Categoria: Resenhas

Title: Hegel
Séries: Studies in Continental Thought
Author: Martin Heidegger - Translated by Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn
Editora: Indiana University Press
Release Date: 2015
Formatar: Hardcover
Páginas: 168

Heidegger’s Hegel

This installment in the Studies in Continental Thought series from Indiana University Press continues the recent string of excellent translations of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, bringing volume 68 of the German Klostermann editions to English readers for the first time. Heidegger’s slim volume on Hegel belongs to the third division of the Gesamtausgabe, “Unpublished Treatises: Addresses-Ponderings,” of which Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) was the first to appear. The recent (2012) retranslation of the Beiträge as Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) seems to have marked a renewed commitment to Heidegger’s oeuvre by the IU Press, as well as the broad acceptance of an approach to translation that has greatly enhanced the general readability of Heidegger’s work in English. This review will do three things: 1) address the strengths and weaknesses of Hegel as a work of translation; 2) at times, briefly situate Hegel among Heidegger’s overall project; and, 3) confront the text itself as a treatment of Hegel in the context of Heidegger’s all-important Seinsfrage, or the question of Being.

As a work of translation, Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn do an admirable job of rendering this often dense and sometimes fragmented work in more or less accessible English. The well-known and much-lamented difficulty in translating Heidegger is the way in which he plays on German grammar and the associations among roots, prefixes, and suffixes that dominate the technical, philosophical vocabulary of the German schools, and German Idealism after Wolff and Leibniz in particular throughout Hegel. Arel and Feuerhahn demonstrate a real sensitivity to this difficulty, especially where Heidegger makes crucial connections from Kant, to Hegel, to his own work – something of a recurrent theme in this text. Where Heidegger plays on the meaning of prefixes by deploying hyphenations, the translators preserve the hyphenation in English when they are afforded a basically direct correlation between German and English. Where this is not possible, as it often is not, the translator’s have opted to include the German in brackets to clue readers in on Heidegger’s game, while providing a sensible English alternative that allows readers to more intuitively grasp the moves Heidegger makes. I generally agree with this approach, as it benefits both readers who have a knowledge of German and those who do not. Those with serious interest in Heidegger should know some German, and the indication of the original text is illuminating. However, even the most scholastic of Heidegger scholars must appreciate the benefits of a readable English text that does not constantly disrupt the reader with bizarre and unintuitive locutions and neologisms, throwing the reader out of the flow of the text and making it even more difficult to follow the line of thought therein. The translators navigate this pitfall adroitly, and when the text suffers I think the fault is Heidegger’s and not his translators. Let Heidegger do the work and lay his own traps. Successful translators of Heidegger allow the slow and tedious transformation of concepts to unfold as Heidegger seems to have intended without attempting to shoehorn ready-made interpretations into unnecessary and distracting neologisms and ugly faux German hyphenation schemes. Arel and Feuerhahn are successful far more often than not.

With that said, Hegel is certainly a book for students of Heidegger or Hegel, and not at all a good general introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy, and even less so to philosophy generally. Without some basic knowledge of Heidegger’s project, readers would quickly become lost in this text. Some basic knowldege of Hegel is only marginally less important, and greatly aids in making the text accessible. Even still, some of this book is extremely challenging, for reasons that differ wildly depending on the part of the text under consideration.

Hegel is split in two, the first part composed between 1938-39 and revisited in 1941. The second part dates from 1942 and deals at length with the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a much fuller and more robust style than is exhibited in the first part. Arel and Feuerhahn do well to make clear the sources of Heidegger’s Hegel, as well as outline their general approach to translation, in their brief introduction. Again, the problems of producing a proper scholarly edition of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe are well-known and documented. The Heidegger estate, executed by his son Hermann, does not allow what they deem to be extraneous or otherwise excessive scholarly apparatuses to be attached to the work of the Father, who is considered the final word on all matters philosophical. Thus, even in English, Heidegger’s works lack helpful indexes (something set to change with the publication of the first volume of Black Notebooks this spring, 2016), or extensive interpretive introductions. I suppose I can do without the interpretations, though an index would be a great boon to all Gesamtasugabe editions. Nevertheless, Arel and Feuerhahn have worked within these parameters to provide some helpful context and clarify their decisions regarding translations in a brief introduction.

