Luz Ascarate: Imaginer selon Paul Ricœur

Imaginer selon Paul Ricœur: La phénoménologie à la rencontre de l’ontologie sociale Book Cover Imaginer selon Paul Ricœur: La phénoménologie à la rencontre de l’ontologie sociale
Le Bel Aujourd'hui
Luz Ascarate
Hermann
2022
Paperback 28,00 €
282

Reviewed by: Sergej Seitz (University of Vienna)

Luz Ascarate’s dissertation Imaginer selon Paul Ricœur is a thorough study of Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination. It will be well received by at least three groups of readers. (1) Ricœur scholars will find in Ascarate’s book a novel interpretation of Ricœur’s philosophical oeuvre. Not only propounding yet another reconstruction of Ricoeur’s take on imagination (Kearney 1988; Taylor 2006), Ascarate’s account presents imagination as the key concept of his thought, structuring both his early phenomenological writings and his later hermeneutic and social-ontological reflections. (2) Phenomenologists will be drawn to the way the book retraces Ricœur’s explication of the pivotal role of imagination in phenomenological methodology. While in Husserl imagination remains by and large an operative concept,[1] Ricœur is the first to highlight the crucial “place of imagination in the philosophical method of foundation” (Ascarate 2022, 15), as Ascarate shows.[2] (3) Social and political philosophers, finally, will be interested in Ascarate’s reconstruction of how Ricœur’s phenomenology of imagination may inform the critical analysis of (ideological and utopian) social imaginaries, thus launching a dialogue between phenomenology and critical theory.

Combining these three points of intervention, Ascarate’s general aim is to sketch, with Ricœur, the contours of a post-foundationalist social ontology that unveils both the constitutive and the subversive functions of imagination at the heart of social relations. Crucially, this endeavor is not framed as a timeless philosophical reflection but as a response to contemporary social challenges. In view of a new foundational crisis—similar to the one Husserl takes as his point of departure in his Krisis book—Ascarate holds that it is high time to resuscitate imagination as a radical social and political force. Reclaiming imagination and the imaginary as the primary resources of our (inter)subjective self-understanding is necessary to counter neoliberal reification and the infamous ideological belief that “there is no alternative.”

As Olivier Abel notes in his favorable preface, Ricœur is indeed a promising interlocutor in this regard. On the one hand, Ricœur recognizes the “emancipatory potential” of imagination and its ability to “enlarge the sense of the real” (8) by disclosing hidden possibilities. On the other hand, he does not fall prey to the idea of an imaginary “creatio ex nihilo” (Castoriadis 1975; Papadimitropoulos 2015) that reproduces the metaphysical illusion of the imagining subject as an absolute, autonomous origin.[3] Following Ricœur, Ascarate stresses the productive power of imagination while at the same time recognizing the responsive condition of a human subject that never intervenes “out of nothing,” but inevitably acts within an already constituted socio-historical world.[4]

The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Ascarate reconstructs Ricoeur’s phenomenology of imagination in a roughly chronological manner, starting with (1) his “Husserlian heritage” and his early phenomenology of the will before proceeding to (2) the role of imagination in his hermeutics of symbols and to (3) his later reflections on ontology and anthropology. The second part deals with the import of Ricoeur’s thinking of imagination for social ontology. Here, Ascarate begins by (4) sketching the contemporary discourse in critical theory and post-foundationalist social philosophy before (5) outlining a phenomenology of utopias. In what follows, I trace the main steps in Ascarate’s argument before pointing out some problems and indicating how, in my view, critical reflection should proceed.

Ascarate does not confine herself to Ricœur’s published works but also takes into account his lecture courses (such as the important, yet still unpublished, Lectures on Imagination held in Chicago in 1976)[5] as well as his translator’s notes on the early translation of Husserl’s Ideen I (Husserl 1950) done during the war. Right from the beginning, Ricœur construes imagination as the philosophical faculty par excellence. As Ascarate makes clear, we find the conviction that doing philosophy would not be possible without the imaginary suspension of factual reality already in his early work. Even more than that, according to Ricoeur, phenomenology as a method is not feasible without the faculty of imagination. What Husserl calls epoché, the bracketing of our natural attitude toward the world, requires the ability to neutralize the grip of reality. In this sense, “imagination can appear as the foundation of phenomenology” (41). It is precisely this neutralizing function of imagination that Ascarate focuses on throughout her book. Phenomenological research involves neutralizing or suspending reality—not in the sense of denying it, but in terms of disclosing the contingency of its factual conditions. In this vein, Ascarate also speaks of the “suspending function of imagination” (76).

Imagination is not, however, confined to facilitating the epoché. As Ascarate emphasizes, Ricœur also shows that and how the eidetic reduction requires imagination. The intentional varying of an object’s characteristics that is at the heart of this methodological device of classical phenomenology would be impossible without the faculty of imagination. In this way, imagination surpasses perception. While perception (Wahrnehmung) always involves ‘value-ception’ (Wertnehmung), as Scheler points out (Scheler 1980, 205), it remains bound to the order of facts—to the specific way, that is, in which objects are empirically organized in the world. In the eidetic reduction, by contrast, imagination “deterritorializes our perception” and “breaks the order of facts” (47) that perception reveals. In short, where perception only registers facts (the given empirical reality), imagination penetrates the realm of essences.

Imagination thus plays a double role in phenomenological methodology. On the one hand, it is what suspends the firmness of empirical reality under the epoché: “Ricœur appropriates Husserl’s conviction to break the kingdom of the empirical law by force of the liberty of imagination in order to access the field of the possible” (69). On the other hand, imagination makes possible the eidetic reduction by allowing us to transcend the contingent world of facts and push through to the world of essences. Writing about the “illustrative function of imagination,” Ricœur claims that “fiction is the true revealer of essence” (Ricoeur, in Husserl 1950, 24). It discloses precisely what cannot be otherwise: “imagination … reveals, by way of free variation, the true resistance of essence and its non-contingency” (Ricoeur, in Husserl 1950, 223).

Turning to Ascarate’s presentation of the role of imagination within Ricœur’s own philosophy of the will, imagination functions as the precondition of decision and action. Imagination presents possibilities for intervention, thus directing our will toward the future. There is no genuine decision without imagination. At the same time, imagination can render us passive and lure us away from action whenever the “charm of an unreal” prompts “an escape from reality” (80). That is to say, even as imagination is oriented toward the absent, the other, and the beyond, it needs to remain bound to the present and the conditions of reality, at least to some extent.

This, Ascarate suggests, becomes especially clear in Ricœur’s thinking about evil and human fallibility in Fallible Man (Ricœur 1986). To understand the human condition of moral fallibility, Ricœur argues, we must first come up with a notion of innocence. For without a preliminary and counterfactual understanding of innocence, some inclination or other could not even be identified as evil (see also Ascárate 2021). Because we are never truly innocent, however, we cannot perceive innocence in its purity. Again, imagination has to step in, furnishing an “imagination of innocence” (112). This imagination of innocence displays our own innocence as a (forever unrealized) possibility. This is not some Hegelian daydream in which I imagine myself as beautiful soul with a clean moral sheet. As Ricœur emphasizes, “this imagination is not a fanciful dream; it is an ‘imaginative variation’, to use a Husserlian term, which manifests the essence by breaking the prestige of the fact. In imagining another state of affairs …, I perceive the possible, and in the possible, the essential.” (Ricœur 1986, 112) Thus, the imagination of innocence discloses not so much a random possibility among others as my essential humanity, while at the same time always running the risk of regressing into self-righteous reverie.

Indeed, every philosophical discourse is to some degree a walk on a tightrope on the edge of deceptive imagination. As evidenced by his reflections on symbols and symbolism, Ricœur is well aware of this. The fact that all thought takes place within a specific language and within a specific symbolism and imaginary does not mean that the philosopher has to renounce the idea of beginning anew. However, there is no beginning anew without some presuppositions. Thinking in and with symbols is what gives our thoughts content, but at the same time symbolism “introduces radical contingency” (Ricoeur 2004, 399) into our discourse. Ascarate argues that “the symbol is the eidos from the point of view of its contingency, an eidos from the point of view of its imaginary foundation that cannot be fully explicated” (134). Acknowledging the imaginary foundation of essence in this way leads to the surprising conclusion that essence is not simply discovered but always to some degree invented. In this context, Ascarate cites the Lectures on Imagination, where “Ricœur argues … that the imaginary variations take on a productive and creative function, for instead of verifying a concept they create new concepts” (167). As it turns out, the eidetic reduction is, to speak with Kant, not so much a kind of reproductive imagination as a kind of productive imagination.

Indeed, as Ascarate’s study makes clear, concerning the classical distinction between reproductive and productive imagination, Ricœur proves to be a fierce advocate of the latter. Apparently, one of his most elaborate pleas for productive imagination is to be found in the soon-to-be-published Lectures on Imagination. Here, Ricœur argues that it is only in productive imagination that we get an unobstructed view of the phenomenon of imagination. For as long as it is conceived in terms of reproduction, imagination is held captive by perception, making the former but a second-rate compensation for, or maidservant of, the latter. (Ascarate mentions that Ricœur accuses Sartre and Ryle of reducing imagination to this reproductive role.) Productive imagination, by contrast, roams freely, evading the suffocating grip of perception.

To see imagination in all its productivity, it is necessary, Ricœur argues, to cut the cord tying it to the image. Conceiving of imagination in terms of an image (an image-portrait, a depiction of something that already exists) inevitably leads to neglecting imagination’s creative powers. While reproductive imagination is associated with this notion of an image-portrait, productive imagination, as Ricœur understands it, ought to be thought of in terms of fiction. Productive imagination has the power to “open our mind to new perspectives on the real” (165). This again foreshadows the emancipatory function of utopian narratives: “productive imagination has an ontological force,” Ascarate writes, “that consists in enlarging and producing new visions of the world and new ways of seeing things. Thus, it can change our way of being in the world” (166). In renouncing the pictorial function of image-portraits, productive imagination is thus closer to language than to the visual realm. As Ascarate shows, Ricœur gains this insight from Gaston Bachelard and his phenomenology of poetic imagination (Bachelard 1983). True poetry, as in the case of the living metaphor, constitutes an event in the most radical sense: the birth of new meaning (Ricœur 2003; see also Seitz and Posselt 2017; Flatscher and Seitz 2023). Metaphor is in this sense language in statu nascendi: “According to Ricœur, Bachelard makes a decisive step … by understanding the new as an event born in language and through it.” (169) Bachelard’s conception of poetic imagination supports the “hypothesis of another life” (169).

However, as Ascarate makes clear, Ricœur does not stop here but in fact goes beyond Bachelard, arguing that productive imagination is not restricted to poetic metaphors. Far from being confined to art, productive imagination is at work even in scientific discourse. In Ricœur’s view, scientific models are the result of productive imagination, too; what science comes up with is not merely a picture of the real. In poetry as well as in science, “imagining does not consist in making appear what is absent from perception, but rather in edifying an autonomous sense.” (Foessel 2014, 245) This interest in the possibility of the new, Ascarate notes, is what unites Kant’s, Husserl’s, and Ricœur’s reflections on imagination. (One could also add Arendt to the list, who locates productive imagination at the heart of political judgment, referring to Kant’s notion of enlarged mentality [erweiterte Denkungsart], see Arendt 1992; Zerilli 2016).

Against this background, Ascarate seeks to draw from her reconstruction of Ricœur’s thinking of productive imagination both ontological and anthropological consequences. On the ontological level, Ascarate sketches how Ricœur’s take on imagination may engender a new ontology, an “ontology of the possible (175) or an “ontology of hyperreality” (30). The concept of hyperreality, although rather underdeveloped throughout the book, points to a conception of reality that does not limit the real to what is factually given but includes the possible. The possible, then, is not a separate sphere neatly cut off from the real but forms an intrinsic part of reality. On the anthropological level, (productive) imagination is framed as a uniquely human faculty. In Ascarate’s words, “the human being is the one who imagines; or the human being is the one who creates new possibilities from the real” (181). In this sense, the “productive function of imagination” (187) is what makes the essence of the human being.

It is here that the therapeutic import of Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination comes in. Productive imagination, Ascarate hopes, may enables us to respond to the present “crisis of sense” (146). Philosophy must combat the hegemony of instrumental rationality in which reason has lost its emancipatory force. Resuscitating this force requires that we draw on human creative power as “the experience of a human being to suspend the given world and access the possible” (189). Imaginative creativity should then help us reacquaint ourselves with the possibility of bringing about new ways of living together, new social foundations, and new ways of forging the social bond. Ascarate even trusts the “phenomenology of fiction” to assume the role of “a first philosophy for times of crisis: it would be a thinking that searches for foundations in an epoch that has lost them; an opening toward new ways of thinking” (191).

To explicate the critical and social-ontological implications of Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination, Ascarate draws primarily on his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (Ricoeur 1986). Her goal is to show the relevance of Ricœur’s conception of imagination for critical theory and post-foundational social philosophy. Ricœur’s phenomenological account of ideology and utopia could, Ascarate argues, open up a new perspective on the critique of ideology, thus bringing into dialogue phenomenology and the Frankfurt school.[6]

In his analysis of the relation between ideology and utopia, Ricœur makes use of Karl Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie (Mannheim 2015). As Ascarate shows, Ricœur twines the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and anthropological strands of his thought together to give an account of the social and political imaginary in its various guises. Ricœur starts off by reformulating Mannheim’s distinction between ideology and utopia in Kantian terms: “utopia is the fiction of productive imagination and ideology is reproductive social imagination” (213). From a phenomenological perspective, then, utopia is a function of productive imagination. What is more, Ricœur explicitly associates utopia with Husserl’s idea of eidetic reduction. Utopia “is close to the imaginary variations around an essence as proposed by Husserl” (Ricoeur 1986, 36). (Which begs the question, of course, whether the assumption of an authentic essence runs the risk of blunting utopia’s critical edge.)

Ascarate also emphasizes that Ricœur does not simply pit utopia against ideology. Rather, he argues that both ideology and utopia have “constitutive as well as pathological dimensions” (214). Ideology’s constitutive function is social integration. It generates a sense of affiliation and belonging. In contrast to classical Marxian approaches, Ricœur renounces the idea of ideology as mere distortion of reality. As a form of social and political imagination, ideology does not primarily disguise material conditions but is constitutive of social cohesion. Utopia, for its part, can assume a pathological modality once it regresses into mere denial: “utopia is effectively pathological whenever it presents itself as a flight from reality” (253), causing us to lose ourselves in the passivity of fascination or reverie. Instead of dissolving reality, utopia has to reveal reality in a different way by providing an imaginary exterior standpoint. As Ascarate writes, “when utopia’s exterritoriality is turned toward reality, its constitutive, creative, and critical force is unleashed” (256).

Here, Ricœur distances his phenomenological account of ideology and utopia from Mannheim’s. Mannheim is concerned about the ways in which ideology and utopia attack the status of social facts. While ideology reifies facts, displaying them as unchanging, naturally given entities, utopia fails to recognize the binding character of facts, presenting them as arbitrarily changeable (Mannheim 2015). Ricœur, however, does not share Mannheim’s concern with regard to utopia: “Ricœur insists on the positive aspects of utopia, that is, on the constitutive or productive function of imagination” (231–2). Seen from this perspective, the pronounced distance to reality is not utopia’s weakness but its strength. Instructive in this respect is Ascarate’s mention of the different paradigms of utopia in Mannheim and Ricœur. In Mannheim, the paradigmatic utopia is Thomas Münzer’s anabaptism. Ricœur, by contrast, turns to Thomas More’s Utopia. Mannheim cherishes Münzer for his active desire and engagement to realize his utopia (in a religious revolution). For Ricœur, it is precisely utopia’s unrealizability that makes it a productive social and political force. The fact that utopia cannot turn its back on reality does not mean that the gap between reality and utopia should simply be closed. For this gap ensures society’s openness and non-totalization. In this sense, utopian thinking is necessary for any human community: “while it is possible to imagine a society without ideology, to think of a society without utopia amounts to creating a society without purpose: no longer exceeding reality would lead to a facticity that marks the ruin of human will” (237). In this view, exceeding factual reality is a matter of life and death for any genuinely human society. It is not the lack of congruence with reality that makes utopia constitutive of the social but the aspiration “to undermine the established order” (239).

Ascarate emphasizes that utopia unites imagination and emancipation. Imagination has to break with the past. Ricœur puts into question Marx’s distinction between interpretation and transformation. For utopian imagination at once interprets and transforms reality. This also points to the essentially antagonistic character of utopia that is already stressed by Mannheim. Every utopia implies an anti-utopianism launched against other utopian proposals: “in every utopia there is a counter-utopian aspect directed against another utopia. This antagonism dynamizes the relation between utopias” (235). The communist utopia, for example, denounces all other utopias as ideology, which also inhibits a clear-cut, ahistorical distinction of ideology and utopia. What seems utopian from one political perspective can appear ideological from another.

Despite its antagonistic character, Ricœur praises utopia for its potential of nonviolent transformation. In order to bring about something new, we have to break with the past, but this rupture should not be achieved by violence, Ricoeur argues, but by imagination: “instead of violence, imagination has to perform the break with the past” (Ricoeur 1986, 378). Ascarate notes that Ricœur’s role models in this context are Saint-Simon and Fourier. Utopian socialism favors imagination over violence. As Ricœur emphasizes with Fourier, utopia not only demands the possible but also that which, in a given situation, seems impossible. From this perspective, utopia seems to be the test case for the ontology Ascarate envisages in her reading of Ricœur—namely, a philosophy of hyperreality that conceives of reality not in terms of an abstraction from the possible but as a recognition of the manifold horizons of possibilities, even if they remain unacknowledged.

By way of conclusion, I raise some critical questions and mark points of departure for further reflection. These concern (1) the inner structure and articulation of the phenomenon of imagination, (2) the status of passivity in relation to the social imaginary, and (3) the search for foundations within a post-foundationalist framework.

First, let me note that, in my view, one of the merits of Ascarate’s book is the way it manages to capture the complexity of the phenomenon of imagination as well as its many dimensions. Note the long list of different functions of imagination that are discussed throughout the book. Needless to say, given that Ricœur “considers it the central function of imagination” (161), the function of neutralization or suspension looms large. However, reference is also made to an “emancipatory function” (8), a “practical function” (39), an “illustrative” and “exemplary function” (42), an “evasive” function (83), an “intermediary function” (97), a “productive function” (99), a “creative function” (125), an “integrative” and “distortive” function (of ideology, 213, 216), a “critical function” (of utopia, 229), and a “constitutive function” (232) of imagination. This list underscores imagination’s many faces. Ascarate does not, however, investigate how these different functions are interrelated. It remains unclear, for instance, whether some of them are mere synonyms or whether some are more fundamental or more primordial than others. Given that a phenomenology of imagination has to explicate the compossibility of imagination’s various functions, what we require is a more detailed and comprehensive cartography of its fault lines. This could also entail a less egological account of imagination, especially in regard to questions of political imagination. The attempt to render the phenomenology of imagination productive for social ontology can only succeed if it enables us to think of imagination in terms of collective acts and intersubjective processes (see Seitz 2022).

This becomes all the more urgent, second, in light of Ascarate’s/Ricœur’s aim to integrate imagination within an ontology of possibility and an anthropology of the capable subject. In this framework, the positive, productive, and creative aspects of imagination take center stage. Imagination’s productivity, its creative power, and its disclosing force always are presented as somehow ‘more essential’ than its deceptive, reproductive, and ideological aspects. This raises the question of how the coercive function of the social imaginary, the repressive function of ideology, and the fixating function of reproductive imagination are to be explicated within an approach that focuses primarily on human capabilities. For within such an approach, the passive aspects of our socio-political being come into view only as secondary, derivative, or pathological phenomena. On the other end of the spectrum of conceptualization, as Andreas Hetzel recently outlined with recourse to Bachelard, the contours of a different phenomenology of imagination come into relief—one that no longer thinks of imagination as the subject’s autonomous capability but as “a capability of the images themselves, the capability of presenting themselves before our eyes. Imagination would then be not so much the … capability of producing images as a consciously sought-out incapability, a readiness to be fascinated by the images … in their activity and waywardness” (Hetzel 2021, 112; see also Calin and Hetzel 2021). I bring this up to indicate the different routes theorization can take within the phenomenology of imagination—and to suggest that the problem of how to reconcile the intuition that imagination forms an essential part of human autonomy with the observation that imagination (or ‘the imaginary’) is all too often precisely what holds us firmly in its grip rather than what we command still remains to be solved.

This leads, third, to the question of autonomy or heteronomy in the context of the institution of social and political foundations. In my view, Ascarate remains rather vague in this respect. On the one hand, she inscribes Ricœur’s reflections on imagination into the discourse on post-foundationalist political philosophy, where the possibility of ultimate, transcendental foundations is rejected in favor of the need for contingent, historical foundations (Marchart 2018; Butler 1995). On the other hand, her diagnostics of crisis appears at times quite nostalgic, mourning the loss of an era where social foundations were not yet in question. Take, for instance, Ascarate’s description of the phenomenologist’s role in the present: “The phenomenologist is, for us, the one who still dreams of evidences in a world that has lost them; the one who” remains faithful to “those that search for foundations” (266). By contrast, we could ask whether it was not at times precisely the quest for strong foundations and infallible evidence that prevented us from genuinely dreaming. In other words, the nostalgic stance toward lost foundations seems incompatible with the post-foundationalist theory framework Ascarate claims to employ. Note, though, that such compatibility is not even desirable. As I see it, Ascarate has exemplarily shown how phenomenology can today proceed without continuing to be haunted by the specter of absolute evidence, which may also be one of the liberating powers of imagination in phenomenology.

Acknowledgments

I thank Matthias Flatscher and Anna Wieder for their helpful comments and remarks.

Funding Information

This work has been funded by the European Union (ERC, PREDEF, 101055015). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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[1] That is not to say, of course, that the phenomenon of imagination eludes Husserl. As Julia Jansen points out, “[h]ardly any other philosopher in the history of philosophy has paid as much detailed attention to the nature of imagining and to the distinct characteristics of imagined objects as Husserl” (Jansen 2016, 69). Ascarate’s point is that though Husserl indeed calls imagination the “vital element” (Husserl 1983, 160) of phenomenology, he nonetheless privileges perception as the default form of intentionality.

[2] All translations from Ascarate’s book and other non-English sources are my own.

[3] The question of whether imagination is to be construed either as creation or as responsive productivity is at the center of the debate between Ricœur and Castoriadis (Adams 2017). Note, also, that Castoriadis repeatedly defends his account against this criticism, see (Castoriadis 1997).

[4] This conception seems close to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “coherent deformation” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 262).

[5] These lectures are currently edited by George Taylor and will be published in 2023.

[6] Ricœur’s attempt to rethink the social bond as constituted by the imaginary powers of ideology and utopia may, Ascarate argues, also resonate well with Oliver Marchart’s political ontology (Marchart 2019).

Anna Brożek & Jacek Jadacki (Eds.): At the Sources of the Twentieth-Century Analytical Movement

At the Sources of the Twentieth-Century Analytical Movement: Kazimierz Twardowski and His Position in European Philosophy Book Cover At the Sources of the Twentieth-Century Analytical Movement: Kazimierz Twardowski and His Position in European Philosophy
Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Volume: 118
Anna Brożek and Jacek Jadacki (Eds.)
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2022
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x + 345

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)

At the Sources of the Twentieth-Century Analytical Movement is explicitly drawn from the 2016 Krakow-based Naroidowe Centrum Nauki research project headed by Jacek Jadacki on Kazimierz Twardowski’s place in Polish culture and European philosophy (see https://projekty.ncn.gov.pl/opisy/352223-en.pdf ). Notwithstanding the title and subtitle of this collection, virtually half its fourteen contributions focus upon Twardowski’s and his students’ role in Polish intellectual life and philosophical enquiry, initially in Lwów (also known as Lemberg and nowadays as Lviv) from 1895 and twenty years later in Warszawa (Warsaw).

Readers curious about the fate of philosophy in twentieth-century central Europe’s killing field will be amply rewarded. Seven chapters partly or wholly focus upon the formerly partitioned Poland onwards such as those by Jan Wolénski (66ff. & 143ff.), Mariusz Grygianiec (124ff.), Anna Brożek (156ff., 221ff. & 236ff.), Ryszard Kleszcz (212ff.), and Marcin Będkowski (250ff.) as well as Tadeusz Szubka’s “Opening Word” (5-11) and Part One of the co-editors’ “Closing Word” (267-306). Collectively, the treatment of Polish philosophers here demonstrates a marked departure from the first, frequently republished English-language monograph by Henryk Skolimowski (1964) which regards Polish philosophers described by him as analytical to be definable by their approach to language. He noticeably tends to sidestep not only their analyses of scientific knowledge, but also their application of techniques drawn from the logico-linguistic realm.

For non-Slavic readers, who at best may have some familiarity with, for example, Roman Ingarden or Jan Łukasiewicz in translation, might wonder why so many others included by the editors remain largely ignored outside Poland. Do they share the fate of so many Slavic-speaking intellectuals prone to neglect because, in the words of Norman Geschwind, their “important confirmed scientific observations,” and “in other fields as well,” “could almost be expunged” from the knowledge nowadays of contemporary scholars for relatively predictable reasons (1974: 19)? These include “neglect of work written in a foreign language, neglect of work done by someone in a different field, excessive reliance on the authority of certain towering individual figures” (1974: 19). Should Geschwind’s concern be considered exaggerated, the recent proliferation of works by and about Twardowski nonetheless warrants careful appraisal. As Gilbert Ryle concludes in the case of Twardowski’s teacher, Franz Brentano:

Ours is an age of posthumous literary magnification. Reprintings chase reprintings; commentaries chase commentaries; unpublished writings … are forever being assembled into … collected editions which publishers …  unload on to libraries. (1976, p. 15)

Three overlapping issues repeatedly associated with Twardowski figure throughout the Brożek and Jadacki anthology under review. The first issue centres upon what Twardowski meant by “scientific” philosophy. The second concerns his seminal distinction between “actions” and “products” emanating from his 1894 thesis undertaken in Vienna. Whilst probing both issues, we will include the roles of psychology and logic Twardowski subsequently attributed to philosophical enquiries. Thereafter, we shall conclude by critically exploring the presumption that the twentieth century “analytical movement” to which Twardowski and his circle contributed is principally distinguished by its “general methodological attitudes” (274).

I

Szubka’s opening contribution immediately launches us into the theme of “scientific philosophy.” He includes different European views that emerged from the ’twenties and ’thirties. For example, Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle is baldly summarised as seeing philosophy not as a way of conducting a (“natural”) science but of “elucidating” it by “investigating its language and logic” (5). Hans Reichenbach (1951) of the Berlin Society for Empirical (or Scientific) Philosophy construes scientific philosophy in terms of analysing the results of the physical sciences, the knowledge acquired falling short of certainties associated with the “principles of logic and mathematics” (13). Moreover, he believes that “scientific philosophy advances” by “performing logical analysis” and “avoiding metaphorical and pictorial language” (14). Yet, Szubka continues, Reichenbach remains wedded to “the verifiability theory of meaning” which reductively commits itself to “bare direct observation” and therefore cannot accommodate the interpretation of such evidence needed to develop a scientifically significant “body of systematic knowledge” (15).

Szubka confronts readers with the “startling” fact that Twardowski himself did not undertake “a detailed and systematic account” of scientific philosophy (6). Instead, he appears to “implement … those ideas of Brentano … he considered as undeniably correct” and pursuing them in clear and exact language as the “rigorous academic discipline” of scientific philosophy demands (7). Szubka locates four basic trajectories within Twardowski’s view of scientific philosophy:

[a] In his essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, Twardowski (1895, p. 380) concludes with the exhortation that “scientific philosophy will continue to demand severely and unrelentingly that the first condition of philosophical investigation is precision of expression.” In a later foray into philosophical discourse, Twardowski (1920, p. 258) claims that “our thought, especially when it is abstract, manifests itself from the beginning in verbal attire, having the most intimate connection with expressions of speech,” so that obscurity of expression is purportedly tantamount to obscurity of thought.

