Seeing Style: How Style Orients Phenopractices across Action, Media, Space, and Time
Persuasione ed evidenza. Sul rapporto tra retorica e fenomenologia in Husserl, Heidegger e Blumenberg
The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka
Reviewed by: Gabriel Popa (Independent Scholar)
In one of the most quoted introductions to phenomenology[i], Robert Sokolowski was asking about the need for a justification regarding the transition from the natural to the phenomenological attitude. Thus, equating phenomenology and philosophy, the above justification is said to stand for philosophy in general. The interrogation regarding the “why” of transitioning to phenomenology is the “why” of philosophical interrogation in general. Why do we ever need to employ something like a philosophical interrogation and way/s of inquiry? We have, on one part, mathematics and the “real” sciences, which deal with the most objective objectivities in general, and, on the other part, we have the less scientific rules of conduct that served us reasonably well in dealing with mundane activities. So why do we ever have to bother ourselves with something which is pretty much a way of confusing everything? Actually, this line of thinking is followed by any anyone unfamiliar with philosophical inquiry and may be tested by observing the common use of the term “philosophy”, especially its adjectival employment in folk parlance, when it is used to characterize something as lacking any use, as a mean to complicate the issues being discussed, as a distraction from “things that matter”.
In some way, this may be a pretty accurate description or symptom of the completely non-usable character of philosophy during our average dealings with beings in general, to use a famous Heideggerian locution. Even the Cartesian suspension of belief preserved some idées reçues, mainly for conducting our daily behavior. Following Aristotle, philosophy and philosophical interrogation is considered to be prompted by a starkly uncanniness with the way things are, which has been rubricated as wonder. Wonder was elicited in Ancient Greece, when the usual explaining in terms of works of gods and their relationship with the mortals was considered as insufficient or at least worth inquiring. The main issue with this determination is that even if it may have served as the intellectual origin for delivering something like a philosophical way of interrogating, later translated to first principles and metaphysical inquiring, it seems unproductive for the latecomers. We pretty much know or believe that we know what philosophy is long after that an eventual wonder starts crippling our usual way of living. One’s turn to philosophical engagement is not necessarily prompted by an originar, that is genuine, wonder, but by some fascination with a specific way of treatment of some issues that may go from trivial one to insolubilia such as the world in general, life, human being or the divine. But it may be that our startling curiosity, since it starts that way, may be soon tranquilized by the high availability of ready-made answers, or it may be that the sheer amount of these answers, some of them opposed to each other, will prompt us to further the inquiry. In each case, nonetheless, the root of our inquiry is hardly the or a genuine wonder, while we have a lot of philosophical traditions and schools of thought to turn to, while, in time, we develop a preference for one or some of them, based on some reasons that will finally remain unidentified.
If we turn to Hubick’s Phenomenology of Questioning, when considering its title, it may seem that it sets the bar too high, while the task is one that would be impossible to deliver in just a little over than 200 pages, considering the generality of its topic, the tradition and complexity of phenomenological inquiry, even if reduced to Husserl, Heidegger and Patočka, along with the seemingly overextended contemporary range of phenomenological object domain. But actually, the topic itself and the historical considerations are pretty much streamlined to this: that phenomenology is, if not the only, but the most appropriate philosophical line of inquiry able to preserve this sense of originar wonder that may be so soon and so easily covered with predetermined and already worked out answers. By focusing on the interrogation itself instead of answering it as soon as we get a chance, phenomenology is seen by Hubick, both in itself and historically, as prompting, preserving and developing this very sense of a continuous reworking and reshaping of both our experience and its theoretical framing.
How is that phenomenology was and still is able to do such a thing is one of the main directions of the book. The other one is related to the very act of questioning, in a sense of an actual phenomenology of this act. Accordingly, Hubick’s book may be red in both of these ways: as a plea for phenomenology as a certain way of relating to experience while preserving the manifoldness of the objects that are given within it, but also as a reiteration of the acute importance of questioning in philosophy. At the same time, these are not to be understood as separate topics, since the historical dimension is mostly seen as being determined by the particular character of phenomenological research. Scholarship in phenomenology, if we consider only Heidegger and Patočka, is rubricated under the topic of a heretical understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, where the heretics are the ones who were being able to both preserve the genuine phenomenological insights while departing, in one way or another, from the answers provided by Husserl. This departure is not necessarily seen by Hubick as providing different or even opposed answers, but as a departure from answering itself, as least from the risk of reification of the latter as a definite system of concepts, statements and validities. Not a system, but nonetheless systematic.
According to Hubick, questioning in Husserl is related to the very possibility of “returning, eliciting and reflecting” on our experiences. Accordingly, both experience and the interrogations it elicits should be constantly revisited, such as the answer provided, as “attempts to clarify the way experience operates”, are always, on some part, only preliminary. Phenomenology and phenomenological attitude, as envisaged by Husserl, is key to the possibility of both opening, but also and not least important, to preserve this openness of the field of experience, instead of covering it with a set of answers, being these a set of descriptions, conceptual framework or a systematics of arguments:
‘Husserl’s project of pure phenomenology is a way for philosophy and science to preserve and explore the ongoing openness of questions while keeping such an infinite procedure in check with the establishment, clarification and the systematic presentation of answers’ (67).
Accordingly, the intentional feature of thought in general, determines not only the fundamental relatedness of consciousness to its objects, but also the fact that experiencing in general may be constantly revived, revisited and described, so as that one may verify on its own if and how descriptions are true to the objects described but also if is there something in the actual experience that has been left out of standard, traditional, depictions of it. An anticipable objections to this seemingly open-ended flux of experiences and the various ways the same object may be given and thus depicted within experience could be that, since phenomenology may value the same any experience as experience of something, any systematic or close to systematic way of relating to these is worthless. The most radical of these objections would follow the line arguing that since experience is always one’s own, it is fundamentally private and, thus, incommunicable, at least in its most relevant, that being private, features. In the best scenario, phenomenology would thus try to make sense of a collection of experiences, working inductively toward some insights that would somehow prompt at least a very general description of the main features of experience and its relatedness to objects, which will, nevertheless, remain short of an accurate depiction of both consciousness and objects. Intentionality as such is the answer that phenomenology would offer to this type of objectioning, as it shows that mind is outward bounded, that, notwithstanding some peculiar traits, consciousness is public by design, as it is oriented to things other than itself. In the same vein, intentionality is meant to answer another set of objections, which would make any object a representation, thus not an object for the mind but an object within the mind, or, at least, it would instill a serious doubt about any way of relating consciousness to something that has a different character.
The second objection has been traditionally posed as the question concerning the difference and relation between the way something really is and the way it appears to us, as being equipped with both intellectual and sensible means or perceiving things. The history of this question is the history of philosophy itself, but what phenomenology does, as devised by Husserl, is to seriously approach and engage with the issue or appearance, while focusing on the very character of this appearing. By its own name, as phenomenology, its main task would be to interrogate phenomena as such. This “as such” would best preserve the character of appearance as appearance, making it a dignified object of research, while, at the same time, approaching if differently, as no more bounded by trying to identify something of whose appearance this appearance is. At least, not first, not before the appearance by itself is made an object of inquiry. Now, this happens under the category of the phenomenon, which, preliminary, would entitle that some-thing, any-thing, is firstly considered as it appears itself (to a conscience, taken itself at the highest level of generality, as any conscience whatsoever), before any further thematization. In Husserl’s words, from the Logical Investigations (LI), as quoted by Hubick: ‘if higher, theoretical cognition is to begin at all, objects belonging to the sphere in question must be intuited’ (72). Maintaining the focus on the questioning side and the phenomenological ability to preserve it as such, Hubick makes here an interesting distinction, that is between the phenomenon as such, which is interrogated in the most proximate experience, and the further conceptualization of it. This openness or clearing if we want to follow Heidegger, of the experiential dimension, will trigger the manifoldness of the way phenomena are perceived (Husserl will say “intuited” in order to highlight its pre-theoretical feature).
In order to better clarify what the phenomenon of phenomenology is about, Hubick will follow through a distinction made by Husserl in his Inaugural Lecture, that is between “Objects in a pregnant sense of the world”, objects as logical predicates and phenomena. To summarize, the first, which are called “Objects in a pregnant sense”, are the natural objects, which are outside the perceiving conscience. The logical predicates may be any objects whatsoever, as long as they are treated as being attributable to some subject. The phenomenon is a higher level of generality, as it means a transitioning to the very way the previous types of objects are given to and within conscience. Moreover, this focusing on the side of “given” feature of the object as such, means that a considerable part of phenomenological inquiry should be devoted to the receiver’s part, that is the conscience and the way it “constitutes the object” (80). Now, the above-mentioned higher degree of generality should not be understood as going beyond what is actually perceived, as in pre-Kantian metaphysics, but neither in the Kantian sense of an inquiry into the (subjective) conditions of experiencing as such, even if Husserl will sometimes name the phenomenological move as transcendental. Transcendental, as in transcendental reduction, would here designate that it is, indeed, a move towards the conscience, but only since it breaks with the Cartesian tradition of an isolated, reified ego, which will only be able to overcome doubt and meet the external being that the world of res extensa or God) by means of some apriori, received truths. The phenomenological conscience, as in Husserl, is made an object of inquiry in such a way as to emphasize its critical relatedness and oriented feature, its “toward-something” dimension. Keeping close to Hubick’s focus on questioning and Husserl’s own programmatic statements, we are advised to constantly maintain the whole picture in front of us, such as transitioning back and forth from the manifoldness of the way objects appears to the modifications that are enacted by these to the way conscience perceive them. Accordingly, even the apodictical is made into an object of interrogation, in Hubick’s words: ‘as each new example of evidence appears and problematize previous understanding, it also provides a source for further reflection and consideration’, while ‘after the discovery of an essence, were a phenomenologist to forsake the original repetitive practices of questioning that yields it […] they would cease to be a phenomenologist and effectively become a metaphysician’ (82).
Let’s consider now the first presumable objection that was mentioned before, regarding the difficulty of delivering a systematic philosophy in a phenomenological matter, that may seriously damage Husserl’s project of a scientific philosophy. What Hubick does, without mentioning explicitly the doubt raised by such category of objections, is to delineate the systematic character of Husserl’s philosophy, while keeping it apart from “theoretical metaphysics or just another philosophical system” (86). Systematicity outside of a system is attainable, according to Hubick, by means of a “non-linear reciprocity”, that would undercut the traditional focus on conceptual analysis while focusing on the experience and its questioning correlate that has initially prompted an eventual conceptual framework that may be used for its understanding, but which, nonetheless has to undergo a continuous validation and re-validation through the works of others. Non-linearity supposedly means here that we will not build, “systematically” (as in a system) or more geometrico, from one set of truths to another, but we will constantly revise our base assumptions by trying to engage “with the things themselves”, keeping thus open the possibility of further confirmation, adjustment of even rejection.
Now, this distinction between system and systematicity is one which is very difficult to preserve, especially since, in Husserl’s own programmatic statements, phenomenology should always be understood in a scientifical sense, while the transition from LI to Ideas seems like building up a system based on previous, thus preliminary, research. According to Hubick, true to his attempt to emphasize questioning instead of answering, this would be the main contentious point between Husserl and Heidegger. The latter will read LI as fundamentally opening a way of doing philosophy whose aim is to destabilize traditionally provided answers, in this case the answers provided within general logic, a discipline whose reluctance to changing and developing is one of the most well documented. Destabilization does not mean here that phenomenology will search and eventually identify some weak chains in the conceptual and propositional architecture of an already constituted discipline, to emphasize their debatable character, even if it may happen to do so at some point. Destabilization is to be understood as reopening the space of experiencing which originated the solidifying of a particular discipline as a set of answers, concepts and propositions, more like an attunement to the instability of phenomena as such.