The first part of Hegel is fragmentary and comes from notes Heidegger was preparing for an oral presentation to a small gathering of colleagues. Whether or not Heidegger ever delivered these remarks on “Negativity” remains unclear. However, there are striking connections to other works on nihilism (the Nietzsche lectures, his 1955 essay in celebration of Ernst Junger translated as “On the Question of Being” in Pathmarks, and, in particular, his 1957 lectures published as Identity and Difference, which Heidegger himself viewed as among the most important of his works after Being and Time) and also to the 1942-43 essay published as “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” in Off the Beaten Track. The latter essay reiterates Heideggers meditations on the meaning of Hegel’s addition of the word “experience” to his subtitle “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” in the 1807 edition of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In his Hegel book, Heidegger works out the history of Hegel’s manipulations of the title and fixes his analysis on uncovering the importance of “experience” to the phenomenon of consciousness central to the Hegelian system. This later emphasis on experience stems from his engagement with Hegel at the end of Being and Time, where Hegel was deployed in an effort to work out the transcendence of Dasein; ultimately, the view that Dasein is itself the transcendent, since it is the Dasein that exists temporally as that which oversteps itself. However, for the remainder of the 1920s, Heidegger largely shifts his focus to Kant and, in 1929, publishes Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, a text that marks the end of the Being and Time era and in which we see the first signals of the turn toward the truth of Being and the history of Beyng. Heidegger does not seriously concern himself with Hegel again until 1930-31, when he gives a winter seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

In Hegel, Heidegger again returns to the thinker of absolute Spirit in his private pondering, and attempts to trace the development of Hegel’s system, as well as the bearing of Hegelian philosophy on Heidegger’s own project. The text is remarkable for its clear elucidation of Hegel’s shifting system of logic and the role his Phenomenology plays in the overall system. The first part of Heidegger’s short book is fragmentary, and those not intimately familiar with Heidegger’s project will find that it offers them very little. It is certainly provocative, and therein is really the value – not that Heidegger gives us the answers to questions concerning the “correct” interpretation of Hegel, but rather that Heidegger makes brief pronouncements on Hegel that spur us on to think more deeply and critically about the issues at hand. Less frustrating, and much more fully developed, are the comments Heidegger makes concerning the fundamental negation at the heart of Hegel’s logic, wherein self-conscious being must enact a negation in order to stand out from its surroundings, but then covers over this negation in the disclosure of beings that appear to it. If Heidegger does violence to Hegel’s text, it is certainly where he tries to find traces of his own ideas about the ontological distinction and the covering over of Being, its withdrawal in the wake of the appearance of things. However, when read carefully, these sections give us powerful insight into Heidegger’s philosophical inspiration and the source of his ideas, which are certainly new and exciting for his time, but are also deeply immersed in and connected with the history of metaphysics.

The second half of the book is much fuller and more developed, and it deals with Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit in detail, going paragraph by paragraph through the text to give very clear exegesis while simultaneously developing his own insights through this “confrontation” with Hegel. There are strong resonances here with the lecture course from 1930-31, with what is published a year later as “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” and, in addition, a robust commentary on the relationship between transcendence and dialectic in Hegel’s understanding of the experience of consciousness (self-consciousness). Heidegger rigorously exposes self-consciousness as a journey, which begins with a painful separation from the self and continues down the path opened by absolute spirit, lighted by the “ray” that connects an individual consciousness with, effectively, the World Spirit. Whatever self might exist exists only insofar as it is a projection forth, but also then a rebounding back wherein the self comes to see itself as such by recognizing itself in the revelation of the things it cognizes. Although, surprisingly, Heidegger does not venture into the well-worn metaphor of Hegel’s “Odyssey,” there is an obvious parallel here between Heidegger’s own interpretation of Hegelian philosophy and that interpretation which reads absolute Spirit coming to see itself as such in terms of an Odyssey – a painful separation and journeying away from itself only to return to itself in the end as a self-conscious being.

For Heidegger, then, we best understand Hegel’s philosophy as the place where we can first see Dasein itself as the transcendent because of the dialectic procedure of self-consciousness as such, experienced as this journeying forth and back, that journey marking the transcendence of the Dasein itself. Of course, Heidegger does not claim that Hegel himself quite saw it that way. As always when dealing with the history of philosophy, Heidegger goes from delivering very clear and precising explanations of Hegel’s text, to then push that text further, developing his own unique insights from a critical engagement with past thinkers. Careful readers will have no problem parsing out these two threads within Heidegger’s writing, however, one does need to be careful, especially when this particular book exhibits its fragmentary character. I find that in those moments, where the text becomes provocative, annunciatory, quasi-poetic (though poorly poetic in poetry’s own terms), Heidegger is often exposing himself most fully, that is, putting forth his own unguarded thoughts without much in the way of explanation. Some readers will find this philosophically suspect, though regular readers of Heidegger and those familiar with this particular division of the Gesamtausgabe will no doubt be unsurprised by Heidegger’s style.

