Permanent (trickster) liminality: The reasons of the heart and of the mind

Abstract

The term liminality is often used to celebrate escape from rigid structures or to promote creativity. However, the collapse of the stable frameworks of social life also generates anguishing conditions of uncertainty. This article introduces the term “permanent liminality” for situations in which the temporary suspension of normality becomes permanent. Such situations of entrapment within an interstitial dimension produce an emotional overheat, generating a “liminal hotspot.” This paper addresses the possibility of ending such entrapment. Reasoning cannot guide out of permanent liminality, as—in the absence of stability necessary to apprehend ratio, or harmonious proportionality—it is also liable to short-circuit, being closely associated under liminal conditions with imitativity. A solution is offered, through Pascal rather than Kant, by the heart. Such an idea also receives support from the Palaeolithic Age, maternal heartbeat in the womb, and long-distance walking pilgrimage.

Keywords

heartbeat imitation Pascal permanent liminality schismogenesis trickster

Can this age, this disintegrating life, be said still to have reality? My passivity increases from day to day, not because I am exhausted by struggling with a reality that may be stronger than myself, but because on all sides I encounter unreality.

(Broch, 1985, p. 557)

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things,

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

(Whitman, 1990, p. 123)

Liminality: An introduction

The term “liminality” was developed in the field of anthropology. While it was marginal for a long time even there, it is now increasingly used in the social sciences, and is about to become a master concept. However, it is still far from having reached its full potential and is often used in a too-limited sense. One of the aims of this article is to present the notion of permanent liminality, basic for understanding liminal hotspots. “Permanent liminality” allows us to better exploit the full potential of liminality for social theory.

The conceptual history of the term has three main steps. It was introduced by Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 classic book (1909/1960), written to become a cornerstone for social anthropology as well as for sociology. However, due to a bitter confrontation with Durkheim, van Gennep and his book were pushed aside and all but ignored, except in specialised ethnographic research.¹ In a second step, in the mid-1960s, Victor Turner (1967, 1969) started to popularise the concept. However, there were two serious shortcomings with his use of the term. First, yielding to professional pressure, he limited the term to small-scale “tribal” societies, claiming that more advanced societies only have “liminoid,” or liminal-like, and not properly liminal situations. Second, he assigned an almost exclusively positive sense to the term, in rhythm with the 1960s, celebrating ambivalence, flux, creativity, and the dismantling of presumably ossified structures. The most important innovative aspect of Victor Turner’s related contribution concerns his recognising that Dilthey’s effort to re-think experience beyond Kant can be brought to a fruitful completion through the term “liminality” (Turner, 1985a, 1985b). The third step was the extension of the concept into the social sciences in general, in sociology inaugurated by Zygmunt Bauman and S. N. Eisenstadt. The term became used with particular emphasis in two recent efforts. One is the proclamation of a “performative turn” in the social sciences, associated with the works of Jeffrey Alexander and Bernhard Giesen (Alexander, Giesen, & Mast, 2006). They argue that the idea of performativity, as pioneered by Goffman and Victor Turner, offers a new paradigm for cultural sociology, and systematically analyse the purported theatrical aspects inherent in social practices, characteristic in particular for contemporary American politics and society.² The second is associated with the journal International Political Anthropology, which aims to renew theorising in the social and human sciences with the help of anthropology.³

It is in this latter context that two ideas emerged that will be the main subject matter of this paper. The first is “permanent liminality” (Szakolczai, 2000, pp. 207–217). The second is by Agnes Horváth who, through her PhD research about the manner in which the Communists gained power in a post-war situation of the collapse of the established order of things, discovered a problematic, even negative aspect of the term. She eventually combined it with a number of other anthropologically based concepts like “imitation,” “schismogenesis,” and the “trickster” (Horváth, 2000, 2013). Thus, far from simply celebrating the novelty and creativity offered by liminal situations—an approach that obviously has its own relevance—the term allows us to understand the manner in which anguishing situations of uncertainty can emerge; and, in particular, how and why such situations can be used and artificially provoked.

My paper will take up these latter points by relating them to the specific purpose of this special issue, focusing on the emotional aspects of liminal situations and the possible manner in which stability can be found in them. In contrast to rationalistic philosophical anthropology, which pretends that the stability in uncertain situations is provided by reasoning, I offer a Pascalian perspective, focusing on the power offered by the stability of the heart. Spectator-based rationality, developed by Descartes, Adam Smith, and Kant, renders possible,⁴ and at the same time justifies, a trickster-like external manipulation of emotions. Such manipulation involves an image-magic that uses the concrete power of images, along with rhetorical discourse saturated with verbal images and theatre-like scenarios, to exploit the delicacy of liminal moments of crisis or transition, or even to provoke their emergence (Szakolczai, 2013a).

