Metametaphysics and the Sciences: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives
New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume 17, 2019
Reviewed by: Bence Peter Marosan (Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University)
The 2019 issue of The New Yearbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy has two main parts: the first one (consisting of eleven texts) is a Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Dermot Moran, the second one (with seven texts) contains updated version of the papers presented at a workshop held at the University of Montreal on the problem of imagination in Kant and in the phenomenological tradition, (The Imagination: Kantian and Phenomenological Models, 5-6 May, 2017). The volume ends with a “Varia” section,[1] with the study of Emiliano Trizio, (“Husserl’s Early Concept of Metaphysics As the Ultimate Science of Reality”).
*
Dermot Moran is a key figure of contemporary philosophy and phenomenology. He has an immense, extensive knowledge in the field of natural sciences (having originally studied applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry), the humanities, and particularly, philosophy. He defended his PhD Thesis in Medieval Philosophy at the University of Yale University in 1986; the title of his thesis was: Nature and Mind in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study in Medieval Idealism.
He counts as one of the leading researchers and experts in phenomenology, and especially in Husserl. He wrote several excellent books on Husserl and phenomenology (Introduction to Phenomenology, 2000; Edmund Husserl – Founder of Phenomenology, 2005; Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology – An Introduction, 2012), and has a long list of articles published in a number of highly rated philosophy journals. His publications have always generated intensive scientific discussions. He was the President of the Programme Committee for the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy which took place in Athens (August 4-10 in 2013), as well as the President of the 24th World Congress of Philosophy which took place in Beijing (August 13–20 in 2018). Professor Moran is the founding editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and the co-editor of the books series Contribution to Phenomenology.
One of his main goals has been to mediate in the greatest schism of our present day’s philosophy: the Analytic-Continental Division. He is urging a more intensive dialogue between the two sides. As an original philosopher, his basic philosophical stance is adopting transcendentalism, the critique of naturalism, with an openness to natural scientific research (from the transcendental point of view), and with continuous integration of the newest results of positive sciences into the considerations of transcendental philosophy. In our present days, when analytic naturalistic philosophy has a huge predominance, I think, these above-mentioned motifs are especially important.
I find myself fortunate that I was his PhD-student in 2008, so I know his personal side as well. I can say that he does not only represent the highest scientific and academic standards, and he is not just an exceptional teacher, but he is also an astonishingly kind person, very open to everybody and extremely helpful to all. This present volume pays a tribute to his outstanding career by his friends and colleagues. [2].
*
He attempts to prove this thesis through a microanalysis of Husserl’s depiction of the structure of action, as it is elaborated in “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins”. Husserl interprets the will as a peculiar sort of conscious acts, which stand under the law of motivation. In Husserl’s view, subjectivity is essentially embodied, bodily consciousness, which is part of nature, and this conscious body is the source of will (and voluntary decisions). According to Husserl, free will is just the free functioning of this lived, autonomous and conscious body. As Staiti emphasizes, Husserl creates an elegant balance between anti-naturalistic and naturalistic interpretations of the will, and this could be a fruitful approach within the contemporary debates concerning the relationship of will and action.
In the original paper a dialogue is recorded between Husserl, as founder of phenomenology, and Aquinas, committed to an ethos of rational faith. The dialogue is possible because of the willingness of the two thinkers to enter into it, and together explore the differences between their respective positions. An important motif is the discussion of the nature of philosophy as well as the idea of essence: together the two thinkers try to attain rational insights concerning basic philosophical topics. The main point of the article is that it is the idea of intelligibility present in their respective understanding of essence that allows the two interlocutors to engage in a dialogue, and that the dialogue form brings this out. According to Stein (in Lebech’s interpretation) essence is a presupposition for the intersubjective, dialogic praxis of communities.
According to Moran, the main authors of phenomenology – after Husserl – rejected both his transcendental attitude and his idealistic tendencies. The “inflection point” of phenomenology in this story was Heidegger’s philosophy of Being, and his vehement criticism of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, some really naturalistic features were gained, and finally in Derrida, the phenomenological method “collapsed” into deconstruction.
But in Crowell’s opinion, we could interpret the history of phenomenology in another way: phenomenologies – after Husserl – could be interpreted as transformations of transcendentalism. One could clearly identify the transcendental motif in Heidegger’s account of being-there (Dasein, the subject), as well as in (e.g.) Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of chiasm and the phenomenology of nature.
Relying on this interpretation of phenomenological tradition, Crowell offers us a possible way of phenomenology for the 21st century, which keeps the transcendental attitude onwards in the future, but abandons classical metaphysical demands. It should be a phenomenology – as Husserl (and also Moran) claimed – of radical self-responsibility, a radical claim concerning evidence and ethical responsibility.
In the background of every movement, there is an anonymously functioning body, though the embodied agent is at once an encultured and thoughtful one. In this account, we do not find an indifferent animal body surmounted by human reason. Following on Joseph Berendzen’s work, Mooney stresses that Merleau-Ponty rejects a “layer-cake” model of human subjectivity (according to which there could be hermetically separated layers of body and mind). As Berendzen states: “There are certainly elements that we share with animals, […] but there is no shared layer” (76). Both body and bodily-founded consciousness are specifically human, and every so-called layer mutually determines and shapes the other.
Mooney illustrates the functioning of this embodied and culturally formed awareness in everyday life with a series of examples. The central concept in his essay is that of “little reflections”. These refer to the way in which we consciously adjust our bodily movements (and not just our speech) to changing events in the lived environment. We frequently make explicit corrections to our movements and in so doing contribute to replanning them. Without these little reflections, we would be literally unable to survive.
Steinbock makes a difference between feeling-states and feeling-acts. States are objective and static, and they could be conceived as objects. Acts are always dynamic, and could never be conceived as objects, in the way states could be. States are founded by acts. Hate is founded by love, both as act and state. It gains its entire reality and energy from love.
A key conception of Steinbock’s paper is at first a mysteriously sounding phrase: the hate hates the beloved (121). What does it mean? It means that hate is founded upon the positivity of love and beloved. It is a counter-movement, a negative striving against love and the beloved; it is a closing down with regard to the beloved (or a turning away from it), or even a destructive action against the beloved. But in its entire negativity, it is made comprehensible only through love, against which it is directed. It is the denial of the beloved.
In Nenon’s interpretation, transcendental philosophy does not make reality dependent (objectivity) from consciousness, nor is it unable to consider and treat them apart. Transcendentalism is rather the first-person view treatment of experienced objectivity, and the ways in which objectivity appear in experience. It is Meillassoux’s realism which is somehow naïve and naturalistic, because it is simply oriented toward the worldview and achievement of modern natural sciences. Nenon says that Meillassoux’s concept of objectivity is too narrow – as opposed to phenomenology which has a much richer and sophisticated notion of objectivity, with many different regions, (the world of nature, the realm of culture, the sphere of ideal meanings etc.).
An important point of Kearney’s paper is the motif of return, which he emphasizes with the Greek prefix “ana”. Kearney speaks about “anatheism” which is “returning to God after God: a critical hermeneutic retrieval of sacred things” (152). Anatheism is not just the Hegelian “Aufhebung” (uplifting); it is not simply a moving through the opposition of theism and atheism towards something higher. It is an ultimate re-opening to the radically new, it is the final union with the divine dimension.
In the final part of his study, Kearney applies and demonstrates his insights on the artwork of the contemporary artist, Sheila Gallagher.
*
Doyon then tries to show that Husserl inherited this set of problems (amodal perception, constitution of perceptual identity through time and classificatory functioning of perception), without, however, subscribing to Kant’s explanation, which grants to the imagination a transcendental role. In Husserl, there is no place for the imagination in perception, except in two (relatively) rare situations: in image consciousness (when we perceive images [photos, paintings, sculptures, etc.]) and perceptive phantasies (experiencing of works of art; such as theatrical plays, operas, etc.). Otherwise, there is – pace Kant – just no place for the imagination at all in perception.
In Husserl, imagination and perception belong to essentially different sorts of acts. Imagination has a special – and very important! – epistemological role, but fundamentally it is the “inversed mirror” of perception. It is everything which perception is not, (with the exception that both are intuitive acts). Imagination is not-doxic, free, neutralized and quasi-positional act. According to Aldea this account, though at certain points grasps some fundamental features of imagination, at certain points it is rather insufficient, what is even more: misleading. In Aldea’s opinion, imagination cannot be interpreted in such a negative way as Husserl has.
Aldea, in an alternative model, which – notwithstanding – relies on Husserl, describes perception and imagination, which are radically different, but at certain essential points are nevertheless intertwined and in strong cooperation with each other. “Imagining possibilization” (a key conception in Aldea’s framework) has – as opposed to Husserl’s view on imagination –a motivated and teleological structure, and is embedded into the concrete medium of the life-world of the proper subject in question. “Imagining possibilization” plays a fundamental role in the constitution of meanings, and thus in cognition and experience in general. Aldea wishes to present such a model of imagination, which is bound by contingent cultural and historical conditions on the one hand, but – on the other hand – nevertheless has a fundamental transcendental necessity too.
In the beginning of her writing, she emphasizes that there are four basic claims in Kant’s conception of imagination: firstly, the “perceptual presence”-claim (according to which imagination plays a constitutive role in the perception of a concrete material thing); secondly, the “transcendental”-claim (which says that imagination makes experience possible in a transcendental and apriori way); thirdly, the “pre-cognitive”-claim (which states that imagination operates prior to cognition, and founds the latter), and fourthly, the “know-how”-claim (in accordance with which imagination has a deeply practical function). Matherne tries to show that all these motifs could be found in Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of imagination.
The Heidegger-part of this study is also a very creative analysis: the author (Matherne) does not investigate Heidegger’s Kant-book, which would be all too trivial in this context (though she – of course – mentions that work). She focuses on Heidegger’s Being and Time (of which she offers a closer reading) in order to show that the above-mentioned four elements could be found in Heidegger’s existential analysis of the Dasein (being-there). She completed the same work in analysing Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; highlighting that Merleau-Ponty embeds the fore-mentioned Kantian claims into his conception of bodily existence. Imagination, in Merleau-Ponty, is fundamentally the functioning of the embodied subjectivity – but this treatment of imagination, according to Matherne, also has its roots in Kant.
