Können des Lebens: Schlüssel zur radikalen Phänomenologie
The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings
Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry
Reviewed by: Jacob McGuinn (University of London)
Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
Psalm 119:18
Kevin Hart’s attention moves from what he calls his “native tongue,” (10) phenomenology, towards theology. His work is consistently concerned with attending to the theological in the phenomenological. This turning to theology has manifested through readings of modern philosophy, most particularly, and perhaps surprisingly, in reading Maurice Blanchot, whose concerns with the impossibilities of literature have lead Hart towards the parallel impossibilities of the sacred. In Poetry and Revelation, Hart resumes these themes: the religious constructions of philosophy, and poetry’s difficult role in shaping and articulating those constructions.
Poetry and Revelation is explicitly concerned with phenomenology, and with developing a phenomenology of reading poetry. Such a project is certainly aligned with contemporary trends in poetics, many of which are favourable to religious experience. Here, for Hart, the shape and structure of this phenomenology is itself afforded by the theological experience of reading. Reading is already theologically inflected, and so is any phenomenology. So while Hart is concerned with the experience of reading poetry, he is at the same time concerned with the ways such reading shapes our sense of phenomenology, and thereby with a theological inflection to phenomenology. Reading modern religious poetry – Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, first of all, and then other Australian and European voices – means responding to the range of Christian theology which frames that poetry, and in to the ways this reading frames a version of phenomenology. If there is a religious ‘experience’ of poetry, then it is attuned to the world under the revelation of faith. This is the world experienced as ‘created’, in which that creation is given. And if there is any phenomenological bracketing of the world, it is through a capacity to register shifts in representation framed by this religious experience. The book is therefore a meshing of specifically Christian experience of modern religious poetry with the phenomenological apprehension of that experience; and the two, for Hart, are mutually inflecting. Religious revelation can be subject to phenomenology, “a ‘religious’ experience” where “the speaker has been converted to see things from a new perspective” (54). And this ‘conversion’ of revelation, for Hart, mirrors the epochē of phenomenological bracketing. But it also exceeds phenomenal appearance – and here is Hart’s problem. If there is a religious, revelatory experience, it is of something that transcends the given, because “the phenomenon of divine revelation, centered in Incarnation, saturates our intentional horizon” (59). If we are to speak of a phenomenology of revelation, then, we must do so attentive to this “saturation,” whether disabling of the resources of phenomenology or not.
Poetry can offer new resources for such a phenomenology, and this is the connection Hart is concerned with excavating. Husserl’s injunction that we return our thinking to appearance is, for Hart, “as valuable to a philosopher as to a poet: one must learn how to attend to phenomena, and not merely inherit a sense of the ‘poetic’.” (151) From Husserl, then, Hart’s modernity inherits a double demand: both to think about appearance, and to write it. This twinning shapes his book. The question of ‘phenomena’ in poetry collides with the question of the ‘phenomenological’ reading of it. Both, Hart suggests, are modes of ‘revelation’, and both are therefore channelled through religious experience and writing. Religious poetry, attentive as it is, for Hart, to phenomenal appearance as ‘revelatory’ of religious truth, can span these two poles: its concern with its own poetic ‘phenomena’ models a ‘phenomenology’ of its appearance as poetry. Poetry, in this way, cooperates with phenomenology, defined by Hart as an “attentive response to what is given” (77) – poetry is both response to the world’s phenomena and doing its own phenomenological work. Hart’s Husserlian poet is already involved in a bracketing of experience, an epochē, because a poem’s strategies of manifestation in language already include not merely the questions ‘what’ or ‘why’, but also ‘how’ something appears (156). The artist is “someone wakeful” (157). But “Art is not attention; it is a change in the quality of attention so that we can see that we have already been in contact with what we see.” (157) If the poet is phenomenologist, that phenomenology is articulated in the vocabulary of poetry, and its consequences are registered in a poem.
We are in the orbit of a poetics of phenomenology, here, with, in Part I, Eliot distinguishing between a poetry written in the language of philosophy, and a philosophy articulated through the language of poetry. We favour the latter. Hart’s Eliot is “concerned with how one thinks in verse, not how one translates philosophy into poetry,” (45) and Hart traces his question through poetic encounters, letting these reading encounters shape his articulation of phenomenology. Part I develops a close reading of religious poetry as a phenomenological theology. Hart reads Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot as poets of religious revelation. In Part II, this attention shifts to the limits of religious poetry, described by Geoffrey Hill, and the limits of poetic revelation, rather than of the poetry of revelation. Parts III-V then retrace these two positions – revelation and its limits – through Australian, and then French, Italian, and American, poetries. This poetic scope is matched by a philosophical scope, asking after the limits of phenomenology from Husserl to Derrida, Heidegger, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion, but also with Levinas and Blanchot, in particular. And Hart brings each of these discourses into a further conversation with Christian theology, ranging from Patristic thinking forwards.
Hart’s methodology is, to use his own metaphor, ‘triangular’ (and no doubt Trinitarian), triangulating poetry with theology and phenomenology. The work of the book is in plotting this triangulation, and this plotting is subject to its own transcendental scrutiny: what kind of experience could account for the conflation, or at least the coincidence, of these distinct modes in the act of reading? In Part I, in close reading Hopkins’s poems (themselves acts of close reading the world), this act of getting reading right is itself theological, and this seems to be Hart’s central point: exegesis can be revealed as intum legere, reading from the inside, in which interpretation is not a determination of experience but its phenomenological revelation. There is certainly a phenomenological shaping of reading experience. The more obvious reference point is Jean-Luc Marion, and his sense of the limits of intuitive experience, but Hart poses the question directly to Husserl. The epochē is resituated as a theological bracketing (22-24). But this in turn resituates theological experience, more explicitly making its transcendent claims part of an experience of immanence. Revelation is the key to this conversation. Under revelation, the phenomenological sense of the world’s unfolding takes on theological dimensions – as one mode of creation, and of faith – as much as theological experience undergoes a phenomenological reading.
A revelatory experience of the world, immanent or not, requires an epochal shift in our sense of the world. Hart is attempting to uproot the theological assumptions in such a bracketing, and to imply that the representational shift of dimensions involved in it are coincident with a ‘revelatory’ Christian tradition. The triangulation of theology and phenomenology with religious poetry is therefore an attempt to demonstrate that shift. Reading such poetry compels us to recognise the revelatory as at once a phenomenological bracketing, and an epochal shift in representation of the world. So Christianity adds to phenomenology “another protocol that does not change it but clarifies its range” (23). Faith opens experience to new intentional horizons. Religious poetry emerges from a contemplation of the world through this faithful bracketing: a sensual imagination of the world as ‘instressed’, to use a word of Hopkins, by faith. For the poem, attuned to faith, the world appears as revelatory: through a phenomenologically guided shift in representation (28-34). “There is no special revelation, only a conversion of the gaze that intensifies the meaning of general, public revelation for the poet.” (34) Hopkins is here participating in a revealed world, not revealing it. Reading a poem, then, means assuming a phenomenological position towards the text: just as the poem is already bracketed from normative experience (here Hart follows Jean-Luc Marion closely, for whom certain experiences are ‘saturated’ with intuition which exceeds any concept invoked (15)), so too a reader of a religious poem is bracketed from expected objects of experience. The poem is ‘of’ revelation to the extent that it is ‘revealed’ (and “reveiled” (10)) through being read.
The question, then, is how much, or in what way, poetic revelation coincides with or collaborates with phenomenological reading. Hart seems to shift his emphasis with each momentary reading of a poem. In Part I, with Eliot, we are explicitly concerned with philosophy articulated in the language of poetry, and not with the poetic adornment of philosophical truths. As suggested, Hart’s Eliot is “concerned with how one thinks in verse, not how one translates philosophy into poetry.” (45) But as we proceed through the book – starting in part II with Hill – religion shifts from being a phenomenological mode of poetic writing to a mode of poetic reading. Hart reads the poems through religion, in a sense suggesting that exegesis is one of the poetic modes of articulation these religious poems inhabit. We shift, then, from the poetic experience of revelation to the revelation of poetic experience. This shift is important, because it opens up one of the ambiguities of this work. To what extent is the articulation of experience something poems do, and to what extent is articulation itself something by which poems are experienced? Do we ‘experience’ revelation in a poem, do we witness, as attuned readers, the revelatory experience poems themselves articulate, or is ‘revelation’ one of the experiences readers can bring to a poem? Is this poetry as revelation, or poetry for revelation? How are these two modes aligned in reading and writing about poetry?
In Part III, describing the saturated sensuality of A.D. Hope’s poem “The Double Looking Glass”, Hart remarks that, “What we see of Susannah in the poem has not all been seen before; it was never so visible.” (138) The poem, here, is exposing the reader to an experience of saturation, and is making visible phenomena which would not otherwise be so. In the poem, “the story [of Susannah] becomes a visionary narrative, a poem in which sensuality and transcendence cooperate rather than compete” (139). In this ‘visionary’ work of making visible, the poem combines the revelations of religious transcendence with the revelations of phenomenal sensuality. The revelatory ‘vision’ of the poem is in making this combination, and cooperation, visible. In part IV, Hart turns explicitly to the idea of poetry’s experience – poetry of, or as, experience – and the congruence of such experience with religious experience. Again, Hart marks poetry as, and not about, experience; but as such, structuring or making visible certain experience. “I am not thinking poetry as Erlebnis, lived experience, but as Erfahrung.” (194) The question raised here by religious poetry is of the experience of transcendence. Such ‘experience’, however, is complicated by the way that poetry draws upon an impossibility of experience. Hart’s point of contact here is the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. There is an inconceivability to this poetry, because of the inconceivable – unthinkable – range of possibilities both inscribed and erased from the poems. Such poetic experience is therefore both ‘impossible’ experience and an experience of ‘impossibility’. Here Hart draws upon Blanchot, and thinks of the ways poetry can configure ‘impossible’ experience itself through its presentation of language: “the poem brings into meaning something that refuses to settle into a definite meaning”. (196)
The ‘impossible’ also signifies the space left for poetry after the ‘departure’ of the Gods (here Hart is after Hölderlin): after a symbolically meaningful religious experience of the world, poetry presents the impossibility of such meaning so that, in such saturation, meaning might be preserved (205-6). Hart’s question, however, is not of a post-Christian experience, but rather, “In a reality held to be finite what sense, if any, can be made of transcendence?” (206). Hart’s thinking about the poetic image in Jaccottet and about poetry’s experience in Montale thus resolves into a question about poetry’s transcendence, or not, of possible experience. The terms of a Husserlian ‘bracketing’ of experience are thereby channelled through a poetic claim that “one cannot simply suspend reference to transcendence in the case of a text, literary or not. One can at best fold that reference.” (207) The ‘transcendence’ Hart has in mind is, of course, religious, and revelatory: an experience, such as Hopkins’s, of the transcendence of the world itself, rather than of any world beyond it. This question is “skewed in advance” by an insistence that modernity is “co-ordinate with the finite” (208). In such insistence, “we distance transcendence from experience at the cost of rendering transcendence unintelligible.” (209) Hart’s task, here, is a reintegration of religious transcendence to our sense of finitude through poetry’s Erfahrung.
