Nicola Ramazzotto (Ed.): L’estetica pragmatista in dialogo. Tradizioni, confronti, prospettive

L’estetica pragmatista in dialogo. Tradizioni, confronti, prospettive Book Cover L’estetica pragmatista in dialogo. Tradizioni, confronti, prospettive
philosophica (284)
Nicola Ramazzotto (Ed.)
Edizioni ETS
2022
Paperback € 15,20
140

Reviewed by: Filomena Trotta

Il volume curato da Nicola Ramazzotto raccoglie alcune relazioni presentate per la prima volta alla conferenza internazionale Pragmatist Aesthetics in Dialogue presso l’Università di Pisa, con l’esplicito intento di dare un rinnovato slancio alla complessità dell’estetica pragmatista. Gli otto contributi che compongono tale dialogo danno vita a un intreccio teorico per nulla estraneo all’essenza stessa del pragmatismo, proponendo un percorso capace di indagare in senso retrospettivo, parallelo e prospettivo la continuità tra diversi metodi e stili filosofici.

Attraverso un’indagine di tipo sinechista, atta a lavorare sulle analogie nelle differenze piuttosto che su rigide contrapposizioni, il primo contributo della raccolta, scritto da Rosa Calcaterra, approfondisce la questione della continuità epistemica e ontologica nell’estetica di John Dewey in relazione al trascendentalismo di Kant e all’empirismo di William James, fino a considerare la proposta di Linguistic Turn di Richard Rorty. Fin da subito viene messo in evidenza come Dewey, nelle pagine del suo celebre testo Art as Experience, tenti di evincere le funzioni antropologiche e storiche dell’esperienza artistica, un criterio metodologico che ricorda molto il punto di vista pragmatico dell’antropologia nel pensiero kantiano, soprattutto nell’utilizzo della locuzione Kunst. Foucault sottolinea come questa parola, frequentemente impiegata nell’Antropologia di Kant, diventi simbolo dell’ambiguità epistemica e ontologica dell’esistenza umana: si tratta di un’espressione che si fa carico di tutto l’enigma che costituisce la condizione dell’esistere, della sua essenza patica e al tempo stesso artefice, dove nulla si dà alla coscienza se non attraverso la libertà di cui essa gode e allo stesso tempo di cui essa stessa è vittima, nel momento in cui non riconosce i limiti delle proprie possibilità di attingere in modo inequivocabile alla verità. La Kunst, in tal senso, non intacca il principio ontologico della libertà umana, ma piuttosto ne evidenzia la natura mutevole in quanto potenzialità e possibilità da implementare (p. 11). Se Kant, però, aveva postulato l’esistenza di un mondo noumenico entro il quale operasse la libertà in quanto carattere distintivo della ragione in virtù di una supposta autonomia delle strutture razionali della mente umana, per l’empirismo naturalistico di Dewey la libertà costituisce un fattore che pervade a tutti gli effetti la sfera biologica, sensibile e fisico-naturale. Il metodo empirico, seguendo la scia jamesiana, non solo permette di approfondire aspetti ontologici della realtà, ma consente allo stesso tempo di indagare le fitte relazioni tra realtà fisica e realtà psichica, tra sensibilità e ragione. Appare dunque eloquente la posizione deweyana in merito alla valenza antropologica della produzione artistica, nonché il profondo legame che lega l’ontologia all’antropologia, là dove l’ordine non viene imposto dall’esterno, bensì sviluppa se stesso, coinvolgendo un numero sempre maggiore di cambiamenti e risignificazioni (p. 14). Al di là dell’impostazione trascendentale della conoscenza tipica di Kant, è dall’empirismo di William James che prende vita il progetto deweyano di dare rilievo alla ricchezza ontologica ed epistemica dell’esistenza umana. L’impatto jamesiano è palese anche nella considerazione del nesso tra piano dell’agire e piano del significato, un legame che non era sconosciuto nemmeno a Pierce. In tal senso, l’opera d’arte non è solo una risultante immaginativa, ma ha anche la possibilità di agire nel mondo concentrando e ampliando l’esperienza immediata in quanto comprova della complessità del vissuto (p. 17). Un aspetto altrettanto rilevante che compone l’indagine sulla costituzione del concetto di esperienza in Dewey arriva dall’attenta disamina di Rorty in merito all’utilizzo, da parte del filosofo pragmatista, di un vocabolario e un’epistemologia fortemente contaminati dalla corrente idealista. È proprio partendo da questa constatazione che, secondo Rorty, si rende necessaria un’indagine comparativa tra esperienza e linguaggio, approdando alla possibilità di un Linguistic Turn in ambito pragmatico. Ma ciò che principalmente si evince da questo tentativo è l’imprescindibilità della ricostruzione di un concetto di esperienza che abbracci le diverse interpretazioni fornite da Pierce, James e Dewey nelle loro rispettive filosofie, al di là di qualsiasi paradigma fondazionalista. Infatti, sebbene le metodologie d’indagine dei tre filosofi siano evidentemente differenti, attraverso il loro intreccio è possibile agire su fruttuosi punti di consonanza, cercando così di svilupparne le tracce più rappresentative.

Il secondo contributo, di Danilo Manca, tenta di far fronte a quella che possiamo definire una negligenza filosofica rispetto al mancato dialogo tra fenomenologia e pragmatismo nel corso del Novecento. Nel saggio di Manca vengono prese in esame, nello specifico, le posizioni di Husserl e Dewey, dapprima constatandone le analogie in virtù di una doppia implicazione tra esperienza estetica e vissuto quotidiano, per poi evidenziare le sfide che i due pensatori rispettivamente pongono alla filosofia rispetto a un concetto di esperienza artistica inscritta in una dimensione naturale. Per entrambi i pensatori, seppure partendo da presupposti alquanto differenti, il riferimento all’arte risulta imprescindibile per descrivere i caratteri emotivi e percettivi dell’esperienza umana, nonché per dare forma alla sfida che l’arte ha il compito di lanciare alla filosofia. Contro qualsiasi impostazione isolazionista, l’obiettivo di Dewey è di comprendere come il “quotidiano far cose” si riveli una “forma di fare genuinamente artistica”, come prova del fatto che l’essere umano abbia la capacità di dare coesione al senso, al bisogno, all’istinto e all’azione in quanto caratteristica della creatura vivente (p. 28). È inoltre evidente l’intreccio tra esperienza ed emozione in quanto fonte dell’arte: l’atto espressivo necessita la frequentazione di uno stato d’animo che orienti la percezione. In questo gioco di fare e subire che è l’esperienza, anche l’immaginazione occupa un ruolo imprescindibile in quanto adattamento tra nuovo e vecchio. Diversamente, Husserl considera la percezione e l’immaginazione come atti totalmente differenti: in tal senso, considerare la parte ignota di un oggetto rappresentato in un’immagine non porterebbe ad immaginarlo, bensì a co-intenzionarlo in quanto aspetto irriflessivamente saputo (p. 31). Tale dissonanza, però, trova il suo punto di risoluzione nella consapevolezza che tutto ciò che viene esperienziato può essere notevolmente arricchito dalla componente immaginativa. Rivolgendoci inoltre alla sfida posta alla filosofia di dover partire dall’esperienza estetica per comprendere davvero cosa sia l’esperienza, si scorge tra Dewey e Husserl un’ulteriore differenza che cela in sé, anche in questo caso, la possibilità di rendere questo incontro particolarmente proficuo: se per Dewey l’esperienza estetica va a costituirsi come sguardo privilegiato sul costante alternarsi di armonia e disordine che scandisce l’incontro tra organismo e ambiente del vissuto quotidiano, per Husserl esperire esteticamente comporta una rottura con il mondo ordinario, costituendosi come atto che porta a maturare su di esso uno sguardo da spettatore disinteressato. Sebbene si tratti di una differenza incontrovertibile, entrambi concordano sul fatto che il soggetto sia portato ad agire e vivere all’interno di un sostrato abituale che non consentirebbe di assumere una posizione adeguata rispetto al vissuto. È qui che per entrambi i pensatori si fa palese la necessità di un arricchimento estetico capace di aprire l’essere umano a un’effettiva capacità critica che conduce a un’integrazione tra dato di fatto e novità (p. 36). Il pregiudizio husserliano nei confronti del naturalismo, concepito come modo ordinario del vivere o in quanto conoscenza naturalistica del mondo, viene superato attraverso l’approccio filosofico di Merleau-Ponty che, lavorando su un terreno fenomenologico, si accorse della mancanza di Husserl nell’esplicitare che l’atteggiamento naturale presuppone metodicamente una preparazione fenomenologica (p. 40). L’indagine sulle potenzialità dell’esperienza estetica da un punto di vista pragmatico e fenomenologico approda alla consapevolezza che questo tipo di vissuto sia da intendersi come preparazione al rivolgimento filosofico in quanto esperienza attiva che porta alla luce aspetti della specie umana: in tal senso, la fenomenologia dovrebbe considerare, oltre al corpo vissuto e al corpo come oggetto, anche il corpo vivente studiato dalla biologia. Il corpo vivente preso in considerazione all’interno del dibattito estetico, inteso come intenzionalità incarnata e sede dell’esperienza, è il punto di contatto con l’alterità, con il mondo storico e sociale, nonché con la sua dimensione naturale. Risulta dunque fondamentale parlare di corpo, in quanto ciò consente di mettere al centro tutte le possibili interconnessioni del vivente.

Nel terzo capitolo si delinea il tentativo di Nicola Ramazzotto di dar vita a un dialogo tra pensiero angloamericano e pensiero continentale in merito al tema dell’esperienza estetica e della sua capacità di costituire nuovi orizzonti di significato. Tale incontro viene realizzato prendendo in esame le posizioni di Heidegger e Dewey, due pensatori apparentemente agli antipodi, che però nelle divergenze possono dar forma a un dialogo estetico quanto mai fruttuoso. Partendo dalla constatazione di una progressiva compartimentazione e musealizzazione dell’arte nel corso della modernità, entrambi i pensatori concordano sul fatto che ad oggi l’esperienza artistica non soddisfi più il nostro bisogno di significato (p. 47). Il mondo greco, al contrario, necessitava dell’arte per comprendere e rappresentare la natura e la storia. La realtà moderna e classica diventano dunque per Heidegger e Dewey due esemplificazioni del concetto di arte totalmente diverse: nel primo caso, infatti, si costituisce come mero piacere soggettivo, mentre nel secondo come vera e propria possibilità di significazione in relazione a una determinata realtà storica. Non si tratta di un ritorno al classicismo in senso nostalgico, ma si mira piuttosto a dimostrarne la portata in virtù di un’odierna possibile riconfigurazione del nostro rapporto con l’opera d’arte che tenga conto della sua intrinseca capacità di arricchimento onnicomprensivo, in contrasto con la concezione che sorregge la visione artistica nel mondo moderno (p. 48). Per quanto l’ermeneutica e il pragmatismo siano due correnti filosofiche essenzialmente distanti, vi si può scorgere un’inaspettata assonanza nel tentativo di rispondere alla crisi dell’esperienza estetica, riconoscendo la sua capacità di dare vita a nuovi orizzonti di senso. Significato e orizzonte diventano allora due parole chiave per approfondire il dialogo tra Dewey e Heidegger: per entrambi l’esperienza umana non è ricerca di una mera verità teoretica, ma di una verità che sia significativa, una situatività che può essere dispiegata solo in relazione a un determinato ambiente. Dunque, l’arte, in quanto azione significante, consiste proprio nel trasformare una situazione data in un qualcosa che abbia senso e valore (p. 50). Il significato non è mai l’unico possibile, ma è sempre il senso di una precisa situazione, dove per senso s’intende l’unità di significati nella formazione di una realtà condivisa (p. 51). Noi abitiamo, o meglio “in-abitiamo” il mondo grazie ai nostri habits che insieme danno forma all’ethos, propriamente il nostro in-abitare, e solamente un mondo abitato artisticamente può essere significativo. L’arte, afferma Heidegger, fa sì che le cose siano liberate dal loro semplice essere-cosa e possiede la capacità di creare significati in virtù della sua particolare modalità di prendersi cura delle cose. Ramazzotto evidenzia come sia per Dewey che per Heidegger l’abilità di un soggetto che crea sia artistica se mossa dall’amore, e come questo amare sia l’essenza autentica del potere, che non solo può far essere questa o quella cosa, ma può anche permettere alla cosa stessa di essere presente (p. 53). Il significato può dispiegarsi solo all’interno di un orizzonte, cioè la totalità dell’insieme di significati a partire da cui un evento può assumere senso. L’arte, dunque, non ha solo il compito di svelare la dimensione situazionale, orizzontale e spazio-temporale del vissuto umano, ma possiede anche un carattere operativo, stabilendo i differenti e sempre mutevoli orizzonti di verità e di senso per l’abitare umano – là dove per abitare s’intende l’assunzione di un atteggiamento di radicamento nel mondo e di ricezione in divenire del vissuto. Infatti, sia per Heidegger che per Dewey, l’arte è una peculiare modalità di apertura all’evento mettendo in discussione la totalità dei significati che lo animano in virtù di un dispiegamento di nuovi orizzonti di abitabilità (p. 57). Tuttavia, così come non è possibile riferirsi a un significato unico, in egual misura non è possibile parlare di un solo orizzonte, ma di una serie di orizzonti che si susseguono storicamente. Ne consegue che l’arte diventa mezzo privilegiato per una comunità storica per conoscere se stessa: la storicità, in tal senso, è da intendersi come inevitabile situatività che permette al vissuto di essere significativo nella composizione di una rete di credenze che permette all’essere umano di accadere in un mondo condiviso.

Il quarto contributo, firmato da Elena Romagnoli, indaga il rapporto tra opera d’arte e pubblico, prendendo in considerazione le posizioni di Hans-Georg Gadamer e John Dewey, rispettivamente operanti nelle correnti dell’ermeneutica e del pragmatismo. L’idea di conciliare la lettura estetica dei due pensatori nasce in virtù del loro modo d’intendere l’opera d’arte come vero e proprio processo d’interazione. Sul versante deweyano, l’indagine prende avvio dal ripensamento dell’esperienza in senso anti-cartesiano con un particolare focus sul legame tra la creatura vivente e l’ambiente in cui questa dispiega il proprio esistere. L’ambiente diventa motivo, non causa, per cui la vita è: nessuna creatura vive solo sotto la propria pelle, piuttosto è solo quando essa riesce a prendere parte alle relazioni ordinate nel suo ambiente che si garantisce la stabilità che è essenziale per vivere. Da ciò ne consegue l’imprescindibilità di un ripensamento dell’esperienza stessa da un punto di vista antropologico (p. 67). Occorre tuttavia chiarire che un’esperienza estetica si differenzia significativamente da un’esperienza ordinaria, proprio per la sua capacità di racchiudere in sé un insieme di significati altrimenti dislocati e inafferrabili. Come viene lucidamente chiarito da Romagnoli, non si tratta di una separazione netta, quanto di un rapporto processuale di continuo perfezionamento e arricchimento reciproco, tale da procurare una vitalità intensificata. Su un altro versante, attraverso un approccio squisitamente heideggeriano, Gadamer intende mostrare il carattere mutevole e trasformativo dell’esperienza a partire dalla centralità dell’esperienza estetica. Un ruolo fondamentale in virtù di questo obiettivo è svolto dal tema del gioco, un concetto capace di mettere in discussione una lettura dualistica che vedrebbe l’opera d’arte come mero oggetto contrapposto a un soggetto. Da un punto di vista antropologico, il gioco diviene momento di comune sperimentazione a patto che venga preso sul serio e abbia una compiutezza (p. 71). In uno scritto successivo a Verità e metodo, ovvero il saggio L’attualità del bello. Arte come gioco, simbolo e festa, Gadamer descrive il gioco come funzione elementare della vita umana, come fenomeno di eccedenza di autorappresentazione del vivente riscontrabile nella natura e in tutti gli animali, come movimento senza fini che nell’essere umano però acquisisce razionalità e consapevolezza (p. 72). Anche lo spettatore è invitato a prendere posto in questo continuo movimento in virtù della determinazione stessa del gioco, il quale presuppone sempre un “giocare insieme”. Questo aspetto mette in luce il ripensamento dell’esperienza estetica in senso processuale in contrapposizione a una lettura che la renderebbe priva di potenzialità estrinsecative e interattive. Dewey, in tal senso, evidenzia come un’opera, per essere davvero artistica, debba anche essere estetica, ossia “concepita per una percezione ricettiva della fruizione” (p. 74). Tale esperienza andrebbe così a costituirsi come una forma stessa di creazione e partecipazione all’opera. Come per Dewey, dunque, anche per Gadamer risulta necessaria una riformulazione del rapporto tra creatore e pubblico in virtù di una rinnovata considerazione dell’esperienza estetica. Il carattere interattivo dell’arte ne mostra il suo aspetto collettivo essenziale, nonché il suo costituirsi come fenomeno collettivo, anti-elitario e trasformativo.

Continuando sulla scia di un dialogo che ha per sfondo una lettura pragmatista dell’estetica, il quinto contributo, di Stefano Marino, si focalizza sulla questione della popular music (nella forma di una sfida estetica rivolta dall’arte popolare all’estetica tradizionale) e si muove tra pragmatismo e teoria critica. Partendo dalla considerazione del modo di indagare tipico del pensiero occidentale, il quale si costituirebbe nella forma di un “All or Nothing”, viene enfatizzata la necessità di un superamento di tale tendenza dicotomica a favore di un approccio maggiormente comprensivo, tipico della corrente pragmatista. Nella sua opera Estetica Pragmatista Richard Shusterman evidenzia in modo eloquente la negligenza filosofica nei confronti dell’arte popolare, la quale, quand’anche considerata, viene abitualmente declassata a mero prodotto privo di valore (p. 82). L’arte popolare in realtà è un ambito molto vasto e in continua espansione, così come la popular music, la quale contiene in sé numerosi generi e sottogeneri, anche legati alle odierne sottoculture. Tra alcuni filosofi contemporanei impegnati nel dibattito sulla popular music – e, come si vuole sottolineare nel caso specifico, sulla musica pop-rock – spicca la disamina di Alva Noë, il quale, seguendo una tendenza piuttosto tipica delle odierne critiche filosofiche, evidenzia come alcune forme della musica pop-rock siano perlopiù trainate dalla figura stessa dell’artista fomentato dalle masse. In tal senso, ciò che viene adornianamente definito come il “materiale musicale” costituirebbe solo un mezzo finalizzato ad attrarre tutta l’attenzione sul personaggio. Non si tratterebbe dunque di musica, ma piuttosto di mero fanatismo e culto della personalità. È evidente come questo tipo di impostazione filosofica non sia disposta ad ammettere l’esistenza delle numerose sfumature presenti nel mondo della musica pop-rock, prediligendo al contrario un’ottica che mira a porre delle pretese totalizzanti valide per tutto il genere, in linea con la succitata logica “Tutto o nulla”. Viene evidenziato però come, in modo alquanto interessante, Noë si smentisca nell’ammettere che alcuni fenomeni nel campo della musica pop-rock come i Radiohead possano occupare una sorta di “spazio intermedio”, posizionandosi nella sfera del genere pop-rock e al contempo creando una musica che richiede attenzione e che affascina in quanto musica (p. 86). Ciò comporta che non ci sia alcuna ragione per ignorare altri tipi di eccezionalità, altri “oggetti di consumo d’avanguardia”, come ad esempio i Nirvana, chiave di volta all’interno di questa indagine, oltretutto citati più volte nell’analisi critica di Noë per supportare la sua posizione in merito allo scarso valore significativo della musica pop-rock. Come evidenziato dal famoso pianista contemporaneo Brad Mehldau, per quanto sia indubbio che molte persone siano attratte all’ascolto di questa band per via del culto della personalità, è altrettanto evidente che fermarsi a queste considerazioni limiterebbe la possibilità di accogliere qualcosa di più sottile, come la capacità e la forza di Kurt Cobain di esprimere la propria vulnerabilità, nonché la fragilità di una generazione politicamente destabilizzata, un’abilità oltretutto supportata da un grande talento compositivo (p. 89). Al di là di qualsiasi pretesa generalizzante, Shusterman mette in luce come gran parte della popular music del nostro tempo pretenda di essere creativa e originale, e come questa originalità si possa raggiungere anche attraverso quella che potremmo definire un’appropriazione creativa del vecchio (p. 91). Dunque, attraverso un approccio adorniano “eterodosso” alla popular music (ossia, al di là di una dicotomia troppo ferrea tra musica leggera e musica seria) e attraverso le stimolanti intuizioni di filosofi impegnati nella valorizzazione dell’arte popolare come Shusterman, emerge la possibilità di sviluppare analisi maggiormente concrete delle varie arti e delle differenti forme della loro appropriazione (p. 93). Tale capacità, come chiaramente evidenziato nel capitolo qui presentato, può emergere in maniera decisiva grazie a un punto di vista estetico che sia pluralista e pragmatista, capace di donare rilievo e slancio a generi musicali come il pop-rock che, seppure segnati dai caratteri di mercificazione e feticismo, possono costituirsi come esperienze estetiche dalla grande ricchezza significativa.

