Kevin Hart: Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul

Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul Book Cover Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul
Kevin Hart
Columbia University Press
2024
Paperback
160

Reviewed by: Robert Farrugia, Ph.D.
(Department of Philosophy, University of Malta)

The past century has seen a significant surge in philosophical circles focusing on the active life centred around exteriority, which comprises the other, the world, and, in general, the social dimension of the self. However, this determination to deal with exteriority, a central pursuit that has remained a significant characteristic of contemporary continental thought, can be identified in the negative perception of interiority and the contemplative self, which had previously occupied the philosophical pursuits of previous periods. To this end, throughout the past century, there has been a notable lack of serious discussion and, often, even a complete elimination of the contemplative life, which has trickled down from academic discourse to popular culture. The notion of contemplation has undergone such harsh criticisms over the last century that any awareness of an interior life often ends up being portrayed as narcissistic, solipsistic, old-fashioned, or even as an epistemological error on the part of the speaker and, hence, a mere conundrum which is overcome by either eliminating it or migrating it to exteriority. To this end, most 20th-century schools of thought glimpse at contemplation – the ‘vita contemplativa’ – in suspicion from a safe distance, with a deep sense of indifference, distrust, and ambivalence, viewed as a thing of the past, consequently relegated to a long-forgotten myth that few philosophers will dare allude to, let alone revive.

Kevin Hart’s book Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul is a much-needed philosophical work that counteracts this attitude without adopting a reactionary tone, thereby dispelling a prevailing current understanding of contemplation as “the lowest of cognitive modes, as a free-floating state close to daydreaming” (44). This work by Hart invites the reader to rethink the significance of contemplation, reopening philosophy to wonder, love, and the courage to move into the deep. His work reminds us of the numerous significant philosophers, theologians and mystics from different epochs who took contemplation very seriously, developing their oeuvres and way of life around it. For such contemplatives, this practice occupies a dominant locus point in the structure and experience of thought and truth, as the path to higher wisdom is understood as passing through the contemplative self.

In the introduction, the author immediately states his aims by first negating what this book is not: it is neither a guide to contemplation nor a survey of different contemplation methods; it is neither a philosophy nor theology of contemplation nor a contribution to mysticism or contemplative studies. The book aims to initiate its readers into a broad study of the soul’s movements by reflecting on the sacred and secular forms of dealing with issues of morality and mortality, the invisible realm, truth, and transcendence. The book explores a wide range of religious, aesthetic, and philosophical perspectives on contemplation, with a primary focus on retrieving sources from Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. It is neatly divided into five chapters: 1) First Thoughts About Contemplation, 2) Questions of Practice and Cognition, 3) Ways of Contemplating, 4) What to Contemplate, and 5) Why Contemplate? Through the smooth and flowing transition within each, a guiding spirit clarifies, without simplifying, the meaning of contemplation and how the soul is exercised through various practices. Ultimately, the overarching message found within the pages of this book is a valuable reminder of the need to contemplate whilst questioning what keeps us from doing so.

In the first chapter, Hart, aware that his reader may range from a layperson to an initiated contemplative, aims to dispel certain critical misconceptions about contemplation. It is widely assumed that contemplation is a practice exclusive to Asian religions. Hart elucidates that Judeo-Christian religions have a rich heritage of contemplation and explains with clarity the significant differences between Buddhist and Christian contemplation: the former is a quest for spiritual enlightenment which aids the one who persists with the discipline to achieve emancipation from worldly desires; the latter is a means of attaining union with the deity, whereby Christ identifies himself as the image of the Father. Significant similarities are present in both, such as the need to sit upright in a particular space and synchronise one’s breathing with one’s heartbeat. The author maintains that the diverse Eastern practices ultimately lead to a similar outcome: “clarity and quietness of mind, a higher degree of compassion and receptiveness to others, and an ability to regard everything in fresh terms” (6). Similarly, although not without significant differences, the diverse Western practices also aim to simplify the hearts and minds “to become more and more like the God they worship, whose being is held to be utterly simple: love itself” (6).

Through flipping pages, one notes that Hart’s insights into the diverse practices across cultures and religions, as well as the interwoven parallelism, are crisp, clear, and commanding. One crucial issue he sets out in the first few pages is that religion and philosophy are not to be understood as separate or, worse, at odds. This applies to both Eastern and Western faiths since it is evident in both that they are philosophically concerned with how we know things (epistemology), notions of reality and truth (metaphysics), the way we think (logic), how we ought to act (ethics); and what philosophy should and should not do (metaphilosophy). Hart references Aristotle, whose work seeks to attain happiness (the philosophical life) by examining the unmoved mover (theology). In other words, a happy person lives a contemplative life.

Even though practices firmly rooted in religious contexts, such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Judaism, have been secularised, this does not make them more philosophical and less spiritual. Hart raises the issue of mindfulness, with its deep roots in Buddhism, which has gained traction in the Western world over the past few decades and has been adapted—and, in some cases, modified—for secular use in medical and clinical settings. Hart does not make the negatively charged remarks one would expect here. This book appears more interested in the various applications of contemplation, hence its enduring relevance even today, rather than a work of distillation.

 Hart confesses that unfolding the meaning of contemplation is far from simple. For one thing, he emphasises the distinction between contemplation and meditation, which have often been understood as interchangeable. Meditation involves paying attention to sacred images to allow the soul to mature and learn how to live more closely with God, as well as asking oneself questions to see where one stands in relation to God with the intent of seeing the truth about oneself as a moral and spiritual being who is allowed to be reformed; whereas contemplation is a simple intuition of God as truth in whom one reposes perfectly secure in him as the truth, free from discursive thought. Hart concisely sums it up: “Meditation helps one to find God; contemplation is resting in him” (13). Here, the author highlights that some individuals transition from meditation to contemplation but then revert, either because meditation remains familiar and comforting or because they cannot sustain awareness of the divine for an extended period.

Another key distinction Hart provides in discussing his first chapter is between contemplation and mysticism. Mysticism revolves around the hiddenness and darkness of God, whose holiness is so overwhelming and intense that it cannot be directly encountered. Here, Hart refers to the work by Pseudo-Dionysius, known as The Mystical Theology, which begins by praying to the Trinity, asking to be guided into the ineffable divine mysteries, and plunging into the darkness of unknowing, where God exists eminently. This entails that mysticism is not merely talking about God, but also talking to God and, ultimately, living a life pleasing to God. Hart’s commanding knowledge of the mystical tradition is evident throughout. He refers to such names as Margaret Porette and Madame Guyon, along with their writings, which may be unfamiliar to the reader and, therefore, invite exploration of these intriguing works. The reader is also directed to a concept known as mystical reading, which is applied, for example, to ancient Greek methods of interpreting Homer’s epic poems or the Hebrew Scriptures. This entails reading allegorically to allow a text to convey a meaning beyond its literal interpretation, leading to the discovery of more profound truths.

Hart wishes to move meaningfully beyond the tendency to equate mysticism with a peculiar state of consciousness and paranormal events. He traces this link to the rise of modernity and its fascination with experience, whereby “the mode of awareness is feeling and it cannot be denied; it escapes all argument” (24), and how religious experience becomes a standard category with the rise of modern psychology. Awareness of psychological states invited people to become attuned to neuroses and psychoses. At the turn of the century, Hart points out that Freud and William James wrote influential works on such elusive phenomena, interpreting and theorising these experiences. Hart’s contention is to show the departure from the meaning of the mystical in the expression ‘mystical theology,’ where contemplation was emphasised as a way to enter into a loving relationship with the darkness of God, in whom one finds absolute rest.

In the concluding pages of the first chapter of his book, Hart examines the etymology of the word “contemplation,” which derives from the Greek “theoria” and the Latin word “templum,” from which the word “temple” is derived. Accordingly, contemplation is closely tied to the temple, as it involves attending to God in an ecclesiastical manner. Hart also notes that the contemplative life can be lived in various ways, for example, as a professor in a research university or within a religious order. What is indeed key here is that contemplation involves both study and prayer, the latter being essential.

The second chapter becomes weightier and more intense as Hart revisits the subject of meditation and challenges the reader to realise the reversal of the gaze, whereby, while meditating on an icon, one becomes the object of the gaze. This unnerving experience is designed to unsettle the meditator, prompting them to look more deeply within themselves and reconsider their life, with the hope of being transformed and attuned to God’s will, or even becoming encouraged and consoled to pursue their current pathways. This can also be a passage read from Scripture which allows one to move from hearing to participating, whereby one finds oneself inside the scene as one of the characters or as a bystander. One begins to imagine what it would be like to be that person in that situation. The aftermath of meditation is prolonged through one’s everyday life engagements, as one finds oneself filled with a sense of joy and understanding that can change the character of the whole day, “just as a dash of salt seasons an entire dish” (33).

Again, Hart prompts the reader to move from meditation to contemplation by shifting from focusing on an image, story, or poem to being before God and having nothing other than Him. Hart’s position is clear: “There is a time for petition, a time for meditation, and also a time for contemplation, for simply being with God. Believers hope to spend eternity with God, and contemplation is a pledge of that hope” (34). This is where he begins to unpack the practice of contemplation in more detail. At first, Hart contends that, traditionally, one would benefit from having a focal point to aid in contemplation, which could be an object such as a crucifix and a short word to murmur, such as ‘Jesus’ or ‘Father’ to keep the mind, breath, and heart harmonised, as one slowly begins to approach one’s centre, where God dwells, with loving trust. Exterior and interior distractions are gently brushed away through concentration and unbroken utterance of the chosen word. As Hart accentuates, ultimately, in contemplation, one does not converse using words but rests confident in God’s truth, mercy, and love with deep gratitude.

Before all this, however, there is also the need for preparation, which, as Hart reminds believers, entails curating the room’s space, such as dimming the light and eliminating any sensory distractions, whilst shutting off contact with the external world. Following this initial stage, one prepares to enter a sacred inward space by making the sign of the cross as a reminder that they are a faithful follower of Jesus and accept His teaching, as well as all trials and tribulations that come their way. This entry must be made with a profound sense of respect and openness, knowing that one is in the presence of another person, the Lord. Almost anyone practising meditation or contemplation in any religion will acknowledge most of this and have additional insights to share.

In his second chapter, Hart makes a curious reference to the medieval Scottish philosopher and theologian Richard of St. Victor and his work, The Ark of Moses, to highlight our uncritical stance towards the supremacy of thinking as an act mainly prized in our educational system. What is striking is that Richard sets both meditation and contemplation above thinking, remarking that the latter is slow and tends to lead to distractions. In turn, Richard compares the movements of the soul with the movements of birds in the skies as we hold ourselves aloft before God with nothing particular to do, moving around and placing ourselves before God. Hart lyrically formulates it: “When contemplating God, we are like birds flying in the sunlit air, wholly secure and yet enjoying our freedom” (40).

Hart’s work does so many valuable things simultaneously. He revitalises the reader’s need for contemplation and meditation while narrating the saga of this tradition without overdoing it. Without paying much attention to how this tradition develops chronologically, Hart introduces the reader to such spiritual giants as St. Benedict, known for his Rule written for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot to pursue a Christocentric life. Hart explicitly refers to his Lectio Divina, providing the reader with an understanding of what such a reading entails: the first stage involves reading a very short passage of Scripture, followed by the second stage, which is meditating on it. Then, the third stage is applying that meditation to one’s own life by asking questions such as: “What can I learn from the Scriptures? How can I fold what I have learned into my everyday life? What graces do I need in order to grow in life on the basis of what has been put before me?” (41). Hart then proceeds to a final stage, contemplation, where one rests in the confidence of divine truth, mercy, and love. He warns that it may be a great temptation to turn lectio into a scholarly exercise, with the consequence that one will never progress from the first to the second stage and will remain stuck at that point. To this end, God appears as a problem to be solved, not as someone with whom one is deeply connected.

Hart’s close affinity to phenomenology is helpful here, as he highlights Husserl’s reference to the limits of the natural attitude and the need to recover the personalistic attitude. Meditation and contemplation allow us to move beyond the natural attitude and towards a momentous term Hart formulates in this work: the ‘Kingdom attitude,’ which is taught and embodied by Jesus and sought for its own sake. In this attitude, one is attuned to a spiritual space where God is King and Father, in which power is manifested in weakness, rejecting the logic and patterns of the world. Through this attitude, one does not become more enlightened. Instead, one embodies the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. In this attitude, as Hart patiently explains, we encounter God on His terms, as He comes to us, not in the ordinary way other humans approach us. God comes to us and departs from us in a manner that does not fit our worldly categories. In truth, God is absolutely singular since there is no genus of divinity.

In his third chapter, Hart reiterates the need to recuperate something left behind after the turn to modernity. He returns to the Middle Ages, this time to Thomas Aquinas and his celebrated Summa theologiæ. Here, Hart reminds us of the need to consult the Latin version to retrace the exact meaning of the words used accurately. An example is the word ‘speculative,’ which, in the Latin word, speculationem refers to reflection and inquiry. In this sense, Scripture offers us wisdom through its revealed knowledge. In turn, we respond to this knowledge by acknowledging it through our words and actions. Hart beautifully and consistently balances his work between the extraordinary lives of visionaries such as Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen and the ordinary life of everyone who, through contemplation, is slowly brought to a degree of blessedness. His main point is that contemplation is meant “to bring one to union with God without any peculiar experiences taking place” (63). Moreover, this union encompasses both the intellectual and affective dimensions, which are seen as mutually indispensable.

Hart points out that Aquinas describes God, at the beginning of the Summa, as simple, good, perfect, immutable, eternal, one, and so on, but does not use the word ‘transcendent.’ Instead, it is with Kant that the word ‘transcend’ becomes more apparent, used to denote something beyond the world of sense. Following Kant, especially in the Romantic era, it became commonplace to describe God as transcending the world. What becomes clear is the dichotomy between transcendence and immanence, which arises with Kant. Hart invites the reader to set aside the word ‘transcendence’ and, like the ancients who practised spiritual exercises, focus more on being transformed.

Not staying in the same space for too long, Hart swiftly moves from one era to another, from one religion to another, and from one spiritual guru to another, leaving the reader with a sense of wonder and the courage to follow their example and delve deeper. This allows the reader to be introduced to various concepts that can be further explored, making it consistently accessible and flowing, even though such themes are anything but easy to absorb. Hart devotes several pages to exploring the issues of presence, divine will, and providence, and with simplicity, he establishes significant connections across religions. For many, the idea of being utterly abandoned to a dark divine will runs counter to the desire to live well in this world. This requires a deep trust in God and His overflowing ‘dark love’ – His mysterious love.

Without losing track of the previous sketches, Hart reflects on Richard of St. Victor’s treatise, The Ark of Moses, and his triad of imagination, reason, and understanding, which consists of three groups of two in an ascending hierarchy of being. This ‘ladder’ is intended to illustrate the progression from the sensory world to the invisible or intellectual world and then to what lies beyond the intellect. Hart explains this path using the example of a daffodil: we start from the sensual world of how the flower can be represented, moving then to the invisible or intellectual world via reason to understand the universality of the flower, and then become elevated, by grace and divine aid, to grasp the flower as God’s creation until we reach the highest level of beholding the triune nature of the creator, i.e. God. The move towards the highest level is centred around the idea that a finite mind cannot contain an infinite God. Yet, this does not stop God from revealing his nature to a person. It only means this person cannot hope to encapsulate God in the intellect. In Hart’s words, “We do not bring God into the presence of our minds; we hope to be brought into the presence of God” (82). In light of this, Hart then moves on to (re)consider Aquinas’ views on contemplation, who critically inspects Richard’s spiritual chart. Aquinas maintains that the first levels proposed by Richard are modes of consideration in a quest for certitude. Instead, it is only when one reaches the final steps that one indeed enters the proper realm of contemplation. For Aquinas, it is the intellect that ultimately communicates with God.

In chapter four, Hart examines whether God is the sole legitimate object of human contemplation. In other words, can we behold things other than God? Again, the author reminds us to resist the modern temptation of distinguishing between the secular and the religious. Intriguingly, Hart notes that just as Plato’s idea of philosophy entails those who seek knowledge of the Forms, St. Paul, somewhat similarly, describes the Christian as one who beholds the glory of the Lord and becomes transformed into His likeness by the Spirit. Nonetheless, unlike the philosophical way, Christians do not have to engage in discussions to become like the Lord. One must only repent, believe, live up to the message of the Gospel, and pray. However, this is not an anti-philosophical stance either. Here, Hart reminds us of Justin Martyr, who proclaimed that faith in Jesus is the true philosophy. Hence, the Christian is the genuine philosopher (friend of wisdom) since Christ is Wisdom incarnate.

In this chapter, Hart examines classical philosophy and the reception of Plato and Aristotle, then delves into the Neoplatonist tradition, with a particular focus on Plotinus, providing numerous quotes from his Enneads. This work serves as a testament to the living contemplative tradition of philosophy, which nearly disappeared with the advent of the modern period. In fact, unlike the image of galleons departing from the known world to explore new lands on the cover of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, it was thought that the philosopher did not need to travel, as he could practice right where he was. Augustine, highly influenced by this tradition, writes in De Vera Religione, “Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interior homine habitat veritas” – a phrase famously expressed by Husserl at the end of his Cartesian Meditations. This entails that the Truth is an inward quest and, hence, it is through prayer that one can hope to encounter it.

Hart continually takes the reader on a philosophical and theological excursion through the ages. From his intellectual depth, he effortlessly transitions from the Classical and Middle Ages into the Modern period by probing Kant’s criticism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Both philosophers primarily support a new mode of cognition in the West: aesthetic contemplation, which alleviates mental pain and grants intellectual gratification. Hart, however, ends this chapter with significant remarks on Wittgenstein and Husserl concerning what they could contribute to the question of contemplation.

Hart points out that Wittgenstein did not treat philosophy as an exercise to educate us in virtue and dialectic, nor as a system that can provide a comprehensive vision of life and thought, nor as a means to draw us back to the One or God. Famously, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), we find a distinction between ‘what can be said’ and ‘what cannot’ without rejecting the latter as insignificant, so much so that it affirms a mystical sense of the world which invites us to come to terms with intuitions that cannot be voiced. Hart notes that this work is like “a ladder that rises to a moment of enlightenment and is then kicked away at the very end. To that extent, one might regard it as a spiritual exercise” (107). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) is also therapeutical, directing the reader to work on themselves and resist being lured by the standard philosophical problems.

Husserl, who was concerned with philosophical description rather than argumentation, seeks to describe phenomena as they appear in pure consciousness. Again, like Wittgenstein, Husserl’s view of philosophy is not a means to return to the One, nor does it provide a critique or a system-building approach. Instead, it is a meditative exercise that allows us to understand how beings are and how we come to know them. Here, Hart creates a beautiful bridge between attending to the experience of a pear sitting on the table and attending Mass and receiving Communion, whereby “the wafer is received not simply as bread to be perceived but as something holy. The liturgy refers me to the past (the Passion of Christ, the creation of the elements), my possible moral and spiritual transformation in the present, and to the future (the banquet of heaven). I am overwhelmed by the economy of creation and salvation. I overflow with many modes of awareness, most of which I suppress at the time” (110). In adopting the phenomenological attitude, I move away from the theoretical attitude to contemplate reality by beholding it in wonder as poets and artists do. As Hart concludes in his fourth chapter, “We must learn to let the poetry release us from our mental constraints so that we can hear the holy song” (114).

In his final chapter, “Why Contemplate?” Hart considers oppositions to contemplation and the contemplative life, offering reasons why it remains a worthwhile pursuit. Hart presents four main criticisms: a waste of life, unnatural, leading to heresy, and draining those who support such lifestyles. As Hart insists, if one is called to such a life, where the mind and heart act as one, one will eventually follow it, regardless of criticism. And how would one know of such a calling? Hart maintains that “an unavoidable part of the process of discernment as to whether one has a genuine vocation to the contemplative life is heartfelt evidence of the love of neighbor” (118). Loving God and others are one and inseparable. Beholding God entails practicing being virtuous. The works of love that spring from a life of prayer are invisible. It is incalculable to even think of how much evil the prayers of contemplatives deflect from the world and intercede for both the living and the dead. It is unreasonable to hold that contemplatives are not profoundly interested in others.

Those engaged in spiritual exercises, meditation, or contemplation are often accused of being self-absorbed or exclusive.  Is there any merit to this type of charge? As Hart rightfully points out, today, we spend a significant part of our day watching TV, playing video games, browsing the Internet, gossiping, checking apps on our iPhones, and engaging in other ways to take breaks from tasks. But could it be that those who pursue contemplation are better off than others in terms of education and leisure, meaning it can be an activity reserved for the middle classes? Lower classes will struggle to find the time, resources, and tranquillity to study, practice mental prayer, and engage in spiritual exercises. Others might believe they are involved in sufficient good works and, therefore, find no need to engage in this practice.

Hart aims to show that cultivating a spiritual life is hardly self-centred or promotes exclusivity. For example, practitioners of aesthetic contemplation seek to train and refine their feelings, whereas, in philosophical contemplation, one aims to find new ways of responding to challenges and gaining new perspectives on the world whilst remaining open to its beauty. Those who follow the Abrahamic religions seek a more intimate relationship with God, whilst Buddhists seek enlightenment. Generally, it can be said that contemplation helps individuals gain a deeper understanding of life and achieve eudaimonia.

However, Hart insists: “Are there pressing reasons, though, to attempt contemplation at a higher level than to improve one’s mental health?” (123). Intriguingly, he attempts to answer this question by bringing Nietzsche on board, zooming in on the latter’s infamous passage of the madman declaring that God is dead in The Gay Science (1882). Hart invites us to reread this passage to consider whether such a dramatic claim holds more significance than it initially appears to have. What is meant by ‘God’ in this context? Is it a rejection of an entire metaphysical reality? It unquestionably points to a situation of disaster. Hart provides the etymology of this word, derived from the Latin dis (away from) + astrum (star), implying a lack of guidance from the stars above. The wiping away of the horizon suggests that the earth and sky cannot be kept apart, disturbing our planet’s orbit around the sun and leaving us wandering through space, soaked in a deepening sense of guilt and mistrust of this new modern situation in which we find ourselves misplaced within it.

The inquiry remains: “Has God died because it is impossible to conceive a Creator and Redeemer being at all interested in our speck of a planet? Can the Abrahamic God even be squared with a cosmic reality of vast empty spaces, megacomets, wandering black holes, catastrophic solar flares, and complete indifference to life? Or is God immeasurably greater than we once thought because of the scale of creation?” (125). As Hart rightfully points out, we are overwhelmed not only by the universe out there but, perhaps more so, by our world down here, bombarded with too much information (and misinformation), ideas, news, and views. We feel abandoned in a post-truth world of preferences and individual choices, which takes an immense psychic toll on us before we know it.

Ingeniously, Hart then takes the reader back to a passage from The Divine Names, written by Pseudo-Dionysius sometime around the 6th century, which he intends to read alongside the previous one by Nietzsche. Pseudo-Dionysius most likely lived during disastrous times of great turmoil in a land ravaged by plagues, war, and famine. However, unlike Nietzsche’s diagnoses of our modern situation, Pseudo-Dionysius offers inner movements that lead from experiences of brokenness to oneness with God, advocating contemplation. Hart directs us to the soul’s circular, spiral, and linear movements: “The soul performs a circular motion when it passes from the external world to its own spiritual reality, and, on reflecting on itself, as we have seen time and again in earlier chapters, it curves upward to God. If the soul engages in discursive reasoning about God, as happens when one reads philosophy or theology, it enacts a spiral movement, since time is involved. One slowly winds upwards to the deity. Finally, if the soul looks to phenomena, reflects on them, and so rises above them to God, it traces out a straight line” (127).

Finally, Hart concludes his final chapter with an insightful and straightforward reflection on three essential aspects of contemplation: penetrating, free, and extended everywhere. The former enables us to delve deeper into things, gaining more insight and training us to become more attentive. The second stresses the freedom to adopt this attentive attitude, navigating around the object we choose to pay attention to, allowing ourselves to be drawn by it and filled with wonder. The latter aspect implies that contemplation opens us onto infinite, always fresh horizons. Hart leaves us with this good instruction: “The important thing is to ensure that the exercise is undertaken with all due concentration and to do it each day and not yield when periods of flatness and spiritual dryness come, as they surely will. The movements of the soul are at least as essential to life as the motions of the body” (133).

 

 

Riccardo Pugliese: The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre, Springer, 2024

The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre Book Cover The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre
Riccardo Pugliese
Palgrave Macmillan Cham
2024
Softcover
XII, 88

Reviewed by: Tyler Perkins (Gannon University)

The Burden and Dignity of Possibility: On Riccardo Pugliese’s The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre

Introduction

If the Socratic prescription for living well is to “let no day pass without discussing goodness and […] that life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” then, as Riccardo Pugliese suggests in The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre, the existentialist counterpart might read: let no day pass without choosing oneself — and that a life without this sort of choice is not worth living (Plato 1993, p. 23). But how is one able to choose? What choices are available? What is the self that one must choose? And how does this make life worth living? What kind of failure results from failing to choose?

These are the animating questions of Pugliese’s concise and provocative volume. The book is neatly divided into two parts: the first investigates “the relationship between freedom and possibility in Kierkegaard,” while the second “dwells on the idea of freedom as condemnation as it was conceived by the philosopher who most radicalized its scope: Jean-Paul Sartre” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 1–2). At first glance, the book appears to offer a familiar exegetical pairing of two major existentialists. Yet Andrea Tagliapietra’s preface signals a more ambitious aim: a reorientation of existentialism around the category of possibility, challenging the long-standing ontological priority given to actuality and essence in Western metaphysics.

Pugliese develops two intertwined arguments: first, that existentialist thought uniquely subverts the classical dichotomy between possibility and reality, treating possibility not as mere potentiality or lack, but as an ontologically rich mode of being. Second, that this ontological shift has significant ethical consequences — particularly for the question of how to live. His reinterpretation of Kierkegaard and Sartre thus serves not only to clarify their positions, but to advance a broader philosophical proposal: that the self must be understood through the lens of possibility, and that a life lived well is one that takes up this burden with lucidity.

