complex species, homo sapiens sapiens which has invented and learned to develop the abstract language through its nervous system.
As to the evolutionary path this species will take, nothing is known: what the sciences of evolution and genetics - new sciences , born in the general context beside more classic sciences such as mathematics and physics - have produced is, along general lines, what we have previously explained: the selection of the fittest has indeed selected the biological events, but, in our opinion, only up to the advent of the human species; from here onwards, nothing is known, in actual fact, about the species' necessary course of evolution. The human species has acquired the faculty of developing, through its central activity, a phenomenon that never existed before, which is the so-called abstract thought, and which from our place of observation can be considered as the capacity to elaborate and experience a different condition from that previously expressed by life. The human species has acquired, through its more advanced nerve activity, the capacity to abstract that is to say, in our acceptance, that faculty because of which is given the possibility of maintaining and developing a relationship even in the perceptible (concrete) lack (absence) of one of the relationship's components. It is not only a faculty, but a general condition that takes the human species to a level which differs from any other component in the universe: we have denominated this condition or level 'absence': a sort of place where relationships are possible in the (concrete) absence of the object of the relationship. For this condition to have optimal development and integrations, a few essential premises - if we want to so define them - need to exist in the organism capable of absence. For the capacity of abstraction to be achieved, and namely for what we call 'the abstract mind' to find a place in the biological organism, it is required, as a basic condition , that that thinking organism acquires the capacity, the faculty of detachment; it is required that a new level arises within the relationship capable of absence: the relationship with the object will be developed even in the absenze of that object, without the affective component getting lost - the one which is most ample and open, most abstract and absent - a means to relationship itself -, a kind of invisible and non-concrete tissue formed by very close meshes as if of absence, as we want to represent it.

One situation where this condition is most manifest, at least in some expressions of it, is that of the so-called 'cutting of the umbilical cord' at childbirth. The 'cutting' of which we speak operates not only in the physical field, separating the somatic components of the child and the mother, but - and it is this that interests us most - this separation, should it be radical and affective at the same time, would induce an irreversible and fundamental modification in the meshes of the psycho-biological organisms of the two components of the relationship - especially within the balance of the child's system which is under organization and transformation - thus imprinting itself on the entire future life of the child and marking its capacity to generate an abstract and affective thinking activity , which is the capacity to produce a mind fit for developing cognitions and emotions with a high relationship content. Of course, that is not the only moment in which the life of a person is decided, but it is one of those topical moments where the generating of some detachment within the components of a very close relationship necessarily involves, for the relationship to exist, the organisms that are part of the relationship inventing a new way of being together and exchanging, the way of a relationship by absence whereby the cutting of a certain tie, instead of generating the cessation, the extinction of the relationship, causes the system to shift level: it is necessary for the way the relationship takes place within the system to change, from which thus originates a new kind of exchange , the one by absence: the two components will exchange affection and intelligence even if one of them is (temporarily or definitely) missing. The relationship will exist even though its more 'concrete' and immediate part has failed to exist through the cutting of the umbilical cord, since the two components have separated, taking on the quality of independent beings capable of relating on more abstract levels.
The relationship has changed level, if the passage has taken place in a congrous way; subtlety and abstraction of higher degree have come into play. The mother and child will exchange on a level which is a place of lighter, more intense and conscious affectivity, where the two individualities are specified and valued, now that they are no longer 'joined' in one single almost indistinct whole.
At the act of separation, should it take place in the best possible way, a new level, a new component in the relationship which is absence, would be achieved: the (absent) place of detachment, capable of integrating the new event in a domain of a higher degree and quality of expression if compared to that world, mostly a closed-circulation one which constituted the basis of the intrauterine relationship.
So, along with the birth of a new individual of the species what we designate as the capacity to elaborate in absence has thus taken place: a particular condition which expresses a new level of the relationship and of life manifesting itself: a sort of tissue capable of absence, abstraction and 'void', of a similar composition to the one we also intend to induce by means of this piece of writing, if it is apprehended in its entirety and its (absent) articulation. This first separation, which, in actual fact, unfortunately, is not radical - as we will explain more thoroughly later - because of the immature state of the today's species, will be followed, in the life of a human by other more or less successful attempts at separation and detachment which will more or less dramatically mark that destiny.

as you can now already see, the life of a person is all concentrated in a few very short tracts of his existence; even in one single act, in one single verbalization (well articulated and profound), as I used to say when I dealt with that method - which has been written about in the previous letter - discovered and denominated by me 'Activation'. It is a clinical and knowledge-developing method that directly leads to the centre of being, within the 'absence' of it, actually uncovering a level of existence where even the beating out of ordinary time stops.

