The following is a short exert from my soon to be finished (YEA!) dissertation that completes my requirements for a PhD:

QUEER FAITH, WYRD HOPE, LOVING STRUGGLE: A RECONSIDERATION AND APPLICATION OF KARL JASPERS’ EXISTENZPHILOSOPHIE FOR QUEER LIBERATION

When I was but a young thing, I saw Baryshnikov dance on television. Besides how handsome he always looked, I was in awe of the power he demonstrated when he would leap across the stage. It was never enough, of course, for me to want to follow him into ballet; however, the marvel of his physical control always stayed with me.

I could have described it:”Ah! There is the feline grace of the great dancer.” Or even, “Yes! Isn’t this the beauty of the gazelle as it leaps through the savannas?”

Yet even before becoming an “existentialist,” I never saw Baryshnikov’s art in terms of what an animal could do by nature of being that animal. Rather, my awe was toward a basic ability–hopping, jumping, leaping–transformed into a real capability developed over decades of practice by the dancer’s surpassing of common physical limits.

Baryshnikov’s dance expresses active beauty throughward the poetics of the body’s willed possibility.

I have been thinking a lot about Baryshnikov and many other dancers—including my friends Joy (1), Rivkah, and Susie as well as my great nephew Matt—because of the impression left upon me by their enduring commitment to explore expression through the body. Practicing to make leaps is a crucial aspect of enacting authentic freedom. So my dissertation (2)–queering Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of Existence to investigate paths for the liberation of QUILTBAG (3) folks–explores the importance of making such leaps in thinkering.

Jaspers denotes this ability as necessary for disclosing a place of authentic philosophizing:

Since Existenz [Self-Actualization] is thus inaccessible to one who asks about it in terms of the purely objective intellect, it remains subject to lasting doubt. Yet, though no proof can force me to admit [Existenz] being, my thinking is still not an end: it gets beyond the bounds of objective knowability in a leap that exceeds the capacity of rational insight. Philosophizing begins and ends at a point to which that leap takes me. (4)

Obviously, folks make leaps all the time: they leap for real joy, they leap to invalid conclusions, they leap into bad deals, etc. So a distinction must be drawn between springing-forth from the solid ground of critical experience (the dance of uncertainty) and hopping-around on the shaky ground of uncritical opinions (the spasms of insecurity). Existential thinkering must train the intellectual muscles to gracefully move toward an idea that uplifts life.

As boring as I often find it, a bit of practical exercises in logic strengthens the thinker’s form while moving them beyond the atrophy of confusion. But it is more than just drilling pre-established universal patterns or repeating culturally choreographed assumptions. Logic–informal, formal, and transcendental–is preparatory for developing stances to leap toward profound intuitions and to return withward sound insights, landing again among the everyday with some grace.

Nonetheless, I turn from logical exercises to engagement with my experience or else I remain in formal abstractions.

Looking at my life, I always see myself in everyday activity through a kind of autobiographic lens: Each experience fits as plot details in my life-lived. These arise from self-narrated introspection that orient my activity. When these experiences get a lot of my attention, I become submerged in story-telling–rationalizing–without turning on them a well-trained critical eye.

Sharing the “telenovela” of my life may or may not be of interest to others. Recounting centers on me: it is all about my (re)actions and, with a few exceptions of those I promote to co-star or regular character, others with whom I share the life-world are often stand-ins, extras among so much scenery. If I speak to a person who somehow can relate my story to their own, perhaps the engagement may go farther along. But if I am sharing uncritical self-narrative, I should not be surprised to find waning audience interest. 

Nonetheless, I do want to share myself with others. 

Do I simply keep relating my story ad nauseum? Or is there another move? I think the latter… Before sharing any more, I must step-back, crouch-down, and spring into what is going on beyond what directly affects me. (And that also means overcoming the telenovela gravity of my closest companions.)

Stepping-back, I see that there is a story bigger than myself, maybe even greater than all of us.

Crouching-down, I ensure the shared ground is solid and ready for sustained movement.

If I have been adequately training my embodied consciousness, I let-go of the ordinary and spring into the extraordinary.