According to her, though the characters of fictional stories aren’t real, our emotions concerning them could be. Presence and real existence of things aren’t criteria for our emotions to be real; as Summa emphasizes, (real) emotions are often intertwined with the absence of its object (as in the case of e.g. grief). The sadness, she states, we are feeling for Anna Karenina, is both real and rationally motivated; (the situation, the experience is such that it is just rational to feel this way); the tears we shed for her fate are real, though she is not. Our entire personality could live in such fictional emotions – just as in the case of real emotions.
An interesting and creative moment of this essay is the analysis, devoted to Husserl’s contemporary, Kurd Laußwitz, a Neo-Kantian author, who spoke about different, non-human parallel worlds, and to whom Husserl also refers in the manuscripts of the treated period.
Kant’s and Husserl’s conception of imagination, despite all the common points, are essentially different. Imagination, for Kant, in a certain way, serves as a condition of possible experience; while for Husserl, it is a possible (particular) form of experience. But there is also an important connection between them: the question of the “problematic object”. For Kant, the problematic object was the “object in general”, before every determination. In Husserl, the “problematic object” was the object of imagination or fantasy which – at certain points – played nevertheless an important role in Husserl’s epistemology, (e.g. in his method of “eidetic variations”).
*
Trizio follows Husserl’s intricate trains of thought concerning the relationship of these two disciplines – from 1896 (Lecture on Logic)[4] up to some of the earliest documents of his transcendental turn (Such as the Introduction to logic and the theory of knowledge. Lectures 1906/07).[5] The theory of knowledge, according to Husserl, was about the essence of justified knowledge, and the proper means to attain grounded knowledge. Metaphysics, on the other hand, was about being; in the end, for Husserl, it was the ultimate science of factual reality.
Husserl hesitated for a while on how to define the boundaries between theory of knowledge and metaphysics. His final stance on this question began to crystallize in his above-mentioned 1906/07 lectures; according to which they are distinct and separate fields. Theory of knowledge (as “first philosophy”) yields the ultimate foundation of every knowledge; metaphysics (as “second philosophy”) is the supreme form of the philosophical disclosure of reality.
*
In my opinion, the 2019 volume of The New Yearbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy meets the highest standards. Both sections are excellent, with studies of very high standard, and the closing essay is also a very good one, treating a topic (Husserl’s early metaphysics), which deserves much more attention than it received until now. The first part is a compilation of studies of very high quality, in the honour of one of the most important contemporary philosophers; the second part is a collection of essays, which illuminate, in a very precise way, the peculiar philosophical importance of the phenomenon of imagination.
[1] A section for papers, which do not fit into the thematic parts of the volume.
[2] This paper was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, (No. BO/00421/18/2). I would like to express my gratitude to everybody, who helped with her/his comments and corrections the completion of the final version of this article – first of all, to the authors of this volume. I am also very grateful to Zsuzsanna Keglevich, for proofreading the article.
[3] Husserliana 7. Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff 1956).
[4] Husserliana Materialien 1. Logik. Vorlesung 1896 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001).
[5] Husserliana 24. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff 1985).
Concepts of Normativity: Kant or Hegel?
The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon
Reviewed by: Thomas Nemeth (USA)
Salomon Maimon hardly needs an introduction today. However, there was a time, not too long ago, when a relatively popular image of German Idealism within Anglophone philosophy had it consisting of just four figures, viz., Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, with the last three uniformly denounced and thereby simply dismissed. Bertrand Russell, for one, as late as 1945, saw Fichte’s subjectivism as involving almost a form of insanity. Even today, it may be all-too-easy to see Maimon as a curiously odd and eccentric figure sandwiched between Kant, who was fundamentally mistaken but could, they thought, be understood, and Fichte, whose prose was manifestly unintelligible and so could not possibly be understood. Of course, Maimon’s numerous philosophical writings, most of which are quite unfamiliar to even the most informed student of intellectual history, represent much more than a transition or stepping stone on the path to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Thankfully owing to the efforts of a number of recent assiduous scholars, this picture has considerably changed, although Maimon is still largely seen as an astute and penetrating critic of Kant’s epistemology rather than a precursor or even initiator of a strand of neo-Kantianism. Still, the appearance of outstanding studies of, in particular, Fichte and Hegel has forced increasing attention be paid to the conceptual understanding of the development of their respective philosophies and thus to Maimon. What is truly remarkable is that he alone penned a detailed autobiography—and an often amusing and informative one at that—whatever the motivation for writing it might have been.
We can briefly summarize Maimon’s account of his life. The bulk of the recollections in this volume admittedly have little to do with what gained him renown. Had he not written a single line of philosophy, his autobiography would be of interest only to cultural historians for what it tells us of the environment in which Maimon grew to young manhood and of the way of life within several dispersed Jewish communities of the time. But Maimon did write philosophical tracts of a rather high, perhaps, some might argue, even of the highest order and many will turn to this autobiography in hope of understanding his philosophical, rather than cultural, development. Admittedly, they may initially come away somewhat disappointed, but the information is there in plain sight.
Born Shlomo ben Yehoshua in 1753 in what was then Polish Lithuania (now Belarus), Solomon Maimon, as he recast himself in homage to the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, spent a significant portion of his adult life travelling in search of an education. In this pursuit, he left behind a family from an arranged marriage. Much could be said of the sheer intellectual poverty of his environment during his early years. He tells us that he was raised in the “blackest darkness,” that he tried to free himself “from superstition and ignorance” (215), that he read at a young age a Hebrew-language book on astronomy found in his father’s library, but, he laments in retrospect, it was already over 150 years old. The point we might notice today is not that the book was antiquated, as Maimon wants us to think, but that his father had a library! As a youth, Maimon was already recognized for his intellectual gifts in his community and was raised to follow his father’s footsteps as a rabbi. He writes that when he was about nine years of age he could “already grasp both the Talmud and the commentaries, I also enjoyed engaging in disputations about them” (31). In fact, Maimon recounts that in one of his travels in Germany he met a leading rabbinic opponent of the Jewish enlightenment, Raphael Kohen, who described Maimon’s father as a “famous rabbi” (219). Was Maimon’s environment, then, as impoverished as he wants us to believe. Did he not hone his intellectual gifts through an immersion in Jewish texts? And were the respective backgrounds of Kant and Fichte more “enlightened” than his? Kant’s family was hardly intellectual; his father was a harness maker. Fichte came from a family of poor ribbon weavers. What sort of “libraries” were those families likely to have? Certainly, one may respond that they had a greater opportunity for career advancement than Maimon did, but that is not the issue. The issue is Maimon’s portrayal of his background as intellectually impoverished.
Quite dissatisfied with his life and wishing to learn, Maimon set out westward in hopes of reaching Berlin ostensibly to study medicine. Eventually while on the road, he came upon a Jewish beggar, with whom Maimon wandered for a number of months and who taught him the art involved in his acquaintance’s “profession.” They came to Posen in Poland, and there Maimon decided to stay for a time owing to the generosity he encountered from within the Jewish community. After a while, realizing what he took to be the general superstitious nature of many of the locals, Maimon set out again for Berlin. Unlike his first attempt to enter the Prussian capital, he was able to enter without incident, since he traveled by coach, whereas previously he arrived by foot – and was turned away. Now in Berlin he encountered Moses Mendelssohn, for whom he expresses high praise indeed. Despite the privations he experienced during his meandering travels and his obvious mental gifts, Maimon not for a moment seriously considered adopting a trade that could improve his material well-being and yet yield sufficient free time to pursue his interest in philosophy. Mendelssohn was but one who admonished him to pursue a settled direction and cease his “dissolute” way of life – precisely what this was Maimon fails to elaborate. In any case, he had no intention of heeding this well-meant advice, telling Mendelssohn, as he told others, that he was “uninterested in practical undertakings,” that his upbringing had made him “prefer the quiet, contemplative life” (208). If this was the case, why did he frequent and spend what little financial resources he had at taverns and, quite likely, other establishments of ill-repute? He records that he spent three years in an apprenticeship at a pharmacy, even earning a certificate to document his knowledge, but confesses that he never had any intention of actually working as a pharmacist.
Deciding to leave Berlin without offering much thanks to those who befriended him, he eventually made it to The Hague in Holland, where again he was welcomed and stayed for some nine months, “leading a life of complete independence but also extreme reclusion” (211). In short, he again gives every indication of being in debt to the generosity of others, not giving so much as a hint once of seeking meaningful employment. In the end, despairing of the Dutch Jews, whose only interest in his eyes was to make money, he decides to travel yet again, this time back to Berlin. Throughout his travels, Maimon often laments his inability to speak the language of those whom he encounters wherever he went. Judging from the numerous conversations he relates, though, one finds it hard not to ask how was he was able to communicate with so many. This remains somewhat of a mystery unless we take his linguistic handicap to be somewhat exaggerated. Were those with whom he had extended conversations able to understand his tongue, or did he acquire theirs in a remarkably short time?