Section V leads us to the work, implicitly assigned to poetry throughout, of imagination: that poetry’s invocation of images does not merely ‘present’ a world, but also ‘contemplates’ it, contemplation historically indexed by Catholic devotion to Mary. The picturing of the world in contemplation, as in poetry, reveals the world as not just materially inert, but immanent with poetry’s revelation of meaning. The question of such contemplation is phenomenological: how, we ask in contemplating Mary, does the incarnation happen? How does transcendence happen? In this way, contemplation of Mary and poetry parallel a (more overtly Protestant) Hegelian ‘concretion’: “the particular ways in which the dialectic gathers all that there is and makes it into an ever more concrete reality.” (229) The poetic contemplation of Mary, asking ‘How’ Mary becomes meaningful, thereby also makes the transcendent concrete (242); and in doing so, despite its transcendent object, invokes a phenomenology. Hart’s final question, then, comes into focus here: the question of revelation is the question of ‘how’ the world becomes meaningful, and in a religious sense ‘transcendent’; and as such, the question of poetic revelation exposes us to a phenomenology of the transcendent which other versions of phenomenology might conceal. Religious poetry invokes a bracketing of experience in order to present the transcendent as the ‘impossible’ – sacred or silent, but still one intentional horizon in which the world becomes meaningful. In reading poetry this way, for Hart, we employ a phenomenology. And in this employment, phenomenology is exposed to a religious intentionality it might otherwise conceal, or have concealed. This is not just a compatibility of religious experience with phenomenology, but their coordination.
This coordination amounts to an intervention in our conception of phenomenology – the intervention of theology which, as Hart has repeatedly suggested in his career, is not in an intervention so much as an anamnetic recovery of revelation. In the final chapter, Hart attempts to describe this intervention. Without mentioning recent work on Derrida’s theology, Hart plays deconstruction against this kinds of ‘negative theology’ he has been detailing. Deconstruction takes différance to be a quasi-transcendental condition for the play of meaning between text and context, whereas in negative theology the transcendent idea of God yields multiple meanings in experience of the world. In this situation, however, the two are “back to back,” and in fact, “deconstruction can only ever be the ghost of apophatic theology precisely because it answers to a structure of transcendence and not a divine transascendence” (259). Derrida’s exemplary readings yield a silence behind their texts. Hart asks whether ‘other’ silences might be read, too, and this is where theology becomes operative. Husserl’s presupposed exclusion of the transcendence of God from phenomenology would in such a reading be exposed to a different version of appearance. “In uncovering this presupposition we may ask ourselves what happens if we do not limit our phenomenality at all, restricting it neither to objects (Husserl) nor being (Heidegger), and instead granting everything the right and the power to manifest itself in whatever way is appropriate to it.” (259) For Hart this attitude is indexed through the theological tradition of engaging with the world in its revelation, and articulated by a religious poetry concerned with what the word might reveal (or not) in the world. Undertaking the phenomenology of reading such poetry would only be to rediscover a phenomenological attitude concealed in the Husserlian bracketing of the transcendent from the transcendental. Religious revelation, as religious poetry shows us, is the manifestation of its own transcendent mode of showing, and theology is its shaping construction. After all, “Every prayer is an epochē that can make the writing of theology possible, and theology only begins when we are led back from the world we master and that tries to master us to a created world” (260). And religious poetry is attuned to such creation, the “morning knowledge” of “the way of knowing granted when things are seen as created, invisibly tied to God” (260).
On September 15-17, 2017, the Department of Philosophy at Kent State University held the Husserl in a New Generation conference in Kent, Ohio, USA. The lead organizers were Professor Deborah Barnbaum and Associate Professor Gina Zavota, both of Kent State University. This was the second in a series of “In a New Generation” conferences hosted by Kent State University’s Department of Philosophy; the first, Sellars in a New Generation, took place in May 2015. The aim of this conference was to revisit Husserl’s most significant contributions to a wide range of philosophical subfields, highlighting both their relevance to the questions that philosophy faces today and the important role they have played in the evolution of a wide range of academic disciplines.
The conference featured two invited keynote presentations and five additional invited talks, as well as three faculty papers and seven graduate student papers selected through anonymous peer review. As a result, the conference showcased the work of both eminent and emerging Husserl scholars at all stages of their careers.
The first day of the conference consisted of a graduate workshop where six graduate students presented their research. In the morning session, Justin Reppert, from Fordham University, showed how Husserl’s multiplicity theory [Mannigfaltigkeitslehre] can offer insight into a variety of important questions in the philosophy of mathematics in “Husserlian Contributions to the Epistemology of Mathematics.” Andrew Barrette, from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, discussed Husserl’s treatment of questioning in “The Socio-Historical Emergence and Operation of Questioning in Edmund Husserl’s Work,” in order to lay the groundwork for a larger project in which he will demonstrate that questioning is an essential moment in the history of reason. Anthony Celi, from Duquesne University, argued in “Logic and the Epoché: Questioning the Necessity and Possibility of Bracketing Logic in Husserl’s Ideas I” that Husserl’s reduction of logic in Ideas I is neither necessary for arriving at the phenomenological attitude nor even a legitimate possibility within a larger philosophical context.
In the afternoon session, Mohsen Saber, participating via Skype from the University of Tehran (Iran), explained in “Finitude and/or Infinitude? Husserl on the Teleology of Perception” that the teleological process of perception can be characterized both as finite and as infinite. Emanuela Carta, from Roma Tre University (Italy), argued that Husserl’s notion of pure essence [eidos] plays a functional role in his phenomenology and does not rule out the possibility of other types of analysis that are not eidetic. Colin Bodayle from Duquesne University closed out the day’s presentations with “Husserl on Object Collision,” in which he discussed the ways in which Husserl, Heidegger, Hume, and Graham Harman approach the question of how and whether inanimate objects can “touch” or encounter each other. Most of the main program presenters, as well as many other attendees, were in the audience during the graduate workshop, making for particularly rich and productive discussions after each of the presentations.
The main program spanned the second and third days of the conference and featured a total of eleven speakers.
Rudolf Bernet, Emeritus Professor, KU Leuven (Belgium)
“Husserl on Imagining What is Unreal, Quasi-Real, Possibly Real, and Irreal”
The second day of the Husserl in a New Generation conference began with the first keynote talk, given by Emeritus Professor Rudolf Bernet. In his talk Bernet explored the essential difference in imagination between intentional acts of pure phantasy and acts which represent an object by means of an image or a sign. The pure phantasy of an unreal or quasi-real intentional object, he argued, can be further distinguished from perceptive phantasies and from the act of remembering the real object of an actual past perception. The opposition between what is real and what is unreal in phantasy loses further significance, Bernet argued, when one moves to the consideration of how imagination relates to the objects of a possibly actual experience. Imagined unreal objects can, indeed, become real objects which lend themselves to an actual perception. However, it is because they are not taken to really exist that objects of phantasy most easily lend themselves to an eidetic variation and to an insight into the essential constituents or ‘essence’ of a certain type of object and of their intentional experience. It is through their contribution to an insight into the real and ideal conditions of possibility of different forms of intentional acts that acts of phantasy best show their potential for Husserl’s entire philosophical project. Imagination or fiction becomes, in Husserl’s own words, the “vital element of phenomenology.”
Sara Heinämaa, Professor, Academy of Finland, University of Jyväskylä (Finland)
“Variants of Bodily Subjects: Embodiment, Expression and Empathy”
In the second presentation of the morning session Professor Heinämaa explored Husserl’s distinction between two attitudes, the naturalistic and the personalistic, for the purpose of clarifying the embodied character of human beings and animals. She argued that we have to distinguish between several different senses of the lived body [Leib] in order to understand how human beings can relate to themselves and to one another. These senses are not free-floating formations but are constituted in complicated dependency relations. By explicating the relevant relations of dependency, she demonstrated that the human being (and the animal) as a psychophysical system is a dependent formation that rests on several more fundamental sense achievements, the most important of which include (i) the human being as an embodied person, (ii) the living being as another self, and (iii) the self as a bodily agent. By distinguishing these senses and studying their relations, Heinämaa argued that Husserlian phenomenology offers us powerful conceptual tools that allow us to understand the different ways in which human beings can relate to one another and to living beings more generally.