[b] In his essay probing psychology, physiology, and philosophy, Twardowski (1897, p. 60) declares that the “term ‘philosophy’ designates a group of sciences,” amongst which figure ontology, logic, and epistemology. In his later 1929 Polish Philosophical Society address, Twardowski (1931, p. 274) emphasizes that scientific (or “critical”) philosophy is opposed to metaphysical systems claiming to be “scientifically well-founded” and possessed of indubitable “objective status.”

[c] In his inaugural Polish Philosophical Society address, Twardowski (1904, p. 47) remarks  that, “in the area of facts which is the subject matter of philosophy,” “continuous peer control is indispensable” amongst colleagues; indeed, their collaboration, by bringing different perspectives to bear upon the problem involved, needs “to occupy the foremost place.”

[d] The first trajectory above is recast in terms of fallacies besetting philosophers and scientists alike when Twardowski (1921, pp. 262 & 263) pinpoints the tendency to reify logical and mathematical symbols: “symbols and the operations performed on them, originally the means to an end, become … an end in itself,” ultimately ignoring what “the symbols (being the signs of things in  the broadest sense of the term) symbolize.”

At this juncture, more questions emerge than answers. Has Twardowski provided us with an unequivocal account of “scientific” philosophy? Szubka concludes that the very notion of scientific philosophy is ambiguous, noticeably sliding between philosophy as “conforming to the general pattern of scientific investigations” and as engaging with “the results of the sciences themselves” (20). Is Twardowski’s fourfold trajectory above specifically applicable to “analytical” philosophy? Again, Szubka reminds us from the outset that, although the “idea” of the scientific and the analytical might well be “inextricably connected,” the self-description of individual philosophers and the various intellectual movements which they advocated were not always so bound (3; cf. 5-6). We shall examine some alternative conceptions of the analytical movement in our concluding section.

II

Twardowski’s action-product distinction, his most influential argument amongst analytical and phenomenological philosophers about the nature of judgement, receives repeated attention. Chapters by Maria van der Schaar (25ff.) and Sébastien Richard (79ff.) respectively re-examine the distinction’s relevance by considering not only its antecedents in the writings of Bernard Bolzano (1837) and Franz Brentano (1874), but also its re-interpretation by Friederike Moltmann in recent years who is fully familiar with Anglo-American analytical conceptions of propositional truths and cognitive acts. By contrast, another chapter by Jan Wolénski (50ff.) traces the successive modifications of Twardowski’s distinction before examining how Polish philosophers, especially Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, and Alfred Tarski, applied them. Given limits upon length, we shall specifically focus upon the challenging critique mounted by van der Schaar. Before doing so, we shall briefly pinpoint Twardowski’s manner of conceptualising the distinction particularly but not exclusively in his 1912 “Actions and Products” paper.

Discriminating actions from products—czynności and wytwory in the Polish, fonctions and produits in the French, Funktionen and Gebilde in the German versions discussed by Wolénski (52-53)—has been crucial to the “sciences” Twardowski identifies as philosophy, especially those characterized as logical or epistemological. Moreover, according to Arianna Betti, “Actions and Products” neatly exemplifies “the method which has become now strongly associated with analytic philosophy” (2014, §3.2). Without fully summarising its classificatory details, two modes of analysis Twardowski only partly deployed are worth considering as regards the intersection of analytical and phenomenological enquiry. The first involves the syntactic-semantic analysis of language and the second, an analysis of the use and users of language.

Firstly, the distinction’s logical differences are supposedly demonstrated linguistically with verbs exemplifying mental (as well as physical and psychophysical) actions (1912, §10-12) and their corresponding nouns exemplifying the results (or products), demonstrated by “judge” and “judgement” or “think” and “thought” respectively (1912, §1; cf. §8-9). Judgement in the sense of an action is used in a psychological sense whereas judgement in the sense of the result or product of an action operates in a semantic if not logical sense (1912, §14). Without promoting an explicit actions-products distinction, Twardowski could well have remained trapped in the turn-of-century Psychologismus-Streit. It was a dispute that quickly engulfed Brentano in so far as he was seen to uphold psychologistic arguments of the following kind. If logic, for instance, is the theory of judgements and inferences, if judgements and inferences are mental categories, and if mental categories form the subject-matter of psychology, then logic is part of psychology. Or again, if psychology is defined as the science which investigates laws of thought and if logic is a discipline which investigates only a subset of laws of thought, then logic is part of psychology.

Secondly, in his 1894/1895 Vienna lectures on logic, when dealing with the mental or psychological actions being directed towards their objects, not their contents or subject-matter, Twardowski considers the difficulty arising when predicating judgements or propositions about mythical, imaginary or fictional objects or states-of-affairs. He consequently contends that all judgements can assume an existential (Existenziell) or a relational (Beziehungs-) form expressed positively or negatively (1894/1895, pp. 118ff.). A judgement exists as long as there is someone performing the corresponding act of judging which Twardowski identifies as “non-enduring” (1912, §23). So how can a set of judgements or propositions endure beyond the action producing them? They can endure when a spoken expression of them is materially transformed, for example, into writing, thereby no longer being an event, but becoming an independent thing or artefact (1912, §26-27). The spoken expression or utterance of the judgement counts as the sign of the judgement and the judgement counts as the meaning of the expression or utterance. This, of course, is by no means a singular phenomenon because spoken expressions or utterances cause other judgements either in another person or the same person at different times (1912, §32 & §34). Should we commit ourselves to a single meaning of a sign and not to a multiplicity of meanings affecting those upon whom it had acted, Twardowski assumes we have in effect entered a process of “abstraction performed on concrete mental products” (1912, §39). In other words, the process of abstraction results in a second-order psychological act focused upon the actual first-order mental activity before it. However, this raises a dilemma. Quoting van der Schaar, either the act of abstraction “presupposes an identical meaning that gives direction to our act of abstracting, or it is merely a psychological act” thwarting our capacity “to reach an identical meaning for different subjects on different occasions” (35). In short, “the relevant act of abstraction cannot occur without presupposing an abstract identity” (35).

Appealing to singular or unique meaning of expressions or utterances leads Twardowski to the imaginary (or “surrogate”) use of the language of judgements or propositions. In other words, not all judgements are produced by acts of actual judging; instead, they can result from actions of presenting. This, as Twardowski (1912, §43) acknowledges, is manifested by actors in wordless moments expressing emotions by means of gestures and postures in the context of drama which are no more than imaginary, mimicked or pretended (a point further elucidated by van der Schaar (34)). Admittedly, “Actions and Products” mainly targets the logical use of language. Following Twardowski (1912, §44), take, for example, the context of teaching patterns of reasoning in formally valid deductive arguments. We can present instances of false or fanciful judgements or propositions to demonstrate cases of affirming the antecedent (modus ponens) or denying the consequent (modus tollens):

            If all hexagons are square, then all squares are circular [Cpq]

            All hexagons are square [p]

            Therefore, all squares are circular [q]

           If all animals have vertebrae, then all vertebrae have purple indentations [Cpq]

            Not all vertebrae have purple indentations [Nq]

            Therefore, not all animals have vertebrae [Np]

Van der Schaar acknowledges how Moltmann’s recent essays, employing “ample linguistic evidence,” aim, like Twardowski, to portray that “the notion relevant to logic and philosophy in general is the product, not the act or the proposition” by giving “an account of semantics, propositional attitudes and truth” (36). But van der Schaar wishes to shift our attention to acts of inferring without invoking Twardowski’s problematic notion of abstract propositions. Nor does she wish to rely upon Moltmann’s appeal to propositional attitudes whose (attitudinal) objects are shared, whose properties “may have more than one instance” and hence “abstract,” and whose predication can apply to “more than one object” and hence “general” (39). “What Lucantonio feared was hoped for by Larisa” (cf. 38; a case overlooked by Moltmann (2017, pp. 274-275)) is not simply a proposition or judgement made, let alone an abstract one, but a proposition being true such as “that their cousin Alyssa will arrive next weekend.” Van der Schaar next probes whether we can, according to Twardowski and Moltmann, understand “judgements as bearers of truth or falsity” (40). Doubt emerges whenever we assert a judgement because “it seems more appropriate to call [it] correct or incorrect” (40). If our assertion, in response to the question of how we know, can be justified, then it is correct and such “an epistemic notion of correctness is one of the roles of truth” (40). The other notion can be found when explaining what makes a proposition true as distinct from merely valid as used in logical inferences (see our modus ponens and modus tollens examples above). If the “connectives” of objects and contexts are open to proof, then the “semantic role” of correctness comes to the fore as a bearer of truth (40).

Later, when reviewing theories of knowledge, Twardowski overtly claims that “Logic occupies itself with judgements as products” (1925, p. 186). Van der Schaar immediately questions the inferential relations based on prior judgements made and the judgement made in conclusion:

What are these inferential relations? Do they obtain independently of the judging agent? And what is the product of an act of inferring? … Can we give a unified account of logical inference for cases where we judge the premises … [and] where we merely take the premises as examples without them being judged? (41).

Aware that German distinguishes between schliessen (“to infer” (although also translatable in English as “to conclude … to connect … to deduce … to imply,” etc.)) and Schluss (“inference” or “conclusion”), van der Schaar identifies the act of inferring to be an epistemic act in which the act “has brought us from known premises, former judgements made, to a known conclusion, a new judgement made” (42). This, in turn, leads her to at least three crucial contentions in an effort to complete Twardowski’s act-product distinction regarding the concept of inference:

[a] Firstly, “former judgements made … function as a justification of the conclusion, but as such they are not part of the conclusion, that is, of the product of the act of inference in the strict sense” (42).

[b] Next, “we may also question the act of inference itself. Was the act in order? We distinguish valid from invalid inference schemata [sic] …. An inference rule such as Modus Ponens we know to be valid on the basis of our understanding of implication …. If it is not, if we have made a mistake in the application of the rule, we are not entitled to call it an act of inference: there is merely a purported act of inference … We thus see that implicit in our description of a mistake in inference the notion of rightness of the act …. We now see … a third role of truth: the rightness of the act …. [which] seems to capture the normative role of truth … (44).

[c] Thirdly, “Unlike truth and correctness, rightness does not have an equal conceptual counterpart, such as falsity or incorrectness. The opposite of rightness is APPEARANCE, a form of absence; here the contrast between appearance and reality is at stake …. Only when the act turns out not to be a true act of inference, we can say that it merely has a psychological value” (44-45).

Adapting a logico-linguistic critique of Ryle by Alan White (1971), let us end this second section by re-contextualising inference beyond its treatment by Twardowski and van der Schaar. To infer cannot be categorized as if it were identical with to judge or to think. It does not operate temporally as do the latter pair. Lucantonio could gradually or eventually come to think or judge something; he could ask Larisa or even himself to think or judge something and either of them may subsequently do so. Granted, Larisa may take a considerable time when subsequently thinking or judging whereas Lucantonio takes very little time to do so. But what Lucantonio cannot do is ask Larisa or himself to infer. In other words, to infer cannot be used within a first- or second-person imperative to issue a command or an instruction, an admonishment or a request.

Next, inference does not adhere to the same logical category as judgement or thought. It does not convey the same consequences as do the latter pair. Larisa can more or less explain Lucantonio’s actions, behaviour, or discourse by reference to his judgement or thought that something is (or is not) the case, but not because of his inference that something is or is not. Lucantonio can of course have the same thought or judgement repeatedly, but, just as he cannot repeat the same discovery, he cannot repeat the same inference. This holds although an inference, like a discovery, can be included as part of a reported theory. After all, reporting an inference is not an act of making an inference any more than repeating the report on various occasions is repeating the inference. In short, for Lucantonio to repeat his or another’s inference is not an act of inferring twice.

Although Larisa often infers from something previously or currently experienced, known, or perceived, an act of inferring is not the accomplishment or culmination of a task. She might vacillate between drawing inferences cautiously or rapidly yet often make them on justifiable grounds. For Lucantonio impatiently then to declare “You cannot infer that” is to deny her a logical right or to announce “You must not infer that” is to issue her a logical warning. But has he implicitly presumed here that to infer is a passage towards or a process of reaching a particular point of view? If so, he has misunderstood that to infer is to accept or adopt a point of view which seems to Larisa to explain past or present clues or evidence (but not argumentative premises) such that what she infers contrasts with what she already believes, experiences, or perceives. For example, we could envisage that Larisa might well say to Lucantonio, “From your continuing silence about Alyssa’s planned visit next weekend, I infer that you have no objections.” The reverse, by contrast, would not constitute an act of inferring, but rather an act of deducing a proposition or one of predicting an event: “From your lack of objections, I deduce—in fact, I predict—that you will remain silent.” Not all acts of reaching a conclusion are acts of inferring.

III

This final section begins with what contributors collectively understand by the third theme of the Brożek and Jadacki anthology, namely, the nature of the analytical movement. Consider Wolénski’s personal aside that his practice is “governed by analytic way[s] of doing philosophy” (51). This remark is made in the context of his realisation that “the majority of problems analyzed in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language begin with a remark that, for example, we should distinguish science ([or] language) as an activity,” the “results and expressions” of which function “as products of related actions” (51). As summarised in the abstract to his third chapter, Richard pursues the problem of and alternatives to “two traditional conceptions of propositions in analytic philosophy” (79). Both conceptions postulate that propositions are “mind-independent entities,” and hence “intersubjectively sharable,” which operate as “the primary bearers of truth, the meanings of sentences and the objects of propositional attitudes” such as belief and doubt (79). Building an alternative principally based upon the theory of meaning promulgated by Roman Ingarden (1931 & 1937) (85-88; cf. Richard 2021, pp. 158-163), Richard concludes that it “should be confronted with the traditional problems faced by propositions” (91), leaving it open whether this invitation is mainly directed at analytical philosophers. Mariusz Grygianiec’s sixth chapter comprises an account of Tadeuz Czeżowski’s report in the early ‘fifties of how members of the Lvov-Warsaw School such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Kortarbiński, and Stanislaw Leśniewski understood “the issues of persistence and identity of objects through time” (125). Grygianiec’s investigation of the central debate over “the problem of internal change (whether qualitative or mereological)” makes only passing allusions to “analytical” philosophical references by Elizabeth Anscombe and Karl Popper in the ’fifties (131, n. 5 & 133, n. 7) and Roderick Chisholm and David Lewis in the ’seventies and ’eighties (125). On one interpretation of being “at the sources of the twentieth-century analytical movement,” none of the four represent the early movement in the ways, say, a Gottlob Frege, a Bertrand Russell or a Ludwig Wittgenstein did.

As hinted in our introduction, many contributions do not overtly explore the nature, let alone the sources, of the analytical movement. For example, the fourth chapter by Dariusz Łukasiewicz on Twardowski and methodological and ontological Psychologismus avoids labelling those discussed from Descartes onwards as analytical. Instead, he mentions “empiricist projects” and “German idealistic philosophy” (96 & 97), “phenomenologists” and “naturalists” (101 & 102). Arkadiusz Chrudzimski’s fifth chapter explores the formation of “idiogenetic” theories of emotions—that is, where emotion is regarded as a fundamental kind of mental phenomenon—in the thinking of Brentano and Anton Marty. Only when he draws comparisons with contemporary Anglo-American philosophers are “pragmatists and anti-realists” mentioned (116); Polish reception to different strands of pragmatic thinking associated with Charles Peirce and William James form the topic of Brożek’s eighth chapter (156ff.). The closing chapters—Ryszard Kleszcz on rationality (207ff.), Brożek again but selectively upon formal and informal logic amongst notable figures in the Lvov-Warsaw School (221ff.), and Marcin Będkowski on the pedagogical dimension connected with the latter—whilst discussing the role of logic and science do not explicitly examine the analytical movement as such.

The editors’ close their anthology with a lengthy appraisal of the significance of Twardowski in Poland and beyond. Before a bibliographical reckoning of Twardowski’s works and influence, their “Closing Word” begins by endorsing the opening paragraph of Betti (2014) (267). She ties Twardowski to Anglo-Germanic analytic philosophers in two ways. Firstly, the distinction in his 1894 thesis “between the content and the object of a presentation” within Brentano’s “theories of the intentionality of mental acts” is “a psychological, non-platonistic counterpart of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference.” Secondly, Twardowski “belonged to a tradition of non-idealistic German-language philosophy” originating with Bolzano and indirectly “influenced … Moore and Russell’s transition from idealism to analytic philosophy.” Subsequently, when rationalising membership of the Lvov-Warsaw “science school,” the editors quote a 2016 interview with Bogusław Wolniewicz, a politically controversial philosopher, who regards it as “determined by two factors”: an animating “common spirit” and an “‘apostolic succession’ … entered … only through contact with the master,” namely, Twardowski (276). What characterizes the analytical movement beyond any component schools adhering to it is left unsaid.

By now, the predominantly allusive character of contributors’ references summarised above suggests that “analytical movement” not only operated in highly heterogenous contexts. Possibly for that reason, it is also constantly attributed to individuals outside Poland such as Frege and Russell or, often more implicitly, to Polish individuals variably associated with the Lvov-Warsaw School such as Ajdukiewicz and Łukasiewicz. With that in mind, we might at first be tempted to resort etymologically to, say, the ancient Attic and Ionic Greek ἀνᾴλῠσις (an unloosening) or ᾀναλύω (to unloosen) in order to establish a commonality. Next, we may equally be tempted to collect lexical definitions of what “analysis” has typically come to signify no matter the domain of enquiry, for example, separating something into its component parts or tracing something to its source and thereby discovering the general principles underlying individual phenomena.

However, a more nuanced approach to dominant kinds of analysis beckons. When considering the formative years of analytical philosophy, especially debates in the early ‘thirties within the Cambridge School and the Vienna Circle, Michael Beany proposes that “three core modes of analysis” functioning singly or jointly can be discriminated (2000, p. 97). In chronological order of their deployment, the “regressive mode” aimed “to identify the ‘starting-points’ … by means of which something can be ‘explained’ or ‘generated’,” that is, a set of “first principles,” “premisses” or “causes” as the means of solving “a given problem (e.g. construct a particular geometrical figure, derive a particular conclusion or explain a particular fact)” (2000, p. 98). Secondly, the “decompositional mode” was “concerned to identify the components—as well as [logical] structure—of something” typically focused even nowadays upon the constituents of a concept or a proposition (2000, p. 98). Thirdly, the “interpretive mode,” which “emerges explicitly in the twentieth century,” is said to paraphrase or “‘translate’ something into a particular framework” (2000, p. 98). In other words, this mode of analysis “presupposes a particular framework of interpretation” and hence “preliminary work is done in interpreting what it is we are seeking to analyse … before we engage in other processes” leading us towards the “more fundamental” (2000, p. 98). Beany concludes:

there is an intricate and continually shifting web of conceptions of analysis involved here, which sometimes combine effectively and sometimes pull apart, and it is this complex and contested web that characterizes, and will continue to characterize, analytic philosophy. (2000, p. 114)

Perhaps this, in turn, underpins why Michael Potter amongst many others finds that “it is surprisingly hard to find a coherent cluster of views that would be subscribed to all those twentieth-century philosophers … taken to belong to the analytic tradition” (2008, p. 69).

Does the difficulty of unequivocally identifying a philosophical movement on the grounds of its pursuit of a distinctive set of topics, problems or methods lie elsewhere? The above-mentioned reaction against Germanic idealism, initially associated with Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, is one shared not only by the analytic and phenomenological movements, but also by the other two major philosophical movements pursued during the twentieth century, the marxist and the pragmatic. Nor are any of these philosophical movements confined to a specific location let alone a specific language. Occasionally, we find it convenient to talk of geographical and/or linguistic subsets of a movement such as Italian marxist philosophy; at other times, we label a movement by the name of the person initiating novel philosophical methods such as Descartes and his 1637 Discours de la méthode: Pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences.

That said, is it feasible to identify a philosophical movement by what it excludes rather than includes? Stephen Gaukroger, for example, nominates the failure to use history as a resource for philosophy when no longer “dealing with the pressing intellectual problems of the day—not least in science, religion, and politics” (2011, p. 423). He ends by mapping the twentieth-century terrain as follows:

philosophy, in both its analytic and phenomenological versions, has been shaped by a Kantian conception of philosophy as an a priori enterprise, exploring conceptual, by contrast with empirical, problems …. [T]he dominant view in the twentieth century has been that philosophy, at least in those areas considered to be its core, are self-contained …. And when it does engage with another discipline, such as science for example, it does it in the form of a ‘philosophy of science’, something that abstracts from and stands above the empirical content of science, and considers epistemological and methodological questions that are independent of whatever content the scientific theories have. (2011, pp. 423-424)

Also worth noting is that Gaukroger’s paper, not unlike Beany’s above, focuses upon homogenizing views that were particularly heightened entre-deux-guerres. The analytical movement, it seems, then decontextualised the content of past philosophy “as if the issues” predecessors engaged, “the reasons they had for raising them, the way they approached them, and the expected outcomes of philosophical enquiry, exactly matched modern concerns” (2011, pp. 407-408). Modern concerns were “considered timeless, deemed to have transcended the contingencies of their formulation,” and unhampered by “translation and transmission” (2011, p. 408). Whether all analytical and phenomenological projects, Twardowski’s included, can be similarly accused remains open to debate.

Finally, another kind of omission when accounting for twentieth-century philosophical movements is the role of institutional definitions. This has been overlooked by Brożek and Jadacki’s anthology, notwithstanding Twardowski’s third trajectory concerning intellectual collaboration and critique listed in our first section. Recognising, say, the analytical movement distinctively from an individual’s perspective might well prove problematic for someone being unaware that he or she had entered the terrain of that movement without a philosophical framework or theory to indicate it. Is part of the reason for this situation explicable by re-applying the stance taken by Arthur Danto (1964) before being reconceptualised by George Dickie (1974) with respect to the so-called “artworld”? Here, echoing Danto, the terrain is “constituted” as analytic by virtue of intentionally presented “theories” of or hypotheses about the analytical movement (1964, p. 572). That is, “one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate [the analytical] from the rest,” consists in making the analytical movement “possible” (1964, p. 572). Encountering a new class or category of topics, problems, or methods is “analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to explain” (1964, p. 572). Indeed, the history of philosophical movements is marked by “conceptual” revolutions where a “widely credited theory is being threatened in such a way that all coherence goes” (1964, p. 573)—especially since evolving intellectual movements cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria. Theorists of philosophical movements have to relate their philosophical audience, community, or “world” to what the movement comprises by “an emphasis upon newly significant features” of what has previously been accepted and by providing “quite different accounts of their status” (1964, p. 573). It remains open to members of the philosophical audience, community or “world” to construe the theorist’s role historically or philosophically. To draw upon R.G. Collingwood’s familiar distinction, “In reading the historians, we ‘consult’ them” to cull knowledge we lack; when “reading the philosophers, we ‘follow’ them” to “understand what they think” and “reconstruct … the processes by which they have come to think it” (1933, p. 211). In other words, “What we demand of the historian is a product of his [or her] thought; what we demand of the philosopher is his [or her] thought itself” so that we commit ourselves to reconstructing “the same experience” the philosopher had intellectually engaged (1933, pp. 211-212).

Dickie mitigates Danto’s apparent circularity by reconstruing Danto’s appeal to a “world” as referring to “the broad social institution in which works … have their place” (1974, p. 29). This enables Dickie to accommodate the fact, also recognised by Gaukroger (2011), that the context of institutions varies, sometimes “associated” with “religion,” sometimes with “the state” (1974, p. 30). The expected roles of practitioners, audiences, and their venues are “defined by the traditions” developed within institutions “as an established way of doing and behaving” (1974, p. 30; cf. p. 36). So, whenever Dickie calls a “world” an institution, he is “saying that it is an established practice,” each of whose “systems has had its own origins and historical development” and “each of which furnishes an institutional background for the conferring of … status on objects within its domain” (1974, pp. 31 & 33). At least two conclusions relevant to philosophical movements follow. Firstly, there are no limits on the number of “systems” or traditions under a “generic conception” of philosophy; these, in turn, providing sufficient “elasticity” where “even the most radical” kind of “creativity … can be accommodated” (1974, p. 33). Secondly, the concept of “conferring status” need not be as clear as that within legal institutions “where procedures and lines of authority are explicitly defined and incorporated into law” (1974, p. 35). Counterparts in the “world” of philosophy “are nowhere codified,” yet “there is a practice and this defines a social institution” where “every person who sees [her- or] himself as a member … is thereby a member” who can potentially act on behalf of others (1974, pp. 35-36).

At the Sources of the Twentieth-Century Analytical Movement balances historical data and philosophical provocations for its Anglophone readership. Perhaps, apart from a thorough proofreading, a future re-issue of the collection would benefit by confronting what is meant by the notion of the “analytical movement.”

References

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Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das literarische Kunstwek / The Literary Work of Art. Translated by G.G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

——-. 1937. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks / The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art [rev. edn. 1968]. Translated by R.A. Crowley & K.R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

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Marie-Eve Morin: Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being

Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology Book Cover Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology
New Perspectives in Ontology
Marie-Eve Morin
Edinburgh University Press
2022
Ebook (PDF) £85.00
216

Reviewed by: Vanessa Ossino

Marie-Eve Morin’s comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy focuses on two objectives: First, it compares Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s stances on the nature of the relation between “sense” and “being” which includes a lengthy analysis of their methods as well as an elaborate inquiry of their respective ontological framework. Secondly, Morin responds to “the new realist critique of post-Kantian philosophy, according to which all post-Kantian thinkers in the phenomenological tradition would remain unable to think an outside worthy of the name.” (183)

Right from the beginning, it becomes apparent that the study is of relevance to the broader field of phenomenology, and promises nuanced insights into still pressing questions posed by new realists and post-phenomenologists. One of those questions being: To what extent is phenomenology able to speak of an »outside« which is not suspected of being a correlation of consciousness? Another challenge posed to phenomenology by the aforementioned philosophical strains is concerned with the claim that phenomenology narrows »sense« into »being« and vice versa. This is assumed in particular by ‘traditional phenomenologists’ with whom Morin mainly means Edmund Husserl and the early Martin Heidegger. Through her engagement with new realism and phenomenology, Morin frames her study in-between two antithetical stances:

(1) The premise that sense and being are divided along the lines of a »subjective inside« and an »objective outside« (new realism).

(2) The premise that being is a function of meaning, which reduces it to the limits of sense (Husserl and Heidegger of Sein und Zeit).

The risk to which phenomenology allegedly exposes itself is that “by reducing fact to sense, phenomenology abandons pure otherness or brute factuality, in order to arrogate to itself the right to speak” (12). By bringing Derrida’s critique of the phenomenological method into play, Morin places her focus in a still gaping wound of phenomenology, which is located at the border-crossings of phenomenology and ontology. In the words of Derrida:

“We pass from phenomenology to ontology (in the non-Husserlian sense) when we silently question the direction of the upsurge of naked factuality and cease to consider the fact in its phenomenological function. Then the latter can no longer be exhausted and reduced to its sense by the work of phenomenology, even were it pursued ad infinitum.” (Derrida 1989, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, p. 151-2, trans. mod. by Morin)

The logic by which phenomenology gets challenged here is as follows: If, for those phenomenologists that remain in the Kantian tradition, the limits of consciousness are the limits of what can be given, then transcendental subjectivity must be seen as the universe of possible sense and thus as possible being in its givenness.

Through this perspective of questioning, Morin inscribes herself in the discourse on phenomenology’s correlationism. The latter can be described as the view that subjectivity and objectivity cannot be understood or analysed apart from one another because both are always already intertwined or internally related. It is the view that we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking (theory) and being (reality) and never to either in isolation from or independently of the other. (Zahavi 2016: The end of what? Phenomenology vs. speculative realism, in: International Journal of Philosophical Studies, p. 294).

