Resources and resonance: Notes on patiency as world relation

Introduction

Within the family of sociocultural approaches to human mental life (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007), cultural psychology has been in the forefront for decades pushing for a much-needed scientific reconceptualization of individuals as agents. It has articulated a stimulating perspective on culture as sets of material and semiotic mediators through which persons act. Unlike the psychological mainstream, which typically depicts individual minds as affected by various processes—so-called variables—that can ideally be described by causal laws, cultural psychology “is the study of active people carrying out their projects according to the rules and conventions of their social and material environments” (Harré & Moghaddam, 2012, p. 6). This is something else entirely than the standard viewpoint in psychology that “focuses on hierarchies of hidden mechanisms which underpin the patterns of meaningful actions” (p. 6). Without an understanding of human beings as acting persons as supplied by cultural psychology, most significant phenomena of psychology are simply rendered incomprehensible, including those that belong to the ethical, judicial, and political dimensions of our lives. In order to understand essential human phenomena such as these, we need to acknowledge the basic normativity of psychology and its subject matter (Brinkmann, 2011), and the agentic powers of human beings, both of which are key points for cultural psychologists (Valsiner, 2014). ¹

It has thus been immensely valuable that a new image of human beings has been painted by sociocultural psychology: Instead of the mind as a mechanism, we have persons who act; instead of information processing, we have meaning making; instead of variables and causal factors, we have norms and reasons for action; and instead of culture as a quasi-agent affecting individuals from the outside, we have a conception of culture as a set of resources actively taken up by forward-oriented persons engaged in various projects (Valsiner, 2014). Of course, this image is not completely new in philosophy, where it goes back at least to Aristotle (see Harré, 1997), nor is it new in people’s everyday dealings with one another, where it arguably is indispensable when we hold each other accountable as agents, but it can be considered relatively new in psychology although it also exists in other traditions alongside cultural psychology such as parts of phenomenology and discursive psychology.

The present article builds on a deep appreciation of this cultural psychological starting point, which is also foundational for my own work (e.g., Brinkmann, 2018), but I believe that we need to balance it by taking other important features of human existence into account to a greater extent, which this image by itself makes it difficult to grasp. For humans are not only interpreting, meaning making agents who employ cultural resources in acting. We do not just carry out tasks, for we are also creatures who respond to layers of meaning that are revealed as already existing in relation to the world prior to the projects in which we willingly engage. We are not only meaning making actors, but also more passive recipients of meaningful flows of processes. My argument is not that cultural psychologists have been completely blind to this dimension, but rather that its starting point in an active use of resources (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010), meaning construction (Valsiner, 2014), cognitive projects (Harré & Moghaddam, 2012), or sense making (Salvatore, 2018) risks forgetting a deep dimension where humans may encounter the world more passively or receptively that is emphasized by the phenomenological tradition. Let me give an example that hopefully illustrates what I mean. In a book on The Production of Presence, literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes the kind of impact he as a teacher would like to make on his students of aesthetics in the humanities:

My first more personal concern for this class was to be a good enough teacher to evoke for my students and to make them feel specific moments of intensity that I remember with fondness and mostly with nostalgia – even if, in some cases, this intensity was painful when it actually happened. I wanted my students to know, for example, the almost excessive, exuberant sweetness that sometimes overcomes me when a Mozart aria grows into polyphonic complexity and when I indeed believe that I can hear the tones of the oboe on my skin. (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 97)

Initially, this description (which illustrates the phenomenon that Gumbrecht calls presence, and which I return to below) is hard to understand from an agentic perspective. The person involved does not really do anything; there is no project or real reason for action involved and no conceptual relation to the world implied. And although Gumbrecht may willingly have chosen to listen to Mozart, it seems a bit farfetched to claim that the aria is a resource that is used for a specific purpose. It seems to me that a form of meaning (if this is even the right word) is uncovered—rather than constructed—in his relationship to the music as something he discovers, even physically, on his skin. The effect is something that he cannot create, control, or deliberately bring about. It is not done by him, but happens to him.