Nel sesto contributo, firmato da Anita Merlini, l’intento è quello di mettere in luce gli sviluppi teorici sugli studi visuali e sulla Bildwissenschaft attraverso un’ottica critica squisitamente pragmatista. Entrambi gli ambiti nascono ufficialmente nel 1994: i primi con la pubblicazione del volume Picture Theory di William J.T. Mitchell, nel quale viene annunciata una “svolta figurativa”; i secondi con la pubblicazione dell’opera Was ist ein Bild? di Gottfried Boehm, nella quale viene presentata una “svolta iconica” (p. 99). Al di là delle modalità con cui si vogliano descrivere tali svolte, questi campi di studio si contraddistinguono per la promozione di un approccio interdisciplinare, il quale però rischia di risultare particolarmente destrutturato, soprattutto in mancanza di un assetto epistemologico ben definito. Innanzitutto, bisogna specificare che entrambe le correnti mirano al raggiungimento di uno statuto che consideri l’immagine come fenomeno a se stante, libera dall’imperante logocentrismo su cui il sapere in generale e gli studi sulle immagini in particolare tradizionalmente si poggiano (p. 100). Le posizioni teoretiche di Mitchell in merito allo statuto delle metapicture, cioè immagini capaci di fornire un discorso retrostante alla pura rappresentazione che ci dice qualcosa dell’immagine stessa, vengono contrapposte all’impostazione pragmatista e fenomenologica di Wiesing, il quale, nel volume Sehen Lassen, contesta tale descrizione dell’immagine, che tenderebbe a concepirla come una sorta di soggetto capace di agire (p. 104). Secondo Wiesing, infatti, non sono le immagini di per sé a mostrare un determinato stato di fatto, ma siamo noi, in quanto soggetti umani atti all’interpretazione, ad attribuire all’immagine una capacità significativa. L’immagine si costituirebbe così come un intreccio segnico sviscerabile solo da un ente interpretante. Il nodo problematico delle premesse di queste due correnti si muoverebbe attorno a una mancata distinzione tra visibilità e ostensione: se il primo concetto può essere inteso come un dato di fatto potenzialmente osservabile, il secondo va a configurarsi come una vera e propria azione mossa dall’intenzione. Risulta evidente, dunque, come la visibilità dell’immagine non sia metodicamente legata alla sua ostensione: la capacità ostensiva dell’immagine non rappresenta una sua caratteristica visibile, quanto piuttosto una sua disposizione attuabile solo grazie alla presenza umana. Così, l’approccio dei Visual Studies e della Bildwissenschaft, che tende a soggettivizzare le immagini in virtù di un approccio all’immagine fortemente animista, rischierebbe di trasformarsi in una nuova ideologia dell’immagine, minando i fondamenti di qualsiasi comprensione filosoficamente coerente capace di fornire un impianto epistemologico e metodologico alla base di tali approcci. L’indagine qui riportata mira, dunque, a risvegliare la presa di coscienza rispetto a tali rischi, promuovendo una riconfigurazione degli studi sull’immagine in virtù della possibile istituzione di una vera e propria disciplina, un’esigenza che risulta quanto mai necessaria.

Nel settimo capitolo, Alberto Siani focalizza la propria attenzione sul tema della valutazione del carattere di paesaggio, una nozione che fa la sua prima comparsa negli ultimi trent’anni in ambito anglosassone, diffondendosi rapidamente in altri contesti. La sua nascita è finalizzata alla tutela e alla gestione di un paesaggio sulla base delle sue caratteristiche, rispondendo a un’urgenza di tipo pratico e teorico. L’obiettivo qui proposto è quello di sottrarre il controllo dei criteri di valore del paesaggio al monopolio di pochi individui privilegiati, rendendo tale gestione libera dal paradigma modernista sotteso a operare tramite un dualismo di oggettività e soggettività. Il paesaggio sarebbe dunque inteso come un’entità oggettivamente data, in contrasto con l’esperienza profonda di chi lo abita. Ci si propone, dunque, di delineare una proposta di miglioramento ispirata alla corrente pragmatista che consideri il paesaggio come unità vivente e concretamente situata della nostra esperienza, in virtù di una riconsiderazione dei concetti di estetica e di esperienza (p. 120). L’oculocentrismo e l’essenzialismo che dominano gran parte della teoria e della pratica del paesaggio ostacolano l’obiettivo di transdisciplinarietà, che parrebbe almeno formalmente condiviso. L’ambito della valutazione paesaggistica, difatti, sembra essere guidato da metodi e prospettive di architetti e geografi, a discapito di altre discipline e altri ambiti altrettanto necessari in tale contesto. Il principale problema, secondo tale indagine, è sostanzialmente la vera e propria “scomparsa dell’estetico” e una ristretta concezione di esperienza (p. 118). Una prospettiva pragmatista, invece, favorirebbe la costituzione di un concetto di esperienza che riguarderebbe ogni singola interazione tra essere umano e ambiente, così come un concetto di estetica che agirebbe sulla qualità di tale interazione. Il paradigma dominante, che mira a considerare il paesaggio come un costrutto oggettivo parcellizzabile, dovrebbe al contrario considerare che il carattere di un paesaggio richiede la consapevolezza di un certo grado di arbitrarietà e instabilità, attraverso una prospettiva che dunque non dia nulla per scontato, ma sia anzi in grado di problematizzare (p. 121). In tal senso, la nozione di carattere dovrebbe render conto, per quanto possibile, di aspetti come la pluralità culturale, psicologica ed esperienziale di un determinato ambiente attraverso una rinegoziazione di esigenze, valori e punti di vista. La proposta qui presentata non mira certo alla fondazione di una prospettiva soggettivista e relativista dell’ambiente, quanto piuttosto all’apertura di uno spazio all’interno del quale sia possibile esplicitare una valutazione del carattere del paesaggio davvero includente, trasparente e partecipata, guidata da un approccio pragmatista dell’esperienza e dell’estetico.

L’ottavo contributo, firmato da Giovanni Matteucci, conclude il fruttuoso dialogo sin qui esposto proponendo di indagare la svolta pragmatista degli ultimi cento anni nell’ambito dell’estetica filosofica. Tale teoria estetica, rispetto alle altre, implica la revisione di strutture fondanti della stessa filosofia moderna, in virtù di una radicale rivalutazione teoretica in ambito estetico. Si tratta, dunque, non solo di una sfida filosofica all’estetica, ma anche di una sfida estetica alla filosofia (p. 125). L’intento del contributo di Matteucci è proprio quello di mettere in luce il senso di tale sfida: riprendendo alcune delle tesi dell’estetica moderna, si procede ad evidenziarne i punti critici attraverso una disamina diversiva di impianto pragmatista. Quello che ne risulta non è un sistema chiuso volto all’istituzione di principi fissi e immutabili, ma uno spazio entro il quale sono ravvisabili i principali impianti tematici di una reale rivoluzione pragmatista in ambito estetico. Una delle tesi di stampo modernista qui presentata descrive la disciplina estetica come finalizzata alla considerazione e alla valutazione dell’arte e dei suoi prodotti, una pretesa che, in un’ottica pragmatista, risulta di per sé essenzialista – in quanto tendente ad attribuire all’arte un’essenza valida per tutti i suoi prodotti – e giustificazionista – perché non in grado di accogliere fenomeni estetici inaspettati, che si costituirebbero al di là di ciò che viene in modo unanime ritenuto esistente. In tal senso, è necessario mettere in discussione la pretesa di istituire un principio che riconosca un prodotto perfetto come standard dell’estetico: l’opera d’arte, come evidenzia Dewey, non è un prodotto oggettivo assumibile come dato, ma mira piuttosto a dare risalto alla modalità dell’esperienza rispetto all’oggetto fattuale, coinvolgendo in un movimento unitario organismo e ambiente. L’estetico avrebbe dunque un’accezione oggettuale, addirittura avverbiale: l’interazione si costituisce esteticamente quando l’esperienza prende forma attraverso le variegate modalità d’interazione tra organismo e ambiente, dove per organismo s’intende un essere vivente di cui si riconosce pienamente la sua immanenza corporea. Un’ulteriore tesi di stampo modernista tenderebbe a rilegare l’estetico al di là dell’ambito percettivo, sublimando il sensibile nello spirituale. Al contrario, il pragmatismo invita a prendere sul serio il senso etimologico del concetto di aisthesis, che dunque non dovrebbe preoccuparsi del prodotto, quanto piuttosto del modo in cui soggetto e ambiente interagiscono intessendo un particolare costrutto esperienziale. In tale contesto, Dewey mette in luce come l’esperienza estetica, e dunque l’opera d’arte nella sua attualità, sia percezione (p. 129). Tale approccio antropologico alla teoria della percezione mette in secondo piano ogni partizione tra differenti facoltà sensoriali, in virtù di un’unità percettiva sinestetica e cinestetica. Inoltre, contrariamente alla teoria secondo cui l’esperienza estetica si costituirebbe a partire da ciò che di determinabile cognitivamente va a presentificarsi, il pragmatismo promuove un’esperienza pre-discorsiva, ponendosi in quello spazio liminale in cui il soggetto, non ancora completamente individualizzabile, costituisce un’unità simbiotica con l’ambiente in virtù di un’interazione immediata, intuitiva e contestuale (p. 133). Ciò non equivale ad escludere totalmente ogni contenuto cognitivo: un simbolo, ad esempio, configura automaticamente una presenza che non rinvia, bensì manifesta. La pregnanza significativa dell’estetico, con le parole di Dewey, non risiederebbe in una presunta funzione semiotica, quanto piuttosto in una relativa aspettualità espressiva. Si può allora parlare di giudizio estetico, ma solo come processo mutevole e mai esatto, mai concluso. Risulta interessante anche la posizione del pragmatismo in merito alla presunta mancanza di significato dell’esperienza estetica teorizzata dalle correnti moderniste: per quanto l’estetico in senso pragmatista escluda le dimensioni del significato in senso denotativo, ciò non implica che sia privo di una carica semantica. Tale carica espressiva, significativa ancor prima che significante (perché si vuole dare rilievo alla significatività immanente al campo, piuttosto che alla denotazione di senso), recupera l’effettiva qualità dell’esperienza nel suo invito a prender parte, nella sua dimensione relazionale (p. 135). La percezione, in tal senso, è da intendersi come prassi immanentemente dotata di orientamento, rilevanza e ricettività performativa, ben diversa dalla passività del riconoscimento fattuale (p. 136). Il pragmatismo non s’impegna a prendere in esame gli aspetti canonici di espressione, forma e contenuto: la nozione di esperienza messa qui in risalto rende giustizia alla pienezza dell’arte, collegando artista e pubblico in un processo di mutuo scambio. L’arte, nella sua creazione e nella sua fruizione, non si costituisce in un binomio soggetto/oggetto, nel senso che non c’è qualcuno che chiama e qualcuno che risponde, cioè non ci sono ruoli predefiniti senza possibilità di mobilità: c’è la partecipazione di un movimento magmatico creato da questa stessa partecipazione che, partecipando, crea lo stesso appello, crea la stessa chiamata.

Peter Dews: Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel

Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel. Book Cover Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel.
Peter Dews
Oxford University Press
2023
Hardback £82.00
344

Reviewed by: David Gordon (Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Peter Dews has given us a work of great depth and detail, concerned especially to show the different ways in which Hegel and Schelling reacted to problems posed by Kant. Further, while fully recognizing the greatness of both Hegel and Schelling, Dews maintains that Schelling’s negative and positive philosophies of nature and history constitute a more adequate response to Kant’s problems than what he views as Hegel’s pan-rationalism, which struggles with difficulty to find a place for concrete events that are really new and are not just instantiations of the endlessly repeated categories of the Science of Logic.

In carrying out his project, Dews shows himself a master not only of the thought of the two notoriously difficult thinkers on whom he focuses but of analytic and existentialist philosophy as well; for example, he draws out with great insight the Schellingian resonances of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. But unfortunately some obstacles confront the reader. Schelling’s thought is often difficult to follow, and I freely confess that I have found myself lost in its labyrinthine complexity. The task of understanding Schelling is even harder, because, as Dews shows in painstaking detail, Schelling often changed his views. In what follows, I shall endeavor to discuss a few themes in the book that strike me as of particular importance, though I fear I will not succeed in doing the book justice.

Kant’s successors agreed that his thought changed fundamentally the way one should regard human beings’ relation to reality.  “The new beginning in European philosophy marked by the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 can be summed up in the claim that Kant re-centered philosophical attention on the structure of the relation between the subject and the object of experience as such. The first Critique no longer asks how the mind can make cognitive contact with a reality assumed to subsist independently of it, or what it would mean to establish an accurate representation of such a reality.” (19) In Kant’s account, there of course remains a distinction between our minds and the objects given to us in experience, but this distinction is one within the phenomenal world, and we possesses no knowledge of the noumenal world. Kant is an empirical realist but a transcendental idealist. One question that Dews does not raise, but which might usefully have been addressed, is whether it is correct to deny that the mind represents a reality independent from it.  To the contrary, he takes for granted that the “Kantian turn” cannot be undone. It would not be a good reply to say that Dews is engaged only in a historical account of how the great post-Kantians reacted to the Critique, as clearly he is not; he wishes to show the greater reasonableness of some philosophical options over others. But this is by the way.

Kant’s new account of knowledge led to problems of its own, and two of these in particular were central to his successors. If we have no knowledge of the noumenal world, on what basis is it claimed that it exists and, in interaction with the categories of judgment and the intuitions of time and space, brings about the phenomenal world? And how is the “unity of apperception” present during this interaction related to the minds of individuals, which are perspectives on the phenomenal world, not the phenomenal world sans phrase? As Dews puts the latter problem, “Evidently, in this account, the I which carries out the combining cannot be equated with the identity of consciousness which results from the process, even though Kant insists that we could not formulate the thought ‘I think’—which is grounded in what he terms “pure apperception”—except as identical subjects of experience. The important point is that our status as subjects cannot consist simply in a formal unity which emerges through a contrast with what is constituted as the objective content of experience. There must also be an awareness of our spontaneity as thinkers, of which some explanation, or at least a plausible characterization, must be given.” (22-23)

How were these problems to be unsnarled? One path was taken by Fichte, who attempted to derive the world entirely from the I, though he constantly changed his views on how exactly this task was to be accomplished. Though Schelling and Hegel were greatly influenced by him, they soon turned away, in considerable part because, far from being a vindication of common sense, as Fichte claimed it was, his approach seemed to dissolve the world into hypotheticals: “At the same time, in the Sonnenklarer Bericht Fichte still tries to persuade his imagined reader and interlocutor that the meaning of statements regarding unobserved events —he gives the example of the movement of the hands of an unwatched clock, while the reader is sunk in reflection—should be given a strictly verificationist analysis . . . But why should this conception, in which the reality of objects and events must be cashed out in terms of counterfactuals confined to the subject-object nexus of experience, be any less an affront to common sense than the metaphysical conjectures which transcendental philosophy was supposed to have overthrown?” (31-32)

Schelling and Hegel came to embrace the opposite way of dealing with Kant’s problems to Fichte. They turned to the object rather than place exclusive stress on the subject, in this way reviving the metaphysical inquiry that Kant had declared impossible, though indeed not die alte metaphysik but a metaphysics in line with the transcendental turn.

Before Dews can proceed with his investigation, he needs to address a problem. An influential reading of Hegel does not take him to be a metaphysician at all, instead seeing him as trying to discover the necessary features of the “space of reasons.” Dews not only rejects this view but reacts vehemently to one of its principal defenders, Robert Pippin, who in the course of expounding his interpretation of Hegel, Dews alleges, is unjust to Schelling: “However, because of his insistence that the ‘problematic of German Idealism,’ as developed by Hegel, was the ‘transcendental problem of self-consciousness’ . . . Pippin had no option but to dismiss the Schellingian tenor of Hegel’s early writings as an unfortunate and misleading aberration. This he did partly by means of ad hoc historical and psychological suggestions to the effect that Hegel was somehow pressurized into adopting Schelling’s position; partly by means of a perverse exegesis of Hegel’s early publications, which tried to cast doubt on their commitment to a trans-subjective (and trans-objective) absolute that cannot be accessed through an abstraction from empirical consciousness in the Fichtean manner, since the result would then remain subjective and conditioned, but only through what Hegel himself terms ‘pure transcendental intuition’; partly by the simple expedient of rewriting Hegel, so that his ontological claims become epistemological ones.” (8) One awaits with interest Pippin’s reaction to this book.

Schelling’s turn to the object led him to a fundamental assault on the Cartesian starting point of modern philosophy. Descartes maintained that by applying his method of doubt, everything except the bare “I think” was uncertain; to regain knowledge of the external world, it was necessary first to prove the existence of God and then to contend that God would not deceive us about what was clearly and distinctly perceived. Schelling rejected this entirely: one’s certainty is not that thinking exists but that one’s body exists, and, further, that one’s body cannot be detached from the world, of which it is an organic part: “But whereas, according to its surface grammar at least, Descartes’ cogito suggests that my existence necessarily follows from the thought of my existence, Schelling proposes a performative analysis: my being is a precondition of my entertaining the very thought of it. As he points out, in the statement, ‘If I exist, then I exist,’ the truth of the consequent is presupposed by the thinking of the antecedent, even though the statement has the form of a hypothetical. Hence it is equivalent to an absolute assertion of existence: ‘I exist because I exist.’ Schelling concludes: ‘My I contains a being which precedes all thinking and representing. It is by being thought, and it is thought because it is; this for the reason that it only is, and is only thought, to the extent that it thinks itself’. . . Schelling both asserts an identity of thought and being, in line with the concept of intellectual intuition, and refers to ‘a being which precedes all thinking and representing.’” (34-35)

If Schelling regards thought and being as united in this way, is he not in danger of reviving the monism of Spinoza, who likewise saw thought and being as attributes of Deus sive natura?  Schelling responds that though Spinoza was on the right track in taking thought and being to be united in one entity, he erred in seeing their unity as mechanical rather than freely developing, changing and growing in a real and not illusory time: “All freedom is lost because, with the subject of being—the primordial possibility of ways of being—now occluded, philosophy can only understand its a priori task as being to track the unfolding of the necessary consequences of unknowingly objectified being-ness. For Schelling, Spinoza is the thinker who expresses this situation in the most stark and unerring way.” (125)

Freedom, then, does not in Schelling’s view arise only at the level of human decisions: to think that it does would be to recur to the Cartesian error. It is present in animal life and indeed in a whole series of potentials, which Schelling expounds in dizzying detail through a series of Potenz, a word that originally designates mathematical powers, as in squares or cubes of numbers, but later comes to mean potentiality. In explaining what Schelling has in mind, Dews makes creative use of the contemporary analytic philosopher Helen Steward. Like Schelling, she sees freedom as present in animals: “The views put forward by the British philosopher Helen Steward are especially relevant in the present context, since—operating strictly within the parameters of contemporary analytical philosophy—she arrives at many positions strikingly reminiscent of those proposed by Schelling in his philosophy of nature and freedom. For example, one of Steward’s main contentions is that philosophical discussions of freedom often begin at too elevated a level, where conscious decision-taking capacities and the exercise of the will are the focus of attention. . . In a challenge to this ingrained tendency, she argues that, to avoid human beings appearing, in the libertarian portrayal of them, as a strange metaphysical anomaly, a view which understandably calls forth deterministic reactions, we should focus rather on the notion of agency. On Steward’s account, agency cannot be a matter of consciousness intervening in a natural world separated from it by a metaphysical gulf, or of purely mental processes initiating physical ones; the applicability of the concept of agency extends quite far into the domain of non-human nature.” (198)

Dews conveys to readers his great admiration for Schelling as a thinker, but skeptical readers may well wonder, “Why should we believe any of this?” In answering this question, Schelling is at his most original and, in my judgment, at his best. He contends, in line with his stress on freedom, that by studying the history of religion and myth, and endeavoring to explain what we have learned, we can discover how God—taken not just as an idea in people’s minds but as a real entity— has developed in time. We could not have deduced this development a priori, but once it has happened, we grasp its necessity. “Schelling also contends, again anticipating Sartre, that speculation can at most seek abductively for optimal explanations.” (177-178) He applied this view in particular to the history of Christianity. “The focus of Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, then, is the historical fact of Christianity: ‘the philosophy of revelation cannot be dogmatic, but rather simply explanatory, just as it must set to work in general in a more investigative than assertoric manner.’ . . Schelling evidently takes what he regards as his uniquely comprehensive and theoretically coherent interpretation of mythological consciousness to have validated the objectivity of his principles, as a hermeneutic framework” (229, 231)

A metaphysical and ethical lesson Schelling takes his study of Christianity to have validated is the value of suffering. By freely accepting his death on the cross, Jesus disarmed cosmic power, symbolized, for reasons I shall not here enter into, as “B”; and thus the crucifixion has significance for the metaphysical development of the universe: “Only a complete renunciation of any claim to superiority or sovereignty on the part of . . .[the principle of unity] as a cosmic power could deprive B of the antagonist it dialectically required to sustain its own identity. . . This complete surrender of selfhood is enacted by Christ in his acceptance of arrest, torture and execution on the cross; only by voluntarily going to his death could he fully disarm B, and thereby bring about the reconciliation of the potentialities, whose tension (Spannung), in their guise as cosmic-psychic powers, obscurely dominated mythological consciousness.” (233)

To those who find Schelling’s ideas strange, Dews replies that they are not without parallel in recent philosophy. As I mentioned at the start, he finds Schellingian themes in the thought of Sartre, in particular the unity-in-difference between consciousness and being: “In order to bring Schelling’s approach to un-pre-thinkable being, and the problems which it raises, into focus, it may help to draw a comparison with a historically more recent and—no doubt to many—more familiar philosophical project which proposes a similar conception of being: that of Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1943 masterpiece, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). ‘Being,’ Sartre states in the Conclusion of this work, ‘is without reason, without cause, and without necessity’ Sartrian being, then, which he further specifies as ‘being-in-itself ‘ (l’être-en-soi) or simply the ‘in-itself ‘ (l’en-soi), in contrast to consciousness or the ‘for-itself ‘(le pour-soi), cannot be regarded as the cause of itself, or as the necessary realization of its own thought possibility. Indeed, in Sartre’s view the notion of ‘causa sui’ is viciously circular.” (173) Schelling also rejects the notion of causa sui.