Anthony Steinbock, Professor, Southern Illinois University – Carbondale
“The Modality and Modalizations of the Absolute Ought in Husserl”
The morning session concluded with Professor Steinbock’s exploration of the distinctiveness of the modality of the absolute ought in Husserl. To make his point, he first distinguished in Husserl the ought-modality in the practical, praxical , and personal spheres. He then addressed in detail the absolute (personal) ought as the manner in which the absolute value of the person is revealed and the modality peculiar to vocation, and he examined the call as loving. The absolute ought, he explained, is a revelatory givenness that is not a ‘must,’ a ‘shall,’ or a wish. It is also a dimension of freedom and is the insistence of the call to love, which constitutes me as a person in a loving community. Furthermore, it is given temporally as urgency and as ‘for always’ from the perspective of our finite existence. Steinbock concluded by suggesting five ways in which the experience of the absolute ought is susceptible to modalization. While only hinted at by Husserl, these moralizations could be organized in such a way as to provide further insight into Husserl’s notion of the absolute ought.
H.A. Nethery IV, Assistant Professor, Florida Southern College
“Yancy, Husserl, and Racism at the Level of Passive Synthesis”
Professor Nethery’s talk, the first of the afternoon session, examined the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on the work of George Yancy. Yancy argues that the field of experience for white folks is always already racialized, and mobilized through what he calls the white gaze. Yancy often recognizes that his work is phenomenological, and, as such, Nethery suggested that it would be useful to highlight the ways in which Husserlian phenomenology influences his work. Specifically, he argued that Husserl’s theories of internal time consciousness and passive synthesis are implicit within Yancy’s concept of the white gaze. He did not argue that Yancy’s work can be reduced to Husserl’s but rather showed the importance of Husserlian phenomenology within critical race theory and the fight against anti-black racism. He began with a brief analysis of the white gaze and the racialized field of perception for white folks using Yancy’s now famous elevator example. He then turned to the structures of internal time consciousness and passive synthesis and showed how the black body is constituted within white experience as delinquent through these structures. He concluded with a reading of the elevator example through the work done in the previous section of his talk in order to “fill out,” as it were, Yancy’s own initial descriptions.
Lanei Rodemeyer, Associate Professor, Duquesne University
“Affectivity and Perceiving Other Subjects: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Essential Role of Affectivity in Basic Empathy”
In her presentation, Professor Rodemeyer argued that while contemporary discussions of empathy often address our ability to experience the emotions of others, for Husserl (and certain other phenomenologists), an important aspect of the question of empathy entails our fundamental experience of other subjects as other consciousnesses. The notion of ‘affectivity’ is understood as an important component of perception at the level of passive synthesis by Husserl, she explained, but it can also be seen as an essential component of empathy. Although empathy is not the same activity of consciousness as perception, they overlap each other in important ways, especially through the structures of apperception and association. Given these connections, as well as Husserl’s discussions of affectivity, awakening, and animation or governance in many of his analyses of empathy, she maintained that affectivity is arguably an essential component of our basic experience of empathy — even if the term is not mentioned in Husserl’s most famous analyses of intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations.
Ellie Anderson, Visiting Assistant Professor, Pitzer College
“Irreducible Otherness: Ethical Implications of Intersubjectivity in Husserl, Derrida, and Stein”
Professor Anderson’s talk explored Derrida’s defense of Husserl contra Levinas on the question of the relation to the other. She argued that this defense indicates a preservation of the first-person perspective in deconstruction that has largely gone unnoticed. Moreover, it suggests the ways that Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations provides a basis for ethical concerns of preserving the otherness of other beings. After exploring Derrida’s affirmation of Husserl, she turned to the ethical implications for the distinction between self and other that Husserl upholds in his writings on intersubjectivity. Taking Husserl’s approach in tandem with Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, she showed how it is crucial to both of these views that the distinction between self and other be preserved. From a phenomenological perspective, there is no direct experience of foreign consciousness. Moreover, the intersubjective relation is, for Husserl and Stein, fundamentally embodied and affective — a notion that obviates stale accusations that Husserl is not a philosopher of the body. As a result, Anderson claimed, both Stein’s and Husserl’s approaches to intersubjectivity remain highly relevant in light of contemporary inquiries into empathy, and Derrida’s affirmation of Husserl’s view suggests the relevance of analogical appresentation for contemporary poststructuralism and response ethics.
Donn Welton, Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University
“The Actional Roots of Husserl’s Transcendental Theory of Perceptual Intentionality”
The final day of the Husserl in a New Generation conference began with the second keynote talk, given by Professor Emeritus Donn Welton of Stony Brook University. Welton’s presentation addressed two main issues essential to any unified theory of intentionality with transcendental ambitions. First, he asked whether Husserl’s “first” phenomenology of the structure of intentionality calls, from within itself, for a “second” on which it rests — one that nests the bodily movement essential to our experience of the world in our bodily actions in the world. Utilizing Husserl’s development of a genetic phenomenology and his account of intentionality, Welton argued that a deep transformation within Husserl’s theory of perception takes place with his “genetic” turn during the 1920s. Moving to the second issue, Welton asked whether there is a way in which the lived-body [Leib] can be transposed from a factual condition, introduced to account for shifts in point-of-view and the spatial configuration of objects, to a transcendental condition that characterizes the very being of intentional consciousness itself. In response, he outlined the expansion that takes place within the notion of the body once it is viewed as an agent of perceptual action, and not just a center of movement and orientation.
Gina Zavota, Associate Professor, Kent State University
“Escaping the Correlationist Circle: A Husserlian Approach to Meillassoux’s Ancestral Statements”
Professor Zavota began by noting that phenomenology is often characterized as a form of antirealist, idealist philosophy, with Husserl’s thought put forth as a particularly extreme example of these tendencies. In After Finitude, for example, Quentin Meillassoux identifies Husserl as an adherent of what he calls ‘correlationism,’ or the view that the world and the rational subject are mutually constitutive and cannot be known in isolation from each other. One significant problem with correlationism, according to Meillassoux, is that it offers no satisfactory way of interpreting ‘ancestral’ statements: those statements which refer to a time prior to the existence of humans and thus prior to any possible correlative relationship between being and thought. Zavota argued that Husserl does not fit Meillassoux’s definition of a correlationist, and that his thought is, at the very least, compatible with some forms of realism. Furthermore, by examining the Crisis and the unfinished text “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move,” Zavota showed that Husserlian phenomenology does, in fact, allow us to attribute meaning to ancestral statements and thus escapes what Meillassoux sees as a fatal flaw of correlationist philosophies.
Denis Džanić, University of Vienna (Austria)
“Husserl, Externalism, and Compensatory Individual Representationalism”
Denis Džanić, a graduate student from the University of Vienna, won the conference award for the best submission by a graduate student, and thus his presentation was included on the main program. After being presented with the award, Džanić gave his talk, in which he addressed the question of where Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology fits into the distinction between ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism.’ To do so, he used Tyler Burge’s critique of Husserl as presented in Origins of Objectivity. In that work, Burge reads Husserl against the backdrop of his notion of ‘Compensatory Individual Representationalism’, of which he takes Husserl to be a paradigmatic representative. Džanić stated that Burge’s analysis is emblematic of the strongly internalist reading of Husserl, which he maintained is principally uninformed and misguided. First, he argued that Husserl was not an individualist in Burge’s sense of the word, and hence not an internalist. More generally, he claimed that, while this in itself does not entail that Husserl was an externalist, his later phenomenology was founded on ontological and epistemological commitments fully compatible with a broad and systematic externalism.
Walter Hopp, Associate Professor, Boston University
“Metaphysical, Epistemic, and Transcendental Idealism”
The afternoon session of the third day began with Associate Professor Walter Hopp’s discussion of transcendental idealism and metaphysical realism. Hopp acknowledged that there are several textual and philosophical reasons to think that Husserl’s brand of transcendental idealism is incompatible with metaphysical realism about the natural world. However, he claimed, one major difficulty with this interpretation is that metaphysical anti-realism stands in tension with two other claims that enjoy significantly stronger phenomenological support. The first is that the natural world presents itself to us, in both thought and perception, as metaphysically real and largely independent, in both its existence and its nature, of our consciousness of it. Second, in accordance with Husserl’s “principle of all principles” (Ideas I, §24) this fact provides us with excellent and perhaps conclusive reasons to take the natural world to be metaphysically real. To solve this tension, Hopp suggested an interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental idealism that draws from several existing realist interpretations and that is consistent with metaphysical realism.
Chad Kidd, Assistant Professor, The City College of New York (CUNY)
“Re-examining Husserl’s Non-Conceptualism in the Logical Investigations”
In the final presentation of the conference, Assistant Professor Chad Kidd began by acknowledging the recent trend in Husserl scholarship that takes the Logical Investigations (LI) as advancing an inconsistent, self-contradictory view about content of perceptual experience. Within the confines of the same work, these commentators claim, Husserl advances both conceptualist and non-conceptualist views about perceptual content. In his talk Kidd argued that LI presents a consistent view of the content of perceptual experience, which can easily be misread as inconsistent, since it combines a conceptualist view of perceptual content (or matter) with a nonconceptualist view of perceptual acts. Furthermore, the charge of inconsistency rests on a misreading of the passages in LI (specifically, in LI VI §4) where these commentators locate the core argument for nonconceptualism about perceptual content. Kidd took Husserl to be advancing a distinction between two varieties of non-conceptualism about perception, brought to prominence in recent literature by Richard Heck’s writings about non-conceptual content. One of these varieties concerns the nature of perceptual content, the other the nature of the perceptual act. Kidd argued that after certain important changes to Heck’s formulation are made, it can serve as part of a characterization of Husserl’s view of the nature of perceptual experience that exonerates it of the charge of inconsistency.
The Husserl in a New Generation conference attracted over 100 participants and attendees from throughout the United States and Europe, and from several different academic disciplines. Many commented that the event provided a unique opportunity to learn about new directions in Husserl scholarship in a welcoming, engaged, and philosophically pluralistic environment. Attendees also spoke of the openness of the participants to discussion and the exchange of ideas, and of the spirit of true collegiality that characterized the meeting. As the organizers, we are deeply grateful to all who were involved with the Husserl in a New Generation conference, and for the opportunity to explore the landscape of contemporary Husserl scholarship.
