Politique, économie et société: Ecrits et conférences 4
Homo Interpretans: Towards a Transformation of Hermeneutics
Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur
Reviewed by: Octavian Gabor (Methodist College)
A theologian once told me that philosophy and theology are two approaches that have the same object of knowledge, truth, but they come toward it from different directions due to their respective natures. According to him, philosophers stretch their hands toward heaven, playing with their fingers in the sky. On the contrary, theologians stretch their hands from heaven toward the earth. Coming from two different places, the fingers of philosophers and theologians become intertwined. Brian A. Butcher’s volume, Liturgical Theology after Schmemann. An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur, takes place on the stage of this encounter, bringing into dialogue Orthodox theology and contemporary philosophical problems.
Such an endeavor, while truly needed, always proves to be difficult, primarily because one needs to explain the benefits of this encounter between philosophy and theology. Does liturgical theology benefit from philosophical work? Do we understand a philosopher’s ideas better if we apply them to the study of the liturgy? The answers to these questions bring to surface both the virtue and the inherent problems of Butcher’s volume. On the one hand, his work is a remarkable excursion into Paul Ricoeur’s work, which emphasizes themes that remain at the core of theology: personhood, memory, symbol, and interpretation. On the other hand, it is difficult to establish whether we are dealing with a work in liturgical theology or one of philosophical exegesis. The double nature of the work is suggested by the two parts of the title: first, the impression is that we are dealing with a book that discusses the future of liturgical theology after Alexander Schmemann’s work; second, we are told that the author focuses mainly on an Orthodox interpretation of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy.
Be that as it may, the connection between Ricoeur’s philosophy and theology is an appropriate one. Even if Ricoeur ‘s work referred to the liturgy only tangentially, as Butcher’s acknowledges, his analyses of memory, symbol, metaphor, or personal and communal identities “offer liturgical theology a plethora of resources” (2). I take it, though, that this work of bringing together Ricoeur and liturgical theology generates a question: whether the use of these philosophical resources improves theology, or whether it shows that philosophical methods and theological methods may arrive at similar conclusions. Butcher’s book does not engage this question directly, and this leads to some lack of clarity as to how it should be read. It takes as its starting point liturgical theology as developed by Alexander Schmemann. One should not expect, however, that Butcher writes in the vein of Schmemann. In fact, Butcher criticizes him and his alleged claim that, throughout history, it is not the liturgy that has changed, but its interpretation. Butcher is in accord with various critiques of Schmemann which accuse him of rejecting prior interpretations of the liturgy because they are interpretations instead of revelations of meaning, while he, Schmemann, does not acknowledge that his work is an interpretation as well. I think, however, that Schmemann’s claim that we have departed from the liturgy is interpreted too radically by them, which has led to a misunderstanding of his work. I take it that Schmemann starts from the idea that we can find the meaning of the liturgy in the experience of the service itself. His critique was directed toward those who, in his perspective, considered the liturgy a symbol removed from that which it symbolizes. For him, however, liturgy is similar to an icon: it does not represent reality, but rather it makes reality present. If I am correct in assessing his approach, we can say that Schmemann advocated for a partaking of truth in the analysis of the liturgy and criticized what he perceived a discussion of the liturgy as a mere symbol.
Butcher departs from Schmemann and is more interested in finding a philosophical methodology that is applicable to theology. After the initial critique of Schmemann’s thought, he engages it only in passing, focusing rather on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach found in his philosophy, and thus analyzing how his methods of studying a text can be applied in liturgical theology.
The first obvious concern is the appropriateness of using Western philosophical tools for Eastern theological discourses, and Butcher engages this problem in his first chapter, arguing successfully for his approach. He emphasizes that Ricoeur’s work has already borne fruit in some Western theologians’ analyses of the liturgy. He believes that Ricoeur’s work can enrich the field of theology because the French philosopher shows that the nature of symbolism, “liturgical or otherwise, [is] to engender nolens-volens a multiplicity of meanings” (15). Butcher continues, “this is so because symbols, particularly as represented verbally through the work of metaphor, do not merely adorn a meaning equally accessible in a nonsymbolic, or nonmetaphorical manner. Instead, they give rise ex opera operato, so to speak, to original thinking, to a creative redescription of the world” (15). This attribute of Ricoeur’s approach can lead us, Butcher believes, to a liturgical theology that goes beyond that of Schmemann. The author’s perspective is well described by the quote I just mentioned and it shows the difference between his and Schmemann’s views. Butcher follows Ricoeurian thought, and so he begins from the perspective that symbols are meant to produce a creative redescription of the world. Schmemann is not interested in descriptions, but rather in how symbols bring in people’s presence the reality of the Kingdom. He should not be read as claiming that symbols have only one valid interpretation, but that any interpretation is irrelevant in the absence of communion between man and the deeper reality that the symbol brings forward. For Schmemann, I would argue, symbols do not interpret reality, but rather allow us to commune with it.
The two approaches are not contradictory, and we would be mistaken in placing them in opposition. Instead, they approach the same thing from different directions, as in the image with philosophers and theologians stretching their hands towards the sky. Nevertheless, I think that clarifying the difference between the two of them would be helpful. This is particularly so in the second part of Butcher’s volume (chapters 3 and 4). Here, the author analyzes the role of the metaphor in religious language. First, Butcher offers a convincing description of Ricoeur’s application of metaphor to the biblical text, emphasizing the polyphonic naming of God. God, for Ricoeur, becomes a limit-expression, “i.e., an expression that cannot be fully thought specifically because it dwells at the frontier of thinking” (73). Butcher dwells on this idea and develops elegantly the directions in which it can go, pointing to the perennial question of what kind of truth can be expressed in a metaphorical utterance. In the fourth, the author continues this approach, providing a rich discussion on metaphor.
When analyzing Biblical texts, one must always clarify how one understands the connection between that which is expressed and the expression itself. Butcher points out that Ricoeur’s analysis of metaphor is useful because the Bible speaks of events that are ineffable. The question is whether language can foster a connection between these events and the one who reads about them. Butcher gives the example of the Incarnation (92). If it is completely ineffable (92), then there are no accounts of it. “But if ineffability does not altogether preclude description (and, in turn, inscription) then the resultant texts—whether treating of the Incarnation or the Shoah—ought to be duly subject to analyses in keeping with their genre” (92-93). But one may allow for the possibility that we can look at these “descriptions” not as representations of some events, but rather as openings toward them. If we apply this to the liturgy or to sacred texts, then we could claim that the liturgy or these texts can be understood as places that make present the Kingdom of God on earth. Butcher does not travel on this path, though. It is true, however, that the effort of these pages is concentrated on clarifying Ricoeur’s thought and defending it against accusations that his view on metaphor (1) ignores “the uniqueness of the events attested in Scripture,” (2) subverts “the due authority of the Bible by making this authority a function of the believing community,” and (3) subscribes “to a perilously subjectivist notion of biblical ‘truth’” (91).
Butcher rejects this criticism (proposed by Graham Ward and others), emphasizing primarily that Ricoeur is not a subjectivist. Consider, for example, the claim that Ricoeur’s philosophy entails that the authority of the Bible is subordinated to the believing community. As a consequence, the community takes precedence over the sacred text. Still, even in a Ricoeurian analysis, one may say that the Bible has precedence even if, at the same time, the Bible must be read within a community, and this is because the community is the one that receives the revelation, and not because the community, as an entity different than an individual member of the community, tells him or her how to read the Bible.