Schelling’s speculations are of great interest, though they will not be to the liking of those who, like W.V. O. Quine, “have a taste for desert landscapes”; but Dews faces a challenge. If Dews is right, Hegel also developed a metaphysical account of the world, one which attempted by strict logic—of a special kind, it is true—to deduce the essence of the world. Why should we prefer Schelling’s system to Hegel’s? One answer to this question is to deny that Hegel was a metaphysician; but, as we have seen, Dews rejects this with great vehemence. Another answer would be to find flaws in Hegel’s reasoning, but this is not the path that Dews takes.  Instead, he argues that because for Hegel the categories of his Logic proceed in a circle that is endlessly repeated, he cannot acknowledge the genuine significance of human actions. “Hegel’s Logic takes the form of a quest for the reconciled unity of the Idea, which proceeds through the repeated resolution of contradictions. However, the Idea—as Hegel presents it—unfolds with rational necessity: it allows no space for the other dimension of freedom: the possibility to be or not to be. This would not pose a problem if Hegelian logic were able to acknowledge its own limit, as negative philosophy—but this it is constitutively unable to do because it takes itself to have fully articulated, in the Idea, the structure of the immediate ‘being’ with which it began, but which, from Schelling’s viewpoint, is already an occlusion of being-ness as possibility.”

Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel is a major contribution. It will lend support to those who agree with the great twentieth-century philosopher of history Eric Voegelin that Schelling was “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.” (Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume VII, University of Missouri Press, 1999, p.198.)

Gregory Desilet: The Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life

The Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life Book Cover The Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life
Gregory Desilet
McFarland
2023
Paperback
219

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ACHE Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)

Gregory Desilet plunges his readers into a hypothetical debate between the early Jacques Derrida, especially of the ’sixties and ’sevembeenties, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, mainly of the ’thirties and ’forties. It is a debate that seeks comparable concerns with language, meaning, and metaphysics by both intellectuals before pursuing significant contrasts between them. For all his interests in theories of communication and rhetoric, Desilet avoids the vagaries of thematic adaptations or rejections of decontextualised, often provocative statements by paying closer attention to published and unpublished writings emanating from the above-mentioned decades.

The Enigma of Meaning is divided into three main parts preceded by “The Life of Signs” (5-12) and succeeded by “The Signs of Life” (161-177). The first part (14-81) comprises six chapters centred upon Derrida’s response to Wittgenstein on the role and significance of mind, use, interpretation, rules, limits and justification. The second part (84-107) devotes three chapters to contrasting terms informing Wittgenstein and Derrida, specifically public and private, family resemblance and dissemination, and games and “economies” (or degrees of predictability) respectively. Chapter by chapter the third part (110-160) explores both thinkers on five central philosophical themes: other minds, metaphysics, time, truth, and “violence” (introduced by the selective categories of language).

Desilet’s ultimate aim is to view Wittgenstein and Derrida despite their differences as not confronting us with a choice between their respective accounts of language, between their “metaphors of the tool and the trace” (169). Such a choice “refuses to reduce to either/or as it continually slips into both/and” (169-170). Why? Because the “nature of language as a tool changes when supplemented with the … trace” (176). Why, in turn, should this be?  Because the “trace changes the essence of the tool by placing it within a temporal, moving context” and by doing so “the tool’s identity becomes mobile and divided as it acquires aspects from every new context through which it is used” (176). The mutual “entanglement” between trace and tool leads Desilet to declare:

Wittgenstein without Derrida can make language appear misleadingly whole. And yet Derrida without Wittgenstein can make language appear misleadingly broken. Wittgenstein calls forth Derrida, not as opponent but as supplement, drawing out the both-and/neither-nor complementarity of difference. (177)

This review essay on The Enigma of Meaning will initially pursue two complementary points of view regarding a pivotal argument exploited by Derrida without which readers unfamiliar with him could quickly lose their moorings. Next, we shall briefly focus upon the twelfth chapter on time; temporality for Derrida being so crucial to comprehending not only experience but also the nature and role of “the trace.” At the same time, our first three sections shall incorporate passing references to the early transcendentally weighted phenomenological stance taken by Edmund Husserl. In our fourth and final section, we shall examine two alternative approaches to understanding Wittgenstein that appear not to have been fully recognised by Desilet. The first draws upon a student of Husserl, Helmuth Plessner, and the second, upon another interpretation of Wittgenstein misconstrued by Peter Hacker which Desilet omits in his appendix (179-189) devoted to the latter. Considering such alternatives is warranted by a volume that could well become the standard defence for upholding how Derrida’s contribution “to understanding the complexities of language” explicitly “emerges with a metaphysical depth beyond the positions Wittgenstein occupies” (177).

I

Beneath the wealth of topics probed by Desilet’s monograph lies a pivotal line of argument deployed by Derrida which can be construed from at least two perspectives. We shall call the first point of view verbalizable experience and the second revisable binaries or hierarchies. Applied rigorously, both undermine any philosophical attempt to uphold if not access reality, be it questioning “What is …?” (119) in the case of essential meanings and phenomena or first principles and conditions. Let us begin, albeit briefly, with the first perspective.

Desilet’s eleventh chapter takes Derrida’s La Voix et le Phénomène (in the 1973 David Allison translation rather than the 2011 Leonard Lawlor one) as exemplifying Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological avoidance of the question “What is a sign?” However, as quickly becomes apparent, Husserl’s avoidance is quite unlike that in Wittgenstein’s 1933/1934 notes popularly known as the Blue Book (or the Nachlass Ts-309):

If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?” – Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose … to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs.” (16; Ts-309, 26)

Husserl in his First Investigation of Logische Untersuchungen, by contrast, seizes upon a “twofold sense” of the term “sign” which can apply to an experiential “indication” (Anzeigen) and a semantic “expression” (Ausdrücke) (Vol. 2, Ch. 1, §§1-16).  Its twofold character need not exclude the possibility that the one sign can convey both aspects. For instance, “signal” may indicate the event or occurrence of conveying an utterance as well as the expression of the meaning of an utterance. Does the same apply to the use of idioms popularly thought to distinguish one language from another? However, to adapt an example from Lawlor (2021, §2, para 3), idioms can confront us with distinct meanings even within the one language without identifying the experience undergone and without ensuring which meaning might act as the actual or essential, proper or true one:

After Héloïse overheard her studious brother Hugues muttering “Il y va d’un certain pas,” she wondered whether he meant “One goes there at a certain pace or with a certain step” or “What’s at issue is a certain kind of ‘not’ or negativity.”

As Derrida (1967) insists, indicative and expressive signs whether idiomatic or not prove to be “a difference more functional than substantial” since they are “signifying relations, not terms” (p. 20; cf. p. 37). This is because the same phenomenon can be apprehended as an expression or indication, “a discursive or nondiscursive sign,” depending upon “the intentional experience [vécu intentionnel] which animates it” (p. 20). Although Husserl regards communication itself as “a stratum extrinsic to expression,” “each time an expression is in fact produced, it communicates, even if it is not exhausted in that communicative role” (p. 20). Furthermore, in Derrida’s terms, “the discursive sign, and consequently the meaning, is always involved, always caught up in [or “contaminated” with] an indicative system” of sounds, marks, and so forth, although “the reverse … is not true” (pp. 20 & 21). Husserl himself (Vol. 2, Ch. 1, §1) concedes the expressive and the indicative are “always interwoven (verflochten),” yet “must not …cut off the possibility of a rigorous distinction of essence” (p. 20). However, as Derrida (1967) asserts, this appeal to what is the essential is at best discoverable through and relies upon “the possibility of language” (p. 21); an assertion reminiscent of Wittgenstein (1945, §§371 & 373): “Essence [Wesen] is expressed in grammar” and “Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is.” Moreover, claims Derrida, the “entanglement” of the expressive and the indicative is “always produced” in mutual discourse or actual conversation for two reasons. Firstly, “expression indicates a content forever hidden from … the lived experience of another” (1967, p. 22). Secondly, “the ideal content of the meaning” has been attributed by Husserl to “sensibility”; his phenomenological project having already committed itself to “intentional consciousness” only becoming “revealed … in the reduction of the totality of the existing world in general” (p. 22) (see, e.g., Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. 1, Ch. 8, §49).

II

So far, Derrida has set the scene for detecting “entanglement” or “contamination” as the norm for all communicative acts which Desilet connects to Derrida’s “law of contamination” where, although “oppositional relations do not dissolve oppositions and thereby do not support the use of terms without their antitheses, they nevertheless alter the structure of oppositions by way of supplementation to the structure” (126). The first perspective we labelled verbalizable experience above now begins to be re-enforced by the second one labelled revisable binaries or hierarchies.

Desilet next focuses upon Derrida’s 1966 Baltimore lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play…” which sees Derrida (by way of Claude Lévi-Strauss) indirectly pursuing the intersection of signifier and signified propounded by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Although de Saussure, unlike Derrida, gives priority to speech (la parole) against the derivative standing of writing (l’écriture), both he and Derrida argue that a sign in sheer isolation cannot signify: it can only do so in relation to other signs. To that extent, the basically syntagmatic and syntactic sequential arrangement of individual signs in intersection with the largely semantic and phonic open-ended association of other signs (see, e.g., de Saussure, 1922, Part 2, Ch. 5 & 6) seems to imply the systemic, self-referential nature of language (la langue). For both theorists, the detectable patterns language incorporates indisputably points to its capacity for repetition. As we find Derrida declaring, “A sign which would take place but ‘once’ would not be a sign” because as an “event” it would “mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular” (1967, p. 50). He then concludes,

A signifier (in general) must be formally recognizable in spite of, and through, the diversity of empirical characteristics which may modify it. It must remain the same,  and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across deformations which the empirical event necessarily makes it undergo …. But it can function as a sign, and in general as a language, only if a formal identity enables it to be issued again and to be recognized. This identity is necessarily ideal. (1967, p. 50)

Why does Desilet focus upon the Baltimore lecture? Because it illustrates the oppositional relationship between signifier and signified of the sign itself to the point of modelling “the structure of every opposition” (127). To cite Derrida himself on the paradoxical consequences of attempting “the metaphysical reduction of the sign” which “needed the opposition it was reducing”: “The opposition is systematic with the reduction. And what we are saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse of structure” granted that there were and still are “several ways of being caught in this circle” (1966, p. 281). Without the opposition between signifier and signified, there can be no sign; without the sign, there can be no discourse, leaving Desilet to elaborate that the

nature of the particular oppositional structure between the signifier and the signified is … complementary such that the signifier and the signified form a system where one cannot exist without the other and each cannot be reduced to the other without effectively destroying the system, without destroying the sign and its functionality. (127; cf. Derrida, 1967, p. 51)

Furthermore, he continues, the “logic of opposition … posits no pure instance of either pole of the opposition” which, in turn, implies that “every presumed singular identity contains the seed of its other within its essence” (128). Even casual occasions can reveal how postulating, say, a hierarchy of culture over nature is by virtue of their binary interdependences always revisable:

When Héloïse began teasing Hugues by saying, “Culture can always destroy nature,” he immediately retorted, “Yet without nature there can be no culture.”

At this juncture, we shall leave aside the transcendental and eidetic reductions comprising the phenomenological reduction characterising Husserl’s project pursued by Derrida and succinctly summarised by Desilet (e.g., 121). Nonetheless, readers may well question why Desilet’s eleventh chapter does not overtly confront the accusation notably raised by Martin Dillon (1995) that Derrida remains guilty of assuming another kind of reduction. In effect, this suggests that both Husserl and Derrida exploit a methodology of reduction. According to Dillon, Derrida employs a methodology of “semiological reduction,” one which involves an “ontological bifurcation which sets language in a realm apart from perception and denies reality” to the “world as perceived” because it is “displaced by the world as inscribed in language” (1995, p. 100). (Here, Derrida, as previously discussed, disputes the realm of indicative signs which, even in moments of self-directed monologues according to Husserl’s First Investigation of Logische Untersuchungen, are communicatively prelinguistic because “we live in the experience of the object” (Vol. 2, Ch. 1, §8).) Alternatively expressed, Dillon regards semiological reduction as “driven by an argument based on the transcendental function of signifiers” (1995, pp. 19 & 35). Why? Because cognition if not consciousness “presupposes identification which presupposes a formal ideality,” be it a concept, an essence, or a signifier (p. 19). As Dillon warns his readers from the outset of his monograph, a semiological reduction appears to beg two questions. One is “the question of the re-identification of signifiers themselves” and the other is “the question of how the play of signifiers temporalizes and makes history possible” (p. 13).

Before briefly turning to Derrida on temporality in our next section, what follows were Desilet to accept Dillon’s critique? Would he need to concede the degree to which “intentional consciousness” implies that there is an experience of something? By so doing, would he also need to concede that the experiencing subject need not be entirely removed from the “world as perceived,” from the community of persons, especially when the expressive, as distinct from indicative signs visible in nature, “extends beyond mere indication in its capacity to communicate meaning from one subject to another by means of a system of exchange … organized through structure (grammar, syntax) and categories (meaning, concepts)” (120)?

III

For those still searching for a singular absolute transcending all possible oppositional relationships, not only must they transcend the signifier-signified nexus of language but the quest for absolute unity also needs “the absence of time” (131). Returning to the “most disconcerting” First Investigation of Husserl’s phenomenological project, according to Derrida (1967, p. 56), particularly where the temporality of experience is juxtaposed with deictic or indexical expressions such as “I” and “now” which “shift with the occasion” of their utterance, they also have a fixed meaning such as “the person currently speaking” and “the present time” respectively. Yet, semantically speaking, as Husserl realises, shifting and fixed meanings cannot be invariably substituted for each other in all circumstances (Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. 2, Ch. 3, esp. §26). Derrida criticizes the conflation of “pure ideality” with temporality in Husserl which “signifies the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present” (1967, p. 53). On the contrary, suggests Derrida, “The I am, being experienced only as an I am present, itself presupposes the relationship with presence in general, with being as presence. The appearing of the I to itself in the I am is thus originally a relation with its own possible disappearance. Therefore, I am originally means I am mortal” (1967, p. 54). Whether such an original meaning holds in indexical or deictic cases—for example, Hugues’ present statement (to Héloïse’s query “Are you there”?) “I am there,” let alone the past “I was there” and the future “I will be there”—remains open to debate.

Given that time and experience are interwoven, it is commonly understood that every experience occurs in present time, in the “now.” Although what happens now is a distinct event different from any other we have ever experienced, yet, in the present, we can recollect the recently past and/or anticipate what is about to happen. Because what we experience now can be immediately recalled, it is repeatedly re-identifiable, such repeatability enabling us to anticipate the same thing happening again. Hence, from Derrida’s perspective, what is happening now also does not differ from every other “now” experienced. In other words, the present experience is both an event and, owing to its repeatability, not an event. Consequently, we cannot have experience in time that does not contain both event and repeatability.

Derrida’s argumentative trajectory ultimately carries the same kind of implication for time as it does for language. Experience of the present (“now”) is not simply reducible to a single experience of something present to us because it contains the re-iteration of what has passed, but no longer present, as well as what is about to occur, but not yet present. In brief, the present, to quote Lawlor (2021, §3, para 3), “is always complicated by non-presence.” This basic instance of repeatability residing in every experience is what Derrida (1967) calls “the trace” (e.g., pp. 67 & 85) which has already been implied in our previous section by the minimally re-identifiable signs of language itself.

Some readers may still have misgivings over a gap in Desilet’s treatment of re-identifiability. For example, how, in practice, does re-identifiability work when, say, Héloïse insists, “That’s my signature, Hermione”? If “signature” is in dispute, then Héloïse’s remark suggests that she is not only drawing a significant distinction between authenticity and forgery, but she is also appealing to her actual role in its inscription. Alternatively expressed, she has in effect adopted what Nelson Goodman explores as the “autographic” conditions for re-identifying her signature, whether she happened to etch or paint it, “if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine” (1968, p. 113).  By contrast, if the sign in question is Héloïse’s above utterance in full, but now embedded within her draft playscript, performative instantiations of this playscript operate independently of its history of production. In this case, Goodman explores the sign as one of a set of complex “allographic” conditions for its (re)identification. Mistaking “what’s” for “that’s” and “bi-” for “my” in a misreading of the playscript by someone, say, an actor, director, or understudy, does not comply with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of its governing “notational” system. From a metalingual point of view, “What’s bi-signature, Hermione” has become a wh-question in the language system.

This and the previous section have concentrated upon Derrida and have particularly alluded to one of his better-known critiques of Husserl’s phenomenological project with which Desilet is obviously familiar. The next section shall shift the focus to alternative approaches to understanding Wittgenstein that appear not to have been fully recognised by Desilet notwithstanding his contention that

Both Wittgenstein and Derrida belong to metaphysical positions presenting forms of dualism, but Wittgenstein, despite his opposition to Cartesian mind/body dualism, still belongs more in the Cartesian modern tradition of oppositional structure whereas Derrida offers a genuinely different metaphysical alternative. (130)

The alternative, Desilet continues, lies in recognising oppositional relations “maximally anticipating the shifting ground of meaning under the influence of temporal succession and changing contextual boundaries” (138) irrespective of whether “temporal succession” is construed as temporal direction of past, present, and future, or as temporal order between earlier and later. Desilet then concludes:

For Wittgenstein, time affects everything, including language, but does so from the outside … For Derrida, time affects language, and everything else: without time there is no thing, no event, no position, no being—nothing. Time and space, time and matter, time and being—these oppositions name a complementarity such that each does not exist without the other. (138-139)

IV

When Wittgenstein contrasts what “behaves like a human being” with a stone or a corpse, he simultaneously raises the question of “how can a body have a mind?” (1945, §§283-284). According to Desilet, this “positions human beings as mind/bodies embedded within the world and community” before making any inferences about “the separation of mind and body” (117). So, let us begin somewhat indirectly at first by recounting the way in which Peter Hacker and colleagues interrogate the longstanding binary distinction between mind and body, between mental and physical phenomena.

Maxwell Bennett and Hacker (2003, e.g., pp. 72-74, 103-106) claim that past and present followers of René Descartes are guilty of committing the mereological or part-whole fallacy. The fallacy is traceable within, for example, Part One of Descartes’ Les Passions de l’âme where the passion of the soul is a mental state or thought which directly results from the activity of the brain that causes us to act. However, that body and mind, or that which has spatial extension and that which has not, can causally interact remains puzzling. After all, as Harry Smit and Hacker (2014, pp. 1080 & 1084) argue, conceptually speaking because “the mind is not an entity of any kind,” the mind having “a relation to the brain” simply does not apply and “makes no sense,” although the brain’s neuronal activities are “a causal condition,” a precondition, for, say, our capacities for remembering, rehearsing, and reciting things. Hacker and his co-authors consequently cleave to Wittgenstein’s contention that an “‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (1945, §580). In his 1949 “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment,” Wittgenstein separates the criteria demonstrating someone’s capacity and “the criteria for ‘inner states’”: “Even if someone had a particular ability only when, and only as long as, he [or she] had a particular feeling, the feeling would not be the ability” (vi, §36).

Equally puzzling for Hacker and colleagues is that the mind and/or the brain is predicated as having psychological attributes which belong to the person as a whole. This, in effect, upends the former conception of person in which the psukhē (commonly but misleadingly translated as “soul”) was reconfigured. To quote an earlier article by Bennett and Hacker, the psukhē is no longer construed “as the principle of life, but as the principle of thought or consciousness” (2002, p. 12). After noting that Aristoteles upheld “the principle that only living beings have a psuchē,” Smit and Hacker (2014, p. 1091) describe the psukhē, by contrast with Cartesian conceptions of mind, as “a biological principle.” By identifying psukhē solely with the thinking mind (res cogitans), its other functions as enumerated by Aristoteles were frequently reclassified by Cartesian adherents as material or bodily features (res extensa). Because Descartes conceives of thinking as awareness or consciousness, thinking therefore comprises volitional, ratiocinative, and imaginative powers as well as sensory apprehensions ranging from perceptions to passions. In the first book of the Peri psukhës (On the Soul), we find Aristoteles articulating the conceptual conflation in question:

We speak of the soul [psukhē] as being pained or pleased, being bold or fearful, being angry, perceiving, thinking …. Yet to say that it is the soul which is angry is as if we were to say that it is the soul that weaves or builds houses. It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks, and rather to say that it is the man who does this. (408b, 11-15)

It is a conceptual confusion which, outside “secondary” uses typical of child-play, Wittgenstein also depicts by virtue of our enactive and verbal interchanges as follows: “only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” (1945, §§282 & 281).

