The Santorini Experiment: How Philosophy Ended its Ancient Quarrel with Theatre

Abstract

In July 2009, a group of actors and philosophers met on the island of Santorini, under the direction of voice teacher Kristin Linklater, to explore links between the theatre’s approach to truth and philosophy’s. Linklater’s voice exercises were to be the bridge. Surprisingly, there was a meeting of mind and body—and some mutual understanding between theatre and philosophy.

Question: why would ten actors from half a dozen different countries, five professors of philosophy from the United States, Canada, Italy, and South Africa, the director of Switzerland’s leading research institute on neuroinformatics, and a professor of theatre at Columbia University meet on the rim of a slumbering volcano in the Aegean Sea? Answer: to challenge one of the basic precepts dominating Western philosophy for the last two-and-a-half thousand years.

It was in the fifth century BCE that Plato declared menacingly that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Unlike philosophers, who wanted the truth to emerge from rational argument, poets, actors, and orators, he alleged, used their talents to inspire or bamboozle their audiences for their own satisfaction, without regard for the truth. Consequently they, and indeed artists of all kinds, were to be banned from Plato’s ideal republic. Ever since the founder of Western philosophical thought pronounced his fatwa, the divide has remained unbridged.

Both sides aim to discover truths about the human condition, to consider how desirable ends like freedom can flourish, and to grapple with the deceptive differences between thought, speech, and the reality of the outside world. “The theatre is the place where people come to see the truth about life and the social situation,” Marlon Brando’s drama coach, Stella Adler, used to insist (Obituary, Stella Adler), and Oxford University’s professor of logic, Michael Dummett, suggested much the same goal for his teaching: “Philosophy attempts, not to discover new truths about the world, but to gain a clear view of what we already know and believe about it” (Pyke). But while one side relies on reason and logic, the other prizes emotion and art, and neither accepts the value of the other’s methods.

Consequently, when the actress Salomé M. Krell and her father, Professor David Farrell Krell, former chair of the philosophy faculty at DePaul University in Chicago, decided in 2009 to bring both sides together for a week of intensive study on the island of Santorini, they were flying not only in the face of history, but also of epistemology, the nature of knowledge. “I grew up among philosophers,” Salomé Krell explained; “they came to stay with us, Jacques Derrida was a family friend. It seemed weird to me that there should be no connection between what I learned and experienced then and what I do in the theatre now.”

The inspiration for the Santorini Voice Symposium came from a theatre workshop on voice that both the Krells attended in 2008 (Salomé as a participant and her father as an audience member). To Professor Krell, an authority on, and prolific translator of, European philosophy, including philosophy of voice, it was obvious that the physical nature of the voice training overlapped with texts on language by the German existentialist Martin Heidegger, and those on the body by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. To investigate the connection, he recruited a cross-section of philosophers, while his daughter brought in a cast of actors and voice teachers from Europe, Australia, as well as the United States. “I don’t know what’s going to happen” David Krell admitted shortly before the participants began to assemble. “Clearly there is a history of suspicion or incomprehension, that’s Plato’s legacy. But I’m sure we’ll make some connections; these are all exceptional people.” He paused, as though considering the chances of a successful outcome. “I keep telling everyone, it’s just going to be a beach party with kindred spirits.”

His effort to downplay expectations was understandable. And the extent of the gap to be bridged became physically apparent once the participants were assembled. What sort of connections could be expected between Corrado Fortuna, a dark, brooding, thirty-one-year-old Italian film actor with two movies in the 2009 Venice Film Festival, and Professor Walter Brogan, who at sixty-four was the white-haired doyen of the philosophy department at Villanova University and a renowned authority on Heidegger? How was the learning of Professor Angelica Nuzzo, with doctorates from both the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Universität Heidelberg, and philosophical command of German Idealism, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, supposed to mesh with the internationally recognized expertise of Susan Main, a feisty thirty-five-year- old actress and designated Linklater voice teacher based in New York?