In the words of Morin, the question that she confronts through her engagement with speculative realist states as follows: „How to speak of an outside that is inscribed in the inside as absolute outside without falling into too much modesty or too much presumption?” (3) Taking this question as guidance, Morin turns to Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s respective philosophies, that in her view provide promising approaches responding to the posed questions.

As for Merleau-Ponty, Morin rightly hints at his radicalization of the paradoxical relation between being and sense, which does not allow being to be limited to sense, but much rather points to a Being within which sense is entailed. Nancy’s ontology of sense on the other hand is not situated within the theoretical realm of phenomenology, even though he is still concerned with a philosophy of experience. Both thinkers share an engaged interest in the torsion between inside and outside, which manifests in their “displacement of the metaphysics of presence toward a thinking of the ‘subject’ as non-presence-to-self, as a co-existence with the world and with others prior to the division between subject and object […].” (15) In other words, both philosophers share the effort to think sense and being beyond a rigid subjective consciousness, without losing the focus on experience altogether.

The well-structured introduction offers a plausible guide to the oftentimes in-transparent and enigmatic realms of Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s ideas, promising a profound analysis of the different thought patterns as well as their respective ontologies, which touch on the same object and yet approach it from different angles.

The study is divided into three parts: Body (I), Thing (II) and Being (III), with each part being divided into three chapters. The first chapter always thematizes Merleau-Ponty’s stance on the notion in question, the second chapter respectively concerns Nancy’s stance and the third chapter brings the two philosophers into dialogue. This structure succeeds in guiding the reader carefully through the different thought realms of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, leading to a two folded incline in Morin’s argumentative fashion, in that each part includes an interim conclusion, with all three interim conclusions building up to a final conclusion.

In what follows I will outline Morin’s inquiry in accordance with the mentioned structure. I will do this in a rather detailed fashion in order to engage thoroughly with Morin’s argumentation.

Part I – Body

The first part addresses Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s respective conceptions of embodied existence and puts them into dialogue through distinguishing them in accordance with the conceptual pair of »unity« versus »dislocation«.

Chapter 1

In this chapter, Morin puts Merleau-Ponty’s well-known contention with René Descartes in relation to an underexposed perspective, which argues that Merleau-Ponty is driven by a “desire to find the premise of his own theory in Descartes” (see Morin 47 footnote 1, citing Isabel Thomas-Foigel 2011: ‘Merleau-Ponty: De la perspective au chiasme, la rigueur épistémique d’une analogie’, Chiasmi International 13, p. 387, Morin’s translation). In stating that Merleau-Ponty finds in Descartes the necessary tools to overcome the cartesian dualism, Morin’s begins her inquiry into Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived-body in an unusual but daring fashion.

Early on in the chapter Morin emphasizes that Merleau-Ponty’s main interest in Descartes lies at the heart of the imminent tension between Descartes’ »philosophy of the understanding« and his »philosophy of existence«, between »reflection« and the »unreflected« (31). Morin argues that Merleau-Ponty criticizes Descartes for excluding the lived experience of the unity of body and soul from his notion of nature as extension. Thereby, Descartes states that our lived experience cannot teach us anything more than what our understanding of it offers to us. It is in the periphery of Descartes’ philosophy of understanding and reflection that Merleau-Ponty thus finds his guidance into a field of truth that is concerned with the “obscure sphere of unreflected existence” (30, cited in a note from Merleau-Ponty autumn 1957, Morin’s translation). This »sphere of unreflected existence« is located at the – for Descartes – confused unified experience of two different substances: body and soul. And yet, this unified experience has a certain clarity in itself, one which ‘renders unintelligible’ once it is disentangled through analytical thought, as Merleau-Ponty points out. Therefore, he argues that the lived experience of the »unity of the body and the soul« offers us a certain intelligibility of the opaque realm of an unreflected existence, to which analytical thought can never account for sufficiently. Descartes’ sixth meditation, in which he states that “nature also teaches me […] that I am not merely present in my body […] but that I am very closely joined and […] intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit” (Descartes 1996: Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 56), reveals in the eyes of Merleau-Ponty that “there is something before and after the ‘series of reasons’, and this something is called ‘existence’.” (32)

Thus, Morin highlights that Merleau-Ponty’s own method develops through a circular reading of Descartes, in that he takes the sixth meditation with its emphasis on the unreflected unity of body and soul as remaining valid in the face of the second meditation, in which the cogito is elaborated. Followingly, the unreflected unity still holds accountable throughout a certain reflection, one that Merleau-Ponty calls »radical reflection« in contrast to the ‘intellectualist’ philosophies of reflection, including Husserl’s phenomenological-transcendental reduction. Morin emphasizes that a radical reflection, far off from being an ‘ultimate’ reflection, is grounded on factical experience and concerns an existential philosophy that questions the “ever-renewed experience of its own beginning in the unreflected and the description of that experience” (34, citing Merleau-Ponty 2012: Phenomenology of Perception, lxxviii, trans. mod.). The difficulty in such a radical reflection lies in the fact, that it still has to account for a mode of openness of a certain pre-reflective and pre-linguistic towards reflection and language. In order to not fall back into the argument of a constituting consciousness, Merleau-Ponty therefore posits a »tacit cogito« on the grounds of a sensing and self-sensing lived body, a body which opens itself towards itself as well as towards the world through active-passively sensing of an ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ at what seems to be the same time.

At the end of the chapter, Morin emphasizes, with regard to different objections that were raised after the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, that the notion of »tacit cogito« still remains entangled with some kind of constituting consciousness, not being able to “develop the specific way of being of the body [as a mediator] itself in a positive way.” (42)

Chapter 2

In the second chapter Morin enriches the idea of a possible operative cogito beyond a constituting consciousness through Nancy’s reading of Descartes in Nancy’s book Ego Sum. Through this engagement, she emphasizes Nancy’s notion of the body not as mass but as differance (26). Similar to Merleau-Ponty, Nancy points to the special »kind of unit« in Descartes’ sixth meditation, with the focus on the unit being “neither-soul-nor-body” (56) but an opening that articulates itself, not in the structure of a substantial presence but in that of a »to-itself« (57). As Morin emphasizes, Nancy here argues that “the to-itself denotes […] the movement of existence as being-towards itself so that […] there is no self at the origin of this movement” (57, my emphasis). Again, similar to Merleau-Ponty, Nancy focusses on the moment in which ‘the subject’ comes to its first articulation, which for him necessarily implies an experience that is given through the body.

Beyond these similarities, the first grave difference between Merleau-Ponty and Nancy lies at the heart of their respective notions of »body«. Where for Merleau-Ponty the lived body can still be posited as a certain subjective operative consciousness (at least in the Phenomenology of Perception), which indeed implies a subject, Nancy aims at egressing subject-philosophy in stating the utterance of the »ego sum« as “a pure performative, […] without underlying substrate or subject (53, citing Nancy 2016: Ego Sum: Corpus, Anima, Fabula, p. 84-5). The performative utterance of the »ego sum« is stated as an action without subject (54) or in the words of Derrida: as a »teleopoetic utterance«. With regard to the relation of body and ego, the teleopoetic utterance, by uttering ‘ego’, produces something proper: “An I that can say ‘I’, and ob-jects the body, that is, throws it in front of itself. […] [B]ut only because it is effectively not its own body […] holds the body at a distance” (57). The limit of the self for Nancy is a limit that does not lead to a solid ground but to an »abyssal intimacy«, which Morin, in accordance with Nancy, names the “inside of the world” (57).

Reminding us of Merleau-Ponty’s »radical reflection« in which a certain pre-reflective sets the stage for an endless endeavor of reflection, so too – but in a different fashion – Nancy hints at Descartes’ sixth meditation in order to show that “what is most inside is not some me that would finally coincide with itself but always something more […] and opens me up to relation” (58). The union of body and soul for Nancy is not a relation between two things, but an ontological spacing or opening-to of the other (60). For him, not only bodies are radically plural and fragmented, but so is the world and with that sense making itself. Sense-making, which constitutes on the model of touch in Nancy’s thought, is always an experience of a limit (64). The world, far from being understood as a cosmos, follows the logic of a singularity that is always plural in its origin (80).

Thus, a major difference between Nancy and Merleau-Ponty can be found in their elaboration of Descartes’ unity of body and soul in the sixth meditation. Where Nancy follows the logic of divergence, Merleau-Ponty respectively focusses on a certain logic of entanglement (as can exemplary be seen in his notion of body-schema).

Chapter 3

In this chapter Morin puts Nancy and Merleau-Ponty in a more direct conversation and refers her inquiry back to the guiding question of how the nuanced differences in their respective ontologies lead to new insights on Merleau-Ponty’s path along the edge of phenomenology. Morin mainly focuses on the difference that “lies in their respective ways of conceiving of sense and making sense” (70). She casts this difference in terms of a »priority of unity« (Merleau-Ponty) over »dislocation« (Nancy), which for her includes a priority of interiority over exteriority or of the moment of reappropriation and integration over the moment of alienation and separation. Even though Morin repeatedly emphasizes that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical endeavor aims at overcoming such dichotomies, and especially the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority, she oftentimes methodically draws back on such a dualistic thinking, which might leave the impression of a problematic tendency to undermine Merleau-Ponty’s original thought beyond such dualisms.

Yet, the reader gets a better sense of her usage of such conceptual pairs through her comparison of Merleau-Ponty’s »body-schema« and Nancy’s description of the body as »corpus«. Through engaging with the lived body as body-schema and Nancy’s corpus as “constituted by a fragmentation that is never mended” and which “difference spreads to the body’s relation to the world” (71) it becomes obvious that Morin uses such dichotomic pairs in an argumentative-methodological fashion, in order to highlight the nuanced differences of the two thinkers in a straightforward way. This leaves the impression that she somewhat simplifies the argument for readers who might not be too familiar with the respective philosophies. Nevertheless, such a simplification through a contrasting dichotomic argumentative fashion to me seems like a valid methodological approach, especially with regard to the sometimes very opaque subtleness of Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s ontologies.

Without going into too much detail, it is sufficient to emphasize that in this third chapter Morin thoroughly shows how Merleau-Ponty’s »lived body« – which is distinguished by a body-schema that allows for the integration of my synesthetic perception, gestures and relation to the world as well as to others through a kind of pre-reflective synthesis -, differs in its way of sense-making from Nancy’s »corpus« – which is derived from Descartes’ partes extra partes and highlights the plurality of my senses and of my bodily being in general and that cannot be collected into a systematic whole (76). Whereas for Merleau-Ponty sense is related to a unified pre-reflective synthesis (at least) given through the body-schema, sense for Nancy finds its place in the differentiation of multiple singularities.

Interestingly, Morin concludes the chapter with a critical outlook on Nancy, arguing that: “What Nancy emphasizes then is resistance to synthesis or unification, even if one must in the end say that the subject or the world finds in this resistance its ‘stance’, that is, a certain kind of unity” (81).

Part 2 – Thing

As the title promises, the second part is concerned with the status of the object or thing in Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s philosophies. Whereas the first part drew on Descartes as a dialogue partner, the second part starts a conversation with more recent thinkers of object-oriented ontology, new materialism and speculative realism. In order to better understand the ‘accusation’ of correlationism, Morin is concerned with the question of the strategic role of a supposed anthropomorphism in Merleau-Ponty’s description of inhuman things.

Chapter 4

In order to understand Merleau-Ponty’s alleged »strategic anthropomorphism« in his description of things, Morin engages with his phenomenology of perception which emphasizes the paradox that perception is always perspectival but nevertheless neither the perception of the thing for-itself nor of a sign of the thing. What Morin calls the »paradox of the in-itself-for-us« highlights the fact, that perception is not a mere step in the path of objective thought towards the objective relations behind an experience, but that perception itself, in its finite character, exposes the objective thing in its reality as it is given in its appearance. Speculative realists interpret this as a philosophy of immanence, predicating that phenomenology is stuck ‘within’, and thus, does not have the possibility of comparing reality as it would be ‘without’ consciousness (91).

In order to not fall back on the difficulties of a philosophy of immanence respectively a philosophy of transcendence, Morin reminds us that Merleau-Ponty thinks reality at the level of the phenomenon, an order in which we are neither solely a being nor a constituting consciousness, but first and foremost we are mixed up with the world and others in that we are united to being “through the thickness of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: Phenomenology of Perception, p. 311, my emphasis). The notion of »thickness« that we encounter in Merleau-Ponty in different stages of his thought is not always easy to understand, since – similar to his notion of style – he doesn’t really offer an explicit definition of it. Nevertheless, Morin lucidly underlines that “this thickness is not a third thing that would stand between consciousness and being and hide the latter. It is rather the world not as thing but as promise of something more that sustains my explorations” (92).

We learn from this chapter, that in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking ‘the thing’ offers itself to us through a certain manner or style, which we encounter in its phenomenality and not its mere appearance. In its phenomenality, an object is an “intersensorial thing that speaks to all my senses” (93) without being absorbed into the sum of its parts. Ultimately Morin encounters a sort of »strategic anthropomorphism« in Merleau-Ponty’s correlative concept of the lived body and its being-towards-the-world. The important difference between a reductive anthropomorphism and Merleau-Ponty’s stance lies in the fact, that for Merleau-Ponty one encounters the world through a body that is never fully mine, “i.e. that is never constituted by and hence laid out in front of consciousness” (97). The thickness of the world is a modality of the inexhaustibility of my relation to the world as well as my relation to myself as a bodily being.

At the end of the chapter though, Morin rightly points to the fact that even though Merleau-Ponty was able to dialecticise the notion of subject and object into a system in which both are correlates, in the Phenomenology of Perception he is not yet able to account for the being of the dialectical relation itself.

Chapter 5

Here Morin continues to inquire of a »strategic anthropomorphism« in Merleau-Ponty.  She mainly addresses two questions in this chapter:

(1) Do objects refer us back to ourselves, since they are filled with our own possibilities projected in space?

(2) If so, are objects mere internal possibilities?

In order to answer these questions, Morin engages with a notion of »cautious anthropomorphism« introduced by Steven Shaviro and Jeffrey Cohen, to broaden the strategic anthropomorphism in Merleau-Ponty in order to show that his anthropomorphism is not about centering a thing around human abilities, feelings or categories, but much rather about how a thing appears to us in entering our existence and is thus always recognized in its own place, in which objects dialogically shape our experience of the world (115). Objects then might refer us back to ourselves but neither in a way that would lead us to acknowledge them directly or in their totality nor in a way that would amount to an alleged neutrality of intellectual contemplation. On the contrary, in accordance with a »cautious anthropomorphism« – that Morin sees reflected in Merleau-Ponty’s »strategic anthropomorphism« – objects are guaranteed an irreducibility to mere intellectual ideas, in that they are given »in the flesh« which arouses certain »desires« and amounts for the incompleteness of any exploration.

With regard to Morin’s own method, I here find it a bit irritating that, even though she underlines Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to commit to a notion of an active constituting consciousness, she sometimes underlines that we, as sentient-beings, take an active positioning, in that “we lend things our flesh in order to make them flesh” (113, my emphasis). Although this might be a rather fussy critique, I would argue that such phrasing can be misleading with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s argument, that the underlying structures of our engagement »in the flesh« are of a certain passivity. In fact, Merleau-Ponty prominently speaks of a passivity without passivism (Merleau-Ponty 2010: Institution and Passivity).

Chapter 6

Morin starts the chapter with a synopsis of Nancy’s “radical desubjectivisation of freedom” (119). For Nancy freedom does not resemble self-determination but it means “to be absolutely without ‘why’” (120). Morin underlines: “Freedom is the unfounded factuality of an existence that surprises itself in existing” (120). She then continues to connect Nancy’s notion of freedom with his understanding of »finitude« that lies in the fact “that any being must be exposed to an exteriority or an otherness in order to be what it is” (120). The finitude of singularities in their infinite exposition to an exteriority expresses an open-ended movement of coming to presence. In putting Nancy in dialogue with his Heideggerian roots, Morin underlines that »the freedom of the world« outreaches Heidegger’s concept of world that stands for a “coherent milieu of significance already laid out in advance” (122). In emphasizing Nancy’s depart from phenomenology through his detachment of sense-making from any form of intentional givenness, Morin uncovers Nancy’s concept of world as “the space of sense: the sharing of singularities exposed to one another: stone, ground, dog, grass, star, and me, and you” (122). The world is thus free in its infinite finitude in that it signifies a “groundlessness of the world, the ever-renewed coming-to-presence of the world […]” (120). To say that a thing exists then, is to affirm its structure of difference and spacing which is opposed to a pure in-itself as well as an essence for consciousness. In this way, sense is not reduced to its givenness and accessibility, be it to intentionality, a sentient lived body or a Dasein. In challenging phenomenology’s access as the a priori of being-in-the-world, Nancy emphasizes »sense« as that “what happens on the edge or threshold, in-between singularities, in the encounter with an […] alterity that resists assimilation […], to which there is access precisely only in the mode of non-access” (125). The exposition of a thing thus, is an exposition of an »it-self« to itself and others.

The question that hovers above this chapter followingly, is whether Nancy’s materialism resembles a kind of unifying relationalism after all, in that one still has a certain kind of access to a thing by means of a contact-separation of surfaces. This impression deepens when Morin stresses in Nancy that “I am able to encounter the stone only insofar as I am also already stone” (125). A sentence which Morin further contextualizes in view of Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology of flesh, an ontology that she argues to be too unifying in view of Nancy. She engages with this question through further elaborating on Nancy’s notion of sense as material, by which he means that sense-relation resembles precisely not a givenness but a “void – or space […] which relates without gathering, or gathers without uniting” (128). Followingly, Nancy’s ontology does advocate a certain relationalism, with the main difference that it is not unifying, in that it hints at a “materialism [which] is linked to the plurality of origins in their impenetrability” (135).

Part III – Being

The final part of the book confronts Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal ontology” more directly with Nancy’s “ontology of the singular plural” in order to elaborate on their respective quests for “a principle of non-dialectical difference that allows for the emergence of sense right at Being itself” (145).

Chapter 7

Morin starts the chapter with an extended dialogue of Merleau-Ponty, Nancy and Heidegger. She emphasizes that both, Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, “seek to undo the metaphysical difference between existentia and essentia in favour of thinking of existence or presence that is not pure positivity but includes a moment of negativity that is not the other of presence but its opening” (146). In terms of Merleau-Ponty, this chapter engages with his reappropriation of the notion of »Wesen« through his reading of Husserl and Heidegger, in order to “emphasize the intertwinement of fact and idea, or existence and essence” (152). In this way, facticity becomes the ground or ‘fabric’ that gives essences their solidity.

In order to further analyze the tools with which Merleau-Ponty and Nancy ponder Being beyond the dichotomy of presence and absence, negativism and positivism, Morin engages with Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as a “third genre d’être between Being and Nothing” (153) and continues with Nancy’s annulment of the ontological difference through his emphasis that “there are only beings, nothing behind, beneath or beyond them” (164).

Morin concludes the chapter with the lucid observation that for both philosophers the »il y a« or »es gibt« does not mean that Being gives the given. Through making a detour of a deconstructive reading of Heidegger she reasons that: “Rather, we must hear the Heideggerian es gibt through Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift in Given Time. […] The gift must not only be thought as without giver and without given (beyond subject and object) but also as without property or propriety” (163).

Chapter 8

The last chapter is dedicated to the question, to what degree Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh “introduce[s] difference – differance, spacing – at the heart of sense, which would bring Merleau-Ponty’s later thought in closer proximity to Nancy’s ontology” (169). She engages with this question through a reevaluation of the notion of »écart«, which both thinkers use extensively. »Écart« in its broader sense is understood as divergence and hints at a self that is never truly identical but only given through divergence, which thus becomes a constituent for sense. Following this thought, Morin asks how radical Merleau-Ponty’s account of »divergence« is. She points to his notion of »chiasm« and asks if its underlying assumption of reversibility succeeds in giving “spacing, exteriority and alterity its due” or if it ends up “reinstating a massive unity at a higher level” (178).

Morin finds her answer in a final juxtaposition of Nancy and Merleau-Ponty. Because Merleau-Ponty repeatedly underlines that »écart« is rooted in the notion of flesh, as the “primordiality of écart” (180) and the “formative medium of the object and the subject” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: The Visible and The Invisible, p. 147), promiscuity and encroachment lie at the heart of »écart«.

This latter conclusion remains foreign to Nancy. Morin argues: “Speaking of what happens between singularities, Nancy also uses the image of the intertwining or the knot, but insists on the absolute separation of the different strands being knotted” (180). Followingly, Nancy in opposition to Merleau-Ponty, highlights an »ontological void« at the limit that exposes bodies to themselves and each other (180), so that the in-between of singularities remain an “absolute separation” (180). For Merleau-Ponty on the other hand, the in-between already belongs to one flesh, which does not resemble a simple unity, but nevertheless does not include an ontological void.

Conclusion

To get to the point: Morin succeeds in her proclaimed aim, in that she effectively casts the differences in emphasis of the two respective philosophers, so that each is an important corrective to a tendency in the other’s work (182). In approaching her study from the angle of speculative realism and its criticism of phenomenology’s correlationism, she fruitfully offers an alternative reading of post-Kantian thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, that, in light of the criticism, “would reduce all being to sense-making to a subjective process” (183).

Through her engagement with Nancy and Merleau-Ponty, Morin offers a coherent and pertinent proposition, which underlines that at least two positions in the broader post-Kantian phenomenological realm neither collapse being into sense nor reinstate a strong division between them. She concludes: “[B]oth Merleau-Ponty and Nancy displace and reassess the role of the limit in sense-making as the place of separation and exposure” (183) and thus of a place at the limit of subjective processes.

Morin’s study offers a highly relevant perspective in a time that “demands a decentering of the human and an attentiveness to the human outside” (184). In light of this, her book can also be read, not least (!), as a fruitful addition to the very lively discourse of a phenomenological geography, which engages with challenges that the climate-crisis impose on us as human beings.

Moritz von Kalckreuth: Philosophie der Personalität

Philosophie der Personalität. Syntheseversuche zwischen Aktvollzug, Leiblichkeit und objektivem Geist Book Cover Philosophie der Personalität. Syntheseversuche zwischen Aktvollzug, Leiblichkeit und objektivem Geist
Moritz von Kalckreuth
Felix Meiner Verlag
`2021
Paperback 49,00 €
328

Reviewed by: Carlo Brentari (University of Trento, Italy)

This valuable essay by Moritz von Kalckreuth develops in the theoretical space left free by the gradual disappearance of any metaphysical notion of personhood and personal identity from modern and contemporary thought. The critique moved by the English empiricists to the alleged substantial solidity of personal identity—made definitive by the transcendental dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—reveals the need to think of the person, no longer as a soul (or some other thing-like entity) but in new, more dynamic ways: as a function or a relation, as a process based on emergent properties, as a particular way of the human self-experience, or by adopting still other approaches. Von Kalckreuth’s text is not directly concerned with the historical reconstruction of the long-term process of overcoming metaphysics; rather, it explores the possibilities it allows in the context of twentieth-century German philosophy. In other terms, the dissolution of the Boethian concept of the person as substantia rationalis individua stands as a common, and sometimes unspoken, negative reference for subsequent, contemporary divergent lines of reflection on what it means to be a person.

Without pretending to exhaust the richness of the volume, I would like to focus on what is perhaps the main fracture line among the post-substantialist notions of the person it examines. It is the opposition between three German approaches on the one side (the phenomenological axiology of Max Scheler, the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, and the Neue Ontologie developed by Nicolai Hartmann), and, on the other, some analytical theories of personhood (Peter Strawson, John Searle, Harry Frankfurt, David Olson, John McDowell). The time span of this opposition is the twentieth century, but behind the theses of the considered authors it is possible to guess debates of a much longer period. For example, how does one not perceive, behind Hartmann’s idea of the person as form of the objective spirit, a solid link with classical German philosophy? The choice criterion adopted by the author for the continental conceptions he focuses on is also significant. They are all, in different ways, Syntheseversuche; that is to say, attempts to develop a synthetic theory of personality. Scheler, Hartmann, and Plessner sketch the contours of personhood by inserting it in the context of human life and action (the organic, bodily, emotional, and super-individual dimensions). On the opposite pole, analytical philosophy proceeds by discussing single distinctive traits of personhood; typically, analytical philosophers aim at evaluating the significance of the personal traits through mental experiments (i.e., through fabricated situations specifically devised to isolate them under controlled conditions).

In von Kalckreuth’s book, the confrontation between synthetic and analytic approaches to personhood focuses on two key points. The first is the determination of what a person is, from an ontological point of view and with reference to other spheres of the anthropological reality (body, mind, emotional life, etc.). The second is the intersubjective, pragmatic phenomenon of the recognition of an individual as a person inside a given sociocultural context. In our discussion of Philosophie der Personalität, we will proceed by addressing the two key points separately, but without neglecting, when necessary, the links that keep them together as parts of a unitary enquiry.

The core of von Kalckreuth’s book is the critical exposition of three ways of ontological determination of personhood: the theories of Scheler, Hartmann, and Plessner, which are discussed—with extensive textual and critical references—in the central chapters. However, the author does not limit himself to a mere introduction; the very choice to position a reasoned and synthetic study on analytic philosophy before these central chapters provides the reader with a valuable access key to the three Syntheseversuche. If (with rare exceptions) the ontological theories of the person proposed by analytical philosophy remains within the framework of a fundamental individualism, the three continental approaches are, instead, clustered together by the idea that personhood is a diffuse form of life, a collective dimension. In different ways, Plessner, Scheler, and Hartmann keep the approach of the German classical philosophy alive, according to which, for a given entity, the relations with other entities are constitutive and, so to speak, push their effectiveness right into the inner sphere of the entity, co-determining its essence. This approach contrasts sharply with the idea (that prevails, instead, in analytical approaches) that entities have a separate subsistence and relate with each other only in a second phase; in the ways made possible by their different properties.

When applied to the case of personhood, the difference between the two ontological approaches emerges with particular clarity. The analytical authors on which von Kalckreuth dwells move from the common-sense idea that a person is primarily an individual organism, and then ask themselves what requirements this individual entity must fulfil to be considered a person. Following the line pioneered by Peter Strawson and Daniel Dennett, most of analytic philosophy includes, among these requirements, “the presence of mental states […] that are structured in a logical-conceptual way and based on representations” (31). Such mental properties embrace language and communication skills, cognitive self-awareness and ‘I’ centeredness (Lynne Baker), presence of a sense of responsibility and the ability to commit to a coherent line of action, presence of a ‘theory of mind’, or the ability to place oneself from the point of view of other rational subjects, anticipating their reactions and moral judgments. More recent authors, such as Harry Frankfurt, translate this approach in a theory of volition, adding to the distinctive properties of the person the presence of second-level volitions. A personal entity not only wants to be a good friend, but also wants to maintain this volition into the future. A lesser number of authors include, among the conditions of possibility of personhood, non-rational and unintentional forms of relationship with the world, such as the embedding in an umwelt and the presence of pre-rational ‘body pictures’ and ‘body schemas’ (as in the embodiment theory by Shaun Gallaghers). Here von Kalckreuth is very attentive to some recent developments in the analytic philosophy of the person attesting, among other things, that continental phenomenology is, indeed, exerting a valuable influence onto the analytic field.

Despite their variety, the analytical approaches remain unified by the common approach we have highlighted above: personhood is investigated as a property (sometimes, as an emergent property) of an individual entity whose subsistence and duration are ensured in other ways—as a single organism, or a human being. To this common approach, von Kalckreuth contrasts the ‘synthetic’ theories by Plessner, Hartmann, and Scheler, which (in different ways) explore the possibility that the person is, indeed, an entity endowed with ontological autonomy, but that the root of his[1] autonomy is to be sought in its belonging to a collective dimension. The three authors develop this intuition in different ways, depending on their overall philosophies. In Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, personhood appears as a peculiar trait of a particular form of life, the ‘ex-centric positionality’ of the human being; that is, the double nature of human experience, both centred in the body and capable of assuming an external point of view ‘on the body’. The ex-centric position opens to the human being the possibility of seeing himself from the outside. The distance from the present self (with the related phenomena of memory and anticipation) becomes a basis component of the world experience. With reference to a theory of the person, the most relevant element of this form of life is that it allows—and, at the same time, requires—the “access to oneself from the perspective of the other” (93). Plessner calls this condition Mitweltlichkeit, the constitutive belonging of the person to the ‘common world’ of the mutual references to others.