Although we may find Maimon’s itinerant life-style curious, perhaps even amusing, what surely interests us here is his encounter with Kant’s philosophy, which he came upon sometime in the mid- to late-1780s. Writing down his observations and commentary on the first Critique, these became his best-known treatise, the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, published in 1790 in Berlin. The story behind this work—or, rather, immediately after its composition—has been related numerous times. Maimon showed his manuscript to Marcus Herz, who suggested Maimon send it to Kant himself accompanied with a letter of introduction that Herz offered to write.[1] Kant, receiving the package and claiming he had little time to read carefully such a ponderous work, nevertheless, glanced at it. He quickly realized its worth, and remarked that Maimon had understood him better than any of his other critics. Maimon, of course, took this to be an affirmation of his own perspicacity into Kant’s thought particularly in contrast to Karl L. Reinhold’s, Kant’s first popularizer. What Maimon does not dwell upon in his Autobiography is Kant’s extended (for a letter) reply in his letter to Herz dated 26 May 1789 concerning the central issues raised in the Transcendental Philosophy. Kant recognized Maimon’s “many acute observations” (Ak 11: 54) but also that although Maimon’s central question “quid juris?” could be answered along the lines of Leibnizian-Wolffian principles, such an answer would require sensibility to be understood as not fundamentally different from the understanding. In short, Maimon’s “way of representing is Spinozism” (Ak 11: 50). As Kant understood the Transcendental Philosophy, human understanding is not just a faculty of thinking but also a faculty of intuition, whereby thinking brings the intuitive manifold into clear consciousness. In his reply to Herz, Kant wrote that regardless of the quality of Maimon’s manuscript, he could hardly explicitly endorse its publication, since it was in effect an extended criticism of his own views. As we know, it did get published and went on to receive high praise from Fichte for one.
Maimon’s autobiography was published in two volumes, the first in 1792 and the second in 1793. Naturally, then, he was able to recount the events of his life and publications only up to that time which includes several essays written and published soon after the Transcendental Philosophy. He sent copies of at least two of these essays to Kant, asking for the latter’s opinion. Kant did not answer. We cannot even be certain that he read them. Nevertheless, that he had at least looked at them would account for a sharp change of attitude toward Maimon conveyed in his letter to Reinhold from 28 March 1794 in which Kant wrote that he “never really understood what he [Maimon] is after” (Ak 11: 495). Reinhold may have seen Maimon as a competitor in the public arena. As mentioned, Maimon appears to have thought in such terms. Kant may have simply realized that Reinhold could be a much more effective propagandizer for his own transcendental idealism than the disheveled Maimon and accordingly sought to bolster Reinhold’s self-assurance.
It certainly is a great pity that Maimon died in 1800 in poverty. It is also quite sad that given the date of his autobiographical reflections only one chapter—and a short one at that—concerns his dealings with Kant and Kantian philosophy. Maimon would go on in the few years before his death to write a number of other works that have received little recognition in the meager scholarship devoted to his philosophical thought. It is fortunate, though, that the existing English-language scholarship is of a high order, the studies accompanying this translation being examples.
A translation of Maimon’s autobiography by J. Clark Murray appeared in 1888. It was republished by the University of Illinois Press in 2001 with a quite valuable introductory essay by Michael Shapiro. Despite that early translation’s imperfections, it is still useful for anyone wishing to become acquainted with Maimon and his environment. Shapiro’s introduction provides much useful background information for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. The language used in Murray’s translation may appear quaint to us today, but it is perfectly intelligible to anyone familiar with English literature of the period. For those who prefer contemporary idiom, the translation under review will be welcomed. This new translation is often more literal, arguably on a rare occasion to its disadvantage. For example, in one place Maimon recounts a well-meaning friend telling him “die Philosophie gelte nichts mehr,” which Reitter translates as “Philosophy has lost its value,” whereas Murray, more figuratively, but perhaps more accurately conveying its intent, translates it as “philosophy was no longer a marketable commodity.”
More significantly, of course, as the editors and translator note in their own introductory essay entitled “Maimon’s Autobiography: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Murray’s translation omitted ten chapters on Maimonides and a preface with which Maimon had begun his second volume. The Murray translation, in fact, did not acknowledge within the text itself a break between the first and second volumes, but he did confess in his “Translator’s Preface” to having omitted the material mentioned. Those who wish completeness either for its own sake or out of interest in what Maimon had to say about his hero Maimonides will welcome the inclusion of that material here in this new translation. On the other hand, the exclusion of it in the 2001 reprinting of the Murray edition will allow it to be read as a more natural autobiography, the chapters on Maimonides appearing as a distraction. The present translation also includes, in the editors’ words, a “comical, puzzling allegory with which Maimon concluded the second, final part of his autobiography” (xvi). Again, Murray may have felt this opaque text to be irrelevant for the purposes at hand. The editors of the present translation provide helpful information to its understanding, but the tale is unfortunately brief and sheds no substantial light on Maimon’s philosophy. It does allow us, though, to conclude, as mentioned, that he viewed Reinhold as his competitor.
Arguably more serious were Murray’s omissions in the chapter mentioning his philosophical writings circa 1790. Although Murray admitted that he had “condensed” those pages since the information there seemed to him to be “no longer of any special interest.” The problem is that many, if not most, readers of Maimon’s autobiography come to it with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy, not ethnic studies. Murray entirely omitted Maimon’s, brief though they may be, description of his 1789 article “Über Wahrheit,” some clarifications of another piece “Was sind Tropen?” from the same year as well as his short discussions of two other essays from 1790. All of these can be found in this splendid new translation. Of special interest in this regard for the student of philosophy is Murray’s failure to include Maimon’s criticism of Wolff’s definition of truth.
Whereas such are the omissions of the Murray translation, this beautifully produced 2018 translation omits—understandably, of course—Murray’s own “Concluding Chapter” in which he dutifully observes that despite the prejudices that Maimon as a Jew would have encountered there was no overarching reason why he had to live and die in poverty. As we know, one of his early heroes, Spinoza, did not find it beneath himself to earn a living working with his hands.
Melamed and Socher, the editors of the new Reitter translation, have added copious and helpful notes to the text throughout. They point out that many of the tales, incidents, figures, and quotations seem so incredible that a reader may conclude they are either fictitious or at least exaggerations. Yet, in every instance that could be verified Maimon’s accounts check out (xvi). They correctly point out that they documented this corroboration in their notes, thereby making this translation additionally valuable.
A significant addition to this translation is, of course, the editors’ essay, as mentioned, but also yet another essay, an “Afterword” entitled “Maimon’s Philosophical Itinerary” by Gideon Freudenthal, himself the editor of a collection of essays on Maimon’s thought.
The translation is accompanied by a thorough index and a nice bibliography for those who wish to learn more about both Maimon as an individual and as a thinker.
In conclusion, whereas the much earlier Murray translation particularly in its 2001 incarnation can still prove useful particularly to the initiate, the Reitter translation, given its completeness, accompanying materials, that it hews more closely to the text, will be preferable to those looking for those qualities.
[1] This, at least, is Maimon’s account. In his letter of 7 April 1789 to Kant, Herz writes that Maimon asked him to write such a letter (Ak 11: 14).
Brill's Companion to German Platonism
Reviewed by: Miquel Solans (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya)
Brill’s Companion to German Platonism explores how Plato was interpreted and appropriated by some of the leading thinkers of the history of German philosophy, from Nicholas of Cusa to Hans Georg Gadamer. The book includes fifteen chapters, each of them devoted to one author or school, written by outstanding scholars. While most of the contributions deal with the reception of Plato’s epistemology and ontology, some others also—or only—address the long-disputed issue of how to interpret Plato’s philosophy. Since it is not possible to discuss all the topics in this almost four-hundred page volume, the review is limited to discussing how Plato’s most famous and controversial doctrine, the so-called theory of forms, was interpreted by German philosophers. More specifically, I will pay special attention to what we might call—to use the terminology suggested by the editor—the ‘transcendental interpretation’ of Plato’s theory of ideas. In the following lines, I focus on how this reading emerged and was developed by German philosophers in their various ways of endorsing, modifying, or rejecting Plato’s thought.
Alan Kim’s Introduction (chapter 1) provides an overview of the topics discussed by each of the contributors and identifies the two conflicting interpretative models already mentioned: the ‘transcendental’ or ‘functional’ reading of the ideas, on the one hand, and the ‘transcendent’ or ‘substantial’, on the other (2). According to the latter, which is the most common interpretation of Plato, ideas are separated substances that exist in a transcendent sphere of reality. Under this view, the forms are conceived as the true objects of knowledge and the soul is said to gain access to them through intellectual intuition. On the other hand, the former reading does not understand the forms as objects, but rather as ‘transcendental conditions of possible experience’ (3). The transcendental reading thus rejects the realism and dualism associated with the transcendent one and does not consider ideas as objects of intuition, but rather as functions of understanding. Among the figures examined in this volume that ascribe to Plato the substantialist view are Kant, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. On the other side, the functional interpretation was anticipated to some degree by Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Mendelssohn and Hegel, and explicitly supported and developed by Cohen, Natorp and Husserl.
In the first chapter after the introduction (2), Claudia D’Amico presents a detailed study of the manifold connections between Nicholas of Cusa and Platonism. She also provides a valuable survey of German authors that in one way or another were influenced by Cusanus’ thought. As for the understanding of Platonic forms, Nicholas of Cusa criticizes Plato for conceiving ideas as separated forms, suggesting instead that while forms are real, they do not exist separated from things. Cusanus thinks that real forms are inaccessible to human reason, only capable of forming conjectures.
In chapter 3, Jack Davidson examines how Leibniz incorporates Plato and Platonism into his own philosophical system. Among the most remarkable points of agreement between both philosophers, Davidson points out Leibniz’s rejection of materialism and his conviction that reality ultimately consists of immaterial, intelligible substances, of which sensible things are appearances (53). After indicating other points in which both philosophers converge, the author devotes epigraph 5 to show how Leibniz’s epistemology reshapes some Platonic themes. More precisely, this section focuses on the agreements and disagreements regarding the role and nature of innate ideas. As it is well-known, Leibniz holds that some of the most fundamental concepts are known innately. At the same time, however, he rejects two positions he ascribes to Plato: the pre-existence of the soul and the presupposition that every truth one knows has been explicitly known by the soul before (63). Despite the emphasis that Leibniz puts on his differences with Plato at this point, both philosophers agree on a fundamental level, as Davidson suggests, that sensible experience does not suffice to account for our knowledge of necessary truths. Thus, the human soul must be equipped with a special potential to know them (ibidem).
