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Jacques Derrida: Artaud the Moma

Title: Artaud the Moma
Séries: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts
Author: Jacques Derrida. Edited with an afterword by Kaira M. Cabañas. Translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Editora: Columbia University Press
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Paperback $20.00 £14.99
Páginas: 112

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ARC Centre for History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI European Philosophy & History of Ideas –Deakin University)

This essay reviews a lecture by Jacques Derrida regarding Antonin Artaud. However, we should immediately note that Derrida is not discussing a philosopher or even a philosophical system. Instead, he rhetorically embraces Artaud in Artaud’s own terms, namely, that Artaud is not an artist nor is his work art as conventionally understood. Alternatively expressed, Derrida appears to be engaging in a rhetorical performance in the guise of a lecture as both an homage to Artaud and a provocation of the artistic establishment. Hence, for the vast majority of readers of Phenomenological Reviews, this could well be a problematic starting point for an analysis of Artaud and his late work.

On at least half-a-dozen occasions since the mid-’sixties, Derrida has written or spoken about the confronting avant-garde artist Antonin Artaud. His extended October 1996 lecture at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, translated here by Peggy Kamuf, took place at an exhibition of drawings-and-writing on paper undertaken between 1937 and 1948. These works were grouped sequentially. The first group comprised specifically dated and addressed “Spells” crafted from 1937 which were also clinically regarded as a symptom of Artaud’s severe psychological dislocation. The second group emanated from the Rodez psychiatric hospital between 1943 and 1946 which has since been associated with Artaud’s acute physical pain resulting from repeated electro-convulsive therapy. Finally, MoMA included a series of asymmetrically positioned portraits and self-portraits executed at a private clinic in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, Ivry-sur-Seine, that were exhibited at Galerie Pierre in July 1947. Unfortunately, none of these works are reproduced with the English translation. This is all the more so when, for the 1947 exhibition’s catalogue, Artaud wrote a prose-poem in which he declared:

the human face,

in fact, wears

a perpetual death of sorts

on its face

which it is incumbent on the painter precisely

to save it from

by restoring

its own features

and which Derrida (40ff.) interprets as giving us a clue to Artaud’s vociferous view of the artworld.

Derrida’s originally untitled lecture forms part of Columbia University Press’s monograph series in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts. This series construes philosophy beyond its academic strictures “to embrace forms of discussion” in which the conventions or “rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place.” (ii) Derrida fulfils the series’ goals as, in part, he continues his 1986 essay on Artaud’s conception of le subjectile. There, he also probed the relationship of drawing and writing (“pictograms”) in terms of at least three consequences. The relationship is one where the conventions of language are made extremely problematic; where Artaud’s creative practices are better construed in terms of force rather than form—his piercing and scorching of the material being used is not simply to foreground the material but also the very activity of Artaud himself—and where the deliberate act of employing brute or clumsy techniques intensifies the spectator’s response to the nature of the encounter between artist and medium. Derrida’s Manhattan response to the sheer frenetic, if not contrary, nature of Artaud’s language is at times no less frantic as he explores how Artaud, on the basis of only a few artefacts—notably the July 1947 portrayal of Jany de Ruy—undercuts the aesthetic categories said to be upheld by MoMA, North America’s leading modernist museum. Amongst these institutionally sanctioned categories, Derrida includes artistic originality and techniques as well as artistic history and influences. Derrida also fulfils the goals of the Columbia series in that he explores the aesthetic realm by way of his widely disseminated interpretive strategies of singularity and repetition. Time and again, these are deployed in the lecture, occasionally without providing listeners an overt rationale, possibly because Derrida may have assumed an audience sufficiently acquainted with his linguistic and phenomenological pre-occupations.

Firstly, we shall briefly sketch his polysemous approach enacted from the beginning of his lecture which sets the scene for the lecture as a whole. Next, we shall examine the approach more closely (without resorting to the derogatory tone that has characterised so many Anglophone responses to Derrida’s prolific writings as exemplified by the multiple accusations of J.R. Searle (1983)). Finally, we shall conclude by raising a number of questions that the published lecture leaves unanswered for its readers nowadays.

Unlike the way he questions the underlying, idealised conceptual schemes of past philosophers such as Immanuel Kant or Edmund Husserl, Derrida’s handling of artists as Artaud the Moma rapidly demonstrates is quite different. Whether Franz Kafka or James Joyce, Paul Celan or Francis Ponge to mention but four literary artists whom he had discussed before the 1996 MoMA lecture, his approach is notably distinctive. He particularly focuses upon specific works, specific words, as intensely singular events. Indeed, in an April 1989 interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida elaborates upon the very experience of singularity characteristic of reading (or viewing) modernist artefacts of the twentieth century, including Artaud himself. Although the “‘historical solidarity’ of literature and the history or tradition of metaphysics must be constantly recalled, even if the differences, the distances must be pointed out,” there remains “a task inherent in the experience of reading or writing” which does not “mean that all reading or all writing is historicized.” (1989: 54) What is this experiential, as distinct from historical or metaphysical, task? It is

to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge […] to give oneself to a poetico-performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders […] which do not only change language, or which, in changing language, change more than language. (1989: 55)

When Attridge raises the question of a longstanding claim of “traditional” literary criticism that “it heightens or reveals the uniqueness, the singularity, of the text upon which it comments,” Derrida concedes that a work or oeuvre “takes place just once” and hence “Attention to history, context, and genre is necessitated, and not contradicted, by this singularity” providing we keep in mind “the date and the signature of the work […] which constitute or institute the very body of the work.” (1989: 67-68) Yet, no matter how paradoxically, we also must concede that for a work to

become readable, it has to be divided, to participate and belong […] in the genre, the type, the context, […] the conceptual generality of meaning, etc. It loses itself to offer itself. (1989: 68)

To that extent, singularity is “deferred”

to be what it is and to be repeated in its very singularity. There would be no reading of the work—nor any writing to start with—without this iterability [….] And any work is singular in that it speaks singularly of both singularity and generality. (1989: 68)

For this reason, we encounter such assertions in the Manhattan lecture as an artwork “is archivable because iterable, in the museum and in the history of art”; in fact, in all those institutions “which the work attacks.” (45) However, Derrida continues, “for there to be iterability” or repetition, there must also be “the singular event of […] its indisputable occurrence.” (45)

Against this apparently paradoxical background, let us now return to the very opening of Artaud the Moma. Derrida immediately intones the question inscribed vertically adjacent to the pastel blue bordering the pencilled full-face portrait of Jany de Ruy, dated on a Wednesday, the 2nd July 1947, in Ivry-sur-Seine:

And who

today

will say

what? (1)

Derrida seizes upon the fact that we are not simply encountering a “rhetorical question”; rather, it is one he is “miming” and “relaunching,” “framing” and “immobilizing,” if not ultimately “pretending to install […] today” (1)—Thursday evening, the 10th October 1996, in an exhibition at MoMA. In short, any of us can “decipher right here […] this mute interrogation that, in effect, says nothing at all: neither who nor what.” (2) By such means, his audience is thrust into the realm of the deictic utterance and whether or not it can be understood by virtue of the meanings of words or of its actual context, if not both. Derrida’s reply is one captured earlier by one similarly albeit sceptically wrestling with phenomenological issues, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein comments about the deictic utterance, “After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before,” as follows:

Do I understand this sentence? Do I understand it just as I would if I heard it in the course of a report? If I stood alone, I’d say I don’t know what it’s about. But all the same, I’d know how this sentence might perhaps be used; I could even invent a context for it.

(A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in all directions.) (1945: § 525)

After pursuing the analogy of understanding the meaning of an utterance with that of understanding a musical theme, Wittgenstein ends:

Hearing a word as having this meaning. How curious that there should be such a thing!

Phrased like this, emphasized like this, heard in this way, this sentence is the beginning of a transition to these sentences, pictures, actions.

(A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in all directions.) (1945: §534)

In sum, Derrida, continuing to draw upon other instances of word meanings throughout the lecture—for instance, le coup, la foudre, and le mômo—each with an indefinite number of associations and contexts, pithily declares: “This work is not exhausted in a discourse.” (56)

Consequently, the portrait of Jany de Ruy “overruns” Derrida’s own discourse. (56) It does so because, on the one hand, “it gives itself its own body one single and unique time in an event that is both irreplaceable and serial,” and, on the other hand, the “event, at the moment of signing, recognizes no soothing status for itself, no assured stability: neither as a drawing […] nor as work of art in the tradition of a history of art or […] the culture of a museographic canonization.” (56)

At this juncture, Derrida re-assembles Artaud’s vertically inscribed question (quoted above) to ask his audience, “Where are we today? […] This evening?” before responding on its behalf with:

We are within the walls of a MoMA. What is a MoMA? What does museum of modern Art mean? In this very place, who would take place? To say what?” (56)

Shifting the onus from artefact to institution, Derrida abjures any attempt to define visual art (or artists) by its (or their) empirical or concrete properties, let alone abstract or metaphysical ones. Gleaned from his comments about Artaud throughout the lecture, it is apparent that for Derrida there is no work of art in general except when those institutions—galleries, schools, museums—insist on grouping individual works together and, one might add, the spatio-temporal manner by which they are best viewed. Nor can institutional efforts to distinguish between stylistic forms and represented content hold with any clarity or certainty: content can no more be abstracted from style than a representation from what is represented. Oddly, Derrida pays no attention to institutional definitions of art, against which Artaud constantly rails, in terms of the horns of a dilemma first pinpointed by Richard Wollheim (1980: 160-164). If, for example, those conferring artistic status—be they critics, teachers, or scholars—have good reason for taking some object to be an artistic work, then all that these institutional representatives have done is to confirm a status already had before their act of conferral and so they can dispense with the need to define artistic works in institutional terms. If, by contrast, those conferring artistic status were ultimately to deny that a good reason is ever needed or could be articulated for taking some object to be an artistic work, then the very point or value of attributing the status of art to anything appears to be quite arbitrary and hence any institutional definition would fail to provide us with a necessary criterion in the first place.

So, how are we to experience, to understand, Artaud’s work if institutional interpretations are illusory? One will fail to understand, declares Derrida,

if one does not hear his voice, if one does not attune oneself to the tempo of his letters and the rhythm of his words beyond coded language, beyond its grammar and its instituted semantics. (57)

Imbued with Artaud’s April 1947 text, “Ten years since language left,” Derrida excerpts the following:

How?

By a blow…

antidialectical

of the tongue

by my black pencil pressing

and that’s all. (22; cf. 1986: 113 & 121)

These words epitomise the sheer force of Artaud’s drawings and their capacity for

transforming the aesthete’s body, [for] changing these transient guests who, having come as visitors or voyeurs into a museum, would claim to be mere spectators. Woe to these contemplators and consumers of images. (60)

Understanding Artaud also requires “a slow, careful, inflamed, vocalized reading” of all his contemporaneous texts “preceded by subtle and audacious protocols of interpretation.” (63) Indeed, continues Derrida, “without the experience of these texts, without meditation on these protocols, without recasting everything from top to bottom,” both bodily and cognitively, we shall fail to experience the drawings and, at best, will merely “indulge in some aesthetic tourism.” (67)

Having now sampled some pivotal passages of the Manhattan lecture, how, for readers nowadays, does Derrida himself understand Artaud’s drawings, especially in 1947 when Artaud re-iterates his protest against any suggestion that his portraits and self-portraits are skilfully “academic” and have not truly broken from “those great figures in the history of art” be their work figurative or non-figurative? (37 & 42) Accepting Artaud at his word, Derrida admits that there is one exception, “only one avowed figure of a legitimate and legitimating ancestor,” namely Vincent van Gogh. (43). However, unlike his essay on Artaud’s conception of le subjectile (1986: 96ff.), Derrida stops short of explicitly delving into Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society. In it, Artaud asks of someone he regards as “great a writer as he was a painter”:

What is the use of describing a painting by van Gogh! No description attempted by anyone else could be worth the simple alignment of natural objects and hues to which van Gogh gives himself, (1947: 498)

and consequently concludes:

So I shall not describe a painting of van Gogh after van Gogh [upon citing his letters such as those of the 8th September 1888 and the 23rd July 1890], but I shall say that van Gogh is a painter because he recollected nature, because he reperspired it and made it sweat, because he squeezed onto his canvases in clusters, in monumental sheaves of color, the grinding of elements that occurs once in a hundred years, the awful elementary pressure of apostrophes, scratches, commas, and dashes which, after him, one can no longer believe that natural appearances are not made of.

And what an onslaught of repressed jostlings, ocular collisions taken from life, blinkings taken from nature, have the luminous currents of the forces which work on reality had to reverse before being finally driven together and, as it were, hoisted onto the canvas, and accepted?

There are no ghosts in the paintings of van Gogh, no visions, no hallucinations. (1947: 499)

In van Gogh, Artaud finds a painter only “and nothing more.” (1947: 502) In other words, there is “no philosophy, no mysticism, no ritual, no psychurgy or liturgy” to seek on canvas; indeed, “no history, no literature, or poetry.” (1947: 502) By such logic, understanding is re-directed:

These sunflowers of bronzed gold are painted; they are painted as sunflowers and nothing more, but in order to understand a sunflower in nature, one must go back to van Gogh, just as in order to understand a storm in nature,

stormy sky,

a field in nature […] (1947: 502-503)

To attend to van Gogh’s work itself is to attend to the actualities of his medium:

Painter, nothing but a painter, van Gogh adopted the techniques of pure painting and never went beyond them.

I mean that in order to paint he never went beyond the means that painting offered him. (1947: 503)

By quoting Artaud liberally, we have attempted to elicit the degree to which Artaud’s encounter with van Gogh above often parallels Derrida’s with Artaud. More bluntly expressed, does Artaud’s rationale for avoiding descriptions of van Gogh’s work exhibited at the Orangerie in Paris between January and March 1947 function as a precursor for Derrida’s similar avoidance with respect to Artaud’s works exhibited at MoMA between October 1996 and January 1997? Or, as a way of disputing Derrida’s reliance upon Artaud here, are readers meant to presume that Derrida’s lecture is a manifestation of what he had long held about the nature of rhetorical acts which include acts of describing and hypothesizing, evaluating and observing? For example, in his 1974 essay on Stéphane Mallarmé, Derrida succinctly claims that rhetoric contains a “hidden philosophy,” one exclusively tied to “the meaning of a text” or “its content.” (1974: 113) What rhetoric fails to do is “deal with signifying forms (whether phonic or graphic) or with the effects of syntax, at least as far as semantic control does not dominate them.” (1974: 114) Hence, for rhetoric or any act of description “to have something to see or to do before a text, a meaning has to be determinable.” (1974: 114) Not unlike Mallarmé’s texts, it may be counter-argued, Artaud’s texts for Derrida seem to be organised such that meaning remains indeterminate (“undecidable”) at which point “the signifier no longer lets itself be traversed, it remains, resists, exists and draws attention to itself.” (1974: 114)

It is scarcely controversial to say that the Manhattan lecture is far more focused on the writing accompanying and within Artaud’s hybrid work on paper. Yet, curiously, Derrida makes no mention of the fact that the full-face portrait of Jany de Ruy (amongst many others at the time) is a double portrait; it has Artaud’s portrait embedded within it. What does such an omission indicate? More particularly, what does it imply about the role Derrida has assigned to his audience, to those fulfilling the role of spectators (cf. 14, 33) or witnesses and, for that matter, to himself?

To begin with the latter, the lecture closes on what at first appears to be a confession. Referring to the months before the lecture, Derrida talks of being taken to court and put on trial by Artaud as both plaintiff and prosecutor in a scene incessantly, if not obsessively, in which Derrida hears Artaud’s voice: “I see nothing, I see no one, but I hear him,” Artaud, who “cries out at me.” (71) Haunted by the return of Artaud-Mômo on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, not as a “visible apparition” at MoMA, but as the ghost of his voice which, “by sacred mission or commission, it would be my job to play at guarding for a moment, the bodyguard, right here, of a voice from beyond-the-grave.” (71-72) Next, after capturing the voices of the dead Paule Thévenin (to whom the lecture is dedicated (26)) and Antonin Artaud (whose voice recorded in November 1947 for his radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God prefaces and concludes the lecture), Derrida qualifies his role: “The bodyguard of Artaud’s voice—which I am not and do not wish to be but which I have perhaps acted for once—sees nothing but he lends an ear.” (74)

What are we to make of this tale and its bearing, not upon the concept of the artist or maker, but upon the equally crucial concept of spectator or witness of the visual arts? To what extent is Derrida enacting the stance taken six years earlier in the 1990 catalogue, presented in the form of a dialogue, for an exhibition at the Louvre of drawings he selected? There, he postulates:

In fact, a witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception. The witness cannot see, show, and speak at the same time […] No authentification can show in the present what the most reliable of witnesses […] has seen and now keeps in memory. (1990: 104)

On the one hand, does this proposal resonate with his longstanding objection to any phenomenological commitment to direct perception, especially visual perception, as the means of garnering experiential facts or truths? After all, Derrida implies, no witness can retrospectively demonstrate through his or her perceptual modality (whether helped or not by electronic prostheses) what event or phenomenon is to be witnessed. Does the above proposal, at the same time, bolster his belief in the efficacy, no matter how contingently or momentarily, of writing and drawing to mediate and ultimately transform experience? On the other hand, does this conception of witnessing—whether his own or his audience’s—exonerate, as it were, not recognising or seeing the full-face portrait of Jany de Ruy as a double portrait? Again, is the witness’s shift from the visual to the rhetorical, to narrative discourse, consistent with Derrida’s underlying appeal to the vocally performative “something vision alone would be incapable of”? (1990: 122) Finally, there appear to be other aspects of the role of witness Derrida neglects. His conception of narrative associated with the role of the witness leaves open whether it accommodates both the temporal and the evaluative dimensions of narrative or remains limited to the temporal alone? Nor does his notion of witness take account of circumstances where sighting an event and avowals of its occurrence take place simultaneously in such cases as witnessing signatures. Moreover, there are also cases of spectators or witnesses viewing an event or phenomenon whilst simultaneously verbalising a running commentary about it in speech directed at others (or at self) as exemplified by sports commentators or gallery guides.

As stated at the onset of this review, Derrida’s lecture seems to be a problematic starting point for an actual analysis of Artaud and his late work. Ultimately, for readers less familiar with the visual arts and with Derrida’s approach to them (designated as “a poetico-performativity” (1989: 55)), perhaps there is something to be said for Mary Ann Caws’ prefatory observation to her translation of Derrida (1986). There, she notes, the text might be better read “like a musical score” as Artaud would say of his own writing and, as Derrida remarked about his selection of works from Artaud, he “won’t be describing any paintings” let alone their development. (1986: xii)

Thanks are particularly owed to musician and composer Elissa Goodrich for alerting me to issues raised by performance theory.

References

Artaud, Antonin. 1947. Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society. In Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag; translated by Helen Weaver, 483-512. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Attridge, Derek. 1989. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge; translated by Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, 33-75. New York & London: Routledge, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. 1974. “Mallarmé.” In Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge; translated by Christine Roulston, 110-126. New York & London: Routledge, 1992.

————-1986. “To Unsense the Subjectile.” In Jacques Derrida & Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Abridged translation by M.A. Caws, 61-157. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

————-1990. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

————–1996. Artaud the Moma: Interjections of Appeal. Edited by K.M. Cabañas; translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Searle, J.R. 1983. “The Word Turned Upside Down.” The New York Review of Books 30(16): 74-79.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1945. 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.

Wollheim, R.A. 1980. “The Institutional Theory of Art.” In Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays, 2nd edn., 157-166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bruce B. Janz (Ed.): Place, Space and Hermeneutics

Place, Space and Hermeneutics Book Cover

Title: Place, Space and Hermeneutics
Séries: Series: Contributions to Hermeneutics, Vol. 5
Author: Bruce B. Janz (Ed.)
Editora: Springer
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Hardback 139,09 €
Páginas: XXIV, 531

Reviewed by: Sanna Lehtinen (University of Helsinki)

Place, Space and Hermeneutics is an extensive compilation of articles that cover a wide spectrum of hermeneutical approaches to understanding place and space. It is the 5^th volume in Contributions to Hermeneutics series and comprises 37 individual chapters. Hermeneutics is understood quite loosely through philosophical and non-philosophical definitions of it. This is explicitly done in order to avoid diminishing its possibilities: the emphasis is on making visible the richness of current hermeneutical thinking and show new directions and application possibilities for it. Hermeneutics is presented as an umbrella term for a set of methods and perspectives to interpretation that will, and already have proved, to be useful for understanding place and space. How exactly do the fundamental hermeneutic tasks of understanding and interpreting help in making sense of the human relation to space and place? Hermeneutics of place is approached through various very different cases: from imaginary places to embodied experience and from textuality to particular places on the Earth, the specific position of hermeneutics for understanding the human relation to place is shown to be undisputed. One obvious meta-question central to the collection of articles is, what kind of interpretations hermeneutics itself elicits from its authors.

One of the more fundamental themes for an anthology with this type of a theme is the spatial nature of the very situatedness of human beings (v). The interweaving of the ontological and epistemological approaches within hermeneutics is done to a convenient extent: as Jeff Malpas writes in his foreword, the emphasis of the book has been on depicting the hermeneutical engagement with the topics at hand, instead of making a dedication specifically to hermeneutical philosophy (vii). This proves that the approach stays open and close to the topics it is attempting to cover. Another more fundamental question deals with the mechanisms of how place and space contribute to the constitution of the human subjectivity and embodied experience of space. This is a topic that Shaun Gallagher, Sergio F. Martínez, and Melina Gastelum examine more closely in their joint article. The baseline, in a sense, for any hermeneutical relation to the world, comes from understanding how the lived body relates to the world it is by necessity bound to. Understanding the body as it is lived as opposed the ‘corporeal body’ (Körper) brings forth the bodily ramifications for any engagement with place. Kevin Aho takes up this distinction in his contribution and develops the theme of a hermeneutic understanding of the ‘lived-body’ (Leib).

While the application of hermeneutics to place is not new as such, attention has been paid in the book to developing hermeneutic philosophy also towards future needs and purposes. A lot of emphasis is put, quite understandably, on the notion of place. Space is not necessarily discussed to the same extent as place due to the rich, already existing phenomenological tradition concentrating on interpreting place. Space is most often treated in relation to either place or time: direct approaches and experiential perspectives to spatiality become exposed in glimpses. These reflections open up new paths and clarify old conceptions of hermeneutics. It seems clear, that future research will be able to build on the preconception that time and temporality are complemented with place and space within the hermeneutic tradition. The collection makes visible the myriad ways in which hermeneutic philosophy and phenomenology are intertwined and also where their ways part. In this, Ricoeur’s distinction between epistemological (Dilthey) and ontological approaches (Heidegger) to hermeneutics has traditionally worked as a useful compass (116). However, the multiplicity of voices is present throughout the book: in a compilation this vast, no one thinker manages to override others in balancing “the opposing pulls of space and place” (275).

The volume introduces the reader to the internal variation within contemporary hermeneutic thinking. The book is divided into three larger parts: “Elements of Place, Space and Hermeneutics”, “Figures and Thinkers” and “Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Spaces of the Hermeneutics of Place and Space”. The importance of a comprehensive account of hermeneutical methodologies applied to place is also highlighted directly by many of the contributors, since, for example according to Christina M. Gschwandtner: “place is always interpreted. There is no objective, neutral, or “pure” place.” (170). Place as such calls for an interpretation as it demarcates an already existing, culturally and historically tinged engagement with space.