Coming to Nicolai Hartmann’s stratified ontology, the collective sphere of which the person is part, and which substantiates his very existence, is that of the objective spirit. With this concept—clearly Hegelian in its origin, even if integrated in a non-idealistic ontology—Hartmann means the tangible cultural context in which human individuals lead their lives: natural language, traditions, institutions, the corpus of religious beliefs, and other forms of worldview. “For Hartmann, persons are spiritual individuals—that is, individuals who do not exist in isolation each for themselves but are connected to each other. It is the objective spirit that allows this connection, through the common belonging of the persons to it” (132; translation mine). In Hartmann’s ontology, however, the phenomenon whereby the entity-person draws its ontological specificity from the belonging to a super-individual sphere—while remaining rooted in individual organisms—receives a more precise determination. It is, in fact, described as a form of Überbauung, or ‘super-construction’. Überbauung is a relationship between entities belonging to different ontological layers, in which the higher-level entity ‘rests’ on the lower level one without necessarily re-proposing its characteristics, and thus enjoying a real ontological freedom. The person is, for Hartmann, an actual entity, which, although depending on the lower layers (inorganic matter, the body as an organism, and the individual psychic sphere) for its factual existence, enjoys, however, a wide operational freedom. This freedom makes possible the full variety of symbolic and cultural forms that can be found on Earth—real points of concretion and re-elaboration of the personal life in a given historical place and moment. At the same time, inasmuch as he thinks of the person’s freedom as a freedom ‘in situation’, Hartmann’s conception of the person also takes into account the limits placed on the individual action, the resistance opposed to change by languages, institutions, systems of values, and the other subdomains of the objective spirit.

In von Kalckreuth’s text, Plessner’s Mitwelt and Hartmann’s objective spirit are the first two forms of ‘collective’ ontological determination to be discussed. The largest space, a hundred pages altogether, is, however, dedicated to the Syntheseversuch proposed by Scheler. The main reason for this preponderance is explained by von Kalckreuth himself. If, in the works of Plessner and Hartmann, the explicit presence of the term ‘person’ is marginal, and the theses on personhood seem often interchangeable with those on the human being in general (an observation that is especially true for Plessner), Scheler proposes, instead, an articulated theory of the person. This theory varies in the course of his philosophical production, but some key features remain unchanged: the critique of rationalism (which, for Scheler, is an integral part of the rejection of Kant’s formalism), the decided anti-substantialism in relation to personal identity, and, finally, the original definition of the person as a concrete unity of individual acts. The reconstruction offered by Philosophie der Personalität highlights Scheler’s ability to investigate the person’s emotional and relational aspects with an approach that, while remaining phenomenological, knows how to grasp the deep interdependence between the different processes of the inner life. In Scheler’s view, the person is understood as the nucleus (Kern) of all possible emotional acts (of love, hate, attraction…) and decision-making processes of an individual human being. As reported by von Kalckreuth, the person is, for the inner and relational life of the single individual, what the “crystal formula” is for the concrete crystal. The metaphor, which stems from Scheler himself, comes from the natural world. Its applicability to the personal structure, however, is made possible by the fact that, in Scheler’s vitalistic world view, nature is permeated with spirit, so that the hidden teleology that guides the crystal formation can serve as an explanatory figure for the unfolding of the personal core in the individual concrete acts.

It is clear, and von Kalckreuth explains it well, that Scheler’s conception risks introducing a dangerous dualism into the theory of the person. On the one hand, there is the profound unity of the acts, that is the personal centre or nucleus; on the other, there is what Scheler calls the human person (die menschliche Person), the individual human being in his bodily singularity and in his capacity for agency. Incidentally said, neither of the two levels implies the existence of substantial entities—an assumption that would cause Scheler to fall into another, this one insoluble, form of dualism: person and concrete individual as two substances? The person as a substance and the concrete individual as an accident? Scheler tries to maintain his theory of the personal life within the limits of phenomenological evidence, but as far as the ‘core’ level is concerned, his phenomenological approach is constantly exposed to the risk of resorting to a kind of metaphysical intuition, to acts of ‘feeling’ more than of ‘seeing’.

As in the theories proposed by Plessner and Hartmann, also in Scheler’s thinking, the ontological discussion of the person is not limited to the investigation of an isolated individual entity but includes the recognition of the constitutive relationality of the person. This relationality takes the form of the belonging of the person to the “umfassende Persongemeinschaft [comprehensive personal community]”, or “Gesamtperson [general person]”. Gesamtpersonen are, for Scheler, national, cultural, or religious collective bodies supported by internal principles of solidarity and the adherence to a common axiological order (the modern phenomenon of mass society, therefore, hinders the formation of Gesamtpersonen). The admission of this kind of higher-level general persons is very problematic from the ontological point of view. Scheler, in fact, does not limit himself to affirming the personal character of the entities that make up the Gesamtperson, but seems to attribute personality and (to some extent) even responsibility and self-awareness directly to the collective body.

In von Kalckreuth’s discussion of the theories of the person by Plessner, Hartmann, and Scheler, the thought styles of the three thinkers emerge, so to speak, in filigree. Scheler appears as a passionate investigator of the person’s deep emotional life, but also as constantly exposed to the danger of falling into an elusive and hardly verifiable metaphysics of the profound; therefore, the solidity of his views is ultimately entrusted to the positive resonance effects aroused in the reader. Plessner and Hartmann, on the other hand, are representative of a non-reductionist naturalism, open to the possibility that the existence of personal beings does not break nature’s unity in any way. Personhood is, instead, an enrichment, respectively, of the organic life or the ontological reality. Hartmann’s approach, in particular, is an unceasing prompt to categorial precision and the sobriety of the enquiry—especially when it comes to sketching the different levels of reality co-existing around and inside the person.

Our presentation of Philosophie der Personalität has followed, so far, a possible hermeneutic line of the text: the search for the most convincing points of the continental theories of the person proposed by Scheler, Plessner, and Hartmann, in comparison with the analytic philosophies of the person. As mentioned above, this comparison pivots mainly on two key points: the ontological determination of the person (which we have just finished discussing) on the one side, and, on the other, the discussion of the intersubjective process of the recognition of an individual as person—with the strictly related issue of what happens when someone claims to be a person or vindicates for others the same status. It is this second point that we now need to address.

Most analytic approaches start from the assumption that the ontological determination of the person takes place on the individual level, while intersubjective processes intervene only at the later stage of the recognition or vindication of personhood seen as a social and juridical status. The continental theories of the person discussed in Philosophie der Personalität avoid this risk in a twofold way. First, as we have seen, they link the very ontological determination of the person to his belonging to a supra-individual sphere. Second, and more important with reference to our new issue, von Kalckreuth rejects the idea that the intersubjective recognition of an individual as a person could be a sort of screening (Überprufung) of his ontological requirements of personality—as if, at each new encounter, we would screen the rationality, linguistic ability, self-awareness, moral values, and sense of responsibility of entities prima facie indeterminate. Von Kalckreuth underlines how, on the contrary, the recognition of a person consists in the immediate grasping of a phenomenological primary meaning, and of a meaning that, among other things, arises as a condensation or reverberation on the individual entity of a widespread personal context (the Mitweltlichkeit in Plessner, the objective spirit in Hartmann, the Gesamtperson in Scheler).

Von Kalckreuth does not dwell on this possibility, but it is clear that his criticism to the thesis of personal recognition as Überprufung can be addressed not only to the analytic ontologies of the person (which, as we have seen, focus on the individual possession of language, reason, and self-awareness), but also to those continental ‘personalist’ ontologies that (still) base on hypothetical personal Gestalt or essences—uncertain heirs of the substantial soul of the metaphysical tradition. In this kind of personalism, too, the attribution of the status of person goes through a kind of screening phase, the assessment of the presence of the personal essence. Other than the analytical positions, the Überprüfung tends, here, to ascertain the presence of traits that are ‘essential’ for all human beings (but maintains a rigid exclusion stance towards non-human animals). Leaving aside its possible usage towards continental essentialist theories, however, von Kalckreuth’s criticism (supported by the authors he analyses) is very clear: when we are faced with a potential person, we do not evaluate requirements. There is no Überprüfung of originally impersonal entities. As human beings, we lead our life in a phenomenological space that is, so to speak, already predisposed to the emergence of something ‘personal’. This emergence process is spontaneous, unplanned, and takes place in every society. At the same time, this phenomenal space is open to historical variables; ‘filled’ with different historical values and contents. Among the latter, the author notes, there is also the possibility of the socio-political deprivation of the status of person for certain categories, which is, however, nothing but an ex post annihilation of a primary meaning.

The view on personal recognition by the author of Philosophie der Personalität differs not only from the analytic, individualistic theories of the person, but also from those which, in chapter 3 of the first part of the book, are grouped as “postmodern critical theories”. In these theories, personhood would be the mere outcome of performative linguistic acts (such as the claim of oneself as a person), and thus, an only “apparently ontological category” (75; here, von Kalckreuth refers to Judith Butler’s thesis). In other terms, according to the postmodern critical theories, the attribution of personhood would neither hide, nor rely on, any ontological, natural, or anthropological trait of the concerned entity, and the attribution of the status of person would depend exclusively on intersubjective recognition. The third position von Kalckreuth outlines, starting from his authors of reference (Scheler, Plessner, and Hartmann), is that the vindication of the status of person is completely independent by the recognition of individual requirements of any kind, but at the same time, does not rely only on pragmatic and performative acts (in this case, any subjectivity would be a person who, having the capacity to claim itself as such, actually does so). In the collective, ‘widespread’ ontological dimensions theorized by Plessner, Scheler and Hartmann, the processes of claiming and recognizing the individual as person does not happen in vacuo. Performative acts are, obviously, always possible, but their very sense and their outcome depend on the relational space from which they come and into which they fall, and from the resistance they meet in already consolidated institutions, values, and cultural dynamics. That’s why any new claim for personal dignity is effective only if it finds a way to adhere to the pre-existing obstacles, albeit to break them down.

From the phenomenological perspective adopted by Philosophie der Personalität, not every entity gives itself as personal. If, however, it is given in this way in the intersubjective sphere, then many discussions on its ‘ontological eligibility’ for the status of person turn out to be sterile. Consequently, the bioethical question of the status of foetuses, very young children, individuals in a vegetative state or affected by severe cognitive disabilities is also set differently—and differently not only with respect to the analytic theories of the person, but also (again) to the essentialist personalism of many continental bioethics (especially in the Italian context). In fact, it is not a question of verifying the absence or presence of individual personhood requirements, but of starting from the phenomenologically immediate understanding of the belonging of the individuals to a collective sphere of ‘widespread personhood’. In the authors discussed by von Kalckreuth, the Mitweltlichkeit, the objective spirit, and the Persongemeinschaft are primary backgrounds of meaning; quasi transcendental schemes for the phenomenal constitution of the person. What must be questioned is not the reality of these schemes, but their relevance for the case-by-case understanding of which line of conduct is most oriented to justice. Incidentally said, approaches of this kind are difficult to apply to non-human animals, which are, from the phenomenological point of view, an extremely variable set of entities. They convey at times a strong impression of alienity, coldness, and ‘impersonality’ (this is especially true for animals who are phylogenetically very distant from humans, such as reptiles and insects), and at other times a decided closeness to personal modalities of interaction (just think of the high level of individual differentiation of the interactions inside a group of primates, in front of which the researcher spontaneously resorts to expressions such as the ‘personal’ preference or aversion of one member to another).

Adopting the well-known definition of Norberto Bobbio, the person is the “individual raised to value”.[2] If this is true, it is also true that this statement can be understood in two radically different ways, depending on how the elevation to value is understood. Is this process, which takes place through the vindication of oneself as a person and the recognition by others, due to the fact that the individual already has in himself, ontologically, a higher component or ‘essence’? or, on the contrary, is it possible precisely because it does not own anything similar, because it is axiologically neutral and, therefore, offers itself to historical and social processes of valorisation? Here the three authors examined by von Kalckreuth diverge. Plessner’s anthropology and, above all, Hartmann’s ontology lead in the second direction (the individual as a natural being is axiologically neutral, which is a prerequisite for the assumption of personal value). As for Scheler, instead, we can speak of a further enhancement of an original axiological datum. By exposing their different positions and establishing a fruitful comparison with analytical philosophy and postmodern political thought, von Kalckreuth’s text helps the reader to orient himself in the debate on personhood and the theoretical relationship between individual and person—both central questions of contemporary moral philosophy.


[1] As possessive adjective and pronoun for ‘the person’ or ‘the human being’ we chose respectively ‘his’ and ‘him’, to avoid the connotation of neutrality and impersonality of ‘its’, or ‘it’. A greater accuracy would be obtained through ‘his / her’ and ‘him / her’, but this choice would make the reading harder. In our intention, however, the female form is always included.

[2] Norberto Bobbio. 1944. La filosofia del decadentismo. Torino: Chiantore, p. 119

Manuel DeLanda: Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception

Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception Book Cover Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception
Theory in the New Humanities
Manuel DeLanda
Bloomsbury Publishing
`2021
Paperback $26.95
224

Reviewed by: Kenneth Novis (University of Edinburgh, MScR Philosophy)

Manuel DeLanda is best known by some due to the experimental films which he made before beginning his philosophical career; to others, he is known as one of the leading interpreters of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy; to others still, it is because of his association with the so-called speculative realist turn in continental philosophy that his name is recognisable. His latest book is likely to disappoint those familiar with his earlier contributions to continental philosophy. Indeed, Deleuze’s name appears a single time here (200-1n101) and DeLanda’s engagement with speculative realism continues only in the background of this book. Materialist Phenomenology sits more comfortably in the tradition of analytic philosophy of mind, alongside the works of Dennett and the Churchlands, with whom he substantially engages here. More notable is the absence of the many authors with whom DeLanda might be expected to have engaged due to his background in continental philosophy, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Trần Đức Thảo, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The purpose of this book is to produce a non-reductive materialism, in opposition to the contemporary prominence of epiphenomenalist, panpsychist and eliminativist philosophies of mind. The leading motivation behind DeLanda’s own philosophy of mind is that, to paraphrase Deleuze, ‘modern neuroscience hasn’t found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.’[i] Furthermore, DeLanda hopes to provide such a metaphysics by developing a novel theory of perception, drawing upon his close engagement with contemporary neuroscience, systems theory, and the science of artificial intelligence. One might be surprised to hear such grand intentions attributed to so brief a book. However, Materialist Phenomenology is extremely dense, requiring careful and deliberate navigation. For that reason, the largest part of this review is dedicated to laying out DeLanda’s arguments from each chapter, following which I will conclude by providing some brief, critical comments on the book.

The Contributions of the World

The first chapter of DeLanda’s book introduces the synthetic approach on which he will rely for the remainder of this work, as well as several key concepts for his theory of perception. However, the ponderous manner in which he navigates his subject matter here makes the overall trajectory of his argument sometimes difficult to discern. One might struggle, for instance, to see the relevance of his critique of Lewis and Kripke’s modal metaphysics on pages 23-4. Indeed, the explicit terms of DeLanda’s argument are not introduced until the conclusion of the chapter, where he clarifies that he is offering a “proof by construction” (38). I will briefly consider the relevance of such a proof and its meaning before proceeding. To begin, let us note that, to offer an account of perception, one option which lies open to philosophers (frequently adopted by phenomenologists) is to begin with the fact that we have a direct awareness of what perception is, as perceiving beings. But, after one has deduced the structures of perception from examining one’s own experience, it may remain a mystery how those structures emerged in the first place. Materialist Phenomenology pursues just such an explanation.

DeLanda’s argument proceeds via proof by construction. Such a proof, in this case, means simulating the origins of perception, and using this simulation to draw real lessons about the historical origins of consciousness. DeLanda calls his simulation the “Multi-Homuncular Model” [henceforth, MHM] (10). The name of this model follows from the method of construction on which DeLanda relies. This book pursues the possibility of modelling the origins of perception using “artificial neural nets” (10). Neural nets are artificial intelligences which, unlike other intelligences that are programmed by a human designer to possess certain capacities, can simply be fed information from which they develop associations autonomously. It may be objected that reliance on software developed by already-conscious beings cannot accurately simulate the origins of consciousness unless the existence of a designer, like the human software designer, is assumed.[ii] However, DeLanda does not consider this objection, and instead relies on a theory of natural signs, according to which the basic components of perception always-already exist in the external world (7-8).

To initiate the construction of MHM, DeLanda begins by providing what he terms a “job description” for perception. This job description names the features which any rudimentary cognitive agent must possess to have access to perception in our sense. For this purpose, DeLanda thinks that perception must possess a causal and intentional connection to the external world (9), create meanings usable by other cognitive agents (11), and emerge from evolution alongside other, similarly perceiving cognitive agents (13). This cannot be all, however. Not only does human perception possess the aforementioned features, it also emerged in a very specific, terrestrial environment which provided the basic form that we use to discern features of the external world. Our world is populated by solid surfaces which appear in consistent shapes (16). Additionally, things in our usual environment have tendencies to behave in one way rather than another, such as the tendency of gasses to maximally expand within a given container (22). Such facts about our material environment evolutionarily present us with a basic datum of what to detect and what to ignore.  With this as his description of perception, DeLanda attempts to show that we can move from mere hypotheses about the origins of such perception to demonstrate these origins by simulating each feature using neural nets.

If we accept DeLanda’s use of neural nets as analogues for the origins of human perception, a radically different view of perception presents itself to us. Such a view of perception is at great odds with the classical image of the Cartesian Theatre. On this old image, perception operates by a kind of master-operator or homunculus which observes the visual field as would a viewer in a theatre. Contrary to this, MHM is a non-hierarchical conception which posits a multitude of homunculi, represented by different neural nets, operating autonomously to build up perception as we know it through their spontaneous cooperation. In this case, when sense stimuli are received, they are imagined to activate an array of corresponding data-processing units which “all broadcast their signs to whatever other agents are capable of making use of their content” (29). DeLanda concludes this chapter arguing for MHM’s use in contemporary debates around reductionism, for which mental phenomena “are nothing but physical phenomena” (29). Unlike other models of perception, MHM is emergentist, allowing both the origin of perception in the material world, and the causal efficacy of the mind upon the body, represented in the way in which a program, when implanted in an artificial body, can issue commands to that body making it move.

The Contributions of the Body

The second chapter provides a response to a possible criticism of MHM. MHM in chapter 1 conceives of perception as if it was done by disembodied minds whose sole occupation is the processing of input-data. However, to accurately mirror perception as it occurs in us, “the brain must command and control, not only represent” (39). An intuitive view of embodied artificial intelligence would have it that “when we raise our arm the brain must specify the exact angle that each different joint (shoulder, elbow, and wrist) must end up having, as well as the precise degree of contraction that the attached muscles must have once the target position is reached” (39). Embodiment understood in this way would be unrecognisable to human cognitive agents, and if MHM entailed endorsement of such a view of embodiment, the analogy between neural nets and human perceivers would fail. DeLanda’s argument is that this view of embodied perception does not accurately describe the operations of neural nets outfitted with artificial bodies: the way neural nets occupy bodies is in fact extremely similar to our own.

To show the similarity of embodied artificial intelligence to human embodied perception, DeLanda makes significant use of insights from systems theory. This use of systems theory has been a staple of his philosophical work throughout his career, but it is given a central place in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. There, he uses the “theory of dynamical systems where the dimensions of a manifold are used to represent properties of a particular physical process or system, while the manifold itself becomes the space of possible states which the physical system can have.”[iii] Imagining the transformations a system can undergo as a space of possible states (a state space), some of those states (attractors) are more statistically likely ones for the system to move into. For instance, due to the elasticity of tendons in human hands, the natural state which they occupy when no other influence is causing them to be otherwise is with the fingers curled slightly towards the palm. However, when a new system is created, such as one including a hand and a box which it is involved in pushing, the hand might be attracted into a flat and stretched-out configuration.

Attractors within a state space also provide the parameters in which the system it represents operates. Continuing with our example, the same elasticity that gives resting fingers their natural state also entails their inoperability when bent too far backwards and broken. Instead of issuing abstract commands, detailing precise dimensions for movement as would the operator of a Taylorist factory, neural nets implanted in an artificial body learn to navigate their environment through the mediation of the parameters and capacities of the body that they occupy. For this reason, the neural net does not need to specify the exact parameters of its intended movement, as the intuitive view of embodied artificial intelligence above claimed. Rather, “much of the computational work would still be offloaded to the dynamics of the robot’s legs interacting with the ground” (40). DeLanda also extends this view of embodiment to a theory of embeddedness, in which “the dynamical system is simply an extension of the body” (43). Dynamic systems theory conceives of systems as open and reconfigurable as they enter into contact with other systems. Because of this, the environment in which a system functions in a very real sense enters into the functioning of that system as well by adding new attractors.

The above accounts only for how the body influences the commands issued by the mind; it is desirable as well to understand how the body is influenced by the structure of its environment. For this purpose, DeLanda introduces the concept of affordance, which describes features of the environment which are activated by the introduction of the right kind of system, such as “medium-sized elongated objects that afford wielding to a human hand” (45). Introducing the concept of affordance suggests the existence of an already well-structured environment in which only certain details become salient based on the kind of agent interacting with them. Summarising his use of affordance, DeLanda suggests that “[r]ather than thinking of the cook’s brain as containing a single unified model of the entire kitchen, and a detailed plan of the overall task we can think of multiple partial models each specific to a task, or even to a single stage in the task” (48). This addition further highlights the potential value of MHM: it removes the need to develop a single, complete cognitive agent to simulate perception, since the same job can be done by a team of only partially functional agents.

The remainder of this chapter returns to the inner sense of embodiment, before dealing at length with several objections to DeLanda’s account of embodiment and embeddedness, primarily those associated with what he calls the “enactive approach” and the “radical embodiment approach” (63). I will pass over the objections for the sake of this review. To explain the inner sense of embodiment, DeLanda focusses specifically on two kinds of internal perception: proprioception and interoception. While proprioception is responsible for the fact that I do not need to look at my hand to know it is raised above my head, interoception “keep[s] the brain informed about the current state of the body’s visceral environment in order to maintain its metabolic balance” (48). By accounting for both proprioception and interoception, DeLanda hopes to show how we also develop our “sense of ownership of our bodies [and] a sense of agency” (50). For this purpose, DeLanda once again relies on a constructivist approach. Internal representations of our body as situated in a three-dimensional environment, and as a complex system requiring biological regulation are “slowly developed as sensory experiences accumulate” (51). The body map built up through these sensory experiences is primarily a way of organising the “steady stream of signs from joints, muscles, tendons and viscera” (57), and this organisational map of internal perception gives “us a sense of ownership of our phenomenal experience” (57).

The Contributions of the Brain

The picture of perception which DeLanda has offered until this point intentionally avoids the question of how external signs become internal ones. The distinction between internal and external signs was explored in chapter 1 in the context of DeLanda’s attempt to offer a job description for internal signs. This job description required that internal signs be causally and intentionally connected to the external world, and that the intentional meaning of these signs be transmissible between cognitive agents who have undergone a similar process of evolution. The discussion of interoception at the end of chapter 2 adds a further condition to the success of DeLanda’s model, since here it is added that “interoceptive information, in turn, is transformed into lived hunger, thirst, and sexual arousal, or into a primordial feeling of anger, joy, sadness, or fear” (68). Now, MHM must not only be able to account for the communicable content of internal signs, but also their emotional content for the cognitive agent that produces them. In other words, the purpose of chapter 3 is to develop MHM to account for the change from signs that merely satisfy the job description in chapter 1, into signs that also have an emotional, lived significance.

To add this requisite complexity to his model, DeLanda begins by “removing, one at a time, the simplifying assumptions” (77) which allowed him to develop an initial, cogent articulation of MHM. This complexifying process begins by moving from hypothetical models of artificial cognitive agents to a “toy model of the brain” (76). Accordingly, this chapter marks a crucial shift in his argument. Until now, his proof by construction has only attempted to show that the qualities of perception with which we are familiar can be replicated with simulations involving artificial neural nets. This chapter “replace[s] artificial neural networks as our main example of a mindless cognitive agent with something more realistic” (79), that is, actual neuronal systems embedded in an organic brain and body. One simplification that DeLanda here discards imagines that the retina functions in a manner analogous to the optical array of a camera. Now, he stresses that the retina should be understood as “capturing not pictures resembling objects but an array of intensities isomorphic with the optical phenomena in the section” (80). This cunningly bypasses the classical problem of the correspondence between mental contents and the external world by acknowledging that the array of photoreceptors in the retina directly encode the external world in a form isomorphic to itself (although this description of mind-world correspondence is complicated again on page 90).

The greatest part of this chapter is devoted to explaining how the features of neural nets as already described apply in similar terms to specific regions of the brain. Assuming DeLanda’s understanding of contemporary neuroscience to be sound, this is an impressive addition indeed, since it decisively shifts the discussion from artificial neural nets to, not only organic systems in the abstract, but the neuronal structure of the human brain as it realises perception in fact. After a prolonged discussion of how the anterior intraparietal area and the premotor areas of the frontal lobe interact in a dynamic loop that allows affordances to exist within perception, DeLanda returns to considering “the role that the biological value system we discussed in the previous chapter plays in this process” (92). For this purpose, he introduces the contribution to perception of two “relay station[s]”, the first comprised of the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and hippocampus, and the second comprised of the brain stem, hypothalamus, and amygdala, although DeLanda does concede that “from the point of view of the neural basis of the biological value system, the amygdala is probably the most important component” (93-4).

It may be wondered at this stage just how a description of the structure of the brain will yield an understanding of the emotive content of internal signs. Furthermore, it is just this emotive content that DeLanda earlier claimed this chapter is meant to explain. However, after describing the neurobiology of emotions, DeLanda concedes that his argument at this stage must be left “deliberately vague” (96) due to the current state of the science. Despite promising to offer an account of the emotive content of internal signs in perception, DeLanda’s conclusion that neuroscience has yet to provide a satisfying account of this may confirm what critics of physicalism have long suspected: that, however much neuroscientific data we acquire on the biological structure of the brain, it will always be insufficient until we have at least discovered a bridge principle adequate for closing what Nagel called “the gap between subjective and objective”.[iv] Be that as it may, DeLanda’s suggestions, although not obviously providing a satisfactory bridge principle, may give suggestions concerning the form that such a bridge principle could take.

The standard approach to dealing with the hard problem of consciousness begins with the qualitative difference between mind and body, and provides a description of how the latter realises the former. DeLanda’s attempt to provide an account of the emergence of internal signs in their emotive aspect should be seen as a variant on the hard problem of consciousness, to the extent that he is trying to explain how the functions performed by the brain come to acquire a lived significance. However, he does not begin to deal with this problem as most do. His way of beginning is instead similar to Searle’s. Searle writes: “I believe that the key to solving the mind-body problem is to reject the system of Cartesian categories in which it has traditionally been posed. And the first step in that rejection is to see that ‘mental,’ naively construed, does not imply ‘non-physical’ and ‘physical’ does not imply ‘non-mental.’”[v] Likewise, DeLanda states that “given that we need consciousness and intentionality to emerge gradually, we must give up any model that includes only two levels, such as the brain and the mind” (96). Accordingly, DeLanda’s suggestion is that what might serve as a bridge principle “will involve introducing intermediate levels between the two” (98) which do not involve qualitative differences but greater degrees of systematic unity and coordination between a plethora of non-conscious, rudimentary cognitive agents.