On reviewing Hacker and his co-authors, Jasper van Buuren (2016, pp. 226-227) questions what they understand by the mereological relationship between brain and person and between mind and person. To contend, following van Buuren, that Hugues’ brain is part of Hugues suggests that it is not part of the person Hugues so much as part of the person Hugues’ body. In other words, Hugues not only has a body of a particular size and weight which includes mouth and hands, lungs and brain, blood and bones, but he also is and, so to speak, lives through his body. Again, the person Hugues, whilst he continues to live, has a mind, a mind which can be said to belong to him. What the foregoing omits is that Smit and Hacker distinguish the concept of a person and that of a human. Whereas a human is a “rational, language-using” creature with “powers of intellect and will,” a person “is not a substance but a status concept,” a creature “capable of participating in a culture” and assuming “moral agency and responsibility” (2014, pp. 1092-1093 passim). Furthermore, Smit and Hacker warn us against conflating two senses of the human body, namely, “the body (the living organism) that a human being is with the body (the somatic features) that a human being has” (2014, p. 1083). That Bennett and Hacker elsewhere conceded that they are primarily concerned with “human beings qua possessors of those characteristics that render them persons” so that the brain “would be part of the human being” not the person leaves van Buuren unconvinced (2016, p. 226). Without considering whether mental properties might supervene upon physical ones (see, e.g., Robert Francescotti (c.2009)), van Buuren surmises, “Even if the mind is not literally a ‘part’ of the person, there must be some kind of mereological relationship between person and mind” (2016, p. 227). However, given Bennett and Hacker’s appeal to the unifying role of the psukhē “as that which encompasses and transcends the opposition between the mental and the physical,” then how, van Buuren asks, do they explain a person as both a physical and mental being whilst being “encompassed” by that which is “not reducible to the physical or mental” (2016, p. 228)?

In the apparent absence of an answer to this question, van Buuren looks to a student of Husserl whose philosophical anthropological theory has gained increasing interdisciplinary attention (see, e.g., Shawn Loht (2020) in this Journal). Drawing upon the largely non-Cartesian anthropological theory of Helmuth Plessner (1928) regarding “levels of organic life,” van Buuren argues that Hacker has overlooked the “threefold structure” of “our bodily existence” in the world (2016, p. 230). Baldly summarised, at an objective “level” (die Stufe des Objekts), our physical bodies are, firstly, “things among other things in the world” as are plants despite their variability (2016, p. 230). Secondly, at a subjective “level” (die Stufe des Subjekts), each organic body is “a center of sensorimotor activity” in the sense of being “open to the world” in a manner befitting most animals (2016, p. 230). Thirdly, from a positional or perspectival “level” (technically called exzentrische Positionalität), humans are distinctively “at a distance to both the body as object and the body as subject” because generally “we can always distance ourselves from any relationship we have to ourselves or the world” including other persons (2016, p. 230).

For readers more familiar with Wittgenstein, the positional capacity for distancing oneself in order to make connections, perceive relationships, resolve disparities, and the like complements his “concept of a surveyable representation [übersichtliche Darstellung]” which “characterizes the way we present things, how we look at matters” (1945, §122). Surveyability equally underpins Wittgenstein’s dual methodological attention that subsequently comes to the fore upon the interpretive role of interlocutors’ beliefs and upon logico-syntactic rules (1945, §§185ff.). Desilet’s initial focus, it is worth noting, centres upon the latter (45ff. & 179ff.) before summarising others’ arguments for the former (48ff. & 181-186 passim). For Wittgenstein in a critique not unlike Derrida’s, the distortion of surveyability emerges when “the question of the essence” of phenomena, be it thinking or language, feeling or literature “sees the essence of things not as something that already lies open to view, and that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering, but as something that lies beneath the surface” which somehow “an analysis is supposed to unearth” and where the answer claims “to be given once for all, and independently of any future experience” (1945, §92).

However, as Beth Savickey (2014) cogently argues, the foregoing translation of übersichtliche Darstellung endorsed by Hacker is highly contestable. She has at least two reasons, the first concerning the very phrase and the second concerning the Philosophische Untersuchungen itself. Translations of Űbersichtlichekeit are not merely “surveyability” or “overview,” but possibly more so “clarity” or “perspicuity,” “plainness” or “transparency” (2014, pp. 101-102). Similarly, not only “representation,” but also “account,” “depiction” or “portrayal” can translate Darstellung (2014, p. 112). For Hacker, Savickey continues, “the central preoccupation of the Investigations is the nature of language”; for Wittgenstein “it is life (i.e. all the expressions of life in language)” making a “representation of life … inherently dynamic” (2014, pp. 111-112). As Wittgenstein himself pointedly remarks, “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? – In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? – Or is the use its breath?” (1945, §432). Further elaboration can readily be found in Wittgenstein’s Zettel, including, for example, how “to explain our understanding of a gesture by means of a translation into words” and vice versa (1948, §227). This then elicits the remark:

How can these gestures, this way of holding the hand, this picture, be the wish that such and such were the case? It is nothing more than a hand over a table and there it is, alone and without a sense. Like a single bit of scenery from the production of a play, which has been left by itself in a room. It had life only in the play. (1948, §238).

In fact, the Zettel constantly applies other examples of understanding wrought by übersichtliche Darstellung to the arts, especially music and poetry (1948, §§155-176).

Now, let us return to Plessner’s tripartite approach as summarised by van Buuren. It ultimately reveals the limits of the mereological fallacy employed by Hacker and colleagues. Owing to the positional or perspectival capacity to “distance from our relationship to the external world,” we can focus upon “an inner world” and “a social world” in mediated rather than immediate, idealised rather than perceptual ways, a focus conducted as mental thinking rather than as embodied processing (2016, p. 232). Moreover, the above-mentioned subjective and objective senses of the body in effect are dual “aspects of the one and same body” without necessarily implying that one sense is reducible to the other (2016, p. 234). That Héloïse, for example, has a brain and two hands is one way of classifying parts of her body. However, brains are not perceived, possessed, or deployed in the way hands are. Why? Because, as van Buuren succinctly contends, “our hands are part of our first-person world” whose bodily appearance has “immediate practical” meaning when feeling, gathering, moving, touching, and so forth (2016, pp. 234 & 238). However, the “appearance of the brain,” which fulfils its complex functions independently of us, “presupposes the third-person perspective of science” (2016, p. 234). If the foregoing account holds, then Hacker’s mereological accusation falls short. According to van Buuren, it needs to differentiate between two different kinds of part-whole relationships in terms of parts and aspects, namely, that “between a part of the body and the body as a whole” and that “between a partial aspect of our bodily existence and this existence as a whole, whereby the whole is the person” (2016, p. 237).

In conclusion, Desilet’s volume extolling the “metaphysical depth” achieved by Derrida in comprehending “the complexities of language” beyond the logico-linguistic explorations of them by Wittgenstein (177) demands our attention. Nonetheless, one might wonder whether both philosophers were aiming at the same metaphysical trajectory with greater or lesser success. Those sympathetic to Desilet’s conclusion may well question how to determine what counts as “the same” here. Of course, none of us can definitively determine, to echo Bernard Williams,

what counts—what will have counted—as going on in the same … way. Nothing can do that, finally, except the future itself. The Last Word, as always, will lie with what actually comes about. (1998, p. 44)

References

Aristoteles. c350 BC. Peri psukhës. Translated by J. A. Smith, “On the Soul.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes, Vol. I, 641-692. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Bennett, Maxwell and Peter Hacker. 2002. “The Motor System in Neuroscience: A History and Analysis of Conceptual Developments,” Progress in Neurobiology 67(1): 1-52.

——-. 2003. “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience.” In Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 68-107. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Derrida, Jacques. 1966. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference / L’Écriture et la Différence. Translated by Alan Bass, 278-293. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

——-. 1967. “Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” In Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs / La Voix et le Phénomène. Translated by D.B. Allison, 1-104. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Descartes, René. 1649. The Passions of the soul / Les Passions de l’âme. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff & Dugald Murdoch, Vol. 1, 325-404. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Dillon, Martin. 1995. Semiological Reduction: A Critique of the Deconstructionist Movement in Postmodern Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Francescotti, Robert. c2009. “Supervenience and Mind.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by James Fieser & Bradley Dowden, at: https://iep.utm.edu/supermin/

Goodman, Nelson. 1968, “Art and Authenticity.” In Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 99-124. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co.

Hacker, Peter. 2005. “Surveyability and Surveyable Representation (§122).” In Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, 2nd edn., 307-334. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Husserl, Edmund. 1900 & 1901. Logische Untersuchungen / Logical Investigations. Edited by Dermot Moran; translated by J.N. Findlay [second 1913 edn.; two volumes]. London & New York: Routledge, 2001.

Lawlor, Leonard. 2021. “Jacques Derrida.” In Stanford Encyclopedoa of Philosophy. Edited by E.N. Zalta, 27 August, at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/

Loht, Shawn. 2020. “Helmut Plessner: Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” Phenomenological Reviews 6, at: https://reviews.ophen.org/2020/12/27/helmuth-plessner-levels-of-organic-life-and-the-human-an-introduction-to-philosophical-anthropology/?lang=fr

Plessner, Helmuth. 1928. “The Sphere of the Human.” In Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology / Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie [2nd 1965 edn.]. Translated by Millay Hyatt, 267-322. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1922. Course in General Linguistics / Cours de linguistique générale, 2nd edn. Edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye & Albert Reidlinger; translated & annotated by Roy Harris. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1983.

Savickey, Beth. 2014. “Wittgenstein and Hacker: Űbersichtliche Darstellung,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3(2): 99-123.

Smit, Harry and Peter Hacker. 2014. “Seven Misconceptions About the Mereological Fallacy: A Compilation for the Perplexed,” Erkenntnis 79(5): 1077-1097.

van Buuren, Jasper. 2016. “The Philosophical-Anthropological Foundations of Bennett and Hacker’s Critique of Neuroscience,” Continental Philosophical Review 49(2): 223-241.

Williams, Bernard. 1998. “The End of Explanation,” The New York Review of Books 45(18): 40-44.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1933/1934. Blue Book. In Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”: Generally known as The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edn. Edited by Rush Rhees, 1-74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964 [= Der Nachlass Ts-309, at: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org › w › index.php?title=Blue_Book ].

——-. 1945. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 4th rev. edn. Edited by P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte; translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

——-. 1948. Zettel. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright; translated by G.E.M Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.

——-. 1949. “Philosophie der Psychologie — Ein Fragment / Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment.” In Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 4th rev. edn. Edited by P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte; translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte, 183-243. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Aurélien Djian: Husserl et l’horizon comme problème

Husserl et l’horizon comme problème: Une contribution à l'histoire de la phénoménologie Book Cover Husserl et l’horizon comme problème: Une contribution à l'histoire de la phénoménologie
Philosophie
Aurélien Djian
Presses universitaires de Septentrion
2021
Paperback
292

Reviewed by: Julian Lünser (Erasmus MasterMundus Europhilosophie: Charles University Prague/Université Toulouse-2-Jean Jaurès)

Introduction

Aurélien Djian’s monography with the title Husserl et l’horizon comme problème sets out to render a systematic account of the concept of the horizon in the framework of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. It seeks to both show in what sense the horizon is crucial to such a transcendental phenomenology, which according to Djian is necessarily a constitutive phenomenology, and to describe the historical development of the horizon in its interplay with the general framework of this transcendental phenomenology. In this way the unity, the particularity and the importance of this concept in constitutive phenomenology will appear.

The work, published in 2021, is built upon the author’s doctoral thesis from 2017 with the title L’Horizon comme Problème. Within his doctoral thesis Dijan also refers to the concepts of horizon in Heidegger, Gadamer and French Phenomenology (Levinas, Henry, Marion), while the focus of this monography lies exclusively on Husserl. The relevance of such a study, analyzing exclusively Husserl’s understanding of the horizon, stems, as Djian notes in the introduction, from the general lack of large-scale systematic works attempting to understand the Husserlian horizon. The only exception Djian mentions is Salius Geniušas‘ The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Djian characterizes Geniušas’ book as one that attempts to show the compatibility between the Husserlian and the hermeneutic horizon, thus distinguishing it from his own endeavor. However, there is indeed one more systematic work on Husserl’s concept of the horizon to be found — namely, Roberto Walton’s Intencionalidad y Horizonticidad („Intentionality and Horizonality“). Most probably, Djian was unaware of this study as it was published in Spanish and has not been translated yet. Nonetheless, Djian’s work constitutes a long-needed complementation to the still underresearched topic of Husserl’s concept of the horizon, even without referring to Walton’s book.

Overview

As a whole, the book is divided in two parts: While the first part is dedicated to the first appearance of the concept of the horizon in Husserl’s writings, even independent of the term `horizon´ itself, and its subsequent generalization, the second part of the book investigates different interactions between the emergence of the horizon and several phenomenological operations, such as the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic variation and the intentional analysis. The two focal points of this study, the emergence of the concept of the horizon and its consequences regarding the main operations in phenomenology, allow Djian to reasonably and systematically limit the scope of the investigation: Within the introduction to the second part Dijan himself points out the need of further analyses, concerning every specific horizon that corresponds to each of the different constitutive correlations, that remain excluded from this study.

The author presents his main thesis in the introduction: Namely, that the concept of the horizon plays a central role in Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology, as it is necessary for the constitution of a synthetical unity of sense in a manifoldness (Djian speaks of multiplicité, the original Husserlian term is Mannigfaltigkeit) of consciousness. To characterize this constitutive phenomenology that implies the need for the horizon, Dijan takes the concept of phenomenon to be key, understanding phenomenology hence as „a universal eidetic science of the correlations of the phenomenon“ (16). As he acknowledges, such a conception of phenomenology excludes Husserl’s work before the so-called transcendental turn, marked by the systematic introduction of the phenomenological reduction and first developed publicly and systematically in The Idea of Phenomenology from 1907. That is, Djian presents the concept of the horizon as central to Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology, and its hypothetical role in any prior phenomenology remains excluded from his study.

Accordingly, he depicts to what extent it is possible to speak of a distinctly constitutive phenomenology within the first chapter. To this end, he maps out the central argument of The Idea of Phenomenology, which presents such a constitutive phenomenology for the first time. By means of this, the synthesis of a manifoldness of consciousness can be described, hence constituting the unity of sense of the intentional object. This is then the crucial innovation that will require the concept of the horizon.

However, the term `horizon´ does not appear in The Idea of Phenomenology, nor does it appear in Thing and Space, i.e. the lectures that were introduced by The Idea of Phenomenology. Still, Djian argues in chapter 2 that there are two other terms that already contain the concept of the horizon within Thing and Space: Namely, the concepts of improper apparition [Uneigentliche Erscheinung] and halo [Hof]. The improper apparition refers to the empty intention by which the subject means [meinen; viser] something more than is properly perceived, hence operating the intentional unity of the thing. Such an intentional unity is at the same time a temporal unity, given that this meaning intention includes that which just passed and that which is now to come. The halo, on the other hand, refers to the empty intention that describes the possible, motivated by the empirical types of the correlation between kinesthesia and perception. In this way, both halo and improper apparition are necessary to constitute the actual and possible identity of the thing, and manifest at the same time the surplus of empty intentions that qualifies any external perception as inadequate.

The notion of the horizon itself appears only in Ideas I. This is, however, not the only important event that Dijan describes in the third chapter. Rather, while the concept of the horizon only appeared locally in Thing and Space, as its validity was limited to external perception, that is, to the constitution of the thing, Djian argues that a generalization and a systematization of the horizon can be observed in Ideas I. The generalization consists of the elevation of the horizon to become a universal structure of pure consciousness. How exactly does this elevation manifest itself? First, by means of the horizon of temporality, in which it is the horizon that enables succession and simultaneity; and second, by means of the horizon of inactual (inaktuell; inactuel) intentionality. This leads to the systematization of the horizon, as every non-accomplished intentional lived experience [Erlebnis; vécu] is now grouped under the title `horizon´. In this way, any lived experience can become the horizon of any other cogito, given that they are connected horizonally in the same flux of experience. However, Dijan distinguishes this broader sense of the concept of horizon from a narrower sense, the functional horizon, which is limited to those horizons that belong to the same synthetic unity.

In the second part of the book, stretching from chapter 4 to 6, the author studies the methodological repercussions of such a generalization of the horizon. The first of these repercussions are the diverse interactions between horizon and reduction, studied in three parts in chapter 4. The first argument characterizes the horizon as that which motivates the critique of the Cartesian path to the phenomenological reduction, a critique which results in the psychological path from First Philosophy. Concretely, the problem lies in the horizonally implied habitual validities, which in their totality can be apprehended as the horizon of the world, given that they render a reduction in various steps, as in Ideas I, impossible: for in any partial reduction, some of these natural validities remain functional. Conversely, it is precisely the horizon that makes it possible to become conscious of the totality of my flux of consciousness, and hence to reduce it in its entirety. In a similar manner, the world as horizon is that which is reduced in the path through the lifeworld as developed in the Crisis. Subsequently, turning to the eidetic variation, Djian argues that in its genetic form, as described in Experience and Judgement, it is related in various ways to the horizon: First, the style of the object can only be seized thanks to the horizons that prescribe its system of possible variations. Second, the eidetic variation is an attempt to detach the pure possibilities of the eidos from its co-determining world horizon. Third, to intuit all those possible, but amongst each other incompatible, properties of the eidos is only possible thanks to horizonality.

Chapter 5 tries to establish the relation between horizon and intentional analysis, arguing that it is precisely the horizonal constitution of objectivities that prescribes the need for the intentional analysis. Hence such an intentional analysis, while not yet named as such, would already appear in Ideas I, namely to develop a classification of the sciences. This recognition is subsequently enlarged to also include the shared objective world.

Finally, in chapter 6, Djian argues that it is the generalization of the horizon that challenges the theory of the evidence of reflection from Ideas I. This theory was founded upon the idea that the sphere of consciousness was given adequately and hence apodictically. However, as the horizon is also functional in the case of immanent lived experiences, for they are given in a manifoldness of temporal phases, strictly speaking the sphere of consciousness is inadequately given too. Following the author, this recognition leads Husserl to amend his notion of apodicticity in the Cartesian Meditations: Rather than adequate evidence, it is the impossibility of thinking its non-existence that qualifies something as apodictical. In this way, apodicticity stops being the point of departure and becomes a telos, which is to be reached in infinity after having traversed the transcendental domain and having performed a critique of transcendental knowledge.

Commentary

It is certainly well-justified to attempt to undertake a study like this: The Husserlian concept of the horizon is clearly underresearched, given its important role in Husserl’s phenomenology. In this context, Djian’s approach to the problematic is indeed reasonable: As within most other investigations of Husserl’s phenomenology, he had to face the impossibility of looking through all Husserlian manuscripts, due to their enormous number. In this sense, to limit the study by focusing on the relation between horizon and constitutive phenomenology was a good choice, and the secondary effects of this constitutive role of the horizon on different key operations of phenomenology are well-suited to underscore the relevance of the horizon. Therefore, Djian’s book has the merit of being a systematic and valuable study of the horizon, even without being all-encompassing.

Furthermore, this book is well-structured and clearly written. All important methodological choices are indicated and justified. In addition, it is easily accessible even to readers that are not very familiar with Husserl, which is by no means obvious: The relevant Husserlian concepts are explained and documented through references to the original texts, a decision that has, at the same time, the disadvantage of sometimes quite lengthy excurses into topics that are scarcely related to the horizon (for example, the precise explanation of how to distinguish pure, descriptive, material essences from all other kinds of essences in chapter 4).

In the context of this close reading of Husserl, one could, however, ask why there is so little discussion of secondary literature in this investigation. How can this approach be justified? First of all, as Djian indicates it himself, there has been comparatively little work on the concept of the horizon in Husserl’s phenomenology. Additionally, the literature that is available and accessible in English is at least included in the bibliography, with the possible exception of the work of Aron Gurwitsch, who mostly develops his own account in The Field of Consciousness, but does make some comments on Husserl too. In any case, the only in-depth discussion in the study relates to Geniušas’ The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology, which without doubt provides the most relevant available commentary.

Before scrutinizing that particular discussion, it is still necessary to examine further how well justified it is to use so little secondary literature: For there is a lot of more general research on Husserl that relates to the different topics addressed by Djian, even without referring specifically to the horizon. For example, Djian does not discuss Kern’s description of the ways into the reduction even though the horizon is identified as one of the factors leading to the abandonment of the Cartesian path. A possible answer could be that, as Djian indicates, the work is meant to be an internal study of the horizon; that is, a study limited to the way the concept develops in Husserl’s own thought. This justifies the exclusion of other philosophers that have worked on their own concept of the horizon. But it remains questionable if this legitimizes Djian’s preference of a close reading of Husserl, as opposed to an examination of secondary literature dedicated to Husserl: For of course, those approaches are not exclusive to one another. A further disadvantage of this omission of most of the secondary literature is a presentation of Husserl’s thought as too unambiguous: Rather than opening the space for different possible interpretations of Husserl and the reasons that led him to change his conceptual framework, Djian imposes the impression that everything relevant has been explained and that his is the only possible understanding; even though Djian’s reading of Husserl is reasonable, and I generally support it, it would have been preferable to show what issues are more or less contested within the relevant literature.

