Eugen Fink: Play as Symbol of the World

Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings Book Cover Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings
Studies in Continental Thought
Eugen Fink. Translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner
Indiana University Press
2016
Hardcover
349

Reviewed by: Shawn Loht (Baton Rouge Community College, USA)

While his work has been the subject of extensive research in Germany in recent years, Eugen Fink has only ever received sparing exposure in English-language scholarship. Certainly much of this is due to the lack of English translations of his writings. The publication of Play as Symbol of the World (Spiel als Weltsymbol), considered by many to be Fink’s most important book, will hopefully give his work a wider audience outside of Germany and encourage the publication of more translations of his work.

Fink was a student and collaborator of Husserl during the 1920’s and 30’s. He was also a working associate of Heidegger during the latter decades of Heidegger’s career. The stature of these two no doubt overshadows Fink’s contributions to phenomenology and twentieth-century German philosophy. Fink’s work is best-known to English-speaking audiences through his seminar on Heraclitus, co-authored with Heidegger (available in English under the title Heraclitus Seminar), and through his book on Husserl’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Fink also authored a highly original book on Nietzsche’s philosophy which appeared in English translation through Continuum Press in 2003. In the 2000’s, the German publisher Karl Alber began issuing a complete critical edition of Fink’s writings, of which Spiel als Weltsymbol is the seventh volume. This English edition from Indiana University Press, translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner, presents all of the contents of the seventh volume in the Karl Alber critical edition. In addition to the title essay are included several shorter pieces of Fink’s on the topics of play and cosmology that he wrote between 1957 and 1975, the year of his death. Bookending the writings by Fink are an extended translators’ foreword and an afterword by the editors of the German text, the latter of which presents an extensive overview of Fink’s philosophical program as it relates to Play as Symbol of the World. All in all, these various items make for a very fine, comprehensive edition of Fink’s text.

In this review, I will focus on just the main, title work of the volume, as this portion will be of principal interest for most readers. The title Fink gives to this work, Play as Symbol of the World, requires some unpacking. As the book’s German editors note, Fink proceeds by attempting to describe, without prior assumptions, what connections obtain between the title’s main keywords: play, symbol, and world (303). One guiding thought for Fink is the oft-cited Fragment 52 of Heraclitus, which suggests that the cosmic aion is akin to the play of a child; the life cycle of the universe is a child moving pieces on a game board (77). (This fragment figures strongly into Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus, with which Fink was surely familiar.) Fink’s approach throughout is dialectical, somewhat Aristotelian even, as he works through the historical and conceptual puzzles bound up with the title’s theme. Scholars of Heidegger will notice a lot of similarity as well. Fink demonstrates a flair for deconstructing historical philosophical prejudice and dissecting the original meanings of terms. Much of Fink’s aim in the text is to arrive at a satisfactory phenomenological description of the relationship of play and world such that the book’s title can demonstrate any meaningful expression. What does it mean to call play a “symbol” of the world? Wherein lay the metaphorical similarity between play and world? And how is the notion of “world” to be understood? Why would one make such a comparison?

In addition to the Heraclitean paradigm of cosmic play, other significant cues from ancient thought inspire Fink’s analysis. Fink frequently engages the Platonic conception of imitation and its underlying ontological commitments as a foil for developing a phenomenological view of play. Moreover, the entire third chapter of Fink’s book focuses on the development of cults and the manifestation of play in cultic ritual. In Fink’s account, the anthropology of primitive cultures indicates that play originated historically as a primal, cultic practice rather than as a vehicle for mere amusement or entertainment.

The first of the book’s four chapters analyzes the concept of play systematically. Fink understands the term “play” (Spiel) in multiple guises; these correspond well to the common use of the word “play” in English. In English vernacular we often use the word “play” to refer to what children do when they amuse themselves. We tend to think of play as essential to a child’s healthy development. But “play” is also often used to describe engaging in a game (e.g. “I play chess”); or, more remotely, it names what we watch at the theatre as well as the “play-acting” performed by actors. In older locution for instance, actors were referred to as “players.” This older meaning reminds one that acting and theatrical performance were originally conceived as mimesis, or imitation. And of course, this is the Platonic critique of the performative arts: what they depict is not real, but rather a watered-down copy of a more original reality. Fink’s conception of play encompasses all of these aspects. He understands play as an imaginary, “non-actual” state of existence enacted on the foundation of the actual, lived world. Play is a mimetic, yet also freely-chosen world-bestowal. In terms of its ontological status, Fink gives play the Husserlian label “irreal,” in order to indicate its phenomenological quality of fostering a non-actual disclosure of meaning (95-96).

One might get the drift from this book’s title that play is the main subject, that the book comprises a work on the philosophy of sport. The opening title pitches the idea that play stands to symbolize world, that there is some illustrative relationship between the former and the latter. But in the end, Play as Symbol of the World is a cosmology, an account of world. In Heideggerian fashion, Fink by and large ends up in a very different spot than where he began the text.

“World” for Fink is to be understood in Heideggerian terms. Fink even uses a good amount of space in Chapter One citing Heidegger’s conception of world from Being and Time as he formulates his own position (66ff). World in Fink’s reading comprises the underlying background within which all phenomena appear for the human agent; world both individualizes and contextualizes. Yet world is not a thing, not a substance to which one can assign a definite article. It is not to be understood metaphysically, as the receptacle housing all things of the universe, nor is world the sum total of all beings. World disappears when we try to circumscribe it with a definition. In and of itself, world is meaningless and groundless, and lacking end or purpose outside of its very manner of givenness. In other words, world’s underlying function is simply to foster the appearance of things in general. It is thus a crucial counterpart to human existence insofar as all human life is “worldly” or world-oriented.

Another thought to Heidegger is apposite here, though it is not a subject to which Fink dedicates explicit attention. Whereas Heidegger tends to characterize being as the fundamental philosophical category, Fink sees world as filling this role. Fink’s rationale appears to be that world is the more immediate, yet also more elusive phenomenological underpinning of human existence. World is the more visceral, tacit background that cradles human life. Some contrast with Husserl is likewise visible on this score. Fink justifies his conception of world with much less attention to the primacy of the transcendental ego, instead taking world and human existence to be co-constituted at rock-bottom. (For a comparison, see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations §1, Section 7.)

The central position of this book, which Fink articulates in the fourth and final chapter, is that play’s uniqueness lay in its capacity to reveal world (206ff). This is because play (broadly construed as theatrical play-acting, games, sport, or cultic ritual) fundamentally enacts the irreal, groundless purposelessness of world; these features are what play itself is. Play in turn reveals the world-open character of human existence. In other words, Fink suggests, we play because we are open to world and are existentially co-constituted along with world. The hypnotic character of play is universally attractive to all people precisely because play allows us to enact and own world through independent means. Play functions as a unique mode of human existence in which we are empowered to exercise our freedom and realize it reflexively.Yet, these achievements remain irreal; they comprise moments of human existence that are at once non-actual. In this way, play comes to mirror the ontological status of world itself.

In the end, Fink does not endorse describing play as a symbol of world, at least in the guise of a metaphor for world’s ontological makeup. More deeply, Fink holds that play manifests a primal connection with world, as expressed in the Greek etymology for “symbol.” The sym- root, in the Greek sum, conveys a togetherness or commonality; the keyword sumballein denotes two or more essentially connected “fragments of being.” Thus symbols do not comprise mere metaphorical comparisons or representations (127). In this case, while play enacts world in an irreal fashion, world cannot be understood as play. At the most, Fink argues, to propose that world is itself an instance of play comprises an antinomy, or at least a problematic that can only be solved outside of metaphysical thought (215). Not only is world incomprehensible as a conceptual whole; even to make this comparison overlooks that human beings are those who play. It would be a contradiction in terms to hold (as Heraclitus suggests) that world plays.

This is a complex and challenging text, perhaps an essential primary source in the history of phenomenology. It is certainly noteworthy for exemplifying a unique crossroads in the legacies of Husserl and Heidegger. Fink’s writing style is occasionally pedantic and shows some repetition as the chapters proceed, but these drawbacks do not detract too much from the book’s accomplishments.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails Book Cover At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Sarah Bakewell
Other Press
2016
Hardcover
439

Reviewed by: Anthony Clemons (Alma Mater Europaea/Global Center for Advanced Studies)

Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. However, a philosophy taken outside of the context of the philosopher’s life can make their ideas seem, at best, un-relatable and, at worst, inaccessible.

In her latest work At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell revisits the texts that defined her adolescence and adopts this premise, writing, “Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so” (p. 326) This feeds into her interest of investigating the lives of the seminal philosophers who re-appropriated German phenomenology into a redefined brand of continental philosophy known as existentialism. In doing so, Bakewell assumes the role of cultural tour guide and frames an ever-vivid and occasionally nostalgic milieu of love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, lifelong partnerships, and the fallings-out of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Wright, Edmund Husserl, Jean Genet and other larger-than-life thinkers who defined the thinking and culture of the post-World-War II generation.

In the book’s opening pages, Bakewell encapsulates the depth of her scholarship and biographical pluck by encapsulating the birth of existentialism into a singular point, “near the turn of 1932-3 when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house specialty, apricot cocktails” (p. 1). These burgeoning philosophers included a 27-year-old Sartre, his 25-year-old girlfriend Beauvoir as well as Raymond Aron, an academic colleague of Sartre’s who was visiting during winter break from his philosophical studies in Berlin.

Suffering from intellectual atrophy in their own careers, Sartre and Beauvoir were interested in the intellectual discoveries Aron had unearthed in Berlin. Aron was only happy to oblige by describing a new brand of philosophy purported by Martin Husserl and refined by Aron’s mentor, Edmund Heidegger. Using vivid prose, Bakewell richly describes the Husserlian word phenomenology,

[Aron] was now telling his friends about a philosophy he had discovered there with the sinuous name of phenomenology—a word so long yet elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it makes a line of iambic trimester all by itself (p. 2).

Though well-educated in their own right, neither Sartre or Beauvoir found Heidegger’s treatise on phenomenology to be linguistically accessible. However, on this day, in this café, Bakewell describes the moment Sartre and Beauvoir jumped into the phenomenological abyss, arguably spurring the most influential cultural movement of the 20th-century. Speaking directly to Sartre, Aron said, “You see mon petit camarade…if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (p. 3).

Flying in the face of the analytic calculus in which they were formally trained, Beauvoir wrote that, “Sartre turned pale on hearing this” (p. 3). Similarly, Sartre would recall in an interview some 40 years later that moment “knocked me out”, because there was now a treatise for, “doing philosophy that reconnected it with [the] normal, lived experience” (p. 3). In fact, Bakewell’s rendering of just how much Aron piqued Sartre and Beauvoir’s curiosity gives her opening a flavor of France at that time; feverish, yet relaxed.

Ultimately, this new-fangled notion of phenomenology was the ingredient that both young philosophers needed to refine their own theories and a starting point for Bakewell to chronicle how their ideas fuse and infuse the European cultural scene.

Yet, a discussion of phenomenology and existentialism would be incomplete without considering the role of World-War II. Bakewell does this by recounting how even the celebrated minds of philosophy are sometimes thrust into the fray of reality. She illustrates her case with an account of Sartre being held as a German prisoner of war and his anti-climatic escape by making an ophthalmology appointment and leaving unattended, only to never return. Bakewell also parallel’s Sartre’s experience with the measures Beauvoir was taking to survive the rationing of food and other items in Nazi-controlled Paris.

Upon Sartre’s return to France, Bakewell sets the stage to evidence just how much reality can affect even the staunchest of pure practitioners, writing, “Beauvoir was briefly jubilant at seeing Sartre, then frankly pissed off by the way he began passing judgement on everything she had been doing to survive” (p. 143). Sartre’s confrontation with Beauvoir regarding her philosophical compromises would ultimately cause both philosophers to make an introspective inquiry as to how existentialism should now be defined, leading to Sartre’s seminal work Being and Nothingness (1943) and Beauvoir’s feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949).

Combined, these examples are the formative means that Bakewell uses to frame the case that phenomenology and existentialism are more than just a couple of philosophical theories. Rather, they are rather formative notions of the nature of living, suffused with the real experiences and personal sufferings of those who developed the ideas and lived their lives according to their dictates.

Early-on, Bakewell acknowledges the influence existentialism welded on her adolescent years and acknowledges the cherished the role it serves in her life today. She writes, “when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Albert Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology and Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news” (pp. 28-29). This is why Sartre, Heidegger, and especially Beauvoir would likely approve of Bakewell’s approach to telling the story of existentialism. As a storyteller, she reconnects their lived experiences with their contribution to the development of existentialism as a philosophy. She also pervades her storytelling with the mark of her own interdisciplinary education and experiences.

Born in England and raised in Australia, Bakewell is a polymath and self-reformed academic. She read philosophy at the University of Essex and eventually took a postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. Professionally, she has worked as a factory worker on a tea-bag assembly-line, bookshop attendant, library cataloguer, and is now an award-winning full-time author and professor of Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford, UK. These experiences have influenced Bakewell’s biographical style, giving rise to her willingness to ground the high-brow, biographical tone of her characters to their own story, while also intertwining her own lived experiences.

At the Existentialist Café offers a nostalgic and introspective look at the birth and development of pure existentialism through the eyes of the most notable philosophers of the movement and the author, whose experience with the philosophy provides grounded clarity. The book is also a refreshing glance at the mid-twentieth century ideas that led to the post-modern and deconstructionist philosophies that we continue to refine. Ms. Bakewell’s method of storytelling exudes a personal sense that is neither overreaching nor overtly critical. It is seemingly the result of a conversation between her, a historian, a philosopher, and a cultural critic, all draining Apricot cocktails along a bustling Parisian street, while reminiscing on an earlier period forgotten by most, remembered by some, but loved by all.