For videos of all of the main program presentations, please visit https://www.kent.edu/philosophy/husserl.
Report by Gina Zavota and Deborah Barnbaum
Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene
Reviewed by: Richard Fitch (Independent Scholar)
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), was a problematic polymath whose life and work continue to discreetly haunt both German and European intellectual life. He was first a soldier, highly decorated and often wounded in the First World War. The Second War he spent as a staff officer occupying Paris where he mingled with the likes of Picasso. Both experiences were transmuted into literature, most famously in his 1920 memoir of the trenches, Storm of Steel, which made his literary name. He went on to excel in many literary genres, such as those of memoir, diary, novel, essay, science fiction, allegory, theoretical tract and in the forms of literary expression usually associated with the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. He stands alone, amongst German writers, with Goethe, Klopstock and Wieland in having had two editions of his collected works published in his lifetime. As if this were insufficient for a life well lived, he was also an entomologist of some distinction. So far, so wiki – he appears a figure of some note; but is he, or was he, of philosophical note?
There is a paucity of English-language secondary literature on Jünger, and little of that literature is of direct philosophical interest. Does this matter? Was Jünger more than a warrior littérateur entranced by beetles – if being philosophical would make more of that? In this book Vincent Blok sets out to provide an affirmative answer to this question. He proceeds in two keys: in that of the history of philosophy and in that of philosophical argument.
With regard to history, Blok’s strategy is to entwine Jünger with Martin Heidegger. This is no facile ‘x & y’ project. They corresponded, and Heidegger was a careful reader of Jünger, and more than a careful critic. Volume 90 of his Gesamtausgabe carries the title Zu Ernst Jünger ‘Der Arbeiter’. And in his celebrated essay collection Pathmarks the essay ‘On the Question of Being’ is a direct response to Jünger’s essay ‘Across the Line’. But even more than this Heidegger saw Jünger as the figure that stood between himself and Nietzsche. This in itself would seem to suffice to establish Jünger’s place, howsoever minor, in the history of thinking in the twentieth century. However, Blok desires even more than this. More than showing the influence of Jünger on Heidegger, and exploring Heidegger’s critical response to Jünger, Blok ventures to assert that Jünger goes beyond Heidegger. To ground this startling proposition a change of key is required, to that of philosophical argument.
With regard to philosophical argument, Blok initially uses the entwining with Heidegger to make an intervention in the philosophical questions of, not only, as the title suggests, technology, but also those of nihilism and language. And Blok entwines these questions as he entwines his leading men. And it is with regard to the question of language that Blok argues that Jünger goes beyond Heidegger.
The book consists of an argument in three interlinked movements. First, Jünger’s concept of the worker is explored as it is presented in his text with the most direct philosophical import: The Worker of 1932. Then Heidegger’s engagement with this concept takes the stage. Finally, Blok suggests how Jünger’s work might be understood to elude the critique that issues from Heidegger’s engagement, and thus be of continuing philosophical import. This book is an argument first. Readers after an introduction to Jünger’s life and work need to look elsewhere. In addition, at least a basic appreciation of the full range of Heidegger’s mature thought is probably a prerequisite for a fruitful engagement with Blok’s argument. The three movements will be tracked in turn.
Part One ‘The Age of Technicity and the Gestalt of the Worker’: The Worker: Dominion and Form, to give its full title, is a work written in the twilight of the Weimar Republic that seeks to explore how one can reorientate oneself in the wake of the shattering of the brittle maps of nineteenth century bourgeois liberalism by the brutal hammer of the First World War. Without much need for the gifts of prophecy, the implication is that the Weimar Republic sought to carry on as if nothing had happened and that is the secret of its coming disaster. Jünger with the form, or gestalt, of the worker seeks to articulate a more robust response to a world whose contours are formed by the ice and fire of technology and not by the ethereal legal fictions, then practically dispelled, of contracts and rights. Central to The Worker is a slippery conception of gestalt, and it is here that Blok’s focus falls. As Blok argues, for Jünger gestalt indicates that power that gives fundamental ontological form, and thus unity, to a particular epoch of human existence. Blok describes gestalt as “a summarising unity or measure within which the world appears as ordered.” (13) Gestalts can differ, so the world can appear as ordered in different ways. It seemed clear that the appearance of the order of the world changed in Germany, and in Europe, between the springs of 1914 and 1919. Reflecting on his experience of the trenches Jünger intuits a shift in fundamental measure from that of the Enlightenment to that of the worker. Evidence of this is that the War makes no sense in a world as ordered by the Enlightenment. It makes no sense, yet it is, thus something must have changed. But the shift is hard to discern, so for those without the eyes to see it is experienced as the nihilistic dissolution of bourgeois values and meaning-giving. It is hard to discern because, for Jünger, a gestalt cannot be perceived directly, but only through its effect on its world. The gestalt is not a product of history as even ‘the characteristic of time changes through the influence of the gestalt.’ (16). Blok argues that Jünger sees his task first to draw out the contours of the forms of life as work imposed by the new gestalt of the Worker, and then strive to find ways of being that might productively respond to this new fundamental ordering. In the gestalt of the worker, the world appears ordered as work, to the extent that even leisure is understood as a form of work. And the world is waiting for the task. Blok quotes Jünger to the effect that “The working world expects, hopes to be given meaning.” (12).
Blok understands this meaning-giving in Nietzschean terms, specifically those of the will to power as art. And before proceeding Blok offers an intermezzo on Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. The Nietzsche presented is a Nietzsche of the will to power. While this Nietzsche is currently interpretatively unfashionable, this is the Nietzsche that Heidegger sees Jünger as embodying, so it is contextually apposite. More problematic is Blok’s rather narrow understanding of nihilism which he takes to consist in the erasure of the “Platonic horizon of the transcendental idea.” (21).
Returning to Jünger, Blok now explores how the gestalt of the worker leads to the type of the worker, where the type is the way of life that fits best with the gestalt. One is already in the gestalt of the worker so, “Our transition to the type of the worker thus consists of a becoming who you are.” (32). Blok’s reading here is informed by Jünger’s 1930 essay ‘Total Mobilisation’. Being a worker-type is not a matter of personal industriousness or wage-slavery. It is an attunement to the situation that the new gestalt of work leaves one in. “In the epoch of the worker, ‘work’ would form the metaphysical measure of the world and men, in whose light the technological world appears as technological order and man finds his destination as the type of worker.” (35). Again, it is not a matter of a traditional work-ethic, or a class based analysis calling the workers of the world to unite. It is a recognition of the metaphysical ordering that currently dominates. It is a strange metaphysics which appears necessary while it dominates, but which can dissolve, and with it its necessity, in the blink of an eye. This shift to the worker means that what appears as nihilism is not the collapse of all value, or the highest values devaluing themselves, but the misrecognition of a shift in the metaphysical order of the values that themselves give order to the appearance of our world – a shift here from Enlightenment to Work. And to consciously create oneself as a worker is to most fittingly respond to the manner in which the world appears to be ordered when it is ordered by the gestalt of the worker. The analysis of the gestalt of the worker thus does not aspire to the utopian or normatively prescriptive but tries to be realistic and phenomenological. It is a response to the world, and one’s most fitting place in it, as they appear given. The ‘heroic realist recognises himself as the type of the worker’ (36). One may not like this world of work, but it is the world that appears.
How does the worker work? This work is, somewhat surprisingly, a poetic task guided by the gestalt: “The will to power is led as though by a magnet by the gestalt, which is not and only is in the will to power as art.” (36). It is a poetic task, bringing forth a language that allows the dominion of its gestalt ‘to emerge from its anonymous character’ (35). What then is the worker to work at? “The worker’s task is to transform the work-world of total mobilisation into a world in which the gestalt guarantees a new security and order of life.” (39). The task of the worker is to be bring to light how the world appears to be ordered in the epoch of the worker, where this bringing to light is guided by the source of that ordering, and results in the practical ordering of life. There is a suspicion that here Blok’s Jünger is too close to Nietzsche, but then that is where Heidegger also finds him so he is in good company.
Part Two: Heidegger’s Reception of Jünger – Work, Gestalt and Poetry: Blok identifies Heidegger’s key problem with Jünger as his apparent claim that nihilism can be overcome. Where Jünger sees two gestalt: Enlightenment and then Work, Heidegger only sees one nihilism. The gestalt of the worker is yet another occasion of the forgetting of the question of being. Furthermore the gestalt itself is platonic, still concerned with the search for certainty and security. And from this symptom Heidegger diagnoses that Jünger remains within the orbit of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. But Jünger is not minor satellite, but ‘the only real follower of Nietzsche’ (54). As ever there is the question of the trustworthiness of Heidegger’s interpretation, whatever its stimulating novelty. Blok notes that the likes of Günter Figal and Michael Zimmermann argue that it is Jünger that first provokes Heidegger to find his own response to the question of technology and to the modern world in general. A response that would lead to Heidegger grasping for both National Socialism and then Hölderlin.
