Category: Reviews

Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman: Hannah Arendt and Politics

Hannah Arendt and Politics Book Cover Hannah Arendt and Politics
Thinking Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman
Edinburgh University Press
2024
Hardback
232

Reviewed by: Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin)

In their book, Hannah Arendt and Politics, Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman not only develop a comprehensive and rich account of Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking and judging. But their analysis also constitutes an act of thinking and judging itself, as they employ Arendt’s “exercises in political thinking” (2023: 3) to understand the political crises of Arendt’s time as well as our own. Following the “Introduction,” which sketches Arendt’s elusive notion of “exercises in political thinking,” comes Part I, “Arendt and Politics: Thinking about the World as a Public Space,” which consists of three chapters: Chapter 1: “Action,” Chapter 2: “Between Human Action and the Life of the Mind,” and Chapter 3: “Exercises in Political Thinking.” Part I provides an excellent account of Arendt’s conception of politics, the human condition, as well as thinking and judging.

In Part II, “Arendt and Political Thinking: Judging the World(s) We Share,” Robaszkiewicz and Weinman offer up a wide variety of political (and social) topics for debate. In Arendtian fashion, they think about the crises that Arendt was confronted with herself, namely, the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (reflected in the Heidegger controversy) and the Eichmann trial, explored in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman do not limit their analysis to the political concerns that Arendt sought to understand. Instead, they apply her exercises in political thinking to the crises and political concerns of our time. In Chapter 6, “The Earth, Education, and Human Action,” the authors tackle one of our most pressing political concerns: the climate crisis. By taking the Fridays for Future protest as a “case study” (2023: 199), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman emphasize the vital role that children play in shaping and changing the world.

Chapter 7, “Social Justice and Feminist Agency,” explores an appropriate way to politicize social concerns, thereby making feminist action possible within an Arendtian framework. Chapter 8, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty,” sets “political personhood,” not nationality, as the criterion for membership in a political community (2023: 157). Lastly, Chapter 9, “Thinking With and Against Arendt about Race, Racism, and Anti-racism,” exposes the blind spots in Arendt’s thinking about race, her Eurocentrism, and subsequently employs Arendt’s conception of enlarged mentality as a means for incorporating diverse perspectives into our own.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman navigate between thoroughly sketching the secondary literature on each proposed topic, advancing their own original opinions, and maintaining the freedom of their readers to think and judge for themselves. The authors thus tease out and exemplify what it means to engage in exercises in political thinking. To this end, the “Introduction” sheds light on Arendt’s elusive and ambiguous notion of exercises in political thinking. As the authors point out, this notion appears as an “inconspicuous remark” because Arendt only mentions it in the title and “Introduction” of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2023: 1). It is therefore no wonder that this notion has not been picked up in the secondary literature.[1]

However, Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s novel contribution to the secondary literature is their contention that Arendt’s exercises in political thinking lie at the very core of her work. As they claim, “Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as examples of such exercises” (2023: 1). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus establish a new and powerful approach to considering Arendt’s work. “Throughout her body of work,” the authors maintain, Arendt “never loses sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of political life” (2023: 1). It is generally acknowledged that understanding political events is Arendt’s main objective. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman shine new light on Arendt’s oeuvre by viewing it as an instantiation of exercises in political thinking, which is a means for gaining an understanding of the world.

The wide array of topics covered in Hannah Arendt and Politics thus serve as examples for how to think and judge about the world. By applying Arendt’s exercises in political thinking to the political crises and issues of our own time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman illuminate the continued relevance of Arendt’s thought. “By examining more closely Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking,” the authors claim, “our work understands itself as an opening for further research into the practical applicability of her political thinking” (2023: 201). In this way, each chapter offers an example of a possible judgment on a given topic, from Arendt’s misjudgment of Heidegger to framing the Friday for Future protests as an example of the political capability of children to change the world. By exemplifying what it means to think and judge, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus equip their readers with a framework through which to think about the concerns and crises of our time.

At the same time, the authors remain true to Arendt’s thought, insofar as they do not prescribe how their readers ought to think about and judge political events. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, “we also express our judgments and we do so in an explicitly Arendtian sense: not trying to tell our readers what they should think, but inviting them as dialogue partners to think and judge together about the world that we share” (2023: 71). Thus, the accuracy of their approach is that they remain true to the freedom involved in thinking and judging. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman could describe themselves in the way they describe Arendt: “perhaps like Socrates: a gadfly irritating the people of Athens to motivate them to thinking and better understanding of the world and themselves” (2023: 153). Like Arendt, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman inspire their readers to think and judge critically and freely, so that they reach their own judgments and conclusions. Hannah Arendt and Politics therefore truly embodies what the authors claim lies at the core of Arendt’s own work: exercises in political thinking.

In Chapter 1, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman proceed by accurately and succinctly sketching the core tenets of Arendt’s thought by following Arendt’s own unsystematic method, which is “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (Arendt 1958: 5). Since Arendt defines the activity of thinking as inconclusive or “resultless” (Arendt 2003a: 167), the authors thus paint the broad strokes of Arendt’s political thought. Not in “building block format,” but rather, they “pave Arendt’s conceptual paths in small steps, from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory” (2023: 11). Accordingly, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman employ the concepts of “natality, plurality, action, power, freedom, the private and the public, and the social” as “guideposts” (2023: 12) to understand Arendt’s political thought.

Their method thus does not over-systematize Arendt’s thought, but rather establishes a red thread that twists and turns through paradoxes, weaving key concepts into a rich and colorful fabric that allows us to see Arendt’s thought as a whole. For example, the authors establish a link between the activity of labor and the realization of the political phenomena that Arendt cherishes, e.g., speech and action, plurality, and political freedom. In what is meant to be a summary of Arendt’s political thought, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus already make a novel contribution to the secondary literature. While they provide a standard definition of labor as responsible for maintaining the natural life cycle, they tease out the political implication of labor that Arendt seems to overlook herself.

Generally, labor is regarded as pre-political in the sense that it tends to necessity (Arendt 1958: 31), thereby setting persons up for political participation. What Robaszkiewicz and Weinman add however is that the body is the medium through which citizens speak and interact with each other. As they contend:

This description of labor might seem deflated but we must not forget that human embodiment is one of the central conditions for all activities we ever undertake. Without a body that we take time to nourish, care for, and cultivate, as subjects we would have no worldly reality (2023: 16).

In this way, embodiment can be regarded as the physical condition for the possibility of political action and the realization of all public-political phenomena. Without engaging in labor, neither political participation, natality, plurality, nor political freedom could unfold in the world.

In Chapter 2, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly parse out three versions of thinking, which are often overlooked and conflated in the secondary literature. Namely, metaphysical or philosophical thinking; dialectical thinking (the Socratic two-in-one); and political thinking (enlarged mentality). I will focus on the first two versions and will return to the third later. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman rightly note that metaphysical thinking undergirds the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (city). This follows because the philosopher must withdraw from the world to pursue eternal and universal truths through contemplation. As such, the philosopher is fundamentally at odds with the polis and political involvement. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus convey the tension between the contemplative and active life as Arendt sees it: “thinking as such has little use for society” (Arendt 2006h: 190)” (2023: 39).

In contrast, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman frame the second type of thinking, namely, dialectical thinking, as relevant to the political community. They elucidate what Arendt means with dialectical thinking by turning to Socrates. While Socrates too withdraws from the world, “in his thinking he is alone, but not lonely” (2023: 40). Even though Socrates must retreat from the world in order to think, his internal conversation partner keeps him company. As such, dialectical thinking contains an inner form of plurality and intersubjectivity, insofar as it represents a dialogue between two people (Arendt 2003b: 90). This leads Robaszkiewicz and Weinman to the conclusion that dialectical thinking “turns out to be a thoroughly practical activity, even if of a very particular kind” (2023: 40). Similarly to other scholars, such as Berkowitz (2010), Fazekas (2024), and Topolski (2015), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman present dialectical thinking as world-oriented. Precisely because the internal dialogue between Socrates and himself mirrors public debate (Arendt 2017: 625-626).

Specifically, the authors argue that the political relevance of dialectical thinking is that it fosters moral character development, underlining political speech and action with moral responsibility (2023: 45-46). On the one hand, their claim squares with Arendt’s link between dialectical thinking and morality. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly observe, morality is “a by-product of the activity of thinking itself (SQMP 106)” (2023: 46), insofar as it is achieved by conversing with oneself openly and harmoniously. The authors explain that an honest internal dialogue therefore prevents self-deception and self-contradiction (2023: 45).

On the other hand, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman concede that their proposition appears to contradict Arendt’s stringent demarcation between morality and politics (2023: 46). Arendt upholds this division because morality is fundamentally subjective (Arendt 2003b: 97), which opposes the intersubjectivity and plurality that marks political debate. This follows because the golden standard that guides dialectical thinking, for Arendt as for Socrates, is being able to ‘live with oneself’ (Arendt 2003b: 78). Basing morality on internal harmony makes it subjective, seeing as what persons can live with is highly changeable. As Arendt admits herself, moral judgments “can change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century” (Arendt 2003b: 101).

Yet Robaszkiewicz and Weinman claim that dialectical thinking underscores political participation with moral responsibility. Thus, they suggest a link between morality and politics:

We may see the relation between them as an instance of the butterfly effect: as a by-product of thinking, the constitution of the person influences all her actions. Since action takes place between people, it always has a moral dimension (2023: 46).

While they point out that there is no guarantee that citizens will ignite and maintain an internal dialogue with themselves (2023: 47), the moral imperative is clear.[2] If citizens do not converse with themselves, they run the risk of contradicting themselves, and hence not being able to live with themselves.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman unfortunately leave the precise connection between moral responsibility and political action implicit. There are three reasons that make it difficult to connect the dots. First, Arendt does not make it easy to link morality to politics, owing to her commitment to keep morality and politics entirely separate. Second, and as the authors acknowledge, “Arendt herself sees this connection as somewhat ephemeral” (2023: 46). Third, Arendt’s understanding of morality is self-referential and highly subjective, which presents difficulties when squaring it with the world-interest, plurality, and the intersubjectivity of the political world. However, the following questions remain: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? If political action is world-oriented, then it follows that moral responsibility (in a way) should be as well. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to favor this interpretation when they hold that dialectical thinking “improve[s] both the moral and political competence of democratic citizens” (2023: 47).

Although this answer remains implicit in Chapter 2, it can be teased out in Chapter 5 by turning to Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s analysis of Arendt’s “ironic tone” (2023: 96) in her judgment of Adolf Eichmann. In this chapter, the authors interpret Arendt’s irony in her assessment of Eichmann as a means for the public appearance of her personality (2023: 101). In this way, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman capture the importance of the delivery of judgments, as opposed to their “particular content” (2023: 101). As the authors rightly note, Arendt’s irony in delivering her judgment of Eichmann reveals who she is and how she sees the world in her own unique way.

Their interpretation squares nicely with Arendt’s insistence that the appearance of our personalities is a fundamentally public-political phenomenon over which individuals have no control (Arendt 1958: 179). It is against this claim that Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s portrayal of Arendt should be read. For the authors argue that the tonality of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann has been questioned and misunderstood (2023: 101). From Arendt’s perspective, perhaps it is the lack of control that persons have over their appearance that has caused a discrepancy in the way Arendt judged Eichmann and the way her verdict has been received. To substantiate their claim, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman focus on “how she wrote (and spoke) even more than what she did in judging Eichmann;” and how her “‘wildly ironic’” (2023: 101) tone has been misunderstood.

Accordingly, the authors take Gershom Scholem’s criticism of Arendt as an example of misinterpreting Arendt’s irony in response to Eichmann (2023: 98). As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, Scholem found Arendt’s irony not only misplaced, but also indicative of her lack of love for her own people (Knott 2017: 203-204; 2023: 102). In response, Arendt contends that Scholem misunderstood her irony. She did not absolve Eichmann of culpability for committing crimes against humanity. Instead, Arendt believed she was simply recounting Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone (2023: 102). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus clarify that Arendt’s irony was her unique mode of judging Eichmann.

The objection to Eichmann [the book], Arendt is saying, is actually an objection to her subjectivity: not really the particular content of her judgments, but the personality that comes across in her manner of expressing that content (2023: 101).

This leads the authors to claim that irony is not only a means for the public appearance of the who. But it is also a means for sustaining public debate when confronted with unprecedented political events (2023: 102). Irony is thus portrayed as a mode of judging that reinvigorates public debate, and hence preserves the political world.

Furthermore, uncovering Arendt’s irony as the only viable response to unprecedented political events could have provided Robaszkiewicz and Weinman with a more precise connection between morality and politics. Arendt’s ironic response to Eichmann thus clarifies the questions raised above: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? A potential answer could be that the moral imperative to externalize one’s internal dialogue sustains and preserves public debate, and by extension the political world. Arendt’s particular way of acting on this moral imperative was to frame Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone.

Accordingly, what makes moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented is perhaps the realization that expressing one’s inner dialogue has the potential to promote the continuity and integrity of the political world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to imply this when they claim, albeit in reference to political thinking, “the public performance of irony as the manner of passing reflective judgment is integral to enacting one’s sense of personal responsibility as a democratic citizen” (2023: 107).[3] This statement demonstrates why the connection between moral responsibility and political action remains somewhat unclear. While Robaszkiewicz and Weinman distinguish between dialectical and political thinking, this distinction becomes muddled in their analysis of Arendt’s response to Eichmann.

However, there is a way to account for a possible connection between moral responsibility and political action while maintaining a distinction between dialectical and political thinking. Realizing that expressing one’s internal dialogue has the potential to spark public debate is the moment when dialectical thinking turns into political thinking, thereby making moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented. This squares with Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s claim that reflective judgment ties moral responsibility to political action (2023: 107). This realization thus constitutes a bridge between dialectical thinking and political action, mediated by political thinking.

Moreover, the third form of thinking, namely, political thinking, is presented in Chapter 3. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman sketch political thinking conceived of as enlarged mentality, which Arendt plucks from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. The most salient aspect of their account is that Arendt follows Kant by conceiving of enlarged mentality as a reflective ability. In contrast, many scholars, such as Disch (1993), Flynn (1988), Passerin d’Entrèves (1994), Pitkin (1981), and Young (2001), have misread Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality as a public ability. However, as Robaszkiewicz and Weinman make clear, enlarged mentality sparks a “speculative” plurality and “speculative community” (2023: 54), which occurs when persons think in the place of someone else. The authors thus proceed by teasing out the elements of reflective judgment that appeal to Arendt: the plurality incited by enlarged mentality (2023: 54); the intersubjective validity, impartiality, and communicability of aesthetic judgments (2023: 54-59).

Subsequently, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman introduce a valid point that problematizes the veracity of Arendt’s notion of enlarged mentality. They wonder, “[c]an we really think in place of someone else, let alone everyone else?” (2023: 55). This follows because we cannot truly know what it is like to judge from someone else’s perspective. The authors thus criticize Arendt’s choice of example when elucidating political thinking. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, “she suggests a thought experiment, in which she imagines how she would feel living in a slum from the perspective of a slum dweller (SQMP 140), and she frames this example as if it was not a problem whatsoever to do so” (2023: 55). The issue is twofold. First, if one has not experienced what it is like to live in such a situation, then one cannot fully inhabit the perspective of someone who has. Arendt seems to suggest as much when she holds that “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt 1992: 43; 2023: 55).

While Arendt’s example fails, reading her reflections on enlarged mentality as a whole allows us to arrive at the type of exercise the authors believe is more accurate. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman have it,

one can attempt to find a third perspective, in which the judging subject simultaneously remains herself and brackets her own position: the one in which she still judges as herself but, in doing so, she imagines multiple other perspectives, which are not her own, and thinks them through in a critical way (2023: 56).

Engaging in critical introspection, while not knowing exactly what it is like to think in someone else’s shows, is precisely the hallmark of Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality. While we can neither extricate ourselves from our own perspective fully, nor inhabit someone else’s perspective perfectly, what matters is that we ‘enlarge’ our mentality and aim for our judgments to be “more representative” (Arendt 2003b, 141; 2023: 55) of the political world.

This leads into the second point. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, our ability to invoke possible perspectives, and hence our very ability to judge politically, is flawed. As the authors point out, we might not envision someone else’s perspective accurately, let alone know what it is truly like for them to see the world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus hold, “[i]t is clear that in this process we might simply be wrong in our representation of other persons’ perspectives” (2023: 56). The authors link the failure of judgment up nicely with Arendt’s conception of opinion as partial, fleeing, and vulnerable. Arendt conceives of opinion, as the authors rightly note, in line with Socrates, namely, as “‘what appears to me’ (dokei moi)” (2023: 56). While opinions should always incorporate other possible perspectives, what Robaszkiewicz and Weinman home in on, is that opinions are nevertheless grounded in subjectivity.[4] That is, one can only ever engage in enlarged mentality from one’s own viewpoint. As such, political thinking and judging will always be limited, flawed, and sometimes completely mistaken. The novelty of their reading is that they present political thinking as “a very fragile practice, in which neither the journey nor the destination is certain” (2023: 56).

At the same time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain that political thinking is not an altogether futile undertaking. While we might fail in our thinking and judging, what motivates us to try again is to keep the political world alive. As the authors hold, “Arendt’s keenest and most lasting observation: the political, which is what makes us human at all, entails an ongoing practice of exercises in political thinking” (2023: 192). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus correctly observe that political thinking is a never-ending process of improving and correcting our judgments. On the one hand, this can be achieved by taking new perspectives into account when enlarging our mentality (2023: 200).

On the other hand, conceiving of political thinking as a “practice” means that “the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized” (2023: 200). The open-endedness of political thinking thus ensures that persons continue to improve and correct their judgments – with the hope that they will learn to judge well and more accurately each time. We can therefore view Hannah Arendt and Politics as an open-ended, non-prescriptive yet loosely instructive, performative guide for thinking and judging through the political events that marked Arendt’s time, as well as the current and future political events of our time. As such, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman fulfill their aim of unearthing “the hidden treasure of [Arendt’s] political philosophy” (2023: 198).

Bibliography

  1. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  3. Arendt, 2003a. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 159-192. New York: Schocken Books.
  4. Arendt, 2003b. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 49-146. New York: Schocken Books.
  5. Arendt, Hannah. 2006h. Vom Leben des Geistes. Munich and Zurich: Piper.
  6. Arendt, Hannah. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York and London: Penguin Classics.
  7. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 2002. The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  8. Berkowitz, Roger. 2010. “Solitude and the Activity of Thinking.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, 237-246. New York: Fordham University Press.
  9. Bot, Michael. 2013. “Irony as an Antidote to Thoughtlessness.” Amor Mundi, July 10. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/irony-as-an-antidote-to-thoughtlessness-2013-10-07
  10. Disch 1993. “More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory Vol. 21, No. 4 (November): 665-694.
  11. Fazekas, Samantha. 2024. “Leaving PhronesisBehind: Arendt’s Turn to Kant,” in Works of Philosophy and Their Reception (WPR). Edited by Nicholas Dunn. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www.degruyter.com/database/WPR/entry/wpr.28861265/html
  12. Flynn 1988. “Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Vol, 19, no. 2: 128-140.
  13. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  14. Knott, Marie Luise, ed. 2017. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  15. Koivusalo, Markku. 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Angels and Demons: Ten Spiritual Exercises.” In Hannah Arendt: Practice, Thought and Judgment, edited by Mika Ojakangas, 105-150. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
  16. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London & New York: Routledge.
  17. Pitkin, 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory Vol. 9, No. 3 (Aug.): 327-352.
  18. Robaszkiewicz, Maria. 2017. Übungen im politischen Denken: Hannah Arendts Schriften als Einleitung der politischen Praxis. Wiesbaden: Springer.
  19. Robaszkiewicz, Maria, and Michael Weinman. 2023. Hannah Arendt and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  20. Topolski, Anya. 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
  21. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, edited by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 205-228. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[1] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman list the following accounts that deal with Arendt’s exercises in political thinking: Bar On (2002); Koivusalo (2010); and Robaszkiewicz (2017); (2023: 1).

[2] The term, “moral imperative,” is used here in the loosest sense possible, seeing as moral decision-making, for Arendt, does not establish any rules for moral actions (Arendt 2003a: 78).

[3] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Michael Bot (2013) as making a similar point (2023: 105).

[4] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Gines (2014) as developing a similar point (2023: 192-193).

Michael Barber: Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning

Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning Book Cover Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning
Contributions to Phenomenology (CTPH, volume 129)
Michael Barber
Springer
2024
Hardback
X, 228

Reviewed by: Daniela Griselda López (CONICET, Universidad de Buenos Aires)

 

Michael Barber’s Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning represents a notable contribution to the study of Schutz’s provinces of meaning. Published on the cusp of the 80th anniversary of Schutz’s seminal essay On Multiple Realities, this book holds particular significance, both in light of Barber’s scholarly trajectory and the historical impact of Schutz’s work.

In the first chapter, Barber highlights resilience and responsiveness as central themes in Schutz’s approach, presenting them as pivotal to comprehending the full scope of his work. Although Schutz himself did not explicitly use these terms, Barber argues that the concepts and their implications serve as a powerful interpretive lens for examining his ideas as a whole. In addition, these concepts gain significance in the context of recent debates that address the confrontation between the Schutzian paradigm and other theoretical perspectives.