We state that the more detachment is radical and affective at the same time - capable of a 'tissue of absence' (affective abstraction) between the relationship's components - the more there will be the possibility of achieving an open field, it itself made of void and absence, within which the biological organization - life - can be placed, in this way availing itself of a place, of a field of reality more consonant to the stage the human species has reached after the long and complex course of evolution.
Then, the place of detachment is equivalent to a place of the mind; the more detachment will be accepted and radical (and affective), the more the mental component will be profound and capable of generating that abstract language in the world, that capacity of reason and affection congrous with that component, given the new level of the species. But this is not enough: the detachment we are speaking of, the plane of absence where the evident language is silent and silence manifests itself as being capable of a more abstract condition which is less tied to the soma of ancient and superceded origin, are only seldom accomplished; it is true, on the contrary, that those ties with low abstract content tied to the soma and not to the affective thought, dominate the nature of the species which, besides , still depends on the animal species it derives from.
Detachment - the (abstract) tie by absence - is poor not only between members of the same species, but the same species itself is incapable of a more radical detachment which would place it outside and beyond that superceded nature no longer pertaining to it.

It should be taken into account that the tòpos of detachment is only one of the points one can start from to observe and, if ever possible, to understand the new condition we want to put into existence. We think that the thinking species is actually lacking in its most specific activity, thought, in general, abstract thought in particular which has been relegated as if to a corner, enclosed in a box of limited proportions, dominated and compressed by those somatic apparatuses that have been geared towards the necessity of satisfying primordial needs - hunger, sleep, sex - just as occurred when life was subjected to the laws of preservation and replication, or else would have been bound to extinction, or the innate 'fear' of such an occurrence.
The development of peripheral organs, such as sight, hearing and touch, has been accomplished and refined for this purpose, defending and preserving the organism, thus increasingly perfecting itself, but with a perfection which has really little to do with the faculties of the higher activity of the nervous system: they do not need that much either the keenness of sight, or the hyperspecialization of hearing, given the mainly cultural and high technology orientation that the species has, at least in part, taken, and thus given a movement towards abstraction and not the fixation in concretization which the condition at the basis of the archaic sensory and perceptive system is.
We are of the opinion that the sensory peripheral apparatus has taken a course which has little or nothing to do with the new activity of thought, in particular the abstract one, the trend of which is to make 'void', to produce a larger space within reality and develop this latter not so much in the direction of the thing, but rather towards the absence of it.
For thousands and thousands of years reality has been occupied by 'thinghood' which is the 'concrete' object of which life made use for its immediate and filogenetical needs as we can see "a posteriori". With the advent of the new species capable of abstracting, the dimension of the thing, the dimension of the object of use with poor and limited horizons has lost importance within reality : in its place, a new dimension has gained importance, the cultural dimension, where the object has increasingly divested itself of its material appearance, thus becoming abstract object, its meaning rich in significance, in abstraction with which communication can take place conceptually.
