Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai (Eds.): Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, Routledge, 2022

Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology Book Cover Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology
Edited By Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai
Routledge
2022
Hardback
304

Reviewed by: Michael Blezy

Introduction

What exactly Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks contributes to the field of phenomenology is difficult to pin down. Although the text conveys its insights in the distinct vocabulary of phenomenology and its description and analysis of experience recognizably parallels the efforts of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it is not immediately clear how Fanon’s work is supposed to relate to these thinkers or the phenomenological tradition he draws from.

For instance, does Fanon take himself to be merely applying, say, Husserlian or Sartrean phenomenology to a new or underexplored domain of phenomena while leaving the basic tenants of their phenomenology intact? Or is Fanon’s work much more ambitious, aiming not only to expand upon or supplement the work of his fellow phenomenologists, but to offer a fundamental challenge to their work? And if Fanon is offering a fundamental challenge to traditional phenomenology, is this challenge supposed to bring about an immanent transformation of phenomenology? Or is it supposed to call into question the very phenomenological enterprise and what it is capable of achieving?

Due to the lack of clarity on these basic issues, scholarly assessments of Fanon’s contribution to phenomenology vary widely. Reaction to Fanon’s phenomenological work ranges from complete neglect (Fanon’s name is not even mentioned in Moran’s (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology) to disparaging (consider Macy’s (2012, p. 132) assessment that “Fanon is not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist”), to Fanon’s work being celebrated for its importance and originality and for moving the field of phenomenology in an exciting new direction. For instance, Karera (2020), speaking for a number of contemporary scholars that utilize phenomenology to explore issues of race, gender and politics (Guenther 2020; Weiss, Murphy, & Salamon 2020), heralds Fanon as one the key figures whose work ushered in a new era of politically-informed, “critical” phenomenology.

It is with a longstanding interest in precisely pinning down Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology that I eagerly dove into Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, a collection of essays organized around Fanon’s contribution to a number of contemporary philosophical topics. In particular, I was encouraged to see that the editors and contributors took Fanon’s relation to phenomenology seriously, and that one of the editors’ main motivations for bringing together the collection was to shed light on the nature of Fanon’s phenomenology:

[A] rigorous exploration of Fanon’s distinctive uses and forms of phe­nomenology  emerged as one of the foremost motivations for this edited collection. As we began the  literature review that formed the first research task of this book, it quickly became apparent that there have been a number of excellent studies of Fanon’s uses of   phenomenology (many of which we have been fortunate enough to include in the pages that follow). The problem with this literature was not its content, but its distribution: Without dedicated searching and access to suitable academic databases and libraries, this literature remained so scattered and inaccessible that it has seemed, historically, as if it had almost completely fallen through the cracks of Fanon studies … [The] the appeal to experience, and more directly yet, the appeal to the lived experience of the Black man, is   an absolutely irreducible and crucial aspect of Black Skin, White Masks. At the risk of    being dramatic: There would be no Black Skin, White Masks without this method of        description and engagement. Fanon’s uses of phenomenology – which, as several of the     following chapters show, did not leave phenomenology unchanged – proved a condition   of possibility for that book, and, extending our argument, for much of what was most    compelling, visceral, and innovative within it. (2022, p. 7-8)

 

In what follows, I want to draw upon the contributions to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology in order to say a bit more about how it is Fanon stands vis-a-vis phenomenology. I will not offer a summary of each of the articles in the collection. Not only would this be tedious for the reader, but the editors of the collection give an overview of the text and succinctly sum up each of the individual contributions in their introduction (p. 1-10). Instead, I want to specifically draw upon the contributors’ accounts of Fanon’s phenomenology and, further, critically evaluate these accounts, so as to bring new clarity to the relationship between Fanon and phenomenology.

Phenomenology and the Search for Structure

More than simply the fact that scholarly work on Fanon’s phenomenology has been scattered or inaccessible, it is the inherent difficulties with interpreting Fanon’s descriptions of experience and longstanding ambiguities and confusions regarding phenomenology itself that has resulted in a lack of clarity regarding Fanon’s contribution to the field. Black Skin, White Masks in particular, with its semi-autobiographical, fragmented, stream of consciousness way of proceeding, requires a large amount of philosophical reconstruction if something like arguments or positions are to be derived from it (including phenomenological ones).

Fortunately, for my purposes here, an overview of the ways in which Fanon’s phenomenology is characterized by the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Phenomenology will allow me to quickly get to the heart of the matter. By outlining the ways in which the contributors of the collection characterize (and, unfortunately, mischaracterize) Fanon’s phenomenological approach, the points of contact between Fanon and the phenomenological tradition he engages with will quickly be established.  

Before setting off on such a task, however, I think it will be useful for the reader if I briefly offer an account of how it is I understand phenomenology. By clarifying some of the key characteristics of phenomenology, as well as providing some philosophical distinctions that will allow me to more precisely differentiate between phenomenological accounts, Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology can be more accurately assessed.

In the Introduction to the recently published 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, the editors open the text in the following way:

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with a question: ‘What is   phenomenology?’ Nearly three-quarters of a century later, this question remains  unanswered. (2020, p. xiii)

Despite the inherent difficulties involved in definitively characterizing a field of philosophical investigation that is continually transforming as it critiques itself and finds new areas of application, I think the above claim is an exaggeration. And, frankly, I don’t believe the editors truly ascribe to it. A few pages later in the Introduction to 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, we are offered the following account of phenomenology which, at least in broad outline, marks out some of the key characteristics that belong to phenomenology:

One of phenomenology’s … methodological commitments is the refusal to accept     the taken-for-grantedness of experience. This commitment entails the perpetual   interrogation of the most familiar features of our everyday experience, not to deny them  but in order to know the better … Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such   descriptions can disclose the most basic structures of human existence … as these structures are brought into relief, our understand of our own experience is transformed, and our deepest assumption about our very being in the world may be challenged. (Ibid.)

Besides the regrettable characterization of phenomenology as marked by a “faith” that its description can disclose fundamental structures (there is no such faith, phenomenology is committed to its descriptions yielding such structures), this account nicely outlines at least three central features of phenomenology. In general, it can be said that phenomenology:

  • Does not accept as true any claim about the nature of our experience unless it is demonstrated by a means of a descriptive interrogation of experience. In part, this is the meaning of Husserl’s call to return to the “things” or “matters” themselves. Only what can be exhibited through the interrogation of experience should be philosophically adhered to.
  • Offers a descriptive interrogation of experience that does not simply lie content with more accurate, or perhaps even more rich and nuanced, descriptions of experience. Its descriptions are undertaken with a certain aim in mind: to reveal the “structures” (indeed, the most fundamental structures) of experience. I will say more about this below.
  • Concretely brings to light the structures of experience – an undertaking that transforms our relation to experience.

I think the main challenge offered by Fanon to traditional phenomenology revolves around a disagreement about how exactly the structures outlined in (2) are to be understood. However, before elaborating on (2), I want to briefly say something about (1) and (3).

Boldly stated, phenomenology’s goal of revealing structures of experience proceeds by way of an interrogative description of experience that concretely makes these structures apparent to the phenomenologist. For this reason, the task of providing better or more accurate accounts of what experience is like is not primary motivated by the goal of simply providing us with more nuanced or insightful accounts of our experience. Rather, phenomenology proceeds with an eye to reveal what makes experiences, and, indeed, experience as such, possible.

I want to suggest that this is the case no matter how important or meaningful the experiences interrogated may be to us. Indeed, “applied” phenomenology may offer us valuable clarifications and correctives regarding everything from what it like to undergo an emotional state to what it is like to sail a boat, to fall in love, play a video game or even give birth. However, such descriptions of what experience is like, although achieved by a descriptive turn to experience itself, do not necessarily satisfy the phenomenological aim of getting at the underlying phenomenological structures that make these experiences or experience itself possible. Indeed, it is the unearthing of structure that ultimately distinguishes phenomenology from mere psychological description, first-person reporting, or what an artist, poet, novelist or naturalist does when they attempt to depict or faithfully describe some aspect of our being in the world. In each of these instances, there is a turn to “things” or “matters” themselves – and in a loose sense, these things or matters provide the standard by which we judge the description – but they are not strictly speaking “phenomenological” in that the uniquely philosophical aim of exhibiting the underlying structures can fail to be undertaken. 

We can begin to understand phenomenology’s transformative dimension ((3) above) by noting that it can operate at two levels. First, it is common knowledge that undergoing experiences – philosophical or otherwise – results in a change in our relation to experience. Colloquially, we describe experiences as “marking us” or “giving a new perspective on life,” where what we are saying is that undergoing certain experiences transform who and what we are, and to such a degree, that they inform how it is we come to be disposed toward our experience. For instance, illness, the death of a loved one, the profound realizations we have in the face of art or nature – these experiences recontextualize lived experience in such a way that features and dimensions of the world are revealed to us that we had not experienced before. In a similar way, engaging in phenomenological descriptions – casting off our assumptions and theories about experience and paying heed to what it is experience itself offers or makes available to us – can occasion an experiential shift, perhaps even an irreversible shift, in how it is we experience ourself and the world.

However, phenomenology’s transformative power can also operate at a second, deeper level. Insofar as phenomenology is not solely concerned with descriptions of what lived experience is like, but interrogates experience in order to unearth structures, phenomenology involves a methodological maneuver that recontextualizes our relation with experience in a way that is not typically experienced when we are dealing with experience on the first level. Whether this maneuver is Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s destructive-hermeneutic analytic of Dasein, Sartre’s unearthing “the being of phenomenon” by descriptively mapping out the parameters of the existential situation (the “phenomenon of being”), or Merleau-Ponty’s expounding the worldly correlates of our bodily flesh, phenomenology involves a methodological re-orientation that, more than simply providing a unique kind of philosophical experience, fundamentally transforms our relation to experience itself.

What I am stressing here is that phenomenology reconstrues our relation to experience by turning it into a special field of philosophical investigation: experience as such and its possibility. By so transforming our relation to experience, the possibility arises not only of securing a whole new source of knowledge (that is, a phenomenological knowledge that would simply exist alongside the forms that concern objects found in experience). Rather, what we discover about ourselves and the world can bring about a change in how our experience of the world at the first level is to be understood, and so potentially motivate us to transform the very way we occupy or navigate such a world.

That what phenomenology interrogates is experience as such and its possibility nicely leads to a discussion regarding the all-important second feature of phenomenology ((2) outlined above): that its main aim is to disclose the structures of experience. Indeed, thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have provided different philosophical accounts regarding how exactly it is that phenomenological structures are to be understood (coming down differently on issues such as how it is the structures and what they structure is to be conceived of, the basis or ultimately ground of such structures, the connection between the structures and ontology, etc.). However, each of these phenomenologists are committed to the phenomenological discovery of structures, where these structures are supposed to account for how certain experiences are possible or, more fundamentally, the very possibility of experience.

Fanon and Phenomenology

Phenomenology takes up the task, arguably first initiated and pursued by thinkers like Descartes and Kant, of expounding the conditions of the possibility of experience, where this is to be understood as expounding the a priori conditions of possibility that allow for there to be something like experience as such and without which there would be no experience (and not just the absence of this or that experience). Whether it is such structures as the intentional nature of consciousness or the unity of apperception in Husserl, “attunement” in Heidegger, the “Look” which Sartre’s argues defines our being with others or Merleau-Ponty’s account of the objectivizing structure of perception, phenomenology aims to reveal the fundamental structures that allow for experience (e.g., intentionality, temporality, affectivity, intersubjectivity, perception, language, etc.) and which enables us to navigate the world.

Now, to a certain extent, many of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology recognize that the search for such structure is the ultimate aim of phenomenology and that Fanon provides his descriptions of experience in order to ultimately reveal such structure. Miraj. U. Desai, for instance, proposes to read Fanon “phenomenologically,” where this involves, crucially, an “attention to structure”: namely, the “invariant” structures that Fanon himself claims to have discovered in Black Skin, White Masks and which Desai’s article proposes to unearth and interrogate anew (2022, p. 75).

However, it is worth noting that when it comes to actually saying something about these structures, Desai (1) narrowly conceives of them as structures that underlie and make possible particular ways of engaging with objects found in experience (specifically, Desai has in mind the experience of creating an artwork or composing a piece of writing) and (2) identifies phenomenological structures with a range of material determinates (historical, social, political and even geographical) that create personal identity, without clarifying in what sense these determinates are “invariant” or what (if anything) they have in common or how they might work together to make experience possible (Ibid., p. 74). The result is that the account of structure here remains merely at the level of objects of experience and the generation of particular sorts of psychological states, without clarifying the nature of the “invariant” conditions that would underpin these very material determinates. Consider the following passage:

            Fanon’s greatest originality came from examining colonialism via the lens of         psychopathology and personal identity via the lens of colonial violence. Hook (2005, 2012) articulated Fanon’s ‘materialist psychology’ that demonstrated how racist  encounters and gazes strip away a person’s embodied subjectivity and resources for personal and cultural identity … social ills like pov­erty, antisemitism, racism, and colonialism [are not to be] minimized to mere mental states. As was suggested above, Fanonian investigations necessarily connected psychological structures to political,  socioeconomic, and geographical ones. (Ibid., p. 80)

To be perfectly clear: Fanon is keen to demonstrate that various social-historical determinates structure experience and lie at the basis of our psychology and personal identity, as well as bring into being different forms of psychopathology. Additionally, phenomenology can be concerned with the structures that inform particular kinds of intentional states and show how concrete, material reality provides intentionality with the matter to occasion its various states. However, at the deepest level, these structural determinates are not to be understood, following Derek Hook’s interpretation (which Desai quotes approvingly above), in straightforward materialist terms. If Fanon was simply interested in straightforwardly enumerating the material conditions that create our identities in a particular social-historical situation, then (1) his account would be far too specific (and so lack the necessary “invariance”) to be strictly phenomenological, and (2) would risk eliding the phenomenological task of articulating the structural conditions that underlie, inform, and govern any and all instances of material reality. Indeed, as Nelson Maldonado Torres points out, the more basic structures that phenomenologists seek to discover—e.g., embodiment, intersubjectivity, language, etc.—are what make possible our very experience of “being,” regardless of its material makeup in any given point in history or social organization:

            [Specific] cultural and structural analyses are not enough to [exhaustively] explore the … formation of subjectivity … and [in particular] of [phenomenological] structures. For this, Fanon takes a philosophical approach that considers … the formation of subjectiv­ity  as subjects relate to basic aspects of human experience: embodiment, intersubjective contact (via language and love), time, and space … Time, space, embodied subjectivity, and intersubjectivity play a key role in the formation of what is often defined as Being. (Ibid., p. 91)

A Torres stresses, these deep phenomenological structures cannot be straightforwardly identified with concrete material conditions. If Fanon’s descriptions of his lived experience are to be understood “phenomenologically,” then the relation between the phenomenological structure and material reality, as well as the sense in which the latter relate to the former, needs to be exhibited.

If a materialist interpretation of Fanonian structural determinates overlooks and presupposes the fundamental structures that his phenomenology is after, then a Hegelian account also fails to help us see what Fanon is up to. First, Fanon does not conceive of the discovery of phenomenological structure as the outcome of a dialectical process whereby consciousness’ one-sided descriptions of thought/being continually force it to reconstrue itself until it is resolved in identity. Second, for Fanon, capturing the basic phenomenological structures does not necessarily result in consciousness that is capable of overcoming its alienation from being—especially, if overcoming alienation does not simply involve consciousness’ overcoming of its distinction from being, but, ultimately, forms of social alienation and oppression. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa and Lou Tuner:

 Black Skin, White Masks could be read as a phenomenology of the colonized   consciousness. ‘Phenomenology’ in a Hegelian sense first: It is the narration of the various stations and figures of consciousness through which mind, in history at large as well as in the history of an individual, first experiences and then endeavors to resolve    the various forms of its own alienation. (Ibid., p. 49)

[Hegel allows us to see that] the ‘fact’ of Fanon’s ‘black skin’… doesn’t remain at the  level of perception, but is instead elevated, in the sense of its determination to appear,  and reflected back in the look of the very subject whose bodily schema had been       racialized. Internal intuition breaks down the ontology of the colonial or racialized situation into a process of becoming wherein the inherent defects of the Manichean  world are also [to quote Hegel] ‘endowed with the impulse of self-development’ … This, in Fanon’s terms, represents the agency of the Negro, or that which becomes the revolutionary process of decolonization in his later works. Internal intuition, in short, is the method and means by which Fanon’s comprehension of the ‘colonial situation’  entails both the logic of its existence, i.e., its phenomenology, and the dialectic of its    overcoming. (Ibid., p. 68)

Although these two scholars draw on very different aspects of Hegel, they are both in agreement that Fanon’s phenomenology should be understood in a Hegelian register. The passages suggest that (1) consciousness in Fanon (or rather a particular form of consciousness, colonized consciousness) will work through various stages until it grasps its experience and, moreover, (2) this process will occasion consciousness’ to overcoming its social alienation, which is to say, that there is an impulse to (revolutionary) self-development built into this process.  

Although what consciousness’ comes to learn about its experience by the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit may overlap in certain respects with Black Skin, White Masks (e.g., it may be the case that, say, what we now call discourse is essential dimension of consciousness’ grasp of the world, including how we interpret skin color), the specific way Fanon reveals these structures via phenomenological description, however, bears little to no resemblance to Hegel’s progressive, dialectical account of consciousness’ overcoming its alienation. What is more, coming to knowledge of phenomenological structures for Fanon does not necessarily awaken in consciousness an impulse, much less a social-political program, to achieve recognition of other subjects.

While Fanon certainly argues that colonial situations are unacceptable and ought and can be transformed, he is not committed to the idea that his phenomenological depictions of the colonized subject’s experience are necessarily “endowed with the impulse of self-development.” Indeed, it may be the case that recognizing the structures that underpin experience as such may give us clues or suggest strategies as to how we can bring about such a transformation (e.g., new forms of representation, the reconsidering of language and its importance). However, there is no clear connection between unearthing phenomenological structures and the transforming of the cultural coordinates that imprison consciousness in certain pernicious social forms and self-conceptions. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a transformation of the culture or political situation informed by a knowledge of its underlying structures may come to imprison subjects in new pernicious forms.

Body and Discourse

If Fanon’s phenomenology is not limited to shedding light on a particular material, social-political set up and what it is like to live in such a set up (with its forms of social and political oppressions and accompanying pathologies), but attempts to lay bare the underlying structural conditions that make experience possible (a knowledge that does not necessarily point in any straightforward manner the way to overcoming an intolerable social-political situation), then what exactly is his contribution to this field of knowledge? And what, if any, are the ramifications or consequences this phenomenological account has for politics (broadly construed) if it doesn’t tell us how to overcome social and political forms of alienation and oppression?