Blok begins his defence of Jünger by examining the development of Heidegger’s ontology of work in Being and Time and beyond. He argues that this development is provoked by his reception of Jünger’s work, but that, between 1930 and 1934, Heidegger was following Jünger rather than reacting against him, so that, for example, ‘following Jünger, Heidegger rejects economic conceptualizations of work and worker’ (70). For Blok it is only in 1934 that Heidegger develops his own response, and it only then that he turns his guns on Jünger. Only then does Jünger become captive to the unquestioning of Being, and becomes one who indicates but does not question. Where Blok sees Jünger as engaged in a poetic task, Heidegger sees him all ‘bound up with the will to power of representation’ (80). Jünger fails to enact the ‘new’ languaging of Being that is required. For his own part Heidegger begins to move away from the trope of work towards those of exposure and Gelassenheit. As Blok notes “According to Heidegger, our questioning is only really philosophical when this questioning recoils back from what is asked, back upon itself.” (88). One might speculate that Gelassenheit et al, the whole post-conceptual rhetorical apparatus of the mature Heidegger, with its negative and mystic overtones, be a recoiling back from not only Jünger’s world of work, but also from the world of the trenches (and perhaps even from their successors as the locus of extreme horror – the camps, though that is certainly too charitable to Heidegger) that was the midlife to the expression of this world? Blok examines Heidegger’s use of a conception of gestalt in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935-6) with an eye on Heidegger’s emerging idea of the poetic tasks of language. Blok’s response is, by now, as expected. Whatever Heidegger’s idea of the poetic task, Blok argues that Jünger is up to it. Jünger’s is not the old language of will to representation or of the bad old subject. Blok quotes Jünger “It has far more to do with a new language that is suddenly spoken and man answers, or he remains silent – and this decides his reality… The clatter of looms from Manchester, the rattle of machine guns from Langemarck – they are signs, words and sentences of a prose that wants to be interpreted and mastered by us.” (104). Whence then this new language? From Engels’ Manchester or Jünger’s trenches, or indeed from their contemporary equivalents, or from sojourns at Todtnauberg? Jünger may lack Heidegger’s philosophical sophistication but perhaps he is not without judgement here. And howsoever Blok may overstate Jünger’s case, it is perhaps, against Heidegger of all thinkers, a case worth overstating. For Heidegger, the man of the university-machine, we are exposed off the beaten tracks of the Black Forest. For Jünger, the stormtrooper insect-fancier, we are exposed on the battlefield or the factory floor (it is all too easy to think of contemporary equivalents here). Wherever they both are, Blok asserts that Jünger is “on his way to an understanding of the essence of language that is no longer metaphysical.” (106). And that, all over the place, is the philosophical goal.
Part Three: The Essence of Language and the Poetics of the Anthropocene: In this final act Blok makes a case for Jünger as a properly post-Heideggerian poetic language-worker and thus not a pre-Heideggerian epigone of Nietzsche. It is the weakest part of the book, but that might be no bad thing. Why? Because of the structure of his argument and book, Blok has to connect this act to the preceding two, in particular the first act on the worker. In order to achieve this he examines texts such as Jünger’s 1963 essay ‘Type, Name, Gestalt’ where the link, via gestalt, is obvious. However, much as Heidegger did, in his later years Jünger moved far from some of his earlier work, and especially from anything that reeked of political engagement. This retreat might be seen, in print, as early as On the Marble Cliffs (1939), a thinly but artfully veiled allegory of the Germany of the time and its horror. By 1951’s The Forest Passage, Jünger is a ‘forest fleer’ or rebel, alone in the same German forests where Heidegger sought a different sort of solace. Jünger seeks a quiet but firm freedom, not the main event. And by his 1977 allegorical novel Eumeswil, there is the figure of the Anarch, not to be mistaken for the anarchist, who survives the world dominated by work not by embracing the fate of the worker but by cultivating a resolute scepticism and a careful if still quiet freedom. “The difference is that the forest fleer has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from himself.” (Jünger 1995, 147). This seems far from the trope of work, and Blok is aware of all this, he notes that ‘the poet must stand in opposition and not engage in the workshop landscape.” (113). But he also appears constrained by the logic of the argument he has already made. But when, at the close of a chapter that touches on The Forest Passage, Blok asserts that “In general, we can conclude therefore that Jünger’s later essays are in line with his early work on the gestalt of the worker.” (116) the effect is not altogether convincing as to whether Blok himself believes his own case. That said, there is much of interest in the case that he does make. And even if he is constrained by his earlier positions, this reader senses that, ultimately, fidelity to Jünger’s text wins out, hence the weakness of his argument might not be a weakness when it comes to exposing Jünger’s work.
There is also the problem, for Blok, of trying to demonstrate how Jünger manages to squeeze past Heidegger on their tight forest path to post-metaphysical language, in only 33 pages including notes. His case simply does not have room to breathe. For example, Blok asserts that the inaccessibility of gestalt necessitates poetic naming, but does not explore how this echoes the withdrawal of Being that Heidegger associates with clearing and event. And while Blok asserts that the “Geheimnis [secret] of the gestalt makes clear that the new epoch of the worker is not a matter of observation but of poetry.” (141) it is not always clear quite how we got from work, and the trenches, to poetry. While Jünger clearly was an skilful, experimental and promiscuous stylist, the suspicion remains that this is inadequate to merit the mantle of a new post-metaphysical language fit for the time of the worker. All in all the third act reads as a draft of an argument to come, and when it comes it will be welcome.
A complicating of the actual relationship between Heidegger and Jünger would also be welcomed, as would, though it is clearly outwith the task Blok set for himself, a questioning of the relationship of each, personal and intellectual, with another German master of the dark arts, Carl Schmitt. In an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday Jünger reflected on what he saw as Heidegger’s political stupidity: “He thought something new was coming [in 1933], but he was terribly mistaken. He did not have as clear a vision as I did.” (Hervier 55) How might Heidegger have responded? In the same interview Jünger relates one of his brother’s Heidegger anecdotes: “One day, Heidegger was stung on the back of the neck by a bee, and my brother told him that that was excellent for rheumatism. Heidegger didn’t know what to answer.” (Hervier 55). In his final letter found in the collection of their correspondence Heidegger, on the occasion of Jünger’s 80th birthday, wrote: “My particular wish for you on this day is brief: Remain with the proven, illuminating decision on your singular path of saying. That such saying is itself already an act that needs no supplement by a praxis, only few still (or yet?) understand today.” (Heidegger & Jünger 61). Blok does aid in that task of understanding.
A few scattered comments: as is not uncommonplace the index is lamentable; the book’s connection, as promised in its title, with the workplace concept of the Anthropocene is slight, gratuitous and unnecessary to the argument (138-9); the style is repetitive but repetition of one’s place in the argument can keep one on track, and it ameliorates the effect of the inevitable typos and occasional infelicities in sentence construction.
In conclusion: Blok benefits from the lack of a substantial body of existing English-language secondary literature, in that it is easier for a novel perspective to stand out when the field is not crowded. Though he might soon have company with the publication in late 2017 of an English translation of The Worker (Jünger 2017). Although details and arguments might be disputed, he clearly establishes Jünger as a significant interlocutor with Heidegger and thus as someone who cannot be philosophically ignored by readers of Heidegger. Likewise, much as Heidegger cannot be ignored by those engaged with the philosophical questions of technology, nihilism or language, neither now can Jünger. In short and to repeat: Blok succeeds in making sure that his Jünger can no longer be ignored by philosophers, especially by those who care about the same philosophical questions that propelled Martin Heidegger’s mature work.
References:
Heidegger, Martin & Jünger, Ernst. Correspondence 1949-1975, translated by Timothy Sean Quinn (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Hervier, Julien. The Details of Time: Conversation with Jünger, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Marsilo Publishers, 1995).
Jünger, Ernst. Eumeswil, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (London: Quartet Books, 1995).
Jünger, Ernst. The Worker: Dominion and Form, translated by Bogdan Costea & Laurence Paul Hemming (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World
Reviewed by: Anya Daly (University College Dublin)
Enactivism as a theoretical framework that addresses diverse domains is establishing itself firmly as the paradigm of the 21st century.[1] Not only does it have the potential to bridge the so-called analytic-continental philosophy divide and the east-west divide, but it also offers cogent reinterpretations of key issues in all the disciplines concerned with the human and animal sciences. The enactivist account challenges and is differentiated from paradigms that explicitly or implicitly rely on rigid external-internal oppositions as well as those grounded in a reductive materialist metaphysics such as the currently popular paradigm of neurocentrism. Any persisting Cartesian dualisms in addition to monist reductivisms are thus revealed as bankrupt endeavours in the investigation of consciousness, agency, subjective experience and our shared worlds.
This current collection of essays presents a rich offering of interdisciplinary scholarship from some of the leading thinkers alongside emerging scholars connected to the enactivist tradition and its progenitor phenomenology; their remit – to investigate how the various dimensions and domains of our shared world are crucially informed by cultural modes of embodiment and enactively galvanized cultural contexts. Many of the chapters were presented as papers at the conference Enacting Culture: Embodiment, Interaction and the Development of Culture, October 15-17, 2014, University of Heidelberg, Germany. This was the final conference marking the end of the European Commission funded Innovative Training Network, Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity.
Embodiment, Enaction and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World comprises 20 chapters organized around 4 themes: Phenomenological and Enactive Accounts of the Constitution of Culture; Intersubjectivity, Selfhood and Persons; Cultural Affordances and Social Understanding; and Embodiment and its Cultural Significance. It is important to note that, while the title may be taken to suggest otherwise, any reader expecting the cultural themes of aesthetics to be addressed in this book will be disappointed. The writers in this current collection represent the disciplines of philosophy, neurophysiology, cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and evolutionary studies and so address ‘culture’ in the broader sense. This volume will be an important resource not only for philosophers, but also for those researching and teaching in any of the disciplines represented here by these various writers.
As Merleau-Ponty has declared “the very first of all cultural objects which enables all the rest to exist, is the body of the other person as a vehicle of behavior (Phenomenology of Perception: 364). As soon as I perceive the living body of an-other, my environment attains significance not just as the context and means of my possible agency but also that of the other. Through the potentialities and actualities of interaction, our bodies form a system” (Daly, 2016). Merleau-Ponty here articulates the central organizing insight that motivates this collection of essays; that culture, embodiment and sociality are intrinsically and dynamically interdependent.
