Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl: Philosophical Exchanges
Persuasione ed evidenza. Sul rapporto tra retorica e fenomenologia in Husserl, Heidegger e Blumenberg
Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death
The Philosophy of Wilhelm Schapp: From Phenomenology to Jurisprudence and the Hermeneutics of Stories
The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka
Reviewed by: Gabriel Popa (Independent Scholar)
In one of the most quoted introductions to phenomenology[i], Robert Sokolowski was asking about the need for a justification regarding the transition from the natural to the phenomenological attitude. Thus, equating phenomenology and philosophy, the above justification is said to stand for philosophy in general. The interrogation regarding the “why” of transitioning to phenomenology is the “why” of philosophical interrogation in general. Why do we ever need to employ something like a philosophical interrogation and way/s of inquiry? We have, on one part, mathematics and the “real” sciences, which deal with the most objective objectivities in general, and, on the other part, we have the less scientific rules of conduct that served us reasonably well in dealing with mundane activities. So why do we ever have to bother ourselves with something which is pretty much a way of confusing everything? Actually, this line of thinking is followed by any anyone unfamiliar with philosophical inquiry and may be tested by observing the common use of the term “philosophy”, especially its adjectival employment in folk parlance, when it is used to characterize something as lacking any use, as a mean to complicate the issues being discussed, as a distraction from “things that matter”.
In some way, this may be a pretty accurate description or symptom of the completely non-usable character of philosophy during our average dealings with beings in general, to use a famous Heideggerian locution. Even the Cartesian suspension of belief preserved some idées reçues, mainly for conducting our daily behavior. Following Aristotle, philosophy and philosophical interrogation is considered to be prompted by a starkly uncanniness with the way things are, which has been rubricated as wonder. Wonder was elicited in Ancient Greece, when the usual explaining in terms of works of gods and their relationship with the mortals was considered as insufficient or at least worth inquiring. The main issue with this determination is that even if it may have served as the intellectual origin for delivering something like a philosophical way of interrogating, later translated to first principles and metaphysical inquiring, it seems unproductive for the latecomers. We pretty much know or believe that we know what philosophy is long after that an eventual wonder starts crippling our usual way of living. One’s turn to philosophical engagement is not necessarily prompted by an originar, that is genuine, wonder, but by some fascination with a specific way of treatment of some issues that may go from trivial one to insolubilia such as the world in general, life, human being or the divine. But it may be that our startling curiosity, since it starts that way, may be soon tranquilized by the high availability of ready-made answers, or it may be that the sheer amount of these answers, some of them opposed to each other, will prompt us to further the inquiry. In each case, nonetheless, the root of our inquiry is hardly the or a genuine wonder, while we have a lot of philosophical traditions and schools of thought to turn to, while, in time, we develop a preference for one or some of them, based on some reasons that will finally remain unidentified.
If we turn to Hubick’s Phenomenology of Questioning, when considering its title, it may seem that it sets the bar too high, while the task is one that would be impossible to deliver in just a little over than 200 pages, considering the generality of its topic, the tradition and complexity of phenomenological inquiry, even if reduced to Husserl, Heidegger and Patočka, along with the seemingly overextended contemporary range of phenomenological object domain. But actually, the topic itself and the historical considerations are pretty much streamlined to this: that phenomenology is, if not the only, but the most appropriate philosophical line of inquiry able to preserve this sense of originar wonder that may be so soon and so easily covered with predetermined and already worked out answers. By focusing on the interrogation itself instead of answering it as soon as we get a chance, phenomenology is seen by Hubick, both in itself and historically, as prompting, preserving and developing this very sense of a continuous reworking and reshaping of both our experience and its theoretical framing.
How is that phenomenology was and still is able to do such a thing is one of the main directions of the book. The other one is related to the very act of questioning, in a sense of an actual phenomenology of this act. Accordingly, Hubick’s book may be red in both of these ways: as a plea for phenomenology as a certain way of relating to experience while preserving the manifoldness of the objects that are given within it, but also as a reiteration of the acute importance of questioning in philosophy. At the same time, these are not to be understood as separate topics, since the historical dimension is mostly seen as being determined by the particular character of phenomenological research. Scholarship in phenomenology, if we consider only Heidegger and Patočka, is rubricated under the topic of a heretical understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, where the heretics are the ones who were being able to both preserve the genuine phenomenological insights while departing, in one way or another, from the answers provided by Husserl. This departure is not necessarily seen by Hubick as providing different or even opposed answers, but as a departure from answering itself, as least from the risk of reification of the latter as a definite system of concepts, statements and validities. Not a system, but nonetheless systematic.
According to Hubick, questioning in Husserl is related to the very possibility of “returning, eliciting and reflecting” on our experiences. Accordingly, both experience and the interrogations it elicits should be constantly revisited, such as the answer provided, as “attempts to clarify the way experience operates”, are always, on some part, only preliminary. Phenomenology and phenomenological attitude, as envisaged by Husserl, is key to the possibility of both opening, but also and not least important, to preserve this openness of the field of experience, instead of covering it with a set of answers, being these a set of descriptions, conceptual framework or a systematics of arguments:
‘Husserl’s project of pure phenomenology is a way for philosophy and science to preserve and explore the ongoing openness of questions while keeping such an infinite procedure in check with the establishment, clarification and the systematic presentation of answers’ (67).
Accordingly, the intentional feature of thought in general, determines not only the fundamental relatedness of consciousness to its objects, but also the fact that experiencing in general may be constantly revived, revisited and described, so as that one may verify on its own if and how descriptions are true to the objects described but also if is there something in the actual experience that has been left out of standard, traditional, depictions of it. An anticipable objections to this seemingly open-ended flux of experiences and the various ways the same object may be given and thus depicted within experience could be that, since phenomenology may value the same any experience as experience of something, any systematic or close to systematic way of relating to these is worthless. The most radical of these objections would follow the line arguing that since experience is always one’s own, it is fundamentally private and, thus, incommunicable, at least in its most relevant, that being private, features. In the best scenario, phenomenology would thus try to make sense of a collection of experiences, working inductively toward some insights that would somehow prompt at least a very general description of the main features of experience and its relatedness to objects, which will, nevertheless, remain short of an accurate depiction of both consciousness and objects. Intentionality as such is the answer that phenomenology would offer to this type of objectioning, as it shows that mind is outward bounded, that, notwithstanding some peculiar traits, consciousness is public by design, as it is oriented to things other than itself. In the same vein, intentionality is meant to answer another set of objections, which would make any object a representation, thus not an object for the mind but an object within the mind, or, at least, it would instill a serious doubt about any way of relating consciousness to something that has a different character.