Instead of logic, Heidegger will turn to history and ontology in order to clarify the way the phenomenological method relates to their actual enactment as established, traditional disciplines. Following Hubick, Heidegger’s phenomenological reworking of history under the rubric of historicity (and temporality, not mentioned here) is meant to “elicit from experience the unstable phenomena via questioning that is then taken to be the ‘material’ worked upon by the ‘scientific work’ of stabilizing the material via answering” (105; italics and inside quotes are Hubick’s). Phenomenology turns into ontology, in the double sense as the meaning of being and Dasein’s fundamental ontology, and further turns into hermeneutics, while phenomenology is devised by Heidegger as a kind of propedeutics for what has been his main concern for the most part of his inquiries, being as such. As Hubick’s emphasizes, by illuminating the structure of the question itself, as Gefragtes, Befragtes and Erfragtes (110), as the what of the questioning, the object domain and what eventually will come up, one is already situated in the proximity of what one searches for. Accordingly, the radicality brought up by phenomenological inquiry is not necessarily that of developing new or original insights about conscience, but to clear and maintain open the space of the experiencing that firstly sourced the questioning, while further elaborating the structure of the latter will prompt the revisiting and clarifying of those experiences, paying attention and attempting to uncover their genuine possibilities.
Now, the way one addresses the question is fundamental for both the opening of the intended object domain as it is for the opening of the “subjective” or transcendental dimension, if we limit ourselves to understand by the latter that there is always somebody asking the question, with a specific, that being human, way of perceiving things, some-thing in general. What phenomenology does, not quite surprisingly considering its actual name, and what Heidegger’s analyses will take to its limit, is to double on the ontological status of appearance, which will no longer be relegated to the domain of “mere appearance” or falsehood. Actually, the latter is maintained as one of the possible ways some-thing appears, but the issue becomes increasingly complex[ii], while the instances of appearance are multiplied and made into a dedicate object domain for phenomenological inquiry. In very general terms, what appearance has always considered to do is to stand before perception and the things outside it, as a kind of inter-positioning that prevent or obturates the access to the very thing. Hubick’s analysis of the way Heidegger reworks this issue is one of the most promising in the book, even if not obviously related to its programmatic intentions, focusing on the fourfold dimension of appearance brough up by Heidegger in Being and Time (BT) but also, previously, in the lecture notes delivered in Marburg and collected as the History of the Concept of Time (HCT), as phenomenon, semblance, appearance and mere appearance (120). Moreover, it is in this light that Hubick restates the purpose of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, along with the latter’s residual Hume-ism, as emphasizing the proto-phenomenological dimension of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) since its main accomplishment would be the revealing of pure intuition as phenomena, thus a proper object for phenomenological inquiry, instead of grounding the very possibility of metaphysics.
Hubick continues to play on the different tones of Heidegger’s well documented, sometimes overstretched, terminological equilibristic regarding various terms such as truth, being, logos and phenomenon, while all the way trying to maintain or to remind the reader Hubick’s own general framework of inquiry, that being the opposition between questioning and answering, with a strong emphasis on the former. Such an example is provided by the analysis of Heidegger’s famous version of truth as unconcealment or aletheia, where it is made to stand for the actual experiencing of phenomena as opposed to the “stabilization of their original fluctuating correlates” delivered by the traditional understanding of truth as correspondence (131).
If Heidegger is the most obvious candidate for the phenomenological relevance of the act of questioning, since he made it into an actual topic during much of his writings, lectures and seminaries, Patočka is the most viable candidate for the idea of a heretical following of Husserl, again, since his he actually characterized (some of) his work as such. There are three main strands informing Hubick’s account of Patočka’s heretical encounters with the phenomenological path developed by Husserl. First, we have the idea of a “lifeworld”, as Husserl used it to denote the pre-scientifical, natural, or the naïve world as it stands facing a conscience which is yet un-informed by a critical approach and a scientific conceptual framework. It is life as it is given in average experiencing, which forms the background and backbone of any ulterior attempts at one’s taking into possession by means of understanding and explaining. But, for phenomenology in general, this explanation is always an “explaining away” of some originar encounter with worldly beings in general, losing touch with the experienced as such. The cornerstone of a phenomenological approach is to give an account of exactly this insight, that it is more into experience that grounding a buildup of a chain of reasoning allowing us to arrive at some definite and definitive statements about the way the world really is. If the latter is meant to dispense with the way the world appears, in order to climb the ladder up to a (more) scientific perspective, being if that of natural of social sciences, phenomenology will constantly drag us down, reminding us that the domain of appearances is not and could not be exhausted by natural and social regularities. Instead of developing vertically, in a Cartesian manner, phenomenology will develop horizontally, as a way on enlarging and renewing the very domain or appearance.
According to Hubick, Patočka revisits this issues that became standard for any phenomenology scholar, while, at the same time, preserving them as genuine interrogations. In this regard, Patočka operates a critical distinction between phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy or the phenomenological as such. While the former is a descriptive manner of referring to an already established way of conducting phenomenological researches, indebted to Husserl and to his already provided answers, the latter is considered as allowing a more nuanced approach, more balanced on the part of questioning. ‘Phenomenological philosophy’ will say Patočka in his Plato and Europe (PE) as quoted by Hubick (146), ‘differs from phenomenology, in that not only wants to analyze phenomena as such, but also wants to derive results from this activity; phenomenological philosophy is not an understanding or a kind of slipping away from the proper problem of the phenomenon as such. The phenomenon must remain the phenomenon’.
For the phenomenological philosophy, the phenomenon must remain problematic, beyond or beside any attempt to thematize it, which, according to Hubick, will bring Patočka in close proximity to Heidegger’s focus on the being’s concealment, while also helping him furthering his own heretical way of practicing phenomenology. Since it is this latter, practical, dimension that will be used by Patočka in order to both emphasize, if not radicalize, the experiential feature of phenomenology and to employ the Heideggerian trope of “primacy of practice” (155, 157), an expression which, while not used by Heidegger, found its way in Heidegger’s scholarship to denote the analysis of the mundane in the first part of BT.
Accordingly, and this will constitute the second contentious, that is heretical, strand, Patočka seems to object to Husserl’s “objectification” of conscience in two ways: as to the possibility of the making conscience into an object of reflection but also as to the considering the conscience solely under its traditional, that is Husserl’s, intentional dimension. Akin to Heidegger, Patočka will ask if these modes of an objective apprehension of conscience and its objective correlates constitutes the actual way that objects are given in the most proximate experience.
While dispensing with the entire idea of conscience, Heidegger will turn these questions into his ontological-hermeneutical analysis in the first part of BT, focusing on Dasein’s average understanding of being which is for the most part some kind of a practical one. The so-called “primacy of practice” in Heidegger has proved itself to be both a promise and a locus of potential confusions, both on the part of scholars and Heidegger himself, while the hermeneutical dimension of Heidegger has somehow receded under the weight of his further inquiring into the history of being, not to mention the political record of his thought. Nevertheless, for both Patočka and Hubick, this approach is able to stimulate the furthering of questioning of the manifoldness of experiencing and appearing, while preserving the core assumptions, even if mainly methodological, of phenomenology.
The third strand of Patočka’s phenomenology, as accounted in Hubick’s book, is constituted by the former’s incursions in the phenomenology of history. Time is divided, according to Patočka’s Heretical Essays (HE), in three main divisions, from the unhistorical to proper historical, interceded by a glimpse into history, the prehistorical. The main criteria for this division is the relation life, human life, has with itself an with the life of others. While, for the unhistorical, life is only concerned with its own preservation, appealing to an entire plethora of transcendent entities, the glimpse into proper history if offered by the imposition of others and the need for a structuring, if not yet regulating, of life in common. The critical component of the preservation of life is labor, while it is the latter’s transitioning into work (following Harendt) that best captures the irruption of the second category, the prehistorical.
The proper historical is only born at the intersection of political and philosophical thought, when living in the mode of polis develops alongside the abandonment, least in part, of the traditional insurance provided by the divine, thus bringing forth the shaking of the prehistorical naïve and absolute meaning (Patočka, HE, 3rd essay). While living within the polis transcends its orientation toward own preservation, philosophical interrogation and the ontological fracturing of the identity between meaning and being led to furthering the attempts to understanding and explicitation into the unsuspected and unforeseen (idem). This constitutes fertile ground for the reiterating Hubick’s main these, as questioning and mainly philosophical type is closely connected to the irruption of history as the shaking of previously agreed meaning. Proper, that is philosophical interrogation could only come about within the space/ clearing created by the loss of a total meaning, while, at the same time, meaning is preserved mainly as the horizon of the partial, localized attempts. It is within this dialectics between a complete loss of the total meaning and the push for constantly renewed attempts to recover fragments of it, as a polemical dialogue between day and night, uncovering and concealment, that life becomes problematic, prompting philosophical questioning as and open ended task, worthy of pursuing even within the ‘recognition of a very dire, even hopeless, situation, wherein one remains simultaneously fully cognizant of one’s bleak situation and yet persists to ask more questions and remains undaunted by it’ (165).
The concluding chapter, focused on the logos of questioning, streamlines the main findings of the previous historical considerations, while restating the general premises of the Hussein’s general inquiry, mainly the focus on the destabilizing dimension of questioning against the stabilization provided by answers, the preeminence of experience for phenomenological research and the particular place of the latter within the history of philosophy, as featuring both questioning and experience as prime movers. The constant return to experience, being able to overcome the burden of the already provided answers, may be seen as a kind of a remake of what originary prompted something like a philosophical inquiring, namely wonder and its truth-searching correlate. Moreover, in these terms, the relation between teacher and student/ master and apprentice is constantly reshuffled, while since the eventual answers and solutions provided by the former are nothing more than pushes for the latter to take over the attempt to validate the same experiences while, during the process, other facets of the same experiences or experiences previously unaccounted for may be considered and further thematized.
As an overall introduction to phenomenology, by stressing and, sometimes, overstressing, the role of questioning in phenomenology and philosophy, while sometimes undermining the specific difference between these, Hubick’s book may stand alongside more famous others. On the other part, for a more versed reader in phenomenology, its added value is mostly debatable, since, for the most part, it stops short of a more rigorous and thorough exegesis. Nonetheless, its particular stance and point of observation may prove valuable in redirecting the reader, any reader, to shake the dust off such a seemingly inconspicuous figure as questioning and reassess its role within the history of philosophy, being that phenomenology.
[i] R. Sokolowski. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press.
[ii] Of which Jean Luc Marion’s analysis of the given is probably the highest degree.
A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking
Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ACHE Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)
Kenneth Maly begins his pedagogical book, the seventeenth volume in the “New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” series since 2006, by directly addressing his readers with a set of suggestions and guidelines (xi-xv). Only later does he announce that his “project” is written for those not necessarily possessing any “philosophical training” (17). In the course of retrieving ancient Greek thinking, readers will encounter “issues of translation, the core theme of change” and thereby “the dynamic … intertwining conditions” that enter “the more hidden way of thinking that is less logical” (17). To achieve such a retrieval, Maly nominates a pre-eminent hermeneutic pair, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, whose earlier published and unpublished writings “shed light on how things ‘started’ in the early days of Western thinking” (xxviii; cf. xviii).
The Retrieval of Greek Thinking is divided into four main parts preceded by a personal “Preamble” based upon extensive dialogue about Maly’s “project” at the onset of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 plague (xvii-xxxv) and an “Interlude” introducing Heidegger’s “key words” and what they and their cognates “say-show” (3-16). The first part (17-92) surveys traditional, often ossified interpretations of ancient Greek thinking before several forays into alternative approaches of what the ancients “experienced, thought, and said” (17) including examples drawn especially from Nietzsche (47ff., 63ff.). The second part (93-163) delves into Maly’s framework centrally associated with Heidegger and his re-interpretations of, for instance, Anaximandros, Parmenides, and Herakleitos. Also contained within the second part are holistic analogies with David Bohm questioning quantum theory and with Lao Tzu evoking the Dao principle. The third part (165-288) explicates ten ancient Greek words, ten pivotal concepts ranging from khora, aletheia, and phusis to logos, psukhe, and nous, as reconstrued by Heidegger. The final part (289-319) closes by way of four questions or issues calling for further enquiry as well as a coda elaborating how “everything is connected, driven by potential” by which all of us “will be transformed” (314 & 319).