In what follows, I first summarize the major claims and structure of the book, then assess its interpretive and philosophical contributions. I conclude by reflecting on the ethical and phenomenological implications of reading existentialism as a meditation on the dizziness — and dignity — of possibility.

Possibility and Selfhood in Kierkegaard

The first half of the book offers a reading of Kierkegaard centered on the ontological and ethical role of possibility. Drawing primarily on Either/Or and The Sickness unto Death, he presents Kierkegaard as a thinker who defines the self through exposure to what might be—and what might be chosen.

Using Kierkegaard, Pugliese argues that possibility provides the ontological basis for human existence itself. Prior to realizing any one possibility—to choosing, that is—one is at the zero-point of existence, as a nothingness (at least in that moment). Possibility here is framed as “permanent indecision, the unstable balance between opposing alternatives that present themselves in the face of any given possibility” (Pugliese 2023, p. 2). This zero-point is more than a fork in the road (does one go down one path or the other?), Pugliese quotes Kierkegaard’s Diario, where he compares the experience of possibility to being caught at “an intersection of ways that radiate in all directions” and at which one is compelled to turn down several (albeit incompatible) roads at once. What’s more, the existential condition of possibility is not overcome by the act of choosing. Pugliese claims that Kierkegaard’s remark “implies that from choice there is no escape,” this, it seems, is because one transgresses the zero-point only to arrive back at it (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).

The Aesthetic and the Ethical

Choosing isn’t merely one option among others in the face of possibility. Because human existence is defined by possibility, choosing is necessary. To be sure, echoing Kierkegaard, Pugliese describes choice as “an ineradicable component of our persona […] the individual is not what he is but what he chooses to be […] even the renunciation of choice is a choice, albeit a type of choice by which man renounces himself” (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).

Thus, the first dilemma at the heart of Pugliese’s existentialist ethic is not between choosing and not choosing—not choosing, he tells us, is itself a choice. Instead, it’s between renunciation and commitment; between, in Kierkegaardian terms, the aesthetic stage and the ethical stage.

When in the aesthetic stage, one lives according to the motto carpe horam (seize the hour!), immersed in a world of immediate, external goods. The aesthete is “one who grounds himself and the meaning of his life on external agents (e.g., wealth), or independent from one’s own will (such as beauty, health, talent, or intelligence)” (Pugliese 2023, p. 6). While Pugliese notes structural similarities between Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage and later existentialist notions such as Heidegger’s thrownness or Sartre’s facticity, he does not address whether he interprets it as a normative program, or on a more descriptive register. However, since Pugliese claims that modern ethics after Kierkegaard emphasizes transformation, growth, and development, his argument appears to carry an implicit normative force. Readers should be aware, however, that this is not the only — or even the dominant — interpretation of Kierkegaard’s stages.

By contrast, one passes from the aesthetic to the ethical stage “by assuming full responsibility for his own freedom, commits himself to a task to which he remains faithful,” and “embraces the repetition that the aesthete has shunned” (Pugliese 2023, p. 4). This review will cover Pugliese’s treatment of the ethical stage in a later section. For now, the question is, where is the tipping point between the aesthetic and the ethical? Answer: Despair.

Despair as the culmination of the aesthetic life

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard examines the existential condition of despair through the figure of Judge Wilhelm — a representative of the ethical stage who offers a sustained critique of aesthetic life. As Pugliese emphasizes, despair marks “the first, inescapable step toward the ethical stage,” because it is in despair — a crisis that is, paradoxically, “deeply and intensely coveted” — that the self first becomes aware of itself as something to be chosen (Pugliese 2023, p. 14). This reflective awareness is the defining feature of the despairing aesthete, who “becomes aware of himself, of his own freedom, and of the possibilities that this awareness entails” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).

This moment of critical self-awareness brings existential clarity to the aesthete; it is the recognition that they have “tied the very purpose of their life to transient, finite, and fleeting things and feelings. The despairing aesthete’s perspective reveals “the futility of everything and its ephemeral character” (Pugliese 2023, p. 10). With the futility of their vanity in full view, the despairing aesthete has no reason to continue their pursuit of meaning and purpose in immediate and external goods. But how can this despair be distinguished from mere dissatisfaction—from the boredom or weariness that follows exhausting one’s options for pleasure? As Pugliese puts it, the despairing aesthete, having exhausted even their own fantasies, now “marches irrevocably toward the abyss” (Pugliese 2023, p. 11).

In the end, Pugliese presents the despairing aesthete as a kind of tragic seer—someone who has penetrated the illusion of aesthetic meaning and now lives with the naked awareness of its futility. This is not the despair of ignorance, but of insight. The cost of this lucidity, however, is paralysis: with all values dissolved, no action seems justifiable. Judge Wilhelm’s ethical challenge, then, is not to negate despair but to embrace it—to “choose despair” as the first step toward becoming a true self. In framing despair this way, Pugliese gives it a paradoxical dignity: it is not merely a dead end, but the beginning of responsibility.

Choice of self as foundational to ethical existence

According to Pugliese, the ethical life begins when one recognizes that freedom is not simply given but must be grasped. This means choosing not merely between options but choosing to become a self in the fullest existential sense. It is “a great original choice that determines the horizon of [their] existence, namely, the choice to choose” (Pugliese 2023, p. 13). The critical self-consciousness one gains through despair “will lead [them] to a condition of complete transparency and lucidity, which existentialists call authenticity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).

In chapter 3, “The Choice of Self,” Pugliese follows Kierkegaard in describing ethical selfhood as a movement through three existential moments: (1) Self-recognition as absolute freedom – “I can do anything.” (2) Self-recognition as a necessity, based on one’s history and conditioning – “I am constrained by my facticity.” (3) Self-recognition in one’s eternal worth through repentance – a synthesis of (1) and (2) yielding a stable identity. This sequence does not imply resolution or closure. Rather, it marks the conditions under which a stable identity emerges.

For Pugliese, this existential choice represents the minimal condition for authenticity. It does not guarantee ethical fulfillment, but it opens the horizon in which commitment, responsibility, and selfhood become possible. In this sense, the ethical is the willingness to relate to oneself through an enduring commitment to continual self-perfection.

The threefold structure of ethical selfhood in Pugliese’s reading highlights the paradox at the heart of existential subjectivity. One must come to terms with being a synthesis of opposing forces: freedom and necessity, transcendence and facticity. The pain of despair reveals the self as absolutely free. Yet in the second moment, the individual “clashes against the limits of his contingency and discovers that he has a history, and that this history is indivisibly interwoven with the histories of other men, bound to become a single, collective history” (Pugliese 2023, p. 18). It is precisely this finitude, when confronted freely, that makes ethical selfhood possible. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the final synthesis arrives not in denial of either pole, but in a kind of existential reconciliation: the choice to affirm both freedom and necessity in the act of becoming oneself.

Pugliese argues that the moment of self-recognition as a necessity adds an extra dimension to the existential weight of responsibility. One is not only responsible for who they freely choose to become, but also for the nexus of background conditions—historical, social, and personal—that have shaped their becoming. Repentance is the existential structure through which individuals redeem themselves in their “entirety and complexity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 19). Repentance, for Pugliese, is not merely a reconciliation of contradictions within the self. It is existentially significant because it marks the culmination of ethical selfhood — the moment at which one becomes answerable to something both immanent and transcendent. Quoting Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Pugliese formulates the effect of repentance as a kind of mystical rebirth, whereby “the self chooses itself or rather receives itself,” and “Man does not become different from what he was before, he just becomes himself; consciousness gathers, and he is himself” (Kierkegaard 1843, quoted in Pugliese 2023, p. 19).

Pugliese began by comparing the aesthete’s predicament to being adrift in an open and indeterminate sea of possibility, one who is content with the amusement of considering, but never realizing any of the possibilities that lay before them—a kind of infinite existential procrastination. The ethical individual has been emboldened by their critical self-awareness to resolutely and passionately choose. Yet neither clarity nor resolve can shield the ethical individual from what Pugliese calls the “painful and melancholic irreconcilability between opposite life paths,” a suffering felt most acutely in the sacrifice possibility at the altar of actuality (Pugliese 2023, p. 23).

Sartre and Freedom as Condemnation

In the arc of Pugliese’s text, Kierkegaard lays down the premises for some of the philosophical conclusions he wishes to draw out of his engagement with Sartre and 20th-century existentialism. However, while Kierkegaard provides much of the philosophical foundation for more recent existentialist philosophies, Pugliese is careful to distinguish Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism from the kind of philosophy that was done as a response to the “feeling of desolation and estrangement from life” and “the idea of the individual as a clearly distinct entity opposed to society as a whole” (Pugliese 2023, p. 28). Chapter 4, “Existentialism and the Birth of the Modern Era,” gives a relatively straightforward and uncontroversial account of the cultural, philosophical, and political changes that took shape between the mid-19th to early-20th centuries in Europe.

The Age of Anxiety (1918-1939) upended almost every aspect of humanity’s philosophical self-understanding. Important for the development of existentialism is the “process of rationalization that will dismantle all the theological or metaphysical premises on which universal value judgments had previously been based,” as well as “the positivist illusion that such ideals can be objectively grounded in historical or social facts and their development,” and humanity’s loss of its “central position in the universe,” all adding up to a general feeling of “bewilderment and loneliness” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 26-7).

In Chapter 5, “Human Existence,” Pugliese begins to develop existentialism as a philosophical response to the spiritual and cultural crisis of the Age of Anxiety. To do so, he situates 20th-century existentialism against the backdrop of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, distinguishes between the natural, biological dimension of the human being and the rational, self-conscious capacity that defines human subjectivity. For Pugliese, this model is not embraced by existentialism so much as reworked: the existentialist inherits Hegel’s emphasis on self-consciousness and negation, but without the metaphysical assurances of a reconciled totality or final synthesis.

If Kierkegaard demonstrates that human beings have the freedom to transform themselves, to choose to give themselves purpose by making a passionate commitment to themselves, then Hegel offers the structural resources to explain how such transformation is ontologically possible. Existentialists inherit the notion that human beings are split between their immediate impulses and the reflective distance afforded by self-consciousness. For Sartre, whom Pugliese take up in the second half of the book, this struggle is reframed as a fundamental tension between existence and essence.[1] It is from within this tension that Sartre articulates his claim that being-for-itself (i.e., consciousness) negates and transcends being-in-itself (the natural, biological dimension). By denying one’s immediate impulses, “a crack, a fissure, a nothingness is introduced within the fullness of being by human existence” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Against the backdrop of the Age of Anxiety, Sartre offers not a return to metaphysical certainty, but a redemption of human dignity. Humanity may no longer receive purpose from God or the state but retain the capacity to give it to itself.

However, that capacity is not exercised unconsciously; it “occurs through the precise decision on the part of the individual to interact with it in order to modify it and give it the desired direction actively, in the course of one’s life” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Pugliese thus shows that beginning from ontology rather than ethics still leads us back to a reflection on freedom. It is because human beings are ontologically structured to define themselves in relation to their circumstances that “human existence implies that each of our actions contributes to the overall shaping of our life in its entirety.” One imagines that Sartre would go a step further because for him, action does not merely shape a life, it constitutes essence. Thus, Pugliese returns to and reinforces the grounding thesis of the text: human existence is characterized by possibility, “openness to all,” and that man is “free to choose what he wants to become” (Pugliese 2023, p. 38).

In Chapter 6, “Transcendence and Freedom,” Pugliese extends the ontological significance of possibility into the domains of epistemology and perception. He traces how existentialists inherit and revise Kant’s critical philosophy, particularly the claim that “the world we experience on a daily basis is merely the projection of our way of thinking and perceiving reality” (Pugliese 2023, p. 43). While Sartre may accept a version of this “projection thesis,” he breaks from the Kantian framework by rejecting the idea that perception is conditioned by universal categories shared by all. For the existentialist, it is not transcendental structures but the “free and individual choice, unique and unrepeatable because it is different for each person, which determines the appearance of the world” (Pugliese 2023, p. 44). In this way, Pugliese shows that possibility is not only the ground of ethical life but also of perception itself — the very way the world is given to consciousness.

Freedom and the Demand for Meaning

20th-century existentialism, shaped by the cultural disorientation of the Age of Anxiety, reinterprets Kierkegaard’s ethical demand through the concept of authenticity, emphasizing how important it is to choose oneself. For thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre, the greatest threat to selfhood is not merely the pursuit of pleasure, but the pull of conformity—the pressure to define oneself through the gaze and expectations of others. As Pugliese puts it, communal life “creates alienation and detachment from oneself” under the sway of what he calls “the dictatorship of one” (Pugliese 2023, p. 47). This phrase names the subtle but pervasive temptation to submit to prevailing norms and social routines, effacing difference in the process.

Existentialist thinkers from Nietzsche to Sartre have long warned against the leveling effects of normalization. However, while Pugliese rightly emphasizes their shared resistance to the herd, he glosses over the significant differences in their positions—particularly Nietzsche’s explicitly prescriptive ideal of self-overcoming, in contrast to the more descriptive and phenomenological approaches found in Heidegger and Sartre. This omission risks flattening the conceptual terrain that existentialism traverses in its effort to think authenticity under modern conditions. It is true that one ought to strive to live passionately and authentically, but taken to its radical extreme, this demand risks isolating the individual from the shared fabric of social life. Authenticity, in this register, becomes not just a struggle against conformity, but a potential estrangement from others altogether. The text seems to arrive at a more nuanced position in spite of the omission, which acknowledges that these philosophers “invite us, as individuals, to not adhere uncritically to a particular school of thought, challenging us to think about things autonomously, inwardly, and silently, and to arrive at a final decision using our critical consciousness” (Pugliese 2023, p. 52).

In the final chapter, “Freedom as Destiny,” Pugliese reorients the existential notion of freedom away from abstraction and toward situated commitment. Freedom, he argues, is not a blank slate, but a task that must be worked out within the irreducible constraints of one’s historical, cultural, and personal situation. In this sense, destiny does not oppose freedom but names the terrain through which it must move. Drawing on Sartre’s later reflections, Pugliese shows that the highest form of freedom is not flight from one’s conditions, but the capacity to assume them lucidly and transform them meaningfully. This closing gesture also recalls Kierkegaard’s emphasis on repetition, showing that the ethical life is not simply an escape from despair or an assertion of novelty, but a return to one’s existence with renewed commitment. By ending here, Pugliese reinforces his central thesis: that existentialism, far from a philosophy of despair, is a sustained meditation on the dignity and difficulty of becoming a self through possibility.

Conclusion

The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre is both an accessible introduction to key existentialist thinkers and a philosophically ambitious proposal in its own right. Pugliese’s central claim—that possibility is not merely a psychological horizon but the ontological condition of freedom and selfhood—offers a compelling thread that runs from Kierkegaard’s stages of life through Sartre’s ontology of negation and responsibility. The book succeeds in showing how existentialism responds to the modern loss of metaphysical grounding not with despair, but with an ethic of lucidity and self-commitment. At times, its interpretive scope risks smoothing over significant differences between thinkers, particularly in its treatment of authenticity and the pressure of social conformity. Yet Pugliese’s clarity of exposition and structural elegance allow the philosophical force of the existentialist tradition to come through. For readers interested in the ethical and ontological stakes of freedom—not just as a cultural idea, but as an existential task—this volume offers a valuable and thoughtful guide.

 

Bibliography:

Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton. 16. print. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Pugliese, Riccardo. The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38138-6.


[1] It’s not clear if Pugliese wants to say that, for Sartre, essence and givenness are one and the same. When Sartre famously claims that “existence precedes essence” in Existentialism is a Humanism, essence is not meant to stand in for the concept of facticity, or one’s situation that they may take a stand on.

Nicolai Hartmann: Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn

Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn Book Cover Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn
Nicolai Hartmann. Edited by Moritz von Kalckreuth
Meiner
2024
Paperback
230, XLVIII

Reviewed by: Giulia Spagnolli (University of Padua)

 

In the field of ethics, reflecting on values is of utmost importance. This reflection gains significance due to the complexity of the multicultural environment in which humanity operates today, characterized by diverse value systems and the varying dominance of specific values across different times and cultures. Moritz von Kalckreuth notes that while the topic of values may seem ‘exotic’ today, it was quite popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the belief that it could introduce a scientific aspect to discussions on meaning and normative evaluations. Within this context, Nicolai Hartmann stands out as one of the few prominent value theorists in German philosophy, and his writings presented here, also embody an existentialist spirit typical of the era. In Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn, von Kalckreuth presents a thematically arranged collection of essays by Hartmann, written between 1924 and 1929, all centered on the question of value. The first part of the anthology is specifically devoted to the concept of value, encompassing both moral and aesthetic dimensions, while the second part explores phenomena that cannot be fully explained through purely axiological considerations. These writings serve as a valuable complement to the already remarkable moral treatises found in Hartmann’s major works (Ethik and Das Problem des gesitigen Seins). Published in 1926, Ethik, as von Kalckreuth observes, follows two primary lines of argumentation. Firstly, it examines how values are apprehended, their ontological nature, and provides a detailed account of value phenomena, a topic deeply explored in the second volume (Moral Values). Secondly, it addresses the actions that serve as the practical counterpart to the ideality of values, through which values are actualized by the moral subject. In Das Problem des geistigen Seins, the study on values is situated within a cultural-historical framework, where morality is portrayed as a domain of the objective spirit, facilitating interaction among individuals. That said, Hartmann’s theory of values is deeply intertwined with the intellectual debates of the past century and is part of a broader philosophical endeavor aimed at revitalizing ontology by incorporating insights from other fields of knowledge, striving to establish a shared ontological foundation. It would be therefore incorrect to assume that Hartmann’s axiological theory is confined solely to his 1926 Ethik. As evidenced by his correspondence with Heinz Heimsoeth, Hartmann had already developed several theoretical principles underpinning his moral reflections, before the First World War. This assumption is plausible, given that the overarching structure of Hartmann’s philosophy is evident even in his early works. In particular, Hartmann’s axiology takes its starting point in the Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, where he lays out the gnoseological and ontological conditions of his theory of values, showing that the latter cannot prescind from ontology; indeed, reflection on moral phenomena is part of it as “a regional ontology, an investigation of the ontological structure of the person in its complexity as a multi-layered entity”[1]. As von Kalckreuth highlights, amidst the diverse voices shaping the debate on the question of values—such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler, and Max Weber, among others—Hartmann, with his approach, seeks to unify philosophical research on values, which is otherwise marked by a tendency toward one-sidedness. If Ethik—which today’s reception is limited to—is not regarded as the sole text for understanding Hartmann’s axiological framework, the significance of von Kalckreuth’s collection emerges as a valuable contribution to the study of the philosophy of value.  

At this point, it may be helpful to outline the themes and questions that Hartmann engages with in the realm of a philosophy of values, where the solutions he developed continue to serve as essential reference points for axiological reflection. To better understand Hartmann’s stance within the debate of his time, it is interesting to examine his first essay, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, which, despite its brevity, serves as a highly insightful declaration of his intentions and methodology. In it, Hartmann underscores that, despite the variety of existing doctrines, the issue of values has matured into a distinct philosophical problem that should not be conflated with the question of purposes. Additionally, there are key issues that no philosophy of value can overlook: the notion that life is rich with value, the call to honor the values inherent in the world, and the duty to actualize them—these latter two principles delineate the entire domain of ethics. Starting with the essence of the values, Hartmann identifies a series of issues, that are explored and addressed in this anthology. In the axiological theories developed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questions surrounding pluralism and relativism of values took center stage. Hartmann directly challenges Nietzsche, who, by highlighting the variety of values and advocating for their transvaluation, rendered pluralism and ontology incompatible. Pluralism plays a central role in Hartmann’s reflections and stems from his unique phenomenological approach, which emphasizes a maximum focus on the given data and a minimum of metaphysics, rejecting any form of unilateral Standpünktlichkeit. This perspective also applies to values, as seen in Ethik, published nearly contemporaneously with Weber’s concept of a ‘polytheism of values’, which, at its core, arises from similar needs to those of the philosopher from Riga. Hartmann’s theory of values can be seen as addressing the questions left unresolved by Nietzsche. He manages to mantain an ontological framework while embracing the pluralism of values, driven by the ‘tension toward the universal’, that defines his philosophical inquiry. In this respect,  his approach might be referred to as an ‘ontology of values’.

Hartmann’s original theses engage with and confront tradition, and Nietzsche is not the only interlocutor in this collection. In Kants Metaphysik der Sitten und die Ethik unserer Tage, Hartmann aims to place his reflections within the broader context of the ‘Material Ethics of Value’, a framework pioneered by Max Scheler where Hartmann himself emerges as a prominent figure. This theory can be seen as a synthesis, combining Nietzsche’s discovery of the multiplicity of values with Kant’s apriorism and the author repeatedly highlights its innovative nature, emphasizing how it resolves several aporias, that earlier moral theories failed to tackle. In this essay, Hartmann underscores particularly the capacity of the Material Ethics of Value to handle the diversity of good—something that has become fundamental since Nietzsche. He acknowledges that while our preferences for accessing values may shift, there are laws that remain applicable a priori. This discussion unfolds, as the title suggests, in the context of a comparison with Kantian Ethics. Demonstrating a more accommodating stance toward the philosopher of Königsberg than many of his contemporaries, Hartmann acknowledges Kant’s achievement in addressing the ethical problem through the lens of apriorism. However, he critiques this perspective, which identifies the explanatory principle of moral phenomena as an intrinsic tendency of the subject, arguing that it succumbs to the subjectivism that deeply taints modern philosophy. The Hartmannian solution lies in rejecting the subjective origin of moral phenomena; this is achieved by affirming the existence of an “ideal realm of being, to which values intrinsically belong”. These values are apprehended a priori as “autonomous entities within this realm, entirely independent of  ‘experience’”[2]. Hartmann’s perspective closely aligns with that of Scheler, who criticized the formalism and intellectualism of Kantian Ethics. To move beyond intellectualism, both Scheler and Hartmann recognize the presence of an axiological sentiment (Wertgefühl), which serves as the primary locus of the givenness of values. This sentiment, inherent in every human decision, represents the true essence of moral phenomena. Regarding Kantian formalism, Hartmann, while resonating with Scheler, states: “Values themselves do not inherently possess the nature of laws or imperatives […] in relation to the subject, but rather exist as material and objective entities, although not as real ones”[3]. This is why ethics, building on Kantian apriorism, must evolve into a Material Ethics of Values. It is clear then, that Scheler’s remarkable contribution lies in revealing the existence of material and objective entities whose value is evident a priori. According to Hartmann, this discovery paves the way for an expansive field of inquiry into ethical apriorism, which had previously been insufficiently explored. Furthermore, it reveals that Kantian Ethics and Material Value Ethics fundamentally share the same trajectory.

Closely related to the issue of value pluralism is another crucial problem: reconciling the ‘ideal self-existence’ of values with relativism (an aspect, the second, that Nietzsche’s philosophy brought starkly into focus). As Hartmann observes in Vom Wesen sittlicher Forderungen, the flaw in nearly all moral systems throughout history prior to Nietzsche, lies in their tendency to elevate a specific value as an absolute good in itself. In contrast, it is essential to illuminate the relativity of values. What, then, is the source of this relativity? The questionable nature of values arises from their inability to independently determine human will. They exist autonomously, separate from their actual realization, and in relation to reality, they present only a demand—a call to what ought to be. The ideal nature of values necessitates a moment of mediation between ideality and reality, between moral experience and axiological objectivity. Here, personal being assumes a pivotal role as the mediator between the ideal realm of values and the realities that define world events and human existence. This being has the ability to bring ideal demands into the world and, within its capabilities, transform what already exists; it is entrusted with the responsibility of being a co-creator of the world. Thus, the issue of relativism can be reinterpreted as follows: it is not the values themselves, in their essence, that change, but rather their validity in relation to the moral subject and the axiological consciousness. This consciousness is distinct from theoretical consciousness and does not follow a linear progression of development.  At the individual level, value blindness, or Wertblindheit, which leads to favoring one value while disregarding others, results from a significant limitation of the axiological consciousness. The latter is gripped by the value and, in a way, compelled to respond to it. Each value tends to dominate individuals, often overshadowing other values—a phenomenon particularly pronounced in history, where a ‘one-sided ethos’ periodically prevails. Hartmann successfully bridges the intrinsic nature of values with relativism, through the concept of validity. Here, what emerges is a dynamic and adaptable validity, intrinsically tied to circumstances and aligned with evolving ways of life[4]. The moral demands that shape our lives and guide our will are intrinsically tied to real relationships and the lived world, rather than being mere flatus vocis. As Hartmann elaborates in the essay, these demands arise where instincts fail humanity; unlike animals, humans are not naturally equipped with the skills necessary for survival. Instead, they find themselves entangled in an “infinite chain of situations”[5], compelled to make free decisions at every turn. Only in these moments, do humans become truly capable of action. In contrast to the traditional systematic error, which separates what is given from what is ideally required, Hartmann’s proposed middle path—linking moral demands to real-world structures—finds an ally in Aristotle’s doctrine of situation types as presented in the Nicomachean Ethics.

In Die Wertdimensionen der Nickomachischen Ethik, Hartmann engages in a historical and systematic analysis of Aristotle’s theory of virtue, juxtaposing it with contemporary philosophy of value. He challenges “the notion that ethics of virtue merely involves advocating outdated virtues and applying them case-by-case”[6]. In light of Nietzsche’s concept of a multiplicity of values—contrasting with the unity proposed by Platonic and Kantian philosophies—the ancient doctrine of the multiplicity of virtues has regained significance. Aristotle focused on a value that is valid and recognizable to human beings. For him, the nature of value was defined by the structure of being in different areas of life, reflecting the natural link between value and reality. Aristotle did not entirely discard Plato’s concept of innate ideas of virtues or their autonomy. Instead, he illustrated their connection to the actual structures of human life. It is then the responsibility of individuals to determine how to navigate various situations, and it is the nature of these specific human contexts that dictates the range of possible behaviors associated with each virtue. The Aristotelian theory of value, aligning with the Hartmannian thesis and the Greek ideal of mesotes, addresses ethical relativism. Values are neither purely subjective nor unyieldingly absolute; they are influenced by the framework of human existence and the historical contexts that guide their development. The strength of this essay lies in its effort to tackle an unresolved question posed by Aristotle: “How can one identify the appropriate balance between the incorrect extremes, and what means does an individual possess in their life to ensure that their actions align with the ideal?”[7]. According to Hartmann, the sense of value identified by the phänomenologischen Wertphilosophie[8] serves as an example of orientation within various areas of existence and life, as it allows one to experience a value as either positive or negative.