The second objection has been traditionally posed as the question concerning the difference and relation between the way something really is and the way it appears to us, as being equipped with both intellectual and sensible means or perceiving things. The history of this question is the history of philosophy itself, but what phenomenology does, as devised by Husserl, is to seriously approach and engage with the issue or appearance, while focusing on the very character of this appearing. By its own name, as phenomenology, its main task would be to interrogate phenomena as such. This “as such” would best preserve the character of appearance as appearance, making it a dignified object of research, while, at the same time, approaching if differently, as no more bounded by trying to identify something of whose appearance this appearance is. At least, not first, not before the appearance by itself is made an object of inquiry. Now, this happens under the category of the phenomenon, which, preliminary, would entitle that some-thing, any-thing, is firstly considered as it appears itself (to a conscience, taken itself at the highest level of generality, as any conscience whatsoever), before any further thematization. In Husserl’s words, from the Logical Investigations (LI), as quoted by Hubick: ‘if higher, theoretical cognition is to begin at all, objects belonging to the sphere in question must be intuited’ (72). Maintaining the focus on the questioning side and the phenomenological ability to preserve it as such, Hubick makes here an interesting distinction, that is between the phenomenon as such, which is interrogated in the most proximate experience, and the further conceptualization of it. This openness or clearing if we want to follow Heidegger, of the experiential dimension, will trigger the manifoldness of the way phenomena are perceived (Husserl will say “intuited” in order to highlight its pre-theoretical feature).
In order to better clarify what the phenomenon of phenomenology is about, Hubick will follow through a distinction made by Husserl in his Inaugural Lecture, that is between “Objects in a pregnant sense of the world”, objects as logical predicates and phenomena. To summarize, the first, which are called “Objects in a pregnant sense”, are the natural objects, which are outside the perceiving conscience. The logical predicates may be any objects whatsoever, as long as they are treated as being attributable to some subject. The phenomenon is a higher level of generality, as it means a transitioning to the very way the previous types of objects are given to and within conscience. Moreover, this focusing on the side of “given” feature of the object as such, means that a considerable part of phenomenological inquiry should be devoted to the receiver’s part, that is the conscience and the way it “constitutes the object” (80). Now, the above-mentioned higher degree of generality should not be understood as going beyond what is actually perceived, as in pre-Kantian metaphysics, but neither in the Kantian sense of an inquiry into the (subjective) conditions of experiencing as such, even if Husserl will sometimes name the phenomenological move as transcendental. Transcendental, as in transcendental reduction, would here designate that it is, indeed, a move towards the conscience, but only since it breaks with the Cartesian tradition of an isolated, reified ego, which will only be able to overcome doubt and meet the external being that the world of res extensa or God) by means of some apriori, received truths. The phenomenological conscience, as in Husserl, is made an object of inquiry in such a way as to emphasize its critical relatedness and oriented feature, its “toward-something” dimension. Keeping close to Hubick’s focus on questioning and Husserl’s own programmatic statements, we are advised to constantly maintain the whole picture in front of us, such as transitioning back and forth from the manifoldness of the way objects appears to the modifications that are enacted by these to the way conscience perceive them. Accordingly, even the apodictical is made into an object of interrogation, in Hubick’s words: ‘as each new example of evidence appears and problematize previous understanding, it also provides a source for further reflection and consideration’, while ‘after the discovery of an essence, were a phenomenologist to forsake the original repetitive practices of questioning that yields it […] they would cease to be a phenomenologist and effectively become a metaphysician’ (82).
Let’s consider now the first presumable objection that was mentioned before, regarding the difficulty of delivering a systematic philosophy in a phenomenological matter, that may seriously damage Husserl’s project of a scientific philosophy. What Hubick does, without mentioning explicitly the doubt raised by such category of objections, is to delineate the systematic character of Husserl’s philosophy, while keeping it apart from “theoretical metaphysics or just another philosophical system” (86). Systematicity outside of a system is attainable, according to Hubick, by means of a “non-linear reciprocity”, that would undercut the traditional focus on conceptual analysis while focusing on the experience and its questioning correlate that has initially prompted an eventual conceptual framework that may be used for its understanding, but which, nonetheless has to undergo a continuous validation and re-validation through the works of others. Non-linearity supposedly means here that we will not build, “systematically” (as in a system) or more geometrico, from one set of truths to another, but we will constantly revise our base assumptions by trying to engage “with the things themselves”, keeping thus open the possibility of further confirmation, adjustment of even rejection.
Now, this distinction between system and systematicity is one which is very difficult to preserve, especially since, in Husserl’s own programmatic statements, phenomenology should always be understood in a scientifical sense, while the transition from LI to Ideas seems like building up a system based on previous, thus preliminary, research. According to Hubick, true to his attempt to emphasize questioning instead of answering, this would be the main contentious point between Husserl and Heidegger. The latter will read LI as fundamentally opening a way of doing philosophy whose aim is to destabilize traditionally provided answers, in this case the answers provided within general logic, a discipline whose reluctance to changing and developing is one of the most well documented. Destabilization does not mean here that phenomenology will search and eventually identify some weak chains in the conceptual and propositional architecture of an already constituted discipline, to emphasize their debatable character, even if it may happen to do so at some point. Destabilization is to be understood as reopening the space of experiencing which originated the solidifying of a particular discipline as a set of answers, concepts and propositions, more like an attunement to the instability of phenomena as such.
Instead of logic, Heidegger will turn to history and ontology in order to clarify the way the phenomenological method relates to their actual enactment as established, traditional disciplines. Following Hubick, Heidegger’s phenomenological reworking of history under the rubric of historicity (and temporality, not mentioned here) is meant to “elicit from experience the unstable phenomena via questioning that is then taken to be the ‘material’ worked upon by the ‘scientific work’ of stabilizing the material via answering” (105; italics and inside quotes are Hubick’s). Phenomenology turns into ontology, in the double sense as the meaning of being and Dasein’s fundamental ontology, and further turns into hermeneutics, while phenomenology is devised by Heidegger as a kind of propedeutics for what has been his main concern for the most part of his inquiries, being as such. As Hubick’s emphasizes, by illuminating the structure of the question itself, as Gefragtes, Befragtes and Erfragtes (110), as the what of the questioning, the object domain and what eventually will come up, one is already situated in the proximity of what one searches for. Accordingly, the radicality brought up by phenomenological inquiry is not necessarily that of developing new or original insights about conscience, but to clear and maintain open the space of the experiencing that firstly sourced the questioning, while further elaborating the structure of the latter will prompt the revisiting and clarifying of those experiences, paying attention and attempting to uncover their genuine possibilities.