In this regard, the book engages with recent advances in the field of Schutzian phenomenologically oriented sociology (Chapter 2), which emphasize the notion of “imposed relevances” as a response to the interpretations of Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Zygmunt Bauman. These scholars argue that the Schutzian paradigm fails to address issues of coercion and power. Indeed, within the framework of these discussions, the notion of imposed relevances has been revitalized in recent defenses of Schutz’s social and political theory. Here, Barber brings renewed attention to the concept and demonstrates its pervasive and varied nature. Going further, he seeks to show “the often-unseen positive obverse of such relevances, namely, the multiple creative ways in which we come to terms with the panoply of imposed relevances.” According to Barber, reading Schutz does not evoke a prevailing sense of pessimism, as if we were weighed down or defeated by such imposed relevances. Instead, a different factor is consistently at play—one that aligns with the pragmatism Schutz sees as central to everyday life: resilience.

On Imposed Relevances and Resilience

Imposed relevances consist of the events, persons, or objects we encounter that upset our current systems of intrinsic relevances, that is, our preferred ranking of values, which, in conjunction with our systems of typifications, enable us to categorize, organize, and manage everyday life. When we encounter these imposed relevances, we are often compelled to engage with them reflectively in order to come to terms with their impact. Similarly, in political and social life, we continually confront policies, practices, and other human beings that challenge the projects dictated by our intrinsic relevances and impose constraints or limitations upon us. In this context, Barber approaches intrinsic and imposed relevances not as a dichotomy, but as a dialectic, highlighting the dynamic interplay between imposed relevances and what he identifies as resilience. This discussion suggests that imposed relevances must be understood in a broad sense.

The author elucidates this dialectic by examining the varied nature of imposed relevances, beginning with bodily and epistemological engagements with the world. Furthermore, imposed relevances manifest within the eidetic and ontological structures of both the natural and social worlds, as well as in efforts to assert mastery over everyday life. Notably, these imposed relevances encompass spatiotemporal distances and strata that are accessible through movement, interlocutors who are partially comprehensible despite differences, and the boundaries of the everyday life-world, which may be superseded by an attitudinal shift. Of particular interest is the level of coming to terms with the imposed transcendencies of other persons, where gaps between individuals are partially bridged through alternative forms of signification—a process that echoes Schutz’s reflections on the outgroup and the stranger. Culminating this analysis of different transcendencies, Schutz identifies finite provinces of meaning, which, unlike the transcendency of the other still anchored in the everyday life-world, pertain to worlds beyond everyday life.

When encountering imposed relevances, individuals are often compelled to reflectively come to terms with them. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic forced humanity to confront decisions about how to work, which risks to take, and which preventive strategies to implement. Barber argues that adopting finite provinces of meaning in everyday life can be understood as a resilient response to such imposed relevances. For example, when everyday life becomes boring, individuals might enter the province of play; when tragedy strikes a community, they might turn to religious rituals to attribute meaning to their suffering; or when slavery dominates everyday life, oppressed people may resort to folkloric humor as a means to vent their anger against their oppressors. This allows them to resist succumbing to the despair, depression, or submission that slavery typically engenders in its victims. The creation of an institution parallel to slavery—folklore—surrounded by protections against the slave-owners’ desire to crush any resistance, represents a socio-structural way of coming to terms or confronting the institutionally imposed relevances of slavery. Barber asserts that the development of this “para-institution of folklore humor” exemplifies resilience in the face of one of the most brutal systems of control and domination ever devised. As such, the development and engagement with alternative finite provinces of meaning illustrate the intricate interplay between imposed relevances and resilient human responses.

All the provinces of meaning explored by Barber—play, music, ritual, and humor— are explicitly identified by Schutz as distinct realms of meaning. Regarding ritual and humor, Barber revisits his earlier project from his 2017 book, Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning, with a renewed and focused emphasis on religious and spiritual ritual experiences, as well as African-American folkloric humor. Additionally, he provides a detailed account of two provinces that Schutz only briefly mentioned: play and music.

The Province of Play

After presenting play as a province of meaning in Chapter 3 and demonstrating how play uniquely instantiates the six features of the cognitive style of any province of meaning, Barber proceeds in Chapter 4 to draw out its implications for resilience, everyday life, and ethics. In this chapter, the author addresses the objections that Schutz’s theory of typifications may lead to ossification and “tunnel vision” unless supplemented by spontaneity. In response, Barber highlights Schutz’s comprehensive understanding of imposed relevances and resilience, as well as the role of play as a resource for resisting the sclerotic tendencies raised by this critique. In this regard, he argues that engaging in play itself becomes an act of resistance and resilience against the tendencies of everyday life to excessively regiment the self. The playful process of escaping the imposed relevances of everyday life, only to recreate variations of these relevances within play and subsequently exhibit a recurrent, restless resilience in coming to terms with these new layers of impositions, is also observable in everyday life.

Furthermore, this chapter asserts that play can lay the groundwork for ethical behavior by fostering interactive responsiveness among participants. According to Barber, rather than opposing ethics, Schutz’s view implies that play can serve as a precursor to ethical interactions, encouraging mutual attunement and collaboration as essential components for achieving shared ethical values​​. Barber emphasizes that play promotes a form of ethical sensitivity that, while not reaching the explicit “responsibility” described by Emmanuel Levinas, creates an environment of mutual engagement and attentiveness. Schutz views these interactions as arising from what he calls “imposed relevances”—the meaningful intrusions of others into one’s experience that invite cooperative responsiveness. In play, these interactions are not forced but naturally encourage individuals to attune to one another, fostering “collaboration in the struggle to realize aesthetic and other types of value together.”​ While Schutz does not equate play directly with Levinasian responsibility, Barber suggests that the dynamics of responsiveness in play lay a foundational structure for ethical behavior.

Intersubjectivity and the Experience of Music

Chapters 5 and 6 can be read together or in dialogue, as they complement each other in several respects. Chapter 5 begins with an exploration of the embodied, emotive, and affective aspects of musical experience, positioning music as a finite province of meaning characterized by its unique cognitive style. Building on Schutz’s essay, “Making Music Together,” which analyzes the social interactions inherent in the musical process, the chapter extends Schutz’s insights to deepen the understanding of intersubjectivity. Key implications include the irruption of the “Thou” into our pre-reflective experience, similar to how music affects us mimetically, and the immediate absorption in the other’s temporal flow, where a pure “Thou-orientation” becomes impossible. The chapter also addresses the asymmetrical focus on the other’s communication, both in music and in extended face-to-face interactions, and the difficulty of reflecting on the “we-relationship” without disrupting it. Additionally, it highlights the unique tuning-in to the other as well as the challenges of typifications in capturing the polythetic unfolding of the other’s experiences.

In Chapter 6, Barber builds on the understanding of social relationships developed in the previous chapter to explore a line of inquiry that Schutz himself did not pursue. Whereas Schutz typically describes provinces of meaning by examining each of their six cognitive features in isolation, Barber delves into how these features interact with one another, specifically by examining how non-social features—such as epoché, form of spontaneity, tension of consciousness, sense of self, and temporality—affect the dimension of sociality. Focusing on the provinces of music, play, and everyday life, Barber argues that non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning foster a form of “responsiveness.” However, he contends that this responsiveness does not reach the level of Levinasian “responsibility.”

Barber notes, though, that certain instances, such as jazz performance, can illustrate the transition from responsiveness to responsibility, as he explores in the final section of the chapter. This possibility of responsiveness and responsibility coinciding, Barber argues, is fully consistent with Levinas’s thought, as he identifies ethical responsibility even in the most mundane situations. In jazz, musicians engage in spontaneous, pre-reflective interactions that go beyond technical responsiveness to each other’s cues. They exhibit what Barber describes as an ethical responsibility—such as when a musician steps in to support or cover for another’s unexpected silence or missed cue. This requires attentiveness and care for each other, reflecting a moral commitment rather than just an aesthetic or performance-based interaction. Jazz players display a unique blend of freedom and ethical attunement, balancing spontaneity with respect and responsibility toward one another. This attunement becomes a type of “jazz etiquette,” in which musicians prioritize the group’s harmony over individual performance, embodying a relational ethic that merges responsiveness with a deeper moral engagement.

Barber intertwines the themes of imposed relevances, resilience, and responsiveness, proposing that the other can function not merely as a disruptive imposition but as a “beneficent imposed relevance.” Drawing on Levinas’s ideas, Barber suggests that while encountering the other might initially seem to threaten one’s intrinsic relevances, it can ultimately promote self-empowerment and ethical growth. Figures like Martin Luther King and Gandhi exemplify this by transforming the threat of death into resilient commitments to justice. Barber extends Levinas’s idea, arguing that imposed relevances, including suffering, can break through self-centered perspectives and promote liberation, grounding one’s identity in ethical responsibility. Rather than viewing imposed relevances solely as threats, Barber encourages considering them as opportunities for reflection and freedom. In this light, even spiritual and communal experiences may act as liberating imposed relevances, guiding individuals toward ethical responsiveness and selfless service.

The Religious/Spiritual Ritual Province: Resil­ience and Responsiveness to Others

Chapter 7 illuminates how the religious ritual province can contribute to the resil­ience and responsiveness to others, which this book claims to be central themes for Schutz. As in previous chapters, Barber focuses on social relationships and extends this analytic method of examining sociality through the lens of other cognitive style elements unique to each province, specifically to the religious province. The chapter begins by comparing ritual to play, discussing similarities and distinctions as widely recognized in anthropology. Barber then focuses on Abrahamic religions, in which communication within rituals involves dialogic exchanges on a bodily level between a personal God and the religious community (the hallmark of ritual). This bodily engagement fosters a form of sociality that extends to relationships outside the ritual setting, promoting empathy and responsibility toward others. Barber highlights how the unique, non-social features of rituals (like bodily movements, symbols, and music) can deepen interpersonal relationships, even with those outside the community. He also examines how non-social features like sensory markers and ritual music create a distinct “province of meaning” that separates ritual from everyday life. He draws a comparison to Husserl’s epoché, noting that ritual symbols such as incense, music, and architecture signal a shift away from pragmatism toward a unique cognitive state that stimulates openness to divine and human interrelations. Ritual music, Barber argues, plays a critical role in shaping intersubjective experiences by synchronizing participants’ internal rhythms, which enhances collective attentiveness and empathy. Barber points out that music in the ritual realm helps effect a break from everyday life, guiding participants into a shared temporal experience distinct from typical social roles. He further explains that rituals create an environment where typical social roles and personal judgments are set aside. For instance, sensory experiences within rituals—like the sound of hymns or visual elements such as candles—help cultivate a shared consciousness, enhancing mutual openness and empathy among participants. In Barber’s words, rituals allow participants “to be touched, beneath the control of the ego” in a way that promotes “communication between interactors” through sensory cues.

Finally, Barber emphasizes how the values cultivated in ritual—humility, respect, and receptiveness—extend beyond the ritual setting, potentially shaping attitudes toward others outside the community. This quality of ritual, which Barber likens to music in its ability to cultivate “attunement to oneself and others,” prepares participants for ethical responsiveness in broader social contexts. A significant theme in this chapter is the anticipation of divine revelation, in which the ritualistic waiting fosters humility and respect. Barber suggests that this expectation can counteract forms of violence often associated with religious and cultural imperialism, as the act of waiting for revelation nurtures respect for all individuals. Additionally, Barber argues that the cognitive style of ritual, particularly through music, helps deepen the sense of resilience and responsiveness—a core theme Schutz associated with meaningful social interactions.

Humor Folklore as a “Counter-Institution”

Chapter 8 focuses on African-American folkloric humor as a response to the oppressive conditions of slavery. Barber explains how this humor, embedded within a distinct finite province of meaning, allowed enslaved individuals to confront the “imposed relevances” of slavery with resilience. Through oral folklore, conducted in a protected, informal space marked by an epoché that excluded slave owners, African-Americans cultivated a unique form of intersubjective responsiveness. Just as in the ritual province, this departure from everyday life—doubly reinforced through music and sensual ritual markers—serves to cut participants off from everyday reality and accentuates the differentiation between the ritual sphere and everyday life. In much the same way, African-American folkloric humor enacts this departure through a triple reinforcement: folkloric boundary markers, a fictional narrative structure, and the humor embedded within the narrative. This creates a protective boundary around the humor, allowing it to flourish within its well-defined province of meaning.

Barber illustrates resilience by examining specific folkloric tales, including one in which a slave humorously outwits his cruel master, symbolizing both resistance and ethical complexity. This humor is not only a mechanism of endurance but also a subtle, covert critique of the institution of slavery. The chapter highlights how such responsiveness in folklore can transition toward ethical responsibility, creating a space where resilience enables solidarity and sustains moral identity despite systemic dehumanization. Barber links this resilience to a Levinasian ethical responsibility, suggesting that humor allowed for a shared understanding and a reimagined sociality among enslaved individuals, even hinting at the ethical transformation of relationships between the oppressed and the oppressors. Humor offered a way to express indignation and create solidarity against the dehumanizing conditions they faced, with folklore acting as a “counter-institution” to the institution of slavery itself.

Phenomenological Intentionality and Looking-Glass Sociality

The conclusion provides a comprehensive synthesis of the book’s central arguments, grounded in Schutz’s phenomenology and his seminal essay “On Multiple Realities.” Barber engages with Schutz’s conceptualization of finite provinces of meaning, emphasizing their dynamic and interconnected nature, and how the non-social features of these provinces affect the social relationships within them, while addressing the relevance of this conceptualization to contemporary discussions on resilience, sociality, and ethics.

Barber highlights how finite provinces of meaning are not static domains but fluid spheres shaped by intentionality, bodily movement, spontaneity, and affect, alongside rationality and theorizing. The transitions between these provinces—such as work, play, dreaming, and religious ritual—demonstrate their interdependence and the transformative possibilities they offer, enriching human understanding through the interplay of cognitive styles and tensions of consciousness.

Central to Barber’s argument is the role of resilience in Schutz’s framework, which is grounded in phenomenological intentionality, demonstrating that imposed relevances do not causally determine our responses. He foregrounds Schutz’s concept of imposed relevances, which arise from external constraints or social interactions. These external factors are not determinative but instead invite individuals to engage in meaning-making processes, with the caveat that whatever imposed relevances impinge upon us, we are not always capable of “overcoming” them.  Resilience, in this sense, emerges as a hallmark of Schutz’s phenomenology, challenging the reductionism of “vulgar pragmatism” by recognizing the depth of conscious life and its capacity to navigate constraints with creativity and adaptability.

The conclusion further explores Schutz’s idea of a “looking-glass sociality.” Barber contrasts this with Sartre’s view, in which relationships often involve objectification, reducing one person to an object of the other’s consciousness. Schutz focuses instead on intersubjective mutuality, in which individuals engage in spontaneous and reciprocal interactions that reflect a shared world of meaning. Schutz depicts interactions more in terms of mutual responsiveness. One partner interacts quickly, spontaneously, and coopera­tively with another, as happens among players, musical performers, ritual participants, or folkloric humorists. Barber emphasizes that Schutz’s idea of “looking-glass sociality” is grounded in responsiveness and mutual understanding rather than domination or subordination.

As a whole, Barber’s work enriches the understanding of Schutz’s legacy by providing nuanced insights into the fluidity of finite provinces of meaning and their profound implications for human agency, resilience, and the ethical dimensions of social life.

 

Andrea Oppo: Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity

Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity Book Cover Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity
Andrea Oppo
Brill
2024
Hardback
228

Reviewed by: Thomas Nemeth

Andrea Oppo has given us an interesting and thoughtful book on a most unusual person. Pavel Florensky, part Russian, part Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan, schooled in Georgia, educated at Moscow University and then the Moscow Theological Academy, became an Orthodox priest in 1911. The closure of the Academy shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution made continuance of his teaching activities at the Academy impossible. However, he, like Gustav Shpet, but unlike many others chose to remain in the Soviet Union and was not forcibly deported. Undoubtedly, the Soviet authorities realized for a time that his technical skills could be put to use in service to the goals that they and he shared. Notwithstanding the sheer number of his writings on various esoteric topics and his ecclesiastic position, which he refused to conceal, he, as Oppo states, ‟enjoyed the trust of the [Soviet] government as an applied scientist and electrotechnical engineer” (p. 1). When in 1933 those authorities realized he was an implacable opponent of their fundamental viewpoint – or their patience ran out, he was summarily dispatched to forced-labor camps. Finally, despite increasingly difficult prison conditions, Florensky survived until his ‟number” came up in connection with the order to reduce the camp population in the autumn of 1937. In his case, the camp population was reduced by one in the simplest manner possible. His family was not informed of the exact date of his death until 1989.

Although there are substantial biographies – even in English – of Florensky, Oppo provides in the appropriate context relevant biographical information including recently unearthed material that helps illuminate his topical discussions of Florensky’s thought and that were unavailable to previous biographers. In bringing this material to the attention of Western audiences, Oppo has rendered a valuable service to those interested and capable of consulting these many Russian-language sources.

Clearly of the major figures in the history of Western philosophy Florensky was closest to Plato, whose works he began to read even before entering Moscow University. Notwithstanding his enrollment in the undergraduate course in mathematics there, Florensky read and re-read Plato allegedly in Greek and regularly attended student philosophical circles. In his third year of study, he helped organize a mathematics-physics circle and wrote an address he planned to deliver – but ultimately did not – at the opening of the circle (late October-early November 1902) in which he affirmed that mathematical laws are the laws of the universe. As such, those laws should guide us in understanding the world. Although from a contemporary Western viewpoint such a claim may sound promising, as an expression of the legitimacy of mathematical physics, of the marriage of the a priori of mathematics with the a posteriori of physical observations, Florensky had a different understanding of mathematics than we typically associate with mathematics today. We should add here that Florensky was initially disappointed or dismayed with the narrow focus of the courses typically available to students studying mathematics. He did manage, however, to overcome institutional obstacles, and already in his first year at the University he attended Sergei Trubetskoi’s seminar-course on ancient philosophy, for which he wrote essays on Plato’s Meno and The Republic. Additionally, he attended Lev Lopatin’s seminar-course on psychology, for which he wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s view of the inductive origin of geometrical concepts.

Florensky’s desire to extend mathematical reasoning beyond the confines of an abstract discipline was evident from his first years in Moscow. Oppo writes that Florensky’s undergraduate thesis reveals a shift on his part from pure mathematics with his discovery of discontinuity in geometry to seeing discontinuity in every natural phenomenon (p. 38). Clearly, Florensky already in his first years at the university had little interest in pure mathematics and mathematics for its own sake. His outlook was grander. As a first-year student in October 1900, he wrote his mother that he saw mathematics as key to a worldview in which everything is worth study. Through mathematics, nature can be united with ethics and aesthetics to form a whole, and religion obtains a new sense. Florensky’s publication in 1904 of two articles ‟On the Symbols of Infinity” and ‟The Idea of Discontinuity as an Element of a Worldview” surely was taken at the University as an indication of his great promise. Although offered a position to continue his work as a graduate student in mathematics, Florensky opted instead upon graduation to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy.

Oppo writes that Florensky’s active engagement with Greek thought, particularly with Plato’s philosophy, occurred upon entering the Theological Academy and the start of the ‟Great War.” He is undoubtedly correct, but we must not understand that engagement as exclusive. As we shall see, his interests remained wide-ranging until the end. During that decade-long period, Florensky wrote much that concerned ancient philosophy, but these largely stemmed from lecture notes for a course on the history of philosophy that he taught for an extended period starting in 1908. (It was typical at the time at the theological academies for outstanding students to be retained to teach upon graduation, typically in the subject of their magister’s thesis. Oppo correctly gives Florensky’s graduation from the Academy as 1908 (p. 59f and p. 63) but a few pages later as occurring in 1910 (p. 67) – most likely a simple oversight. Oppo points out that Florensky’s notes clearly reveal an influence from Sergei Trubetskoi and that Florensky’s understanding of Plato’s thought underwent no substantial change afterward (pp. 59-60). Make no mistake, though, Florensky’s Plato was not the Plato of the Marburg neo-Kantians, a Kantian before Kant. His reading of Plato’s dialogues was one from a distinctly Christian, even mystical, viewpoint. As Oppo writes, Florensky’s ‟view of Platonism is integrated entirely within a Christian medieval context and, even beyond that, within a universal and extra-historical dimension” (p. 68).

In order formally to qualify for the teaching position at the Academy, Florensky had to present two lectures, which would meet with approval. The first of these was presented in mid-September 1908 and entitled – at least as given the following year in the published version – ‟The Universal Roots of Idealism.” It was Florensky’s first significant work centered on Plato, but a Plato portrayed as a ‟Christian before Christ” (p. 63). Oppo correctly provides Florensky’s claim in this lecture that only ‟magic” is capable of resolving the Platonic question, but just what is that question? Unfortunately, a plain and precise question, one not couched in vague, metaphoric language is not forthcoming. Oppo writes that theology and mathematics may appear to be concerned with two different worlds, but Florensky found Plato’s philosophy to be the bridge between the two. The difficulty here is that mathematics at least is a precise discipline that allows little ambiguity but offers a great deal of analyticity. There is little of the latter in Florensky’s lecture but a great deal of the former. What Oppo does not dwell on in Florensky’s lecture is the attempt there to make Plato a Solovyov-like prophet of integral knowledge and of ‟all-unity” more than two millennia before Solovyov and the Slavophiles. Rather as Oppo points out, Florensky attempted to assimilate Plato, on the one hand, to Pythagorean mathematics and, on the other hand, with the late Neoplatonism of Proclus (p. 108).

