Categoría: Reseñas

Título: Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology
Serie: Speculative Realism
Autor: Markus Gabriel
Editorial: Edinburgh University Press
Fecha de Publicación: 2015
Formato: Paperback £19.99
Páginas: 400

The world has always been a key topic for phenomenologists.[i] Any book claiming to prove its non-existence is therefore worthy of phenomenological attention. Since others have provided a general review of Gabriel’s book,[ii] we will instead aim to engage in a discussion of two substantive points in Gabriel’s so-called “New Realism” from the perspective of what can broadly be called phenomenological philosophy.[iii] Zahavi has recently presented a thorough (and convincing) criticism of a number of positions self-identifying as “Speculative Realism” or “New Realism”.[iv] Gabriel’s is not among them, although it is, in our judgment, the position that most deserves a closer look.

We will take at least a first one: firstly we will try to shed light on the relation between phenomenology, metaphysics, and ontology by considering phenomenological accounts of these matters. Secondly we will discuss how phenomenological theories anticipate Gabriel’s No-World-View by conceiving of the world in ways that avoid the ontotheological pitfalls Gabriel highlights.

Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Ontology

Gabriel posits a twofold relation between New Realism and phenomenology, one antagonistic, one co-operational. Husserlian phenomenology as he sees it is in conflict with his New Realism since Gabriel conceives of Husserlian phenomenology as a brand of metaphysics. “Metaphysics” in Gabriel’s terminology denotes a theory of everything, of totality, of the absolute or of the world, understood as the ultimate unity or the fundamental whole; it is, in short, what Heidegger calls “ontotheology” (23); ontology, in contrast, is a theory of existence and objectuality. We will use the same terminology. Gabriel now brands Husserl a metaphysician for two reasons, namely for positing the world as “ultimate horizon” (6) and thereby committing to a theory of totality; and for looking for a “point where we have to stop” (22), i.e. an absolute fundament which Husserl is said to find in the transcendental Ego.

Whether Husserl’s notion(s) of the world really deserves the label “metaphysical” remains to be seen in the second section, but regarding the latter charge we tend to agree with Gabriel. Even though nature, structure and function of Husserl’s transcendental Ego are still a matter of debate and research, it is hard to deny that Husserl exhibits ontotheological tendencies by repeatedly positing transcendental subjectivity as the absolute or ultimate ground (akin to the early Fichte) on several occasions – even though his idea of phenomenology as a critical undertaking of responsible thinkers would actually seem to exclude this move (Tugendhat 1967, 195). Gabriel correctly identifies the problem with this idea as one arising from the epistemological privilege granted to first-person givenness as fundamental (the “point where we have to stop”), motivating Husserl to understand the transcendental as consciousness of myself as an Ego, which is in turn illicitly granted ontological privilege. In light of these Cartesian (foundationalist and subjectivist) tendencies, Husserl may well be classified as a metaphysician. It is however equally possible to find decidedly anti-idealist and anti-ontotheological strands of thinking in Husserl. László Tengelyi’s last book is an eminent example of this (Tengelyi 2014), as is John Drummond’s work on the status of the noema (Drummond 1990). Indeed, the Cartesian trouble with Husserl has also already motivated post-Husserlian phenomenology to for the most part reject or re-interpret Husserl’s absolute subjectivity. Sartre for example paradoxically speaks of the subject as a “dependent”, “non-substantial absolute” (Sartre 1943, 713).

Already on an exegetical level then, the phenomenological tradition would have deserved a closer look. Thus it is very doubtful whether the metaphysical charge still holds regarding post-Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger, for instance, is explicit in his criticism of Husserl’s illicit Cartesian move. This criticism not only dismisses the epistemological privilege of the first person by reconceiving it as eminently practical, world-embedded and finite, decisively modifying the phenomenological account of subjectivity vis-à-vis the transcendental subjectivity of Ideas I. More fundamentally, Heidegger’s account of ontology as understanding being qua being of entities – among which the subject is only one – is oriented not towards subjects but towards objects (things) as exemplary case of existence. In later Heidegger in particular, senses of being are equivalent to “interpretations of the thingness of the thing” (Heidegger 2003 (GA 5), 7). This not only sounds realistic, it presents a genuine phenomenological realism.[v]

Gabriel is at least in part aware of how close his own position is to some strands of the phenomenological movement. Regarding a non-metaphysical, i.e. non-foundationalist phenomenology, Gabriel proposes a division of labour between phenomenology and ontology: ontology in Gabriel’s sense “is the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘existence’, or rather investigation of existence itself aided by insight into the meaning of ‘existence’” (5), whereas phenomenology could potentially take the role of “an overall theory of error and its manifold forms” (21), alongside psychoanalysis. While Husserl and Heidegger can be taken to both present error-theories of sorts (namely how naturalism comes about and how European thought has become forgetful of Being), it remains unclear why the link between phenomenology and ontology should be severed in the first place. For while we find different ways of thinking about the relation between ontology and phenomenology within the phenomenological tradition, no phenomenologist separates them completely, as Gabriel’s division of labour presupposes.

Husserl for instance distinguishes but doesn’t separate ontology and phenomenology: ontology is a straightforward investigation of the fundamental or formal properties of objects and the structures of the world itself, phenomenology deals with the laws of transcendental constitution. For Husserl this implies an asymmetrical relation between the two insofar as ontology as a static theory of being needs to be recast as a genetic transcendental theory of constitution, since, according to Husserl, we can only understand what existence is once we understand how it is constituted by transcendental (inter-)subjectivity (Husserl 1971 (Hua V), 129). A “concrete ontology” (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 214), encompassing all a priori noetic-noematic correlations, can therefore be only a “transcendental ontology” (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 212). So while a non-transcendental ontology is possible – and actual in the form of mathematics, mereology or a formal theory of objects – it is necessarily one-sided (Husserl 1959 (Hua VIII), 224). Such ontologies are therefore to be reformulated using the phenomenological method, resulting in a genuinely phenomenological ontology unified by phenomenological method.

Heidegger on the other hand takes phenomenology to be simply the way to do ontology (Heidegger 1977 (GA 2), 36), as all non-phenomenological ontology fails to even obtain its topic. Only destructing the history of metaphysics, foregoing errant theorizing and going back to the ‘things themselves’ can bring out the meaning of existence. This is what a “phenomenological interpretation” of the history of philosophy is supposed to achieve. The hermeneutical task of philosophy thus has a phenomenological purpose and, ultimately, an ontological aim.[vi] As addressing the question of being (existence) is philosophy’s paramount task and phenomenology the way to reach this end, ontology and phenomenology are but two sides of the same.

Sartre, to name just one other thinker from the phenomenological tradition, builds on this idea, in some sense subverting the Husserlian priority of phenomenology: phenomenological description allows a regressive analysis leading towards the ontological structures necessary for the kinds of phenomena described (Sartre 1943, 83). This option corresponds to Gabriel’s own (earlier) definition of “transcendental ontology” as the investigation into “the ontological conditions of our conditions of access to what there is” (Gabriel 2011, ix), i.e. into a subset of transcendental conditions that obtain in experience. In Gabriel’s work under review, however, ontology seems to be first philosophy, without any form of transcendentalism involved.

Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre (among others) offer very different takes on the exact relationship between phenomenology and ontology (foundation, identity, facilitation). Yet on no account can a complete ontology be accomplished without phenomenology and on no account are the ontological questions “what is existence?”, “what is an object?” or “(what) is the world?” excluded from the set of problems to be answerable by a phenomenological philosophy. As Günter Figal has argued, Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology is even (unduly) restrictive in that it concerns itself with the meaning of existence only, neglecting to give an account of phenomenological description for the sake of determining what makes phenomena possible at all. Phenomenology should try to understand the relation between an account of existence and an account of the manifestation or constitution of entities (Figal 2010). From the perspective of phenomenology, then, ontology is but phenomenology with regard to a particular topic, namely the meaning of existence. It is simply part of what can be achieved through phenomenological insight into the structure of meaning as it is experienced. Thus from the phenomenologists’ point of view, the division of labour Gabriel proposes undercuts (or ignores) the entire project of understanding existence with the manifestation of entities firmly in view, i.e. the whole idea of a phenomenological ontology.

Unfortunately, however, Gabriel doesn’t address the methodological import, the very idea of phenomenology as a way of ‘doing philosophy’. Congruent with his move away from his earlier endorsement of ontology as transcendental, Gabriel’s work under the heading of New Realism does not proceed from an analysis of experience towards ontology. Rather, Gabriel discusses and dismisses particular ontological claims by labeling them and then developing a critique of that position, including phenomenology. But if one wishes to show that phenomenology is unapt for understanding the meaning of existence, one needs to do more than distribute such labels and show in more detail why phenomenology as a method fails with regard to this particular question. And that presupposes that one makes explicit how one thinks ontology should be done, and how existence/being does relate to experience/manifestation/phenomenality.

In the welcome engagement of phenomenology with Gabriel’s realism we would like to see more discussions on the proper way of doing ontology and on how claims to descriptive plausibility or experiential givenness (intuitions) can be introduced in a controlled, philosophically justified way. If there is a “fallacy of misplaced ontological concreteness” (198), then where is the right spot to place the concreteness of experience—that Husserl famously associated with his own commitment to realism (Husserl 1994 (Hua Dok.III/7), 16) and that Heidegger sought in the experience of things in an eminent sense? Until Gabriel addresses phenomenology’s concern for concreteness, nothing in the idea of phenomenology as a method or a way of doing philosophy commits one to posit either the subject as a metaphysical absolute or the world as a metaphysical totality, as we shall now see.

The Worlds of Phenomenology

Gabriel calls his own position “only faintly phenomenological, as the goal of phenomenology is usually to ‘save the appearances’, or even to privilege the zuhanden and absorbed being-in-the-world over the mere being-there of spiders and hair. Yet, in my view, there is no monolithic domain of appearances to be saved, but manifold fields with their related appearances.” (195) It is unclear what makes the “domain of appearances” a “monolithic domain” for Gabriel. Possibly, the impression of homogeneity stems from the idea that Husserlian phenomenology sometimes equates appearance with possible experience. But be that as it may, for Gabriel, the “monolithic domain of appearances” triggers his critique of phenomenology, as it is one guise of the absolute or the world, the existence of which he so vehemently denies. “The World” for Gabriel is “any kind of unrestricted or overall totality, be it the totality of existence, the totality of what there is, the totality of objects, the whole of beings, or the totality of facts or states of affairs.” (187) It follows from Gabriel’s ontology that the world cannot exist. Here is how and why.

According to Gabriel’s definition, existence is just “the fact that some object or objects appear in a field of sense.” (158) The term “appearance” however is not supposed to indicate the involvement of any form of subjectivity. “Appearing is fairly inhuman. […] What appears comes forth; it stands apart from a certain background.” (166) These backgrounds (or contexts or domains or …) are what Gabriel calls fields of sense. “Fields are not horizons or perspectives; they are not epistemological entities […] They are an essential part of how things are in that without fields, nothing could exist.” (157) Note that taken as a description of experience, Gabriel’s account seems centered around one key intuition, namely the contrast between a background/field and an object appearing within it. But if no phenomenology (such as the experiential contrast between background and foreground) is to enter into his ontology, the challenge for Gabriel is to define objects without referring to any particular experiential setup.

Gabriel addresses this challenge by offering the following “formal theory of objects”: “an object is anything that can become the content of a truth-apt thought.” (146) Gabriel further refers to his position as an “ontological bundle descriptivism” (230, cf. 346) according to which “objects are bundles of senses or objective modes of presentation, that is to say, objects are identical with the totality of what is true about them” (231). That idea is of course familiar to phenomenologists: it matches Husserl’s definition of the (logical) object as studied by formal ontology as “subject of possible true predications” (Husserl 1976 (Hua III/1), 17). Gabriel and Husserl also agree on the fact that there “simply is no bare reference without sense” (238), i.e. that we cannot refer to/intend an object without referring to/intending it as this or that object, it is always given in some way or the other and not in another way (Husserl 1984 (Hua XIX/1), LU 1, §13; LU V, §17); for something to be manifest means for it to become manifest as part of a particular experiential context, a position developed in detail in Being and Time.

Despite the contrary implication of his terminology, Gabriel emphasises that just as “appearance” is “inhuman”, “description” is not to be understood as a linguistic activity and not as a correlative process at all. There are “visual descriptions” (19) and more generally “sensory descriptions” (20, cf. 332) — and these descriptions define objects regardless of the experiential content of these descriptions. Beneath the terminological similarities to phenomenological positions, however, Gabriel’s disregard for experiential givenness defines the decisive difference: the idea that a formal or descriptivist theory of objectuality is sufficient for ontology is probably the most contentious point of disagreement between phenomenology and Gabriel’s New Realism.

Be that as it may, the “no-world-view” follows from Gabriel’s definitions by way of a reductio ad absurdum: the world qua field of fields (or background of backgrounds or context of contexts etc.) cannot exist, since it would have to appear within a field of sense as an object in order to exist. This would then either lead into a regress of ever-bigger fields or it would engender paradoxical duplications since the world would otherwise have to appear within itself, next to all other entities which would then not only exist within the world, next to the world, but also within the world-within-the-world.

The world thus obtains a peculiar status that is most clearly defined negatively: the world is a non-object; the “world’s necessary non-existence is not a truth about an object, the world. The world is not even an object, and it absolutely does not exist.” (174) “The principle statement of the no-world-view, that the world does not exist, does not say of a particular object, the world that it does not exist. The reason for this is that ‘the world’, had it existed, would have been a very peculiar object. Had it existed, it would have been all-encompassing. Thus, it would certainly never exist in a proposition, as the proposition itself would rather exist in the world. The world, with which the proposition deals as its object, cannot be identical with the world in which the proposition exists.” (201) So “the point is that ‘the world’ has no meaning; that the term cannot refer to anything if it means what it traditionally means (the all-encompassing).” (203) The core idea of the axial age therefore turns out to have been an illusion as “there never was such an object as ‘the world’ about which one could have truth-apt thoughts.” (206)

Setting aside the worry that to think that the world doesn’t exist should be a truth-apt thought for that claim to be true (and hence be about an object in the formal but for Gabriel decisive sense), how Gabriel talks about objects and fields raises numerous questions: for instance, what is that “governing sense, as it were, that holds the various senses of an object together” (231), a notion that sounds very much like an eidos? Is it but another “truth-apt thought” or another description? What makes it “governing” and how is one then to understand the “weak form of essentialism” (231) that the no-world view entails? What is ‘essential’ here? Further, is there an identity of objects across fields? How do fields appear as objects (and not as fields)? How can fields “interact” (272) and even “merge” (172)? It is unclear how fields should be able to ‘do’ that on Gabriel’s account if “[s]ense is responsible for the individuation of fields” (131, cf. 139), and sense is the “objective mode of appearing [within that field]” (161). Again, from a phenomenological point of view, small change is needed to evaluate these ideas: would a merger of fields ‘blend’ the objective modes of appearing? How would that look like? For whom? Is “interaction” not a relation between objects? What is it like to witness an interaction of fields (in contrast to the interaction of objects)? The trouble we see is that Gabriel gives no more detailed account of these issues. In the remainder of this review we will thus focus again on what Gabriel does say a lot about, namely the matter of the world. We see no reason to dismiss that notion. Rather than a valid object of Gabriel’s criticism, we see phenomenology rather anticipate many of his ideas—without, however, therefore urging us to renounce in speaking of ‘the world’.