Now, the way one addresses the question is fundamental for both the opening of the intended object domain as it is for the opening of the “subjective” or transcendental dimension, if we limit ourselves to understand by the latter that there is always somebody asking the question, with a specific, that being human, way of perceiving things, some-thing in general. What phenomenology does, not quite surprisingly considering its actual name, and what Heidegger’s analyses will take to its limit, is to double on the ontological status of appearance, which will no longer be relegated to the domain of “mere appearance” or falsehood. Actually, the latter is maintained as one of the possible ways some-thing appears, but the issue becomes increasingly complex[ii], while the instances of appearance are multiplied and made into a dedicate object domain for phenomenological inquiry. In very general terms, what appearance has always considered to do is to stand before perception and the things outside it, as a kind of inter-positioning that prevent or obturates the access to the very thing. Hubick’s analysis of the way Heidegger reworks this issue is one of the most promising in the book, even if not obviously related to its programmatic intentions, focusing on the fourfold dimension of appearance brough up by Heidegger in Being and Time (BT) but also, previously, in the lecture notes delivered in Marburg and collected as the History of the Concept of Time (HCT), as phenomenon, semblance, appearance and mere appearance (120). Moreover, it is in this light that Hubick restates the purpose of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, along with the latter’s residual Hume-ism, as emphasizing the proto-phenomenological dimension of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) since its main accomplishment would be the revealing of pure intuition as phenomena, thus a proper object for phenomenological inquiry, instead of grounding the very possibility of metaphysics.
Hubick continues to play on the different tones of Heidegger’s well documented, sometimes overstretched, terminological equilibristic regarding various terms such as truth, being, logos and phenomenon, while all the way trying to maintain or to remind the reader Hubick’s own general framework of inquiry, that being the opposition between questioning and answering, with a strong emphasis on the former. Such an example is provided by the analysis of Heidegger’s famous version of truth as unconcealment or aletheia, where it is made to stand for the actual experiencing of phenomena as opposed to the “stabilization of their original fluctuating correlates” delivered by the traditional understanding of truth as correspondence (131).
If Heidegger is the most obvious candidate for the phenomenological relevance of the act of questioning, since he made it into an actual topic during much of his writings, lectures and seminaries, Patočka is the most viable candidate for the idea of a heretical following of Husserl, again, since his he actually characterized (some of) his work as such. There are three main strands informing Hubick’s account of Patočka’s heretical encounters with the phenomenological path developed by Husserl. First, we have the idea of a “lifeworld”, as Husserl used it to denote the pre-scientifical, natural, or the naïve world as it stands facing a conscience which is yet un-informed by a critical approach and a scientific conceptual framework. It is life as it is given in average experiencing, which forms the background and backbone of any ulterior attempts at one’s taking into possession by means of understanding and explaining. But, for phenomenology in general, this explanation is always an “explaining away” of some originar encounter with worldly beings in general, losing touch with the experienced as such. The cornerstone of a phenomenological approach is to give an account of exactly this insight, that it is more into experience that grounding a buildup of a chain of reasoning allowing us to arrive at some definite and definitive statements about the way the world really is. If the latter is meant to dispense with the way the world appears, in order to climb the ladder up to a (more) scientific perspective, being if that of natural of social sciences, phenomenology will constantly drag us down, reminding us that the domain of appearances is not and could not be exhausted by natural and social regularities. Instead of developing vertically, in a Cartesian manner, phenomenology will develop horizontally, as a way on enlarging and renewing the very domain or appearance.
According to Hubick, Patočka revisits this issues that became standard for any phenomenology scholar, while, at the same time, preserving them as genuine interrogations. In this regard, Patočka operates a critical distinction between phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy or the phenomenological as such. While the former is a descriptive manner of referring to an already established way of conducting phenomenological researches, indebted to Husserl and to his already provided answers, the latter is considered as allowing a more nuanced approach, more balanced on the part of questioning. ‘Phenomenological philosophy’ will say Patočka in his Plato and Europe (PE) as quoted by Hubick (146), ‘differs from phenomenology, in that not only wants to analyze phenomena as such, but also wants to derive results from this activity; phenomenological philosophy is not an understanding or a kind of slipping away from the proper problem of the phenomenon as such. The phenomenon must remain the phenomenon’.
For the phenomenological philosophy, the phenomenon must remain problematic, beyond or beside any attempt to thematize it, which, according to Hubick, will bring Patočka in close proximity to Heidegger’s focus on the being’s concealment, while also helping him furthering his own heretical way of practicing phenomenology. Since it is this latter, practical, dimension that will be used by Patočka in order to both emphasize, if not radicalize, the experiential feature of phenomenology and to employ the Heideggerian trope of “primacy of practice” (155, 157), an expression which, while not used by Heidegger, found its way in Heidegger’s scholarship to denote the analysis of the mundane in the first part of BT.
Accordingly, and this will constitute the second contentious, that is heretical, strand, Patočka seems to object to Husserl’s “objectification” of conscience in two ways: as to the possibility of the making conscience into an object of reflection but also as to the considering the conscience solely under its traditional, that is Husserl’s, intentional dimension. Akin to Heidegger, Patočka will ask if these modes of an objective apprehension of conscience and its objective correlates constitutes the actual way that objects are given in the most proximate experience.
While dispensing with the entire idea of conscience, Heidegger will turn these questions into his ontological-hermeneutical analysis in the first part of BT, focusing on Dasein’s average understanding of being which is for the most part some kind of a practical one. The so-called “primacy of practice” in Heidegger has proved itself to be both a promise and a locus of potential confusions, both on the part of scholars and Heidegger himself, while the hermeneutical dimension of Heidegger has somehow receded under the weight of his further inquiring into the history of being, not to mention the political record of his thought. Nevertheless, for both Patočka and Hubick, this approach is able to stimulate the furthering of questioning of the manifoldness of experiencing and appearing, while preserving the core assumptions, even if mainly methodological, of phenomenology.