With regards to Djian’s discussion of Geniušas, there remain several issues. Djian is correct in giving it a prominent position, since Geniušas’ study is the only other attempt of an extended and systematic understanding of Husserl’s concept of the horizon that is accessible in English: Hence he discusses Geniušas‘ approach in both the introduction and the conclusion, in addition to a small content-related discussion at the end of chapter 3.

In the introduction, Djian mostly aims to show in which way his approach differs from Geniušas‘, so as to prove the relevance of his study. Djian claims here that the aim of Geniušas is to demonstrate the compatibility of the Husserlian and the hermeneutic horizon, as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method. He continues to argue that Geniušas‘ account is thus based on the introduction of a problem that actually remains extrinsic to Husserl’s phenomenology; in contrast, Djian’s own account would have the merit of investigating the question of the horizon intrinsically. This argumentation is continued in the conclusion of the book: There, Geniušas‘ supposed thesis, namely that hermeneutic and Husserlian horizon are compatible, is refuted. According to Djian, this is because the horizon in Husserl’s account depends on the framework of constitutive phenomenology, while Gadamer relegates the importance of any subjectivity. Djian concludes that Geniušas is only able to confirm his thesis because he assimilates the Husserlian horizon to the hermeneutical one, hence „only discovering in Husserl what one has put there“ (277).

This strong critique goes far beyond the necessity of justifying the difference of his own approach in regard to Geniušas‘ study. In addition, in my opinion, Djian’s account seems to misrepresent Geniušas argumentation. While it is true that Geniušas refers to Gadamer and the hermeneutic horizon, particularly to justify the relevance of his study, he does so in a reasonably critical manner: In Geniušas’ book, Gadamer is introduced because he is part of the general philosophical context in which the horizon appears. In addition, Geniušas attempts to put the Husserlian and the hermeneutic horizon in dialogue. This dialogue, mostly carried out in chapter 9 of The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology, confronts Husserl’s transcendental and genetic concept of the horizon with Gadamer’s, to finally not only distinguish them but to show how hermeneutics could be enriched by considering subjectivity, for in this way it would become possible to account for the origins of the horizons. In this way, instead of assimilating Husserl’s concept of the horizon to Gadamer’s, Geniušas is pointing out the specificity of the Husserlian horizon to criticize the narrowness of the hermeneutic concept. Now, it is true that following Geniušas, the specificity of Husserl’s horizon goes beyond its constitutive function for intentional objects: He argues that the horizon can only be understood properly as a genetic phenomenon and mostly aims at showing the crucial significance of the world-horizon, which he distinguishes from the horizons of objects. But such a thesis is not necessarily incompatible with Djian’s own project, and a direct discussion of these claims would have been very interesting – however, they remain unthematized, as Geniušas work is set aside too quickly. Similarly, both Geniušas and Djian put forward their own theses on the antecedents that led Husserl to the development of the concept of the horizon: As we have seen, Djian tries to show that the concept is already present in Thing and Space, while Geniušas traces its seeds back to the problem of indexicality in the Logical Investigations. This issue, too, is not addressed or discussed by Djian.

There is only one question of content which Djian does discuss in detail with Geniušas: Namely, how to interpret Husserl’s distinction between background and horizon in the case of the arithmetic world in §28 of Ideas I. Here, Djian quotes Geniušas as saying that Husserl does not provide an explanation of this distinction, in order to argue that this is why Geniušas introduces the extrinsic, “hermeneutic“ concept of the limit to establish a distinction between horizon and background. Djian then refutes Geniušas’ approach, arguing that „Husserl gives all the indications in this paragraph […] to allow the reader to propose a purely internal explanation of the distinction in question“ (122-123). Namely, he argues that it is the connection (connexion) between the objectivities of a same world – in this case, the arithmetic world – that justifies to speak of a horizon. This is how Djian justifies the distinction from the background which refers to other worlds that are only co-present to the extent that they appear to the same subject, without having any relation to each other if we abstracted from the subject. That is, according to Djian the concept of the horizon at play here is its strict, functional definition.

Now, comparing this argumentation with Geniušas‘, the actual differences between both approaches seem insignificant. When discussing §28 of Ideas I, Geniušas introduces the notion of the horizon as a limit in order to argue that the horizon is what is necessary for an objectivity to appear, while backgrounds and halos can be lost. This is true, as Geniušas argues here, because in Husserl the horizon has to be understood in its constitutive, functional, in its transcendental dimension: The horizon is the structure which co-determines the sense of the objectivity in question, in this case the arithmetic objectivities, and can hence be distinguished from background and halo. Thus, in both commentaries, the specific, functional relation between the arithmetic objectivity in question and its arithmetic world is highlighted in order to justify Husserl’s distinction between horizon and background. However, once more it remains questionable if Djian’s way of representing Geniušas‘ argumentation is reasonable; and additionally, the opportunity for a more interesting discussion of the specific similarities and differences between both approaches is missed again.

Having developed these two major points of critique, the little discussion of secondary literature, and the misleading representation and critique of Geniušas‘ The Origins of the Horizon in Husserls Phenomenology, there persist a few more, less relevant, remarks I would like to make before concluding this review. Rather than evaluating what Djian did write, these remarks point at topics which could have been addressed here in order to enrich the discussion. Therefore, they are in no way direct criticisms of Djian’s text; instead, they aim at showing the possible points of continuation of the study of the Husserlian horizon.

First of all, there is a series of analyses in Djian’s book that are very relevant, but that could have been further developed. This holds true, for example, for the claim in chapter 3 that the horizon as universal structure of pure consciousness makes reflection possible (107). This proposition is only developed very concisely in a footnote, and is not addressed further within chapter 6, which deals with the evidence of the reflection (whilst Roberto Walton dedicates a whole chapter to this question in Intencionalidad y Horizonticidad). Furthermore, it is possible to point out that within chapter 5, the specific mode of operation of the intentional analysis is not fully developed. While the role the horizon plays in the preparation of the intentional analysis becomes clear, it is not shown in detail how the intentional analysis can be understood as a clarification of the horizons. Finally, the very intriguing argument at the end of chapter 6, namely that the horizon works as one of the factors to transform the apodicticity of transcendental knowledge into a telos, could have been developed in more detail and particularly called for a discussion of secondary sources.

One more topic that could have been discussed in more depth is the relation between horizon and Husserl’s theory of intropathy [Einfühlung]. The book touches upon this relation twice: First, in the discussion of the different cases of intentional implication in chapter 4, and second, in the enlargement of the intentional analysis to the shared world at the end of chapter 5. In chapter 4, Djian presents the different cases of intentional implication as described by Husserl in First Philosophy, namely phantasia, memory, expectation, image-consciousness and intropathy, to then argue that the horizonal consciousness is a kind of intentional implication too. He distinguishes it from the other cases by arguing that the intentional implication is always actual [actuel; aktuell], with the exception of horizons and intropathy. Now, to differentiate these two cases, he states that while horizons are susceptible to be fulfilled, the acts of intropathy are not. Later, in chapter 5, the question of the constitution of the alter ego is presented: Djian repeats here that the appresentation of the alter ego is not a synthetic unity in a manifoldness of my lived experiences, and hence is not constituted by means of the horizon; for what is appresented with the other’s lived body is not susceptible to be fulfilled. It is only by implying the potentialities of perceiving the world from there rather than here, that the horizon plays some role in the associative function permitting to understand the alter ego as similar to me, thus enabling its constitution.

One can ask here if it really is that compelling that the constitution of the alter ego is not mediated by the horizon structure. To be sure, the appresented content of the other’s consciousness is indeed not susceptible to fulfilment. But while Husserl does not speak explicitly of horizons in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (including the parts where he distinguishes the apperception of the thing from the apperception of the other), he does speak of the apperception of the alter ego: And how could the other be apperceived, if not as a unity in a manifoldness of actual and potential lived experiences – only with the particularity, that many of the potential lived experiences can never become actual if the other is to remain other? The point here is not to show that it is indeed necessary to speak of a horizonal apperception of the other; instead, it is enough to raise awareness to the fact that such an interpretation of Husserl seems possible and that Djian’s discussion of the question is not exhaustive.

Finally, there remains one last remark before concluding. The relation between the horizon as a possibly persistent secret link to the world and the two new paths into the phenomenological attitude is well developed in chapter 4 and highly relevant. However, one could have also taken a more critical perspective: For instance, Djian shows correctly how Husserl uses the horizon in the process of the psychological path in First Philosophy in order to be able to seize the totality of the ego’s stream of consciousness, and submit it to the epoché at once. But it remains unclear in Husserl, and equally in Djian, how the risk of still co-functioning hidden validities is averted: for a horizonal seizing of “the universe of all objectivities, which ever had validity for me” (Husserl 2019, 361) seems scarcely enough to discover, reflect on, and abstain from all the possible hidden validities. In a similar fashion, Husserl seems to simply claim the possibility of a universal epoché in the Crisis. Still, Dijans decision to refrain from a discussion of these critical questions is most likely justified by his methodological decision to give an internal account of Husserl’s thought, without adding his own critical perspective.

Conclusion

All in all, Djian’s study constitutes one more, valuable piece in the precise understanding of Husserl’s thought. Notwithstanding the lack of discussion with secondary sources, its analyses are well-justified and help to develop a more comprehensive and accurate notion of Husserl’s concept of the horizon, as well as of its influence on the development of Husserl’s thought. Furthermore, the accuracy of Dijan’s main thesis of the central role of the horizon in constitutive phenomenology can now be estimated: It has become clear, that the horizon is crucial for the constitution of objectivities and thus plays a major role in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, hence underscoring the relevance of the concept for Husserl. However, the strong interpretation of this thesis, namely that Husserl’s concept of the horizon has to be understood as limited to the context of the constitution, excluding any other possible dimensions of the horizon, remains unproven: For such a task, it would have been necessary to discuss the different appearances of the term in different Husserlian texts in more detail to actually show how they all refer back to the constitutive role of the horizon.

Literature:

Geniusas, Saulius. 2012. The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology 67. Dordrecht: Springer.
Gurwitsch, Aron. 2010. The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin. ed. Richard M. Zaner. 1st ed., Volume III. The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands : Imprint Springer.
Husserl, Edmund. 2019. First Philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920-1925). transl. Sebastian Luft and Thane M. Naberhaus. Collected Works / Husserl, Edmund, XIV. Dordrecht: Springer.
Walton, Roberto J. 2015. Intencionalidad y Horizonticidad. Bogotá: Aula de Humanidades.

Aaron Aquilina: The Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature

The Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature Book Cover The Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature
Aaron Aquilina
Bloomsbury Academic
2023
Hardback $103.50
240

Reviewed by: Susi Ferrarello (California State University, East Bay)

In this eloquently written book, a meaningful dialogue emerges between literature and philosophy, exploring the theoretical complexities and practical implications of the death penalty.

The book is composed of five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion which examine the death penalty as “the ultimate expression of sovereignty” (3). Each chapter develops a thesis that discusses the unavoidable progression of biopolitics into thanatopolitics and necropolitics. Following Aquilina’s argument, if the death penalty is not the exception of a political system that uses the lives of human beings as a way to teach order and respect of the law (biopolitics), but is “the paradigm of punishment itself” (43), then politics is based on death (thanatopolitics) rather than on living human beings. Accordingly, in a society of death, the anonymous νεκρός (nekros), the corpse, is the paradigm of justice, order and fair retribution of resources.

As the author writes:

“The death sentence is what founds the very structure of the law (…). Condemnation to death, as the foundation of human society, always denotes and necessitates a social and collective experience of putting to death” (42-3)

Societal order and well-being are based on the ultimate punishment of ripping human beings of their own identities and revoking the ownership over their own body. Accordingly, the foundation of political justice is based on death rather than life. For this reason, within this political context Aquilina examines what notion of subjectivity, agency and humanity are left to the citizens living in such a society, especially when their life is demanded and stripped off from their identity. To proceed in this analysis Aquilina uses the examples offered in literature from Blanchot to Sophocles, Dostojevski to Shakespear and Kafka. He starts from analyzing the phenomenon of depersonalization triggered by the instant of death, the moment in which it is decided that one’s life is demanded for the good of the State. Even if this life is saved and the condemned person is left free to walk back to life, this life is no longer there to embody them. The human being is reduced to homo phaenomenon, to use Kant’s expression (38), that is, to the shallowest form of being human. Humans of this kind are no longer considered a worthy human being (homo noumenon) capable of participating in rational and moral law, but they are comparable to animals incapable of telling their own story. As Aquilina shows using  Heidegger “we die because we live– or rather because we are. (…) Unlike animals we do not simply perish” (45) Our death brings with itself an ontological and existential significance that reveals “its singularity because I die” (46). Human anxiety stems from this awareness. Hence, if the singularity of our death is taken away from us; if we are forced to be animals, our entire existence is at stake. Challenging Heidegger and using Dostojevski (as well as other numerous sources) the author employs the concept of relational death. While for “Heidegger it is incoherent to insist on any sort of relational death (…) because if I do not die then I am not I,” Aquilina believes that the notion of relational death is key to understanding the irreplaceability of our singularity (50). Using Stone, Aquilina insists on the Mit-Sein and sociality in death:

one dies precisely as one forms these relations with the other, because it is ‘I’, as constituted by my death, that makes such relations. In a part of me dying with the other who becomes a corpse or a thing, it is only a quality of the self that dies, and not the self as a whole self; only a part of one’s psychological, social and ethical self – in Stone’s words, a ‘dimension’, ‘strand’ or ‘part of this person’, a part of one’s narrative or ‘story’ – comes to an end” (58)

As Stone’s words show, no human being is an island. We are all caught in a unique interrelation of meanings and goals that make our life significant. Our life does not end with the end of our life since the significant essence of our being lives on with the relationships that our life has established. As Butler writes:

“It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you [. . .] then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you?” (95)

Another way in which the author puts it in his third chapter, Missing death, is “living life without life” (63). When I lose the main interlocutor of my life, the main referent of my deeds, then ‘I not only mourn the loss’ but I live without an important part of my life. I am without you. I am without life. The notion of relational death becomes even more crucial during the waiting time of the death penalty. In this life that “whitholds relations as opposed to annulling them”, time, too, becomes relational to our close ones and to the end. In this waiting the naturality of our lives becomes unnatural (as Oliver remarks, 67). From being animal, as in the phenomeninc human being, we become living corpses (nekroi) by law, because of the death penalty, “in suspension between life and death which leaves a mark that is no marker” (Butler, 71). We become living corpses because as the author remarks “it has been introduced death into one’s existence without recognition” (71).

The individuation of the self would be possible through alterity or, as in Levinas, the imperative of alterity, “the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity” (101). Yet, this individuation does not find its place because the alterity is annulled through the death penalty. As Levinas remarks “justice is not a legality regulating human masses” because the judge, who is supposedly the person outside of the conflict, is in the conflict while should be the one who helps us to see the third possible way, to open our eyes to justice and its humanity. In this case, in a society where death penalty is possible, “the third can never save us from the death penalty because sociality is itself the death penalty; we can only survive without surviving” (105). The author once again concludes that in such a society we live as corpses. We are not horrified by the nothingness of death, as in Heidegger, but by the “condemnation ‘’ that is, becoming a Being which cannot be exited (111).

In such a necropolitical society, autobiography, as well, is impossible (127) because the death kills the authos (the person itself) and its interlocutor, so the only rendition of one’s life can be an “autothanatography (…) a literary realization of never having left this nothingness in the first place” (127). “The literature of the death penalty allows us to view ourselves as subjectless things” (135). The anonymous homo sacer, to use Agamben’s expression (145) is the one who knows the sovereignty of the non-social society. (145). As Agamben shows paraphrased by the author “politics is always a politics of death’ but death ultimately kills even the possibility of necropolitics” (147)

Hence, in this ontological survey of death as a punishment the author describes the progressive loss of our humanity as the political context in which this humanity should thrive becomes more and more constituted by death and its anonymity. No space is ultimately left to the particularity of the human being and its voice.

As a reader, what I missed most is the human being. Given the tragic nature of the topic I wish I had touched more lived experiences or at least mental experiments (the author proposes one at page 127, with the Lazarus phenomenon) that could show what actually means for the human being to live through the practical and theoretical implications of death and death penalty. Yet, half way through the book I found myself reading this book as an open conversation with John, the person to whom the book is dedicated. In this book John–”who survives with me” becomes the interlocutor of a universal experience that touches all of us in different modalities and makes the very essence of who we are.

Another note is about the choice of the title and its content. It is true that the main topic of the book is death penalty but this latter becomes an opportunity to reflect on the larger theme of death and its ramifications in the constitution of our present life. Hence, while reading I wondered, is this a book about an ontology of death or about an ontology of death as a penalty? At page 157 the author proposes a title that I found more descriptive but probably less effective than this one “The ontological ramifications of death penalty.”

In conclusion, I recommend this book to everyone who wants to dive into this theme for personal needs or those who are moved by scholarly purposes and are in need to build a robust bibliography on it. In fact, the concluding chapter at page 153-4 proposes a very interesting list of readings on the topic and more directions that could be taken to explore the theme from a philosophical and fictional point of view.

In its complexity this book adds an important voice on the death penalty. Maybe in continuity with Foucault, its major contribution is to help people think in depth on the theoretical and practical consequences of living in a country that accepts the death penalty as a capital punishment.

References:

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York and London: Harper and Row, 2008.

Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘Dying For . . .’. In Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, 207–18. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Stone, Alison. ‘Natality and Mortality: Rethinking Death with Cavarero’. Continental Philosophy Review 43, no. 3 (2010): 353–72.

Stone, Alison. ‘The Relationality of Death’. In On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality, edited by Victoria Browne and  Daniel Whistler. Bloomsbury, 2016.

 

Reiner Schürmann: The Philosophy of Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Nietzsche Book Cover The Philosophy of Nietzsche
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes
2020
Paperback
176

Reviewed by: Zach Schroeder

Reiner Schürmann’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche, edited by Francesco Guercio, provides a comprehensive detailing of the philosopher’s corpus while interpreting it largely through the lens of Kantian Transcendentalism. Schürmann claims that Kant’s transcendental philosophy is the horizon of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values and roots each element of Nietzsche’s thought in the Kantian concept from which he believes it actually derives. Schürmann claims this is necessary «to understand the horizon within which Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values, and primarily his transvaluation of reason and truth, actually applies (17).» By interpreting Nietzsche in this way Schürmann is eventually able to derive a moral imperative from Nietzsche’s transvaluation of the will through the concept of eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche claims to be the first to question the founders of religion and philosophy seriously but it is Kant, according to Schürmann, who really did so, and Nietzsche is radicalizing this critique. Nietzsche criticizes Kant as having won a victory over dogmatic traditions only to open a secret path for them to work their ideals back into philosophy, which is why he seeks to go beyond Kant by criticizing truth itself (21).

The quest for truth, in Nietzsche’s view, is seen as a symptom and he targets the individual seeking it. While this might seem to invoke truth and reason as criteria and thus undercut the raising of the question in the first place, Schürmann believes Nietzsche avoids this pitfall by associating the question with a certain type of person or will. Because philosophers have so far failed to make this association, their prejudice remains masked. Schürmann believes that this is still a transcendental quest, however, arguing that it is compatible with Kant’s definition (23). The conditions of truth in Nietzsche are defined in terms of the truthful person. Reason is a tool for the purposes of life itself, thus Nietzsche’s genealogy of reason can be seen as a continuation of the Kantian project.

Transcendentalism is a tracing back of phenomena to their condition of possibility in the subject. This is core to both Kant’s and Nietzsche’s transcendentalism, with one key difference. In Kant, this is forms of knowledge, in Nietzsche, it is will types. The a-priori forms are then distinct life types or wills.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche praises Kant for making philosophy creative instead of contemplative. However, Nietzsche began to observe the negative effects of Kant through a despair of truth, and believes this led Kant back into the cages of dogma and God. This is why Nietzsche wants to radicalize Kant’s critique. Schürmann draws our attention away from the detail of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, which he takes to be easily understandable, and instead examines the many different points of view Nietzsche takes, which are often contradictory. We are then meant to approach his concepts with an emphasis on nuance, multiplicity, and interwoven forces at play, as opposed to deducing some common unifying thread.

Schürmann says that everything from Zarathustra onward should be read with quotation marks, as Nietzsche distancing himself from the specific affirmations because Western language is contaminated with a faith in reason. Schürmann thinks this leads to an illusory reification through language. It is the Platonic structure of our language that sets us as unlike each other and identifies types abstractly, thus generating the illusion that some ideal prototype could be discovered and give us a science of that which we speak. In other words, the establishment of a mean among many is core to the very function and flow of our language, which disguises the rather nebulous nature of being in something artificial.

Kant reduced the self (identity) to form and function while Nietzsche believed it is dissolved entirely once traced back. The instinct or drive to discover stable principles is one of fear, a fear of a loss of identity, because our notion of identity is not metaphysically stable. Thus Schürmann believes that for Nietzsche the cardinal principle of logic appears to be the principle of identity. So, if identity is dissolved at the level of a-priori forms (will), logic does not have transcendental application.