While theorists in sociocultural psychology rightly talk about meaning making or meaning construction (Valsiner, 2014), and although this is without doubt a ubiquitous feature of human existence, it seems to me that a more adequate phenomenological analysis of examples such as Gumbrecht’s would concern meaning discovery or revelation. We are here concerned with a kind of meaning that is imposed on someone, but without that someone actually seeking it or “meaning” it. With phenomena such as this, it is perhaps more adequate to talk about human “patiency” rather than human agency? We do not just act in each and every moment of our lives, we also let things happen. This is not the same as the kind of passivity one finds in causal processes that are mechanical, for example, in the context of billiard balls on a table. There is a mode of being for humans in-between willed agency on the one hand and mechanical causality on the other, and it is this mode, I seek to capture with the notion of “patiency.” It is akin to what Martin Heidegger called Gelassenheit as a kind of letting-be, which he defined as “openness to the mystery” of that “which shows itself and at the same time withdraws” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 55). It is this general phenomenon I would like to explore in the present article.

An immediate objection could be if we do not already have the theoretical resources in cultural psychology to understand this matter? For example, Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) have developed a very useful comprehensive overview of cultural psychological approaches to uses of tools and signs, and they mention aesthetic appreciation as an example of mediated sign use, which has been explored by different cultural psychologists. They refer among others to Boesch (1991), who would likely classify the Mozart aria in Gumbrecht’s example as a “consumptive object.” This means that it is a cultural resource that is an end in itself (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010, p. 43). This does indeed take us some of the way toward understanding the phenomenon, but even this still suggests that such objects exist for the sake of something (e.g., enjoyment), which is what a resource essentially is. And the argument I would like to articulate in this article claims that humans have relations to the world beyond those of resources, which are to be understood in categorically different ways. Of course, we do have sociocultural analyses of phenomena such as aesthetics, play, dance, music, and religion, but my argument here is that we have not paid sufficient attention to the underlying reality of patiency or Gelassenheit that make such phenomena possible. ² We—again myself included—have been so busy pursuing the agentic view of the person, which has been a very necessary correction to mechanical psychologies that we have forgotten about other, more responsive modes of being in the world. Perhaps we have thought (again, I am speaking partly for myself here) that a passive view of the human person is equivalent to the mainstream view and its perspectives on variables and causality? However, I believe we need to look for the middle ground between mechanical causality and agency. Wrathall (2004) finds this middle ground in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, who developed notions of habits, motives, and motor intentionality between brute causality and conceptual normativity, and I believe that cultural psychology could favorably incorporate something like this in its analyses.

In their thorough overview of contemporary sociocultural research in psychology, Valsiner and Rosa (2007) draw a distinction between four different traditions: The discursive/conversational, the semiotic mediational, the activity tradition, and the evolutionary readings of cultural history (p. 4). In very broad outline, these traditions depict people who do things with words, people who construct and use meanings, people who act within systems of activity, and people who employ action tools under ecological conditions with evolutionary histories, respectively. All four have given us many valuable insights, but I maintain that none of them has fully theorized the ways in which human beings may experience meanings that cannot be adequately conceived as constructed or related to activity in any immediate sense. In all traditions, the view of human beings as meaning-constructing actors is dominant to the extent that it overshadows other ways of being in the world.

In the analysis below, I therefore aim to explore those aspects of our relations to the world that are better understood through other concepts than those of activity, meaning construction, projects, and resources. As humans, we can certainly approach the world as a range of material and semiotic resources and employ them as tools to reach our goals, but what about our relations to fellow human beings, poetry, paintings, and appreciation of natural wonders like landscapes? Are these phenomena and objects entirely graspable as “resources” that become significant only through a process of meaning construction as we carry out various projects? I think not, and in order to explain this, I first build in particular on the later work of Heidegger, who criticized the tendency of modernity to make everything into “resources,” but also on Gumbrecht (2004), who has emphasized the noninterpretative mode of encountering the world as presence, and on the philosopher Jonas (1996), who developed a distinction between tool, image, and grave as signifying three modes of relationship to the world for human beings. In line with Heidegger, Jonas argued that the “tool mode” has gained primacy in modernity, leading to a reduction of the world to a set of resources for human agents.

Then, after having introduced the idea of “resonance,” recently developed by the sociologist Rosa (2019), I shall try to unfold an understanding of the “patiency” side of human life and argue that it is something cultural psychology could take into account to a greater extent. A main point is that we in modernity too easily conceive of our relationship to the world as one of agents-being-in-control-through-the-use-of-resources. Following the four German-born thinkers—Gumbrecht, Heidegger, Jonas, and Rosa—the argument is that we should be careful not to reduce our relationship to the world to one of active agents that use passive resources in ongoing projects as this easily mirrors a specific experience of alienation in modernity. In many cases, it is phenomenologically more adequate to see us as patients who are moved by active objects—or who at least engage in responsive relations with objects—which in many ways is the opposite of alienation. In my view, we need to imagine what a human science may look like that both respects our agency and capacities for tool use (semiotic as well as material), as emphasized by cultural psychologists, and also our patiency and the noninstrumental relations to the world as studied by Rosa and other phenomenologists. We need in other words to balance the sociocultural approaches with phenomenological sensitivity to the receptive sides of human existence.