The third strand of Patočka’s phenomenology, as accounted in Hubick’s book, is constituted by the former’s incursions in the phenomenology of history. Time is divided, according to Patočka’s Heretical Essays (HE), in three main divisions, from the unhistorical to proper historical, interceded by a glimpse into history, the prehistorical. The main criteria for this division is the relation life, human life, has with itself an with the life of others. While, for the unhistorical, life is only concerned with its own preservation, appealing to an entire plethora of transcendent entities, the glimpse into proper history if offered by the imposition of others and the need for a structuring, if not yet regulating, of life in common. The critical component of the preservation of life is labor, while it is the latter’s transitioning into work (following Harendt) that best captures the irruption of the second category, the prehistorical.
The proper historical is only born at the intersection of political and philosophical thought, when living in the mode of polis develops alongside the abandonment, least in part, of the traditional insurance provided by the divine, thus bringing forth the shaking of the prehistorical naïve and absolute meaning (Patočka, HE, 3rd essay). While living within the polis transcends its orientation toward own preservation, philosophical interrogation and the ontological fracturing of the identity between meaning and being led to furthering the attempts to understanding and explicitation into the unsuspected and unforeseen (idem). This constitutes fertile ground for the reiterating Hubick’s main these, as questioning and mainly philosophical type is closely connected to the irruption of history as the shaking of previously agreed meaning. Proper, that is philosophical interrogation could only come about within the space/ clearing created by the loss of a total meaning, while, at the same time, meaning is preserved mainly as the horizon of the partial, localized attempts. It is within this dialectics between a complete loss of the total meaning and the push for constantly renewed attempts to recover fragments of it, as a polemical dialogue between day and night, uncovering and concealment, that life becomes problematic, prompting philosophical questioning as and open ended task, worthy of pursuing even within the ‘recognition of a very dire, even hopeless, situation, wherein one remains simultaneously fully cognizant of one’s bleak situation and yet persists to ask more questions and remains undaunted by it’ (165).
The concluding chapter, focused on the logos of questioning, streamlines the main findings of the previous historical considerations, while restating the general premises of the Hussein’s general inquiry, mainly the focus on the destabilizing dimension of questioning against the stabilization provided by answers, the preeminence of experience for phenomenological research and the particular place of the latter within the history of philosophy, as featuring both questioning and experience as prime movers. The constant return to experience, being able to overcome the burden of the already provided answers, may be seen as a kind of a remake of what originary prompted something like a philosophical inquiring, namely wonder and its truth-searching correlate. Moreover, in these terms, the relation between teacher and student/ master and apprentice is constantly reshuffled, while since the eventual answers and solutions provided by the former are nothing more than pushes for the latter to take over the attempt to validate the same experiences while, during the process, other facets of the same experiences or experiences previously unaccounted for may be considered and further thematized.
As an overall introduction to phenomenology, by stressing and, sometimes, overstressing, the role of questioning in phenomenology and philosophy, while sometimes undermining the specific difference between these, Hubick’s book may stand alongside more famous others. On the other part, for a more versed reader in phenomenology, its added value is mostly debatable, since, for the most part, it stops short of a more rigorous and thorough exegesis. Nonetheless, its particular stance and point of observation may prove valuable in redirecting the reader, any reader, to shake the dust off such a seemingly inconspicuous figure as questioning and reassess its role within the history of philosophy, being that phenomenology.
[i] R. Sokolowski. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press.
[ii] Of which Jean Luc Marion’s analysis of the given is probably the highest degree.
Kompetenz- und Persönlichkeitsbildung: Phänomenologischer Zugang zu einem personenorientierten Kompetenzverständnis
Die Werttheorien. Geschichte und Kritik: Ausgewählte Werke. Band I
Primary Sources in Phenomenology
Springer
2024
Hardback
IX, 398
Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
Reviewed by: Peter Shum (University of Warwick)
Introduction
Lorenzo Girardi’s wide ranging and highly informative book, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka, explains the origins and nature of Europe’s contemporary “crisis”, and conducts its own enquiry into the significance of the catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. It investigates the limitations of rationality in the political sphere, and is sympathetic to the insights of agonistic political theory.
Girardi ends the introduction to his book on the same note on which he concludes the book itself, namely by warning us not to forget about the unprecedented catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. The admonition is apposite, since the book’s entire train of thought turns out to be, in a certain way, haunted by the hecatombs of the first and second world wars. It alludes not only to a peril associated with a fading of our collective memory, but also to a philosophical danger of failing to comprehend what it was that transpired in the first place, in the traumas that we now denote with terms like “The Great War” the “The Holocaust”. Indeed, I suspect that many readers will be prompted in the course of this book to wonder if the term “war” itself is due a metaphysical clarification.
Edmund Husserl predeceased those whose lives were cut short by the Holocaust, but by the time of his death in 1938 he was, to say the least, more cognizant than most of the nature of the crisis that seemed to be engulfing Europe. Husserl thought Europe was in crisis on the grounds that a naturalistic conception of the world cannot account for or support humanity’s existential needs. He saw rational discourse as a reliable path towards the reconciliation or convergence of opposing views, and wanted conflicting nations to embark on a political journey from their respective cultural life-worlds to a more universal life-world.
Girardi elaborates an important counterpoint to Husserl’s rationalist teleology, by introducing the thought of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Girardi explores Patočka’s concerns about Husserl’s understanding of the root of Europe’s crisis, and about Husserl’s proposal to restore the ideal of reason in political philosophy. This turns out to be connected to potential philosophical problems that can arise when one tries to attribute a final or transcendent meaning to the world as a whole. This, in turn, is connected to phenomenological questions pertaining to how one attributes significance to experiences, and how one responds to situations of apparent meaninglessness. All of these considerations inform Patočka’s concept of problematicity, which is really the central theme of the three final chapters. Girardi goes on to consider the implications of Patočka’s notion of problematicity for the discussion about the future of politics in Europe, and how this discussion has been taken up by certain post-structuralist political thinkers. The interconnectedness of the topics of Patočka, problematicity, and politics will incline me to review the book’s final three chapters as a unit, in place of the chapter by chapter approach that I shall adopt for the rest of the book. Toward the end of this book review I shall offer three discussion points that I hope readers will find constructive.
The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason
The main discussion of the book opens by drawing attention to the centrality of rationality in Europe’s sense of its own self-identity, and of its own relation to the rest of the world. The very notion of “Europe”, as something other than simply a geographical designation, advanced when “Europe” began to replace “Christendom” in diplomatic language to signify a collection of cooperating coordinate sovereign states with a shared heritage from Christendom. The distinguishing feature of this European civilisation was that it saw itself as based squarely and fundamentally on reason.