These are big questions to tackle, and I will certainly not be able to provide satisfying answers here, especially when it comes to the thorny issue regarding the relation between phenomenology and politics. However, I think an answer to the first question begins to take shape by taking a look at how some of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology helpfully characterize Fanon’s account of two inter-related phenomenological structures in particular: the body and discourse.   

Fanon is certainly not the first phenomenologist to make the case that the body is to be counted amongst the transcendental conditions of experience. Husserl, Sartre, de Beauvoir and, of course, Merleau-Ponty each have offered accounts of the body and its role in structuring the world. More than any other phenomenologist, however, it is clearly Merleau-Ponty that has cast the greatest shadow over Fanon’s thinking about the body. This influence comes through in the very conceptual tools Fanon uses to articulate his insights, as well as in the way scholars depict Fanon’s account of living in a black body under a system of colonialism. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa, Derek Hook and Athena V. Coleman:

[T]he body [is] not only … a thing within the world but also as a ‘posture’ or as a condition for a primordial interrogative relationship to the world, a condition for the constitution of the given as world … The system of racism leads to the real loss of    this interrogative body, revealed by phenomenology, which is instantly turned into a thing. (p. 49-51)

            In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his  bodily schema … the black man suffers from his body quite differently from the white     man. (p. 117)

In contrast to the universality of the corporeal schema, Fanon discovers a multiplicity of   schemas that shape those subjects and moments excluded by the corporeal schema …     Fanon’s rereading of phenomenology and psychology opens up the question of [what is responsible for] structuring schemas, which structures … our connections to others. (p. 133)

The main idea is that Fanon, following Merleau-Ponty, is committed to the idea that the body plays a structural role in making our experience of the world possible. The body, understood along these lines, is not to be strictly identified with a thing or with anything thing-like. Things are found in or occupy the world opened up by the body. “Corporeal schema” (sometimes translated as “body schema” or “bodily schema”) is Merleau-Ponty’s term for the fundamental “posture” of bodily being that allows for an openness to the world insofar as it enables an array of possible movements and mobilizing projects that extend from us to our surroundings; a pre-reflective structure that lets the world meaningfully appear as the bodily correlate we competently navigate and in which we discover things that we can seamlessly take up and utilize (“interrogate”).

But not only that. This structure, as condition opens us to a world and lets it be experienced, also opens us up to and exposes us to others, that is to say, to the perspective of other similarly constituted bodily beings. To claim then that Fanon’s account of the black body under colonialism demonstrates (1) that the corporeal schema encounters difficulties in its development, and (2) that the bodily perspective that, fundamentally, opens up the world of things is itself made thing-like, is to draw attention to one of the main conclusions of Black Skin, White Masks: the body, or more precisely, the corporeal schema, despite being a condition of possibility of having a world, cannot be straightforwardly universalized.

It is here that the bodily schema needs to be seen as bound up with another condition of possibility: discourse. Although bodily being is pre-reflective in that the bodily integration and engagement with our surroundings does not necessarily involve the intellectual contribution thinkers such as Kant and Husserl would ascribe to it, the body is in each case bound up with a particular discursive context that delimits and shapes the body’s mobilizing projects. “Discourse,” as I am using the term here, is not limited to the linguistic or conceptual; it does not simply refer to a societies’ possibilities of talking or thinking. It extends to the material deposits of a greater symbolic order: images, spatial arrangements, print media, as well as gestures, comportments and other forms of social signifying all contribute to discourse.

Fanon’s idea is that the discursive milieu established by colonialism – with its binaries, asymmetries, and exclusions – ends up carving up, categorizing and segregating bodies along the lines of colonized/colonized or black/white. This comes to be internalized not only at the level of individual psychologies or self-conceptions, but actually informs the very way bodies come to orient themselves and establish relations with things and people in space. Specifically, the black body, having its exploration of space be in each case mediated through an awareness of how it stands vis-à-vis a white world and its occupants – an awareness, mind you, that does not necessary extend in the other direction. The result is not only that the possibilities for bodily exploration and usage are frustrated or limiting, but continually forced to fold back on itself in consideration of a hostile, yet mostly indifferent, white other. As Helen Ngo puts it:

[R]acism not only becomes interiorized but ‘epidermalized’- or in phenomenological  terms, lived and inhabited bodily … embodiment becomes marked by a kind of bodily schema fragmentation … Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. (p. 194-5)

Indeed, Fanon not only uses his phenomenology to put pressure on the notion of a universal bodily schema, his descriptions of bodily being under colonialism also call into question how it is we should characterize the struggle for recognition: to be for the other as fellow subject and not object or thing. The black body is forced to continually turn its gaze back on itself insofar as its bodily being is one that is shaped through a discursive context that forces it to consider itself in relation to a white other that does not repay it in kind. Everything from lighting a cigarette to finding a seat on a bus becomes conditioned by the asymmetrical colonial relationship that reifies the colonized black as it acknowledges the white. Under such social-political conditions, the struggle to be recognized as a subject via the other is not characterized by the unfolding of any sort of progressive logic, but is already predetermined at a level of the body and its worldly conditioning. The discourse of colonialism seemingly precludes the very possibility that the colonized can initiate a relation between subjects with the colonizer. As Lewis R. Gordan nicely puts this point:

[The] racialized schema below the [vicissitudes and outcomes of the] Hegelian [lordship/bondage relation] addresses contradictions that are not of a dialectical kind. The call for [a distinctly] Black Consciousness already demands addressing a ‘lived reality’ … but one that has not been acknowledged as such … The consequence is the retort: At least the other is an other. To become such initiates ethical relations. (p. 223)

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Ed.): Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality, Springer, 2023

Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality Book Cover Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Springer
2023
Hardback
IX, 245

Reviewed by: Konstantin Hokamp (Europa Universität Viadrina)

In many ways, the volume edited by Ingríd Vendrell Ferran is seemingly set up for failure. That is by no means due to the illustrious list of contributors or the importance of its subject matter, but rather due to the tasks it sets out to achieve – providing a building block towards a „new genealogy” of phenomenology by shining light on the life, philosophical and psychological work, and politics of a little-known figure in the history of phenomenology – Else Voigtländer. As Ferran states in the introduction to the volume, while scholarly efforts have been made to highlight the contribution of women to the history of phenomenology those efforts have been focused on Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Fittingly, almost everyone who has worked on Voigtländer in recent years contributed to the volume.

Vendrell Ferran hypothesizes that this might very well be linked to two factors among others: Voigtländer did not pursue an academic career after her PhD and as a very early figure in the Phenomenological Movement is rarely cited in the work of other phenomenologists, despite being among the first to publish on the topic of Ressentiment inauthentic feelings. She was omitted from Herbert Spiegelbergs canon-building work History of the Phenomenological Movement and has thus received little attention, even though almost all her work is publicly available in a digital format. The caveat being that there are no English translations.

The volume aims to contribute to rewriting the phenomenological canon and give readers a good entryway into Voigtländer’s thought while dealing with the fact that as an NSDAP member and director of the women’s prison Waldheim, Voigtländer seems like a problematic political figure to say the least. All these goals by themselves are desiderata for the history of phenomenology and the history of Women in the history of Philosophy and Sciences (The Series the volume is published in). They might be too much to achieve in a single volume, but they do make for a good one with a broad range of topics and readings of Voigtländer.

The book is structured in four parts with expert contributions on key aspects of Voigtländers philosophy. The first part is made up of only two articles, while all the other comprise three contributions.The volume is  opened by an article-length introduction by Ingrid-Vendrell Ferran that highlights the themes I laid out and gives an outline of Else Voigtländer’s Life and key philosophical themes and concepts. Ferran stresses the importance of including the Munich School of Phenomenology in research on the history of Phenomenology and the current state of Voigtländer research and sources on Voigtländer. She does a brilliant job juxtaposing Voigtländers published articles with archival evidence, such as her PHD report and correspondence. Only the information on the latter could have been slightly more precise. While the article seems to indicate that there are numerous letters to be found, the known correspondence with Ludwig Klages is limited to a letter by Klages on an editorial issue [cf. DLA Marbach A:Klages, the contents of Letters in the Klages collection may not be publicized at this point], which is likely also the case for her correspondence with Kippenberg which I was not able to access.

Part I: Sources and Influences

The first of four parts engages with Voigtländer’s work by dealing with two „sources and influences”. In „Value in Existence: Lotze, Lipps and Voigtländer on Feelings of Self-Worth” Philipp Schmidt compares Voigtländer notion of Self-Feeling to that of Hermann Lotze and her PhD supervisor Theodor Lipps who both held the position that self-experience is grounded in a feeling of some sorts. He concludes that Voigtländer was largely able to develop her notion of self-feelings by drawing on ideas from the Romantic philosopher C.G. Carus and Friedrich Nietzsche and combining them with the insights of Lotze and Lipps. He reconstructs Lotze’s theory as highlighting the importance of feelings of pleasure and pain as motivators for self-interest, while Lipps broadened the range of what qualifies as a feeling with an emphasis on the fact, that feelings are differentiated from other psychic phenomena by emphasizing that feelings directly constitute the self. He introduces the term ‘Selbstgefühl’ but is unclear on whether they are the result of conscious deliberation or a form of pre-reflective self-appraisal. Schmidt then introduces and explains Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings as a stratified pre-reflective form of consciousness, that is largely determined by a person’s biological constitution but also subject to intersubjective determining factors like the judgment of others. He then goes on to argue that Voigtländer would not have been able to arrive at this position without drawing on a Nietzschean value-relativism and a vitalistic notion of unconscious life force similar to the Lebensphilosophie of Ludwig Klages and Carl-Gustav Carus. He does so both to indicate the originality of Voigtländers proposal as well as a warning sign against integrating her theory into the canon of phenomenologically informed theories that stress the importance of the affective sphere for cognition all too quickly because the vitalist intuitions undergirding it are closely linked to the development of racial psychology.

The second entry by practising psychoanalyst Thomas Barth attempts to reconstruct Else Voigtländer’s relationship with and impact on psychoanalysis.

Voigtänder was the first German academic psychologist to publish a paper on Freud in 1911, received a letter in return and was a member of the Berlin Local group of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1912 to 1915. After leaving the group she went on to publish a paper on the notion of unconsciousness in 1916 and dealt with psychoanalysis yet again in a 1928 paper on welfare education in which she highlighted the potential benefits of psychoanalysis. From a critical note regarding Freud‘s lacking appreciation of the importance of innate character to a dismissal of anything unconscious that cannot become unconscious to a recommendation of giving welfare education staff psychoanalytic training Barth reconstructs how Voigtländer „met psychoanalysis with appreciation, ambiguity, and sometimes harsh criticism.” (59) He then goes on to outline the reactions of psychoanalysts to Voigtländers articles as well as speculatively drawing parallels between Voigtländers thought and later developments in psychoanalysis, indicating a potential parallel between her notion of inauthentic mirror-self feelings likening them to notions of Winnicott, Lacan and Helene Deutsch. His final verdict is that Voigtländer mainly used Psychoanalysis to serve as a negative foil to assess her theories and outlines further opportunities for research. One aspect of Voigtländers relationship to Freud that might have been highlighted yet is missing is the analysis Willy Haas, a fellow student of Theodor Lipps who also potentially drew on psychoanalytic concepts yet never explicitly named psychoanalysis as a source in his disserting underwent with Freud. Barth refers to Ulrike May’s work on the subject but unfortunately does not draw a parallel. It is only a minor omission but one that could easily have been avoided.

Part II: Affectivity and Value

The second part focuses on a central theme of many early phenomenologists and works towards the goal of the new genealogy by contrasting Voigtländer’s theory of sentiments with that of Alexander Pfänder and Gerda Walther and her take on Ressentiment, a topic she was the first phenomenologist to publish on with those of Max Scheler and Adolf Reinach. In addition, an entire article is dedicated to the systematic importance of Voigtländer’s view on erotic love. It partially overlaps with the article on sentiments but delves deeper into its subject matter.

Genki Uemura attempts to reconstruct Voigtländer’s analysis of benevolence in her 1931 contribution to a Festschrift for Pfänder „Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” and compares it to the phenomenological analysis Alexander Pfänder provides in his 1913/1916 work on the subject. He reads Voigtländer as saying that contrary to Pfänder’s view positive sentiments – a term Pfänder uses rather unusually to talk about other-directed evaluative affective phenomena like love and hate or benevolence or malevolence – are made into a category of their own exclusively by features of their respective centrifugal streams of feeling, while their respective acts of unification (Vereinigung) and position-taking vary greatly. While love always entails an attraction to its object, an interest (Anteilnahme) in the affirmation, both are missing for benevolence. Uemura then goes on to argue, that this does not pose a problem for Pfänder’s analysis of actual sentiments but might well be problematic for his theory of non-actual sentiments. Uemura stresses that Voigtländer arrives at these conclusions while staying true to the methodological commitments of Pfänder. He then compares Voigtländer’s position to that of Gerda Walther who takes the unification found in positive sentiments as a fundamental building factor for social communities. He suggests that to most plausibly incorporate Voigtländer’s strong differentiation between love and positive sentiments Walther would have to contend that only love plays this foundational role while other positive sentiments do not. Thereby Uemura wants to show the originality of Voigtländers without claiming that it was intended as an intentional criticism of her contemporaries.

Toru Yaegashi in his more systematic approach aims to develop Voigtländers views on erotic love that Voigtländer criticizing Simmel, strongly differentiates from sexual desire. She holds the sphere of the erotic to be fully distinct from that of the sexual and argues for a phenomenological separability of sexual love and erotic love even in heterosexual relationships. Yaegashi reconstructs Voigtländer’s view on the difference between love and benevolence much in the same way Uemura does but adds that love and hate are less reactive than benevolence and malevolence which tend to fade away once the situation that motivated them has passed. He then goes on to elaborate on the object side of love – the value of the loved object, aiming to work out Voigtländers position in the debate on value realism by comparing her view to that of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Max Scheler – the staunches value realists among the early phenomenologists whose position she reconstructs as being that „we sometimes love correctly and sometimes incorrectly the object whose value is independent of our love”. (94) Voigtländer on the other hand argues, that there are cases, where no value of the beloved is given in experience while love itself is experienced. She differentiates between the qualitative value an object has and three kinds of value bestowed on the object by love. By differentiating these kinds of values, Voigtländer can criticise a rationalization of the idealization involved in love as well as develop a concept of genuine love that acknowledges the flaws of the beloved. Yaegashi concludes that Voigtländer’s forgotten phenomenology of erotic love is both interesting in contrast to the late Husserl’s more ethicized view of love and that it may well prove productive in dialogue with Feminist Philosophy and queer theory because it goes against the grain of connecting love with its reproductive function.

[Both contributions are exquisitely structured and argued and reconstruct Voigtländer’s position quite well. Yet they both could have paid closer attention to Pfänder’s text and especially his position on the necessity of non-actual sentiments and of non-actual love for the continued existence of actual sentiments. This is especially true for Uemura who directly refers to Pfänder’s notion and would have been an interesting way to highlight the differences between Pfänder’s and Walther’s theory.]

Ingríd Vendrell Ferran contributes a text on the Phenomena of Ressentiment and Self-Deception in the works of Else Voigtländer, who was the first phenomenologist to publish on the subject in her 1910 dissertation, Max Scheler who published Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (unfortunately referred to by the title of a slightly reversed 1915 version „Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen”) in 1912 and Adolf Reinach who worked on the subject in his Grundzüge der Ethik (1913). She first reconstructs the individual positions and then compares them with a focus on the origins of Ressentiment, its ontology (105) the psychological mechanisms responsible for it. For Voigtländer, Ressentiment occurs due to a person experiencing a lack in her vital self-feeling (the part of the pre-reflective self-consciousness outlined above that is due to the biological constitution) by devaluing others to improve her conscious feeling of self-worth. She reconstructs this as Ressentiment being an „affective background orientation whose main target is the self and which aims at compensating a weakness with an exaggerated, modified and unrealistic self-assessment.” (107) In conceptualizing the process Voigtländer follows Nietzsche by understanding it as involving both a modification of perceived affective states and value experiences and changes in the attention towards the objects of Ressentiment. She also holds that some form of knowledge of the object of Ressentiment’s value remains present. Vendrell Ferran then reconstructs Scheler’s position on Ressentiment as a mental disposition that may turn into a character trait (and not an emotion) resulting from a process, more thoroughly described than in Voigtländer of repression of hostile affective attitudes. She then contrasts it with Reinach, who also viewed Ressentiment as a compensation mechanism for a felt diminishment of the self, that changes the way a subject apprehends values. She then goes on to put the key position of the three early phenomenologists in dialogue with the current literature on the subject. She finds similarities with the Schelerian view (or maybe just his longer elaboration on the ressentiment process) on the etiology of Ressentiment. Current literature usually conceptualizes Ressentiment as a sentiment, which Ferran, following the early phenomenologists, argues to be an inadequate description. Finally, she stresses the importance of the early phenomenologists work for adequately understanding Ressentiment as a non-intentional process leading to self-deception.

Part III: Social Self and Character

The first of three articles in this Salice on Social Self-Feelings gives a slightly different reconstruction of Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings and criticizes her harsh verdict on inauthentic self-feeling. The second article goes back to evaluating Voigtländer’s notion of inauthentic self-feelings in the light of Voigtländer’s later work. The third article gives a historical overview of different conceptions of character.

Allesandro Sallice first reconstructs Voigtländers theory of self-feelings in general, slightly diverging from other readings by stressing that there is only one ever-shifting vital-self feeling and proposing that her taxonomy is merely a taxonomy of different manifestations of the same vital self-feeling in different situations. He does agree that there are different kinds of conscious self-feelings, which are purely episodic. He differentiates the two types of self-feeling on the phenomenological level by indicating that Voigtländer seems to hold that there is an emphasis on the affective side for the vital self-feeling(s) while there is an emphasis on the side of value judgement for the conscious self-feelings. There is also a difference in intentionality: The object of vital self-feeling is the not truly objectifiable self, while the object of conscious self-feelings is the objectified self.

This leads Salice to criticise Voigtländers notion of inauthentic self-feelings, which he takes to be both morally and epistemically negatively connotated. Against this, he argues that there are indeed cases where the judgement of others is more (or at least not less) reliable than our self-feelings. Yet he holds, that Voigtländer’s theory anticipated contemporary debates on self-knowledge and, given proper scrutiny on the points he criticizes, is highly relevant for modern-day research.