Among the non-philosophers there was a mixture of bewilderment and suspicion. “I don’t really see the point of philosophy,” said Marie-Louise Avery, who was photographing the event. “It just complicates things that should be straightforward. If you’re trying to work out whether someone’s right or wrong, or making sense, you use your experience and your judgment. Why go back to Plato?” For Susan Main, philosophers were not only irrelevant, but threatening. “I know they’re going to make me feel stupid,” she prophesied. “Once they start talking, my mind’s going to close down, and I’m going to sit there thinking, I’m an idiot.”

The location itself added to the existentialist or, for the theatricals, the Prosperolike nature of the meeting. Consisting of little more than half of the rim of a volcano pushing out of the Aegean Sea, Santorini not only appears too precarious to be quite real, but also is considered the most plausible site for the legendary civilization of Atlantis that was abruptly engulfed by the sea. Whether Atlantis ever existed may be questioned, but there is no doubt that Santorini was once a thriving commercial society serving the more famous Cretan empire at Knossos seventy miles to the south. In about 1650 BCE, a series of massive eruptions vapourized the island, throwing around fifteen cubic miles of magma and rock into the atmosphere and leaving a 1,300-foot-deep crater that was suddenly flooded by the sea. The island’s wealthy cityport of Akrotiri was buried in ash, and the resultant tsunamis triggered the end of Crete’s Minoan culture. Layers of creamy ash and black-and-red melted rock rising hundreds of feet up from the sea testify to the violence of the eruption. Since then periodic convulsions have shaken the island, the most recent in 1950, and the volcano’s continuing activity is revealed by the sulphur springs bubbling up beside a steaming vent in the centre of the sea-filled crater. It made an apt setting for what lay ahead. The ancient quarrel might continue to simmer quietly, or it might suddenly erupt. No one could be sure.

What made the Santorini experiment unique was its goal of finding common ground in the methods of working. Attempts at bridge-building have been made before. Generations of philosophers have used Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy to examine the nature of consciousness, theatres have repeatedly staged versions of the Socratic dialogues, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, with its well-known line “Hell is other people,” was existentialism as drama. But these were concerned with the finished product; they rendered theatre philosophical, or philosophy a subject of drama. Whether the theatre had anything to teach philosophy, and vice versa, about its way of exploring the nature of reality was another matter.

Two apparently insuperable obstacles had to be overcome. The first was to find a way of fitting the direct emotional response that is the theatre’s lifeblood into philosophy’s rigorous methodology. The latter requires an idea to be examined rationally, not only in relation to the text in which it appears but also in relation to previous commentaries on the text, and to other works by the same author. The variety of elucidations is as valuable as the final synthesis. Its purpose, in the succinct summation of Oxford’s Professor Dummett, is to attain “a more explicit grasp of the structure of our thoughts; and that in turn [depends] on discovering how to give a systematic account of the working of language, the medium in which we express our thoughts” (Pyke). Thus, forensic intelligence is prized, but not the philosopher’s tendency to weeping or laughter.

The second obstacle was to find a proper place for logic in the theatre’s transformation of words into a physical performance that will move, inspire, or entertain an audience. “Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream,” Lee Strasberg, founder of the Method school of acting, once said. “In life the stimuli to which we respond are always real, [while] the actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing” (78). The primary means has always been to tap into the actor’s emotional resources, through imagination, or through access to what Strasberg’s mentor, Constantin Stanislavski, called “affective memory.” It was not a method likely to commend itself to rationalists. “We do reality,” one of the Santorini philosophers remarked, only half-jokingly; “we leave imagination to Disney.”

Nevertheless, the formal title of the workshop, “The Santorini Voice Symposium,” revealed the one interest shared by the two groups. Both theatre and philosophy require voice. Presiding over the confrontation, therefore, was Kristin Linklater, professor of theatre at Columbia University, whose book Freeing the Natural Voice has been a seminal text in American theatre, selling more than 100,000 copies in English, with translations in use by Russian, German, French, and Italian actors. (At this point I should declare my interest, and experience, as her admiring if occasionally carping younger brother.) Forceful, silver-haired, clad in flowing, multicoulored shawls, shifts, and harem pants, Linklater combines exuberant authority with a born teacher’s capacity for pinpoint concentration upon each of her student’s needs. Before she had even arrived, her work was the subject of anxious discussion. Based on Kristin Linklater’s lifelong interest in the physical consequences of the impulse to speak, the Linklater training explores the locks that inhibit the body’s response to thought and feeling. To the philosophers’ alarm, it was rumoured that once these locks were opened cathartic tears might be the result. “Oh nonsense, none of us knows the outcome,” Linklater said briskly when questioned. “We’re involved in an experiment without an hypothesis. It’s the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the purest kind of philosophy.”