Husserl certainly conceives of “universal ontology” as a theory of the “total coherence or nexus (Totalzusammenhang) of everything that exists actually or possibly, of everything real and irreal” (Husserl 1974 (Hua XVII), 177), which is almost exactly the definition Gabriel gives of a metaphysical notion of world, depending on whether we consider the dichotomy real/irreal as exhaustive. We agree with Gabriel that this constitutes an unwanted remainder of ontotheology in Husserl’s work (among others). Yet to therefore abandon all notions of the world in Husserl’s writings as metaphysical would be hasty. Husserl’s famous notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt) for example, which he identifies as the “universe of pregiven self-evidence [Universum vorgegebener Selbstverständlichkeiten]” (Husserl 1954 (Hua VI), 183), is not a metaphysical concept in that the life-world is not meant to be all-encompassing; and it differs radically from the (arguably metaphysical) notion of the world he puts forth in Ideas I (Cf. Carr 1974, ch. 6). Hans Blumenberg, for instance, pointed out that the notion of the finite life-world is developed precisely in contrast to the world as a metaphysical totality and super-entity, motivating an understanding of phenomenology Blumenberg explicity labels ‘realist’ (Blumenberg 1986, 28; cf. Blumenberg 2010). László Tengelyi even reads the later Husserl as directly and strictly opposing all (ontotheological) notions of the world “as a whole in the sense of an absolute totality” (Tengelyi 2014, 299).

Heidegger in particular consistently denies object-hood as well as existence to the world. As early as 1920/21 he states that the world is something to live in, not an object (Heidegger 1995 (GA 60), 11). In Being and Time Heidegger says of the world that it is “further out” than any object might ever be, while he also denies its identification with the “totality of objects” (Heidegger 1977 (GA 2), 484). Both early and later Heidegger discuss the world not as an object but as a type of event, as a “worlding” (Welten) (Heidegger 1987 (GA 56/57), 73). The world here is not an entity but a mode of being, a “how of being” rather than a what (Heidegger 1978 (GA 26), 219).[vii] This mode of being indicates the infinity and openness of appearance, the openness of meaning rather than its closure.[viii] Only with a view to human beings and their ontological understanding, the “worlding” mode of entities forms a totality, a historical world among others.[ix]

But if Husserl and Heidegger have themselves either moved away from or consistently rejected the idea of the world as a super-entity, it is doubtful whether phenomenological notions of ‘the world’ can be targets of Gabriel’s reductio ad absurdum. And the later one looks in the history of phenomenology, the less likely this is. Werner Marx, who followed Husserl and Heidegger on the Freiburg phenomenology chair, is a case in point. Marx goes even further in Gabriel’s direction than his predecessor by dismissing the idea of the world as an “ultimate horizon” altogether, replacing it with the universality of a demand for the justification of human practice, an idea Marx associates with empathy. Marx indeed already employs the very notion of a “field of sense” (Sinnfeld) in his criticism of ontotheology. But in contrast to Gabriel’s method, which despite its self-proclaimed anarchism doesn’t provide a systematic way of proceeding from the manifestation of a particular entity to his account of existence, Marx’s approach is indeed bottom-up, as it were, beginning with ordinary language and everyday experience. This includes his treatment of the notion of the “world”, whose meaningfulness Marx never denies: “with ‘world’ we always mean, at least at first, something spatial, a space in which we perceive or into which we act, a space ‘surrounding’ us as bodily beings, a space in which the things are located together with which we live our lives, the things of nature, landscapes, mountains and oceans as well as all the objects craftsmanship and technology produce. This is the space in which we either deal with things near; but it is also the space for all those things far from us, with which we could only possibly have to deal.” (Marx 1986, 59) In Husserlian short-hand, ‘the world’ is nothing but the life-world.

Note that Marx’s is a take on the notion of the world beginning with the first-person-perspective, with an account of how objects appear and are relevant to us. But what comes into focus are not subjective achievements constituting the objects’ meaning, locating them within a super-entity encompassing everything. Rather, what presents itself to the phenomenologist are precisely “fields of sense [Sinnfelder]”, the interaction of which makes up experience, an interaction the form of which is eminently spatial for Marx. Marx emphasizes the plurality of fields of sense in the world thus described, concurring with Gabriel’s claim to a constitutive (infinite or transfinite) plurality of such fields. And exactly along Gabriel’s lines, Marx denies that these fields are portions of one “indivisible field of sense”. Rather, Marx argues, it is an ongoing philosophical task to “free us humans from this unfruitful longing” for a whole and salutary (heil) world. Instead of dismissing the notion of world completely because it can supposedly only take on the meaning of a metaphysical totality, Marx wants us to learn to “live in many worlds at once” (Marx 1986, 69). In Marx’s view, the constitutive plurality of worlds then further motivates an ethics of empathy.

This last consequence may well be a non sequitur. What results from Marx’s discussion of Sinnfelder, however, is effectively a merger of Gabriel’s ontology with an understanding of first-person-phenomenology as inherently normative. Marx’s description of the normative import of empathy is much fuzzier than recent phenomenological accounts such as Steven Crowell’s fusion of a theory of normativity with semantic externalism (Crowell 2013). By focusing on empathy Marx misplaces and restricts the source of normativity to the self’s relation to the other, an error corrected in Crowell’s broader understanding of normativity[x] and in the larger debate surrounding the normativity of perception. Nonetheless, with a view to the history of phenomenology, Marx’s essay is quite an interesting parallel to Gabriel’s work in post-Heideggerian phenomenology. It confirms that the trajectory of phenomenology as a movement is indeed gradually overcoming rather than repeating the Cartesian and the ontotheological fallacy. But it holds fast to the notion of ‘the world’, taking a no-world-view as unwarranted. Most phenomenological notions of ‘world’ are no residues of ontotheology but attempts at a phenomenological reflection and description of what we do call (our) world(s). Rather than simply giving up on the world’s existence then—and what would be at stake in this decision?—, phenomenologists should welcome a conversation with New Realism and press it to say in more detail how the no-world of fields looks like. Gabriel has given us large notes, but we need small change.

References

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Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Theorie der Lebenswelt. Ed. by Manfred Sommer. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Crowell, Steven. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drummond, John. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Figal, Günter. 2010. “Phenomenology. Heidegger after Husserl and the Greeks”. In Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. by Bret Davis, 33-43. Durham: Acumen.

Gabriel, Markus. 2011. Transcendental Ontology. Essays in German Idealism. London: Continuum.

Golob, Sacha. 2014. Heidegger on Concepts. Freedom, and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe 56/57, ed. by Bernd Heimbüchel. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

Heidegger, Martin. 1978. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz Gesamtausgabe 26, ed. by Klaus Held. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1995. “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion”. In Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe 60, ed. by Matthias Jung / Thomas Regehly / Claudius Strube, 3-156. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Husserliana VI, ed. by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Overgaard, Søren. 2004. Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Sparrow, Tom. 2015. “Markus Gabriel. Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology”, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews October 2015, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61350-fields-of-sense-a-new-realist-ontology/.

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Zahavi, Dan. “The end of what? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2016), pp. 289-309.

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[i]            Cf. recently László Tengelyi. 2014. Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg / München: Alber.

[ii]        See Tom Sparrow’s review: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61350-fields-of-sense-a-new-realist-ontology/.

[iii]              For a sustained discussion of Gabriel’s work from other perspectives see the discussion in German in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 2015, pp. 113-185, with contributions from Thomas Buchheim, Claus Beishart, Catharine Diehl/Tobias Rosefeldt, Marcela Garcia, Volker Gerhardt, Anton Friedrich Koch, Sebastian Rödl, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer.

[iv]           Dan Zahavi, “The end of what? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2016), pp. 289-309.

[v]               For an interpretation of later Heidegger along these lines, see Tobias Keiling. 2015. Seinsgeschichte und phänomenologischer Realismus. Eine Interpretation und Kritik der Spätphilosophie Heideggers, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

[vi]              See, for instance, the programmatic Natorp-Bericht (Heidegger 2005 (German version in GA 62)).

[vii]             For a detailed treatment of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s notion of the world, concurring in substance with Tengelyi’s assessment, see Overgaard 2004.

[viii]          The phrase “openness of meaning” is taken from Michael Steinmann. 2008. Die Offenheit des Sinns. Untersuchungen zu Sprache und Logik bei Martin Heidegger. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

[ix]              On “worlding” in later Heidegger, see Keiling 2015, 439-460.

[x]         On normativity and phenomenology, also see Sacha Golob. 2014. Heidegger on Concepts. Freedom, and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Título: L’être en forme. Dialectique et phénomenologie dans la dernière philosophie de Merleau-Ponty
Serie: L'oeil et l'esprit
Autor: Mariana Larison. Préface de Renaud Barbaras
Editorial: Éditions Mimésis
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Paperback 28.00 €
Páginas: 312