Jacques Derrida: Heidegger: The Question of Being and Historyd History (Trans. Geoffrey Bennington)

Heidegger: The Question of Being and History Book Cover Heidegger: The Question of Being and History
Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington
University of Chicago Press
2016
Cloth $40.00
288

Reviewed by: George Webster (University of Warwick)

In the academic year of 1964-65, Derrida taught two courses at the École Normale Supérieure: an agrégation course on ‘The Theory of Signification in the Logical Investigations and Ideen I’ and ‘Heidegger: The Question of Being and History’. Having fulfilled his curricular obligations with the former, it was Derrida’s own interests that governed the choosing and development of the latter. This volume, painstakingly transcribed and translated from Derrida’s own handwritten notes, therefore provides a glimpse into some of the earliest workings of Derrida’s thought.

Given through nine sessions, this lecture course is concerned with rendering apparent the essential link between being and history (referred to as ‘historicity,’ to avoid confusion with the academic discipline and actual world history) throughout Heidegger’s thought. As to it’s broad construction, sessions one-through-six of the lecture series constitutes an introduction to the titular concepts, Heidegger’s approach, and an account of the ways in which Heidegger breaks from two other prominent philosophical reflections on historicity – those of Hegel and Husserl. Sessions six-through-nine feature Derrida’s examination of the role of historicity in Being and Time (henceforth BT) as well as Heidegger’s corresponding critique of Western thought.

In his introductory session, Derrida focuses on the use of the word ‘being’ in his course title over that of ‘ontology’. He forwards the view that Heidegger’s destruction (Destruktion) of the history of ontology (initiated in BT) develops into the rejection of the very notion of ontology itself as Heidegger’s thought matures. This session also features the first of many comparisons with Hegel. Here Derrida clarifies Heidegger’s method of Destruktion by contrasting it with Hegelian dialectical refutation (Widerlegung). He demonstrates that whilst Hegelian Widerlegung gathers up and sublimates its previous elements in the process of producing a higher philosophy (3), Destruktion is a ‘deconstruction’ or ‘solicitation’ that reveals what is hidden within the structures of philosophical thought (9).

In his second lecture, Derrida turns to the place of the term ‘history’ in his course title. He explains that Heidegger is perhaps the first philosopher to identify an essential relation between being and history and highlights two basic ‘assurances’ (41) that betray the essential historicity of being. First, the fact that we are ‘always already’ linguistically familiar with the meaning of being in some preliminary fashion (42-3). Second, the fact that Dasein is the being that is interrogated (Befragtes) within the question of the meaning of being (46).

In session three, Derrida pauses to explore an implication of the first assurance just outlined: the connection between being and language. As he examines the role of metaphor in Heidegger’s thought, Derrida masterfully decodes the famous Heideggerian statement that ‘language is the house of being’ (57-9). Derrida suggests that, on Heidegger’s view, metaphor obscures the meaning of being and that a proper, poetic language capable of directly speaking being should eventually arise (62-3).

Session four opens with a lengthy analysis of Heidegger’s seemingly innocuous reference to the Befragtes as a text on which the meaning of being is to be read (77-84). Derrida then shifts back to focus on the second assurance of being’s historicity: the identification of Dasein as Befragtes. Derrida explicates the two principal reasons for this identification: first, the fact that Dasein is itself the being that poses the question of being (85); second, that through this questioning Dasein comes closer to its own essence (85-6). He then highlights the problem of the hermeneutic circle: the objection that we cannot identify Dasein as the being through which we will gain access to the meaning of being without first enjoying this access (86). Derrida argues that not only is this objection unproblematic, but that it emphasises the very historicity of being that Heidegger is working to reveal insofar as it demonstrates ‘the impossibility of a pure point of departure’ (90) for philosophical thought. This session closes with the beginning of a lengthy account of the differences between Hegel’s, Husserl’s, and Heidegger’s respective reflections on historicity. Here, Derrida contrasts Heidegger’s view that being is essentially historical with Hegel’s view that historicity depends on state, culture, memory, and consciousness (99-104).

Continuing this juxtaposition through session five, Derrida now brings in Husserl, who he suggests has a comparable account to Hegel’s insofar as they both assume a primary distinction between the historicity of culture and the non-historicity of nature (105). Derrida embarks on a perhaps unnecessary and tangential comparison of Hegel and Husserl (105-113) before beginning to account for the ways in which Heidegger breaks from the Husserlian account (114-126).

It is clear that Derrida struggled with timing toward the end of session five, leaving him to finish his survey of Heidegger’s breaks with Husserl in the sixth session (127-133). The most significant of these breaks is the fact that, for Heidegger, the Husserlian account constitutes a ‘worldview’ (129) — that is, a representation of the totality of beings. Derrida points out that, for Heidegger, the idea that philosophy offers such a worldview (Weltbild) has its origins in Plato. Heidegger therefore sees Husserl as part of the metaphysical tradition he is trying to deconstruct (130-1). Derrida now shifts to his analysis of BT, wherein he demonstrates that reflection on Dasein’s relation to its birth and death reveals the prejudice which has hitherto blocked any proper recognition of historicity: the privileging of presence and the present (137). Rejecting this prejudice, Heidegger suggests that birth and death are not events no longer or not yet present. Rather, they coexist in Dasein insofar as Dasein is the continuity (Erstreckung) between them (148).

In session seven, Derrida acknowledges the ‘running out of breath’  (153) of BT with respect to its analysis of historicity. He suggests that the thematic of temporality, as the origin of historicity, is what obscures any further results. Looking for clues as to the specific difficulties, Derrida exposits the later material of BT and identifies the terminology of (in)authenticity as something dropped in later works (168). Moreover, Derrida highlights Heidegger’s identification of the assumption that underlies various inadequate conceptions of historicity: the centrality of the human subject (170). Derrida makes clear that Heidegger is moving us away from the idea that there is a historical subject to whom events happen to the idea that subjectivity is supervenient upon already historical ek-sistence (175).

Not wanting to dismiss BT, in his eighth session Derrida explores its final chapters for any original concepts that might pertain to and differentiate historicity from its originating temporality. He examines the concepts of   ‘auto-transmission’ (Sichüberlieferung) (180), which describes temporality, ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) (185), through which temporality and historicity become authentic, and ‘being-toward-death’ (188). This latter concept leads Derrida to an evaluation of Alexandre Kojève’s suggestion that there exists a relation of analogy between Heidegger and Hegel with respect to their reflections on freedom and death. Derrida is unsympathetic to this view, arguing that Hegel’s and Heidegger’s accounts are ultimately inconsonant because Hegel’s conception of temporality is, for Heidegger, inauthentic ‘intra-temporality’ (194-201). Finally, Derrida strikes upon what he believes to be a concept uniquely characteristic of historicity in BT: repetition (202).

In his final session, Derrida explicates Heidegger’s derivation of world history (Welt-Geschichte) and historical science from the historicity of Dasein (206-214). This involves a digress through Nietzsche and his relation to Hegel (215-221). Derrida then makes some conclusory remarks. He indicates the direction of Heidegger’s later thought and further emphasises the role of metaphor, suggesting again that, for Heidegger, the gradual deconstruction of metaphoricity will instigate a new language through which we could come into direct contact with being and in which the designation ‘being’ would itself be obsolete (223). Finally, in a comment that presages his own subsequent work, Derrida claims that the ultimate problematic for Heidegger will be that of difference (225).

It is evident that this course yields some of Derrida’s earliest reflections on ideas that would later come to define his mature thought: such as deconstruction, writing, trace, metaphysics of presence, binary opposites, and difference. Moreover, this is one of the most readable and accessible of Derrida’s works. He is clearly a gifted exegete, rendering much of Heidegger’s complex text transparent. His thoroughness as a scholar is also clear to see, given his numerous insightful comparisons with Hegel; not to mention the fact that only the first division of BT was available in French at the time of this course (and then only for a few months). As such, most of Derrida’s references to Heidegger were his own translations and this course likely provided an initial exposure amongst its attendees to much of Heidegger’s thought.

There are, however, some weaknesses that could be addressed. Although Derrida readily admits it (222), the tone of this course remains preparative throughout and the reader never feels as though they are getting to the heart of this essential relation between being and historicity. The transition between sessions five and six is awkward; it would also have been beneficial to see more on the distinction drawn between metaphor and poetry in session three – especially given the import Derrida assigns to it. Also, there are moments when the relevance of Derrida’s reflections on the relations of Husserl and Nietzsche to Hegel come into question. Finally, whilst there is the occasionally inconvenient ‘[illegible word]’ notation, this frustration more rightly serves as a testament to the immediacy of our access to Derrida’s thought and as a credit to the translators.

Stefano Marino: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer

Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer Book Cover Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer
Stefano Marino
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2015
Hardback £41.99
155

Reviewed by: Diego D'Angelo (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Sono pochi, forse pochissimi gli autori di lingua italiana in grado di muoversi agevolmente nel panorama filosofico internazionale. Molti si astengono persino dal provarci. Tanto più va lodato e apprezzato, allora, il riuscito tentativo di Stefano Marino di pubblicare anche in lingua inglese, come dimostra questo volume, uscito di recente per Cambridge Scholars Publishing, su estetica, metafisica e linguaggio in Heidegger e in Gadamer. Non si tratta peraltro della prima pubblicazione di Marino diretta ad un pubblico internazionale: ricordiamo qui il volume, risalente 2011, Gadamer and the Limits of the Modern Techno-Scientific Civilization (Peter Lang, Francoforte sul Meno), nonché il saggio in lingua tedesca Aufklärung in einer Krisenzeit: Ästhetik, Ethik und Metaphysik bei Theodor W. Adorno, pubblicato nel 2015 (Kovac Verlag, Amburgo).

La raccolta di saggi qui in questione continua dunque un discorso di apertura nei confronti della ricerca filosofica in lingue che non siano unicamente quella italiana. E si nota che, qui, Marino si muove con coerenza, affrontando soprattutto temi legati all’estetica e alla metafisica, rivolgendo la propria attenzione ad autori classici della tradizione tedesca del Novecento: Adorno, Heidegger e Gadamer, soprattutto, per quanto proprio questo volume contenga un’apertura anche verso il pensiero – diretto soprattutto alla politica – di Hannah Arendt, nonché al discorso anglofono di John McDowell e Richard Rorty. In questa recensione forniremo dunque alcune osservazioni contenutistiche a proposito dei cinque capitoli che costituiscono il volume, chiudendo poi con alcune osservazioni critiche di carattere generale. Tutti i testi tranne il primo, che è un contributo originale al volume, sono infatti rimaneggiamenti, a volte anche sostanziali, di articoli pubblicati in precedenza.

Il saggio di apertura, Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature, World/Environment, and Language, cerca di ricostruire il debito, espressamente riconosciuto da McDowell stesso, che alcune posizioni di Mind and World – uno dei libri più dibattuti degli ultimi vent’anni – hanno nei confronti del pensiero di Hans-Georg Gadamer, e in particolare del suo capolavoro Wahrheit und Methode (Mohr Siebeck, Tubinga 1960). Nella ricostruzione di Marino, questo debito è individuabile soprattutto nei temi della seconda natura, del mondo (ambiente) e del linguaggio. Infatti, McDowell si riferisce espressamente a Gadamer, per il quale, nella lettura che ne dà il filosofo sudafricano, “the human experience of the world is verbal in nature” (p. 10; le indicazioni del numero di pagina in questo formato si riferiscono sempre, nel testo seguente, al libro preso in esame). Partendo da qui, Marino individua somiglianze e corrispondenze (cfr. p. 13) tra i due autori che ci consentono di vedere il discorso di entrambi sotto una luce nuova, in grado di chiarifica in particolare la genesi filosofica dei concetti di mondo e mondo ambiente: se è vero che McDowell si rifà a Gadamer per questi concetti, e che questo legame è riconosciuto dalla maggior parte degli studiosi, il merito di Marino sta nel connettere questo legame, a sua volta, agli autori cui Gadamer stesso si ispira per il suo concetto di mondo (cfr. p. 23), restituendo così al concetto tutta la sua complessità anche dal punto di vista della storiografia filosofica.

Un approccio simile, legato alla ricostruzione di punti precisi di storiografia filosofica, è perseguito anche nel secondo saggio, Gadamer on Heidegger: The History of Being as Philosophy of History. Se prima si trattava soprattutto di ricondurre concetti adoperati da McDowell alla loro fonte in Gadamer, e poi di vedere da dove Gadamer aveva a sua volta tratto certe linee del pensiero, ora è proprio questo secondo aspetto a venir enfatizzando, mostrando come Gadamer sia, nella sua filosofia della storia, debitore alla cosiddetta “storia dell’essere” di cui parla l’Heidegger degli anni ’30-’40. Eppure, questo “debito” è soprattutto di carattere negativo: secondo Marino, Gadamer recupera alcuni temi “particolari” della storia dell’essere, rigettandone l’impianto concettuale generale (cfr. p. 50). In particolare, Marino individua tre motivi. Il primo, di carattere filologico, è che la violenza con cui Heidegger interpreta altri filosofi per iscriverli nella sua storia dell’essere è, secondo Gadamer, un atto “barbarico” (cfr. p. 51). In secondo luogo, Gadamer rifiuta, secondo la lettura di Marino, l’esistenza, postulata da Heidegger, di un linguaggio unitario della metafisica che andrebbe superato (p. 52). In terzo luogo, legando Heidegger a Hegel, Gadamer è essenzialmente scettico nei confronti dell’unificazione forzata della storia della filosofia sotto l’egida della “dimenticanza dell’essere”: questo introduce una teleologia nella storia che Gadamer non può sostenere, secondo Marino. Discutendo anche alcune conseguenze che questa impostazione porta con sé per la questione estetica, cioè per la questione relativa al ruolo dell’arte nella contemporaneità, il saggio si chiude mettendo il luce come, forse, il debito di Gadamer nei confronti di Heidegger sia meno diretto di quanto si tenda comunemente a pensare (p. 63).