Given limits upon length, what follows will mainly probe the use made of Nietzsche and (whilst acknowledging the larger role played by Heidegger throughout the text) will concentrate upon the latter’s first book to appear in English, the 1935 Einführung in die Metaphysik [Introduction to Metaphysics], that is, before Heidegger’s lectures from 1936/1937 onwards began repeatedly yoking Nietzsche to the Greek-influenced poet Friedrich Hölderlin (apart from 1935, pp. 96-97). In keeping with Maly’s mode of presentation within the Retrieval of Greek Thinking, this review essay will conclude with the kind of apophatic discourse not only permeating Maly but also encountered in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This endpoint shapes the degree to which interpretations of crucial examples of extant writing or thinking attributed to centuries of Hellenic intellectuals from Thales of Miletos onwards remains open to debate. For instance, Heidegger laments how we become mired in “the terminology of linguistics,” in “technical instruments that we use mechanically to dissect language and establish rules” which “grew out of a very definite interpretation of the Greek and Latin languages” (1935, pp. 40 & 41). Without supplying evidence, it is not obvious that the long neglected Dionysos Thrax’s Tékhnē grammatikē (ca. 100 B.C.) and Marcus Terentius Varro’s De lingua latina (ca. 44 B.C.) respectively are candidates given their marked theoretical and practical differences as Daniel Taylor (1990) amongst others documents. Such contestability is not simply a debate over the interpretive use of textual contexts and intellectual allusions as Lara Pagani (2011) reviews. It equally derives from the presumption that adhering to the monistic if not holistic hypothesis that all that exists ultimately can be referred to one category (e.g. 301-303, 314-315) in opposition to upholding a duality of mind and matter. Or, in Maly’s words, apprehending the “It” is tantamount to attending to “what is happening beyond the physical and the measurable” (318). His “Meanderings” section (300-312) captures a multiplicity of ways to experience “It,” but “only with non-conceptual thinking and saying … that is poi-etic” (300) where the “poi-etic” involves “connotation rather than denotation” and is “open-ended rather than defining” (135). Ultimately, the “It”
is not a thing, even though things are one with it. It is not physical, even though physical things are one with it. It is not measurable, even though measurables are one with it. (318)
I
Having disclosed the direction of this critique, let us begin with Nietzsche’s incomplete 1873 manuscript Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen [Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks]. Maly praises it for its “groundbreaking insight” into “how to approach the Greeks, how to see and hear … uncluttered by inherited biases” (77) notwithstanding his overall goal of extending “Nietzsche’s intentions beyond even the steps he took”:
Nietzsche here is a springboard that takes us further … in a way he did not – and perhaps could not … [given] possibilities that were not yet available when Nietzsche attempted his history of ancient Greek philosophy. (73)
From Nietzsche’s perspective, Thales to Sokrates epitomized “an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge” and they “controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life” (§1, 31). Moreover, he continues, “what they invented were the archetypes of philosophic thought” and formed not a “republic of scholars,” but a “republic of creative minds” (§1, 31 & 32). Yet Thales, the earliest acclaimed philosopher, leaves us in a quandary because he apparently began “with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the origin and womb of all things” (§3, 38). According to Nietzsche, there are three reasons for attending to this proposition:
First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, contained … if only embryonically, is the thought “all things are one.” The first reason still leaves Thales in the company of the religious and the superstitious; the second … shows him as a natural scientist, but the third makes him the first Greek philosopher. (§3, 39)
Even if the above-mentioned proposition was not actually stated as a “pure abstraction,” but instead functions as “a concrete expression of it,” even if the thought is “unprovable,” its “value” centres “precisely in the fact that it was meant non-mythically and non-allegorically” (§3, 42 & 41) — and, as Maly might add, non-scientifically (48).
Maly, revisiting Nietzsche’s 1873 manuscript, contends that it recognised amongst early Greek thinkers a realisation that “‘the way things are’ is a dynamic unfolding,” a “dynamic of interdependent conditions and not merely independent things/being” nor, for that matter, the presence of “a highest being or highest unchanging principle” (63). Their texts should not be regarded as “incomplete or failed attempts” at ordering neatly organized logical arguments, but as engaging in dialogue “intended to expand our ability to think, our ability to stay with the question” in all its “complexity” (64 & 65). However, before embarking upon an Excursus on “the word tragic” (65ff.), Maly declares that “Nietzsche’s truth – my truth – is not a dogma but rather an engagement in developing the mind … that goes beyond mere academic exercise.” By so doing, intellectual “gymnastics” should be rejected so that “thinking” instead becomes “conscious, critical awareness” without “reaching a ‘final completedness’” (64).
II
The Excursus rapidly dissects the meaning of “tragedy” and “tragic” as well as the Dionysian-Apollinian dialectic within Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy [Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik] (2nd edn. 1874). For Maly, the term “tragedy literally means ‘goat song’,” although the connection between the two remains uncertain (65). Without providing readers details of possible connections, Maly basically recapitulates Nietzsche’s conflated aesthetic, epistemological and metaphysical speculations (66-69). Yet passing comments in the extant writing of Herodotos, Thoukydides, and Aristoteles – all of whom variously analysed the eventual dominance and significance of Peisistratos from 560/559 to 528/527 B.C. over Athens and the region of Attika – have long been used to rationalise a welter of possible genetic connections. For example, the term might refer to the goat sacrificed in rituals to the god Dionysios from which tragedy in theatre eventually developed; or, by analogy, to the sacrificial nature of the protagonist facing death within rituals and performances; or to the goat skin costumes of performers comprising the chorus; or, relatedly, to the use of a chorus of satyrs often depicted as half-goat, half-human. Equally conjectural are attempts to anchor the connection historically, notably, the first enactment of tragedy at Athens’ City Dionysia by the actor/playwright Thespis, ca. 534 B.C., the first one said to have initiated dialogue between an individual actor and the choric leader (khoragos) and to be awarded a goat.
Even a cursory reading of Nietzsche’s opening sections – a book he described to Friedrich Ritschl as “a manifesto” (Letter 40, 30 January 1872) – depicts tragedy as the Dionysian and the Apollinian “mutually augmenting one another” (§4, p. 47). Whilst Maly’s conclusion of his Excursus (70-71) mentions both the “contrast” and the “dynamic tension between the two,” the tripartite nature of perspectives embedded within Nietzsche is not fully clarified here for his readers. In brief, metaphysically speaking, the Dionysian is the “truly existent primordial unity, eternally suffering and contradictory” (§4, p. 45). For the ancient Greeks, “the greatest abstraction” beforehand had “kept running back into a person.” But Thales had purportedly said, “Not man, but water is the reality of all things” (§3, p. 42). Next, epistemologically speaking, only through a state of “intoxication” – Rausch akin to ekstasis (cf. §1, p. 36) – can the most “horrible truth” be glimpsed and, “once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence” to the point where “now he understands the wisdom of … Silenus” (§7, p.60). In the words of Seilenos, legendary mentor and companion of Dionysos, so often echoed by poets and philosophers alike, “What is best of all is … not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon” (§3, p. 42). It is an understanding not merely affectively felt or experienced, but also able to be expressed or predicated in communicable language. Finally, aesthetically speaking, once our individual rational apprehension with all its “restraint and proportion” has “succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states” associated by Nietzsche with dance and music initially, then “Excess” – Übermaß or that beyond measure or proportion – will have “revealed itself as truth” and contradiction (“the bliss born of pain spoke[n] out from the very heart of nature”) (§4, pp. 46-47).
The Apollinian is also expounded thrice. To continue drawing upon Nietzsche’s wording, metaphysically speaking, the “two halves of our existence, the waking and the dreaming states,” are “compelled” to uphold “the truly nonexistent” in the form of “a perpetual becoming in time, space, and causality,” that is, as “empirical reality” (§4, pp. 44-45). So, epistemologically speaking, when construing “our empirical existence, and that of the world in general, as a continuously manifested representation” of a postulated “primal unity,” we know little more than “a mere appearance of mere appearance” in dreaming states and “mere appearance” (Erscheinung) in waking states “as that which alone is lived” (§4, pp. 45 & 44). Aesthetically speaking, the arts for artist and spectator alike are “absorbed in the pure contemplation of images” (Bildern), and whose satisfaction in “minutest details” are akin to the “dreamer’s pleasure in illusion” – “together with its beauty” (§ 1, p. 36) – or are “projections” of one’s “self” (§5, p. 50).
Whenever the Dionysian and Apollinian interact in genuinely tragic artworks, Nietzsche declares, it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (§5, p. 52). Towards the end of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche repeats his declaration, elaborating upon his “leap into a metaphysics of art” by conceding that there is “only one way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately.” How? Through the “significance of musical dissonance” (§24, p. 141). As does tragic myth, music also possesses the “same origin,” a “common source,” in the Dionysian “primordial joy experienced even in pain” (§24, p. 141). Alternatively expressed, “artistically employed dissonances” reveal to us “the playful construction and destruction” of a world, such “world-building force” being comparable to a child at play building “sand hills only to overthrow them again” (§24, pp. 141-142). Here, Nietzsche has shifted from portrayals of the diurnal world, from portrayals of “an art degenerated to mere entertainment” or to “a life guided by concepts” (§24, p. 142). Instead, we enter “a sphere of art that lies beyond the Apollinian” (§25, p. 143) where
art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming … [and] participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure. (§24, p. 140)
III
In this penultimate section, let us briefly examine Maly’s attempt to guide his non-philosophical readers from the normal, traditional static duality we first inherit and upon which we first reflect (“the first beginning”) towards the retrievable “non-conceptual experience” of the dynamic non-duality (“the other beginning”) that he contends is “knowable beyond conceptualization and is sayable only in non-conceptual, poi-etic language” (169). As befits this lengthy third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking, it adheres to “the transformation of thinking and language” undertaken by Heidegger as he journeyed towards the non-dualistic in pursuit of “the meaning or question of being” (169).
Maly seizes upon the “unresolvable tension” this question raises, translating the crux of Heidegger’s 1935 Freiberg lectures, the Einführung, as: “We stand between two equally unsurpassable limits: On the one hand, as we think and say ‘being “is,”’ we immediately make being [Sein] into a being [das Seiende] …. on the other hand, as long as we experience beings, we can never deny the ‘being’ and the ‘is’” (171). Heidegger (1935, pp. 23ff.) subsequently elucidates the distinction not only by examples of individual objects such as a piece of chalk’s characteristics, but also by way of institutional objects such as a school whose building both inside and outside has a multitude of specifiable features. Yet the being or existence as such (Sein) of chalk or of school which makes it a particular being rather than a non-being (nichtseiend) eludes us. In wrestling with this conundrum, Maly urges his readers to avoid “oppositional” thinking, thinking limited to oscillating between “differences” (175).
However, what Maly neglects to examine for his targeted readers’ consideration are the multiple meanings or uses of the “is” when predicating or categorizing something (“that creek is algae-ridden”), when identifying or defining something (“this pentagon is a plane shape with five equal straight sides each of whose interior angles measures 108º”), and when stating the existence of something (“there is a supreme being”). That being as such (Sein) is “in” or belongs to particular beings such as chalk and school might at first be regarded as feasible since when ascribing characteristics to objects or things – “chalk is fragile” or “a school is a place of learning” – their existence is usually presumed before the characteristics being attributed to them. Yet presuming existence is not tantamount to identifying existence in itself as the most basic characteristic of existing objects simply because existence in itself is not a characteristic or ground, ingredient or source of existing objects. In other words, if we emphatically state that “cheetahs and dragonflies do exist,” we are stressing that some things possess characteristics connoted by the words “cheetahs” and “dragonflies”; that is, that these sets of characteristics apply to certain things. Similarly, if we state that “centaurs and unicorns do not exist,” then we are denying that anything possesses characteristics connoted by the words “centaurs” and “unicorns”; that is, that these sets of characteristics do not apply to anything notwithstanding our imaginative ways of picturing fictional entities. Heidegger’s disclosure of the paradoxical nature of being or existence as such (Sein) and his subsequent quest for pinpointing its tendency both to conceal and to reveal itself in particular beings (das Seiende) appear to be stymied from the onset.
