Into the Origins of the Inside – Outside Debate: Rediscovering Smell/Odor and Tracking the Steps of Nietzsche, Proust and Timothy Morton

Authors: Allaerts W*

DOI: 10.23880/phij-16000129

Volume 2, Issue 4

Abstract

The philosophical problem of the Inside - Outside duality has a long history. In this paper I recall that not only this duality caught the attention of philosophers like F. Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel and J.-P. Sartre, but it also formed the pièce de résistance in the famous controversy between S.A. Kierkegaard and Th.W. Adorno. In Nietzsche’s early work Menschliches, allzumenschliches (1878), an interesting starting point is found that reminded me of the also famous, original viewpoint of M. Proust as expressed in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1914). Doing so, these re-collections brought me to a re-formulation of my 1992 paper on the problem of the linearity of written language and the nature of communication. This paper aims at showing that the translation of the Inside-Outside duality in a contemporary context together with a non-linear topography of natural communication, allows us to answer T. Morton’s (2016) challenging logic of the hyper-real and so-called agrilogistics view on ecology. It is concluded that this debate is indeed important to distillate a logic of future coexistence.

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