Before closing I do want to say that I think the Hegel book is most illuminating when considered in conjunction with the final chapter of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which translates a lecture course delivered in 1927, and is considered to be, in part, the scene of Heidegger’s informal completion of Being and Time where he gets to the destruction of metaphysics promised in his unfinished magnum opus. There, Heidegger talks about the temporalization of Dasein as a “stretching” that is the ontological basis of dimensionality itself. The stretch marks a very clear and explicit analysis of Dasein itself as the transcendent, and the notion of stretch makes a crucial contribution to Heidegger’s understanding of Hegelian dialectical procedure in the Hegel book. According to Heidegger in Hegel, Hegel errs and falls into the history of metaphysics exactly where he treats the transcendent as some being toward which we would overstep in an act of transcendence. Again, typical of Heidegger, Hegel is accused of not being mindful of the ontological distinction, and thus erroneously treats the transcendent as a being among other beings. What Heidegger has in mind, and again, this is made very clear in the 1927 lecture course and reiterated at length in Hegel, is that when we carry out the proper analytic of Dasein, we find that the transcendent is not some being toward which we overstep, but that the transcendent is in fact the very overstepping itself, which is exactly the dialectical procedure of Dasein’s own historical standing forth from Being. It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger is beginning to develop his philosophy in the direction of the history of Beyng at the same time he is seriously reengaging with Hegel’s philosophy. Here too, although it outstrips the purview of this review, we see why Heidegger is so enthused by Aristotle’s treatment of time and movement, which Heidegger reads as an essential phase in the understanding of Being as the temporality of Dasein’s transcendent essence.

In the end, this is an excellent translation of a difficult and sometimes frustrating work by Heidegger. Certainly an insightful text for students of German philosophy, the book suffers from its sometimes fragmentary character, which makes it mostly unsuitable for anyone not already familiar with Heidegger or Hegel. Those just coming to Heidegger, phenomenology, or Continental philosophy for the first time will do well to avoid this text lest they be frustrated by the depth of Heidegger’s commitment to the vocabulary of Hegel and Kant, as well as his sometime cryptic pronouncements on Hegel and Being. However, philosophers with serious interest in Heidegger, and in particular with Heidegger’s relationship with German Idealism and his own philosophical development during the crucial “turn” of the 1930s, will find this volume illuminating and occasionally inspiring.

Title: Archéo-Logique. Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka
Séries: Epiméthée
Author: Jean-François Courtine
Editora: PUF
Release Date: 2013
Formatar: Paperback 29.00 €
Páginas: 256

Title: Heidegger et la pensée à venir
Séries: Problèmes & controverses
Author: Françoise Dastur
Editora: Vrin
Release Date: 2011
Páginas: 252

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Recension originale publiée dans Bulletin heideggerien 3, 2013

Du neuf avec du vieux ? Non : du classique avec du moderne. Tel est le secret de fabrication du dernier ouvrage de Françoise Dastur, le premier qui, eu égard à son titre ou à son sous-titre, ne porte pas littéralement sur une question chez Heidegger – contrairement à Heidegger et la question du temps (1990), Heidegger et la question anthropologique (2003) et Heidegger. La question du logos (2007) –, sans doute parce qu’il les pose toutes dans l’horizon de ce qui s’avère, du moins à nos yeux, la question la plus digne de question chez ce penseur : celle, précisément, de sa pensée, c’est-à-dire de la pensée à venir. Classique donc, ce livre l’est d’emblée pour reposer sur des études qui, depuis 25 ans, ont modelé la compréhension la plus large et l’interprétation la plus juste de la pensée heideggérienne en France – autant qu’à l’étranger, étant donné les diverses traductions des travaux de l’A. et leur réception, notamment américaine. Moderne, ce livre l’est aussi pour proposer ces textes « dans une version nouvelle, et pour certains, profondément remaniée et augmentée » (p. 251), certainement afin de coller au plus près aux progrès de la littérature primaire – les récentes livraisons de la Gesamtausgabe – et de la littérature secondaire – les préoccupations actuelles de l’exégèse internationale. D’où, parfois, la sensation d’une paramnésie de reconnaissance, ou illusion du déjà vu, sinon du déjà lu. Si, ici et là, nous pensons en effet relire l’A., ce n’est pas qu’elle se répète – pas plus que le bon professeur qui se doit de reprendre afin de faire apprendre –, mais parce que nous répétons avec elle ce que, depuis longtemps, elle nous enseigne : l’intelligence du texte heideggérien – au double sens et du mot, et du cas : l’ingéniosité qui est la sienne comme l’entente que nous en avons.