There are already plenty of books on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that centre either on his so-called first phase, marked by the Phenomenology of Perception, or on his later thought, mostly expressed in his final, unfinished work, The Visible and Invisible. There are also works that deal with Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole and with its development from the Phenomenology of Perception through to The Visible and Invisible. Even the genesis of Phenomenology of Perception has already been given adequate treatment in the now classic study by Théodore Gereats. Nonetheless, there is work to be done with regards to: 1) the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and the nature of his final philosophical proposal in the light of his still unpublished lectures especially those given at the Collége de France and 2) the complex topic of the relation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to his sources. Mariana Larison’s most recent book succeeds precisely in filling these gaps and for this reason is well placed to become an important text in the field of Merleau-Ponty studies.
Mariana Larison has studied at the Universities of Buenos Aires, Paris and São Paulo, under the supervision of Roberto Walton, Renaud Barbaras and Marilena Chauí. She was awarded her PhD at the University Paris I-Sorbonne. The present book is the author’s first major work. Although she is currently a researcher in Argentina, the book is written from a French background and seems to be addressed almost exclusively to French philosophers. Although this brings undeniable benefits to the work, the greatest of which is the author’s extensive knowledge and command of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished writings, it has the downside of blocking engagement with Anglo-Saxon studies of Merleau-Ponty. Some decades ago, this kind of approach was altogether legitimate. At a moment when there are excellent studies of Merleau-Ponty’s work in English, however, such as those from the likes of Lawrence Hass , Ted Toadvine, and M.C. Dillon, among others, and when Merleau-Ponty’s thought is being given a central place in current debates in the philosophy of mind by such authors as Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, it is perhaps high time that this divide came to an end. To be fair, the problem is not exclusive to this book; this failure to engage with other traditions works both ways, and many Anglo-Saxon studies are for the most part still silent on some of the most important contributions to Merleau-Ponty scholarship from the French tradition. This lack of dialogue is damaging to both traditions and perhaps to the present book as well, to the extent that it merits engagement and discussion by scholars who do not belong to the relevant French circles.
Renaud Barbaras wrote a foreword to the book, and the author indeed engages most with his interpretation. The book’s main strength lies not in its dialogue with other commentators, however, but rather in the author’s vast and thorough knowledge of both Merleau-Ponty’s published and unpublished writings and, in particular, his sometimes hidden sources.
The book’s main hypothesis can be summarized, in the author’s own words, by the idea that Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology arises from the problem of conceiving of being in such a way that it includes negativity in itself. In addition to characterizing Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as it can be gleaned from The Visible and the Invisible, however, the author reveals what drove Merleau-Ponty to that ontology in the first place. For this reason, the book can also be taken as an account of the genesis of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought, although its impressive philosophical scope makes it much more than this. Its main focus is on texts from 1955 up to Merleau-Ponty’s last writings. It is in this period that the author locates Merleau-Ponty’s later thought. The division of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical career into two phases, with the 1955-56 lectures working as a turning point, is a premise of the whole work (a premise which the author tries to justifiy throughout the course of the book). It should also be pointed out that, although the book takes its departure from Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the concept of dialectics in his 1955-56 lectures, this criticism is shown to be merely the starting point of the turn (tournant) in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. From here we are led by the author to how Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of dialectics led him to his thoughts on nature, and from there to his later ontology, centred on the notion of ‘flesh’. A caveat should be made here. Although the author argues for the existence of a turn in Merleau-Ponty’s thought by the year 1955, the book is far from blind to Merleau-Ponty’s first period. Whenever necessary, the author follows the thread of one idea down to Merleau-Ponty’s very first work, The Structure of Comportment. This taking into account of Merleau-Ponty’s thought prior to 1955 is only fitting; one of the book’s main theses is that Merleau-Ponty’s final work, The Visible and the Invisible, should be read as a phenomenological work and not as a departure from phenomenology. Without questioning the legitimacy of the division of Merleau-Ponty’s work into periods, I remain convinced, after reading Mariana Larison’s work, that there is a deep unity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole, and that this unity lies precisely in Merleau-Ponty’s life-long attempt to come to terms with Husserl’s phenomenology. In the foreword, Renaud Barbaras himself stresses the fact that the author, perhaps against her explicit intentions, ends up reinforcing the idea that there is a deep continuity in all of Merleau-Ponty’s work.
In the book’s first chapter, the author begins by arguing that the turning-point of Merleau-Ponty’s thought can be found in his still unpublished lectures on dialectics from the years 1955-56. According to the author, it was precisely by radicalizing his thought on dialectics (and thus also on history), that Merleau-Ponty managed to put into question the implicit ontology of his earlier works and to make headway towards a new ontology (which would receive its philosophical expression in Merleau-Ponty’s final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible). In order to show this, the author starts by returning to the years 1952-3 and the polemic surrounding the war in Korea. It was this event that lead Merleau-Ponty to question his Marxist conception of dialectics and to distance himself from the French Communist Party. This questioning bore its first fruits in 1955, not only in the aforementioned lecture course, but also through the publication of The Adventures of Dialectics.
In short, according to the author, Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Hegelian and Marxist dialectical accounts of history hinges on two closely related points: 1) the course of events in world history is not thoroughly determined; 2) history does not have a final sense, an ultimate aim that would put an end to all dialectical contradiction. What Merleau-Ponty opposes to the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical view of history in order to reveal its ontological presuppositions is not a new dialectic of history, but rather a history of dialectic. The author gives an account of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Hegel, showing how his acquaintance with the critique by the Vietnamese philosopher Tran-Duc-Thao of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel was crucial in shaping Merleau-Ponty’s own position on dialectics. In particular, Tran-Duc-Thao’s criticism of Kojève motivated Merleau-Ponty to start questioning the status of nature in Hegel’s dialectics. It became questionable for him that nature should be conceived as something fully positive, as a reality in-itself outside of the dialectical movement of subjectivity, history and spirit. However, against Tran-Duc-Thao, Merleau-Ponty holds that dialectical movement does not resolve itself in an ultimate synthesis.
It is precisely to the problematic of nature that the author turns in the book’s second chapter. Here, the main text is, of course, Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature (and to a lesser extent Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Husserl).
For those familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature, it is well known that it is here that Merleau-Ponty traces the history of the concept of nature to its ancient and modern roots. The author takes us precisely along this path in an attempt to discover both the essence of modern philosophy’s account of nature as it can be found in Descartes and Leibniz and the true nature of the break with the latter that Merleau-Ponty detects in Schelling, Husserl and Bergson. It should be added that the author does not limit herself to a commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature. As mentioned above, one of the defining traits of this book is her extraordinary command of Merleau-Ponty’s sources. As a result, she compares Merleau-Ponty’s original text for the lecture with his preparatory notes and informs us on the particular sources he relied on when devising them. (For instance, we come to know that Merleau-Ponty’s knowledge of Schelling was almost entirely second-hand.)
The author shows that in the history of the concept of nature, Descartes represents a turning point for Merleau-Ponty. It is Descartes who for the first time introduced a positive concept of infinity, then also adopted by Leibniz. However, Cartesian philosophy is also profoundly ambiguous when it comes to the analysis of the body. On the one hand, there is the body as it is considered by the understanding, as pure extension, and then there is the living body, the body as it really exists, in which the union of body and soul is manifested. Descartes discovers in the human being a nature that cannot be reduced to an object. Although the author does not mention this, this reading of Descartes, along with the idea that there is an ambiguity in his conception of the body, was already in place in the Phenomenology of Perception and cannot be said to be a distinguishing feature of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy.
According to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature, Schelling, Bergson and Husserl were the first to question the idea of a positive infinity. Concerning this, the author gives voice to the question that every reader of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature certainly asks herself: what can possibly bind thinkers as diverse as Schelling, on the one hand, and Bergson and Husserl, on the other. As is perhaps now apparent, the answer is that these were the thinkers who, in one way or the other, introduced a negative conception of infinity. Schelling is particularly relevant in this regard, since he was the first to put into question Descartes’s conception of nature. Instead of thinking of being (or God) as an actual infinity and the ultimate cause (Grund) of nature, he introduces what he calls an abyss, a lack of Being, into God. The second major idea that, according to the author, Merleau-Ponty finds in Schelling is the idea of philosophy as an exercise in seeing. Nature, according to Schelling, is originally discovered in intuition or perception. This of course runs against the conception of nature as an object of the understanding, as we find in Descartes. Here I cannot help but point out once again that the idea of an original phenomenon of nature accessible via perception and opposed to both intellectualist-idealist and materialist conceptions was already laid out in the Phenomenology of Perception.
According to the author’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures, what Bergson shares with Schelling is precisely the idea of a primordial unity of nature to which we have access through intuition. To this idea Bergson adds a critique of the idea of absolute nothing, to which he opposes the thesis that the concept of nothing is always relative, always a negation of something. For Bergson, both the idea of radical contingence and the idea of pure necessity are two sides of the same coin in that both entail that being and nothing are absolute. To them Bergson opposes the idea of a “there is” (il y a) as the ultimate fact with which we are faced. However, according to the author, even though Merleau-Ponty shares Bergson’s critiques of absolute nothing, he rejects Bergson’s identification of being with present being (actualité) since it entails an ahistorical ontology.
After dealing with Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Bergson, the author goes in detail into Merleau-Ponty’s late reading of Husserl. In this context, the texts that support her interpretation are not only the lectures on nature but also Merleau-Ponty’s seminars on Husserl from the years 1959-1960. Regarding Husserl’s conception of nature, the author points out that there is an ambiguity that corresponds to Husserl’s ambiguity concerning the phenomenological reduction. On the one hand, the reduction should pull us out from a state of ignorance and give us access to another world, a world of truth. On the other hand, the reduction does no more than make explicit what is implicit in our usual dealings with the world in the natural attitude. According to the latter interpretation of the reduction, nature is discovered as a dimension that is prior to reflection. Following a detour through Merleau-Ponty’s views on contemporary science and Whitehead’s philosophy, the author resumes Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl. According to her, what is characteristic of the latter is the fact that Merleau-Ponty does not merely detect opposite tendencies in Husserl. What he discovers in some of Husserl’s late essays such as ‘The Origin of Geometry’ and ‘The Earth Does Not Move Itself’ is a way towards a new form of ontology, which, according to the author, Merleau-Ponty took upon himself to fully develop.
To make a long argument short, the author points out that in Merleau-Ponty’s view the late Husserl’s main philosophical accomplishments revolve around the notions of sense and horizon. Regarding the former, Husserl’s late essays reveal that, rather than being atemporal, sense only comes to fruition in time and history. Regarding the notion of horizon, it represents for Merleau-Ponty the discovery of an ‘invisible’ dimension that structures and shapes what appears. This notwithstanding, the author points out that Merleau-Ponty maintains a fundamental disagreement with the way Husserl conceives of the notion of horizon. Whereas Husserl thinks of horizon as something capable of being made totally explicit, Merleau-Ponty, for his part, maintains that horizons always remain opaque to us, something that we can never fully disentangle.
The second chapter closes with the preliminary conclusion that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on nature point the way towards a new ontology that would fully bloom in The Visible and the Invisible. According to the author, this new ontology intends to tread a middle path between the ontology of the object and the ontology of the existent, and for that reason it can be called an ontology of mediation between these two models. For my part, it remains doubtful whether the path towards this ontology was not already laid out by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception.
It is precisely to this ‘new ontology’ that the author turns in the book’s third chapter. Surprisingly or not, the chapter begins with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on the nature of the human body compared to the animal body. It is also in this chapter that the author relies more on Merleau-Ponty’s early work. The author starts by focusing on the idea that the animal body is a form, and this form is life itself. She then proceeds to the nature of the human body in particular. Here, she introduces the important idea that the human body constitutes a symbolic relation to the world. Her study of symbolism is very interesting and reveals once again the amazing scope of her command of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit and more hidden sources. In order to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of symbolism, the reader is led by the author into a study of Sartre’s The Imaginary and is introduced to psychoanalytic notions that helped shape Merleau-Ponty’s views on symbolism. Here she shows that, in his first period, Merleau-Ponty held to the view that it was not possible to make a clear-cut distinction between perception and imagination, both of them being rooted in the lived body’s transcendence. Later, in the lectures on Institution and Passivity from 1954-55, Merleau-Ponty no longer located this common element in the body-subject, locating it instead, under the influence of Freud and Melanie Klein, in a primary symbolism of the living body.
At the end of the chapter, the author delves into the core of Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology: his notion of ‘flesh’. That she manages to give a very original interpretation of such a difficult and controversial notion must be counted as one of the book’s greatest achievements. In summary, the author argues, tracing the roots of the notion in his lectures on nature, that ‘flesh’ is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to the reflexivity of the human body. As a ‘reflexive form’, the ‘flesh’ comes to take the place of the old philosophical notion of subjectivity. Next, the author asks what it means to extend the ‘flesh’, conceived in this way, to the whole world, as Merleau-Ponty does in The Visible and Invisible when he speaks of a ‘flesh of the world’. Here, the author refrains from mythical interpretations of the notion of ‘flesh of the world’ that attribute reflexivity to all things. In order to accommodate the idea of a ‘flesh of the world’, she distinguishes between a notion of flesh in a strict and a figurative sense. Whereas flesh in the strict sense points to the human body’s reflexivity, the ‘flesh of the world’ is flesh only in a figurative sense. The sensible is flesh because it is bound up with the reflexivity of the human body. There is no reflexivity of sense without an opening to the sensible as such. In the end, the author argues that there is no reason to restrict the notion of flesh to the human body only. The reflexivity of the human body is the reflexivity of the whole of nature through the body. In this sense, much as the organs of the individual body must be seen as a part of the latter, the individual body forms part of a larger system that comprises the whole human world. It is this human world that the flesh designates, according to the author.
The fourth and final chapter (the longest in the book, comprising over 100 pages) constitutes without doubt the centrepiece of the book. The author starts by putting forward two hypotheses. The first consists in the idea that Merleau-Ponty’s work after 1956 is the realization of the research plan laid out by him in the seminar on dialectics from 1955-6. This hypothesis leads to the conclusion that Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology was thought out as an ontology of mediation, centred around the idea of being as perceived form. The second hypothesis is that Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is still phenomenological in character.
The author starts by investigating the notion of dialectics on the basis of his still unpublished seminars on the subject from 1955-6. The outcome of this analysis leads to the idea that ontology must be in some sense dialectical. According to this new ontology, things are not determined by themselves alone and are not coincident with themselves. This ontology is obviously opposed to object ontology, where things are what they are and are determined as such. That things lack coincidence with themselves can be translated by the idea that things are what they are by means of a relation to what surpasses them. Here the notion of background originated in Gestalt psychology and the Husserlian notion of horizon occupy centre stage. A thing is always a figure against a background and in that sense is always surrounded by a horizon.
Since the notion of form (Gestalt) is from the beginning so vital to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the author proceeds to analyse it more closely, not only in his earlier writings but also in its historical inception. In this context, the author argues that, although Merleau-Ponty has never relinquished the notion of Gestalt, we can trace a development in the way he understood it and in its systematic function in his thought. Whereas by the time of the Phenomenology of Perception the Gestalt has essentially a subjective function to the extent that it was mostly tied to the body schema, which constituted the most primary form (the one that conditioned all the others), in his later ontology Gestalt comes to be acknowledged as a self-regulating phenomenal structure.
The first part of the last chapter concludes with the idea that Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is an ontology of perceptible forms. These forms take the place of Husserl’s essences. They constitute the meaning of sensible being, but they cannot be thought apart from the compound of visible and invisible that constitutes it.
In the last chapter’s second part, the author presents the thesis that Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology constitutes a radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenology. In order to argue for this bold and original thesis, the author revises Merleau-Ponty’s lasting relation with phenomenology since its beginnings. For those acquainted with Merleau-Ponty’s work, it will come as no surprise that, besides Husserl himself, the author discusses at length the influence of such figures as Eugen Fink, Gurwitsch and Heidegger on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology.
As is self-evident, the characterization of a thought as being phenomenological depends on the way one understands phenomenology. In this regard, the author seeks support from the side of Brentano. She shows that, contrary to Husserl, Brentano did not identify being with being an object. It fell to Husserl to accomplish this identification and, according to the author, Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology springs from a critique of it. As a result, Merleau-Ponty came to disregard Husserl’s meanings and essences and the possibility of having a ‘categorial intuition’ of them – that is, the possibility of ‘seeing’ ideal entities apart from their particular instances. Husserl’s ideal meanings and essences become for Merleau-Ponty what he calls ‘the invisible’, which shapes the visible and together with it makes up the sensible. According to the author, Merleau-Ponty’s entire effort consists in conceiving a form of intentionality aimed at pre-objective being without thereby setting up a division between an immanent and a transcendent sphere, a sensible and an ideal sphere. It is in terms of this purpose that the notion of Gestalt becomes especially fertile. Intentionality should be seen as inherent in the form (Gestalt) of the body as ‘flesh’.
In the conclusion, the author summarizes once again the book’s main theses and tries to gather any loose ends. It must be said that, given the book’s myriad references and themes, it is not always easy to follow and at certain points seems to lose focus. But this is perhaps an unavoidable problem for such an ambitious endeavour. For the same reason, it could be also argued that some of the topics could have received more extensive treatment, but this would be unjust, for to fully develop one of them would have necessitated writing a different book. It should be mentioned that one of the work’s greatest virtues is precisely the extent to which it is likely to inspire further research on many of its themes.
In sum, I believe this book will establish itself as a key text in the field of Merleau-Ponty studies. Although it is not meant for the uninitiated, its originality, tremendous breadth of reference and erudition make it essential reading for anyone interested in Merleau-Ponty and the history and development of phenomenology in general.

Título: Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language
Autor: Andrew Inkpin
Editorial: The MIT Press
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Hardcover $43.00
Páginas: 381

Is there a need for a phenomenological approach in the philosophy of language? According to Andrew Inkpin’s Disclosing the World, phenomenology indeed offers a better account of the way we experience and perceive language than most contemporary philosophical approaches to language do.

In his exposition of the need for a phenomenology of language, Inkpin refers to certain kinds of experience that most contemporary philosophical approaches to language are unable to  apprehend, mostly due to “antecedent assumptions about what language should be like – the degree of systematicity or the form it should have, the epistemological function it is desired or perceived to play, how it connects with philosophy of mind or metaphysics, and so on – in a way leaving them peculiarly insensitive to the factors that speakers might perceive to be at work in different kinds of linguistic phenomena’ (p.4). Instead of drawing on some ‘ideal’ of language, Inkpin takes our experience of language as his starting point. By doing so, Inkpin wants to come to an understanding of language as ‘a process of articulation in the public space that plays a constitutive role in human actions and thought’ (p.5).

