Yochai Ataria

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Tel Hai Academic College

In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Heidegger expresses profound concern that humanity has fallen into a technological mode of being, reducing the world and human beings to mere resources in the pursuit of efficiency. He warns that technology’s dominance alienates us from our true essence and from the world itself. Heidegger often stated...

Following in the footsteps of Stiegler, this essay turns to cutting-edge studies to demonstrate that technologies preceded humans—technologies are the evolutionary engine that made us what (and how) we are, and in fact, technologies are the origin. The ramifications of this idea are radical—it is no longer possible to conceive the cognitive system...

This paper delves into the concept of the uncanny, a theme that has fascinated scholars across multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, literature, and film studies. The study’s primary goal is twofold: to examine the theoretical foundations of the uncanny as explored by Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger, and to propose a new perspective...

This article explores the concept of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) by considering the works of Hoffmann, Jentsch and Freud. Although famously linked with Sigmund Freud, Ernst Jentsch was the first to study and attempt to define uncanniness. However, both Jentsch and Freud drew on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816). While Jentsc...

Human experience is imbued by the sense of being an embodied agent. The investigation of such basic self-consciousness has been hampered by the difficulty of comprehensively modulating it in the laboratory while reliably capturing ensuing subjective changes. The present preregistered study fills this gap by combining advanced meditative states with...

Technology has an internal dynamic and can, undoubtedly, change our way of thinking, but it is far too easy to blame technology rather than take responsibility for our actions.

While the hunter-gatherer theory asserts that humans are above all hunters, so that our evolutionary development is linked to hunting and blood and a very specific kind of masculinity, the gatherer-hunter approach posits that pre-industrial humans were more similar to “noble savages”, as defined by Rousseau. The only advantage offered by the first...

Although more sophisticated than the killer ape hypothesis, the selfish gene theory is not without scientific difficulties, and similarly seeks to absolve us of responsibility for acts of genocide.

The scientific dynamic that led to the development of the atomic bomb is widely considered the culmination of the techno-scientific dynamic. Does this approach absolve humankind of responsibility for the horrors of the twentieth century?

Utopia, associated with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, cannot be thought of but in relation to apocalypse. It thus follows that utopia, “the good place that does not exist”, is also inexorably linked to dystopia, the bad place that very much does exist.

The tendency of scholars to compare humans to the violent male chimpanzee and to ignore our equally close kinship with the relatively non-violent bonobo attests to the fact that the study of human origins has consistently sought to demonstrate the existence of a single trajectory, leading directly from the violent male chimpanzee to the concentrati...

Martin Heidegger was one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. His theory of the essence of technology, not as a tool, but as a total reality, allowed him to completely exonerate the Nazi regime of the horrors it perpetrated and even to blame European Jewry for its own destruction.

Is violence inherent to technology or is technology neutral? Is the desire for self-destruction inherent to human nature? This concluding chapter explores these and other questions in light of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and the works of the popular s...

The more scholarship advances, the blurrier the boundary between Homo sapiens and other species becomes. Our claim to uniqueness is all the more tenuous when even language is no longer a bastion. Could we alone have survived because we are inherently evil?

Dominant scientific theory tends to explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals as the result of Homo sapiens’ first genocide, but there are many other possibilities that have failed to receive sufficient attention.

What is the connection between the atomic bomb and the apocalypse, and is the desire for total annihilation inherent to rationality?

Anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders, yet current approaches (psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioural, biomedical, etc.) have failed to provide a comprehensive theory of the phenomenon or effective methods of treatment. Previous studies on a variety of pathologies (schizophrenia, post-trauma, depersonalization, etc.) have shown that tak...

If we are to understand the premises at the core of debates regarding the philosophy of technology, as in the works of several prominent figures such as Marcuse, Ellul, and Habermas, we must confront Heidegger's philosophical legacy. Based on a broad overview of early and later Heidegger, and some of his notable followers, we argue that Heidegger's...

Human experience is imbued by the implicit sense of being an embodied agent, differentiated from but acting on an external world. Because this basic, embodied sense of self is both pervasive and implicit (i.e., pre-reflective), its investigation requires broad means of manipulation, as well as rigorous first-person methodology for mapping ensuing s...