Christophe Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes in their introduction acknowledge the intellectual debts of enactivists to the ground-breaking book, The Embodied Mind (1991), in which the authors, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, launch the enactivist vision; and they in turn have acknowledged their intellectual debts to biology, Buddhist philosophy, phenomenology and specifically the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. As the editors explain, the writings address the constitution of the shared world through the interrogations of “participatory and broader collective sense-making processes manifested in dynamic forms of intercorporeality, collective body memory, artifacts, affordances, scaffolding, use of symbols, and so on. The contributors investigate how preconscious and conscious accomplishments work together in empathy, interaffectivity, identifications of oneself with others through emotions such as shame, we-intentionality, and hermeneutical understanding of the thoughts of others. The shared world is seen as something constituted by intersubjective understanding that discloses things in the shared significance they have for the members of a culture” (Durt, Fuchs, Tewes, 2017:1). The initial inspiration for enactivism came from the biological sciences with the idea that the organism both geared into its environment through its active sensorimotor engagement and itself became cognitively constituted through this engagement; in other words, the salience of the environmental features depended on the survival requirements of the organism and the perceptual, agentive and cognitive capacities of the organism reciprocally became structured by the demands of the environment. In the cultural domain, enactivism interrogates how collective cultural activity constitutes worlds of shared significance, not, as the editors insist, in any constructivist sense but rather in the mode of disclosure. And they give recognition to Merleau-Ponty and his notion of the ‘intentional arc’ for this enactivist notion regarding the human life-world. Due to its perspicacity and relevance to this book, it is worth repeating here:
The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life – is subtended by an “intentional arc” which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, out physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility. (Phenomenology of Perception, 2006: 157; 2012: 137)
The chapters in this volume address all of these various aspects of the cultural world from the everyday sensorimotor perceptual engagements, to affective intersubjective life, through to artifacts and technology, to institutions, and finally to the psychopathological which, in the breakdown and failures of the ‘intentional arc’, provide unique and incisive insights into the life of consciousness.
It is impossible in a review to do justice to each and every chapter in this broad collection and so I will briefly discuss only a few that have relevance to my own current research interests.
The collection begins with a groundwork piece by Dermot Moran, who sets the scholarly context for much that the later chapters depend, with his essay – ‘Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Exploration of Embodiment’. His opening statement gives recognition to the centrality of phenomenology for revolutionizing philosophy in the twentieth century by offering a radical reconceptualization of human existence that continues to inform the philosophy of mind and action, and the cognitive sciences. Moran offers a rigorous analysis of the lines of investigation, the conceptual convergences and divergences of key contributors in the phenomenological tradition. Given the complexity of the domain and that intellectual debts were not always explicitly acknowledged in both some of the primary literature and the secondary literature, this is no mean feat. Importantly, he alerts scholars to the fact that in the evaluations of Husserl’s work, his later “original, radical and fundamentally groundbreaking explorations of intersubjectivity, sociality, and the constitution of historical cultural life” (25) are often overlooked. And while Moran reminds us that this later work was key to both Heidegger and Schutz, it is Merleau-Ponty, in the preface to his opus Phenomenology of Perception, who famously ‘outs’ Heidegger as having developed central ideas in his Being and Time on the basis of Husserl’s unacknowledged later work Ideas II (Phenomenology of Perception, 2006: viii; 2012, lxx, lxxi). Moran is more circumspect about this omission on the part of Heidegger and turns his focus on Husserl’s mature reflections to give them the appreciation they deserve and, moreover, set the record straight. Specifically, Moran’s interrogations are concerned with Husserl’s elaborations of the role of lived embodiment in the intentional constitution of culture, our mutual being-for-one-another and the riddle of transcendental subjectivity.
Moran alerts us to the Husserlian origins of key concepts found in the work of later phenomenologists such as ‘world-consciousness’, ‘generativity’, the interrelation that holds between objectivity and intersubjectivity – as he writes: “The sense of objectivity is co-constituted by us, and we are constituted as living beings in relation to this backdrop of world” (27). And it is this co-constitution of worlds that become expressed in all the various dimensions of culture. The discussion then turns to a key distinction in the phenomenological analyses of body and embodiment between Leib (lived body) and Körper (physical body), more readily associated with the work of Merleau-Ponty, but nonetheless, as Moran notes, already present in the writings of Fichte, Husserl, Scheler, Stein and Plessner. So too, the signature notion of the ‘I can’ as elaborated by Merleau-Ponty is prefigured in Husserl’s later work and this contributes to self-constitution as much as denoting capacities and powers in world-engagement. Here we have the dialectical dynamic as expressed through the enactivist framework and this is further elaborated on in discussions tracking the scholarly sources of enactivist ideas such as co-constitution, embeddedness and participatory sense-making in the earlier notions of situatedness, reversibility, empathy, intercorporeity and intersubjectivity.
One of the discussions that especially drew my interest was that concerning intrauterine lived experience from the perspectives of mother and fetus. Whereas Merleau-Ponty, drawing on Piaget, erroneously argues for an indistinction of perspectives between mother and fetus or newborn, Husserl recognizes that there is both an attunement and distinction between subjectivities from the beginning. Moran identifies a number of correspondences between the thinking of Husserl and current research in developmental psychology, referencing in particular the work of Colwyn Trevarthan (37). Vasudevi Reddy in Chapter 6 – ‘The Primacy of the “we”’, develops an account compatible with and extending some of Trevarthen’s founding ideas.
Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne de Jaegher, in Chapter 4 ‘Neither Individualistic nor Interactionist’, give a review of key debates in the enactivist account of intersubjectivity that continue to generate controversy, suggesting that some of these have arisen in the first place due to misinterpretations which call for clarification. This is exactly what they seek to do, differentiating those accounts that intersect partially with enactivism but which failed to appreciate key aspects from those that remain attuned to the central organizing insights of enactivism. There are two misreadings that they target particularly. Firstly, there is a confusion, they claim, between the operational account of social interactions versus interaction as participatory sense-making. They write: “The realm of intersubjectivity is animated by a force that is neither what goes on in people’s brains or in their self-affective bodies nor what occurs in social interaction processes – if we consider each alternative on its own. On the contrary, intersubjective phenomena emerge only as a dynamic relation between these two broad domains: the personal and the inter-personal. Any emphasis on either side of this relation at the expense of the other fails to capture the complete picture” (87). It is exactly this insight that is prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s argument that while I am always “this side of my body”, there is nonetheless an internal relation between self and other and that it is this category of otherness at the heart of subjectivity which underwrites relations between external others. He writes: “Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system” (Phenomenology of Perception, 2006:410; 2012:368). The crucial point di Paolo and de Jaegher defend is that “social interaction and embodied agency are equiprimordial loci of scientific and philosophical inquiry” and further that “intersubjective phenomena emerge only as a dynamic relation between the two broad domains; the personal and the interpersonal” (87); the relation thus transcends the relata; and importantly while the relata maintain their autonomy, their coupling “constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics” (89). They furthermore stress that the coupling is never guaranteed, because if we allow the “autonomy conditions for both interaction patterns and participants, the experience of the other never achieves full transparency or full opacity but rather intermittently moves through regions of understanding and familiarity toward provinces of misunderstanding and bemusement, corresponding to phases of interactive coordination or breakdown respectively” (91). The second misreading they target is the claim that enactivism is unable to account for interior life, as in imagining, planning and thinking, without recourse to representation. In brief, Di Paolo and de Jaegher argue that the ‘agent-world’ coupling in the here and now is not, contrary to representationalists’ claims, the only possible source of meaning-generation for enactivists. Due to the length constraints of this review I will not rehearse the careful and persuasive arguments they marshal in support of their case, but just note that in the section titled ‘Deep Entanglement’, de Jaegher and di Paolo, recruit experimental neuroscience to add force to their analyses. So too they address the emergence of hybrid accounts that seek to patch the holes in their theoretical frameworks by aligning with another theory; these accounts never achieve coherence or explanatory sufficiency; and notably, they often smuggle in Cartesian commitments entirely incompatible with enactivism, such as the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ cognition.
Chapter 6, ‘The Primacy of the “We’’, brings the integrated expertise of philosophy, phenomenology, developmental psychology and cognitive science together to investigate collective intentionality in human sociality. The authors, Ingar Brinck, Vasudevi Reddy and Dan Zahavi stress the importance of clarifying both the theoretical commitments and the on-the-ground science regarding collective intentionality so that when it is invoked in the diverse disciplines, from psychology, politics, anthropology through to economics etc., these invocations will be on a surer footing. Despite the philosophical work already accomplished in this domain, the authors argue that there are a number of key issues that remain controversial and unresolved. As they write: “… it is by no means clear exactly how to characterize the nature, structure, and diversity of the we to which intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are often attributed. Is the we or we-perspective independent of, and perhaps even prior to individual subjectivity, or is it a developmental achievement that has a first- and second-person-singular perspective as its necessary precondition? Is it something that should be ascribed to a single owner, or does it perhaps have plural ownership? Is the we a single thing, or is there a plurality of types of we” (131). Here I recognize particularly the issues with which Zahavi has been grappling over the past few years, reaching evermore refined articulations of the philosophical questions and precision with regard to the philosophical stakes.
Reddy brings the developmental psychological perspective into the investigation suggesting that the empirical claims and the conceptual interpretations originally expressed in Piaget’s research from the 1960s, notably the claims of a fusion of perspectives between the neonate and others, are coming under serious challenge. She stresses the significance of the empirical research regarding “infant discrimination at birth between internally and externally originating sensory stimulation, fetal distinctions between own and other bodies as targets for actions, and early forms of social interactions” (133). Reddy draws on other cutting edge research (other than her own) in infant and fetal attention, interaction, affectivity, neural response etc., to give further support to her key claim that the self-nonself differentiation and sense of agency are ontogenetically basic and well in advance of being able to pass the ‘mirror self-recognition’ test and also in advance of any awareness of group affiliation or its converse social ostracism.