Hartmann revisits the relationship between reality and ideality also in his 1938 writing, Zeitlichkeit und Substantialität. In this text, he only apparently departs from the axiological theme, in order to clarify the nature of values. The philosopher examines the history of Western thought, particularly its persistent quest to identify something permanent amidst the passage of time. From Parmenides to Plato, through Christianity, to Kant and beyond, time has been seen as destructive, leading to a preference for immutability. The highest values and meaning have often been connected to eternity. Hartmann emphasizes rather a real and ephemeral dimension of them, which has a “more important role than the ideal values that remain merely schematic”[9]. This raises the question of how to understand the definition of values as ‘ideal essences’ that Hartmann offers in Ethics.  Hartmann’s acknowledgment of values as ideal entities does not suggest an evasion from reality; like all ideal beings, values maintain a connection with the real world. Specifically, they serve not only as ‘principles of the ideal ethical sphere’ but also as ‘principles of the actual sphere’ and of the ‘practical sphere’[10]. The ethos of humanity is characterized by actions rather than being merely an ideal product. Therefore, the existence of values cannot be reduced to ‘mere essence’; as principles of ethos, their essence transcends the realm of ideal existence and integrates into the changing world of ethical acts. However, the challenge against the populär metaphysischer Substanzbegriff is not limited to values alone; it encompasses the entirety of existence, including personal and ethical beings in their spiritual dimensions. It is relevant, in this context, to connect the 1938 essay with Hartmann’s innovative considerations presented in Philosophie der Natur. Here, the philosopher examines how relative permanence manifests in reality, going beyond the notion of absolute duration. Hartmann differentiates between the concepts of subsistence (Subsistenz) and consistency (Konsistenz), as strategies of relative permanence employed by natural entities. Subsistence represents a static category predominant at the lower levels of natural existence, particularly concerning phenomena related to matter, the preservation of motion, and forms of energy—where inertia and mechanistic organization of formal entities dominate. In contrast, consistency is observed only at the most advanced levels of organic existence and is characterized as a dynamic concept. Because of this trait, living organisms do not rely on a static foundation but persist as procedural forms and are maintained by continuous reaffirmation activities, which enable them to change while preserving their identity. The permanence of the self and the moral person is seen as a specific form of consistency: “Das Ich ist nicht Substanz, aber er hat Konstanz im Wandel seiner Zustände, Akte und Inhalte”[11]. Within the framework provided by the ontology of nature, personal identity consists of two elements: a center of reaffirmation and time. At each moment of our lives, we are a present self that reaffirms its identity in relation to a set of past selves. In the non-spatial dimension of inner experience, the self can detach from any material element and achieve a higher level of freedom—moral freedom—by deciding the extent to which the present self should remain faithful to the past self. The personal being is not only capable of understanding the vast array of values and realizing them but also uniquely possesses free will, which distinguishes it from other entities. Without freedom, which is the fundamental premise of any ethical system, values would remain unexpressed and unrealized. Therefore, freedom is an essential attribute of the person, who acts as a mediator between values and reality. Hartmann identifies this uniquely human ability to attribute meaning to reality as an expression of human distinctiveness, dignity, and nobility. In this context, although humans may be physically insignificant in the vast universe, their impact is immense. They serve as vehicles “of a higher principle, creators of a reality which possesses significance and value (Schöpfer eines Sinn- und Wertvollen in der Wirklichkeit)”[12], and as mediators of the highest values in the world.

In Sinngebung und Sinnerfüllung, Hartmann highlights the complex relationship between metaphysical issues of meaning and value, reflecting the existentialist ethos of his time. By providing a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of meaning, Hartmann illustrates how humanity’s relentless search for meaning has driven individuals to transcend empirical boundaries, ultimately surpassing limits of comprehension and making any attempt to fully grasp or understand it unattainable. Hartmann suggests that value does not lie in a primary unit but in the ‘ontologically secondary’, within what is given. This sense of value emerges in the world through epigenesis rather than stemming from foundational principles. In this context, man is inherently tardy because, if meaning existed independently within the world, it could not belong to him. Therefore, humanity carries a profound responsibility, which is intertwined with the capacity to impart meaning. Consequently, a new metaphysics must emerge from the remnants of the old, reinstating mankind’s rightful claim to the world. To support this assertion, the author examines the philosophy of history. Contrary to Hegel’s rational and purposeful interpretation of history, individuals find their place in it through moments of senselessness and randomness. Despite these limitations, humans ascribe meaning to history, which is the process by which humanity unfolds its essence and achieves fulfillment through human actions. As von Kalckreuth states: “This gives an idea of how man’s creative role should be understood”[13]. In emphasizing the originality and significance of the philosophy of values and the paradigm shift it introduces, Hartmann contends that this approach would uncover a new dimension. The realization of meaning hinges on values, and society’s role is to achieve this through active individual participation.

The anthology edited by Von Kalckreuth, concludes with a discussion that focuses on value and individuality. Hartmann’s speech at the Primer Congreso Nacional de Filosofía in Mendoza, titled Das Ethos der Persönlichkeit, begins by distinguishing between person and personality. Personality, specifically the value of personality, is what makes individuals unique. It is an irreplaceable trait that contrasts with the concept of personhood, which is shared by all individuals who possess consciousness, the ability to think, ethical sense, and free will. The anthology’s proposal of this speech is noteworthy, as it seeks to revisit the concept of personality as discussed in Ethik. The origin of the value of personality can be attributed to Hartmann’s awareness of the limitations of the category of person; this category, as previously said, identifies human beings as mediators between the realm of values and reality. However, it seems overly broad and fails to capture individual uniqueness, while the concept of personality refers to what is “exceptional and unique in a person”[14]. Persönlichkeit differs from other values as it presents a normative instance applicable only to specific individuals, involving the personal synthesis each person makes of various values. Although personality possesses an ideal nature independent of the degree of achievement, this value is different from one individual to another. Its content does not apply uniformly to everyone; therefore, personality cannot be defined as universal. Strictly speaking, there is no concept of  ‘personality in general’; rather, it is more accurate to speak of ‘values of personality’. Hartmann faces the paradox that values associated with various personalities (which as ideal entities should be universal) are distinguished by their individuality. The philosopher’s solution emphasizes that the value of personality is both ‘subjectively universal’—meaning it applies to every individual capable of understanding values—and ‘objectively universal’—because the uniqueness of the value of personality lies not in the ideal nature of the value itself, but in its connection to reality. Ultimately, this value is not inherently individual but can be defined as such since it pertains to the person. This represents the “extreme case of the concretion and individualization of valuational matter”[15]. In Das Ethos der Persönlichkeit, Hartmann revisits the subject, indicating dissatisfaction with the solution he had proposed. Reaffirming the almost inscrutability of a concept that, nonetheless, cannot be unrecognized as true, the author states: “Where there is value, which is not common but which is only of an individual, it is difficult to say. However that it exists […] is not debatable”[16]. From Hartmann’s perspective, personality values are considered moral values that are indispensable and supreme as they elevate the autonomous character of individuals. In light of this view, Hartmann suggests a significant revision (Umkehrung) of Kant’s categorical imperative, highlighting the importance of respecting individual personalities. Moreover, the value of personality presents a challenge regarding our modes of knowledge; in this context, referring to an intuitive cognitive mode, as we do with other values, is not appropriate.  The value of personality, due to its individuality, stands apart from other values and complicates its aprioric knowledge; it is more sensed than learned, yet in every situation, it emerges as an intuitive guide for our feelings and actions[17]. Hartmann’s focus on the value of personality stems therefore from his deep commitment to the individual as the cornerstone of ethics. By highlighting each person’s unique and distinctive nature, Hartmann aims to move away from an impersonal ethical framework. He argues that individuality is fundamental in establishing the significance of this value and underscores its importance to the extent that he regards it as the supreme moral value and the core of moral life.

In conclusion, it is pertinent to examine the significance of von Kalckreuth’s editorial selection and how it fits into the ongoing philosophical discourse on values. The anthology revitalizes reflections on the theory of values, which remains highly relevant in an era characterized by widespread reevaluation and significant transformations. The path outlined by the editor effectively highlights the dual aspects of Hartmann’s axiological theory. On one hand, this theory accounts for the historical and cultural dimensions of value, wherein the individual contributes meaning within the flow of a non-teleologically ordered history. On the other hand, it does not overlook what defines a person’s uniqueness, namely the Persönlichkeit. Additionally, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn addresses and even enhances key issues in the axiological debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it tackles unresolved aporias from Nietzschean reflection, which Hartmann engaged with. Specifically, it explores the relationship between pluralism, relativism, freedom, and the ideality of value, as well as the nature of moral demands and the position of personal beings in relation to the cosmos of values. Within the framework of his Material Ethics of Values, Hartmann successfully conveys an ideal of values coexisting with their multiplicity and reinterprets the apparent relativism of values concerning their relativity to individual and historical axiological consciousness. Consequently, the philosopher upholds personal freedom—a fundamental prerequisite of ethics—realized through the capacity to actualize values and associated with the ability to impart meaning to the world. Focusing now specifically on today’s debate on values and phenomena associated with them, the importance of von Kalckreuth’s collection can be emphasized, based on some key points. Unlike contemporary literature, which often fails to precisely differentiate values, it is essential to specify which normative phenomena are considered values to avoid an ‘inflationary concept of value’[18]. In Anglo-Saxon discussions, it is generally accepted that moral values exist, but the question remains whether other types of values also exist, and if so, what they are. Von Kalckreuth also identifies a common approach in contemporary contributions on values, which often conceptualizes values based on the model of moral values. In this regard, Hartmann’s reflections are significant, as he outlines a system of various types of values, which is extensively discussed in the second volume of Ethics, titled Moral Values. A further point emphasized by the editor is that today’s philosophical thinking often lacks a comprehensive cultural, social, and historical frame. While social contexts are acknowledged as important, individual value concepts are frequently analyzed without incorporating cultural perspectives, treating value as a standalone aspect of the individual. Hartmann’s theory, however, suggests that values are connected to historical change and cultural diversity, that “our experience of value occurs within the objective spirit and is therefore influenced by socio-cultural factors”[19]. A third issue, highlighted by von Kalckreuth, regarding which Hartmannian’s reflections are pertinent in contemporary debate, pertains to the disciplinary classification of the theory of value. The author argues that it is limiting to categorize it solely as metaethics (as is commonly done today), and asserts that Hartmann’s axiology clarifies the broader scope of this theory. Through an analysis of Hartmann’s insights into the differentiation among various types of values, on the inclusion of a socio-cultural reference context for their emergence and on individual phenomena, it becomes evident that there exists “a much broader conception of the philosophy of value, which addresses fundamental issues in ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy”[20], encompassing philosophical, cultural, and historical considerations. All things said, Von Kalckreuth’s work integrates Hartmann’s theory of values into contemporary discussions, illuminating its unique and original aspects. Hartmann’s strength lies in his ability to act as a mediator rather than positioning himself as an ‘elitist of values’. He demonstrates a commitment to intellectual honesty and an openness to the complexities of reality, which is a hallmark of his philosophical approach that prioritizes Problemdenken. Within this framework, his theory of value should be regarded, as von Kalckreuth notes, as a crucial reference point for any discourse on values.


[1]C. Scognamiglio, LA PERSONA. Etica e ontologia nella filosofia di Nicolai Hartmann, ebook version.

[2]N. Hartmann, Ethics, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1932, p. 165.

[3]Ivi, p. 179.

[4]See N. Hartmann, Ontologia dei valori, edited by Giuseppe D’Anna, Morcelliana, Brescia 2011, p. 43.

[5]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p.68.

[6]Ivi, p. 31.

[7]Ivi, p. 32.

[8]Ibidem.

[9]Ivi, p. 39.

[10]See N. Hartmann, Ethics, pp. 232-241.

[11]N. Hartmann, Philosophie der Natur. Abriss der speziellen Kategorienlehre, De Gruyter, Berlin 1950, p. 311.

[12]N. Hartmann, Ethics, cit., p. 243.

[13]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 36.

[14]Ivi, p. 263.

[15]N. Hartmann, Ethics, cit., p. 349.

[16]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 271.

[17]See P. Martinetti, «La filosofia morale di Nicolai Hartmann», in Rivista di Filosofia ANNO XXVI, Fratelli Bocca Editore, Milano 1935, pp. 1-46, here p. 18.

[18]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 42.

[19]Ivi, p. 45.

[20]Ivi, p. 46.

Iain D. Thomson: Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI

Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI Book Cover Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI
Elements in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Iain D. Thomson
Cambridge University Press
Paperback
74

Reviewed by: Giorgi Vachnadze

 

“How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it?” This is the opening question in Thomson’s (2025) book: Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. No doubt a very much needed and anticipated reflection on how the original ideas in, for instance, the Question Concerning Technology[1] would react with the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence. No less importantly, Thomson combines the algorithmic anxieties of our age with fears concerning things that have been lurking in our globalized (inter)cultural unconscious throughout the 20th and 21st centuries: nuclear technology, genome engineering and synthetic biology. As we enter the new stage of the Anthropocene[2] with Utopian promises and Dystopian nightmares, Thomson’s work could give us a compact handbook to reanimate the Heideggerian call to start thinking and (therefore) acting in new ways through the use and abuse of technological artefacts.  

Thomson’s approach is both historical and philosophical, tracing the trajectory of Heidegger’s thoughts on technology while contextualizing them within modern advancements. The exploration of Gestell (enframing) as the operative mode of revealing that structures human perception of reality is central, as AI is situated within the larger continuum of destructive, panopticonic (Foucault, 1995) and subjectivating (Foucault, 2008) technological “advancements”[3]. Thomson addresses Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit (releasement) as a potential means of cultivating a more reflective, in some ways poetic engagement with technology, succumbing neither to its charms, nor rejecting it outright.

The review will outline Thomson’s key arguments, exploring how he applies Heidegger’s ideas to AI and other technological concerns of the present. We will explore the book’s central themes, discuss the main insights, and consider its broader relevance. By revisiting Heidegger in this context, Thomson invites us to reassess the ways in which technology not only transforms the world but also reshapes the very conditions of human thought and action.

Technology is a provocation to philosophical thought. Precisely in so far as it is a challenge to thinking itself. Technological thinking threatens to make thinking redundant by rendering it reductively computational. Philosophy is thereby cornered; if thinking is calculation, then philosophy as the art of thinking becomes obsolete – replaceable. If the simulacrum of thought (Baudrillard, 1994) becomes thought itself, then technological thinking would easily automate the philosopher’s job. But the real concern (Sorge) here is what happens to thinking as such in a technological age. And how can philosophers still think something that is relevant, new and most importantly; irreducible to algorithmic thinking (Vachnadze, 2024a 2024b) or “mere” calculation? Among many other questions, Thomson explores how Heidegger could help us step outside the confines of our episteme (Foucault, 2005) and think the thought of the Outside (Debnar, 2017) through technology.

In the chapter: From Atomic Weapons to Genetic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence the author takes on a monumental task of tracing the ontological shifts induced by three of the most consequential technological advances of the modern era. Thomson’s discussion of nuclear technology is one of the chapter’s strongest sections. Thomson frames the nuclear age not just as a political and military development, but as an ontological rupture—an epochal shift in how humanity relates to power in so far as it relates so to itself through the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein – anxiety. Major global catastrophes; more so their potential eruption, occupies a fascinating ontological space vis-a-vis the human psyche. The general sense of an impending doom, with no clear indication of which direction the destruction will come from, bears a strong resemblance, acting as pretext almost to the fundamental anxiety that structures human experience. What under different circumstances would have been “pure” anxiety, just the existential condition of being-in-the-world for Dasein, is now triggered by a material, yet no less ethereal threat of world-annihilation. But this time no longer only in the metaphysical, but in the literal sense as well.

Modern thought and its obsession with enframing (Gestell), an obsessive attempt to measure, optimize and calculate every aspect of the world, seems to find a kind of culmination with generative AI and Natural Language Processing software. ChatGPT tends to – or effectively does – turn thinking itself into a standing reserve. If we assume Cartesian dualism (another symptom of modern thinking), it seems then that genetic engineering would be enframing the body, whereas Artificial Intelligence would enframe the mind (through the enframing of language). Leading consequently to a total Neoliberal bio-commodification and the splitting up of the human lifeworld (Husserl, 1970). Nothing short of capitalist eugenics.

Returning to Thomson’s work; the author takes multiple moments to expose the distortions and ideological manipulations of both the utopian and fatalistic narratives around AI that have now reached eschatological dimensions (Vachnadze, 2024c). Heidegger offers a fruitful middle ground that avoids the pitfalls of both corporate hype and nihilist doom. In chapter 3 Thomson elaborates on Heidegger’s infamous diagnosis of the cybernetic age. The notion that the essence of technology – which strictly speaking is not an “essence” in the classical sense of a fixed abstract Platonic core, but more something along the lines of a process-philosophical understanding of the term – is something rather indeterminate. It is, one could say, an essence of becoming technological, a style of being. More importantly, as Thomson notes, quoting Heidegger, the essence of technology is “nothing technological” (2025). That is, the essence of technology is quite different from its material manifestation in the form of various concrete apparatuses and tools. It is thereby neither abstract nor empirical. It is a kind of thinking, a mode of “going about” in the world that precedes and establishes the conditions of possibility for technology. Thereby Thomson, via Heidegger, offers an insightful exposition of the contemporary episteme. In short, the essence of technology is precisely what we mentioned earlier: An enframing of nature that makes the world into a standing reserve ready to be exploited, extracted and used. One could go as far as to say that the essence of technology is a kind of ethical attitude, or more importantly perhaps, an unethical attitude or concern that Dasein exhibits toward the world, toward other Daseins, and toward itself.

Thomson argues that modernity consists of two distinct epochs continuous with one another: early modern subjectivism and late-modern enframing. Together they constitute the modern subject establishing Dasein’s fundamental concern with being and technology. The guiding question here is whether Heidegger’s philosophy allows for a postmodern alternative beyond the nihilism of late-modern technological enframing. Each epoch, Thomson continues, is temporarily stabilized through a unique ontotheology – a dual structure that anchors both an inner, foundational understanding of being (ontology) and an external, overarching framework that grants meaning to existence (theology). Throughout Western history, these ontotheological foundations have given successive epochs their coherence.

Late modernity marks a radical departure from the historical ontotheological pattern. The late-modern age is thoroughly Nietzschean. Dominated by the “metaphysics” of will to power and eternal recurrence. Here the Western tradition reaches an impasse: rather than anchoring reality to a stable ontotheological foundation, the contemporary episteme dissolves and gives way to a groundless, ceaseless flux of mere competing forces. As a result, modernity’s attempt to achieve mastery over being through rationality, science, and technology culminates in a paradox: Dasein that once sought control over reality becomes itself reduced to an object, stripped of all metaphysical or phenomenological privilege. Marking the transition from modern subjectivism to late-modern enframing[4].

This paves the way for a post-modern Heideggerian attempt to make a clearing for thought that could potentially escape both the constraining dispositif of computational reductionism as well as the threat of complete chaotic dissolution into non-sense. “When a metaphysics is truly “great” (in Heidegger’s terms), it quietly spreads a new “understanding of being” far and wide until it has settled into taken-for-granted common sense (Thomson, 2025). Ontotheology, far from a whimsical flight of the philosophical imagination, is what provides the most basic foundations for our understanding of the world. Despite being foundational, it is nonetheless subject to change, as each epoch reflects on its own conditions of existence quite differently. Thomson traces the emergence of subjectivism in early modernity, focusing on the Cartesian and Kantian traditions. Cartesianism establishes human cognition as the foundation of certainty, Kant further develops this framework and makes the rational subject the cornerstone of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Subjectivism, Thomson argues, is Heidegger’s term for the modern drive to establish mastery over the totality of what-is – a metaphysical project that underlies the scientific and technological developments of the modern age.

At the same time Heidegger explains how this framework mischaracterizes human experience by treating the world as a collection of objects external to the subject, rather than an integrated network of beings. The subject, in the quest to master the world, inadvertently sets the stage for her own self-objectification. As modernity progresses, subjectivism increasingly loses its metaphysical coherence, giving way to the late-modern epoch of enframing. Enframing is a self-overcoming of subjectivism. The subject-object dichotomy is no longer viable. The will to mastery becomes an endless process of optimization, in which the subject loses its ontological distinctiveness and becomes indistinguishable from the technological systems it once used to steer.

The danger of enframing, and danger is an important component here, also creates the possibilities of thinking the Outside of the given epistemic formation. The very forces that threaten to enclose human existence within technological enframing might also contain the potential for an alternative mode of (thinking) being. The possibility for a post-metaphysical alternative that does not attempt to establish a new ontotheology but seeks rather to twist free (verwinden) from technological enframing would involve shifting from a mode of instrumental rationality toward one of meditative thinking (Besinnung), where being is encountered as something that both informs and exceeds conceptualization. Thomson argues that the postmodern revolution can already be traced through the works of figures like Hölderlin, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. “Heidegger’s postmodern revolution began over two centuries ago” (Thomson, 2025). The dispersed and polysemic thinking offered by these and similar writers/artists; a thinking of multiplicities perhaps, contain insights that could help resist nihilistic-technological enframing.

The initial question returns in new and altered form as we reach the final culminating chapter: Thinking a Free Relation to Technology, or: Technology and the Other (Postmodern) Beginning. What in the beginning was posed as “How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it?” has now become: “How do we move beyond the nihilistic tendencies of late-modern enframing and into a genuinely free relation to technology?” Thomson weaves previous discussions on technology, metaphysics, and postmodernity together into a coherent Heideggerian response to the technological age.

Our relationship with technology has to be untangled or unframed from its original reductive-computational form not through reactionary rejection, but through a postmodern attunement to being. The phenomenological capacities of technology need to be reactivated in order to make an alternative clearing in Dasein’s relationship with the various tools at its disposal. This implies first seeing; noticing the said alternative potential of deterritorializing artifacts as immanent to technological becoming, and consequently – making use of this potential in a creative way. An event that would see technology as a site of ontological disclosure rather than a device for turning beings into standing reserves of energy is what Heidegger terms Gelassenheit (releasement or “letting be”). Gelassenheit entails the bracketing of the exploitative attitude of enframing by letting beings be and allow beings to reveal themselves differently; on their own terms. A fundamental change of aspect (Wittgenstein, 1953) where we cultivate an open and thoughtful engagement with technology, employing artefacts in new and meaningful ways while rejecting the optimization imperative. Heidegger offers us a techno-political aesthetics of difference.

The optimization imperative is Neoliberal through and through; the reduction of all human activity to the extractive logic of cost/benefit analysis. We have seen the disastrous effects of technological enframing in every institutional domain throughout the world: labor, education, sexuality, jurisdiction etc. Teachers still see AI as an educational problem, rather than the symptom of making students into a standing reserve of labor and profit. The widespread use of AI in and outside the classroom is symptomatic of the optimization crisis. When students view learning as an obstacle between them and the labor market; as a tool of improving one’s credentials for employment rather than a transformative process, the use of AI to generate essays or answer exam questions, far from an ethical lapse or instance of academic misconduct, is rather an entirely logical response to a system structured around efficiency and productivity rather than meaning. A direct consequence of technological enframing.

Thomson’s meticulous engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy reveals a profound tension between the promise and peril of technology. At its core, Heidegger’s critique of enframing is not a reactionary rejection of technological progress but rather a diagnostic tool for understanding the historical shift in our relationship to being. This shift, as Thomson convincingly argues, has now reached a critical point with the emergence of artificial intelligence. As contemporary AI systems increasingly dictate the parameters of knowledge production, human creativity and thought risk being reduced to mere instrumental functions, evaluated through the capitalist diagram of efficiency and calculability. To repeat; however, the essence of technology is nothing technological – meaning that any escape from its grasp cannot be found in a simple reversal but in a transformation of our mode of thinking itself. Motion without movement.

Thomson’s analysis of late-modern enframing shows how AI, genetic engineering, and nuclear technology represent powerful forces that restructure the conditions of human existence. The danger of technological enframing is twofold: It positions human beings as mere objects within the Bestand (standing reserve), reducing all things – including thinking – to a matter of managing resources; and it obscures the possibility for an alternative mode of being, foreclosing Dasein’s imaginative and existential destiny. Gelassenheit opens up a path to the Outside – a way of inhabiting technology that neither facilitates the production of a Homo-Oeconomicus (Foucault, 2008)  nor retreats into the helpless nostalgia of a pre-technological age. In order to ‘let beings be’ one would require a form of thinking that resists the impulse to master and control, cultivating an openness to the unfolding of being in its plurality.

The implications of this stance are far-reaching. If modernity’s drive for mastery has led to an epoch of nihilistic enframing, then our task is not to overcome technology in the traditional sense but to reorient our relationship to it. Thomson’s invocation of Hölderlin, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche suggests that art and philosophy provide crucial sites of resistance – spaces for the emergence of alternative modes of world-disclosure. This is particularly relevant for recent developments in AI, where the optimization imperative has all but stripped language of its poetic function, making a standing reserve out of thought and all creative human activities through reductive computationalism. Can we re-infuse technology with a poetics of being? More so, can we achieve this with AI and not in spite of it?

The crisis of technological enframing is, once again, also an opportunity: “… where there is danger some salvation grows there too”  (Hölderlin, 2018). An opportunity for a philosophico-poetic clearing where philosophy can reclaim its role as a site of genuine thinking rather than mere calculation. A difficult undertaking. The Neoliberal structure of global capitalism is deeply invested in technological enframing, ensuring that resistance to optimization is met with skepticism, hostility and recently – open fascism. One must bear in mind, once again, that the ontotheological structures of our epochal thinking are not fixed; they are subject to transformations – ruptures, which those tasked with the work of thinking must uncover. We are indeed on the cusp of another major shift – an epochal flight that may only become legible in hindsight. Let us hope that the philosopher does not arrive too late.