Butcher, however, says that, “because Ricoeur appreciates the historical process by which the Bible was produced and canonized, he is reluctant to speak of its authority apart from the community integral to this process” (93). The possible implication of this is still that the community establishes what is true and not true in the Bible. The solution arrives in Ricoeur’s claim that “metaphor by its very nature points to the unsayable” (101). If this is the case, then even if the sacred text points to the unsayable, it does so within a specific community, and thus it depends on the community while it is connected with a truth beyond it.
The discussion on whether it is possible to meaningfully say something on Divine Being is not new. The question has often been raised, in theological as well as philosophical discourses. In philosophy, it becomes this: is it possible to have logos about the Logos? Is it possible to ever understand the deep structure of reality? Is it possible to ever reach an understanding of God?[i] Butcher moves immediately to the difference between the kataphatic and the apophatic ways. It may prove helpful to also consider a distinction between studying as observers and studying as participants. The observers contemplate their object of study and give more or less complete definitions of it. The participants cannot distinguish themselves from the object of study because there is no such object to begin with, but rather only relation in communion. Consider this example: if we were to claim that our role is to understand the divine being in Trinity and thus offer definitions of what nature and personhood are and how these definitions can be applicable to the three divine persons, then we place ourselves in the positions of researchers who study an event (again, using the notion loosely) from the outside. Similarly, those who study the song of birds describe the various sounds they make, the sequence of the sounds, the movements, the relations between them, but are never able to sing with them. The birds themselves do not “understand” the Song—they are in the middle of it; they are living it. They have it in their hearts. The birds’ song is not their Song, but it is the Song that is sung in them on different voices. The Song takes place in their midst only when they are coming together with their own voices. But one can see here that the Song is both the beginning, the source of their singing, and also the end. The Song is that which nourishes them and that which is expressed in their communion. The Song is that which lives each one of them—the Lord in their hearts. At that moment, the personal logos is nothing else than the glorification of the Logos, its joyful expression. In the tradition of someone like Vladimir Lossky (to whom Butcher will refer in the third part of his work), Orthodox theology has this precise aim: to glorify the Trinity in the union between the “knower” and Divine Being.
If Orthodox theology contemplates the divine being, this contemplation cannot be done from the outside, but from the inside. This means that the contemplation of the Trinity is not analysis of it, but its glorification: the birds sing not their song, but rather the Logos of the universe. Vladimir Lossky says that Christian apophaticism transforms rational speculation into “a contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity” (50). The negative way of apophatic knowledge cannot be, though, only this, a negative way. If it is understood as a method, apophaticism inscribes itself in a list of methods from which one may choose in one’s attempt to achieve knowledge. In some respect, apophatic knowledge stems precisely from a preference for a way of approaching knowledge. However, if it is to be Christian, apophaticism begins in love. Contemplation of the divine stems from the thirst for being, if I may use Mircea Eliade’s phrase (64). If we consider the example with the birds, contemplation of their Song stems from the thirst for this Song which awaits its birth in them.
In fact, any time we approach metaphor and truth, we are also called to give an account of knowledge, and Butcher does exactly that in various parts of the book. In Chapter 6, he shows that the notion of truth at work in the liturgy “constitutes just that kind of truth eligible for the designation ‘attestation’” (138) that we have in Ricoeur. Attestation is not knowledge in the sense of episteme, but neither is it belief in the sense of doxa, in the sense of opinion that has no given justification. Attestation goes beyond these categories—it does not lack justification in the sense that justification is not applicable to it. As Ricoeur proposes, “attestation belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe in’” (see Butcher 138), and so it corresponds to testimony—I would even say to glorification. Butcher reminds us of Ricoeur’s important discussion about the one who engages in attestation, the witness. In “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” the French philosopher shows that the agent of attestation is the figure of the martyr. Butcher cites Ricoeur saying, “Testimony is also the engagement of a pure heart and an engagement to the death” (Ricoeur, Essays in Biblical Interpretation, see Butcher 141). Ricoeur’s observation is remarkable and it engenders a discussion about the recognition that takes place in the liturgy, which, according to Butcher, is best seen in the exchange of gifts, the moment of the kiss of peace. There are various aspects that Butcher mentions here, and I think they can be furthered developed. First, the exchange of peace takes place between persons who recognize each other as witnesses by the very fact of participating in the liturgy. At the same time, the exchange is personal: it is performed with someone who maintains his ipse-identity, different than mine, and different than any other person’s, and thus making the exchange unrepeatable. This idea correctly leads the author to mentioning Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of face, which, as he says, reveals the otherness of the other (147). But Butcher rejects too hastily that it is possible to behold this “Levinasian” face because, “all that is unveiled, as with Moses on Mt. Sinai, is the shekinah or glory of the Lord—and this from behind” (147). I think, however, that in a liturgical context, the one who is revealed—and the one to whom people also give testimony—is the ultimate Other, Christ. One can also find scriptural textual support in Jesus’ own words, in John 14:7: “If you had known me, you would know my Father as well. From now on you know Him and have seen Him.” Since Jesus proclaims that he himself is the truth, as Butcher reminds us, perhaps one could find here even more reasons to point to attestation. The one who testifies to Christ in the liturgy, the ultimate Other revealed in the face of any other, testifies also implicitly to the Father, the one whose shadow was seen from behind on Mount Sinai.
The third part of the book is the strongest and most germinal. It focuses primarily on self-identity and how Ricoeur’s notions of self apply to the interpretation of the liturgy. There are two reasons for its germinal nature. On the one hand, the text abounds in information, and the author has some powerful intuitions. He proposes that Ricoeur’s analysis of memory can “chasten the hubris of a facile historicism” (151), such as the one proposed by Michael Aune, who believes that liturgical theologians would have to focus more on historical research. Calling on Vladimir Lossky’s discussion of the Church’s tradition as holy memory to support his thesis, the author reminds us of Lossky’s view of Mary’s life “as the paradigm of anamnesis” (160). However, while Butcher agrees that a historical approach may “yield a wealth of insights” (160), he also shows that this cannot “replace the qualitatively different, existential engagement with the past that is memory; the past as lived from within” (160). In doing so, he places himself in the tradition of a Lossky or a Schmemann, and he does so by summoning Ricoeur to his defense: “According to Ricoeur, the former [the “objective” historical approach] depends in great measure upon the latter [subjective memory]” (160).
On the other hand, the text abounds in questions that need further elucidation. The author has a habit of proposing interesting avenues by asking questions that suggest an answer already formed in the author’s mind. But the connections the readers should make between what is stated and what is implied are not always that evident, and are in need of a deeper analysis. For example, on page 163, at the end of the section, “The Crisis of Testimony: Experiences ‘At the Limits,’” the author asks two questions. He begins, “Do not ‘incredulity and the will to forget’ threaten the memory of the magnolia Dei that Christian worship attempts to preserve through a manifold deployment of poetic and aesthetic resources?” Then, after just a few lines, another question ends the section: “Does not this dichotomy impel the very mutation and multiplication of forms of worship to which liturgical history bears witness, while also occasioning the atavism within this same history of iconoclastic (and fundamentalist) movements—as well as the perennial presence of mystical currents eschewing corporate prayer altogether in favor of silence and solitude?” (163). Both questions purport to be rhetorical, and asking such questions seems to belong to the author’s style. Nevertheless, their frequency throughout the book can be frustrating.
The final section focuses on the Great Blessing of the Waters, the liturgical service that is best suited to a Ricoeurian analysis. Indeed, while one may say that a liturgy is the revelation of the body of Christ, the Church, that is formed in the coming together of worshippers, the Great Blessing of the Waters has a revelation at another level as well: it is the moment when, according to Tradition, the Trinity is revealed. Both God the Father and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove attest and witness to Jesus’ divinity. To my mind, this service can provide the occasion for an analysis of human work of attestation in the likeness of the divine self-attestation, but Butcher does not go in this direction.