Zahavi and his coauthors develop one of the key lines of their argument in opposition to that of Hans Bernhard Schmid (2014), who argues for a plural self-awareness that precedes both self-experience and other-experience. They rightly argue that not only does this imply an unacceptable ‘fusion’ but also that Schmid has failed to differentiate between “social relatedness, common ground, and we-intentionality” (137). They further argue that while the first two shared experiences are necessary for interaction, ‘we-intentionality’ cannot be guaranteed, most notably in conflictual situations.
Brinck, Reddy and Zahavi build a rigorous case for the view they are defending. They conclude by differentiating between three possible options: “First, the we is conceptually and developmentally prior to the I and the you. Second, the I, the you, and the we are equiprimordial. Third, the I and the you are conceptually and developmentally prior to the we” (142). It is the third option which they favor. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest there is another option that has not been considered and which has clear philosophical support from Scheler and Merleau-Ponty; the philosophical support of this view from Husserl is somewhat ambiguous.[2] This fourth option proposes that the I and the we of primary subjectivity are equiprimordial but without fusion; these, the constitutive modes of identification and belonging, both underwrite and become further shaped and developed at the secondary level of concrete interpersonal relations. According to Scheler there is an a priori ‘logic of the heart’ that underwrites:
… all morally relevant acts, experiences and states, in so far as they contain an intentional reference to other moral persons; obligation, merit, responsibility, consciousness of duty, love, promise-keeping, gratitude and so on, all refer, by the very nature of the acts themselves, to other people, without implying that such persons must already have been encountered in some sort of experience, above all without warranting the assumption that these intrinsically social acts… can only have occurred and originated in the actual commerce of men with one another. They demonstrate that even the essential character of human consciousness is such that the community is in some sense implicit in every individual, and that man is not only part of society, but that society and the social bond are an essential part of himself; that not only is the ‘I’ a member of the ‘we’, but also that the ‘we’ is a necessary member of the ‘I’ (Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 1913) my italics.
Merleau-Ponty writes:
We must conceive of a primordial We [On] that has its own authenticity and furthermore never ceases but continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each of our perceptions. (‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’, Signs, 175)
For Merleau-Ponty, Otherness is a category internal to the subject and without which apprehension of external others would be impossible; the internal sense of otherness can thus be understood as ‘others-like-me’ – ‘us’ or ‘we’, which necessarily requires differentiation from ‘others-not-like-me’.
What I dispute in Brinck, Reddy and Zahavi’s account is the assertion that: “I can be aware of myself (for instance, as a subject of experience or embodied agent) without being reflectively or prereflectively aware of myself as part of a we, and I can be aware of another without that awareness necessarily giving rise to a shared we-perspective” (143). Just as in the perception of a figure, the ground even though indeterminate is nonetheless a positive presence that is always there, so too in the awareness of myself as an embodied agent or subject of experience, there is always the implicit awareness of myself as belonging to a particular we, whether of species or culture which necessarily informs engagement in that particular context. With regard to the awareness of another, that other is always culturally situated as like-me or not-like-me, as belonging to my sphere of we-ness or not. And so whether or not the encounter gives rise to a shared-perspective, depends entirely on the intersubjective identification of we. For further discussion of this alternative view, see Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity, (Daly, 2016).
Matthew Ratcliffe, in Chapter 7 – ‘Selfhood, Schizophrenia, and the Interpersonal Regulation of Experience’, extends the discussions of enactivism into the domain of psychopathology. The central thought that Ratcliffe pursues in this chapter is that while understanding psychopathology in terms of disturbances of the self offers fruitful reconceptualizations of problematic issues within psychiatry, the invocation of minimal selves remains to be fully and convincingly articulated. Ratcliffe cites Zahavi’s articulation of this notion (151) – that the minimal self is the most fundamental, underpinning all forms of self-experience and that whereby the integrity of experience itself is assured. This integrity of experience is challenged in schizophrenia in ways that are more profound than in other mental disorders, and hence, according to Zahavi, schizophrenia must be understood as a disturbance of the minimal self. While Ratcliffe does not dispute any of the above, he insists that the minimal self needs to be understood also in terms of the concrete interpersonal in contrast to Zahavi’s view that minimal selfhood is anterior to interaction. Thus Ratcliffe challenges the widely held view, as above, that schizophrenia originates solely in disturbances of the minimal self and proposes that rather the interpersonal dimension is also key as both the source of a precipitating trauma and oftentimes also the means of compounding misidentifications and delusions. Ratcliffe builds an integrated analysis from diverse philosophical sources and clinical research, concluding that trauma and damage to basic trust vindicate the claim that investigations of schizophrenia must take account of relational factors rather than regarding it as a solely individual disorder.
The next chapter ‘The Touched Self’ also offers a critique of Zahavi’s account of the minimal self. While neither Ratcliffe nor Ciaunica and Fotopoulou dispute the existence of a minimal self, they do, however, dispute how this minimal self is conceived and constituted; both of their accounts insist on the importance of the concrete interpersonal to the sense of ‘I’. For Ciaunica and Fotopoulou, selfhood, even minimal selfhood emerges in the mutuality and proximity of social interactions. It is to the editors’ credit that they invited Zahavi to respond to these critiques and in this way we have the advantage in reading, of witnessing the evolution of this aspect of the self debates.
In Zahavi’s own words, his account of the minimal self is that “experiential episodes are neither unconscious nor anonymous; rather they necessarily come with first-personal givenness or perspectival ownership. The what-it-is-likeness of experience is essentially a what-it-is-likeness-for-me-ness (Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016)” (194). Importantly for advancing the debate, Zahavi identifies a significant shift in Ratcliffe’s account from the stronger claim that the minimal self is interpersonally constituted to the claim that the minimal self is not an unchanging core of selfhood and with this Zahavi then asserts that his “thinner and more minimalist self is a condition of possibility for Ratcliffe’s interpersonally constituted minimal self” (195). And I agree with Zahavi that a minimal self is the condition of possibility of interpersonally constituted minimalist selves, but would like to suggest following the same thread of thought in my response to Chapter 6, that the minimal self includes both the ‘I’ and ‘we’ (without fusion); and this is how subjects can break out of egoic isolation, how they can be constitutively open to the later interpersonal dimensions (Daly, 2014, 2016).
I was interested to read Zahavi’s response to the chapter from Ciaunica and Fotopoulou; that he had also found that their criticisms had not hit the mark and that there were some idiosyncratic and confusing use of terms – such as ‘mentalization’. Nonetheless, in my view, Ciaunica’s and Fotopoulou’s identification of the need to tackle the affective dimension of minimal selfhood is a most promising avenue of investigation. I hope that they pursue this and that they also reassess and refine their philosophical differences with Zahavi in future work. Zahavi is proving his value as a philosophical provocateur in the esteemed tradition of Socratic gadflies!
Chapter 11, ‘The Significance and Meaning of Others’, is yet another demonstration of the breadth of scholarship and versatility in thinking that Shaun Gallagher brings to all his writings. In this contribution, he examines social cognition through the lens of hermeneutics, focusing specifically on the distinction between significance and meaning with regard to interpretation. Gallagher weaves together a number of the key threads in his philosophical repertoire to deliver a compelling case for pluralism with regard to social cognition. The chapter begins with a clear survey of the contributions from leading historical figures in the hermeneutical tradition, contrasting the traditional approaches to textual interpretation (Hirsch and Betti) which sought to establish meaning as the truth of the text, in other words, that which corresponded to the author’s original intention, with that of Gadamer who gave priority to significance – the interpretation that the reader brings to the text. While it is Hirsch who introduces the distinction, as Gallagher points out (219), for Gadamer any access to the meaning of the text is inevitably via an interpreter and so significance always informs meaning. There is no objective unchanging meaning. These interpretations can be further complicated and deepened, as Gallagher reminds us with Habermas’ notion of ‘depth hermeneutics’ which brings into play all the cultural and socio-political forces that shape any interpretation. Gallagher writes: “In this view, the deeper meaning is equivalent not to the author’s intentions, or to the original audience’s understanding, but to a realization of how certain socioeconomic forces shaped such intentions and understandings and their subsequent interpretations” (220).
In what follows, Gallagher employing hermeneutical practice in the domain of social cognition, maps the notions of meaning and significance onto the current theory of mind accounts, noting the theoretical and methodological ‘fit’ between Theory-Theory (TT) and traditional hermeneutics, whereas his own account of Interaction Theory (IT) coheres well with the Gadamerian account. Gallagher offers cogent critiques of the purely inferential TT account and he builds a convincing case for his hermeneutical analysis of social cognition in terms of interaction (IT) and also understanding others through the dynamical processes of narrative. To my mind these comparisons of differing theoretical domains testify yet again to not just the viability but even moreso the perspicacity of the enactivist account which coheres with the insights of Interaction Theory.
Chapter 12, ‘Feeling Ashamed of Myself Because of You’, by Alba Montes Sánchez and Alessandro Salice is one of the most philosophically satisfying papers I have read on this subject. It offers a succinct and critical synthesis of the literature, and furthermore identifies precisely the point that these other accounts overlook. The ‘I’ is co-constituted with the ‘we’ and this underwrites our susceptibility to feeling shame for others on two counts; shame-inducing others as members of our in-group and also in the wider sense as belonging to our human species. And it is this rendering of the primordial ‘we’ to which I have previously referred (in this review) and also in the context of the empathy debates (Daly, 2014, 2016). They distinguish their current proposal from earlier discussions which focus on the fact that “shame is not possible for a monadic, isolated self” (Zahavi 2014, 2012; Montes Sánchez 2014), that “the self of shame is intrinsically social”, arguing that there is an additional aspect to shame which is able to account for hetero-induced shame (231), when one feels shame because of the behavior or experience of another. I have now removed the ‘Shame’ paper off my ‘to-do’ list. This current chapter from Montes Sánchez and Salice has not only made this entirely redundant but they have also accomplished their analysis of this overlooked aspect of shame in such a superb way that it would be extremely difficult to improve on.