Il terzo saggio, Gadamer’s and Arendt’s Divergent Appropriations of Kant: Taste, Sensus Communis, and Judgment, ricostruisce un altro momento di questa critica ad una storiografia basata sui “debiti filosofici”, se si può dire così: Marino vuole, in effetti, anche in questo caso mettere in luce soprattutto le divergenze tra Arendt e Gadamer. Le loro letture della Critica del Giudizio, infatti, sarebbero addirittura “opposte” (p. 76): sintetizzando l’opposizione, spiega Marino, “Kant is praised by Arendt for having politicized some basic aesthetic concepts, but he is criticized by Gadamer for having depoliticized and aestheticized those same concepts!” (p. 77, corsivi ed enfasi nell’originale). Non si tratta, però, di semplici errori di interpretazione da parte dei due filosofi del Novecento: piuttosto, la storia delle ricezioni kantiane è una storia fatta di “productive misunderstandings” (p. 79), di cui il presente non è che un esempio.

Il quarto saggio presentato nel volume porta il titolo Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Tragedy and the Tragic, ed è l’unico a non seguire già dal titolo la struttura del confronto tra due (o più) autori della storia della filosofia. Si tratta in questo caso, infatti, piuttosto di un’analisi concettuale in senso stretto: Marino si dedica ad una disamina del modo in cui Gadamer pensa e interpreta la tragedia e il tragico, un tema tradizionalmente poco esaminato (p. 85). Marino sposta il concetto di tragedia al centro del pensiero gadameriano, ricostruendone il ruolo giocato anche in Verità e Metodo: la tragedia, così la tesi dell’Autore, dimostra in maniera pregnante l’irriducibilità dell’esperienza umana all’approccio scientifico (p. 87). La tragedia sorge infatti dall’incontro/scontro tra l’umano e il divino (p. 88), ma non è riducibile unicamente a questa origine (p. 99), andando, nel suo sviluppo, al di là di essa. Gadamer ci consente, infatti, di riconoscere l’origine religiosa della tragedia senza negarne il valore estetico autonomo.

In conclusione, il volume ritorna alla struttura binomiale dei saggi precedenti, concentrandosi su Heidegger and Rorty: Philosophy and/as Poetry and Literature. Cerando di superare l’impasse che ha costituito buona parte dell’attrito tra filosofia analitica e filosofia continentale, ossia l’accusa rivolta dalla prima alla seconda di essere troppo vicina alla letteratura e poco al rigore scientifico, Marino decide di interrogare i massimi rappresentati di una filosofia contaminata con la letteratura: Heidegger perché nessun autore ha mai avvicinato così tanto poesia e filosofia (p. 107), e Rorty perché egli stesso vede la sua filosofia “come” letteratura (p. 108). Anche qui Marino ricostruisce il debito di Rorty nel confronti di Heidegger, concludendo però in modo fortemente critico: la lettura rortiana di Heidegger è – uso l’indicativo perché mi sembra difficile non concordare, specialmente alla luce delle ultime pubblicazioni e degli esiti della ricerca internazionale – “hermenutically careless and does not adhere to Heidegger’s own text” (p. 114). Purtroppo l’articolo si chiude, a mio parere, troppo presto, mancando di discutere se, effettivamente, da un punto di vista sistematico, l’idea di filosofia come letteratura sia davvero perseguibile.

In generale – sia detto in chiusura – l’approccio di Marino non vuole affrontare questioni di carattere teoretico-sistematico, ma solo fornire una disamina storiografica: egli stesso riconosce che si tratta di un “comparative approach” (p. 5). In tal senso, i limiti della lettura sono chiaramente definiti fin dall’inizio. Ciononostante, il lettore rimane con un certo amaro in bocca proprio per la mancanza di una discussione più approfondita di certi punti proprio in una prospettiva sistematica. Nel momento in cui, in effetti, l’Autore si ripromette di superare il “gap” tra analitico e sistematico, come afferma con chiarezza nell’Introduzione (p. 6), questo obiettivo sembra mancato: come si può, in effetti, istituire, da parte continentale, un discorso con la filosofia analitica – per altro, auspicabilissimo, se non addirittura necessario al giorno d’oggi – concentrandosi su questioni di storiografia? Certamente il tentativo sviluppato nel primo saggio di ricollegare espressamente John McDowell al pensiero di Gadamer è lodevole anche sotto questo punto di vista, ma non è forse abbastanza per rinfocolare un discorso tra due tradizioni. Lo stesso valga per l’ultimo saggio, riguardante appunto il problema della filosofia e/come letteratura, che lascia la questione in sospeso.

Al di là di questo limite, che è, come detto, intrinseco all’approccio esplicitamente adottato dall’autore, la “storiografica comparatistica” sviluppata qui da Marino ha grandi pregi: innanzitutto, la chiarezza espositiva; in secondo luogo: l’onestà intellettuale di restringere chiaramente a pochi concetti le proprie analisi, senza ricadere nella retorica roboante di certa letteratura; e infine, di presentare la tradizione filosofica italiana (buona parte dei contributi scientifici che Marino cita sono infatti di area italiana) al pubblico internazionale, un’impresa che, pur nei limiti accennati, non si può che lodare.

Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Francesco Alfieri: Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni neri

Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni neri Book Cover Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni neri
Filosofia -Testi e Studi, n. 72
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Francesco Alfieri
Morcelliana
2016
Cloth € 35,00
464

Reviewed by: Laura Paulizzi (École Normale Supérieure, Paris)

L’intellettuale attuale si distingue da quello “antico” oltre che per il modo di fare ricerca, data la varietà odierna, qualitativa e quantitativa, di fonti a disposizione di tutti, anche per le diverse dinamiche e i diversi scopi di diffusione del sapere. È probabile che di uno scritto si affermi prima la sua fama, e che questa si sostituisca al suo contenuto ; infatti se normalmente ci si deve trattenere dal giudicare un libro dalla copertina, con il fenomeno “Martin Heidegger antisemita” viene da domandarsi se la moltitudine che ha espresso opinioni, giudizi e sentenze a riguardo, l’abbia almeno mai vista quella dei Quaderni neri. È molto facile, poi, arrivare ad erigere interpretazioni o indirizzi di pensiero partendo da estrapolazioni linguistiche ; con un qualsivoglia contenuto filosofico, questo lavoro di isolamento del particolare, della parte rispetto al tutto, risulta abbastanza semplice. Infatti, un enunciato filosofico, se non letto alla luce di un contesto, del suo proprio sorgere, può adagiarsi comodamente sulle più difformi opinioni. A questo punto, i frutti delle diverse letture interpretative, sorte dallo sradicamento di porzioni di pensiero e di affermazioni filosofiche singolari, possono imboccare strade certamente differenti : prendere piede in contesti scientifico-accademici, o essere accolte in circostanze meno elitarie, alla portata di tutti, come per esempio quelle mediatiche. Ora, se questo desumere dà vita ad un pensiero apparentemente organico che ha la fortuna di essere accolto favorevolmente da entrambi i contesti, accademici e mediatici, può accadere che altri intellettuali, di “vecchio stampo” potremmo dire, sentano il bisogno di far sorgere un nuovo flusso di pensieri che, pur non ponendosi come semplice risposta a questo sradicamento, ha il merito di far riemergere l’originarietà del pensiero preso di mira, i cui frammenti stavano costituendosi come opera a sé ; questi studiosi si sentono in dovere, in nome di quella ricerca non strumentalizzata, ovvero non mirante ad altro, di “riassestare” la sistematicità di un contenuto filosofico, il quale, essendo stato sottratto al suo contesto, al suo stesso sviluppo, non vede il suo senso solo alterarsi, bensì mutare radicalmente, assumere altri significati.

            È questo l’excursus che viene narrato in Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, dal  Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, ultimo assistente di Martin Heidegger, e dal Professor Francesco Alfieri. Quest’ultimo infatti, è invitato dal primo a leggere gli Schwarze Wachstuchhefte, ma non comprendendone il “senso e il nesso” — come egli stesso afferma in un’intervista curata da Elena Poletti dell’associazione ASIA -, si rivolge di nuovo a Von Herrmann e da questi primi scambi inizia una corrispondenza tra i due che si traduce in un lavoro costante di commento al testo. Le annotazioni heideggeriane vengono così fatte oggetto di uno studio filologico, che in seguito si configurerà come seconda parte del libro, dal titolo “Analisi storico-critica sine glossa”. Una terza figura significativa del progetto, pur non avendo contribuito direttamente ad esso, è Peter Trawny, fattosi portavoce di una incauta interpretazione, come vedremo,  che ha condotto al solido affermarsi dell’idea di un antisemitismo presente in tutto il pensiero di Martin Heidegger ; idea che ha assunto dimensioni importanti, fino a prendere su di sé i tratti di un vero e proprio indirizzo filosofico, detto “antisemitismo ontostorico”. Questa corrente di pensiero ha guadagnato terreno anche in Italia, dove è andata via via sviluppandosi come “antisemitismo metafisico” « che trova la sua origine nella filosofia tedesca, e precisamente in una serie di pensatori che da Kant giunge fino a Nietzsche, per poi trovare il suo culmine in Heidegger » (p. 14). Fatto inconsueto questo. Data infatti la difficoltà odierna del farsi strada di un dibattito filosofico di grande portata, lascia sorpresi come esso sia invece emerso proprio in seguito a un simile lavoro di estrazione che trova le sue fondamenta in una chiave di lettura dualistica, esoterico-essoterica, dell’intera opera heideggeriana. Ecco infatti la vera bizzarria della questione. Secondo gli autori di Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri isolando alcuni passi delle annotazioni heideggeriane e interpretandoli seguendo una direzione univoca, Trawny ha avuto un riscontro positivo coinvolgendo tuttavia il pensiero di Heidegger nella sua interezza. In altre parole, il fenomeno dell’antisemitismo heideggeriano rende manifesta la facilità con cui dalla trattazione di singoli passaggi, estraniati dalla loro rete concettuale, si traggono al contrario considerazioni di carattere generico.

           Questo spunto di riflessione nasce a partire da un’adeguata e disinteressata lettura del testo su Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, a cui effettivamente esso si presta poiché viene alla luce proseguendo secondo lo stesso metodo, sospendendo il giudizio. Difatti, uno degli aspetti che lo rende più interessante  è il carattere non heideggeriano di Alfieri, il quale ha analizzato le annotazioni di Heidegger linguisticamente, filologicamente, per comprenderne in prima persona il senso. Nonostante poi, in un secondo momento i celebri taccuini fossero stati destinati alla pubblicazione dallo stesso Heidegger, ma solo alla fine dell’edizione delle sue opere complete, bisogna tenere costantemente a mente, e su questo il libro insiste, il fatto che si tratta di appunti su riflessioni private che Heidegger annotava anche durante la notte su dei pezzi di carta che, a questo scopo, teneva prontamente accanto al letto. Il vero lavoro per von Herrmann e Alfieri è stato dunque quello di costruire in itinere un percorso che ridesse sì, giustizia ad un pensiero caduto vittima di strumentalizzazioni anche mediatiche, ma che aiutasse loro in primis a comprendere una posizione poco chiara che poggiava su affermazioni effettivamente inusuali, soprattutto per il fatto di essere personali e private.

            Il testo sembra dunque presentare un duplice intento dettato certamente dalla primaria esigenza di restituire dignità speculativa al pensiero heideggeriano, sottoposto ad un dibattito non filosofico, sottraendo il contenuto degli Schwarze Hefte ad una qualsivoglia strumentalizzazione. Da una parte, in particolare da quella di  von Herrmann che lo esprime più che chiaramente, c’è il bisogno di « comprendere quale sia stato il reale coinvolgimento di Heidegger con il nazionalsocialismo e il perché egli abbia deciso di non volersi opporre pubblicamente ad esso » (p. 16). Questa parte introduttiva del e al testo infatti, ne costituisce la premessa contestuale, descrive il clima in cui matura l’idea stessa del progetto ; in queste pagine emerge in maniera più decisiva la necessità di porre l’accento sull’errata interpretazione che ha condotto all’unilateralità di giudizio sulle annotazioni di Heidegger, frutto del lavoro svolto da Trawny e ritenuto poco filosofico. In questo senso, l’autore considera diversi punti di partenza, in primo luogo un’adeguata comprensione del termine Selbstvernichtung che può essere approfondito, tuttavia, solo successivamente ad uno studio concernente i Beiträge. Grande scoglio certo, per il lettore che non ha questo tipo di bagaglio in quanto, già di per sé il linguaggio heideggeriano, come ogni utilizzo speculativo del linguaggio, rimanda a significati ulteriori, che non ristagnano sulla superficie della cosa, sui suoi significati immediati e ben noti, ma conducono alla profondità del concetto, all’essenza del contenuto ; d’altronde questo è il prezzo da pagare qualora si intraprenda lo studio del pensiero dei maestri della filosofia.