The natural sciences seek to explain all natural phenomena, including human beings. This lofty objective encompasses the scientific project in all its glory, within which brain science constitutes an integral part. Essentially, however, neuroscientists not only seek to achieve a greater understanding of how the human brain works but rather, and per...

This chapter presents two studies that were carried out in accordance with the phenomenological approach (see Appendix): the first involved interviews with 15 former prisoners of war (POWs) who were imprisoned in Egypt and Syria after the Yom Kippur War (1973), while in the second I interviewed 27 senior meditators with an average of 10,000 hours o...

We cannot reduce consciousness solely to brain activity and we cannot limit consciousness to the head. Consciousness is embedded in the world through the body: we are present in the world in our physical, visceral bodies; first and foremost, we are flesh and blood. Consciousness is not an exception; namely, consciousness is in the midst of the worl...

Based on insights from the interviews conducted with the two study groups, former POWs and long-term meditators, this chapter presents a static structure of human consciousness. Fundamentally, my goal is to present a model of consciousness that seriously considers the subjective experience. This chapter suggests that consciousness can be broken dow...

Are we indeed nothing but an isolated central system inside a brain that happens to have a body? In light of recent technological advancements, this question is not merely hypothetical but rather one that is debated by many philosophers, scientists, and engineers: Can we build a robot that will act like us, will have our abilities but be in its ent...

Miron (Alpayim 10:196–224, 1994, 200) characterizes Ka-Tzetnik as being addicted to ‘kitsch and death’. According to Miron, the same addiction fuelled both his writing and his public persona—culminating in his appearance at the Eichmann trial. This is a grave accusation. Miron and those who share his criticism effectively argue that because (a) Ka-...

The attempt to write about ‘what happened there’ can be a process of working through and recovery. At times, however, the process of writing not only about the death camps but from within them as well may result in a process whereby the survivor repeatedly re-enacts (acts out) death. A well-known and generally accepted point of view in the field of...

While Levi’s suicide was a scandal, Améry’s suicide was reasonable, almost necessary (that is, if we accept the Theory—that writing generated by acting out can lead to loss of self). Indeed, Améry would have been the first to sign a declaration that no one wants survivors of his kind. The difference between Levi and Améry is clear. For example, it...

As we have seen in Chap. 7, even if Levi did commit suicide, his philosophy need not automatically be associated with the manner of his death. For those who do see a connection between Levi’s writing and his suicide, however, the specific method by which he chose to end his life becomes significant. As a chemist, it would surely have been easier fo...

Shivitti (Hatsofen—The Code) is about Ka-Tzetnik’s terrible nightmare: ‘being called by my own name, waiting naked to see eyeball to eyeball the most horrifying of all my fears—the secret revealed; the secret of the nightmares that had visited me night after night these last thirty years’ (Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti: A vision. Trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur a...

This chapter explores the nature of the connection between Levi and Kafka. As we will see, when Levi translated The Trial in the summer of 1982, he began to identify with the novel’s protagonist, Joseph K. As he worked on the translation, Levi underwent a metamorphosis, ultimately conceding the necessity, even inevitability of the story’s ending. I...

The world of the camps, Levi claimed, cannot be ‘reduced to two blocs’. Indeed, one of the crushing blows upon entering the camps was the ‘concentric aggression at the hands of the very persons in whom you had hoped to find future allies’ (Levi, The complete works of Primo Levi. Ed. Ann Goldstein. Various translators. 3 vols. New York: Liveright, 2...

Both Levi and Ka-Tzetnik agree that the Muselmann is not merely an accident or a by-product of the totalitarian state and progress, but proof of the successful implementation of the principle of ‘progress through technology’, taken to a twisted extreme in the context of totalitarianism. That said, it is clear why they believe that the Muselmann is...

We know that memory can be deceptive; nevertheless we continue to trust it. Traumatic memory can be particularly deceptive, to the point that survivors of extreme trauma may lose confidence in their own memories, uncertain whether the event they remember happened as they remember it. They may even doubt whether the event happened at all, or whether...

Primo Levi died on 11 April 1987 at 10:05 in Torino, in the house where he was born and lived nearly his entire life. Although there is no absolute proof that it was suicide, few scholars doubt that Levi indeed killed himself. We should therefore say that Primo Levi committed suicide on 11 April 1987 at 10:05 in Torino, in the house where he was bo...