Ultimately, the task of philosophy in the age of AI is not to offer prescriptive solutions but to cultivate a different attunement to the world. Heidegger’s concept of Besinnung, meditative thinking, offers a potential path forward – a way of engaging with technology that does not seek to dominate but rather to listen, to dwell, to allow beings to disclose themselves on their own terms, according to their unique internal logic. This is not a call for passivity but for a radical form of engagement – one that refuses the terms of technological enframing and seeks out new modes of relationality. In this sense, Thomson’s work is in many ways a call to reanimate our mode of being and to make it genuinely conducive to an ethical and political metamorphosis.

The book’s final provocation, whether a free relation to technology is still possible, remains aptly and intentionally open-ended. Following the path-marks laid down by Heidegger, one should bear in mind that every attempt to resolve the problem in advance would throw us back into the mode of enframing, leading to a foreclosure of the very openness that allows for genuine thinking. Thomson leaves us with anxiety –  the future of technology is, as it should be, undecided. The forces of enframing are what constitute power today; and thought must resist by twisting itself free from the algorithm. Whether we succeed in doing so remains contingent on our willingness to embrace the challenge that Heidegger and Thomson set before us: to think, in a world increasingly governed by calculation. What could it mean to stubbornly resist and philosophize today?

 

Bibliography:

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. Glaser. University of Michigan Press

Davies, J. (2016). The birth of the Anthropocene. University of California Press.

Debnar, M. (2017). Michel Foucault on Transgression and The Thought of Outside. European Journal of Science and Theology13(1), 59-67.

Ellis, E. C. (2018). The Anthropocene: A very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things. Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. 

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland Pub.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.

Hölderlin, F. (2018). Selected Poetry. Bloodaxe Books.

Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2018). The human planet: How we created the Anthropocene. Yale University Press.

Thomson, I. D. (2025). Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. Cambridge University Press.

Vachnadze, G. (2024a, October 17). Cybernetic discourse analysis: “Mother was an AI”. Blue Labyrinths.

Vachnadze, G. (2024b). The incomputability of calculation: Wittgenstein, Turing, and the question of artificial intelligence. Newsletter on the Results of Scholarly Work in Sociology, Criminology, Philosophy and Political Science, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.61439/URSA3237

Vachnadze, G. (2024c). Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh. Becoming.

Wittgenstein, L., & Anscombe, G. E. M. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Basil Blackwell.


[1]  Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland Pub.

[2]  See; Ellis, E. C. (2018), Davies, J. (2016), Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2018).

[3]   Throughout the review I make several connections with Foucault’s work. These connections are my own, Thomson does not make these connections and he does not use Foucault’s texts in his work.

[4]      The two together define Modernity proper.

Jean-Louis Chrétien: Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath

Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath Book Cover Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath
Kalos
Jean-Louis Chrétien. Translated by Steven DeLay. Foreword by Emmanuel Housset
Wipf and Stock Publishers
2024
Paperback
126

Reviewed by: Dr Angelo Bottone
(Dublin Business School)

In Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath, Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952-2019) focuses on ten ordinary words which are also “decisive in the spiritual tradition,” as he explains in the Preface. Each word is a path, and in questioning them, Chrétien does not seek to master or define them, but rather to let them speak, to allow their resonance, their biblical, philosophical, and poetic echoes to unfold. The act of meditating on these words becomes a form of attentive listening, where language itself is received as a gift and thinking takes the form of response.

Originally published in 2009 under the title Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: dix brèves méditations, this is the first time the work has been translated into a foreign language.

The ten terms Chrétien explores are: breath (souffle), way (chemin), temptation (tentation), attention (attention), recollection (recueillement), blessing (bénédiction), peace (paix), gentleness (douceur), abandonment (abandon), and wound (blessure).

Each meditation may be read in isolation, but Chrétien suggests considering them as a progression that moves from the most general, breath, which also inspires the book’s title, to the most specific, wound, a theme he has explored in other works such as La joie spacieuse (2007). The trajectory is not linear or developmental in the traditional sense, but contemplative and intensifying: beginning with the elemental experience of breathing, Chrétien gradually draws the reader deeper into the vulnerabilities of human existence, until reaching the wound as the place where all previous themes converge. The wound, in Chrétien’s thought, is never merely a mark of suffering; it is a place of encounter, where fragility becomes the threshold of transcendence. Chrétien approaches these words with reverence and vulnerability, seeking not to explain them from without but to dwell with them from within, allowing the voice of tradition and the fragility of human existence to illuminate their hidden depths.

Chrétien’s style in these ten meditations (“brief meditations” in the original title Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: dix brèves méditations, published in 2009) is deliberately slow, poetic, and resonant. It resists systematic exposition and instead unfolds through a kind of contemplative circling, like a long-breathed conversation, in a low voice. This stylistic choice is not incidental; it mirrors the very rhythm of breath that structures the book: the inhalation of silent attention, and the exhalation of praise, surrender, or poetic invocation. Chrétien writes with what might be called a phenomenological lyricism. His prose blends philosophical reflection with scriptural allusion, patristic echoes, and poetic imagery, weaving a polyphony of voices such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Malebranche, Silesius, Dante, Kierkegaard, and above all Augustine, into a living tapestry of meaning. The result is a form of writing that is as much addressed to the heart as to the intellect. It invites not just interpretation, but inhabitation. One reads slowly, contemplatively, letting the words breathe rather than submitting them to conceptual closure. In this way, the style itself becomes a spiritual exercise: the reader must pause, attend, and receive, echoing the very structure of prayer that the book so gently evokes.

Chrétien’s dialogue with Augustine is particularly vital. Augustine is not merely cited but becomes a kind of subterranean guide. Chrétien draws on Augustine’s notion of the inner word (verbum mentis) and the dilated heart of Psalm 119 to articulate a theology of interiority oriented toward generosity and praise. The voice, for both Augustine and Chrétien, is where the soul becomes manifest, and the dilation of the heart signals the soul’s readiness to respond to God. In this way, Chrétien’s meditations do not simply echo Augustine; they translate Augustinian insight into phenomenological attentiveness.

“This book aims to be European,” Chrétien specifies in the Preface. In fact, each term is often explored in its semantic variations across major European languages, primarily French, but also Latin, German, Spanish, English, and Italian. Chrétien is attentive not only to etymology but to the spiritual and poetic nuance each linguistic tradition carries. For example, in the meditation on attention, the resonance of the Latin attendere (to stretch toward) contrasts subtly with the modern English “to attend,” which has lost its meaning of “waiting” while retaining that of vigilance and assistance. This philological sensitivity is never merely scholarly; it serves Chrétien’s larger spiritual and phenomenological aim: to illuminate how words, when listened to with care, become sites of lived experience and theological depth. Through this multilingual, intertextual weaving, Chrétien constructs a space that is unmistakably European in its cultural lineage, yet open to the universal dimensions of spiritual life. The small book thus positions itself not only as a contribution to philosophy or theology, but also as a work of cultural memory, echoing the shared breath of Europe’s literary, mystical, and philosophical traditions.

Although Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is among Chrétien’s more lyrical and accessible works, it remains firmly grounded in the philosophical commitments that shape his wider corpus. At the heart of Chrétien’s thought is the idea that human existence is fundamentally structured as response: we are not self-originating subjects but beings addressed by the world, by others, by God, and constituted in our capacity to answer. This response is not reducible to verbal or intellectual articulation; it is enacted through the body, and especially through the voice, which Chrétien in his La Voix nue (2007) has described as the site where interiority is exposed, offered, and made vulnerable. The voice is not a neutral instrument of expression; it is the manifestation of the self in its vulnerability. Unlike writing, which can be revised or deferred, the voice is immediate, ephemeral, and exposed. It gives the speaker before any content is communicated.

Breath, then, is not only physiological but metaphysical; it is the silent precondition of all voice, all responsibility, all praise. Each meditation in this volume can be seen as a variation on this theme: the human person as appelé à répondre, called to respond. Whether in attention, abandon, or blessing, the author emphasizes that we do not initiate meaning or mastery; we listen, receive, and offer ourselves in return. His phenomenology resists the ideal of sovereign subjectivity in favor of a relational approach in which being human means having been addressed first. This commitment aligns him with other figures associated with the so-called “theological turn” in French phenomenology, but Chrétien distinguishes himself by placing emphasis not on concepts like the invisible or the saturated phenomenon, but on the embodied, voiced, and prayed experience of being touched by transcendence. In this sense, Ten Meditations does not diverge from his more explicitly theoretical works as it enacts them, allowing his philosophy to take on a liturgical and poetic form.

The book does not fit neatly into any single genre or discipline. It is neither a philosophical treatise nor a theological tract; neither a devotional manual nor simply a collection of essays. It is all of these and more. Rooted in phenomenology, it adopts the stylistic cadence of spiritual writing. Its rigor lies in fidelity to lived experience, not conceptual closure. For this reason, it resists easy classification but rewards deep attention. Like the best of the mystical and poetic traditions from which it draws, its authority arises not from argument but from resonance.

A particularly illuminating insight into Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath comes from Andrew Prevot[1], who proposes that Chrétien’s meditations are not merely about prayer but are themselves a form of prayer or, more precisely, a text that invites the reader into a posture of prayer. According to Prevot, Chrétien’s style of writing, with its peculiar rhythm, tone, and theological poetics, functions analogously to lectio divina, the traditional Christian practice of slow, meditative, receptive reading of Scripture. Chrétien’s prose does not proceed by systematic demonstration or argumentative clarity; instead, it unfolds contemplatively, circling around key spiritual words such as souffle (breath), recueillement (recollection), bénédiction (blessing), and blessure (wound). These meditations are phenomenological in method, but liturgical in spirit, drawing the reader into a rhythm of interior attentiveness and affective response.

This rhythm is not incidental. As Chrétien makes clear in the opening meditation, which is also the one that inspires the title, breathing is not only a biological act but a spiritual posture. To breathe is to receive life from beyond oneself, to exist in openness, exposure, and dependency. The movement between catching one’s breath and losing it is not merely physiological, but theological: it names the structure of spiritual existence, in which one receives (grace, word, silence) and responds (in prayer, love, or abandonment). Chrétien’s meditations unfold this structure across ten variations, each tracing a movement from interiority to gift, from attention to response, from wound to song. His words operate in this sense not only as analysis but as invitation: the reader is called not to evaluate them critically from a distance, but to enter into them, to pray them, to let them reorder one’s breath.

Prevot highlights this feature with remarkable clarity: “Chrétien’s works are also spiritually edifying. They invite one not merely to think but to pray with them. Indeed, I believe it would be possible to turn to Chrétien as a spiritual guide, to go on a personal retreat structured by his books (perhaps especially the ten meditations in Pour reprendre et perdre haleine)”.[2] What Chrétien offers, then, is not simply a theory of prayer, but a form of philosophical praying, a writing that breathes with the cadences of invocation, silence, and praise. The language of the book is saturated with Scripture, poetry, and theological resonance, but it is never dogmatic or didactic. Instead, it is polyphonic and contemplative, weaving the reader into a web of listening. For Chrétien, as Prevot stresses, prayer is not a private act but a choral response to divine excess. This choral dimension is crucial: to pray is always to pray with others, even in solitude. Chrétien’s prose, by echoing voices from biblical characters, medieval mystics or modern poets, places the reader inside this community of response, and asks them to breathe in its rhythm.

This makes Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath a unique and remarkable work in the phenomenological tradition. It is a book that not only interprets spiritual experience, but that becomes spiritual experience, a kind of literary liturgy, a textual prayer. It does not aim at conceptual mastery but at spiritual transformation, leading the reader gently but insistently toward a more attentive, wounded, recollected, and surrendered existence. To read it, as Prevot notes, is to discover that “Chrétien has given us the gift of thinking prayer and praying thought.” The text breathes, and invites the reader to breathe with it—to catch one’s breath in wonder, and to lose it in love.

The rhythm named in the title – to catch and to lose one’s breath – is more than a poetic flourish; it is the structural and spiritual heart of the book. Chrétien uses this double movement to articulate a phenomenology of contemplation and self-gift. Reprendre haleine, to catch one’s breath, names the moment of interior gathering, a pause of attention and recollection in which one prepares to speak, to listen, or to act. This inhalation is not idle; it is a way of opening the self to receive what is given: from language, from others, from God. It is the very posture of prayer, of philosophical meditation, of poetic readiness. But Chrétien does not allow this moment to close in on itself. Each meditation ultimately gestures toward perdre haleine, losing one’s breath, which signifies not exhaustion but generous expenditure, surrender, and praise. The breath that is recollected in silence is given back in song, in blessing, in abandonment. The highest breath, Chrétien suggests, is not the one we keep, but the one we offer. This rhythm animates the entire progression of the meditations, from the elemental fragility of breath to the sharp exposure of the wound. Contemplation is not the opposite of action; it is its condition and its source. In this light, the book’s structure mirrors the logic of the gift: what is most interior becomes most truly itself when given away. In this, Chrétien articulates not only a phenomenology of prayer, but a vision of human existence grounded in receptivity and generosity: a life lived between the breath we receive and the breath we return.

It is fitting that the final meditation in the series is dedicated to blessure (wound). If souffle (breath) introduces us to our dependence, our need to receive life and meaning from beyond ourselves, blessure brings that vulnerability to its highest intensity. The wound is where the breath falters, where speech breaks, and where the self is opened, often involuntarily, to what exceeds it. Chrétien does not romanticize suffering, but neither does he treat the wound as merely a deficit to be healed. Rather, he sees in it a site of revelation and transformation. The wound is the mark of having been touched by love, by grief, by God, and it is often in the wound that the deepest form of prayer emerges: the silent cry, the sigh, the breath that can no longer be held. This final meditation gathers all the others by showing that every moment of attention, recollection, and blessing ultimately leads to a place where we are undone, not annihilated, but rendered porous to grace. The breath we have received and given finds its limit here, but also its completion. In the wound, Chrétien suggests, we are most exposed and most available to the divine. This is not the culmination of a dialectic, but the intensification of a rhythm: breath given, breath lost, self offered. The meditation on blessure thus brings the reader to the edge of voice, where silence is no longer absence but a form of communion—a shared fragility that opens onto transcendence.

Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is not only a work by Jean-Louis Chrétien. It is also a translation of his work by Steven DeLay, a novelist and philosopher himself. Translating Chrétien is no small task: his prose is dense with theological, philosophical, and poetic resonances; his style favors nuance, rhythm, and allusion over clarity and conciseness. Yet DeLay manages to preserve the contemplative cadence of the original French while rendering the text in an English that is both faithful and fluid. His translation succeeds not only in accuracy but in tone, and it breathes with the same reflective pace and reverent attention that mark Chrétien’s voice. Moreover, DeLay’s editorial presence enhances the volume in subtle but significant ways. His editorial footnotes, which were absent from the original French edition, serve to clarify linguistic choices, point the reader to relevant works by Chrétien, and provide essential theological or philosophical context where needed. These notes are never intrusive; rather, they assist the reader in navigating Chrétien’s references and concepts without disrupting the meditative flow. Importantly, in the Translator’s Introduction, DeLay recounts how this project began with Chrétien himself, who, the first time they met in 2017, among almost thirty published works, selected Pour reprendre et perdre haleine as the book he most wished to see translated by DeLay. This personal invitation adds a layer of fidelity and responsibility. DeLay is not only the translator, but the one entrusted by Chrétien to carry this particular voice across into English. In this sense, DeLay’s work goes beyond translation: it is a form of interpretive accompaniment, making the text more accessible to Anglophone readers while preserving its depth and integrity. In doing so, DeLay not only brings this important work into the hands of English-speaking readers, but also contributes meaningfully to the growing reception of Chrétien as a central figure in contemporary phenomenological theology, one whose voice, now more audible across linguistic boundaries, continues to challenge, console, and inspire.

The volume also includes a brief but illuminating foreword by Emmanuel Housset, one of Chrétien’s closest students and collaborators. Housset situates the book within the broader arc of Chrétien’s life and thought, and reads it as a “reminder of philosophy’s indebtedness to words. For it is in words that we think, it is also words that make us think”. (p. ix)

Taken as a whole, Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath is not a loosely connected sequence of spiritual essays, but a tightly woven theological and phenomenological meditation on what it means to live a life of attention, receptivity, and self-offering. It exemplifies Chrétien’s distinctive voice within the landscape of French phenomenology, a voice that insists on the primacy of response over initiative, of listening over mastery, of vulnerability over control. More quietly than his overtly theoretical works, this book nonetheless enacts many of the central motifs of Chrétien’s philosophical project: the structure of call and response, the exposure of the self through the voice, the liturgical nature of human embodiment, and the ethical demand that arises from being addressed. The meditations are phenomenological not because they analyze phenomena as such, but because they dwell in the phenomena of prayer, praise, recollection, and fragility without reducing them to abstract categories. In doing so, Chrétien gives us a rare kind of writing, at once philosophical and poetic, theological and personal, rigorous and prayerful. It is a book that does not merely speak about the breath; it breathes. And in doing so, it invites us to breathe with it, to catch our breath in silence and contemplation, and to lose it in love and praise.

 

Bibliography

 

Chrétien, Jean-Louis. La Voix nue: phénoménologie de la promesse. Paris: Minuit, 1990.

Chrétien, Jean-Louis. La Joie spacieuse: essai sur la dilatation. Paris: Minuit, 2007.

Chrétien, Jean-Louis. Saint Augustin et les actes de parole. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.

Bloechl, Jeffrey. Fragility and Transcendence : Essays on the Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Gonzales, Philip John Paul, and McMeans, Joseph Micah (eds). Finitude’s Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chrétien. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2023.

Peruzzotti, Francesca. “Human Spirituality: Jean-Louis Chrétien and the Vital Side of Speech” in Religions n. 7, vol .12 (2021), p. 511.


[1] Andrew Prevot, “Praying with Jean-Louis Chrétien,” in Geffrey Bloechl (Ed.) Fragility and Transcendence, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 117-129.

[2] Ibid, p. 118.

Daniele de Santis: Husserl and the A Priori

Husserl and the A Priori: Phenomenology and Rationality Book Cover Husserl and the A Priori: Phenomenology and Rationality
Contributions to Phenomenology (CTPH, volume 114)
Daniele De Santis
Springer Cham
2021
Hardback
XIII, 331

Reviewed by: Shuai Zuo (Fudan University)

 

It’s unusual to write a review of a book published four years ago. However, one research book doesn’t lose its value because it is in the past. The problem of a priori, and a series of concepts such as idea, eidos, essence, rationality etc., are apparently not as attractive as the concepts such as reduction, pure consciousness, time etc. This is understandable, since it seems that many discussions of the a priori revolve around metaphysical problems, which are speculative instead of descriptive. However, phenomenology doesn’t start with transcendental reduction, there are hidden motivations that lead Husserl step by step to transcendental reduction. To thoroughly study a priori truth is no doubt one of those motivations. Actually, we could find the structure of ontological concern – transcendental concern in Husserl’s important books, such as two volumes of Logical Investigation; the first Chapter and the others in Ideas I, the first half and the second in Formal and Transcendental Logic. We should take serious of Husserl’s “metaphysical” thought. There is a reason why Heidegger said ontology is possible only as phenomenology (cf. Heidegger 1967, 35).

What just said is corresponding to Santis’s ambition, which is clear in the very beginning of this book. Santis worries that if Husserl scholars have eyes only for present, phenomenology might lose its propria principia, and disappear in the future (cf. De Santis, 2021, 3-4). Maybe one of the examples of “present” refers to the frontier interdisciplinary research between phenomenology and other sciences. This kind of research is no doubt pivotal for phenomenology to keep alive. However, to what extent could it keep alive as itself? Only by understanding that question clearly could phenomenologists truly know their position and what they could contribute in the interdisciplinary trend. In this sense, Santis’s book is very inspiring. For example, it’s impressive to trace Husserl’s thought back to the rationalism, i.e., from Descartes to Kant (Part VI). What Santis has done is not only put Husserl in a historical line, instead, he points out the most profound contribution that phenomenology provides to philosophy, and that is the understanding of Rationalität/Vernünftigkeit.

This book is not a straightforward, step-by-step argument but rather resembles a circular labyrinth. The questions Santis raises at the beginning are only addressed at the end. He juxtaposes his thoughts in between, and those thoughts are also relevant. On the one hand, some parts of the argument have overlapping tasks, for instance, the discussions of essence, idea in the third part and the discussions of eidos in the fifth part. On the other hand, every part contributes to the understanding of the ultimate question: a priori. This is also the author’s interpretation of the system of the book through Schopenhauer’s mouth: a single thought must “preserve its most perfect unity. If, all the same, it can be split up into parts for the purpose of being communicated, the connection of these parts must once more be organic, that is, of such a kind that every part supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole” (8). It’s obvious that the whole and the part support each other, but in my view, this organic nature is still hidden in the fog and can be clarified by summarizing. Before the specific summary, let’s take a look of the basic theme and structures of this book.

The central question of this book is the relation between ontic a priori and constitutive a priori. Among the eight parts of the book, apart from the introduction in the first part and the conclusion in the last part, strictly speaking, only the seventh part deals with the constitutive a priori. Parts II to VI are all concerned with the ontic a priori. Santis provides the background of some crucial concepts by analyzing their historical development, especially in part III and IV. Accordingly, these parts tend to consider ontic rationality (Rationalität). In part VII, Santis starts discussing constitutive a priori in the perspective of genetic phenomenology. Santis tries to argue that the a priori laws have its resource in the self-constitution of monad. If Santis successfully finish this argument, we would understand Husserl’s position between realism and idealism. However, since Santis’s main concern is ontic a priori rather than constitutive a priori (8, 9), this problem is only touched upon and there left a space for further discussion. I would like to take the structure of ontic a priori – constitutive a priori, or the dichotomy between Rationalität and Vernünftigkeit as a main clue in this review.

I’ll start with Part III. If it’s proper to say that the book is a circular labyrinth, then the real circle starts in Part III. Part III is the longest part in the whole book, the first half of this part concerns why Husserl gradually replaced “idea” with eidos, which is actually the only meaning of a priori. The second half provides a detailed analysis of the development of concepts such as species, idea, essence, a priori, laws and necessity.

Let’s begin by stating that a priori is an adjective that describes nouns. The next question is: what kinds of nouns can it describe? Essences and ideas are certainly among them. Besides, some particular judgments could also be regarded as a priori. The key standard is foundation (Begründung). A proposition, a knowledge, or even a truth could be called a priori “means nothing else but stating its own specific Begründung” (126). The foundation is conceptual essentialities (126), pure essence (128-129). According to the first half of part III, pure essence is eidos, and they are both distinguished from species. Species is universal (Allgemeine), which is obtained by generalization, while essences are obtained by formalization. Husserl realized this in around 1905. In around 1912, pure essence or idea is gradually separated from the other two meanings of essence. Essence could still be intuited while pure essence couldn’t, instead, it could only be obtained through extrapolation (Herausschauung) (118). Just like geometrical concepts, pure essences are also ideal limit. (119)

To be more specific, pure essence are also foundation for a priori laws (138). That means, the pure essences in themselves have certain laws. If some particular judgments are necessary, the reason would be that they are the particularization of relevant laws. For instance, the proposition “this yellow must extend over one flat” is necessary, because the pure essence of color is independent of pure essence of extension.

Therefore, pure essence is the key concept. We are committed that there are pure essences and corresponding laws. Pure essences and laws could be particularized into individual judgments, and the latter could also be purged or retrieved to the former. Here we are first confronted with Rationalität and Rationalisierung. If we could successfully retrieve any particular judgments to laws governed by pure essences, then this judgment is rational. We could also explore pure essences and laws in phenomenological perspective. Then the question is on what acts does the pure essences and laws are grounded? In contrast with a posteriori empirical judgment, as Santis quoted, “essential judgments are characterized by the fact that they do not need perception and experience, yet still some intuition through which their states of affairs are given” (134; Hua V 42). Although Santis doesn’t explicitly mention, here concerns the problem of constitutive a priori. How does subjectivity constitute pure essence and laws? What does it mean by saying “still some intuitions are given”. Only solving this question could we understand phenomenological Vernünftigkeit, which refers to the acts that conform with pure essences and laws. We should keep this in mind, for it will be touched upon in detail in the seventh part.

The fourth part discusses three methodological variations through Logical Investigations to Ideas I, i.e., ideation, eidetic attitude and eidetic reduction. This part intersects with part III, since it discusses the method apprehending pure essences.

First method is ideation or idealizing abstraction. We could abstract some specific moment from other moments in some given empirical thing, besides, individuality should also be abstracted (De Santis, 2021,159). For instance, there is a red stone in front of me, I could abstract red quality from extension and other moments, and I could also abstract the idea red from “this-here”. I no longer grasp spatiotemporal thing, but the intemporal pure essence instead. Ideation or idealizing abstraction is categorical act, and it is founded on sensuous act. “Foundation” doesn’t mean that categorical acts must first intend the objects of sensuous acts, then to idea. As Santis summarizes as Ideation 7: “The act of ideation, or universal intuition, is a categorial act of the type that does not co-intend the objectuality originally given by the founding act” (163). Therefore, abstraction is not the proper term anymore. Categorical acts intend to idea or pure essences directly, there is nothing to be abstracted from.

The second method is eidetic or a priori attitude. According to what is discussed in part III, it is not difficult to understand a priori attitude. In empirical attitude, objectualities of existence (Daseinsgegenständlichkeiten) are given, while in a priori attitude, objectualities of essence (Wesensgegenständlichkeiten) (168). The distinctive feature of the a priori attitude is that, under this attitude, it is not only ideas that are given; rather, it is the ideal world itself that is emphasized as being given (168).

The third method is eidetic reduction in Ideas I. In analogy with transcendental reduction, we could distinct three steps of eidetic reduction.