In his phenomenological approach to language, Inkpin elaborates a ‘minimalist conception of phenomenological method, defined by the basic commitment (…) to describe accurately how things appear or manifest themselves’ (p. 6). The development of this phenomenological conception draws extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. By combining the philosophical ideas of these three thinkers, Inkpin tries to come to a unified view, claiming that these three positions have the potential to complement one another. In particular, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, offers a framework in which two aspects of language, the presentational and the pragmatic, are further developed by using Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein respectively.

The first part of the book sets out this Heideggerian framework and focuses on the ‘role Heidegger sees language having in the broader phenomenon of disclosure and a pattern of commitments that characterize his conception of language as a phenomenological one’ (p.25) As Inkpin himself notes, it is not obvious to focus on Sein und Zeit when discussing Heidegger’s view on language. Indeed, language became increasingly central in Heidegger’s philosophical work and his earlier work Sein und Zeit ‘had treated language as peripheral to his overall philosophical project and discussed it only in a dispersed and fragmentary manner’ (p.25). However, in Sein und Zeit Heidegger emphases the foundational role of understanding equipment in everyday practices. According to Inkpin, this yields a better account of the pragmatic aspect of language which will disappear in Heidegger’s later writings, but which is surely central to lived human experience of language.

In this first part, Inkpin addresses the role played by language in disclosure. Inkpin concentrates on Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the world and his account of how human understanding of the world takes a determinate form, culminating in language. According to Inkpin, ‘Heidegger’s conception of language belongs to an overall picture of intentionality that centers on and is shaped by his idea of Dasein as being-in-the-world’ (p.54). Heidegger thus does not consider language as something with an inside-outside topology, but respects the various processes and phenomenal relations it is involved in. Starting from the idea that ‘in describing some phenomenon one must respect its character as unified whole’ (p. 55), Heidegger rejects attempts to conceive language in terms of symbolic forms, categories of meaning or the logic of propositions, because ‘picking out one of these aspects as the “essence of language” cannot yield a philosophically adequate understanding of language’ (p.55). Language is to be understood as embedded in the world.

After explaining the more general features of the Heideggerian framework Inkpin considers Heidegger’s view of the disclosing function of linguistic signs. According to Inkpin, Sein und Zeit ‘brings together two distinct factors in the articulation of lived meaning (…) each of which clearly features in our prereflective experience of language and has implications for the inferential properties that linguistic expressions manifest in sentential contexts’ (p. 90). Linguistic signs are thought of as bearers of both presentational and pragmatic sense. Linguistic signs are entities that ‘can reveal features of the world to us through either a proper appreciation of their presentational implications or a grasp of their pragmatic utility’ (p.90). However, Heidegger does not offer a detailed conception of each kind of sense, which leaves open the question of how the relation between presentational and pragmatic sense is to be understood. Inkpin therefore explores these two aspects by drawing on the philosophical works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein respectively.

In the second part of the book, Inkpin therefore tries to come to a better understanding of the presentational aspect of language by discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view on language. This view considers language as a kind of ‘incarnate sense’, meaning that sense is generated by embodied agents living their lives. According to Merleau-Ponty, the use of linguistic signs is inseparable from what makes them meaningful: ‘the word, far from being the simple sign of objects and of meanings, inhabits things and is the vehicle of meanings’ (p.97). For Merleau-Ponty, language is primarily expressive behaviour and shares various features with painting. In literary language use, but also in translation, we are ‘attentive to the role of linguistic form in anchoring specific associations or nuances of meaning’ (p.153). In these kinds of contexts, linguistic signs are experienced ‘as literally the means of which thoughts are composed, as expressive “materials” that embody certain constraints’ (p.153). In this way linguistic signs can be seen as bearers of presentational sense.

Although Merleau-Ponty’s view on language offers the possibility to fill in one of the gaps that remained in the Heideggerian framework, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on expressive and creative language use seems to downplay the use of established language . At this point, Wittgenstein is brought in to discuss the pragmatic sense of linguistic signs. In contrast to both Heidegger and Merleau Ponty, Wittgenstein did not consider himself a phenomenologist. Without trying to interpret Wittgenstein as a phenomenological philosopher, Inkpin states that his conception of language is compatible with a phenomenological one. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games can be considered a way to understand the pragmatic sense of linguistic signs. In particular, the later Wittegenstein’s claim that practice constitutes meaning can be seen compatible with the approaches of both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who both stressed the embeddedness of language in human practice and experience.

Combining Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, Inkpin comes to an overall picture that ‘sees languages as embedded in human practice, in embodiment, and in their own semiotic horizon’ (p. 225). Within this framework the relation between pragmatic and presentational sense ‘should be thought of as one of symbiotic complementarity’ (p.227). According to Inkpin, the combination of these two distinct aspects of sense articulations provides a basis for explaining different kinds a phenomena related to the experience of language. This claim results in three important implications.

Firstly, Heidegger’s conception of the world questions the traditional opposition between realism and idealism. According to Heidegger, there is no gap ‘between the way the world appears to us in the perspective of our projects and the way the world is “in itself”, because ‘the expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ marks genuine and direct contact with our surroundings’ (p.234). Therefore, language does not have to be seen as representations that are standing between us and real objects, but as a way of being in contact with them. The embeddedness of language in other phenomena implies ‘that knowledge of language is not sui generis, but is intrinsically bound up with more general awareness of the world’ (p.243-244).

Secondly, the phenomenological approach shows the limitations of the semantics approach – the more mainstream philosophical approach to language. Semantics cannot be seen a self-sufficient functionality, because linguistic meaning is ontologically and functionally embedded in the world. Furthermore, the phenomenological approach shows that language should not be overrationalized and that thinking of language as a systematically ordered whole misrepresents the specific modes of intelligence that language use embodies.

Thirdly, Inkpin suggests that his descriptive phenomenology of language can be complemented with the explanatory approach of 4E cognitive science (approaches in cognitive science that emphasize the importance of the embodiment, embedding, enaction and extension of cognitive processes). Just as Inkpin’s phenomenology, 4E cognitive science is attentive to the role of things outside the head in understanding cognition. But the availability of a theory capable to offer some explanation  could make us wonder whether there is still need for a purely descriptive phenomenological approach to language. But Inkpin claims that 4E cognitive science needs phenomenological description of our experience of language, because this description has a role to play in identifying the constituent parts of embedded/enactive/extended cognitive systems.

Inkpin’s book therefore succeeds in showing the value of a phenomenological approach to language in relation to both mainstream approaches in philosophy of language and cognitive science. Inkpin’s approach points out the embeddedness of language and shows the need to complement the prevalent semantics approach with a phenomenological one. Furthermore, Inkpin stresses the need to see phenomenology and 4E cognitive sciences as complementary, undermining the unnecessary competition between science and philosophy. Inkpin grounds his approach on the work of three respected thinkers and tries to explain their ideas as clear as possible, while at the same time assigning them a place in his bigger framework. He does not try to give an overview of already existing phenomenological theories of language, but rather elaborates his own philosophical framework, building in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. This makes Disclosing the World much more than an interesting introduction to the philosophical ideas of these three thinkers on language. Inkpin’s book offers an interesting perspective on what a phenomenology of language could  be and why it should be necessary. Although it is not always as accessible as one would like it to be, this book is certainly a must read for everyone interested in philosophy of language.

Título: Negative Certainties
Serie: Religion and Postmodernism
Autor: Jean-Luc Marion
Editorial: The University of Chicago Press
Fecha de Publicación: 2015
Formato: Cloth $45.00
Páginas: 278

Edmund Husserl, in Die Idee der Phänomenologie, points out that phenomenology has two designations. The first is a science, and the second is “the specifically philosophical attitude of thought” together with “the specifically philosophical method”. [I] Since Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, Jean-Luc Marion critically adopts the second designation. His reception is critical because he does not simply repeat Husserl’s transcendental reduction and Heidegger’s existential reduction, but further introduces the reduction of givenness and offers a new “principle of all principles”: as much reduction, as much givenness.[ii]

His book Negative Certainties aims to expand the limits of “classical” phenomenology founded by Kant and Husserl.[iii] His innovation of phenomenological method solves four unsolved puzzles in transcendental philosophy. Man, God, the gift and the event are the puzzles, as they are ideal entities which we can think, on the one hand, but not comprehensively conceptualize or objectify, on the other hand. What is the relationship between negative certainties and the four puzzles? We can think and even “know” them, but we cannot comprehensively conceptualize or objectify them. Marion argues that “such knowledge can indeed be described as noncertain, but should not considered as uncertain, because the indetermination here plays the role of a positive qualification of that which is to be known, and does not sink down into a disqualification of its mode of knowledge” (206). It means that the indeterminablility is not equivalent to undeterminability. The indeterminable knowledge is lack of complete or adequate certainty. The lack has a positive role in the meaning-constitution as a whole. So it is false to say that the indeterminable knowledge has no certainty at all. Indeterminable knowledge is another expression of negative certainties.

There are four questions to trace the train of thought in the book:

1. Why can’t we comprehensively conceptualize or objectify the ideal entities?
2. If we cannot comprehensively conceptualize or objectify them, then how can we think them?
3. If the ideal entities can be thought of without conceptualization or objectification, then are these thoughts knowledge?
4. More importantly, what is the condition of possibility for the non-conceptual or non-objectifying thinking and the conceptual or objectifying thinking?

In the first chapter Marion performs his radical reduction of Man. The first subtitle one is: “What Is Man?” The obvious answer is: “I am a man”. Through the reduction of the “I” he finds that, instead of solving the problem, the answer leads to further obstacles. Firstly, “I” am not simply a physical thing, so I cannot be seen as an object frontally “full of meaning” (10). In addition, the term “I” is a definite pronoun, but it operates as an index rather than as a definition. Consequently, the “I” cannot exhaust what man is. Secondly, in the expression, “I am a man”, man “escapes me to the extent that the very mode of his possible knowledge, which makes him a thought object, contradicts and hides his first characteristics that of a pure thinking thing, who thinks without becoming a thought thing”. (16) The second obstacle is fundamental because the “I” becomes a thought object, rather than a pure thinking thing. It is impossible to know the pure thinking thing by the name the “I”. The name is a representation of a pure thinking thing. The name as a representation is foreign to any pure thinking thing(s), and therefore there is “a first and chief impossibility in define the essence of man, an epistemic and directly metaphysical impossibility” (15). Through a further reduction of the impossibility in defining the essence of man, Marion points out that the impossibilities are “some characteristics of knowledge by concept, there follows as a consequence the impossibility for man to name – this is, to define – a man except by reducing him to the rank of simple concepts and thereby to know not a man but an object” (25).

Does this imply that “Man” cannot be thought or known? Marion’s response is no. There is “no contradiction between the knowledge of man as the object of anthropology and the impossibility of this knowledge within a reflexive self-consciousness; for knowing me, myself [le moi] as an object, constituted by the alienation common to all objects” (25). The lesson of this reduction teaches us is that “man is the insurmountable difference between the two sides of the cogitation: the ego and the object” (25). As a result, it is impossible to exhaust the essence of man, but it is possible to incomprehensibly know and understand what Man means. Man is originally indefinite. “The original indefinition of man does not remain undecided and anonymous, but instead is inscribed and developed within the horizon opened by its assignation and its reference to the image and likeness of the visible” (50).

In the second chapter, Marion performs the reduction of God. Atheists doubt the existence of God, and even conclude the death of God. The conclusion can be formulated into a subject-predicate judgment, God is death. Atheists do not hesitate to use the concept God. However, through the reduction, Marion finds that “in order to be able to deny having an idea of God, it is necessary to have one” (58). Atheists claim that it is impossible to experience God. Nonetheless, their attribution of God (the experiential impossibility of God) already offers a perfectly conceivable and thus acceptable meaning to God. It is paradoxical that we can disqualify the knowledge of God’s essence, existence and phenomenon, but we cannot eliminate the very question of God. “Consequently, not only our (metaphysical) impossibility of demonstrating the existence of God but especially our (nonmetaphysical) impossibility of defining by concept the least essence of God becomes ambivalent themselves, and therefore problematic” (52). Through a further reduction of the impossibility of defining by concept the least essence of God, Marion realizes that “what one uncovers with the help of the concept of God is an idol, which philosophically has only the signification of making us see what idea of summon ens and of Being is generally directive” (57). It is because the second impossibility refers to the impossible de-nominates or abolishes “the limits set by metaphysics to experiences” (the possible). “This (im)possible can only be understood by opposition to that which it surpasses – by opposition to what metaphysics understands in its way as the relation between the possible and the impossible” (71). Through further reduction of the (im)possible, Marion suggests that  the term “the impossible”, in fact”, can also mean unconceivable, unthinkable or unimaginable. “There is, then, no contradiction other than what is conceivable, and nothing is conceivable that is within a conception of ours, and therefore quoad nos, for us, for our finite mind” (72-3).  If something is unconceivable, unthinkable or unimaginable, then it could never be conceivable to us. God could be conceivable to us that God is attributed by some properties, e.g. not unconceivable, unthinkable and unimaginable to us. It follows that God is not completely unconceiavle, unthinkable or unimaginable. And God is somehow epistemological possible for us. It is a valid argument (denying the consequent). Marion adds that the degree of the knowledge of God is based upon the conceivability of man. He states that “the impossible for man [us] has the name God, but God as such – as the one who alone does what man cannot even contemplate” (82). God is a name or a limiting concept of what man cannot conceive, therefore it denotes what is impossible for man (us).

In the third and fourth chapter, Marion performs the reduction of the gift. The gift is an index denoting a pure gift (the givenness) in the reflective level. The distinction is significant because of two reasons. Firstly, the gift appears as ideal and unreal, whereas a pure gift is real and denoted by the gift. Secondly, the gift appears under the conditions of experience, whereas a pure gift is nonappearent, hence it is presupposed by the gift. The gift appears as its meaning under the condition of actual experience, but it is a term of exchange. The distinction leads to a paradox: “either the gift appears in actuality, but it disappears as gift; or, it remains a pure gift, but it becomes nonapparent, in actual, excluded from the process of things, a pure idea of reason, a mere noumenon, resistance to the conditions of actual experience” (86). As a result, “it is the characteristic of the gift given that it spontaneously conceals the givenness in it” (125). Through a further reduction, “the gift is reduced to givenness by being fully realized without any consciousness of giving-without the self-consciousness…The gift reduced to givenness has no consciousness of what it does” (97-8).

