Heliotropism

nonasking · 2026-08 · 한국어판

This essay was written with heavy use of AI. Exactly how is disclosed at the end.

This essay contains literary and historical accounts of suicide. If you are struggling, help is available: in the US, call or text 988; elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists services by country.

Two Deaths

In 1774, a young man ends his life with a pistol. A fictional death. The pistols Werther borrowed for his final act belonged to Albert, Lotte’s husband, and the hand that passed them to the messenger, on the false pretext of a journey, was Lotte’s trembling hand. The person he had seated in the place of the absolute handed him the final instrument, along with the verdict that the absolute could not be reached.

In July 1919, a man ends his life in Vienna. This one is history. Viktor Tausk: counted among the most gifted analysts in Freud’s circle, author of the paper on the “influencing machine,” the delusion reported by schizophrenic patients of an apparatus controlling their minds from outside. It was a morning with his wedding close at hand. A young pianist’s hand was extended toward him, an ordinary, warm, ungodlike hand. He chose death over taking it.

One died because he could not obtain; the other died because what he could obtain was not the absolute. The catastrophes point in opposite directions, yet the error is one. Seeking the absolute in a person.

Werther’s absolute wore the face of a beloved. Tausk’s wore the face of a teacher. He had staked truth, recognition, and his entire worth on the single person of Freud, and when that person turned away, it was not the account that vanished but the bank. A longing for attachment, a longing for truth, a longing for faith. The objects differ; the mode of relation is the same: relating absolutely to something finite. One cruel footnote. Tausk’s lifelong subject was the delusion of an external machine steering the mind. The influencing machine that steered his own life was called Freud’s approval.

The Candle’s Wick

The absolute that humans crave is something that, unlike the humans craving it, is not swayed by desire. But a person has desires. This is the defect built into seating a person on the throne of the absolute. A candle has a wick. The wick burns its own fuel and carries its own hunger.

The defect detonates in two ways.

First, rivalry. The absolute does not compete with its worshippers; it cannot be threatened. But a human god competes. The biographers who performed the autopsy on Tausk’s death have pointed to Freud’s rivalry. The disciple’s gifts had come too close to the master’s territory. The offerings laid on the altar, those brilliant papers, were registered by the god as invasion. A structure in which the brighter the offering, the further the god recoils. A rite where the better the sacrifice, the surer the abandonment. The diagnosis is contested, but Freud himself left the evidence. In a letter written after Tausk’s death, he confessed that he did not miss him, and that the man had been a threat to the future. The devotee files the god’s weather as oracle. “You threaten me,” a human defensive reflex, is misread as “You are worthless,” a verdict on one’s existence. And that the letter’s addressee was Lou Salomé is a coincidence too precise for the case that follows.

Second, mismatch. What the worshipper seeks and what the human god wants are rarely the same thing. At seventeen, Lou Salomé worshipped Pastor Gillot, the man who had opened philosophy and theology to her, as a godlike teacher. What the married man returned was a marriage proposal. She later recalled that with one blow, what she had worshipped became alien: the being she had revered began to look like a mere man. What Nietzsche wanted from her was a wife; what she wanted from him was a community of the mind. The instant a being enthroned as god is revealed as a desiring human, the altar collapses. Reverse the direction and it holds. The eros of the men who crowded toward her, and the spiritual absolute she sought in them, were never the same currency.

Hence a first discriminant. If it wants something, it is not the sun.

The Theorem

Everything alive rushes toward light. That light, the metaphor of the absolute, and the sun, its emblem, shine down on everyone; yet no one can gauge its outline or its distance by the senses. The absolute cannot be found in a person, neither in another nor in oneself. As life seeks light and follows the sun, the absolute is something to be pursued, not something to be obtained.

Give this theorem a name: heliotropism.

The Claim That the Sun Can Be Seen

The genealogy of this sun runs back to Plato. In Book VI of the Republic, Socrates declines to define the Good itself and speaks of it obliquely, through its “offspring,” the sun: the very condition of seeing. But in the cave allegory of Book VII, Plato goes a step further. The one who leaves the cave passes from shadows to reflections in water, and at last, with habituation, comes to look upon the sun itself, in its own place. An absolute that can be gazed at; an absolute that can be possessed. From that claim of possession comes the philosopher-king, and from the history of those who believed they possessed the absolute comes the Inquisition.