Prenant, dans ce volume, comme « axe privilégié de référence » la Kehre des années 1930, qui fait passer Heidegger « de l’approfondissement de la métaphysique traditionnelle à [son] “dépassement” » (p. 7), autrement dit à son « assomption » – puisque, l’A. le rappelle, l’Überwindung se comprend comme Verwindung (p. 219) –, Françoise Dastur se donne pour fin de « prendre toute la mesure de la “révolution du mode de penser” à laquelle en appelle Heidegger », (p. 10) et pour moyen d’étudier cette « pensée à venir » dont il est dit, sinon prophétisé par lui en 1946 qu’« elle ne sera plus philosophie » (GA 9, 364). Douze chapitres répartis trois par trois dans quatre parties distinctes, soit quelque 240 pages plus loin, l’objectif est atteint, et cela après une introduction aussi interrogative qu’apéritive : « La pensée à venir : une phénoménologie de l’inapparent ? » (pp. 11-24). Car cette mise en bouche assure exquisement – et même exotiquement – la mise en tête de ce syntagme : après un retour sur, non pas l’école à laquelle appartient Heidegger, mais la méthode qu’il met en œuvre – la phénoménologie –, et avant un détour par l’intérêt dont il témoigne pour l’Orient et, plus particulièrement, pour le vide de la scène dans le nô – l’inapparent –, l’A. évoque la formule par laquelle le penseur, dans le séminaire de Zähringen, définit ultimement sa pensée – « phénoménologie de l’inapparent » (GA 15, 299) –, tout en suspendant là son propos. Il faudra patienter jusqu’à sa quasi fin pour que le thème liminaire refasse surface, bouclant ainsi la boucle (p. 225). Eussions-nous aimé que Françoise Dastur opte pour une relecture de l’œuvre heideggérienne à rebours, afin de voir comment et de savoir pourquoi le travail du penseur demeure, de bout en bout, phénoménologique ? Vœu pieux. Elle préfère que nous avalions dans l’ordre les sections de son livre, en terminant par son menu.

Or, c’est à lui que nous voudrions borner ce compte rendu, tant il est, dans ce recueil de reprises revues et corrigées, non seulement l’unique part inédite, mais plus encore le morceau de choix. C’est qu’en cette « table des matières » (p. 253) sur laquelle se clôt l’ouvrage se contemple de l’A. toute la maestria. Intitulée « De Être et temps à la pensée de l’Ereignis », la première partie articule, plus que les motifs du monde (pp. 27-43), de l’espace (pp. 45-58) et du temps (pp. 59-75), le traitement de chacun par les trois Heidegger – celui du Tournant, comme celui d’avant ou d’après lui. Intitulée « Une autre pensée de l’être de l’homme », la deuxième partie renvoie anthropologisme et anthropomorphisme dos à dos (pp. 79-96), unit la question de l’être à celle que nous sommes (pp. 79-96) et, derrière le dire de son dit, ressaisit l’éthique de Heidegger comme « éco-nomie de l’Unheimlichkeit » (pp. 119-132 ; ici p. 129). Intitulée « Une autre pensée du divin, du néant et de l’être », la troisième partie – toutes pièces à l’appui insistons-y – , instruit les dossiers de la relation de Heidegger à la théologie jusque dans la « théiologie de la pensée » (pp. 135-154 ; ici p. 153), de sa conception du nihilisme dans sa différence d’avec celle de Jünger (pp. 155-169) et de sa compréhension du commencement grec dans l’explicitation de la parole d’Anaximandre (pp. 171-185). Intitulée « D’une pensée qui ne serait plus philosophie », la dernière partie s’interroge sur l’existence d’une philosophie de l’histoire chez Heidegger (pp. 189-206), sur la signification de la fin de la philosophie sous sa plume (pp. 207-226) et sur le sens de l’avenir de la présence humaine dans l’événement de l’être (pp. 227-250). Tout n’est-il pas là ? Tout, c’est-à-dire chacune des lignes de force que nous observons à lire les lignes dédiées par Heidegger à l’établissement de cet autre commencement de la pensée qui fait sa pensée ?

L’herméneute le plus fin d’un penseur toujours en chemin se doit d’offrir au lecteur, pour traverser son œuvre, la meilleure des boussoles. Avec Heidegger et la pensée à venir, Françoise Dastur, en offre une très bonne. Mais si le diable se cache dans les détails, Hermès se niche ici dans le sommaire.

 

 

 

Title: Leibniz, Husserl and the Brain
Author: Norman Sieroka
Editora: Palgrave Macmillan
Release Date: 2015
Formatar: Hardcover £60.00
Páginas: 320

Norman Sieroka’s book is about “the systematic, structural relations between phenomenological and (neuro)physiological aspects of perception, consciousness, and time, with a specific focus on hearing” (p. 4), based on Leibniz’s and Husserl’s views. While Sieroka displays a great depth of knowledge in his discussions of these two philosophers, his main aims are not exegetic, but consist, rather, in casting new light on the said philosophical and interdisciplinary issues. However, the scope of his interpretative project is ambitious. There is, on the one hand, Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, for whom perception is, first and foremost, conscious. On the other hand, there is Leibniz, the great rationalist metaphysician, who stands out in his era for bringing center-stage various kinds of unconscious perception. Sieroka effectively reconciles these seemingly very different perspectives, as he argues for numerous points of similarity between them and synthesizes them for mutual enrichment.