            Ora, nella contestualizzazione del dibattito intorno ai Quaderni neri, di cui von Herrmann tiene a sottolineare che « per il fatto che un concetto del pensiero storico dell’evento come il “pensiero calcolante” sia riferito all’elemento ebraico, il puro concetto storico-ontologico non diventa “antisemita” » (p. 24), non manca un tono di denuncia determinato da un coinvolgimento personale oltre che professionale. Difatti, il Professore e Peter Trawny si conoscevano molto bene in quanto Trawny è stato seguito ed aiutato da von Herrmann dalla fine del suo dottorato fino al momento in cui egli, giunto all’età di 51 anni, non aveva ancora ottenuto un posto di professore retribuito, ma aveva una famiglia da mantenere. Fu con questo intento che il suo nome è stato indicato come curatore dei volumi, ma « nei quarant’anni di storia dell’edizione completa delle opere heideggeriane non era mai successo che uno dei curatori, parallelamente all’apparizione del volume da lui curato, pubblicasse un libro[1] con pretese interpretative — cosa espressamente vietata da Martin Heidegger » (p. 27). La pretesa interpretativa di cui ci parla l’autore tuttavia, com’è già stato detto, ha riscontrato un ampio consenso dando vita ad un dibattito che ha sconfessato 46 anni di pensiero storico-ontologico heideggeriano. È alla logica del consenso dunque, che si rivolge principalmente il libro ; difatti, ancor prima di addentrarsi nella trattazione specifica del suo oggetto, esso risveglia un senso di giustizia speculativa che rimanda ad un’esigenza oggi quasi impercettibile, data la vastità delle pubblicazioni e la frammentarietà di un vero dibattito filosofico attuale. Una lotta contro la strumentalizzazione e la finalizzazione della filosofia, che traspira volontà di non sconsacrare un pensiero che, in ogni caso, ha contribuito in modo ineguagliabile a dar vita e spirito a tutta la filosofia del Novecento. Anche gli autori si distanziano dalle dichiarazioni di Martin Heidegger contenute in questi ormai celebri taccuini, « ma non a costo di sconfessare l’importantissima opera di un grande pensatore » (p. 27). La stessa Hannah Arendt trovandosi a difendere, o meglio, a cercar di far capire il suo studio sul caso Adolf Eichmann mostrò il grande abisso che allontana la comprensione di un fenomeno dalla giustificazione e dal perdono dello stesso ; il risultato fu la nozione di “banalità del male”, uno dei concetti più significativi ed universali del suo pensiero, nonché della filosofia, dato che ahimè, vede la sua attualità al di là di ogni tempo storico determinato. In altri termini, se i grandi filosofi avessero proceduto all’espressione del loro pensiero con il timore di essere poi in seguito etichettati anche dai “non addetti ai lavori”, se nel timore del giudizio i pensatori avessero posto dei limiti alla propria operosità razionale, siamo d’accordo nell’affermare che i quasi tremila anni di filosofia non avrebbero mai visto la luce.

            Von Herrmann non manca inoltre di sottolineare come « [i] 14 passaggi testuali che nei volumi 95, 96 e 97 della Gesamtausgabe si riferiscono agli ebrei o all’ebraismo mondiale costituiscono appena tre pagine formato A4 in confronto alle 1245 pagine complessive di questi volumi » (p. 17) ; affermazione questa che potrebbe tradursi in una discolpa dalle accuse di antisemitismo rivolte ad Heidegger, oppure nella dimostrazione dell’accessibile rischio di compromettere un intero e complesso sistema di pensiero basandosi su singoli passaggi, la  scelta dipende certamente dall’inclinazione del lettore. Nondimeno, l’incisiva presenza della critica heideggeriana, il tono di denuncia, lo stile destante, inseriscono i riferimenti  all’ebraismo in una più generale critica alla modernità, e la critica in Heidegger è sempre di tipo filosofico-speculativa, mai rivolta ad altro né tantomeno politicamente orientata ; al contrario, lo sviscerare con il sacro mezzo della parola, il domandarsi originario, la capacità di saper questionare, restano i veri intenti della sua riflessione. La purezza di tale linguaggio, che di certo non si lascia attraversare senza fatica, non può lasciarsi vincolare però altrettanto facilmente a fraintendimenti di carattere politico. E non è senza fatica, infatti, che von Hermann e Alfieri, nell’indagine sui Quaderni neri, si sono impegnati in un lavoro che innanzitutto ha coinvolto i testi e la stessa scrittura.

            Lo sforzo ermeneutico e filologico è particolarmente evidente in quella che si configura come seconda parte del testo Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri. Difatti, se la premessa introduttiva di Von Herrmann illustra le opere heideggeriane  nella loro complessità, richiamandone alla memoria la successione cronologica e filosofica, nell’interesse di far emergere lo scarto tra il lavoro di Heidegger, volto da sempre a questioni di carattere teorico-speculative, e le possibili interpretazioni che invece mancano di basi filosofiche, la seconda parte conduce nel vivo della parola e il maggior proposito che vi si pone è quello di « far emergere anzitutto la complessa stratificazione terminologica delle annotazioni heideggeriane tenendo conto del contesto in cui sono inserite » (p. 53). Ecco la problematica fondamentale cui hanno dovuto soccombere gli autori e a cui è stato sottratto lo stesso lettore in seguito al lavoro svolto da Trawny, la riabilitazione del contesto. Sebbene lo spirito che ispira il libro sia accompagnato da un intento apparentemente “personale”, tentativo di chiarificazione dei nodi aporetici che costituiscono un pensiero già di per sé difficilmente interpretabile, se non incomprensibile ad una lettura superficiale del testo, esso non costituisce nel contempo una manovra redentrice. Procedendo con la lettura dunque, ci si inoltra nel mirabile lavoro di Alfieri, il quale riportando effettivamente all’attenzione alcuni passaggi delle annotazioni heideggeriane, risveglia l’oggettività di un approccio disinteressato. Al lettore imparziale, infatti, il contenuto dei Quaderni neri, non può non suscitare quel coinvolgimento speculativo a cui la penna di Heidegger, rara tra poche, perviene. Di fronte ad un’analisi linguistica dei problematici passaggi, Alfieri, ben edotto della laboriosità dell’impresa, introduce a più riprese i passi affrontati con un lodevole auspicio, che il suo lavoro venga in ogni caso sottoposto « al proprio e altrui vaglio di una critica radicale» (p. 54).

            Ora, l’analisi linguistico-ermeneutica condotta da Alfieri permette al senso dei taccuini rilegati con tela cerata nera di emergere, sollecitando il lento mostrarsi  della loro verità ; una verità che, in Heidegger, è nel linguaggio, nell’Essere, nell’autentico domandare, nella critica ad una modernità che rischia di perdere, attraverso le sue stesse istituzioni, la purezza di un pensiero originario, e di sostituire la filosofia con una “pseudofilosofia”. Vale la pena a questo proposito di riportare uno dei passi heideggeriani più significativi preso in esame da Alfieri e che costituisce il paragrafo 134 delle Überlegungen V :

« Chi crede che la “filosofia” andrebbe abolita dalle università, che comunque sono morte, e che andrebbe sostituita con la “scienza politica”, in fondo ha pienamente ragione senza avere la minima idea di che cosa sta facendo e di che cosa vuole. In questo modo non si abolisce certo la Filosofia — questo è impossibile — ma si toglie di mezzo qualcosa che ha l’apparenza della filosofia — in un certo senso si salva da pericolo di essere sfigurata. Se si procedesse a tale abolizione, allora la filosofia sarebbe, da questo lato, assicurata “negativamente” — e in futuro sarebbe chiaro che i sostituti dei professori di filosofia non avrebbero nulla a che fare  con la filosofia, neanche con la sua parvenza — ammesso che quella sostituzione non sprofondi ancora più nella parvenza della filosofia. La filosofia sarebbe scomparsa dall’“interesse” pubblico e educativo. E questa condizione corrisponderebbe alla realtà — poiché qui non vi è traccia di filosofia — e proprio allora, quando essa è veramente ».

       L’iniziale bisogno di comprendere per poi illustrare il “reale” coinvolgimento di Heidegger con il nazionalsocialismo, in questa seconda parte del testo Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri viene in qualche modo licenziato dalla profondità speculativa di riflessioni di questo tipo — culla di un fondato itinere filosofico. I possibili scopi altri del libro si inseriscono, dunque, in una cornice di rimandi al nazionalsocialismo, all’ebraismo, a Hitler, etc., che intendono sicuramente far luce sul rapporto che il pensiero di Heidegger vi intrattiene, ma che tuttavia finiscono in secondo piano rispetto al fascino teoretico delle fondamentali nozioni di quel pensiero. Alfieri si inoltra infatti negli abissi del linguaggio, nella parola di Heidegger, per comprendere, o meglio, per non fraintendere i pensieri inestimabili che ne risultano, e che restano tali, anche in seguito all’adesione al partito nazionalsocialista ; adesione di cui in questa sede non si parlerà in modo esauriente, ma si invitano piuttosto i lettori a capirne l’origine e la motivazione. In particolare, successivamente alla pubblicazione dei Quaderni neri nel 2014, si è andata formando una letteratura che tratta questo tema, oltre allo già citato Trawny. Il problema  diviene qui al contrario, quello di cernere, all’interno di questa varietà di analisi, opinioni e interpretazioni, quelli che seguono il procedere filosofico heideggeriano rintracciandone la genuinità del senso dal “gossip” filosofico che si è venuto a inserire con estrema facilità, data forse l’abbordabilità del tema dell’antisemitismo, in questo dibattito.

            Corretta la scelta da parte dei Professori Von Herrmann e Alfieri di inserire un terzo capitolo nel libro dedicato ai Carteggi inediti di Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann che comprende gli scambi epistolari di Martin Heidegger con lo stesso von Hermann  e Hans-Georg Gadamer. Anche in questa parte del testo, curata con precisione da Alfieri, viene assicurato l’intento di far chiarezza sul contenuto dei Quaderni neri, di cui si fa riferimento in primo luogo al titolo che in effetti contribuisce, in particolare per coloro che non assumono un atteggiamento disinteressato, a creare intorno alle già discusse annotazioni un’idea di segretezza, come giustamente esplicita lo stesso Alfieri :

 « A nostro parere, già la semplice denominazione di Quaderni neri ha creato un alone di mistero che, seppur in modo inconsapevole, ha condotto i lettori a immaginare che essi contengano qualcosa che — per qualche inspiegabile motivo — è stato a lungo tenuto nascosto e che, con la loro pubblicazione, “l’uomo Heidegger” sarebbe finalmente venuto allo scoperto in modo da poter essere “conosciuto” da tutti. La loro uscita non ha tuttavia prodotto un’autentica conoscenza di quello che Heidegger vi aveva annotato. Ci siamo infatti resi conto che l’espressione Quaderni neri — che indica la loro classificazione non il loro contenuto — è stata purtroppo utilizzata per rendere ancor più misterioso e inaccessibile il percorso tracciato da Heidegger nei suoi taccuini. E se a questo si aggiunge che, volutamente, non sono stati fatti conoscere all’opinione alcuni passi significativi in essi contenuti, è facile dedurre che non c’era modo migliore per tessere la fitta tela della strumentalizzazione tuttora in atto (p. 329) ».

Insomma, l’idea di un esoterismo interno all’opera heideggeriana e la prontezza con cui si è sviluppata la nozione di antisemitismo ontostorico, che con altrettanta lestezza ha acquisito consensi perfino nella pubblica opinione, lasciano supporre che ci fossero delle teorie latenti su Heidegger che si sono poi viste comprovate a partire dalla prima interpretazione che ha dato loro voce. Il perché di questo, certamente rimane da comprendere.

     Illuminante è poi l’appendice che chiude il libro, dal titolo La strumentalizzazione mediatica in Italia dei Quaderni neri curato dalla giornalista Claudia Gualdana, che passa in rassegna tutto ciò che è stato scritto sui giornali italiani a proposito del rapporto tra Heidegger e il nazismo e, più in generale, sui Quaderni neri. Partendo dal libro di Donatella Di Cesare Heidegger e gli ebrei. I «Quaderni neri», si ripercorre quello che è stato da una parte il dibattito filosofico concernente la questione dell’antisemitismo heideggeriano e dall’altra la diatriba intorno ai Quaderni neri. In questa sezione i toni mutano e assumono una puntualizzazione polemica contro quella parte di studiosi e pensatori che concorda con la chiave di lettura di Trawny e della Di Cesare, richiamando alla memoria come già nel 1987 la controversia circa la suddetta questione si era avviata con Victor Farías ed era stata riproposta da Emmanuel Faye nel 2005. Vengono citati tra gli altri, consenzienti e non, il giornalista Antonio Gnoli, l’ex presidente della Martin Heidegger Gesellschaft Günter Figal, il filosofo Gianni Vattimo, Antonio Carioti, la fenomenologa Roberta de Monticelli, la giornalista Livia Profeti, Emanuele Severino, Giacomo Marramao, e tra i quotidiani La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera e Il Mattino ; un panorama complesso dunque anche dal punto di vista internazionale, che invita sicuramente ad un approfondimento del dibattito stesso, il quale secondo Gualdana in Italia si è sviluppato « a tratti in un dibattito pro o contro Di Cesare» (p. 414), ma che vale la pena approfondire ricorrendo direttamente ai testi di chi ne è coinvolto. Senza un rinvio alle fonti originali infatti, espressioni come quella della Di Cesare, che afferma come sia essenziale «studiare attentamente le pagine di Heidegger e guardare alla Shoah in una prospettiva inedita. Perché la Shoah non è solo una questione storica ma una questione filosofica che coinvolge direttamente la filosofia», restano enigmatiche, se non filosoficamente ingiustificate, proprio perché appunto, estratte dal loro contesto. Evitare di procedere come si è tentato di fare con il contenuto dei Quaderni neri di Heidegger, ovvero isolando dei passaggi per reinserirli in altri contesti a scopi interpretativi personali, resta dunque un metodo imparziale e filosofico per aprirsi ad una comprensione autentica dei concetti.

            Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri nel complesso sottolinea una linea di demarcazione tra un tipo di approccio agli Schwarze Hefte che trascura lo scenario generale a cui appartengono, e un’analisi che invece si rivolge ad essi super partes. Uno spartiacque “naturale” dunque, segna la critica successiva alla pubblicazione dei taccuini neri, tra una visione disinteressata marcata dalla volontà di comprendere il testo, innanzitutto filologicamente, senza necessità di difendere alcuna idea, e il bisogno invece di assumere una posizione attraverso un’interpretazione degli stessi scritti per proporre un proprio pensiero o convalidare una tesi specifica ; a questo tipo di necessità aderiscono secondo Gualdana  le voci di chi «vuol far clamore a tutti i costi, cadendo così nell’approssimazione e nell’invettiva più sterile» (p. 414), mentre il primo approccio sembra appartenere a chi per esempio, arriva a leggere la critica di Heidegger nei confronti degli ebrei come una polemica rivolta alla modernità, in cui agli ebrei «sono imputati alcuni elementi negativi al pari che agli altri protagonisti della critica heideggeriana» come afferma nell’Epilogo del libro Leonardo Messinese, che vede nella definizione di antisemitismo ontostorico una «sorta di drammatizzazione  della questione ebraica in Heidegger» (p. 384).

            A prescindere dalla diversità di approccio al testo, di analisi ermeneutica o di metodo di studio, l’auspicio più importante è che tutte le voci che hanno espresso la loro — voci che in questo caso appartengono anche al non filosofo, al non specialista della materia, dato che la faccenda “Heidegger antisemita” ha assunto proporzioni mediatiche importanti — abbiano letto attentamente e lentamente gli Schwarze Hefte oltre che gli scritti fondamentali dell’opera heideggeriana. È questo che distingue la ricerca filosofica autentica, svincolata da scopi “altri”, dal procedere secondo vie e linguaggi che differiscono da quelli della ragione, che Heidegger stesso in Essere e Tempo definiva come facenti parte della dimensione della “chiacchiera”, quella dimensione in cui il Dasein è gettato, è già situato senza riflessione,  in altre parole senza scelta.


[1] Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, tr. it. Heidegger e il mito della cospirazione ebraica, di C. Caradonna, Bompiani, Milano 2015.

Charles Taylor: The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity

The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity Book Cover The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity
Charles Taylor
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
2016
Hardcover, $35
368

Reviewed by: W. Clark Wolf (Department of Philosophy, Marquette University)

Charles Taylor’s new book places the meaning-making capacity of language in service of a philosophical anthropology that has been at the heart of his influential work for decades. In general, Taylor’s hermeneutical approach to philosophy emphasizes the essential character of “human meanings” for any explanation of our world. Taylor has long been concerned that the naturalistic approach dominate in mainstream analytic philosophy has no room to accommodate these uniquely human – “metabiological” – meanings. His new book suggests that a central aspect of the naturalistic failure to understand the human world is due to a faulty conception of language that has been dominant since Frege, and indeed for a lot longer.  Taylor places blame on the empiricist view of language common to Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac (HLC).  Since, as Taylor argues, language plays an indispensable role in the constitution of the human world (especially in its ubiquitous normativity), an impoverished view of language has resulted in an impoverished conception of ourselves.  Taylor proposes that an alternative historical tradition of reflection on language—for which he credits especially Hamann, Herder, and Humbolt (HHH), but which includes the Romantics and phenomenological thinkers like Heidegger as well—provides an understanding of language that simultaneously underlies an adequate philosophical anthropology.  Using insights from this tradition as well as his own gift for apt description, Taylor attempts to demonstrate what mainstream philosophical reflection on language has missed and what an appreciation of “the full shape of the linguistic capacity” has to say about the kind of “animal” we are.

The Basic Argument

The core argument of the book concerns the distinction between the “designative” and “constitutive” function of language.  Taylor argues that both the HLC tradition of linguistic thinking as well as post-Fregean philosophy of language rely on a model of language wherein its primary (even exclusive) function is to provide signs for designating objects.  Accordingly, the existence and characteristics of which can be noticed and known quite independently of those signs.  Taylor calls this an “enframing” theory of language, since here language merely puts a framework of human life in place that exists without its help (p. 3).  The central doctrine of the enframing theory is that words are signs for prior thoughts.  Thus, according to HLC, words are at best obtrusive windows into thought, necessary expedients.  This view works hand in hand with a firm rejection of any “Cratylean” dimension to language, a sense that words can “fit” the things they express.  Though Taylor acknowledges the modifications to the early modern conception of language within analytic philosophy, he thinks that the mainstream tradition has preserved the central elements of that doctrine.  Despite Frege’s appreciation of the fact that words themselves cannot function as signs or meanings of anything apart from the context of a sentence or proposition, analytic philosophy maintained a primarily epistemological interest in language (p. 117), and for this reason seemed only or primarily to notice its assertive dimension.  As Robert Brandom puts it, the “assertion game” of language is the one that could be played “though one played no other” (p. 127).  Thus, even if other aspects of language are acknowledged, they turn out to be subordinate to its role of enabling the communication of veridical thoughts.  According to Taylor, this perpetuates the notion that the function of language is merely to designate what is otherwise available.

Happily, Taylor contends that this impoverished view of language is not the only one on offer. Developed partially in response to the designative view as developed by Locke and Condillac, thinkers like Hamann and Herder inaugurated a conception of language which recognizes its constitutive dimension. Taylor explains this idea using the concept of “articulation,” which was especially significant for a later figure in this tradition, Wilhelm von Humboldt.  To articulate, for Taylor, is not simply to express some feature of the world already in the open, but to make it possible to notice this feature in the first place.  As Humboldt took pains to demonstrate, human speech uniquely allows for the inscription of differences that allows for the production of diverse thoughts[1] (an insight further developed by Saussure).  For this reason, a determinate thought cannot precede a word as its mere sign, but the thought can only emerge coevally with the articulation of the word.  If thought does not precede a merely instrumental language, language itself must play a productive role.  Taylor argues that it is “human meanings” that are constituted by language.

Human meanings are the modes of significance possible for us on a “metabiological” level, integral features of our ordinary lives such as music, morality, and political community.  In each of these cases, language (understood in a broad sense) plays a role in “enacting” a meaning that becomes bound to a certain feature of life, but goes beyond anything merely given.  Language for Taylor is thus the clue for the discontinuity between ourselves and the “extralinguistic” or natural world.  As he writes,

“We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value.  Language can only be explained through a radical discontinuity with the extralinguistic” (p. 33).

In a strong sense, for Taylor, language provides the basis for all human meanings that transcend our mere naturalness.  This is why I suggest that Taylor here proposes something like the foundation of a “philosophical anthropology.”[2]

Taylor’s critical task is to demonstrate the weaknesses of the “enframing” theory as an account of language as it actually features in human life.  His positive task is to convince us of how the productive and constitutive function of language is an ever-present (but easily ignored) dimension of ordinary life.  To address these tasks, the book is divided into three parts.[3]

Part I, “Language as Constitutive,” argues for the existence of a constitutive dimension of language in contrast to a merely designative function.  Taylor informs his perspective here both with classic and contemporary linguistic theory, as well as onto-genetic accounts of language development in children.  This research shows that the HLC account of language has underestimated the way in which language is embedded and embodied in broader contexts of human life.  Taylor emphasizes, for example, the way language figures in human life as essentially accompanied by bodily gesture and social ritual.  The empiricist conception of language as designative simply has no room for such considerations, but this deprives it of explanatory and even descriptive power.  The HLC conception of language is fed by a “narrow diet of examples.”

Part II, “From Descriptive to Constitutive,” begins by addressing more specifically the historical roots of the “enframing” theory of language as it originates in empiricism.  For Taylor, the key element of this theory lies in its commitment to the notion that thought is prior to language, so that language should be at best an “unobtrusive” window into individual minds.  Taylor then considers the merits of Frege’s revolutionary work in the philosophy of language but suggests that, despite crucial innovations, he (and the tradition following him) preserved two mistakes of the empiricists.  First, the post-Fregean tradition continues to suppose that words denote features of the world that have already come to our attention (p. 133).  In this sense, language does not constitute genuinely new meanings.  Second, the analytic tradition ignores what Taylor calls the “Cratylean” dimension of language.  By this, Taylor means the ability of language to seem somehow “fitting” to the world.  We can experience a metaphor, for example, as getting it right, as articulating a new aspect of things that we couldn’t have noticed without its help (p. 137).  Taylor continues Part II by giving a positive account of the constitutive dimension of language that is missed by the HLC tradition.  His focus is on what he calls “human meanings,” which always belonging within a network of significance for us.  Human meanings are thus intimately interconnected with our practices, values, and emotions.  Since language does not describe human meanings that exist prior to their linguistic articulation, Taylor shows that this dimension simply cannot be captured by a designative view of language.

The final part, “Further Applications,” takes a look at how appreciating the constitutive dimension of language helps to understand two more specific issues.  Taylor first discusses a thesis central to Paul Ricoeur’s work, that narrative is hermeneutically irreplaceable.  That is, narrative understanding cannot be reproduced in the temporally neutral language of facts.  This shows how the insights gained from a literary work, for example, cannot be stated without reference to narrative context that gave them rise.  The final chapter addresses the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis that each language creates an incommensurable conceptual world, or “linguistic relativism.”  Taylor’s distinction between the designative and constitutive dimensions of language enables him to take a nuanced view of this thesis.  He suggests that the application of linguistic relativism to designative contexts is unconvincing, that where language serves as a vehicle for signifying objects, different practices do not support the idea of radically different linguistic worlds.  On the other hand, in language’s constitutive dimension, where elements of our “ontology” are brought to light by our linguistic practices, we should expect a measure of incommensurability (325).  This serves as a warning to the “imperialistic” temptations of enframing theories of language (like Davidson’s, for example), which suppose that we can understand someone’s language without a thick mutual understanding.

The Humanization of “Meaning”

Taylor’s book serves less to introduce a totally new approach to the philosophy of language or “philosophical anthropology” as to remind of the founding insights of the hermeneutical tradition and to provide them with further support, especially from recent empirical studies.  I hesitate to say that those familiar with the work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer on language, not to mention the prior work of Taylor himself, will find little of groundbreaking significance here.[4]  Moreover, despite Taylor’s passing mentions of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of “symbolic forms,” Cassirer himself develops a more systematic and arguably more persuasive account of the unique function of “human meaning” in the constitution of culture and knowledge.  This is only to say that the function of Taylor’s book is pedagogical and perhaps therapeutic, rather than didactic.  The virtue of Taylor’s writing is the way he “assembles reminders” for the sake of his purpose (as Wittgenstein describes the work of a philosopher).  That is, Taylor tells us what we already know but easily forget, especially amidst the tendency to over-intellectualize so tempting to philosophy.  Taylor’s work is therapeutic in the way he attempts to reconcile us to our way of life in the “immanent frame.”  Taylor wants us to notice how we already live, rather than to change our lives.  His anti-naturalist stance relies simply on the sense that a de-humanizing theory requires forgetting the way in which we “always already” depend on a structure of human meanings that cannot be explained from the outside.  While Taylor’s book may not be obligatory for the specialist, it is rewarding for the sympathetic enthusiast as well as the hermeneutical neophyte.

            Nevertheless, I think there are significant causes for concern with Taylor’s project.  I will discuss a few briefly.  First, Taylor’s work exemplifies a commitment to a hermeneutical style of philosophy that may strike phenomenologically (not to mention analytically) oriented readers as lacking method.  While Husserl’s phenomenology employs a descriptive method in service of the elucidation of “essences” or eidetic invariances, Taylor’s hermeneutics seems to license the use of anecdotal description for any generic project of sense-making or understanding.  As Taylor describes hermeneutical reason, it is characterized by drawing together a “constellation” of meanings within some larger whole, against which the parts find greater significance (pp. 317-18).  This implies, to a certain extent, that nothing is off-limits for Taylor.  Anything, so long as it can claim to be a part of the whole under consideration, can make a demand to be explained.  In particular, Taylor’s approach allows him to include a number of surprising features under the banner of language—feelings, gestures, rituals, music, etc.—that are obviously connected with the phenomenon of language in ordinary life, but don’t seem to be essential to a conceptual articulation of language.  Taylor can then condemn rival accounts of language for failing to include such elements in their consideration, but their inclusion seems dependent on a holism so broad it starts to spread thin.  Taylor seems to forget that that hermeneutical holism can be maintained even while it is bracketed in favor of topical specificity.  On occasion, Taylor’s criticisms of rival philosophers amount to a complaint that they are not doing everything all at once.