The first part, “Elements of Place, Space and Hermeneutics”., consists of nine individual articles examining basic questions of hermeneutics as an approach to place and space. Some do it on a more general level, but others have already a specifically chosen point of view to present. Textuality is presented as a central perspective in Bruce B. Janz’ account, the first of many dealing with this specifically central theme. Annike Schlitte takes up narrative, whereas dialogue is presented as the main topic in Kyoo Lee’s contribution. The choice of focus on textuality in the beginning is well justified by the history of hermeneutical tradition and ideas to which it is still associated with most strongly. The textual model for interpretation is a valid starting point for many of the subsequent ventures as well. The textuality-based themes discussed in the first part serve well also the interpretation of the rest of the book. While text interpretation continues to be central point of orientation for any hermeneutic approach, other interesting themes in the first part of the collection are covered by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s article on the notion of play (Gadamerian Spiel) and style and Dylan Trigg’s phenomenological take on the differences between place and non-place, that builds on the legacy of both Marc Augé and Edward Relph.

Text as a metaphor for place together with other metaphors is examined since both textuality and place are core concepts in hermeneutics (26). The relation of places to memory is also evoked (171). Different narratives turn spaces into shared places, even fictitious or dreamed spaces (Cristina Chimisso on Gaston Bachelard). The theory and practice of art is also present to some extent (Babette Babich on Merleau-Ponty and Keith Harder on place-specific artistic practices). It goes without saying, that architecture is also present in this context. Interestingly enough, stairwells and stairs prove to be important architectural elements discussed as examples in both articles that are directly focusing on architecture: Jean-Claude Gens writing about Gadamer and David Seamon focusing on the architectural language of Thomas Thiis-Evensen.

The second part is titled concisely “Figures and Thinkers” and it delves deeper into the general theme by presenting central figures for contemporary hermeneutic approach to place and space in its 12 chapters. Diverse and indispensable philosophers from Heidegger to Ricoeur or Gadamer to Malpas receive direct attention, the whole list of figures being too extensive to go through here in detail. Space is also dedicated to thinkers less directly associated with hermeneutical tradition: these include Arendt and Foucault. Some names come altogether outside the philosophical canon, such are for example Yi-Fu Tuan and J. J. Gibson, to name a few. All of these thinkers have a slightly different type of relation to hermeneutics and specifically to examining place and space. Some are closer to what could be characterized as the core of the approach and others have had a less direct influence on the unfolding the interpretational themes related to place and space. The thinkers in this part represent many traditions from ontological hermeneutics to human geography. Despite the seemingly wide variety between figures and approaches, there is unforeseeable value in bringing them together under the same title in this context.

The legacy of some prominent thinkers who have been previously considered to be at the margins of hermeneutical tradition, is rewritten from the perspective of inclusive, multidisciplinary hermeneutics. An example of this, Yi-Fu Tuan, is noted in Paul C. Adams’ chapter to explicitly avoid any methodology. However, in his approach closely following some of the central parameters of hermeneutic thinking: empathy and interest towards a vast variety of human experiences and advancing thought through contrasts in circular motion. Other thinkers would seem to resist the stamp of hermeneutics more but are still depicted in this account as bearing some connection to the current forms of hermeneutics of place and space. Henri Lefebvre, for example, is traditionally seen to be very far from any version of hermeneutics but according to Peter Gratton’s reading of his work, Lefebvre’s projects on spatiality are affect also any subsequent hermeneutical account of the themes of place or space. This selection of articles show also, how hermeneutic approach to place can get significant depth and reinforcement from Arendtian multi-perspectivism, Foucauldian discourse analysis or Gibsonian ecological psychology. Also, the more sceptical attitudes towards methodologies in general are given a place, as the articles on Bachelard, Arendt and Tuan pay attention to show.

Hermeneutics is often used to refer to the conscious development of a specific methodology, but the term also denotes a general, even a more intuitive attempt to understand the constituents of particular human actions. The volume at hand makes explicit the inevitable distinction between hermeneutics as a philosophical program (Malpas & Gander 2014) and hermeneutics as a set of interpretation tools applicable to varying topics. An overview of hermeneutics to place and space is created thus by showing the strengths of these approaches in relation to the main topics of interest here: what types of interpretations do human actions and their spatial dispersions elicit and enable? Understanding human actions and practices, their meanings and intentionality behind them, is at the centre throughout the collection, even though interpretative efforts are directed towards more particular aims in each individual contribution. The human relation to place and space and the forms it gets, opens up the discussion to many directions. This serves as a reminder of the vast terrain of possible subthemes in any variety of hermeneutics of place and space. Besides direct engagement, hermeneutics is used also to interpret the many traces left by human activity. It is easy to see great value in this type of an approach, and hermeneutics in this form could profit even more the ongoing discussions about such complex and large-scale issues as climate change and urbanization. This has already been shown by a growing interest towards environmental hermeneutics that precedes this publication (see e.g. Treanor & al. 2013). This is also precisely where the anthology proceeds towards its end.

The third, last and understandably the largest part of the book is dedicated to “Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Spaces of the Hermeneutics of Place and Space”. As one strand of the final part, the topical planetary level problems that are increasingly seeping into our everyday consciousness are taken into closer consideration. The broad concepts discussed in the chapter include the Anthropocene (Janz) and climate crisis (Edward Casey). Environmental and ecological thinking is present more broadly also already in Gschwandtner’s application of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to place. Janet Donohoe gives environmental hermeneutics a more detailed account as she focuses on the concept of the environment and what this environment in peril is in relation to the human culture and the significant places in our lives. This type of an approach is a welcome reminder, of how environmental philosophy can profit from taking hermeneutics into account in comprehending the current complex environmental threats and the relation to the human lifeworlds.

From environmental perspective, it is also relevant to think about how to draw interpretation about the events that take place on a planetary scale. How does the need for space of the human population affect the living conditions of other species on Earth? What type of knowledge and engagement do these types of questions entail? These questions raised by the currently prevailing ecological concerns show, that the need to reflect, understand and interpret these tendencies and the human responsibilities is more crucial than ever. The human capacity for collectively organizing its living conditions according to the afforded space is not unique, by any means. What we are capable though, is the conceptual thinking and long-term planning in relation to how human spaces are created, developed and used. This type of long-term, temporally evolving engagement is what hermeneutics is also well-equipped to illustrate.

The final part of the book consisting of 15 chapters in total, gives an overview of the interdisciplinary relations in which hermeneutics has proven to be particularly fruitful. The clear intention of this part is also to widen the possibilities of use and show new directions for developing hermeutics of place and space. Among various newer or less-studied interdisciplinary constellations presented here are for example topopoetics, which according to Tim Cresswell is “a project that sees poems as places and spaces” (319). This part of the book, intended to be “exploratory and creative”, stretches further ground for new hermeneutical approaches (4). Paths point towards the possible multidisciplinary futures of hermeneutics of place and space: hermeneutics as inherently directed towards exploration of inner meanings encourages these interdisciplinary approaches. This becomes apparent by some chapters of the final part: they rely strongly on the tradition of their specific field but show how hermeneutics has successfully been implemented into their approach to place or space. Thomas Dörfler and Eberhard Rothfuß, for example, have human geography as their starting point. In the same vein, Pauline McKenzie Aucoin has anthropological and Eva-Maria Simms psychological focuses in their contributions. Making visible these intersections with fields of study that grew in importance during 20^th century, point towards the scale of possible uses for hermeneutical concepts and methods.

One pivotal strand in the book focuses on how hermeneutics could help in understanding urban life in its current forms and settings. Urbanization is a complex phenomenon that a collection with a focus such as this cannot omit. Yet it can be approached from many different directions even in this context and it follows that there are various more or less direct references to urban hermeneutics: Alan Blum and Andy Zieleniec, for example, take each in their own article into focus the urban social sphere in order to show how hermeneutics has already been applied and could be developed further within the sphere of social sciences. Zieleniec, for example, brings together Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre in order to draw a specifically sociological approach to space and spatiality within the urban sphere. The meanings and values that space and spatiality get through everyday urban activities is in the focus when going through the influence these thinkers have had on sociological study of urban environments. Hermeneutic approach definitely has a lot to offer to the philosophical understanding of different facets of urban life. In this context, the subtheme of mobility could have easily been added in a separate article: moving in any given space necessarily alters the starting point for interpretive engagement. Mobility is present in some parts though, as in Cresswell’s account of poetry (327) or when Zieleniec writes about Simmel and Benjamin (384–385; 387).

The social aspects of hermeneutic philosophy include the shared nature of place, intersubjectivity of spatial experiences and spatial or platial interpretations of social situations. Also presented are the themes of globalisation (Gratton) and inequality (Abraham Olivier on townships in the opening article of the collection), to which philosophically solid accounts are urgently needed. Towards its end, the book presents in separate articles some currently important but also exceedingly wide themes. The questions pertaining to the digital realm, for example, are opened up by Golfo Maggini’s article on digital virtual places. He presents the digital places stemming from ubiquitous computing as heterotopic places of radical alterity. This reading … It would certainly be interesting to read more about this type of an approach to digital and virtual environments, where hermeneutics can significantly widen the interpretational context.

Crucial contributions in the last part of the book are the openings towards feminist and racial approaches to hermeneutics of place and space. Janet C. Wesselius charts feminist philosophy through its already existing approaches to situatedness. She takes into examination the notion of “a woman’s place”, in particular. The perspective of philosophy of race comes through Robert Bernasconi’s article where he dissects institutional racism as a historico-spatial construct. In the final article of the volume, the reader is also given a glimpse of the non-western perspectives to hermeneutics of space and place. This is done by On-cho Ng’s critical treatment of the limits and tensions following from applying local knowledge to interpreting phenomena elsewhere: in this case from how Western hermeneutics collides with Chinese traditions of interpretation. This part of the book scratches the surface of a fascinating discussion that will hopefully continue to flourish. Due to the fact that racial, feminist, queer, non-western or multicultural approaches are by no means marginal anymore, they definitely could intersect already earlier with the main themes of the book in order to be better taken into consideration as parts of the multitude of interpretational horizons.

Throughout the entire collection, the list of actual places used as examples opens up a vast spectrum of different place typologies. They include traditionally valued culturally and historically significant places, such as the UNESCO World Heritage Site Meteora in Greece (in Bahar Aktuna & Charlie Hailey’s article) or more generic forms of human spatial traits such as urban hiking trails (in Simms’ example). Walmart chain store (in Trigg’s account) comes to represent a quintessential non-place of the contemporary Western society. Importantly, also places of human despair that should be an exception in the story of any civilisation, such as German refugee camps (in Dörfler and Rothfuß’s article), are included in order to critically examine their non-place qualities. These and other concrete and sometimes even surprising examples fix reader’s attention effectively and punctuate the varied theoretical accounts on place.

The book opens up to two directions that are by no means antithetical but support each other: what are the implications of hermeneutics of place and space on studying different types of phenomena and, on the other hand, what are the direct consequences on the philosophical discourse of more explicitly emphasizing this connection and approach. All in all, there is surprisingly little redundant repetition (or wasted space, one is tempted to say in this context), even when different authors discuss the same thinkers or concepts. It is also a notable feat that the collection is accessible to readers who do not have an extensive knowledge of the hermeneutical tradition. The strengths of this volume are in its wide-ranging scope, the way it presents on-going discussions and includes less heard voices to the canon of hermeneutical approaches. By emphasizing hermeneutics as an inherently open and engaged approach, it encourages any subsequent exploration on human spatiality through this lens. This strong engagement at the core is thus also the legacy of hermeneutics outside the immediate sphere of philosophy.

Care has been put on selecting the themes and writers, at the same time giving them the freedom to approach the topic from an individually selected point of view: “This book is more curated than edited.” (2) This has resulted in a coherent and intellectually rewarding piece of philosophical literature. Janz as the editor clarifies in the introduction, that the idea has not been to cover every aspect of the wide topic but to offer enough for the discussion to continue with renewed energy (2–3). As a result, the collection will inevitably have influence in shaping and directing the contemporary understanding of what hermeneutics is and what it could be. It is also stated explicitly in the introduction that the collection is not intended to be a handbook on hermeneutics and place and space (4). However, this does not mean that it will not, or should not, be used as such. On the contrary, it is easy to see that this selection of texts can open the tradition of hermeneutics to students, scholars and other curious minds, even if they do not have philosophy as their main interest. The collection is an indispensable reference to researchers working on a variety of different topics and approaches within philosophy of space and place as well as more applied approaches circling these themes. It is a valuable contribution to hermeneutic literature as well as to place/space research and the many imaginable intersections between these.

Literature

Malpas, Jeff & Ganders, Hans-Helmut (Eds.) 2014. The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics. London & New York: Routledge.

Treanor, Brian, Drenthen, Martin, Utsler, David & Clingerman, Forrest (Eds.) 2013. Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press.

Hans Blumenberg: Théorie de l’inconceptualité

Title: Théorie de l'inconceptualité
Séries: Philosophie imaginaire
Author: Hans Blumenberg. Traduit de l’allemand par Marc de Launay
Editora: Éditions de l’éclat
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Paperback 15,00 €
Páginas: 144

Reviewed by: Sonja Feger (Universität Koblenz · Landau)

Recent years have seen several new translations of books and shorter works by Hans Blumenberg into English and French, and an English edition with Blumenberg’s most important shorter writings is forthcoming [1]. The French translation under review here, published in 2017, is further evidence of this growing interest in Blumenberg’s work.

Blumenberg’s previously unpublished text Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit was first edited in its German original by Anselm Haverkamp in 2007. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (Theory of Nonconceptuality) borrows its title—and so does the French translation by Marc de Launay—from a 1975 summer term lecture Blumenberg gave in Münster. This short text is of particular interest, as it relates several themes within Blumenberg’s thinking in a rather condensed way.

The main text (7–108) consists in the edition of those typescripts Blumenberg based his lecture upon (see 128) and is followed by an appendix entitled “Bruchstücke des ‘Ausblicks auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit’” (Perspective sur une théorie de l’inconceptualité; 109–125)[2]. A translation of the editor’s postface completes the volume (127–131). Théorie de l’inconceptualité most of the time does without headings or subheadings; only an excursion on ‘economy and luxury’ (19–26) and a revised passage on ‘negation’ serving as a transition (89–91) fall under headings. Instead, larger sections are simply divided by page breaks. As the editor remarks, Blumenberg presents his observations giving examples with varying levels of complexity, and often does so without guiding his listeners or readers to a conclusion (des exemples de complexions diverses—souvent sans déboucher sur une conclusion; 131). By refusing to add any new headings or divide Blumenberg’s work into sections, the editor succeeds in carefully preserving and communicating the original character of the typescript, which is between the tone of a lecture and a written text. Because all Blumenberg’s texts stylistically dense they present a challenge to the reader, and this text is no different. If one expects an easy-to-read introduction to his works, one will not find it in this booklet. Nonetheless, the themes discussed are at the heart of Blumenberg’s phenomenological project and are well worth the effort.

To begin with, it is difficult to judge what exactly the book is about. Here is my proposal: one might say that the text as a whole bundles varieties of human ways to deal with reality. More specifically, in Théorie de l’inconceptualité, Blumenberg primary focus is upon the epistemic operations humans are capable of. Specifically, he is interested in one particular way for humans to engage with reality, namely in the act of theorizing—or, to put it in phenomenological terms, the act of distancing oneself from one’s object of consideration by adopting a theoretical attitude.

Théorie de l’inconceptualité may be regarded as a text about ‘theory’ in a twofold or two-layered way. First, Blumenberg addresses various epistemic operations humans are capable of, focusing on the role of conceptual thinking (or its lack) in cognition. In his attempt to describe the structure of conceptual thinking and to ascribe to it the role it plays in cognition, Blumenberg scrutinizes the various forms the act of theorizing can take.. Secondly, Théorie de l’inconceptualité is itself a theoretical work. This does not so much amount to opposing theoretical and practical philosophy to one another, for Blumenberg himself does use practical examples (though in a broad sense) as much as he draws from epistemological observations and concepts. Rather, Blumenberg considers the ability to take on a theoretical attitude as something we do and perform; for him, it is a distinguished, an essentially human one. In short, Blumenberg addresses theory as one of the human ways to engage with reality from a precisely theoretical point of view. In other words, theory is taken both as a method and as the object in question; that is, theory itself becomes the very object of Blumenberg’s theoretical interest. In this sense, the above-mentioned two-layered approach to be found in the text emerges with Blumenberg playing on the reduplication of theory.

As a first step in this review, I want to discuss Blumenberg’s proposal for a notion of conceptual thinking. Secondly, I will link conceptual thinking to the theoretical attitude humans can assume. Then, I will turn to consider Blumenberg’s attempts to delimit conceptual thinking and nonconceptuality and his anthropological observations. By way of conclusion, I will touch upon the connection between the anthropological and the epistemological dimension found in Théorie de l’inconceptualité. It goes without saying that I cannot consider every aspect the text touches upon. Other topics within the wide range of Blumenberg’s observations such as aesthetics, the concept of the lifeworld, happiness, metaphors, the epistemic operation of negation or the anthropological function of prevention must remain largely uncommented upon here.

Conceptual thinking

Contrary to what the title of the book suggests, the text does not start out by shedding light on what is to be understood by the term of ‘nonconceptuality’. Rather, Blumenberg’s text first lays its focus on conceptual thinking. However, rather than aiming at a (precise) definition of either of the two, Théorie de l’inconceptualité raises the question of how those two different ways of dealing with reality might refer to each other and, moreover, refer to theory in general. The reader expecting to be given a precise definition of at least one of the two terms will be deceived.

The fact that the text lacks a precise definition of conceptual thinking does not mean that Blumenberg does without spelling out crucial aspects he ascribes to conceptual thinking. For him, two features are to be found at the core of conceptual thinking: first, conceptual thinking has something to do with the phenomenon of absence (Le concept a un certain rapport avec l’absence de son objet; 7). For example, imagine the groceries you have run out of, which are therefore absent, and which you (mentally) represent when writing a shopping list. For Blumenberg, what one does in this case is use conceptual thinking in order to re‑present that which is not tangibly accessible (le concept seul demeure, qui, de son côté, représente toute l’échelle de ce qui est sensoriellement accessible; 7).

Blumenberg’s own example of the representation of an absent object in conceptual thinking, however, is more specific than my example of a shopping list. It consists in referring to a primal scene of anthropogenesis, namely the construction of a trap. A trap layer has to adjust his construction in shape and size to the animal he hopes to catch eventually. For example, setting a trap adequate for catching a mammoth requires nothing more than calling into presence that very mammoth which is absent the moment the trap is being set. Having a concept of a mammoth thus means to determine it as the expected prey, that is, to determine the trap in shape and size. In Blumenberg’s view, what the trap layer accomplishes is a conceptualization of an absent object. Or, to put it in phenomenological terms: laying a trap involves knowing an eidos and acting upon that knowledge. What Blumenberg’s example emphasizes, however, is that being able to use concepts is an achievement in (human) evolutionary history, implicitly assuming a historical constitution of transcendental (inter‑) subjectivity.

The second aspect Blumenberg locates within the realm of conceptual thinking is closely linked to the above-mentioned phenomenon of absence and concerns the phenomenon of distance (see 7; 10). Laying a trap directs one’s actions towards objects or events not immediately given but distanced in space and time: a mammoth shall not be caught right now and here but perhaps tomorrow and over there. In this regard, concepts are like tools humans use to act over a distance, they are the means of an actio per distans (12). For Blumenberg, the trap is the first triumph of conceptual thinking (Dans cette mesure, le piège est le premier triomphe du concept; 12).

Theory

According to Blumenberg, conceptual thinking such as the representation of a prey when setting a trap can count among reason’s products or performances (un produit de la raison; 7). As reason encompasses conceptual thinking and, therefore, also the above-mentioned actio per distans, it follows for Blumenberg that reason is the epitome of those epistemic operations that put in a performance over a distance, both spatial and temporal (On pourrait dire que la raison serait le condensé de pareilles réalisations à distance; 8). Yet the reverse, that reason only exists when something is conceptualized, does not hold (Mais cela n’autorise pas le renversement qui voudrait que la raison n’existe que lorsqu’elle parvient […] au concept; 7). Thus, it can be emphasized that, for Blumenberg, acting over a distance by means of conceptual thinking is only a first step within humans’ process of becoming a creature capable of theorizing. For what exceeds conceptual thinking insofar as it encompasses it, in Blumenberg’s view, is a theoretical attitude as such.

Blumenberg makes this idea more accessible drawing from an anthropogenic assumption: man, for Blumenberg, is the being that straightens up, transcends the short range of perception, and transgresses the horizon of its senses (L’homme, l’être qui se met debout et quitte le domaine de la proche perception, franchit l’horizon de ses sens; 8). Man raises his gaze and directs it to the horizon, that is, he is no longer only concerned with objects given to him within the realm of immediate and actual tactility, but also with potentially tangible objects (again, such as mammoths caught in a trap).

In Blumenberg’s view, this movement of transgression finds itself repeated. Man not only transgresses the horizon of his senses in order to master objects given to him in a (both temporally and spatially) mediated way. The above-mentioned anthropogenic moment lies in a two-step rotation of the head man accomplishes. First, he directs his gaze from the ground towards the horizon, which amounts to mastering mediately given objects over a certain distance. In this way, both building a trap and focusing on the horizon amount to an actio per distans. Second, man turns his head another ninety degrees to look at the sky (Ce qui veut dire que le regard n’est pas fixé sur l’horizon, spatial et temporal, pour attendre ce qui va arriver et pour agir sur ce qui surgit, mais que le regard, ayant accompli un mouvement à quatre-vingt-dix degrés pour quitter la direction du sol et parvenir à l’horizontal, va encore une fois accomplir une rotation à quatre-vingt-dix degrés et viser la voûte étoilée; 14). As laid out in The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, Blumenberg considers Thales of Miletus to be the “putative first philosopher” (see Laughter, Preface). It is exactly his gaze at the sky that turns him into the first contemplator caeli in a philosophical sense. Instead of anticipating prey and, therefore, being directed toward a potentially tangible object, the stars in the sky are perceptible and yet (at least for the run of several centuries) intangible. The skies represent that which encompasses the totality of all possible objects of perception, and thus represent the idea of totality. In this sense, the sky Thales of Miletus turns his gaze to represents the ultimate object of a theoretical attitude; this is why Thales is described as the proto-philosopher (le proto-philosophe et astronome Thalès de Milet; 16). For Blumenberg, it is a theoretical attitude that ultimately envisages the totality of the world (la théorie pure, son aspiration à la totalité du monde; 16). This is what Blumenberg must have had in mind when he suggests that reason’s intentions exceed the performances of conceptual thinking and relate to the idea of totality (Il se pourrait que la performance d’un concept soit simplement partielle par rapport aux intentions de la raison qui semble toujours avoir en quelque manière affaire à la totalité; 7).