The overture to a volcanic week was gentle. On the first morning the strangers introduced themselves to one another in the courtyard of modern Akrotiri’s local school. In a variety of accents, each spoke his or her name, then challenged the others to shout it aloud, before playing a children’s game of throwing a ball to one another, crying out the name of the person to whom they threw it. Bathed in the warm air, lifted by the eye-watering blue sky above and dazzling white walls around, their suspicions began to dwindle.

The schedule allocated mornings to the theatre. As the group stretched and breathed and hummed “aaahs” into the sunshine, it was clear that Linklater’s exercises were aimed at making her students physically aware that not just the mouth, but every part of the body is involved in making sound. It was also clear that she was taking no cerebral prisoners. “This body is who I am,” Linklater insisted, and as for the place where thinking took place, the philosopher’s ivory tower, “this head,” she said dismissively, “is just a periscopic addition, it’s just guiding me around.” During a break, she set the group a small challenge: what did each person fear most about the week ahead? The answers offered a hint of the nightmares lurking within: embarrassment from the philosophers, intellectual inadequacy from the actors.

The battle-lines appeared that same afternoon. This was scheduled to be the philosophers’ slot. First up was Professor David Krell himself. Gentle, approachable, with a pony-tail and a white-toothed grin that belied his deep erudition, he delivered a paper that considered the theme of Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice in relation to continental philosophy’s treatment of speech, an exploration that extended from Plato’s Phaedo to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phénomènologie de la Perception. With great subtlety, he teased out the differences between thought and language, and the way that thinking—Socrates’s “silent discourse with the soul”—was treated by philosophy as an activity divorced from any physical context.

But, as Krell himself admitted, “as a philosopher, I had to formulate my thoughts and write them down, that’s what philosophers do.” Read in the stifling heat of the Akrotiri school, his paper, with its feast of textual allusion, had a soporific effect. At first the actors politely acted interest, but as the curtains keeping out the afternoon sun flapped heavily in the hot breeze, their looks grew fixed, their eyes glazed, and their bodies slumped. In theatrical terms at least, it was clear that Krell had lost most of his audience. Although his fellow philosophers responded, discussing the meanings inherent in such words as natural and freedom, Linklater appeared to take his formal approach as a challenge. The thespians would now show the philosophers what they did.

In the final episode of the day, then, she led the actors into a demanding vocal exercise requiring them to imagine that each part of their anatomy had a voice anxious to contact a friend. From the imagined mouths in shoulders, bellies, knees and ankles arose a cacophony of yells, screams, and roars that echoed, ringing, around the stone-floored schoolroom. To the watchers, the philosophers, trapped at the far end of the room, the savage movements and deafening sounds became a monstrous, lunatic assault. For at least one philosopher, it became intolerable. Contorted with pain, Professor Angelica Nuzzo from the Graduate School of the City University of New York ran out of the building. But there was no respite. The onslaught continued with an unrehearsed group improvisation around Ted Hughes’s translation of the myth of the birth of Semele. Through a frenzy of wild exertion and dislocated speech emerged terrifying scenes of rape, murder, and agonized birth. Participants and audience alike were engulfed in the explosion of noise and fury.

There was a bruised atmosphere when the group met in the school courtyard the next morning. Nuzzo, who has a herniated disc in her back, confessed that she had felt the noise reverberating in her spine. “It was torture to be sitting back there,” she told the others; “literally I was absorbing what you were disordering. I had to leave.” The lively, almost birdlike attentiveness of her face crumpled in remembered agony. In more measured tones, Dr. Kevin Miles, an expert in Greek philosophy, described his empathic distress, comparing it to the experience of watching a troupe of blindfolded dancers performing on a stage covered with broken glass. But the actors had also been jarred. Few had worked together before, and to improvise as a group before an audience left them exposed, like “becoming a child,” said KK Moggie, a thoughtful Malaysian-New Zealand actress. Linklater was unrepentant. “Yes, I think it was deliberate,” she later remarked of the exercise. “I wanted to do some kind of full-on, in-your- face exercise to jolt people out of their protective selves. We don’t have much time together on Santorini so it had to be quite confrontational.”