 The second of the two lectures, ‟The Cosmological Antinomies of Immanuel Kant,” demonstrated Florensky’s absorption not just with Kant, but also with Western idealism. It is surprising, then, given Solovyov’s fascination with Schelling, on the one hand, and the hold Hegel held on nineteenth-century Russian thought, on the other hand, that Florensky devoted so little explicit attention to the further development of German Idealism. This appears to be something generally overlooked by secondary studies. One also cannot overlook the curious absence in Florensky’s writings of references to the Marburg neo-Kantians, whose interests in certain respects was similar to his own, albeit from a different direction. Like Florensky, Cohen and Natorp were very interested in Plato, and like Florensky Cohen was interested in developing philosophy around a conception of the infinitesimal in mathematics. Oppo makes no mention of these similarities and differences but does note that Florensky displayed no interest in the Russian neo-Kantian movement that was arising as he himself was turning to Kant (p. 107). Oppo writes that Florensky’s Kant was a ‟Mach-like” Kant, the positivistic Kant presented in the early works of Alois Riehl. But apart from a mention by Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in his highly polemical Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which was intended as an intervention in a political dispute and was not an abstract philosophical treatise, Oppo presents no grounds for saying that Riehl’s works were well-known in Russia. Purely as an aside, we can note that of Riehl’s two-volume work Philosophical Criticism and Its Importance for the Positive Sciences only the second part of the second volume was translated into Russian. Apart from Peter Struve, who certainly could have known Riehl’s work in German, it was generally ignored by the Russian neo-Kantians and Kant-scholars, though these were few in number.

In his lecture on Kant, Florensky dealt with Kant’s epistemology as if it were the stark antithesis of Plato’s. In this he may have been consciously emulating Pamfil Iurkevich’s similar contrasting of Plato vis-a-vis Kant in an address he delivered at Moscow University in early 1866. However, whereas Iurkevich sketched Plato as starting where Kant had stopped his investigations, Florensky saw the philosophical ideas of Plato and Kant in sharp opposition. Florensky, not unlike many other theologically-oriented commentators on the first Critique, was chiefly concerned not with the ‟Transcendental Deduction,” but, as the title of his presentation indicates, with the cosmological antinomies. Oppo finds Florensky’s dissatisfaction with Kant to lie in the latter’s reasoning. Kant confused the conditions that he assigned to appearances with those he assigned to things in themselves (p. 85). Florensky also found a petitio principii in Kant’s placing conditions in the concept, not in experience. Oppo’s interpretation here could be greatly clarified. Are the conditions in the two cases identical or different? That is, Oppo fails to inform us as to just what these conditions in either case are so that the Kant-scholar can determine whether Florensky’s position is substantial or illusory. Just what are the conditions that Kant assigned to things in themselves? Is there a dichotomy in Kant’s epistemology between conceptual conditions and experiential ones? Florensky certainly rejected Kant’s strict distinction between appearances and things in themselves, but where does Florensky make the case for this rejection? For Kant, the basis for that distinction lies primarily in his ‟Transcendental Aesthetic,” and it is not his conclusions that are sophistical, but Florensky’s.

Oppo tells us that Florensky lectured for four years on Kant, presenting the latter’s Critical system, his scientific outlook, and even his biography. In this connection, Oppo writes that Florensky translated Kant’s pre-Critical Physical Monadology, which of course he did, but not in connection with his lecturing. Rather, it appeared in the house organ of the Moscow Academy, Bogoslovskie trudy, in 1905, although the original plan, as we see from Florensky’s letter to his mother from October 1902, was devised in conjunction with others in the university’s new mathematics society to publish such Kant-translations. Again, though only as an aside, Oppo refers to a 2020 edition of Florensky’s lecture notes on the history of philosophy, which includes a listing of Kant’s works in Russian. This listing, however, is quite unreliable. Vladislavlev’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason is given as 1807 instead of 1867, and Florensky’s translation of the Physical Monadology is given as ‟1901 August?” note the question mark found in this listing. These lecture notes as published contain no critical apparati that would inform us of the ambiguities in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting and his ample use of abbreviations. Additionally, if the listing of Kant’s works was made by Florensky himself, how is it that he did not recognize the errors pointed out above? And if these errors were ones introduced by unnamed editors of these notes in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting, then must we not be suspect as well of any precise reading of these notes?

Oppo declares that his main objective consists in identifying Florensky’s philosophy as a ‟dialectical part” of the Western tradition. Thus, being such a part it can confront that tradition (vii). One is hard pressed, however, to understand how Florensky could be considered as part of a tradition – or at least that part of the Western philosophical tradition – that upholds the fundamental laws of logic. For Florensky was apparently comfortable with rejecting its most elementary law, namely that of non-contradiction. Florensky questioned ‟the idea of truth based on an absolute and dogmatic faith in the law of non-contradiction” (p. 89). Thus, Oppo clearly recognizes Florensky’s position but seeks not to question it. How can dialogue occur if one of the participants rejects the very possibility of being contradicted and thereby refuted? Are we to take Florensky’s statements at face value without question, i.e., dogmatically? Arguably in contrast to Oppo’s picture of Florensky here, Zenkovsky in his classic  history of Russian philosophy contended that Florensky made a sharp distinction between Russian philosophy and philosophy in the West. Turning to his criticism of Kant’s antinomies, Florensky held that contrary to Kant’s position the antinomies arise not from a misapplication of the cognitive faculties, in subjectivity. Rather, they lie in objective space and time themselves. Would it not be more accurate to say that Florensky saw himself as the antipode of the modern Western tradition? Could we not say that Florensky saw his thought as fundamentally an effort, as Oppo himself declares, ‟to demonstrate the profound value – both ancient and modern at the same time – of Russian-Christian culture” against the scientistic one offered by the West (p. 7)? Oppo writes that although Florensky and Husserl are antithetical figures in many senses, both shared the view that Western science has an essentially nihilistic character (p. 15). I will defer to Oppo concerning Florensky’s position, but Husserl in the early pages of his Crisis of European Sciences did not charge science with nihilism, with the denial of values, but with indifference toward them. Husserl exclaimed that fact-minded sciences make for fact-minded people, but he does not say that such people reject values and ethical goods.

Oppo holds that Florensky’s originality, presumably overall originality, lies in his philosophy of discontinuity, a philosophy or, rather, a conception that he believed could be extended to all of nature and human culture (p. 13). This idea came to him with his discovery of Cantor’s work while still an undergraduate in mathematics. We should also mention Florensky’s early recognition of the continuum hypothesis, which Cantor proposed but which Florensky saw utilized, albeit without the term ‟continuum,” in Aristotle and even the pre-Socratics. However, in Florensky’s revisionistic history of mathematics Galileo relying on Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy abandoned the continuum hypothesis. Florensky found discontinuity seemingly everywhere in physical laws and in the natural world, in human history and in human culture, even in language, words, and names. In fact, the term, as Oppo recognizes, appears almost everywhere in Florensky’s works. What it lacks in them, unlike in mathematics, is a precise definition. Rather, it is an operative term, the understanding of which is tied to its specific usage. In other words, Florensky assumes the widespread, if not universal, presence of discontinuity without concluding to it on the basis of evidence. It is disconcerting also that having claimed discontinuities can be found in mathematics and physics, all other sciences should assume discontinuities are present in their respective investigative fields of reality (p. 52). Nonetheless, Oppo writes that Florensky held discontinuity to be a general theory in which there is an unresolved opposition of two truths that form a self-contradiction (p. 29). Here, we surely have moved beyond Cantor’s innovations in mathematics. Whether the term ‟discontinuity” is, then, the appropriate one when speaking of unresolved oppositions remains unexamined. Is Florensky’s conception of ‟discontinuity” the same as that used today in mathematics when speaking of discontinuous functions? In any case, Florensky viewed this ‟tension” between the two ‟truths” in a discontinuity to be necessary in order for knowledge to be ‟alive and not dead” (p. 29). Can we really speak of knowledge as being ‟alive”?

Oppo tells us that Florensky’s conception of discontinuity sets it against the reigning positivistic conception which has knowledge evolving progressively and accumulatively (p. 30). But is that not what we would mean if we say that knowledge is ‟alive”? Do we not then have a contradiction in Florensky’s conception of knowledge? Or is this again a ‟discontinuity” and thus acceptable? If we look at, say, Hegel’s Science of Logic, do we not also see a progression, a progression following a dialectical circuit through discrete stages each of which arises through the development of the previous one toward the Absolute? Was Hegel, therefore, a positivist? Or does Florensky propose a discontinuous model of knowledge that includes transitional stages arising purely by chance and thus as unable to be predicted in any way beforehand? Or is the model far more subtle with shifting reigning paradigms as in Kuhn’s now-classic study of scientific revolutions? Regrettably, these issues are passed over in silence.

Oppo writes that after the original publication of his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth in 1914 Florensky turned toward the second dimension of the world, viz., natural reality including culture (p. 122). But we are not to take this as meaning there was a sharp break or radical turning point in Florensky’s interests. In Oppo’s eyes, this second period in Florensky’s philosophical oeuvre can be characterized as a rational attempt to justify certain symbolic theories of his own. This reading of Florensky sets it apart from and against Cassirer’s constructivist theory of the symbol, which sees the symbol as ‟arbitrarily produced to give meaning to the world” (p. 136), and it is this that Florensky combats. It is highly unlikely that Cassirer would have agreed with Oppo that symbols are ‟arbitrarily produced.” Oppo regrettably ceases his confrontation of Florensky with Cassirer at this point which would have aided an understanding of the former’s theory. Instead, the author pursues a connection, though again only briefly, with the medieval theologian Gregory Palamas. This turn to a medieval theologian marks another characteristic of Florensky’s thought, a concern not with having science and evidence lead the way, but religious belief, indeed a sectarian religious belief. To be fair, though, Oppo makes an admirable study of Florensky’s work, as he phrases it, from the perspective of the philosophy of discontinuity, tracing its development chronologically (p. 31). The final result of this ‟new” philosophy is a ‟scientific Neoplatonism” (p. 35). What are some of the features of this ‟scientific” outlook? Here, Oppo cannot help but remark that Florensky held ‟unorthodox conceptions” (p. 48). Without delving into details – perhaps Oppo believes his own English-language edition of Florensky’s Imaginaries in Geometry is sufficient – Florensky sought to resurrect the Ptolemaic view of the solar system! The result of this was that, as another scholar of Russian religious thought has commented, ‟scientific terms lost their physical meanings and started playing the role merely of religious-metaphysical metaphors” (Obolevitch, p. 106). What are the constraints, then, in the construction of such metaphors? Whereas conceivably we give Florensky the benefit of some ‟poetic license,” he himself thought that data supported the veracity of the Ptolemaic view over the Copernican! Florensky also concluded, for example, that the speed of light was not an inviolable speed limit and arguably most astonishing that the border between Earth and Heaven lies between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Are we to take Florensky seriously at this point?

Clearly, Oppo attempts to cover as many of the lines of inquiry that Florensky pursued as possible. A short review, such as this, cannot do justice to all of them. But we can, however briefly, mention Florensky’s foray into aesthetic realism. Oppo tells us that Florensky called Renaissance painting ‟fake art,” an accusation meant to be a provocation. He set himself against ‟a specifically Western and positivistic” nineteenth-century idea (p. 146). But as Florensky’s reflections were written in Russian, not German, French, or English, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, a time when disturbances in the country were widespread, just whom did Florensky seek to provoke – the Bolshevik authorities? One cannot help but be suspicious of Florensky’s fundamental attitude. He, unlike his esteemed teachers never sought to journey, let alone study, in the West. He demonstrated a considerable facility with Western languages, but again unlike his teachers in mathematics and philosophy never thought to express his ideas in what was then regarded as the lingua franca for science. Why was this if he thought his ideas were true and be recognized as such?

Evaluating Florensky’s work is particularly difficult for the contemporary scholar, the Husserlian phenomenologist perhaps most of all, since, as alluded to above, it covers, on the one hand, such a wide range of topics in a quite peculiar, long forgotten style, largely dismissed as antiquated. On the other hand, it explicitly abjures logical reasoning, subjectivity, and manifest evidence. One contemporary scholar of Florensky’s writings, Michael Chase, has conjectured that no one, not even Leonardo Da Vinci, has made as many substantive contributions to a wide range of fields. The question remains, however, whether any of Florensky’s ‟contributions” were indeed substantive or nothing more than jottings of an overly zealous religious mindset. After all, Florensky’s various pursuits were in the interest of uniting all in a distinctly Russian Orthodox Christian worldview that owed so much to an idiosyncratic Platonism. To be sure, some have seen him as an obscurantist. Comparison with Solovyov – at least the later Solovyov – is misplaced. There is little of his ecumenical and internationalistic attitude in Florensky.

Oppo’s work remains a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on Florensky, the comments above notwithstanding. An understanding of Florensky’s wide-ranging thought, however flawed it may be from today’s perspective, can help illuminate the era, particularly its vying intellectual extremes, in which that thought, the consequences of which resonated around the world for decades. Oppo, as it were, presciently recognized the criticisms expressed here in writing that it can be hard to be objective with Florensky (p. 189). Whatever we may think of the object of Oppo’s study, it must not be confused with patience and diligence of the study itself.

 

Bibliography:

Obolevitch, Teresa. Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Joel Hubick: The Phenomenology of Questioning

The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka Book Cover The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka
Joel Hubick
Bloomsbury Academic
2023
Paperback
272

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.

Lorenzo Girardi: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka Book Cover Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political
Lorenzo Girardi
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2024
Hardback
226

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.

 

Kenneth Maly: A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking

A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking Book Cover A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking
New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Kenneth Maly
The University of Toronto Press
Hardback
xxxv + 288

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ACHE Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)

 

Kenneth Maly begins his pedagogical book, the seventeenth volume in the “New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” series since 2006, by directly addressing his readers with a set of suggestions and guidelines (xi-xv). Only later does he announce that his “project” is written for those not necessarily possessing any “philosophical training” (17). In the course of retrieving ancient Greek thinking, readers will encounter “issues of translation, the core theme of change” and thereby “the dynamic … intertwining conditions” that enter “the more hidden way of thinking that is less logical” (17). To achieve such a retrieval, Maly nominates a pre-eminent hermeneutic pair, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, whose earlier published and unpublished writings “shed light on how things ‘started’ in the early days of Western thinking” (xxviii; cf. xviii).

The Retrieval of Greek Thinking is divided into four main parts preceded by a personal “Preamble” based upon extensive dialogue about Maly’s “project” at the onset of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 plague (xvii-xxxv) and an “Interlude” introducing Heidegger’s “key words” and what they and their cognates “say-show” (3-16). The first part (17-92) surveys traditional, often ossified interpretations of ancient Greek thinking before several forays into alternative approaches of what the ancients “experienced, thought, and said” (17) including examples drawn especially from Nietzsche (47ff., 63ff.). The second part (93-163) delves into Maly’s framework centrally associated with Heidegger and his re-interpretations of, for instance, Anaximandros, Parmenides, and Herakleitos. Also contained within the second part are holistic analogies with David Bohm questioning quantum theory and with Lao Tzu evoking the Dao principle. The third part (165-288) explicates ten ancient Greek words, ten pivotal concepts ranging from khora, aletheia, and phusis to logos, psukhe, and nous, as reconstrued by Heidegger. The final part (289-319) closes by way of four questions or issues calling for further enquiry as well as a coda elaborating how “everything is connected, driven by potential” by which all of us “will be transformed” (314 & 319).

Given limits upon length, what follows will mainly probe the use made of Nietzsche and (whilst acknowledging the larger role played by Heidegger throughout the text) will concentrate upon the latter’s first book to appear in English, the 1935 Einführung in die Metaphysik [Introduction to Metaphysics], that is, before Heidegger’s lectures from 1936/1937 onwards began repeatedly yoking Nietzsche to the Greek-influenced poet Friedrich Hölderlin (apart from 1935, pp. 96-97). In keeping with Maly’s mode of presentation within the Retrieval of Greek Thinking, this review essay will conclude with the kind of apophatic discourse not only permeating Maly but also encountered in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This endpoint shapes the degree to which interpretations of crucial examples of extant writing or thinking attributed to centuries of Hellenic intellectuals from Thales of Miletos onwards remains open to debate. For instance, Heidegger laments how we become mired in “the terminology of linguistics,” in “technical instruments that we use mechanically to dissect language and establish rules” which “grew out of a very definite interpretation of the Greek and Latin languages” (1935, pp. 40 & 41). Without supplying evidence, it is not obvious that the long neglected Dionysos Thrax’s Tékhnē grammatikē (ca. 100 B.C.) and Marcus Terentius Varro’s De lingua latina (ca. 44 B.C.) respectively are candidates given their marked theoretical and practical differences as Daniel Taylor (1990) amongst others documents. Such contestability is not simply a debate over the interpretive use of textual contexts and intellectual allusions as Lara Pagani (2011) reviews. It equally derives from the presumption that adhering to the monistic if not holistic hypothesis that all that exists ultimately can be referred to one category (e.g. 301-303, 314-315) in opposition to upholding a duality of mind and matter. Or, in Maly’s words, apprehending the “It” is tantamount to attending to “what is happening beyond the physical and the measurable” (318). His “Meanderings” section (300-312) captures a multiplicity of ways to experience “It,” but “only with non-conceptual thinking and saying … that is poi-etic” (300) where the “poi-etic” involves “connotation rather than denotation” and is “open-ended rather than defining” (135). Ultimately, the “It”

is not a thing, even though things are one with it. It is not physical, even though physical things are one with it. It is not measurable, even though measurables are one with it. (318)

I

 

Having disclosed the direction of this critique, let us begin with Nietzsche’s incomplete 1873 manuscript Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen [Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks]. Maly praises it for its “groundbreaking insight” into “how to approach the Greeks, how to see and hear … uncluttered by inherited biases” (77) notwithstanding his overall goal of extending “Nietzsche’s intentions beyond even the steps he took”:

Nietzsche here is a springboard that takes us further … in a way he did not – and perhaps could not … [given] possibilities that were not yet available when Nietzsche attempted his history of ancient Greek philosophy. (73)

From Nietzsche’s perspective, Thales to Sokrates epitomized “an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge” and they “controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life” (§1, 31). Moreover, he continues, “what they invented were the archetypes of philosophic thought” and formed not a “republic of scholars,” but a “republic of creative minds” (§1, 31 & 32). Yet Thales, the earliest acclaimed philosopher, leaves us in a quandary because he apparently began “with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the origin and womb of all things” (§3, 38). According to Nietzsche, there are three reasons for attending to this proposition:

First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, contained … if only embryonically, is the thought “all things are one.” The first reason still leaves Thales in the company of the religious and the superstitious; the second … shows him as a natural scientist, but the third makes him the first Greek philosopher. (§3, 39)

Even if the above-mentioned proposition was not actually stated as a “pure abstraction,” but instead functions as “a concrete expression of it,” even if the thought is “unprovable,” its “value” centres “precisely in the fact that it was meant non-mythically and non-allegorically” (§3, 42 & 41) — and, as Maly might add, non-scientifically (48).

Maly, revisiting Nietzsche’s 1873 manuscript, contends that it recognised amongst early Greek thinkers a realisation that “‘the way things are’ is a dynamic unfolding,” a “dynamic of interdependent conditions and not merely independent things/being” nor, for that matter, the presence of “a highest being or highest unchanging principle” (63). Their texts should not be regarded as “incomplete or failed attempts” at ordering neatly organized logical arguments, but as engaging in dialogue “intended to expand our ability to think, our ability to stay with the question” in all its “complexity” (64 & 65). However, before embarking upon an Excursus on “the word tragic” (65ff.), Maly declares that “Nietzsche’s truth – my truth – is not a dogma but rather an engagement in developing the mind … that goes beyond mere academic exercise.” By so doing, intellectual “gymnastics” should be rejected so that “thinking” instead becomes “conscious, critical awareness” without “reaching a ‘final completedness’” (64).

II

The Excursus rapidly dissects the meaning of “tragedy” and “tragic” as well as the Dionysian-Apollinian dialectic within Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy [Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik] (2nd edn. 1874). For Maly, the term “tragedy literally means ‘goat song’,” although the connection between the two remains uncertain (65). Without providing readers details of possible connections, Maly basically recapitulates Nietzsche’s conflated aesthetic, epistemological and metaphysical speculations (66-69). Yet passing comments in the extant writing of Herodotos, Thoukydides, and Aristoteles – all of whom variously analysed the eventual dominance and significance of Peisistratos from 560/559 to 528/527 B.C. over Athens and the region of Attika – have long been used to rationalise a welter of possible genetic connections. For example, the term might refer to the goat sacrificed in rituals to the god Dionysios from which tragedy in theatre eventually developed; or, by analogy, to the sacrificial nature of the protagonist facing death within rituals and performances; or to the goat skin costumes of performers comprising the chorus; or, relatedly, to the use of a chorus of satyrs often depicted as half-goat, half-human. Equally conjectural are attempts to anchor the connection historically, notably, the first enactment of tragedy at Athens’ City Dionysia by the actor/playwright Thespis, ca. 534 B.C., the first one said to have initiated dialogue between an individual actor and the choric leader (khoragos) and to be awarded a goat.

Even a cursory reading of Nietzsche’s opening sections – a book he described to Friedrich Ritschl as “a manifesto” (Letter 40, 30 January 1872) – depicts tragedy as the Dionysian and the Apollinian “mutually augmenting one another” (§4, p. 47). Whilst Maly’s conclusion of his Excursus (70-71) mentions both the “contrast” and the “dynamic tension between the two,” the tripartite nature of perspectives embedded within Nietzsche is not fully clarified here for his readers. In brief, metaphysically speaking, the Dionysian is the “truly existent primordial unity, eternally suffering and contradictory” (§4, p. 45). For the ancient Greeks, “the greatest abstraction” beforehand had “kept running back into a person.” But Thales had purportedly said, “Not man, but water is the reality of all things” (§3, p. 42). Next, epistemologically speaking, only through a state of “intoxication” – Rausch akin to ekstasis (cf. §1, p. 36) – can the most “horrible truth” be glimpsed and, “once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence” to the point where “now he understands the wisdom of … Silenus” (§7, p.60). In the words of Seilenos, legendary mentor and companion of Dionysos, so often echoed by poets and philosophers alike, “What is best of all is … not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon” (§3, p. 42). It is an understanding not merely affectively felt or experienced, but also able to be expressed or predicated in communicable language. Finally, aesthetically speaking, once our individual rational apprehension with all its “restraint and proportion” has “succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states” associated by Nietzsche with dance and music initially, then “Excess” – Übermaß or that beyond measure or proportion – will have “revealed itself as truth” and contradiction (“the bliss born of pain spoke[n] out from the very heart of nature”) (§4, pp. 46-47).