Starting from the concepts that correspond to empirical objects, Blumenberg proceeds by broadening the scope of his scrutiny insofar as he takes into account something by which conceptual thinking in the narrower sense is exceeded. That is, the subject not only perceives singular objects entirely detached from one another and is amazed by the sky as a cosmic whole, but also takes into account the—potential—relations between objects. To put it in phenomenological terms, one could say that it is the horizontality of noemata according to which the perceiving and reflecting subject progresses in her intentional process of intuition. The less an empirical object plays a role in the act of conceptualization (or theorizing), the more intellectual performances—such as the act of idealization—gain importance in the process of thinking. The attempt to establish a meaningful relation among particular noemata leads to a reflection on the totality encompassing them—or again in phenomenological terms: to a reflection on the horizon of all horizons. That being said, it is clear that Blumenberg shares the fundamental insight with phenomenology that there is, apart from a naïve attitude, an observing, theorizing mode of consciousness.

Nonconceptuality

Yet, the question as to which role is to be ascribed to nonconceptuality within the realm of theoretical performances is still unanswered. Once it has been shown that the use of concepts does not remain limited to representations of empirical objects (such as foods or a prey) but is also in some way involved in intellectual acts of greater abstraction, Blumenberg shifts the focus to the very boundary between conceptual and nonconceptual thinking, both of which for him are encompassed by a theoretical attitude. In conceiving of conceptual thinking as an epistemic operation that above all establishes a correspondence between intuition and understanding, Blumenberg clearly draws from a Kantian point of view. In that sense, it is not at all surprising that Blumenberg addresses nonconceptual thinking, too, in Kantian terms.

What Blumenberg does is to relate limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe) and ideas (see 41–42) to his conception of nonconceptuality. This refers to his conviction that the mode of conceptual concretization achieved in the representation of empirical objects is unlike the way abstract ideas are represented. Of course, this does not mean abstract ideas (such as the concept of world or the idea of freedom) cannot be addressed or dealt with by human reason at all. Instead, for Blumenberg, human reason has to approach abstract ideas in a different way, namely by drawing from nonconceptuality. As it follows for him, nonconceptuality must not be taken or undertaken as a mere auxiliary discipline to philosophy (une simple discipline auxiliaire de la philosophie; 56). Instead, it must be acknowledged that the preliminary endeavors to a notion of conceptual thinking do not achieve their aims (le travail dans le champ préalable du concept ne parvient pas à son but; 56) and that conceptual thinking is subject to the condition of—at least possibly—eventually being rendered concrete by the intuition of empirical objects. As Blumenberg sees it, nonconceptuality comes into play the very moment it turns out that this condition cannot be fulfilled, i.e. in the attempt to represent ideas. (Here, it seems to me to be helpful to quote both the German original text and its French translation. For what in German reads “im Zusammenhang mit der Angewiesenheit des Begriffs auf Anschauung und der Verfehlung dieser Bedingung bei der Idee” is rendered into French as follows: dans le contexte de l’articulation du concept sur l’intuition et […] de l’échec de cette articulation quand il s’agit de l’idee; 56). In other words, nonconceptual thought for Blumenberg is the means to operate in the concretization of abstract ideas. In my reading of Théorie de l’inconceptualité, limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe) and ideas (just as metaphors, incidentally) for Blumenberg represent the threshold of conceptual and nonconceptual thinking. The wide range of theoretical performances must exceed the purely conceptual.

However, Blumenberg merely indicates what a theory of nonconceptuality would have to undertake and leaves it open to his readers (or listeners) to follow down the indicated path. According to him, a theory of nonconceptuality is about reconstructing in a broad sense those horizons from which the theoretical attitude and conceptual thinking are derived (Une théorie de l’inconceptualité aurait à reconstruire les horizons, en un sens très large, dont ont procédé la prise de position et la formation conceptuelle théoriques; 112).

Anthropology

It is important to bear in mind that Blumenberg does not seek a definite notion of each of the epistemic operations in question for their own sake. As the use of both conceptual and nonconceptual thinking can be counted among the whole of epistemic performances human beings are capable of, they are part of the description of essentially human traits. That is, as Blumenberg aims at locating his observations within a larger, anthropological framework.. As he says, an anthropological theory of conceptual thinking is an urgent desideratum (Une théorie anthropologique du concept est un réquisit urgent; 9).

In order to frame Blumenberg’s endeavor in Théorie de l’inconceptualité, it is helpful to come back once more to the aforementioned primal hunting scene. Blumenberg does not give a clear answer to the question of why he is using a primal scene to illustrate the performances of conceptual thinking, or to that of which epistemic status this example is supposed to hold. All he does is to underline his assumption that the image of the construction of a trap may be nothing but the best way to depict the capacities of conceptual thinking (Sans doute peut-on montrer le plus clairement ce dont un concept est capable lorsque l’on songe à la fabrication d’un piège; 8). That is, the author himself leaves it an open question as to which epistemic status must eventually be ascribed to the example he is using. However, Blumenberg makes clear that he aims to explain how the capacities of conceptual and nonconceptual thinking have become possible by taking a view that is both anthropological and genetic at the same time (J’essaie de comprendre cela du point de vue anthropologique, générique; 8). The construction of a trap may, therefore, be taken as an attempt to locate reason’s performances or capacities within an anthropological, and more specifically, within an anthropogenic framework. It is thus no coincidence that Blumenberg’s example is the laying of a trap some ten thousand years ago and not a shopping list.

What Blumenberg does is draw a line connecting the anthropogenic observations of man having straightened up and having accomplished twice a ninety-degree-rotation of the head to the transcendental question as to how theory—and with it philosophy— became possible. Théorie de l’inconceptualité offers a contribution to the discussion of the status of conceptual thinking from an epistemological point of view—and, beyond that, points to the discussion of reason’s capacities in a whole. It is thus part of transcendental philosophy since it is an approach to the conditions of the possibility of theory. Blumenberg’s view on the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental in Théorie de l’inconceptualité is quite complex: he raises a question of transcendental philosophy in aiming to lay bare the conditions of the possibility of theory; these conditions can only be explained by reference to empirical assumptions about human prehistory.

In other words, Blumenberg considers both conceptual and nonconceptual thinking to offer a crucial contribution to the project of describing man (like the title of another posthumously edited work lays out, namely Beschreibung des Menschen/Description de l’homme). As he says, one has to consider the anthropological preconditions as the source of the performances of conceptual thinking, which in turn are part of reason’s intending totality (des présupposés anthropologiques […] la source d’où procède également l’efficace du concept qui n’est, en effet, que partiellement liée à l’intention de la raison visant la totalité; 122). Pointing to the intention of describing (and, in parts, explaining) characteristic performances of reason such as conceptual and nonconceptual thinking amounts to counting Théorie de l’inconceptualité among Blumenberg’s numerous approaches to an anthropological philosophy. It is here that Blumenberg’s endeavor exceeds the demands of a phenomenological discipline as Blumenberg gives phenomenology an anthropological orientation. What he undertakes is not a phenomenology of pure consciousness but rather a phenomenologically motivated description of an anthropogenic dimension that presumably has brought about man’s ability to theorize and to philosophize at all.

Conclusion

Blumenberg’s text offers a complex interplay between the fields of anthropological description and of transcendental philosophy. As Blumenberg draws attention to the question of how conceptual thinking as a part of the whole of reason’s capacities might have become possible, it is especially the anthropogenic dimension that links the two. In conclusion, one could say that Théorie de l’inconceptualité can be read in a threefold way. It is, first, an anthropological text, for it focuses on performances of human reason. Since the main interest of the text lies in reasoning and in all the various forms reason may take, the text may, secondly, be regarded as pursuing a project in epistemology. What then provides a link between the anthropological and the epistemological dimensions is, thirdly, the extension of genetic phenomenology into the anthropogenic view Blumenberg puts forward.

At this point, one might return to the style in which the text is presented. Although the title may seem to promise a fully developed theory of nonconceptuality, the text itself maintains a tentative and exploratory character. The reader is offered examples and illustrations taken from diverse texts of philosophy and literature and thus is offered nothing more—and, one has to add, nothing less—than enriching descriptions of the performances of human reason. All of these descriptions are strongly influenced by the phenomenological tradition. Théorie de l’inconceptualité should be counted among Blumenberg’s attempts to contribute to a phenomenologically influenced anthropology.[3]

Selected Bibliography

Blumenberg, Hans. 2011. Description de l’homme. Translated by Denis Trierweiler. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

Blumenberg, Hans. 2015. The laughter of the Thracian woman: A protohistory of theory. Translated by Steven Rendall. New York: Bloomsbury (quoted as: Laughter).

Blumenberg, Hans. 2017. Concepts en histoires. Translated by Marc de Launay. Paris: Édition de l’Éclat.

Blumenberg, Hans. 2018. Lions. Translated by Kári Driscoll. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books.

Blumenberg, Hans. 2018. Rigorism of Truth: Moses the Egyptian and other Writings on Freud and Arendt. Edited by Ahlrich Meyer. Translated by Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Bajohr, Hannes, Fuchs, Florian, and Joe Paul Kroll (eds.). 2018 (in press). The Hans Blumenberg Reader. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

[1] Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (eds.). 2018 (in press). The Hans Blumenberg Reader. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Other recent translations of Blumenberg’s work include among others: Blumenberg, Hans. 2017. Concepts en histoires. Translated by Marc de Launay. Paris: Édition de l’Éclat; ibid. 2018. Lions. Translated by Kári Driscoll. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books; ibid. 2018. Rigorism of Truth: Moses the Egyptian and other Writings on Freud and Arendt. Edited by Ahlrich Meyer. Translated by Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

[2] Unless stated otherwise, all page references refer to Théorie de l’inconceptualité.

[3] I want to thank Tobias Keiling for numerous helpful comments.

Jairo José da Silva: Mathematics and Its Applications: A Transcendental-Idealist Perspective

Mathematics and Its Applications: A Transcendental-Idealist Perspective Book Cover

Title: Mathematics and Its Applications: A Transcendental-Idealist Perspective
Séries: Synthese Library, Volume 385
Author: Jairo José da Silva
Editora: Springer
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Hardcover 93,59 €
Páginas: VII, 275

Reviewed by: Nicola Spinelli (King’s College London / Hertswood Academy)

This is a book long overdue. Other authors have made more or less recent phenomenological and transcendental-idealist contributions to the philosophy of mathematics: Dieter Lohmar (1989), Richard Tieszen (2005) and Mark van Atten (2007) are perhaps the most important ones. Ten years is a sufficiently wide gap to welcome any new work. Yet da Silva’s contribution stands out for one reason: it is unique in the emphasis it puts, not so much, or not only, on the traditional problems of the philosophy of mathematics (ontological status of mathematical objects, mathematical knowledge, and so on), but on the problem of the application of mathematics. The author’s chief aim – all the other issues dealt with in the book are subordinated to it – is to give a transcendental phenomenological and idealist solution to the evergreen problem of how it is that we can apply mathematics to the world and actually get things right – particularly mathematics developed in complete isolation from mundane, scientific or technological efforts.

Chapter 1 is an introduction. In Chapters 2 and 3, da Silva sets up his tools. Chapters 4 to 6 are about particular aspects of mathematics: numbers, sets and space. The bulk of the overall case is then developed in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9, “Final Conclusions”, is in fact a critique of positions common in the analytic philosophy of mathematics.

Chapter 2, “Phenomenology”, is where da Silva prepares the notions he will then deploy throughout the book. Concepts like intentionality, intuition, empty intending, transcendental (as opposed to psychological) ego, and so on, are presented. They are all familiar from the phenomenological literature, but da Silva does a good job explaining their motivation and highlighting their interconnections. The occasional (or perhaps not so occasional) polemic access may be excused. The reader expecting arguments for views or distinctions, however, will be disappointed: da Silva borrows liberally from Husserl, carefully distinguishing his own positions from the orthodoxy but stating, rather than defending, them. This creates the impression that, at least to an extent, he is preaching to the converted. As a result, if you are looking for reasons to endorse idealism, or to steer clear of it, this may not be the book for you.

Be that as it may, the main result of the chapter is, unsurprisingly, transcendental idealism. This is the claim that, barring the metaphysical presuppositions unwelcome to the phenomenologist, there is nothing more to the reality of objects than their being “objective”, i.e., public. ‘Objectivation’, as da Silva puts it, ‘is an intentional experience performed by a community of egos operating cooperatively as intentional subjects. … Presentifying to oneself the number 2 as an objective entity is presentifying it and simultaneously conceiving it as a possible object of intentional experience to alter egos (the whole community of intentional egos)’ (26-27). This is true of ideal objects, as in the author’s example, but also of physical objects (the primary type of intentional experience will then be perception).

There are two other important views stated and espoused in the chapter. One is the Husserlian idea that a necessary condition for objective existence is the lack of cancellation, due to intentional conflict, of the relevant object. Given the subject matter of the book, the most important corollary of this idea is that ideal objects, if they are to be objective, at the very least must not give rise to inconsistencies. For example, the set of all ordinals does not objectively exist, because it gives rise to the Burali-Forti paradox. The other view, paramount to the overall case of the book (I will return to it later), is that for a language to be material (or materially determined) is for its non-logical constants to denote materially determined entities (59). If a language is not material, it is formal.

Chapter 3 is about logic. Da Silva attempts a transcendental clarification of what he views as the trademark principles of classical logic: identity, contradiction and bivalence. The most relevant to the book is the third, and the problem with it is: how can we hold bivalence – for every sentence p, either p or not-p – and a phenomenological-idealist outlook on reality? For bivalence seems to require a world that is, as da Silva puts it, ‘objectively complete’: such that any well-formed sentence is in principle verifiable against it. Yet how can the idealist’s world be objectively complete? Surely if a sentence is about a state of affairs we currently have no epistemic access to (e.g., the continuous being immediately after the discrete) there just is no fact of the matter as to whether the sentence is true or false: for there is nothing beyond what we, as transcendental intersubjectivity, have epistemic access to.

Da Silva’s first move is to put the following condition on the meaningfulness of sentences: a sentence is meaningful if and only if it represents a possible fact (75). The question, then, becomes whether possible facts can always be checked against the sentences representing them, at least in principle. The answer, for da Silva, turns on the idea, familiar from Husserl, that intentional performances constitute not merely objects, but objects with meanings. This is also true of more structured objectivities, such as states of affairs and complexes thereof – a point da Silva makes in Chapter 2. The world (reality) is such a complex: it is ‘a maximally consistent domain of facts’ (81). The world, then, is intentionally posited (by transcendental intersubjectivity) with a meaning. To hold bivalence as a logical principle means, transcendentally, to include ‘objective completeness’ in the intentional meaning (posited by the community of transcendental egos) of the world. In other words, to believe that sentences have a truth value independent of our epistemic access to the state of affairs they represent is to believe that every possible state of affairs is in principle verifiable, in intuition or in non-intuitive forms of intentionality. This, of course, does not justify the logical principle: it merely gives it a transcendental sense. Yet this is exactly what da Silva is interested in, and all he thinks we can do. Once we refuse to assume the objective completeness of the world in a metaphysical sense, what we do is to assume it as a ‘transcendental presupposition’ or ‘hypothesis’. In the author’s words:

How can we be sure that any proposition can be confronted with the facts without endorsing metaphysical presuppositions about reality and our power to access reality in intuitive experiences? … By a transcendental hypothesis. By respecting the rules of syntactic and semantic meaning, the ego determines completely a priori the scope of the domain of possible situations – precisely those expressed by meaningful propositions – which are, then, hypothesized to be ideally verifiable. (83)

Logical principles express transcendental hypotheses; transcendental hypotheses spell out intentional meaning. … The a priori justification of logical principles depends on which experiences are meant to be possible in principle, which depends on how the domain of experience is intentionally meant to be. (73)

There is, I believe, a worry regarding da Silva’s definition of meaningfulness in terms of possible situations: it seems to be in tension with the apparent inability of modality to capture fine-grained (or hyper-) intensional distinction and therefore, ultimately, meaning (for a non-comprehensive overview of the field of intensional semantics, see Fox and Lappin 2005).[1] True, since possible situations are invoked to define the meaningfulness, not the meaning, of sentences, there is no overt incompatibility; yet it would be odd to define meaningfulness in terms of possible situations, and meaning in a completely different way.

Chapter 4, “Numbers”, has two strands. The first deals with another evergreen of philosophy: the ontological status of numbers and mathematical objects in general. Da Silva’s treatment is interesting and his results, as far as I can see, entirely Husserlian: numbers and other mathematical objects behave like platonist entities except that they do not exist independently of the intentional performances that constitute them. One consequence is that mathematical objects have a transcendental history which can and should be unearthed to fully understand their nature. The phenomenological approach is unique in its attention to this interplay between history and intentional constitution, and it is to da Silva’s credit, I believe, that it should figure so prominently in the book. Ian Hacking was right when he wrote, a few years back, that ‘probably phenomenology has offered more than analytic philosophy’ to understand ‘how mathematics became possible for a species like ours in a world like this one’ (Hacking 2014). Da Silva’s work fits the pattern.

And yet I have a few reservations, at least about the treatment (I will leave the results to readers). For one thing, there is no mention of unorthodox items such as choice sequences. Given da Silva’s rejection of intuitionism in Chapter 3, perhaps this is unsurprising. Yet not endorsing is one thing, not even mentioning is quite another. I cannot help but think the author missed an opportunity to contribute to one of the most engaging debates in the phenomenology of mathematics of the last decade (van Atten’s Brouwer Meets Husserl is from 2007). Da Silva’s seemingly difficult relationship with intuitionism is also connected with another conspicuous absence from the book. At p. 118 da Silva looks into the relations between our intuition of the continuum and its mathematical construction in terms of ‘tightly packed punctual moments’, and argues that the former does not support the latter (which should then be motivated on different grounds). He cites Weyl as the main purveyor of an alternative model – which he might well be. But complete silence about intuitionist analysis seems frankly excessive.

A final problem with da Silva’s presentation is his dismissal of logicism as a philosophy of, and a foundational approach to, mathematics. ‘Of course,’ he writes, ‘Frege’s project of providing arithmetic with logical foundations collapsed completely in face of logical contradiction (Russell’s paradox)’ (103). The point is not merely historical: ‘Frege’s reduction of numbers to classes of equinumerous concepts is an unnecessary artifice devised exclusively to satisfy logicist parti-pris … That this caused the doom of his projects indicates the error of the choice’. I would have expected at least some mention of either Russell’s own brand of logicism (designed, with type theory, to overcome the paradox), or more recent revivals, such as Bob Hale’s and Crispin Wright’s Neo-Fregeanism (starting with Wright 1983) or George Bealer’s less Fregean work in Quality and Concept (1982). None of these has suffered the car crash Frege’s original programme did, and all of them are still, at least in principle, on the market. True, da Silva attacks logicism on other grounds, too, and may argue that, in those respects, the new brands are just as vulnerable as the old. Yet, that is not what he does; he just does not say anything.

The second strand of the chapter, more relevant to the overall case of the book, develops the idea that numbers may be regarded in two ways: materially and formally. The two lines of investigation are not totally unrelated, and indeed some of da Silva’s arguments for the latter claim are historical. The claim itself is as follow. According to da Silva, numbers are essentially related to quantity: ‘A number is the ideal form that each member of a class of equinumerous quantitative forms indifferently instantiates’, and ‘two numbers are the same if they are instantiable as equinumerical quantitative forms’ (104).[2] Yet some types of numbers are more or less detached from quantity: if in the case of the negative integers, for example, the link with quantity is thin, when it comes to the complex numbers it is gone altogether. Complex numbers are numbers only in the sense that they behave operationally like ones – but they are not the real (no pun intended) thing. Da Silva is completely right in saying that it was this problem that moved the focus of Husserl’s reflections in the 1890s from arithmetic to general problems of semiotic, logic and knowledge. The way he cashes out the distinction is in terms of a material and a formal way to consider numbers. Genuine, ‘quantitative’ numbers are material numbers. Numbers in a wider sense, and thus including the negative and the complex, are numbers in a formal sense. Since, typically, the mathematician is interested in numbers either to calculate or because they want to study their relations (with one another or with something else), they will view numbers formally – i.e., at bottom, from the point of view of operations and structure – rather than materially.

Thus, the main theoretical result of the chapter is that, inasmuch as mathematics is concerned with numbers, it is ‘essentially a formal science’ (120). In Chapter 7, da Silva will put forward an argument to the effect that mathematics as a whole is essentially a formal science. This, together with the idea, also anticipated in Chapter 4, that the formal nature of mathematics ‘explains its methodological flexibility and wide applicability’, is the core insight of the whole book. But more about it later.

Chapter 5 is about sets. In particular, da Silva wants to transcendentally justify the ZFC axioms. This includes a (somewhat hurried) genealogy, roughly in the style of Experience and Judgement, of ‘mathematical sets’ from empirical collections and ‘empirical sets’. The intentional operations involved are collecting and several levels of formalisation. The details of the account have no discernible bearing on the overarching argument, so I will leave them to one side. It all hinges, however, on the idea that sets are constituted by the transcendental subject through the collecting operation, and this is what does the main work in the justification. This makes da Silva’s view very close to the iterative conception (as presented for example in Boolos 1971); yet he only mentions it once and in passing (146). Be that as it may, it is an interesting feature of da Silva’s story that it turns controversial axioms such as Choice into sugar, while tame ones such as Empty Set and Extensionality become contentious.

Empty Set, for example, is justified with an account, which da Silva attributes to Husserl, of the constitution of empty sets that I found fascinating but incomplete. Empty sets are clearly a hard case for the phenomenological account: because, as one might say, since collections are empty by definition, no collecting is in fact involved. Or is it? Consider, da Silva says, the collection of the proper divisors of 17:

Any attempt at actually collecting [them] ends up in collecting nothing, the collecting-intention is frustrated. Now, … Husserl sees the frustration in collecting the divisors of 17 as the intuitive presentation of the empty collection of the divisors of 17. So empty collections exist. (148)

It is a further question, and da Silva does not consider it, whether this story accounts for the uniqueness of the empty set (assuming he thinks the empty set is indeed unique, which, as will appear, is not obvious to me). Are collecting-frustration experiences all equal? Or is there a frustration experience for the divisors of 17, one for the divisors of 23, one for the round squares, and so on? If they are all equal, does that warrant the conclusion that the empty sets they constitute are in fact identical? If they are different, what warrants that conclusion? Of course, an option would be: it follows from Extensionality. Yet, I venture, that solution would let the phenomenologist down somewhat. More seriously, da Silva even seems to reject Extensionality (and thus perhaps the notion that there is just one empty set). At least: he claims that there is ‘no a priori reason for preferring’ an extensional to an intensional approach to set theory, but that if we take ‘the ego and its set-constituting experiences’ seriously we ought to be intensionalists (150).

Chapters 6 is about space and its mathematical representations – ‘a paradigmatic case of the relation between mathematics and empirical reality’ (181). It is where da Silva deals the most with perception and the way it relates with mathematical objects. For the idealist, there are at least four sorts of space: perceptual, physical, mathematical-physical and purely formal. The intentional action required to constitute them is increasingly complex, objectivising, idealising and formalising. Perceptual space is subjective, i.e., private as opposed to public. It is also ‘continuous, non-homogeneous, simply connected, tridimensional, unbounded and approximately Euclidean’ (163). Physical space is the result of the intersubjective constitution of a shared spatial framework by harmonization of subjective spatial experiences. This constitution is a ‘non-verbal, mostly tacit compromise among cooperating egos implicit in common practices’ (167). Unlike its perceptual counterpart, physical space has no centre. It also admits of metric, rather than merely proto-metric, relations. It is also ‘everywhere locally’, but not globally, Euclidean (168). The reason is that physical space is public, measurable but based merely on experience (and more or less crude methods of measurement) – not on models.