Permanent liminality: An unforeseen complication, or the Batesonian “error”

What is “permanent liminality,” this nuisance and “error”?⁵ The definition of the term is simple, and thus it is helpful to render intelligible situations that otherwise are difficult to grasp. It happens when a temporary suspension of the normal, everyday, taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent, generating a loss of reality, even a sense of unreality in daily existence. The problem is not deviating from “the” norm, as understood in a universalistic sense, but from whatever people living at a given time and place were taking for granted as normal and ordinary in their lives.

The point can be illustrated through rites of passage. Such rites consist of three stages, and the ritual can be suspended at each (Szakolczai, 2000, pp. 212–214). For example, rites of separation include temporary deprivations of food, shelter, or sexuality, which become a permanent condition in asceticism. Moving to the 20th century, permanent liminality has close affinities with the perception of their times by major social theorists, philosophers, or artists. As examples, one might evoke the ideas of Heidegger (1977) and Patocka (1976) concerning the never-ending wars of the century, the “non-places” of Marc Augé (1995), or films by Luis Buñuel (Viridiana or The Exterminating Angel; Alatriste & Buñuel, 1961, 1962). Gregory Bateson’s (1972) studies concerning “schismogenesis” and the “double bind” are particularly relevant. Schismogenesis adds escalating violence, which has a particular force to unsettle all forms of stability, to the previous examples of permanent liminality. In fact, permanent liminality, trickster, schismogenesis, and imitation are concepts that are closely related and help to illuminate each other. In a liminal situation, when the taken for granted order of things becomes suspended, suddenly imitative processes might emerge which can easily spiral out of control and generate a schism within a previously united and harmonious group, especially if certain individuals who do not participate in emotional involvement—called “tricksters” by anthropologists—gain influence.

Permanent liminality has fundamental relevance for a central concern of this special issue, “affectivity,” and its link to the problems of attunement (see Greco & Stenner, 2017). This is due to the tight connection between liminal situations and emotions. Any liminal situation excites or incites emotions, whether positively or negatively. Childbirth or death, examinations or even vacations generate emotional tension in the persons undergoing the change, and all those around them. But liminality also stimulates reasoning, though in a complex, even paradoxical manner. On the one hand, there is no “rational” solution to the most important liminal moments of human life, like death, growing up, or even birth; life is not a problem that can be solved. The successful response given by human beings to any liminal situation depends on other factors—most importantly the manner in which they can unite their forces to meet the challenge, which depends much more on a combination of will and emotion than “rationality.” On the other hand, liminal crises generate awareness and call for explicit responses. The character of such responses raises the paradoxical connection between imitation and rationality. This means that a liminal crisis jointly stimulates reasoning (in searching for a proper way out), and feelings (by generating uncertainty and anxiety), both of which might be alleviated by opting to follow the way “others” behave.

Whoever is caught in a liminal situation, deprived of the stable frameworks of life, needs orientation. If a community or an entire society enters liminality, it is likely that imitative processes will suddenly escalate. Everybody looks to “others” for guidance. At the same time the powers of reasoning are also stimulated, and thus a gap emerges between rationality and reasoning. Rationality means adherence to ratio, or proportionality and harmony. This is what, under normal conditions, the use of mental powers apprehends. Under liminality, however, deprived of stability, and thus harmony and ratio, the mind keeps turning round and round, in search for a solution, as when the accelerator is pushed with the gear in neutral. Thus, imitativity, affectivity, and rationality are jointly stimulated, until, somehow, the crisis gets resolved, and a new stability is found. If this does not happen, the paradoxical situation of lasting or “permanent liminality” might emerge; paradoxical, because in this way temporariness can become lasting, seemingly never-ending.

The difference between permanent liminality and any “ordinary” liminal situation is twofold: it concerns the valorisation of the situation and its visibility, and both yield paradoxical results. The value of permanent liminality is fundamentally negative. A situation of “permanent liminality” brings disaster to all parties involved; it consumes their forces, persisting until their resources are exhausted, leaving nothing but devastation through escalating mimetic crises. Nobody can really win, as change has become so much accelerated and taken for granted that any effort to tie it down to something stable and accommodating becomes impossible; indeed, most participants of the situation have long forgotten even the idea of how it was when things were “stable” and “normal.” This situation produces a sense of entrapment, resulting in an emotional overheat, eventually leading to a burnout, characterised in the introduction to this special issue as a “liminal hotspot” (Stenner, Greco, & Motzkau, 2017). The second, no less disconcerting idea, is that the situation is invisible for anybody who is part of the circle. Change can only be perceived by somebody who stays fixed, being an outsider to the group—a position that anthropologists identified with the trickster (Pelton, 1980; Radin, 1972). The trickster, however, is only interested in maintaining liminality, as they can only gain influence under such conditions of confusion and distress. External, spectator reasoning cannot be used for returning to lasting and meaningful stability, as the existential connection with concrete individuals and communities is missing. Thus the suggested solution will always have an artificial, external, unconvincing aspect.