By the reduction of the gift, the two moments of givenness are revealed. “The gift shows itself on the basis of itself in a double capacity: first of all, because like every other phenomenon, it gives itself on the basis of itself; next, because, more radically than every other phenomenon, it gives its self on the basis of itself” (107). On the one hand, the gift that it gives or es gibt refutes Heidegger’s claim that “the giving gives only the given, it never gives itself” (124). On the other hand, unlike the tradition of transcendental philosophy since Kant, the givenness of the gift is self-giving without employing “anything from a possibility that comes from elsewhere, such as the parsimonious calculation of sufficient reason-in short, without any other possibility than its own” (111). However, this is also dissimilar to what speculative realism aims at.  A further reduction is performed towards the self-giving of a pure gift. Marion asks, “what, then makes the visibility of the gift possible, if the very process of givenness, whereby the giver turns the gift over as given, by handing it over in its autonomous visibility?” (125). This is the key for Marion, ie. to have both the commitment of phenomenology and its way beyond the “traditional” phenomenology. Marion’s commitment to phenomenology is his insistence on the reduction, and the insistence is also his pathway beyond the “traditional” phenomenology.  Through the reduction, “the gift given allows the return from which it proceeds to appear, and gives itself up for that reason” (126). A pure gift or the givenness cannot re-veal itself in a reflective or philosophical way. It can be re-cognized through the reduction or the phenomenological reflection of the gift. To perform the radical reduction of a pure gift or the givenness, Marion aims at bringing its nonappearance into appearance; turn the invisible into the visible. This reduction is a re-turn or making anew. Therefore, “it is not a question of suppressing the gift given, for the benefit of the giver, but of making this gift transparent anew in its process of givenness by letting its giver eventually appear there, and first and always, by allowing to appear the coming-over that delivers the gift into the visible” (126). It is the very meaning of his new principle of all principles: “as much reduction, as much givenness”. He reformulates this principle in this context: “the more the giver gives, the less he loses; the more he abandons, the more he affirms himself as a consciousness irreducible to its gifts” (134). It is his hermeneutical dialectic to reveal the play between the two moments or “the game of loss and gain” in Marion’s terminology.

In the fifth chapter, Marion performs the reduction of the event. There are two characteristics in satisfying the demands of a rigorous science through clear and distinct ideas. The first is to constitute an essence (a model, a definition, a “concept”), which is known in advance and foreseeable before the production of the object. The second is to allow for the object to be repeated and reproduced through the essence. “Consequently, the possibility of the object coincides with the conditions for experience-that is, it coincides with the very conditions of scientific knowledge by definition for a finitude understanding” (159). Scientific knowledge pays attention to cognizable objects only. It leads scientific knowledge to “monopolize presence” and expel “the non-objective phenomena from the space of manifestation” (162). The demand of clear and distinct ideas begins with Descartes. By means of universal doubt, Descartes performs the reduction of wax. “The wax, then, has been reduced to what the pure cogitatio (without the senses) can grasp of it, the wax ceases to appear as a thing that is complex, multiple, with undefined properties, ever changing, never stable, in short, a thing in and  of itself” (163). This performance of reduction ceases the wax as an unforeseeable thing, then the wax becomes a foreseeable object. The wax as an unforeseeable thing is what Kant calls an object = x. Nevertheless, Kant cancels the investigation of “an object = x” through his important distinction between phenomena and noumena. He argues that any metaphysical desire to know noumena with objective validity is a misuse of categories or a categorical mistake. Unlike Kant, Descartes explains what “an object = x” means through his implicit reduction. “Things become object through the elimination of those things, or more precisely, through the elimination of that in those things which does not allow itself to be abstracted according to order and measures” (165). It means that things become objects, if and only if the thingness of things are extracted and eliminated. The thing in-itself is concealed. What remains are the appearance or phenomenon of a thing, namely the thing of-itself. It is what Marion claims “the objective interpretation of the phenomenon masks and misses its eventness” (177). The events are indexes denoting any non-object phenomena or “saturated phenomena”, whereas the objects are indexes denoting any objective phenomena or “diminished phenomena” (181).

Marion does not stop here. He performs a further reduction, and uncovers the condition of possibility for the distinction between the events and the objects. Since the “as-structure” is inscribed within the rank of the existentialia of Dasein, “the distinction between the modes of phenomenality (for us, between object and event) can be joined to the hermeneutical variations that, as existentialialia of Dasein…the distinction of phenomena into objects and events thus finds a grounding in the variations of intuition” (199). Therefore, Marion re-emphasizes his principle in this context: “the more a phenomenon appears as an event (is eventualized), the more it proves itself to be saturated with intuition. The more it appears as an object (is objectivised), the more it proves itself to be poor in intuition” (199).

In the conclusion, Marion insightfully points out that “the paradox does not prohibit the knowledge of phenomena, but on the contrary defines the figure that phenomena must take in order to manifest themselves, when they contradict the conditions the finitude cannot not impose upon them” (207). Thus, the titles on the four ideal entities, e.g. man, God, the gift and the event, employ “or” to set up the paradoxes, which are the residuum of the reduction(s): the undefinable, or the face of man (chapter 1); the impossible, or what is proper to God (chapter 2); the unconditioned, or the strength of the gift (chapter 3); and the unforeseeable, or the event (chapter 5). Throughout the book, Marion uses the phenomenological reduction to demonstrate how the double interpretation is possible by means of the “as-structure”, which is inscribed within the existentialia of Dasein. More importantly, it is Marion’s phenomenological contribution to uncover that the “as-structure” is the condition of possibility for the double interpretation: “… or…”. The uncovering is done through the phenomenological method, namely the phenomenological reduction. Consequently, Marion does not repeat what Husserl and Heidegger did, but also broadens the horizon of the unexplored phenomenological field. He is a living successor of the phenomenological movement. His book is so fruitful and rich, a book review cannot exhaust its content. Apart from the already mentioned, his analyses of different saturated phenomena like birth, sacrifice and forgiving are of great value. To borrow Marion’s terminology: reading (his) book is a “saturated phenomenon”.

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[i] Husserl, E. (1973). Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. Hua. Bd. II, Hrsg. von W. Biemel. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 23.

[ii] Marion, J. L. (1998). Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 203.

[iii] It is debatable whether phenomenology can be  divided into new and old. Still the distinction between new and classical phenomenology can be found in Leonard Lawlor’s work. He traces the Derridean and Deleuzean criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology back to Eugen Fink. In his interpretation, Fink, under the great influence of Heidegger, argues that phenomenology consists of a “new idea of philosophy”. This new idea of philosophy leads to what Lawlor calls new phenomenology. See Lawlor, L. (2003). Thinking Through French Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 147-150.

Título: Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language
Autor: Andrew Inkpin
Editorial: The MIT Press
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Paper Text $43.00
Páginas: 400

Andrew Inkpin’s book, Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language, is an original and sophisticated account of the processes involved in linguistic disclosure—the role that language plays in revealing the world. In particular, Inkpin is centrally concerned with the experiences speakers have of language and its ability for them to, in effect, come to know the world through those experiences.

Inkpin understands phenomenology in terms of our ability to give an account of the experiential surface (p. 9) and uses phenomenology to study our experience of language (understood as an artifact). He argues for a “minimalist phenomenology,” which is an attempt to “describe accurately how things appear or manifest themselves” (p. 6). His goal in adopting a minimalist phenomenology is to describe accurately the way language is experienced by speakers. Since speakers typically do not speak in isolation from others, an account of how speakers are experienced by their respective audiences would also be expected. While Inkpin does make some progress in this direction, with his understanding of language as language-in-the-world, through his use of some speech-act theory as presented by Searle, his account would have been strengthened from a discussion of Gricean speaker-meaning insofar as speaker intention and recognition of that intention impacts our understanding, and, in effect, experience of language.

Four parts make up the book: 1. A Heideggerian Framework; 2. Merleau-Ponty: The Presentational Aspect of Language; 3. Wittgenstein: The Pragmatic Aspect of Language; and 4. Some Philosophical Implications.

Some of the more interesting parts of the book are Inkpin’s heterodox interpretation of the works of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While other scholars have appealed to each of these authors, and various combinations of them, for the purpose of understanding language, Inkpin argues that neither one is sufficient for understanding linguistic disclosure. Instead, they are able to complement each other.

From the early Heidegger, Inkpin adopts a model of how words function and a general account of the role of language in understanding the world. He then incorporates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to account for how linguistic signs function to present the world. Wittgenstein’s pragmatism aids Inkpin in understanding the versatility of language. Inkpin rightly observes that each of them “captures something of major importance about the phenomenology of language” (p. 15). While it is perhaps more obvious that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are incorporated within the phenomenological tradition, Wittgenstein is typically not thought of as being a phenomenologist. Inkpin is careful not to frame him as one, but only argues that Wittgenstein’s pragmatism can serve as a complement to a minimalist phenomenology (p. 200).

Given that this is a nontraditional approach to understanding these three thinkers, Inkpin spends the majority of the text arguing for how we can develop a Heideggerian framework to incorporate both Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s writings. While this is important for scholarship purposes, his thoroughness in resituating the three of them leaves room to further develop how his account of the experience of language is to overcome some of the major problems confronting the traditional Fregean semantics approach.

Furthermore, the more interesting parts of the book come towards the end, but, on my understanding, appear to be left as promissory notes regarding the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive science. In particular, he focuses on the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of cognition (hereafter, ‘4e’). This is a potentially important contribution given that our understanding of perception and cognition inform our understanding of how we experience the world and its artifacts, including language. Here Inkpin’s account would have benefitted from closer attention given to the likes of Gallagher and Lakoff.

In his adoption of Heidegger, Inkpin attempts to provide an account of Heidegger’s general view of the role of language in disclosing the world. In doing so, he offers substantive background to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the world. This allows the reader to develop a better understanding of how human understanding of the world arises through the use of language. It is unclear, however, that Heidegger is able to account for determinate meanings of language (p. 33) and how Heidegger is able to account for language’s ability to reveal anything about the world itself (p. 34). Inkpin attempts to overcome these difficulties by focusing on Heidegger’s notion of Articulacy (Rede) and reconciling it with the issue of understanding the extent to which, if at all, intelligent behaviors are fundamentally linguistic (p. 26). The upshot of the chapter being a clearer account of the relation between language and linguistic content.

After having clarified key issues of Heidegger’s account of language, Inkpin is then able to clarify how Heidegger’s understanding of language is a phenomenological account. In doing so, he clarifies how language is best understood as language-in-the-world. By understanding language in this way, Inkpin is able to develop a Heideggerian account of the experience of language as something being experienced in the world. This section is of particular interest to me given my own sympathies of moving away from Cartesian dualisms, but my concern is whether or not we can think of language as an artifact if we are always in the world and we come to experience much of the world through language.

Given that language is instantiated through the use of linguistic tokens, and, from the Heideggerian perspective, language discloses the world, Inkpin offers an account of how those signs are capable of disclosing the world to agents (p. 68). Inkpin argues that Heidegger’s account, at best, offers only a schematic framework since Heidegger maintains an instrumentalist about linguistic signs—that is, linguistic signs for Heidegger always stand in for something else. This gives linguistic signs both a presentational and pragmatic role, resulting in two different senses of language. Inkpin’s attempt to reconcile these two senses motivates him to consider the work of Merleau-Ponty (p. 91).

In particular, Inkpin makes use of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of indirect sense to clarify the presentational sense of linguistic symbols (p. 96). Merleau-Ponty’s concern was with the relationship between language and the formation of thought. Inkpin considers Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to reconcile this relationship by looking at creative expression, but suggests that creative expression does not offer the explanatory role that Merleau-Ponty suggests, but instead, can be accounted for by situating Merleau-Ponty within the Heideggerian framework developed in earlier parts. This is an interesting move on Inkpin’s part to show how both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are mutually beneficial.

After having shown their complementarity, Inkpin is able to clarify the role of Merleau-Ponty’s account of indirect sense to better understand the representational ability of linguistic symbols. Linguistic symbols provide the means for understanding the underlying structure of presentation, offer an account of how they should be appropriately used in specific contexts (i.e. function), and their abilities to attune to the agents involved in their use (i.e., mode of intelligibility) (p. 120). While the combination of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty assists with understanding language’s ability to present the world, Merleau-Ponty is not sufficient for understanding the pragmatic sense of language found in Heidegger. This is where Inkpin makes use of Wittgenstein.

Inkpin makes use of two major features of Wittgenstein’s writing: The commitment to the idea that appropriate linguistic articulation must correspond to appropriate forms of practice; and rules are able to attune to real-world circumstances to determine future appropriate forms of practice (p. 168). Here, Wittgenstein sheds light on how the appropriate usage of language is shaped by how the world is. A study of the experience of appropriate instances of linguistic usage, then, offers insight to our experience of the world.

Whereas the first three parts of the book make use of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein to offer a phenomenological conception of language, the last part considers more broad philosophical implications. Although I appreciate Inkpin’s intentions in this section, I believe the first three parts of the book are sufficient on their own and leaves the last part unbalanced in terms of depth.

One of the first philosophical implications that Inkpin addresses is the realism / idealism debate. Inkpin argues that the Heideggerian framework he develops illustrates that the realism and idealism debate is based on faulty ontological presuppositions. Furthermore, understanding Dasein as being-in-the-world illustrates that there is no principled gap between the way that the world appears as mediated through our projects and the way that the world is in itself (p. 235).

Inkpin’s writing is challenging and detailed. The overall book is well-organized and the argumentation is exceptionally clear. His nuanced arguments regarding the appropriate interpretation of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, to illustrate how they complement one another, will be lost on those who do not have a substantive background in the authors’ earlier and later works. For this reason, the earlier parts of the book will likely be of use only to those who are engaged in scholarship. The last part of the book, however, will be of use to those who are more interested in the general relationships between cognitive science, phenomenology, linguistics, and language. Overall, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the writings of historical thinkers can aid us in our understanding of how we experience language and the world.