Certainly, sharing the convulsive episode seemed to create some sort of bond. As they took part in Linklater’s explorations of the physical nature of sound, a mood of companionship began to emerge among the actors and philosophers. The exercises were soothing and meditative. Inwardly watching where breath went. Listening to the murmured sound of an escaping sigh. Stretching in a yawn. Hanging the head from a relaxed spine. Lying on the warm ground, simply breathing. The goal, as Linklater repeatedly emphasized, was to make the participants aware of the adjustments that occurred throughout the body in response to the impulse to speak, as breath passed in and out, as ribs and diaphragm expanded and contracted, as muscles tensed and slackened. Soon, an unmistakable harmony seemed to reign over the Santorini experiment.

When partners were needed to detect the vibrations of a hum in the head, or to feel the vertebrae in a bent spine, actors and philosophers intermingled. Salomé Krell held the head of Molly Painter-Morland, DePaul University’s professor of ethical philosophy; and Rob Pensalfini, director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble in Australia, manipulated Walter Brogan’s spine. By the end of the morning session, the physicality of the work had apparently transformed the group’s mood. Formerly stiff-backed academics were moving more loosely, and as Walter Brogan happily remarked after experiencing the resonance of his humming, “I’m tone-deaf, I’ve never felt notes before. But this morning I could feel them for the first time. You know, I believe there may be possibilities there.” The afternoon talk would show whether the actors were making similar discoveries.

As it happened, the next speaker was Angelica Nuzzo, scheduled to give a paper on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a task made more daunting by the need to relate it to the voice work in which she and her audience had been engaged. With a bravura display of confidence, Nuzzo junked her paper in favour of a conversational musing on the pleasure she took both in abstract thought and the discipline of yoga, and the way this affected her understanding of the philosopher’s notorious distrust of physicality. Deftly unpicking Kant’s texts, she showed that despite this suspicion, he made assumptions about the body’s physical awareness that were essential to his fundamental belief that the outside world could be understood morally and intellectually by a rational mind. “If the body is so important to all this,” she concluded, “we need to listen to the body.”

Nuzzo’s attempt to reach out to listeners with no background in philosophy had an unexpectedly explosive effect. It began with a question from Valentina Cervi, a clever actress who starred in Spike Lee’s latest movie, Miracle at St. Anna. Picking up on Nuzzo’s final words, she said, “In the voice training, I know that I need to listen to my body, so I want to know, doesn’t the body have a mind?” In proper philosophical fashion, Nuzzo began to distinguish the differences between the immaterial mind and the physical body, but as she spoke Cervi suddenly sensed that here was someone who had read widely and thought carefully about these subjects. In growing excitement she fired a volley of questions at the philosopher, “So, is my brain the same as my mind? If my brain is part of my body, is my mind too? And the spirit, that’s also in my body?”

Two-and-a-half thousand years dissolved in an instant. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates grapples with the same questions and, except for the new light that neuroscience has thrown on the composition and working of the brain, the nature of the discussion conducted by Professor Nuzzo had not substantially changed. On the face of it, philosophy and theatre had found a bond. Yet the Socratic dialogs were designed to demonstrate the superiority of reason as a way of arriving at answers to such questions. Their inescapable end was to sideline emotion. So long as the schoolroom debate was conducted exclusively in terms of logic, it seemed destined to slip into the same pattern. Gradually, the subjects being discussed became increasingly abstract. As they did so, Linklater’s frustration grew, and when the time came for another actors’ exercise her feelings could no longer be hidden.