The central argument of the paper is that such stability can only be restored through the heart. Following Pascal, it is claimed that the heart is our only reliable guide in a world turned systematically upside down by permanent liminality. This article will therefore focus not so much on liminality, but rather on the possibility of ending entrapment in permanent liminality, dissolving a “liminal hotspot” through the “heart.” The “heart” is not identical to emotions, but captures, not only metaphorically, whatever lies at the core of the human person, the condensed essence of life experiences, personal integrity, and the intactness of the self (Horváth, in press), beyond the Enlightenment schism between “rationality” and “emotivity.”

Pascal and the reasons of the heart

A case for the contemporary significance of Pascal was recently made by Pierre Bourdieu in his Pascalian Meditations (2000). However, Bourdieu did not offer a coherent guide to Pascal’s thought; for him Pascal was only a vehicle for his own ideas. In particular, he did not even touch upon Pascal’s central concern with the “reasons of the heart.” Pascal was also fundamental for Nietzsche, though most of even the best Nietzsche interpreters hardly mention Pascal in their works. Nietzsche claimed that “[w]hen I speak of Plato, Pascal, Spinoza, and Goethe, then I know that their blood rolls in mine” (as cited in Kaufmann, 1974, p. 306). The connection was emphasised by Eric Voegelin, at a prominent place in his History of Political Ideas project: “[b]eginning in 1876, at decisive junctures, Nietzsche orients his position by relating it to that of Pascal” (1999, p. 252), being particularly fascinated by Pascal’s personality (p. 256).

Pascal is one of the most difficult and least known of the French philosophers. His neglect is often justified by claims that his ideas are pre-Kantian, belonging to the prehistory of philosophy. As we’ll see, it is indeed true that Pascal cannot be understood through Kantian categories. However, this does not mean that Pascal had no idea about the genuine powers of reason. Quite the contrary, when Pascal took the reasons of the heart to be more fundamental than the reasons of the mind, arguing that the ideas of Descartes were “uncertain” and “futile” (B76, 78),⁶ and claiming that mathematics is irrelevant for understanding human nature (Force, 2003, p. 228), his claims must be taken seriously. Pascal is one of the most important figures in the history of mathematics, the inventor of probability theory. In physics, together with Torricelli, he demonstrated, before Newton, the existence of a partial void (Force, 2003, p. 224), in memory of which the pascal is a standard measure for internal pressure. He also built a computing machine that is considered a major step towards modern computers, so much so that the first popular structure computer program, developed around 1970, was simply entitled PASCAL. He never repudiated his scientific and mathematical work, and up to his death maintained belief in the importance of the powers of the human mind (Desmond, 1995, p. 91). His point was simply that the mind’s reasoning is incapable of touching upon the really fundamental aspects of human existence. He certainly would have been astonished by Kant’s idea according to which the most important feature of humans is that they are rational beings.

Reading and misreading Pascal

When trying to understand the thinking of Pascal we immediately encounter a major puzzle. The problem is particularly apparent when reading Pascal in translation. The word by which English translations express the kind of knowledge and certainty provided through the heart is “intuition.” This term, however, was given a specific meaning in the thinking of Kant, the French original being completely different: finesse, and especially sentiment. As “sentiment” is also an English word, with the exact same spelling and close meaning as French sentiment, we must explore the stakes involved here.

Such translation effectively substitutes one of the most important cornerstones of Pascal’s thinking with a concept from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Sentiment for Pascal means the manner in which the heart operates, at its most basic level. It does not mean fleeting “feelings” a concrete human being might entertain, derived from accidents of life-history and subjective preferences. The argument is that the most basic and stable aspects of our lives are based on deep-seated certainties; and that these are right without any need for proof. Pascal offers as convincing examples our sense of space and time, or the certainty of whether we are dreaming or awake, which cannot be proven or disproven by rational discourse, and yet we all know, deep in our heart, what these are.

Intuition is a concept Kant uses to identify the same conviction, but he locates it not only in the mind, but rather in the transcendental mind, connecting it to consciousness and separating it from sensation (Janiak, 2009), thus part of a central dichotomy in Kant between feeling (sensation) and thinking (consciousness). This move has two main features. First, the transcendental mind is disembodied. It is universal, thus it is nowhere, an abstract entity connected to the purely rational operations of the mind. It is this fundamental Kantian presupposition that is continued, in various ways, in analytical philosophy, artificial intelligence, or the neurosciences. Second, the mind according to Kant has nothing to do with feelings. Any emotion, any activity of the heart only confuses the delicate operation of the mind, so must be eliminated. In this Kantian framework intuition is connected to the most abstract levels of the mind, thus the furthest away from the heart, which for Pascal is the basic level, where—in contrast to Kant—there is a unity rather than a dichotomous break between thinking and feeling. This means that translating sentiment as “intuition” is to reposition Pascal’s thinking on the horizon of Kant’s, rendering it unintelligible.