This European civilisation saw itself as superior to all others, and the capacity for reason was held to be constitutive of our humanity. Importantly, this involved seeing reason not only as a mode of enquiry but as a way of resolving disputes. According to the rationalist perspective, all fields of human life, including morality, and the organisation of society, were to be grounded in reason. Grounding everything in reason had the consequence that the world became “disenchanted”, since in principle everything could be mastered by means of calculation.
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, there were concerns that rationalism was undermining community and social cohesion. Weber observed that for all of rationalism’s successes, it didn’t seem to have much success in answering questions about the ultimate meaning of human existence. In a rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society, there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. Sociologists like Ferdinand Tönnies regarded rationalist society as a complete inversion of community. Later in the twentieth century, the idea was put forward, by the Frankfurt School of critical theory amongst others, that rationalism contributed to, facilitated, or made possible the atrocities of the first and second world wars. Girardi points out that the extent of rationalism’s responsibility for these horrors remains a matter of dispute.
A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation
Chapter 2 begins to explore some of the different currents in the ongoing contemporary debate concerning the philosophical direction that European political thought ought to be taking, and in particular how entangled with rationalism this direction ought to be. One pole of the contemporary debate argues that Europe needs to revert and reconnect to its Christian heritage. This view gained ground after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, when there was a resurgence of Christianity in many Eastern European countries. This became an important part of their national identity. At a European level, this reinforces the centrality of Christianity to contemporary European identity. Today, sceptics of the EU project are often proposing a culturally Christian Europe. They regard reviving Europe’s Christian heritage as a way of counteracting the disenchantment of the world that rationalism seemed to usher in, and re-enchant the world with some transcendent spiritual values. This position is not so much about completely rejecting rationality as keeping it in check and making space for a re-enchantment of the world. Girardi points out that Novalis (1772-1801) was a very early proponent of a version of this view, and that, more recently, Gianni Vattimo (2002) argues that European identity is inextricably enmeshed with Christianity.
A different pole of the contemporary debate argues that the way forward for Europe is to double down on rationalism. Proponents of this view argue that rationalism could have enabled us to rise above our small-minded human disputes over territory, natural resources, and cultural differences, and that if only Europe had been more rational, it would have avoided both world wars completely. In the rationalist’s view, the world wars were not a case of rationalism taking Europe in the wrong direction, but instead a bursting forth of an incomprehensible and lethal irrationalism.
The cogency of the pro-rationalism pole of the debate is difficult to deny, but Girardi observes that the main drawback is that it now seems to be leading us toward a bureaucratic European Union devoid of human existential meaning. The idea that rationalism was supposed to enable us to rise above our cultural differences seems to have been conflated with the view that it is improper to rate one culture more highly than another. This is to say that cultural relativism has acquired a strong foothold in political circles. This view informs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We now run into the problem where there is a tension between respecting what we deem to be universal human rights and respecting a foreign culture.
A second drawback stems from the fact that, understandably, those backing the EU project like to use the Holocaust for symbolic purposes. Yet Eastern European countries, and the UK, for instance, tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust. For such nations, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. In the end, observers of the contemporary debate about the future of Europe need to be cognizant of the fact that those who wish Europe to revert to its Christian heritage are liable to hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of unchecked rationalism, whilst their opponents hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of neglecting rationalism.
Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique
Girardi observes that it seems to be a characteristic of a purely rational or “universalist” rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society that there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. After all, in a strictly rational society (if such a society were ever to exist) the function of reason would be to optimally redesign and reorganise society. This gives rise to concerns that this way of going about things is conducive toward totalitarianism.
Pluralist rationalism (as opposed to universalist rationalism) aims to address this concern by introducing a process of reconciliation between diverse attitudes and opinions. The two-fold aim of a pluralist rationalist society is mutual safety and individual freedom. Under pluralist rationalism, the state is neutral with respect to worldview. Liberal democracy has much in common with pluralist rationalism, but is not completely neutral with respect to worldview. Sometimes democratic procedure restricts individual rights. This is the tension between democracy and liberalism. This leaves room for a wide variety of versions of liberal democracy, and Rawls and Habermas each develop their own.
One of the features of a liberal democracy is the requirement that there should be a general consensus across all citizens about democratic procedure. This is called the liberal consensus. In searching for the liberal consensus, Rawls and Habermas both want to strike the right balance between universalism and pluralism. Habermas doesn’t want secularism to dominate public debate, and this means affording traditional worldviews the opportunity to participate in public political debate. Consonantly, people should have the right, in Habermas’s view, to contribute to public debate in their own religious language. This means Habermas could be said to be a post-secularist, something that Rawls is not.
After the discussion of Rawls and Habermas, Girardi turns his attention to the topic of the agonistic critique of rationalist political theory. Proponents of the agonistic critique advance a battery of objections stemming from the suspicion that the idealised conceptions that rationalist political theory employs do not correspond to reality. They tend to argue that rationalist political theory has invented a fictional political model using idealised conceptions of discourse, discussants, citizens, consensus, deliberation, and the discursive environment. Agonists are concerned that rationalist political theory ignores the possibility that some problems may be irresolvable in principle. They typically believe that (a) there is an irreducible plurality of values; and (b) when values come into conflict, it is a mistake to assume that the conflict can be resolved, or that it is necessarily possible to devise a comprehensive or overarching reconciliation procedure. They maintain that there is no political framework that can be devised a priori, that rationalist political theory marginalises people critical of the liberal consensus, and that it curtails the plurality of views.
Girardi proceeds to examine in more detail the respective positions of various agonistic thinkers, including Honig, Mouffe, Gray, and Connolly. In the course of this discussion, Girardi explores how they advocate resisting and disrupting the liberal consensus. Agonists like Gray and Connolly are proponents of a radical and ever-changing pluralism, which can involve a plurality of possible political frameworks. According to this kind of agonistic stance, illiberal views and illiberal political frameworks cannot be ruled out.
Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project
Girardi draws attention to the important distinction between Husserl’s “idea” of Europe and his “absolute idea” of Europe. Husserl’s “idea” of Europe is a conception of European culture. It is so broad that it can be taken to refer to Western civilisation in general, including the colonial expansion of the British Empire, and the migration of European peoples to North America. It excludes, however, itinerant peoples such as the Roma. This “idea” of Europe is formed eidetically based on what is given in concrete empirical instances. Every culture or civilisation will have an equivalent “idea” or “spiritual shape” of this kind.
By contrast, Husserl’s “absolute idea” of Europe is not constituted eidetically on the basis of empirical instances. Instead, it is a self-standing ideal concept grounded in rationality itself. It is independent of, and in that sense transcends, actual human experiences. According to Husserl, the “birthplace” of this “absolute idea” of Europe was Ancient Greece. It is the idea of a completely rational human civilisation.