The next chapter, written by Bruce Rosenstock, studies Moses Mendelssohn’s appropriation and reworking of Plato’s Phaedo within the framework of his ‘Leibnizian Platonism’ (79) in his own Phädon. Rosenstock focuses on the ‘infinitesimal calculus of the soul’ as Mendelssohn applies it in his own version of the dialogue. The application of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus leads Mendelssohn to endorse a functionalist view, since he believes that the soul’s process of knowledge works—like that type of calculus—by progressively ‘integrating’ the initially indistinct mass of representations’ (83). Thus, following Leibniz, Mendelssohn understands the soul as an active Platonic idea that brings unity into multiplicity (84). However, as Rosenstock indicates, this is only one side of the story. Under Mendelssohn’s view, the Platonic ideas do not only account for the integrative nature of human knowledge; they are not merely abstract objects of understanding, but also and at the same time ‘the object[s] of the soul’s authentic (philosophic) desire for happiness’ (92). In this sense, the soul’s capacity to unify the multiplicity of appearances through conceptual unities is the ‘expression’ of the soul’s desire for happiness (93). Hence, according to Mendelssohn, the search for knowledge is necessarily entangled with the quest for the good (92).
In chapter 5, Manfred Baum examines Kant’s appropriation of the theory of ideas in both the pre-Critical and the Critical period. It is worth noting, first, that Kant never attributes the two-world doctrine to Plato, even though his primary source, Brucker, does it. The Kantian pre-critical reading of the Platonic idea assimilates it with a ‘common standard of perfection’ for measuring all other less perfect realities (115). In the critical period, Kant’s well-known differentiation between understanding and reason leads him to reshape his reading. Under this new light, Plato’s ideas are interpreted as anticipating to some extent Kant’s concepts of reason, the regulative ideas, in contrast with the concepts of understanding, the categories (123-124). According to Baum, both Kant and Plato agree that ideas do not originate in the senses and that their object is not found in the empirical world (ibidem). However, Kant rejects the alleged hypostatized nature of Platonic forms, that he presumably takes from Bruker’s Neo-Platonic interpretation of Plato (126-127). The result of Kant’s appropriation of Plato’s theory of ideas, then, is twofold (as Kim also puts it in the introduction [5]): Kant attributes to Plato a substantial or transcendent view of ideas, while at the same time he sees Platonic ideas as the first attempt towards a transcendental consideration of human knowledge.
Hegel’s reading of Plato can be seen, as Jere Surber persuasively presents it in chapter 6, as the first modern philosophical interpretation of the Platonic corpus (133). The most distinctive features of the Hegelian approach to Plato are, first, Hegel’s direct and detailed engagement with the dialogues and, second, his distinctive appropriation of the Platonic ideas. According to Hegel, Plato’s ideas anticipate in a still unsystematic way his own systematic account of genuine Begriffe (concepts) as “concrete universals” (141). Relying on his interpretation of Parmenides, Timaeus, and Republic, Hegel rejects the dualistic, transcendent interpretations of the forms. He suggests instead that the Platonic idea should be understood as an ‘identity-in-difference’, and therefore as a genuine concept in Hegelian terms, that is, one that unifies in itself the formal and material aspect of reality (136). On the other hand, Hegel also dismisses the psychological transcendentalism according to which the ideas are mere constructs (or mere concepts, as opposed to genuine concepts) of the human mind since this view fails to account for the essential connection between the ideas and the sensible things (p.136). Therefore, as Surber points out, Hegel thought of his own philosophy as the articulation of Plato’s ‘in a modern systematic form’ (142).
The following two chapters (7 and 8) are devoted to Schleiermacher’s influential approach both to Plato’s philosophy and its interpretation. In chapter 7, André Laks provides an insightful discussion of Schleiermacher’s both philological and philosophical reading of the Platonic dialogues. Regarding the interpretation of Plato’s ideas, Schleiermacher rejects Aristotle’s criticisms and defends that the forms are real concepts that actually possess causal force and can directly affect both the physical and the moral world, given that they derive from God’s power (155). Chapter 8 is at odds with the rest of the contributions since it does not offer a reconstruction of Schleiermacher’s reading of Plato, but rather presents the author’s (Thomas Szlezák) main reasons for disagreeing with it. While the philological arguments provided by Szlezák are highly illuminating, and many of his objections to Schleiermacher are indeed very persuasive—see, for instance, his detailed analysis of Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus (172-179)—, one cannot but wonder why Schleiermacher’s interpretation is the only one subject to such critical scrutiny. Besides, the main objections of the Tübingen School–to which Szlezák belongs– to Schleiermacher are again developed and argued for in chapter 14 by Vittorio Hösle. In his contribution, Hösle also provides a valuable survey of some of the most representative advocates of the abovementioned school and provides a summary of the main points of Krämer’s pioneering dissertation Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles, still only available in German (337-339).
Robert Wicks’ chapter on Schopenhauer (9) stresses the role of Plato’s account of time in the former’s metaphysical account of human consciousness and reality. More specifically, according to Wick, the Platonic conception of time as ‘the moving image of eternity’ in the Timaeus inspired Schopenhauer’s consideration of the spatio-temporal world as a prison of human consciousness (192 and 215). In his mature philosophy, Schopenhauer regards Plato’s ideas as essentially dependent on the Will, which constitutes the core of reality, the thing-in-itself, which lays beyond any form of representation and time (209). Under this view, ideas are said to play an intermediary role between the thing-in-itself as Will, on the one hand, and the objects of the spatio-temporal world, on the other (210). Therefore, as Wick suggests, Schopenhauer’s reading of ideas within this framework attributes them a twofold nature: as long as they are objects, they ultimately belong to the world of representation and, to this extent, they are high-ranking illusions; however, considered in their relationship to the thing-in-itself, ideas are ‘timeless acts of Will’ (213-214). In this last sense, Plato’s forms are placed behind the veil of the ordinary experience of the world, and thus they are only apprehended by a certain timeless intuition that Schopenhauer identifies with an intense awareness of the present moment (200-201). Philosophy is thus conceived as a form of asceticism whose aim is to reach such timeless, transcendent, and even mystical awareness (215). As Richard Bennett stresses at the beginning of chapter 11, Nietzsche regards this ascetic approach to reality—that he attributes to Plato—as anti-natural, coward, and decadent (249-252). In the second section of his contribution, Bennet proves that Nietzsche’s consideration of Plato goes far beyond this one-sided evaluation and is more multi-faceted and less consistent than usually acknowledged.
The transcendental reading of Plato’s ideas was explicitly defended for the first time by the two leading figures of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism: Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp. In chapter 10, Karl-Heinz Lembeck examines both authors’ attempts to mediate between Kant and Plato in their ambitious philosophical-historical interpretations (217). Cohen’s early reading of the forms as psychological categories radically evolved in the mid-1870s into a purely logical-transcendental interpretation of them. Under this new approach, and drawing on Kant’s Critique of Judgement, ideas are now viewed as ‘regulative concepts’ guiding knowledge. Within this picture, the form of the Good is not seen as a real entity, but rather as ‘the function of a unifying synthesis of appearances’ (223-224). Cohen extracts this interpretation from Plato’s alleged identification of ideas as hypothesis, that is, as ‘pre-sub-positions’ which thinking anticipates in order to be able to apprehend reality (228). In other words, ideas are said to be a priori conditions of knowledge.
Unlike Cohen’s, Natorp’s appropriation of Plato is grounded on a deep engagement with the texts. In Platons Ideenlehre (Plato’s Theory of Ideas), Natorp develops his reading of Plato’s theory of ideas as a theory of the constitution of experience (231-232). From this standpoint, Natorp downplays the ontological significance of the ideas, stressing their epistemological relevance as ‘laws’ that govern the dynamisms of knowledge (233). In his late systematic philosophy, Natorp modifies his reading of Plato’s ideas, as he seems to come under the influence of Neo-Platonism. Now, forms are understood as categories and, as such, as secondary functions unable to grasp the ultimate level of reality. Such level corresponds to Plato’s form of Good, which is radically transcendent and, therefore, inaccessible by means of articulated knowledge (237).
In the next chapter (12), Alan Kim explores Husserl’s ‘productive appropriation of Plato into phenomenology’ (273), relying on the fact that Husserl considered himself a phenomenological Platonist. By doing this, Kim provides an original, perceptive reading of the theory of ideas from a phenomenological perspective and, at the same time, a compelling presentation of the Husserlian account of eidetic intuition. In a way akin to Cohen and Natorp, Husserl endorses a transcendental interpretation of Platonic ideas, rejecting the ‘static’ Platonism of separated substantial forms along with its subsequent metaphysical dualism and mystical intuitionism (274). According to Kim, Husserl’s ideas or eidê refer to the object of the apprehension of the what-ness of a given thing. Such eidê, however, differ from the empirical universal concepts derived by abstraction from contingent facts. Eidê also relates to facts, but not because they derive from them, but rather because they constitute the rule of any possible apprehension of them. In order to illustrate the process by means of which consciousness moves from facts to eidê, Kim draws on Plato’s Divided Line and Allegory of the Cave. The first is meant to represent the different psychic states, while the second focuses on the soul’s progression from one to another. Here, eidê are presented as logical structures or essential meanings ‘that had always been co-intended in my aesthetic grasp of the phenomenon as actual thing, but which had been, as it were, eclipsed by the glare of ‘reality’’ (278). The ascension of the soul towards the realm of ideas is thus understood as a progressive detachment and liberation from the blinding glare of sensible appearances of things, so as to be able to perceive the essential features of them. This interpretation explains both the fact that the highest form of knowledge according to Plato, namely, dialectics, is said to deal only with ideas, and also that the knowledge of ideas allows the ex-prisoner in his return to the cave to recognize images as what they really are (280). In the following pages, Kim equates both Husserl’s and Plato’s account of the vision of eidê with the ‘understanding of the F-ness of many f’s’ (281). As the author points out in a footnote, the state of consciousness in which we grasp an eidê is not adequately described as a learning process, that is, as certain acquisition of knowledge, but instead as some sort of perceiving or, even more accurately, re-cognizing (erkennen) (281, n. 70). In this sense, the phenomenological method of purifying the mind from its factual intentions and redirecting it towards the essential turns out to be very similar to Plato’s account of dialectic as a process of remembering (anamnesis) what one already knows in his or her soul (281). Within this framework, Kim forcefully argues that Husserl’s basic idea of a ‘noematic form implicitly governing the coherence of sense experience’ can be paralleled with Plato’s account of the relationship between noêsis and aisthêsis in the passage on the summoners in Republic VII, as well as with the role attributed to sensibility in the recollection argument offered in the Phaedo. Finally, the author points out that the Husserlian reading was deeply influenced by Lotze’s thesis that ideas do not possess existence (Sein), but rather validity (Geltung) (294).