Thus, the problem is much deeper than a mere issue with translation. Whether in French or in English, or in any other European languages, we are unable to understand what Pascal meant, as our terminology, even the core of our language has changed since. Whatever could have happened between Pascal and Kant in European thinking, explaining such a tectonic shift? Evidently, we stumbled here upon a major change in discursive practices, using the terminology of Foucault much relevant to the historicity of emotions, as reflected in the history of psychology (Brock, 2006).

As an indication of such a change, the next section will shortly introduce a basic semantic shift taking place in the mid to late 18th century in the meaning of the term “sentiment,” breaking the fundamental, etymologically confirmed unity between understanding and feeling.

The meaning of “sentiment,” or the meaning of meaning

The root word of English or French “sentiment,” the Latin verb sentire, to “perceive, feel, know,” is by no means a simple equivalent of the current meaning of “feeling.” This can even be perceived through contemporary languages, where English “sense” or French sens mean a “reasonable” way of behaving, or simply “meaning.” Italian sentire even today has a broad range of meaning, including “hearing,” but also “understanding.” The Latin word can be traced to the *PIE root sent, simply meaning “to go,” visible, for example, in French sentier, which means a beaten path.⁷ It therefore had a much broader range of meanings, where emotions and reasons were not yet separated, but rather connected, and at a fundamental anthropological level. Partly as a result of Cartesianism, one could argue that already in Pascal we have a certain limiting of the meaning of “reason,” which preceded the alteration of the meaning of “sentiment.” This is visible in the way in which the meanings of the terms “esprit” and “raison” seem all but conflated, for us, in Pascal.

The close connection, dialogue, or cooperation between the working of the mind and the heart, or between emotion and reason, is not a feature of Indo-European languages alone. The same can be seen in Hungarian, where “to understand” is ért, while “to feel” is érez, both to be traced to the same basic root ér, to which a number of related words like érték (“value”), érdem (“merit”), érint (“touch”), or érett (“mature”) also belong. It can be seen in a particularly clear manner through the way in which “reason, understanding, meaning” (értelem), and “feeling, sentiment, sensation” (érzelem) are all but identical words, differing by one letter only, which in an agglutinating language is not a coincidence, but indicates a point where a compact meaning becomes differentiated, just as branches separate from a trunk.

Even casual perusal of an etymological dictionary renders evident changes in meaning concentrating around the 1760s and 1770s. “Sentiment” became an in-vogue word in the mid-18th century, as a “thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion” (Simpson & Weiner, 1989, p. 994), especially in literature and art. The term “sentimentalize,” or “indulge in sentiments,” is from 1764; while the current meaning of “sensation” as “state of shock, surprise, in a community,” goes back to 1779. All this renders evident the particularly problematic character of Kant’s insistence that the history of words, and language in general, do not matter, implying that any talk about language is only sophistry. This Kantian proviso conceals the peculiar operation by which, among others, he altered the meaning of words, hiding his own traces, and offering the blackmail of taking or leaving his work as a whole, or being branded “irrational.”

Whatever generated in Europe such a shift in meaning between Pascal and Kant? As the central focus of this paper is to recover the perspective of Pascal, it cannot offer a detailed genealogy of the rift between and re-articulation of emotion and reason that happened in European culture in the 18th century; a rift which, translated into the language of liminality, implies that modern rational thought, by its aprioristic separation of reason and emotion, reifies as foundational a situation of permanent liminality. This is accomplished in detail in my new book, focusing on the rise to dominance of the sublime in aesthetics with Burke, the emergence of the realistic novel and theatre in England in the early 18th century, and the ideas of Diderot and Lessing about the centrality of the position of the critic (Szakolczai, 2016); all having a central impact on Kant. Here I can only allude to the liminal crisis in European thought provoked by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, also central for Kant, that captures in a both very real and metaphorical manner this foundational and so far unhealed rift taken for granted by “rational” thought.

Understanding Pascal’s “reasons of the heart”

Pascal recognised that the heart and the mind fundamentally complemented each other—none could be reducible to the other, and each performing basic functions that the other could not do on its own (see B1–4). Further, each had its own, serious weakness. Reason is weak, being exposed to fantasy, imagination, and feelings (B95, 274–5), its most laudable act being the recognition of how many things lie beyond its capacities (B267–8; see Morris, 1992, p. 81). The heart, on the other hand, was easily corruptible, thus it also became weak and unsteady (B801), unjust and unreasonable (B100), and even empty (creux; B143).

Still, of the two, Pascal assigned a clear primacy to heart (Borkenau, 1984, p. 539; Force, 2003, pp. 220, 224–225), and for a series of reasons. To begin with, the heart could make use of reason—according to one of his most famous aphorisms, “the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing about” (B277); while reason, in its limited sense of reasoning power, cannot rely upon the emotions of the heart. Furthermore, the heart even has to do with truth (B100, B949); and not with any truth but the truth of first principles (B282). This being one of the most famous aphorisms, central for the purposes of this paper, it must be discussed in some detail.