On the world as resources: Heidegger and Jonas

We shall begin with the problematic figure of Martin Heidegger, before moving on to Gumbrecht and Jonas, both of whom were influenced by him. Heidegger is significant in this context since he warned very early on of the dangers of reducing the world to a set of resources. After World War II, when he had been rightly condemned for his scandalous Nazi sympathies in the 1930s, he wrote a number of essays concerned with what we might call cultural critique. One of these was “The question concerning technology,” which remains an insightful analysis of the consequences of a technologically dominated culture (Heidegger, 1993a). We shall see how Heidegger’s analysis may critically inform a discussion of resources.

Heidegger begins the essay by rejecting the simple instrumentalist notion of technology, according to which technology consists of neutral means in the service of human intentions. This is at best a superficial understanding, for Heidegger believes that technology provides for an entire way of being in the world for humans: a way that enables the world to be disclosed in a specific way. “Technology,” he says, “is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” (1993a, p. 318). What technology first and foremost reveals is that things have become “standing-reserve” (Bestand) for us (p. 322). As Heidegger explicates:

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. (p. 322)

To give some examples of what Heidegger may have had in mind, technology reveals the forests as lumber (to be used for construction purposes), the wind as energy (to be harvested by turbines), and human beings as production units to be developed in order to work efficiently. As such, there is nothing wrong with this, but Heidegger’s point is that it easily leads to a forgetfulness of other modes of relating to and revealing the world. In modernity, everything is hegemonically made into a resource, and Heidegger sounds strangely prophetic when he directs his analytic eye to humanity as such, “does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence for this” (Heidegger, 1993a, p. 323). In the decades since Heidegger wrote this, we have witnessed the rise of human resource management and self-optimization practices, not just in workplaces, but more or less everywhere in modern nation states, including educational systems (see e.g., Cederström & Spicer, 2017; Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). In what Jensen (2012) has called a “project society,” it has become hard to think of humans and their activities in terms other than use-value, development, and optimization, that is, as resources relative to various projects. Even knowledge, art, and literature are increasingly instrumentalized and evaluated according to their effects on the GNP of the nation, population mental health, human happiness, or other ulterior outcomes. Humans are increasingly thought of as a reserve to be mobilized for action rather than as creatures who dwell in the world.

For Heidegger, the question concerning technology is not the expression of some romanticism in the spirit of Rousseau, and he is not out to destroy the benefits of modern technology. His discussion is about how we come to relate to the world, and about how dwelling becomes difficult when we reduce our understanding of the world to technological practices. Dwelling is a term used in Heidegger’s writings that refers quite generally to “the manner in which mortals are on the earth” (Heidegger, 1993b, p. 350). It means to be in a place, situated in a certain relationship with existence and finitude, characterized by nurturing. Dwelling is in a way a “patient” rather than an active mode of being, and it enables the world to appear in noninstrumental ways.

Dreyfus (2002) has explained Heidegger’s intentions with the example of a cup. In much of the world today, it is common to use mass-produced Styrofoam cups that serve the purpose of maintaining a constant temperature of the beverage, hot or cold, and which can then be discarded. Every conference participant has experienced this. A Japanese teacup, on the other hand, is an object rich in cultural meaning that may play a role in various ritual practices and which is preserved from generation to generation. The Japanese teacup is not just an instrument that enables the consumption of a resource, but is rather revelatory of a whole cultural understanding of what it is to be a thing (delicate, beautiful, and traditional) that fits with an understanding of what it is to be human (passive, contented, gentle, and social) in Japan. The teacup situates the human being as a dwelling creature in noninstrumental relations to the world, whereas the Styrofoam cup articulates humans as efficient and controlling creatures vis-à-vis a world of resources.