There are at least three ways for bounding-over the mundane to successfully elucidate my authenticity. While I do not believe such leaps must happen in any fixed order, they at first might best be understood by a fairly causal chain: 

1. A leap-outward: Objectivity as the intentional process between personal perceptions and common conceptions. This world-orientation.
2. A leap-inward: Subjectivity as the creative process between actual memories and imaginative possibilities. This is existential elucidation. And,
3. A leap-upward: Self-actualization (Existenz) as the liberatory praxis between the World and Transcendence. This is metaphysics as lived: Seeking after the Source.

Disclosing aspects of my narrative that might jibe with the lives of other people involves the leap-outward: A search after objective structures, the patterns that obtain interpersonally and sometimes interculturally within material circumstances, or the life-world.

Outward-situated while looking back on my life, reality seems almost limitless. There is so much to explore.(5) I see via the outward-leap that my personal drama belongs to a more expansively meaningful reality: History as the account of being-in-the-world at a time/space connected to myriad other eras/locales. There is one humankind but there are a diversity of social and personal histories. Nonetheless, in the outward-leap, I am alone:

“…[a] substantial solitude of one who knows universally, detached from any situation… like the pure eye that meets no other eye and looks upon all things, but not into itself.”(6)  

I am turning-outward into history: I am not for the world but rather the world and all its potentials are for me by my seeking orientation.

The extent of it almost overwhelms compared to the small moment(s) of my autobiography. I grasp then my powerlessness to completely comprehend the world-horizon in a single viewpoint or even a collection of snapshots arranged just-so. The “calm of [my] vision…”(7) no longer has personal content; I hang in a sensation of weightlessness. Not the seconds of Baryshnikov defying gravity, but my own moment of breaking-out.

I can only tarry in such a viewpoint so long before the calm slips back into the busyness of the everyday. As an entity always already in situations, I gain the perspective from this leap that all people have these limits as well as an ability to explore them. I grasp, moreover, that each will come to the limits idiosyncratically. This warns me off making too many universal claims.

I could sustain a dance throughward the broad warrens of history, refocusing from myself to my folk if not humankind in general. This, however, strands me in the solitude of the “objective watcher.” It does not fully integrate my story into the meaning of human history as I have discovered it. Rather, becoming the witness of history keeps me apart for the sake of objectivity.

The leap-outward need only be the quickest of exits and returns for my uncritical (unreflective) story to recalibrate as connected to a history greater than myself. But once connected, the story now become historic: a sharable exchange with others who are just as much in the changing currents of human time/space alongside of me now/here within abiding traditions.

There must be a return movement, a return to my life but now in history. Leaving the wider horizon of the general account of humanity or the tales of a particular people, I leap-inward onto the way of subjectivity. Herein, I engage history as related to personal memory and individual creativity: I am historic. This opens me up to the possibility of Self-Actualization (Existenz).

I do not really occupy the point outside; I merely look for a way to get there, and my conception of the completed way prepares me, rather, to reenter the world. For, having taken this first leap out of the world, I find myself still very much within mundane existence [Dasein, everydayness], still involved in situations. But as an historic expression both of myself and of humankind, my concern with reality moves toward a greater emphasis on authentic potential. I am no longer the character with a fixed destination:

My lonely self-being turns into the knowledge which in [mundane] existence opens my mind to boundary situations; for fleeting moments only can it be a pure eye. (8)

The actuality of being an historic entity with others reveals my “…possible Existenz, sheltered as in a germ in this lonely punctuality of having stepped outside… [now able to] take my second leap to elucidation.”(9) For Jaspers, I encounter herein the ability to give myself over to philosophizing as casting a light of truth onto how I am ready to become my ownmost self. I think of this as a leap-inward; not, however, backward into my inner monologue. Rather, I go much deeper. I approach the crossroads where my self intersects inwardly with that which lies beyond me otherwise: Being-World(10) and Transcendent-Being.(11) Even if I had been dismissive of the limitations I encountered throughout my life as “not about me” or even as “beyond my control,” I catch sight of them now/here as how I am able to experience any life event. In all truth, these situations are the eventfulness of being alive. Solipsistic narratives and “universal knowledge” morph around each other, intertwining in the light of understanding the boundaries “…in my own mind as possibilities that hit the essence of my being.”(12)

Further exploration via existential elucidation discloses situations I can pass through that affect me minimally, if at all, while simultaneously revealing that “…there are indeed situations I cannot get out of, situations I cannot see through as a whole.”(13) These, of course, are the ultimate situations mentioned above.