Título: Patočka. Une phénoménologie de la naissance
Autor: Frédéric Jacquet
Editorial: CNRS Editions
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Broché 25,00 €
Páginas: 388

            À la suite de la determination heideggerienne de l’être en tant que Dasein, qui marque le concept d’existence en la définissant comme être-pour-la-mort, n’est pas chose aisée penser et élaborer une philosophie de la naissance, en effectuant au même temps une exégèse qui non seulement place la naissance au coeur de la phénoménologie, mais qui attribue à ce concept sa propre importance ontologique et anthropologique dans la philosophie en général. C’est dans cet esprit que l’auteur, Frédéric Jacquet, dans son livre Patočka. Une phénoménologie de la naissance, parle d’une anthropophénoménologie recherchée à partir de l’élaboration d’une philosophie asubjective. Ce faisant, il montre d’abord l’importance et la centralité du sujet, un sujet qui toutefois ne soit pas marqué du dualisme né à partir de Platon et Aristote, et qui a fondé la métaphysique traditionnelle, mais qui au contraire comprenne en soi tant la dimension transcendantale que physique. Dans cette perspective de désacralisation du concept d’être, prend sa place aussi la rupture avec le subjectivisme husserlien et heideggerien, qui permet à Patočka de penser le sujet comme phénomène parmi les phénomènes : « l’analytique de l’existence cède à l’abstraction : si le Dasein existe de manière native, la natalité en question doit être enracinée dans la dimension biologique de la naissance, introuvable au sein de Sein und Zeit. » (p. 21) C’est ici qui s’ouvre à l’auteur la possibilité de definir une phénoménologie de la naissance, déterminée par la constante relation entre l’homme et le monde.

            On peut penser à une sorte de retour de l’homme, comme sujet transcendantale et physique, à la nature, à savoir, à une réconciliation de la physis avec la métaphysique. Jacquet met en effet l’accent sur la nécessité patočkienne d’effectuer une recherche archaïque, qui montre l’appartenance originaire du sujet au monde, sans toutefois nier le sujet métaphysique. Au contraire, un des concepts fondamentaux du livre est précisément l’idée de la seconde naissance qui vit l’homme à l’intérieur du monde, c’est-à-dire la formation du pour-soi à partir et dans l’en-soi. La naissance est donc considérée selon toutes ses acceptions. Il s’agit d’abord pour Patočka de ne pas nier l’appartenance biologique et ontologique de l’individu au monde, mais de la concilier avec sa dimension transcendantale.

            Tout cela est mis en lumière avec force par Jacquet grâce à la comparaison assidue avec la philosophie de Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne, mais aussi Maldiney, Ricoeur et Jean-Luc Marion ; sur ce point, on est d’accord avec Barbaras qui dans la préface reconnait ce livre comme « inaugural et dont la portée excède très largement son propos explicite, déjà par lui-même difficile, à savoir une interprétation de la philosophie de Jan Patočka » (Préface, p. 6).

           Cette exégèse de la naissance, qui s’insert dans un débat phénoménologique de grande ampleur spéculative, a donc permit à l’auteur de déterminer le concept de naissance à l’intérieur de la problématique d’une conciliation entre la dimension phénoménologique, métaphysique et biologique.

            La problématique se développe pour Patočka, premièrement à partir d’une confrontation avec la pensée heideggerienne, en particulier avec l’essence du Dasein. Il ressort d’abord la nécessité de donner lieu au sujet transcendantale, de comprendre la dimensione spirituelle dans la corporéité  et vice versa. Le but est donc de libérer la naissance d’une abstraction totalisante et de la reconduire à sa nature aussi biologique. C’est mettre l’accent sur la vie plutôt que sur la mort, ce que nous permet de penser une « natalité entendue au sens d’une générativité de l’existence, de la perception à la pensée, tout en faisant l’archeologie de cette existence afin d’enraciner la natalité dans le sens premier de la naissance — la condition d’être né : le mouvement de l’existence prend la figure de ce que nous appelons natalité, parce que sa dynamique dépend de la modalité humaine de la naissance » (p. 14). Dans un sens plus général l’auteur veut comprendre, à travers une philosophie de la naissance le concept de finitude en montrant également comme dans l’oeuvre patočkienne, ce concept est très lié à celui de liberté. En dédogmatisant la métaphysique, héritage platonique, il s’agit de montrer que la philosophie ne doit pas préserver l’homme de sa facticité, de sa finitude, en le posant dans un delà, mais l’insérer dans son existence réelle : « de cette critique de la métaphysique procède l’exigence d’une phénoménologie asubjective, c’est à dire d’une “épochè sans réduction” » (p.19). Comme on le verra ci-dessous, cet aspect assumera une déclinaison éthique qui constitue la conclusion du livre.

            Dans cette optique se réalise un changement de rapport ontologique qui touche l’être dans le monde, marquée par la centralité du concept de mouvement et par la compréhension de la naissance comme événement. Il s’agit moins pour l’auteur d’assigner une définition à cet événement que de décrire la dynamique réelle dans laquelle s’inscrit la naissance comme phénomème. À cet égard différentes nuances dialectiques sont mises en évidence afin d’éclairer la signification de l’événement naissance, mais également de la nature de l’homme et du fondement de la philosophie. En premier lieu la simultanée différence et appartenance du sujet au monde, qui se concilie avec la coexistence dans l’homme d’une dimension transcendantale et son natalité physique et biologique : « Naitre, c’est se séparer du monde sans le quitter, participer de la vie du monde sans y réduire » (p.17), dit l’auteur dans le sillage des mots de Patočka « C’est du monde que nous naissons ; nous nous séparons en naissant de la cohérence d’ensemble de ses processus, nous devenons quelque chose pour nous-mêmes »^[i] (p.23), et de Merleau-Ponty : « Naître, c’est à la fois naître du monde et naître au monde »^[ii].

            Très intéressant à cet égard est la définition de l’homme comme celui qui seul se sépare de la nature. En fait, l’homme est tel à la lumière de cette séparation alors que « l’animal est approprié à la nature, inscrit en elle sous la figure de la continuité impliquant que l’animal est sans “égoïté” » (p. 146). Le concept d’égoïté, rarement traité pour clarifier la question de l’essence de l’homme, outre à préciser en quoi il se distingue de l’animal, peut ouvrir un intéressant débat à propos du rapport entre l’homme et la nature, ou mieux du sens de l’existence humaine à l’intérieur du monde. Donne à réfléchir en particulier le fait que le trait distinctif de l’homme réside en ce qu’il se démarque de la nature et des autres vivants. C’est la distinction même donc à faire de l’homme ce qu’il est, mais, et sur ce point Jacquet ne manque pas d’une fine capacité d’analyse, l’appartenance de l’homme au monde est ce qui le détermine, et qui advient grâce à l’événement de la naissance.

            Cette réflexion conduit donc à des considérations métaphysiques qui concernent l’appartenance ontologique de l’homme à la nature, autant que sa différence phénoménologique. Cette dernière en particulier, mène à la compréhension de la signification de cette distinction. En effet, l’analyse de la condition humaine dans le monde, le fait que, d’une part on habite le monde et on participe des ses dynamiques, de l’autre, on s’en détache, en arrivant à créer une réalité differente de celle naturelle, formée par le langage, par la technique, etc., relève d’une deuxième “nature”, ou, pour le dire avec Patočka à travers Jacquet, d’une deuxième naissance. Le sujet donc appartient au monde, en premier lieu, comme faisant partie de son mouvement “phénoménalisant” autant que les autres vivants, « cependant, alors que la naissance des choses et des vivants non humains est immanente à la physis, la naissance de l’homme dans le monde excède cette naissance cosmique et appelle un sens métaphysique de la naissance, supposant de distinguer entre individuation par délimitation et individuation par séparation » (p. 140).

            La deuxième naissance, ou naissance métaphysique est ce qui conduit Jacquet à penser la notion de “co-naissance” à travers le concept merleau-pontien de Chair. Toutefois l’auteur va plus loin, il a pour objet de montrer qu’en réalité la philosophie de la chair ne parvient pas « à comprendre vraiment ce que signifie naitre au monde », en accomplissant dans ce sens un Aufhebung de cette philosophie. Ici le concept hégélien Aufhebung est utilisé dans ce sens que « il y a bien conservation, puisqu’il s’agit de penser l’appartenance au monde de la subjectivité percevante (la physis accomplit la relève de la chair du visible en délivre une compréhension dynamique) et suppression, puisque cette philosophie est en mesure de rendre compte de la différence de l’existence à l’égard du monde sur fonde de son appartenance à lui » (p. 174). Dans ce contexte dans lequel chair et perception sont au centre d’une ontologie de la naissance, Jacquet, d’accord avec Dufrenne, distingue « un concept cosmologique et un concept phénoménologique de monde», non présent chez Merleau-Ponty. L’Aufhebung se rende necessaire pour expliquer ce que Merleau-Ponty n’arrive pas à exprimer, à savoir l’écart même qui existe entre « penser le sensible » et rendre compte de «l’émergence de cette sensibilité » (p. 166).

            Penser le rapport fondamental entre l’homme et le monde signifie pour Jacquet comprendre le sens de l’événement naissance, c’est-à-dire, en quoi la naissance conditionne le naitre du sujet dans le monde, son apparition métaphysique à l’intérieur de la physis.

            À la finitude de l’homme fait donc face la continuité de la naissance, laquelle marque, outre que la distance de l’homme à l’égard du monde, également la différence avec l’animal. La physis est définie comme una natalité cosmologique, une sorte de Terre-Mère qui donne naissance aux mouvements particuliers destinés en revanche à la mort. Dans cette finitude toutefois l’homme peut bénéficier d’une naissance répétée ; il s’agit de sa naissance métaphysique, du surgir de son en-soi, de ce auquel Jacquet se réfère avec le concept de “étonnement”. « L’étonnement est finalement l’épreuve, ou l’éclat, au sein de l’expérience, de l’événement métaphysique, l’existence se déployant sous le signe de cette séparation native : penser la naissance de la philosophie appelle donc une philosophie de la naissance » (p. 32). La différence entre l’événement naissance et la naissance du sujet métaphysique est le rôle du sujet même. Dans sa seconde naissance le sujet est présent à soi alors que dans la naissance biologique, comme dans la mort le sujet n’assiste pas, comme l’explique Barbaras dans sa Préface « la naissance est donc structurée par un retard originaire : le sujet ne coïncide pas avec sa naissance, il ne naît pas mais est déjà né, bref il n’est pas le sujet de sa propre naissance » (Préface, p. 3).

            À ce stade, on est dans un point spéculativement très élevé qui prend en considération le dualisme sartrien et la conception de trans-possibilité de la naissance de Maldiney. On est vers la moitié du livre, et Jacquet tente d’aborder un des thèmes plus compliqués du point de vue philosophique, à savoir, le moment de la naissance de la conscience pure, du pour-soi ; en ce faisant il s’appelle au dualisme sartrien entre pour-soi et en-soi, et au concept maldinéen de trans-possibilité. En critiquant l’un à la faveur de l’autre, l’auteur veut démontrer avec Patočka, mais aussi avec Dufrenne, comme le surgir d’une conscience, d’un pour-soi, ne soit pas une chose incompréhensible mais pensable. Pour mieux comprendre ce noyau spéculatif, il convient de citer quelques mots de Patočka sur la notion d’expulsion, auxquels l’auteur même a donné justement assez d’importance : « L’homme est, parce qu’il y a une dissolution au sein même de la totalité de l’être absolu, dissolution qui peut être formulée comme l’expulsion de la partie hors du tout et l’aspiration de la partie à s’approprier ce même tout, aspiration vaine et perverse, puisqu’elle ne peut aboutir à une subordination nouvelle, à une réconciliation, à une intégration nouvelle »^[iii]. Le fait que entre l’homme et le monde il y aie une différence, autorise en quelque sorte l’homme à regarder le monde comme une chose extérieur à sa propre personne, donc comme un objet à connaître, et dont il peut s’approprier. La référence au tout et à ses parties correspond parfaitement à la double condition du sujet dans le monde ; d’un côté il est fruit de la nature, de l’autre il s’en sent au-delà.

            À travers l’appelle à Sartre et Maldiney, Jacquet nous montre toute la difficulté de penser et par conséquence de definir, le moment de la naissance de la conscience métaphysique et donc de la naissance de la philosophie ; la phénoménologie de la naissance s’inscrit dans cette optique, comme une philosophie de la naissance où le sujet est considéré dans son unité transcendantale et physique. C’est cette unité qui permet justement à l’auteur de parler de anthropophénoménologie, en rendant compte de l’importance que pour Patočka revêt « la surrection de l’apparaître dans l’être archaïque qui est compris comme physis, dans l’optique d’une dédogmatisation de la philosophie aristotélicienne » (p. 24) ; de cette manière, comme le dit également Dufrenne « La philosophie combine ainsi une pensée de la physis, conçue comme Terre natale, à une “signification métaphysique de la naissance”^[iv] » (p.26). De l’événement naissance on est donc passé au concept de naissance métaphysique, que l’auteur identifie avec la notion de co-naissance avec le monde, laquelle coïncide à son tour avec une phénoménologie de l’existence.

            Jacquet, dans l’argumenter ce passage philosophique a le mérite de faire référence à deux concepts également embrouillés, auxquels on vient d’esquisser, à savoir la conception du sujet chez Sartre et le concept de l’existence transpassible chez Maldiney. D’une part Sartre montre la nécessité de définir le surgir d’une conscience, d’un pour-soi, au sein d’un en-soi qui le précède ; de l’autre il radicalise ontologiquement le Dasein Heideggerien, en définissant le pour-soi de façon complètement transcendantale et immanente. En ce faisant, Sartre – et comme le souligne Jacquet, Sartre lui-meme le reconnait – se heurte à un dualisme qui aboutit à une contradiction. En effet, il décrit l’événement du pour-soi comme absolu, dans le sens que le surgir du sujet transcendantale, c’est-à-dire l’origine du pour-soi, demeure inexpliqué, car n’étant pas un choix du sujet, il advient de façon incompréhensible.

            À cet égard c’est plutôt le monde qui s’inscrit comme sujet de l’événement, en revanche le sujet transcendantale n’est que pure ouverture au monde déjà là, origine et cause de tout phénomène. L’incompréhensibilité de l’événement métaphysique par le sujet mène donc Sartre à penser le rapport de l’en-soi et du pour-soi en termes de séparation, mais « Que peut signifier cet acte de révolte de la part de l’en-soi dépourvu de toute subjectivité qui seule rend possible la révolte, la conscience de sa condition donnant lieu à la tentative de fondation? » (P. 192). Dans ce cadre il faudrait plutôt parler de “passage”, de moment dialectique, lequel ne veut pas expliquer la nature de se détachement, de ce surgir du pour-soi au sein de l’en-soi, mais au contraire le definir comme unité dans l’être même, où il reste immotivé, mais toujours pensable. Même si « cet événement ne soit pas un possibilité de l’être, il doit ne pas être impossible dans l’être » (p.193). Il s’agit donc pour Jacquet de penser la corrélation au lieu de la séparation, et l’identité au lieu de la néantisation, d’où le besoin d’élaborer une ontologie dynamique et non statique, qui rende compte du surgir de l’événement métaphysique dans une continuité phénoménalisante.