The Contributions of the Mind

Operating within the limits imposed on his explanation by the current state of science, the last chapter of DeLanda’s book offers some final additions to MHM to help with overcoming the hard problem of consciousness. In this context, DeLanda’s humility is certainly appreciated. At the end of this chapter, he clarifies that “[i]ntroducing intermediate levels between the brain and a subject who can issue reports does not solve the hard problem but it does break it down into three more tractable problems. And it points to the direction we must follow to find the solution: a methodology that combines analysis and synthesis, starting from the bottom and moving upward” (139). What these three problems are will be seen in the following. DeLanda begins here, surprisingly, by attempting to show that at least three forms of perception (the perception of properties, objects, and situations) do not involve the use of concepts. Why this matters is not at all obvious; and, as another reviewer has noted, it goes against much of the received wisdom on the theory-ladenness of experience.[vi] An explanation of this decision is offered in the book’s introduction. It might be objected that a neurobiological account of perception is sufficient only for explaining perception in organisms less complex than we are. However, “[t]here is no deep discontinuity between animal and human visual experience, as there would be if linguistically expressed concepts shaped perception” (2-3).

If not by means of concepts, how does perception access the sense-data presented to the retina? Most of this chapter is devoted to developing DeLanda’s alternative, that it is instead preferable “to view the perception of properties as performing a measurement function, to view the perception of objects as performing the function of separating the perspectival from the factual, and the perception of situations as having the function of allowing qualitative judgements about the relations between objects” (113). His attempt to prove that none of these kinds of perception involve concepts is unlikely to convince anyone committed to the contrary view. Consider, for instance, how DeLanda deals with the perception of situations. After dubiously asserting that there is no need to depend upon concepts to ask the question “What is that?” (125), he proceeds by appealing to vervet monkeys, who can perform a variety of tasks related to attention and specification “without possessing any sortal concepts” (126). However, DeLanda makes his case here using a doctored understanding of what a concept is. He takes as intuitive the view that a prototype which “does not stand for an essence or abstract universal” (126) is not a concept. But what of the concept of a game? It is well established that such a concept would stand for neither an essence nor an abstract universal, encoding instead a variety of mere family resemblances, and being much closer to what DeLanda calls “a construct capturing statistical regularities in the objects actually used for training” (126).[vii]

The above concerns DeLanda’s attempt to deal with the “easy problems of consciousness, that is, the problems that can be tackled by cognitive psychology and the neurosciences” (129). From this point on, he tries to build a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, on the principle that “the brain monitoring its own activity is the key to the solution to the hard problem” (129). By this, DeLanda means the following. It is strictly incorrect to speak of perception as the perception of qualities in the external world. Instead, wherever there is perception, it is perception by the mind of the various neuronal circuits and the way they behave when subjected to certain kinds of stimulation of the retinal array. Thus, “[f]ar from being an input from the world, perception is more like an intermediate output, and the volition behind an action is not an output to the world but an intermediate input to the motor areas of the brain” (102). Allowing that perception is not perception of the external world, but perception of changes within the brain “eliminates the idea that the visual field is like a veil separating us from reality, as well as the idea that the transparency of this veil must be accounted for” (130).

Let’s see how DeLanda’s multilayer approach deals with the hard problem of consciousness. For this purpose, DeLanda distinguishes between four different senses of the word ‘consciousness’: arousal, alertness, flow, and selective awareness (137-8). In each case, he shows that MHM can simulate the different kinds of conscious phenomena in question. What is most surprising is that qualitative experiences, sometimes called qualia, enter into none of the senses of consciousness DeLanda defines. This begs an important question: in showing that, beginning with a multiplicity of mindless cognitive agents we can simulate arousal, alertness, flow, and selective awareness, has DeLanda shown how such systems realise consciousness? But there is no answer to the hard problem of consciousness which does not explain how it is possible for the operations of mindless things, even teams of mindless data-processing units, to produce conscious states. Along these lines, the three constitutive problems into which DeLanda analyses the hard problem concern the emergence through evolution of what he calls protoselves, core selves, and autobiographical selves. However, only the emergence of protoselves is analogous to the hard problem since the development of protoselves is the stage at which mindless systems “slowly get the ‘sentient’ part to emerge” (139). And the closest DeLanda comes to explaining how protoselves emerge is the following: “The emergence of protoselves in the course of evolution may be due to the fact that the internal milieu displays a greater degree of constancy than the body as a whole” (69).

Critical Comments

With the core arguments of DeLanda’s book aside, I want to conclude by offering three considerations pertaining to the success and nature of his project. In the first case, consider the following. DeLanda’s book begins with the claim that “[t]raditionally, communication between philosophers of the materialist and phenomenological schools has been limited” (1). But this is not remotely true. It would be more correct to claim, as Derrida did, that attempts to synthesise materialism and phenomenology have consistently resulted in “impasse.”[viii] DeLanda’s attempt to bring materialism and phenomenology into dialogue with one another suffers from this same fault. However, his attempt does so differently than have many others. Rather than approaching this reconciliation through the mediation of social interaction and language, DeLanda decisively rejects the relevance of these “meso-scale” (143n4) phenomena for understanding consciousness itself. Instead of approaching the reconciliation of materialism and phenomenology through the highest order of material phenomena, social and economic factors, DeLanda’s approach begins from the lowest: the biological evolution of neuronal networks ultimately possessing rudimentary consciousness.

Secondly, for a work which purports to produce communication between materialism and phenomenology, it is remarkable that there are no discussions whatsoever of the core components of the phenomenological method, such as epoche or noesis. This calls into question the sincerity of the rapprochement being offered. DeLanda’s approach, apart from ignoring the work of actual phenomenologists, sides consistently with phenomenology’s critics. There is an unmistakable affinity between Dennett’s ‘hetero-phenomenology’ and DeLanda’s claim that the “tendency of the conscious mind to make sense of its decisions and actions, results in the fabrication of explanations after the fact” (97). Despite this, the book concludes by adding, “[a]nd this is why it is so important to adopt a materialist approach to phenomenology” (141). But the arguments of the book have nothing to do with adopting a materialist approach to the deduction of the transcendental categories of experience, as one might expect this closing statement to mean. Rather, DeLanda appears to mean ‘phenomenology’ in the sense in which it is more frequently used in analytic philosophy of mind, where it refers to the general quality of experiential states, instead of the rigorous study of experience which begins from within subjectivity itself.

Thirdly, a contrast should be made between the kind of account of perception that DeLanda attempts to provide, and the kind of account that he actually provides. He declares his theory to be a variety of “non-reductive materialism”, which for him means “first, that there are mental properties that are different from physical properties; second, that the existence of mental properties depends on the existence of physical properties; and third, that mental properties can confer causal powers on mental events” (1). However, MHM tries to solve the hard problem of consciousness by positing a continuum between the physical and the mental such that there are between the two “intermediate levels [which] implies a graded conception of both intentionality and consciousness” (134). This solution may be inconsistent with DeLanda’s commitment to a conception in which mental and physical properties really are different. Given some continuum, for instance between hot and cold, it can be granted that the properties lying at either end are really different in some sense. However, this kind of difference is not the kind that a non-reductive materialism requires. Representing differences along a continuum implies their representation as differing in terms of something continuous between the two, reducing the difference to a difference in degree. But the claim that between conscious and nonconscious things there is only a difference in degree is something that even reductive materialists can assent to. A truly nonreductive materialism must successfully maintain the difference in kind between minds and bodies, and since DeLanda’s theory does not offer this, it is perhaps incorrect to call it non-reductive.

The project behind Materialist Phenomenology is a highly ambitious one; and insofar as ambition and innovation themselves deserve praise, DeLanda’s work is clearly laudable. However, the careful reader of this book will inevitably discover many questionable inferences. I am greatly sympathetic to attempts to defend non-reductionism within materialism. I also agree with DeLanda’s initial premise that such a materialism must be brought about by cultivating communication between materialism and phenomenology. But, as with any worthwhile discussion, this communication must transpire among equals. This would mean taking seriously what phenomenologists have learned throughout the last century of their deliberations on the meaning and nature of consciousness. In Materialist Phenomenology, the materialist has been handed the megaphone, and the voice of the phenomenologist has been drowned out by the amplified orations of their interlocutor. Despite this, DeLanda must be applauded: even if the attempt to unify materialism and phenomenology has failed here (and, if Derrida is to be believed, may always fail), the attempt itself is something which unfortunately few philosophers today aspire to enact.


[i] Paraphrasing Deleuze, G. 2007. “Responses to a Series of Questions,” in Collapse, Volume III. London: MIT Press, p. 41.

[ii] For closer treatment of this objection, see Negarestani, R. 2018. Intelligence and Spirit. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

[iii] DeLanda, M. 2013. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, p. 5.

[iv] Nagel, T. 1974. “What is it like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review (83:4), p. 449.

[v] Searle, J. 1991. “Response: The Mind-Body Problem,” in John Searle and His Critics, ed. Lepore, E. and Van Gulick, R. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 141.

[vi] Richmond, S. 2022. Manuel DeLanda, “Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception”, Philosophy in Review (42:2).

[vii] Cf. Wittgenstein, L. 2009. Philosophical Investigations, trans, Anscombe, G.E.M., Hacker, P.M.S., and Schulte, J. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, §67.

[viii] Derrida, J. 1983. “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Montefiore, A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peter Antich: Motivation and the Primacy of Perception

Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Knowledge Book Cover Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Knowledge
Series in Continental Thought, № 54
Peter Antich
Ohio University Press · Swallow Press
2021
Hardback $95.00
264

Reviewed by: Jim Gabaret (Paris 1 University)

Motivation and the Primacy of Perception, the edition of Peter Antich’s doctoral thesis, is a study of the notion of ‘motivation’, which has been the focus of extensive investigation in recent years. The term refers to an affective and perceptive awareness of possibilities towards which the agent feels drawn[1]. The notion is part of an already well-established phenomenological tradition but it could still prove useful for epistemologists as it suggests a “Merleau-Pontian epistemological program” (p. 6). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motivation has already been described as a compelling alternative to the empiricist and rationalist assumptions that underpin modern epistemology[2]. The question of how knowledge can be grounded in experience without reverting to a naive empiricism is a fundamental challenge to contemporary philosophy of cognition. By placing the French phenomenologist in dialogue with major contemporary figures of the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of mind, Antich’s clear and scholarly book identifies some of the most important issues in the transition from perception to judgments, even if it does not resolve them all.

But how exactly can phenomenology help epistemology? First, this book aims to understand knowledge as an intentional state, a type of experience distinct from wishes, imaginations and perceptions, with the tools of phenomenology. But it also allows us to overcome epistemological issues once the phenomenologically inadequate terms in which they were expressed have been replaced. We must indeed understand how, without simply causing knowledge, our embodied experiences can motivate and ground beliefs about the world. In a very merleau-pontian fashion, Antich highlights in turn the difficulties of empiricists and rationalists, causal and intellectualist explanations of perception and knowledge, or conceptualist and non-conceptualist programs, as well as disjunctivism and conjunctivism, in order to propose a middle way, beyond the false difficulties created by these dualistic alternatives.

However, by creating a specific zone between a causally explicable physical world and a reason-justified knowledge, are we not blurring the differences between experience and knowledge, or between the most immediate perceptive norms and the norms of judgments, which are more prone to interpretation or verification? The notion of motivation, a process where we would spontaneously and bodily grasp meanings pertaining to our worldly situation, prompting us to believe or act in a certain way, could wrongly incite us to naturalize a meaning that is in fact always intentionally produced. Antich’s challenge is to solve an age-old problematic dualism about experience and knowledge, by bridging the “space of causes” and the “space of reasons” – and, what is more, to do so without falling into an obscure monism.

Critical overview: the main theses

  1. Causes, reasons and motivation:

The first thesis of the book (chapter 1) is that the traditional epistemological dichotomy – found for instance in Sellars or McDowell – between reasons and causes (or justifying and explaining) is false. If we ask why something happens, we can answer with an objective cause, a conscious reason or a motive that has triggered it. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says motivation is not only what grounds our will in action but is also a perceptual and an epistemic ground. Perception motivates our beliefs: it does not justify them (there is sometimes a gap between our motivated beliefs about the external world and reality) but it does not simply explain them either. But does such a spontaneous normative relation between the perceptive world on the one hand, and us, our body or our knowledge on the other hand, actually exist? Is it absolutely irreducible to justifications by reasons, or to explanations by causes?

According to Antich’s distinction, causal relationships hold between objects and events and affect everyone the same way, while a motive has an effect on us because of its meaning which appears as the actual cause of our action or thought but is relative. Causes explain why something is the case, reasons explain what should be the case, as far as our knowledge is concerned; motivation also explains what should be the case, but as far as our beliefs are concerned, in front of a perceptual scene. Therefore, it accepts several beliefs (but in finite number and in accordance with certain norms). The norms of perception that motivate our beliefs are for instance equilibrium and determinacy (when a hesitation occurs, it is meant to be solved and doubt to disappear), veridicality, or a « good grasp » of the object perceived. Indeed, contrary to imaginings, perceptions are experienced as non-optional. In front of two conflicting motives, one is right and has to be followed and the other denied. Motives are not norms in themselves, says Antich, but the aspect of what I perceive with perceptual ends in mind. Nevertheless, since motivational processes are not conscious choices, they are intrinsically characterized by normativity.

Antich also distinguishes between motivation and reason. A reason is explicit and revisable while a motive is spontaneous, implicit and cannot be changed. For instance, the Müller-Lyer illusion cannot be affected by reason. Antich then gives much more “intellectual” examples, which are prone to changing interpretations where we might revise our motivation just like with reasons, but he maintains a difference by putting emphasis on the explicitness of reasons. I know the right way to strike the ball on the tennis court without reasoning, because the trajectory of the ball is a motive for my body to position itself in a certain way. If I had to reason, I could not have the same spontaneity.

There are intuitive relations between perceptions: for instance, the notes of a melody bear an intrinsic relation to each other that gives them their meaning, and the retention-protention structure which unifies them is constitutive of perception. Likewise, the gestalt principles of grouping are perceived relations supposedly “out there” in the perceptive field: the groups of dots we see when looking at dots separated by regular spaces are not our creation, but the grouping arises spontaneously, through our perceptive contact with the world. The grounding relations are similar: some are active and intellectual (explanation or justification) but others are spontaneous and bodily relations (motivation). Motivation has the specificity of being a reciprocal relation: a “proactive” influence of a motivating factor and a « retroactive » influence of the motivated on the motivating. Similarly to a melody where the last note influences the meaning of the previous ones, my motivated beliefs or actions can shed a new light on what motivated me: if the death of my friend is the motive of my journey of grief, my decision to go on the journey might, in a logical sense, “confirm this sense as valid”.

  1. The primacy of perception and its relation to grounding.

Antich’s second thesis (chapter 2) is that all our knowledge is based on perception and that perception is, as Merleau-Ponty says, a “nascent logos” with a “silent thesis” which explains the birth of knowledge.

Of course, knowledge cannot be reduced to perception. Knowledge is about states of affairs, it is propositional, thetic, explicit, it depends on symbolization and takes place at the level of verification, in the logical space of reasons, while perception is an experience of meaningful things, one devoid of judgment and verification. Knowledge seeks a greater degree of certainty than that found in perception, and it has a universality through truth that the particular and perspectival perception can never reach.

But despite the differences, every item of knowledge includes in its ground at least some component, not of reason, but of motivation, which is itself an effect of perception. Although they can endure beyond the perception upon which they are founded, knowledge, meanings and intellectual evidence depend on perceptual evidence.

This is the “primacy of perception” explained by Merleau-Ponty: the perceived world is the presupposed foundation of all rationality, value and existence (see The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays). This notion is to be distinguished from empiricism insofar as science and reflection are not mere transformed sensations. In spite of the founding character of perception, the founded knowledge is not merely derived from this perception; for only through what is founded does that which founds become explicit (p. 51): “it is only through the founded that the founding appears” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 414). This double relation (bottom-up and top-down) between the perceived object – which is a fragment of meaning that calls for determination by attention and knowledge – and the thetic understanding that fixes the perceived object and finally makes it exist, imply that the perceived object is the motif, rather than the rational warrant or the natural cause, of the “knowing event” (p. 54). Motivation is thus an epistemic mode of grounding in which perceptions can be that which spontaneously grounds items of knowledge without deliberation. It gives weight to some beliefs and not others, sometimes against my judgment (optical illusions), but does not give actual reasons.

  1. Particular experience, evidence and universal knowledge.

In chapter 3, Antich focuses on particular judgments about the perceptual world: “How can nonpropositional perceptions justify propositional judgments?” (p. 70). Antich abandons the alternative between causality and reason in order to overcome the debate between Davidson’s coherentism and McDowell’s “minimal empiricism” or foundationalism. According to Davidson, our beliefs are only justified by other beliefs: natural events do not belong to the space of reasons, and perception cannot be a justification but causes our belief. But he does not explain the normative fact that there are right and wrong descriptions of the perceptual scene and the phenomenological fact that perception is neither a mere sensation nor an explicit perceptual belief disconnected from its sensory content.

Rejecting the “Myth of the Given”, McDowell, on the other hand, argues that perception does not directly cause our beliefs but that the nonpropositional content of perception noninferentially justifies it through active and reflexive dispositions. But he does not take into consideration the spontaneous aspect that characterizes such perceptions as optical illusions, which are obviously not liable to revision by active thinking. Ordinarily, we do not actively think about the relation between perception and perceptual judgments, nor are we free to revise or alter this relation under the recommendation of active thinking, says Antich.

When we are faced with new experiences, many perceptions are even indefinite and ambiguous; this proves that judgment is not intrinsic to perception – on the contrary, the former determines and enriches the perception. But the perception still grounds the judgment, which without it would be empty and merely verbal. The concept of motivation helps to understand the intimate bond between knowledge and perception in terms of fulfillment. We can freely form an a priori judgment about a state of affairs but it is empty until it achieves evidence, in Husserl’s terms, that is to say until it is intuitively fulfilled by a perception which makes it evident and thus motivated.

One might ask whether this is not simply putting a name to a difficulty rather than explaining it. But the wager of phenomenology is that a good description already contains the beginning of an explanation. In his article “Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Preconceptual Generalities and Concept Formation” (2018), Antich more precisely explains the formation of concepts as a bridge from perception to knowledge. Against theories of concept formation using abstraction, he very convincingly defends a merleau-pontian account of the birth of concepts from “preconceptual generalities” which organize experience at the most basic level. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty indeed exhorts us to “replace the notions of concept, idea, mind, representation, with the notions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinge, pivots, configuration”; but he does so in order to preserve perception from conceptual analysis, and not because concepts should be evacuated. To understand how we are able to identify, categorize and then exert our conceptual capacities towards experience, it is useful to understand the conceptual availability of intuition. But since Merleau-Ponty does not generally think of perception as having conceptual content, in his new work on motivation, Antich wishes to stay neutral with regards to the role of concepts in perception, even though an elucidation of this question might have shed a new light on these debates.

  1. Experience, abstraction and a priori knowledge: overcoming the rationalism-empiricism divide

Chapter 4 focuses on universal judgments beyond perceptual experiences. It advocates to follow Merleau-Ponty’s path to overcome the alternative between rationalism and empiricism. According to the empiricist, for knowledge to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, or between truth and mere logical consistency, it must be grounded in experience. Merleau-Ponty assumes that even abstract scientific concepts like “time” have meaning for us only due to our perceptual experience of time. But the universality of knowledge transcends any singular experience, replies the rationalist. Contrary to the empiricist claim, such concepts as high numbers or time, universals and terms as diverse as “quark,” “chiliagon,” and “modus ponens” and at least some intellectual content (like a priori knowledge) are not reducible to experiential content and evidence, and might even be innate.

Rationalists still have a hard time explaining how such concepts can be self-evident then, as Merleau-Ponty noticed: intellectual evidence (just like perceptual evidence) actually relies on a foreground/background structure, such that any proposition can appear evident only in virtue of a background set of beliefs not simultaneously raised to explicit awareness. That is why every judgment can be doubted and is open to correction. There is a historical situatedness of all evidence (at least in their apprehension). Of course, some propositions known analytically seem presuppositionless since they are apodictically known only because their negation is inconceivable, but they can be labeled as “consequent” rather than “true” if they are not fulfilled in reality. We have to admit that a judgment always relies on other presuppositions. Particular experience grounds a priori knowledge by motivation.

Some moderate rationalists like Laurence Bonjour (In Defense of Pure Reason) argue that any argument, even the ones of the empiricists, depends on some a priori justification, for instance accepting the conclusion of an inference. If the rules for justified inference from experience were derived from experience, they might not themselves be justified, and no knowledge would be. Nevertheless, it can be motivated, says Antich: motivation is not a mere contingent occasioning ground for knowledge, but a funding ground. It creates a transcendent and necessary knowledge which originates in perception but is not reducible to it. Perception, being contingent, cannot justify the necessity of our knowledge, but it can motivate knowledge containing necessary truths. It can ground many of our ideas which are neither caused by our senses nor produced by our imagination, like personal identity, substance or causality, doubted by Hume but which are not mere fictions. The same goes for quantities: first, young children can perceptually distinguish magnitudes, but they have to learn a count list made of numbers, then learn to map their representations with this list in order to acquire the concept of natural numbers, and to finally acquire the concept of succession and the mastering of very large numbers, according to Susan Carey.

  1. Perceptual faith against skepticism

Primacy of perception anchors knowledge in ordinary beliefs. But Antich recognizes that this motivation process cannot provide a justified true-belief account of knowledge. “A belief counts as knowledge, just in case it is a normatively motivated true judgment”, without the need of an explicit justification (p. 60). Chapter 5 focuses on this perceptual faith, the fact that I trust my perception to be of the world, and not a mere appearance. It is not an active position-taking expressed as a judgment about existence, but an experience of inhabiting the world with our body prior to all verification, which cannot justify but grounds our knowledge about the world.

But here the skeptic’s objections arise. Perception sometimes fails to distinguish itself from illusion. Our belief in the perceptual world, because it is not justified, may then be understood as a psychological natural fact about us, caused in us, but lacking normative import. Knowledge could then be entirely inexistant. Rationalists like Descartes or Kant tried to answer skepticism by use of a nonperceptual faculty: reason. But we may not need this recourse to reason if we consider that the skeptic’s desire for justification is simply excessive and should be ignored. Our perceptual faith is a spontaneous and involuntary feature of our perception: it is not an ordinary belief susceptible to error.

Sometimes, hallucinations can of course trick us, but patients can ordinarily distinguish them from perceptions, because differences in the horizonal content are available. One might argue that one can actually find an epistemological disjunctivism in Merleau-Ponty, but this is not Antich’s point: the disjunctivist’s claim that perceptions are intrinsically different from illusions does nothing to dispel the skeptical threat that I may not be able to distinguish them. Such a certainty is simply not needed. In a first-person epistemic perspective, we don’t need a reason to justify our belief that we perceive and are not victims of a hallucination: we simply perceive it. Illusion cannot disqualify perception either in our epistemology because it essentially depends on ordinary genuine perception (the possibility of a false experience presupposes the possibility of a true one).

Again, we may have simply named on a problem that still remains unsolved, and perceptual faith has not been justified but only described. But Antich defends that such a description is neither a psychology of knowledge merely explaining the formation of our beliefs, since the normativity of motivation make them acceptable, nor an actual justification, since trying to justify perceptual faith would reproduce the mistake made by reflective philosophies which look for excessive warranties and reasons to every belief. Asking for more, like the skeptics, would equate to “requir[ing] of the innocent the proof of his non-culpability”, as Merleau-Ponty says: the task of philosophy, rather than justifying or describing the perceptual faith, is to return to it.

  1. Merleau-Ponty versus Kant: grounding transcendental knowledge in experience

Chapter 6 deals with consequences of the abovementioned thesis on the opposition between Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to overcome the rationalism-empiricism debate. Kantian experience is an empirical cognition: a conscious presentation referring to an object which has unity through concepts, that is to say, a judgment. It needs to follow certain rules in order to be necessary, justified then objective. In saying so, Kant may describe conditions for experience in the sense of justified empirical judgment, but not in the sense of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not a judgment – it is the pre-predicative givenness of the thing – and does not need to be justified, but only motivated. Kant emphasizes the need of an intellectual synthesis like causality in order to experience objective time order, while Merleau-Ponty argued for a passive temporal synthesis which does not need the principle of sufficient reason, since temporal processes are given as wholes and not as distinct moments to be ordered. Perception is not governed by categories, and yet it is objective, since its objectivity derives from motivation, “perception’s spontaneous sensitivity to norms” (p. 164). Moreover, transcendental justification is ultimately motivated in the course of experience, which challenges the a priori status of the categories and the synthetic principles.

Chapter 7 addresses the question of metaphysical knowledge (cognition through mere concepts) which seems to be allowed (contrary to Kant’s thesis) by Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motivation: does Merleau-Ponty release metaphysics from Kant’s bounds? Antich answers this question by focusing on Kant’s Third Paralogism, namely, the identity of the self. Kant considers that intuition only gives us objects, so empirical apperception can give me successive determinations of my mind like a stream of presentations, but it is not a perception of myself as a subject. But Antich shows that the fact that I perceive things and make normed judgment about self-identity is a tacit cohesion of experience (a “tacit cogito”) and a direct self-perception rather than an a priori judgment. According to Merleau-Ponty, the self is made of a stream of continuous experiences that are always internally related and are the background against which each particular experience acquires its meaning: this field implicitly unifies my existence. Contrary to Kant’s view of the self, which fails to account for how transcendental and empirical apperception can “merge” and intend the same determinative (active) but also determined (passive) subject, Merleau-Ponty’s tacit cogito allows us to consider the pre-reflective self as both passively synthesizing the flow of consciousness and as synthesized within the flow of consciousness. The return to motivation, then, does not exactly open the door to metaphysics but does “put transcendental and empirical apperception into dialectic (i.e., it shows both types of apperception to be insufficient in themselves and to be parts of a larger whole)” (p. 193). Perceptions are therefore moments of a common structure, something which is neither a fixed foundation nor a contingent multiplicity, but rather what Merleau-Ponty calls transcendence. It does not mean that we have to embrace groundlessness and skepticism, but that we have to accept that within the contingent, the quest of necessity is permanent and that not ultimate justification, but motivation and negotiated ambiguity, constitute our path towards to an always progressing knowledge.

Issues

Debates inside phenomenology

Antich acknowledges in the notes that his decision to give a unified view of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception is open to discussion (see Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology). It might have been interesting to further discuss this point.

Moreover, Merleau-Ponty is the main inspiration for this study, but Peter Antich also borrows from the phenomenological tradition, as his very rich and stimulating notes underline. Despite his criticism of Husserl’s intellectualism, Merleau-Ponty in fact takes up the notion of motivation from him[3] and from Edith Stein[4]. The idea also appears in Anscombe (Intention, 1957), but also in Anthony Kenny (Action, Emotion and Will, 1963), who sees it as a pattern of behavior that invites people to see my action in a certain light, or in Paul Ricoeur (Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 1950), who sometimes speaks of a motive as an antecedent of action and sometimes as a general trait of action (a personal, social or human tendency). It would have been fruitful to study even more closely the links of dependence but also the profound differences that may separate these philosophers[5], in order to grasp the specificity of the Merleau-Pontian concept of motivation.

The notion of motivation finally comes up in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion with Sartre[6], when dealing with the question of freedom in situation. The fact of having ‘motives’ implies that freedom is never indeterminate or absolute, but according to Sartre, it is always the free subject who gives a situation or a motive its meaning and its motivating power. Yet Peter Antich does not really put this contextual use of the notion of motivation into perspective: he chooses instead to understand the notion at a level that is often more fundamental and less free than action, that of perception, and it leads him to mix, in his demonstrations, examples of very spontaneous and unthinking perceptual acts, and actions (such as undertaking a journey) where reflection on motives, their interpretation and the self-narrative that one makes in an often intellectual way carry much weight, while using the same notion of ‘meaning’ in both cases, and claiming that this meaning always comes spontaneously in context.