In short, it is as if reality had emptied itself and cleared the field little by little for a more articulate activity, less imprinted by the concrete object, and more free and absent, different indeed from the way it was when the animal still reigned, before developing into the homo species.
But the homo species, as stated, has not yet actually accepted and experienced that detachment which we can define as 'detachment of the species': the species has not separated itself and has not definitively discarded the heredity it derives from and of which it still bears the mark of preservation and aggressivity that are characteristics not pertaining to the animal, but to the species which has followed it, and that has remained sort of unaccomplished and split. Not only has the newly born baby not yet learned to detach itself forever from the body and the psyche of the mother at the cutting of the umbilical cord, or in the following phases when that tie will prove again to be a close and binding one, as it will occupy all the inner (and outer) space through unconscious, instinctual fantasies, but the whole human species depends on the previous species, since it has not 'accepted' to detach itself from the animal world of which, deep down, it maintains fears, instincts, primitive reactions and even hallucinatory states affecting its growth, because the animal world has not ceased to exist within it and, therefore, has joined together and mixed, in an improper way, with the new condition, thus generating a state of serious anomaly and limitation.
Above all, the world is made of the thing. It is not an abstract, empty, open universe, it is not at all in harmony with the new thinking activities it has achieved in spite of its attempts that, being turned to liberation from the old ties of the species which originated from the animal, are, as stated, compulsorily ambivalent.
If it is true that evolution has worked by selection as it preserved the characteristics necessary for survival, then the advent of a nerve activity which is finer and more capable of being modulated, the organism's acquisition of a completely new faculty, such as the one of thinking in the abstract, is certainly in contrast to the apparatuses developed along the path of evolution that bridle and delay the formation of ideas, shape patterns and judgements of the mind which is unable (or is unwilling) to prescind for ever from the ancient bonds to the origin, of which it maintains the no longer worthwhile drive.
Therefore, nothing different has actually ever taken place on Earth since the moment of the origin of life. Not only do animals and plants protect and reproduce in the same way throughout the ages, but the human species, too, does not change at its foundations: it has not yet happened that the centre of the brain took control of operations for itself and itself lead the game of evolution without leaving anything to chance or that necessity of ancient and no longer valid usefulness. Should the central nervous system, given its potential and complex abstract activities, take actual command of operations, then the whole world would change: the patterns - the judgements - according to which reality is observed and composed would fall into decay, life itself would lose its excessive importance of a concrete kind which is carried inscribed in genes, thus setting off a new level of civilization, knowledge and affection because of which there is no longer a need for the existence and the experience of the thing, of a reality filled up with the thing which is the expression of our old sense of touch and of a not-yet-definitive posture (the human species is a tottering species). Reality, as I have already written in the previous Letter, would make itself empty and other, infinitely detached, free from the projection of that soma as well as its postural and sensory apparatuses that do not belong any longer to a species that has moved to a stage where the distance and the difference are of value, interwoven with a very thick mesh of wefts which are affective and of absence.