In Part I of his book, Sieroka gives an overview of the scope and methodology of his study. He describes the Leibnizian methodology as involving extrapolation from conscious to unconscious perception, and pursuit of the structural analogies between the physical and the perceptual. His interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological method emphasizes similarities with these Leibnizian ideas, enabling Sieroka to broaden the Husserlian conception of perception to cover unconscious states, and bring it into closer contact with empirical disciplines. He rejects what he refers to as foundationalist readings of phenomenology, insofar as they disallow the idea that phenomenology may be guided by empirical research. He also believes that he is, in effect, following Husserl in proceeding mainly by abductive and transcendental argument, rather than phenomenological description (p. 37).

In Part II, Sieroka introduces Leibniz’s account of perception, including notions such as appetite and expression, as well as the distinction between conscious and unconscious perception. Perception, for Leibniz, is an activity of the monads. The mental and the physical aspects of perception stand in a relation of a pre-established harmony. Sieroka pursues a secular version of this idea, with a focus on the Leibnizian concept of “expression”. To say that the mental and the physical express each other is to say that they stand in a kind of relation of structural resemblance, which Sieroka interprets based on the mathematical notion of homeomorphism, falling short of an isomorphism. Unlike the other major philosophers of his time, Leibniz allows for unconscious perception, distinguishing between unnoticeable and merely unnoticed (or “minute”) unconscious perceptions. Sieroka discusses Leibniz’s reasons for proposing these distinctions, and compares these views with Dretske’s, Block’s and Dennett’s. Sieroka also lays considerable emphasis on Leibniz’s notion of an appetite, or a monadic striving to evoke new perceptions, providing clarifications of the relations between the ideas of perception and appetite, and construing appetites as part of a framework of final causation, distinct from the efficient causation that governs the physical universe. He then devotes a chapter to discussing empirical research, to garner support for the Leibnizian view of perception. He invokes the Leibnizian unconscious appetites in providing an alternative account of the results, otherwise credited with disproving the existence of free will, of an experiment by psychologist Benjamin Libet. In the last major development in Part II, Sieroka discusses Leibniz’s view of the transition from unconscious to conscious perception, viz., that it takes place in the course of the accumulation of minute perceptions, with consciousness arising when a certain threshold of distinctness of perception is attained. Sieroka interprets this as a one-level intentionalist view of consciousness, as opposed to higher-level views (p. 109). He further elaborates this view by invoking the notions of attention, reflection, memory, and apperception, and assumes the Leibnizian perspective to voice his reservations, in some final remarks, towards the influential view that conscious and unconscious states are rightly demarcated based on whether or not they possess the requisite what-it-is-likeness (pp. 118-119).

Part III is presented as a brief “intermezzo”, consisting of just one chapter, in which empirical findings are discussed and given a Leibnizian construal. The physiology of perception is considered at different time-scales, with a focus on the range of 1s to 6-8s and the phenomenon of mismatch negativity (MMN), or a kind of sensitivity to breaks in patterns of auditory stimuli. Sieroka argues that MMN are physiological analogs of Leibnizian unnoticeable perceptions, and also brings to bear the Leibnizian notions of immediate memory and pre-attentive anticipation (p. 148).

In Part IV, Sieroka proposes a Husserlian-Leibnizian account of perception, which he then uses to discuss the topic of time. In the merger of the two views, Leibnizian views of perceptual presence are articulated and developed in terms of the more thorough Husserlian account of the extended present, invoking the apparatus of retention, protention, and primal impression. The Husserlian account is extended to cover unconscious perceptions, and viewed as structurally analogous to the underlying physiological processes. Sieroka highlights various points of similarity between the two philosophers’ views. Thus, he interprets the Husserlian distinction between causation and motivation as being analogous to the Leibnizian distinction between efficient and final causation (Section 7.1), and he draws parallels between the Leibnizian ideas of simple reflection and appetite, on the one hand, and the Husserlian immediate memory and immediate anticipation, on the other (Section 7.2). He furthermore contrasts his Husserlian-Leibnizian account with other views and ideas, such as William James’s specious present (p. 177), and Barry Dainton’s extensionalist model of time consciousness (p. 184), criticizing these accounts for unduly privileging physical time over experienced time. Interestingly, Sieroka sees an affinity between his Husserlian-Leibnizian approach and Francesco Varela’s neurophenomenology. He argues that the significance of Varela’s approach, as well as other kindred approaches, should be seen not so much in their invoking some particular mathematical apparatus (e.g., dynamic systems theory), but more generally in their making use of a system of formal notation to investigate the structural parallels between the phenomenological and physiological levels (p. 220).