When Husserl speaks of a European “crisis”, he essentially means that Western civilisation has fallen short of, or fallen away from, its rational ideal, that is, its “absolute idea”. More specifically, Husserl believes that we have become so enthralled by scientific discoveries and technological developments that our understanding of the true remit of rationality has become impoverished and truncated. In the first part of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl scrutinises and critiques the way many people, including some scientists, tend to think about the hard sciences. He says they “take for being what is actually method”. By this he means that they think the idealised scientific world is the actual real world. Science has been so successful that one begins to think of the idealised mathematical world that the scientific method works with as the real world. The trouble is that we have forgotten that the sciences presuppose the world as we ordinarily experience it. Husserl observes that we still require philosophy to ground science, on pain of committing ourselves to the erroneous position of naturalism, which is the view that the only possible objects of knowledge are the objects of the natural sciences. Naturalism subtracts cultural properties from objects, and excludes all matters pertaining to value. Those caught up in naturalism overlook or ignore the fact that we still require philosophy to investigate the existential meaning of life and its value. Another way of looking at this is to realise that philosophy, for whatever reason, has failed to be a satisfactory foundation for the sciences. This amounts to a falling short of rationalism as a whole.
For Husserl, the fundamental distinction in political thought has to be between rationality and irrationality. Europe’s failure to understand the remit of rationality has led some citizens to seek existential meaning in irrational areas, such as ethno-nationalist politics, or develop an hostility to reason, and has led some European governments to pursue irrational foreign policies. Husserl believes that the catastrophe of the first world war revealed the irrationality, the “inner untruth, the meaninglessness” that had befallen European civilisation.
We have found, then, that philosophy itself is implicated in, and entangled with, the crisis that Husserl is describing. It is only when philosophers can understand the nature of the crisis that has engulfed them, and for which they are partly responsible, that they can begin to find a way out of it. The first step is to reassess what rationality really is, and what its remit is. Rationality should include what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”. Once we have revised our understanding of rationality, we must then recommit ourselves to it.
Husserl’s Reestablishment of the Ideal of Reason
Husserl believes that, in response to Europe’s “crisis”, there are a number of pressing reasons for exploring the “life-world”, which is constituted in one’s pre-scientific experience of the world. One of these reasons is the overcoming of naturalism, and the provision of a proper epistemological foundation for the sciences. Another reason is to investigate what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”, which includes enquiry into moral values. The life-world can disclose to us things that we pre-theoretically intuit to be morally right. An example of this is that when a group of people live in proximity to one another, we often find it morally appropriate to come together in a community of love, in which individuals are valued and loved in all of their uniqueness and particularity. Phenomenologically, it is an intrinsic property of moral values that they transcend time and space: they are applicable at all times and in all places. This brings us to the idea that an important reason to investigate the life-world is to uncover a universal sense of the world. Finding a world valid for everyone is relevant to the field of reconciliation between conflicting parties and nations. Indeed, chapter 5’s main concern is the problem of finding a universal life-world.
One and the same perceptual object may be understood to be amenable to being apprehended in separate acts located across a set of perspectival and temporal positions. The set of perspectival and temporal positions may be said to form an intentional horizon, and this is sometimes referred to as the object’s internal horizon. Yet in addition to an internal horizon, perceptual objects are also found to be embedded within an external horizon. Husserl describes the external horizon as “the openness of the world as an indeterminate horizon against which things can become determinate.” The internal and external horizons are both regulative principles ordering experience.
Every life-world partially “fills in” the indeterminate external horizon. The external horizon is pre-given and implicit in every life-world. Husserl calls this universal horizon the world in general. The world in general is the world in its universal sense. We find that objects belonging to the world in its universal sense are not only given horizonally (internally and externally) but also carry the sense “experienceable by everyone”, or “meant for all”.
It is important to note that in the life-world, perceptual objects belong to a wider cultural world of values that exceeds them. The life-world is always already embedded in one’s culture. So there is in this sense a plurality of life-worlds across the population of the world, since there is a plurality of cultures. Or to put it another way, the life-world of someone aware of the existence of other cultures is a plurality of cultural worlds.
This would seem to raise the aspiration of finding a universal culture. It is to this end that Husserl tries to find an account of the life-world that is consistent with rationality, and hence valid for everyone. Husserl seeks the rationalisation of culture, but not its deletion. This leads Husserl to consider the possibility that perhaps philosophy could take certain traditional beliefs and somehow restate them philosophically. We might cautiously draw some encouragement from the observation that there is already some commonality discernible between the various life-worlds. One reason for this is common biological needs across all humans. Another reason is sharing the same planet.
In the course of chapter 5, also Girardi raises some doubts about the prospects for Husserl’s rationalist teleology, and mentions a number of possible objections to it, including the agonistic critique.
Patočka, Problematicity, and Politics
Patočka’s relation to Husserl is a complex one, and ultimately ambivalent. Whilst Patočka agrees with Husserl that the life-world and the scientific interpretation of the world very often seem to be at odds with each other, he is doubtful on the question of whether such conflict can always be resolved. Husserl finds grounds for believing in the possibility of the resolution of such conflict in what he sees as the intrinsically teleological structure of experience. However, Patočka argues that there is no absolute grounding for the meaning of the objects that appear to us. The world as a whole is implicit in the meaning of the objects that appear to us, but it doesn’t make sense to ascribe a final meaning to the world as a whole. The world as a whole doesn’t have a meaning, but instead should be understood to be the horizon of all meaning.
Patočka’s criticism of Husserl suggests that we ought to look more carefully at the phenomenology of the life-world and how we go about attributing meaning to the objects we encounter there. Patočka thinks Husserl makes the mistake of striving for a philosophy that will be capable of deciding, or eventually converging upon, the final meaning of the world. By contrast, Patočka thinks the world as a whole has significance but not a final meaning. In fact, he maintains that significance precludes the possibility of a final meaning. So we must distinguish between significance and signification. The act of intuiting significance, for Patočka, means grasping the potential for a system of possible significations. Interestingly, this leads Patočka to the view that instances of apparent meaninglessness can have significance, on the grounds that they might harbour the possibility of finding meanings.