We reiterate that nothing is actually other than that which has appeared on Earth until now; the whole world with its forms and contents is, at any rate, pre-selected by mechanisms that are at the basis of the evolutionary process and that are at the service of the preservation and replication of life, almost in exactly the same way as when life appeared on Earth. Neither does the human sexual and istinctual apparatus behave in a dissimilar way, as it is still anchored to those roots from which it has not yet definitively detached itself ; apparatus which has informed psychosomatic life from its birth and later, gradually, throughout the ages, filling and 'saturating' the inner (and outer) space with inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties, all of them being 'thinghood' belonging to the plane named 'unconscious', the tangible trace of a unaccomplished world, with a low degree of abstraction and 'nothingness'.

Conclusions

The Cure of the Species.

'thinking'(2) , then, is the same as dying: this means that extending the thinking activity is the same as opening a way-through in that part of the object which is the matter-soma so as to make the (empty) tissue of absence in here larger and more profound. We should also take into account that , until now, it has been thought - and known - in a reduced and anomalous way with the higher activity of the species fragmented and fragmentary; with a mental activity unable to bear a condition of greater unitary complexity; with a thought struggling to read a systemic condition in which each element is closely bound to the other so as to form a largely and possibly deeply extended dimension, one that has further 'absence', a good level of abstraction and 'void'.
A species, the human one, condemned to a sort of schizophrenia not only because of the inferior levels on which it still stands, but also because of a limited thinking activity, of an oppressive incapability to abstract, to produce thought without the object of which one thinks.
Human thinking is a structure which is too tied to the object; it is not willing to think without representation, without figuration, and without word. Thinking is tied up to the soma, it is a by-product of the soma, an accident within nature which has not accepted to withdraw and give a free hand to what is absence: the lack of a (physical) object, the propensity to produce something so similar to nothing that it can identify itself with it and proceed.
Therefore reality, our everyday representation of it, is mostly a projection to some extent of unconscious and also partially conscious origin, and springs from a physical ego, from an ego which is held in a soma of an archaic kind; the ego is as if entrapped, not only within the body clothing it, but also because of its obligation to continously confirm itself with the fear and the anguish of disappearing from the scene of life: the ego identifies itself in the element it produces; and this is still 'ego' and reality is that ego, place of precarious habitability and abstraction, generating the Other not being possible.
Then proceeding in little steps, such as accomplished by History until now, is no longer sufficient: a jump needs to be made, light needs to be shed on a new level on which a new process can stand, more suitable for the abstraction and the comprehension of itself and of the reality it itself has produced, provided that all this is still necessary: it is not said, my dear reader, that thinking and producing reality are objects of necessity; this action, its product are sons of the History of which we have been architects so far, but that History could come to an end without giving place to any further History; a new thinking level, abstract and empty, could mean very deep and 'abstract' silence: an empty and conscious silence, placed beyond the known limits of time and space. We do not know it yet from the point of view of historical and metahistorical objects; we are taking this path just now: 'Thinking nothing', is the same as 'thinking beyond', beyond the boundaries that made reality concrete, yet not objective enough, reality which has made itself in excess of the thing.
Ideation, as the faculty of producing the thinking act, is, according to this new observation point, of an archaic type and stands on nerve structures not congruous with the new condition which is maintained and also experienced.
In the early stages of the research, we studied the phenomena concerning inhibition and, in particular, the extinction of behaviours which follows the task-learning process in laboratory animals. We were interested in the phases immediately before the extinction and then in that phase in which the animal has definitively learned to unlearn and the response curve has become flat.
As we were to understand even more clearly later on, the phenomenon of cessation, rather than that of the excitability produced by a reinforcement, was fundamental to us. The leitmotif of our proceeding was, and still is, that of having access to the way of abstract knowledge in those places closer and more similar to the level where the zero appears, where nothingness is represented, and namely where nothinghood outlines the field (of nothing).
Nothinghood is, indeed, the new way of considering space and being which make themselves empty and absent, so that another thinking (empty and made nothing) can make its way through reality which, on the contrary, is made of the thing. Thinking in absence also means the action, the conditions that are to some extent analogous to those originating from the thought which has existed so far, and that have generated that thought and 'keep it alive' every day, but that nonetheless are (also) other than that thought, being of another level, of another abstraction, of an ampler quality, of an indeed greater capacity to understand and assimilate (the void, nothingness).