In this chapter, which is a reflection on the second part of the book, I will try to show that Levi was motivated by an obsession to explain Auschwitz. Although he may in fact have succeeded in explaining Auschwitz, at least to some extent, it came at a high price, too high: the inability to explain the behaviour of Lorenzo, the Italian civilian wo...

Salamandra (1946; Eng. Sunrise over Hell, 1977) was one of the first books about the Holocaust to appear in Hebrew and is certainly one of the best known. It is an extreme work by any standard, and many subsequent books on the subject of the Holocaust may very well have been understated precisely in reaction to this work. The Salamandra series—comp...

Body schema refers to the system of sensory-motor functions that enables control of the position of body parts in space, without conscious awareness of those parts. Body image refers to a conscious representation of the way the body appears—a set of conscious perceptions, affective attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own bodily image. In 200...

A fundamental aspect of the sense of self is its pre-reflective dimension specifying the self as a bounded and embodied knower and agent. Being a constant and tacit feature structuring consciousness, it eludes robust empirical exploration. Recently, deep meditative states involving global dissolution of the sense of self have been suggested as a pr...

A considerable number of studies have attempted to account for the psychotic aspects of schizophrenia in terms of the influential predictive coding (PC) hypothesis. We argue that the prediction-oriented perspective on schizophrenia-related psychosis may benefit from a mechanistic model that: 1) gives due weight to the extent to which alterations in...

A fundamental aspect of the sense of self is its pre-reflective dimension specifying the self as a bounded and embodied knower and agent. Being a constant and tacit feature structuring consciousness, it eludes robust empirical exploration. Recently, deep meditative states involving global dissolution of the sense of self have been suggested as a pr...

This paper argues that severe and ongoing trauma (SOT) can lead to impairment at the level of the minimal self (MS), which is the core element in the structure of subjectivity. In the long-term, such impairments can result in complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and schizophrenia. The paper tackles this issue while trying to create meanin...

Body image (BI) and body schema (BS) refer to two different yet closely related systems. Whereas BI can be defined as a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one's own body, BS is a system of sensory-motor capacities that functions without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. Studies have demonstrated that appl...

This paper is a practical guide to neurophenomenology. Varela’s neurophenomenological research program (NRP) aspires to bridge the gap between, and integrate, first-person (1P) and third-person (3P) approaches to understanding the mind. It does so by suggesting a methodological framework allowing these two irreducible phenomenal domains to relate a...

This paper describes the phenomenology of the prisoner in the Gulag. In this extreme situation, the prisoner is reduced to the body-as-an-object and, as a result, develops a strong sense of hostility towards the body. In cognitive terms, this mechanism can be defined as body-disownership.

Based on his own experience, Jean Améry (At the Mind’s Limits, 1980) argued that torture is “the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself” (p. 22). This paper, relying largely on Améry’s own words, investigates this statement and seeks to provide it with a more concrete basis in phenomenology and embodied cognition. In particular...

In his article entitled "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", David Chalmers divides the study of consciousness into two parts: the easy problems and the hard problems. The easy problems are those related to neurological/functional/cognitive processes. In contrast, the hard problem is the study of consciousness which is related to the subjec...

Based on the experience of innocent individuals who were arrested and sent to the Gulag, this paper examines the transformation from being human to being nonhuman. It suggests that during this process, one shifts from belonging to nonbelonging. As a result, similarly to Winston Smith–Orwell’s hero in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the prisoner is...

This chapter examines the role of the witness as a narrator, writer, and historian through a comparison of the writings and testimony of Primo Levi and those of Georges Perec. Despite the significant differences between the two, which cannot be ignored, both Levi and Perec focus on the role and the ability of the witness to provide authentic testim...

This response confronts some crucial questions raised by the reviewers: (a) Can the phenomenological approach be applied to the study of trauma? (b) What is the exact meaning of the term “traumatic event? (c) Is our phenomenological approach too thin? (d) What is the nature of the proposed cognitive bridge - what else is needed? (e) Is the shared w...

Although trauma research has advanced immensely, the struggle to find effective treatment for posttraumatic survivors continues. It seems reasonable to say that, at present, our ability to treat those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is, at the very least, limited. Problem: We argue that in order to confront the current crisis in...

Complex posttraumatic stress disorder, depersonalization, and schizophrenia are not identical phenomena, yet this article suggests that they nevertheless share at least one feature; in all these cases, the body becomes a defective tool, an IT. In turn, those suffering from these phenomena (e.g., complex posttraumatic stress disorder, depersonalizat...