  • A given individual lived-experience is … eidetically excluded, i.e., bracketed, as an individual existence, hence assumed as an exemplar.
  • Based on the given exemplar, a relevant pure essence is brought to consciousness and thus submitted per se to scientifc investigation.
  • “Application” of a relevant eidetic law to the previously excluded individual existence. (179)

In all these three stages, we can find one similar structure. In ideation there is founding sensuous acts and founded categorical acts. In the second stage, there is basing empirical attitude and based a priori attitude. In the third, there is exemplar as the beginning, and then the operation of reduction. We can summarize them as sensuous acts-categorical acts; empirical attitude-a priori attitude; exemplar-pure essence. In all of these three pairs, how could we obtain the latter from the former, and guarantee that the latter is eidetic? This is also the key problem between ontic a priori and constitutive a priori in the whole book. This clue is always implied in Santis’s arguments, although he doesn’t mention that.

Part V meticulously analyzes the first chapter of Ideas I, it is divided into three themes. First is to explain further what eidos is; then, based on the understanding of eidos, Santis analyzes eidetic science; finally, the complicated concepts “region” and “material ontology” are clarified. The first two steps are leading to the third, and material ontology plays a crucial role in part VI. We could even argue it is Husserl’s special material ontology that distinguishes him from the traditional rationalism.

In both part III and IV, eidos had already been discussed. It is different with species and individual essence. Part V clarifies the difference between eidos with essence once again. Essence is “the stock or set of predicates pertaining to an ‘individual object’ as an entity that is in such and such a way”, while eidos “comes under ‘truths’ belonging to ‘different levels of universality’” (188). That means eidos doesn’t affiliate to empirical objectuality, rather, it is a new kind of objectuality. It might be proper to distinguish two structures, essence-individual and eidos-exemplar. I hold that the latter structure is solid in the whole book from now on.

Based on the discussion of eidos, we can understand what eidetic science is. The task of eidetic science consists in “a systematic rationalization of the empirical”, and the paradigm is geometry (205). The process from exemplar to eidos is identified as an act of rationalization, then eidetic science designates a rational system of empirical realities. Here things become complex, because under the title of “eidetic science” there are two possibilities, one is pure formal sciences, such as pure logic; the other is material ontology, such as pure phenomenology. Remember in part III we take idea as Kantian limit concept, for instance, “2” and “the eidos red” are both limit idea. Now we should keep in mind that although we could use Rationalität and eidetic science to describe the process from two tables to “2”, and from red table to the “eidos red”, there are slightly differences between them. I’ll leave this for now and only focus on the third point of this part, i.e., region and material ontology.

In §9 of Ideas I, region is simply the highest material genus, while in §16, Husserl gave a more rigorous definition of region: “With the concepts ‘individuum’ and ‘concretum,’ the scientific-theoretical and fundamental concept of region is also defined in a rigorously ‘analytic’ way. Region is nothing else but the entire, supreme generic unity belonging to a concretum, i.e., the essentially united connection of the supreme genera that pertain to the lowest differences within the concretum” (Hua III, 36). This is the sentence that leads Santis’s exploration. Region is no longer highest genus. For instance, sensuous quality could be the highest genus of one particular red, but it is not region. Region is the unity of the highest genera. But not any highest genera could be held together, only those that belong to the lowest differences within the concretum could become a unity. Unlike abstractum, concretum or concrete essence are independent. Color essence, for instance, is abstractum because it can only exist with extension. By contrast, stone essence or computer essence are concretum, since they don’t need to be with others. However, stone or computer are not lowest difference yet, because they could further be subdivided to diamond, laptop etc. Below lowest differences there is no more species. Lowest differences could only be individualized through tode ti. If a concretum is individualized according to this path, then we obtain individuum. Others such as one ruby red is individual rather than individuum.

We can only understand region by this seemingly “tedious” explanation. But this is not some intellectual game invented by phenomenologist. Instead, this implies several crucial points. For example, it means that eidetic reduction always commences with individuum, and what’s more important, the laws mentioned in earlier part are exactly the “regional axioms”, i.e., “the highest synthetic and a priori ‘laws’ that rule over the genera and species subordinate to it” (220). It is also clear now why the laws are founded on genus, and strictly speaking, on region.

Therefore, there is solid eidos-exemplar structure. Through rationalization, exemplars could be retrieved to their laws, which are based on region. The laws in region are different with the laws governed by pure formal field such as pure logic. But they are both eidetic sciences. Before distinguishing these two kinds of eidetic sciences in detail, Santis put Husserl in the history of philosophy. This movement precisely responses his concern at the very beginning of this book. Instead of staring at present, he tries to focus on past and clarifies Husserl’s unique contribution to philosophy.

I take Part VI as the most impressive in the book. Santis put Husserl in the tradition from Descartes to Kant, presents the Husserl’s breakthrough of rationalism. The writing style may lead one to become engrossed in contemplating each individual philosopher’s questions, while neglecting the overall interest. I contend that there is one leading thread: from modern philosophy to Kant, all neglected material a priori.

Husserl belongs to the rationalism tradition, and he placed its historical origin in Plato (cf. 248). The belief of rationalism is reason (Vernunft), i.e., individual experience acts could be rational. Spinoza represented the first radical peak of rationalism, who argued that “the totality of being” is immanently rational (242). Husserl would agree with this, since the function of eidetic science is the rationalization of experiences. According to Santis, Husserl borrowed Spinoza’s term “sub specie aeternitatis” to describe this function (243). Sub specie aeternitatis can be interpreted as seeing something from the perspective of eternity, which, in fact, means adopting an eidetic attitude (237). Husserl’s use of Spinoza’s terminology was based entirely on his own philosophy. We must understand eternity in the structure of eidos-exemplar. That means Husserl only partly agree with Spinoza and other rationalist. Santis summaries it as follows: “Husserl agrees on the form but disagrees on the content; he embraces the very same philosophical aspirations of the old rationalists, yet he rejects the way in which their project was first understood and carried out” (245). What “content” didn’t Husserl agree on?

Santis traces the history of rationalism from Plato according to Crisis. In Plato’s ancient philosophy, idea and empirical things are not completely divided, empirical world are méthexis of the ideal world. Even in Euclid’s geometry, ideas can always be applied to the world of experience (252). Galileo followed but reshaped (umgestalten) this path, radically mathematizing nature and thus nature itself is idealized (ibid.). Galileo’s nature purified all real things into mathematical or physical expressions, so that every real had a mathematical index. Everything in the natural world, including psychological experiences, is seen as part of this grand universe dominated by causality. Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, adopted an understanding of rationality influenced by Galileo. In other words, modern philosophy pursues the path of formal a priori. Spinoza’s imitation of the geometry and Leibniz’s mathematica universalis are examples. Husserl criticized Leibniz for failing to recognize rationality within experience itself. Instead, Leibniz rationalized experience through thought (Denken), resulting in an experience that was reduced to being purely mathematical. Leibniz didn’t see the difference between formal a priori and material a priori (263); Wolff traced all experience back to the law of contradiction (264). Kant is an exception. Kant is opposed to an extreme logicism (264), since he argued “synthetic a priori”. However, Kant still failed to see the rationality inside the material, missing the real sense of the material a priori. Therefore, from Descartes to Kant, the neglect of material a priori is the content that Husserl disagreed with.

Besides the main thread of formal and material a priori, the analysis of modern philosophy is also accompanied by logical rationality (Rationalität) and transcendental reason (Vernunft). By idealizing nature, Galileo’s theory should be monistic, because psyche is also collected into causal nature. However, the dualism has already been prepared (254). Why? I think Santis implies that it wasn’t feasible to naturalizing psyche completely. We could indeed rationalize and study psyche in the way of natural science, however, modern philosophers also realized that there is transcendental reason. Descartes’s “I think” and Leibniz’s “monad” are proof. Unfortunately, modern philosophy has always failed to highlight this unique transcendental reason of psyche, and always confused it with naturalized psyche. This is the meaning of “misadventure of rationality” in the title of this part.

Only now could we understand clearly the two kinds of eidetic sciences, one is exact science such as pure logic; the other is descriptive science such as phenomenology. The whole modern science, and also Kant, emphasized exact science, hence only emphasized one kind of rationality. The particular rationality of material, which leads to material ontology, is missing.

Material ontology are explained in part VII by genetic phenomenology. According to the critical acceptance of modern science, now we could understand material a priori, it refers to the rationality immanent to empirical entities. Material has its own laws. Just like Husserl said, color is inseparable with extension, this is material a priori, instead of analytic a priori (cf. Hua XXVIII, 403). How two understand the unique laws belonging to material? Santis analyzes two similar laws according to the second version of the third logical investigation:

   a. example of formal law: There cannot be a king (master, father) without subjects (servants, children) etc.

  b. example of material law: A color cannot be without something colored, or A color cannot be without some space that it covers. (De Santis 2021, 275)

Husserl must prove that the latter is synthetic law. Both these two kinds of law are different with another kind:

   c. example of pure analytic law: A whole cannot be without parts. (275)

For our purpose, we can only focus on the first two. What’s the difference between the relation king-subject and color-something colored? They have different correlatives. Santis gives a final determination about correlative after solid research: “Two expressions are correlative when their relation is included in them as an implicit content, or, better, as an implicit meaning” (281). According to this determination, when we say “color”, the expression doesn’t implicitly include its relation with something colored. By contrast, the expression “king” or “father” actually implies its relation with “subject” or “child”. I think it need more research to reinforce this argument[1]. But I will accept it and turn to following constitutive a priori.

Until now, the discussion is confined in ontic a priori, formal laws and material laws are directly accepted. The analysis up to this point maybe serve as the strongest defense of Husserl as a realist. As for constitutive a priori, Santis analyzes it and its relation with ontic a priori by genetic phenomenology.

The structure of synthetic a priori disclosed above has its root in ego’s “form-system”. “[W]ith the genesis of the ego itself implying at the same time the ‘genetic development’ of the ontological structure in question” (289). In the constitution of egoic monad, the ontological structure is simultaneously constituted. Both formal a priori and material a priori are grounded in the constitution of monad. With this turn, “formal a priori” is changed to “innate a priori”, while “material a priori” to “contingent a priori”.

“Innate” (eingeborene) doesn’t mean people could find out formal laws in their head, instead, it means “the lawfulness that rules over the process of the intentional self-constitution of the monad” (291). There are laws in the self-constitution of the monad, only then the monad could be regarded as rational. Constitutive laws and ontological laws overlap each other. Which “comes first”? Is it legal to ask this question? Let’s turn to contingent a priori first and then ponder in this question.

Material a priori is synthetic, it designates laws pertaining to two different moments. This kind of law is also independent of empirical material, and also refers to universality. But it is restricted compare with the universality of formal a priori (cf. 297).

How to understand this restriction? If we turn to the perspective of subjectivity, then “material” is changed to hyle or hyletic. If subjectivity is constituted, various formal laws are required—such as the intrinsic formal laws mentioned earlier. Even hyle itself is a formal concept (p. 298), for subjectivity is inconceivable without perceptive capacity. However, what is perceived concretely, i.e., hyle, is entirely contingent (kontingent). For example, if a subject is affected by color, this is contingent; a person born blind has never been affected by color. Yet, once affected by color, the subject gains insight into the essence of color, such as the essential relation between color and extension.

Furthermore, the dimension of subjective genesis also triggers a change in the understanding of the temporality of “essence” or “idea.” In Logical Investigations, what stands in opposition to reality is the idea. Real entities are individuated and has spatiotemporal positions, whereas ideal entities are characterized by in-temporality. In genetic view, what opposes reality is no longer the idea but irreality, since ideas/irreality can fully participate in reality. The temporality of irreality is no longer in-temporality, but omni-temporalit instead. Being omni-temporal means irreality still has a form of temporality, which allows the irreality, such as idea, pure essence, eidos or essential relations, to establish a connection with subjectivity. This connection is twofold: on the one hand, the omni-temporal irreality can be reactivated (Reaktivierung) by the subject, undergo particularization, and enter into the mundane world. On the other hand, irreality inevitably undergoes subjective constitution (311).

In light of this argument, the a priori relations constructed by irreality—whether analytical or synthetic a priori—are embedded within the genetic constitution of the monadic ego.

If the earlier parts describe Husserl as realism, part VII describes Husserl as idealism. Santis also deals with this dichotomy in conclusion (319). Santis argues that there are two forms of intelligibility, we could call them ontological and transcendental rationality. These two must be combine together (ibid.). How to understand this combination in detail? This is not the main task of this book, as Santis claims more than once that the Vernunft and Vernünftigkeit is only hinted (such as 317). Also, Santis makes it clear that the task is not to explore how a priori is embedded in the monad (289). However, it could be questioned. How the formal and material a priori is embedded, or constituted in monad? Once we ask, there might be the risk of collapsing into psychologism.

We could ask, how does the innate laws, such as motivations, constitute formal laws? If the formal laws are traced back to the self-constitution of monad, and even rationality is defined by the innate laws. What’s the difference with psychologism then? Doesn’t it mean that ontological structure depends on the subjective structure? To avoid this, could it be that formal laws do not “embed” within the monad, whereas material laws do? Then could we distinguish realism Husserl with idealism Husserl according to different kinds of laws? I cannot explore it here but it might at least be a question worth to think.

Bibliography:

De Santis, Daniele. 2021. Husserl and the A Priori: Phenomenology and Rationality. Cham: Springer

Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Husserl, Edmund. 1952. Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Hrsg. M. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, Edmund. 1988. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre. 1908–1914. Hrsg. U. Melle. Den Haag: Kluwer.


[1] Whether this is semantics analysis? Santis denies it in one footnote (276-277). But still, “color includes no other implicit meanings”, this sounds very semantical. To put it another way, when we perform fantasy variation starting with a single individual color, we arrive at ‘colored something’ as the invariable element; and when we begin with a specific individual, like a king, we arrive at the ‘subject.’ What is the difference between these two types of invariable elements?

Henri Bergson: Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905

Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905 Book Cover Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905
Henri Bergson. Edited by Nils F. Schott and Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor
Bloomsbury Publishing
2024
Hardback
272

Reviewed by: Kynthia Plagianou (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Introduction

This edition marks the first in a series of three English translations of lectures that Henri Bergson (1859-1941) presented from 1901 to 1905 at the Collège de France. As the editors of the series, Nils F. Schott and Alexandre Lefebvre, mention, the complete list of courses Bergson offered during his fourteen-year appointment at France’s most prestigious academic institution remains unknown (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: ix). Intriguingly, from the eleven known delivered courses, only four were preserved in writing out of sheer coincidence: Charles Péguy, a dedicated attendee of Bergson’s lectures, hired two stenographers to keep verbatim notes when a scheduling conflict prevented him from attending the lectures for four subsequent years. These four transcriptions, the only records of Bergson’s teaching style and material, eventually appeared in print by the Presses Universitaires de France between 2016 and 2019. With the first book on The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom (1904-1905) published in 2024, the other two of the four courses are scheduled to appear in English translation by 2027: The History of the Idea of Time (1902-1903) and The History of Theories of Memory (1903-1904).[1] Since the current edition introduces the series to prospective readers, I want to briefly comment on the project’s specifics before I provide an overview of Bergson’s lecture on the problem of freedom. It is worth noting that, for curious reasons, the English translations do not follow the courses’ chronological order. However, the editors do clarify why the fourth preserved course on The Idea of Time (1901-1902) is not included in the series: only the last sessions were transcribed, and the French edition is based on a reconstruction of the course thanks to surviving students’ notes (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: xiii).

The translations arrive in good time as the revived enthusiasm for Bergson’s thought has peaked in the past few years. In the English-speaking world, Bergson Studies flourishes, with new publications on different aspects of his thought and life appearing almost annually.[2] Edited and translated by leading Bergson scholars, the lectures at the Collège promise to attract a wide readership. For philosophers and intellectual historians, especially those working in the continental tradition, the lectures manifest the richness of Bergson’s philosophical vision. Perhaps the most important philosopher of the early twentieth century in France, Bergson revolutionised metaphysics and developed rigorous reflections on many topics relevant to contemporary philosophy, such as the nature of time, the relation between memory and perception, types of causality, and, of course, the possibility of freedom. Luckily, not only do we have the preserved transcripts, but these are devoted to the three central themes of Bergson’s thought until the 1910s: time, memory, and freedom. In his course material, Bergson recapitulates or anticipates the ideas developed in his three major works, Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). The lectures read complementarily to the published works as they follow the historical evolution of each theme, looking at cardinal moments in Western philosophy when a thinker or a school of thought shifts the problem in a new direction. This engagement with the tradition in the lectures corrects the impression Bergson’s writings sometimes evoke, “that he springs from the ground as if without any predecessors at all” (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: x). Importantly, the lectures offer an accessible way into the Bergsonian universe for a general audience interested in philosophy and the history of ideas. Designed to appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, the courses at the Collège were open to everyone without academic requirements, registration, or fees. In this regard, Bergson’s lectures can still play their part in disseminating complex ideas while conveying to the general audience the pleasures of “thought in the making”.

The Freedom Lectures

  1. Necessity and the origin of the idea of freedom in antiquity

Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom unfolds in twenty lectures over a period of five months (from 6 December 1904 to 20 May 1905). In the first lecture, instead of defining freedom directly, thus “favouring a particular theory and prejudging the solution”, Bergson sketches the constitution of freedom “as a problem” in the history of philosophy. Perhaps anticipating impatient listeners, he downgrades this introductory exposition, characterising it as invoking “vague generalities”, but in truth, it sets the tone for the entire course (Bergson 2024: 12, 21). His opening lines, “[…] no matter what theory (people) advance on the subject of freedom, there’s one point on which everyone agrees: freedom is a certain characteristic that is inherent, or that seems to be inherent to our action such as it immediately appears to us, such as it’s given to our immediate consciousness” (Bergson 2024: 12), condenses several assumptions, which Bergson unpacks into the following interrelated claims.

First, there are two primary faculties that differ in nature and function: “immediate consciousness” and “reflective thought”, reigning over “action” and “speculation” respectively. Second, freedom arises as a problem in the encounter of these two mutually exclusive faculties: “[i]t is the problem that our action poses for our speculation” (Bergson 2024: 12). Why is this so? Precisely because they work differently. Any voluntary act, Bergson continues, is “self–sufficient”: it exists in the thrust of a single intention. The intellect, on the other hand, operates through pairs of terms. While the will is expressed in one single tendency that translates into action, the intellect oscillates between two terms and, by establishing a causal relation, makes a synthesis for reflection. Even so, it is still unclear why the problem of freedom arises at this stage, and Bergson deepens his explanation, marshalling the concepts of time and duration. His third claim is that, while action necessarily unfolds in time, time “absolutely escapes the grip of reflective thought”. Summing up the gist of themes that appear in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory and the drafts of Creative Evolution, Bergson makes a fourth claim: immediate consciousness proceeds via intuition and becomes the site for the unfolding of inner life, while the intellect proceeds via understanding, and has an altogether different role and relation to time. The intellect evades duration or the passage of time. It merely registers the results of this passage arrayed in fixed positions in space. Even if we introduce movement to simulate duration, this is composed of spatial elements, and as much as we narrow the intervals between points, we will not capture the flow of time.

According to Bergson, science and intellectualist metaphysics, relying precisely on a spatial conception of time, grasp only “what is already made” and eschew what exists “in the making”, namely action. Historically, they constantly upgrade their methods, advancing all the more sophisticated theories to determine causal relations and uncover natural laws, committing to an all the more rigorous determinism. However — with this point being the crux of this introductory exposition — the tighter our deterministic outlook becomes, the more the dissonance between our intellectual faculties and intuition increases. The inner feeling of agential freedom we experience when we act, and to which intuition testifies, persists despite our intellectual progress. Even though the will, with its practical orientation, harnesses the intellect and its capacity to establish necessary connections to navigate through a chaotic world, the intellect remains oblivious to the will’s freedom. Evolutionary speaking, action precedes speculation, and our intellectual faculties have developed to facilitate action. Increasingly, these faculties gained independence and instituted their own proper scientific and speculative domains. When the question of freedom is posed from within these domains, we necessarily adopt the deterministic framework that renders freedom a mere illusion. By contrast, starting from the practical domain of action and the perspective of the will, both freedom and determinism are rendered effectively explainable.

Turning to history, Bergson notes that there are good reasons why determinist views predominate and the freedomists are “always on the defensive”. Since all habits of thought, logic and even language conform to necessitarian thinking, the freedomists are “forced to appeal to an inner feeling”, which they can only articulate through ready-made concepts and in opposition to determinism. In that respect, notwithstanding the course’s title, “Evolution of the Problem of Freedom”, it is deterministic theories that have evolved, properly speaking. An early conjecture of necessity as a “rhythmic movement” that periodically brings back the same events is found in the Ionian philosophers. With the Stoics, the grid of causal connections tightens, and what was understood as a “vague regularity of nature” turns into a cosmological doctrine “of the universal interdependence of all things” (Bergson 2024: 19). Later, Plotinus, while rejecting the Stoic doctrine, refines it further. Deterministic thinking, as Bergson relates, evolves throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until it finds its most rigorous expression in modernity. While in antiquity necessity was understood in qualitative terms, the effect manifesting a qualitative change induced by the cause, with the advent of modern science and the mathematisation of nature, causal relations become quantifiable, that is, relations between magnitudes expressed by functions. The scientific mechanisation of necessity will first enter philosophy with the Cartesian system and culminate in Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s absolute determinism.

If the idea of necessity is naturally prompted by our intellectual tendency to structure reality according to causes and effects, the idea of freedom arises in an altogether different manner. Stemming as a sentiment accompanying action, freedom grows and strengthens primarily outside philosophy. Progress in the ideas of freedom never occurs from speculation or science but rather “by an intrusion into philosophy of certain sociopolitical elements”, which are products of collective intuition. Bergson’s interesting thesis accounts for the discontinuous manner in which ideas of freedom surface and claim validity throughout intellectual history. The first “explosion” of the freedomist sentiment, according to Bergson, took place in the fifth century BCE in Pericles’s Athens, where social changes shifted notions about citizenship and ethico-political life. The collective experience of social upheaval found expression in Socratic thought. Even though Socrates did not explicitly interrogate the possibility of human freedom, his thought is impregnated with a latent intuition of freedom, which will become explicit in Plato and Aristotle.   

The lectures between December 16, 1904, and March 10, 1905 — the second to twelfth lectures in the current volume — present the evolution of determinism in antiquity: from early Greek thought to Neoplatonism, through to the Stoics and Epicurean atomism. As mentioned, Bergson argues that the ancient stream of necessitarian doctrines was disrupted by themes of freedom rooted in Socrates’s moral considerations. Bergson’s originality is easily seen in his interpretation of the Greek canon. Despite Socrates being treated by historians — including Aristotle — as a psychological and ethical determinist, Bergson argues that he is evidently a nascent freedomist: his focus on human action, his questioning of the scope of natural science, his resort to inward experience, and his propensity to mysticism are all traits of freedomist thinking. According to Bergson, the Socratic intuition of freedom is manifested in the possibility of choosing knowledge leading to virtue over ignorance. Plato dramatises this theme through his mythical and allegorical imageries: in the fall of the soul and the allegory of the cave, the good is a kind of light, and freedom consists in the choice of enlightenment. However, Platonic freedom is a concept that is not easy to circumvent, either. Depending on which dialogue we consider, Plato’s reflections on the human soul oscillate between determinism and freedom. In fact, in Timaeus, he posits two forms of necessity: one that guides action towards the good aligning with reason, and a blind, physical necessity of bare chance (anankē). The possibility of freedom lies between these two distinct causal orders in choosing the middle ground of aretē (virtue). As Bergson notes, Plato, like every great thinker of freedom, reveals its problematic nature: “[….] the moment we’re about to grasp it, we say to ourselves that now free will must be explained, that if we choose, we do so for a reason and for something. Then, as we articulate the choice, we see it vanish into thin air” (2024: 57-58).

Next, Bergson moves on to make some interesting remarks about Aristotle’s general methodology insofar as it takes the problem of freedom into an altogether new terrain. For Bergson, Aristotle is not a systematic thinker in the sense of constructing new problems; rather, he is a great analyst: his speciality is analysing existing ideas to their elements, clarifying them and pushing them to new ground. Regarding freedom, we will not find a definition or a theory in Aristotle, but rather a meticulously developed network of concepts, “chance, randomness, a general theory of contingency and the relation of the soul and pure intellect (nous)” that are all components of the problem of freedom. For Bergson, Aristotle is the first to acknowledge that the idea of contingency frustrates the mind’s attachment to necessary conditions, and he discusses in detail Aristotle’s solution to the problem of future contingents. The latter was originally formulated by the Megarian School, and then reconstructed by Aristotle in his Peri hermēneias (On Interpretation) in the following way: “out of two opposite propositions relative to the future one is (already) necessarily true; thus, there is no contingency and future is fully determined” (2024: 73). Aristotle rejects this formulation because experience and common sense inform us otherwise: logic cannot foreclose the actuality of the future, and tukhē (chance) remains open in the present. Instead, what qualifies as the truth of two opposite future propositions in the present is a disjunctive proposition that poses the two as alternatives (“Tomorrow there will be or there will not be a sea battle”).

According to Bergson, Aristotle’s analysis of the Megarian syllogism reveals the fallacy behind any form of determinist argument. Specifically, the rejection of contingency results from an arbitrary and illusionary negation of truth’s temporal character. Tricked by the intellect’s natural tendency to think mathematically, strict determinists understand all possible truths to be similar to mathematical propositions, namely eternal truths (the fact that even mathematical truths are discovered does not alleviate the fallacy). The intellect cannot accept a truth’s semi-eternity, the fact that it comes into existence: “[…] it seems to us that (a) proposition, which became true, has been true for all eternity. It’s one of the characteristics of truth, as soon as it appears to us as truth, to leap outside time and appear to us as timeless” (2024: 76).