Butcher’s volume is a tour de force, in which the author exhibits a wide awareness of the scholarly work in liturgical theology and Ricoeurian studies. While I believe that it leaves certain aspects not fully developed, focusing, perhaps, too much on a description of various responses to Ricoeur’s work instead of deepening the analysis of the ideas that the author proposes, it certainly emphasizes the need for an increase in dialogue between contemporary philosophical work and theological studies.
Works Cited:
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Orlando: Harcourt, 1987.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
[i] I acknowledge that, taken separately, each of these questions can be understood differently in its own right. At the same time, the use of Logos is quite liberal; I do not imply here Christ, but rather the Logos used in ancient philosophy, the one of Heraclitus, which one may not utter, but may hear behind the various particular utterings of people.
The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self
Phänomenologie und Textinterpretation: Studien zur Theoriegeschichte und Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft
Hermeneutik der Anerkennung: Philosophische und theologische Anknüpfungen an Paul Ricœur
Hermeneutics After Ricoeur
Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Reviewed by: Roger W. H. Savage (University of California)
In his introduction to this timely volume, Saulius Geniusas underscores the diverse ways in which the essays collected in this book address the concept of the productive imagination. By asking what this concept entails, Geniusas outlines the reach of the contributors’ various investigations into the history of this concept, the role of productive imagination in social and political life, and the various forms that it takes. Geniusas astutely points out that the meaning and significance of the productive imagination cannot be confined to the philosophical framework or frameworks in which it was conceived. Moreover, as Geniusas and several contributors points out, the power that Kant identified with the art of intuiting a unity of manifold sensible impressions was for Kant secreted away in the soul. As the faculty of synthesis, the workings of the productive imagination prove to be elusive, as the essays in this volume attest. While Kant was not the first philosopher to employ the concept of productive imagination (Geniusas explains that Wolff and Baumgarten had taken up this concept in their work), the central philosophical importance he accorded it vests the concept of the productive imagination with its transcendental significance. In his introduction, Geniusas accordingly provides an instructive summary of Kant’s conceptualization of the productive imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
Kant’s treatment of the productive imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is the staging ground for post-Kantian engagements. Geniusas remarks that the transcendental function Kant identifies with imagination in the first Critique leads him to draw a distinction between the productive imagination as an empirical faculty and the imagination as the a priori condition for producing schemata of sensible concepts. Geniusas’s review of the role of the schema provides the reader with an introduction to Kant’s philosophical enterprise. According to Geniusas, Kant “identifies productive imagination as the power than enables consciousness to subsume intuition under the concept the understanding” (ix) by engendering schemata of substance or of a cause, for example. From this standpoint, experience is possible due to this act of subsumption. Hence, one could “qualify productive imagination as the power that shapes the field of phenomenality” (ix).
Conversely, the account Kant provides in the third Critique places the accent on the productive imagination’s creative function. Whereas in the first Critique the power of imagination is operative in subsuming an intuitive manifold under the categorical structure of a universal, in the third Critique the direction of subsumption is reversed. Hence, in aesthetic judgment the power of imagination is operative in the way that the individual case summons its rule.[1] Conceptualizing the “experience of beauty as a feeling of pleasure that arises due to imagination’s capacity to display the harmonious interplay between reason and sensibility” (ix), as Kant does on Geniusas’ account, underscores the difference between determinative and reflective judgment. Geniusas here identifies the productive imagination’s conceptualization with its medial function within the framework of Kant’s philosophy. Furthermore, this medial function is at once both reconciliatory and procreative. By generating the schemata that provide images for concepts as in the first Critique, or by creating symbols that harmonize sensible appearances and the understanding as in the third Critique, the productive imagination “reconciles the antagonisms between different faculties by rendering the intuitive manifold fit for experience” (ix). Geniusas can therefore say that for Kant, the productive imagination acquires its transcendental significance by reason of the fact that this faculty of synthesis is the condition for the possibility of all phenomenal experience.
The several difficulties and drawbacks of Kant’s conception of the productive imagination that Geniusas subsequently identifies sets the tone for several of the chapters in this book. First, the concept of productive imagination as Kant employs it “appears [to be] too thin” (x) to accommodate post-Kantian philosophies in which the productive imagination figures. Second, one could object that Kant’s use of the term “productive imagination” in his various writings, including the first and third Critiques, differs in significant ways. Third, most post-Kantian thinkeoers, Geniusas emphasizes, do not subscribe to the ostensible dualisms of sensibility and understanding, phenomena and noumena, nature and freedom, and theoretical and practical reason that pervade Kant’s philosophical system. Post-Kantian philosophies, Geniusas therefore stresses, seek to capitalize on the productive imagination’s constitutive function while purifying it of its reconciliatory one. As such, the volume’s success in engaging with the Kantian concept of productive imagination while attending to this concept’s history in relation to the different philosophical frameworks in which it figures rests in part on the ways in which the contributing authors situate their analyses in relation to the broader themes set out in the editor’s introduction.
Günter Zöller’s study of the transcendental function of the productive imagination in Kant’s philosophy highlights the parallel treatment of reason and the understanding with regard to the imagination’s schematizing power. Charged with bridging the gap between sensibility and the understanding, the faculty of imagination assumes this transcendental function in order to account for the production of images that constitute cognitive counterparts to the sensible manifold of a priori pure intuitions. Zöller explains that as the source of these images, transcendental schemata provide the generative rules for placing particular intuitive manifolds under the appropriate concepts. As such, these transcendental schemata evince the extraordinary power of the productive imagination. The imagination’s medial role vis-à-vis sensibility and reason is no less extraordinary. Zöller subsequently emphasizes that Kant introduces the term “symbol” in order to differentiate between “a schema, as constitutively correlated with a category of the understanding, and its counterpart, essentially linked to an idea of reason” (13). Zöller concludes by remarking on the analogical significance of the natural order for the moral order in Kant’s practical philosophy. On Zöller’s account, a twin symbolism either “informed by the mechanism constitute of modern natures sciences … [or] shaped by the organicism of [the then] contemporary emerging biology” (16) thus give rise to different conceptions of political life in which normative distinctions between rival forms of governance take hold.
By emphasizing the formative-generative role of the imagination as Wilhelm Dilthey conceives it, Eric S. Nelson situates Dilthey’s revision of Kant’s critical paradigm in the broader context of Dilthey’s “postmetaphysical reconstruction” (26) of it. For Nelson, “Dilthey’s reliance on and elucidation of dynamic structural wholes of relations that constitute a nexus (Zusammenhang) is both a transformation of and an alternative to classical transcendental philosophy and philosophical idealism that relies on constitution through the subject” (26). Reconceived as historically emergent, structurally integral wholes, transcendental conditions that for Kant were given a priori are eschewed in favor of the primacy of experience conditioned by the relational nexuses of these dynamically emergent wholes. Since it “operates within an intersubjective nexus rather than produce it from out of itself” (28), the imagination is productive in that it generates images, types, and forms of experience that can be re-created in the process of understanding. Nelson here cites Dilthey: “all understanding involves a re-creation in my psyche …. [that is to be located] in an imaginative process (cited 32-33). According to Nelson, for Dilthey the imagination’s formative-generative role plays a seminal part in enacting a historically situated reason and in orienting the feeling of life rooted in specific socio-historical conditions and contexts. While Dilthey rejected aestheticism, poetry and art for him are nevertheless “closest to and most expressive of the self-presentation of life in its texture, fulness, and complexity” (38). Aesthetics consequently provides an exemplary model with regard to the human sciences’ “systematic study of historical expressions of life” (Dilthey, cited 39).