Hilge Landweer’s contribution touches on similar points as Salice’s and is both slightly more critical towards and more favourable to Voigtländer. Landweer praises Voigtländers rich descriptions and agrees with Salice on the fact that Voigtländer seems to negatively evaluate mirror self-feelings (a term Landweer prefers to authentic self-feelings) but problematizes a different aspect – Voigtländer’s notion of an authentic self. Her main point of interest is however the 11-page 1923 text Über die Art eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der Maske in which Voigtländer remains true to her notion of the core of persons but increases the complexity of her understanding of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ by turning towards the subject of how the manner of a person – namely the way she appears to others and how this feels to her – while never explicitly rejecting the view held in the dissertation. According to Landweer Voigtländer implicitly holds a topological understanding of personhood, according to which authentic self-feelings are „anchored in the ‘core’  of the person with inauthenticity increasing the further one moves away from this core” with the opinions of others forming the outermost strata. The manner of a person is comprised of both authentic and inauthentic as well as genuine (in the sense of true) and non-genuine actions which others hold to be characteristic of that person. Landweer concludes that the two sets of terms are not mutually interchangeable. Non-genuine self-feelings and actions are always the effects of conscious or unconscious dissimulation while non-authentic self-feelings rely on the impressions of others. Landweer considers the distinction between genuine and non-genuine self-feelings to be systematically interesting albeit needing conceptual clarification. She goes on to problematize the metaphor of the core, suggests a relational reading for it and finally proposes an updated, less normative and fluid reading of Voigtländers concept informed by Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity. In her view, Heidegger clearly stated what manifests as an implicit tension in Voigtländers theory and rich phenomenological descriptions: The fact that the authentic and inauthentic are never fully separable.

Guillaume Frechette approaches Voigtländers’s theory of self-feelings more historically by situating it within the sub-discipline of characterology, the systematic study of personality. A field to which Voigtländer considered herself to be contributing. He contrasts what he calls the „Austrian Account” (e.g. 168) of character traits originating in the work of Franz Brentano and later developed by Emil Utitz and Kraus. He reconstructs it as conceptualizing character traits as mental dispositions to act in specific ways in certain situations and take pleasure in acting that way, which entails that character traits can only ever be hypothesized about. [Critique because of the failure to capture enduring states] He contrasts with the view prevalent of phenomenology, which he considers Voigtländer to be exemplary for. Frechett stresses Voigtländer’s method is based on the thesis that the essence of a person’s personality can be intuited from her realistic mask, a view he attributes to Alexander Pfänder based on lecture notes by Voigtländer fellow student Johannes Daubert. He tries to reconstruct Voigtländers epistemology of self-feelings based on a Lippsian notion of Einfühlung [„courageousness is simply expressed in corresponding gestures, and you get to feel courageousness by perceiving these gestures”] (173) and the thesis that individuals have privileged access to themselves. Frechette finds merit in both theories, holding that the Austrian Account is more economical while failing to accommodate character traits like being anxious which are closer to emotional phenomena. Frechette pleads for furthering the phenomenological analysis and not reducing character traits to either of the two accounts. In a longer piece on the issue, it could have proven very fruitful to look at the work of Alexander Pfänder on characterology (scattered through notes in the Pfänder Nachlass) and address Voigtländer’s thesis of the stratification of self-feelings in relation to her characterology.

Part IV – Gender and Politics

The last part of the volume is devoted to Voigtländer as a theorist of gender, politics and as a political actor and the contributions do justice to the complexity of the subject by the variety of their approaches, ranging from a focus on her views on gender, her applied philosophy, and her life as a political actor.

Ute Gahlings opts for rewriting the history of phenomenological approaches to gender, replacing Edith Stein with Else Voigtländer as the pioneer of the field, drawing on texts written by Voigtländer after she had completed her dissertation and – not being permitted to pursue an academic career as a woman – moving towards psychology as her specific field. She reconstructs the points on gender made in an experimental study that Voigtländer conducted with Fritz Giese and three texts co-authored by Voigtländer and Adalbert Gregor, the latter of which contain both strong statements confirming sexual differentiation as well as a few subtle observations on the female experience. Gahlings indicates that the relationship between Voigtländer and Gregor still needs to be researched further and points towards Voigtländers contributions to a dictionary and journal of sexual science as the best source for Voigtländers views on gender, painting a picture of Voigtländers statements as „the awakening of a gender theory which is differentiating between sex and gender” (187), dealing with epistemological issues regarding how gender difference may be addressed, rejecting metaphysical constructions as the base of sexual difference and opting instead for a culture-based approach. Gahlinger then goes on to reconstruct the views of Edith Stein, which according to here were founded not in psychology but philosophical anthropology and with a more ethically driven impetus and leaning slightly more towards essentialism than Voigtländer’s. She pleads for including Voigtländer in „the canon of classical writings” (195) while calling into question how Voigtländers’s critical mind could have served under the Nazis.

Sophie Loidoldt and Petra Gehring find less inconsistency here than Gahling.  They evaluate  Voigtländer’s application of her psychology of character in a study on mass psychology, a text written together with Adalbert Gregor on the relation between gender and neglect as well as a talk on the problem of gender difference based on her contributions to the Dictionary of Sexual Studies. The article is polemical in tone, stating that the text on mass psychology is „a miserable failure” (205) judging by Voigtländer’s self-proclaimed standard of value-neutrality. They instead diagnose a vulgar Nietzschean preference for vital values and authoritarian politics, while being unable to clearly explain how the political views she criticizes connect to the character of those she judges and resorting to cliché-laden racial psychology in the end. (208) They have much the same verdict on the article written with Gregor, criticizing that her value-neutral approach is perfectly compatible with sterilization practices. Additionally, they take Voigtländer to be, essentializing gendered traits despite arguing against metaphysical essentialism. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that „not every theory of difference that is not immediately and obviously sexist, is therefore already emancipatory” (219), concluding that there is at the very least no logical discontinuity between Voigtländers theoretical work and her position in the NSDAP regime.

George Heffernan bookends the section reader with a more positivistic approach to Else Voigtländers politics starting with textual evidence from her dissertation and giving more context to her work on mass hysteria written in 1920 from the standpoint of a member of the German National Party, her nationalist family background as well as her work with racial-hygienicist Adalbert Grego. He then fills out a missing link in the evaluation of Voigtländer by carefully compiling reports on her performance as director at the women’s prison of Waldheim as well as the official documents regarding her NSDAP membership and contributions to party organizations.  Based on his sources, which cannot be given justice to within the scope of this review, he arrices at the preliminary verdict that „Voigtländer was, if not an enthusiastic or a fanatical Nazi, a reliable Mitläuferin and Unterstützerin of the National Socialist Regime.” (237)

Heffernan’s text makes for a fitting ending to a volume that shows that Voigtländer merits scholarly attention as an original contributor to the philosophy of emotions and personality and a historical figure that may be seen as exemplary for her time. For readers not familiar with Voigtländer’s work a differently structured approach to the compilation of texts might have been beneficial, seeing as especially the section on sources and influences already lays the groundwork for some of the more critical approaches in the latter sections, yet there is no indication that that is the case. The structure of the individual parts leaves little to be desired, providing the reader with a plurality of perspectives on Voigtländer’s philosophy, juxtaposing more historically oriented and more systematic approaches. The contriubutions touch on all key aspects, with the rather unfortunate but understandable exception of her work on the aesthetics of nature in the short text Zur Phänomenologie und Psychologie des alpinen Erlebnisses. I have outlined a few interesting points for further inquiry in my summary of the individual articles, but there are numerous more to be found.

The volume’s biggest problem is due to the state of Voigtländer research. There are no standard translations for essential terms in Voigtländer’s philosophy. That makes it somewhat harder to put some of the contributions in dialogue. That is hardly the fault of the contributors and only serves to underline Vendrell-Ferrran’s plea for an English translation of Voigtländer’s works in the introduction. The volume is invaluable for anybody who wants to engage with the history of phenomenology in general or Else Voigtländer in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Feenberg The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis

The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing Book Cover The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing
Andrew Feenberg
Verso Books
2023
Paperback
256

Reviewed by: Dana S. Belu (California State University)

 

The new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the standard of living.” (Marcuse, Essay on Liberation)

 

Andrew Feenberg’s The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis is a tour de force of Marcuse’s philosophy. It is multilayered and dives deep into the phenomenological-existential dimensions of Marcuse’s work. The book is energetic, ambitious and offers timely insights into the nature of technological rationality as the origin of the current environmental crisis.

The first chapter takes the reader through Feenberg’s personal reminiscences of his professor at UCSD and then on the frontlines of the May 1968 events in Paris. One gets the sense of a continuity between Marcuse’s personal values and his political and philosophical commitments. His integrity underscored his philosophy and endeared him to his students. Chapters two through six switch gears from the personal to the philosophical and weave a complex Marxist, psychoanalytic and phenomenological narrative that advocates for a life-affirming socialist rationality, an antidote to the ongoing hegemony of technological rationality. Marcuse is cast as the philosophical forerunner of the environmental movement and other social justice movements. I will focus on chapters five and six where Feenberg explicitly takes up the relationship between Marcuse’s and Heidegger’s critiques of technological rationality and expands Marcuse’s proposal for overcoming it through the aesthetic cultivation of a life affirming form of reason.

In chapters two through four Feenberg explains Marcuse’s appropriation of Hegel, Marx Freud and the early Heidegger. His critique of Marx’s notion of subjectivity is especially significant. While many readers of Marcuse may already be familiar with the influence of psychoanalysis on his thought, the phenomenological legacy is less well known. His focus on the significance of Heidegger’s phenomenology of world (46-56) for Marcuse’s understanding of Marx’s ontology of labor is especially insightful, as he shows how Marcuse concretizes this world as a capitalist world.

Chapter four “The Politics of Eros” revisits Marcuse’s “performance principle” as an alternative to Freud’s reality principle where the repression of pleasure in favor of work is no longer a natural given but is socially determined. The socialist revolution will release the working body from its desexualized dedication to labor. Feenberg should have emphasized that the emphases on labor, technological production and the desexualized “dedication” to work- in equal measure social coercion and individual compulsion – were life denying terrors under communism and not just under capitalism. By the late 1960s Marcuse was critical of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China. Including his specific criticisms of communism would have helped to further clarify Marcuse’s proposal by distinguishing it from technological thinking in communist societies. Moreover, noting the difference between a socialist rationality and the rationality at work in contemporary socialist countries (Scandinavian countries) could have helped to further clarify Marcuse’s call for a new aesthetic sensibility and a new concept of reason that corresponds to it.

In Chapter 5:  The Critique of Technology Feenberg clarifies the Marxist, Weberian and Heideggerian legacies in Marcuse’s account of technological rationality, especially in his One Dimensional Man (1964). This chapter does an excellent job of acknowledging many similarities between Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and One Dimensional Man, noting similarities in structure and in their phenomenological retrieval of the Greek notion of potentiality versus the denial of potentiality by modern science. Feenberg shows that by privileging quantification, precision and planning, modern science and technological rationality eliminate potential (150-2) Moreover, he shows how Marcuse incorporates Heidegger’s notion of a “ground plan,” a concept developed in “The Age of the World Picture,” and Husserl’s notion of the life world. And by combining phenomenological ontology with Marxism, Marcuse uncovers a political dimension that drives Marcuse’s thinking forward along a path not taken by either Heidegger or Husserl.

With Feenberg’s help, Marcuse can be seen to recast capitalism as a lifeworld defined by  “projection” (Vorhaben), a way of pushing into one’s possibilities, as Heidegger describes it in Being and Time. The futural temporality of technological rationality could have been fruitfully explored in relationship to the other two temporal ekstases discussed in Being and Time, thrownness and falling. (Heidegger 1996, section 68) The existential inertia of falling renders the tendency to conform to what is present (or actual) almost inevitable. This phenomenological-ontological insight supports Marcuse’s capitalist concretization of “projection.” As he shows, under capitalism, the possible collapses into the reproduction of the actual and the same. (158) Furthermore, both capitalism and communism “expose nature to both representation by science and control by technology” (150) so that neither sees nature as a process latent with potentialities. They see it through the lens of technological rationality, as a mere resource for production and modernization.

But here Marcuse’s position seems even closer to the later Heidegger than Feenberg acknowledges. For instance, Marcuse’s call for a critical appraisal of the technical age put him at odds with the technophilic, liberalist and Marxist camps that extolled the virtues of mechanized progress, and with the technologically reactionary camp, the technophobes, who feared technology and called for its banishment. Marcuse’s proposal for a third way beyond this false dilemma echoes Heidegger’s own ontological injunction in “The Question Concerning Technology” (154) that we don’t relate to technology in a reactionary way by either loving it or hating it, seeing it as “the work of the devil.” (Heidegger 1977, 25)  Marcuse’s call for a new beginning or what he calls a new sensibility from within the provenance of art also echoes Heidegger’s call for the saving power of art at the end of “The Question Concerning Technology” and elsewhere. Unlike Marcuse, however, he does not call for the liberation of our repressed subjectivity but for the cultivation of receptivity. Feenberg’s interpretation helps us see how the two calls complement one another.

Like Heidegger, Marcuse insists that technology is not neutral.  The first of his three theses about the non-neutrality of technology claims that technology has become a “total system and a world” that justifies capitalism. (137) The second thesis states that technology is not value neutral because “even though it serves generic ends such as increasing the productivity of labor, their design and application under capitalism imposes top-down control in production and social life generally.” (137) The third thesis states that, “scientific-technical rationality is a priori adapted to the maintenance of social domination.” (137) This echoes Heidegger’s ontological a priori of technology that runs deeper than social domination. It extends its reach into the past and foreseeable future, since it blocks our awareness of technical rationality as a clearing of being, a mode of presencing and the source of this presencing itself.[1]

The extent to which this reduction is a capitalist domination is left undetermined by Heidegger but he is clear that in the technological epoch (or clearing) the potentialities of people and nature are harnessed only to be cut to order, not allowed free expression. For Marcuse, the suppression of potentiality shows up starkly in capitalism’s devastating treatment of nature, the negation of its free potential. (Feenberg 2023, 142) Two prominent examples are mass deforestation for cattle ranching and logging, both of which raise carbon dioxide and, worse, methane levels in the atmosphere. 

 Feenberg sees Marcuse as one of the first environmental philosophers, one who sees in the environmental movement an erotic and life affirming resistance against the destruction of nature. This movement, exemplified today by organizations like 350.org and Extinction Rebellion among many others, discovers marginalized potentials in nature and society. This discovery is not value neutral but projects a world of harmony and peace, potentials that can be seen once we tune in to “creative receptivity instead of repressive productivity.” Creative receptivity is a condition of the promised socialist rationality. In a socialist society, a new erotic reason will harness potentialities without domination. (169, 177) Unfortunately, the emergence of this erotic reason is threatened on all sides by scientific-technological rationality and its offsprings: exploitation, overproduction and control in all sectors of life, including our moral lives.  This rationality replaces normative rationality as every form of injustice and harm is transformed into a problem in search of technological quick fix. (141) Technology then feeds the death drive rather than the erotic drive and so shapes a society based on competition or strife, essentially a violent society that subordinates most values to the value of profit making. (125) Like Heidegger, Marcuse sees scientific-technological rationality “as complicit in the concentration campus, atom bombs and media propaganda – all the disasters of the twentieth century.” (Feenberg 2023, 148) He sees them as the materialization of life-denying capitalist values. However, contra Heidegger, who dismisses values as subjective, Marcuse recasts values as “objective realities that guide technical practice.” (153) He disagrees with his former teacher that values are technological products that merely “correlate” with technology. Marcuse is less abstract, more philosophically granular. He analyzes actual “social procedures that reduce potentialities to values, to operational components in the bureaucratic and technical systems of capitalism… [and shows that] certain values have a transitive content indicating the blocked potentialities of the society.” (154, my insert)

Marcuse’s profound insight, according to Feenberg, is that only dialectical logic (not formal or transcendental logic) works with substantive or social universals to reveal the bias of formal reason at work in technical rationality. Feenberg’s exposition of this non-neutrality of formal reason is one of the most innovative and exciting contributions of the book, especially for phenomenology and critical theory.  As Feenberg explains it, social universals such as peace, freedom and justice (161) among others, have meanings (essences) that don’t refer simply to their present instantiation but “to a history and to a social context that requires interpretation.” But technological rationality, shaped by formal universals, marginalizes dialectical thinking, the seeing of substantive universals and latent possibilities. Technological rationality prefers the actual, the present-at hand. (162) It ignores social context and history. When the dialectical logic of substantive universals is suppressed the internal contradictions inherent in things are papered over leaving only reified, one dimensional consciousness in play. As a result, social change is blocked and real subjective consciousness is stunted so that what is actual and present is mistaken for what is fundamentally real.

In this truncated reality techno-scientific rationality breaks up the world into problems to be solved and then reduces the problem solving to the use of technical devices. Thus “social crises and injustices no longer call for fundamental change but instead are interpreted as technical problems” (164) In other words, social and environmental injustices are not understood historically but managed by abstract forms of technological rationality that value production, calculability and control regardless of the ends that are served. In sum, under capitalism the value neutrality of technological rationality, as it encroaches upon the social sphere, covers up the possibility of seeing that the very neutrality with respect to bias is its bias and that this bias legitimates domination. Amplifying Marcuse’s insight, Feenberg states that “it is the very neutrality of science that supplies the link between instrumentalism and domination.” (165)  Marcuse refers to this link as “[science’s] neutral character which relates objectivity to a specific historical Subject – namely, the consciousness that prevails in the society.” (165) Only a new form of reason, an aesthetic reason, can de-reify this consciousness and save humanity from itself. By the conclusion of chapter five Feenberg shows that Marcuse and Heidegger agree about the diagnosis of modern technological societies but not about the prognosis. Feenberg aligns himself with Marcuse’s prognosis. Instead of waiting for art to give us a new god or what amounts to the same thing for Heidegger, a new clearing, Feenberg underscores the timeliness of Marcuse’s call for a new form of reason.