Pascal here argues that we know the truth not only by reason, but just as much by the heart. In particular, it is only through the heart that we gain certainty about certain basic guiding principles about human conduct, like the distinction between sleeping and waking, the perception of space and time, of movement and numbers, which reasoning cannot prove (see also Moriarty, 2003, pp. 156–157). In order to overcome this impotence, and guided by the hubris of reasoning, one of its most important, titanic features, its acolytes can only try to refute such inner certainties. But they do not succeed, and thus are forced to base their arguments on certainty concerning basic principles that are provided by the heart. For Kant, such intuition is purely an operation of the mind, or the organ of reasoning, the slipperiness of which Pascal has repeatedly demonstrated. Also, such a “transcendental mind” has no rootedness in the human being, thus no solid existence, no material stability whatsoever, while what is specific to the heart is that it is the joint centre of the life of the body and of the mind—recalling the Greek term psyché, usually translated as soul or spirit, but also meaning breath, and simply life. The aphorism clearly specifies how the heart arrives at such first principles: “le coeur sent” (that there are three dimensions); “Les principes se sentent, les propositions se concluent et le tout avec certitude quoique par différentes voies” (Pascal, 1972, B282). The French original cannot be directly rendered into English, as for us today a direct translation would be that “the heart feels” such principles, or that “the principles are being felt,” which would sound meaningless, as sentimentalist. What Pascal meant, however, is that we have immediate internal evidence about such principles, or that—as Nietzsche, the philosopher in many ways closest to Pascal, would say—we gain a certainty about them which requires no proof;⁸ and furthermore, that the organ by which we reach such evident knowledge is the same organ that guides our feelings, and also our willpower. In other passages (see especially, B3–4, 82, 194–195), Pascal uses two terms that help to better understand his meaning: “sens” (sense) and “jugement” (judgment). These two terms are easy to translate, and together form the term “sense of judgment,” which well-captures what Pascal is writing about; we should only point out that the “sens” of a “sense of judgment” is the exact same word that Pascal uses about the heart that “sent” (which, again, cannot be simply translated as “feels”). Thus, the central organ of a sense of judgment for Pascal is the heart, in contrast to the “intuiting mind” of Kant.

Pascal’s discussion of the “sense of judgment” located in the heart is contained in a few fragments that were selected as the opening aphorisms of the collection as reconstructed by Brunschvicg (B1–6; see Pascal, 1972). They contrast and distinguish the way the mind and the heart operate, accepting that there are different kinds of “right senses” (sens droit), capable of formulating judgments, but gives clear priority to those that can gain access directly to the first principles, which belong to sentiments and the realm of the heart. The conclusive fourth fragment of the series formulates this in no uncertain terms: judgment, moral judgment (which can safely ignore la morale, by which Pascal means both official philosophy and institutionalised moral, police, and legal rule, which are only built upon, thus implicitly even stimulate, concupiscence; B453) fundamentally belongs to “sentiments,” just as the sciences belong to reason (esprit); and only the former can penetrate directly to first principles: “Se moquer de la philosophie c’est vraiment philosopher” (B4), or real philosophy consists in ridiculing philosophising as it was done already in his days.⁹

These first principles are accessible through the heart, as they were deposited there, in times most remote. Here Pascal makes use of the double meaning of “principle,” again visible through etymology, as “principle” can be traced back to a Latin term for “first,” thus connected to the origins, just as Greek arché. These principles are located inside human beings (sentiment intérieur), deep in the heart of everyone. They can thus be called “natural” (B95, B431), and furthermore have some “greatness” about them. However, what we today can perceive, reaching to the bottom of our heart, is only what is left of them, due to the corrupt nature of our contemporary position (B435). Here Pascal turns to the forces that in the past and the present manage to undermine one’s sense of judgment. They include ridicule, particularly effective against the remains of such noble feelings (sentiments de grandeur), dragging them down (B431); imagination and the various forms of entertainment or divertissement (B37, 125–127, 275; especially B82, a crucial section about imagination), of which Pascal strikingly singles out for attention as most pernicious theatre (B11);¹⁰ and in particular by nothing else but the powers of reasoning (B6, 95, and especially 274; see also Force, 2003, pp. 224–226). This is because our sense of judgment is formed by conversations (B6), and just as a right kind of conversation can form it properly, the wrong kind undermines it. This is why Pascal is so hostile to comedies, which proliferate, as models, through the stage, depraved kinds of dialogues, inciting our passions; and, combining the points about ridicule, conversations, and the inciting of passions, we can see how close Pascal was to identifying the close connection between theatricalisation and unconditional, self-founding, and self-justifying reasoning. The term often used for this latter phenomenon by Pascal, raisonnement, is particularly revealing, as its German translation as räsonieren, important for Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” essay (Foucault, 1984), would be selected as the central mode of proceeding for the “discursive ethic,” set to operate in the “ideal speech situation” of the public sphere by Habermas (1989).¹¹

The conclusion by Pascal is uncompromising: no matter how important the powers of reason can be for human beings who are safely endowed with their first principles, reason itself cannot apprehend properly such first principles, though it can corrupt and destroy those principles, planted in the heart since time immemorial, as it can undermine them through doubting and a search for justification where there is no place for doubt.