            La référence à Maldiney s’inscrit en ce contexte, aux dépens d’une ontologie statique. En particulier, Jacquet repense avec Maldiney la nature de l’événement en le définissant comme ouverture au monde, « un événement ne se produit pas dans le monde : il ouvre le monde » car le monde même est le « là de l’événement du monde »^[v]. L’existence est le sujet des plusieurs ouvertures au monde, elle contient en soi la transpassibilité de percevoir et de vivre l’événement, produit d’une réalité transpossible. La transpossibilité du réel rend possible la reception de l’événement chez le sujet qui peut accueillir l’événement grâce à sa transpassibilité. C’est la relation entre une réalité transpossible et l’existence transpassible à donner sens à l’existence même, qui se configure, à ce point comme une deuxième naissance, en tant que co-naissance avec le monde.

            Ces considérations conduisent Jacquet encore plus loin, jusqu’à un dépassement de la pensée maldinéenne même, que vise à penser non seulement le rapport entre l’homme et le monde, mais le surgir de l’événement subjectivité : « l’événement n’est pas d’abord ce qui arrive à la subjectivité, il est l’arrivée de la subjectivité » (p. 203). Ainsi, en mettant l’accent sur l’événement de la subjectivité, plutôt que sur l’événement perçu par le sujet, l’auteur peut penser, à l’instar de Patočka, une phénoménologie de la naissance à partir également de l’origine du sujet métaphysique au sein de l’être, et à la lumière d’une relation continue entre l’homme et le monde, ainsi qu’entre la dimension transcendantale et la physis.

            La naissance métaphysique, en se configurant comme événement dans le monde, permet de ne pas renoncer au concept de finitude qui définit l’essence de la condition humaine à l’intérieur de l’existence même. C’est à Jacquet d’être parvenu à une telle conciliation grâce à un grand effort interprétatif de l’oeuvre de Patočka, sens lequel une telle philosophie de la naissance serait introuvable dans la pensée patočkienne. Il est dès lors d’autant plus surprenant la conclusion à laquelle Jacquet est arrivé, et qui marque le propos du livre ; dans le but de l’expliquer on va suivre l’auteur précisément avec les notions de finitude et de mort.

            Le dépassement du dualisme entre « existentialité et corporéité qui empêche une approche concrète de la naissance », redéfinie le sujet comme un “être-par-la-naissance”^[vi] « puisque le sens d’être de la vie subjective dépend de la modalité de son entrée dans l’être, c’est-à-dire de sa naissance » (p. 22). Si l’existence de l’homme est marquée par sa finitude et donc par sa mort, cela veut dire que de la naissance dépend la vie, mais aussi la mort, événement que, tout comme l’est également la naissance, appartient au mouvement originaire qui donne vie au monde même et à ses déterminations particulières. Jacquet l’exprime en ces termes « Penser le sujet comme un vivre, c’est-à-dire comme mouvement, concilie la dimension d’appartenance (le mouvement est intramondain, se déploie dans le monde) avec celle de la différence (en tant que mouvement phénoménalisant) » (p. 22). La phénoménologie de la naissance élabore au même temps une philosophie de la finitude qui ne méconnaît pas la mort mais repense la naissance au sein de l’appartenance du sujet à la physis.

            Dans ce cadre est très intéressant la définition du concept de liberté, lié à celui de finitude, mis en lumière par l’auteur et qui nous introduit à sa conclusion éthique. Comme Jacquet l’a déjà mentionné dans l’introduction, la philosophie de la naissance chez Patočka « en laquelle la phénoménologie trouve à s’accomplir et que Patočka lui-même comprend sous le titre d’une “philosophie de la liberté finie”^[vii]», est également une description de la finitude de l’homme dans le monde. La finitude qui caractérise l’homme est la même liberté qui lui permet d’exister métaphysiquement, donc, vraiment ; car d’un côté « Penser la finitude, c’est penser ensemble la liberté et le monde » (p. 30), de l’autre, prendre conscience de cette finitude ça veut dire adhérer à propre mortalité. La mort assume alors un « sens existentiel » (p. 333), et l’adhésion à la mortalité comporte l’adhésion à sa propre liberté, à l’existence authentique.

            L’intention de Patočka consiste à promouvoir « le combat pour une liberté qui refuse toute “norme” ou tout “appui extérieur” » (p. 334), afin de se libérer de ce qu’il appelle “mortification” et que n’est rien d’autre que « la mort qui s’est emparée de la vie derrière notre dos, qui l’a vidée sous prétexte de la prolonger »^[viii]. Naitre à soi, c’est naitre spirituellement, à savoir, renoncer au désir d’immortalité « engageant un rapport renouvelé au passé et au présent » (p.29) ; contrairement, le désir d’immortalité « est clairement présenté comme la figure aliénée de l’aspiration ontologique » (p. 335). La seconde naissance, ou naissance spirituelle ouvre donc à l’homme la possibilité de « conquérir une vie libre de contingences secondaires comme de la tendance à l’objectivation ; bref, une vie dans le déracinement qui est aussi celle du philosophe » (p. 29). La naissance métaphysique peut donc se présenter sous un profil éthique, en ce sens qu’elle comporte pour l’homme une libération soit de conditions préétablies, que d’un besoin insurmontable de vivre sous le signe du désir d’immortalité ; l’existence spirituelle, authentique, devient alors une sorte de nécessité par le sujet d’accueillir sa propre vie, en l’acceptant pour sa temporalité et finitude, y compris également la liberté qui lui revient non à l’égard du monde mais à la lumière de son rapport avec le monde.

            La tentative de Jacquet d’interpréter la philosophie de Patočka à la lumière d’une phénoménologie de la naissance, a été bien achevée, au delà de tous les espoirs d’un lecteur qui s’attend une digression de l’ouvrage de Patočka, basée sur le concept de naissance. Digression qui toutefois est présent comme une exégèse complète de l’événement naissance mais aussi come une phénoménologie de l’existence, considérée sous ses plusieurs aspects constitutifs. Mais en plus l’auteur contribue au surgir de réflexions originaires, à repenser l’être en sa propre nature, en son lien avec le monde et sa physis conçue comme Terre natale, en récupérant une dimension parfois cachée en philosophie, car difficilement exprimable. Ce faisant, Jacquet, ne manque pas de faire émerger le sens et le moteur de tout ça, à savoir la perception du mystère du notre être dans monde et de l’apparaître du monde même, sans toutefois tomber dans l’obsession d’une recherche d’un fondement absolu, au contraire en restituant à l’homme sa facticité et sa naturalité, son étonnement devant la vie.

           

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^[i] Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, trad. fr. E. Abrams, Dordrecht-Boston-London, Kluwer, «Phaenomenologica» 68, 1976, p. 107.

^[ii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, tel Gallimard, 1992, p. 517.

^[iii] Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, op. cit., p. 175-176.

^[iv] Mikel Dufrenne, La notion d’a priori, Paris, PUF, 1959, p. 250, p. 148, p. 162, p. 196-199.

^[v] Henri Maldiney, Art et existence, Paris, Klincksieck, 1985, p. 26.

^[vi] Mikel Dufrenne, La notion d’a priori, op. cit., p. 282.

^[vii] Jan Patočka, Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie ?, trad. fr. E. Abrams, Grenoble, Millon, 1988, p. 261.

^[viii] Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, op. cit., p. 44.

Título: Studia Phaenomenologica: Vol. XV / 2015 – Early Phenomenology
Autor: Dermot Moran, Rodney K.B. Parker (Eds.)
Editorial: Zeta Books
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Paperback €30.00
Páginas: 520

The edition of Studia Phaenomenologica devoted to early phenomenology makes a highly original and important contribution to philosophy. Moran and Parker bring to publication articles about figures and their texts foundational to the phenomenological movement, ultimately expanding our understanding of key issues and developments in thought. The large volume consisting of 522 pages contains articles by leading scholars and provides both in-depth scholarship and philosophical analysis. In their Introduction, Moran and Parker define early phenomenology in the following way: “The term “early phenomenologists” is used here to encompass five main groups of philosophers who contributed to the  early phase of the phenomenological movement in the first third of the twentieth century: the students of Theodor Lipps who formed the Munich Circle of phenomenologists; Husserl’s original students at Göttingen prior to 1907, the so-called Urschüler; the Göttingen Circle, who studied with Husserl, Reinach, and Scheler in Göttingen from 1907 to 1916; the students who studied with Husserl in Freiburg from 1916 until he was barred from the university in 1933; and a handful of students of Carl Stumpf in Berlin” (11). The Editors note that as research advances, more members of the Movement and their texts are being uncovered (12), ultimately demonstrating a wide breadth and depth of research interests as well as tensions between philosophers over the exact nature and scope of phenomenology itself.

The volume opens with Thomas Vongehr’s presentation of some interesting documents, including an excerpt from Edmund Husserl’s Nachlass (Ms. A III, 1, 1914), which consists of Husserl’s assessment of Jean Héring’s thesis tiled, “Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze,” a text later reworked by Héring into his well-known article “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. Edmund Husserl zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet” (in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung  IV, 1921, pp. 495–543). In the excerpt one sees Husserl’s succinct grasp of Héring’s attempt to deal with the problem of individuation and singularity by proposing individuated essences in addition to more general essences or ideas. In this text, we see Husserl comparing Héring’s ideas with his own, resulting in an interesting dialogue about the delineation of essences as well their logical limits.  The two other documents in the first part are by Jean Héring (Phänomenologie als Grundlage der Metaphysik? / Phenomenology as the Foundation of Metaphysics? (Edited by Sylvain Camilleri. Introduction by Sylvain Camilleri and Arun Iyer. Translated by Arun Iyer)) and Hedwig Conrad-Martius (Dankesrede bei der Feier zur Verleihung des großen Verdienstkreuzes der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am 01. März 1958/ Acceptance speech at the ceremony for the award of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, March 1st 1958 (Introduction and translated by Susi Ferrarello)). The former text struggles with the relation of essences to the factical world, and posits a distinction between eidetic phenomenology and a phenomenology of facticity in order to deal with the fact that the world presents itself as highly determined and individuated. Héring notes that a transcendental phenomenology can deal with topics and questions in general metaphysics, but it has to find ways of overcoming the risk of reducing the world and factical existence to my consciousness (48). The latter contribution by Hedwig Conrad-Martius reflects on the early phenomenological movement and its adherents. She draws attention to how inspiring Husserl was for his insistence that students study the things themselves, despite the fact that many of his students were critical of his turn to idealism. The text is interesting because it gives a brief history of the early Movement and her own development as a young philosopher.

The next section of the volume contains various articles on questions and debates within early phenomenology. George Heffernan’s article, “The Paradox of Objectless Presentations in Early Phenomenology: A Brief History of the Intentional Object from Bolzano to Husserl, With Concise Analyses of the Positions of Brentano, Frege, Twardowski and Meinong,” explores the concept of the intentional object. Heffernan shows that Husserl’s understanding of the concept can be better understood through a discussion of key insights of 19^th century figures like Bolzano and Brentano as well as other figures like Frege, Twardowski and Meinong. Heffernan ultimately concludes, “Husserl accepts Bolzano’s objectivism and Frege’s logicism, rejects Brentano’s conception of immanent objects and Twardowski’s notion of representational pictures, and ignores Meinong’s theory of objects. Thus the paper has employed the formation of Husserl’s concept of the intentional object to enhance the understanding of the historical and philosophical relationships between early phenomenology and contemporaneous philosophical movements. The result is a clearer picture of the influences that early phenomenology drew upon for the formation of its concept of intentionality, and of the influences that early phenomenology exerted on philosophers outside the phenomenological movement” (87). Marek Pokropski’s article “Leopold Blaustein’s Critique of Husserl’s Early Theory of Intentional Act, Object and Content” introduces readers to the ideas of Blaustein, which were deeply influenced by Husserl when Blautstein studied under him at Freiburg. Pokropski describes Blaustein’s philosophy as “analytical phenomenology” (94).  Blaustein was also deeply influenced by Roman Ingarden, who urged Blaustein to study with Husserl. Both Ingarden and Blaustein continued to debate about the concepts of act and object developed in both Husserl’s Logical Investigations and the the turn in Ideas I until the latter’s death in one of the Nazi-controlled Jewish ghettos in Poland. Ultimately, Blaustein maintains, “Presenting content is understood, following Husserl, as the representation or the fullness of hyletic moments. However, contrary to Husserl, it is not a part of act (taken in the second broader sense). The concept of intentional essence is, according to Blaustein, redundant, and it is possible that ideal and fulfilled meaning are redundant too. Object of representation is not a part of act itself, but rather accompanies it” (100). The next article makes an interesting contribution to the scholarship on Husserl and Bentano. Hynek Janoušek’s “Judgmental Force and Assertion in Brentano and Early Husserl” continues the line of thought carried out in the previous articles that explores various logical problems raised by Husserl’s concepts. Janoušek defends the claim that Husserl’s early theory of judgement, in contrast to Brentano, opens up a wider space for considering objectifying acts: “Since for Husserl fulfilment of act-matter does not concern only act-quality of assertions, but also that of conjectures, pure presentations and other qualities as well, this approach opens a much wider space for the theory of objectifying acts and their different modalities in which a theory of judgment has to be situated. This brings the phenomenological theory of judgment to a deeper level of understanding of concepts of assertions, judgments, truth, actual and possible being etc.” (126).