Nietzsche’s transcendentalism as a genealogy of life forms amounts to radical criticism because it is leveled against faith in reason and truth itself. This criticism cannot be carried out in ordinary language so it takes place in the background of another truth that Schürmann believes should be taken with quotation marks, tragic truth. In tragic truth our instinct for truth reconciles itself in the insight that the only taste of a stable backdrop we can have comes from our dissolution into nothing, the opposite of metaphysical truth which then turns out to be the only one. Nietzsche shifting the question away from what truth is to where do truth and reason arise is exemplified in his critique of Socrates as the symptom of decadence and emblematic of a particular type of will. This also serves as a genealogy of not only truth, but the type of will that finds it so appealing. The history of truth as error shows “how the real world became a fable” and this part of Nietzsche’s work, Schürmann claims, is preparatory for tragic truth that can act as a protagonist.

Kant takes appearance to be, among other things, manifestations. Nietzsche rejects this in favor of preserving the beauty of things as presented. Nietzsche does not deny synthetic a priori judgments, but he denies that such judgments produce any objectivity in the sense of a transcendental science (47). Instead of asking how such judgments are possible, Nietzsche asks why our belief in such judgments is necessary. The objective validity of such judgments is, to Nietzsche, a value for someone and is necessary for life.

Schürmann believes Nietzsche uses Kant’s own insights to dismantle the Kantian quest for knowledge. What we call knowledge is, according to Nietzsche, only a schematization of chaotic sense reality for practical vital needs. Schürmann directs the reader’s attention to an emphasis on the body given by Nietzsche as evidence of chaotic reality. The practical need for schematizing and simplifying is then to resist the thrashing of chaos, but the body shows us that this resistance is futile in the long run, and instead serves our purposes during life alone.

Schürmann points out that Heidegger identifies Nietzsche as still within the Platonic tradition because of his poeticizing prior to reasoning out his concepts, something Plato does in Phaedrus. Schürmann believes this is an oversight on Heidegger’s part because the “prior-poeticizing” in Nietzsche is actually the transcendental grounds for truth in service of life (51). In other words, poeticizing is ontologically prior to reason in Nietzsche’s account.

The tragedy of ideal truth, understood historically, undertakes epochal turns at the moment of a “self-emptying” of values, also known as nihilism. The will to power is Nietzsche’s final conceptual understanding of the play of tragedy on truth and the various forms and emergences of nihilism. Schürmann focuses heavily on historical nihilism, but he does provide explanations for all forms of nihilism addressed by Nietzsche. Furthermore, linking nihilism with his broader attempt to explain Nietzsche’s work as a radicalization of the Kantian project, he says that because Kant placed ideas about totality in thinking and the human mind alone they had to inevitably be denounced as nothingness.

Schürmann interprets the will to power differently than Heidegger and Kaufmann (68). He views it through the notion of historical decadence culminating in Nietzsche’s passage in Twilight of the Idols called “How the ‘true world’ became a fable.” Schürmann takes a phenomenological approach and comes to describe it as a playing out of forms which through time is a perpetual attempt at configuration. The will to power is most evident as the means of distinction between epochs. To break from epochal influences is to assume control of one’s reality, transvaluating its activities into joyful creations. This phenomenological view puts struggle at the heart of all that there is and invokes a need to resist getting too carried away with useful fictions.

For Schürmann, the very phenomenology of the will to power makes for a verbal understanding of being. Nietzsche’s gift-giving virtue is a horizontal transfer of knowledge motivated by love. Its necessity for action and the emptying of power (knowledge) makes for a highly verbal description of ethical life. After examining the grounds of what he calls Nietzsche’s practical philosophy, the will to power emerges as the differentiating principle within the flux of forces. For Schürmann, the moral imperative derived from the will to power is then along the lines of “do justice to that flux (85).”

Nietzsche sees himself as the first philosopher to compare many moralities as part of the same phenomenon, opposed to his predecessors who attempted to understand a “correct” morality (90). The bad conscience that takes hold as a result of allowing oneself to live in service of one of these moralities is an example of assuming an inherited role instead of assuming control of reality. The result of Nietzsche’s critique is that “Kant is turned against himself: if morality is ‘common,’ then what is moral is to show what commonly happens, namely the a-moral aggregation of forces for which Western morality is but a disguise (94).”

Schürmann interprets the eternal recurrence as a transvaluation of both time and will. It is a movement from “thou shalt” to “I will” to the “free spirit.” Once eternal recurrence is fully thought, the selective essence contained within moments is revealed and creative choice becomes accessible. The wills of others is then transvaluated and one’s own will can live through the body and time goes from a succession of events narrated by a prior will into the now and its perpetual repetition of moments. Thus time goes from a particular life to be endured through one’s given role to a continuous return of opportunities for joy; from “a life” to “life.”

Nietzsche’s project of radical enlightenment robs us of the chance to systematize ethics, but Schürmann believes that the heavy moral imperative derived from the eternal recurrence, that of facing the consequences of each action as if we had to do so for eternity, is a chance to universalize ethical thinking in a different way. The moral imperative derived from Nietzsche is then identified as a kind of Hereclitean justice. To do justice is to homologize one’s logos with the strife of existence. The homologizing of living and thinking is meant to avoid the very essence of injustice, which is to be selective of certain forces over others. In other words, injustice can be understood as a breach in the process of thinking one’s way through life in a manner that is compatible with the flux.

Schürmann’s coverage of Nietzsche is comprehensive and detailed. It succeeds in its task of establishing him within the broader philosophical discourse. While some of the conclusions Schürmann draws are thought in a manner compatible with his own, particularly in relation to the tragic double bind, I see no reason to think of them as uncharitable or unreasonable. Any reader would walk away from this book with a firm grasp of core Nietzschean concepts, but that is not all. In this work one finds the beginning of an altogether different Nietzsche, a positive Nietzsche. While we have been thoroughly treated to Nietzsche’s negative concepts through his reclamation in the 20th century, Schürmann successfully pulls back the veil on a vast reservoir of thought that is, as of yet, largely untouched. For anyone looking to do serious work on Nietzsche in the future, it is my firm opinion that this will be a fundamental and necessary text.

André Duarte: Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy, Routledge, 2023

Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy Book Cover Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy
Andrè Duarte
Routledge
2023
Paperback
169

Reviewed by: Garrett Pierman (Florida International University)

The 21st century seems filled to the brim with crises that political theorists have a duty to make sense of.  Three years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that has rendered most of our lives irreparably changed in some way, critical theorists are beginning to develop mature, articulate responses to local, national, and international political responses to, and effects of, the pandemic. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is one such book and represents an exercise in sense-making of recent politics that will likely be a boon to many of those who get the opportunity to read it.

This review begins with a summary of the book as a whole. From there,  I turn to three specific lines of thinking that are present throughout the book, all of which are highlights in terms of the overall contribution of the book to contemporary political theory. Having completed that summary and one brief critique, I offer a contextualization of this exceptionally timely work in terms of identifying prospective audiences and placing it as a work of new critical theory that can begin to address a new idea of “The Americas” in a 21st-century context.

As a whole, the book seeks to situate the presidential politics of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as not only a horrible mismanagement of a public health crisis by an authoritarian who seeks to erode democratic institutions but, alongside that mismanagement, a creation of a new kind of necropolitics that amplifies existing trends within Neoliberalism to even more catastrophic ends. To these ends, Duarte masterfully begins a book with an essay, sometimes in first-person perspective, about the pandemic as he experienced it in Brazil. These sorts of narratives, I hope, will prove useful to those who come after us and who might not have firsthand experience of the anxiety, death, mourning, and authoritarian encroachment of this period in our history. Chapter two, then, develops ideas of power in the context of biopolitics, which turns into necropolitics under neoliberalism. The analytical framework set out in chapter two is applied in chapters three and four, which demonstrates that the Necropolitics of covid was not a breach of politics as normal, but, rather, a continuance and intensification of already-existing neoliberal political processes that cast many persons and groups outside of the consideration of worthiness for life. The conclusion is a clear one: such necropolitics are a clear and present threat to democracy, and we can no longer pretend that mere constitutional rights and Enlightenment hopes for democracy are enough to stop authoritarianism. Instead, Duarte concludes, we need a more performative theory and praxis of democracy that has a chance at developing meaningful counters to the bio- and necropolitical praxes offered by the right.

To make this nuanced and necessary political argument, Duarte takes the time, especially in the second chapter, to outline the important contributions to contemporary understandings of Foucault, Arendt, Mbembe, and several others in the areas surrounding the politics of bodies in the contemporary world, such as Judith Butler. These explanations are one of the highlights of the book, as they summarize and situate many years’ worth of reading and analysis into a few dozen pages, rendering some of the more complicated ideas of recent decades of political thought into simple and easily accessible concepts that are then deftly deployed in the rest of the book. At times, the reader might mistake the book for a transcript of lectures given by an experienced professor for the sake of clarifying the aforementioned giants in contemporary political thought: the clarifying role of these sections of the book make what could otherwise have been a hard argument to follow much more compelling.

Making good use of those clear explanations, the book’s second major contribution is in its recording and situating of Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of existing political practices. As the book outlines in chapter three, Brazilian politics already exhibited an increasingly authoritarian politics before COVID that sought to other the LGBTQ community, communists, those on the left, darker-skinned folks, and so on, COVID provided an opportunity to not only expand those same biopolitical narratives but declare whole swaths of the population who did not belong to those already marginalized groups as subject to death for the sake of the preservation of the image of Brazilian strength personified by Bolsonaro himself. This politics, which Duarte labels as Bolsonarism, makes use of COVID to intensify dedication to those in political power by disregarding any form of knowledge that would seek to question the official line of the moment: the resultant deaths from this foreclosure of critique and discussion towards good public health ends directly turns the biopolitics of neoliberalism into the necropolitics of authoritarianism. As the author describes it, “ If biopolitical mechanisms for the governing of the lives of the population bring together dangerous side-effects derived from the distinction between worthy and unworthy lives, these consequences tend to become even more intensified and aggravated when authoritarian regimes or illiberal, immunitarian, populist or façade democracies recur to them”(Pg. 44). Documenting that shift from biopolitics to necropolitics is of vital political importance to any reader of this work.

The book also situates itself vitally as a work of political theory aimed at recording and making sense of the lived present of the author in the hopes of explaining the trends that he sees to those of us who would read the work. Intellectually, the foundations for this are best laid in the second chapter’s deployment of Arendt, who spent much of her academic career carefully documenting the major events of the Second World War as well as the formation of the state of Isreal in theoretical terms. This sense of political theorist as historian of the present carries throughout the book, however. For instance, Duarte makes the case that writing books such as this one is the “duty” of academics in times like these (Pg. 22) in the introduction of the book, and he spends much of the final few pages turning towards a call for praxis that might slow down or alter the catastrophically destructive and anti-democratic course upon which many nation states have set themselves.  With these three highlights in mind, I would highly recommend this work to anyone interested in gaining a more critical understanding of COVID politics and how those political trends may well set the stage for upcoming anti-democratic political movements and struggles in the coming years and decades.

Pandemic and the Crisis of Democracy is, as a whole, well-written and timely, situating contemporary political thought within ongoing political practices. No work is without flaws, however. In the case of this work, the conclusion, though it is itself well-done, connects less to the overall theme of Brazillian COVID politics than the rest of the work does. A future edition, perhaps with several more years to observe political outcomes and make reflections that can move beyond calls for praxis, would address the political fate of Bolsonaro thanks to the demos’ perception of and action against his COVID politics as neoliberal necropolitics.

In terms of audience, this book would be of great benefit to undergraduate students in two contexts. The most obvious of these would be in an international relations class that focused on Latin America as a whole, or Brazil in particular. In such a context, this book serves as a timely and critical intervention in some more recent events that highlight power dynamics and authoritarian political shifts. Perhaps less obviously, this would make an excellent part of a contemporary political theory course: the first and second chapters that lay the intellectual framework for the arguments of chapters three and four would make excellent companions to assigned readings from Foucault and Arendt. As I said above, Duarte’s explanations of earlier thinkers are masterful in their clarity without doing much, if any, conceptual violence to the original works.  Graduate students focused on Latin American politics, or who are looking to begin research agendas in the contemporary application of critical theory to COVID and the world thereafter should consider this book to be essential reading.  Finally, the book is written clearly enough that those politically concerned with, but perhaps unable to articulate praxis about, the erosion of democracy should also consider this to be an important book to better understand the political processes through which we are living.

Beyond the text of the book, this work is also an important intervention in a contemporary political understanding of The Americas. In reading this work, especially the sections in which Duarte documents Boslonaro’s refusal to take medical advice, insistence on always having been “right” despite having contradicted himself, and utter willingness to sacrifice his countrymen for the preservation of his own power and ego, I was brought back to my own experiences as a citizen of the United States (and moreover of Florida). Both (former, twice impeached) President Trump and Governor DeSantis not only promoted the same ineffective drugs as Bolsonaro, but the Floridian counterparts also saw fit to happily merge their anti-LGBTQ agendas was red-scare tactics and a biopolitics of the “Good Citizen” that was more than willing to throw away the lives of the working class. Beyond the fact that Bolsonaro now lives in a gated community in Florida, apparently a favorite post-career trend of would-be authoritarians, the similarities of the political responses to COVID have, in my view, brought into sharper focus a concept of “The Americas.”

For recent decades, many activists and scholars have been reluctant to consider this hemisphere as any one political unit, and rightly so: the colonial overtones to the concept are clear, as are the neocolonial ones in the economic dependencies built into NAFTA and its military precursors, the Monroe Doctrine and American anticommunist efforts in Latin America. With that said, there may be a case from within critical theory to take a closer look at the similarities we see in Latin America, the United States, and Canada in terms of the concerning development of necropolitics. This goes beyond what Duarte correctly identifies in the relationships between, for example, the United States in Chile, the former being more than happy to cooperate with a dictatorship in the latter to try out neoliberal principles. Instead, I suggest that this Bolsonarist politics, with its quick move to necropolitics for the sake of hastening neoliberal-style corporate hegemony and authoritarian power are a style of politics beginning to affect the Americas more broadly. And, unlike the temporal cycles of colonialism, this style of necropolitics developed simultaneously. The political sickness that COVID-19 brought to the Americas, then, might be a bolstering of a new, authoritarian necropolitics that travels well across borders. In combatting this new strain of neoliberal horror, books like Pandemic and the Crisis of Democracy are essential inoculations against misinformation and authoritarian rewritings of history, which are already well underway. Despite, or perhaps because, of the Bolsonarist politics unfolding in some of the communities most affected by COVID in the United States, this work should be considered required reading for those critical of the new political normal after the pandemic.

Daniele De Santis: Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations

Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: Commentary, Interpretations, Discussions Book Cover Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: Commentary, Interpretations, Discussions
Daniele De Santis (Ed.)
Karl Alber
2023
Hardback
521

Reviewed by:  Stefano Franchini (University of Pisa)

The importance of the volume Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Commentary, Interpretation, Discussions can be found in its aim: providing a study of the Cartesian Meditations (henceforth CM) in its entirety. Against the tendency to reduce the CM to some of its parts – mostly intersubjectivity or transcendental idealism –, this Commentary attempts to offer a unified view of the text. As the editor De Santis in the Introduction recognizes, CM are not only »Husserl’s second attempt at systematizing his philosophy after the so-called »turn« to a transcendental form of thought« (p. 9) but are also the key to understanding Husserl’s late phenomenology. The editor states that the motivation of this book can be found in the necessity to seriously deal with the text in which Husserl highlights the importance of the »concrete ego«, which provides also a teleological-practi­cal ontology. Regarding the goal of this book, it is important to notice that the three parts CommentaryInterpretation, and Discussion are bounded by each other’s, and it is possible to find some frameworks strictly related to the Commentary and also to the other sections. The development of the Commentary is completed and expanded in the following sections, Interpretation and Discussion, but these parts are not secondary to the others.

The volume is divided into three sections, as the title states. The first part, Commentary (§1-6) provides detailed analyses that stick to Husserl’s publication of the text. The latter two, Interpretation (§7-14) and Discussion (§15-20), intertwine both the commentary and the interpretation. The editor De Santis claims (p.16) that the first part can be regarded as a commentary only if we accept »commentary« in a broad sense. Starting from the CM, the authors develop reflections that go deeper than a simple reconstruction of Husserl’s passages. As is well known, one of the main problems of CM’s reception is the tendency to overlook most of the content of the text (p.12). While in Interpretation the authors emphasize how some philosophers have been dealing with CM, in Discussion the authors spotlight some core problems of Husserl’s CM and reflect on them with other frameworks of phenomenology. For this reason, Interpretation and Discussion both aim to compare CM with Husserl’s phenomenology and with Scholars’ reception of this text, as well as to investigate some of the themes of CM that are central to all Husserl’s phenomenology.

The goal of understanding CM as a whole can be found also in the internal links that can be found. Regarding this, it’s important to notice Daniele De Santis’ §4 on Fourth Meditation with Witold Płotka’s §8, Aurélien Djian’s commentary on Second Meditation with §9 written by Ignacio Quepons and §15 by Emanuela Carta and §5-6 on Fifth Meditation made by Sara Heinämaa (§5) and Alice Pugliese (§6) with Stefano Bancalari’s work on Levinas (§10) and Saulius Geniusas’ contribute on Paul Ricoeur. This allows both a mutual confrontation and a thematic deepening – although internal references are not always present in the text. But it is also possible to further interweave internal references and compare e.g. Landgrebe and Husserl on the account of the idea of Erste Philosophie – these topics are respectively discussed in §9 concerning Landgrebe’s remarks on CM and in §19 §20, specially here on Husserl’s »first« and » universal« and »second« and »last« philosophy. Thanks to the in-depth sections, it is therefore possible to compare the theoretical outcomes of the MC’s with Husserl’s latest phenomenology – e.g Andreea Smaranda Aldea in §17 claims that »Husserl’s emphatic call for a higher-order critique in the Cartesian Meditations as anticipating his Crisis call for radical self-reflection« (p. 453) and Alice Pugliese who compares the Fifth Meditation also with Husserl’s Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie.

It is important to note that Interpretation and Discussion are not appendixes of the Commentary. Alongside a reading accompaniment, the authors shed light on issues that are often overlooked. For this reason, it seems to me that rather than exhausting the research, the importance of this volume is to be a forerunner for even more in-depth studies of MC. For example, Witold Płotka in §8 goes far beyond just a simple reconstruction of Roman Ingarden’s remarks on CM. Namely, even if these remarks »are an historical document of phenomenological movement« (p. 216), the author stresses the importance of Ingarden’s work also in respect to the Fourth Meditation and to some unjustified presuppositions. In this respect, also Danilo Manca researches in §7 the Hegelian motifs of MC which Fink highlights. Specifically, Manca focuses on the »transition from the natural to the transcendental attitude« (p.193), on the Gespaltung of the Ego after performing epochē and the thematization of unconscious dimension of constituting life which that phenomenological method makes possible. Based on Fink’s reflections and stressing Hegel’s use of »Aufheben« (p. 197), the author shows the continuity between the natural and transcendental attitude. Regarding MC, the author deals with Fink’s remarks on §32 – in which the ego in is understood as a »substrate of habitualities« and with the dialectic between the two I, the natural and the transcendental one. In a passage of Fourth Meditation, Husserl claims that his CM are for the »nascent philosopher the genuine introduction into a philosophy«[1]. The same thing does not completely fit with Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Commentary, Interpretation, Discussions. In some parts the content discussed by the authors presupposes a good knowledge of Husserl’s philosophy – not just of MC – and for a non-specialist reader it might be difficult. Especially §14 Meditations on Purity: Edmund Husserl and Hans Kelsen wrote by Federico Lijoi and §18 Lavigne’s Objection to Phenomenologica Idealism: Critical Remarks with the Help of the Cartesian Meditations by Agustín Serrano de Haro are only fully clear to readers that already are familiar with the phenomenological milieu and, in the second case, with Logic Investigation. For this reason, the »broad sense« of the Commentary includes discussions of problems that are not limited to the text commented on here and investigate some core problems of Husserl’s phenomenology. Nevertheless, these chapters are certainly an opportunity to explore these issues.