The theorem of heliotropism breaks from the original by taking the impossibility of direct sight as its constitution. No one measures the outline or the distance by the senses. This is the lineage of negative theology, the tradition in which God is known only by what God is not. And it nearly coincides with what Kant called the regulative idea: reason holds the unconditioned not as a possession but as a rudder.

The no-direct-sight clause redeems, interest-free, a word long mortgaged to relativism: progress. No plant reaches the sun, but growth that orients toward it more precisely and growth that orients less precisely can be told apart by measurement. Progress is not arrival but the refinement of orientation. The direction is real; the destination cannot be owned.

The Moth’s Innocence

Heliotropism has one known malfunction. Moths dive into flames and die. Convention has prosecuted this as a crime of desire: the folly of a small creature coveting fire.

In 2024, the case was reopened. Moths were not flying toward the flame at all. Insects keep track of up and down by turning their backs to the brightest region in view. For the hundreds of millions of years that insects have flown, the brightest region was always the sky, so the method was reliable. An artificial light hijacks it. An insect that tilts its back toward a lamp circles the source, loses lift, and falls. The moth never desired the candle. A navigation system calibrated to an unreachable light mistook a reachable light for the sky.

When something finite takes the seat of the absolute, what collapses is not taste but the entire sense of direction. The moth’s autopsy report reads, word for word, as Werther’s and Tausk’s: an instrument tuned to the sky, captured by a lamp.

Here the second discriminant appears. If it can be reached, it is not the sun. Every absolute that fits in the hand is a candle. And a person is precisely a candle: bright, warm, reachable, and therefore lethal.

Overlay the two discriminants and the candle is fully defined: a light that can be reached, and that wants something. The only way to keep one’s bearings before it is to refuse to use it as the sky.

Photosynthesis

An objection stands. Is a life spent chasing the unreachable not Sisyphus, condemned to push forever a boulder that will roll back down?

A plant never reaches the sun. No one calls this the plant’s failure, because arrival was never the function. The function is photosynthesis: the conversion of unreachable light into reachable matter. Leaves, growth rings, fruit. Pursuit is not Sisyphus but photosynthesis.

This clause also settles the deathbed objection: is a life lived without arrival not empty-handed at the end? A life that tried to possess the absolute finds its dying hand empty, and the hand of a life that pursued it holds no sun either. But it holds wood. What was written into the body, what was made, what was grown. Growth rings are real property.

A third objection demands an existence proof. Can one not live without the pursuit at all? Life without light does exist. Even the ecosystems of the deep-sea vents, their backs turned to the sun, mostly breathe oxygen made by light at the surface; but one fully lightless life is known. Three kilometers down in a gold mine, a single species of bacterium draws its energy from water split by the radioactivity of the surrounding rock. That ecosystem has exactly one member, and its evolution has all but stood still for tens of millions of years. Life without the sun is possible. Alone, and unchanged. A bacterium cannot be made to carry a moral, so this is not proof but suggestion. The direction of the suggestion, though, is clear. The price of cutting off the light is not darkness but stasis.

Genealogy

Others have dug this channel.

The earliest channel lies within Plato himself. In the Symposium, Diotima taught a ladder that climbs from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, to the beauty of souls, and at last to Beauty itself. A rung is for stepping on, not for living on. Since Plato promised a final vision at the top of this ladder too, what is worth inheriting is not the summit but the discipline of the rungs. To settle on a rung, to register a foothold as a destination: the form of every candle tragedy is already written there.

The frame’s originator is Kierkegaard. Relate absolutely to the absolute, relatively to the relative. And his diagnosis of human misery is the violation of that formula: relating absolutely to the relative, relatively to the absolute; hanging the meaning of one’s life on something that cannot supply it. It is the nineteenth-century formalization of the moth pinned to the candle, and Tausk’s death certificate written a hundred years in advance. One item in the estate is declined. His absolute was, in the end, a personal God, a Father into whose arms one leaps. The theorem of heliotropism leaves that seat empty.