While the first few articles of the second section of the volume focus on logic and questions of intentionality and objectivation, the next few articles look at the work of figures like Héring, Geiger, Lipps, Ingarden and Conrad. Christian Y. Dupont’s essay, “Jean Héring and the Introduction of Husserl’s Phenomenology to France” and Daniele De Santis’ “Wesen, Eidos, Idea. Remarks on the “Platonism” of Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden” take up important questions on Héring’s notion of essence. The former author traces the influence of Héring on thinkers like Levinas and Lev Shestov, demonstrating that Héring was not only vital for showing both thinkers the limits of Husserl’s positions, but was also instrumental for transmitting Husserl’s philosophical legacy in France. The latter author clarifies the key Platonic concept of form by exploring Héring’s own distinctions between individual essence, morphé, ideas and essentiality. Simon Calenge’s contribution explores Hans Lipp’s critique of Husserl’s idealism. “Hans Lipps critique de l’idéalisme de Husserl” negotiates a tension in Lipps’ own existential and hermeneutical philosophy by showing how Lipps needs to critique Husserl’s transcendental philosophy qua representation in order to get back to factical existence. There has been very little work on Lipps’ philosophy and Calenge gives to readers not only an engagement with Lipps’ project but also an insight into the constant tensions between realism and idealism, which plague early phenomenological discourses. Faustino Fabbianelli’s “Bezeichnung und Kennzeichnung: Theodor Conrads Bedeutungslehre in Auseinandersetzung mit Husserl” shows the relation to and differences between Husserl and Conrad on meaning. Fabbianelli employs a manuscript by Conrad dating from the early 1950s to show how Conrad’s earlier distinction between Kennzeichung and Bezeichnung shows a fundamental critique and opposition to Husserl’s phenomenological theory of meaning developed in his Logical Investigations and earlier logical writings.

Michele Averchi (“The Disinterested Spectator. Geiger’s and Husserl’s Place in the Debate on the Splitting of the Ego”) and Dalius Jonkus (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness and the Unconscious (Moritz Geiger and Vasily Sesemann)”) focus their essays on the work of Geiger. Geiger, along with Scheler, was considered one of the founding philosophers of early phenomenology. He was also crucial for helping to found the Jahrbuch für Philosophie and phänomenlogische Forschung. Geiger’s work has been largely understudied and both contributors help readers critically understand key concepts in Geiger’s work. The former author shows how Geiger’s notion of the split ego influences Husserl’s consideration of the ego and its ability to perform the reduction. The latter contributor sets up a dialogue between Husserl Geiger and the philosopher Vasily Sesemann. Central to this dialogue is the establishing of the role of both consciousness and the unconscious (Geiger) for the possibility of objectification and self-awareness and self-understanding. Alessandro Salice continues to introduce readers to different aspects of early phenomenologists’ work, especially the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, whose is largely read as a Christian philosopher. His early phenomenological work is largely understudied and contains important studies like the text on the metaphysics of community. Salice demonstrates how von Hildebrand and Reinach, two very close friends, understood the status of values. Salice concludes, “…[I]t might be worthwhile to stress one of the main ideas behind Hildebrand’s theory of moral action: in line with Reinach (1989c: 295f ) and Scheler (1954: 267f), and in partial disagreement with Husserl’s theory of evaluation (werten, cf. Hua XXVIII: 343, Hildebrand 1969: 86f, for a discussion of these divergences, cf. Mulligan 2010), for Hildebrand, values are primarily felt (in the specific sense of Wertnehmen or Wertfühlen)—they are not evaluated, not cognized, not meant, not inferred. To provide a gloss of what this means, one could quote Pascal’s well-known adage philosophique “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” and refer to Scheler’s penetrative interpretation thereof (1954: 269): it is not true that reasons are only those which are known by the intellect and hence it is not true that the heart simply does not have reasons. Quite the contrary: the rationality the heart relies on is diff erent with respect to that of the intellect. But still, this is a kind of rationality. Actions, Values, and States of Affairs in Hildebrand and Reinach” (277).

In his “Reinach’s Theory of Social Acts,” Arkadiusz Chrudzimski explores the status of social acts in Adolf Reinach’s social and political philosophy. The author maintains that contemporary theories of performativity in thinkers like Austin and Searle differ from Reinach’s theory in that the early phenomenologist wished to maintain the possibility of primitive legal powers that stem from the metaphysics of the person. He also shows that in Reinach we find a difference between performative, conventional normativity and genuine moral normativity. Francesca De Vecchi’s “Edith Stein’s Social Ontology of the State, the Law and Social Acts. An Eidetic Approach” defends the view that Stein’s An Investigation of the State must be read as a genuine social ontology, not only because of the various themes and methods deployed by Stein, but also because one finds in it deep traces of Husserlian mereology and the development of a regional ontology of sociality. One wonders, however, despite de Vecchi’s fine analysis, whether Stein has not slipped in her own political desires into her eidetics of the state. Joona Taipale’s essay, “The Anachronous Other: Empathy and Transference in Early Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” brings early phenomenological discussions of empathy into discussion with psychoanalysis and the concept of transference. The author argues that both transference and empathy are modes for understanding the other. Transference complements the notion of empathy and should be included with analyses of empathy in order to better understand the other.

Over the past few years, scholars like Dermot Moran, Dan Zahavi and Anthony Steinbock have turned our attention back to the phenomenology of emotions, especially in thinkers like Scheler, Lipps, Husserl and Stein. Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s “The Emotions in Early Phenomenology” unpacks for the reader key aspects constitutive of the emotions, including stratification, their qualitative aspects, the foundation of emotion in cognitive acts, intentionality, and the relation between emotion and value. The author also ties the discussion of emotion in early phenomenology to motivation. Laudable in this account of the emotions are the discussions of the work of Kolnai. The discussion of emotions continues with Mariano Crespos’s contribution, titled “Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings.” Drawing upon the work of Husserl and Geiger, Crespo shows that feelings can never be fully objectified, making way for what Husserl calls emotive intentionality. The author carefully guides the reader through important distinctions in different forms of perception in order to show how Geiger’s analysis can yield a fully non objectifiable form of the lived experience of of the emotions.

The last three essays of the volume introduce the work of Wilhelm Schapp and Emil Lask, while also taking up the relation between early phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism. Kristjan Laasik’s “Wilhelm Schapp on Seeing Distant Things” argues that the experience of colour adds a certain ordering or form to experience. He concludes, however, “I believe that Wilhelm Schapp is mistaken in his claim that we do not visually perceive distant things due to their lack of requisite color order. Nevertheless, I believe that Schapp’s investigation into what color order, or “form”, is needed in perceptual experience, remains of interest today. While there are doubtless numerous reasons to continue reading Schapp’s work on perceptual experiences, I have specifically argued that some of the same issues and problems that are there in Schapp’s work, produced more than a century ago, are also to be found in Alva Noë’s recent writings, and whoever is interested in the latter has reason to be interested in the former” (411–412).  Timothy Martell’s essay “Cassirer and Husserl on the Phenomenology of Perception” and Bernardo Ainbinder contribution “From Neo-Kantianism to Phenomenology. Emil Lask’s Revision of Transcendental Philosophy: Objectivism, Reduction, Motivation” develop the important relation between early phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism. The former essay, drawing upon the work of Wilhelm Schapp and Ernst Cassirer, argues that the Husserlian concepts of hylé and morphé are significantly challenged by Cassirer’s and Schapp’s discussion of symbolic form. Martell poignantly observes, “Claims about noetic-noematic correlation are supposed to be claims about relations of dependence between mental processes of various kinds, on the one hand, and the objects of those processes (as intended), on the other. If such claims are to be anything other than trivial, then mental processes must have features that can be considered and described apart from their objects. Husserl thinks that mental processes have such features; he calls them the really inherent components of mental processes, as opposed to their intentional components, or noemata. The section of Ideas I in which Husserl differentiates the really inherent parts from the intentional parts of a mental process, §88, lists two kinds of real components: noetic parts and the hyletic data upon which the noetic parts bestow sense. But if Cassirer is correct, then there is no good reason to think that mental processes really have parts of either kind. How, then, can intentional mental processes be described apart from their intentional objects? And if a phenomenological description of a mental process can amount to nothing more than a description of the intentional object of that process, how is it possible to make non-trivial claims about noetic-noematic correlation?” (429). The latter and last essay of the volume shows how the Neo-Kantian philosopher Emil Lask is closer to earl phenomenology than to Neo-Kantianism with regard to certain key structures of consciousness. Ainbinder demonstrates how both the reduction and motivation do not require a transcendental ego to function.

Moran’s and Parker’s special edition of Studia Phaenomenologica is to be lauded, not only for its breadth and depth, but also for its courage. It is not often that one finds volumes devoted to what philosophy traditionally calls, and wrongly so, I might add, “minor figures.” By bringing to the mind of readers the richness of the early phenomenological movement, Moran and Parker present for readers an important moment in the development of phenomenology, making clearer how the paths of the more canonical figures of the Movement, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Sartre, drew upon the ideas and work of figures discussed in this volume. The volume successfully uncovers the richness of the early phenomenological movement and the spirit of dialogue and inquiry between the community of thinkers either inspired or critical of the Movement. Most importantly, the editors and contributors provide readers with a series of rich philosophical perspectives and insights about a variety of topics, including consciousness, logic, judgement, social ontology, emotions, colour, feelings, the unconscious, etc., all of which are relevant for contemporary discussion and research.

Título: Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations
Serie: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Autor: Johanna Oksala
Editorial: Northwestern University Press
Fecha de Publicación: 2016
Formato: Paper Text $32.95
Páginas: 200

Johanna Oksala’s book, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations, is a perceptive, engaging and weighty text that makes a substantial contribution to the field of feminist philosophy. Oksala draws on phenomenology as critique, Foucault’s later work on governmentality, a grounded interpretation of personal experience, and a flexible understanding of language and meaning to strengthen contemporary feminist philosophy. Her objective is to build a model of feminist critique that pulls on the past as inheritance and the present to revive feminist theorizing and action. She argues this is vital “if feminist philosophy is to withstand and face up to the political challenges of our rapidly changing world” (17).

Some of the most interesting parts of the book can be found in the passages where Oksala actually fleshes out and develops her interpretation of experience, neoliberal governmentality and phenomenology. A prime example of this is her account of Foucault’s theory of experience as shaped by both knowledge and power yet also self-related. She makes this clear in a skillful passage which explains how the subjective and objective parts of experience and identity should be conceived of as an inter-related “series of foldings: the subject must fold back on itself to create a private interiority while being in constant contact with its constitutive outside. The external determinants or historical background structures of experience and the internal, private sensations fold into and continuously keep modifying each other” (57). This framework allows Oksala to show how both structure and subjectivity can exist in a non-binarized form.

With respect to phenomenology, Oksala suggests a postphenomenological framework which resists the reductive subjectivity that often results from bracketing. Instead, she posits that a partial bracketing, coupled with a focus on naturalized and notable ‘foreign’ assumptions, can be used to reach the ontological schemas that shape our lives – while remaining attendant to the fact that these schema are “tied to cultural normativity – to language, history, and culture” (107). It is precisely because these schema are normative, Oksala argues, that they are subject to challenge and reformation.

A third strand of Oksala’s revived feminist philosophy is her theory of language whose role in constructing experience and meaning is understood neither as a poststructural swirl of discourses or as prediscursive in origin. Rather, she claims that phenomenology itself can provide a “resource for thinking about the constitution of linguistic meaning, as well as the fundamental entwinement of language and experience” (73), that is, not reducible to either discourse or the prediscursive.

Taken together, Oksala shows how all three modes of analysis can be knit together to explain precisely how the contemporary feminine subject has been constituted. This mode of subjectivity is made concrete through a process of imposed and internalized neoliberal governmentality where women come to act as willing participants in a system that is inherently oppressive. This system sets up a structure of sanctions, habits and self-surveillance in order to discipline women with respect to expectations about the body, beauty, labor, roles, and general comportment. The internalizing of these norms produces a kind of feminine subjectivity that is simultaneously exteriorized and economic. Self-interest, “personal freedom, economic independence and professional success in all areas of employment” (121), creates the illusion of free choice when in fact one’s options are tightly circumscribed by power relations that “make women more, not less, vulnerable to sexism” (126).

This brings me to one area of the book that could have benefited from a more nuanced analysis. Specifically, I contend that the author’s brief discussion of sex work/prostitution as ‘work’ that traps women through a deceptive discourse of choice and empowerment is somewhat reductive. Oksala warns against seeing prostitution as sex work, a position advocated by supporters of sex worker’s rights, since, in doing so, there is a real danger of reconfirming neoliberal governmentality. This is because by focusing less on the “moral limits of markets,” and more on attempts to “ameliorate the destructive effects” (143), this approach fails to address the fundamental problem posed by governmentality.

While this argument is sounds, it also relies too much on a reading of decriminalization and legalization (of prostitution) as espoused by libertarians like Camille Paglia whose embrace of capitalism, which she claims produces the modern independent woman, mixes with empowerment discourse to frame sex workers as flourishing under fetishized neoliberal governmentality. Oksala states that, “in neoliberal governmentality, they [sex workers] must be treated solely as economic issues concerned with adequate working conditions, toughening markets, and forms of entrepreneurial conduct” (142-3). This misses some interesting scholarship on sex work as challenging patriarchal sexuality, acting as a subversive strategy, and as challenging moral norms and traditional institutions (like that of monogamy and marriage). It also leaves out the application of postmodern frameworks to sex work which focuses on individual experience, activism, the complex situatedness of women, and the breaking down of binaries (good girl/bad girl, agent/victim) as discussed by Shannon Bell. To be fair, Oksala does acknowledge the importance of a feminist stance that respects the fluidity of women’s subjectivities, but concludes that neoliberalism governmentality represents a unique challenge that requires more attention.

Overall, emerging from this dense theoretical framework is a theory of the feminist subject that is simultaneously reflexive, critical, agential and socially and discursively formed. Mobilizing collective responsibility and solidarity based on a theory of inheritance, for Oksala, is the best way to push for transformative and feminist social change. Rather than Nietzschean ressentiment, the works of Derrida and Benjamin are drawn on to argue for an approach to history grounded in remembrance and disrupted linearity. Oksala concludes that for this to occur, feminist politics needs to become comfortable with eschewing definitive readings of history and begin “to choose differing, often incompatible, interpretations of history which acknowledging the limits and the fallibility of that choice” (157). Rounding out the book is a thought experiment where the reader is asked to imagine a utopian world of totally equality and emancipation. Oksala asks whether, were this to take place, past injustices, sexism, and misogyny would be forgotten. The answer, not to put too fine a point on it, is a clear no. Rather, Oksala challenges the reader to find a way towards action that acknowledges “the weak which messianic power with which we are endowed” and use it “for redemption” (158).

Oksala’s writing is both demanding and detailed. Moreover, her complex use and close reading of primary sources requires some background in feminist and continental philosophy. As such, the book itself is definitely not light reading. It is, however, absolutely essential for anyone wanting to learn about the contribution a feminist philosophy comprised by an innovative interpretation of neoliberal governmentality, a reflexive conception of language, and a historically grounded theory of phenomenology can make to fostering tangible social change.