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.
Similar content being viewed by others
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).
References
Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). New York: College Publishers.
Boes, T. (2006). Modernist studies and the bildungsroman: a historical survey of critical trends. Literature Compass,3(2), 230–243.
Brewer, D. (2008). The Enligtenment past: reconstructing eighteenth-century French thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Buber, M. (1958). I and thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). New York: Charles Scribners Sons.
Duncan, R. (2008). Life of Pi as postmodern survivor narrative. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal,41(2), 167–183.
Foucault, M. (1998). Structuralism and post-structuralism. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (Vol. 2, pp. 433–458). London: Penguin.
Fox, W. (1990). Transpersonal ecology: “Psychologizing” ecophilosophy. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,22(1), 59–96.
Frow, J. (2014). Character and person. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Hogan, P. C. (2003). The mind and its stories: Narrative universals and human emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1974). Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (M. J. Gregor, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: the ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (J. Miller & S. Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Leibniz, G. W. (2014). Leibniz’s monadology: A new translation and guide. (S. Llyod, Ed. & Trans.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Martel, Y. (2001). Life of Pi. London: Harcourt.
Martel, Y. (2010). Big Think interview with Yann Martel. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/videos/big-think-interview-with-yann-martel. Accessed 5 August 2019.
Moretti, F. (1987). The way of the world: The bildungsroman in European culture. London: Verso Press.
Naess, A. (1987). Self-realisation: An ecological approach to being in the world. The Trumpeter: Voices from the Canadian Ecophilosophy Network,4(3), 35–41.
Plato. (1955). Republic (H. D. P. Lee, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Raz, J. (1986). The morality of freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Renton, J. (2005). Yann Martel interview. Textualities. August 24, 2019. https://textualities.net/jennie-renton/yann-martel-interview. Accessed 28 July 2019.
Velinger, J. (2003). Interpretations of reality: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Radio Prague International in English. https://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/interpretationsof-reality-yann-martels-life-of-pi. Accessed 9 August 2019.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Ascombe, Trans.). New York: Macmillan.
Funding
This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund Project of China (19BWW008).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00530-5