Certainly, the Commentary’s part offers a detailed discussion. Claudio Majolino in the first part of Commentary (§1) clarifies the meaning of »Cartesian« and »Meditations« and he researches for the Motive – both in its German meanings (p. 27) – why Husserl took Descartes as a reference. This part is longer than the other and it deals both with Husserl’ Introduction and Fist Meditation. Since the earliest reviews many criticisms emerged against Husserl’s approach towards the figure of Descartes (p. 14-6), investigating this point is a good key to start. Claudio Majolino works on Husserl’s so-called Cartesianism and understands it in terms of »repetition and variation« (.p 22). Using some insights from Hua VII / VIII and Husserliana Materialen IX Claudio Majolino stresses the threefold meaning of Descartes’ Meditation recognized by Husserl: the eternal meaning, the importance of CM for the present and finally the meaning of Descartes’ Meditations for the present. The author approaches this problem by pointing out the way Husserl had already discussed Descartes (Socrates and Plato) in his previous Lectures. Regarding this point Claudio Majolino claims that «[Descartes] embedded the skepsis within the innermost core of genuine and radical philosophy itself» (p. 35). If on the one hand, Descartes took some arguments from Skepticism, on the other, on several occasions he points out the differences between his doubt and skepticism[2]. The boundness between the grounded knowledge and responsibility, well discussed in §1, from another point of view, is also investigated by Leonard Ip (§20) using the distinction between »Second« and »Last« Philosophy in Husserl. The reference to Descartes allows Husserl to link knowledge to responsibility, but it also poses some problems: first and foremost, that of the route into phenomenology. In §16 Rosemary Jane Rizo and Patron de Lerner points that out and discusses Husserl’s Cartesian way to reduction. Starting from a discussion of Begründung and Fundierung (p. 405-10) two terms used by Husserl to describe the foundational problem, the A. than discusses the main theme regarding CM. It is important to notice that Rosemary Jane Rizo and Patron de Lerner highlight two antithetical demands in Husserl’s thoughts about science: the interest in a mathematical theoretical foundation and the interest in transcendental subjectivity, which is connected to the Lebenswelt and gives it a foundation. The focus on the Husserl-Descartes link finds another insight in §17. Here, Sergio Pérez-Gatica in his The Distinction between »First« and »Universal« Philosophy in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: On a Basic Precondition for the Trasformation of Philosophy into a Rigorous Science points out that while »philosophy« means »universal philosophy« – in terms of Platonic and Cartesian idea of universal science –, Husserl uses »first philosophy« in a technical way to stress the basic method for a rigorous philosophical knowledge. Considering the lack of rigor in philosophy at his time, Husserl uses the Cartesian path to draft the real goal for its phenomenology: providing a fundamental epistemology. (p. 483). In conclusion Sergio Pérez-Gatica highlights the connection between logical and ontological requirements in Husserl’s philosophy and the reflections contained in MC on the idea of rigorous grounding philosophy. Regarding Cartesian way, another insight comes from §9. Here Ignacio Quepons points out that Landgrebe stresses the same problem of the Cartesian way to reduction declared by Husserl itself in Crisis. It’s also important to observe that even if Husserl criticizes the Cartesian way, nevertheless, the other ways do not reject the first one, but complete it by revealing other possibilities (p. 239-40). Another attempt to focus also on Husserl’s so-called Cartesianism can be found in §13 Jan Patočka on Descartes and Husserl’s Cartesianism wrote by Hynek Janoušek and Wojciech Starzyński. The authors discuss Patočka on epochē and reduction from Husserl. While »Patočka accepts Husserl’s method of epochē as a major breakthrough in modern philosophy […], he rejects Husserl’s idea of reduction as leading to the unwarranted subjunctivization of the phenomenal field of appearances« (p. 344). This chapter seems to me to be successful because it relates Patočka with Descartes and Husserl.

Following the Commentary, in §2 Aurélien Djian points out how Husserl repeats and varies – using Caludio Majolino’s words – Descartes to introduce its own transcendental phenomenology. The author stresses specifically the horizon, synthesis, and intentionality notions. Aurélien Djian shows that transcendental subjectivity should not be conflated with the psychological ego because it only can be grasped through epochē (p. 68). The conclusion of §2 discusses a passage of MC §9 and it has a very specific purpose: showing the problems related to Husserl’s »ranking the horizon among the universal principles of phenomenology« (p. 88) and the need for apodicticity of the ego. In §3 Lilian Alweiss asks: how is it possible to do Ontology after Kant? To answer this question the author considers »two different ways of referring to non-being« picked up by phenomenological descriptions: one linked to »possibilities which have not yet been fulfilled, the other to possibilities which have been dashed« (p. 96). Then Lilian Alweiss traces a connection between Husserl and Kant regarding the answer to Hume’s circle. This passage is fundamental to understand why this chapter states that Husserl traces the limits of being from within, with the notion of evidence and through imagination. De Santis’ §4 investigates the role of transcendental idealism in MC, the only place where it has an »exoteric systematic presentation of this doctrine« (p. 115 mod). This comment connects the focus on Husserl’s idioms to the philosophical content in them. Namely, the author points out Husserl’s use of Unsinn, not just in MC but also in Ideas I, and compares it to the occurrences of Wiedersinn. The goal of this chapter is to show that each sense is grasped with respect to transcendental subjectivity, which must be regarded as a monad. De Santis claims also that the monad is »subjectivity constituted by the correlation between the surrounding world (or the world as it appears to me) and the »personal character« (p. 117). Since Husserl’s fifth meditation is longer than the others, the Commentary is divided into two sections: §5 written by Sara Heinämaa and §6 by Alice Pugliese. The first one deals with MC § §42-54, the second one with §55-64. Sara Heinämaa starts considering that »some forms of critique are thematic and reject Husserl’s descriptions of our experiences of other persons or other human beings, while other lines of critique are methodological and question the adequacy of the conceptual tools used in the analysis« (p.141). Then the author points out the role of these chapters within MC as a whole. As Sara Heinämaa states, »with the supposed failure of Fifth Meditation then, with the failure of its account of the constitution of the sense of another self, much, if not all, of Husserl’s phenomenological project would collapse« (p. 143). The main topic of this contribution is to explain the concepts of verification, analogical apperception, and empathy. This chapter faces the transfer of »sense problem« and stresses Husserl’s strategy already adopted in his previous texts. Namely, Husserl uses scientific and philosophic standard terms without their standard meaning – e.g Husserl’s »empathy« is different from Stein’s or Scheler’s use of the same word (p. 157). Alice Pugliese addresses the last part of MC »using one of the most consistent and ancient questions of metaphysics as a hermeneutical key: the dialectic of unity and multiplicity« (p. 171). More in detail, the author claims that the unity-multiplicity problem leads the empathy problem. This strategy completely fits MC, especially considering that »the monad is a unity that includes multiplicity« (p. 178). This reading is further confirmed if we consider »the core of the egological and monadic intuition« which stands for unity and the »the daily work of science and knowledge« as multiplicity (p. 186). The problems of Fifth CM discussed in the Commentary are taken again by Stefano Bancalari, who in §10 discuss The influence of the Cartesian Meditations on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. If on the one hand, the 5th MC provided Levinas the intersubjective problem, central for his work, on the other, it determined the rupture with Husserl’s phenomenology (p. 260). Considering Levinas’ thought nearly in its entirety, Stefano Bancalari points out how Levinas used his »intersubjective reduction« to overcome the problems related to Husserl’s Cartesian way to reduction. Regarding the aim of this book this contribution is important because it thematizes Others’ constitution problem. Stefano Bancalari also shows why the lack of the Others’ gaze in the analogical apperception for Levinas is a problem (p. 271). Another perspective on the intersubjectivity problem comes from Jakub Čapek, who discusses Merleau-Ponty’s lecture of CM in §11. The author shows how from an initial critique to the ego Merleau-Ponty then  uses Husserl’s analysis, and in particular the idea of appresentation, »to face the objection that his theory makes individual perspectives vanish into a monism of a supra-individual corporeity« (283). As Jakub Čapek recognizes, Merleau-Ponty goes further and in the end of Phenomenology of perception claims the return to the ego – albeit transformed. The author states that for Merleau-Ponty the main problem of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity is the transposition from the I to the Other because it is based on the immediate self-knowledge. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty our self-knowledge is »a practical task yet to be accomplished« (284). Although in §11there is no reference to Merleau-Ponty’s receipt of Ideas II, this contribution further enriches some of the problems seen in the previous chapters. In §12 Saulius Geniusas in his Paul Ricoeur’s Husserlian Heresies: The Case of the Cartesian Meditations points out that MC are the core not only of Ricœur’s reading of Husserl, but also for his philosophy itself. The author approaches the topic using three questions: how Cartesian are Husserl’s MC?  How descriptive is Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology? How egological is Husserl’s egology? Saulius Geniusas claims that »Husserl secularizes Descartes and interprets the Cartesian cogito as the transcendental subject, conceived of as the ultimate origin of all meaning« (p. 305). Additionally, if on the one hand, the author bounds both Descartes and Husserl on the problem, on the other he stresses that Husserl’s radicalization of Descartes does not address God. Regarding the second question, Saulius Geniusas stresses that »for Ricoeur, Husserl’s phenomenology is not sufficiently descriptive because it does not constrain its own descriptions from gliding into transcendental idealism» (315). It is important to notice that this chapter bounds itself both with Daniele De Santis’ §4 and Stefano Bancalari’s §10. Regarding the problem of evidence, Emanuela Carta in §15 reconstructs scholars’ discussion of Husserl’s evidence understood as Theory of justification (Standard View) and proposes a new interpretation of the theme where evidence justifies belief. Fallibilist Thesis claims »What is evidently given to one can be false« and it is related with The Corollary Thesis: »It is possible for one to have justification to believe a false proposition« (379). After criticizing the metaphysical realism of scholars, the author discusses Husserl’s notion of »idealism«. Here a footnote on De Santis’ work in this text could have been useful. Finally, Emanuela Carta provides an alternative to the Standard view, claiming the correlation between absolute truth- adequate evidence and relative truth-inadequate evidence (p 393). Thanks to that it is possible to reject both Fallibilist Thesis and The Corollary Thesis and to argue that evidence justifies belief because it shows what is true, even if in an open and perfectible way. A Discussion that shows the unity of the late Husserl’s thought is that of Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Self-Othering, Self-Transformation, and Theoretical Freedom: Self-Variation and Husserl’s Phenomenology as Radical Immanent Critique. Specifically on this topic the author links the self-critique of the self-variation with Crisis’ zig-zag method. Namely, self-variation clarifies both the goal of inquiries and itself. For this reason, if we consider the Besinnung as a Rückfrage, it is possible to regard self-variation »as methodological tool central to phenomenology as a whole« (p. 453). In his conclusion, following the sense of Besinnung, Andreea Smaranda Aldea claims that self-variation is not just a simple method related to self-constitution, but »a central method at the core of phenomenology itself functions as a necessary condition for the possibility of this radical self-critique« (455).

Before concluding this review, I would like to focus on another goal of the volume: if on the one hand the volume presents itself as a unique volume, on the other the richness of the contributions also allows a specific selection of some parts of it. This means that Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditation. Commentary, Interpretation, Discussions is not only aimed at specialists of Husserl, but also at all those who, across the board, have to deal with MC. In sum, this volume marks a notable achievement. The broad sense of the Commentary completely full fits the goal of the editor. Additionally, it should not be read merely as commentary. Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditation. Commentary, Interpretation, Discussions is a collection of contributions which gives a rich and broad view of the Cartesian Meditations as a whole. All the various parts move in different, often intertwined, directions and show the richness of Husserl’s work. The volume’s conspicuous number of pages proves how urgently an entire study dedicated to MCs was needed.


[1] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian meditations (translated by D. Cairns), p. 88.

[2] See René Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes, 11 voll. (Vrin, 1996).

David Seamon: Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement

Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement Book Cover Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement
David Seamon
Routledge
2023
Paperback
294 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations

Reviwer by: Douglas Giles (Elmhurst University)

This volume takes an interesting approach to the phenomenology of place and human lived emplacement. The book is an anthology of previously published papers and essays rather than a continuous arrative argument. Seamon has, however, assembled the parts of the anthology as an extended annotated bibliography for his 2018 book, Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making. As Seamon states in his introduction to this volume, all of its chapters make a range of references to the three aspects of place discussed in Life Takes Place—phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking.

Seamon is the curator of this anthology, giving it the strength of a deliberate, cohesive narrative, at least from the author’s perspective. How much would we love to have had notable philosophers of the past give us their own sense of their oeuvre as Seamon has given us here! Phenomenological Perspectives is an important service to phenomenologists interested in Seamon or in the philosophies of place and the social lifeworld.

Phenomenological Perspectives, being an in-depth exploration of the three interrelated themes of the book Life Takes Place, is divided into three groups of chapters. The three parts of Phenomenological Perspectives deal with phenomenology as a means of studying place, phenomenologically understanding place experience and lived emplacement, and using artistic media to illustrate the many ways that humans encounter lived experience in place.

In Part I, Seamon presents four chapters in which he explains the basics of the phenomenology of place. Chapter 2, “Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology,” could serve as a general introduction to phenomenology and as an approach to understanding people and the societies they create. The other three chapters in Part I introduce and explain the concepts of lifeworld, homeworld, and environmental embodiment, foundational concepts for Seamon’s phenomenology of place. Chapter 4, “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets,” is noteworthy for Seamon’s discussion of his concept of “place ballet.” This he defines as “the regularity of place grounded in the bodily habituality of users.” It is a concept reminiscent of Heidegger’s “everydayness,” with Seamon placing more emphasis on the lived body in our experience of place and our pedestrian routines within our lifeworld.

Expressing Seamon’s background in architecture and environment behavior, the chapters in Part II explore the relations of places and lived emplacement to architecture, design pedagogy, and urban placemaking. The five previously published papers in Part II use the concepts of lifeworld and place ballet to understand and improve architectural design, with particular emphasis on the practical value of understanding place and lived emplacement. Chapter 8, “Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Buildings as Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes,” provides an insightful description of how architecture plays a central role in human life. The short essay of Chapter 7, “Serendipitous Events in Place: The Weave of Bodies and Context via Environmental Unexpectedness and Chance,” is a slight diversion in tone. In it, Seamon discusses place serendipity—relating stories of people having chance experiences in place. Seamon connects the stories to the subject of Part II by observing that architectural design is an aspect in serendipitous events that affect people’s lives.

Part III comprises eight essays about artistic creations that Seamon sees as providing real-world groundings that identify general aspects of human life and place events. The essays discuss the work of two filmmakers, a photographer, four writers, and a television producer. Seamon’s phenomenological interpretations of these mostly fictional artistic creations may or may not express the intentions of their creators. Nevertheless, the connections that Seamon makes are interesting and informative. If phenomenology, as Seamon defines it, is the description and interpretation of human experience, then fictional creations can concretize human experience in ways that help us understand that human life is impossible without place.

Phenomenological Perspectives is invaluable in a study of David Seamon’s philosophy. It also provides a solid set of resources for the phenomenological study of place and lifeworlds. This book can be useful on its own but is perhaps best appreciated if one also has Seamon’s Life Takes Place alongside. Phenomenological Perspectives deserves a place on the phenomenologist’s bookshelf next to monographs of Jeff Malpas and Anthony Steinbock.

Steven Cassedy: What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning

What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning Book Cover What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning
Steven Cassedy
Oxford University Press
2022
Hardback $32.99
224

Reviewed by: Jacob Rump (Creighton University)

As Steven Cassedy notes in the introduction to this fascinating, wide-ranging, and unique book, meaning is everywhere, and yet it seems no one ever stops to define it (1)[1]. Through a series of chapters tracing the history of “meaning” from ancient Greek and Hebrew sources to contemporary English usage, Cassedy tells a story in which notions of meaning were originally limited to words, signs, and interpretation, but usage gradually expanded to a present-day context in which meaning means… well… almost everything. The book succeeds in something that, in my view, is not often enough done in contemporary philosophy or intellectual history: connecting past philosophical ideas—in broad, easy-to-understand brushstrokes—to popular culture and the popular uptake of those ideas in the present and recent past.

The book is, indeed, more appropriately considered a work in intellectual history than in philosophy in a narrow academic sense. Cassedy works in comparative literature, and the primary method of the work is close reading rather than philosophical argument. His overarching claims are developed via helpful etymological discussions and readings of texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Russian, French, German, and Danish, as well as selective attention to secondary literature on these figures and associated key texts. These treatments, taken as a whole, offer an extremely helpful overview of the evolution of the notion of meaning over the longue durée of Western intellectual history, with some fascinating (if necessarily selective) detailed accounts of key ideas and authors.

I begin with a chapter-by-chapter overview of the more broadly historical Chapters One through Five, then turn to more detailed critical treatment of some major themes, where I also survey Chapters Six through Nine, which are devoted to more recent and popular treatments of meaning.

I.

The concept of meaning as we have come to know it in contemporary English is more recent than we might expect, and does not, on Cassedy’s reading, have an exact equivalent in ancient writings. Chapter One, as its title suggests, argues that the ancient world “got along without” meaning “until the rise of Christianity.” Cassedy surveys Hebrew and Aramaic terms appearing in the Hebrew Bible and concludes that there is simply no word corresponding to our “meaning” to be found there, though there is some interesting discussion of translations of Ecclesiastes using “meaning” in an attempt to get at the sense of value or “meaning in life” that Cassedy is interested in (14-15).

Cassedy then turns to ancient Greece, where he finds significant semantic commonality with regard to the English verb to mean, and ample evidence of diverse theories of signification, signs, interpretation, and the function of language in authors like Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, and as far back as Heraclitan fragments about the Delphic Oracle. But the focus remains on the verb, and on the notion of signification: Cassedy finds little evidence of a noun form of “meaning,” and little attention paid to the “something that gets signified” corresponding to a sign (19). Cassedy also insists, with regard to Platonic forms (ideai) that “nowhere are they likened to a meaning that we retrieve as we do from words in a written text” (23).

It is only in Chapter Two, with Latin-language authors of early Christianity, that we “first find meaning used as the object of a metaphysical interpretive quest into a mysterious, invisible realm separate from the realm of direct experience” and where the meaning of “meaning” begins to expand beyond the literal. The key notion here is “the readability the world,” and Cassedy largely follows the work of Hans Blumenberg and New Testament scholar Harry Gamble in his extended analysis of meaning in Augustine. Here, helpfully, we find an early touchstone for the distinction between natural and conventional (“given”) signs (30)—a distinction that would be important in twentieth-century accounts from Husserl (2001, I.§2) to Grice (1957, 378-79). Divine scripture for Augustine consists of given signs with authorial intent, but the interpretation of those signs involves usage of “ideas/thoughts/meanings (sensa) by means of signs, and those signs relate to our various senses (sensūs)” (31). This anticipates the idea—central to Cassedy’s interpretation of the German Sinn as discussed below—of a close relationship and intermingling between meaning and sensation. It also introduces the important distinction, central to Augustine, on Cassedy’s interpretation, between the actual reading of books, such as the scriptures, and the figurative “reading” of the world or nature, and ultimately of heaven, whose signs are—at least for human beings— “shrouded in mystery and subject to interpretive acts that can never be guaranteed to reveal an absolute truth” (33). This for Cassedy is the central step that clears the way for the contemporary usage of meaning in phrases like “meaning in life.”

Cassedy then notes a shift from the medieval idea of reading the “text of the world” as well as written passages to the later idea—which Cassedy argues, following the historian of science Peter Harrison, arises as a result of the Protestant Reformation—of reading as applying to passages only: “under the older conception, both words (in Scripture) and things (in the world of nature) had meanings. Under the new, Protestant conception, only words had meaning; objects didn’t” (37). The result, according to Harrison, was that “The natural world, once the indispensable medium between words and eternal truths, lost its meanings, and became opaque to those hermeneutical procedures which had once elucidated it. It was left to an emerging natural science to reinvest the created order with intelligibility” (Harrison, qtd. in Cassedy, 37).

The notion that the world itself contains meaning is reasserted, Cassedy argues, in Berkeley’s work on perception. Following Kenneth Winkler, Cassedy finds in Berkley a “semiotic theory of vision,” “founded on the notion that seeing is a matter of recovering meanings from signs whose connections with those meanings are purely conventional and arbitrary” (39). This notion is reminiscent of medieval “book of nature” ideas, but with the crucial difference provided by Berkley’s (in)famous immaterialism, which, Cassedy argues, sets the stage for idealism and romanticism.

Chapter Three, “Idealism and Romanticism,” was for me the most intriguing and the most helpful of the book. It begins from an extended discussion of Johan Georg Hamann, who “embedded language in the very fabric of the world itself, which he viewed as God’s text” (44). This leads a naturally to the idea of a close connection between the perceptual senses (die Sinne) and sense (Sinn), an idea which Cassedy takes up in the next subsection of the chapter. His short history of the German Sinn invokes its early connotations of movement, change of place, and direction, and traces its development through to a more modern conception that builds in a certain “fuzziness” or indeterminacy.

Chapter Three focuses especially on one of the twenty four definitions of Sinn provided in the Grimm Brothers’ mid-nineteenth-century Deutsches Wörterbuch, which notes that “[i]n modern times, Sinn is customarily and commonly [used] for the meaning [Bedeutung], the opinion [Meinung], the spiritual content, the intention [Tendenz] of an expression, a work, or (more rarely) an action, as distinguished from its wording [Wortlaut] or its outward appearance” (qtd. in Cassedy, 49). In this later usage, Cassedy notes, Sinn is most often connotative, whereas the German bedeuten and Bedeutung—like the English meaning—is more likely to be denotative. This of course tracks both the well-known distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung as marked by Frege in the essay of that name (Frege 1892), and also discussions of denotation and connotation in English from, e.g., Mill (1843, I.2.§5). Puzzlingly, there is no treatment of these obvious touchstones in this chapter or elsewhere in the text, despite the fact that Frege’s is concerned with precisely the same German terms, and Mill falls into precisely the same historical period as the German authors discussed in Chapter Three.

Chapter Three then further traces the notion of Sinn in Kant, through pre-Critical writings such as Dreams of a Spirit-seer and into the first Critique, where “Like the Latin sensum/sensus/ sentientia, Sinn conveys both the receiving, sentient mind and the properties of objects that the mind cognizes and interprets” (56-7). Kant’s use of the term stands in stark contrast, Cassedy reports, to that of later romantic-era figures such as Novalis (whose “grand, mysterious statements” about meaning are treated by Cassedy at great and somewhat puzzling length), Goethe, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Herder. It is in these romantic-era figures that we first encounter sustained engagement with the German phrase “Sinn des Lebens,” the philosophical and intellectual precursor to contemporary English’s “meaning of life,” and with the call to rediscover the original sense or meaning of the world by re-enchanting or romanticizing it (64). Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language is given strikingly brief treatment—especially in contrast to the expansive discussion of Novalis—and is discussed only in the context of its influence on Schleiermacher.

