Abstract
In the novel Life of Pi. the story uses a human-animal story to articulate Martel’s transpersonal aesthetics which reconsiders traditional Western philosophical notions of the self, maturity, and rationality. The naming of Martel’s protagonist enacts a symbolic subversion of the subject-object hierarchy, placing the self in a relational continuum with other inanimate and insentient beings. It also blurs the boundary between humanity and animality, thus questioning the role of Western rationality which defines the self as a perfection of unity, autonomy, and independence. The novel also sets forth the notion of a transpersonal, transcultural self through religious pluralism, and expresses an ecological, metaphysical self coterminous with the entire universe. Martel’s philosophical reflection on the transpersonal self expresses the need for breaking the limits Western philosophy has imposed on the boundary of the self.
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Notes
I use the word transpersonal in the sense that one’s self can expand beyond the individual self as an enclosed autonomy, separate from the external world in its perception of the uniqueness of the self. The term was first theorized in 1968 by American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who held that the self is an expansive process that moves beyond a biographic, personal, and egoic vision towards the transpersonal, including collective, communal and cosmic identification. Subsequent theorists expanded this psychological dimension of the self to philosophical as well as other domains. Ecological philosophers also draw on transpersonal psychology as a useful mode for understanding the interactions between humans and the world. Deep ecological philosopher Arne Naess proposed the concept of an all-sided self in 1986, emphasizing the ecological facet of self maturity. And Warwick Fox combined Naess’s ecosophy with Maslow’s transpersonal psychology and proposed in 1990 the notion of “transpersonal self” which is inclusive of the human and non-human, physical and spiritual forces in self realization.
It has to be noted that, while Buber’s notion of I-Thou relation does not exclude animals, trees, and objects, Buber implies the agency of humans in their transformation of I-It into I-Thou so as to achieve a condition of wholeness of being. He emphasizes “the bestowing side of things” of inanimate things, plants and animals in nature, but the Thou-saying human subject takes the initiative to engage in communion with non-human others. There cannot be an I-Thou, for example, in the sense that an animal or a plant acts as an “I” perceiving me as a Thou. Buber speaks of the Thou-saying human subject as equipped with an “instinct to make everything into Thou” (1958, p. 27), and “the inborn Thou is realised in the lived relations with that which meets it” (1958, p. 27).
The three people, including Thomas Dudley, the captain, Edwin Stephens, the mate, and Edmund Brook, the crewman, fed on Richard Parker’s body and drank his blood for survival, although Brook dissented at first. Following their rescue, the case was argued and decided eventually in 1884 in the Divisional Court of the Queen’s Bench Division, and Dudley and Stephens were charged with murder. The case, known as Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, has since become a controversial one in legal history.
Leibniz argues that monads “have no windows through which anything could enter them or depart from them” (2014, p. 15).
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This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund Project of China (19BWW008).
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Ding, L. Questioning rationality: Martel’s philosophy of transpersonal self in Life of Pi. Neohelicon 47, 301–314 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00530-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00530-5