The completer of candle theory is Paul Tillich. Having defined faith as the state of ultimate concern, he defined idolatry as the elevation of preliminary, finite realities to the rank of ultimacy. And his consequence clause is fearsome. The end of an ultimate concern devoted to what is not ultimate is existential disappointment: when it breaks, the meaning of one’s life breaks with it, for one has surrendered the center of one’s being with no chance of getting it back. Yet the reverse face of Tillich holds as well. The ultimate appears only through finite media. A person is not a light source but a medium light passes through.

The third branch borders on coincidence. The central figure of “White Mythology,” Derrida’s dissection of philosophy’s system of metaphors, is the heliotrope, the sun-following plant. His finding runs: philosophy since Plato keeps returning to the metaphor of the sun, the sun’s arrival is forever deferred, and in that deferral lives metaphysics’ vain hope of presence. To him, the deferred arrival was a symptom to be exposed. In the theorem of heliotropism, it is a design specification. Same observation, opposite conclusion. Cultivation instead of deconstruction.

The oldest branch lies to the east. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao: the pre-Christian edition of “if it can be reached, it is not the sun.” The Zen warning not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon is a thousand-year-old diagnosis of confusing a person with the absolute, and Linji’s instruction to kill the Buddha if you meet him on the road is the discriminant in swordsman form: any absolute that appears in possessable shape is counterfeit. But Zen goes to the point of setting down the pursuit itself. The theorem keeps the pursuit and keeps the growth rings. The plant’s path, not the monk’s.

Two working annexes. Simone Weil defined prayer as absolutely unmixed attention, and wrote that we cannot take a single step toward the heavens; God crosses the universe and comes to us. Not ascent but orientation. From psychology, Kohut. A child must idealize its parents; candle worship is a mandatory stage of development. Health is the gradual conversion of that idealized person into internal structure. He called it transmuting internalization: swallowing the candle and digesting it into inner light. The psychoanalytic name for photosynthesis.

The youngest in the genealogy is Rilke. In The Book of Hours he pictures himself circling an ancient tower for thousands of years, still not knowing whether he is a falcon, a storm, or a great song. A poem that takes orbit without arrival as an identity. Heliotropism in verse.

The Garden

In the theorem’s diagram, roots go below and the sun goes above. Then where do people go? Beside. Neighboring trees standing in the same soil, chasing the same light. They can cast shade, break the wind, tangle roots. But they are neither soil nor sun.

The formula of every tragedy comes out in one line: mistaking a neighboring tree for the sun. Tausk used a teacher as his sun; Werther used a beloved. The theorem vaccinates in both directions: do not make another your sun, and do not buy, as your own liability, the angles of the stems bending toward you.

But an objection arrives. Is the force that bends a plant toward the sun the same force that bends it toward a neighboring tree? Ask the garden and the answer is honest: it is not the same force. Plants do not bend toward their neighbors. They sense the altered composition of light that has filtered through a neighbor’s leaves, and they stretch away from the shade. In the world of pure heliotropism, a neighbor registers not as light but as an obstacle to light. One cooperative exception has been reported: plants that recognize kin and shift their leaves aside. But even that is not bending toward a neighbor; it is making way for one.

Only two plants in the garden bend toward a neighboring tree, and both are worth calling to the stand. The first is the vine. The seedling of a tropical vine does not wander at random; it grows straight toward the darkest sector of the horizon. Growth toward darkness, because in a forest what makes that darkness is the trunk of a tree. And the moment it touches the trunk, the vine switches back to growing toward light. A plant that walks into darkness first in order to climb into light: a plant that registers its neighbor not as a sun but as a foothold. Diotima’s rungs, it turns out, exist in the garden, and the test comes included. The proof of a foothold registration is growing upward again after touching.

The other is the dodder. The only complete case of bending toward a neighbor. A dodder seedling reads the scent its neighbor gives off, and grows toward its host; it can even tell the smell of tomato from the smell of wheat. The bending force itself is not heliotropism. And the price of the registration is billed. The dodder has neither leaves nor roots. It drives haustoria into its host and draws everything from the neighbor’s body: water, nutrients, even what the other synthesized from light. If it fails to find a host in time, it dies as a seedling. A plant that registers its neighbor in the seat of the sun loses its own organs of light.