It is clear from Heidegger’s analysis that in order think, we have to dwell, and the current constitution of acting humans in a world of resources controlled by tools does not easily allow for that. This is, he believes, the main problem of technology: By reducing the world to a range of resources to be mastered and enhanced through tool use, it makes a kind of receptive thinking difficult, which in essence is noninstrumental. All in all, Heidegger’s analysis is meant to show that in modernity, we have come to relate to everything as a standing-reserve, and this includes the human being that is thereby made into a resource. The essence of modern technology “is to seek more and more flexibility and efficiency simply for its own sake […] That is, our only goal is optimization” (Dreyfus, 2002, p. 166).

How else could we relate to the world, then, if not technologically? An answer is provided by one of Heidegger’s students, viz., Jonas (1996). Jonas argued that there are three features that distinguish humans from nonhuman animals, summarized as tool, image, and grave: Tool use certainly is a significant human characteristic, argues Jonas, and the tool “tells us that a being, forced to deal with matter out of need, meets this need in an artificially mediated way that depends on invention and is open to improvement” (p. 85). This is immensely important, and the starting point of this article was that sociocultural psychologies, by conceiving of our relationship to the world as materially and semiotically mediated, in many ways have provided an anthropological generalization of the tool relation. But, Jonas adds, the image (e.g., the iconic cave paintings) is different in telling us of a world beyond our material needs in which we may dwell, and finally the grave that “tells us that a being, subject to mortality, reflects about life and death, defies appearances, and raises his thinking to the realm of the invisible” (p. 85).

With the world being revealed through the modes of the image and the grave, thinking in the sense of Heideggerian dwelling becomes possible. Jonas argues that our tool-being has historically given rise to physics, while our capacity as image creators naturally underlies the world of art. Jonas (and Heidegger) may be criticized for equating science and technology, for while technology is inherently utilitarian, science may also be contemplative. The grave as an anthropological universal is the birthplace (paradoxically) of metaphysics, for the grave signifies the presence of an absent other. It is “that place in the world where the dead is not,” as the Danish poet Søren UIrik Thomsen has expressed it. Although we have both graves and images (lots of them in an increasingly visual culture) in modernity, it would follow from a Heideggerian analysis that their respective ways of revealing the world for us have been concealed by the dominance of the tool and technology in our thinking. Images and graves themselves have become tools that serve specific instrumental purposes (e.g., consoling the bereaved) rather than being world-revelatory in their own right. As ideal types, tools orient us to the world as resources and articulates the human being as an agent who carries out projects; images orient us to the world as an aesthetic sphere (which is entirely different from usefulness; see Genette, 1999); and graves orient us to a world of symbolism that takes us beyond the senses and use-value (Ruin, 2018). Tools are employed by interpreting agents, while images and graves are responded to (rather than employed) by contemplating patients. Of course, as I said, we may use images as tools, for example, or we may conversely contemplate tools aesthetically, but the point to take from Heidegger and Jonas is that they each disclose the world for us in fundamentally different ways.

On the notion of presence: Gumbrecht

With the notion of presence, Gumbrecht (2004) has applied Heideggerian thinking to literature and aesthetic theory in order to develop a theory of “presence”—a dimension of cultural phenomena that is not to be thought of in terms of meaning as commonly understood (see Brinkmann, 2014). Gumbrecht believes that the humanities have been overly dominated by a focus on meaning interpretation and have neglected the physical and noninterpretative aspects of how we encounter the world. The word presence comes from the Latin prae-esse, which literally means “to be in front of.” It signals something that is within reach, something that we can touch and have immediate perceptions of in noninterpretative and nonconceptual ways (Gumbrecht, 2006). Think again of the Mozart aria described above. In that way, presence “always binds time to a particular place” (p. 61) and is typically accompanied by a feeling of composure, or “letting-be,” which in German is Gelassenheit (p. 55). There is, Gumbrecht says, “a layer in cultural objects and in our relation to them that is not the layer of meaning” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 54), and it is this layer that he seeks to capture when talking about presence. His point is not to say that meanings are irrelevant or that hermeneutics should be disqualified in the human and social sciences. As cultural psychologists have rightly emphasized, we are indeed forward-looking, interpretative creatures who construct meaning. The point is simply that we are also receptive, dwelling, and patient creatures who get in touch with the world in other ways.