Chapter 6: A New Concept of Reason? renews the call for a dialectical understanding of nature grounded in the lifeworld, a scientific socialist rationality that will bridge the gap between, what Marx’s two forms of nature, “sensuous consciousness and sensuous need.” (169) According to Marx, the senses themselves are mediated or humanized by history and culture, i.e., by labor.  Expanding this insight, Marcuse claims that since science relies on the senses, the basis of science is already cultural despite science’s attempt to enforce cultural neutrality. Thus, scientists are never merely “indifferent observers, but are active beings informed by culture” who live in a “historical epoch that objectifies nature in accordance with a specific social a priori.” (169) Whether all human senses have “evolved” into their current civilized form, as Feenberg claims, is somewhat debatable. According to the book Marcuse’s complaint is against a widespread sensuous repression and stultification, not a sensuous evolution.  Marx, in the 1844 Manuscript, describes a classist humanization of the senses, patchy and uneven. The poverty and exploitation of the proletariat condemned them to continuous sensuous deprivation but it does not do this to the bourgeoisie who benefitted from that exploitation and notoriously indulged their senses. Today, the middle class is not the only class addicted to a compulsive cycle of work and consumption that desensitizes the feeling for nature and beauty. This is the result of the instrumentalist a priori that Marcuse criticizes. He suggests that a “socialist a priori, in contrast, recognizes nature as a subject in its own right. Nature’s potentialities are its own, even as it serves human needs.” (170) He hopes that socialist rationality will reclaim the everyday experience of nature as the atelic unfolding of potentialities, from the formalizing clutches of science. This reclaiming requires a return to the lifeworld of everyday experience and to the criterion of life affirmation that together will help us to recognize and bridge the gap between “the existential and the mathematical truths” of nature. (171) One problem with applying this criterion is its relativity. What is life enhancing for a technocrat is experienced as domination of nature by the sustainable farmer. Marcuse’s account does not always help us to decide who is right.

Chapter 6 explains that bridging the gap depends on cultivating a feeling for the beautiful where the beautiful is thought analogically with Kant’s aesthetics, as a singular experience that lacks a concept. Just as for Kant the feeling for the beautiful is a harmony between the interplay of the imagination and the understanding, a feeling for the “furtherance of life” (Kant 1987, 98), so for Marcuse the feeling for the beautiful points to the harmony between the individual and nature. The analogy is limited because Marcuse’s harmonization serves an ultimate purpose, the “pacification of existence” – a social good. This goal, however, is blocked by the current split between science and technology on the one hand, and art and philosophy, on the other hand. The split ensures that reality is reproduced mechanically by the former while the latter develops beautiful and imaginative yet impotent alternatives.

Feenberg leads the reader through three stages of (176-179) Marcuse’s work where he attempts to rethink the bridge between artistic and technological rationality under a socialist rationality. Feenberg incisively targets the limitations and flaws in Marcuse’s plan for a “successor science” – the embodiment of a socialist rationality. (181) Despite shortcomings, Feenberg sees tremendous promise in Marcuse’s phenomenologically informed attempt to return science to “its original logos, the service of life” (183) and works hard to bring it out. To do this he underscores Marcuse’s use of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “translation” as “the materialization of values … the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process.” (181) The question is how an aesthetic revolution will connect the experiences of nature with the formal facts about nature provided by science? The gap remains, for instance, in persistent denials of climate change, i.e., many people refuse to connect rising global temperatures with global warming supported by science. The scientific reports and predictions are value neutral in the sense that they can serve climate mitigation or harmful industry, though the scales lean in favor of the status quo, the perpetuation of harmful industries. But Feenberg is hopeful that the continued work of environmental groups will correct this default bias. He points out that environmental groups have already reshaped our conceptions of nature from within the lifeworld, just as Marcuse hoped for, so that it is now seen as an organism in need of protection (save the planet!) instead of as a heap of fungible, raw material for further exploitation. Moreover, new disciplines such as environmental science and sustainability studies have grown out of this new conception of nature. Feenberg points out that this is a revitalization of the “epistemic status of concrete experience.” (186)

Furthermore, newly emerging technosciences such as “postnormal science” also support Marcuse’s call for an aesthetic socialist rationality. Postnormal science is fruitfully unstable because it is in constant contact with the public, with social and political concerns (190). Feenberg expands the domain of postnormality to all “disciplines that have immediate effects on the social world and vice versa.” He cites the example of pharmaceutical research where the gap between theory and practice disappears since the “science and the commercial product emerge simultaneously from the lab – the research is the technological application.” (190) Here the existential and the scientific dimensions converge. Moreover, other fields such as “medicine, engineering, and ecology are more and more constrained to construct their objects in terms of norms imposed by social movements, regulation, and public opinion without abandoning scientific methods.” (197) For instance, once a technological concept, “pollution” is no longer an exclusively scientific-technological object of study.  The public’s concern with dirty air and water injected normative criteria into the specialized study of nature and opened new environmental ways of seeing potentialities for cleaning and protect nature.

Environmental science and technology increasingly support the translation of the public’s existential concerns with environmental health and security into concrete earth friendly innovations. The plastic tax and the increased production of electric cars are just two examples. Feenberg recounts others, perhaps the most striking of which is the history of nuclear energy in the U.S.. While it was once considered the highest sign of progress, the mass publicity of several nuclear accidents scared the public and the technology went into abatement. Public safety and security won out over progress and the scientific transcendence of limits. This was a small revolution that transformed a local world. Today, most scientists agree that nuclear energy is a good alternative to the devastation caused by fossil fuel and that it is safer to use than it was in the 1950s. It remains to be seen how the dialogue with a still skeptical general public will go. But one thing is clear, scientists and activists are both moved by normative concerns from within the lifeworld and by a desire for the flourishing of life on earth (not Mars). They are not neutral observers but desiring agents who seek harmony with nature not its domination. And if Marcuse and Feenberg are right then they also seek beauty.


[1] First, according to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” the essence of technology is “nothing technological” but “a mode of revealing,” a historical dispensation, a world. (Heidegger 1977, 16) The technological era continues to unfold under the imperatives of control, order and optimization whose authority is self-legitimizing and derives from the ubiquity of these imperatives. Second, in its essence technology is not merely a value neutral tool, a means for a subject to control objects. Although devices appear neutral means in the hands of subjects, they conceal the way that users are driven to produce more and more tools to maximize their output. This drive is out of control. Finally, since technology’s essence reveals the real as historically a priori and describes this a priori as a relationship between an attitude of challenging-forth and a world that it reduces to a resource (Heidegger 1977, 17), the essence of technology sums up the reduction of nature and things to “standing reserve” or resources.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning  Technology and Other Essays. Translated William Lovitt. Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment. Translated Werner Pluhar. Hackett Publishing Co, 1987.

 

 

Nicolai Hartmann: Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, Meiner Verlag, 2024






Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn Book Cover




Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn




Philosophische Bibliothek





Nicolai Hartmann





Felix Meiner Verlag




2024




Paperback




275




https://meiner.de/philosophische-bibliothek/h/hartmann/das-wertproblem-in-der-philosophie-der-gegenwart.html

Die Grundfragen der Werttheorie und Wertethik haben Nicolai Hartmann über sein ganzes akademisches Leben hinweg begleitet. Entsprechend sind im Laufe der Zeit neben seiner monumentalen Ethik verschiedene Aufsätze entstanden, in denen sich Hartmann mit einschlägigen Einzelphänomenen befasst, seinen eigenen Gesamtentwurf umreißt oder sogar aktualisiert. Hier formuliert er seine berühmte These von Werten als „Problem“, reflektiert das Verhältnis von Werten und kulturell vermittelten Wert- oder Sinnerfahrungen und beschreibt Wertphänomene im Bereich des Ästhetischen. Zentral ist auch die Frage nach der Beziehung von Werterfahrung und „sittlichen Forderungen“, die er zudem mit Blick auf historische Vorläuferfiguren und Gegenentwürfe einordnet. Insgesamt ergibt sich das Bild eines reichen wertphilosophischen Denkens, das ausgehend von heutigen Debatten schon deshalb attraktiv ist, weil es die Frage nach Werten nicht auf moralphilosophische Probleme reduziert und angesichts von Erfahrungen von Geschichtlichkeit und kultureller Vielfalt sprachfähig ist.
In seiner ausführlichen Einleitung ordnet der Herausgeber Moritz von Kalckreuth die verschiedenen Texte in den Kontext des Gesamtwerks Hartmanns, der philosophischen Debatten zu seinen Lebzeiten und der heutigen philosophischen Diskussion um Werte ein.

A Compilation of Bibliographical References on Aron Gurwitsch for the 50th Anniversary of his Passing (1973-2023)

by María Luz Pintos Peñaranda

The summer of 2023 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Aron Gurwitsch’s death in 1973. Our contribution here is to present all the bibliographical references and data of the events devoted to him between 1929 (which is when the first review of his first published text, his doctoral dissertation, appeared) and today, ending in the year 2023.

By gathering here all the material related to this philosopher, we are pursuing a twofold objective. The first aim is, above all, to keep Gurwitsch´s memory alive and pay him tribute in this anniversary. The second goal is to make it easier for researchers who are now or will later be interested in Aron Gurwitsch. To this end, two lists with different formats and contents are provided.

Continue reading A Compilation of Bibliographical References on Aron Gurwitsch for the 50th Anniversary of his Passing (1973-2023)

David Roberts: History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture






History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture Book Cover




History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture




Morality, Society and Culture





David Roberts





Routledge




2022




Paperback




152

Reviewed by: Moritz v. Kalckreuth

In current philosophical discussions, the concept of historicity is rather problematic: Most of analytical (and also some phenomenological) views do not mention history at all, assuming that an analysis of concepts or phenomena would automatically lead to universality. This seems rather odd, keeping in mind that there are many phenomena with a historical dimension, especially those related to culture. However, trying to grasp this dimension by referring to “causal powers” or to “functions” does not seem an extremely promising way for it suggests an analogy to physical and biological matters that is difficult to defend. On the other hand, there are influential traditions focused on the history and genealogy of modern society – for instance Critical Theory and different views often labelled as ‘postmodern thought’ or ‘French Theory’. Apart from the fact that these traditions come along with a vast field of research-literature and their own classical canon (what makes a reception from ‘outside’ quite difficult), they do also apply a horizon of key narratives such as ‘alienation’ and ‘objectification’ which many scholars – more interested in specific questions than in the deconstruction of modernity – would hesitate to accept.

In History of the Present, David Roberts discusses notions of the historicity of the present and how it is coined in literature, cultural practices and institutions (like the museum). Though being clearly influenced by the latter tradition (referring to thinkers like Walter Benjamin, György Márkus and Agnes Heller) his discussion is very focused on the problem in question, what makes it insightful and stimulating for readers who are interested in cultural theory and cultural philosophy, even though they might remain rather skeptical about critical movements and deconstructivist campaigns. According to Roberts, our current notion of the present as “the contemporary” is problematic because of isolating us from adequate relations to the past and the future (1): Whereas the reference to the past is primarily focused on the present itself recognizing only what fits into our current structure of needs, the relation to the future is characterized by seeing it as a threat that has to be avoided by lengthening the present (2).

Most chapters of the book do explore the change of our relation to present, past and future to a mere reduction of the present to the contemporary – a perspective that is called “presentism”. This critical analysis includes also the different consequences regarding various cultural phenomena. The first step of Roberts’ discussion is to provide an understanding of the consciousness of present, past and future corresponding to modernity. He argues that the modern approach to historicity is shaped by “scientization” (16), i. e. the expansion of a scientific attitude towards non-scientific forms of our lifeworld, then “aestheticization”, (16) by which is meant an understanding of relics and artefacts as artwork combined with a view on art as the new “absolute spirit” (22), and finally “musealization”, i. e. the creation of institutions that guard artworks and lore of the past (2, 16, 21). These features go along with a strong faith in progress and in the realization of universal ends in the future (18). Following thinkers like Lukács, however, Roberts does not hesitate to add that this modern perspective is in many ways problematic and suffers from alienation (16–21).

After that, he reconstructs the view of Walter Benjamin that (in the intellectually fruitful time after World War I) stands somehow between modernism and presentism by referring to the present as being pregnant of traumatic images of the past (33). Since Benjamin is strongly influenced by Marcel Proust and his famous figure of an involuntary experience of the past (29), Roberts discusses their relation over some pages. This chapter is clearly to be considered a highlight of the book, succeeding to explore the work of these quite enigmatic authors briefly and yet in an appropriate and informative way. At the very end of the book, he will return to some insights of Benjamin stressing their potential for an alternative view.

In the following chapters, Roberts explores how the modern view on the present, past and future is replaced by what is called “presentism” (22), pointing out the various implications that concern our cultural lifeworld. In presentism, the present is understood as “the contemporary” (23) which is no longer standing in historical traditions but does constantly repeat “the spectacle of […] the eternal return of the new” (21) looking at itself “as on history” (47). Roberts writes: “Precisely this loss of a historical relation to the past is the mirror of a present that celebrates itself in the endless now of a consumer society” (48). After formulating this general problem, he describes different phenomena that might be interpreted in the light of this problematic development. For the purpose of this review, I feel compelled to summarize his comprehensive analyses ‘in a nutshell’.

As regarding art, it is argued that there is no longer a ‘definition’ or self-understanding somehow connected to a (national or international) art history. Even the self-understanding of being progressive, that would still presuppose a relation to the past, is replaced by a multiplicity of styles and self-citations (101–103). Furthermore, art does no longer come to us from the past: In fact, anything may count as contemporary art, at least if its form of presentation fits with the need of “spectacle” and “experience” (53, 55). Another field that is explored is that of literature, which is discussed from different perspectives: First, it is analyzed how various novels after World War I begin to depict dystopian, threatening views on the present and the future, showing the danger of “anonymization in mass”, the “disintegration” of value-attachments and reason or a “imprisonment in the self” (65–70). Then, Roberts argues that the change from modernity to presentism includes the shift from “world literature” to “global ubiquity” (83). Here it is shown that the modern historicity is compatible with different views on literature: World literature does not necessarily mean that there is some sort of world-canon (a notion that is contaminated by the idea of a western domination), but as a “form of circulation”, making parts of different national literary history accessible to others by means of translation (91). The presentist perspective, though, does understand contemporary literature as “global”, which means that it is no longer part of literary history (87).

As pointed out above, one cultural phenomenon repeatedly emphasized by Roberts is the museum. According to him, the idea of an institution for the collection and preservation of relics and artwork from the past is clearly connected to modernity and universalism. The contemporary museum, however, has become a place of a spectacular “encounter” (107), in which fashion (109), everyday objects or digital simulations may become artwork (110), often presented in the context of new temporary exhibitions (110). Being globalist and “transhistorical”, a museum of contemporary art can be located everywhere and has no need to be connected to local history (108), but to tourism and cultural industry (54). A quite similar case is that of heritage: Roberts points out that the notion of heritage applied in presentism is post-historical by being limited to our experience in the present (48). As an example, he mentions the restoration of historical city centers, offering just facades meant to satisfy a certain demand of aesthetic experience in terms of a highly commercialized “heritage-industry” (51). To put it bluntly, the history of sites and monuments is not relevant, as long as they can be made fruitful for spectacle ore leisure, for instance as a setting for concerts, festivals or other events (51). Roberts’ claim, that the emergence of this whole industrial complex cannot simply be explained referring to “the cheapness of travel” (58), is very persuasive: Today, every bookshop provides numerous books that tell us which 999 places are worth a visit ‘before you die’ – not to mention podcasts, blogs and videos and reels on social media. One reason why the “culture industry” critically described by Roberts is so successful is its correspondence to a certain notion of a meaningful life: Today, leading a good and successful life means accumulating a remarkable quantity of experiences by having seen and visited this and that.

There are some categories that return more or less clearly in all of these mentioned fields: a problematic isolation of contemporary culture from its historical context, their potential for commercialization and finally their aestheticization. From a philosophical (and phenomenological) point of view, especially the last feature is interesting: In current neo-phenomenology (for instance the works of Gernot Böhme or Hermann Schmitz), there is a clear affirmation of our bodily experience of the present, which is taken to be the source of authentic life and self-understanding. Following Roberts, we may lay bare a weak point of such an argumentation: A philosophical account of our (cultural) life should be able to reflect the rather obvious possibility of manipulated experiences and the misuse of an aestheticization of the lifeworld.

On the last pages of the final chapter, Roberts sketches his own alternative to the problematic ‘presentism’ (and, of course, also to the forever blocked path back to the great narratives). Following a reading of Benjamin and Agnes Heller, he argues for a historical consciousness that performs a constantly repeated “discovery, recovery and revaluation of the past” (137). Although this past is partly “our creation”, it is a creation in the non-problematic (i. e. not self-centered) sense of an “outcome of endless labour of interpretation” (137). This historical consciousness has to be combined with the idea of “contemporaneity”, i. e. the “togetherness” of past, present and future from the perspective of an “absolute present”, that is “capable of integrating dynamic change and continuity (137). Instead of an arbitrary relation to heritage that is vulnerable to commercialist misuse, Roberts advocates  a notion of world heritage that is related to the idea of the freedom of mankind and civilization (138).

It is a good sign if a book does not simply provoke approval or disapproval (depending on the constellation of intellectual traditions of author and reader), but honest questions and reactions for a further discussion. In this sense, I would like to formulate some questions and comments. Firstly, I have asked myself if Roberts’ account could also provide an understanding for the historical consciousness of philosophy itself, though this topic is not clearly addressed in the book. In our current debates and systematics, there are many distinctions that are taken to be ‘timeless’ and universal, though they are an evident product of the development of different traditions – for instance the distinction of mental states and bodily feelings in the philosophy of mind, the reduction of practical philosophy to ethics (and thus to individual choices and their justification, ruling our political and social matters) and finally the distinction of doing either theoretical or practical philosophy. Then, analog to art and museums, mainstream-philosophy has become transnational, for it does not longer matter if an analytic philosopher works at a British, a German or a Brazilian university: the debates and the literature are mostly the same, while differences concern rather the funding and the e-literature packages that the institutional libraries may afford.

The second point does concern Roberts’ thoughts on heritage: Though I do fully accept his description of the problematic constellation of heritage, commercialization and tourism (in fact, I write this review being visiting-scholar in a city overrun by tourists after having gained the UNESCO-status), I am not sure if the concept of heritage itself is – so to speak – fatally contaminated by presentism. Actually, Roberts himself does imply that a non-problematic notion of heritage is possible, using the term “world heritage” at the end of his book. However, if we understand heritage as something that comes to us unbidden (!) from the past, that we cannot change but that we have to deal and live with, this does not seem to far from the notion of involuntary memory and remembrance proposed by Roberts referring to Benjamin. Putting it in that way, heritage may also provide a ground for a hermeneutical relation to history, interpreting why we have the heritage we have and how we should deal with it. Perhaps, this whole point does arise because of a certain lack of examples apart from the restoration of historical city centers for aesthetic purposes.

The last point concerns the range of theories discussed by Roberts: It is clear that the brevity and the very focused character of his book make it difficult to pay attention to all possibly relevant approaches. Nevertheless, since he does himself include some sort of “hermeneutics” in his view, it would be quite interesting to know how his position relates to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, that was (from Dilthey to Taylor) always concerned with historical relations and interpretation. The same applies for culture critique: Roberts is mostly inspired by Marxist and deconstructivist views, mentioning also conservative counter-positions like that of Ludwig Klages and Heidegger. Nevertheless, there seem to be various alternatives ‘in between’, for instance the approaches of Helmuth Plessner or Hannah Arendt, formulating critiques that are grounded on the idea that there are certain conditions of the possibility of personhood (including a historical dimension) that are challenged and thus have to be defended.