Claudio Majolino’s examination of the phenomenological turn reprises significant moments of the history of the concept of the productive imagination. Starting with Christian Wolf’s definitions of the facultas imaginandi and the facultas fingendi, Majolino follows the course of different philosophical accounts of the imagination’s productive character. Unlike Wolff’s definition, which stresses the imagination’s power to feign objects that in the case of phantasms have never been seen, Kant on Majolino’s account replaces the “idea of ‘producing perceptions of sensible absent things’ … with that of ‘intuiting even without the presence of the object’” (50). Kant’s insistence on the productive imagination’s a priori synthetic power consequently opens the door to a Heideggerian strand of phenomenology. According to Majolino, the productive imagination manifests its solidarity with the main issue of ontology as the source of the upwelling of truth. The stress Paul Ricoeur places on metaphor’s redescription of the real in light of a heuristic fiction and on fiction’s power to project a world that is unique to the work accentuates the productive imagination’s ontological significance and force in this regard. Ricoeur accordingly illustrates the “first ‘hermeneutical’ way in which PI [productive imagination] turns into a full-fledged phenomenological concept” (61). For Majolino, Husserl’s account of Kant’s concept of productive imagination opens a second way to phenomenology, which following this other path describes the eidetic features of a form of phantasy consciousness that in the case of poetic fictions are free of cognitive constraints. Majolino consequently asks whether the “eidetic possibility of the end of the world” (73), which he credits to the originality of free fantasies that in Husserl’s view mobilize emotions, offers a more fecund alternative to the course inaugurated by Heidegger.
Like Majolino, Quingjie James Wang credits Heidegger with singling out the productive imagination’s original ontological significance. According to Wang, Heidegger identifies two competing theses within Kant’s system: the “duality thesis,” for which the senses and the understanding are the two sources of cognition, and the “triad thesis,” for which an intuitive manifold, this manifold’s synthesis, and this synthesis’s unity are the conditions of possibility of all experience. For this latter thesis, the transcendental schema, which for Kant is the “medium of al synthetic judgments” (Kant, cited 83), constitutes the third term. On Wang’s account, Heidegger endorses the triad thesis by interpreting Kant’s concept of the transcendental power of imitation in terms of a “transcendental schematism, that is, as schematization of pure concepts within a transcendental horizon of temporality” (87). This transcendental schematism precedes, phenomenologically speaking, psychologists’ and anthropologists’ conception of the imagination’s power. Wang remarks that for Heidegger, the transcendental power of imagination is the existential and ontological root from which existence, life, as well as the phenomena amenable to phenomenological inquiry proceed. Wang accordingly concludes by stressing that for Heidegger, the “originality of the pure synthesis, i.e., its letting-spring-forth” (Heidegger, cited 88) reveals itself as the root of the imagination’s transcendental power.
Saulius Geniusas’s engagement with Miki Kiyoshi’s philosophy brings a transcultural dimension to this volume. Miki’s philosophy, Geniusas stresses, is one of productive imagination. Moreover, “[b]y kōsōryoku, Miki understands a power more original than reason, which is constitutive of the sociocultural world” (92). On this view, the productive imagination shapes our world-understanding through generating collective representations, symbols, and forms. Miki’s phenomenology, Geniusas accordingly explains, is Hegelian and Husserlian. Furthermore, for Miki, “imagination can only be understood within the standpoint of action” (94). Hence, only from this standpoint can one thematize the productive imagination’s transformative power. Contra Ricoeur, whose goal, Geniusas maintains, is to develop a typology of forms of the productive imagination, Miki aims to “ground productive imagination in the basic experience from which productive imagination as such arises” (96). According to Miki, the logic of action, which is equivalent to the logic of imagination, is rooted in group psychology. Geniusas remarks that Miki’s insistence that the logic of imagination differs from the logic of the intellect is difficult to understand. Accordingly, Geniusas’s account of the way that collective representations, symbols, and forms both shape our understandings and experiences and refashion the given order of existence ties the logic of productive imagination to the real’s formation, reformation, and transformation. For Geniusas, a “philosophy that grants primacy to imagination over reason and sensibility provides a viable alternative to rationalism and empiricism and a much more compelling account of the Japanese … 1940s than any rationalist or empiricist position could ever generate” (104-105). For such a philosophy, the notion that imagination plays a seminal role in the constitution of historical, socio-cultural worlds would seem to open the door to a further consideration of the nexus of reason and imagination vis-à-vis the initiatives historical actors take in response to the exigencies and demands of the situations in which they find themselves.
In order to attend to everyday experiences, Kathleen Lennon adopts the idea that imagination is operative in images that give shape and form to the world. By rejecting the concept derived from Hume that images are faint copies of sensory perceptions, she espouses a broader conception that she initially relates to Kant. Similar to several other authors in this volume, she remarks how Kant credits the synthesis of a manifold apprehended in a single intuition to the productive imagination. As such, she identifies the work of the productive imagination with the activity of schematizing this synthetic operation. Lennon stresses the relation between schema and image by citing Kant: “imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition in the form of an image” (115). From this standpoint, the activity of “seeing as,” which she points out has been emphasized by several writers including P. F. Strawson and Ludwig Wittgenstein, draws its force from the way that the image schematizes the unity drawn from a manifold of sensations. At the same time, for her, the “picture of a noumenal subject confronting a noumenal world” (118) in Kant’s second Critique haunts his account of the imagination. Unlike Kant, who Lennon maintains tied both reproductive and productive imagination to perception, Jean-Paul Sartre bifurcates perception and imagination. According to Lennon, on this account the act of imagining for Sartre evinces the ground of our freedom through negating the real. In contrast, Maurice Merleau-Ponty “introduces the terms visible and invisible” (120) in place of the distinctions drawn by Sartre between presence and absence, being and nothingness, and the imaginary and the real. Rather than impose a conceptual form on intuited matter, Lennon says that for Merleau-Ponty the synthesizing activity of the imagination is the “taking up or grasping of shape in the world we encounter” (123) as it emerges in relation to our bodies. Lennon rightly maintains that feelings are felt on things as they manifest themselves to us.[2] For her, that both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty view the “imaginary as providing us with the affective depth of the experienced world” (125) is therefore constitutive of the ways that we respond to it.
The subversive power that Annabelle Dufourcq attributes to the field of the imaginary for her calls into question the pattern of the world based on a synthetic activity “concealed in the depth of the human soul” (Kant, cited 129). In her view, both Gaston Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty recognize the imaginary’s capacity both to distort the real and to render it in striking ways. Dufourcq accordingly searches out the ontological roots of the productive imagination in order to understand how, in contrast to the “arbitrary activity of a subjective faculty called my imagination” (130), the being of things makes images and fantasies possible. Following Husserl, who she maintains “rejects the idea that imagination is first and foremost a human faculty” (131), she adopts the notion that fantasies provide a more accurate model for thinking about images than do pictures. Unlike perceptions, in the case of fantasy, an imaginary world competes with the real in a way that it might even be said to supplant it. Hence for Dufourcq, reality itself become problematic in light of fantasy’s power to unseat the set of significations adumbrated within a limited perceptual field. Her assertation that “Cezanne’s paintings are integral part of the reality of the Mount Santie-Victorie [as] Merleau-Ponty claims in Eye and Mind” (136) resonates with Ricoeur’s claim that works iconically augment the real.[3] Unlike Ricoeur, for whom the real’s mimetic refiguration of the real brings about an increase in being, Dufourcq maintains that Being lies “in the echo of itself. …. [as] the shimmering that … gives birth to beings” (138). How, she therefore asks, can an ontology of the imaginary escape the nihilism born from the belief that there is no reality beyond the imagery of its representation. In response to the question: “[H]ow can one know what the right action is?” (140), the ethics she espouses assigns a profound meaning to any “symbolic” action the value of which ostensibly will be recognized later by those who follow after.