            A second concern relates to Taylor’s concept of “human meanings,” the central target of his book.  Taylor’s concept of human meanings seems vague and this almost as a matter of principle.  Namely, Taylor resists any distinction between the conceptual articulation of human meanings from their embodiment in human practice.  To speak of “human meaning” is to speak of “the significance things have for us” (p. 179), and this in a way that seems viciously subjectivist.  While one can agree with Taylor concerning way the genesis of human meanings is coeval with their embodied “enactment,” this does not imply that these human meanings cannot be discussed on a level of abstraction (our rightful caution of this word should not deny it a legitimate place in thought).  Failure to distinguish the conceptual level from the mode of its embodiment leads Taylor to bind human meanings to a thorough vagueness or indeterminacy.  It is because he does not allow for an (at least notional) abstraction of conceptual meaning that he can say of human meanings, “These meanings cannot escape the circles which help determine their significance; and these circles are always changing.  Hence they defy final and decisive definition” (p. 257).  Taylor means that our inevitably human concepts concerning morality, mind, custom, and language itself always resist genuine determinacy, since they are bound to personal significance.  This seems to reinstate a stereotypical contrast between rationalistic science and fuzzy humanism.  Taylor fails to recognize the legitimate rational stratum in human meanings, which is precisely necessary for the critical evaluation of such meanings.

It is here that Husserlian phenomenology holds out a promise.  For Husserl, the eidetic clarification of fundamental concepts is not restricted to those that figure in “hard” natural sciences, but includes those that figure in the “life-world” just as well.  Husserl writes,

“As regards this, nothing prevents starting at first quite concretely with the human life-world around us, and with man himself as essentially related to this our surrounding world, and exploring, indeed purely intuitively, the extremely copius and never-discovered Apriori of any such surrounding world whatever, taking this Apriori as the point of departure for a systematic explication of human existence and of world strata that disclose themselves correlatively with the latter.”[5]

For Husserl, the natural human starting point provides the basic material for inquiry, but phenomenological inquiry employs it for the constitution of clarified concepts (though they are founded intuitively).  My concern with Taylor’s understanding of human meanings is that he takes their naïve and unclarified role in human life as their ultimate truth.  His account leads us to resist ultimate clarification of these meanings, since such a clarification could only abstract from the particular contexts in which these meanings have their genetic origin for us.  Taylor’s humanization of meaning is a shelter for the vagueness of meaning, while Husserl suggests that the normatively structured concepts of the human world are those that ought to be most clear.[6]

            In short, the fact that language (even taken in Taylor’s broad sense) helps constitute a world for us that goes beyond the reach of natural science does not have to have the consequence that Taylor suggests, that this world is one that can be felt but not conceptually grasped.  This is of course a Hegelian point, and, from that point of view, it seems telling that Taylor’s Romantic turn has led him to undervalue conceptuality.  We have seen that this puts Taylor at odds with a Husserlian conception of phenomenology as well.  Still, while Taylor’s work will do little to sway those with rationalist leanings, he provides a thorough and engaging account of an embodied approach to language, meaning, and human life.  His book is especially recommended as an insightful reminder of the ways in which we inhabit a world which larger depends on our own making.


[1] See Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, trans. Peter Heath, ed. Michael Losonsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), §§ 8-10.

[2] This tendency of Taylor’s makes a close analogy with Ernst Cassirer’s use of his philosophy of “symbolic forms” as the basis for a philosophical anthropology in his An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).  Taylor often alludes to Cassirer’s notion of symbolic forms, but the influence is clear throughout.  Cassirer, too, uses the inspiration of the linguistic theories of Herder and Humboldt his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).

[3] I will forgo the typical chapter-by-chapter summary, a version of which is easily accessible in Michael Forster’s review of the same book: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/69603-the-language-animal-the-full-shape-of-the-human-linguistic-capacity/.

[4] See especially, Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature” and “Theories of Meaning,” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[5] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 138; Hua. I, 165.

[6] Notice that just later in Husserl’s text we find the conceptual aim of his investigations clarified: “Thus the investigations concerning the transcendental constitution of the world, which we have roughly indicated in these meditations, are precisely the beginning of a radical clarification of the sense and origin (or of the sense in consequence of the origin) of the concepts: world, Nature, space, time, psychophysical being, man, psyche, animate organism, social community, culture, and so forth.” Ibid., 154; Hua. I, 180.

Jean-Paul Sartre: What is Subjectivity?

What is Subjectivity? Book Cover What is Subjectivity?
Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by David Broder and Trista Selous
Verso Books
2016
Hardback £40.00
160

Reviewed by: Mariam Thalos (University of Utah)

Jean-Paul Sartre was an intellectual powerhouse, even in his own time.  He moved people, both scholars and non-scholars alike, by the power of his ideas and his tremendously powerful way of expressing them.  He blurred all category boundaries and violated conventional mores. He even turned down a Nobel prize on principle. This book documents a philosophical exchange over a topic as big as the very significance of Sartre’s work in light of Sartre’s own commitment to Marxism. How can his Marxism make sense in the light of his existential philosophy?

The subject of experience, and the experience of that subject, are the primary topics of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, especially in Being and Nothingness. But Sartre also professed allegiance to Marxism. Marxism is, at least to a first approximation, the view that the material conditions of life—what someone in an earlier point in time might have called its political economy—is the primary determinant of all of social, cultural and intellectual life, all of human life and knowledge. Marxism is a dialectical materialism.  How can there be room in it for an independent contribution made by human freedom, or even by the human subject as such? How, then, are Sartrean existentialism and Marxism both to be embraced simultaneously?How is it possibly to put the two together into a single anthropology—an objective study of the forces acting in human societies? It would seem to be a difficult balancing act to be a Marxist follower of Sartre. Perhaps he, best of all, is able to resolve the tensions, and thereby to explain the marriage between his existential phenomenology and a Marxist politics. That question is one theme in a very large opus published in 1960 as The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

In 1961 Sartre delivered a guest lecture to the Gramsci Institute in Rome, where he sought to address the issues surrounding the marriage of Marxism and existentialism. In attendance were some of Italy’s leading Marxist thinkers, many of them profound admirers of Sartre’s philosophy and all of them very conversant with it. This book comprises Sartre’s lecture and the conversations pursuant thereto, involving many of those Marxists in attendance, and including as well Sartre’s reactions and responses to their interventions. Because it attempts to capture the real-time interactions of the participants, this book makes for a coherent and fascinating read, bringing to life a very lively controversy that foreshadows (and indeed still survives in) the controversies inherent in the contemporary projects of Critical Theory.

Another existential phenomenologist might have managed very well in uniting a Marxist anthropology to an existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, for example, because his phenomenology was very much attuned to the way the body contributes to experience as such, might have had recourse to the body as a channel through which the Marxist dialectic was realized and actualized in subjectivity. Many passages in Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre speaks of the body as such a site and conduit for a potential dialectical materialism of which a Marxist might be proud. But Sartre is not Merleau-Ponty; indeed Sartre is on record as not concerned with the contributions of the body. For Sartre, the ego is decidedly, even suspiciously, transcendent.

Sartre’s own route to realizing the Marxist dialectic within his particular existentialist vision is via a sort of imperative. He speaks here, as in the Critique, of subjectivity as an obligation or necessity—the necessity to be in our consciousness what we are in and to the world at large—to others, and toward nature. (Surprisingly, it reads very much like a Kantian imperative, and one that will not be denied—that is in some sense inviolable.) It is in some sense another way of speaking of authenticity. For Sartre, to respond authentically to the existential imperative, is to perform in one’s own subjectivity what one is to others, in effect to perform one’s material reality. So perhaps one performs one’s proletariat-ness, or one’s capitalist-ness.  It is, in Sartre’s words, not merely an imperative but a drive: we are “obliged to be the mediation between [ourselves] of forms of exteriority such as, for example, class being.” We are obliged to create a “singularization”—a performance, if you will—of the universal of our class. This description of things he refers to as the practico-inert. Thus for Sartre, the social reality is not to do with the machines, or materials more generally, that make of the worker’s life what it is, the social reality is instead the worker who in his own person internalizes the material reality. Thus Sartre internalizes in consciousness —he relocates to consciousness—the material conditions of social life. (These are the themes drawn here from The Critique of Dialectical Reason.)  Unwilling to join Durkheim in the idea of a collective social life that includes the material conditions, Sartre instead insists upon subjectivity as the fundament even of collective, anthropological life.

Throughout the conversations, the interlocutors press Sartre on points of intersection between his existentialism and a variety of Hegelian doctrines, especially those on which Marxist theories draw. Sartre’s interlocutors reiterate many of the same questions: if there is a Marxist or Hegelian dialectic, how does it manifest in the consciousness of a given subject? Moreover, does one or the other disappear at the “level of the dialectic”—in the final “totalization”? The clearest answer we receive from Sartre is in the response he makes to Valentini: “For me, the dialectic […] is not totality, but the ensemble of structures of a totalization in process…We are ourselves the beings who make the dialectic” (50-51). For Sartre, then, the forces of history are made flesh, because huan subjectivities actualize the larger conflicts in which human lives are embedded.

Does a Sartrean Marxism require the Kantian move Sartre makes in the practico-inert? This is a question with which the exchange leaves us. And perhaps more poignantly, is Sartre’s existentialism able to accommodate such a move?

Emmanuel Falque: Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology

Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology Book Cover Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Emmanuel Falque, Translated by Reuben Shank, Introduction by Matthew Farley
Fordham University Press
2016
Paperback $28.00
216

Reviewed by: Owen Earnshaw (Durham University)

This remarkable book deals with the border between philosophy and theology and asks a question that Stephen Mulhall (2001) also poses at the end of his book Inheritance and Originality and leaves unanswered, namely, “[C]an philosophy acknowledge religion and still have faith in itself?” Falque argues very much in the affirmative and a repeated slogan of the text is “the more we theologize, the better we philosophise”, that is, philosophy finds its rightful place when it engages with theology and then returns to its own land of ‘the human per se’. In this book Falque is dealing mainly with the theological ‘turn’ in French phenomenology and what we are to make of it, but it will be of interest in this review to see if his arguments hold for the wider terrain of philosophy.

He starts out reviewing hermeneutics and its relation to phenomenology and examines how Ricoeur and Levinas both allow their confessional faith to help determine their hermeneutic approach; Protestant faith’s reliance on scripture alone for Ricoeur and Judaism’s trace of God in the letter of scripture for Levinas. In contrast to these approaches Falque puts forward his own Catholic hermeneutic of the body and the voice, which highlights that in the liturgy the Word of God nourishes the faithful both in the aspect of Scripture and in the Eucharist. This leads to the idea that phenomenology should engage with lived experience and the Catholic hermeneutic that he has expounded allows us to do this by making us aware of the body that speaks (the original form of the text) and should allow us to appropriate the text or be appropriated by the text in a bodily way that he calls ‘intercorporeality’. He then moves on to an analysis of what faith is and states that there is a common human faith in the reality of the world that he calls ‘philosophical faith’ that we attempt to suspend in Descartes method of doubt or in the phenomenological reduction and argues that confessional faith must be a transformation of this faith rather than a further step on from this faith. This is based on the theological foundation that God became man to transform humanity not to supercede it. Confessional faith is a transformation of the natural trust in the world all humanity shares. This leads on to the idea that philosophers who have taken the decision to believe need to produce not so much a philosophy of religion but rather a philosophy of religious experience as he claims Kierkegaard, Edith Stein and Simone Weil all worked on. This involves elucidating the reasons from within the faith that led to their decision ‘while not renouncing philosophy, conceive its activity quite otherwise’ (Falque 2016: 104). Falque then carries out such a philosophical investigation by looking at the choice of believing and concludes that it involves community, that I believe through a ‘we’. The next part looks at the relation between Theology and Philosophy and the final section is called ‘finally theology’ and reiterates Aquinas’ phrase that ‘philosophy is the servant of theology’. At this point I will quote Falque to make his position clear:

Finitude, or the human per se…are indeed starting points for philosophy and under the jurisdiction of the philosopher. But only as this finitude is then rejoined and transformed in the recited and assumed act of the Resurrection, is it made known that we were actually within the realm of true humanity and thus of philosophy-not of divinity concealed under the cover of humanity –that is, theology…This position can be summarized as the principle of ‘the philosopher before all else’ which should be adopted today not against theology but, on the contrary, for it, in order to dwell otherwise and situated within it. (Falque 2016: 148-149)

In what follows I shall look at Falque’s contestation that philosophy can be transformed by a confessional faith and still remain philosophy.

‘First live then philosophize’

The first point we shall look at is how a confessional faith can impact on the work of a philosopher. Mulhall (1994) in Faith and Reason gives a Wittgensteinian take on the limits of philosophy’s foraging into the territory of theology and I shall quote it at length in order to contrast it with Falque’s position:

Is there really room here for an exercise of reason that is not an employment of it on one side or another of the existential choice with which Christianity faces us?