This brings us to Patočka’s concept of problematicity. Problematicity refers to an absolute indeterminacy in the meaning of an event or an experience. Patočka’s concepts of significance and problematicity can therefore be regarded as two sides of the same coin. Problematicity is always in relation to a fundamental moment of significance. Events and experiences that strike us as significant always seem to refuse a final meaning. We experience problematicity when we run up against the limits of meaning. The experience of problematicity subverts the sense of the world passed down by tradition, myth, ideology, and religion. Patočka thinks religions tend to make the mistake of bestowing a signification on certain instances of significance. According to Patočka, problematicity has always been part of human experience. The history of mankind is one of shaking the certitude of a pre-given meaning. Every life-world is intrinsically problematical. The disenchanted scientific world that rationalism ushers in is problematical, because there is a loss of transcendent meaning. In general, Patočka wants to postulate a problematical relationship, or an incongruence, between the empirical and the ideal. Patočka thinks we have in the end to regard problematicity as an objective insight, that is, that problematicity is to be regarded as a structural characteristic of human existence and the world in general. It is to be thought of as a feature of the world, not a deficiency in our understanding of it. Patočka’s account of problematicity renders his philosophy incompatible with both Husserlian phenomenology and Christianity. It precludes a rationalist teleology toward a unitary universal life-world.
Understanding Patočka’s concept of problematicity is one thing, but understanding its phenomenology is another. It makes sense to suppose that if one wished to explore the phenomenology of problematicity, then it would become most salient in situations involving a pronounced or unequivocal incongruence between the empirical and the ideal. This explains why Patočka finds encounters with meaninglessness to be particularly illuminating of the phenomenology of problematicity. Patočka wants to suggest that in the encounter with an instance of meaninglessness, one can be moved to bring meaning into the encounter oneself, by sacrificing oneself in some sense. One decides spontaneously to put oneself on the line, so to speak, without concern for, or clear knowledge of, the consequences for oneself or for others. Patočka’s “sacrifice” is an existential refusal of nihilism. It manages to eschew or stave off the Nietzschean response to the problem of nihilism, according to which the only way to produce meaning is through force, strength, and power. In Patočka’s sacrifice, then, we seem to have an experience of transcendence without a metaphysical positing of that transcendence. Patočka calls this Negative Platonism. It seems to be about demonstrating how strongly you are choosing to commit yourself to certain values. One experiences an absolute freedom in doing so.
This idea of discovering a meaning to life that reaches beyond one’s own survival, the satisfaction of one’s own appetites, and the mere perpetuation of human life is consonant with the Ancient Greek philosophical project of the “care for the soul”, which Patočka himself seeks to adopt and incorporate into his own philosophy. Patočka thinks freedom is crucial to the care of the soul. One chooses, in a free act of the will, a project or a cause whose scope transcends the immediate parameters of one’s own life. Adopting such a project places one in a position to live a free, responsible, and thoughtful life in which one’s thoughts and actions should be in harmony with the project. Instead of constantly reacting to circumstances, one begins to think and act meaningfully and coherently in the world. In the confrontation with instances of apparent meaninglessness, Patočka’s notions of sacrifice and the care of the soul offer a way of escaping what he sees as an excessive reliance on rationality, and is conducive toward an existentially responsible shaping of one’s life. It is a path toward a deepening of the soul.
Committing to a cause that you have chosen for yourself motivates you to enquire, research, and work things out for yourself, instead of relying on pre-given answers that have been passed down by religion or tradition. This is why, for Patočka, the care of the soul is fundamental to politics. Part of Patočka’s politics is aimed at forging new forms of community outside of the traditional community. Such communities should always comprise diverse views and opinions. They prioritise debate, dissidence, and dialogue over the survival of the community. Patočka sees a parallel between a society’s dissidents and Plato’s “guardian class”. They demonstrate model characteristics for everyone else: public spirited, community minded, ascetic, sincere, admonishing, speaking inconvenient truths, self-sacrificing. Because of their integrity, they are well suited to running stable institutions for a society. We find, then, that Patočka’s political philosophy takes its inspiration from Plato’s notions of the care of the soul, and the just state.
Patočka’s ambivalent relation to Husserl therefore turns out to be highly relevant to the contemporary debate surrounding the theory of the state and the question of finding the right architecture for a pluralist political framework. The philosophical rationale behind such an architecture is multi-faceted. Firstly, just as the polis of Ancient Greece provided a framework for dissent and debate, Patočka desires a respectful political space in which conflicting views can be aired, scrutinised, and reflected upon. Patočka, together with other agonistic political thinkers who have taken up his thought, want to find ways of incorporating dissidence and problematicity into our political institutions. Yet Patočka also wants his philosophy to inform a constructive politics – a politics that is capable of effectuating change, as well as facilitating dissent and debate. The framework and space for such debate and discussion is what Patočka calls the sphere of the political. For Patočka, the sphere of the political is distinct from politics. The sphere of the political is essentially indeterminate with respect to ideology, because it is grounded in the concept of problematicity. Such a political sphere will be more likely to forestall tendencies toward totalitarianism, and make twentieth century atrocities such as the Holocaust less likely to recur.
Furthermore, Patočka wants to find a middle way between rationalism and relativism. Pluralism cannot be allowed to become pure relativism, on the grounds that activity within the polis must be subject to certain norms of conduct and procedure. On the other hand, Patočka also wants to avoid pure rationalism, because he believes pure rationalism can lead to a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac that neglects the care of the soul. One of the attributes of a just state is that it is possible for the one who cares for his soul to flourish. This is connected to a concern of Patočka’s that liberal democracies can be conducive to a kind of moral vacuity, and don’t sufficiently nurture human freedom.
Part of the task lies in navigating the inherent tension between freedom, as Patočka conceives it, and the state’s institutions. A step in the right direction has been taken by some liberal democracies to the extent that they have a separation of powers between different institutions. They separate powers between the government of the day, the law-makers, the judiciary, law enforcement, and so on. This is what is meant when it is said that democracy is an institutionalisation of conflict, and that a healthy democracy will have an absolute indeterminacy at its foundation. Additionally, state institutions can have an important role in protecting certain basic freedoms, such as those of petition, association, publication, assembly, and speech. Subject to certain conditions, a healthy liberal democracy will actively encourage the expression of a diversity of views.
The desire to forestall relativism raises the question of whether there should be hurdles or entry criteria to the sphere of the political. The successful operation of Patočka’s political framework would not depend upon the possibility of a reconciliation between conflicting parties, but merely a mutual recognition of the essentially problematic nature of human existence. All parties should subscribe to a shared view of problematicity. Conflicting parties find themselves sharing a space of significance. One “prays for the enemy”, or at least tolerates him as a valid participant in the debate. This kind of tolerance is known as agonistic respect. Patočka calls it the “solidarity of the shaken”.