Kwok-ying Lau’s defense of Sartre ostensibly offers a response to Ricoeur’s critique of the representative illusion and by extension of Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis. For Lau, as a writer of fiction, Sartre could hardly have been ignorant of the imagination’s productive power. Hence according to Lau, for Sartre the creative imagination’s essential condition consists in its capacity to produce the irreality of an image posited as the “nonexistence of an object” (152) presentified by it. Conceived as “nothingness,” the irreality of the imagined object is for Sartre an ontological category won through the imagination’s nihilating act. By insisting that fiction for Ricoeur is ontic, Lau overlooks Ricoeur’s insight into how a work’s mimetic refiguration of the real brings about an increase in being. Following Sartre, Lau instead insists that the production of image-fictions takes place in “a void, a nowhere” (153) outside or beyond the real without the need to refer to any existent things. The act of “irrealizing” the real is undoubtedly attributable to the productive imagination’s subversive force. Yet, one could ask whether by giving a “phenomenological and ontological explication of the absolute status of consciousness, whose freedom allows it to express and operate as … the constitutive origin of the world of reality” (153), Sartre in Lau’s reading of him supplants the model of the image-picture and the attendant metaphysics of presence with an aestheticizing idealization of the “[m]imesis of the imaginary” (159) that preserves intact the Platonic theory of imitation while seemingly reversing its direction.
The relation between reason and imagination figures prominently in Suzi Adams’s reflections on Cornelius Castoriadas’s theory of the radical imaginary. Adams stresses that for Castoriadas, the “radical imaginary is a dimension of society” (163). Like Merleau-Ponty, Castoriadas regards phenomenology as a means of interrogating the interplay between history, social formations, and creative impulse that, as the “‘other’ of reason in modernity” (167), unsettles philosophy. At the same time, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Castoriadas embraces the radicality of the social imaginary as instituting the particular set of significations that constitute the real. Adams emphasizes that for Castoriadas, the real is irreducible to functionalist determinations, since any functionalist approach to society “already presupposes the activity of the imaginary element” (171). Accordingly, Castoriadas sets out a tripartite structure in which functional, symbolic, and imaginary aspects of social institutions operate together. Overturning the long-received distinction between the imaginary and the real in this way brings to the fore the radical imaginary’s significance vis-à-vis the networks of symbolic significations that constitute reality for a particular society. For Castoriadas, “the imaginary institution of the real” (176) thus takes shape as a “new form created by the socio-historical out of nothing” (177)—that is, as a creatio ex nihilo that is irreducible to any prior antecedents. Adams remarks the Castoriadas’s turn to ontology and his “radicalization of creation to ex nihilo meant that he could no longer account for the world relation of ‘the meaning of meaning’” (161). From this standpoint, Castoriadas’s contribution to our understanding of the social imaginary opens an avenue for exploring the relation between the productive imagination, the rational, and the real.
Richard Kearney’s attention to the difference between phenomenological accounts that regard imagination as a special mode of vision and Paul Ricoeur’s turn to language underscores the ineluctable role of imagination in the production of meaning. Most philosophies of imagination, Kearney remarks, have failed to develop a hermeneutical account of the creation of meaning in language. Ricoeur’s tensive theory of metaphor redresses this failure by highlighting how a new meaning is drawn from the literal ruins of an initial semantic impertinence. The semantic innovation that in the case of metaphor leads to seeing a peace process as on the ropes, for example, owes its power to disclose aspects of reality that were previously hidden to the power of imagination. Kearney accordingly stresses that imagination is operative in the “act of responding to a demand for new meaning” (190) through suspending ordinary references in order to reveal new ways of inhering in the world. Kearney subsequently sets out Ricoeur’s treatments of the symbolic, oneiric, poetic, and utopian modalities of the imagination. The power of the imagination to open the “theater of one’s liberty, as a horizon of hope” (189) bears out the specifically human capacity to surpass the real from within. Kearney points out that “without the backward look a culture is deprived of its memory, without the forward look it is deprived of its dreams” (202). The dialectical rapprochement between imagination and reason made possible by a critical hermeneutics is thus a further staging ground for a philosophical reflection on the imagination’s operative role in the response to the demand for meaning, reason, and truth.
The two chapters that conclude this volume explore how the concept of productive imagination might apply to nonlinguistic thought and imaginary kinesthetic experiences. By claiming that scenic phantasma (which he equates with “social imaginary”) play out fantasies concerning complex social problems, Dieter Lohmar ostensibly extends the role played by the imagination to regions in which the symbolism at work subtends or supersedes language-based thinking. On Lohamr’s view, scenic phantasma draw their force from nonlinguistic systems of symbolic representations that he maintains are operative in human experience. At the same time, the narrative elements that he insists inhere in scenic phantasma vest the “series of scenic images” (207) that he likens to short and condensed video clips with an evaluative texture. According to Lohmar, “it is nearly impossible to represent the high complexity of social situations by means of language alone” (208). For him, the recourse to scenic phantasma offers a nonlinguistic alternative for representing these complex situations in an intuitive way. Weaving series of scenic representations together into a “kind of ‘story’” (209) redresses the apparently insurmountable problem of conceptualizing adequately real-life situations and calculating accurately the probabilities of possible outcomes. Scenic presentations of one’s attitudes and behavior in response to a personal or social problem or crisis thus supposedly provides a more reliable basis for judging the situation and making a decision as to how to act than linguistically mediated accounts of events. Lohmar insists that “[o]nly in the currency of feeling are we able to ‘calculate’” (212) possible outcomes through appraising competing factors in order to arrive at a decision. For him, this “‘calculation’ in the emotional dimension” (210) thus provides a greater surety with regard to one’s motives and convictions than propositional abstractions.
The theory of kinesthetic imagination that Gediminas Karoblis advances extends the concept of productive imagination to the corporeal reality of bodily movement. According to Karoblis, Ricoeur voids the corporeal moment of kinesthetic movement by ridding the imagination of the spell of the body in order to account for the productive imagination’s transformative power.[4] In Karoblis’s view, Ricoeur insistence on fiction’s capacity to place the real in suspense accords with the idea that the “kinesthetic sphere in principle pulls us back to reality” (232). Similar to Lohmar, Karoblis sets kinesthetic phantasy against the linguistic domain. For him, contemporary virtual and augmented realities are as much phantasy worlds as are the worlds projected by narrative fictions. Kinesthetic phantasy, he therefore maintains, involves a phantasy body that is “positively imagined as free” (234) as, for example, in the case of flying. According to Lohmar, positing bodily movement as quasi-movement, as though the act of flying was physically enacted, fulfills the “necessary requirement of the irreality and the freedom applicable to any imagination’ (233). We might wonder whether a future in which kinesthetic experiences manipulated by designers of fully immersive computer games will be one that supplants fiction’s mimetic refiguration of the practical field of our everyday experiences. Conversely, the kinesthetic imagination’s role in figuring nonnarrative dance, for example, evinces its productive force through revealing the grace and power of bodies in motion.