In sum, Sieroka has developed a kind of empirically-informed Husserlian-Leibnizian parallelist account of perceptual and physiological phenomena. He duly updates Leibniz where needed: instead of regarding God as the origin of the parallelism, he has effectively placed time at its core (p. 226). Throughout the book, he develops his views with great rigor, and in many passages brings to bear his perspective on current debates, attesting to the current relevance of his account. The book is very clearly written, rendering the Leibnizian and Husserlian views accessible to a broad philosophical and scientific readership, and providing a framework to organize one’s thoughts on the topics of perception and time.

Title: Aesthetics as Phenomenology. The Appearance of Things
Séries: Studies in Continental Thought
Author: Günter Figal
Editora: Indiana University Press
Release Date: 2015
Formatar: Hardcover ($85); Paperback ($30)
Páginas: 288

This 2010 monograph, by the Freiburg philosopher (published in English translation in 2015), follows his previous work, Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie (Objectivity: Philosophy and the Hermeneutical), which appeared in an English translation in 2011. Although Figal is a major continental philosopher and scholar of the German philosophical tradition, he is perhaps less known outside of European circles, particularly in the Anglo-American sphere. In a perfect world, the present work would make his name more prominent among scholars in the philosophy of art, in both the continental and analytic persuasions. Aesthetics as Phenomenology: The Appearance of Things is an important and potentially major contribution to the philosophy of art, despite some weaknesses that I will outline below. Although this monograph comprises a dedicated work of phenomenology, it also poses some powerful, if unspoken, rejoinders to current trends on the analytic side of aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Figal’s stated aim in the book’s introductory preface is to recover the primacy of the question of art for philosophy at large (1). An implicit assumption on this score is that Western philosophy has slowly neglected the concept of art considered in its own right; this, after the philosophy of art, saw something of a climax in the philosophy of Kant.

In its execution, the scope of Figal’s study would be best described as a phenomenology of art, representing all of the best features of phenomenological philosophy: vigorous and provocative questioning of longstanding assumptions embedded in the subject matter, emphasis on description of phenomena rather than argumentation, and especially important for the phenomenology of art, significant engagement with the phenomenon of art arising concomitantly with subjective experience. Indeed, one of the most powerful rejoinders Figal’s book makes to contemporary philosophy of art vis-à-vis leading positions in Anglo-American work, is an emphasis on the temporal, spatial, and generally intermedial character of the experience of art works.

Stylistically, readers may find Figal’s prose to contain a mixture of accessibility and density. He writes in an often sparse, formal philosophical voice that sometimes leans toward the abstract and theoretical, especially in the book’s first two chapters, though his central position does become more concrete and transparent as the book proceeds. Throughout, however, he also writes with a stately grace and elegance, particularly when weaving between observations formulated in his own philosophical voice and contributions leveraged from the thought of other philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Valéry. When his writing is clearest and most engaging, Figal’s style may even strike the reader as very close to Gadamer’s prose in Truth and Method; when it favors the abstract, Figal’s writing may come across as somewhat Hegelian. This book is one for specialists and advanced scholars of phenomenology and the philosophy of art.

The main position of the first two chapters, which sets the stage for the remaining three, is that an art work comprises a true phenomenon, par excellence, in the classical terminological sense of phenomenology. This to say that works of art are appearances that self-show, and this is the way that they are the only beings that effect this accomplishment. This character of art works reflects the fact that their ontological makeup lay in their capacity to appear – to appear as appearing – and thus, not to be encountered as, say, mere useful objects or natural things (86). Figal uses Kant’s philosophy of beauty (from the latter’s third Critique) as a lift-off point for broader exploration of the nature of art. Despite his emphasis on phenomenology, Figal’s understanding of art works remains Kantian at the core, though as the book develops, his position takes on a more Heideggerian note. Figal summarizes his position, definitive for the remainder of the book, in the following passage:

[T]he beautiful as such is a decentered order that stands for itself as an appearance. A decentered order does not permit of being assigned to any conceptually identifiable object and thus being made comprehensible through this object. The order only exists by appearing. In artworks, this appearance is deictic. Something appears in its decentered order—for instance that which a picture shows, or that which a novel narrates. This something is shown, but only in such a way that an artwork itself shows itself. Artworks do not point to something that exists beyond them and that would be intended by the works themselves. What they show is rather only in them and with them, in the way that they show it (4).

Figal’s sustained interest in Kant seems to stem from the observation that the latter’s work represents the last major attempt to describe aesthetic experience in a manner that does not subordinate art and the aesthetic to other ontological categories. Whereas after Kant, philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger all render the ontology of art in terms such as “spirit” or “truth”, for Figal, this issue is problematic in that such approaches overlook the unique phenomenologico-ontological character of art works. In other words, Figal wishes to describe the ontology of art in a way that is not parasitic on other categories of being, and which instead stems from art’s way of self-showing.