For all its running commentary on key Greek terms, the third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking gives little background about Heidegger’s response to and handling of pervasive turn-of-century phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses influencing his major writings in the decade before the 1939/1945 war (see, e.g., the Steven Crowell, Edgar Boedeker, and Cristina Lafont 2005 contributions). Two examples come immediately to mind. Firstly, by opposing the methodological division between mind and world, consciousness and its objects, with which to begin one’s philosophical enquiry, Heidegger began by refocusing upon indivisible being or existence as such and its meaning from which conscious and natural processes unfold in their turn. Secondly, when probing the fragmentary passages such as Herakleitos and Parmenides on logos (cf. 1935, e.g. pp. 96ff., 104ff.) up to Platon’s dialogue Timaios (ca. 360 B.C.) (cf. 1935, e.g. 50ff., 72ff., 137ff.), Heidegger often seems to be adapting a neo-platonic understanding of the metaphysical trajectory of early ancient Greek thinking and language (to be investigated in our concluding section).
Let us now end this section with the potential danger faced by Maly’s designated readers. In the attempt to defamiliarize traditional or reductive interpretations of pivotal notions including phusis and aletheia, do Maly and Heidegger all too frequently resort to neologisms that read as stipulations to be absorbed rather than debated? Consider the following passage about the “inner connection between Being and seeming”:
… we can grasp this connection fully only if we understand “Being” in a correspondingly originary way, … in a Greek way. We know that Being opens itself up to the Greeks as phusis. The emerging-abiding sway is in itself at the same time the appearing that seems. The roots phu- and pha- name the same thing. Phuein, the emerging that reposes in itself, is phainesthai, lighting-up, self-showing, appearing …
It would be instructive to clarify the naming force of this word through the great poetry of the Greeks, as well. Here, it may be enough to indicate that for Pindar, for example, phua is the fundamental characteristic of Dasein: to de phua kratiston hapan, that which is from and through phua is wholly and fully the most powerful (Olympian Ode IX, 100); phua means what one originally and authentically already is: that which essentially unfolds as having been (das Ge-Wesende), in contrast to the subsequently forced and enforced contrivances and fabrications. (Heidegger 1935, p. 77)
Now consider some of Maly’s glosses, for instance, when readers first encounter Dasein which ordinarily signifies “to be there” with its prefix da meaning “here” or “there” (3):
In Heidegger’s thinking the word da indicates the “open expanse” in which one finds oneself … [and] always has an ecstatic character.
… from Sein und Zeit onward, it is a way of saying (1) being-in-the-world and (2) being in the opening-out (expanse) in which being itself emerges …. Thus, Dasein is the word for human existence in its ownmost and most proper way of being, that is, standing-out in the opening expanse … As such, the word Dasein describes the fundamental comportment or relationship that “humans” have – to the world and then to being as emerging – as “ec-static.” This names the fundamental shift, in Heidegger’s thinking, away from subjectivity and its objectifying, to the always already relatedness in the non-dual dynamic of no-thing and no-form “being” that cannot be objectified. (3-4)
Readers are also introduced to aspects of metaphysical being in itself (Sein). Aletheia is Greek for “truth,” the opposite of “falsity,” which “human judgement connects in concepts” that “corresponds” to “things” in the world (217). By contrast, Maly asserts, a-letheia contains the word lethe signifying the forgotten, the hidden, the concealed, the unseen where the negative prefix ἀ signifies “not” (217). After surveying phusis “beyond the traditional ‘reducing to the physical’” – including “nature”? – towards “growth, originating power, origin, force, birth” as signalled by its underpinning verb phuo (235-237), Maly gradually introduces “the playing field” (187) of phusis and aletheia, traced in Heidegger’s later seminars and essays especially on fragments of Herakleitos, by tabling the inner connections of being in itself and its manifestations or phenomena, and then noting:
I include φύσις here because it says the same as ἀ-λήθεια. Although the word emphasizes the action itself, it also shelters the no-form no-thing and dynamic withdrawing-concealing along with that which gets manifest or disclosed – all within the non-dual dynamic of radiant emptiness, aka beyng. There is no “third” aspect as such. Rather, by emphasizing this seemingly third aspect, we are emphasizing movement from and to. But since all is one, this too is not separated from the non-dual one. (245)
To what extent can the anthropological, etymological, and ontological set of suppositions here unequivocally establish the veracity of Heidegger’s contention that “Being essentially unfolds as phusis” and is based upon “the unique essential relation between phusis and aletheia” (1935, pp. 77 & 78) as relayed by Maly?
IV
Despite sensitivity to the limitations of language and its translatability, the Retrieval of Greek Thinking and its emphasis upon Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical approaches invites us to critically examine their deployment of apophatic discourse and thinking. When reflecting upon the Birth of Tragedy in his 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” [“Versuch einer Selbstkritik”], Nietzsche finds it “an impossible book” in an affective reconstruction of his authorial state of mind confronting the “what” was being expressed and the “how”:
I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine … uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates …. What found expression here was anyway … a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God” …. What spoke here … was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this “new soul”—and not spoken! (§3, pp. 19-20)
Drafting a work during a period of relentless Prussian expansion especially at the expense of Austria and France by 1870/1871 and convalescing from illness contracted at the ten-week siege of Metz, Nietzsche concedes that “this questionable book” about the Greeks was “deeply personal” (§1, p. 17). Yet it obviously does not conform to an exercise in actual or fictional autobiography. Nor, as revealed above, is it a logical, provable argument; in fact, proof is not only scorned, but also seen as inappropriate if not surplus to the needs of readers initiated into Nietzsche’s realm of enquiry. Although better expressed in song than in speech, it becomes a realm expressible in the “strange voice” or “strange tongue” of a disciple of a yet-to-be known god, a disciple who appears to be struggling like “a mystical, almost maenadic soul” (§3, p. 20). By this stage, readers should have little difficulty sensing that female worshippers of Dionysios – the mainades – whose rites involving intoxicated dancing induced violent and enraged, frenzied and ecstatic states – are but a stepping stone into disentangling the question “what is Dionysian?” (§3, p. 20).
Birth of Tragedy provides a foretaste of apophatic discourse without recourse “merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision” in which the Greek “terms Dionysian and Apollinian … disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods” emerging from “these art impulses of nature” (§1, p. 33; §2, p. 38). Between the “two art deities … there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” but whose contrasting “tendencies run parallel to each other … till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘will,’ they appear coupled with each other” (§1, p. 33). When finally coupled in tragic myths, rituals, and the drama of Aiskhylos and Sophokles, the Dionysian is apprehended as “the eternal and original artistic power that first calls the whole world of phenomena into existence” and the Apollinian as “a new transfiguring illusion” that “becomes necessary in order to keep the animated world of individuation alive” (§25, p. 143). That this “should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by intuition” (§25, p. 144).
Needless to say, that language
can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena (§6, p. 55)
continues to pose problems. For example, how can the “metaphysical intention of art to transfigure” and reveal itself as “a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature” (§24, p. 140) when transcendental primal reality itself is “beyond and prior” possible experience? Granted, possible experience is patently not presumed by Nietzsche to follow the transcendental arguments and proofs of possible, systematically coherent experience developed by Immanuel Kant (1787, B.125ff. and B.756 & 813ff.). Furthermore, Nietzsche does not appeal to hypothetical counter-instances that appear as little more than cases of seeming experience. Instead, he actually appeals to his own experience of experiencing something of the transcendent when experiencing the third act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859) (§21, pp. 127ff.). But if the transcendental is beyond possible experience, then could whatever he purportedly experienced be an actual reportable experience of it? Other examples of what it is for the above-mentioned “cosmic symbolism of music” to reveal or intimate the transcendental brings us back to the vexed issue of what it is for the arts to represent anything. That, of course, returns us to Platon’s question about whether or not, in experiencing a work of art, we experience what that artwork represents (Politeia [Republic] (ca. 375 B.C.), Bk. X, 595b-602b).
Finally, apophatic discourse in arguably its most radical form can be located in the later neo-platonic text of Damaskios of Khalkis, Peri ton proton arkhon [On First Principles] (ca. 534). Damaskios exploits an aporia, namely, an impasse or conundrum, that in so far as the puskhe “divines that of all things, conceived in whatever way, there is a principle beyond all and without relation to all,” then “it should be called neither principle, nor first, nor before all, nor beyond all …; it must not be proclaimed, nor conceived, nor conjectured at all” (Part 1, §2, p. 24). Although “we can conceive nothing simpler than the One, the wholly one and only one,” any act of “predicating … categories” of it results in the “not knowable … not nameable” One being “made many.” Hence, such a predicated One, if “the cause of all and encompasses all,” impedes our capacity “to mount up beyond it” given that the “uncoordinated,” “circular” many “cannot form one cause” (Part 1, §2, p. 25). In brief, the One as the principle of all cannot be involved in any predicated characteristics or relationships because that would contradict its absolute transcendence. At best, the One is completely “ineffable,” completely “unsayable”:
And if it is necessary to indicate something, most useful are the negations of these predicates—that it is neither one nor many, neither productive nor infecund, neither cause nor deprived of causality—and such negations, I know not how, overturning themselves absolutely into infinity. (Part 1, §28, p. 39)
As his translator, William Franke (2004, p. 20) comments, to read Damaskios is to confront metalingual discourse driven to the very “limits of … intelligibility,” demonstrating where discourse “breaks down and yields to the ineffable”; exploiting “a style that is highly discursive and elliptical”; and deploying “the more skeptical-sounding vocabulary of reversal or turning around and against itself … of discourse that refutes and annuls itself”; yet “negatively register[ing] a vertiginous experience of radical transcendence.”
When Maly’s initial “Interlude” introduces Heidegger’s terminology of Dasein/Da-Sein, Seyn/Beyng, and Ereignis (and cognates), his focus is largely upon writings and lectures from 1936 to 1938 eventually assembled as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) in Maly’s neologistic co-translation]. Maly advises his basically non-philosophical readers that his suggestions for handling Heidegger here include “to be aware that the word Sein was central to Heidegger’s pursuit from the very beginning, where sometimes … what Seyn says was more hidden than at other times” and to “decide for yourself how to read those instances of Sein that are ambiguous, given that there is no logical proof for all of this” (8).
Although this critical review has been limited to Einführung, the 1935 volume already exemplifies many facets of apophatic discourse in train (not to be confused with phenomenological “apophantic interpretations” in Sein und Zeit (see, e.g., Boedeker (2005), pp. 159f. & 168ff.)). Witness how a concluding metaphor reverses the relationship between who and what can speak (if not switching, as Charles Taylor (1992) argues, from “instrumental” language in actual circumstances to “constitutive” language in possible ones):
Even the very act of asking about “the essence of language … regulates itself in each case according to what has become the prevailing preconception about the essence of beings and about how we comprehend essence. But essence and Being speak in language” (1935, p. 41).
Now witness how the shortcomings of logical analysis of being as such (Sein) demands removal from a sphere not available to logic and philosophical enquiry reliant upon it:
despite Kant and Hegel, logic has not taken a single step farther in what is essential and inceptive. The only possible step remaining is to unhinge it [that is, as the definitive perspective for the interpretation of Being] from its ground up. (1935, p. 144)
Again, witness two neighbouring examples of how etymologically grounded neologistic expressions, whether in Greek or not, repeatedly pervade a noticeably roving or seemingly discursive style, yet increasingly becoming, for philosophically untrained readers, semantically elliptical as if struggling with what cannot be fully said:
… the having-of-itself wherein the constant holds itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being be a being as opposed to a nonbeing. For something to take such a stand therefore means for it to attain its limit, to de-limit itself. Thus a basic characteristic of a being is its telos, which does not mean goal or purpose, but end. Here “end” does not have any negative sense …. “end” means completion in the sense of coming to fulfillment [Vollendung]. (1935, p. 46)
What we have said helps us to understand the Greek interpretation of Being … in our explication of the term “metaphysics”—that is, the apprehension of Being as phusis. The later concepts of “nature,” we said, must be held at a distance from this: phusis means the emergent self-upraising, the self-unfolding that abides in itself. In this sway, rest and movement are closed and opened up from an originary unity. This sway is the overwhelming coming-to-presence that has not yet been surmounted in thinking, and within which that which comes to presence essentially unfolds as beings. But this sway first steps forth from concealment—that is, in Greek, aletheia (unconcealment) happens… (1935, p. 47)
Turning to the closure of the Einführung, notice how being in itself (Sein) can only be approached by what it is not so that “talk of the indeterminateness and emptiness of Being is erroneous” when searching for the “meaning of a word” (unless, readers might wonder, when “the happening in which Being becomes word, was poetry” (1935, p. 131)):
The determinateness of Being was brought before our eyes by the discussion of the four divisions:
Being, in contradistinction to becoming, is enduring.