This volume explores themes originating from the work of Jean Améry (1912–1978), a Holocaust survivor and essayist—mainly, ethics and the past, torture and its implications, death and suicide. The volume is interdisciplinary, bringing together contributions from philosophy, psychology, law, and literary studies to illuminate each of the topics from...

The sense of helplessness stands at the very core of the traumatic experience. This paper suggests that a sense of helplessness arises when, despite the functioning of the cognitive system and awareness of circumstances and feelings, an individual is unable to access practical knowledge. As a result, the subject becomes a victim of one’s own inabil...

institute of science, Rehovot, israel; b Tel-hai college, Kiryat shemoneh, israel; c The open University of israel, Ra'anana, israel ABSTRACT The sense of helplessness stands at the very core of the traumatic experience. This paper suggests that a sense of helplessness arises when, despite the functioning of the cognitive system and awareness of ci...

This chapter argues that while in certain cases, self-injuring behavior can be considered adaptive, when the self-harmer has a background of severe and prolonged trauma, the self-injuring behavior is based on the mechanism of body-disownership.

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma—particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)—from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus produci...

Marking the 40th anniversary of Améry’s suicide, we invite papers for a special volume (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan) exploring the many faces of Améry’s thought.

Marking the 40th anniversary of Améry’s suicide, we invite papers for a special volume (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan) exploring the many faces of Améry’s thought.

Diana Gasparyan's target article aims to offer a new model for consciousness. However, it also raises some philosophical and methodological concerns, which will be the subject of my commentary.

This book describes the diverse manifestations of trauma and the ways in which trauma has shaped-and dismantled-our culture. Yochai Ataria describes how we are addicted to trauma and have become both its avid producers and consumers. Consequently, the culture in which we live has become posttraumatic in the deepest sense. This is apparent in the pr...

This chapter examines Kafka’s last major novel, The Castle. I contend that the relationship between K. and Klamm represents the split in the posttraumatic individual in the postmodern age. This is a condition in which the self is split and human beings find themselves in an impossible inner struggle toward a single goal—destruction of the self—beca...

This chapter examines a new character, Lola from the movie Run Lola Run—a character that moves to the beat of techno, the language of trauma, and, by so doing, manages to revive the human heart and save her man. She does this not by disregarding the virtual world in which we live, but rather by crossing, and thus eliminating, the lines between “tru...

Throughout the book, I emphasize the connection between the concepts of the postraumatic individual on the one hand and the posttraumatic culture on the other hand, even though the shift from individual to society is not at all clear in this context. In this chapter, then, I examine how trauma can shift from the individual to society. I bring up wh...

This chapter examines the relationship between silence and trauma and discusses the possibility of expressing trauma through silence. This chapter proposes an alternative for the posttraumatic subject—to choose silence. Indeed, in a world in which human beings are sent to die for “justifiable reasons,” the very use of words constitutes a form of co...

This chapter introduces the new leader of anarchy—Tyler Durden, protagonist of the movie Fight Club. Tyler is the direct outcome of the posttraumatic structure of Western capitalist monotheistic culture, and particularly of characters like Camus’ Meursault and Kurtz from the movie Apocalypse Now. In this chapter, I discuss the character of the post...

This chapter focuses on Larry, the protagonist of the movie A Serious Man. Larry moves along two main axes. One is his professional life, and specifically his application for tenure in the academic world of science. The other is his private life, and particularly his son Danny’s bar mitzvah. The tension in the film is between the world of religion...

This chapter is based on research conducted among returned prisoners of war (POWs) who had been held captive in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. The main insight of this chapter is that postmodern individuals are primarily posttraumatic individuals who as prisoners have lived their lives with uncertainty, fear of death, and the dissolution of a sense of...

This chapter examines three writers: Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and Michel Houellebecq. In Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, we encounter the character Hans. Hans represents the traumatic figure immediately before the moment of pleasurable death. From there I go on to Camus and to Meursault, hero of The Stranger, who signifies humanity’s shift from...

This chapter explores male characters during and after the Vietnam War through an examination of post-Vietnam movies such as The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now, in an attempt to characterize the total collapse of manhood. The discussion focuses on the polarization of the posttraumatic figure, which leads to the ultimate understanding...