Putting into question our notion of the present and its relations to the past and the future, David Roberts elaborates a highly plausible background for the description and normative interpretation of various cultural phenomena and issues. The brief, but precise and focused chapters do also provide a remarkable overview on philosophical accounts on historicity and their reception in terms of cultural theory. Combining these two efforts, History of the Present is to consider an highly insightful and stimulating work for scholars of philosophy and cultural studies.

Veronica Cibotaru: Le problème de la signification dans les philosophies de Kant et Husserl






Le problème de la signification dans les philosophies de Kant et Husserl Book Cover




Le problème de la signification dans les philosophies de Kant et Husserl





Veronica Cibotaru





2023




Paperback




442

Reviewed by: Begüm Özuzun

In her book titled Le problème de la signification dans le philosophies de Kant et Husserl [The Problem of Signification in the Philosophies of Kant and Husserl] (2023) (hereafter abbreviated as PspKH), as the title suggests, Veronica Cibotaru addresses the issue of signification in the works of Kant and Husserl. Within this text, she highlights the similarity in Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) and Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1838) approaches to the problem of signification, both of whom engage with this issue in terms of a linguistic and logical semantic signification specific to an expression. Despite this similarity, it is necessary not to overlook the usage of signification in the sense of ‘meaning’ in Kant. That is why when we aim to examine the similarities and differences in their approaches by comparing Kant’s notion of signification with the problem of signification in Husserl, Cibotaru notes that the words Sinn [sense] and Bedeutung [reference] used by Kant are used interchangeably. However, for the sake of clarity in analysis, she distinguishes between sense and signification, suggesting that due to the linguistic and logical aspects of signification in Husserl, it is advisable to focus generally on places where the term Bedeutung appears in Kant’s writings (PspKH, p. 9). If we delve further into this choice, the word signification in French does not have a direct equivalent in German; hence, when the question of signification arises in Kant and Husserl, the German words Sinn and Bedeutung, meaning ‘sense’ and ‘reference,’ respectively, emerge. Bedeutung carries the connotation of ‘intended meaning’ distinct from Sinn. Hence, just as Sinn directs us to a general meaning, the focus on Bedeutung in Husserl indicates a semantic meaning of an expression, leading us toward a more accurate understanding (ibid.).

As previously mentioned, when discussing the problem of signification in Kant, it is necessary to expand our research beyond the instances where the term Bedeutung appears, because signification in Kant only sometimes entails an investigation and curiosity into the semantic meaning of an expression. Since Kant does not sharply distinguish between two meanings, it is suggested that we would predominantly encounter not the signification we associate with Sinn but rather the word Bedeutung (ibid., p. 10).

While these two philosophers diverge in their approaches to signification, whether focusing on a semantic expression or not, both emphasize the importance of consciousness for us to speak of signification, attributing a similar significance to consciousness (ibid.). The importance of consciousness in Husserl’s thought has always been noticed. This importance is evident in the significance attributed to signification, as early as in the Logical Investigations (1900) (ibid., p. 11).

However, a distinction can be drawn between the two philosophers; while in Kant, the issue lies in the relationship between consciousness and objects, Husserl focuses on this relational situation, radicalizing Kant’s thought by determining consciousness through the harmony it establishes with things. The intentional aspect of consciousness in Husserl also arises from this point (ibid.). This difference stems from a strategic difference between the two philosophers: namely, the motivations behind Kant’s focus on consciousness are not the same as those of Husserl. Kant, unlike Husserl, poses an epistemological question beyond the determination of an object from a phenomenological perspective; this question concerns the possibility of “a priori recognition of things” (ibid., p. 12).

While Kant’s discussion of signification may indeed have an epistemological motivation, the question pertains not to linguistic or logical aspects but rather to the connection between unity of consciousness in terms of concepts and representations of objects. Therefore, it is evident that this thought places importance on discussions of consciousness (ibid.).

In this regard, Cibotaru poses three main questions to address the problem of signification in both philosophers: 1) The question of consciousness as the giver of meaning (through this question, we will also address whether in Kant, in a Husserlian sense, consciousness is placed at the foundation of all meaning); 2) The question of separating signification from sense (through this question, we will ascertain whether in Kant, meaning can be understood as the apprehension of an object by a consciousness); 3) The question of signification within the harmony of consciousness and object (through this question, we will inquire whether in Kant, before Husserl, there is a consideration of consciousness conceptualized in terms of intentionality). This book shapes its research methodology around these three main questions (ibid., p. 13).

Following consciousness, another similarity between the two authors is their shared emphasis on intuition. However, while intuitions, a condition of our experience, serve as a fundamental question to answer the problem of signification in Kant, they will fill in the intentional content in Husserl. Although it may seem that the function of intuition has been set aside in Husserl, it will nonetheless facilitate the fulfillment of this aim via intuition via intentional content (ibid.).

This similarity also gives rise to a divergence. This distinction does not stem from the importance of intuition by the two philosophers but rather from the difference in the understanding of the role of intuition. From this perspective, we can question the applicability of Husserl’s concept of intentional content, which is attributed to intuition in Kantian philosophy. Particularly considering the difference between theoretical and practical significations in Kant, while theoretical signification is linked to our intuitions, our practical significations, deriving their essence from the noumenal realm, carry a meaning independent of our intuitions (ibid.). Regarding a Husserlian notion of signification, will these concepts, developed independently from our intuitions, be meaningless? Considering the different functions attributed to intuition, how successful are we in achieving our goal if we think both philosophers address signification in French with the words Sinn and Bedeutung? In other words, how legitimate is it to approach the problem of signification through the words Sinn and Bedeutung?

Faced with this problem, Cibotaru reformulates the three questions she previously posed: 1) What is the harmony between signification and consciousness? 2) What is the harmony between signification and intuitions? 3) Is there such a stark difference between theoretical and practical signification? (ibid., p. 14).

To answer these questions, Cibotaru presents us with the following method: She divides the study into two main parts, dedicating the first part entirely to the problem of signification in Kant, and in the second part, she reveals the extensions of the conclusions drawn in the first part within Husserlian phenomenology (ibid., p. 17). Thus, she seeks to find an answer to the question of whether the problem of signification can be addressed jointly by these two philosophers. She divides the first part into three main sections following Kant’s three Critiques, thereby addressing the problem of signification independently in each Critique and allowing for a comparison between the concepts of Sinn and Bedeutung (ibid.).

While addressing the first two Critiques, she examines the difference between theoretical and practical signification. When analyzing the Third Critique, she demonstrates how practical significations acquire meaning through the different status accorded to pure concepts such as God and Freedom (ibid.). In the second part, based on the conclusions drawn from the problem of signification in Kant, instead of approaching Husserl’s texts with key terms as in Kant’s texts, she focuses on what Husserl generally says about the connection between signification and consciousness, the connection between consciousness and intuition, and the distinction he makes between theoretical and practical significations (ibid., p. 19).

***

In the section where Cibotaru examines the First Critique, she presents three principal axes of inquiry. The first axis considers the significance of understanding concepts regarding the harmony between them and the object. However, this should not be perceived as a referential signification problem in an empirical sense, as it emphasizes that this harmony occurs not through the compatibility of the concept with the object but rather through the connection of signification to pure sensibility (ibid., p. 131). In the second axis of inquiry, she prefers to approach the problem of signification by examining how concepts are introduced in Kant’s logic lectures. In these logic lectures, concepts appear as a general representation of the modus operandi quality. According to this view, concepts are composed of essence and are not considered in terms of their conformity to reality. However, it is demonstrated that the logic theory in these lectures is based on the teachings of Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777), inspired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) theory of concepts. This contradicts Kant’s assertion in the First Critique that for signification to be possible, the object must be given, that is, perceptible. Thus, Cibotaru emphasizes the importance of perception in the problem of signification in Kant, in contrast to Leibniz’s theory of two worlds, and shows that Kant’s theory includes the problem of signification between the worlds of senses and reason (ibid., p. 132, 133). Next, Cibotaru examines the relationship between the problem of signification and the question of consciousness in the third axis of her research. She highlights the significance of Kant’s addressing this issue, considering it essential to establish a connection with Husserl’s texts, as it is a relationship often overlooked by Kant’s successors and contemporaries (ibid., p. 133).

From the analysis advancing along these three main axes, two conclusions emerge: 1) In the First Critique, Kant attributes the meaning of being a synthesis procedure of many different elements to the concept. Therefore, the concept always appears as the synthetic unity of consciousness, whether empirical or pure. This synthesis, in Kant, is adapted to our senses through transcendental schemata grounded a priori. 2) In Kant, although consciousness is not intentional in the Husserlian sense, how concepts acquire signification is defined, meaning that consciousness as the constitutive subject is also inherent and fundamental to signification. Thus, if a theory of signification were to be derived from Kant, he neither presents a conceptualist theory that eliminates the concept as a simple image of things nor proposes a nominalist theory that regards the concept as the abstract representation of many similar objects (ibid., p. 133, 134). What leads Kant away from this approach is his treatment of consciousness through its relation to objects, akin to Husserl.

***

In the second main section of the book, Cibotaru lists the sections in Kant’s Second Critique where the concept of Bedeutung is mentioned, this is because she wants to elucidate how Kant approaches the problem of signification in the Second Critique and how he arrives at the distinction between theoretical and practical signification with which arguments (or by what arguments) (ibid., p. 134).

While in the First Critique Cibotaru seeks to answer the problem of signification through the importance of the senses in determining concepts, in the Second Critique, she can develop a more direct method because the problem of signification is addressed more explicitly. She argues that Kant’s more explicit treatment of the problem of signification in the Second Critique is because moral thought is not confined to a single philosophical school and is universally relevant to everyone (ibid., p. 140). Hence, morality must possess a general signification. Additionally, while we do not experience a sense of responsibility for conformity to moral laws in our empirical experience, the justification of morality, which is a product of practical reason independent of the senses, is provided in the noumenal realm, leaving moral laws subject to a certain sense of meaninglessness. Kant endeavors to resolve this sense of meaninglessness.

As practical signification operates independently of the senses, Cibotaru continues to examine the Second Critique by focusing on the concept of Bedeutung rather than Sinn. This allows her to move away from the deficiency of the term “sens,” which remains tied to sensibility, and to explore concepts derived from linguistic practical signification (ibid., p. 140, 141). Indeed, Kant, even in the First Critique, prefers to approach signification linguistically rather than ontologically, as in Kantian thought, the function of the senses only emerges as a condition for signification, and questions such as the meaning of life are not discussed within this philosophy. Instead, the focus is primarily on the signification of concepts (ibid., p. 141).

In this context, Cibotaru focuses on the concept of freedom, which is given a separate status in Kant, and explains how, despite its lack of inherent meaning, it becomes part of the game of signification and emphasizes the difference between theoretical and practical signification, thereby demonstrating that we can still speak of signification. Then, she examines how signification operates in the Second Critique by addressing the idea of God, another pure concept in Kantian philosophy (ibid., p. 142).

Cibotaru asserts that the distinction between theoretical and practical signification is polemically introduced because it is based on a supposed moral assumption. She labels morality as “supposed” because practical signification cannot construct morality, as it is not grounded in morality. For something to have moral value, it must occur in the phenomenal realm where morality is experienced. It gains moral value to the extent that it occurs in the phenomenal realm. In this sense, when the distinction between practical and theoretical signification is initially proposed in the Second Critique, practical signification is not considered moral. Therefore, this distinction arises not initially to interpret our moral actions but rather to describe how we can approach objects of recognition within the framework of any action for specific purposes (ibid., p. 144).

Kant states in the second part of the first book “The analytic of pure practical reason” (Kant, 2015) that he is not concerned with theoretically knowing the nature of a being; for Kant, a being already appears as a pure will. A being must already adhere to causality to determine itself as a pure will (ibid., p. 146). Therefore, Kant excludes freedom from theoretical knowledge. By excluding freedom from theoretical knowledge, he expands the category of causality that depends on it because he demonstrates a practical domain of causality outside the realm of cognition (ibid.). How does Kant determine the special status that allows freedom to appear both as a pure idea and a practical concept, opening up a domain of practical signification distinct from the theoretical?

After the distinction between practical and theoretical signification becomes apparent through the concept of freedom, Kant develops the notion that the concepts of understanding in the First Critique cannot attain signification without recourse to the sensible realm. His argument suggests that while they cannot acquire theoretical signification without resorting to the sensible, they will acquire a different type of signification, namely practical significance, without recourse to the sensible. Thus, although freedom may establish itself as a pure idea in the noumenal realm, Kant demonstrates that it can also carry practical significance. Consequently, the distinct status of freedom does not pose a contradiction in signification, as it can bear both theoretical and practical significance without inconsistency (ibid., p. 147).

Due to freedom’s presence as a pure idea in the First Critique, morality maintains its necessity based on a command from the noumenal realm, even though it only occurs in the phenomenal realm. Even if we do not understand freedom, we must still enact it (ibid., p. 149). The exclusion of freedom from the realm of cognition does not imply that it cannot be thought; instead, I can assume it in the practical domain precisely because I can think it (ibid., p. 149, 150). In this sense, moral causality is not a domain where the concepts of understanding are simply applied to objects; instead, it is the realization of its object’s conformity through a kind of interpretation, through thought (ibid., p. 161).

Freedom, while operating within the framework of moral law in the phenomenal realm and being subject to a kind of causality due to its conformity to the law, demonstrates that members of the ethical community can consist only of rational beings. This is because freedom can only be exercised by agents who apply their will according to conditions and determine themselves. In this sense, individuals can be part of this ethical community to the extent that they can exercise reason; this necessitates an intersubjective moral consciousness in the phenomenal realm (ibid., p. 183).

Following this, Cibotaru addresses the issue of signification in the idea of God, which does not derive its source from the sensible realm but emerges as a pure idea. Although Kant touches upon the immortality of the soul, God, and Freedom as the three concepts of pure reason in the First Critique, in the Second Critique, while discussing God and Freedom as conditions of practical reason, he does not address the immortality of the soul (ibid., p. 195, 196). This underscores that God and freedom have a functional aspect beyond their theoretical significance in practical signification. For instance, Kant discusses the necessity of the idea of God for moral reason in the Second Critique. Kant speaks of an indirect necessity because although the moral law is obligatory, it is subjective rather than objective, and its subjectivity is realized only through an imagination of a good sovereign. Without the functionality of the idea of God, just as it would be without the objective nature, finite beings like us would not be able to fulfill it (ibid., p. 196). It’s essential to emphasize that the function of the idea of God lies not in the possibility of morality but in our ability, as finite beings, to actualize morality by acting under moral reasons. I feel the moral law within me without resorting to the idea of God in my experiences; I am immediately conscious of the moral laws (ibid., p. 197). Thus, although its origin is derived from a residue of thought in the noumenal realm because it is based on the assumption of a world of reason, God can manifest himself in the phenomenal world because of the subjectivity he gains. Through this idea, Kant ensures we can guide our actions within morality and happiness and govern our desires accordingly (ibid., p. 201). Thus, through this special status, God presents himself as the legislator of the ethical community, enabling the subject to govern according to these laws (ibid., p. 202).

Despite the difference between theoretical and practical signification, for instance, connecting practical significations with the phenomenal world through imagination, both signification theories lead to objective reality. The givenness of the sensible guarantees the connection with objective reality in the concepts of the mind. In contrast, in the ideas of pure practical reason, the connection with objective reality is ensured by the subjective necessity of the supreme good (ibid., p. 206).

***

Cibotaru points out that the signification issue is addressed in the three parts of the Third Critique. First, it is discussed in §50 of the “Analytic of the Sublime” section. In this paragraph, it is mentioned that without laws, freedom is merely absurd. The word absurde used in the French translation corresponds to Unsinn in German, meaning freedom lacks meaning without laws or, in other words, without moral causality (ibid., p. 215, 216). Second, in the final paragraph of the “Methodology of Teleological Power of Judgment,” in the section “General Remark on the Teleology,” the concept of Bedeutung, not Sinn, is used (Kant, 2000). Once again, the concept of God is discussed in terms of its limits, with a negative connotation (PspKH., p. 217). Finally, the signification issue is addressed at the end of the “Methodology of Teleological Power of Judgment” (Kant, 2000). Here, Kant also refers to the concept of Bedeutung, discussing signification in the context of the limits of our categories, stating that without these limitations, our categories would be meaningless (PspKH., p. 217).

The issue of signification, although less addressed in the Third Critique, has a broader scope than in the other two critiques. Cibotaru finds the explanation for this in the remarks of Alexis Philonenko (1932-2018), the French edition translator of Critique de la faculté de juger (2000). According to Philonenko, this book presents an intersubjective logic. Thus, Philonenko considers the Third Critique as a logic of signification (ibid., p. 241). Since the act of signification is also a form of communication, it always finds its essence in human encounters. To speak of a universal beauty in these encounters, one must delve into the depths of the issue of signification. Without delving into these issues, such an investigation into signification would not be possible (ibid.). In a sense, although Kant addresses signification in different contexts, he uses signification in meanings found in the assumptions of the First and Second Critiques without introducing a new definition of signification in the Third Critique.

***

Kant and Husserl both agree on the role of intuition in enabling signification. However, as previously mentioned, they attribute different roles to intuition. In the First Critique, Kant pursues pure intuitions to make signification possible, while Husserl defines signification as pure ideality in the Logical Investigations’ First Investigation. After defining signification as linguistically pure ideality, Husserl discusses intuitions’ function in intentional acts. Unlike Kant, he examines intuition not to reach the conceptual domain but to investigate intuition in the conceptual flow (ibid., p. 247). In other words, in the Logical Investigations, the problem of signification arises as a correlation problem between thought [signification] and intuition. At the same time, in the First Critique, Kant arrives at a duality between intuition and thought. This dichotomy, stemming from the radical distinction between the sensible and the intellectual, leads Kant, unlike Husserl, to the inability to conflate intuition and thought (ibid., p. 248).

Husserl proposes categorical intuitions to establish a correlation between intuition and thought. Thus, unlike sensory intuition, which perceives objects in their spatio-temporal extension, Husserl defines intuition as perceiving objects as general and non-temporal entities (ibid.). By giving intuition a categorical meaning, Husserl addresses the problem of synthesis between thought and the sensible world found in Kant (ibid., p. 249).