Debates about perceptual and veridical normativity

Antich tries to create space between a physicalist reductionism and a theory of knowledge merely internal to the space of reason and disconnected from our experience. He therefore encompasses various phenomena, towards physical or gestalt effects susceptible of a purely physical explanation, but also mental representations and judgments whose origin in experience he tries to understand. But there is much debate about the relevance of avoiding at all costs a reductionist approach of gestalt effects which would describe them as a purely physical process. One phenomenon gives rise to another, not through objective causation, but through “the sense it offers”, says Merleau-Ponty (PhP, 51). But is it not possible to explain illusions or gestalt effects in terms of spatial and temporal contiguity or of an impact of light, textures, and distances on our perceptual system? On the other hand, cognitive « motives » such as reinterpretation of an ambiguous perception, or groundings for our action (for instance a travel we begin because our friend just died) could be given a comprehensive justification in terms of reasons. If there is a retroaction which transforms the whole, it seems to be purely internal to my decision process and my approach of the event: it does not define the intrinsic meaning of my friend’s death, which can be interpreted in many other ways by his other friends or his family, and it does not affect the existence of the event itself. According to Merleau-Ponty, the reinterpretation of the motive in light of the motivatum makes us forget the actual event. But this amounts to admitting that it is our intentionality that has changed, our beliefs or our memories, but not reality itself.

Of course, this continuity seems to be helpful to understand how our knowledge could be grounded in experience: if we consider that gestalt effects are already normative and have meanings, though they are not conscious and voluntary, it could explain how our judgments are also normed in ways we do not control in order to follow the truth. But are these norms exactly the same?

Any activity can be good or bad, depending on whether it fulfills its conscious purpose or not. We can thus say that perceptive activity contains norms of satisfaction: in certain situations, I see badly, because of the distance, an obstacle, or shortcomings in my body, and if I want to perceive, I have to move backwards or forwards, remove the obstacle, or put on glasses. We know this without thinking about it because we are already “experts” in perception (see H. Dreyfus et C. Taylor, Retrieving Realism, 2015). This habit of perception invites us to make anticipations and to see the world continuously, without contradiction between the data of the different sensitive organs or between different moments of experience. In the sense that it has standards of success or failure, perception is normative, which has already been commented on a lot. But are these not descriptive rather than normative features? And if this normativity is the same for perception as for any action that our body considers pragmatically successful or unsuccessful, can it have an epistemic force to guarantee true knowledge? If “seeing well” consists in succeeding in satisfying a practical need to operate within the perceptual scene, can we ever draw from perception a normativity that would concern “true seeing”?

Antich himself is careful to distinguish norms about true judgments (reasons) and perceptive norms which motivate beliefs, when he tries to avoid a reductionist approach which would consider motives as implicit reasons. But then, he faces two difficulties: are motives indeed different from reasons? And if they are, how is their normativity related to the one in the space of reasons, and how can we bridge the gap between motivation in experience and reasons justifying knowledge? It may seem easier, to answer the second issue, to say that there is a continuum between explicit and implicit reasons, as is suggested by Merleau-Ponty himself: sometimes, “motivation” seems to mean the incorporated rules we possess as reason to act or believe in a certain way even if we are not aware of reasoning anymore. It would help in avoiding to disconnect reasons from experience and invent a purely idealistic realm, because reasons are rarely as pure and different from perceptual motives as one might think.

But in section 9 of the first chapter, Antich argues against the idea of implicit reasons by saying that some motives are so amorphous that they can never be made explicit and function as reasons. But this argument seems to reduce the field of « motivation » to indeterminate phenomena, which are quite rare and are not the kind of examples that the author considers in the rest of the book. Of course, it would not be useful to do away with the distinction between perception and reasoning, or between unexplicit belief and clear knowledge. But seeing the kinship between these two categories may allow us to conceive of them as two types of intentional aiming without assuming that motivation is based on a meaning inscribed in reality itself rather than on our intentionality. This would help to understand how a perception can change, as one “changes her mind”, and how it can have in common with knowledge a certain dimension of commitment vis-à-vis the real to be identified or characterized. Interestingly, Antich admits that the meanings produced by motivation are not the motivating meanings, that for instance a light on the wall can draw my attention but is not a compelling force, and that « the light does not drag me along behind it, but awakens within me an intention ». There seems to be room for the intentionality of the subject here. But following Merleau-Ponty’s path between objectivity and subjectivity and refusing the divide, Antich claims that the contributions of both perceiver and perceived are inseparable from the normativity of perceptual motivation: “the idea is (…) not that the subject is solely responsible for the epistemic normativity of perception. Rather, the subject is responsive to the normative significance of perception.” (ch. 2 note 25). Antich later specifies that the subjective role of the perceiver is merely to desire to or be oriented toward seeing the world “as it is”, implying that most of the motivation comes from the side of the world.

The naturalization of meaning

The benefits of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis relies greatly on the essential « fact about perception » which is described in Phenomenology of perception: the idea of a “spontaneous sense”. At the level of the body, at the level of individual history and at the level of society, there are spontaneous valuations “in us”: the perceptual scenes appear to us to be great or small, easy or difficult to reach, and desirable or not, depending on our physiological constitution, our experiences, the lifestyle of our society, and the methods of solving problems that seem ordinary and habitual. This can give the impression that situations are “calling” us in one way or another.

But as Jakub Capek explains, “there are only norms for a being capable of assuming them, carrying them, and, in certain cases, turning away from them”[7]. It is essential to realize that it is always our human commitments that give one meaning or another to an event that motivates us to act or think: Merleau-Ponty himself admits that a form of freedom within these spontaneous valuations and these motives – and motivated by them – is always possible; but to conceive of this, one must not naturalize the meaning of a motive and the value of things in the things themselves. Otherwise, we could no longer go back and change their meaning.

If motivation is conceived as a part of an “operative intentionality” which does not oppose but deepens Husserl’s conception of intentionality, it has to be described as a way of aiming at things and giving them meaning (even if it is outside of the egoistic consciousness, involuntarily and in a pre-predicative and bodily functioning) rather than a passive reception of natural meanings already out there in the world (the “world” itself being the way we make sense of reality). But Merleau-Ponty often implies that the world itself comes to us as already bearing a sense. Indeed, perception does not give us a set of mutually indifferent atomic sensations but an arrangement of figures on a background, which cannot exist (or at least mean something) without another, and which make us do things according to the meaning they have for us.

The few examples given by Merleau-Ponty to prove the existence of such natural senses are ambiguous. If we unconsciously register the reflection of the light in the human eye even though painters forgot it for centuries, it does indeed mean that we can register information without focusing our conscious attention on it, but not that it is in itself a natural information of “livelihood” which cannot be explained. And if we first see a tree on the beach and subsequently reinterpret it as a shipwreck, or if the distance between two objects appears to change when I discover other objects interposed between them, without any conscious decision, does this really mean that we perceive meanings without an intentional movement? Does it not actually prove that, precisely because it can change, meaning is not a given but a construct (even if bodily, necessarily, naturally and unconsciously built)? Quoting Stein, Antich admits that a single state of affairs can always be interpreted in a variety of manners, but he says that “it defines a range of possibilities” (p. 36), as if these interpretations were contained in reality as possible meanings.

The difficulty may lie in the fact that Merleau-Ponty and Antich mix examples related to interpretative meaning with gestalt effects. But these existing gestalt effects are not meanings: they are physical relations between objects. This naturalization of meaning could be a major theoretical difficulty. Many of our perceptions seem to vary depending on the context and meaning has thus often been taken to be “intentional”, to pertain to the ways in which we aim at things rather than to the things themselves. Antich says his analysis keeps the grounding relations “internal to the sphere of meaning” without taking a stance on its ontological location: “Some form of mentalism (the view that what justifies a belief is a mental state) is probably most congenial to my view—though even this would raise thorny questions about Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of meanings” (p. 60), he recognizes. But this point is important, and Antich often seems to implicitly give an external reality to these meanings in order to distinguish them from our intentional conscious judgments. In chapter 2 note 33, he says that “motivation is a responsiveness to normative forces exerted by the phenomena themselves.”

Why is it important to distinguish motivation from causes and reasons and to give it natural meaning? First, Antich’s aim may be to ground truth in something real; lacking this foundation, Merleau-Ponty’s account seems to relativize knowledge which proceeds from mere motives rather than from rational explicit justifications. But as in many other cases, it might also have to do with morality. Antich’s example page 61 illustrating “dispositions” which guide us from experience to belief and knowledge is particularly striking: “For example, if I have a disposition to act generously, this just means that under ordinary circumstances, I will act out of a responsiveness to the relevant normative forces of a situation (e.g., the wants or requirements of those around me). » It inclines toward an innate spontaneous moral sense. The project is commendable but can also lead to biases, especially since morality is susceptible to change, and it would perhaps be preferable to note that it depends on an intentional commitment which is continually relaunched.

At the end, we can say that Antich’s clear, precise and stimulating book offers many glimpses of Merleau-Ponty’s contributions to contemporary epistemology. It highlights the places where the philosophical investigation must be carried on today, toward the understanding of the links between reality, action, perception, meaning, intentionality and knowledge. The localization of problems and their correct description being one of the major tasks of phenomenology, one can only appreciate the way in which Antich deploys his own phenomenology in order to highlight its advantages in contemporary debates, and the manner in which he opens a path to many lines of work in the future.


[1] Dreyfus, H. L., “The Return of the Myth of the Mental”, Inquiry, 50(4), 2007; Kelly, S. D., “Merleau-Ponty on the Body”, Ratio (new series), 15, 2002; O’Conaill, D., “On Being Motivated”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12 (4), 2013.

[2] Wrathall, M., “Motives, Reasons, and Causes”, In T. Carman (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

[3] Walsh, P. J., “Husserl’s Concept of Motivation: the logical investigations and beyond”, History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 16 (1), 2013.

[4] Bello, A. A., Causality and Motivation in Edith Stein, in Poli, R., Causality and Motivation, Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag, 2013.

[5] Carman, T., “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophical Topics 27, 2, 1999.

[6] Gordon, R., “Let’s Get Rid of Motivation: Sartre’s Wisdom.” Sartre Studies International 12, 1, 2006.

[7] Čapek, J., « Motivation et normativité : Réflexions sur le concept de liberté à partir de Merleau-Ponty », Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologique [online], V. 16, 2 (2020).

Emmanuel Falque: Hors phénomène: Essai au confins de la phénoménalité

Hors phénomène. Essai aux confins de la phénoménalité Book Cover Hors phénomène. Essai aux confins de la phénoménalité
De visu
Emmanuel Falque
Hermann
2021
Paperback 34,00 €
476

Reviewed by: Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere (Catholic University of Paris/Australian Catholic University)

Towards a Critique of Phenomenological Normativity

 

Emmanuel Falque’s latest book, Hors phénomène, implicitly opens up a tantalising new possibility by way of an alternative philosophical anthropology: namely, a critique of phenomenological normativity (i.e., of what phenomenology traditionally considers to be ‘the norm’ for its analysis), one that is moreover itself phenomenological in nature (i.e., demonstrates how these ‘norms’ belong to the natural attitude and therefore require reduction). It is, as he puts it, “the norm of all phenomenality” that is at issue here, for that norm does not appear to have been phenomenologically secured itself but entails—precisely—an “a priori of phenomenality” (9):

Are there not, to say the least, certain things taken to be self-evident that would rightly be scrutinised today? For nothing guarantees that health should a priori be the norm rather than illness, the event rather than the brute fact, the given rather than resistance, or indeed the other rather than solitude. (13)

Everything phenomenologists tend to think of as ‘normal’, Falque questions on phenomenological grounds: there are experiences, notably those he considers ‘traumatic’, that fall outside phenomenological ‘normality’ and thereby render it inadequate as a comprehensive framework for the analysis of the whole breadth of human experience. By focussing on these traumatic experiences that remain outside the norm of phenomenality, that are extra-phenomenal (hors phénomène), Falque hopes to reinvigorate phenomenology: specifically, Hors phénomène reconstructs the anthropological vision implicit in the phenomenological tradition around these experiences, which define the human being not according to their presupposed opening to the event of appearing but rather as existing in the transformation wrought by the traumatic events that befall them.

However, one wonders whether, in opening up this new and unexplored field of experience, in his correction of phenomenology’s naïve anthropological vision, Falque’s tendency to return immediately to the frameworks just declared inadequate might mean that he ultimately only scratches the surface of his important discovery: what he finds to be outside phenomenality is almost immediately brought back inside of it (albeit under the guise of modification) in the name of maintaining the phenomenological status of the investigation. Indeed, at times, we can even observe this tendency, not just in the progression of the argument, but in the cadence of a single sentence: “Having (…) dismantled the distinction between the normal and the pathological, I am now taking the additional step of asking whether there is not some kind of ‘privilege’ of the pathological over the normal” (309). Yet, what use is it to dismantle—indeed, to deconstruct—a distinction, only to re-establish and maintain it (albeit in the inverse) in a second instance? What Falque describes as taking a step further is only a very hesitant advance, one that perhaps appears all the more insufficient in light of the position from which it rightly retreats after the eloquent diagnosis the book provides. This, I would suggest, is the tension that haunts Falque’s admirable critique, one that perhaps necessarily plagues the phenomenological project as such (as Derrida might insist). With this book, Falque therefore cements his position as one of the most significant phenomenologists working today, whilst also illustrating the inherent difficulty of using phenomenology as an all-encompassing philosophical method.

***

Let us first, however, examine Falque’s interesting proposal. This is Falque’s first book of ‘pure philosophy’, without reference to the Christian theological tradition, yet the aim of his investigation remains as ever primarily anthropological in nature. Specifically, Hors phénomène articulates a phenomenological understanding of the human condition as transformation by rather than openness to experience: confronted with the experience of trauma, as “defeat of my categories, or rather ‘extra-categorial’, I can only reinvent myself differently—not just in the expectation of eventiality or the so-called salvation of alterity, but also in the confidence of a ‘power of the self’, having no other reason to exist than always being already ‘ahead of itself’ or as if ‘metamorphosed’” (8).

After rooting its starting point in the experience of trauma, the book’s first chapter sets out its titular notion of the extra-phenomenal in a programmatic way:

There is the infra-phenomenal (propaedeutic to phenomenality), there is the supra-phenomenal (excessive to phenomenality); and then there is the extra-phenomenal (outside all phenomenality). The first prepares phenomenalisation, the second overflows phenomenalisation (…), and the third is outside phenomenalisation. The ‘extra-phenomenal’ (…) is thus not itself a phenomenon in the ordinary sense, for it destroys (…) all capacity for phenomenalisation (the phenomenalising subject) and any phenomenalised object (the horizon of appearing). In this sense, speaking of the extra-phenomenal, is (…) to open up a ‘new field’—that of what is (now) without ‘field’ or ‘horizon’. (89-90).

The extra-phenomenal, understood as a traumatic experience that is neither infra- nor supra-phenomenal, is thus meant to counter what Falque calls the “a priori of manifestation” (93): namely, the normal course of phenomenological analysis in which anything that is non-phenomenal is immediately understood as either preparing or exceeding phenomenality, instead of being conceived of as properly outside of phenomenality. This diagnosis is indeed eminently correct and the perspective on the phenomenological method it opens extremely valuable: Falque seeks to give an account of the extra-phenomenal in its extra-phenomenality, namely in its deviation from the phenomenological norm of manifestation. On this account, the extra-phenomenal not only falls outside conditions of possible experience, but in being experienced also destroys these conditions and thus the very possibility of subsequent experiences being lived as phenomena. It accomplishes, as Falque puts it, the “annihilation of any transcendental focus of appearing” (63). Nevertheless, he insists, this account of what remains outside phenomenalisation is nevertheless itself a phenomenological one: a “(phenomenological) essay at the confines of phenomenality,” namely the exercise of “phenomenological scrutiny at the limits of phenomenology itself” (18). Yet, one can be forgiven for thinking that this is a contradiction in terms: at no point does Falque explain in what sense an extra-phenomenal experience can still be addressed by an intra-phenomenological discourse, which constitutes the necessary tension that haunts both this book in particular and phenomenology in general.

In that regard, we can perhaps immediately ask the perfectly reasonable question: why should infra and supra not simply be understood as two different ways of being extra? Falque gives a very eloquent descriptions of the various kinds of infra- and supra-phenomenality known to the phenomenological tradition (§§12-13), but never really explains quite how they differ from the negatively defined regime of extra-phenomenality. To his credit, Falque does provide examples of extra-phenomenal experiences that would constitute a trauma: illness (§1), separation (§2), death of a child (§3), natural disaster (§4), and the pandemic (§5). Here, too, we can ask: the death of a child is undoubtedly a traumatic experience that leaves its mark on whomever undergoes it (thus making it extra-phenomenal), but does it not equally and at the same time exceed any objective representation (thus being supra-phenomenal) and determine how other children appear subsequently (thus being infra-phenomenal)? The book never becomes specific enough to provide us with the material to verify or falsify its presupposition: that phenomenology can consider the extra-phenomenal as such without relating it to phenomenality as either infra- or supra-phenomenal.

It is therefore an abstract phenomenological framework that the book offers us, yet one that is undeniably ground-breaking. Having defined the extra-phenomenal programmatically in the first chapter, the subsequent two provide a detailed account of what Falque understands to be its mode of phenomenality—or, rather, extra-phenomenality. The second chapter, over and against the phenomenological norm of signification or givenness, conceives of it in terms of resistance: the “phenomenon” is “no longer what manifests itself or appears as such, but what resists, opposes, holds back, or simply ‘exists’, or even better ‘insists’” (123). Falque explains:

We no longer have to do here with phenomenalisation (phainesthai), quite the contrary. Rather, we stand at the limits or at the confines of phenomenology, as soon as the very idea of appearing does not or no longer appear. The discourse on the conditions of appearing finds itself disqualified here, as soon as the ‘resisting presence’ opposes itself to it in every way and even destroys the very conditions of its possibility. (122)

Here, Falque indeed identifies a radically new field of phenomenality and rightly insists that it is deserving of its own account. Moreover, he provides that account in the third chapter, which deals with the way in which the extra-phenomenal destroys the conditions of possible experience, notably in reference to a curious remark by Kant in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason about cinnabar (the main mineral ore of mercury): if cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes heavy and sometimes light—i.e., if nature were not subject to the same normative rules as the association of ideas by human reason—, then the phenomenalising imagination would stumble before the sensational manifold that it offers. In thus in contemplating the possibility of the breakdown of the transcendental imagination, of its act of synthesis being rendered impossible by the very experience whose empirical manifold is subject to it, that Kant adumbrates the extra-phenomenal according to Falque: “Cinnabar not only contests the confrontation of opposites within the object (red and black, light and heavy), but glimpses this possible and ‘unimaginable’ decomposition of the object, even of the subject itself, in an experience where it loses even its identity” (209). In other words, the extra-phenomenal denotes the breakdown of the transcendental schematism: an experience that deviates from the norm, whose empirical manifold escapes the reach of the rule according to which it is associated with pure concepts—and thus, ultimately, resists constitution into an object or phenomenon.

The final three chapters develop the consequences of the extra-phenomenal thus conceived for the broader phenomenological method. Chapter 4 deals with the subject as self: far from being given to the subject by another as one would normally expect, ipseity exists in a constant process of modification or transformation by the traumatic experiences that befall me. Chapter 5 considers this transformation on the existential level: crisis, whose experience is the extra-phenomenal trauma, constitutes being-there ontologically, because it is the experience whose experiencing accomplishes transformation. Here, Falque therefore formulates a new principle of phenomenality according to which “so much exception, so much modification” (299): the experience that is experienced outside—and not just below or beyond—the conditions of possible experience (the trauma of crisis), accomplishes a modification or transformation of possibility itself (the being of Dasein). As Falque puts it: “The exception (within the phenomenalised horizon) and modification (of the phenomenalising subject) have in common that they go hand in hand in an all the more transformed being-oneself in one’s trauma, to the point that one loses any idea of what was once one’s identity” (302). Chapter 6 then frames the extra-phenomenal according to its most fundamental phenomenological contribution: consciousness is not originally characterised by intersubjectivity, but by a solitude that the phenomenological tradition considers to be abnormal—precisely because trauma does not let itself be shared (e.g., despite all the care I may receive, no one can suffer illness on my behalf). “Trauma,” Falque insists, “first of all and always returns me to this original solitude” (393).

***

The book is perhaps best understood as the first step in a bold and ambitious new programme in which the human condition as redefined phenomenologically as transformation rather than opening. It poses a radical challenge to the field in an attempt to disrupt the normal procedure of phenomenology by asking a crucial question with which every phenomenologist should reckon: how do we account phenomenologically for what remains persistently outside phenomenalisation? Falque’s answer is provided by his anthropological account of the transformation accomplished by the extra-phenomenal: “an experience becomes such that it simultaneously ruins the phenomenalising subject and the phenomenalised horizon. In light of the trauma, life is no longer the same” (12). The book’s main and impressive achievement is thus the opening up of this field of extra-phenomenality.

Yet, in achieving this result, perhaps the main question Falque leaves unanswered is that of the status of his investigation: in what sense are these “meditations” still truly phenomenological? When challenged on this front, Falque is inclined to respond that, ultimately, this question of jargon matters little. However, this response confirms and highlights a certain curious irony present throughout the book: in abandoning the Christian theological tradition as philosophical point of reference, Falque nevertheless for the first time becomes fundamentally complicit with phenomenology’s theological turn. I do not mean that Falque thereby abandons phenomenology in favour of theology, but rather that he nevertheless—and with good reason—leaves phenomenology proper behind in his attempt to articulate an “extra-horizontal” phenomenology (302). In a way, this book reverses the patricide Falque so eloquently committed against Jean-Luc Marion (his onetime doctoral supervisor): whereas Falque once defended the existential conditions within which givenness is received as forming the horizon for its phenomenalisation, precisely against Marion for whom these only come into view to the extent that they are exceeded by givenness; we now find Falque suggesting that the extra-phenomenal destroys the horizon against which phenomenalisation takes place along with the subject who projects it. To better understand the unexpected turn Falque takes here, we may perhaps refer to the famous debate Marion had with his own teacher:

Marion. I do not recognise the ‘as such’ as mine. What I have said, precisely in that horizon, is that the question of the claim to the ‘as such’ has no right to be made.

Derrida. Then would you disassociate what you call phenomenology from the authority of the as such? If you do that, it would be the first heresy in phenomenology. Phenomenology without as such!

Marion. Not my first, no! I said to Levinas some years ago that in fact the last step for a real phenomenology would be to give up the concept of horizon. Levinas answered my immediately: ‘Without horizon there is no phenomenology.’ And I boldly assume he was wrong.

Derrida. I am also for the suspension of the horizon, but, for that very reason, by saying so, I am not a phenomenologist anymore. I am very true to phenomenology, but when I agree on the necessity of suspending the horizon, then I am no longer a phenomenologists. So the problem remains if you give up the as such, what is the use that you can make of the word phenomenology.

Marion. (…) As to the question of whether what I am doing, or what Derrida is doing, is within phenomenology or beyond, it does not seem to me very important. (…) Whether Étant donné is still phenomenology we shall see ten years later. But now it is not very important. I claim that I am still faithful to phenomenology (…). But this will be an issue, if any, for our successors.[1]

The debate around Étant donné, which could perhaps be repeated with Hors phénomène, is wrapped up in this brief exchange. Derrida is eminently correct, not only in his insistence that there is no phenomenology without a horizon (i.e., for then there would be no more phenomenon understood as the appearing of things as what they are to intentional consciousness), but also that it is out of a decidedly phenomenology exigency that he sees himself necessitated to go outside phenomenology proper. For now, however, it suffices to note that at this instance, suddenly, we could replace Marion in this conversation with his student Falque. Indeed, the critique that was once levelled against Marion, can perhaps now also be levelled against Falque: in their respective attempts at somehow cancelling out the horizon (whether by going beyond or outside of it), and their joint lack of interest in actually considering the question of the phenomenological nature of their proposal, they both end producing a discourse that is non-phenomenological or even extra-phenomenological—but, as Derrida insist, therefore no less true to phenomenology. Having dealt with Falque’s attempt at cancelling out the horizon higher up, let us now consider his lack of interest in the question of whether his discourse is phenomenological in nature or not, and what it may be instead if not phenomenological.

Revisiting Falque’s treatment of Kant’s reference to cinnabar—a highly sophisticated discussion that constitutes one of the book’s highlights—, we can directly observe his reluctance to properly engage with the question of the nature of his investigation into the extra-phenomenal. With much fanfare, Falque notes that Kant omits the reference to cinnabar from the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “Kant is frightened by the ‘conceptual monster’ he has created, in that the mere hypothesis of ‘cinnabar’ is enough to ‘take out’, even ‘blow up’, any principle of unification” (210). On Falque’s reading, Kant realised he had hit upon a notion that threatened the entire edifice of the critique and therefore quickly swept it under the rug. Yet, one wonders whether it is not just as likely that Kant—the first to articulate a transcendental theory of objective experience and therefore perhaps the original phenomenologist—omitted the reference to cinnabar, not because he worried that it risked undoing the very framework he had set out, but rather because he realised that there is nothing that can responsibly be said about this matter from within said framework? In other words, perhaps the first Critique—rightly—avoids further discussion of cinnabar, understood as the experience that destroys the transcendental schematism, precisely because its discussion of experience takes places on the basis of that transcendental schematism. An altogether different discourse would therefore be needed to address the experience Falque focusses on: if Kant says nothing more about cinnabar, perhaps that is because there is nothing more to say within the confines of transcendental-phenomenological investigation. This does not mean that there is nothing further left to say at all, but simply that it cannot be said within the register of phenomenology, that a different discourse is needed.

This is, ultimately, the paradox on which Derrida hits in his own critique of phenomenology and highlights again in his conversation with Marion: the questions that are most fundamental to phenomenology—whether that of presence (Derrida), givenness (Marion), or the confines of phenomenality (Falque)—, require us to leave phenomenological discourse behind in order to consider phenomenology itself from a position and in an investigation that is itself extra-phenomenological. In other words, if Falque wants to submit “the norm of all phenomenality” (13) to scrutiny by way of the valuable notion of the extra-phenomenal; he must also make good on his promise by facing up to the fact that, insofar as it succeeds in moving outside phenomenality (i.e., phenomenological normativity), this scrutiny necessarily takes place outside the phenomenological method. If this were not the case, if the account of the extra-phenomenal were itself an intra-phenomenological enterprise, then the critique of phenomenological normativity would in turn itself be subject to that normativity—leading to precisely the tension that Derrida thematises by way of deconstruction. Falque’s continual attempt at returning to the framework of phenomenology (its normativity) hampers his excellent account of the extra-phenomenal as destroying that very framework (its existence outside-the-norm). At times, we can literally see him struggling with this tension:

So much exception, so much modification: Kant’s hapax (cinnabar) thus becomes the rule here (…); what had thus been the ‘exception’ in a well-ordered phenomenality (…), becomes the norm for what precisely has no norm—the ‘extra-categorial’ of what has no or no longer categories, or the impossibility of all possibility. (302)

Falque’s advance thus proceeds with a certain amount of hesitation: he discovers that there are experiences that remain outside phenomenality, due to the fact that phenomenology operates certain norms that are themselves phenomenologically illegitimate (insofar as this normativity cannot be reduced to actual experience); but then immediately brings those experiences inside of phenomenality, and thus within the bounds of normativity, by turning the exception into the new phenomenological norm. Falque therefore perhaps also finds himself in the position he ascribes to Kant, namely a reluctance to fully exploit his valuable discovery of the extra-phenomenal since it would necessitate abandoning phenomenological discourse altogether—as Derrida already adumbrated: every possible “principle of phenomenology” requires deconstruction insofar as it excludes those experiences that make exception to it, that do not conform to the phenomenological norm, because these principles constitute a priori restrictions of the field of experience that are themselves phenomenologically illegitimate. In other words, what drove Derrida outside phenomenology was precisely what he learned on the inside: the phenomenological ambition is descriptive, not normative; but as scientific description, actual phenomenological analysis exists in bringing experience within a particular normative framework of transcendental rules that govern the intentional constitution of objects (i.e., the “principle of phenomenality”). However, Falque apparently refuses to abandon the discursive style of phenomenology, i.e. the description of experience in its essence by subjecting it to transcendental rules or normative principles; even though his book—rightly—proposes a critique of that normativity in response to a distinctly phenomenological exigency. This is therefore the true result of Hors phénomène (as of Étant donné, though in a very different way): there are experiences that persistently remain extra-phenomenal and therefore also require an analysis that is itself extra-phenomenological; phenomenology may be a perfectly valid way of analysing experience, but it is not exhaustive. Indeed, how else are we to understand what Falque calls the “night of phenomenology” and describes as “not the givenness of the phenomenon of givenness or non-givenness (the phenomenology of the night), but the non-givenness of givenness itself—not by privation, nor by excess, but only by negation” (89)—the negation of what if not phenomenology itself?