In order to appreciate what is controversial about Figal’s aims here, one may consider by contrast the recent text Beyond Art (Oxford University Press, 2014), a major work by analytic philosopher Dominic McIver Lopes, to see how unfashionable essentialist or systematic ontologies of art have become in mainline philosophical circles. Lopes’ book defends the argument that there is no “art” in the sense of an over-arching metaphysical umbrella that pervades both colloquial talk as well as philosophical discussion of art. Rather, Lopes argues, there are merely “arts”, that is, individual art media that share a name but little else.  Lopes makes this claim on the ground that key seminal moments in the philosophy of art never made a definitive case for the existence of art as such, but were concerned with issues such as taste and beauty. Other Anglo-American philosophers who have suggested a view in line with Lopes include Derek Matravers (Introducing the Philosophy of Art in Eight Case Studies, Acumen, 2013). Although Figal’s book does not take up such contemporary perspectives, readers may wish to take note of just how radically opposed his approach is compared to these other leading positions. Figal is right to say that art is not the major concept of interest it once was for philosophers.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Figal’s book fill out the picture considerably, taking up the topics of art forms, nature, and space, respectively. The third chapter presents the most original and powerful material of the book, with the fourth and fifth mostly serving the role of amplifying Figal’s core position. In the third chapter, Figal proceeds from the observation that art works manifest themselves in certain frequently occurring guises; it is not the case that art manifests itself in random types of human-fashioned objects. Yet at the same time, it is difficult to understand why this happens—it is difficult to comprehend why art historically seems limited to common media like painting, music, and poetry, and offshoots of these three (95-96). Figal addresses this issue with an altogether original and in fact quite stunning account: he suggests that art works share a common foundation by virtue of originating in the ontological overlap of image, text, and rhythm. That is, the forms and thus, the genres that art works exhibit stem from an underlying ontology of “master” categories (129-30). This may sound like a grandiose series of claims to defend, but Figal proceeds in all seriousness, with a citation of Plato to boot. The underlying suggestion is that art works originate as phenomena in the guise of rock-bottom categories, namely, the poetic, musical, and imagistic. This ontology is evidenced by the fact that art works are by and large “mixed” media, phenomenologically speaking. Visual works such as sculptures and paintings can be read as texts, often demanding “textual” analysis. Or at least, it is obvious even to lay reason that visual art always has composition and structure; imagistic works are never comprehended at one glance. Similarly, literary and poetic works tend to exhibit musical structure. Poetry for its part has historical roots in meter and song. And musical works of art have their effect by lending themselves to imagistic meaning or textual reading. The larger point in force here is not simply about interpretation. Figal’s account emphasizes that art works truly consist of these three basic forms, such that no art work can be said to consist solely of any one of them in isolation (138). So the accomplishment of this incredibly rich reckoning is that Figal ends up recasting the ontology of art in terms on the one hand Platonic and on the other hand strongly Heideggerian. Although Figal devotes significant space throughout the text to critiquing Heidegger’s philosophy of art, especially the “Origin of the Work of Art” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” essays, Figal’s overall position comes across as a more thorough and improved version of Heidegger’s phenomenology of art, having its strengths (vis-à-vis Heidegger) in the development of detail and extensive use of examples.

Figal’s Heideggerian approach probably also reveals the most prominent weakness of his book’s central position, namely that it seems more successful in the abstract than when one starts to think of examples and problem cases that Figal does not address. For instance, Figal seems mostly uninterested in taking up the hard cases posed by the advent of 20th-century modern art. It seems very difficult at first glance to consider how broadly Figal’s thesis applies to all art; it may be that his thesis only sufficiently describes certain historical instances of great art. Nor does he give much sustained attention to postmodern works in literature or music. From a general philosophy-of-art standpoint, Figal’s appreciation of art seems rather narrow compared to the more inclusive, thoughtful vision of influential philosophers of art like Arthur Danto. In the end it seems that Figal’s understanding of art is quite strongly steeped in the same classical European tropes that occupied Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. But perhaps this shortcoming can be forgiven, in light of the merit of Figal’s ambition.

The fourth and fifth chapters exhibit a similar mixture of broad ambition and narrowness of vision, but do not significantly add new content to Figal’s general position. The fourth chapter takes up the concept of nature, in order to engage the historically problematic question of how art works differ ontologically from nature or natural phenomena. Figal presents the notion that art works have their character in revealing nature while also originating in nature (154). Art serves to call out nature in its distinction from the human as well as in nature’s intersection with the human. The paradigm case he uses to illustrate this view is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a seminal work of an art medium if there ever was one. While Figal’s ensuing illustration is thorough and exhaustive, one cannot help but wonder about its broader applicability to the philosophical issue of distinguishing art from nature. As an example supporting a thesis about art’s contrast with nature, Fallingwater comes across as too singular, and moreover, too convenient and easy to serve the purpose at hand.