The two remaining chapters are devoted to Heidegger’s confrontation with Plato (chapter 13) and Gadamer’s productive reshaping of the Heideggerian reading (chapter 15). Francisco J. Gonalez begins his chapter on Heidegger’ reading of Plato by focusing on the 1924/25 course on Plato’s Sophist. In these lectures, it becomes apparent a tension that characterizes how Heidegger will read Plato the rest of his life. On the one hand, the Heideggerian approach reveals several points where Plato’s understanding of being comes very close to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. On the other, the German philosopher insists that Plato interpreted being as presence, that is, as the object of logos, and therefore that Plato’s philosophy is to be seen as the first of a long series of reductions of truth to correspondence (306). As Gonzalez clearly shows in his contribution, this tension will persist until the late Heidegger, although the latter approach will become the ‘official’ reading. The author suggests that one of the most remarkable exceptions to the official reading can be found in the Parmenides seminar of 1930/31. Drawing on both Heidegger’s class notes and Herbert Marcuse’s transcript of this seminar, Gonzalez clearly shows that Heidegger saw Plato’s discussion of exaiphnês (instant) in the Parmenides as a genuinely ontological comprehension of the problem of ‘being and time’ (314-315). We find a similar exception in Heidegger’s interpretation of erôs in the Phaedrus seminar of 1932 (319 ff.). Gadamer’s appropriation of Platonic philosophy, discussed by François Renaud in the final chapter (15), reacts against Heidegger’s official reading. Gadamer claims that ‘Plato is not a Platonist’ and argues that the theory of forms and the method of dialectic are meant to make explicit the conditions of Socrates’ practice of dialogue in the early dialogues (356). According to Renaud, Gadamer seems to think that the forms are objects independent from representation, though he also speaks of them as if they only were transcendental principles (374).
This volume is worth reading for both historical and philosophical reasons. Each of the fifteen chapters provides the reader with valuable insights into the history of German philosophy in line with the most updated research and effectively supports the general thesis of the book that Plato exerted a decisive influence over the most relevant German philosophers (1). On the other hand, anyone interested in the interpretation of Plato’s works will surely find this book an exciting source of inspiration. In particular, as I hope to have shown, it will prove especially helpful for those intrigued by the possibilities of a transcendental reading of Plato’s theory of ideas. Last but not least, this collective work reminds us of both the risks and benefits of a philosophical reading of Plato, that is, one that attempts to identify and rethink the core issues of Platonic philosophy anew.
Beauty: New Essays in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
The Antinomy of Being
Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy
Reviewed by: Jethro Bravo (UNAM/Husserl-Archiv der Universität zu Köln)
Guillermo E. Rosado de Haddock’s Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy (2018) is a collection of essays and book reviews representative of a Platonist understanding of analytic philosophy. In this sense, it is the counterpart of orthodox empiricist analytic philosophy, whose anti-universalism swings between negation and pragmatic forms of acceptance. In any case, this empiricism cannot be traced back to Gottlob Frege, as Rosado himself insists in this collection.[1]
In fact, the collection is strongly marked by the contentious approach to themes preferred by traditional analytic philosophy, like logic, mathematics and physics. I, as a philosopher formed in the phenomenological tradition founded by Edmund Husserl, was originally attracted to this book out of a hope for a possible critical exchange between both traditions. Alas, no such exchange is found here.
Nevertheless, the book speaks often of Husserl, but from the point of view of his objectivist efforts concerning logic and mathematics. Interesting topics include the simultaneous discovery of the (in Fregean terms) “sense-referent” distinction by both Frege and Husserl, Husserl’s distinction between “state of affairs” and “situations of affairs” (which I guess went unnoticed by many readers of Husserl), Husserl’s understanding of the relation between logic (syntactical) and mathematics (ontological-formal), which foreshadows that of the Boubarki School, or his acceptance of Bernhard Riemann’s views on geometry, who puts him at odds with the more antiquated Frege. He also touches upon Husserl’s notion of analyticity as a development of Bernard Bolzano, as well as Husserl’s very important understanding of mathematical knowledge as coming from a conjoined function between categorial intuition and formalization [as a side note, the treatment of categorial intuition is not so inexistent as Rosado thinks (152), one only has to look into Dieter Lohmar’s texts, who himself is a mathematician grown philosopher, just as Rosado likes to say about Husserl]. All these subjects, not excluding the case of Rudolf Carnap’s “intellectual dishonesty” in relation to Husserl’s ideas, which amounts to a sort of scandal in the philosophical realm, give a very interesting material for any philosopher -not just analytic philosophers.
Of course, the book contains other topics of interest, some of them original contributions from Rosado, like his definition of analyticity, which is strictly tied to his semantic treatment of the analytical-synthetical difference of judgements, or his many refutations of empiricism spread all over different essays. As I find the first one more attractive, I will sketch it out in what follows.
Rosado confronts the “traditional” identification of the following concepts: on the one hand, necessity, a priori and analytic; on the other hand, contingent, a posteriori and synthetic. To do this, he exposes three pairs of contrapositions, namely, necessity and contingency, which he characterizes as a metaphysic distinction, apriori and aposteriori, as an epistemological and analytic and synthetic, as a semantic (57-58). Rosado’s aim is to show in a comparison the inequivalence of the semantic notions with the other two (58), wherein the concept of “analyticity” comes to the fore. Rosado contrasts the definitions of analyticity given by Kant and Husserl. Although Husserl’s definition is regarded as more “solid” (59), it is not assumed. According to Husserl, a statement is analytic if its truth persists even when it is formalized. However, following this definition, some mathematical truths cannot be defined as analytic, e.g. “2 is both even and prime” (59-60). Therefore, Husserl’s notion, which seems to be more syntactical than semantical (60), cannot be followed. On the contrary, Rosado’s definition of analyticity is the following: “A statement is analytic if it is true in a model M and when true in a model M, it is true in any model M* isomorphic to M”, to which he adds the clause that the statement “does not imply or presuppose the existence either of a physical world or of a world of consciousness”. (61). In this sense, the Husserlian definition of “analytical necessity,” which is that of an instantiation of an analytical law, cannot be categorized as analytical. With this definition of analyticity, Rosado “attempts to delimit exactly what distinguishes mathematical statements from other statements” (72).
I think that in this context it is worth looking at the definition of necessity which is almost hidden in Husserl’s work. This definition is not metaphysical, but logical. In his Ideas I, necessity appears as a particularization of a general eidetic state of affairs and it is the correlate of what Husserl calls apodictic consciousness (Hua III/1: 19). On its turn, apodictic consciousness is the certitude that a given state of affairs cannot not-be or, to put it in Husserl’s words, “the intellection, that it is not, is by principle impossible” (96).
In the Logical Investigations, Husserl already exhibits this treatment with an interesting variation. In the third investigation, Husserl says that an objective necessity entails the subjective impossibility of thinking the contrary or, as he also puts it, the pure objective not-being-able-of-being-another-way, that is, necessity, appears according to its essence in the consciousness of apodictic evidence. Then he states that to the objective necessity corresponds a pure law, whereby necessity means to be on the ground of a law (Hua XIX/1: 242-243). We can then state that the comprehension of contingency is the exact opposite to that of necessity. That is, an objective contingency or a contingent object has the characteristic of being-able-to-be-in-another-way and the corresponding non-apodictic consciousness, both in the form of uncertainty and the possibility of thinking the contrary. However, this does not mean that objective contingency is unrelated to law or even that there are no necessary facts. As Husserl states in Ideas I, a contingent-object is limited by various degrees of essential laws and the necessity of existence of consciousness is grounded on an essential generality, through which we can recognize the mentioned subjective-objective characters (Hua III/1: 2; 98). Going beyond Husserl, not the object itself, but its being-contingent is an objective necessity based on the general eidetic law of contingency.
The treatment of the concept of analyticity by Rosado gains meaning in connection with the name he chose for “his philosophical endeavors since the 1970’s,” as an alternative to the term already taken by Karl R. Popper– “critical rationalism” (1). Rosado’s philosophy is analytic (I would not repeat why it is also unorthodox) because it has a strong tendency towards formalism in the sense of logical and mathematical analysis with the only exception being his lesser tendency to discuss physics. He believes that “you cannot do serious philosophy without taking into account the development at least of the three more exact sciences, namely, logic, mathematics and physics, but without committing to or presupposing in any sense the giant meta-dogma of empiricist ideology” (1), that is, that of the inexistence of “universals.”
Now, I think that philosophy does not need to unconditionally consider the latest developments of logic, physics and mathematics. This is clear, insofar as philosophy should not be identified with these specialized and highly technical enterprises. Philosophy’s endeavors can and must have another sense, namely, that of the examination of the fundamental concepts of scientific (in a broad sense that not only includes formal and natural sciences, but also the material eidetic sciences and the rigorous humanities) and everyday knowledge.[2] But this approach must also embrace our practical and emotional understanding in general too.