Moreover, for Aristotle, contingency is an inherent defect of nature introduced by hylē or matter, which is a principle of indetermination. Freedom is a human privilege, precisely because it refers to a choice: to reverse the movement of nature towards indetermination, ascend towards nous or the pure intellect, and reconnect with what is essential and the immutable. This is contrasted with the modern humanist idea of freedom, which maintains absolute necessity with respect to matter, while contingency pertains only to questions of ethics and human agency (2024: 78). Prefiguring the conclusion of the course, Bergson challenges both accounts, arguing that contingency and freedom, understood as the “creation of certain unforeseeable actions” and “indetermination in relation to causes” are found “everywhere there is consciousness, and de jure, everywhere where there is organic life” (2024: 78).

The next school of thought discussed by Bergson is Stoicism, which introduced the doctrine of universal fatalism in its “most powerful expression” (2024: 93). For Bergson, the Stoic doctrine exemplifies the absorption and assimilation of ideas of freedom into deterministic presuppositions commonly found in history: “[w]e have here the first example of a fact we find throughout the entire history of philosophy. […] what I’d call the necessary chocking of the doctrines of freedom by speculations concerning the whole of nature” (2024: 93). Stoicism, in particular the Greek founders of Stoicism, aiming to “democratize” philosophy, modified certain aspects of Platonic-Aristotelian thought to make it more accessible. The most critical of these transformations is the substitution of the single principle of logos spermatikos (generative reason) for the duality of matter and form or Idea (hylē and eidos). The Greek word logos has different meanings (speech, discursive reasoning, theatrical practice), but they all designate “the idea or image of a double-sided reality”, “something that as multiple, as unrolled, as slackened or as extended, is material, and that, when considered as one, as taut in itself, as undivided, is something rational, intellectual, and even intelligent” (2024: 104). In Stoicism, the universe is at once matter and intelligence, both corporeal (all that is, is a body, sōma) and rational or intelligent.

According to Bergson, ancient philosophies tend to agree that if things were perfectly rational, there would be no place for contingency, indetermination and, consequently, human freedom. For Aristotle and Plato, things are not as they ought to be: the world is subjected to movement and change, and these processes degrade it. Movement is the tangible proof of imperfection in the world. For Aristotle, the fact of contingency makes human freedom possible, whose purpose is to compensate for the disruption of the rational order: “[t]he function of our will is to put things back in place, as much as that’s possible” (2024: 106). By contrast, in Stoicism, things are as they ought to be insofar as change and movement are not understood as imperfections; their very explanatory principle, logos, is something essentially mutable and in a constant state of unfolding. The principle of logos spermatikos entails movement, change and transformation; it is an intelligent and rational principle, and yet mobile. For Bergson, the Stoics do not perceive any breach between things as they are and things as they ought to be. The world is exactly as it should be (“sympathy of everything with everything”), and its perfection and absolute coherence exclude contingency and, consequently, freedom in humans.

Bergson devotes considerably less time to conceptions of freedom and necessity derived from ancient atomism, developed by the Epicureans and solidified by Lucretius. While he dedicates two lectures to all the other ancient doctrines, his discussion of Epicurus and his legacy is cut short to almost half a session. This is because, as he argues Epicurean “ideas on the subject of freedom did not evolve” (2024: 119). Nevertheless, Bergson emphasises the radical character of the atomistic theory of necessity, which is indeed close to modern and contemporary mechanistic determinism based on the idea of the material universe as an abstract field of mathematical points. Ultimate units or atoms, indestructible and unchanging, separated by the void, yet mobile, combine in different aggregates, changing their relative positions and generating all natural phenomena. Whereas in Stoicism universal interdependence posits a rational necessity that proceeds from the whole of the universe to its parts, like the image of an organism, in Epicureanism, necessity has no overarching meaning, and the universe emerges as the sum of the primary elementary necessities of the atomic combinations. Despite its deterministic kernel, Epicurean philosophy accounts for contingency and freedom through the notion of paregklisis (the Latin clinamen). To allow for the accountability of human action, Epicurus endows atoms with the ability to deviate slightly (paregklinein) from their preordained course, from the ‘path that destiny assigns to it’ (118).

Bergson concludes his discussion of ancient doctrines with Plotinus’s “synthesis of all ancient thought” (2024: 127). As Bergson states, Plotinus’s doctrine of freedom is “by far the most complete, the most highly constructed of what the ancients have bequeathed to us on this question” (2024: 127). Plotinus’s corpus, in general, is the most systematic philosophy in antiquity, and it has reached us intact. He produced a “perfectly coherent and unified” synthesis of all Greek thought, aiming to insulate it from the ideas of his time (third century CE), which he considered “barbaric”. This is particularly evident, for Bergson, in Plotinus’s theory of freedom, which integrates Platonic-Aristotelian and Stoic elements. Even if “he fought the Stoics, and the Stoics’ fatalism in particular”, Plotinus’s starting point, according to Bergson, is distinctly Stoic, for he accepts the “perfect regularity of the course of nature” (2024: 129). Bergson cites several of Plotinus’s descriptions, all of which are reminiscent of Stoic themes: for example, his conception of the universe as a living being composed of parts, separated in space yet contiguous, fulfilling a universal sympathy or intention; or his comparison of the material universe to the harmonious complexity of a dance, where “the dancer is not conscious of the multitude of movements”, but s/he simply wants to dance (2024: 129).

As Bergson notes, Plotinus articulates the quest for freedom with the greatest precision: “[i]t suffices to find a solution, that, on the one hand, preserves the principle of causality […] and that, on the other hand, will allow us to be something” (2024: 130). For Bergson, Plotinus’s particular novelty is to present the problem of freedom as a question of the origin of life, specifically human life. Extending the Platonic-Aristotelian teaching on the body-soul relationship, he provides a theory about how the human being both enters the order of nature as a living body and “breaks” it in exercising her will. Plotinus argues that, even if we can overcome the natural order and secure for ourselves the realm of action, true freedom rests on detaching from nature and retreating to the plane of the Intelligible (kosmos noētos). As Bergson explains, the Neoplatonic teaching that “freedom does not reside in action but in the intellect” and “[h]umans produce action when they are too weak for contemplation, action being only the shadow of contemplation” is the ultimate expression of the Greek belief that the faculties of action are inferior to the intellect. In modernity, under the influence of Jewish and Christian theology — Bergson mentions the debate between Scotus and Aquinas over the primacy of the will — this hierarchical relationship will be reversed: beginning with Descartes, modern philosophers acknowledge and affirm the miraculous power of the will to prevail over understanding, to multiply its power, and, in certain cases, to be the source of the intellect.

The first (thematic) half of the course ends with Bergson demarcating ancient and modern assumptions pertaining to the problem of freedom. So far, his discussion is systematic rather than simply historical and follows the interpretational lines announced in the first lecture: freedom marks the limit between the speculative and the practical domain. Occasionally, Bergson indulges in small digressions, which enrich the main exposition without affecting its structure and lucidity. For example, when he explains that necessitarians do not oppose theories of freedom but rather “absorb” them to assimilate freedom with necessity, Bergson does so with a comparison from geology: every intuition about freedom is a “geological eruptive force”, while theories of necessity are forces of “disintegration” and “sedimentation” that act upon intuitions and reshape them (2024: 21); or, when, in an illuminating digression, he discusses the ideas of moira (fate) and anankē (necessity) in ancient non-philosophical literature — from tragic and epic poetry to Herodotus — with the aim of elucidating the emotional and affective roots of fatalistic thinking (2024: 25-27).

2. Determinism and the problem of freedom in modern philosophy

The second thematic half of the course comprises seven lectures, from 17 March to 20 May 1905 (lectures thirteen to twenty in the volume). Bergson here follows the intertwining of necessity and freedom within the framework of Western modernity. As it was prefigured in the first lecture, the new parameter defining the relationship between the two notions from the early seventeenth century onwards is the advent of modern science. According to Bergson, the scientific framework mandates, on the one hand, that causal relations pertain to physical laws and that, on the other hand, the reality of these relations can be fully grasped by mathematics. In that respect, Bergson’s discussion follows the way in which philosophy grapples with scientific determinism, beginning with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, through to Kant’s Copernican Revolution, with the discussion concluding with a brief but suggestive preview of Bergson’s position (introduced in “The Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) and fully developed in Creative Evolution (1907)).     

While philosophical notions of necessity evolve vis-à-vis developments in science, philosophy always turns to questions of freedom when forced by developments in the social domain, and always via intuition. In the dawn of modernity, the second “eruption of freedom” is traced back to the transformations Christianity and Judaism initiated in social and psychical life. These themes, which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, were incorporated by Descartes’s voluntaristic philosophy and, from there, spread across modernity. The third explosion emerged from ‘ideas and feelings’ related to the 1789 Revolution as they appear in Rousseau and more thoroughly in Kant.

Bergson highlights several key aspects of Cartesian philosophy, the first of which refers to the “incontestable and profound influence” of Christianity in Descartes’s system. The most obvious influence is Duns Scotus’s ideas on the subject of divine and human will. Descartes’s freedomist doctrine rests on a series of creationist theses: God not only created the world but also created the truth and the good, and the criteria to judge his creation, by a “decree of his free will” (2024: 152). The idea of a creative God, a willful and active deity intervening in the world, is absent from ancient thought, in which contemplation and the intellect are superior to action and everything appetitive (2024: 151). By contrast, Descartes affirms that the human will is infinite, similar to the divine, and he ascribes to human beings an absolute faculty of choice. The difference between human and divine will is that, in humans, even if in principle infinite, factually the will is restricted by the intellect, which imposes its own time to judge and evaluate. Bergson sees as underlying Descartes’s voluntarism a theological motivation. Error and sin result from a lack of coordination between the will, infinitely invested in every act and operating fully in the present, and the intellect, which takes its time to deliberate. Thus, Descartes can account for the existence of evil through this discordance of the faculties, without tracing it directly back to God.

What is striking about Descartes, in Bergson’s view, is that he combines a rigorous determinism with the quest for freedom. While Cartesian metaphysics follows the mechanistic principles found in physics and analytic geometry, his moral intuition affirms the inner feeling of freedom manifested in action. In Descartes’s disciples — Spinoza, Leibniz, and the eighteenth-century physicians and scientists inspired by Cartesianism — the rational component of Descartes’s thought prevails. Specifically, Bergson sees in Spinoza and Leibniz a “partial return to the Greeks” as they seek “to provide a unified and simple, consistent and logical explanation of the totality of things” (2024: 175). Christian influences are superseded by an intention to unify Cartesianism, eliminate its subjectivist presuppositions, and provide a metaphysical ground. In doing so, Bergson holds that, even if not deliberately, they return to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic themes. Spinoza, for example, assumes the Aristotelian ideal of athanatizein, of allowing the human intellect to reconnect with what is purely intelligible and eternal. The difference is in the execution of the plan towards immortality. Broadly speaking, for the ancients, the essential, eternal forms or genera, the source of pure knowledge, lie more or less in “a beyond”, while in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which conforms to the new science, the intelligible, that is, natural, physical laws, are immanent to nature.

For Bergson, Spinoza transforms Cartesianism “from a doctrine of freedom that it was into a doctrine of necessity, and of the most radical and least flexible necessity that has ever been formulated” (2024: 178). Nevertheless, Spinoza’s interventions resolve Descartes’s inconsistency or discontinuity, as Bergson calls it, that is, the influence of the soul on the body, which remains inexplicable in Descartes and which disrupts the order of universal mechanism. Bergson focuses on the first two parts of the Ethics, and his discussion of the key moment of Spinoza’s doctrine is lucid and insightful: the difficulty with explaining the status of the attributes, the type of distinction pertaining to modes, and the symmetry of order between modes of different attributes. Bergson argues that everything in Spinoza’s system leads to a single goal: beatitude, what Spinoza calls true freedom as the liberation from servitude, an aspect of which is the illusory belief in free will. Rather, we partake in “the absolute freedom of God” when we apprehend what is necessary, the eternal reasons inscribed in nature expressing God.

Similarly, Leibniz aimed to eliminate the Cartesian rift between determinism and freedom, and he did so in the extreme. Bergson calls Leibniz a “pure intellectualist” much more assiduous than Spinoza: “he is convinced that reality can be fully resolved into ideas” (2024: 187). Both epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Leibniz’s determinism are equally inflexible and result from the reworking of ancient doctrines, modifying them to fit the new scientific framework: “[t]hus, by starting from the Aristotelian […] conception of science and by eliminating hylē, we arrive more or less at the doctrine presented in the Discourse on Metaphysics, just as, by taking Plotinus’s doctrine, his theory of the Intelligibles, and by eliminating hylē, we arrive at a doctrine analogous to the one presented in the Monadology” (2024: 192). First and foremost, Leibniz aims to erase the troubling idea found in Descartes that the soul can, somehow, interact with the body and change its movement. Developing this criticism, Leibniz will abandon the idea that matter is essentially extensive because extension results from an abstraction, a homogenisation of a fundamentally heterogeneous reality. From there, Bergson explains, Leibniz is led to posit indivisible elements that are “dynamic points”, or mathematical points, the center of forces that he calls monads or souls. Monads are isolated from each other, and each is a “state of mind”, a perception that fuzzily represents the totality of the universe and clearly only as a (point of) view of this totality: a “monad is a view of the universe; the totality of these complementary views make up the universe” (2024: 196). According to this theory, space is a projection made by the human mind, a symbolical order that allows us to represent the partial views or monads, that is, “purely qualitative differences, which alone are real”, as magnitudes (2024: 196).

Bergson maintains that, for Leibniz, this inelastic, fully saturated universe sustains not only human freedom in the Cartesian sense, but wholesale contingency. Leibniz breaks freedom down into three essential characteristics: spontaneity, intelligence and contingency, and he argues that, in his monadological universe, each substance maintains these three elements. Spontaneity characterises the monads to the extent that they are self-developing and self-determining, being totally insulated from each other. Intelligence as a condition of freedom “is realised by human souls”, and so the anthropomorphic notion of freedom is maintained. Finally, contingency is affirmed: even if actions are absolutely determined by the monads’ notion (its complete definition), these determinations are not logical necessities, since their opposite would not imply a contradiction. They are real possibilities, alternatives to what is actually the case. The latter, which “we call existence”, is akin to a highlighted contour among all the other possible sketches that remain unactualised. As Bergson remarks: “[f]reedom is power. An intellectualist like Leibniz cannot accept the idea of power, and so he spreads out all the possible actions, he turns them into so many accompaniments, as it were, of the action really performed” (2024: 211).

The last three lectures, on 5, 12, and 19 May 1905, comprise a second, much shorter semester. Bergson touches upon several important issues, but in places, due to the limited time, the discussion seems uneven. He begins with a summary of the main differences between ancient and modern notions of necessity, indeterminacy, causality and freedom, as they have been developed throughout the lectures. He also makes some interesting methodological remarks on how philosophical notions are displaced within scientific debates. For example, he sketches an acute criticism of reductive and eliminativist positions in psychophysiology, arguing that the misapplication of allegedly rigorous materialist commitments to mental phenomena results in a much less rigorous metaphysics, a weak variant and “simplification of Cartesian metaphysics” (2024: 219). This is why, Bergson stresses, “we have to distinguish very clearly between science and philosophy” and their respective methodologies, and that the philosophical question is “whether freedom can find a place” within the mechanistic explanatory framework. According to Bergson, this type of semi-scientific, semi-metaphysical determinism prevailed at the end of the eighteenth century, nourishing its own opposition as notably expressed in Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy. At the same time, in England, Berkeley’s immaterialist and nominalist ideas challenge the foundations of Newtonian and Cartesian science, based on the criticism that the mechanistic image of nature they presuppose is a mental or symbolic construction (2024: 228). While Rousseau’s motivations are moral, and while Berkeley’s are primarily theological, their criticisms halt the unbound mechanism prevailing at the time, creating a current of thought that puts freedom back in the discussion and prepares the third Kantian “eruption of freedom”.

For Bergson, “Kant’s stroke of genius” was that he realised that “if we put freedom in the very place of reality, we don’t for all that compromise scientific mechanism […]; on the contrary, we’re able thereby to found this mechanism, give it an unshakeable basis” (2024: 229). In the remaining one-and-a-half lectures, Bergson explains in what the Kantian solution consists, and how we should understand the notion of freedom that it entails. Already with Descartes, free will defies mechanism, and becomes a positive and creative power. Kant’s great invention, however, is to posit freedom’s creative power as the ground of the mechanistic, natural order itself. Beginning from a concept of nature that adheres to Newtonian science, Kant’s starting point in the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the link between physics and mathematics: the problem of founding mechanism translates to a question of founding mathematics. Bergson provides an instructive summary of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, which renders nature coextensive with scientific consciousness and its transcendental apparatus, meaning that “nature and science are the same thing: nature cannot [not] be scientific because they’re the same thing” (2024: 233). As Bergson explains, the Kantian conception of nature, the realm of phenomena constituted by human intellect, becomes the seat of mechanism: “determinism exists, in short, only for our intellect, […], as a function of our knowledge” (2024: 234). Kant endorses freedom, but not as a possibility for the empirical self, locating it outside the causal order of knowledge. Kantian freedom, in Bergson’s description, refers to the transcendental perspective, from which the pure self initiates the unfolding of a moral character. Bergson stresses, that while our moral conduct is conditioned upon the transcendental position that the “intelligible self” creates for itself and occupies, yet it unfolds in a series of actions in time. It is questionable if such an unfolding of freedom can be integrated into the mechanistic order, as Kant claims it can. We must assume that our actions “carve out a surface from the rest of nature”, which necessarily depends on a certain flexibility granted by the causal order (2024: 236). For Bergson, this interdependence implies that the spontaneity and autonomy of moral conduct are compromised, and arguably, freedom, even if it is granted, cannot be sustained.

By the time the reader arrives at the final lecture, the problem of freedom arises as “the problem of the relationship between thought and action” (2024: 239). It is in the last lecture that Bergson speaks from the perspective of the present, and therefore, not as a historian but as a philosopher aspiring to transform the problem of freedom in his own right. For Bergson, Kant gave the modern problem of freedom its most precise and rigorous formulation, and consequently, any systematic intervention must begin there. Kant’s solution was so effective that, despite the nineteenth-century’s explosive developments in the sciences and in mathematics, there was no radical displacement of the problem of freedom. In this paradigm, knowledge is “a perfectly coherent system of mathematical relations” underlying natural phenomena, and action is a separate domain that precedes this order: “[a]ction is reality itself, and what we call science is something that gravitates around action”, which is “the foundation of science” (2024: 241). Therefore, freedom hinges upon how rigorously one upholds this primacy of action over knowledge. In Kant, the primacy of action is conditioned by universal consciousness, the impersonal, transcendental human mind that “insofar as it is free, it will launch phenomena into space and time that perfectly connect with one another, and insofar as it knows itself, it will present a nature in which everything is necessary” (2024: 242).

Bergson takes an issue with Kant’s solution based on universal consciousness because it renders philosophically irrelevant the inner feeling of freedom accessed by “empirical or psychological consciousness”. The latter, for Bergson, testifies to the complex conditions of action within what he calls “duration”. Kant does not, and could not, allow “jurisdiction” to empirical or immediate consciousness because he lacks an understanding of time as duration and treats time in spatial terms (2024: 244). Bergson’s critique of spatialised conceptions of time, as alluded to in the introductory lecture, concerns the discrepancy between the intellect’s spatial mode of knowing (giving coherence to distinct elements that remain external to each other) and intuition’s mode of access, which testifies to the qualitative change in the stream of inner experience, a type of knowledge that the intellect cannot register. Between the two, that is, “physical or discursive knowledge” and “intuitional knowledge”, Bergson sees intermediary forms, such as the systematicity corresponding to organic life (2024: 245). Between orders of knowledge, what changes is the density or tension of deterministic relations: “[i]n the physical world, causality means necessary determination, but to the extent that we go from the physical to the psychical, we see the connections between cause and effect becoming less and less tight. And when we reach the pure psychical, there’s almost no more connection at all, causality being not a relation but a being, a production […]. So we go by degrees, by an imperceptible transition, from what Kant called causality according to nature, physical causality, to what he calls causality by freedom, which is creation” (2024: 246). Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom ends with a statement of his philosophical project: to develop a kind of radical empiricism that is both scientific and takes into account intuition or internal experience, recasting thus the problem of freedom anew.

Conclusion

My aim in this review was primarily to inform potential readers about the contents of this publication. I offered some evaluations of the lectures’ general format and teaching aims, but I avoided criticisms of Bergson’s historical arguments as it would have necessitated an extensive reference to his monographs and other works. I want to conclude this task with some additional comments. First, the transcribed version of Bergson’s lectures might sound, at times, repetitive to the reader, but this serves perfectly the aims of the oral exposition, in which dramatising repetition creates cohesion and imprints the ideas on the audience. Ideally, Bergson’s lectures would be recited, perhaps, in the context of a study group, to reinvigorate the orality of this “thought in the making”. Second, readers interested in the history and historiography of philosophy should bear in mind that Bergson presents the ideas of the canonical thinkers in the form of a metanarrative, which serves the reconstruction of “the problem of freedom”. His reading is selective, and as he notes, sometimes he diverges from the standard interpretations and classifications of thinkers found in the scholarship. For example, Bergson’s presentation of Kant’s concept of freedom is based exclusively on the Critique of Pure Reason and its relation to transcendental idealism, and he omits the details of Kant’s moral theory. Finally, the contemporary reader cannot avoid noticing the patent Eurocentrism of Bergson’s discussion, which focuses exclusively on the Western philosophical canon. Without disregarding the time and context of the lectures, readers might think that Bergson could have acknowledged the limits of his presentation. But overall, and as I highlighted at the beginning of this review, both specialists and non-specialists will find Bergson’s Freedom lectures a rich and rewarding reading experience.

 

Bibliography: 

Bergson, Henri. 2024. Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. London-New York: Bloomsbury.

Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. 2024. “Series Preface” and “Introduction: Henri Bergson, Freedomist”. In Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor, ix-xiv, 2-9. London-New York: Bloomsbury.

Alexandre Lefebvre, Nils F. Schott & Alan Shepherd. 2024. “Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott”. In The Philosopher, Vol. 112, No. 2, 78-83. Available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.


[1] See also ‘Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott’, available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.

[2] The most recent in publication order: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, Bloomsbury (2018); Mark Sinclair, Bergson, Routledge (2019); Alexandre Lefebvre & Nils F. Schott, Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press (2020); Paul Atkinson, Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, Bloomsbury (2020); Mark Sinclair & Yaron Wolf (eds), The Bergsonian Mind, Routledge (2022); John Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy Matter, the Meta- Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson, Oxford University Press (2023); Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, Basic Books (2024).

Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman: Hannah Arendt and Politics

Hannah Arendt and Politics Book Cover Hannah Arendt and Politics
Thinking Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman
Edinburgh University Press
2024
Hardback
232

Reviewed by: Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin)

In their book, Hannah Arendt and Politics, Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman not only develop a comprehensive and rich account of Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking and judging. But their analysis also constitutes an act of thinking and judging itself, as they employ Arendt’s “exercises in political thinking” (2023: 3) to understand the political crises of Arendt’s time as well as our own. Following the “Introduction,” which sketches Arendt’s elusive notion of “exercises in political thinking,” comes Part I, “Arendt and Politics: Thinking about the World as a Public Space,” which consists of three chapters: Chapter 1: “Action,” Chapter 2: “Between Human Action and the Life of the Mind,” and Chapter 3: “Exercises in Political Thinking.” Part I provides an excellent account of Arendt’s conception of politics, the human condition, as well as thinking and judging.

In Part II, “Arendt and Political Thinking: Judging the World(s) We Share,” Robaszkiewicz and Weinman offer up a wide variety of political (and social) topics for debate. In Arendtian fashion, they think about the crises that Arendt was confronted with herself, namely, the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (reflected in the Heidegger controversy) and the Eichmann trial, explored in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman do not limit their analysis to the political concerns that Arendt sought to understand. Instead, they apply her exercises in political thinking to the crises and political concerns of our time. In Chapter 6, “The Earth, Education, and Human Action,” the authors tackle one of our most pressing political concerns: the climate crisis. By taking the Fridays for Future protest as a “case study” (2023: 199), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman emphasize the vital role that children play in shaping and changing the world.

Chapter 7, “Social Justice and Feminist Agency,” explores an appropriate way to politicize social concerns, thereby making feminist action possible within an Arendtian framework. Chapter 8, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty,” sets “political personhood,” not nationality, as the criterion for membership in a political community (2023: 157). Lastly, Chapter 9, “Thinking With and Against Arendt about Race, Racism, and Anti-racism,” exposes the blind spots in Arendt’s thinking about race, her Eurocentrism, and subsequently employs Arendt’s conception of enlarged mentality as a means for incorporating diverse perspectives into our own.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman navigate between thoroughly sketching the secondary literature on each proposed topic, advancing their own original opinions, and maintaining the freedom of their readers to think and judge for themselves. The authors thus tease out and exemplify what it means to engage in exercises in political thinking. To this end, the “Introduction” sheds light on Arendt’s elusive and ambiguous notion of exercises in political thinking. As the authors point out, this notion appears as an “inconspicuous remark” because Arendt only mentions it in the title and “Introduction” of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2023: 1). It is therefore no wonder that this notion has not been picked up in the secondary literature.[1]

However, Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s novel contribution to the secondary literature is their contention that Arendt’s exercises in political thinking lie at the very core of her work. As they claim, “Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as examples of such exercises” (2023: 1). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus establish a new and powerful approach to considering Arendt’s work. “Throughout her body of work,” the authors maintain, Arendt “never loses sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of political life” (2023: 1). It is generally acknowledged that understanding political events is Arendt’s main objective. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman shine new light on Arendt’s oeuvre by viewing it as an instantiation of exercises in political thinking, which is a means for gaining an understanding of the world.

The wide array of topics covered in Hannah Arendt and Politics thus serve as examples for how to think and judge about the world. By applying Arendt’s exercises in political thinking to the political crises and issues of our own time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman illuminate the continued relevance of Arendt’s thought. “By examining more closely Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking,” the authors claim, “our work understands itself as an opening for further research into the practical applicability of her political thinking” (2023: 201). In this way, each chapter offers an example of a possible judgment on a given topic, from Arendt’s misjudgment of Heidegger to framing the Friday for Future protests as an example of the political capability of children to change the world. By exemplifying what it means to think and judge, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus equip their readers with a framework through which to think about the concerns and crises of our time.