Patočka himself is pessimistic about the prospects for a widespread spiritual conversion to his doctrine of problematicity. It would require a transformation of political culture, a collective conversion to a new “civil religion”. But a new civil religion of problematicity, Patočka believes, would give modern human existence a meaning that it currently lacks.
Discussion Point 1 – Two Kinds of Optimism
One of this book’s key topics is reconciliation. This could mean reconciling the worldviews of two different cultures, reconciling two warring nations, or reconciling the agendas of two political parties. In this context there are two relevant senses of the term “optimism” (and similarly “pessimism”) in relation to the prospects for such a reconciliation. In some places, it is clear which sense Girardi has in mind, but in other places it is not always entirely clear.
Firstly, there is a teleological sense. For instance, one might believe that it belongs to the nature of rational discourse to arrive, sooner or later, at an agreement. Husserl believes that Western culture has an inborn teleology, a striving toward rationality and a life of reflective self-responsibility. When Girardi refers to “optimistic rationalism”, I infer that he is using “optimistic” in this teleological sense.
Secondly, there is a practical sense. For instance, one might believe, purely on the basis of what one knows about the world, human nature, and our political realities, that there are grounds for hope in relation to the prospects for reconciliation in certain areas. As Girardi points out, in this practical sense, Husserl himself is not entirely optimistic about our prospects. Husserl acknowledges that often history seems to be resisting and frustrating his goal. This is why Husserl describes his infinite task as “a struggle between awakened reason and the powers of historical reality.”
Two examples of where it is not entirely clear which sense is being used are: “Overall, however, Patočka is certainly less optimistic about Europe’s trajectory and the capacities of reason than Husserl was.” [94]; and “Although the possibility of a positive appropriation of problematicity is indicated here, Patočka is also pessimistic of the possibility of such a metanoia on a grand scale.” [122].
Discussion Point 2 – Habermas’s Shift to Post-secularism
Towards the end of chapter 5, Girardi points out some commonality and complementarity between Husserl’s and Habermas’s political philosophies, in that they both exhibit a faith in the process of reconciliation between different views. Girardi points out that Habermas “[…] attempt[s] a purely procedural approach to reconciliation”, and has “a faith in the rational transformation of particular views with an eye on their reconciliation” [89]. Girardi indicates that, according to Habermas, “all relevant views can meaningfully by reconciled with each other” [90]. Girardi argues that it is debatable whether Husserl’s and Habermas’s optimism with respect to the possibility of reconciliation between diverse views is justified, and that we need to consider the possibility that some views are not amenable to a process of rational reconciliation.
My concern here is that this particular discussion in chapter 5 doesn’t distinguish between Habermas’s earlier and later work. We have already learned in chapter 3 that “[i]n his later work, [Habermas] is no longer as committed to the secularisation thesis as he was in his earlier work” [39], and that in his later work Habermas sees liberal democracy as “a rationalisation, of communicative practices already present in more traditional worldviews, even if he no longer believes that these traditional worldviews can fully be replaced” [39]. Girardi also suggests in chapter 3 that when Habermas says he will not impose the condition of reflexivity on the worldviews of others, he comes close to “problematic relativism” [39].
Discussion Point 3 – The Holocaust
The Holocaust is pertinent to this book in a number of ways. Firstly, references to the Holocaust have an admonitory function. They serve to remind participants in the discussion about Europe’s political future of the imperative to avert a recurrence of something like the atrocities of the second world war. Indeed, the book’s closing sentence warns about the importance of not forgetting about them.
Secondly, the book is also concerned with enquiring into the complex web of causation behind the Holocaust. Girardi rightly points out that the extent of rationalism’s causal role behind the Holocaust remains a matter of controversy. [13] Yet the Holocaust would not have been possible without either advances in military and industrial technology, or systematic planning. So rationalism is certainly implicated in the web of causation, and Girardi is inclined to endorse Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of a “structural connection between the Holocaust and modernity” [19]. My observation about the phrase “structural connection” is that it could be taken to imply that modernity was somehow always going to entail something like the Holocaust. Perhaps such an implicit claim requires more justification than Girardi provides.
Thirdly, considerations about the web of causation behind the Holocaust lead on to questions about culpability. The egregious nature of the immorality of the Holocaust leads Girardi to believe that European civilisation itself bears some culpability for even making it possible. [150] It seems to me that laying a portion of blame at the door of European civilisation itself raises the following potential problem. What is to be said in this regard to Eastern European countries, for example, who tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust? For them, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. [26]
Fourthly, Girardi is also interested in how the Holocaust has affected our understanding of the broad sweep of European history, and the extent to which the Holocaust has dispelled a “Grand Narrative” of European cultural progress. There is no escaping the force of the observation that it would be a very strange “Grand Narrative” indeed that led up to something like the Holocaust. Yet Girardi also recognises that, after the Holocaust, the “Grand Narrative” did not disappear completely from the way historians thought about European history. [170]
As I reflect on the various ways in which the Holocaust haunts Girardi’s book, I find myself wondering if it might have been fitting for him to have said more about Patočka’s account of war contained in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. It is relevant to the question of causation, and, by implication, to the question of culpability, and provides an original metaphysical perspective on how we might understand the hecatombs of the first and second world wars.
Conclusion
As its title indicates, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka is broad in scope, and covers a lot of historical and philosophical ground. What stood out for me was the way it raised and explored the question of the limitations of rationality, and the unsettling possibility that the worthy aspiration to eliminate conflict and hostility in world affairs could turn out to be metaphysically mistaken and futile. In that respect, I found the chapters engaging with the thought of Jan Patočka particularly valuable. In those chapters I was impressed by Girardi’s elucidation of the ways in which Patočka’s philosophy is informed by subtle echoes and motifs from Christianity, such as the ideas of sacrifice and praying for the enemy.
In addition to becoming acquainted with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, and agonistic political thought more generally, there are many other good reasons for studying this book. Some readers will be seeking to find out more about the diverse roots of European culture. Other readers will be aiming to improve their understanding of the philosophical motivations behind rationalist pluralism and liberal democracy. Yet others will be interested in Edmund Husserl’s account of Europe’s “crisis”, and how his concerns about Europe motivate his phenomenological project. Girardi’s fascinating book is a thorough enquiry into the main currents that inform the contemporary debate about the direction of European politics. It is an absorbing read from start to finish, and contains a treasure trove of insights for anybody interested in the intersection between philosophy and politics.