In fact, this concept of philosophy was present in Husserl since his Habilitationsschrift, which Rosado, in accordance with his Platonic point of view, sees as a “dead born child” (87). However, the most significant aspect of this very early text of Husserl does not lie in his unclear position regarding psychologism [through which, however, we can learn a lot in regard to philosophical thinking and which I would not call “mild psychologism” as Rosado does (87, 147, 162)], but in his use of the psychological analysis to clarify the phenomenal character and the origin of a fundamental concept in mathematics, namely, that of the number. For Husserl, philosophy was from the very beginning of his career a psychological analysis, which searches for the “concrete phenomena” related to a concept and the psychical process through which this concept is obtained, namely, abstraction (Hua XII: 292; 298-299). As Husserl’s analysis shows, this search is also carried out in intuition and by testing conflicting theses. In fact, Husserl’s famous argumentative style of the Prolegomena makes its first appearance in his Habilitationsschrift.
Moreover, the concept of a psychological analysis in Husserl’s Habilitationschrift is clearly distinguished from that of a mathematical, logical or even metaphysical analysis (291-292). In this line of thought, I agree with Rosado’s constant affirmation that Husserl’s logic and mathematical ideas do not lose their validity after the so-called “transcendental turn”. However, if we have to talk about a “turn” instead of a penetration of former intentions, or, on the other side, of an unchanged validity of logic and mathematics instead of a modification of this same validity by clarification of its phenomenal character and origin such that it cannot stem from logic or mathematics themselves, then this is not so easily dismissed.[3]
Also, the more developed concepts of categorial intuition and formalization as epistemological groundings of mathematics can only be examined through a phenomenological analysis, for they are processes of consciousness. We have here a more advanced case of the clarifying function of Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, this contribution of phenomenology to the understanding of mathematics is not highlighted by Rosado as something that comes from outside mathematics itself, and in fact, outside any “objectifying science”.
In this same sphere of themes, it appears to me that the famous discussion of the Prolegomena presupposes a peculiar attitude of analysis that cannot be understood as pre-phenomenological, as Rosado understands it (150). If we agree with Husserl when he states that the dogmatic scientist does not question the givenness of his objects but just deals with them without further trouble (cf. Hua III/I: 54-55), then the problem of the recognition of universals and the confrontation with logical-psychologism is a problem that originates in the critical or epistemological attitude and its solution demands the clear exercise of reflection and the distinction of the different “data” given to consciousness. I believe that this is not only the true understanding of the discussion in the Prolegomena, but also that this is clearly seen in the study of the origins of this discussion in Husserl’s prior philosophical endeavors. Husserl’s philosophy started as a psychological analysis in the sense of his master, Franz Brentano, and only through the imperfection of this psychology in which there was no clear demarcation between psychological objects and logical objects the critique of psychologism became possible. To put it another way: without the prior reflective attitude towards consciousness and the confusion caused by conflating logical objects with psychological objects, i.e., without psychologism, there is no possibility of distinguishing both spheres of objects or to exercise any critique in relation to the psyche and the logical, which will be in fact missing. And the only way to solve this theoretical conflict is by means of a clear reflective analysis, in which the objects of each side are distinguished as they are given in their different sorts of acts of consciousness. The common idea that Husserl’s phenomenology is a consequence of the critique of psychologism seems to me to be false. In truth, it is the other way around.[4]
I am also not convinced that there is a Platonism of ideas in Husserl, as Rosado thinks (4). It is true that Husserl acknowledged the distinct givenness of ideal objects and that he defended his independence from empirical objects. However, this acknowledgement and defense do not make Husserl a Platonist (not even a structural one). So long as logic and mathematics, to mention two “ideal” sciences, deal with their respective subject matter, the sense and limits of their ideal objects are not in question. But when the epistemological problems start to confuse the mind of the scientist, that is, when he reflects on the relation of his objects with knowledge, then his acquiescence fades away. Now, even when the critical reflection on the mode of givenness of mathematical and logical objects shows that these objects are not to be confused with empirical data, this recognition does not amount to Platonism. On the contrary, their mere givenness, that is, the possibility of having something as “ideal objects” persists as a theoretical problem to be decided within the epistemological-phenomenological attitude. The sheer acceptance of the independent existence of these objects, that is, Platonism, cannot be conceded. On the contrary, just as realism of nature succumbs to the phenomenological analysis, so do Platonic ideas. It should be noted that Husserl was neither a psychologist in his early development, nor a Platonist at any moment of his career.
To conclude, I still would like to point out that although Rosado is well aware that for Husserl, first philosophy meant epistemology in the sense of transcendental phenomenology (145), he tries to downplay this determination by contraposing Husserl’s own definition of logic as first philosophy in his 1908 lectures on old and new logic (143-144). There, Husserl states, in effect, that the new logic is “first philosophy” (Hua M6: 7). Nonetheless, this same logic is understood as a dogmatic-positivist discipline in Formal and Transcendental Logic: logic can only be a truly philosophical logic says Husserl, as if remembering his lectures of 1908, or first philosophy, when it stays true to its original sense, already present in Plato, i.e., to the broader idea that ends in transcendental phenomenology as transcendental logic (Hua XVII: 17 ff.) Here again, the use of such beloved philosophical tags proves itself deceitful, for this enterprise resembles the empiricist’s traditional aim of exposing the origin of concepts in intuition.
Bibliography
Rosado Haddock, Guillermo E. 2018. Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy. Texts in Philosophy 27. College Publications. Lightning Source: United Kingdom.
Husserliana
II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. 1950. Hrsg. Walter Biemel. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.
III/1: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Erstes Buch: allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. 1976. Hrsg. Karl Schuhmann. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.
XII: Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890-1901). 1982. Hrsg. Lothar Eley. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.
XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. 1974. Hrsg. Paul Janssen. Martinuns Nijhoff: Den Haag.
XIX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. 1984. Hrsg. Ursula Panzer. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.
Materialen
6: Alte und neue Logik. Vorlesung 1908/1909. 2003. Hrsg. Elisabeth Schuhmann. Springer: Dordrecht.
[1] I want to thank R. Andrew Krema for the review of the English of a penultimate version of this text.
[2] I took the idea of everyday knowledge hearing Dieter Lohmar’s lectures about modern epistemology.
[3] In fact, the problem digs deeper, because with the phenomenological clarification we attain the true understanding of the basic objects of science (cf. Hua XVII: 18 or Hua II: 22) or even of non-scientific attitudes, for example, of the world as being a horizon.
[4] I own this line of thought to an idea shared to me by my teacher and friend Antonio Zirión Quijano, who once conjectured that phenomenology does not comes from the critique of psychologism, but that this very critique indeed presupposes phenomenological analysis. If I have been true to Zirión’s intentions in my present development of his seminal idea, any possible error is of course my responsibility, not his.
Heidegger's Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn
Reviewed by: James Kinkaid (Boston College)
In his WS 1935-36 lecture course on Kant, Heidegger remarks that every philosopher must attempt the impossible task of leaping over his own shadow. In his excellent book Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn, Chad Engelland persuasively argues that Heidegger’s shadow is transcendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophy, and in particular Heidegger’s Husserlian reading of Kant, serves as a necessary entry point into Heidegger’s thinking, and the unity of Heidegger’s thought between his two masterworks—Being and Time and the Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)—must be understood in terms of Heidegger’s struggles to free himself of the limitations of the transcendental tradition. A recurring theme of Engelland’s discussion is the “problem of motivation,” that is, the problem of explaining what motivates the turn from mundane experience toward the transcendental “experience of experience” (2).[1] On Engelland’s reading, Heidegger grows dissatisfied with the “Cartesian” appeal to the authenticity of the researcher as a motivation for the transcendental turn, turning in his work of the 30s to an account of the “fundamental dispositions” that motivate philosophy.
There is much to applaud in Engelland’s treatment. Particularly welcome is Engelland’s suggestion that mining the transcendental origins of Heidegger’s thinking may not only resolve stand-offs in the literature on the abiding topic of Heidegger’s long career, but also help us to identify and fill the aporias in Heidegger’s own thinking and thus “find ourselves working as transcendental phenomenologists in the Heideggerian tradition” (4). To this end, Engelland closes the book with some critical reflections on the limitations of Heidegger’s own approach and the promise for creative appropriation of his thought in the future. In the same spirit, after briefly summarizing the central chapters of the book, I will suggest some directions in which I would like to see more philosophical development of some of the positive proposals Engelland puts forward.
After an introductory chapter that situates Engelland’s reading in relation to contemporary Heidegger scholarship and raises the problem of motivation, Engelland traces Heidegger’s development from the “casting” of the shadow in Being and Time (Chapter 1) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Chapter 2) to his attempts to leap over the shadow in the “revised Kant book” of 1935-36 (Chapter 3) and the Contributions (Chapter 4). A closing chapter reflects upon both the merits and limits of what Engelland calls Heidegger’s ‘affective transcendentalism’.
Engelland begins Chapter 1 by arguing that commentators have failed to distinguish two questions that the Being and Time project seeks to answer: the “preparatory [question] about the timely openness of Dasein” and the “fundamental [question] about the temporal reciprocity of that openness and being” (30). The preparatory question is taken up in the extant part of Being and Time, whereas the fundamental question would have been addressed in the unpublished third division. Engelland claims that Heidegger came to recognize that his transcendental approach to the preparatory question was a necessary, if misleading and transitional, path to his later attempts to answer the fundamental question, which “is not itself adequately stated in transcendental terms” (30). Chapter 1 also offers an interpretation of the “destruction of the history of ontology” envisaged for the second part of the book. Engelland presents the destruction as a corrective to two prejudices: the “logical prejudice” that locates the locus of truth in the judgment and the “mathematical prejudice” that interprets all beings as on-hand (vorhanden) (51-4).