The Apollinian is also expounded thrice. To continue drawing upon Nietzsche’s wording, metaphysically speaking, the “two halves of our existence, the waking and the dreaming states,” are “compelled” to uphold “the truly nonexistent” in the form of “a perpetual becoming in time, space, and causality,” that is, as “empirical reality” (§4, pp. 44-45). So, epistemologically speaking, when construing “our empirical existence, and that of the world in general, as a continuously manifested representation” of a postulated “primal unity,” we know little more than “a mere appearance of mere appearance” in dreaming states and “mere appearance” (Erscheinung) in waking states “as that which alone is lived” (§4, pp. 45 & 44). Aesthetically speaking, the arts for artist and spectator alike are “absorbed in the pure contemplation of images” (Bildern), and whose satisfaction in “minutest details” are akin to the “dreamer’s pleasure in illusion” – “together with its beauty” (§ 1, p. 36) – or are “projections” of one’s “self” (§5, p. 50).

Whenever the Dionysian and Apollinian interact in genuinely tragic artworks, Nietzsche declares, it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (§5, p. 52). Towards the end of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche repeats his declaration, elaborating upon his “leap into a metaphysics of art” by conceding that there is “only one way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately.” How? Through the “significance of musical dissonance” (§24, p. 141). As does tragic myth, music also possesses the “same origin,” a “common source,” in the Dionysian “primordial joy experienced even in pain” (§24, p. 141). Alternatively expressed, “artistically employed dissonances” reveal to us “the playful construction and destruction” of a world, such “world-building force” being comparable to a child at play building “sand hills only to overthrow them again” (§24, pp. 141-142). Here, Nietzsche has shifted from portrayals of the diurnal world, from portrayals of “an art degenerated to mere entertainment” or to “a life guided by concepts” (§24, p. 142). Instead, we enter “a sphere of art that lies beyond the Apollinian” (§25, p. 143) where

art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming … [and] participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure. (§24, p. 140)

III

In this penultimate section, let us briefly examine Maly’s attempt to guide his non-philosophical readers from the normal, traditional static duality we first inherit and upon which we first reflect (“the first beginning”) towards the retrievable “non-conceptual experience” of the dynamic non-duality (“the other beginning”) that he contends is “knowable beyond conceptualization and is sayable only in non-conceptual, poi-etic language” (169). As befits this lengthy third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking, it adheres to “the transformation of thinking and language” undertaken by Heidegger as he journeyed towards the non-dualistic in pursuit of “the meaning or question of being” (169).

Maly seizes upon the “unresolvable tension” this question raises, translating the crux of Heidegger’s 1935 Freiberg lectures, the Einführung, as: “We stand between two equally unsurpassable limits: On the one hand, as we think and say ‘being “is,”’ we immediately make being [Sein] into a being [das Seiende] …. on the other hand, as long as we experience beings, we can never deny the ‘being’ and the ‘is’” (171). Heidegger (1935, pp. 23ff.) subsequently elucidates the distinction not only by examples of individual objects such as a piece of chalk’s characteristics, but also by way of institutional objects such as a school whose building both inside and outside has a multitude of specifiable features. Yet the being or existence as such (Sein) of chalk or of school which makes it a particular being rather than a non-being (nichtseiend) eludes us. In wrestling with this conundrum, Maly urges his readers to avoid “oppositional” thinking, thinking limited to oscillating between “differences” (175).

However, what Maly neglects to examine for his targeted readers’ consideration are the multiple meanings or uses of the “is” when predicating or categorizing something (“that creek is algae-ridden”), when identifying or defining something (“this pentagon is a plane shape with five equal straight sides each of whose interior angles measures 108º”), and when stating the existence of something (“there is a supreme being”). That being as such (Sein) is “in” or belongs to particular beings such as chalk and school might at first be regarded as feasible since when ascribing characteristics to objects or things – “chalk is fragile” or “a school is a place of learning” – their existence is usually presumed before the characteristics being attributed to them. Yet presuming existence is not tantamount to identifying existence in itself as the most basic characteristic of existing objects simply because existence in itself is not a characteristic or ground, ingredient or source of existing objects. In other words, if we emphatically state that “cheetahs and dragonflies do exist,” we are stressing that some things possess characteristics connoted by the words “cheetahs” and “dragonflies”; that is, that these sets of characteristics apply to certain things.  Similarly, if we state that “centaurs and unicorns do not exist,” then we are denying that anything possesses characteristics connoted by the words “centaurs” and “unicorns”; that is, that these sets of characteristics do not apply to anything notwithstanding our imaginative ways of picturing fictional entities. Heidegger’s disclosure of the paradoxical nature of being or existence as such (Sein) and his subsequent quest for pinpointing its tendency both to conceal and to reveal itself in particular beings (das Seiende) appear to be stymied from the onset.

For all its running commentary on key Greek terms, the third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking gives little background about Heidegger’s response to and handling of pervasive turn-of-century phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses influencing his major writings in the decade before the 1939/1945 war (see, e.g., the Steven Crowell, Edgar Boedeker, and Cristina Lafont 2005 contributions). Two examples come immediately to mind. Firstly, by opposing the methodological division between mind and world, consciousness and its objects, with which to begin one’s philosophical enquiry, Heidegger began by refocusing upon indivisible being or existence as such and its meaning from which conscious and natural processes unfold in their turn. Secondly, when probing the fragmentary passages such as Herakleitos and Parmenides on logos (cf. 1935, e.g. pp. 96ff., 104ff.) up to Platon’s dialogue Timaios (ca. 360 B.C.) (cf. 1935, e.g. 50ff., 72ff., 137ff.), Heidegger often seems to be adapting a neo-platonic understanding of the metaphysical trajectory of early ancient Greek thinking and language (to be investigated in our concluding section).

Let us now end this section with the potential danger faced by Maly’s designated readers. In the attempt to defamiliarize traditional or reductive interpretations of pivotal notions including phusis and aletheia, do Maly and Heidegger all too frequently resort to neologisms that read as stipulations to be absorbed rather than debated? Consider the following passage about the “inner connection between Being and seeming”:

… we can grasp this connection fully only if we understand “Being” in a correspondingly originary way, … in a Greek way. We know that Being opens itself up to the Greeks as phusis. The emerging-abiding sway is in itself at the same time the appearing that seems. The roots phu- and pha- name the same thing. Phuein, the emerging that reposes in itself, is phainesthai, lighting-up, self-showing, appearing …

It would be instructive to clarify the naming force of this word through the great poetry of the Greeks, as well. Here, it may be enough to indicate that for Pindar, for example, phua is the fundamental characteristic of Dasein: to de phua kratiston hapan, that which is from and through phua is wholly and fully the most powerful (Olympian Ode IX, 100); phua means what one originally and authentically already is: that which essentially unfolds as having been (das Ge-Wesende), in contrast to the subsequently forced and enforced contrivances and fabrications. (Heidegger 1935, p. 77)

Now consider some of Maly’s glosses, for instance, when readers first encounter Dasein which ordinarily signifies “to be there” with its prefix da meaning “here” or “there” (3):

 In Heidegger’s thinking the word da indicates the “open expanse” in which one finds oneself … [and] always has an ecstatic character.

… from Sein und Zeit onward, it is a way of saying (1) being-in-the-world and (2) being in the opening-out (expanse) in which being itself emerges …. Thus, Dasein is the word for human existence in its ownmost and most proper way of being, that is, standing-out in the opening expanse … As such, the word Dasein describes the fundamental comportment or relationship that “humans” have – to the world and then to being as emerging – as “ec-static.” This names the fundamental shift, in Heidegger’s thinking, away from subjectivity and its objectifying, to the always already relatedness in the non-dual dynamic of no-thing and no-form “being” that cannot be objectified. (3-4)

Readers are also introduced to aspects of metaphysical being in itself (Sein). Aletheia is Greek for “truth,” the opposite of “falsity,” which “human judgement connects in concepts” that “corresponds” to “things” in the world (217). By contrast, Maly asserts, a-letheia contains the word lethe signifying the forgotten, the hidden, the concealed, the unseen where the negative prefix ἀ signifies “not” (217). After surveying phusis “beyond the traditional ‘reducing to the physical’” – including “nature”? – towards “growth, originating power, origin, force, birth” as signalled by its underpinning verb phuo (235-237), Maly gradually introduces “the playing field” (187) of phusis and aletheia, traced in Heidegger’s later seminars and essays especially on fragments of Herakleitos, by tabling the inner connections of being in itself and its manifestations or phenomena, and then noting:

I include φύσις here because it says the same as ἀ-λήθεια. Although the word emphasizes the action itself, it also shelters the no-form no-thing and dynamic withdrawing-concealing along with that which gets manifest or disclosed – all within the non-dual dynamic of radiant emptiness, aka beyng. There is no “third” aspect as such. Rather, by emphasizing this seemingly third aspect, we are empha­sizing movement from and to. But since all is one, this too is not separated from the non-dual one. (245)

To what extent can the anthropological, etymological, and ontological set of suppositions here unequivocally establish the veracity of Heidegger’s contention that “Being essentially unfolds as phusis” and is based upon “the unique essential relation between phusis and aletheia” (1935, pp. 77 & 78) as relayed by Maly?

IV

Despite sensitivity to the limitations of language and its translatability, the Retrieval of Greek Thinking and its emphasis upon Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical approaches invites us to critically examine their deployment of apophatic discourse and thinking. When reflecting upon the Birth of Tragedy in his 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” [“Versuch einer Selbstkritik”], Nietzsche finds it “an impossible book” in an affective reconstruction of his authorial state of mind confronting the “what” was being expressed and the “how”:

I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine … uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates …. What found expression here was anyway … a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God” …. What spoke here … was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this “new soul”—and not spoken! (§3, pp. 19-20)

Drafting a work during a period of relentless Prussian expansion especially at the expense of Austria and France by 1870/1871 and convalescing from illness contracted at the ten-week siege of Metz, Nietzsche concedes that “this questionable book” about the Greeks was “deeply personal” (§1, p. 17). Yet it obviously does not conform to an exercise in actual or fictional autobiography. Nor, as revealed above, is it a logical, provable argument; in fact, proof is not only scorned, but also seen as inappropriate if not surplus to the needs of readers initiated into Nietzsche’s realm of enquiry. Although better expressed in song than in speech, it becomes a realm expressible in the “strange voice” or “strange tongue” of a disciple of a yet-to-be known god, a disciple who appears to be struggling like “a mystical, almost maenadic soul” (§3, p. 20). By this stage, readers should have little difficulty sensing that female worshippers of Dionysios – the mainades – whose rites involving intoxicated dancing induced violent and enraged, frenzied and ecstatic states – are but a stepping stone into disentangling the question “what is Dionysian?” (§3, p. 20).

Birth of Tragedy provides a foretaste of apophatic discourse without recourse “merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision” in which the Greek “terms Dionysian and Apollinian … disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods” emerging from “these art impulses of nature” (§1, p. 33; §2, p. 38). Between the “two art deities … there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” but whose contrasting “tendencies run parallel to each other … till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘will,’ they appear coupled with each other” (§1, p. 33). When finally coupled in tragic myths, rituals, and the drama of Aiskhylos and Sophokles, the Dionysian is apprehended as “the eternal and original artistic power that first calls the whole world of phenomena into existence” and the Apollinian as “a new transfiguring illusion” that “becomes necessary in order to keep the animated world of individuation alive” (§25, p. 143). That this “should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by intuition” (§25, p. 144).

Needless to say, that language

can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena (§6, p. 55)

continues to pose problems. For example, how can the “metaphysical intention of art to transfigure” and reveal itself as “a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature” (§24, p. 140) when transcendental primal reality itself is “beyond and prior” possible experience? Granted, possible experience is patently not presumed by Nietzsche to follow the transcendental arguments and proofs of possible, systematically coherent experience developed by Immanuel Kant (1787, B.125ff. and B.756 & 813ff.). Furthermore, Nietzsche does not appeal to hypothetical counter-instances that appear as little more than cases of seeming experience. Instead, he actually appeals to his own experience of experiencing something of the transcendent when experiencing the third act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859) (§21, pp. 127ff.). But if the transcendental is beyond possible experience, then could whatever he purportedly experienced be an actual reportable experience of it? Other examples of what it is for the above-mentioned “cosmic symbolism of music” to reveal or intimate the transcendental brings us back to the vexed issue of what it is for the arts to represent anything. That, of course, returns us to Platon’s question about whether or not, in experiencing a work of art, we experience what that artwork represents (Politeia [Republic] (ca. 375 B.C.), Bk. X, 595b-602b).

Finally, apophatic discourse in arguably its most radical form can be located in the later neo-platonic text of Damaskios of Khalkis, Peri ton proton arkhon [On First Principles] (ca. 534). Damaskios exploits an aporia, namely, an impasse or conundrum, that in so far as the puskhe “divines that of all things, conceived in whatever way, there is a principle beyond all and without relation to all,” then “it should be called neither principle, nor first, nor before all, nor beyond all …; it must not be proclaimed, nor conceived, nor conjectured at all” (Part 1, §2, p. 24). Although “we can conceive nothing simpler than the One, the wholly one and only one,” any act of “predicating … categories” of it results in the “not knowable … not nameable” One being “made many.” Hence, such a predicated One, if “the cause of all and encompasses all,” impedes our capacity “to mount up beyond it” given that the “uncoordinated,” “circular” many “cannot form one cause” (Part 1, §2, p. 25). In brief, the One as the principle of all cannot be involved in any predicated characteristics or relationships because that would contradict its absolute transcendence. At best, the One is completely “ineffable,” completely “unsayable”:

And if it is necessary to indicate something, most useful are the negations of these predicates—that it is neither one nor many, neither productive nor infecund, neither cause nor deprived of causality—and such negations, I know not how, overturning themselves absolutely into infinity. (Part 1, §28, p. 39)

As his translator, William Franke (2004, p. 20) comments, to read Damaskios is to confront metalingual discourse driven to the very “limits of … intelligibility,” demonstrating where discourse “breaks down and yields to the ineffable”; exploiting “a style that is highly discursive and elliptical”; and deploying “the more skeptical-sounding vocabulary of reversal or turning around and against itself … of discourse that refutes and annuls itself”; yet “negatively register[ing] a vertiginous experience of radical transcendence.”

When Maly’s initial “Interlude” introduces Heidegger’s terminology of Dasein/Da-Sein, Seyn/Beyng, and Ereignis (and cognates), his focus is largely upon writings and lectures from 1936 to 1938 eventually assembled as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) in Maly’s neologistic co-translation]. Maly advises his basically non-philosophical readers that his suggestions for handling Heidegger here include “to be aware that the word Sein was central to Heidegger’s pursuit from the very beginning, where sometimes … what Seyn says was more hidden than at other times” and to “decide for yourself how to read those instances of Sein that are ambiguous, given that there is no logical proof for all of this” (8).

Although this critical review has been limited to Einführung, the 1935 volume already exemplifies many facets of apophatic discourse in train (not to be confused with phenomenological “apophantic interpretations” in Sein und Zeit (see, e.g., Boedeker (2005), pp. 159f. & 168ff.)). Witness how a concluding metaphor reverses the relationship between who and what can speak (if not switching, as Charles Taylor (1992) argues, from “instrumental” language in actual circumstances to “constitutive” language in possible ones):

Even the very act of asking about “the essence of language … regulates itself in each case according to what has become the prevailing preconception about the essence of beings and about how we comprehend essence. But essence and Being speak in language” (1935, p. 41).

Now witness how the shortcomings of logical analysis of being as such (Sein) demands removal from a sphere not available to logic and philosophical enquiry reliant upon it:

despite Kant and Hegel, logic has not taken a single step farther in what is essential and inceptive. The only possible step remaining is to unhinge it [that is, as the definitive perspective for the interpretation of Being] from its ground up. (1935, p. 144)

Again, witness two neighbouring examples of how etymologically grounded neologistic expressions, whether in Greek or not, repeatedly pervade a noticeably roving or seemingly discursive style, yet increasingly becoming, for philosophically untrained readers, semantically elliptical as if struggling with what cannot be fully said:

… the having-of-itself wherein the constant holds itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being be a being as opposed to a nonbeing. For something to take such a stand therefore means for it to attain its limit, to de-limit itself. Thus a basic characteristic of a being is its telos, which does not mean goal or purpose, but end. Here “end” does not have any negative sense …. “end” means completion in the sense of coming to fulfillment [Vollendung]. (1935, p. 46)

What we have said helps us to understand the Greek interpretation of Being … in our explication of the term “metaphysics”—that is, the apprehension of Being as phusis. The later concepts of “nature,” we said, must be held at a distance from this: phusis means the emergent self-upraising, the self-unfolding that abides in itself. In this sway, rest and movement are closed and opened up from an originary unity. This sway is the overwhelming coming-to-presence that has not yet been surmounted in thinking, and within which that which comes to presence essentially unfolds as beings. But this sway first steps forth from concealment—that is, in Greek, aletheia (unconcealment) happens… (1935, p. 47)

Turning to the closure of the Einführung, notice how being in itself (Sein) can only be approached by what it is not so that “talk of the indeterminateness and emptiness of Being is erroneous” when searching for the “meaning of a word” (unless, readers might wonder, when “the happening in which Being becomes word, was poetry” (1935, p. 131)):

The determinateness of Being was brought before our eyes by the discussion of the four divisions:

Being, in contradistinction to becoming, is enduring.

Being, in contradistinction to seeming, is the enduring prototype, the always identical.

Being, in contradistinction to thinking, is what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand.

Being, in contradistinction to the ought, is what lies at hand in each case as what ought to be and has not yet been actualized, or already has been…

… The determinateness of Being is not a matter of delimiting a mere meaning of a word. It is the power that today still sustains and dominates all our relations to beings as a whole … (1935, p. 154)

 

Finally, reflecting upon Sein und Zeit, Heidegger distinguishes it from the Einführung as “a title” that cannot be meshed with the above-mentioned negative “divisions” because it “points to a completely different domain of questioning”:

 

In such a meditation, “Being and time” means not a book but the task that is given. The authentic task given here is what we do not know; and insofar as we know this genuinely—namely as a given task—we always know it only in questioning.

Being able to question means being able to wait, even for a lifetime. But [our] age … takes questioning as … something that does not count as profitable. But what is essential is not counting but the right time—that is, the right moment and the right endurance.

For the mindful god

does detest

untimely growth.

—Hölderlin, fragment from the period of “The Titans” (1935, p. 157)

 

Ultimately, Heidegger, ever mindful of Sophokles’ Antigone (ca. 442/441 B.C.) (see 1935, pp. 113ff.), has broached the understanding of being in itself (Sein) as that which is the realm of the inexpressible, the unsayable. The supposedly first “violent,” “deep intimations” of Dasein and Sein experienced by the ancient Greeks “and placed poetically into its ground, remains closed off to understanding” and “a mystery” had they “hastily take[n] refuge in some moral appraisal” (1935, p. 125).

 

 

 

References

 

Boedeker, Edgar. 2005. “Phenomenology.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 156-172. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Crowell, Steven. 2005. “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 49-64. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Damaskios. ca. 534. On First Principles / Peri ton proton archon. Edited by L.G. Wersterink; translated by William Franke, “Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle,” Arion ser. 3, 12(1), 2004: 19-39.

Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and Time / Sein und Zeit. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. 1935. Introduction to Metaphysics / Einführung in die Metaphysik. Translated by Gregory Fried & Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 [citations to the 1953 German pagination].

Heidegger, Martin. 1936-1938. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) / Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann; translated by Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Kant, Immanuel. 1787. Critique of Pure Reason / Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited & translated by Paul Guyer & Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Lafont, Cristina. 2005. “Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 265-284. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872. “Letter 40: To Friedrich Ritschl.” In Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited & translated by Christopher Middleton, 93. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. ca.1873. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks / Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Co., 1962.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1874. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music / Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 2nd edn. In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 29-144. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1886. “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” / “Versuch einer Selbstkritik.” In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 17-27. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Pagani, Lara. 2011. “Pioneers of Grammar: Hellenistic Scholarship and the Study of Language.” In From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship. Edited by Franco Montanari & Lara Pagani, 17-64. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Platon. ca. 375 B.C. Politeia. Edited by Giovanni Ferrari; translated by Tom Griffith, The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Taylor, Charles. 1992. “Heidegger on Language.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 433-455. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Taylor, Daniel. 1990. “Dionysus Thrax Vs Marcus Varro,” Historiographia Linguistica 17(1-2): 15-27.