The essays in this volume thus not only explore the enigmas and challenges posed by Kant’s conceptualization of the productive imagination, but they also broaden the scope of inquiries into the imagination’s operative role in various dimensions of our experiences. The sundry directions taken by post-Kantian critiques and appropriations of the concept of productive imagination is a testament both to this concept’s fecundity and to its continuing currency in contemporary philosophical thought. Furthermore, the degree to which the authors in this volume draw upon, and in some ways are inspired by, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Castoriadas, and Ricoeur bear out the extent to which the work of these authors adds to, and augments, the history of this concept. We should therefore also recognize how, in these essays, philosophical imagination is at work. For, every question, difficulty, or challenge calling for an innovative response sets the imagination to work. Genius, Kant maintains, “is the talent … that gives the rule to art.”[5] Correlatively, he insists that the products of genius must be exemplary. Phronesis, which according to Aristotle is a virtue that cannot be taught, has a corollary analogue in the power by reason of which of social and historical agents intervene in the course of the world’s affairs. The essays collected in this volume are indicative of the productive imagination’s ineluctable significance. As such, this volume broadens the scope of philosophical deliberations on the often highly-contested terrain of a concept the operative value of which is seemingly beyond dispute.
[1] See Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). Ricoeur explains that by allowing for a “split within the idea of subsumption” (95), Kant reverses the direction of a determinative judgment, which consists in placing the particular case under a universal. Consequently, in aesthetic judgment, the individual case expresses the rule by exemplifying it.
[2] See Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). Ricoeur emphasizes that is definitely intentional, in that a feeling is always a feeling of “something.” At the same time, feeling’s strange intentionality inheres in the way that the one hand, feeling “designates qualities felt on things, on persons, on the world, and on the other hand [it] manifests and reveals the way in which the self is inwardly affected” (84).
[3] Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 130-133; Paul Ricoeur, François Azouvi, and Marc de Launay, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 179.
[4] Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
[5] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 174.
Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger: Nearness, Metaphor and the Question of Education in Digital Times
Reviewed by: Shawn Loht (Baton Rouge Community College, USA)
This study by junior scholar Anna Kouppanou proposes to recast Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of nearness, technology, and imagination in terms that show their interrelated phenomenological character as this speaks to the philosophy of education. Drawing substantially on the work of Bernard Stiegler, as well as Jacques Derrida, her method of analysis is less oriented in a Heidegger-studies approach per se, and more geared toward re-directing Heideggerian themes in service of specific questions. Kouppanou reads Heidegger from a persuasion such that the latter’s critique of technology is one-sided and negligent of considering how technology may overlap with other, more originary modes of being’s disclosure. She entertains a number of provocative theses. Among these theses are the following: nearness characterizes the event of truth and an essential aspect of education; technology affords nearness; imagination and temporality are co-constitutive; language, perception, and imagination are metaphorical; and the philosophy of education demands rethinking the interrelation of technology, imagination, language, and truth. All in all this project is an ambitious one, but Kouppanou gracefully weaves together a number of Heideggerian concepts and gives us new insights for understanding the scope of Heidegger’s notion of technology. I will say at the outset that I believe the study is actually much more effective on this score than it is on a philosophy of education front. To my mind this book’s most significant and groundbreaking contribution is its inventive interpolation of the connection between imagination, nearness, language, and technology in Heidegger’s philosophy. The concept of imagination in particular has historically been neglected in Heidegger studies, given Heidegger’s dismissal of imagination as a vestige of aesthetics and Cartesianism. Kouppanou’s book should broaden current understanding of imagination in Heidegger, especially in its positive sense.
Kouppanou prefaces the study in the Introduction by raising the question of how the concept of technology might be reconciled with Heidegger’s notion of authentic nearness. Kouppanou suggests that nearness ultimately concerns imagination, given that for something to be near entails that one sees it “as” this or that. Or vice versa, to see something in a particular aspect is to have it phenomenologically near. In other words, following Kant, the schematizing condition of perception is imaginative. This notion restates the hermeneutic turn in Heidegger, that any state of human understanding, any state of meaning, is always already interpretive. Kouppanou regards imagination (Einbildungskraft) as a core concept here because it unifies the schematization bound up in technology as Gestell with education conceived as Bildung (4). In this light there is a connection between technology’s enabling of nearness and education’s model of culturation; a guiding idea Kouppanou borrows from Véronique Fóti is that Heideggerian Gestell possesses a formative character similar to education. In other words, maybe there is not as sharp a distinction between Gestell and other, more originary manifestations of being as one may think.
The first chapter begins by addressing these issues further, taking up the concept of education from the critical standpoint of Heidegger’s concept of Gestell. Kouppanou highlights the current trend in education to demand measurement in terms of assessment, outcomes, research outputs, and so forth. The implicit notion is that, as “enframed” in a Heideggerian sense, education is removed of all freedom. The human subject in this situation is understood according to a pre-defined set of conditions, and her education is directed toward predetermined measures for future productivity. A text of focus for Kouppanou is Heidegger’s essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” particularly in its pertinence to Heidegger’s notion of education qua aletheia. As a reader of this essay would know, Heidegger interprets Plato’s Cave allegory in terms of the precedence of aletheia, truth as discovery, in paideia, education. According to this text, education means being brought into light from out of darkness. Kouppanou emphasizes the equally decisive presence here of “nearness.” The cave prisoners experience aletheia and enact paideia by being brought nearer to the real things they formerly saw in shadow form. As the story relates, education has its apex when one’s intellection attains nearness to the original sources of sight and being. Importantly in Kouppanou’s reading, this allegory introduces the distinction of truth as aletheia from truth as orthotes, or correct judgment, which is predicated on one being in the presence of the actual thing. As Heidegger holds, this moment is the advent of metaphysics, and likewise of knowledge conceived as adequate representation modelled after the actual thing (13). For Kouppanou, this distinction is emblematic of Heidegger’s accounts elsewhere of the epistemological commitments of “productionist metaphysics,” where the human being achieves knowledge by receiving and grasping the model. Pre-given standards are contained in the model, rather than discovered in the nearness afforded by aletheia. Another way to understand the phenomenon of nearness occurs in the later Heidegger, particularly in Heidegger’s accounts of the poetic image. These accounts concern production that is not derived metaphysically (16). This distinction is perhaps best borne out, as Kouppanou observes, in Heidegger’s notion of the work of art, where the work affords an originary instance of aletheia, not a mere copy of an externally existing thing (17). As Chapter One concludes, a principal question for Kouppanou becomes that of a middle ground between originary presencing and subjective imagination; that is, are there modes in which human beings can conjure or fashion images which nonetheless emerge from out of the originary presence of things? For Kouppanou, this is a question as to whether technologically-mediated images can afford nearness in a fashion akin to the nearness afforded by works of art (19). Kouppanou writes:
The distinction between poetic and non-poetic image opens up a whole new discussion concerning types of images (Bild), types of forming (Bilden), their relation to imagination (Ein-Bildungskraft) – as the one being affected in receiving and producing forms of imagining, and ultimately their connection with Bildung as the very process concerned with human formation (19).
Employing a more expansive notion of this concept than Heidegger, the author understands “nearness” as a mode of knowing and connectedness to the world that allows the human being to participate in the unfolding of life through formative procedures (19-20). Thus, she regards nearness as intimately bound up with education.