Being, in contradistinction to seeming, is the enduring prototype, the always identical.
Being, in contradistinction to thinking, is what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand.
Being, in contradistinction to the ought, is what lies at hand in each case as what ought to be and has not yet been actualized, or already has been…
… The determinateness of Being is not a matter of delimiting a mere meaning of a word. It is the power that today still sustains and dominates all our relations to beings as a whole … (1935, p. 154)
Finally, reflecting upon Sein und Zeit, Heidegger distinguishes it from the Einführung as “a title” that cannot be meshed with the above-mentioned negative “divisions” because it “points to a completely different domain of questioning”:
In such a meditation, “Being and time” means not a book but the task that is given. The authentic task given here is what we do not know; and insofar as we know this genuinely—namely as a given task—we always know it only in questioning.
Being able to question means being able to wait, even for a lifetime. But [our] age … takes questioning as … something that does not count as profitable. But what is essential is not counting but the right time—that is, the right moment and the right endurance.
For the mindful god
does detest
untimely growth.
—Hölderlin, fragment from the period of “The Titans” (1935, p. 157)
Ultimately, Heidegger, ever mindful of Sophokles’ Antigone (ca. 442/441 B.C.) (see 1935, pp. 113ff.), has broached the understanding of being in itself (Sein) as that which is the realm of the inexpressible, the unsayable. The supposedly first “violent,” “deep intimations” of Dasein and Sein experienced by the ancient Greeks “and placed poetically into its ground, remains closed off to understanding” and “a mystery” had they “hastily take[n] refuge in some moral appraisal” (1935, p. 125).
References
Boedeker, Edgar. 2005. “Phenomenology.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 156-172. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Crowell, Steven. 2005. “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 49-64. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Damaskios. ca. 534. On First Principles / Peri ton proton archon. Edited by L.G. Wersterink; translated by William Franke, “Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle,” Arion ser. 3, 12(1), 2004: 19-39.
Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and Time / Sein und Zeit. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.
Heidegger, Martin. 1935. Introduction to Metaphysics / Einführung in die Metaphysik. Translated by Gregory Fried & Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 [citations to the 1953 German pagination].
Heidegger, Martin. 1936-1938. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) / Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann; translated by Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Kant, Immanuel. 1787. Critique of Pure Reason / Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited & translated by Paul Guyer & Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Lafont, Cristina. 2005. “Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 265-284. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872. “Letter 40: To Friedrich Ritschl.” In Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited & translated by Christopher Middleton, 93. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. ca.1873. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks / Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Co., 1962.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1874. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music / Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 2nd edn. In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 29-144. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1886. “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” / “Versuch einer Selbstkritik.” In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 17-27. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Pagani, Lara. 2011. “Pioneers of Grammar: Hellenistic Scholarship and the Study of Language.” In From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship. Edited by Franco Montanari & Lara Pagani, 17-64. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Platon. ca. 375 B.C. Politeia. Edited by Giovanni Ferrari; translated by Tom Griffith, The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. “Heidegger on Language.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 433-455. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Taylor, Daniel. 1990. “Dionysus Thrax Vs Marcus Varro,” Historiographia Linguistica 17(1-2): 15-27.
Realismus und Idealismus in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie
Reality and Hermeneutics
Mohr Siebeck
2024
Hardback
XII, 255
Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit
Reviewed by: Pierre-Adrien Marciset,
The historicity of consciousness and the horizon of its thought
“His habilitation thesis is undoubtedly a step that sheds light on Blumenberg’s career…” Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“He was [after all] the exemplary ascetic who had earned his lion. Working night after night, Blumenberg told himself proudly, the thanks had now come in the form of the lion.” Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg (2011, Seagull Press 2017, for the English edition, p. 6)
I thank warmly Robert Savage for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review, without which the review would not have reached such a degree of precision and clarity.
“Enjoy only with caution”
Hans Blumenberg (born July 13, 1920 and died March 28, 1996) could, despite everything, still be considered an “invisible” philosopher today, justifying the adjective with which Christoph Rüter’s documentary film refers to him (Hans Blumenberg – Der unsichtbare Philosoph, 2018). The German philosopher did not give interviews and did not allow himself to be photographed, nourishing, according to his current detractors, a certain staging of the reception of his texts, in particular those that are still inaccessible and have long remained so even for the German-speaking readership. This posthumously edited version of Die ontologische Distanz is the text edited by Nicola Zambon that Blumenberg presented in 1950 for his Habilitation thesis, accompanied by an “appendix” (“Anhang“, attachment) of the earlier versions, i.e. the one he proposed in 1949, immediately after his doctoral thesis, defended in 1948.
This text belongs to the beginnings of Blumenberg’s production, corresponding to an important stage, in my opinion, in the anthropological practice of phenomenology – I will return to this. This anteriority, in relation to the works written later and which had a significant impact, could push potential readers to consider it as “outdated” insofar as it would be a “scaffolding”, a stage in the path of Blumenberg’s thought which could, in hindsight, be considered negligible. This is the premise often accepted by current research on Blumenberg. Indeed, since on the one hand Blumenberg himself did not authorize the publication (he wrote that he left it to his heirs to do what they wanted with it, decorating the manuscript with a drawing of a bottle of poiso labelled “enjoy only with caution”), and since on the other hand Blumenberg would go beyond some of the ideas proposed in Die ontologische Distanz while not following up on others, it would perhaps be fraudulent, from the point of view of the coherence of the philosopher’s thought, to resort to the elements of this text and perhaps even to speak of it.
The German edition of Die ontologische Distanz nevertheless responds to certain works of contemporary phenomenology, such as the reflections of the French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras (Introduction à une phénoménique de la vie, Vrin, 2012, for example) who poses in particular the need to return to the idea of the correlational a priori raised in Ideas’s §49, according to which “between consciousness and reality there is a real abyss of meaning” (Hua III/1, § 49), on which Blumenberg comes frontally in Part. II, §3, notably pp. 73-75. This is how Blumenberg tackled the problem of what separates philosophizing from life, and the question of the possibility of existence in the subjectivity of successive beings.
Certainly, I find in Die ontologische Distanz the first stirrings rather than the foundations of notions that I will see better and more extensively defended elsewhere in Blumenberg’s work – for example what will become the critique of the acme of history in theology in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or again the critique of phenomenology that was deployed in several lost or transformed manuscripts, some sections of which ultimately constitute entire chapters of Beschreibung des Menschen. But I also find sketches which, even if better specified elsewhere, remain decisive from the point of view of the history of philosophy, and even from the point of view of the history of historical science, by shedding new light on the problems which he approached (this is the case for the whole question of the possibility of the self-assertion of reason, see second part, “§7 Die Selbstbehauptung der Vernunft for der Gewißheitsfrage”, pp. 113-126). To take yet another example, I find already in the defense version of Die ontologische Distanz the idea of the “valences” of paradigmatic epochs which, from the idea of a “morphology of ontological distance” become after 1961 the arguments of a “concept of reality” which he will study under various approaches, and on several occasions, under the first prism of a “consciousness of reality”. I’m thinking here of an article from 1964, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” (in: History, Metaphors, Fables, A Hans Blumenberg Reader, « Signale », Cornell University Press, 2020 for the English edition).
Blumenberg abandoned many of his book projects, quickly tiring of the considerations related to the publication of his works and perhaps preferring to devote himself to writing, thus accumulating manuscripts in the drawers of his archives. Given this inclination, leaving aside or devaluing manuscripts that were not carried through to publication does not seem necessarily essential to us. If the young Blumenberg (thirty years old in 1950) later presented in more accomplished forms what he wrote by trial and error, in the heat of research, this does not seem to us to justify the elimination or reduction of these ideas, whether we assume that he returned to them later with a more mature and firmer eye or, conversely, that he preferred not to exploit the valences thus opened but left them in a state of a suspension. The extreme vitality of these twenty-six paragraphs spread over four parts warrants their being given serious consideration, even if this vitality certainly sometimes suffers from confusion, contradictions, unfulfilled promises (notably in the fourth part), or breaks in the rhythm and the demonstration. As the “Habilitation dispute” attests (see below), Blumenberg perhaps also suffered from not having yet managed to find his own voice, sometimes ventriloquizing Heidegger at the same time as confronting him.
I am convinced that if Blumenberg had wanted to simply to disown the work he had begun in the manuscript of Die ontologische Distanz, then he would not have isolated his text and allowed it to join his archives; to those who would justify this by sentimentality, I should defend myself by showing that some of Blumenberg’s great ideas are already, confusedly or not, expressed in this manuscript. Reading this text today perhaps allows us to understand the lineaments of a thought which was already emerging itself in his doctoral thesis (Hans Blumenberg, Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie, Frankfurt, Verlag Suhrkamp, 2020). It therefore makes sense to approach this text today “with caution”, keeping in mind this reserve, that of the reasonable prudence that Blumenberg maintained with regard to the treatment of this text and which resisted until the end, both in the mind of its author and in the letter of his work. One of the major terms of the whole philosophy of Hans Blumenberg could well be that of the “horizon” – historical, of meaning, phenomenological, of consciousness, cultural, technical, etc. In this respect, Die ontologische Distanz could well be the “horizon” that forms both the starting point and the perspective of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy.
The rigor of Die ontologische Distanz
The publication of Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit in 2022 seems to us to be decisive for understanding the substance of Blumenberg’s overall work. It is also an opportunity for us to expose the homogeneity of a work always already contained in embryo in the Habilitation. To try to bring it together in a formula, this text deals with the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the structure of performance that is consciousness – consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. All of Blumenberg’s intellectual singularity is announced from this formidable ambition of the Habilitation.
Hans Blumenberg’s first project aimed at nothing less than the restitution of philosophical “rigor” and anticipates the aims of his entire philosophy. Thanks to this first text, practically “genetic”, arriving immediately after his thesis on medieval ontology, the tools are now assembled that allow us to consider the system as a whole, by demonstrating the rigor of its logic, its outcomes and the necessity that presides over all the ramifications that were sometimes considered to have been scattered and disordered. However, it is possible today to discern the centers of gravity of this work. Jürgen Goldstein already named some of them in 2020, to which I can now add others thanks to the posthumous publications that have taken place since: “The central aspects of his philosophy require presentation in their respective context: the self-preservation of reason, the absolutism of reality, the phenomenology of history, for example.” (Jürgen Goldstein, Hans Blumenberg, Ein philosophisches Portrait, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2020, p. 11) I would add: genetic phenomenology; that is to say ontology and its conditions of possibility, the reflection on being in the wake of Aristotle as it was first pursued by Husserl, then defended by Blumenberg in Husserl against Heidegger while nevertheless integrating certain Heideggerian notions – without forgetting Landgrebe, whose Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (1949) is an essential text for Blumenberg — and especially for the Blumenber of the Habilitation thesis.