We start to see models of physical space when we get to mathematical-physical space. In the spirit of Husserl’s Krisis, da Silva is very keen on pointing out that mathematical-physical space, although it does indeed represent physical space, does not reveal what physical space really is. That it should do so, is a naturalistic misunderstanding. In the author’s words:

At best, physical space is proto-mathematical and can only become properly mathematical by idealization, i.e., an intentional process of exactification. However, and this is an important remark, idealization is not a way of uncovering the “true” mathematical skeleton of physical space, which is not at its inner core mathematical. (169)

Mathematical-physical space is what is left of the space we live in – the space of the Lebenswelt, if you will – in a representation designed to make it exact (for theoretical or practical purposes). Importantly, physical space ‘sub-determines’ mathematical-physical space: the latter is richer than the former, and to some extent falsifies what it seeks to represent. Euclidean geometry is paradigmatic:

The Euclidean representation of physical space, despite its intuitive foundations, is an ideal construct. It falsifies to non-negligible extent perceptual features of physical space and often attributes to it features that are not perceptually discernible. (178)

The next step is purely formal representations of space. These begin by representing physical space, but soon focus on its formal features alone. We are then able to do analytic geometry, for example, and claim that, ‘mathematically, nothing is lost’ (180). This connects with da Silva’s view that mathematics is a formal science and, in a way, provides both evidence for and a privileged example of it. If you are prepared to agree that doing geometry synthetically or analytically is, at bottom, the same thing, then you are committed to explain why that is so. And da Silva’s story is, I believe, a plausible candidate.

Chapter 7 is where it all happens. First, and crucially, da Silva defends the view that mathematics is formal rather than material in character. I should mention straight away that his argument, a three-liner, is somewhat underdeveloped. Yet it is very clear. To say that mathematics is essentially formal is, for da Silva, to say that mathematics can only capture the formal aspects of reality (as the treatment of space is meant to show). The reason is as follows. Theories are made up of symbols, which can be logical or non-logical. The non-logical symbols may, in principle, be variously interpreted. A theory whose non-logical symbols are interpreted is, recall, material rather than formal. Therefore, one could argue, number theory should count as material. Yet, so da Silva’s reasoning goes, ‘fixing the reference of the terms of an interpreted theory is not a task for the theory itself’ (186). The theory, in other words, cannot capture the interpretation of its non-logical constant: that is a meta-theoretical operation. But then mathematical theories cannot capture the nature, the specificity of its objects even when these are material.

That is the master argument, as well as the crux of the whole book. For it follows from it that mathematics is essentially about structure: objects in general and relations in which they stand. This, for da Silva, does not mean that mathematics is simply not about material objects. That would be implausible. Rather, the claim is that even when a mathematical theory is interpreted, or has a privileged interpretation, and is therefore about a specific (‘materially filled’) structure, it does not itself capture the interpretation (the fixing of it) – and thus it is really formal. Some mathematical theories are, however, formal in a stricter sense: they are concerned with structures that are kept uninterpreted. These are purely formal structures. Regarding space, Hilbert’s geometry is a good example.

Da Silva’s solution to the problem of the applicability of mathematics is thus the following. Mathematics is an intentional construction capable of representing the formal aspects of other intentional constructions – mathematics itself and reality. Moreover, it is capable of representing only the formal aspects of mathematics and reality. It should then be no surprise, much less a problem, that any non-mathematical domain can be represented mathematically: every domain, insofar as it is an intentional construction, has formal aspects – which are the only ones that count from an operational and structural standpoint.

This has implications for the philosophy of mathematics. On the ground of his main result, da Silva defends a phenomenological-idealist sort of structuralism, according to which structures are the privileged objects of mathematics. Yet his structuralism is neither in re nor ante rem. Not in re, because structures, even when formal, are objects in their own right. Not ante rem, because structures are intentional constructs, and thus not ontologically independent. They depend on intentionality, but also on the material structures on whose basis they are constituted through formalisation. This middle-ground stance is typical of phenomenology and transcendental idealism.

I have already said what the last two chapters – 8 and 9 – are about. The latter is a collection of exchanges with views in the analytic philosophy of mathematics. They do not contribute to the general case of the book, so I leave them to prospective readers. The former is an extension of the results of Chapter 7 to science in general. A couple of remarks will be enough here. Indeed, when the reader gets to the chapter, all bets are off: by then, da Silva has put in place everything he needs, and the feeling is that Chapter 8, while required, is after all mere execution. This is not to understate da Silva’s work. It is a consequence of his claim (217) that the problem of the applicability of mathematics to objective reality, resulting in science, just is, at bottom, the problem of the applicability of mathematics to itself – which the author has already treated in Chapter 7. Under transcendental idealism, objective, physical reality, just like mathematical reality, is an intersubjective intentional construct. This construct, being structured, and thus having formal aspects to it, ‘is already proto-mathematical’ and, ‘by being mathematically represented, becomes fully mathematical’ (226). The story is essentially the same.

Yet it is only fair to mention that, while in this connection it would have been easy merely to repeat Husserl (the approach is after all pure Krisis), that is not what da Silva does. He rather distances himself from Husserl in at least two respects. First of all, he rejects what we may call the primacy of intuition in Husserl’s epistemology of mathematics and science. Second, he devotes quite a bit of space to the heuristic role of mathematics in science – made possible, so the author argues, by the formal nature of mathematical representation (234).

As a final remark, I want to stress again what seems to me the chief problem of the book. Da Silva’s aim is to give a transcendental-idealist solution to the problem of the applicability of mathematics. Throughout the chapters, he does a good job spelling out the details of the project. Yet there is no extensive discussion of why one should endorse transcendental idealism in the first place. True, a claim the author repeatedly makes is that idealism is the only approach that does not turn the problem into a quagmire. While the reader may be sympathetic with that view (as I am), da Silva offers no full-blown argument for it. As a result, the book is unlikely to build bridges between phenomenologists and philosophers of mathematics of a more analytic stripe. Perhaps that was never one of da Silva’s aims. Still, I believe, it is something of a shame.

References

Boolos, G. 1971. “The Iterative Conception of Set”. Journal of Philosophy 68 (8): 215-231.

Bealer, G. 1982. Quality and Concept. Oxford: OUP.

Fox, C. and Lappin, S. 2005. Foundations of Intensional Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hacking, I. 2014. Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all? Cambridge: CUP.

Lohmar, D. 1989. Phänomenologie der Mathematik: Elemente enier phänomenologischen Aufklärung der mathematischen Erkenntnis nach Husserl. Dodrecht: Kluwer.

Tieszen, R. 2005. Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics. Cambridge: CUP.

Van Atten, M. 2007. Brouwer Meets Husserl: On the Phenomenology of Choice Sequences. Dodrecht: Springer.

Wright, C. 1983. Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects. Aberdeen: AUP.

[1] Unless impossible worlds are brought in – but as far as I can see that option is foreign to da Silva’s outlook.

[2] The notion of quantitative form is at the heart of Husserl’s own account of numbers in Philosophy of Arithmetic – and it is to da Silva’s credit that he takes Husserl’s old work seriously and accommodates into an up-to-date phenomenological-idealist framework.

Denis Seron: Apparaître: Essai de philosophie phénoménologique

Apparaître: Essai de philosophie phénoménologique Book Cover

Title: Apparaître: Essai de philosophie phénoménologique
Séries: Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology, 16
Author: Denis Seron
Editora: Brill
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Hardcover €204,00
Páginas: xii, 213

Reviewed by: Charles-André Mangeney (Archives Husserl de Paris, rattachées à l'ENS d'Ulm. Paris, France)

Des géants ou des moulins ? A propos de l’ambiguïté de l’intentionnalité en phénoménologie.

Une manière d’entrer dans le nouveau livre de Denis Seron est d’emprunter le chemin d’un des problèmes centraux et classiques en philosophie de l’esprit et du langage, problème qui sert de pivot au déploiement de son argumentation : le problème de représentations sans objets, connu en philosophie du langage sous la forme russellienne du problème des énoncés singuliers existentiels négatifs. Intuitivement, le problème se formule ainsi [i] : lorsque je dis, par exemple, « Le Père Noël n’existe pas », je profère bien un énoncé doté de signification, mon énoncé et la représentation qui le sous-tend se rapportent à quelque chose, et tout le monde me comprendra s’il m’arrive de dire une telle chose, bien que mon énoncé soit sans référence. On me comprend, et pourtant, je ne parle de rien. Tout se passe comme si je parlais bien de quelque chose, puisque ce que je dis a un sens, alors que je ne parle pas de quelque chose qui se trouve dans le monde (il n’y a pas hors de moi un référent « Père Noël » dont cela a du sens de parler). Or, notre conception naïve du langage, reprise par les empiristes de Hobbes à Stuart-Mill, indexe le sens d’une proposition sur sa référence : dire quelque chose qui a du sens, c’est faire en sorte qu’à notre discours corresponde un état de chose auquel il est adéquat. Or, avec l’exemple du Père Noël, ce n’est pas le cas. Comment est-il donc possible qu’un énoncé sans référence soit doté de sens et de quoi cet énoncé, puisqu’il est pourvu de sens, peut-il bien parler ? On dit bien, en présence d’un énoncé dépourvu de signification, que l’on ne voit pas de quoi il parle, et donc que son objet, sa référence, n’est pas clairement défini. Ce problème se retrouve dans toutes les attitudes propositionnelles qui peuvent impliquer un irréel : lorsque je dis que « je m’imagine le Père Noël », ou alors même dans les illusions ou les comportements hallucinatoires (« j’ai cru un instant voir un spectre » etc.). Ici aussi, nous comprenons ces propositions, et pourtant elles font référence à une certaine forme de non-être.

La stratégie de Denis Seron consiste à réinvestir une des solutions données à ce problème impliquant le recours à l’intentionnalité et à tenter en retour une clarification des concepts qui appartiennent à la panoplie intentionnaliste, afin d’en retirer une conceptualité phénoménologique claire et une définition plus précise de la phénoménologie (il faudrait dire que l’allure logique de l’argumentation ici mise en œuvre est du type : « si l’intentionnalité doit vraiment permettre de répondre au problème des représentations sans objets, alors il faut qu’elle comporte telle ou telle détermination »).

On peut apporter deux types de solutions à ce problème : d’abord, la solution que l’on peut qualifier de sémantique, d’inspiration frégéenne ou russellienne, et qui consiste à soutenir que le langage peut parfois être trompeur, puisqu’en réalité, derrière les formulations paradoxales du type « X n’existe pas », nous trouvons une structure logique saine et non aporétique. Russell montrera , par exemple, qu’il est d’abord nécessaire de distinguer être et existence , que quelque chose peut être sans nécessairement exister (un concept est quelque chose mais n’a pas d’existence dans le temps et l’espace), puis que les énoncés sans objets peuvent tous se traduire sous la forme de concepts sans subsomption ou extension, d’un concept vide d’instanciation : dire « Pégase n’existe pas », cela revient en fait simplement à affirmer que sous le concept de Pégase ne tombe aucun objet, présupposant par là la distinction entre sens et référence que l’on doit à Frege[ii]. Ainsi, affirmer que Pégase n’existe pas, revient bien à parler de quelque chose : nous parlons du concept « Pégase » et nous affirmons qu’il n’existe pas d’individus y correspondant.

Denis Seron critique explicitement cette conception sémantique ou conceptualiste, et l’objection est de taille, puisque ces conceptions ne parviennent pas à rendre compte des hallucinations ou même d’attitudes propositionnelles comme l’imagination (il est peu probable que lorsque nous imaginions Pégase, nous ne faisions qu’en convoquer le concept). Denis Seron se revendique au contraire d’une approche héritée de Brentano et Husserl, d’une approche intentionnaliste, qui se réfère à une compréhension bien précise de ce que l’on nomme les contenus intentionnels. En un sens, celle-ci pourrait d’abord se formuler comme suit , en revenant à Husserl : «Si […] l’on demande comment il faut entendre que le non-existant ou le transcendant puisse avoir valeur d’objet intentionnel […] il n’y a à cela pas d’autre réponse que […] : l’objet est un objet intentionnel, cela signifie qu’il y a un acte avec une intention de caractère déterminé qui […] constitue précisément ce que nous appelons l’intention dirigée vers l’objet»[iii]. C’est donc sur la voie d’un retour à Husserl et Brentano qu’il nous faut suivre notre auteur pour en apprécier la richesse et l’originalité.

Le problème de l’intentionnalité : le contenu intentionnel n’est pas l’objet extramental

Denis Seron rappelle d’abord l’origine et les présupposés fondamentaux de toute théorie intentionnaliste de l’esprit[iv]. Le terme d’intentionnalité est originellement un terme de scolastique médiévale, repris par Brentano dans un but précis : lutter contre la conception empiriste et dite « atomiste » de l’esprit. Si nous partons du principe que l’esprit est constitué de contenus mentaux que l’on nommera des représentations, les représentations que nous vivons effectivement sont des contenus complexes que nous appelons des contenus propositionnels,[v] et qui se caractérisent par le fait d’être toujours en lien avec le monde, au sujet de ce qui s’y passe. Ainsi , comme le rappelle Denis Seron, désirer, croire, penser, ce n’est pas simplement avoir conscience de désirer, de croire ou de penser, mais c’est bien plutôt désirer que quelque chose se réalise dans le monde, croire que quelque chose a lieu, penser à quelqu’un ou quelque chose. Autrement dit, si nos représentations sont intentionnelles, cela signifie qu’elles sont toujours représentations de quelque chose. L’auteur rappelle très clairement la ligne de fracture entre la conception intentionnelle et la conception atomiste de l’esprit. Pour des empiristes comme Hume, Hobbes ou Stuart Mill, le caractère intentionnel des représentations est accidentel et dérivé : pour eux , les représentations qui peuvent être intentionnelles sont des complexes formés d’éléments simples non-intentionnels, les sensations, qui sont le fruit d’un rapport causal, et donc non sémantiquement motivé, avec le monde. Il n’y aura donc que certaines représentations qui pourront prétendre à mordre sur le monde, mais originellement le flux mental est fermé sur lui-même, composé d’éléments simples sans rapport avec les choses. Pour Brentano, au contraire, tout contenu mental est un « acte intentionnel »[vi], c’est-à-dire qu’il est intrinsèquement au sujet, à propos de quelque chose d’autre que lui-même.

Après ces éclaircissements, si nous en revenons au problème des représentations ou énoncés sans objets, il nous semble d’abord qu’une telle théorie non seulement ne peut pas nous aider à résoudre ce problème, mais bien d’avantage, qu’elle nous plonge dans une perplexité plus grande encore. En effet, si nous reprenons la question de Denis Seron lui-même au début du second chapitre : comment des représentations sans objets (fiction, hallucination, illusion) sont-elles possibles, si toute représentation doit être intentionnelle, c’est-à-dire si toute représentation se définit intrinsèquement par la propriété d’être au sujet de quelque chose d’autre qu’elle ? nous conduirait à affirmer que celui qui voit un spectre ne voit rien (le spectre n’est pas présent en chair et en os devant lui) mais qu’ il doit bien voir quelque chose, puisque sa perception doit être intentionnelle. Tout le travail de Denis Seron , grâce aux avancées conceptuelles de Brentano et Husserl, montre non seulement que l’intentionnalité permet de répondre à cette question, mais qu’en retour cette question elle-même nous permet de mieux déterminer ce qu’est l’intentionnalité.

Reprenons l’exemple de l’hallucination, et soyons attentifs à sa grammaire. Soit l’exemple, repris ici, de Don Quichotte[vii] qui, sur la route de Puerto Làpice, voit des géants alors qu’il s’agit en réalité de moulins. En un sens, Sancho Panza a raison de rétorquer à Don Quichotte qu’il ne s’agit pas de géant mais bien de moulins, mais en un autre sens, Don Quichotte à raison de répondre à son tour qu’il voit bien des géants, et qu’il ne voit pas autre chose. Toute la force de la conception intentionnelle de Brentano, reprise par Denis Seron, est de nous permettre de maintenir ensemble les deux alternatives de ce dilemme et d’y séjourner assez longtemps pour le résoudre. Il va s’agir en réalité de faire apparaître l’ambiguïté de la grammaire de l’intentionnalité. En effet, l’argument clé est qu’il faut distinguer le fait qu’une représentation soit au sujet de ou à propos de, et le fait qu’elle soit en relation à ce à propos de quoi elle est. Autrement dit, l’internalisme de Brentano nous permet de distinguer le contenu intentionnel de la représentation et son objet. Une représentation peut être au sujet de X (avoir X comme contenu intentionnel) sans être en relation effective avec un X extra-mental (avoir X pour objet). La distinction entre le contenu intentionnel et l’objet est la pierre de touche de l’exposé de Denis Seron, il faut donc bien la comprendre : si le contenu intentionnel est une propriété de l’état mental intentionnel, il n’est pas une entité intermédiaire par laquelle serait médiatisé notre rapport au monde, il est lui aussi intrinsèquement mental et de la même étoffe que notre esprit, mais il oriente notre esprit vers quelque chose du monde sans être lui-même cette chose. On parlera alors d’une théorie de l’inclusion intentionnelle, et il faudra la comprendre en termes d’apparence. Lorsque je dis par exemple que « la tache sur ma chemise m’apparaît comme bleue »[viii], je dis bien d’une part que ma représentation est au sujet de ma chemise et de la tache qui s’y trouve, je parle donc de quelque chose qui se trouve dans le monde, mais du fait de l’utilisation d’une grammaire de l’apparence, j’indique également que ma représentation n’a pas encore trouvé le chemin de sa référence, c’est-à-dire, précisément son objet. En disant qu’il me semble que la tache est bleue, je peux encore me tromper. Il est donc possible que ma représentation ait une direction, qu’elle concerne intentionnellement quelque chose, sans qu’elle soit en référence à un objet : elle peut avoir un contenu intentionnel sans pour autant être en relation à un objet existant en dehors d’elle-même (il faut noter que Denis Seron prends ici explicitement position pour une conception brentanienne, c’est-à-dire, intra-psychique de l’intentionnalité, à rebours de toute conception métaphysique de l’intentionnalité[ix], comme par exemple la conception heideggerienne qui établira que l’intentionnalité est transcendance, c’est-à-dire, relation au monde[x]).

L’ambiguïté intrinsèque du langage intentionnel

Cette théorie de l’inclusion intentionnelle ne nous permet pas encore de voir comment Denis Seron résout le problème de l’hallucination : nous devons mieux saisir ce qu’il nomme l’ambiguïté intrinsèque du langage intentionnel . Pour ce faire, il faut distinguer l’intentionnalité à proprement parler et la conscience phénoménale. Cela revient à distinguer le contenu intentionnel visé par la conscience et la conscience de la visée de ce contenu : lorsque nous disons que « nous voyons un vase devant nous », d’une part, nous avons une conscience perceptuelle de ce vase, c’est-à-dire que notre état mental se dirige vers un objet, et si nous voyons effectivement le vase, nous sommes absorbés par lui dans une expérience directe, mais d’autre part, nous avons aussi conscience de percevoir le vase, conscience de notre propre perception, et si quelqu’un nous demandait « que fais-tu ? », nous pourrions sans difficulté lui répondre : « je regarde ce vase ». Pour le dire en termes sartriens, toute conscience non-positionnelle de soi est accompagnée d’une conscience pré-réflexive de soi[xi]. Notons ici que Seron reprend le contenu minimal du dénominateur commun à Brentano et Husserl[xii], à savoir, l’idée qu’il y va de l’essence même de la conscience que de se connaître (une conscience inconsciente est un monstre logique, comme un cercle carré), même si elle se connaît sur un plan pré-objectif et non encore représentatif.

Dans le cadre de la théorie non relationnelle ou encore de la conception adverbiale l’intentionnalité défendue par Denis Seron à la suite de Brentano, cette distinction entre conscience phénoménale et représentation intentionnelle est décisive pour répondre au problème des représentations sans objets. Si l’on reprend l’exemple célèbre de Brentano : « Le centaure est une fiction des poètes », il est très clair que ce qui est en question ici, ce n’est pas l’objet extra-mental « Centaure » avec lequel les poètes seraient en relation par le truchement d’une représentation cherchant une référence dans le monde, mais c’est bien plutôt un état mental intrinsèquement « à-propos-de-Centaure », et dont la conscience phénoménale permet de rendre compte, puisque lorsque j’imagine des centaures, j’ai conscience de les imaginer. Si bien que l’énoncé « Le centaure est une fiction des poètes » qui était encore problématique dans une conception métaphysique et relationnelle de l’intentionnalité (puisqu’il faudrait que le poète soit en relation avec le Centaure comme objet extra-mental), devient un simple énoncé concernant un état mental, dans lequel est inclus un contenu intentionnel, lui-même encore mental. L’objet auquel il est fait explicitement référence, c’est la représentation elle-même et non pas son objet extra-mental. Denis Seron propose de paraphraser l’exemple brentanien comme suit : « Il existe un état mental tel que des poètes sont dans cet état et qu’il a pour contenu intentionnel le centaure »[xiii]. Ainsi, la référence touche l’état mental intentionnel des poètes, et non pas son objet, ce qui serait absurde.

Il y a cependant certains contextes dans lesquels il est difficile de savoir si c’est l’état mental avec son contenu intentionnel qui est endossé[x iv], c’est-à-dire qui est tenu pour existant et prétend au rôle de référent, ou si c’est l’objet extra-mental. Si je dis : « j’imagine le Père Noël », il n’est pas difficile de savoir que ce qui est endossé, ce n’est pas l’existence du Père Noël, mais l’existence de mon « imagination-à-propos-du-Père-Noël » en tant qu’état mental intrinsèquement intentionnel. Dans le cadre du vocabulaire de l’apparence ou de l’hallucination, les comptes-rendus de l’expérience intentionnelle deviennent précisément ambigus. Si je dis que « la tache m’apparaît bleue », il n’est pas évident de savoir si je me situe sur le simple plan de l’apparence phénoménologique qui ne me permet de n’endosser que l’existence du contenu intentionnel pour moi, c’est-à-dire au sein de mon état mental, et cela sans prétention à mordre sur l’être effectif de la tache, ou si au contraire je prétends faire référence à la tache elle-même, de manière extra-mentale.

In recto, in obliquo.