If Derrida moves outside phenomenology from within it so as to consider the infra-phenomenal (the deconstruction of presence), and Marion moves outside phenomenology from within it in order to consider the supra-phenomenal (the theology of revelation); then Falque’s book nevertheless sketches a similar way out of phenomenology for him: the psychoanalysis of trauma. After all, what is an investigation that operates “following Freud” (23) and is “built upon the basis of the traumatic” (127), if not psychoanalysis? Indeed, a psychoanalytic lens allows us to better appreciate what Falque means by the extra-phenomenal as exemplified by the experience of trauma:

A nothing that is not nothing, this is what makes up the ‘resistance of presence’—(…) not in that the Id takes refuge in invisibility (a kind of negative theology (…)), but in that its obscurity or thickness is such that it demonstrates impenetrability. (117)

In this sense, “so much exception, so much modification” (299) is perhaps best understood, not as a principle of phenomenality (for nothing appears in the exception), but rather as a principle of psychoanalysis (or, perhaps, of ‘traumaticity’): the traumatic experience is precisely the experience that is not phenomenalised, that is not lived-through in experience; but rather the experience that denotes “any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” of consciousness (exception) and thereby can “provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy” (modification), ultimately resulting in “the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them (…) so that they can be disposed of” (destruction).[2]

Curiously, this path is arguably already forged by Falque’s book, but he appears reluctant to actually walk it by confessing his ultimately psychoanalytical perspective. This perspective, nevertheless, provides him with precisely what he needs in order to execute his critique of phenomenological normativity: a discourse that does not operate according to norms, or at least not according to the same norms as those of phenomenology, and is thus able to provide a critique of phenomenological normativity from outside the norm of phenomenality. Yet, such is the necessary tension that haunts Falque’s book in particular and all phenomenology in general, this critique of normativity from outside of it is an inherently phenomenological gesture: it goes by the name of reduction and extends to principles or norms as it does to judgments. We should therefore understand the present book alongside those other unorthodox yet major works of phenomenology that forge a path outside phenomenology from within in order to remain true to phenomenology, as Derrida put it, by justice to the full range of possible experience: Derrida’s Le toucher provides an extra-phenomenology of touch (deconstruction), Marion’s Étant donné provides an extra-phenomenology of revelation (theology), Falque’s Hors phénomène provides an extra-phenomenology of trauma (psychoanalysis)—each time showing how phenomenology can only be actual when confronted with and transformed by non-phenomenology.


[1] John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Eds.). 1999. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 66-68.

[2] Sigmund Freud. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 23-24.

Wouter Kusters: A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking

A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking Book Cover A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking
Wouter Kusters. Translated by Nancy Forest-Flier
The MIT Press
2020
Hardback $39.95
768

Reviewed by: Thomas Froy

Wouter Kusters’ ‘Philosophy of Madness’ is difficult to classify. This is probably the point. This enormous work – the full text reaches 738 pages – draws from sources diverse as Plotinus, Sartre, Eastern mysticism, personal testimonies, free associative prose and more; some canonical, some obscure, some empirical, some fictional. It’s difficult, too, among this mass of material, to discern the author’s intentions. Kusters states his explicit intentions quite often, but these statements often contradict each other, remain unfulfilled and unexplained. Gradually, what becomes clear, however – and this is perhaps the overarching theme of the book – is that Kusters’ doesn’t want to be classified.

Insofar as the author and his work reject classification, this book positions itself in a certain post-Foucauldian, anti-psychiatric tradition, which includes figures such as R.D Laing and Thoms Szaz. Psychiatry, writes Kusters, is largely “unable or unwilling to understand madness … [psychiatrists] hold it in contempt or even fear it while at the same time boasting about their “expertise” because they are thought to be able to explain or effectively subdue it” (Kusters 2020: 64). The inability or unwillingness to understand madness which Kusters identifies in psychiatrists and the psychiatric tradition as a whole is thus counterposed to the author’s own comprehensive and emancipatory ambitions: at one point, Kusters writes that the book aims to “alleviate psychosis and emancipate the psychotic person from medical classifications” (Ibid., xv). This work thus shares with many others in the anti-psychiatric genre an allegiance to what might be considered the more Romantic aspects of Foucault’s early work on madness: philosophy and madness are uniquely positioned to emancipate each other from their institutional imprisonments.

Kusters subject, then, is madness, and his aim is emancipation. ‘Madness’ is a rough translation of the Dutch ‘waanzin’; Kusters’ previous works include (as yet untranslated) Pure waanzin (2013) which recounts his personal experiences of psychosis, episodes to which he returns frequently, both as source for philosophical reflection and direct citation (Kusters is no stranger to self-citation, including sizeable passages from previous work, semi-fictional prose and passages which appear to be expressions of his own paranoid fears). Philosophy, for Kusters, is uniquely positioned to gain insights into the experience of madness, and madness into philosophy. The book can thus be understood as a dialogue between madness and reason, in which both slowly unwind and unhinge the other. The process of unwinding and unhinging will gradually lead each toward emancipation from their origins toward freedom.

The opposition between madness and reason – as well as his emancipatory aspirations – does not, however, lead Kusters to a confrontation with the concerns raised, about Foucault’s work, by Jacques Derrida. ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (Derrida: 1978), an essay originally delivered as a lecture, warns that any author, including Foucault, who aspires to emancipation from their chains risks reinterning the mad in the institution of philosophy. Already 60 years ago, then, the difficulties associated with semi-Romantic aspirations toward emancipation from the institution of psychiatry have been available to the reader, and presumably to Kusters himself. The consequence of Derrida’s confrontation with Foucault, consequently, are that if Kusters sets his sights on liberation from the prison of psychiatry – with its associated “medical jargon … supposedly objective labels and descriptions, and behind risk management, fear, and attitudes” (xvi) – he will have to be cautious not to reproduce that other trick of reconfinement. Emancipation demands, on the one hand, a rigorous distinction between, on the one hand, the domain from which the emancipated will escape (psychiatry) and on the other hand, the domain into which the mad will arrive. If no rigorous distinction is established, it may remain unclear whether liberation has occurred, and where the liberated find themselves as a result. Consequently, the risk is that madness may be liberated from psychiatry, but reinterned with philosophy.

Indeed, Kusters constructs a yawning chasm between the domains of madness and philosophy. “Madness is kept out of bounds as a nadir of meaninglessness, a breeding ground for unreal apparitions, chimeras, and sham” (2). However, this chasm does not present any obstacles to repeated definitions, in highly philosophical terms, of the essence of madness. On the contrary, despite Kusters’ repeated and clearly stated opposition to psychiatric definitions of madness, he displays no aversion to a philosophical classification of madness: psychosis is defined as “the desire for “the desire for infinity and absolute freedom” (xvii); madness is the experience of “trying to resolve the most fundamental questions of existence but in an uncontrolled, wildly associative way. You want to know what it’s all about, what good and evil are, what is at the very heart of existence: you want to know the meaning of life and the cosmos” (xxiii), and so on.

Not only does this appear to be in contradiction with the author’s stated opposition to classificatory jargon, but also with his declaration that he does not intend to contribute to classifications of madness (4). Since Kusters does not engage – at least, not explicitly – with the concerns Derrida raises about emancipatory critiques of institutions, it’s difficult to know where Kusters stands. It appears that he takes no issue with liberating madness from psychiatric definitions by means of firmly subjecting madness to philosophical definitions. As such, it remains, from start to finish, difficult – mystifying, perhaps maddeningly so – to divine precisely what Kusters’ aim – in terms of method or subject matter – might be.

This mad road is trod by a series of associations or identifications between philosophical notions and Kusters ideas about madness. For the most part, these associations are drawn from canonical works of Western philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre – and form the comparative structure of the book. Oppositions and comparisons are drawn from a huge number of texts in order to define, describe, and refine Kusters idea of the relation between madness and philosophy. The discourse is highly conceptual, dealing primarily with time and space. Aristotelian time, for example, is considered exemplary of the ‘normal’ attitude and can be juxtaposed with “mad crystal time”: normal time is chronological, while mad time might be circular, or perhaps everything happens at once (89-105). Although he states, early on, that madness and philosophy have appeared as each other’s enemies (p2), this does not mean that they cannot speak to each other, and inform our understanding of both; Aristotle may represent a spokesperson of normal experience at one point, and then an exemplar of insanity at another. As the book progresses, Kusters writes, oppositions will collapse and contradictions will multiply meaning that the reader will be “seduced seduced into identifying even more with the madman and letting himself be transported down a ‘stream’ of madness” (18).

In Part One, Kusters’ comparisons are most commonly within in the phenomenological tradition. Chapters One and Two give describe normal and mad experiences of perception, with citations drawn primarily from Edmund Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal-Time Consciousness. Beginning with what Kusters takes to be a Husserlian phenomenological description of experience, the normal perception of time can be characterized as Aristotelian – continuous – while the mad experience of time is circular (45-52). Chapters Three and Four subsequently develop phenomenologies of space and time, citing Husserl, Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘static time’ (94-6), as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of schizophrenia (98). Rather than subject each citation to analysis, Kusters’ approach is closer to compilation: long passages are introduced with a brief remark indicating that the text is ‘another example of’ of Kusters’ theory of madness, and rarely followed with any interpretation. Husserl, Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty are not subjected to interpretation or criticism, but rather contribute insights to the growing understanding of madness. Given this lack critical engagement, it’s difficult to discern Kusters’ own understanding of these texts. The specific texts are not selected for any stated reason, other than the evocation of a certain phenomenological experience: Kusters frequently introduces texts by describing them as “examples” of the conceptual terms or neologisms which characterize madness.

Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological work is given slightly less attention, and this represents something of a missed opportunity. Insofar as the assumption that phenomenological analysis of a subject’s experience can give us insight into their world is one of the key – if unstated – presuppositions of Kusters’ interest in phenomenology, the lack of engagement with Heidegger’s thinking is a shortcoming. Contemporary thinkers, such as Havi Carel, draw extensively from Heidegger’s rethinking of the spatio-temporal essence of being in order to give a clear picture of the situation and experience of an ill person (Carel 2016). Kusters’ constructions of a series of oppositions and comparisons between normal and abnormal experiences precisely mirrors the work done by post-Heideggerian phenomenologists, especially those working on the experience of mental and physical illnesses.

Part II – Chapters Five to Eight – shifts away from, without leaving, the explicitly phenomenological discourse toward Kusters’ interest in mysticism. Mystical experiences, he argues, are highly comparable with experiences of insanity, insofar as both provide an escape from the normal experience of the world. To some extent, Part II is continuous with Part I: those abnormal perceptions evoked by phenomenology are described more richly in Kusters’ selections from the mystical tradition; the experience of time, for example, may not only become non-continuous but also more intense. Kusters names four processes – ‘Detachment’, ‘Demagination’, ‘Dethinking’, ‘Delanguization’ – in which mysticism can lead the reader further along the path of madness. Here, Kusters draws most consistently from Plotinus: various long passages are drawn from his corpus and cited as instances of each process. Again, Kusters leaves Plotinus’ words largely unexamined, preferring to compile texts rather than subject them to analysis.

In Part III, Kusters describes a series of delusions: ‘The Uni-Delusion’, ‘The Esse-Delusion’, ‘The Ω-Delusion’ and ‘The Ø-Delusion’. Like the mystic processes, the removal of delusions will open the door and lead the reader down the path of madness. The ‘opening door’ motif, an explicit reference to Aldous Huxley’s writings on psychedelia, chimes with the earlier engagement with phenomenology: the experience of madness expands and reformulates our understanding in the world by breaking through the normal limits and parameters of thought. In this part of the book, the content shifts from canonical philosophy toward logical paradoxes, reflections on LSD, and extracts from fictional works. Kusters describes his process as being increasingly illogical, both in terms of content and form; the gradual destructuration and unravelling should mirror the experience of going mad.

Part IV extends Part III’s interest in paradoxes, aiming to cement Kusters’ idea that the process of philosophizing – be it about space and time, or the prisoner’s dilemma, or nothing at all – may lead the philosopher into madness. In this regard, Part IV is continuous with the previous parts of the book, insofar as the style is consistently compilatory. A number of the same ideas reappear in each part – madness, perception, space, time – but Kusters does not construct a theory of any of these; he merely cites, compares and collects interesting insights into various aspects of what he considers to be madness. On the one hand, this is clearly deliberate and fulfils his refusal to produce a systematic classification of psychosis; on the other hand, compilatory theory does not clearly present the author’s own position. The enormous range of sources are merely included within the ever expanding portrait of madness: the pieces collect without anything resembling structural relation or connection. The consequence of this is that the reader rarely gets Kusters’ own perspective: canonical texts – Plato, Descartes, Sartre, Husserl – are cited at length and pass without comment. Many readers will already be familiar with this works, and less familiar with Kusters’ own thinking: ‘A Philosophy of Madness’ is generous in material, less so when it comes to the author’s actual perspective, ideas, or interpretations of these widely-read traditional texts.

With this in mind, Part IV represents a substantial step within the work’s development: as noted above, Kusters remains highly elusive – perhaps difficult – in submitting to a simple characterization of his intentions. In addition, although the Chapters interweave and interconnect in both style and content, Kusters rarely gives any sense that his theory is building toward any conclusion or system. Chapter 14’s reading of Charles Taylor’s work – specifically the opposition between the bordered and the porous self – substantially revises this non-systematic approach. The compilatory method remains – Taylor’s thinking is merely another example – but Taylor’s thinking on reenchantment radically reorients the purpose of the book. ‘A Philosophy of Madness’ clearly signals its disinterest in contributing to a classificatory theory of madness, and Chapter 14 is consistent with this insofar as, at this late stage, it suddenly becomes clear that Kusters is writing a book about enchantment.

The portrait of madness Kusters presents is so unsystematic and incoherent – I believe, deliberately so – it’s difficult to think that his intention is to present anything like a new understanding of madness. Instead, ‘madness’ – and all the processes and experiences which come along with it – is a placename for reenchantment. Kusters collects and compares a huge range of oppositions between normal and abnormal experiences: madness represents an opportunity to be led out of our compartmentalized, limited, singular selves into a new understanding of the world and our place in it. Becoming mad opens the self to a massively enriched and enhanced relationship with worldly phenomena, as well as new possibilities for different and rewarding interactions with everything around about.

Kusters introduces Taylor’s porous self – open and in dialogue with the world outside – as a comparative example with madness, and in this regard, makes explicit the analogy between going mad and reenchantment. However, Kusters does not suggest that this is the comparison which should frame the work. Like Taylor, Kusters sees the contemporary world as a difficult and unwelcoming world, unwilling to accept the insights (even the existence) of the mad enchanters.  Yet the advantages of living as a Taylorian porous self are numerous and many are shared with the madman: the world becomes infused with numerous and diverse meanings (531); greater intimacy with one’s feelings (534-5); greater receptivity (547), and so on.

Despite the apparent proximity of identity between the mad and the enchanted, Kusters does not dwell on this, nor does he explicitly outline what I understand to be the essential affinity described between the processes of madness and of reenchantment. ‘A Philosophy of Madness’ frequently returns to its disinterest in classification, systematicity and structure; it is possible, however, that this lack of focus may prevent the reader from recognizing some of the greater themes and purposes of the book. I suggest, in light of this, that interpreting Kusters’ thinking on madness as a longer meditation on the possibilities of what might be ‘mad enchantment’ may grant some thematic coherence to the work without sacrificing the stated desire for chaos, contradiction and confusion.

‘A Philosophy of Madness’ presents the reader with some difficulties. Although Kusters’ work is at home in the anti-psychiatric tradition – and Kusters asserts his devotion to the anti-psychiatric field vocally and repeatedly – this opposition is never substantiated. Kusters does not engage, at any length, with psychiatric literature or the history of psychiatry; he writes that his previous work – the as yet untranslated ‘Pure Madness’ – produced a comparison between his own experience of psychosis and the psychiatric reports written on him. There is no confrontation with the medical tradition, with medical professionals, the history of medicine and its relation with psychiatry, or with psychiatric institutions. Such a confrontation would give greater clarity to Kusters’ understanding of psychiatry, what it is, what its aims are, its limitations, and so on; the reader might also get a clearer picture of Kusters’ consideration of the possibilities and dangers associated with liberating the mad from the domain of psychiatry in order to reintern them within philosophy. Perhaps the matter – namely, of psychiatry as an institution, historical phenomenon, contemporary political entity and all those who work within it – is considered settled. Perhaps the translation of ‘Pure Madness’ will grant the English reader greater access to Kusters’ engagement with psychiatry, but until then, the detail is lacking.

In addition, Kusters does not make any engagement with the contemporary young but fast growing field of critical disability studies. Like the anti-psychiatry movement, scholars and thinkers in this field owe a substantial debt to Foucault’s work on institutions as well as a deep suspicion of those who want the ‘cure’ the sick and mad; furthermore, analyses of chronic pain , psychopathy, long-term illnesses and so on share a great many of the concerns and ideas raised in Kusters thinking; finally, many scholars – like Kusters – turn to the phenomenological tradition in order to understand the spatio-temporal qualities of being disabled. Kusters decision not to find points of dialogue with this field represents a missed opportunity.

Finally, Kusters’ decisions with regard to the structure are problematic. The overview presented above is accurate with regard to the theoretical content of the book; however, through a series of ‘Overtures’, ‘Intermezzos’ and interstitial passages apparently reflecting Kusters’ own mental state. The Overture and Intermezzos largely function as introductory and concluding remarks, describing the plan for the work and the relation between different sections. Kusters prose is highly expressive, ironic and rhetorical; for different readers, this may be amusing, witty, or a little bit irritating. But it is the interstitial passages, found especially in the early parts of the book, which are difficult to read. It appears that they function as literal representations of the paranoid fears of a person experiencing psychopathy.

Besides questions of structure, the Intermezzos also contribute an extremely strange first personal account, in which the writer – perhaps Kusters himself, perhaps not – describes, in direct prose, his everyday life in Amsterdam, meeting up with friends, driving around, spending time alone. The writing is frenzied, sometimes fearful, sometimes ecstatic, often difficult to understand or make sense of. It’s difficult to say what the fragments are – Kusters doesn’t introduce or reflect upon them. Most significant, and troubling, however, is that they are occasionally shockingly racist. While reflecting on languages, the author muses “Yiddish is a kind of basic Esperanto, just like Jews are the people without a country and without an identity” (119). This thought isn’t introduced – there’s no context – nor interpreted or analysed – there’s no explanation. It’s not clear what its purpose, meaning or significance is. Why are the Jews a people without a country? What does it mean to be a people? What is it to have a country? Does lacking a country mean lacking an identity? No context, no analysis. A few lines later, writing from the perspective of ‘the Jews’, Kusters writes “We watch over the system behind the system. We’re the backup, the fourth empire” (Ibid.,). Again, no context or explanation; merely, the introduction of classical anti-Semitism as a passing phrase.

A few pages on, Kusters writes “The ones who always do it right are the Holocaust deniers. And they’re still at it. As soon as you start tampering with Auschwitz, they throw you in the madhouse. But that’s where the Enlightened Ones live, those who haven’t been able to keep their big mouths shut. Of course there was no Holocaust!”. Kusters doesn’t direct these racist remarks toward any other ethnic minorities, nor does he return to them at any other point. Does Kusters mean to be ironic, or funny? Should these remarks frame Kusters’ opposition to institutions, or even the book a as a whole? Should they be ignored? It’s not at all clear what purpose these passages serve, if any.

Kusters’ compilatory method is perhaps the defining feature of ‘A Philosophy of Madness’. It’s possible – perhaps preferable – to understand the decision not to subject any of the his interlocutors to sustained or detailed analysis as being consistent with his stated opposition to systematicity and classification. Perhaps this is the right decision: for readers less familiar with the canonical works of European philosophy, this book functions as a useful introduction to texts from Plato, Descartes, Husserl, Sartre and more. Kusters sets his course firmly in the direction of madness, and this colossal book – just short of 800 pages, in all – is by no means a strict, disciplined work of theory. Instead, it’s pure, philosophical chaos.

The reader should not approach ‘A Philosophy of Madness’ with the expectation of finding a contribution to our understanding of what it feels like to experience psychosis, or periods of mental ill health; nor, a close reading or interpretation of a number of texts from the phenomenological tradition, mysticism or the fictional and real writings of ‘the mad’. Instead, Kusters’ presents the reader with a mass of text which, without ever coming together in any moment, points the reader toward possibilities: possibilities for reflection and reconsideration on one’s place in the world. Madness might be ecstatic, joyous, terrifying, upsetting and scary; it might be a normal way to live in a strange world. It might also be an opportunity to approach one’s life and the people in it with a new sense of enchantment. An off-kilter perspective, to be sure, but one filled with madness and magic.

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press.

Kusters, Wouter. 2020. A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. MIT Press.

Christian Tewes, Giovanni Stanghellini (Eds.): Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches

Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches Book Cover Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches
Christian Tewes, Giovanni Stanghellini (Eds.)
Cambridge University Press
2020
Hardback 103,99 €
400

Reviewed by: Emilia Barile  (Alexander von Humboldt fellow – A. von Humboldt Stiftung, Bonn (DE) - Italian Section)

Edited by C. Tewes and G. Stanghellini, Time and Body. Phenomenological and Psychopathological approaches (2021) is concerned with working out the role of phenomenology and embodiment research methodologies and insights in order to explore the interrelation between psychopathology, temporality and the embodied mind. The volume’s emphasis lies in investigating the temporal and intersubjective constitution of the body in phenomenological and psychopathological approaches.

An introductory essay by Tewes and Stanghellini (2021) and a preliminary paper by Fuchs (2021)  ̶  to whose enduring work the book is also dedicated  ̶ open this interdisciplinary collection. Fuchs’s seminal influence over the subsequent researches presented in the volume is thus recognized right from the start. His own hypothesis is that a desynchronization of the intersubjective time experience causing a loss of bodily resonance (2013, 99) lies at the heart of several psychopathologies, such as autism, schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia nervosa (2021). The remaining essays are grouped by pathologies into 4 sections: I. Body and Time (Legrand, 2021; Stanghellini, 2021; Depraz, 2021; Tschacher, 2021); II. Grief and Anxiety (Køster, 2021; Tanaka, 2021); III. Borderline Personality and Eating Disorders (Ratcliffe & Bortolan, 2021; Schmidt, 2021; Rodemeyer, 2021; Doerr-Zegers & Pelegrina-Cetran, 2021); IV. Depression, Schizophrenia and Dementia (Lenzo & Gallagher, 2021; Froese & Krueger, 2021; Van Duppen & Sienaert, 2021; Tewes, 2021). Interesting commentaries follow each article, discussing the item at issue. The book shows how insights and methodologies from phenomenology and enactivism can be applied in clinics (p. 5), especially in suggesting alternative treatments: Dance therapy or music therapy, for example, can induce a re-synchronization, restoring co-temporality in the therapeutic relationship.

Since Gibson’s (1979) and Varela’s (1991) seminal works on the ecological approach to mind and consciousness, embodiment and enactivism have gained an increased following in the cultural (intersubjective) domain too (Durt, Fuchs & Tewes, 2017; Etzelmüller & Tewes, 2016). What is still missing, however, is an investigation into the interconnection between temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity (Fuchs, 2013, 2017, 2018) and its significance for psychopathology (Fuchs, 2021): This is the novel contribution the book aims to provide. The main goals of the volume include increasing understanding of the intertwinement of time and bodily experience as well as in the development of an embodied-based phenomenological psychopathology. Some fundamental phenomenological insights can enlighten the several psychopathologies analyzed: The distinction (and shift) between the body as subject / as object (Merleau-Ponty, 1945); time, as an implicit/explicit feature (Husserl, 1952); intersubjectivity, and the related self/other demarcation (as disrupted in pathologies (Sacks, 1987; Sass, 2003; Tsakiris, Prabhu & Haggard, 2006)) as well as the debates about ‘minimal self’ (Lane, 2020; Zahavi, 2017; Nelson, Parnas & Sass, 2014).

With this in mind, another useful way of carving up the conceptual space of the book is by a further thematic (phenomenological) grouping of the several contributions to the volume. Each essay is concerned with the interrelation between temporality and the embodied/embedded mind in psychopathology. However, it is also possible to recognize a particular focus on some of these fundamental phenomenological insights.

Most of the essays are committed to the grounding role of the body. Section I includes papers focussed on the shift from the subject-body [Leib] to the object-body [Körper] in psychopathology. Stanghellini (2021) points out this shift to an ‘objectified body’ in schizophrenia. The Leib profile, meanwhile, is recognized as related to the borderline disorder  ̶  especially under the outlined profile of the ‘sheer flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 1968; Henry, 1965). Moreover, Stanghellini identifies the ‘body-for-others’  ̶  i.e., the body under the others’ gaze (Sartre, 1956)  ̶  as being particularly impaired in eating disorders. Beyond the traditional Körper/Leib distinction, he also works out multiple layers of Leib (the ‘lived’ body) as distinct from the ‘living’ body: A crucial difference (but also an intimate relationship between living/lived body), that is further recognizable between just ‘living’ and ‘feeling’ of being alive, Leben and Erleben (Fingerhut & Marienberg – Eds., 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Engelen, 2014, 2012; Barile, forthcoming). In the following sections of the volume, Tanaka (2021) also investigates the role of the body-as-a-object ‘for others’, but in the context of social anxiety. Doerr-Zegers and Pelegrina-Cetran (2021) are concerned with the shift from the body-subject and the body-object in anorexia, as related to implicit/explicit temporality. Van Duppen and Sienaert (2021) examine catatonia  ̶ a psychopathology that is underinvestigated  ̶  particularly body freezing, as ‘objectifying’ the body. Finally, Tewes’s (2021) contribution on dementia offers an embodied approach to selfhood and personal identity over time. Specifically, he assigns a constitutive role of bodily continuity to personhood, in line with other kinds of approaches also in opposition to the brain- and cognitive-centred mainstream view (Damasio, 2021, 2010; Barile, 2016).

A minor part of the essays collected in the volume focuses on the other grounding phenomenological insights of the book: Time (as implicit/explicit temporality), and intersubjectivity. Tschacher (2021) emphasizes the role of time and body in psychotherapy, offering a quantitative approach based on dynamical systems theory. Adopting a microphenomenological methodology, Depraz (2021) instead investigates psychosomatic diseases as related to chronic time. On his side, Rodemeyer (2021) deals with temporality and body involvement in gendered experiences in the context of eating disorders. Lenzo and Gallagher (2021) underline the role of intrinsic temporality and its disruption in depression, schizophrenia and dementia.