The German term Strenge, rigor, is the keystone of one of the three versions of the subtitle of the Habilitation, as Nicola Zambon testifies on the first page of the afterword (Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers”, p. 349). The central question of philosophical “rigor” is grasped by Blumenberg as having been the point on which the Cartesian project stumbled, justifying Husserl’s resumption of that project (see on this subject the introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology which opens precisely with the recognition of this unresolved debt in the history of philosophy), and the failure, in Husserl’s own eyes, of what he concentrates in the formula of the “universality of the coincidence of language and thought” (Husserl, Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic, Halle, 1929, p. 22, here expanding the Husserlian idea of §49 of the Ideas). This is how Blumenberg justifies in his introduction the perspective of this “investigation” that he is conducting on this subject, in his Habilitation thesis:
This breakthrough through traditional ontology does not take place in the claim of methodological freedom, in the name of a new attitude towards thought. Rather, it can be characterized as the persistence of a historical situation until it is interpreted. This situation represents the critical turning point that the understanding of being in modern times has taken as a whole. The turning point is succinctly marked by the crisis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, from which Martin Heidegger’s thought emerges. The presentation, classification and interpretation of this crisis constitute the main theme of the investigation. (Blumenberg, p. 11, which he extended p. 51 in the problematization of the historical context of the performance of intentionality)
Therefore, the gesture of the Habilitation proposed to restore through the “rigor” of the homogeneity of phenomenology, thanks to which the crisis irremediably separating the subject from the world of objects would be resolved. It is with the study of the conditions of mediation of the distance of this separation, as a source of ontogenesis, that the Habilitation is concerned; that is to say, Die ontologische Distanz aims to explain what is expressed in the phenomenon of ontological distance, but also to describe the mode of this expression.
I will therefore discuss this work as if I was progressing on the cartography of the future complete philosophical work, naming different points of his radiancy’s philosophic activity, in order to underline its dynamic arcs (the famous “metakinetics of being” thanks to the work of which “the realities in which we live replace being“, Zambon, p. 372) and show their radiation from the focus that would have been Die ontologische Distanz. What could be considered as the problem of the distance of the subject from the world would be what would stand between the conscious activity of the interiority of the subject on the one hand and its consciousness of the world on the other, the latter understood here in the sense of the subject’s “consciousness cast” on the world. It seems to us that this denomination of “ontological distance” designates, simultaneously with this first problem, the ontological activity required by the need to connect with the world, which is active in and made active by the subject.
For Blumenberg, and this is yet another justification of the relationship by “radiation” and “concretions” that I was talking about, the entire history of the world of thought is a succession of manifestations of this “metakinetics of thought as a whole” (Blumenberg, p. 18) that springs from an internal and fundamental encounter between two regimes of the activity of the mind. Later, after the publication of his book on metaphorology in 1960, Blumenberg would be more radical and would integrate into the Husserlian concept of the lifeworld the importance of the role of aesthetics in ontogenetic activity, through a “return” to the contributions of Ernst Cassirer. Thus when the support of ontogenetic certainty of the paradigmatic era wavers, the ontological distance comes into action:
Aristotelian scholasticism arises from the need for a scientific theology in an intellectual environment that wants to be convinced. It is an articulation of ontological distance that is no longer understood only in terms of possibility, but has its own objective horizon, in which there is a search and a doubt, a discussion of positions, an affection and a rejection. (Blumenberg, pp. 104-105)
Here, at the heart of the exercise of ontological distance, the reader can already grasp the terminology that would not be fully deployed until about ten years later. We also see the spirit, but also the letter, of a paradigm shift that is systematically identified in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975, 1987, MIT Press for the English edition), but also in the first edition of the book published in 1966, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (3rd ed. 1997, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition). All this contributes to a demonstrable homogeneity.
As a metakinesis of historical horizons — and in anticipation of the dynamics of repositioning that Blumenberg introduces in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit and that will be refined in the Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt — it is appropriate to examine why distance has taken the forms that it has. The analysis amounts to affirming that the Cartesian configuration of distance — the contraposition between subject and object — is a historical form, which means at the same time that it is only a historical form (among many others possible). The historical modes of distance were possibilities, they were neither destiny nor chance, but: contingency. The crisis of modern times was therefore not a necessity. The Cartesian understanding of the subject and the object that gave rise to the crisis was not inevitable, nor natural, but was in turn a contingent historical constellation whose evidence must be questioned in order to find a way out of the diagnosed epochal impasse. (Zambon, p. 355)
Zambon seems to support here this idea of a shift from the “history of being” to what I could establish as a “history of the paradigmatics of being” that would ultimately be consummated. However, writing it this way would run the risk of mixing up what is announced by the Habilitation and what would only be methodically materialized later on. However, it should not be overlooked that the Habilitation is a work of a man in his late twenties, and as such contains the entire extremely rich intuitive arsenal of intuitions that he would spend the next forty years developing. It seems to us that, beyond the effective radicalization of his break with Heidegger, Blumenberg never changed his trajectory, even assimilating Heidegger over time.
Hans Blumenberg constructed his entire work in perfect metaphorological adequacy with what he wanted to demonstrate (Goldstein, 2020, p. 28), always illustrating the object in the theorization of a demonstration which is homogeneous with the other perspectives of its theory. But this is not so much an irony, or a paradox, as the very mode of synthetic understanding by which we must always read Blumenberg if we want to understand him: we must read by accepting that erudition, and education with it, is a horizon, and not an arsenal (or not only).
The content (the product) and the container (the production space, the work space, Arbeit) of his system overlap and coincide. Another of Blumenberg’s monumental works, Work on Myth (1979, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition), follows an identical pattern: it is a work on myth as what is on the author’s loom, but at the same time it is a study of the ways of working on myth, of the conditions of possibility and necessity of its production. The work of Die ontologische Distanz now available is the focus from which the other works can be understood as the materializations (Blumenberg uses the metaphor of “onion skins” in Die nackte Wahrheit, 2020) of the formal conditions of which Die ontologische Distanz was or would have been the archistructure and the turn from which Blumenberg rose to another dimension of philosophy. In other words, the Habilitation seems to us to have been the germ of a decisive stage in the genesis of the progression of what, thanks to it, we understand today as the crisis of the subject. In the same way, for the subject, the internal formal phenomenon of ontological distance is the focus from which the other aspects of its capacity to be a subject can be understood and interpreted – I will return this again below.
The ontological crisis as a sine qua non condition for the possibility of the subject’s cognition
Since Die ontologische Distanz, or soon after, Blumenberg’s philosophy can consider that the very notion of crisis is intrinsic to the subject. Just as truth is the metaphor of the infinite aim of knowledge by the human being, and not its essentialization, the crisis would thus be the phenomenological experience that is at the very foundation of the conditions of possibility of what, particularly since Freud, is covered by the terminology of the different states of consciousness. Die ontologische Distanz, as already written, announces in our sense that of which Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960, 2010, Cornell University Press for the English edition) are the practical case and the illustration, if not even that of which they are the demonstration of the efficiency and the progress. The balance sheet of the internal crisis of any subject is both production and product of what is formally manifested in the two simultaneous regimes of the activity of the mind, and constitutes the plurality of the conditions of possibility of what is called the world of thought. These two regimes of the activity of the mind, conceptual and “nonconceptual”, are materialized in the thought of Hans Blumenberg in several works and in particular in his Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit (Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit, Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort von Anselm Haverkamp, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007, 2019).
What philosophical content does Die ontologische Distanz proposes? It already started from the principle of ambivalence, still foreign to Blumenberg in 1948: contrary to the idea of a progression of history that would be linear and progressive, on the Hegelian model, and in which humanity would have passed, in the eyes of Cassirer for example, from the age of substance to that of the understanding of function, it is for Blumenberg two simultaneous aptitudes that are both expressed in the regimes of the activity of the mind and that the need of each era pushes the subject to invest or not according to the paradigmatic prevalence. From this perspective, substance and function correspond not to two historical stages of the mind, but to two paradigmatic modalities (Blumenberg evokes “potentiality” in the sense of Aristotelian ontology, p. 137) of the mode of relation of the subject to the world, in language, in science, or in myth. The past, writes Blumenberg,
is “decided” from all possible pasts, which are always causally present: for example as literature, as vocabulary, philosophical doctrines, museum objects, etc. (Blumenberg, p. 138)
It is therefore a revolution in the relationship to history that is announced: no longer a history of being, but a history of “paradigmatic eras” reproducing and themselves culturally while producing the conditions of possibility of the subject’s self-constitution.
In other words, individuals who establish themselves in the distance that separates them from the world of objects as transcendental subjects proceed from an epochal focus that polarizes the mediation of this distance, from the tools that are available. They do not follow a historical progression dependent on their relationship to belief or their relationship to science, they depend on the availability of tools that allow them to react to the internal crisis, and which leads them to organize themselves by instituting the conditions of possibility of ontogenesis as it is established in the epochal paradigm as resolution of the distance to the world. Because the transcendental subject is above all the process of the affirmation of its own autonomy in its use of the principle of determinability, this would be a phenomenology that wants to be existential (or existential) – the influences of Landgrebe, Freud but also Heidegger himself on Blumenberg are known. The subject, for Blumenberg (but not yet explicitly in the Habilitation), is capable of returning to the conditions of materialization of its own principle of determinability, starting from this fundamental crisis of which he identifies the work (and not the origin) in the quantitative differential of the regimes of the synthetic activity a priori of the cognition.
From then on, this “ambivalence” (a term that is not already present in the paths pursued during the Habilitation, despite several titles exposing an ambivalence, such as §1 of the second part) is expressed as a paradigm, or as a principle, of a simultaneous double tension external to each individual in his relationship to the world, and internal to each individual in the relationship of his faculties between them, between finitude and imagination, and which materializes on the phenomenological level in the use of his own process of determinability as a transcendental subject through the historical availabilities in each era.
The formal content of the text
In addition to the philosophers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Blumenberg’s doctrinal trajectory crosses several of the philosophical edifices that are contemporary with him. The borrowings that he makes from them and the critical props with which he modifies them are, however, often the occasion for a questioning of the foundations of their structures, sometimes without having named them. This is his obsession with the « paradigm” (see his 1971 article: “Paradigma, grammatisch”, in op. cit., 2001). What can thus pass for an infinite heterodoxy (to Husserl, Heidegger and Landgrebe himself, to cite the names that are most often found, but one could add Cassirer, Kant, Thomas Aquinas or Plotinus), or for a dispersion whose center one could not locate, would exacerbate a certain annoyance, a fortiori in the event of disagreements on the conclusions or the practicality of the concepts deployed. His writings on phenomenology (from 1981 to 1988, edited by Nicola Zambon) and his writings on literature (from 1945 to 1958, edited by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler) are known, both of which were published by Suhrkamp. By its proliferation, which nevertheless designates a center of gravity, certainly invisible to those who approach it without conjectures on the horizon, Blumenberg irritates.
And still! The elements considered by Blumenberg in Die ontologische Distanz find their vein in the diffusion of everything that touches on ontology: both from the point of view of ontogenesis as production and at the same time from the idea of ontogenesis as product. In doing so, he reflects both on the expression of the morphology of ontological distance in the ambivalence between mythos and logos (II §1) which contains in its seminal state what is in 1971 the surer gesture of “Wirklichkeitsbergiff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”, then also instructs a part of The Readability of the World (1981, Cornell University Press, 2022 for the English edition), as well as on the form that the exteriority of the guarantee of reason can take (II §7), as well as on history as an investment of ontological valences (III §1), but it is unthinkable to render exhaustively the content of the list of “historical-philosophical practical cases” which constitute the four parts of this text. Here and there, each paragraph could and should be discussed in order to be ideally presented; here is a loosely translated list which allows us to grasp the dynamics at work in the text:
Part I: Explanation and development of the problem of distance
Part II: Insights into the Historical Morphology of Ontological Distance
Part III: Objectivity and Independence as Terms of Ontological Distance
Part IV: The Finitude of Thought
The editorial content of the 2022 work therefore includes the 1950 version, which is the one used for the defense and is spread over 276 pages (9-285), the framework of which I have just outlined, but it also contains the first, more concentrated version from 1949, containing 56 pages (287-249) including the bibliography, as an “attachment” to the 1950 manuscript. This is the file established by Blumenberg himself on the cover of which he had drawn a skull, thereby ensuring highly toxic, pirated or at least poisoned content – hence the “caution” I was talking about earlier.