Daniel Hutto and Glenda Satne’s Chapter 5, ‘Continuity Skepticism in Doubt: A Radically Enactive Take’ is, like a number of chapters in this collection, another foray into the fine-tuning of the articulation of the enactivist account so as to ensure that counterfeits are not mistaken for the real-thing. Their particular aims are to clarify the related issues of content, representations and evolutionary continuity in the REC account and its rivals. Importantly, they stress that content-involving cognitions are compatible with the REC account, but are only available to those entities that have some mastery of sociocultural practices. This will be a particularly rewarding read for those already familiar with the debates and acronyms as the analyses not only reference earlier critical engagements between the various proponents but also offer an incisive if not fully resolved response to the continuity skeptic.
Chapter 10, ‘The Emergence of Persons’, by Mark. H. Bickhard, takes the discussion into the domain of metaphysics and as he stresses he is drawing on process metaphysics not entity metaphysics to give an account of the emergence of persons. Bickhard defends a view that aims to challenge the account of Radically Enactive Cognition and its critique of representationalism. He argues that even some of the more primitive life forms require normative truth-valued representational capacities. It seems that the conflict between the two accounts might be reconfigured by; firstly, determining what constitutes mastery of sociocultural practices; and secondly, whether what constitutes representation may be construed more broadly beyond narrow cognitivist formulations.
Chapter 16, ‘Neoteny and Social Cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment’, by Vittorio Gallese, proposes a new model of social perception and cognition through the simulationist paradigm, and suggests what might qualify as the neural underpinnings for such an account. The thrust of Gallese’s argument is that a closer examination of neoteny (according to Stephen Jay Gould – that humans “retain in adulthood formerly juvenile features, produced by the retardation of somatic development” (309)) will support his claim that embodied simulation plays a key role in evolution and ontogeny.
The discussions are all philosophically interesting, but in my view the last section deserves special mention; here Gallese ties his analyses of neoteny with the aesthetic experience of fictional worlds. And while I would challenge Gallese’s claim (Daly, 2018) that during “the aesthetic experience of fictional worlds, our experience is almost exclusively mediated by a simulated perception of the events, actions and emotions representing the content of fiction”, nonetheless, that he brings this aspect of human experience into the debates is important. As I alerted in the beginning of this review, the artistic dimensions of culture were a regrettable but understandable omission from the selection of chapters.
Chapter 17, ‘Collective Body Memories’, by Thomas Fuchs extends the usual considerations of memory and body memory as individual experience into the intersubjective and collective domains, drawing principally on phenomenology and also indicating intersections with enactivism and dynamical systems theory. Fuchs’ key thought is that the similarities of embodiment and the commonalities of the human situation and practices, contribute through familiarity and repetition to the transfer of bodily memories and habits across time to become collectively embedded in cultural practices and rituals. Our bodies respond with a collective ‘know-how’ when solicited by the cultural situation or the interactive dynamic which have roots in a bodily remembered past. These all serve to establish and consolidate collective body memory. He writes: “Cultures preordain and suggest certain ways of sitting, standing, walking, gazing, eating, praying, hugging, washing, and so on. In so doing, they induce certain dispositions and frames of mind associated with these bodily states and behaviors: for example, attitudes of dominance or submission, approximation and distance, appreciation and devaluation, benevolence or resentment, and the like” (333). Fuchs examines bodily memory from the perspective of the individual experience, within the interactions of a dyad and also social groups across the domains of philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport and everyday culture. His thorough scholarship conjoined with his thought-provoking analyses add an important dimension to the overall aims of the project.
The final chapter, ‘Embodiment and Enactment in Cultural Psychiatry’, by Laurence J. Kirmayer and Maxwell J.D. Ramstead, examines the implications of cultural diversity for individuals undergoing anomalous experience in psychopathology, in illness, and also for those seeking to intervene on behalf of these individuals. They propose there is a bi-directional relevance between the paradigms of embodiment, enaction and narrative practice, with the concerns of cultural psychiatry. None of these approaches dismisses the value of neuroscience in the understanding of human experience, but nonetheless there is a warranted wariness of the neurocentric tendency in much modern psychiatry. The focus of this chapter as the authors outline is to examine “the cultural neurophenomenology of mental disorders that focuses on the interplay of culturally shaped developmental processes and modes of neural information processing that are reflected in embodied experience, narrative practices that are structured by ideologies of personhood, culturally shared ontologies or expectations, and situated modes of enactment that reflect social positioning and self-fashioning” (397). They specifically draw on the phenomenology of delusions to establish their case that “psychopathology cannot be understood completely in neurobiological or individual terms but requires a broader social and cultural perspective” (Kirmayer and Gold, 2012) which also takes account of the often blurred lines between what is considered pathologically mentally ill and what may be described as self-limited forms of psychopathology that are not debilitating (399). The analyses extend from enaction, to predictive processing, to metaphor and embodiment, to the metaphoric mediation of illness narratives, to embodiment, enactment and intersubjectivity in delusions, to cultural ontologies and constructions of normativity, culminating in a discussion of the cultural neurophenomenology of psychopathology. Each analysis displays a breadth and acuity of scholarship that deserves a more extended treatment – another book perhaps.
Unfortunately, this review could not do justice to all the chapters in this collection. These other chapters include: ‘We Are, Therefore I Am – I Am, Therefore We Are: The Third in Sartre’s social ontology’ by Nicolas de Warren; ‘Consciousness Culture and Significance’ by Christoph Durt; ‘The Extent of Our Abilities: The Presence, Salience and Sociality of Affordances’ by John Z. Elias; ‘The Role of Affordances in Pretend Play’ by Zuzanna Rucinska; ‘Ornamental Feathers Without Mentalism: A Radical Enactive View on Neanderthal Body Adornment’ by Duilio Garofoli; ‘Movies of the Mind: On Our Filmic Body’ by Joerg Fingerhut & Katrin Heinmann; ‘Painful Bodies at Work: Stress and Culture’ by Peter Henningsen & Heribert Sattel.
Conclusion:
Given the potential scope of such a topic it is of no surprise that other equally important dimensions of enaction and culture were not included in this volume such as those flagged in the introduction – notably the work achieved by Lambros Malafouris in regard to material culture and his fascinating book How Things Shape the Mind (2013), appreciatively referencing Shaun Gallagher’s earlier book How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005). So too Richard Menary’s work in the area of ‘tools’ as elucidated in his books Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition (2007) and as editor of and author in The Extended Mind (2010). The fine arts, music and theatre, the high-cultural domains, are conspicuously absent (apart from the last section of Gallese’s chapter) and this is a great pity particularly given the centrality of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to the origins of enactivism and his enduring fascination and appreciation of painting in revealing our shared worlds. Nonetheless, the chapters included in this volume present new insights, refinements of the debates and extremely valuable contributions to our understandings of the cultural dimensions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity both in anomalous experiential contexts and in the everyday context.
References:
Daly, Anya. 2014. “Primary Intersubjectivity: Empathy, affective reversibility, ‘self-affection’ and the primordial ‘we’”. Topoi, Special Issue: Embodiment and Empathy: Current Debates in Social Cognition, Vol. 33, Issue 1,
Daly, Anya. 2016. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Daly, Anya. 2018. “Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetic Interworld: From Primordial Percipience to Wild Logos”. Philosophy Today.
Durt, Christoph, Thomas Fuchs, Christian Tewes (Eds). 2017. Embodiment, Enaction and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Boston: MIT Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2017. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Pres.
Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Jardine, J. 2017. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Ipseity and Alterity in Husserl’s Second Ideen. Copenhagen: Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.
Kirmayer, L. J., and I. Gold. 2011. “Re-socializing psychiatry: Critical neuroscience and the limits of reductionism“. In Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, (eds) S. Choudhury and J. Slaby, 307-330. Blackwell.
Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind. Boston: MIT Press.
Menary, Richard (Ed). 2010. The Extended Mind. Boston: MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962, 2006. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. “The Philosopher and his Shadow”, Signs. Trans. Richard C. Mc Cleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Scheler, M. 1970. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. P. Heath, Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard. 2014. “Plural Self-awareness”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 13:7-24.
Varela, Rosch and Thompson. 1991. The Embodied Mind. The MIT Press.
Zahavi, D. and U. Kriegel. 2016. “For-me-ness: What it is and what it is not”. In Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches, (eds) D.O. Dahlstrom, A Elpidorous and W. Hopp, Routledge, 36-53.
[1] See Shaun Gallagher’s latest book – Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
[2] In Ideas II, and in the section titled – ‘Transition from solipsistic to intersubjective experience’ (trans, 1989), Husserl outlines various implications of pursuing the solipsistic thought experiment, indicating that it is only in the interaction with others, particularly in conflictual situations, that the intersubjective sphere and a shared world can be established. Nonetheless, he points to an underlying condition for any interaction to take place in a footnote. “Of course, this conflict should not be considered total. For a basic store of communal experiences is presupposed in order for mutual understanding to take place at all” (84). It is this that I would suggest is pointing to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘primordial we’, and Scheler’s ‘I’ within the ‘we’, and the ‘we’ within the ‘I’. The intrasubjective experience of belonging to a ‘we’, lays the ground for shared intersubjective experience and this is not a fusion because the attention constantly shifts between ‘I’ and ‘we’, just as perception shifts between figure and ground. An alternative interpretation of this quote was suggested to me by James Jardine, “namely that Husserl is here indicating that, in order for reciprocal understanding to occur I must ‘assume’ that the other’s experiential world is similar to mine in certain respects (an assumption that is then confirmed in the ongoing course of the other’s expressive ‘behaviour,’ particularly when that behaviour exhibits that the other has recognized and is responding to me as a fellow embodied subject). The term which Husserl uses here, ‘gemeinsam,’ could just as well be translated as ‘common’ rather than ‘communal’” (Jardine, 2017).
Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science: Homage to Alexandre Koyré 1892-1964