Linguistic expressions carry meaning through this function of intuition. Husserl distinguishes linguistic signs from indicators. Linguistic signs carry meaning inherently, not based on their relationship with something else; indicators, on the other hand, are part of a process of signification about something external to themselves. By addressing signification through the distinction between linguistic signs and indicators, Husserl elevates signification to an independent structure and ensures its definition as an ideal unity. This ideal unity distinguishes between linguistic expressions and physical phenomena in Husserl’s framework. Physical phenomena, lacking an ideal unity, do not enter into a signification game alone (ibid.). On the other hand, linguistic signs carry a different meaning because they always refer to a determined entity, even if it does not exist (ibid., p. 250).

In this sense, Cibotaru identifies a fundamental difference between the two thinkers. In contrast, Husserl sees signification not as the emergence of the sensory, as in Kant, but as an intentionality inherent in phenomena already carrying meaning (ibid.).

Husserlian thought manifests itself in two senses: Firstly, by distinguishing between physical phenomena and linguistic signs, and by extension, between Bedeutung and Sinn; secondly, by assigning a foundational role to intuition in signification. While Kant uses Bedeutung and Sinn interchangeably, Husserl’s theory assigns distinct meanings to both (ibid.).

Husserl does not directly reference Kant in his discussions on the problem of signification. However, significant Kantian references in Husserl’s texts indicate his stance. For instance, in §100 of Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Husserl adopts a critical stance towards Kant’s formal logic. He directs this critique by praising its a priori nature against Humean conceptual understanding (ibid., p. 251, 252). This critique reveals Husserl’s views on formal logic. It reflects his opposition to Kant’s failure to acknowledge the presence of an objective ideal in formal logic within the problem of signification (ibid., p. 252).

The second reference comes from Husserl’s lectures on ethics delivered between 1920 and 1924. Here, Husserl highlights that in Kantian ethics, the phenomenological method is only applied through how words are understood, and he criticizes Kant for not focusing on acts that give meaning instead (ibid.).

The third reference is from an unpublished fragment of manuscript B IV 1, where Husserl draws a parallel between the theory of analytic judgments in his work and Kant’s theory of analytic judgments. This parallelism arises from both gaining their validity through simple significations, implying that in both thinkers, it is possible to establish a connection between simple signification and a simple concept (ibid.).

However, all these references do not provide us with enough material to develop a systematic theory of signification between the two thinkers. This is because Husserl only aligns with Kant on analytic judgments, which remain more within the realm of pure logic, theory of knowledge, and phenomenological methodology due to their applicability only to simple concepts. In other words, there is no parallelism between the two thinkers regarding signification.

***

Cibotaru aims not to examine systematically the moments when the term “signification” emerges or the passages in Husserl’s texts that refer to Kant. Instead, they seek to compare how the two thinkers respond to the question of signification by clinging to the similarity based on the importance given to consciousness and intuition by them.

In Kant, the connection between consciousness and signification is indirect. This connection is established to explain how concepts are possible. Without consciousness, speaking of concepts or any signification is impossible. Thus, Kant’s understanding of constitutive consciousness is similar to Husserl’s. However, Kant does not explicitly characterize consciousness as constitutive; for him, consciousness is seen merely as the field that unifies sensible multiplicity (ibid., p. 260).

Nevertheless, consciousness is a fundamental discussion of signification. On the other hand, Husserl emphasizes more directly in Logical Investigations that consciousness is necessary for all kinds of signification (ibid.). At this point, Cibotaru suggests examining the interconnectedness of consciousness and signification in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Ideas (1913) texts.

Husserl distinguishes physical phenomena and linguistic expression in the ninth paragraph of First Investigation. He reaches a radical separation between the word and its object, defining the word as an ideal. According to this view, an object can only acquire meaning when a word is intended for it. In other words, when the intended object, targeted by linguistic expression, becomes intended towards the physical object. However, the object intended through consciousness already possesses signification because it comes from consciousness (ibid., p. 261).

Then, in the eleventh paragraph, he presents three reasons the intended object is ideal. Firstly, the intended object is ideal because it can never be reduced to a single word or group of words. In other words, the word itself cannot explain the object’s ideality. The second reason is that the ideal object is never reduced to the relationship between the object and consciousness. Therefore, this ideality cannot be reduced to subjective, ever-changing representations each time. Thirdly, the intended object is ideal because it never becomes identical to the actual object. The concept of ideality, for Husserl, renders the actual object insignificant in terms of the problem of signification, thus diminishing the importance of intuition compared to consciousness. While the intended object presents itself with signification as it is, the actual object only realizes signification in intuition. This indicates that the actual object is the body of the intended object, but to acquire meaning, the actual object does not require intuition afterward (ibid., p. 262). Husserl also states that complex significations combine these simple significations (ibid., p. 265).

Kant, unlike Husserl, does not perceive signification as an ideal objectivity. Still, he defines it based on the relationship between consciousness and an object or an objective reality, as Husserl does (ibid., p. 268). However, in the case of theoretical signification and practical signification, the object intended in Husserl’s theory, as opposed to Kant’s, would be categories rather than objective reality. Cibotaru offers an interpretation at this point: the difference between ideality in Husserl and reality in Kant arises from one being timeless and the other being spatio-temporal. Kant’s theory requires the precondition of pure sensory spatio-temporality for signification. However, according to Husserl, in a Kantian sense, space and time only provide an idealized perception of space-time. In other words, they are not objects perceived empirically (ibid., p. 269). From this perspective, although Kant’s philosophy may not seem to attribute a priori characteristics to reason beyond categories, it legitimizes all our experiences through an idealized space-time, providing us with a philosophy before orientation towards experience in a sense (ibid.).

***

In Husserl, as we ’ve shown, there’s less emphasis on intuition than in Kant. Therefore, Cibotaru turns to Husserl’s Sixth Investigation to compare the relationship between intuition and signification in the Kantian and Husserlian sense. In this book, Husserl investigates not directly signification but rather the possibilities of knowledge. In this sense, he demonstrates that intuitions are necessary not for signification but for knowing. An ideal object must already be presented to our intuitive consciousness for us to know. So, while intuition is not necessary for signification in this sense, it gains a fundamental function in recognizing an object, termed as Auffassungssinn. Through this definition, the function of intuition in the general process of object recognition expands, as it enables a Kantian-like extension of intuitive consciousness (ibid., p. 324), thereby allowing Kant to include the sensory in the realm of knowledge.

However, Husserl attributes a role to intuition quite different from Kant’s. While Kant shows our pure intuitions as conditions for our experience, he does not assign them an operational role in these conditions; if there were to be any operation, it would be performed by the understanding. Conversely, Husserl defines intuition as the meeting point between the ideal and actual objects, asserting that cognition occurs in this manner, thereby intertwining the realms of understanding and intuition. For instance, in Kantian thought, categories belong to the realm of understanding, whereas in Husserl, we can speak of categorical intuitions.

***

The exploration of the topic of signification between Husserl and Kant and its transformation from Kantian thought to phenomenological inquiry is one of the significant areas of inquiry due to its limited treatment and its influence on contemporary French philosophy. In this regard, two points stand out: 1) The frequent examination of the distinction between “sens” and “signification” in contemporary French philosophy (For instance, Jean-Luc Nancy attributes distinct importance to “sens” as opposed to other senses as the provider of externality (Derrida, 1998), while excluding “signification,” which denotes a more active, linguistically meaningful interpretation); 2) This distinction transforms “signification” from being something apprehensible to being an actively given element. From these perspectives, it can be said that this work occupies an essential place among current research endeavors.

While initially, it may seem possible to establish a parallel between Kant and Husserl by examining the roles attributed to consciousness and the practical significance of pure ideas in Kant and to interpret Husserl as a complement to Kantian idealism, it becomes evident that the positions they hold regarding intuition and signification diverge. Kant views intuitions not as where intentionality realizes, as Husserl does, but as conditions for apprehending objects. This indicates that, unlike Husserl’s phenomenological act, Kant does not speak of a general act of signification. With his persistent stance on Bedeutung, Husserl radically distinguishes between “sens” and “signification,” transforming the act of giving meaning into a phenomenological act mediated by intentional consciousness. In this regard, PspKH successfully reveals the fundamental differences between the two thinkers and can be characterized as a significant publication for contemporary research due to its systematic approach.

Martin Heidegger: On Inception.






On Inception Book Cover




On Inception





Martin Heidegger. Translated by Peter Hanly





Indiana University Press




2023




Paperback




194

Reviewed by: Shawn Loht (Delgado Community College, New Orleans, USA)

This edition marks the first English-language translation of Über Den Anfang (GA 70), an entry in Heidegger’s so-called “esoteric writings.”  These writings consist of private notebooks from the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, in which Heidegger tries out different approaches for describing the phenomenology of the origins of being and meaning.  Notably, none of these writings were available to the public during Heidegger’s lifetime, as he intentionally chose for them to become available only after his death.  Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) (GA 65) is the most well-known of the esoteric writings, but other titles now familiar to Heidegger scholars include Mindfulness (Besinnung) (GA 66) and The Event (Das Ereignis) (GA 71).  As with these other texts, in On Inception Heidegger does not present a systematic or progressive exegesis.  Rather, the text is loosely organized according to general themes, with short sections that provide microstudies on specific topics.  On Inception is divided into six principal divisions, with the first two of these taking up more than half of the book.  Both of these first two divisions analyze at length the phenomenon of “inception,” while the remaining four study “event” and being-there, interpretation, the history of being/beyng, and Heidegger’s own work Being and Time, respectively.  In all instances, the numbered sections comprising these divisions of the text show significant repetition and thematic overlap.  One gets the sense in the course of reading that Heidegger is experimenting to find the words and locutions for what he wants to say, in a manner that no single statement or argument is meant to be authoritative.

In what follows, I will highlight some of the text’s key concepts and some of the notable positions Heidegger develops.  First and foremost, as he describes in the first division, the term “inception” (Anfang) signifies for Heidegger the dawn of being in the West, the moment in which being (Sein) takes hold and history eventuates.  Likewise, inception marks the moment at which the ontological difference comes to life, such that human thought begins to identify both “being” in general, and “beings” or specific things as such.  But “inception” does not denote a temporal unfolding.  It is not an event happening in time, and it does not mark a point between “before” and “after.”  Finding the right language to express this dimension poses a challenge.  “Inception” refers to the moment in which time comes to be, and in which “being” arrives as a meaningful concept.  (In the third division, Heidegger describes pre-inception reality as “the beingless” (98).)  Indeed, in most of the passages devoted to this theme, Heidegger uses the more archaic Seyn, or in the English translation, “beyng,” to indicate the primordial sway of being in terms of effecting an origin and destiny.  He often refers to beyng in terms of the entire historical epoch of the West, whereby “being” is instantiated as such.

Much of the account of inception involves describing the phenomenology bound up with such a beginning of being.  For instance, Heidegger characterizes inception as, on one hand, concomitant with a clearing or unconcealment, through which world and things first become ontologically conspicuous.  On the other hand, this clearing entails a concomitant “receding” (Untergang), whereby being withdraws further and further from view.  This latter phenomenon for Heidegger reaches its apex with the total abandonment of being in the epoch of twentieth-century technology.  Whereas Heidegger leaves many gaps in the explanation of this historical phenomenon in more popular writings like “The Question Concerning Technology” (GA 7) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (GA 40), the analyses in On Inception suggest that he regards receding as a definitive, necessary dimension of inception.  (“In the first inception the arche emerges, but incipience begins only in the intimacy of retreat” (12).  The moment of inception at the dawn of Western history immediately entails an unnoticed concealing, such that what is at first most illuminated is countered by a receding that becomes less conspicuous with the duration of history.  The clearing in which being comes to appearance is countered by its unseen groundlessness.  For Heidegger, this receding that counters the clearing is just as relevant at the end of beyng’s history as it is at the beginning.

As expressed in other writings from this period of Heidegger’s career, the “end” of inception’s initial reign at once makes the beginning fully apparent, and discloses hints of a second or “other” inception.  Here, however, Heidegger inclines toward describing the second inception as merely the next in a potentially infinite series.  This is to say, he uses less frequently the locution “other beginning” (andere Anfang) known from texts like Contributions to Philosophy and Basic Questions of Philosophy (Grundfragen der Philosophie) (GA 45), favoring a view in which inception has a cyclical character, though it need not manifest the same shape every time.  Similarly, a contrast with Contributions Philosophy’s better-known concept of “appropriation” (Ereignis) that one sees in Heidegger’s account of inception is an emphasis on inception’s atemporal character, out which space-time comes to be.  Whereas Heidegger’s accounts of Ereignis emphasize the twofold, appropriative correspondence of being with being-there occasioned in Ereignis, the account of inception places more focus on the very moment of inception itself, asking as it were, what it means to describe beyng purely as inception (Anfang), as having a beginning.  Heidegger often invokes the keyword “incipience” (das Änfangnis) to describe inception’s continuous, singular character, according to which it is constitutive of history.  For instance, Heidegger writes “Incipience determines and ‘is’ the essential unfolding of inception” (6).  Incipience signifies “a way whose scope and configuration is in inception’s being in itself the essence of history” (Ibid.).

Beyng (Seyn) is essentially bound up with describing inception.  In this text, beyng (Seyn) refers not simply to being (Sein), and definitely not to beings (Seiende).  Instead, the “question of being,” Heidegger suggests (echoing the scope of the Being and Time project), is more deeply the question after inception: “Being remains, always, what is said; however, the essence of beyng is not beyng, but is rather the incepting inception.  From this, and as this, beyng incepts (and that also means recedes) into its proper domain” (10).  In other words, we do not and cannot cease to live amongst beings, from which our reckoning with the question of the meaning of being is always determined.  Yet, to ask about the dawn or origin of being entails inquiring more deeply into the inception (Anfang), or literally, the taking-hold (An-fangen) of beyng.  Heidegger writes: “Incipience is the ground of the poetic character of beyng” (18).

The second division of the text, entitled “Inception and Inceptive – Thinking the Creative Thinking of Inception,” continues the themes of the first division while placing emphasis on a kind of meditative reflection.  In Section 72, Heidegger makes explicit that inception is a singular phenomenon but with multiple manifestations, that is, multiple inceptions.  Each subsequent inception is nonetheless a manifestation of the same underlying movement.  “Each inception is more inceptive than the first, and thus is this inception itself in its singular future” (71).  An appropriate intuition of an inception to come calls not for action but instead for a meditative waiting and thoughtfulness.  Although one cannot predict how inception will unfold, simply the ability to distinguish the name of “inception” and what it entails offers some preview of the impending epoch (87).  Referring to the historical moment at his time of writing, Heidegger observes that German culture in contrast has mistakenly pursued goal-setting, machination, and achievement, all of which only lead to destruction.  He echoes and recasts here the famous passage from An Introduction to Metaphysics that begins “All distances in space and time are shrinking…”, published just a few years before this writing, stating “No longer can it be asked: ‘To what end?’  The simple plight alone is to be knowingly accepted” (Ibid.).  He concludes that there is no sense in thinking of present history as having a human-directed “purpose” or destiny, because the destitution of the age is under the sway of beyng (Ibid.).  There is not some other historical trajectory that human beings can bring about by sheer force of will.  Thus, he gives a preview here of his later concept of Gelassenheit or “letting-be.”  In the following section, he draws this point out in observing that preparedness for inception will become manifest when language and images cease to yield food for thought (72).  This passage echoes statements from elsewhere in the esoteric writings to the effect that in a future time, thinking will become “imageless,” viz., that in this future guise, we discover a kind of thinking that does not rely on the affordances of sight or the outward look of things.  Whereas in the present, we are still under the way of being understood as idea, what is visible (75).

The fourth division of On Inception pivots from the earlier themes of the book, with a series of reflections on poetry and the legacy of Hölderlin.  One key theme is the appropriate understanding of “interpretation,” where this concept in its modern context is taken to mean correct “reading” of history and texts.  Heidegger takes issue with the proposition that interpretation involves “correct” or “objective” analysis, maintaining instead that interpretation involves hearing the inceptive word.  He writes: “For interpretation must first ground itself more inceptively from out of itself, surrendering to inception and to history, so that it might emerge more inceptively from its inception” (121).  In contrast, to talk of “escaping” the hermeneutical circle that is typically invoked in discussions of “objective” interpretation overlooks that the sway of beyng dictates the circle within which one moves.  Indeed, there is no escape, nor is there any such circle to be inside or outside of, aside from beyng (126).  Regarding Hölderlin, Heidegger goes on to state that this poet’s importance has nothing to do with seeking knowledge or founding truth.  Instead, the poet poetizes being, “naming therein the domain of historical decision in its own poetic essence” (132).  Here Heidegger describes that Hölderlin does not “think” the other inception, in the way that this is the subject matter of his work.  Rather, Hölderlin’s poetry provides clues about the other inception for those who are able to think ahead to the epochal decision the poems indicate (Ibid.).  For Heidegger, the futural phenomenon Hölderlin identifies is the “holy” (130).

The fifth division of the text, entitled “The History of Beyng,” finds Heidegger meditating on how to understand the time-instantiating dimension of beyng or “inceptive history” (144).  A central question concerns how to describe beyng as an occurrence that itself is not temporal.  Heidegger writes of this occurrence: “Nothing happens.  The event eventuates.  The evental appropriation takes on what it at the same time clears as its own: the clearing itself, which is the ownness of beyng” (143).  To seek for a whatness, something that can identify the history of beyng’s essence, misses the point, mistaking the history of beyng for a being proper.  The history of beyng is groundless; it “happens” as itself (Ibid.).  Consequently, the history of beyng cannot be studied or known as an object of historiography (Ibid.).  Similarly, other phenomena occasioned with the history of beyng, such as concealment, unconcealment, clearing, and being-there, are likewise irreducible to temporal moments (143, 145).  Instead, they comprise the inceptive, groundless ground in which the temporal can take hold at all.

Another theme receiving treatment in the fifth division (already peppered throughout the first four divisions) is the growing conspicuousness of inception (147), by virtue of its distance from the present.  While Heidegger observes that inception is essentially concealment, and moreover, concealment that becomes more and more hidden as history elapses, this concealment has a double effect of becoming more silently conspicuous over time as its absence becomes further pronounced.  For Heidegger, this progression is manifested in the history of metaphysics and its subsequent abandoning of being for the sake of beings, such that at the end of metaphysics, it becomes painfully obvious that being no longer has any meaning; being has become an empty notion (148).  Here and elsewhere, Heidegger is not much re-inventing the wheel or introducing new vocabulary.  But he is offering some deeper and more patient phenomenologies that fill in considerably many claims from the more well-known texts in his corpus.