This chapter presents three models: (a) the story of the Binding of Isaac—the Akeda. This story exposes the primordial trauma that has shaped Western culture; (b) Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return; and (c) the Kafkaian ever-present sense of guilt. Through an understanding of these models, we can begin to describe the traumatic origins of Weste...

In 1996 Varela established the neurophenomenology research programme (NRP). This project was not designed to solve what Chalmers has defined as the hard problem, but rather to offer a methodological remedy for this problem. The NRP seeks to bridge the explanatory gap by creating a reciprocal dialogue between the first-person perspective on the one...

Self-specific processes (SSPs) specify the self as an embodied subject and agent, implementing a functional self/nonself distinction in perception, cognition, and action. Despite recent interest, it is still undetermined whether SSPs are all-or-nothing or graded phenomena; whether they can be identified in neuroimaging data; and whether they can be...

Following the Vietnam War, the white male in America was defeated and humiliated, having undergone severe trauma of paternal loss and with this the loss of the entire patriarchal value system symbolized by the father. The soldier, defeated and lost, finds that he is no longer surrounded by his brothers in arms. Rather he is alone with his pain and...

This chapter examines the role of the witness as a narrator, writer, and historian through a comparison of the writings and testimony of Primo Levi and those of Georges Perec. Despite the significant differences between the two, which cannot be ignored, both Levi and Perec focus on the role and the ability of the witness to provide authentic testim...

This article suggests that, after severe and prolonged trauma (which, for the sake of simplicity, is referred to herein as trauma type II), cognitive resources are depleted and the victim is completely dependent on her persecutor. This, in turn, may cause the victim to develop a feeling of disownership toward the entire body. The central claim made...

With the advance of science, the concept of “the self” as some kind of separate Cartesian entity appears increasingly implausible. Nevertheless, it is hard to dismiss the intuition that an entity which can be classified as “the self” does indeed exist, independent of the body (the dualistic stance). This paper argues that the self-body separation i...

The goal of this study was to examine the bidirectional relationships between humor and trauma-related psychopathology (posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], depression, and anxiety symptoms) among 105 dyads consisting of Israelis who were injured during terror attacks and their spouses (N = 210). An actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) was a...

This study examined the relationships between dissociation and posttraumatic stress (PTSD) symptoms among injured survivors of terror attacks and their spouses (N = 210), specifically exploring survivor-spouse dyadic associations. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) were used to test the bidirection...

This study examined the relationships between dissociation and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among injured survivors of terror attacks and their spouses (N = 210), specifically exploring survivor–spouse dyadic associations. Structural equation modeling and the actor–partner interdependence model were used to test the bidirectional d...

This paper applies the concept of being-in-the-world, in particular the notion that we are in the world through our body, to the study of trauma. Since (i) trauma is experienced and remembered bodily, and since (ii) we are in the world through our bodies, for the post-traumatic survivor the body itself can become a source of pain and unstructured-b...

This paper suggests that during severe and prolonged traumatic experiences such as trauma type II, one may develop disownership toward the entire body. In this situation one’s body becomes a pure object and as such an integral part of the hostile environment. This article applies Merleau-Ponty’s approach to perception in order to improve our unders...

במאמר זה נבחן את תפקיד העֵד כמספר, כסופר וכהיסטוריון תוך השוואה בין פרימו לוי לבין ז'ורז' פֶּרֶק. לטענתי, משום שהעֵד הוא גם ההיסטוריון של עצמו, אין הוא עֵד תמים. עם זאת הן לוי והן פֶּרֶק, כל איש בדרכו, מציעים מודל אותנטי של עדות. לוי מסר עדות מתוך תחושת אלביתי וכתיבתו חרדה מהאין ומהשתיקה, ואילו פֶּרֶק התמודד עם החרדה הזו וכתב את )ולא רק על( השתיקה...

At present, due in part to our insufficient understanding of the traumatic experience, we are unable to account for the fact that while some people develop post-traumatic symptoms following a traumatic event, others do not. This article suggests that by adopting the enactive approach to perception—according to which perceiving is a way of acting—we...

Muselmann was a term used in German concentration camps to describe prisoners near death due to exhaustion, starvation, and helplessness. This paper suggests that the inhuman conditions in the concentration camps resulted in the development of a defensive sense of disownership toward the entire body. The body, in such cases, is reduced to a pure ob...