Nous voudrions attirer l’attention du lecteur sur une distinction très importante que l’on doit à Brentano, et qui, si elle est souvent oubliée, est bien rappelée et restituée dans toute sa richesse par Denis Seron. Il s’agit de la distinction entre le modus rectus et le modus obliquus[xv]. Elle nous permet de mieux thématiser l’ambiguïté intrinsèque du vocabulaire intentionnel et de tenir ensemble sa double aspectualité (le contenu intentionnel mental et la référence extra-mentale) : si je perçois qu’il pleut dehors et que je suis sûr que c’est bien le cas, alors on dira, d’après Brentano, qu’in recto je me réfère à la pluie comme objet avec lequel je suis en relation, et qu‘in obliquo je me réfère à l’état mental intentionnel qui vise la pluie, c’est-à-dire indirectement et non représentativement, mais par le biais de ma conscience phénoménale intra-mentale. Inversement, dans les cas où la référence est incertaine, comme par exemple si je crois simplement qu’il pleut , il faudra dire qu’in recto je me réfère d’abord à mon état mental, mais qu’in obliquo je vise, du fait de mon contenu intentionnel inclus dans mon état mental de croyance, quelque chose comme la pluie. Comme le dit Denis Seron : « La description phénoménologique in obliquo est ontologiquement réductible à la description psychologique in recto […] »[xvi], c’est-à-dire que lorsque l’on prétend référer dans le cadre d’un référence incertaine ou qui échoue, la référence effective doit se retourner vers la tentative de référence elle-même, et donc, le vécu psychologique en personne (dire que « X m’apparaît », dans le cadre d’une description phénoménologique oblique, c’est dire que j’ai effectivement un contenu mental visant intrinsèquement X).

Nous pouvons alors comprendre en quoi, dans l’exemple des géants pris pour des moulins, Sancho Panza et Don Quichotte ont raison. En effet, en un premier sens, Sancho Panza a raison de dire qu’il n’y a pas de géants, car il n’y a pas d’objet extra-mental dénotable in recto sous la forme de géants. Mais Don Quichotte a raison, en un autre sens, de dire que ce qu’il voit c’est bien des géants, au sens où il faut convertir sa description phénoménologique in obliquo en description psychologique in recto : il existe bien un état mental intentionnel au sujet ou concernant des géants et dont Don Quichotte est le porteur. Il est donc vrai qu’il n’y a pas de géants et que Don Quichotte ne voit rien sur le plan de l’objet, mais il est vrai qu’il y a bien des géants sur le plan du contenu intentionnel mental. Les géants n’existent qu’in obliquo, mais le contenu mental intentionnellement lié aux géants existe bien, lui, in recto.

Cette manière élégante de régler le problème des représentations sans objets, a de lourdes conséquences en ce qui concerne sa compréhension implicite de ce qu’est l’intentionnalité. Cette conception très brentanienne suppose d’abord de définir l’intentionnalité en termes d’apparence, c’est-à-dire d’un donné non pas immédiatement en lien avec le monde, mais qui est d’abord présent pour moi et pour moi seulement. Il y a d’abord une conscience phénoménale pré-représentationnelle. Ce qui, nous rappelle Seron, implique non plus de définir la conscience en termes d’intentionnalité (et ainsi, la conscience viserait donc quelque chose sous la forme d’une représentation qui prendrait position sur l’existence ou l’inexistence d’un état de choses), mais l’intentionnalité en termes de conscience (par là, un état mental intentionnel est d’abord le fait intrinsèque d’avoir conscience du fait qu’il est au sujet de X). Ce qui permet à l’intentionnalité de n’être plus la notion originaire, mais d’être une notion seconde, laissant la préséance à la distinction entre existence et apparence. Cela a l’avantage immense de montrer qu’une représentation intentionnelle peut réussir ou échouer[xvii], et c’est ce qui permet, dans les cas d’échec, de penser des représentations sans objets. Denis Seron ajoute que cet internalisme n’est pas pour autant un phénoménisme stricte : certes nous commençons par avoir conscience de nos représentations, d’un point de vue privé, mais la visée in obliquo creuse une brèche dans le solipsisme et fait en sorte que l’état mental soit toujours et au moins à la recherche de quelque chose du monde, même s’il ne le trouve pas : même lorsque ce qui m’apparaît n’existe pas, il faut déjà que cet apparaître prétende à l’existence pour qu’il puisse être démenti.

Cette nouvelle définition de l’être même de l’intentionnalité permet, par ailleurs, à Denis Seron de critiquer, par l’intermédiaire de sa résolution du problème des représentations sans objets, certaines conceptions contemporaines de la perception et de l’intentionnalité. Il critique d’abord la théorie des sens-data, en démontrant que contrairement à sa théorie, qui conserve au moins un rapport oblique au monde, cette dernière sombre dans un internalisme radical qui vire à l’idéalisme, perdant toute possibilité d’une intentionnalité effective. Il s’attaque ensuite à la conception sémantique de l’intentionnalité, à travers un de ses représentants : Gilbert Ryle. Le point de discussion concerne la possibilité d’une intentionnalité qui ne soit pas conceptuelle. Seron défend alors l’idée qu’il y a des expériences immédiates, non médiatisées par du conceptuel, qui nous mettent en présence des choses. C’est dans cette même optique qu’il va critiquer la thèse célèbre sur la perception de Charles Travis. La position de Travis consiste à dire que la perception est « une simple confrontation »[xviii] au monde, qu’elle est en deçà de toute attitude propositionnelle, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’y a aucun sens à dire qu’elle pourrait échouer ou réussir. Par exemple, dans le cadre de l’illusion de Müller-Lyer, analysée par exemple par Jocelyn Benoist[xix], nous voyons d’abord perceptuellement la ligne avec les flèches tournées vers l’intérieur comme plus grande que celle avec les flèches tournées vers l’extérieur. Et cela n’a pas de sens de dire que nous nous trompons, dans l’espace logique de la perception. Notre perception n’est alors illusoire qu’extrinsèquement, dans la position de Travis, à l’expérience perceptive. Le contre-argument de Seron, fort de tous les acquis précédents, se présente comme suit : si l’on veut préserver la différence entre l’être et l’apparaître, il faut en un certain sens que la perception soit déjà représentationnelle, et qu’elle prenne position, même si c’est seulement de manière oblique, quant à l’existence ou à la non existence de son objet.

Conclusion : qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie ?

Enfin, cette définition internaliste de l’intentionnalité, la définissant comme un apparaître qui prétend obliquement à la référence sans nécessairement y avoir accès d’emblée, a une implication majeure : elle détermine une certaine compréhension de ce qu’est la phénoménologie et du contenu de son travail. Si l’intentionnalité est définie en terme d’apparence, et si l’apparence, qui n’est certes pas une entité médiatrice entre le sujet et le réel, mais bien plutôt un moment de l’accès du sujet au réel, le rôle de la phénoménologie va être « d’analyser les apparences »[xx] pour établir quelles sont celles qui vont pouvoir légitimement prétendre à la référence, et celles qui ne le pourront pas. Autrement dit, la phénoménologie doit être une théorie critique[xxi]. En d’autres termes, cela signifie que la phénoménologie n’est plus une discipline autonome, mais qu’elle devient un instrument nécessaire de toute théorie de la connaissance qui prétend décrire nos conditions d’accès au réel lui-même. La phénoménologie devient donc bien, comme le précise Denis Seron, une ressource pour la philosophie de l’esprit, et notamment pour répondre à un des questions principales qu’elle pose : qu’est-ce qu’une croyance vraie ? Nous en arrivons donc à une définition minimale de la phénoménologie, consciemment déflationniste[xxii], qu’avec Denis Seron nous pourrions formuler ainsi : il s’agit d’une théorie permettant de parvenir à une connaissance objective de l’expérience subjective. L’étude phénoménologique de l’apparaître se trouvera, dans cette perspective, toujours placée dans un contexte où l’apparaître est toujours déjà compris depuis une différence effective en l’apparence et la réalité : étudier l’apparence, ce n’est pas d’abord étudier comment le monde nous apparaît en original, mais déterminer à quelles conditions cet apparaître pourra toucher et rejoindre ce qui est véritablement.

La prise de position est ici, dans son ensemble, une prise de position empiriste, c’est-à-dire que la démarche fondamentale de ce travail consiste à retracer la genèse subjective de l’objectivité, en partant de ce qui se donne à nous, de l’expérience, pour déterminer à quelles conditions cette expérience pour nous est aussi expérience de ce qui existe en dehors de nous. La démarche de Seron est explicitement anti-naturaliste, puisque le naturalisme refuse par principe que le subjectif soit premier, et des relations naturelles (connexions neurales, efficiences de processus physiques etc.) le fondement de toute connaissance possible. La « réduction phénoménologique », véritable pierre de touche de la phénoménologie historique, acte fondateur du retour aux choses mêmes, se voit conférer , dans cette optique, un sens déterminé : il s’agit de ce que Seron nomme une « escalade phénoménologique »[xxiii], et qui consiste à réduire les représentations visant le monde in obliquo à des états mentaux psychologiques pris pour thème réflexivement in recto. Cette escalade nous permet de sortir de l’attitude naturelle dans laquelle nous endossons nos croyances en ce qui concerne le monde, pour revenir réflexivement aux états mentaux et à leurs contenus intentionnels intrinsèques, afin de déterminer si l’endossement qu’on leur prête, concernant le monde et non plus seulement leur existence psychologique, est justifié.

Cette manière d’intégrer la phénoménologie à la philosophie de l’esprit représente, comme le rappelle Denis Seron dans son avant-propos, une réelle possibilité de réconciliation de la philosophie continentale et de la philosophie analytique. Nous voudrions cependant nuancer une telle affirmation, car la définition de la phénoménologie qu’elle implique laisse pour compte et exclut tout un versant de la phénoménologie, lui aussi inspiré des travaux de Husserl : il s’agit du versant ontologique de la phénoménologie, qui prend sa naissance avec Heidegger et se poursuit jusqu’à aujourd’hui avec Renaud Barbaras ou Claude Romano. Cette acception de la phénoménologie se place en-deçà ou au-delà de la question de notre accession à la réalité, car cette question de théorie de la connaissance suppose quelque chose que cette tradition ontologique remet en question, à savoir qu’il y ait une distance originelle entre un sujet isolé et un monde existant sans lui, distance qu’il reviendrait à la connaissance objective de combler, moyennant une procédure définie et consistante. Cette ontologie phénoménologique ne vise donc pas à analyser les apparences pour savoir si elles peuvent prétendre au statut de connaissance, puisqu’elle refuse la différence entre l’apparaître et l’être, elle ne se donne pour objectif, au contraire, que d’explorer les différents modes d’être par lesquels les choses se donnent à nous, travail initié par la distinction husserlienne du mode de donation de la région monde et de la région conscience. On donnera pour preuve que la définition de la phénoménologie en termes d’analyse des apparences ne fait pas encore consensus, cette citation de Michel Henry : « La phénoménologie n’est pas une théorie des apparences, théorie qui laisserait derrière elle l’être réel des choses »[xxiv]. C’est là la preuve que la phénoménologie n’a pas encore résorbé son éclatement[xxv] constitutif, éclatement qui est à la fois le garant insigne de son éclat et la ressource de sa vie même.

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[i] Nous reprenons l’exemple donné par Pierre Wagner dans son excellent ouvrage introductif : Wagner, Pierre, Logique et philosophie, Paris, Ellipses, 2014

[ii] Voir à ce sujet Russell, Bertrand, The principles of mathematics, Cambridge, At the university press, 1903, § 47 et Frege, Gottlob, Ecrits logiques et philosophiques, Paris, Seuil, 1970.

[iii] Husserl, Edmund, Recherches logique II, Paris, PUF, p. 218-219.

[iv] Seron, Denis, Apparaître. Essai de philosophie phénoménologique, Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2017, p. 19.

[v] Voir Panaccio, Claude, Qu’est-ce qu’un concept ?, Paris, Vrin, 2011.

[vi] Brentano, Franz, Psychologie du point de vue empirique, Paris, Vrin, 2008.

[vii] Cité par Denis Seron, Op. Cit. p. 140.

[viii] Ibid. p. 31.

[ix] Seron fait la distinction, Ibid. p. 33.

[x] Heidegger, Martin, Les problèmes fondamentaux de la phénoménologie, Paris, Gallimard, 2007.

[xi] Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’Être et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.

[xii] Husserl propose pour sa part de distinguer « le contenu intentionnel » qui est ce que vise la représentation, et le « contenu réel » de la représentation, qui est le vécu lui-même de cette visée. Recherches logiques, II, Op. Cit. §16. Comme le disait Scheler à propos du mouvement, il faut distinguer « la conscience qui tend » et « la conscience de tendre ». Scheler, Max, Le formalisme en éthique et l’éthique matériale des valeurs, Paris, Gallimard, 1955.

[xiii] Seron, Denis, Op. Cit. p. 108.

[xiv] Sellars, Willfrid, « Empiricism and the philosophy of mind » in Science, Perception and Reality, Routledge & Kegan, 1963.

[xv] Brentano, Franz, Op. Cit.

[xvi] Seron, Denis, Op. Cit. p. 95.

[xvii] Seron, Denis, Op. Cit. p. 129.

[xviii] Travis, Charles, Le silence des sens, Paris, Les éditions du Cerf, 2014.

[xix] Benoist, Jocelyn, Éléments de philosophie réaliste, Paris, Vrin, 2011.

[xx] Seron, Denis, Op. Cit, chapitre III.

[xxi] Le terme « critique » doit être compris ici au sens kantien, c’est-à-dire au sens d’un questionnement en retour sur la légitimité des prétentions que peut envelopper une faculté déterminée ou un usage donné de cette faculté. La critique n’a donc pas pour thème le monde en dehors de nous, mais les théories qui s’y rapportent, théories dont on évalue la capacité à s’élever à la dignité de connaissance.

[xxii] Comme Denis Seron le dit lui-même : « le monde phénoménal est vaste et l’on doit voyager léger », p. 18.

[xxiii] Seron, Denis, Op. Cit.

[xxiv] Henry, Michel, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, Vendôme, PUF, 1965, p. 164.

[xxv] Janicaud, Dominique, La phénoménologie éclatée, Paris, éditions de l’éclat, 1998.

Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, Luca Vanzago (Eds.): Imagination and Social Perspectives

Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology Book Cover

Title: Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology
Séries: Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Author: Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, Luca Vanzago (Eds.)
Editora: Routledge
Release Date: 2018
Formatar: Hardcover £96.00
Páginas: 358

Reviewed by: Mary Edwards (School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University)

In his Philosophical Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imagination: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, published in 2004, Jonathan Webber observes that despite the centrality of the imagination to numerous philosophical debates, scant attention has been given to questions such as “What is imagination? What are we actually doing when we imagine? What are we aware of, and what kind of awareness do we have of it?” (2004: xii). The situation has changed dramatically since 2004. Today, questions concerning the character, function, potential, and limits of the imagination are the focus of many exciting debates not only within phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, but also in the fields of psychology, social and political theory, and aesthetics. In short, the imagination is now flourishing as a subject of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology takes on the vital task connecting new insights about the nature of the imagination to questions concerning “the meaning and formation of social perspectives” (1). Although it would be incorrect to claim that research into the imagination has hitherto ignored questions about human sociality (see, for example, Castoriadis 1987 [1975]; Lennon 2015; Robinson and Rundell 1994), this edited volume strives to fill some notable gaps in the available research on imaginary dimension of sociality. Specifically, the editors state that their aim is to offer new investigations into the nature of the “interplay between imaginative and social experience” (1), a topic that has been relatively under-researched.

As the subtitle suggests, the volume emphasizes insights from phenomenology and phenomenologically informed research in psychopathology. However, an increased appreciation for centrality of the imagination to human life – along with the recognition that phenomenological methods provide the most satisfactory means to investigate it – means that this emphasis has the potential to furnish a rich interdisciplinary exchange. This potential is realized in this volume, which brings together contributions from leading and emerging scholars working not only in phenomenology and psychopathology, but also in philosophy of mind, epistemology, psychology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of language, and anthropology. What’s more, Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology does some work towards bridging the so-called divide between continental and analytic philosophy by combining insights from thinkers from both traditions.

The volume’s eighteen chapters are divided into five sections: Imagining Oneself; Imagination and Intersubjectivity in Psychopathology; Imagination and the Experience of Others; The Sociality of Imagination; and Aesthetic, Ethical and Social-Political Grounds of Perspective-Taking. These section titles provide an accurate indication of the diversity – in terms of both focus and approach – of the volume’s contents. Although it is impossible to do full justice to all eighteen contributions in the context of a review such as this, in what follows, I shall try to provide a general sense of the achievements of the collection as a whole by discussing it in terms of what I take to be three of its key themes.

Unsurprisingly, empathy is an important theme. What is perhaps more surprising though is that the chapters that offer theorizations and analyses of empathy in are not confined to the third section on Imagination and the Experience of Other but, rather, peppered throughout the volume. Indeed, the idea that our common conception of empathy – as an imaginative action through which one simulates the experience of another in order to feel what s/he feels – is impoverished is continually reinforced throughout the book.

Matthew Ratcliffe’s chapter, titled “Empathy Without Simulation”, is the chapter that most obviously calls our preconceptions about what empathy is into question. Drawing on instances of empathy in clinical practice, Ratcliffe contends that empathy has a “wider applicability” than is generally supposed (199). He criticizes theories of empathy that define it as the (implicit or explicit) simulation of another’s experience for mistaking a characteristic particular to quite sophisticated kinds of empathy – and which is neither necessary nor sufficient for empathy – for the essential characteristic of empathy. Further, he maintains that while phenomenological accounts – such as those defended by Edith Stein and, more recently, Dan Zahavi – correctly underline the centrality of the second-person to empathic experience, they tend to overstate its perceptual (or quasi-perceptual) quality, with the consequence that they render the other’s feelings as visible but vague; they seem incapable of explaining how one subject would be able to “‘see’ why” another feels the way she does (212). Sight is, therefore, gained at the cost of empathetic insight in Ratcliffe’s view. In order to preserve both “the second-person orientation” of empathy and grant its subject insight into another’s perspective, Ratcliffe argues that empathy ought to be characterized as an “openness to potential phenomenological difference between self and other” (205), with more sophisticated forms of it also involving “exploratory” processes, including simulation (202).

Anita Avramides examines simulation and perception accounts of empathy in chapter 11, so as to contrast their respective views on the role of the imagination in “knowing others”, which she takes to be a means not only for predicting others’ behaviour but also for calibrating one’s mental life with regard to theirs (194). She contends that simulation accounts assign a central role to the imagination and perceptual accounts, none at all. This sets the stage for the introduction of Avramides’s own alternative account, which grants the imagination a key role in the process of knowing others, but turns out to be in accordance with perceptual accounts due to its insistence that “the role of the imagination in our coming to know the minds of others is the role it plays in the perception of others, not the simulation of others” (192). Building primarily upon the work of P.F. Strawson, Avramides’s chapter may be of particular interest to readers from continental and phenomenological backgrounds, since it employs an “analytic” frame to defend a perceptual account of perception, which makes an interesting contrast to the phenomenological (quasi-)perceptual accounts of empathy discussed elsewhere in the volume.

Matthias Flatscher and Sergej Seitz’s chapter on “The Ethico-Political Turn of Phenomenology” makes another important contribution to the overarching idea that empathy may function in ways that extend far beyond our conscious efforts to understand others. The authors hold that Husserl’s key insight that “the other is ultimately not a phenomenon in the phenomenological sense” (327) – since the other qua other conscious subject is given to conscious as inaccessible – when considered alongside the “riddle of how empathy becomes indeed possible”, gives us cause to challenge the “two basic assumptions that Husserlian phenomenology shares with the whole tradition of modern Western thought”; namely, the presumed “analytic priority of the subject over the other” and the idea that the “relation between self and other is first and foremost epistemological” (328). Then, through a careful discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’s view that subject’s being is one that “occupied by the other” from the beginning (332), Flatscher and Seitz suggest Levinasian phenomenology – which takes the ethico-political sphere as ontologically more primary than the epistemological – opens up the possibility of conceiving of empathy not as a riddle, but as a the principal ethical event triggered by perception of a face that “speaks” (330).

The idea that intersubjective events play a fundamental role in shaping human experience motivates all the chapters in this collection, in one way or another. It is an idea of central philosophical importance because it prompts us to challenge our preconceptions about the autonomy of the individual, and many of the chapters within this volume attempt – in more or less direct ways – to respond to this challenge. Even Andrea Altobrando’s chapter, titled “Imagining Oneself”, eventually connects the capacity to abstractly conceive of oneself on one’s imagination to the capacity to be a social subject (39). The indispensability of the imagination to social experience is the subject of chapter 8, where Jens Bonnemann seeks to illuminate the fundamental role it plays in Sartre’s conception of intersubjectivity. The novelty of this chapter lies in the fact that rather than examining Sartre’s thought on the imagination in The Imaginary, it focuses on his discussion of “The Look” in Being and Nothingness, in order to highlight the role of the imagination in shaping social experience and, primarily, the experience of being looked at. Bonnemann’s analysis elaborates upon Sartrean insight that when one feels oneself as the object of a look, the “perceptible qualities of the objective Other become the basis for imagining his/her inaccessible view” (161). In the context of Sartre’s phenomenology, it contends that only our interactions with others can show us who we are. This implies that “[w]hen I think about myself, the imagination comes into play as well because I try to imaginarily see myself with the eyes of another” and so the other’s otherness, together with “the inescapability of the first-person perspective”, provide “the basis for the constitutive correlation of interaction and imagination” (165). And, what Sartre sees as being constituted by this correlation is, according to Bonnemann, precisely the subject’s sense of herself as an I.

Fittingly, the chapter that follows Bonnemann’s provides an elucidation of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to move away from what he regards as overly individualist philosophical accounts of intersubjective experience – which he even finds preserved in Sartre’s phenomenology – by shifting the emphasis from the subjectivity of consciousness to “intercorporeality”. Here, Luca Vanzago explains that intercorporeality for later Merleau-Ponty designates something more than the “incarnated subjectivity” discussed in The Phenomenology of Perception. Although the nature of this “something more” is difficult to define, Vanzago’s suggestion is that it involves a revision of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier sharp distinction between the imagination and perception, as well as “a different articulation between the two” (167). This different articulation is described as being one that presupposes a “relationist” as opposed to a “substantialist” conception of life and nature. It, therefore, gives way to a new relational ontology. This gives us further insight into what the “something more” of Merleau-Ponty’s later notion of intercorporeality consists in, as the “ontologization of the interrelations between subjects” in his later work is described to take “the shape of intercorporeality”, which – rather than deriving from substance – appears to be “more fundamental than substance” (171). But what does this ontological claim have to do with sociality? What does this understanding of intercorporeality imply for intersubjectivity? In responding to these questions, Vanzago underlines the crucial point that if intercorporeality provides the basis for intersubjective experience, then “what a subject is can neither be equated with its own self-consciousness or with its own biological body”, since “Othernes” is “already present as a constitutive part of the subject’s sameness” (172). Why might this view be considered more radical than, for instance, Sartre’s idea that the imagined other is essential to the subject’s capacity to understand herself as an “I-subject”? The answer is because it refuses to posit even a weak sense of self-consciousness as existing prior to the encounter with otherness. The perspective from which the problem of intersubjectivity is considered is, therefore, reversed in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, according to Vanzago. The task for the philosopher approaching this problem is no longer that of accounting for the experience of another but, to the contrary, that of accounting for the experience of the self as an individuated subject.

Silvana Borutti, and Karl Mertens, in chapters 16 and 17 respectively, offer further illuminating changes of perspective in relation to the problem of intersubjectivity. The perspective put forward by Borutti is one that regards “an aesthetical-imaginative relationship with otherness” as “the foundation of meanings comprehension” (288), which is illustrated through an analysis of Kant’s concept of Gemeinsinn (common sense) alongside Wittgenstein’s notion of Übereinstimmung (literally: consonance of voices). Mertens’s chapter asserts that if the perspective that “agents are always already embedded in situations that are fundamentally social” is adopted, “there is no need to transcend the individualistic perspective of the involved agents” and the “problem of explaining how it is possible for individual agents to develop collective intentions that guide their social action no longer arises” (311). Mertens presents “collective social perspectivity” – whereby “the particular social perspectives of social groups and even whole societies are considered in the specificity” (306) – as real possibility, in order to support the adoption of this perspective in analyses of societal change and social progress.