The second chapter explores these issues in relation to the dimensions of nearness afforded by Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology, especially the spirit of phenomenology’s dictum to allow the things to show themselves. For Kourannou, this overlaps with the phenomenon of authentic temporality, by which one allows the voice of conscience to be heard. This overlap is made evident in the temporal aspect in which everyday engagement with things derives from a temporal, historical origin. As Heidegger observes in Being and Time, perception is grounded in “seeing-as.” Nearness to things is predicated upon their presence “as” this or that. Our everyday world-involvement is already interpretive, and this interpretation is typically framed by the historical reception of the given (25). In other words, as Kouppanou describes, Heidegger’s brand of phenomenology “affirms an openness that lets beings be received” (25). This as-structure works forwards as well as backwards in time. Authentic temporality entails a seeing-as that frames what is to come, from out of the nearness of what is present. Language is likewise a mode for Heidegger through which the nearness of things is gathered. As Kouppanou highlights, a key distinction that emerges in Heidegger’s conception of language lay in language’s tie to phenomenology – language is the logos of the phaino. Kouppanou cites a passage from Being and Time according to which discourse or logos in the guise of spoken language allows for things to be “sighted,” in the Greek, phone meta phantasias. The term phantasia here is decisive for Kouppanou precisely because it at once entails the originary character of bona fide phenomena (through its root pha-, which refers to “appearing” and “showing”) while it also refers to the later Aristotelian notion of imagination, the more familiar brand of seeing-as (27-28). This later notion of phantasia as imagination characterizes the way something appears to one, as when a blip on the horizon of a desert landscape is “imagined,” seen as an oasis. The point Kouppanou leverages here is that the Greek conception of phantasia, understood as a microcosm for nearness and imaging, is at once passive and active. On one hand, it characterizes the human capacity for receiving appearances from outside oneself – of having appearances show up – in the form of images. On the other hand, phantasia is the capacity of image-formation, for imaginatively bringing an absent something near to one through one’s own constructive powers. The challenge is to understand how Heidegger can regard the active dimension of phantasia in terms other than the representational, when he holds at the same time that phantasia comprises the “sighting” of what appears. As Kouppanou describes this tension, the task for Heidegger is to “reimagine imagination in terms of a knowing that is transformative and yet responsive to things” (28). To resolve this dilemma, Kouppanou cites Heidegger’s own engagement with Kant on the question of imagination’s relation with subjectivity. The key to resolving the dilemma of phantasia conceived as representation versus phenomenological disclosure is the temporal nature of imagination, in the mould of Kant’s account in the first Critique. Imagination not only figures into Kant’s account of the conditions for the possibility of experience in the First Critique’s A-Deduction; imagination also drives Kant’s account of schematism, the subjective component of perception by which one forms images while also deriving such formation from things. Kouppanou cites John Sallis to emphasize that transcendental imagination is identical with originary time, writing “[i]magination thus lies at the heart of the unity of time, since temporality necessitates, above everything, connection and association” (32). Another way to describe this structure, Kouppanou continues, is to understand nearness as coextensive with temporal experience as Heidegger understands the latter. As Kouppanou puts it,
Taking this reorientation into account, image, formation, and imagination become indistinguishable from Heidegger’s temporality. For Heidegger, time is the result of synthesis, an originary association that allows past, present, and future to come together and give time. This original nearness of moments allows time consciousness and consciousness in general. Without this bringing-near of past and present, and presence and absence, time cannot be formed (32).
So in this light, imagination (Einbildungskraft), education (or “formation,” Bildung), and image (Bild) consciousness are co-constituted through temporality. Or what is the same, Heideggerian temporality is conditioned by the underlying synthesis or formation manifested in imagination, with nearness operating as a crucial component. A question that remains to be taken up in the third chapter concerns the nature of future-directed imagination, or what Kouppanou calls “in advance formation.” If imagination transcends mere subjective representation, then the question becomes one of how imagination’s future-oriented, schematizing mode avoids this limitation. The question she poses is whether there are other structures involved that make this possible – and in particular – what is language’s role, insofar as it plays into the formation of originary poetic images?
The third chapter explores these issues in greater depth. One aspect Kouppanou highlights in further analyzing the futural character of imagination is the moment of vision, the augenblick, as a poetic image. Here she invokes the three ecstatic modes underlying temporality in Heidegger’s account from Division II of Being and Time. The mode of futurity lay in Dasein’s character of being-ahead-of-itself, of projecting forward interpretively from one’s own factical state. Yet, Dasein’s futural orientation also possesses an imaginative aspect insofar as it can be influenced by Dasein’s authentic acknowledgement of the voice of conscience. Dasein’s potential for authentic temporality has its seat in allowing conscience to be heard and in wanting to respond to this voice. Imagination would seem to be a crucial component here in that Dasein’s responding to the voice of conscience is necessarily a seeing-as, a hermeneutic moment of vision that is poetically gathered for one and disclosed in image form by virtue of Dasein’s self-understanding through heeding its own death. Similarly, as was observed in the look at imagination in Kant, the notion is that the image-formation of authentic temporality does indeed stem from both a subjective foundation and one that responds to things. As Kouppanou summarizes this point, authentic temporality instantiated in one’s owning of death is a process of bringing-near, to make present what is absent (38-39). However, she also adds the rejoinder that nearness is not a concept that can be expressed propositionally. “[N]earing, just like the originary image, is less of a designation and more of a metaphor, an irony, and a paradox” (39). For “nearness” itself is a metaphorical idea. It does not refer to an objective orientation in space or a property neatly predicable in a sentence. Rather, it is an interpretive mode in which things appear to one. In this light, Kouppanou suggests that the linguistic origin of the notion of nearness qua metaphor merits further discussion. On one hand, metaphors are antithethical to Heidegger’s attempt to transcend metaphysics insofar as they postulate a divide between sensuous and nonsensuous reality. On the other hand, as Kouppanou suggests, Heidegger’s accounts of perception in various texts suggest that he understands sensation (aisthesis) as subject to metaphorical transformation in perception. This is to say, everyday human perception occurs through metaphorizing of sensation, given that all seeing is in fact seeing-as. Kouppanou writes: “The world as phenomenon, as Heidegger seems to argue, is perceived with the assistance of both aisthesis (the senses) and phantasia (imagination), or better yet: aisthesis perceives imaginatively and through the modification of sense data” (42). To say that perception metaphorizes the stuff of things is to regard perception as imaginative, as a kind of image formation. (An aside Kouppanou hints at here is that language’s metaphorical character is likewise imaginative, based in image-formation, similar to Nietzsche’s account of metaphor.) Kouppanou finishes out the chapter by again invoking the role of productive imagination by way of Kant. If one concedes that perception is imaginative, this assumes that perception requires “exterior images” (44). This is to say that, as concomitant with productive imagination, perception also engages the retentive aspect of time-consciousness by which images are frozen as schemas that inform future experience. In brief, perception is imaginative reproduction. In the chapter’s conclusion, the primary question asks whether nearness is confined to the relation of imaginative schematization and language, or whether there are other media in which nearness can occur.
Chapters Four, Five, and Six explore the concept of nearness according to its various treatments in the early, middle, and late periods of Heidegger’s thought, respectively. Chapter Four takes up nearness as it is implicated in the early Heidegger’s concept of things “ready-to-hand.” Chapter Five examines the role of nearness in Heidegger’s political thought, particularly as it pertains to Heidegger’s thought on homeland and native soil. Chapter Six focuses on Heidegger’s perhaps best-known discussions of nearness, from the later writings on poetic experience and the life of the “thing” (Das Ding), where nearness is conceived as an alternative mode of dwelling to modern technology. In what follows I will summarize these studies briefly before taking up the final two chapters of the book.