Soon after that early experimental and theoretical laboratory research, we turned to the study of the live human condition : in particular the states concerning psychopathologies of a certain importance. Since the beginning, we have have adopted a critical standpoint: we noticed that human activity in general and more specifically mental activity, lacks more advanced degrees of freedom and consciousness than those which have so far manifested themselves, and what a blatant and clumsy mistake research, culture and the human species in general, have made, thinking that the human condition is only that which has historically - phylogenetically and ontogenetically - manifested itself until now without the arising of a methodological doubt - apart from some very few exceptions, not significant if compared to our position - that there might be something else different from what has been until now. No radical criticism of the system is in fact manifest from the inside of the system itself, having given up resorting to the imaginary or to beliefs of the religious kind which project either a redemption or a palingenesis at the end of time or a change which, by the way, is totally marginal if compared to the phenomena examined by us, after life and death.
Our idea was to reach a new level and observe it, a level where a new field of suitable observation and intervention could be placed, on which unblockings, openings within the human system could be induced, be it healthy or, more properly suffering from a disease which, as it later became clearer to us, belongs neither to the single individual nor to society but to the whole species. A psychopathological state does not only concern the ill subject and its altered relations, be they conscious or unconscious, of the inner world and between this and the outer world. In short, a disease does not exist isolated from a general context. On the contrary, what exists is a complex state of anomaly, of disease which originates from the characteristics of the species, be it conceived as a biological being or an abstract being: the pathological state of a subject is the symptomatic condition of a wider and more radical state of suffering concerning the species as a whole and the reality it has constructed. Curing and bringing to recovery an individual means working towards a species' therapy and contemplating a much ampler process than that considered so far: the individual who becomes conscious and capable of a new level of experience - as occurred, albeit for a limited length of time, in the experience of a state of birth through the method of Activation invented (3) by us that involved simultaneous consciousness of several phenomena of different characteristics and dissimilar places of origin: affective, rational, emotional by putting into effect subtle inner relations and, simultaneously, the relation between these and the outer world (which has made itself inner in the most radical way) by means of a particular verbalization involving the capacity of decision and will at the same time, in one single (conscious) act - produces a change not only within the subject but even within the deep and faulty structures of the species because a new level has formed and taken place capable of greater health within the experience not only of the single subject but also within a more general and radical structure, that of the species, and within the entire 'condition of reality' because of the Theorem of Inclusion, expressed in the previous Letter; in other words, that individual works towards that hoped-for detachment of the species we described in the first part of the letter.
We have apprehended simultaneity and entirety as elements of observation of the countless ways of the possibility of this new condition : rational and affective simultaneous consciousness of several distinct elements and of several places is characteristic of this new field: it is the sign of a higher unitariness of the system which is complex and finely articulated if compared to the tendency towards fragmentation given by the prevailing unconscious nature of the species as it has been until now.
The capacity of apprehending reality in one single act - and, what is more, one that is empty and wide of this void - a reality which , thus being 'included', becomes double and triple or more, and also capable of self-generation simultaneous and detached in a clear and transparent way, free of the ties of the sensory and perceptive organism of an old and superceded kind , is a sign of the new. So, the therapy will have to move towards the acquisition of further levels of culture and knowledge (of the new): never will the interpretation of a symptom or of a symbolic manifestation suffice for a recovery - if we can still describe it as such - unless as a premise to all this, the actual possibility of a radical change of the system is given - which occurs through the stimulation and becoming real of that level which is underlying and which opens onto absence.
In our opinion, working on reality, in general and in the cure of psychological diseases in particular and also, very likely, of those somatic diseases somewhat implying a systemic involvement, has less and less sense unless we take into account the fact that the plane where we operate has to be changed because the plane presenting itself as being occupied by the symptom, soaked with the disease, is 'saturated' and nothing will ever be able to de-saturate it unless a sudden shift in level takes place, whereby the subjective and inter-subjective field becomes more ample, abstract and clear thanks to the becoming real of something which has no occupation and is able, being 'absent' , to produce maturation in and around the system it underlies.