 

Guido Cusinato: Periagoge. Theory of Singularity and Philosophy as an Exercise of Transformation

Periagoge. Theory of Singularity and Philosophy as an Exercise of Transformation Book Cover Periagoge. Theory of Singularity and Philosophy as an Exercise of Transformation
Philosophy as a Way of Life, Volume: 4
Guido Cusinato. Translators: Rie Shibuya and Karen Whittle
Brill
2023
Hardback

Reviewed by: Emilia Barile (Università di Bologna - Dipartimento delle ARTI)

Used by Plato in the cave myth of Politeia, the term periagoge (from which this book takes its title) corresponds to the moment the prisoner ‘turns’ his neck. In diverting the gaze away from the used world, periagoge signifies a total ‘conversion’ of the freed prisoner to an entirely new perspective on reality. The subtitle, Theory of Singularity and Philosophy as an Exercise of Transformation, clarifies how this happens, and its consequences for the constitution of the human being. In human existence, this ‘turn’ often occurs by means of the experiences of crisis and fall, thanks to which the human singularity assumes its unique form. However, this does not happen in isolation but with others, through practices of emotional sharing, particularly in relationships of care. This second moment becomes explicit thanks to the force of exemplarity.

Based on a first Italian edition[1], the book is almost entirely new, encompassing four main focus areas: 1. The ontology of singularity and its arising in human beings; 2. the constitutive function of emotion and feeling in this process; 3. the key role of philosophy (understood as an exercise of transformation) for the meaning of existence; 4. a final proposal for building up a new axis of social  transformation.

A peculiarity of this volume is the constitutive role of images, with the help of which it has been grown: Starting with the iconic prisoner of the Platonic cave, other meaningful images surround Cusinato’s philosophical analysis. The second image is The Wave by the painter Hokusai: The typical curving of the crest of the wave at the center of this image, breaking the equilibrium, represents the process through which the human singularity assumes form in the experience of crisis and fall of one’s own certainties. Furthermore, two different depictions of the Annunciation (Botticelli’s and Titian’s) are shown: The anthropogenic process of formation does not stop after the impact of crisis or fall, but proceeds further. Concerning this second moment – which becomes explicit thanks to the force of exemplarity – relationships of caring for others and practices of emotional sharing are particularly crucial, thus involving the social feature.

The originality of this work mainly consists in rethinking the traditional question of the meaning of human existence, and in particular the conditions that are needed for it to arise, as a task that is closely interwoven with the anthropogenic process of formation.

 

Over more than 300 pages, Cusinato scrutinizes a number of different topics, as organized in the original structure of the book. Most of them remain pertinent in the contemporary philosophical debate: Self/person distinction, emotion/feeling relationship, social transformation in the era of narcissism and of ‘liquid society’, etc. Nevertheless, the author accepts some terms in a peculiar (and, sometimes, even idiosyncratic) way, so that sometimes it can be difficult to compare his own understanding with other approaches to the same topics (see, for ex., ‘self’, ‘person’, ‘feeling’, etc.). As such, the glossary introducing the volume turns out to be very useful. In the following, I will propose an analysis of some of the most interesting but also controversial terms.

 

The first of these is ‘person’ or ‘personality’, which is already much disputed. We mainly take ‘person’ for granted, understood as a very intuitively grasped concept: However, as soon as we address it more analytically, it suddenly turns out to be much more difficult to describe. As in Augustinus’s discussion on ‘time’[2], we know what it is only until we are asked for a definition. Beyond the approaches emphasizing the social role as an interchangeable ‘mask’[3], we usually consider personal ‘identity’ – understood as having moral as well as legal responsibility – as also exemplifying the definition of ‘self’ or consciousness.

Nevertheless, in order to indicate this concept of the ‘person’ that is acknowledged «as the self-referential subject that says ‘I’» (p. 3), Cusinato links it to what he calls the «little self»[4] (also identifying the dominant culture of narcissism as based on the very lack of distinction between ‘person’ and the ‘little self’). More precisely, personal «singularity» (as he defines it, rather than personal ‘identity’) is understood as the «result of a process of transcending one’s own little self» (p. 4). Under the impact of a crisis, the past horizons of the ‘little self’ turn out to be unable to give a form to her own new existence: So, she searches for further growth in the encounter with the other. Nevertheless, this ‘self-transcendence’ – which is intended as an immanent process, as part of the world – is a transcendence of the ‘little self’, and should not be confused with the existence of an otherworldly dimension (p. 6).

This definition, however, sounds somewhat puzzling for the reader used to the still ongoing debate about ‘self’ and ‘I’. First, in order to discriminate amongst the different levels at which we can deal with ‘subjectivity’, however understood, some approaches prefer to adopt the impersonal term ‘self’ rather than the personal ‘I’. Additionally, in the time sequence of biological evolution, personal identity is neither the principal nor the first organizational level, either phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Neurobiologically, this level corresponds to the so-called «autobiographical self»[5]: Its functioning requires a capacity for memory, for projecting into the future and into the past, starting from the present, within a social and linguistic context. Biologically understood, the autobiographical self can thus be identified with the reflective self that says ‘I’: This level is typically human and requires a language and the exercise of memory in order to be remembered. It is also the only level so far able to ‘witness’ the neural processes themselves, since it is endowed with self-reference, the ability to think about itself  thematically. At a complexity level immediately below sits the so-called «core consciousness», or «core self», the preverbal core: Its neural basis is in the subcortical nuclei of the thalamus, and it is neurally configured as a transient coherent construction of a pattern, formed following the onset of any relationship between the body and an object/event of the world[6]. The so-called «proto-self», meanwhile, is the structure at the deepest level of stratification, at the base of all subsequent constructions. Forerunner of all the higher organizational layers of complexity, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, «the proto-self is the steppingstone required for the construction of the core self. It is an integrated collection of separate neural patterns mapping, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism’s physical structure»[7]. Much deeper — in the footsteps of the researches of the last 25 years, collected by Tsakiris and De Preester[8] — the physiological underpinnings of subjectivity can be recognized at the physiological level of the interoception proper, as distinguished from proprioception[9], into which it is usually assimilated.

On the other hand, philosophy (mainly phenomenology) also seems to accept this ‘nesting principle’ structuring the different layers of ‘self’. Several phenomenologists nowadays understand subjectivity as based on ‘bodily self’ as its core dimension, and, eventually, on the «minimal self» hypothesis[10]. The perception of the body involved is the qualitatively distinctive experience of the body from inside, the ‘lived’ body [Leib] or the body-subject[11]. In between phenomenology and psychiatry, Fuchs has recently offered a detailed definition and taxonomy of self-experience as relevant for therapy of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression or borderline personality disorder (BDP). In James’s footsteps, Fuchs acknowledges ‘self’ as a «process» rather than a «mere construct or model concept»[12]. In opposition to Metzinger[13], he maintains that «selfhood is not a construct, but our fundamental reality»[14], whose disruption has pathological effects. Even if recognizing that we have still no shared definition of ‘self’ and that it is a difficult concept to grasp, he defines it, very broadly, as «a pole of experience contained in every experience, which centers the field of consciousness on a subject and establishes the unity of experience over time»[15]. The term ‘ego’ or ‘I’, which is traditionally used, thus has to be replaced by the narrower, lower and grounding dimension of ‘self’, that is bodily, unconscious and earlier developed in childhood. «The ego could therefore also be described as ‘the reflective self’»[16].

Following Gallagher’s ‘pattern theory’[17], Fuchs acknowledges ‘self’ as a ‘pattern concept’, grasping a multidimensional process developing at several levels in different periods of life. In a nutshell, Fuchs’s model recognizes two main levels of self-experience, i.e., the so-called «basal self» (basal, vital bodily, affective, social self, also acknowledged by Damasio[18], Gallagher[19], Zahavi[20], Rochat[21]) — which is primary, pre-reflective and always present at further levels – and the so-called «extended self», which is reflexive, narrative, existential and personal proper. These two main layers can be further distinguished in other sublayers: The basal self comprises the physical self, the ecological self, the primary social self; on its side, the extended, personal self includes the reflective self, the narrative self, the existential self[22]. When pathologically affected, different layers of self imply different therapeutic approaches as more appropriate. That’s why a working definition of ‘self’ is not only a sophisticated theoretical need, but, much more, a strong clinical urge.

Having said that, however, it is quite difficult to identify which of these understandings of ‘self’ or ‘person’ are shared by Cusinato in his book.  Up to now the «little self» he deals with seems to be identified neither to any ‘minimal self’ nor to the personal self-referential subject sic et simpliciter. Going beyond the so-called myth of personal identity (marked by ‘continuity’, howsoever understood), the author makes his proposal compatible with a radical Humean perspective. He rather interprets «singularity» as self-transcendence and incompleteness of the starting condition of the so-called ‘little self’. Even if associating it with the personal level, which is understood «as the self-referential subject that says ‘I’» (p. 3), I would say that the author idiosyncratically uses the term (little) ‘self’, which is instead mainly adopted as an impersonal item in literature.

Cusinato further deepens the difference between the concept of individuality and identity and the peculiar singularity of human existence. This singularity listens to the voice of the daimonion of its own individual vocation, independent of biological and environmental factors. His definition is thus intended to leave behind the immunitarian, self-referential and the substantial and confessional conceptions of person. Reborn in the space offered by an exemplarity, once her own ‘little self’ has been transcended in taking care of the other, she herself becomes a space to be offered for the growth of the other. Distancing himself once again from the usual meaning of words, the author understands ‘exemplarity’ as the providing of a concrete testimony to the successfulness of an expressive pathway of self-transcendence and detachment from the ‘little self’ (an exemplarity can be a teacher like Socrates, a testimony to the successfulness of an act of self-transcendence out of the ‘little self’). Since the personal singularity assumes form in detachment from the ‘little self’, it is a ‘non-self’, in the literal sense of the term. To be more precise, it is a «personal non-self» (p. 46). The process of transformation [Umbildung] Cusinato describes is intended as a «transformation», understood as a discontinuous and irreversible process thanks to which an  organic, social, or personal system creates a new equilibrium, giving a form to a being that is born without existential form. Anthropogenesis is thus understood as the process of formation that characterizes human beings, through practices of emotional sharing.

 

Connected to personal ‘singularity’ is the constitutive emotional aspect, which is another key insight of the book. ‘Self’, ‘person’, ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ turn out to be closely intertwined: Along with the recognition of the fundamental role of affectivity, Cusinato outlines the importance of emotional sharing practices, particularly care and desire, in the process of anthropogenesis described. Amongst affective states, feeling is particularly significant: However, this term too is adopted in a very peculiar sense.  Especially (but not only) in psychology, ‘feeling’ is mainly understood as the subjective component of emotions (emotion as it is ‘felt’), as distinct from the so-called ‘public’ dimension of emotion, i.e., posture, mime, facial expressions and behaviour. Although functionalist approaches à la Frijda[23], for ex., recognize ‘feeling’ as a mere epiphenomenon, the private dimension of an emotion can hardly be eliminated in the analysis as easily as the author suggests.

Cusinato understands ‘feeling’ not as referring to a subjective activity that remains confined to the psychological or mental level, but, more broadly, to «the ability of a living being to interact with the expressive level in such a way as to remain connected with the life of the biosphere» (p. 8). Along an enactive view[24], living and feeling imply each other: A similar perspective is also supported by Fuchs, outlining the very continuity – i. e., not identity (in Lewis’s[25] understanding) – between the organic ground of life [Leben] and the phenomenal level of experience [Erleben], as not just etymologically grounded. In his view, this continuity lies in the very double-faced description of the body as Körper and as Leib[26]. Furthermore, the most recent enactivist approaches, focussing on the affective dimension[27], endorse an integrated approach to the organic ground of ‘aliveness’ and the phenomenal level of ‘experience’ right from the start[28]. The reason for these multiple views lies in the fact that feeling too is a poorly defined concept: Yet despite this, psychologists, neurobiologists, philosophers etc. make broad use of it, in the most widely varying ways. As a result, they often use the same term to refer to very different phenomena. That’s also why the glossary proposed by Cusinato at the very beginning of the book turns out to be very useful, as well as stating explicitly in which sense the term is understood in the context analysed.

In my view, if we wish to work out a shared definition of ‘feeling’, we must not consider ‘feeling’ as related to emotions only. Emotion, in fact, is just one of the possible ‘felt’ states: Probably, not even the most interesting one. ‘Feelings’ are connected not only to emotions, but also needs[29], motivations, desires, etc.: All of these states include a hedonic component (at different levels of complexity) and feedback from the perception of the overall condition of the body. Moreover, the debate[30] on the definition and the classification of emotions seems to have arrived at a theoretical impasse: There are still no unified and shared taxonomies of emotions[31]. We go around in circles: Defining an emotion in a specific way implies a certain kind of classification following, and vice versa. In summary, the different theoretical views can be grouped as: Neuroscientific approaches[32], emphasizing the role of the physiological reactions (in the footsteps of the James-Lange theory[33]), and logocentric views[34], underlying the role of the cognitive evaluation (considered as primitive and antecedent to the physiological reactions). However, the emotion/cognition relationship is much more blurred than it is simplistically supposed to be: Even the most orthodox cognitivist views nowadays have to admit that emotions cannot be just ‘ignored’ or reduced to cognitive states.

Considering ‘feeling’ as mainly associated with ‘emotion’ probably derives from a typical overlapping in the English language, which often employs the terms ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ as synonyms. In contrast, the Romance languages distinguish these terms in a more refined way: The Italian language, for example, differentiates the term ‘emotion’ [emozione] from ‘feeling’ [sentire, provare] and from ‘sentiment’ [sentimento]. Cusinato acknowledges this, underlining the same distinction made in the Italian language between feeling as a noun [sentiment] and feeling as a verb [sentire]. He also proposes adopting the nominalized infinitive ‘il sentire’ in translating ‘feeling’ as that state «through which a living being remains connected to the biosphere, to emotions» (p. 8). Nevertheless, as I have suggested elsewhere[35], we can understand ‘feeling’ as distinguished not only from ‘emotion’, but also from ‘sentiment’: The last is defined as a mental state proper, always aware, following an emotion, or, more precisely, a combination of emotions. A complex sentiment like ‘friendship’, for example, is not simply a consciously perceived emotion: It is a long-term state, involving a set of emotions[36]. That’s why I share Cusinato’s preference for the Italian translation of ‘sentire’ instead of ‘sentimento’ and I also accept the term ‘feeling’ to refer to the entire set of states that can be ‘felt’ (like emotions, but also ‘needs’, ‘drives’, ‘motives’ etc.).

 

Amongst the different layers of feelings, the author focuses in particular on a specific kind of feeling, i.e., the so-called ‘primordial feelings’. Cusinato writes: «(…) There are different levels of feeling: from primordial feeling, through which a living being remains connected to the biosphere, to emotions, which represent feeling that orients the movement of an animal organism endowed with a body schema, a social self, or a personal singularity» (p. 8). At the biosemiotic[37] level, he recognizes at least three ramifications of primordial feelings: The feeling of the living body, the feeling of the social self and the feeling of the personal singularity (p. 156). However, ‘primordial feeling’ is not a notion that can be taken for granted either: It is not at all a shared object in our conceptual armoire.

Amongst other scholars, particularly Damasio (and also Colombetti[38]) recognizes ‘primordial feelings’ in the taxonomies of affective states: Examples of these basic feelings are the feeling of ‘existence’, the feeling ‘of the body’ or the feeling ‘of life’, the feeling of ‘being alive’[39]. Over recent decades, Damasio’s conceptualizations have become very popular in the affective sciences community, including outside neuroscience. Philosophers such as Ratcliffe[40], Slaby and Stephan[41], Varga and Krueger[42], psychologists such as Stern[43] and also psychiatrists such as Fuchs[44] acknowledge his organic portrayal of feelings as the neurophysiological counterpart of their philosophical/psychological concepts. However, in my view Damasio’s conceptualizations have been often misinterpreted[45], especially in the equation of the affective layer of ‘primordial feelings’ and the previously recognized layer of «background feelings»[46], to which these scholars usually refer. Even if the relationship between background feelings and primordial feelings is intimate[47], these concepts cannot be simply equated. Background feelings – such as a (felt) ‘tension’ or a (felt) ‘edginess’ – are discrete feelings (i.e., different kinds of feelings, such as «edginess», «wellness», «malaise», etc.[48]), while «the feeling of being alive» or the «feeling of existence», classed among the so-called ‘primordial’ feelings, concern the overall feelings of the body[49]. Primordial feelings provide the overall ‘sense of the body’: They originate from a number of different sources, such as interoceptive and proprioceptive maps of the body as a whole.

Damasio recognizes that, in essence, his definition of ‘primordial feeling’ can be traced back to Panksepp, in particular to his notion of «early feelings»[50]: Both feelings share the characteristic of preceding any interaction with the world, or any feeling arising from the emotions. Nevertheless, there are also some differences: Panksepp relates the primary consciousness emerging from primordial feelings mainly to motor activities in structures of the brain stem, while Damasio emphasizes the role of sensory structures[51]. Moreover, concerning interaction with the world, Damasio is somewhat incoherent: He underlines that Panksepp’s views differs in that ‘early feeling’ appears to be necessarily related to external events in the world[52], while for Damasio, in theory, primordial feelings occur «regardless of whether the protoself is engaged by objects and events external to the brain. They need to be related to the living body and nothing else»[53]. Later on, in the same book, he maintains that «Panksepp also gives emphasis to the notion of early feelings, without which the process of consciousness cannot proceed. The detailed mechanism is not the same, but I believe the essence of the idea is. More often than not, treatments of feeling assume that they arise from interactions with the world […] or as a result of emotions. But primordial feelings precede those situations, and presumably Panksepp’s early feelings do too»[54].

This point is also controversial in Cusinato’s understanding of primordial feelings as the feelings «through which a living being remains connected to the biosphere» (p. 8), thus revealing an intrinsic relationship to the world that is in line with other phenomenological views (cfr. Ratcliffe’s «feeling of being» — i.e., the feeling of being-in-the-world[55]). Moreover, he defines ‘primordial feeling’ enactively, recognizing it in every living being: «Sunflowers feel light at the level of primordial feeling and so follow the movement of the sun. This is a process of expressive positioning» (p. 129).

In contrast, Damasio’s primordial ‘feeling of life’ (understood as the feeling ‘of the body’) turns out to be a feeling ‘of the body’ from ‘inside’[56], so to speak, and not the feeling of the body as ‘being-in-the-world’. This does not mean that the body is not in the world: It cannot exist in isolation, of course. In my view, Damasio’s view does not presuppose a different ontology: He just focusses on the body rather than the intentional relationship with the world, as in standard intentional feelings, from which the primordial feelings such as the feeling of being alive differs[57]. According to him, the ‘feeling of being alive’ (and the other primordial feelings to which it belongs) is independent of any connection to any object in the world. This, I believe, is explicitly clarified in the following: «There is some deeper feeling to be guessed and then found in the depths of the conscious mind. It is the feeling that my own body exists, and it is present, independently of any object with which it interacts, as a rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive»[58]. Damasio’s primordial feelings entail a relationship to the body, as a whole[59], and not a relationship to the world, as a whole[60] – even if the body is in the world anyway, and does not exist in isolation. Moreover, concerning the questionable intentionality[61] of the feeling of being alive described as ‘the feeling of the body’ as a whole, some further explanations need to be added.

First, regarding the ‘independence’ of any connection to any object in the world[62]: Even if the interrelation provided cannot be a kind of standard intentional relationship from the body to the world, in my view there has to be something like a body-world interrelation that is not intentional. Otherwise, the question of how the body might be able to experience itself as a whole[63], without any contact with the world as a kind of ‘other’ or border of the organism, seems hard to explain[64].

Second: To be ‘objectless’ (that is, the main feature of ‘background’ states as background feelings, as well as primordial feelings) does not mean not being-in-the-world. In my view, it is rather a matter of ‘focus’. Damasio underlines that, while standard emotional-feelings focus on the specific/aspecific object of emotions rather than on the body, background feelings (such as «tension» or «surging») or the primordial feeling of being alive, for instance, reveal an intrinsic relationship to our own body as a whole – so, coming into the foreground. In contrast, in feelings connected to emotions or other more cognitively structured states, the body always stands ‘in the background´, unattended.

In contrast to this view, and adhering to Scheler’s Gefühlsdrang[65], Cusinato defines ‘primordial feelings’ as «the most elementary way in which the organism interacts with the expressive level thanks to the laws of biosemiotics» (p. 113, my emphasis [NoA]).

 

In sum: The first part of Cusinato’s book offers a new ontology of personal singularity as a result of the anthropogenic process. Seeking to separate the problem of ‘singularity’ from that of personal ‘identity’ (marked by continuity, howsoever understood), the author goes beyond the ‘myth’ of personal identity and interprets singularity as self-transcendence and incompleteness of the starting condition of the so-called ‘little self’. This process of antrophogenesis comprises practices of emotional sharing (particularly, care and desire): The book thus highlights the interconnection between the antrophogenic process and the affective dimension (emotions, feelings, and the ‘phatic’). Cusinato supports the hypothesis that emotions and especially feelings (and their particular order) guide the expressive process by which our existence assumes form in the world through society, culture, and language.

The second part of the book assumes philosophy as an exercise of transformation. This periagogic turn is conceived as the starting point for the arising of personal singularity. The periagogic conversion – changing the order of priorities and allowing an entirely new perspective on reality, beyond common sense and common feeling – coincides with a philosophy understood as an exercise of transformation. However, there is a difference between the transformation concerning the ‘little self’ or the singularity. In the case of the ‘little self’, the transformation implies a process of pain and suffering: The earthquake fault is experienced only as crisis, severance, separation. In contrast, for the singularity, transformation can additionally involve very intense positive emotions, since it does not necessarily coincide with suffering or pain, but it also includes a kind of ‘rebirth’. The cultivation of emotions as desire represents a way of transformation of human beings that is primarily based on the plasticity of feeling.