In the final division of the text, Heidegger reflects on the relevance of the phenomenon of inception to the Being and Time project.  In Section 172, he comments that Being and Time reflects “onto-historical inceptive thinking,” viz. that the project of that work is essentially about inception in its scope (161).  Although, Heidegger’s implication is that his own writing of Being and Time did not sufficiently comprehend this fact.  Continuing, he writes, with a series of line breaks:

Being and time are the same.
Being is inception.
Time is inception.
The incipience of inception (Ibid.).

He concludes by remarking that “the age is not ripe” to engage in a full criticism of Being and Time vis-à-vis its relevance for the phenomenon of inception, because readers are too eager to interpret the work merely as a continuation of metaphysics.  The register of this statement implies that critics of Being and Time are unable to comprehend the broader phenomenological direction that work opened up.  (Here, we have to remember that, as Heidegger is writing this text a mere 12-15 years after Being and Time’s publication, most of Heidegger’s audience would have had no inkling of his concerns regarding inception, the appropriative event, or the history of beyng, and so forth.)  To similar effect, in Section 174 Heidegger invokes Kant and Hegel in order to contrast his own understanding of the Being and Time project with views of critics that Being and Time concerns only transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience.  Kant’s project, Heidegger remarks, only takes up conditions for experience regarded from knowledge of beings or objectivity.  Similarly, Hegel’s project purports to unravel the conditions for experience based on an “unconditioned”; however, like Kant, Hegel fails to realize that arriving at the unconditioned fundamentally differs from insight into beyng.  In this aspect, Hegel does not overcome the transcendental but only draws out its metaphysical implications.  Heidegger concludes “All conditioned is abysmally separated from appropriative event” (163).

In Section 175, communicating his own assessment of what Being and Time failed to achieve, Heidegger concludes:

Only one thing was already clear and fixed at that time; that the way into the truth of being headed toward something unasked and could no longer find support in what came before, as other pathways were to be investigated.

Initially, nonetheless, supports were borrowed from metaphysics, and something like an attempt at overcoming metaphysics through metaphysics was advanced.

[…] although the direction of the question has already leapt over all metaphysics (Ibid.)

Heidegger’s self-criticism here ostensibly centers in the notion that, while the Being and Time project began with metaphysics, any attempt to resolve the question of the meaning of being necessarily entails pressing the language of metaphysics to its limits.  This outcome enables one to envision what new language must arise next.
To conclude, On Inception offers many helpful explorations that supplement themes from Heidegger’s entire corpus.  In this way, the book has something for everybody among readers of Heidegger.  Nonetheless, its immediate audience will be very narrow, given that it is a private writing not originally conceived for publication.  Scholars who stand to benefit most from engaging with this book will be those studying Heidegger’s accounts of the history of being/beyng and the appropriative event (Ereignis).  The book’s value for providing insight into Heidegger’s actual thought will be somewhat more tenuous.  The experimental style of the book makes questionable whether the content represents positions Heidegger wishes to advance or whether Heidegger is simply trying out various ideas.  Current Heidegger scholars including Thomas Sheehan and David Kleinberg-Levin favor treating the esoteric writings as primary sources informative for comprehending Heidegger’s philosophy overall.  Yet, some care is surely called for in this approach.  In this regard, I suggest that caution may be in order if one is tempted to place On Inception on equal ground with books Heidegger published in his lifetime.

Claudio Rozzoni: The Phenomenological Image






The Phenomenological Image: A Husserlian Inquiry into Reality, Phantasy, and Aesthetic Experience Book Cover




The Phenomenological Image: A Husserlian Inquiry into Reality, Phantasy, and Aesthetic Experience





Claudio Rozzoni





De Gruyter




2024




Paperback




247

Reviewed by: Marina Christodoulou
(Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5721-833X

Rozzoni’s book is a work of double value, as should any book of philosophy be about: at first it has the value of serving as a secondary literature text, that is, offering comments and references to its various primary sources, which include works mainly by Husserl, but also Merleau-Ponty, and others, and various other artistic works (paintings, photographs, films, installation pieces, etc.). However, being a secondary literature text, it has the unique capacity of not sustaining/conforming/limiting the reader between its 247 pages, but motivating one to visit the sources, that is, the primary texts it deals with. This is a virtue that only seldomly do works labelled as secondary literature possess. This is why, Rozzoni’s book gains a double-acquired value, which is that it can serve as a work that can be labelled primary literature as well, as it can also be read as a work that in itself offers an original approach to both philosophy, and especially aesthetics (in both its meanings, as a discourse on the senses and thus on perception and experience, but also as a discourse on artistic works/experiences), and also to art, literary theory, and film theory and criticism. It offers to both aesthetics and art/literary/film criticism a new perspective and even a new method or approach, through phenomenology, but also it offers to phenomenology a new aesthetic and artistic/literary/cinematographic dimension. At last, it also introduces, but profoundly so, a so far neglected work of Husserl, only translated in 2005, and, so far, not much studied or researched. The aforementioned work of Husserl are the Nachlass manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, published in 1980 in Husserliana XXIII in German, based on his 1905 course in Göttingen.[2]

Thus, Rozzoni’s The Phenomenological Image: a Husserlian Inquiry into Reality, Phantasy, and Aesthetic Experience is a work of multiple values and uses. Firstly, as a study of Husserl’s so far unnoticed Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory. Secondly, as a philosophical commentary on Husserl’s phenomenology in general, and more specifically his aforementioned work, as well as a commentary on the of aesthetics and phenomenology, a study on phantasy and/in phenomenology and the different forms of experience in phenomenology. And thirdly, as an original work on phenomenological aesthetics, or even aesthetic phenomenology, and more specifically on new approaches to art, literature, and film theory and criticism. In other words, it is a source offering new (phenomenological) ways towards film theory and criticism.

It is an indispensable book for philosophers already working in phenomenology, or on experience, on phantasy, fiction, reality and other relevant subjects. It is, in general, an excellent book regarding a philosophy of experience (phenomenology’s major preoccupation is experience, but in this book, it becomes even clearer), and more specifically perceptual experience, aesthetic experience etc.

However, it can be read even by audiences that have no familiarity with phenomenology or even philosophy, since Rozzoni is doing a great job explaining in simple words every new term or concept that he is using (such as intentionality and many other), thus, every next page of the book is already prepared by the previous ones. Thus, it is an indispensable book for artists, art criticism and filmmakers and film theorists and critics, as well.

For that reason, it is a self-contained and self-sufficient work that offers both an introduction to phenomenology, but at the same time an advanced study of it with original insights spanning further than phenomenology or even philosophy itself. What can serve as an introduction to phenomenology can simultaneously function as a further redefinition of it, which is an important philosophical methodological trait, that is, that a philosopher always clarifies the definitions they are working with and makes no pre-suppositions. Thus, Rozzoni’s definitions and descriptions (as well as normative depictions) of phenomenology are important not only for their pragmatic function but predominantly for the meta-philosophical or rather meta-phenomenological one. I quote some passages so as to make my points clearer:

Phenomenological description must be capable of rendering a satisfactory account of the different modes in which our acts (and, correlatively, their objects) and our objects (and, correlatively, their acts) are given to consciousness. When we say our acts are intentional, it implies the necessary corollary that there can be no “consciousness” that is not a “consciousness of.” The relationship between consciousness and object manifests itself in different ways depending on the particular act involved—for example, perception of a tree, phantasy of a tree, etc.—and such relationships are “expressed by the little word ‘of’” (Hua XVI, p. 12; Hua I, p. 33). (Rozzoni 2024, 15)

He continues a bit later in clarifying the different “modes of consciousness” which are important both for understanding phenomenology (“phenomenology must…”), intentionality (which is core to phenomenology), Husserl, phantasy, image, and this book in general:

These initial considerations are enough to suggest that Husserl’s primary interest lies in discerning qualitative differences between our experiences, a question that drives him to seek out an essential distinction between what he calls “modes of consciousness.” Perception is only one such mode; objects are given to us in several other modes as well—such as when we see objects either through images or, as they say, “in our minds.” As indicated, phenomenology must be able to provide an account of the essential differences among these modes of consciousness as well as of the particular nature of each mode’s inherent intentionality—the essential correlation between its subjective and objective poles. After dedicating his efforts to the perceptual dimension in the first two parts of the course, Husserl uses the third part to attempt to define the eidetic differences that distinguish phantasy consciousness from perceptual consciousness. (Rozzoni 2024, 16)

When analyzing phantasy through a phenomenological lens, we are soon confronted with a phenomenon that will prove challenging: it seems that any description of the ways in which phantasy manifests itself must necessarily involve the notion of image. Indeed, it is in this context that Husserl comes to examine the issue of defining the particular type of manifestation pertaining to image and the related form of intentionality called “image consciousness.” In the third part of the Göttingen course, when seeking to define the nature of intentionality pertaining to phantasy acts, Husserl begins by describing this intentionality in terms of “pictorialization [Verbildlichung]” (see, for example, Hua XXIII, § 8). Let us remark that he had already adopted this approach in an 1898 text devoted to “phantasy and representation in image” (see Appendix 1 to Hua XXIII, pp. 117– 152)—a text that did, indeed, serve as a starting point for his later Göttingen analysis. (Rozzoni 2024, 17)

Moreover, the constant use of simple examples (e.g. the photograph of a friend) render the book even more accessible and the concepts and terms explored easier to understand.

Adding to the preciseness and clarity, Rozzoni systematically and precisely clarifies terms/concepts, as it is already shown, both in English and how terms have distinct meanings in German: for example, reality [positionality] – phantasy, fiction, phantasy [Phantasie] – imagination [Einbildung] – imaginatio, perception [Perzeption] – perceptio Wahrnehmung. For example, he writes concerning the latter distinction, and the different choices of words in the original (by Husserl), but also by Rozzoni in the English translation:

Perzeption is Wahrnehmung without belief, and, as Husserl says, any Wahrnehmung that does not take (nimmt) something as true (wahr) is no longer Wahrnehmung in the proper sense of the word. It is legitimate to say that an object given perceptually (wahrnehmungsmäßig) is also given as complying with perceptio (perzeptiv), but the converse is not true: we cannot state that what is given when complying with perceptio (perzeptiv) is automatically given perceptually (wahrnehmungsmäßig). Though these terms may overlap in some cases, this does not change the fact that such a distinction can be rightfully (and not pleonastically) introduced in the English translation, thus allowing the reader to feel the distinction between Wahrnehmung and Perzeption that plays a seminal role in these analyses. This is why Husserl’s references to illusion claiming the status of reality are not, in principle, cases of phantasy complying with perceptio (perzeptiv), but rather of perceptual (wahrnehmungsmäßig) illusions that, once discovered, become canceled perceptions (Wahrnehmungen)—canceled realities only apprehended après coup as perzeptive Phantasien. Accordingly, we can also think of perceptio as a genus encompassing the species of positional perceptio (or Wahrnehmung) and positionless perceptio (or perceptio in the strict sense). (Rozzoni 2024, 17, n. 11)

At last, in a further way to be precise and clear, Rozzoni makes sure that he prevents possible misconceptions and misunderstandings, as for example in the sub-chapter 1.7: A Potential Misunderstanding: The “Image-Theory”, concerning “the unction Husserl assigns to the image object”. (Rozzoni 2024, 28)

Rozzoni engages in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue with artists (painters, installation artists, cinematographers), literary writers (Proust, Kafka), and philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze). It furthermore offers numerous references to scholars dealing with relevant subjects such as imagination, phantasy, film theory and criticism etc. In this way, Rozzoni’s book can also serve as a reference book towards further researching the main topics it discusses (image, phantasy, imagination, reality, fiction, film, experience, perception, belief, time consciousness, epoché, content-form/style, etc.).

It is a book one can read multiple times, each time focusing on a different subject/topic, and each time feeling that they are reading a new book, since new perspectives and connections are opened at each reading, depending on the shift of focus.

Chapter 1 focuses, as it is already evident from its title, on the “Phenomenology of Image and Phantasy”, by visiting concepts such as reality, perception, imagination, phantasy, images, consciousness of reality, consciousness of fiction, etc., and also re-setting their inter-connections.

Chapter 2 entitled “The Aesthetic Consciousness”, evidently focuses on the nature and qualitative originality of aesthetic experience and consciousness, while also “deepen[ing] the originary phenomenological distinctions elucidated in the first [chapter]”. (Rozzoni 2024, 3) In more detail, I quote:

The second chapter deepens the originary phenomenological distinctions elucidated in the first but with a specific focus on the nature of aesthetic experience. Too often, the type of consciousness associated with aesthetic experience is confused with other modalities of consciousness which, despite possibly overlapping with aesthetic experience in some ways, must nonetheless be kept distinct as regards their originary sense. Specifically, the term “aesthetic” is often used interchangeably with terms like “fictional,” “artistic,” or “iconic,” thereby creating confusion that can fundamentally undermine research outcomes. Through the Husserlian manuscripts, I attempt to trace the roots of the “aesthetic” back to a consciousness which, though it may indeed have seminal connections to the associated terms listed above, ultimately possesses its own qualitative originality that cannot be reduced to any of those terms. (Rozzoni 2024, 3)

Moreover, it expands Husserl’s phenomenological re-appropriation of Kant’s “aesthetic disinterest”, through a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of this disinterest, emphasizing, as did Kant, “the moment of the “how” rather than the “what” of a manifestation”. (Rozzoni 2024, 4):

Despite entailing disinterest in something’s existence in the general sense (in other words, disinterest in whether something actually exists or not), aesthetic experience does involve another form of interest: though “existentially disinterested,” it is “axiologically interested.” In aesthetic experience, axiological interest manifests itself through the sphere of feeling—we experience a particular value, an appreciation for the manner in which something is given, and it is necessarily given in a feeling interrelated with this value.

Clearly, talking about the “how” of manifestation, the manner of appearing, might carry the risk of reintroducing the dichotomy between content (what) and form (how) into the discussion of aesthetic experience. […] In aesthetic experience, even the most ordinary object can emerge in the value of its manifestation—and strictly speaking, all manifestations can be aesthetically “expressive” in principle: a “zero degree” of aestheticity is only a limit point. (Rozzoni 2024, 4)

In more detail, Rozzoni discusses in the subchapter 2.6: Constituting the “How”: Stylistic Manifestations (pp. 110-112), this habitual dichotomy between style/form (how) and content (what), which is unfairly conceived as a dichotomy or a binary, as well as content is unfairly conceived as of being hierarchically superior (I would name it as a certain hegemony of the “what” in philosophy, which takes the dimensions of essentializing the philosophical discipline to a “science” -not even, at least, an “art”-, of the content, and allocating to other sciences or arts the “burden” of occupying themselves with the “lesser” “how” of the style or form.) This intra-hegemony of content over form, is a reflection of the general (meta-)philosophical inter-hegemony and supra-hegemony on all other disciplines and forms-of-thinking, found in its most systematized depiction in François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.

As Rozzoni observes, “the distinguishing element in aesthetic experiences is the particular mode of manifestation in which the phenomenon is given (among many possible such modes).” Afterwards, he is talking about the “precise phenomenal modalities whose specific manner of appearance yields an aesthetic effect” (Rozzoni 2024, 110). These “precise phenomenal modalities”, in my understanding, are another formulation for style or form, since, in the following paragraph, he proceeds to give an example from a film, where the director makes “specific stylistic choices […] when depicting one man killing another allow[ing] us to feel not only the what— […] —but also the how”. (Rozzoni 2024, 110) He then mentions the notion of “rhythm”, which is an important stylistic element, on which he also has a reference to Merleau-Ponty, on the “relationship between the how (style, rhythm) and value in cinema”. (Rozzoni 2024, 110, n. 123)

I quote this extended passage since I think it touches on important points concerning the aesthetic experience and style:

To sum up, with belief-acts of each of these four types, we have an essential, eidetic option to transform them into (modified) phantasy acts, rendering them neutral in terms of possible reference to actual existence. Crucially, however, the resulting phantasies do not yet constitute aesthetic experiences merely by virtue of having left reality out of play; rather, the distinguishing element in aesthetic experiences is the particular mode of manifestation in which the phenomenon is given (among many possible such modes). To continue with Husserl’s example, an iconic phantasy of one man killing another may take the form of a mere iconic presentification of a quasi-fact—with no attention to its mode of manifestation—or it may employ precise phenomenal modalities whose specific manner of appearance yields an aesthetic effect. (Rozzoni 2024, 110)

For example, in the duel scene near the end of For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965), the specific stylistic choices Sergio Leone makes when depicting one man killing another allow us to feel not only the what—the quasi-occurrences on-screen that could just as easily be recounted through a purely iconic sequence, advancing the plot without artistic pretensions—but also the how, the value of this particular scene as it unfolds. Our aesthetic experience is affected by the fact that the different phases of the duel are depicted in this particular way, with this specific “rhythm.” Husserl rightly takes care to emphasize what may seem like an obvious point, namely that things are always given in accordance with a mode of manifestation (in the aesthetic sense just described), a mode that may or may not elicit aesthetic pleasure or displeasure—what we might describe as “positive” or “negative” aesthetic valence.

Further on, quoting from Husserl’s Text 15, he refers to phrases such as “object’s manner of appearing”, “mode of presentation [Darstellung]”, and “mode of manifestation”, which all put style, form, and in general the “how” of an object, in the spotlight, apart from its “objective position taking” and “the consciousness of an object as such” (the “what”). (Rozzoni 2024, 111, quoting Husserl in Hua XXIII)

Chapter 3, entitled “Toward Perspectival Images”, investigates “some of the ways that art can become a domain for broadening the notion of aesthetic experience to encompass the possibility of producing a perspective aesthetically (in a contemporary development of the Kantian notion of ‘aesthetic idea’).” Here the potential of art or artistic experience to “transform our conception of the world” (Rozzoni 2024, 4) is explored, “altering the perspectives in which we always live.” (Rozzoni 2024, 5) Thus, here, Rozzoni dares the intimate but neglected connection between art (artistic experience), ethics (how we live), and philosophy:

These transformations can be connoted either positively (by enlightening us to previously unknown facets of the world) or negatively (by concealing, anesthetizing, or speciously “spectacularizing” reality).

More fundamentally, I seek to demonstrate how, by acting upon sense as the foundational element of a (real or fictitious) world, art can operate in a dimension “refractory” to the distinction between documentary and fiction—sub specie sensus—and can even explore the thresholds between these two polarities in multiple directions; […]. Art recipients thus become participants in perspectives that force them to think at a cognitive-emotional-axiological level, whether or not they believe in the factuality of what they are seeing.

Artistic images can vary and deform reality— not so much to offer a diversion from it as to allow new essences to emerge and thereby create possibilities for expressing new perspectives.