Chapter 2 begins with a helpful tour of the development of Heidegger’s reading of Kant: “In four phases and with reference to Husserl, Heidegger interpreted Kant as first falling short of phenomenology, then approaching phenomenology, then advancing phenomenology, and finally recovering phenomenology” (84). Engelland then argues that Heidegger reads Kant as a “phenomenological collaborator” who “glimpsed that intentionality can happen thanks to the transcendence engendered by the ecstatic-horizonal bringing forth of timeliness” (105). Engelland suggests that we who are working as transcendental phenomenologists today should follow Heidegger’s lead in “returning judgment to givenness” by disclosing “the transcendental ground that makes judgment possible” (105). What is most novel and perhaps unusual about Engelland’s reading is his claim that Heidegger’s reading of Leibniz is the key to understanding the Kantbuch (see Golob’s review for criticism of this claim).
There are two significant omissions in Engelland’s otherwise careful and interesting discussion of the Kantbuch. The first is a lack of any significant discussion of Husserl’s attitude toward Kant. Engelland claims that by Being and Time and especially in the Kantbuch, “[f]or Heidegger, Husserl has been superseded by the phenomenological Kant he made visible” (75). I think a case can be made that Husserl is drawn to precisely that aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy that Heidegger considers the “central core” of the first Critique (KPM 63): the doctrine of the schematism and the transcendental imagination (see Kinkaid, “Phenomenology, Idealism, and the Legacy of Kant”). A thorough account of Husserl’s relation to Kant is surely outside the scope of Engelland’s specific concerns, but it would, I suggest, be important for a full accounting of how new work in transcendental phenomenology should proceed—and in particular, whether and to what extent there is a need to “supersede” Husserl. The second omission is the lack of discussion of the Marburg neo-Kantian reading of Kant. Engelland mentions the contrast between the constructivist tendencies of the neo-Kantians and the “genuine empiricism” that Heidegger adapts from Husserl (71), but another striking feature of the Marburg interpretation that puts it at complete odds with Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation is the claim that “‘intuition’ no longer remains a cognitive factor which stands across from or is opposed to thinking […] It is thinking […]” (Natorp, “Kant and the Marburg School,” 186). These gaps could be filled, I suggest, by reading the Kantbuch more closely in conjunction with the WS 1927-28 lectures Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
In Chapter 3 Engelland examines Heidegger’s revised interpretation of Kant in his WS 1935-36 lectures, which are published as What Is a Thing? Toward Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles. This revised reading focuses on the Analytic of Principles, which Heidegger reads as uncovering the “‘context’ (Zusammenhang) in which we can encounter and know things that are genuinely other than ourselves” (148). Heidegger interprets the “context” uncovered by the principles as the “open” or “between” in which intelligibility happens. Though he sees Kant as anticipating this important concept of his Contributions, Heidegger is also critical: “The subjective starting point and the exclusive interest in objectivity mean that, while Kant illumines the open between in which alone judgments are possible, he does not fathom that the open in fact allows humans to be themselves” (149). A more adequate account of the “open between,” Engelland suggests, requires a recognition of the historical and affective character of the context of experience, as well as of its self-concealing nature: “Put in the poetic terms of Heidegger’s later philosophy, we can say that Kant glimpsed world, but missing history, he could not fathom earth” (157-8).
Chapter 4 explores how Heidegger’s being-historical thinking in the Contributions answers the question of what motivates philosophy. In the “first beginning,” philosophy was motivated by the fundamental disposition (Grundstimmung) of wonder, but “[c]uriously, wonder carries within itself the seeds of its own dissolution” (181). This is because, by disclosing entities, wonder covers over the self-withdrawing space or clearing in which entities come to presence. Heidegger thus calls for an “other beginning” motivated by a fundamental disposition comprised of terror, awe, intimating, and reservedness (192-3). Heidegger’s narrative about the history of being, Engelland explains, is his attempt to awaken the fundamental disposition that discloses the “between” that “is richer than transcendental philosophy could fathom” (198).
In the closing chapter Engelland praises Heidegger for his “post-subjective” “affective transcendentalism” while leveling three criticisms. First, Engelland argues that Heidegger is a mere theoretician rather than a philosopher. By this Engelland means that Heidegger is concerned throughout his career solely with the transcendental theme of the grounds of experience, rather than with questions concerning the examined life. One upshot of this limitation, Engelland argues, is that Heidegger’s many personal failings are irrelevant to the interpretation of his thought. Second, Engelland finds Heidegger’s narrative about the history of being to be dogmatic and unnecessary to motivate transcendental philosophy. Pointing to his own earlier work on ostension, Engelland suggests that “the manifestation of the body in ostensive acts or the difference in presentation between an actor on stage and in real life” may function like Heidegger’s famous description of tool breakdown to motivate reflection on “the play of presence and absence at work in all our experience” (238). Third, Engelland finds Heidegger’s later tendency to speak of the clearing in anthropomorphic terms unnecessarily mystifying.
Having completed a summary of the rich contents of Engelland’s book, let me now turn to some criticisms, requests for clarification, and directions for future research into the promise of transcendental phenomenology in a Heideggerian style. I wholeheartedly agree with Engelland concerning the continued philosophical significance of transcendental phenomenology, but I think this significance comes out most forcefully when emphasis is placed on the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics. As I read Being and Time, Heidegger is centrally concerned with what makes a priori knowledge—in particular the a priori sciences that Husserl calls ‘formal’ and ‘regional’ or ‘material’ ontology—possible. Consider how Heidegger describes his inquiry into being and its meaning:
The question of being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type […] but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and provide their foundation. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (BT 31)
On the one hand, an inquiry into being involves the development of regional ontologies, i.e., accounts of the natures or essences of entities that fall into highly natural kinds and comprise the subject matters of the natural, mathematical, and social sciences. The central question of Being and Time, however, is the question of how that is possible—how ontological knowledge is possible. Answering this deeper question—the question of the meaning of being—requires an ontology of the ontological questioner, i.e., a “fundamental ontology.” Similarly, Heidegger reads the first Critique as “laying […] the ground for metaphysics” through an “ontological analytic of the finite essence of human beings” (KPM 1).
One interesting upshot of reading Being and Time as an account of how a priori knowledge is possible is that it sheds light on Heidegger’s notion of the clearing (die Lichtung). Die Lichtung is clearly meant (in Being and Time) to have resonances of Descartes’s lumen naturale and Augustinian divine illumination. (See Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, Chapter 5 for a discussion of Heidegger’s shift away from understanding die Lichtung in terms of light.) Both of these concepts are meant to explain how a priori knowledge is possible, and both appeal to a divine guarantee of that knowledge. For Heidegger, “[t]o say that it is ‘illuminated’ means that as being-in-the-world it is cleared in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing (BT 171). Heidegger’s suggestion here seems to be that skepticism about a priori knowledge is put to rest by an adequate ontology of Dasein. This is an intriguing suggestion, which would require much more space to develop in a plausible way than I have here. This way of understanding Heidegger’s transcendental aspirations, though, has a number of ramifications.
First, it would allow us to make a powerful case for the continued philosophical relevance of transcendental phenomenology. In recent years there has been a surge in interest within analytic philosophy in metametaphysical questions about the substantivity and methodology of metaphysics. One important question concerns modal epistemology: metaphysicians often claim knowledge of possibility, impossibility, necessity, and essence, and there is a growing body of literature on how such knowledge is possible (see Tahko, Chapter 7 for a survey). Husserl and Heidegger’s writings are also rife with claims to modal knowledge, and I suggest a central task of both of their brands of phenomenology is to vindicate such claims. If this is right, it opens up room for a productive discussion between transcendental phenomenologists and analytic metaphysicians.
Second, this reading of the role of transcendental philosophy has the advantage of answering Engelland’s “problem of motivation.” Metaphysics has long between the target of suspicion and abuse by Humeans and Carnapians, giving the likes of Kant and David Lewis plenty of motivation for defending it (albeit in very different ways). Indeed, this reading explains Heidegger’s attraction to Kant, whose primary goal in the first Critique and Prolegomena was to put metaphysics on the secure path of a science. It is suggestive that Husserl explicitly identifies the subject matter of material ontology with synthetic a priori truths. This reading raises an important interpretive question: if Husserl and Heidegger are, like Kant, interested in putting metaphysics on the secure path of a science, do they also follow him in holding that the “proud name of an ontology […] must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding” (A247/B303)?
I agree with Engelland, then, in giving pride of place to the transcendental aspects of Heidegger’s thought, but I think a shift in emphasis toward the connection between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics would bring out its most promising aspects. This is not to say that Engelland doesn’t recognize this thread of Heidegger’s thought at all; he repeatedly and approvingly cites, for example, Heidegger’s praise of Husserl’s non-constructive, intuitive conception of the a priori (BT 75n). The importance of Heidegger’s metametaphysical project is obscured, however, by a lack of clarity about the meaning of some of Heidegger’s terminology, especially Sein.
In the introductory chapter, Engelland discusses the debate between Thomas Sheehan and Richard Capobianco over the topic of Heidegger’s Seinsfrage: “for Sheehan, the lasting topic is the finitude of human existence as that which makes meaning possible; for Capobianco, the lasting topic is the manifestation of being” (6). Though Engelland does not endorse either position outright, he does seem to foreclose an interpretation on which Sein means, well, being. In Being and Time and surrounding works, Heidegger distinguishes the following senses of ‘being’: that-being, essence, and such-being. On my reading, the early Heidegger uses ‘being’ in a wholly traditional sense; where he disagrees with the tradition is in his substantive critiques of previous category schemes and accounts of the essence of the human person. Relying on an interpretation on which talk of being is really talk about meaning or manifestation, I submit, covers up the promising connection between Heidegger’s transcendentalism and metaphysics.
Getting clearer on what ‘being’ means would also substantially enrich Engelland’s discussion of realism. In the final chapter, Engelland criticizes Taylor Carman’s view that Heidegger is an ontic realist and an ontological idealist. Carman defines ‘ontic realism’ as “the claim that occurrent entities exist and have a determinate spatiotemporal structure independently of us and our understanding of them” (Heidegger’s Analytic, 157). Engelland accepts ontic realism but rejects ontological idealism, the claim that being depends on Dasein:
Yes, “there is” no being independent of Dasein, but that does not make being into a projection of Dasein; rather Dasein only is thanks to the affectivity of being […] Realism about entities entails realism about the context for interpretation. The meaning of being is not some thing independent of entities; it is the domain in which we meet with them. The domain and the entities can be distinguished but not separated
Engelland here alludes to an infamous passage that has been enlisted in support of two ways of interpreting Being and Time: (1) interpretations on which Sein means Sinn and (2) Blattner’s temporal idealist interpretation.