Gumbrecht develops this point nicely with reference to Hans-Georg Gadamer (another student of Heidegger), and arguably the most important hermeneutic philosopher, who in his own way argued for greater acknowledgment of what is beyond meaning (the nonsemantic). As Gumbrecht reports, when Gadamer was once asked by an interlocutor if the function of the nonsemantic features of poetry (e.g., rhyme and rhythm) was to challenge the “hermeneutic identity” of the text, Gadamer answered (in Gumbrecht’s translation from the German):

But – can we really assume that the reading of such texts is a reading exclusively concentrated on meaning? Do we not sing these texts? Should the process in which a poem speaks only be carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the same time, a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with which the poem confronts us. (Gadamer quoted in Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 64)

Gadamer’s words here are interesting because they emphasize the material and somatic aspects of poetry (without, of course, forgetting about meaning and interpretation). Poems are supposed to be “sung” (not necessarily in a literal sense, of course), as Gadamer says, and there are vital aspects of singing and performing poetry that have little to do with meaning as conventionally conceived, but which are nonetheless central to the aesthetic experience. The prime reason that we have poetry in the first place (instead of simply stating meanings literally) may have to do with all these effects that meanings themselves cannot capture, but which are generated by rhyme, rhythm, prosody, intensity, etc. The reason why people are willing to pay large sums of money to be present at concerts, for example, rather than simply listening to music in their homes on high-quality equipment may stem from the same phenomenon of presence. Gadamer emphasizes in the quote that presence-effects are not at the expense of truth.

In the qualitative corners of the human and social sciences, it is common to think of meaning, interpretation, and agency as the “good” terms (perhaps even emancipatory) in contrast to the “bad,” objectifying terms such as variables, causality, and behavior. I began this article with a similar contrast. What we may learn from Heidegger’s and Gumbrecht’s critiques, however, is that this is just a half-truth because both sets of terms carry the risk of positing human beings uniquely as meaning-making agents in a mute world of resources. If Heidegger is right, however, both sides—the “good” and “bad”—are in a way related to the technological worldview. This is easy to see concerning the “bad” side, as I tried to illustrate above, and there is a long tradition of analyzing positivist science as an ideological construct related to technological dominance and control of nature, including human nature (going back at least to Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944). But technology—in Heidegger’s sense—may also lie behind the interpretative endeavor, if it (technology) indeed is a kind of translational device.

In his Methodology of the Heart, Ron Pelias shows us how this may be understood by claiming the following: “Science is the act of looking at a tree and seeing lumber. Poetry is the act of looking at a tree and seeing a tree” (Pelias, 2004, p. 9). The act of looking at a tree and seeing lumber is a precise example of what Heidegger meant when he described how technology reveals the world, and it is at the same time a hermeneutic act of interpretation. It goes beyond the presence of the tree to interpret its possibilities and its meaning (here, in quite a vulgar instrumental sense). However, the act of looking at it, as a kind of dwelling, in all its noninstrumental presence and “thisness,” is to experience it truly, as a concrete, material entity. This explains what Heidegger meant when he argued that the natural sciences may give us correctness (due to their technological revealing of a world of resources), but poetry and the arts may give us truth because only the latter can reveal the essences of things, made possible by noninstrumental thinking and dwelling. Natural sciences informed by technology give us access to a world of resources, but not to a world of presence. For that, we need to dwell as a kind of patiency.

On resonance: Rosa

To sum up, the argument has been so far that modernity—with its technological understanding of the world—has largely forgotten that the world does not have to be mute world of resources that is given meaning only through human interventions. In its justified ambition to highlight the agentic, tool-using, and hermeneutic dimensions of human existence, cultural psychology should be careful not to forget the other basic modes of existence. If Heidegger’s critique strikes one as philosophically hyperbole, then perhaps Hartmut Rosa’s thorough social scientific analysis of alienation in modernity may come across as more convincing, so this is what I will focus on now.

Rosa has recently published his magnum opus on Resonance in English, which he subtitles “a sociology of our relationship to the world” (Rosa, 2019). The book is in a way a sequel to his previous analysis of social acceleration: The fact that the temporal structure of society has been changing—not least through technological development—leading to the acceleration of almost any life process (Rosa, 2015). The consequences of acceleration are manifold, and Rosa has not only analyzed the current epidemics of stress, burnout, and depression in the light of social acceleration but also the democratic crises in modern societies. Notably, he has argued that alienation is a significant result of acceleration. He defines alienation as “a specific form of relationship to the world in which subject and world confront each other with indifference or hostility (repulsion) and thus without inner connection” (Rosa, 2019, p. 184). Alienation in this sense follows from what he calls “a mute relationship to the world” where “we see things (including other people and our own body) only as resources, instruments, or efficient causes. Our relationships are in this sense reified” (p. 179). It is not primarily from Heidegger that Rosa finds the fuel for his critique, but rather from the German tradition of critical theory going back to the Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer, and later also Habermas and Honneth. But the conclusions are strikingly similar: Understanding the world as resources to be used by humans leads us to think in terms of utility rather than responsiveness, which means that dwelling and noninstrumental thinking are marginalized. Only humans are seen as agents, and things are passive resources.