Outwardly the borders were intelligible but only abstractly. Inwardly, they become explorable through the sensibility of personal experience. I am moving along the limits of the human condition, seeing them up close as where To-Be-I and To-Be-World both begin. Their opacity requires resolve to explore. Unlike those situations having little impact, the kind that “…are wholly transparent to me that knowledge gets me out of…”(14) with some effort, I am never out-of the ultimate boundary situations. Furthermore, I have very little if any power over them. Here I find my self-revealing uncertainty at the borders “… I cannot knowingly control [but] I can only grasp existentially.”(15)

Exploring my own subjectivity, I am possible Existenz realizing how ultimate boundaries—e.g. guilt, suffering, struggle, etc—can leave me in a “blind helplessness” if I stay only as a mere object to myself in introspective autobiography or reduce myself to an object among a nearly infinite amount of ideal types:

I now draw a line between the being of the world, which I can knowingly leave as a mere specific dimension of Being [Sein, To-Be], and Existenz, which for me is not something to contemplate and get out of, but something to be or not to be.(16)

Where the outward-leap allowed escape from a circular egotism, the inward-leap promotes a letting-go of “cognitive self-being,” of treating myself as a mere entity, whether a material object [a la positivism] or an ideal type [a la idealism]. 

The unrest in this boundary situation is that what is up to me lies still ahead; my freedom in it is to assume given facts, to make them my own as if they had been my will. While the first boundary situation [I always in a situation] makes men aware of the historicity in all [mundane] existential existence, particular boundary situations—death, suffering, struggle, guilt—affect each individual as general ones within [their] specific historicity of the moment.(17) In this, I no longer seek “valid knowledge”—empirical data sets or ontic formulations—which prove useful for explaining exherent worth or justifying inherent value. Existential elucidation traces along, plays around, and works out the meaningful obscurity of ultimate boundaries.(18)

ENDNOTES

(1) I want to thank my great friend, Joy Harris, for looking over the first chapters in my dissertation and pointing out the need to make clear how one gets ready to leap, like a dancer who must train not only to fly up gracefully but to come back down with the grace of a sure-foot. I only hope I am not abusing the metaphor in this essay.

(2) Brown, K. (2023). Queer Faith, Wyrd Hope, and Loving Struggle: A Reconsideration of Karl Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie for Queer Liberation. Denton, TX: University of North Texas. Dissertation. Forthcoming Fall 2023.

(3) I use this acronym in place of LGBTQIA. It stands for Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transexual, Bisexual, Asexual/Ally, Gay/Gender non-conforming. I prefer to use this because I can speak it when I am lecturing. I introduce the term early in any course where I will be talking at length about Queer Theory. The acronym is preference on my part as an educator; I do not mean to suggest that ALL folks under the Rainbow should use it. I do, however, find that even the most conservative students use the term freely and without the usual “irritation” in their voice when spelling out the list. I also like the word because it calls to mind the Quilt project that helped bring real attention to the AIDS crisis. Furthermore, the notion invokes how very eclectic Queer culture can be.

(4) Jaspers, K. (1971). Philosophy V2: Existential Elucidation. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 9.

(5)  Jaspers, Philosophy V2, 180. 

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) In my actual dissertation, I will take up a Star Wars Universe formation and refer to this as the Living Force, To-Be as possibility. 

(11) Following n10, I will refer to this later as the Cosmic Force, To-Be as necessity. 

(12) P2: 180.

(13) P2: 180.

(14) P2: 180.

(15) P2: 180.

(16) P2: 180. 

(17) P2: 184. 

(18) P2: 181.