Rudolf Bernet’s chapter, “Spinoza on the Role of Feelings, Imagination and Knowledge in Sex, Love and Social Life”, is an investigation into the possibilities that emerge from considering the metaphysics of intersubjectivity by following Spinoza, for whom “[t]he metaphysical interest in what it means to be a human among other humans and the ethical interest in what it means to lead a good life in relation to other persons are intimately related” (140). Bernet’s close study of Spinoza’s understanding of the passions provides a way of conceiving of “the imagination of others” as something that may be surpassed and transformed into “an intellectual insight into their intrinsic nature” (151).

A different question to that of how the imagination may function in our awareness of others’ experiences is the question of whether we can share imaginative experiences with others. The three chapters comprising section IV, The Sociality of Imagination, take up this question. In chapter 14, Julia Jansen uses a phenomenological approach to consider whether there is “even such a thing as shared imagining” (247). By situating the question concerning the possibility of shared imagining within a phenomenological framework that considers the imagination not merely as a cognitive function that generates private representations “inside” the subject’s mind, but as a dynamic mode of consciousness that can also be embedded in, extended into, and distributed throughout a social world, Jansen shows that the idea of shared imagining is not strange as it might initially seem. What is most illuminating about Jansen’s chapter, is its development of Husserl’s idea that imagined objects are not individual objects (as objects of perception are), but ideal objects that are, in Jansen’s terms, insusceptible to “individuation” (255). When imaginary objects are conceived of in this way, it becomes possible to see how different subjects can still be said to imagine the same thing even if the contents of each subject’s consciousness is not the same: “Despite the different psychological episodes the two [imaginers] may be undergoing, they can still share the content of their imagining because that content is ‘ideal’ insofar as it is irreducible to any real experiences in space and time or any processes underlying them . . . we can both imagine the same (snow white, ‘a just state’) in different ways”, and this “same” turns out to be “merely quasi same” because the imagined object necessarily lacks a distinct position in space and time (256). The possibility of having the quasi same imaginary object as another opens up the further possibility of bringing our imaginings closer together through communication. For instance, if we imagine Madame Bovary together and you tell me that she has brown eyes, so long my imagined Madame Bovary is neutral with regard to eye-colour, I can adjust my image of Madame Bovary to bring it closer to yours. However, Jansen suggests that Husserl’s key insight about sharp distinctions between perception and imagination being phenomenologically unviable is not pushed to its full conclusion in his work, which places too much emphasis on the “creative” aspects of imagination (261). More work must be done then, in Jansen’s view, in order to satisfactorily account for the imaginative aspects of less cerebral forms of collaboration at work in activities such as dancing together, playing music together, etc.

Emanuele Caminada’s exploration of Scheler’s account of the social cognition, in chapter 15, and Thomas Szanto’s normative account of collective imagination, in chapter 13, compliment Jansen’s chapter by investigating the conditions for sharing mental states that are usually construed as “subjective”. First, Caminada’s chapter does a good job of underlining the value of following Scheler when considering different types of social understanding in connection to different forms of sociality, by showing how “paying attention to the role played by different forms of sociality permits to see how direct social perception is constitutively embedded in communities that share a good amount of expression forms” (278). Caminada draws upon Scheler’s famous example of shared grief to provide a typology of social emotions that illustrates how the difficulty in understanding how another feels may be reduced or increased depending on the social situations of both parties, as well as their relation to the object of the emotion in question. Second, Szanto’s chapter considers the phenomenon of “imaginative resistance” – where the subject finds that s/he is unable to engage in imagining a situation s/he finds morally abhorrent – in order to counter the common assumption that there are no limits to what can be imagined. Then, it proceeds to argue that the normative constraints that the imagination is subject to take on a stronger role in collective imaginings. Szanto maintains that an appreciation of the enhanced normative dimension in collective imaginings turns out to be crucial for grasping the ways in which collective imaginings differ from individual imaginings. Drawing on the work of Edith Stein, Szanto reinforces Jansen’s point that subjects can imagine the same object differently, and he helpfully outlines the normative criteria he believes must be satisfied in order for the imagining of an object to be considered collective by developing Kendall Walton’s classic account of collective imagination. A final result of Szanto’s chapter is that it provides a solid basis for more comprehensive accounts of the collective imagination.

The final key theme of this volume, as I see it, is that of the as-if function of the imagination. This function is shown to be essential not only to our theoretical understanding of the imagination, but also to our understanding of certain psychopathological conditions, since the awareness that imaginings merely constitute objects “as if” they were present is vital in distinguishing fiction from reality – as Michela Summa’s chapter “Experiencing Reality in Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability” superbly illustrates – as well as for separating the real from the unreal within experience. Thus, in addition to revealing the imagination as an essential component of human experience, the volume also offers systematic analyses of its potential to be dangerous and alienating. In chapter 5, Thomas Fuchs provides a fascinating account of the ways in which the as-if function of imaginings may be reduced or altogether lost in schizophrenia by investigating some of its symptoms, including: concretism, defined as “the failure to adequately use an understand the metaphorical or figurative meaning of language”; transitivism, “the loss of self-other distinction or self-demarcation”; and delusion (87-94). Moreover, Fuchs also argues that the transition from the delusional mood – in which aspects of experience take on an unreal character – to full delusion – in which the unreal is mistaken for the real – involves not only a loss of the as-if function, but also a loss of intersubjectivity (92). The centrality of a sense of a shared reality to non-pathological imagining is further explored in the two chapters that follow: Tim Grohmann’s chapter 6, titled, “Intersubjective Expression in Autism and Schizophrenia”, and Zeno Van Duppen’s chapter 7, “The Phenomenology of Intersubjective Reality in Schizophrenia”.

If one expects to find some sustained engagement with Cornelius Castoriadis’s philosophical work on the imaginary institution of society in this volume, one will be disappointed. Castoriadis is mentioned in Szanto’s chapter (224) and briefly discussed in Jansen’s (249-50), but there is no sustained treatment of his work here. As the focus of this volume is on phenomenological analyses of the imagination and social perspectives, it would be unfair to regard the absence of a prolonged engagement with Castoriadis’s work as a flaw. But, it certainly would be a bonus, in my view, particularly as Kathleen Lennon has recently underlined its significance for philosophical investigations into the social imaginary (2015: 71-95). Further, even though Sartrean insights are developed throughout this volume outside of Bonnemann’s chapter in ways that will surely be of interest to Sartre scholars (see, especially, 84, 124-5, 223, 228), some may find it disappointing that there is only one chapter that concentrates on Sartre’s thought on the imagination. My only real issue with this volume, however, is that it has been let down by careless copy-editing in places. Notably, one finds “deem [instead of doom] to failure” on the first page, then “synonymous of [instead of with] ‘supposing’” (2), “how [instead of what] your experience would be like” (11), and “the most evident bias of these current debates consists in its naturalism” (265, emphasis added). Castoriadis’s name is also missing from the Index. Although minor, these errors can distract the reader from the content.

In conclusion, this collection of original articles – some of which were first presented at the 2015 conference “Imagination, Intersubjectivity, and Perspective-Taking”, held at Villa Vigoni, Loveno di Menaggio, Italy – offers a fresh and truly interdisciplinary perspective of on the significance of the imagination in our social lives. But it has much to recommend it beyond its novelty and interdisciplinary scope. First and foremost: it brings together vitally important research on the social features and functions of the imagination that have so far been under-researched. The editors’ helpful introductory chapter outlines the problems raised by the question of the imagination’s role in human life and gives readers a good sense of which chapters will be most relevant to their interests. The chapters themselves each yield new insights into the incredibly complex ways in which the imagination provides structural support for human sociality and indicate areas where further research is required. Altogether, this means that Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology represents an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students working on the philosophy of the imagination and/or the psychological mechanisms involved in social interaction.

References:

Castoriadis, C. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lennon, K. 2015. Imagination and the Imaginary. New York and London: Routledge.

Robinson, G. and J. Rundell (eds). 1994. Rethinking Imagination: Culture and creativity. New York and London: Routledge.

Webber, J. Philosophical Introduction. In The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination, by J.-P. Sartre, trans. Routledge. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

Miles Groth: Translating Heidegger

Title: Translating Heidegger
Séries: New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Author: Miles Groth
Editora: University of Toronto Press
Release Date: 2017. Reprint edition
Formatar: Paperback $29.71
Páginas: 314

Reviewed by: Eric v.d. Luft (Gegensatz Press)

This book is a non-updated reissue of a book published by Humanity Press in 2004. Nevertheless, the University of Toronto Press did well to pick it up, because it is an important contribution to anglophone Heidegger studies. Markus Weidler’s review of the 2004 publication in The Review of Metaphysics, 60, 2 (December 2006): 399-401, is both a straightforward summary and a clear appraisal of the main thrusts of its contents.

The book’s title suggests that it might be a sort of manual for rendering Heidegger’s difficult technical vocabulary into English. Some of this is indeed included, but it occupies only the first third of the book (15-112), which is mainly historical. The second third (113-198), which is mainly systematic, concerns Heidegger’s own theory of translation, and the final third (199-304) is bibliography.

The Preface and Part One expose infelicities and errors in translating some of the key terms of Heidegger’s technical vocabulary into English. In so doing, Groth suggests a few modifications, some of which seem more controversial than the questionable renderings which he is trying to improve or correct. For example, he translates das Seiende, which he considers “the pivotal term in Heidegger’s way of thinking” (8), as “be-ing,” then gives an unconvincing explanation of how adding the hyphen emphasizes both the substantive and the participial or gerundive nature of this word and reveals how Heidegger used sein as a transitive verb. Since das Seiende “denotes the active ongoing manifesting of an effective actuality” (8), it leads him to rather farfetched renderings such as “seienden Menschen (actual human beings)” (8). The reader is left wondering not only how he would translate wirklichen Menschen, but also whether a clumsy circumlocution such as “human beings who actively are” would be more in keeping with his analysis of das Seiende.

One of the thorniest problems in translating Heidegger is to distinguish adequately between Dasein and Existenz. A common solution is to translate the latter as “existence” and the former as either “being-there” or “there-being” or just leave it in German. Groth suggests translating Dasein as “existence” and Existenz as “life” (9-10). Some of his reasons are cogent, but his flouting of the cognate is bound to cause confusion and his bending over backwards to avoid allusions to Dilthey is unnecessary.

Groth identifies six “fundamental words” (Grundworte) from Heidegger’s technical vocabulary as indispensable in his thought, namely, Sein, Seiende, Dasein, Existenz, Nichts, and Ereignis (23). We might add a few more, such as Sorge, Gestell, Anwesen, Sprache, Alltäglichkeit, ontisch, das Man, eigentlich, Bestand, Zuhandenheit, Gelassenheit, and even the infinitive lassen. Translating these terms as accurately as possible is crucial toward developing any plausible understanding of Heidegger among anglophone thinkers. Accordingly – and wisely – Groth’s focus in Chapter One (29-94) is on the earliest receptions of Heidegger in English, starting with Ryle’s review of Sein und Zeit in 1929, in order to identify the roots of persistent misinterpretations of Heidegger among anglophone scholars. Groth apparently believes that Ryle got Heidegger completely wrong, and it would be difficult to disagree with Groth about this, especially since Groth cites to his advantage several of Ryle’s most blatant mistranslations of Heidegger’s terms, e.g., Sein as “timeless substance” (30) and besorgen as “being-about” (31). Nevertheless, despite his strong criticism of Ryle, Groth graciously gives Ryle the last word, citing to Ryle’s advantage Ryle’s 1969 partial recantation of his 1929 review (32-33).

Groth is less kind to Marjorie Grene. He is not the first to name her 1948 Dreadful Freedom (later retitled Introduction to Existentialism) as among the least helpful introductions to existentialism in general or to Heidegger in particular. Her book, which considers Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Marcel, is worthwhile only with regard to Kierkegaard, and is indeed quite pernicious with regard to Heidegger. In the preface to the 1959 edition, she not only admitted her own laziness in trying to interpret Heidegger for the first edition, but also, after claiming to have finally understood him, rejected him outright and withdrew from any serious consideration of Heidegger to wallow in her pessimistic existentialist morass. After duly citing this preface, Groth shows how Grene actually had little or no understanding of Heidegger (35-36), but obstinately tried to squeeze him into her Procrustean existentialist framework and called his thought and language “weird” or “nonsense” whenever she could not satisfactorily perform this squeeze.

Groth gives about two dozen more good examples in Chapter One of erroneous pre-1949 receptions of Heidegger. Many of these early interpreters, e.g., the theologian Julius Bixler (37), misunderstood Heidegger’s idiosyncratic use of Existenz and thus threw him in among the existentialists. Others, e.g., Paul Tillich (47-49), Ralph Harper (49, 75-76), and Vincent Edward Smith (68-69) each erred in similar ways, trying to impose Thomistic or Scholastic categories of essence and existence upon Heidegger, who uses Wesen, Dasein, and Existenz in quite different senses from how medieval philosophiers used quid est, quod est, essentia, esse, or existentia. All that these theologically or existentially inclined interpreters really show is that, despite their interpretations, Heidegger’s philosophy cannot easily be turned in a theological direction. Furthermore, Eric Unger, writing for the intelligent laity rather than just philosophers, presents Heidegger not as a serious thinker, but as a curiosity, almost a sideshow freak (57-60). Not surprisingly, he also lumps Heidegger in with the existentialists. Unger fails to recognize the ontological difference, believes that Heidegger contrasts reality and existence, and translates Seiende as “reality.” A frustrated Groth writes that “any possibility of understanding Heidegger’s notion of existence is foreclosed by Unger’s translation of Dasein as ‘human life'” (59). Many such interpretations leave us “with an overwhelming sense of obscurity and incomprehensibility about Heidegger’s so-called existential philosophy” (65). Others simply dismiss his vocabulary as impossible to fathom in English (41). For Groth, none of these writers misinterprets Heidegger more grotesquely than William Tudor Jones (70-71) and none of them comes closer to satisfying Groth’s own understanding of Heidegger than William Barrett (72-74).

Regarding Heidegger’s too often alleged connection to existentialism, Groth notes in several places (e.g., 37, 45-49, 66-67, 72, 74) that some interpreters, especially theologians, are too quick to consider Heidegger in conjunction with the radical Christian existentialist Kierkegaard, who, after all, has very little in common with Heidegger. Groth suggests that this tendency to lump the two together may arise from inadequate understanding of such terms as Sein, Dasein, Existenz, Leben, and Wesen. He complains that some translators render Dasein as “human existence” (42, 47), which he says is redundant, since Dasein only refers to specifically human existence. Even though his point is well taken, the redundancy might be necessary to convey the full Heideggerian sense of Dasein to anglophone readers.

Given her life story and especially her close association with Heidegger from 1924 to 1926, we would expect Hannah Arendt not to misunderstand him, even when she disagrees with him. Nevertheless, Groth identifies an “essential error” (51) in her reception of Heidegger, namely, that she confuses Dasein, Existenz, and Mensch. However, as a native speaker, she surely realized that what was perfectly clear to her about Heidegger’s technical vocabulary in German could not be adequately expressed in English. Also, it is not unlikely that her view of Heidegger in the 1940s was influenced by her subsequent mentor, the avowed existentialist Jaspers, and was thus pushed toward existentialism. If we look at the German text of her “What is Existenz Philosophy?” (1946) or “What is Existential Philosophy?” (1994), i.e., “Was ist Existenz-Philosophie?” (1948), we see that among her purposes is to explain, in plain German, Heidegger’s complicated German to a German audience. For example, she uses Essenz instead of Wesen. Such a purpose would naturally not translate well. But Groth considers only the first of these two English translations, does not mention her German version, and indeed seems to be misinterpreting her, alleging, for example, that she equates Existenz and Dasein when she certainly knows better than to do that. Hence we should give her the benefit of the doubt. Much of Groth’s criticism of Arendt could more properly be applied to her translators, Barrett, Robert Kimber, and Rita Kimber (87 n. 48).

Chapter Two (95-112) gives an account of the earliest translation of Heidegger to be published in English: Existence and Being (London: Vision; Chicago: Regnery, 1949). It is important to realize that this book is not a translation of a book by Heidegger, but rather an English journalist’s loosely interrelated compilation of four of Heidegger’s essays (albeit with Heidegger’s approval). In other words, there is no systematic unity to that book. Of the five who worked on it, Stefan Schimanski, Werner Brock, Douglas Scott, Alan Crick, and R.F.C. Hull, only Brock had solid philosophical credentials and none of them were qualified to interpret or translate Heidegger (109). The result was not only a misrepresentation of Heidegger, but also an internally inconsistent hodgepodge. Groth shows how these inconsistencies swirled around the usual key terms: Dasein, Seiende, Existenz, and Sein (104), as well as Befindlichkeit, Entfremdung, existenziell, etc.

The art of translation is to break a textual or literary artifact apart then reassemble it in the context of another culture. Good translating has many axioms, e.g., use a dictionary as contemporary as possible with the text to be translated; translate into, not out of, your native language; try to preserve etymological connections, puns, permutations, transpositions, rhymes, etc. Heidegger would not disagree with any of these; however, his project was different. Going back to original terms and texts was a key aspect of his deconstructive agenda, and thus of his entire philosophy. He did not trust translations, but always preferred to consult and analyze the originals, which in his case generally meant classical and scholastic Latin and especially ancient Greek. Groth notes that Heidegger believed that misunderstandings and corresponding mistranslations of five Greek terms, alêtheia, hen, logos, idea, and energeia, have largely “determined the course of Western philosophy” (19), for better or for worse.

Accordingly, Chapter Three (115-163) discusses Heidegger’s theory of translation as it evolved from 1915 to 1969. Groth has painstakingly gleaned this theory from scattered remarks in Heidegger’s vast corpus. These gleanings provide insight into not only Heidegger’s theory of translation, but also his method and agenda of philosophizing in general. This feature alone would, for both Heidegger scholars and Heidegger disciples alike, make this the most interesting chapter in the book; but Groth makes it even more interesting with the extraordinary claim (116-117) that, contrary to common sense and to traditional hermeneutical principles, thinking is not dependent upon words. Rather, Groth holds that, for Heidegger, thinking is a kind of saying (Sagen), as if there were a real difference between the spoken word and any other kind of word. After all, common sense dictates that we cannot “say” anything unless we have words in which to say it. Without words, spoken or otherwise, actual thinking is not possible, but just a flow of inchoate emotions, disconnected perceptions, and vague notions of how to proceed and survive in the world on a purely animal level.

Groth notes that other commentators have missed this counterintuitive interpretation of Heidegger, as well they might, since it is spun out of thin air and couched in equivocation. Groth even presents evidence against it as evidence for it. He cites “language speaks” (die Sprache spricht) to support his argument that “thinking is not up to the thinker” and that we do not use language, but language uses us in the service of being (117). While it is certainly true that, for Heidegger, language reveals being to us if we listen carefully; it would still be a misinterpretation to take the individual or subjective human actor out of the process of creating or presenting language in the first place. Heidegger’s optimal kind of thinking, meditative thinking (rechnendes Denken), although we may get lost in it and end up we know not where, is above all a deliberate, self-motivated, and self-motivating act, as we clearly infer from Heidegger’s 1955 “Memorial Address.” His famous assertions that “language speaks” and “language is the house of being” mean, among other things, that thought hides in words, i.e., that thought remains concealed (verborgen) in words – whether written, spoken, read, heard, or even merely dreamed – until it is disclosed (entborgen) as being. If we conceive of language in the broadest possible way, then the existence and development of language is a necessary and sufficient condition for thinking.

Despite this major misstep by Groth, other aspects of Heidegger’s theory of translation and Groth’s interpretation of it are less problematic, and generally lead to the conclusion that translating is a kind of thinking (160 n. 69).

Chapter Four (165-193) provides a detailed example of Heidegger’s “paratactic” method of translating. Parataxis means “arranging,” “arrangement,” or “array.” Groth shows how Heidegger breaks up, rearranges, and reassembles an eight-word fragment from Parmenides, using Parmenides to elucidate more precisely his own meaning of seiend-, seen in the Greek as various forms of einai. This is a reciprocal process (183); i.e., in order to bring (herüberbringen) into German the concepts that are hidden in Greek words, the German translator must first immerse himself in Greek thought and go over (hinübergehen) into the Greek so as to become capable of understanding these concepts in both Greek and German and thereby of eventually rendering them in German. Thus Heidegger reads himself into Parmenides and Parmenides into himself. Heidegger is not interested as much in the grammar or syntax of the Greek text (150) as in its particular words, syllables, and even letters, so as to disclose to himself and his readers the far-reaching allusions, etymological inferences, and deep truths that would otherwise remain hidden forever, and were perhaps even hidden from Parmenides. This method coheres well with the whole deconstructive enterprise. “For Heidegger, translating was not at all a matter of words, but of ways of thinking” (108), which suggests that Heidegger’s translation of Parmenides may tell us more about Heidegger than about Parmenides.

Sebastian Luft, Maren Wehrle (Hrsg.): Husserl-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung

Husserl-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung Book Cover

Title: Husserl-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung
Author: Sebastian Luft, Maren Wehrle (Hrsg.)
Editora: J.B. Metzler
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Hardcover 89,95 €
Páginas: VI, 374

Reviewed by: Corinna Lagemann (Freie Universität Berlin)

Das vorliegende Werk Husserl-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2017), herausgegeben von Sebastian Luft und Maren Wehrle, stellt einen vielseitigen, umfassenden Überblick über das Leben und Wirken Edmund Husserls dar. Sein besonderes Verdienst liegt darin, dass er deutlich über einen bloßen Überblick hinausgeht und inhaltlich auch in der Tiefe zu überzeugen vermag. Der Band versammelt eine Vielzahl von Aufsätzen, nicht nur zu Husserls Schaffen als publizierender und lehrender Philosoph – die Sektion „Werk“ umfasst immerhin 24 Beiträge und untergliedert sich in Veröffentlichte Texte und Nachlass – auch seinem Leben, seiner Biographie und den historischen Gegebenheiten seiner Zeit wird, immer in Hinblick auf sein philosophisches Projekt, Beachtung geschenkt. Abschließend widmet sich der Band dem Einfluss, den Husserl ausübte, sowohl auf Personen, deren Denken und Wirken er maßgeblich geprägt hat als auch Strömungen und Denkrichtungen innerhalb und außerhalb der Philosophie. So sind hier neben philosophischen Schulen auch Soziologie, Psychologie und interdisziplinäre Diskurse genannt.

Als „besonderes Anliegen“ und gleichzeitig als Neuartigkeit des Bandes bezeichnen die HerausgeberInnen dem Nachlass: „den in ihm behandelten Themen, seiner Entstehung und der sich durch diesen ausdrückenden Arbeitsweise Husserls, gebührend Raum zu geben. Die Betonung des Nachlasses in der Auswahl der in diesem Handbuch behandelten Themen ist in der Forschung ein Novum“ (S.3).