As concerning intersubjectivity, Tewes and Stanghellini’s (2021) and Fuchs’s opening articles (2021) on embodiment, temporality and intersubjectivity in phenomenology and psychopathology are seminal contributions. Among the others, Legrand (2021) is the most committed to the very intertwinement of intersubjectivity, time and body in psychopathology. From a phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) and a psychoanalytical perspective (Lacan, 1981), she focuses on the fundamental role of body and time (synchronization) for clinics. As concerning body, ‘otherness’ and the self/other demarcation, Legrand argues against Nancy (2000) for the existence of ‘fluctuating’ boundaries between bodies, recognized as at the basis of both singularity and alterity. Also committed to the ‘being-with’ feature, Køster (2021) provides an existential-phenomenological analysis of the feeling of ‘emptiness’. Ratcliffe and Bortolan (2021) deal with borderline disorder (BDP) as related to emotion dysregulation and unstable interpersonal relationships. On his side, Schmidt (2021) offers a holistic account and a multifactor description of BDP. He focusses on self-experience (which all other factors amount to) rather than on interpersonal relationships only. Froese and Krueger (2021) also concentrate their attention on intersubjectivity and the disturbed self/other demarcation, particularly in schizophrenia.

In sum, the volume turns out to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays accomplishing the goals «to sharpen and deepen an understanding of the intertwinement of time and bodily experience» and «to contribute to the further development of an embodied-based phenomenological psychopathology» (p. 4). Furthermore, the book offers some important contributions (particularly, Tewes & Stanghellini, 2021; Fuchs, 2021; Legrand, 2021; Køster, 2021; Ratcliffe & Bortolan, 2021; Schmidt, 2021; Froese & Krueger, 2021) to enlightening the interconnection between temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity (Fuchs, 2013b, 2017, 2018b) and its significance for psychopathology (Fuchs, 2021). This aspect is recognized as «still missing» in embodiment and enactivist researches in the introductory paper by Fuchs (p. 12): Some steps on this direction can be traced back to Fuchs’s seminal work (2013b, 2017, 2018b) as well as a number of others (Durt, Fuchs & Tewes, 2017; Etzelmüller & Tewes, 2016; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Koole & Tschacher, 2016). Disclosing the interconnection of time, body and intersubjectivity in psychopathologies constitutes a key ‘inspiration’ of the volume. However, the innovative approach to the clinical practice, considered in the light of phenomenology and embodiment research methodologies and insights, is where this volume’s main contribution lies.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

References: 

Barile, E. (forthcoming).

Barile, E. (2016). Minding Damasio. Ledizioni, Roma.

Bizzari, V. (2018). Sento quindi Sono. Fenomenologia e Leib nel Dibattito Contemporaneo. Mimesis. Milano.

De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (4), 485–507. doi: 10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9.

Damasio A.R. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

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

Durt, C., Fuchs, T. & Tewes, C. (Eds.). (2017). Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. MIT Press: Cambridge (MA).

Engelen, M.E. (2014). Das Gefühl des Lebendigseins. In: Vom Leben zur Bedeutung. Philosophische Studien zum Verhältnis Von Gefühl, Bewusstsein und Sprache. De Gruyter: Berlin (5-42); first in: Marienberg, S. & Fingerhut, J. – Eds. (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin (239-56).

Etzelmüller, G., & Tewes, C. (Eds.). (2016). Embodiment in evolution and culture. Mohr Siebeck: Heidelberg (DE).

Fingerhut, J. & Marienberg, S. (Eds.). (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin.

Fuchs, T. (2012). The Feeling of Being Alive. In Marienberg, S. & Fingerhut, J. – Eds. (2012). Feelings of Being Alive. De Gruyter: Berlin.

Fuchs, T. (2013b). Temporality and psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12 (1), 75–104. doi:10.1007/s11097-010-9189-4.

Fuchs, T. (2017). Self across time: The diachronic unity of bodily existence. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16 (2), 291–315. doi:10.1007/ s11097-015-9449-4.

Fuchs, T. (2018a). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind. Oxford University Press: Oxford (UK).

Fuchs, T. (2018b). The cyclical time of the body and its relation to linear time. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (7–8), 47–65.

Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Huoghton-Mifflin: Boston.

Henry, M. (1965) Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Presses Universitaire de France: Paris.

Husserl, E. (1952). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Den Haag: Nijhoff.

Koole, S. L. & Tschacher, W. (2016). Synchrony in psychotherapy: A review and an integrative framework for the therapeutic alliance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00862.

Lacan, J. (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar, Book XI, 1964 (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company: New York, London.

Lane, T.J. (2020). The minimal self hypothesis, Consciousness and Cognition, 85, 103029. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.103029.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press: Evanston (IL).

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la Perception. Gallimard: Paris.

Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being Singular Plural. (Tr. Robert Richardson & Anne O’Byrne). Stanford University Press.

Nelson, B., Parnas, J. & Sass, L.A. (2014). Disturbance of Minimal Self (Ipseity) in Schizophrenia: Clarification and Current Status, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 40 (3), May: 479–482, https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu034.

Sacks, O. (1987). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. Harper and Row: New York.

Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library: New York, NY. (Original work published 1943).

Sass, L.A. (2003). Negative symptoms, schizophrenia, and the self. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 3 (2), December: 153-180.

Tewes, C. (2018). The phenomenology of habits: Integrating first-person and neuropsychological studies of memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01176.

Tewes, C. & Fuchs, T. (2018). Editorial introduction: The formation of body memory. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (7–8), 8–19.

Tsakiris, M., Prabhu, G., & Haggard, P. (2006). Having a Body versus Moving Your Body: How Agency Structures Body-Ownership. Consciousness and Cognition, 15: 423-432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.09.004.

Varela, F.J. (1991). Organism: A Mesh work of Selfless Selves. In Albert Tauber (Ed.). Organism and the Origin of Self. Kluwer: Dordrecht (77-107).

Zahavi, D. (2017). Thin, thinner, thinnest: Defining the minimal self. In C. Durt, T. Fuchs & C. Tewes (Eds.), Embodiment, enaction, and culture: Investigating the constitution of the shared world (pp. 193–199). MIT Press: Cambridge (MA).


Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Thomas Fuchs: In Defense of The Human-Being

In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology Book Cover In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology
Thomas Fuchs
Oxford University Press
2021
Hardback $45.00
272

Reviewed by: Elodie Boublil (University Paris Est Créteil; UPEC, France)

‘Persons are living beings, not programs’

Fuchs’ phenomenological theory of embodied anthropology

Thomas Fuchs is Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophical Foundations at the Psychiatry Clinic of the University of Heidelberg. He chairs the research section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at the Psychiatric University Hospital Heidelberg.

His latest book, In Defense of the Human Being, meticulously demonstrates how corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are intertwined and defeat any attempt to reify human beings, either through identifying them with machines or through digitalizing their existence thanks to algorithms and the digitalization of the lifeworld.

Indeed, the book argues that the standard humanistic paradigm displayed by Western societies, especially since the Renaissance, is superseded by a technological and transhumanist view that aims to develop an even more predictable and controllable version of the human being. Fuchs explains: “It is not my concern to defend humanity against an accusation but against a questioning. Because today, in question is what one could call—with unavoidable imprecision—the humanistic image of man. At the center of this image is the human person as a physical or embodied being, as a free, self-determining being, and ultimately as an essentially social being connected with others.”

Challenging and questioning our image of humanity entails another questioning that targets the philosophical and anthropological validity of our moral and ethical claims (dignity, personhood, responsibility, etc.). In other words, defending humanity responds to the urgent need for grounding our anthropological image of the human being based on the findings of contemporary science. Far from debunking the humanistic paradigm, Fuchs argues that recent findings concerning embodied freedom, relationality, the plasticity of the brain, etc., prove authentic our relational and embodied experience as human beings, and defeat the mechanical view of the body as well as the chimera of artificial intelligence and other transhumanist projects. In so doing, Fuchs admirably shows that endorsing the latter will alienate rather than emancipate human beings and may lead to new psychological conditions if technology is not used appropriately. As such, Fuchs’s book deserves to be known and read as it successfully defeats the diagnosis and predictions of Yuval Noah Harari’s book: Homo Deus (2017), according to which “Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm” (Harari, 2017, p. 381; Fuchs 2021: 3). To do so, Fuchs deconstructs three assumptions that lie behind this “scientistic view of humans”: reductionist naturalism, the elimination of the living, and functionalism according to which “phenomena of consciousness are attributed to processes of neuronal information processing. “The author puts forward a philosophical anthropology that insists on “embodiment and aliveness” to characterize the person:

“No abstract inwardness, disembodied consciousness or pure spirit are the guiding ideas of a humanistic view of the person, but the person’s concrete physical existence. Only when it can be shown that the person is present in her body itself, that the person feels, perceives, expresses, and acts with her whole body, do we escape confinement in a hidden inner space of consciousness, an inaccessible citadel from which only signals penetrate to the outside world, signals which can no longer be distinguished from the those of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, only when persons have an embodied freedom, i.e., determine themselves as organisms in decisions and actions, does subjectivity become more than an epiphenomenon, i.e., really effective in the world”.

The book is divided into three parts: 1/ Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and Virtuality; 2/Brain, Person, and Reality; 3/Psychiatry and Society. The first two parts delve into the anthropological and existential implications of the brain paradigm already explored in the Ecology of the Brain (2017) to show their impact on the way individuals relate to themselves and each other. Fuchs demonstrates the philosophical inconsistencies of the assimilation of the brain to machines and algorithms, the self-reification at stake, and its psychological consequences for the subject. Part three illustrates the necessity to provide society with an adequate anthropological foundation to address pressing issues such as aging, dementia, or psychological conditions.

***

The first chapter clarifies the distinction between human and artificial intelligence. Debunking the dream of replacing humans with robots thanks to algorithms, Fuchs explains the epistemological and ethical implications of dematerialization and the disincarnating process at stake. His critical analysis of “information” plays a key role as Fuchs rightly explains that “information only exists where someone understands something—that is, news as news signs as signs. Information exists only for conscious living beings or for persons.” In other words, a computer does not “understand” messages; it “computes” them. This clarification brings to light how human beings project their abilities, states of mind, and emotions into machines. In other words, we should be aware that “we are only dealing here with metaphors.” Subsequently, this chapter retraces the history of the digital revolution to underline the categorical differences between human intelligence and AI. Fuchs claims that “there can be no real intelligence without life and consciousness” and that, therefore, the idea of “artificial intelligence” or “artificial life” is self-contradictory. Opposing Harari’s claim that “organisms are algorithms,” Fuchs claims that “programs” are not persons and persons are not programs. Technological artifacts rely on simulation, yet they lack qualitative and differentiated experience. It also applies to the brain’s functioning: “The brain is not a control center, but an organ of resonance and relations (Fuchs, 2018). Only living beings are conscious, feel, sense, or think—not brains and not computers. Persons are living beings, not programs.” Consequently, this chapter appraises the challenge addressed to medicine and scientific research by artificial intelligence as it unconsciously challenges the image we have of human beings, their finitude, and their capabilities. Ultimately, artificial intelligence addresses not only epistemological and ontological questions but ethical dilemmas as it pretends to become a new compass to consider our existence against its performance.

Chapter two expands on this idea by assessing the worldview and ideology developed by transhumanism. Transhumanism seems to do away with what is the most salient feature of humanity: namely, embodiment. Indeed, by considering human beings either as purely “biological machines” or “pure minds” to be programmed, transhumanism denies the very “foundation of our existence” and the irremissible power of “cultural shaping” in the way we conceive of our physical nature. In other words, instead of fully acknowledging life’s dynamism and the realization of freedom through the “embodied enactment of life,” transhumanism reveals a process of self-reification that relies on a “false concept of consciousness.” Moreover, the utopia of the “new man” liberated from finitude and mortality eradicates the very idea of freedom and accomplishment, as limitations and resistance precisely confer its value to any endeavors: “transhumanist utopias thus counteract the very efforts that have so far supported the idea of improving the human world – the efforts to achieve social, cultural, and moral progress based on individual and collective efforts, progress that cannot be achieved by technical reconstruction of the human being but only by self-education, self-development, and the common shaping of the lifeworld.” The chapter ends with a consistent criticism of neuro-reductionism and the fantasy of “mind uploading” that relies on an epistemological and philosophical fallacy. The epistemological mistake consists in identifying the brain and the person; the philosophical dead-end annihilates freedom at the very moment it seeks to expand it: indeed, contrary to what transhumanism argues, “this embodied and thus, of course, mortal individuation is the price we have to pay in order to experience the freedom and wonder of earthly existence.” Transhumanism is ultimately a form of neo-Gnosticism that carries significant ethical consequences.

Chapter three focuses on the impact of neuro-constructivist paradigms on our intersubjective relations through the example of virtuality. Does the virtual world help us develop and improve empathy, or does it compromise its flourishing? “What consequences may ensue for intersubjectivity and relationships in our society because of increasing virtualization of perception and communication? How is empathy transformed when it is increasingly directed to a virtual other?” According to Fuchs, empathy relies first and foremost on our corporeality and the embodied dynamics of inter-affectivity. Recalling Scheler’s conception of empathy, Fuchs explains that “we experience the other person primarily as a psycho-physical unity of expression.” What we generally understand as perspective-taking or imaginative transposition (putting oneself in the other’s shoes) reflected a different level of empathy that the author describes as “explicit empathy”: “it seems necessary to differentiate between a primary, implicit, or bodily empathy and an expanded, explicit, or imaginative empathy. The latter already involves an element of “as-if” and thus of virtuality.” The question thus arises whether we could disconnect primary bodily empathy and imaginative empathy, as it happens in “virtual empathy.” According to Fuchs, “the culture of growing virtuality and simulation is connected with disembodiment, a retreat from bodily and intercorporeal experience. Simultaneously, empathy tends to separate itself from these experiences and to shift into virtuality – into a space where we are confronted by hybrid forms of the other as a mixture of appearance, simulation, and illusion, and where the medium and the mediated reality intercorporeal pole toward the virtual and projective pole of the spectrum.” Consequently, the “media-based idealism” that inspires our digital age may well give us the impression that we are all easily interconnected, yet it considerably undermines the reality of the qualitative experience we undergo while facing – for real – the presence of the other. Indeed, virtual communication lacks non-verbal synaesthetic interaction. It modifies and structure our attention and often reinforces individual projections and ego-centeredness rather than achieving genuine empathy. Fuchs then concludes with an epistemological and ethical claim: “only when others become real for us in this manner can we become real for ourselves. Today, our relationships come increasingly to be mediated, even produced, by images. But no one encounters us through a smartphone. The virtual presence of the other cannot replace inter-corporeality. “

The second part of the volume provides a critique of cerebrocentrism and the way the brain paradigm shapes our conception of reality and self-identity.

Chapter four analyzes the abusive identification between person and brain and the way such an approach to personal identity lays further the ground for a simplistic approach of reality and subjectivity: “for neurobiology, the brain becomes the new subject, the thinker of our thoughts and doer of our actions; subjectivity itself is only a useful illusion.” This neurobiological conception disqualifies our ordinary conception of freedom and decision-making. It entails a deterministic conception of the human world as if thoughts and actions were governed by predictable movements and neuronal connections. According to this worldview: “persons are cerebral subjects, and images of the brain are the modern icons of the person.” On the contrary, Fuchs aims to show that “the brain is only an organ of the person, not the seat of the person. In other words: personhood means embodied subjectivity.” This chapter thus reinvests the previous critique of neuro-constructivism to show that the latter reinforces the Cartesian paradigm of exteriority that does not match the reality of our embodied interactions with ourselves and the world. Drawing on the analysis developed in The Ecology of the Brain, Fuchs shows that the person is not reducible to her brain, even if this organ – as a mediating organ – is key to her understanding of the world. Persons are “embodied subjects” and “living beings.” Neurosciences are thus wrong to undermine the role played by the body – as a lived body – in our understanding of the world as the brain cannot be dissociated from the living organism it draws upon: “this ‘cerebrocentrism’ neglects the interrelationships and circuits in which the brain is situated – as if one were to examine the heart without the circulation or examine the lungs without the respiratory cycle. The reason for this is that the neurosciences have no concept of a living organism. They are still trapped in the computer metaphor of the mind.” To Fuchs instead: “Conscious experience therefore only arises in the overarching system of organism and environment, through the interplay of many components to which the brain and the entire body with its organs, senses, and limbs belong, just as much as the appropriate objects of the environment. The brain is the organ that mediates these interactions; in short: an organ of mediation and relation. But, in the brain itself there is no experiencing, no consciousness, no thoughts. (…) the brain is therefore a crucial condition of the possibility of personal existence in the world. However, the person is not a part of the body, but the body-mind unity, the living human being. Persons have brains, they are not their brains.”

Chapter 5 concludes this critique of cerebrocentrism and argues for a libertarian conception of embodied freedom. Even if freedom may be philosophically challenged by determinism, we all have decisions to make in the experience of our day-to-day lives. Thus, our lived experience of freedom is irreducible and must be accounted for. Consequently, Fuchs develops a concept of embodied freedom that reflects the person’s life and does not limit its course to unfolding brain activities or the weight of individual determinations and constraints. According to the author: “If one wants to find the cause of a person’s actions, one must not look for them in an “I” or in the brain but only in the person with all their mental and physical states, or in other words, in the person as an embodied subjectivity.” The person as an embodied subjectivity is thus the source of all decisions. This conception defeats linear causality and psycho-physical determinism to claim back our human sense of responsibility and freedom. To Fuchs, the critical element lies in the person’s self-relation. Drawing on the notion of “circular causality” analyzed in depth in his previous book, The Ecology of the Brain, the author does not oppose the mind and the organism but instead merges the two poles into an “overarching structure” that interrelates the level of life and the level of existence. This view is not only philosophical. Fuchs demonstrates that it corresponds to a true scientific conception of the human being as a person that is more realistic than the scientist accounts based on cerebrocentrism. He further argues that “we do not find any empirical findings in the scientific world that are insurmountably opposed to our experience of freedom of choice” and that it is the human being’s responsibility not to get trapped in a worldview that might lock herself “in the cage of determinism.”

Chapter 6 questions the worldview elaborated by neuro-constructivism and how it has disrupted our sense of the lifeworld to replace it with the “brain world.” According to this worldview, reality is a construction and simulation of the brain, and our world of senses is “a world of illusion.” Fuchs shows that such a conception is not new and relies on a hidden Cartesian dualism that divides the world into artificial “inner” and “outer” dimensions. “Representationalism” objectifies human reality and amounts to a process of “de-anthropomorphizing” that divests the human being from its same characteristics as an embodied living being. Contrary to this perspective, Fuchs recalls his account of perception based on sensorimotor interaction. According to the enactive conception, “embodiment, lifeworld, and reality mutually ground each other.” Mutual perception and recognition frame our perception of reality and prevent us from reducing our first-personal lived experience to brain mechanisms.

Chapter 7, titled “Perception and Reality: Sketch of an interactive realism,” goes a step further by elaborating on the enactive approach to perception and embodiment to promote a “lifeworld realism.” It argues that “the fundamental reality is not the world of measurable quantities and particles abstracted by the special sciences, in particular physics, but the common reality of the lifeworld constituted by implicit intersubjectivity.” In other words, the brain should be conceived as a “mediating or relational organ, not as an internal producer of perception.” Neuroconstructivist approaches seem to reproduce the type of disconnected sense of reality one founds in schizophrenia. According to Fuchs, “The “ego tunnel” in which one lives according to the neuroconstructivist conception, the movie-in-the-head that is supposedly presented to us by our brain, is only a pathological state that patients experience in psychosis (Fuchs, 2020). In everyday experience, on the other hand, we find ourselves in the shared world, constituted by the implicit intersubjectivity of perception”.

The third and last part of the book focuses more directly on the role and status of psychiatry in contemporary society and the scientific landscape.

Chapter 8, “Psychiatry: between psyche and the brain,” investigates psychiatry’s relation to the spirit and analyzes its various discourses’ epistemological and historical roots. Fuchs recalls the specific status of psychiatry and its historical relation to natural and human sciences. Contemporary reductionism makes psychiatry contingent upon a kind of neurobiological monism: “Mental disorders are brain disorders” is the guiding principle of biological psychiatry today,”  Fuchs explains. Following his previous critique of neuro-constructivism, the author offers an alternative account of psychiatry as “a comprehensive relational medicine” – a practice that reconnects with the interpersonal aspect of reality’s experience. According to this view, the impact of environmental and social factors on the individual is as much significant as the genetic and biological factors involved in mental illnesses. Following the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry (Binswanger, Straus), Fuchs defends a global approach of the person in this chapter. Indeed, psychiatry’s “primary object is not the brain, but the person living in relationships.”

Chapter 9 explores the relationship between embodiment and personal identity and how it may be disrupted in dementia. Personal identity is a “basal self-experience” coextensive to embodied experience. It refers to a non-predicative sense of self that yet unifies our stream of consciousness. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s description in The Phenomenology of Perception, this phenomenological account of personal identity does not require narrative skills or reflective processes to characterize one’s sense of self. Instead, it argues that the ecological and enactive approach of the subject includes the constitution of personal history at the level of the habitual body.

From this perspective, Fuchs analyzes contemporary approaches to dementia, primarily based on externalist or discursive accounts that miss the crucial role of embodiment in preserving the subject’s first-person perspective. According to Fuchs: “the concept of embodied personhood and history is able to change our image of dementia. In place of a brain and cognition-centered perspective, we may adopt the view of the patients in their own individual embodiment, which, for its part, is embedded in social and environmental contexts. (…) A concept of person grounded solely in rationality and reflection inevitably stigmatizes people with severe cognitive deficits. By contrast, bringing in a concept of person orientated towards embodiment and inter-corporeality, the response and relational capabilities of patients become a significant foundation of their personhood—such as the ability to give expression to joy, gratefulness, sorrow, or fear that is still preserved”.

Finally, the last chapter – chapter 10 – compares and contrasts the cyclical time of the body with the linear time of modernity. Expanding on the concept of physical memory, Fuchs analyzes the alterations of the experience of time in various mental illnesses and how they conflict with the demands of modernity. Modernity and, in particular, Western economies rely on a linear time that is always prone to be accelerated. The cyclical time of the organic body also matches the cyclical time of the unconscious brought to light by Freud in “repetition compulsion” – a sense of time that is also profoundly disrupted in other mental illnesses. Fuchs gives the example of the manic patient and the one suffering from depression. Both conditions reveal a specific way to relate to the modern lifeworld or to be cut off from it. As the author explains: “precisely as a fundamental disorder of temporality, depression, like no other mental illness, reflects the conflict between the primary, cyclical structure of life processes and the rule of linear time, which has been established in Western culture since modern times. Desynchronization, falling out of linear world time, becomes a latent threat in our competitive and accelerated society, which has to be fought against continuously. In depression, these efforts fail, the individual lags hopelessly behind, and decoupling from the common time becomes a reality.” Implementing back a rhythmization of one’s life, based on the cyclical time of the body, could help restore a connection to oneself and others.

**

In line with his previous book (The Ecology of the Brain), Thomas Fuchs continues his critical, epistemological and phenomenological work by offering us a book resolutely turned towards pressing contemporary issues: the virtual world, aging, the status of care for the most vulnerable in our Western societies. Far from the gnostic fantasies of transhumanism, Fuchs offers us a phenomenology of the life of the mind that is both resolutely human and existentially fruitful.

The legacy of Jaspers and existential psychiatry (Binswanger, Straus, Minkowski) is evident here. Any scientific project is the consequence of a specific anthropological vision of the human being. What we could call the de-anthropologization of the world in favor of a technocentric approach must also be considered a contemporary worldview. We are then facing the following alternative as a limit situation: either the headlong rush into the ideological consolidation of this worldview and the deadly reification of the human and the living as a whole or an existential leap that allows us to reconcile a scientific approach to the world and a critical phenomenology of our relationship to it. By offering us a salutary deconstruction of contemporary scientism, which claims to master and go beyond the limits of the body and consciousness through technology, Fuchs offers an approach as accurate as adjusted to science, denouncing the myths of its metaphors (information, dematerialization, etc.). The author admirably demonstrates that this worldview is based on a normative conception of normality and dictated by a representation of the human being designed to match our contemporary pleonexia.

The book is vibrant, and we would like to highlight three aspects of it: 1/ the phenomenological deconstruction of contemporary psychiatry and the highlighting of an expanded concept of consciousness that reintegrates its ethical dimension and its embodied anchorage; 2/ the defense of a humanism that is less the classical humanism of the spirit than a humanism of the living, embodied spirit. In other words, the philosophical critique of Cartesian ontology calls for its overcoming in a renewed humanism anchored in phenomenological realism. 3/ The crucial role of the concept of the lifeworld and the relational and interpersonal dimension of any properly human existence.

Fuchs would undoubtedly acknowledge the words of Erwin Straus, who already stated in his writings that: “The object of psychiatric action is not primarily the brain, the body, or the organism; it should be the integral man in the uniqueness of his individual existence as this discloses itself – independently of the distinction between healthy and sick – in existential communication” (Philosophy and Psychiatry); or the words of Binswanger for whom psychiatry is a “science of man, of human existence.” It is not a question of denying some illnesses’ biological and organic dimensions. Instead, it is necessary to articulate this level of analysis and understanding with the existential and relational possibilities that give it meaning and inscribe the latter in the biography of a person. The richness of Fuchs’ analysis shows that this is not a theoretical bias. Recent scientific findings make the phenomenology of embodied cognition and enaction more credible and inescapable. In other words, contrary to the contemporary ideology developed by novelists like Harari, freedom is not the founding myth of our humanity but its real and embodied fulfillment. Fuchs insists on this crucial point: “Humanism in the ethical sense, therefore, means resistance to the rule and constraints of technocratic systems as well as to the self-reification and mechanization of humans” “The defense of man is, in this respect, not only a theoretical task but also an ethical duty. ” (Fuchs).

The high prevalence of mental illnesses in our contemporary times is explicitly correlated with a weakening of the social bond and atomization of the existence of individuals that can only increase in the schizoid world of the “technological mind.” Conversely, the examples of care, and in particular the care of older people with dementia, show the importance of interpersonal relationships and real socialization to guarantee the well-being and dignity, and self-esteem of one’s person. The ecology of the embodied self, therefore, requires us to question our modern systems based on the performance of individuals and self-sufficiency in order to consider the resources of our vulnerability and finitude, especially at the ethical and relational levels: ” As the other becomes real for us in his body, we also become real for ourselves, as bodily beings appearing in their bodies. Embodiment, lifeworld, and reality mutually ground each other” (Fuchs, 155). Isolating someone is undoubtedly the best attempt to destroy her humanity. The valorization of the disembodied spirit in our contemporary societies through digitalization – an ideological perversion of Cartesian ontology – alienates us at the very moment it thinks it can liberate us.

Fuchs’ phenomenological realism insists on embodied cognition and its constitution in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It is constitutive of our free relationship with others and the world in that our choices and environments determine each other. Interactive realism goes beyond materialist monism and Cartesian dualism in favor of a relational ontology whose primary constituent is interdependency:  “Because perception, according to my first thesis, is neither an activity of the brain nor a process in an inner mental world, but rather an active engagement of living beings with their environment, or in short: perception means sensorimotor interaction. (Fuchs, 158).

The aesthesiological and cosmological dimension of perception promoted by interactive realism allows us to overcome the explanatory gap. Indeed, “only humans can grasp objects and situations as such, i.e., independently of a purely subjective perspective” (Ibid.) From this perception arises a form of responsibility towards other human and non-human forms of life. In other words, any epistemological perspective on the human being also implies an ethical perspective on freedom, truth, and reality. Such a perspective opens new philosophical ways to existential psychiatry, in the tradition of Straus, as we have said, but also of Minkowski.

We can only rejoice at this demonstration which brilliantly defeats the worldview of neuro-constructivism and the fallacy of the technological mind who pretends “to encounter us through a smartphone.” Fuchs’ book keeps all its promises and offers an essential analysis that holds the human being and the world together. This phenomenological approach departs us from the paradigm of power and mastery that foments some posthuman conceptions in favor of a paradigm that resynchronizes life and embodiment to make us responsible for our ways of being and living together within the common world, here and now. As such, by defending the human being, Fuchs defends all forms of life against the reductionisms or relativisms alienating them.