“I don’t know if I have anything more to contribute,” she finally burst out. “We spend three hours every morning trying to attune our mind’s attention to what is happening to our body when we want to speak. But none of that is coming through here.” Her voice trembled with fury. “I feel impotent. I am involved in the breath and the voice, but that’s not what’s being discussed. I want new words to describe the way thought works on the body—that’s what I hoped the philosophers would provide—but it’s not happening. Until we get these terms involved in our discussion, I don’t think I can go on.” Her anger caused consternation. The philosophers in particular, having seen Nuzzo abandon much of their methodology—the dry, impersonal paper, the detailing of references, the rigorous questioning about meanings—in order to meet the actors on their ground, felt bewildered. “Perhaps frustration is part of the process,” suggested Professor Painter-Morland. “For the philosophers, the noise last night was frustration. We’re dealing with language, and that’s about relationships, and, let’s face it, relationships are difficult.”

But Linklater would not back down. “I’ve spent the last half-hour just feeling stupid,” she objected, and her irritation seemed to set off the actors. Fearful of betraying her incomprehension of Kant’s work, KK Moggie had felt her heart racing, as she later confessed, and had hardly been able to breathe. “I’ve been feeling paralyzed with stupidity for the last two hours,” she exclaimed. And all Susan Main’s nightmares had returned. “This whole time I’ve been repressing questions out of a feeling of stupidity,” she said, clutching at her throat. “I feel so damn stupid, it’s like a beast in my throat, I cannot speak.”

The gap seemed unbridgeable. The philosophers could try to follow the actors’ physical training, but they couldn’t abandon abstract reasoning. The actors could ask philosophical questions, but they needed to understand the answers on an emotional level. In the angry silence, it seemed as though the Krells’ daring experiment had failed.

The tension that erupted in the Akrotiri schoolroom had a wider significance. It reflected the conflicts within a growing range of reason-based disciplines that have been forced to discover ways of incorporating emotional behaviour within their remit. The pressure comes partly from the inadequacies of existing methods to take account of reality, and partly from the astonishing expansion of knowledge about the physical working of the brain. In economics, for example, the inability of economists to predict the shape of the 2008 recession has focused attention on the shortcomings of purely math-based economic theory, exemplified by the reliance of hedge funds on the flawed Black-Scholes equation to predict risk in the stock market, and the failure to give adequate weight to the aspirations and fears of millions of homeowners. In biology, where Jane Goodall, founder of modern primatology, was once disparaged for ascribing the emotion of awe to a chimpanzee observing a waterfall, an increasing number of scientists involved in animal studies now follow her lead. “We’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species,” insists Dr. Toni Frohoff, a marine biologist specializing in whale studies. “We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use” (Siebert). Paradoxically, it is in the rapidly developing field of neuroscience that this change of attitude is most apparent. “Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings,” Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, explained recently, “feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it. Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it” (Carey). Nevertheless, none of these developments has taken place without fierce and continuing controversy about the apparent blurring of well-established disciplinary boundaries. Philosophy’s traditions are older than those of economics, biology, or neuroscience, and, as the source of rational thinking, the consequences stretched further.

The first voice to break into the charged atmosphere of the schoolroom was conciliatory. “I want to celebrate something here this evening that’s very rare,” said Rob Pensalfini. “I want to celebrate the willingness of people from utterly different disciplines to talk to each other.” His large wrestler’s frame, black beard, and waist-length hair ensured that Pensalfini would not be overlooked, but more importantly, with a doctorate in linguistics from MIT and experience as a theatre director, he had a foot in both camps. “We need to build on that goodwill.” In the moment of surprise that followed his words, Brogan reached out. “You know, when I find a new text by Hegel, it’s still just as difficult to take in,” he confessed. “In your terms, it still makes me feel stupid. But what I’ve learned is to be comfortable with the unfamiliarity of what it is saying. If I keep working at it something will come out of it.”

Quite suddenly, the tension in the room dissipated. Awkwardly at first, but with growing warmth, the two sides began to discuss ways round the impasse. Eventually, they accepted that the meeting point must be the influence of thought on the voice. How this was to be achieved remained a mystery. But at least they agreed upon the goal. As it transpired, the actual junction could not have been thought out; it could only be acted out.

By the fourth day, the understanding that everyone was engaged in a joint project had focused the mood. In her voice work, Linklater concentrated on the physical changes that occur in response to the impulse to make different sounds. To create a high-pitched note, for example, the soft palate at the back of the mouth lifts. Using a mirror made it possible to see that the mere intention to sing higher was sufficient to move the soft palate. The visual evidence confirmed the sequence of impulse, physical reaction, and sound that is central to Linklater’s work.