Chapter Four begins with a brief treatment of Kierkegaard, due to his explicit invocations of the “meaning of,” and sometimes “in” “life” (74-75), but his usage of these phrases is dismissed as relatively “uneventful.” (The influence of broader themes in Kierkegaard’s work on twentieth-century writers, due to the appearance of English translations of his work, is returned to in more detail in Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight). The bulk of Chapter Four consists of extensive discussions of Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyle’s engagement with Novalis, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Carlyle’s work represents for Cassedy the movement of German culture into British culture over the course of the nineteenth century (77), and in his partly satirical novel Sartor Resartus we find what Cassedy suspects to be the first use of the phrase “the meaning of life” in English, “where the phrase refers not to the meaning, or definition, of the word life but to the meaning of life itself” (82).

Emerson brought Carlyle’s novel to the United States, where it was influential for the American Transendentalists. Emerson was also influenced directly by earlier German mystics such as Novalis, as well as by the uptake of German romanticism in Coleridge, from whom he took the notion of the “book of nature” that would be influential in Emerson’s extended engagements with the theme of nature and humankind’s place in it. Emerson, Cassedy plausibly argues, “envisages a world in which we ‘read’ (metaphorically speaking) and interpret not just actual books but, well, that world itself, which he implicitly represents as yielding up meaning, significance, sense to our acts of interpretation” (90). This amounts to a form of idealism reminiscent of Berkeley and Kant, but in which “the mind or consciousness always bleeds over into a mysterious spiritual realm that appears to be simultaneously coextensive with and hidden from it” (92). For Cassedy, such a mystical, book-of-nature connotation of “meaning” in English is a major component of our contemporary usage and understanding of the term.

Chapter Five turns to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, including some intriguing comparison of the Russian smysl and the German Sinn (95). From Tolstoy’s increasingly religious writings—especially due to their popularity with readers of English-language translations appearing in the early twentieth century—and in references to Tolstoy in well-known works such as James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, we first get the close connection between meaning and purpose that is also part of our contemporary understanding of the word. Due to Dostoevsky’s existentialism and the centrality of mortality for so many of his characters, Cassedy suggests, readers find in his works a more secular treatment of meaning in life than in Tolstoy, despite Dostoevsky’s frequent association of the phrase “meaning of life” with the immortality of the soul. “‘The meaning of life,’ with its enormous potential for ambiguity, is a phrase that allows the secularist to form at least a partial understanding of what a person of putatively pure religious faith actually believes” (118).

II.

As the above overview suggests, the real focus of Cassedy’s book is not the notion of meaning as such, but the way in which the word has come to be associated with concepts like value and purpose, as in the phrase “the meaning of life,” which would seem to be quite far from the ancient Greek usage of the verb “to mean” and from its later European-language verbal and nominal relatives. In all these earlier cases, “meaning” is primarily a matter of signification, of what signs, words, and language do (15). Cassedy thus seeks to understand the relationship between what we might call the semiotic or semantic connotation of “meaning” and its more recent purposive or axiological connotation. In this regard, the book is both original and important: he is one of very few recent authors who appears to have thought carefully and extensively about the relationship between meaning in these two senses. As Cassedy puts it, in a glib criticism of a passage from Charles Taylor, “telling us first that meaning means ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ and next that it means the same thing that it means in the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ doesn’t really narrow things down very much” (2).

Even in contemporary academic philosophy, discussions of these semantic and axiological conceptions of meaning continue to be worlds apart, with discussion of the former located in particular sub-domains of the analytic philosophy of language or (post-?) post-structuralist pontifications about signs and signifiers, whereas discussion of the latter is located primarily among philosophers writing in the domains of ethics, social-political philosophy, and related areas of value theory. The fact that philosophical treatments of meaning have become so divergent is intriguing and alarming, at least if Cassedy is right that these notions are related in more than merely homophonic ways. In this sense, I think the book can be read as a kind of call to action for the reintegration of philosophical (and not merely pop-cultural) investigations of meaning. This call to action is to be applauded, in my view, and indeed is one I have tried to take some small steps toward in my own work. I return to this theme toward the end of this review.

Unfortunately, Cassedy’s treatment of this issue is limited to a more-or-less genealogical account of how the change came about: the book answers the question, “How does a word that fundamentally has to do with signs, words, stories, and other things that, well, mean or signify something come to mean ‘purpose’ and ‘value’? How does it come to mean all the other things it appears to mean, apart from ‘signify’?” (4). While Cassedy offers us a detailed (if not always balanced, as I note below) historical account of the emergence of these additional connotations of the word, he doesn’t offer much beyond that genealogical account as to why this divergence occurred.

But perhaps this is part of his point: that there is really nothing ultimately beyond the genealogical account—there is no deep reason, at least none available to human beings—for why meaning came to have the meaning that it now, in Western popular culture, has. There is, perhaps, only something like the Nietzschean revaluation of values that it signifies (I’m putting words in Cassedy’s mouth here; there is actually strikingly little engagement with Nietzsche in the book, given its theme, and that minor engagement is only indirect, appearing in the context of discussions of Paul Tillich). This claim would seem to fit with Cassedy’s explicit thesis about the ambiguity of the contemporary usage of “meaning”: “what we mean when we talk about meaning” is ultimately, necessarily, “polyvalent” (8, 33, 182). “It’s the very fluidity that gives meaning its peculiar resonance and mystique and that allows it to live with equal comfort in the writings of secular scientists and the official decrees of Catholic popes. That’s the ambiguity that lends this word its peculiar and characteristic power—what makes it the quintessentially modern word” (10). The power of this polyvalence is that it allows meaning to refer to whatever it is that fills a void in the existential dimension of our contemporary lives, just as philosophical-religious figures like Tillich and Ulrich Barth suggested it should.

Hence the book’s extensive focus, in the twentieth-century portion of its historical genealogy, on such popularizing philosophical-religious figures—a treatment that turns increasing toward the popularizing, and increasingly away from the philosophical, with its coverage of each subsequent decade. For Cassedy, the meaning of “meaning” began to fracture in the twentieth century alongside (and perhaps because of) its more popular uptake. The fracturing begins, as discussed in Chapters Six and Seven, with the extensive employment of the term in the English-language writings of Tillich, Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and increases in the oft-announced “age of anxiety” in American culture—a term that Cassedy traces to W.H. Auden’s poem with that name published in the U.S. in 1947, and a term which was firmly entrenched in popular discourse by the early 1960s. “Meaning” has by this time come to serve an increasingly therapeutic purpose, a panacea for a variety of existential woes characteristic of modern American life in the post-war period. With regard to the source of these woes, Cassedy has much to say about contemporaneous changes in mainstream religious belief, but relatively little to say about the effects of the second World War, the Holocaust, or an increasingly capitalist, consumerist American society. In any case, in the post-war period, the term “anxiety,” like the “meaning” that is popularly believed to contain its cure, has come “to denote a remarkably wide range of things” (131).

In Chapter Eight, Cassedy documents a shift from religious to more popular, scientistic, and therapeutic conceptions of meaning, and a corresponding expansion of its usage as both cure-all and catch-all term. This change is tracked via an account of the development of existential psychotherapy in figures such as Victor Frankl and Rollo May (Frankl is singled out for particularly extensive and trenchant criticism, about which I am not qualified to comment), through treatments of recent biochemical approaches to meaning such as the work of Barbara Fredrickson (approaches about which I am skeptical, but again not qualified to comment), and in the contemporary proliferation of works that give center-stage to the notion of meaning, while hardly ever defining it, in the contemporary self-help movement (about which I think no additional comment necessary). Thus, Cassedy argues, from the late 1960s to the present, at least in mainstrem American society, meaning increasingly becomes “a suggestive term, undefined, unspecific, and preponderantly secular, designed to conjure in our minds the idea of something grand, mysterious, and unnamed that, owing to our particular life circumstances, we must strive for” (140).

In this light, Cassedy’s polyvalence thesis is both unique and refreshing, and certainly speaks to the era of human social and intellectual history that we find ourselves in today—an era which, Cassedy convincingly argues, has been presaged by the enormous uptick of concern with anxiety and meaninglessness beginning in the early twentieth century. However, there are points in the book where Cassedy’s polyvalence thesis comes off like the hasty conclusion of a student who has closely read the relevant texts, but not moved much beyond a survey of positions (with requisite fascination and awe) to the analytical work of crafting an original and nuanced thesis about them: the thesis is simply that they differ. The overarching claim that the meaning of meaning is ambiguous because it has to be thus comes off—at least to this reader—sometimes as thoughtful and sometimes as glib.

At some points, the book reads like a collection of essays held together loosely by their relation to meaning and more generally by the fact that the author happened to want to write and reflect on the texts they interpret. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, of course—all academics do this to some degree—but in this case it results in a book whose treatment appears uneven. While the entire period of Western thought from Augustine to Bishop Berkeley is surveyed in a single chapter, the period from the end of the second World War to the present takes up approximately one third of the book. This is natural, of course, given that things are often more interesting to us as we get closer to the present, but what is less natural is the change in focus as the book moves chronologically. Up through its treatment of the “Russian Titans” Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, in Chapter Five, the book deals entirely with what we might call “high intellectual culture” figures, from the worlds of theology, literature, and philosophy. But beginning in Chapter Seven, and even to some degree in the first treatment of Tillich in Chapter Six, Cassedy’s chronological narrative turns almost exclusively to a more “popular culture” orientation, discussing sources like self-help books, popular psychology, references to “meaning” in Time magazine, etc. This, in part, reflects Cassedy’s thesis: that in the later twentieth century, the obsession with meaning became a mainstream phenomenon, making its way, in light of growing existential concern in the “age of anxiety,” into popular culture and even into the marketplace via the contemporary self-help industry.

But the book almost entirely neglects the fact that meaning never diminished as a topic of conversation in more “high culture” domains in the twentieth century. There is no mention of, e.g., the linguistic turn in philosophy or the resultant projects of linguistic or conceptual analysis in the analytic tradition,[2] and no substantial account of the consideration of meaning in late nineteenth and twentieth-century continental figures such as Dilthey, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, except as minor precursors to the thought of Tillich and Barth. There is, by contrast, extensive treatment of Tillich, and especially of his more popular writings, including his article in the 1966 issue of Time magazine with the iconic “Is God Dead?” cover, despite its status as, in Cassedy’s words, “quite possibly, in the history of American popular periodical literature, the most famous article that no one actually read—or remembers having read” (119). We are told that, by the time of the appearance of Tillich’s article in 1966, the word “meaning” “has traveled a winding path, in its guise as the German Sinn, from the nineteenth-century German philosophy and theology that we’ve examined so far, through such twentieth- century German and French thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Camus, and Sartre” (128-9). But little further treatment of these figures is offered, except, occasionally, in the footnotes.

Indeed, there is only the briefest mention and quick dismissal of Sinn-analysis among phenomenologists and neo-Kantians: in a discussion of German philosophical accounts of Sinn as influences on Tillich, Cassedy assures us that “[w]e can safely set aside the philosophical genealogy of the concept (it stems from Edmund Husserl and an obscure philosopher named Emil Lask), whose details need not concern us” (122). It’s not clear why this dismissal is “safe.” Why needn’t these details concern us, and in what sense are figures such as Lask too obscure to merit discussion? Given that earlier chapters of the book discuss historical philosophical figures—even less well-known ones such as Hugh of St. Victor (34)—in some depth, the decision to gloss over large swaths of late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth-century philosophical work that would seem relevant for Cassedy’s overall thesis and aims in the book seems to stem more from the whims of the author’s own reading than from any serious scholarly research strategy. It’s as if the robust and highly influential discussions of meaning in the twentieth-century analytic and phenomenological traditions never happened. This omission would be understandable in a book devoted to popular, rather than academic-philosophical conceptions of meaning throughout Western intellectual history, but given its extensive discussions of figures such as Augustine, Berkley, and Kant in earlier chapters, the sudden shift to exclusively popular conceptions of meaning in the twentieth century is quite jarring. Even if Cassedy’s point is to show how meaning in the twentieth century went mainstream, it seems odd for an academic monograph to downplay the persisting deeper academic undercurrents.

I do not doubt that there is much to learn from the way that the term meaning has functioning in the popular American imagination in recent decades. Indeed, I found the treatment of this theme in the last four chapters of the book to be both enjoyable and edifying. But earlier chapters are not limited to the American context, and do not offer extensive accounts of the usage of meaning in the popular imagination of, e.g., the farmer of the Middle Ages or the industrial worker of the nineteenth century. If the “we” in What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning? refers to popular rather than academic culture in the later decades of the twentieth century, it’s not clear why Cassedy addresses it with regard to the latter rather than the former in his treatment of previous centuries.

Cassedy returns to academic (as opposed to popular) work on meaning, to some degree, in Chapter Nine, “Meaning Bridges the Secular and the Sacred.” The chapter focuses primarily on appeals to meaning in the contemporary faith traditions of Catholics, Evangelicals, and Hasidic Jews (171-180), focusing on texts from Popes John Paul II and Francis, evangelical Pastor and popular author Rick Warren, and Rabbi Simon Jacobson, director of the Meaningful Life Center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. As a philosopher and not a theologian or scholar of religions, I will not comment on these discussions, except to note that this chapter provides a nice bookend to the treatment of meaning in medieval theology in Chapter Two, and seems largely interested in exploring the relation between the secular and the sacred for its own sake, rather than primarily as a point of confluence in recent popular discussions of meaning.

Chapter Nine also includes some discussion of Charles Taylor (163-171), including a helpful tracing of Taylor’s diagnosis of contemporary “disenchantment” to the usage of that term in Max Weber’s 1919 “Science as Vocation” (166-168), and brief discussion of Phillip Kitcher’s recent work on secular humanism (169-171). At this point in the book, the reader might expect a return to the focus on philosophical and theological treatments present in the first few historical chapters, but this time from a contemporary academic perspective, and perhaps a more detailed treatment of the relation between the semantic and axiological senses of “meaning” noted above. Surprisingly, however, there is very little detailed treatment of the upswing in recent decades in philosophical literature on the meaning of/in life (e.g., Richard Taylor, Thomas Nagel, John Kekes, Susan Wolf, Terry Eagleton, Thaddeus Metz, John Cottingham, etc.). Metz, Cottingham, and Eagleton are discussed briefly in the introduction, where Cassedy admits that they have written whole books on the concept of meaning and living a meaningful life, but they are quickly dismissed for not offering summary definitions of the word “meaning,” whereas recent popular treatments are discussed at great length, even though the definitions on offer from these sources are often found to be “not helpful” (144, 179) or completely lacking (154, 158, 161, 169).

Throughout the book, Cassedy is laser-focused on definitions of the word “meaning,” and on which words (e.g., “purpose,” “goal,” “value,” “significance”) various authors appear consider synonyms.[3] This is the primary form of evidence given in support of his polyvalence thesis, and perhaps this focus stems naturally from his training and orientation as a scholar of comparative literature. But Cassedy seems to neglect the possibility that—excluding the more popular treatments featured in the final few chapters, in which cases ambiguous usage is perhaps more permissible— “meaning” is not given a simple, easily quotable definition in the works modern philosophical or theological figures not because it is ambiguous but because it is complicated or beyond words.

III.

This is, indeed, a central lesson of twentieth-century phenomenological treatments of meaning. Allow me to dwell on this point in concluding, given the venue of this review. Unlike their analytic counterparts, phenomenologists (especially, e.g., Husserl and Merleau-Ponty),

refused to limit their conceptions of meaning to simple definitions or even to accounts of linguistic meaning. This broader, phenomenological approach to meaning is a central component of the philosophical genealogy of Sinn that Cassedy assures us—as noted above— “we can safely set aside,” and “whose details need not concern us” (122). By refusing to treat meaning exclusively within the confines of a philosophy of language, phenomenologists such as Husserl indeed presage, in an intellectually more rigorous, if necessarily more complicated way, the very move to consider meaning as the antidote to existential crises in the later part of the twentieth century that Cassedy presents in painstaking detail in the second half of the book. What is Husserl’s Crisis, if not a call to recover the level of meaning that belongs originally not to our language or our systems of scientific abstraction but most fundamentally to the lifeworld of everyday experience, the “general ‘ground’ of human world-life” (1970, 155).

For Husserl, it is through the ongoing synthesis of sensory givens arising from individual perspectives that we uncover—and make—law-governed determinations of meaning:

[A]s bearers of ‘sense [Sinn]’ in each phase, as meaning something [Etwas meinende], the perspectives combine in an advancing enrichment of meaning [Sinnbereicherung] and a continuing development of meaning [Sinnfortbildung], such that what no longer appears is still valid as retained and such that the prior meaning which anticipates a continuous flow, the expectation of ‘what is to come,’ is straightaway fulfilled and more closely determined. (1970, 158)

In its focus on the concrete details of lived experience, phenomenology interrogates precisely the point of intersection Cassedy emphasizes in Augustine and later idealism and romanticism between sense (Sinn, sens) as the modality or content of perception (sensation), and sense as the basic unit of meaning or meaningfulness. Without simply equating meaning with sensory givenness, and thus avoiding the dreaded “myth of the given,”[4] phenomenology insists on interrogating their complex and difficult connection. Seen in this light, phenomenology appears to be the ultimate return to the readability of the world, rather than just of the text, if ever there was one!

Indeed, in this light, classical phenomenology can also be interpreted as offering the last great attempt—prior to the hyper-specialization of philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century that made such attempts almost impossible—to theorize the relation between the axiological and semantic or semiotic dimensions of meaning. Meaning pertains both to language and to the value in living a life not simply because our experience is often mediated by language and concepts (though of course it is), but because lived experiences are themselves enactions of meaningfulness and value or “axiological nuance” (Scheler 1973, 18). Human beings are not just language-animals (Taylor 2016), concept-mongerers (Brandom 1994, 8, 620) or meaning-users, but meaning-makers. Our making sense of the world is a necessary component of our life projects. If sense (meaning) were not made, but simply found, our lives could not be meaningful—could not even, ultimately, make sense—for we could have no life projects. This point of connection between the axiological and semantic or semiotic is obscured when we think of meaning-making exclusively via models such as defining, naming, reading, writing or conceptualizing. It becomes much clearer when we include models of meaning-making that more fully reflect our ways of being in the world, such as ritual, dance, or everyday embodied movements like the blind man navigating the world via his cane, which is for him not merely a “sensitive zone” but also the “primary sphere” in which “the sense of all significations [le sens de tout les significations]” is given (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 143-44).

I do not mean to suggest that the phenomenological tradition has definitively explained this connection—I don’t think it has—but it may well be the last major movement in Western philosophy that seriously tried, without defaulting to the comfort of more isolated problems limited to examination in the domain of value theory or the philosophy of language. Cassedy’s neglect of this thread of the history of what we mean when we talk about meaning thus seems to me most regrettable, if perhaps understandable given the enormous ambition and historical scope of the book.

Conclusion

These criticisms aside, What Do We Mean when We Talk About Meaning? is an original, thoughtful, well-written, and wide-ranging examination a theme of major importance both for academic philosophy and for understanding our wider contemporary lifeworld. It should have broad appeal to philosophers, intellectual historians, students of comparative literature, and even theologians and sociologists. It helpfully synthesizes a wide breadth of historical and contemporary sources and is a welcome contribution for all of us interested in the perennial question of the meaning of meaning.

 

Bibliography:

Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment Harvard University Press.

De Santis, Daniele and Danilo Manca, eds. forthcoming. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Series in Continental Thought. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Frege, Gottlob. 1892. «Uber Sinn Und Bedeutung.» Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Philosophische Kritik 100 (1): 25-50.

Grice, Herbert Paul. 1957. «Meaning.» Philosophical Review 66 (3): 377-388.

Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay, edited by Dermot Moran. Paperback ed. Vol. I. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Mill, John Stuart. 1843. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. University of Toronto Press.

Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Harvard University Press.


[1] All parenthetical citations are to the reviewed text unless otherwise noted.

[2] Especially pertinent, given the Cassedy’s titular focus, is Ogden and Richards (1923).

[3] Along related lines, another issue that merits mention—this is not a shortcoming of the book by any means, but a necessary limitation—is that Cassedy’s treatment, while it focuses on historical precursors in a variety of Western languages, is ultimately focused on the English-language word “meaning.” The book is clearly intended primarily for an Anglophone readership, and while there are some helpful treatments of various senses of, for instance, the French sens and the German Bedeutung and Sinn (though, as already noted, no discussion of Frege’s important account, and only passing treatment of Husserl’s), these are offered as part of the historical-genealogical story rather than as standalone treatments of contemporary French and German authors and usages. And there is no comparative treatment of terms similar to meaning (historical or contemporary) in non-Western languages. In this sense, Cassedy’s treatment is necessarily (and, again, excusably) incomplete.

[4] On this important challenge to phenomenological approaches meaning, perception, and knowledge, see especially the essays collected in De Santis and Manca, forthcoming.