Of course only as long as Dasein is […] ‘is there’ [gibt es] being. When Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself’. In such a case this sort of thing can be neither understood nor not understood. In such a case even entities within-the-world can neither be discovered nor lie hidden. In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not. But now, as long as there is an understanding of being and therefore an understanding of presence-at-hand, it can be said that in this case entities will still continue to be. (BT 255)
Engelland’s passing endorsement of a realist reading would benefit from dwelling longer on this puzzling passage. If I’m right that ‘being’ means that-being, essence, and such-being, it’s hard to see how this passage is even compatible with ontic realism. One strategy for taking the anti-realist bite out of the passage is suggested by Sacha Golob: “it should be read with the stress on the phrase ‘“gibt es’ Sein’” (Freedom, Concepts and Normativity, 177). In other words, Heidegger is making a substantive claim about the conditions for having being given. That is, he is gesturing toward an analysis of how a priori ontological knowledge, understood on the model of Husserl’s “genuine empiricism,” is possible (see Kinkaid, “Phenomenology, Idealism, and the Legacy of Kant,” 609-11).
In general, I’d like to hear more about how Engelland understands the relations between being, the meaning of being, and the domain of intelligibility. I’d like to hear more, too, about how he understands Heidegger’s praise of idealism in Being and Time: “If what the term ‘idealism’ says, amounts to the understanding that being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic” (BT 251). I agree with Engelland that Heidegger is a realist, but absent clarification about how he understands ‘realism’, ‘idealism’, and ‘being’, it’s not clear to me what this agreement amounts to. Is Heidegger a metaphysical realist, as Lafont and Carman deny he is (see Lafont, “Hermeneutics,” 269 and Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, 166)? How does his position relate to Husserl’s brand of transcendental idealism or analytic anti-realists like Hilary Putnam? Is there any interesting sense in which Heidegger is a relativist (see Lafont, “Hermeneutics” versus Golob, “Was Heidegger a Relativist?” and McManus, “Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World”)? A full-blown defense of a realist interpretation of Heidegger would need to answer these and other questions.
As a reader sympathetic to Heidegger’s Being and Time project, I find myself unpersuaded of the need to make the “post-subjective turn” Engelland praises. Similarly, Golob urges Engelland to take up a more critical stance with respect to Heidegger’s claims about the open: “What exactly is this deeper sense that the tradition has missed?” (review of Heidegger’s Shadow). As I read it, Being and Time is already as “post-subjective” as we need to get. That is, Being and Time articulates a compelling picture of human persons as constitutively dependent on a holistic and historically contingent network of social kinds, roles, and institutions. As Engelland notes, Heidegger criticizes Husserl in his SS 1925 lectures for a failure to clarify the mode of being of the subject (33). Doing so requires an analysis of the structure of being-in-the-world. Now the world, understood as a referential totality of significance, stands in interesting relations of dependence with Dasein. On the one hand, there clearly would not be a world, in Heidegger’s sense of the word, without Dasein. But the world also has a kind of independence from Dasein. Consider an economy, for instance. Economies depend for their existence and nature on human beings, but once established, they take on a life of their own. Economic facts have a kind of objectivity, which is why social scientists can be wrong about or discover economic facts and I cannot through sheer force of will increase the balance of my bank account (though willing a decrease is no trouble at all). Furthermore, the existential possibilities for being a self available to a person depend on a world: what it is to be a stockbroker or an economist, say, depends on the existence and nature of economies. Finally, what existential possibilities are open to me is a historical matter: “I cannot now be a samurai since the necessary web of goals, tools and dispositions of other agents no longer exist” (Golob, Freedom, Concepts and Normativity, 217).
What is missing in this account? Engelland suggests that this early account places too much emphasis on projection at the expense of thrownness, is too ahistorical, and misses the phenomenon Heidegger calls ‘earth’. I can’t evaluate each of these charges in detail here, but one point worth noting is the importance of a kind of historical reflection in the early work. Ontology is supposed to be guided by our “vague understanding of being,” but that understanding is “infiltrated with traditional theories and opinions about being” (BT 25). Rooting out the distortive effects of this infiltration, I suggest, requires not only a destruction of the history of ontology (which Engelland skillfully discusses in Chapter 1), but also attention to non-philosophical ways in which Dasein expresses itself. Think here of Heidegger’s early interests in Paul and Augustine, his remarks about ethnology and myth (BT 76 and the review of Cassirer’s Mythical Thought), the fable of Cura in BT §42, and the analysis of the existential content of the concept of original sin (BT 354n and “Phenomenology and Theology”). This element of Heidegger’s method has both interpretive and philosophical significance. On the one hand, interpreters have long worried that Being and Time is, as Karl Löwith claimed, a “disguised theology,” which has been taken to undermine its transcendental ambitions (see Kisiel, Genesis, 423 and Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being). On the other hand, the suggestion that transcendental philosophy needs this kind of historical corrective is a ripe topic for future research.
Heidegger’s later affective and historical thought is supposed to be a deepening of “the phenomenological task […] to undermine prejudice and recover the breadth of experience” (224). We need Heidegger’s later thought today, Engelland argues, because “[t]he contemporary intellectual landscape remains dominated by the mathematical prejudice” (207). I have two worries about the claim that the contemporary intellectual landscape is dominated by this prejudice. First, the contemporary intellectual landscape is not as monolithic as Engelland’s comment suggests, and I would at least like to see some representative examples of the mathematical prejudice from contemporary philosophy. Second, the mathematical prejudice seems to pick out two distinct worries, the conflation of which, I suggest, creates an illusion of more continuity between Heidegger’s early and late work than is really there. On the one hand, the mathematical prejudice may be the tendency to interpret all entities, including artifacts and persons, as on-hand. More needs to be said about what Vorhandenheit means (see McManus, Measure of Truth, 53-6 for a discussion of some interpretive difficulties); even assuming we have a firm grasp on the concept, what resistance to the mathematical prejudice in this first sense requires is a more sophisticated ontology—one that does justice not only to natural kinds but also social kinds. On the other hand, the mathematical prejudice may be the tendency to interpret nature as something to be mastered, to overlook the meaning of ordinary objects, and so on. On the first reading, the mathematical prejudice is primarily a theoretical error; on the second, it’s an evaluative error. Now Heidegger certainly sees some connection between these two errors, but that connection surely falls short of entailment. Moreover, it seems to me that Heidegger’s attempts to awaken a new fundamental disposition serve primarily to combat the second kind of error. If this is right, though, it is highly misleading to represent Heidegger’s entire career of thought as answering one question, the Seinsfrage.
This last suggestion surely contradicts Heidegger’s own pronouncements about the path of his thought. It seems to me, however, that commentators need to balance two, perhaps competing, hermeneutic principles when interpreting Heidegger’s staggering body of work. Interpretations like Engelland’s and Sheehan’s have the merit of respecting Heidegger’s claims to continuity, while my interpretation runs the risk of being uncharitable by accusing Heidegger of changing the subject while misleadingly calling it by the same name. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Heidegger’s attempt to bring experience to greater givenness is serving very different ends in the early and late work: in the early work, to show how ontology is possible, and in the late work, to evoke a new fundamental disposition in the face of the threat of nihilism. If this is right, I remain unconvinced that we need to follow Heidegger’s way in order to get the most out of the transcendental elements of his early thought.
These worries and requests for clarification should not be taken to detract from what Engelland has accomplished in Heidegger’s Shadow. The book is clearly written and carefully researched, drawing on an enormous swath of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. Like Engelland, I believe the tradition of transcendental phenomenology contains philosophical riches that are yet to be fully mined; the foregoing challenges come from someone who, like Engelland, stands in Heidegger’s shadow but seeks to go beyond him. While my assessment of what is most worth preserving in Heidegger’s thought surely differs from Engelland’s, he has done a great service to scholarship by attempting the daunting task of motivating a way into Heidegger’s huge body of at once fascinating and frustrating thought.[2]
Bibliography
Capobianco, Richard M. 2011. Engaging Heidegger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Carman, Taylor. 2007. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engelland, Chad. 2017. Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn. New York: Routledge.
Golob, Sacha. 2014. Heidegger on Freedom, Concepts and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Golob, Sacha. 2017. Review of Heidegger’s Shadow: Kant, Husserl, and the Transcendental Turn by Chad Engelland, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/heideggers-shadow-kant-husserl-and-the-transcendental-turn/.
Golob, Sacha. 2019. “Was Heidegger a Relativist?” In The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism, edited by Martin Kusch, Katherina Kinzel, Johannes Steizinger, and Niels Wildschut, 181-95. New York: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time [BT]. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [KPM]. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. “Phenomenology and Theology.” Translated by James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo. In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 39-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kinkaid, James. 2019. “Phenomenology, Idealism, and the Legacy of Kant.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27: (3): 593-614.
Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lafont, Cristina. 2005. “Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 265-84. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
McManus, Denis. 2012. Heidegger and the Measure of Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McManus, Denis. 2012. “Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World.” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (2): 195-220.
Natorp, Paul. 2015. “Kant and the Marburg School.” In The Neo-Kantian Reader, edited by Sebastian Luft, 180-97. New York: Routledge.
Philipse, Herman. 1998. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tahko, Tuomas E. 2015. An Introduction to Metametaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[1] Parenthetical citations refer to Engelland, Heidegger’s Shadow unless indicated otherwise.
[2] Thanks to Dan Dahlstrom, Emma Jerndal, and Eden Kinkaid for helpful comments and discussion.
Reflexion, Gefühl, Identität im Anschluß an Kant / Reflection, Emotion, Identity. From Kant Onwards