What this meant in philosophical terms emerged from Professor Mollie Painter- Morland’s talk. On the face of it, she was examining the voice in relation to semiotics, the discipline that treats language as a kind of code made up of sounds and symbols. Out of the hums, sighs, and yells of the voice work come words and speech, the basic semiotic material that enables one person to communicate with another. Hierarchy, however, has been built into language, both into its grammar and into the relationship between speaker and listener, a link that Professor Painter-Morland labelled “relational space.” So far, so abstract. But two examples from her past demonstrated the huge emotional content that gave meaning to her intellectual concept.

Painter-Morland grew up in South Africa speaking Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language of the first European settlers in the region. As her first language, it had an immediacy that English lacked. She was particularly aware of this as a teenager when her father, a minister in the Dutch Reformed church, remonstrated with her for her increasingly rebellious behaviour. “He would use this hard, jutting, masculine voice, his minister’s voice, laying down the law,” she recalled. “And as he spoke he would put one foot on a chair, so that he appeared even more dominant.” The patriarchal nature of that relational space was unmistakable. But it was the nature of the girl’s rebellion that gave the concept its true, electrifying impact. While still a teenager in apartheid South Africa, the young Mollie Painter took a black lover, and would meet him in a house a few doors down from her father’s home. “I was not allowed to be with him, and he was certainly not allowed to be with me,” she said, her voice breaking up. “In all the time we were together, we could not speak aloud. We spoke in whispers.”

Her audience listened, stunned by what they had heard. The stories of the voice as master and victim transcended barriers between philosophy and theatre. The emotional impact of her stories was inseparable from rational argument. And at that point a way across the chasm began to appear. The connection was easier to understand from the actors’ perspective. Each had felt the pain and the desire in Painter- Morland’s experience. But the drama carried with it the logic of “relational space.” That rational concept required communication to be examined in terms of hierarchy. Thus it created an intellectual framework for thinking about the physical and emotional context of speech. Clearly, it offered new ways to wring meaning from a text and to give sense to a performance. On the philosophers’ side, the talk presented a greater challenge. It brought the physicality of speech centre-stage. Painter-Morland had explicitly linked her argument to the bodily experience of voice that the schoolyard exercises had made familiar to everyone. Her words were not merely thought clothed in language, or even a semiotic link to thought. They required speech to be understood as thought mediated by the body.

At the start of the twentieth century, the broad stream of Western philosophy split apart over one fundamental problem of language: could it describe the objective outside world, or merely a subjective impression of that world? Disenchanted by the increasingly introspective trend of nineteenth-century German idealism, the Anglo- American analytic school, numbering Ludwig Wittgenstein at one end of the twentieth century and John Rawls at the other, holds that language should aim at scientific and forensic description based on pure logic. Its meaning should be lasting and objectively testable. To exclude distortion, Wittgenstein attempted to express its operation in almost gnomic propositions or, where possible, in mathematical terms. “The general form of truth-function,” he wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “is [p, ξ, N(ξ)]” (79).

The continental school, identified with such philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, takes language to be inseparable from human existence, and therefore never purely logical, always distorted and riddled with both intended and unintended meanings. Moreover, language is constructed on hierarchical oppositions, as so-called deconstruction attempts to demonstrate. Anathema to analytic philosophy, deconstruction endeavours, in dismantling these oppositions, to welcome what they rule out or conceal. Or in Derrida’s words, “The interest of deconstruction is a certain experience of the impossible: that is [. . .] the experience of the other” (36).

How could these philosophical traditions be made to join the physicality of voice? The problem was neatly summed up by Kevan Martin, co-director of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. Jointly funded by the Swiss government and the University of Zurich, the Institute is one of Europe’s leading research bodies in modelling artificial intelligence on the organic original. Given the simultaneous surge of discoveries in neuroscience and of increased computing power, this is a golden age for neuroinformatics, but one of its unexpected outcomes is the realization that the brain’s operation cannot be understood in isolation from the body. “In the fifty years we’ve spent trying to build intelligence,” Martin declared, “we have found that ‘embodiment’ is of fundamental importance. The brain is grounded in the body. That’s why Kristin Linklater’s work is so fascinating: it shifts the emphasis to the physical experience.” But that is also where the problems lie. “The learning,” Martin pointed out, “is in the doing, not in the thinking.”