A similar lack of self-critique seems to pervade the book’s final chapter, which takes up the topic of space. By “space” Figal does not mean three-dimensional, Cartesian space, but instead something akin to Heidegger’s phenomenological accounts of space in terms of nearness and distance. Art, Figal concludes, serves the purpose of defining and articulating human space, such that art works reveal to the human subject a world beyond the boundaries of her own perception. The experience of art reveals to one the limited nature of one’s own person, through the revelation of decentered orders, loci of possible meaning fundamentally beyond oneself (220-221). At this point of the book it seems that Figal is speaking largely metaphorically and in terms too sweeping in order to be very persuasive. This last chapter perhaps works better if read as an outline of a much fuller account to be made. The discussion of space in particular may strike some as akin to an idealism rather than phenomenology. At the same time, this book’s contribution to the philosophy of art should not be ignored, and I hope it will be taken further by others.

Title: Phenomenology An Introduction
Author: Stephen Kaeufer and Anthony Chemero
Editora: Polity Press
Release Date: May 2015
Formatar: Harcover €68.80, Paperback €21.30, Ebook €17.99
Páginas: 224

There are so many significant figures in the phenomenological tradition that it proves difficult to cover all of them in an introduction. This book gives us an overview of the history and development of phenomenology from its 18^th Century philosophical background to contemporary debates in cognitive science, philosophy of mind and psychology, as they are informed by phenomenology. The core of this introduction is organised around three theses. First, the authors expose how the faithful understanding of human beings by phenomenologists can provide an ontological ground to (radical) embodied cognitive science. Second, they explore how responses towards the frame problem (e.g. dynamic system theory, enactivism and the sensorimotor approach), which share similar ideas with phenomenology, “are doing phenomenology” (p.3). Third, putting in perspective the sharp distinction between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy, the authors claim that a “traditional analytic philosophical problem” is pursued in the phenomenological movement.

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Title: Saussure's Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology
Author: Beata Stawarska
Editora: Oxford University Press
Release Date: Février 2015
Formatar: Relié £74.00, Ebook
Páginas: 304

With this clearly argued and engaging study of Saussure, Beata Stawarska has done a great service to the broad, ongoing effort to radically reassess the established historiography not only of structuralism or phenomenology, but of pre-war European intellectual history as a whole. By convincingly making the case that one should liberate Saussure’s thought from its infamously strict dichotomies (langue-parole, synchrony-diachrony, signified-signifier), explore its entanglements with Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology and give heed to its positive echoes in Merleau-Ponty rather than its critique by Derrida, Stawarska contributes crucial elements to a new historiographical account that presents structuralism and phenomenology not as antagonistic schools tightly bound to their respective founding figures, Saussure and Husserl, but as intermingling, even complementary threads in the still misunderstood interdisciplinary, highly networked and pan-European scientific context of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Instead of the unproductive opposition or mutual ignorance that have mostly characterised the relations between structuralism and phenomenology since the early 1960s, Stawarska correctly intimates, the rediscovery of their entangled history opens the way to a “rapprochement” and carries the promise of new vigour for both traditions.

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Title: Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology. Nature, Spirit, and Life
Author: Andrea Staiti
Editora: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: November 2014
Formatar: Harcover £60.00
Páginas: 323

Transcendental phenomenology has a reputation of avoiding engagements with other scientists and philosophers, contemporary or past. Pure description of absolute consciousness demands, according to Husserl, a ‘bracketing’ of all scientific results, philosophical ideas, and of argumentation altogether. The phenomenological philosopher operates in a self-enclosed and systematically expanding field that is built up entirely from a priori principles, without being misguided by the theories and systems of knowledge constructed in the worlds of dogmatic science and philosophy.

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Title: Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame
Author: Dan Zahavi
Editora: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2014
Formatar: hardcover ($49.95)
Páginas: 280

This book continues Dan Zahavi’s ongoing discussion of the closely related themes of subjectivity, selfhood, intersubjectivity, and sociality. Following several other books he has previously published on these topics, this one presents Zahavi’s considered views on them primarily through a critical engagement with a whole range of contemporary philosophers’ and empirical researchers’ theories on selfhood, subjectivity, and the underpinnings of human social interaction, with special attention to the phenomena of empathy and shame. Generally speaking, the result is a validation of insights achieved in the phenomenological tradition by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Alfred Schutz. In each case, though, Zahavi relies on his own phenomenological analyses that guide his readings of these thinkers’ works as he translates their findings into his own independently developed terminology.

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