The solution that Rosa now presents in his new book is called resonance. Gumbrecht’s description of presence (the Mozart example) could have been a prime example of resonance. Resonance is in Rosa’s rendition:

a specifically cognitive, affective, and bodily relationship to the world in which subjects are touched and occasionally even ‘shaken’ down to the neural level by certain segments of the world, but at the same time are also themselves ‘responsively’, actively, and influentially related to the world and experience themselves as effective in it. (Rosa, 2019, p. 163)

Resonance is thus not a discrete feeling, but is a kind of relationship in which we are both af-fected (receptively) and in e-motion (responsively). Rosa borrows the concept of resonance from acoustics and gives the example of a tuning fork that may be struck and put close to another tuning fork, which will then also begin to vibrate at its own frequency. There is resonance when the two of them vibrate together, each at their own frequencies, and in response to the other. This is in contrast to the phenomenon of the echo, which is just mechanically sent back from a surface that does not contribute with anything by itself. With the echo, there is only one active part vis-à-vis a quiet world, but with resonance, both parties are involved in a process of mutuality. The world contributes with something and is not just an empty screen of human meaning construction.

Resonance is for Rosa both a descriptive and a normative concept. It denotes a precondition for human development as children can only develop psychologically if they take part in resonant relationships (rather than simply meeting mechanical echoes), but resonance is more generally also the key ingredient in a good life for human beings in a normative sense. Resonance runs across three axes: A horizontal one, where we may experience resonance in our social relations (we may refer to this as the ethical sphere); a diagonal one, where we may experience resonance in relation to objects, both natural and cultural ones (this is the aesthetic sphere); and finally a vertical one, where resonance is experienced in response to existential and cosmological concerns as a whole (this is the traditional sphere of religion) (Rosa, 2019, p. 195). All axes share the feature that resonance opens up for a world that “speaks” to us (this is a common metaphor used by Rosa.). The world may even come to “sing,” as he puts it, appearing for us as a vibrant, insisting, demanding universe that is not a collection of mute objects to be given meaning only by human constructions, but always already imbued with significance.

Rosa’s analysis of resonance is persuasive, as it both introduces the notion in general, and shows how it manifests itself in processes as diverse as breathing, eating, sex, music, sports, education, and work. The analysis is at the same time deeply critical because Rosa demonstrates how these processes and others in modernity have been subjected to reification, instrumentalization, and alienation, but it is also optimistic in its insistence on resonance as the default mode of relation for humans. A certain romanticism can be found in Rosa’s belief in the authenticity of resonance that is thwarted by social processes: “resonance denotes a primary relation to the world, whereas alienation, however necessarily, always follows processually as an effect of socialization and culture” (Rosa, 2019, p. 372). The human being is born in resonance, but everywhere alienation breaks in. If this is so, it follows that we can regain more resonant experiences to ourselves and the world, but the question then becomes how.

In conclusion: Looking for human patiency

As a sociologist, Rosa (2019) answers this how-question by pointing to social processes: “Relationships to the world are not individual accomplishments, but rather are to a large, perhaps even critical extent culturally and structurally institutionalized” (p. 404). Therefore, unlike individualist practices like mindfulness and other currently popular technologies of self-improvement, Rosa calls for social and cultural change, which will also avoid the paradox that something like mindfulness in itself becomes a tool, although it is perhaps often sought exactly in order to overcome the tool relation to the world. If Rosa is right, then the way to overcome the muteness of the world goes through families, institutions, schools, and workplaces. It needs to involve the political domain, and Rosa very concretely supports a guaranteed basic income for citizens without preconditions. However, especially educational contexts must be designed in a way that makes resonance possible. Teachers have a special responsibility to ensure processes of Bildung in which pupils and students are presented with possibilities of dwelling, thus letting the things of the world show themselves in noninstrumental ways.