In this process, philosophy plays a key role. Since human existence has no pre-stated meaning, but only possibilities of meaning, human beings need to do philosophy: They lack a pre-determined existential form. Since this process is connected to emotions and feelings as its drivers, identifying the most effective techniques for promoting a maturation of all affective layers should be placed today at the center of philosophy. Once reawakened, the new order of feelings themselves will produce orientation and a horizon of meaning, thanks to practices of emotional sharing and the force of exemplarity. 

This is significant not just at an individual level, but also at a social level: The last section of the book is devoted to this aspect. Starting from an analysis of the failure of social transformation in the era of narcissism, Cusinato ultimately proposes a new axis of social transformation, based on a reorientation of emotions in the public sphere.

 



[1] Guido Cusinato, Periagoge. Teoria della singolarità e filosofia come cura del desiderio (Verona: QuiEdit snc di Fill & C., 2014).

[2] Augustinus, Confessiones [400].

[3] Carl G. Jung, “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology”, in The collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. VII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 264.

[4] My emphasis [NoA].

[5] Antonio R. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

[6] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 22 – 23.

[7] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 190.

[8] Manos Tsakiris & Helena De Presteer, The Interoceptive Mind. From homeostasis to awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[9] Charles S. Sherrington, “On the proprioceptive system, especially in its reflex aspect”, Brain 29, 4 (1907): 467-482.

[10] Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective (Boston: MIT Press, 2005).

[11] Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1952); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).

[12] Thiemo Breyer and Thomas Fuchs, eds., Selbst und Selbststörungen (Freiburg:  Alber, 2020), 34.

[13] Thomas Metzinger, “Precis: Being No-One”, PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 11 (2005): 1—30.

[14] Breyer and Fuchs, eds., Selbst und Selbststörungen, 34.

[15] Breyer and Fuchs, eds., Selbst und Selbststörungen, 31.

[16] Breyer and Fuchs, eds., Selbst und Selbststörungen, 33.

[17] Shaun Gallagher, “A Pattern Theory of Self”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013). DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00443.

[18] Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness (Harvest edition, 1999).

[19] Shaun Gallagher, “Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 1 (2000): 14 – 21.

[20] Dan Zahavi, Self-awareness and alterity: A phenomenological investigation (Northwestern University Press, 1999).

[21] Paul Rochat, “The emergence of self-awareness as co-awareness in early child development”, in The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness, Zahavi, Parnas, Gruenbaum, eds. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004).

[22] Breyer and Fuchs, eds., Selbst und Selbststörungen.

[23] Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[24] Francisco J. Varela, “Organism: A meshwork of selfless selves”, in Organism and the Origin of Self, ed. A. Tauber (Kluwer, 1991): 77–107.

[25] David K. Lewis, “An Argument for the Identity Theory”, The Journal of Philosophy 63, 1 (1966): 17-25.

[26] Thomas Fuchs, “The feeling of being alive”, in Feelings of Being Alive, eds. Marienberg & Fingerhut (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012): 149.

[27] Durt, Fuchs, Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the shared World (Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2017); Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2014).

[28] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2007).

[29] Cristiano Castelfranchi, “Affective Appraisal versus Cognitive Evaluation in Social Emotions and Interactions”, Affective Interactions. IWAI 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. A. Paiva (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2000), vol. 1814. https://doi.org/10.1007/10720296_7.

[30] Anthony Hatzimoysis, ed., Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[31] Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A philosophical introduction (London: Routledge, 2012). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203721742.

[32] Jaak Panksepp. Affective Neuroscience: The foundation of human and animal emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jacques E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life (Simon and Schuster, 1998); Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Emotion, reason and the human brain (New York: Quill, 1994). 

[33] William James, “What Is an Emotion?”, Mind 9 (1884): 188-205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-IX.34.188; Carl G. Lange, The Emotions (Baltimora: William & Wilkins, 1885). 

[34] Nico H. Frijda & Jaap Swagerman. “Can computers feel? Theory and design of an emotional system”. Cognition and Emotion 1, 3 (1987): 235-257; Ortony, Clore, and Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The intelligence of emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[35] Emilia Barile, Minding Damasio (Roma: Ledizioni, 2016).

[36] Barile, ‘Dare corpo alla mente’. La relazione mente/corpo alla luce delle emozioni e dell’esperienza del ‘sentire’ (Milano: B. Mondadori, 2007).

[37] Guido Cusinato, Biosemiotica e psicopatologia dell’«ordo amoris». In dialogo con Max Scheler (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2019).

[38] Colombetti, The Feeling Body.

[39] «I now introduce this fundamental feeling as a critical element of the ‘self’ process, which I had not deemed necessary to note in earlier approaches to this problem. I call it primordial feeling, and I note that it has a definite quality, a valence, somewhere along the pleasure-to-pain range. It is the primitive behind all feelings of emotion and therefore is the basis of all feelings caused by interactions between objects and organism» (Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 185).

[40] Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality (Oxford: Oxford University, 2008); Ratcliffe, “The phenomenology of existential feeling”, in Feelings of Being Alive, eds. S. Marienberg & J. Fingerhut (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012): 23–54.

[41] Jan Slaby & Achim Stephan, “Affective intentionality and self-consciousness”, Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008): 506–513.

[42] Somogy Varga & Joel Krueger, “Background Emotions, Proximity and Distributed Emotion Regulation”, Rev. Phil. Psych. 4, (2013): 271-292.

[43] Daniel N. Stern, Forms of vitality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[44] Fuchs, “The feeling of being alive”.

[45] Barile, “Are Background Feelings Intentional Feelings?”, Open Journal of Philosophy 4 (2014): 560-574.

[46] Antonio R. Damasio. Looking for Spinoza. Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain (Harcourt, 2003); Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens.

[47] «Prominent background feelings include: fatigue; energy; excitement; wellness; sickness; tension; relaxation; surging; dragging; stability; balance; imbalance; harmony; discord. The relation between background feelings and moods is intimate: drives express themselves directly in background emotions and we eventually become aware of their existence by means of background feelings» (Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 125).

[48] Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 286.

[49] «There is some deeper feeling to be guessed and then found in the depths of the conscious mind. It is the feeling that my own body exists, and it is present, independently of any object with which it interacts, as a rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive» (Damasio Self Comes to Mind, 22, 185) .

[50] Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience.

[51] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, ch. 1, note 17 (my emphases [NoA]).

[52] Barile, “The Interoceptive Underpinnings of the Feeling of Being Alive. Damasio’s insights at work”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09900-7.

[53] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, ch. 1, note 17 (my emphases [NoA]).

[54] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, ch. 8, note 3 (my emphases [NoA]).

[55] Matthew Ratcliffe, “The Feeling of Being”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005): 52.

[56] «Primordial feelings [to which the feeling of being alive belongs] result from nothing but the living body and precede any interaction between the machinery of life regulation and any object» (Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 101; my emphases [NoA]).

[57] Barile, “The Interoceptive Underpinnings of the Feeling of Being Alive. Damasio’s insights at work”.

[58] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 185 (my emphases [NoA]).

[59] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 76.

[60] Ratcliffe, “The Feeling of Being”, 52.

[61] In my view Damasio’s formulation of the deepest level of primordial feelings (2010) definitely endorses a non–intentional account of this kind of non-emotional feelings, at least in the standard meaning of intentionality. Following his latest analysis, both according to the meaning of «aboutness» and the meaning of «directedness» (in Goldie’s (2002) understanding), Damasio’s background feelings – and above all the primordial feelings on which they are based – turn out to be not intentional (see Barile, 2014).

[62] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 185.

[63] Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 76.

[64] Barile, “The Interoceptive Underpinnings of the Feeling of Being Alive. Damasio’s insights at work”.

[65] «I have developed this concept while thinking of the one proposed by Scheler in 1926 by means of the term “primordial impulse of feeling” (Gefühlsdrang). Cf. GW VIII, 336; in GW VIII, 443, he also speaks of “exstatische[m] Gefühlsdrang”» (Cusinato, Periagoge, 113, note 6).

Hans Blumenberg: Die ontologische Distanz

Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit Book Cover Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit
Hans Blumenberg. Edited by Nicola Zambon
Suhrkamp
2022
Hardback
378

Reviewed by: Pierre-Adrien Marciset,

The historicity of consciousness and the horizon of its thought

 

“His habilitation thesis is undoubtedly a step that sheds light on Blumenberg’s career…” Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

 “He was [after all] the exemplary ascetic who had earned his lion. Working night after night, Blumenberg told himself proudly, the thanks had now come in the form of the lion.” Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg (2011, Seagull Press 2017, for the English edition, p. 6)

I thank warmly Robert Savage for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review, without which the review would not have reached such a degree of precision and clarity.

 

“Enjoy only with caution”

 

Hans Blumenberg (born July 13, 1920 and died March 28, 1996) could, despite everything, still be considered an “invisible” philosopher today, justifying the adjective with which Christoph Rüter’s documentary film refers to him (Hans Blumenberg – Der unsichtbare Philosoph, 2018). The German philosopher did not give interviews and did not allow himself to be photographed, nourishing, according to his current detractors, a certain staging of the reception of his texts, in particular those that are still inaccessible and have long remained so even for the German-speaking readership. This posthumously edited version of Die ontologische Distanz is the text edited by Nicola Zambon that Blumenberg presented in 1950 for his Habilitation thesis, accompanied by an “appendix” (“Anhang“, attachment) of the earlier versions, i.e. the one he proposed in 1949, immediately after his doctoral thesis, defended in 1948.

            This text belongs to the beginnings of Blumenberg’s production, corresponding to an important stage, in my opinion, in the anthropological practice of phenomenology – I will return to this. This anteriority, in relation to the works written later and which had a significant impact, could push potential readers to consider it as “outdated” insofar as it would be a “scaffolding”, a stage in the path of Blumenberg’s thought which could, in hindsight, be considered negligible. This is the premise often accepted by current research on Blumenberg. Indeed, since on the one hand Blumenberg himself did not authorize the publication (he wrote that he left it to his heirs to do what they wanted with it, decorating the manuscript with a drawing of a bottle of poiso labelled “enjoy only with caution”), and since on the other hand Blumenberg would go beyond some of the ideas proposed in Die ontologische Distanz while not following up on others, it would perhaps be fraudulent, from the point of view of the coherence of the philosopher’s thought, to resort to the elements of this text and perhaps even to speak of it.

            The German edition of Die ontologische Distanz nevertheless responds to certain works of contemporary phenomenology, such as the reflections of the French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras (Introduction à une phénoménique de la vie, Vrin, 2012, for example) who poses in particular the need to return to the idea of ​​the correlational a priori raised in Ideas’s §49, according to which “between consciousness and reality there is a real abyss of meaning” (Hua III/1, § 49), on which Blumenberg comes frontally in Part. II, §3, notably pp. 73-75. This is how Blumenberg tackled the problem of what separates philosophizing from life, and the question of the possibility of existence in the subjectivity of successive beings.

            Certainly, I find in Die ontologische Distanz the first stirrings rather than the foundations of notions that I will see better and more extensively defended elsewhere in Blumenberg’s work – for example what will become the critique of the acme of history in theology in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or again the critique of phenomenology that was deployed in several lost or transformed manuscripts, some sections of which ultimately constitute entire chapters of Beschreibung des Menschen. But I also find sketches which, even if better specified elsewhere, remain decisive from the point of view of the history of philosophy, and even from the point of view of the history of historical science, by shedding new light on the problems which he approached (this is the case for the whole question of the possibility of the self-assertion of reason, see second part, “§7 Die Selbstbehauptung der Vernunft for der Gewißheitsfrage”, pp. 113-126). To take yet another example, I find already in the defense version of Die ontologische Distanz the idea of ​​the “valences” of paradigmatic epochs which, from the idea of ​​a “morphology of ontological distance” become after 1961 the arguments of a “concept of reality” which he will study under various approaches, and on several occasions, under the first prism of a “consciousness of reality”. I’m thinking here of an article from 1964, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” (in: History, Metaphors, Fables, A Hans Blumenberg Reader, « Signale », Cornell University Press, 2020 for the English edition).

            Blumenberg abandoned many of his book projects, quickly tiring of the considerations related to the publication of his works and perhaps preferring to devote himself to writing, thus accumulating manuscripts in the drawers of his archives. Given this inclination, leaving aside or devaluing manuscripts that were not carried through to publication does not seem necessarily essential to us. If the young Blumenberg (thirty years old in 1950) later presented in more accomplished forms what he wrote by trial and error, in the heat of research, this does not seem to us to justify the elimination or reduction of these ideas, whether we assume that he returned to them later with a more mature and firmer eye or, conversely, that he preferred not to exploit the valences thus opened but left them in a state of a suspension. The extreme vitality of these twenty-six paragraphs spread over four parts  warrants their being given serious consideration, even if this vitality certainly sometimes suffers from confusion, contradictions, unfulfilled promises (notably in the fourth part), or breaks in the rhythm and the demonstration. As the “Habilitation dispute” attests (see below), Blumenberg perhaps also suffered from not having yet managed to find his own voice, sometimes ventriloquizing Heidegger at the same time as confronting him.

            I am convinced that if Blumenberg had wanted to simply to disown the work he had begun in the manuscript of Die ontologische Distanz, then he would not have isolated his text and allowed it to join his archives; to those who would justify this by sentimentality, I should defend myself by showing that some of Blumenberg’s great ideas are already, confusedly or not, expressed in this manuscript. Reading this text today perhaps allows us to understand the lineaments of a thought which was already emerging itself in his doctoral thesis (Hans Blumenberg, Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie, Frankfurt, Verlag Suhrkamp, ​​2020). It therefore makes sense to approach this text today “with caution”, keeping in mind this reserve, that of the reasonable prudence that Blumenberg maintained with regard to the treatment of this text and which resisted until the end, both in the mind of its author and in the letter of his work. One of the major terms of the whole philosophy of Hans Blumenberg could well be that of the “horizon” – historical, of meaning, phenomenological, of consciousness, cultural, technical, etc. In this respect, Die ontologische Distanz could well be the “horizon” that forms both the starting point and the perspective of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy.

 

            The rigor of Die ontologische Distanz

 

The publication of Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit in 2022 seems to us to be decisive for understanding the substance of Blumenberg’s overall work. It is also an opportunity for us to expose the homogeneity of a work always already contained in embryo in the Habilitation. To try to bring it together in a formula, this text deals with the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the structure of performance that is consciousness – consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. All of Blumenberg’s intellectual singularity is announced from this formidable ambition of the Habilitation.

            Hans Blumenberg’s first project aimed at nothing less than the restitution of philosophical “rigor” and anticipates the aims of his entire philosophy. Thanks to this first text, practically “genetic”, arriving immediately after his thesis on medieval ontology, the tools are now assembled that allow us to consider the system as a whole, by demonstrating the rigor of its logic, its outcomes and the necessity that presides over all the ramifications that were sometimes considered to have been scattered and disordered. However, it is possible today to discern the centers of gravity of this work. Jürgen Goldstein already named some of them in 2020, to which I can now add others thanks to the posthumous publications that have taken place since: “The central aspects of his philosophy require presentation in their respective context: the self-preservation of reason, the absolutism of reality, the phenomenology of history, for example.” (Jürgen Goldstein, Hans Blumenberg, Ein philosophisches Portrait, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2020, p. 11) I would add: genetic phenomenology; that is to say ontology and its conditions of possibility, the reflection on being in the wake of Aristotle as it was first pursued by Husserl, then defended by Blumenberg in Husserl against Heidegger while nevertheless integrating certain Heideggerian notions – without forgetting Landgrebe, whose Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (1949) is an essential text for Blumenberg — and especially for the Blumenber of the Habilitation thesis.

            The German term Strenge, rigor, is the keystone of one of the three versions of the subtitle of the Habilitation, as Nicola Zambon testifies on the first page of the afterword (Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers”, p. 349). The central question of philosophical “rigor” is grasped by Blumenberg as having been the point on which the Cartesian project stumbled, justifying Husserl’s resumption of that project (see on this subject the introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology which opens precisely with the recognition of this unresolved debt in the history of philosophy), and the failure, in Husserl’s own eyes, of what he concentrates in the formula of the “universality of the coincidence of language and thought” (Husserl, Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic, Halle, 1929, p. 22, here expanding the Husserlian idea of ​​§49 of the Ideas). This is how Blumenberg justifies in his introduction the perspective of this “investigation” that he is conducting on this subject, in his Habilitation thesis:

 

This breakthrough through traditional ontology does not take place in the claim of methodological freedom, in the name of a new attitude towards thought. Rather, it can be characterized as the persistence of a historical situation until it is interpreted. This situation represents the critical turning point that the understanding of being in modern times has taken as a whole. The turning point is succinctly marked by the crisis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, from which Martin Heidegger’s thought emerges. The presentation, classification and interpretation of this crisis constitute the main theme of the investigation. (Blumenberg, p. 11, which he extended p. 51 in the problematization of the historical context of the performance of intentionality)

 

Therefore, the gesture of the Habilitation proposed to restore through the “rigor” of the homogeneity of phenomenology, thanks to which the crisis irremediably separating the subject from the world of objects would be resolved. It is with the study of the conditions of mediation of the distance of this separation, as a source of ontogenesis, that the Habilitation is concerned; that is to say, Die ontologische Distanz aims to explain what is expressed in the phenomenon of ontological distance, but also to describe the mode of this expression.

            I will therefore discuss this work as if I was progressing on the cartography of the future complete philosophical work, naming different points of his radiancy’s philosophic activity, in order to underline its dynamic arcs (the famous “metakinetics of being” thanks to the work of which “the realities in which we live replace being“, Zambon, p. 372) and show their radiation from the focus that would have been Die ontologische Distanz. What could be considered as the problem of the distance of the subject from the world would be what would stand between the conscious activity of the interiority of the subject on the one hand and its consciousness of the world on the other, the latter understood here in the sense of the subject’s “consciousness cast” on the world. It seems to us that this denomination of “ontological distance” designates, simultaneously with this first problem, the ontological activity required by the need to connect with the world, which is active in and made active by the subject.

            For Blumenberg, and this is yet another justification of the relationship by “radiation” and “concretions” that I was talking about, the entire history of the world of thought is a succession of manifestations of this “metakinetics of thought as a whole” (Blumenberg, p. 18) that springs from an internal and fundamental encounter between two regimes of the activity of the mind. Later, after the publication of his book on metaphorology in 1960, Blumenberg would be more radical and would integrate into the Husserlian concept of the lifeworld the importance of the role of aesthetics in ontogenetic activity, through a “return” to the contributions of Ernst Cassirer. Thus when the support of ontogenetic certainty of the paradigmatic era wavers, the ontological distance comes into action:

 

Aristotelian scholasticism arises from the need for a scientific theology in an intellectual environment that wants to be convinced. It is an articulation of ontological distance that is no longer understood only in terms of possibility, but has its own objective horizon, in which there is a search and a doubt, a discussion of positions, an affection and a rejection. (Blumenberg, pp. 104-105)

 

Here, at the heart of the exercise of ontological distance, the reader can already grasp the terminology that would not be fully deployed until about ten years later. We also see the spirit, but also the letter, of a paradigm shift that is systematically identified in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975, 1987, MIT Press for the English edition), but also in the first edition of the book published in 1966, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (3rd ed. 1997, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition). All this contributes to a demonstrable homogeneity.

 

As a metakinesis of historical horizons — and in anticipation of the dynamics of repositioning that Blumenberg introduces in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit and that will be refined in the Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt — it is appropriate to examine why distance has taken the forms that it has. The analysis amounts to affirming that the Cartesian configuration of distance — the contraposition between subject and object — is a historical form, which means at the same time that it is only a historical form (among many others possible). The historical modes of distance were possibilities, they were neither destiny nor chance, but: contingency. The crisis of modern times was therefore not a necessity. The Cartesian understanding of the subject and the object that gave rise to the crisis was not inevitable, nor natural, but was in turn a contingent historical constellation whose evidence must be questioned in order to find a way out of the diagnosed epochal impasse. (Zambon, p. 355)

 

Zambon seems to support here this idea of ​​a shift from the “history of being” to what I could establish as a “history of the paradigmatics of being” that would ultimately be consummated. However, writing it this way would run the risk of mixing up what is announced by the Habilitation and what would only be methodically materialized later on. However, it should not be overlooked that the Habilitation is a work of a man in his late twenties, and as such contains the entire extremely rich intuitive arsenal of intuitions that he would spend the next forty years developing. It seems to us that, beyond the effective radicalization of his break with Heidegger, Blumenberg never changed his trajectory, even assimilating Heidegger over time.

            Hans Blumenberg constructed his entire work in perfect metaphorological adequacy with what he wanted to demonstrate (Goldstein, 2020, p. 28), always illustrating the object in the theorization of a demonstration which is homogeneous with the other perspectives of its theory. But this is not so much an irony, or a paradox, as the very mode of synthetic understanding by which we must always read Blumenberg if we want to understand him: we must read by accepting that erudition, and education with it, is a horizon, and not an arsenal (or not only).

            The content (the product) and the container (the production space, the work space, Arbeit) of his system overlap and coincide. Another of Blumenberg’s monumental works, Work on Myth (1979, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition), follows an identical pattern: it is a work on myth as what is on the author’s loom, but at the same time it is a study of the ways of working on myth, of the conditions of possibility and necessity of its production. The work of Die ontologische Distanz now available is the focus from which the other works can be understood as the materializations (Blumenberg uses the metaphor of “onion skins” in Die nackte Wahrheit, 2020) of the formal conditions of which Die ontologische Distanz was or would have been the archistructure and the turn from which Blumenberg rose to another dimension of philosophy. In other words, the Habilitation seems to us to have been the germ of a decisive stage in the genesis of the progression of what, thanks to it, we understand today as the crisis of the subject. In the same way, for the subject, the internal formal phenomenon of ontological distance is the focus from which the other aspects of its capacity to be a subject can be understood and interpreted – I will return this again below.