Die AutorInnen sind der internationalen Husserl-Forschung zuzuordnen; neben Beiträgen aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum von einschlägigen Husserl-Experten wie Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Christian Bermes und Thomas Bedorf, ist z.B. Nicolas de Warren zu nennen, der insbesondere den ersten Teil des Buches mit luziden Betrachtungen zentraler Werke Husserls bereichert.

Der biographische Abschnitt „Leben und Kontext“ bündelt familiäre Situation, zentrale Personen, psycho-soziale Umstände (Husserl spricht in den 1930er Jahren über seine Depression) und bettet sein Schaffen und Lehren sowie die Ausführungen zu seinem wissenschaftlichen Projekt gut ein. Teilweise sehr sachlich, teilweise anekdotisch, greifen die Beiträge von unterschiedlichen Autoren sinnvoll ineinander und schaffen so einen roten Faden, der plausibel zur Werk-Sektion überleitet und die Auseinandersetzung motiviert. So werden bereits hier zentrale Interessen und Begriffe in Husserls Phänomenologie angerissen, die im Lauf des Buches erörtert werden. Als Beispiel wird Husserls Analyse von Twardowski genannt, die gewissermaßen der Ausgangspunkt für Husserls Weiterentwicklung des Intentionalitätsbegriffs sei und damit eine bedeutende Rolle spiele: „Die Frage nach der Rolle der Intentionalität in der Relation zwischen Akt und Gegenstand, und allgemeiner zwischen Ich und Welt, wird dann zum Fundamentalproblem der Phänomenologie“ (S.30).

Im Abschnitt III A, in welchem die veröffentlichten Texte verhandelt werden, folgen die Beiträge chronologisch nach Erscheinungsjahr des behandelten und publizierten Werks. So macht denn auch die Philosophie der Arithmetik als erstes Buch, das auch den Weg in den Buchhandel fand, den Auftakt. Bereits in diesem frühen Text, so arbeitet Mirja Hartimo heraus, werden Konzepte angelegt und entwickelt, die Husserls gesamte Philosophie prägen werden. So wird die Methode der kollektiven Verbindung genannt, und zwar „als psychischer Akt, der mehrere Objekte als ein Ganzes begreift, ohne dass diese ihre Individualität verlieren“ (S.49). Hier zeichnet sich Husserls Herangehensweise ab, Logik und Erfahrungswissen zu verknüpfen, die Gesamtheit eines Phänomenbereichs im Blick zu haben, ohne dabei die Individualität und die logischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten zu verlieren. Originellerweise wendet er diese Methode auch auf die Arithmetik an, wenn er seinen Zahlbegriff aus der natürlichen Anschauung entwickelt: „Husserls Argument ist, dass man ohne die Idee einer kollektiven Verbindung nicht erklären könne, warum bestimmte Inhalte verbunden sein sollen, während andere von einer solchen Kollektion ausgeschlossen sind“ (S.52). Die Anschauung dient Husserl immer als Ausgangspunkt für seine Analysen, und in der Anschauung ist nunmal die Mannigfaltigkeit gegeben. Ein Problem sieht Husserl darin, „die Welt der reinen Logik und die Welt des Bewusstseins zu vereinen“ (ebd.), und hierin liegt, das legt Hartimos differenzierte Analyse nahe, der Ausgangspunkt für Husserls phänomenologisches Projekt, die formale Logik mit der Psychologie zu vereinen, um – im Sinne eines Arguments gegen den Psychologismus – „die Korrelation der objektiven Logik mit dem subjektiven Bewusstsein verständlich zu machen“ (S.55).

An dieser Stelle können nicht alle Beiträge im Band in der Tiefe betrachtet werden. Allen gemeinsam ist, dass sie Bezug aufeinander nehmen, zentrale Begriffe hervorheben und deren Weiterentwicklung skizzieren, was dieser Sektion eine große Stringenz verleiht. So wird das Projekt der Philosophie als strenger Wissenschaft thematisiert (Vgl. Nicolas de Warren, „Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie“), außerdem wird der Begriff der Epoché eingeführt, jene Methode, die durch Abschälung der Sinneseindrücke und die Ausschaltung der naiven Annahme der Gegebenheit der Welt definiert ist und die phänomenologische Untersuchung damit auf die reine immanente Bewusstseinsleistung beschränkt. Diese Methode wird v.a. in den Cartesianischen Meditationen erneut zentral.

Besondere Beachtung verdienen indes Nicolas de Warrens Text zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins sowie Dermot Morans Beitrag zu den Cartesianischen Meditationen. Beide Texte überzeugen durch ihre knappe und dennoch sehr lesbare Entfaltung hoch komplexer Thematiken. De Warren unterfüttert seine Betrachtungen durch kurze Exkurse zu Kant und Hegel, die als wichtige Einflüsse genannt werden und arbeitet Husserls eigenes Projekt in Abgrenzung zu Kants Zeitbegriff heraus; Zeit wird bei Husserl nicht als Abfolge von Jetzt-Punkten im Sinne eines naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitbegriffs verstanden, sondern vielmehr, im Rahmen seines Begriffs der Intentionalität, als Dauer, als Ineinandergreifen von Protention, Retention und Urimpression, was der Dimension des Zeiterlebens viel eher Rechnung trägt. Husserl gelingt hier, das verdeutlicht de Warren, eine Konzeption der Zeit als Struktur des Bewusstseins, welche für nachfolgende Autoren und auch für die heutige Forschung in anderen Disziplinen maßgeblich ist.

Die Cartesianischen Meditationen werden als Husserls „Haupt- und Lebenswerk“ (S.90) gewürdigt, in dem viele Hauptbegriffe der anderen Werke zusammengeführt und weiterentwickelt werden, auch werden wichtige Einflussgrößen diskutiert. Bei aller Komplexität und Detailfülle bleibt Morans Text kurz, präzise und dicht, ohne dabei einen übermäßigen Lesewiderstand aufzubauen.

Wie bereits in der Einleitung angekündigt, erfährt im Folgenden der Nachlass Husserls eine besondere Würdigung in Form einer recht umfassenden eigenen Sektion. Diese ist sehr plausibel und systematisch nach Themen gegliedert; auf besondere Schwierigkeiten bei der Sichtung des Materials gehen die HerausgeberInnen ein. Die Schwierigkeiten ergeben sich aus Husserls durchaus origineller Arbeitsweise, täglich Denktagebuch zu führen, dabei immer neue Ideen anzureißen, auszuprobieren, zu verwerfen oder weiterzuentwickeln, was zwar produktiv ist, aber auch ganz eigene Herausforderungen bei der Aufbereitung birgt. Umso mehr sei die sorgfältige Zusammenstellung der Beiträge entlang der wichtigsten Themen und Begriffe in Husserls Werk gewürdigt, die sowohl das gesamte Projekt der Phänomenologie unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten (als Erste Philosophie, Im Grenzbereich zur Psychologie, Intersubjektivität u.a.) beleuchtet, als auch große Themenbereiche wie Erkenntnisphilosophie und Logik und zu guter Letzt auch auf Kernthemen aus Husserls Schaffen eingeht, wie Lebenswelt und Räumlichkeit.

Im Anschluss benennt der Band Personen, die durch Husserl maßgeblich beeinflusst wurden, darunter natürlich Martin Heidegger – der wohl prominenteste Zeitgenosse Husserls, wobei wohl das gleichzeitig äußerst inspirierende und problematische Verhältnis der beiden maßgeblich für diese Prominenz war und ist. Dies stellt Thomas Nenon in seinem Beitrag sehr gut dar. Außerdem sind z.B. Sartre, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Derrida und Foucault genannt, aber auch Husserls Einfluss in Japan wird erwähnt, in Form eines Beitrag zu Kitaro Nishida. Kritisch bemerken lässt sich, dass Edith Stein keinerlei Erwähnung findet, die als Husserls Assistentin durchaus großen Anteil an manchen Werkphasen hatte – wie immerhin in der Einleitung erwähnt wird – und eine Theorie der Einfühlung entwickelte, die durch Husserl ebenfalls inspiriert war.

Die letzte Sektion setzt sich mit dem Einfluss Husserls auf verschiedene Denkrichtungen und Disziplinen auseinander. Hier wird einmal mehr deutlich, welch große Rolle seine Theorien für die – nicht nur philosophische – Wissenschaft seit dem letzten Jahrhundert spielen.

Alles in allem liegt mit diesem Handbuch ein äußerst bereicherndes Werk für die Auseinandersetzung mit Husserls Philosophie vor. Durch seinen hohen Detailreichtum, seine enorme Dichte und Tiefe bei gleichzeitig überzeugender Struktur, hoher Lesbarkeit und seiner sehr gelungenen Auswahl an Autoren bietet es Kennern eine gute Handreichung und ein solides Nachschlagewerk, aber auch Einsteigern und an Husserls Philosophie Interessierten, die sich einen Überblick verschaffen mögen, ist es eine wertvolle Quelle. Es eignet sich sowohl zum Nachschlagen einzelner Themen und Begriffe, als auch zur Lektüre insgesamt, was dem klugen Aufbau und dem sinnvollen Ineinander der einzelnen Artikel zu verdanken ist.

Jean-Luc Nancy: The Possibility of a World

The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin Book Cover

Title: The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin
Author: Jean-Luc Nancy, Pierre-Philippe Jandin, translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain
Editora: Fordham University Press
Release Date: August 8, 2017
Formatar: Paperback
Páginas: 152

Reviewed by: Nikolaas Deketelaere (Balliol College, University of Oxford)

A reader looking to make their first entry into Jean-Luc Nancy’s work is bound to feel intimidated by the extraordinarily vast and varied nature of this particular French philosopher’s oeuvre. As it spans over dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and engages with almost every major modern thinker, one would be forgiven for feeling somewhat at a loss in deciding where to start. This is why the set-up of the interviews collected in The Possibility of a World is full of promise: guided by Pierre-Philippe Jandin, who shows himself both knowledgeable of how Nancy thinks and skilful in driving the conversation to cover as much ground as possible, Nancy is made to reflect on the entirety of his career in fluent and conversational language: the interviews provide both an accessible articulation of all the major themes of Nancy’s thought, if sometimes only implicitly, for those who are new to it; as well as a valuable insight into how Nancy relates to his own thinking and writing, for those who are already familiar with it. The present translation of these conversations by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain generally captures Nancy’s playful use of the French language well, adding clarifying footnotes where necessary, and makes for a very fluent read in English that only falters occasionally when confronted with a particular French idiom or colloquialism.

Before delving into the conversations themselves, it is perhaps worth noting that, in my view, Nancy is a philosopher perfectly suited to be approached in this dialogical way: not just because it takes the sharp edges of his sometimes frustrating writing style; but also because the dialogical form – which, as Nancy notes, “has always been associated with philosophy” as the expression of “the free life of thinking” (Nancy 1982, 46-47) – embodies the very logic he wants to describe, namely the infinite circulation of meaning. Even when Nancy writes like any other philosopher would, he always does so under the guise of an engagement with someone else’s thinking: his own thinking exists in a dialogical interaction with that of others, to the point that it becomes hard to discern which ideas belong to which conversation partner, and that is exactly the point. Thus, in reading Nancy, we are always reminded of one fact: “without dialogue, no thinking, and no philosophy” (Nancy 1975, 330). In the case of the present text, we have the interesting opportunity to witness how, as prompted by Jandin, Nancy engages with himself, dialogues himself.

The first section of the book is dedicated to Nancy’s “formative years.” What the reader will not find here is a description of how Nancy sees the development of his own thinking throughout his life, for, as he admits elsewhere, he is “not somebody who is very self-aware, I don’t really have much of a conception of my own historical trajectory” (Nancy 2003, 45). What he does do in this section, however, is discuss the various “moments”, both anecdotal and more substantive, that would later prove important for his intellectual development. These anecdotes are really quite delightful. There is, for example, the very early memory of walking past a fence that “had these elaborate patterns.” Already betraying a theoretical orientation at that very young age, Nancy relates how he would “get lost in speculations about the necessity or non-necessity of all these adornments” (2). Then there is the story of his discovery of Heidegger: apparently the reason Nancy first engaged seriously with Heidegger was to play a trick on François Warin, by writing a text on Comte in a parody of Heidegger’s style that managed to convince Warin that it was actually penned by Heidegger himself (17-18).

One of the more informative moments he relates is his reading of the Bible together with the Young Christian Students when he was a teenager: for Nancy, this was “the beginning of a relationship with texts as an inexhaustible resource of meaning or sense (sens).” What he learned there was above all that “One has to interpret a text and this interpretation is infinite” (7). This can still be seen in what we could call the hermeneutic logic that governs all of Nancy’s writing and sits alongside a critique of the specific hermeneutics formulated by Ricoeur and Gadamer. This interest in the texts of Christianity, however, soon became detached from a “properly religious relationship” (8). It is this religious orientation, together with a taste for social and political activism, which he sees as “the initial ferment of my intellectual formation” (8). Nancy then goes on to discuss his initial discovery of Derrida, who he saw at the time as ushering in a profound intellectual upheaval (14, 22). Finally, it is worth mentioning how he looks back on his early work on Kant, undertaken when he was preparing to take the agrégation, for it sets the stage quite well for how he would later develop his own thinking: “What Kant taught us is that (…) pure reason is practical in itself.” Hence, he continues, “in our desire for the unconditioned, in our desire for sense, we’re practical, we act in the world, and so, a priori sensibility (…) is praxis. In every case, I am in action” (19). It is this notion of the sense of the world consisting in our action within it that sets Nancy up to articulate the idea that is at the core of, and indeed guides, his entire philosophy: “Images of the world must be substituted for a dwelling (habitation), a life of the world, in the world. (…) The world is a possibility of sense or meaning’s circulation and we have to make a world, to remake a world” (26).

This allows for a seamless transition to the second section of the book, which deals with Nancy’s understanding of world. Indeed, one of the strengths of these interviews is that they show very clearly how all of Nancy’s thinking hangs together quite closely. Regarding the world, he again takes up his starting point as it is formulated elsewhere (see Nancy 1997, 4): declaring that “There’s no longer a cosmos, there’s no longer a mundus” (38), by which he means that the world no longer appears to us as a coherent totality that is unified by some kind of inherent order. The world that we are to think “no longer has a sense, but it is sense” (Nancy 1997, 8), exists in a circulation of meaning. This leads him to formulate his relational ontology, where the meaning that is the world exists in what happens between entities, in how they relate to one another. It is this question of relation, central as it is to Nancy’s thinking, that he sees as never having received serious philosophical attention (48). Nevertheless, “What is the world,” he wonders, “if not precisely the possibility of the ‘between’?” (47). For, if meaning is not inherent to any single entity, it can only exist in how that entity relates to other entities. In that sense, it is the between, not the self-enclosed singularity of an entity, that comes first. It is only because of “the relation between the two, that is, the ‘between’ the two, which relates the one to the other and separates it from the other at the same time” (47), that something can be anything at all: thing A can only be thing A because it is separate from thing B, because it is-not thing B; because of a separation that constitutes thing A as thing A. It is only because of this between that there can be something, or rather, some things. Being, for Nancy, even when it is singular, is always plural. Indeed, it is only within plurality that there can be singularity. The world is then the totality of sense or meaning that is created by the constellation of different entities in their relation to one another (133). Nancy has coined the term transimmanence to describe the nature of the meaning constituted in this way: neither fully immanent, nor transcendent; but an immanence pointing outside of itself to the between that would be collapsed by full immanence (93).

Ultimately, this thinking of the between is a critique of self-sufficiency: the self does not constitute itself, but must go outside of itself in order to find itself. This opens up an entry into Nancy’s social and political thought, for this impossibility of self-sufficiency “is true for both the collective and the individual,” he notes, “the idea of ‘community’ quite clearly implies (through communitarianisms) the danger of shutting oneself off in self-sufficiency” (49). Indeed, the subsequent three sections deal mostly with Nancy’s handling of questions concerning community and politics. Political questions are essential for Nancy, as long as this is understood in a broad and nuanced way: for him, the French word politique means both “the organization of common existence (…), conjoining antagonistic interests,” as well as expressing “a sense or truth about this existence” (94), and as such has clear ontological significance. Most of the discussion revolves around Nancy’s (relatively) recent engagement with questions concerning identity in relation to the notion of the people, formulated polemically in reaction to the French government’s attempt to have a debate on national identity in 2009. Just like the world no longer has meaning, but is meaning; so too, the people no longer have an identity, but are an identity (Nancy 2015, 29-32). That is to say, their identity is not inherent but exists in their action within the world, their life of the world in the world: the people in themselves are not sufficient for the constitution of their own identity. Hence, speaking of the people always risks understanding this plurality inauthentically as absolute, coherent, self-sufficient singularity: “What allows one to make sense out of numerousness is the people,” Nancy says, “which gets expressed in forms that themselves are no longer numerousness, but suggest a ‘substantial’ unity (‘one’ people, ‘one’ nation)” (73-74).

The sixth section deals with Nancy’s understanding of religion, Christianity in particular. For Nancy, “in the depths of Christianity, there is something like the germ of the disappearance of the sacred” (99). What this means is that Christianity is the religion through which the West is able to leave the religious modality of thought behind. It is the religion that allows the West to emerge from its metaphysical closure, which Christianity is nevertheless at the same time also responsible for. Nancy traces this historical development in his two volumes on what he calls the deconstruction of Christianity (Nancy 2008; 2012). In doing so, he takes up various Christian concepts – God, creation, grace, etc. – and uses them to think atheologically: not necessarily against theology, but in any case against onto-theological metaphysics; in order to put on display how Christianity and the West are opening themselves up from their metaphysical closure. In doing so, these concepts come to describe the way in which we inhabit the world, our dwelling in the world: for example, “creation is the world existing,” Nancy says. “In another sense,” he continues, “one could say that within this lies an opportunity to recover the possibility of admiring, of adoring that the world exists, and the fact that I exist, that you exist” (102). That is to say, these concepts not only function within the (a)theological register, but also take on a much broader existential and ontological meaning.

In the same way, Nancy can be seen to charge the notion of art with ontological and existential significance in the seventh section of the book. There he explains how, given that we no longer live in a cosmos, a world that is unified in its display of a certain inherent order, art is in crisis: what is its role if it can no longer represent this order now that it has collapsed? Let me quote Nancy at length here: “It’s like another creation, a recreation of the world and when there isn’t actually a creator or organizer of the entire world anymore, then this gesture becomes detached for itself, but this gesture has always been the gesture of art, of opening the possibility of an ordering. And I think that one can say that the human being is the one who has to bring out a world, both as a form and as sense, or as language” (106-107). Here Nancy is first of all saying that when art is without ground it fulfils a truly ontological role: in the absence of an order or truth preordained by a creator, art is no longer in the business of merely representing this truth; rather, it performs the gesture of the opening of the possibility of an order, expresses the movement in which the possibility of a world exists, by exposing the void at its origin as “the complete absence of beauty, that is, what points out or indicates beauty” (105). Art exposes what Nancy calls the patency, the opening or the transimmanence of the world: that the world is possible even in the absence of a unifying cosmic order, for it is patently already there in our engagement with it. Art exposes that the world is possible, that the world straightforwardly or manifestly makes sense to us, without the need for a unifying and ordering cosmology or metaphysics. As such art is, as Nancy puts it, “the presentation of presentation” (Nancy 1996, 34), of the infinite circulation of sense that is the world. All we need to do is greet the world in its thereness. Art thus embodies the very gesture of the world as it is constantly coming to be in our engagement with it, in our dwelling within it. When Nancy then says that human beings bring out a world, he means that “the human being is both the expression of the world and the world’s expression,” that is to say that it “is the inhabitant of the world, but at the same time, it transforms the world deeply through its technē, its technology, what in Latin gets translated as ars, its art” (115).

The discussion on art, the presentation of presentation, makes for a smooth transition to the final two sections of the book, dealing with presence and joy. Nancy here reprises, albeit in a more metaphysical way, the analysis of presence that he already formulated in his essay on sleep (see Nancy 2009). According to him, there is never full presence, indeed absence is at the heart of presence: just like the self needs to go outside of it itself in order to find itself; so too he understands presence generally as the continual arrival, or birth, of non-being into being. Here Nancy makes this clear by talking about how when we fall asleep, we at the same time descend into nothingness as well as fall into ourselves and the world. “Every morning,” he says, “one comes back to the world after being truly absent during sleep, which is connected to this poor, physiological, biological truth: Without sleep, one can’t live for long” (121). Though this does not come through particularly clearly in these interviews, for Nancy joy (jouissance) is the moment or experience of being on the limit shared between those two opposites – being and non-being, inside and outside, presence and absence, etc. – through which meaning comes-to-be as the sense that is-about-to-be, to come, through one’s being-outside-of-oneself. “Joy, jouissance, to come,” Nancy says, “have the sense of birth: the sense of the inexhaustible imminence of sense” (Nancy 1993, 5). As such, joy is the experience of ek-sistence as it “strives toward (…) the world and Being-in-the-world, that is, toward the possibility of making sense” (133). Knowing that these interviews were conducted in 2013, Nancy’s thinking of joy here seems to anticipate the conversations with Adèle Van Reeth he would have on the subject not long after, conversations that were published in 2014 under the title La jouissance and translated into English in 2016 as Coming (Nancy & Van Reeth 2014; 2016). It is perhaps unfortunate that the translators do not make a note of this, as one of the strengths of this book is that otherwise, whenever a particular aspect of Nancy’s work is broached in the interview, it comes with a series of useful footnotes that direct the reader to the relevant texts by Nancy or indeed his interlocutors.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that some of the most interesting reflections Nancy articulates over the course of these interviews are often the result of him briefly going off on a tangent. For example, he perhaps shows himself the present-day Kierkegaard or Nietzsche – albeit with a decidedly less capricious personality – when he recounts how he envies the painter and the writer of literature and poetry, since their mode of expressing themselves might be more suited to what Nancy is trying to do. The relationship between philosophy and literature has been a central topic of Nancy’s thinking since the start of his career, and indeed continues to be to this day: “I have the feeling that my philosophical texts aren’t philosophical enough,” he says, “that they need to be more philosophical, but in order to be so, they need to no longer be philosophical, but something else” (23). Hence, Jandin describes Nancy’s writing strategy very accurately by saying that we “aren’t in the coincidentia oppositorum, nor are we in a dialectical logic; we are trying to go ‘between’” (124). The possibility of a world rests entirely on this notion of the between that is explored by Nancy’s writing. Therefore, Nancy’s writing itself must be understood as similarly structured as the world it is trying to shine a light on, to uncover, to stage; a world that is “centrifugal, erratic, open” (134).

References

Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘“Our World” an interview’, trans. by Emma Campbell in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:2 (August 2003), 43-54.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Galilée, 1982).

Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Le ventriloque (À mon père, X.)’ in Mimesis: Des articulations (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 271-338.

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. by Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness, trans. by François Raffoul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. by John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

Jean-Luc Nancy & Adèle van Reeth, La jouissance: Questions de caractère (Paris: Plon/France Culture, 2014).