Now many parts of the scientific artistic, musical, technological, philosophical and social issues and activities make History bend to our side: the trend of research is more and more geared towards the construction of patterns that contain 'quality', no longer sacrificed to quantity.
Reality, as it is, appears to be no longer sufficient as, on the other hand, has appeared to be since the beginning of time as far as religion and the imaginary are concerned.
Today, further meanings and forms are proposed to be given to things - the reality, already known, couples with the dream of a virtual reality - a reality which is as if dematerialized - empty from a tactile point of view and set in a space-time condition freer, but only in appearance, in the vacuous and vain system of the imaginary - in order to also try to give an answer in an explicit and technologically concrete way to the eternal questions : "Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going to?". New universes and different civilizations in intergalactic space are being sought and the doubt whether other beings of different culture and form inhabit the world incessantly arises.
The patterns of theoretical physics tend towards 'void': primordial particles become tinier and tinier and increasingly unpredictable, whereas they, instantaneous, cross space-time. Are they real, are they fruit of an artifact? The beginning of time - the horizon of events - is more uncertain, it is as if wrapped in a cloud made of nothing and coming from what is not. The theoretical 'cage' within which one can place the equations describing the foundations has been reinforced, as it has made itself even more complicated, as if compressed, and has filled itself with abstract unaccomplished objects - mathematical and, in general, scientific formulations, extremely concrete objects, only clothed by conceptuality, expressions of missed void - , so that several different fields can interact between them and lead to the unification of the initial forces. In the face of the crowding and overlapping - the toiling - of conjectures and equations capable of explaining the beginning of the world and its consequences, it often comes naturally to us to invite any person having such a task in view to think below the level it normally thinks at and experiences and, albeit for a short while, to experience something which, instead of being object is nothing, is antithing and antiuniverse - anti antithing, anti antiuniverse - , and, instead of beginning with a scale which starts from zero and counts one, two and so on, it begins to think and to enumerate as if from a step lower, differently, below and beyond the threshold of the old kind, since it has produced inside and outside itself a sudden change in direction, albeit minimal, if compared to the place in which the obsolete and imperfect nature of the mind keeps pressing, in opposition to that much opener (empty) space, unburdened and free of noise, where the rule of unitary complexity is accomplished, of a multi-composite and absent reality on many simultaneous planes, empty and distinct, which are apprehended in a dimension which is consciously unitary instead of tending to fragmentariness and precariousness which are essentially due to an improperly accomplished and uneven mind-body relationship, like that of the present stage of the species.
It is necessary for what we call mind to prepare to be a container detached from the body but not split from it; for a condition of absence to begin, whereby the body and the mind , being concentrated in the very same place, further penetrate themselves, thus originating a new event, as if it were a 'revolution' (a complete rotation of 360°), because of which the mind is 'other' than the body and comprehends it in the 'abstract'.
The thinking activity will have thus loosened its ancient mind-body ties by making itself abstract, capable of a new ideation which originates outside the context of the ancient tie and which - if we can so express ourselves - is suitable to fully precede such a tie, by anticipating the Beginning of History. In this way, what the soma and the mind were - constrained within a never accomplished unity - are now subordinated to a more general (empty) whole which 'contains them in absence', perfectly detached from it and it itself detached (from all the rest and from itself furthermore.
In the end, we confirm that the new level of which we are writing is not that dissimilar - even though thoroughly other: a real paradox! - than the level on which ordinary thought arises, that of the present species: this latter is less complex, albeit of the same substance; yet it is limited and fearful, not abstract enough, with poor and insufficient breath, unable to replace that (biological) activity which is preponderantly occupied with life and death, 'things' of the ancient oppression, places without the sufficient 'passivity', without the necessary sudden change in direction to give birth to the abstract thinking activity which is able to replace wholly or almost wholly that activity which is vital in abundance and 'concrete'.
I would further add, as I consider it to be manifest enough, that the use we have made of a few terms and concepts is strictly correlated to the new issue we are dealing with and, therefore, they do not simply occupy the place they are usually fixed in: we stretch them, we call them forth, we instigate their sense, we broaden them, adapting them to our needs. Like, for example, the use we have made of the concept of abstraction which is ampler and freer than the usual one: 'abstracting' means to us, as in its ethymological sense, detaching, and in its ample and deep sense, drawing, as if producing the 'emptiest' and freest essence, drawing to oneself the essence and the 'void' as much as possible in order to become an absence : a matter which can be hollow beyond itself until complete detachment. Abstracting, in our case, is not so much a place and instrument of symbolization and conceptualization, but it further detaches itself from these, being our new condition of the same substance as nothingness, that is without any figuration and representation (on the other side of these: on the side of nothingness).
With this, my dear reader, I take my leave of you and apologize for the density and length of this Letter, but I believe they were necessary to let such a tissue emerge; to achieve a structure as if formed by small dots, and yet of strong and sound consistency, governed by its own, yet in accordance with general rules so that it can be accepted and understood; ample and strong enough, for great synthesis, suitable for supporting the nucleus - empty and rich, from another root and from another origin - of what will be, in our opinion, the History which is to come.
I hope that something, that is to say (a) nothing has fecundated your ideation at least a little and bring you to empty that world which, old and full of accumulation, is ill in the human species.

Soon, at least one passage is to be carried out if possible: let's give form to the intermediate species which can happily be called homo abstractus a. (4) ; homo sapien s. is worn out and in poor health. It is to be replaced well.

Sincerely yours,

Paolo Ferrari

(1) Title of the original work by J. Monod, 'Le hasard et la necessité', copyright 1970
(2)'Thinking' on the other level
(3) The method is described along general lines in the previous Letter
(4) a. = short for 'abstractus'