Only if the following distinction can be made and observed: the distinction between a description and a defence of (or an attack upon) a form of life. For what can then follow is a distribution of duties, a division of intellectual labour. On this understanding, philosophy can spell out the features of the forms of life that face one another across the divide between religious and other modes of existence, and bring us to see how each will inevitably appear to the other…But it neither can, nor should, attempt to engage in those arguments with, let alone to make that choice for, its readers.  The latter is always an error; the former is the business of edification, engagement, substantive discussion. It is, of course, neither an intellectually nor an ethically illegitimate enterprise – it is a perfectly valid use to which reason might be put, and forms a central part of any individual’s life; but it is not a philosophical use of reason, and it should form no part of a philosopher’s life qua philosopher. A philosopher should never forget that she is a human being, but not everything that a human being may do should be done in philosophy’s name. As Climacus might say, philosophy is not an edifying business. (Mulhall 1994: 76-77)

What seems to be missing here, and what Falque is very much aware of is that philosophy is never done in a vacuum. To take a hermeneutic approach for a moment, there is always, as Heidegger (1962) states, a fore-concept before the analysis begins and this is then where the enquiry starts from. If this is the case then the most intellectually honest way of proceeding is to make this fore-conception transparent. And so if you are philosophizing from the standpoint of someone with a confessional faith it is best if this faith is given an airing at the start to make the reader aware of the type of human life you envision and are trying to elucidate. Falque makes this point by looking at the Protestant hermeneutics of Ricoeur and the Judaic hermeneutics of Levinas before positing his own Catholic hermeneutic and what this allows us to see is how a confessional faith can help to make salient certain aspects of the philosophical enterprise that may be obscured from a primarily secular starting point. The life a person leads undoubtedly permeates their philosophy and although philosophy should be solely based on reason, the experiential ‘content’ given through a lived faith and the motivation, in terms of the mission of the philosopher will transform the subject matter and methodologies employed.  This does not mean the resulting philosophy will necessarily be edificatory, but rather certain evidence, premises, topics and intuitions will have salience above others in the work of a philosopher with a confessional faith and this will not invalidate the philosophy by itself, but a self-aware philosopher would do well to make transparent how her faith informs her practice.

‘The more we theologize, the better we philosophise’

To make clear how a faith can inform a philosophical practice I would like to set out one particular practice in philosophy that is evident in philosophers such as Cavell, Mulhall, Wittgenstein and arguably Falque and argue that it is a legitimate philosophical practice. This practice might be called ‘transfiguring the ordinary’ and I will present a version of it developed elsewhere (Earnshaw 2011). A quote from Simone Weil sums up a way of understanding the interconnection of philosophy, ethics and aesthetics focused on the everyday:

The beautiful: that which we do not want to change. The good: not to want to change it, in fact (non-intervention). The true: not to want to change it in one’s mind (by means of illusion).  The good — not to want to change what? My place, my importance in the world, limited by my body and by the existence of other souls, my equals (Weil 2004: 38).

The experience of beauty is of something that strikes us in such a way that we do not want to change it; the apprehension of it as beautiful just is seeing the object of our attention as perfect just as it is. Such an experience is articulated in McCarthy’s book The Road:

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The seas black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (McCarthy 2007: 234).

Here the character describes an experience through which he is willing to affirm the whole world as it is. In such experiences we are able to ‘see’ the world as ‘good’, as God is said to have done in Genesis. These experiences allow us to affirm that there is a value to life and living, and, indeed, we are able to affirm the value of our own existence because it is only due to the fact that we exist that this consummation experience (of perceiving the goodness of the world) is possible.

So what is it about ourselves that leads us to want to escape the real and live in fantasy? One line of thought (developed by Cavell in The Claim of Reason (1979)) is that we become entangled in philosophical problems (in the widest sense) because of the tendency for humans to want to overcome what they see as the limitations of finitude. This is one way of understanding what Weil is responding to in the quote above when she talks about the true as not wanting to change the world by means of illusion. The work of philosophy can then be understood as getting the person to see that the facts about our lives that can seem like obstacles or limitations should instead be perceived as limits to our lives. Their overcoming does not make any sense as they are the conditions for the possibility of the intelligibility of the world and other people. Scepticism can be seen as a desire to know the world in a more secure way than through our human faculties, as if there were a means of arriving at a more direct access to the world than through our everyday procedures for finding things out and to other people than through the means provided by language. Ordinary language philosophy tackles scepticism by reminding us of ‘what we say when’ in order to bring the conditions for knowledge of the world and others to the fore. However, this can seem like a very deflationary account of what is possible for philosophy.  Wittgenstein sums this feeling up when he says:

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble) (Wittgenstein 1963: §118).

If ‘the destruction of anything interesting’ is all this methodology of philosophy can achieve, why should it claim any of our attention? Wittgenstein’s answer is that ‘the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’ (Wittgenstein 1963: §129). The disappointment we feel at the humble task of philosophy is a hankering after the facility and seeming profundity found in fantasy. In order for us to see ‘the aspect of things most important for us’ it is necessary to find ways of exalting in the ordinary and recovering the hidden beauty therein.

One way of tackling this problem of familiarity can be found in art, but also in religion. In Catholicism, the sacraments involve taking some everyday activity and relating it to the divine. For instance, in the sacrament of Communion the value of sharing a meal is celebrated with all the related values of family and friendship. In Confession the process of repairing a relationship is connected with our relation to the divine. In all religions the life of the community is understood as bound up with the eternal. In this way everyday practices are transfigured and thereby their value as part of a life is re-presented (reflected back to the community) in a new light and reaffirmed. This reaffirming of the everyday is found in Wittgenstein’s philosophy where we are invited to pay careful attention to our life with words and how this is inextricably bound up with our form of life (thereby taking our anxieties about language and showing how they express anxieties about our lives). Wittgenstein’s writings focus our attention on the conditions of the human relationship to the world and others, and help us to recognise that the wish for depth in our understanding of things is inherently empty. Such a recognition is one way in which we can overcome artificial craving to go beyond the everyday. The words of this philosopher allow the familiar to become strange and enticing and thereby reignite our interest in the ordinary. Through the ordering of his words the ordinary is transfigured and our poor substitute fantasies can be left behind for a time.

The idea that ‘transfiguring the ordinary’ is a respectable aim of philosophy is given backing in the writings of Victor Shklovsky who takes the methodology of art as involving what he calls an ‘enstrangement’ of objects and forms of life. I will quote at length from Shklovsky’s book and then comment briefly afterwards:

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously — automatically. If someone were to compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand or speaking a foreign tongue for the first time with the sensation of performing this same operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us. It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words…If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been.

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious. (Shklovsky 1991: 5-6).

It is by creating a space in our workaday activity (by making the task ‘harder’ than it might normally be) that can release us from ‘enslavement’ to habitual practices. This disruption enables us to carry out projects in ways that interweave spontaneity into the rhythm of the task we are engaged in. This practice in philosophy of trying to ‘transfigure the ordinary’ for the reader can be seen as a practice adopted from a perspective of a confessional faith without overstepping the boundaries of the ‘human per se’. I believe this is what Falque is aiming towards and if it seems an important practice is worth defending.

Conclusion: ‘I am first of all a philosopher and want to remain one’

Mixing theology and philosophy can be seen as a path inherent with dangers that may mean that others convict you of not doing philosophy at all. Crossing the Rubicon is an important book in that Falque attempts to cross the stream between these two disciplines to eventually return and know philosophy better.  It would seem his crossing is successful and that he does remain a philosopher in the end and I have tried to outline the practice within philosophy that he follows that has confessional roots but conforms to the boundaries of philosophy. The book is a testament to being honest about your motivations and trying to find a way to carry on in a discipline bound by the ‘human per se’ while being inspired by the divine and highlights an overwhelming need in philosophy for the recognition and the acknowledgement of the personal as an necessary partner of the rational.

References

Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Earnshaw, O. 2011. Recovering the Voice of Insanity: A Phenomenology of Delusions. (Doctoral dissertation). Available at: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3225/

Falque, E. 2016. Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology. trans. R. Shank. New York: Fordham University Press.

Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.  Oxford: Blackwell.

McCarthy, C. 2007. The Road. London: Pan Mcmillan Ltd.

Mulhall, S. 1994. Faith and Reason. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

Mulhall, S. 2001. Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Oxford: OUP.

Shklovsky, V. 1991. Theory of Prose. trans. B. Sher. London: Dalkey Archive Press.

Weil, S. 2004. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. trans. A. Wills. London: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, L. 1963. Philosophical Investigations. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

 

Scott Davidson, Marc-Antoine Vallée (Eds.): Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon Book Cover Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon
Contributions to Hermeneutics, Volume 2
Scott Davidson, Marc-Antoine Vallée (Eds.)
Springer
2016
Hardcover 93,59 €
XIX, 215

Reviewed by: Leen Verheyen (University of Antwerp)

Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy can be characterised as a continuous dialogue. By discussing theories of both his contemporaries and key figures in the history of philosophy, Ricoeur has developed a philosophical thinking with an exceptionally broad scope. Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon focuses on the two philosophical methodologies that are most decisive for Ricoeur’s thinking and concentrates especially on the interaction between these two.

The book is divided in four parts, each consisting of three to four chapters written by leading Ricoeur scholars. The first part of the book, From Existentialism and Phenomenology to Hermeneutics, provides a contextual background by examining some of the most significant sources of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In the first chapter, “Ricoeur’s Early Approaches to the Ontological Question”, Marc-Antoine Vallée focuses on the existentialist influences on Ricoeur’s early approach to the ontological question. Although the understanding of the ontological question in Ricoeur is usually based on Ricoeur’s text The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), Vallée shows that before this text, Ricoeur considered the ontological question from a different point of view, in which the difference between, on the one hand, Heidegger and Sartre and, on the other, Jaspers and Marcel plays a central role.

In the second chapter, “Distanciation and Epoché: The Influence of Husserl on Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics”, Leslie MacAvoy shows that Ricoeur’s thinking is a hermeneutics that is capable of a critique of ideology. By pointing at the relation between Ricoeur’s conception of distanciation and Husserl’s conception of epoché, MacAvoy makes the differences between Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s conception of hermeneutics visible. MacAvoy shows that Ricoeur’s philosophy can be characterised as doing hermeneutics without forgetting Husserl. Referring to the Gadamer-Habermas debate, MacAvoy argues that, because of the importance of distanciation or epoché, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is better able to offer the possibility of a critique of tradition or ideology than Gadamer’s.

The final chapter of the first part is “Thinking the Flesh with Paul Ricoeur”, in which Richard Kearney suggests new directions for a carnal hermeneutics based on Ricoeur’s writings. Kearney shows that, while Ricoeur developed a phenomenology of the flesh in his early works, this focus disappears when Ricoeur in the 1960s starts concentrating more exclusively on a hermeneutics of the text. Starting from some reflections in Ricoeur’s final writings, which attempt to reanimate a dialogue between his initial phenomenology of the flesh and his hermeneutics of language, Kearney suggests new directions for a carnal hermeneutics in which the insights of a philosophy of embodiment and a philosophy of interpretation are brought together.

The second part of the book, Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Self addresses the questions of the self and of our belonging to the world. In the chapter “Identity and Selfhood: Paul Ricoeur’s Contribution and Its Continuations” Claude Romano challenges Ricoeur’s idea that selfhood can be conceived as a form of identity. However, Romano does not suggest that Ricoeur’s conception of selfhood should be abandoned, but argues that we should seek a better way of understanding the relationship between selfhood and our qualitative identity.

“From a Genealogy of Selfhood: Starting from Paul Ricoeur”, the fifth chapter, explores the idea that otherness is constitutive of selfhood. Although Ricoeur distinguishes different kinds of otherness in Oneself as Another, Carmine Di Martino focuses on the otherness at work in the intersubjective relationship. By putting Ricoeur’s thought in dialogue with the works of Axel Honneth, René Spitz, and Jan Patočka, Di Martino shows how our belonging in the world is marked fundamentally by our relationships with others.

In the final chapter of the second part, “The World of the Text and the World of Life: Two Contradictory Paradigms?”, Michaël Foessel focuses on language and narrative as constitutive elements of our belonging to the world. By showing that reading is not only the interpretation of an objective meaning but also a central element of the understanding of the self, Foessel makes clear that textuality constitutes a fundamental dimension of our being in the world.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Tradition, Memory and History, the third part of the book, examines another aspect of alterity that constitutes the self, namely the influence of the past. In “Word, Writing, Tradition” Michael Sohn, just as Leslie MacAvoy, starts from the Gadamer-Habermas debate about tradition, but has a different approach from MacAvoy. Sohn demonstrates that the concept of tradition Ricoeur formulates within this debate goes back to Ricoeur’s earlier writings, specifically his critical engagement with French structuralism and philosophy of language. In this way, this chapter shows how Ricoeur’s philosophical ideas not only build on phenomenology and hermeneutics, but also arise to a great extent from his discussion with other schools of philosophy.

In the eighth chapter, “Involuntary Memory and Apprenticeship to Truth: Ricoeur Re-reads Proust”, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin joins Richard Kearney’s search for a carnal hermeneutics. Starting from Ricoeur’s interpretation of Proust in Time and Narrative, Gagnebin shows that Ricoeur’s reduced attention to embodiment in his later work results in an interpretation of In Search of Lost Time, in which the corporeal dimension of memory present in Proustian descriptions is not sufficiently emphasised.

The endeavour to connect embodiment to meaning is also present in the next chapter, “Memory, Space, Oblivion”, in which Luis António Umbelino shows that memory is not only a temporal experience, but also has an important spatial dimension.

A different approach to Ricoeur’s thinking about the past is offered by Pol Vandevelde in his chapter “The Enigma of the Past: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative as a Response to Heidegger”. In this chapter, Vandevelde tests the fruitfulness of Ricoeur’s conception of narrative as the guaranty of continuity between event and historical fact, by examining some events at the end of WWII and the nature of the delay that took place between the happening of these events and their recognition decades later as historical facts.

The last part of the book is dedicated to the Challenges and Future Directions for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology. In the first chapter of this final part, Marc de Launay focuses in “The Conflict of Hermeneutics” on Ricoeur’s permanent hesitation between two different approaches to hermeneutics, hermeneutics as philosophy and hermeneutics as method. According to de Launay, Ricoeur’s intention to reconcile these two different hermeneutics cannot be maintained in the end.