Jean-Luc Nancy & Adèle van Reeth, Coming, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. by Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

Michael Barber: Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning

Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning Book Cover

Title: Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning
Séries: Contributions to Phenomenology, 91
Author: Michael Barber
Editora: Springer
Release Date: 2017
Formatar: Hardcover 96,29 €
Páginas: XV, 231

Reviewed by: Adrian Razvan Sandru (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

Michael Barber investigates Alfred Schutz’s psychological phenomenology (6) aiming at describing the possibility of emancipation from the stress of everyday life through non-pragmatic regions of meaning. Barber believes that Schutzian phenomenology has the potential of emancipation even though Schutz was weary of committing society to normative determinations and he considered reason to be merely an explanatory instrument in determining the relation between means and ends. Barber grounds the possibility of emancipation in Schutz as follows: 1) the “world of working” – the everyday life of an agent oriented toward pragmatic goals – consists of morally neutral pragmatic situations. At the center of these stands the ego agens as 0-point of all its projects and plans which it needs to master and accomplish. 2) The pragmatical relevances – i.e. the hierarchical ordering of one’s plans and projects – of the ego agens are often confronted with obstacles which may or may not be overcome. 3) The confrontation with higher-level obstacle – such as death, natural phenomena or societal restraints – leads to the ago agens developing pragmatic meta-levels of coping with obstacles and uncertainties such as “the medical industry, massive security measures, or the societal suppression of uncomfortable questions and the development of central myths” (24). Barber argues that such meta-level strategies – meant to defend lower-level pragmatic interests – may lead to pathological needs of mastering the world and exerting one’s control and manifest themselves as “domination of others” or “psychological neuroses”. 4) Relief from such pathologies can be provided by non-pragmatic regions of meaning such as literature, phantasy, dreaming, or theoretical endeavors. 5) These can however also be endangered by the pragmatic anxieties of not reaching one’s goals and thus require grounding in something more. 6) This something more would be, according to Barber, “someone else”, i.e the other embodied in the religious and humorous non-pragmatic provinces of meaning. Drawing and building on Schutz’s “On multiple realities”[1] Barber speaks of religion and humor not just as opposing the world of working but also as provinces of meaning standing in a dialectical relation to everyday life: they can free us from pragmatic anxieties, shed new light on the possibilities of everyday life, and incorporate pragmatic bodily functions essential for communication. Thus, the pragmatic and non-pragmatic are also inter-dependent. Non-pragmatic provinces resist the pragmatic in not being accomplishment-oriented but rely on the latter to manifest themselves in communicative acts.

Barber’s book aims thus not only at reconstructing Schutz’s phenomenology but also at extending it to address the possibility of emancipation. In doing so he hopes to develop an account of non-pragmatic regions of meaning which can communicate and reflect on the pragmatic but also and more importantly address current social, racial, cultural, and psychological issues. In this vein he describes religion and humor as intersubjective experiences which can bridge the conflictual differences afflicting our current society. Barber’s undertaking is remarkable in several aspects: he describes in a Schutzian manner the constitution of the natural attitude; he accepts and further develops Schutz’s extension of this natural attitude through several regions of meaning; building on this he addresses the problem of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and tries to offer several solutions to current societal issues based on it; he addresses the relevancy of religion in a secular world and gives an exhaustive account of humor and its inner workings. Given that Barber relies on Schutz to achieve this I shall first give an account of his reconstruction of the Schutzian philosophy. From this I shall move to discussing in detail the above mentioned aspects of Barber’s book. Even though I appreciate Barber’s attempt I do believe that he runs into some issues discussing the character of religion and of humor as emancipating regions of meaning. This is why I shall also give a short account of the concerns I had reading the book presented here. This shall be followed by a conclusion in which I weigh in once again on the positives and negatives of Barber’s work.

Alfred Schutz and the World of Working

As Barber explains, Schutz – being influenced by Max Weber, Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl – grounds his description of everyday life on a stream of consciousness in which present experiences are lived, future ones are anticipated and past ones are mediated by memory. He sees the formation of meaning of this stream of consciousness in a twofold fashion: first, experiences receive meaning via intentionality, i.e. by singling out experiences and reflecting on them; second, by planning in future past tense we can imagine a project, which as a goal provides meaning to any action we undertake. An important step in describing the world of working is the standardization of these meanings through culture. The standardization occurs as both general typification – concepts such as cats, dogs, trees, house etc. – and as personal typification – the ordering of our interests in hierarchical relevances (e.g. I study in order to receive a well payed job). Even though these typifications occur in culture and are thus intrinsically intersubjective – as language typification shows – they also pertain to subjective meanings as they are formed in the personal temporal unfolding of consciousness of each subject. Despite this they present a common pragmatic ground which makes communication possible. Communication and relating to others in general are also determined by our temporal and spatial state. When space and time are shared with another, subjects take part in the unfolding of each other’s stream of consciousness and influence each other’s typifications.[2] When only time is a shared determination the other is only known as a Contemporary based on typifying inferences leading to an ideal-type. Other ideal-types would be Successors and Predecessors. This kind of pre-reflective typisations constitute our social world, which Schutz holds to be dominated by pragmatic relevances, though he does not accept pragmatism as a viable description of everyday world. Instead, he relies on phenomenology and its methods: aiming objects as form of interacting; eidetic variations as determining essences; the epoché as explaining transitions from one finite region of meaning to another. The latter are not to be understood as ontological structures but as coherent domains of experience which we determine as real by inhabiting them. These regions of meaning are spelled out by a shared “cognitive style” determined by six features: 1) a tension of consciousness which is described in a Bergsonian manner as the attention to life needed at accomplishing projects; 2) the epoché as accessing a certain region of meaning; 3) a form of spontaneity which in the world of working describes the pragmatic involvement of the ego agens, i.e. the pragmatic agent engaged in its projects, in the world through bodily actions; 4) “a specific form of experiencing oneself” ( 5) which in the world of working would consist in an undivided and non-reflective subject living in the present of its projects; 5) “a specific form of sociality (as it is experienced in common sense communication)” (5); 6) and lastly temporality. Given that Barber describes the religious and humorous region of meaning by means of these attributes of the cognitive style I shall present his account of religion and humor in the same manner.

Cognitive Style of Religion

The first attribute of the cognitive style addressed by Barber is the tension of consciousness. Barber associates religion with Bergon’s pure memory as release from the tension of everyday life (10; Bergson, 1950). The tension of consciousness is loosened in religion as believers turn over the control over their lives to a transcendent and establish the latter as the absolute value of their system of relevances. By doing this, a certain objective order is ascribed to the world, through which everything is part of a higher order plan.[3] This, the unconditioned objective order which does not blame failure, helps the ego agens cope with the possibility of not achieving its goals. This in turn helps the ego agens have a more relaxed attitude towards its plans and help it better achieve them, without being plagued by anxieties of failure. Thus, the leaping into a non-pragmatic region of meaning can shed new light on the pragmatic and improve one’s engagement in the world by providing relief from the anxieties of the world of working. The transition from one region of meaning to another is achieved via a certain form of epoché. This transition functions in a Husserlian way by opening up new regions of meaning. In religion this is achieved through sacred spaces, times, and rituals. These isolate the individual from everyday life and inscribe one in a religious appresentative state: “the religious epoché displaces one from straightforward engagement with the world, reorients one’s system of coordinates, and alters one’s relevance scheme” (p12). One can however further engage the world both in a pragmatic and in a religious way. Both manners of involvement require a certain spontaneity of the individual. The involvement in the world of working is thought as being purposive, namely determined by the possibility of achieving goals. The assessment of this possibility and the non-reflective involvement of the ego agens rely on the typisation of past actions. Through the passive representation of accomplished past actions the pragmatic subject determines a certain goal as possible. This possibility is embodied in the sentence “I can do that again”. This determines the possibility of any goal starting from the ego agens as the 0-point of every action. In religion, the story differs. In this region of meaning, the transcendent is set as the ultimate goal, independent from us. This relativizes any other pragmatic goal and makes it lower-order. Such relativizing process may soothe personal anxieties regarding the possibility of pragmatic failure. Liberation however requires that we relate properly to the transcendent. The proper way proposed by Barber is absolute giving over to the transcendent which strips the ego agens of its characteristic as 0-point of all action. This stands in close relation to the fourth attribute of the cognitive style, namely the form of experiencing one’s self. In the world of working one understands oneself as the unity of his involvement in the world and as the “0-point of one’s spatiotemporal and social coordinates” (13). In religion one sees one’s entire history as the appresentation of the transcendent. As such one does not see oneself as the sole conductor of one’s life. As such, one’s involvement in the world is relieved from anxiety as one understands failures not as absolute but as inscribed in a certain purposiveness. This departure from an egocentrical world view reflects itself in the fifth attribute – sociability – too. Just as in phantasy one can enter religion alone or with others. Religious experience accentuates though sociability as the temporality of religion allows for the “socializing” with predecessors in a ritual time. The same ritual aspect of religion weakens the self-oriented typifications and strengthens other-oriented ones. As such “religion engenders social responsibility for the others” (14). As it was shown, the temporality of religion also differs from the one of the world of working. In religion time presents a non-linear character in which passed events or moments may be re-actualized as actually present and not just as memories. This allows for a multivectorial time which provides relief from the linear and future-oriented time of the world of working.

These six attributes show how each aspect of everyday life can be reinterpreted in religion in such a manner that the pragmatic is made relative. Paradoxically, exactly this relativizing of the pragmatic reinforces the pragmatic possibility of the ego agens: not afflicted by anxieties, one can better accomplish one’s projects. This overarching pragmatic view can however raise certain questions. These will be addressed in the section to follow.

Intrinsic and Imposed Relevances

As explained shortly above, everyday life is mainly constituted by the pragmatic engagement in the world. This engagement relies on typisations and passive synthesis which standardize behaviors and actions improving the efficacy of pragmatic agency. Based on such standardized action, the ego agens determines the possibility of a future action based on past successful ones and concludes “I can do it again”. By inhabiting the world of working in this way it also posits itself as the 0-point of its actions. Starting from its spatio-temporal and societal coordinates the pragmatic self determines which plans and projects it can accomplish. The plans and projects are in their turn conditioned by one’s intrinsic relevance system: what one wishes to attain. However, the ego agens is also confronted with imposed relevances and obstacles. The confrontation between imposed and intrinsic relevances can give rise to the meta-strategies at mastering the world. These consist in converting the imposed relevances into intrinsic ones manifested as plans and projects which the ego agens carries out. The degree of imposed relevances can however bring about a conflict in the ego agens, which can lead, according to Barber and Schutz, to pathologies such as anxiety or depression: “it is this collision of intrinsic relevances and imposed relevances that prompts us to turn to non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning like religion and humor” (47). It seems that non-pragmatic regions of meaning are responses to an increased level of anxiety determined by higher-order imposed relevances which cannot be overcome in a pragmatic way: non-pragmatic regions provide relief as the subject renounces control and ceases to act pragmatically. This may relativize the relevance of the pragmatic self and allow for a more relaxed repositioning of the subject in the world-of-working. This description however also presents some difficulties. The starting point in discussing religion and the transcendent is clearly the religious community regarded from a pragmatic standpoint. One gets the feeling, from the beginning of the book, that this entire involvement in religion only occurs because one is stressed and needs relief. The danger of this is to drag the non-pragmatic into the pragmatic as a kind of Feuerbachian response to finitude. Given that Barber states at times that the pragmatic subject re-identifies and sees itself as a new self from the point view of religion, I do not think that he thinks that religion is purely a non-pragmatic tool for the pragmatic. Nevertheless, one does get the feeling that this danger – which is announced in the beginning by Barber – is not dealt enough with and is also not overcome by the communicative dialectics, which Barber proposes as answer to the relation between the pragmatic and the non-pragmatic. The dialectic of communication states that religion not only opposes pragmatic provinces but also makes use of them as communicatory tools. This however does not answer my concern regarding the reduction of religion to pragmatics. A more plausible answer might be the fundamental aspect of the non-pragmatic region of religion explained by Barber as the absolute entrusting of oneself to the transcendent. This absolute entrusting would then eliminate the danger of reduction: even though one is lead to religion by pragmatically induced anxiety, the absolute entrusting ensures that one does not return to the region of pragmatics in the same manner and that therefore one’s relation to the transcendent is not pragmatically determined. Even though this makes clearer how religion interacts with the pragmatic region of meaning without being absorbed in it, it still doesn’t resolve all issues of the religious province of meaning. In the same context of mastering the world Barber says: “we address imposed relevances through all sorts of approaches, from ignoring them, suppressing them, or even developing central myths about the superiority of our own social group” (8.) Here, Barber explains how the pragmatic integrity of a pragmatic community can be defended by mastering strategies relying on a central myth, which can reinforce the mastering identity of said community. Barber does not explain in my opinion how religion avoids acting as a central myth and as such as acting as a hyper-mastering strategy, even when the subjects give themselves completely over to a transcendent. It seems that these issues need be addressed given that we are confronted time and time again with religious fanatism and discrimination. It seems all the more stranger that he does not discuss in detail such issues as he does address it in the case of humor. Barber acknowledges that religion may be seen in a negative way but chooses not to go into detail in this matter. Instead, he states that he deals with an ideal understanding of religion and does point to the necessity of religion being in contact to the theoretical region of meaning for constant revision. I believe that he does not address such issues in depth because he chooses to speak of religion in a universal manner, without differentiating too much between multiple forms of religion. Barber attempts to resolve the problematic of religious variety by ascribing a generic “transcendent” as religious object and appresentation as religious process. In addition to this, he provides several examples of rituals from different religions which match this description. I believe that this is not enough in order to resolve the above mentioned issue and moreover restrains Barber to a generic discourse, which cannot address very specific topics. Furthermore, this generic discourse also neglects the variety of “transcendences” present in different religions. This is for me the overarching problem with Barber’s analysis of religion. One gets the feeling that all forms of religion are constituted by a pragmatic response to an obstacle which relies on a ritualistic process in the name of an absolute power. As such, one could argue that non-pragmatic provinces are constituted by pragmatic ones and for the sake of pragmatic improvement: “Paradoxically, leaping into a province of meaning, in which pragmatic relevances no longer govern, may in some cases be the most pragmatic way of dealing with the difficult-to-control dangers jeopardizing lower-level projects and relevances” (25). This circularity might be problematic as the non-pragmatic provinces would be essentially pragmatically oriented and as such instrumentalized (the other included).

Cognitive Style of Humor

Barber relies on the incongruity theory to describe the intentionality of humor as a non-linear, disturbed one. He argues more precisely that intentionality does not attain its goal as the result of a certain comical event is unexpected: humor breaks away from the expectations of everyday life and does so with a flexibility which allows for laughter. This phenomenological description is, as Barber argues, universal for all humor related phenomena. He also states that the incongruity theory underlines the other two major humor description models: the superiority and the relief theory. In the first case it is argued that one finds something to be funny only as one adopts a superiority stance over that something. In the second description, humor is described as relief of built up tension. Barber argues that in both cases incongruity is first required. The definition of humor is completed later on (151) by two criteria: the first one is that the experience must be enjoyable and it leads to the second, namely that the person experiences the scenario as laughable. I do not know in what degree this really adds to the definition of humor. Incongruity is a powerful argument, but the laughability of humor somehow seems tautological. This concern is resolved later in the book (177) where Barber further explains what laughter and enjoyment actually stand for. Humor detaches itself from the world of working as it has no practical value, instead it only pertains to the enjoyment of incongruities without any other goal. Due to these characteristics it relaxes the restrictions of everyday life by showing that pragmatic relevances can be viewed from another, i.e. comical, perspective. Furthermore, it also has a cathartic function allowing for the venting of tensions in a – ideally – benign way. These last two aspects of humor pertain to the relaxation of the tension of consciousness. Furthermore, incongruities are not rationally interpreted in humor. Instead, they are processed in passive syntheses which surprise the subject with their speed of development. They pertain thus to a certain loosening of the control of the subject and therefore to a loosened tension of consciousness. The transition to these humorous region of meaning is again achieved through an epoché, in this case a comical one. The comical epoché makes apparent the intersubjective nature of humor “perhaps because the humorous province of meaning usually relies on companions, including comedians, who invite others to leap with them into the province” (182). I believe this is one of the most important distinctions to religion. While religion affords a solitary connection with the transcendent and a leap into its region of meaning, humor is conditioned by the immanent other, who has the role of inviting.[4] In short, the transition to the humorous region of meaning relies on the invitation – mediated by body or language cues or specially designated times and spaces such as comedy clubs – of another. The leap in humor often happens in hindsight, when laughter occurs and incongruity is processed in reflection. The enjoyment of this incongruity is the form of the third attribute of the cognitive style, namely the form of spontaneity. Thus, humor relaxes spontaneity as disinterested and purposeless enjoyment. When this enjoyment or when the joke is not fully dedicated to the incongruity and for its own sake then the humorous region of meaning is not achieved. When this is though achieved, one’s experience of oneself – the fourth attribute – changes. The humorous self is a split self as it leaves the pragmatic region in which it is an undivided self, focused on the task at hand and often resorting to formerly developed patterns of behavior. Splitting the self occurs as the comical reveals hidden unconscious actions (such as weird bodily movements) and reorganizes one’s relation to one’s self. This, is explained by Barber through Helmuth Plessner (1970) who calls humans eccentric: “rooted in a body and yet able to take a perspective from outside itself upon itself” (198). Thus, while the pragmatic self thrives in predictability, the humorous self is directed towards incongruity and interruption which diversifies perspective. All this equips humor with a certain flexibility which not only loosens the tension of consciousness and helps the ego agens but also allows for reflection and reassessment of societal conditions. This of course also shapes one’s sociability. The experience of sociability can range from intimacy to aggression. However, when one respects the structure of humor, as Barber argues, humor normally tends towards intimacy, in which a comical community is built and which allows for a flexible ascription of roles: each one of the members can be the joker or the listener. In this community, trust plays an interesting and important role, namely it both determines the possibility of humor – without trust one might be insulted – and is itself determined by humor – trust that is met with trust is also reinforced by humor. The last attribute of the humorous province of meaning is its temporality. Just like phantasy, dreaming, or religion, humor does not deal with objects fixed in time. Instead, it brings a sort of temporal flexibility: it can slow down time, it can rearrange the temporality of a situation by re-assessing it from the viewpoint of incongruity (after the punch-line one reassess a certain temporal process as leading toward the comical climax). However, unlike religion, humor cannot reverse time and it cannot make something past or future present.

Face-to-face Humor

Barber gives an exhaustive account of humor contrasting Schutz’s view with other concurrent theories. The remarkably interesting aspect of the analysis of this region of meaning is its interracial and intercultural potential, as Barber explains it. Intersubjectivity is closely related to the humorous epoché: the very accessing of humor is determined by cues given by another. After the epoché is reached one’s expectations are shattered by the passive synthesis of events developing at a surprising speed. This incongruity re-shapes perspectives bringing to light hidden aspects of experience. Furthermore, as explained above, the very humorous style of an individual is influenced by the passive absorption of different humorous styles from different individuals. This also involves an interracial sensibility to humor: through associative absorbing, a situation – which could otherwise present interracial tensions – can be understood in a more relaxed and comical way. Barber further develops this thought stating that humor can reveal hidden cultural determinations of our behavior, submitting them in a comical way to a reflective process, which could loosen sociocultural preconceptions. This aspect of Barber’s book is interesting insofar as it deals with sensitive social issues through the agency of a more relaxed environment prone to intersubjecivity. Here, however, the idealistic manner of treating different regions of meaning is also felt. Barber often speaks of his African-American friend who through humor makes Barber conscious of his cultural background. This in turn helps Barber better understand himself and relate to his friend. Intercultural or interracial jokes and humor can however also turn into clichés and/or discriminatory typifications, which mediated by humor may appear benign. In the case of humor, Barber does see the danger of racism and discrimination and addresses it in chapter 7.4. Based on Schutz he argues that humor is also the medium of discriminatory typifications of closed groups through which they denigrate the Stranger. As a solution he offers a face-to-face humor, namely a humor based on interpersonal relationships. Face to face, says Barber, the subjects are constantly confronted with each other. This regulates humor insofar as the face-to-face situation forces both teller as well as listener to measure each other’s responses and exchange perspectives. He develops on this with examples of his already mentioned African-American friend. He states that his jokes make Barber aware of cultural differences as well give him insight in the oppression experienced by the African-American community. This opens the way for interracial communication. This account is indeed an interesting alternative to intercultural and interracial approaches but it does have, in my opinion, a weak spot. It remains ideal as it speaks of already friendly relationships in which respect is presupposed. Furthermore, it offers as example the jokes of a person which is described by Barber as kind and always willing to breach racial barriers (166). Based on this, it seems to me that the kindness of the joke teller and his disposition and respect to the other build the basis for non-racist jokes and not the face-to-face situation. The same can be said about another requirement of intersubjective comical community, namely trust. If trust is part of humor from the outset,[5] then humor between parties in tension would not be possible. Furthermore, it strengthens the worry, that Barber bases his analyses of humor on examples of humor within an established relationship of friendship. This question would be answered, if one accepts a common, universal, and underlying trust between all people which can be reinforced by humor and thus improving interracial relations. There is however no argument for such a trust in Barber’s book and its mere presupposition would be problematic.

Conclusion

In conclusion I think that Barber’s handling of humor is more interesting and appealing than his expose on religion. I think the problem with his analysis of religion lies within the fact that he analyses religion as a unitary and uniform concept: he reduces a variety of religions to a system of relevances and a relationship to the transcendent which strips his analysis of specificity and in depth analysis of religious phenomena. On the other hand, humor is treated in its entirety as it is looked at on its own. A further advantage of humor in this book is that it is more universal than religion. Religions each have their own set of rituals and dogmas which I do not think can be reduced to some sort of universal set of relevances. On the other hand, humor is described as flexible and adaptable to each situation. Furthermore, each one of us can relate to a comical phenomenon and as such, humor is universal. I regret not being able to discuss other interesting themes of Barber’s book such as Schutz’s view on passive synthesis and the constitution of the natural attitude, the dialectical nature of the collective and the individual in religion, the relation between the reflexive and the pragmatic self in the world of working and its relation to death, etc. Unfortunately, due to lack of space I had to focus on the main goals of Barber’s book: explaining humor and religion as emancipating regions of meaning. As I have stated, I think the analysis of humor is more precise and clear. Nevertheless, both topics shed light on the possibilities of alternate solutions to intercultural, interracial and psychological issues. This makes Barber’s book worthy to read.

Bibliography

Schutz, Alfred. 1962. On multiple realities. In The problem of social reality, ed. M. Natanson, 207–259. Vol. 1 of Collected Papers. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Plessner, Helmuth. 1970. Laughing and crying: A study of the limits of human behavior. Trans. J.S. Churchill and M. Grene. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1950. Matter and memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. London/New York: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd./The Macmillan Company.

[1] Barber does not only discuss “On multiple realities”. He provides a detailed historical development of Schutz’ thought. Unfortunately, I am not able to go into detail concerning this historical account due to space restrictions. This aspect of Barber’s book would be nevertheless of great interest for any Schutzian scholar.

[2] This is important in Barber’s account of face-to-face humor.

[3] Barber explains this relation to the transcendent in a Husserlian way, namely by means of appresentation: symbols function as appresentative loci for the divine.

[4] One can of course re-live a past comical event by oneself, but this would also be intersubjective in nature as humor is often associative and reflected in connection to the humorous style of another. Barber refers here to a “passive absorbtion” of other humorous styles which shape the humor region of meaning in an intersubjective manner.

[5] As shown above.