In the Twilight of Idols, Nietzsche wrote about the development of a certain kind of patience: “Learning to see – habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality” (1889/1990, p. 75). If one is uncomfortable with the word spirituality in this context, then it may be replaced with ethical formation (Lovibond, 2002) or simply Bildung. As Rosa says about education and resonance:

Educational processes are characterized as successful when they make some specific segment of the world (the world of numbers, the formulas of physics, the mechanics of bacteria, the poetry of Expressionism, the history of the Thirty Years’ War, etc.) “speak,” establishing a responsive relationship between subject matter and learner. (Rosa, 2019, p. 40)

These are the “moments of intensity” that Gumbrecht also talked about when reflecting on what he wanted to convey to his students. A good life demands responsive, noninstrumental relations to the world, which is made possible by cultivating the patiency sides of human being in the world, which again presupposes institutional contexts that are not only focused on transferring tools to learners (who are then to be tested and measured), but rather let some segment of the world “speak” or even “sing.” In these cases, learners may come to see the tree as a tree and not as lumber. Such relationships are also characteristic of good work practices, where the desire to do a job well for its own sake is a basic human impulse (Sennett, 2008). Whenever one is not focused on the “outcome,” but deeply engaged in the process as such, there is likely to be resonance.

Concerning cultural psychology as a discipline, we may conclude that this approach to humans and their minds has to a large degree focused on people as agents, who are forward-oriented and use different tools to accomplish their goals and projects through meaning construction. This has been extremely valuable as a corrective to mechanistic psychologies that operate with variables and look for causal effects. The mechanistic approach reduces the mind to a passive cog in a causal machinery, but there is another risk of reductionism in seeing the mind solely as an active creator of meaning. The latter, I have argued, is a generalization of the very important tool mode of our being that basically reveals the world for us as a set of resources. If the insights of phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Gumbrecht, and Rosa are valid, this perspective should be supplemented with a view of human patiency—a more receptive, contemplative, and “dwelling” mode of being in the world. We need to look for a middle ground between agency and causality, and my suggestion is that we further explore patiency as a fundamental way of being in the world for humans. A pure agency view too easily reduces the world to a set of resources, and a pure causality view risks reducing humans to objects. In both cases, a subject–object dichotomy is installed, whereas notions of patiency and resonance point to processes that are simultaneously active and passive, subjective and objective. Sometimes, humans certainly are agents in the sense of using resources to realize their projects, and sometimes they are affected causally by forces that can be conceived as variables. But many of our experiences are better thought of as in-between these forms. If this dimension of human existence is forgotten, then there is a risk that a theoretical perspective like that of cultural psychology simply comes to function as an ideological construct in a socially accelerating world in which not just human actions are constantly seen as productive, but also humans themselves are reduced to resources to be optimized. A nonreductive view of human beings should underline both dimensions of agency and patiency and resources and resonance.

The kind of patient creature that Heidegger and Nietzsche longed for is certainly out of sync with modernity’s emphasis on activity and control. We need perhaps to uncover the modes of being that were celebrated by the ancients, but largely forgotten today. Nietzsche praised the Greeks of the Homeric age:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity. (Nietzsche, quoted in Dreyfus & Kelly, 2011, p. 164)

It would be disastrous to annul the intellectual gains of cultural psychology and the whole view of humans as interpretative, meaning making creatures. But it would also be a shame not to take into account the other side of our constitution, that is, that having to do with presence, with “stopping courageously at the surface” instead of always insisting on going beyond in interpretative movements. If the world is not a collection of mute things that only come alive through human meaning making, but already a rich and vibrant world that may speak to us if we are only patient enough to listen, then relations of resonance might be possible. Realizing how rich the surface of the world already is would be a profound lesson. This should be an important insight for cultural psychology, and it would be edifying for a humanity as such, if it is true that it longs for resonant and noninstrumental relations to the world.

Future work in this area should address what Gumbrecht called the “nonsemantic” layer of meaning and how this is related to semantic meaning. How are reasons (agency), responsiveness (patiency), and causality (variables) to be integrated in a psychological science? Cultural psychology is certainly capable of addressing biological and physiological preconditions of cultural meanings, for example, as these have been studied in biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008). Meaning does not begin only when someone “means” something but is already present in nature and the phenomenon of life itself, as Jonas (1966) argued. Future inquiries—theoretical as well as empirical—should study the oscillation of agency and patiency in human life, and cultural psychology seems to be well equipped to do exactly this.