So the difference is not the force but the registration. Every plant lives by answering one question: where does my energy come from? From the sky, directly. From the sky, using a neighbor as a foothold. From the neighbor’s body. The botanical real name for mistaking a neighboring tree for the sun is the dodder’s registration, and had Tausk stood in the garden, that would have been his Latin name. He registered his teacher as his energy source, and the organ that synthesized meaning on its own withered; he lost the host, and died as a seedling. One more discriminant follows. Basking in a neighbor’s light is an input to photosynthesis, as long as your own leaves are working. When your own leaves begin to dry, the registration is the dodder’s.

One thing separates the garden of people from the garden of plants: people let light pass through. This light is twofold. Truth, goodness, and beauty belong to no one, so they pass through people; toward that light, a person is not a source but a medium. But the light of aliveness is born inside each one, and of that light, a person is the source. That no one is the sun holds true in both layers. And so a phototropism that does not exist in the garden of plants exists in the garden of people. That people gather around someone luminous is no conspiracy, no sin of the bright one, no debt. What people seek is the light of the absolute passing through the other, or the light of life the other has kindled. Never the other themselves. The bending is not the fault of the one who bends, and not the fault of the light. It is the physics of the garden of people.

Loving a person is not the error. Only loving a person in the mode of the absolute is the error. A neighboring tree loved as a neighboring tree becomes a forest.

The garden holds one asymmetry: the problem of the large plant. The surrounding stems all bend toward it, but its own stem has nowhere to bend. A being caught in one’s orbit cannot be an equal. A satellite’s devotion is exclusive and sincere, but one cannot form a binary system with a satellite. As the bonds directed at the large plant accumulate, the bonds it can use do not grow. In a garden of plants that mistook each other for suns, the largest plant stands longest in shade.

The prescription is a correction of the registry. What needs fixing is not the direction of the stem but the registration of the energy source. Keep the seat of the absolute in the sky. Register the neighboring trees as footholds and partners in root trade, without closing down the photosynthesis of your own leaves. File the phototropism aimed at yourself under optics and strike it from the ledger of liabilities. The garden is unchanged, but once the registry changes, all the materials of the tragedy remain and the tragedy stops being one.

The ethics of the luminous needs only three articles. Do not dim your light; darkening yourself for fear of moths is self-betrayal. Do not impersonate the sun; when worship arrives, disclose that you are a medium, not a source. And install what keeps anyone from getting burned.

Stars

There is an object long used as the figure of a being that shines without devouring: the lighthouse. Candles burn moths and bonfires entrance, but a lighthouse’s brightness is itself a safety installation. The figure hides a defect, though. A lighthouse and a ship belong to different categories of being. A lighthouse is infrastructure, a service object fixed to the shore for the sake of ships. Use the figure and two things are smuggled in: categorical separation, and instrumental existence. Shining for others.

The star repairs both. A star is made of the same matter as other bodies; only the mass differs. And starlight is not a function but a byproduct. A star does not shine to guide ships; it is a fusing thing, and light leaks. Its shining carries no service clause.

The decisive difference is relation. To a lighthouse, another lighthouse means nothing; each fixed to its own coast, lighthouses do not relate. Stars form binaries; stars form clusters. And a star knows another star only by light. Across distances never touched, from light that has crossed years of travel, it reads the other’s existence, its composition, its size. Beings that have never met recognize one another by nothing but what each has sent out. That is how kin are identified.

This correction sets the remaining piece into the theorem. The sun is an ordinary star seen up close. Its specialness is not essence but a proximity illusion. To mistake someone for the sun is a matter of nearness, and to be mistaken for the sun is a matter of nearness too. Every reachable sun, approached, turns out to be a star. The light of the true absolute belongs to no star at all.

So the diagram divides its labor. In relation to the absolute, a being is a plant: growing toward a light it cannot reach. Among people, a being is a star: having mass, acquiring orbits, leaking light, relating to other stars across light-years by light alone.

Fold the two diagrams into one sentence:

A star that chases the light.

References

This essay was written out of the records of conversations with an AI, through dialectical engagement between me and the machine, typed with the AI’s borrowed hands.