Let us write it again with the help of this new argument: when consulting this skeleton, it’s possible to see clearly how, later, Blumenberg’s philosophy was able to envelop and integrate into pre-existing concerns the position of a philosopher of myth and culture such as Ernst Cassirer. Similarly, I could envisage what was already preparing the philosopher from Lübeck for the position that is his own regarding the Davos quarrel opposing Cassirer to Heidegger, notably on the level of the destination of the human being with regard to his finitude: as a source or as an impasse – even announcing, in fact, his response to the positions taken by Wittgenstein and Russell on this subject, and ultimately his position regarding the outcomes of the “cleavage” that fractured philosophy between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.
Some would say that Blumenberg is involved in too many quarrels, wants to lead too many struggles simultaneously on the same front, and these titles give a paradoxical insight into the rigorous homogeneity of his approach, which radiates from the problem of ontological distance, that is, as I have already written, from the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the performance structure that is consciousness — consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. It should not be forgotten that the 1950 text of Die ontologische Distanz is not a testament but, on the contrary, a burst frozen in its energy, some of whose repercussions are only subsequently dealt with. Systematizing the idea of a “thought of crisis”, Blumenberg even went, late in life (that is to say, not directly in the text which concerns us here), to the limit of the functionality of the activity of thinking.
The Habilitation Quarrel
As early as 1949, Blumenberg was ready to submit the text of his habilitation thesis. One of the three jurors, Walter Bröcker, wrote the equivalent of a completely devastating preliminary jury report on the 1949 version. It is possible that Bröcker simply did not find the question posed by Blumenberg relevant, nor did he find a sensible solution to the problem he claimed to provide. There is no real explanation other than the speculations of commentators who do not allow us to understand this conflict, apart from, perhaps, a certain defense of the orthodoxy of Heidegger’s reading.[1]
As Zambon writes, Bröcker’s exact motives are still unknown today, but it seems that the third assessor, whose name and the content of his intervention are still unknown to this day, ultimately “saved” Blumenberg (Zambon, p. 367). In any case, the candidate experienced the content of this preliminary report as a casus belli, and Nicola Zambon speaks of a “slap in the face” in the afterword. Blumenberg considered this preliminary report as a personal attack, aimed either at the Catholic tradition of his intellectual training, or at the heterodoxy of his Heideggerian reading, or even at the divergence of Heidegger’s reading of Husserl on the one hand, whose doctoral student Bröcker was until 1928, and those of Husserl read by Landgrebe on the other hand. Thus, rather than hearing it as a questioning of a possible immaturity of all or part of the doctrinal positions of this demonstration that would become the Habilitation, Blumenberg made it a personal matter, over which he sometimes put Landgrebe in a situation of emotional blackmail. Simultaneously and because he had no choice, intellectually speaking, Blumenberg took up the manuscript in its entirety to the point of “completely reorganizing [it]” (Zambon, p. 368). With his other “fathers”, the same Bröcker would validate the text of the Habilitation in its definitive form in 1950.
In addition to a certain tendency towards exaggeration or dramatic and definitive statements—which his mentor mostly appeases—one must therefore take into account Blumenberg’s resentment towards what could have been the objective reality of his environment. At this stage, any researcher who is particularly invested in his work and identifies with the success of his ideas can only feel boundless empathy for the Blumenberg who was just thirty years old. However, without this failure, without what he experienced as the humiliation of his first Habilitation project, “because of its majestic pretensions, to measure modernity by the horizon and its crisis” (p. 372), Nicola Zambon suggests that Blumenberg might never have written his major works—which can perhaps pass for belated responses to some of the lapidary remarks in Bröcker’s provisional report.
Perhaps, for archaeological reasons, readers should go back to his doctoral thesis to understand the extent to which the germ of what would later happen was to be found in his entire work, but I believe at this stage that the work of reworking the text of the Habilitation, after the failure of the first (too hasty) submission, between 1948 and 1950, truly “determined” the direction that Blumenberg would take in his entire philosophical stance. For example, I find in the Contribution (his doctoral thesis) the famous intuition, later taken up and systematically deployed, of the “paradigmatic epochs”, which Blumenberg will associate with the materializations of that by which the history of consciousness treats the test of ontological distance, and which recalls certain elements of the posture of the still Privatdozent Heidegger, and accessible in his courses of the winter semester 1921-1922, published in English under the title Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Indiana University Press, 2001) – edition whose German version was precisely directed by Walter Bröcker (1902-1992) and his wife Käte Oltmanns, both former students of Heidegger. The content of the relationship between paradigmatic eras under the pen of Heidegge corresponds to what Blumenberg develops here for exemple in III, §1, pp. 135-149, “Historische Vergangenheit und geschichtliche Gegenwart” (Volume 61 of the Complete Works of Heidegger, 1985). Going in the same direction as this first Heidegger, the very history of consciousness becomes for Blumenberg a historicity of the modes of resolution of the ontological distance throughout the succession of paradigmatic epochs, investing the “potential” of yet-unconscious influences. Blumenberg then has to distance himself from Heidegger in his own eyes and he chooses to defend Husserl – although Husserl’s name does not appear in the final title.
The project of a reflection mixing metaphysics and phenomenology
Ultimately, he attempted to propose nothing less than a reflection extending the Krisis of the subject, as identified by Husserl, in his Habilitation thesis. To quote the presentation on the publishing house’s website:
[…] a monumental project that seeks nothing less than to measure the philosophical horizon of modernity against a backdrop of crisis. Although Die ontologische Distanz does not entirely live up to this claim, the combination of historical-philosophical interests and the phenomenological method of the study lays the foundations on which Blumenberg’s major research on the history of consciousness would flourish in the following decades to come.
Indeed, I observe the ramifications of the continuation of Die ontologische Distanz taken as a construction site in the publications that occurred between 1950 and 1996 — and even beyond due to a very intense posthumous editorial activity. The Husserlian transcendental subject (then increasingly Kantian, as Blumenberg progressed) has a reserve of resources to institute the choices that he will make in the course of his principle of determinability (Die Sorge geht über den Fluß, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987): and to describe the subject himself (Beschreibung des Menschen) and to describe the readability of the world (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, ); this reserve materializing in the possibility of resorting to the elements constituting the history of culture. The management of the internal crisis, fundamental to any subject conscious of the availability of the principle of determinability, makes culture the destination and the origin of the uses that the subject will make of it[2]: culture is the container of all the frozen traces of the historicization of reactions to the fundamental economy of fear (Schrecken) that all human beings experience. These frozen forms are available in culture and can be seized by subsequent generations for their management of this same internal crisis, similar in motive and reason, but dissimilar in historical influence. The conditions of possibility of the subject establish, in this new configuration of the morphology of ontological distance, a new concept of reality, establishing the conditions of the shift from one “epochal paradigm”, or “paradigmatic epoch” to another (for example pp. 135-137). In the dynamic balance between “ritual texts” (texts that establish a paradigmatic era) and the “poeticization” of these texts, ontological distance is the primordial paradigm of the activity from which the possibility of the self-decomposition of the historicization of the subject progresses.
This primordial, incontestable paradigm is therefore manifested in the mediation by which the subject resolves the distance to the world (of factuality, of finitude) and is expressed at the level of the subject in the quantitative distance between the two regimes of the activity of the mind: the regime of the logico-formal, already identified by Kant, and the regime of intuitions, the hypothesis of which we have put forward elsewhere, under the name of an “aesthetico-formal regime” (Marciset, op. cit., 2023). In other words, and to attach it to the Heideggerian trajectory of the history of being, just as being conscious always depends with Husserl on a consciousness of something, like an activity carried out on an object, being always means being in the world, and this is the meaning of the syntagm Dasein. So that these are two different and complementary ways of speaking of one and the same structure of performance, which the doxa calls consciousness or being: by being (there, in the world) or by consciousness (of the object, of the world).
For Die ontologische Distanz, read through the lens of Blumenberg’s later work, being might not be the depository of an essence or a truth, but the focus of a permanent enactment of the conditions of possibility of the structure of performance at the foundation of the possibility of the transcendental subject which actualizes, since the inclusion of the principle of crisis at the very heart of its faculties, the valences of the current paradigmatic epoch and state of permanent mutability. The crisis is thus neither a promise nor a threat but the agent of the ontological dynamic and the guarantee of the perseverance of consciousness as an activity — whether one chooses, at this stage, to support this activity in an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason as proposed by the neo-Kantians, on the side of theories of knowledge, or whether one seeks, as Heidegger does, the restitution of the historicity of Dasein. Husserlian indifference or Heideggerian anxiety, it doesn’t matter: the history of consciousness is always one historical morphology (a punctual being, one of its events) of ontological distance, which is the activity of what it is to be in the world.
There is no simplification in a return to essentialization in Blumenberg’s theory: it is not a question of considering that his theory, however functional it may be, would rest on the idea of a “truth” of human nature and this is precisely what pushes Blumenberg towards Cassirer and simultaneously leads him to keep a certain distance from him[3]. No more than there would be a “truth” of the modes of application of Kantian theories, in Blumenberg’s prism, there is no ameliorative conception of the history of the mind. The superposition of the exteriority of the model as it can be theorized with the internal economy of the subject is due to a constructivist product and is not concerned with a destination or a prefiguration of what happens in history (Blumenberg, Präfiguration, Frankfurt, Surkhamp Verlag, 2014). In other words, Blumenberg’s theory is a theory of the “paradigmatic epoch” presiding over the metakinetic portion of the period thus presented, much more than a “history of being ».
Conclusion
What is the ontological distance that Hans Blumenberg deals with in his habilitation thesis? Two things, both of which arise from the relationship between the distance of the subject and the world, and from the conditions of possibility of materialization and polarization of this distance. It is in this distance, for Blumenberg, that the historicity of science is established. The first of these two implications concerns the repercussions of the evolution of this distance throughout history (the question of historicity being at the center of the problem, depending on whether the notion is considered as a phenomenon or as a cause) and then joins Husserl. “”For Husserl,”” writes Blumenberg, “method” is rather “the organon by which the scientific spirit frees itself from the contingency and finiteness of the researching individuals and escapes from the constraints of factual historical existence” (Blumenberg, p. 248). “The infinite implication of the phenomenological method, which here represents modern science, banishes humans from philosophical thought. It contains the functionalization of the individual and his sacrifice for a task indifferent to man and his finitude.” (Zambon, p. 358)
The second links the metakinetics of the subject, or practical being (Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Dasein) taken as a paradigmatic epoch (paradigmatische Epoche), to this problem and reinjects — or attempts to reinject — the method specific to phenomenology into the study of historicity, leading to a restoration of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), but this time, against any risk of essentialization and through the historically metakinetic mobility of the subject.
I find here the motif of the homogeneity of the work of the “invisible” philosopher. Blumenberg’s inspiration for his Habilitation thesis comes from a phenomenological generalization of the specific work that occupied him in his thesis and related to the problem of the crisis of the subject in modern European sciences. Thus, returning to the common conception of scholasticism on the ontological level, not “only [as] mediation and [as] passage for the heritage of Antiquity”, but also having a “distinct and original contribution of its own” (Blumenberg, Beiträge, 2020, p. 24), he begins to perceive the shifts of epochs as signs of the metakinetic activity of being, thereby opposing Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. History is a manifestation of the metakinetics of being, and not the direct relationship of being to history, and it is the status of the distance of being to history, through the mediation of this metakinetics, which constitutes the originality of Blumenberg’s phenomenological (and de facto anthropological) posture.
[1] Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers” in op. cit., 2022, pp. 366-367 and p. 370. It seems that the only argument that is still alive today concerns the lack of recourse to texts that are not strictly derived from Husserl, and which could imply different readings of Kant, as well as the Habilitation’s supposed failure to resolve anything genuine. For a more exhaustive exposition of the quarrel, see Rüdiger Zill, Der absolute Leser. Hans Blumenberg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020, pp. 146-156.
[2] Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” (1971) in op. cit., 2001; already outlined in op. cit., 2022, pp. 61-66, II, §1. “Mythos” and “Logos.”
[3] Read about this in Haverkamp, op. cit., Paradigm, 2017, pp. 53-56.