At the same time, the authors remain true to Arendt’s thought, insofar as they do not prescribe how their readers ought to think about and judge political events. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, “we also express our judgments and we do so in an explicitly Arendtian sense: not trying to tell our readers what they should think, but inviting them as dialogue partners to think and judge together about the world that we share” (2023: 71). Thus, the accuracy of their approach is that they remain true to the freedom involved in thinking and judging. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman could describe themselves in the way they describe Arendt: “perhaps like Socrates: a gadfly irritating the people of Athens to motivate them to thinking and better understanding of the world and themselves” (2023: 153). Like Arendt, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman inspire their readers to think and judge critically and freely, so that they reach their own judgments and conclusions. Hannah Arendt and Politics therefore truly embodies what the authors claim lies at the core of Arendt’s own work: exercises in political thinking.

In Chapter 1, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman proceed by accurately and succinctly sketching the core tenets of Arendt’s thought by following Arendt’s own unsystematic method, which is “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (Arendt 1958: 5). Since Arendt defines the activity of thinking as inconclusive or “resultless” (Arendt 2003a: 167), the authors thus paint the broad strokes of Arendt’s political thought. Not in “building block format,” but rather, they “pave Arendt’s conceptual paths in small steps, from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory” (2023: 11). Accordingly, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman employ the concepts of “natality, plurality, action, power, freedom, the private and the public, and the social” as “guideposts” (2023: 12) to understand Arendt’s political thought.

Their method thus does not over-systematize Arendt’s thought, but rather establishes a red thread that twists and turns through paradoxes, weaving key concepts into a rich and colorful fabric that allows us to see Arendt’s thought as a whole. For example, the authors establish a link between the activity of labor and the realization of the political phenomena that Arendt cherishes, e.g., speech and action, plurality, and political freedom. In what is meant to be a summary of Arendt’s political thought, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus already make a novel contribution to the secondary literature. While they provide a standard definition of labor as responsible for maintaining the natural life cycle, they tease out the political implication of labor that Arendt seems to overlook herself.

Generally, labor is regarded as pre-political in the sense that it tends to necessity (Arendt 1958: 31), thereby setting persons up for political participation. What Robaszkiewicz and Weinman add however is that the body is the medium through which citizens speak and interact with each other. As they contend:

This description of labor might seem deflated but we must not forget that human embodiment is one of the central conditions for all activities we ever undertake. Without a body that we take time to nourish, care for, and cultivate, as subjects we would have no worldly reality (2023: 16).

In this way, embodiment can be regarded as the physical condition for the possibility of political action and the realization of all public-political phenomena. Without engaging in labor, neither political participation, natality, plurality, nor political freedom could unfold in the world.

In Chapter 2, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly parse out three versions of thinking, which are often overlooked and conflated in the secondary literature. Namely, metaphysical or philosophical thinking; dialectical thinking (the Socratic two-in-one); and political thinking (enlarged mentality). I will focus on the first two versions and will return to the third later. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman rightly note that metaphysical thinking undergirds the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (city). This follows because the philosopher must withdraw from the world to pursue eternal and universal truths through contemplation. As such, the philosopher is fundamentally at odds with the polis and political involvement. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus convey the tension between the contemplative and active life as Arendt sees it: “thinking as such has little use for society” (Arendt 2006h: 190)” (2023: 39).

In contrast, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman frame the second type of thinking, namely, dialectical thinking, as relevant to the political community. They elucidate what Arendt means with dialectical thinking by turning to Socrates. While Socrates too withdraws from the world, “in his thinking he is alone, but not lonely” (2023: 40). Even though Socrates must retreat from the world in order to think, his internal conversation partner keeps him company. As such, dialectical thinking contains an inner form of plurality and intersubjectivity, insofar as it represents a dialogue between two people (Arendt 2003b: 90). This leads Robaszkiewicz and Weinman to the conclusion that dialectical thinking “turns out to be a thoroughly practical activity, even if of a very particular kind” (2023: 40). Similarly to other scholars, such as Berkowitz (2010), Fazekas (2024), and Topolski (2015), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman present dialectical thinking as world-oriented. Precisely because the internal dialogue between Socrates and himself mirrors public debate (Arendt 2017: 625-626).

Specifically, the authors argue that the political relevance of dialectical thinking is that it fosters moral character development, underlining political speech and action with moral responsibility (2023: 45-46). On the one hand, their claim squares with Arendt’s link between dialectical thinking and morality. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly observe, morality is “a by-product of the activity of thinking itself (SQMP 106)” (2023: 46), insofar as it is achieved by conversing with oneself openly and harmoniously. The authors explain that an honest internal dialogue therefore prevents self-deception and self-contradiction (2023: 45).

On the other hand, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman concede that their proposition appears to contradict Arendt’s stringent demarcation between morality and politics (2023: 46). Arendt upholds this division because morality is fundamentally subjective (Arendt 2003b: 97), which opposes the intersubjectivity and plurality that marks political debate. This follows because the golden standard that guides dialectical thinking, for Arendt as for Socrates, is being able to ‘live with oneself’ (Arendt 2003b: 78). Basing morality on internal harmony makes it subjective, seeing as what persons can live with is highly changeable. As Arendt admits herself, moral judgments “can change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century” (Arendt 2003b: 101).

Yet Robaszkiewicz and Weinman claim that dialectical thinking underscores political participation with moral responsibility. Thus, they suggest a link between morality and politics:

We may see the relation between them as an instance of the butterfly effect: as a by-product of thinking, the constitution of the person influences all her actions. Since action takes place between people, it always has a moral dimension (2023: 46).

While they point out that there is no guarantee that citizens will ignite and maintain an internal dialogue with themselves (2023: 47), the moral imperative is clear.[2] If citizens do not converse with themselves, they run the risk of contradicting themselves, and hence not being able to live with themselves.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman unfortunately leave the precise connection between moral responsibility and political action implicit. There are three reasons that make it difficult to connect the dots. First, Arendt does not make it easy to link morality to politics, owing to her commitment to keep morality and politics entirely separate. Second, and as the authors acknowledge, “Arendt herself sees this connection as somewhat ephemeral” (2023: 46). Third, Arendt’s understanding of morality is self-referential and highly subjective, which presents difficulties when squaring it with the world-interest, plurality, and the intersubjectivity of the political world. However, the following questions remain: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? If political action is world-oriented, then it follows that moral responsibility (in a way) should be as well. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to favor this interpretation when they hold that dialectical thinking “improve[s] both the moral and political competence of democratic citizens” (2023: 47).

Although this answer remains implicit in Chapter 2, it can be teased out in Chapter 5 by turning to Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s analysis of Arendt’s “ironic tone” (2023: 96) in her judgment of Adolf Eichmann. In this chapter, the authors interpret Arendt’s irony in her assessment of Eichmann as a means for the public appearance of her personality (2023: 101). In this way, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman capture the importance of the delivery of judgments, as opposed to their “particular content” (2023: 101). As the authors rightly note, Arendt’s irony in delivering her judgment of Eichmann reveals who she is and how she sees the world in her own unique way.

Their interpretation squares nicely with Arendt’s insistence that the appearance of our personalities is a fundamentally public-political phenomenon over which individuals have no control (Arendt 1958: 179). It is against this claim that Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s portrayal of Arendt should be read. For the authors argue that the tonality of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann has been questioned and misunderstood (2023: 101). From Arendt’s perspective, perhaps it is the lack of control that persons have over their appearance that has caused a discrepancy in the way Arendt judged Eichmann and the way her verdict has been received. To substantiate their claim, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman focus on “how she wrote (and spoke) even more than what she did in judging Eichmann;” and how her “‘wildly ironic’” (2023: 101) tone has been misunderstood.

Accordingly, the authors take Gershom Scholem’s criticism of Arendt as an example of misinterpreting Arendt’s irony in response to Eichmann (2023: 98). As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, Scholem found Arendt’s irony not only misplaced, but also indicative of her lack of love for her own people (Knott 2017: 203-204; 2023: 102). In response, Arendt contends that Scholem misunderstood her irony. She did not absolve Eichmann of culpability for committing crimes against humanity. Instead, Arendt believed she was simply recounting Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone (2023: 102). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus clarify that Arendt’s irony was her unique mode of judging Eichmann.

The objection to Eichmann [the book], Arendt is saying, is actually an objection to her subjectivity: not really the particular content of her judgments, but the personality that comes across in her manner of expressing that content (2023: 101).

This leads the authors to claim that irony is not only a means for the public appearance of the who. But it is also a means for sustaining public debate when confronted with unprecedented political events (2023: 102). Irony is thus portrayed as a mode of judging that reinvigorates public debate, and hence preserves the political world.

Furthermore, uncovering Arendt’s irony as the only viable response to unprecedented political events could have provided Robaszkiewicz and Weinman with a more precise connection between morality and politics. Arendt’s ironic response to Eichmann thus clarifies the questions raised above: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? A potential answer could be that the moral imperative to externalize one’s internal dialogue sustains and preserves public debate, and by extension the political world. Arendt’s particular way of acting on this moral imperative was to frame Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone.

Accordingly, what makes moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented is perhaps the realization that expressing one’s inner dialogue has the potential to promote the continuity and integrity of the political world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to imply this when they claim, albeit in reference to political thinking, “the public performance of irony as the manner of passing reflective judgment is integral to enacting one’s sense of personal responsibility as a democratic citizen” (2023: 107).[3] This statement demonstrates why the connection between moral responsibility and political action remains somewhat unclear. While Robaszkiewicz and Weinman distinguish between dialectical and political thinking, this distinction becomes muddled in their analysis of Arendt’s response to Eichmann.

However, there is a way to account for a possible connection between moral responsibility and political action while maintaining a distinction between dialectical and political thinking. Realizing that expressing one’s internal dialogue has the potential to spark public debate is the moment when dialectical thinking turns into political thinking, thereby making moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented. This squares with Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s claim that reflective judgment ties moral responsibility to political action (2023: 107). This realization thus constitutes a bridge between dialectical thinking and political action, mediated by political thinking.

Moreover, the third form of thinking, namely, political thinking, is presented in Chapter 3. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman sketch political thinking conceived of as enlarged mentality, which Arendt plucks from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. The most salient aspect of their account is that Arendt follows Kant by conceiving of enlarged mentality as a reflective ability. In contrast, many scholars, such as Disch (1993), Flynn (1988), Passerin d’Entrèves (1994), Pitkin (1981), and Young (2001), have misread Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality as a public ability. However, as Robaszkiewicz and Weinman make clear, enlarged mentality sparks a “speculative” plurality and “speculative community” (2023: 54), which occurs when persons think in the place of someone else. The authors thus proceed by teasing out the elements of reflective judgment that appeal to Arendt: the plurality incited by enlarged mentality (2023: 54); the intersubjective validity, impartiality, and communicability of aesthetic judgments (2023: 54-59).

Subsequently, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman introduce a valid point that problematizes the veracity of Arendt’s notion of enlarged mentality. They wonder, “[c]an we really think in place of someone else, let alone everyone else?” (2023: 55). This follows because we cannot truly know what it is like to judge from someone else’s perspective. The authors thus criticize Arendt’s choice of example when elucidating political thinking. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, “she suggests a thought experiment, in which she imagines how she would feel living in a slum from the perspective of a slum dweller (SQMP 140), and she frames this example as if it was not a problem whatsoever to do so” (2023: 55). The issue is twofold. First, if one has not experienced what it is like to live in such a situation, then one cannot fully inhabit the perspective of someone who has. Arendt seems to suggest as much when she holds that “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt 1992: 43; 2023: 55).

While Arendt’s example fails, reading her reflections on enlarged mentality as a whole allows us to arrive at the type of exercise the authors believe is more accurate. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman have it,

one can attempt to find a third perspective, in which the judging subject simultaneously remains herself and brackets her own position: the one in which she still judges as herself but, in doing so, she imagines multiple other perspectives, which are not her own, and thinks them through in a critical way (2023: 56).

Engaging in critical introspection, while not knowing exactly what it is like to think in someone else’s shows, is precisely the hallmark of Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality. While we can neither extricate ourselves from our own perspective fully, nor inhabit someone else’s perspective perfectly, what matters is that we ‘enlarge’ our mentality and aim for our judgments to be “more representative” (Arendt 2003b, 141; 2023: 55) of the political world.

This leads into the second point. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, our ability to invoke possible perspectives, and hence our very ability to judge politically, is flawed. As the authors point out, we might not envision someone else’s perspective accurately, let alone know what it is truly like for them to see the world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus hold, “[i]t is clear that in this process we might simply be wrong in our representation of other persons’ perspectives” (2023: 56). The authors link the failure of judgment up nicely with Arendt’s conception of opinion as partial, fleeing, and vulnerable. Arendt conceives of opinion, as the authors rightly note, in line with Socrates, namely, as “‘what appears to me’ (dokei moi)” (2023: 56). While opinions should always incorporate other possible perspectives, what Robaszkiewicz and Weinman home in on, is that opinions are nevertheless grounded in subjectivity.[4] That is, one can only ever engage in enlarged mentality from one’s own viewpoint. As such, political thinking and judging will always be limited, flawed, and sometimes completely mistaken. The novelty of their reading is that they present political thinking as “a very fragile practice, in which neither the journey nor the destination is certain” (2023: 56).

At the same time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain that political thinking is not an altogether futile undertaking. While we might fail in our thinking and judging, what motivates us to try again is to keep the political world alive. As the authors hold, “Arendt’s keenest and most lasting observation: the political, which is what makes us human at all, entails an ongoing practice of exercises in political thinking” (2023: 192). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus correctly observe that political thinking is a never-ending process of improving and correcting our judgments. On the one hand, this can be achieved by taking new perspectives into account when enlarging our mentality (2023: 200).

On the other hand, conceiving of political thinking as a “practice” means that “the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized” (2023: 200). The open-endedness of political thinking thus ensures that persons continue to improve and correct their judgments – with the hope that they will learn to judge well and more accurately each time. We can therefore view Hannah Arendt and Politics as an open-ended, non-prescriptive yet loosely instructive, performative guide for thinking and judging through the political events that marked Arendt’s time, as well as the current and future political events of our time. As such, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman fulfill their aim of unearthing “the hidden treasure of [Arendt’s] political philosophy” (2023: 198).

Bibliography

  1. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  3. Arendt, 2003a. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 159-192. New York: Schocken Books.
  4. Arendt, 2003b. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 49-146. New York: Schocken Books.
  5. Arendt, Hannah. 2006h. Vom Leben des Geistes. Munich and Zurich: Piper.
  6. Arendt, Hannah. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York and London: Penguin Classics.
  7. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 2002. The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  8. Berkowitz, Roger. 2010. “Solitude and the Activity of Thinking.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, 237-246. New York: Fordham University Press.
  9. Bot, Michael. 2013. “Irony as an Antidote to Thoughtlessness.” Amor Mundi, July 10. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/irony-as-an-antidote-to-thoughtlessness-2013-10-07
  10. Disch 1993. “More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory Vol. 21, No. 4 (November): 665-694.
  11. Fazekas, Samantha. 2024. “Leaving PhronesisBehind: Arendt’s Turn to Kant,” in Works of Philosophy and Their Reception (WPR). Edited by Nicholas Dunn. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www.degruyter.com/database/WPR/entry/wpr.28861265/html
  12. Flynn 1988. “Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Vol, 19, no. 2: 128-140.
  13. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  14. Knott, Marie Luise, ed. 2017. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  15. Koivusalo, Markku. 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Angels and Demons: Ten Spiritual Exercises.” In Hannah Arendt: Practice, Thought and Judgment, edited by Mika Ojakangas, 105-150. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
  16. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London & New York: Routledge.
  17. Pitkin, 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory Vol. 9, No. 3 (Aug.): 327-352.
  18. Robaszkiewicz, Maria. 2017. Übungen im politischen Denken: Hannah Arendts Schriften als Einleitung der politischen Praxis. Wiesbaden: Springer.
  19. Robaszkiewicz, Maria, and Michael Weinman. 2023. Hannah Arendt and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  20. Topolski, Anya. 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
  21. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, edited by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 205-228. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[1] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman list the following accounts that deal with Arendt’s exercises in political thinking: Bar On (2002); Koivusalo (2010); and Robaszkiewicz (2017); (2023: 1).

[2] The term, “moral imperative,” is used here in the loosest sense possible, seeing as moral decision-making, for Arendt, does not establish any rules for moral actions (Arendt 2003a: 78).

[3] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Michael Bot (2013) as making a similar point (2023: 105).

[4] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Gines (2014) as developing a similar point (2023: 192-193).

Michael Barber: Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning

Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning Book Cover Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning
Contributions to Phenomenology (CTPH, volume 129)
Michael Barber
Springer
2024
Hardback
X, 228

Reviewed by: Daniela Griselda López (CONICET, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero)

 

Michael Barber’s Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning represents a notable contribution to the study of Schutz’s provinces of meaning. Published on the cusp of the 80th anniversary of Schutz’s seminal essay On Multiple Realities, this book holds particular significance, both in light of Barber’s scholarly trajectory and the historical impact of Schutz’s work.

In the first chapter, Barber highlights resilience and responsiveness as central themes in Schutz’s approach, presenting them as pivotal to comprehending the full scope of his work. Although Schutz himself did not explicitly use these terms, Barber argues that the concepts and their implications serve as a powerful interpretive lens for examining his ideas as a whole. In addition, these concepts gain significance in the context of recent debates that address the confrontation between the Schutzian paradigm and other theoretical perspectives.

In this regard, the book engages with recent advances in the field of Schutzian phenomenologically oriented sociology (Chapter 2), which emphasize the notion of “imposed relevances” as a response to the interpretations of Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Zygmunt Bauman. These scholars argue that the Schutzian paradigm fails to address issues of coercion and power. Indeed, within the framework of these discussions, the notion of imposed relevances has been revitalized in recent defenses of Schutz’s social and political theory. Here, Barber brings renewed attention to the concept and demonstrates its pervasive and varied nature. Going further, he seeks to show “the often-unseen positive obverse of such relevances, namely, the multiple creative ways in which we come to terms with the panoply of imposed relevances.” According to Barber, reading Schutz does not evoke a prevailing sense of pessimism, as if we were weighed down or defeated by such imposed relevances. Instead, a different factor is consistently at play—one that aligns with the pragmatism Schutz sees as central to everyday life: resilience.

On Imposed Relevances and Resilience

Imposed relevances consist of the events, persons, or objects we encounter that upset our current systems of intrinsic relevances, that is, our preferred ranking of values, which, in conjunction with our systems of typifications, enable us to categorize, organize, and manage everyday life. When we encounter these imposed relevances, we are often compelled to engage with them reflectively in order to come to terms with their impact. Similarly, in political and social life, we continually confront policies, practices, and other human beings that challenge the projects dictated by our intrinsic relevances and impose constraints or limitations upon us. In this context, Barber approaches intrinsic and imposed relevances not as a dichotomy, but as a dialectic, highlighting the dynamic interplay between imposed relevances and what he identifies as resilience. This discussion suggests that imposed relevances must be understood in a broad sense.

The author elucidates this dialectic by examining the varied nature of imposed relevances, beginning with bodily and epistemological engagements with the world. Furthermore, imposed relevances manifest within the eidetic and ontological structures of both the natural and social worlds, as well as in efforts to assert mastery over everyday life. Notably, these imposed relevances encompass spatiotemporal distances and strata that are accessible through movement, interlocutors who are partially comprehensible despite differences, and the boundaries of the everyday life-world, which may be superseded by an attitudinal shift. Of particular interest is the level of coming to terms with the imposed transcendencies of other persons, where gaps between individuals are partially bridged through alternative forms of signification—a process that echoes Schutz’s reflections on the outgroup and the stranger. Culminating this analysis of different transcendencies, Schutz identifies finite provinces of meaning, which, unlike the transcendency of the other still anchored in the everyday life-world, pertain to worlds beyond everyday life.

When encountering imposed relevances, individuals are often compelled to reflectively come to terms with them. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic forced humanity to confront decisions about how to work, which risks to take, and which preventive strategies to implement. Barber argues that adopting finite provinces of meaning in everyday life can be understood as a resilient response to such imposed relevances. For example, when everyday life becomes boring, individuals might enter the province of play; when tragedy strikes a community, they might turn to religious rituals to attribute meaning to their suffering; or when slavery dominates everyday life, oppressed people may resort to folkloric humor as a means to vent their anger against their oppressors. This allows them to resist succumbing to the despair, depression, or submission that slavery typically engenders in its victims. The creation of an institution parallel to slavery—folklore—surrounded by protections against the slave-owners’ desire to crush any resistance, represents a socio-structural way of coming to terms or confronting the institutionally imposed relevances of slavery. Barber asserts that the development of this “para-institution of folklore humor” exemplifies resilience in the face of one of the most brutal systems of control and domination ever devised. As such, the development and engagement with alternative finite provinces of meaning illustrate the intricate interplay between imposed relevances and resilient human responses.

All the provinces of meaning explored by Barber—play, music, ritual, and humor— are explicitly identified by Schutz as distinct realms of meaning. Regarding ritual and humor, Barber revisits his earlier project from his 2017 book, Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning, with a renewed and focused emphasis on religious and spiritual ritual experiences, as well as African-American folkloric humor. Additionally, he provides a detailed account of two provinces that Schutz only briefly mentioned: play and music.

The Province of Play

After presenting play as a province of meaning in Chapter 3 and demonstrating how play uniquely instantiates the six features of the cognitive style of any province of meaning, Barber proceeds in Chapter 4 to draw out its implications for resilience, everyday life, and ethics. In this chapter, the author addresses the objections that Schutz’s theory of typifications may lead to ossification and “tunnel vision” unless supplemented by spontaneity. In response, Barber highlights Schutz’s comprehensive understanding of imposed relevances and resilience, as well as the role of play as a resource for resisting the sclerotic tendencies raised by this critique. In this regard, he argues that engaging in play itself becomes an act of resistance and resilience against the tendencies of everyday life to excessively regiment the self. The playful process of escaping the imposed relevances of everyday life, only to recreate variations of these relevances within play and subsequently exhibit a recurrent, restless resilience in coming to terms with these new layers of impositions, is also observable in everyday life.

Furthermore, this chapter asserts that play can lay the groundwork for ethical behavior by fostering interactive responsiveness among participants. According to Barber, rather than opposing ethics, Schutz’s view implies that play can serve as a precursor to ethical interactions, encouraging mutual attunement and collaboration as essential components for achieving shared ethical values​​. Barber emphasizes that play promotes a form of ethical sensitivity that, while not reaching the explicit “responsibility” described by Emmanuel Levinas, creates an environment of mutual engagement and attentiveness. Schutz views these interactions as arising from what he calls “imposed relevances”—the meaningful intrusions of others into one’s experience that invite cooperative responsiveness. In play, these interactions are not forced but naturally encourage individuals to attune to one another, fostering “collaboration in the struggle to realize aesthetic and other types of value together.”​ While Schutz does not equate play directly with Levinasian responsibility, Barber suggests that the dynamics of responsiveness in play lay a foundational structure for ethical behavior.

Intersubjectivity and the Experience of Music

Chapters 5 and 6 can be read together or in dialogue, as they complement each other in several respects. Chapter 5 begins with an exploration of the embodied, emotive, and affective aspects of musical experience, positioning music as a finite province of meaning characterized by its unique cognitive style. Building on Schutz’s essay, “Making Music Together,” which analyzes the social interactions inherent in the musical process, the chapter extends Schutz’s insights to deepen the understanding of intersubjectivity. Key implications include the irruption of the “Thou” into our pre-reflective experience, similar to how music affects us mimetically, and the immediate absorption in the other’s temporal flow, where a pure “Thou-orientation” becomes impossible. The chapter also addresses the asymmetrical focus on the other’s communication, both in music and in extended face-to-face interactions, and the difficulty of reflecting on the “we-relationship” without disrupting it. Additionally, it highlights the unique tuning-in to the other as well as the challenges of typifications in capturing the polythetic unfolding of the other’s experiences.

In Chapter 6, Barber builds on the understanding of social relationships developed in the previous chapter to explore a line of inquiry that Schutz himself did not pursue. Whereas Schutz typically describes provinces of meaning by examining each of their six cognitive features in isolation, Barber delves into how these features interact with one another, specifically by examining how non-social features—such as epoché, form of spontaneity, tension of consciousness, sense of self, and temporality—affect the dimension of sociality. Focusing on the provinces of music, play, and everyday life, Barber argues that non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning foster a form of “responsiveness.” However, he contends that this responsiveness does not reach the level of Levinasian “responsibility.”

Barber notes, though, that certain instances, such as jazz performance, can illustrate the transition from responsiveness to responsibility, as he explores in the final section of the chapter. This possibility of responsiveness and responsibility coinciding, Barber argues, is fully consistent with Levinas’s thought, as he identifies ethical responsibility even in the most mundane situations. In jazz, musicians engage in spontaneous, pre-reflective interactions that go beyond technical responsiveness to each other’s cues. They exhibit what Barber describes as an ethical responsibility—such as when a musician steps in to support or cover for another’s unexpected silence or missed cue. This requires attentiveness and care for each other, reflecting a moral commitment rather than just an aesthetic or performance-based interaction. Jazz players display a unique blend of freedom and ethical attunement, balancing spontaneity with respect and responsibility toward one another. This attunement becomes a type of “jazz etiquette,” in which musicians prioritize the group’s harmony over individual performance, embodying a relational ethic that merges responsiveness with a deeper moral engagement.

Barber intertwines the themes of imposed relevances, resilience, and responsiveness, proposing that the other can function not merely as a disruptive imposition but as a “beneficent imposed relevance.” Drawing on Levinas’s ideas, Barber suggests that while encountering the other might initially seem to threaten one’s intrinsic relevances, it can ultimately promote self-empowerment and ethical growth. Figures like Martin Luther King and Gandhi exemplify this by transforming the threat of death into resilient commitments to justice. Barber extends Levinas’s idea, arguing that imposed relevances, including suffering, can break through self-centered perspectives and promote liberation, grounding one’s identity in ethical responsibility. Rather than viewing imposed relevances solely as threats, Barber encourages considering them as opportunities for reflection and freedom. In this light, even spiritual and communal experiences may act as liberating imposed relevances, guiding individuals toward ethical responsiveness and selfless service.