 

            The ontological crisis as a sine qua non condition for the possibility of the subject’s cognition

 

Since Die ontologische Distanz, or soon after, Blumenberg’s philosophy can consider that the very notion of crisis is intrinsic to the subject. Just as truth is the metaphor of the infinite aim of knowledge by the human being, and not its essentialization, the crisis would thus be the phenomenological experience that is at the very foundation of the conditions of possibility of what, particularly since Freud, is covered by the terminology of the different states of consciousness. Die ontologische Distanz, as already written, announces in our sense that of which Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960, 2010, Cornell University Press for the English edition) are the practical case and the illustration, if not even that of which they are the demonstration of the efficiency and the progress. The balance sheet of the internal crisis of any subject is both production and product of what is formally manifested in the two simultaneous regimes of the activity of the mind, and constitutes the plurality of the conditions of possibility of what is called the world of thought. These two regimes of the activity of the mind, conceptual and “nonconceptual”, are materialized in the thought of Hans Blumenberg in several works and in particular in his Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit (Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit, Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort von Anselm Haverkamp, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007, 2019).

            What philosophical content does Die ontologische Distanz proposes? It already started from the principle of ambivalence, still foreign to Blumenberg in 1948: contrary to the idea of ​​a progression of history that would be linear and progressive, on the Hegelian model, and in which humanity would have passed, in the eyes of Cassirer for example, from the age of substance to that of the understanding of function, it is for Blumenberg two simultaneous aptitudes that are both expressed in the regimes of the activity of the mind and that the need of each era pushes the subject to invest or not according to the paradigmatic prevalence. From this perspective, substance and function correspond not to two historical stages of the mind, but to two paradigmatic modalities (Blumenberg evokes “potentiality” in the sense of Aristotelian ontology, p. 137) of the mode of relation of the subject to the world, in language, in science, or in myth. The past, writes Blumenberg,

 

is “decided” from all possible pasts, which are always causally present: for example as literature, as vocabulary, philosophical doctrines, museum objects, etc. (Blumenberg, p. 138)

 

It is therefore a revolution in the relationship to history that is announced: no longer a history of being, but a history of “paradigmatic eras” reproducing and themselves culturally while producing the conditions of possibility of the subject’s self-constitution.

            In other words, individuals who establish themselves in the distance that separates them from the world of objects as transcendental subjects proceed from an epochal focus that polarizes the mediation of this distance, from the tools that are available. They do not follow a historical progression dependent on their relationship to belief or their relationship to science, they depend on the availability of tools that allow them to react to the internal crisis, and which leads them to organize themselves by instituting the conditions of possibility of ontogenesis as it is established in the epochal paradigm as resolution of the distance to the world. Because the transcendental subject is above all the process of the affirmation of its own autonomy in its use of the principle of determinability, this would be a phenomenology that wants to be existential (or existential) – the influences of Landgrebe, Freud but also Heidegger himself on Blumenberg are known. The subject, for Blumenberg (but not yet explicitly in the Habilitation), is capable of returning to the conditions of materialization of its own principle of determinability, starting from this fundamental crisis of which he identifies the work (and not the origin) in the quantitative differential of the regimes of the synthetic activity a priori of the cognition.

            From then on, this “ambivalence” (a term that is not already present in the paths pursued during the Habilitation, despite several titles exposing an ambivalence, such as §1 of the second part) is expressed as a paradigm, or as a principle, of a simultaneous double tension external to each individual in his relationship to the world, and internal to each individual in the relationship of his faculties between them, between finitude and imagination, and which materializes on the phenomenological level in the use of his own process of determinability as a transcendental subject through the historical availabilities in each era.

 

            The formal content of the text

 

In addition to the philosophers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Blumenberg’s doctrinal trajectory crosses several of the philosophical edifices that are contemporary with him. The borrowings that he makes from them and the critical props with which he modifies them are, however, often the occasion for a questioning of the foundations of their structures, sometimes without having named them. This is his obsession with the « paradigm” (see his 1971 article: “Paradigma, grammatisch”, in op. cit., 2001). What can thus pass for an infinite heterodoxy (to Husserl, Heidegger and Landgrebe himself, to cite the names that are most often found, but one could add Cassirer, Kant, Thomas Aquinas or Plotinus), or for a dispersion whose center one could not locate, would exacerbate a certain annoyance, a fortiori in the event of disagreements on the conclusions or the practicality of the concepts deployed. His writings on phenomenology (from 1981 to 1988, edited by Nicola Zambon) and his writings on literature (from 1945 to 1958, edited by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler) are known, both of which were published by Suhrkamp. By its proliferation, which nevertheless designates a center of gravity, certainly invisible to those who approach it without conjectures on the horizon, Blumenberg irritates.

            And still! The elements considered by Blumenberg in Die ontologische Distanz find their vein in the diffusion of everything that touches on ontology: both from the point of view of ontogenesis as production and at the same time from the idea of ​​ontogenesis as product. In doing so, he reflects both on the expression of the morphology of ontological distance in the ambivalence between mythos and logos (II §1) which contains in its seminal state what is in 1971 the surer gesture of “Wirklichkeitsbergiff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”, then also instructs a part of The Readability of the World (1981, Cornell University Press, 2022 for the English edition), as well as on the form that the exteriority of the guarantee of reason can take (II §7), as well as on history as an investment of ontological valences (III §1), but it is unthinkable to render exhaustively the content of the list of “historical-philosophical practical cases” which constitute the four parts of this text. Here and there, each paragraph could and should be discussed in order to be ideally presented; here is a loosely translated list which allows us to grasp the dynamics at work in the text:

 

Part I: Explanation and development of the problem of distance

  • 1. The questioning of the scientific character of philosophy
  • 2. The origin of the scientific self-interpretation of philosophy
  • 3. The decisive ontological character of the scientific concept of certainty
  • 4. The radicalization of the scientific concept of certainty in phenomenology
  • 5. The problem of the distance of the phenomenological reduction
  • 6. The inversion of the Cartesian-phenomenological approach

 

Part II: Insights into the Historical Morphology of Ontological Distance

  • 1. “Mythos” and “Logos”
  • 2. The Socratic Situation and the Logos
  • 3. The Metaphysical Definition of Theoretical Distance
  • 4. The Disempowerment of the Cosmic Logos
  • 5. Seeing and Hearing
  • 6. The Double Truth and the Origin of the Crisis of Certainties
  • 7. The Self-Assertion of Reason in the Face of the Question of Certainty
  • 8. The Decisive Ontological Character of the Enlightenment and the Awakening of the Historical Sense

 

Part III: Objectivity and Independence as Terms of Ontological Distance

  • 1. Historical Past and Historical Present
  • 2. The Original Form of the Philosophical Question
  • 3. The Genesis of Historical Consciousness as the Original Formation of Objects
  • 4. World and Object
  • 5. The World as Intellectual Achievement
  • 6. The Foundations of the Phenomenological World of Science in Its Problems of Originality
  • 7. The Yield of the Phenomenological Concept of “Horizon” for the Theme of the “World”.
  • 8. The Passive Genesis of the World Horizon

 

Part IV: The Finitude of Thought

  • 1. The Infinite Project of Phenomenology as a Claim to Historical Impartiality
  • 2. The Collapse of the Universal Familiarity Structure of the World
  • 3. The Destruction of the Ontological Foundations of the Project of Infinite Certainty
  • 4. The Reduction of the Forgetting of Being and the New Thought of Being

 

The editorial content of the 2022 work therefore includes the 1950 version, which is the one used for the defense and is spread over 276 pages (9-285), the framework of which I have just outlined, but it also contains the first, more concentrated version from 1949, containing 56 pages (287-249) including the bibliography, as an “attachment” to the 1950 manuscript. This is the file established by Blumenberg himself on the cover of which he had drawn a skull, thereby ensuring highly toxic, pirated or at least poisoned content – ​​hence the “caution” I was talking about earlier.

            Let us write it again with the help of this new argument: when consulting this skeleton, it’s possible to see clearly how, later, Blumenberg’s philosophy was able to envelop and integrate into pre-existing concerns the position of a philosopher of myth and culture such as Ernst Cassirer. Similarly, I could envisage what was already preparing the philosopher from Lübeck for the position that is his own regarding the Davos quarrel opposing Cassirer to Heidegger, notably on the level of the destination of the human being with regard to his finitude: as a source or as an impasse – even announcing, in fact, his response to the positions taken by Wittgenstein and Russell on this subject, and ultimately his position regarding the outcomes of the “cleavage” that fractured philosophy between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.

            Some would say that Blumenberg is involved in too many quarrels, wants to lead too many struggles simultaneously on the same front, and these titles give a paradoxical insight into the rigorous homogeneity of his approach, which radiates from the problem of ontological distance, that is, as I have already written, from the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the performance structure that is consciousness — consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. It should not be forgotten that the 1950 text of Die ontologische Distanz is not a testament but, on the contrary, a burst frozen in its energy, some of whose repercussions are only subsequently dealt with. Systematizing the idea of ​​a “thought of crisis”, Blumenberg even went, late in life (that is to say, not directly in the text which concerns us here), to the limit of the functionality of the activity of thinking.

 

            The Habilitation Quarrel

 

As early as 1949, Blumenberg was ready to submit the text of his habilitation thesis. One of the three jurors, Walter Bröcker, wrote the equivalent of a completely devastating preliminary jury report on the 1949 version. It is possible that Bröcker simply did not find the question posed by Blumenberg relevant, nor did he find a sensible solution to the problem he claimed to provide. There is no real explanation other than the speculations of commentators who do not allow us to understand this conflict, apart from, perhaps, a certain defense of the orthodoxy of Heidegger’s reading.[1]

            As Zambon writes, Bröcker’s exact motives are still unknown today, but it seems that the third assessor, whose name and the content of his intervention are still unknown to this day, ultimately “saved” Blumenberg (Zambon, p. 367). In any case, the candidate experienced the content of this preliminary report as a casus belli, and Nicola Zambon speaks of a “slap in the face” in the afterword. Blumenberg considered this preliminary report as a personal attack, aimed either at the Catholic tradition of his intellectual training, or at the heterodoxy of his Heideggerian reading, or even at the divergence of Heidegger’s reading of Husserl on the one hand, whose doctoral student Bröcker was until 1928, and those of Husserl read by Landgrebe on the other hand. Thus, rather than hearing it as a questioning of a possible immaturity of all or part of the doctrinal positions of this demonstration that would become the Habilitation, Blumenberg made it a personal matter, over which he sometimes put Landgrebe in a situation of emotional blackmail. Simultaneously and because he had no choice, intellectually speaking, Blumenberg took up the manuscript in its entirety to the point of “completely reorganizing [it]” (Zambon, p. 368). With his other “fathers”, the same Bröcker would validate the text of the Habilitation in its definitive form in 1950.

            In addition to a certain tendency towards exaggeration or dramatic and definitive statements—which his mentor mostly appeases—one must therefore take into account Blumenberg’s resentment towards what could have been the objective reality of his environment. At this stage, any researcher who is particularly invested in his work and identifies with the success of his ideas can only feel boundless empathy for the Blumenberg who was just thirty years old. However, without this failure, without what he experienced as the humiliation of his first Habilitation project, “because of its majestic pretensions, to measure modernity by the horizon and its crisis” (p. 372), Nicola Zambon suggests that Blumenberg might never have written his major works—which can perhaps pass for belated responses to some of the lapidary remarks in Bröcker’s provisional report.

            Perhaps, for archaeological reasons, readers should go back to his doctoral thesis to understand the extent to which the germ of what would later happen was to be found in his entire work, but I believe at this stage that the work of reworking the text of the Habilitation, after the failure of the first (too hasty) submission, between 1948 and 1950, truly “determined” the direction that Blumenberg would take in his entire philosophical stance. For example, I find in the Contribution (his doctoral thesis) the famous intuition, later taken up and systematically deployed, of the “paradigmatic epochs”, which Blumenberg will associate with the materializations of that by which the history of consciousness treats the test of ontological distance, and which recalls certain elements of the posture of the still Privatdozent Heidegger, and accessible in his courses of the winter semester 1921-1922, published in English under the title Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Indiana University Press, 2001) – edition whose German version was precisely directed by Walter Bröcker (1902-1992) and his wife Käte Oltmanns, both former students of Heidegger. The content of the relationship between paradigmatic eras under the pen of Heidegge corresponds to what Blumenberg develops here for exemple in III, §1, pp. 135-149, “Historische Vergangenheit und geschichtliche Gegenwart” (Volume 61 of the Complete Works of Heidegger, 1985). Going in the same direction as this first Heidegger, the very history of consciousness becomes for Blumenberg a historicity of the modes of resolution of the ontological distance throughout the succession of paradigmatic epochs, investing the “potential” of yet-unconscious influences. Blumenberg then has to distance himself from Heidegger in his own eyes and he chooses to defend Husserl – although Husserl’s name does not appear in the final title.

 

            The project of a reflection mixing metaphysics and phenomenology

 

Ultimately, he attempted to propose nothing less than a reflection extending the Krisis of the subject, as identified by Husserl, in his Habilitation thesis. To quote the presentation on the publishing house’s website:

 

[…] a monumental project that seeks nothing less than to measure the philosophical horizon of modernity against a backdrop of crisis. Although Die ontologische Distanz does not entirely live up to this claim, the combination of historical-philosophical interests and the phenomenological method of the study lays the foundations on which Blumenberg’s major research on the history of consciousness would flourish in the following decades to come.

 

Indeed, I observe the ramifications of the continuation of Die ontologische Distanz taken as a construction site in the publications that occurred between 1950 and 1996 — and even beyond due to a very intense posthumous editorial activity. The Husserlian transcendental subject (then increasingly Kantian, as Blumenberg progressed) has a reserve of resources to institute the choices that he will make in the course of his principle of determinability (Die Sorge geht über den Fluß, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987): and to describe the subject himself (Beschreibung des Menschen) and to describe the readability of the world (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, ); this reserve materializing in the possibility of resorting to the elements constituting the history of culture. The management of the internal crisis, fundamental to any subject conscious of the availability of the principle of determinability, makes culture the destination and the origin of the uses that the subject will make of it[2]: culture is the container of all the frozen traces of the historicization of reactions to the fundamental economy of fear (Schrecken) that all human beings experience. These frozen forms are available in culture and can be seized by subsequent generations for their management of this same internal crisis, similar in motive and reason, but dissimilar in historical influence. The conditions of possibility of the subject establish, in this new configuration of the morphology of ontological distance, a new concept of reality, establishing the conditions of the shift from one “epochal paradigm”, or “paradigmatic epoch” to another (for example pp. 135-137). In the dynamic balance between “ritual texts” (texts that establish a paradigmatic era) and the “poeticization” of these texts, ontological distance is the primordial paradigm of the activity from which the possibility of the self-decomposition of the historicization of the subject progresses.

            This primordial, incontestable paradigm is therefore manifested in the mediation by which the subject resolves the distance to the world (of factuality, of finitude) and is expressed at the level of the subject in the quantitative distance between the two regimes of the activity of the mind: the regime of the logico-formal, already identified by Kant, and the regime of intuitions, the hypothesis of which we have put forward elsewhere, under the name of an “aesthetico-formal regime” (Marciset, op. cit., 2023). In other words, and to attach it to the Heideggerian trajectory of the history of being, just as being conscious always depends with Husserl on a consciousness of something, like an activity carried out on an object, being always means being in the world, and this is the meaning of the syntagm Dasein. So that these are two different and complementary ways of speaking of one and the same structure of performance, which the doxa calls consciousness or being: by being (there, in the world) or by consciousness (of the object, of the world).

            For Die ontologische Distanz, read through the lens of Blumenberg’s later work, being might not be the depository of an essence or a truth, but the focus of a permanent enactment of the conditions of possibility of the structure of performance at the foundation of the possibility of the transcendental subject which actualizes, since the inclusion of the principle of crisis at the very heart of its faculties, the valences of the current paradigmatic epoch and state of permanent mutability. The crisis is thus neither a promise nor a threat but the agent of the ontological dynamic and the guarantee of the perseverance of consciousness as an activity — whether one chooses, at this stage, to support this activity in an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason as proposed by the neo-Kantians, on the side of theories of knowledge, or whether one seeks, as Heidegger does, the restitution of the historicity of Dasein. Husserlian indifference or Heideggerian anxiety, it doesn’t matter: the history of consciousness is always one historical morphology (a punctual being, one of its events) of ontological distance, which is the activity of what it is to be in the world.

            There is no simplification in a return to essentialization in Blumenberg’s theory: it is not a question of considering that his theory, however functional it may be, would rest on the idea of ​​a “truth” of human nature and this is precisely what pushes Blumenberg towards Cassirer and simultaneously leads him to keep a certain distance from him[3]. No more than there would be a “truth” of the modes of application of Kantian theories, in Blumenberg’s prism, there is no ameliorative conception of the history of the mind. The superposition of the exteriority of the model as it can be theorized with the internal economy of the subject is due to a constructivist product and is not concerned with a destination or a prefiguration of what happens in history (Blumenberg, Präfiguration, Frankfurt, Surkhamp Verlag, 2014). In other words, Blumenberg’s theory is a theory of the “paradigmatic epoch” presiding over the metakinetic portion of the period thus presented, much more than a “history of being ».

 

            Conclusion

 

What is the ontological distance that Hans Blumenberg deals with in his habilitation thesis? Two things, both of which arise from the relationship between the distance of the subject and the world, and from the conditions of possibility of materialization and polarization of this distance. It is in this distance, for Blumenberg, that the historicity of science is established. The first of these two implications concerns the repercussions of the evolution of this distance throughout history (the question of historicity being at the center of the problem, depending on whether the notion is considered as a phenomenon or as a cause) and then joins Husserl. “”For Husserl,”” writes Blumenberg, “method” is rather “the organon by which the scientific spirit frees itself from the contingency and finiteness of the researching individuals and escapes from the constraints of factual historical existence” (Blumenberg, p. 248). “The infinite implication of the phenomenological method, which here represents modern science, banishes humans from philosophical thought. It contains the functionalization of the individual and his sacrifice for a task indifferent to man and his finitude.” (Zambon, p. 358)

            The second links the metakinetics of the subject, or practical being (Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Dasein) taken as a paradigmatic epoch (paradigmatische Epoche), to this problem and reinjects — or attempts to reinject — the method specific to phenomenology into the study of historicity, leading to a restoration of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), but this time, against any risk of essentialization and through the historically metakinetic mobility of the subject.

            I find here the motif of the homogeneity of the work of the “invisible” philosopher. Blumenberg’s inspiration for his Habilitation thesis comes from a phenomenological generalization of the specific work that occupied him in his thesis and related to the problem of the crisis of the subject in modern European sciences. Thus, returning to the common conception of scholasticism on the ontological level, not “only [as] mediation and [as] passage for the heritage of Antiquity”, but also having a “distinct and original contribution of its own” (Blumenberg, Beiträge, 2020, p. 24), he begins to perceive the shifts of epochs as signs of the metakinetic activity of being, thereby opposing Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. History is a manifestation of the metakinetics of being, and not the direct relationship of being to history, and it is the status of the distance of being to history, through the mediation of this metakinetics, which constitutes the originality of Blumenberg’s phenomenological (and de facto anthropological) posture.

 

[1] Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers” in op. cit., 2022, pp. 366-367 and p. 370. It seems that the only argument that is still alive today concerns the lack of recourse to texts that are not strictly derived from Husserl, and which could imply different readings of Kant, as well as the Habilitation’s supposed failure to resolve anything genuine. For a more exhaustive exposition of the quarrel, see Rüdiger Zill, Der absolute Leser. Hans Blumenberg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020, pp. 146-156.

[2] Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” (1971) in op. cit., 2001; already outlined in op. cit., 2022, pp. 61-66, II, §1. “Mythos” and “Logos.”

[3] Read about this in Haverkamp, ​​op. cit., Paradigm, 2017, pp. 53-56.

 

 

Christian Schmidt: Vom Trauma zum bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnis

Vom Trauma zum bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnis. Über die Entstehungsbedingungen von Person und Personalität aus Sicht der medizinischen und der Philosophischen Anthropologie Book Cover Vom Trauma zum bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnis. Über die Entstehungsbedingungen von Person und Personalität aus Sicht der medizinischen und der Philosophischen Anthropologie
Christian Schmidt
Philosophie der Psychopathologie, Philosophische Anthropologie
Karl Alber
2024
Hardcover
342
https://www.nomos-shop.de/de/p/vom-trauma-zum-bedeutungsvollen-ersterlebnis-gr-978-3-495-99450-4

Seit einigen Jahren schon ist sowohl in der deutschen wie auch der internationalen Diskussion ein großes Interesse an der Verknüpfung phänomenologischer Theoriebildung und Grundlagenproblemen der Psychopathologie zu erkennen. Dabei ist zu beobachten, dass sich die phänomenologisch orientierten Beiträge (naheliegenderweise) vor allem an der Frage abarbeiten, was das ‚Wesen‘ psychischer Krankheit ausmacht und welche Rolle sie hinsichtlich der Gegebenheit von Lebenswelt (bzw. der Interaktion mit ihr) spielen. In diesem Zusammenhang beziehen sich die meisten Ansätze auf Klassiker wie z. B. Husserl oder Merleau-Ponty.