Reasoning is not capable of guiding us out of liminal hotspots. It even fails to perceive the problem—a problem that it was complicit in bringing about. It can only be sensed and resolved by the heart. The last sections of the paper offer a hint about how this was done, and what can we learn from the past—and are in fact starting to re-learn now, after the slumber into which Enlightenment reasoning lulled us.

Beyond the schism and back to basics

In offering a sketch about the “conceptual history” of sentiment, taking cues from Koselleck (1985), this article has incorporated a fundamental anthropological dimension. Here, this dimension will be illustrated by three relevant examples, touching upon basic historical, anthropological, and even psychological concerns. These examples offer ways out of the emotionally wrecking situation of permanent liminality, through the guidance provided by the stability of the heart.

Heartbeat in the Chauvet cave

The Chauvet cave was discovered in December, 1994. Due to a landslide, it became almost hermetically sealed about 28,000 years ago. Inside, archaeologists discovered some of the most exquisite wall paintings of all times, depicted 37,000 to 29,000 BP. The age of the paintings is beyond reasonable doubt, the cave being the single most precisely dated cave in the world.

Werner Herzog made a 2010 film entitled The Cave of Forgotten Dreams about Chauvet (Creative Differences & Herzog, 2010). Given the experience of Lascaux, Chauvet is closed off to the public, so the film, shot in 3D, offers unique glimpses inside. In the middle of the film and deep inside the cave, Jean Clottes, director of excavations and a distinguished French archaeologist, ordered everybody to keep completely silent. As a result, after a few seconds, only one sound was audible: heartbeat. For us, it was the heartbeat of those nearest to the microphone; but for anybody who was ever down there, it was his or her own heartbeat.

The experience of entering the cave, as the “experiment” of Clottes rendered evident, was a way to face up to one’s own heart, evoking parallels with Tarkovsky’s Zone (Demidova & Tarkovsky, 1979).¹² Entering the heart of darkness tens of thousands of years ago, hundreds of metres away from the surface, armed with nothing more than a burning charcoal torch was most dangerous; nobody could be certain to see the light again. Down there, by contemplating the magnificent animals on the walls, which in the flickering light seemed to be moving, one had a concrete and overwhelming experience which must have been similar to ours, as we are human beings of the same kind: an overwhelming joy concerning the beauty of it all, but also a fear of the darkness and the unknown, combined with a fear of the known, as the images evoked the most dangerous animals like lions and rhinos charging, or ready to pounce (Horvath, 2013). It was a testing at a most basic level, a testing of the heart. In order to tolerate it all, and see the light again, one had to preserve, beyond and in spite of the entire experience, the calmness of the heart; restore the steadiness of one’s heartbeat. The encounter, down in the cave, at the heart of the Earth and surrounded with the liminal void, was the recognition of something fundamental and deeply concrete: there is something deep inside us that provides a rock-solid foundation to our very being, which is the beating of our heart, where the body and the mind, reasoning and emotion, the soul and the spirit, and the brain and the blood coincide. It never betrays us; if it starts to beat faster, this is a signal: we then need to respond, but that response should come also from the bottom of our heart, otherwise we never return to a stable relationship with ourselves again.

The mother’s heartbeat

The central question, under conditions of permanent liminality, is how to generate the stability necessary for a meaningful life. Such stability, at a level beyond the conscious self, can be searched for, historically and anthropologically, in the interaction between the mother and the infant; and a particularly interesting area concerns the use of sounds, in particular music. In his conclusive dialogue, where searching for the most basic anthropological foundations of human life, Plato argued that the title word nomos has a musical connotation, implying harmony (Laws, 799E–800A). Such emphasis on sounds and music can be applied to the concrete setting of the relations between mother and infant already inside the womb.

Following a hint of Darwin and influenced by Adam Smith, Malthus, and Marx, the origins of music were earlier located in work, in the rhythmic sounds of beating tools, or in male competition for sexual favours. In contrast to this, emphasis seems to have shifted to the intimacy of mother–child relations (Dissanayake, 2001).

What happens to a human being in the first few months of existence is fundamental in securing stability for one’s entire life. This stability is offered not at a cognitive level, but by touches and sounds that not only make no sense, but look strange, even ridiculous from the outside, and whose exposition to onlookers is even more embarrassing than the act of suckling. Researchers termed such behaviour and voice-uttering as “motherese” (see also Masataka, 1998), taking up suggestions by Gregory Bateson about the “protoconversational” (Dissanayake, 2001, p. 391), and consider such conduct to be practically universal (Dissanayake, 2001, p. 398).