But as it turned out, there was a way of relating doing to thinking, of creating a physical sense of “the other.” It emerged when Linklater moved the group from voice work to acting exercises in preparation for the moment when they would deliver the texts they had brought with them. The first was a performance workout known as “mirroring.” In the Akrotiri schoolroom, actors and philosophers were paired off to perform as observer and mirror, the first behaving as though seeing his or her reflection after a heavy party, the other mimicking each movement. Thus the observer might look into the other person’s face, yawn and see the other yawn, then lean forward towards the approaching other, pull down a bleary eyelid from the right eye with a shaky right finger, and observe an equally heavy lid pulled down from the other’s left eye with a shaking left finger.

A basic theatrical exercise, mirroring creates a curious, sometimes even disturbing, fusion of the participants’ personal space, and the merging of the two grows more pronounced as they alternate rapidly between looking and reflecting. For actors, it exercises the basic empathic connection they need to make with adopted characters and new roles. For philosophers, however, the distortion of subjective experience and the confusion of identity proved upsetting. “It was an uncomfortable sensation,” Dr. Kevin Miles confessed after mirroring the distinguished Swiss actress Nina Hesse Bernhard. “I was seeing my gestures coming from the other side, and I really wasn’t sure that they were not mine.” He laughed. “And I never realized I was so beautiful.”

Yet what had happened might almost have been termed “physical deconstruction.” It belonged neither to thought nor to language, but the rapid oscillation between looking and reflection provided a perfect example in physical terms of the mirrored oppositions deconstruction uncovers in language. The playful, back-to-front movement paralleled the methods Derrida practiced to explore and overturn accepted connections between words and meaning. And Dr. Miles’s uneasy sensation of almost being occupied by the other person was akin to the impossible experience of “the other” at which deconstruction aims.

The gap might not have been bridged, but it was clear that ropes were being thrown across the divide. David Krell was delighted. “Philosophers want to be surprised by ideas,” he said, “but our spaces for this sort of exploration are so restricted in a university. We play safe, we don’t do the dangerous thing. Here we can, and this is what I want to bring back from the symposium.”

Another surprising idea sprang out of the next acting workshop. Each pair of participants had to declaim a poem or tell the story of their journey to Santorini, but with the spoken word replaced by a breathed out “fff.” The schoolroom rustled with sighs, exhalations, and sussurations, as airport anxieties were described and sonnets were recited. The theatrical purpose is, in Linklater’s words, “to de-wire the brain in order to let the emotion through,” but this too turned out to have a philosophical application. “The breath intervenes before you conceptualize, before you see the image,” Painter-Morland exclaimed in astonishment. “That exercise is truly extraordinary. It teaches you to have a thought you don’t own, it pushes you away from the subjective.”

As the connections began to multiply, the effect could be heard in the growing expressiveness of the philosophers’ voices, and in the actors’ readiness to ask questions. But while the contribution that physical experience could make to philosophical inquiry was becoming clearer, the application of philosophy to the physical and emotional craft of the actor had so far only been touched on. Then, on the last day but one of the symposium, Professor Walter Brogan introduced the group to Heidegger’s work on the voice. By chance, his starting-point was also a silenced voice, his own. With a benign, almost priestly air of resignation, he described how he had been forbidden to sing by the music teacher at his first school after her hearing of his off-tune voice. But then, revealing how far the voice-work had overcome a lifetime of being gagged, he launched into a pitch-perfect, if teary, version of “Oh what a beautiful morning,” guaranteeing that his captivated audience would follow him into the lowest pits of existentialism.