The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul
Reviewed by: Chiara Rubbonello
The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul is a revised version, translated into English, of the book La filosofia dei Radiohead. Musica, tecnica, anima, written by Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi, and originally published in Italian in 2021. This particular work stands apart from many other books that have been written about Radiohead, which have generally dealt with the band’s history or its discography or the band’s members individual biographies. Instead, The Philosophy of Radiohead is a sort of “hybrid” work, presenting itself, on the one hand, as a musical and poetical investigation of Radiohead’s artistic path, and on the other hand as a philosophical essay on the possible connections between the main results achieved by the band and «some observations on the relationship between art, technology and society, like those offered by a wide array of thinkers that may include, among others, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Günter Anders, Hannah Arendt, Arnold Gehlen, and […] Theodor W. Adorno» (p. 11). Although the book written by Marino and Guzzi is strictly focused on Radiohead, it is not just aimed to reach the fans of the Oxford-based band; in fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead also proves to be an interesting read for those who are not familiar with the whole oeuvre of the band but are anyway fascinated by pop-rock music and/or curious about its potential connections to contemporary society and the music industry. Although philosophical themes are consistently present in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the book is straightforward and can be easily understood, thanks to its clear language that makes it accessible to a wide range of readers, whether they are experts of philosophy or not. Though not exclusively, Marino and Guzzi make frequently reference to Adorno’s philosophy, both for his influential position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and for his musical interests, which make him an essential voice in a text that precisely deals with the relationship between critical philosophy and music. As explained in the book, Adorno was also a musicologist and composer who analyzed the musical landscape of his time through the lens of critical philosophy. Focusing on the relationship between music and society, Adorno sharply and critically distinguished two musical spheres: popular music and serious music. For him, all popular music exhibited a conciliatory, uncritical attitude towards the society, whereas serious music (at least in its more experimental forms, like in avant-garde music) maintained a critical relationship with it. Therefore, serious music – which Adorno especially appreciated in its more radical and more innovative expressions – was considered the only kind of music actually provided with a subversive potential and hence capable to express a real “truth content”.
However, in accepting and endorsing some of Adorno’s ideas (who can be considered, in many ways, the critical theorist par excellence), the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead also suggest to critically rethink and reconsider them, thus using his conceptual tools while questioning some of his conclusions. Marino and Guzzi argue that both fields could benefit from the proposed connection between critical philosophy and pop-rock music: on the one hand, it offers an opportunity to rethink some of critical philosophy’s key concepts in a perhaps less radical way and certainly in a more contemporary light, relating them with some products from today’s popular culture and allowing to philosophize with Adorno and at the same time against (or beyond) him; on the other hand, it offers a fresh perspective on the music of a band like Radiohead, which, depending on the diverse perspectives of different listeners, can be sometimes seen as a “mere” artistic product – or worse, just as a source of entertainment. According to the authors, Radiohead’s music seems to controvert Adorno’s notion of popular music as a mere standardized product of the culture industry, totally uncritical and lacking any genuine truth content. It is important to note that Adorno himself did not conceive of the distinction between serious music and popular music as ontological; rather, he understood it as historical and thus believed in the dynamic and changing nature of the relationship between the two spheres, which allowed for a redefinition in different historical periods. Actually, as Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi point out, our current historical period has witnessed a redefinition of the relationship between serious and popular music, as some musical groups inside the popular sphere, for example, seem to adopt a critical attitude towards the society and the music industry in which they operate.
This seems to be the case of Radiohead, which uses its artistic production to critically challenge our materialistic and alienating society. As persuasively argued in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the band’s poetic vision always includes a «critique of the deformations and even obsessions that can derive from an unscrupulous and unreasonable use of technology in our highly technologized, digitalized and also globalized world» (p. 24), evident both in the lyrics and in the musical structure and sound of Radiohead’s songs. The book points out the recurrence and centrality of several themes, in the songs of the band, that are distinctly critical of contemporary society: «each song at least in part reflects themes such as the subject’s troubles, difficulties and uncertainties in the present, the difficulty of human relationships in a digitalized and virtual world, the need for a greater closeness to and protection of nature, and so on» (p. 28). Radiohead’s songs often denounce phenomena that are characteristic of the present day, thoroughly explored by critical philosophy, such as the discomfort and alienation of contemporary individuals, their spiritual impoverishment, and the illusory nature of their free choices in a society dominated by technology and entirely devoted to consumerism.
As evidence, the authors highlight that in 2019 Radiohead’s frontman, Thom Yorke, released a solo album titled Anima, «which is focused on the feeling of anxiety and worry that afflicts individuals and grips their souls, validating more than ever the idea of a creative process and a narrative characterized by a sense of technological dystopia and, at the same time, by the desire to openly confront the challenge that technology represents, rather than flee from it» (p. 28-29). Anima and technology are two key concepts employed in the discussion developed in the book, as is already made clear from its subtitle: Music, Technology, Soul. In fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead offers a philosophically oriented exploration of the band’s artistic journey, which can be interpreted as a dialectical development of the relationship between the dimension of technology, initially perceived in the first albums as an «alienating, destabilizing and often suffocating force» (p. 13), and the soul, understood as the individual’s free and spontaneous interiority. Technology, in particular, is understood as inherently dialectical itself, as it does not include only its “dark” alienating and dehumanizing side, which makes it an agent of an «essentially and inexorably utilitarian “administered world”» (p. 45), but is also «able to gift new languages and original possibilities of expression to the human being that are better suited to, and efficient in, describing the existential malaise of our time and the discontents of our civilization » (p. 13).
The authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead describe how, in the case of Radiohead’s music, there is always a dynamic, dialectical relation with technology, which ends up being continually revisited as the band evolves artistically. In the band’s early work (especially their albums The Bends and OK Computer) a reference to technology appears mostly in the song lyrics as a threat to humans that «demand[s] the subordination of humans, making the human being an object of its domination» (p. 15), while the musical form of the songs often remains that of traditional rock, although with some notable experimentations in OK Computer. However, this form was destined to undergo «a breakthrough that, due to its truly radical nature, has few precedents in the recent history of pop-rock music» (ibidem). As highlighted in The Philosophy of Radiohead, from the album Kid A onward technology would no longer be addressed with distrust and fear, but would rather become a fundamental resource for the development of Radiohead: indeed, once the band became «aware of being unable to entirely evade the net and logic of technology that shape the world in the present age» (p. 28), it underwent «a new form of indirect and mediated emancipation that passes through technology itself, rather than manifesting itself in a more direct and immediate manner through a mere contraposition» (ibidem).
This virtuously dialectical choice effectively responds to the complexity of the phenomenon of technology: by establishing an inspiring and symbiotic relationship with it, technology becomes «the means used by the human beings to gain access to new creative languages and expressive possibilities» (p. 23), enabling the band to experiment, achieving particularly expressive and impactful results. The band seems to have realized that «a “human” message can often be more powerful and effective precisely when it is conveyed through technological means and their (real or presumed) “dehumanizing” nature» (p. 66). The critical relationship between the band’s music and society is thus simultaneously expressed on both a thematic level, i.e. the level of the contents of the lyrics, and a formal level.
This innovative use of technology confers a strong experimental character to the music of the band, which, as noted by the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead, does not shy away from bold, sometimes avant-gardist sounds. A good example of this is especially Kid A, which, with its dark and menacing sounds, presents itself as «a sort of musical “riot act” by a band that had been “a hitherto ‘front-line’ rock act”, as well as a musical experiment that, in its own way, was quite extreme and radical at the time, guided by the goal of freeing itself from the mindset of a homogenizing, standardized culture and the system of the music business» (p. 60). In this willing for experimentation, we can hear echoes of Adorno, as the German philosopher believed that what we may generally call experimental music could generate a kind of artistic expression that conveys a form of critical truth. For Marino and Guzzi, Kid A has a style that «can at times sound difficult, hard, hostile, angular, indirect and intentionally tending towards a strong negation of every attempt at conciliation between the individual and his/her world» (p. 71). So, this style is entirely opposed to the standardized, uncritical and conciliatory style typically adopted, according to Adorno, by all popular music.
Nevertheless, The Philosophy of Radiohead does not just analyze the band’s aesthetics from a critical-philosophical perspective, but it also explores the practical relationship it has established with the market dynamics of the music industry. This relationship is significantly different from the one usually established between popular music and culture industry, and this can be easily noticed by looking at Radiohead’s discography, which appears rather restricted compared to that of other similar bands, as Radiohead has allowed itself relatively long breaks between the various albums, defying the production speed typically demanded by the culture industry. Beside the fact of partially distancing themselves from the market’s demands, the members of the band have managed to do more. According to Marino and Guzzi, the five musicians from Oxford have always been very aware «of not being able to fully flee from the power of the culture industry and show business» (p. 57), so that «the band always turned a critical eye towards these aspects of pop-rock music and, at the same time, belonged to this genre, also sharing its conception of it with the listeners. In this sense, Radiohead’s attempts to partially free itself from (or, from another perspective, to avoid fully adopting) the established rules of the culture industry and the market are well known, as well as the band’s attempts to exploit these rules in its favor on some occasions» (p. 58). According to the authors, it is fair to assert that the band has successfully followed a sort of “golden rule” originally formulated by Robert Fripp, which requires «[to be] “in the marketplace but not governed by the values of the marketplace” – which is to say working within the music industry as a sort of outsider, as a “small, mobile, independent, intelligent unit” in search for a way out from the suffocating alternative between a strict adherence to a merely consumerist aesthetics, on the one hand, and artistic marginalization, on the other» (ibidem).
Marino and Guzzi point out that, in practical terms, Radiohead has tried to distance itself from the traditional communication methods typically employed by the culture industry – for example, by distributing Kid A exclusively via the internet and adopting a “pay what you want” strategy for the album In Rainbows. On a strictly artistic level, through the critique embedded in its most successful tracks, Radiohead has managed to produce «commodities that transcend themselves or, to speak, self-transcending commodities» (p. 76), because it has managed to «[perform] a sort of aesthetic acrobatic turn, succeed in doing what Adorno himself self-consciously and paradoxically prescribed to philosophy and art in the age of their potential “liquidation”, namely to be able to repeat the Baron Münchhausen’s gesture of “pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail”: “nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he [or she] should be at every moment both within things and outside them”» (p. 77).
The possibility, embodied by Radiohead’s songs, of transcending their commodification is a key point in the discussion, allowing the reflection to extend far beyond the analysis of the band’s aesthetics. Indeed, the analysis of the musical phenomenon embodied by Radiohead provided by the two authors is not (and does not aim to be) an end in itself; instead, it encourages a profound rethinking of the current possibilities for effective social critique that can reach the people through the popular arts. The Philosophy of Radiohead does more than highlighting the band’s exploration of deep themes on content, formal, and practical levels; it has the great merit of bringing to the fore the urgent need for a social critique that does not remain confined to academic and intellectual discussions, but takes shape within the popular sphere, thus reaching the masses. In the final analysis, the book argues that the popular arts – firmly condemned by thinkers like Adorno as untrue and uncritical, thus serving the perpetuation of the status quo – have, instead, the potential to engage in a critical relationship with society, using the market to their advantage to promote the spread of critique itself. The authors do not exclude, and indeed affirm, the possibility of finding other virtuous examples of popular musicians who, like Radiohead, have given voice to a free form of social criticism without losing the appreciation of the audience, taking on in their way the arduous and necessary task of turning the spotlight on the individual’s discomfort in our age.
Finally, a book like The Philosophy of Radiohead is a clear invitation to open our eyes (and especially our ears!) to pay attention to present-day issues, rather than passively, uncritically, and complacently naturalizing them. Only through collective awareness, we can embark on a radical qualitative change in our lives, leading to a society where the artificial needs, imposed by the market and fueled by ever more abundant yet less useful consumer goods, are replaced by the real needs that every human holds within themselves, whose unmet fulfillment implies a “reconciled” and submissive existence, and the renunciation of a full sense of life.
Briefwechsel 1922–1976 und andere Dokumente
Rote Reihe
Klostermann & Verlag Mohr Siebeck
2024
Hardback
XII, 516
The Phenomenology of Play: Encountering Eugen Fink
Bloomsbury Academic
2024
Hardback
264
Ways of Releasement: Writings on God, Eckhart, and Zen
Reiner Schürmann Lecture Notes
Diaphanes
2024
Paperback
600