Chapter Four analyzes the early Heidegger’s account of nearness as revealed in things ready-to-hand (such as Being and Time’s tools) in order to better understand Heidegger’s attempt to “eliminate the technological aspects of being from his theorization of authentic time” (51). Kouppanou suggests that Heidegger’s avoidance of emphasizing aspects of existence such as “materiality, embodiment, spatiality, and prostheticity” (51) in his accounts of perception and world are reflective of his disinclination to include technology in the sphere of authentic temporality. Whereas, Kouppanou wants to suggest here that such a divide between the poetic or originary, and the technological, is artificial, given that technology is embedded in historicality. Technological being informs the imaginative character of perception no less than the rooted and homely in Heidegger’s early account of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
Chapter Five examines Heidegger’s notion of nearness in its guise as a “political scheme.” The primary goal of Kouppanou’s focus here is to highlight Heidegger’s recasting of nearness into the political dimension of rootedness (76). Technology is to blame, according to Heidegger, for creating a false sense of nearness that results in rootlessness. Citing Stiegler, Kouppanou argues in contrast that technology does in fact have a constitutive role in the formation of the polis and the emergence of nearness; she emphasizes that “time cannot be a single destiny,” nor can time circumvent the mediation of technology (81). Simply put, authentic temporality cannot occur outside the sway of technology. Part of Heidegger’s error here, Kouppanou suggests, is to absolutize space as a metaphysical principle, whereas in Being and Time, he makes a stronger case that the nearness of space is a metaphor disclosed by Dasein. Kouppanou comments: “Heidegger’s return to space [in the critique of technology] coincides with the distortion of the very process that his thinking attempts to become: the poetic image. Instead of letting poetic imagery to be freely received, Heidegger imposes interpretations that temporalize space and emphasize the historicality of the homeland” (77).
Kouppanou transitions to Chapter Six by highlighting the later Heidegger’s move away from thinking nearness in terms of the futural, spiritual, and cultural. In particular, she emphasizes Heidegger’s remark in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that the poetic can no longer be understood from the standpoint of the imagination, but instead relies on a freely-received letting-be of the historical manifested in the interplay of world and earth (84-85). In other words, the later Heidegger seems to allow for historical being to occur as a disclosure of truth from without. However, Kouppanou suggests that the concept of imagination remains in play for Heidegger by virtue of informing his position on the relation of truth, language, and art. In particular, the function of metaphor as a proto-linguistic imaginative stuff underlying poetic experience suggests that imagination still figures into the primordial disclosures of being occasioned by art. Thus, poetic experience can still be regarded as imaginative in its foundations. In this vein Kouppanou writes:
While language is presented as the basic process that lets things be and affords nearness, Heidegger’s own metaphorical language says much more about the way nearness and the poetic realm unfold than his explicit argumentative language. What’s more, his discussion concerning the work of art, as a site for truth, emphasizes the spatiotemporal dimensions of revealing and accounts for the material and embodied aspects of its unfolding. This in turn provides us with an opportunity to reconsider poetic image as a mode of presencing that does not belong to language exclusively (90).
In the ending sections of Chapter Six, the final chapters of the book are previewed in some explorations of how Heidegger understands true nearness in the lived world of “things” (as in the essay “The Thing”) versus his view of the alienated state of being afforded by technology. Kouppanou highlights the primacy of the human hand for Heidegger in the creation of works fostering true nearness, as the hand is integral to both traditional handicraft and originary language conceived as gesture. Heidegger highlights this phenomenon when he contrasts the hand’s use in speaking and writing with the hand’s diminished capacity in these activities upon the advent of the typewriter. A pervasive ambiguity Kouppanou identifies here in Heidegger is the equal role of the hand in making use of differentiated, external being. It would be a mistake to claim, as Heidegger seems to suggest, that works of the hand constitute self-contained, holistic processes of creation. As Kouppanou suggests, there appears not to be a sharp underlying divide between Heidegger’s notion of the lived experience associated with tools and “things” of handicraft, which are derivative upon metaphorizing imagination, and robust manifestations of modern technology. Both make use of beings external to themselves in fostering their brands of nearness. It is not sufficient to claim that modern technology is problematic simply because it maximizes nearness and totally removes distance. The thrust of Kouppanou’s argumentation is that there seems not to be a fundamental difference between the imaginative disclosure afforded through, say, the hammer and the disclosure given through 21st-century computing.
The final two chapters of the book engage the findings of Chapters One through Six as they pertain to education and technology in current times. Of particular emphasis for Kouppanou is the type of nearness fostered by the imaginative schematization prevalent in the World Wide Web and social media. Kouppanou’s central argument in these final portions of the book rests on the claim that the nearness availed by modern technology is coextensive with Heidegger’s core assumptions about the relation of nearness, language, metaphor, and imagination. She writes that “technology is always already constitutive for our ways of seeing-as,” and “[a]ll technology participate in our hermeneutical processes” (119). In sum, “hermeneia is itself a material exterior and embodied metaphorical process unfolding through a twofold process of discretisation and synthesis instantiated through both language and technology” (Ibid.). For Kouppanou, this last view is decisive because it drives home the imaginative, metaphorical basis equally latent within “gestures, tools, words, and stories.” Metaphoricity is simply a constitutive element of things and their lived meaning (Ibid.). Kouppanou then grafts this reasoning onto the digital being of the contemporary computerized world. The digital world is not simply the alienated world of technology; for human Dasein the digital world is still being-in-the-world. (This view has been developed by other Heideggerian philosophers including Michael Eldred.) Online experience is coextensive with the worldhood of everyday, “real” experience. The metaphorized images of online being are equally meaningful as the “real” world of meaning (123). A core assumption of these passages is that the online experience fostered in media such as Facebook is always derivative from the meaning-structures embedded in intentionality.
In the final chapter, Kouppanou addresses these issues as they pertain to the philosophy of education. The primary question concerns whether modern technology’s current manifestation fundamentally alters the outlook for education conceived in its original guise as Bildung, formation through images. On one hand, she notes, the temporal form of “nowness” or constant immediacy created in online being would seem to encourage a pervasive lack of freedom. Online experience in this light is one of the individual perpetually being formed or educated from without (145). The danger Kouppanou sees here is the metaphorization or formation of the human latent in the pervasive reach of computing technology. For, technology, like handicraft is not merely metaphorized being in its own right; technology also leads its user to become metaphorized. This phenomenon has been documented in empirical science, as research has shown different types of media cause the human brain to rewire itself. Therefore, Kouppanou’s position here argues that technology’s power to completely metaphorize and rewire the educational process risks undermining the processes of discovery, scaffolded learning, and above all, hermeneutical freedom that are integral to education (150).
This book is a very impressive piece of scholarship for an early-career researcher. Its reassessment of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology in terms of the concepts of nearness and imagination is especially fruitful. Stylistically I believe the chapters proceed somewhat quickly at times, jumping from one dense source to another in often rapid fashion, when the author might in fact benefit from covering less material and proceeding more slowly. The connections between the chapter topics also sometimes suffer from a similar feeling of disjointedness, where the inclusion of certain topics and subtopics comes off as unmotivated and ad hoc. The fifth chapter on Heidegger’s political agenda struck me particularly strongly in this regard. The first four chapters of the book, along with Chapter Six, come across much more cohesively in contrast. However, these are all small caveats given the strong total contribution of the book. As I noted at the beginning, the book’s principal shortcoming may be that its conclusions vis-à-vis the philosophy of education are relatively lukewarm and prefatory. The final chapter in which education takes center stage reads somewhat more like an appendix, whereas the chapters dedicated to Heidegger are more focused on making sense of a complex line of inquiry in his thought.