The Nightshift
A beeping sound from some device at the office, the smell of printers mixed with that of the floor lining occasionally interrupted by the air freshener's dying buzz; just another day passing me by in this horrid and seemingly endless existence as a corporate man; tired, overworked and disappointed with my peers and therefore with myself. Une saison en enfer as a Rimbaud would frustratingly put it; however, there's a consolation in a distant companionship where a friend is in a similar position albeit in a different company, but solidarity softens the sorrows and we talk it into something fruitful.
Countless nightshifts have I spent reading and listening to Händel while on company's time; it was the only way to legitimise the life being wasted under that particular form of modern labour. This week, I met my friend after his first nightshift and we talked about the Night as a space rather than a time and how he was a being where his 'there' rendered him without a soul; he spoke in light of a stanza from Lorca's Adelante which occupied him during his shift.
"My morning has wings / My night has a soul.”
This picture, inspired by the Psalmist and weaved by Lorca into something serene and openly human, was corrupted -if not completely undermined- by the experience of a Nightshift; a place where the wings of one's morning are cut and his night is perturbed enough to become soulless.
Of course, there's an added layer of discourse since my friend read it in french and it was
Mon matin possède des ailes.
Ma nuit possède une âme
And given the existential range in the phonetic proximity between possède (meaning possessed) and décède (meaning deceased) as well as céder (as to give up), then our picture could be reformulated à la Lorca as
Mon matin cède ses ailes.
Ma nuit, l’âme décède.
And it was this nighttime soullessness that stuck with me for the rest of the week; it emerged from the back of my mind as I worked and made itself manifest in questions. Why are you soulless? Or better yet, in which of the ways are you now soulless?
I found that I have been asking myself unanswered questions in unresponsive silence for enough time for the whole process to look like a disquieted ascetic purifying himself in his God; mysticism by mistake, I have called it. But then I thought, was that really the case? There was an underlying structure and that I've already been underway without realising and that, ironically, I've been receiving the help of yet another Spaniard; it was the Dark Night of the Soul.
That formula itself comes, in its modern usage, to signify the period in a believer's life where he experiences a crisis of faith or goes through a foundation-shaking period.
It's an expression that comes from 'The Dark night of the Soul' (La noche oscura del alma) which is a poem by the 16th-century Spanish mystic St.John of the Cross. To be brief without misrepresenting what that poem is or what its author's commentaries on it are, one must realise that this is a work of both heightened emotions and acute rationality insofar as it is allowed to go without undermining the originary experience; it's a document of feeling and the thinking about that feeling.
For St.John of the Cross, the “dark night” is not emotional despair but the divinely guided stripping away of every faculty by which the soul naturally tries to possess God. At first the believer knows God through feelings, images, and understanding; then God withdraws sensible consolation (the night of sense), teaching that He is not an object of experience. Next He removes intellectual and spiritual certainties (the night of spirit), so that even meaning, assurance, and religious identity collapse: the soul feels abandoned precisely because God is present without mediation; this might be a phase where even lady philosophia is not that consoling. In this radical unknowing, faith becomes a simple, objectless loving awareness — not thinking about God but existing towards Him. Finally the faculties return transformed: the intellect knows by participation, the will loves with God’s own love, and the self no longer relates to God as to another but lives from Him. The night therefore purifies not merely sin but the very structure of self-centered consciousness, until nothing remains through which the soul can grasp God — and thus God alone remains.
All that was highlighted for the sake of pointing out the underlying structure where there's a self, its absolute Other and the dynamic relation between them as the self Others itself to better be in its Other. Does that not utterly reek of what came to be called the German speculative tradition? Is that not suspiciously Hegelian?
Naively, one can detect an immediacy that is negated and in such negation, a reconciliation occurs on a higher plane; yet for St.John, the negation is not the self-movement of Spirit coming to self-knowledge. It is, rather, an asymmetrical action of divine transcendence where God removes every mediating form precisely because He cannot be contained within consciousness. The final union in this case, therefore is not reconciliation of subject and object within awareness, but the surrender of the subject as center; St.John wants the soul to participate in God rather than to comprehend Him which is something that a Hegel would metaphysically aspire to, even if it is seemingly foolish.
No wonder why Hegel, being all too familiar with the mystical tradition, decided to describe the human being as "This night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity.”
To quote the passage in full, in the Jena Lectures (1805-6) Hegel says:
"The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here – pure Self – [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying.”
It's here that Hegel describes the mind where it is not a thing and also not a substance but rather a negativity that holds determinations without being any of them i.e. without being determined; he's showing the structure of subjectivity before the subject exists. And the consequence of this is that the self is a structured emptiness, a negativity. And when such self becomes conscious of itself through its Other, it becomes a negativity relating to its own negativity; a secularised and internalised mysticism where instead of the Self getting lost and then found in St.John's God, this same God is lost and found as higher in Reason. St.John couldn't do without the asymmetry, Hegel couldn't do with it, for there can be no talk of 'leaps' in Hegel.
But all is not lost, even after using this Hegelian lens to shed light on our obscure issue; for this structural asymmetricality which St.John reads as that transcendence in front of which the self will dissolve as Self and unite with its Other, provides us with a structure of a Night of the Soul where it remains Dark.
In his major work The Obsolescence of Human beings (1956) [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen], Günther Anders has this idea of what he calls the Promethean Gap. It claims that there's a serious gap between what humans are capable of producing and what they are capable of understanding or morally processing. Meaning that, as the technology develops, humans start to fall short regarding the overall visualization of the technical projects, they steadily lose touch with the emotional register of the scale of things and, ultimately, they fail the anticipation of long-term consequences.
That book was mostly a response to industrial mass production, nuclear tech, the technocratic system and how the underlying bureaucracies fragment responsibility (since production relegates ethics to a second order function.)
On a different level, and perhaps through our Hegelian structure, one would argue that being a self-conscious cog in the bureaucratic machine opens you up to the truth of the Promethean Gap as it becomes instantiated on the psychological scale; the Promethean Gap replaces St.John's asymmetry in the face of transcendence and suddenly the Dark night of the Soul becomes the Nighttime soullessness at the Nightshift.
Now, in Hegel, the negativity can always be worked through, by virtue of the system's self-determination, it must be worked through. And the result is a reconciliation where Spirit returns to itself, knowing itself fully and the night is overcome into a new Day. But, due to the abysmality of the Promethean Gap, the reconciliation fails, the spirit cannot return to itself and therefore it doesn't know itself fully; as you realise your own position and being in the overall structure of things, you see that it is not rational, not nearly enough for you to 'be' at any rate. Alienation becomes a permanent condition of being and man becomes out-dated because unable to achieve a coincidence with his self which, in itself, is a failure in ethics. The dark night becomes a permanent condition of ethical impotence because actual freedom is lacking; a true dark night of the Soul.
And a Nightshift is more than a Nightshift when that Night-shifts-the-Soul; and what's worse than a Nightshift is another Nightshift and another and you must take them all.
Le même succède au même.
Mon matin cède ses ailes.
Ma nuit, l’âme décède.
Le même succède au pire même.