In “Intersectional hermeneutics” Scott Davidson states that Ricoeur’s commitment to structuralism poses a serious challenge for his hermeneutics. To surmount this problem, Davidson develops the interesting alternative in which intersectional theory takes over the role previously played by structuralism.

The two final chapters of the book both focus on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of truth. Sebastian Purcell approaches this topic in “Hermeneutics and Truth: From Alètheia to Attestation” by contrasting Ricoeur’s approach with Heidegger’s, while Todd Mei constructs a unified theory of truth from various texts of Ricoeur.

It is clear that the book consists of very different approaches to Ricoeur, and in particular to the question of the interaction between his hermeneutics and his work in the school of phenomenology, both in terms of philosophical disciplines, framework and objectives. In this way, this book offers a good sample of the broad scope of Ricoeur’s philosophy, his historical relevance and the possible future of his thinking. The collected essays all stand on their own, although interesting parallels can be drawn between some of them, resulting in an enriched view on both the influence on and interaction of different philosophical schools in Ricoeur’s philosophy and between the different philosophical disciplines Ricoeur practiced. Although this book shows well Ricoeur’s attempt to find a certain cohesion between many different philosophical approaches and assumptions, the overarching theme of the book is not everywhere equally present. Some of the texts are able to offer a very clear account of how the interrelation between hermeneutics and phenomenology is at work in the development of some of Ricoeur’s philosophical idea’s, but other texts seem to address this question barely or not at all. Therefore, the central question of the book is maybe not dealt with explicitly enough in all the different chapters. Although the individual quality of the different essays in the book is outstanding, which makes the book already worth reading, this book therefore does not quite work as whole. The different chapters rather seem to offer a puzzle the reader needs to bring together to gain insight in the complex and diverse ways in which phenomenology and hermeneutics interact in Ricoeur’s thinking. This puzzle does justice to the complexity of this central question, but a more profound elaboration of the central topic would have been beneficial.

Joel Smith: Experiencing Phenomenology: An Introduction

Experiencing Phenomenology: An Introduction Book Cover Experiencing Phenomenology: An Introduction
Joel Smith
Routledge
2016
Paperback £21.24
222

Reviewed by: Owen Earnshaw (Durham University)

As the Conclusion to Experiencing Phenomenology suggests, this book encourages us to dwell in Phenomenology[1] in order to judge its claims adequately and in doing so provides a much-needed bridge from contemporary philosophy to the world of Phenomenology. It starts out by providing a basic orientation to the problems of Phenomenology along with a brief history of the subject, but then dives straight into dealing with specific issues starting with an account of intentionality, objects, properties, events, possibilities, before then addressing the meaty subjects of self, embodiement, Others and emotions. Smith provides a good introductory overview of the main authors of the phenomenological tradition namely Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Stein and relates the theories from these authors to contemporary debates in a range of philosophical disciplines. In this review I will focus upon 4 lacunas in the text and explore whether they can justifiably be left out. In examining gaps in the text I do not wish to say that the text does not function extraordinarily well as an introductory text, but rather to analyse the authors attempt to relate Phenomenology to contemporary concerns and investigate whether such a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer: 2004) would require a more involved and careful handling of such a project than there is room for in an introductory text.

Competing Visions of Phenomenology

My first qualm about the text is the way a range of authors are presented in conjunction with each other in attempts to solve particular philosophical problems. The first problem Smith addresses is the phenomenological method itself and in doing this he pits Husserl ‘science of experience’ against Heidegger’s attempt to work out the ‘question of the meaning of Being’. The main problem here is that for a beginner this leaves out the central motivations for each thinker’s position. It would be uncontroversial to say that Heidegger and Husserl are up to very different things in their texts, and the same could be said for Sartre and Merleau-Ponty later on in the book. To present them as attempting to address certain specific problems in different ways would seem to stretch to the point of distortion their very particular approaches to the subject. The problems faced by each of the authors covered are bound up with their method, which is itself a question for them that they deal with as part of the outworking of their position. A concern with method is an aspect that is salient in much of ‘continental’ philosophy. Smith writes in the Preface, “[o]ne last thing: you won’t find the terms ‘analytic’ or ‘continental’ in the pages that follow. Good riddance” (Smith 2016: XV). Now the motivation for this statement is presumably that we have come to a point in the Anglophone philosophy where such terms are outdated and unnecessary. Smith maybe has other reasons for wishing to banish these terms from his book that he doesn’t mention, but a clarification of this statement would be good. However, it would seem that these terms can still usefully be applied if it is possible that there are different traditions behind the work done in mainly French and German Phenomenology and contemporary anglophone Philosophy of Mind or Metaphysics. And maybe the divide needs a more careful handling rather than just to ignore it. I will look at these questions in section 3. Suffice it to say that an introductory text might need to give a map of how Phenomenology is significantly different from other fields of the subject that is philosophy and at least nod towards the division that there has been in the past between at least two ways of doing that subject.

To return to the central point, with Husserl’s phrase “back to the things themselves!” we encounter a subject that wants to found a new beginning for itself as Descartes did and is very aware of its relation to the history of philosophy. Arguably this tradition of philosophy is much more dependent on personalities shaping the discipline and the student must be made aware of this. Wanting to find what is common to all Phenomenology is understandably an important concern for an introduction to the subject, but to really dwell in the subject any text on Phenomenology needs to question its own methods in relation to the history of the subject. Questions such as “Is what I am doing here authentic?” arise in relation to any engagement with the work of Heidegger or Sartre. “Can my work in this field be seen as scientific?” is a question that comes out of looking at Phenomenology with Husserl and maybe this is the method that Smith finds works best for what he has in mind and there is evidence that he sees the subject as a collaborative enterprise, where solutions to problems are worked out through argumentation, from the conclusions that he gives to each chapter. And this indeed is an appropriate methodology for an introductory guide. However the fact that the question of method for the text is never itself given an airing means that students are left with a rather disjointed exposition of fragments of the authors’ works and some of the most exciting parts of Phenomenology are left untouched. The most glaring omission to my mind is the absence of Sartre in the chapter on Other Minds, instead including Stein on empathy. This felt very unsatisfactory considering the original phenomenological analysis of shame Sartre gives as the basis for our knowledge of Other Minds and the vignettes he uses to illustrate this. Now this could be because Stein is more incisive here (and also this choice can be seen to grow out of the preceding chapter on embodiement) but it might be instead that Smith chose this author as being more in line with ‘analytic’ concerns and so a phenomenological treasure is passed over.

The Importance of Psychopathology in the Phenomenological Tradition

It would seem very unfair to point out particular subjects that an author omitted in an introductory work where tough choices will have had to be made about what to include considering the accessible size of the volume. However, for reasons I will elaborate, psychopathology is central to an understanding of the subject of Phenomenology and at least deserves a mention on the basis of its contribution to methodology. Phenomenology aims at an accurate description of the structure of experience and in order to do this it needs examples. Smith goes back again and again to his contemplation of his place of work to illustrate phenomenological points. This could reasonably be thought of as normal experience. The critical thing about psychopathology (particularly of cases of delusions, hallucinations and unusual bodily and self experiences) is that it enables us to look at abnormal experience and see what the structure of experience must be in terms of extremes. It provides real cases for giving conclusions about the imaginative thought experiments found in the method of Husserl’s eidetic reduction. Jaspers (1997) is the main exemplar of the tradition of phenomenological psychopathology and his General Psychopathology from 1923 is still in circulation among psychiatrists to this day. Although Smith occasionally peppers some of his arguments with psychiatric cases, Jaspers is mentioned only once in passing and not in relation to psychopathology. There is a grand tradition of phenomenological psychopathology including the Zollikon Seminars by Heidegger (2001) and it is currently in ascendency among philosophically inclined mental health professionals and some mention of it would have helped show a wider view of the subject and its potential practical ramifications. The need to reflect on out of the everyday experiences should be highlighted to the student new to the subject in giving them tools to be able to dwell in the subject. The scope of the book is ample and many of the chapters would have been helped by examples from psychopathology including the ones on embodiement, self-awareness and Other minds. Hopefully if the book runs to further editions this may be remedied.

Mind the Gap: Acknowledging Differences in the Analytic and Continental Traditions

An exemplar of someone who draws on both the analytic and continental is Stanley Cavell (1979) for example in The Claim of Reason, but unlike Smith he acknowledges the split of mind between the two traditions and integrates the two styles of philosophizing into his own original voice. I would argue that trying to overcome the divide between the two traditions necessitates at least acknowledging that there is a divide that needs to be overcome rather than refusing to talk about it. This is especially important in an introductory text as students may not be aware of the history of the different practices in Anglophone and Continental institutions. How the divide came to be is not something I will go into here, but that there is a difference seems undeniable. The ability to relate the philosophers from the different traditions takes careful handling as the student introduced to a particular philosopher may read up on a reference and be left in perplexity as to how the writing of someone in the continental tradition relates to what they have done before in philosophy. Heidegger’s neologisms can be a large stumbling block to someone trying to read the primary text for the first time and may put the student off a seminal work in philosophy unless given guidance on what to expect. The frequent references to Derrida by Smith would lead the uninitiated to think that reading his texts is a straight forward matter as there is no acknowledgement that they can be quite difficult to enter into without some background contextualization. Although his exposition of various concepts in the work of the authors he focuses on are very clear, this aspect of Phenomenology needs addressing by Smith. Again to convict him of missing out something when the scope of the work seems constrained by the fact it is introductory would seem unfair. However, as Husserl and Heidegger are such important figures to understanding works by Derrida, Levinas and Ricoeur it would have made sense to outline their place in what has been known as the ‘Continental’ tradition as a guide for future reading and also to point out that a straightforward transposition to the concerns of contemporary anglophone philosophy can require a translation of concepts. To be fair to Smith he does a good job of combining the two perspectives but this is because he focuses on matters that are the concern of the two traditions such as intentionality rather than issues mainly from the continental tradition such as authenticity, or the Nothing that might well be of interest to more inquisitive students.

Is Phenomenology a Scientific Enterprise?

The question of method permeates Smith’s book in the way he presents the subject matter. He seems to come down on the side of Husserl that Phenomenology is a science of experiences and its methods are comparing phenomenological descriptions in a collaborative deductive exercise that will eventually lead to the truth of the structure of experience. In contrast to this he gives an airing to Heidegger’s ‘Hermeneutic Phenomenology’ but does not follow through on an analysis of this method of Phenomenology, one that requires a greater role for culture in elucidating the structures of experience. Heidegger’s method is a more historically and literary based questioning of experience.  Although it includes the critique of others in advancing the subject, the validity of its claims are based on the authenticity of the self-questioning involved. To put it another way, Husserl’s method relies on the paradigm of a scientific inquiry whereas Heidegger’s method points to the paradigm of a religious confession where the truth of the matter is based on the honesty and self-examination of the questioner. Heidegger’s method has been hugely influential in the continental tradition so this method should not be dismissed out of hand. Modern anglophone philosophy would seem to side on the whole with Husserl’s tendencies, but it should be noted that Wittgenstein’s (1963) Philosophical Investigations, an important work for inheritors of the analytic tradition, starts by quoting Augustine’s Confessions suggesting that Wittgenstein was not wholly adverse to Heidegger’s conception of method in philosophy. So to raise the question in earnest, which method would seem to have the most going for it? As this question goes beyond the scope of a book review, I will only make a few brief points that suggest that the question of method might be something Smith may need to go into in more detail in future editions. Phenomenology is based on articulating experience and so honesty with ones self about the character of experience would seem to be of upmost importance. This would involve trying to find the truth for yourself at a distance from the opinions inherited from others and your upbringing and this itself is perhaps the kernel of truth in Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. This is not to say that others should be ignored but rather that the role of the other is to help you to better scrutinize yourself, what Heidegger terms ‘being-ahead’ of the another person and trying to help someone attain transparency to themselves. The other person’s role is to articulate the internal voice of conscience. This suggests that virtue is indeed required to perform the aims of Phenomenology adequately and further hints that one should rely upon one’s own self-examination rather than looking for the results to be given through a collaborative, objective, science-like enterprise. Smith presents the results of the conclusions of his chapters in the style of the latter; hopefully I have raised sufficient doubt about the necessity of that method to make plausible the idea that an introductory text in Phenomenology, to be fair to the subject matter, requires more reflection on the method of its composition.

Conclusion

Experiencing Phenomenology is a bold attempt to provide access for beginners to the wealth of a tradition that holds out the hope of charting human subjectivity. In his book Smith accomplishes his aim with a deft handling. The critique of the text provided here is merely to point out some of the structural problems that could be addressed to further his aims in future editions. In ignoring the analytic-continental divide Smith seems to be writing from the perspective that questions of method and presentation have already been decided in favour of the paradigm of science and the doubts I have raised here should help the reader to keep this as an open question. Aside from this I would thoroughly recommend the text to undergraduate students and scholars keen to look at Phenomenology in dialogue with the analytic tradition while noting that there are important issues that explicitly need addressing in order to avoid confusion.

 

References

Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gadamer, H. G. 2004. Truth and Method 2nd Revised Edition. trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall. London: Continuum.

Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.  Oxford: Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. 2001. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters. trans. M. Franz and R. Askay. ed. M. Boss. Illinois: Northwestern University Press .

Jaspers, K. 1997. General Psychopathology. Volume 1. trans. J. Hoenig and M. Hamilton. London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Smith, J. 2016. Experiencing Phenomenology: An Introduction. Oxford: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, L. 1963. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.


[1] I shall refer to ‘Phenomenology’ with a capital, for the reason that, as I argue in the text, I do not believe it is possible to separate the subject from an understanding of its tradition.