Brought up a strict Catholic as part of a large and gifted family in the Bronx, Brogan came to Heidegger’s philosophy intent on revealing it to be a source of evil. Instead he found that, as he put it, “I had been set free to think for myself.” Although Heidegger’s reputation is tarnished by his later embrace of Nazism, Being and Time, his magnum opus written in 1927, treats the nature of existence in a fashion that continues to influence both Eastern and Western philosophy. Before considering anything else, such as consciousness or meaning, Heidegger insisted on looking at the basic business of being, and of being aware of being, which he termed Dasein. Time provided the context in which Dasein occurred, creating a tense awareness of both individual mortality and the immediacy of public life.

Brogan picked out two central characteristics that relate to the voice. The first was Vorlaufen, or anticipation of what time would bring, and the other Heidegger termed das Man, the public self. The discourse of das Man made a connection with other people, but its content was often not much better than idle chatter. The silent promptings of Vorlaufen, however, provided the authentic voice of being. “What motivates the silent voice,” Brogan explained, “is the desire to be. Heidegger described its qualities as being passionate, anxious, and free. Attentiveness to its call is what allows me to speak it aloud.”

The questions that crowded in came primarily from the actors, who recognized intuitively Heidegger’s description of an inner consciousness. But it was Linklater who appeared most moved. “That description of the inner sense—‘passionate, anxious, free’—I love those words,” she exclaimed. “Heidegger might have meant them for an actor, because those are just the qualities you would want in your voice when you are about to go on stage.” What it meant in practice could be glimpsed in the last exercises before the participants were asked to deliver the Shakespearean sonnets and Beckett monologues each had memorized. Texts were written down, then torn into scraps of paper, and scattered on the ground to become random words that participants picked up and used to talk to one another. “Now that’s what I call deconstruction,” one philosopher observed happily.

They sat down, whispered coherent words, and exchanged chunks of poetry. Then while the others lay on the floor with eyes closed, each person in turn stood up to speak the opening lines of a sonnet. The knowledge that the others could hear but not see created a choice. Either the sonnet was addressed to everyone in a public voice, or it was shared individually as an inner emotion. The Heidegerrian split was inescapable. Time ran out before all the ramifications could be explored. “You know,” Brogan said, “just as I came here thinking my singing voice was disabled, I think you felt your philosophical voice was disabled. And now I think we may both have been wrong.”

The final day had a sense of accomplishment about it. Always intent on keeping the brain off-balance, Linklater added new wrinkles to the ball-throwing games in the schoolyard, requiring participants to identify themselves as their favourite authors, and then as their favourite foods. But most minds had grown as flexible as voices, and quickly adjusted to recognizing that the person who called herself Pablo Neruda had now become a pizza, and Herman Melville had metamorphosed into a rack of lamb. As the vocal exercises turned breath into sound, the voices that soared on high tones and rumbled on low created a harmonic powerful enough to reverberate down the narrow alleyway outside the school.

Now it was time for the sonnets, laden with image and vocabulary, and for the anxious, word-bare monologues. But in the poetry there was argument to be found, and depths of humanity in Beckett’s bleak speech. As Linklater worked with the speakers, layers of meaning were uncovered, most of them beginning with “p”—personal, political, psychological, and “don’t forget the philosophical,” Linklater warned. Perhaps the periscopic extension did serve some useful purpose.

Appropriately, the final words came from a philosopher, Dr. Kevin Miles, weaving Linklater’s championship of the freed voice into the vision of freedom presented in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Although most widely known for having damned Adolf Eichmann’s bureaucratic administration of the Holocaust as “the banality of evil,” Arendt’s main work concerned the different forms taken by totalitarianism and freedom. Above all else, the latter was characterized by the ability to act freely within a community, and especially to speak out freely, because that is how people reveal their identity. “What we’ve done here this week fits that definition,” Miles pointed out. “I believe in freedom for, not freedom from. Freedom is for a purpose, but it has to occur by making a connection to other people. That’s what we’ve found in Kristin’s work. We have made a community here, and I hope we can share it with the rest of the world.”

At sunset, the reddening rays bounce across the sea that fills Santorini’s crater and strike the great, burnt walls of the caldera. The falls of melted rock become molten again, and the layers of compacted ash glow once more. Every evening that moment of theatre gives birth again to the legend of the lost world of Atlantis beneath the waves. Yet the man who first recounted the legend was no one other than Plato, philosophy’s founder. If ever there were a place where the ancient quarrel might be resolved, it would have to be here.