The third chapter examines this concept in detail, specifically in relation to cinematographic images. (Rozzoni 2024, 5)

[…] If, as I propose, the condition of a world’s possibility for manifestation is the essential connection among narrative (perspective stricto sensu), values, and emotions, these authors think of cinematography as a privileged field that, though purely presentificational in nature, can create new perspectives directly affecting our perpetually perspectival comprehension of what we call “the world.”

In fact, cinematography can also provide an avenue through which to experiment with experiences we typically cannot or would not seek out in real life. (Rozzoni 2024, 6)

Proceeding to give some sample tastes of the possibilities of (attempting/essaying) thinking that it offers, à la Nietzsche’s sisyphean (saperesapio) method of philosophical thinking, that tastes over (thinking) possibilities, I will start from the first line of the Preface, which in a philosophical but mostly a psychoanalytical wording talks about a “return to […] the image”, in the same way that Lacan spoke of a return to Freud, or Aristotle of a visiting or a return to names (etymologies). This is the clear core purpose of the book “to promote a return to a description of the image that starts from its fundamental characteristics, its essential features.” (Rozzoni 2024, 1). Furthermore, “[t]he fundamental question that such lines of inquiry soon raise concerns whether there are structural differences between our image experiences and phantasy experiences—or, in phenomenological terms, between image conscious- ness and phantasy consciousness.” (Rozzoni 2024, 1) In the attempt to answer this Rozzoni takes different tastes of Husserl’s work, in discussion, as said, with commentators and scholars as well as other philosophers, artists, literary writers, filmmakers, etc. More specifically, to focus on Husserl, in his course from 1905 attempted to define the nature of image based on his inquiry on the nature of phantasy. Thus, it already becomes evident that in Husserl there is a direct correlation between imagery and phantasy. This is the key question here as Rozzoni locates it, “whether phantasy consciousness is ultimately founded upon image consciousness. […] In other words, does phantasy need images in order to represent absent objects, or is our ability to produce and see images instead grounded in phantasy consciousness?” (Rozzoni 2024, 2)

The Husserlian answer to this, which Rozzoni will keep analyzing, is a reversal of the hypothesis that “phantasy needs images”: I quote:

[…] his phenomenological inquiries yielded the result that phantasy need not necessarily be founded on the capacity to pro- duce mental images. In Husserl’s view, the capacity for phantasy (as an originary modality of consciousness) need not be grounded in images proper; rather, phantasy consciousness is what underlies the capacity to recognize and produce physical images. He determines that phantasizing is not projection of an image medium acting as a representative for an absent object but rather is perception in the as-if, quasi-perception carried out by a quasi-subject—hence the possibility of distinguishing between real and phantasy egos from a phenomenological standpoint. In this sense, phantasy is the originary mode of consciousness that, in more strict phenomenological terms, can be called presentification. We can then further distinguish between “private presentifications” (quasi-perceptions without images) and presentifications in image. (Rozzoni 2024, 2)

As part of his analysis, which involves further original questions inspired by this Husserlian answer, he is asking whether the usual distinction or even dichotomy between images pertaining to phantasy, and perception pertaining to reality, shall be further “tried” in terms of thinking: “in other words, that proper images (presentifications in image) are eo ipso considered nonreal, whereas perception involves things ‘in the flesh’ and thus taken as real.” (Rozzoni 2024, 2). This is the main inquiry of Chapter 1 entitled “Phenomenology of Image and Phantasy”:

[…] perception per se is no guarantee of reality, nor does the image per se guarantee unreality: it is possible for perceptual experiences (or, more precisely, experiences complying with perceptio) to pertain to phantasy and for image experiences to force associations with reality. Though the image in itself is “unreal” in the sense of its presentifying nature (it shows something not present in the flesh), this is not to say that the sujet— the thing or person we see by “looking into the image”—cannot or should not be considered real. In short, we can have phantasies in the flesh and images imbued with belief.

[…] The image in itself makes no absolute guarantees concerning belief or lack thereof: context is what motivates the emergence of a documentary or fictional consciousness in relation to any given image. The same can apply to perceptual, noniconic experiences: we can experience them either in a consciousness of reality (as occurs constantly in context of going about our everyday lives) or a consciousness of fiction (as is the case, to mention one paradigmatic example, when we watch events upon a theatrical stage, which represents one possible context in which fictional worlds can comply with perceptio). (Rozzoni 2024, 2-3)

Rozzoni’s methodological insights, appearing, apart from the Preface, in more detail under Chapter 1, Sub-chapter “Again and Again” (1.1) are interesting themselves. It seems to me that he is consciously or unconsciously following a Deleuzian methodological-creative approach regarding the definition of philosophy as a creation of concepts. I think that this creativity can only spring from a synthetic openness, a wide and broad variety of interests within a field, an interdisciplinary openness, and a personal passionate investment to the topic of the research, as much as a “diagnosis” of an issue that is critical for the spatiotemporal milieu of one’s living experience. Rozzoni’s project/book incorporates all of the aforementioned elements or criteria, which render it significant, and original. In more detail, the three criteria that Deleuze has set for the worth-writing book/work (“bon ouvrage”) are the following: at first, spotting an error in books on the same or neighbouring subject (polemical function), then adding something that you think was ignored or forgotten on that subject (inventive function), and, at last, creating a new concept (creative function).

Hence, Rozzoni starts by spotting an “error”, or rather an omission, concerning Husserl’s manuscripts, on which his study is rooted upon, which are the manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, elaborated over a period of 20 years, and published in 1980 in Husserliana XXIII in German. Their importance according to Rozzoni is that they “serve as testimony to the father of Phenomenology’s style of work—evidence that is all the more significant because it concerns themes Husserl considered crucial to the destiny of the entire phenomenological project, despite having devoted comparatively little space to them in works published during his lifetime.” The fact that a manuscript is not published by a philosopher/writer shall “not mean that they are not of great importance: they offer valuable insights into published passages devoted to phantasy and image consciousness, offering beneficial context through which we can appreciate their relevance more fully.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10)

Thus, he is spotting an error in the research around these manuscripts and their corresponding thematic units and concepts (polemical function), and he is adding something that he thinks was ignored or forgotten on that subject (inventive function), which is the “underappreciated theme”, in Husserl’s corpus, of the phenomenology of (the) image (Rozzoni 2024, 11). The reasons for this underrepresentation and underappreciation are given as follows:

Whereas Husserl’s phenomenological analyses concerning theory of judgment, logic, perception, and time are well-known, his contributions toward a phenomenology of phantasy and image might be described as relatively unknown, or at least lesser known until recently. One reason for this is the aforementioned lack of space devoted to the topic in Husserl’s published works (see, for instance, Hua I; Husserl 1939, especially §§39–42), even though Husserl famously declared that “feigning [Fiktion],” exercised by our “free phantasy,” “makes up the vital element of phenomenology as of every other eidetic science” (Hua III/1, p. 160). Moreover, Husserliana XXIII, which collects the bulk of Husserl’s unpublished work on Phantasy and Image Consciousness (Hua XXIII), was only published in 1980, and John B. Brough’s English translation was not released until 2005. Now, however, several aspects previously overlooked or misunderstood by many contemporary theories of image can be addressed more thoroughly with the help of these richly complex writings, and these implicit potentialities are on the verge of finally taking their rightful place within philosophical debate on the subject (Brough 2012; Ferencz-Flatz/Hanich 2016; Wiesing 2005). (Rozzoni 2024, 11)

He continues by clearing up this lacuna (inventive function), and from the matrix of the lacuna to, then, proposing a new potential arising concept, or field of study, for new phenomena (of image) in phenomenology and in philosophy in general (aesthetic and other experiences), as well, as we will see in the following chapters, in art and in film. Thus, these phenomena pragmatically extend in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways, rendering them a concept:

[…] the Nachlass writings shed light on the specific (and difficult) genesis of some of the most significant results Husserl published within his lifetime, and even directly explore the complex (and problematic) nature of these processes of perpetual development. Another seminal aspect immediately relevant to our work is that these manuscripts on image and phantasy (and, more generally, on reality and unreality) invite others to embark upon their own explorations of these topics. (Rozzoni 2024, 10)

Though the Nachlass represents a corpus of posthumous manuscripts, it would be a mistake to discount the enormous potential within these pages for that reason alone. Rather than construing this as some insurmountable obstacle to the contemporary revival of such research, let us think of it as a precious—albeit complicated —opportunity to develop a new field of study concerning new types of descriptions for new phenomena. (Rozzoni 2024, 11)

The further pragmatic importance of studying these phenomena, apart from establishing a new field of study or a new concept (thus rendering this book a primary source), through which readers “embark upon investigative processes of their own” (Rozzoni 2024, 11), is that if we cast light on Husserl’s corpus, and read this book as a secondary source this time (as said, it has this double function), these unpublished philosophical manuscripts can have the value of revealing a “seminal role in shedding light on the genesis of an author’s published corpus and providing a treasure trove of new avenues through which to explore and develop the author’s thoughts.” (Rozzoni 2024, 11-12)

To emphasize it once more, as does Rozzoni, this does not mean that this study is limited to what I call its secondary function, namely, as commentary of the manuscripts of Husserl, thus merely opening up an horizon of study within Husserl’s scholarship, or what Husserl would also call a “regional ontology” or “ontological region”, but, and according to Husserl’s methodological insights on the phenomenological method, [thus studying these new horizons that these phenomena open up to, that is, the “essence of images”, based on Husserl’s phenomenological method; a cyclical meta-textual process, which constitutes another originality of this book], also opening “new horizons and descriptions such an approach could potentially reveal today, and how we might use Husserl’s legacy—which he encouraged others to test “again and again [immer wieder],” especially through variations—as a starting point for new inquiries.” (Rozzoni 2024, 11)

Such horizon-openings can be extended to phenomena which were not already there when Husserl was writing, but which are prominent nowadays (“phenomena that Husserl did not specifically describe”) (Rozzoni 2024, 10), that is on our own Umwelt, such as “image material found on the various electronic devices that have now become part of our everyday lives […].” (Rozzoni 2024, 10-11) If we were “to insist on subjecting any phenomena that Husserl did not specifically describe […] to static limits defined before such phenomena existed, it would betray the very spirit of phenomenology.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10-11)

Moreover, despite admitting that “[t]he present study does not pretend to be all-encompassing regarding the different ways in which such a task might be undertaken” (Rozzoni 2024, 12), that is, the different possibilities of horizons, a further horizon that Rozzoni’s book can achieve to open out is to “yield retrospective potential for new dialogues between Husserl and [these] philosophers, thereby opening up novel possibilities for interpretation, development, and critique that can and must serve as an avenue toward productive perspectives on our contemporary understanding of images.” (Rozzoni 2024, 12) This is due to the late publication of these Husserlian manuscripts in 1980, and the fact that philosophers that were influenced by Husserl, such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and others, did not have access to it when forming their own concepts.

Such expansion of horizons and new conceptualizations (“paths”) “are never easy” as he admits, “and worse yet, they are perennially menaced by aporetical results.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10) This latter phrase, “perennially menaced by aporetical results”, I find to be a quintessential phenomenological but also philosophical “feeling” and disposition, or even a stylistic and a methodological philosophical act of epoché, dictated by the affirmation of aporia within a philosophical tendency and thinking, as it was also set to be in Ancient Philosophy, re-set by Friedrich Nietzsche’s method of ephexis, and systematized in François Laruelle’s non-philosophical methodology, abstaining from or suspending from arriving at a (final) decision, thus having the philosophical courage to stay and remain “menaced” by aporias; as much as posthuman feminists advocated on the virtue of “staying with the trouble”, against the totalitarian modern or positivistic (or “scientifistic” as I would prefer it) reflex or tendency (or rather obsessional or even psychotic tendency that in combination seek for a certainty-safety-trust nexus regarding an “unmovable earth” or ground of thinking, -to borrow Husserl’s phrase on the immovability of the earth-) of arriving at a final unmovable result. I quote from Rozzoni:

Such paths are never easy, of course—and worse yet, they are perennially menaced by aporetical results. Despite treading arduous ground, however, the material in these manuscripts offers us a unique opportunity to describe the iconic and imaginative dimension of our time in the spirit of phenomenology. Echoing a well-known Merleau-Ponty essay, this would mean striving to develop the “shadow” (Merleau-Ponty 1959) of Husserl’s legacy—a shadow that still looms large today, inviting us to take up the challenge and shed new light on these elusive domains (while simultaneously generating new and productive obscurities, as an essential counterpart of every process of clarification (Franzini 2009, pp. 37–47)). (Rozzoni 2024, 10)

At this point, I would like to raise three further points from this book which, I consider, at least from my own horizon/“regional-ontology”/“situated point of view”, as highlights that can motivate further thought.

The first, concerns what I would call the “Heideggerian colonization” of Continental Philosophy, and especially the “Heideggerian colonization” of the philosophers that Heidegger mostly deals with, as is the case of Husserl. Although Rozzoni does not either explicitly or implicitly make such a statement, I think this can be deducted as a comment, not only from various other instances of reading authors such as Plato, Schelling and others, from the point of view that Heidegger has read them, so that they become, in a way, more of a Heidegger’s Plato and a Heidegger’s Schelling than themselves as themselves, but in addition here from the fact that Heidegger happened to edit “the well-known ‘lectures on time consciousness’ in 1928 in Volume 9 of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung.” (Rozzoni 2024, 12-13) These lecturers are only the fourth part of the Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge (Hauptstücke aus der Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis), which is a course that Husserl taught in Göttingen in 1904/05. I think that it is not completely irrelevant that Heidegger edited the fourth part of these lectures into a published volume, and this same fourth part gained the most notoriety out of the three other parts, where the first and second were devoted on the phenomenology of perception and attention, and the third on “a phenomenological description of phantasy as he considered it a necessary and complementary step to its account of perception.” As Rozzoni further explains: “He set out to uncover the essential differences between perception and phantasy, eventually finding them to be two originary modes of manifestation marked by an irreducible temporal difference (hence his devotion of the fourth and final part of the course to seminal investigations of time consciousness).” (Rozzoni 2024, 1) Thus, Rozzoni’s book comes to fill this lacuna in Husserlian studies and re-emplace the importance of all four parts, but especially of part three (on phantasy), within Husserl’s experiential strata comprising his “science of knowledge” or gnoseology, and their respective forms of intentionality. Maybe this bias that was taken up by Heidegger, was already initiated by Husserl, who, as he

explains at the beginning of this seminal course, [he] initially intended to devote the lectures exclusively to “the superior intellectual acts, […] the sphere of the so-called ‘theory of judgment.’” Later, however, he felt compelled to instead conduct an analysis at a “lower level,” i.e., of “those phenomena that, under the somewhat vague titles of perception, sensation, phantasy representation, representational image, memory, are well known to everyone, yet have still undergone far too little scientific investigation” (Hua XXXVIII, p. 3). This testifies to Husserl’s belief that a “science of knowledge” would inherently entail analyzing the “aesthetic ways in which this knowledge is articulated” (Franzini 2002, p. XIV); in this sense, this third Hauptstück may provide a capital contribution to the study of aesthetics as gnoseologia inferior.

It is in this context of inquiry into the lower experiential strata that Husserl confronts the challenging task of providing an account of the concept of phantasy, which he considered a necessary counterpoint to the account of perception he gave in the first two parts of the course (see Hua XXIII, p. 1). This would ultimately prove crucial to defining the particular form of intentionality pertaining to phantasy and image consciousness under scrutiny in this book. (Rozzoni 2024, 13-14)

Despite the fact that Husserl, as a philosopher critical to himself, changed his mind and made a four-part lecture onto experience/gnoseology, his commentators and editors were still biased towards the “superior intellectual acts”, as did Philosophy for most of its history, and especially philosophers that made it to the (hegemonic) canon, such as Heidegger.

The second point that I would like to highlight, concerns a possible connection, which I formed based on Rozzoni’s writing, between phenomenological epoché and psychoanalysis. This is not a connection that Rozzoni implies in any sense, but through the way he describes the phenomenon of Ichspaltung (ego-splitting) (in 1.10: Phantasy Ego, pp. 38-44), based on Husserl’s Text no. 15, he paves a connection between it and phenomenological epoché, which if thought further, since Ichspaltung can also concern psychopathology and psychoanalysis, then it might be said that there is a possible connection between phenomenological epoché  and psychoanalysis to be additionally elaborated on. To further unveil this thought, towards a possible future elaboration, Rozzoni explains, starting from the aforementioned section, that “the phenomenon of Ichspaltung” is “the division of the ego into the real ego and the phantasy ego” (Rozzoni 2024, 38). The corresponding footnote is the piece of text which inspired this connection to me: “The phenomenon of ego-splitting (Ichspaltung) does not concern the relationship between real and phantasy experiences exclusively. It goes to the very heart of the possibility of the phenomenological epoché.” (Rozzoni 2024, 38, n. 38) If the Ichspaltung is a presupposition or a precondition for the phenomenological epoché, then how could we connect both non-pathological (construction of the phantasy experience/intentionality) and pathological cases of ego-splitting (such as psychosis) with the methodological act of epoché? And also, could there be a linkage between epoché and pictorial arts and film (since they are, in a way, a parastasis of the phantasy experience/intentionality)? Which new methodology can we derive from these, which new insights into phantasy and psychosis, as well as which new insights from phantasy and psychosis concerning each other as well as the phenomenological epoché? These will remain open questions for the moment.

A last, the third point to highlight concerns style/form (how) and content (what), as already aforementioned in the presentation of Chapter 2. Such a stylistic emphasis is rarely found in philosophy, especially within academia and secondary literature on philosophers-but it is nearly always found in the work of all philosophers, which consists a paradox-, and thus I think it is always important to highlight it when an author/philosopher reserves some lines or pages on philosophical stylistics or the aesthetics of philosophical style.

There are further innumerable both systematic but also aphoristic points that one can locate in Rozzoni’s The Phenomenological Image, thus rendering it a work that can be read at and from multiple “places” and multiple times, offering different perspectives to not only phenomenologists or philosophers, but also to artists, filmmakers, art and film theorists and critics, literary theorists, but also to anyone seeking to see, in action, how philosophy operates, since, in my view, it is a book concentrating some of the best philosophical methodologies and traits one can use, as demonstrated in this review.


[1] This paper is prepared as part of my postdoctoral research project “Ontological Exhaustion: Being-Tired, and Tired-of-Being: a philosophy of fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout” at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, implemented with the financial support of the National Programme “Early-stage and Postdoctoral researchers” – 2, Stage 1, 2022–2024.

[2] Husserl, Edmund (1980): Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Ed. Marbach, Eduard. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff; – Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Eng. transl. ed. by Brough, J., Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.