The Religious/Spiritual Ritual Province: Resil­ience and Responsiveness to Others

Chapter 7 illuminates how the religious ritual province can contribute to the resil­ience and responsiveness to others, which this book claims to be central themes for Schutz. As in previous chapters, Barber focuses on social relationships and extends this analytic method of examining sociality through the lens of other cognitive style elements unique to each province, specifically to the religious province. The chapter begins by comparing ritual to play, discussing similarities and distinctions as widely recognized in anthropology. Barber then focuses on Abrahamic religions, in which communication within rituals involves dialogic exchanges on a bodily level between a personal God and the religious community (the hallmark of ritual). This bodily engagement fosters a form of sociality that extends to relationships outside the ritual setting, promoting empathy and responsibility toward others. Barber highlights how the unique, non-social features of rituals (like bodily movements, symbols, and music) can deepen interpersonal relationships, even with those outside the community. He also examines how non-social features like sensory markers and ritual music create a distinct “province of meaning” that separates ritual from everyday life. He draws a comparison to Husserl’s epoché, noting that ritual symbols such as incense, music, and architecture signal a shift away from pragmatism toward a unique cognitive state that stimulates openness to divine and human interrelations. Ritual music, Barber argues, plays a critical role in shaping intersubjective experiences by synchronizing participants’ internal rhythms, which enhances collective attentiveness and empathy. Barber points out that music in the ritual realm helps effect a break from everyday life, guiding participants into a shared temporal experience distinct from typical social roles. He further explains that rituals create an environment where typical social roles and personal judgments are set aside. For instance, sensory experiences within rituals—like the sound of hymns or visual elements such as candles—help cultivate a shared consciousness, enhancing mutual openness and empathy among participants. In Barber’s words, rituals allow participants “to be touched, beneath the control of the ego” in a way that promotes “communication between interactors” through sensory cues.

Finally, Barber emphasizes how the values cultivated in ritual—humility, respect, and receptiveness—extend beyond the ritual setting, potentially shaping attitudes toward others outside the community. This quality of ritual, which Barber likens to music in its ability to cultivate “attunement to oneself and others,” prepares participants for ethical responsiveness in broader social contexts. A significant theme in this chapter is the anticipation of divine revelation, in which the ritualistic waiting fosters humility and respect. Barber suggests that this expectation can counteract forms of violence often associated with religious and cultural imperialism, as the act of waiting for revelation nurtures respect for all individuals. Additionally, Barber argues that the cognitive style of ritual, particularly through music, helps deepen the sense of resilience and responsiveness—a core theme Schutz associated with meaningful social interactions.

Humor Folklore as a “Counter-Institution”

Chapter 8 focuses on African-American folkloric humor as a response to the oppressive conditions of slavery. Barber explains how this humor, embedded within a distinct finite province of meaning, allowed enslaved individuals to confront the “imposed relevances” of slavery with resilience. Through oral folklore, conducted in a protected, informal space marked by an epoché that excluded slave owners, African-Americans cultivated a unique form of intersubjective responsiveness. Just as in the ritual province, this departure from everyday life—doubly reinforced through music and sensual ritual markers—serves to cut participants off from everyday reality and accentuates the differentiation between the ritual sphere and everyday life. In much the same way, African-American folkloric humor enacts this departure through a triple reinforcement: folkloric boundary markers, a fictional narrative structure, and the humor embedded within the narrative. This creates a protective boundary around the humor, allowing it to flourish within its well-defined province of meaning.

Barber illustrates resilience by examining specific folkloric tales, including one in which a slave humorously outwits his cruel master, symbolizing both resistance and ethical complexity. This humor is not only a mechanism of endurance but also a subtle, covert critique of the institution of slavery. The chapter highlights how such responsiveness in folklore can transition toward ethical responsibility, creating a space where resilience enables solidarity and sustains moral identity despite systemic dehumanization. Barber links this resilience to a Levinasian ethical responsibility, suggesting that humor allowed for a shared understanding and a reimagined sociality among enslaved individuals, even hinting at the ethical transformation of relationships between the oppressed and the oppressors. Humor offered a way to express indignation and create solidarity against the dehumanizing conditions they faced, with folklore acting as a “counter-institution” to the institution of slavery itself.

Phenomenological Intentionality and Looking-Glass Sociality

The conclusion provides a comprehensive synthesis of the book’s central arguments, grounded in Schutz’s phenomenology and his seminal essay “On Multiple Realities.” Barber engages with Schutz’s conceptualization of finite provinces of meaning, emphasizing their dynamic and interconnected nature, and how the non-social features of these provinces affect the social relationships within them, while addressing the relevance of this conceptualization to contemporary discussions on resilience, sociality, and ethics.

Barber highlights how finite provinces of meaning are not static domains but fluid spheres shaped by intentionality, bodily movement, spontaneity, and affect, alongside rationality and theorizing. The transitions between these provinces—such as work, play, dreaming, and religious ritual—demonstrate their interdependence and the transformative possibilities they offer, enriching human understanding through the interplay of cognitive styles and tensions of consciousness.

Central to Barber’s argument is the role of resilience in Schutz’s framework, which is grounded in phenomenological intentionality, demonstrating that imposed relevances do not causally determine our responses. He foregrounds Schutz’s concept of imposed relevances, which arise from external constraints or social interactions. These external factors are not determinative but instead invite individuals to engage in meaning-making processes, with the caveat that whatever imposed relevances impinge upon us, we are not always capable of “overcoming” them.  Resilience, in this sense, emerges as a hallmark of Schutz’s phenomenology, challenging the reductionism of “vulgar pragmatism” by recognizing the depth of conscious life and its capacity to navigate constraints with creativity and adaptability.

The conclusion further explores Schutz’s idea of a “looking-glass sociality.” Barber contrasts this with Sartre’s view, in which relationships often involve objectification, reducing one person to an object of the other’s consciousness. Schutz focuses instead on intersubjective mutuality, in which individuals engage in spontaneous and reciprocal interactions that reflect a shared world of meaning. Schutz depicts interactions more in terms of mutual responsiveness. One partner interacts quickly, spontaneously, and coopera­tively with another, as happens among players, musical performers, ritual participants, or folkloric humorists. Barber emphasizes that Schutz’s idea of “looking-glass sociality” is grounded in responsiveness and mutual understanding rather than domination or subordination.

As a whole, Barber’s work enriches the understanding of Schutz’s legacy by providing nuanced insights into the fluidity of finite provinces of meaning and their profound implications for human agency, resilience, and the ethical dimensions of social life.

 

Andrea Oppo: Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity

Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity Book Cover Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity
Andrea Oppo
Brill
2024
Hardback
228

Reviewed by: Thomas Nemeth

Andrea Oppo has given us an interesting and thoughtful book on a most unusual person. Pavel Florensky, part Russian, part Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan, schooled in Georgia, educated at Moscow University and then the Moscow Theological Academy, became an Orthodox priest in 1911. The closure of the Academy shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution made continuance of his teaching activities at the Academy impossible. However, he, like Gustav Shpet, but unlike many others chose to remain in the Soviet Union and was not forcibly deported. Undoubtedly, the Soviet authorities realized for a time that his technical skills could be put to use in service to the goals that they and he shared. Notwithstanding the sheer number of his writings on various esoteric topics and his ecclesiastic position, which he refused to conceal, he, as Oppo states, ‟enjoyed the trust of the [Soviet] government as an applied scientist and electrotechnical engineer” (p. 1). When in 1933 those authorities realized he was an implacable opponent of their fundamental viewpoint – or their patience ran out, he was summarily dispatched to forced-labor camps. Finally, despite increasingly difficult prison conditions, Florensky survived until his ‟number” came up in connection with the order to reduce the camp population in the autumn of 1937. In his case, the camp population was reduced by one in the simplest manner possible. His family was not informed of the exact date of his death until 1989.

Although there are substantial biographies – even in English – of Florensky, Oppo provides in the appropriate context relevant biographical information including recently unearthed material that helps illuminate his topical discussions of Florensky’s thought and that were unavailable to previous biographers. In bringing this material to the attention of Western audiences, Oppo has rendered a valuable service to those interested and capable of consulting these many Russian-language sources.

Clearly of the major figures in the history of Western philosophy Florensky was closest to Plato, whose works he began to read even before entering Moscow University. Notwithstanding his enrollment in the undergraduate course in mathematics there, Florensky read and re-read Plato allegedly in Greek and regularly attended student philosophical circles. In his third year of study, he helped organize a mathematics-physics circle and wrote an address he planned to deliver – but ultimately did not – at the opening of the circle (late October-early November 1902) in which he affirmed that mathematical laws are the laws of the universe. As such, those laws should guide us in understanding the world. Although from a contemporary Western viewpoint such a claim may sound promising, as an expression of the legitimacy of mathematical physics, of the marriage of the a priori of mathematics with the a posteriori of physical observations, Florensky had a different understanding of mathematics than we typically associate with mathematics today. We should add here that Florensky was initially disappointed or dismayed with the narrow focus of the courses typically available to students studying mathematics. He did manage, however, to overcome institutional obstacles, and already in his first year at the University he attended Sergei Trubetskoi’s seminar-course on ancient philosophy, for which he wrote essays on Plato’s Meno and The Republic. Additionally, he attended Lev Lopatin’s seminar-course on psychology, for which he wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s view of the inductive origin of geometrical concepts.

Florensky’s desire to extend mathematical reasoning beyond the confines of an abstract discipline was evident from his first years in Moscow. Oppo writes that Florensky’s undergraduate thesis reveals a shift on his part from pure mathematics with his discovery of discontinuity in geometry to seeing discontinuity in every natural phenomenon (p. 38). Clearly, Florensky already in his first years at the university had little interest in pure mathematics and mathematics for its own sake. His outlook was grander. As a first-year student in October 1900, he wrote his mother that he saw mathematics as key to a worldview in which everything is worth study. Through mathematics, nature can be united with ethics and aesthetics to form a whole, and religion obtains a new sense. Florensky’s publication in 1904 of two articles ‟On the Symbols of Infinity” and ‟The Idea of Discontinuity as an Element of a Worldview” surely was taken at the University as an indication of his great promise. Although offered a position to continue his work as a graduate student in mathematics, Florensky opted instead upon graduation to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy.

Oppo writes that Florensky’s active engagement with Greek thought, particularly with Plato’s philosophy, occurred upon entering the Theological Academy and the start of the ‟Great War.” He is undoubtedly correct, but we must not understand that engagement as exclusive. As we shall see, his interests remained wide-ranging until the end. During that decade-long period, Florensky wrote much that concerned ancient philosophy, but these largely stemmed from lecture notes for a course on the history of philosophy that he taught for an extended period starting in 1908. (It was typical at the time at the theological academies for outstanding students to be retained to teach upon graduation, typically in the subject of their magister’s thesis. Oppo correctly gives Florensky’s graduation from the Academy as 1908 (p. 59f and p. 63) but a few pages later as occurring in 1910 (p. 67) – most likely a simple oversight. Oppo points out that Florensky’s notes clearly reveal an influence from Sergei Trubetskoi and that Florensky’s understanding of Plato’s thought underwent no substantial change afterward (pp. 59-60). Make no mistake, though, Florensky’s Plato was not the Plato of the Marburg neo-Kantians, a Kantian before Kant. His reading of Plato’s dialogues was one from a distinctly Christian, even mystical, viewpoint. As Oppo writes, Florensky’s ‟view of Platonism is integrated entirely within a Christian medieval context and, even beyond that, within a universal and extra-historical dimension” (p. 68).

In order formally to qualify for the teaching position at the Academy, Florensky had to present two lectures, which would meet with approval. The first of these was presented in mid-September 1908 and entitled – at least as given the following year in the published version – ‟The Universal Roots of Idealism.” It was Florensky’s first significant work centered on Plato, but a Plato portrayed as a ‟Christian before Christ” (p. 63). Oppo correctly provides Florensky’s claim in this lecture that only ‟magic” is capable of resolving the Platonic question, but just what is that question? Unfortunately, a plain and precise question, one not couched in vague, metaphoric language is not forthcoming. Oppo writes that theology and mathematics may appear to be concerned with two different worlds, but Florensky found Plato’s philosophy to be the bridge between the two. The difficulty here is that mathematics at least is a precise discipline that allows little ambiguity but offers a great deal of analyticity. There is little of the latter in Florensky’s lecture but a great deal of the former. What Oppo does not dwell on in Florensky’s lecture is the attempt there to make Plato a Solovyov-like prophet of integral knowledge and of ‟all-unity” more than two millennia before Solovyov and the Slavophiles. Rather as Oppo points out, Florensky attempted to assimilate Plato, on the one hand, to Pythagorean mathematics and, on the other hand, with the late Neoplatonism of Proclus (p. 108).

 The second of the two lectures, ‟The Cosmological Antinomies of Immanuel Kant,” demonstrated Florensky’s absorption not just with Kant, but also with Western idealism. It is surprising, then, given Solovyov’s fascination with Schelling, on the one hand, and the hold Hegel held on nineteenth-century Russian thought, on the other hand, that Florensky devoted so little explicit attention to the further development of German Idealism. This appears to be something generally overlooked by secondary studies. One also cannot overlook the curious absence in Florensky’s writings of references to the Marburg neo-Kantians, whose interests in certain respects was similar to his own, albeit from a different direction. Like Florensky, Cohen and Natorp were very interested in Plato, and like Florensky Cohen was interested in developing philosophy around a conception of the infinitesimal in mathematics. Oppo makes no mention of these similarities and differences but does note that Florensky displayed no interest in the Russian neo-Kantian movement that was arising as he himself was turning to Kant (p. 107). Oppo writes that Florensky’s Kant was a ‟Mach-like” Kant, the positivistic Kant presented in the early works of Alois Riehl. But apart from a mention by Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in his highly polemical Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which was intended as an intervention in a political dispute and was not an abstract philosophical treatise, Oppo presents no grounds for saying that Riehl’s works were well-known in Russia. Purely as an aside, we can note that of Riehl’s two-volume work Philosophical Criticism and Its Importance for the Positive Sciences only the second part of the second volume was translated into Russian. Apart from Peter Struve, who certainly could have known Riehl’s work in German, it was generally ignored by the Russian neo-Kantians and Kant-scholars, though these were few in number.

In his lecture on Kant, Florensky dealt with Kant’s epistemology as if it were the stark antithesis of Plato’s. In this he may have been consciously emulating Pamfil Iurkevich’s similar contrasting of Plato vis-a-vis Kant in an address he delivered at Moscow University in early 1866. However, whereas Iurkevich sketched Plato as starting where Kant had stopped his investigations, Florensky saw the philosophical ideas of Plato and Kant in sharp opposition. Florensky, not unlike many other theologically-oriented commentators on the first Critique, was chiefly concerned not with the ‟Transcendental Deduction,” but, as the title of his presentation indicates, with the cosmological antinomies. Oppo finds Florensky’s dissatisfaction with Kant to lie in the latter’s reasoning. Kant confused the conditions that he assigned to appearances with those he assigned to things in themselves (p. 85). Florensky also found a petitio principii in Kant’s placing conditions in the concept, not in experience. Oppo’s interpretation here could be greatly clarified. Are the conditions in the two cases identical or different? That is, Oppo fails to inform us as to just what these conditions in either case are so that the Kant-scholar can determine whether Florensky’s position is substantial or illusory. Just what are the conditions that Kant assigned to things in themselves? Is there a dichotomy in Kant’s epistemology between conceptual conditions and experiential ones? Florensky certainly rejected Kant’s strict distinction between appearances and things in themselves, but where does Florensky make the case for this rejection? For Kant, the basis for that distinction lies primarily in his ‟Transcendental Aesthetic,” and it is not his conclusions that are sophistical, but Florensky’s.

Oppo tells us that Florensky lectured for four years on Kant, presenting the latter’s Critical system, his scientific outlook, and even his biography. In this connection, Oppo writes that Florensky translated Kant’s pre-Critical Physical Monadology, which of course he did, but not in connection with his lecturing. Rather, it appeared in the house organ of the Moscow Academy, Bogoslovskie trudy, in 1905, although the original plan, as we see from Florensky’s letter to his mother from October 1902, was devised in conjunction with others in the university’s new mathematics society to publish such Kant-translations. Again, though only as an aside, Oppo refers to a 2020 edition of Florensky’s lecture notes on the history of philosophy, which includes a listing of Kant’s works in Russian. This listing, however, is quite unreliable. Vladislavlev’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason is given as 1807 instead of 1867, and Florensky’s translation of the Physical Monadology is given as ‟1901 August?” note the question mark found in this listing. These lecture notes as published contain no critical apparati that would inform us of the ambiguities in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting and his ample use of abbreviations. Additionally, if the listing of Kant’s works was made by Florensky himself, how is it that he did not recognize the errors pointed out above? And if these errors were ones introduced by unnamed editors of these notes in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting, then must we not be suspect as well of any precise reading of these notes?

Oppo declares that his main objective consists in identifying Florensky’s philosophy as a ‟dialectical part” of the Western tradition. Thus, being such a part it can confront that tradition (vii). One is hard pressed, however, to understand how Florensky could be considered as part of a tradition – or at least that part of the Western philosophical tradition – that upholds the fundamental laws of logic. For Florensky was apparently comfortable with rejecting its most elementary law, namely that of non-contradiction. Florensky questioned ‟the idea of truth based on an absolute and dogmatic faith in the law of non-contradiction” (p. 89). Thus, Oppo clearly recognizes Florensky’s position but seeks not to question it. How can dialogue occur if one of the participants rejects the very possibility of being contradicted and thereby refuted? Are we to take Florensky’s statements at face value without question, i.e., dogmatically? Arguably in contrast to Oppo’s picture of Florensky here, Zenkovsky in his classic  history of Russian philosophy contended that Florensky made a sharp distinction between Russian philosophy and philosophy in the West. Turning to his criticism of Kant’s antinomies, Florensky held that contrary to Kant’s position the antinomies arise not from a misapplication of the cognitive faculties, in subjectivity. Rather, they lie in objective space and time themselves. Would it not be more accurate to say that Florensky saw himself as the antipode of the modern Western tradition? Could we not say that Florensky saw his thought as fundamentally an effort, as Oppo himself declares, ‟to demonstrate the profound value – both ancient and modern at the same time – of Russian-Christian culture” against the scientistic one offered by the West (p. 7)? Oppo writes that although Florensky and Husserl are antithetical figures in many senses, both shared the view that Western science has an essentially nihilistic character (p. 15). I will defer to Oppo concerning Florensky’s position, but Husserl in the early pages of his Crisis of European Sciences did not charge science with nihilism, with the denial of values, but with indifference toward them. Husserl exclaimed that fact-minded sciences make for fact-minded people, but he does not say that such people reject values and ethical goods.

Oppo holds that Florensky’s originality, presumably overall originality, lies in his philosophy of discontinuity, a philosophy or, rather, a conception that he believed could be extended to all of nature and human culture (p. 13). This idea came to him with his discovery of Cantor’s work while still an undergraduate in mathematics. We should also mention Florensky’s early recognition of the continuum hypothesis, which Cantor proposed but which Florensky saw utilized, albeit without the term ‟continuum,” in Aristotle and even the pre-Socratics. However, in Florensky’s revisionistic history of mathematics Galileo relying on Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy abandoned the continuum hypothesis. Florensky found discontinuity seemingly everywhere in physical laws and in the natural world, in human history and in human culture, even in language, words, and names. In fact, the term, as Oppo recognizes, appears almost everywhere in Florensky’s works. What it lacks in them, unlike in mathematics, is a precise definition. Rather, it is an operative term, the understanding of which is tied to its specific usage. In other words, Florensky assumes the widespread, if not universal, presence of discontinuity without concluding to it on the basis of evidence. It is disconcerting also that having claimed discontinuities can be found in mathematics and physics, all other sciences should assume discontinuities are present in their respective investigative fields of reality (p. 52). Nonetheless, Oppo writes that Florensky held discontinuity to be a general theory in which there is an unresolved opposition of two truths that form a self-contradiction (p. 29). Here, we surely have moved beyond Cantor’s innovations in mathematics. Whether the term ‟discontinuity” is, then, the appropriate one when speaking of unresolved oppositions remains unexamined. Is Florensky’s conception of ‟discontinuity” the same as that used today in mathematics when speaking of discontinuous functions? In any case, Florensky viewed this ‟tension” between the two ‟truths” in a discontinuity to be necessary in order for knowledge to be ‟alive and not dead” (p. 29). Can we really speak of knowledge as being ‟alive”?

Oppo tells us that Florensky’s conception of discontinuity sets it against the reigning positivistic conception which has knowledge evolving progressively and accumulatively (p. 30). But is that not what we would mean if we say that knowledge is ‟alive”? Do we not then have a contradiction in Florensky’s conception of knowledge? Or is this again a ‟discontinuity” and thus acceptable? If we look at, say, Hegel’s Science of Logic, do we not also see a progression, a progression following a dialectical circuit through discrete stages each of which arises through the development of the previous one toward the Absolute? Was Hegel, therefore, a positivist? Or does Florensky propose a discontinuous model of knowledge that includes transitional stages arising purely by chance and thus as unable to be predicted in any way beforehand? Or is the model far more subtle with shifting reigning paradigms as in Kuhn’s now-classic study of scientific revolutions? Regrettably, these issues are passed over in silence.

Oppo writes that after the original publication of his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth in 1914 Florensky turned toward the second dimension of the world, viz., natural reality including culture (p. 122). But we are not to take this as meaning there was a sharp break or radical turning point in Florensky’s interests. In Oppo’s eyes, this second period in Florensky’s philosophical oeuvre can be characterized as a rational attempt to justify certain symbolic theories of his own. This reading of Florensky sets it apart from and against Cassirer’s constructivist theory of the symbol, which sees the symbol as ‟arbitrarily produced to give meaning to the world” (p. 136), and it is this that Florensky combats. It is highly unlikely that Cassirer would have agreed with Oppo that symbols are ‟arbitrarily produced.” Oppo regrettably ceases his confrontation of Florensky with Cassirer at this point which would have aided an understanding of the former’s theory. Instead, the author pursues a connection, though again only briefly, with the medieval theologian Gregory Palamas. This turn to a medieval theologian marks another characteristic of Florensky’s thought, a concern not with having science and evidence lead the way, but religious belief, indeed a sectarian religious belief. To be fair, though, Oppo makes an admirable study of Florensky’s work, as he phrases it, from the perspective of the philosophy of discontinuity, tracing its development chronologically (p. 31). The final result of this ‟new” philosophy is a ‟scientific Neoplatonism” (p. 35). What are some of the features of this ‟scientific” outlook? Here, Oppo cannot help but remark that Florensky held ‟unorthodox conceptions” (p. 48). Without delving into details – perhaps Oppo believes his own English-language edition of Florensky’s Imaginaries in Geometry is sufficient – Florensky sought to resurrect the Ptolemaic view of the solar system! The result of this was that, as another scholar of Russian religious thought has commented, ‟scientific terms lost their physical meanings and started playing the role merely of religious-metaphysical metaphors” (Obolevitch, p. 106). What are the constraints, then, in the construction of such metaphors? Whereas conceivably we give Florensky the benefit of some ‟poetic license,” he himself thought that data supported the veracity of the Ptolemaic view over the Copernican! Florensky also concluded, for example, that the speed of light was not an inviolable speed limit and arguably most astonishing that the border between Earth and Heaven lies between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Are we to take Florensky seriously at this point?

Clearly, Oppo attempts to cover as many of the lines of inquiry that Florensky pursued as possible. A short review, such as this, cannot do justice to all of them. But we can, however briefly, mention Florensky’s foray into aesthetic realism. Oppo tells us that Florensky called Renaissance painting ‟fake art,” an accusation meant to be a provocation. He set himself against ‟a specifically Western and positivistic” nineteenth-century idea (p. 146). But as Florensky’s reflections were written in Russian, not German, French, or English, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, a time when disturbances in the country were widespread, just whom did Florensky seek to provoke – the Bolshevik authorities? One cannot help but be suspicious of Florensky’s fundamental attitude. He, unlike his esteemed teachers never sought to journey, let alone study, in the West. He demonstrated a considerable facility with Western languages, but again unlike his teachers in mathematics and philosophy never thought to express his ideas in what was then regarded as the lingua franca for science. Why was this if he thought his ideas were true and be recognized as such?

Evaluating Florensky’s work is particularly difficult for the contemporary scholar, the Husserlian phenomenologist perhaps most of all, since, as alluded to above, it covers, on the one hand, such a wide range of topics in a quite peculiar, long forgotten style, largely dismissed as antiquated. On the other hand, it explicitly abjures logical reasoning, subjectivity, and manifest evidence. One contemporary scholar of Florensky’s writings, Michael Chase, has conjectured that no one, not even Leonardo Da Vinci, has made as many substantive contributions to a wide range of fields. The question remains, however, whether any of Florensky’s ‟contributions” were indeed substantive or nothing more than jottings of an overly zealous religious mindset. After all, Florensky’s various pursuits were in the interest of uniting all in a distinctly Russian Orthodox Christian worldview that owed so much to an idiosyncratic Platonism. To be sure, some have seen him as an obscurantist. Comparison with Solovyov – at least the later Solovyov – is misplaced. There is little of his ecumenical and internationalistic attitude in Florensky.

Oppo’s work remains a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on Florensky, the comments above notwithstanding. An understanding of Florensky’s wide-ranging thought, however flawed it may be from today’s perspective, can help illuminate the era, particularly its vying intellectual extremes, in which that thought, the consequences of which resonated around the world for decades. Oppo, as it were, presciently recognized the criticisms expressed here in writing that it can be hard to be objective with Florensky (p. 189). Whatever we may think of the object of Oppo’s study, it must not be confused with patience and diligence of the study itself.

 

Bibliography:

Obolevitch, Teresa. Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought. Oxford University Press, 2019.