Christian Schmidt verfolgt in seiner Studie zu Traumata, Ersterlebnissen und Personalität ein doppeltes Anliegen: Erstens geht es ihm darum, einen Zugang zum Phänomen des Traumas zu erschließen. Dazu soll mit dem Begriff des „bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnisses“ ein Gattungsbegriff herausarbeitet werden, der es gestatten soll, neben den Traumata als Ersterlebnissen der „Diskrepanz“ auch Erlebnisse der „Kongruenz“ zu artikulieren (15). Zweitens soll gezeigt werden, dass die Verwirklichung von Personalität in der Lebensführung von Menschen als ‚Aufgabe‘ die Kontextualisierung bedeutsamer Ersterlebnisse (seien sie nun erhebend oder erschütternd) einschließt (15). Dabei bezieht er sich zum einen auf Karl Jaspers und die Denker des sog. „Wengener Kreises“ – hier schwerpunktmäßig Ervin Straus und Victor Emil von Gebsattel – sowie zum anderen auf Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner, also zwei Protagonisten der Denktradition der Philosophischen Anthropologie.

Zunächst erarbeitet Schmidt einen Überblick über psychiatrische und psychopathologische Ansätze zum Trauma, wobei er auch die einschlägige Entwicklung der PTBS-Forschung beleuchtet (17 ff.). Besonders interessieren ihn an dieser Stelle Alternativen zu neurobiologischen Mainstream-Theorien, etwa das von G. Fischer und P. Riedesser vertretene Verständnis von Traumata als „Erschütterung von Selbst- und Weltverhältnis“ (48) als Folge des Erlebens einer „schutzlosen Preisgabe“ an „bedrohliche Umweltfaktoren“ (52). Diesen Theorien und den darauf fußenden verhaltenstherapeutischen Ansätzen kann Schmidt bereits einiges abgewinnen, er kritisiert jedoch die Fixierung auf das Erlebnis selbst, das in der Therapie bewusst durchgearbeitet werden soll (53). Als Erweiterung schlägt er vor, den biografischen Zusammenhang der Person verstärkt zu berücksichtigen, um traumatische Erlebnisse kontextualisieren und zu anderen bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnissen in Beziehung setzen zu können. Für einen solchen Ansatz bedarf es jedoch einerseits einer systematischen Erschließung des Begriffs bedeutungsvoller Ersterlebnisse sowie andererseits eines Zugangs zur Person und ihrem biografischen Zusammenhang. Da die Ansätze von Straus und Gebsattel von einer ähnlichen Grundintuition ausgehen, erscheint ihre Rezeption besonders naheliegend, auch wenn Schmidt sich (im Anschluss an Passie und Borck) darüber im Klaren ist, dass diese Rezeption zugleich kritisch-distanziert erfolgen muss.

Die nächsten Kapitel beinhalten jeweils Kombinationen von kurzen biografischen Darstellungen und informativen Werksanalysen der Denker Straus und Gebsattel. Hier weist Schmidt darauf hin, dass die beiden Denker gegensätzliche Zugriffe entwickeln, die sich allerdings bis zu einem bestimmten Punkt ergänzen: Beiden ist die Auffassung gemeinsam, dass bedeutungsvolle Ersterlebnisse in den Bedeutungszusammenhang der personalen Biografie zu integrieren sind (105). Während Straus nun die Erfordernis leiblich-lebendiger Spielräume und eines offenen Deutungshorizonts (Kultur) für eine „gestaltende Beantwortung“ von Situationen betont (113), hebt Gebsattel den „numinosen“ Widerfahrnischarakter von Ersterlebnissen hervor und verweist auf die Bedeutung höherer Werte, um die Patientin von Selbsttäuschungen und Verlorenheit zu befreien (122–135). Mit den unterschiedlichen Zugriffen gehen auch verschiedene Vorstellungen hinsichtlich der Rolle der Therapeutin einher: Während es bei Straus vor allem darum zu gehen scheint, unter Bejahung lebendiger Individualität zur Einnahme einer deutenden Haltung zu verhelfen (143), geht Gebsattel offensichtlich weiter, indem die Therapeutin hier als eine Art Seelsorger-Figur die Deutungshoheit über die gelungenen oder misslungenen Orientierungen auf höhere Werte übernehmen soll (131, 143). Ein derartiges Verständnis sieht Schmidt kritisch, indem er schreibt:

„Könnte die suggestive Wirkung eines seelsorgerischen Psychotherapeuten wie Gebsattel bei seinen Patientinnen nicht durchaus bewirken, dass sie numinose Qualitäten in ihre früheren Erlebnisse hineinfantasieren, um sich mit Gebsattels Hilfe in eine transzendentale Heilsphäre zu retten […]? Anders gefragt: Was wäre mit all jenen Patientinnen anzufangen, die nicht dazu im Stande sind, in ihren Erlebnissen numinose Qualitäten zu identifizieren und diese zur Entfaltung zu bringen?“ (143)

Neben dieser Gefahr einer mit der Therapeutin ‚mitvollzogenen‘ „Selbstmystifizierung“ (143) der Patientin gibt Schmidt ferner zu bedenken, dass eine solche Auffassung der Figur der Therapeutin mit der seelsorgerischen Autorität auch ein großes Maß an Verantwortung aufbürdet, das in der Realität therapeutischer Praxis schwer einzulösen ist (160).

Im Anschluss an die Rezeption der beiden Denker entwickelt Schmidt eine Lesart des bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnisses als Gattungs- oder „Überbegriff“ (139) für Erlebnisse, die durch ihre „Erstmaligkeit“ (105) der Biografie neue Richtungen geben oder zu Brüchen führen. Dabei kann es sich nicht nur um Erlebnisse der „Diskrepanz“ (Trauma), sondern auch der „Kongruenz“ handeln (138 f.). Auf dieser Basis skizziert er ein Verlaufsmodell, das erstens die psychovitale Vorsequenz, zweitens das Ersterlebnis und drittens die Integrationsphase umfasst (144 f.). Im Vergleich zu den eingangs erwähnten Traumatheorien besteht seine Pointe darin, dass eine hermeneutische Deutung der sich in der Biografie zeigenden psychovitalen Vorsequenz nötig ist, um die bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnisse integrieren zu können.

Der zweite Teil des Buches zielt darauf ab, im Anschluss an Helmuth Plessner und Max Scheler eine Lesart von Personalität zu entwickeln. Auch hier verfährt Schmidt wieder nach dem Schema Biografie, Werkschau und Schlussfolgerung, wobei er auch einschlägige Anschlüsse wie die Arbeiten von Hans-Peter Krüger, Matthias Wunsch und Moritz v. Kalckreuth einbezieht. Analog zu den gegensätzlich-komplementären Konzeptionen von Gebsattel und Straus stellt er hier Plessners Bezug auf das Leiblich-Lebendige (221 ff.) der Fokussierung Schelers auf Liebe, Fühlen und Werthaftigkeit (268 ff.) gegenüber. Im systematischen Schlusskapitel erschließt Schmidt schlussendlich das „Diskurssystem“, das sich ausgehend von den vier Positionen ergibt (310). Während Straus und Plessner die Person vom Lebendigen und dem sich durch Leiblichkeit und Positionalität ergebenden „Spielraum“ (319) her charakterisieren, sieht er bei Scheler und Gebsattel eine Bestimmung des Personalen ausgehend von der Bezogenheit auf (a)personal Geistiges und Werthaftes (311, 319).

Die Verbindung der Fragen nach bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnissen und nach Personalität besteht letztlich darin, dass es die Betrachtung bedeutungsvoller Ersterlebnisse (inkl. Traumata) vor dem Hintergrund der Person und ihrer Biografie (statt isoliert als Einzelereignis) gestattet, die eigene Personalität zu behaupten und zu entfalten – was Schmidt als „personales Wachstum“ vom psychotherapeutischen Trendbegriff „posttraumatischen Wachstums“ abgrenzt (323–326). Auf diese Weise wird die Idee von gelingender Personalität als „Aufgabe“ mit einbezogen, ohne sie – so seine Kritik an Jaspers – als „heroische Verantwortungsübernahme“ (140) angesichts von Grenzsituationen zu stilisieren. Auch wenn man sich an dieser Stelle vielleicht eine etwas ausführliche Entfaltung dieser systematisch wichtigen Schlussfolgerung gewünscht hätte (sowie ggf. eine Verortung zu ähnlich anmutenden Ansätzen wie etwa Anwendungen der Resonanztheorie), so leuchtet doch ihre Implikation für die therapeutische Praxis völlig ein.

Insgesamt stellt Christian Schmidts Buch eine sehr gelungene Verbindung von Psychopathologie, philosophischer Diskussion und Intellektuellenbiografie(n) dar. Dabei erscheinen drei Momente besonders hervorhebenswert: Erstens gelingt es ihm einerseits, den psychiatrisch-therapeutischen Status quo der Traumaforschung für eine Leserschaft aus der Philosophie überzeugend zu rekonstruieren, sowie andererseits die philosophischen Kategorien des bedeutungsvollen Ersterlebnisses und der Person auf eine Weise zu verteidigen, die auch Leserinnen aus der psychiatrischen oder therapeutischen Praxis einleuchten dürfte. Zweitens mag die Verbindung von komprimierter Werkschau und Biographie der besprochenen Denker zwar gelegentlich über das inhaltliche Anliegen des Buches hinausgehen, sie ist aber dennoch insofern hoch informativ, als sie zeigt, wie sich bei Gebsattel, Straus und Binswanger theoretische Anschauungen und die eigene therapeutische Tätigkeit zueinander verhielten. Drittens wahrt Schmidt – bei aller inhaltlichen Sympathie – eine vorbildliche Sachlichkeit und intellektuelle Redlichkeit, die sich insbesondere in der kritischen Reflexion der Rolle des Therapeuten zeigt.

Stefano Marino, Eleonora Guzzi: The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul

The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul Book Cover The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul
Stefano Marino, Eleonora Guzzi
Mimesis
2024
Paperback
172

Reviewed by: Chiara Rubbonello  

The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul is a revised version, translated into English, of the book La filosofia dei Radiohead. Musica, tecnica, anima, written by Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi, and originally published in Italian in 2021. This particular work stands apart from many other books that have been written about Radiohead, which have generally dealt with the band’s history or its discography or the band’s members individual biographies. Instead, The Philosophy of Radiohead is a sort of “hybrid” work, presenting itself, on the one hand, as a musical and poetical investigation of Radiohead’s artistic path, and on the other hand as a philosophical essay on the possible connections between the main results achieved by the band and «some observations on the relationship between art, technology and society, like those offered by a wide array of thinkers that may include, among others, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Günter Anders, Hannah Arendt, Arnold Gehlen, and […] Theodor W. Adorno» (p. 11). Although the book written by Marino and Guzzi is strictly focused on Radiohead, it is not just aimed to reach the fans of the Oxford-based band; in fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead also proves to be an interesting read for those who are not familiar with the whole oeuvre of the band but are anyway fascinated by pop-rock music and/or curious about its potential connections to contemporary society and the music industry. Although philosophical themes are consistently present in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the book is straightforward and can be easily understood, thanks to its clear language that makes it accessible to a wide range of readers, whether they are experts of philosophy or not. Though not exclusively, Marino and Guzzi make frequently reference to Adorno’s philosophy, both for his influential position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and for his musical interests, which make him an essential voice in a text that precisely deals with the relationship between critical philosophy and music. As explained in the book, Adorno was also a musicologist and composer who analyzed the musical landscape of his time through the lens of critical philosophy. Focusing on the relationship between music and society, Adorno sharply and critically distinguished two musical spheres: popular music and serious music. For him, all popular music exhibited a conciliatory, uncritical attitude towards the society, whereas serious music (at least in its more experimental forms, like in avant-garde music) maintained a critical relationship with it. Therefore, serious music – which Adorno especially appreciated in its more radical and more innovative expressions – was considered the only kind of music actually provided with a subversive potential and hence capable to express a real “truth content”.

However, in accepting and endorsing some of Adorno’s ideas (who can be considered, in many ways, the critical theorist par excellence), the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead also suggest to critically rethink and reconsider them, thus using his conceptual tools while questioning some of his conclusions. Marino and Guzzi argue that both fields could benefit from the proposed connection between critical philosophy and pop-rock music: on the one hand, it offers an opportunity to rethink some of critical philosophy’s key concepts in a perhaps less radical way and certainly in a more contemporary light, relating them with some products from today’s popular culture and allowing to philosophize with Adorno and at the same time against (or beyond) him; on the other hand, it offers a fresh perspective on the music of a band like Radiohead, which, depending on the diverse perspectives of different listeners, can be sometimes seen as a “mere” artistic product – or worse, just as a source of entertainment. According to the authors, Radiohead’s music seems to controvert Adorno’s notion of popular music as a mere standardized product of the culture industry, totally uncritical and lacking any genuine truth content. It is important to note that Adorno himself did not conceive of the distinction between serious music and popular music as ontological; rather, he understood it as historical and thus believed in the dynamic and changing nature of the relationship between the two spheres, which allowed for a redefinition in different historical periods. Actually, as Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi point out, our current historical period has witnessed a redefinition of the relationship between serious and popular music, as some musical groups inside the popular sphere, for example, seem to adopt a critical attitude towards the society and the music industry in which they operate.

This seems to be the case of Radiohead, which uses its artistic production to critically challenge our materialistic and alienating society. As persuasively argued in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the band’s poetic vision always includes a «critique of the deformations and even obsessions that can derive from an unscrupulous and unreasonable use of technology in our highly technologized, digitalized and also globalized world» (p. 24), evident both in the lyrics and in the musical structure and sound of Radiohead’s songs. The book points out the recurrence and centrality of several themes, in the songs of the band, that are distinctly critical of contemporary society: «each song at least in part reflects themes such as the subject’s troubles, difficulties and uncertainties in the present, the difficulty of human relationships in a digitalized and virtual world, the need for a greater closeness to and protection of nature, and so on» (p. 28). Radiohead’s songs often denounce phenomena that are characteristic of the present day, thoroughly explored by critical philosophy, such as the discomfort and alienation of contemporary individuals, their spiritual impoverishment, and the illusory nature of their free choices in a society dominated by technology and entirely devoted to consumerism.

As evidence, the authors highlight that in 2019 Radiohead’s frontman, Thom Yorke, released a solo album titled Anima, «which is focused on the feeling of anxiety and worry that afflicts individuals and grips their souls, validating more than ever the idea of a creative process and a narrative characterized by a sense of technological dystopia and, at the same time, by the desire to openly confront the challenge that technology represents, rather than flee from it» (p. 28-29). Anima and technology are two key concepts employed in the discussion developed in the book, as is already made clear from its subtitle: Music, Technology, Soul. In fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead offers a philosophically oriented exploration of the band’s artistic journey, which can be interpreted as a dialectical development of the relationship between the dimension of technology, initially perceived in the first albums as an «alienating, destabilizing and often suffocating force» (p. 13), and the soul, understood as the individual’s free and spontaneous interiority. Technology, in particular, is understood as inherently dialectical itself, as it does not include only its “dark” alienating and dehumanizing side, which makes it an agent of an «essentially and inexorably utilitarian “administered world”» (p. 45), but is also «able to gift new languages and original possibilities of expression to the human being that are better suited to, and efficient in, describing the existential malaise of our time and the discontents of our civilization » (p. 13).

The authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead describe how, in the case of Radiohead’s music, there is always a dynamic, dialectical relation with technology, which ends up being continually revisited as the band evolves artistically. In the band’s early work (especially their albums The Bends and OK Computer) a reference to technology appears mostly in the song lyrics as a threat to humans that «demand[s] the subordination of humans, making the human being an object of its domination» (p. 15), while the musical form of the songs often remains that of traditional rock, although with some notable experimentations in OK Computer. However, this form was destined to undergo «a breakthrough that, due to its truly radical nature, has few precedents in the recent history of pop-rock music» (ibidem). As highlighted in The Philosophy of Radiohead, from the album Kid A onward technology would no longer be addressed with distrust and fear, but would rather become a fundamental resource for the development of Radiohead: indeed, once the band became «aware of being unable to entirely evade the net and logic of technology that shape the world in the present age» (p. 28), it underwent «a new form of indirect and mediated emancipation that passes through technology itself, rather than manifesting itself in a more direct and immediate manner through a mere contraposition» (ibidem).

This virtuously dialectical choice effectively responds to the complexity of the phenomenon of technology: by establishing an inspiring and symbiotic relationship with it, technology becomes «the means used by the human beings to gain access to new creative languages and expressive possibilities» (p. 23), enabling the band to experiment, achieving particularly expressive and impactful results. The band seems to have realized that «a “human” message can often be more powerful and effective precisely when it is conveyed through technological means and their (real or presumed) “dehumanizing” nature» (p. 66). The critical relationship between the band’s music and society is thus simultaneously expressed on both a thematic level, i.e. the level of the contents of the lyrics, and a formal level.

This innovative use of technology confers a strong experimental character to the music of the band, which, as noted by the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead, does not shy away from bold, sometimes avant-gardist sounds. A good example of this is especially Kid A, which, with its dark and menacing sounds, presents itself as «a sort of musical “riot act” by a band that had been “a hitherto ‘front-line’ rock act”, as well as a musical experiment that, in its own way, was quite extreme and radical at the time, guided by the goal of freeing itself from the mindset of a homogenizing, standardized culture and the system of the music business» (p. 60). In this willing for experimentation, we can hear echoes of Adorno, as the German philosopher believed that what we may generally call experimental music could generate a kind of artistic expression that conveys a form of critical truth. For Marino and Guzzi, Kid A has a style that «can at times sound difficult, hard, hostile, angular, indirect and intentionally tending towards a strong negation of every attempt at conciliation between the individual and his/her world» (p. 71). So, this style is entirely opposed to the standardized, uncritical and conciliatory style typically adopted, according to Adorno, by all popular music.

Nevertheless, The Philosophy of Radiohead does not just analyze the band’s aesthetics from a critical-philosophical perspective, but it also explores the practical relationship it has established with the market dynamics of the music industry. This relationship is significantly different from the one usually established between popular music and culture industry, and this can be easily noticed by looking at Radiohead’s discography, which appears rather restricted compared to that of other similar bands, as Radiohead has allowed itself relatively long breaks between the various albums, defying the production speed typically demanded by the culture industry. Beside the fact of partially distancing themselves from the market’s demands, the members of the band have managed to do more. According to Marino and Guzzi, the five musicians from Oxford have always been very aware «of not being able to fully flee from the power of the culture industry and show business» (p. 57), so that «the band always turned a critical eye towards these aspects of pop-rock music and, at the same time, belonged to this genre, also sharing its conception of it with the listeners. In this sense, Radiohead’s attempts to partially free itself from (or, from another perspective, to avoid fully adopting) the established rules of the culture industry and the market are well known, as well as the band’s attempts to exploit these rules in its favor on some occasions» (p. 58). According to the authors, it is fair to assert that the band has successfully followed a sort of “golden rule” originally formulated by Robert Fripp, which requires «[to be] “in the marketplace but not governed by the values of the marketplace” – which is to say working within the music industry as a sort of outsider, as a “small, mobile, independent, intelligent unit” in search for a way out from the suffocating alternative between a strict adherence to a merely consumerist aesthetics, on the one hand, and artistic marginalization, on the other» (ibidem).

Marino and Guzzi point out that, in practical terms, Radiohead has tried to distance itself from the traditional communication methods typically employed by the culture industry – for example, by distributing Kid A exclusively via the internet and adopting a “pay what you want” strategy for the album In Rainbows. On a strictly artistic level, through the critique embedded in its most successful tracks, Radiohead has managed to produce «commodities that transcend themselves or, to speak, self-transcending commodities» (p. 76), because it has managed to «[perform] a sort of aesthetic acrobatic turn, succeed in doing what Adorno himself self-consciously and paradoxically prescribed to philosophy and art in the age of their potential “liquidation”, namely to be able to repeat the Baron Münchhausen’s gesture of “pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail”: “nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he [or she] should be at every moment both within things and outside them”» (p. 77).

The possibility, embodied by Radiohead’s songs, of transcending their commodification is a key point in the discussion, allowing the reflection to extend far beyond the analysis of the band’s aesthetics. Indeed, the analysis of the musical phenomenon embodied by Radiohead provided by the two authors is not (and does not aim to be) an end in itself; instead, it encourages a profound rethinking of the current possibilities for effective social critique that can reach the people through the popular arts. The Philosophy of Radiohead does more than highlighting the band’s exploration of deep themes on content, formal, and practical levels; it has the great merit of bringing to the fore the urgent need for a social critique that does not remain confined to academic and intellectual discussions, but takes shape within the popular sphere, thus reaching the masses. In the final analysis, the book argues that the popular arts – firmly condemned by thinkers like Adorno as untrue and uncritical, thus serving the perpetuation of the status quo – have, instead, the potential to engage in a critical relationship with society, using the market to their advantage to promote the spread of critique itself. The authors do not exclude, and indeed affirm, the possibility of finding other virtuous examples of popular musicians who, like Radiohead, have given voice to a free form of social criticism without losing the appreciation of the audience, taking on in their way the arduous and necessary task of turning the spotlight on the individual’s discomfort in our age.

Finally, a book like The Philosophy of Radiohead is a clear invitation to open our eyes (and especially our ears!) to pay attention to present-day issues, rather than passively, uncritically, and complacently naturalizing them. Only through collective awareness, we can embark on a radical qualitative change in our lives, leading to a society where the artificial needs, imposed by the market and fueled by ever more abundant yet less useful consumer goods, are replaced by the real needs that every human holds within themselves, whose unmet fulfillment implies a “reconciled” and submissive existence, and the renunciation of a full sense of life.