What is the reason for such “infantile” behaviour? How and why does it work, and what effects does it produce? In the perspective of permanent liminality, the argument starts with a stunning claim: the central feature of early childhood interaction is that “mother and infant live in a split second world where demonstrably significant signals (events) in kinesic, facial, and vocal modalities last approximately one-half second or less” (Dissanayake, 2001, p. 391).¹³ In other words, and by no means stretching the argument, in the first period after birth mother and infant entertain themselves in a mutual state of permanent liminality. This implies first of all a relationship that is similar to what Bakhtin called dialogical, as both partners fully and freely give themselves up to the interaction, entering each other’s state (Dissanayake, 2001). This, however, is a nonverbal relationship, being partly or even fully out of conscious control; the words used by the mother matter not through their semantic meaning (p. 394), but through their mode and tone of utterance. This shows how Bakhtin is right even beyond his intentions, as his claim that every utterance is different here reaches its ultimate meaning: every single sound uttered by the mother is different, as it is stated at a different and always highly significant moment of the infant’s development, even if it has no semantic meaning. Furthermore, while voices uttered have a rhythmic character, this is not a uniform hammering, but a mutual emotional involvement, containing anticipations and expectations which the mother raises, so that they would eventually be satisfied—if everything goes well (p. 394).¹⁴ In order to characterise the nature of this interaction, Dissanayake introduces another striking formulation: this interaction works by its “use of sequential structural features that rely on expectation to create emotional meaning” (p. 394). In the terminology of the paper, it uses, unconsciously, as if encrypted in the natural and unconscious behaviour of all mothers of all times and all places, the same kind of sequence-structuring process that was laid bare by van Gennep through his analysis of rites of passage.

These interactions have worked over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and have played a major role in why we are all the kinds of human beings we are, capable of having and expressing emotions, while having a stable selfhood and capable of formulating reasonable goals for our lives. It is exactly the foundation of the stable human personality that, according to Dissanayake, the mother–infant interaction establishes. She formulates the main result of this mutual attuning in such a striking way that it must again be quoted fully: “[b]y three to four months, levels of emotional engagement in both partners can be defined by particular coordinations of spatial orientation, visual attention, facial expressivity, and type of temporal reactivity” (2001, p. 391). Translating the sentence into the language of social theory and philosophical anthropology, our capacity to perceive space, time, and images is not due to a disembodied “transcendental mind,” but is claimed to have been implanted into us in our first few months by our mother, and its place is in the heart.

Yet, even this argument can be moved to an even more basic level, concerning the sounds, in particular the mother’s heartbeat, to which an embryo is exposed inside the womb. Since the by now classic articles of Lee Salk (e.g., 1962), a number of researchers confirmed that infants remember sounds heard inside the womb, and that the character of their mother’s heartbeat leaves an imprint on their own character. Of course, a full scientific study of such a phenomenon is practically impossible. Yet, as we today need “science” in order to confirm the most evident matters, it might be worthwhile to present some of the main results of this line of research, relying in particular on a 1999 article by Giselle Whitwell, with some complements from a recent paper by Avi Gilboa (2014).

According to the research summarised by Whitwell (1999),¹⁵ even embryos within the womb hear sounds, and many months before they are due to be born. This is the reason why, in the past, expectant mothers were singing lullabies and telling stories to their as yet unborn child, until they were instructed to stop behaving “irrationally.”

The most important “sound environment” of an embryo, however, is the mother’s heartbeat. This is the sound a child will remember most, and so the argument concerning music and prenatal sounds can be turned around as well: a child not only will have a preference for the music heard inside the womb, but all children, and eventually adults, will prefer music that most resembles their mother’s heartbeat. Thus, the rhythmic movement secured by drums and other percussion instruments, one of the most important and widely spread musical instruments, does not imitate the rhythm of work, or the hammer, but rather the rhythm of the heartbeat, and at a most basic level the mother’s heartbeat.

In a recent article, Avi Gilboa (2014) argues that the ideas of Salk, Whitwell, and others, concerning the importance attributed to the stability of the mother’s heartbeat must be extended to the importance of those situations of stress where this heartbeat actually accelerates, as children also need to get accustomed to such states. This argument for a “dual nature” of the womb seems well taken, and is consistent with the importance of the “permanently liminal” relationship between mother and child, characteristic of the first months. However, just as such extreme closeness has its time and must end, situations of stress could only be beneficial if they are not lasting. The basic level of stability, at the level of the nascent personality, is imprinted on a child by a stable maternal heartbeat; just as the stability of the perception and “sentiment” of the basic coordinates of the external world is formed in the first months of the infant through the symbiosis of the mother and the child. The dual aspects of the womb are rather part of a same whole.

Finally, in this way, through the womb and the maternal heartbeat, we can also sense, at a deeper level, the reasons why our ancestors, for tens of thousands of years, kept descending deep inside the earth, into womb-like caves, in order to reconfirm and renew the solidity of their own hearts, by listening to the sound of their own heartbeat, while contemplating, and occasionally creating, images of incomparable beauty.

Yet, a similar experience is available even in contemporary times.

Walking to your own heartbeat: The Camino di Santiago

Among contemporary searches for “experience,” as means to escape the tedium of modern life, one is different; this is the Camino di Santiago. Year after year, more—especially young—people walk the old pilgrimage road from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela, near the “end of the world” in northwestern Spain. Since the route was re-launched in the 1980s, there is a steady and significant annual growth of pilgrims.

In its contemporary form the Camino is a Christian pilgrimage road, traced to the early 9th century. However, Santiago is close to Fisterra (finis terrae, “end of the world”), the endpoint of a very old route, which goes back into the Palaeolithic. It not only connects the southern French and northern Spanish regions on the two sides of the Pyrenees, containing many prehistoric painted caves, but goes through Atapuerca, near Burgos, where one of the oldest and most significant caves was excavated, with a history traced back to 800,000 BC, and evidence about the possible use of speech dating to 500,000 years ago. Though among contemporary participants in the Camino there is an unofficial distinction between those who undertake it for religious or spiritual reasons and those who undertake it for merely cultural reasons, the distinction is quite porous, as many people shift categories between them—though mostly in one direction. This is because the road has its impact on those who decide to undertake it and persist after the initial, inevitable difficulties. As pilgrims are repeatedly reminded, it does not give you what you want, but what you really need, again evoking the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Demidova & Tarkovsky, 1979), where those who make the trip to the room at the core of that dangerous area will be granted what they desire at the bottom of their hearts, but must be careful, as they will not be granted what they explicitly declare, rather what they really desire. Similarly, the road grants pilgrims, after weeks of walking, the rhythm of one’s own life, dictated by one’s heartbeat. This is why pilgrims continuously form and re-form their companionships on the road, as everyone must find one’s own rhythm. In this way, the resonances between walkers, companions of the road, recall resonances between mother and child. Misunderstanding the rhythm can be costly, as stories and signs abound concerning those who found their grave, instead of a new life, on the Camino.

Descending deeply underground, into the heart of a cold and dark cave, and walking on the wide-open plains under the Southern sun are evidently the most opposite activities possible. Yet, the two are also fundamentally connected, and in more ways than one. They are at one at the most basic historical level, as both activities were evidently part of the same Palaeolithic Atlantic landscape; furthermore, painted caves were always centres of pilgrimage, and it can be conjectured that visiting these caves was part of a long-distance trip directed towards the “end of the world” where many of the folk-tale heroes ended up, dangling their feet into the ocean below. And they are also connected at the deepest anthropological level, as they tested, regulated, or re-set the most important part of the human body and soul, the heart.

This theme of the heartbeat can be taken to an even deeper and basic level, the psychology concerning the experiences of the human child, even the embryo, before the moment of birth, inside the maternal womb, and the effects of the mother’s heartbeat, confirming the metaphor at a most basic physiological level.

A concluding comment: Problematising creativity

All this suggests a corollary concerning contemporary permanent liminality. Under static, ossified, rigid conditions, change in the sense of creativity, innovation, and adventure, in one word, “liminality,” is most welcome. Under conditions of permanent liminality, however, such a terminology loses its value. After all, as Michel Foucault argued, a prerequisite of any meaningful study is “a historical awareness of our present circumstance,” and we also must be clear about “the type of reality with which we are dealing” (Foucault, 1982, p. 209). Permanent liminality is intolerable, to use another Foucauldian word, as it generates a sense of stasis, meaninglessness; the more things change, the more they stay the same. To argue that therefore there is need for more change, more innovation, more excitement, however, is to offer the source of the problem as a solution: to re-infect the sick body; to pour fuel on the fire.

This leads to a perhaps paradoxical conclusion. While in our time creativity and innovation became almost irresistible buzzwords, this is exactly what is no longer beneficial for a genuinely human existence. What is required, under the specific conditions of permanent liminality, which was identified as a specifically modern condition, in contrast to the “human condition,” is a return to the most basic values and truths of human and social life. We must listen to our own heart; we must be in a position in which we would dare to face the Zone, in the language of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Demidova & Tarkovsky, 1979); and for this we must understand that the solid foundation of human existence is not offered by “rational” education, but rather the mother’s heart.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Árpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork since 1998 and previously taught at the European University Institute. His books include Max Weber and Michel Foucault (1998), Reflexive Historical Sociology (2000), Sociology, Religion and Grace (2007), Comedy and the Public Sphere (2013), and Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary (2016). He has published articles in, among others, Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Sociology, International Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Political Science, and European Journal of Social Theory.

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